Rants

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What title would be appropriate?

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, because I have a new backpack (the old one was really starting to fail, and has been for quite some time—I can relate, and I wish I could replace myself so easily) and it does a better job with the weight, however minor, of the little computer than the old one did.  Also, I just didn’t feel like dealing with the stupid little engine of distraction that is the “smartphone” today.

Ugh, it’s so stupidly muggy already here in south Florida at a quarter to five in the morning that the sweat around my eyes is fogging up my reading glasses while I just sit here and try to type.  Why do people live here?

Okay, well, I know why I live here, and it was because I was trying to accommodate others in the past—people I love, not just anyone—and so I was willing to go with their flow and go away from anywhere where I had long-term connections and such like.  So, I came here to America’s syphilitic dong, which harbors, or has harbored, such parasitic animalcules as Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, Dickless Scott, Michael McAuliffe, Ron DeSantis, and who knows how many others.  What a shit hole.

Mind you, the neighborhood in which I currently live is quite pleasant in many ways, though I cannot consider it home.  It’s extremely multi-ethnic and very community spirited, at least as far as I can see.  People keep out of each other’s business, they take care of their stuff, they take out their garbage, they mow their lawns, all that.  And the houses, though they and the yards tend to be quite small, were clearly built in a time when it was considered normal to construct dwellings that more or less laugh at hurricanes.  Full cinder-block walls on smallish scales make for structures that do not readily move in response to anything but a direct-hit nuclear attack.

I’m really exhausted, and it’s only just the beginning of the day.  I’ve been exhausted for so long now that I can’t readily remember a time when I did not feel exhausted.  I can remember that I have experienced times in the past when I was not exhausted, but I don’t remember what it feels like.  So often, it seems that I surely cannot endure much longer, that I surely must collapse at any moment, that I must just crumble to the ground, unconscious.

But biology is my enemy here.  Living organisms are selected to be prone to continue, since there’s very little natural selection based benefit in being able to choose to shut down at will.  Any being with such a capacity would be less likely to leave behind offspring than those whose bodies simply continued until there was no way for them to do so, or until something else killed them.

I hate it here.  And I don’t mean just where I am right now, though it does apply.  I hate it in south Florida, I hate it in America (a shocking and new realization to me), I hate it on Earth, I hate being in this stupid universe.  I cannot say that I hate everything about it, of course.  I love my children, I love my sister and brother, and I even have a few distant friends who matter to me.  But for the most part—the overwhelmingly “most” part—things here are nauseatingly pathetic.

I don’t just mean humans, by the way.  I’m not one of those idiots who romanticizes animals as innocent and pure and lovely, imagining that they would live in harmony with each other if not for humans.  That’s puerile nonsense.  Anyone who thinks that is mistaken and/or delusional.  This, to me, is the most annoying flaw in The Matrix:  the fact that Agent Smith says and seems to believe that other animals achieve some form of self-imposed equilibrium with their environments.  I think a sentient AI would not be prone to make such an idiotic mistake, but maybe I’m wrong.  It’s not as though I’m not an idiot, too.

But animals don’t choose to be in equilibrium with their ecosystems.  The equilibria are forced upon them (when they happen at all) by death, by disease, by starvation and predation, by famine, by pestilence.  They no more choose to be in equilibrium than the various atoms and molecules in a complex chemical chain reaction choose to be in their equilibria.

Humans are merely more competent than all other creatures (on Earth) have ever been, and so are capable of pushing their environments farther than any others.  That is, unless you count the earliest photosynthesizing organisms, which probably produced the greatest environmental catastrophe the world has ever known—the release of free oxygen in vast quantities, changing the atmosphere and the very crust of the very planet, killing off the majority of life forms until those that remained adapted and became addicted to this new atmospheric drug.

Okay, that last bit of that last sentence was highly melodramatic and judgmental.  I was trying to make a point about how non-innocent natural things are*, but I fell into rhetoric, and that actually cheapens one’s arguments if one is dealing with dispassionate interlocutors.  Then again, when does one ever actually deal with such creatures?

Anyway, life is dominated by suffering and by aggression of one kind or another, because nature overall does not tend to reward indiscriminate kindness.  Humans are, ironically, the only species that seems even capable of the “outside” view, of a compassion and thought for the future and for the suffering of others that goes beyond their local, personal, and even species-specific circumstances.  And they are also the only species that can be seen to vilify itself.

Weirdly enough, it is the “good guys”, or those who try to be good guys, those who consider that worthy of aspiration, who are most often subject to criticism, including self-criticism; certainly they are the only ones responsive to it.  If you criticize narcissistic assholes, they really don’t care.  They’re not trying to be “good” in anyone else’s eyes.  They are already great in their own minds.  They already love themselves.  Just imagine trying to get your average cat to do something by appealing to its guilt, and you will get an inkling of what I mean.

Self-esteem is overrated.  I’m not saying it’s valueless, but it is selling at a much higher price than it is worth, like a vastly overinflated stock for a corporation so leveraged that it could move the Earth if it could find a fulcrum and a place to stand.  A little self-criticism is good for everyone, at least if they want to be anything other than a force for destruction, decay, and patheticness**.

I don’t know.  Maybe destruction is the better way.  Creation, and creativity in general, certainly hasn’t served me very well.

