there'll probably be more, and different

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Okay. A lot of things are weighing on my mind damn heavily lately. For quite some time I have been struggling with my urges to tell that shill yonder to stick it where the sun don’t shine. It is no longer worth it to use up so much time and energy trying to keep his blog running smoothly, keep things from going too far into the awful zone. It was way worth it when I felt it was going to help him make a difference in the too damn fashionable election fraud thing, but he, somewhere along the line, decided to settle in for the long haul instead of go supernova to make it stop, now, and that means he has all the time in the world to keep his own blog rolling along... or find someone who does not mind filling their time herding the scandalized minions while he fills every page with the mob-generating polemics that pass for American culture these days.

Not my bag.

I have news for everyone. The people on the other side—and, clue, there is no other side—are people in the identical sense as those on this side—and, clue, there is no this side—are people. We’re all people.

The critical mass superiority complex battling the right wing echo chamber is every bit as pernicious as those they battle. It’s identical, actually. They're actually battling themselves. It’s all us-versus-themming all humanity to death. What's wrong with this picture?

C'mon, you can do it....

No excuses. There are none. It’s crap. Smart people can think up and spew endless excuses. So what? So it pisses off people who are desperate for something REAL to happen to make things better... no matter what the idea of “better” might turn out to be in each head. We can’t ever get to better this way. The strongest—aka, the meanest, most energetically greedy, most singlemindedly determined—will forever turn out to feel things are better when they have their way, but the rest of us won’t. And it’s worse even than that! Once the strongest get a taste of that exalted better, they can’t stop themselves from continuing their massively destructive shit to keep heaping that better on themselves at everyone else’s expense.

This is precisely as true with “progressives” as it is with “conservatives”... with the “altruistic” as with the “selfish”... with the downtrodden as with the downtreaders... EVERYONE, high and low.

And, well, high time we cut this out, no?

Yes.

Doug Hofstadter, someone who used to bear the brunt of many of my New Year’s Day letters, brought up the concept of “jumping out of the system” a couple thousand years ago in the Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel, Esher, Bach and, even though I don’t think he ever got anything like a good grip on the basics of Zen, it was a damn Zen thing he put forth there. The book is a very hard read, but rewards one with a little cosmos of wonderful concepts, gloriously abstract, and useful for a lifetime... but... er... I digress.

When you find yourself trapped in a system that does not work, you jump out of it, look at it from outside so you can SEE what makes it unworkable and how to go about fixing that.

This seems dirt evident to me.

So, while it is also thrilling to read Doug coming up with it and playing with it, sending you off down a path more wonderful than Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole, it is dirt evident that one must jump out of a system that doesn’t work, or only works on a level too low to satisfy the imperatives, to make that dull insufficiency stop wrecking things for everyone. Right? Oh, right? Uhm, duh? Please? Are you strapped to a full length mirror and calling that freedom? Or can you look up from the contents of your own mind long enough to get the lightbulb on and dance? Hmmm?

Try to divorce this argument from the smart/dumb axis, because looking up from this jail cell mirror thing doesn’t seem to favor smart people over dumb people. In fact, sometimes stunted intellect means there’s less of a hinderance to assimilating dirt evident stuff.

What is it about your own ideas that make them more important to you as weapons to bash others with than your basic love of living things? I mean, even the most evil fuckers of all time loved living things, no matter how many of them they slaughtered, no matter how many they squished like bugs. They couldn’t help it. Life itself loves life itself. Life itself is love. The only self you have more fundamental than your status as a living thing is your status as star stuff, which means, of course, not only do you love everyone in your very essence, but you love everything, every atom, every quark, in your very essence. You ARE every quark in your very essence. So, pfeh, this left/right, Republicrat, good/evil, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, mode of picking up a standard to bear is just SHIT okay?

Can you stop long enough to take this in?

Can you bring yourself up short, just stop, for long enough to realize all your, say, anti-racism crap is as stupid as racism? Does that sound too nihilistic to you? It ain’t, and if you can’t hang with it, you have not stopped for that moment to take a gander at the basics.

We’re star stuff. So are rocks.

[So is Glenn Beck.]

Hating racism is as hateful as racism. Whenever you build up an us-versus-them to fight bad things, you are creating an isomorphism containing the same awfultude you flatter yourself you combat. You have to jump out of us-vs-them, this-versus-that, or you’re a bipedal exercise in futility. Period.

That’s why I use New Years’ Days to do this sort of thing. A great do-nothing day to just stop and look at actuality, remind somebody of it. I know you probably don’t come here for me to bap you over the head with Zen, use up yer eyeprints being told to stop being a jackass for a few moments, but, ahem, it’s getting dire out there and this should only take a few moments. You can get pissed at me for calling you a jackass tomorrow. For right now, just, please, shut the fuck up, and stop.

You’re supposed to be sentient. You’re supposed to be possessed of more intelligence than warring troops of chimpanzees, and this means you have to do this sort of thing from time to time. Or would you prefer the Social Darwinism we call Globalization, the Social Darwinism that already is the Third Millennium, the Social Darwinism that is melting our planet with wars and greenhouse gasses? If yer so almighty clean and righteous and progressive, then whut’s yer problem taking this in and DOING BETTER?
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