Just sharing, in a more relaxed and nonchalant approach, some more examples of my immaculate, 100 percent accurate and true politics for the benefit of the under-educated:
Why vaccination passports are a bad idea: (from an argument I had with someone)
What’s so bad about it? Why are people so worked up? Because it’s not just the vaccination status; you are, in effect, giving the federal and state government the consent to harvest your medical history and confidential medical information man… You think that’s how this stuff works, it stops right at the vax status and goes no further? When has that ever been the case with the machinations of the state? “Sure, you can keep track of my covid vaccination status, but nothing else?” What do you mean nothing else? You give them the right to harvest that information, you are giving them the right to harvest as much of your medical history as they want. Does the state and fed not already have enough of our data? Are they not already tracking every aspect of our lives? Do they not already keep massive caches of our entire online history? And you want to freely give them ANOTHER tool to use in tracking us, in manipulating, controlling, and deciding where we go and what we do and where we’re allowed to be? Are they not already spying on us through every device we have? You want them to have carte blanche with our medical history now too? The problem is you stop two steps into the logical thought process and say to yourself, “sure yeah keep track of our vax status, doesn’t seem like such a bad thing”, but you don’t continue the thought process and explore its more distant ramifications, so it seems incomprehensible to you why people have a problem with this stuff. Stop and think about the not immediately obvious ramifications of this. I have just told you some of them. Because that is called “critical thinking”; there are consequences to things like this that are not immediately obvious and that nobody is going to spell out for you, especially on mainstream news and media, and it depends on you to actually think it through and become a responsible member of the polis, because otherwise, there is nothing to stop the State from continually enlarging its power. We, the people, are at the end of the day, even with all the built-in checks and balances of our Republic, the only thing standing in the way of tyranny: it depends on us being able to actually think things like this through to their logical conclusion. You have to start doing that man, not just on this issue, but on ALL issues, especially now, late in the game, where everything becomes all that much more meaningful. I want us to be free, to be able to pursue our own idea of fulfillment and happiness, and be able to speak our mind, and that dream is just- it’s not going to make it at this rate. I hope I have instilled in you even a glimmering of recognition: this isn’t just about our vax status, it’s about the fact that we’re consenting to give the government another powerful tool to use in harvesting our data and tracking us as a population when they already have countless surveillance systems in place to cover almost every single aspect of our lives and backdoors installed in every device we use.
And the CDC recently said we can take off the masks, as if we need their permission. They’re just coming to terms with the fact that it was never a world-ending catastrophe. They could have told us we don’t need masks anymore months ago, and they didn’t. Not because of some conspiracy theory, (As Optimus suggested, musingly, since I guess people who don’t want to wear a mask anymore are automatically thrown in with morons who believe the virus is not real, moon landing conspiracy theorists, 5g caused autism, lizard people and microchips and whatever else.) but just because hysteria, drummed up by the media like the media always does when something happens, (The media seizes every opportunity they get to sell us panic, because nothing gets us to watch and click faster or more-- than panic. Be it over fear of video games causing violence, fear of big bad Trump deathsquads, fear of teens with their new trend of rectally ingesting vodka to get more wasted, etc. I think it’s indisputable that this is their go-to strat.) has led to bad decisions on the part of both the public, and our leaders,- decisions that have cost countless families everything they have. The economic shutdowns do not hurt big companies like Walmart that can weather the storm- they hurt smaller ones, (almost exclusively) you know, family run little stores. Because they do not have the surplus capital to recover after the economic restrictions are lifted. Kind of interesting-- see, here’s a “conspiracy theory” that I came up with, I didn’t read it on some blog: I believe that the corporate interests that basically write our laws in this country absolutely loved seizing the opportunity of imposing economic restrictions (In the name of the public good, no less!) that nearly exclusively hurt their competitors while leaving themselves unharmed, those being the smaller businesses, as I mentioned. They literally got to impose restrictions championed by everyone as a public good-- that allowed them to crush their competitors legally. Do you deny that happened?
contra general coronavirus stupidity:
It’s really not something to be that deeply fearful over. Unless you have an immunocompromising disease like AIDS or cancer, you’re in the later stages of COPD, or you’re 85 years old. Otherwise, the pandemic poses very little risk to you- not much more than a bad cold. You’re likely a perfectly healthy 18 year old. You’re not risking your life buddy. I could throw a whole vial of it at you, and you still wouldn’t be risking your life. You’re ‘actually’ not risking your life,- as in, based on any conceivable statistical model of the respective mortality rate for your cohort, (term in statistical analysis) you- personally- are not risking your life, again, assuming you’re a generally healthy TEN-FIFTY year old. You have literally nothing to fear from it, and it cheapens it when you make it out like you’re in existential crisis mode over here. If this is your genuine reaction to a pandemic this clinically insignificant to those in your probable age bracket, then… I mean, what would you do with the Black Death? This virus has a 1 percent mortality rate: the black death had a 40-50 percent mortality rate. Can you wrap your mind around that? So please, chill out a little. But then, this isn’t your genuine reaction. It’s a product of TV doing what TV does with everything: fanning the coals of hysteria, because that’s good for ratings. Mass hysteria is never a good thing- look what it did, you can’t even get a roll of toilet paper. The virus didn’t do that, mass hysteria did that, and mass hysteria- where does it come from? Oh yeah, these media dinosaurs and their outdated predatory tactics. Mass hysteria is especially not a good thing when, like I said, a healthy 18 year old has as little to fear from this pandemic as they do from a bad cold and it’s entirely unfounded. That mass hysteria is not helping anything or anybody, but it’s hurting plenty. Get some perspective.
