10. You’ve protested something on your college campus

This is a funny one. During a popular and caustic response to an “unjust” war (I quote unjust because it needs to be defined and understood before deeming it as unjust), you’re out on the streets of a city with a sign while people drive by laughing at you. You have no idea about any of this though. In your mind, you’re doing a just service for your country by doing nothing but standing or sitting on a street corner while holding up a sign. But unconsciously, you know you’re really doing nothing. Unconsciously, your egregious attempts at defining yourself are making you an unctuous person. What’s even funnier is when this shit happens in a state and city where people are already in a state of disapproval of some Washington policy. You’re then speaking to no one, which can only mean you’re trying to speak to yourself, which means if you don’t grow up now, you will forever be an a complete fool.

9. You’ve driven cross country

If you don’t drive Cross Country then there must be something wrong with you for the Bohemian. It’s not about visiting random places or different countries and most importantly, not staying there for a long time. It’s about visiting places as quickly as possible on this transcendental road trip so you can come back and tell people that you visited places that you actually never really visited but simply passed by to say that “I’ve been there”. These people are what you would call “Experience Whores”, who actually have no real experience of any one place in particular but like the idea of experience in general. But how could one possibly experience a place if they’re not there for more than 1 day? Do everyone a favor, if you have the impulse to drive cross country, don’t go telling everyone about it afterwards. No one wants to hear about your non-experience masquerading as an experience.

8. You’re not allowed to like sports

“What, you like football! What’s the matter with you? All it is are people hitting each other and falling on each other! Why would you want to be part of such violence?” Independent of the obviously misogynistic connotation that goes along with the above quote is a complete misunderstanding of competitive sports. The fact that these professionals spend their whole lives working toward a goal that they had since they were children never comes across to your mind. The fact that some of these professionals play their sports with broken wrists and bum shoulders means nothing to you. The words “courage” and “commitment” mean nothing to you. Why do they mean nothing to you and why do you think you can get away with saying something so halfwitted? Maybe because you sucked ass at everything in life.

7. You painted a mural on a wall on your college campus

You’ve seen it in movies about the ghetto. You’ve seen people in states of penury naturally graphite walls and you want to do this yourself. You want to be from the streets and a state of penury like people from the ghetto are regardless of the fact that you come from $700,000 dollar property and your father is a divisional manager of an insurance company. Express yourself! Paint on these walls and show the world everything that you’re about. Show the world how complicated you are by painting something that could never possibly make any sense to anyone, in turn making you appear interesting because there’s no possible way of understanding you! Just make sure not to sign your name on the bottom or you will be on probation by campus security and you don’t want that. You don’t want your parents finding out about that one. You can tell all your friends though, or everyone that you’ve felt the incessant need to impress.

6. You walk to class barefoot

The ground is dirty and there’s probably mud on the grass on your way to your “social issues” class where you discuss world poverty and do nothing about it. You decide to not wear any shoes knowing that everyone is coming back from class or going to class at the same time. Shit, you are really different. Look at that person without the shoes; look at how different they are…man I could really learn something from them. An idiot would think this to themselves. For the rest of us, it’s “What the fuck is wrong with this person? What are they trying to prove? Why are they so in need of respect by paradoxically wanting to appear that they don’t care about what people think about them?” Ahh, there is your answer. These people deeply care about what you think about them, so much so that they’re willing to get their fucking feet dirty!

5. You go to Chinese restaurants just so you can use chopsticks

Don’t you love seeing these people? They talk softly but intently in a Chinese restaurant about things that they think are important but aren’t important beyond their abstract sociological classes with mawkish professors who think they’re still 21. They hunch over their sushi for some odd reason, probably to appear coquettish because that is the bohemian style after all…to be a fucking pansy. When the chopsticks come, it’s like they’ve won a fuckin trophy. When they dig into their sushi with their chopsticks they are really on top of the world in all their cosmopolitan glory. They want you to know how cultured they are and the major signifier of this disingenuous multi-cultural aspiration is the fuckin’ chopsticks. If you like chopsticks so much, why don’t you go over to China and produce them in one of their thousands of sweat shops. Then you can really feel “cultured”.

4. You wear T-shirts with a random slogan or advertisement on it

Robot figures, an advertisement for mayonnaise from 70’s, whatever it is, because you’re wearing it, you’re cool as fuck. Who else is wearing this stuff? People walk by you and laugh and you think to yourself “Yeah, shit I’m different from everyone”, but little do you realize that people are laughing at you because you’re a dumbass who’s obsessed with himself. Who knows, maybe the people actually think you’re cool. They don’t want to hang out with you, but they get a sense they are experiencing something different because they’re walking by a retard like you. This is college life in a nutshell. When the dream is over, the dumb shirts are taken off and you’re left to yourself, your nothingness…and that’s when the meds start.

3. You cite Noam Chomsky from books of his you’ve never read

There is one certainty for you, the self-obsessed Bohemian, and that’s the fact that everything that’s “wrong in the world” is because of the United States who’s either 1. giving you your loan to go to college and/or 2. Made your family filthy rich to make you go to college without earning it. How to supplement this insincere distaste for the US? You look at the front cover of Noam Chomsky’s “Imperial Ambitions” and flip through a few pages about how the US extorted the Ecuadorian population for their Snow Pea market. The history of the US in World War 2 and Post World War 2 policies like the Marshall Plan are so outside your mental space that you don’t even know who the US’s allies were in World War 2. All you know is that The United States is evil and you’re going to do something about it by flipping through a book and telling others about this book you flipped through. Damn, you’re so interesting.

