idea for a book + synth audio feed test

I haven't posted in a while. Partly because what I have been thinking about is too political for this blog.

If I did write more, it would probably be a huge effort, an anthropology of the last 4 decades of the West: how politics has become fantasy (how the official versions of history are getting faker and faker); And what are the root anthropological causes.

I have done a preliminary outline. Of the twenty or so topics the list of indirecteffect-appropriate topics would be:

-Bill James (insiderism vs outsiderism)
-Big Bang theory vs Creationism
-the phantom-time hypothesis (just a hypothesis)
-the origins of homosexuality (and why Westerners can't figure this out)

Yes, this list is eclectic, but that's why the book might need to be written.

The West's problems are only superficially in the various political spectra (+ only superficially due to religious differences). Deep down the problems are anthropological.


==P.S.

I recently noticed the Odiogo gizmo, providing better-than-expected TTS audio for blogs and tried it out. Unfortunately it generated the audio from the short feeds I had set, and now I can't figure out how to recreate the feeds in the long form. So all the audio for the earlier posts are cut off.

This post hopefully will be entirely put in the feed and then automatically turned into a full TTS audio.

a URL

check out "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus".

It's a transcribed speech, highly original, about computers and sitcoms, w nice anecdotes and metaphors.

[via Pathologically Polymathic]

the muddle of opposites

(click photos for bigger)
Long ago, a mental universe like these



was replaced by one like these



but now, in the collective unconscious are things like these



In an upcoming post: why.


in case you prefer
words to pictures
For ages humanity felt an underlying formality of imagined elements. For instance, Wood + Fire + Earth + Metal + Water
[earlier post]

Not anymore.

The Industrial Revolution changed what people feel is behind things. The ancient imaginings ended, but what replaced them was not modern concepts (like atoms or quarks).

There may have been a brief period when people imagined that things merged into other things illogically. But now, for sure, people feel a muddle of opposites becoming each other.

inner life (photo)

[from STATIC]

technically, specialness is irrefutable

I don't know about other places, but in the USA lots of people experience their existences as amazing coincidences.

They are in the dominant country on the habitable planet in the most fortunate age. Ever. As humans, they are the dominant species. How could they not feel special? What a coincidence!

These people experience coincidence itself as an ally, as a positive force.



Abstractions become involved, making this large subset of Americans a tribe of coincidence theorists. This is why so many Americans will accept explanations for things that are riddled with unlikelihoods.

For example, you can tell them a story where --by amazing coincidence-- a bullet goes three people, changes direction and emerges intact, and not only do they have no problem with this, they even like the feeling when they believe it.



The crazier the story the more flattered they are.

*More recently these people heard about an election where every machine-count matched but every paper ballot count did not match. They had no problem with this coincidence. ... Their specialness is their explanation. Special stuff like that just happens to them! When they are alive!

When someone tells them coincidence does not exist, that there is another explanation (that they are not special) the threat to them is deeper than politics.

So they lash out and call the truth-tellers 'conspiracy theorists'.



I repeat: the threat to them is deeper than politics.

modified: 2008-02-12