Sorry about your mom, but my 66 year old father had it and, despite having advanced COPD, got over it like a bad cold. And everyone else in my family had it and it didn’t do to them what you just described. Permanent lung damage? I also just made all that up, about my father/family, etc. See how easy that is? Your anecdotes are as good to me as lies and mean nothing. And in fact, that’s all you’ve got is anecdotes, no argument. The only thing that means anything is the actual statistics posted on the CDC’s own website right now that you can go pull up and corroborate every thing I said with. Almost every death associated with this virus has occurred in people of considerable age: that is indisputable. Even mainstream “news” admits that young, healthy people aren’t exactly the most at risk. And reports of ‘permanent lung damage’ (as it concerns young people) are so clinically insignificant, they might as well not even exist. (Also, “likely” permanent damage? What are you talking about? It is known, and has been known by medical science for quite a long time, what kind of lung damage/scarring can heal or not heal; you either have permanent damage or you don’t, so I don’t know what studies or doctors you’re citing. Kinda smells fishy.) That’s my assertion, and nobody has to take my word for it like you expect people to just take your word for it on this.
You don’t have to take my word for it, take the CDC’s word for it. For the life of me, I do not know why you feel the need to argue against my basic point that: hysteria is bad, the media likes to make money off our panic because it gets us to watch their repetitive garbage, and this panic has led to a lot of people in positions of power making reactionary decisions- bad decisions. What? Do you think mass hysteria is good? Is that your point? What even is your point.
Dawg, it is simple. I am not going to take your word for it over the official numbers for this virus’ mortality rate, effected age brackets, etc. So unless you are able to concoct something approaching a rational argument, and all you’ve got is anecdotes that might as well be lies for what they’re worth in a debate,- why don’t you just stop? First you downright misinterpreted everything I said in my first message, and then you come back to my reply with nothing but anecdotes, simply claiming I’m lying. I’d post the damn link right here if youtube allowed it, JUST LOOK AT THE OFFICIALLY PUPLISHED STATISTICS ABOUT THIS CRAP. And yeah, it’s a diatribe about something important. And you’re not going to refute me with anecdotes. If that’s true about your aunt though,- I am sorry, but you must realize that… people died and got sick before the virus, right?
I had a grandparent that died of pneumonia after getting the flu. What exactly about that, if true, is supposed to refute my points about the virus not posing much of a risk to healthy young people? My point that it is mostly the elderly with pre-existing conditions that have something to fear of it, such that mass hysteria driven up by the media is causing people outside that affected bracket to act irrationally. Like, what is the connection there?
Buddy I didn’t try to justify anything. I think you misread what I wrote. I will try to explain it again, but first I wanted to let you know: I wear the mask when I am around a lot of people and I socially distance. (I also respect property rights as much as I respect my own rights, and I understand that a private business has fully authority to make up their own dress-codes, which of course includes mandating masks. If you choose not to wear a mask in a store that demands you do, they have the right to throw you out. Thus, respecting the law, I wear the mask in such stores without any question.) I didn’t try to justify anything, I just (very eloquently, and in great detail, with supporting facts) explained to you that 90-something percent of serious hospitalizations over the virus occurred with people over the age of 50 who had pre-existing diseases; I explained that if you are young and healthy like me, you have almost ZERO risk of DYING because of the virus. You are simply not risking your life, that is insane to believe.
I didn’t justify wearing or not wearing masks. Like I said, I wear them when someone asks me to, which is really only the doctor’s office to get my pills, which requires me to wear them on premises anyway. All I did was: I said, because of that SIMPLE STATISTICAL FACT YOU CAN LOOK UP ON THE CDC’S WEBSITE RIGHT NOW, to become so hysterical over something that you really shouldn’t,- with your pathos driven up by a news cycle that you know sells fear and panic whenever they can,- (Be it over the fantasy that video games are causing mass shootings or kratom is killing millions of people or the kids are trying to rectally ingest vodka now; they sink their claws into every possible thing they can to sell panic to public, because nothing gets more clicks and watch time than panic.) to become so hysterical, in a word, over something that is absolutely not going to kill you, has led to everyone rushing to buy out stuff they don’t need, like 50 rolls of toilet paper, with no regard for their fellow human in the back of line who gets nothing, as well as to the closure of businesses (due to the misguided and thoughtless reactions of state officials) that had no real reason to close. (most of them permanently now.) Do you know how many families you have devastated? I don’t think you understand. The big guys like Walmart don’t suffer form the closures, the little family run stores do- because they are unable to recover after the Gov. decides to turn the economy switch back on. You have ruined families over nothing. The virus didn’t. These policies did. So yeah: the virus killed a lot of people, but like I said: 99 percent of them were over the age of 50 and already sick with something. You, as a healthy young adult, do not need to go around thinking you could die at any moment over this virus. It breeds hysteria for no reason, it prompts stupid reactions from your state officials that end up doing more hard then good, and it leads you, as all panic does, to making bad decisions.
Now, I’d suggest improving your reading comprehension skills, because your assertion that I was trying to justify things like not wearing a mask- yeah, none of that had anything to do with my original post. I understand that I am long winded and make extensive use of parentheses, however, I’d expect you could glean something from all of this.
