Philosophy – Page 5

Who’s really entitled?

My Thoughts

As if we’re the entitled ones because we want a fraction of the wealth we create to be spent on making our lives dignified and comfortable.

You entitled right wing types can’t see a millimeter past your own narcissism and greed.

You don’t think you owe anyone anything, but news flash, you do.

We’re only alive because of each other. The very thoughts in your head are in a language you did not invent. You made very likely nothing in your life. How much stuff in your life says made in China on the underside?

We’re in this together, and as much as you want the toy box of life all to your spoiled self, eventually you’re going to have to grow up and learn to share like a big boy.

You people call us entitled while you parrot talking points penned for you by the biggest parasite class in all of human history.

We’re not buying your bullshit anymore.

If you won’t share your toys with the other children, the adults will take them away. You can try to understand or you can have a tantrum.

Either way, as responsible adults, we’ll treat you with the compassion your toddler mind clearly isn’t yet capable of. Maybe in a couple decades you’ll be an adult, or maybe you’ll self destruct before then despite our best efforts.

But unlike you, I welcome you to the human family and wish you a better time than I had, even if some of my tax money pays for it. Because that’s the adult thing to do. The right thing.

Even obnoxious children deserve a better future.

They say we’re generous with other people’s money and that we just want free stuff. Well, apparently it’s equally easy to be greedy with other people’s money. Where do you think the 1%’s massive wealth came from?

You’re buying into the lie. Wealth extraction is not wealth creation. Your masters aren’t even job creators. As if working to death to make money for them is a privilege in the first place. But no they can’t even share that much.

Trickle down is a lie. The 1% is a bloated tick on the economy of humanity. Wall Street is a fraudulent casino where the losses are paid for in public blood. And congress is its inept gridlocked public relations division.

They say we just want free stuff. But no one believes that lie. Not even you. Do you think they’ll reward you for being a good little drone just because you repeat the lie?
This isn’t about free anything, it’s about getting some say over how all that money the 1% stole from us is spent.

We’re not even going to take what you’ve already got. We’re just going to limit how much more you can take.

No more subsidies, no more tax loopholes, no more high frequency trading without a tax, no more banks big enough to hold the global economy hostage, no more off shore tax havens, no more revolving door appointments, no more 76,000% return on lobbying investment, no more purchased elections, no more immunity for executives, no more stolen pensions, no more lead in the water, no more pretending the ocean isn’t rising, no more bombing random countries for a stock bump.

Your time has ended.

Free stuff. What a giggle.

Does that look free to you?

We already paid for everything we’re demanding, and frankly you fops can never pay us back for the lives your greed has already destroyed and ended.

You’re getting off easy with peaceful reform.

We’re unrigging the system. And you should thank us for saving you from your own greed. Because I assure you, you’d like the alternative even less.

You have a very simple choice and I’ll explain it with someone else’s words.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” ~JFK

Some whine about the violence implied and to them I say, playing the victim now? I didn’t even know crocodiles had tear ducts.

The ones in favor of an entire economy built on extortion playing the victim card. Because mah profits.

Have you ever looked at history? Do you know what usually happens when wealth concentrates like this?

Your masters are literally killing us by the tens of thousand ever year, at least. And you have the pampered balls to whine about threats.

What a laugh coming from a social Darwinist tough guy. Where’s that fitness now? Already looking for someone to tattle to?

Your masters have made it clear they’ll never stop. They’re like the lunatics in Dr Strangelove worrying about a mine shaft gap.

Even if we were literally their slaves they’d still obsess over ways to spend less and make more till the sun ran out of hydrogen.

They will not stop until stopped. That is blatantly obvious. They could have switched over to nuclear power decades ago and halted all greenhouse gas production. France showed the world how it’s done. But they are too lazy and spoiled and above all pathologically greedy.

There’s two ways to stop them. One is peaceful and political.

The other? Well, assuming people will not be slaves and yet we continue down this path of making substantive reform a fantasy, I ask you, what’s the outcome?

What would you do to avoid having 20 years of your life cut off because some patent holder decided you weren’t profitable enough to live?

Would you peacefully watch your child die to protect stock growth this quarter?

Don’t act like I’m being violent. And don’t act like you’re tough. You people are cowards. Intellectual terror is your defining trait. That’s why your masters imprison more people than China. That’s why they spend more on the war machine than the bulk of the planet combined. That’s why they live in gated communities defended by private security companies. That’s why they arm their racist shock troop police like a literal army and send them to ring and mace every protest into silence. That’s why they tap our phones and amass enough data on us to make the Stasi look bored and sloppy.

