The aftershow party was at mals13‘s. I love her apartment for parties. It has an incredible good vibe: relaxed, varied, “come on in and take your top off”-inviting, filled with unassumingly trendy and enchanting furnishings, and mals13 and her roommates are laidback, fun hosts.

But last night there was a video camera.

Evidently it was there with mals13 blessing. By the time I asked about it, she said it’d been on for an hour, and that everyone knew. Well, *I* didn’t know, and I felt like it was something of a break of faith. The comments below aren’t directed at mals13 (or the camera’s owner), and I’m not still annoyed at all; I just have a definite opinion on this, and I’m interested in others’ thoughts on it.

Of course mals13 or any other party host is welcome to have cameras at their parties… but doing so is a break from the normal rules of Rocky parties: what happens at the party stays at the party. That rule isn’t just a good idea. It’s a vital assumption. It’s there to cultivate an atmosphere where anyone can let it all out, without worrying about the consequences. It’s not easy being sexually free or raw-bones open.

Rocky is a context for, among other things, exploring sexuality. Sexuality– a core of our selves– is complex, surprising, and shadowed in layers of societal nonsense. Opening it up and getting beyond all the layers is difficult work, and ultra-sensitive to the situation you’re doing it in. The more you’re concerned with the future (as when there’s a camera in the room), the more you’re taken out of the present, the only place where sexuality lives. Not having cameras doesn’t guarantee for that special context for sexuality, but it’s an important piece. The right mix happens so rarely anyway.

The rule is also there to protect people– especially the ones who aren’t willing to ask for that protection. There are members of Rocky and visitors to Rocky who could get into problems with their friends, family, work, and future plans if anything got out. Keeping records is forcing them to trust you, or assuming that you know their situation well enough to positively know that it wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t consider that an ethical stance.

As Rocky, we are the chauffeurs of a valuable treasure: our Arc of the Covenant is the Rocky party. It is unique and sorely needed in our world. If we treat it well, it will shower us with gifts and allow us to bring light into the lives of others who visit our temple. We don’t have to use it every week– other kinds of parties are fun too– but I hold it in special regard and do not want to see it corrupted.

This is a core aspect of what Rocky parties mean to me. If someone wants to have another kind of party I think attendees should be warned.

Life Updates: I helped with a party Friday, played Riff Saturday, dropped the Culture Tech seminar and picked up TA-ship of an AI section of MIT’s intro CS course, got a little sick, and am sore from my first rock climbing excursion.

St. Damian’s Day: Forget Mr. Valentine! His institutionalized version of love has been the cause too much sorrow to deserve the word. Seven days later is St. Damian’s Day, in honor of the saint of self-flagellation. Read it as the day of self-love, joy in independence and personal drives and finding love without loss of self.

LJ Essays: I have half-written entries on the Ethics of Manipulation, the Relation between Intention and Passion, the Future of Programming Paradigms, and the Dilemma of Physics, but today they seem pedantic and irrelevant. Give me dialogue, not blank pages.

Politics: We’ve successfully installed an bloody authoritarian regime in Iraq (and we want to blame Iran). Go USA, peace-maker of the world!

State of Self: My ego is weak today. I wish I had a yardstick to measure myself against, and a window into other people’s worlds. I’m feeling overwhelmed by what I want to do, like I’m falling behind my own moving train. Otherwise, I’m great, and I love being sick.

It’s snowing!!!

I’m back from roadtripping across Germany. Enormous fun! I love travel. I love Europe. But I love Cambridge too, and it’s good to be back amongst good friends and waiting projects.

There’s a blog of the adventures at http://www.depoint.net/roadtrip/. Highlights include hiking in the Alps of Slovenia; getting a personal tour of Ljubljana from someone we met at a 24-hour Burek eatery; discovering Ljubljana’s artsy, squattery alternative scene and staying at their prison-turned-hostel; wandering the grounds of Dachau Concentration Camp; having divine signals lead us to the best food of the trip in Worms; and seeing Cologne’s cathedral and gay town. Here are some images from the journey:

And I’m back with a change, if a small one. Recently I’d been back-of-my-mind depressed because of my job: I independent contract for two companies that give me an endless stream of interesting work… but work that I can’t believe in as anything but a fun way to make money. And I can’t live to make money or respect myself for it, no matter how fun. But as I sat in the prison-turned-hostel’s Oriental Cafe, I shifted my foreground and background and realized that I was already doing the job I wanted, just not the job I was hired for: I’m starting a business. My business is Departure Point, the traveler’s community site I’ve been working on on-and-off for months. I’ll continue contracting, to support my business until it gets off the ground, but now I have a end that I can believe in.

