Hopeless Romantic Seeks Filthy Star Trek Playmate

I'm not Borg, but I want to add your biological distinctiveness to my own.


fingerguns
 

Turtles All the Way Down

I'm glad that some of yesterday's authors are still writing with today's youth in mind. Even if his presentation is sometimes a bit cliche, there are always sufficient pangs of reality in John Green's writing to justify the concession to his target audience. I need to complete my collection of his books before I'm too old to read.

"Most adults are just hollowed out. You watch them try to fill themselves up with booze or money or God or fame or whatever they worship, and it all rots them from the inside until nothing is left but the money or the booze or God they thought would save them. Adults think they are wielding power, but really power is wielding them."

Be lazy

Today I learned that

"Some seven-syllable sound"
Works every time

7 hours since "I just need to find a high-quality version of one song," and...

... now I've found this. Not only does it fit right in with classic Ministry, but it might be the most entertaining video on Youtube.

Wordsagne

tarseirdinuddlis

[tahr-seer-din-youd-lihs]

noun

1. the familiar, comfortable, distinctly erotic, vaguely filthy feeling-cum-sensation of a person's warm underwear sliding down their naked legs and coming to rest upon and around the exposed heels and dorsa (topsides) of their feet.
   
   

Origin of tarseirdinuddlis

2018; early Middle Jamesage < English: a loose portmanteau of the words 'weird,' 'nude,' 'pubic,' 'libidinous,' 'tarsus' and 'cuddle.'
 

Related forms

• tar·seir·din·udd·lic,  adjective
• tar·seir·din·udd·li·ty,  noun
• tar·seir·din·udd·lic·al·ly,  adverb

  

The Meaning of My Beard

I often wonder.

At times, my wonder wanders toward the undeniable peculiarity that is my beard. Why do I care about it? I might as easily just cut it off, and for all the social lubrication that doing so would afford me, a clean shave would undoubtedly find me on the "net gain" side of the energy ledger. It's not procrastination, laziness, apathy, or fetish that keeps it firmly attached to my chin and jowl, either; I am possessed of some sort of intuitive understanding that my beard is more than simply a vestigial biological element of my face, and I can't shake it - but I also don't yet understand it. Most paragraphs abutting any arbitrary anecdote of mine are destined to arrive at similar ends on the way to their beginning, I suppose. Why should the truth about my beard be any different?

Perhaps hair is a sentient organism with its own life goals, and I am tenuously attuned to the tune of its gentle Zen.

Ramblings on the meaning of art

Perhaps one reason everyone can find their own way to appreciate art is that everyone understands—in their own way—that the human condition's problems have solutions, but that many such problems have only ever been described in a language too complex, too vacuous, or too nonexistent for us to decipher efficiently enough to accommodate any measure of useful comprehension. Every instance of art represents an individual's attempt to write a sentence in a new language, and to preserve its memory and meaning before continuing to the next. Some artists are tragically bad at their own homemade grammar, of course, but some apparently grow to be less-bad.

As our numbers grow, so do our problems, but at least our capacity to cooperate for the benefit of humanity's collective interests remains strong. Maybe art is also fundamentally about frustration, then; an expression of one person's realization that certain work must be done, and perhaps at times alone even if not with that intent - or it'll never get done at all.

Swedish "vaccine ban" social media BS

Oh man, just... no. First of all, this "news" was almost exclusively reported by fringe clickbait media outlets - such as redice. There's a reason for that: the actual news in Sweden is that the government simply decided not to enforce the compulsory vaccination of its citizens, on the grounds that it conflicted with pre-existing constitutional rights. There's no "ban." The mandate to vaccinate still exists in law, because it's still totally sensible; they just aren't enforcing it. It's very likely that the language will be rewritten in the coming years to implement sensible penalties for abstainers, because abstainers are ignorant, and because perpetuating ignorance about critical social healthcare tends to lead to a lot of people becoming unhealthy and/or dying for absolutely no good reason. Not nearly as sensational when you put it like that. There was no citing of health concerns, etc., only acknowledgement that side effects to vaccines exist and that that their citizens should have the option of over-reacting to them because of something false they saw on Facebook. (They're progressive like that). That particular blatant falsehood can be chocked up to "creative embellishment" by the apparently exclusively non-journalistic entities that came out of the woodwork to "report" it - along with other examples of comic anti-brilliance, such as citing "sodium chloride" (aka COMMON SALT) as a "toxic, unhealthy chemical" additive.

