More sausage, and Eris on the brain.

[kiya]

For you political buffs out there -- worldaffairs, a political RPG of sorts. (From porcinea.)

Somewhat thought-provoking article about hate and moral behaviour and . . . stuff. Title: Moral people must learn to hate. (From theaceofspades.)

oldsma has provided a public informational page with paypal link here; it contains a little more information about her situation than my post from a few days ago (a frequently given answers section).

Very Discordian Today notes:

jikharra had a lava lamp; he decided he did not want this lava lamp anymore. It is orange. It was seated upon the table at games. I informed keshwyn that she had a lava lamp on her table. She explained the above. Somehow, this conversation managed to turn into me becoming the new mama of an orange lava lamp, which is currently up in the green room next to my blue one. (This was in between discussing blurry lesbian photography, polio, and Massachusetts politics.)

Clearly I need to build a Discordian altar with those as the altar candles. (Perhaps from pieces of the altar that I built in the crawl space of my father's house when I was a teenager, which my father found recently and is moderately perplexed by. If I'm remembering it right, it has a particularly, ah, colourful cloth.)

I have also, with the thought of the altar, developed an ambition to acquire two more lava lamps (probably purple and yellow) and thus be able to have a full ritual circle setup with lava lamps to mark the corners/elements. teinedreugan is tolerantly amused. I pointed out to him that as ambitions go, it's fairly harmless. (I did not point out that my angling back towards religious witchcraft as a component of the contents of my brain has picked up several layers of wack, because that goes without saying.)

keshwyn has pointed out that we have to have a Yule celebration this year, so that we can wish for pie. (montrealais, this is all your fault. ;) )

Also, on the way home from games, I developed a profound urge to come up with a ritual veneration of Ra that included "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas" somehow.


I nearly have a poem or something that came out of kneading bread; we will see if punching it down makes a difference to its progress into completion, or whether I have to pound on it at length. But good bread. Yay feast with bread. (Cooking with honey is really remarkably sticky, you know.)

Comments

[ibnfirnas.livejournal.com]

Rabbi Boteach is a fool, I think. I think he doesn't understand love; love doesn't mean sitting back and taking it, you know? Love has nothing to do with tolerating evil. If you truly love a killer and truly love the killed, you will see justice for the victim by acting against the killer, and you will see justice for the killer by making sure that your acts are fair. You'll teach.
Hatred is useful in the short term for fighting, but he makes a bad distinction between liberal hate of war and liberal hate of evil, which he calls insufficient. War -is- an evil; it's subsumed under the hate of evil, that is to say; it's a matter of evils that are sometimes necessary in order to prevent greater evils. And if we loved enough, if we all loved enough, it wouldn't be an issue.
He talks about the terrible silence of the just, but this isn't insufficient hatred of evil; it's insufficient love of the good. And fighting with love will never go too far, as fighting with hate will always.
He makes, in short, the same mistake that many good people make: assuming that love is weak and passive. He wants the immediate power of hatred to fight back the dark, an easy and very human impulse; the power of love is slow sometimes, and subtle. Love is the only thing that will fix things, as you know I've said before; but it must be a fierce love to go far.
I love every despot and tyrant. I also love their victims. There is action implied in that, not quiet cheek-turning.

[mindways]

Somewhat thought-provoking article about hate and moral behaviour and . . . stuff.

It is thought-provoking. I also think it's...unfortunate. Not that he's barking completely up the wrong tree - many people are apathetic about the world's woes (at least partly as a defense mechanism, I think, but that's another discussion) and one of the byproducts of trying to understand both sides of a conflict can sometimes be a certain reluctance to intervene. (Mind you, "moral relativism leading to complete inaction" is to my mind just as much of a nonrepresentative, dysfunctional failure case as "utterly ignoring the rest of the world's existence", but that's also another discussion.)

But while he identifies a real issue, his proposed solution is...dangerous. Hatred has a way of getting out of control...especially when there's disagreement over what should be hated. Personally, I believe many of Israel's actions against the Palestinians are just as bad as the Palestinian suicide bombings (ie: they're both terrible and reprehensible). If I hated both of them, it might bleed over into hatred of the associated people, and I might write them both off and stop caring about them - or if someone disagreed with my viewpoint, claiming that only the one side or the other was hateworthy, I might come to hate them, too. Hatred splatters. It's hard to keep narrow.

Far better to advocate conviction - the sort of conviction that leads to action, not idle stubbornness of viewpoint, which fails both due to inaction and due to lack of understanding. Conviction can be disciplined, can be narrow. The lack of a conviction to act is the problem he identifies, and I think it's better addressed directly, if that's possible.

(This then raises the pragmatic question of whether, practically speaking, it is possible - or whether the only viable option for increasing popular involvement is to fan the flames of hatred. Yet another discussion.)

[rainfallsautumn.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I partly agree with him-- actually, I mostly agree with him. Incidentally, it reads like a very *Satanist* argument to my ears, but that could just be me. Although I disagree with the distinction he makes between hatred and rage, that hatred=can be good, and rage=always bad. Uh, no. A healthy person needs their rage too, IMO.

Then I came across this:
Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind.

Yes, but *everyone* is kind to the kind. Few are willing-- or indeed *able*-- to be kind to the cruel. I consider that, in ways, to be my life's work. For if none can do this, the "other side", no matter *whom* they are, is forever reduced to one dimension, a purely hated Other that is never understood.

Did I just contradict myself? Eh.

Lava Lamp

[the-real-diana.livejournal.com]

ORANGE!!!