SURPRISE! EASTER EGG CODE-MYSTERY TREASURE CHEST AUCTION - YOU'LL LOVE OUR MONEY-BACK "GUERE-ON-TEE" (GUARANTEE) WORLDWIDE: A NAME YOU CAN TRUST - LUX
"If we reform intellectual property laws to recognize the realities of the 21st century, we will have no choice but to legalize armed robbery and abolish all private property!"
For LUXXXCORP, the kind of mass hedonism that emerged during the 1970s shattered his belief in working-class innocence. “My art was not for mass anything."
He became completely disillusioned, for the sub-proletariat was drawn into the consumers' society and was unable to resist mass-hedonism.
Later, when asked what challenges came up by competing in the midst of the mass-hedonism of Las Vegas or the Seychelle Islands he, excitedly, answered, "I rocked the house." He seem quite cheerful, at times. The reference to that unfortunate incident in the Seychelle Islands seemed to, actually, perk him up a bit.
In Britain, this weekend, was the almost-annual mudbath of mass hedonism, self-abuse and oddness known as the Glastonbury Festival. As per usual, LUXXXCORP was a no-show.
"Excising faith would open the flood gates to mass hedonism.", said the bulbous head filling the wall-to-wall-TV panel.
Those Floridians. Now they've gone and elevated the good life into an art form that stops just short of mass hedonism. Lord knows where the natives go on their holidays!
Mass hedonism, (abandonment to sun, sea, sex and drugs) is the hidden link between the concentration camp and the Club Med.
Why is the Media falling all over themselves attempting to bail Ms. Gunning out of jail as though she were a human rights victim rather than a casualty of mass hedonism? ... She's a victim of the Media rather than a casualty of mass hedonism. Because sex sells and taking your clothes off doesn't merit a jail sentence. Then why are our broadcasters still putting out programs extolling and exploiting such debauchery? ... Most of you asked for it in many, many, many, many different ways that are kept a secret from you.
In some ways Amsterdam, with its heccic oscillacion between mass piery and mass hedonism, is odd.
There was also a display of mass hedonism, (at least in the area I was standing in) that left this married fellow gasping for breath a few times. Good times!
China does not accept homosexuality, mass hedonism, multiculturalism and of these three, mass hedonism has done more to do away with China's culture.
It's colossal arenas of violent entertainment exhibiting mass hedonism were all maintained by the ruthless media machine.
Historians are divided over why the internet failed to transform turn-of-the century American propriety into mass hedonism.
The hippies were right but they did not last because their's was the first event of mass hedonism in the media age. The idea spread rapidly across the globe.
What we're seeing is the progressive entrance of consumers who are the sons of the “cleansing revolution.” This could clear the way for the mass hedonism of the future.
Take notes, heathens. The first wave of Plague, mass hedonism, is being opposed by those seemingly well inside the Plague's recent structures.
Mass consumption and heterogeneity bring with it mass hedonism for the residents of big cities.
Along the Atlantic coast, which you guys might call 'the West' - the culture is characterised by the breakdown of the extended family, tradition, mass hedonism, materialism and the Cult of Narcissis.
Welcome to social libertarianism. Consenting adults is a line one might draw. The point is that the slippery slope, 'slouching towards gomorrah', crowd don't have a leg to stand on re: their "predictions" that adopting such a standard will lead to state recognition.
One has to supplement a slippery slope worry with actual evidence that the trend is moving in the direction you worry about. "From my perspective all reasonable morality is being tossed out the window -- now anything goes" is not adequate. That's just playing the part of social reactionary to changing norms. Pity it's little more than handwaving, since you're so skilled at it.
"Do as you will; this shall be the whole of the law." -- Aleister Crowley
And then there's the variant which is the one and only commandment for Wiccans: "If it hurt none, do as ye will." Not sure why I know these things, as an agnostic on my bad days and a Jeffersonian deist on my good ones, but there you go. And as a libertarian, who probably won't get much love here, I have to say the Wiccan rule would be a great way to run a society.
....the difference is that torture is broadly recognized as outside social sanction here, and is punished. Not enough, no; not in every instance where it ought to be, no. But contrast with the Dutch rush to depravity. I'll take things here, thanks. And I live in San Francisco.
Well first, here's hoping we can all avoid debating the incendiary "for those wishing to pretend that a homosexual coupling constitutes marriage" -- just once it would be nice, I think, if the bait was left on the hook -- and focus on the whomping good time they're having in the Netherlands.
Or, I suppose, if civil union statutes guarantee a similar 'open door' here.
re: Declining, falling and fattening From a survey taken a couple of years ago on toddlers' feeding habits:
* Soda is being served to infants as young as seven months.
* One-third of 19- to 24-month-old toddlers are not eating a single fruit in a day, and one-fifth are not eating any vegetables.
* French fries are the most commonly consumed vegetable for toddlers by 15 months of age.
* By 19 to 24 months, most toddlers consume sweets, desserts, or salty snacks at least once a day.
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/nutrition/infantfeeding.asp
Some nutritionists reackon that these kids will be the first generation in the US to fall short of their (non-gay, monogamous) parents in terms of life expectancy.I think that is much more worrying than gay couples getting some legal rights.
I'd add the following things to look for:
* 128 channels on the television 24 hours a day.
* What I percieve to be a lack of willingness to assume personal responsibility on the part of both parents and kids. I suppose, coupled with a growth in the welfare state. While I think there's causality there, I couldn't prove it.
* "Wussification" My parents grew up playing with rusty razors, broken glass and rabid dogs. I grew up playing with metal bats, hardballs, and ...'Gasp!'...rode a bike without a helmet. Let a kid play with a cap gun today and child protective services gets involved.
Those are the things I'm watching. Hard to measure and nearly impossible to determine the impact but I'm watching it anyway.
I think the above are all far more corrosive to society than mass hedonism. I'm only 24 and I already think kids are spoiled. 12 year olds want an iPod because their friends have them and they look cool -- they don't even have any music! I mean kids will be kids, and kids always bug their parents for more. But I agree hugely, between the ridiculous junk food, TV, and the "wussification", how can you expect anyone to grow up without a sense of entitlement?
What would Mark Twain think :)
As far as the welfare state: considering that the decline of parenting over the last 25 years has coincided wiht the decline of the welfare state.. and the preceding 2 generations, (IMO much tougher,) were raised in a time of a much stronger welfare state.. well maybe your feeling for causality is more based on a dislike for the welfare state than any particular relationship.
How can you expect anyone to grow up without a sense of entitlement? Well the word "no" works as well as reminding your children that your parental contract obligates you [the parents] to stick your nose into their business. It really isn't that difficult.
Well, become an agent of change when you have children. They certainly will appreciate it.
The parenting decline began in the 1960's, I think 1968 is pretty much the inflection point for most indicators.
Could it be that the post 1970 social disaster you describe might have other causes? The rise of mass media? Accelerating social mobility? The rat race?
I pity kids on the "wussification" front. As I've said here before we roamed the neighbourhood like a pack of wild dogs and learnt many lessons through it.
Still, when peak oil hits and we're all living off of whatever you caught cooked on an open fire and civilisation collapses all around us and we have to walk everywhere because there won't even be any buses... well, then I'll be one up on the young uns :)
The biggest societal change I've seen in my lifetime is the number of families with both parents working full time jobs outside the home. At first it was a choice brought about by liberalised social values and a better economy. Now it's no choice. Competiton from 2 salary families means that if you con't have 2 salaries you can't afford a house to live in.
I am very interested to see how this creche raised generation will be compared to my parent raised one. I could imagine good and bad influences, so it will be interesing.
The other big change that I will watch is the increased availablity of hard core pornography to children.
(Weird, also, that on the day the full Abu Ghraib record is finally released, over admin objections, a three-way in the Netherlands spurs the 'decay of Western civ' remark.)
Re: the decline and fall So, is the Netherlands really more socially disfunctional than the US? Higher infant mortality? Shorter life expectancy? Higher poverty rate? Higher illitteracy rate? Higher teen pregnancy rate? Higher abortion rate? Higher STD rate? Higher divorce rate? More prone to infectious diseases? [insert your favored criteria here]?
The numbers for every one of the categories you list are in Norway's favor. Indeed, the numbers for each category is better in any and all European countries than in the USA. The Western countries with more relaxed views on sex, sex education, birthcontrol, etc, ALL have lower teen pregnancy rates, lower STD rates, and lower abortion rates than the USA. The literacy rate is higher, the life expectancy is higher, the infant mortality rate is lower in all the Western countries than in the USA. The Puritanical, repressed, sex-is-dirty-and-best-ignored policies of the USA act objectively counter to their supposed benefits. The attitude makes EVERYTHING relating to sex worse than any other Western country. It objectively is a failure. It would be best to emulate our Western European superiors so we can enjoy the benefits that accrue (higher numbers for each and every category in your list). I meant "Netherlands". Nonetheless, ALL of Europe has more liberal views on sex than the USA and their numbers, across the board, are higher than the USA's.
Given their relative homogeneity, their small populations and areas, realtive wealth and the pervasiveness of Lutherainism, it would be amazing if they did have significant problems... Name a large country, say 30 million or more with some population diversity, that does not have problems similar to ours.
* That is changing and they will soon have problems -- just like us :)
I have deliberately not looked up the numbers, so I don't know which ones the US comes out better and which ones favor the Netherlands. But let's set the criteria before drawing conclusions.
Anthropologists tell us that neolithic society was once matrilinear (that is, name and property were inherited through the mother); this in an age when women ruled tribes and villages, and men were migratory hunter-gatherers. Because males were often absent, marriages were frequently polyandrous, a pattern repeated in later societies where men were often away (the Celtic and some native American, for example, or more recently, the Tibetan). The inhabitants of ancient Europe were thus far more inclined to continue to grant their women certain freedoms (serial divorce and remarriage, among others) long after the Bronze Age patriarchial revolution made women into virtual slaves of men elsewhere. This is attested to in the written records of the ancient Norse and Welsh. In Semitic nations, as well as Asian, polygamy was the norm, and in many places continues to be so even today. The Hebrew Bible chronicles the process by which that tradition was banned among the Jews, and the astonishing Judeo-Christian notion that men should not only abjure polygamy but be sexually faithful to a single wife for a lifetime was so utterly revolutionary that Islam could be viewed simply as a cultural counter-coup to restore a cherished status quo. And this, of course, is what Senator Santorum and others are really talking about when they publicly deplore the gate opening to legal polygamy in the West; the socializing of Sharia, the crack in the door that may create an appealing alternate lifestyle for addled American teens. We have already had some evidence of that among the followers of a 100% homegrown American religion, as witness the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping and subsequent Stockholm-syndrome polygamous 'marriage'.
