not beauty

I’ve been hearing repeatedly from girls that the foremost demand society makes on them is beauty. But i think this is a huge mistake. They are not expected to be beautiful, but to make themselves beautiful, which means that the actual beauty is unimportant, as long as they conform to the character.

today’s predicament

The world is a mess. To say that something has to be done is naive and misleading. And still we should think about this predicament, we should be interested in it.

Everything is always falling. The world has always been failing. The nations are always dying and the empires are always ending. If you care to think for an instant that (and how) our society is but a flicker of self-righteousness amidst the flow of history, it’ll give you a new perspective — maybe even new ideas. The risk is you’ll also see that there are paths still open, there are ways we still have to go, and then… Will you be confused?

hostility towards strangers

It’s become common complaint that people have become too individualistic, that even next-door neighbours don’t give good morning to each other anymore. So much so you can even get bad looks for disagreeing. In fact it is seen as positively evil to disagree. But it’s bullshit.

This is not at all about individualism. It’s not that people don’t like to talk to each other, it’s simply that they are not forced to. In fact, most people don’t like other people, even in your archetypical small town. But in big cities the infrastructure protects them from one another, so that they are free to not have a relation and still not incurr attacks (subtle and not) from it.

how about a fourth way?

[This comes from a very old notebook and i do not believe most of it any more, i'm posting it here anyway as to exemplify some of the roads whereby my head has come up with ideas i'm posting shortly...]

At the height of the last financial crisis it was “in” to say the moment heralded the “end of capitalism” and that this, in turn, represents the downfall of the last ideology amongst the 2 we used to have. We are supposed to be the age without options. The people without faith in big plans and big ideals, the guys who will say that business-as-usual is as-good-as-it-gets. The ones who will stop daydreaming and “just do a little better”, go fixing the problems with an ant’s strategy, bit by bit, without looking at the big picture and attempting changes where it really hurts.

I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any of it. Beginning with the stupid claim that there where only two ideologies.