The entire theoretical purpose of any society is to mandate sensible minor compromises for the objectively greater benefit of the majority. That aforementioned free—useful—education to which Swedes have access is also an important contextual omission from the headlines and stories circulating. History, science, and common sense are actually taught in schools there. So, while they may now officially not be legally required to do so, I strongly suspect they're generally extremely likely to continue to vaccinate their children... ya know, so their children can continue to NOT die from/be-maimed-by/end-up-horribly-disfigured-by some truly fucking awful, completely preventable diseases. Here in the states, on the other hand, we're "free" to let measles and mumps outbreaks run rampant thanks in no small part to a not nearly small-enough minority of anti-vaxxers - who are still numerous enough to put a significant dent in herd immunity, putting not only their own kids at risk, but everyone else's, too.

There should be fewer/better additives developed to stabilize and preserve vaccines, sure - but even the oldest, most toxic vaccine to ever see widespread use would still do far less damage even in its outlying worse-cases than would a minute or two of inhaling secondhand cigarette smoke. This entire issue is sensationalist bullshit. Nobody is entitled to an unchallenged public opinion when said opinion contradicts fact, reason, and even common-fucking-sense!

There, I'm done. A tall glass of reason with a thick tmesis sandwich is a balm in this age of insanity.

Well... apparently I don't sleep any more

So that's a thing.

On the mental torsion of the subject of abortion

Ahh, abortion.

There are a few popular questions and observations that often crop up when discussing this issue. For instance, while most rational people will agree with the idea that it shouldn’t generally just be up to the woman, a common obstacle to productive discourse is the often (apparently) inarguable notion that "it’s their body." Furthermore, what’s the end all be all if there’s a stalemate in the parental decision-making process? Does anyone have the right to "force" a woman to carry a life inside of her for 10 months and give birth to it? Just as strange as a woman being able to wake up one day and decide—on a whim—to have an abortion, wouldn’t it also be strange that a man could just wake up one day and decide she's keeping the baby and carrying it to term? As always, these questions are overly-simplified to the point of irrelevance—by idiots—and must be re-evaluated and refined.

To begin with, those questions aren't even the right questions. There's a tremendous amount of emotional pressure pushing a lot of rhetoric, powered by a lot of tangible agenda, all driving nearly all of the discussion about this issue. For instance, the basic premise of the whole shapiel was predicated on the condition of a mutual decision before it even became a conversation: people (plural) decided (emphatically) to have sex. (Unless they didn't, but that endlessly-slippery slope requires delving even deeper into the behavioral chain of custody and determining what, exactly, constitutes "decision," what defines—and what mutators can affect—bonafide agency, etc., but not even those basic attributes of human existence are generally agreed upon - by those few with the capacity to comprehend them!) But, hell, even that seemingly-initial decision itself could be reasonably considered a heavily-derivative mid-chain event, just flowing on downstream from the social contracts and other, varying, tiers of  conscious and subconscious—hopefully not unconscious— transactions from which it sprouted.

Referring to the notion of it being a woman's body... well, sure, after the fact, it technically "is" - but that's after the fact, so at that point, discourse has already devolved to rhetorical semantics. It wasn't just a woman's body that led to that scenario, or even to the prior scenarios which in turn led to that scenario; someone else's body was more than just involved. Someone else's body was, in fact, required. (Barring the obviously vastly more complicated issue of artificial insemination, which I'm not touching), a pregnant woman's body being pregnant is the direct result of hers AND someone else's body having a mutually-significant interaction. Arguing about the extent of that significance is, again, just superficial semantics at this point. Perhaps more importantly even than the physical transaction, though, there would have also been an investment of intent—and by extension, agency... and by extension, self, identity, and purpose, and so on—both required, and in turn provided, and in turn accepted and acknowledged, in two directions. To change the woman's body at that point isn't just changing "her body" - it's altering the course of multiple complex processes, all but one of which still involve another person at that point. There's a LOT more going on there. All of it is relevant.

To reasonably ask the question, "What gives a man the right to aspire to affect what a woman should do with her body," you'd also have to ask, "What gives a woman—or anyone—the right to aspire to control the value or meaning of a choice that a man—or anyone else—already made WITH his body?" I suppose they're either equally ridiculous, or equally worthy of consideration. These questions have actually already been converted into relevant scientific notation, so to speak, in the form of, "What objective fact should be interpreted as proof that a woman's pregnancy—a natural, normal physiological state—is, or should be, more objectively significant than the significantly-offset physiological state of an expectant—or simply hopeful—father?" To date, there is no such fact, nor evidence of one, nor even reasonable suspicion of the existence of one. Human physiology being what it is, even as primitive as we are now, we know better than to even suggest that state of mind is anything less than a critical component of net state of being - or of a person's overall health. Perhaps a man's investment in a pregnancy is, in a strictly mechanical sense, "less" - but if mechanics were the deciding factor in, or even particularly important or reasonably relevant to, matters of such fundamental—and fundamentally subjective—scope as this, then human rights in general make for pretty ridiculous concepts. In any case, by the time this particular conversation is born, it always seems that nearly everything on the table is just latent consequence of no immediate (or clear) relevance or provenance, all of which mostly just obfuscates the root and prevents a productive discourse on the topic at a low enough level. The real seed (pun intended) of the algorithm is barely even a comprehensible concept to most people, much less the opaque and high-resolution image that it would need to be in order to hope to grow a productive—or accurate—discourse about itself. That could change, someday... but I think the median IQ of the world has to change first. ;)