Because of course, there are two distinct flavors of polygamy in the West--the formal, which is illegal, and the timeless and informal, which is universal and all around us, seemingly the result of a strong biological imperative in the male. This need to 'start over in midlife' is particularly amplified by the longer lifespan of modern man. The French have even codified the state of 'concubinage' (a concept lifted whole from Confucian China), where the rights of a mistress' children are, to some degree, protected by law. And that, of course, is the whole basis of monogamy in a nutshell: to guarantee the rights of primogeniture. This is why the ancient Greeks and Romans instituted it and enforced it with such vigor, even while they took their pleasure with slaves (or each others' sons. Sex between two grown men was termed 'pathic' and considered a disgusting vice). With polygamy, inheritance becomes a murky issue at best, a vicious and violent one at worst, as the Bible can attest. One of the unuttered secrets of Jihad is the 'second-son' syndrome--sons of minor or discarded wives are given no patronage or inheritance, cannot afford wives of their own and drift into religious extremism in order to gain social respect; we imagine all such unfortunates to be the bored playboy sons of wealthy oil sheikhs, but the reality is they are members of a vast, despised, and all-but-illegitimate underclass, one that we have created for ourselves in urban ghettoes and rural trailer-parks alike. One might even assert that the 'pimp' gangsta culture of today, where a man keeps a 'stable' of young working women is an exact mirror of that of tribal Africa, where the local chief may be married to dozens of women, whom he loans out in return for favors. Should reality--instead of being ignored--instead be legitimated? Why not gay marriage, polygamy, and polyandry? These are the questions confronting our nation in the accelerating age of Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World'; as Michel Houellebecq has cruelly illustrated in his own despairing novels, there will soon be no need for marriage at all, since all modern children are rapidly being abandoned pell-mell by most traditional forms of community and family structure. And as for the laws of inheritance--we see these redefined each day in our courts; they seem to largely now rely on DNA tests and a good lawyer. When wedding has lost its meaning, it become mere theatre, and when that happens we are forced to stare the most fundamental and obvious fact about it in the face: marriage endures, quite simply, when two people are in love with and desire to share their lives with each other. In that most joyous of all human equations we find God's truest handiwork (though the secular are free to argue that it's just a happy coincidence). The law can only compel us to honor our commitments; it cannot make a sacrament of them. And please forgive an old man for pointing out that he has never in his life seen three people in a state of such blissful union.
At least not for long.
(Santorum's point, of course, was that if marriage can mean anything, it will -- and will eventually mean nothing and that the social fabric will fall apart if "deviant" acts are legalized.)
Wonderful comment, LUXXXCORP !
A few follow-up questions though, if you will.
When wedding has lost its meaning, it become mere theatre, and when that happens we are forced to stare the most fundamental and obvious fact about it in the face: marriage endures, quite simply, when two people are in love with and desire to share their lives with each other.
What is its meaning (your structure suggests there's one best answer to that)?
This is why the ancient Greeks and Romans instituted it and enforced it with such vigor, even while they took their pleasure with slaves (or each others' sons. Sex between two grown men was termed 'pathic' and considered a disgusting vice).
What of Alexander then? Was he "pathic," taking his pleasure with persian "boys" who were of an age older than some of his indentured soldiers? Or did the rules not apply to the emperor?
Thank you for your kind words, Edward! And for pointing out my errors.
What I meant to say, of course, is 'When a society forgets what it means by wedding' rather than 'When wedding has lost its meaning'. As a heterosexual man still faithfully married to his high school sweetheart, I personally am a terrific romantic and can imagine no distinction in God's eyes between genders inside a marriage bed or out of it. As an old man, I hold many ultra-conservative views; a prejudice against full gay rights is not one of them.
As for Alexander, there are many schools of thought as to his actual sexual inclinations and behavior. As any student of history knows, there has always been one social code of sexual behavior for men in their civic lives and quite another while off on military campaign (hence the attraction of it for such tortured souls as T.E. Lawrence.) Recent scholarship raises the possibility that several of the early sources for Alexander's life were influenced by Ptolemiac 'hatchet jobs', histories now lost, in which Ptolemy, the former general of Alexander who seized Egypt and whose descendants included Cleopatra, sought to legitimate his own reign both by playing up the rumor that he was Alexander's half-brother and by implying a great deal more homosexual activity to Alexander than he actually engaged in. Obviously, no one can ever know for sure (nor do I care). However, according to the 'official' coda, Alexander's relations with Bagoas (the famous 'Persian Boy') led to a near-mutiny of his troops; they were used to treating him with near god-like status, but even they were revolted at this liaison, possibly because Bagoas was reputedly a eunuch. It was this social pressure, as much as dynastic, which convinced Alexander to remarry (he had three, possibly four, wives) twice more, the final time to Roxana, who was pregnant with a son at the time of Alexander's death. However, Alexander's rumored homosexual relationships included only one--with his childhood friend and close companion Hephaiston--which could have been termed 'pathic' had he even been Greek, which he was not. The rest fell into the category of an older man's love for an 'ephebe', the hallmark of the Sacred Band of Thebes, for example.
There are many books on the subject of the Romans' sexual lifestyles. We think of classical morality in terms of 'I Claudius', largely because it was taken from the scurrilous history of Suetonius (and no one on earth has read Suetonius more often and more credulously than I; it is a sort of Krafft-Ebbing of the madness of power), but the fact remains--we can't be sure that much of it is actually true. If we want a realistic view of Greco-Roman moral behavior, the modern city of Palermo is perhaps our best model. There, as in ancient Rome, a few powerful families and their thousands of 'clients' control civic life with an elaborate system of 'honor', commerce, and murder; publicly conservative and family-oriented, the true proclivities of these men (and their wives) erupt behind closed doors with domestic servants or expensive prostitutes, while their pampered offspring (sometimes even their daughters) enjoy the liberty of the town to pursue their own wild indulgences before assuming the mantle of responsibility in early middle age. There, too, the patronage of a handsome boy by an older 'knight' or indeed, priest or schoolteacher, is thought normal and admirable; sexual congress between two capos would be considered bestially obscene (unless of course one was ritually humiliating the other). This is what antiquity meant by 'pathic'--abnormal, perverse--and we still tack the suffix onto our modern complexes and psychoses as we come up with new ones. Do I agree with this view? No. Do I acknowledge that this is what they truly believed? As with Alexander: as far as history now knows, so yes.
However, according to the 'official' coda, Alexander's relations with Bagoas (the famous 'Persian Boy') led to a near-mutiny of his troops; they were used to treating him with near god-like status, but even they were revolted at this liaison,
"Official" codas were, to my understanding, fossilized in the the 1950-60's no? The attitudes toward homosexuality prevelant in the West at that time might explain the laborious contortions to find Ptolemic conspiracies.
My understanding is the opposite. That Bagoas, if he existed, represented (more than he did homosexuality) the seduction of Alexander by Persian attitudes, especially the notion of the emperor's god-like status (which even the "official" texts I've read indicate drove the Madedonians insane---particularly the idea that his Generals who he had always treated as equals, and probably still considered him of suspect birth, should begin humbling themselves before him). Also, there's little reason to suspect Ptolemy et al. were not also helping themselves to other captured Persian lads, is there?
However, Alexander's rumored homosexual relationships included only one--with his childhood friend and close companion Hephaiston--which could have been termed 'pathic' had he even been Greek, which he was not.
He was close enough with respects to how he behaved once he left Europe, no? Surely, he was more "Greek" than Persian or what have you.
Again, incredibly well-written and informed info...thanks!
What a pleasure to engage in debate with one so erudite and charming.
I'm afraid I cannot pretend to any scholarship on the subject, which in any case is easily Googleable. But I shall attempt a modest (and mercifully brief) reply, hopefully without having to leave this chair to consult my library of Alexandriana--which includes Arrian and Plutarch, both of whom were, I believe, translated well prior to the 1950s...
When I spoke of his troops revolting, something they did several times, as I recall, I was referring specifically to his relations with Bagoas and not to Alexander's policy of Medeizing his troops; when he insisted that they marry Persian brides, for instance, they submitted to this bit of state--and stage--craft with an obvious appreciation of the fact that it in no way compelled them to abandon their wives in Macedonia. As for his Persian robes, they were used to his tantrums and theatrics; Alexander was what we would latterly call a 'drama queen' (indeed Caesar's men affectionately called him the 'Queen of Bithynia', supposedly because of a youthful fling with that country's king). Further, Alexander's soldiers were happy to treat him as a godling, as both Alexander and his mother had peddled the rumor for years that he was the son of Zeus--neglecting the obvious inheritance issues presented; soldiers are happy to follow any leader who is notoriously lucky or blessed by the gods. Again, Caesar's men genuinely believed that he was especially lucky because of his reputed descent from Venus. Discovering a god in one's pedigree was a favorite hobby in antiquity and hid a multitude of miscounted months by one's grandmothers.
And as for Alexander being Greek! I strongly suggest a visit to modern Macedonia, where you will no doubt be set straight. Although Alexander was, of course, tutored by Aristotle and evinced great reverence for Athens, he was hated and distrusted by many Greeks; he had after all, helped his father destroy them as an independent political entity and was now their absolute ruler in all but name. It was partly armies of Greek mercenaries, many motivated by patriotism, that he fought in his first campaign in Asia Minor, where he posed as the liberator of 'Greater Greece'. Macedonia, though it shared some cultural and linguistic links with classical Greece, was as it is today, a largely Balkan nation with a distinct language. And views toward homosexuality there in that time can best be summarized by a single famous incident: the assassin who murdered Philip, Alexander's father, was said to have done so because Philip had ordered him trussed up naked in a courtyard to be sexually assaulted by servants, apparently a common practice (and one that persists to this day inside our own prison system). A practice not rooted in respect for gender orientation but rather in the exercise of primal power and ritual abasement--which they hardly needed to travel to Persia to learn.
It's a shame he's so breviloquent.
I've noticed from your other comments just how thoughtful and articulate you are; so your words are praise indeed.
And I'll try to employ more brevity in future.
And views toward homosexuality there in that time can best be summarized by a single famous incident: the assassin who murdered Philip, Alexander's father....
A few details you omit (and get wrong) in the tawdry business: Philip's assassin was his former boy-lover Pausanias. Supplanted in Philip's bed by another youth (the nephew of the increasingly important noble Attalos) he contrived to send this rival to his death in battle. Whereupon Attalos (not Philip) took revenge by getting the young man blind drunk at a feast and throwing out to be raped. Philip's part in the latter business, and the source of Pausanias' grudge against him, was that he refused to have Attalos prosecuted for the crime. (The account derives from Aristotle)
"Where [polygamy] survives, mostly out in the rural west, it invariably carries with it grave problems of child and sexual abuse, to say nothing of chronic impoverishment." As polygamy is practiced in the rural west it is child sexual abuse. It's not just a side effect. Fourteen year old girls are married off to their uncle or some other community elder and used as breeding slaves.
Could we quit being PC about this? There is one specific group in the US that practices this, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints: The problem with them is not that they are simply polygamous. The fact is, they treat women as chattel, young teenage daughters are married off to members within the church by their father's wishes. In a few cases, men of the church were excomunicated and their wives and children were 'reassigned' to other men within the church. They also tend to live off the federal government, as the men generally do not have incomes that can support ~10 women and ~50 children making them the ultimate example of the Reagan era welfare nightmare. However, the irony of this particular instance of polygamy, aside from teh fact that polygamy isn't really the problem here, is that it is not at all a good example of Tacitus' sky is falling rhetoric, in that these people follow a very rigid and strict moral/religious code, which, while not his, is certainly stable. The early mormon church worked in this manner and obviously survived quite well in a hostile environment.
