Insomnia

I’m cur­rently suf­fer­ing from putting my insom­nia to good use (so far I’ve installed Tracks), so I’ll take the time to post some ran­dom thoughts:

• I was bit­ten by April Fools twice today. The sec­ond time because I was too exhausted to remem­ber that it was April Fools.
• A life with­out hope is not wasted or a pity any more than a life with­out reli­gion is.
• A good friend of mine once told me that if you lis­ten to what peo­ple say care­fully, they will give them­selves away at some point. Like most wis­dom phrased in an open-ended way, I’ve seen lots of con­fir­ma­tion of this and lit­tle contradiction.
• I think a fair num­ber of peo­ple like to dom­i­nate oth­ers with their words. Being on the receiv­ing end of that kind of thing is really exhaust­ing. I think it’s fairly obvi­ously just peo­ple play­ing out their psy­chodra­mas in an envi­ron­ment where you can’t just club and be clubbed.
• State-granted monop­o­lies on cul­ture, art, and media in gen­eral sti­fle cre­ativ­ity, limit free­dom, and exist to pro­tect one power against another. In this soci­ety it’s almost always used to pro­tect the estab­lished power against the new one. Standard Lessig, now apply it to those orga­ni­za­tions we may oth­er­wise sup­port. That pinched-face dis­com­fort you are feel­ing is cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance between your stated pref­er­ences and your desire to defend your principles.