2. You listen to indie music

Here it is again. The good old indie scene taking it on the chin again by Old-Wizard. Can’t listen to anything that is remotely popular, can’t admit to liking a song because it’s on the radio. Everything you listen to has to be from some obscure channel on an obscure station that only a few people know about so you can tell other people about these new abominable bands to appear “cutting edge”. But do you really like the music? Difficult question. You like the idea of telling other people about things they don’t know, and if you do this at the expense of music, then so be it. At least these awful bands are getting the credit they don’t deserve but they want because people like you exist who eventually start bad bands like the bad bands you’re telling everyone else about. It’s a big circle of shit.

1. You look dirty and smell like shit

Dirty ass T-shirts, dirty feet, almost naked listening to reggae, specifically Bob Marley. You sit outside your apartment dorm that your parents shelled out $130,000 for, thinking that you’re from fucking Jamaica. What the hell is going on in your absolutely handicapped mind? You’re telling the world that you don’t have to appear clean like everyone else because you’re your own person who does their own thing, and there is no better sign for this than looking dirty and smelling like shit. The world is relaxed for you. You can do whatever you want. Of course you can you dip shit, you don’t have to pay for any of this disgusting display of individuality, someone else does! There’s a washer in the basement of your immaculate apartment complex on campus. Use it once and awhile. Maybe you’ll really learn a thing or two about yourself besides the fact that you have to be someone so grotesquely different from everyone else.

Related Articles: Top 10 Worst Types of People

It’s the prime of the political season and everyone is going ape-shit over who their going to vote for and why. What causes this exaggerated mania? There are many reasons. Everywhere you look in modern mediums of communication, you hear about the presidential election like we are approaching the apocalypse. You are being force fed canards about how important it is to vote and how your vote “counts”. In this brief list, we will go through the reasons why not to vote, and how this over-exaggeration for having to vote is not the God given privilege of being “civically responsible”, but the animal herd trying to express it’s identity in it’s banality.

5. You’re in a state that always votes the same way.

Why the hell are you going to vote in a state that you know is going to for democratic or republican? If I live in Connecticut, I know how it’s going to vote. If I live in Kentucky, I know how it’s going to vote. Alaska, Massachusetts, Texas, ect. Your vote doesn’t matter because the 95% of the states in the union are out of play. So why are you getting so excited about something you have no impact over? The reason why will be shown later in this list.

This is the most popular answer I hear from people that don’t vote. WAKE UP! If you let the same people vote every year you’re going to see the same results every year. It’s not an uphill battle to induce change in a democracy, it’s one of the few instant gratifications we have! In CT alone, which is a tiny state to begin with, 113,028 2004 registered voters just didn’t vote, forget about those too lazy to even register. The youth (<35) have the lowest voter turn out rate in the nation and WE HAVE THE MOST TO GAIN. You want a viable third party candidate, you want to see a red state turn blue, or do you want your home state to be a battle ground, garnering national attention from politicians every four years? then vote, dummy.

4. There is no REAL difference between the candidates

When you look at the candidates’ actual policies, there isn’t much of a difference. The main difference between these candidates is their character differences. The nation is in debt, the stock market is in borderline depression, and golden parachutes are flying out with carefully crafted insurance policies made out just for them. These problems all need to be dealt with and they will be dealt with in circumscribed ways. With economics as the main “issue” for the voter, the problem will lie in the expertise of the treasury and federal reserve. Whoever is in office will appropriately follow suite. The differences one sees now are political differences, and for this reason should be disparaged.

We, the people of the Unites States of America, are f-g fed up and cynical. CNN tells you that based on the button you pushed on your phone survey, that the economy is the most pressing issue with voters. Eff-that. Your bank account does not equal the economy, and the majority of voters are not economists. The character differences between the presidential candidates speak volumes about the nation we are going to be living in for the next four years. We have one side that is anti-gun control, incredibly pro-life, in favor of NSA privacy invasion, in favor of breaking international human rights violations in order to torture people into being 9-11 scapegoats, and would increase international hostility toward our nation. We have seen first hand the danger of rolling over and allowing the president to execute their ABUSE of executive power and it’s time to take a stand, YOUR VOICE IS YOUR VOTE!

3. You have an imagination beyond an immediate political reality

If you have a big imagination, chances are you probably have more important things to do than to worry about voting for the president. You probably have your own reading and writing that you do. You have your own friends who go out and have their OWN conversations about their OWN interests. You don’t watch TV slavishly thinking that you’re being informed by equally biased cable news channels like MSNBC and Fox News. Your mind’s in much more transcendental places even if their predictably categorized as “fantasy” by the herd.

In our nation’s history, there have been several people who have had imaginations that blasted way beyond their current political reality. Our nation’s founders imagined past England to a land where they could worship freely and let every man have a voice. Lincoln and Dr King imagined a world beyond slavery and segregation. I think the phrase “I have a dream” comes to mind. If we used our imaginations to sway our nation toward our own youthful dreams, we could rise up and demand a country that fights for our agenda.

