Month: October 2015

It’s Just Fiction

1682cae91918693a88c05c380c7ed798I’m so tired of that argument.

As if all the propaganda in the world that directly leads to death and pain is fine just because it’s fiction.

Pandemic ignorance of how the mind works is the greatest threat to human freedom ever invented.

Neither your conscious or unconscious mind knows how to separate fiction from reality entirely.

For example, imagine a scene of two people fighting to the death. Look at the scene detail by detail. Where exactly is the fiction? We are looking at two flesh and blood human beings. The materials are real, the sand is real, the sunlight is real, the words are as real as words can be.

The entire concept of fiction is too complex for the majority of the human brain. When your brain goes to encode a memory it doesn’t know the difference. And as I just pointed out, how could it? When it goes to remember the scene, 99% of the parts are real. Ok so the steel might be aluminum, the blood might be dye, but does your hippocampus know that? Can it know that? Of course not. It’s a machine chunk. It doesn’t understand what it’s recording any more than a camera does.

It’s insane to expect each part of the brain to have all the functions of an entire brain. And that’s why this wrecks people. The vast majority of your brain processes fiction as if it’s truth. Especially if it’s well made and convincing on a detail for detail basis.

This isn’t about me being pedantic, or needing to lighten up, it’s about you and so many others being oblivious. Oblivious to how your mind processes fiction and how much of your memory is actually fabricated.

Unless you have a degree in archaeology and a particularly vivid imagination you can’t even come close to picturing what this kind of thing was really like, if it ever even existed at all.

Your entire memory barring actual first person events is a series of comparisons between fictions. When people speak of events you create the mental picture in your head like a cinematographer.

I bet even your dreams have movie and TV elements, maybe even games. Why? Because your brain physically can’t tell the difference.

For 200,000 years, what you saw was what you got. We are not adapted for this.

You’re all blind slaves. Perhaps the greatest irony in history is the fact that it is your conviction of freedom that enslaves you.

Who owns your limbic system?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television

Open Letter To Bernie’s Team

If Bernie wants to educate people on a subject he really first needs to stress the fact that he’s not a spoiler or a splitter. And he needs to repeat this point at the outset of all his speeches and replies. He needs to work it in as an issue statement.

His biggest enemy is the perception that he’s 3rd party or splitter. People conflate his being essentially an independent with him running as an independent. People know he’s running democrat but most don’t really know that that means he’s safe to vote for in a way that greens aren’t.

He needs to remind voters that in the primary they can afford to vote for him without hurting the party, and that even democrats in republican states very much need to vote in the primary if not the general.

I’ve seen people in comments still talking like voting for Bernie is somehow like voting for Nader. People are already resigning themselves to voting for Hillary as if they don’t have two votes coming up. The primary and the general. When in fact the primary is more important.

Also I’ve seen people say that it doesn’t matter because they live in republican states. This is of course not true. And you should be talking about it.

Seriously, you guys should really add some basic primary information to everything you send out. Even if it’s just a single sentence to address the spoiler effect and the fact that you need everyone to vote in the primary. Like “Remember, your vote is important, even in the red states, especially in the primary.” Something.

I think you run the risk of getting people hyped about the general only to lose the primary because a large enough chunk of people just seriously had no idea. Make it so that your web page reads incoming IPs and feeds them primary data by location. Make it a banner across the top that scrolls with the screen. With a count down.

Make it impossible to come away from your content without knowing there are two elections coming up.

Because lets be honest. At this point, the hillary vote is the leftist low information tactical vote. The habitual vote. The preemptive compromise vote. The vote that doesn’t understand things are different this time.

You kind of touched on this when you started trying to educate people on democratic socialism, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. That’s for after you win the primary and your job is getting swing votes and inspiring turn out.

The primary/spoiler lesson is way more pressing, and easier to teach, than defining democratic socialism. Let people know that finally it’s safe to vote their conscience without compromise and that tactical voting isn’t needed this time.

Bernie can’t fix anything because powerless?

It’s funny how some people say that the president doesn’t have any real power to change things, when the fact is we haven’t had an actual progressive president since jimmy carter, so how would we know?

Well by the actions of every other president since Carter. So long as you realize they are actually republicans trying to maintain a facade.

Every democrat elected to the office has been functionally a moderate Republican. And if you’ll notice, each one had to talk further and further left to get the job, and thus their betrayal was more and more obvious each time. Hopefully Obama is the last one that was possible. He had to make such a massive about-face going from a reform mandate landslide to the impotent banker puppet his funding sources desire that it hopefully discredited the entire ploy of running a republican in reformer clothing.

I think that’s why the right wing has virtually given up on this race by allowing Trump and the clown car. They know they don’t have a prayer.

The question is can the actual progressives and reformers seize the opportunity and have the courage to risk looking like a fool again. By once again admitting hope and voting for a reformer.

Yes Obama tricked us all, but that should not translate into a strategy of handing a dying party the executive branch, overtly or covertly. (By which I mean a vote for anyone other than Bernie.)

And we definitely don’t have to preemptively compromise by picking Hillary when there is zero risk when voting for a real reformer. Worst case, Hillary wins anyway and then we all have to pick her to avoid outright insanity. Best case, the reformer we thought we were electing when we pulled the lever for Obama.

The election is going to test some interesting theories. Essentially we’re going to be putting the alternative vote to the test because people in the democratic primary can indeed go for broke and vote for the real reformer with zero risk to the general.

The question is do people engage in tactical voting only to avoid a loss or is it also ego, join the herd, Stockholm syndrome?

In any case, I predict a Bernie primary and general victory. The scales will possibly clearly tip when the tickets are complete and we know who the VP will be.

Mental Victims

This culture has a disease. It take many forms but the root is ultimately tolerance for the suffering of others. So many of us have mental victims.

Hypothetical people that represent real groups whose suffering we tolerate or even enjoy, and tell ourselves we’re right to do so.

But we never are. Suffering is never helpful. Human rights have no exceptions.

Hurting evil does not make you good. You must do good to be good. Preventing evil is doing good, but rarely do our fantasies of deterrence occur. Vengeance does not actually dissuade future exploitation, ironically because like we do with our mental cruelties,  the criminal always assumes someone else will be doing the suffering.

It’s always a surprise when we find ourselves the victim. And when it’s over and we expect outrage and sympathy on our behalf and for our plight, we get nothing because we to our horror find out that someone else dismisses our suffering. And we think we are better. But you can’t be better so long as you want the suffering of someone else.

You are merely different. And being different from evil leaves room for being a different kind of evil. As I said, being evil to evil does not make you good.

“Being against evil doesn’t make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide… I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you’re fighting.” ~Ernest Hemingway

The meanest word in the English language is “deserve.” We dismiss on the grounds that they deserve our violence and their pain.