In addition, it looks like this semester I’m co-teaching a class on Technology and Culture, and teaching a section of MIT’s intro CS class. Exciting!

This Sunday, I’m taking a week’s trip to Germany with three friends. *Three*. Finding one person to go over-seas with is tough– four people going at the same time is unheard of! (When I got my tickets, incidentally, I thought I’d be going alone.) We’re renting a car in Cologne and road-tripping across Germany, Austria, and into Slovenia. Why? Because it’s there, and we aren’t. Yet.

I played Brad last week at Rocky, and it was a ton of fun. janetweiss69 was a huge help throughout, with blocking, advice, cues. I gave Costumes a scare when I forgot that I only had the bottom half of a floorshow costume, but they and catullus_5 got me on stage on time.

I’ve had a lot of busy weeks recently (and my game is taking a lot of time), and I’m half-nightshifted (but that’ll be good for Germany). This weekend is going to be exciting– I want to go to MTG’s Reefer Madness, Birka, the Fetish Flea, and a Dance Odyssey created by a friend.

And I need a new camera.

Disclaimer: I hold a regular Salon discussion group, with wide-ranging conversations on politics, philosophy, society, and life. The thoughts in this post came from a recent Salon, but are not meant to be an accurate reflection of the dialogue.

We had the Salon at MIT (and it will be again on Tuesday), and talked about MIT education, online gaming, and usury, and we griped about contemporary philosophy. I’m concentrating on the last, because it’s symptomatic of (what I believe is) a deep rot in society.

With few exceptions, education at MIT is engineering, no matter what they call it. It’s all math applied to different problems, or it tries to be. Our science is super-analytical, and we reduce everything to particle physics. Biology at MIT is biochemistry. Political science is the quantification and analysis of political metrics. In philosophy (my field), respectable papers contain at least one mathematical equation, and it’s rare to read anything written before 1970.

I love philosophy, but I don’t love what it’s become over the past 50 years. Philosophy today is obsessed with language, with disconnecting itself from the problems of life, with breaking things down to and building things up from the driest infinitesimals. Instead of bold statements, it prefers conditional hedges, most of which would be intuitively obvious if they weren’t couched in esoteric language. It’s boring, and irrelevant. Since Descartes, the history of philosophy has been dominated by trends that brought it to this point. (Jonathan Swift, of all people, wrote about these in his Battle of the Books).

There are some deep chasms that run through philosophy, and philosophy is in no small way *about* those chasms. Epistemology is about the gap between understanding and truth. Ethics centers on the gap between choice and conscience. Ontology is the gap between our perceptions and reality. Metaphysics is between reliability and causality. And on a deeper level, there’s a chasm between what we can philosophize about and *anything* real. “Truth”, “Right”, and “Being” are figments of the philosophical imagination, and we’ll never know if thinking about them is anything more than mental masturbation.

To cross the chasms, you have to embrace some (however small) totally unfounded beliefs. Modern philosophy hates that and avoids taking any leaps. We say, “You’re either progressing at a snail’s pace, or not at all.” The edges of these chasms are fractally complex, and modern philosophy satisfies itself with magnify-glassing the border. We’ve tried to build bridges across these gaps, brick-by-brick, so we could cross without making any jumps, but we haven’t succeeded yet, and I don’t think we will (the most famous failure was logical positivism).

Unfortunately, the unfounded leap is where the action, the adventure, the worth of philosophy is. The leap is the essence of paradigms, and it makes philosophy relevant. Ancient philosophy was quick to leap and quick to acknowledge the error in its leap, but do it anyway.

Modern philosophy conceives of itself as a science, and sees its future in scientificating itself ever more. It has some scientific methods and some so-far-so-good postulates, and it works on piecing those together into new corollaries. When an idea is shown to be false (not an easy thing to do, but anyway), it’s thrown out. Philosophy has become the science of ideas.

Plato made statements he knew were wrong (and said so), because they contained a grain of truth, and their rejection contained a different grain of truth. There’s no way to make real claims and have them be totally true, but ancient philosophers embraced and played with that fact.

