Something Stupid

"Hello. I have a problem. Okay, a whole host of problems, and I think it all centers around this: I want to be happy. That's all, just happy. Why would we all be here if I couldn't be happy? Or successful. It's hard to tell. I don't care much about money, but I do have an eye on my finances. I have car payments, mortgages on the house, and I'm underpaid for a college graduate. So I'm always looking for ways of making a few extra dollars (okay, more than a few). But I don't care much about money.

And my kids, I often get worried about them. Do you know where I can find one of those GPS recievers so I don't have to worry about them getting kidnapped? And, I'd never admit this in public, but I'm looking for one for my wife too—in case she gets kidnapped.

At work, I don't think my boss respects me. Like I said, I'm underpaid as it is, but still I make enough. But it seems to me that I have all this free time when I get home from work, do you know where I can find that one blog post of yours about starting a side business? You said that my boss would respect me more if he knew I didn't have all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. And then I'd still have time left for my wife and kids. I so hope nothing happens to them.

Anyway, I'm open to any advice you can offer me. Is there anything you can tell me that will help me? Anything that probably won't change anything, but make yourself feel good?"

Something stupid, that's what you are.

Sigh. Sometimes browsing some popular blogs makes me sad :(

Arizona Militia. Check out their web page to see these militia groups who claim to be patroling the border for illegal immigrants. First, if you're just trying to spot illegal immigrants, then why do you need fire arms?

I've been doing a lot of searching today looking for various racist groups in Arizona—I figure just Arizona for now, at least there might be people I can confront, and sometimes a confrontation is all you need. People in general are extremely submissive and few of them have ever encountered someone with any level of real independence. I discovered this kind of thing early on in school. I was always picked on, but I learned early on that the kids would only pick on me when they are in groups. Individually, each one became shy, easily intimidated, and non-confrontational. What is true of kids is also true of adults—that's why adults also cluster in groups (ideologies, factions, militias) because they are only dangerous in groups. But individually, it's always possible to, if not change someone's mind, question their convictions and water the seeds of a bad conscience. This could be enough to form dissent within some of these groups.

Anyway, I just formed my first google news alert with, what I hope, is a well-crafted search string. I'd like to monitor what happens in Arizona about this sort of thing, because I think racism is more common here than I had thought.

Also, once I finish investigating the classic free will topic, I intend on turning my studies toward the nature and cause of racism. I have a need to understand these sorts of things, as they are always complex.

What isn't there to respect about Diogenes the Cynic? He was an incredibly wise man, how does it matter if he masturbated in public? But he said something that doesn't cease to make sense to me. He felt above the tyrants of his day because he understood correctly that tyrants are slaves to their desires. And Diogenes, through the kind of training that he practiced as a Cynic, believed himself to be the master of his desires. So he reasoned correctly that this made him the master of the tyrant's master. That made him a sort of king.

I guess, for a while, I thought I was in control, and now I realize that I'm not really. I have my own addiction: it's called internet addiction. By all means, Kevin, get off! get off! No, I'm not going to abandon the internet altogether, but I certainly want to back away quite a bit. I need to find my freedom.

There's a thread on PF about desires and happiness. Usually, I post longer posts, but sometimes with just a single line you can say all that needs to be said. So I wrote: "The satisfaction of desires does not produce happiness—ask any addict." And then I realized I'm not free.

Been a while since my last post—I haven't had a whole lot of free time, not enough time for this post even. So I'll make this quick

Ahh, conformity, there's little that really gets to me as much as this does. But it's more than this, a lot more. I've never actually felt the need to be opposed to conformity. Here are some good thoughts on conformity. Being critical of individualism is a good thing. It takes thought to be a non-conformist, we whose goal is thoughtfulness itself.

That's all for now. Happy easter everyone.

I observe that I can be angry, even though I don't feel angry; or I can be depressed, even though I don't feel depressed; and so on. Then it also seems to me that those times when I feel angry, or depressed, or whatever else emotion I'm conscious of, it's due to the reactions or statements of other people. To what extent are our feelings (which I define as our consciousness of our own emotions) wholly the product of our attempts to see in ourselves what other people see in us? The nature of our emotions is almost certainly something other than what we feel like when have them.

