a book and a play that help shed light on the subgenius phenomenon

i found out about this story listening to all things considered on npr today, and it just does a perfect job of explaining the purpose of the church of the subgenius. a 1989 book called the araboolies of liberty street came out, and there is a new play of the same name debuting in a theatre (yes, i use british spelling because it has more flavour) in maryland. just read the story at npr.org and then come back here and read the rest of this post. now the whole point of the chuch of the subgenius is to celebrate being different and weird, and to make that something to be proud of, rather than something to feel inferior because of. the point is to not feel like you are inferior because of your oddities that people may pick on you about or insult you for. in the church of the subgenius, there is nothing worse than a normal person. normals are the scum of the universe. and why is that? their slavish conformity takes away all individuality, all creativity, and turns them into cogs in the machine, mindlessly acting out the will of the “hive-mind” of society and popular culture. people become “wage slaves”, making money and wasting it on things they don’t need, working hard but to get ahead so they are more “successful”, but never actually being satisfied or being happy. in fact, the harder people try to get to a situation in life where they are happy, the less successful they are at reaching happiness. that is the whole point of “slack”. the point of “slack” is to not be brainwashed by advertising into becoming a shopaholic, not to spend yourself into debt and be enslaved by the system, not to spend years working hard in a company that gives you hardly any reward for all your hard work, but to be liberated from all that, by thinking for yourself, and indulging in pleasure rather than abstaining from it. the point of “slack” is to stop fighting against everything and to just go with the flow and enjoy things. the point is to find inner peace and happiness by removing all obstructions to this happening. the point is not to care if people think you are weird or different, because in your mind, our unique qualities make us special in a good way, and people who are not weird at all, who are completely normal, are quite boring and uninteresting and no fun to be around or to be. and the point of the church of the subgenius is to spread ridiculous bullshit and have people pretend to believe it, in order to help people realize how prevalent bullshit is and how much bullshit most people actually believe in, because the more obvious bullshit you are exposed to, the more you can notice patterns and start to realize that other less-obvious things are also bullshit too. the point is to give abnormal people that society looks down upon a group to belong to and a place they feel welcome, where they can express their individuality. the point is to use absurdity to help people deal with the fact that reality itself is often absurd, and to see the humor in it and stop taking everything so seriously. and this play that npr discusses is about a family of liberated people who are, in effect, subgenii, and discuss how the normal people try to oppress them with a fascist state that does not allow anyone to be different. because you know how children like to pick on anyone who is different. and adults are just the same. like nowadays, germany is refusing to let tom cruise be filmed there for a movie about a planned coup against adolf hitler back during nazi germany. why? because tom cruise has an unpopular belief system, scientology. the irrational and morally questionable belief system of tom cruse, scientology, is pretty much illegal in germany, whereas germany taxes everyone in order to pay money out for free to churches that advocate another irrational and morally questionable belief system, christianity. the difference is, christianity is popular and scientology is unpopular. besides that, they are basically the same thing. i listened to the local christian radio station at work the day before yesterday. it was such mindless nonsense. there was a preacher talking about how the apocalypse was coming and how 2/3 of the jews would be killed in a great war by the evil arabs against the holy land of israel, and how only those who have accepted jesus christ as their personal savior get eternal salvation in heaven, and how everyone else burns in hell for all eternity. the preacher is some mexican guy in california named roll reace or something like that. he is probably an illegal immigrant, but they still put him on the radio every night at 7:30 for half an hour, because he is a born again christian. and he mentioned some things from the theory of dispensationalism he adheres to, and of course the rapture, and he talked about other various bullshit. in fact most of the doctrines of born-again protestant evangelists were false doctrines developed in the 1800s that totally go against traditional christianity, but that is another story. traditional christianity is catholicism, and by revolting against it, the protestants were in a sense revolting against jesus by revolting against the church that the disciple paul established in jesus’s name. in the pre-catholic days, there were several different competing schools of thought in christianity, such as the gnostics, and christians were much more nonviolent and courageous, but that is another story. suffice it to say, christianity has devolved into a pathetic mockery of what it once was, and now its most ardent supporters preach hate instead of love. the church of the subgenius, however, has not lost its way, at least not yet, because the original founder, who calls himself ivan stang, is still in charge of everything. he is very adamant about the way things must be done, and he is much more tolerant of other belief systems than most members of the church of the subgenius. ivan stang believes in being tolerant of those who are different, especially if they are in the minority, and he believes that the cult he founded is the best way to promote the values he holds dear, by disguising it as one big joke, when really, they really do have a message. now a lot of other subgenii hold completely different belief systems from ivan stang, and subgenii are really all over the map when it comes to what they believe in, although generally we believe in individual freedom and are opposed to governmental or corporate intrusions into our freedoms. another thing about the church of the subgenius is, by mocking evangelical christians, subgenii are helping to fulfill biblical prophecies, so that if the crazy mexican dude is right and the rapture is coming, it will be in part because of postmodern humor cults that insult christianity during the end times. by the way, the church of the subgenius has a whole lot of doctrine in common with evangelical christianity, like how we are living in the end times, and how the fightin’ jesus is coming back and this time he is gonna be pissed off and kill people. yeah, i used to think the “fightin’ jesus” doctrine was just a subgenius one, but the other day when i was listening to roll reace, the crazy mexican preacher, he was talking from a christian fundamentalist point of view about how jesus is coming back, and how jesus will be quite angry and will be coming to punish sinners by killing them and sending them to eternal hellfire. of course, jesus will be coming to protect the jews of israel from the arabs who try to destroy israel, and he will only succeed in saving 1/3 of them. but that is just the christian doctrine. anyway, the church of the subgenius also has a lot of doctrines in common with real cults like scientology, the raelians, and the ones who killed themselves about 10 years ago, heaven’s gate. all of those 4 religions are ufo cults focused on space aliens in their doctrine. i especially like the raelian doctrines about aliens and ufos and all of that. the raelian