Pots, Pans, Plato

I think that one thing that can be over looked in Platonic dialogues is time they were written in. At this time Greece was falling apart and there was lots of corruption. It is almost helpful to think of Socrates as a Mr. Rogers like character; instead of going to the factory to see how crayons are made, he goes to talk to the rhetoricians who maim the political process and create corruption. Blaming Plato for some of the unsavory discussions is a lot like blaming an investigative reporter for the unsavory news story reported on.

Another thing I've realized that is a plus for Platonic dialogues is how they are philosophy laid bare. A lot of philosophic writing now-a-days are in the form of treatises. In a treatise, the thinker lays down his ideas in a matter-of-fact way. The thinker also abstracts the questions being ask as if it is taken for granted that all the answers being given have come from a question. However, Platonic dialogues expose the question as an integral part of the process. I think much injury has been done to philosophy due to modern writing styles. It has changed the roll of a philosopher to the state of a fortune teller rather than an inquirer. And this leads to philosophers focusing on interesting answers when really the important part is the question. Or it is insightful questioning that leads to insightful philosophy. Once questioning is removed from philosophy, the result is not much more than rhetorical wizardry.

Many people I've spoken with who are interested in philosophy will say Plato is pretty good but at the same time pretty basic. That to get to the meat of philosophy you have to step it up to more recent thinkers because their philosophy is more complex, as if Plato is a writer of children stories. Yet I am not persuaded by this. They think philosophy is a sport to one up each other with ideas, or trying to make something so complicated only an elite few can spend the time to have intimate knowledge of it. Much of the complications of modern philosophy have not so much to do with the ideas but with the language. Often creating words to replace commonly used words as an encryption. People spend lots of time trying to figure out what the basic meaning of the words are. Since they spend so much time just decoding, they feel something intellectual must have taken place in the time span they spent or else it would have been a waste of time. So anything that is takes a long time to decipher can be passed off as philosophy now-a-days.

Most importantly a lot of people bored with Plato are bored with questions and are bored therefore with philosophy. The intellectual stigma that comes with philosophy has enticed many people who detest it but like being seen as smart. Often since these people are bored with the practice, they become bullies. They push out the people who like philosophy and gain attention because they are persuasive. It has almost gotten to the point where if one wants to philosophize, they shouldn't take advice from modern philosophy because a lot of it is no more that what a used car salesman does.

Beginings of 'How To Think"

I think it is important that people with aspergers get involved with philosophy. It provides insight to why people who don't have aspergers do things like flirt all the time or do many things we find fake and superficial.

Flirting is just a game from socializing; almost as if it were socializing for the sake of socializing. Flirting is not boring to people who enjoy it because it involves them abstracting and heightening skills that come naturally to them. They don't have to toss and turn over doing these things because they lean towards them without having to choose it (much unlike people who do not have innate social skills). Take athletic people who innately lean towards sports. They excel at these things because they don't have to convince themselves constantly to do them; they can concentrate more wholly to the task at hand and not have to constantly remind themselves why they are doing it.

Much to other people's dismay, people with aspergers are innate thinkers. Being a thinker doesn't mean they are geniuses, but that they lean towards thinking. The sad truth is that this goes unrecognized and often discouraged as a mental illness. Many thinkers think themselves into black-holes and self-destruct. People who do not lean towards thinking use this as cannon fodder and try to cattle the person who has made himself fragile from thoughts into a cat carrier; they will probably encourage the thinker to take on the thing they lean towards because they think its the way every human achieves happiness.

But this does not help the thinker. It could distract the thinker for a time if he gets interested in task the person hands down, but ultimately after the task is intellectually exhausted, it loses it fun. The thinker suddenly drops the activity and people who don't understand this type of person view it as a sign of depression. The thinker feels depressed and just assumes this emptiness is caused by "depression". After this the aspie ping-pongs around desperately trying to medicate this emptiness with either chemicals or trying to emulate other people who appear happy/content. It does not dawn on the aspie that he lacks thinking fitness. Friends and guardians will generally advise this person to not think so much. Asking a thinker to stop thinking is like taking away a football from an athlete and making him take piano lessons (when he has no interest in music at all). This is when the aspie has to soul search and recognize bad advice, and not to abandon thinking, but take the mind for a jog to keep it fit.