2. You make more of a political impact by not voting, than voting

Think about it. What would happen if 90% of the population didn’t vote? With the United States standing in the world, this act would be seen as nothing other than an absolute lack of confidence by the US population. It would show that people no longer care about what happens in the beltway because they could take care of their own affairs. The beltway would then have to adapt to the population’s own wants and needs because of the newfound independence of the people. The more people vote, the more people are simply taking part in something they think they believe in, although they consistently tell people they don’t believe in the government because it has failed them. The herd is unaware of their own confusion.

This is true. By not voting you would have a much larger impact on the world than if you did vote. You would send a message to the world that we are a failed nation. You would throw a cloak of weakness over our nation that would signal to the rest of the world that we have rolled over and given up. As bad as we might think we have it, we have never fought a modern ground war on our own soil. What if we were taken over, or if we allowed an uprising of fanatics who were the only ones who did vote while we all stood by and watched? Have fun with a state run media. Have fun with your state owned land. Have fun being thrown in jail for a blog entry. We need to stop being a nation spoiled with freedom and re-educate ourselves to strengthen the freedoms we have compromised and gain the freedoms we lack. You can only do that with a vote.

1. You don’t need politics to give yourself an identity

You are who you are regardless of the relative issues at hand dealt with by relative people in a relative culture. Why would you identify yourself with this relativity? Because you don’t know any better and are caught up in a presence that you think will have a massive impact for the future, the future of the next 10-20 years, within an estimated universal history of billions of years. Spare the universe your all-to-human pretensions of change and destination and de-identify yourself with any present reality. Real change is that which is absolutely unpredictable and is able to transcend man’s categories of time. Political change is just man playing games with that which he thinks is important, but is simply the lack of a larger understanding of how the universe works.

Your politics should be a result of your identity, not the other way around. This is why we choose (or create!!!!) a party. Is the health of the planet your bag? Go green. Do you Want to keep your guns and get the feds off of your land? Go Libertarian. Do you think abortion is murder and there’s rampant godlessness in our schools and government? Vote republican. Your identity gives you your politics if you have a mind of your own. Don’t insult your self and humanity by claiming you won’t vote because you don’t want politics to define you. Define your self, then vote accordingly. GO WHIGS!

Related Posts: Old-Wizard Officially Endorses Gene Amondson For President, Top 5 Reasons Not to Vote

5. You’re in a state that always votes the same way.

Why the hell are you going to vote in a state that you know is going to for democratic or republican? If I live in Connecticut, I know how it’s going to vote. If I live in Kentucky, I know how it’s going to vote. Alaska, Massachusetts, Texas, ect. Your vote doesn’t matter because the 95% of the states in the union are out of play. So why are you getting so excited about something you have no impact over? The reason why will be shown later in this list.

4. There is no REAL difference between the candidates

When you look at the candidates’ actual policies, there isn’t much of a difference. The main difference between these candidates is their character differences. The nation is in debt, the stock market is in borderline depression, and golden parachutes are flying out with carefully crafted insurance policies made out just for them. These problems all need to be dealt with and they will be dealt with in circumscribed ways. With economics as the main “issue” for the voter, the problem will lie in the expertise of the treasury and federal reserve. Whoever is in office will appropriately follow suite. The differences one sees now are political differences, and for this reason should be disparaged.

3. You have an imagination beyond an immediate political reality

If you have a big imagination, chances are you probably have more important things to do than to worry about voting for the president. You probably have your own reading and writing that you do. You have your own friends who go out and have their OWN conversations about their OWN interests. You don’t watch TV slavishly thinking that you’re being informed by equally biased cable news channels like MSNBC and Fox News. Your mind’s in much more transcendental places even if their predictably categorized as “fantasy” by the herd.

2. You make more of a political impact by not voting, than voting

Think about it. What would happen if 90% of the population didn’t vote? With the United States standing in the world, this act would be seen as nothing other than an absolute lack of confidence by the US population. It would show that people no longer care about what happens in the beltway because they could take care of their own affairs. The beltway would then have to adapt to the population’s own wants and needs because of the newfound independence of the people. The more people vote, the more people are simply taking part in something they think they believe in, although they consistently tell people they don’t believe in the government because it has failed them. The herd is unaware of their own confusion.

1. You don’t need politics to give yourself an identity

You are who you are regardless of the relative issues at hand dealt with by relative people in a relative culture. Why would you identify yourself with this relativity? Because you don’t know any better and are caught up in a presence that you think will have a massive impact for the future, the future of the next 10-20 years, within an estimated universal history of billions of years. Spare the universe your all-to-human pretensions of change and destination and de-identify yourself with any present reality. Real change is that which is absolutely unpredictable and is able to transcend man’s categories of time. Political change is just man playing games with that which he thinks is important, but is simply the lack of a larger understanding of how the universe works.

Tim asks, Do you believe in the theory of gravity?

Absolutely not. Its just another case of scientist making up crazy theories.

Henry asks, What would happen if I shot a gun in space?

Depends if you have a license to carry a concealed weapon in space and whether or not you hit someone. I imagine you would end up in jail or possibly a large fee.