For this reason, I think I'm going to not use the mood entries anymore, unless I'm in some obvious mood, because so far it seems like I'm making up stuff because at any moment I often don't know what mood I'm in.

The problem with honesty is that no one has the courage for it. I fear that the entirety of the social existence of most people is behind a disquise: they don't want to show their vulnerabilities, nor do they even have the strength to laugh at them. They can only gather their strength insofar as they are taken for something they're not.

And what has happened to standing up for something you believe in? Well, that takes courage too, and I suppose it's almost preferable to a lot of people to not believe in anything at all rather than hold anyone accountable to it. Weakness corresponds with lack of integrity.

And morality is subjective, morality is relative: how come that sounds to my ear as, "Don't judge me! You have no right to judge me! Please don't judge me!" But when I say that morality is relative, I mean something altogether different.

One thing that offends my taste is conformity. I've always "rebelled" against conformists, the problem is that often they thought they were the non-comformists. Here, I'm speaking of the herd instinct in the teenage mind. I rebelled against fashion—I still do, to a great extent. Really, how does it matter what you think of my clothes? Have you considered that I make the clothes what they are, they don't make me? The purpose of fashion is way too obvious, it simply doesn't make any sense to say that people choose the clothes they wear out of a kind of aesthetic sense, we'd all be in wonder at how often the aesthetics of people change! Rather, fashion in all ages (whenever fashion is actually an issue, as I understand it the ancient Greeks only prefered their plain togas) is a nice little game people play to show each other who is really on top in society and who is really on bottom. You'd think this kind of thing would pass away in democratic society, but it looks as insidious as ever. The people on the top want to show everyone that they are on the top, and the people on the bottom want to look like they are on the top. This causes the people on the top to change how they dress because, behold, the people on the bottom are catching up and beginning to dress like them! Then how would the people on top be able to express their superiority? Thus, you have the fundamental cause of change in fashion trends. And it's incredibly important that the fashion world not be aware of what it really represents, so it is always deluded about itself, to maintain it's good conscience. Being honest about fashion is the one thing that's always out of fashion.

Isn't it sad that so many people care so desperately about what other people think of them? I'm not immune to this, but I think I'm better off than most people. I've never experienced any envy of rich people. To what extent is the desire for more money that so many people seem to have really no more than a desire for a status symbol? Fashion, regretably, isn't only about clothes: it's about anything that can be tied to social prestige, and I think that for the modern USA just the fact of having a great deal of money automatically puts you up into a higher class. Do the economists have it all wrong? Could it be that money has acquired for itself an intrinsic worth?

What I want to know is: where are the non-conformists? Am I really the only person who doesn't care at all about these things? Am I the only one who sees in himself the desire to distance himself as much as possible from society, seeing it as a fundamentally deluded institution? If only there is someone out there who can ask, "What is honest?" with me and knows exactly what I mean.

But the problem with honesty is that no one has the courage for it.

And this is to honor my new distant and impersonal friend lusciousspike, who I stole the quiz from. Yes, for anyone who is wondering, I'm male, I just thought it'd be funny. Judging from the picture, it looks like even the hidden beauty has substantial ta tas.

And yes, I'm usually this weird :)

Addendum: Okay, now I regret every using the phrase ta tas. I swear, I've never used the word in my life before this. See? When I try to be light-hearted, this is what I get. But don't worry, I'll be getting back to seriousness sooner than you think.

I enjoyed the season finalle of the fourth season of BtVS, one of the things I thought was interesting was how each character represented a character trait: heart, mind, spirit, and hand. Well, here's a page that goes along with the same idea: Head, hand, and heart. Which one most represents you? I'm definitely in the head category, my views of other people corresponds well with what they list there. Go ahead and take a look at that page.

I also want to say that Changing Minds is a most interesting site. They have articles on power, methods of pursuasion, and so forth, which explains a lot about how modern society actually works.

Also check out the Matching Hypothesis, which I think I've heard before somewhere.

