End of the School Year

The school year is coming to a close and I have a headache. That headache means quite a bit. I am getting tired of school. I am getting tired of schoolwork and I am getting tired of my head hurting because I haven't worn my glasses all day. The meanings behind it are quite immense.
But more importantly I am sick of the school system and the ideas behind school and everything attached to what it means. I don't want to be a functioning capitalist citizen. But it's getting harder and harder to hold control.
Lately I have been reading blogs about finance and financial control and it's kind of fun to keep track almost as a sort of game. But I find myself falling victem to a fiscal machine.
Recently I read about creating and organizing co-ops and I would really appreciate and love doing that. We will see.
This brings me to the next point I want to discuss: I am sick of the lack of activism in Eau Claire. I want to see it grow and be a powerful thing that everyone knows and understands and sees as necessary. But those are some intense goals. This means that I will have to truly focus. I intend to use this summer without school work to get involved and start organizing such things. Eventually, I would like to see the next lease I sign be one for a cooperative with people that are willing to combine and work together. We will see if this happens, but it is certainly I goal that I have.
On another note, I have been working on the hopefully new flipside website. I am not even the webmaster but I really want to see this happen. It will make editing and even publishing our issues easier and more involved with the internet.
Otherwise, I am off. I think that I can get my glasses and get cleaned up after a day of volleyball, soccer and a lot of heat.

New Left Network Created

I found a social networking site that is open-source and free to use. You might be thinking "all social networking sites I have seen have been free to use." But I would argue that there is still a certain amount of corporate connection to the site you use as these sites are created, backed and served by financially-oriented corporations.

Anyways, this site, called The People Aggregator, is open for anyone to create a network that can connect many people.

I have created a network that is called the New Left Network which I hope will connect people around a New Left movement. Whether they be anarchists, anti-globalizationists, pareconists, or any of the other movements spreading in this new century, I hope that the New Left Network becomes a communication hub for ideas and for supporting and promoting activism.

So I invite anyone who reads this to come join in the discussion about what a New Left Movement would be in this century and how we can all work together to make it possible.

Blogging and Not Blogging

Well It seems that I lack the ability to post on a regular basis. I think that it is pretty normal for ADD kids to start things and then never finish them. This blog has always been on my mind, I hope that at some point I will continue this blog and in fact I plan on doing it. I just need to get control of myself as a person first.

For instance, I seemingly spent an entire break doing nothing. I mean nothing useful for myself and my stress-levels. Sad that in this day-and-age we consider ourselves and our being in terms of how much stress we have. Though I am sure that this has never really been any other way even if as a society we continually diagnose ourselves with countless syndromes and disorders so that we can manage in a world fixated on efficient functionality.

I for one don't want to consider myself as an "efficient functioning member of society." I would rather be a friend, a lover, a community member than anything materially-oriented or efficiency-oriented. But what can we do, right? This is where we are in this world and this is what we must function as.

Though I find myself constantly searching for some better world and some better place and time. I often wonder to what extent this world is my imagined world and that other imagined worlds are others imagined worlds and nothing more. That we imagine better times and we idealize great things but these are personal and subjective visions. This is a fairly postmodern analysis of life. And in that I am glad I can actually find consolation that there are people out there who attempt to synthesize a postmodern miscommunicative vision with an idealist and community-oriented vision.

But away from that philosophical rant, I still must bunker down and understand myself. Through the recent annals of a friends use of psychology, I myself will venture into the world of psychoanalysis and I hope to find someone and/or something that can help me.

In some sense this is a cop-out to my being. I have always been against medicine for fear of losing my personality. Though recently I have decided that my personality will not go with the use of psychoactive drugs even if the rough edges will be smoothed out a bit.

But whatever happens, I think I need to do this, because where I am right now--though I found a wonderful girlfriend, who I love very much--is a place that is stressful and is pressuring me to act and organize in a capitalist world. As much as I despise that vision for our world I must be able to act within it if I am to gain numbers in any cause that I wish to support and work with. Anarchists still organize and leftists still organize and they understand that to gain numbers we must work with the capitalist schedule until that schedule can be finally broken down.

Again I find myself lost within thoughts. But I consider this message a goodbye to the rant-driven quirk-filled mind jaunts and hello to hopefully a more focused a refined drive that can help me fulfill the many goals that I have attained while anarchically jaunting through the forest of my own mind. My vision of freedom and liberty is nothing without a focused response through activism and hard work.

Adieu and cheers to all! Hopefully my adventure will bear the fruit of focused visioning!

National Slander

The U.S. has consistently slandered Venezuela's democracy and called it a nationalist fascist regime. But realistically this is far from the truth. The beautiful thing about what has been going on lately is that corporate interest is greatly enjoying the stability of Venezuela's oil industry. But our Secretary Rice has again defamed Venezuela's reputation in a bout of slander that is criminal.

Read BoRev.net for the scoop on U.S slander and the real Venezuelan picture. This stuff really gets you riled up.

For now, I am off to work on the Flipside. Hopefully we will get this issue done soon! I don't think I will have an article in this issue, but it will definitely have one for the next issue.

Have a good weekend!

Late Night Discussions

Jennie, Matej, and I had an intense discussion last night about our lives and about what we want to do with them and what, if anything, is the ultimate purpose of each of us. A lot of the times I feel like I have no real purpose in life and that I am useless like all of humankind. This comes from the fact that, at least right now in my life, I feel like nothing really has meaning and that there really is no reason to fight for anything. The reason this really irks me so is that my life goal has always been, in some way, to help the human race. Or to bring something to the forefront. Well this nihilistic approach that I have developed really doesn't accent my life goal very well and I am left with this feeling of total emptiness.
But the discussion we had last night helped a lot. It really got me thinking about what it means to be an acceptable person, or what it means to realize your full potential as humans. So Matej and I pulled out a doctrine--each of us in our own way--that kind of matches what we are talking about. Matej has this idea of fundamentally viewing human interactions and recognizing the many layers of communication and that nihilism is a base core but that so much builds off of that.
I find that idea definitely concurrent with my own perception of what really is the case here. I defined a dialectic that I think is a proponent of all of being. In fact I am coming to the initial conclusions of Kant but I really don't like that he passed on through, trying to trudge on out into reason. As if he failed to see one of the dialectics, the one that is at the core of his entire theory, that between reason and areason (nihil).
In some senses, the battles of philosophy have, for generations, always been about fighting rationalism versus materialism. Rationalism holds that the mind is the most important facet of our existence and from it all can originate. Kant extended on this viewpoint with his slightly twisted form of idealism (perception and cognition are constant interactions between our perceptual schema and the objects themselves of which we have no access other than what squeezes through the schema). Materialism was built off of empirical beliefs that center on the constancy of matter and nature. This battle still rages to this day--though in highly focused areas mostly. The existential philosophy of Europe still builds off of a deep rationalism. The analytic philosophy still builds off of foundations of matter and material psychology, etc..
But these two strands of philosophy, as dialectical as they are and can be, are not the ultimate dialectic of which we can philosophize about. There is a metaphilosophy of which Matej and I were discussing last night. The idea that there are two forces within us that push us towards belief on one side (we called this the Egoist side) and that push us towards non-belief on the other side (We called this the nihilist side). I would argue, as well as Nietzsche--of which I think much of this resembles--, that we need to have a proper mix of both in order to prosper. I say 'prosper' because I consider this just as much a descriptive analysis of the crises of philosophy but also as a way of attaining prosperity in a mental/philosophical/existential sense.

For now, I will leave it at that. Ponder these thoughts if you will. I have schoolwork.