A Transhumanist Poem

Judging by the existence of Google Mail Goggles, I'd guess that people often write things tired that they later regret.

I think there are enough examples of people who've said or written stuff in anger or frustration and regretted it afterwards that I'm inclined to think twice.

I probably wouldn't recommend the anger state to everyone. Just those of us who have found from personal experience that it has its advantages. My default state is carefree and flippant - which results in all sorts of problems if I forget for one second that communications can be taken by rivals and used for their personal advantage. This has resulted in many a regret.

Anger on the other hand provokes goal directed thinking, improved attention and decisiveness when it comes to determining and protecting my interests, whatever they may be.

Unfortunately contempt seems to result in the worst of both worlds. My instincts seem assume that just because someone is blatantly stupid they can't be a viable social threat so I am both flippant and opposed. Big mistake. Contempt is a more useful emotion for people to feel when their contempt producing instincts are finely calibrated to what level of status they can get away with conveying that the object should have in the eyes of the applicable audience.

The abrupt interruption of lyrical flow is part of hip-hop. BBut, in exchange for that break, you get a rhyme structure that is far more complex than any usual lyrical poetry can deliver. To use my example, lyrical poetry could never present the LINE RHYME TIMing WHY FINE subLIME rhyming pattern with an offbeat. Instead of rhyming along a ruler, they rhyme along a parabola. I'm not trying to convince you to like hip-hop. I'm trying to point out the aesthetic that is there, that I like. Hip-hop artists do it way better than my silly off-the-cuff example, but I think I got the Fibonacci-vs-Cartesian feel close enough to hear.

I don't especially like hip hop - mostly because the content is usually unappealing (and content matters to me more than to most).

I like hip-hop musically, but dislike the content, and I get the sense that lots of people have this problem. I get around this by searching for hip-hop with incomprehensible lyrics or ideology I like. There is good rationalist hip-hop out there. Try Baba Brinkman, sample here. I'm not trying to convince anyone to like hip-hop, I'm just saying it's out there.

There's a lot of variety in the content of hip hop. There's introspective hip hop from Black Star, sci-fi from Deltron 3030, liberal politics from Blue Scholars, storytelling about innercity life from Capital D & The Molemen, clever wordplay from Binary Star, or music from Jurassic 5 where the words are like another instrument so you don't have to worry about what they mean. If there are a few songs that you like, you can probably find more like them.

Yes, I do prefer, and I don't see any reason why I should pretend that jimrandomh meant that when he wrote "Some types of deviations are allowed, but some aren't". In any case, it seems scarcely credible that Swimmer963 is unaware that poetry has traditionally tended to have (perhaps even by definition) a lot of metrical regularity and that many people strongly prefer it to be that way, so on your reading jimrandomh's comment seems to convey little actual information. (And what actual information there was seemed to imply that all poetry should be iambic tetrameter, which is just ridiculous.)

Also: You might want to consider the possibility that Swimmer963 (or jimrandomh or T S Eliot) might have criteria of poetic merit other than "what will gain me status". (I find that a lot of the comments here about status, signalling, etc., give me the impression that their authors haven't appreciated how indirect a lot of this stuff is. Yes, a lot of human behaviour can be explained in terms of status-seeking; that doesn't mean that the people who do those things are actually, literally, seeking status. A lot of human behaviour can be explained in terms of trying to optimize one's reproductive success, but the humans behaving in those ways are often going out of their way to avoid actual reproduction. The same goes for status.)

[EDITED to add: Those remarks about status often seem to me like very clear examples of status-seeking behaviour themselves. "See how much more sophisticated I am, seeing through what Picasso might have said about beauty or artistic integrity to the status-seeking core beneath."]