I'm amazed at how much my mood determines my posts. I started to post something yesterday, when I was cranky, that I saved and now I can't bear to post it today. It was interesting in its own right, but I can read crankiness in every line. Yet, I didn't feel cranky at the time—how messed up is that? Usually, when I sit down at my computer at night and begin reading things, I calm down and I usually do end up selecting calm for my mood. But I think whatever mood I had before I sat down is still there—whatever baggage I'm still carrying for the day. So I don't think I'm ever as calm as I think I am.

Today, on the other hand, has been a pretty good day for me. What sucks though is how much my mood depends on other people. If I had my way, human beings would never have been social animals, we'd all be individuals who are all emotionally independent from the rest of the group. I became re-acquainted with an old friend from high school and I guess that lightened me up quite a bit. Also, earlier today and last night I've been thinking to my self about power and purpose, and I think I'm a little proud that I do think about things without writing them down. Sometimes I'm afraid that I only think when I write (a lot of my posts are really experiments, not conclusions), but I think I'm making progress.

And, well, I haven't been making a big deal about but I've been losing weight which is a good thing. I'd like to get back in shape. Let me tell you a little something about myself: I have a bad conscience about fitness and dieting. Anyone who knows me knows that I deplore anything that is done merely for the sake of appearances. I was a lot worse in high school: I didn't even believe in brushing my hair in the morning. Other kids, of course, laughed at me but I always thought of them as vain and superfiscial, and I don't think I'm entirely wrong. So for me whenever I go on a diet or begin running I always probe myself for the real reason I'm doing these things.

Well, lets say that fitness has become quite a project. I'm not satisfied with merely losing weight: I have to become fitter in general. And while it was once something of a self-deception, now I think I have a different attitude about the whole affair. After my dad just suffered a stroke, my client died from pneumonia (a heavy smoker), and my grandma died of congestive heart failure (from diabetes), I have a new attitude towards the whole health thing. Whenever I hear that someone is suffering from a disease I usually always ask, "So could this disease have been prevented?" There's no way to protect yourself 100% from disease or even early death (people who die suddenly from something unforseeable is pretty scary if you think about it), but as a caregiver I've noticed that a lot of these diseases have been building up for decades. And I feel that as a man in his early twenties, I can prevent a great deal of it. I can put the odds in my favor.

Consequently, I read a lot about fitness and dieting, usually magazines and books. It's interesting how each article has its demographic that it is after. The fitness books are usually all geared towards athletes or men (in the case of anything that has to do with weight training). The bodybuilder philosophy is still dominant, and from my perspective it looks like either a way of trying to impress women or an expression of insecurity. Yes, it looks to me that there are a lot of guys walking around with little man syndrome. Most dieting articles are aimed at women. Women seem to be a lot more conscious of their weight than men are. But I think there's something seriously wrong when you're willing to sacrifice your health for looks. The aim should be healthy, not skinny.

But the most important things I've found is first of all: don't smoke, don't do drugs, and drink infrequently. Everyone recommends exercise: both aerobic and weight training. Another thing that is recommended is a low calorie diet: not for losing weight but for longevity. Every study confirms that people who eat less calories than they need throughout their lives are not only healthier but they live longer. This is something I intend to seriously do.

I think my problem with food is that I eat when I'm bored. I hear that a lot of people eat based on their emotional states: some people eat when they are stressed, others eat when they're depressed, I eat when I'm bored. I think it's a remnant of my childhood hyperactivity: boredom is one of the most frequent states of mind when you're hyperactive. So my solution is to either change that habit or become bored a lot less often. I always remember what my parents told me when I told them I was bored when I was a kid: "If you're bored, there's plenty of work I can give you." Of course, they had no idea what it means to be hyperactive. Work is boring.

