Why I don't like patriotism

This is the longest I've ever gone without posting. Holy hell have I been uninspired lately.

I don't have any issue with patriots (much.) I think that it's a very good thing to love your country, helps to unify people and get them to work as one, helps especially in the military, where strong dedication is needed at all times. I don't hold favour with the people who go around and tell anyone who'll listen that their country is a piece of shit, the Queen/PM/President/Dictator is an asshole, and anyone who believes otherwise is a moron. In that respect I don't consider myself an anti-patriot.

But the reason I don't like it is because it's so manipulative.

The whole point of patriotism is as I said: to unify. To bring people together under one banner in support of the same thing, as denizens of the same nation. And so in going about this, they (the unifiers) seed every speech with words like "nation" and "glory" and "pride" in an elaborate rhetoric that makes no secret of the fact that it's trying to rile you up in a flurry of nationalistic zeal.

Maybe I'm a little shortsighted about this, though I'm well aware that the unifiers aren't the only ones trying to manipulate you. Every single business - whose ultimate aim is to make a profit - works to manipulate you into buying their wares or services, and they do it in clever, brilliant ways, which is why advertising and PR etc. are such big business.

But the point is that they are subtle about it. The unifiers and patriots are almost never subtle, and the manipulative intent is very clear. I don't like being manipulated because I know that I can be easily, and that proves a weakness. It's not just patriotism - anything impassioned that doesn't bother to hide the fact that it's trying to recruit me bugs the hell out of me. This week I was helping out at the church for a youth club for young people, and had to sit through "1000 questions", where a black Christian woman sang and preached and rapped the word of Jesus, and the rhetoric was so thick it was stifling. I hated it because it was nothing informative, it was preaching. I don't like being preached at, I like being given good reasons to adopt a certain view.

That's why I'm not a patriot. Give me good reasons to support England as a country, don't try to invoke some kind of nationalistic pride in me as some poor substitute that amounts to "You should be proud of your country... because!" I don't buy it.

Huh.

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ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Helvetica - abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
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Call me crazy, but Arial and Helvetica look COMPLETELY identical. There are supposed to be differences, but they're subtle. Not on Blogger. What wizardry is this?


Maybe they're just lazy.


Do you guys have a favourite font?

~Love Leonidas

Numbers

I was just spinning round in circles thinking "What could I write a blog about?". I sit before a soroban. I'm sure I've mentioned it somewhere in the dusty realms of the rambly detritus that makes up most of my blogs - it's a cute Japanese abacus that I originally bought with the intention of facilitating addition in a fun and new way, but never got round to learning how to use it. I am going to try though.

A lot of this rambly detritus comes out of my mouth and is directed towards my poor mother, who I've always been one to plague with questions to which she has not an answer. Some of it is maths related, because I often find maths fascinating - certain parts of it - and she remarked that the way the number system works is just remarkable, that "Noone could ever just devise a system like that." Totally agreed on that one.

As often the case, this is a rumination about something which I don't know a great deal. Have fun <3.

The number system is such a curious thing. It fits together perfectly, and you have to ask: how much of it is natural of the system of numbers to which we've given a name, and how much of it is purely of our own construction, that fits together just the same? An even bigger question: is there such thing as a natural number system? It's easy to think "Yes, of course, numbers are as natural as volcanoes and trees," but I honestly can't say if that's accurate or not.

Imagine apples. A tree full of apples. You take a group of apples and divide them like the primitive caveman you may or may not be (just kidding, I know y'all aren't cavemen. I think.) You identify a single apple, and by some linguistic means or another, you give a designation for the singularity of that apple. In other words, you say there is "one" apple. You understand that it means one single apple, and not many of them. You then add another apple to the party. You clearly understand the distinctness of the separate apples - you feel them, see that they're independent of each other, realise that affecting one apple doesn't affect the other apple. You conclude that they're separate and come up with a word for there being one apple, and a second apple. You call this "two". So it goes on. Unless you're a culture that only has words for "one," "two" and "many", of which there are some.

Those are named numbers. We use them all the time. But what about when you move away from names and you deal with the abstract, the constructions of algebra, for instance? Geometry and the rules that hold it in harmony? Are they as grounded as the difference in the number of apples? I guess that they must be, because algebra generates rules that you could just as well use for apples and get the same result - geometry, too. Perhaps for every mathematic rule, there is some way you can use objects to demonstrate them. But is that any better than writing down "the area of a circle is pi*r^2"?