doctrines are even funnier than the subgenius ones, even though the raelians are serious! the subgenius ones are less funny because they are told as jokes and not as things people actually believe in. anyway, lately all the cults, including the subgenii, have developed stylized symbols for them that look like the symbols for other religions. subgenii and scientologists based their symbols on the christian cross. the raelians based theirs on the star of david. if you look closely, the symbol for raelianism is actually a star of david with a nazi swastika inside of it. and the funniest part is, i think the raelians are so stupid, they do not even realize that is what it looks like! the raelians are somewhat obsessed with the nuclear bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki and think they were very immoral, which has helped them get a lot of followers in japan. the raelians are most notable for pretending to clone human beings, of course. and the scientologists are most notable for hollywood stars like tom cruise who are members. now you know what cult is really awful? the unification church of sun myung moon. the unification church owns the washington times, which was ronald reagan’s favorite newspaper, and they have close ties to the republican party and to the religious right in the united states. they also now own united press international, a wire service that they bought a few years ago. they are bad news. they perform mass marriage ceremonies. their leader, rev. sun myung moon, claims to be the reincarnation of jesus christ, and several republican congressmen were found at a ceremony crowning him messiah. sun myung moon is famous for escaping the north korean death camps and crossing the border into south korea to freedom in a miraculous story of survival. but he is much more dangerous than the leader of raelianism, rael, who is a harmless kook. and as for ivan stang? he usually pretends not to even be a cult leader, instead pretending that the fictional character j.r. “bob” dobbs is the cult leader. ivan stang is very modest and does not like people looking up to him too much. what he really wants is for everyone to think for themselves, and to not look down on those who are different. so should germany be punishing tom cruise just because he is a scientologist? of course not. scientology may be an evil cult, but the german government immorally subsidizes christianity using the hard-earned money of german taxpayers. now, other churches can be subsidized too, if they are recognized by the german government, and this includes major ones like judaism and islam. but if there is one thing islamic religious leaders do not need, it is more money to spread their ideology of killing people even further. islam celebrates murder of innocent people, and suicide bombing. yet the german government subsidizes it. now it is true that christianity celebrated the murder of innocents during the crusades and the inquisitions. but at least christianity has reformed itself somewhat since then, and is no longer an ideology of mass murder, at least not pre-armageddon mass murder. and the jewish old testament celebrates mass murder several times in the book of exodus, the 2nd book of the bible. not something to be proud of. all 3 major abrahamic religions believe in the old testament and support the genocide in the book of exodus, the genocide the jews carried out against the people of canaan after returning from their slavery in egypt. so is it any wonder there is an israeli-palestinian conflict? i am not saying that an evil cult like scientology is any better; they are smaller and less influential, however, which means they are less dangerous than a more popular religion. and the church of the subgenius is least dangerous of all. some subgenii, the holocaustals whose leader is named papa joe mama, advocate killing all non-subgenii, but this does not take place until after x-day, the day when a gigantic alien armada of flying saucers surrounds the earth to conquer our planet and enslave the humans. and x-day does not happen until july 5, 1998, according to subgenius doctrine, which holds that there is a gigantic conspiracy that has been changing our calendars and that the date july 5, 1998 is still in the future. and so the subgenius religion is harmless. but it is a genuine bona fide religion; let there be no doubt about that. it may not make any supernatural claims, but that is not the point of religion. that is the point of spirituality. anyway, one of the subgenius doctrines is called time control, and it really does work. in order to understand how to use time control, first you need to know its limitations, and that it is not time travel. but you can speed up or slow down the passage of time. it is very simple. chemicals known as stimulants can be used to slow down the passage of time, and chemicals known as depressants speed up the passage of time. it really works. for example, a cigarette is a type of stimulant. if you smoke a cigarette, this makes time go by slower. alcohol is a depressant. if you drink a bottle of wine, this speeds up time. there are more advanced levels of time control than this simple chemical type, but this basic type of time control works best. another type of time control involves changing clocks to read different times. this is more like time travel. if you change a clock to read 2:30, then it really is 2:30. all the other clocks might say it is 7:25, but all the other clocks are wrong and the one that says 2:30 is right. why do we tend to accept what the majority of clocks say? it is merely a social convention. by rejecting the social convention and granting yourself authority to decide what time it is, you have the official power to change what time it is, and what date it is too. now, probably nobody else will recognize this authority, but this does not matter, because they are normal and you are abnormal, and therefore you are right and they are wrong. anyway, there are even more advanced forms of time control, but these are the basics and they always work. well, usually. if someone is addicted to cigarettes and is calmed down by smoking, cigarettes may actually have the reverse effect on time. and if alcohol causes you to have a panic attack, its effects on time are reversed, too. but the exception proves the rule. and anyway, there are plenty more ways to do time control, like simply following the theory of relativity by albert einstein and using it to speed up or slow down time through acceleration of matter. through relaxing meditation, people can make time go by faster. and professional athletes can slow time down to a crawl. this is all possible through the miracle of subjective reality, where reality is simply a subjective experience that is different for each person, rather than an objective thing that simply exists only 1 way. subgenii hold that reality is subjective and not objective, because that is the postmodern view, and it is also in keeping with the theory of relativity and frames of reference. and through extreme subjectivity, we can return to a geocentric model of the universe, where the sun rises and sets, rather than the earth spinning on its axis. in fact, the earth can even be flat! why not join the flat earth society? if it looks flat, it is flat. that’s common sense, which is pretty uncommon nowadays. anyway, abnormal people are superior to normal people, because everyone is inherently abnormal, but the normals repress their abnormality and try to all be the same, and this slavish devotion to normality makes them inferior to people who are radical individualists. ideologies where people all believe the same thing are a form of mind enslavement and group-enforced normality that takes away individuality, freedom of thought, and the ability of people to be truly rational. that is why all ideologies must be rejected, including the ideology that all ideologies must be rejected, which is a paradox and therefore it must be true.

