response post 2

in reference to Joshua Chan Zuo Sze's post entitled "meaningless" dated 21st of June 2009.

this post posed some interesting points and I felt that writing on the cbox in his blog would not to the post justice so im going to copy some of the interesting points and offer my opinion.

from one paragraph:

But.If u think deeper, LIFE in itself can be neutralised by DEATH.

If what we do now on this earth is for NOW.

Then Life is meaningless because there is no eternal consequence to what we do.

Pleasure is meaningless.

Suffering is meaningless.

Wealth is meaningless

 

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States. in his days in office, he succesfully abolished slavery. Lincoln left to attend the play Our American Cousin on April 14, 1865. As a lone bodyguard wandered, and Lincoln sat in his state box (Box 7) in the balcony, Booth crept up behind the President and waited for what he thought would be the funniest line of the play ("You sock-dologizing old man-trap"), hoping the laughter would muffle the noise of the gunshot. When the laughter began, Booth jumped into the box and aimed a single-shot, round-slug 0.44 caliber Derringer at his head, firing at point-blank range. abraham Lincoln died. 

could it be said that his life and all his actions were neutralized by his death?

eternal consequences? 

he had abolished slavery and today, we have the first black president in Barack Obama. 144 years later after his death. i dare you to say his life and all his achievements were meaningless and all his hardships and he had to go through to achieve that goal meaningless. i dare you.  

i feel that in this paragraph, death has been glorified terribly  till the extant where it grinds your face in the dirt. what an insult. i summarised his whole life and paid all the importance on his assasination but i do hope, that that those three words would outshine and outweigh his death and that death does not neutralize life, but rather death is a part of it.  and i shall leave it at that. 

in another paragraph.( im not going to dwell in the religious part of the post. and im not going to offer an explanation.)

 Our human wisdom has a limit.Even if you have newtons brain or whatever.

The limit is death.

All your effort in finding the answers to the questions in life will lead to more questions that are more complex.

And when you die.Selfishly ask yourself

How will your wisdom help you when you rot in the ground?

You might think you have contributed to the world.

That might be true, youve provided temporary solutions.

Well done, but the inevitable is coming.

The day when our human race will and i promise you it will happen, our extinction.

peace.

"All your effort in finding the answers to the questions in life will lead to more questions that are more complex" now why is it that it is said in such a manner that more questions is a horrible bad thing. rejoice! in the fact that there will always be another greater question awaiting us. is that not the most beautiful thing about being human? (no, love is not the most beautiful thing about being human because animals love too.) 

well i wont even bother debating the rest of the paragraph. it aint worth it.  but what strikes me as interesting was the ending sentence "The day when our human race will and i promise you it will happen, our extinction." now i know this idea was not formed based on evidence or even any thought but, i guess the bible says so.

cheers, chuen

response post

in reference to Quay Xiao Yun's post entitled "there's so much more to life than this" dated 20/06/2009. (excuse the formality, im only doing it for future references.)

right, reading her post reminded of an article in the TIMES magazine so i went to do a little digging and i found it buried under a ton of forgotten issues. it was dated the 3rd of december 2007. (i know, im quite astounded that i remembered ) the article was entitled "what makes us moral" and i thought a few of the many issues listed by xyun could be explained partially.

so I'll get straight to the point.

in one of the paragraphs,

I find myself taken aback sometimes to see how far I've come, how much i've changed & conformed to the society's unforgiving acceptance. It scares me to think that the very same girl who first stepped into Wesley Methodist is now more accepted compared to then. It wasnt that I had faked who i really was to the world, because if you really know me, you'll find that being someone I am not, to me, is harder than being ostracized by the very society whose acceptance everyone seems to crave.
i have highlighted the issue by which i am going to explain by directly quoting off the TIMES magazine.