They know the alternative and they know they can’t stop themselves. Avoiding violence is our goal. Not yours, and not theirs.

External Links

I Like Bernie, But…

Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. He believes that our current economic system isn’t doing enough for poor and middle-class Americans and that democratic change is needed to create a more fair and just America. But this isn’t radical or scary! Many of the programs instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson that we take for granted today — such as Medicare, the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, and Social Security — can be considered socialist programs.

Libertarians and Conservatives must choose: Competitive Enterprise or Idolatry of Property

In this analysis, I’d like to focus on one of the directions that conservatism has gone a-wandering. But note first: I’ll try to do this without taking a single position that could fairly be called even slightly left-of center – by the old standards at least. My entire critique will be from what used to be a completely conservative perspective. You’ll know this by the historical figure whom I cite above all others.

Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies than Social Welfare Programs

About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006.

Sociology, philosophy and political history, documentary films about power and how it works in society.

Extremely informative and eternally relevant documentaries on the science and application of crowd based volition manipulation first called propaganda and later rebranded as “public relations.”

Ayn Rand by Darryl Cunningham

Important context about the philosophical root of conservatism which is the worship of money above all else.

10 corporate welfare programs that will make your blood boil

The money for Sanders’ platform can easily come from eliminating the costliest entitlement programs for the top 1 percent and multinational corporations. Here’s a breakdown of the most superfluous giveaways to the rich and how much they cost the rest of us:

Underlore Links

(None yet)

Videos

Photos

Hindsight

We can know some things about life in advance. Truisms and cliches. But steeped in truth nonetheless. It might be wise to try and draw up a list of the most qualitatively important ones and then build a worldview around obviating them that wouldn’t cost a culture its fitness for extreme long term survival.

A quick example is the notion that hindsight is 20/20. The lesson there is not to shrug and endure, but to think about the future, but to try and see the world in such a way that it’s ok to go back and admit you made mistakes, if that’s all that’s keeping you from being happy or better off.

We have this misguided intolerance of mistakes where we share the impossible effort of never making them. Instead we should be honest with ourselves that mistakes will inevitably be made and try to profit from them.

They can be compensated for. Not erased, but at least leveraged towards the future. Don’t try to avoid them wholesale, as that’s a fool’s errand, but to embrace the utility they may provide. Embrace the liberation that brings.

This doesn’t make you devoid of culpability for lousy choices, but it prevents you from doubling down on bad bets trying to pretend you never bet in the first place. (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy)

If your intentions were good from the beginning, if you at no point were trying to hurt or exploit anyone, if you made the best and kindest decision available to you at the time, then why should you feel any regret or accept any blame?

Only if you knowingly made a decision that had to be utterly correct and could have been avoided, or was malevolent in some way, should you embrace any feeling of wrong doing.

This speaks to the lack of wisdom in vengeance. The best decisions more or less are in my opinion the ones that permit adaptation up to and including being rescinded.

So don’t hurt people, because you can’t unhurt them later if you’re wrong. Don’t disable anything you can’t repair if needed.

The Problem with “Hardcore” Gamers

For starters I reject the term “hardcore” as it sets up a false dichotomy. It implies casual gamers are “soft” which in a community of 99% males means weak. I prefer the term tryhard because that’s what they do and what they want to force everyone else to do. To try hard. To be punished for failing to try hard.

Quite simply the problem with them is that it’s not enough for them that we openly admit the high points of a given game. If we complain at all, if we don’t obsequiously adopt their bizarre work ethic mentality towards gaming in its entirety, they literally act like we’re a bad people.

Casual gamers on the other hand are perfectly fine to let tryhards play however they see fit without judgment. What I judge, is being judged. In this sense tryhards need to effing relax.

If you complain about a game being too hard they say “It’s supposed to be hard.” They respond as if you’re complaining about chess being hard. Never mind that chess by definition is ultimately the most casual of games. That doesn’t stop international competition chess from being a thing.

Chess is how it should be done. I can play any variant of chess I want. The tryhards have no power there. The less power you give them the better a game, and the game’s community is.

Catering to tryhards is a mistake because, as with chess, catering to casuals would not prevent them from enjoying fierce competition gaming, it would only prevent them from having the power to deny casuals the same right to play and enjoy.

Catering to tryhards makes people like them feel justified in literally hating people like me. This does not occur in casual game communities. It is a direct boot camp, cultist, Stockholm syndrome style reaction to a hateful unforgiving game setting.