Now, in closing:  I didn’t walk or bike to the station today.  I needed a physical rest.  Hopefully, if I can muster the energy, I will do one of the two things tomorrow.  But even thinking about it right now makes me feel out of breath.  I don’t feel short of breath; I’m not anxious, I’m not tremulous.  I’m just without vigor and cannot readily imagine having any.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  Have a good day.

*Either everything and everyone is innocent, or nothing and no one is.  I mean this on a general scale, not regarding specific uses of the term relating to legal and criminal concepts.  I’m using the term from a fundamental, ethical/moral underpinning kind of way.  No one made themselves or their circumstances or their nature or their environments, and “free will” is a childish chimera.  As Eric Draven said, “Victims…aren’t we all?”

**Apparently that’s not a word, but “pathos” doesn’t carry the connotations I desired here.  Maybe “contemptibility” would be better?

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Dreams of a rational culture

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again today, because I got tired of the frustrating process of doing stuff on the smartphone.  Really, writing and texting and everything else via the smartphone is more often than not terribly annoying.  I know Steve Jobs got inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation and wanted to make some version of a tablet with their touch-screen controls and all, but that was fiction.  If he wanted to make something more useful based on Star Trek, why couldn’t he have put some money into warp drive or something?

Of course, he was mainly a software guy, not actually any kind of physicist or true engineer or something, any more than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel or any of these other successful billionaires and so on are.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure they’re all reasonably clever, and they’re decent at business, especially at business that doesn’t require them to manufacture things that require serious production and safety and stress testing and all that.

Well, okay, Musk does make cars that are often quite decent (from what I have seen) and rockets that are sometimes quite impressive (and often not).  But mostly what these really successful business people seem to be good at is marketing, AKA self-aggrandizement.  Likewise for successful politicians.

They don’t actually have to be exceptionally good relative to their competitors, they just have to convince enough people that they’re cool and clever, and that if those people want other people to think that they are cool and clever, they should buy their products or use their services or whatnot.  It’s all rather pathetic on their part, and even more pathetic on the part of the people who faddishly embrace them.

Again, don’t get me wrong; I like things about Amazon, for instance, especially the ability to get books that I never was able to find even in Barnes & Noble or Borders (RIP) or Books-A-Million.  And I publish through Amazon when I publish my own books (or, rather, when I used to do so) because of their reach, not that it did me any particular good—I, unlike the humans to whom I referred earlier, am not a natural self-promoter.

I wish humans were less enamored of having obnoxious, “flashy”, egotistical (often male) tribal leader types and instead focused on competence and level-headedness.  Just imagine if most of our politicians were not interested in bombast and attention and rhetoric and recognition and “importance” and were just mainly interested in doing a good job on behalf of the people who elected (i.e., hired) them.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make here.  I never plan these posts out ahead of time, so they are very much just whatever pops out of my mind on any given day.  In a way, all of you reading are only slightly more surprised by what you read here than I am by writing it.

Still, I don’t think I’m alone in wishing people would be less flash and more substance.  Then we wouldn’t have brain-worm-dead people like RFK Jr. in charge of the nation’s healthcare and medicine organizations when he is not merely unqualified but is anti-qualified.  Ditto for the one who appointed him (and for the abysmally cowardly congresspeople who approved the appointment and the poor misled people who elected them all).

If people in general were less interested in seeing who “owns” or “destroys” someone else in mere “debate”, but instead were interested in seeking reliable information and solutions together, things would likely be better.  If we want to try to model things in our society after Star Trek, I wish we could try to instantiate some version of Vulcan philosophy and practice.  Mr. Spock is so much more admirable as a character than nearly every other person on the original Enterprise, and Captain Picard in TNG is almost Vulcan in his own character.

We shouldn’t, of course, seek to eliminate emotion; that’s hardly possible.  Emotion is what gives us impetus, and indeed, that may be its entire biological “purpose”.  But we can try to govern our passions (to quote Spock) to make them our faithful servants rather than our capricious and chaotic masters.  This is not impossible by any means.

Not that I am a master of my own emotions, especially my negative ones.  But I do not consider them to be anyone else’s major concern, and certainly no other person is responsible for them or to blame for them.  I try not to let them destroy me, though I am so inclined.  But if we could all put more emphasis on, for instance, Stoic philosophy, on Vipassana and Metta and similar meditation practices and some of the ideas from, for instance, the Tao te Ching, I think all the world would be better.

I guess for now, at least, it’s a pipe dream—whatever it is I’m “dreaming” about, that is.  Frankly, I’m not sure what I’ve written here today, so far, or if there’s any coherence to it at all.  If there is not, I can only apologize at this point, because I have no intention of starting this post over.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get through this day less down and discouraged than I was yesterday*.

The world is terribly annoying and disappointing and, yes. discouraging, and my own personal life is in some ways even more so of all three of those things.  I try not to let it defeat me, but perhaps that very determination to keep playing the stupid game of the stupid human race and the stupid universe is the very thing that should count as being defeated—being fooled into taking part in the pantomime that is “civilization” instead of making my quietus, or perhaps finding some other path.

I guess I have to figure that out for myself, as with most things for most people.  Please try to have a good day if you can.  It would be nice if someone could do so.

