You can listen to it whole, which I’d strongly suggest. Or you can skip straight to 10:00, where the part of the song which is playing its earwormy tricks on me begins.
Somehow, listening to Yes makes me feel as if everything’s going to be okay.
Category: English
LINK: THE PSYCHONAUT FIELD MANUAL
AKA an introduction to chaos magick. This illustrated digital booklet holds some great guidelines and info and it is exquisitely presented. It’s s easily one of the best things I’ve ever laid eyes on, especially since we don’t get to read about esoteric stuff like that in such a form very often. That said, I can’t say anything about whether it works or not or how—that might have to wait a while still! Check it out here or download a .pdf of the latest version here.
REVIEW: THE PSYCHOPATH TEST
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a gift from my Latvian friend Zanda for my 26th birthday. When I got it I thought it was going to be about what makes people crazy or sets crazy people apart, and I do believe Mr. Ronson set out to write this book from a kind of similar mental space. Instead, I discovered, together with him, how psychopathy is much different from what is typically understood as mental illness by most people.
A psychopath doesn’t do “crazy” things—they are very calculating. A psychopath doesn’t suffer from schizophrenia, paranoia or psychosis–the actual illnesses we have connected with the picture of madness; in fact, a psychopath could easily pass off as a completely normal, sociable, even extremely attractive person, with one key difference: psychopaths are unable to feel for other people. It’s impossible for them to experience empathy or sympathy. It’s literally impossible. According to Robert Hare, the creator of the Hare Psychopath Checklist, which lent its name to the title of this book and which has been used to spot psychopathy in people, the disorder is actually biological: a certain kind of neural activity in the amygdala of normal people connected to horror, revulsion and other intense emotional responses just do not fire up in psychopaths.
Many murders or serial killers in history have been psychopaths, but to them killing was nothing “wrong”. It was an act of curiosity or of scratching a certain itch. Furthermore, many higher-ups in important corporations holding key positions are actually psychopaths, or at least the profession with the largest percentage of psychopaths within its ranks is that of the CEO. Companies that are shaping the present and future of humanity are run by people who cannot feel remorse or responsibility and only think of their own selfish needs.
Doesn’t that go a long way towards explaining why things are the way they are in the world right now? I mean, I have been wondering for a long time just how hugely influential people manage to live with themselves and their (probably negative) actions. How they can have so much power and influence and just never use it in a way that makes any kind of ethical sense. I was imagining they must look at themselves in the mirror and every once in a while involuntarily throw up a little.
Turns out it is far more likely they go to bed each night feeling proud of themselves and how they spent another day proving the world who’s boss: predators preying on the lesser people who got what they had coming for them.
But if it’s not their fault, if they do end up becoming CEOs because that professional field vastly rewards this kind of remorseless behaviour, what are we supposed to do with that information?
What if you were born without the capacity to connect with other people, to understand why people cry or feel hurt? What if everything boiled down to “predators and prey”, as it does for so many psychopaths? What should the world do with you then? Would it be justified to lock you up and throw away the key?
Bonus: the Psychopath Test reveals the shocking truth that illnesses such as ADHD, bipolar disorder and Asperger’s or autism might not have had as much thought put into their definitions as we might like to think. By DSM V, published in 2013, you would be quite hard-pressed not to find something wrong with you and your mind, even if that were you being scared of spiders, preferring one parent over the other (Parental Alienation Syndrome), spending too much time on the net (Internet Addiction Disorder) and the list goes on.
I don’t want to make assumptions, since I’m not in any way a specialist, but I’m guessing that big pharma wanting to sell drugs for plausible-sounding illnesses, as well as therapists aspiring to categorize everybody’s quirks into a system of diagnosable mental conditions, are playing a much more important role in creating unhealthy, dependent people than the will of the medical industry is oriented towards making everybody’s lives better—be it that of sick, healthy people, or anywhere on or around the murky borders inbetween.
EARWORM GARDEN // HIGHANDMIGHTYCOLOR — PRIDE
Where the heru did this come from?!
LINK: CAPTAIN AWKWARD
I keep thinking of Captain Awkward as Captain Awesome by The Animation Workshop (I even subconsciously wrote one instead of the other a couple of times while writing this post!) If you remove the hilarious scatological humour of the latter, I don’t think that the association is any kind of accident: she really is awesome.
