17/10/2008

Wall of Text: About bloging, evolution, information, and such.

So, there's some of you that's been reading this blog that probably wonder who the hell I am, and why anything that I say should be listened to. Not that it would come as a surprise to anyone even a bit familiar with the so called blogosphere.
No one will agree with everything you say, just as you wont agree with everything someone says. This goes for identical twins, and in extension also clones.

So, why did I start bloging in the first place? Attention? Fame? Anger? Boredom? All valid reasons to start spewing your metaphysical guts out over the Internet, even though their content might not always be the best.
One thing I think we can all agree on is this: we like to express ourselves. Communication is a vast part of humanity after all, one of the fundamentals of society if you so will.
So that was of course part of it for me. I wanted to make my voice heard. I have no idea if I've succeeded, since none of you bastards ever write anything, but that's ok. I didn't want attention or fame.
I probably felt a bit lonely, needed a good output for emotions. And what I've realized after over a year of sporadic bursts of anger, excitement, sometimes clever phrasing, sometimes pubertal anger. What I've realized is that it focuses my mind. It's like my on-line scheduling system, where I shape my thoughts and opinions into clear crystals so that other will see, whiteout the light getting dimmed.
And that's just part of it.
I'm a idealist. I belive that humanity can do great things if we decide to. Yet I would never call myself unselfish. It's easy to fall into that trap, because it's a quality that takes on an almost... biblical tone. It's a word that people like to connect to idealism I suppose. Which is fine, but I'd never admit to being one.
Mainly because that'd make me a hypocrite asshole, and secondly, I don't think any human being, that could still be counted as a human being, would be totally unselfish.
Let me clarify: I'd love to be totally unselfish. It's a good thing. It's, what I'd call, a sign that we're still evolving. We ignore our survival instinct and work for the better of humanity, even if we have to suffer for it.
It's not gonna happen any time soon with how society looks, unless we drastically alter our lifestyle, even our view of life, personal ideals, and a lot of other things.
Part of the problem, at least in my eyes, is a system based on capitalism. The accumulation of wealth and property trough the production of more property to exchange for wealth.
This is encouraged, even though we don't need a lot of it. Hell, most could easily survive on less than half of what they make. For those of us who've been, and are students (that wasn't spoiled by our parents) know how little you can survive on. Noodles, hard bread, rice, pasta and ketchup. You can easily live like that. I'm quite sure you can also be happy like that if you just ignore all the things you should have. Who says you need a big tv, a car, air conditioning and so on?
I could probably get rid of most of my things, except for a matress and my laptop, and I'd be happy like that. The books I feel I need to read could be borrowed from the library. Food would be pretty cheap if you keep it basic. Rice, pasta, the things I mentioned. In fact, after a while you'd begin to enjoy it.
I know I somtimes do. Sure, it sucks not being able to have a beer or two with your friends, but you know what I'd like to think would happen if they tried it?
You'd end up having conversations for hours. You'd need to discuss things, just because there nothing else to do. No tv, no radio, no video games.
The thing is: What would you discuss if you didn't have anything to discuss? No movies, shows, something on the news. You'd have to think up things yourself, right?
Or, as I'd probably prefer, you activly work to accumulate information.
See, I've been thinking about evolution lately. The purpose of evolution is adapting to the enviroment, right? How do you do that?
By doing two things:
One. You adapt the old fashioned way, trough random mutations that spreads trough the race, in some cases proving beneficial, in some they kill you. Mostly, the bad ones makes sure the individual die, or their offspring die.
Two. We gather information about the world around us, so that we can adapt ourselves and our eviorment using our knowledge. This goes a lot quicker than what you might call classical evolution.
I'd like to belivie that it's this informational evolution that is the basis of our current existant. That we, as a race will spread our ideas, values, discoveries, and all the other things we learn, until we force ourselves to evolve.

By forcing ourselves to evolve I don't mean that we genetically alter our bodies or minds, although that will probably be a reality at some point in time. I mean that we force our minds to evolve to deal with the massive flow of information that will sooner or later become neccesary for us to absorb.
What happens when the worlds history is so long that it would take years to learn just the most basic parts of it? Should we just ignore the parts we deem least important? Who will decide what is least important, and what if it turns out one of these things has an effect on the then present, now future, time?
Of course, this also assumes we haven't decided to let a few develop new technology that the rest of us have no idea how it works. The ideal would be that everyone knew a little about almost everything, and specialised in a few things. Then we'd be able to expand this knowledge to others when they need it.
All of this builds on the thought that information and communication is the cornerstones of human life and civilazation, something I can't say for sure is fact.
I think there's definetly something to it, but there could be something I've overlooked I suppose. I'm still only human, after all.

Secret Service loves McCain/Palin?

At least according to this piece, the Secret Service is preventing journalists from leaving the press area to talk to those attending campaign meetings. Censoring the press is not what I'd call democratic, but then again, making sure you can actually vote, is even more important.
Or maybe they're so ashamed that they're trying to hide the problem? Who knows.

Via Think Progress.

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