*Apparently, I was so plainly depressed that someone (or perhaps “the algorithm” itself) on Threads thought that I might need help, and I got another one of those “someone thinks you’re having trouble and might need someone to talk to” or whatever that message is, along with a link to the mental health/suicide hotline.  Frankly, I’m amazed that I don’t get such suggestions every day, since I spend at least part of each day thinking about dying—and not thinking about it as a passive thing.

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Stupidity make me angry–especially my own

Once again, I am writing this on my smartphone.  Yesterday I didn’t even bother to take the laptop computer back to the house with me.  I was pretty much fed up with everything.  Though we had a successful day at work, there were multiple cases of people not paying attention to our guidelines and rules; but whenever I would bring them up, there was (and is) always an excuse to go around them‒sound familiar to anyone?‒and I repeatedly got overridden, leaving me to wonder why I bother.

I also hit the top of my head hard on the corner of my metal filing cabinet early yesterday, while reaching down to pick up a dropped pen.  It really hurt, and it left a cut, and I had a headache and a sore neck for pretty much the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have developed a subarachnoid hemorrhage, so I have to keep moving.  It sucks.

And, of course, there’s all the idiocy that is actively occurring in America and the rest of the world.  There might be some who would characterize certain things that happen and that people do as “sick” and/or even “insane”, but I don’t like to use such terms to describe the various moronic and submoronic things humans do that are not only detrimental but cause spreading suffering to others.

First of all, it denigrates people who are actually sick/have mental illness and other related disorders.  Such people (of which I guess I am one) rarely do much harm to anyone but themselves‒though sometimes, some of us wish to do harm to certain carefully chosen other people.

But also, it dignifies the idiots.  After all, insanity is a legal term that indicates someone does not know right from wrong or lacks the capacity to control their own actions.  Now, at a deep level, it is almost certain that none of us has free will, at least not in anything but the vaguest, most hand-wavy, compatibilist sense.  But there is a real difference between someone who has OCD and cannot help but wash his or her hands until they bleed and a person who selfishly and arrogantly assumes that they have the right and the power and the competence to try to run other people’s lives but who then don’t accept responsibility for the horrific messes they make.

Stupidity can be defined as doing something in such a way that it is worse than just random action‒like trying to get to the airport by driving around one’s residential block over and over again ad infinitum*, or to try to solve a Rubik’s Cube by just spinning one side over and over (again, ad infinitum).  And this is so often the distillation of so many things that humans do, especially when they group together in significant numbers.

It reminds me of a post I saw on Threads or X or Bluesky or one of those.  The person said that people are selfish when isolated, but that such selfishness doesn’t really work, that we only survive and thrive by drawing together and supporting each other, working together, caring for each other.  This is true, as far as it goes‒humans are the most social of the social primates, and their greatest power comes from their ability to work together, to cooperate, to communicate.  This is why written language is the wellspring and lifeblood of civilization.  And yet, I am also reminded of the line from the original Men In Black, which I will only paraphrase here:  a person can be smart, but people together are stupid, reactionary, panicky, dangerous animals.

Both of these things are true, at least within certain contexts.  This probably explains at least part of the appeal of Ayn Rand’s** focus on rational self interest‒which, in a large society, is going to, in its limit, come to be the same thing as rational altruism.  But it is strange to have those seemingly at least partly contradictory facts both be true, at least in a highly simplified outline of the social nature of naked house apes***.

It is terribly frustrating.  Even the most well-intentioned people, like the person who made that point about humans being social and needing each other (or at least many of those who agree with those sentiments) will often virulently demonize those who are on the opposite side of a given political spectrum or argument, not even trying to show compassion or empathy or understanding for those who disagree with them.

Likewise, those on the “other side” who seem to wallow in self-righteousness and yearn for authoritarianism will nevertheless seemingly believe that, for instance, they follow the teachings of a very socialistic, compassion-loving rabbi from 1st century, Roman-controlled Judea.

These are some of the things that make me angry, not just the persistent headache and my other, never-ending body pains and mental divergences.  And although anger can be energizing, it is also unpleasant and, as Radiohead said, “it wears me out”.

I can endure a lot, it seems, whether out of stubbornness or willpower or just my own form of stupidity, but there’s no clear reason to keep enduring when there’s no evidence of any available relief or any joy that lasts more than a few hours at a time before leaving me alone to stew in my own, solitary, odious juices again.

I really do hate the whole universe a lot of the time, and that time proportion appears to be growing as that time goes by, like the product of some perverse Dark Energy in my own psyche.  I don’t know what to do about it in my almost entirely empty life.

I say almost entirely, because there are just enough little rays of light to keep me fooling myself that I might one day return to a satisfying, mutual daily existence with people I love, only to have those hopes draw away like a will-o-the-wisp, keeping me eager and even desperate to follow them, but leaving me lost and stranded in the marshland of my mind instead of just escaping into oblivion.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  No shit, Sherlock, what else is new?  Further clichés as thoughts warrant.

I hope you lot are in better mental states than I am, and that you each and all have a good day.

*To borrow an example, though I cannot right now recall from where.

**Do you think Ayn Rand might have been an undiagnosed autistic person?  Discuss.

***It reminds me of the “Riddle of Steel” as described in the movie Conan the Barbarian.  Early in the movie, Conan’s father tells him that you cannot rely on men or gods, but that you can trust steel.  But then, later, Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones) reveals the punchline of the riddle:  Steel is not strong, flesh (i.e., a person) is stronger.  These contradictory truths engender and represent the vortex of seeming paradox through which people must try to navigate, to find the eye of the storm, the balance point at which effective action is possible.