what is with these conspiracy theories?

ok, so it seems some people who are, like me, on the left, have a problem with conspiracy theories. check out this discussion of dick cheney. now, don’t get me wrong... dick cheney is untrustworthy and evil, as evidenced by the fact that he picked himself to be vice president, how he is so obsessed with secrecy, how he likes to have our nation’s enemies tortured despite evidence that torture does not work, how he cooked the books on the intelligence about iraqi weapons of mass destruction through his office of special plans, and how he is corrupt and thinks he is above the law. and the elections of 2000 and 2004 may both have very well been stolen, the first one stolen in florida and the second in ohio. who knows if the elections were really stolen? not me. maybe the perpetrators would know, or maybe there are no perpetrators. but anyway, dick cheney is not behind 9/11, our country is not a fascist dictatorship, we are still a democracy, president bush is actually in charge, and it is not the end of the world. we are having a presidential election in 2008 and bush and cheney are not up for re-election! democrats control both houses of congress after winning them in last year’s elections! it is sooooooooo not the end of the world. and we are probably not going to nuke iran, although politicians continue to say that “all options are on the table”, which presumably includes the option of us doing a preemptive nuclear strike. anyway, yes it is true that neoconservatives like dick cheney are bloodthirsty warmongers who want to kill as many people as possible by fighting as many wars as possible. but i think dick cheney has become somewhat sidelined and less influential as more and more people within the government realize he is a tyrannical madman. our democratic system works, and soon we will be rid of bush and cheney. and i think people really need to stop buying into crazy conspiracy theories with regard to evil tyrants like dick cheney. just because someone is evil, insane, obsessed with secrecy, loves torture, loves war, and hates being held accountable, that does not mean that person is actually involved in any secret conspiracies. the neocons are certainly not a conspiracy. everybody knows about the project for a new american century! and everyone knows about dick cheney’s secret energy policy meetings with the leaders of big oil companies and ken lay from enron, and how dick cheney tried to keep everything secret. and now we are finding out about how dick cheney was behind pressuring john ashcroft to sign off on something evil (torture, or something) when john ashcroft was sick in the hospital; alberto gonzales was the one actually sent to the hospital to do the deed of pressuring a bedridden ashcroft. but that is actually good news! it means ashcroft was not the evil guy everyone thought! and there is more evidence coming out about how colin powell and condoleezza rice have both acted as obstructionists towards cheney’s all-consuming lust for power and domination. but dick cheney is no genius. he is probably not even that much smarter than the president. and the president is not as stupid as some people say, although he is a little stupid. the truth is, dick cheney’s idiocy is plainly apparent because dick cheney is so bad at public relations and his approval rating is so low. if he had half a brain, he would try harder to manage the media and have them cover him positively. but instead, he is an utter failure at preventing the media from publishing stories that damage his reputation. in other words, dick cheney is incompetent, and could never pull off a major conspiracy because he is such an unapologetic bloodthirsty tyrannical dumbass. al qaeda was behind 9/11 and lee harvey oswald acted alone when he killed john f. kennedy. i can see why people would be inclined to believe conspiracy theories about dick cheney, but in reality, if i were starting an evil conspiracy, i would not want to include an idiotic nutball like dick cheney. someone like him would ruin the whole conspiracy with his incompetence and the press would find out. you see, nobody likes dick cheney. now his chief of staff, lewis “scooter” libby, is going to jail for a crime dick cheney committed, and libby was just the fall guy. but that is because libby is a submissive idiot who is dumb enough to obey whatever his tyrannical boss tells him to do. scooter libby deserves to rot in jail. it is his fault he lied under oath, not dick cheney’s. dick cheney was behind the whole campaign to make joseph wilson look bad by revealing that valerie plame was a cia agent, and, predictably, the whole plan backfired and made dick cheney look bad instead, and started a criminal investigation. that incident reveals the stupidity of vice president cheney, and why he could never pull off an actual conspiracy. these people could never turn our country into a totalitarian dictatorship. nobody would support them! if they tried something like that, our own military would rise up and overthrow them, and then we would transition back to democracy again. and the bitter american expatriates overseas who post online about how horrible our country has become are just sad and pathetic human beings who are too closed-minded to see all the good things about the united states of america. just because we have bad “leaders” does not mean the whole country is rotten to the core! but it bothers me that sometimes we leftists allow conspiracy theorists to claim irrational things, and rather than correct these inaccuracies, we just debate the right-wingers. i mean, sure, conspiracy theories may sometimes be beneficial politically, if they make the other side look bad. but they are not a logical and rational way to discuss current events, and we should try not to have opinions that are so strong, they overpower facts and the truth and cloud our judgment. i still believe the threat posed by dick cheney to our nation has been contained and he is being monitored closely by other forces in our government who realize he poses a threat to our democracy. and thus, our great democracy is protected from these fools! the central intelligence agency, for instance, has consistently been an enemy of dick cheney, and they have often fought each other with leaks to the press. if he tries anything funny, i am sure someone will be watching him and will leak it to the media, and it will be all over the newspapers and the television and the news on the radio and on the internet. for dick cheney, there is no escape from bad press! everyone hates him, including most of the government and most of the media. so i do not think he poses any threat to us anymore. people should stop with the hyperbolic paranoia about how our country is turning into a totalitarian nightmare. that is just not true. i watch c-span, and politicians in both political parties are quite similar. i think anybody who gets involved in politics has to act like they do in order to be successful. but that is how democracy works. congress caved in to the president on the funding for the iraq war a while back. there will be another fight over that in september, supposedly. this does not mean our democracy has failed. democracy works slowly, and sometimes it takes years for politicians to catch up to the will of the people, because the system has so many checks and balances to slow things down and obstruct anything controversial. it is hard to end a war, because most people in congress don’t have the balls, guts, or whatever you wish to call it, to just do it and end the war. this does not mean we are an empire and that the imperial presidency can do whatever it wants and that congress is just a rubber stamp regardless of which party is in control. i know some people say that type of rhetoric but it is just untrue. there is a real difference between both parties, but it is in the policies they try to enact, not in the human behavior of individual politicians. people are just too cynical and do not believe politicians actually mean what they say and believe what they are saying to the public. it is quite sad how cynical and jaded we have all become towards our democratic process, and how much distrust we have of politicians, most of whom are dedicated public servants. yes, their human failings and subjective understandings of reality prevent them from enacting real change most of the time. but that does not show corruption. it just shows that they are fallible humans like everyone else, and most of them are not original enough thinkers to come up with great new ideas for how to do things. and as for whether dick cheney is evil... he believes he is a good person, and so do some of those close to him. he believes his actions are justified. but you know who else believed that about himself? adolf hitler. and stalin too. you see, people always try to justify their own actions to themselves, and this clouds their judgment. just because someone believes they are good and tries to do what they believe is good does not mean they are actually good. if that were true, adolf hitler would be considered saintly. we judge people by what we think is good and evil, and what society thinks is good and evil, not by what the people who are doing the things we are judging think about their own actions. so that is why dick cheney is evil. it is because we live in a society where his actions are considered morally reprehensible. in some other society, he might be considered a good person, if they had a different value system and different morals. but here in our democracy, we consider dick cheney evil, because that is a subjective value judgment, not objective reality. in objective reality, there is no such thing as good or evil. morality is all an invention of human society. but it is a good invention, and one we should believe in and use accordingly. dick cheney is pure dagnasty evil. it’s just a fact. what kind of fact, you ask? well, the kind that is actually just an opinion because morality is subjective and not objective, because it is based on arbitrary rules and standards devised by human society, and not universal laws of science. but we would have no society, no civilization, no science or technology, if it were not for morality. it is necessary for humanity to function cohesively as a whole and not have us all divided into egocentric amoral individuals who only care about themselves. if only dick cheney were smart enough to understand all of that, and not so obsessed with power and domination and secrecy. and did i mention halliburton and its no-bid contracts where it rips off the government for billions of dollars? yes, in that last sentence, for the first time. is dick cheney behind halliburton getting these contracts? who knows. the whole bush administration is run by former oil executives. there is probably just a general consensus in the administration in favor of oil companies, one that needs no discussion because everyone already understands it and nobody wants to be caught saying things that could be damaging to the administration and their own careers. i think it might be a good idea for the legislative branch to have more authority over the executive departments, and for the presidential administrations to have less authority over the rest of the executive branch. we should limit presidential power as much as possible without damaging national security. there is too much power in the hands of one person (the president). and why is there too much power in the hands of our current vice president? because the president lets him get away with it. in the end, everything is bush’s fault. even hurricane katrina. president bush controls the weather and caused a hurricane to hit new orleans. okay, now i am joking, and i hope you recognized that was not serious. anyway, conspiracy theorists have no regard for the truth or for being accurate. they just want to make as many unsupported accusations as possible. so please ignore people like the infamous alex jones (a very popular conspiracy theorist nowadays). they do not add to the discussion, they only throw it off track with bullshit. there are only a few conspiracies, and 90% of the conspiracy theories are wrong. i just wish conspiracy theorists could focus on the 10% of conspiracy theories that are true, and when one of their conspiracy theories is proven false, if they could just stop repeating their falsehoods, it would be great. they should just focus on the conspiracy theories that are actually true, but always be open to accepting it when one of their conspiracy theories is debunked. and why do we have to call the vice president names? calling someone “dick cheney” is the biggest insult in the world. dick cheney has already earned such a bad reputation, there is no reason to call him anything but the name that has earned such a horrible reputation. like why do people call him darth cheney and a sith lord? are they star wars fans or something? or why do they call him dr. evil and call dubya mini-me? that is all stupid. let us just call him dick cheney and then insult the hell out of him and call him evil and insane and everything else we can think of that we can make stick and become a part of his reputation. that is the solution.

