Might and Right - An Essay

 On Might vs Right

“Might is Right” is the law that governs the world, whether we like it or not. I’ve often sat and pondered on the many injustices in the world, those suffered by minorities, the poor, victims of genocide. Being of Armenian descent forces one to try to make sense of the cruelty of the world. I think when Azerbaijan conquered the Armenian territory of Artsakh in 2020, it was finally the moment I realized that no higher power is going to step in and establish karma and justice. No one is coming to save you. A lot of people have yet to have this illusion broken for them. You have people across religions and even the political spectrum all operating under this false assumption, that we live in a just world. The fallacy of a “just world” only makes the world worse; under that assumption, one believes that everyone gets what they deserve, and if someone is struggling or being victimized it is strictly their own fault. 

I’ve been on another philosophy kick in an effort to overcome my burnout and mental fatigue, and while I’ll get back into the ancient Egyptian philosophy, I’ve been in the mood for pessimistic German philosophers. Perhaps I will tie this into Egyptian mythology. I came across a passage in Arthur Schopenhauer’s essays on human nature. I’ll link it at the end of this post. 

—

Right in itself is powerless; in nature it is Might that rules. To enlist might on the side of right, so that by means of it right may rule, is the problem of statesmanship. And it is indeed a hard problem, as will be obvious if we remember that almost every human breast is the seat of an egoism which has no limits, and is usually associated with an accumulated store of hatred and malice; so that at the very start feelings of enmity largely prevail over those of friendship.

—

I think it helps to see “Might” and “Right” as two different forces. Right by itself is powerless, it needs Might in order to enforce itself. This, ideally, is the job of a state, or a hierarchical system in general. And as Schopenhauer points out, it’s doomed to fail anyway due to the egoism and malice in the hearts of a typical person. They say power corrupts, but what it really does is reveal who you always were, the parts of one’s personality that they typically repress. Can Might and Right be on the same side? Perhaps at least temporarily. You’re not going to change the world by being passive. This is why things like peaceful, nonviolent protest, or just voting and hoping for the best, never get you far. It’s often little better than leaving an angry or sad reaction on a Facebook post. With no Might to back it up, Right has nothing, it’s just an idea. Add to that the fact that everyone has a slightly different opinion on what is Right. In order for there to be any Might behind it you need enough people to agree on what Right is. People with power, and weapons. 

I’m about to go after a modern “holy cow”, as it were; democracy itself. Whenever anyone criticizes democracy, they are immediately silenced with assumptions. “Oh, would you prefer a dictatorship?” “Oh, where’s your 500-page manifesto describing a better form of government?” I don’t think I need that. I’m not here to suggest a better alternative. I don’t have one. All I need to do is direct your attention to who is in power now. Can you look at the current US president, as well as every other corrupt politician in power right now, and tell me democracy is working as intended? Just like communism, real democracy has never been put into practice in the real world. Just like communism, it relies too much on impossible-to-reach ideals that put way too much faith in humanity. I would posit that the longer a self-professed “democracy” goes on, the more likely its brainwashed denizens will vote in a tyrant. When the people in power own the media, this is even more inevitable. People fear uncertainty, and a tyrant gives them certainty. The moment things get tough, it becomes like two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner, and by that point, the wolves have rigged everything with gerrymandering. 

Democratic kemetics fascinate me. So you believe the Egyptians were correct all along about religion, but had it all wrong when it comes to government, even though they were around for 4,000+ years? There were of course periods of chaos and foreign invasion, but for the most part it was a stable monarchy. I’m not even a big fan of monarchy, honestly. I don’t think being born into a “royal” family should automatically qualify one to be in power. But the Egyptians made it work. And in a moneyless society no less, something modern economists want us to believe is impossible, even though it has appeared several times in human history. It was not a classless utopia of course, and there were still rich and poor, but as far as I know there was no major homeless crisis, they didn’t harm the environment. We can imagine if it had stayed in a vacuum of sorts and away from any foreign invaders it could still be functioning today. Might and Right were perhaps as closely  associated with one another as is possible. Perhaps that is the best we can hope for in this flawed world.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10739/10739-h/10739-h.htm#link2H_4_0004

May Sutekh rise and A𓌜p𓌜e𓌜p𓌜 fall.  𓇼𓀢𓏛𓃪

𓋹֍֎𓋹

~ Siamanto the Foreigner

 𓋷𓅁𓈖𓏏𓍯𓀭𓈖𓐎𓏺𓈉𓏏𓅂𓌙𓀀 

Սիամանթօ Օտարը

Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War

I have somewhat unorthodox opinions on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine for someone from the US, and I felt like just getting them all out. I’m not pro-Putin by any means, but I’m also not pro-NATO either. I do feel for the regular people caught up in the conflict. After having followed a war very intimately only less than two years ago, I have an idea of what they must be going through. And I know even better what it must be like for people in the Ukrainian diaspora watching from afar. With one big difference though; the Armenian diaspora had to suffer alone.  

When the Russia-Ukraine war began, and everyone expressed their outpouring of sympathy for Ukraine, I’ll admit; my gut reaction was one of jealousy. None of this happened during the 2020 invasion of Artsakh by Azerbaijan. No one who wasn’t Armenian was changing their Facebook profile picture to an Armenian flag. No one other than Armenians were donating to Armenian charities. Armenians had to stage a protest in front of the CNN headquarters to even get the news agency to make a passing mention of the war. No one except Armenians cared when the city Stepanakert was shelled for 44 days straight, when videos surfaced of Azeri soldiers beheading Armenian civilians, when the land was burned by illegal white phosphorus. 

