pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity

This is perhaps the best response I've yet seen to the general manipulated insanity of that whole Mohammed cartoon fatwa frenzy kerfuffle. "You call THAT anti-Semitic? Let us show you how it's done!" It's an idea whose platonic form is touched by Slack.

I've said it before, and I expect I'll be cheyne stoking it out on my deathbed five hundred years hence (or, you know, five years hence as poisonous radioactive Damnation Alley-style cockroaches nibble at me. All depends on which way the probabilities collapse, if you can dig it), that the world would be less of a right fucking mess if people weren't so godawful self-serious all the time.

On that topic, there's this. You know it's a perfectly accurate summation of whatever the actual research says, as Wired is one of those bastions of solid journalism whose quality has in no way plummeted over the past few years, and whose high point could in no way be fairly described as "a weird sort of magazine written with the tone of gearheads on crank." (It's one of the quotes I lost the source for, one of my memory's more longstanding flaws. I remember entertaining quotes but not who said them.) The main problem with egocentrism isn't egoism itself per se (don't make me stop the engine of the world! I will if you don't settle down! I'll pull the world right over and stop its engine and we'll just SIT here so you can think about what you've done!), but how it's generally formulated. People tend to narrate themselves (and thus see themselves) as a sort of inner homunculus in what some cognitive philosophists (like cognitive science, but without the troublesome bother of needing more than anecdotal data) have called "the cartesian theater."

Which is a problem. The way people should conceive of themselves is as a luminous pipe, through which the pattern of the self ever combusts and rises, prabob.
posted by Gar @ 8:26 PM