Why climate change legislation is a bad idea: (this time from one of my books, an essay on tertiary or what I call stage-3 capitalism)
A conspiracy without conspirators is, perhaps, the phrase most apropos. Observe the manner in
which well-meaning youths extemporize on a matter like climate change, egged on by their
likewise clueless professors and drummed up into frenzy over the promise of social capital in
garnering a few more likes on their social media, or even in fulfilling the more distant hope of
‘going viral’,- youths, in any case, apparently oblivious to the fact that there are deeper
geopolitical consequences involved in any possible response to climate change undertaken by us,
at least at the scale being asked for, that aren’t immediately obvious, like the fact that the
(keyword: seemingly) pro-environment regulations being passed in the name of fighting climate
change simply strip (in a politically calculated way, that is, in service to a panhemispheric,
globalized world-market favoring multinational corporatocratic power at the expense of any one
nation’s inherent interests) the US of energy independency and make us more reliant, for example,
on the Chinese, to whose desires our political ‘leaders’ are more bound than they are to their own
citizenry,- while China remains at the same time, in perfect irony, one of the greatest sources of
pollution on the planet earth. These remote consequences are not simply about economic growth,
which Leftist ideologues flippantly take their opponents to task for having espoused as a concern
far more pressing; the issue is a thousand times more complicated than that,- so much so that
seemingly pro-environment regulations end up, in however circuitous a way, harming the
environment even more by empowering foreign nations like China, whose trespasses on the
environment far exceed even our own, and whose machinations are carried out with even less
transparency than is afforded in nations like the US. This is a world-system. Any change
reverberates and enlarges itself, sweeping up into its orbit other structures that don’t seem like
they are connected to it at first glance, and advocating policies whose distant ramifications one
has not thought-through, is dangerous- dangerous even to one such youth’s own political goals,
which would presumably be saving us from the ‘existential threat’ of something like climate
change. However, the problem is that it is not possible to think-through anything at this point.
Thus, I advocate the use neither of the democratic process and open debate, nor the use of what
one might call civil disobedience, for neither debate nor protest are capable of changing anything.
Besides, change is dangerous: all conscious change reifies unconscious forces at work upon us,
and all unconscious or ‘unseen’ change conceals itself in precisely what is and can be seen, upon
which basis we couch our acts. I advocate theory; I advocate philosophy, for there is in our case
no adequate theory to explain, at least in consistent terms, what is even happening right now,–
what is going on in that greater geopolitical process which no one nation has any control of, but
that in accordance to which every nation’s own fatum or evolutionary trajectory has been hijacked
and coopted by those blindly swept up into its momentum,- the technocrats who fancy themselves
its masters, having no more understood the processes they would wield than those who suffer
their instruments, for the volatility of the “inner long-range correlations” involved, or the
‘feedback-cycles’ I have elsewhere noted, necessitates a continuous re-adaptation of the ‘degrees
of freedom’, ‘valence’, or ‘dimensionality’ of the very representational systems in which their
trajectory is in the first case plotted and analyzed, such that these trajectories escape the grasp of
any available statistical tools, echoing the “dynamic principle of the ‘doubling of the degrees of
freedom’ between a system and its thermal-bath in the coalgebraic modelling of quantum
dissipative systems” by ‘computational automata’ “interpreted as labelled state transition
systems”,-- (See Gianfranco Basti, in “The Post‐Modern Transcendental of Language in Science
and Philosophy”.) the process of globalization, or the march of what Stiegler called ‘techne’, in its
levelling of all human culture to a homogenous, singular, ‘politically correct’ substrate devoid of
genuine humanity. Only when it is understood, can it be changed without risking those more
distant consequences noted here in the unseen. For my part, I of course care less about a merely
phenomenal reality like climate change, as any philosopher would confess, and more about the
essential problem, which would be the complete levelling of the human being to a homogenized,
‘de-individuated’ cog in the globalist machine of ‘tertiary capitalism’.
From another argument with someone, this time on systemic racism:
Things can go just as bad (and often do) for every race that exists; Asian, white, black, Mexican. For every video of a black man being abused by the police, I can pull up a video of a white man receiving just as severe brutality. But when it happens to a black man, every news outlet on Earth covers it ad nauseam, thousands riot in the streets over it, the victim is venerated as some kind of martyr,- even if they are discovered, in retrospect, to have in fact been at fault,- and it overtakes the entire national discourse, namely as a political tool upon which to couch the assertion of a systemic racism in the very bedrock of the American justice system, even if the event occurs in an area of the country where the majority of the police are themselves black- but when it happens to a white man, nothing; nobody even knows the victim’s name; not a single news outlet covers it, not even online. I bet you can rattle off the top of your head 10 ‘unarmed black men’ who got beat down and or killed by cops in the last few years: name me one unarmed white man that the exact same thing happened to- without using google. Name. Me. One. I bet everything I’ve got that, if I confronted you with that challenge IRL, you’d be unable to do it- because I have ventured that challenge to people, and so far, not one person has been able to meet the challenge. And yet they exist,- these white victims,- in staggering numbers. The fact that you can’t is a real problem guys. And if something about what I just said causes you to interpret me as somehow being racist or something, or causes you to brand me as some kind of right-wing lunatic,-- well you know what,- that’s a problem too: a big one.
