One Shyeah To Rule Them All

If you were an adolescent in the early 90s you probably went through the experience of hearing every unfunny douche in your school go around saying “exsqueeze me?” all the time and even though Wayne’s World was okay you still wanted to track down Mike Myers and slap the shit out of him for the legion of double-plus annoying idiots he inspired to imitate him.

That’s kind of how I feel about Tolkien and the genre of pseudo medieval faux European fantasy tropes he unwittingly spawned

Fiction and the fantastic

Fiction should be fantastical. The entire reason fiction exists is because it can contain and express human-created concepts that have no real-world analogue. If you are writing fiction and you are constraining yourself within the set of things that are real and actual and possible, you are wasting your time and your audience's time as well. You want a story about the horrors of war, or the tragedy of drug addiction, or the quiet malaise of 1950s suburbs? They're out there already. That ground is well-covered by actual people and the actual experiences of their actual lives.

But robots and vampires and aliens and time travelers and superheroes and zombies and talking gorillas? None of that is real, or at least not yet.

The Valentine-O-Gram Lesson

In my high school, every Valentine's Day, every single class got disrupted throughout the day by the constant delivery of Valentine-O-Grams. I found this of interest because I was in the principal's office constantly for "disrupting class" but apparently it was okay to disrupt class for stupid Valentine-O-Grams that I never got from anyone anyway. And I came to realize that they didn't discipline me for disrupting class, in the sense that I was preventing the other students from receiving their education -- they didn't give a shit if class got disrupted as long as it was part of their design -- but for disrupting class when they hadn't planned for class disruption. Even though the end result was the same whether class got disrupted by me or by Valentine-O-Gram delivery, my individual disruption was sign that they lacked control and had to be shut down before anyone else realized it. I never got a Valentine-O-Gram but I did get a valuable look behind the curtains at the invisible machinery that makes society work. And maybe that was even a fair trade.

A Conspiracy Of Silence (2004? 2005?)

 When I was a child my parents told me about this man named Santa Claus. Santa Claus, if you have never heard a similar tale, is allegedly this ageless guy who lives at the North Pole. Every Christmas he travels around the world in his magic sleigh pulled by reindeer, and somehow defies the passage of time by visiting the household of every child to deliver gifts. (Or at least the household of every nice child—naughty children got nothing, as my parents repeatedly warned me every time I acted “out of line.”)

Despite the ridiculous nature of the story, even to the pre-school version of me, I decided to believe it, to take their word for it—after all, why would my parents lie? Didn’t they have my best interests at heart? Didn’t they themselves repeatedly tell me that lying was “wrong,” was one of the Deadly Sins that would make Santa Claus skip my chimney come Christmas? Then, when I reached a certain age and confronted them about it, I found out that (as many of you have already discovered) the whole thing was a lie. The toys I opened on Christmas morn weren’t made by elves at the North Pole, they were made by poorly-paid laborers and purchased at local department stores. That day marked the beginning of my descent into paranoia.

Nobody really thinks about the whole Santa Claus phenomenon much. As a child, when you find out the truth you must still allow your younger siblings or cousins to find out on their own or risk getting in trouble—when the authorities lie, telling the truth is a crime. Then they grow up and tell their own kids about the fat man in the red suit without really thinking about why they’re doing it or what the implications are. Perhaps some clever students of sociology explain it as that culture’s particular rite of passage, initiation into the inner perimeter of adult society.

I like to look at it as a conspiracy. Ever since my Santa Claus illusions were shattered I have been very mistrustful of whatever “authority” figures tell me the truth is, knowing that they could be lying to me FOR ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD REASON. Conspiracies can exist without any of the members involved even being conscious that they are part of any conspiracy. The sad fact about conspiracies is that they do not need to be driven by some Power Elite sitting in a room somewhere puffing on cigars and planning which democratically-elected official to assassinate next, which Manchurian Candidate Lone Gunman to activate, which buildings to fly planes into. Conspiracies can just happen, arise out of social forces no one really understands. This is the lesson of the Santa Claus conspiracy.

But there are of course more lessons to be drawn from this. Those who scoff at conspiracy theories often pull out the line “How could you manage a conspiracy that large? It’s simply impossible!” Yet no conspiracy to kill Kennedy or conceal alien contact or get Bush elected has ever been postulated to be as large as the Santa Claus conspiracy actually IS: almost every adult and many children over the age of eight in North America alone. How does a conspiracy so large manage to operate? How can there still be small children to this day who are deceived, who believe in Santa Claus? The answer is simple: control of information. Any information a child runs into that denies the existence of Santa Claus is dismissed by the authorities he or she goes to to verify it. Famously, the Saturday Evening Post once told a small girl the bald-faced lie: “Yes, Virginia…” Older children who discover the truth either become co-conspirators or keep their mouth shut, out of fear of retribution for leaking the truth.

And of course, maybe the real conspiracy is that there IS a Santa Claus after all. Looking up in the sky once as a child I thought I saw his sled as it was pulled by the reindeer. The problem with paranoia is that it allows no verified truth to stand. Rather like the scientific method which can never completely prove a theory, merely disprove it, paranoia is a tool for deconstructing old realities but very poor for building new realities to replace them. Who can you believe?