At the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, de Waal was struck by how vigorously apes enforced group norms one evening when the zookeepers were calling their chimpanzees in for dinner. The keepers' rule at Arnhem was that no chimps would eat until the entire community was present, but two adolescents grew willful, staying outside the building. The hours it took to coax them inside caused the mood in the hungry colony to turn surly. That night the keepers put the delinquents to bed in a separate area—a sort of protective custody to shield them from reprisals. But the next day the adolescents were on their own, and the troop made its feelings plain, administering a sound beating. The chastened chimps were the first to come in that evening. Animals have what de Waal calls "oughts"—rules that the group must follow—and the community enforces them.
see, humans aren't the only one's that fear being ostracized.

One of the most powerful tools for enforcing group morals is the practice of shunning. If membership in a tribe is the way you ensure yourself food, family and protection from predators, being blackballed can be a terrifying thing. Religious believers as diverse as Roman Catholics, Mennonites and Jehovah's Witnesses have practiced their own forms of shunning—though the banishments may go by names like excommunication or disfellowshipping. Clubs, social groups and fraternities expel undesirable members, and the U.S. military retains the threat of discharge as a disciplinary tool, even grading the punishment as "other than honorable" or "dishonorable," darkening the mark a former service person must carry for life.

"Human beings were small, defenseless and vulnerable to predators," says Barbara J. King, biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary and author of Evolving God. "Avoiding banishment would be important to us."

in another paragraph,]

it's hard to continually understand why people do things and what has cause them to do something that causes pain to someone else. it is harder to continually excuse their actions and peg them as "they're only human" or "everyone is doing it". Because in all honesty, people should take responsibility for their actions. It's like saying a mass murderer should be excused from what he has done because it wasn't his fault his life was hell and his parents or the environment around him while he was still a boy conditioned him to be the person he is today. &then letting him go to do as he pleases. i know, this is a much larger scale compared to petty high school drama like "she stole my boyfriend" or "he lied to me" or "she bitched about me", but if you really look into, there's no real difference at all.

The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego notwithstanding, it's a quality other species share.

Things are different in the case of the cool and deliberate serial killer, who knows the criminality of his deeds yet continues to commit them. For neuroscientists, the iciness of the acts calls to mind the case of Phineas Gage, the Vermont railway worker who in 1848 was injured when an explosion caused a tamping iron to be driven through his prefrontal cortex. Improbably, he survived, but he exhibited stark behavioral changes—becoming detached and irreverent, though never criminal. Ever since, scientists have looked for the roots of serial murder in the brain's physical state.

Schulman, the psychologist and author, works with delinquent adolescents at a residential treatment center in Yonkers, New York, and was struck one day by the outrage that swept through the place when the residents learned that three of the boys had mugged an elderly woman. "I wouldn't mug an old lady. That could be my grandmother," one said. Schulman asked whom it would be O.K. to mug. The boy answered, "A Chinese delivery guy." Explains Schulman: "The old lady is someone they could empathize with. The Chinese delivery guy is alien, literally and figuratively, to them."

This kind of brutal line between insiders and outsiders is evident everywhere—mobsters, say, who kill promiscuously yet go on rhapsodically about "family." But it has its most terrible expression in wars, in which the dehumanization of the outsider is essential for wholesale slaughter to occur. Volumes have been written about what goes on in the collective mind of a place like Nazi Germany or the collapsing Yugoslavia. While killers like Adolf Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic can never be put on the couch, it's possible to understand the xenophobic strings they play in their people

in another,

&if everyone has their own thoughts, everyone has their own mind and mental capability to create and mould their own existence, then who is anyone to say that what i am doing right now is wrong if it is not to me? who is anyone to say that what he is doing is wrong when it is not to him? No one has the right to enforce a belief or practice unto someone else because, it is their belief, and their practice

What does, or ought to, separate us then is our highly developed sense of morality, a primal understanding of good and bad, of right and wrong, of what it means to suffer not only our own pain—something anything with a rudimentary nervous system can do—but also the pain of others. That quality is the distilled essence of what it means to be human. Why it's an essence that so often spoils, no one can say.

Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. A preschooler will learn that it's not all right to eat in the classroom, because the teacher says it's not. If the rule is lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply. But if the same teacher says it's also O.K. to push another student off a chair, the child hesitates. "He'll respond, 'No, the teacher shouldn't say that,'" says psychologist Michael Schulman, co-author of Bringing Up a Moral Child. In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone in authority countenances it. That's the difference between a matter of morality and one of mere social convention, and Schulman and others believe kids feel it innately.

