The Doom Scroll - The Worst of Social Media - April 2021

 

Welcome to the third installment of my monthly series where I lament the downfall of our society, offer my spicy political opinions, and make fun of bad memes. They’re kind of like writing prompts for free-writes, I’ve just realized. Gods I miss my Creative Writing classes. Even though they financially ruined me. Should have just joined a writer’s guild. Ahem, anyway, here we go. 

No, I Demand an Apology!

The Whites are at it again. I say that being white as a sheet myself. So according to this person, God personally decides what shade everyone’s skin is going to be before they’re born, and what they’ll have between their legs. I think if you take away all of the social racial privilege issues and look at it from strictly a Darwinian survival perspective it’s actually more advantageous to have darker skin, because you don’t have to worry as much about sunburns and skin cancer. I wish I were darker, actually. White people are just jealous, deep down. See I have to be careful in the sun. I need a sun hat and lots of sun lotion or I’ll fry to a crisp. Thanks for that, God. My skin tone may work for the climate of Ireland, not so much Florida. But at least the cops are less likely to shoot me for no apparent reason. Sad but true.

You know what my biggest problem with Creationism is? Why would a supposedly flawless and perfect supreme being create human bodies with so many design flaws? Why is it so easy for food to go down the wrong pipe and for us to choke? Why can’t we go much more than a minute without breathing? Why do we have to wipe our asses after taking a dump? Why do we get hang nails? Why are our eyes so sensitive that we can’t even touch them? And here’s a big one, why are human testicles on the outside of our bodies? Couldn’t a divine being have found a better solution for keeping sperm cells alive than having what is essentially a vulnerable internal organ on the outside of the body with nothing but a flimsy skin pouch for protection? What the hell is that? It doesn’t make sense. To say nothing of what females put up with, like periods and childbirth. A divine punishment to an entire gender all because some lady ate an apple a long time ago, was it? And what was that about forgiveness and turning the other cheek, hm? Do as I say not as I do, I guess. There are millions of other flaws in our imperfect flesh vehicles that I could go into, not the least of which is how they break down with age, as I’m already experiencing at 35 years old. I’m missing a tooth and I have lower back problems, can’t even sit for long. And yet this body was created by a perfect divine being in their image? Now I’m not really an atheist. I’m more of a pantheist I suppose. I like polytheism in a more symbolic way. I can believe that perhaps the universe has an inherent intelligence, and I’m fond of the hypothesis of panpsychism, but if the universe does have a higher consciousness and intelligence, it’s not an old man with a long beard sitting in the clouds sculpting people out of clay. Evolution is still the best explanation. Homo Sapiens is a work in progress.

But I’m putting way more thought into this than the original person who wrote this did. Basically all they’re actually saying is “shut up and stop complaining about being on the receiving end of systemic racism and sexism, which I personally benefit from and justify using religion. Don’t blame me or my ancestors for your oppression, blame HIM.” This person’s an arsehole. Got to love that emphasis on “HIS” too. God is definitely a man, so get back in the kitchen.

 

This was shared in Creepy Uncle Joe Biden’s Demented Shambling Neoliberal Nightmare. One of the best group names ever. 

The “Great” Outdoors

This screenshot made its rounds through most of the lefty groups this month. You know now that I have a kid myself I notice this even more. How is he supposed to go outside and play when anywhere he goes he might get hit by a car, or trespass on someone’s property? The town I’m living in, Rockledge, Florida, is swiftly becoming just like this picture. A sea of bright neon signs that stay on all night, billboards plastered with ads, dwindling areas of greenery and very few sidewalks. Everything that isn’t paved over with asphalt is private property, consisting of manicured lawns coated in pesticides and dog piss. There is a meadow in a vacant lot nearby the condo complex I live in but there are so many ant hills it’s like stepping on landmines. The ants have been driven out of everywhere else so they just own that area. For now, that is. There are a couple parks in town, but not within walking distance. And people wonder why kids are absorbed in their phones these days. What else is there for them to do? Older people seem to have this idea that kids could go rafting like Huckleberry Finn if they wanted to, but they’d rather play video games and be lazy. All the ponds in the neighborhood where I live are surrounded by houses and are private property. You can’t go anywhere. Parks exist but do you really want to go to the same park every single day? 

