So on facebook there are many political groups.  Many centered around various irrelevant aspects. Ex: looks, popularity, money, and of course sexiness.

Now, I've read some of the argements faced in these groups.  most of them amount to:

Ad Hominem: Tu quoque and Abusive. 

Being a hypocrite is not a good reason to disprove someones logic.  I could give you the best diet plan available, and just because I'm not in shape doesn't mean it's a bad plan.

I'm so sick of ad hominem arguments.  'Pussy liberals hate guns, they're such idiots.' Did you seriously just use a standard of your own group to insult someone from ANOTHER group?  Because that would really offend them, and it would make them understand where you're coming from. 

It would be ok if these groups were just to find like minded people, but the also attract people of dichotomous view points.  These people will NOT understand your psuedo hate-speech about them.  They will see it as the threat, and responding with poor arguements make you look stupid.

stinking conservatives, you have good points.  Now learn how to argue properly, or you look like a bunch of misogynistic, war mongering, white supremist, foolish tools.

heh heh.  Ad hominem, right?
   

Sometimes when I sit and people watch I imagine that everyone has truly an exciting life.  Whether they are aware of it or not.  Sometimes I am sure that they are all super heroes saving the world from the dangers their powers create.  And MY super power is realization.  I suppose it's good we can't choose our powers, otherwise the world would be top heavy with whatever was in vogue.  Can you imagine the dark ages? Everyones powers being in the line of alchemists and 'crush the heathen hoard!' And today our powers would be super intelligence and good looking forever.

Let me think.  If I really had to chose one super power, for the rest of my life, I think that it would be to live each day less selfishly than the last.

Or good timing.  Good timing is basically all your need for serendipity. 

Maybe the power to grow things, like a Jack and the Beanstalk on reality TV

Now there's a good topic.  Reality TV.  Andy Warhol in his oft quoted '15 minutes of fame' was indeed chronospective.  I just made that word up, it means ahead of it's time.  That's the beauty of know Latin and Greek root words! You just meld a couple together and Presto! your own new word. 

Reality TV.

I think is is not 'reality' as in, what happens to the majority of the people the majority of the time, but rather what most people wished happened to them. 

What was the first reality TV show?! I don't even remember.  Survivor?  This needs to be wikipedia-ed.


TBC

I am upset with Hershey's Chocolate Syrup, because it is consistently the only thing in my house that can replace things we don't have.

Last night I used it in leiu of hot fudge, and tonight in replacement for honey. 

I just don't enjoy it.  Good news: In two days I'm turning in my two weeks notice! Woah! That means I have two weeks until I go back to school?!



that's just weird.  How can I both really really long to to back, and not want to be there at all? Dichotomous? I guess not.

I'm going through this stage about personal ethics: I think they are dangerous.

I think they can get in the way of the ambiguous 'greater good'.

Example: There is a Clydesdale horse chained securely in front of you, with no way of moving or getting free.
If you kick this animal to death (you're allowed to wear steel toed boots) in half an hour, every sex slave in the world will go free.  What do you do?

First, I don't know if kicking a Clydesdale to death is even near feasible.  But you would have to be brutally vicious for sure. 

What if it was killing a known murderer chained in the same manner, with your bare hands?

What if it was killing your Mother?

My personal scruples wouldn't allow me to kill anyone in cold blood.  But the greater good is at stake here.  Thousands of innocent young women who are just like me would be allowed to live normal lives.  They often die young of terrible diseases, or are 'raped to death'.

If I have the ability to free them, aren't I more obligated to them, in a sheer numbers sort of way, than to my personal morals?

If I feel like an awful ashamed person for the rest of my life...does that matter? Thousands will have opportunities they never would have before.


On the con, if I don't stick true to what I believe, doesn't it make it worthless? Is keeping my personal integrity intact, therefore the morals they represent, worth thousands of lives?


(I just had a rather heated discussion with my own Mother about this situation...she basically refused to answer it and  went off on things tangent to the conversation.)

What is the right answer here?  I think this question is pretty much the good of the few vs. the good of the many in star trek language.

Build Your Own Boyfriend.

Today I put my fake boyfriend into action.

His name is Chad Kowalski, and he lives near Spokane WA. 

He is an electrical engineer major.

He went fishing in Alaska over the summer

He plays on the mens hockey team

He has red hair.

He plays drums in a yet unnamed band.

He gives amazing backrubs.

Have I taken the best parts of boys I know and made them into one?!

Yeah....oops.  But my coworkers are convinced that I am really super in love with him.  We've only been dating for four months though, so it's too soon to tell, but he thinks he's coming to visit me in a week.  But that might get canceled.  Word on the street is I'm really excited to go back to school to see him.

Tee Hee!

N B C

Under Pressure is a song that Queen wrote, and is suspected to be the idea behind Vanilla Ice's notorious 'Ice Ice Baby'.

Under Pressure is also how I feel about writing my first LiveJournal entry. LJ is like the older (and more precocious) brother to Xanga, with whom I had a long and healthy relationship. Hopefully this somewhat more artistic community will accept me.

Today was as fruitful as North Dakota in December. I mostly just lounged around the house until it was time to go to work. I work at a national retail store, and with irony and malice in my heart daily don the red and khaki.

I've always thought blogs are an interesting idea, because you want to portray a realistic picture of yourself (even if only as a vehicle for your writing), but still conceal all of your faults. So the picture is not very realistic at all- it's missing all your problems. Some people feel like they need to compensate for the tendancy to do that by speaking ill of themselves. Where, Aristotle, is your Golden Mean?!

So I feel disinclined to trust the words that I'm writing, knowing that they are merely cast to entice others into believing what I have to say. I also feel I shouldn't trust others writings' past an amusing past time. But I'm going to have to get over that if I want to...what? Succeed in the land of Internet? Become a self aware person? Win a beauty contest?

Yeah man.

I'm majoring in Philosophy and English Lit. I love both of those areas, but a lot of the time I get super frustrated with how disinterested my peers are in either of them. And I get frustrated in have misinterpreted they are. And I get frustrated because they're so stinking ambiguous.
For example: Free Will, Determinism, and Compatibilism. What a conundrum. Thousands of people over thousands of years have held different ideas about whether or not man has 'free will'. What bothers me most is not that the question has never been settled, but that the metaphilosophy of all of this creates a bigger problem: does this argument matter? In my actions does the knowledge that I have control of my life, or that I don't, matter?

Frankly I'm not sure that it does. So that whole branch of philosophy is useful only as a 'pure science' in which the study is useless except for a thinking exercise.

If I have free will, good. If I'm determined, I can't do anything about it. There is no possible resulting action of changing either circumstance, and so the debate is useless in my view.

Well...that's about all I have right now.

But I'll have to think more about this subject, I think I wrote a paper on it once, only I don't remember.

Look at me! First post all done and squared away. Excellent, hopefully I will have fun with my LJ duration!