Leave The Dishes. Let The Celery Rot In The Bottom Drawer Of The Refrigerator And An Earthen Scum Harden

YUKI Rei（由木礼 Japanese, 1928-2003）

End of the Summer 夏の終わり　1972 Woodblock print 72 × 37cm via

The cultivation of Ideas   -   René  Magritte  1927

 Belgian  1898-1967

The Appetizer for Fuzzy

"Bart Kosko, the leading proponent of fuzzy thinking, has degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics and electrical engineering but even in his book there is a clear-cut thesis that ties all this complex thinking together: to explore the paradigm shift from black and white to gray, from bivalence and binary (either/or) thinking to multivalence, a less simplistic but more accurate way of thinking that responds to life in matters of degree, integrating probability and ambiguity in all modes of operation. (Kosko, Bart. Fuzzy Thinking. New York: Hyperion Press, 1993.)

Fuzzy thinking demands that you increase your options. What are all the possible things or events or conditions that could occur as you explore something? You must use your imagination much more actively than usual. Fuzzy thinking comes from fuzzy math sets in which endless possibilites have been explored. So to unite fuzzy thinking with traditional logic, you need to know more, feel more and think more exhaustively.

Perhaps the word "fuzzy" is misleading for undergraduates. Gratuitous ambiguity due to laziness is not the goal, but rather an inclusion of degree, probability and ambiguity in the formulation of structures that respond to phenomena. In other words it is harder and more intellectually demanding to engage in fuzzy thinking. Kosko has a thorough understanding of traditional logic and its fallacies as well as all the specific scientific applications of fuzzy thinking.

Traditional logic, with all its artificiality, is based on language, but the irony is that the flesh of language is our bodily experience, the cries and sighs and gurgles of needs and wants that slowly grow into more complex sounds that usually connote more than they denote. Nature constantly speaks a language that is homospatial and homotemporal, layered and nonlinear in space and time, and this language still resides in our subconscious world of dreams. While expository writing necessitates so-called logical, grammatically correct sentences that grow into coherent, well-developed paragraphs integrated by a thesis, this type of writing should not exclude the multivalent nature of experience, of our bodies, our dreams and our environments. Clarity in expository writing is important so you must redefine words in the context in which you are using them but it's okay to struggle with solutions, to end with answers and to obfuscate a cause-effect relationship with a provocative "what if?" "

- Julia L. Keefer

I’ll have to disengage from online stuff on Ukraine for a while because although I have no intention of isolating myself from the life-changing events that are occurring in my literal backyard and are going to affect Europe for years to come, the rate at which I’ve been consuming the news cycle is starting to affect my head and that’s just not benefiting anything or anyone.

But before I do fuck off, a few words on what I’ve been noticing today. Namely that after the initial shock of seeing the terrorist gas station just going fucking mental and actually invading a sovereign country with no justification whatsoever, people (overwhelmingly uninformed Americans, as is tradition) have gone back to both-sidesing the war and sharing their dumbass radical centrist takes on how maybe Putin not good, but NATO is at fault. How NATO provoked the little fascist oligarchy into two days of nonstop war crimes. How if the evil West had just told Ukraine to fuck off, we don’t want you around, everything would have been peachy keen.

And there’s only one thing I can say to that—if you don’t support a people’s right to decide on its fate, on who it chooses to associate with; if you think that countries are by default beholden to whoever wields the biggest stick and have no right to rock the boat because might makes right, then I don’t give a fuck about how many thoughts and prayers you post—you don’t support Ukraine. You’re not an anti-imperialist and you sure as fuck aren’t a leftist. You’re a useful lapdog for the propaganda of a dying empire stuck in the 19th century notion of great powers that are somehow entitled to a sphere of influence, regardless of whatever said sphere of influence has to say about it or whether it even wants to be one. You’re showing a willingness to throw a free people expressing a desire to live in democracy to an expansionist dictatorship that’s a humans rights nightmare, simply “because that’s how the world works, nothing to do about it”. By regurgitating the Kremlin line on NATO provocation and “expansion” (i.e. Russia’s former colonies doing everything in their power to get the fuck out of Russia’s homicidal reach), you’re actively promoting colonialism and imperialism and you’re as useful to the victims of these horror shows as a soiled toilet paper.

Your “suck it up, buttercup” helps no one whatsoever. Quite frankly, it’s a part of the reason why we got here.

I implore you, read a fucking book on Eastern European history. Go into therapy with your U.S. centrism and “every conflict is like the Iraq War” because I swear, nobody in this part of the world is impressed with your main character syndrome. Grow out of the idiotic thinking that just because US BAD, an authoritarian regime automatically good.

You’re a part of the problem. Get solved, please.

Why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA (however “metaphorically”), but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or a coherent electromagnetic field? The answer, it seems, is because it’s pretty much impossible to ascribe self-interest to a snowflake. If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found. Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.

David Graeber What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun

Listen/purchase: G.I.M.P. - Government Issue Music Protest by Loki with Becci Wallace

I frequently hear the same yearning expressed in my consulting room – the wish for the world to disappear, for a cessation of any feelings, whether positive or negative, that intrude on the patient’s peace, alongside the painful awareness that the world’s demands are waiting on the way out. You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless. Life becomes something that won’t stop bothering you. Among its most frequent and oppressive symptoms is chronic indecision, as though all the possibilities and choices life confronts you with cancel each other out, leaving only an irritable stasis.

Josh Cohen

Every winter an absent joy pains you and you walk under the rain one in two: you and the person you were in another winter. You speak secretly to yourself words you don’t understand because of memory’s inability to retrieve a previous emotion, and because of longing’s ability to add what did not exist to what existed. Such as the tree becoming a forest and the stone a quail, such as being happy in a prison cell you see wider than a public garden, and the past standing waiting for you tomorrow like a loyal dog. Longing lies and it doesn’t tire of lying because it lies truthfully. The lying of longing is a profession. ... It is the fusion of instinct in the conscious and the unconscious. It is lost time complaining of the sadism of the present.

Mahmoud Darwish 'In the Presence of Abence' Translated by Sinan Antoon