Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, one thing I should probably be more clear on. While I rant repeatedly about republicans here, for the most part I mean the people actually in power. Granted, I am also sad at the people who put them there, and I do feel as if *real* conservatives have been totally deplatformed. I don’t agree with real conservatives, but I don’t think they’re evil. They just have a different definition of utopia than I do, which is kind of a one man’s heaven is another man’s hell sort of thing. The people who I loathe are the people who have risen to the top of the republican party, and who show a distinct delight in dirty deeds, a willingness to cheat, a complete lack of honor or morals, and that kind of thing. Not the man on the street.

For that matter, for all the denigration of the folks who broke into the capitol on the 6th – if the things they had believed were true, they would have been heroes. The real villians on the 6th where the lying president and the willing-to-cosign-his-BS republican leadership. The people who broke into the capital are mostly guilty of being gullible and easily lied to – something that we all have probably been a time or two.

Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker, it’s amazing how much parts of the story remind me of Trump. I guess grifters gonna grift, and the grift has changed very little over the years. I hope that as part of Trump’s sentence, some of his grifted money can be taken and put to some use better than the ones he would think of to put it to. Then again, Trump’s faithful don’t seem to have objected to Steve Bannon being pardoned for stealing their money – I guess they just keep telling themselves it’s all fake news.

So, I have gotten a twitch account at SheerPanic_ (note the underscore at the end). I will be setting up over the next few weeks to do a show in late Feb – I did my first test transmission today, and while there were a few minor warts it went better overall than I had any right to expect. I apparently need to get over yet another type of stage fright.. (it’s so bizarre. I’m over the “stage fright when multitrack deck is running” and I’ve put a pretty good dent in the “stage fright while performing IRL” but apparently video broadcasting is yet another thing.

It’s also never going to be beautiful – I don’t anticipate millions of viewers or anything like that, so I’m not going to build a set or set up special lighting for it. I will arrange to have multiple camera angles, and I will hard-mount them so they don’t get in the way when I’m doing other things in the studio. I’m going to see if I can set up rules in OBS to switch randomly between cameras as well.

It’s kind of impressive, really. At this point the Republicans think cheating on elections is just dandy. Calling for violent overthrow of the government is fine. Trump should get a pass for that and the many felonies he’s demonstratibly committed (the washington post was kind enough to round those all up for us at https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/rap-sheet-trump-crimes/2020/10/16/c6a539da-0e61-11eb-8a35-237ef1eb2ef7_story.html). Of course, I’ve come to expect cheating from the republican party, I’ve come to expect voter disenfranchisement, and apparently in the new normal we can also expect violence from them. (To be fair, they did lots of false-flag violence while pretending to be Antifa during the summer, so this is just stepping up to committing violence in their own name)

I knew they were the party of corruption and lies, but I didn’t realize – and I should have, given how often they talk about how patriotic they are, something that they wouldn’t have to say if it were actually true – that they were the party of destruction of our democratic republic. If they can’t win elections fairly, they’d like to just get out the guns and stop having elections.

Of course, their almost-always-lying “news” sources (Fox, Breitbart, Rush) have whipped them up into a frenzy and made them believe some things which are *clearly not true* (look, if you are dumb enough to think there’s a conspiracy to change the election results that *every single judge* signed off on, including many appointed by the most recent administration – then I can’t help you, you’re dumb enough that you’re likely going to darwin-award yourself sooner or later anyway.)

I think a lot of what’s going on is many of the republican party members are going on, emotionally, what they’d *like* to be true – they want for more humans to be in favor of treating their fellow man awfully than to be in favor of sharing, because it makes their awful behavior more defensible (because everyone’s doing it)

And as far as the leaders, they’ve realized they can cheat and lie their way out of having been complicit in a attempt to overthrow a fair and free election, and they’re in favor of that.

We need to figure out some way to hold their feet to the fire, because it is clear that the party of lies, corruption, and “screw you, I’ve got mine” is going to continue to be as awful as possible for as long as they can, and that apparently includes giving Trump a pass for having deliberately created a violent attack on the capital because he’s such a toddler that he can’t cope with having lost a election.

So, you know those hollywood movies where there’s a alien invasion and humans defeat the aliens and the hero rides off into the sunset?

Yah, not what would really happen. The reality is, we’re the people who don’t have enough agility to make it through a minor pandemic without losing millions. We *politicize wearing masks* (and let’s not even get into the patheticness that is Q).