Armenia, and Azerbaijan for that matter, are under “Wait, does that country exist?” on the world tragedy map above. Also notice the color difference between Ukraine and Russia on the map. But logically I get why the Artsakh war in 2020 didn’t illicit the same reaction. The Russia-Ukraine war has the potential to go nuclear or start World War 3, it matters more to people than a war between two small countries they can’t find on a map, one of which they probably can’t pronounce. But it just reminds me that most people don’t care about the suffering of others until it has the potential to affect them. The “oh no, gas prices are going to go up” reactions are pretty sickening when people are dying. I try to keep myself informed about the genocides of the Tigray of Ethiopia and the people of Yemen (one which the US is complicit in by the way). But the American media only tells you what they want you to know about, so it is difficult to stay informed about everything. And they’ve been beating the war drums against Russia for a long, long time. Why exactly do they demonize Russia for invading Ukraine when the US invades a country like every other day? They just got done occupying Afghanistan for 20 years. It was bad for Russia to invade, don’t get me wrong, but is it only bad when Russia does it? When is the US going to get sanctioned?

While I do feel that war should never be the answer to a country’s problems, there is a bit more nuance to the war than you might be getting from US media. It’s a continuation of the Russia vs NATO conflict, which should have ended in the 1990s, but didn’t because war is big business. And honestly, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, imagine what the US would do if Mexico and Canada aligned themselves with Russia and started building military bases and placing missiles along the US borders. Maybe all the sudden a Mexican oblast would try to declare independence from Mexico and join the US, for some reason, and a war would start. In fact, another apt comparison is the United States’ treatment of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. This doesn’t absolve Putin of any wrongdoing, but the war didn’t come out of nowhere either. Basically, NATO has blame for it as well. I would even go so far as to say they intentionally provoked Russia. 

In my efforts to be a nonconformist free thinker as always, I’ve had a look at what the Russian media says about it, in an attempt to fully understand the conflict. There’s misinformation coming from both sides of course. The fog of war, they call it. But my mistake during the Artsakh War of 2020 was putting blind trust in the Armenian news media while ignoring Azerbaijan’s media. So it came as a shock when the war ended with a very humiliating defeat because the Armenian news was telling me that Armenia was winning. It turned out Azerbaijan’s media isn’t always lying, and Armenia’s media isn’t always telling the truth. It was a hard pill to swallow. Since this war is less personal to me, it makes it easier for me to try to look at what both sides are saying. This isn’t my first time trying to follow a war through the internet like it is for most other Americans. I think if you are concerned with Ukraine’s people it is actually very dangerous to only listen to one side of the media, to assume your side only ever tells the truth and the enemy’s media is purely propaganda. Because it’s always going to be a mixture of both.

And it’s very interesting how difficult the entire internet is making it to even access Russia’s side. Their news agency RT is being banned everywhere, or at least shadow-banned (for example, following RT on Facebook has been rendered impossible, as even if you do they never show up in your feed), you can’t access their website in the US or Europe, even Reddit’s Russia subreddit has been “quarantined” for allegedly spreading misinformation. They’re protecting us from the big, bad, Russian-state controlled media. As opposed to the American corporate-controlled media, which surely never tells a lie, because when the state controls media in a country it’s evil. As an aside, in America corporations own both the government and the media, so it’s still state-controlled media in a way. Whose lies do you want to follow? Anyway, the corporations of America are united against Russia. It feels like the 1950s again. And it’s alarming not only the level of censorship but how readily everyone accepts this censorship. Why wouldn’t they want the public to have access to this opposing point of view, one has to wonder. What do they want to hide? It’s not a good look for the West. 

Now suddenly every boring white American who wouldn’t have been able to find Ukraine on a map before thinks of themselves as geopolitical experts, and the narrative they believe is that Putin decided to invade Ukraine one day out of the blue because he’s so evil. Well he is evil, but that’s besides the point. This isn’t exactly the same as Germany invading Poland in 1939. NATO is the one trying to expand. Especially irritating is how they act like this is the first war that there’s ever been in Europe in decades, but that’s me being bitter about Artsakh being ignored again. For the record, there’s the ongoing Ethiopian civil war, Israel has been bombing Syria, and a continued war in Yemen. Anyway, someone on the quarantined Russia subreddit posted a timeline of events that led up to the war:

You can fact-check it if you like. But the point is, the conflict didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s been slow-boiling for a long time now. Even if one side is in the right and the other is in the wrong, or if both sides are in the wrong (as is my opinion in this case; I think all the big countries are bad, really), there’s always two sides to a conflict. 

Anyway, I better not share this blog post very widely, as not only would I get dog piled by people who like to argue on the internet, but who knows, I might get the CIA after me. 

 

The Doom Scroll - November 2021

 

Doing another of these again. I didn’t do it last month because my tablet got run over by cars (yes, plural) and by the time I got a replacement I had much bigger fish to fry. 

