stream of consciousness: the prophet

i man mics like moses, swarms, rhymes like locusts, purified the tribes of idol rap-styles tha's bogus, hopeless in a desert still i find the mind's oasis, the basics, truth-and-wisdom banging when the bass hits, focused on the future, write an opus like the buddha, see me float up on the lotus and internalize a sutra, meditating, mind readymade for rhyme disposal, penetrating i'm, venerated like the chosen, i'm golden, midas touched cobra clutched crowd erupts, rappers-turned-soda-pop left drunken monks sobered up, known to cuss, known to buss glocks on the blocks i rush, grabbed so many microphones you thought i'z doctor octopus, murderous, versus i be killin em willingly, jackin rhythms that's feeling me, made em ill with the villainy, still the spirit is telling me, use the skill as a remedy, it better be energy, bled on hip hop epiphany

stream of consciousness: the persecuted

unspoken halves, tales never told-of-the-past, the chosen last, the poor left in lowered caste, who walk the path littered with broken glass consoled by flasks like liquored up blokes and lads, we spoke too crass for folks of the owning class, disowned us fast, our struggle too hard to grasp, our hopes were dashed, crushed under molten casts, as swollen mass all rushed the golden calves. i'm rolling fast, doped up on olden hash, i sold my last, killer-grammar coke for cash, so scope aghast the gat that i'm holding blasts, the open gash leaves many broken halves...


[think bronze nazareth - 5th chamber instrumental]

inequality of opportunity in modern society is its greatest threat

finding the right track

i've been overwhelmed with insecurity about 'making it' for the last year and a half. all of a sudden things take a turn towards better possibilities and i feel this immense tide of confidence welling up inside. i will let this wave hit and ride it out. but i won't forget what it took to get here and that the future for me is still uncertain; i might hit a jackpot, i might not. but tis much better to have a gamble available than no gambles at all.

i am excited and impatient. i want it all now!

thought on stereotypes

why are stereotypes gross and often oversimplified generalizations? humans are not that smart. in order to make decisions we dichotomize rather than parametrize all the variables. we have the capacity to visualize in a spectrum of colour but ironically so often only think in black and white. so it's A or ~A. good or bad. us vs them. this coupled with our tendency to draw inferences from small samples and first impressions result in conclusions that often lack enough robustness to merit the degree of our convictions.

also a great factor in the mix is our self-love: everyone thinks "my opinions are superior to those of others" even though that is statistically a fallacy. we proceed to nucleate around people who we believe possess potential for reciprocal empathy within the contexts of our life because that makes us feel good about our social selves. and after surrounding ourselves with such people and consolidating our views with theirs -lacking recourse to genocide- we run our mouths off about those in different groups who occupy our environment.

the negative ethnic stereotyping we see today is a vestige of our tribal instincts from a time when, having to compete for resources with other tribes, denigration of others was perhaps expedient in strengthening the bonds in your own group of look-alikes. this is what i think of as the foundation of culture, an underlying behavioral ecology.

look-alikes -through herd behavior and processes like information cascades and memetics- eventually become think-alikes. thus culture has evolved into its own, carrying with it the prejudices inherent in the genetic tendencies that provided its original cues. and why so many 'prejudices'? well... how could pouncing on the positive attributes of others we don't want to mate with possibly help us beat the god-cursed folks at nature's game?

mating & taboos about promiscuity

in trying to understand how male female social roles are influenced i want to think about the strategies of reproduction. males and females both try to optimize gene flow but there are different solutions for each gender because the advantages are skewed. the male has one great advantage -less energy expenditure per generation of offspring- while the female has to give half her energy to child-bearing and her pregnancy is preclusive of other offspring generation.

child-bearing becomes a great un-equalizer and unfortunately this is a static gender difference. however child-bearing gives females one advantage out of a handful of disadvantages: information assymetry, a woman has a much clearer idea of who the father is than the man. this leads to the existence of a culture of gender discrepancies in the perception of promiscuity.

men have nothing bad to say about promiscuous men. it is the best strategy we can have hands down, no pun intended. what women have to say about promiscuous women i don't know. the "men are pigs / assholes" derision that women have for male promiscuity probably derives from the loss of resources from a promiscuous mate -she will have a harder time child-rearing if he has to stretch resources to care for his other offspring.

but there is a tolerance for it because a woman has advantages a man doesn't: information assymetry and the fact that she can still get pregnant so that *her* gene flow is successful even if her mate is spreading his seed elsewhere; her offspring is also likely to have greater natural fitness or sexual selectivity if the ability of her mate to be promiscuous, chosen by many women, is an indicator of such things.

the corollary to this explains men's absolute horror of female promiscuity. a promiscuous female is basically playing the ultimate advantage of child-bearing and the consequences are worse for males in the context that they cannot get pregnant and ensure gene flow. for a man, because a promiscuous mate can entail zero gene continuity there is much less tolerance for it.

all these interacting perceptions result in the state of taboos that exist today around promiscuity. if my logic makes sense such taboos are thus not necessarily derived from the paternalistic sexism that existed but are actually game theoretic consequences of the mating fiasco.