And also, are basic numbers even grounded in natural principles? If we put together ten apples, we can count them and say "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten," and point to each one in a determined position along the line of apples. A French person would count them similarly, "Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix." But what about someone who uses a different base of counting? We use base-10 - it's convenient because we have ten fingers, and this convenience is echoed in the ongoing battle between metric and imperial measurements. You see conflicts between base-12 and base-10 all the time: measurements are done in both inches (12 inches in a foot,) and centimetres (100 centimetres in a metre;) the clock, zodiac chart and western year are split into twelve; a dozen is twelve and a gross is 144, or twelve twelves, the origin of the word "grocer". They're just two different ways of counting, and both equally valid, but both bases will get you a different English word when counting apples, even though you mean the same thing. If you have 64 apples (which is 12 to the power of 1.673657673906779, God knows why you'd ever want to know that,) that would be 54 in base-12.

But whatever base or language we express it in, numbers are always going to be the same, expressible in one form or another. Perhaps in that sense, they're really objective. Hard to say.

The world of maths is full of constructions and numbers, and who really knows what there is that makes numbers work. They're just awesome like that.

I've only got one apple left :(.

Modern music

I really don't know about the new blogger layout. It looks neater but I can't decide if it's better laid out. I also don't like that it takes you more steps to get from the editor to the blog.

I was watching Chuggaaconroy's Okami Let's Play just now. Scenario: Wolf-God called Amaterasu is the reincarnated form of a wolf called Shiranui, who slew the dreaded beast Yamata-No-Orochi 100 years ago, and died from the battle. Amaterasu goes back in time and ends up fighting the original Orochi along with the hero of legend, Nagi, and together, they defeat him, but in an act of vengeance, the spirit of the dead beast summons a boulder to crush Nagi. Just as you think Nagi is crushed, suddenly a beautiful white light appears, and it turns out that, supporting the rock while nearly dying himself, Shiranui himself has saved Nagi's life. The music that plays during this scene is the most beautiful, soul-reaching music that cuts down to the heart, and when I was watching this video about a video game - albeit an incredible one - I honestly felt close to tears, because the music is so beautiful and the sacrifice of Shiranui to save Nagi so touching. Don't give a crap what anyone says.

This is the theme of Shiranui, and I'm listening to it it again as I write this. No words, but who needs words? Excuse me while I pause writing....

Songs like this bring the ever-present question to my mind: what is there in modern music? The entirety of anything that I argue on the subject of music can be blown away in an instant by recognising the fact that tastes are subjective and certain people like different things. So I write this without the expectation that anybody should take it seriously, and honestly, I don't think you should. This is just the thoughts of one sixteen-year-old.

I was complaining earlier this evening about the song that I now know is called "Boyfriend" - I also didn't have any idea that it was written by Justin Bieber, I just can't stand that song. Whatever that noise is that undulates throughout the song and sounds like someone whistling in the background is creepy. The song is nothing new, it's the same thing every artist sings about - love and being the perfect guy for you etc. It's nothing new from what Bieber seems to sing about either. It's more than the quality of the music and the banality of it, but the way it comes across just grates on my nerves. It's a song that paints the picture of a shallow little pretty-boy who's really only in it for sex but wants to make it look like he's all about the love and "I'm the perfect boyfriend for you." I don't hate it because it's Justin Bieber, I hate it because in my head, it's a horrible, dull song.

This isn't isolated. The radio is on a lot, and I'm constantly hearing stuff that's in the charts, and every time, almost every song I hear makes me think "I hate modern music!" So many artists just sound exactly the same to me, the lyrics seem dull and uninspired, and the music, too, so samey. I think it's because to me, music is more important than words, which is why something like Shiranui's theme from Okami cuts deep, whereas Justin Bieber saying how if he was my boyfriend then he'd never let me go doesn't impress me.

There are lots of exceptions. There are great singers who stand out, have a distinctive, strong voice that you hear and you think "Oh, that's Adele" or "That's Florence!" There are beautiful, wonderful instrumentalists who write deep and passionate music that hits home with me. But modern music is just somewhere that I don't care about. It's dancing, parties, love, lust, drink, drugs, rap, beats, techno, girl bands, boy bands, teen sensations - I don't want any of that, I want good music. I don't mean that to disparagingly say that anything not on my favourite tracks list isn't considered music at all, what I mean is that I like it when the emphasis is placed on making deep music with emotion, who are trying to really get a message across, and not just be another popular, famous singer who makes it big and gets lots of fans. The singers and the guitarists and pianists and musicians of all kind who have something to say, and they play it, and god damn it do they play it well.

Those are the type of people who strike a chord with me.

