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Guns, Germs, and Steel.  It's going a long way to help me get past the whole "take to the wild" bent.  It's good to understand the factors that led to various stages of development for different kinds of societies, and how those factors influenced the outcomes of clashes throughout history.  I'm only about half-way through, but I'm digging it so far.

I heard this guy speak on NPR and he sounded intelligent, and the things he talked about seem to have relevance to the questions of "What are we doing? Where are we going?"  His new book, The Upside of Down, talks about societal stresses that impact the future of civilization.  I'm going to get a copy today when the stores open.  I've read the prologue which can be found here:  http://www.theupsideofdown.com/pdf/theupsideofdown-prologue.pdf and he makes a lot of sense, especially in his comparison of the Roman Empire's collapse with America's current situation.

I've gotten about halfway through Prometheus Rising, but I keep forgetting I'm reading it the next day.  Consistency is not my forte.

People will be happy with whatever they end up with, however circumstances turn out, because the brain is wired that way.  It is supported by experimental data about various groups being offered Monet prints and their affinity for the one they got versus the one they turned down.  It's really worth a watch, cause I don't do the ideas justice.

Ignorance actually is bliss.

Is false bliss really bliss?

is there a difference? can you tell?

Yes.  The answer is here:  http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=d_gilbert

Duration 22:02

I've found lots of interesting things on the tedtalks site.

My opinion on one particular aspect of life does not encompass the whole of my existence. 

I've done it a couple of times.  It's fun.  A technique I've used is to mark a dot on your hand and every time you see it you think "I'm awake" and then when you dream and catch sight of your hand, the dot is missing and you realize you're dreaming.  Most of the time when I lucid dream though it's more of a half-way thing, where I'm not really sure I'm dreaming, but I am sure I don't like the way the dream is turning out, so I rewind it to the point I want to change, then fix it the way I want.  Fun stuff.

I just finished reading that a couple of days ago.  The biggest thing I got from it was (paraphrase) "If you look for secrets everywhere, eventually you'll find them, but that doesn't mean they're real."

I know people who've gone the self-publishing route, and had a good time doing it, but the big dreams of fame and fortune don't materialize very often.

There is a page on Piers Anthony's website that lists all sorts of publishers and services for aspiring writers.  It's not updated very often, but it is peer reviewed in that people with experiences from various sites let him know if they were good or bad.  Link:  http://www.hipiers.com/publishing.html

There's all sorts of writer's resources like http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/workshops/resource/ to be found on the net.

As a matter of fact, it was the same guy, so I also got a copy of Ishmael.  "The story of B" it was called.  I enjoyed it, cause I'd never seen things that way before.  It also made sense to me on quite a few levels, like getting rid of The System, and keeping human life possible on this planet indefinitely, instead of where I see humanity going (like the progression of the Panopticon towards complete surveillance of all aspects of individual's lives and the destruction of the complex systems of interconnected organisms that support and allow human life). 

The map is not the territory, and the ideas are not the person.  Just because I think right now that tribalism would be better for our species, and realize that a shift to tribalism would never occur without a drastic change in world population, does not mean I'm a monster, or would take action to achieve such a change. 

Most likely, the more I consider it, even with such a change in total human population, the people who would be left would just build the same shit over again, with no net gain.  Okay, so now I can see that the problem lies with changing minds and attitudes, but I'm filing away the ideas of tribalism, just in case there's an apocalypse, and I happen to survive it.  As ideologically appealing it is to me, it rates a 1/100 on practicality, so my time and effort are better put toward waking others to the System in place.

I only advocate these ideas because I haven't found anything better yet, so I'd be interested in other authors/websites that you went to after primitivism. 

I'd like to find a real way to fix the problems produced by our current system, especially in regards to personal freedoms and not devoting the bulk of my time to keeping the whole thing going.

It's not the skin color that I have the problem with, it's the assumptions that go along with the culture.  "Look, something pretty!  I'm gonna steal it!  What?  I can't steal it?  I better smash it then."  History is full of that shit.

I'm not saying I would kill them, I just don't see any other alternative that would: 1- Get rid of the Machine  2- allow for our species to survive indefinitely.  If you've got a better idea to achieve those goals, I'm all ears.

Granted, it's not "nice" and it's completely against so many common assumptions in our culture, but from what I can figure, it would be effective.  I don't wanna alienate anybody, but I gotta say what I gotta say.

I also freely admit that it's an impractical solution.  Logic dictates that if there were a disease or man-made threat that could wipe out a vast majority of the world's population, the powers that be would do everything in their power to stop it right?  Right?

not willingly starve, be wiped out by a disease or cataclysm.  and that would allow a shift from the city paradigm to one of roving bands of humans living off of what food they can hunt/gather.  Materialism is the problem I'd like to eliminate and I think that nothing short of widespread death will allow it to happen.  Returning to a tribal lifestyle would allow the diversity necessary to increase the odds of success instead of the trend toward Monoculture we're currently seeing.  It would take a while for the growth of living things to reclaim the cities and fix the damage already done by pollution, but the relationships between humans would improve right away, because we'd be forced by our struggle for survival to depend on each other again.  Also it'd be a step back from the blind pursuit of technology, which currently is driven by the military/industrial complex in areas that allow the Machine to expand its control of individuals through surveillance, which would promote personal freedom and self-reliance in a tangible way.

The human population on the planet successfully lived in tribes up until the comparatively recent development of Totalitarian Agriculture, where people started to live in larger societies, thereby developing the Machine, which has gotten too big to eliminate from within.  No large societies = No Machine = Good

I'd like to hear other alternatives to getting rid of the Machine, and ensuring the future survival of our species.

I'm comforted in the idea that you will die before me.

This is not our regular niche, because it's doomed to failure.  I'm advocating an alternative that is empirically successful at keeping our species alive.  All you're advocating is an illogical twisting of my words in an attempt to prove yourself somehow superior because of juvenile territory issues.  Get Over It!

What I care about it "success" for my species as it relates to the planet.  I think we just have different ideas of what constitutes success.  And they're not my ethical standards, they're my practical standards.  And until you offer something more reasonable to believe your opinions are disregarded as childish and insignificant.  Get over your power trip.  Take a good dump.  Do whatever you gotta do to purge your hate so we can move on to something productive.