It's a fool's paradise

You know there's something wrong when you're happy that you're crying.

the falsity that is philosophy

The subject of this update is, sadly, a rant. The more I dive into philosophy, the more I realise who utterly obscure and almost pointless it is. You read a little about Heidegger and Dasein; plunge into a little of Hegelian dialectics (and then realise that Marx has somehow 'inverted' that into materialist dialectics); be told about Bergson's durée and temps. All of this is frivolous, and only scraping the surface of things. It's almost as if the only thing they have ever actually done is read each other's works and then expanded or negated those theories. Original thought and philosophy other than critique or response does not exist. You cannot be a philosopher without referencing Hume somewhere in your studies.

The closed system that is philosophy seems even smaller if you escape from the west and try to look at it from a global perspective. Any opposition to the 'West' is the 'East': typified in Buddhism (pronounced, with a slur, 'Boodhism'); differentiation of different forms of Buddhism or any understanding of the origins of that Buddhist thought are completely ignored because, of course, everything in the East is homogeneous. Any thoughts on discussing Khoisan concepts of existence are negligible because they're neither East nor West.

How can philosophy ever actually say it represents any sense of 'wisdom' or shared ideas when it continues to exist in a little sphere of its own? Until there is some unified ideas of thought (not just left to anthropologists or sociologists) the ontology, epistemology, and so on, of anything (and nothing) cannot even begin to be tackled, let alone presumably 'comprehended'.

The Olympics are Political

What is it about worshipping Money that has lead us to this position? Since when have we been those who stand by and let crimes occur in fear of losing financial gain? In France, Ségolène Royal told the press that there was still time to reconsider a boycott, yet in Britain, the government was happier pleasing their pockets by making sure that innocent peaceful protesters were forced to remove t-shirts which said 'No torch in Tibet, China Stop the Killing and Talk to the Dalai Lama'. Peaceful protesters were forced behind metal barriers: pushed and shoved by police for no apparent reason. Brown has praised the police, stating that "This a democratic country, people in this country are free to express their opinions within the law". Is asking for China to agree to conform to international human rights now somehow against the law?

These protests should not be seen as violent actions to crush the Olympic spirit but the opposite. The Olympics were (re)founded on principles of global unity, sporting ethics and human rights. The fact that the International Olympic Committee has allowed for the Olympics in China to continue after the repressive actions taken by the Chinese government which have continued to defy the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a sign of the fallacy that is the Olympics and supposed ethical sport.

I fail to understand why Chinese individuals living in England and watching/reading about the atrocities in Tibet refuse to recognised the importance of Tibetan human rights (not even Tibetan independence). I understand the importance of celebrating nationalism, and I do not deny the Chinese the pride they felt as the torch filtered through the streets of London. What I condemn however, is that when Tibetans protested by China's betrayal of human rights, the Chinese flag wavers made it very clear that 'frankly Tibet, we don't give a damn'.

In a post-imperial world, how can we stand there and let minority groups continue to be oppressed in inhumane ways?

The Mouse Ran Up the Clock

A wander into previous blog entries has lead to a reconsideration of blog utility on my part. I wonder if I should use this in an almost diary-like format, and connecting and pulling together random ideas and thoughts into a believable manner. Believable perhaps because I'm only applying my pointless subjective ideology onto the page in an illegible format; you might believe you know what I'm talking about, but I'll bet you don't.

London is hailing today. Yesterday was almost summer, today is almost winter. So it goes.

Time

More thoughts about time, as everyone seems to have some understanding of time but no-one seems quite able to define it. I keep thinking of ideas and concepts, my favourite being that time is made of little monsters (time-beings) which are infinitely small. You look closely at one being, and you realise it's actually two, infinitely. The time-beings get larger in accordance to the relative amount of time passed. They are also the cause of the phrase 'for the time being'.

Instantaneous/Continuous
Have also been comparing Zeno of Elea to Heraclitus. (Zeno's paradoxes seem to suggest the problem of the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics.) What I find interesting is the idea he suggests about the arrow. In essence, Zeno's Arrow paradox is simple, and in terms of time the idea is that motion is mere illusionary, and in actually nothing really changes or moves; we only see time passing. Heraclitus argues the opposite (Panta rhei): that stationary time is merely illusionary as things are constantly in a state of flux between two binary opposites.

What I am beginning to notice is that time is interlinked entirely with change. The only physical apparition of time that we have is through change. We have clocks and other methods of time measurement, but our subjective understanding of time (such as efficiency) seems to be seen through time:
Time is measured through the movement of a clock, through the movement of daylight, through our own actions.

To transcend time is to know all.