What’s in a Name?
Now that it’s been proven that political orientation is not genetic, can I refer to myself as Progressive Independent Social Democrat–Questioning? I’m tired of just being PISD all the time…
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hardie karges
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hardie karges
Religio-politics 101: Desiderata Considerata
Texas, Mexico, river, fence and questions
…and a strange peace comes over me, in the midst of all the chaos, rejection and reflection, in the midst of patchwork solutions to comprehensive problems that are beyond my comprehension… and I think it has to do with people, last but not least of the great apes, violent and intelligent beyond belief, the gentle ones naturally long gone, left only with the hardened ones that must be softened by religion often rendered impossible by the needle tracks of time and the sloppy sutras of space…
We are pathetic little people with our pathetic little problems of food, shelter and clothing, mostly just demanding dignity, Capital D Dignity, as if that were the most important thing in the world, that self-importance, that self-esteem, that love that is a priori to all other loves, that feeling of being centered in our self slightly above the navel and just below the head let’s call it heart and get it over with, the connections between people one of heart firstly and foremostly…
I love the so-called losers of this world because they are the humans with heart, sometimes, or sometimes not, but at least they’re usually open to it, for lack of better options, but it’s not that I hate those who are so sure of themselves and such masters of the world; it’s that I pity them for they will never know the feeling of submission, the feeling of being part of an indivisible whole of which they count only for a little bit, whether entertainers CEO’s or politicians, it’s lonely up there…
Celebrity sickness is the disease of the day in late 21st C. America, drunk on fame, real or imagined, our obligatory fifteen minutes barely enough in this day and age of hard drugs and random hugs, gotta’ keep the rush coming to see ourselves in pictures on the Big Screen; selfies won’t do for much more than government work, the basic minimum of likes, follows and shares needed to gain some face and hold on to it for a day or two. Why do we see ourselves on the Big Screen at the expense of ourselves on the ground planting seeds and forgiving misdeeds?
My main memory of a visit to Cuba was the loaded question from a local functionary, fully formed and well-thought-out, could only come from a Commie, stuck behind ironic curtains for most of his life and that of a nation: “Just what do you need Internet for, anyway?”
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Just what DO we need most, anyway? Why are we obsessed with this corporate mentality of skyscrapers Hondas and iPhones while homeless people are sleeping on the streets and begging for food? Is there no middle ground that we can all be part of? Maybe it’s time to reassess our priorities. Maybe it’s time to get back to the garden—a high-tech one—we and our smart-phones: but no two-year contracts, please…
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hardie karges
Religio-Politics 2015: Capitalist Kabbalah, Dial ‘F’ for ‘Freedom’…
I don’t know why there is such hatred from mostly-Christian Westerners toward Middle Eastern cultures generally and Islamic religion specifically, any more than I know why there is such racism toward black people from those same Westerners. I suspect it’s because we’re so similar, and historically so close geographically, so competing for the same turf, really, physically and psychologically. They’re violent; we’re violent. They’ve had great cultures; we’ve had great cultures. They’re stubbornly opinionated; we’re stubbornly opinionated. They had slavery; we had slavery. So why all the animosity?Despite all the historic animosity over the Crusades, which was mostly an act of European aggression, there is the case of modern Israel, once again mostly an act of Western aggression, as Israel re-invents itself as a modern European-style alcohol-based republic, situated in the heart of the Mideast, after centuries of being ghettoized in Europe itself and largely protected in the Mideast itself.
That’s brilliant—and our cross to bear, somehow, all puns intended. The current fad of ‘Christian Zionism’ is ample proof of that. Other than that, the only real difference is that we—and Israel—are free-for-all devil-may-care capitalist consumerist economies, while most of the oil-based Mideast is not. Hmmm… No surprise there, as Jewish banking funded Portugal, then Spain, then northern Europe in their Age of Discovery, after the expulsion from Spain along with fellow Muslims. They never looked back, at their former life as Middle Easterners—until now. It gets worse.
For all the good it’s done, runaway capitalism today is the number-one problem facing the world, not terrorism IMHO. Enough is enough. Terrorists aren’t destroying the planet with global warming. We Westerners (Americans especially) are, we and our precious freedoms: freedom to drive our cars, mostly, around and around, uptown and downtown, whatever is left of our hollowed-out cities, existing for little more than ceremonial purposes (i.e. entertainment) now.