There is some seriously dark psychology in play here. Tryhards behave a fair bit like religious extremists or fascists of some stripe. No joke. I firmly believe if they had the option of hurting me and getting away with it over this ideological difference, they’d do it.

But see, I wouldn’t hurt them. Casual gamers generally wouldn’t, expressly because they are casual. Honestly, even if I had a magic button that would just low voltage zap them, I wouldn’t even do that.

What I am opposing is the effort to make a game into a religion. Which is what tryhards more or less do. They elevate this stuff to religious extremes and the devs encourage it for the money and the rabid worshipful fan base.

They are cult builders and that’s clearly bad. IPL abolition would solve this problem because it would suddenly be legal to reinterpret and translate the holy texts, by which I mean it would be legal to fork the code.

They often say we have plenty of easier games to play, as a prelude to telling us take it or leave it, stfu or gtfo. But they have the overwhelming majority of other games to go play as well. Again, this is part of the problem.

A badly coded game is a “challenge” too, and plenty of inept devs hide behind “challenge” as an excuse for being lousy coders. (Evil Dead on the Dreamcast springs to mind. Worst controls ever I think.) Ease of use in the application market on the other hand is usually an indicator of skill. Not so for game devs. Because of tryhards.

There are tryhard equivalents in the software community too, to be sure, plenty of Linux types get all miffed and ideological about not making GUIs or clones and the like, but they aren’t as common as the gamer version by any stretch of the imagination.

Hard core gamers and games are unilaterally exclusive. They’re like the gaming version of racists. The games which cater most to tryhards, are also not coincidentally, the most rigid and unchanging. The most resistant to modding and inclusiveness. The most brimming with smug hate in the communities. The most rife with the sheer loathsomeness of greed and obsession when money is on the table, as in the case of Starcraft and Counter Strike.

On the other side, a causal game with a nice open mod system could be as hard as you want it to be without excluding others wholesale. (Again, see Chess.)

In short: Give casuals what they want, and we can all play how we like. Give “hardcore” gamers what they want and only they can play how they like.

Obviously, our desires are the more inclusive and more ethical. Tryhards should be ashamed of themselves by any rational ethical measure.

Everything I ask for in any game would be implemented ideally as an option/setting. My wishes being granted would not impact tryhard play at all. Casuals are not the problem here. Tryhards are.

Addendum 2016-01-24 0608 AM:

It is a constant source of rage for me because I see in them mirrored the same psychologies that allow some of humanities most shameful actions.

The entire software market is a toxic meme in my view. The notion that one can own an idea to me is dangerous lunacy on it’s face. And these people are the shock troops of that lunacy.

Ever since the early 90s when I washed up on the shores of the Internet in IRC chat, it amazed me that the first thing I found in what was essentially a shared lucid dream, the concept of hierarchies.

When I found out that rooms had operators that were literally placed above everyone else in the name list, I was floored and instantly began asking why?

“Oh well it’s to prevent this abuse or that.”

“Then why not bake that into the code of how rooms work?”

“*awkward silence followed by ban for violation of rule 32f/b Never Question Ops*”

Tryhards in any debate almost always first fall into an attack pattern of “Are you too stupid to read the rules?” Followed by “It’s just a game, the devs own it, you should be grateful for the opportunity to lick their boots, because other devs are even worse.”

And that shit sounds way familiar out here in the real world. When business owners first objected to the civil rights movement it was on the exact same private property my yard my rules argument.

Everyone sane and ethical scoffed, but virtually no one scoffs in the gaming world at the exact same logic. Gamers have no rights, and tryhards defend this lack of protection with all the vehemency of the Tea Party Movement.

I swear the gaming/software market has deep seeded the youth of America with these toxic memes and it’s all we can do to keep up on weed patrol at ground level.

Social Darwinists Headed for Extinction

Quick note to cutthroat types. Your days are numbered.

You monied types have two choices psychologically, buy the job creator style myth of the owner class, or watch your own ethics callous over from repeated abuse.

History is on my side. The march of history and the ascension of humanity has always been away from brutality and so called social Darwinism. What is the thing that Europe, and the United States, and China have in common? Confederation. They were all essentially separate nations or states that learned that it’s better for everyone to work as a team.

We have been on a steady march, along with the rest of life, towards unity, because it works.

From amino acids to Pando, from Lucy to the United Nations the clear and obvious fact of life is that working together pays better than screwing eachother over and making excuses about it.

The Ayn Rand crowd only exists because the rest of us permit it. You may well live out your life as an exploitative agent in the meantime, as many corporate apologists and Horatio Alger types will, because clearly it’s a slow march and we have a long way to go, but don’t pretend for a second that’s the future because it is quite obviously the past.

