Here’s the second installment of a new monthly feature on my blog where I bemoan the state of the world and rant about bad memes. I don’t know how many people actually liked the first Doom Scroll, it got about 12 views. But these are kind of therapeutic so I’m going to keep doing them. If too many people saw these posts I might have to get into a dreaded internet argument, and I wouldn’t want that. So the low view count kinda works for me anyway. I am at peace with my obscurity and eventual oblivion.
March was quite a month to be on social media. The manufactured culture wars continued, and of course, humanity slid ever closer to oblivion. You might notice more Reddit this time around. That’s because my Facebook feed didn’t update much for the first half of the month. I kept getting stuff that was two or three days old and seeing it over and over again. Could it be Zuckerberg doesn’t like these blogs so he’s keeping me from seeing things? Ha, if only I were that important. The problem seems to have righted itself now though. Anyway, beware of edgy political opinions ahead. Keep in mind a big reason I write these blogs is to have an outlet without participating in online arguments, ‘kay? Also, having a month to work on them gives me time to form the perfect comebacks to things, which I would never be able to do in a real-time argument. But I hate arguing and debating, just so you know. And I don’t consider myself an expert in everything I talk about either.
Places I’d Rather Be Than My Old Call Center Job #109,853,739
As a palate cleanser, let’s first have a look at the surface of a planet that isn’t facing immediate doom. One that isn’t divided into arbitrary territories called countries that all hate each other. That is unless Elon Musk has his way and space capitalism gets exported there. The Perseverance rover sent back breathtaking views of the surface of Mars in March. This is the surface of what was for the majority of human existence merely a red shiny dot in the sky. What would someone 1,000 years ago think of seeing the surface of another planet? The rover even sent back audio recordings. You can hear the wind on another planet. And yet while this was happening, everyone was whining about Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. Humanity is indeed doomed. Will humanity be able to refrain from destroying itself long enough to terraform Mars and live there? I have my serious doubts. If it does happen, you know you and I aren’t going there. It will be a refuge for the billionaires after they finish making this planet uninhabitable. Best us peasants can hope for is to be taken there as servants.
Shared in the subreddit r/spaceporn. Which isn’t what it sounds like.
Another “Don’t Make Me Tap the Sign” Meme
I hate American politics. I would much rather think about astronomy and things like that. Higher, loftier thoughts. Or just escapist fantasy, that works too. But, it inevitably affects me and people I care about, so I can’t completely shut it out. I’m not going “back to brunch” like the neo-liberals though.
“B-b-but, orange man bad!” they might say. Yes, I agree. But he lost. Can we not bring him up anymore? It’s the Fallacy of Relative Privation. “Sure, X is bad, but Y was even worse so we must tolerate X.” I may be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if the reason they failed to impeach Trump was so that they could keep him around as a threat to the left so that they won’t criticize anything Biden and his team does. If he runs again in 2024 it will be another convenient excuse to keep the two-party system going. We’ll be told we have to vote blue because “You don’t want the cheeto man back in the White House, do you?” It’s all a big show. Theater, really. I wonder if it’s scripted and predetermined like pro wrestling sometimes. This is why nothing ever changes or gets better in America. But before the inevitable repeat of 2016 in 2024, can we at least have a couple years where we’re not talking about the orange oompa-loompa man, please?
It’s not an airport, no need to announce your departure
It’s 2021, and people are really still fighting over Nintendo vs Sega like it’s 1991? This is just sad. So I am in a Sega Genesis group on Facebook, as it was my game system of choice throughout most of the 1990s. I even have access to every game ever made on it now thanks to my Mega Everdrive. And this schmuck posts this on March 5th. I cropped his name out as a courtesy, since I would want someone to crop my name out too if I said something stupid on the internet that warranted screenshots. (Maybe this whole blog is something stupid I said on the internet.) Not long after this, the group was flooded with pro-Nintendo trolls bashing Sega, who couldn’t find something better to do with their time. I buried the hatchet with the Super Nintendo years ago. I realize that being loyal to a corporation is meaningless, because they certainly don’t care about you, just your money. It’s about as pointless as nationalism, really if you think about it. Both systems had good games. Why restrict yourself to one system? Especially these days, when the rivalry between Sega and Nintendo has been over for 20 years. I have a Retron 2 bootleg game system that plays both NES and SNES games, which I bought after my old NES died. I only have Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Kirby Superstar, and a Super Game Boy cartridge that allows one to play Game Boy games on the TV, but it’s something. I guess there are some in the group who hold onto this immature grudge against the Super Nintendo like they’re still on the playground at Elementary School, this person isn’t entirely wrong about that. One day in about 30-40 years there will be a Nintendo vs Sega fight at a retirement home. People will never give it up. Prideful jerks just ruin everything. Why a grown ass adult would have their pride tied up in a damn game console is beyond me. Then again, is it any stupider than social constructs that people kill each other over, like religion, race and nationalism? In the eyes of the universe, in the cosmic sense, not really.