Ancient philosophy wasn’t a science, even though it dealt in truth. It was an *art*. It glorified in making beautiful leaps, in awing the mind, in revealing truths by artfully constructing new perspectives. But art and fine craft aren’t appreciated in our society. Something is either science/technology/engineering/mathematics, or it’s a hobby.

Today, as a result of technology and science, the world that we and philosophy deal with is hugely different than ever before. We’ve barely begun to construct worldviews that can cope with and enlighten our new modern lives. We *need* philosophy… but it has forfeited its service in society.

There is a growing counter-philosophy. There are movements in the past decade to revitalize philosophy and make it relevant. I think the way forward is clear… but we didn’t discuss it much at the Salon, so I’ll leave that for another day.

I’m swooning over my new read, How to Succeed with Women. I’ve read *plenty* of books on the intricacies of sex: how to books on flirting, kissing, fucking; philosophy and essays on love and sex; books on manipulation that made me sick, on personal development that changed me, and on how the genders interact that still befuddle me. But books that are ethical and pragmatic and thorough are rare, and I think this is one such, but it’s so “dense to act on” that I’ve only dipped my feet in.

This kind of book demands to be more than the week’s lean-back recreation. The sexual world goes so deep, and holds such incredible excellence. I think you can learn about sex relations your whole life and still be surprised by every turn. The creative, ethical, and stylistic expertise possible makes it like a second career, with ever more responsibilities and privileges. It’s an alien world to me, who never gave sex a third thought before four years ago, but it’s one I want to immerse in.

I’m waffling over the consequences, though. Some days, I think of everything I can give to others and learn for myself, and I just want to get as many people as possible to play sexual games with me. But then, I think of all the good time I spend with girls as friends, and I hear about all the ways guys make a nuisance of themselves. I know I’m a lot better at being chaste– I can make more people happy and fewer hurt if my gender stays out of it. And there are no gentle paths in there.

Err, um, not that I can think of too many people I’ve hurt recently (If you beg to differ, kick me or something so I realize). But if practicing my drums gets on your nerves, I’ll always be happy to play elsewhere.

Money is a funny idea. As natural as it seems today, our ancestors rebelled against it for centuries (ask Mutual Aid). Money is an incredibly useful tool, but it has huge social and institutional effects, where the minutest choices in the arbitrary rules surrounding it can have huge differences.

We choose to use a single idea of money as exchange for both items and actions (but not jobs or college admissions), land (but not air), advertising space (but not ideas), institutions (but not people), power (but not freedom), and security (but not safety). Money isn’t supposed to be used to buy and sell sex, votes, or ideologies, but it is. We allow money to be given away or held indefinitely, irrespective of the individualness or ephemeralness of its original granting. And we allow those who most directly generate the profitable products and services to get the least money.

But I’m not arguing against money or property today– they’re ideas that work awfully well. Capitalism provides for something like liberty, opportunity, and a high standard of living in a way no other system has come close to. I want to argue against one particularly funky practice: the use of money to make more money– that is, usury.

Usury is an ill-defined term. Lending is complicated business, and different degrees of justice are served by different limits on interest. The extremes delineations are at zero interest and free-market interest. With proper safety-nets, charging nothing extra seems perfectly just, if not more than just. Similarly, it seems fairly unchallengeable that charging more than what you could get on the free-market is clearly usurious. But there are finer gradations between.

Just up from zero interest is the charge to cover basic assessment and handling of a loan. I’ll call this epsilon interest, because I think it’s comparatively small (but it doesn’t make much difference if it’s bigger), and I include it in the other levels. Then there’s risk-insurance interest, set at a level to protect its lender from a disinterested party’s estimation of the risk of the endeavor. Sure, it’s theoretical, but it’s useful. Either above or below that level is the current “risk-free interest level”, which is whatever return the lender can get investing in risk-free endeavors (corporate finance people scale everything in terms of this interest rate). Finally, there’s the combination of risk-insurance, risk-free, and epsilon interest. In theory, the market drives toward that line of justice and interest, but not very well, as evidenced by the recent explosion of payday loans.

Good arguments could be made for crying usury at any level. I’ll argue that the limit of unjust interest is at the greater of the risk-free interest or and the risk-insurance interest. Call this the tipping interest.

