This thumbs up needs to be published

While some of the rare to find readers of this may have noticed that I am following more or less loosely other blogs, too, there is one among the crowd where the following is an appreciated task for a great variety of reasons. It's this one, The Barreness.

While reading it I've actually discovered that, contrary to former belief, there is an archetype of women that makes me wiggle in my seat, less for the optics and more for the mind, though. Interestingly enough they all have an obsession for cats and seem to have an education and interests not really related to technology. That's kind of a shame as I think that mathematics and informatics bare a huge connection to the less applicable sciences on a meta level. Understanding e. g. the concept of communication Luhmann outlines in his works is way easier if you know the concepts of communication existing in the field of informatics and vice versa. And especially the recent developments, meaning the last couple of centuries and especially decades and years, in the way society works and changes can, in my opinion, not be understood without understanding the impact of technology. And I so love (mean hate) it when people talk about the advent of the internet as a caesura and a paradigm shift when all they know is browsers, email and twitter. But I didn't want to rant about (that kind) of ignorant folk, there's something better to waste words on today!

Follow the link above, read and figuratively stroke your genitals in a sense of wellbeing. If you follow the the first link in her posting you can read that other people find the style of writing as good and intriguing as I do myself, which is sparing you a lot of drivel from my end as I just second what's written there. Especially the part about having read a lot of books and also posts, be it from blogs or boards, and still thinking that the Barreness' blog's damn well written. Did I type still? I meant because of that!
The general topic of the post is the connection between appearance and inner state as much as the question what forms the appearance. That's a topic that has attracted the thoughts of many great minds, even back in ancient Greek where Diogenes is said to have lived in barrel, although this is likely the result of a mistranslation. I personally can relate to the idea of such a live a lot. Due to reasons in my own personal history I am greedy for any kind of profane treasuries like money an possessions, but the only things I really value are immaterial and can only be gotten by using one's own mind and brain. While you may get a nice car and a big house by inheritance or the lottery, true understanding of anything cannot be gained in such a way. Even money in vast quantities and wise men as a surrounding won't teach a fool the merest insight. Character and culture, which I, unlike Diogenes, regard highly, are also things that can only be achieved actively by usage of your brain in various ways. I say mainly because e. g. proper manners of eating can be learned on a purely phenomenological level by imitation and seem to be learned this way mainly today, completely ignoring that these weren't habitus of the fine men in older days, but instead developed out of practical reasons mainly.

There's another old quote from, iirc, Iuvenal, a Roman writer, from, iirc again, his satires that says a sane mind lives in a healthy body. It's an idiom in Germany, but as often the source has been misinterpreted. But let's take a look on this postulated coherence between body and mind. Science says it's true and there's many studies that have shown a clear connection between mental health, the subjective content with oneself and one's situation in general and physical health, interestingly enough from both sides you approach this. E.g. people with depression have not only a severely reduced rate of  especially facial movement and expressions and at the same time a lot of physical conditions. On the other hand people who described their mental state as balanced and overall happy had way less (especially severe) medical conditions than expected by the statistics. Of course we get no answer for the question what is cause and what is result, but we only asked for coherence and that's definitely there. But actually this complete paragraph is a digression...

The counterpart of a life philosophy inspired by Diogenes and a life in a barrel, valuing the ideas of insight, understanding and wisdom above all physical goods, has maybe been established by the rise of the it girls. And as I have kind of a history as a type setter I have to congratulate the Barreness on the layout of her post. Having the line "the pathetic wastes of space" appear just under the image of Paris Hilton might be coincidental, but I couldn't have done it any better! The exclusive group of it girl's is in no way self defined, as girls having earned their money themselves are already excluded from being part of this phenomenon. If not directly, then indirectly by not being able to reach the state of mind of a suckling, lacking all the accomplishments in human development that Freud describes as "Ich" and "Über Ich", again. The decision whether you are an it girl or not is one not made by yourself, but by your reception of other people. Deciding that yourself would require a level of reflection that needs to be missing to become one.
And yes, by my own set of morals people are not equal in any way, but equivalent at best. Whether there's a worth to your life or not is a difference everyone makes through thinking and acting. While I'm not sure whether there's a proper scale to determine the absolute worth of a person and how the the things to be factored in should be ranked in their importance, I am absolutely positive that there's people whose life has no worth in any way. But I'm digressing again!

Let's think a second about morals, demands and roles that society has been passing on as traditions since ages. While tradition has been a good mechanism to pass on knowledge and morals in the long gone past, this is starting to get a problem in the last decades, where basically every part of everyday life has been changing or is still changing. If you need an example think about traveling. For hundreds of years the speed of travel was limited by the speed of a horse. At the beginning this was a rare privilege and it got more common later, but for hundreds of years no good or information could travel significantly faster than a horse could run. How unimaginable this is today gets clear if you read what kinds of reservations were mentioned when the first trains emerged. It was seriously questioned whether the human body would really be unharmed traveling at such crazy speeds. That was just 150 years ago and we are now close to making space travel a tourist attraction and the idea to not leave one's hometown ever sounds silly and retarded. So while your grandparents might have been struck with awe when someone arrived with a car in their childhood, the closest thing to that today is maybe picking up trampy High School girls in a used Seven Series to fuck them on the backseat later.
Under such circumstances the step of a single generation is fucking huge and if that certain one of my neighbors would pass on his attitude towards the internet to his son he would make an imbecile out him, too!

