qotd

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different!
Kurt Vonnegut

Cult ethic

Arbeit macht frei:

We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult.

This relates to my previous post about the ancient intertwining of the parasites: religion and politics. Without these, civilisation as we know it would never have come about. Were they inevitable? Unlikely - it seems they were more like a disease that spread from the Middle East.
Peter Drucker, who loves Calvinism and "management" - admitted that it was not certain that management was a good thing, or productive, or whatever. Well it isn't - the best "management" like "best government" is hands off. Which begs the question - why is it there at all? Because of organised violence, that's why. Giant protection rackets, all over the globe, born of politics and religion. The Invisible Boot.
There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.

QOTD

Maths - boring? Or killed by the education system? Maybe this will make it clearer:

All this fussing and primping about which “topics” should be taught in what order, or the use of this notation instead of that notation, or which make and model of calculator to use, for god’s sake— it’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors: your patient is already dead.

A mathematician's lament - Paul Lockhart (2002)

Work is play

This is brilliant - this guy demonstrates what I mean about the ludic life. He actually says it himself - he goes in and plays. He correctly identifies corn syrup as an allergy-inducing inferior ingredient. Plus he takes on the big companies, champions small artisan-made sodas, and still comes out ahead.

hey...

this is written by a libertarian ludic libertine hedonist, individualist, primal foodie, atheist, apolitical, Darwinian amateur philosopher. Standing, as are we all, on the brink of the Greatest Depression. I think the following ideas currently floating around like malignant parasitic insects, ubiquitous and iniquitous, need re-examination or outright extermination:

Democracy
Vaccines
“Too big to fail”s
Religion & “belief”
Environmentalism
The BBC
Marriage as a deal for men
Corporatism
Vegetarianism
Prohibition of drugs
Discipline & sacrifice
Zero sum views of the world
“Rights”
Common Fisheries Policy
“Hope”
Agriculture
Myth that fat is bad for you
Credentialism
Economics
“Teams” & teamwork

And they're all related. For now the first thing I’ll link to, to set the tone, is this exhilarating paradigm-busting essay on why work should be abolished.