Most people today would never guess that I was once hyperactive as a kid. Everything in me that is geek comes from growing up hyperactive, and I think I'm still hyperactive to this day. I just have the tendency to get lost in my thoughts, or throw things around (I've actually become somewhat adept at juggling). I'm a huge procrastinator, although that in itself isn't anything strange. But I also have the tendency to get distracted and lose my train of thought or forget things. Sometimes I've thought about going to see a doctor to see if some sort of drug might help me concentrate better. But on the other hand, I think to myself that hyperactivity isn't a disease, it's who I am. I'm lucky because I've heard what hyperactivity does to other people—it makes them completely unable to function. I can usually get along my day to day, but most of the time I wish I was always in that focus mode where I know exactly what's going on and what I need to do. On the other hand, I need to learn to deal with my own quirks just as, I suspect, everyone else has to. There's no such thing as a normal human being: every geek knows this. And I don't think the potential side-effects of any drugs would be worth it. But...maybe someday.

Yes, I have certain geeky vices: last night I went ahead and bought me a rechargeable 2 million candlepower spotlight. I think candlepower for me has become like horsepower for other guys.

Then I did some searching on the internet, and behold: The Ultimate.

No, I don't know why.

So far I've been a little too relaxed about my own online security. What they say is true, knowledge is power. But today, it's more like information is power. And it's not just people with things to hide who need to remain hidden, but everyone who spends enough time online. I made one mistake already: I gave away the city I live in. From there it probably isn't too difficult to narrow me down if you consider also my first name and my age, which are also avaliable.

You really need to be on the defensive online. Consider this: criminal records of anyone living in Arizona are avaliable online to anyone who knows how to use a web browser. And it's not just major offenses that they catalogue either, they also file speeding tickets, child custody cases, and similar non-violent offenses. You don't need to be a hacker in order to harass someone online from thousands of miles away if that person made the mistake of giving too much information.

The pseudonym, in my opinion, is the best possible defense against online harassment and hacking. A pseudonym isn't just a fake name, it should also constitute a fake identity. It's your way of saying how much you want other people to know about yourself. The key to a good pseudonym is that it should be untraceable to your real identify: including your real name, phone number, where you live, what school you went to, and so on. And don't just consider one website, but across the entire web and, if you use them, in chat conversations, mailing lists, usenet, and so on. None of this stuff is secure. If you do any sort of chatting, consider it a public form of communication, even if you're private messaging to someone. There's nothing that has been hacked more often than the chat protocals.

Additionally there's the issue of passwords. The way I do it, I have easy, basically throw away, passwords for sites that I don't need to be very secure, and more difficult passwords for things like online banking. But one problem I have is that I basically use the same username and password at most of the sites I've signed up with. This means, basically, that anyone who was able to crack one account is able to crack them all. This is why it really isn't a good to use the same username/password combination for every site you sign up with.

What I'm planning on doing to rectify this is to come up with more than one pseudonym. The pseudonym/password combination will in each case be unique. Additionally, none of the pseudonyms will refer to anything about the other, for example, you'll never see me mention my other pseudonyms under this pseudonym. That would defeat the point. The purpose is to make the hacker or the online harasser's task impossible or nearly impossible.

By the way, you won't find greater believers in pseudonymity than hackers and this isn't only because they are afraid of getting caught by law enforcement. They, as hackers, know how easy information on the internet is to get, so they aren't just protecting themselves from the police but also other hackers. If you want to be secure online, act like a hacker.

I'm also thinking about setting a system where I'll go through and change the passwords of some of my pseudonyms every three or six months. There's no such thing as being too cautious.

What does history teach us? When I read Nietzsche I can't help but get the feeling that this philosopher has spent some of his time not just contemplating the ancient world, but imagining that he lives in it. But how is it that he thinks he understands the psychology of ancient people and men? He does it intuitively. But to do this is premised on this presumption: that human nature has remained basically the same. If the ancient Greeks, for example, were fundamentally different than us, in both mind and body, then it would be more likely that we would completely misunderstand their intentions, let alone their psychology.

