recently upgraded blog

you may have noticed that i recently changed the layout of my blog as well as the fonts and colors and the links section. i also now make use of a new blogger feature that shows 4 google news stories, from the latest news. that new feature is not very customizable yet. but it is better than nothing. anyway, it was fun making up 6-digit hexadecimal numbers to encode the colors, all the way from #000000 to #ffffff (or in decimal, from 0 to 16,777,215, if i recall correctly, though some of those digits may be wrong due to my pre-pubescent onset senile dementia).

so i worked hard at changing and overhauling my links section too. i made sure each of the existing links met my rigorous and stringent guidelines. every blog i link to has to be one that regularly has new entries (i made 2 exceptions for people i know personally, but for blogs that i just link to because i find them interesting and like their up-to-date commentary/satire/whatever, they have to meet this requirement). and i have rewritten the descriptions for many of the blogs i link to, either to be more explanatory, or more humorous and satirical. but mainly, i added a bunch more links to blogs, so i had to go all over the internet searching for anything i found interesting. mainly i looked at political blogs but also ones that dealt with my religious beliefs, as an atheistic lapsed quaker who has been brainwashed into the subgenius cult through their internet propaganda.

now why do i find the subgenius cult so compelling? well, their cult is basically set up exactly the way i would set up a cult if i were doing the whole thing from scratch. they come out and admit that they are a brainwashing cult that just wants your money, and that everything they say is bullshit (or bulldada, as they call it). but, it turns out, they are not really a religion or a cult at all. they are, legally speaking, a fan club of the fictional character j. r. “bob” dobbs, whose name and image they have copyrighted and registered as trademarks. they were created as a satirical organization in the 1970s in order to mock real cults such as the scientologists and the moonies, as well as the evangelical christians. but they are quite expert in knowledge of all the various other cults and fringe religious groups, having studied all of them, in something known as the high weirdness project. they are all artists, perhaps artists who draw pictures or make short films, or who compose and perform music, or who mix together audio clips in a humorous way, or who just preach in a manner reminiscent of a christian preacher, except spreading the message of “bob” instead, and having the whole thing interspersed with little jokes, to hide the fact that the whole thing is one big joke. for a long time i have been very much into comedy, and it is my favorite thing to watch on television. i liked the movie “the aristocrats” because it was hilarious how it attacked so many sacred cows of modern culture. and subgeniuses constantly attack the sacred cows of modern culture. they are said to be a counter-cultural post-modern self-satirical pseudo-religious movement of artists. there are other similar groups, such as the discordians or the followers of the spaghtetti monster, but none of those other groups has become as well-established, as popular, or as utterly bizarre and wacky as the subgeniuses. subgeniuses, through their art, express absurdity and things that make no sense, things that are confusing or stupid. the ever-present symbol of the dobbshead is a parody of symbolism in general, and the stupidity and absurdity of all forms of symbolism. the nazis had their swastika and the communists still use the hammer and sickle and the color red. christians have the cross, jews have the star of david, muslims have the crescent moon, and taoists have the yin-yang symbol. only subgeniuses can show the absurdity of all these symbols, by having the dumbest symbol of all, and using it so much and overemphasizing it to the point where it becomes obvious how stupid symbolism really is. the artistic works created by subgeniuses, especially the audio works, but also the pamphlets and books and videos, all of them have the same effect of mentally deprogramming those people who have been brainwashed by culture, the media, the educational system, their churches, their parents, and everyone around them. but the mental deprogramming is painless and in fact quite enjoyable and full of humor. if you continue to expose yourself to subgenius propaganda for too long, you will end up saying nothing but offensive nonsense all the time, never making any sense, and slacking off and never doing any work. but then, if you listen to normal people and their advice for long enough, you will find yourself not saying anything offensive, making sense, and working hard to get ahead. that is why subgeniuses are so important; they try to fill your mind with stupid nonsense, but in the end, when your mind takes out the trash and cleans up, there is a good chance you might discard some long-held beliefs that you realized are stupid, because of how similar they are to subgenius nonsense. once you have discarded several of your long-held beliefs, you will have less beliefs, and be neutral on more issues, and thus more open-minded. at this point, you can observe reality fairly objectively, having neutralized and removed much of your previous bias. at the same time, your sense of humor will be much more open to laughing about almost anything, even things that are not considered appropriate to laugh at. any political correctness will be removed from your thoughts, if not your speech and writings. you can only free your mind if you realize that much of what you believe in is bullshit, and the only way to realize that is to have your beliefs mocked and parodied and for you to actually find it funny instead of getting offended by it. getting offended is the last refuge of a scoundrel. there is no such thing as hate speech. let the bigots dig themselves into holes on their own. then we can ignore them. censorship is for cowards who are afraid of being proven wrong. it is pointless to criticize subgeniuses, because they regularly criticize their own pseudo-religion far more harshly than anyone else ever could. the real hate speech is when people say that only followers of their religion will get into heaven, or that only their political ideology is correct and anyone who dissents is wrong or even an immoral bad person. but there is no reason to silence such people. they will alienate other people on their own, and thereby gradually eliminate any influence they have, as more and more people see the light. now the joke religion of worshipping the flying spaghetti monster is now calling itself pastafarianism, but this just shows how unoriginal they are. this newfangled joke cult is nothing compared to the coolness of the frop-smoking bob with that big technicolor grin on his face.

