Yesterday, at noon I traveled through the mysterious back roads of PA.

The reason for my journey, or rather I should say, the excuse for my
journey, a deal I found on the mighty fatwallet. (no the deal isn't worth the price in gas but whatever) Basically if you go to
this certain store chain you can get 40x worth of stuff for a
expenditure of 20x dollars. The first 20x had to be spent on a specific
set of goods from a particular company, but a lot of those goods
weren't bad at all and they were all on sale to begin with. Coffee,
Pizza, Nuts, Cereal, Crackers, Cookies that kind of stuff. The second
20x you can spend on anything you want in the store. X is usually 1,
but depending on your conscience and how many fictitious names you want
to use and/or how many accomplices you have with you, x can be a lot
more than 1.

This isn't the best food deal that I have seen, but it was a decent one
and a convenient way for me to stock up on a lot of food stuffs for
reasonably cheap.   x was only 2 for me, but there is a non-zero chance
I will go back again tomorrow and make x 3. Really though the day to do
this was Sunday early, even today some of the goods were already sold
out.

The problem is the version of this store that is near to me was
recently closed down so I had to travel to another one. The maps de la
google told me that there is in fact another store only a little
further away from me than the last but the path is a weird one. I have
to travel north across obscure back roads I have never traveled before.
One road google told me to take was so obscure and tiny looking that I
decided to reject that route and drag the line across to roads that at
least sounded like they were bigger and more noticeable. This only
added a couple of minutes to the total time so I went with that.  I
like google maps now. It used to bother me a lot and I still think the
directions it gives are a little obscurely worded and harder to follow
than mapquest, but the maps themselves are very impressive and easy to
read and manipulate. I don't like that the scroll wheel zooms rather
than scrolls the page though, that constantly causes me frustration,
but the dragging of routes won me over.

So I went. First I traveled through the college town. Oddly this is a
part of the nearby campus I've never really been before, but you can
tell a lot of students live up this way in apartments because you can
see them walking toward campus. You can also tell it was a part of the
college because of the big multi-colored Bus with the picture of the
campus mascot traveling through the area.

As I traveled on the collegy atmosphere slowly melted away and I ended
up traveling through increasingly rural areas. At first there were the
parks that were so obviously domesticated, but that soon gave way to
older looking homes built into the countryside which in turn gave way
to farm land and hillsides.

It was weird that I passed by quite a few signs of roadkill. There was
one dear lying dead looking up at me and it looked like it had just
barely missed getting off of the road in time.

It's strange to think of how many animals have died for our ability to
move about conveniently using automobiles. If ever we were to decide
that other species of mammals were truly deserving of exactly or nearly
the same respect, rights and privileges that we afford to human beings,
then when we look back at the very act of driving we may start to see
it as a historical crime on the level of slavery, the oppression of
women, or the destruction of native american civilizations, the
holocaust, or the very existence of third world countries. Which means
of course that we will poopoo about it for a while and then promptly
try as hard as we can to forget it ever happened. That dear I saw may
be one of the countless unnamed victims who is sacrificed because lazy
people like me can't be bothered with riding a bicycle.

You might say, well, we'll never really grant other mammals that kind
of regard anyway. I mean they aren't self aware in the way that we are.
To that I say, one, I challenge you to prove that in a way that is
beyond the shadow of a doubt. And two, we are a lot closer to giving
certain mammals that level of privilege right now than you think. In
particular we give dogs a lot more consideration than we did a century
ago and we express a similar outrage to the injustices done to them
that we express to injustices done to our fellow human beings, and
sometimes a heck of a lot more. Some get pissed off about this and
think it is unnatural. I've got no problem with it. The choices we make
on what and who to value are mostly arbitrary so what difference does
valuing dogs more than strangers really make? It is much akin to
valuing your siblings or your children above the siblings and children
of people you've never met. There's no real 'reason' for this. But it
would be an awfully twisted world if we didn't think this way so I
wouldn't want it any other way.

Anyway passing by the poor dead victim of social injustice I come
across the road that google maps wanted me to take so on a whim I drive
down it a little ways. This was one scary road. Tiny, one lane with
huge hills and lots of ditches and pitfalls on the left and right hand
side to fall off of. Woodlands covered everything making it dark and
difficult to see anything and the road curved about in sharp corners
without much indication that a turn was coming up. And the guy behind
me is totally tailgating me even though I'm going at the expected 40
mph which seems to me to be waaay too fast to navigate that dangerous
road, and people passing on my left hand side going the other way seem
to be zooming pretty fast too so I guess its common behavior to be
traveling 55, 60 n this crazy back road.

That's enough of that. I quickly turn around and go back on the route
that I had altered it to. This was a much safer route all the roads
were like numbered and easier to follow. Only one weird encounter here
and that is that I came upon a place where the sign said "One Lane
Bridge" with a stop sign, a phenomenon I've seen only once before. Only
this time the bridge was surprisingly long compared to the last place
I'd seen  such a thing so it was difficult if not impossible to really
see if anyone was coming  from the other side.  I'm not sure how this
bridge does not result in numerous accidents or at least traffic jams
where someone has to back up in order to clear the bridge so that the
other vehicle can pass. I guess people get along with it just fine
though since nobody ever bothered to rebuild the bridge and make it two
lanes wide.

I arrive at the store before long buy my goods and then I'm off again.
This time on the way home I decide on a whim to try a different route.
Not the one recommended by google maps and not the one I came, but a
different one I could see on the map I printed out. Why? Mostly because
I was bored and wanted to see what else there was to see in this place
I'd never been before.

Of course I promptly got lost. And that's fine. I actually felt pretty
good about being lost. It gave me the sense of being on an adventure
and not knowing where exactly I am. I usually do enjoy getting lost
except when I have somewhere that I need to be. If I'm in a rush and
get lost then I start to get pissed off and if I'm by myself I'll be
shouting and cursing and screaming at the heavens like the best of
them, and when I'm with someone else and am lost and in a hurry, it
takes all of my willpower to stop myself from acting too much like a
dick due to my frustration, anger, and annoyance. I am never fully
successful.

But when I'm by myself and have nowhere to be and nothing to do, I
couldn't be happier to get lost. In fact I don't even try to be found.
I just drive and drive and barely glance at a map and just look around
me to see what it is that is out there. And when I start to run out of
gas with no gas station to be found and my cell phone starts to run out
of batteries as were both the case yesterday, well then that's just
when it starts to get really exciting.

