These Dreams

These dreams go on when I close my eyes, every second of the night I live another life.  No, I’m not gonna embed the Heart video where the camera became allergic to Ann Wilson’s plus loveliness.  But I am going to tell you about my recent dreams, as if that was interesting, haha.

This will be a short one.  I didn’t make an effort to remember the dream well right when I woke up, and it was some time last week I had this?  Anyway, I was an evil clown.  Just for a minute, but that’s kinda weird.  It was one of those dreams that changes perspective, like movies change who they follow in different parts.  So it was basically one of the scenes that follows Jason around while he’s slashin’.

I shot these teenagers in the head with a crappy little revolver, but it got the job done.  One dead, two dead, three, four.  As I was killing these kids, I felt no especial joy or malice or anything.  I had only one thought:  Am I doing this wrong?  I’m supposed to be scaring them first, aren’t I?  I’m doing this wrong.

So now you know what lurks within the heart of the killer clown.  Mild self-reproach.

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Socialize Social Media

Social media is clearly an essential service in modern life.  I was thinking about this a while back, because blogs like ours are just not seen by the masses, and I wanted a solution aside from “link every post from a social media account.”  I couldn’t come up with a single answer that seemed likely to succeed.  It’s the agora, for better or for worse, and nobody wants to lose access to that.

The idea that social media actually is essential has led to the proposal it should be owned and regulated by the government, not by private businesses.  That it should be socialized.  I had hit on this as a solution to the twitpocalypse, but I figured this had been proposed by others, and wikipedia served up an answer to that question.  The article I linked takes the usual pains to be neutral, includes the arguments of detractors, but you can see how flimsy those arguments are.

“It would harm consumers because only the competition of private enterprise drives innovation.”  Essential modern services like internet and phone service are horrible in the USA, carved up into fiefdoms by oligopolies that exploit corporate welfare, extort from customers, and provide the minimum service they can possibly get away with.  The supposed competition doesn’t exist, and government services are capable of innovation.  They do this all the time, usually in incremental ways.

Plus the most popular social media is the most simple fuddy-duddy retrograde one out there – Facebook.  Socializing the service isn’t an all-or-nothing deal.  The boring backbone service for all the oldsters and low-fi people, the one that connects families, helps dying uncles feel less alone, that one should be less innovative!  Facebook changes up its UI all the time to allow more ads and other creepiness, you think 70-year-olds love learning a new interface every three months?  Then all the other social media can stay private.  The most essential and basic version of social media is there to fall back on when businesses fail, all the fun zazzy insta tiktok whatever can continue to benefit from all the supposed magic of capitalist free enterprise.

“It isn’t essential, technically you can live without it.”  Technically you can live without phone service, until you can’t.  If it is the public square, keeping people out who couldn’t afford the internet connection is discrimination.  The conversations we have on social media have toppled governments; indeed they are within spitting distance of toppling the pretense of democracy right here in the USA.  That means access to those conversations is as important to representation as voting itself.

There’s more, but you get the idea.  The reason it has become critical to bring this idea back?  Musk has shown that all you need to violate the privacy of billions of people, to completely fuck up the program, is phat bank.  A decade of people communicating in private with each other, assuming the platform would conduct itself with a bare modicum of ethics, and all it took was one creepy apartheid heir with a few billion in the back pocket to burn that trust to the ground.

Every branch of the USA government including the military has official twitters.  I’m sure they weren’t using the DMs of those branches to send classified info, but it points to how vulnerable these systems are to bad actors.

This got me thinking, the USA has a lot of public services that have been made private.  We let private businesses handle our power, our telecommunications, and so much more – varying from state to state and sometimes city to city.  All of those services are potentially prone to billionaires with napoleon complexes.

What’s to stop Jeff Bezos from buying Verizon and then just shutting it down?  If he wants to burn his cash, he can.  If he decides to buy a major power company, then simply turn it off, he’s within his rights.  Municipalities with private waste disposal, what happens when that company is bought by somebody who just wanted to see your city buried in rats and sewage?

