Category: Philosophy

Friday Philosophy: If only you were gay…

In the past few days my mind has been on the Mental Wayback Machine a few times.  I seem to always end up in the same places.

When I made the conscious decision to not end my life, I had to find a purpose in life beyond just existing.  I latched on to a statement I heard from my boss when I refused to resign For The Good of the Team.™

If only you were gay….

How does one respond to that?  What was I supposed to say?  Was I supposed to point out that no openly gay or lesbian faculty member at the University of Central Arkansas had ever been granted tenure?  Or was I just supposed to accept that assertion that being gay would be an improvement in my life?

See this movie!

Last night on a whim I went to the movies with a friend, and I saw something that left me jaw-dropped and disturbed.  I’ve spent all day turning it back and forth in my head, and I’m stunned how rich and complex the ironies were, and how devastating the ending – like very few movies I’ve seen.  And all this in a film directed by Ben Affleck.

It’s that ending I want to talk about – without giving away anything concrete about the film, the movie ends with a dilemma so shattering that it causes you to reexamine your moral beliefs.  Not bad for a 2 hour crime thriller, but it works.  Maybe even too well. 

The key is this notion of dilemma, and I want to discuss that concept in a little more depth before I talk about the movie:

writing in the raw: what i love

there are times for anger. and action. there are times for confusion and catastrophe. there used to be… time for love.

yet is seems much of my time has been spent feeling overcome by the weight of so many bad things happening all at once that it….

… makes me forget why i’m so angry… because i love.

or why i feel this need to fight against changing winds, rising seas, cultural hatred, and eve_vree_thing else that darkens the sun… because i love

Friday Philosophy: Love

First rewrite:

Sometimes, in order to stretch the boundaries of who I am, I give myself a mission.  I force myself to write a poem about some subject in order to see what I really think about it.  Or I try to write an essay.

Several weeks back, I assigned myself such a task.  Having written about death and fear, pain and struggle, I needed to write something about love…no matter how much it hurts me to do so.

It is not an easy subject for me.  I have experience to draw upon.  Love hurts.  Or can do so.

Maybe I think I know love when I see it.  Or maybe I’m just full of it.

Each time I seek to grasp for the words I wish to say, memories of times past, fears of rejection and its actuality, push them out of my reach.  Pain is remembered.  Mental scabs are picked at.

writing in the raw: stop.making.sense.edition.

If you’re ready to stop making sense… then take a jump below the fold…

part II

Friday Philosophy: Getting Real

I suppose I was real when I was born.  I assume so, though I can’t remember that far back, since I doubt that I had the capability to understand that being real is something that society does its best to stamp out.

Soon after birth however began the seemingly never-ending subtle, and too many times very unsubtle, messages from those around me about how I should behave, how I should act, how I should be, and who I should be.  There were so many “shoulds.”  And I learned that in order to get along with the world, being real, being who I truly was, was not the order of business.  Being who and what other people wanted me to be was what must be done in order to survive.

As time passed these messages became more and more vehement, sometimes to the point of violence, more often via a caustic remark, a devastating rumor, or the isolation of ostracism.  Perhaps just the threat of these was sufficient to make me bow to the pressure and conform.  And submit to the pressure was what I did, allowing the world around me to build my identity.  But I knew that identity was not really me, but rather a shell that I had allowed to be built around myself for protection.  I so desperately wanted to be part of the world around me that I walled myself off from it, hidden within that “acceptable” shell.

writing in the raw: it’s my nature

love.death.love.death.love.sex

before my 16th birthday, my dad took me out for dinner. he said he figured it was time for the “sex” talk. whoo boy.

so we’re at dinner and i say, dad i know about sex… haven’t had it yet, but like i know about it.

he says i only wanted to tell you this one thing: don’t ever let anybody fuck you. if you want to fuck them, that’s fine. but don’t EVER let anybody fuck you.

holy shit. what did he just say?

and then we both started laughing.