It's not so much an error, I'd think that at times Nietzsche realized this, but an indication that there is very little that we do know: that we're always surrounded by our basic cluelessness regarding the world around us. It's the coldness of logic that tells us these things, that for every X we believe there is always a not-X that we can't argue against. Nietzsche's method was on the mark: the purpose of philosophy must be understanding, not knowledge, and we can only understand things in terms of our own experiences. This understanding doesn't need to be true, in fact it's unlikely that it is true. Our experiences can lead us to a greater understanding of the world or, alternatively, it can cause us to become incredibly blind and solipstic. The latter occurs when, for example, when we live in our prejudices, our hatred, or our narcissism. In this way, philosophy requires a level-headed mind. I'm not sure if this is an affirmation or a reversal of Plato's view.

As I sit here contemplating a plan for my future to answer the whole question of what I'm going to be doing the rest of my life, there's no getting over the fact that most of it will be dealing with power relationships: both myself under the power of someone else, and hopefully other people under my power. Power sounds like such a nefarious word, but it really isn't: it's one of the facts we have to deal with. Usually the power relationship between people is either employer/employee or buyer/seller and that gets pretty complicated.

It's for this reason that I've spent some time thinking about power itself: what it is and what it means. The way I see it, power is always a means and never an end, but to accomplish anything requires some degree of power. At the same time, power is a very scary thing, not the least because all the most hated people in history are also the most powerful. I think this fear of power has caused a lot of people to remain ignoble: without purpose, or their purpose is to do nothing more than resist the power of other people. Murasaki, in a comment she made a long while ago, when I was talking about nobility and living for a purpose, she suggested that I watch "Serenity". So I went ahead and re-watched that movie and the overarching impression I get is that the nobility in that film never goes beyond resisting the power of other people. Joss's characters are rebels, but that depends on there being something aweful to rebel against. The villain in that film is somewhat unrealistic for that reason: a rebel isn't noble unless who he or she is rebeling against is comparable to Satan. I can only think of a few characters in the history of humanity who are worth rebeling against, in truth most people see themselves, and for the most part are, good human beings. The rebel under these circumstances is a sign of immaturity.

But just as society at times needs rebels: a Jesus or a Ghandi, at other times we need law givers and rule makers. We need people who write constitutions and commandments. This is the sort of power that makes it's own rules as if creating a new game: though not trivial like a game. And power relationships are often like this: there is no power without purpose, and society contains any number of at times competing at other times cooperating interests that conflict with each other and rise for supremacy. Sometimes we believe that there are certain things that everyone is interested in, when instead we find to our suprise that someone doesn't believe in the game we constructed. Businessmen don't understand socialists for this reason. Whether you are a piece and serve the interests of someone else (as every employee does), or you strive to resist power: everything depends on they who write the rules and save the game.

Reading over what I just read, it probably won't make much sense unless you're thinking what I'm thinking. But I'll keep it here so I can fill in the gaps later.

In my subjective yet absolutely correct opinion, any funny event that is preceded by the word humorously is officially dead on arrival.

That will be all.

A quick internet search doesn't produce much that I can relate to with regard to psychological drives. Here's a brief article that discusses motivation. I can't help but think that motivation is intimately related to psychological drives, and it was on the top ten of links after googling for "psychological drives." My problem with some of their theories of motivation is that they all contain a creeping empiricism and they take our emotions for granted as raw empirical data. But the drives themselves can't be felt, yet everyone acknowledges their existence.

What I have in mind right now is that every psychological drive has a success and a failure state, and the emotion we feel at the time depends on what state that drive is in. I'll provide some examples in a moment, but I think another characteristic of psychological drives is that they determine our will. So my view is a raw determinism, not in the sense that everything we do must have be a consequence of nature or nurture (which might be the case, but isn't necessary), but that everything we do is a necessary consequence of what psychological drive is at the wheel. And since we can't choose our psychological drive, we can't determine our own will.

Hatred is perhaps the easiest psychological drive to define. It is the need and will to hurt something or someone. In the success state we feel joy and satisfaction: we are able to destroy. In the failure state we turn our hatred against ourselves.

Aggression may be the most common drive at work among people today. Examples I can think of include sports and displays of patriotism. Also, fighting looks to me like an expression of aggression. I'd define it as the drive toward combativeness, it's the drive by which alone winning and losing can have any meaning. Unfortunately, aggression is often looked on as a negative drive, but in it's success state it exhibits an inspiring exhileration and excitement of the future. But the failure state looks to be one of depression, one feels fundamentally like a loser.