anyway, you might notice that all the sites i link to have a rather left-wing perspective, but not so far to the left that they do not support the democrats. this is for a very good reason. i could link to sites that i do not agree with at all. i used to do that from this blog. but, i think that is a patently dishonest tactic, because it makes it seem like i actually look at both sides of the argument. but, to be honest, i only look at things from the democratic party line perspective. and i cannot support any viewpoints that oppose this perspective. why not? because it would undermine the party, of course. and supporting the party is the only way to help the party achieve victory, and enact its agenda. and i agree with almost all of the party agenda, or at least a lot more of it than the republican agenda. but it would be dishonest for me to link to anything i disapprove of, while pretending that i think it is worthy of linking to. i know that there are plenty of very prominent right-wing blogs out there that get lots of hits. but i am not a fan of any of them, nor do i support them in any way. so why should i link to them? that would be deceptive and make it look like i actually consider their opinions valid or even look at their sites, which i don’t. rené descartes once tried to abandon all beliefs from his mind and start from believing in nothing, and then he came to believe in himself, and then reality and god. but he never really managed to abandon all beliefs; the ones he had beforehand were the same ones he had afterwards. he just temporarily deceived himself into thinking he had abandoned the beliefs that he kept believing all along. similarly, my liberalism is a belief system that continues in my mind as strong as ever no matter how many times i question it or consider that maybe something else that contradicts it is right instead, or how many times i practice not having any beliefs at all politically. that is simply an excercise in temporary self-denial, denial that i have long established strongly held opinions that do not change easily. but i am not open to other conflicting ideas, to be honest. i will listen to them, perhaps, but i am too skeptical of that which contradicts my beliefs in order to ever be won over by anything that conflicts with them, unless there is absolute proof, or something of that level of evidence. of course, liberalism itself is an exercise in self-denial, because it calls on people to be open-minded, rational, able to consider both sides of things objectively, and willing to embrace change and try doing things that have never been done before. it also has a major humanist aspect, calling on people to help each other out, and to respect each other, to treat people equally, and to help out those who are less fortunate by taxing those who are most well-off. equality is the foundation of liberty, and inequality leads to tyranny. markets must be regulated to correct for negative externalities and market failure. while conservatives think unintended consequences of regulation and government programs outweigh any benefits, they fail to understand that in a democracy with a functioning news media, the unintended consequences get well documented and then the government programs and regulations can be modified, corrected, and tweaked to correct for any errors in how they were originally structured. and many things done by corporations have unintended consequences, or bad consequences that do not directly impact the corporation, but if nobody is there to regulate this, these bad things will be done with no punishment, to the detriment of everyone. pollution, insider trading, monopolies, unsafe products... these are all things that can and must be regulated, which is why all of them are regulated and have been for many years. conservatives combine oversimplified, false views of economics with the religious right’s gradualist theocratic agenda, a sense of superiority over all other nations as if we are entitled to complete world domination with nobody questioning us, and a basic authoritarian mindset that could result in fascist government if the leading politicians were crazy or power-hungry enough to seek out fascism. i do not wish to poison my mind with the false consciousness or the delusions of the conservatives; they have already infected me with a severe case of islamophobia and a lingering distrust of the feminist movement and women in general. my malleable young mind is still susceptible to deceptive manipulations that teach me that other groups of people are to blame for my problems. so i feel a need to protect my mind from anything that would lure it into the selfish, arrogant embrace of empathy-free all-about-me consumer-culture conservatism. with my asperger’s syndrome, i naturally lack empathy, and do not inherently care about anyone else, but only care about myself. it is important that i get past this lack of empathy and get myself to care