10 Reader Responses

1. Daniel Lee Sale Says:
   June 2nd, 2006 at 7:55 pm

   The video doesn’t show up in Bloglines. I don’t know why, because they were supposed to have made that a feature recently.

2. Tim Boucher Says:
   June 2nd, 2006 at 7:57 pm

   I have no idea how to solve that. I guess everyone will just have to climb down from their RSS ivory towers to watch this!

   Would be nice if it did work though, as I have some loose plans to start including lots more video in the near future, if all goes well.

   Anyway, it seems to work here though, so that is my primary concern.

3. Aditi Says:
   June 2nd, 2006 at 10:37 pm

   I used to attend protests in NYC from in the late 90s/pre 2001 (that was when they would actually have po-po escorts for us blocking traffic so we could be safe. wow, that was a whole other world.) and they were pretty ridiculous even back then. They would have the most powerful speakers up first, the ones who knew how to stay on topic and really get the crowd going…but they would just be speaking to the people who knew what was what. Everyone else passing by were too busy with their lives to even stop for a few moments to join, to raise up their hands and go “yeah, why can’t we change this?”

   But it got worse; after only 20 minutes of this it would always rotate to a speaker who took it away from the peak it had gotten to and just destroy the energy of the whole group. For instance, if you were protesting the Star Wars program, someone would eventually come on and discuss Feminism and start reading awful poetry. I’ve had my own personal issues dealing with the whole concept of ‘protest’ for many years now, and I’m still unsure of how to tackle it; the idea is good, was once effective and is still effective in small doses and outside of the US (France, Nicaragua, etc) but it’s just not effective in these times in this place.

4. alistair Says:
   June 3rd, 2006 at 4:15 pm

   i enjoyed the video. chuck was saying that it isn`t effective in your life to be pissed off. protesters are pissed off. don`t protest. it`s pretty straight forward. i will say this here for fear of being redundant. choose good feelings for no reason. then decide what to do with your life. you will make better decisions when you are in a good mood.
   if you must protest, if that is your highest value in living, then accept that your life will be protest.

5. Aditi Says:
   June 3rd, 2006 at 5:10 pm

   I haven’t had a chance to watch the video due to my laptop’s lcd going out every five minutes, but that’s just my own feelings in regards to protest.

   if you must protest, if that is your highest value in living, then accept that your life will be protest.

   I don’t agree with that last line for many reasons, but I won’t go into it now. Too long.

6. chutney Says:
   June 3rd, 2006 at 7:52 pm

   I think he’s on the right track. But I see at least two big meta-stories out there, variously competing and cooperating:

   1. The Market-as-God stories
   2. The fundamentalist stories

   The trick is to tell a Story that makes both of those obsolete.

7. alistair Says:
   June 3rd, 2006 at 9:20 pm

   if your highest value is protest then your life will be protest. it doesn`t matter what adjective you put in there………it could be compassion, or health, or guitars, or blogging…………….protest isn`t special just because it`s what a person chooses as thier highest value. when people believe that thier highest value is the default highest value in the universe then they give themselves all sorts of unreasonable permission in thier life. like interfering in the lives of others.
   est and landmark after it attempts to make distinctions such as the one above to give people the chance to choose values that will enhance thier lives instead of guarantee failure.
   to be unwashed, rebelious, stoned, infected, malnourished and angry isn`t a good script to run your life on.
   the human potential movement, of which hypnotherapy and nlp are a representitive part, give people flexibility in thier own lives. not analysis purely for judgmental purposes. there are no tests other than the one`s that you honestly run on yourself.

8. Tim Boucher Says:
   June 4th, 2006 at 3:47 am

   to be unwashed, rebelious, stoned, infected, malnourished and angry isn`t a good script to run your life on.

   Which is very much the argument I’m making in my post about yippies…

   the human potential movement, of which hypnotherapy and nlp are a representitive part, give people flexibility in thier own lives.

   Honestly, I’ve always had a healthy amount of skepticism for the human potential movement, but that BBC documentary really solidified it for me in a serious way. I don’t quite have the ability to articulate it yet, but I think it has to do with reaching some place where you realize that satisfying your desires isn’t the greatest thing in the world. If not though, then what is?

9. alistair Says:
   June 4th, 2006 at 4:06 am

   here is the distinction though. it`s not about satisfying one`s desires so much as it`s not being self-destructive. my clients don`t come to me to be better than thier nieghbours. the come to me to learn to have some mastery over issues that limit them in health and in spirit. while there are those who benifit materially, the majority just one peace of mind.
   and i do consider dashing one`s self on the rocks of a percieved morality self-destructive.

10. Fight Club For Real - Pop Occulture Says:
    June 4th, 2006 at 4:07 pm

    […] Speaking of Chuck Palahniuk and the idea of creating new societal meta-narratives, here’s a pretty interesting article on CNN about some high tech workers in Silicon Valley who are engaged in a real live version of Fight Club. […]