The Doom Scroll - The Worst of Social Media ~ May 2021

 

Another dreary month passes, as humanity edges ever closer to oblivion. I mainly spent May following the ever-more-troubling events in Armenia, while also trying to distract myself from it with literally anything else for the sake of my mental health. That will shine through in this blog entry I’m sure. Don’t play a drinking game and take a sip every time I bring Armenia up, you’re going to get alcohol poisoning. Worrying about big world events while only being able to control the little microcosm of my life. That’s always fun. But again, that’s what Doom Scrolling is all about.

You know, I thought about putting a Table of Contents here because this post is really long (been writing it all month), but that would betray the format. This is supposed to mirror the experience of scrolling through Facebook/Reddit and seeing random stupidity. So just keep scrolling, skip stuff you don’t care about, just like you do on social media.

Anyway, time for some freewrites.

Ad-Blocking on Facebook

To start with, I felt like ranting about a feature of Facebook rather than a specific post. As you doom scroll, you will eventually be bombarded with ads telling you to consume. They listen to your conversations and find out what you buy. Your phone, your smart TV, your “Alexa”, are all spying on you. I have often brought up some product in conversation, or bought something at a grocery store, only to “miraculously” be bombarded by ads for that thing later. Just recently my wife said something like “we need more band-aids”, and lo and behold I started getting ads for them. Go ahead and say “I need more *insert product here*” out loud and see what happens. Surprisingly, everyone has simply come to accept this dystopian, dare I say Orwellian eavesdropping. The right-wing nutjobs who normally rant about government conspiracies never address the most obvious and demonstrably true one right under their noses. To do so would be to critique capitalism, which is their religion (money is their God, not Jesus, as they’d like to think). I think the advertisers probably know that I am a tough nut to crack when it comes to ads. They probably have me on some list of people who are awake to their brainwashing. I am at least aware that they are trying to invade my subconscious with their subliminal messaging, and I actively try to prevent it. I can’t say I am completely immune, maybe I am even less immune than I like to think I am, but I try my best. I hate that I recognize corporate logos better than I recognize varieties of plants and animals, or certain historical events, or world capitals, or even small countries. Without looking it up I would have a hard time placing Kyrgyzstan on a map, but I can tell you that Coca-Cola was founded in 1886 in Atlanta, Georgia, and they used to put cocaine in their drinks, and I don’t even drink the stuff and haven’t for over a decade now. Perhaps that is partly my own fault for not doing the research and memorizing it, but I would argue it is also a fault of the US education system. It’s an embarrassment that so much of my knowledge had to be self taught. The job was already done on me when I was a child, before I knew any better. An entire section of my brain is reserved for corporate brainwashing and I can’t erase it.      

In an effort to avoid advertising I no longer watch cable, with its constant breaks for five minutes of brainwashing in the middle of your show. I mainly watch YouTube and other streaming services, and I allow YouTube to charge my credit card each month so that I can have premium and avoid the ads. It is worth it, to me. I am less concerned with shielding my son from sex, violence and cursing, all things that he is going to encounter eventually anyway, than I am about shielding him from ads; at least as much as is possible in this consumerist society, which is not much. 

I am stuck with Facebook ads, however. The best I can do is hide the ones that get repetitive or that I find especially objectionable. The menu they give you when you do this is the above screenshot. Many of the categories, “knows too much” (they outright admit they’re spying on you there), “repetitive”, “too personal”, are usually equally true. But you can only pick one, so I always choose the one that is the most true. Irrelevant. Because everything is irrelevant in the cosmic sense, really. Humanity itself is irrelevant. Relevance is a manmade concept, and one which mankind does not even qualify as by their own definition. But least of all relevant are ads. 

Sphinx Bizimdir!

“Thə pyramids wərə built by Caucasian Albanians, Sphinx bizimdir!”