Systemic racism is not the issue for the simple reason that there’s no “system” to be “systemically” racist. The police force in one county in one state might be mostly black themselves, and certainly not racially motivated; the demographic can shift from county to county, with one county perhaps having a unit in which a good number of officials are racist, but with another unit in another county being staffed by minorities themselves; one county might be stocked by a bunch of liberals and another county in another state by a bunch of harsh right-wingers,-- and beyond that, all the disconnected police units county-to-county and state-to-state don’t hold meetings where they all get together, from all over the country, to decide how racist they’re going to be that year. How can racism be systemic when… when there’s no ‘system’? That is, when there’s not any one systemic, integrated structure in which all the unconnected agencies and units intercommunicate? It doesn’t make sense. And besides, it is contradicted empirically in the disparity I began this post discussing, the one between reporting on white vs. black victims of police brutality. Has nobody ever heard of the nearly cliche prison sociological experiment? It’s not about race, it’s about a simple reality engrained, seemingly, in our very DNA as a species: when you give one group power over another, like that possessed by police over civilians, a tendency toward abuse appears. It’s really that simple. And as long as very simple realities like this are buried under tidal waves of ideological rubbish, nothing is going to get any better.
I do know that when people speak of ‘systemic racism’ they believe they’re talking about some kind of inherent racial legacy in our institutions. And that is what my post was about: all the ways that assertion is absurd.
Your assertion that we created the “police system” specifically to keep black people down is all that needs to be noted. There is no such thing as “the police system” as a single structure passed down from the 1700’s to now; there is systemic variance between police forces even county to county, let alone century to century. It’s absurd. Do you mean the actual concept of having police? What are you actually talking about when you say: " The concept of the police system here in America was adopted by white people, and usually used to punish people they thought were “bad” or did things that were “illegal”. And as a part of the sentiment back then, minorities and specifically Black people were the main culprits of doing “bad” things like escaping slavery or trying to vote."?
It is important to note also: a lot of early US law, at the inception of our nation, was inherited directly from English legal theorists and English common law,- systems of law invented when there weren’t even any black people around to enslave,- laws invented by white English people to govern, punish, and regulate other white English people,- so your idea that we created these laws just to keep black people down is historically non-sensical. A lot of our law in the US also draws on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and legal theory, so again, this idea you have that it was all invented to suppress minorities, doesn’t make sense. Some of the most fundamental elements of our constitution are pulled right out of Plato and Aristotle, by white Greek theorists organizing systems to regulate other white Greek theorists two thousand years ago, so how could it possibly be racially motivated intrinsically, as you assert it is?
You do understand that the North had a police system too, you know, the part of the country that fought the South in the civil war and helped to end the institution of slavery. Yeah: the police enforce laws and ‘punish’ people breaking them, that’s the whole point of police. There’s nothing more that can really be said because… the idea that the concept of “police” itself was invented just to keep minorities down is not only not true, but doesn’t make sense. Every nation on planet earth developed a police force, it kind of goes hand in hand with having laws; you must enforce those laws. I’ve just never seen someone try to argue that before. You’re suggesting that we created the concept of the police and created a system of laws… specifically just to keep minorities down. What?
Then you talk about areas ‘dedicated to black people’s living space’, and that also isn’t real. I don’t even know what you’re talking about with that one. Some of the poorest areas in the country are rural areas predominantly white, and some of the areas most ravaged by opiate addiction for example, are white populations within the rust belt. Different areas of the country ravaged by crime and poverty now, were quite successful in the past, and vice versa; so your argument that it is all because black people started off with less, doesn’t actually pan out, because black communities were doing well in some cases, then all of a sudden they tank; in other cases, they were tanking in the past, and then started doing well, and there’s all kinds of oscillations over time that can be seen.
“This of course, is correct, but also wrong.” I don’t know much else to say besides laughing. Poverty is associated with increased crime because it’s associated with unstable family structures; children raised in unstable environments lose out in opportunities on life and suffer mental and psychological damage, then they inevitably turn to crime after being unable to succeed in ‘normal society’; black people commit more violent crime (that isn’t bias or racism, it’s actually true) than the average of other races, not because they’re black or genetically predisposed to criminality, but because of what I just said- the poverty they are raised in from childhood, and the damaging cycle it brings about.
I got called transphobic for this: “Who was being transphobic? I don’t believe identifying as a woman makes you a woman. Does thinking that necessitate transphobia, or is it possible to honestly hold that idea as a result of dispassionate reasoning? Because if you don’t believe it is possible to hold that idea honestly, without transphobia, then you have shut the door to all possible communication, because you have assumed I am speaking from a dishonest and malicious position, not out of an honest opinion.”
