Gift box

I just got the box full of goodies yesterday. Thank you so much. I needed everything that was in there. I enjoyed the letters a lot. I’m going to listen the the music CD and watch the meditation DVD. The money was especially helpful, since I only just got a job and haven’t even gotten a paycheck yet. The food is tasty and appreciated. I was full of worries but now I see I don’t need to be since I have all of you looking after me. I feel very encouraged by all the support. Thank you, you will always be my home dojo. I’m planning a visit to Jacksonville sometime soon. I would really love the chance to train with everyone again and see how much you’ve all improved.

Hugs and Kisses for all of you darling people.

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Categorized as Aikido

53 comments

  1. To give credit, the gift box was originally Dee’s idea. (I think she remembered her stay in New York all those years ago and felt a wave of empathy and compassion for you.)

    After a certain point, however, the gift box became a dojo wide endeavor with contributions from many of our students. It was neat watching the gift box take shape as more and more items were included.

  2. Glad you are enjoying the gift box. I’m sure everyone will be delighted to have you come and visit. I look forward to seeing how much you have improved.
    p.s.
    Please give Yamada Sensei a belated “Happy Birthday” for me.

  6. Yeah I did see the carpet when I was going through all the stuff. I wondered if it was an accident that it was in there, but I know how mischievous all of you are.

    I’m trying to get Luke to come with me and teach a class or train, but alas, he prefers to relax on his vacations.

  14. Tonya, I have some interesting statistics for you, which I may elaborate on in the next newsletter.

    Your blog is the second most visited page on the website, after our home page. During the past month, visitors from 17 countries have read your postings. In the U.S., you have readers from 21 states. (Florida and New York being the most popular, followed by California).

    You’re a celebrity! 😉

  15. Some more statistics…

    In Florida alone, visitors from 25 cities visited your blog during the past month, from Fort Lauderdale to Miami. Visitors from Jacksonville were the most numerous (obviously), and stayed on the site an average of just under four minutes.

    Not to worry, though, you also have a significant fan base in Titusville, as well as several readers from south Florida.

  18. Thanks Jerry. You should try jedi-mind-tricking me into not tripping, stumbling, getting my toe(s) caught, and doing suwari-waza that looks at least somewhat familiar to the technique shown. 🙂

  19. I’ll do my best.

    BTW, you missed a great class Saturday. We had a full mat in both classes, and everyone had a lot of energy. Classes like that remind me why I love aikido so much.

  20. Well, (as with the past two months) I had a legitimate reason for not coming. I should, however, be able to come to Saturday classes pretty soon.

    I’m really liking this new location.

  28. This movie is not for you, grassHopper.

    In my opinion, The Comedian is one of the most fully realized, insightful anti-heroes I’ve seen on the big screen. It’s a mistake to pigeonhole him as a nihilist. Think Sartre, instead.

    He is a sadist, though.

  30. Personally, I thought that Rorschach was the only real hero in the whole story line. No one else cared about what happened to the world as much as what was going on in their lives. No one else was had anything to loose. Dr. Manhattan was the epitome of a lack of self sacrifice, but all the other characters had a similar view. They only cared as it was related to them. Rorschach on the other hand lost everything to his unflenching and relentless determined quest for justice. He is also the only character who goes into the final conflict with the determination to win even if it means he must die. Like the Comedian, he is neither good nor evil, but in my opinion, he his the only true hero in the lot.

  31. Yay, a philosophy discussion! 🙂

    grassHopper, although you could classify nihilism as a type of existentialism, (the concept of which I was referring to when I mentioned Sartre), I think Sartre, Camus, et al. are a better fit for The Comedian. The joke he is referring to, I think, is the same absurdity Meursault confronts in the Stranger.

    incogneto, oh I think The Comedian is evil. (I didn’t say I *agreed* with Meursault).

    Interestingly, Alan Moore has stated that he disagrees with the absolutist philosophy expressed by Rorschach. I’ve read that Rorschach is supposed to be an Ayn Randian type objectivist. Not sure if I agree with that characterization, but Rorschach the hero? Really?

    Is that how you want your heroes to behave?

  32. I disagree. I don’t believe The Comedian to be evil. He is in himself the personification of impulsiveness. He is the walking depiction of human impulse nature. He is an anti-hero not because he is evil, but because he’s human.

    For a man to be evil, in most schools of thought, he is defined by free will. Evil is a choice. To be good is to choose good, to be bad is to choose bad. Some one who is evil must choose between a greater bad or good.