"There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch." - Nigel Powers
This social liberalization and mass hedonism will lead to the decline and fall of the Rebublican Party. But the euphoria will let loose a darker spirit: nostalgia. It's a well-known and meaningless cognitive illusion.
The older you get the more you need to guard against the inevitable "it was all so much better when I was young" tinted glasses.
So, put away your nostalgia-tinted glasses; America is doing just fine. Every generation longs for the good old days.
The thing is - many conservatives are standing on this hill - commitment to traditional social norms as a necessary stabilizing factor at the local level of the individual. The resistance to change is non-trivial and non-compromising.
This country used to have a Middle Class that balanced the ideological wings against each other. I don't think that is true so much anymore, which implies that one or the other ideology will dominate.
On Harry Seldon - Asimov's Foundation Trilogy postulated that a brilliant mathemtician built a mathematical model of human sociological interactions, e.g. statitistical mechanics for human societies, and based upon this, could model societal trends in the future in the way statistical mechanics models the behavior of large groups of particles, without knowing the specifics of any particular one. E.g., mathimatical sociology. Until Harry Seldon comes along, we merely can argue our opinions.
What we're seeing develop are "problems" of affluence, such as the uses of leisure, the new mass hedonism, the collapse. of thrift. Our behavioral engineers, (we tease and call them "Attitude Re-Ajustment Managers", {"ARMS"} y'know, "The Strong A.R.M.S. of the Law) are at this moment running the programs that are helping us begin to look for new ways of expanding human accomplishment. Exponentially!
..."Modeling the mind of a Senator" project. If it works, we can move on to actual human beings! :^) Think local, act global.
Modeling the mind of a senator. What soap could possibly clean you up after that?
Utilitarianism is basically mass hedonism. Satan says "Always look out for your own interests and never compromise your own strength."
Ayn Rand, not Satan, is not advocating mass hedonism and anarchy. Rand is simply saying that actions should be done because it is in the person's own best interests.
"Balance is for losers. Real life is us or them, and by God, its going to be them."
Visit Port Watson! It has it all. Complete with mass hedonism, sacrifices and orgies dating way, way back to before there were Americans, taxes, or even Christians.
Much later, in order to foster biologic fusion, there was a display of bizarre mass hedonism and festivals of nudity to break down residual resistance and let in the radiant light of Christ.
As a society, is Rachel’s web site how we now define mass hedonism? Are her circus tricks and trampy sex appealing? She thinks so. The party girl is trying to cash in.
If her impact on Bollywood isn't evidence enough and even though she exudes mass hedonistic appeal, to simply dismiss her as all looks and no substance is drastically wrong.
Are we immune to this mass hedonism campaign that no longer respects children and the status quo re: television hours? There have been many reports that have surfaced indicating so.
Mass hedonism is summed up quite well as the fever of consumption. It is a fever of obedience to an unstated order and the degrading anxiety of being unlike all the others.
Unsurprisingly, many turn to mass hedonism and apathy as a way of life. Clergy, physicians, and teachers have all seen the toxic results of this character disorder: it's bigger than life and twice as ugly.
While the number eight being the number three for others - this atmosphere of mass hedonism, anarchy and mindless selfish individualism will, certainly, be the death of us all.
Sooner or later, we always end up in the porn section: Mass hedonism was not their style. I pulled my ... out of Priscilla¹s warm ... "Roll over." I told her, as I stood on the other side of the bed.
... or the personal ads: Must be clean-shaven and wear the latest fashions. About that "End-of-Life-As-We-Know-It" mass hedonism scene in "The Matrix: Revolutions": I think it was designed beautifully. Look where Neo And Trinity... (As we, quietly, lower the curtain on this scene...)
I'm in turn stunned into tunnel-vision, shocked at what I've seen, horrified of it's very existence, embarrassed for them, angry that I feel embarrassed for them, disgusted with myself for being angry and, finally, left with a strange feeling of...I can't describe it.
DJ SHADOW provokes mass hedonistic frenzy throughout New York - And it's all happening, again this weekend.
There are several aspects to this unseemly whole and the worst is that the bulk of the mass hedonism problem will continue, and continue to be ignored.
The serum's low uric acid index and it's relationship to mass hedonism, plasma urea, intracellular potassium and packed cell volume in a normal population group is an incredibly important discovery in the field of Heuristic Endemic Algorythems (Positive), HEAP, for short.
Conclusions in this study: SSSSS with or without sex in healthy, middle-aged women and men showed an increased in mass hedonistic behavior, (MHB) and a decrease in fat.
By developing “mass hedonism tourist industries” as a means to pay off its debts, these countries are actually encouraging the peacetime institutionalization of the sex industry and that's terrible.
In the United States, the underground current of mass hedonism became apparent after the completion of the government's Awareness Campaign that began in January of this year.
If the experiences of social legislation of the past half century have taught us anything, it is that tinkering with the basic institutions of family and moral structure by government fiat -- however well-intended -- is usually unwise and fraught with unintended consequences. No-fault divorce opened up a Pandora's box of easily-broken families and maladjusted single-parent youth; poorly-designed social welfare programs weakened family bonds to an oft-fatal degree; and now we see that the "civil union," intended as a sop for those wishing to pretend that a homosexual coupling constitutes marriage, is opening the door to polygamy. As is its wont in matters of the decay of Western civilization, the Netherlands is leading the way.
No-fault not at fault: "No-fault divorce opened up a Pandora's box of easily-broken families and maladjusted single-parent youth;" Not in my experience. Me and my buddies all were divorced during the good old days of fault divorce (it was assumed that us bestial males were at fault) and lost our houses, our children and much of our future income. Big rewards for the lucky winners: a nice house, the kids, and a court-assured income. And without The Hairy Beast to contend with. Too tempting for even the most virtuous woman to resist, I'm afraid.
Fault-based divorce was 'tinkering' to begin with. It represented legal roadblocks preventing two adults from dissolving their union, and it had its own unintended consequences (the legal farce of routine perjury for one, legal empowerment of abusive spouses for another).
No-fault divorce removed these legislative roadblocks. It was not a government intervention, but the end of a government intervention.
The Romans as well as the Greeks had no hang ups regarding homosexuality. Nor did the Japanese, and that culture was stable for 2 millenia. But no doubt your right, offending your particular religous sensibilities is definately causing the sky to fall.
So Edward's advocacy is going to lead to an avalanche of three-ways that will ultimately bury our God-fearing nation beneath an avalanche of sin and sinners? On the other hand... If there is very little possiblity that civil union laws will lead to the American fabric getting as bendy as a weekend in Roger Stone's hot tub? Then I'm not sure what this diary achieves. Other than to offer a grave warning about events that are unlikely to happen.
Government spokespeople said they will not change it's own 300-year-old rating system: "This system is for everyone: Jews, Catholics, heretics, agnostics. Everyone!'' An X rating, however, will prevent anyone under 21 from being allowed to attend. "Especially if accompanied by a parent or guardian.", they added.
The new campus craze: mass hedonism. “Because of the recent change in attitudes toward sex in North America, mass hedonism has booted football from the top spot in college circles." reported Cindy Sherm, a Student council representative and leading student activist.
Discipline is one of those critical front-end tools that can improve the odds for achieving a place in life where personal satisfaction can, if not overwhelm, at least balance, the pain of any human existence.
Then you should be legislating chores and allowances, doing away with trust funds and large inheritances (or making them contingent upon the recipient's productivity), spending the cash to beef up public education and get parents involved, setting federal time limits on TV watching and video game playing .... you know, instilling a work ethic. Because the formal structure of the family itself has absolutely no bearing on productivity. But nice try.
Getting parents involved and instilling a work ethic is a fine thing to say but, with 100,000 plus US K-12 schools each managed differently, with thousands of reform experiments spending many billions over fifty years, it has not happened. Its like demanding that antigravity machines be invented to solve the traffic problem. Yes, it would be nice. We just don't know how to do it.
The traditional family (can) provide more of the inputs we believe are required for raising well adjusted children. The traditional family structure is (often) sufficient, but necessary? I would say no.
TAMPA (AP) -- Thirty Texas churches are backing mass hedonism evangelist Robert Wilton in fraud lawsuits filed by people who say they gave him money but their prayers went unanswered. A 1991 ABC "PrimeTime Live'' report highlighted Wilton's luxurious lifestyle and questioned whether individual requests were processed as promised. His libel suit was dismissed.
Wilton took his "Mass Hedonism'' TV show and live Saturday broadcasts off the air in 1993. His Silva Mind Control Center in suburban Tampa, which was once affiliated with the Church of Bob, boasted more than 10,000 members, now has fewer than 1,000.
I wonder if this latest guy, in Tampa, is going to start a new trend of mass hedonism/suicide parties?
Bangalore_Lakshmi's Xanga Site I like metal but not head banging music, although that, too, is, sometimes, enjoyable, literature, weaving, bead weaving, metal working, glass blowing and crew (crew meaning rowing, not mass hedonism).
That cleared the way for the advice column, a typical feature of the women's magazine known as the "agony column", to become the vehicle for the dissemination of mass hedonism as a way of life. In these columns, medical experts such as Dr. Felon Allwright warned of the discomfort and discombobulation associated with this.
She is the author of three books: "The Aphrodisiac That Failed: Why SSSSS Did Not Become a Mass Hedonism Therapy", "What They Did to Women: The Origins of Sex Therapy" and "Towards Mass Hedonism Therapy: Wilhelm Reich and the Spanish Revolution." "The Age of Mass Hedonistic Maturation: Results and Discussion of the Otholiths of Oceana"
Humans need conformity. There are good reasons for this. Some of the paths the expression of conformity can take are going to cause hardship for non-conformists, like LUXXXCORP. But the greater benefits of it are essential.
Weaken one rule and you weaken all rules. Americans in particular are not, culturally, bound very tightly by rules. In America it has always been possible for a rule-violator to flee the village and start over elsewhere. This makes systems of rules fragile.
Is gun control the answer? Nope. An armed society is a polite society :) We need more weapons, not fewer.
You're not good enough! Human evolution is now being engineered. Choose to enhance yourself or face inferiority. By Joel Garreau, Joel Garreau, a Washington Post reporter and editor, is the author of the newly published "Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human" July 17, 2005
In the next few years, your child will come home from school in tears. He'll say, once again, that he is unable to compete with the children who are brighter, better behaved and physically more capable than he is because their parents have bought them technological enhancements and you have not. What will you do?
You could say, "That's all right dear, we don't care what other parents do with their children's minds and bodies, we love you just the way you are."
Or:
You could remortgage the house, again, to try to allow your child to keep up with the human enhancements that ever so rapidly are coming onto the market.
