Ruins

I feel like I've reached that point where I don't really care about interacting with people who don't want to listen.  Necessary components of my life are traumatic enough even without exhausting arguments with people who have no interest in being ethical or finding Truth.  If you have no interest in improving, wallow in your exploitative, hurtful, privileged filth.  I'll put in an incredible amount of emotional labor for people who are there for me, who aim to be people, who traverse the realm of ideas and not just the physical world.  Most of the time I'll be overgenerous with sharing what I've learned and advocating for things that are objectively important.  However, recent events in my life have put things into a bit of perspective that isn't new, but which I'm now forced to take far more seriously. 

If you listen to ethical arguments and marginalized perspectives and resort to defense mechanisms or cognitive biases without lifting a fingurative finger to humble yourself to the truth of the universe and the truth of the living beings who surround you, then you simply don't matter to me.  I've put my fair share of energy into outreach, argumentation, and social advocacy.  I'm passing the torch and moving onto the next phase of my life!  Knowing me, this'll be a phase and I'll engage tons of carnists/capitalists/prison advocates/transphobes/misogynists in the future, but for now I'm going to focus my energy on the superior human beings - that is, those who recognize that they are not superior, who relinquish any claims to unassailable dominance.

Please let this alienate some people.  Please let this whittle down my friend circle to the people who are genuinely trying to be the best human beings they can be.  Please let this offend people to the degree that they would rather sit mired in ignorance than subjugate their own pride to the well-being of others. 

...Unfortunately, the reality here is that this will be read like a horoscope.  People will undoubtedly read into it what they are predisposed to see.  Those who want to be offended will be offended, and those who want to feel validated will feel so.  So let me clarify.  If you think it's okay to exploit animals, I don't care about you.  If you react to anti-capitalist arguments unequivocal vitriol or dismissal, I can't trust your intellect.  If you characterize disagreement that doesn't masturbate your ego as aggression or conflict, then you make it impossible for me to be myself around you, and I don't plan on spending energy or time on you.  If your reaction to being challenged is to gaslight that intervention as abuse, then I can't very well take your narrative seriously until you listen to mine.

We only live so long.  Living our best lives requires us to strive, reaching for our dreams and pushing our love as far as it will go, whether it be eros, storge, philia, or agape. We have to use that time to become excellent, or else we will die ineffective and unfulfilled.  I have reached heights of friendship and personal accomplishment that are both far short of what I think I can reach, and more than adequate to prove that I must be more conscientious about my aspirations to reach those peaks.  We are dying and the world is dying.  We don't have time for casual, grassroots socialization to do the jobs that must be done.  We have to dream.  We have to work to realize those dreams. And we have to surround ourselves with the energy and circumstances that allow us to perform that necessary work.

I have too many dreams to fulfill them all, and my psychological profile is such that this overwhelms me to the point of total paralysis and subsumption by lifestyle inertia.  I am faced with a question of whether I want to grasp a few of those dreams, or none.  The way to arrive at the correct answer is yet outside my comprehension, but hopefully the pathways I've mapped out that arrive at the wrong answer will help to illuminate their inverse.

Organizing to Save the World

The entire Western world is being overrun by fascism and we in the eye of the storm are still deluding ourselves into believing that it's a time of peace. 

Today is Armistice Day

I want to be extra, crystal clear.  Participating in the United States military is de facto an act of implicit racism and functions to strengthen the power of American oligarch hegemony.  This is a bad thing.  People do not go into the military intending to do this--and therefore it would be stupid and malicious to act like they are deliberately trying to destroy dark-skinned people.  Yet we have to hold people accountable for what they actually do.  And to the extent that the military-industrial complex is an evil system, we must hold to a certain kind of responsibility every person who participates in that system, whether unwittingly or not.  I don't mean that we should say they're horrible people.  I mean that they ought to bear witness to the emotions of the people they've unwittingly victimized.  They ought to share the spotlight with the experiences of The Other, the people on the other side of the gun barrel.  They ought to hear the rationale of the people who oppose the initiative they signed onto, as that initiative is not victimless.