You might have noticed I changed the name of the blog. I suppose I’m just in a different headspace now than I was when I started the blog. To be a bard in today’s society is to dwell in obscurity unless you’re lucky enough to win the publishing lottery and be chosen by the ruling class if they think they can profit off your work. To create anything is to scream into the abyss. Eventually our voices will be silenced one by one, and eventually we will be forgotten no matter how famous we become. I care not for fame anymore, because I’ve realized this. I’m just going to keep writing and drawing whatever I feel like. The audience for my webcomic is growing, though. Ultimately, the thought of being famous, of being heard by a large number of others, kind of scares me, and yet I keep screaming because I can’t stop. It’s what keeps me alive. 

Anyway, yes, online rubbish from November. I have a nice selection of it to go over this time. 

Black Friday Blackout and Reddit Drama

I made sure not to spend a dime on Black Friday, did you? To not consume is an act of rebellion against our wealthy overlords. I’ve worked through a couple Black Fridays in my day, and they are hellish for people in retail or in call centers. People are forced to work overtime, unable to call in sick without being fired, and trampled over by customers either figuratively or literally. The whole machine would come to a screeching halt if everyone stopped spending money on Black Friday. Not that I hold much hope for enough people participating in Buy Nothing Day for that to happen. Then again, sales were down this year. Maybe it worked? If it turns out to be a trend, maybe. 

The online push for Black Out Black Friday came loudest from Reddit this year. And this sadly came around the same time that the capitalist class discovered the Antiwork subreddit, and moved to extinguish their dangerous ideas, which to be clear aren’t necessarily against all forms of work, just the exploitative kind where you’re giving up years of your life to make someone else richer. Yes, in the midst of the Great Resignation, with more people quitting their crappy jobs than ever, the subreddit hit a million subscribers, and then the media took notice.  Even Goldman Sachs started shaking in their breeches because the subreddit was getting too big. My beloved little club of like-minded individuals who see the truth of the situation of workers in the US was then quickly subverted and compromised. Flooded with posts from suspicious brand new accounts gradually changing the conversation of the subreddit from discussing the reality of the exploitation of the working class, to discussing wage inequality between races and genders, how they quit their jobs, the ethics of tipping waiters, or blaming everyone’s woes on Boomers instead of the rich. Things that either pit the working class against itself or otherwise don’t threaten the system as a whole. It was being brigaded by fake accounts started by corporate shills. The bots haven’t been enough to completely derail the subreddit, but they’re clearly trying. The people who were serious about Antiwork fled and created their own smaller subreddits. The post I’m about to share below might well have been the final nail in the coffin:

When Reddit Inc. posts something like this, it’s over. “Aww see, not all business owners are bad. We got them to listen to us, mission accomplished. Now stop complaining and get back to work.” If anything in this post really happened, it wasn’t in America that’s for sure. But I think it’s fake. “I’ll take ‘Things That Never Happened’ for $500, Alex.” Something similar happened a few months ago when the media discovered the Herman Cain Award subreddit, and it was subsequently forced to block out the names and pictures of idiotic antivaxxers who chronicle their ironic demise to Covid on their public Facebook pages. This practically neutered the subreddit, it’s not nearly as effective anymore if you can’t see the names and faces behind the posts. The Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements took some time for the capitalist class to subvert and extinguish, but they’ve really been on top of nipping the antiwork movement in the bud before it caught on. Probably because that’s an even bigger threat to them.

So yes, back to Black Friday. A new subreddit called Black Friday Blackout was started as kind of a sister subreddit to Antiwork, in hopes of spreading the word to boycott Black Friday. Then the media caught wind of Antiwork. Shortly after, one of the moderators on Antiwork did a post trying to call off the Black Friday Blackout, calling it unrealistic, and instead encouraged only boycotting Amazon and nothing else (which wouldn’t actually hurt them much, since they do Cyber Monday). It was obvious that the mods had either been bribed, threatened, or had guns pointed to their heads. This resulted in a messy divorce between the two subreddits, and a splintering of the community. Now Antiwork has been largely de-fanged. Maybe it’s not completely hopeless, not every post seems to be from a mysterious bot and you still see some traditional antiwork discourse on the subreddit. Even if the mods have sold out or been replaced by corporate shills, it’s not like they can go around deleting posts for no good reason without people getting suspicious. But it’s clear that the subreddit has been compromised. It is now under the microscope and subject to the Psychological Operations of the ruling class. I’m just sad that it got discovered, I miss the days when it was more niche. It definitely changed my perception. But, the fact that the subreddit blew up the way it did means enough people are waking up. It’s bigger than Reddit. Can the idea be subverted forever?

The most depressing job recruitment ad ever.

So you’re 65 years old, you’ve been working since you were about 18, and finally after almost 50 years, you can live your life again as you choose, for the years you have left. But why retire when you could be flipping burgers while being yelled at by customers and managers? All the younger employees got fed up with the abuse and left, but that just spells opportunities for you! You can even relive your youth by getting uncontrollable facial acne! 

Don’t the people in the picture just look like they’re laughing at you? Oh haha, look at that old geezer who needs to go back to flipping burgers for poverty wages to get by, what a loser. Are these just corporate executives dressed in normal people clothes? I can’t imagine reaching old age and being forced to work fast food. It used to be that the elderly lived with their families and were taken care of and treated with respect. Nowadays they’re just thrown to the wolves. They have to keep working until they literally can’t work anymore, at which point they’re thrown into retirement homes that take them for every penny they’re worth, and forgotten. If they don’t end up homeless. Everyone in the US is too individualistic to care. 