Some of my favorite stories are "amnesia" stories. You know those tales
where someone forgets all about who they were and everyone they knew
and has to both figure out how to lead their life from then on and go
on a quest to find out the life that they lost.   Sometimes I think
such a story would be incredibly cool to be a part of. To really have
no memories tying you to the present, no bindings keeping you bound to
life that you once lead and only your natural abilities to determine
what you can be from then on. That sounds just great. So much fun. It
would be far less boring than going on the way things always are with
only the options before you that were available before you yesterday
and are likely to be there before you tomorrow.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure actually having amnesia would be a
horribly unpleasant experience. It would probably drive you crazy with
wondering about who you really were. But why is that exactly? Probably
because you would have this nagging feeling that you'd lost things that
were important, that you didn't want to give up.  So maybe the trick
would be to leave some sort of a note for yourself to let you know not
to worry about your old life. So since in order to make an interesting
story your wallet, cell phone, car license plate and any other
materials that could be used to identify you would have to be totally
lost in whatever accident resulted in your amnesia, the way to remind
yourself would have to be something tatooed on your body.  So maybe you
have a tatoo across your chest that says:  "Self, in the event that you
ever wake up and don't remember anything about your previous life.
Relax. Don't bother to look for your old life. It sucked anyway." 
Whether or not that message represents the truth, it would provide a
great relief to your amnesiac self right? Now you don't have to be so
freaked out by thoughts of what might have beens.

Don't worry. I don't intend to try to give myself amnesia any time
soon. I know the probability is pretty high that I'd end up crippled in
every other possible way but still have my memories fully intact.  And
besides, I wouldn't want to do that to anyone I know. It'd be to cruel.
Still, sometimes that feeling of being lost somewhere I've never been
gives me that feeling of being in an amnesia story, of being totally
just 'away' from everything I've ever known. I like it. It feels good.

The area I traveled through while I was lost had some interesting quirks that I observed.

During the first leg of my journey home I traveled though a weird area
that had like a golf course ever five, ten miles and farm lands
interspersed in-between. What was being cultivated in these farms, why
corn of course. Ah corn, America's crop.  Some book I read a while back
said that if you are what you eat than Americans are corn. I believe
it. Corn is everywhere. The only other visible thing on those farms
were occasional cows.

The golf courses were unusual but the farm lands weren't anything
special to me. The place where I grew up was similarly populated with
small farms like this as far as the eye could see back in the day. Of
course now it's all commercialized there, but I remember growing up and
driving bout seeing corn fields and cows all around. There are still a
few farms out there but its nothing like the old days. Driving through
this mysterious area filled with farms yesterday made me feel a little
nostalgic.

Besides golf courses one thing that was very different in the area that
I was driving were the road signs. You see every half a mile or so on
the roads I was traveling I would see these strange orange helpful
signs. They would say:

"Buckle Up. It's the Law."

or

"Don't Tailgate"

or, and most commonly:

"Slow Down. Save a Life."

Fascinating eh? It's interesting to me that these three signs use
entirely different motivators to try and get you to do what they
suggest. "Don't Tailgate" is the empty imperative. It's an "order" that
you should do just because the sign tells you to. The sign doesn't
specify the advantages of not tailgating, nor does it appeal to any
higher authority. Rather, I suppose you are supposed to rationally see
the wisdom of the directive and so do as it says or else you are just
supposed to do as it says without really thinking about it.

"Buckle Up. It's the Law" is a direct appeal to authority. They cold
have just said "Buckle Up" or even said "Buckle Up. It will save your
life." But they don't. Instead they assume you aren't going to think to
buckle up unless there is a direct threat of legal or monetary consequences should
you choose not to buckle up. You should buckle up because it is "the
law".

The third sign, "Slow Down. Save a Life." is the most irrational of
all. It uses an appeal to ethics to sway you. Everyone knows that
saving a life is good, so you gain some moral advantage by slowing
down, hence you'd do it right?

It would be an odd world if all I had to do was slow down a little and
that would prevent someone, somewhere from dying. That'd totally be
awesome, I'd slow down all the time, in fact if we all just stopped
maybe human beings would live forever.  But we rationally know that it
isn't going to do anything at all. No, the sign means that if I slow
down and I happen to get into an accident someone won't die or that by
slowing down I will not get into an accident that could cause someone
to die. Of course there isn't even the slightest guarantee of that. In
fact I can even imagine scenarios where my slowing down might actually
cost a life. Say for example I slow down and guy behind me doesn't and
bashes right on into me killing me! Well that's no good! Ok, maybe the
sign is still accurate as maybe my slowing down prevented the guy
behind me from getting into a worse accident that would have caused
some other stranger their life. So my slowing down saved a life at the low cost expense of my own.  Ok, still not exactly all that great from my perspective anyway.

Somehow I don't think that's what was
intended.  Also, here's another scenario. Say there's somebody dying in
my passenger seat that I have to get to a hospital. Now my slowing down
would surely cost that person their life so it certainly wouldn't be
accurate to say that I should slow down because it will save a life.
The sign should probably say something like "Slow Down. Decrease the
probability of committing Vehicular Manslaughter." That would be more
accurate.

I'm not sure why in this area of PA they feel it is necessary for
drivers to be reminded of various common sense things every few
minutes. Do people forget that they are supposed to drive at the speed
limit that frequently out there? Do they randomly unbuckle their
seatbelts ever few minutes and then need to be reminded to buckle up
again? I don't get it. It seems like a big waste of signs. Maybe it is
sort of like a subliminal message meant to drive its way into drivers
subconsciouses eventually conditioning them to drive in a certain way.
And maybe it even works. Maybe now I'm much more likely to slow down,
buckle up, and not tailgate than I was before getting lost in the
wilderness of PA. And I may never even realize the cause. Clever sign makers.

Well, I drove on. Still lost. My phone beeps telling me it is running
low on power. I look around and notice that I took out the car charger
the other day when I was cleaning out the interior of my car and didn't
put it back. Sweat. If my phone runs out of power I'm totally screwed.
A good deal less than a quarter tank of gas left, and I haven't seen a
gas station in as far back as I can remember. Hmm. I wonder how people
get gas out here?

