Pynchon's defenses of socialism, of terrorism

Capitalist:
"...Merely to need a sum
is not to deserve it."

Socialist:
"...In these times,
'need' arises directly from
criminal acts of the rich,
so it 'deserves'
whatever amount of money
will atone for it."

(Against the Day page 32)

"If you are not devoting every breath
of every day
waking and sleeping
to destroying those
who slaughter the innocent
easy as signing a check,
then how innocent
are you willing to call yourself?"

(Against the Day page 87)

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Testosterone on the Tree of Life

the esteem motive parallels
at least in part
one's testosterone level

so if we map testosterone
green high
yellow normal
red depressed

(and similarly for other hormones)

the red phases
should be accompanied
by effort to restore esteem

and mindwrestling
often involves cunning blows
to the testosterone gland

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01-08 December 2006 links

Iraq is massproducing superterrorists (iSteve w/link)
Urban planners don't understand latino culture (iSteve-shortish)
Nice example of daily-comix crit (cCrmdgn)
How did they get the people to stand still long enough to paint their faces and stuff? (oDoffice)
'Clitorides.' (Seriously.) (oDinny)
Nifty visualisation of USA's gWarming emissions (map via eAard)
More salmonella than ever in factory chicken (cRprts via iGreed)
Eric Foner disses W (WaPo-junky via vBoat)
Mixed critique of NPR (Sam-shortish)
CNN alone posts Ahmadinejad's critique of Zionism (etext via Sam)
Area Man Accidentally Responds To Own 'M4M' Ad (Onion-short)
Pretty US zip code maps (maps via Infosthetics)
Examples of badly designed products (thread-no-pix via Fim)
'pill dough' = crushed cold pills for meth labs (dTongue)
Pharmco development 'a total crapshoot' (iGreed)
No, this is my life (oDinny)
Black Cheech&Chong (oDinny)
Upbeat subjective update on Wikipedia (tBray-short)
12 things you can buy from Amazon (eAard-vfriv)
CSS stylesheets are slowing the Web (heh via jm)
Tom McGuane story (NYer-unread)
Rummy's parting words on Iraq spin (iGreed-vshort w/link)
Annotations to new Pynchon (wiki)
Hobo vs little boy (oDinny)
Seven-year-old boy to his three-month-old sister (oDinny)
Backgrounder on Russian polonium poisoning (Xym)
Psychology in 'The Sims' (2003 PsychToday)
Elegant Haskell hack (Gm-short-arcane)

Maslow on the Tree of Life

the goal
of the Tree of Life
visualisation/paradigm

is to discover
by arduous bumbling
new geometric metaphors
for literary/psychological nuances

and this one's a beaut




like any list of motives
Maslow's
is necessarily both
heterogeneous
and incomplete

so it's a useful exercise
to ask, for each proposed motive
on the Tree of Life
which branches
at which moments
are dominated by that motive

and explore coloring schemes
to capture this

(right this moment
what motives
color those immediately around you?)

eg hunger
universally dominates cyclically
with famine at one
frequency extreme
and an IV drip
at the other

or comfort
making continual small demands

or sex
usually triggered by proximity
of an interfertile couple

or safety
never recapturing the primal womb
but well-cushioned by wealth

or esteem
vaguely discontent
with anonymous alienation

or stimulation
antsy from too much regularity




and when the patterns of dominance
for each of these
and 100 more
have been visualised and compared

(eg how are
conflicting motives
resolved?)

a truly universal model
of motivation
becomes more plausible

.

Orthodoxy and heresy as modalities on the Tree of Life

for a given school of ethics
on the yahoo zodiac
color white
all orthodox views

color black
any wholesale rejection
of the chosen school

(notice whether black or white
has the innermost orbit
ie the greater popularity)

and classify
all specific heresies
into six groups
red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet
with as many subdivisions/shades
as you like

now
considering the whole Tree of Life
use this color scheme
to identify lifelong heretics
heretics just going thru a phase
gradually confirmed heretics
heretical teachers
heretical schools
heretical populations
heretical species
(eg bonobos
always the violet sexual heretics)

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