Staying Safe in the Advent of a Trump Presidency

Donald Trump will soon have access to the NSA. If you need to say or do anything that a bigot like him would take issue with, please be safe. Do NOT speak about such things:

 

-through the Internet

-over the phone

-or even with a turned on phone in the room.

Now, more than ever, it's important that we learn about Internet privacy and keep in mind what a potential fascist dictator will do with the power granted to the ruler of the most powerful country in the 21st Century.

Think about what the FBI could use to mischaracterize you or prosecute you. Think about the various things you admit to on facebook which are actually illegal, and consider how such minor crimes might be used to imprison political dissenters.

Learn about Edward Snowden. Learn about Putin's Russia. Learn about PRISM. Learn about censorship in China and North Korea. Learn about the American system of prison slavery. Learn about Net Neutrality. Learn about historical state oppression. Learn about different economic systems like communism, syndicalism, and socialism. Learn about different forms of governance, like anarchism, direct democracy, and mutualism. 

 

Open up Wikipedia and start reading about history, while we still have access to it. Wrap your head around the theory of how we can change the world from the abysmal state it's currently in because of capitalism and long-unchecked power concentration.

Read Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, or Miyamoto Musashi's Book of 5 Rings. Read whatever other books give you a better understanding of how people manipulate others. Learn about analytical ethics. Learn about cognitive biases. Learn about the Rise of the Third Reich.

Most importantly, be smart. If we are, in fact, looking at the rise of a genocidal maniac and a force of right-wing nationalists from rural America, which is a possibility supported by history, then we need to be many steps ahead of them. We have to consider the power of the American military. We have to think about how he brainwashes people so effortlessly, and we have to counteract those forces. We have to consider how he co-opts powerful institutions and large groups of people for unjust causes, and we have to consider how that can be safely, legally, and democratically reversed to buy us enough time to organize and create a Dual Power and a Dual Economy.

 

Stop falling for false rhetoric.  Wake up and realize that incredible amounts of "progress" among the highly-socialized, cosmopolitan urban folk are easily reversed overnight with a simple resurgence of reactionary, conservative, right-wing, xenophobic, capitalist, nationalist zealotry in the places that don't get the same kind of attention from our government.  Realize that the root causes of all this turmoil are always very simple:  money and power.  Realize that massive cultural paradigms have been being shaped for a huge length of time.  Systems and institutions that are in place, cultural paradigms, and widespread beliefs, taboos, and norms are essentially investments of the oligarchs in a society that works for them.  Almost every quality of our society works to keep them in power, and we have to recreate society so that it has qualities which work against keeping them in power. 

Our government is extremely conservative--and extremely evil--right now. We have a lot to fear. We need to start thinking intelligently and planning actively. And we have to always be on the right side of the law, especially in our communications through recorded media.  So fight for what's right while always staying safe.  If you put yourself out of the fight by making stupid, risky decisions, you are putting others in danger.  Your advocacy is a vital tool to your comrades, so preserve it and use it wisely.

National Coming Out Day: Nonstandard Identity Edition

Warning: one-to-many heart-to-heart

You Can't Just Say that Vegetarianism is Unquestionably a Superior Moral Decision

For whatever reason, the face of an old dorm-mate suddenly came to my mind tonight, and I remembered that we were no longer friends on Facebook.  I remembered having an argument through Facebook messages that must have convinced him that I couldn't be reasoned with, because he unfriended me sometime after that last online discussion.  The argument came about when he, opting to deal with his personal concerns one-on-one, sent me a message in response to a post I made about factory farming.  He wanted me to know that it was belittling and dismissive to say things like "Vegetarianism is unquestionably a superior moral decision to eating meat," and very politely explained why he found this a Very Bad Way to Go About Things.  This was my response:

Why Openly Criticizing Hillary Helps Hillary

To all of those people complaining that Bernie supporters are being too harsh on Hillary, politely telling us to shut up about our analysis and policy concerns:

Distinguishing Between the Conceptions of Ownership in Capitalism and Socialism

Responding to yet another discussion about socialism on Facebook, I wanted to find out what comes up on a Youtube search for socialism.  One of the first names that came up sounded familiar:

Your Powerlessness, Quantified

While many would say that the degree of oligarchy in the US government is just one of many important issues, I claim that no debate about government policy matters unless the parties debating have the ability to affect government policy, whether through petitioning to representatives' good will or by using legal mechanisms (like voting or referenda).  I also propose that this is objectively applicable to the current political climate of the United States.