i posted 8 videos to youtube

well, i have posted 8 videos to youtube. they are all a part of my gigantic “subgenius video tape barrage sequence”, a long sequence of 58 mind-melting videos that totally numb your skull. now, do not be confused by my user account name on youtube.com. the name “mcgrewrich” is based on the name of one of my family members. my name, on the other hand, is numinous ubiquity. please do not confuse the 2 of us. he wants nothing to do with me, or so he tells me. he has voiced his disapproval of how i am tarnishing his good name, but i reminded him that we both share the same youtube account name. i didn’t want to have to get a new one once i found out he already had one, so yeah, we just share it. he told me to get my own user account, but that’s no fun. what is the point of doing something that makes sense when you can do something that makes no sense? and that is the whole reason i posted those 8 videos on youtube. there was a 9th video i wanted to post but i knew it violated youtube’s rules because of brief clips of less than a second where you see things that are kind of against the rules. that raunchy video is on google video where it has been since july 5, 2003. anyway, all 8 videos were posted on google video by the subgenius foundation, inc., but nobody had bothered to put any of them on youtube. so i posted them all to youtube, and luckily, all 8 videos are in the flash video flv format that youtube uses internally for everything, since that is also what google video uses to display videos if it detects that you have the flash plugin. so the videos are all the same high quality as the originals on google video. so now all the official subgenius videos from google video except the one i was too afraid to post are on youtube, where anybody can see them (and probably will)! this will help more people find out the good news about “bob” before july 5, 1998, which is still in the future, according to official church doctrine. save the humans! or should we save the humans? according to savethehumans.com, ayn rand’s philosophy of objectivism is the only way to save the humans, and the sites exists to mock non-objectivists. well, subgenii aren’t humans, and the church of the subgenius exists to mock humans, who also happen to be non-subgenii. so, in a way, we are like the objectivists, except, unlike them, we are rational enough to embrace irrationality instead of being obsessed with it. the objectivists are just another one of these cults we all keep hearing about, based on the teachings of ayn rand... much like how the scientologists are based on the teachings of l. ron hubbard. both groups have a similar amount of grasp of reality: none whatsoever. but at least the objectivists want to save the humans. good luck, once july 5, 1998 rolls around! that is the date of the end of the world, the date that all of the end times prophecies point to, and that date is not in question. our calendars are all wrong. it is all a gigantic conspiracy which goes all the way back to ancient atlantis. but that is another story. suffice it to say, the earth is actually hollow and inhabited by nazi hell creatures, and aliens from planet x are coming to destroy all humans on planet earth. the only way to escape this fate is to slack off, and then eventually participate in “the rupture”, which is like the rapture only more realistic. anyway, these doktrines are all found through the forbidden sciences pioneered by j.r. “bob” dobbs, noted scientician. he is the great prophet whose vision came when he electrocuted himself inside a television set that he tried to build from scratch despite not knowing how televisions work. are the objectivists any more rational or logical than this? no, they just pretend they are. objectivism is really just one big joke, since ayn rand was supposedly a philosopher yet her philosophical teachings have always been widely ridiculed in university philosophy departments, by real philosophers. objectivists are just closed-minded know-it-alls who think that greed is good and who worship capitalism as a religion. they have less grasp of reality than subgenii because at least subgenii know all their teachings are a bunch of bullshit (or “bulldada”, as subgenii prefer to call their form of bullshit). objectivists are so stupid, they actually believe their ridiculous teachings! and they believe in an extremist point of view in the field of economics, a ridiculously pro-capitalist school of thought based on the teachings of an austrian guy named ludwig von mises, something that even alan greenspan acknowledged was a bunch of bullshit, despite his involvement with the objectivists and ayn rand. he knew enough economics to know that the objectivists belive in a bunch of lies, and that is despite the fact that greenspan himself is somewhat of a pro-capitalist “neoclassical” extremist himself. the neoclassical school of thought in economics is the predominant one in economics departments nowadays, and it too is ridiculously pro-capitalist, but not to the same extremes as ludwig von mises. the irrationality of the neoclassicals is more hidden and less overt than with followers of von mises. anyone who claims they are more rational than everyone else, like the objectivists all do, is probably full of it and wouldn’t know the truth if it hit them over the head. i’m glad i’m not such a peabrained closed-minded hypocrite who is unable to see their own irrationality or question a set of ridiculous assumptions that somebody else told them to make. the objectivists all believe in the same assumptions because they are sheeple following the herd instinct who never question what they are told if they think the source is credible. and, shamefully, the libertarians are based on the same faulty reasoning as the objectivists, and the libertarians, like the objectivists, do not believe in market failure even though it happens every day. libertarians are also pro-capitalist extremists, just like objectivists, and a lot of people fall into both categories. i, of course, belong to neither, because i want to find a middle ground between capitalism and socialism, one that leverages the benefits of capitalism but also helps poor people instead of just letting them die because they are judged to be “inferior”. extreme pro-capitalism leads to a belief in social darwinism, and that rich people are superior to poor people. and i guess that means paris hilton is a genius and we should repeal the “death tax”. what a joke! anyway, i posted 8 videos to youtube, and they all came from google video. now more people will see them.

