Trail to Guantanamo

When I look at the results of the Gitmo detainee database, I feel a strange pride. There's something about feeling every fiber of your being over a long time span interwoven into a factual process, into every numerical component of a statistic. You have in some way achieved numerical representation. You didn't fabricate the data yourself, but derived it from empirical reality, so you have not contrived a fantasy. Therefore you are not looking at a monolith of your imagination, but your related thought processes intertwined with reality.

Such are the only profound thoughts of a researcher.

Why didn't they tell us?

It's a cold feeling when you realize that they didn't tell us because they can't. But surely there's something objective about it, there's something that you can detect in it, some systematic process that all engaged, Hegelian beings understand and follow? They seem to understand one another well enough. Surely they could at least try to impart that. But if they tried to tell us, we would'nt understand. You realize that though the objective good might be out there, it's inaccessible to us except through experience - through the same repetition of experiences. It's so sad to recognize that the reason the literature is still out there is not because the world itself hasn't changed, but because the world itself can't change - that's a task for the individual, and new individuals always appear. It's even more sad to recognize that you can't fully appreciate and recognize what a book has to say until you've experienced it.

Here is where Tommy comes in. The Buddhists similarly have a procedure of particular objective practices that they've passed down over centuries, but that still achieve the same individual results. But the ritualists, who like their intrinsically worthless but traditional practices, try to hide the objectivity as mere opinion. Perhaps in a more conspiratorial, Nietzschean way, they are engaged in an attempt to make us like them

Why couldn't someone tell me how to solve by perceptual problems? Because I couldn't articulate them into a question myself. By the time one can, they don't need the answer any more. There is no advisor, because they know nothing more than the details of their particular program, all the objective things that you can get online. You can't go to people for general counseling, you must go in with a question, put people on their guard for an attack, for a responsive action that responds to you, rather than a mere performance.