People Are All Crazy! Then What?

Had a conversation today that put me in mind of this post I wrote.  Like in that one, this one has to contain ableist language, but hopefully not be seen as an endorsement of such, or an invitation to do that in my comment section.  In fact, read that post first, because I don’t wanna repeat the same junk.  Long story short, what if the things we rate as cognitive deficits and malfunctions are vastly vastly more commonplace than we assume?  What if, as an emotionally stable person without any major risk of delusions, you were in a minority?  Can we sane few right the world gone mad?  Can we steer this ship of fools unto the safe harbor of sanity?

Nope.  There are no cures for most of what can ail a mind, just a life of care and carefulness.  Assuming we are even fortunate enough to know how bonkers we are.  A lot of people who are walking around assuming they are fairly normal or similar to others, not susceptible to delusions, are one weird day away from joining a cult and giving their lives over to it.  One moment away from being told “the truth” on a facebook post and forever thinking something that would make a gullible child look twice.

Atrocity Guide on yewchoob has a video about a cult that includes interviews with an ex-member who got out and is doing well.  Nice.  But what happened?  At a seminar the cult leader gave, he saw a golden light radiating from the man.  The deeper he got into it, the more impossible things he bore witness to.  And yet, on the other side, he realized those were all hallucinations, provoked through the power of suggestion.  Hearing this sensible guy say these things, you have to wonder, could it happen to me?

If it’s never happened to you before, well, probably not.  I think some people just have wild imaginations, or are more prone to influence.  But who knows?  Also, as you age, who is to say how your faculties might change?  As an atheistical type, formerly of the fiery brand, I used to imagine we could eliminate magical thinking from the world by getting everybody hip to philosophical materialism.  The holes in the logic of religion are trivially easy to point out, to talk under the table.

But nobody is impervious to bullshit, and it’s so pervasive in the world that it deforms the perception of reality on an everyday basis for vast swathes of humanity.  They’ll never buy reality because the fantasy everybody around them was taught every day forever just feels more correct, in their hearts.  Words to the contrary, they just sound like silly noises.  Maybe they don’t have the exact words to argue against you in the moment, but they’re sure somebody smarter in the faith, some preacher would be able to get you to see the light.  Because they have the same point of view as I do, at the end of the day.  Their truth is so obviously self-evident, it doesn’t need a rationale.  You don’t see me doing atheist apologetics much.  We all know what’s what, right?

The misguided person I spoke with today, she felt mighty foolish and didn’t know what to do with herself.  Not her fault.  I got the same conclusion here as I did before, but feel it more today than the last time I wrote it.  We need laws against lying.  The ACLU will say no, reaching across the aisle to join hands with political propagandists and corporate salesfuckos, but nay.

We can’t prevent all types of exploitation forever, we can’t protect people from themselves perfectly, but if human life and well-being has any value at all, we, as a society must find a way to reduce the harm caused by dishonest persuasion, better than we do now.  It’s like how we have laws against murder, knowing full well it will still happen at some point, no matter what we do.  But the laws give us a mechanism of enforcement, a disincentive.  Right now, in the USA, you’re literally praised for being the biggest con artist.  It’s fucked up and I hate it.

cosas blasfemiosas

a lil googling shows me this would typically be cosas blasfemias en español, but i gotta be an extrañero in meiner eigener way.

this post will be written in a shorthand that i understand, but you may not.  it is for my own reference.

INSPIRY – Jupiter Ascending Blood Meridian Doowutchyalike Dune Heavenly Creatures IDK

________INICIO__________________DUO__________________TRISTE
____pope takes a nap___________who is she?_____________all is readied
_________bailar_______________les miserables________ich will kein engel sein
____josie war n peace__________freedom in exile___________punchin holes
______vatican hustle________directives and expletives_____prelude to starcrash
_____angels deserve___________pinochet’d ches________what god just did to us
_______creperie______________trouble in paradise__________in da cloughb
____voitures des anges___________get broke________________dad killlah
_____celestial bodies___________a crone alone______________rent is theft
______haunted sky____________psychic damage___________you’re nicked
______tower descent____________oubliette’d_____________commies hate you
______sensei sez______________out or in? sleep__________doctor thorazine
______taking over_____________uncounted sheep___________walmart sux
__but what does it mean?_____who let the dogs out?_________da crone fades
______the wall of ice____________alright it’s on___________commies makeup
__the flesh corrupts – la mujer_____rêve d’ange_____________doctor crepes
_____que es verdad?____________escapade_______________cuckoo flew
______sisters sisters___________an epic poem____________back in the vatican
_____________________________ladies’ night____________happy happy joy joy

you can easily enough guess what this is, but nuh sperlers, don’t think about it too hard.

Did We Not Link the Podcast?

Did we forget to promote the Podish Sortacast we did on plagiarism this morning?  Whoops here it is…  Like a joker, this link goes to the start of my poem in the video, not to the beginning of the video, so if you wanna watch us mumble and bumble from the beginning, scroll back. EDIT – maybe that didn’t work.  I’m too tired to figure it out.  It’s at, like, 56:25.