It was claimed that my argument was exaggerated, so I would like to substantiate this couple of claims with a purely mathematical argument.  Here are the numbers that prove we Americans have literally--quantitatively--provably--no power in our government:

Collusion: A Better Critique of Capitalism than Twilight

A capitalist friend asked on Facebook how we can rightfully accuse the wealthy of exploiting the system.  This is my answer, in the form of a narrative about the absurdity of a system that just so happens to be a capitalist republic:

with respect to People who Possess Child Porn

*TW Trigger warning for discussion of sexual abuse of children*

What I Mean when I Say Congress is Corrupt (and so is Hillary Clinton)

More and more, I find myself bringing up the same argument in increasingly varied contexts.  I just find it impossible to have the same political conversations I used to, because it's clearer than ever that the those conversations are completely meaningless, given one key factor:  our government is irrevocably corrupted, with Congress completely beyond the control of the American people.

The system of government that is supposed to represent our collective opinions does not.  Not only is it hopeless to throw our letters and phone calls at Congresspeople, to do so is a severe placebo that prevents us from strategizing about how to actually change laws and the world.  Whenever I get into political conversations, I find myself drifting away from the topic at hand, towards metadiscourse about having a political conversation.  The meager effect that our opinions have, and our consequent powerlessness to mobilize change, are the reasons I'm creating Magnova Carta (which I'll write about in my next post), are the reasons the United States needs a major rework of its system of government, and the reasons Bernie Sanders is the only politician I actively support.

So, this is my thing.  Everything that comes next is the basis of my political ideology.  Take it as you will.

Violence is Peace

I totally understand and empathize with many Republican beliefs.  Distrust of federal government, protecting your liberties, strong call for defense, and plenty of others are pretty solid ideals.  But at this point, the Republican party isn't really advocating for those things.  I really don't think they represent the average Republican anymore.  The Democratic party has also gotten pretty far from the issues they claim to represent.  They're just businessmen who take up the banner of progressivism to gain power, and to be in the position of receiving corporate patronage.  The successful politicians are those who run the most expensive campaigns, who make their name recognizable to more people.  It's not about issues anymore, it's about political strategy.

But one of the scary things the R party has done is to take advantage of the reasonable values of conservatives and create a culture of xenophobia and paranoia.  It's also taking advantage of people, especially people who have been chronically lied to and economically abused for generations.  And it's created a culture where many in our country want to stand up against people who haven't actually done anything wrong.  To an Orwellian degree, we've been conditioned to think that violence is a way of seeking peace, that spreading fear is a way of defending against terrorism.  And the very people that represent everything a Republican genuinely hates--centralized authority, terrorism, killing innocent Americans--are the ones controlling the Republican party.  They've turned people against their own beliefs, in the name of those beliefs, and are turning their support into a radical insurgency.  Innocent people are dying as a result.

Every once in a while, we need to step back and look at ourselves--are we really fighting for what we believe in?  Or are the thought leaders of our time taking advantage of our beliefs dishonestly?  Are we giving them the benefit of the doubt because we need somebody to trust, or do they genuinely fight for the ideals they claim to uphold?

11,300 guns = 1 human life

I was sifting through the data that was available on Wikipedia on guns per capita and gun deaths per capita.  Found that among the countries with the top 15 scores for Human Development Index, the correlation between guns owned and gun deaths per capita has an R² of 0.94.



Using this line of regression, you might even say that, in a highly developed country, the optimal number of firearms per 100 people is the y-inercept of this line, at 5.61 guns or fewer per 100 people.  US has the 5th highest HDI, making it one of the world's most developed countries, so it falls squarely in this category.

