Category Archives: philosophy

mo’ momo: so you feel like shit

Posted on by

See, this is why you shouldn’t mess with Canadians. Because not only did we popularize the concept of brutality in team sports (there’s no “I” in “ICU!” Oh, wait…Canadians say “I” will put “U” in intensive care, “C?”) but our motivational speakers don’t natter on about lathering your positive vibes over the pectorals of the Universe or scattering the rose petals of your dreams on the cosmic winds. They just straight-out tell you what to do when you feel like shit.

Canucks do not mess around. If we’d had momo during the War of 1812, our Foreign Minister and his biker chick would be enduring CSIS‘s interrogations from their private quarters in the White House.

Benjamin Franklin on Despotism

Posted on by

Never Forget

So today we get TWO quotes o’ the day, but when presented with a bounty one must simply accept it and share it with one’s friends. Really, this one is a stunner. I’d add my own thoughts, but what Benjamin Franklin and Gore Vidal have said really cannot be improved upon by my words. It would be like painting the Lincoln Memorial or something.

From We Are the Patriots, by Gore Vidal, here is what Benjamin Franklin had to say about the future and the implications of the newly-written Constitution of the United States of America:

“There is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

And here is what Gore Vidal has to say in his opening paragraphs:

I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that’s that. We won. And those who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity—Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last century—and I lived through three-quarters of it—we still held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once believed that I would see a great part of the nation—of we the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of war and peace-demonstrating in such numbers against an arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.

During Vietnam Bush fled to the Texas Air National Guard. Cheney, when asked why he avoided service in Vietnam, replied, “I had other priorities.” Well, so did 12 million of us sixty years ago. Priorities that 290,000 were never able to fulfill.

The Definitive Act of the Twenty-First Century

Posted on by

For Realz.

And that is: not “quoting Tionna Smalls.” Although that’s a close runner-up. No; no indeed, the definitive act of the Twenty-First Century is, naturally, something that first surfaced on YouTube. Because you, the reader, are so finely attuned to nuance and Zeitgeist and other foreign-sounding words, you are reading it here before it registers on the consciousness of the tastemakers at Gawker Media, the Times, or CBC. Ahead of the curve, in front of the pack, on the top of the heap, and (perhaps?) good for loaning me twenty bucks till the end of the month?

Yes, that is the raincoaster blog devotee!

And just for you we present the following video, another Brian Atene monologue, but this one may be somewhat familiar in parts, if you’ve survived high school English. I had all of the great “To be or not to be” speech memorized by the time I was ten because it was on the cover of my best friend’s mother’s cookie tin and it would always take her ten or fifteen minutes to talk her mom into letting us get at the Peek Freans, so I had plenty of time to go over the lines. I used to recite them to her poodle when I was pet-sitting, just to discombobulate it.

It was a nasty little dog, and I’m a bitch. What can I say?

So here it is, the video containing the plan for the definitive act of the twenty-first century. And what might that act be, you wonder? Well, I’ll tell you. But I’ll tell you over the jump, because I’m like that.

add to del.icio.us : Add to Blinkslist : add to furl : Digg it : add to ma.gnolia : Stumble It! : add to simpy : seed the vine : : : : post to facebook

Continue reading →

Surfwise, Livedumb

Posted on by

I’ve been waiting for this to hit YouTube: the trailer for a documentary of an archetypal American character, the freewheeling intellectual.

As a somewhat freewheeling intellectual myself, I feel no hesitation at saying that Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz was a completely self-centered man who confused hedonism with enlightenment and whose pathalogical need to be “different” rendered him incapable of being free. The most humbling truth apparent in this biographical film is this: that voluntary subjugation to the tyranny of doctrinaire antiestablishmentarianism should not be mistaken for intellectual triumph or self-determinism. It is fascism.

Now, enjoy your surf movie! Hippies in a bus = good times!

Right?

Here is the much prettier official statement:

Like many American outsider-adventurers, Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz set out to realize a utopian dream. Abandoning a successful medical practice, he sought self-fulfillment by taking up the nomadic life of a surfer. But unlike other American searchers like Thoreau or Kerouac, Paskowitz took his wife and nine children along for the ride, all eleven of them living in a 24 foot camper. Together, they lived a life that would be unfathomable to most, but enviable to anyone who ever relinquished their dreams to a straight job. The Paskowitz Family proved that America may be running out of frontiers, but it hasn’t run out of frontiersman.

New Beijing Olympic Logo

Posted on by

Beijing Olympic Logo from Beau Bo D\'Or

At that point – I would have you see – the force to which one yielded mingles with one’s will; and no excuse can pardon their joint act.
Absolute will does not concur in wrong; but the contingent will, through fear that its resistance might bring greater harm, consents.
Dante, Paradisio IV 37


The Hand That Feeds: Nine Inch Nails

Alas, once again so much to say at one-thirty in the morning with two hours of work left before bedtime and Wordcamp in the morning. As with our recent post about Flora and the grey market in interracial babies, be aware that this train of thought is only temporarily sidelined. In the meantime, there is plenty to ponder here.