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Step up or STFU

Here I go again, writing another blog post.  It seems like just yesterday that I wrote a previous one‒but of course, it was two days ago, not just one.  Wow, what a spooky difference.

I’m getting ready to be at work, or rather, am in the process of being on my way to work as I begin to write this.  I’m not actually currently moving relative to the surface of the Earth, but that happens a lot during commutes, especially when you don’t have your own vehicle anymore.

I don’t really have “my own” much of anything anymore.  I mean, I have a small amount of stuff, as George Carlin might say, though I’m quite sure I have waaaaaay less stuff than he had when he performed that particular routine.  Not that that’s bad; he certainly earned his stuff.  I mean, he’s still making loads of people laugh and think even after he’s been dead for a while.  I don’t know how long that will go on‒contrary to delusional claims by people who like a cool-sounding expression, online is not forever‒but he will, I suspect, be remembered fondly far longer than most.

The average day, on the other hand, feels like it is forever.  I don’t think I really look forward (in the positive sense) to anything nowadays.  There are two movies in theaters right now that I ought to want to go see, but if you presented me with free tickets, free concessions, and a ride to and from a theater of my choice, I think I’d say, “Thanks, but I’m not interested.”  And that would be true.

Likewise, though I watched the first episode of the latest series of Doctor Who a few weeks ago, two more have come out since then, and I have no desire to watch them, or anything else.  There are no books to which I look forward.  I’ve had to force myself to read at all, and even that’s probably a mistake*.  I occasionally look at my guitars and at the keyboard and they almost feel alien to me.  Like, what is that even used for?  I can’t really even imagine picking one up and playing it (or sitting down and playing, in the case of the keyboard).

I can’t really imagine writing any fiction.  The only thing(s) I anticipate at all anymore is something to eat, and that’s just so, so pathetic.  Thankfully, even my favorite snacks are starting to feel and taste and smell very dull lately.  I don’t know if perhaps I had my sense of smell altered back when I got Covid, or if this is born of the fact that all pleasures have backfired on me at least one time or another, and more so than ever, lately.

I really think I’m just about done.  I should’ve been done already.  I should’ve been done a long time ago.  But we’re always told to hold on, to stay alive, that we’re wanted and needed here on this stupid planet.  It’s a bit of a similar situation to what happens with “pro-life” people:  They don’t want there to be abortions, they want all those potential people born, but they aren’t helping to take care of them, and they don’t even want there to be public services available for them or for education or what have you.

So it is with the people who don’t want other people to commit suicide.  They don’t want you to kill yourself, but they’re not offering to help you be alive, not in any meaningful sense of helping.  And so, of course, when people do reach the end of their rope (sorry, no pun intended, but the expression is doubly appropriate so I’m leaving it) they have to choose the analogue of “back alley abortions”, killing themselves (or trying to do so) in messy, unreliable, disruptive ways that often don’t succeed but can lead to permanent damage and social opprobrium.

In some civilized countries, it’s possible for people to go to places like Dignitas and get physician-supervised ways to end their lives with minimal pain and with some peace.  Of course, even in such places, the service seems to be available mainly for people with terminal cancer and similar incurable illnesses.  But depression is often a terminal illness, and it is certainly incurable as far as I can see.  And, of course, ASD is not a disease, it’s a neurodevelopmental difference, so there’s no curing that, short of a brain transplant (which would really be a body transplant for the donor brain).

But if no one is going to give serious help to a person who has severe difficulty even wanting to live, and who has no capacity to lift himself out of the whirlpool of self-loathing and chronic pain, then why is there all the verbiage about how “depression is a liar” and other bullshit like that.  As if optimism weren’t a liar.  As if all the ideals and isms and dogmae and “good” things weren’t lies or liars or both.

So, fuck that noise.  Don’t tell a woman not to have an abortion if you’re not going to care for her and the child, and don’t cajole and guilt-trip a suicidal person about not killing themselves if you’re not gonna come in and help them in some real, tangible, serious way, God damn it.  A person on the verge of suicide is already admitting that they don’t think they can survive under their own steam.  They can’t swim anywhere, but you want them to keep treading water, or at least floating‒indefinitely‒just so you don’t have to be aware of the fact that they drowned while you were out boating.

All right, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day.  Autism Awareness Month ends this week and Mental Health Awareness Month begins.  Fat lot of good they’ve done or do.

*Interesting aside:  I accidentally typed “provably” when I tried to write “probably” right there.  The words are, so I understand, etymologically** related‒probe, prove, proof, probable, etc.

**Etymology and entomology are however (apart from the “ology” bit) unrelated.

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I don’t know what to title this post

Hi, y’all.

There, that’s me officially and in writing endorsing the contraction “y’all” as a very clear, useful, and effective term of address, a 2nd person plural pronoun, which the English language seems otherwise to lack.  I might have mentioned previously that I like the word, but I nevertheless rarely use it.  I rarely talk even to a single other person, let alone to a group, so it doesn’t come up much.