Above that optimal number of guns, the line of regression shows that there is about 1 death for every 11,300 guns in a highly developed country.  In other words, if we had a gun buyback program, for every 11,300 guns that were turned in, 1 human life will be saved.

The correlation between guns and deaths becomes weaker as you start to include countries with progressively lower HDI.  But the correlation was still strong at R²=.75 for the top 33 countries Wikipedia had the relevant data on.  This line of regression, which has a less strong correlation, suggests that the optimal number of guns is zero (since you can't have a negative number of guns), and above that, 1 human life is lost for every 12,900 guns owned.  Still in the same ballpark as before.



Note that the US falls just above the line of regression in each case, suggesting that this relationship holds true for us as well.

Here's the data used to construct the above graphs, all taken from Wikipedia on December 5, 2015:

Country	HDI (Human Development Index)	HDI Rank	Guns/100 (2014)	Gun deaths/100,000/year	Year of Calculation
Norway	0.944	1	31.3	1.78	(mixed)
Australia	0.933	2	21.7	0.86	-2011
Switzerland	0.917	3	45.7	2.91	(mixed)
Netherlands	0.915	4	3.9	0.46	-2010
United States	0.914	5	112.6	10.5	-2013
Germany	0.911	6	30.3	1.24	-2010
New Zealand	0.91	7	22.6	1.45	(mixed)
Canada	0.902	8	30.8	2.22	(2007-2011)
Singapore	0.901	9	0.5	0.16	(mixed)
Denmark	0.9	10	12	1.28	-2011
Sweden	0.898	12	31.6	1.47	-2010
Iceland	0.895	13	30.3	1.57	(mixed, incomplete)
UK	0.892	14	6.6	0.26	-2010
South Korea	0.891	15	1.1	0.06	(mixed)
Japan	0.89	17	0.6	0.06	(mixed)
Israel	0.888	19	7.3	1.87	-2009
Taiwan	0.882	20	4.6	0.87	(mixed)
France	0.884	20	31.2	3.01	-2009
Luxembourg	0.881	21	15.3	2.02	(mixed)
Belgium	0.881	21	17.2	2.42	-2006
Austria	0.881	21	30.4	2.95	(mixed)
Finland	0.879	24	29.1	3.64	-2010
Slovenia	0.874	25	13.5	2.49	(mixed)
Italy	0.872	26	11.9	1.28	-2009
Spain	0.869	27	10.4	0.62	(mixed)
Czech Republic	0.861	28	16.3	1.76	-2010
Greece	0.853	29	22.5	1.64	(mixed)
Qatar	0.851	31	19.2	0.15	(incomplete)
Cyprus	0.845	32	36.1	0.96	(mixed)
Estonia	0.84	33	9.2	2.54	-2010
Poland	0.834	35	1.3	0.25	-2010
Slovakia	0.83	37	8.3	1.75	-2010
Portugal	0.822	41	8.5	1.77	-2010

Sources:

List of countries by firearm-related death rate

Number of guns per capita by country

List of Countries by Human Development Index

Katie Brown and Stochastic Pet Abuse

Photo taken from Fox News

Katie Brown, the woman who duct-taped her dog's mouth shut:  obviously what she did was cruel, potentially traumatic.  But if you look at her pictures, she was obviously a person who deeply loved her pets.  From her perspective, she was trying to teach her dog a lesson, which is extremely difficult to do without language.  She wasn't trying to traumatize her dog.  She just did.  Animal cruelty isn't something that comes from malice or violence, it's something that happens when people don't know how to treat their pets.

Look through her photos yourself if you think I'm cherrypicking

Just like average (not overtly racist) police officers sometimes shoot black people, normal pet-owners sometimes do things that are cruel.  You don't just make that go away by locking up the bad people.  If you want to stop that particular kind of pet abuse, then you have to reframe the way our culture views nonhumans.  We might call what happened in Florida stochastic pet abuse.

Look at the way her dog and cat sleep together.  Has the owner of these pets raised them to be malicious?  Look through her pictures and tell me that this woman is the face of animal cruelty.

