This looks like a good place to set a spell.
The Illogical Seminary, as you may have already guessed, is a play on words my wife and I came up with on a car ride after seeing a theological seminary. Since we are a pair of smart-assed atheists, we felt the new designation fit much better. Since my dreams of becoming a rock star have been somewhat sidelined due to my inability to play anything, I will no longer say “hey, that’ll be the name of my next band!”(hyuk yuk yuk) when I come up with some moderately clever pun and instead say, “hey, that’ll be the name of my next blog”. It’s much easier to start a blog than a band, and an equally satisfying way to irritate my wife and ignore the children. At least I won’t come home late from posting, but I may be inebriated after doing so.
I’ll be posting mostly about politics because I have noted the dearth of such sites on the internet. I can’t help that I find it all so fascinating, and no one will typically give me face time for rants of this nature, so I’ll put it here instead. I will occasionally write about music and culture in general, two things I contribute very little to but I’ll be bumptious enough to inflict my taste upon you should you arrive by accident. I imagine that will include all of you.
I’m a US army soldier; well, not for long. I’m actually in the process of trying to avoid a stop-loss to guess where. I think I will be successful. I hope I am, for their sake. I’ve had eight good years with the service (well, they weren’t all good-already been to Iraq once, and then turned around to go to Korea not long after), but it is time for me to make my way in the real world, which can be a scary proposition for most soldiers. We might have to actually do some work, for example. Well, that’s not entirely fair. The problem is that the service offers free housing, free healthcare, free food, and unlimited employment-so let’s just say we’re not accustomed to having to fight for basic survival in this lovely free market hell called the United States. With this in mind, I don’t suppose I can blame my fellow soldiers for staying on. They take it out of your hide eventually, though. Especially when our foreign policy is geared to controlling all of the oil in the Middle East, where we Americans are not particularly popular, you can imagine how busy we are.
I am a recovering right-winger. How odd it is to hate everything I once believed in. It feels funny…I worry inside about how I sound to people having done a complete philosophical, moral, and ethical turnaround. It’s not easy to swing from say, Rand to Rawls and have people respect you, or wonder if you yourself have a fatally flawed soul who doesn’t viscerally feel anything solid about anything. But being a progressive fits who I am and how I really feel. I have always been the underdog. I have always preferred tenderness to toughness. Why on earth would I subscribe to the dog-eat-dog philosophy of conservatism? I may be white, but I ain’t rich and I don’t have connnections. I really can’t explain how I wound up siding with the ruthless rigidity of the right wing. God, I’m stupid. I was a cheerleader of people who couldn’t give a fat crap about people like me, and what for? It’s not like I had Christian values that I felt needed protecting. Lowering taxes wasn’t going to help someone who barely paid any in the first place. I dunno. I can’t see what kind of empowerment I was enjoying from it, although I’m sure a psychologist could figure it out.
But the important thing is, I’m free from all of that now, and can see from outside the matrix what the Right-Wing Wurlitzer does to people’s heads. I am now able to see more clearly How The World Really Works. I’m still ignorant as hell, but I’m reading as much as possible to catch up.
Welcome To The Illogical Seminary. Or if you prefer, this is my new blog, and I’ll put whatever the fuck I want in it and I don’t care what anyone thinks of it.
Yeah, I lie sometimes. I’m working on it.