Cassandra-Leo

“Down below this concrete prison,
Dying yet always enduring,
Remains a resistance to this endless cycle
Of production, consumption, and spiritual rape.
Tear down every last prison.
Open all cages and disrupt the current.
Bring down all institutions.
Rip up the foundations and love as you used to.”
-Falls of Rauros, “Awaiting the Fire or Flood That Awakes It”

Location now and likely for the indefinite future: Sarasota, FL, US

As of March 2011, I'm pretty sure this needs to be rewritten. As of December 2011, I still intend to get around to it too!

I’ve put up a bunch of stuff I wrote a long time ago under my own name, Aaron Freed.

I’m not in a very personable mood right now, so if I take two weeks to respond to your shout don’t feel offended. It’s not personal.

I listen to far more metal than is probably good for my mental health. I also listen to prog (in fact, most of the metal I listen to is prog as well), post-rock, avant-garde, alternative, hip-hop, indie, various other assorted forms of rock, and game soundtracks (because let’s be honest, I’m a dork). That said, I’m open to listen to just about anything as long as it’s not syrupy overproduced pop crap or lyrically stereotypical rap/country, but I tend to prefer complex music. Also, while I’ll often listen to music that expresses completely different political viewpoints from my own (i.e., NSBM or religious music), I’m generally unable to identify with any of it on anything other than an emotional level, which probably explains why so much anarchist and left-wing music is near the top of my charts. (I address politics further below). Sadly, I almost never get to go to concerts, in part because almost no artists worth attending ever play in Florida (even though Atheist formed in my current place of residence - go figure), and in part because I’m a hermit anyway.

I graduated from university in December ’08. I read a lot. Amongst my favourite authors writing fiction today are Don DeLillo, George R.R. Martin, China Miéville, Terry Pratchett, Thomas Pynchon, Daniel Suarez, and John Twelve Hawks; Kurt Vonnegut, Robert A. Heinlein, James Joyce, H. P. Lovecraft, Walter M. Miller, Stieg Larsson, William Gaddis, and George Orwell were just as good when they were writing. I also read nonfiction, everything from Chomsky to Hitchens and a good deal in between. I frequent message boards a lot. My own board is Fool’s Gold (As registration is currently moderated due to a massive influx of spambots, message me if you need account activation). The most frequent topics of discussion there are politics, music and literature, although there was also a running project wherein we actually started creating our own RPG (as a parody of mostly Japanese games, especially the Final Fantasy series), but it's dormant. That said, most of the time we just fuck about and do nothing of real importance. It’s great fun. Other forums I’m active at on a regular to semi-regular basis are Freethought Forum, FFOF, EoFF, TLS, and FFR. You’ll probably get to know me a lot better if you post at, or at least read, one of these boards than you will through other means.

I used to be a garden-variety moderate, but Bush and Obama have pushed me further and further to the left to the point where my political views now border on anarchism if not completely embracing it, and I tend to follow American politics obsessively despite the fact that they often depress the shit out of me. I dislike Republicans because they constantly do the wrong things, Democrats because they constantly do either the same wrong things or close to nothing at all, the electoral system because it actively discourages the election of anyone who’s actually worth electing, and the corporate media because it actively perpetuates the system we have of two worthless political parties. While certainly an improvement over his predecessor, Obama is nonetheless indistinguishable from Bush in a number of key policy areas, as I long expected him to be (I was a Gravel/Kucinich supporter during the primaries for what it’s worth, though I never harboured any delusions that either of them were electable as president under America’s current broken system, which thanks to the Nine Bastards of the Supreme Court was broken even further earlier this year), and while I voted for him without hesitation on the principle of keeping Sarah Palin as far away from the White House as possible, thus far I’m not certain I can say he has even met my expectations, much less exceeded them. My plans for the future involve some vague sort of attempt to improve politics through grassroots organising, although, for various reasons (example: I’m an atheist), I harbour no delusions of being an electable candidate. There was a brief moment after the 2008 economic crash when it seemed everyone might finally be starting to wake up, but it passed and everyone is now as complacent as ever, as evidenced by the once again rampant stock market speculation despite the fact that unemployment is still in the double digits. I have no idea what the solution is.