Fast food jobs are best done by people who are still in denial that they’re going to die one day and they’re giving up their best years to a greedy CEO. By the time you’re of retirement age it’s a little harder to live in denial about impending death. I know some elderly people get bored after retirement and actually choose to work (likely due to a lifetime of brainwashing and basing their self-worth on their employment status), but you really want to spend the last years of your life where you still have your wits and your motor skills doing this kind of a job? Would anyone ever actually choose that? Not to mention the job is a lot harder if you have arthritis, back pain, a bad hip, etc. Managers don’t let you sit down and rest, and they’re not going to like it if you need a lot of bathroom breaks, as elderly people often do. I remember at the call center I worked at, there was this elderly guy who had to work there for the insurance. He had a weak bladder, and he still got chewed out by his supervisor all the time for taking bathroom breaks too frequently. He shouldn’t have been working, he should have been on disability. It’s like the rich are trying to squeeze every last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, getting as much work out of the poor as they can, even at the end of their lives. How sad that anyone has to do this. If I got to this age and had to work fast food in order to survive, I would probably consider just ending it all on my own terms because by then life’s not going to get any better. At least if you’re doing this kind of job when you’re young there’s still some sort of hope that you’re eventually going to get a better job. By 65 and older it’s a little too late to climb the corporate ladder.

Cartoons then and now

This is at least a couple years old, but it’s been making its rounds on Facebook again. It mocks the homogeneous so-called CalArts style of animation that was popular for most of the 2010s. In some ways I agree with it, but it is being a bit disingenuous and unfair. Firstly, you really can’t use anything by Hanna-Barbara that isn’t 1940s Tom and Jerry as an example of good character design and animation. Only someone with their nostalgia goggles on would forget about the cheap, thick-lined, jerky animation of the dozens of Scooby Doo clones they produced. Animation really reached a nadir in the 1970s, and hasn’t been that bad since. The 1950s through the early 1980s is known as The Dark Age of Animation for a reason. I’m sure none of the cartoons below are quite as bad as that.

But yeah, other than that, the character designs in a lot of modern cartoons might be the same, but character design and animation are two different things. The characters can be much more expressive than this meme suggests. Another thing that was rather new to television animation in the 2010s was the storytelling. American cartoons almost never had ongoing storylines before then. They were always episodic, each episode was standalone so someone who was new to the series could jump right in without missing anything. The most you might see was a two-part episode. Anime always did storylines though, and that’s probably what influenced American animation. The only one out of the new ones I’ve watched is Steven Universe, but that had a very intriguing story that kept me watching the whole series. There were a few standalone episodes, but not many.

I do miss hand drawn animation, and I think it can still do things digital animation cannot. Nothing today quite captures the animation style of the 1930s and 1940s, when the art form was at its peak. But, this meme is cherry-picking. I’d much rather watch Steven Universe than Woody Woodpecker, who I find to be one of the most annoying classic cartoon characters, even if the animation was better (although I don’t think it was, from what I’ve seen it really wasn’t the best of the 1940s cartoons, Universal’s animation really couldn’t hold a candle to Warner Bros., MGM or Disney). That just goes to show, there were crappy cartoons back then too. Every era of animation is a mixed bag. 

Are Right Wing Libertarians even Real?

Oh Chris Farley, how I miss you. Adam Sandler, not so much. Anyway, when I take those political compass tests, I come out as a left libertarian. There’s also left authoritarian (people who believe Stalin did nothing wrong, and would probably call my grandfather’s memoir about his time in the Soviet gulags CIA propaganda), right authoritarian (fascists), and right libertarian (republicans with bongs). But the more I think about it, I don’t think it’s possible to be both conservative and libertarian. Conservatives love authority. The self-professed conservative libertarians say they’re are all about no government, but really they just want to cut out the middleman and be ruled directly by corporations, without the pretenses. They believe in anarcho-capitalism; they want to get rid of government but still keep capitalism. Who needs health regulations and antitrust laws? Why shouldn’t five year olds be sent to work in factories and coal mines?  Let’s just allow all the corporations to merge into one mega conglomerate and declare Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk the overlords of Earth and be done with it. Of course without government who’s going to bail out the corporations with our misappropriated tax money every time they tank the economy? That’s probably the only reason we still have a government at this point. That and paying for the military.

But anyway, wanting to give all the power to the rich and have nothing to regulate them is still authoritarian. In fact it’s even more authoritarian than a traditional dictatorship or a theocracy. These are the type of people who fly both the “Don’t Tread on Me” and the “Blue Lives Matter” flags in the back of their rusty old pickup truck, oblivious to how those two flags actually contradict one another. I’ve seen them compared to indoor house cats; they believe themselves to be independent, but their lives are dependent on systems they don’t know exist. They think they want freedom, but when they escape the house and have to face nature and the elements they don’t know what to do and they starve. They have no idea how horrible it would be if they actually got their way. And in the US the word “libertarian” is always equated to these self-deluding fools. I think it was done on purpose to whitewash actual libertarianism, which is a leftist political position. It’s all about muddying the waters, that’s how the wealthy stay in power. Those political compass tests are bollocks. 

See this? Racist Karen and Facebook Conspiracy Theorist Karen are almost always the same person. What we call conservative libertarianism is really just a different brand of conservative authoritarianism. That’s why the political compass fails, and it was probably invented for the sole purpose of granting legitimacy to this actually nonexistent political ideology. 