Todd in the Shadows

You might have recently become aware of Todd in the Shadows as the guy who compiled James Somerton’s lies, whacking him with a steel chair after HBomberguy body slammed him from low earth orbit with the plagiarism exposé.  Todd is usually a music reviewer, with popular video series such as Train Wreckords and One Hit Wonderland.  My bf told me Todd’s Somerton video was among his most popular, which got me asking about where his other videos ranked.  I found out this one never even hit a million views, and was scandalized.

Behold, the best Todd in the Shadows video ever:

The Blade of Lord Shiva

content warnings: ultragore, violence against women

Dreamed I was a South Asian teenager who was the only boy on a co-ed lacrosse team.  One of the girls was sick and had to sit out the game, so the others were all pissed off or sad, anticipating a big loss.  I was like, what’s the big deal?  Play just to play or go home.  They disagreed and my subconscious chauvinisms said, “girls are all the same. gotta have it all.”

The dream time skipped to the aftermath of the game.  At that point I was no longer the boy – it was third person – and the team’s mothers were presenting them with gifts.  They had lost; call ’em prizes for worst place.  “Lori I bestow upon you this shovel, that you may dig your own grave.”

When the line got to the boy, he was blood-flecked and all pumped up, like he has just defeated some guys in hand-to-hand combat, and was ready for more.  The dream’s camera eye was over mom’s shoulder, as she handed him a machete, like a princess bestowing a sword upon a knight.

“For great victory in battle I bestow upon you the blade of Lord Shiva.”  The boy roared in triumph.  The camera moved to where we could see mom’s face, and it was a flat plane of glistening bone and bloody meat.  The front few inches of her head had been cut off.

I feel like the story implied by the time skip was of a lacrosse match turned into a brutal fight, during which boy’s mom was mutilated.  The game was lost but the fight was won by the co-ed losers.  Anyway, yikes.

People Are All Idiots! Then What?

Gonna use ableist language in this post, obviously, but not as an endorsement, also obviously – I hope.  A common belief of misanthropes in all walks of life is that they are the lone sane or intelligent person in a world gone mad or gone stupid.  You get that a lot in comments on FtB.  Observe my comment policy in the sidebar before you bring that here, please.  I just wanted to get out an idea that’s been occurring to me a lot lately.  I’ve been running into the cognitive deficits of others pretty often, and the big plagiarism video focused a lot on the question of “why plagiarize?”  I feel these things are related.

When I say I’ve been running into the cognitive deficits of others, you might reasonably infer that I think of myself as superior to those people in intellect and worth – that I am being ableist.  But I believe you can acknowledge that somebody has a deficit in a non-ableist way, for example, when developing policies to allow the cognitively impaired full access to a good life.  It’s what you do with the observation of that fact that matters.  Do I think people are less valuable than I am because they would do worse on standardized tests?  Worse at math, reading comprehension, elementary logic?  No.

Do I think I am the end-all be-all of genius?  Fuck no, I feel the limits of my own ability to think every fucking day at my job.  It sucks.  It sucks worse for the people I deal with, and I feel bad for them.  My job is, in part, trying to explain information that makes me feel feeble-minded to people who find that information fully paralyzing.

The picture I’m starting to get, the half-baked thesis I’m dropping here, is that huge swathes of humanity are much less intelligent than society expects them to be.  We expect certain basic abilities in modern life – attention span, reading comprehension, math, awareness of cultural concepts and trivia, wit, spelling and grammar, whatever.  You might see people being slack about some of these and scoff, say there is no standard, but that’s a facile way of looking at shit.  Witness the way people get dogpiled for embarrassing themselves on social media.  These expectations are unevenly enforced, but they do exist.

(Quick aside on race and class:  I’ve talked to an upper middle class white person who was hatefully resistant to understanding the most basic aspects of the laws and policies they were dealing with, and a user of thick AAVE with multiple children dependent on social benefits -your “welfare mom”- who effortlessly intuited subtleties of the even worse laws and policies they were being subjected to.  You can’t judge cognitive ability from how educated a person sounds.)

This situation has not resulted in people rising to those standards, because they fucking can’t.  The actual result of those standards is a lot of fakery.  People learn how to pretend they’re more capable than they are.  Some buy their own act and get overconfident, but most live in terror of being discovered.  It’s not always imposter syndrome, because – if I’m right – the average person is genuinely not as cognitively capable as we expect them to be.  This is not unlike the way we expect everybody to be more slim and physically adroit than most people are capable of being.  We’re all doing our best to not get attacked for our deficits, and if I’m right, huge numbers of people passing as able right now are actually mentally deficient by mainstream standards.  They’re suffering for it.

The shittier skeptics will just mock the gullible.  The more idealistic skeptics might see this issue and think, well, we’ll just help enlighten them.  They’re right that nobody deserves to be gulled, but they’re wrong to think it’s possible for most people to reach a point of skeptical competence that will prevent it.  We’d do better to push for laws and social mores that protect people from deception.