"But it's ILLEGAL!"

If there's any laws you don't follow -- laws you think are stupid, laws that it is convenient or advantageous or fun for you to break -- if you are someone who assumes the right to pick and choose laws like the legal code is a buffet table, then you are a hypocrite should you get uptight over other people choosing which laws they will follow. Say, if you are someone that gets mad over illegal immigration or illegal drug use or people driving faster than the speed limit or whatever other outlawed bugaboo crawled up your butt that day, but you yourself have decided that you are allowed to ignore certain laws to your own benefit, than you are, I say again, a hypocrite. You ever notice that when someone commits murder, the outrage isn't because murder is illegal but because murder is wrong? When someone molests children, the ire is not because the law against child molestation has been flouted? The only time people get uptight about things specifically because they are illegal is when the illegal things are quite debatably not wrong in any universal or moral sense. So. Either you respect the rule of law in its entirety or you don't. Period. What makes you so special that you and you alone are granted permission to break laws as you see fit?

Resolving the Fermi Paradox

Possibility #1: Some sort of Galactus/Unicron type being that consumes entire planets.

Possibility #2: Physical space is an incubator for higher minds, who upon reaching a certain level leave this realm and thus are not sending out broadcasts of alien I Love Lucy for us to detect. 

Possibility #3: Perhaps amidst all the UFO hoaxes and sloppy ancient astronaut theories there is an actual account of an actual visitation.

Possibility #4: While there may be other intelligent life in the universe, there is no particularly strong reason to assume we are not the first and oldest of them.

Possibility #5: Every time an intelligent race gets sophisticated enough, they choke on their own pollution and/or bomb themselves into extinction over subtle ideological differences.

Possibility #6: We are living in a vast computer simulation and, for whatever reason, the simulation only spawned one race of intelligent "life" and it's right here.

Possibility #7: There is intelligent life but they are for some reason (intentionally or not) concealing their presence from us.

Possibility #8: The life that has evolved elsewhere takes such radically different forms and utilizes such wildly different technology that we could be looking right at them and do not even realize it. 

Possibility #9: God made Adam and Eve, not Xadam and Ee'hv.

Am I Statler or am I Waldorf in this exchange?

Attila: You hear that Ronda Rousey wants to play Captain Marvel?

Me: Man, you cast ONE pro wrestler in your cinematic universe, pretty soon they all want in.

Attila: She's not a wrestler. She's MMA.

Me: Exactly! That means it requires NO acting skills!

Nothing Means Everything, Everything Means Nothing

You're born for no reason. You live for no reason. You die for no reason. The world goes on without you, for no reason, because the world exists at all for no reason. No reason, no purpose, no meaning, to any of it. Some will tell you that it means whatever you want it to mean; this is a long and roundabout way of saying that it means nothing. Because you mean nothing. What it means to you, what you choose to have it mean to you, means nothing. Nothing means anything, and everything means nothing.

a pithy primer on perfunctory primate pack politics

I have a question. When gas is $4 everyone blames Obama, but now it's under 3 and shouldn't those same people be praising him? Since, like, they think he's in charge of making the prices or something.

- @BDCThug (Twitter)

Well, you see, @BDCThug, you've made a common mistake. You are expecting there to be a consistent and rational line of thought behind the widespread Obama hatred. You are imagining, perhaps, civilized human beings, dressed in fine clothing adorned with pocket watch and cravat, reasonably discussing their beliefs.

Picture instead a group of rabid chimpanzees, beating their chests and flinging poo. The rational cerebrum that human beings possess is only used after the fact to justify this animalistic primate response, but it is not utilized to the point where they might realize how irrational and inconsistent they are, because then their entire belief bubble would pop.

This is not to say that there are not a host of perfectly good, valid and rational reasons to criticize and mistrust Obama -- in fact, many of them would apply straight across the board to ANY U.S. president -- but rather that most people seem to find it nigh impossible to articulate any of them, choosing instead to parrot whatever talking points the television has spoon-fed them this week.

So, when Barack Obama saluted the troops while holding a coffee, THIS MARXIST MUSLIM HAS NO RESPECT FOR OUR HEROES, but when George W. Bush saluted the troops while holding a dog, HOW DARE YOU QUESTION THE PRESIDENT?!?! HES A GOOD AMURCAN!!! USA! USA!

How does this relate to the price of gas? Well, when the price of gas went up, the television told the people that Barack Obama must be to blame, and so by gum he was to blame. Then when the price of gas went down, the television had moved on to a completely different and unrelated reason to hate Obama, and the people (who have the collective memory span of a hummingbird on methamphetamines) certainly would never remember to make that connection themselves.

But In The REAL Real World

People who talk about "the real world" fail to consider that that the world they believe to be real is a world that is almost entirely generated and created by the actions and mindsets of human beings. Who are capable of different actions and alternate mindsets. "The real world" is a meme in the classical sense of the term, an idea that exists to perpetuate itself. In talking about the existence of the "real world," they help to reinforce the idea and keep it alive a little longer.