I see a sign that says Applebees ahead. I think maybe I'll stop and get
lunch at Applebees and while there ask someone A. where to get gas, and
B.  how to get back home. Seems like a plan. Well I drove and drove and
I swear there was no Applebees. What the heck was that sign? A mirage?
I do see a weird diner shaped like a windmill. Something about that
place scared me off so I kept driving.

Still lost. Why am I lost? What am I searching for? There's just no point in being lost. It's a waste of time.

Soon after I have that thought I see a sign for a road that I remember
so I take it, heading south which I know is the general direction to
home. Will this road work? Will I get there? Who knows. But it is an
interesting path.

As I drive down this road I find myself truly in the countryside now.
Just farms. Barely any signs even. Except for one. I saw a sign saying
you can hire horse and carriage rides ahead. As if summoned by the sign
I see a horse and carriage driving along the road a minute later.

And that was the only one I saw for another ten minutes. And then I saw
them everywhere. Seriously everybody had a horse and carriage. It
seemed like in this area it was the default means of transportation. It
was quite odd since I don't know what the rules of the road are with
respect to horse and carriages. Do they have the right of way? Anyway,
I saw everybody else just passing them when it was safe to do so, regardless of the solidity of the center road lines, so so
do I. It was just really strange to see so many horse drawn vehicles
actually on the road. I think I saw more that day than I have my entire
life. It was quite a unique experience.

The road goes on and on winding and winding and twice making a crazy
right angle turn at a four way intersection. Both times I accidentally
kept going straight only to have to turn around to get back on the
right road. So annoying, but ultimately not hard.

Eventually, I drive and drive, my phone dead, my car almost out of gas,
I see the dead dear and it's still staring at me. I guess I'm home now.
Whatever that means.

I usually wake up pretty early. Not at any set time, but anywhere between 5 AM and 7 AM I will usually wake up whether I want to or not. Sometimes, if I went to sleep really late then I'll wake up like as late as 8:30 or 9 but never much later than that. I have an alarm clock and it rings every once in a while but I honestly can't remember the last time the alarm clock has actually woken me up. I'll always awake when it goes off.

And I tend to wake up pretty alert too. I usually don't feel like I need something to wake me up and I usually don't feel this urge to crawl back into bed and sleep the world away. I just get up. I start checking me email, doing many other pointless things, and living life as anyone would on a normal day. Sometimes I'll get tired later and have to take a nap or something, but I rarely wake up and want to go back to sleep right away.

Today was different. I woke up feeling this profound feeling of lethargy. I really didn't want to get up. I just wanted to stay in bed and keep sleeping and sleeping. I felt as if I had absolutely zero energy and zero will to act. None of the things I imagined doing with myself for the day appealed to me anywhere near as much as the thought of sleeping or even just lying down staring at nothing appealed to me.

And so I did. I woke up at about 7:00 AM, got up checked my email, and then went right back down to bed again. I lay there stared at the ceiling for a while, got up, dozed, got up walked around, lay down on the futon, dozed, got up checked my email, sat down in my chair, dozed, woke up lay down on the floor stared at the ceiling for a while, dozed, got up paced around my apartment, lay down in bed again, dozed, and so on. This lasted until like 11:30 or so.

I just didn't want to do anything! My will was so totally sapped and I couldn't understand why. There were so many things I knew I needed to do. There were so many things I, in fact, wanted to do, things I had planned to do last night before going to bed. But this morning the though of doing them just filled me with a sense of utter disinterest. They all seemed like such a waste of time. So instead I burned 4 and a half hours doing nothing at all.

What caused this feeling? Maybe it was the tiring and emotionally draining events of this past weekend. Maybe it is the inevitable feelings of fear and self doubt that I knew would come eventually but which I somehow managed to mostly avoid last week. Or maybe it was all that really odd dream.

In my dream there were two of me. One of me was standing and watching the other me, but like behind some kind of a glass barrier so he couldn't interfere. The other me, who was the actual me, the point of reference me, was sitting at a strange desk and in front of me is this infinitely growing stack of papers and I am being forced to read them all. The papers are in fact huge letters from all of the people I know addressed to me. They are almost like payback for all the long letters I have written in the past, an equivalent amount for me to read in recompense. And what's more they are all about me, lengthy treatises on who I am and what they think of me and what I should do and why I should do it. Some of the letters are angry, some are cruel, some are sad, some are kind, some are full of praise, others are filled with bitter criticism. The letters are all extensive, even letters from people I've barely interacted with, people I only met once, people I don't even remember the names of. Their letters are there though, and they all have more to say than I ever imagined. But none of them ever have anything to say about themselves. And the whole time I'm reading, I keep wondering why they don't talk about themselves.

The me that is watching behind the glass is horrified and terrified by the proceedings. He keeps shouting for the me in the chair at the desk to stop reading and to get up and run away. Get out of there while you still can! But the me in the chair is addicted and can't get enough of the letters. He just reads and reads, sometimes horrified by what he reads, sometimes deeply moved, but in all cases incapable of stopping. I never want to stop. I feel so gratified for finally knowing something.

When I awoke of course I don't remember any letters content. Indeed there weren't any letters, only dreams. But maybe a part of me just kept wanting to go back there and read those letters, whereas a part of me is horrified by the very thought of my ever having been there. Perhaps the conflict kept me in this netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, trying to find some reconciliation between two directly contradictory urges.

So anyway, now it's after 5 and I've resolved that I'm just going to spend the rest of the day writing, rather than doing the other things I should be doing. That usually helps me to reconcile the stranger thoughts that twist reality in ways I did not expect.

I agree.

While it is apparent as many people have mentioned that the two terms
by pure definition are not equivalent,  if you look at the connotations
of the terms it tells a different story.

Terrorism is a tactic, but a "terrorist" in modern parlance is a
despicable being bent on the destruction of civilization for selfish or
deluded reasons. The 'terrorist' is never seen in a good light. They
are the people that good people should fight to defeat. They are the
enemy that should be locked up and throw away the key. A 'terrorist'
isn't merely a person who uses a terror inspiring tactic, it is a
simply 'evil' person with no regard for the sanctity of human life. The
reason the term is contorted in common usage is that we are always
inclined to think negatively of those who rely on fear to coerce us
into a certain course of action. The very nature of the term is such
that we should expect it to attract negative connotations like a magnet.