So to this dumb bitch telling me it’s not her job to explain what’s morally wrong with me not accepting trans-women as real women, nor to explain why my side of the argument cannot possibly be made in good faith and requires malice- my retort, perhaps I went a little too hard:
Yeah, it is your job to explain why it’s wrong. Because you’ve just said it is impossible for me to rationally come to the conclusion that identity is not subjectively determined in its entirety, and that the only way I can think that is due to repressive transphobia and dishonest politicizing instead of impersonal, purely rational thought; you’ve said it is impossible for me to, without malice, without wishing to deprive anyone of their rights or place in society, come to a simple conclusion about the nature of human identity that happens to differ from your conclusion: mine, that human identity is something, in large part, imposed upon us, not something we get to pick out of a hat and wear on a whim. You’ve just admitted what most of us have already gathered trying to talk to Marxist deconstructionists, far Leftist ideologues, critical theorists and the like: you’ve admitted that you reject the possibility of dialogue; that you reject the possibility that someone like me can hold the view on the nature of human identity that I do as a product of simple reflection instead of ideology. What that means is, you’re not interested in the pursuit of truth, dialogue, the possibility that you might be wrong; (by rejecting the possibility of dialogue with my side or any other side and converting this subject into pure ideology, you have framed it in such a way that you literally can’t be wrong, because the contrary view has been wed to an inherent malicious transphobia in your mind, which invalidates the prime directive you have to pursue the materialist Utopia) it means you have rejected the possibility of discussing this issue, because you have rejected the legitimacy of my side of the debate- so go f yourself for that, just as an aside. I don’t reject the legitimacy of your side, though I’d be more justified in doing so than you are in rejecting the legitimacy of mine- but I don’t, because I am interested in honest dialogue, not ideology. I have no agenda to push and I don’t quite honestly care what trans people do or don’t do- I just don’t believe their actual lived experience matches the words they use to describe it.
I will put it as simply as I can: I do not believe this modernist conception of human nature, inherited from Hegelian dialectical philosophy, as something mostly socially constructed, is true. Because I built my view of human nature up from Platonic metaphysics, ancient Greek thought, and modern psychoanalysis, etc.- a very different tradition than the one inaugurated by the Hegelians. At any rate, it’s not an illegitimate thought. It’s not transphobic or hateful. It’s not malicious. I think differently about human nature than you do, and I believe that my formulation of human nature is more accurate to reality than yours is. I don’t believe either psychology, genetics, history, or psychoanalysis corroborate the idea that gender is a fluid social construction. It seems to be about as rock solid a thing as our physical bodies. And you have done precisely nothing to convince me otherwise.
You have entirely closed your mind to this subject, in other words; but more than that, your entire politics is designed to close other peoples’ minds to it as well, because you’ve branded my side of the debate illegitimate and malicious.
I am telling you that I have nothing against ‘trans’ people, have no desire to deprive them of the rights we all have, nor to exclude them from anything: I simply don’t believe them, their ‘lived experience’, at least their self-accounting of it. You aren’t a woman just because you think you are or decide to be. We can be incorrect about the nature of our own selves, we can see ourselves incorrectly and say things about our own experience that are not true, because we have made a mistake in self-analysis. I think that is what transexuality is. Saying you’re a woman is not going to give you a uterus, you will never experience a period cramp. You cannot give birth to a child. You do not inherit the neurology of a female human by proclaiming yourself female. I believe that “woman” is more than a sound you make with your face hole- it’s a reality, not a word, as is “man”. I would not want to live in a world where all these things are,- where all anything is,- is just… words.
I don’t care personally about trans people, they should be able to do whatever they want to their own bodies, I will even humor their pronouns. I’m not trying to exclude anyone, I just don’t believe in passive identity. You can’t just decide to be something: man, woman, or anything else. As little as a white man can decide he’s black.
What is the point of all these pronouns anyway; to obnoxiously, cartoonishly flaunt your sexuality,- deviant or otherwise,- as, for some reason quite beyond me, a constitutive element of your personal identity as a human being? (As opposed to basing your identity, not on politics and passive traits, or in terms of what you consume, or in terms of sexual activities you enjoy, or in terms of what video games you like playing … but in terms of what you create and do.) Profound. Just a rock solid idea about how to approach life and your fellow human beings. I mean wo-man beings. I mean hupersons. Wait but ‘son’ is male-specific too. Hmm. Hu-per-xons. Huperxons, there I did it.
You shouldn’t be a “gay person”, you should be a guy who maybe writes books and happens to be gay, or a guy who won some award who happens to be gay, etc. Gay is a passive trait, like what media you consume or what political party you vote or what fandom you belong to, it’s not something you create, so using it to ground your sense of identity causes your identity to be framed passively, like it’s a hat you pull out of a drawer and put on- and that subordinates you to the collective, be that collective the society at large or just the group of particular weirdos you’re trying to fit in with because you failed at mastering any other ‘normative’ social hierarchy. Nobody sat down and thought up one of the 100 genders facebook allows you to pick: other weirdos thought all those terms up and then someone else comes along and picks one, again, like picking a pair of shoes out of your closet you happen to feel like wearing that day. Passive identity. And passive identity isn’t even identity, really, it’s just a semiotic game used by weaker individuals to weasel their way into positions on the social hierarchy they could not attain actively, through active expression of identity. Active identity? That’s what the Greeks called ‘arete’. In Plato’s metaphysics, as elaborated in the Phaedrus, all souls originate in self-motion, through which they separate themselves from the ontos or “All-Being”, the collective, establishing a microcosm for themselves. To pursue active identity is the only worthy ambition for our kind. That’s my message. (Everyone is a mix of active vs. passive identity, for we cannot entirely extricate ourselves from the socius, but the goal would be to make as much of your identity an active expression of your own creative instinct, your own genius and skills, your own law, etc. as possible. And that is the use of philosophy, systems of morality, theology, art, science, and psychology- and even armed with all of these tools, it proves itself a goal not easily advanced upon.)