    He is 100% impulse behavior however. He would kill an innocent woman with the same impulse that might drive him to run into a burning building to save another innocent woman. He isn’t a manifestation of any honor, values or lack there of. He is a manifestation of the human impulse nature alone, not the manifestation of that impulse’s moral consequence. That impulse by itself is amoral; neither good nor bad; it just exists within one moment. The results of the impulse is what carries the moral weight to be judged. Is he himself evil when all he identifies is momentary, finite impulse? Or is it the results of that impulse that are evil, not necessarily the man itself– that man, whom by characterization within the graphic novel is a slave to human impulses–thus the manifestation rendered here into?

    However if we want to talk about evil; who is really evil? The Comedian who shot a pregnant woman in the face with the same careless impulse that drove him to love that same woman months before? Or rather, Dr. Manhattan, who is a being free of fear and emotion; whom has the omniscience to be free from time and finite logic, who can rationalize the atomic structure of a bullet, but could not be bothered to stop it? In the end his defense is pure logic; a dead body and a live body has the same atomic structure– one as good as the other. It is subjective behavior justified with objective rhetoric! He is suppose to be a god, but his attitudes I find curiously demonic. He’s a man acting as a god pretending to be human– allowing ends to justify means… no wonder Rorschach couldn’t exist in a world where it was okay to cut off the neck to save the head! (Rorschach being an objectivist.)

    Rorschach wouldn’t allow ends to justify means, to the point he couldn’t exist in a world where they did. In his view 2+2= 4.. he woke up one day, millions of people where dead and he discovered that his friends just made 2+2=3… It was an offense upon the objectivism he manifested in his characterization. However he did have the last say in the moral debate; he left his journal to be published. By leaving that journal in the end Rorschach begs that the death of one is as great of an atrocity as the death of billions. Simply put,, death is death in whatever amount assuredly as watch is water whether it drizzles or pours. In a sense his understanding of that made him both more human than Dr. Manhattan and more Godly. The objectivist moral view exist between the 4thand 5th plane of moral development within Kohlberg‘s stages of moral development, where people act good rather than bad for the sake of good, because good is the right answer to the equation, no matter what the equation. (The 1st plane of moral development being you act good out of fear of punishment, the 2nd: you act good to preserve your own interests only, 3rd: you act good to keep the social norm out of fear of social rejection. The 4th: because of legalism, the law is the law. The 5th social contract, because of self inflected or non-self inflicted ideals. And the 6th: one that only God Himself most likely ever achieved fully, Universal ethic– you act good because you ARE good. Evil does not exist in your equation, ever.)
    “Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it. -Ayn Rand(Atlas Shrugged)” —Rorschach would have lived by this principle.

    Forgive the length of this post: I’m sick from work, I had a long time to think about all of this.

  33. OK. I think what you mean by impulse is “intent”. Does he intend to do evil, or does he act without intent, driven by, say, his Id (if you’re a Freudian).

    I think your assumption that The Comedian is 100% impulsive is in error. Let’s examine this a bit closer.

    On the scale of intentional acts:
    An epileptic person carrying a gun has an unforeseen seizure, thereby injuring another. No intent.

    A sleepwalking person takes her firearm from the drawer and injures her sleeping partner. No intent?

    A drug addicted person under the influence stabs another. Intent?

    A battered spouse feels she has no choice but to burn the bed of her partner, to protect herself and her child. Intent.

    A soldier of fortune, with firearms training, and without threat of severe bodily harm, kills another. Intent.

    I think you’d have a difficult time arguing that The Comedian did not intend to kill that woman, (or that he acted on unthinking impulse). He knew EXACTLY what he was doing, because he couldn’t be bothered to support that child. His rebuke to Dr. Manhattan *immediately* after the confrontation pretty much establishes that he had a clear head. Sorry.

    But that’s the point to his character, isn’t it? He INTENDED to kill that woman because in the end, it doesn’t matter. Life is an absurd joke. Ergo, my comparison to Camus.

    Thanks for the pointers on Objectivism. I appreciate it.