Who knew a Facebook group about a 30 year old game system could provide such insight into human nature?
“Where are my grandkids?”
I forget where I found this meme. One of the lefty groups I’m in.
Did Dennis Nedry do Nothing Wrong?
I was far too young to be reading the Jurassic Park novel when I was ten years old, but it was my favorite book. And the movie was my favorite movie. But until I started working, I never saw things from Nedry’s perspective. Would I have screwed over the companies I worked for at the call centers for a chance to get rich? Hell yes. In a heartbeat. They treated me like an expendable number anyway. Besides, Nedry couldn’t have known he’d be Dilophosaurus food while the park descended into Malcolm’s chaos theory. He was only supposed to be gone a few minutes to deliver the dinosaur DNA and get back to the control room. The power wasn’t supposed to be out long enough for dinosaurs to start escaping. It was just bad luck. In fact, and the book goes into even more detail about this, dinosaurs had already been escaping and breeding long before Nedry did this, even making it to the mainland. So you could argue the disaster was going to happen one way or another anyway. It helps that in the book John Hammond is much more of a villain himself. They toned him down a lot for the movie, because Steven Spielberg didn’t like the idea of an evil rich character. But even movie Hammond deserves the blame for what went wrong at Jurassic Park. He spared too much expense despite claiming not to.
Shared in Jurassic Park Raptorposting.
What-aboutism and Mental Gymnastics in Azeri Internet Discourse
Oh look, it’s the Fallacy of Relative Privation again. It’s is every Turkish/Azeri nationalist’s favorite fallacy, followed also by the Red Herring Fallacy which gets used in genocide denial. It provides an indispensable golden ticket that justifies every single depraved genocidal act they commit. Either exaggerate or outright invent atrocities committed by Armenia, and suddenly it’s okay for a guy to murder another guy in his sleep with an axe because the murderer was Azeri and his victim Armenian. Even though neither of them had anything to do with any perceived wartime atrocities in the early 1990s because they were kids at the time and weren’t there when it happened. The victim just happened to be on the wrong team. Gives them permission to destroy all the churches and monuments they want as well, which was big news this month. I had to come to accept that any land they were able to ethnically cleanse in Artsakh last year is pretty much doomed, and you might as well forget about them preserving anything Armenian there. It’s gone. Helps soften the blow when more news comes out about about their latest act of destruction. I already mourned all of that back in November. I’m more concerned with people than buildings and such. Have to say though, it makes one grateful that all Turkey does with their abandoned Armenian churches is let them decay and crumble, or turn them into barns, or occasionally mosques if they’re intact enough. That’s still better than either destroying them or making them into “Caucasian Albanian” churches for historical revisionism.
And yes, Armenians shouldn’t be doing this what-aboutism either, and they can do it sometimes, although I don’t see their hatred institutionalized and made an inseparable part of their national identity the way it is in Azerbaijan. You’d think the Azeri nationalists would at least stop acting like sore losers after ethnically cleansing most of Artsakh, but now they’re sore winners, doubling down on their xenophobic hatred. Azeri nationalism is a cult, it hinges on scapegoating and historical revisionism. I mean, so does most nationalism if you think about it. But while the United States has its own boogeymen, you don’t see the whole country cheering at leaked videos of American soldiers torturing and beheading Afghanis or Syrians, or whatever country we’re bombing this month while the news talks about something else. I remember when evidence of torture at a prison camp did come out during the Iraq war, Americans were appalled, aside from perhaps a few psychopaths. It was a scandal. Admittedly, that was an unusual example; the default reaction by the majority of Americans is to ignore those sorts of things. There’s a reason nobody really talks about the Iraq war anymore. I suppose you could draw a lot of parallels between Azeri nationalists and white supremacists in the United States, but while the US government and media does kind of subtly, low-key cater to these people behind the scenes, especially when Republicans are in office, it’s not quite to the degree that Armenophobia and Turkic supremacy is pushed by the government and media in Azerbaijan. The bigoted fascists don’t need dog whistles in Azerbaijan, it’s all out in the open.
I’m a recovering nationalist myself, as I’ve written about in this blog before. You can enjoy your own ethnic culture and history without thinking yours is superior and hating other groups of people. Just like you can enjoy both Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. I’m over jingoism and tribalism, and the very concept of nation states. All it’s brought humanity is death. But I’m forced to take a side when ultra-nationalism threatens to morph into genocide. I am against the doctrine of Pan-Turkism and those who push it, not Turks and Azeris themselves. And I understand the Azeri nationalist trolls I see all the time on the internet don’t represent every Azeri, and neither does their petty, hateful dictator of a leader. I respect the Azeris who are able to deprogram from their minds all the hatred and bigotry that they’re force-fed by their government from the moment they’re born. But humans in general are a long way from getting to the point where they can overcome nationalism. Makes me want to go live on Mars.