Or:
You could try to get the enhanced kids thrown out of your school, widening the chasms that already will be separating "enhanced" humans from the "naturals" who could adopt such enhancements but, for aesthetic or political reasons, choose to abstain, like today's vegetarians or fundamentalists.
What you and your children can't do is ignore the enhancement products that are already realigning our concept of what it means to be human.
We are at a turning point in history. For millenniums our technologies - fire, clothes, agriculture, cities, space travel - have been aimed outward at modifying our environment. Now, for the first time, our technologies are increasingly aimed inward - at altering our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities and progeny.
This is not some science fiction future. Such innovations are in the labs and hitting the market on our watch. Inexorable increases in ingenuity are opening vistas, especially in what we may call GRIN - genetic, robotic, information and nano - technologies.
The curve of innovation is rising exponentially. The significance of all this is not the gee-whiz gear. It is in how we will wrestle with what this means to relationships, loves and lives as we enter a period of engineered evolution that we create and adopt ourselves.
The scientists, engineers and philosophers pondering the reshaping of humankind see three scenarios. .
There are those who think we're bound for a near-future technological "heaven" in which we conquer suffering, stupidity, ugliness, even death.
Then there are those who think powers of such scope could be used for supreme evil in the next 25 years, threatening the very existence of our species - the "hell" scenario.
Finally, there are those who have sufficient faith in human cussedness that they think we will be able to control our futures rather than be the pawns of technology - the "prevail" scenario.
Ethically, intellectually, technologically - it won't be an easy for us to choose. Yet we must.
Consider the genetic temptations you and your budding young scholar-athlete will face. Scientists' understandings of the human genome and the proteins that control all cellular processes in the body are leading to the creation of remarkable pharmaceuticals. One example is the pain vaccine being tested by a Bay Area company. It would cancel acute suffering for a month. Ready for that marathon, son?
Five companies in the U.S. alone are competing to bring memory pills to market. No wonder. They could be a bigger commercial blockbuster than Viagra. They promise not only to ban the senior moments of the baby boomers but to revolutionize education of the young. Think of what it will do to language acquisition alone. Some analysts believe that it could increase our kids' SAT scores by 200 points or more.
Robotics is allowing unprecedented connections between the human brain and our machine creations, blurring the distinction between the made and the born. Matthew Nagle, a paralyzed young Boston man, last summer became the first human to send an e-mail with his thoughts. A computer device implanted into his brain by a company called Cyberkinetics can read his neurons as they fire. This also allows him to control a robotic arm. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - the research arm of the Pentagon - is funding similar research because an F-22 is a difficult machine to fly with a joystick. How much simpler it would be, they reason, if a pilot could control it directly with his brain. Images and alarms collected by the plane could be piped directly to her senses, bypassing computer screens and keyboards.
Nanotechnology refers to building objects and substances one atom or molecule at a time. The results can be amazing, including forms of carbon that exist by the beaker-full that are 60 times stronger than steel, have the weight of plastic, sport the clean electrical conductivity of diamond and display the precision of DNA.
Nanotechnology is projected to be a trillion-dollar industry by 2015 - comparable to the total GNP of Canada. Some say it will revolutionize everything: warfare, energy use, medicine.
These GRIN technologies, in short, mean that every power of our comic-book superheroes from the 1930s and '40s either exists or is now in active development. A technique called "gene doping," for example, produces such muscle strength in rodents that some University of Pennsylvania researchers flatly doubt we'll ever have an Olympics again that does not involve genetically altered humans. The 2004 Athens Olympics may have been the last one.
Brain-scanning devices at Temple University, meanwhile, offer tantalizing hope of lie-detection so meticulous that, like the Shadow, we may indeed know what evil lurks in the hearts of men.
Advocates of the "prevail" scenario think back to the Dark Ages. Humans then were beset by apparently insurmountable trials similar to our own. But with the rise of the printing press, we could store and share our ideas in ways never before possible. Print allowed the rise of institutions beyond the imagination of one country, much less one person: global trade, and then the Enlightenment, which gave us democracy and modern science itself.
There's reason to hope that such co-evolution is occurring again. In the '70s, if you had been told that there would be a ceaseless rain of computer viruses and worms attacking the guts of our most sensitive computers, you might rationally have assumed the human race, or at least technological progress, to be doomed. You might have seen it as hopelessly Pollyannaish to think that defenses might evolve as quickly as they have.
In fact, the signs that humanity can make good use of technology to thwart the bad abound. On 9/11, the fourth plane didn't make it to its target. Why? Because the Air Force was so quick? No. It was because dozens of ordinary people on that plane - empowered by mobile phone technology - in less than an hour analyzed, diagnosed and cured their society's problem, at the greatest cost to themselves.
Still, we have many questions with which to grapple.
Already we see people living much longer, healthier lives than in the past. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health think that the first human to robustly live 150 years is already alive today. What will it mean to marriage and parenting - not to mention Social Security - if this curve of increased vigor continues?
What will it mean to your family if your kids are greatly more capable mentally than you are? Did any fathers ask their daughters to fix the Model T, the way we now routinely hand a balky cellphone to our offspring? The relationship between who learns and who teaches, which has been stable for millenniums, has been upturned: "You looked at the previous generation to learn how to live yourself. That's no longer possible," explains anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson.
And what does it mean to the institutions we cherish - like democracy - if it is no longer clear that all men and women are created equal?
The measure of success in the "prevail" scenario that I hope for would not be how many transistors we can get to talk to each other. That way merely leads to the other two scenarios, in which our future is technologically determined and we are just along for the ride. Rather, "prevailing" in the midst of such radical evolution would be measured by the richness, depth, variety and ease of the most important connections - the ones among unpredictably clever humans like ourselves.
P.S. DJ SHADOW RULES! BECK, TOO! Can't forget NEGATIVELAND or ART OF NOISE, either. (And I liked Mark McGuire's dingers. So what about the steroids. It's called "Takin' it to the next level, TOO THE EXTREME, BABY, YEAH!!!" Not for me no thanks I've got to go check the Top 40 now bye. {You, really, shouldn't meet your heroes up-close-and-personal-like. You're just ruining it for yourself.)
UNPUBLISHED TERM PAPERS, SHORT STORIES, MAGAZINE ARTICLES AND OTHER EPHREMIA I'VE AUTHORED FOR SALE
"Goal Setting For Dream Achievment: Willy Loman, Victor Frankl and "Man's Search For Meaning" term paper, 7.5 pages
"The Managerial Enterprise of IBM" late 70's, early 80's" comprehensive management evaluation of corp. circa late 70's, early 80's, (thumbs-up) 11 pages + works cited page
"Organizational Behavior Modification Theory and Style" 7 pages
"An Autobiographical Examination of Carol Pearson's "The Hero Within": What Archetypes Am I?" 6 pages + works cited page
"Mass Media as a Tool for the Encouragement of Radical Hedonism and Egoism in Society" 4.5 double-space-typed pages with 1" margins + works cited page
"A Slush Pile of Business Management Case Studies" a passel of "What If's..." answered. Stupid stuff like "Cookie Wars" and "My Best Employee Is Having A Nervous Breakdown! What would you do?"
"Lighting the Stage" primer, 4 pages
"Naval-Gazing Tripe" actually, an 8 page goals statement
"The Return, (from the dead), of the Mucker" Parts I & II, both 2 page prose poems glorifying Conanesque life as well as the war in the far distant, higher-tech future. Y'now, a diptych. Would make a better motivational poster around the office, with art by Frazetta or Neal Adams, than most of those dry Boy Scout anthems and stern Calvinistic warnings.
"Sexpit" short story, modern horror, 6.5 pages
"Golddiggers of 1984" short story, modern horror, 6.5 pages
"Helluva City" beginning of an urban noir novel, 3 pages
"The Tomorrow File" sci-fi thriller feature film treatment for an adaptation of the novel by Lawrence Sanders, 3 pages
"The Unformed" sci-fi horror feature film treatment, purple ichor a la Classic Lovecraft, pastiche?, 3 pages
"Visit Port Watson" undefinable genre comic book, many, many, many, too many uncounted pages, LUXXXCORP is an outlaw Savings and Loan whose home office is located in the free port/pirate enclave, (see "Islands in the Net") of Port Watson, the capitol of the Republic of Sonsoral, an island in the South Pacific that operates outside the guidelines of international law with total legal impunity. Explores Libertarian Political & Economic Theory.
"Reluctant Messiah" sci-fi action/adventure feature film treatment, "Jesus? Meet the aliens!" 1.5 pages
"The Big Show" Sundance Project treatment, "Slackers" attend the weekend Art in the Park in "Nashville", 3 pages
"The Road to Parnassus" any genre feature film treatment of an adaptation of a Tudor, (Stuart?) era play circa 1497 - 1642. It's my little secret because as of 1947 the author was still...UNKNOWN! There's a French edition of the plays, (It's a trilogy!) in the Folger/Shakespeare Library, Georgetown DC, if you're REALLY interested.
"He's Fenster. She's Dorkus." half-hour romantic sitcom treatment, 1 page, Oh, hell, this one's a freebie > Just fill in the blanks. I'll do it for you the first time: "--Dorkus' --father is the --Islamic --Ambassador to --the United States. He's a --closeted, --hedonist at heart. --Fenster's --not his real name --father is a --Chinese trade representative doing some--industrial spying when he can. She's an --idiot. He's --even dumber. It's Tristan & Isolde, the Capulets & the Montegues, The Patty Duke Show, { just say any TV show - the more obscure the better.} with an --ideological twist. And they don't --die in the end, either! {Exclamation points are key!} See, there? That's not too bad. And it's easy. I guess that's why they call it "hack" work. It's, simply typing away...filling up the page with little sqiggles that I can, maybe, SELL! Hmmmm. {I need to type faster.}
"Sybil Brand" porn treatment. This is not for you.
"Blue Velvet" film commentary, 3.5 pages
"The Deer Hunter" film commentary, 3.5 pages
"Your Dead Grandparents had Sci-Fi Movies, Too>Go to>Metropolis" film commentary, 2 pages
I've got a film commentary on "The Searchers" around here, somewhere. "Dr. Strangelove", too.
Assorted manifestos, thesii, screeds and rants.
Another slush pile of dreck I had to write. It was for the money of a Korean-American feature film producer in Hollywood, (Fairfax) We did four flix together. From two guys in the living room hammering it out all the way to The American Film Market, Beverly Hills Hotel. With help from The Greek in his hillside pallazo. Ah, the tales of Hollywood...where was I?
The above are only hard copies. I lost 100's of pages when I spilt coffee on my notebook keypad and, slowly, it...fried...right...up. Quite an experience. I would wish it upon mine enemies. Carrie Phillips is not my enemy.
I've had a few art exhibitions: "Fuel in the Engine of Consumer Democracy" and such at the 0 Gallery in L.A. 01, too. Cotton Exchange & other L.A.C.E. shows. Almost made it into the Temporary Contempory! Current project: 44" x 77" giclee's on foil, flocked & just plain weird wallpaper. Nice Sofa Art if you like "My Trinity" of Rosenquist, Rauschenberg & Lichtenstein! Cheap, too. Framed or rolled - Get 'em now 'cause after I'm dead there'll be no more a-coming and you know what that means...Jeez does this mean I have to include scans? Oh, bother. ChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewall
For LUXXXCORP, the kind of mass hedonism that emerged during the 1970s shattered his belief in working-class innocence. “My art was not for mass anything."