This is the world that has been crafted for today’s children. Cities planned completely around cars, suburbs and shopping centers. You’re not allowed to trespass on people’s lawns, and no one talks to each other. In the populated areas of the United States at least, that is the reality. It’s a disgusting reality. Cars really ruined the world, that’s what it all boils down to. That and lawns. We could be using that land to grow our own food and barter it with our neighbors for their crops, but no let’s have useless grass that we have to waste water on. I sense a conspiracy; the food corporations wanted to monopolize the food supply so they got local governments and Home Owners Associations to outlaw using your land for growing food. People who live in apartments really can’t grow anything. Then you have Monsanto putting copyrights on plant seeds and going after people who plant them. That way you’re forced to work crappy corporate jobs for money to buy food in order to survive. This is how they’ve enslaved us. They’ve taken away our ability to be self-sustaining. Makes for a very obedient population. I decided to research when this started, and it all started in the 1500s when the German aristocracy took away the peasants’ ability to use the land for growing crops and hunting, and privatized it, thus resulting in the German Peasant War, which the peasants lost, unfortunately for all of us today who aren’t filthy rich. Then this concept of the privatization of land was imported to North America, to the detriment of the Native Americans, who had no such concepts of private property. And it was imported everywhere Europe colonized. There’s a little history lesson for you. This is why it’s BS whenever someone says “it happened in the past, get over it”. You cannot separate the present from the past. The present is the culmination of the past, and things that happened hundreds, even thousands of years ago built up to the world we find ourselves in today. Nobody even thinks about this stuff, they just accept that we need useless plants and sprinklers. It never occurs to them that there’s something very sinister behind it all.

That’s how all these little rants of mine end, isn’t it? At least my conspiracy theories make logical sense. Gee, I wonder why I never learned about the German Peasant War in school? Couldn’t have been purposely left out of the curriculum, could it? Nah I’m just being a conspiracy nut.

Genocide Recognition as Retaliation for Genocide Recognition 

Obligatory Armenia-related post time. So this month was the month that the US president finally dropped the “g-word” on April 24th, date of the Armenian Genocide Memorial. I was shocked, I must admit. Biden said he was going to do that last year, but I didn’t actually believe him. Nearly every US president in my lifetime promised to recognize the genocide while campaigning, and then once in office chickened out, bowing to political pressure from Turkey. In fact when Obama did that in 2009 it was kind of a turning point for me in my political worldview, a disillusionment that gradually pushed me further left. Obama was supposed to be different from the others, you see. Hope, change, all that. It was supposed to be a new era. If you were alive and old enough to be aware of the news in 2008 you remember. So many promises. But he was just another spineless corporate-owned warmonger. I’m never falling for that again. Obviously Armenian genocide recognition isn’t the only political issue I care about, but I feel that this particular issue is a good litmus test. If a politician can’t keep a promise like that, what else are they lying about? What other human rights violations will they tolerate in the interest of keeping good relations with dictatorships? No one was surprised when Trump didn’t recognize the genocide; actually what was different about him was that he never promised to recognize the genocide in the first place. That’s still better than promising and then not doing it. At least it was honest. But I never expected Biden to do better on this litmus test than Obama had. Anyway can we close the ICE camps now? Yeah, I didn’t forget about those after Trump left office.

Now of course, this wasn’t really about Armenia. They don’t care about an unfortunate little Russian vassal state. It was just the US putting political pressure on Turkey. It would have happened years ago had it been recognized for moral reasons. But especially in light of recent events, Armenians must take victories where they can find them, however seemingly small. This was the result of decades of lobbying, marches and protests. I’ve been a part of some of those marches and protests myself. If the Armenian diaspora community had stayed silent, none of this would have happened. So yes, it was an achievement. Now that the United States recognizes it, hopefully other countries will too, if only to avoid looking morally inferior compared to the US (a low bar to set). Israel is the next big recognition that needs to happen. But they’re such buddies with the Azeris it probably won’t happen soon. It also involves acknowledging that the Holocaust wasn’t the only genocide ever in all of history, which they are reluctant to do. (Yes I feel justified in that jab.) 

In any case, back when the US senate recognized the Armenian genocide in 2019 Turkey actually did do something like the meme above. “Oh yeah? W-well you genocided the Native Americans, so there!” Once again following that logical fallacy genocide deniers love to use, that before any country recognizes a genocide they should recognize and atone for every single bad thing their own country ever did first, thus conveniently allowing Turkey to be last in line for punishment. It was pretty funny when they tried to do this to Germany in 2016 after they recognized the Armenian genocide, when they have already atoned for their past misdeeds. Thing is though, no one really denies what happened to Native Americans. Even the most psychopathic right-wing American patriots that are proud of the genocide of the Native Americans aren’t denying that it ever happened. To be fair though, I think that if the Native Americans had their own independent country and recognizing the genocide might open the United States to being forced to give land or monetary reparations to them, then you’d start to see the US government denying it. It’s not as if Americans are more righteous than Turks. Americans only don’t deny it because they know no one is going to force them to pay reparations for it. Nationalist Americans and nationalist Turks are very similar. Just as one could argue that the Armenian genocide is actually still ongoing (because genocide is more than just mass killings, but also denial, cultural erasure, loss of language, forced integration, forced relocation, causing emigration via deliberate economic pressure and threats of invasion, etc.), the genocide of the Native Americans is also ongoing for mostly the same reasons. The US has the KKK, Turkey has the Grey Wolves. It’s all the same. So if anything, my only problem with the above meme is that it makes America look more morally superior to Turkey than they actually are. 

This meme came from the ArMEMEia subreddit. 

Saying the quiet part out loud.

