Jon Stuart… wow.. after a day of being angry at the inability i see within the world for change i get a man with a lighthearted and yet very serious take on reality. The method of delivery is light-hearted while the subject matter is very serious.

First was the PBS show with Charlie Rose where Jon pontificated about strange things like politicians are monkeys throwing feces and that the media should not be saying, “thats what they (politicians and monkeys) do.” instead they should be stating that, “That is what they do, but still those are Bad Monkeys.”

bad metaphor but it worked in his context… one way metaphor… can’t go backwards

C-Span question and answer period… awesome… he is hillarious… and he makes me feel like the world isn’t that bad… one statement i like that he said…

“When bush says, “Let history judge if i’ve made a mistake.” is unfortunatly wrong. We don’t have the time to let history be the judge. We need to judge now because the reactions of the judgements are here and now. ”

beautiful statement. and i paraphrased because i’m horrible at quoting.. horrible.. so now i’m going to be making a recording of this on tape for my history proffessor…

Outfoxed disturbed me greatly… History of the Modern African American Experience disturbed me also… and listening to a man rant about how his “religion” was more accurate then another man’s religion disturbed me. That was the philosophy meeting on The Muslim Religion, which detailed what Christianity Was and Islam Was Not.

subtle difference eh?

I’ve also spent some time today watching Jon Stuart being interviewed by different media outlets.. interesting… i’m watching it right now… PBS Charlie Rose is on right now… interesting..

For an atheist i appeal to a personal god a lot don’t I? Contradiction? perhaps not… but irrelevant..

Jon Stuart has mobilized a strike on various fronts…
cspan
crossfire (of course)
charlie rose
60 minutes…
etc…

he is a virtual media frenzy now…

go him…

and on a completly related side… yet more depressing…

I watched outfoxxed today… wow… i’ll talk about it friday or tomorrow… i’m too depressed…

I so wasn’t ready for the papers people are writing in Nietzsche’s class. Topics of popular choice are:

1) Christianity and how it has perverted Christ’s views.
2) The Herd and all the wonderful understanding that can come from such a topic…
3) The Ubermensche… or as I like to jest with the people who chose the topic, “The Ubermensche, and why I’m not one even though I choose this topic to make it seem like I were”

Boring choices eh? I’m on my second report right now destroying Christianity. It’s a blast… really it is.. don’t you see how pleased I am? *sarcasm falls short in typeface*

Honestly, I wish people would abandon the Nietzsche -> Christian link completely. It is highly overused.. In fact, I’ve noticed a general trend in my class. No one is attacking Nietzsche’s views. The smartest person I’ve seen in class is simply doing a translation of another philosopher’s work. I say simply, but I mean non-philosophical essay consisting of a translation. Is that good or bad? neither. I’m excited about his essay, I just wish more people were taking contrary views to Nietzsche. Perhaps approaching it from a point of how much bullshit Nietzsche is. Maybe I am in the minority with this viewpoint.

Don’t get me wrong I appreciate a lot of what I have learned about Nietzsche. I was too harsh on him before I took this class. I obviously knew very little about him, which is disconcerting because I took a class on him earlier. I still believe though that his arguments are fundamentally flawed. Some are good. His critique of language, awesome. His critique of morality, interesting yet flawed. Eternal recurrence, bullshit. Ubermensche, nice idea and maybe in a physical evolutionary sense, but not a good use for value theory. Recognizing the will to power? priceless. I appreciate his evaluation of the will to power. It is his most useful treatise aside from the critique of language. But both awesome doctrines contradict each other thereby producing a kind of failure ultimately.

So in the end my paper on morality in the Nietzsche sense is going to end up being a destruction of Nietzsche’s moral claims. Yes I will make appeals that might work but I will also highlight objections that must arise.

oh well speaking of let me get back to doing just that.

I had some interesting discussions today.. the Israeli-Palestinian war was debated by me and an Ex-Jew… the political campaign and media inadequacies were heatedly debated about at the cafe early this morning or.. last night however you wish to label the time frame…

my failure’s in debating with people… apparently I’m dogmatic and I approach things as a teacher and not a learner… of course this is coming from my brother… which means that he has a unique vantage point on my life…
I might act that way about my subject with him because we argue so much that I find if I don’t argue that way I’ll be trampled and my points will have less weight… so I find myself coming out of the gate in the beginning and setting up a whole argument before he has a chance to respond to anything… we have had a unique dynamic over our lives…

Only recently, in the past 2-4 years has he taken me seriously in any form of information exchange… before he would placate my whims.. and i think the reason is because I became forceful in my conclusions and I didn’t bow down… also because I had training in rhetoric… not to mention the subjects we talk about –> religion, morality, existence, -> are all subjects i study in depth.

