On a Personal Note!

It has been a very long time since I visited my blog, nonetheless wrote in it. However, nothing like a kick in the butt from the exam-time stress and a general feeling of panic to get things going again. Listening to mellow electronica and focusing my eyes on a poorly lit laptop screen for days upon days is not my idea of fun, but there is no escape this time around. Things needs to be written, and I am the one who needs to write them.

So in the great words of our melodramatic friend Werther, from the book where he suitably is the main man, all I have to say is:

“Ach!”

A Philosophical Tribute: My Man Arthur

There have been many philosophers that I have become engulfed in over the course of time, but none of them has struck me with the same”POW” effect as this one. This man was not sane. This man was not rational. This man did not put forth the most bullet proof arguments nor was he a specially gifted writer. But I love him!

Why?

You will realise shortly.

The man I am talking about went by the name of Arthur Schopenhauer.

He dove into the dispute concerning the classical problem many atheists used to discredit believers in the existence of God, that problem being the famous “problem of Evil”. Basically, the problem of Evil denies the existence of God based on the argument that a loving, caring, and all-powerful deity would not have allowed there to be evil and suffering in the world, like for example when a child starves to death or the thousand plagues and misfortunes that haunts man. My man Schopenhauer took a bold head dive into this prominent philosophical question and came out with a (in) genius counter-statement. These were his words:

“If there is so much pain and suffering in the world then the pain and suffering must be the meaning!”

“Hu?” you might think! And you should think that. At least at this stage. Now for further clarification. Arthur recognized not only the presence of suffering in the world, but also acknowledged it to be of a greater force than the force of good. He stated that all life is suffering, because all suffering comes from desire of getting the things that you want, like the satisfaction against thirst and hunger and to finally get that damn administrator-executive job. Hence if we are always hunted by desire there can only be one type of pleasure. And this pleasure comes from the absence of pain.

However, this absence is only momentary and the desire remains constant, he argued. So what would be the final pleasure? His answer was simple. Death! Arthur Schopenhauer dared to thread where no man had gone before, and he bravely argued that Earth was a cruel prison for us mere mortals, a prison where we could repent our sins that we had committed in a previous life, which was so blasphemous to our Master, that he sentenced us to be in a world of pain and suffering until we died and deserved our way into the Great Heavens. Genius! This is where the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russel would have later pointed out the irony and utter lack of rational thought in “worshipping the mugger with infinite power”. However, my man Arthur didn’t care much for such heathen talk and continued to hold lovingly to his theory until he died in his beloved armchair in 1860.

So after reading this, you might question my adoration for the man! Well, the reason is very simple. His dogmatic views and extreme religious fanaticism is of a type that is not lacking in the world today. The closest we can get to his kind are Muslim suicide bombers and Christian crusaders, with their infinite obsession of death as the final salvation and their mission to rid the green and blue ball that we live on for blasphemy and so called “ungodliness”. However, Schopenhauer was never a man of action, and he would for sure not support murder and mayhem. Arthur was a philosopher! His arguments were his and his alone and he firmly stood his ground through, what I can only imagine to be, a barrage of other up-and-coming smart-ass philosophers who had no problem pointing out the errors in his ways. But he stood his ground! Someone might call it stupidity, arrogance, or blasphemous misinterpretation of the Bible. But what justified him in his conclusions, you’d might ask. The simple reason is, well…

He was a philosopher.

Introduction to Blogging, A Social Perspective

Well, well, here we are. Yet another drop in the large pool of blogs. My first blog. I admit, I have always been skeptical in my view towards blogs. This is a relativly new “invention”, and in the early years of this playpark of thoughts I’ve been thinking that blogs were mere personal, and largely unproffessional, rants(and I still partially hold that agree). However in the recent times it has proven its worth in the modern world.

I feel like I would regurgitate what many other, and much smarter, people said when I state that the position the media has become less and less of an informative one and more and more a controlled medium. This initially struck me during the beginning of the Iraqi War. Whereas the government of the United States had learned from the Vietnam War, where people had pictures of dying children and soldiers directing their guns at the heads of civilians and facing the citizens of the invading nations with the grim reality of that which is war, it was obvious that the homebase needed to provide a more alienated and unrelateable view on future conflicts. This started to become apparent during the Gulf war where most citizens of the Western World heard of the relatively low death toll of just a couple of hundreds of soldiers(more specifically 358). However, what they did not advert too much and what was mainly seen on the bottom of news paper pages, besides the articles on page 14 that no one really read, was the death toll of the opposing side of the conflict where an estimated and very unspecific death toll of 20.000 – 200.000 was seen. A mildly bloodless war, one might say.

There were many punches in the face of journalism that happened during the Iraqi War. Washington D.C. reporter Ron Suskind had a conversation with an unnamed Bush official at the beginning of the Iraqi War and this quote, while naturally any source that is “unnamed” should not be trusted too much, seems to coincide with the current trends of the popular press, in this case the American:

 “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality–judiciously, as you will–we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read the New York Times or Washington Post or the LA Times.”

Easy and shameless distortion of the news image. The physical paper newspaper and “White House Reports” that both CNN and FOX News rely on heavily, due to their affordable nature, are conveyours of news, or “news”, and people in the US, Canada, Europe, and everywhere, still has the tendency to trust blindly in the news. After all, news reporters are just supposed to deliever a product, the product being news, but how that product is managed and processed before it reaches its consumer, that is the pickle.

 Keep in mind, this is a critique of the American press, not all things American. Hell, I love Americans. They invented imported this gadget from a couple of Japanese guys, who only knew the English words “walk” and “man”, for all the Western world to enjoy. How can we not love them! It is obvious that people who feels anger towards a certain government has a tendency to target its people as well. I mean, look at the ridiciolous concept of the “Freedom Fries” as if the Americans were going to take something precious from the French population: their Fries, and metaphorically speaking, steal them. Okay, but enough about my disdain for the contemporary press and my little side-points. I have not as much argued my statement as much as explaining it. However, now my for my conclusive thoughts, my grande finale, my magnum opus within my magnum opus and the reason for the previous 800 words that you have probably skimmed before getting to this part:

The power of the blog is a new power in our super-duper-information-highway(even though I’ve always imagined the information highway as more of a information sea, but anyways). Its power is rising, and its power is even becoming apparent in the mainstream press. Only a short time ago I heard about the mainstream media creating an uproar of the alleged adultery by John Edwards, after a long period where bloggers had been talking out about it, without the restraint of prominent newspapers, most obviously the New York Times, who knew of the case but initally refused to write about it. Now while this is in my opinion a sensationalist matter, one politican cheating on his wife, it is an example that shows the effectiveness of the bloggers as a primary source for information. And the great thing is that people are aware that anyone can write a blog, hence they filter their information more carefully than they would with news channels.

While I might have hyped up the “power of the blog” as if it was a new social movement, all I can say is that even the transfer of a thought, the thoughts on a view, and the view on a thought are all things that I hope to gain while joining this open thought pool. Even a single view, I feel, would make me happy.

 

So I leave you with a quote, by James Dean, who can much better reflect my intentions with this blog than I can do myself.

“The gratification comes in the doing, not in the results”

  

Magnus M.