We are not good at truth, facts, or adaptability. We’re more in love with our economic system than we are in continuing to live (as Greta has reminded us), and let’s not even talk about some of the epic stupidity surrounding politics and religion.

I just heard rumors about a party where 10 people got COVID – that was thrown as a birthday party for a *cat*.

The sad thing is, if we could have just stopped everything for two weeks but real ‘essential operations’, we could have stopped COVID in it’s tracks. But in America, *every* job is a essential operation because if you don’t work you end up with no place to live and no food.

*sigh*

Well, it’s over. Four years of a con man grifting as much as he possibly could, and watching some people unable to comprehend that everything he said was a lie and that he was destroying us.

Now i can go back to having my normal level of loathing for our government, which is still a very long way away from what you might expect to find in a utopia. This will leave me much energy to spend on other, more productive things. I can probably even return to facebook. I look forward to someday in the near future having no idea what the president is up to, and not needing to know.

I do note that not only did the Republicans bring us two of the worst presidents in a hundred years – dubya, who started a war over false pretenses and got a million plus people killed, and Trump, who drove a wedge into the already growing divide between left and right and hammered it repeatedly, lied, stole hundreds of millions of dollars, committed so many impeachable offenses (including ignoring the emoluments clause) that most of us have lost count, and was such a badly-behaved child that he couldn’t even accept losing reelection and lied repeatedly, causing a small insurrection that undoubtedly has done much damage to the thousands of fools who believed his lies and broke into the capital.

Both of them lost the popular vote, but were placed in office anyway. Perhaps we could learn from the mistakes of history and either do away with the electoral college, or make it true proportional representation. It’s already demonstrated that it does not perform it’s desired function of not allowing dictators and demagogues to ascend to the office of the presidency (largely because by the time such a person can get elected, the brainwashed faithful are everywhere)

A lot of this does underline the evil of people like Rush Limbaugh and stations like Fox News – who have been lying repeatedly because it makes money to lie – the more you rile the people up, the more the advertisers will pay you. Rush had better pray there is no such thing as karma.

Anyway, so, we have people living in two different realities. The one I inhabit seems to match observable reality, in which, for example, the COVID virus did *not* go away in the spring. The one in which people continue to support republican politicians requires being willing to ignore those lies. Heinlein had a story that I’ve referenced before, ‘pravda means truth’ in which he talked about how a important aspect of living in the USSR was a willingness to forget the previous “truths” told by the government whenever a new “truth” came along. This is definitely a requirement to live in the modern conservative party, and even more so if you want to for example be a Q or CCP conspiracy nut.

Will they ever figure it out, or will we have republican suicide bombers insisting that the election went for Trump (*common sense* will tell you why it didn’t – he *barely* made it in the first time in a perfect storm, and then he spent years pissing off just about everyone by being his awful self. But, if you believe every lie he told, which some people do, then you believe he’s the best president we’ve ever had and you’re puzzled as to why he was not reelecte)

The one good thing I will say for Trump is that he didn’t start any foreign wars. That still probably makes him a better president than Dubya. However, I think history is a lot more willing to forgive Dubya for being easily duped than Trump for being a asshole who couldn’t even handle losing and threw a trumper tantrum that involved a violent assault on the capital by his followers.

Hopefully it’s over. I don’t expect to love Biden – he’s a moderate in a era when what we badly need is a extremist extreme enough to do as much good for the nation (and heartbreaking to the republicans) as Trump was willing to do bad for the nation. Even Bernie is to the right of me, though. I would be working on redesigning the resource allocation system, I’d be disbanding almost the entire military and outlawing ever having a bigger military than the two other largest nations, I’d be working on universal health care, universal income, mass automation to ensure no one starves, 3D-printing houses for the homeless, and so on. But I could never be elected, because as we said, I’m to the left of Bernie. So Biden’s legalistic tendencies and beholdenness to the powers that be are likely to annoy the heck out of me. But at least he won’t be actively swinging a sledgehammer at everything that’s good about the country (Trump tried to destroy the *post office* in order to win) and there is some hope that Trump will start his ‘Patriot’s party’ and A: they’ll agitate for ranked choice voting, since it benefits them too, B: they’ll occupy the extreme right, letting the Republicans become moderates and the Democrats become left and C: hopefully for a while, they’ll help make sure neither they nor republicans get elected by splitting the vote.