He became completely disillusioned, for the sub-proletariat was drawn into the consumers' society and was unable to resist mass-hedonism.
Later, when asked what challenges came up by competing in the midst of the mass-hedonism of Las Vegas or the Seychelle Islands he, excitedly, answered, "I rocked the house." He seem quite cheerful, at times. The reference to that unfortunate incident in the Seychelle Islands seemed to, actually, perk him up a bit.
In Britain, this weekend, was the almost-annual mudbath of mass hedonism, self-abuse and oddness known as the Glastonbury Festival. As per usual, LUXXXCORP was a no-show.
"Excising faith would open the flood gates to mass hedonism.", said the bulbous head filling the wall-to-wall-TV panel.
Those Floridians. Now they've gone and elevated the good life into an art form that stops just short of mass hedonism. Lord knows where the natives go on their holidays!
Mass hedonism, (abandonment to sun, sea, sex and drugs) is the hidden link between the concentration camp and the Club Med.
Why is the Media falling all over themselves attempting to bail Ms. Gunning out of jail as though she were a human rights victim rather than a casualty of mass hedonism? ... She's a victim of the Media rather than a casualty of mass hedonism. Because sex sells and taking your clothes off doesn't merit a jail sentence. Then why are our broadcasters still putting out programs extolling and exploiting such debauchery? ... Most of you asked for it in many, many, many, many different ways that are kept a secret from you.
In some ways Amsterdam, with its heccic oscillacion between mass piery and mass hedonism, is odd.
There was also a display of mass hedonism, (at least in the area I was standing in) that left this married fellow gasping for breath a few times. Good times!
China does not accept homosexuality, mass hedonism, multiculturalism and of these three, mass hedonism has done more to do away with China's culture.
It's colossal arenas of violent entertainment exhibiting mass hedonism were all maintained by the ruthless media machine.
Historians are divided over why the internet failed to transform turn-of-the century American propriety into mass hedonism.
The hippies were right but they did not last because their's was the first event of mass hedonism in the media age. The idea spread rapidly across the globe.
What we're seeing is the progressive entrance of consumers who are the sons of the “cleansing revolution.” This could clear the way for the mass hedonism of the future.
Take notes, heathens. The first wave of Plague, mass hedonism, is being opposed by those seemingly well inside the Plague's recent structures.
Mass consumption and heterogeneity bring with it mass hedonism for the residents of big cities.
Along the Atlantic coast, which you guys might call 'the West' - the culture is characterised by the breakdown of the extended family, tradition, mass hedonism, materialism and the Cult of Narcissis.
Welcome to social libertarianism. Consenting adults is a line one might draw. The point is that the slippery slope, 'slouching towards gomorrah', crowd don't have a leg to stand on re: their "predictions" that adopting such a standard will lead to state recognition.
One has to supplement a slippery slope worry with actual evidence that the trend is moving in the direction you worry about. "From my perspective all reasonable morality is being tossed out the window -- now anything goes" is not adequate. That's just playing the part of social reactionary to changing norms. Pity it's little more than handwaving, since you're so skilled at it.
"Do as you will; this shall be the whole of the law." -- Aleister Crowley
And then there's the variant which is the one and only commandment for Wiccans: "If it hurt none, do as ye will." Not sure why I know these things, as an agnostic on my bad days and a Jeffersonian deist on my good ones, but there you go. And as a libertarian, who probably won't get much love here, I have to say the Wiccan rule would be a great way to run a society.
....the difference is that torture is broadly recognized as outside social sanction here, and is punished. Not enough, no; not in every instance where it ought to be, no. But contrast with the Dutch rush to depravity. I'll take things here, thanks. And I live in San Francisco.
Well first, here's hoping we can all avoid debating the incendiary "for those wishing to pretend that a homosexual coupling constitutes marriage" -- just once it would be nice, I think, if the bait was left on the hook -- and focus on the whomping good time they're having in the Netherlands.
Or, I suppose, if civil union statutes guarantee a similar 'open door' here.
re: Declining, falling and fattening From a survey taken a couple of years ago on toddlers' feeding habits:
* Soda is being served to infants as young as seven months.
* One-third of 19- to 24-month-old toddlers are not eating a single fruit in a day, and one-fifth are not eating any vegetables.
* French fries are the most commonly consumed vegetable for toddlers by 15 months of age.
* By 19 to 24 months, most toddlers consume sweets, desserts, or salty snacks at least once a day.
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/nutrition/infantfeeding.asp
Some nutritionists reackon that these kids will be the first generation in the US to fall short of their (non-gay, monogamous) parents in terms of life expectancy.I think that is much more worrying than gay couples getting some legal rights.
I'd add the following things to look for:
* 128 channels on the television 24 hours a day.
* What I percieve to be a lack of willingness to assume personal responsibility on the part of both parents and kids. I suppose, coupled with a growth in the welfare state. While I think there's causality there, I couldn't prove it.
* "Wussification" My parents grew up playing with rusty razors, broken glass and rabid dogs. I grew up playing with metal bats, hardballs, and ...'Gasp!'...rode a bike without a helmet. Let a kid play with a cap gun today and child protective services gets involved.
Those are the things I'm watching. Hard to measure and nearly impossible to determine the impact but I'm watching it anyway.
I think the above are all far more corrosive to society than mass hedonism. I'm only 24 and I already think kids are spoiled. 12 year olds want an iPod because their friends have them and they look cool -- they don't even have any music! I mean kids will be kids, and kids always bug their parents for more. But I agree hugely, between the ridiculous junk food, TV, and the "wussification", how can you expect anyone to grow up without a sense of entitlement?
What would Mark Twain think :)
As far as the welfare state: considering that the decline of parenting over the last 25 years has coincided wiht the decline of the welfare state.. and the preceding 2 generations, (IMO much tougher,) were raised in a time of a much stronger welfare state.. well maybe your feeling for causality is more based on a dislike for the welfare state than any particular relationship.
How can you expect anyone to grow up without a sense of entitlement? Well the word "no" works as well as reminding your children that your parental contract obligates you [the parents] to stick your nose into their business. It really isn't that difficult.
Well, become an agent of change when you have children. They certainly will appreciate it.
The parenting decline began in the 1960's, I think 1968 is pretty much the inflection point for most indicators.
Could it be that the post 1970 social disaster you describe might have other causes? The rise of mass media? Accelerating social mobility? The rat race?
I pity kids on the "wussification" front. As I've said here before we roamed the neighbourhood like a pack of wild dogs and learnt many lessons through it.
Still, when peak oil hits and we're all living off of whatever you caught cooked on an open fire and civilisation collapses all around us and we have to walk everywhere because there won't even be any buses... well, then I'll be one up on the young uns :)
The biggest societal change I've seen in my lifetime is the number of families with both parents working full time jobs outside the home. At first it was a choice brought about by liberalised social values and a better economy. Now it's no choice. Competiton from 2 salary families means that if you con't have 2 salaries you can't afford a house to live in.
I am very interested to see how this creche raised generation will be compared to my parent raised one. I could imagine good and bad influences, so it will be interesing.
The other big change that I will watch is the increased availablity of hard core pornography to children.
(Weird, also, that on the day the full Abu Ghraib record is finally released, over admin objections, a three-way in the Netherlands spurs the 'decay of Western civ' remark.)
Re: the decline and fall So, is the Netherlands really more socially disfunctional than the US? Higher infant mortality? Shorter life expectancy? Higher poverty rate? Higher illitteracy rate? Higher teen pregnancy rate? Higher abortion rate? Higher STD rate? Higher divorce rate? More prone to infectious diseases? [insert your favored criteria here]?
The numbers for every one of the categories you list are in Norway's favor. Indeed, the numbers for each category is better in any and all European countries than in the USA. The Western countries with more relaxed views on sex, sex education, birthcontrol, etc, ALL have lower teen pregnancy rates, lower STD rates, and lower abortion rates than the USA. The literacy rate is higher, the life expectancy is higher, the infant mortality rate is lower in all the Western countries than in the USA. The Puritanical, repressed, sex-is-dirty-and-best-ignored policies of the USA act objectively counter to their supposed benefits. The attitude makes EVERYTHING relating to sex worse than any other Western country. It objectively is a failure. It would be best to emulate our Western European superiors so we can enjoy the benefits that accrue (higher numbers for each and every category in your list). I meant "Netherlands". Nonetheless, ALL of Europe has more liberal views on sex than the USA and their numbers, across the board, are higher than the USA's.
Given their relative homogeneity, their small populations and areas, realtive wealth and the pervasiveness of Lutherainism, it would be amazing if they did have significant problems... Name a large country, say 30 million or more with some population diversity, that does not have problems similar to ours.
* That is changing and they will soon have problems -- just like us :)
I have deliberately not looked up the numbers, so I don't know which ones the US comes out better and which ones favor the Netherlands. But let's set the criteria before drawing conclusions.
Anthropologists tell us that neolithic society was once matrilinear (that is, name and property were inherited through the mother); this in an age when women ruled tribes and villages, and men were migratory hunter-gatherers. Because males were often absent, marriages were frequently polyandrous, a pattern repeated in later societies where men were often away (the Celtic and some native American, for example, or more recently, the Tibetan). The inhabitants of ancient Europe were thus far more inclined to continue to grant their women certain freedoms (serial divorce and remarriage, among others) long after the Bronze Age patriarchial revolution made women into virtual slaves of men elsewhere. This is attested to in the written records of the ancient Norse and Welsh. In Semitic nations, as well as Asian, polygamy was the norm, and in many places continues to be so even today. The Hebrew Bible chronicles the process by which that tradition was banned among the Jews, and the astonishing Judeo-Christian notion that men should not only abjure polygamy but be sexually faithful to a single wife for a lifetime was so utterly revolutionary that Islam could be viewed simply as a cultural counter-coup to restore a cherished status quo. And this, of course, is what Senator Santorum and others are really talking about when they publicly deplore the gate opening to legal polygamy in the West; the socializing of Sharia, the crack in the door that may create an appealing alternate lifestyle for addled American teens. We have already had some evidence of that among the followers of a 100% homegrown American religion, as witness the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping and subsequent Stockholm-syndrome polygamous 'marriage'.