forget about “american interests” in iraq

nowadays some people say that we should not pull out of iraq completely because there are certain “american interests” in iraq that need to be protected. if you allow them to make their argument fully, they often come right out and say that blood for oil is a good idea and they support it. that’s right, they actually say that our troops should be fighting and dying so that american consumers have access to cheap oil from iraq. that is one of several “american interests” in iraq that supposedly needs to be protected. well, pardon me for being so blunt, but why the hell should anyone give a damn about american interests in iraq? there are like 200 countries in the fricken world. do we have young people fight and die to protect american interests in all 200 of them? no. apparently, only one country is that important, and it is iraq. ok, so maybe it is 2, and we can add afghanistan to the mix. but those are the only 2 where we actually put our own troops on the line to fight and die for our supposed interests. but which american interests are these? are these the best interests of america? or are they simply the lowest common denominator? are they simply the lust for greed and power? is it simply the fact that we americans want something for nothing, and we want to buy stuff at a cheap price and sell stuff at an expensive price? see, hillary clinton and probably half the other democratic presidential candidates, along with probably all the republican ones except ron paul, are all proponents of this theory that the united states has vital national security interests that can only be protected by having troops fighting and dying in iraq. sure, that may be the case right now, because that is where we are doing the fighting right now. but look at it this way. it is really expensive for us to pay for sending people all the way around the world to iraq from here in america, and to have them learn all about the culture and try to learn how to fight a war there, and ship them equipment and try and rebuild a country at the same time as destroying it. now imagine if the terrorists had to fight us here in the united states. they would be the ones who had to spend all the money to come here and learn about our culture so they can fit in and not be suspicious and find out the weak points in our security before we do. that would make it much, much more difficult for them to kill americans. right now the terrorists are killing us on the cheap and it is working, because we are doing it in their backyard and they know the lay of the land and they speak the language and practice the religion of the locals. but if we trick the terrorists into having to come all the way to the united states, imagine how much money they will be wasting! now, we will probably be able to catch them, because they are all poor, uneducated, stupid people. even if they can avoid being caught, they will probably be too stupid to pull anything off successfully. the truth is, the terrorists got lucky on 9/11. that plan could have easily failed, many different ways. the odds were probably very much against the plot of 9/11 succeeding. it required too many terrorists to do too much suspicious activity and it had to all go undetected, and norad and the air force had to fail to defend our sky against hijacked planes, and the terrorists had to actually have good enough flying skills to fly planes into buildings. if you really multiply out the probabilities, the probability of everything going right was very low, but it still happened. why? simply because there were many other terrorist plots that failed. this just happened to be the one that succeeded. if the terrorists keep having one plot after another against us, eventually one of the plots is bound to be successful. it is like the old saying about even a stopped clock being right twice a day. if we prepare our nation for being attacked by terrorists, we can probably foil most plots, but we can never be completely foolproof, because most terrorists are quite stupid individuals, or else they would not be dumb enough to volunteer for a suicide mission. stupid people have a way of finding the kinks in a system that smart people would be unable to find due to overthinking the situation and less of a willingness to take irrational risks. the irrational risk-taking of stupid terrorists, in a way, makes them more dangerous than highly intelligent terrorists might be. but then again, it might be fairly easy for the terrorists to attack america. all they have to do is come here, and because of the lax gun control laws, they can buy automatic machine guns and then go to public areas and use them. and why do we have such a big, obvious hole in our national security? why are people like the virginia tech killer able to get guns? it is because of the corrupting influence of lobbyists in washington, who have been able to prevent any sensible gun control legislation from coming to effect to prevent senseless tragedies of mass murderers going on shooting sprees. lobbyists do all sorts of awful things. and they are never held accountable like politicians are. you know who else is not held accountable? journalists. people who do shoddy reporting are all too often not punished for it. the news media completely failed during the months leading up to the united states invasion of iraq, and this invasion would probably not have happened if the news media had been covering things critically since the invasion talk started in august 2002 with the psychotic ramblings of dick cheney about saddam hussein being hell-bent on developing nuclear bombs. now, to be fair, saddam hussein did want to develop nuclear bombs, but his nuclear program was stalled and not going anywhere, and everyone close to saddam hussein lied to him all the time and only told him good things, because saddam hussein was a shoot-the-messenger type who hated to hear bad news. saddam hussein’s own insanity prevented his nuclear program from developing any further. but anyway, it is obvious that the best way to fight this war on terrorism is on the defensive, not the offensive. terrorists in iraq can plant improvised explosive devices in the roads at night to blow up our tanks, and live to fight another day. in iraq, terrorists do not have to pay with their lives every time they attack us. if we make them come here to attack us, then terrorists will have to die every time they try to kill. so they will never get to be repeat offenders. then, who will want to be a terrorist, if they know that all it will earn them is ending up dead? only people with severe mental problems, who are both suicidal and homicidal as well as devoutly muslim, will be willing to sign up. and those mental problems will have to last long and be fairly stable, which means very strong fanaticism. if we focused more on propaganda efforts in the middle east and less on military efforts, things might be going better. the more we spend on propaganda in the middle east, the better. i think it would practically be impossible to spend too much on propaganda in the middle east, unless we started getting into the range of over 90% of arab muslims loving and greatly admiring both the united states and israel. if we got to that point, it would be safe to say that maybe we spent a little too much on the propaganda. but up until that point, i say, increase the funding for propaganda, and diversify our propaganda offerings. iraq has like, hundreds of different newspapers. bribe as many newspaper owners as possible and get as many as possible to print nothing but pro-american propaganda. and do the same for all the arab satellite tv channels, like al jazeera. if we throw enough money at this problem, we can bribe everyone, and then nobody will be printing anti-american stories in newspapers or having anti-american propaganda on the tv. and the same thing goes for hugo chavez and venezuela. with enough money, we can simply buy hugo chavez and get him to be our buddy and run venezuela the way we like. why do you think hugo chavez has so many allies in latin america? they were all bribed! he paid them all off, with the money he made off venezuelan petroleum sales. nobody understands the business of bribing better than hugo chavez, and every man has his price. now where, you ask, will we get the money for all of this bribery? very simple: we steal the money back from them after bribing their politicians and media outlets, using our corporations to do all the fancy business dealings to get the money back. we can end up making a profit off the whole venture. making the muslims of the world like us again could prove to be an extremely profitable business venture, and it would put an end to terrorism too. think of all the savings, all of the money we waste fighting terrorism that we could save by eliminating the terrorism before we have to even spend any money fighting against it in the first place! once the muslims of the world are on our side, they will turn the terrorists in, and rat them out for a reward! we just need to perfect our propaganda technique. we need actual imams preaching from the koran that are saying how wonderful the united states is. we need to be bribing the islamic fundamentalist preachers to preach pro-american islamic bullshit. bribe as many people as possible! instead of democratizing the middle east, we ought to make it as corrupt as possible through widespread bribery. and then we can bribe our way into controlling opec and getting the price of oil to be as low as we want it. and instead of letting the terrorists make money off opium poppies, we can be corrupt and sell licenses to grow opium poppies freely in afghanistan without being bothered by any law enforcement. we can be the ones who take bribes as well as the ones who give them! through this type of corruption, we could become true masters of the middle east. and that would all cost far less than having our troops over there fighting and dying. in fact, if our government took enough bribes, we could make more money than we spend on the whole deal, and come out ahead. that is the best way to protect any so-called “american interests” in iraq. but fighting a war over there? no thanks. the longer we fight, the worse it gets. when you find yourself in a hole you dug, maybe it is time to stop digging. we got into this problem through too much war-fighting. we certainly cannot solve it through war-fighting, because the more of that we do, the worse we make the problem. we are trying to use military troops to win the hearts and minds of a civilian population that is under military occupation, an occupation that is supposedly necessary only because the civilian population is offering such unusually strong resistance, but the more we fight against the resistance, the stronger the resistance gets, and it has gotten to the point where there is a civil war between different factions of the resistance at the same time they are fighting us, and still, they are winning and we are losing. it is insanity to think the best way to win over a civilian population in the opinion polls is through an aggressive military occupation. but, that is still our strategy in iraq, and why we are losing. in reality, we do not need to have anything to do with the nation of iraq if we do not want to. we could cut off all ties to iraq and withdraw everyone we have there, and just abandon our embassy and the green zone and everything, and we would probably be better off afterwards, having done that, than if we desperately try to hold onto everything we still have over there. iraq does not belong to us and we should stop acting like it does. it is its own nation and it is time for us to learn to leave iraq alone and stop interfering in iraq’s internal affairs. i mean, we accuse iran of interfering in iraq’s internal affairs. what is wrong with that? we do far more of it than iran does, so if there is something wrong with it, then both the united states and iran should stop. and that is exactly the position that i take on that issue, that all external nations should stop interfering in internal iraqi affairs, including the united states, and that we should do this regardless of what any iraqis tell us. we cannot let them grow dependent on us. we are the ones making them dependent on us, and we have to just stop doing it. disagreements between sunnis and shiites are not our problem. let the crazy muslims solve their own problems, without our troublesome meddling that only makes things worse. if the sunnis and shiites are all so crazy that they can’t stop themselves from killing each other, then what can we do to stop them? nothing. let them find sanity on their own. we cannot give them brains. they would have to be undead zombies for that to work. and everyone knows that in the middle east, the undead are made into mummies, not zombies, or at least that is what they do in egypt. zombies are primarily made in haiti and other caribbean islands. that is why we cannot stop the fighting between sunnis and shiites, and why we should leave iraq. now, if zombies were made in egypt, it would be a different story. and don’t even get me started on vampires made in transylvania. we in the united states need to develop our own type of undead, in order to stay globally competitive with transylvania, haiti, and egypt. but that is a whole ’nother story.

this just in: something is happening in palestine

ok, so it appears that the palestinian authority has collapsed. the coalition government between hamas and fatah has fallen apart, and hamas militants have taken over the entire gaza strip. why, you ask? well, someone from aipac blames american and israel right-wingers, which is ironic because those are exactly the 2 groups that aipac helped bring together in a neoconservative alliance against islam, ever since 9/11 changed everything. maybe aipac does not have as much orthodoxy as i and others have thought, and is more of a heterodox zionist organization. who knows? the israelis, at least, make a hell of a lot more sense than the palestinians, at least on some level. they are a wealthy nation like us, and just like us, they have to fight islamic terrorists all the time, terrorists who are out to destroy their nation. and just like us, they are occupying arab muslim lands with their military, and antagonizing the local population in these occupied territories. except we occupied iraq in 2003 following the invasion of afghanistan back in 2001. israel occupied the west bank, the gaza strip, the golan heights, the sinai peninsula, and lebanon in the past. out of those 5 areas, israel remains occupiers of 2 territories: the west bank and the golan heights. 2 of the other areas, lebanon and the gaza strip, are areas israel has had major military conflicts or occupations in within the last few years. anyway, both lebanon and the gaza strip were under israeli occupation until recently, and now both places are really fucked up because israel left and left a power vacuum behind and then used military force again after leaving, making things even worse.

