Andy's Mind

I was to write a long, thoughtful piece about freedoms, paperwork & alchemists but I’m too exhausted. Getting up too early does it to me always, too early being anything before 9:30 AM. I can’t understand how people can get up at hours like 6 AM and continue to be alive, but in most cases getting up at such hours is related to manual labor. Some correlation? Hm…

So, instead of philosophizing about the world at large I’m drinking beer, listening to Schiller and feeling generally happy and satisfied with myself and my day. Which was quite good.

I worked much today and there is a chance I’ll end this PITA project for the National Fund for Something Very Important – maybe even this Friday. And I just hope this is the last time I’m doing anything for a governmental agency here – people there tend to be not on my level, to be frank. Too much chaos, too little logic and/or intelligence – I just can’t talk with such people, communication somewhat doesn’t occur. To be fair I have to say that these are particularly bad, totally lost in illusion of own omniscience, but I’ve met some decent people even in gov on my previous projects.

I also have a chance to get another project, this time not related to government. Keep your fingers crossed.

Just a short news roundup before going to bed. So, Greasemonkey made it to Slashdot today – but I’ve already looked at it a few days ago and decided it’s not what I need. I need a way to program my Firefox to delete cookies from a certain site every second time I use it. Greasemonkey can’t do that, it is about rearranging content on a webpage and, frankly, I just don’t use websites whose design would piss me off enough to do any coding or scripting to make them usable.

Something I had a good laugh over – a guy named Victorio Farias discovered some early writings of the late Salvador Allende, the communist who was removed from power by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte – luckily for Chileans. It turns out he was fascinated by the Nazis in his young years, his doctoral thesis is just a pile of racist gibber and pure nonsense (which shows nicely and again that paperwork is worthless – some idiots allowed this piece of rubbish to pass as a scientific paper even back then) and he nearly introduced an eugenic program of killing “unfit” in his first government appointment as Minister of Health. (here are some articles about it – Spanish English)

I’m not that surprised, since I’ve read some of his talks just about the end of his reign – he could as well have been speaking on a Komintern meeting. It won’t help the leftists though, as in most cases they don’t think for themselves nor check the sources for themselves. Fine example of that is that not even all terrible soviet crimes (next to which even the holocaust pales) were able to persuade some people that communism is, well, evil and Marx was a madman. But at least I will have another argument when discussing with all those who attack Pinochet without knowing anything about Chile, Allende and 1973 except for what Allende’s daughter and some of his commie friends who escaped say (and media repeat). Funny how leftists’ brains function, BTW – when I cite a Chilean Pinochet supporter they say he is not objective but somehow Allende daughter is not subjective at all.

Yesterday I was visiting people almost whole day. I visited my parents to smoothen the relations some. Then I visited some friends for barbecue, nice eating, some beers, light chat. Then on to another friends, Peter & Martha – I couldn’t eat anymore but we talked well into the night over tea. We ended up discussing quite seriously the nature of our reality. In the end I felt very well, it’s nice to meet people in different contexts and situations, it enriches mind.

Today I’m in a pensive, thoughtful mood. All this discussion about what Peter called “Apparatus” and I would call “Individual Instance of Mind” or “Mind Stream” and then reading “Limes Inferior” before sleep left me somehow mentally unsatisfied. I’ll have to go buy some food for me & the cats and do some thinking while walking.

I was to go to Gdansk today with friends, but in the end it didn’t work out. I’m broke this weekend, so are they and in the end we are all stuck in this sad crappy capital. Pity. I would bike then tomorrow and visit friends to get away from my longing for the sea.

I really love the sea, as you might have guessed from this page’s design. The sea is a great metaphor for everything – and I really mean it. We are all just a streams of consciousness in the ocean of mind. I can watch waves for hours, just sit and watch them come and go – each different and unique yet each similar to the next one. I love the sound of sea, no matter whether it’s calm or stormy. I love it. Even despite the fact that I get seasick if weather gets rough – something I need to get over.