&because i know that despite everything i've just typed out, I, myself fall into the same category. the society which will only continue to live in its own denial and continue to destroy itself. Because neither am i above the very people i've just scorned &unless, although highly unlikely, i manage to practice what i preach, i'll only continue to live in disgust with myself

what do u preach?

sincerely, jc.

life ain't so bad. fuck, its pretty darn awesome.

waking up at 12 in the afternoon and its raining so the sun rays are not directed straight at my groggy, sensitive eyes. plus since it was raining, it isn't too warm and i can still snuggle under the blanket. i fall asleep again and wake up an hour later and i get out of bed, open the door and see my dog, brownie snuggled right outside. i pick him up and put him on my bed and place my head on his back. we both fall asleep again.

 life aint so bad. heck, i'd say its pretty darn good.

me alex and alastair go to rock corner and pick up 3 tickets for the Manchester United match against Malaysia's XI which will take place on the 18th of July. tickets cost rm28 for students. cashier hands us the tickets.

once again,  life aint so bad. heck, i'd say its pretty darn good.

playing the air guitar to ACDC's back in black topless and jumping around like a rockstar and forgetting that im 17 and that the most important exam of my life so far is a mere 5 months away. yes,  life aint so bad. heck, i'd say its pretty darn good.

in reference to mark william's post dated the 6th of  2009. "life ain't so bad" 

so guys, chill out take a step back and a deep breathe and you'll see that life aint so bad. heck, i'd say its pretty darn good.

HAIL ME

my loyal subjects.. feast your eyes on THIS.



omfg la what the hell, the print screen is so fucking blur. what the jibaiz hellz. thiz suckzzz.

damn potong steam la.
fucking fuckerty fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck.

chuen.

diary entry number2

2nd of July.

woke up at 1, meaning i had a blissful 13 hours of sleep. i dont know about you guys but i took my watch off when the holidays started and i've totally lost track of time. beautiful. like the ancients, i relied on the sun. too bad i spent almost every hour indoors. 

well, me and the family went to Zen in sunway pyramid for a japanese dinner and after that went over to trisha's place for poker.

i shall not dwell on this subject for too long for that was the worst poker session i have ever had. i lost 50bux. pissed me off. i didn't win a single round. every round that i won, i had to share the freaking pot. didnt win a single fucking round on my own.

GAAAH. @#$%@& 

after so, off to andrew's place where i spent the night. omygod i fucking hate writing about my life. gosh, fuck it. 

has anyone watched 17 again? or high school musical or whatever blasted disney movie that tweens live on? i have absolutely no bloody clue what the bloody hype is all about and why girls go head over heels over a prancy little prick that goes to a hair salon everyday has blue eyes, dances plays basketball and has a six pec. 

oh wait. i think i got it. 

(yes, this is how you spell six pec. not pack)

anyway,  gtg. but i will blog about this subject. soon.

because my day is far more interesting than yours.

right. 1st of june. 3rd day of our 16 day holiday. 

me and the guys went paintballing. man, this is a sport for real men. pussies, stay at home. 

i got shot up real bad. again. once again, i end up with the most shots. again. and this one really looks nasty. like fuck nasty. 

well, anyway. im just keeping a diary of what goes on in my life during the holidays. so i might post everyday.

 

the funny thing when they split us into teams was that the short were on one side and the taller ones were on the other. xw, tim, andrew, jasjeet, alastair. taller ones : jonYo, alex, meha, lionel, yau and me.  talk about luck. but the tall side still got owned. (im not gonna say tall side, because yes, we aint that tall but we are taller.)

xw: fuck man, u came over shouting "friend, friend!" and u shot me u fucking asshole!

meha: i was shouting to lionel. LOL 

well, most of it was yelling and screaming. got the adrenaline pumping real good. but its probably gonna be the a long time before i play. cost 120rm to play. -.- i know. 

chuen.