Jeff asks, I just read that scientists actually came within one ten millionith of a degree from reaching Absolute Zero, back in 2000 bu have not been able to get any closer. How much would that suck to be those scientists? Sooo close, but no cigar.

LOL. I hadn’t thought of it that way, I bet they went home and cried. Then they tried make ice cream but only got cream and then they tried to build a tree fort but only got a back porch. Ehhh… well that’s all I got. This was fun.

James asks, Why is there light on earth from the sun, but yet in space, it is black?

In order to see something light has to reflect off it, black is total absorption (i.e. no reflection), so when nothing reflects it looks black like space.

Eric asks, What is the fifth dimension?

Its the one right past the fourth but before the sixth. You can’t miss it.

Jared asks, What is the most destructive weapon in the world, which does not use nuclear power? (Real weapons, not metaphors like “Hate”)

I would say non-nuclear missiles, or maybe biological stuff. Things that burn, or melt you are pretty powerful. I would rather be vaporized by a nuclear weapon than die slowly from fire or some crazy disease that makes your eyes fall out. Greed is pretty powerful too.

Liam asks, Which law of physics best describes you?

I would say conservation of Mass. I eat a lot but don’t seem to get fat.

Stephen asks, Are you a “Dark Matter Theory” or “Modified Newtonian Physics” kind of person? Do you create something invisible to explain the world or just change the rules?

We here at OW are rule changers. We see the status quo and then do awesome things that force the world to change. We’re different, trend setters if you will. The cool kids that are smart, and incredibly sexy. So yeah, ladies, let us know, most of us are single.

Shawn asks, What do you know about the theory of everything?

Nothing.

Nicole asks, Who knows the equasion for gravity

I bet Newton and anyone who has taken an intro physics class.

Dawn asks, What is the benefit of studies if we are not going to imbibe in our daily life?

Imbibe? Is that a word? I think it means drink, are we going drink our studies? I’m not sure that’s a good idea, don’t most schools have a problem with imbibing?

Phil asks, The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest atom smasher, started up this month. Scientists predict collisions of sub-atomic particles produced by the LHC. Is anyone worried about ‘black holes?’

Lord knows I am. As we all know scientists are the agents of Satan and this device is a gate for Satan. So forget black holes, I’m worried about Satan.

Joe asks, What is another name for a circular particle accelerator?

What? I don’t know. A round particle accelerator?

Enter Gene Amondson. This man is nuts, and by nuts we mean completely insane. If its one thing the U.S. needs its another expensive drug war, you know, because the other ones are going so well. I mean its impossible to buy illegal substances in this country…. right? Besides that we all know how well the government does when it stands up to big business. I mean destroying a multi-billion dollar industry that provides millions of jobs all over the country won’t negatively effect our economy at all and since the economy is doing so well right now, now is definitely the time to remove more jobs from the hard working American public. Besides all of these well thought out reasons, let’s face it, after you turned 21, drinking just wasn’t as much fun. You know you miss the high school house parties, bon fires in the middle of the woods, and sneaking around your parents. With Gene at the wheel these times will never end.

For these reasons we think that Gene Amondson would be the best pick for the next president. He’s a chainsaw wielding, death costume wearing, wine not drinking, priest from the back woods of Washington state. The breeding ground of great leaders. It’s time to bring back bootlegging! It’s time to bring back rum running! Its time for Prohibition! Its time for Gene Amondson!

P.S. We would have endorsed Obama but the stupid NY times beat us too it. Bastards!

10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau acted as a romantic counter-weight to the often convoluted nature of Kantian enlightenment. His political and social theories influenced not only his own generation but much of the 20th century French social theory. Here we had a man who was not afraid to be other than what it was to be a human being. Here we had a man who would even privilege the life of animals and “prior-man” in his “Discourse on Inequality” where he traces the genealogy of man solely to the nexus of private property, where man sees other men building huts from the sediments and eventually asks himself “Why can’t I have one of those?”, or “I wonder if I can use the structure that he has made.”. In his famous political treatise “The Social Contract”, Rousseau states his more enduring maxim; “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” referring to his own political situation and reflection on instituted law. It is there where we have one of the more strong insistences on human freedom in distinction to the competition that makes man dependent on other men. Rousseau serves as a sign of the individual in the face of a possible myth created by those wealthier that there is a certain defined social hierarchy. While government must implement its laws as long as we are human beings in need of security, we as human beings must recognize that this counter-influence to the “state of nature” may not be the whole truth to our whole happiness.

9. David Hume

David Hume is the primer empiricist and skeptical philosopher of the 18th century. A simple and often jolly man, no one would have thought that his ideas would serve as the benchmark for skeptical thought centuries after. His influence not only traversed the myriad of 20th century social Darwinists, but also the counter-influence of German enlightenment, especially Kant. What Hume advocated was nothing other than philosophical destruction. By negating the fact that we can know anything about the external world, we were led to believe that our scientific audacity was nothing other than exaggerated hubris. All we have for Hume are recognized patterns from external phenomena. That something should happen twice, there is no necessity for this in the external world. That we should form mental patterns from the external world, this is simply limited to itself, in other words, we should be quite foolish to think our mental patterns can tell us anything about the world “in itself”. All we can understand is our own subjective experience of the world. We can’t know total truths, we can state aggrandized maxims, and we can only know what we experience. With this fact in mind, Hume stands as the “Bulldozer of Metaphysics”, as the ever-consummate challenger to the value of abstract thought.

