Month: April 2019

(There are no spoilers here.)

The Thanos snap in the previous film is not just wrong it’s foolish. Every population at some point was nearly or exactly half what it is now. So halving populations is intrinsically temporary. His entire proposition was foolish for that reason alone. (There are MANY others, just as damning.)

So the core context of the film is stupid. Or it has a lie to sell? Death is not a necessary evil. These films exist to convince you otherwise. I leave figuring out why to other contexts.

The stones are retconned into specific impotence to serve the death trance, and that trance is basically the core moral of the film.

Imagine a country spent billions trying to tell everyone death is awesome for some sort of religious reason, and made super hero propaganda films to lie to people in service of that maxim.

That happened. And it’s called the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

They give us (unmarried males in particular) intense guilt training on par with religion’s original sin. (Females get a different but equally if not more loathsome version, unpaid caregivers.)

Essentially we are trained to believe that our life has no intrinsic value, and that all our worth is achieved (“earned”) as opposed to ascribed (human rights.)

By default men are told they are parasitic children and hateful thugs with a legacy of tyranny and atrocity to feel guilty for. Surprise surprise the only social absolution is hard labor and profitability. It is this mentality that drives homeless male suicide. (And our grim silent acceptance of a 9 to 1 workplace fatality gender ratio.)

Put simply before you can get a man to break himself on a barge or oil platform or suffocate himself in a coal mine you need to convince him he’s worthless otherwise.

Every male in my family older than me got profoundly worse versions of this training. Males younger than me get a creepy new one that has a more 90s office dystopia feel.

But don’t buy it man.

Say it with me: “I’m a human being God Dammit! MY LIFE HAS VALUE!” (Network, 1976)

Some citations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRuS3dxKK9U (The quote)

Science as a human organizational category is completely devoid of public relations understanding, and I think this is because of selective brain drain. Any scientists that actually start to approach real persuasion understanding are quickly scooped up by the existing persuasion for hire industry.

A purely rational definition of science is inherently psychopathic and fortunately not accurate. The vast majority of scientists deploy science either in line with their ethics or because of their ethics. The best, in terms of good done per hour invested, are driven by those ethics. Norman Borlaug screams to mind.

But what I don’t see are scientists who approach problems like demagoguery or political corruption the way they would approach something like a plague. (Epidemiology is closest.) And it’s a shame because we’re facing problems right now that could really use that sort of response. Climate change for one.

Game it out: Science concludes huge problem is in progress, but problem can’t be solved until a more human problem is solved. Climate change and political corruption respectively.

Arguably war itself is a bigger problem than climate change that science could have started to tackle, but never really did. Persuasion study should be job one for science, yet it doesn’t appear to be on the job stack at all in the way that I mean. Imagine if science mastered diplomacy to the degree they mastered physics.

Science is mostly unified and yet they don’t lean that unification in any persuasive direction. That’s extremely weird to me. Humanity doesn’t war over things like the atomic weight of tungsten. Science has mastered internal agreement, at least in so far as avoiding war goes.

And the answer to why produces little more than confused scoffery and snarks about education when absolutely cornered and forced to look at it. But that’s just an evasion, since education could be parsed itself as little more than persuasion aimed only at social subordinate castes. (Children, the poor, any deemed in need of “education” or “rehabilitation” etc.)

Again, I think it’s selective brain drain. The persuasion industry prunes this line of thought out of public science like a well tended bonsai. Threats and checks being the sheers.

See also: http://underlore.com/avoid-my-mistakes/