At the very least, come up with a social media platform comparable to Facebook, run by the government.  Zuck Fuckerberg, he can cry about that on his pile of gold bricks.

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What to Say, What to Say

I have a few sticks in my craw lately and don’t know which of them I should post about, or if posting about them would just rile me up worse.

One, Apartheid Beneficiary Musk letting famous transphobic inquisitors look at your DMs.  That put me in mind of the way cisheterofash always accuse LGBT+ people of being pedophiles, and the way actual pedophiles get nothing like this level of persecution from them.  Actual pedophiles are incredibly commonplace.  We all know them, they’re in every community.  They would not be hard to hound in this way, to be exposed and have their privacy invaded, to be threatened from all corners.  And yet, where is that?  Oh yeah, it’s somehow different for right wingers when it’s their dad, their brother, their pastor, their football coach.  Somehow he’s the one who can be saved if you just let him off the hook this one time with a promise to be different and never do that thing again.

Two, given how my boyfriend’s life has been enriched by using AI art, the prevalence of irrational and uninformed luddism in that discourse is especially depressing and infuriating.  On this site, at least, people pride themselves on being skeptical thinkers.  I thought I might leverage that to spread the word about how unfounded the AI hater’s main points are.  But focusing on that at the moment?  I dunno.

What do you like to see me write about?  What’s your preferred GAS content?

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All the Dollars, Genre Edition

Capitalism is about every business needing to maximize profits at all times, at the expense of quality, of careers, of productive businesses themselves, of individual lives, of communities, of art and intellect, of the continued existence of the human species, etc.  I don’t much cotton to it.

Something wiser people than I have remarked on, or expounded at length, is that this has the effect of reducing consumer choice.  That might be small potatoes compared to it reducing the life expectancy of the human race, but it’s not nothing, and it’s what I’m talking about at the moment.  Briefly.  This will be a total driveby.

I’ve been reading Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix, mostly for the pictures.  It’s an art book of schlocky horror book covers, but also a history of the industry, artists, and writers.  Some combination of tax law and corporate greed led to the destruction of the mid-tier book market in the ’90s, and more relevant to my point here, led to trend-chasing and the death of entire genres.

It was never about public desire to actually read this or that.  It was about the money men’s perceived need to put all your money on the winning horse, to hedge no bets.  When Silence of the Lambs blew up, supernatural or scifi horror was chucked in the dustbin of history.  It couldn’t get published without a select few author’s names on it.  It was serial killers or thrillers, for the spooky end of the book rack, or nothing.

I haven’t finished the book yet so I don’t know if it mentions the way book stores don’t even have a horror section now, but they do have a supernatural romance section, boy howdy.  Anyway, all these genres are ridden into the dirt like so many Dr. Strangelove bombs, leaving the public tired and wired.  We still have needs for artistic and intellectual stimulation that are not being met, interests The Man has deemed unprofitable.

And thanks to cultural balkanization driven by social media, it’ll be pretty hard for The Man to keep these gravy trains on track.  Disney’s historically recent media monopolies seemed like they could rule forever, but those profits are sure to get limp over time.  What then?  For us, the consumers of media, we have our rabbit holes, our communities, our own trends that flicker this way and that like cat’s tails.

I don’t know if I have anything to say with all this.  It’s just what was on my mind.  I’m going to self-publish a supernatural horror action-adventure sometime soon-esque, and that would’ve been among the casualties of this mess, once upon a time.  Who’s to say what will happen with it now?

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No Solutions

Content Warnings:  Mental Illness, The Failure of Social Services, Poverty, The Failure of US “Democracy,” Child Abuse, Murder, Paranoia, Doomy Thoughts.  But I’m OK, don’t worry.

People get overwhelmed, look at the whole of everything that’s wrong in the world, or just their lives in particular, and feel hopeless.  Generally, I think that’s depression or some other problem messing with you.  Life can be made bearable or have OK moments for almost anyone.  But I have to admit, sometimes in life there are problems with no solutions.