The Big Lie in America is that ‘they covet our freedoms’, but the truth is far from the narrative. We said that first about Communists, and now about ‘jihadis’, and neither one was true, not necessarily because they don’t want more freedom, but because we’re hardly the paradigm for it. The communists waited in line for bread; we wait in line for Apple watches. “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” Both have failed miserably. So what’s the big difference? Desire selects accordingly. The prostitute picks her trick. (More …)
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hardie karges
Religions Gone Awry, Systems Rendered Asunder
Buddhist shrine in Sri Lanka
Islam promotes discipline and ends up glorifying violence. Christianity promotes love and ends up glorifying sex. Buddhism promotes non-possession and ends up glorifying money. Hinduism promotes India. Judaism promotes Israel. How did our major religions go so badly wrong? Good question. An even better question is how to set them right again. It won’t be easy.
Religion was long ago taken over by politics, and used as a tool for manipulation, souls for sale as the price of politics, people’s desire for meaning in life reduced to authoritarian submission and hopes for the best. Truth, beauty, and goodness have been traded for sex, money, and violence in some devil’s bargain, arbitrage of the soul, leveraged buy-outs of vestigial beliefs, so much debris and detritus… (More …)
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chicagoja
I agree whole-heartedly. However, understanding God never required a religion, a church or even a holy book.
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hardie karges
Amen.
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chicagoja
Except Amen is a reference to an Egyptian god. Funny where some terms come from.
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hardie karges
News Flash from the Conspiracy Channel
Isis execution
Conspiracy TV has announced that it plans, in a rare show of support, to renew the contract for “ISIS: We’re Desert Rats, not Democrats” in its prime-time reality TV slot for two years, instead of the usual one year, according to CEO Rupert Crotchrot. “We’re very excited about the potential of this series,” explains Crotchrot, adding, “good head-loppers are hard to find. We had high hopes for the Mexican cartels, but the back-story just wasn’t there. Heads hanging from a bridge are fine, as long as you know WHY they’re hanging from that particular bridge.”
ISIS, the shadowy terrorist group that has captured much of the Syrian and Iraqi deserts, emerged from relative obscurity earlier this year to capture the world’s imagination and restore a sense of awe to an otherwise ‘been there, done that’ world. There is wide hope that they will do much to restore otherwise moribund defense spending and jump-start economies still reeling from six years of economic recession. No one will confirm it, but apparently there are plans to expand the action to other locations as quickly as they can be found. But that’s just the rumor. No one’s talking.
“ISIS: …Desert Rats…” will have its work cut out for it, what with new competition from the new reality TV series “Ebola: Out of the Cave, Part II” now scheduled in the same time slot on a competing channel. I know you’re as excited as I am. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this all plays out. On a sadder note, “Border Kids: the Wonder Years” has been canceled, effective immediately. Hey, they had a good run. That’s entertainment. Stay tuned for politics.
(This intended as a work of satire, of conspiracy theories, military spending and the mass media. I have nothing but sympathy for all victims on all sides of all Mideast conflicts)
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hardie karges
Campaign sign in New Mexico desert: “Freedom or Collectivism–It’s your Choice”; now in what warped world-view is that the choice? Oh, yeah, right…
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hardie karges
Thai Politics, Protests and the World’s Cutest PM: Democracy’s a B*tch
Thai PM Yingluck Shinawatra
A primer for the uninitiated: The Thai political troubles of the last six to eight years revolve around the larger-than-life presence of one billionaire-turned-politician named Thaksin Shinawatra, who was elected Premier a decade or so ago and whose only prior political experience was an appointed one in the regime of some fat-ass general whose name escapes me at the moment. After being declared innocent of some minor corruption charges he was allowed by the courts to serve.
One of his first acts was to limit the competition for his AIS cell-phone company, worth gazillions. Another was to limit public support for the country’s flagship carrier Thai Airways (the better for his Air Asia to flourish). He also declared war on drug dealers with an infamous ‘blacklist’ and orders of ‘shoot to kill’. Unfortunately this list also included some political enemies. Oops, his bad. He also initiated many programs to benefit the poor.
