Caveat: Preoccupied

My friend and former LBridge colleague Christine [broken link! FIXME] commented on my post about the Occupiers from a few days ago. I think her criticisms and points are completely valid. Certainly, I am not making any claim to a better sort of politics or activism than the activists – I am an armchair activist, at best. A bourgeois marxist with zero praxis.

But I'm a strong believer in the idea that minds cannot be changed through confrontation, and my main discomfort with the occupiers is that they seem to thrive on a sort of aimless confrontationalism that comes across as confrontation-for-the-sake-of-confrontation, which would be the worst sort.

Perhaps if I was there among them, I would feel differently. In past lives I have been "down in the crowd" in some types of political activism, generally rooted in a commitment to anti-war movements. And as the Arab spring has been showing, or the colored post-Cold-War revolutions of 1989-91, activism can yield spectacular results in the right geopolitical setting.

So the question is, is the setting right, in the US, right now? Seen from afar, dissatisfaction with the system certainly seems incredibly high. In my own self, it's high enough that I dread going back "home." I'm happier to be an outsider in someone else's dysfunctional system, e.g. South Korea at the current moment.

Anyway, I'm just meandering, here. I don't mean to come across as anti-Occupy. I just had a cynical moment of reactionary libertarianism.

Caveat: Less Facebooky Than Before

To my facebook-based friends and acquaintances, sorry. I prefer the control having my own webpage and blog give me, so I will continute to post here at caveatdumptruck, daily.

I have stopped logging into facebook on a regular basis. Partly, that's in protest of the fact that they are so aggressively tracking users' web activities – did you know that if a page has "Like" button, facebook knows you've been there even if you don't click it?

Because of that, among other reasons, I only log into facebook once every couple of days. These blog entries still sometimes cross-post, but I'm not trying extra hard to make sure that always happens.

[broken link! FIXME] Dinner 001

Those of you who know me well, and read between the lines… probably realize I've been kind of down, lately. Above all else, I'm so utterly discouraged about my learn-Korean project that I've essentially stopped studying. I don't know how to regain my motivation.

Meanwhile, I've been wasting a lot of time reading bad novels and surfing radical politics websites (e.g. Who Is IOZ, whose recent rant was fabulous – most hilariously: "The supercomittee, a sort of homeopathic version of a legislative body, a thing, reduced to its essence and then placed near a vial of water whose molecules were supposed to realign and magically cure what ails us, or, ahem, whatever, failed.").

I ate very healthy today: I had rice with kim (seasoned dried seaweed) and kimchi for breakfast, and for an early weekend dinner I had tricolor rotini and penne pasta with a simple vegan homemade sauce of onion, garlic, tomatoes, thyme, oregano, rosemary, bayleaf and pepper, with a half-cup of red table wine to give it some character. It's not really that attractive, nor even deeply delicious, but it was healthy and satisfying. And I saved the leftovers, hopefully I'll get better at using leftovers.

What I'm listening to, right now.

Stereo MCs, "Step It Up." Catchy tune.

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