8. Friedrich Hegel

After Kant had rescued abstract philosophical thought from Hume, Hegel took it upon himself to describe the entire existence of the totality of the world in his magnum opus appropriately titled “The Phenomenology of Spirit”. The task was so big, some say it drove him to madness. Carl Jung has been quoted as saying that “If Hegel lived in the 20th century, he would have been diagnosed with a mania”. 20th century pedestrian psychological thinking aside, Hegel would prove to be the foremost thinker in romantic philosophy for his large leaps of logic that covered all that could be known in the human world. In the “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel traces the human being from his purely conscious state to his self-conscious state and then his fall back into non-consciousness. This would be referred to later as the Hegelian Dialectic. For Hegel, with the recent accomplishments of enlightenment reason and science, we have become self-aware of ourselves in a grandiose historical narrative, where we realize we had a large past and possible future where we no longer recognized ourselves like we do now. We see ourselves in a time with ancestors before us. For Hegel, because we see ourselves, there is no more left for the human-being to accomplish, making the goal of human existence the realization of the self. Francis Fukuyama would echo this sentiment in his book “The End of History and The Last Man”, where he foresees democracy and world-wide communication ending history as we know it, because we have fulfilled what we have needed to fulfill. Hegel swayed by the trust in reason of the enlightenment created the greatest and most sweeping of systematic philosophies, one that wanted to exemplify everything in one text.

7. Martin Heidegger

In the early part of the 20th century 2 world wars devastated the morale and spirit of both the west and the east. During this time, there were massive vacuums for spirited leaders to find the “groundings” of all existence in hopes of gaining clarity on their situations. Heidegger was the foremost thinker of this period who insisted that we reestablish what it is we mean by “being”. We all use the word, but none of us really understand what it means. In Heidegger’s most famous work “Being and Time”, Heidegger sets out to reestablish what “Being” is concretely. Through his existential analytic, we are brought to the most insightful, basic, understandings of the Dasein (Being-There, Human Being). We are simply “Looking-around-for-things-to-do” circumspectively. We are influenced by the “They-Self”. We are always calculating for future purposes, what Heidegger denominates as “Running-ahead-of-itself” when referring to the futural Dasein. It’s in this explanation, this subtle criticism of what he found man to become, that he demands a look back to the pre-socratic thought of greek antiquity, a time where thinkers were more in awe of the world than in trying to calculate an infinite amount of sediments that ostensibly make it up. Heidegger would become a Nazi, a move that he tacitly apologized for, a move that would repudiate him of the legacy as a philosopher he deserves. The task when reading Heidegger is trying to understand how one could be such a brilliant philosopher while at the same time being a nefarious Nazi. It’s in Heidegger that we learn more than anywhere, how deep the divisions are between politics and philosophy.

6. Soren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard is undeniably the father of existentialism. It’s Kierkegaard’s reaction to Hegelian idealism that places him as the founder of personal subjective philosophy in contra-distinction to “systematic” philosophy. A thinker who thought more with his body than mind at times, Kierkegaard was known for making decisions based on sometimes ostensibly absurd reasons. As a thinker deeply influenced by the tradition of Christianity, especially the life of Jesus Christ, Kierkegaard would go on to give deep polemics against his own native church of Denmark, in hopes of restoring the passion of the actual life of Jesus Christ. In one of his more famous books “Either/Or” Kierkegaard speaks of a “Rotation Method” which is nothing other than limiting yourself as a human being to the most focused passionate existence that often defies modernity’s discursive social logic of “Being everything to everyone” ubiquitously. In his somber “Sickness unto Death” Kierkegaard would trace a genealogy of despair from the unconscious despairer to the conscious despairer, to the despairer-no-more (the man of pure faith). In all his works, he encounters the cumbersome division between faith and reason that the modern catholic church often likes to package up in a nice present, as if they may never come into conflict, a point that Kierkegaard absolutely negates. Kierkegaard places philosophy solely into the human being who has to make these difficult choices. It’s with Kierkegaard that philosophy starts to become distinctly human.

5. Immanuel Kant
Kant’s importance is unprecedented. As Kant would claim, “Hume woke me up from my dogmatic slumber”. It was with this claim that Kant would go on to create the most celebrated and accepted idealist (privileging the mind) philosophy to ever hold sway in the western world. His influence over other philosophers is great to say the least. What Kant saw in the popularity of Hume’s empiricism was nothing other than the diminution of the human mind in being able to know its universe. It was Kant’s turn back to cartesianism that made him state “knowledge comes from experience, but doesn’t arise out of experience” signifying the mind as a co-accomplishing force with the external world that is able to give us the knowledge we have. It is with Kant, that epistemology (theory of knowledge) becomes a formal discipline. By re-appropriating the status of the mind in total nature, Kant gave relief to a plethora of philosophers who wanted to champion the romantic self in being able to create large systematic totalities (Hegel, Fitche, Schelling). In his most famous work, the “Critique of Pure Reason” Kant analyzed all the ways in which the mind worked demarcating a “judging faculty” here and discovering a “transcendental intuition” there. His hyper-analysis of the subjective intake of experience would lead to an increase want for the understanding the mind. His influence paved the way for Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Phenomenology. Kant is the philosopher the west has always been proud of.