  35. The Comedian did not pull out the gun and blow the woman away as soon as she walked into the room, though. He did not even look at her as he talked to her about him leaving. He didn’t care about her, like a child that got bored of a toy. He was just going to leave when she tried to attack him. I am NOT saying he was justified in killing her, but I am saying it was an impulsive reaction person who had been shooting people for so many years that he could do it without much thought about how or what he was doing. “War is hell,” -Socrates. He did not plot her murder, it was because she attacked him that he attacked. That is why me and maggie both agree that he is the personification of impulsiveness. Even not getting what he wants doesn’t seem to bother him much. He is never really sad, to the point that Rorschach was questioning the story about the Comedian crying at his enemy’s house just because he couldn’t image the Comedian upset. He was always living in the moment, the way he dies proves it. Consider that he was watching TV and doing not much of anything as he is going through this moral crisis that has shaken him to his core. He got over the biggest psychological problem in a day and is back to watching TV and chilling. He is impulsiveness in my opinion. I say he is neither good nor evil because of I don’t consider all of his actions evil, and I do not consider any person completely evil or good. They may do good things or bad things, but they themselves are not entirely good or entirely bad. Neither would be able to exist in the world unless it is omnipotent. A being that is entirely evil would destroy itself before it encountered another being (unless it could not be destroyed), and a truly good being would give everything to others in favor of their survival rather than its own, it would never eat because it would always find a more hungry person to feed (again, unless it could not die or was omnipotant). Neither fit a human character, so I can’t say that they are evil. A person can change for the better or the worse. The Comedian did good deeds and bad. During the riot scene he broke up the riot, be it violently, without anyone dieing. He was firing a shot gun at a crowd like a loonie, but there were no bodies in that scene, meaning he broke up the crowd without any loss of life. The silk specor I said that she bared no ill will to him because of this contradiction. Yes he did horrible things, but he also did great good things.

    As far as Rorschach, I think he was acting like a hero. He saw an evil going unpunished and went to stop it. What isn’t heroic about that? He was the only one in the whole movie that was concerned for justice for justice’s sake. He was the only one who was prepared to die for his ideals, and like he said, “That is the differance between you an me, never compromise… Even at the face of the apocalypse.” He was prepared to do what he did selflessly, where as dan retired because he was afraid. Dr. Manhattan didn’t care about anything and had nothing to loose, his existance is meaningless. Silk Specor II only cared about injustice as it related to her and her afairs. The Comedian was pure impulse, he would have shot a nun in broad daylight if she slapped him. Brain boy was a steriotypical dictator. He thought he knew what was best for the world and silenced anyone who got in his way -all for the common good of course. Rorschach was the only one who would have never sacrificed an innocent person regardless of the consiquences. If all of the characters were put in a situation where there was no other option other than they had to die or an innocent person had to die, I honestly believe that Rorschach is the only one who would not choose themselves. He would do this simply because it is right, and I don’t believe anyone else would do the same. At least not for the same reasons…

  38. incogneto, how do you define justice? Certainly a utilitarian view of justice, a la Ozymandias (or Bentham), is no less valid than Rorschach? Remember that Ozymandias saved the world. Rorschach, if left to his own devices, would have doomed it.

    Look at it this way. It has been proven statistically that in every large scale building project, a certain percentage of workers will be seriously injured or killed. It is a certainty. (Insofar as anything is certain). The building contractors know this beforehand. But they still build. Are their actions unjust?

    Should Rorschach kill them?

    Even putting aside metaphysics, look at Rorschach’s ethics. He kills, needlessly injures, all in pursuit of HIS version of retribution.

    He indirectly caused the death of Moloch, and directly caused the death of Big Figure, when not directly threatened. And about to escape.

    He is inarguably a threat to society, as evidenced by the Keene Act. The people in the Watchmen universe made their judgment, and decided to outlaw costumed heroes.

    And you disagree because…because why?

    Because he died fighting to uphold HIS version of justice, when if he had succeeded the world would have been destroyed? Seriously? Remember that his own TEAMMATES disagreed with him, in the end.

    The tension between revenge and retribution has been around a long time. Hamlet had the same issue as Rorschach, and like him, they both had unhappy endings. (Though given the narrative I suspect that Rorschach always wanted to die, albeit on his own terms).

    (Remind me to show you my third year thesis from law school, which explored the concept of revenge in Hamlet. It is not so different than what Rorschach dealt with).

    Regarding the Comedian, forget the philosophy for a moment and look at the text. Throughout the story, he alludes to a joke, “it’s all a big joke”. He says this on the night of his death.

    Which interpretation respects the character more? That he is an impulsive killer unable to see beyond his own immediate desires? Or that he has something more to tell the reader, on a slightly deeper level?

  39. Rereading your post, incogneto, about how you would classify the other characters (“a stereotypical dictator”, etc.), I really think you are doing the text a disservice.

    The whole point of Watchmen is that the world is not black and white, that there are shades of gray.

    Try tenkan for a moment, and look at the world through Adrian’s eyes. I think he has more to say than just: “I’m the villain!”