That’s the kind of shit I deal with at work sometimes.  I got somebody on the phone with paranoia, wanting help in protecting herself from imagined oppressors.  What the fuck is the recommended wisdom for helping people with paranoid delusions?  Do you humor them and act like you’re taking it seriously, but not facilitate any actual pursuit of their claims?  Do you tell them gently that they’re imagining things?  Tell them sternly?

Any action you take will only result in more paranoia, more delusion.  The best case scenario is that they get distracted and forget they talked to you in the first place, but unfortunately a lot of paranoid people have excellent (if warped) memories.

Sometimes at work* I have to tell people that they have no income, have a massive new debt, and are facing months of travail for a mere chance of setting things right.  Basically, “If you don’t have family to lean on, welcome to your new home eating rats in the underpass.  Or go back to work even though you’re disabled and stay doing that until it kills you.”

Technically, this is a problem with a solution:  Overthrow of the US government, or at least a progressive rout of the whole system.  But that magical probably-not-happening future does nothing for people fucked to death by the laws and policies of the here and now.

I wrote my senator about the need for progressive reform and her underlings sent a form response with clear tells that the message was skimmed at best, not really read for understanding.  That senator is literally the perfect person to write about the issue, sitting on a committee deciding the relevant laws.  Too bad, so sad.

Mutual aid is probably the only way the masses will survive late capitalism, but we’ve been systemically divided.  I don’t know the rotating cast of neighbors in my apartment complex and they don’t know me.  We have every reason in the world to regard each other as potential thieves and creeps.  We’re all busting our humps at work too much to do the emotional labor of establishing a community.  Instead we’re fighting over parking spaces, as the jacked up rent has the number of tenants per unit exceeding capacity.  There have been a few murders and attempted murders in my little apartment complex, and it’s not even considered one of the bad ones in my city.

One of those murders may have been the solution to a problem – a child stabbing a (possibly) predatory adult in the household many times.  But you know what happens to that kid next, and it looks like less of a solution in the end.  As common as child abuse is, most likely it was the motive, but I did open the article talking about paranoid delusions, and the murdered person may have been innocent.  Who can say?  As the meme says, the world is a fuck.

The idea that things can always get worse looks more true every year, with a natural end point for that in human extinction.  With a complex enough system there are thousands of ways for things to go wrong and very very few ways for them to go right.

But, you know, keep taking care of yourselves and each other, and maybe this will look less dire on the other side.  And in the meantime, if somebody can eviscerate Matt Walsh and use his entrails to hang JKR from the parapet of her castle, please do.  The sun will come out tomorrow, haha.

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*This is the best job I ever had, in terms of recompense and security, and my only hope of clearing the traps of poverty in what’s left of my life, so changing jobs is not an option at the moment.  How’s your line, lately?

Negative Revelation

People will say they believe in god because of a convincing personal experience – the argument from personal revelation.  Interestingly (to me at least) googling this phrase yields mostly atheists talking about debate, but one highly ranked result is theist-on-theist bloodshed.  Some creep saying why “jesus personally told me it’s cool to be trans” is not legitimate because it’s an argument from personal revelation.

As for me?  I long ago decided logic and reason and debate are not much use against theism, or even advocating atheism.  Motivated reasoning is strong.  Your case can be ironclad and even if the theist is stumped, in that moment, they weren’t convinced in their feelings, which is the only place that ultimately matters.  Time erodes the momentary uncertainty you induced, and within a week they don’t even remember the particulars of what you said.

And even when somebody does say they were convinced by logic, which came first?  The logic or the feeling of the logic’s legitimacy?  There’s a tension in that, and probably more factors that fed into the conversion than the rationale alone.  Not to say you should give that all up forever, just that you understand why it’s not as effective as it should be, if we were purely rational agents.  And more than that, to preface my own personal revelation.

Personal revelation for a theist is a feeling or vision that powerfully convinces them of a god’s reality and effect on their own life.  While as an atheist I would never experience a convincing vision – I’d sooner assume I was having a neurological problem – I can get a powerfully convincing feeling.  If that counts as a personal revelation, then I have absolutely come to atheism by way of personal revelation.

