Stupid is as Stupid Does: The Making of an Unpresident

The truly stupid people are those who (feel they must) believe that Trump is more stupid than they are—while he redirects their agendas with his apparently stupid antics (like ‘unpresidented’—which I happened to think was an ironically brilliant remark). He will become our unpresident, and he knows it. He absolutely fucking intends to be just that. And, in choosing to make a word-choice error, he sends the message out to “his” people (and, especially, to people who might be on the fence about joining “his” people) that, despite his wealth, he is, after all, just an ordinary ignorant person like they are; and he gives them hope that they too could one day become as rich and famous as he is. It’s a stupid message for stupid people, but it is not stupidly constructed and delivered. It’s pure genius. And, finally, it’s also a vague reference to the lefties who are so hell-bent upon unseating him before he even gets seated. Trump is taunting them, poking fun at their determination to “unpresident” him, snickering behind their backs as they make fools of themselves and continue to alienate those level-headed, mature progressives who would rather be working as responsible adults than chasing their tails trying to derail a president via character assassination before he even gets started. There is no sense in pursuing this course. If his character has not been assassinated by now, it never will be. His detractors are feeding him energy with their  diatribe. He thrives on this stuff; he always has. He’s rope-a-doping the Democrats (and out-of-line Republicans) left and right. They fall for his silly little tricks time after time. Leave him alone. He’s sucking all the energy out of the country with his attention-grabbing antics as he changes subjects by distracting people away from what they should be paying attention to. If you want to do some good, if you feel you must protest “in the streets,” go to Standing Rock instead. That’s the front line of the war, where the real social and cultural damage is being done. You’re not going to stop Trump before he starts, and you’re not going to slow him down much once he does. He’s got you all by the nose and leading you where he wants you to go. Wake up. There are important things to be done, and trying to out-trump Trump is not one of them. Is your intent to prove that you are every bit as uncaring, crass, rude, and boorish as he is? Because, if it is, you’re succeeding. He’s managed to lower you to his level and you can expect him, with his best denial and projection tactic, to turn around on you and point out how badly you are acting. He’s sucking you into his game and he’ll continue to do it for the next eight years if you don’t wake up to what he’s all about. Don’t be so stupid as to believe that he’s the stupid one. He didn’t win the election because he’s stupid; he won it because you are.

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final solution: to be or not to be is not a question

There’s no question that climate change (global warming) is happening.

But I see no evidence, let alone scientific proof, of the eotw scenarios.

All the computer simulations depend on too many assumed variables.

And they tend to ignore possible human intervention and remediation.

Not to mention unforeseen circumstances and disregarded science.

Will people die? Undoubtedly. By the millions probably. Oh well.

Will the planet die? I very much doubt it. Life is highly adaptable.

Will the human race go extinct? One can only hope. But I doubt it.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll even wake up to necessities we now ignore:

Population control. Efficient food and meds production/distribution.

Universal healthcare. Universal affluence. The end of armed conflict.

Demilitarization. The end of weapons manufacture. The end of borders.

World government. Yeah, I know. Those ideas offend fascists globally.

That’s the big one, then: the end of fascism, xenophobia, and racism.

Think it will never happen? Think it is all pie-in-the-sky impossibility?

Then why take the negative side and think we will all die out so soon?

Your doomsday scenarios are just as likely or unlikely as my utopia.

It’s all a matter of conjecture and expectation. Expect the worst; get it.

Mass hysteria and hallucination create reality: we are now nuclear.

Extinction is just the next stage in humanity’s self-fulfilling prophecy.

But we have a choice: we can go on as we are or we can face the truth:

We are making this all happen. Life takes care of itself, absent humans.

But a thought just occurred to me; maybe our extinction is the solution.

Maybe life’s wisdom convinces us to kill ourselves off to save all else.

I could get behind that idea. Problem is, how much do we take with us?

If we’re intent on offing ourselves, why not leave other species behind?

Or is that the true nature of humans, to destroy everything as we go?

Maybe it is, after all. Whichever, it’s not up to you or me, but all of us.