I rant about religion a lot, which tends to puzzle people who don’t live in the American South, because the particular brand of fundamentalism we’re subjected here is far more vile than what people find elsewhere in the country (or, especially, in Canada or most European countries). I tend to find that religious intolerance is the cause of much suffering in the world (which greatly amuses me since Jesus was all about loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek). I suppose people who actually seem like role models are Jesus the historical figure (as opposed to the god Christianity has attempted to make him into), Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Heinlein’s fictional Valentine Michael Smith. All were extremely effective at evoking social change through nonviolent resistance and pursued moral ends which I find difficult to question; unfortunately, all were also eventually assassinated, which is probably part of the reason I’m so cynical about the world. (If I were going to convert to a major world religion it would probably be Taoism, Buddhism or Tolstoyism, as I already agree with a large number of the central teachings of each; however, I remain a staunch atheist. Also, because apparently the fact that I'm an anarchist flew over some dumb troll's head, I guess I need to clarify that as far as I'm concerned people can believe whatever they want, as long as they don't try to force their beliefs on others).

I view government as being currently necessary only insofar as it protects human beings from certain things, which in an ideal world would be limited to the following things: each other, starvation, ill health, ignorance, and the forces of nature. However, as long as other countries have militaries, they remain a necessary evil; what I am coming to believe must occur, for the sake of the very survival of the world, is that all countries must come together and agree to disband their militaries simultaneously. (Not that it's likely to happen). We certainly need to end those fucking wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and I mean really end them, not this half-assed bullshit we’re seeing, although at least we've finally begun pulling out our combat troops from Iraq now). In any case, such foolishness as the war on drugs and the vast amount of corporate welfare we’re seeing is entirely unnecessary, and I have nothing but scorn for our government’s fiscal irresponsibility. While spending in a depression is a necessary evil there is simply no excuse for burning through so much cash so quickly in the name of national “defence” (which ironically is increasing the number of people who want to blow the crap out of our country), and at the current rate we'll be completely owned by China and Japan in a matter of years.

I should greatly like to see the day when governments prove to be completely unnecessary and can be abolished, but it is quite clear to me that society needs to transform itself vastly before such a system can be considered workable. I would like to devote the rest of my life to making such a transformation possible, but I severely doubt that it is fully achievable within my lifetime. My natural inclination is to distrust all governments, because I find people who seek and succeed at obtaining power tend to be untrustworthy vastly more often than they are not. As the late Douglas Adams wrote, “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

If you want to listen to me rant about politics further, I do plenty of it in my livejournal, here, at least when I’m arsed to update it, which lately has been almost never. I’ll also talk through more personal channels; message me or post in my shoutbox if you want to know about them. I’ll generally also be glad to share rare music I have in my possession should last.fm prove inconclusive.

In addition to English, I used to speak decent Spanish; at present I’m a year or two out of practice with it, although I still comprehend it fairly well. I also spoke marginal German at one point but it’s been so long since I spoke any German at all that my skills could pretty much be described as nonexistent at this point.

I am something of an audiophile, and nearly all the music I scrobble is FLAC (or some other lossless format) encoded at at least CD quality. Much of it is my own personal vinyl rips or edits of commercial CDs intended to compensate for things like overuse of volume compression, which I will send to you if you want them. Since around mid-2008 vinyl transfers have been my preferred means of listening to music; I'm trying to build up a good vinyl collection and might be interested in buying some of your rare stuff if it's priced reasonably. I've also been using Audacity to restore lost dynamic range to clipped recordings (Muse, The Mars Volta, Moonsorrow, Porcupine Tree recordings Wilson wasn't given full production control over, list goes on and on). A horribly outdated list of my music library, which was last updated sometime in January 2006, is located here (not only is it nowhere near complete but I lost many of these files in a hard drive crash and never bothered replacing all of them), and an even older list of all the CDs I owned or copied illegally (which includes stuff I hadn’t ripped yet at the time I compiled the January ’06 list, but which obviously does not include stuff I obtained after I compiled it) is located here, embarrassments of youth and all.

Oh, and I stole your fucking cloudsong. Beeyatch.

"...wow. i was going to pick apart your "about me" line by line to show you how much of a fucking tool you are... but wow. i. i... i'm stumped. you may very well be the biggest fucking loser alive. hang yourself." -myrkkyhammas

Political Compass: -10.00 Left, -10.00 Libertarian

“Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.

And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim and hew,
What they like, that let them do.

With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away

Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.”
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Masque of Anarchy”




current reading list (note that I haven't picked some of these up in six months or more, and will probably have to restart them):
Russ Baker, Family of Secrets
James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending
Don DeLillo, Libra and White Noise
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand
William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy
Dennis Lehane, The Given Day
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door (reread)
George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (reread)
Jo Nesbø, The Devil's Star
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (reread)
Thomas Pynchon, V.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Donald E. Westlake, Money for Nothing

If you read this far and have any thoughts at all, feel free to give me a shout. If I have anything relevant to say in response I’ll do so as soon as time and my currently rather precarious emotional state permit me to do so.