personal sovereignty in scarequotes civilization

When you hand over your personal sovereignty to anyone, ANYONE, the risk is always there that your trust will be abused and the power they collect as millions all hand over their own personal sovereignties in turn will be utilized in things you personally would want no part with. It's virtually impossible to hold onto ALL of your personal sovereignty, and I wholeheartedly recommend rendering unto Caesar and all that, but no one should ever be surprised when human beings -- untrustworthy and awful -- turn around and do untrustworthy and awful things. At any level of what we might call scarequotes civilization.

Who was Jesus? Glad you asked! (an overly long response to a somewhat flippant question on Facebook)

Jesus was a revolutionary and visionary from thousands of years back who, despite growing up in a backwards time and among a more or less backwards people, looked out at the mass of injustice and hypocrisy in the world and how cruel people were to one another and assembled a different view of how things could be and how people should behave towards one another. The people who are on top today, he said, will be on the bottom when the reckoning comes. And those who have lost shall be comforted. He suggested letting go of an attachment to physical possessions, especially when in comparison to the worth of any human life. He strongly renounced self-righteous hypocrites.

No one at the time knew what to make of him. Some thought he must be some sort of god himself because he was so clearly ahead of his time. Others, threatened that someone so simple and poor and humble could yet be so vastly superior to them, had him executed in one of the most grisly and sadistic manners "humanity" has ever devised. Immediately afterwards, or soon enough as dammit, the same sort of status quo wealth-and-power assholes who had him killed latched on to his name and his movement, had him declared a god for reals, and have ever since done all sorts of terrible things in his name, becoming exactly the kind of self-righteous hypocrites the dude spent his life denouncing.

Meanwhile, there are those have still managed to pick up the greatest portion of his message, undiminished across centuries, and are still working steadily to make his dream of heaven on Earth a reality. Or so they say. In any case, he prophesied that one day the dead would rise again, and while the loopy superstitious cats who wear his torture device on their necks believe this will be some supernatural divine shit, I am pretty sure it will be good old fashioned human know-how that eventually makes this miracle a reality. Those with ears, let them hear.

A quick look back at Jay-Z's post-Black Album discography:

Kingdom Come? More like Kingdom Dumb.

American Gangster? More like American Wankster.

Blueprint 3? More like Doo-print 3.

Watch The Throne? More like Watch The Porcelain Throne.

Magna Carta Holy Grail? More like Massive Shart, Holy Fail.

Duck Anus and the Seven Woes of Matthew 23

So Phil Robertson from the show Duck Dynasty popped off his mouth and said a lot of ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly shit in an interview and suddenly the world, which heretofore was inexplicably entranced by his ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly antics and had elevated him to a television star and face on t-shirts, became shocked and dismayed by the revelation that an ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly may hold views that are a bunch of ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly shit, and the ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly was suspended indefinitely from his ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly TV show.

That should have been the end of the story. Another sign of the shifting of the times. But then, the people who are most terrified of the shifting of the times, because the times are going to make them and theirs irrelevant -- ie, the conservative wingnut faction that only SEEMS like they suddenly became a force to contend with in recent years when my own memory is these assholes have been around my whole lifetime -- decided to seize on the moment as a rallying point for their culture wars. I guess to take a break from all the War On Christmas crap.

(Here's the War On Christmas in a nutshell, future historians: This is, right here and now, literally the first time in the history of this society that the voice of the Other has been able to be heard above the roar of the smug and entitled majority, and to a certain subset of said smug and entitled majority it is TERRIFYING. The idea that there are people who celebrate their own different winter holidays or indeed celebrate none at all is threatening to people who believe it is their god-given right to shove Christmas down everyone else's throat. Any attempt at getting them to respect or even acknowledge the existence of other traditions or non-believers, is perceived as an attack. The War On Christmas. Now back to our program.)