~Love Leonidas

Labels

Unholy toast, this is the longest period in which I've not written a blog post ever.

I don't think we should confine people to strict labels of "male" and "female". That's my topic sentence for today from which hopefully all things shall flow - because of course, I never plan a blog.

On the one hand, I can see it from the point of view of society. We need labels, to help us function in every day life. How are we to go to the building that vends items of food, clothing and other such essentials if we have no way of referring to it, i.e. "shop"? And we have a very compulsive habit of labelling things where there is no label for them - taxonomy is a field entirely dedicated to a very meticulous process that does just this. There's even a dedicated nomenclature of astronomy for how new stars, planets and so on are to be named, from which area of mythology they can be taken, and look at the system that meteorologists use for hurricanes, recycling 26 alphabetical names in a certain order every so-many years. We have a society built on labels.

But labelling can go too far. For one, examples we should be vaguely familiar with are the insults hurled in the playground, in society at large, especially on the internet with the cover of anonymity. Labels of every black and awful kind hurled willy-nilly at people with no thought for who the people they're insulting really are. Maybe out of a desire to see the world conform to certain patterns gone too far. Maybe because they've been taught that every gay person automatically goes under the label "faggot". Maybe because they're bored on a Saturday evening and calling people "noobs" because they haven't spent as many years grinding Slayer on RuneScape as you have.

I started this blog with the idea that we shouldn't strictly conform to the idea of male and female. Beating a dead horse before I've really started on that one, given that the demarcation between genders is one of the oldest lines out there, but hey, it's 2012, we're a so-called "civilised society", so I'm gonna put it out there just the same.

I am male. In the sense that I was born with all the components of maleness. Yup, that included. But I don't hugely identify by it - my friends accept me as honorary girls, I consider myself one of the girls, and I can be very effeminate. I can also be emasculate at times - believe it or not, for anyone who knows me. Biologically, I'm a guy. In reality, I don't give a crap. I can call myself a blueberry pie if I want to and nobody's gonna stop me. If I wanted not to identify by the category of male, I don't see that that should be a huge problem.

Keight Fahr, BionicDance on YouTube, is a very fierce debater to be sure. I was reading a debate that she was taking part in where she was getting absolutely ballistic at the commenters on the topic of labelling, particularly if people want to call themselves "agnostic", then they should be able to. So argues Keight, there is no such thing as "agnostic". Labelling themselves as such is therefore false, and here's the important bit: that they should not be allowed to identify by a false label.

The example I gave before might strike as a bit silly, and it probably is. Talking about labels is just getting around the issue - the word given for the English language for someone of my gender of the human race is "male". If I decided to call myself "female", then that would be untrue because I'd be using a word to describe myself that doesn't fit to reality. If I call myself a "blueberry pie", again, there's no conformation to any kind of reality. Not that that stops me from saying random shit, but, I can see why people would argue against the point just the same.

But I think the agnosticism label is a lot more interesting. The popular argument is the the position of "agnostic" cannot exist on its own, i.e. you can't just say that you "don't know whether God exists or not," because anything that isn't belief is non-belief. Which is true in its strictest sense. But this ignores what people mean when they say the word "agnostic". What they mean is that they take a position which involves not taking up a proactive stance either for or against religion - they may see the issue of whether God exists from both sides, atheist and Christian. They may not think one side is necessarily wrong. They may think that it is not worth pursuing the question of God's existence at all, or that it is of no significance. This is a very distinct set of people from the group of people who assert "God exists" or "God doesn't exist", and people who argue against the possibility of agnosticism so often completely ignore this in trying to shoehorn these people into the category of "atheism". Yes, atheism as a word applies logically to their position. But does it best describe them or accurately represent their position? No. What word do they choose to accurately describe their position? Agnosticism. People say that it's not real, logical, or that it's just a way around saying that you're an atheist, but this is another example of people being overeager to classify everyone into certain groups. Agnostics generally don't fit into either group. So don't try to make them.

This post has not been very consistent at all and I'm sure you'll find pletny of errors, but I think the ultimate point I want to make out of this is that: sometimes, labels aren't for you to decide. Sometimes they're necessary, sometimes they aren't. And when they concern situations such as agnosticism, where people know their own position a lot better than you do, that's when you put away the dictionary and let them call themselves what they will.

Prominations

So they're circulating nominations for the prom now. I'm new to prom tradition and know crap all about the various events, before, during and after, all I can do is go with it and decide who, in fact, has the best bum or is most likely to be a criminal mastermind, or who is the most intelligent. As I think about the phrase "prom nominations" I start to abbreviate it in my head to "prominations," and then I wonder if "prom-nom" wouldn't sound cooler.