Romantic love, as I wrote to Murasaki, I believe is the desire to possess someone. This shouldn't be confused with lust. It really is beyond the physical as the complete possession of the person is the sole objective. The success state I've never experienced, but I imagine it is what occurs when two people manage to possess each other completely, they might even have a sense of oneness. The failure state is also depression from being resisted and denied.

Anyway, those are the only examples that I have good definitions for at the moment. Now I suppose I should look into Spinoza's Ethics to see if he defines them similarly as I do.

I've always been someone who believes, "Know yourself and all else follows." Yet now that I feel myself coming very close to affirming the antecedent, I wonder about the truth of the proposition. What follows? Could it be that drama is possible in real life, too? Will it be now that I discover, or rather invent, my purpose? Could winning be possible for me too? It depends: Do I know the objective? Is the objective worthy? Do I decide on it from clarity or delusion? And then, and only then, does the problem of how to win become possible.

This began as a reply to Murasaki in my last entry, but it became less of a response to her, and more of something else. This is me, here I've become too honest. If you understand this, then you can take advantage of me and play me like a pawn. Yet, the paradox is, the odds of you understanding this is unlikely.

I'm definitely not unsensitive, that's a great deal of my problem. The question often comes down to whether offending someone is the same as hurting someone and whether I can be "who I am" without offending other people: hence the upsetting dichotomy between honesty and civility, that I've spoken of before. And by upset, I'm not using a figure of speech, it really upsets me that there could at all ever be such a division.

Where I stand, at any given time, is usually a waffling between these assumption: sometimes I believe that it's okay to offend people, since merely offending someone isn't the same as hurting him/her. At other times, I believe it's wrong to express myself, that my very existence is inevitably an assault on other people, that I should spend as much time as possible hiding who I am. Sometimes I become arrogant, I believe it is nothing more than the superfiscial and thin-skinned nature of other people that causes them to become offended. That's when I become the most Nietzschean, not to look down on other people, but to get away from them.

It's both analytical and emotional: it's the result of living a contradiction, which, as I understand it, is due to being somehow different from everyone else around me. Not better, not worse, but that what makes other people happy and exhilerated, makes me sad; what saddens other people makes me happy. I've never had close friends for this reason, all of them are kept at a distance: it's not their fault, it's not my fault, it's a consequence of nature. When I realized this is when I stopped blaming people: either other people or myself, and given my nature it's more common for me to blame myself.

It's only been recently that I've even been able to describe my situation in this way. For the longest time I've been thoroughly confused about what the problem is. I'd try to express myself, and it'd come out all wrong. I was always taken for someone I'm not; but this was a necessary result of always confusing myself for someone I'm not. One day I'm a philosopher, on another day inhuman, on another day a failed human being. Praising myself also has it's consequences, not only of thoroughly nauseating myself and the people around me, but mostly of losing myself in the least literal sense of the word. People judge other people far too readily: that has been my confirmed judgement. I don't want people to agree with me when I praise myself. I don't want to be comforted. I don't even want to be insulted, even though I no longer dignify insults with offense. All I've ever wanted, which I've been by nature repeatedly denied, is to be understood by another human being: not as a pretense, not as an error or miscommunication, but as something ideally authentic that comes about as necessary consequence of finding someone who I'm more alike than unalike. This is why I always take the side of honesty. It's like the coyote's howl whose only purpose is to see if there are even any other coyote's out there.

Now that I have an online journal, it has done strange things to me. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping at night worried that I have hurt someone, or that someone might be upset or even hate me for something I've said. After searching through my thoughts a little on the subject, I've determined that what I assume in every entry is this: that if you know me and understand what I'm saying, then there would be nothing to be offended about. But I don't make either of those things easy through my journal.