Likewise, a freedom fighter is seen in a heroic light. They are the
people willing to do things, whatever things, that the common
individual is not willing to do in order to fight for freedom against
an oppressor.  So a freedom fighter might starve himself or put himself
in harms way risking imprisonment or death, or a freedom fighter might
take up guns or car bombs and try to kill as many of the enemy as
possible. In either case, from the perspective of his or her culture or
at least from his or her own perspective he or she is fighting for
freedom, and would reject the idea of being deemed a 'terrorist'.

So really it's all a lot about PR. A person might try to brand their
organization as "freedom fighters" because that gives their cause more
clout, makes the people more accepting of their tactics however cruel
they may be. Yet those in power whose power is at risk as a consequence
of that same organization's actions might brand them "terrorists" in
order to get the popular support against them.

So yes, one man might see a particular person as a freedom fighter
whereas another man might see that same person as a terrorist even
though the person in question is doing the same things for the same expressed reasons. And yes
historically this struggle has panned out again and again, even when
groups are assiduously careful not to engage in violent acts in their
struggle for freedom, the power elite has still been inclined to deem
them terrorists. This is the natural and expected reaction. After all
those whose power is at risk are going to be afraid of anything that
threatens it, so in a certain sense yeah all freedom fighters are
inspiring fear through their actions.  Don't kid yourself, a million
man march may not use any explosives or weaponry but it would not have
any effect at all if it weren't for the fact that is in fact a
significant show of solidarity that could easily be translated into a threat of force.

On the other hand historically groups that have fought using
terroristic techniques and won (or at least survived) tend to write their own history and in
that history they are far from inclined to call themselves
'terrorists'. Rather they will write in high prose about their heroic
struggle for freedom against the oppressors and bring to light every
dark aspect of the previous regime that they overthrow that they can
find in order to show the necessity of their struggle while not talking
at all about their own misdeeds.

It's all rather sick really.  Can we elevate our discussion beyond this
level? Perhaps in the circles of academia they can, most of the time,
but in the media and amongst the common folk it seems almost hopeless.
Perspective rarely enters into the social dialog.

Maybe the solution is to rewrite our languages in order to create terms
that don't carry such absurd baggage around with them.  For example
henceforth we might rely on the following:

Blah -  a person who does a socially deemed morally reprehensible act
such as - killing, murdering, kidnapping, maming, raping, or destroying
of property

Bleh -  a person acting in order to further a cause or a principle he or she believes in

So you can be a Blah or you can be a Bleh or you can be a BlahBleh.

And we add modifiers:

~BlahBleh - a person who specifically abstains from killing, murdering,
raping, kidnapping, maming, or destroying property when fighting for a
cause that he or she believes in.

Blah~Bleh  - a person who kills, murders, rapes, kidnaps, mames, or
destroys but not for any cause or principle that they believe in, i.e.
just for the heck of it.

Now Blah~Bleh's we obviously condemn, and ~BlahBleh's we might well praise. The
tricky one is the BlahBleh. But in order to understand that case better
a further distinction must be made, namely with regards to the 'causes'
that a Bleh is fighting for.

Foo(x) - a cause is foo if it is considered morally praiseworthy within a given society X.

Bar(x) - a cause is bar if it is considered morally reprehensible within a given society X.

Note a cause can be ~Foo(x)  but also ~Bar(x).  Meaning the cause is one the society X passes no judgment upon.

So where X is the society consisting just of me and only me then any
cause that I am fighting for and I believe in, I probably also think is
morally praiseworthy, so it is Foo(x) for me.

We'll also specify a special society that we will call Z which includes
every living sentient being to have ever lived or ever will live.  A
cause that is Foo(Z) is a moral absolutely good cause. It is good in
all possible worlds. Who knows if such a thing actually exists but
certainly things like feeding people who are starving and housing the
homeless are good candidate causes. Bar(Z) is obviously truly evil.
Though it is difficult to imagine a person who is Bleh-ing toward a
Bar(Z) cause since that would mean fighting for a cause that even you
believe is morally reprehensible which makes little sense.  And
something that is both ~Foo(Z) and ~Bar(Z) is something absolutely
nobody cares about in any possible world. So maybe my right to yawn at
9:03 AM on 8/4/2007 when sitting by myself where nobody will ever know
or care might be an example of such a cause.

Lastly, for short hand we'll create variables for people and we'll
label them A, B, C, etc. A person A belongs to any number of societies
Y, X, W, etc. In addition every person A has at least one society X
which is the default reference society for their moral world view. For
example a person who strongly believes in a particular religion and
utilizes the religion first and foremost when making moral judgments,
then the society made up of members of that religion and traditions
created through that religion is that person's default reference
society. It is the first place the person looks when making moral
judgments about the morality of a cause or a action. Likewise, a person
who sees himself as first and foremost an 'American' and makes moral
judgments based on how much in line a particular cause or action is
with American values of freedom, independence, capitalism, or whatever,
then that 'American' society is that person's default reference society.

When referencing a person's default reference society (or more
precisely the intersection of all common moral principles across all
such default reference societies for a given person) we will use the
shorthand A.DR

Few, background done.

You might be thinking after reading the above, why did I create a
relativist framework for understanding causes and principles inherent
in the Bleh aspect of a person but I did not do the same when
discussing actions with regards to the Blah aspect of a person. The
reason is fairly simple. I think it is easier to determine the moral
standings of certain kinds of actions, at least those for which we are
concerned when we are talking about 'terrorism'. Hence, I did not think
it necessary to go into depth when discussing actions relativistically.
I leave that as an exercise for the reader. Suffice it to say that the
actions we are concerned about when discussing a Blah person are those
that would be something approaching Rab(Z) as opposed to being
something like Oof(A.DR).

Ok, now, here's the way we think of BlahBleh's right now.

For a given person A, a BlahBleh that is Blehing for a cause that is
Foo(A.DR) will be a person that A praises and forgives or at least
forgets the Blah actions of. Or put another way, all persons C that
have a C.DR such that a cause of a given BlahBleh is Foo(C.DR)  will
either forgive, forget, or ignore the Blah actions of said BlahBleh.

On the other hand if a cause is ~Foo(A.DR) and ~Bar(A.DR) then A will
generally criticize the Blah methods while being tolerant though not
understanding of the Bleh principles. So A will be like to say things
like "they should have found a better way" and whatnot.