Philosophy is a good exercise for the mind. It is like those who flirt for the sake of flirting. Philosophy is thinking for the sake of thinking. Chiefly it trains it how to fan out an idea and not get stuck at a mental road block (a very painful experience for any thinker). Often reality for a thinker is only as real as the thoughts he props it up with. Without coherent thinking, things begin to get scary. It is like losing a sense and it is easy to bump into mental things and hurt yourself. So if someone is looking at the sun and complain about their eyes hurting, it wouldn't be effective to tell this person to quit opening their eyes so much. The better advice would be to quit looking at the sun and focus on less luminous things.

Philosophy is a tool to the mind much like the neck is to the eyes. When an idea appears so heavy that it freaks you out, philosophy can come to spread it out. It wont solve the thought but it allows thinking for long durations with out retreading on the same thought. When a thinker gets stuck on a particular thought and cannot move on to other thoughts, it feels like drowning or that time has stopped. Just avoiding these thought traps can make a thinker's life infinitely more sane.

The problem is that philosophy is not taught in primary and secondary schools. The thinker can struggle throughout education without getting schooled in how to effectively use their skills unless a wise teacher interferes and gives this person instructions. Once the thinker is old enough to independently make choices, he if often tied to the responsibility of adulthood and cannot devote as much time and routine to the fitness of the mind as he could in school. This is true especially if the thinker has to start at square one. The thinker may also not have knowledge of what to pursue and what books to read because he hasn't developed friends with a similar temperament to share with. It is a miracle if any of these thinkers land on their feet. Especially since people who do not naturally lean towards thinking try to stifle it and derive enjoyment in doing so.

Another big problem is philosophy has been infiltrated by those who hate thought and use the prestige of philosophy to earn accolades and social advancement. Since non-thinkers are unaware of what philosophy is, they will accept the definition from anyone who seems credible and gives the appearance of a thinker. How ever these fake philosophers choose to display their philosophy, it will be easily marketable since non-thinkers will take to it more readily. So the market is saturated with crap and you need to know how to find the good stuff and to find the right people.

Although it's very hard to keep the mind fit in today's culture, thinkers must figure it out (sadly for a large part on their own). They will have to go through a large gauntlet of people telling them they are mentally ill and that they serve no purpose in society. Their talents will be treated as childish. But as much as these things are true, the thinker must figure these things out or they will self-destruct.

Digesting Philosophy

Synopsis of Nietzsche's
On The Genealogy Of Morality
First Treatise: "Good and Evil", "Good and Bad"

Nietzsche does two things to disqualify morality as something to take seriously. First, he remarks about the idea that morality came from functional habits of which later became part of culture (even when the function was lost). This is lambasted as false and foolish.

He refutes the idea by announcing that morals are set by those with authority. The words noble/good stem back from class distinctions and not functionality. The bad is associated with commoners. Words that are used to express 'bad' are interchangeable with words used to denote activities for common folk. So it does not come about by function but by declaring things so arbitrarily.

He associates nobility with a can-do attitude. They use their sense of right or wrong not to avoid things entirely, but to make themselves more effective (a functional version of morality). They treat opponents not as evil counterparts but more like an opponent in a board game. He makes a comparison to predators hunting prey. They do not hate the things they hunt. It is actually quite the opposite. They love the way they taste.

The morality used by common folk is used to denote who is doing harm. One who is violent is seen as evil. The action is then made into an object that is resented as an idea of the action. But this resentment is seen as impotent. Morality is used to identify evil and dislike it, but that does not make it go away. Morality causes inaction because instead of acting on one's impulses, it requires one to be less active. Or actively being inactive.

Personally Nietzsche is displeased by the consequence a moral carries. It quiets the human spirit and domesticates it. He is not attached to morality by idealism or function. He sees little in it but a way that 'weaker' people try to hold the stronger back. He views morality as a regression. It causes people to fall into nihilism because they are bored with man. Since a moral man is neutered, they get the same respect as a house cat.

The punchline of his polemic and second point against morality is that morality does not remove the desire for revenge or pleasure. It doesn't even eradicate that these acts will happen. Since the weak are to feeble to take matters into their own hands, they design the concept of a spirit that will eventually take care of their problems. While it would be immoral for a person to take revenge or seek pleasure, there is no problem with having a god to take care of the dirty work. So these moral beings are not doing something that is functional and neither are they avoiding unjust behavior in the long run; they are just not willing/able enough to take care of their own problems or deal with them in a way that can still be pleasurable and free of resentment.

