Category: Sociology

Blank People

It was recently asserted to me that multiculturalism is to blame for among other things a dramatic rise in the death rate of my demographic.

Here are my thoughts:

I think it’s more like a contrast thing. Like western culture seems recently eager to respect demographic variations, such as gender, race, income, orientation etc, but the side effect is a rising of the tide that doesn’t include the one group that essentially serves as the default. White men.

In western culture your demographic identity is more or less defined by some deviation from a somewhat arbitrary baseline. That baseline is white straight male. Or “Cis” males in the more hateful corners of the web.

Socially, if I can’t check one of the non-default boxes, I am essentially deemed unworthy of focused help.

Because white men have historically been in the top slot socially,  the perception is that the last thing that they need is help. But this is based on old data. Maybe my grandfather didn’t need help, but I might. Even by your definitions.

A culture is by definition people working together to help all members of the culture so long as they play by the rules. While the drive to unbias the rules is certainly a worthy ethical goal, the bigger picture of inclusion is being lost in some places along the way.

In today’s world I feel like a lot of assumptions about my value are made in a hateful way for actions and contexts that simply have never applied to me. I feel like I live in a bunker, waiting for the radiation to dissipate. I feel isolated and cut off because no part of the culture I was born in wants me beyond my family and friends or any pocket money I may have.

Nothing in this culture is welcoming to me except those things which welcome everyone and have a parasitic agenda. (Like the various cults on offer, both secular and spiritual, and of course anywhere my money is good.)

These days all the division lines are about keeping the 99% from uniting vs their real enemies. And while I have no interest in buying into that I must also face the fact that others have bought in, and as such I am going to find myself hated on many fronts for being white, or straight, or male, or whatever.

This makes me afraid to speak to people because I’m always an outsider in some sense. And always I feel silently hated. I can barely interact with minority strangers because I have to worry about everything I say lest it be twisted into some kind of racist remark. Which is extremely ironic when you think about it.

So the problem isn’t that society is reaching out to other groups, the problem is that the only people reaching out to my group are bigots, to the point that if you made any kind of support system for white men exclusively in any context it would be instantly crushed and mocked as being racist, sexist, etc. Or invaded by actual racists.

The only group that gets even a tiny fraction of respect (as well as disproportionate hate) is the men’s rights movement. And really that’s only because they have such glaring points. Male over representation in the homeless population and the work place fatality stats for example. It’s hard to say they don’t have a point when there is audio recording out there of men being mocked by domestic abuse help lines as if having a penis makes one immune to being beaten with a hammer or a brick. Or otherwise abused or intimidated.

I mean really, can you imagine calling 911 essentially only to be mocked? Calling 911 to protect yourself and being arrested because your attacker was female? That happens. And we learn as men of non-color to never complain about anything that applies to just us because of the hateful social response. Hell, the only reason I feel comfy sharing this post is because I assume no one will ever read it.

Essentially we are being left behind, and as men are generally conditioned by both evolution and social training to literally put our lives on the line in an effort to be useful, this lagging behind means that suicide looks more and more like a good idea. Especially when getting psychological help often essentially means being scolded and humiliated.

Many of these suicides are passive. Not wearing your seat belt, taking up smoking, eating all kinds of salt and sugar and processed meats just waiting for something to kill you so your family can get the insurance because Contrary to the popular image a whole lot of white men are Really selfless good people.

I’m not saying I’m one of them, I’m just saying they are out there. About once a day it like occurs to me that I could simply die and avoid a whole lot of potential horror. Nothing dissuades me from this except those same friends and family. TV seems to want me to die for all sorts of things. Especially being jobless. At the very least my death would be culturally invisible.

Again, think about it. When a death happens what’s the first thing the TV tells you to make you care about it? Gender, family status, race. Etc. How many times have you heard the addendum “including women and children” as a way to intensify the impact of a wrong? (Google the phrase in quotes, 434,000 results, virtually all of them attempted outrage multipliers.)

I’m fortunate in that I am articulate enough to explain myself to therapist types, but in all my interactions with them I had to make a clearly and lengthy case for why I don’t just go get some life crushing job.

The solution with those people always seems to be about going away or getting in line.

It’s not pressure from the other groups crushing my demographic, it’s the lack of help at the cultural level making it merely appear hat way by contrast. I am not oppressed by gays or minorities or women or whatever. I am oppressed by the 1% and its machine. I am oppressed by a culture that dismisses my suffering and the very value of my life. I am oppressed by being a blank person.