So first the governor of Louisiana comes out and immediately demonstrates that the governor of a state in this Union, right now today, has no functional understanding of how the First Amendment works. Not to be undone in idiocy, the inexplicably still-relevant Sarah Palin comes out to show that she, who was once almost the Vice President of the United States, also has no clear or cogent comprehension of the concept. And then every idiot fucking Republican tea bag motherfucker has to swallow the party line and parrot this same lame line about freedom of speech, or even better, freedom of religion. Because Phil Robertson is a Christian. So obviously whatever dumb shit this dumb ass says about the undesirability of anuses or how black people were more godly before civil rights came along is clearly motivated by his faith in Jesus.

Cue a bunch of snarky articles defining the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and how it does not insure one continued employment if said free speech should become a threat to the employer's livelihood. And then a bunch of people wondering where Sarah Palin was when Martin Bashir got fired a few weeks ago for making the completely reasonable suggestion that someone should shit in Sarah Palin's mouth. Those with longer memories chuckle and remember when Bill Maher got fired after 9/11 and how no one said boo about free speech. Cue more snarky articles reminding Republicans that the right of an employer to fire an employee in a free marketplace is actually about as Republican as it gets. Some also draw parallels between the right wing rushing to defend the right of some duck fuck to express his Christian faith and values, and the recent condemnation of Pope Francis by many of these exact same people when he freely expressed HIS Christian faith and values. Meanwhile, on the comments pages of any article about this topic, ignorant and illiterate people of all kinds line up behind the inbred hillbilly and express views that can be charitably described as on the wrong side of history.

Somewhere, an array of computers has been keeping track of all of this. Bombs are dropped by remote control death planes, precipitation seeding and nourishing more terror and violence for years to come. The spaceships are nowhere in sight. And I'm going to bed.

The Bible Is Worse Than Grand Theft Auto

The Bible is, in terms of objectionable content, far far worse than any video game ever made to date. Within its pages there is incest, infanticide, rape, mass murder, animal sacrifice. A woman drives a tent peg into a sleeping man's ear. Actual murderers in the real world have directly cited passages from the Bible in justifying their actual murders committed in the real world. And yet, among all the cultural watchdogs, to my knowledge not one has made a movement to ban the Bible, or make it illegal to sell, or even to put some kind of rating on it to prevent children from having access to such horrible and clearly influential material. Rather, and in direct contradiction to their stated goals, many of these people look at the Bible like it some sort of moral guide. All I'm saying is, I'm hiding the tent pegs before I go to sleep.

I Am A Chinese Room

I am a Chinese room. Or, if you prefer more accuracy, an English room. Because, although not a single cell of my body understands the English language, somehow enough of them together in meaningful complexity can comprise a system that DOES understand the English language. My mouth and vocal cords call this system "me;" my fingers assert that it is "me" that types while my eyes watch letters appear on a screen. Not a single cell in my body understands English, understand. When I scraped cheek cells for middle school science class microscope labs, I did not accidentally murder poets and journalists. They're just cells. They're not very smart. And before cells even, they're just chains of molecules that describe the creation of the cell and the patterns they form in congregate. No ability to comprehend the difference between "hermetic" and "hermeneutic." But somehow, those cells and the patterns they form in congregate -- me -- does. My hands appear to understand English as they move across the keyboard, hastily backspacing over irrelevant digression; remove them from the system (i.e., chop them off) and suddenly they are useless.

I am a Chinese room. I have no idea where my thoughts come from. From my perspective they just... come to me. After they have come I can look back and sort of see where they came from, or guess where they come from, but when they come they come unannounced. Some thoughts I can hold on to and manipulate a little, some thoughts I shove away as swiftly as I can; but this is the description of someone experiencing thoughts, not thinking them. I have never seen my brain. I am only accepting as the most likely model that what I have been told is correct; that there is a brain inside my skull that thinks these thoughts that come to me. But I have never seen my brain. I have never seen my skull either but I can feel it. Never seen my brain. If it turned out that I was literally a Chinese room, that there was a tiny homunculus with a huge book and a filing cabinet and a pen and paper in my skull, and the sensory inputs from the outside world come to him to compute and process a response to, that would only be slightly weirder than the model I'm supposed to accept, the model I more or less do accept.