- Some Azeri, probably

With how dire things have been lately for Armenians, what else can we do but stupid stuff like this. Yes, that is the president-for-life of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev imposed over the sphinx. That man is probably the person I hate most in the entire world, I have to honestly say. More than anyone who ever personally wronged me. Քաք կեր, բոզի դղա:  I hate looking at his punchable, ugly ass donkey face. A hideous ape in a suit and tie. I want to knock the teeth out of that braying donkey grin of his with a baseball bat wrapped in rusty barbed wire (in Minecraft). They like to caricature Armenians as having big noses (as seen in that disgusting “victory park” they opened in Baku), but look at that ski slope. It’s projection, obviously. Carl Jung would find modern Azerbaijan an interesting case study in psychological projection. “Bizimdir” in their language translates to something like “is ours”, which is something they like to say about Artsakh. The picture mocks the tendency of Azerbaijan to claim the ancient history of Armenia, as well as Iran, as their own. Azerbaijan is an insecure nation, you see, that never existed on a map until 1918, while records of Armenia existing go back to at least 500 BC, specifically an inscription from the records of King Darius of Persia. But in their twisted historiography, Armenia is the country that only sprung up recently, while Azerbaijan is actually ancient, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary by ancient Persian, Greek and Roman sources. Pretty much no historian outside of their own country and Turkey would agree with their version of events, unless they were bribed or something. This may seem humorous, but it’s had dire real world consequences, as it is being used to justify the continued genocide of Armenians, as no doubt their claims that the current territory of Armenia is ancient Azeri land will give them an excuse to sell an invasion to their populace in the future, as soon as they think they can get away with it. Isn’t it great having a neighbor that wants to erase any evidence that you ever existed, and probably would succeed too were it not for the dubious, half-assed protection of Russia? Not that the rest of the world cares. No, but when a very similar conflict happens between Israel and Palestine, that gets their attention. Speaking of that subject:

Serj Tankian’s Take on Palestine

Serj Tankian, lead singer of System of a Down, had the best Armenian leftist take on the Israel/Palestine War/Occupation, and it is basically my take too. I more or less come down on Palestine’s side, but that doesn’t mean their leadership, the Hamas, doesn’t also suck. Neither party is any friend to Armenia. Which, perhaps selfishly, is at the center of my international political opinions (I don’t really root for the United States much if you haven’t noticed). I have personal beef with Israel for supplying Azerbaijan with weapons, knowing full well what they were going to be used for. But paradoxically, Palestine celebrated Armenia’s defeat last year too, despite Azerbaijan being BFFs with their worst enemy. I may have my issues with both governments, but I do feel bad for the regular people caught up in this mess, people just trying to go about their lives until suddenly Israel hurls missiles at them, and if I’m being objective I think Israel is in the wrong, they are the clear aggressors and occupiers, and they’ve created an apartheid state. I firmly believe if a group of people want to be independent from a country they should be. Right to self determination over territorial integrity. Anyway, if anyone asks where I stand on Israel vs Palestine, Serj Tankian’s opinion is more or less my own. 

In fact while we’re on the subject, here’s a take on the subject I saw that gave me food for thought:

Does the metaphor work? I mean I see where this is coming from, although the Romans no longer really exist, they converted to Catholicism and became Italians, and they were never native to England; while Jews have existed basically uninterrupted since ancient times, and did originate from the Levant area. I like the use of the Roman pagan religion as justification. That is a good metaphor. I still don’t think a book of old folk tales gives a country the right to establish itself on an existing country and kick the former inhabitants out. A big reason Israel happened was because of some batshit insane protestant Christians wanting to fulfill the prophecies in Revelations.  