Following other questionable actions and various conflicts of interest within and around the extended family holding his wealth, discontent from the country’s better-educated city-dwellers finally led to protests, then negotiations which culminated in Thaksin’s resignation in 2006. Or so we thought. His cabinet stayed in office, though, and after a month or so of ‘rest’, Thaksin simply walked back in like nothing ever happened. The army then took over while he was at the UN on official bizniz. He returned to face corruption charges, then left again with promises to return. He lied.
Since then the country has been divided politically between Thaksin’s ‘red-shirt’ supporters and ‘yellow-shirt’ opponents, with outbreaks of sporadic confrontation including, but not limited to, a certain noodle shop on Hollywood Boulevard. For the last few years the country has been led by Thaksin’s freely-elected ‘clone’ and sister Yingluck.
The current problems stem from a recent bill that would have made amnesty for exiles a simple matter, including you-know-whom. Yellow-shirt protests have since been ongoing for the last month or so, even though the bill was withdrawn. Although a few people have been killed, police have mostly foregone the use of force.
A few salient points are probably in order: (More …)
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hardie karges
Reblogged this on Backpackers & Flashpackers: Losing It in Laos and commented:
This my take a half-year ago:
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hardie karges
Burying the past with language
removes it from the usual patterns of evolution, as would deliberate gene splicing. The Dravidian languages of southern India deliberately remove Sanskrit influence while ignoring similar influences from English, which would certainly be easier to locate and remove because of their obvious foreignness. Local politics and petty jealousies weigh heavily. ‘Aryanization’ carries with it the connotation of ‘civilization’, at least in Thai, notwithstanding the fact that the same people now called ‘Dravidians’ have ancestors who created one of the world’s greatest early civilizations in the Indus River valley. They undoubtedly left much DNA in the current bloodlines of both northern and southern India. Unfortunately for them, this is the darker-skinned lower-caste bloodline that was ripe for Islam to enhance their status. It’s no accident that that same Indus River is now in Muslim Pakistan, though linguistic traces with their forbears are long gone. The lingua franca of Pakistan, Urdu, in fact is mutually intelligible with Hindi, the closest thing India has to a national language, and the local language of no one in Pakistan. Once again, efforts are continuous to separate the two for political reasons. The same has not yet happened, but could, with India’s other major language, Bengali, also known as Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh. -
hardie karges
No matter how hard the West may squeeze the rest of the world by the balls,
individually a single man has no assurance that anyone loves him. The more that the world fragments and splinters, the more that people need simple unequivocal love. This is the Achilles heel of even the cruelest warrior, the need for certainty, the need for absolutes, the need for loyalty, the need for love. Empires of love all crumble and fall without warning nor welcome, just like empires of the map and empires of the soul, systems and constructs looking for reasons to return home to entropy. Still we need it, like we need belief systems and religions, insurance companies and bank accounts. We hedge our bets as fast as we can make them, joining hands with our enemies and rejecting our allies simply by the natural laws of turbulence and motion. We can only unite in something larger than us, the overarching umbrella, the golden parachute. Catch us if you can.
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hardie karges
The past is a pool of blood.
Internecine squabbles continue between former camel-shit caravan drivers turned oil princes and former horse shit cowboys turned capitalists. When planes slammed into the World Trade Towers like two over-extended penises caught in a lie, a warm radiation spread over my body like an afterglow to knee-jerk fear. Many of us took a hit when the twin towers fell, psychologically if not physically, conspiracies sprouting like mushrooms from fertile imaginations, unable to accept the fact that not everyone loves us anymore. So that must be our fault, the rejected lover accepting responsibility for imagined crimes against an unfaithful spouse that he didn’t want anymore anyway but didn’t have the heart to tell. But not me, I know suicidal despair when I see it. I know that suicide bombings are suicides first and politics second. We’re on my turf now; this is the world I know, the world of opposites. In martial arts like marital arts, use the aggressor’s weight to his disadvantage. The bad guys might just save us all despite themselves, slow down run-away capitalism before we all die from the heat of our own fires, accomplish what a gaggle of rich-daddy environmentalists driving $30K hybrids could never accomplish in a thousand years. What happens when one billion Chinese all have cars? Whose air will we breathe then?
streaming consciousness... 
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