The bright news is that we’ll be going 100% next weekend. And the whole trip is to work on a yacht which needs some repairs and preparations for the season. It’s a 20 years old steel 40 feeter with some great cruises in its logbooks. It’s a kind of community effort to keep it in good shape. And in return for some hard work I can get some free sailing (or, being seasick in my case hehe) which is a fair trade, I think. And a chance to be close to the sea, get to know cool people etc.

OK, time to sleep now…

As all men I hate household chores. There are of course variations in the intensity of this emotion, I can withstand dishwashing (although I swear I would buy a dishwasher some day) and washing is supportable (after all, I have a washing machine and the only task remaining is hanging the things to dry) but I positively hate cleaning and ironing. As most men I know (except those who were in the military) I not only don’t like ironing, I also can’t do it properly especially with shirts. It’s somehow too complex for me (I can hear you laughing there, lady, cut that!) so I just don’t do it. Vacuuming of course is not complex but I hate it too since childhood (it was one of my parent’s bright ideas to make me responsible for vacuum cleaning our home on Saturdays) – and so do my cats, who hide under the bed as soon as they see the vacuum cleaner being taken out of the closet.

Is there a point in all this whining, you ask? Yep! While doing one of those things, which are laborious but necessary it occurred to me that with the social change we underwent in 20th century we lost something without gaining anything in return. I’m referring to household staff.

Somewhere between 1901 and 2001 the household staff – maids, butlers, cooks etc. – disappeared from all but the most rich households. Somehow the idea of working as one is now seen as derogatory, below dignity of modern people. Conversely, having household staff is seen as funny, not modern, somehow snobbish etc. However, when I think of all the hours spent cleaning, washing, cooking and shopping for food and other basic items that even a simple, bachelor household requires I come to conclusion that having household staff was a good idea. All those hours each day I could devote to work, meditation or simply thinking if someone would take care of all those mundane tasks….

All great men from history books, especially my favorite chapters on history of science, didn’t waste their lives on cleaning their rooms. Do you think Pasteur did shop for his groceries? Did Liebig iron his shirts? Did Kierkegaard wash? Or maybe Newton cooked his breakfasts? No! All of them had household staff who ensured that they could have more productive hours each day (and, while we are at it – none of them commuted anywhere either).

However, they had the luck of living in times when household staff was a norm amongst what would be now called “middle class”. Granted, most people who also benefited from that by having more time each day wasted it, but that’s not the point.

OK, so by now any leftist who was able to read that much of this heresy would scream on top of his lungs “And what about those poor people who had to be servants or maids”! Well, in human society there is a considerable number of people who are not bright enough to do anything complex and are best at performing simple tasks. I know it’s not politically correct to say that openly, but that’s a fact. And this doesn’t mean those people are less human because of it. That’s just the way they were born, they are quite happy working in jobs that don’t require subtlety or intellect. What has changed is the location – they now work at numerous restaurants, bars and retail shops. Do you think work of a waiter or a cook at McDonalds or an attendant at a supermarket is that better a job than being a butler or a maid? It’s nature didn’t change, what changed is shortness of relation with the ones being served.

And, of course, in this area the promise of the 20th century was: “OK, so we won’t have household staff but it wouldn’t be necessary since we would have machines that would take the burden off our backs”. But it turns not to be true so far, because even the most complex machines we have can’t do what stupidest of housemaids could. We have dishwashers, but none of them is able to collect the dishes from the table. We have vacuum cleaners, but only recently it’s possible to buy one who would act on its own – and still in a very limited way… We have electric irons, but none of them is able to take the things out of the washing machine, iron them and then put them on the shelves. Same applies to all kinds of fancy kitchen tools, ironically called “robots” in some languages. And there is still nothing that would be able to arrange the things in a room, cook breakfast or clean windows.

So, unless the robotics would get to the point of creating androids that would indeed be capable of performing all those tasks I would go on missing household staff.