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*

Happy Thanksgiving 2017

I'm thankful that Synth is coming back, and that it hasn't yet been completely corrupted by modern influences.

Sarcasm à la carte

Oh, maaaaan. What is the world coming to?

If we can't even collectively agree that it's fine to kill unwanted babies just for funsies, how the hell are we supposed to eventually achieve the ultimate consensus that it's fine to kill unwanted adults - including quite a few for potentially-legitimate reasons!? We need legalized distant-post-term abortion, yesterday!

— No amount of Las Vegas country music festival hijinks will suffice!

And—this is just a nitpick, but—this also puts a serious damper on our plans to selectively breed out human flaws in lieu of leaving it to "natural selection" - which, bear in mind, is, like, tooooootally composed of an inordinate overpopulation of frat boiz and club gurrrrrls-zah.

How to get anything you want from anyone

How to get anything you want, from anyone:

1) Shed any preconception of morality, ethics, or other rules of conduct.

Accept that humans don't deserve your respect until they give you cause to think otherwise. The only relevant consideration in your choice of interactions with others is how they can or can't benefit you. People are just simple calculators and meat in fleshy suits; consider and use them as such. Should one break rank and demonstrate an objectively valuable and uncommon consciousness, only then should you consider its potential merits as a living thing.

2) Give up your instinctual devotion to truth, logic, and all rationality.

Understand that 99/100 people are more than happy to live entirely in delusions, and that of those, easily 9/10 of them live with an unshakable belief that those delusions are exactly what they really want. By their 20s, most people have given up all attachment to objective reality. In order to interact on their level, you must at least understand this pathology. They only need to be managed.

3) Take nothing personally.

To the idiot masses, you are simply a figment of their imagined reality in a somewhat more tangible form. Your only potential value to these morons is in the form of an essential object in their existing delusions; your actual objective value or worth as a human being is categorically vestigial to the psychology of human society - so you must learn to understand that these fleshbags aren't actually ever interacting with you at all. To take offense is illogical.

4) Manipulate.

Learn the landscapes, characters and ideas central to their delusions, study the simple repetitive patterns of their interactions and the subsequently shallow, boring behavioral routines that result - then insert yourself as one of the controlling ideas. Lie. When they believe you, insinuate your lie further into their delusion, until you control its direction.

That is all there is to this.

— and that is, frankly, about all there is in general.

Ugh. Hipsters.

YES: It's important to develop the ability to recognize projection in others.

BUT: Not all criticism (or otherwise perceived negativity) fits into that category. Oversimplifying interactions that make you feel anything but good—to the point that you perceive them as irrelevant or in some way incorrect—is the start of a cycle of self-absorption and ignorance.

I'm an Optimist.

I'm an optimist.

I have faith that boundless global stupidity will iterate endlessly through an infinite matrix of possible behavioral modalities, and that one of those outcomes will periodically result in a human civilization wherein the supermajority is comprised of intelligent—rather than impossibly-moronic—individuals.

Granted, only 1 in several billion-billion-billion of these freak outlier civilizations will persist beyond the next few iterations of stupidity that inevitably follow, but when that special one rolls around... there will definitely be no Facebook, Miley Cyrus, or USA.

Warms me wee fuckin' heart, that does.

When dumb women try to make dumber jokes about testicles:

Aw, that's cute. 

Who knew Manspreading would grow up to become the oblivious punchline to its own joke?! You're just gettin' soooo biggggg! I bet you don't even know how big and dumb you are, you big ol' dumb-dumb! Ohhhhhh goochy-goochy-goo! 

 Whooooo's mama's little Femrony!?
—*gasp!*— 

OH! It's YOU!

True story

They say don't stick your dick in crazy... 
BUT MAAAAAA! THE CRAZY IS FUCKIN' PURPLE!

Romance

Thanks to the delicious lingering aromas of fast food, I was fortunate enough to accidentally stumble across the correct ways to use my mouth on the female body when I was only a teenager. Many men never learn this skill set, apparently. Clearly, all one must do is date a fast-food worker or ten.

I'm lovin' me them DQ girls.

This researcher observes no hope

Day 11596: Subjects remain proud, content prisoners of own shadows. Near perfect positive correlation of ignorance : bias : noise persists. 

New species of irony encountered: references to "Alternative Facts." Phenomenon commonly occurs in the form of citation by intellectually stunted, emotionally agitated individual as a means of attempting to justify own arbitrary, rationally indefensible and usually fallacious agenda. Point of origin can be traced to political event; initial response to inciting event was likely intended to be clever and/or profound, but was contaminated by hipster origins. 

Human females still exclusively possess and control all significant social powers, but their cognitive dissonance loops continue to deteriorate into increasingly violent hysteria fueled by ever-grander community-enforced delusions of powerlessness. Psychopathological coefficient unsustainable within humankind's existing self- and group-coping framework; violent reversal (and subsequent re-reversal, and so on) of circumstance appears inevitable, affirming predictions by all known historical sources.

Reticulumination

Each day we mourn yesterday's better self, knowing tomorrow's to be a lie.

The human condition is grief.

Cynics laugh most, and hardest

"Wit" is laughing as everyone around you desperately scrambles to learn what you already know—after their circumstances finally make ignorance too inconvenient to maintain—because you also knew, long ago, that this moment would arrive far too late to make a difference. Wit may sometimes appear callous and insensitive to those without the facility to command it, but it is a necessary stress-pressure regulator for the burden of intellect. If you are intelligent, wit will likely save your life someday; if you are a fool, you will grow to resent the sting of wit's refusal to suffer you.