This isn't the place where I try to convey who I am. I don't speak about what's bothering me, and there is too much I leave out. Nor do I even try to gain a good reputation among people, either here or in real life. Among those who are loved by lots of people, I think you'll find invariably among them that maintaining their good reputations becomes a full time job. And, if I'm not mistaken, they aren't liked for who they are so much as liked for who they make themselves out to be. Myself, I've always maintained only a handful of friendships, with more than that I shirk away and prefer being by myself.

Secondly, I freely admit to this, I'm a poor writer. My main problem is voice. I have difficulty maintaining a consistant feeling to the dialogue of any of my characters, and oddly enough, this is true even when I'm writing on behalf of myself. But, you'll find that I try to be as honest as possible when I click on the "mood" icon in each entry, but you'll probably also find that my mood is often quite a bit different than how I sounded in that entry. I'm not being false, I just have difficulty conveying how I actually feel through words, but it doesn't help that I don't try very hard at it.

But I think ultimately I have "faith" in my character, about who I am as a person, and this is my primary criteria as to how much I should worry about offending other people. I've decided long ago not to judge myself based on how other people see me—what a lopsided proposition that is! And given the existence of so many people out there who are far better at conveying to people who they are not than I am at conveying who I am, I simply don't try to compete with them. So who I am will always be, for the most part, a mystery to most of you. I think all I need from you is some faith in my character. And I think friendship is really no more than that.

Okay, back to sleep.

Okay, one more political entry, but I wanted to post this.

I don't spend a lot of time investigating political issues, they usually annoy me more than anything, but I think most of us have a vested interest in Iraq, for more than one reason.

I wish I could say I wasn't surprised by recent news, that the Iraqis are now spiralling into a civil war, but I was. I think at some level I've always known this was a probable result, but I don't think I can be faulted with moments of delusion because I want things to be okay over there. But it's clear to everyone who isn't still deluded that we had no idea what we were doing when we went in there.

Has it not also become clear that everything that Bush has said has been wrong? Now he is traveling around the country telling how he believes that everyone, "deep down", really want freedom. Yet current events disprove this view, with the election of the Hamas, the Muslims up in arms over a political cartoon, and the trial of a holocaust denier. Do people want freedom? Sure, we'll all say we do, yet there are always situations in which we'll say there is too much freedom. What do all of these events have in common? Someone is offended. In fact, offend enough people and people don't even know what freedom is anymore. That's the lesson I've taken from this. But I feel like an America when I insist on freedom in principle, even though I have my doubts whether other Americans feel this way.

To me, I think what we failed to ask is how dictators like Saddam get into power in the first place? Because I think the answer to this question would have predicted this. We've taken our own democracy for granted, we don't understand that democracy is the most unstable form of government there is. If you look at the long history of government, democracy has always been the most fickle and the quickest to collapse. I'm afraid that even among democracies, Iraq may be the most fickle and the quickest to collapse. Our handling of the country after the war has been utterly irresponsible.

I hate to say it, but countries like Iraq need dictators like Saddam simply to keep the country together. There's a reason why dictatorships are so common in the Middle East: there are strong tensions. Wherever you'll find numerous volunteers to blow themselves up for the sake of some cause, you have to question whether democracy is an appropriate form of government there. I think Bush's formula needs to be reversed: it's not because a nation is democratic that it is peaceful, but it's because the nation is peaceful that democracy works there. So really, we need to stop looking across the world at non-democratic regimes as our enemies. What it is that makes a country peaceful is an important question, but it's not one I have a good answer to.

And finally, I don't think we've yet seen how much damage this war has done to the US. We went in, thinking we could defy the UN, but now we'll find ourselves more dependent on them than ever. This is because this war has hurt our reputation in the world. Perhaps more serious is that this war has been the primary contributing factor at polarizing the American people. Sure, there has been a great deal of misunderstanding on the part of both sides, but something strange has come out of the political divide. We might be seeing the end of the union in this tension. Or something worse.

I'm certainly not someone who finds himself offending people often, but I certainly place a limit on how thin-skinned I will allow other people to be. The Muslim world is up in arms over a cartoon that someone drew making fun of, I guess, the prophet Mohammed. It is episodes like this that begin to draw the true character of people, that there must be something about their culture that has caused them to become outraged so easily over the slightest things. In the US we have this phrase that kids are taught in childhood, "Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you." If only Mohammed would have said that at the right time to show the Muslim community themselves how weak and petty they have become.

