Thursday, January 31, 2013

8th Annual Brigid Poetry Festival


"8th Annual Brigid Poetry Festival

This seems like a good time to start the ball rolling for the Brigid Poetry Festival, an outpouring of verse in honor of the Goddess Brigid, Patron Saint of Ireland. "

http://gnosiscafe.com/gcblog/2013/01/21/poetry-inauguration-land/

http://www.magnoliaswest.com/morninggratitudes/new-beginnings/

http://moondrummer.blogspot.com/2013/01/brigid-poetry-festival.html

http://medusacoils.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

some thots on guns and civility


From a societal standpoint, guns are perhaps the the essential symbol for what ought to be regulated in a sane society as their primary purpose is to interfere with the freedoms of nonconsenting others.  This does not mean prohibition nor confiscation.  This means sane regulation such that people can feel that their rights are not being overcome by anyone with a grudge and a gun.

Personally, I don't care whether people own guns or high heels or silly putty.  You stay out of my way; I'll stay out of yours.  What really irks me is all the unexamined talking points and escalated ire.  It ought to be simple enough to understand that people are not likely to respond well to the prospect of stupid assholes with deadly weapons.

I tend to wonder how people favoring gun rights can think they are being persuasive by acting like angry adolescents and threatening violence against those who disagree with their position. Nasty, aggressive argument against people who are concerned about gun ownership's possible negative consequences for themselves and others doesn't seem to me to be a good tactic to assure people of the good intentions of gun owners. 

What if we stopped attempting to beat each other with our weapons of choice and moved through into a discussion about how to better get along?  Maybe we can each have our weapons to work on practice, to feel safer, while looking beyond those defenses to some shared vision of useful interaction, civil dialog?

Thursday, January 17, 2013

wars and attitudes of war


Personally, I don't care whether people own guns or high heels or silly putty. You stay out of my way; I'll stay out of yours. What really irks me is all the unexamined talking points and escalated ire. It ought to be simple enough to understand that people are not likely to respond well to the prospect of stupid assholes with deadly weapons.


I feel like I am watching a debate between the "get a gun" and the "get a law" crowds of revealed lore. As humans I guess weapons and laws as weapons (words as weapons) come to us easily. What if we stopped attempting to beat each other with our weapons of choice and moved through into a discussion about how to better get along? Maybe we can each have our weapons to work on practice, to feel safer, while looking beyond those defenses to some shared vision of useful interaction, civil dialog?


it dishonors real suffering to subsume this victimizing of innocent bystanders, this destruction of nonconsenting, noncombatants casually as collateral to silly arguments of power, to subsume these insane tragedies to some political preference for causes of outrage. If you are concerned about outrageous outcomes of violence, what are you doing to calm, uplift, soothe, lighten, make peace?


I have been thinking about the link between peevish self-entitlement attitudes and capitalism. Certainly such attitudes could surface in a variety of cultural environments; but the capital investment economy social structure seems to be based more on this kind of attitude than most. The idea of taking risk for profit, the idea of encouraging greater production for lower wages from the great majority of the people -- individuals subsumed to their economic role in creating wealth for the risk-takers -- the underlying incentives people are raised on to believe if they fail it was because they did not work hard enough, do not seem to improve our general attitudes toward ourselves or each other.


A MYTHOLOGY OF BULLETS by GLEN SLATER



all is interconnected
each is territorial
life, death, re-emergence in changed form, a nightmare tarantella
a wiggly microbe dance re-imaged into macro by degrees of the eternal
This culture obfuscates the basics of sex and death -- binds them up in moral outrage
and damnation for the masses to feed upon in maenad frenzy
We expect subterfuge to fuel salvation when all we need saving from is the resultant confusion.

Friday, January 11, 2013

don't be an asshole

I am thinking through a "don't be an asshole" theory of public behavior.  It seems to me that problems of social interaction don't arise from opinions (or guns or drugs or ...) but from people having some idea of entitlement to expressing the asshole in their nature.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

PostApocalypse13



epiphany


the crepuscular world knows, does not say

All language is metaphor

Intermingled, light and diminishing glow




the year of prophecies has ended
find my ongoing journey here in the PostApocalypse:



http://postapocalypse13.tumblr.com/