Lastly if a cause is Bar(A.DR), A is pretty likely not even to consider
the BlahBleh person as a BlahBleh. Rather A will tend to find the
BlahBleh person's purposes so incomprehensible and evil that A will
think of the person as acting in a Blah~Bleh fashion. Even if the
BlahBleh person claims a cause, A is unlikely to believe him. A will
think of the person as 'evil' and unredeemable just by virtue of the
fact that the causes the person purports to follow are contrary to A's
default reference society's moral values.

So that's the way it works now. So what's the problem?

It's hypocrisy. That's the problem.

If we were a rational people we would not distinguish between
~Foo(A.DR) and ~Bar(A.DR)  and the Bar(A.DR).  Both share the
characteristics of being a thing that is not something we find morally
acceptable in accordance with our default reference society's moral
value system. The fact that we condemn one without bothering to try and
understand it while at least giving the other the benefit of the doubt
is hypocritical.

Secondly, why privilege Foo(A.DR) causes at all? The fact that a person
was fighting for a good cause by our own reference point does not
eliminate the harm that they have caused. It does not bring the people
killed back to life. It does not make the pain and suffering that
occurred as if it had never existed. If you are doing Blah acts, why
should people be willing to forgive and forget them just because an act
happens to be leading toward a good cause by their own vantage point?
After all, there almost certainly exists a a different social system
under which that same cause might not be praiseworthy at all. It could
even be blameworthy under a certain society. Say for example if you are
fighting to preserve Globalization, some societies see relative
benefits from Globalization whereas others see only relative
disadvantages. In that case the same cause can be seen as praiseworthy
and blameworthy depending on your perspective.

Now an argument can be made that if something is Foo(Z) then the Blah
components of a BlahBleh person's actions can perhaps be considered
just and thus not worthy of criticism or blame. But that presupposes
that we can determine easily whether a BlahBleh's causes are Foo(Z) and
not just Foo(n.DR) where n is any member of the set of all persons that
we happen to know about at the time. There could be some obscure
society out there that perceives a cause as unjust or irrelevant that
all other societies we happen to know about deem just.

It seems reasonable to me to instead of relying on such a system just
looking at each component of the problem individually. We consider the
Blah aspect of a person independently of whether or not they are Bleh.
So that, a Bleh person can be praised for their willingness to be a
Bleh and fight for a cause that is Foo(A.DR) or even approaches Foo(Z),
even as we punish that same person for acting in a Blah manner. Perhaps
say, we offer protection and
economic security to a BlahBleh's family even as you give the BlahBleh
a fair trial and punish them for all of their misdeeds, including if
necessary interrogation or purposeful reputation destruction or
whatever other techniques might serve as both punishment and deterrent.
You do this even if the BlahBleh is successful is furthering their Bleh
cause which is a Foo(A.DR).  The consequences, however good,
should not excuse the acts done to further those consequences, and
anyone who chooses to act in a Blah way should be aware of this and
take it into account when choosing to act in that fashion. This makes
the sacrifices of the BlahBleh all the more powerful and meaningful and
ensures that only people who truly believe that what they are doing is
necessary and the only way to further their ends engage in acts that
are beyond the pale of what is considered morally acceptable. They no
longer have the safety blanket of thinking that their actions may one
day be forgiven. Ideally, as society evolves and becomes more and more
Just there will be less and less of a need to ever become a BlahBleh.

Well, if you could follow all that, I am most impressed. I'll try harder to confuse you more next time.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

For the first time I've gotten a chance to play around with windows vista for a significant amount of time. I'm using the Home Premium edition and I am using it to type this blog entry right now.

Overall, I don't dislike it. It doesn't seem to have the huge improvements over the previous version that windows xp had over ME, but then that would be pretty unlikely since windows XP is a fine OS that I've never had any problems with whereas ME you couldn't pay me to use.

I was actually surprised by the number of UI changes that I quite like. There are a lot of concepts that I have seen on other OSes that seem to be incorporated. The start menu is a lot less annoying now. I still prefer  multiple menus across the top rather than jamming everything together into one button at the bottom, but the start is fine and the organization is clean. I like the translucent windows, the directory structure is much more sane than the old one. And I am ecstatic that they finally made it so that running software does not default to administrative privileges. The best thing though is the new address bar in explorer. It's just really cool and very efficient for moving around through directories and I haven't seen anything quite exactly like it before. I love it.

There are lots of little other improvements I like. From the order in which menus are displayed, to the integration of search into everywhere, to the new control panel, to the lack of annoying advertisements in the left hand sidebars. Generally everything just seems a little bit better here and there making a better overall experience. I am much more impressed than I thought I would be at least as far as the user interface goes. One might argue whether small cosmetic changes to appearance, however well conceived, are worth buying a brand new OS for. Or if the difficulty in needing to relearn how one interacts with one's computer will cause more problems than the improvements solve. But you can't argue that the interface did not improve. It's definitely better now. 

But there's one thing about this new OS that bothers me a great deal. It's  a little slow. Not slow in an intolerable way, but slow enough to be annoyingly noticeable. I am running the OS on a brand new laptop, albeit a pretty low end one compared to what's out there these days, but its still a dual-core  processor with a gig of ddr2 ram which makes it considerably faster than my desktop.  It is a laptop so I don't know maybe it has a really bad motherboard or something, but I doubt it.

You see the interesting thing is that its slow but it is slow in a weird way. Start up and shutdown both go fast.  What's more individual apps don't run slow at all. Their internal menus are all quite responsive and it all works pretty smoothly. Any particular program I am interacting with I can't tell the difference. Even running multiple programs at once, the programs themselves seem to run pretty fast and don't seem to slow each other up substantially.

What is slow is the windowing interaction. If I have multiple programs up and try switching between one to another there is a delay. If I resize a window or move a window there is a delay. The more windows the more noticeable the effect. Also, sometimes when I click on a new executable that I have not run before there is a considerable delay before the application or installer begins. Sometimes it lasts as long as a minute before the OS pops a box that asks me if it is ok to run the program. After that box pops then it runs fast but the delay until that point is pretty annoying.

Perhaps I am just spoiled, back when XP started I had to turn off all of the eye candy and fluff in order to interact with the system smoothly. Since then, many upgrades and new computers later now I run XP with all of the features enabled and don't notice any slowdown at all, and likewise I don't notice any issues when running either kde or gnome without adjustment. But now Vista apparently is a little more intensive so I guess I'm going to have to learn to turn some stuff off again.  But first I'll try upgrading the RAM and see if it helps.