The biggest thing is Prom King and Prom Queen. I have no idea who won it last year despite most of my friends being in the year above me, but I hope that whoever wins it this year deserves it.

At first I very much disliked the idea of the prominations. They're weird categories for sure. I mentioned "best bum" and "criminal mastermind", the most dickish one on there was "Most likely to end up on Jeremy Kyle." How shit has that gotta be, receiving an award telling you you've got serious issues and you'll end up needing professional help? Happy promenade, peoples! I also disliked the idea that, at a time when we were all supposed to come together as friends and say goodbye to our school memories, people would be elevated above others; "Most intelligent", "Most attractive", "Prom King/Queen" etc., which I could see causing resentment. I don't like the idea much less now, I've just gotten used to it. It's silly, but fun, I'll admit.

I don't do enough spontaneous blogging. I established this the last time. Also, I've decided I'm going to try to use jump breaks less. Jump breaks are those things where it says "Read more" and then it takes you onto another page. I've been looking at other blogs and it really doesn't look that bad with the whole post on one page, and I shouldn't be posting obscene amounts of text in the first place. Plus, Blogger is really shit at them. It just sucks at line break formatting generally.

Maybe I should try Wordpress.

~Love Leonidas

The talent show AND The state of my school

I might have mentioned or I might not've, but I'm going to be part of a talent show. In theory, anyway, because so far it's been a little less than I anticipated. The show is on Monday... if it happens at all.

Want to know how many tickets have been sold? Less than twenty. The maximum capacity of the school is two hundred and fifty, and we have over fourteen people who've bought tickets. You know the worst bit? This dearth of attendees was brought to our attendance on Monday, wherein we heard that only six tickets had been bought total. A lot of us were annoyed by this and we went out and did all we could to get people along - I made an announcement in tutor and nobody even picked up an order form, people came round later to our tutor selling tickets and nobody was interested then either. We've been using social networks to do our best to get the news out there too, contacting all my friends asking them to come along... just, nothing.

The response was pitiful. I'm not annoyed with my friends, the majority of them had reasons that were genuine and plenty were prefects that were helping out in the first place, but I'm just upset generally that nobody cared about it. More than that: that so many people when I asked them if they would come, said "What talent show?" The advertising has been awful: posters went up this Wednesday, with the talent show on Monday. It was put on the school network, called Frog, which students don't care about, and emails were sent out, which has already been shown an unreliable method of news. Tutors were supposed to have made an announcement but it ended up being me that took it upon myself to do that. It might have been mentioned in assembly, I don't remember, because I'm a student and we don't like assemblies or remember a lot of stuff that is talked about in them.

The issue is that: in our school, news travels slowly. You wouldn't believe the rate of good gossip; just the same as any other establishment of children, if there's an exciting relationship, or someone had a fight, or a girl gone missing, it'll be round the school like wildfire within the same day. But when the school tries to get a message out, the moment will come where the news will become relevant and half the people in the room won't have a clue.

From my Year 7 to Year 9, we worked under a year system where we were classed according to years. We had morning and afternoon tutor sessions where we were registered in, and every morning, usually without fail, news was delivered from a sheet, we were made aware of stuff. Newsletters were sent home, information went directly to parents. The VLE (Virtual Learning Environment,) that we had then we used but not depended on. Assemblies were weekly, not fortnightly as they are now, but they were short and for all our year, which was larger and meant again that news travelled effectively. When news applied to us, it was made known to all of us in a single day. Now news is fragmented for each year into seven, because we're mixed up into our houses, and delivered over the course of a fortnight for each year, which means that even when it's talked about and not forgotten like lots of assembly content, it doesn't spread fast.

And because we're split into seven houses instead of five years, the assembly groups are a lot smaller, meaning that anything that happens in assemblies has a lot less of an audience (I wasn't, for example, performing in front of my year when I sang "The Scientist" in November,) and anyone giving a message to the whole school via assemblies has to deliver the same message seven times, not five.

And then there's Frog. Did I mention Frog? I'm sure I mentioned Frog. What we had was a VLE, what we got instead was a cheesy, poorly designed web system that all the staff were encouraged to use, that had a lot of glitches in the initial few months and meant many people couldn't get onto it. All news was put onto it and we are expected to see news from there. What they forget is that students don't care. They have other things to do, they don't want to go on a school website. Sure, they should check it for updates, but the fact is that they don't. There are no more newsletters, that's a waste of paper, there are emails which are usually sent to parents, sometimes this news actually reaches the children, and sometimes it doesn't.