ok, so what is going on here? well, the palestinians, that is, the people who live in the west bank and the gaza strip who are not israeli citizens, are a people with no national citizenship, who live in land under military occupation that is not part of any nation. or at least, that was the case until recently... but now the gaza strip is free of israeli occupation. this was not too much of a problem until a civil war broke out between hamas and fatah, which were ironically in a coalition government together, running the palestinian authority, in a coalition that took over a year to put together and had not been going for too long. all of these events would not have happened if it were not for the death of yasser arafat several years ago, because when he was alive, all of the palestinian militant groups answered to him, some more reluctantly than others. israel would have never left the gaza strip with yasser arafat in charge of the palestinians. when israel withdrew from gaza, they knew the most powerful, well-equipped armed group in the gaza strip was hamas. but, they did it anyway. in retrospect, it is amazing that hamas did not take over gaza earlier, given the fact that they could have done it so easily. now, the leader of fatah and the president of the palestinian authority, mahmoud abbas, the pro-american stooge we had installed as yasser arafat’s #2, has declared hamas illegal, and disbanded the coalition government with hamas, installing in its place a government that does not have any hamas members in it. this is despite the fact that hamas overwhelmingly won the most recent elections that swept it into power in the palestinian parliament. so the president of the palestinian authority, mahmoud abbas, has had to resort to undemocratic methods to stay in power and keep the palestinian authority from falling apart. in reality, all he is doing is making the palestinian authority simply be permanently controlled by the fatah movement and by the president of palestine, just like when yasser arafat was the president of the palestinian authority and the leader of the fatah movement. it is well known that mahmoud abbas is willing to do or say pretty much anything in order to win over the americans, the israelis, and the international community. he is a weak, spineless american puppet whose house of cards is crumbling. now he will have to consolidate his base of power in the west bank, get international aid to his government restored, and become a more autocratic type of ruler in the mold of yasser arafat. he will probably have the support of the bush administration, but will that be enough for him to hold onto power? or will hamas take over the west bank too? will everything just collapse into anarchy? the palestinian-controlled parts of the west bank are fragmented and separate from one another, so there could be different armed groups in control of each part, theoretically. but it is more likely that there will be 1 or 2 armed groups that rule everyone as the official government. will that government be recognized by the international community as a real government governing a real independent nation called palestine? no chance. there is a little bit of good news in all of this. the good news is, israel benefits from the palestinians fighting among themselves, because when palestinians fight other palestinians, they are not fighting israelis. but the bad news for israel? things will only get worse once the palestinians are done fighting each other, and if demographic trends continue as projected, someday jews will be a minority and muslims the majority in the nation of israel. then, who will win free and fair democratic elections, if those are ever held? muslims, since they will be the majority. of course, that assumes that new people who are born will practice the same religion as their parents. if instead we assume that each new person miraculously learns to think for themselves, the majority of people, not just in israel but in all other nations, will someday be atheists. but, that is unlikely, and besides, most people are so stupid that if they thought for themselves, they would do even worse than if they just believe whatever they are told. i have seen time and time again examples of the universal stupidity that almost all if not all human beings share, to different degrees of severity. i do not know a single person who has not shown some level of stupidity with their words and/or actions. most people show plenty of stupidity with both their words and their actions. the stupidest thing of all is to deny being stupid, because denial is just plain dumb. the neoconservatives are still in denial over the issue of iraq, and this demonstrates clearly to everyone the degree of stupidity these so-called “intellectuals” have. but i do not think that there is such a thing as a “neoconservative intellectual”, although other people have written on the subject as if such people exist. i think it is an oxymoron. most neoconservatives are actually anti-intellectual. anyway, the palestinians are in quite a pickle now. we’ll see how they deal with this problem. i think, more and more, the west bank and the gaza strip will be viewed as completely separate and distinct in the future, and people will give up on the idea of a unified “palestine”. or, then again, demographic trends could make israel obsolete, and perhaps everyone would rally to the cause of creating a unified palestine, just as people rallied to the zionist cause of creating the nation of israel in 1948. but, do not forget that the problems in lebanon are also closely tied to the fact that israel occupied southern lebanon for many years and fought a war against lebanon last summer. israel will be able to survive in the short term because of military superiority that they owe in a large part to aid from the united states. but in the long run, israel could still be destroyed, given how much they are hated by the muslims of the world, and how they have many more enemies than friends. both israel and palestine seem to be doomed to destruction, but in different ways, and over different time frames. the syrians may someday get their wish of having the golan heights back; perhaps they could annex lebanon as well, one of these days. once israel is dead and gone, like over 1 billion muslims would probably like to see happen, who knows what will happen? now do those same billion muslims want to destroy the united states. no... only a fraction would want that. although we are a lot more hated than before, we are still nowhere near as hated as israel. now israel does have nuclear weapons, but do you expect them to use nuclear weapons if an overwhelming force of a human army invades and is about to destroy their nation? the whole justification for founding israel was because of the holocaust being bad and the victims needing a land they can call home and feel safe in. unleashing a new nuclear holocaust would not be a good way for such a nation to come to an end. it would be more proper to simply dismantle the weapons of mass destruction so nobody can use them. but the time for that has not yet come. anyway, these recent events in the middle east probably fit the end times prophecies of the book of revelations perfectly. it seems that no matter what happens in the world, it always fits perfectly with biblical prophecy, at least when listening to people who make a career out of saying that all the time regardless of the circumstances. who knows? maybe they are right. who would jesus bomb? someday we may know the answer, when the fightin’ jesus comes back to kick some ass for his daddy. perhaps jesus will carry a machine gun, and go around blasting people to smithereens. one can only pray. now, whether you pray for that to happen or for that not to happen, hey, it depends on whether that kind of stuff is your taste. but if you don’t pray, well then, don’t complain when god goes and does something you have a problem with, because guess what? somebody else ordered, and it got delivered. the only problem is, you ended up having to pay the delivery guy the bill, and the delivery guy for god happens to be jesus. what do you end up having to pay jesus? faith. and what if you don’t have any? you will have to pay on credit, and go into faith debt. and don’t even get me started on how hard it is to come out of faith debt. i am trying to come out of faith debt right now, as a matter of fact. this guy “bob” runs a nonprofit corporation that makes money off showing people for free how to transform their debt into wealth, in what it calls “the transforming debt into wealth system”. according to the system, you make money in exchange for doing nothing, and this is called “slack”. i wonder if it works. hopefully it can help me pay off my faith debt to jesus. jesus is not going to collect on my debt until after i die, so hopefully i have a lot of time. i wonder how much indulgences cost? maybe the people in palestine have some answers. after all, these are the end times, and they live in the holy land.

stupid attention-grabbing headlines

fbi tries to fight zombie hordes. that is a news story headline at bbc news. i have seen this kind of sensationalist bullshit many times before. you get a lot more of it from a tabloid news source than a reputable one. but even the reputable ones seem to be full of shit nowadays. the bbc is the most reputable news organization in the world. so this means, by extension, the rest of the news organizations are even worse than the bbc. so, logically, it makes sense to avoid paying any attention to the news, since the news is sensationalist bullshit that tries to trick you into actually paying attention to uninteresting things when nothing interesting is actually happening, but you don’t find that out until it is too late and you have already wasted your short attention span on it. so don’t waste any of your attention span on the news. stay uninformed. most people are uninformed anyway, so this just makes you one of them. if the news people can’t just tell the news to us straight, why waste time on them? keep your brain empty... at least then you will have enough space left to learn something new, if the need ever arises.

good article on “new atheists”