Anyway, I like Vista well enough, but I still wouldn't pay for it if it didn't come with the computer I was buying and I don't intend to upgrade any of my other computers any time soon if ever. Still, it is always fascinating to watch how each OS strives to outdo the last.

"when I was young and I'd get an A on a history test or whatever, I'd get this good feeling about all of the things that I could be and then I never became any of them."

- "The Pursuit of Happyness"

Have you ever felt haunted by the past?
Have you ever felt as if the ghosts of your past experiences are ever
hovering around you tormenting you with their perpetual ephemeral
presence? Every word you say and hear, every silence, every thought
seems imbued with echoes of memories of things that have gone before.
What might otherwise have been a pleasant experience is spoiled by our
recollections. Where once we might have spoken comfortably, we instead
remain silent terrified of bringing back the echoes of things past gone
awry.

What kinds of memories haunt us? The usual suspects.
Moments of trauma. Moments of doubt and fear. Instances where we were
ridiculed or attacked out of hand. The death and loss of those we cared
about. Mistakes we've made. Those times when we said the wrong thing or
did the wrong thing or failed to say or do a thing worth doing or
saying. The cruelty we've unleashed the anger we've suppressed. The
things we forgot when we most needed to remember them. Worse are the
moments perpetuated. Times when we made the same bad decision again and
again and again, knowingly but always wishing we would do otherwise.
Worse still are the single moments where we act in a manner so contrary
to our self image that we find ourselves conflicted with the knowledge
that a being we utterly reject lurks within us.

How do we deal with these haunting memories? How can we get rid of them and move on and live a life unburdened by the past?

My
personal experiences hold no clues for how to do this. Every childhood
memory that haunts me I don't think I've ever properly excised and at
this point they are so much a part of me that I doubt I ever will. In
any case we are almost always the worst judge of our own experiences,
least qualified to distill from them understanding that might serve as
benefit to others.

Still, there may be one place we can look for answers, a place that I turn to all the time. Stories.

But
in this case we find the usual stories to be surprisingly lacking. The
problem is that stories always end at the end. The heroes are
victorious or the major conflict is ended. We don't often see years
down the line how the characters are coping with the haunting memories
of things that went before. Usually conflicts are solved in a very neat
package. Everyone comes to understand and ordinarily forgive everyone
else or else the characters die so we don't have to worry about that. 
In stories characters rarely make a final decision to accept or forgive
and then feel conflicted about it or still feel pained by the past.
They are rarely haunted by memories and they rarely face an eternal
struggle to put the past behind them. Story characters have it easy.
Their memories only go as far back as the author chooses to create for
them and their troubles end when the author writes the last word and
everyone lives happily ever after. Not so for people like us.

In the real world, the memories dominate. They are a pain in the butt. Epheremal,
transparent, hard to get a hold of. These are no villains easily
vanquished, no puzzle easily solved. If you face a conflict in the
present, someone says or does something you don't like, you can fight
back, you can tell them to go to hell, or punch them in the face, or
you can attack back in some other way, try to show them the error in
their ways or try and convince them to think differently. There's
something tangible you can latch on to. The present is a series of
problems to solve and enemies to defeat.  But how do you fight a
memory? It lingers around us always, seems so unreal, and yet so very
troublesome. You can't really tell someone to go to hell for saying
something three years ago that you didn't realize how much it bothered
you until today. Well you can, but it wouldn't have the same effect.
Likewise, it's hard to broach a subject long gone in which you came to
feel months later that the conclusions drawn were dangerously
incomplete or that you didn't express yourself in the way that you
truly feel. The past just sits their like a great cancerous lump within
the confines of your brain poisoning everything that comes after.

Still
we might gain some interesting insight from certain stories after all,
if we look at them a little cross eyed and squint. The stories I am
referring to that might help us to understand our lot in life are of
course Ghost Stories.  Ghosts share pretty much all the characteristics
of our memories and one can argue that there presence in stories
actually serves simply as symbolic placeholder for those moments in the
past that haunt us in the present. After all there is no evidence of
real ghosts in the world that could be the basis of such stories (or is
there?) and the stories have to have come from somewhere. It is
reasonable to  think of ghosts in stories as just symbolism. They
reflect the trials we face in the real world dealing with the past.

And
in most Ghost stories the ghosts are in fact dealt with! Cool huh? So
we can look at these stories and learn a little bit about how we might
deal with our own ghosts, to be at peace with our own demons. Thinking
back I can think of about four ways in which ghosts are typically dealt
with in stories. Let's look at them one at a time.

--------

1. Vanquished Ghosts

Sometimes you just have to beat the crap out of the ghosts.

This
is in fact the default response in stories. The heroes wield their
magical swords or staffs or special ghost killing guns and go to town
on the ghosts. They take them out. The ghosts are wiped from the face
of the planet never to bother the heroes or anyone else again. It
differs from story to story whether the ghosts are said to have had
their spirits erased from existence or simply driven to the afterlife
where they will find peace, but it hardly matters. From the point of
view of the real world in which the story characters interact the
'problem' that the ghosts posed no longer exists. They are simply gone.
And good riddance.

How might we do the same for our 'memory
ghosts'? You can't stick a sword in a memory can you? Ah,but you can
still make the memory no longer relevant in your world. The way to do
this is straight forward. You simply forget. Just make it so the memory
no longer matters so that your spirit is free, so that you no longer
dwell upon it day to day.

Easier said than done right? Well, in
stories it isn't a trivial matter for heroes to beat the ghosts to
death either. Most of the time they need to use some sort of special
weapon or tool that can touch the insubstantial ghosts whereas normal
physical items can't. So they bust out their ghostbuster guns or take up an enchanted katana or whatever. They find some tool that can reach between worlds and touch a thing that normally cannot be touched.

What
tools might reach out and touch a memory? Hypnosis would probably work.
Sometimes shear willpower can be effective. But most often the weapon
of choice is quite a powerful one that serves a number of purposes
besides.  Distraction.

