June 9th-10th No caffeine, politics in 2016

I am fairly certain that the 9th happened as evidenced by the fact that I wrote about it yesterday and I am live today. That being the case, though, I have remarkably little to say about it.
As per Courtney’s advice, and hoping to actually sleep on the night of the 9th, I avoided caffeine all day. I spent the day in a zombie-like haze. Utterly devoid of sense or comprehension. The last time I can recall being so tired was when I was in boring all day classes, jetlagged, in Tokyo last August. That’s the only comparison I can find. I seem to remember that that was worse, and yet yesterday was not something I’d like to repeat.
However, I am.
I had two regular classes with Tateishi Sensei and one special class. The last two classes were 5th and 6th, and the special room has the most amazing couch on it. To be honest, it’s really not great, but, in Japan, where couches are not a thing . . . it is heaven. So, I sat down and tried to rest, but I was interrupted by the sweet girl from the other special class who kind of has a huge crush on me (which is more than a bit awkward). Of course, I can’t tell kids to go away so that I can rest for a few minutes, so I made the most of it. However, the class itself is dull as it’s two teachers and one student, and there’s little for me to do, so I kept spacing out. I felt so guilty.
The 35 minutes between the end of 6th period and me being allowed to leave were hellishlong long. But, I survived them. Somehow. And I rushed to Plasse for chicken and decaf tea (bastards that they are, they had it) and then to Cosmo(s) for lemon juice and cereal. I bought another kind of cereal to have for dinner just because the hyper fiber kind that I’ve been eating seems to be in shorter supply and I should reserve it for breakfast, methinks.
(Between 2nd and 3rd periods. I had coffee. I feel vaguely more human. That’s good for the moment, but it means I’m more addicted than I’d feared and that’s bad. It is now 4th period)
Well, I stayed awake as best I could until about 7:30, then went to bed, read a bit, and crashed at around 8. I just couldn’t stay awake anymore.
I woke up around 2 (as opposed to the normal roughly 3) and couldn’t effectively get back to sleep for the next 60-90 minutes. I also woke up a bit before, and quite a bit after. For what the FitBit is convinced was 11 hours of sleep, I awoke today feeling like a sack of crap.
(I feel human after second cup of coffee).
I talked to Simona a bit this morning. She assured me that she was drunk, but she’d only had 2 glasses of wine. Either she’s a total lightweight or else the Italian and American definitions of drunk are fundamentally different. That was fun. Not as fun as drunk Courtney who may be my favorite person in the world. I want drunk Courtney, Oscar Wilde, and Dorothy Parker to sit around and talk about the things they hate and why. Even if it’s me. That’d just be spectacular.
I have Ebihara Sensei today which means I have, officially, no classes today, but Tateishi asked me to do four. Due to a communication issue that I could have (but didn’t) clear up, I’m doing three of them. I didn’t see him after Ebihara Sensei told me that she didn’t need me first period. However, feeling miserable as I was, I didn’t press myself. One would think I’d have had the sense to drink coffee at that time, but, therein lies the paradox of caffeine dependency.
I’ve got tea ceremony tonight, volleyball tomorrow, (need to avoid the nomikai afterwards somehow) and guitar on Sunday. If I can somehow or other manage to sleep, I hope to finish my back letters. And I’d like to clean.
I was thinking, while pacing about in the back of the room during 2nd or 3rd period, about what it’d take to be a philosopher these days. And I was thinking about education in general. Who really goes out of their way to learn or to really grasp knowledge? It’s not something that I think a lot of people really care about. As knowledge becomes cheaper (in terms of time) it cheapens the pursuit of it. I hate our fetish for degrees and the like. It certifies the certifiable while proving nothing about intelligence. What if I wanted to just philosophize and get followers? Could I do it in Beverly Park? Doubtful. Walking across America? Maybe in the 60’s. Pretending to interview people for a book? Better idea for writing a political exposé. Is there even really a need for philosophy? It seems we mostly refine big ideas into small ones or expand small points into big ones. What would I want to do anyway?
Sometimes I dream of being Emperor of America, but not doing much of anything. Having absolute power, but letting government continue on, more or less, as it does. But anybody I asked would have to come on my Imperial TV show and I’d get to ask them questions. And they’d have to publicly answer. And I’d be able to mock them. I think that’s something that’d be interesting about being famous. Having the ability to make people make time to talk to you. I love the idea of just exposing people for what they are: opportunistic. I don’t think that most people in power are good or evil. I think they’re out for themselves, and, sometimes, that includes an ideology. But . . . not really. One of the thing that gets to me, especially when dealing with the SJW crowd is that they use the same arguments for and against the same things. They have positions, but there’s no unity that they’ve found (or I’ve found) that unifies their positions logically. It is all very emotional. I think that’s why there’s a resistance to logical thinking: it blows up the prevailing academic worldview.
I think that I live in very interesting times. I remember, in high school, when I said that I’d live to see a revolution in my lifetime, people thought that I was crazy. Now, more and more people seem to be thinking that. Sides are too far apart and don’t speak the same language during debate. A national identity is what holds a group of people together, and any attempt to weaken the notion of a national identity destroys the cohesion of that nation. If you identify yourself as something that outranks your national belonging, then you are no longer willing to see helping your neighbor as helping yourself. Unless you vote the same way. Nationalism is a way of creating a balance between people. But it has to be tangible. The last seventy years have seen a breakdown of so much. Romanticism, in the 19th century sense of it, died in 1945. We attempted to replace it with a new Rationalism, which has also failed us. The failure of the international consensus has now resulted in a new Romanticism based on a fetishization of our current failed systems, and demanding more of what hasn’t worked in the past. The new Classicists are taking up Empiricism and nationalism and using it to force a reaction. What’s interesting is that in the past, it was the romantics and nationalists who merged. I think that maybe people are seeing the value of the nation state.
I’m enjoying this biography of James Madison. It’s been the most thought provoking of the biographies I’ve read of the presidents yet (though I’m only 4 in). It’s got me thinking more and more about politics and statecraft. I really want to write politically. I think it’d be interesting to have some kind of news magazine where a “conservative” and a “liberal” (I don’t like the modern connotation of those) debate affairs and ideas. One issue would be “c” proposition and “l” reaction, then they’d switch. Once a year, or so, they’d write devil’s advocate columns to understand other points of view. Sadly, even if I could make it exist, I doubt that anybody would care.
Political questions have a bad habit of turning into moral ones when, frankly, there’s no need. If we are arguing in good faith, very few things are moral or immoral in statecraft. What I find so interesting is the tendency of the modern left to insist on a black and white morality that needs to be imposed on everybody. They are the same people who sought to destroy traditional morality by claiming relativism. The problem is, you can’t have it both ways, but that’s not really the fundamental issue. Puritans will always take over a movement. And Puritans love nothing more than policing the private lives of others. I think that a lot of people mistake general human trends for vices native to individual movements or beliefs.
Well, that’s gotten a bit more political than I’d planned. But, there you have it.
Goodnight.