The Horrors of Fire Emblem Heroes Addiction 

This blog post is getting too political, let’s talk about video games for a change. In February I started playing a mobile game called Fire Emblem Heroes. It’s the first mobile game I’ve ever really gotten into, since I’m a bit old school and prefer playing video games on the TV with a controller. I’ve been a fan of the Fire Emblem games for more than a decade now. It’s a series of strategy role playing games that play like a more complicated version of chess, or like Dungeons and Dragons but it does all the math for you. In 2017 Nintendo came out with this mobile game, which crosses over all of the Fire Emblem games and lets you collect characters from every game to use as your own little army. It’s very fun, it has a good story, and it’s very addicting. 

The luckiest I’ve ever been on this game. Three 5-stars.

The game is actually free to download and play. But…there’s a catch. You’ll constantly be tempted throughout the game to spend real money, in order to buy “orbs” which you need to summon new characters. Summoning new characters is kind of like playing a slot machine. You spend orbs on each summoning (the first pull is free) and usually get crappy, weak characters but every now and then you get a good one. You can slowly and gradually earn orbs for free by just playing the game and completing different challenges, which is what I do, but spending money to get them would be so much quicker and easier. The lucky pull you see above is incredibly rare, especially for someone like me who never spends any money on it. But then you get people like the unfortunate fool in the first screenshot above who get hopelessly addicted and spend thousands on it. At least they’re helping to pay for the game’s high quality cutscenes and such, which oddly are far superior to the cutscenes in any of the console Fire Emblem games, even the most recent one, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. They’re the people who always beat my ass in the game with their absurdly strong characters that they’ve been building up since the game first came out. Gives me a bit of shadenfreude to read about stuff like this. But at the same time it’s kind of sad too. This is the devious undertone of the game. Sure it’s a fun game, but its purpose is to drain the wallets of suckers. Not to mention what could happen if an impressionable kid who didn’t know any better started playing it and decided to steal mommy’s credit card.

But what a dopamine rush it is when you claim your waifu. Isn’t she beautiful?

By the way, the Fire Emblem fandom is full of a lot of weirdos and pervs that love to drool over fan art, and you’ll see them on full display in the Fire Emblem Heroes Hell Facebook group in the comments. I follow it out of morbid fascination. Yeah, ahem…just research purposes. Hey don’t give me that look, at least I only lurk there and I’m just quietly appreciating the fan art. Some of these people love to openly and publicly announce their weird fetishes. Anyway, be warned if you decide to tread there.

The Rewards of the Veteran

Isn’t severe PTSD, possibly losing limbs, and watching your friends die all worth it if you get a free donut on Veteran’s Day? Poor fools. Veteran’s Day is known as Armistice Day in every other country, marking the end of World War One. But that was too anti-war for America, so they started this propaganda holiday. It’s all about fooling enough people to fight their pointless wars and bully other countries. Don’t you want to be held in as high regard as our veterans? You even get free donuts! If you really want to honor the veterans, you’d be antiwar. But the US pushes this twisted idea that to honor veterans you should be in favor of more wars so that more veterans will be created. It also helps to have a boogeyman to fight, like “terrorists”. I wonder if the Department of Defense (more like Offense) paid for this promotion, just like they pay Hollywood to make pro-war movies. 

Top Five Regrets of the Dying

This is something I think about a lot, if you haven’t noticed. I don’t want to die with regrets. It started when I had a potentially life-threatening condition in 2018, and I didn’t have health insurance at the time, so it could have been a possibility that I would have died. I’ll to ahead and admit it was meatal stenosis. You can look it up. Luckily I was able to get it taken care of in an emergency room (in an incredibly painful manner). Still got the medical debt from the whole thing. Another thing that changed my whole outlook on life was when I started getting bouts of depersonalization and derealization (DPDR), late 2019. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never had it, but you just start becoming hyper-fixated on reality and existence. Like how strange plants are, how weird that the sky is blue, and especially with me, in awe of astronomy and the universe. You start thinking about stuff most people just take for granted. You start feeling like a puppet that’s become self aware and realized it is a puppet. Life is bizarre, and nonsensical. Some people who get DPDR snap. It makes them miserable. They want to be cured and go back to their ignorance. Some people manage it. But I actually kind of like having DPDR. I like being able to think outside the box. Once you have it, it changes you. You’re no longer immersed in reality.  

Anyway, I’m going to go down this list of common regrets of the dying and see how I’m doing.

1. I think I’m doing well in this regard. Especially lately. I’m doing my comic, my blog, I’m writing what I want to write, I no longer care about money or fame. I’m pretty content, all things considered. 

2. This one is important to me. I want to watch my son grow up, I don’t want to miss out on his childhood. And I haven’t, so far. 

3. You know when I look back on my school years, I do wish I’d talked back more and stood up for myself. I already feel this regret. If I could do it all over again I wouldn’t have taken all the shit I took from teachers and bullies back then. I could be doing better at this from now on. I’m rather shy and timid though, so it is difficult.

4. This one has been hard too ever since I moved to Florida. Facebook is pretty much the only way I keep in touch with friends. If I had more money I would be flying back to California for visits more often. This is one I don’t have much control over, sadly. 

5. Thanks, I’m cured! I feel like this one is ableist. When you have actual chronic depression you can’t just decide to be happy. Brain chemistry doesn’t work that way. But just because someone is dying doesn’t mean they’re suddenly all-knowing, I guess. I do my best with what I can. 