If you can distract yourself enough you
can prevent yourself from thinking about virtually anything. Buy
yourself deeply enough in other things, other concerns, facing other
demons, or enjoying other experiences and after a while you won't even
remember that thing that was bothering you so much. It just kinda
slides out of mind where it can no longer hurt you. This is why people
when faced with the need to deal with past traumatic experiences often
find it expedient to busy themselves with something, anything to keep
their minds and bodies so occupied that they have no time to think and
no need to recollect. It can work pretty well. Sometimes.

The
problem is that more powerful ghosts are never so easy to defeat as
that they can be taken out by a stab through the heart or single
incantation. The real villainous ghosts of our stories take a lot more
to deal with, and often the direct approach is the most dangerous
approach to apply to them. Sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, the heroes
may make the mistake of attacking the ghosts head on and think that
they have killed the ghosts only to find that the ghosts have possessed
the heroes and made them believe that they were destroyed. This is the
worst situation as the heroes now have to deal with a ghost that they
don't even know is there. It can be a real pain in the butt to get rid
of a ghost that is possessing you if you aren't even aware of its
presence.

So too with the ghosts of our past. Vanquishing a
memory ghost might make sense if it is something trivial like say you
said something stupid at a dinner party that ruined the atmosphere, or
you once locked your keys in your car, or something likewise absurd.
You could let these memories haunt you and you could dwell on them,
beat yourself up over them, but why? Chances are everyone else will
forget them and if they don't does it really matter? You can safely
forget these memories over time and you will be no worse for wear as a
result of it and just resolve to do your best going forward.

But
it can be exceedingly unwise to try the same approach on a stronger
memory ghost.  When you do, when you try to busy yourself and distract
yourself so much that the really devastating memories might be
forgotten, the problem is the memories are never really lost. They just
aren't that weak. They are infused into every aspect of your being, so
no simple distraction will get rid of them. The best you can hope for
is to suppress them, bury them down deep so that you can interact in
such a way that it appears that they are forgotten. You can do this for
a lot more memories than you think you can, with perseverance and determination, but should you?

The
problem is that we act in accordance with our subconscious prior to our
rational mind. So we might well end up 'thinking' that our ghosts are
vanquished only to find ourselves acting in unexpected ways. For example
we might be unexpectedly cruel or intolerant or feel ourselves angry or
exasperated with someone for no reason, or find ourselves being
excessively apologetic or trying to bend over backwards to do something
for others all without ever really knowing why it is that we are
behaving in this way. The very tone of the words we say may well be twisted by the past, and our choices may well be designed to create tension and conflict where we never even wanted them in the first place. There are ghosts that still haunt us and are
influencing our decisions sometimes to our detriment, but we don't know
they are there so we can't rationally assess whether our actions are
the best. Instead we act out of instincts driven by an undetected fear
of the past.

This is a situation that it would be wise to avoid. Consider dealing with stronger memory ghosts using one of the other three techniques.

2. Secrets Revealed

Sometimes a mysterious ghost that has been haunting a region comes
confide in a human being. The ghost reveals his or her story telling
the human what it is that ties them to this mortal plane. The mere act
of revealing the truth and talking them over with the human allows the
ghost to finally let go of the things that bound it to this world. The
ghost travels to the other world at peace.

In other stories, ghosts are terrorizing the world but there's nothing
our heroes seem to be able to do about it. Attempts to defeat the
ghosts physically falter and fail and the ghosts are unstoppable. Until
our intrepid heroes through grueling research and study find out
exactly what it is that keeps the ghosts here in this world, the truth of what came
before, the wrongs that were done to the ghosts and brings it to light.
Once everybody knows the truth, why the ghosts were killed, the ghosts
relent in their assault and finally move on to the other world.

Fascinating eh? Perhaps not all ghosts need be dealt with by sword and
spell when mere knowledge can serve as well.  Can the same be said of
those memories running rampant terrorizing our minds?

I think so. The entire therapy industry depends upon it. The idea being
that sometimes the thing we need to do most in order to move beyond our
pasts is to have an outlet. Someone to talk to and tell the absolute
truth to as you see it, whether or not they believe you or agree with
you or even care about what you are saying. Just the act of revealing
in some form one's thoughts, one's feelings, the things that bother you
and which you can't get past, can help relieve the tension that comes
from thinking that your problems are locked solely within you.

This sounds easy. Pick a random stranger, share all your problems with
them and then you are done. Ghosts gone. And that's that. Heck you
don't even have to look anybody in the eye and tell them the truth just
run a blog and write exactly what is bothering you and I'm sure plenty
of random strangers will commiserate with you or at least you can feel
the illusion that your truths are out there for the world to see.  Or
you could rely on a trained professional taught to listen or tell it to
friends and/or family who care about you, or whatever. Talking and
sharing can be hard at times, but it is far from impossible, if you
know what it is that you want to share.

The problem is we humans pretty much stink at knowing exactly what it
is that is bothering us. We could communicate for years on end sharing
our problems without ever really getting to the point where we truly
admit the thing that really causes a particular memory to haunt us so.
The ghosts of our past are tricky that way. Sometimes the problem
appears to be one thing when there are many other things lying beneath
it. Sometimes a problem has multiple aspects and many layers and the
act of revelation is a process of pealing back layers upon layers of
truth to get at deeper truths that lie below.

Assuming we can do effective detective work and really figure out what
are the root causes that make us feel the way we feel and make the past
such a burden for us, then you'd think then all we have to do is then
tell a stranger and be done with it right? Sometimes that's exactly all
you have to do. Sometimes that works perfectly. You bring peace to
yourself both by knowing the truth and by knowing that you haven't
hidden it away deep inside. You're like the ghost described above who
finally chooses to confide in a human being after haunting a region
unsatisfied for many years and then finds peace because of it. The act
of telling makes a conclusion more real and certain than it would be if
you simply were thinking it and less likely to be forgotten.

Of course, just with those rampaging ghosts, sometimes simply having
someone know the truth is also insufficient. Sometimes a memory ghost
is not excised until specific people are
made aware of the underlying causes. Sometimes a memory ghost will not
find peace until the truth of what created it is known to lots of
specific people, maybe even the world in general. Why is that? Because
sometimes the ghosts are bound not by the acts that wrought them there
but the secrecy that surrounded them. The ghosts are not after mere
understanding and commiseration from others but justice for the time
frame during which the truth was held hostage and hidden. This is a
hard path to follow. To let one person carefully chosen why what we
feel and why we feel it is one thing, but to let everyone know? For
most of us the idea sounds so vastly incomprehensible as to be
virtually impossible. But who said anything about excising ghosts being
easy?