If you see somebody struggling with some cognitive task, cut them some slack.  You’ve surely struggled with thinking at some point in your own life, or will in the future, should you experience senescence.  Don’t call attention to it, just help them get past the situation discreetly and move on.  That’s all I have for now.  I don’t believe education and outreach is useless, but it could be useful to get a more realistic view of its limitations.

The Bacchanal

no idea what to say about these, how to explain how i arrived at them.  i just think, this might be the first time i’ve created AI images of a scene i want to be a part of, haha…

Glitchcore AI Art

My dude and I were making some AI images, and while I’ve been doing more sensible things like the image on the left, he’s been doing glitchy weirdness like the image on the right.  The one on the left is in Midjourney’s 5.2 engine, the one on the right is from a version created by and for Asian countries called Niji.  I may have some terms wrong in all that.

I tried mashing them up by using the images themselves as prompts.  Here’s just the images, in original flavor midjourney:

Here’s the same mashup, but also using the text prompt he used to get his original image set, “neon pixel art cover, in the style of horror manga, webcam photography, psychedelic manga, trick of the eye paintings, ascii art, disfigured forms”:

Here’s me switching from midj to niji, with just the images as prompt:

Then in niji with the text prompt included…

I think the winner is the last one, on the right.  The one on the left has the head duplication problem from early midjourney outputs, like a few versions back.  Kinda fun if you don’t recognize that, though.  Nonetheless, cannot hold a candle to “lascivious psychic ghoul temporarily doffs the skull mask to use third eye on you.”

 

Idea for Some Content

During the October FtB Poddish Sortacast, I told a story off the cuff with nothing but a slim outline (and some personal memories) to guide me.  I feel like I did a pretty good job at it, and I enjoyed it, which has me wanting to do it again.  Great American Satan, yewchoob content creator.  I know a lot of people want words to put in their ears, while doing mindless tasks like exercise, or while trying to sleep.  Would you like to get rhapsodized by this beast?  Wanna get lulled by the dulcet tones of Satan?

More importantly, would you toss a plinky coin into a patreon for that sort of thing?  I would not have the time to make patreon exclusives happen, it’d just be an incentive for me to carve out the time for this, while I’m still making my living nine-to-fivin’ for The Man.  I promise I wouldn’t spend all day on twitter and stop producing content for years at a time like the usual leftesque yewchoob comedians do.  Pinkie swear.

If I go for it, I’d aim to do two to four videos a month, at the upper end if a story runs over to being more than one video.  Most of the time I’d do short stories like Len Ross, but sometimes I might even serialize something to low novel length.  Don’t know, we’ll see or we won’t.  I would do my best to keep the videos ad-free or at least having no mid-roll ads, assuming google’s evil asses even allow that for less than a jillion dollars a month.  Also, comments will be disabled on yt completely.  I don’t have time to moderate the mass of hate I could attract there.

Crosspost from Tumblr

Gotta let my two followers on tumblr know I keep it real:

AnarchoTumblr Fuck Off

Leftoid tumblr in general has gotten my motherfucking goat so many times, I’m done with it.  Hell, the only reason I have a political tumblr is as a spleendump for shit that comes across my dash I feel obligated to spread.  Honestly, I’d be better off completely unplugged from the political attitude on here.

It’s funny because I know the popular tumblr funnyman types that are pushing radical left positions now were pushing fascist shit as teenagers.  They just grew up and transed up enough to realize gamergate was a mental dead end.  But they still have that 4chan influenced nihilistic fuck-the-world attitude, paired with the snooty holier-than-thou sanctimony of the very liberals they are always shitting on.

I ain’t a political liberal.  A lot of my personal beliefs are radical left, particularly by ameriKKKan standards.  But just because I believe voting dem (when there isn’t a better local alternative) is crucial harm-mitigation and shouldn’t be discouraged, these fuckoes would have you believe people like me are genocide apologist bootlickers.

There are people on this site and especially elsewhere who are either sincerely faithful in the democrats, or just feel like spreading any negativity about them at all will harm their odds at the polls.  I don’t love those positions and I try not to RB that shit, but those people are still doing much less harm to human lives than vote discouragers.

People in gerrymandered-out hell states are making moves right now, making changes that directly save human lives because they don’t buy your shit, or aren’t here to be reading it.  I’m proud of those people, even the ones who are deluded right wing assholes about other positions, because I value the lives they are saving.

The rethuglican party is a murderous death cult and every inch of power you cede to them is lives lost.  Even in red states where “your vote doesn’t count.”  It only doesn’t count until that glorious day when it does, and it’s starting to happen.

VOTE.  Crush that shit.  Smash that motherfucking like button.  After that, be as radical as you wanna be.  I don’t give a shit how many cops or shinzo abes you detonate.  Just vote first.

Right now, it’s like that.  If you discourage voting, choke to death on your own shit.  You’re spending enough time up your ass, it’s right there.  Open up and say glug.

Meanwhile my non-political tumblr is a much better time.
The usual memes, no political crap interspersed through it.  Enjoy.