The only thing that would give your kind a substantive future would be a catastrophic setback.

_”We must not allow a mineshaft gap!”_

Black Voters and Bernie Sanders

TL/DR: Bernie won’t actually have a problem with AA/minority voters on the days of vote. The media is just saying that over and over hoping to make it true.

Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote – The Nation

Bernie will have the black vote when it matters and here’s why.

I know no one wants to talk about this really for fear of being misconstrued as implying that blacks as a voting block are ignorant. However, the root of Bernie’s problem with the black electorate at this stage is ironically a consequence of everything he’s trying to fight.

Blacks and most others frankly at this point haven’t on average looked into who to vote for yet because they know it’ll be a trivial decision to make and because they on average are too busy or disenfranchised to engage in what is at its point essentially the politico version of fantasy football.

At this point the election is a first world problem for the majority of those 61% of people that didn’t vote last time. For the moment, and only for the moment, most people have more pressing matters to attend to.

Not having the time to inform yourself of the reality of your choice in an upcoming vote is by definition a bigger problem the more disenfranchised your group is because then you have bigger and more real problems to deal with day to day expressly because of systemic racism or other forms of oppression.

When you are worried for example about being shot by the local police walking down the block to buy groceries, assuming you can even afford them, you’re not going to have a lot of time or inclination at first to wiki Bernie vs Clinton and their voting records. This does not make you stupid, it makes you human.

Sure it might be unwise as a group to disengage, but individually (and here is the critical part) this early, it’s essentially a waste of time. But again, be honest, this really isn’t as complicated an nuanced as the media (both mainstream and alternative) how long would it take anyone browsing to decide which is the candidate for them? We all want to sound smart, but really a choice like this takes no more than 30 minutes of searching.

There’s also the general impact of austerity measures especially in republican states on political awareness. Schools generally are in third world shape in this country and they only get worse in oppressed communities. But again, that doesn’t matter much in this specific context because of the internet and the penetration of smart phones into every level of society.

All this is in my opinion why there is this perception that Bernie isn’t doing well among minorities, blacks in particular. It’s ultimately an illusion.

This will all change the moment the primary begins because he’ll win Iowa and New Hampshire and the news will be forced to name him and the busier more distracted of the black electorate will, by virtue of it no longer being a first world problem, will inform themselves on their upcoming choice.

And when they quickly find that their choice is between a woman who accepts money from the private prison lobby and says whatever she thinks is expedient at the time, or a man who walked with King and was arrested fighting for the civil rights movement, who has not deviated from his message of equality and true progressivism in decades, they’ll make the intelligent, self serving, and compassionate choice.

See, the thing about low information voting is about the price in time of acquiring that information. The opportunity cost is the deciding factor here. As the day of the primary gets closer and closer in each state, a moment will be taken by each person who isn’t totally disconnected or prohibited from participation even indirectly, to confirm or deny what they already believe, and they’ll find Bernie’s revolution waiting for them, instead of SSDD not worth the wait inline come election day.

The issue of who to vote for in the primary will for each person stop being a waste of precious time. It then stops being a trivial day to day hobby horse race, and it starts being something real that matters today. And that only means millions of people discovering Bernie and coming to #FeelTheBern

I believe that essentially all it takes to turn the average black Hillary supporter into a Bernie Sanders’ supporter is 30 minutes on a smart phone and an open mind. Call me sappy or naive but I’m pretty sure open minds and smart phones are still ubiquitous in this country, no matter what the news tells us.

Also, primary voters are by definition more engaged than general election only voters, and engaged voters Google who they are voting for. Any progressive that shows up has a great chance of being behind Bernie than any of these polls can predict. Unless they are online, and the online polls show a landslide coming because there are no spoiler effects in play. It’s perfectly safe to vote Bernie. Indeed, given his performance (compared to Hillary) vs Trump and the other republicans, he’s the safer vote.

This election is defined by populism. That will include the dismissal of the main stream media by the electorate. The same anti establishment populism that caused this race to boil down to Trump vs Sanders also is present vs the six company news machine we all know by now has been lying to us for decades.

Mark my words, Bernie is essentially going to sweep the primaries barring outright election rigging.

Update: 2016-02-23 0517 AM

I’m not afraid of being called a racist as a result of my efforts to point out the value of Bernie’s candidacy to minority voters primary because I’m not a racist by any rational definition.

I’ve realized that the scolding by the neoliberal set for whites to get out of the race issue is a slick way to perpetuate the divide.