Because of course, there are two distinct flavors of polygamy in the West--the formal, which is illegal, and the timeless and informal, which is universal and all around us, seemingly the result of a strong biological imperative in the male. This need to 'start over in midlife' is particularly amplified by the longer lifespan of modern man. The French have even codified the state of 'concubinage' (a concept lifted whole from Confucian China), where the rights of a mistress' children are, to some degree, protected by law. And that, of course, is the whole basis of monogamy in a nutshell: to guarantee the rights of primogeniture. This is why the ancient Greeks and Romans instituted it and enforced it with such vigor, even while they took their pleasure with slaves (or each others' sons. Sex between two grown men was termed 'pathic' and considered a disgusting vice). With polygamy, inheritance becomes a murky issue at best, a vicious and violent one at worst, as the Bible can attest. One of the unuttered secrets of Jihad is the 'second-son' syndrome--sons of minor or discarded wives are given no patronage or inheritance, cannot afford wives of their own and drift into religious extremism in order to gain social respect; we imagine all such unfortunates to be the bored playboy sons of wealthy oil sheikhs, but the reality is they are members of a vast, despised, and all-but-illegitimate underclass, one that we have created for ourselves in urban ghettoes and rural trailer-parks alike. One might even assert that the 'pimp' gangsta culture of today, where a man keeps a 'stable' of young working women is an exact mirror of that of tribal Africa, where the local chief may be married to dozens of women, whom he loans out in return for favors. Should reality--instead of being ignored--instead be legitimated? Why not gay marriage, polygamy, and polyandry? These are the questions confronting our nation in the accelerating age of Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World'; as Michel Houellebecq has cruelly illustrated in his own despairing novels, there will soon be no need for marriage at all, since all modern children are rapidly being abandoned pell-mell by most traditional forms of community and family structure. And as for the laws of inheritance--we see these redefined each day in our courts; they seem to largely now rely on DNA tests and a good lawyer. When wedding has lost its meaning, it become mere theatre, and when that happens we are forced to stare the most fundamental and obvious fact about it in the face: marriage endures, quite simply, when two people are in love with and desire to share their lives with each other. In that most joyous of all human equations we find God's truest handiwork (though the secular are free to argue that it's just a happy coincidence). The law can only compel us to honor our commitments; it cannot make a sacrament of them. And please forgive an old man for pointing out that he has never in his life seen three people in a state of such blissful union.
At least not for long.
(Santorum's point, of course, was that if marriage can mean anything, it will -- and will eventually mean nothing and that the social fabric will fall apart if "deviant" acts are legalized.)
Wonderful comment, LUXXXCORP !
A few follow-up questions though, if you will.
When wedding has lost its meaning, it become mere theatre, and when that happens we are forced to stare the most fundamental and obvious fact about it in the face: marriage endures, quite simply, when two people are in love with and desire to share their lives with each other.
What is its meaning (your structure suggests there's one best answer to that)?
This is why the ancient Greeks and Romans instituted it and enforced it with such vigor, even while they took their pleasure with slaves (or each others' sons. Sex between two grown men was termed 'pathic' and considered a disgusting vice).
What of Alexander then? Was he "pathic," taking his pleasure with persian "boys" who were of an age older than some of his indentured soldiers? Or did the rules not apply to the emperor?
Thank you for your kind words, Edward! And for pointing out my errors.
What I meant to say, of course, is 'When a society forgets what it means by wedding' rather than 'When wedding has lost its meaning'. As a heterosexual man still faithfully married to his high school sweetheart, I personally am a terrific romantic and can imagine no distinction in God's eyes between genders inside a marriage bed or out of it. As an old man, I hold many ultra-conservative views; a prejudice against full gay rights is not one of them.
As for Alexander, there are many schools of thought as to his actual sexual inclinations and behavior. As any student of history knows, there has always been one social code of sexual behavior for men in their civic lives and quite another while off on military campaign (hence the attraction of it for such tortured souls as T.E. Lawrence.) Recent scholarship raises the possibility that several of the early sources for Alexander's life were influenced by Ptolemiac 'hatchet jobs', histories now lost, in which Ptolemy, the former general of Alexander who seized Egypt and whose descendants included Cleopatra, sought to legitimate his own reign both by playing up the rumor that he was Alexander's half-brother and by implying a great deal more homosexual activity to Alexander than he actually engaged in. Obviously, no one can ever know for sure (nor do I care). However, according to the 'official' coda, Alexander's relations with Bagoas (the famous 'Persian Boy') led to a near-mutiny of his troops; they were used to treating him with near god-like status, but even they were revolted at this liaison, possibly because Bagoas was reputedly a eunuch. It was this social pressure, as much as dynastic, which convinced Alexander to remarry (he had three, possibly four, wives) twice more, the final time to Roxana, who was pregnant with a son at the time of Alexander's death. However, Alexander's rumored homosexual relationships included only one--with his childhood friend and close companion Hephaiston--which could have been termed 'pathic' had he even been Greek, which he was not. The rest fell into the category of an older man's love for an 'ephebe', the hallmark of the Sacred Band of Thebes, for example.
There are many books on the subject of the Romans' sexual lifestyles. We think of classical morality in terms of 'I Claudius', largely because it was taken from the scurrilous history of Suetonius (and no one on earth has read Suetonius more often and more credulously than I; it is a sort of Krafft-Ebbing of the madness of power), but the fact remains--we can't be sure that much of it is actually true. If we want a realistic view of Greco-Roman moral behavior, the modern city of Palermo is perhaps our best model. There, as in ancient Rome, a few powerful families and their thousands of 'clients' control civic life with an elaborate system of 'honor', commerce, and murder; publicly conservative and family-oriented, the true proclivities of these men (and their wives) erupt behind closed doors with domestic servants or expensive prostitutes, while their pampered offspring (sometimes even their daughters) enjoy the liberty of the town to pursue their own wild indulgences before assuming the mantle of responsibility in early middle age. There, too, the patronage of a handsome boy by an older 'knight' or indeed, priest or schoolteacher, is thought normal and admirable; sexual congress between two capos would be considered bestially obscene (unless of course one was ritually humiliating the other). This is what antiquity meant by 'pathic'--abnormal, perverse--and we still tack the suffix onto our modern complexes and psychoses as we come up with new ones. Do I agree with this view? No. Do I acknowledge that this is what they truly believed? As with Alexander: as far as history now knows, so yes.
However, according to the 'official' coda, Alexander's relations with Bagoas (the famous 'Persian Boy') led to a near-mutiny of his troops; they were used to treating him with near god-like status, but even they were revolted at this liaison,
"Official" codas were, to my understanding, fossilized in the the 1950-60's no? The attitudes toward homosexuality prevelant in the West at that time might explain the laborious contortions to find Ptolemic conspiracies.
My understanding is the opposite. That Bagoas, if he existed, represented (more than he did homosexuality) the seduction of Alexander by Persian attitudes, especially the notion of the emperor's god-like status (which even the "official" texts I've read indicate drove the Madedonians insane---particularly the idea that his Generals who he had always treated as equals, and probably still considered him of suspect birth, should begin humbling themselves before him). Also, there's little reason to suspect Ptolemy et al. were not also helping themselves to other captured Persian lads, is there?
However, Alexander's rumored homosexual relationships included only one--with his childhood friend and close companion Hephaiston--which could have been termed 'pathic' had he even been Greek, which he was not.
He was close enough with respects to how he behaved once he left Europe, no? Surely, he was more "Greek" than Persian or what have you.
Again, incredibly well-written and informed info...thanks!
What a pleasure to engage in debate with one so erudite and charming.
I'm afraid I cannot pretend to any scholarship on the subject, which in any case is easily Googleable. But I shall attempt a modest (and mercifully brief) reply, hopefully without having to leave this chair to consult my library of Alexandriana--which includes Arrian and Plutarch, both of whom were, I believe, translated well prior to the 1950s...
When I spoke of his troops revolting, something they did several times, as I recall, I was referring specifically to his relations with Bagoas and not to Alexander's policy of Medeizing his troops; when he insisted that they marry Persian brides, for instance, they submitted to this bit of state--and stage--craft with an obvious appreciation of the fact that it in no way compelled them to abandon their wives in Macedonia. As for his Persian robes, they were used to his tantrums and theatrics; Alexander was what we would latterly call a 'drama queen' (indeed Caesar's men affectionately called him the 'Queen of Bithynia', supposedly because of a youthful fling with that country's king). Further, Alexander's soldiers were happy to treat him as a godling, as both Alexander and his mother had peddled the rumor for years that he was the son of Zeus--neglecting the obvious inheritance issues presented; soldiers are happy to follow any leader who is notoriously lucky or blessed by the gods. Again, Caesar's men genuinely believed that he was especially lucky because of his reputed descent from Venus. Discovering a god in one's pedigree was a favorite hobby in antiquity and hid a multitude of miscounted months by one's grandmothers.
And as for Alexander being Greek! I strongly suggest a visit to modern Macedonia, where you will no doubt be set straight. Although Alexander was, of course, tutored by Aristotle and evinced great reverence for Athens, he was hated and distrusted by many Greeks; he had after all, helped his father destroy them as an independent political entity and was now their absolute ruler in all but name. It was partly armies of Greek mercenaries, many motivated by patriotism, that he fought in his first campaign in Asia Minor, where he posed as the liberator of 'Greater Greece'. Macedonia, though it shared some cultural and linguistic links with classical Greece, was as it is today, a largely Balkan nation with a distinct language. And views toward homosexuality there in that time can best be summarized by a single famous incident: the assassin who murdered Philip, Alexander's father, was said to have done so because Philip had ordered him trussed up naked in a courtyard to be sexually assaulted by servants, apparently a common practice (and one that persists to this day inside our own prison system). A practice not rooted in respect for gender orientation but rather in the exercise of primal power and ritual abasement--which they hardly needed to travel to Persia to learn.
It's a shame he's so breviloquent.
I've noticed from your other comments just how thoughtful and articulate you are; so your words are praise indeed.
And I'll try to employ more brevity in future.
And views toward homosexuality there in that time can best be summarized by a single famous incident: the assassin who murdered Philip, Alexander's father....
A few details you omit (and get wrong) in the tawdry business: Philip's assassin was his former boy-lover Pausanias. Supplanted in Philip's bed by another youth (the nephew of the increasingly important noble Attalos) he contrived to send this rival to his death in battle. Whereupon Attalos (not Philip) took revenge by getting the young man blind drunk at a feast and throwing out to be raped. Philip's part in the latter business, and the source of Pausanias' grudge against him, was that he refused to have Attalos prosecuted for the crime. (The account derives from Aristotle)
"Where [polygamy] survives, mostly out in the rural west, it invariably carries with it grave problems of child and sexual abuse, to say nothing of chronic impoverishment." As polygamy is practiced in the rural west it is child sexual abuse. It's not just a side effect. Fourteen year old girls are married off to their uncle or some other community elder and used as breeding slaves.
Could we quit being PC about this? There is one specific group in the US that practices this, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints: The problem with them is not that they are simply polygamous. The fact is, they treat women as chattel, young teenage daughters are married off to members within the church by their father's wishes. In a few cases, men of the church were excomunicated and their wives and children were 'reassigned' to other men within the church. They also tend to live off the federal government, as the men generally do not have incomes that can support ~10 women and ~50 children making them the ultimate example of the Reagan era welfare nightmare. However, the irony of this particular instance of polygamy, aside from teh fact that polygamy isn't really the problem here, is that it is not at all a good example of Tacitus' sky is falling rhetoric, in that these people follow a very rigid and strict moral/religious code, which, while not his, is certainly stable. The early mormon church worked in this manner and obviously survived quite well in a hostile environment.