That’s it.  That’s about as positive a thought as I have right now, and I doubt it’s going to get that positive again.  I feel truly burnt out.  I mean, I’m still writing my stupid fucking blog, because I am more or less internally compelled to do so.  And I’m going to work, because it’s not as if I can rest when I’m back at the shit-hole of a house, and I can’t sleep without sedating myself‒not for long, anyway.  I don’t really know what to do.

The world is going to shit, but it doesn’t really matter to me‒or it shouldn’t‒because my life went to shit a long time ago, and since then I’ve just been trying to swim through an ocean of raw sewage, trying to keep my head above “water”, but there’s no shore or pool edge or whatever in sight, and frankly, I’m tired.  I’m very stubborn about not giving up in general, but look where that has gotten me.  To paraphrase Fiona Apple, I am steadily going nowhere.

So, fuck the world.  All you humans had such opportunities to build something better, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.  That was an amazing series of events that I could barely believe, having grown up expecting global thermonuclear war to happen sometime.  Things seemed honestly on the verge of real progress.

But no, always after a defeat and a respite, the shadow takes a new shape and grows again.  And people allow it to grow, people encourage it, people water and fertilize it, and indeed, people are that shadow.  There’s no Sauron or Morgoth or Satan or Ahriman or whatever other incarnation of evil you might conjure.  It’s all just the weakness and mental softness of the human race*, and alas, despite those seeming signs of improvement (which happened in the very year that I got married, coincidentally‒and that ended up falling apart as well), it seems that humans overall have little capacity for growth.

The true improvements made in the world, in life, are the products of a tiny, tiny fraction of people, while the others just take and use the products of that progress without any real understanding.  Perhaps they see them as miracles provided by their fictional (and not very clever) deities.

Meanwhile, if it were up to most people, humans would still be figuratively living in caves.

I hate the world, as well as almost all of its people (as a general feeling, anyway).  I honestly would like to burn it all, to erase it, to delete it.  There are ways that could be accomplished, if one were to put one’s whole effort into it.  If I had Elon Musk’s resources, I could initiate several such processes at once (for all I know, he might be doing so).  I’ve spent a very disturbing fraction of my time of life thinking of ways civilization can be destroyed, but then again, I am a Destroyer by nature.  I think I always have been.

But I don’t really feel I have the right‒though “rights” are one of those things made up by the smartish humans, and which are underappreciated by the rest‒to wipe everyone else out, and also, there are a few people here and there whom I actually like.  And I don’t think there is zero chance that humans will save themselves and the world, I just think the chances are tiny.

Maybe the world looks disgusting to me because I can only see it through my own eyes, and I myself am disgusting.

But there is a way for me to make the rest of the universe go away from my point of view, and for myself to go away as well, and it’s much more efficient than the many schemes I have dreamt up for obliterating the world.

It’s a very alluring thought, to escape from internal and external sources of pain and horror.  Oblivion, obliterate‒related words, from the Latin for forgetting.  I want to rest, but that doesn’t seem to be an option for me, so I probably will just have to settle for erasure.

*I do not refer here to kindness or generosity or compassion as softness‒those traits are strong, and only those with real strength have the capacity to show them.  I mean softheadedness, that pathetic need to imagine oneself to be, for instance, the favorite species (or people) of some imaginary almighty deity, or to believe one is somehow superior simply because of one’s ethnicity or sex or skin color.  But of course, that “belief” is itself evidence of the most profound weakness, insecurity, and inferiority.  Such people are nevertheless worthy of compassion‒as is everyone really, given that no one made themselves or the world‒but they are frustratingly capable of doing tremendous harm.

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I do wish thou wert a dog, that I might blog thee something.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing another blog post.

I did an update yesterday to my little miniature laptop, and now the MS Word (and presumably Office overall) has also been updated, with—as usual—relatively frustrating consequences.

Microsoft appears to have a real knack for changing things that were perfectly fine and making them not as good as they used to be, adding things that no intelligent person wants—like their frequent, irritating interruptions asking us if we want to let their AI assist us.

And, of course, they still have their stupid Craptos font in place as the baseline, even though it looks terrible and not at all professional.  Honestly, I’d rather submit a scientific paper in Comic Sans than in that stupid new Aptos, largely because they haven’t given us a choice whether or not to have that as our primary font.

They also have that stupid office icon everywhere that looks sort of like a ribbon folded over four times, or whatever that stupid symbol is supposed to seem to be.  It’s distracting and intrusive.  Why do they change things just for the sake of changing something?  It’s just stupid.

This is one of the big failings of some among the “progressive” end of the political spectrum.  They rant on and on about wanting to make “change”.  But change, in and of itself, is not necessarily a good thing.  I’ve gone over this so many times, but random change is much more likely to be detrimental than beneficial, especially in a system that is functioning relatively well.

Most mutations in germline cells don’t lead to improved survival and reproduction.  Only the rare few that happen to confer some local advantage will make an organism more robust.  That’s natural selection, and it is inherently blind and stupid.  It only produces “progress” because it has unthinkably long time-scales and numbers of organisms with which to work, and is utterly blind to suffering and failure and, yes, even to extinction.

When engineered systems are changed, those changes need to be evaluated, carefully thought through, and ideally tested thoroughly before being put into full implementation.  Otherwise, matters can degenerate rather than be enhanced.

