It has nothing to do with intelligence, or IQ, or cleverness, or some inherent ‘goodness.’ Everyone is a dangerous fool until someone or something comes along and makes them into something more. And each of us needs the support of the whole to become our best selves. That’s how human society works. We make the next iteration of the larger social organism, and it reflects our choices, good and bad. Anyone who tells you they were just born brilliant or pious or somehow better is full of shit. This notion of the exceptional versus the inadequate individual is dated and erroneous. There’s some wiggle room, for sure, and individual strengths and weaknesses, along with personal will, are not to be underestimated or discarded, but we are all a product of the environment of information and stimuli around us. If it’s a sewer we’re all gonna get covered in shit.
writing
I reported it under the terrorism report heading this morning (as spreading disinformation on behalf of a military campaign that resulted in organized, willful, mass atrocities counts as that in my book, same as spreading ISIS propo…). We’ll see what happens (if anything, at most it will get deactivated and another one, or five, will pop up in its place).
Key takeaways:
1. Congress needs to better regulate online platforms and ensure that they are not recruiting tools for malevolent states. I’ve been watching this play out since 2016. Generally, these kinds of accounts are everywhere. Some of ‘em sleep for years before doing anything. Maybe the specific account within this context is just a confused individual (I doubt it), which is for others to determine, but it’s pretty sus (it hasn’t blocked me, for example, and that would be the first thing a real person would probably do given that I shit up every one of their posts that comes across my dash). This needs to stop, though. There are governments who do nothing but export poison online, poison that results in real destruction and death. Cut the damned internet connections physically if necessary. These monsters use the same social sites as your kids, and some of your kids are hanging on their every word.
2. Companies have to do more, on a policy level and on an enforcement level, to shut these operations down. This is not as big an issue in the minds of many since Joe Joe B became president, because liberals assumed that it was the end of Return of the Jedi and all was well with the universe, but the shenanigans didn’t stop. You’re about to find that out when the next presidential election comes around.
3. This isn’t just about Russians (although the way them people lie makes me wanna drop an asteroid on this whole fucking planet…). A lot of these ops come out of China, the Middle East, AND Anytown USA. There is a lot of overlap and synergy between foreign propo messaging and U.S. political operations. Free speech my ass, organized for-profit propo operations need to be a crime (including above board PR influence ops, yes, because it’s the same damn thing), and operations that are not just political in nature but which are spreading outright lies need to be shut down. Your free speech does not grant you the license to spread vaccine disinfo and get your neighbors killed.
4. You all need to stop being so damned gullible. I love you but you will literally reblog anything shiny. If your friend whispers something into your ear, you will take it as gospel, while at the same time ignoring evidence that’s right in front of your face. That’s just humans, but damned if it isn’t frustrating to watch. Be careful. Sometimes beautiful, intriguing shit is only put there as bait. It’s not your job to be on patrol for propo, but just be aware that not everybody is on socials for the best reasons.
Power is like an ax. It exists as potential for either tool or weapon, and only becomes one or the other when grasped and hefted. Trouble is, you don’t know if the hand is going to cut firewood to keep people warm, or embark on a rampage, until a person holds it for a while. Don’t let the glitz and glamour of all this technology and centuries of pretty words fool you. It is as important now as ever to really know who sits around your campfire with you, especially if you’re planning on getting any rest.
I’m just saying. Somebody gonna have to pay for all this. ^^
You know what I just realized? The time between WWII and my birth was shorter than the time I have been alive. The first implication of this is that I am old. The second is that the twentieth century was a very, very busy time. No wonder we’re all batshit, right? It’s something to wrap your head around, though. Tyler Durden’s middle child of history, in the flesh, I suppose. ^^
I’m just gonna talk like this all the time, now. It’s fun, and you’d be surprised how clearly you can think if you can remove the barriers in your mind and set aside the constraints built into our syntax by a culture of domination and conformity.
It is a concentric circle of control. Oligarchs in the center, ringed by the tribal security state, ringed by the law, ringed by cultural components who support the structure and its narrative, in media and in entertainment. What is not controlled is pressed to the periphery, consumed if useful, eradicated if threatening, discarded if benign. It is the anatomy of the organism of the contemporary state, its imperative is an apolitical instinctual survival and perpetuation of itself, and it is unconcerned with justice. Any progress is performative. Any redress of past wrongs a form of damage control. Its arms and legs are people who behave like machines, running a program given to them since childhood, to serve the greater machine.