So the overall feeling is that Good/Evil is used to support passiveness and to kick problems down the road with the feeling that this behavior will be rewarded. The good/bad mindset is used to promote action and not to assign guilt or fault to individuals. And it seems that the people who assume the good/bad view point will easily manipulate those with the Good/Evil viewpoint chiefly because the Good/Evil people prize inaction and retaliate with internal ideas they keep to themselves.

This is a park by my house. There are lots of soccer fields, but you can't use them unless you have a scheduled game. The soccer area is about the size of a neighborhood. Most of the time these fields are completely empty and if you try to practice on them a guy from the city shows up in a truck and tells you to leave. Although the birds make good use of the fields.


Gah. This building is ugly. Not to be negative or anything but it's just a fact. I wish they would cover it with some trees. It's surrounded by a large field and you can see it from very far away.


This is my middle school. this building has a common ornament used in many buildings now a days which is the oddly placed windows. I don't know how that will be treated in the future. I think it might bother people like they are like god the window thing! I get it! Oh god!



This is an interesting crop of my house. All the foliage gives this false sense of place. I didn't even recognize this as my house when I saw the photo.

This seems like an intentional solution to a potentially unaesthetic problem. The AC unit seems to be both machine and decoration. The wall with the foliage on it seems to cut off parts of the unit to make something interesting happen. I doubt the AC unit was designed just for that spot so really the considerations to start dealing with the shape of the AC machine as a given and work from there. Things like the wall can be considered in many ways but the AC unit cannot. I image designing for this is a lot like playing the Sims. Where you can build quite a different amount of stuff but you are still kind of stuck with lego like pieces.

I'm not sure what to think about buildings like these. It's cheeky on purpose ( most obviously with the odd window placement). But does the structure work well with its environment? It seems like the building was designed to be placed in many places like a fast food building. I wouldn't be surprised if there was another one of these standing someplace else in the country.



This is the same building from a previous picture but this time it is obscured by a gas station and some trees. What stands out in particular is the very bright illuminated gas station to the hazy naturally lit office building. It is kind of like watching a television program where one character is in high definition and another character is black and white and all grainy.

My mail box is very building like. It uses the same bricks that make the house. I always thought they looked rather silly, but everyone has them in this area. It seems like a lot of material to make a mailbox out of. They also are a pain to fix if a car hits it.

The arch at the top is curious though. Almost like a decoration for the sake of decoration. The bricks around the mail box seem to celebrate the mail boxes curvature. Now that I think of it, the form of the mailbox is somewhat similar to the brick structure only that the brick structure is elongated on the sides. I wonder if that was intentional or coincidental.

It also seems kind of weird to have this huge solid mass and only have a tiny box in it.

This building is in downtown Dallas. I often am interested when electrical wires start to play with buildings. It usually seems so intrusive to the building, kind of like a bug on a television set. I don't know if architects actually plan if the building will have power lines around them. This building in particular seems to be crowded by the wires and also possibly the road and some of the buildings around it.


I like this photo because these buildings seem kind of sneaky. They are peaking at me and I am peaking at them. The shape of the buildings are also truncated causing them to be something completely different than the building is look at from a whole.

Outside when it's night time outside my home

My neighborhood is a typical suburban development. I would like to imagine that this way of building is just a fashion on it's way out of style, but it's where I've lived for a while and there it is. I figure there's merit in giving it a really close look-at. There is a lot to be said but probably it's best to start with baby steps.



This here is my house. To me it is barely a visual thing. It is like a thing you stare at yet you don't recall anything in particular. At night I think this is more so since much of the building is turned into a silhouette. It barely exists at night.



Russell creek signs are at every street entrance. They take on this plain look. Very blocky. The streetlight lights it into a strange green color. There is something about it that reminds me of a funeral.



Some of the homes make me feel ticklish. They are deceptively funky. It all seems to be in the decorations with the sidding, gutters, windows, etc. It can be startling when I try to approach the neighborhood as obnoxious urban sprawl. The building shows itself in this ways as if it jumps out of a box to say "tadaaaaa!"

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Plato's Phaedo

Let us first take for instance the notion that the body is a prison for the soul. That is explicitly a Pythagorean ideal. Also in this dialogue the play on contraries is also a Pythagorean geared argument. The focus on Pythagorean ideals is also important considering the narrator, Phaedo, is also a Pythagorean. Without understanding this, the bias of the narration would be missed entirely.