4. Rene Descartes

Descartes is the father of modern philosophy. Why is he the father of modern philosophy? It is with two publications of Descartes that philosophy takes its “subjective” turn into the absolute experience of the self. It is in his “Discourse on Method” and “Mediations” that philosophy recognizes itself first and foremost as a personal experience of the world. Prior to Descartes, philosophy was guided by the metaphysics of the schoolmen in the middle-ages who were always invested in neo-aristotelian and platonic interpretations of the world. “Change”, “The Infinite”, “Movement” as objects of inquiry into first principles was substituted for the cogito sum as the first principle; “I think therefore I am” with Descartes. Before we can ask questions on the world and how it moves, we first must ask questions on how I can interpret the world in such a way in the first place. In his mediations, we gain a systematic account of a man who was applying his deduction to everything; even God, which he knew would procure himself an endless amount of punishment. It’s with this in mind, that we learn from his “Discourse on Method” that he would wait until he was dead for his work to be published. Totally devoid of any want for fame while he was alive, totally devoid of any want of acceptance of others, totally in want for the basic truth of reality as he was only able to see as one human being, this is what gives Descartes the worthy claim of “the father of modern philosophy”. The sheer amount of philosophers that were influenced by him (E.G. Kant, Husserl, Hegel) would prove to lengthen his work and name for a long time to come.

3. Fredrick Nietzsche
As we live in the new 21st century, there is no doubt that Nietzsche is the most influential philosopher of our time. As a late 19th century German, he predicted the social structure of the 20th century. Not only have philosophers been influenced by Nietzsche, but so have artists, musicians, social theorists, and even theologians! In his famous remark in the “The Gay Science”, Nietzsche states “God is Dead”, but what is often forgotten in the quote is “but you and I killed him”. It is here that Nietzsche introduces us into a godless world that is not bleak and lugubrious, but colorful and vivacious. It is here that Nietzsche becomes the consummate existentialist in placing total responsibility in the hands of the human being, so much responsibility that it was necessary to transcend the “mawkish” desires and emotions of the human being as we know it, and to ascend to the “Ubermensch”, the superman, who acted out of much more pure instincts that those of the self-satisfied bourgeois human being that we have come to know. Nietzsche saw that the mass-industrialization of the late 19th century would make men weak and “herd-animals” looking for the most easy, voluptuous existence possible. It’s with this in mind that Nietzsche would try to cure civilization by over-turning Christianity which he denominated as “Platonism for the masses”. Only when we could overturn our insistence on being sinful and guilty, could we return to a much more magnanimous Greek ethic of strength and vigor. When reading Nietzsche, you feel alive and not guilty about something that may have gone wrong. It is with this in mind that Nietzsche always exercises a profound influence in those younger in age.

2. Edmund Husserl

Nietzsche thought that man must progress forward to become better than what he is. Heidegger thought that man must dive backwards into his roots to become better than what he is. Husserl though, completely ignored the question of “How is it I can become better”, creating an absolute black hole for all proprietary existential thought. By ignoring the existential significance of philosophical themes, Husserl proved to be the true “ubermensch”. Husserl advocated a giant leap “into the things themselves”, echoing the complications of Kantian idealism, but this time, they would be figured out. Only by the most intensive radical Cartesian reduction can we hope to understand anything about the absolute grounds of experience. No philosopher before or after has ever worked on the most grounding of grounds than Edmund Husserl. As a thinker of the early 20th century, Husserl would go on to create the discipline of phenomenology, a radical new account of the workings of inner-consciousness, and how it interacted with the outside “Life-World”. It is here that we gain the fundamental insight of phenomenology, that there is a logic to the purely perceptive world, before it enters into active consciousness that is computing its raw hyletic data by “formal logic”. Husserl through his tireless reductions away from the always-relativistic motivations of existential philosophies saw philosophy as at one time having a much nobler task than what it had become in the earlier part of the 20th century. His insistence on returning philosophy to a “rigorous” discipline of pure forms and explication of pure passive phenomena, places him in the absolute outer-most reaches that philosophy has ever been. We at old-wizard believe that Husserl will be studied 1,000 years from now as much as Plato is studied now.

1. Socrates / Plato
While Plato and Socrates seem like the obvious choice for a #1 on a top 10 philosophers list, it doesn’t go without justification. The texts of Plato have shaped the entire roots and history of western civilization. There have never been ideas that have grabbed hold of the western world as severely as Plato’s dialogues, to the point that most people don’t even realize they are acting platonically, or at least posit platonic ideals. Of course, the catholic churches appropriating of Plato into their own thought helped established his reign as the most influential philosopher of all time, but the influence that holds sway is not because they are simply “widely accepted”.

Within the platonic dialogues, we find every philosophical concern addressed from the more existential themes of love (Symposium) to the wildly abstract metaphysical concepts of number (Parmenides), all in the graceful, easy-to-read, format of the platonic dialogue. How easy it was to understand philosophy when you became a spectator in the interlocution itself, sometimes even participating when you put down the book and started thinking for yourself.