I claim that the use of money to make its possessor more money is inherently unjust. Money is liquid incentive or liquid power *over other people* (directly or indirectly). If we want to ask if someone has gotten wealth justly, we have to ask, “By what do they *deserve* this wealth?” In a capitalist economy, you can justly exchange your property or use your time, mind, and body to get money, and the perceived worth in your items and actions is reflected in the money you get. You deserve the money for the worth you’ve provided.

The argument goes that, similarly, lending money is a kind of providing worth for which you should be compensated. But how can the worth of lending the money be greater than the money itself? Lending money is not the same as providing a service. Moreover, money transfer is not made just by all parties agreeing to the same contract. At best, that fact adds no injustice, but the question of deserving still needs to be answered.

At the tipping interest, investors are assured a risk-free level of interest, or the opportunity for more profit on risky endeavors. Why, then, would they loan to anything but the most institutional and conservative projects? The answer is, for *any* other reason, except for the money. The tipping interest ensures that the incentive for investment isn’t greater wealth, thereby removing the relentless drive on capitalist systems to sacrifice everything for profit. If only for the smallest reason, investment in a system with the tipping-interest cap is based on values– the non-monetary gains from the investment.

Allowing money to make money is at best unnecessary. It accelerates economic growth, which drives “poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment” (ask Jay Forrester). It entrenches and extremities the economic divisions in society. It builds money-centered thinking into every aspect of life.

Will capping interest levels decrease opportunities for ventures that need capital, or otherwise harm the good things about capitalism? I doubt it. Investors will still have an incentive to invest their money– just not extra incentive. If this cap means that less money is in circulation, it will only increase the effective worth of those who don’t have much of it. It will decrease the worth of owning capital, but the greatness of capitalism is in the freedom, opportunity, and fluidity it provides, not its ability to support an upper-class. The tipping-interest cap equalizes society by decreasing the self-fulfilling power of the powerful and cuts capitalism’s bottom-line-is-the-only-line exploitive feedback loop.

I feel like I’ve been on fast-forward all day, and I’ve got way too much energy, too many todo items, too exciting of plans to make to go to sleep. Today, running around with a bottomless list of tasks is a blessing.

I need a new gig. I love being independent and working only under my own whip, and I love turing tricks for multiple clients, and I love the clients that I’ve found. But I can’t take pride or joy in contracting except as a means to an end, and that isn’t enough.

It’s been on my mind from a few people’s questions, and from getting hit up for help this weekend on a class I taught at Olin, and hearing about everything that’s been going on there. I gave up full-time teaching, which I loved, for contracting so I would have time for my own projects. And it’s worked, but not enough.

For years, I’ve wanted to start a learning center, or community center, or commune, or youth hostel (the idea keeps morphing) so much it hurts, but I can’t support myself on it and I can’t make significantly more progress unless I can dedicate myself to it. I do have a new money-making stepping stone idea toward it (I think I can make a kind of Neal Stevenson-style Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer), but I’ll say more on that if it pans out.

I am close to having a project– a travelers community site– advanced enough that I’m pretty sure it could support someone full-time just traveling and working on it and promoting it… but I’m back to never wanting to leave our Cambridgian fairyland. Not permanently, that is. Anyone want to be a professional vagabond?

Disclaimer: I hold a regular Salon discussion group, with wide-ranging conversations on politics, philosophy, society, and life. The thoughts in this post came from a recent Salon, but are not meant to be an accurate reflection of the dialogue.

One topic we discussed was the possibility that the use of money to make money– that is, usury– may be the origin of many of capitalism’s problems. I have many thoughts on that one, so I’m going to leave it for it’s own post. [Don’t let me forget to write that one.]

We started by talking about Bush and his [then] newest foolishness: the rejection of the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. When his public approval and political capital are at history-setting lows, and the situation in Iraq getting ever more disastrous, it seems inconceivable that he would hang on like a tick to his hard-line “victory against the infidels” stance. Unless he actually believes the drivel he spews.

At a protest two years ago, a speaker read from the autobiography of a cold war general whose name I forget. He spoke of the times he almost removed his stars so he could speak freely about his doubts of the reasonableness of the American actions he was helping to engineer– but ultimately he didn’t because everyone else seemed so solid in their beliefs. Much later, he found out that everyone had similar doubts, and kept them private just like him.