This was the big news story this month, and I am pretty angry that no one other than Armenians gave this much of a shit when Artsakh was similarly attacked last year. Where was the media coverage, the internet outrage, even the memes? And no one cares about the current border crisis either. The Armenians of Artsakh are in a very comparable situation to the Palestinians. It is interesting what makes the news and what doesn’t. I have only just now begun to hear about a civil war in Ethiopia that has been going on since last November and a genocide against the Tigray people there, and not through the mainstream media but through individual Facebook posts from certain groups I’m in, and then looking it up on Wikipedia to see what they were talking about (and it is probably not the most unbiased resource, since they refuse to call it a genocide, but it’s just a general jumping point). An entire genocide that almost no one is talking about. How many others are going on in the world right now that I haven’t even heard about? I can’t help but be reminded of how Armenians are ignored by the mainstream media. I suppose it is because the Islamic world and the political left in the US and Europe sympathizes with Palestine, and that Israel is practically the 51st US state, that they have better PR and the conflict gets more attention than either the Armenians or the Tigray. Who also don’t have any oil. But for some reason you can’t get the American left to care this much about any other foreign conflict.

My solution to the conflict is to just do away with the concept of countries, borders, land ownership, nationalism and separate national identities. It’s all fake made-up bullshit in the end. Meaningless social constructs. Just the rich keeping the poor divided and at each other’s throats rather than theirs. The two-state solution would just lead to something like Armenia and Azerbaijan. Two groups of people who just cannot live together at all, fighting over who was there first, claiming each other’s land and fighting over borders, the stronger country gradually choking the weaker one out until the coast is clear for an invasion, all that fun stuff. The two-state solution is not going to stop the conflict. It is no solution at all. In fact, perhaps the entire concept of nation states just lends itself to conflict and war. That’s why humanity would be better off without it. The only thing that ever stopped the fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia was when the Soviet Union conquered both. Maybe Israel and Palestine need to be taken over by some bigger empire to get them to stop fighting. So there’s either the no-state solution, or just having both states get absorbed into a bigger empire which forces them to get along. Neither of which look like they’re happening any time soon. Humans are such territorial monkeys. I wish I didn’t care as much as I do. Let’s leave these warring little ants for a bit and think about the bigger picture.

The Vastness of the Cosmos

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt in your philosophy.

A pallet cleanser. I also follow the official Facebook page of the Hubble Space Telescope, because I need a break from all the idiocy on this space rock. Perhaps thinking about space makes my problems feel small, and there is comfort in that. This is galaxy cluster ACO S 295 (why don’t astronomers ever give things real names?), with some stars in the foreground and other galaxies in the background. This is why “irrelevant” is the correct choice when you hide a Facebook ad. This is what the universe really looks like. Go ahead, break your mind by attempting to comprehend what’s really in this picture. “Reach inside a raging galaxy and grab a small glittering oddity.” Due to the finite speed of light these are galaxies as they looked hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. An amount of time we can’t comprehend either. What else is happening in the universe, this very instant? How many different worlds are there? How many planets harbor life? Is there something else we cannot comprehend? If something is either alive or not alive, what if there is a third option? Are the very stars alive? Or the galaxies themselves? Or do they exist in that incomprehensible third option? With a universe this vast, do we really even need a multiverse? What are galaxies, really? Are galaxies actually cells in the body of an even grander living beast? There’s no limit to size. Maybe we all have a universe inside each of our cells and molecules. If galaxies are alive, we are all part of that life. Like how the microorganisms in our own bodies are part of a much larger living being, we are like microorganisms living inside something larger. 

Think about what this picture really is. We are the first lifeforms on this planet to peer this far into the universe and see what’s really out there. We’ve only known that other galaxies exist for about a century. There are people alive older than that. Have any other life forms become self aware enough to peer through space and see the other galaxies like this? Are we the only ones seeing this, and wondering what it is? Is anyone looking at our galaxy right now, and seeing it as it looked 100 million years ago? We will likely never see our own galaxy from a distance, because it would take eons to even leave the galaxy.

And they want you to waste your minuscule existence, the tiny fragment of time you get to exist in the universe, working. Telling you that you’re “lazy” if you do not comply. So they pollute the skies with light, blind the populace to what’s really out there. Keep people divided with countless labels like races and nationalities that are ultimately meaningless. Avoid teaching astronomy in schools. When you aren’t working, they lull you into slumber and submission with ads, television, internet. Humanity has established a way of life in which you do not enjoy your life at all. I’m not saying I’m above it all either. I’m online all the time myself. But I am beginning to realize what’s going on. I can’t change the world or how human society works, but I can try to control my own life, at least. 

