This will be a thread for ideas that aren't specifically methods of dissent.
Just good ideas, of any variety. I'll provide some launching-point material.
But feel free to ignore my OP and just post any good idea you wish.
First up, a RealGM thread sparked by a bad idea, mostly worthwhile as a study in persistence, mine in this case, as I withstood all sorts of kneejerk hostility and semi-trolling with few exceptions. What I persisted with, is the hope of discovering good ideas and eluding the bad, imagining other ways to live, a la Ike/Moos.
http://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtop ... #p35380198
Here's a taste:
"Ancient standard of living", hmmm. What could I have possibly meant? ("More ancient standard of living" would have been a better wording, my bad.) Perhaps I was alluding to the concept of degrowth, or some moderate kind of anarcho-primitivism, with as many exceptions to unwinding modern technology as democratically deemed fit and necessary, like (alert: series for you to extrapolate as you choose!) antibiotics and washing machines and MRIs and a cure for cancer. Perhaps I was thinking of the fact that, 1000-50000 years ago, humans were somehow able to live quite contently, provided they could elude a few certain travesties (like infant mortality, death-from-infection, being devoured by predators, being enslaved, etc.), that ancient royal plutocrats might have not only been content but wildly satisfied with their lives, despite having a material standard of living that we the modern consumer would find repellent.
Where's our toilet paper!? Why, here, here's your toilet paper. Add it to the list of things we proverbial Nathans from The Jerk would make exceptions for, as necessities, some of which might even be silly, trifling, but fun, comforting. Where's my XBox!? Wahhhh! Here, play. Powered by a stationary bike you have to use to generate power, so now you're not atrophying when you play video games, and you're not a burden to society when you develop Type-2 diabetes in your 50's...three birds, one stone...3.5, actually, because you're draining a little bit less energy from whatever public grid there is sourced by whatever alternate fuel has been invented by then. You're welcome.
Is that a plan of action? Meh. Can we converse a little, before we start planning and acting?
This is my personal favorite from wigglestrue, i.e., from me:
http://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtop ... #p35407841
From a trilogy of sorts of "Get better" statuses from my Facebook wall last night:
1.
Ever notice how musicians who are eerily good at what they do frequently seem to have a mild case of OCD or autism or some other perfectionism-fueling and/or creativity-unleashing mental ailment along that continuum? Maybe it's not a complete coincidence? I don't have the faintest clue how musical talent and what we've come to see solely as psychological disease might coincide on an neuro-evolutionary level. But perhaps we'd save a lot of time, trouble, money, and heartache by actually sending such problematic psyches literally to a funny farm, or rather, a fun farm. A "farm league" of cultivating then sublimating whatever intellectual gift might be hidden/obscured by the less savory/sensible aspects of whichever disability is spoiling everybody else's fun. No one likes having their fun spoiled. So, instead of the expense/madness-contagion of a medical triage or rehab unit, perhaps we should send crazy people to an anachronistic care-free simple-living campus where they're taught things. Get better. Meh?
Yep. In a very real sense, all musical and athletic mastery is the honing of an obsessive-compulsive impulse, into a craft, sublimated would-be disease. Ray Allen is a famous athlete with OCD. But, ALL athletes have it, in a sense. They USE it, though. Channel and steer it. For musicians and other artists and even many great scientists and philosophers, the affliction is not necessarily any mood-neutral one like OCD or Asperger's, etc. It is probably just as often if not more often: Melancholia, mania, or a combo. Since the dawn of civilization, such mood-anomalies have been variously interpreted as anything from divine inspiration to neurological artifacts to demonic curses. They have also, though, been the raw fuel for and the best lens through which to see some of the most awesome shit that human beings have ever done. (As might also, more weirdly, be said of toxoplasma! True story, lol.)
How many people do you know who [insert something] according to a routine every day, more or less religiously? Everyone, is the answer. Everyone you know who does anything ritually, systematically, superstitiously, programmatically...so, everyone, therefore, from a lowly office grunt to a superstar pitcher, fits somewhere on a distribution curve, anywhere from barely a connosieur of OCD impulses to to a bona fide curator of OCD impulses, either a slave to an OCD dictatorship or a citizen of the Constitutional Republic of Slightly-Mild Obsessive-Compulsiveness. And yet, we pretend to want to extirpate these supposed brain defects from the whole species, the notion of that pursuit accomplished seems to most people, I think, not as an irreparable catastrophe but as a grand ambition. It's both! It's both as totally subjective and as circular an interpretation of life-reality as religion, potentially disastrous all while FEELING philanthropic; it is also a perfectly-logical application of scientific power: DANGER!