Then tutor sessions. What they did in the move from years to houses is to scrap the AM and PM sessions so that we come straight into school and are launched into first lesson, which means no time formerly spent in comfortable socialisation with others from our year in the morning, no time to give messages that will apply later in the day, which is left to the mercy of teachers checking their register and reading out notes that have been tagged to our name, and of course, no news given in the morning. They replaced it with Personal Development (PD) sessions, 25 minute sessions after break four days a week (three days on an assembly week,) where we meet with our mixed-year tutor (four-six students from each year,) to discuss and do activities on a different topic every now and then.

These are almost always conducted with limited enthusiasm, and my former tutor had a hell of a job controlling our class, who had no respect for her, and none of us, myself included, found any interest in the work they tried to engage us in. When she went on maternity leave, we were left with a lovely woman (not that our old tutor wasn't nice, but she was forced to shout a lot,) who bought us off by baking cakes for us regularly. People still don't care about PD though.

So, that turned from a rant about the talent show to a rant about my school, but... yeah, I guess I wanted to get that off of my chest. Sorry it turned out to be so long!

Basically, I really hope the talent show isn't cancelled...

~Love Leonidas

Categorisation (and the archive page)

So, usually when it comes to blogging, I pick a subject that I have a decent amount of knowledge on already and give my thoughts on it - a little more tentatively if it's a subject that I haven't encountered a lot. Occasionally, I write a blog on the spot with no forethought as to what it'll contain. Usually, this ends badly, but at the time of writing I decided "Know what... fuck it, I need to write more casual posts, remind people that I have a life, and musings from the top of my head."

I keep an archive. I add every post I write to this archive - it's nothing fancy, it's the fourth tab along, and by this point I've got everything under rudimentary headings. So I write a piece of ramble about glockenspiels and think "Where shall I place this in the archive?" My first instinct is to put it in with the group of blogs I've entitled "Rambly miscellanea" but that got me thinking "Hey, I'm proud of that ramble. That ramble was worth a lot more than any miscellaneum out there." And it got me wondering: am I categorising too obsessively? Should I categorise my blogs at all? XKCD comics don't. To this day, I've never known if anybody actually makes use of my archive, it never occurred to me to ask and I don't think I'll ever find a reason to. I don't know if pigeonholing my blogs is helping anyone, or if it's just my neat-freakiness showing through.

I've been an obsessive labeller for quite a while now. Always I would love to categorise and label things, to fit every little thing in life into my own lil' boxes - which lead to me wanting to create a reverse dictionary, where you look up the meaning and find the word (why aren't there hard copies of those?) For anyone who doesn't play Minecraft: in it you collect lots of unique resources, which you can store in chests - a room entirely dedicated to chests is not an uncommon feature in the house of any Minecrafter, and Zeus I spent a long time organising everything I owned into chests. That's when my label-obsession really shows through.

It can be more than just pettiness, though. A while ago I used to start thinking that I had Asperger's Syndrome, and I was seeing all the signs of it, of course (woo confirmation bias!) It was a good friend of mine who put me right when I was going around telling everyone that I have Asperger's that I shouldn't identify by that label, shouldn't use it to mark me by something that doesn't mean anything about me as a person.

I still do things like that today. Sometimes I think that I'm partly proud to be pansexual simply because I belong to a category.

The ultimate question is: where the heck do I place this post in the archive?

~Love Leonidas

P.S. I've just counted my posts and it looks like this is Post #102. My #100th post was "On the afterlife"

Glockenspiels and the word "aridity"

You know, I don't write nearly enough casual blogs. A lot of people use their blogs as their Facebook, as a "Just stopped in France, having a brill time!" or "Bought this cool new book, can't wait to read it," type thing. I don't do that, I wait until I have a meaningful topic that I think I can offer a decent insight into, or a subject that interests me - hence the aridity of these past few weeks. And to this day I have no idea if it makes a difference that I'm a 16yo blogger who uses words like "aridity." Does my style of writing seriously not put anyone off?

#100th blog: On the afterlife

Death is inevitable. All creatures evolve in such a way that survival is one of their main instincts: death is a pretty crappy thing, therefore, by the standards of any animal. It's hardly illogical, then, that we should fear death. But then, in attempting to find ways around it, of making the idea of death seem easier, we do something utterly unique to humans: we imagine an existence after death, an end to the end, an eternity of glorious paradise in which to live as one with the creator of the world.

My issue is not with death, but with this afterlife.