The dialogue is not so much Socrates telling Simmias and Cebes what actually happens to the human soul, but is more of an attempt to calm them and to make his last moments alive pleasant. The Pythagorean approach which is heavily based on mathematics (body + soul = life) will not prepare someone to handle their own death. Socrates is explicit about this in his allusion to the second sailing. Even if one views death as the separation of the soul from the body, it will do little good to explain what actually happens. Actual life is not like an equation where once a body and soul are split, they can simply be brought back to life by the addition of them again.

The arguement isn't that Socrates is defending the immortality of the soul. The argument is that Socrates is trying to console Simmias and Cebes who would be devastated to think that the soul dissolves at death. The dialectical argument is geared towards Simmias and Cebes who have a way of understanding the world that will not explain death. Socrates is not teaching Simmias and Cebes about the immortality of the soul. Instead, Socrates is teaching Simmias and Cebes how to die, which they ultimately will have to do.

Platonic 'Forms'

In the Platonic dialogs, Socrates uses forms to demonstrate that people use 'forms' to justify arguments (such as Justice, Good, Noble). Socrates demonstrates that these 'forms' weren't gathered from the senses. You cannot see Justice, but only reason about it. The separation of the senses from the 'forms' is what gives the 'forms' special consideration from knowledge obtained by the senses. This means that 'forms' can be more susceptible to human longing.

In many ways 'forms' are anti-philosophical. They are the projections of the soul (better understood as pure thought) being a slave to the body. People will want something and invent something like love to explain and justify why they are doing this. The dialogs do not say forms exists but only that they exist out of human thoughtfulness that is distorted by the body. We do not see reality directly but only through special lenses. Forms are an invention of the human imagination to make life relevant to how are able to interact with the world.

Furthermore, It is well understood that Socrates makes bad arguments on purpose. The Socratic method is all about putting forth an argument and refining it and not about making an airtight thesis. All the arguments that Socrates' companions bring up require an assumption that forms exist. If you read closely, you will find that Socrates is quite critical of forms. While Socrates is arguing with his friends. He defines the argument as other people present it or how things are commonly thought about. Near the end of the dialogs Socrates then, after his friends still do not understand they are being foolish, offers a parable of some sort showing how reason is limited to certain things that pertain to how humans think. His friends still do not understand but we as readers can more easily recognize their foolishness.

Simply put, the tradition of philosophy that was started by Plato is a pursuit of knowledge with the understanding that reason is part of being a human and is not actual reality. This differs drastically from what maybe seen as the scientific pursuit of knowledge which tries to separate the human component of knowledge meaning that what science discovers is not part of human reasoning but an actual law of nature outside and independent of human thought.

Bush v. Gore & Citizens United

These two cases by the supreme court have striking similarities. First they are both targeted at elections. Bush v. Gore essentially secured George W. Bush's first term presidency. Citizens United is also made during a critical election time that will heavily favor Republican congressmen by lining their pockets with more corporate funding. Most importantly, both cases are a 5-4 split between the conservative and liberal members of the court. In both cases the justices in the minority do not simply write a decent but write a scathing decent accusing the majority for making illogical arguments and ignoring decades of court precedents while focusing on novel niches in others.

It is also curious that both of these cases completely contradict the conservative's court stance on federal and states rights. Bush v. Gore stepped into a debate with the Florida state government asserting that the state law was unconstitutional in allowing Gore to recount votes in the 2000 election. The decision is so novel that it is unlikely to be used as precedent for any type of law and it is largely seen as a political play by the court to declare a conservative as president to replace the conservative justices about to retire. Citizens United uses the bill of rights to declare corporate personhood allowing corporations to spend much more on political campaigns. It largely ignores the actual content of the case to make a (some say insane) stretch declaring corporations equal to real people. They make this argument using a tactic using a precedent that they have been largely using to over rule other cases. The same goes for Bush v. Gore. It largely relied on precedents made by the liberal Warren court to justify their ruling. The minority view in both cases took an opposing stance on bases they would normally support. This obviously smells like a partisan fight and not a fight for justice.

Citizens United will no doubt have an immediate positive effect on the Republican party who have in the past decades been in favor of deregulating big business. The Supreme Court have shown their political bias clearly in Bush v. Gore. Yet the politicking done by the court is not in the interest of the American people. It is done to promote a conservative agenda and to fortify the conservative majority within the court.

The Citizens United case has polled disfavorably with most Americans, yet the actions of the court are largely invisible. People chide the Democrats for not being effective. They sight their slight majority in congress and a Democratic president without noting the third branch of the federal government. Currently it is staffed with ideological remnants of the Reagan and Bushes. In congress we have political gridlock over healthcare, but in the Supreme Court, longstanding civil rights cases are being tossed in the dumpster with out much attention.