Captain Awkward is basically an online advice column on love, relationships, friendships, social interaction etc, only Captain Awesome is also a scriptwriter. It’s similar to what you would expect to find in a magazine, but apart from it being some of the best advice in the world, from getting rid of the Darth Vader Boyfriends/Girlfriends and dealing with Geek Social Fallacies, to approaching shy guys (Captain Awekward is a feminist and writes predominantly, but obviously not exclusively, for women), it makes for some very entertaining reading indeed.
Yesterday I stayed glued to my monitor reading till some even wee-er hours of the morning and even closer to sunrise than usual, which is of course my true proof-of-the-pudding process, as it is for many others I’m sure. Check it out.
EARWORM GARDEN // SANTA ESMERALDA – DON’T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD
REVIEW: THE TRANSANTLANTIC TRADE AND INVESTMENT PARTNERSHIP
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership by John Hilary
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Another of my “cheat” books to complete my 2015 Reading Challenge. That said, I wish all cheats and tricks the world over were this beneficial and had this positive a net value as the existence of this little book and me taking the (little) time required to read it in order to complete my Goodreads challenge.
I did so in physical form but you can easily get this booklet in.pdf in various languages, including Greek, from this page. And here’s another quick summary from the Stop TTIP website of what the problem actually is.
What I have to say about TTIP and all agreements similar to it (CETA, TPP, whatever) is that in all the wickedness of the masterminds behind it, they envision a future that’s so unsustainable, so unnatural, so anti-everything that’s good, just or progressive in this world, that my hope is that these abominations, even in the event they come to pass—which, in one form or another, they probably will—will collapse under the weight of their own profound and inexcusable arbitrariness.
Good thing the mega-corporations, the only ones who will benefit from these deals and have lobbied sufficiently to have infiltrated various administrative and legislative national and international bodies, such as the European Commission itself (one wonders if that really did need any lobbying at all), are becoming more and more blatant with all this; unbeknownst(?) to them, they are giving us a blessing in disguise: in these times of widespread uncertainty, passivity and double-think, having a deal such as this where there are zero benefits for the common people, for Europe, for democracy, all those things we’ve come to think are sacrosanct (no matter if they really are), having a deal which pulls the curtains like this in the name of profit, control and inequality… it all leaves very little room for doubt and alternative readings: TTIP is corporate greed in paper form, no questions asked. It really is that simple.
It is precisely for that reason it looks like it’s serving as a call for action to people of all kinds of political beliefs. It’s working similar to how “We are the 99%” could have worked and is absolutely in the same spirit of mass participation. One look at the Stop TTIP petition, which gathered more than 3.3 million signatures, should convince you. Us. Them. Everybody.
Is that a record, Ben? It must be a record.
LINK: A QUICK PUZZLE TO TEST YOUR PROBLEM SOLVING
Try it and go think what it means.
Also apparently I’m in the 9%. Does that mean I’m a good problem solver? Can’t be.
REVIEW: CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Cultural Anthropology by William A. Haviland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Phew! Finally done with this 500-page+ undertaking of a textbook. Reviewing textbooks is kind of weird, but I have to say that staying with this book and reading it bit by bit over almost a period of two years has made me seriously consider studying (cultural) anthropology more formally. I mean I already have a BA in Cultural Technology, why not add some cultural anthropology in there?
Seriously, after reading this book, my official position is that anthropology is for the humanities what physics is to the hard sciences—psychology would be mathematics and sociology would be chemistry. Just like studying physics, studying anthropology (especially combined with cultural studies) you can’t help but look at reality and your circumstances from a more detached standpoint, more objectively as it were. You get to see that your life is the result of the mixture of an endless array of possible sets of circumstances. It teaches humility, it teaches tolerance, curiosity, it awakens a deeper awareness of what being a human person in a world of human and non-human persons is all about.
I still think it’s about laughing, cooking and listening to/ playing music, but that’s just me.
My favourite chapters were on sex and marriage, art, patterns of subsistence food, language, cultural change and the anthropology of futurology. Any overlap with any of my more general interests, including what I believe to be the fundamentals of human culture as exposed above, is purely coincidental, I swear.
THE RAINBOW
I just love this piece of album art. Here it is in high resolution.
Three years ago tonight, Beduin had been open — more than open.
Last time I checked, it had a “for rent” sign hanging on the metal shutters there to stop any curious passer-by from taking a look inside.
It was one of my favourite places in Athens, but I don’t feel as sad to see it go as I thought I would be. I recognize it all for what it is: something dying to give its place to something that’s just been conceived. I’m happy I crossed paths with it, that I experienced it. But I would have taken it in a bit more consciously last time I was there if I had known I would never get to smell it, taste it or see it again. As Beduin, that is, for who knows what might take its place.