Here’s a sign that really makes my blood boil. Basically, it is saying that by subjecting children to verbal abuse you are breaking them down so that they will accept verbal abuse from employers later in life, and we should all be okay with this because “it’s life, get over it”. I certainly wouldn’t allow my kid to be coached by someone with a sign like that. First of all, and I may have stated this on other blogs, I hate the attitude of “that’s just life, that’s just the way things are and always will be, etc.” It’s more than a pet peeve. It’s so defeatist. That very attitude is the reason things never change or get better. Sort of like how the reason third parties never win elections in the US is because people are convinced they’ll never win so they don’t vote for them. A self-fulfilling prophecy. What would happen if everyone voted for the Green party? We’ll never know because of this attitude. So we’re stuck with the lesser of two evils. How convenient for the wealthy overlords, who foster this attitude deliberately. It’s a generational thing too. You usually hear this kind of sentiment from older people who have had all their dreams and aspirations beaten out of them over the years and given up hope, while younger people are more open-minded. And do I even have to say why I hate “get over it” just by itself too? It’s a sentiment that dismisses trauma and mental illness as something you can just choose to turn off and decide not to let affect you. Together, “it’s life, get over it” is the quintessential American mentality. That of victim blaming, gaslighting and the protestant work ethic.

Ah but this sign exposes something else. It outright admits that the purpose of school sports, and school in general, is not to teach, but to  emotionally break children down and produce obedient wage slaves, who will never question authority, accept the mere breadcrumbs they’re paid, and tolerate any and all verbal abuse thrown at them by employers, because “it’s life, get over it”. It exists to stamp out any rebelliousness, to stifle creativity, to produce “human capital stock” that will never stand up for themselves. Mere cattle. Submissive doormats. I wish I would have realized this back when I was in school. Of course, it didn’t fully work on me because I am somewhat unemployable myself, as an artist and writer with a Creative Writing degree who is incapable of getting “over it”. But I still have a hard time being assertive and standing up for myself, because I went through this kind of abusive brainwashing in school. It’s a lot to unlearn.

Anyway, the sign brought to my mind once again the movie They Live, which I talked about in the last Doom Scroll. So I made my own version:

The original image I found somewhere on Facebook, but the meme here is OC. 

Digital Art leads to oblivion 

Now here’s an asinine post with enough wrong with it to write an essay about. I have been working on a webcomic myself, using of course digital art (shameless plug). That shit ain’t easy. It’s not just pressing a button that says “create art” and you’re done. It does however enable me to use colors and effects that if I were to try to do it traditionally would cost me hundreds of dollars in art supplies. The ease of correcting mistakes also allows me to push my art further and improve. It’s far beyond anything I used to do in sketchbooks with colored pencils. It’s just an improvement over traditional art. This post is like bashing writers who type on computers and saying “Pick up a quill and dip it in ink. Don’t you want to be Shakespeare?” You want to talk about dumb, how about not knowing the difference between “you’re” and “your”? Ah but yes, going after someone’s atrocious grammar isn’t really a counter to their argument, is it? So let’s properly debunk it.

Anyway, do I want to be “Van Gooh”? Assuming this person means Vincent van Gogh, no I don’t think I want to cut part of my ear off and die penniless and not have my art admired until after I’m dead. I’m not very concerned about whether I will be famous after my death because I won’t be around to enjoy any of it, quite simply. You can try to postpone it, but one day everyone will be forgotten. No matter how famous they were. I did a whole blog on this subject last year, about coming to terms with my eventual oblivion. Even if I were to do physical paintings instead, how likely is it these days to get famous doing that? In fact I have done physical paintings before, and whenever I tried to sell them no one bought them. You’re more likely to win the lottery ten times in a row than become a famous painter. I can’t name a single painter alive who is a household name like Van Gogh. It just doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Our society doesn’t value artists. It’s not a guarantee to being remembered either. How many countless artists were there 100 years ago that have no surviving paintings and no one remembers today? This person seems to think everyone who paints something becomes famous or remembered. Yeah I guess I should handwrite a fan fiction because “Don’t you want to be Shakespeare?” Again, it’s ridiculous.

And does this person not realize it’s possible to print out your digital art? Yeah, printers exist. I plan on doing that with my comics. Even if it doesn’t get properly published, I can still go to FedEx or somewhere and get it printed and bound as a book just for me to have, or I can make posters for single pictures and have them framed, so when a solar flare or a nuclear war eventually knocks out the internet forever and society crumbles I’ll still have it. It would be just as good as a physical painting. The ability to print out digital art is the biggest reason this person’s argument has absolutely no merit. What an apoosh. And do you really think that if something as huge as the internet disappearing happens people are going to be around admiring artists afterwards? Yeah, maybe your painting will be admired by some post-apocalyptic scavengers raiding the ruins of your house for supplies.

Found this screenshot on What If Phones but Too Much. Rest assured I sure didn’t get it off Twitter myself, I’ve been avoiding that toxic cesspool.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed doom scrolling with me. Join me again next month. You’ve reached the bottom of the newsfeed now.