Father

Father is an often misused word that therefore become a target of a wide range of attacks.

Father, with a capital F, is often used to signify authority or origin, both senses of which have little to do with the experience of a biological father. I think the biological father is a strange figure, an identity which is still in its experimental stages (beta tester fathers), a role which progresses towards becoming a necessity while still leaving open the possibility that he is optional so long as resources are provided to the truly necessary caretakers.

father, with a lower case f, veers toward friendship at times, a benefactor, a mentor, but other times, he could seem more like an exploiter or dominator. Not every child is lucky enough to have a benevolent father. Such children are the most likely to misuse the word to refer to something other than his or her father, to defer the man to an idea, to displace the trauma that could have been unnecessary had fatherhood not been demanded upon societies (why does he exist in such a role?). The rejection of the Father (the displaced, misperceived father) could potentially return fatherhood to its rightfully ambiguous place.

father as a symbol; realistically rendered as father, not the father or Father or fathers, is a thing very few people (only siblings) have in common. To attempt to distill universal characteristics, enough to fill a potent symbol, isn't easy. Symbols based upon fatherhood tend less to be one liners and tend more to express themselves as tomes and ouvres. The Father is one of our oldest and most entangled symbols.

More interesting than the subject of fathers is pretty much most of everything from video games to sex. Just now, I saw a group of people downstairs standing in a circle watching a small dog fuck a tiny dog. Everyone found it very amusing. Concomitantly, we are all very amusing2.

Politics

Arbitration is also known as arbitrage -- the stock market correction, the self-regulating cycling of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen... the raison d'etre of life on earth.

Politics, another nounverb, designates the endeavor of arbitrating (policing) economies (symbolic ecosystems).

Economy

Economy* is a linguistic phenomenon. It means the naming (pricing) of ecosystems.

Large mammals developed symbolic systems (languages) to coordinate economy (growth of general energetics through symbolic exergy). With open arms (limb interface), they welcomed microbial life into their physicality (sovereignty). They took advantage of the alacrity of their microbial kins and became a hybrid life form (fungal dominant).

Symbols, like fungi, seek dominance.  The polis is the symbol's (fungi's) organizational form. It expresses outward in order to colonize and regulate. The network connections (communication) of discrete things** creates ordered chaos conforming to the nebulous universe. With gravity, in time, they contract and harden.

Though the meaning of my speech is timestamped I can still speak as if it were hard (atemporal).

The temporality of symbols is arbitrary***(The arbitration of signs. Politics).

*Nounverb (how silly to separate the two)
**Objects of all orders of temporality

***Arbitrary doesn't mean random, it means up for arbitration.

Natural Language

It was said by Heidegger that language is the house of being.

It was said by Lacan that language is structured like the mind.

It was said by Paul Stamets that the brain is structured like mycelium and that fungi regulate the structures of ecosystems.

Therefore, our symbolic edifice (Being) should be structured like ecosystems under the direction of the mind (fungal brain).

The efficiency of growth of general energetics through communication (economy) seeks to surpass that of fungal spores.

The exergy of symbols should be meditated upon in a basic way.

Symbolic Waste

Our languages are primitive and shitty (sucked dry).

Experimental artists wonder why their experiments don't connote, don't emote, don't signify as intuition would suggest they should. It must be a fault of the art. Not.

The arbitrariness of symbols has been taken seriously but not literally.

Everything should be taken literally.

The telos of an advanced symbolic system would make full use of the bandwidth of signification such that every combination(permutation?) should yield a meaning (fuck taboos and censorship).

Advancements in linguistics, not just the passive study of but also the active creation of, are much needed.

If it's important enough to effect everyone, it should be decided on by everyone

Proof is in the pudding: we don't need a president

If everyone stopped voting, the presidency would be obsolete (like the death of a god)

or vote for someone who will abolish it, either way a possible system (the milieu, new systems):

A national referendum can take place when at least (70)% of the citizenry express concern over a policy matter (or lack thereof) and such expressions could occur passively or actively so long as it is collected in a transparent and privacy respecting manner. However, to enact into law, the referendum requires (90)% of the vote, which means the (70)% concerned citizens have to somehow convince another (20)% of the citizenry to change their minds. Sorry top (10)%er (or conversely, bottom 10%ers) the masses will have their way with you.

Without a presidency, along with legally enforced protection from slavery (or debt bondage of other forms), the middle class will thrive: to resume the futurism of the mid 20th century.

What is called Thinking?

I finally figured it out guys.

Background: What is called thinking? is a book that's a transcribed lecture by Heidegger that's actually more like a sermon. In it he repeats at least 10 times maybe more the mantra like sentence: "what is most thought provoking in our thought provoking time is the fact that we are still not thinking." I have been WTFed by this sentenced for going on six maybe seven years now. Here is what I think.

First we had the golden rule from maybe 5000BC. Do to others as you would have them do to you. This idea is basically the theoretical basis for law, and eventually the more perfect form of law: rule of law. 

Philosophy as reinvented by Galileo represents the epistemological breakthrough that the telescope (a synecdoche for empericism) is preferable to the Pope. This is the renaissance of a certain Greek moment.

Empericism as formalized in Aristotle's criterion of 'demonstrability' was the distillation of the Philosophy movement. A philosopher is an identity invented in distinction to sophists. The best way of translating the word sophist, as pejoratively used by philosophers, is "wise-guy". The words that come out of the mouth of a sophist is true because the sophist is a wise-guy, an expert in a field. A philosopher's words are not true because the philosopher is an expert, indeed, a philosopher does not presume that everything he or she says is true. Rather, a philosopher is a normal person who happens to love (philo) knowledge (sophia), which is external to the philosopher. A telescope is to a philo-sopher as credential is to a sophist (or a pope).

Galileo's provocation begged the question: if the church and the telescope disagreed, who's right? 

Rene Descartes believed in numbers and measuring. He thought: let's use a couple of imaginary rulers to measure nothing - the cartesian coordinates. If you can measure nothing, you can measure anything and maybe just maybe learn something about God. Indeed, by using imaginary rulers to measure space itself, Newton invented physics and in extension all of the mathematical sciences. Nowadays, we can measure production, trade, and consumption with imaginary rulers (and manipulable them with mathematical operations) in the unit of money, an imaginary commodity. Try explaining that to Descartes and even he would be flummoxed methinks. With Amartya Sen and the Human Development Index, we now (try to) measure "the capacity to think for one's self". 

Isn't that what philosophy, especially in its moral dimensions comes down to, whether existentialism, phenomenology (deconstruction), queer theories, or anything else. But thinking for yourself is really not that simple.

Think for yourself. Decomposed to: think, you, self.

Think: thinking has to do with the brain, it has to do with knowledge, language, and education.

You: the person as object. What are the forces that act on you? How do others identify you? What do others want to do to you? What do others demand of you? How do all those forces affect thinking?

Self: the person as subject. What are the forces that you exert on others. What do you want to do to other people and things? How do you identify yourself in relation to other people and things? How do your desires, knowledge, and identity (circumstance) affect your thinking?

If YOU and SELF are taken as exogenous variables, defined by the current state of affairs and your person, THINKING becomes the only endogenous variable, aka the dependent variable. Thinking is a function of a person as subject and object. Thinking equilibriates the relationship between person as subject and object. 

Thinking==F(Person-as-subject, Person-as-object);

If all thinking by all persons come to equilibrium, then there would be no more need to law or rule of law (as the function of law would be implicit in thinking-at-equilibrium). 

So yes, the most thought provoking thing in our thought provoking time is that we are still not yet thinking.