Saturday, February 10, 2007

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!

Thursday, February 08, 2007

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.