The Doom Scroll ~ The Worst of Social Media ~ June 2021

 

Welcome to my consciousness. A window into my mind. Filled with subjects I find important enough to rant about, whether or not it is universally considered important. I know someone reads these things. I write them as if someone reads them. It’s a presentation thing, keeping a stern face in front of the crowd, even though it’s a small crowd. Like how I have three people who subscribe to me on Patreon but I have to write all my posts like I have hundreds of subscribers. It’s the kind of show a third party US presidential candidate puts on, knowing there’s no way in hell they’re going to win the election but keeping their chin up anyway and carrying on as if they do have a chance. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m never going to be some New York Times Bestseller author, just let me have my fun. Let me pretend that more than a handful of people care about what I write and draw. It’s my way of entertaining myself as my consciousness floats in a black abyss, as if the only thing that truly exists. If you’re reading and comprehending this, gaining meaning from these symbols we call “letters”, at least that disproves solipsism. I exist, so far as I know. This was written by a real person. And you know you exist, if you’re reading this. I guess there’s still no way to prove it to each other. Anyway, I should just settle for having been able to entertain a handful of people. Storytellers were more valued back in the days of hunter gather tribes. We lost our value to society by the time of the Industrial Revolution, if not earlier than that. But in ancient times, fame rarely carried you outside your immediate tribe, village, maybe city. Our jobs were stolen by a small number of celebrities, hand-picked by those in power, who reach millions of people and take our audience. So I guess if you read my stuff, I can consider you a member of my tribe. Without the internet my audience would be even smaller. 

I’ve written much of this post while suffering from kratom withdrawal (which is basically the same as an opiate withdrawal), and I am sure the ensuing rage and delirium will shine through. I’ve had to quit both because of the expense and because I built up such a tolerance to it that it was no longer worth it. 

The Meaning of Life

Would life be any more meaningful without menial, time-wasting jobs? Maybe not, but it would be more enjoyable at least. I think if you’re going to be thrust into this bizarre nonsensical universe trapped in a slowly decaying meat robot without any context or explanation, you might as well enjoy the ride. What’s the point of spending it suffering? What’s the point of spending it in boredom? If you aren’t enjoying yourself, you’re wasting time. Responsibility and priorities come first, of course, but beyond that why not enjoy yourself? As long as you and your loved ones are surviving just fine, and your preferred way to enjoy yourself doesn’t harm yourself or others. 

To an extent I agree with what this post is saying, but I don’t know what they’re expecting life to be like. Life isn’t a movie or a book. We’re never going to get superpowers, that just doesn’t happen, at least in our corner of the universe, as far as we know. The vast majority of us are never going to gain any sort of notoriety, and a hundred years from now we’ll only be remembered as names on a family tree at best, if we’re even that lucky. Not that it will matter much. Life is never going to have an objective meaning. Meaning is something humans made up. It has whatever meaning you think it has. 

Generation Bashing, but Kinda True

Nostalgia is an escape from the horrors of the day. It doesn’t even matter if the movie was any good, a movie of our childhood brings us back to a time before we knew the ghastly truth about the way the world worked. I think if you shield children from the truth of the world they’re going to have a much harder time knowing how to handle it when they do have to face it. Like telling them their pet ran off to the circus instead of saying it was hit by a car. How are they going to be able to process it when they face death down the line? 

Anyway, off-topic I guess. But yeah, that’s why I like so many animated movies that can even be “bad”, or flawed. I miss being ignorant. And that’s why today’s twenty-somethings cling to Shrek even though it’s not a good movie. Or that any nostalgia exists among older people for the mostly crude, poorly-animated and derivative Hannah-Barbera cartoons of the 1960s and 1970s. That doesn’t matter when you’re nostalgic. Because it’s not the movie or book or TV show you actually like and yearn for, but the past itself. The world seemed nicer when you knew less about it. Like I was saying last month. I had a return to the An American Tail series in my twenties, but as the years have gone by I look at it more objectively, without the nostalgia goggles, and strictly speaking only the first movie is really any good, although imperfect. So this was kind of a passing phase for me. Or maybe I’m too cynical now to be unrealistically nostalgic. Too self aware.

The Past is Part of the Present

Everything affects the future in some way. You move a pebble, and it causes a chain reaction that might change the future in five hundred years. Things that happened more than 100 million years ago affect the present. The Butterfly flaps its wings in China and it causes a tornado in Oklahoma. This is why people who try to separate the past from the present and tell you to get over it are wrong. The present is the culmination of every event that has ever transpired since the creation of the Universe. 