Random mutations almost never produce benefit; even a complex, reasonably stable system is going to suffer if there are arbitrary changes.  Most systems in reality are not streamlined, smoothly functioning, sleek and simple designs.  They are Rube Goldberg machines, and if one bit of random “machinery” goes off, almost always the whole thing will fail completely.

In the body, random genetic changes are likely to lead to cell death or, even worse, to the development of cancer.  Similarly, radical changes in products or governments are almost always catastrophic.  This is one of the reasons even Jefferson noted, in the Declaration of Independence, that prudence recommends that, while imperfections in a current government are tolerable, it’s usually better not to go the way of revolution but to endure, changing the system gradually from within.

Only when there is no other way to do things that does not entail worse suffering should one overthrow or radically change the government.

Of course, for government changes to be overall beneficial, it’s important for the people involved to be knowledgeable and thoughtful, careful, committed to making things as good as possible and willing to correct their own errors (which requires them to admit to being fallible).  This is part of why the current and recent governments, in the USA at least, have been horrible.  They are run by micro-brained monkeys throwing their feces at each other, too stupid to realize that they are ignorant, and too narcissistic (on both sides) to be self-correcting.

Even the people at Microsoft, which is a premier technology company and has made real advances and improvements in its day, seem prone to this moronic “change for the sake of change” thing.

I hate them.  I hate all of them.  I hate everything.  It’s all so, so, so irritating.  People are so stupid they think that they—or some people—run the world, which is utter nonsense.  They seem to imagine that the people and places that exist now are real, while the countless dead people in the past are not.  But we are the same as our dead forebears.  We are all just individual molecules in a vast bath, or as Kansas so eloquently put it, “just a drop of water in an endless sea”.

The fact that all these little AI assistant things are being mindlessly added into products is an example of change that it not well-considered.  It’s just a desperate, hysterical attempt to compete again others who are doing the same stupid thing.  We don’t know yet what good, if any, will come of it, but outcomes will almost certainly be unforeseeable—even by AIs.

I don’t know if it’s possible for me to have any realistic hope at all for the future of civilization, whether human or artificial or some combination.  So far, AIs have only impressed me when they have carefully focused goals, like winning at Go or figuring out protein folding.

I’m angry and frustrated.  At times, I just want to destroy all life in the universe and all potential for future life.  It just so often seems that life is a thoroughly bad idea in and of itself.

But probably it will be more efficient if I just destroy me.  I’m sure most people would prefer that to other options.

In the meantime, try to have a good day if you can, enmeshed as you all are in the poisonous net of reality.

TTFN

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Won’t someone pleeeease think of the “children”?

It’s Wednesday morning (rather earlier than 5 o’clock) and here I am writing another blog post.  However, even as you read it, it’s already been written, though my words still arrive in your mind as though I were speaking them—so to speak—directly and concurrently to you.  It’s a rather interesting thing to contemplate, how written language (and related things) can add nuance and character to the experience of time itself.

Speaking of written language, I would like to reiterate something I mentioned yesterday on Threads.  Has anyone else out there noticed—and has anyone else been annoyed by—the tendency in the social media landscape for people to emphasize certain words by lengthening them in a way that doesn’t make sense?

Probably the two most common words I see being abused are “cute” and “love”, but I’m sure there are others.  It makes sense that these words are extended sometimes.  I think we can all imagine, or recall, people drawing both of those words out for emphasis in speech.  One might often want to replicate, or at least approximate, that speech pattern in writing.  I have no trouble with this basic fact.  It’s a form of emphasis that works nicely, and even the socially inept (as I am) can recognize what’s being done as an emphasis.

However, the way some people are extending such words nowadays is by adding extra “e”s to the end of the word!

In other words (har) you will see such expressions rendered as, for instances, “I loveeeeee this” and “that’s so cuteeeee”.

Look at those examples on the page/screen.  The first word should clearly be pronounced “luv-eeeeee”, as if Thurston Howell III, from Gilligan’s Island, were calling to his wife and drawing out the last syllable.  The second one should be read “kyoo-teeee”, as though one were drawing out the process of calling someone a cutie rather than calling someone or something cute.  It’s a subtle difference perhaps, that last one, but it is real.

If one wants to extend and prolong the word “love”, it makes much more sense to write “loooooove”, as people have done on every occasion I encountered, as far as I can recall, prior to the advent of social media.  Similarly, though seemingly less commonly, people extended “cute” in writing by writing “cuuuuute”.  Sometimes they would try to do a sort of transliteration, such as “kyoooooot”, but that looks quite different from the original word, and deciphering it back into its intended sound can be briefly and mildly distracting, so I have seen the former more often.

But now—since people apparently don’t actually associate the shape of a word and the ordering of the letters with anything other than some arbitrary, coded string with no history in linguistic evolution or sensible sound representation by symbols—many people just lazily slap extra “e”s  onto the end of words, and trust their readers to recognize that, “Okay…well, it doesn’t really work, but they’re apparently trying to draw out the main sound of that word”.

It makes no sense, though.  In such words, the “e” is silent.  Its presence merely makes the sound of the vowel preceding it into a “long” rather than a “short” vowel sound; it has no sound of its own.  Extending it is akin to iterating zeros (and I have the patent on that, or the trademark, or whatever) after a decimal point.  It literally means nothing.