2.
All athletes injured in most non-career-ending injuries should come back better, always. #1 - Shoulder, elbow (maybe not so much back or brain, or hip), ankle, not-major knee injuries...each should give the injured athlete an opportunity to re-evaluate his physis, how he athletically relates to the world, how to jump, throw, swing, run better and safer with whatever body part was injured, but really the entirety of the body, all of one's rhythms and techniques for generating torque, leaping, sprinting, cutting, shooting, etc. You are a professional athlete, and your skills and overall coordination are already in a minute top percentile of the human species, and now you are injured, and now you have several months to a couple years of free time -- paid fabulously, in fact -- to reexamine your game, your individual game, and the game itself. If you are a hitter on the 60-day DL, for example, and you do not digest the book The Science of Hitting, you are being sinfully wasteful. Get better! Simple. Isn't it?
Wait, I said "#1", shit. Uhhh...yeah: #2 was the "mind" half of the mind-body duality I was recommending injured athletes explore on their unexpected break. There's always an upside. Let the injury make you better. To paraphrase the great Dan Quisenberry, "Find the delivery in your flaw." #antifragile Somebody tell Rondo to watch every instructive video released by a Hall of Famer that the Hall of Fame down the road from him has in their archives. Larry, Pistol Pete, Bill Walton. I'm sure Jordan has some stuff out there, unless he's that selfish a bastard he doesn't want to help others improve, lol, dick. Magic Johnson has a passing tutorial on tape, I'm sure. Bob Cousy did something, I bet. Bob fucking Cousy himself could be a guru to Rondo in person, still. Ask, Rondo, ask for help! Seek help! Get better!
3.
Kids are more vulnerable to germs these days. Allergies, colds, infections seem more prevalent, a little? So, now, what if the (gross alert) secret to maintaining the human immune system as we grow is...eating snot. See, because most kids seem to eat their boogers. They all seem to do this. Instinctively, impulsively. Instincts, impulses...manifesting nearly from birth, near-automatically, out of a mindless curiosity...sounds like a trait programmed into us by evolution. That we then have to be acculturated out of doing, for appearance's sake. And, what if it's actually a crucial part of immunizing, inoculating oneself as a child? What if it's something human toddlers have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years? What if we only exist because toddler proto-humans at some point picked up the habit of eating snots and it made them healthier, got 'em used to this very germy world, by ingesting a daily bit of the world's dirty particulates, microbes? What then? "Get better! Eat more snot!" LOL!
(p.s. "Not just "maintaining", but: Creating, maybe! #antifragiletoo")
[To my deaf cousin, mother of three]
I bet you've seen a pound of booger eaten over the years, haahahaaa! Noseloads. Yeah, that miserable primitive way of living with little need for many things, like (Gasp! ADVENTURE! Survival!) Robinson Crusoe, or Castaway, or Lost, or Survivor! Uh, folks, that's how 99-point-NINE percent of our ancestors lived, for fucking thousands of generations. Ancestors. Remember that thing? It's a thing. Those people were real. All those people existed. They were almost totally identical to us. Newsflash: They did just fine, on the whole. Yes, a flare-up of horrific genocide or war or widespread desperation here and there, every 500 or 100 or 50 or perhaps now 10 years. Yes we have been abominable. To each other. To whole swaths of people. But we must've also been: Very caring, and careful, and resourceful, and empathetic, and patient, and bored, and brave. Because look, that's who we are, too. That's who we've always been. We never needed a single guru or prophet or demogogue to remind us of that. All we need is...us!
We're getting better, but: We always were! Always have been! #pinkerfail We've been good, us humans! And sensible, and lazy, and silly, and hardass, and dispeptic, and musical, and contemplative (even though the quantity of thoughts contemplated were surely less sophisticated 6000 generations ago (real number, true story) they were probably of a similar type of quality to our own meditative, introspective experiences) and cruel, and wise, and dumb. When you are dumbstruck, maybe that's exactly what your great-great-[great-another-5997-times]-great-grandparents felt --- REALLY --- when they dumbly-but-deeply pondered their existence, and found it to be breathtakingly inexpressible, because expression itself had not yet advanced further beyond pant-hoots and mating-song. But what better way exists today, to articulate how unspeakably-immense and grotesquely-weird and startlingly-wonderful the nature of the universe is, than, "Hoo-oooooooooo?"
