[MD] you intellectual dickhead, you

[John Carl]

That's right, I'm talkin' to you.  You purveyor of reason, you definer of
truth, you container of static excellence you.

You, proud of your towering mind, seeking to thrust your ideas into me,
seeking to penetrate my defensive membranes with your "points".

Well you're not gonna do it.  I'm gonna try and do it to you so hard, you
won't be able to do it to me.

Cuz I'm an intellectual dickhead too.  We all are, here, or we wouldn't be
doing this.  Wouldn't be talking about the classical definitions of the
meaning of meaning.

And since it's my choice, I'm gonna defend it.  I can't in any style imagine
stopping or quitting or changing.  My whole life is but a seeking for
knowing and communicating my knowing to others.  Drink, drugs and women are
easy to leave, in comparison to metaphysical speculation.

I guess the only morality question is "how?"  Seduction or  Rape?  A
combination perhaps.

Certainly none of that academic prostitution!

 But honest to goodness we need some balance.  We are crying for a balance
of the other side of consciousness, the other half of human mentation, the
artistic side.   We don't have that and it's the IMPORTANT half, the half of
consciousness that leads the knowing and the explaining.

I'm talking about here on MD, of course, but not critically.  For one thing,
we are reduced mainly to words on an internet forum, and thus can only play
the hand we're dealt.  I don't see the composition of MD as the problem; I
see the problem in the world - the society at large, and MD as a possible
cure.

Or if not a cure, at least a thoroughgoing analysis of where to go for a
cure.  I mean, this intellect we all value so much must be good for
something, right?

Here we seek out what is good, and share it with others.  And there's a lot
of good out in the world, but its mostly old.  There's hardly any new good,
and what's more, the constant shoveling of "new and improved" at us day and
in night, in the service of commercialism, is degrading our tastes.  We lose
our comprehension of old good, and besides, it's old.  We've already seen
it, been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, attended the sequel and
viewed it from the perspective of retro-week on cable.


What I see in the world at large is artistic genius on the wane.  More and
more the works of culture are self-referential and the self that they refer
to is a vapid and shallow self.  With permutations of generations degrading
into sensualist satisfactions unearned and out of context, the foundations
disappear.  There is no proper basis for constructing a worthy self from
such tripe.  We're doomed if we don't turn it around somehow.  We're doomed
if we slide with the times and let the pendulum do its thing.  We're doomed
if we trust in our credentials and status symbols to confirm us in our
rightness and just keep the negative patterns going.

We're doomed unless we somehow penetrate the mystery that surrounds us, the
mystery of why the hell we are so doomed.

And I mean, it's really a nice day and I'm in a good mood.  But
nevertheless, unless we do better, we're doomed.