 

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emotional pathology

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. [REM]

Understanding how eotw scenarios might play out, especially when they are based in very real interpretations (not paranoid, but grounded in solid scientific and rational studies) of situations and events, is important. We should avoid at all costs the temptation to bury our heads in the sand and feel content to let the future fall where it may. But these considerations must be balanced against the fundamental idea that, no matter how much we may want to believe otherwise, we cannot know for certain what will happen in the future. The dour Chicken-Littles of the world who run around bemoaning the fate of humanity and the planet, though they may turn out to be absolutely correct, do no favors to anyone, least of all themselves. I say that we must understand the truth about what’s going on and what seems likely or even merely possible to happen, but to bring such emotion, and certainly much neurosis, to the planning table is ridiculous. That “strategy” only serves to trade any present peace and goodwill for future (and perhaps vain) assurances. Leave the emotion at home, people; wallow in it at night when you awaken out of your horrific dreams. And, in the brightening morning, in light of day, consider this: You may believe this is all going to happen to us tomorrow or next week, but it’s not; not even next month or next year. And the bits of it that are happening right now, the real-time ongoing situations and events, are concerns enough; by dealing with them, properly and adequately, rationally and objectively, in the present, we effectively deal with them in the future as well. My big point here is this: these catastrophes you worry about, these imagined nightmare scenarios, will in no way be avoided because you have gotten all bent out of shape, emotionally charged, and driven to despair (even to the point, as more than one person has testified to me, of imagining how you might, as painlessly as possible, kill yourself so as to avoid the time when food and energy shortages have created a world where you must live cold, hungry, and without your internet or TV). Yes, we need rational, scientific solutions to present day problems so that they do not escalate further; but your anxiety is misplaced when it’s projected onto a failing planet. It’s you you’re worrying about, not the future of humanity. Get a grip. More than likely, certainly if you are over 40 or 50 years of age, you will be gone before conditions deteriorate to a point of what you might consider severity. (The scaremongers who say the end is just around the corner are wrong; their message is an outshoot of their pathology.) And, likely, if are younger than 40 or 50, you’re not one of the end-of-the-worlders; those kids are dealing. [I make a minor exception to my angst-dismissal for mothers (and wussy-tending fathers) of younger kids, with one caveat to this caveat: consider how your biological attachment may be affecting your rational judgment.] So, in short, potential eotw scenarios may or may not have a very real basis in science, but the near-hysteria phenomenon attached to them is an emotional disorder. Deal with that (pathological) issue, and you’ll be fine. 

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I Want to Believe

I believe—“believe,” unscientifically, more as a matter of faith, like maybe as an aspect of my personal religion, which worships fantasy (like, actually, all religions do)—that the human brain can only hold so much information, and when it nears its maximum capacity, it starts to dump content, transferring it, first, to a less accessible holding area and then, later, when that area fills up, dumping it permanently. This is my explanation for Alzheimer’s. People thus afflicted have input too much information throughout their lives and have reached their capacity; or, perhaps, they didn’t have all that much capacity to begin with. This “explanation” (I hesitate, even, to raise it to the level of hypothesis) is, of course, entirely flippant. I want to believe, like others who, often pretending it to be scientific fact, purport that the human brain uses only one-tenth of its capacity; but I find that claim no more rational than my own “religious” tenet. We just don’t know. And we probably never will; because AI will probably far outdistance us and replace us before we could ever rise to a technological level sufficient enough to find out; or else it will make us irrelevant. I mean, do we, even as scientists, care how much capacity the brain of a monkey has? We, humans, are the next monkeys. Well, actually, that’s what we’ve always been.  

And speaking of marginal hypotheses [is that what I was doing?] I believe in—nay, let me qualify the qualification: I more than believe; I accept as scientific fact—the theory of evolution. And, if my scientific education were not enough, I have personal anecdotal experience that confirms the theory. When I was working at my last job, I was looking through a National Geographic magazine one day while in the office eating my lunch, and I saw a picture of a chimpanzee and, honest to Darwin, it looked exactly like a guy who worked for me: same eyes, same nose, same chin and ears. Except for its smaller stature, it could have been his twin. Next time you’re at the zoo, examine the great apes closely. These are people! How can anyone except a totally self-deluded person not intuitively understand whence we humans came?


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a culture of expediency

See, we plan ahead, that way we don't do anything right now.

Kevin Bacon, Tremors

Every time I alter my schedule method to try to accommodate the lady, or anybody or anything, the “requests” [usually accompanied by one or another form of disguised threats (in her case, to hire someone to do the work; in other cases, oh, it could be pretty much anything, like do this when we tell you to or else: your car will not be road legal and we’ll stop you and fine you and you’ll have to do it anyway; you will be in arrears on your taxes and all kinds of further intimidation will take place; we’ll arrest you and put you in jail because all citizens must serve on jury duty otherwise the Amerikan justice system will not work—yeah, as if it works now as it is)] for more immediate task results usually end up scuttling my method, because my method works, when I do it my way: I wait; everything is done in its own time, when its time has come. But when I must do something right now or very soon because it is so damn important to whatever Nazi says it is, I can’t handle it, because, if it were truly so important as people will make it out to be, if it were truly such an emergency that it be done now, there would be no choice in the matter, not even a consideration for when it should be done. True emergencies get taken care of immediately because there is no choice; all other tasks get scheduled. So, the real issue becomes: whose schedule are we going to use, mine or someone else’s? I say mine makes far more sense. But ours is a culture of expediency. Get it done now, get it done fast, and move on. Productivity reigns. What a bunch of bullshit.

