Wednesday 26 May 2010

The Way You Are

Chanced upon this version featuring some dude called Sebastian who adds to the bridge of the famous The Way I Are song. And it's hilarious:

Yo my money ain't Luth like felling 'em,
And it's really not quite Moris Allison
Your body ain't Pamela Anderson
It's a struggle just to get you in the caravan
So, Listen baby girl, before I let you lose a pound, I'll buy a bigger car
So, Listen baby girl, I love you just the way you are, The way you are.

Monday 24 May 2010

The Neverending Fascination With Symbolism

http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=3571

I like the part on Carl Jung, and then pretty much everything else too. The Vigilant Citizen has kept me busy for three hours straight.

My online reading venture this time around began with Lady GaGa's new Telephone MTV. Spotting a few cult references, I was curious to find out more if there was a deeper meaning to the video. Turns out to be quite a handful.

http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=3423

At any rate, I don't think Lady GaGa's music is as innocent as it sounds, although however one wishes to interpret or enjoy her music is an individual choice. And I'm not even referring to innocent in the sense of whether her music has a simple subversive sexually-charged hidden meaning or not - I'm looking at what the article is pretty much talking about.

Call me a paranoid conspiracist, but I think Carl Jung's thesis on the collective unconscious does sound very compelling!
If you're not wasted for a week, you've wasted a week.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

Thursday 20 May 2010

Until Lions Have Their Historians, Tales Of The Hunt Shall Always Glorify The Hunters (African Proverb)

Has Thailand's politics ever been more ablaze than now? This is a classic example of an uprising. My lack of revulsion doesn't mean I'm harbouring somewhat sadistic emotions about what's going on; it's just that this is history in the making.

The Reds were on the brink of retreat; in fact a significant number of their leaders had declared surrender. Many people were tired, particularly those who want nothing to do with the political affairs of the warring camps. These people simply wanted stability and normalcy to occur. Up to a point, some of the laypeople interviewed were even accusing the Reds of going out of the way to get their demands heard. "This [violence] is not the right way to do things," one person was quoted as saying.

But truthfully speaking, is the violence all that unwarranted? Could they have garnered the attention they have now if they didn't resort to taking up arms and aggressing? Aside from Gandhi, who has nobly set a very high standard for non-violent protest, all revolutions and uprisings have been violent and entail unrest, often destabilizing society. History tells us the story, and history will repeat itself again. As Churchill puts it well, "we are not makers of history; we are made by history." The violence is almost inevitable - in the battle between the system and the idealists, lives have to become dispensable.

Perhaps irresponsibility occurs only when people forget the cause they fight for and enact unnecessary violence because emotions are running wild. The building set ablaze as the Reds were apparently surrendering brings to mind one such example. But in the zealous fight for an ideological end, it can be quite hard to draw the lines on these things.



"The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter."
- Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon, The Story of Mankind

Saturday 15 May 2010

Entitlement And Appreciation

What's the key to being resilient, tolerant, adaptable, humble and less judgmental?

I think the answer lies in believing that nothing you have is deserved. Not in the sense that you don't reap anything you sow, or own anything you create, but in the sense that you're never entitled to anything in the first place.

With such a mindset in place, everything can be appreciated at greater depth. The value of everything and anything becomes illuminated with clarity now that one realizes that for everything one owns, a million other things might've conspired such that one's possessions were never to be. Our very existence and life experiences will be taken less for granted, as will the lives of others, particularly those who are underprivileged. Our achievements will be deservedly attributed more to the conditions around us - such as our friends and family - we now recognize more clearly as having allowed us to seize the moment, rather than arrogantly believing that we are all just our own islands.

I believe the world can be beautiful once again with this perspective in mind.