Still, if this is the nature of your ghosts then be happy if they are
to be satisfied with simply letting the truth be known. When justice is
at stake, it is not uncommon for the ghosts to demand somewhat more. 
Such as some form of atonement.

3. Atonement

Sometimes a ghost persists in a region trying to find a way to make up
for the wrongs it has done, and ends up working with the heroes helping
them find the truth and then act upon the truth to save lives or help
people who otherwise would be harmed as a consequence of the ghosts
actions while living. This act of helping can be enough to help a ghost
finally find its way to peace.

Other times a violent ghost refuses to let the people rest until they
make some gesture or engage in some activity that makes up for the
wrong that was done to the living being who died and turned into a
ghost. Only when the wrong is righted, the dark deed made up for will
the ghost leave the people alone and be able to seek a future in the
hereafter.

Without a doubt the hardest type of memory ghost to deal with would be
one that requires some sort of atonement out of us. How do we know that
we need to atone? How would we even go about it? What sort of act or
gesture would be sufficient?  It all seems so vague and impossible to
deal with.

Worst of all the reason we are often conflicted about a memory, the
thing that makes it haunt us so, is that we are deeply conflicted about
the extent to which we believe it is a thing that should be atoned for.
If you were to say find out that you underpaid someone for a service
rendered then it's easy to see that you should make up for it and make
amends. So you find a way to pay them back, equivalent or more for the
lack in what you provided. Maybe you take them out to dinner or
something.

But let's say you you say something that you really believe and the
person you are talking to takes it really badly and is deeply insulted
or hurt by your words. Now it's different. You might well understand
that it was a terrible thing to cause that harm to someone but at the
same time you might feel conflicted because a part of you doesn't think
the words you said should have caused such harm. You might think it was
wrong to hurt someone but not think it was wrong to say the words that
did the hurting. So you can make amends for the hurt, by apologizing,
but it might not be enough to excise the ghosts because you aren't
really apologetic for the act itself.

Situations like that and thousands of others besides make reconciling
ghostly memories through atonement tricky business indeed. You might go
through some elaborate scheme to do something to make up for a moment
in the past that went awry only to find that your act however generous
and incredible it may have been does nothing to release the hold of the
memory upon your daily life. On the other hand sometimes the simplest
gesture you did without thinking, reveals some truth about your nature
to you and is enough to relieve the tensions of a memory that
previously would not release its granite grip upon your soul.

Atonement is difficult. Sometimes it requires an apology. Sometimes an
explanation. Sometimes a gesture of good will. Sometimes an act of
faith. Sometimes a wrong righted. Sometimes a poignant gift. Sometimes
an admittance of guilt. Sometimes a heroic act of courage. Sometimes a
willingness to let go. Sometimes a little bit of all of that and more.
And sometimes none of the above is sufficient.

Atonement is difficult, but the good news is that it almost always
works. At least in stories, when the ghosts find the wrong righted they
virtually always are able to move on and find peace. And I think our
memories are similar. Things bother us when they feel partially
unresolved and when we feel we haven't done enough to really resolve
them. We feel a deep urge to do something, to make up for the things
that went wrong and to find a way to forge a path forward unburdened by
the past. If the past is a thing for which we can and should atone,
then the act of atonement is a powerful force to relieve the pressure
upon us. Suddenly a ghost isn't so daunting if we know we've already
faced it and did what we could to undo the harm we've caused and to
cope with the harm it has caused us.

4. Friendly Ghosts

And when all else fails you just have to suck it up.

In stories the friendly ghost is the one you can't excise, not really.
Maybe the ghosts problems aren't yours to solve or maybe the ghost just
refuses to be let go. But that doesn't necessarily mean an eternity of
terror and nightmare. Sometimes, the ghosts befriend the main
characters and become a part of every day life for them. The ghosts
didn't find peace and they are still ghosts, but they get along just
fine with the heroes as long as the heroes understand what they are and
where they are coming from and so its all just no big deal. Ghosts are
out there. So what?

We can pretty much do the same thing with our memories. There are all
kinds of elements of our pasts that there's a pretty good chance that
we will never fully come to total grips with. Few of us are so well
adjusted that we feel no weights hanging over us, have no suppressed
memories, and are ever and always speaking and acting solely in
accordance with our thoughts and feelings bound to the here and now.

But that doesn't mean that it all has to be such a big deal. Memories
are after all in the end only memories. We may never be able to forget
them but we don't need to let them terrorize us and we don't need to
let them control our actions or govern our choices. We can accept
instead that things are the way things are and make choices rationally
based on our reasoning and our beliefs and who we want ourselves to be
taking into account the influence of the ghosts of the past on our
present nature.

And you'd of course have to accept that there will be times, days and
moments or even months where the ghosts are stronger than usual, and
cannot be easily set aside. They'll be there trying to turn you against
yourself. You'd just have to rationally recognize those moments and
work to deal with them, either by distracting yourself temporarily,
fighting to control your initial instincts more consciously, removing
yourself from awkward situations that invoke the memories and wherein
you might cause harm as a consequent, or calling upon other memories to
help alleviate the burden of the past. If a memory of a dead loved one
darkens a moment in a gathering, make instead a happy comment about
that lost one, invoke a good memory to push aside the bad. This can
bring not just yourself but everyone around you some degree of added
comfort.

In the end if you embrace the memory ghosts in this way, incorporating
them into your life, they become just like old friends. Exasperating
and annoying friends perhaps, but friends nonetheless. You keep them
with you. You joke about them and recall them with a mixture of
fondness and rue. They never fully lose their sting. It still hurts to
remember them, a little, maybe a lot. But you accept that they'll
always be there and you've learned to live with them and learned to
grow stronger and happier in spite of them.

---------

So those I think are the ways in which ghost stories might instruct us
in how to cope with ghostly memories. Are there other ways? Probably.
But I think these four are sufficiently instructive to help us in a
number of real life situations and serve as a starting point for those
who need to forge a different path through their own haunting memories.

In all cases, coping with the past is one of the most difficult
components of the human journey. We are such imperfect creatures that
we are ever likely to continuously conjure up ghost after ghost to
haunt us from day to day. What matters then is how we learn to deal
with them.