If a particular person hates me for defending their interests, that’s their right. I’m not doing it to earn praise. I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.

It’s not about them, it’s about me 🙂

I’m not going to preemptively give up in a misguided effort to avoid offending someone. This is the Internet. Just existing offends some people heh.

Now obviously I realize that blacks can and should be able to vote for whomever they please.
You’ll notice Bernie isn’t black. I’m not saying blacks should vote Sanders because they are black, I’m saying they should vote Sanders because his policies will disproportionately help the AA community.

He’s an even better idea for the AA community than he is for the country at large (and that is really saying something) and people voting against their own interests undermine the core argument for democracy.

If people can’t be trusted to make a superior (as defined by whatever objective metric you like) decision then they shouldn’t have decision making authority. That’s why we don’t vote on matters of science. Because we know taking a poll wouldn’t be a good way of making that type of decision.

Blacks in particular (but also to a lesser extent the electorate generally) voting against their own interests in this election when the choice is between an advocate of mass incarceration, a literal fascist, and someone who marched with MLK and was a civil rights pioneer, would be rather strong evidence that democracy might generally not objectively be a good idea after all.

I mean really, what more do you want? If you don’t have a scenario in mind that falsifies democracy then you’re a fanatic.

Thanksgiving 2015

Every thanksgiving I have a lousy choice.

1. Repeat previous expression of gratitude which will obviously seem forced due to the holiday.

2. Struggle to come up with new ones, and make it seem like I’m not grateful for all the stuff I didn’t mention this time.

My solution to this problem is to try and make my genuine gratitude known through the course of the year, and I believe I’ve done that. No one to whom I feel grateful is unaware of this fact as far as I know barring the normal social distance between those that do good for all humanity and all those who may be grateful to them for it.

For example firefighters or Bernie Sanders. Groups or individuals who do and wish to do awesome things for us all but of course can’t be expected to know us all.

This year however I have something especially new and important to be grateful for.

The great love of my life found me. I tell her every day what she means to me but I’m going to speak about it here again simply because I think it’s the nice thing to do.

I live in a society that is like running the gauntlet. Every part of it seems built to either extract or torment. For me, given my gender and such, a huge part of that effort is aimed at getting me into a “relationship” that the architects of our society both define and exploit.

The punishment for failing in this regard is social mockery across every level of society and a near total exclusion from political power.

That is a small part of why I am so grateful and lucky to have been found by a total goddess who frees me from that trap simply by existing and then goes so far above and beyond, that even metaphor is unable to characterize the distance. A woman who is completely baffling in her level of awesomeness. I would absolutely conclude she was too good to be true if I didn’t know for incontrovertible objective fact that she is indeed entirely true.

I fancy myself a bit of a wordsmith but capturing her extreme magnificence in words with any objective clarity is just utterly impossible. She’s wise beyond a redwood’s years let alone her own. She’s kind to a degree reminiscent of extreme William’s syndrome but with none of the pathology. She’s utterly brilliant to the tune of running medical communities and improving Wikipedia literally thousands of times over, and is the only person whom I have ever met who can win a debate with me repeatedly in single sentences. (Seriously, if you can convince her, she can almost certainly convince me.) And on top of it all she’s beautiful to the point that no doubt when people finally see us together they will be completely confused how a shmoe like me ended up with a goddess like that. (And frankly I share their confusion.)

She is walking proof that karma is a myth. I don’t deserve her infinite love but reality just doesn’t care what people deserve, it gives what it gives and that’s the end of it.

And I won’t lie, I’m taking the offer, justice or not.

Incredibly, on top of that I have other major and minor things to be grateful for as well, in addition to all the things I was grateful for last year and every other day. To say I have a completely epic set of friends and family would be a hilarious unfathomable understatement. (See the links at the end.)

This is just more proof that karma is a myth. Without giving a lengthy list, even if only confined to this year, I’ll just say that what I am most grateful for is real rational hope for me and continued long term hope for my species that is equally objective. We are moving towards a time when we finally and truly declare a winning and real war on pain and death.

The time since last year and this has been for me personally on average a steady climb towards a state of reasonable fulfillment, devoid of overt horrors. A time when I finally have the power to start giving something back to the species and the loved ones that have been so kind to me. And I have good reason to believe that this trend will only improve over the next year as good fortune compounds on good fortune.

And while I may not deserve these wonderful things I am grateful for them and I will try to become someone that does deserve them in time.

Thank you all.

See previous years:

Thanksgiving

An open letter to my parents, Thanksgiving 2012.