On white people not being the ultimo racist shitlords of history:
Every race on earth has both been enslaved, and kept slaves, at some point in history. It is one of the great humbling lessons of both evolutionary psychology and history, that slavery is embedded in us at a genetic level: it existed before recorded history. It is an evil that every single one of us carry in our blood, a primordial instinct that lives in every single human being on this earth and that, because of that, might break forth all over again if we ever let ourselves forget that. Throwing the burden of it on ‘white people’ is divorced from all historical reality, it is simply not true, and it is dangerous. My white ancestors did not chase black people around in Africa like wiley cayote with a lasso, they simply bought black people that were already enslaved… by other black people. Because that is what they did for thousands of years. When one tribe conquered another, they took all the women and enslaved the young males, after killing the old ones. The native American tribes did this exact same thing. The proto-German tribes did the same thing; enslaving themselves when nobody else was around. At any rate, Greek philosophy gave us modern political structures and science so I guess I could be proud about that. The dude who invented antibiotics was white, I could be proud of that. Or the German white guy who designed the first computer. Or you know what, I could also be proud that my white ancestors helped end slavery! (which had existed since before recorded history, and was practiced by all the races that were enslaved at one point or another, like Black people) Black people didn’t end slavery-- White people did. (Slavery, since the Romans, was just thought of as a fact of life, of the same type as, animals eat other animals, it is just nature; nobody ever questioned its morality until Enlightenment era philosophers appearance. And they were quite white.) Slavery was still being practiced by one black tribe against another black tribe while my white ancestors were over here killing other white people to end slavery. So can I be proud of that? You don’t seem to know much about human history, evolution, the cultural history of slavery, the fact that slavery was a human universal since before the Romans, since before the Egyptians, since before there even was a before. Slavery is not, as you put it, “mostly to blame on white people”. That’s incorrect on every conceivable level. The ending of slavery IS mostly to blame on white people though. 
On free healthcare retardation:
I get that there is a good spirit behind your statement, but if it really is made in good spirit, I’d offer some information to you in good spirit. The only thing that is going to make the world any less corrupt is the truth, so I’d hope that a conscientious member of the public like yourself would be willing to hear an opposing viewpoint out in the interest of possibly furthering the truth, if in fact you’ve missed something important. If he and his son lived in one of these enlightened European countries with free healthcare, the kid would have never even made it on the list for a transplant, let alone actually gotten one, due to how few qualified facilities there are in those countries, or surgeons available with the skill to conduct such a surgery- because that kind of tech and skill requires decades of schooling, effort, and training- and usually, when you sacrifice decades of your life to developing technical expertise, you sort of want to get paid for it, and paid for it comfortably, given the fact that virtue does not pay our bills or feed our families or accrue anything for our descendants to inherit in the hope of making their lives a little easier. You see, the free healthcare is great for simple things like if you get a broken bone or something. Yeah, then it is awesome. But literally anything more advanced than that- it becomes a lot less cool.
If they suspect you have a tumor in your brain for example, the countries we are talking about can’t afford many MRI/fMRI machines because, well, you know, they offer free health services and those machines are expensive, so you have to get put on a big waiting list just to get an MRI scan, and by the time they finally get you in there to use the machine and scan your head, enough time will have passed that what turned out to indeed be a tumor has metastasized your entire lymph system and become inoperable. That is why, when people in those countries need transplants and experimental surgeries and such, they book a flight to the US. What if you need an experimental gamma knife surgery to save your life from an otherwise inoperable tumor? Well gamma knives are monstrously expensive and the free healthcare-y countries we’re talking about can’t afford to manufacture or own any, so the US is pretty much the only place that has them. My lover,- she’s a native Parisian,- has a benign brain tumor that needs to be zapped every few years with an experimental radiation therapy to keep it from growing into integral areas of her brain and compressing vital arteries, and she HAS to come to the US and pay a lot of money to get it done because no other country even has the machinery to do it! And the reason they don’t have the machinery is because their healthcare is entirely socialized and they don’t have the excess wealth generated by capitalism to refunnel into research and development for technology like this. So in this kind of an eventuality, you’re either booking a flight here, to the US, to use our shit and coughing up the dough (so we can continue making things like gamma knives) or you set there in Canada or Paris France or wherever else until you effing die. Those are your options in that situation; you have all of two of them. The world is corrupt but it’s not corrupt in the way you people imagine it is. It’s corrupt because people want easy things to blame, like capitalism; it’s corrupt because people want easy solutions to the world’s problems, like throwing their hands up and proclaiming “It’s all corrupt!” It’s corrupt because people like feeling righteous and like they’re on “the right team”, the “right side of history”, as opposed to really sitting down and thinking through cost to benefit scenarios and real solutions, which will never satisfy the basic infantile instinct we all carry in ourselves, for some return to utopia, to perfection, to the garden of Eden, which will never exist: real solutions aren’t satisfying, because reality isn’t satisfying.
on gun control retards and the importance of implicit right:
I will try to be as nice as possible, but: no mass shooting has ever used military grade-weapons like you’re talking about… Machine guns cost thousands of dollars, they weigh 50-70 pounds, it costs hundreds to fire them at a sustained rate for even a minute or two, and they are only useful in the context of on the field warfare, where they function to provide suppressing fire. You blast hundreds of bullets in one general direction, not really trying to hit people, but to prevent them from being able to move anywhere; they get stuck behind something while hundreds of bullets are raining down, preventing them from moving forward while you and your fellow soldiers wait for an airstrike to get radioed in on their position. In war, these high-rate of fire machine guns are used to control enemy troop movements like that. Now imagine trying to use one of the 60 pound machine guns with just as much weight in ammo to do a school attack, walking down narrow corridors with a gun you can’t even barely pick up and aim because of the weight of it: how the hell would you even do that if you wanted to? You couldn’t. And that is why no school attack has EVER used one of those military grade guns. Nobody has EVER tried to rob a bank with those military grade guns. The guns that are used in crime and in mass shootings are just common pistols and simple rifles, not military grade firearms. I am not aware of a single criminal shooting having taken place using one such military firearm.