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encryption matters

You can use communication channels to transfer illegal info, or you can use them to communicate in private legally.

The only way to discover which exchanged info is legal and which is illegal is to monitor all of it; iow, to abolish private communication.

To separate out illegal from legal content, you have to observe it. This requires that the right to private correspondence must be done away with.

Thus, copyright monopoly is pro sharing of information (no privacy) when it belongs to somebody else, but against it when it belongs to them:

They maintain that they are allowed to access your private content, but you are not allowed to access theirs, unless you pay them for it.

The right to share knowledge and culture is dependent upon the right to correspond in private. That said, they can buy my content if they wish.

That is only fair: if I must buy yours, then you must buy mine; and I warn you ahead of time, just so you know—I am not at all cheap.

If you want to know what I am sharing or otherwise doing on the net, pay me; or else stop invading my privacy. End government surveillance.

Support corporate dismantlement. 

Where Are the Guillotines?

Scott Adams says he’s endorsing Hillary because he’s afraid, living in California, that his (thus far very accurate) predictions about Trump’s political success looks to crazy anti-Trump protestors (does he mean Mexican nationals and illegal immigrants?) like he’s a Trump supporter and he worries that, not supporting Trump’s opponent, he will otherwise make himself a target for violence. This is, of course, a very wrong reason for endorsing any candidate and, anyway, Scott is rich enough to be able to afford several bodyguards to protect him from all but a many-peopled coordinated assassination attempt—which is highly unlikely given his less than ubiquitous popularity.

So I suspect there’s a lot more to Adams’ endorsement than his stated reasons, like some reverse psychology, maybe? His whole focus since last August has been the explication of the art and science of persuasion, and I see buried in not so obscure a fashion within his seemingly rational approach to the subject lots of persuasive little machinations. So consider this explanation of his endorsement motive: People reading Scott’s blog entries might start getting and spreading the idea (he has a small but highly intelligent blog-fan base) that it’s dangerous to be pro-Trump, that certain groups of liberals (e.g., illegal immigrants?) might be every bit as much of a physical threat as hard-core red-neck conservatives are, and that choosing to support Hillary over The Don, especially because you might want to be safe from violence, is not perhaps so wise; i.e., there is a more or less equal danger from both sides. Consider all of that in light of the fact that Scott frequently conducts little word-experiments to judge reactions (he calls it A-B testing) or simply to see what might proceed from his odd proposals.

Add here into the mix the suggestions from Anonymous et al. that the conventions and events leading up to them are not going to be quite so peaceful as participants might like, and it’s somewhat easy to see how the issue of violence is a theme rife for exploitation. I’m doing just that right now. I want to see political violence, riots in the streets, physical clashes between right and left. Viva la revolution. I do not want to see business as usual for the next four or eight—or fifty—years. If we must have corruption, I want the elitists to suffer at the hands of a corrupted proletariat. Guillotines in the city parks. Mansions broken into, looted, and set ablaze. And, above all, political change. The oppression must end. The people are ready. Let’s rise up and overturn the regime. If Trump cannot do that, let him be elected so that he can become the scapegoat. Because Hillary is just more of the same, and Bernie is a hopeless case at this point, I am guessing. Unless, of course, Hillary crashes and burns as her sins of the past come back to bite her in her fat white pants-suited ass.

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And Then

Conservatives, especially upper management jerks (apart from rational, primarily economic, conservatives a la William F. Buckley, et al.) are sociopaths. Conservatism in general in this sense is sociopathy, but only when measured against the population as a whole as opposed to elitist factions of it—because sociopathy is relative to social standards and values: if everyone in a society is an egocentric asshole, then conservatives will fit right into a society without conscience. (Resemble any country/government we know?) Liberals, on the other hand, are just plain unrealistic. It can be tough for some to resist their warm-hearted message when it’s obvious they care so much about the downtrodden masses who can never seem, in any way, to help themselves. Survival of the fittest, the conservatives say, not caring that a large part of the population, especially in this latter post-industrial age where the social structure has devolved into narrow specialized groupings that insist upon pigeonholing workers into restricted categories, is significantly compromised. We no longer have the “tribal” units that act to incorporate all members as best they can, and conservatives are happy to disregard anyone who cannot rise to the “responsible” level of fitting themselves in. Well, okay then. Let’s see how fit the conservatives are when the revolution comes. The fitter members of the disenfranchised citizens, at some point, will not take it any more. And then ...

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