Should the Catholic church pay for what they did to Native Americans in boarding schools? Should African Americans get reparations for slavery? Should Turkey recognize and pay for the Armenian genocide? Yes. All of the above. These things created the present. They are a part of the present. There’s no time limit. Another example off the top of my head; I know no one’s really going to make them, but the Mongolians should stop idolizing Genghis Khan too. He was a genocidal mass murderer, killed more people than Hitler. And yet they build huge statues of him. Even though it was 800 years ago, it’s condoning, normalizing and whitewashing that behavior. Maybe they don’t need to pay reparations to the descendants of survivors, perhaps, but at least stop worshiping the guy. Needless to say I think all the Confederate statues should be torn down too. The Union was far from perfect but the Confederates were definitely worse.

In some ways the past is the present, and the present is the past. Look up at the night sky. Even the closest star you see is how it looked about four years ago. Many are hundreds of lightyears away. The sun could explode suddenly and we wouldn’t know for eight minutes. It takes time for your eyes to process light and for your brain to unscramble an image. A fraction of a second, yes, but not instantly. If you feel pain it takes a split second for it to register in your brain. We don’t live in the present. We live in the past. There is no present. Or it is impossible for us to observe the actual present, anyway.

Anyway, this map gave me deep thoughts. 

A List of Brags From an Old Person That Claims Old People Don’t Brag

Where is this mythical old person? I worked at a call center, I know they can be rude, entitled assholes who will chew you out because their coupon is expired. It was actually the younger people who generally were more polite and understanding on the phone. They don’t curse? Please. I’ve heard it all. Do they think the word “fuck” was invented by Millennials? Here’s a better question; do they extend this legendary politeness to African Americans, or pretty much anyone of color, or homeless people? Why do you think they ask you what your job is when you first meet? So they can decide how respectful and polite they’re going to be to you. I’m not saying all elderly people are that way, far from it, but the white male conservative American nationalist elderly people this post is specifically talking about definitely are. 

It’s embarrassing that someone could get that old and still believe in utter bollocks like the national anthem. 80 years old and still worshipping the colored sky cloth, hm? How have they not woken up yet? Flags, countries, borders, money, all your dated “values”, it’s all fake. Fake bullcrap to keep you obedient. The puppet masters have you right where they want you. They still watch and believe Fox News. Might as well believe in the Tooth Fairy. They’ve been force-fed corporate imperialist propaganda their whole lives and they’ve never once woken up and realized it’s all bullshit. They’ve had decades upon decades to figure this out and still haven’t questioned it once. They’ve stayed locked up in Plato’s Cave staring at the shadows on the wall their whole lives. Land of the free? Free to be a wage slave or starve to death, and be victim-blamed either way, some free country. Free to die of some preventable disease because you don’t have health insurance. It’s only “free” if you’re born rich. And what makes a rich person more worthy of respect? Because they’ve collected more imaginary numbers by exploiting others? And home of the brave? A country where people stockpile guns and ammo even if they live in the middle of a safe suburban neighborhood? Where they can’t tolerate the idea of someone different from themselves living in the same country, and went down kicking and screaming over the official end of slavery and later segregation (at least on paper)? Cowards. Fear rules this country. Next door neighbors don’t even talk to each other here. Anyway, I guess it’s because their generation didn’t have their dreams and aspirations dashed to utter oblivion the moment they graduated college like the majority of my generation did that they never woke up from their nationalist fever dream. Disillusionment leads to clarity.

And yeah, #3, “peace keeping missions”, a polite way of saying invasions. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. Orwell was right. Or I guess it’s more like Slavery is Freedom in this country. Anyway congratulations for remembering things and stuff. Or just wars, really. You remember people killing each other over stupid made-up abstract concepts, and America bullying smaller countries and stealing their resources. Good for you, that makes you sooo much better than young people. Give yourself a pat on the back. You wanna know what I don’t remember? I don’t remember when a minimum wage job could afford you even a studio apartment. I don’t remember a time before we were on the brink of ecological collapse and mass extinctions. I don’t remember a time when the world didn’t fucking suck.

And one more thing, about #8, what’s with the hat obsession from pretty much everyone born before the 1960s or so? It’s a freaking head covering, why does it matter if I want to wear it indoors? I’ll wear a hat wherever I damn well please. Life’s too short for your idiotic customs and societal norms. Is my hat bothering someone? Is it hurting anybody? Gives me horrible public school flashbacks of having my hat confiscated for no good reason. 