I am a Chinese room, and if you're not one too, you might just be a p-zombie.

Conservatives In America: A Continuing Exercise In Contradiction

Conservatives in America: It's completely unthinkable that any human activity could in, any way shape or form, impact the Earth's environment; but allowing same-sex couples to marry will have a direct, deep and negative impact on the lives of everyone.

Conservatives in America: Easy access to real guns and their ubiquity in public places in NO WAY increases the likelihood of gun violence, but easy access to virtual guns and their ubiquity in video games GREATLY increases the likelihood of gun violence.

Music Box

I just remembered this music box I used to have. I had it from the time of childhood that memory is mythic and symbolic and not literal and factual memory, so I have no idea how I came about this music box or when. And it was this small wooden box with a long extended handle, and it had a crank, and when you cranked it, it played the theme from Love Story. Which seems kind of random for a childrens toy, in retrospect. But the coolest thing was, it had a clear plastic window covering the machinery on the inside, so as you turned the crank you could see the gears turn. There was a little cylinder with little braille bumps around it enmeshed with this rake-like instrument with many tines, and as the cylinder revolved the bumps plucked the tines and made music, note by note. I would crank it slowly and watch the cylinder painstakingly move around, how the bumps on it would gently lift the keys of the instrument up, up, up, and then continue to turn away and the key would plink back down and make a distinctive tone. A moment later another one gets hooked. And then spin it faster and hear the individual plinks blend into a melodious lullaby, the cylinder spinning around the keys and making them move like a player piano in a cinematic saloon. I had it for years and I loved it. Even into early adulthood I held on to it as a rare and precious talisman of my childhood. Until today I haven't thought about it in years, years, and I have no idea where it is now. I have no idea of how I lost it.

backlash

It seems to me that humanity is self-correcting, after a fashion. The pendulum has swung pretty far in the direction where a small handful of people own almost everything in the world and everyone else struggles and strives; it is absurd to imagine it can go in that direction indefinitely. Sooner or later the pendulum has to swing back, and when it does, it will swing almost as far in the opposite direction. At least if the pendulum metaphor is valid, it will. Regardless. The further it goes in this direction, the stronger the eventual backlash will be, because it's impossible that it goes this direction forever.

The Memory Hole: Some random post 9-11-13 thoughts

Remember that time in the 1990s when the face of terrorism in America wasn't Muslim Arabs, it was white right-wing Christian Americans? Of course not, because the Oklahoma City Bombing has disappeared down the same memory hole as every other unfortunate fact that does not fit our constant mythologizing. Did you know that  the World Trade Center would have only been forty years old now if it had stayed standing? People talk about it like it was some timeless and long-standing Wonder Of The World, like the Great Wall or Colossus Of Rhodes except American, so better. Less than thirty when it came down. At thirty-five, I have now had a longer life-span than the World Trade Center. Just saying. I'm getting distracted. The point is the memory hole that American history disappears into before being replaced by American myth. People can get on television now and imply that all Muslims are terrorists and that all terrorists are Muslim, when it wasn't that long ago at all (still less than 20 years!) that the most grievous, despicable act of terrorism on U.S. soil came not from some turbaned jihadists dead-set on their seventy-two virgin reward, but from some crew-cutted Caucasian conservative Christians who "wanted their country back." This has been forgotten to the point where in the 2008 election, people could bandy about that "Obama" sounded like "Osama" but no one pointed out how similar "McCain" and "McVeigh" were as well. So: terrorism is once again embodied by scary foreigners with a different religion and a different language, calling to mind the "all immigrants are bomb-throwing anarchists" crap of the 1920s. And who was it that was responsible for shifting the dialogue, for changing the public's perception of terrorist away from right-wing Christians? Right-wing Christians. Just saying.