M is for Miscellany

Disparate notes for today...

First, this blog has hit (and since surpassed) 10,000 visits. I waited until there were at least a few hundred over the mark as I'm sure a lot are due to me being paranoid about spelling/grammar/formatting mistakes. Hoorah for me and, once again, a big vote of thanks to all of you who have passed through - particularly those who leave comments.

Secondly, photographs. Yeah...not many of them lately, huh? The answer is simple: no time, but certainly not for lack of interest and passion. Mind you, this autumn (Toronto at least) has been cold, grey, and wet - generally miserable for a season and a region known for some of the most beautiful autumn vistas in the world. In other words, even if I had the time, my output would've been slim (and if not, reflecting the dreary outdoors we've experienced since October began). I promise to publish some in the near future, even if they are not "fresh" (which is usually my preference). Thankfully, the forecast for today called for a high of 16 Celsius; I'm hoping we'll have at least a month remaining of the autumn I've come to know, before the snow hits.

Thirdly, still reading Wittgenstein (book review forthcoming). I must say, there are great swaths of it that are about as easy to peruse as electrical schematics. Punishingly arithmetical. Yet, like the sun glimmering through clouds, here and there I happen upon oases of potent contemplation:

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

Suck on that for a toothache, eh? Still, after this book I'm going to need an antidote - at this rate Anne of Green Gables will do.

UPDATE (02/11/06): It's bloody 6 degrees outside...with a wind from the lake no less. Please disregard what I wrote about "hoping to have a balmy autumn". Christ.

Agnostic Affront

Back when I had free time (ha ha...sigh) I came across a neat little site/feature called StumbleUpon. Essentially, it allows users to add websites they like to the StumbleUpon aggregated index, which is sorted by topics. You can then "stumble" through the sites of any selected subject(s) of interest using a browser extension button that sits on your toolbar. Each time you press it, you move on to the next random website which matches the content that interests you. As a StumbleUpon user, you can rate websites on your own and add them to the aggregated content available to other users.

It's a nice idea, however I was troubled by how the topics were gathered. Some of this, I admit, was for aesthetic or personal reasons - for example, I rather object to the separate topics "Liberal Politics" and "Conservative Politics" (under "Society"); I mean, really - are beliefs that easy to categorize? I know people who, for instance, claim to be left-of-centre but support NAFTA (if only because they work for companies that profit from the arrangement). My point being that political thought - like everything substantial - is inherently complex; if we choose to have supplied to us only the information we want to see (as opposed to a variety of differing viewpoints), our minds will turn to soggy cereal. Politics isn't like music appreciation where one could be excused for only collecting mid-80's Art Rock - our individual tastes in music won't collectively affect society; however, when political information becomes individualised to the point of being cocooning, the result, I fear, is a mind which is incapable of seeing the larger picture, even if the whole picture may never be clear to us.

Anyhow... amongst other topics I selected, I chose the following, under Religion: Atheist/Agnostic.

First off, I thought it a bit odd that they would group these together, if only because there were no listed Religions that had been treated as such. Wicca was separated from Paganism for Christ's sake. Anyhow, I squinted and pushed forward. What came about as I browsed disturbed me to no end...

But first, a fact: I'm agnostic ¹.

...anyhow, what came about as I browsed disturbed me to no end: atheists were assholes. I do not mean Atheists (or atheists) in general, but - for the most part - the ones with websites proclaiming their atheism were overbearing assholes. Which I find hilarious.

The "proud atheist" sites (and I couldn't come across any that didn't fall into this category ²) almost uniformly included the following:

1. Terribly disrespectful things to say about organized religion.
   
2. Quotes from Einstein.
   

My first response was: leave Einstein out of this ³. My second response was: if these atheists were so enlightened, having supposedly thrown off the shackles of organized religion, why were they so evidently obsessed with religion as to put their refutations front and centre on a freaking website? It seemed so bizarre and irrational to see this in people who, supposedly more than any other person, espoused the rational above all else. Judging from this consistency, I can only conclude that the louder the atheist the more insecure they seemed to me. Further, as opposed to us agnostic types, atheists as a whole seemed unable to live comfortably without religion - as either a catalyst or muse.

This tangent takes me back to what I originally wanted to say: agnosticism is not atheism. Not by any stretch of the imagination. So why the hell would StumbleUpon group them together...yet find it necessary to separate Wicca from Paganism ⁴? I have no clue, and I've written to them to ask that they separate the two - or at the very least remove them as a subset of Religion.

Please fulfill my sense of irony by rating this article on StumbleUpon.

1. I'm not going to spend hours trying to define what agnosticism is or what it means to me. Let's just say that I consider it the most sensible choice for me. If you would like a dictionary definition, try here.

2. This pertains solely to what StumbleUpon provided - this was not a self-directed attempt.

3. Why does everyone with a point to prove turn to Einstein?

4. Instead of making the former a subset of the latter.

Wheel of Fire

We live in a society which thinks fortune is synonymous with providence.

Fortune is just fate, marketed well. Fate is a spinning wheel, capriciously objective and favouring no one.

Look at those lottery winners who find themselves bankrupt because they pissed away their winnings on stupid things: flying their friends to Vegas, buying cars for family members. If that's fortune, then I'm happy it doesn't visit me often.

As for providence - providence is for those who treat fate with respect, like fire.

Thoughts on Truth & Medium

I've been reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Intimidating little book. Seems to be written in its own language: cold fucking logic. Still, there are some fascinating ideas relating to how we choose to define the world around us. It's easy to see how revolutionary this book may have been for some people, as concepts of truth and falsity take a back-seat to the greater question of a proper logical confine for the philosophy itself - in doing so, Wittgenstein is saying that the structure of a philosophy is greater than the veracity of its content.

Gleaning from this, I couldn't help but be reminded of Marshall McLuhan's ¹ observation, "the medium is the message" (which was also the name of the resulting book he published ²), which seems resonant of Wittgenstein's approach (if not somewhat parallel).

From Tractatus:

3.332 No proposition can say anything about itself, because the propositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the "whole theory of types").

3.333 A function cannot be its own argument, because the functional sign already contains the prototype of its own argument and it cannot contain itself.

It would be rather trite to pit Wittgenstein against McLuhan based upon a couple of sentences (foundational though they may be). However, from this discourse I'm curious to take a closer look at what McLuhan was trying to say - I suppose I carry a vain hope of tripping over a Unified Theory.

You know you're part-geek when things like this really interest you. However, I swear, I'm also part-superhero ³.

1. I always get this guy's name mixed up with the guy who created the Sex Pistols (Malcolm McLaren)...if only they were the same person.

2. Although, technically speaking, due to a copy-edit error, the book was first published as The Medium is the Massage. I shit you not.

3. ...as opposed to the Nietzschean concept of the Superman (*chortle*)