Of course tradition doesn't strike as hard in that areas as the realization of the changing circumstances does not need abstraction. And that's where women are actually boned, and not the good way of boned that you should enjoy, but the bad one, that some enjoy none the less. In older times the weak social role of women was not really justified either, but at least the existing differences in physical strength for example did matter. In most cases that's not the case any more, but the still passed on role model is way behind with reflecting that and hence are most women. And that brings us in the middle of the situation described in the post mentioned above, where a literally retarded (as in delayed, slowed down) and obese woman starts attacking one that is none of that - and is able to do so with moral superiority!
The traditional womanly value of giving birth has lost a lot of its worth to me in a society like the current one, where individuals pursue their own freedom and happiness instead of living to serve society and the currency of power has shifted from food and weapons to information. Giving birth to a child is something basically every woman can do without putting effort into it, which does cohere to the fact that the group of individually successful women tends to lose something worth being called birth rate. While moralist bitches might be raging now I'm rather sure that all kinds of feminists would be willing to give a leg for a world in which women aren't limited to and judged by their bodily functions, but instead have the chance, as much as the burden, to prove themselves with more than breasts and their choice of men. I personally highly endorse the ideal of women being equivalent to men. Why exactly is a good question, but in the worst case it's because my role model wants me to conquest a woman and that's a boring a game if you can get submission by simply providing better food and shelter in exchange for doing the nasty. It's also adding a moral dimension to relationships that I don't like. If the oven of love has lost its fire (or to add some bad machismo: tightness) I don't want to think whether to break up or not because someone I still like is financially dependent on me and would have to suffer from this. I'm not cold hearted enough to simply tell myself "she could've chosen otherwise" and way too less altruistic to not keep my money and possessions for myself.
I'd go as far as to say a good relationship that provides freedom to both partners needs to be made of partners that are off as good alone except for the relationship. Otherwise it will end more or less like with my aunt who's been chained to the son of the village's drunken bum in the older days - or my grandfather who couldn't ditch his stupid and lazy wife because a divorce would have become a social problem.

So that's basically a public thumbs up from my end for slapping the fat cunt right to the face, dear Barreness. Keep them bitchslaps coming ;-)

I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!

Everyone of us has basic, often unreflected, primitive desires. Not as basic as food and water, but just one step above that, most of them being somehow related to society and social interaction. I personally need something to quench my thirst for schadenfreude. Luckily this word has been adopted by the english speaking world, so I can at least be halfway sure it hits the point I wanna make when I use it.

There's lots of sources to feed this urge. If you open the newspaper you can easily find half a metric fuckton of stuff you can laugh about in a very dark manner. Police and fire brigades should get better a better, digital radio service. It has cost billions already, will cost way more than calculated and has proven to be practically useless in a lot of situations already.
But what do you do when you want a good laugh about some people? Yes, first level support works excellent for that, but those people get on your nerves beforehand, which outweighs the laughing afterward and I also tend to feel sorry for those poor beings. I often enough had contact with people whose business relied on something they could barely switch on and now broke, taking all their data and work with it into oblivion. And I am not cold hearted enough to just say "Well, if those data would have really been important, you would have a backup!" and not feel sorry for them. Yes, the central IT at my job delivers good laughs, but for the price of seeing all my co-workers upset because yet another half of a workday goes down the gutter.

But this Friday there's been starting the new season of our German version of "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!".  Yes, we do have bullshit TV, too, and what's even worse is that we pay an assload for the non-private stations and there's no real choice to get around that anymore. But some of the shit is bad and low enough to actually be good again. Especially because they garnish it with a lot of really degrading humor and malice.
The format itself is just perfect to show off the most primitive ways of human social interaction and how badly you can fail at that if a bit of stress uncovers your personal weaknesses. And you can laugh about that with an at least halfway good conscience, because all of those people chose their fate themselves. Of course, most of them are lured by money and haunted by debts, but we have insolvency for individuals for that and also a social system that would leave none of them homeless or hungry. No, they all chose to expose themselves to the laughter and sadism of the viewers all by themselves. They should know that they are going to be made fun of and the past has shown that the viewers like to torment them and love to see them tortured. Oh what fun was it back some years when they had to make Daniel Kueblboeck unchoosable because he was voted to the bushtucker trials three times in a row, getting closer to despair and upright agony, screaming louder and louder each time. There was a channel on Quakenet at that time populated by thousands of people solely because they wanted to share their loud laughter about his ordeals.
Yes, I admit that I am a bit sadistic, but the last paragraph might give you a false impression. If those poor sould wouldn't have a choice I'd find this horrifying. It's rather like cracking the whip at a woman (is that an existing expression even?). It is a disgusting act of cruelty, unless she is into BDSM and literally begs you to.

What I do ask myself, though, is if some of those third and fourth row celebrities really ever had the chance of making a really conscious decision. This year there's indication that Sarah Knappik, a former contestant of the show "Germany's next Top Model", is going to get her ass kicked by the viewers. The reason for that is easy to see. A spoiled blond brat that not just talks like she's seen everything already, but also whines dramatically and excuses her own fail with "having gotten the hardest trial of all" is so inviting to be bashed. The really sorry thing is that she might actually not just act like a stupid smug girl, but really believe the utter crap that drools out of her mouth constantly. This would necessitate, though, that she has no view of herself that really coincides the slightest bit with the way she is perceived by other people. And wouldn't that somehow be tragic, not sad, but tragic in the original sense of Greek drama? She indeed would have never had a real choice, because one of the most important aspects to base the decision on would have been out of scope for her
And if you see that such a poor and dumb little brat gets near traumatized by having to crawl through some dirty tunnels, isn't it simply cruel to insist on her maturity?

I say yes. But such is life. I'm going to laugh on. But maybe I should read some Bertrand Russel in bed to make up for the lost brain cells and ensure I don't lose the base that I use to justify my arrogance.

You takin' that serious?