Thursday, October 13, 2011

Occupy Wall Street

As LDL pointed out in an earlier post, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston are becoming important enough to mention in class. I am anticipating an in class discussion on this, and if there isn't, I will make one happen on Wednesday. I will ascertain this by occupying Boston over Fall Break, and then coming back with an eyewitness report on the proceedings.
Here is a repost from BoingBoing:
Most revolts are snuffed out well before their efforts impact the political scene – not because their ideas and issues aren’t relevant, but because the major institutional players within the system-that-is rapidly attempt to snag the power and energy for their own. In the eyes of the Democratic Party or the national environmental groups, this revolt is merely seen as an opportunity to assimilate newly emerging troops back into those groups’ own flaccid and ineffective organizing. After all, if those institutional groups have actually been effective all of these years, why the need for a revolt at all?
BoingBoing is a fantastic blog, and is my chief source of news as of right now. The reason why I sometimes giggled in class during Ragtime, whenever someone mentioned the author as being "Doctorow", was that the main contributor on BoingBoing is Cory Doctorow. If you want news on Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston, don't go to CNN. Don't go to NPR. Go to BoingBoing. They'll sort out the stuff from CNN and NPR for you and provide psycho-socio-economic analysis....as well as posting about the random stuff they find elsewhere. I have to warn you, though, that this is not for those who are easily offended by geeks and nerds.

Monday, October 10, 2011

On Camp - Part 4 - Refuge in Audacity (also Trope of the Week)

I have a story to tell.

On Camp - Introduction

Camp, I believe, is taking refuge in audacity. As I like to put it, there are nine states of mind a person can have, and camp is one of them. The mindsets are exactly like character alignments in tabletop RPGs. There are the morals: good, neutral, and evil. Then there are the ethics: lawful, neutral, and chaotic. Lawful good is a paladin, while chaotic evil are the old kind of villains we so rarely see these days.
Personality-wise, I propose the following sets. Sanity, neutrality, madness. Aware, doubting, unaware. Most people are doubting sanity. Camp people such as Lady Gaga, Oscar Wilde, and myself are Full Aware Madness. We are insane, we are aware of it, and we do not try to hide it. That is what gives rise to camp.
Alternatively, there are mindsets. The most stable mindset is being insane and knowing it, because you'll completely lose it if you are doubting your own sanity.

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Location:The Cage