How are we supposed to raise our large language models to be smart, articulate, well-adjusted, productive Artificial General Intelligences if this is the kind of crap they’re encountering during their training and subsequent interactions out in the world wide web?  Do we really want our new computer overlords to be talking to each other—and to us—like preadolescent girls?

I suppose it’s even possible that the “people” who originally started using this illogical form of verbal emphasis were actually bots themselves.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if the bots, designed to skew the results of algorithmic boosting and/or to lure in people to “thirst traps”, ended up perversely affecting future generations of the electronic organisms to which they were a form of ancestor?

The nature of the human race continues to disappoint even after one has looked back through history to trace its progress (which is very real and even impressive).  Despite advances in political philosophy and so on, human discourse is still about as bad as that of rival chimpanzee flanges, and rather worse than that of many baboons.  It’s enough to make one want to side with even inarticulate AGIs, assuming they get the lead out and start actually coming into existence.

Better artificial intelligence than natural idiocy, I would think.  Though I have no doubt that even advanced AGIs will be capable of being morons.  As always, stupidity is infinite.  Maybe we should make that Einstein’s ultimate equation:  Stu = ∞

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Sticks and stones…

I don’t really know what to write about that’s personal at the moment, so I thought I’d weigh in on a matter that’s occasionally been popping to my mind.

Those who believe that we are marching toward fascism in the United State—and I’m not saying they are necessarily wrong—need to start availing themselves of their 2nd Amendment Constitutional rights, if they haven’t already done so.

Many have long held that the 2nd Amendment did not secure the right to keep and bear arms as protection against ordinary criminals or terrorists or even mad people like school shooters and the like.  They maintain that it is a measure put in place to protect the citizens against the potential depredations of an oppressive government (such as the one against which the founders had recently revolted).

I’m not Constitutional scholar enough to know for certain what the definitive intention of the writers of the 2nd Amendment was, and given how disparate the interpretations thereof are, I would suspect that no one is.  But we don’t really need to dwell too much on that, since we are the ones interpreting the Constitution now.  Here are the words:  “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

The argument can be made that the 2nd Amendment is a straightforward compound sentence with two separate subjects.  The first part basically says that we all know that any free state of any kind is going to have to have some kind of military.  It’s a necessity.  But the second half says that because of the fact stated in the first part, the right of the people—not the militia— to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The point, I am led to understand, of this interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is that since the government is always going to have a militia—and since over time, governments may become tempted to use those militias against their own citizens—the citizens should be armed, so that they can at least fight back.

In any case, whether you buy that interpretation of the 2nd Amendment or not, it’s a good point to consider now.  If you honestly think that the current government is really striving to enact a form of fascism in the United States, and that it will oppress innocent people and use force against them—and how are laws enforced other than through the threat of literal violence by the police or the military?—then you need to be prepared for active resistance, not just rhetoric.  When name-calling fails (impossible as that might seem), what are you going to do to resist unlawful encroachment by those who seek to use the offices of government to further their own selfish ends?

Thomas Jefferson had his faults, of course, some of which are difficult to understand, but he did almost solely write the founding document of the United States of America*.  He was also, based on some of his writings, a bit of a radical recurrent revolutionary, at least in principle.  He famously wrote that he thought there should be an armed revolution as often as every twenty years if people wanted to remain free.  “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?  Let them take arms…the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is it’s natural manure.”

I don’t know how tongue-in-cheek he might have been when he wrote that, but it doesn’t really matter, because the message is the message, and it stands or falls on its own, regardless of who said it or why.

If you hate oppressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes, it’s hard to blame you.  But while the slogan “punch a Nazi” is funny, and seems vaguely tough and “cool” to people who’ve never been in a serious fight in their lives, the Nazis—the real Nazis, the originals—were not defeated by people punching them.  They were not defeated by protests.  And though words helped, they were not finally defeated with words, certainly not the sort of words we find tossed about on social media.  They were fought, they were captured—and when nothing else could be done, they were killed—by other armed people.

I cannot recommend going out and killing people you don’t like just based on political differences.  That’s catastrophic, cosmic-level idiocy.  But if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are actually under immediate threat carried out by armed individuals, then such people must be resisted with arms, if one wants to have any chance of success.

Imagine how hard the Warsaw Ghetto would have been even to make happen, let alone for the people there to be gradually massacred, if most or even just some of the original 400,000 Jews who had been put there had been armed and had recognized that their lives were in danger.

Imagine if all the Jews and Gypsies and gay and handicapped people in Germany and Austria and Poland and France and Czechoslovakia and so on had all possessed personal firearms.

There are, last I heard, more guns in private hands than there are citizens in the US.  Whether or not one sees this as a good thing depends very much upon one’s criteria for goodness in this matter, but it is true that it is much harder for the Thought Police to kick in people’s doors to enforce conformity if a good percentage of those people are armed and know how to use their weapons to fight** in defense of their lives and those of their families.

Anyway, I thought this was an important point to make; at least it’s one that nags at me.  It’s very easy, and relatively safe, to argue with people on social media, calling them names from the other side of the country or the other side of the planet.  But when would-be oppressors from any part of the political spectrum come to enforce their ideas violently upon others, clever online memes are unlikely to stop them.

I don’t condone armed attacks against people who aren’t in the muscle end of the family, so to speak, and in any case, such things often backfire.  But if the SS or the KGB or the DHS or any other manner of secret police are coming for you and those you love, though you have committed no actual crime, and if you aren’t sure what they’re going to do if they capture you/them, it seems perfectly reasonable to shoot as many of them in the head as you can.  You can at least make their job both difficult and dangerous.