Hey, this game came out in 2003, it’s not old! Oh…wait…

Once you reach your thirties, is there anything more depressing than watching people in their late teens and early twenties get nostalgic over things that came out less than twenty years ago? I guess I must have really pissed off a lot of thirty-somethings when I was nostalgic for the 1990s in my early twenties. It’s only going to get worse over time as I get older. I can only guess what it’s like to witness this phenomenon when you’re 70. I can’t imagine why someone would be nostalgic for the early 2000s, it was an awful time. 9/11, Iraq war and all that. It was a terrible time for movies and music too. That was around when you had to start digging if you wanted good music because the radio was playing crap, and the movies all had terrible CG and cliche plots (now they have decent CG and cliche plots).

The game above is Sonic Heroes, a game I used to have but never beat because it becomes too damned frustrating toward the end, and completing it 100% to see the true ending requires you to be good at this stupid mini-game that I could never beat, where you run through a tunnel collecting balls. I sold it out of spite years ago. It was a crappy game and people only like it if they were under 10 years old when they first played it, out of nostalgia. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only good Sonic game to ever come out after Sonic 3 & Knuckles in 1995 was Sonic Mania, a retro return to form as a 2D Sonic game. And of course some of the fan-made Rom hacks blow both those games out of the water, good as they are. 3D Sonic was a mistake. I tried to like the 3D games for a while, maybe even convinced myself I liked them, but although they might have occasionally had fleeting moments of being fun sometimes, they’re overall not good. They’ve aged worse than the 16-bit Sonic games. And I also hate the Japanese canon that overtook the American canon when Sonic went 3D. It’s Dr. Robotnik, not Dr. Eggman, dammit. That’s a stupid name. I don’t like Amy Rose or Cream the Rabbit or the Chao either. Give me Sally Acorn and Bunnie Rabbot, please. “Okay boomer”, the young Sonic fans will say to me. I wonder if anyone under 30 holds this opinion.

Sonic Heroes doesn’t feel that old of a game, but I guess it’s currently 18 years old. This game is old enough to vote and smoke. I remember when the first Sonic game was 18 years old in 2009, and it seemed retro then. I mean, I don’t think I bought the game right when it came out, it could have been a few years later, so maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel as old to me, but still. I know I ranted at white conservative American elderly males earlier, but I am on my way to being old and curmudgeonly too. I’ve always been kind of curmudgeonly though. See that sad guy in the bottom picture on this meme, that’s me right now weeping over the fact that anyone could be nostalgic for this bad game that feels like it came out five years ago.

The Problem of Gun Violence- A Nuanced Take

They say when you go far enough left you get your guns back. I suppose that’s true. There’s no easy fix for the problem of mass shootings, or shootings in general. To do nothing, as conservatives want to do, is to allow the problem to continue. To ban guns, as many liberals want to do, isn’t really getting to the heart of the problem, and neither is it going to stop people from getting guns illegally, leaving those who cannot get guns through those channels potentially more vulnerable. Many drugs are illegal but that doesn’t stop them from circulating. The true solution is to look at all the underlying issues that lead someone to resort to gun violence. Mass shootings are rare outside the United States, and that is where these issues are at their worst. It’s one of the only wealthy countries without universal healthcare, it’s where the cults of “Rugged Individualism” and toxic masculinity are the strongest, it has perhaps the worst case of reactionary politics, leading to outlandish conspiracy theories. These are all things that prop up those in power. The image above could also have mentioned racism, colonialism, and the toxic work mentality (wherein people are expected to spend all their waking hours working leading to a burnout) as well, but those too have the same root cause. So yes, in my honest opinion, gun control isn’t really going to solve the issue. To use an unfortunate idiom, it would be a bandaid over a bullet wound.

Where I want to Move

I think I’ll end things on a peaceful note. Above is the isolated village of Katnaghpyoor, in the northern Lori region of Armenia. Quite a mouthful, even for me. This is where I want to live; if not this specific village then one like it. No Walmart, no McDonalds, no traffic and pollution, no being bombarded with neon advertisements and billboards everywhere you look, no lawns covered in pesticide and dog piss. Off the grid. As long as I had electricity and an internet connection, I would be good. I wonder if they grow their own food and barter with their neighbors here. Everyone must know each other here. I bet you could buy one of these houses for like $300. I want to move here and just forget the rest of the world exists. 

Anyway, I could have written more, but I ran out of time, July snuck up on me. So enjoy the utter drivel I was able to squeeze out before the month ended, whoever reads these. Next time I won’t be suffering kratom withdrawals.