These groups I am instructed to resent by the TV all have legitimate issues that need urgent attention and I am happy to see them get what they need, and will help when I can, I however also think when you focus it on any race or gender or designation you are by definition perpetuating a prejudice.

The solution is a universal approach and holding everyone to the same rules.

Specifically we most urgently need a UBI. No picking and choosing, no red tape. Living wage for living people. Let greed and ambition and boredom and creativity and curiosity take care of the rest.

One Possible Solution

The great thing about a UBI is it’s self correcting. A ubi check means nothing to a rich person but means salvation to a homeless person. No administration needed.

It’s like the opposite of a flat tax.

The problem is that when it comes time to be helped, I’ve been abandoned essentially because of my lack of a race or a gender or an orientation etc. I don’t have a culture in a sense. There isn’t much that helps me unless I’m a worker or otherwise funded.

It’s just culturally assumed that because I’m a white male I must be a-ok. And I assure everyone, that’s not the case.

I’m ok because I have a family that loves me. Otherwise I’d be homeless or dead right now.

I feel like the only social help I get is like an unintended side effect of support aimed at other groups that just can’t bring themselves to overtly exclude me in vengeance for the actions of the 1% of previous eras who’s race and gender I happen to share.

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.

Liberal Hate

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To be fair, I do see a lot wrong with the progressive movement, just ask me about gun control, GMO hate, and nuclear power, but that makes a lot of sense since progressivism is forced to be a single party event in this country.

There are two general approaches to political change, the desire for something new or the desire for something old. Conservatives are by definition regressive. They wish for stasis or regression. Progressives are the other side, they wish for change and progress towards something new.

The problem is that there are many possible futures but we all share a past. It makes sense to have a single conservative party. However, in order to counter that you need a concerted effort to balance it, and that’s a problem because progressives can’t agree as easily as conservatives because there are many possible futures, some of which are mutually exclusive.

For example, I want to see a future with nuclear reactors and the freedom to own weapons. My reasoning isn’t relevant to this comment. The fact is that many progressives do not.

Now conservatives may disagree on which elements of the past to keep and how far back to emulate, but those difference are much easier to reconcile. Progressivism of any stripe is always going to be at a disadvantage in this context all else being equal.

My point is to prove that it isn’t logical to lump “liberals” together like it is to do so with conservatives, because of the shared past, divergent future, dichotomy.

8765786076That said, if any party is more guilty of ignoring facts it’s the conservative party (or conservative elements within progressive parties) since there are reasons we abandoned elements of the past when we did so.

Granted not all of them were valid and good reasons but for the most part we had good cause, at least at the time.

The right wing (be they overt or covert) in this country is completely fact immune on a whole slew of issues ranging from economics to climatology to sociology. When they aren’t simply lying for power on behalf of their 1% owners or pathological greed.

Basically we need a depth of process reform that simply isn’t going to happen prior to the singularity. And what I am hoping for is internal changes to the one party that overtly stands for change. Since currently the ship of state is headed for a waterfall.

1336153857475Letting the 1% try to keep ALL the money is just insane. It will destroy the country. Though of course the wealthy can always just fly away. Realizing that they are a pathology at the systemic level is the first step towards finding an ethical cure.

That as opposed to merely executing them, French revolution style, which is perfectly possible given how few people we’re talking about here. And I should also point out that if this ever becomes the position of the government, there’s no where to run as our drone strikes have shown.

The opposite is not true I’m quick to add. They simply couldn’t win a war vs the rest of us. 

Creeping Upgrades

This is how transhuman upgrades will really begin. Repairs refined to the point of invisibility and advantage over the average.

Doctors will eventually have to ask themselves if an upgrade is identical to a repair in terms of application requirements then why not opt for the upgrade for the same reasons you deploy a vaccine?

The logic of the vaccine will be the foundation of creeping upgrades because it a treatment for a condition is known to be safe and also prevents injury by granting some practical asset, then how is failing to offer it not harmful?

This is also how immortality will arrive. Not as a magic injection, but as a series of germ line edits designed individually to prevent known pathologies, but which collectively add years of life.

When we think about making a gene edit we are making something the body does anyway more efficient. Those increases in efficiency will not just cure the issue at hand but will also add both quality and quantity of life.

However, this progress will be seriously limited until we have a single payer medical system whose primary purpose isn’t wealth extortion.