    It was the Comedian, not him, that sabotaged their final Watchmen meeting….

  41. I partially take that back. There appear to be a lot of gray areas in the world today, but in reality, I think (I still have yet to get my research perfectly straight) there are actual absolutes that people tend to make gray.

  42. I agree with you grassHopper. However, I’m arguing from the point of view from the text.

    At the outset, the first question is: What is the author (or the characters) trying to say?

    (Then we get to whether they are right or wrong, backed by our own argument).

    Incogneto, MM and I are stuck on the first question.

  43. After talking with you in depth, I am convenced that we agree on about 99% of the things we are arguing about Jerry. We both agree that all the characters are horribly immoral for their actions, we both agree that we do not share their moral codes, and we both agree that Rorschach is not some one you would want to meet in a dark alley.

    I think our conflict comes from the fact that we keep using the character’s contradictory moral views to compare other characters to each other. For the record, we do not agree totally with any of their moral theories because of the contraditions that were brought out during the course of this discussion. Grasshopper, we are not stating our opinions, but speaking from the character’s view.

    Using the building construction example fails for 2 reasons: Rorschach only goes after people with an intent to do wrong (never said anything about anyone who does accidents which is what we’re talking about in the building) and second, he only goes after people who target people who he considers innocent. He specifically said he would not lift a finger to help a list of people in the beginning who he though were immoral in his introduction. The building fails to meet these standards because you would have to establish the construction workers that died as innocent in Rorschach’s eyes and you would have to prove he thought they were murdered, not just killed accidently. Your moral model fails to account for these, but I do admit that there are a lot of holes in Rorschach’s moral views. You probably could find one, but the flaws of his morals are not the point I am trying to point out. My point is that he is the only hero in the story. His morals don’t affect his status as a hero because of his sacrifice and comitment to his cause (justice in this case). Even if he is wrong, he’s doing the best he can with what he knows how to do. The fact of the matter is that one can only do the best they can with what they think is right if one is not omniscient. Rorschach is doing just that, but the fact that he is a man who is given to fault and error. As such, he has flaws in his moral strategy.

  44. Ok. What about Captain Carnage? He didn’t intend to do wrong. If anything, he was mentally ill, or a supreme masochist.

    Nite Owl ignored him, Silk Spectre pitied him.

    So what did Rorschach do? Drop him down an elevator shaft.

    Did Rorschach do “the best he can with what he knows how to do?”

    Did he act heroically?

  46. I have the same arguement with the Captain Carnage situation as when you quote stuff from the graphic novel. They did not reveal enough about it, so there is no context for the situation. We do not know the context behind how he got thrown down the elivator shaft. Rorschach is an almost 2d character in that you can easily predict his response. He would say his priority is justice before all else. His idea of justice isn’t the same as others, but don’t get hung up on that. My point is that of all the characters, he would be the easiest to get someone to attack them, simply break on of his “rules”. They never said what he did to get Rorschach to attack him, so it is not told to give depth to the character. It is basically comic relief. If anything, it gives a look into night owl’s and silk spector II’s character in that they think that what they do is such a joke that a man’s death is amusing to them. If I remember correctly, (which I could be wrong about it because it has been over a week since I have seen the movie) Night Owl’s exact words were, “I think he Rorschach threw him down an elevator shaft.” That is all that is said about it, and the “I think” doesn’t make it sound really deffinate. I don’t think one can assign any kind of a fair character analysis based on one line that is in there for comic relief when his character seems to contradict it the entire movie. I agree that his sense of justice is screwed up, but he always seems to follow it.

  47. You know, I think I’m going to reevaluate my view of Rorschach. He’s not a Kantian. He’s just a nut.

    Not sure how throwing someone down an elevator shaft fits in with the categorical imperative.

    See, incogneto, we can agree on some things!

    But it is a mistake to dismiss or minimize a character’s actions because you believe it to be “comic relief”. It devalues the character and the author’s message, and provides an “easy way out” for readers critically analysing the work.

    “Aww, Hamlet’s ghost is not to be taken seriously. Clearly Will put it in the play to add a little razzmatazz in the first Act. Now the real meat is that whole Rosencrantz-Guldenstern thing….”

  49. This is an old thread JL, but I’ll put in my two cents.

    Despite my earlier comments, I’m always a bit leery of trying to pigeonhole a character into a certain template. It’s reductionist, and can cut off analysis that doesn’t fit the model.

    Having said that, maybe Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl represent the Everyman, with all their psychological hangups? If so, it’s an interesting commentary by Moore, don’t you think?

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