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

 

What a terrific month to be a member of the human species, am I right? It’s like with each passing month I feel less and less like a participant in society. Like I view everything from the outside. But am I really above biases and being in an echo chamber? Am I guilty of dismissing information that contradicts my established worldview? I try not to be, but maybe it does happen. Most people would deny this even if they are in an echo chamber. And yet there are times when, for instance, despite knowing on an intellectual level that nation states are nothing but a social construct designed to control people, I am tempted to feel hatred toward Azerbaijan and its people for their acts in last year’s war. It is a shadow that has followed me for a whole year now. Nationalism, as it were. It’s one of the main things still dragging me down, keeping me from being above tribalism. I’ve blogged about this struggle before, and I still stand by what I said back then. But I feel like since the war I’ve gone backwards from the progress I had been making. Well, since I’m already talking about this now, why not dig up an article to commentate on that I saw on Facebook. Let’s get this emotional roller coaster started. It will be therapeutic.

A Grim Anniversary 

And here’s a link to the article.  OC Media is one of the very few mostly neutral media outlets you can find that talks about the Caucasus region, focusing on Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. This article features an opinion from an Azeri and an Armenian on the state of their respective countries a year after the war. I don’t read a lot of articles from the Azeri point of view, so I found it interesting. Is it wrong of me to find schadenfreude in the fact that Azerbaijan’s “victory” has actually made things worse for their country in many ways? Their disabled veterans are being denied benefits for frivolous reasons, the suicide rate for their veterans is up, a culture of violence has taken hold of the country (and yes, it is a pity about the femicide and domestic violence, I certainly don’t like that, no schadenfreude there, but what do they expect these bloodthirsty soldiers who filmed themselves beheading Armenians and posted it on social media to do once they re-entered society being celebrated as “heroes”), the cost of rebuilding the areas of Artsakh that they invaded, ethnically cleansed and destroyed last year with bombs and illegal white phosphorus (it’s only a war crime if you lose, right) is astronomical, and I’m sure destroying Armenian churches, cemeteries and ancient artifacts to erase any evidence that Armenians ever lived there can’t be cheap either. Well boo hoo. If not schadenfreude, then at best I feel indifference. They did it to themselves. Some might use Azerbaijan’s dictatorship as an excuse for all of this, but if they really wanted to they could overthrow their government. Hell, Armenia did it a few years ago. But they don’t want to. Their fascist, genocidal, xenophobic government is a reflection of the majority of the people who live in the country. Just like America deserved Trump. As a society, they are complicit in the crimes their government commits. Sure there are a minority of Azeris who see the bigger picture and aren’t nationalists, and who disagree with their government. Even the ones who are nationalists were fed propaganda from the cradle up and taught to see Armenians as boogeymen, so is it really their fault? People are people, after all, ethnicity and nationality are arbitrary social constructs, countries aren’t real, we’re all just a bunch of monkeys on a floating space rock. But does this change anything? It doesn’t make Armenia and Artsakh’s 3,000+ soldiers and 80 civilians any less dead. Not to mention the 5,000-ish deaths on their side, which I am at best indifferent about. I get that they’re victims of their own repressive regime, used as cannon fodder to protect a politician’s ego. But I stop short at pity. I don’t feel obligated to feel bad for them, any more than an African American would feel bad for dead Confederate soldiers. I’m no Dalai Lama, I guess. 

So you see, I want to rise above nationalism, I don’t want to hate people I have never even met, but this sort of thing just drags me back down. I struggle with it. There’s a dark part of me that wants to hate. There’s a more rational and logical part of me that does not. It’s been a rough one year anniversary of this war, all that negativity is being dredged up again by all the news outlets. If they won’t shut up about it soon I’m going to have to unfollow all the Armenian Facebook pages and YouTube channels again because I really don’t feel like reliving this war for the next month and a half. It will keep me up at night if I let it. I still haven’t rejoined the Armenia subreddit because it’s so relentlessly depressing. I wasn’t even directly affected, but it still weighs heavily on me. There’s no use being depressed over something I can do nothing about. I can only imagine how horrible it must be for people who were directly affected. Do I have sympathy for Azeris grieving over lost loved ones on the anniversary of the war? No. I can confidently say I do not. Best I can muster is indifference. I blame them for any hardships they’ve faced because of this war that their own government started. Maybe I’m a hypocrite, or maybe I’m just not enlightened or compassionate enough. At least I can admit it. And I can try to psychoanalyze the reasons I feel this way.

One last thing from the article; it’s both sad and hilarious that the Azeris have a proverb like “a close neighbor is better than a distant relative”. Because they’re just soooo nice to their neighbors. I wonder when, in the brief history of their artificially-created country that they pretend is ancient, the entirety of which they’ve spent hating Armenians, they had the time to come up with that proverb.

That’s Not How You Spell “Eat”

“Ah yes, Alexandria Ocasia Cortez, the left’s only hope in US politics. Don’t ever criticize her, she may not be perfect but she’s doing her best to push the Dems left. She’s changing the system from the inside. Why does the left always attack its own and self-sabotage? Stop gatekeeping and dismissing every politician that doesn’t pass your unrealistic purity tests. I don’t see you coming up with any better ideas, so if you aren’t either coming up with the actual solution to all of society’s problems or out there attending protests and throwing soup cans at the riot police you’re just a keyboard warrior and shouldn’t be allowed to have political opinions.”