As I said above, I’m looking forward to not *needing* to know what the idiot in the while house is doing. while Trump surrounded himself with criminals because he is, at heart, a con man, Biden is surrounding himself with smart and capable people. They may be way too in love with the awfulness that is the criminal justice system of America, they may be way too in love with the horrors that are capitalism, but at least they are not idiots nor grifters. It’s a step in the right direction.

I also appriciate that unlike Trump, who was always very clear about the fact that he didn’t care what the majority (Democrats) wanted, Biden does express a desire to work for all the people who are here. It is a long standing problem that my utopia and conservatives’ utopia would be two wildly different places.

So, here’s to moving forward, hopefully away from the wildly awful behavior of the right. I still hope we do the right thing and put Trump in jail – it is important that politicians see consequences for behavior like his, or we will see Trump after Trump, eventually from both the left and the right. Trump belongs in jail. Eventually hopefully we can make even the conservatives understand how many different horrible things he did. “Orange man bad”. I think history will decide that Trump cared only about Trump, and did much damage to the world.

I’d like Biden to go a *lot* further than that. I’d like to see plasma cutters tearing down what of the wall there was, Trump charged with environmental crimes for the destruction parts of his wall wrought, and – and I know that Biden who is something of a RINO will never go for this – open borders with only a check for a criminal record – a return to the Ellis Island days. Or else let’s be honest and replace Lady Liberty’s poem with one that says the truth – that we are a awful and stupid people – stupid enough that we don’t realize that each immigrant who comes here brings more wealth, awful enough that we care more about our stupid immigration laws that were deliberately created not to avoid having immigrants, but to disenfranchise them, to enable us to use them as semi-slaves – and awful enough that treating humans horribly is something we embrace.

We are clearly not a Christian nation because the bible says, over and over, to treat immigrants well. And we are obviously not very bright, as a nation, because we’re easily programmed to scapegoat immigrants even though studies have repeatedly shown that they are more law-abiding than natural citizens

Mr Biden, TEAR DOWN THAT WALL! You can also sell chunks of it as souvenirs, like they did in Berlin.

So, I’ve been pondering various things about love. It’s always been intuitively obvious to me that the standard behavior claimed by the Christian God (“You’ll be tortured for all eternity unless you believe $WHATEVER) is the opposite of love, and as I went through the various experiences with various people over the past few decades of my life, it became apparent to me that if you love someone and they don’t want to talk to you, then the only real thing to do is not talk to them, at least within the framework of behaving lovingly towards them. I have done further thought about to what extent love accepts people as they are vs to what extent love wants them to grow, and then the other question is when you want someone to grow because you love them, to what extent are you able to accept that you may not be aware of what the real optimum for them is? I definitely think there’s a problem with parents wanting children to have similar moral and value frameworks even though their moral and value frameworks may be wrong (and there’s a *huge* problem with people not considering that their moral and value frameworks may be wrong even as they are cheering on systems which are more or less guaranteed to fail)

Love is probably the slipperiest thing to define I have ever really considered. The word is heavily overloaded (like God) – meaning it has many different meanings depending on context and both the speaker and the listener.

Interestingly, there was one point where I thought I was addicted to sex, but I discovered that sex without love has no value to me, therefore apparently I am addicted to love. I think someone had a song about that..

I’m not even going to try to actually write the definition of it, at least not yet. I note that in the Bible officially love keeps no record of past wrongs, which means that hell as a punishment for any wrong behavior is apparently biblicly impossible. I always find the frantic jumping of Christian apologists to “But God is a Just God!” both funny and predictable. I think I’ve talked elsewhere about how the history of religions involving dieties is in general a measure of how humans always try to put superhuman intelligences into boxes they can understand and invariably end up using too small of a box. Thusly, I expect way, way better behavior from God than most people, and I sometimes wonder if this is because I myself am more intelligent, at least in some senses, than most people, and thusly can imagine a bigger box.

However, having a big enough box to capture the idea of love remains beyond me, at least thus far. I can sometimes identify which the path of love is, but I’m just beginning to even grasp the shape of it, much less be able to compile what I know into english.

I’ve heard it broken down into eros, philios, and agape, but I find all of the above overlapping and also suspect it breaks down to many more colors of the rainbow than that.

So, one of the things I struggle with is the challenges surrounding sexual relationships. I think I’ve talked before about how I think a big part of this is that the memetics surrounding sexual relationships on earth are really not too good – we’re wired to fall in love more than once but we’re encouraged by the powers that be to mate for life, assured by various religions that non-monogamy is a sin (God forgot he wired us to fall in love more than once – or this is part of his grand plan for torturing us for being imperfect – a even bigger and more successful part of that plan is to ensure that sometimes we fall in love with people who don’t love us..)