my father gave me one hell of a gift: the knowledge and confidence to own myself. to own my decisions. to be my own person.

yeah, you own yourself and you give yourself… don’t ever let anybody take anything you are unwilling to give.

but when you let go, let giving yourself be a completing act. because it’s love we all want, so make it about loving somebody.

then sex is a playground, an archeological dig. it’s absurd, a comedy, a vacation of hours… it’s making poetry in grunts and groans. it’s about that slow reveal… the getting there…


maybe, when we stop letting others define us

maybe, when we stop letting life define us

maybe, when we start defining ourselves

we’ll stop creating worlds in which we hate to live

writing in the raw: leave-your-facts-at-the-door edition

Facts… silver bullets in the war against the ignorant, the uninformed, and the intolerant.

Facts. That’s all we need. Forget love, faith, religion, God, even reason or logic. It’s all about the facts. Why can’t these damned neocons and wingnuts just ACCEPT the fucking FACTS???

maybe there’s something to nothing

i’d like to formally announce that i am no longer a democrat. i have decided to register as an independent.

further, i realize there are lots of people like me, democrats and republicans. and they nor I have a political place… we’re orphans with no place to call home. nowhere to go. and nothing to hold us to the status quo.

On Five Schools: The Stoics

PhilosoPhactor: The Stoics
Philosophy On A Porch


This is the second in a five part series in which I have selected five
ancient schools of philosophy, each as a modern archetype for the philosophies you’ll find among people. Within these five I see a patternwork still in
evidence in the world of mankind. These are five schools whose maxims are
well known, each attempting to instruct us how to live a good life.
You may not know the source, and the maxim may have evolved into
many forms, or just an idea, but the principles are well soaked into so
called western cultures. It is not just that we find some of our ideas similar, in these schools we see our philosophical great grandfathers and mothers. My understanding, relativistic, is that each works best in specific conditions.

(by pyrrho for publishing jointly at MLW and DocuDharma)

The Stoics:

As with most of these schools I’ll cover, the name of the school has come
to have a common modern meaning. If it’s fair or not is for someone else to
decide, as a skeptic I’m a bit biased but it seems to me the modern meaning of “stoic” get’s at the meaning of the original school better
than the Epicureans got with “epicurean”. An ancient stoic would have less objection to being called stoic in modern terms than and ancient Epicurean would being called an epicurean in the modern sense, which would offend them.


zeno I will be using the print version of the Oxford “Dictionary of
Philosophy” to refresh myself for this series.

Links offered above may or may not have been referenced to research this
post. I may or may not believe their assertions or have been exposed to them,
but they are given to ease further your direct research should you like. I
give my own impressions of the topics within, please form your own
impressions if you are at all interested in the topics, mine include my own
simplifications and interpretations. I try to present them fairly, clearly,
but I am a skeptic myself, a relativist with opinions on all these schools,
and a tendency to eschew the doctrinaire side of each of these schools,
myself, and tend to seek and emphasize the reusable tools each has to
offer.

To be stoic is to be resolute in the face of adversity, to uphold virtue, usualy in a traditional sense of virtue. One
thing about the name, and the school, which reflects back on Epicurus’ false
reputation is that the Stoics are named after the Place where Zeno of Citium
taught, the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch, rather than after Zeno of
Citium. As a result, and due to a long life of the school, the stoic philosophy
went through
various stages and had a chance to become something different from Zeno’s
philosophy. If it was a refinement or blurring is a matter of interpretation but whatever Epicurus’ self-described followers believed, his philosophy remains
a particular thing attached to his original thinking in spite of how it might be used as an excuse for
indulgence. In contrast to that, and also as a major
contemporary opponent of Epicureanism, Stoicism comes to represent a spirit. It becomes an approach, and that approach was traditionalism. That the world is knowable turns easilly into a belief that it is known, that the our leaders are the right leaders, that our traditions are not random, but sublimely reasonable.