Ahem, anyway, just regurgitating any counterpoints I’ve seen in regards to criticism of this political stunt. What do I think? What’s my useless keyboard warrior opinion that I have while doing nothing to come up with a better option or actively work for change myself? I’m glad no one asked! Well you see, there’s no politician on Earth that I trust. Because if anyone who stood any real chance of making progress and changing the status quo came forth they’d be assassinated long before they got elected into a position of power, like Martin Luther King Jr. for example. Simply put, AOC is where she is because she’s not a real threat to the ruling class.

I see AOC as the “Stone Cold” Steve Austin of politics. In the late 90s Steve Austin’s gimmick in the WWF was as a champion of the working class, a brash antihero going up against the evil boss Vince McMahon and foiling all of his dastardly plans. He satisfied the wish fulfillment we all have of beating up our boss. Why McMahon didn’t just fire Austin, sue him or get him thrown in jail after stunts such as filling McMahon’s car up with cement and spraying his whole family down with beer through a pressure washer hose was never really adequately explained. Realistically I don’t think even WWF’s rating war with WCW was important enough to keep someone who’s physically harmed you and destroyed your property employed in your company. I suppose there were one or two times Vince actually did fire Austin, but it never stuck, he was always back the very next week. But this “sticking it to the man” was all on television. Austin was still getting his paycheck from the same billionaire he claimed to oppose onscreen. Everyone was buddies backstage. He was never an actual threat to the WWF, in fact he was their biggest asset at the time. The fans were meant to see him as one of them, when he was just another highly paid performer.

Politics is just like pro wrestling. It’s all a show. But far too many people buy into political kayfabe, while wrestling’s scripted nature is common knowledge now. Thinking AOC is on your side is like thinking a Hooters waitress really finds you attractive. She’s no more “one of us” than Steve Austin was. She answers to the same puppet masters as every other politician in the US. “Tax the rich”. How wimpy. What a slap on the wrist. Taxing the rich isn’t enough to solve class inequality and rampant climate catastrophe. The rich always find tax loopholes. And 90 percent of taxes go towards building tanks and bombs and militarizing the police force anyway. This hollow publicity stunt has no more meaning than Steve Austin telling his adoring fans to give him a “Hell yeah”. It’s showboating. It’s performative. Entertainment Tonight wouldn’t be talking about it if it were an actual threat to the ruling class. She’s one of them. You’re either capitalist or anticapitalist, and if you’re capitalist, as she is, you’re not the left. No matter how much you claim you want to “reform” capitalism. The Democrats aren’t the left. They are how the ruling class keeps the left contained. They are manufactured opposition, in charge of keeping the masses from rioting.

Do I have any better ideas? On the internet you’re required to come up with a better idea if you’re going to criticize anything. You’re not allowed just complain and offer no alternative. (And that’s why I write this blog series instead of getting into internet arguments!) Of course, this is just a silencing tactic for someone who has no real counter argument. It’s just like when a conservative tells a liberal to leave the country if they don’t like it. But let’s see what I can come up with. I mean, I guess we could all vote for the Green Party and just see what happens. At the very least, if they still lost the ruling class would have to admit that voting doesn’t matter and the system is rigged. If the outrage at this was great enough we could look at dismantling the electoral college and gerrymandering. But noooo, third parties can’t win because no one votes for them, and no one votes for them because they can’t win, because no one votes for them. Circular reasoning. And besides that it’s all their fault when a mainstream candidate loses, apparently. American politics is doomed. There’s no fixing it. You can’t win. The only ways to win are things people will never do because they’ve been conditioned not to. Revolutions and such. It’s like my solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict; there’s a super easy and obvious fix to the problem that no one’s ever going to do.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Don’t you love it when this argument comes up? Checkmate, atheists. Gee, I wonder why for 200 years no scientist ever thought to themselves “huh, you know monkeys still exist, if we evolved why didn’t they?” I guess they think scientists are trying to perpetuate some Satanic hoax. Good thing we have geniuses like Tim Allen to poke holes in their fragile logic in ways surely no one else has ever done. Following this “logic”, you might say “If English is a Germanic language why do people still speak German?” Or how about “If rock music has its roots in jazz why are there still jazz bands?” Turning it on Christians themselves, “If Christianity originated from Judaism why are there still Jews?” Your misunderstanding of science isn’t a valid argument against it. My other favorite non-argument is “the Theory of Evolution is just a “theory”, dur hur, theories are like guesses right?” Conflating the word “theory” with “hypothesis” isn’t a valid argument either. 

I never really watched Home Improvement, I’m not a very big fan of the Toy Story movies, but it is unfortunate that Tim Allen turned out to be a conservative propagandist dickwad. 

Steve Returns, I Guess

I was already about ten years old when Blue’s Clues first aired, so I never watched it. But it was impossible to avoid the hype when the former host Steve Burns came back to explain why he left the show and give the generation younger than me an encouraging pep talk. I eventually watched the video, and I can see how if you grew up with the show his speech would be touching. I got a similar feeling when I watched Mr. Roger’s final message. It’s like finally hearing back from an old elementary school teacher, a message from an old friend who you haven’t seen since 3rd grade or maybe even a grandparent who died when you were young. So I get it, even if Steve’s speech really didn’t move me much.