"There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch." - Nigel Powers
This social liberalization and mass hedonism will lead to the decline and fall of the Rebublican Party. But the euphoria will let loose a darker spirit: nostalgia. It's a well-known and meaningless cognitive illusion.
The older you get the more you need to guard against the inevitable "it was all so much better when I was young" tinted glasses.
So, put away your nostalgia-tinted glasses; America is doing just fine. Every generation longs for the good old days.
The thing is - many conservatives are standing on this hill - commitment to traditional social norms as a necessary stabilizing factor at the local level of the individual. The resistance to change is non-trivial and non-compromising.
This country used to have a Middle Class that balanced the ideological wings against each other. I don't think that is true so much anymore, which implies that one or the other ideology will dominate.
On Harry Seldon - Asimov's Foundation Trilogy postulated that a brilliant mathemtician built a mathematical model of human sociological interactions, e.g. statitistical mechanics for human societies, and based upon this, could model societal trends in the future in the way statistical mechanics models the behavior of large groups of particles, without knowing the specifics of any particular one. E.g., mathimatical sociology. Until Harry Seldon comes along, we merely can argue our opinions.
What we're seeing develop are "problems" of affluence, such as the uses of leisure, the new mass hedonism, the collapse. of thrift. Our behavioral engineers, (we tease and call them "Attitude Re-Ajustment Managers", {"ARMS"} y'know, "The Strong A.R.M.S. of the Law) are at this moment running the programs that are helping us begin to look for new ways of expanding human accomplishment. Exponentially!
..."Modeling the mind of a Senator" project. If it works, we can move on to actual human beings! :^) Think local, act global.
Modeling the mind of a senator. What soap could possibly clean you up after that?
Utilitarianism is basically mass hedonism. Satan says "Always look out for your own interests and never compromise your own strength."
Ayn Rand, not Satan, is not advocating mass hedonism and anarchy. Rand is simply saying that actions should be done because it is in the person's own best interests.
"Balance is for losers. Real life is us or them, and by God, its going to be them."
Visit Port Watson! It has it all. Complete with mass hedonism, sacrifices and orgies dating way, way back to before there were Americans, taxes, or even Christians.
Much later, in order to foster biologic fusion, there was a display of bizarre mass hedonism and festivals of nudity to break down residual resistance and let in the radiant light of Christ.
As a society, is Rachel’s web site how we now define mass hedonism? Are her circus tricks and trampy sex appealing? She thinks so. The party girl is trying to cash in.
If her impact on Bollywood isn't evidence enough and even though she exudes mass hedonistic appeal, to simply dismiss her as all looks and no substance is drastically wrong.
Are we immune to this mass hedonism campaign that no longer respects children and the status quo re: television hours? There have been many reports that have surfaced indicating so.
Mass hedonism is summed up quite well as the fever of consumption. It is a fever of obedience to an unstated order and the degrading anxiety of being unlike all the others.
Unsurprisingly, many turn to mass hedonism and apathy as a way of life. Clergy, physicians, and teachers have all seen the toxic results of this character disorder: it's bigger than life and twice as ugly.
While the number eight being the number three for others - this atmosphere of mass hedonism, anarchy and mindless selfish individualism will, certainly, be the death of us all.
Sooner or later, we always end up in the porn section: Mass hedonism was not their style. I pulled my ... out of Priscilla¹s warm ... "Roll over." I told her, as I stood on the other side of the bed.
... or the personal ads: Must be clean-shaven and wear the latest fashions. About that "End-of-Life-As-We-Know-It" mass hedonism scene in "The Matrix: Revolutions": I think it was designed beautifully. Look where Neo And Trinity... (As we, quietly, lower the curtain on this scene...)
I'm in turn stunned into tunnel-vision, shocked at what I've seen, horrified of it's very existence, embarrassed for them, angry that I feel embarrassed for them, disgusted with myself for being angry and, finally, left with a strange feeling of...I can't describe it.
DJ SHADOW provokes mass hedonistic frenzy throughout New York - And it's all happening, again this weekend.
There are several aspects to this unseemly whole and the worst is that the bulk of the mass hedonism problem will continue, and continue to be ignored.
The serum's low uric acid index and it's relationship to mass hedonism, plasma urea, intracellular potassium and packed cell volume in a normal population group is an incredibly important discovery in the field of Heuristic Endemic Algorythems (Positive), HEAP, for short.
Conclusions in this study: SSSSS with or without sex in healthy, middle-aged women and men showed an increased in mass hedonistic behavior, (MHB) and a decrease in fat.
By developing “mass hedonism tourist industries” as a means to pay off its debts, these countries are actually encouraging the peacetime institutionalization of the sex industry and that's terrible.
In the United States, the underground current of mass hedonism became apparent after the completion of the government's Awareness Campaign that began in January of this year.
If the experiences of social legislation of the past half century have taught us anything, it is that tinkering with the basic institutions of family and moral structure by government fiat -- however well-intended -- is usually unwise and fraught with unintended consequences. No-fault divorce opened up a Pandora's box of easily-broken families and maladjusted single-parent youth; poorly-designed social welfare programs weakened family bonds to an oft-fatal degree; and now we see that the "civil union," intended as a sop for those wishing to pretend that a homosexual coupling constitutes marriage, is opening the door to polygamy. As is its wont in matters of the decay of Western civilization, the Netherlands is leading the way.
No-fault not at fault: "No-fault divorce opened up a Pandora's box of easily-broken families and maladjusted single-parent youth;" Not in my experience. Me and my buddies all were divorced during the good old days of fault divorce (it was assumed that us bestial males were at fault) and lost our houses, our children and much of our future income. Big rewards for the lucky winners: a nice house, the kids, and a court-assured income. And without The Hairy Beast to contend with. Too tempting for even the most virtuous woman to resist, I'm afraid.
Fault-based divorce was 'tinkering' to begin with. It represented legal roadblocks preventing two adults from dissolving their union, and it had its own unintended consequences (the legal farce of routine perjury for one, legal empowerment of abusive spouses for another).
No-fault divorce removed these legislative roadblocks. It was not a government intervention, but the end of a government intervention.
The Romans as well as the Greeks had no hang ups regarding homosexuality. Nor did the Japanese, and that culture was stable for 2 millenia. But no doubt your right, offending your particular religous sensibilities is definately causing the sky to fall.
So Edward's advocacy is going to lead to an avalanche of three-ways that will ultimately bury our God-fearing nation beneath an avalanche of sin and sinners? On the other hand... If there is very little possiblity that civil union laws will lead to the American fabric getting as bendy as a weekend in Roger Stone's hot tub? Then I'm not sure what this diary achieves. Other than to offer a grave warning about events that are unlikely to happen.
Government spokespeople said they will not change it's own 300-year-old rating system: "This system is for everyone: Jews, Catholics, heretics, agnostics. Everyone!'' An X rating, however, will prevent anyone under 21 from being allowed to attend. "Especially if accompanied by a parent or guardian.", they added.
The new campus craze: mass hedonism. “Because of the recent change in attitudes toward sex in North America, mass hedonism has booted football from the top spot in college circles." reported Cindy Sherm, a Student council representative and leading student activist.
Discipline is one of those critical front-end tools that can improve the odds for achieving a place in life where personal satisfaction can, if not overwhelm, at least balance, the pain of any human existence.
Then you should be legislating chores and allowances, doing away with trust funds and large inheritances (or making them contingent upon the recipient's productivity), spending the cash to beef up public education and get parents involved, setting federal time limits on TV watching and video game playing .... you know, instilling a work ethic. Because the formal structure of the family itself has absolutely no bearing on productivity. But nice try.
Getting parents involved and instilling a work ethic is a fine thing to say but, with 100,000 plus US K-12 schools each managed differently, with thousands of reform experiments spending many billions over fifty years, it has not happened. Its like demanding that antigravity machines be invented to solve the traffic problem. Yes, it would be nice. We just don't know how to do it.
The traditional family (can) provide more of the inputs we believe are required for raising well adjusted children. The traditional family structure is (often) sufficient, but necessary? I would say no.
TAMPA (AP) -- Thirty Texas churches are backing mass hedonism evangelist Robert Wilton in fraud lawsuits filed by people who say they gave him money but their prayers went unanswered. A 1991 ABC "PrimeTime Live'' report highlighted Wilton's luxurious lifestyle and questioned whether individual requests were processed as promised. His libel suit was dismissed.
Wilton took his "Mass Hedonism'' TV show and live Saturday broadcasts off the air in 1993. His Silva Mind Control Center in suburban Tampa, which was once affiliated with the Church of Bob, boasted more than 10,000 members, now has fewer than 1,000.
I wonder if this latest guy, in Tampa, is going to start a new trend of mass hedonism/suicide parties?
Bangalore_Lakshmi's Xanga Site I like metal but not head banging music, although that, too, is, sometimes, enjoyable, literature, weaving, bead weaving, metal working, glass blowing and crew (crew meaning rowing, not mass hedonism).
That cleared the way for the advice column, a typical feature of the women's magazine known as the "agony column", to become the vehicle for the dissemination of mass hedonism as a way of life. In these columns, medical experts such as Dr. Felon Allwright warned of the discomfort and discombobulation associated with this.
She is the author of three books: "The Aphrodisiac That Failed: Why SSSSS Did Not Become a Mass Hedonism Therapy", "What They Did to Women: The Origins of Sex Therapy" and "Towards Mass Hedonism Therapy: Wilhelm Reich and the Spanish Revolution." "The Age of Mass Hedonistic Maturation: Results and Discussion of the Otholiths of Oceana"
Humans need conformity. There are good reasons for this. Some of the paths the expression of conformity can take are going to cause hardship for non-conformists, like LUXXXCORP. But the greater benefits of it are essential.
Weaken one rule and you weaken all rules. Americans in particular are not, culturally, bound very tightly by rules. In America it has always been possible for a rule-violator to flee the village and start over elsewhere. This makes systems of rules fragile.
Is gun control the answer? Nope. An armed society is a polite society :) We need more weapons, not fewer.
You're not good enough! Human evolution is now being engineered. Choose to enhance yourself or face inferiority. By Joel Garreau, Joel Garreau, a Washington Post reporter and editor, is the author of the newly published "Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human" July 17, 2005
In the next few years, your child will come home from school in tears. He'll say, once again, that he is unable to compete with the children who are brighter, better behaved and physically more capable than he is because their parents have bought them technological enhancements and you have not. What will you do?
You could say, "That's all right dear, we don't care what other parents do with their children's minds and bodies, we love you just the way you are."
Or:
You could remortgage the house, again, to try to allow your child to keep up with the human enhancements that ever so rapidly are coming onto the market.
Or:
You could try to get the enhanced kids thrown out of your school, widening the chasms that already will be separating "enhanced" humans from the "naturals" who could adopt such enhancements but, for aesthetic or political reasons, choose to abstain, like today's vegetarians or fundamentalists.
What you and your children can't do is ignore the enhancement products that are already realigning our concept of what it means to be human.