Ruining Wrestling Pay Per View Titles

I felt like having fun on the Doom Scroll for once. So I grabbed this one off a wrestling meme group I’m in on Facebook. Pro wrestling has always named their pay per views either something catchy, generic, or just bad. These were the ones I thought were the funniest with “in the Ass” added to them.

Royal Rumble in the Ass

Summerslam in the Ass

Backlash in the Ass

Hell in a Cell in the Ass

Vengeance in the Ass

Armageddon in the Ass

The Great American Bash in the Ass

Halloween Havoc in the Ass

Tables, Ladders & Chairs in the Ass

Money in the Bank in the Ass

Fully Loaded in the Ass

One Night Stand in the Ass

Fatal 4-Way in the Ass

Great Balls of Fire in the Ass 

No Way Out in the Ass

No Mercy in the Ass

Anyway, I could go on, those just seemed like the funniest ones. I’ve written about wrestling on this blog from time to time, how I haven’t really watched it consistently since 2007 but kinda miss it, or at least how it used to be. I still have a collection of wrestling VHS and DVDs for when I want a nostalgia dose. Whenever I would order a PPV I would always be sure to record it on a blank tape in order to get my money’s worth, and I still have all those. I feel that since I stopped watching not only has the wrestling gotten worse but even the pay per view titles have gotten worse. When I was watching they had Vengeance, Backlash, Judgment Day, these were all good titles. Now they have stupid crap like Bragging Rights, Money in the Bank, Extreme Rules, Great Balls of Fire. What even is that last one? Some one-time event in 2017 apparently. I can see why they never reused that title again, what a stupid name. 

An Article on “Shrek” That Pissed Off Fans

 

This article got passed around a lot on May 18th, and many fans of the film were hurt by Scott Tobias’ words. I could have commented on people’s shares of it, but I would have been dog-piled for doing so, because I mostly agree with the article. It basically is a buddy comedy with fart jokes, vindictive jabs at Disney, and a pretty cliche “be yourself” moral to the story, albeit delivered in a way that was unusual for animated films at the time. I was fifteen when the movie came out, too old to harbor any nostalgia for it and look back on it with rose-tinted glasses. I get the nostalgia for it, some of my favorite films from my childhood like Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland and Once Upon a Forest have glaring flaws and probably aren’t movies I would like nearly as much if I were seeing them for the first time as an adult. But I was old enough when it came out to see Shrek more objectively than today’s twenty-somethings. 

  

Now Shrek on its own merits may not be the worst film ever made, but the trends it set, fairly novel when it debuted, made animated films insufferable for the next fifteen years or so. Perhaps it can’t be fully blamed for the demise of traditional animation in favor of computer animation, it shares that blame with Disney and Pixar, but it certainly helped drive it into the grave faster. But the worst influences it had were the infestation of inane fart jokes, needless celebrity voice acting and pop culture humor that quickly dates itself, in just about every animated film for the rest of the 2000s, and though the animation industry has recovered some in the last ten years, now that animated films are allowed to have genuine pathos again, its influence is still being felt. Even today you still see the Dreamworks Face on animated movie posters because they think “attitude” sells, largely a legacy of the success of Shrek. I would still say that perhaps a successful anti-Disney movie needed to happen at that moment in animation history. They needed to be taken down a notch. It was the first animated movie to challenge Disney since The Land Before Time in the 1980s. From the late 1980s on Disney dominated the market, and the only remotely successful non-Disney animated films (Ferngully, Anastasia) succeeded by not directly competing with Disney. After Shrek, the playing field opened up, and to this day Disney still doesn’t monopolize animated films like they used to. But the Hollywood movie studios just took all the wrong lessons from Shrek’s success. It succeeded because it was something different, not because of potty humor, celebrities and pop culture references. Ask yourself why Shrek is remembered but Chicken Little is not. In short, movie itself isn’t nearly as bad as the films it would later inspire, but that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it. 