For a lot of years I identified as agnostic, because verifiable knowledge coming from fallible grey matter seems logically impossible to me.  But I had a strong feeling of philosophical materialism, and that feeling alone pushed me away from that shyness.  Yeah, I’m an atheist.  Now the only thing keeping me from saying that with pride is the behavior of famous atheists, haha.

One time when I was homeless child – maybe seven? – my family was temporarily staying in a hotel, and got our hands on some free bibles.  Hey, that’s kind of exciting.  Free stuff.  The thin paper and tiny print was interesting, the bold assertions within more convincing than the mealy-mouthed version that made a pre-school atheist out of me.  So I played at being christian for a few days.  I don’t remember what made that fall away – boredom? – but I do remember it was a thorough rejection in the end.

I’ve always had a strong feeling of the material reality around me, and its indifference to my desires.  Might be why the idea of levitation appeals to me, as a primal emotion that escapes from the otherwise constant feeling of literal gravity.  This feeling has reached peaks, moments of reality so stark and cold that I had no choice but to believe in my heart that god doesn’t exist, that magic doesn’t exist, that humans have no inherent connection that bridges our experience of life – nothing but imagination and the broken working of society.

These are the moments of negative personal revelation, when UnGod came unto me in a cloud of nothing and I received his word and his truth.  I’ve mentioned a few in my blog history, see which ones you remember!  Roughly in order,

One came when I failed to graduate high school, and everyone disappeared into their adult lives, whatever those would be, reminding me that I have no social importance except that which I painstakingly create and maintain.

Several came over the years, whenever the religious tried one-on-one to get me to feel what they feel, in parking lots and bus stops, and almost always in cold dark weather.

One came when I first had major surgery and experienced nonexistence under anesthesia.

One came when Child Protective Services took my first niece from my dad, because the jesus nazis from rural minnesota were more amenable to keeping her dangerous sociopath mom in her life.  That was the most direct confrontation with human evil I ever experienced, and had me dig under my fingernails til they bled.

One came while walking home from work at Pizza Hut, and made a foolish deal with the devil, because the unmagic of the world was so overbearing in that one random moment.

One came when my worst girlfriend ever dumped me and I took it poorly, gradually burning away every romantic instinct I felt until that version of love was fully dead to me.

One came on a vacation I took alone to a cold place in the dead of winter, again well exposed to my complete insignificance.

Loneliness is a recurring theme here.  I wonder that the most religious might be the most socially insulated?  That doesn’t track with the image of the average saint or prophet.  But loneliness, and even sadness, doesn’t count for all of it.  I’ve just had a profoundly, deeply, overpoweringly mundane life.  Not mundane as a synonym for boredom, just for the material, the earthen, the real.  The wildest moments gravity was always with me, telling me what’s up, and more importantly what’s down.

I am an atheist because that’s what my experience of life has told me to be, and nobody was there to give me the cultural static that would drown out or pervert that experience.  Negative revelation.

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The Miracle of Faith

Isn’t it miraculous how we religious types can believe in something that runs counter to everything that makes sense in our experience of life?  Isn’t faith amazing?  Sometimes religious people will marvel aloud at how amazing it is that they can believe in super-ghosts, and it’s usually phrased something like that.  Of course, the atheo-skeptic finds that less beautiful than horrifying, seeing the close kinship between religious persuasion and medical woo, con artistry, and trumpism.

(Sometimes the “miracle of faith” is termed more like “the mystery of faith,” to give it the air of an intellectual enterprise, but also one that defies answer, thus shutting down earnest inquiry.  It’s slightly more humble in its way, even if it’s cheap.)

To which progressive theists would have a reasonable counter argument, lovingly provided by our atheist “thought leaders” and their slide into fascism.  Does atheism really afford any protection at all from faulty reason?  If so, should we fear or revile religious thought?  Aside from the fact that argument just doesn’t feel right to me, I can’t say I’m ready to shoot it down.

The conclusion this dialogue is leading me toward is one of total disillusionment with the powers of the human mind.  Just assume everyone, including yourself, is broke as hell in the headpiece, and the best you can hope to do is paw in the dark for a less-than-harmful consensus with your peers.  This, unfortunately, weakens one’s power of persuasion, as people respond more emotionally to bold and reductive statements than positions couched in caveats, asides, and uncertainty.