Yep, we can be almost absolutely certain that the very first word ever spoken was something like, "Hooo-ooo!" or "[whistle]" or maybe it was just a shape drawn in sand or, hey, how about this: What if the first word ever spoken, was actually signed? 
Do you realize, [name redacted], that you could literally have a simple conversation --- LITERALLY --- with certain gorillas or bonobos? How fucking awesome is that!!!??? ROFLMFAO! #laughingthroughtearsofenvylol (p.s. You should absolutely find on YouTube and watch a specific part of this claymation Mark Twain video from the 80's, the Adam and Eve section, with your daughters.)
[She says she doesn't do religion]
MARK TWAIN, [name redacted], lol, Mark Twain! Trust me, you're going to want to find it and watch it, that one section.
Now, part of what I hope to muster up in others with this thread is also: Things that already exist which are not necessarily bad things, which have been bespoiled-by-association, in some cases on a fundamental level, but which might still exist nonetheless in some manner in a more-perfect, more-peaceful, more-free alternate universe, perhaps even our own future, who knows. Let's see. Some possible examples, both intuitive and maybe counter-intuitive:
- "I've Got a Feeling" by the Black-Eyed Peas, and other slick mass-produced crap that is invariably played at every fucking wedding and large familial celebration during the period when it's topping the charts. Meaning, yes, that song might be shit. Yes, that band is fucking creepy and perhaps even mind-controlled, lol, agents of the New World Order, replete with a holographic pseudo-baller. But, yet, people gotta listen to something when they have a party, and it's no surprise that most of these celebrations will feature the most popular and over-played songs at the time. There's nothing inherently wrong with a big group of family and friends dancing and goofing and jamming to music. In fact, that's one of the dearest, most universal aspects of human existence. No semi-utopia would be devoid of that. In this world, we get that factory-pop shit. But, hey, at least it's catchy and danceable and actually vaguely exhilarating. I can understand why non-music-connoisseurs might find it a suitable soundtrack for exultation, the soundtrack of their happiest, most social gatherings. Of course, of course: We can do better. We already have. As an aside, I don't see the need to constantly adjust and conform our celebratory soundtracks to the latest fad, we already have decades and centuries of fucking magical soundtracks that don't get listened to enough, or ever anymore. What the fuck is there to upgrade, update? What, everyone is already too familiar with, say, Songs in the Key of Life? I think not. That said, it's part of the secret pleasure I take in attending things like wedding receptions, that the playlist is somewhat frozen in time, that it's one of the few venues where oldies-but-perfect-ies still get regular, universal, quasi-religious play. Something vast quantities of people still have in common. Not to mention the joy of watching people who don't dance, dance for one night, badly, lol, but un-self-consciously. People having real fun, however ephemeral. A real good time. A real good time, by the way, is not to be underestimated as a potential counter-force against everything we hate, fascism and totalitarianism and dehumanization, etc. It has its pitfalls, for sure. The "Whoosh!" recommended by All Things Shining can also be detected in and be a fuel for, say, Nazi parades. Not always necessarily a good thing, having a good night. But, on the whole, it is. A good idea.
- Bicycles
- Magnets (What's the deal with them, anyway? LMAO! #icp)
- Television (Ever seen a life-affirming, mind-opening TV show? Theoretically, they all could be.)
- Games and sports (The professionalism kind of spoils it, but...you got a better war substitute?)
- Military (Yes, even a military, as a concept. Or do we just surrender to Nazis, evil aliens, etc.?)
- Lawyers (Disputes need resolution, one way or another, but there must be a better way for it.)
- Elections (Yes, those. Obviously a hypothetical, unrigged type. Those could exist. Right?)
- Tobacco (Just the natural breed. It can be relaxing, you know. Satisfying, comforting.)
- Pizza (Cheese, mushrooms, pineapple, whatever...no meat, though, please.)
And, well, you probably get the point.
Let the good-idea-ing begin!
Statistics: Posted by FourthBase — Thu May 02, 2013 7:56 pm