Category: Factual

Why do people believe silly stuff like that a man can be a woman just by saying so?

Or that marriage doesn’t have anything to do with reproduction, and that we can call any arrangement, regardless of its reproductive potential, marriage?  And ignore the blatantly obvious place that marriage has at the nexus of reproduction and civilization?

Why does everyone act as though they see no potential problem whatsoever with importing highly nepotistic groups with incompatible cultures and oppositional values into a society whose most prominent characteristics are extreme tolerance and sub-fertility reproduction?

Why do so many European people hate their ancestors and why have so many decided, consciously or otherwise, to surrender to the onslaught of comfort, luxury, and entertainment, and give up their continued existence?

Why are people just going along with taking children away from their parents for witholding from them gender-mutilating drugs and sugery?

Why are Internet corporations and governmental bodies openly collaborating to impose political censorship in public discussion spaces?

Why are massively powerful corporations exhaustively burning up millions of years worth of built-up organic energy in the span of a few 100 years, why are governments allowing nearly every square mile of the planet to be disturbed by humans, if not outright genocided into a monoculture for humans?

Why is there so little resistance to all this? These are all things that don’t have to be that way. They could easily change if people changed their behaviours; it’s not like it would be some monumental task like going to the moon.

Because everyone thinks it’s not easy, they think it’s impossible.  Everyone thinks the system is unstoppable like a runnaway train. If they have the modicum of an attention span it takes to realize what’s going on, then they simultaneously realize the futility of a single person’s actions.

Eveyone knows that if they even speak up, they’ll achieve nothing but misery.

The entire herd is out of its mind, it’s just running, sprinting, mindlessly charging in whatever direction each human thinks the herd is travelling towards.

Some people think this is going somewhere, or fleeing from something, so they constantly make frantic guesses about what will be ideologically stylish in the next moment so they can get there first.

It’s not hard to recognize a stampede, but it is hard to stop.  If every animal just stopped running, the stampede would instantly end, but every animal knows that if they stop, they’ll get trampled.  And everyone else will think they’re a moron.

For humans, that’s the worst part.  Yeah, getting trampled is bad, but the worst would be eveyone thinking you’re an idiot for getting trampled.

And so the whole herd continues the stampede, charging over the cliff into the void.

Opening your heart to someone new is scary. Allowing yourself to love someone is dangerous because it brings with it the possibility of pain from rejection, betrayal, and loss. Love can be kept secret, and that can protect oneself from some harm, but love is more fully manifested when it’s mutual, and truly loving someone means wanting to protect them, which means taking some possibility of harm upon oneself, removing it from the loved one.

Love is inherently dangerous, it’s unavoidably a risk.

Opening your mind to new ideas is scary. Allowing yourself to question your assumptions and consider new ones is dangerous because it brings with it the possibility of pain from uncertainty, confusion, and thinking differently from those around you. Different thoughts can be kept secret, but even hidden uncertainty and confusion is stressful, and progressing beyond that state to new assumptions may lead to new conclusions and convictions that compel the public defense of newly discovered truth.

Open mindedness is inherently dangerous, it’s unavoidably a risk.

We can decide to not care about uncertainty and confusion, but that’s essentially the same as not caring about truth, which is unacceptable and unworkable to those with an internally-arising motivation for honesty.

We can boldly declare that we don’t care what others think of us, but it’s difficult to overstate how much most people value social approval. Many put it above love, some put it above life itself and kill themselves when opinion turns against them.

Open mindedness requires courage. It’s easy to dismiss this as braggadocio, but dishonesty is often easy, and we could just as easily dismiss that dismissal as cowardice.

In Nevada, which should have been the hottest and driest stretch of the trip, or so I thought, ignorantly assuming north was the same as south, after brief periods of minor showers we made our way to the western half of the state.  Cruising along in calm air, a sudden change of wind hit us head-on, bringing a cold ominous foreboding that physically slowed our progress, and mentally assaulted my resolve, so that, in confusion, I stopped at a barren rest stop, void of even a single wall as shelter.  But there was nothing to do, nothing but go on right into the thick of the menacing storm heralded by the bitter relentless gale.  My resolve would be tested yet further as the wind pierced deeper, driving cold wet closer to our souls.  Not heat and aridness would we find, but winding roads littered with fog, snow, and mud–and of course a most beautiful sunset.  Other bikers turned around. We shrugged as they passed and turned our faces forward, the throttle open, and the handlebars naught.

On the other side of it, tired and shaking uncontrollably and rattling frozen bones, I proposed an early stop–why not right here? It was not too far till sundown. Kim was unreceptive and indomitably undeterred, thankfully dragging me out of my momentary weakness. We’ll say the back seat is shielded, more pleasant, less draining. That’s what we’ll say. Knowingly into the dark trap, then. We let the sun duck under the hills and spring an ambush, catching us on the road with a falling shroud of darkness. Groping blindly along the highway, occasionally accompanied by one of the shrugged-at bikers who’d apparently decided to turn around a second time, we snaked westward. At the hotel, we booked the last room and received free cookies.

A grim glorious day that was, but perhaps not as grim as the escape from San Francisco. The transportation networks were choked with traffic; a plethorous mass of human flesh clogging the roads out of San Francisco, slowing the flow to fully stationary, punctuated by brief rolls forward half the length of a car.  Even outside the city, the swelling hominid profusity pressed out and filled all spaces, not sparing the “in and out burger” we stopped at.  Living talking ape meat spread its teeming overabundance into every seat and table so that we were forced out when we eventually received our order, and we ate outside. The masticating mass was repulsively nauseating. As repulsively nauseating as the pink centre of my burger, which I pushed down my throat in a clinically calculating decision to gain nourishment to counter sleepiness without needing to stop at another restaurant. A cheery employee walked by and asked how the food was.  I gave him a cold, dead, “it’s pink”.  As dead and cold as the centre of my burger.  “What?”  “The burger is pink.”  “So… that’s good?”  “No.  It’s bad.”  “Oh… sorry.”  And he walked away.

Later we rolled into Mark and Shannon’s driveway with the relief of Atlas at the apocalypse.

Man is the only beast capable of becoming enthralled to television. He is alone in his desire to turn from reality and life and fixate on the hypnotizing hypercolour display. Unlike the lesser beasts whose existence is tied closely to the world and life around them, he is seemingly freed from the necessity of struggling for sustenance and survival. But he is a natural born slave, and seeks a new master immediately upon release. This he finds in television, and he gladly submits to its remaking of him fully, from the toes up, in its own image. The other beasts are immune to its enticing glow, and instead must be ripped apart and rendered into the new oversaturated and overexposed existence by force, as they flee. Man reclines dumbly into blissful oblivion and welcomes the damaging overstimulation to his senses, and the toxic hypercolor poison blasted into his mind. The fullness of sunlight and its broadly continuous spectrum which nourishes a teeming superorganism of unfathomable beauty and nuance is supplanted and made dull in comparison to the dominating harsh plastic brilliance of the screen’s discreet cold chromatic distillations. Invigorated by its supple prey, television evolves quickly into the apex predator of man’s attention, its obscene glare and hum outcompeting and drowning out all thought in man that is not television. But the wind and beasts and thermodynamic laws have no mental glandes to tickle and continue unperturbed by television. Man’s neglected civilization crumbles around him beside his unwatching eyes, and the synthetic tentacles that went forth from it to give birth to television go slack. A vestigial glow from the unpowered screen shows the deflation and unravelling of the new man in the absence of his animating essence; his flickering screen and hyperstimulation. Flashless to flashless, dull to dull.