Found on the r/ArMEMEia subreddit, which like the main r/Armenia subreddit has been terrible for my mental health these past several months. But I can’t bring myself to quit reading them.
You know what, this calls for another palate cleanser. We need a break from all this depression. Here’s a nice picture I saw in my scrolling.
That’s Lake Van at the top, Lake Sevan at the bottom, and between them is Mt. Ararat. You don’t see any borders from up that high, now do you? Countries aren’t real. They’re abstract constructs. Flags, national anthems, it’s all fake. Delusions created by an insane species. Humans are like little ants, fighting over ant hills. It’s good to be reminded of that before the news gets me down.
This one was shared on an Armenian group I’m in, from this page:
Obey. Consume. Stay Asleep.
Now this ad is a pretty insidious one. You might have to click on it to read it. Basically it boils down to “stop asking to raise the minimum wage or we’ll replace you with robots and you’ll starve and die”. You have to wonder who paid for that billboard. Whoever it was should be boycotted. Now if you ask me (I know nobody ever would, but humor me for a moment) one way we could “rehabilitate” capitalism, if such a thing were possible, would be to just go ahead and replace most jobs with robots, and then give people universal basic income, a guaranteed home at least as big as a small apartment, and universal healthcare. Stuff that the presidential candidate Andrew Yang was talking about. Pay for it by cutting the military budget and taxing the obscenely rich. There are more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people. Money is a made-up concept anyway. Our overlords could do this if they wanted to (but they don’t, of course). If people wanted more money than the universal basic income or wanted a nicer home than the one allotted to them by the government, they could choose to get some kind of job, but no one would be forced to choose between wage slavery and death. And no one would have to work 40 hours a week or more. They could do whatever endeavor they would actually want to do. Follow their intellectual pursuits. Enjoy their finite existences. You know, actual freedom, not the fake freedom the US has where how free you are depends on how much money you were born into. The more grueling and mindless jobs would be automated. Jobs that will always require a human touch, like a teacher for example, would have special benefits so that people would still want to do them. This still wouldn’t solve the environmental problems capitalism causes, but it would go a long way towards alleviating the human rights problems. Of course, greedy people won’t let this happen, and I have little hope of it happening any time soon. Wouldn’t want the peasants having too much time on their hands, they might actually start thinking and forming opinions. Instead of freeing us from labor, technology is instead being used to coerce us into doing even more labor, and to control and spy on the masses. But if the masses were having all their needs met, they’d have no reason to riot. Just saying. Replacing jobs with robots and just meeting the needs of the citizens so they don’t need employment to survive makes sense even from the perspective of our oppressive capitalistic overlords. They can even still keep brainwashing us with the media and ads, they could still have complete control. But they’re either too greedy or too sadistic to do this, or both.
As far as my actual ideal world goes, this idea of “bring on the robots, make employment optional and give people at least the bare minimum needed to survive” would be merely a compromise. It would still be capitalism, you would still have different corporations competing with one another, you would still have consumerism, rich and poor, nation states, property and money. I think all of these concepts need to be either drastically reinvented or abolished altogether, or else humanity is going to kill itself, sooner or later. We live in a society based on trade, when we should have a society based on sharing (isn’t that right....Batman?). Everything is commodified. Land, healthcare, food. You can boil almost all the world’s problems to this. Why don’t the Israelis and Palestinians just share? There, you see, I just solved the Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict too. Why don’t we just share land? Why does it come down to this jingoistic “my people were here longer than yours even if we have to falsify history so the land is all ours and actually your people never existed”, or “face it, you lost the war, the stronger side won, just get over it and accept your oppression and genocide” idiocy? It’s the mindset of trade and ownership that causes such conflicts. It’s the whole reason crime exists.
Not to make sweeping generalizations, but many cultures in the Western Hemisphere prior to European colonialism were based around the concept of sharing rather than trade, and had no concept of land ownership, money, or rigid borders to nation states. It’s not impossible. No other living thing on this planet trades, but they do share. Is it really so evil to think sharing is better than trading? Is sharing lazy, weak or childish? Really examine why it is you think that, if you do. And while you’re at it, examine why you think those adjectives are even a negative thing, whether or not they accurately describe sharing, which I think they don’t. Who wants you to think that those adjectives are negative and accurately describe sharing? Who benefits from it?
There you go, give me the Nobel Peace Prize now, I just solved all the world’s problems, Suren for President 2024. Eh, I’m just some poor deluded dreamer who’d rather live in the Land of Oz than the real world. An April Fool, if you will. But it doesn’t seem like rocket science. Society formed in the first place due to sharing. Trade divided us. And resulted in things like that monstrous dystopian propaganda poster above.