Only lately have we picked up language which is awesome because it triumphs all the above ideas. Why you might ask? Mainly because the ideas above are filtered through language… There is a current trend in philosophy, spawned by Nietzsche btw, where we attack language for its inability to convey or explain reality. Language is very abstract. The real world is physical. How can an abstract entity explain something it is not even able to produce? or in other words how can an abstract entity and a physical entity interact… and they don’t… only humans force them to interact.. the medium is humanity…

What sucks about this is that Trey is the expert here… I’m the dawdling noob… but that isn’t to say I don’t have unique insight… just not the information to back my insight up… but i find myself still wanting to be looked at as an equal in the field… when before i didn’t share equality with trey in the previous fields… there can be no equality in a field i don’t have enough information in.. But this is changing… Trey is approaching linguistics from an English position and I’m approaching language from the philosopher’s position.

It is a unique dilemma. Philosophy has built up to linguistics… all the explanations of reality, morality, etc are byproducts of language… so language trumps it all… why talk about morals when you don’t even know where language and reality diverge?

Oh well… so i got knocked off my high block… its good… I’ve been thinking i needed to stop professing things as though they are true… Epistemology hurt last semester…

Me: you mean logic is flawed?
Korcz: you knew this… you kept saying this when you were taking symbolic logic…
Me: Yeah but not this fundamentally flawed… and it is such a simple flaw… but it destroys everything…
Korcz: It doesn’t destroy everything, it simply highlights it and says, “Yes philosopher, there is no real answer.”

It hurt to say the least… i thought i was making meager progress in understanding things… I’m just now getting used to changing my opinions like the wind… but it is severely disorienting…

anyway….. Below is a dream I had… Extended for brevity.
(more…)

I just got off the phone with Mary… she has a lot of things that are going great for her.. she was offered a job tutoring next semester and it pays the same as her teaching this semester + tuition reduction… on top of which she doesn’t have to grade so more time to run around like a freak in NYC… not to mention she has the opportunity to teach creative writing classes at night which will also pay a lot of money on top of the above tutoring… so in the end it will be a lot of money + a lot of time…. really sounds good….

i’m not tired so i came in here to fuck around… thinking i might go for a walk or something… i’m not sure what i’m going to do.. just not tired… i slept today though so that be the reason.. working all weekend then waking up so early to get to work on monday sucks…

I’m thinking i’m going to have to start charting my finances… i hate money though.. i hate devoting a part of my life deciding…
-=-=-
She’s you’re not so special so look what you’ve done, boy
She’s you’re not so special so look what you’ve done

Now you wish she’d never come back here again
Oh, never come back here again
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oh well.. today in nietzsche we get a student giving his presentation… and judging by his paper it is either going to be a great presentation or a horrible one…

depending on how much work he did…

Mom and I are considering going to houston for the rennaissance festival. Maybe we can see Mike also.. This wednesday the philosophy club has a meeting detailing the impressions of the muslim community…

burn this city… this fire is out of control we are gonna burn this city… oh how i burn for you…

Wednesday also has me and Trey going to go see Outfoxed… an expose` of the fox news industry and their stilted view of “fair and balanced” reporting.. interesting…

heh i’m listening to franz ferdinand… Thursday i’m thinking of going out and seeing the poetry reading… why the fuck not…

i was supposed to come home and talk to Mary before i left for work.. but i couldn’t get in touch with her so i suppose the idea was abandoned… i am now getting dressed for work and i will leave here shortly…

And it is groovy… i blew my ego to astronomical proportions today… i tutored philosophy… just a few minutes ago.. i tutored one of my friends in ancient philosophy…

Thrice divided line… Analogy of the Cave… Third Man Argument… World is in constant change… war breeds new things…the perfect number is 10… pythagoras… zeno of paradoxes… on and on…

it was great… then she told me she is dropping out of college… i wanted to slap her… her argument is that it is getting in the way of her studying… i think she is rebelling against the interpretations… which is good.. but you can’t get the information unless you put up with the proffessor’s interpretations.. they are human they approach information from one position or if it is a good professor from several diffferent positions… but still they get filtered through their own perceptions… there is no objective view of the world…. there is just a consensus of subjective views…

oh well we talked about this.. i hope she doesn’t drop out for that reason.. i’ve seen too many of my friends drop because of stupid reasons…
*taps foot and sings “this fire is out of control.. we are gonna burn this city burn this city….”
but then again who am i to judge reasons as smart and stupid… my criteria is that if the reason isn’t life-threatening then it is stupid…the university is a great institution for acquring information… if you drop that your effectively saying you can’t handle the load of information…

it was interesting…. i think i am in an argumentative mood… one of my friends pointed it out.. trey pointed it out.. mary has been harping on it… i’m not sure why i’m so confrontive.. ego?

I got into a lot of arguments… i’m wiped out… i think i shall go to sleep…