The people choose which automobile to purchase and drive, thousands passed in fifteen minutes. Blocky or sleek, sporty or conspicuous pseudo sophistication, the desperate grasp at the appearance of wealth which is, sadly, not representative of the very wealth being pantomimed. The comedy of the intersection, shabbily clad figures moving along abandoned sidewalks like ghosts, doomed to wander the wastes of ever-expanding strip malls and car washes and banks and gas stations and car dealerships and the law offices of cannibalistic salvation in the niche between the cracks of prosperity, residential enclaves like fortresses among the ruins of what was once a forest and made from its sad bones, the tears of the sky washing into the storm drains. The sun sets and the street lights ignite, and signs like dangling lights in the gloom, luring the wanderers to points in the deep darkness, feeding upon what droplets of economic blood they carry, running on deceased mega-fauna, grains of sand in the hourglass that ends the world in fire in but years, and another sleepless night, choose the jesters in the rectangle, or the solemn lyrical ruminations in empty drywall chambers, the autos tucked safely away in their chambers, safer than the once living sleeping rough beneath the gray sky like a blanket against the vacuum of mass delusion, an eye blink in the sad tale of apes whose god gave such a fantastical kingdom as this. America. There are fates worse than living.
It’s not money, or power, or fame, kids. It’s the many long nights when people have questions and the only answers are in the wind, or in yourself.
We don’t fear stormtroopers in this house, we pity them. The poor bastards are clueless, they can’t shoot for shit, and they’re always, always on the losing side.
Insofar as that the Latin is referenced in the original law of extremely untoward utterances of ill repute in excessively large numbers, there is the concept of cornus cobbus, to which there is no exact translation excepting the vague notion that, as was stated by the scholar Scooby the Mage in 14083, ‘when you put the babby in the anus, the babby shall, forthwith, as an eventuality of gravity and God’s law, come hence from the anus.’ It continues, thus: ‘whence the seed shall plant itself by the design of the worm, when spring should arrive, as the rain falls and the sun shines, the seed should thus begin fruiting and the fruiting shall be in the place whence the seed was rested.’ I think what he’s telling us, in more straightforward terms, is that it’s always best to flush it down because you don’t know what the future might bring. Or, it might just mean that religious nuts and oligarchs are all butt babies. There you have it, folks. I don’t make the rules. Abort ignorance, lol. ☺
I mean, let’s be honest, with regard to both domestic affairs or issues abroad, Biden isn’t much of an actual leader. He’s more like an actor playing the role of what people expect a president to look like, but when it comes to substance he’s a very, very weak president, and he seems more concerned with taking care of rich people and staying president than anything else. But, like so many other weak leaders who are decent talkers, he has all the trappings of the office so it’s possible to suspend your disbelief if you haven’t had enough schooling, or if you want to or need to believe badly enough. The fact is democracy is slipping away under his leadership here, and Ukraine is slipping away under his influence abroad. There is no normal to return to, and there never was.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, Star Trek (dunno about ‘Discovery,’ couldn’t sit through ten minutes of that one) is a fantastic series of stories, and it has a lot of important lessons to teach about being human. A lot of what’s left of what I’d consider the ‘good’ inside of me came from that show. Been watching it since I could talk. But you don’t have to look far to see the other lesson it’s trying to teach you, and you don’t even need Q’s character for that.
Look at the Starfleet captains and their relationships with the admiralty and the Federation (even Janeway, and she’s basically on her own in the Delta Quadrant seventy thousand lightyears from Earth). Their entire lives are basically spent breaking the rules that they supposedly deify because the rules are either inadequate, or being used against some person or group in some horrible way. And they’re usually having to break the rules to save the world, more often than not. And this is not the exception, it is the rule.
Hell, look at the Maquis, or Section 31, or the Bajorans, or Sisko’s entire station, or androids, or holograms, or synths, or the Ba’ku… dude you could go on for days, the whole show is practically screaming at you that everything it tells you is a lie and the only way the characters are making it out alive is by constantly lying and breaking every rule that the story holds sacrosanct.
Because the rules aren’t good enough. And I absolutely HATED that once I picked up on it as a younger person. I felt like the writers were somehow betraying me and the show that I loved, because it was such a haven for me psychologically back then. But they weren’t betraying me. They were showing me ‘this is how humans want the world to be’ and then setting that beside the notion of ‘this is how the world actually is and people, even beautiful people with high-minded ideals, are full of shit.’
Because the rules aren’t good enough, and what it comes down to is the quality of the person setting and enforcing the rules, and the why of the situation. The Federation and the admirals make proclamations and set policies, which are almost always wrong, and it comes down to the people who are there to make it work. And the whole damned beautiful disaster of a show is about that tension between what these people are supposed to be doing and what they actually have to do and sometimes how the dissonance between those two things is sort of a never-ending soul crushing weight.
Star Trek isn’t telling us how beautiful it is to be human. Not really. It’s telling us that human civilization is a farce, and probably always will be. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