Found at the A Boring Dystopia subreddit. A fun place to doomscroll.
There is no escape.
This post caught my eye as I was scrolling Facebook. An interesting piece of absurdist humor. Yes, the pink pony is right, for most people. It costs $2,350 to renounce your US citizenship, and if you don’t do it after leaving the country for good, the US will keep taxing you even though you aren’t living there anymore. I don’t really know what they would do if you just refused to pay and went off the grid, and got lost in the Amazon rainforest or the Gobi desert or something. I’ve heard fleeing the country is a good way to get out of student loans, because really what are they going to do at that point. But the IRS may not give up so easily. Maybe they would extradite you or something. So basically, along with the expenses of actually moving to another country (passport, plane tickets, shipping your stuff over, renting an apartment or buying a home, enough savings to last until you find some source of income), poor people are stuck here, doomed to spend their lives at crappy jobs while barely making ends meet, paying rent on apartments they barely get to spend any time in. And it’s probably no accident either. It’s by design. That’s what I find hilarious when conservatives say “if you don’t like America, I’ll help you pack your bags”. Thanks for the offer. I would leave if I could, but the system has made that impossible. I have this fun idea of getting conservatives to do a crowdfunding campaign where they help pay for willing liberals and leftists to renounce their citizenships and move to another country. At least they would be rid of us, and they could go ahead and have their gun-obsessed corporate owned theocracy unopposed, it’s a win-win.
Catching Google Translate Being Sexist
Here’s an Armenia-related post that isn’t too depressing...although I suppose it can be if you get upset by sexism. Someone on the Armenia subreddit shared this. Now in the Armenian language, there are no gender pronouns. He/she/it are all the same word, է (eh). So why is it “She is beautiful”, and “she raises the child” and “she sews”, when it could have just as easily been “he” or “it”? Why does “he” have a high income, why is “he” a politician? How’s that for gender stereotypes? At least he cooks and cleans the dishes!
Note that having a language free of gender pronouns hasn’t exactly translated to a culture free of sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Armenian culture is very conservative overall, although I like to think it is a little bit more tolerant than its immediate neighbors, but not by much. By bringing this up I’m not trying to change Armenian culture from the outside (I understand native Armenians hate when diaspora Armenians try to do that), it is what it is and it will change (or not) on its own time, I’m just stating facts.
Still, none of this excuses Google Translate for being sexist. Was this just random? Or was it programmed this way? You have to wonder.
Oh WWF Attitude Era...
Let’s end on a funny note, shall we? So I guess NBC is starting their own streaming service (sigh, it was better when the only one was Netflix), and they’re putting wrestling on there. I thought WWE already had their own streaming service, but alas. It’s too bad they’re censoring stuff. I mean I’m okay with content warnings, but censorship never sat well with me. I think of the racist gags in old cartoons. Yes they’re awful, but censoring it is whitewashing the history, pretending it never happened. When Warner Bros. put Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry on DVD they had a content warning with Whoopi Goldberg explaining that censoring them is historical whitewashing, and then presented the shorts unedited (although two Tom and Jerry episodes still didn’t make it on DVD, due to blackface gags which I think they could have edited out fairly easily). But anyway, I don’t think wrestling was ever quite as offensive as that. Err, except for maybe that one time.
But yeah, just wait until that poor intern gets to the part where Mae Young gave birth to a hand. As I recall, it was a storyline involving an 80-something year old woman wrestler having a fling with a much younger wrestler named Mark Henry, whose nickname was “Sexual Chocolate”, and getting pregnant. Things got really weird in the WWF in the late 90s. That poor intern is going to have their work cut out for them going through 1998 to 2001. Nowadays it’s all boring and kid-friendly. The censorship team probably won’t need to censor anything after around 2006 or so. The name change to World Wrestling Entertainment in 2002 kind of signified the end of “kayfabe” as it’s called, because they were no longer presenting themselves as a legitimate wrestling federation, and were admitting it was all just a show. Then WCW went out of business around the same time, which was their only real competition, so they no longer needed to put as much effort into their product. They were still good for a few years after that, but the quality was in decline. Sealing the deal was the Chris Benoit incident in 2007. They needed to make their image squeaky clean after that. I mean it’s good that they’re taking better care of their employees so they don’t get brain damage and go insane like Benoit did, but that’s not an excuse for them to become so boring. In the 1980s they were kid-friendly and did safer stunts too but they were never this boring. I miss the outlandish gimmicks and storylines. Stuff like the original Undertaker gimmick.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed that emotional roller coaster. Let’s see what memes and posts I collect in April! How much worse will the world be by May, I wonder.
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