Now, I don’t want to come off like a incel at all, but one of the things that I find frustrating is that feeling sexual attraction for people is very likely to end in disaster. Not only are the odds fairly low that you will be attracted to the same people who are attracted to you, but also if you do have a friendship that includes sexual overtones when the sexual portion of it is over you probably will never get to talk to the person again. I still miss Phoebe enormously, 15 years later, and Vinnie – although I will acknowledge that I screwed that one up in just about every way there was to screw it up.

Which is perhaps part of the problem.. sexual friendships bring out much more intense emotions than other friendships and so as a result things get a lot more extreme in general. I do think it’s true that we say and do things in sexual friendships that we would never do in others. And of course you have possessiveness and jealousy, both of which are *encouraged* in our current world memetics and turned up to 11 whenever possible in our world’s fiction.

Of course, another problem with all of the above is that if you’re going to try to follow the dictates of religion and mate for life, you have to find the right person – on the first try – while you’re very young and inexperienced – with all of the challenges that apply above. And you might end up with someone who physically or emotionally abuses you, because our memetics have set up situations that leave people in states where they do that, and then you should continue to live with the person no matter what because divorce is immoral. Yes, I have periods of really loathing earth’s memetics.

I also of course wish we could work out the whole ‘sharing’ thing. You would think, given how good falling in love feels, that we would want to encourage people to do it repeatedly, that if we in fact did love the people we are connected with we would want them to be happy. Part of the problem here, discussed many times by many different people, is the fear of abandonment – and the fact that Earth makes being abandoned quite dangerous at times, with worries about things like eating and living indoors. But beyond that I think that a very big part of what ails us is the elders feeling the need to know *which* humans are the parents of which child, and our idea that each individual should be responsible for caring for all the children that share their genetics. (In fact it would be *much* smarter for the entire tribe to be responsible for children – and then we could also stop having teen pregnencies ruin lives. But this would take away the fun of those who delight in punishing and love to sneer at the lack of morality of the teens that react to things *they are deeply evolved to feel*)

I do think a big part of the problem is also all the religious nuts who can’t accept that there are all kinds of signs that we are evolved and almost none that we are designed, and therefore want to blame us for things that evolution has done instead of trying to work out a memetic system that aligns with our evolution. I am sure you have all seen me talk about this many times before and I am sure I will talk about it many times again.

Anyway, I really hate the whole ‘if you are attracted to someone they may also never talk to you again’ bit, and I will be the first to admit that I have (partially due to mental illness) impressively screwed up communications with one particular $_PERSON on the subject. But I also think there’s got to be some middle ground and better communication methodologies that could be taught such that we had a lot less #metoo incidents and at the same time did not have no good way to say what we’re thinking and feeling without breaking any friendship or communication we have with people.

In short, the human memetics surrounding sex are a mess. I think pretty much everyone knows it. No, I don’t know how to write the perfect memetics surrounding the topic either. I suppose we’ll all just continue to muddle through, often with broken hearts and/or holes in our lives.

So, as one would expect, the right is busy lying about how it wasn’t them who smashed the capital, it was antifa, or a left false flag operation. Never mind the fact that *everyone* arrested thus far has been a genuine Trump supporter – never mind all the video of the event posted to right-wingers-only-allowed, free-speech-only-if-you-are-Conservative parler.

I suppose it fits in perfectly with the tendency of the right to lie. What’s interesting is increasingly, you can pretty much safely bet that anything the right accuses the left of doing, they themselves have done or are doing. You can almost start to build a play by play of their actions just by looking at their accusations. Which, of course, makes me assume that if there’s *any* truth to Q’s accusations at all – something I highly doubt – the people running the pedo ring are them on the right. Which is kind of what you’d expect – repress natural aspects of yourself (like sexuality) and they’re going to come out in other ways.

I do wonder if I should offer a URL that shows my journal without my political ranting.. I think that it does help me get out some of my anger at the awfulness and egregiousness of the right without (generally) actively getting into fights with anyone, but I also have to imagine anyone who’s interested in the majority of my life has got to be getting sick of the ‘repeatedly beating dead horse’ section.

Then again, I probably only have about 5 readers and 4 of them agree with me, so maybe it doesn’t really matter. I do sometimes wonder if I am able to build up my musical skills to where I gather some more attention what my fans will make of my blog.