Frankly, the Stoics are conservative in my book, but in moderation, and as such still have
some sage advice. Indeed, I often notice the stoic in the principled conservative, as the source of their misalignment with the Republican party, just a soul seeking a no nonsense strong will, sympathetic to tradition, and accepting the hardness of life as a given. Whomever you are, aometimes you have to be stoic, you ought to be. Sometimes
you owe it to someone, to civil rights, for example, and you have to stand
bravely against something hard. Sometimes such resolve requires philosophy, a philosophy where
virtue is a higher value than practicality… than fear, where hardship is a given and the mind spends no time railing against the unfairness of it all. Alternately, sometimes life is
hard, and the practical thing is in fact the stoic approach, “Don’t Panic”… and the Stoic philosophy is fairly
good at facing such natural adversity. The Stoics are
traditionalists, and take comfort in the certainty tradition offers.

If you want the details of such exchanges of control over the Stoic school and its teachings,
check out the links to the right. The final stages are dominated by an era of
“Roman Stoicism” and this philosophy represents a kind of more chaste Roman
than one might imagine from reading Gaius Petronius.

The Stoics ended up over time favoring a lot of conventional wisdom of the
sort that believes in the rules. They believe in order, it is both a
criticism and compliment to say they make apathy a virtue. I for one have more
sympathy with apathy as a value than traditionalism. Zeno held
that only living virtuously had value, all else was “indifferent”. This is
potentially the philosophy of a hardy soul. The term stoic isn’t quite fair
to that model because it implies something more resolute and less tender… so remember
the stoic of real virtue and endurance can be the noble political activist. Being
too rigid, too stoic, can be a vice when times are good, but when there is an
emergency, and a cousin has broken his leg on a family camping trip miles
from help, the family turns to the stoic members to bear their burdens and carry them through.

Stoicism is a very familiar philosophy, it can be going down with the ship with
dignity, or just as a way to endure winter without
the sort of panic and drama that besets the, well, less stoic. I’ll be honest,
stoicism doesn’t
appeal to me in nearly as pleasant ways as Epicureanism…
Below more technical details about the Stoics.

Friday Philosophy: Outness

I sometimes refer to when I came out/was outed.  Sometimes people ask what I mean by phrasing it that way.  I’ll get to that in the story that follows.

I am out.  I make no secret about being a lesbian.  And I make no secret about being born male.  Some people don’t like that.  Some people think I’m doing a disservice to all sorts of folks by being out.  Some people think I should shut up and go back into the closet, so everyone (except maybe me) might be able to be happy.

Recently I’ve been engaged in several discussions about the proposed exclusion of gender-variant people from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.  A few days ago someone wrote to me:

Are you a woman or not? If so, then the rights you should be fighting for are those of womens’ rights. Which means being legally recognized as a woman and having access to all the rights of women and nothing more.

Seeking special laws to address transsexual women is a self-proclamation that they are ‘different’ from other women, which is a setback and a political dead-end.

writing in the raw: where IS melvin?

i don’t have much tonight. i thought i’d write about writing on the blogs. like how to structure these essays or diaries. how to make them work better. but suddenly, i don’t want to anymore. I want to jam about Jay Elias’s essay, Of Politics and People

Many of you may wonder why I have been so dogged with my “Quotes for Discussion” posts over the last year.  I usually offer them up without context or commentary, and they are tangential to the point of the sites where I post them at best.  Further, few people, including few of you, bother to read them or discuss them.  And even more, sometimes the quotes, and my purpose in posting them, is very hard to gather.  So, I’ll tell you why.

I post those quotes to remind us about people, and to try to get people to think about them, often in a different way than usual for politics.  Because it is easy to speak of political policy and strategy without thinking about these things, about the crucial role that people will have in them.

It is my belief that most political programs and ideas fail because they are not conceived or implemented with people in mind.

emphasis mine (and also a bit out of order of the original)

And I want to go on about Delivery in jessical’s Pony Party: Oh Superman, In a Box.

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