Jeff described a similar situation, but where parroting gave way to belief. People at his company spent so long excusing and using an effective advertising untruth that they forgot it wasn’t accurate. If people propound a belief enough, they can forget that they never believed it. Just like in Don’t Think of an Elephant, facts and beliefs have only the most tenuous connection. Beliefs are to facts what form is to content– except that the human mind works far more with beliefs than with facts.

We carry around a model of the world in our heads, the composite of all our beliefs, which performs two basic functions. Every causal relationship we understand about the world is a consequence of this model, and as such it is the basis of all our decisions. Causality cannot come from observed facts alone, and must rely on a baseless belief (ask Lacan, “decisions are mad”). Second, it manages our perceptions. The senses take in a colossal amount of data, but it is only the details called out as interesting by our model that arrive at the consciousness. As such, the facts we absorb are inseparable from the belief system we hold.

In this sense, belief, model, paradigm, and Weltanschauung are essentially the same, and it follows that the majority of our intelligent knowledge and mental capabilities are functions of our models of the world. The same is true of our stupidities– see Libertarianism Makes You Stupid, or NLP’s claims about the structure of neuroses.

To reword Chomsky’s Plato’s Problem, where do models come from? Artificial life programs have tried to provide a sufficient basis for arbitrarily complex models through competition– with interesting but inconclusive results. Their approach is by random evolutionary changes, where the most effective models result in the most capable organisms. The analogy to human models claims that our heads are competitive environments where memes (the Dawkins kind) battle it out (I had been reading Edge just before the Salon).

Models don’t just live in the mind. They pass from person to person, and have been honed by a million years to do so. Models live in the collective consciousness, and we are constantly passing them around like airborne viruses in the complex and unconscious ways we communicate with each other. As said in the bedroom scene in Waking Life, “When a member of a species is born, it has a billion years of memory to draw on.”

Of course, serviceability isn’t the only reason a particular model will predominate, because the collective consciousness can be variously hospitable to certain ideas. That’s how parroting (and lying) can lead to whole-hearted belief.

Another ramification is that most of the guts of our intelligence are hidden from us. If civilization were to collapse, how much of our knowledge would we be able to draw on? Aside from the knowledge that’s only applicable in a world built to support it, no knowledge is entirely separable from the frameworks that support it. Every container we have for knowledge– our memories, the collective consciousness, the written language, mathematical systems– is deeply structured, and almost none of the knowledge is can stand on its own, outside those containers. Whole areas of mathematical truths that we take to be necessary and obvious where a confounding struggle to the ancient Greeks– and, similarly, some of their simplest truths we can only describe with difficulty.

The biggest piece I’m missing in these notes was our discussion of redistribution of wealth versus ideal libertarianism—the self-determination libertarianism allows and its problem with children. One solution to children in libertarian society is to consider them as extensions of their parents, but the potential for exploiting people that way is almost endless. With the above discussion, I wonder if it makes sense to consider anyone to be truly independent. We rely on each other and society not only for everything we do, but for everything we think.

Jeff had one suggestion which deserves more airtime: currently social security is taken as a percentage out of people’s paychecks, up to a certain amount—but that places the burden most on the wrong people. Why not flip it? We should be taking a percentage out from all paychecks only down to a certain amount, and leave the poorest unburdened.

Happy New Years, all!

d_day‘s party was fantastic! It was a great group of people, and more good food and drink than you can shake a newly emptied champagne bottle at. I got to experience the legendary “rocket”, eat some excellent good brownies, and try my mouth on the ice luge. As the night wore on people mellowed into little clusters of good conversation. I eventually chose my own bed over crashing and New Years brunching, but I hope that went well.

Aaaand, my crew was almost all there, making it Cortney and Cassandra’s first party! Sadly, we didn’t have any a_c_i_d‘s or anastasia1‘s to initiate them, but I think (and I hope!) that they’ll be coming to more parties, so there’ll be more opportunities.

I wrote this for someone, but I’m going to share it for fun– a song for when you’re down:

Raindrops on papers and lightning in windows,
Bright golden boxers and ill innuendos,
Mummified monsters all tied up by queens,
These are a few of my favorite scenes.

When Riff-Raff bites,
When Columbia sings,
When Frank’s feeling up Brad,
I simply remember my favorite scenes
And then I don’t feeeeel sooo baaaaad.