The Court has always been making political decisions. Whether it be seen in hindsight as favorably (plessy v. ferguson) or inhumanely cruel (dred scott v. sanford). Yet this court is purposely nosing deeper and deeper into elections of the two other federal branches which is unique in history. This undermines separation of powers and creates an atmosphere where each branch is nestling inside each other rather than being critical. It might even get sloppy if Republicans take the majority of congress. Two branches will then be right leaning while only the executive branch will have a liberal majority and probably the most limited in influencing legislation or interpreting it. America is still under the shadow of Reagan era ideologies that have recently proven suicidal. The purging of these toxic politics will take a lot longer than I think most people hope for.

Starting A Story

Hi, I'm Ralph. My favorite thing to do is to run on the ocean. Yes, it's a little strange. Okay. There was this weird thing that happened to the oceans that wasn't that long ago really. Ah, okay not a lot people really do it any ways. It's much easier to ride a boat or something.

I was on the beach when I saw this guy run right onto the beach from the water. He looked tired and sat down for a rest and to get some water. I went up to him because obviously I was curious. I said, “Hey, guy. What just happened?” He was all worn out, and gestured to give him some more time to catch his breath.

I was so excited – really really excited. I was looking at him carefully trying to see if he was some weird fish or something. No he wasn't, but he had some weird clothes on for sure! There was a large backpack pack – a camping one, ocean camping?

He got back some breath. Apparently he was from another country because he had a real think accent. I don't know where he was from, god. “Gweyll Yai vun vun on vater fromz how you says Earope.”

I was confused and all. So I got the idea and asked him, “So, Huh? You ran from Europe?”

The guy said some more stuff like, “Tsdats eyet. Yai iz much much tired. Yai fall sleeps now.”

Ovbiously I said, “Geeze. Wait. That's not enough.”

He mentioned this was the last think he could say, “Yoo run run vast and stay vup. Yoo stoop and shink. Vater is dafferint lately. Try. Try. Snore. Snore.”

Okay so he was right – he was all right. I gave a good run and, man, I was jogging on water! The water felt like it was ground, but when I stopped it got back to normal and I sank. I had the swim all the way back. I was soaked in my clothes and that dude was asleep on the beach.

---

That's how I got the idea any ways. I wanted to cross the ocean just like that guy did. I wondered if he ran non-stop or if there were places to stop on the way. It seemed like it would take forever to run that far. How could he run non-stop from here (here is Texas) from Europe?

I didn't see that guy again, so I couldn't ask him any more questions. I asked people around me about and everyone seemed not to care. I did notice the television was talking about how the ocean was getting weird. It was like it wasn't very important though. They didn't mention running on it.

I decided to practice every day. After school I would get a snack and then ride my bike to the beach. I found some cool goggles at the store that I wore.

I wasn't used to running all that much. It took a long time of me just running around to get used to it. I was wondering how the heck that guy made it all the way from Europe. I could barely get any where.

But I improved a bit. I got a life jacket when I started going out far. I would sometimes loose track of how far off I'd run off – I'd get so pooped that I just sank into the water and rested a little bit. It was hard to get back running if I had fallen in.

I perfected a technique using a boogey board. I could stand on it in
the water and hop out real quick and start running again. I had the boogey board tied to me so I could snag it as I started to run again. But I realized why that guy I first saw running had that backpack. I'm sure I need lots of stuff to do ticky tasks. Imagine all the crazy things I would have to deal with crossing the Atlantic. Storms and Sharks, bur, crazy.
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Anti-Wikipedia... for now....

I have noticed the major flaw with wikipedia is not how factually correct it is. I have not run into many articles that are well written at all. I am not saying that there are spelling errors and such. What I am referring to is its patchy nature and its almost inherent inarticulateness. It's obvious that pages consist of several authors who probably never met. Pages often take jarring turns in content and often its segments are illogically ordered.

Even if the information is factually correct, the way the article is written can be so bad that it obscures the facts it contains. The more I read wikipedia articles the more I become dissatisfied with them. Now I am skeptical that I can even use it to discern simple facts. I am currently making a concerted effort to ignore it if I can. I think the more I use it, the more I emulate its ad hoc style and suffer at articulating ideas. At times it is more important to be coherent than factually correct. Even if you know information, it does not materialize into something useful unless you know how to explain your knowledge to someone else in a clear and lucid manner.