here is a good article on the “new atheists”, the people who wrote all the bestselling atheist books lately. the author of the article sympathizes with the “new atheists” who wrote those books, but has a different atheist point of view. i think the real reason there is a problem is, just like nobody has any idea who or what god is defined as, people have the same lack of understanding of what atheism is defined as. an atheist is someone who lacks belief in any supernatural deity and/or deities, and atheism is lack of belief in any supernatural deity and/or deities. of course those are my words and not from a dictionary, but it is just a restatement of what the dictionaries say about atheists. so technically, anyone who is unsure about god’s existence does not really believe, and their lack of belief makes them an atheist. an agnostic is someone who claims that it is impossible for anyone to know whether or not god or any other supernatural deities exist. so an agnostic is a subtype of atheist. there are 2 primary types of atheist: strong atheists and weak atheists. strong atheists claim that they know for sure that there is no god or any other supernatural deity. weak atheists do not make any such claims of knowing about god’s nonexistence. of course, the jewish/christian/muslim god needs to be put on an equal footing with all other deities from other religions, like vishnu and shiva and zeus and thor and the egyptian sun god. there is no reason to give one god special treatment compared to all the others. that would be unfair. anyway, an agnostic is a subtype of a weak atheist. but anyway there are 3 main types of atheist: strong atheists, weak atheists who are not agnostics, and agnostics. weak atheists who are not agnostics are probably the largest category of them all, in numbers. those are people who neither claim to know whether god exists nor claim that they know it is impossible whether to know whether god exists. in other words, they make no claims at all. this is the default position, the position of not knowing anything. anyone who is unsure and does not know whether god exists but thinks there ought to be some sort of way to tell would be in this, the largest of the 3 categories. in fact, this category includes a large percentage of people who claim to follow religions, and who might be followers if you look at their external actions instead of their internal thoughts. but it is someone’s internal thoughts and beliefs that make them either an atheist or a theist. and what are the kinds of theist? the 2 main types of theists are monotheists and polytheists. monotheists believe in 1 god, and are usually jewish, christian, or muslim, but there are some from other traditions such as zoroastrianism, which is the world’s oldest monotheistic religion. polytheists believe in many gods, and the most popular form of polytheism is hinduism. there is also greco-roman paganism and norse paganism, and the various other pagan religions of the world, along with japanese shintoism and chinese taoism. in a recent post i made a mistake about which of aristotle’s axioms of logic is rejected by taoists and those who follow the philosophy of dadaism. it is not just the axiom that every statement is either true or false. it is also important to reject the axiom that a statement cannot be true and false at the same time! taoists like to believe and disbelieve something at the same time, and consider how a statement is both true and false at the same time. dadaists just simply reject logic altogether, and embrace being illogical, so in essence this means, most importantly, rejecting that a statement cannot be true and false at the same time. a subgenius, on the other hand, likes to think that all statements are true and none of them are false, and just believe everything. so technically this would make subgeniuses polytheists, since they believe in everything, especially things that are inherently self-contradictory. the whole point of believing in everything is to prove that you are dumb enough to believe anything. and that is why your iq is below genius level, making you literally a sub-genius. anyone dumb enough to believe anything is obviously not a genius, you see, so they must be a subgenius instead. but not all people with sub-genius-level iqs are subgenii. there are other requirements, all of which contradict each other, and you have to fulfill all of these contradictory requirements to be a true subgenius, which means subgenii do not exist, unless you believe that multiple things that contradict each other can all be true at the same time, in which case there is not a problem. a strong atheist, however, usually stakes out that position based on logic and reason, and typically would believe in all of aristotle’s axioms of logic, and use them as the basis for proving the nonexistence of god, a thoroughly meaningless exercise. i mean, what in god’s name is the point of proving that god does not exist, if god is an inherently self-contradictory “concept”? such a god does not even qualify as a concept because all the contradictions make god impossible for anyone with a rational, logical mind to understand. you must either reject god or reject logic, or else pretend everything somehow neatly fits together and god really does exist. but which god is even being discussed? there are so many gods out there, maybe one of them actually does exist. i mean, statistically, what are the chances that, out of all the gods people have ever made up, not a single one actually exists, if you assume the chances for each god existing are 50%, which is logical if you are completely ignorant? the chances of atheism being correct, or of monotheism being correct, are ridiculously tiny, if you go by the statistics. there are probably hundreds if not thousands of gods, all of which exist, if you think each god has a 50% probability of existence. but what if these gods only have some weird quantum form of quasi-existence, just like schroedinger’s cat can have a weird quantum state of being alive and dead at the same time? i think quantum physics has shown that something can be true and false at the same time, which proves that illogic is correct, and logical people such as strong atheists need to stop using their brains because they are too smart for their own good. embrace stupidity! you can believe things that are obviously false! you can believe anything if you put your mind to it! all you need is a little faith, and then you can believe the craziest-sounding conspiracy theories people have ever concocted, all at once, even if 10 of them involve the kennedy assassination and all 10 blame different people and have totally contradictory storylines! who cares? everything is true! of course that undermines the whole meaning of truth, but that is the point. truth is fiction. this is 1984, and my name is l. ron hubbard. and now that everything is true, nothing makes any sense! everything is just nonsense! you cannot think any smarter than your brain is, but you sure can think stupider than your brain is! i have tried it and it works! i have my brain running now at 90% below capacity, and i am only thinking with 10% of my brain! which 10%? the stupidest! and you see the results... brilliant! i am guided by animal instinct, manipulating objects known as “words” to build structures known as “sentences”. they are all built the same way a stupid monkey would build things out of his own poop before he throws it at people who walk by at the zoo. but the new atheists? they are far too logical to understand any of this mindless drivel. i am the good old-fashioned kind of atheist, the kind who disbelieves in everything. i even disbelieve in my own disbelief. try disbelieving in that! there is one thing that i worship religiously, though, and that is attractive young women my age. they are so great and wonderful, it is impossible to construct a sentence capable of expressing their glory. they are far superior to everything else in this universe. and any so-called “faults” that they seem to have are actually good qualities that are just being looked at incorrectly when labeled as faults. if you are good at telling good qualities from bad ones, then you can tell that all of their qualities are good and none are bad. this is because value judgments are subjective and everyone can make different ones. subgenii think that truth is subjective, and since there is no objective truth, not only is there moral relativism, but there is complete relativism! it is like albert einstein on steroids wearing a dunce cap, sitting in the corner, sucking his thumb! truth and fiction are one and the same because they mirror each other and are inverses, so it is impossible to tell one from the other. according to superstring theory, big and small are one and the same because they mirror each other and are inverses, so it is impossible to tell one from the other. so the universe is either very very big or very very small, according to superstring theory. which one? nobody knows. perhaps the subatomic particles we are made of are actually larger than us, but we are looking at everything backwards when it comes to size, and have “big” confused with “small”. scientists still cannot prove that the universe is big, because a big universe is mathematically equivalent to a small universe that is inside out. so, instead of having a big universe that is expanding, perhaps we inhabit a tiny universe that is getting even smaller. you can’t prove that we do not live in such a universe, can you? so, while strong atheists like me are perfectly capable of proving that a specific god does not exist, if we are given the right definition and properties for that god, we still cannot disprove it if you open it up and allow any god at all to exist, even the minor, unimportant ones from long forgotten polytheistic religions. perhaps one of those gods really does exist, and is watching over all of us, and is really pissed off because everyone has moved on to newer religions and forgotten the ancient religions that actually worships him/her/it. and so that god takes out his/her/its frustration with the fact that nobody on earth believes in him/her/it by making us miserable and making natural disasters happen and manipulating people into becoming enemies and confusing our minds and giving us nasty diseases, and that god is just laughing at us. but that god does not have unlimited powers, since he/she/it is just one of many gods. the others are all ignoring us because there are much more important things going on elsewhere in the universe for them to pay attention to. but for the 1 god that does bother to pay any attention to us, we are just a toy, a plaything, like a video game. only someone stupid enough to believe anything who actually does believe everything would be capable of believing in such a long-forgotten elder god. but i think human language is too limiting and limited to even talk about anything divine. i don’t think a god can exist if it is the sort of god that people can actually speak about in words. only some unnamed force that is so complicated it is beyond human comprehension if we use 100% of our brain could be the real answer... but that would be something for science to study, not religion. but science can never find all the answers, because in reality, the laws that govern this universe are far too complicated for humanity to ever find. yes, when it comes to physics, i am an agnostic, one who boldly claims that nobody can find the answers, ever. even more so when it comes to the laws that govern complex chaotic dynamic self-modifying things in lush heterogenous environments. we can never explain those things, even though we ourselves are prime examples of such chaotic beings. a human being is the very essence of the sacred chao that the discordian religion worships. the funny thing about the laws of chaos is that they change all the time and nobody can keep track of them because whenever you write them down, the piece of paper mysteriously vanishes or something completely different appears on it instead. true reality can never be explained because reality is the opposite of fantasy and we all live in fantasy worlds we create in our own minds. so while atheism is correct, atheism is meaningless and tells us nothing about the world. it simply removes several ridiculous ways for explaining things, but things are still way too complicated to explain, even afterwards. we are only made of matter because we define what we are made of as matter and we define that other stuff that it annihilates with as antimatter, but it could just as easily be the other way around. perhaps all the knowledge humanity has ever discovered is completely stupid and inconsequential to some superior alien race, where a typical baby knows 10 times as much as what our entire civilization knows by its first birthday... if aliens even celebrate birthdays. but who knows? perhaps those aliens in some far off galaxy are so weird, they do not even have birthday parties. if so, i feel sorry for them, despite their advanced ways, because they still do not know the simple joys of a birthday party. i wonder if i am going to have a birthday party. it sure would be nice, since my birthday is coming up, after all. hint, hint, rest of humanity... maybe, act differently than those advanced aliens who do not celebrate birthdays... let us celebrate our primitive ape festivals on our small terrestrial planet... and i still think our earth girls are way better than those space chicks, if the aliens even have 2 genders like we do...