I don’t love that.  I’d love to spout Universal Truths like a demagogue and rally the warriors to the cause of righteousness.  Shit just tends to be more complicated than that.

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pro AI lol

I think I’ve made long-winded posts in favor of AI art (not on this blog) that people “liked“ because they didn’t read far enough & assumed I was part of the popular hate train for it.  I’m in favor of AI art, in case you didn’t know.

(Side note:  I may reiterate the “debate” civilly in my comments, but I’ll block you if I’m at all annoyed by how it’s going.  Don’t come with your fingers in your ears, hot to regurgitate the hot takes you’ve ingested elsewhere.)

I don’t see myself using it for much more than a laugh right now (see Spooktober 2022), but if I ever get back into making art in earnest?  I’ll probably use it as a tool.  In a survey on Midjourney 40% of the thousands of people using that AI said they work as or have worked as professional artists.  They’re using it as a tool, like we all did when we all learned Photoshop and whatnot.

Anyway, pro-AI art thought for the day:  I’ve made the case before that opposing AI art can be ableist, because it allows people to create art who would be otherwise unable to do so.  So as I reflect on that tonight, I’m thinking, that just might be the most exciting thing about AI art right now.

A lot of people who use it are either dabbling, or are already artists in their own right by older means.  But some people are approaching this as artists, who have never been able to make art before.  How might their work be different from the rest of us?  What are they going to do with it?  When they’re new, versus when they’re more developed?

Outsider art is a very interesting realm.  The postmodern embrace of it was one of a few inarguably good things to come out of that school of thought.  Ideas from the untrained help keep the world of art fresh and interesting, and balance the elitism inherent to its sadly ever-present class association.

AI art is, in a very abstract way, a descendant of the art of collage, which is a very common form for outsider art to take.  Where my outsiders at?  What have you done with this new tool today?

– ps: enjoy some abject AI foolery

https://64.media.tumblr.com/1cde910a4b1f05e3d41c103fc94166bb/3a511c869db78977-2c/s500x750/99953150fc8518e0555aa584719d3006fd3d5d0c.pnj

 

Tom Hanks Hate Crime

cw: suicide, tasteless behavior, on my part as much as anybody else’s

I kid, that title “Tom Hanks Hate Crime” is sensationalized.  I read a snippet about the steam tunnel kid whose disappearance inspired Mazes & Monsters and the D&D panic in general, and it mentioned that books about the subject came out before the guy was found alive.  So I was picturing this comic scenario where a guy disappears from his college and assumes an identity to get away from it all, then sees Tom Hanks playing him at a local movie theater.  It is to lol.

Unfortunately, the movie came out (on TV, not theaters) a year after he died.  The young fella in question was maybe gay and very troubled.  A failed suicide attempt precipitated his disappearance, a successful one ended his suffering in the sad way.  So basically, Hanks was playing a fictionalized version of a real LGBT youth that committed suicide, tha homophobic bastid.  Again, jk, Philadelphia etc etc.  But it’s more ghoulish than funny, looking at the facts.

The bastid.

–vhs cover for Rona Jaffe's Mazes & Monsters

Imagination Machine Broke

Had a dream that was a mashup of Logan, No Country for Old Men, and Of Mice and Men.  Whatever wasn’t from one of those wasn’t exactly original either.  Younger Josh Brolin and a younger kid were escaped from a home for maladjusted youth where some murders happened.  Who did that?  Seems it was the younger kid and he snapped because he was being molested.  Kid Brolin snaps and ends up killing that kid, but then becomes a serial killer himself, somehow also friends with old version of Professor X from Logan, and using his powers to get away with stuff.  Like, Prof X has the powers but little sense of himself, and Killer Kid Brolin has the force of personality to lean on him, make him do what he wants.  And of course, who /where was I, in all of this?  Living on passive media got a lot of us dreams where we are nobody and nothing, just taking in a universe like watching a tv show.  It’s one of those deals.