about other people. and i simply cannot see how someone can care about others and be a conservative, since conservatives are the selfish types who, like ayn rand, believe that greed is good. and trying to show you care by having the government intrude into people’s private lives and things that are none of the government’s business, in some misguided attempt to restructure society and undo the changes catalyzed by the hippie movement of decades ago? completely misguided and wrong. undoing things is always a backwards, reactionary step to take, even if you are undoing something bad. a progressive is one who looks to the future and how to make things better than they ever were before, with new ideas, looking to the past only for history lessons, not for a destination to take a detour back towards. so that is why i have that particular set of links, which, to be fair, is not quite perfect. i do not have enough time to find all the best blogs on the internet, or to look through all the ones i link to and make sure they are all good. a lot of it is just which ones i personally liked or did not dislike. but i do have an agenda with this blog. yes, i sabotage my agenda sometimes, but that is just because i like to highlight that part of my agenda is self-sabotage. for a long time in my life, i sabotaged myself covertly, from deep in the subconscious, and refused to acknowledge what i was doing, even denying it adamantly. this caused plenty of emotional turmoil. but i came to accept all aspects of my personality, including the self-destructive ones, and stop hiding my bad aspects from my conscious mind. and suddenly stopping self-sabotage does not work. it will simply return again once you let your guard down, worse than ever. to truly stop it, you must first accept it, and then just try to gradually tone it down and eventually eliminate it. nothing too drastic, because any sudden or drastic psychological changes would cause an imbalance. at least that is how i view my psychology. but my delicate mind is too weak to handle a lot of the right-wing blogs, because they are so schocking to my psyche; especially bad is the blog called “little green footballs”. if i look at that site, it just fills me with such fear, hatred, disgust, hostility, and contempt towards the religion of islam, it is a struggle to even accept the fact that i live on the same planet as muslims, let alone belong to the same species as them and live in the same country as many of them. and i want to be able to be accepting of muslims and not feel negatively towards them, to think of them as equal human beings just like anyone else. the right-wing websites always fill me with negative emotions, which keep me from going back too often. it is the same problem i have with right-wing talk radio. i tried listening to it to understand the right-wingers better, but the more i listened, the more i hated, despised, and wanted to get rid of right-wingers. if i avoid listening to what they say on their radio shows, however, i can forget what i heard from them earlier, and then i am willing to peacefully coexist with them. but more than a few minutes of rush limbaugh is sometimes enough to make me want to send all republicans to re-education camps; it is usually a day or too before that effect wears off and i am willing to peacefully live in the same country as them again. so, no links to right-wing blogs; that is the upshot of what i am saying. reading them brings out the authoritarian aspects of my personality, which i am trying to get rid of. it is odd, but i cannot stand anyone attacking or insulting nancy pelosi, or doing that to the aclu. both nancy pelosi and the aclu are often attacked and for some reason it makes me irate in either case. i don’t know why... maybe because i am proud of nancy pelosi and the aclu and believe in them and think the attacks are all completely unfair and misguided and wrong. but it is weird, then, that i am ok with people attacking the democratic party as a whole, or any of the democratic presidential candidates, or feminists, or jesse jackson, or michael moore, or moveon.org, and if any of those gets insulted, i don’t care. i suppose there is just something special about the first female speaker of the house, or the top organization promoting civil liberties and constitutional rights. it is ok if you say something bad about me, or if you say my mother wears army boots, but you had better not dis on nancy pelosi. anyone who says anything bad about her is just asking for me to beat them up. not that i would... i would calm myself down and find a way to remove my anger and hostility towards all the naysayers who want to bring my favorite house speaker down. i cannot expect everyone to be enlightened enough to realize that nancy pelosi is an even greater thing than sliced bread. but it is unfortunate that people cling to their fanciful notions of sliced bread being better than nancy pelosi. what fools.