— so, just don't let it.

At some point, we will all need to outgrow language in order to evolve. 

 

What would presently be called hypercognition should be driving all frontiers of all human activity, yet it presently amounts to little more than an experiential—if not strictly introspective—demonstration of insurmountable contextual disparity, made so by the soon-to-be—if not already—vestigial need to reduce critically-fundamental knowledge to local syntax in order to share it. "Gestalt," probably the closest term I know that can even begin to approach this concept, is hardly adequate to describe what is somewhat more than just a concept: a full, invisible, infinite container with no label and for which no such notion would be possible, the net contents of which currently serve only to define the silhouette of a boundary we might and ought traverse if only we chose to remember that we already have - and that this present, limited abstraction of scope is just a crutch of our younger, less mature imaginations. 

 

Language, even at its best, is just crude pictures of real tools. We needed those tools yesterday, and less than we will need them tomorrow. Reduction is critical to the initial formation of our capacity to construct analytical processes, yet is detrimental to the actual growth of such processes. Perception need not be constrained to one or the other... and it isn't.

 

 

All that is needed.... is psychological inertia.

Almost nobody comprehends the nature and significance of sense of agency to net perception. For instance: you're an idiot, and you do something stupid. You know that you chose to behave stupidly; your brain created, stored and connected memory of that stupid choice to its subsequent reality, and as a result you are conscious of the validity of that direct correlation. This mechanism, in fact, is fundamental to the very idea of "knowing" anything. Given the right circumstances and a modicum of potential for intelligence, eventually you could learn from such a mistake.

BUT, if you take your sense of agency out of the equation, the entire perception of events always changes. Say that—instead of making an obviously idiotic choice like before—in another case you get drunk, black out, and do exactly the same stupid thing mentioned earlier. You wake up, and... what? Here's what: in this case, your brain lacks logical proof of your responsibility for the inevitable circumstances derived from your behavior - and, ultimately, you don't feel that responsibility. That's where the problem really starts, because you actually are responsible. You simply lack the data necessary to draw that conclusion intuitively, and, because you probably live in the 21st century, you almost certainly also lack the intellectual discipline necessary to arrive at that conclusion retrospectively.

Here's the fun part that nobody will take seriously because it makes 'em feel "icky": even assuming a 50% higher incidence of male>female rape than female>male (which is completely arbitrary and made up, just to make the point all the more obvious to those who need to feel that they can see the fence before being educated about its non-existence), and arbitrarily expanding the calculable margin of error to +/- 25% for good measure (especially given the abundance of sources from which contaminated data is inevitably going to be drawn and the margin of error inherent in calculating them, etc etc), easily 80% or more of "rape" in this country... isn't. I'm not speaking about semantics or nuance of language, here; I mean that it plainly, logically, factually could not be rape - even if we concede to the (imperfect) current vernacular definition of the term. Ignorance of agency is not the same as lack of agency; only the specific context of extreme impairment can create the disparity of comprehension necessary to allow for such mischaracterization. Objectively speaking, rape cannot be rape in the absence of involuntary physical or chemical coercion, but that's hardly a subject to which the collective intellect of our present civilization can even begin to aspire - so I suppose the scientific reality of the event itself will have to remain a nebulous hipster conundrum for the... next century, probably. Everybody is just so excited to be a victim in this day and age! *shrug*

That's fine by me, frankly, because even more interesting to me is the net psychopathological footprint of the false belief and subsequent delusion-reinforcement experienced by believed-victims combined with the unjust ostracism and subsequent cognitive-dissonance load experienced by rape-accusees following alleged rapes, given that the vast majority of such crimes are strictly false. No data exists upon which one could draw a useful conclusion on the matter, but if I were to go with my intuition, I'd wager that the net burden of all of this ignorance on our society is not at all insignificant. Maybe, a few decades from now, more than a handful of people will be mature enough to discuss it. Until then, innocent men and women will continue to be convicted of crimes that weren't actually commited by anyone, because they weren't actually crimes - and, nearly as awful, the normal process of learning from one's obvious mistakes will continue to be circumvented as a matter of popular entertainment, and the subsequent psychopathological saturation will hang heavily from the intellectual ceiling of our societies. Even the inaction of good people is unnecessary for "evil" to prevail... it simply requires enough psychological inertia.

Hrm. Fascinating. We're almost certainly all doomed. Cheers, then!

At what value of delusion does 0=1? Show your work.

Ya know how sometimes you have to wait for people to completely finish whatever bizarre nonsense they're doing/saying so you can find out if there's supposed to be a deliberate punchline or if it's just their god-awful personality showing?
 
— yeahhh, nah, me neither. Those 90s were good times, though.

There exists a point on the spectrum of human behavior beyond which lack of substance is so overwhelmingly characteristic that it inherits all of the inferred attributes of first order substance. Fuck murder; irony of that caliber should be the capital crime. No wonder our dictionary is becoming more unintelligible and backwards every day.

It's all downright pathological -_- 

(But, hey, on the bright side, if there are cultural anthropologists in our theoretical future, their work involving our time period will be really easy!)

On a completely unrelated note:

What manner of nincomfuckery is THIS!?

We live in a society that tolerates an economy in which an isolated minority profits from net waste despite and to spite the poor majority. 

Much about our lives is like a shitty Tom Clancy novel... but with no hero.
 Haaahaha!

I hope we're just being idiots - 
because, if not, we are insane.