 

If I must watch Shrek though, I prefer Shrek Retold, which is the far superior adaptation. I actually enjoyed that. 

 

“No One Wants To Work Anymore”

“Boo hoo hoo, no one wants to work anymore because unemployment pays more than we do!” Did anyone ever really want to work at a fast food joint? The original “No one wants to work anymore” signs have that “Girls only date jerks and not nice guys like me” energy. Nobody wants to work FOR YOU anymore. But this one’s a parody. The fine print on this sign is everything. This is far from the only parody Help Wanted sign I’ve seen floating around online lately, but it was my favorite one. What a humiliating process applying for jobs is. They want you to beg for jobs no one in their right mind would actually want to do, obviously the only ones who do apply are forced to apply by poverty. Capitalism thrives on desperate poor people. Can you imagine if everyone “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, stopped being lazy and stopped buying lattes and avocado toast”? Who would flip the burgers? Who would work in the Amazon warehouses and piss in bottles? Of course, it’s all just victim blaming, everything depends on how rich or poor your parents were. Without a desperate working class it would all fall apart.

I loathe having to submit a resume and cover letter and then enter all the exact same information again on the application. Wasting hours of your life only to never hear anything back nine times out of ten. And they all want someone who’s twenty years old with 15 years work experience. “Why not show up in person with a hand-written application and shake the boss’ hand?” some old fogeys might say, who haven’t applied for a job since the 1970s. It’s never worked that way in my lifetime. Drug testing is just another way to test your submissiveness, as well as to make sure drug addicts can’t find work and end up in prison. The criminalization of drugs is simply an excuse to arrest people to provide free labor (i.e. slavery) to the capitalist class, as well as to keep as many of the dangerous poor minorities imprisoned and as disenfranchised as they can, to minimize threats to the power structure. The 13th amendment which outlawed slavery left that little escape clause in there, “except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. Better invent more crimes to keep your slaves then. Even after they’ve been released they can’t vote or get anything but the lowest paying jobs (provided they pass the drug screening), keeping them impoverished, and under control. 

But most jobs serve a purpose along those exact lines as well. Read David Graeber’s On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant. David Graeber helped me realize a lot of this. The majority of jobs don’t even need to exist. But they do because it keeps the populace busy and under control. People stuck working 40 hours a week don’t have much time to protest. Make them pay rent and put them in debt and that’s even better. The pandemic is winding down, so the “get back to work you lazy bums” propaganda is in full swing. But people understandably are finding that they prefer being on unemployment rather than subjecting themselves to humiliating jobs that pay little and cost both ones dignity and precious hours of their finite lives. This is dangerous to the capitalist class, as these people do have time to protest. Fast food restaurants are resorting to bribery to get people to apply, but doing everything except actually raising their wages. They’re afraid. I hope people stay on unemployment as long as possible. There needs to be a nice shakeup in this dystopian hellhole. Of course the powers that be are already scrambling to sign in laws that make it near impossible to stay on unemployment. Got to get that human capital (live)stock back to servitude and get back to business as soon as possible, of course.

The solution is replace these jobs with robots and give people Universal Basic Income. But the rich will have to go down kicking and screaming first.

 

European Languages circa 600 AD, Or How to Piss off a Turkish Nationalist in One Easy Step

“This map is liəs sprəad by thə global shaytan Ərməni diaspora lobby!!”       

  - Some Azeri, probably

Well well well. What have we here? European languages circa 600AD. I see Armenian, I see Kione Greek, I see Georgian and Circassian, but my my, where is Turkish? I don’t see i- oh look, there it is, Common Turkic, that dark orange one way up there in the northeast by Oghur and Magyar. How very curious. What’s it doing way up there? I thought the almighty president-for-life of Azerbaijan, Führer Aliyev, said that Armenia was only founded in 1920 or whatever, and that Turks have been in the area since 1,000,000 BC. You mean to say the rest of the world doesn’t teach the same history as Baku State University? 