The constitution cannot be left behind, even if people wanted to leave it behind, because it is the foundation of the legal system. Our government was put together by philosophers and theoreticians, and it is built in a logical way, not just mashed together like other governments. You can’t take the base of it out without making the entire building collapse. If the government can invalidate one single thing in it without an amendment, then the whole constitution means nothing and the government becomes tyrannical. Everything else, is based on it; the entire court, is based on these founding-documents… as I explained in great length and detail. In the rest of the world, your rights are not really rights, they are only privileges the government allows that can be taken away for literally no reason, if the gov. wanted to. In the US, we have built the concept of ‘soul’ into the legal system itself, inherited from the great thinkers like Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, etc. That “soul” takes the form of inalienable rights, which the Constitution says are given to us, NOT by the government, NOT by any piece of paper, NOT by the Constitution itself, but, and I quote, by “God or Nature”, whichever you believe. Thus no government has the power to take them away, and that is the key point here. I thank “god or nature” for letting me be born in a country where my inalienable soul and rights, beyond any scrap of legal paper, beyond any other assembly of men, beyond any mortal government, is in fact respected by that mortal government. I live in a country that recognizes my inalienable rights and my sovereign self-determination to whatever course of happiness I desire, as long as it does not infringe upon the implicit or explicit rights of another human. Hence the word “inalienable”. If one can be taken away, all of them can, and our entire government breaks down, which will lead to civil unrest and eventually internal war. Many see the US as barbaric because of our guns, but I perceive all of the rest of the world’s governments as barbaric, because they are built on the premise that you have no rights outside of what the government says: in those other countries, it is the little piece of paper that gives you “rights”. Not here. In my country, in the US, my rights exist outside of and beyond any paper, any other man, any government, etc. etc. and so they cannot be taken away from me by any piece of paper, any other man, any government.
In the US, we have a legal system built up on this idea of individual rights as being sovereign, that is, ontologically primary over ‘social rights’. While in most countries, and indeed all of Europe, a “right” is merely a privilege the government gives people and can take away at a moment’s notice for any reason the State presumes, you can’t do that in the US. Our concept of “right” (developed as it was from the Ancient Greeks, from Plato and Aristotle, Hegelian dialectics, etc.) is more metaphysical than legal. We understand that a right only means something because of the responsibility that comes with it: an individual can take responsibility for his own actions, that is, for his exercising a right, but a group cannot; one black man cannot be made to take responsibility for the actions of other black men, for example. So there cannot be “social rights” or “group rights”, only an individual can have a right. Our whole government, our whole system, is built on that foundation- its entire purpose is protecting those rights, the rights of the individual. The constitution tells us that we actually have an unlimited number of them, because that piece of paper is not what gives us our individual rights in the first place. It says we are given those rights “by either God or Nature”. The piece of paper and our system of government are only intended to protect them, because individuals exercising their rights inside of a civilization can lead to conflicts of rights that need to be resolved, hence the Law.
Thus the Constitution and Declaration say: we have two kinds of individual, sovereign right; implicit rights, and explicit ones. An implicit right is anything that I can do that would not interfere with another person’s implicit or explicit rights. Like, I have the right to be my own doctor- to diagnose and prescribe anything I want to myself in the course of my own self-treatment. I have the right to ingest any substance. I have the right to end my own life, should I choose to. I have the right to, etc. etc. Literally anything that I can do that doesn’t interfere with another man’s implicit or explicit rights. So many people don’t even know this, but it says it right in the constitution- that these implicit rights are just as protected, legally, as the explicit rights, which would be rights directly named and enumerated in the Constitution itself, the Bill, Amendments, etc.- rights like the 2nd Amendment’s right to bear arms, or the right of freedom of speech.
I want you and everyone else to really understand: that piece of paper tells you,- it is written in the paper itself,- that the paper is not what gives you your rights. They are based on metaphysical principles and exist outside of any scrap of legal writing: they are inalienably yours, given to you by 'either God or Nature", whichever you believe. It says that your un-named, implicit rights (literally ANYTHING you can do that doesn’t interfere with my rights) are infinite in number and just as legally protected as the explicit ones. And yet I look around and I see people persecuted by the government for things like drug-use. Boggles my mind how far things have sunk from the Constitution.