It was with the idea of the Platonic “Forms” that Plato defined the west for the next 2,000 years to come. “The Forms” are never-changing ideas that ground all of our existence that are non-material and all pervading in our thoughts and actions. It was with Plato that speculative thought lost its relativistic subtleties from the pre-socratic thinkers (Heraclitus, Democritus) for an all-embracing philosophy of true forms and right conduct. Never has there been more germane ideas on ethical and civil conduct than Plato’s “Republic”. Never do we witness a more salubrious restrain than when Socrates is debating Thrasymachus of the fine points of principalities.

The Socratic restrain, even in the face of an unjust death created the platonic ideal that all people of the west aspire to; to not be in fear in the face of death, to dialogue with others when something needs to be solved, and to exercise restraint and moderation when the body is in want of excesses. While it seems as if the immediate western world has forgotten these values, this would not be an accurate claim. That the immediate western world would agree with the platonic mentality of the good life is true, however, this does not mean that they necessarily follow them, often feeling guilty about their actions. It’s with this in mind that Platonism stands as the signature mark of western values of decency, even if we have increasingly fallen short of the ideals that have come before us. We are aware of ourselves as always falling short of something better for ourselves. That which is better for is nothing other than what the Platonic dialogues have established perennially for the Western World.

5. Safari

Originally bundled with Mac operating systems, this web browser was only in use by a small percentage of the computing world. As Mac has grown in popularity over the past few years, so has their web browser, Safari. A unique and fun name accompanied this quick browser yet for most of its life it has been available for only Mac operating systems. The release of Safari for Windows operating systems was long awaited and anticipated. Wrapped in a silver skin, this program offered a fresh look to traditional Windows programs, yet this was overshadowed by the tremendous lack of speed Safari offered. This dramatically affected the release of Safari for Windows, yet the traditional product has been working great with its home base Mac operating systems. Safari offered a nice feature of automatically resizing windows with ease when the user wanted a differently sized window. The zooming and resizing features in Safari were one of the first and have been enjoyed by its users. Development has continued on the Windows version of this product yet this is not their primary market. Conquering the Mac market was a breeze, as it was the default choice for all Mac computers in the world. Overall this product is gaining popularity and is nice enough to offer development for both Mac and Windows. Old-wizard.com enjoys sharing, so we are in agreement that this is one of the better web browsers, finding itself at five.

4. Internet Explorer

Ah yes, another fine product from the monopoly loving company Microsoft. This web browser is often ranked as the most popular web browser on the planet, yet this is largely to do with the fact that most people just settle for what is standard. This web browser is actually built into the operating system known as Windows XP, and is the standard bundled “option” found with all Microsoft operating systems. Until recently Internet Explorer has had huge security flaws, and lacked any sort of imaginative design. The newest product, still in beta testing, is Internet Explorer 7. The streamlined features with this new version made many people feel lost within a product that they use on a daily basis. The menus disappeared and were replaced with icons, and when you click on the icons they just bring up a menu where everything is hidden. This could be considered as an advancement, yet we consider it as just a cover-up and attempt to mock Firefox. Internet Explorer maybe preinstalled into most computers on the planet, yet the lack of cross platform usage makes them rank only fourth on our list. The backing and development of Microsoft Corporation makes this product stable and secure, but in no means number one.

3. Flock

What the Flock? Many may find themselves asking this question, as this word is popping up more and more in daily conversation, and on several websites, invading your computer. Flock is an up and coming web browser that is strongly based upon the feeling of community. A sleek looking product that resembles Firefox with more shapely outlines and curves. It is almost as if they tried to take the best features of Firefox and Internet Explorer, and meld myspace, facebook and youtube into the same window. Flock can pull statuses from your favorite social websites, such as updates from your friends status window in Facebook. It streamlines this data, from multiple sources, and puts it within your web browser for easy access. This is like using an upgraded version of Firefox, yet it lacks in some of its base features such as favorites organization and sharing. We can defiantly see this product getting more attention in a very short amount of time as the social network sites such as Facebook and Myspace are launching into super popular web applications. Flock also caters to the blogger community, offering the same sort of streamlined updates as for the other sites. Due to its young age, this browser does not have the popularity or user base of other browsers, but it is definitely something to keep an eye out for. Go ahead, install it and check it out, perhaps it will replace your copy of Internet Explorer.

2. Opera

Opera finds itself second in this list of competitors because of the massive amount of platforms, or operating systems, that it supports. In its dossier you can find versions supporting Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, BSD and several versions for cell phones and PDA based platforms. Sharing is caring, and Opera has shown us all how to do so. Another great advantage of this browser is that it is self sufficient for its security features, not dependent on the built in security measures of the platform it is being run on. Usability for this browser is very easy for users to get a hang of, and it actually displays pages with fewer errors than Internet Explorer. Opera also finds itself supporting widgets, which are small web applications, with ease. Users can customize their widgets to feed them different streaming information straight to their desktop. Although it is not as popular as the plugins for Firefox, these widgets go along with the same thought process and are enjoyed by many people every day. A clean looking and functional web browser finds itself in the shadows of Firefox and internet explorer, yet actually offer the user a much more engaging web experience than Internet Explorer. Keep up the good development Opera, as we enjoy how you share your fresh application with almost every possible computer platform on planet Earth.”