But it would be amiss for me to complain about the same thing that goes on in the Western world. I hate to criticize the left so often, but the sentiment against political correctness isn't just a conservative view or racism, but a moderate view. Sure, racism is never a good thing, but nothing is solved by making the atmosphere thick and intimidating racists not to express themselves (legally, that is). The word nigger is used all the time by black rappers and, you know what, that has been overall one of the best things for the civil rights movment, as the more often a profane word is used the less profane it becomes (as is witnessed among those who use the word "fuck" all the time). The word has become less and less meaningful as a weapon that can be used against black people. Supposing there comes a time when the word is no longer offensive, what else does it become than a way to single out racists from the group? I bet, so long as racism maintains it's bad conscience it has for itself now, that the result would be a significant decrease in the word, and all of this without the influence of political correctness. Being offended is never a solution, but only an indication that something is incredibly wrong.

America has, in the long run, become a much tougher nation in this way, we aren't as easily offended as the Muslim world apparently, nor as much as many of the countries of Europe who still have, for example, laws against denying the existence of the holocaust. A while ago I bought an older book on etiquette and it's almost funny reading through it. It's amusing to imagine a woman who becomes offended if a man sits down to eat before she does, or if a man doesn't stand up from the table when she does. Today, it seems to me, we're a lot more real and a lot less given to pretenses.

The way I see it, there's always this tension between honesty and civility, and you'll of course know which side I'm on. But really, the most important thing is that this tension be maintained. Honest, at its extreme, does mean violent expression (violence is always the most honest expression of hatred) if the emotion warrants it. But at the other extreme are people who act, and talk, like diplomats all the time. The key to diplomacy is the fear behind the surface of the diplomat's face that something he says could go all wrong, and I think in general there's always that sense of urgency and danger whenever civility rules completely. The reaction of the Muslim world is one example as to why that danger is often very justified. In the recent history of America, we can imagine the danger that people felt with each other if the impression was given that they aren't equals, that their property or position wasn't respected, if a guest looked at the lady of the house the wrong way, and so on: it means that strong emotions were always dwelling just under the surface, so people were prudent and remained excessively polite with each other.

And in times of extreme racial tension, I suppose that political correctness is also an extremely prudent manuever. A high degree of civility is needed which implies, necessarily, some form of willful (non-legal) segregation that constitutes a compact between the races that allows them to live next to each other even if they can't live with each other. Political correctness only means, in these cases, that races agree not to say to each other what they love to say among themselves. An end to political correctness then means a real achievement, that racial tensions are receding and racial segregation no longer becomes necessary at the emotional level.

This is an example of what I've claimed before in this journal that the difference between political parties, and the left and the right, are really just differences between the prejudices of people who live in the cities and people who live in rural areas. The cities are the front lines of racial tensions, so it makes sense among people who live there that political correctness is necessary and it also makes sense for them to look on people, people in the rural areas who violate this compact, as they do. In rural areas we don't have many problems between the races: mainly, we basically have one race. It's still segregated, we don't welcome black people, so we don't have to worry about political correctness. There's no danger in saying words like "nigger" openly.

It's my hope that in rural areas, that we begin worrying about political correctness, and in urban areas they stop. That would constitute real progress, a real mixing of cultures. But it looks to me that the opposite is happening, that America is regressing, and maybe one day black people will be sailing back to Africa.

Addendum (9:30pm): See what I did? I'm in disagreement with myself. I began by supposedly criticizing the left, and ended with a more complex view. So yes, political correctness is good for rural areas but bad for urban areas. Or more correctly, it depends on the state of racial tension. So I guess I'm saying that political correctness is a consequence, but never a cause. So it doesn't make sense to have a position on political correctness at all. Come on, say it, you hate my tone in my journal entries. But it's my journal afterall. If I was writing for a wider audience, I'd probably write altogether differently.