I did watch Nick Jr. in my early childhood, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, before Blue’s Clues. We had Eureeka’s Castle, the Littl’ Bits and Maya the Bee, but you know who my hero was at that time? David the Gnome. Is he ever going to come back with an encouraging pep talk? No, because he died in the last episode. And it was a very blatant, unambiguous death; he didn’t hop on a bus and disappear like your Steve did, kiddies, he journeyed with his wife to a mountaintop and purposely died because it was his time and that’s what gnomes do. It was almost like he and his wife had a suicide pact and wanted to die together before they got too decrepit, and neither would have to live without the other if one of them died first. You lucky mid-90s toddlers. You don’t know what it is to grieve at such a young age. Here’s the episode if you feel like having a cry.

Anyway, here’s another funny meme I found based on the whole event. Ha, I remember wanting to watch Child’s Play as a kid but my mother wisely didn’t let me. 

Is the Meaning of Life Work?

Let’s unpack this Orwellian dystopian message. Now work in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. Work could be raising a child, work could be doing art, or writing stories, it could be household chores, planting and growing your own food, hunting and fishing, hell even playing a video game is a type of voluntary work if it’s difficult. Work can even be fun in that case. So yes, humans like to work, they like challenges and working toward goals, and life wouldn’t have meaning or purpose if all you did was stare at the wall all day (although there is something to be said for taking the time to get off the internet, drop every other distraction, lay down and simply exist with your thoughts every now and then, something a lot of people are afraid of doing). But how about when you’re working for someone else, to make their lives easier, to help pay for a CEO’s yacht while you’re compensated with bread crumbs, commuting to work for an hour, working from 9-5, wasting your limited time on Earth staring at a computer screen in a cubicle 40 hours a week while being constantly yelled at and disrespected by both customers and management, and micromanaged by supervisors breathing down your neck and getting on your case for taking too many bathroom breaks, until you’re too old and worn down to be of any use to them anymore, and the only alternative to this torment is loss of healthcare and income, potentially ending up starved and homeless? 

This is a perversion of work. It’s not the same thing that work was before the Industrial Revolution. And these are the kinds of jobs the vast majority of Americans have. Work can be fulfilling when it’s something you do because you want to do it. That’s not most jobs these days. These days most work is based on coercion and exploitation. They threaten workers with it often, but they would have already replaced the working class with robots by now if the point wasn’t social control. They’ve tied healthcare to employment, they’ve taken away the ability for most people to grow or hunt for their own food so that we are dependent on corporations for our food supply, they’ve put in place rent and mortgages and dozens of other bills, they’ve subjected the populace to constant subliminal messaging in the form of advertisements so that they will spend their money on frivolous wants and be forced to work more to afford their needs, all to keep the lower classes too desperate and preoccupied to protest against their tyrannical rule. The Protestant work ethic was created to keep people obedient, to be willingly exploited and to actually be proud of their exploitation. They convinced people that the enemy is not their own oppressors but other workers, illegal immigrants, “lazy” people. And they make sure we don’t think too much about how temporary life is; death is to be hidden and ignored, only something that happens to other people. Think too hard about death and you might not like wasting all of the years of your adult life where you’re still able-bodied working for a greedy corporation. It’s the biggest scam ever perpetrated. And even once you’re aware of the scam, you can’t exactly opt out of it because of the sheer amount of people who are unaware. 

So yes, the statement is technically true, depending on how you define “work”. I’m not opposed to work in general, but I am opposed to work as defined by modern American culture, and as likely defined by whoever put that statement up on the wall of the workplace. And that’s pretty much the opinion on the antiwork subreddit where this screenshot comes from. It was there that I was exposed to the works of David Graeber, which woke me up to a lot of this. 

Uh Oh, the Antivaxxers are onto us!

Bahahaha! This gave me a good laugh when I read it. Someone give this person a gold medal in mental gymnastics. Looks like maybe Breitbart is worried that their readership is dying off. So the left is using reverse psychology to get the right to kill themselves off. Genius. Now I don’t know what’s more wrong in this post; the fact that he thinks the left has anything to do with drone strikes, that the left is “fascist”, or that the left is in any way organized! I occasionally lurk around on the Herman Cain Award subreddit and read about all the dumb Trumpsters who refused to get the vaccine, insisted Covid was a hoax, posted a bunch of stupid antivax memes on their Facebook accounts (and there’s only like 20 antivax memes on the whole internet, it’s always the same ones), and then ended up dying from it. It’s addicting in a weird way. I feel bad for their loved ones, and it is really sad when they realize too late how wrong they were, but a lot of these people picked their literal hill to die on, and go to their death beds still ranting about conspiracy theories and blaming the democrats and the Chinese for their illness. At this point Trumpism is a cult, and not getting the vaccine is drinking the kool-aid. They’re drowning on blood clots with tubes shoved up every single orifice in their body to own the libs. Nothing has made me more relieved that I got vaccinated than reading that subreddit, and learning what it’s really like to die of Covid. Worst shot I’ve ever gotten that I can remember, but so worth it. A lot of people still don’t know what happens to those who die from it. The media isn’t talking about it, it’s all happening behind closed doors, in overcrowded hospitals. Sometimes the people featured on the Herman Cain Awards will be idly posting their conservative bullshit memes on Facebook, and one week later, they’re dead. It happens fast sometimes. Other times it drags on for a month. Or they think they’re getting better and showing improvement, only to die two days later. Scary stuff.

You know what, I demand a reboot of the show The Walking Dead, but in this version there was a vaccine for the zombie virus that conservatives refused to take, so they all became zombies and that’s how the apocalypse happens. It’d be more realistic.