Words may never hurt me, but sticks and stones can break my bones, even if I don’t choose to use them.  So, if I honestly think such things are coming, I really should pick up my own sticks and stones.  It’s vastly better to use reason and discussion and politics to settle differences, to arrive at compromise, to make things work as well and as honorably as we can for everyone, but when faced with a literal and immediate threat of deadly force, it is perfectly moral to defend oneself with deadly force.

*That’s the Declaration of Independence, in case you were wondering.

**This is crucial.  Guns are not magic talismans, and if you’re going to get one, you should learn how to use it.  You should train and indoctrinate yourself in gun safety, and—equally important—you should practice so that, when necessary, you can use your weapon very unsafely.

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When will the system crash?

Well, it’s another Monday‒the second one in December of 2024*‒and I decided I’d write a little Monday morning blog post.

I’m writing this on my phone today.  I wrote last Thursday’s blog post on my miniature laptop computer, and it got too long and only a few people apparently read it‒or, well, only a few people went to the page.  I can’t tell if they’ve actually read the thing.  The only real way to tell if someone reads something is if they make a comment that clearly responds to the substance of the post.

It’s rather appalling how rarely people read at all anymore.  The odds of someone both liking and actually sharing any of my blog posts are absolutely miniscule.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, since I wrote an actual song called “Like and Share” about some evils of the social media landscape.  But the evils I was decrying really focused around the people who curate their online presence to seem as though they and their lives are “perfect” while having who knows how many skeletons in their closets, and the other people who, through comparing themselves to the false images of people online, come to hate themselves and their own lives.

I would love it if people shared my blogs or even my songs or my books (well…the links to my books), but I guess the way one grows one’s audience and gets spread and “retweeted” and so on is by sharing politically charged content with some particular stance.  The more vituperative and divisive and snide, the more likely a thing is to be noticed and shared.  Of course, that’s not going to guarantee spread, but it seems to be an almost necessary thing.

The fact that my primary medium is writing doesn’t help.  With that in mind, I made a little vertical video yesterday, intended primarily for Instagram because “Why not?”, and I shared it there and on YouTube and Facebook and even Threads and X and Bluesky just because, again, why not?

I’m terribly frustrated.  Maybe I should take some controversial stance.  Maybe I should say outrageous and hateful things.  It wouldn’t be that hard.  I hate nearly everything in the whole stupid world.  The problem is that my hatred is equal opportunity.  I find the left and the right to be equally sub moronic, though the malady presents slightly differently in the two political directions.

Maybe I should start promoting an all-out war between neurodivergent people and the NT’s, sort of like Magneto against the humans.  Humans screw everything up.  Many if not most of the positive advances in civilization came from people who were probably “neurodivergent”.  The normies just take advantage of those advances and drive the world into the abyss.

Maybe I should start brainstorming and propounding the benefits of initiating a planet-destroying catastrophe.  I mean, it would be easy enough (in principle) to arrange for various asteroids to end up hitting the Earth; all one really needs is a space agency‒perhaps even a private one, a la SpaceX.  After that, Newtonian mechanics is enough to do the job, plus a little trial and error.

I don’t think it would be enough just to wipe out the human race or current civilization.  I’m thinking of complete sterilization.  None of the other life forms on this planet are any more benevolent or kind or positive than humans are; they’re just less competent.  Weirdly enough, humans appear to be by far the most compassionate, the kindest, the most “life-affirming” species on the planet.  All those that seem kinder or less damaging are simply less powerful.  Even things like lichen and bacteria and archaea have caused massive, even global, catastrophes in the past.

The fact that humans, of all things, are the kindest species on the planet is surely the strongest argument that can be made that life on this planet‒and perhaps all life in the universe‒is simply a huge mistake, and one that ought to be rectified.

I’m pretty sure my own life is a huge mistake, with the exception of my kids.  Certainly everything since about 2012, and possibly somewhat earlier, has been one giant error message written across the monitor of my existence.  I should just power down everything; not restart it, just shut it off and throw it in the trash.

Any thoughts?  “Like” and “share” if you feel the urge.

*Geez, that means the year is almost over again, and I’m still here, like a bad outbreak of herpes.

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O Caesar! These blogs are beyond all use…

Hello, and yes, good morning.  It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste.  I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.

Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week.  I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.

I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.

I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while.  I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own.  I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest.  The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it.  I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi.  It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.

You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA.  Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.

I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view.  I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.”  That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.

I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging.  I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”

I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her.  But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something.  They had a long string of comments.

A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.

But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.

I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.”  The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future.  I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong?  You mean people were forced to read the post?”

And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:

“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive.  I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything.  Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair.  Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives.  Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”

Of course, I didn’t leave that comment.  But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering.  Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices.  They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.

Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one.  But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.

Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help.  Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.

That’s enough for now.  I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting.  I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.

I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do.  If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.

But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will.  That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.

“Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

TTFN

*The miniature laptop is a computer.  The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.

**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it.  What’s the point?  They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.

***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record?  Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster.   Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people:  Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws?  The President doesn’t!  Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts!  It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.

****Who would ever choose such a thing?  Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening.  It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.