(Source: radioactivemongoose)
The ramblings, nonsense and indulgences of a wannabe writer. Currently writing an actual serious novel which I intend to publish. Lord help me.
Ask me a Question
Navigate
"Since I don’t smoke, I grew a moustache – it’s better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which were carefully placed several moustaches. I offered them politely to my friends: ‘Moustache? Moustache? Moustache?’ Nobody dared touch them."
— Salvador Dalí (via ivegotabike)
(Source: onthesideoftheegg)
MAJOR DEPRESSION
Nicholas Sparks’ newest book/film should be called “White People Embracing”.
(Source: theoriginalsettler)
DEAR LADY A: The people I know who claim they’re bi are attention-seeking and creepy. I honestly think, of the “bisexuals” I know, the guys are just gays who can’t emotionally handle being gay, and the women are trying to keep potential boyfriends interested with the promise of threesomes. Are actual bisexuals even real? If so, where are they hiding?
~~ Real Homo, Skeptical About The B in LGBT
DEAR DOUBTING HOMO: I’m not hiding and I’m bisexual, so your statement is really more about your own mistrust, isn’t it? It is the worst kind of queer self-sabotage to imply that a sexuality simply cannot be, because you can’t personally imagine it. It’s also ironic. Normally, I have a special contempt for assholes who attempt to inform me that my bisexuality is an urban myth promoted by terrified queens or an affectation I employ to impress my boyfriends. But I will try to exercise patience with you. I will even try to see it from your perspective for a moment.
To pretend like some haven’t used bisexuality as a “gateway drug” to gay or a boy-bewitching sexual tactic, would be disingenuous. Yes, there are folks who, for reasons including self-delusion, hipster trend-grubbing, or maybe just an attempt to earn better money at the stripper pole, might be bisexual pretenders. There are also straight pretenders and gay pretenders, but that doesn’t make you any less gay, does it, sir? And those gay pretenders, by the way, are sometimes boys and girls who love both boys and girls, but felt so unfairly judged by members of their own LGBT community that they actually went back into the bi closet by “picking a side.”
But for the most part, people who call themselves bi, flexible, curious or any other similar designation, are telling you the truth. You know how I know? Because it’s hard to be bi. Society immediately thinks the boys are lying and the girls are sluts, they’re queer but they’re not, they’re straight but they’re not, and they are generally just assigned the convenient homo or hetero sexuality that happens to coincide with their most current partner. They’re also some of the least supported queers in terms of organized help and education … And that’s not fun. So they must have a damned good reason (like the fact that they’ve realized they don’t give a fuck what you or society thinks they ought to be) for standing up and saying who they really are. Just like you had a damned good reason for telling the world who you really are, sir.
So, in answer to your question: Yes, bisexuals are real, and yes, they’re sometimes hiding in your ranks, and could possibly be one of your closest friends or lovers. Being fearful of something you don’t understand and can’t control is scary, isn’t it? On the bright side, now you know how homophobes feel.
I’m bi. No lie. Get used to it.
(Source: chicagophoenix.com)
Utilitarianism and education
“I hate what capitalism has done to university, and all inevitable “privileged white princess” accusations aside, I refuse to content myself with the fact that it’s become all about the marketability of degrees as opposed to the simple joy in learning and gaining expertise in a field you love. Ambitious, passionate young people deserve so much better than this.”— Lady Byron: The 13 Most Useless College Majors (As Determined By Science) (via newsweek)
Marketability and expertise are precisely the same problem in my view. University shouldn’t presume to necessitate any mastery of a chosen subject without accounting for at least some wayside ‘uselessness’; no true genius ever amounted any viable solution without first an innumerable sum of failures behind him.
The university should be a space for free-thinking, a discourse of errors and mistakes, not a factory from which we produce experts to solve the world’s problems. It is with this logic that the critique of ideology is being quickly repressed. Today’s critical miscalculation is this symbolic order of ‘the problem’ and ‘the solution’.
What we need are people who have the perception to look at ‘the problem’ more closely. We need these figures to step down and remind us that ‘the problem’ is not a problem after all; that in order to start approaching social unrest we need to first come to terms with our own ideology. For only in ideology lies dormant that which we presume the world ‘is’ as opposed to what the world ‘can be.’
Tags | ideology | utilitarianism |
The Spiritual Hedonism of KONY 2012
A good question to confront what’s really at stake in Jason Russell campaign: why preface the video with an expiry date?
It states: “This video will expire on December 31, 2012.” It is such a small yet vital detail, and what it signifies is an unsettling commentary of its commercial success. What do I mean by this?
In many ways, KONY 2012 has already expired. Why this happened is no mystery, but it is indeed a testament to our will. Because more than exposing any real view of the suffering and devastation elicited by the warlord archetype Kony, what Russell created was a reflective schadenfreude – a dark mirror to our view, our own gaze upon the killing fields.
Nonetheless, an object we can’t bear to face, so eludes us constantly. The reason why KONY 2012 has expired is the same reason why our milk goes sour, why our credit runs out, or why our coke goes flat. Not because the campaign is perishable by any generic terms, but precisely because it was built as a consumerist item. Of course, Russell’s postmodernism truly precedes him.
Obligatory
Today, Western Civilization nourishes itself on the pleasures of the immediate, the spontaneous. The modern injunction today is, rather than limiting ourselves from pleasure, we want to live life by our own terms. So, as opposed to living for any larger cause or as part of humanity as a collective, we teach ourselves that we must sanction the individual as her own person. Today, independence is the virtue.
Of course, we fancy ourselves as living outside of ideology. We are free agents; we are autonomy. We tell ourselves that we live life by no one else’s law, and this a very useful delusion for the late capitalist to carry to his early grave. It is the very utopia spiritual hedonism creates, necessitates even – that in order to be true to yourself, you must live selfishly. This is how we invent ourselves, it is the delusion of selfhood, of subjectivity.
1 note |
