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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caught in the net

Dude, seriously, why in the hell would you care????? You're going to be eligible for Social Security soon, relax... It's *not* your world anymore... Let it go... Step back... Stake out a spot, keep the idiots out, and enjoy the rest of your life... Remember when you stick your toe in someone else's mud puddle, usually it's going to come out dirty...

Scott Adams blog commenter COWG

This is a good philosophy. I’ve practiced it pretty much all my life. Too bad it doesn’t work. Just because you decide that you’re going to leave them alone doesn’t mean they will leave you alone. Yeah, you can stake out a spot and try to keep the idiots out, but there’s one set of idiots, the big guys, who will insist upon knowing what you’re up to and believe they have the right to know it. They think the whole world is their mud puddle. You can keep as low a profile as you can, but unless you’re determined that you will comply with their every little whim, eventually you’re going to run afoul of their petty laws, rules, and regulations. And nowhere is this more relevant than on the internet. If you want to stay off their radar, start by staying off the net. And, to my mind, that’s not a valid way to spend the rest of my life.

It’s a difficult and far from mainstream effort to stake out your own spot, keep your head down, and keep the idiots out if you maintain a presence on the net. The only way to effectively do it is to be a part of the vast and growing alternative net undercurrent: proxies, VPNs, DarkNet, etc. And if you do, they will try to ferret you out, with whatever two-steps-behind effort. And it doesn’t matter how close to Social Security you are. They’re persecuting grandmothers now just for doing what half the population of the world is doing.

Oppression is upon us, and the elitists are not going to give up until they either get all of your money and put you in the gaol if they must or you get to them first and put an end to their domination. The only other way is to get yourself a place in wilds of Montana, stock it with everything you need, get all of whatever else your daily living requires from a local store, and—especially—stay off the goddamn net! Because, if they’re going to get you, that’s the way they’re going to do it, son.