Sigh, don’t mind me, dwelling on the ancient past is a lot less depressing than dwelling on the present state of Armenia. Instead of going by old Soviet maps to demarcate the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, why not use this map? Just a thought.

Shared on I Fucking Love Maps. I’m sure there were some lovely and civilized discussions in the comments between the Turkic nationalists and everyone else, but I chose not to look at the comments and save myself some brain cells.

So, Let’s See How Ol’ Biden Is Doing This Month...

Well I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you! That the diet-republican candidate who was behind the bill that made it impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans is now doing nothing at all to alleviate them despite promising to. At least the Orange Man is gone and the new president writes nicer tweets, am I right? Now we can all finally stop paying attention to politics and go back to brunch, while nothing fundamentally changes. Now you see, at least Republicans are upfront about being greedy assholes who bend over backwards for the rich. They promise nothing, and they deliver nothing. They’re honest. Evil, but honest. The Democratic Party is like Diet Coke. Masquerading as the healthier choice, but in some ways even worse. The puppet masters put a Democrat in charge when they need to silence dissent from the left while continuing business as usual. 

Recognizing the Armenian genocide last month wasn’t enough to make me like Biden. Besides, he undid that by lifting the sanctions on Azerbaijan and resuming selling weapons to them. In fact I think he only recognized the genocide to distract Armenian-Americans while he aided our enemies. I should have known the other shoe would drop. A brief moment of weakness where my cynicism wavered and I almost thought something good had happened for once. I should know better by now.

As for the student loan thing, my eventual plan is to flee the country to escape the debt. Until I do, I can never own a car or a home without it getting repossessed, and they’d forever be garnishing my paychecks. I’ll never be able to pay it off. They fucked me over for life by getting me to fall for the scam that is college. They think they own my soul. Well fuck that. 

This was shared on the Lost Generation subreddit. 

Another Day, Another Insensitive Tweet

Okay, imagine if you will. In an alternate universe, Twitter and Facebook exist in 2001. September 11th happens as normal, it’s a national tragedy for the US. And on September 12th, let’s say the UK Embassy to the United States tweets out “Look guys, here’s the history of the great British sport, cricket!” Probably wouldn’t go over well, would it? That’s what happens when the US Embassy to Armenia makes this idiotic post on both Twitter and Facebook the day after Azerbaijan infiltrated Armenia’s borders and took six soldiers hostage. Not to mention Artsakh having been ethnically cleansed less than a year ago, and the political turmoil in the months since, which they’ve also never commented on. Oh but please, tell us more about surfing! I mean this is probably pretty normal behavior for the US Embassy of every small country that the US doesn’t care about, but for some reason this time, it pissed everyone off. Even Serj Tankian commented on it (why not just make him Prime Minister of Armenia at this point, he couldn’t do much worse than any other leader the country has had since 1991), calling for the US Ambassador to Armenia to resign and be replaced. Really the only reason the US has an embassy in Armenia is to be a thorn in Russia’s side. They don’t actually give a shit about a little oil-free country like Armenia. I actually visited the US embassy in 2014 during my first trip to Armenia. I was with a class of Armenian students from Fresno State. They took us through a metal detector and I had to leave behind all my coins, my hat and my belt. We had a little tour, of which I don’t remember much because it was rather unremarkable. They took us into a conference room and we were allowed to question the US ambassador. One of my classmates asked why the US didn’t recognize the Armenian genocide, I remember how she skillfully sidestepped the question with some BS about wanting peace between Armenia and its neighbors and open borders with Turkey, never once using the word “genocide”. So this post is completely in-character for the US Embassy. 

Anyway, that was May 2021 on the internet for me. Next month Armenia is having an election, so I’m sure things will go from bad to worse and I will get to lament about that on next month’s Doom Scroll. 

So to the handful of you who read this, I bid you farewell.