We are at a turning point in history. For millenniums our technologies - fire, clothes, agriculture, cities, space travel - have been aimed outward at modifying our environment. Now, for the first time, our technologies are increasingly aimed inward - at altering our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities and progeny.
This is not some science fiction future. Such innovations are in the labs and hitting the market on our watch. Inexorable increases in ingenuity are opening vistas, especially in what we may call GRIN - genetic, robotic, information and nano - technologies.
The curve of innovation is rising exponentially. The significance of all this is not the gee-whiz gear. It is in how we will wrestle with what this means to relationships, loves and lives as we enter a period of engineered evolution that we create and adopt ourselves.
The scientists, engineers and philosophers pondering the reshaping of humankind see three scenarios. .
There are those who think we're bound for a near-future technological "heaven" in which we conquer suffering, stupidity, ugliness, even death.
Then there are those who think powers of such scope could be used for supreme evil in the next 25 years, threatening the very existence of our species - the "hell" scenario.
Finally, there are those who have sufficient faith in human cussedness that they think we will be able to control our futures rather than be the pawns of technology - the "prevail" scenario.
Ethically, intellectually, technologically - it won't be an easy for us to choose. Yet we must.
Consider the genetic temptations you and your budding young scholar-athlete will face. Scientists' understandings of the human genome and the proteins that control all cellular processes in the body are leading to the creation of remarkable pharmaceuticals. One example is the pain vaccine being tested by a Bay Area company. It would cancel acute suffering for a month. Ready for that marathon, son?
Five companies in the U.S. alone are competing to bring memory pills to market. No wonder. They could be a bigger commercial blockbuster than Viagra. They promise not only to ban the senior moments of the baby boomers but to revolutionize education of the young. Think of what it will do to language acquisition alone. Some analysts believe that it could increase our kids' SAT scores by 200 points or more.
Robotics is allowing unprecedented connections between the human brain and our machine creations, blurring the distinction between the made and the born. Matthew Nagle, a paralyzed young Boston man, last summer became the first human to send an e-mail with his thoughts. A computer device implanted into his brain by a company called Cyberkinetics can read his neurons as they fire. This also allows him to control a robotic arm. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - the research arm of the Pentagon - is funding similar research because an F-22 is a difficult machine to fly with a joystick. How much simpler it would be, they reason, if a pilot could control it directly with his brain. Images and alarms collected by the plane could be piped directly to her senses, bypassing computer screens and keyboards.
Nanotechnology refers to building objects and substances one atom or molecule at a time. The results can be amazing, including forms of carbon that exist by the beaker-full that are 60 times stronger than steel, have the weight of plastic, sport the clean electrical conductivity of diamond and display the precision of DNA.
Nanotechnology is projected to be a trillion-dollar industry by 2015 - comparable to the total GNP of Canada. Some say it will revolutionize everything: warfare, energy use, medicine.
These GRIN technologies, in short, mean that every power of our comic-book superheroes from the 1930s and '40s either exists or is now in active development. A technique called "gene doping," for example, produces such muscle strength in rodents that some University of Pennsylvania researchers flatly doubt we'll ever have an Olympics again that does not involve genetically altered humans. The 2004 Athens Olympics may have been the last one.
Brain-scanning devices at Temple University, meanwhile, offer tantalizing hope of lie-detection so meticulous that, like the Shadow, we may indeed know what evil lurks in the hearts of men.
Advocates of the "prevail" scenario think back to the Dark Ages. Humans then were beset by apparently insurmountable trials similar to our own. But with the rise of the printing press, we could store and share our ideas in ways never before possible. Print allowed the rise of institutions beyond the imagination of one country, much less one person: global trade, and then the Enlightenment, which gave us democracy and modern science itself.
There's reason to hope that such co-evolution is occurring again. In the '70s, if you had been told that there would be a ceaseless rain of computer viruses and worms attacking the guts of our most sensitive computers, you might rationally have assumed the human race, or at least technological progress, to be doomed. You might have seen it as hopelessly Pollyannaish to think that defenses might evolve as quickly as they have.
In fact, the signs that humanity can make good use of technology to thwart the bad abound. On 9/11, the fourth plane didn't make it to its target. Why? Because the Air Force was so quick? No. It was because dozens of ordinary people on that plane - empowered by mobile phone technology - in less than an hour analyzed, diagnosed and cured their society's problem, at the greatest cost to themselves.
Still, we have many questions with which to grapple.
Already we see people living much longer, healthier lives than in the past. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health think that the first human to robustly live 150 years is already alive today. What will it mean to marriage and parenting - not to mention Social Security - if this curve of increased vigor continues?
What will it mean to your family if your kids are greatly more capable mentally than you are? Did any fathers ask their daughters to fix the Model T, the way we now routinely hand a balky cellphone to our offspring? The relationship between who learns and who teaches, which has been stable for millenniums, has been upturned: "You looked at the previous generation to learn how to live yourself. That's no longer possible," explains anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson.
And what does it mean to the institutions we cherish - like democracy - if it is no longer clear that all men and women are created equal?
The measure of success in the "prevail" scenario that I hope for would not be how many transistors we can get to talk to each other. That way merely leads to the other two scenarios, in which our future is technologically determined and we are just along for the ride. Rather, "prevailing" in the midst of such radical evolution would be measured by the richness, depth, variety and ease of the most important connections - the ones among unpredictably clever humans like ourselves.
P.S. DJ SHADOW RULES! BECK, TOO! Can't forget NEGATIVELAND or ART OF NOISE, either. (And I liked Mark McGuire's dingers. So what about the steroids. It's called "Takin' it to the next level, TOO THE EXTREME, BABY, YEAH!!!" Not for me no thanks I've got to go check the Top 40 now bye. {You, really, shouldn't meet your heroes up-close-and-personal-like. You're just ruining it for yourself.)
UNPUBLISHED TERM PAPERS, SHORT STORIES, MAGAZINE ARTICLES AND OTHER EPHREMIA I'VE AUTHORED FOR SALE
"Goal Setting For Dream Achievment: Willy Loman, Victor Frankl and "Man's Search For Meaning" term paper, 7.5 pages
"The Managerial Enterprise of IBM" late 70's, early 80's" comprehensive management evaluation of corp. circa late 70's, early 80's, (thumbs-up) 11 pages + works cited page
"Organizational Behavior Modification Theory and Style" 7 pages
"An Autobiographical Examination of Carol Pearson's "The Hero Within": What Archetypes Am I?" 6 pages + works cited page
"Mass Media as a Tool for the Encouragement of Radical Hedonism and Egoism in Society" 4.5 double-space-typed pages with 1" margins + works cited page
"A Slush Pile of Business Management Case Studies" a passel of "What If's..." answered. Stupid stuff like "Cookie Wars" and "My Best Employee Is Having A Nervous Breakdown! What would you do?"
"Lighting the Stage" primer, 4 pages
"Naval-Gazing Tripe" actually, an 8 page goals statement
"The Return, (from the dead), of the Mucker" Parts I & II, both 2 page prose poems glorifying Conanesque life as well as the war in the far distant, higher-tech future. Y'now, a diptych. Would make a better motivational poster around the office, with art by Frazetta or Neal Adams, than most of those dry Boy Scout anthems and stern Calvinistic warnings.
"Sexpit" short story, modern horror, 6.5 pages
"Golddiggers of 1984" short story, modern horror, 6.5 pages
"Helluva City" beginning of an urban noir novel, 3 pages
"The Tomorrow File" sci-fi thriller feature film treatment for an adaptation of the novel by Lawrence Sanders, 3 pages
"The Unformed" sci-fi horror feature film treatment, purple ichor a la Classic Lovecraft, pastiche?, 3 pages
"Visit Port Watson" undefinable genre comic book, many, many, many, too many uncounted pages, LUXXXCORP is an outlaw Savings and Loan whose home office is located in the free port/pirate enclave, (see "Islands in the Net") of Port Watson, the capitol of the Republic of Sonsoral, an island in the South Pacific that operates outside the guidelines of international law with total legal impunity. Explores Libertarian Political & Economic Theory.
"Reluctant Messiah" sci-fi action/adventure feature film treatment, "Jesus? Meet the aliens!" 1.5 pages
"The Big Show" Sundance Project treatment, "Slackers" attend the weekend Art in the Park in "Nashville", 3 pages
"The Road to Parnassus" any genre feature film treatment of an adaptation of a Tudor, (Stuart?) era play circa 1497 - 1642. It's my little secret because as of 1947 the author was still...UNKNOWN! There's a French edition of the plays, (It's a trilogy!) in the Folger/Shakespeare Library, Georgetown DC, if you're REALLY interested.
"He's Fenster. She's Dorkus." half-hour romantic sitcom treatment, 1 page, Oh, hell, this one's a freebie > Just fill in the blanks. I'll do it for you the first time: "--Dorkus' --father is the --Islamic --Ambassador to --the United States. He's a --closeted, --hedonist at heart. --Fenster's --not his real name --father is a --Chinese trade representative doing some--industrial spying when he can. She's an --idiot. He's --even dumber. It's Tristan & Isolde, the Capulets & the Montegues, The Patty Duke Show, { just say any TV show - the more obscure the better.} with an --ideological twist. And they don't --die in the end, either! {Exclamation points are key!} See, there? That's not too bad. And it's easy. I guess that's why they call it "hack" work. It's, simply typing away...filling up the page with little sqiggles that I can, maybe, SELL! Hmmmm. {I need to type faster.}
"Sybil Brand" porn treatment. This is not for you.
"Blue Velvet" film commentary, 3.5 pages
"The Deer Hunter" film commentary, 3.5 pages
"Your Dead Grandparents had Sci-Fi Movies, Too>Go to>Metropolis" film commentary, 2 pages
I've got a film commentary on "The Searchers" around here, somewhere. "Dr. Strangelove", too.
Assorted manifestos, thesii, screeds and rants.
Another slush pile of dreck I had to write. It was for the money of a Korean-American feature film producer in Hollywood, (Fairfax) We did four flix together. From two guys in the living room hammering it out all the way to The American Film Market, Beverly Hills Hotel. With help from The Greek in his hillside pallazo. Ah, the tales of Hollywood...where was I?
The above are only hard copies. I lost 100's of pages when I spilt coffee on my notebook keypad and, slowly, it...fried...right...up. Quite an experience. I would wish it upon mine enemies. Carrie Phillips is not my enemy.
I've had a few art exhibitions: "Fuel in the Engine of Consumer Democracy" and such at the 0 Gallery in L.A. 01, too. Cotton Exchange & other L.A.C.E. shows. Almost made it into the Temporary Contempory! Current project: 44" x 77" giclee's on foil, flocked & just plain weird wallpaper. Nice Sofa Art if you like "My Trinity" of Rosenquist, Rauschenberg & Lichtenstein! Cheap, too. Framed or rolled - Get 'em now 'cause after I'm dead there'll be no more a-coming and you know what that means...Jeez does this mean I have to include scans? Oh, bother. ChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewallChinesewall
posted by LUXXXCORP at 10:23 PM
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