The constitution is not to be cherry picked. You either take the whole thing or leave the whole thing buddy. The constitution is not grounded on the use of force for its meaning, it is grounded on Greek metaphysics and self-sufficient reasoning. The use of force is the sign of a breakdown in Law, not the foundation of the Law. Metapoliticus, P. 89: “It would be useful to qualify the concept of pre-existent individual rights in our present context. Our Federal government (the ‘State’ with a capital S, ie. the ‘executive’ branch, the Feds) is deliberately designed to maintain a balance of power with the other branches of government: there is no monopoly over anything in the carefully, geometrically apportioned scales of US law, in which ‘force’ is a kind of pre-ontological fabric, a philosophical ‘Grund’ holding everything together in the dance of self-maintaining clockwork structures our founders left behind for us. Force only moves from this undulating fabric to perception, from silent noumenon to phenomenon, from the invisible to the manifest, when one of these clockwork gears stalls, if one deigns to follow my metaphor. Only when the balance is ‘thrown out of whack’ does “force” become manifest somewhere down the pipeline on the part of the State, while ideally it remains, ever observantly but in passing, silent.”
In the US, the task of government is not to control and recreate society in its own image, or make life-decisions for us; it’s not meant to program us and tell us how to live or what we ‘need’ or don’t need. It isn’t meant to tell us who the average person is and how the average person should live their average life. Its sole purpose is in protecting the sacred rights of the individual and his freedom, because: only by protecting the freedom of the ‘one’ can the freedom of the ‘many’ be maintained; only by protecting the rights of the individual, can the freedom of the society of which the individual is a member be protected,- for the concept of ‘right’ is made meaningful by the concept of ‘responcibility’, and only the individual can take responsibility for his own actions; a group cannot, thus the group cannot serve as the foundation for a theory of right. The rights of the many depend on the rights of the one: that is one of the foundational insights of Western metaphysics and political theory, going all the way back to the Athenian Greeks, Plato, and Aristotle. It’s called dialectics. At any rate, to protect the rights of the many by protecting the rights of the one, of the individual: that is its purpose,- the purpose of the state, of government. You seem to think that the government should mandate by force of law what the average person “needs” and how they should live … Which would imply the government having the right to design its own perfect society, because if the state can tell us what we need or don’t need on one issue, there is nothing to stop it from deciding that on EVERY issue. Well, to be frank in my response to that way of thinking: … No. If you want the government to make your decisions for you and tell you how to live and protect you like mom and dad, there’s other countries out there for you. (And none of them invented the Internet, nuclear power, or landed on the moon.) That’s never been and it’s never going to be the US. Our founders made sure of that by designing a system of government for which the individual is so deeply engrained as central, that almost nothing can subvert it.
Btw, Shane Erickson: there’s many plants a basically microscopic dose of can kill an adult human being a few times over, and anyone with the intention can look them up and find them in nature, so what exactly is the point in arguing about bromine? Is there any point? Because experts say it’s a good idea to criminalize it? Do you mean chemical researchers,- the kind of people who would have some measure of expertise regarding it,- or do you mean legal experts; who wouldn’t. Because if you meant chemical researchers, why should I care about their ideas regarding law, criminalization, etc.? Ricin was only made illegal in 2019. Tell me, how many cases of murder by ricin are on the books prior to that date, prior to 2019. Alright, good, so we’re on the same page: there isn’t any point. It’s just more laws to add on top of the mountain of laws made for no other reason than to: you guessed it, make some more laws. Those are the best kind of laws man, the pointless ones! Love em.
why male Karens can’t exist:
Check it out. The reason why there’s only female Karens,- the reason there isn’t really a male equivalent of that,- is because, in our culture, it is not socially acceptable to beat the piss out of women. So in the event that a man DID decide to act like a Karen, well, he would have gotten beat the F up. And he would have continued getting beat the F up until he stopped acting that way. Women on the other hand, because they do not get physically compelled by their peers to grow up, are able to get away with it: nobody ever stops them from acting that way. So you see, it’s just pretty elementary level Darwinian selection. The men who did act like Karens got beat the F up until they stopped, whereas the women, having no reason to fear physical confrontation, are able to get away with acting like Karens their whole life without any consequences- they never had a reason to grow up like the men do. And I am not suggesting we should start beating women, I’m just explaining why there’s not male Karens- (and also joking) it’s just because when a man does decide to act like a Karen, other men beat him until he stops.
why we shouldn’t dispense with an irreducible moral category when psychoanalyzing mass killers, murders, etc.; in other words, the importance of philosophically defending the existence of “evil”
I generally agree with your thoughts but I don’t think it’s quite rational to say that guys like The Devil’s Storyteller are the reason certain individuals act out in this murderous way. I’d also say that you can both look into the deeper psychological forces at work, recognize everything you said, and still comfortably view them as monsters. For one could levy all the same psychological burdens on someone else, throw them into the exact same life as these two, and they would not do what they did. Arrange the same causal chain, the same traumas, the same illnesses, and one person will end up engaging in murder and another person doesn’t. Because there is, in the human mind, some mysterious force that acts against Eros, against the vital instinct of all life,- something that, no matter how well-developed a psychology we might possess, no matter how advanced our neuroscience becomes,- cannot be reduced to anything; something that must remain solely an expression of man’s free will; a mysterious force we refer to as ‘evil’,- a force that is, for these reasons, a moral reality,- and, like all moral realities,- something for the priests and philosophers to handle. People like The Devil’s Storyteller might not express themselves very well, but I feel their projections and anger are due to the fact that they perceive analysis of your kind as reductive, as dispensing with this category, that is, a force beyond the merely neuroscientific and psychological. They feel that it is discounting that irreducible moral reality.