So I suppose, ultimately, it's kind of a losing argument no matter who makes it or which direction anyone takes it, at least at this point in time - because it eventually boils down to some more fundamental decisions about the "meaning" of various aspects of human existence (or lack thereof, or ignorance of such options entirely, etc). Do men have reproductive rights? Should they? Should women? Should anyone? Should babies? What IS a baby? What are and/or what should be the rational boundaries of subjective interpretation of the differences between a single cell, a zygote, a fetus, a baby, a human...? What is a human, anyway? What's the difference between a cell and a machine? What rational reason is there to make arbitrary philosophical distinctions between humans made entirely of machine-like cells, and similarly-complex objects that humans arbitrarily think of as "just" machines? What ARE rights? How should we choose them? Are human rights even a reasonable concept given the pragmatic compromises necessary for and inherent in social structures? If so, should there be a distinction between biological imperatives and human rights - and if so, where, and why? Are large scale social structures even sustainable when human psychology is factored into the equation? What is that equation? I really don't think enough humans are ready to ask the questions necessary to even begin to participate in those kinds of conversations.

I have reasonably well-formed opinions on all of those matters, because I've spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to distill and cultivate and reduce them - but even after all of that, there's just not enough opportunity for productive iteration in so many of those interesting directions given the current, uhh, human climate. And, naturally, all of these issues far precede any potentially-useful discussions about such comparatively high-level concepts as abortion. (That's also the same reason I don't generally discuss politics).

I pretty much just accept that there are undoubtedly a countless number of better solutions—and among those, at least one that is both knowable and as close to "correct" as can be—to the problems that exist now, including this one... but also, I accept that better solutions to much of the stuff that I find most interesting will probably remain irrelevant for at least as long as I'm alive. I mostly just like to periodically kick around a reminder that these problems still exist, juuust in case somebody who hasn't thought about it before, and might never, could end up doing just that. The pot needs stirring, right?

I think the strongest (clear) opinion I can genuinely offer on abortion is that it's clearly a supernova-powerful concept that, in practice, affects one of, (if not the most), fundamental of human existential directives in both women AND men, with the potential to affect not just the lives but the outright present and future—and permanent!—identities of both parents—completely irrespective of their personal relationships with each other—in such a tremendous manner that it can shape the direction of the rest of their lives, potentially in diametrically-opposite ways... and, that it wouldn't even be a topic of interest if not for the explicit involvement and overwhelmingly-substantial investment of BOTH parties. Men and women alike are being diagnosed with crippling PTSD following abortions in ever-increasing numbers. Regardless of anyone's stance on anything involving women's bodies, abortions can and DO affect men just as fundamentally as women, and do so with enough permanent consequence that they rationally must be considered effectively-equal participants. Following that, I definitely think that anything so influential, and particularly anything so potentially cataclysmic, is so far beyond even the theoretical best-case scope of any modern human society's capacity to responsibly manage... that to do so may be—and perhaps always should be—entirely beyond its permissible purview.

At the very least, attempting to simplify a multi-variable system by expressing it as a function of only one of its variables is rarely even useful - and in any case, is never a valid solution.

Oh, just shoot me

VIDEO: Bulletproof / Stormproof safe rooms for schools  

The unfortunate reality is that security gimmicks won't keep children safe at school. It would simply accelerate the evolution of this society's school-massacre paradigm. Realistically, the net result would be to make more children less-safe, faster. Anyone can break through bulletproofing (especially, but not just glass) with $30 and a visit to a hardware store - or, with the same budget, cook up a nice IED, or enough poison gas to fill a school, etc etc.

A fundamental truth of security is that preparation supersedes the incidental. Anyone who resolves to kill a ton of people can find a way around incidental obstacles just by knowing they exist ahead of time. The bottom line is that there's no way to keep anyone safe as long as there are people willing to do whatever it takes to kill them, and that's regardless of how many easy options are or aren't available to do so. Guns, for instance, aren't even close to the most efficient way of killing a lot of people right now - they're just one of the most visible thanks to popular media, and thus the most immediate option given the general population's non-existent attention span. We are lucky that murderers are still using guns, frankly. When that changes—and it will, if social trends continue—so will the methodology, along with the scale of the body count.

No matter how much or how comprehensive physical and technological security is or becomes, the only way to truly prevent crime is to balance the social expression whose inevitable remainder is always crime. Crime is just a social waste product that a majority of people are either too dumb or too greedy to recycle properly before it gets out of hand.

... But that process is neither simple, nor profitable. So. *shrug*