Maybe future pet-owners will learn from this event, and it's probably a good thing to use her as an example, but to me it seems really basic to vilify a woman whose Facebook photos are devoted to loving pictures of her cats and dogs.  Again, what she did was cruel, and I advocate for a far more radical approach to animal cruelty than most people are willing to.  But if ending animal abuse were really what people cared about, there are bigger and more heinous targets than some redneck Florida woman.  How many of those raising their pitchforks against Katie Brown are pledging to go vegan?  How many still adopt their puppies from puppy mills?  I'm not saying they shouldn't campaign against one form of abuse unless they campaign against all of them, but the hypocrisy raises some flags that maybe people are taking up arms for the wrong reasons.

Treating acts of physical and psychological violence as the hallmarks of criminals, as opposed to the bad decisions of otherwise good people, is not productive.  We should be looking to create a world where there aren't bad people, and where people don't do bad things.  If punishment and retribution against the perpetrators were the way towards that world, everybody would go blind.  Or maybe we're all already blind, and we're just feeling around in a dark, confusing world for something that makes sense.

I think there's a lot to be done about people like Katie Brown, but I don't think it's putting both the perpetrator and the victims behind bars, whether they're in a prison or a shelter.  There must be a better way, some form of restorative justice that can both heal the wounds of her dog and make Katie a more thoughtful and compassionate person.  Vilifying and punishing individuals hasn't gotten of rid of animal abuse yet, so I'm extremely doubtful that it's the right strategy towards eliminating it.

Being Your Opposite

People are either exactly who they appear to be, or the exact opposite.

As we become adults, we find ourselves; we begin to search for happiness and fulfillment, and we learn what makes ourselves tick.  We might not notice that we're figuring ourselves out, and a lot of the changes that follow are subconscious.  In response to hardships, we develop defense mechanisms that cover up our weaknesses.  If we are scared, we hide it with one of fear's polar opposites--perhaps overconfidence or flippancy.  If we are ashamed, we paint over our shame with a coat of hubris.

2015

In the past year, I've trudged through heart-rending tribulation, searched for inner understanding and peace, and wondered about my place in this world.  I've given sincere thought to how sociopolitical power works, and deeply contemplated how we can pull together as a human race to address its pressing dangers.

In short, I spent a lot of time thinking and giving myself room to breathe.  This change in my lifestyle was exactly what I needed at this phase of my life.  I feel like, for the most part, I've found myself.  I know who I am.  I know what makes me tick, the lifestyle that works for me, what I want, and what I am capable of doing.

Coffee Liqueur

I've frozen myself, my lesser parts
I remember years of being whole
An animal in a society

I've collared and perfumed myself now
There is a way to look, I do

Partitioned, a figure
The orators have perfected

Having established a character,
Honeys have drained
from geometry and frames

All I remember are the caves
of an ancestor
of my mission
-ary present,
Vacuous since they were flooded out--
Graves of a softer man's blood

Re: Secret 1,062

I read an interesting post on RU Secrets about somebody struggling with their gender identity.  This was my response, before I realized it was too long to put on facebook:

Talking makes me sad, and this might be why

Today it hit me like a brick, what might possibly be why I'm always so depressed by online discussions (whether they're actually charged or not).

I come from a youth of arguing online about topics that were really emotional for me.  In those arguments, I was often indignant and aggressive.  (It was justified, but that's not really important right now)

Now, my instinct in online ideological debates, my instinct is to be indignant and aggressive.  I temper that aggressive energy to come up with, uh, somewhat coherent sentences.

I had awful depression last year that SSRIs straight up cured.  So I know that I had a shortage of serotonin.  Higher levels of serotonin means you're happier, and it independently means you're less aggressive.  Less serotonin = more aggressive + less happy.

So serotonin limits aggression and causes happiness.  Happiness, like other emotions, is the feeling that you get as a consequence of having a certain chemical state - in this case, high levels of serotonin.  I had always assumed that aggressive behavior, then, would be the consequence of low levels of serotonin.

Well, today I had a depressive vibe wash over me, and I thought about what I was doing directly before I felt that way.