1. Firefox

The web browser that finds itself at the number one poll position of our list is Firefox. Taking the internet by storm as of late, many users have enjoyed this product because it was a fresh and interesting alternative to the boring and forced upon Internet Explorer. One of the main factors for this product’s popularity was its pure speed at which it could load pages. Zipping through different websites is of course most dependent on the speed of your connection, yet browsing with this superior browser can increase even the tiny sliver percentage of users still using dial up internet. Of course Firefox is secure, if not even more secure than its competitors and is offered for several operating systems. Tabbed browsing was one of the most amazing features introduced by Firefox; allowing users to have multiple web pages open within a single Firefox screen. Increasing productivity and allowing users to have several pages at their fingertips is another huge advantage to this product. Continuing with the list of great features included in Firefox is all of the optional plug-ins that it offers. StumbleUpon, one of the most popular plugins, allows users to select what topics they are interested it and “stumble” through pages that coincide with their likes. If the user enjoys the page, they give it a thumbs up, the program learns and shows more pages like that. If you give it a thumbs down, the opposite happens, and the viewer sees fewer pages with the same content. A community has been created with StumbleUpon users, where links can be shared and sent directly to other users instantly. The popularity of the plugins offered through Firefox, the speed and security of this product, and the cross platform support makes this our favorite web browser on the market. Old-Wizard.com fully supports the use of Firefox, and recommends it for viewing of our content. Enjoy the fox!

Let’s just take a step back, even before the installation attempt. As with previous versions of Microsoft Windows, there are different levels of the operating systems, offering a multitude of options to accommodate your need for the computer. Whether you are the modest home user just browsing the interweb and sending emails, or a powerful business user pushing your computer to its number crunching edge, Windows has been able to accommodate you. Here before you lies the list of Microsoft Windows Vista options, in order from least feature filled, to most: Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate. These were developed with different users in mind and as you go higher up the Vista chain, you get more and more features. It’s a sneaky way for Microsoft to create price tiers, without actually saying it.

Picking out a version shouldn’t be too hard but it does get quite confusing with the plethora of options available between all of the different versions. More bells and whistles obviously means more money spent. Once one purchases their copy of Windows Vista, they then are faced with the daunting task of installing it. This is by no mean a walk in the park. During my trial test of installing Vista on my computer, it took me countless hours spread across a two week time span, crawling through all corners of the internet just to find a piece of software to make Vista see my hard drive. I couldn’t even get past the second step without running into a problem. This was frustration at the “ultimate” level, I somewhat wished my frustration could have been downgraded to business, but Microsoft is not fond of downgrades, only upgrades. Finally, like a diamond in the rough, a suitable driver was found from 1997. For some reason this software worked even though the newer, “Vista Certified” drivers didn’t.. On to the install!

With Vista finally able to find my hard drive, I was then actually allowed to install Windows Vista Business onto the computer. From then on, only mediocre pain ensued. I got blasted into a dark desktop screen, with sleek looking black menus, taskbar and flashy bubbly looking menus. I soon found out that barely half of my computer’s hardware was actually functioning. No sound. No printer. No external hard drives were working. It is as if I bought a brand new car, but could only find one gallon of gas to drive it with. Troubleshooting this issue, I found out that my current and trusty anti-virus software didn’t work with Vista. I was then on the hunt for a version that would work, because as with any brand new version of an OS it is susceptible to viruses instantly.

After several hours of searching, I was able to find a suitable anti-virus program that worked. I also tried to install other programs that I use on a daily basis, but only one of them was Vista compatible. The others didn’t even have a release version of the software that would work with Vista. During all of this, Vista kept bothering me, in the form of tossing a transparent black screen up prompting me with annoying questions, as if I was venturing to places in the computer I shouldn’t have been. Are you sure you want to do that? Is this what you meant to do? Do you know that this could cause an error? Don’t you know that this will make the system unsecure? The questions would not stop. Like an annoyingly indecisive friend. Over and over I was slowed down by Vista making sure all my moves were made apparent to me. This was quite aggravating. Dealing with a half working computer, and screens popping up warning me of what I already knew I was doing, I got fed up. I left the project for the night, not touching it again till the next day. I continued to use Windows Vista for a couple of days, and found it to be more of a hassle than an advantage. Sure, it looked fancy and did nice Mac like visual styles, but overall it was the most painful OS install and usage of my life. I would rather go back to Windows Millennium, and we all know how horrible of an OS that was. I won’t even go there.

As with all Windows products, they regularly release updates that get applied to the software that fixes problems, adds features, and makes it more secure. With Windows XP, about one year after its launch, Microsoft released “Service Pack 1”. It was a collection of all the updates, and then some, that Microsoft released over the year. This was a massive update, and enhanced Windows XP greatly. In the case of Windows Vista, Microsoft has already released information that it will be releasing “Service Pack 1” shortly. There are versions of this service pack floating around the internet, and it should be released to the public soon. Quite sad when the latest OS needs a service pack so shortly after it’s fumbled and rush release to the public. Nonetheless, a few days after I installed Windows Vista, I wiped it clean, and installed a fresh copy of Windows XP Professional in under 45 minutes. Quite superior, for an aging Microsoft product reaching the end of its life cycle.

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