norman podhoretz is praying for the united states to attack iran

norman podhoretz, one of the co-founders of the neoconservative movement who just happens to be jewish, is praying for the united states to attack iran. i know this story is more than a week old, but still... what kind of crazy fucked-up weirdo prays for innocent people to be killed? please, norman podhoretz, next time, just pray for your own death, not somebody else’s. it is people like him who discredit religion, by giving supposedly divine backing to the senseless killing of innocent people. of course the old testament is filled with examples of times god gave divine backing to the killing of innocents. which is why i would advise against being a part of any religion that considers it holy scripture, unless absolutely necessary. but at least moral absolutism must be thrown out, if you believe in biblical literalism, because if the rule that murder is wrong has a ton of exceptions, then there really are no moral absolutes, and we are just left with moral relativism. if you believe in moral absolutism, you have to reject the bible, because it goes against moral absolutism. unless you have a really fucked-up set of absolute moral rules, that is. like if you are like, whatever god does is moral and good. but that is like president richard nixon saying anything he does is legal because he is president. it is just not the way things work. even the powerful must be held accountable for their actions and judged by the same standards as everyone else. so if god is good, his actions must be righteous and good. and that means that god must behave in a completely different manner than what the bible says, unless you have a nixon/dubya-esque view of executive privilege. but if you have that kind of view of things, then the golden rule for you would be whoever has the gold makes the rules. not very idealistic, not really the moral high ground. it is the height of insanity to attack iran while we are already getting our asses handed to us in iraq. only a neoconservative would be stupid enough to do such a thing. but you know how neoconservatives are. they are the stupidest people in the world, because they think they know better than everyone else, and they are always wrong about everything, yet refuse to reform their ways or even consider accepting reality. they just believe that might makes right, and that whoever is the world’s only superpower must have all that power because they are morally superior to everyone else. pure insanity. people like norman podhoretz ought to be committed to an insane asylum. actually, the entire wall street journal editorial board belongs in an insane asylum, in straitjackets, along with everyone at the weekly standard and the washington times, and most of the talking heads at fox news. but i fear most of them are beyond being helped, and are incurably crazy, beyond redemption. it is too bad the neoconservatives still have so much power in the bush administration. if anyone is praying, they ought to pray that bush and cheney are impeached and removed from office, and nancy pelosi is sworn in as president before the end of this year. that is something worth praying for. why? because now joseph lieberman has joined fellow neoconservative norman podhoretz in calling for an attack on iran. joseph lieberman, you do not know how much you are undermining the jewish people, who were once considered a peaceful people. connecticut voters, why did you let this pompous blowhard get re-elected when you had someone much better running against him last fall? idiots. imagine if the 51-49 majority the democrats had in the u.s. senate did not include a 2-faced turncoat who cannot be trusted. but no, the connecticut voters had to put their trust in holy joe, because he had done oh so much for them over the years. thanks for nothing, connecticut. but hey, at least holy joe isn’t promoting mass murder under the banner of the democratic party anymore. he’s an independent now, which really means that nobody wants him inside their political party because everyone knows he is a traitor. all he has left to do is break his electoral promises to caucus with the democrats and officially join the republicans, but i think he is too cowardly to do that. he showed what a coward he was last year when he filed the papers to run as a 3rd party candidate before the democratic primary even happened, and refused to say he would endorse his party’s nominee for senate. he could have stayed democratic if he wanted to, and then he would have won the primary. of course he ended up winning the general election, but only through his guilt trip and his lies and deceit. it is bad enough having the bush administration in office, but people like joe lieberman only make it worse by being enablers of all of bush’s bad behavior.

why so much leftist infighting?

i find this article quite strange. it is written for adbusters magazine, a leftist magazine published out of canada, a magazine which claims to be anti-capitalist or at least anti-consumerist and anti-advertisement. but it is talking down to other leftists and insulting them, insulting the democrats and the liberals of the united states. of course it says “north american” instead of just referring to the united states, so i assume it is also insulting the leftists of canada, where this magazine is published. now the author is a contributing editor of rolling stone magazine, which can hardly be considered an anti-capitalist publication. i assume the author makes plenty of money. the author tries to accuse others of hypocrisy, but only implicates himself. his dissociation from calling himself “liberal”, after admitting that when other people do it it is cowardice, and after admitting that he agrees with liberalism, is complete cowardice. the problem is, there are too many people like him in the leading ranks of the democratic party and liberalism and leftist movements, people who try to be divisive and insult the masses that they should be rallying to the cause.

what kind of idiotic movement insults its own followers? the church of the subgenius does so, but that is because it is a postmodern satirical pseudo-religion. the democratic party and the liberal/progressive movement has no excuse. i support the democratic party and liberalism, and consider myself a liberal democrat. i am not afraid of taking on that identity. what is weird is, either a centrist or a hardcore leftist could author a critique of the type that this fellow wrote. but the real problem is, leftist movements have always had a great deal of infighting, especially at the top, in stark contrast to the well-organized cooperation of right-wing movements. we leftists are too willing to look for any problems in ourselves or our movement, too willing to question ourselves, but most importantly, too willing to air our dirty laundry regarding our self-doubts to the public.

those on the left-wing side of politics always seem a little too eager to attack each other, instead of focusing their attacks on the common enemy, the right-wing side. usually the people who do this attacking think they are doing their fellow left-wingers a favor and helping them out. they are almost always wrong. joe klein of time magazine is a typical centrist left-wing backstabber, who thinks his constructive criticism will help more than it hurts. no, it won’t. it’s criticism, not praise. and it’s in fricken time magazine, a magazine that lots of people of all political persuasions read. any help it does will be grossly outweighed by hurt. if those of us on the left do not even believe in our own ideology (if we even have an ideology), then how convincing does that make us look to someone who is neutral between left and right and defaults to being doubtful towards both?

there are plenty of publications such as the nation magazine which are entirely left-wing, and these could carry all the internal disagreements of the left, while keeping our inner disagreements out of publications that carry both sides. there is no reason to ruin our chances for success by discrediting ourselves out in the open in front of everyone. the right-wing side offers a unanimous message throughout the media, with no dissenting voices. you hear the same point of view from fox news, the wall street journal editorial page, the washington times, and right-wing talk radio. there may be some debate between right-wingers on minor minutiae of something, but not on major issues like whether president bush is good or bad, or whether it was right or wrong to invade iraq. if one side of the political spectrum agrees on everything, and the other side can’t seem to make up their mind on anything, people have a tendency to go with the side that at least agrees with itself.

i mean, i am not advocating being as completely monolithic and rigid in our groupthink as the right-wingers, by any means. but how often do you hear right-wing voices in the media seriously question whether they should support the republican party? it may have been happening a bit more recently, but not at all as much as the left-wing voices questioning whether they should support the democratic party. the republicans are a marriage of convenience between 2 natural enemies: the amoral wealthy elitists who make money for large corporations off their political connections, and the simple folk who inhabit our nation’s heartland and believe in fundamentalist preachings. those groups have completely divergent best interests and political agendas. one group has no morals whatsoever and just wants to steal money from everyone else while nobody is looking, and the other group has too many moral values, many of which are completely wrong, because of their obsessive biblical literalism. why do these 2 groups work together? the amoral wealthy folk who want to make money off us mainly care about economic issues, while the fundamentalist religious folk are obsessed with puritanical values about sex and mainly care about social issues. and on issues of national security, both sides can embrace war, either through amoral war profiteering, or through the religious doctrine of “just war theory”. mainly the reason the 2 sides avoid conflict is their political leaders know not to get in the way of the other side, because they both support the same political party, and, love it or hate it, their fortunes rise or fall together. in the end, that is the only real reason these 2 forces are allied with each other. and basically the amoral war profiteers have proven to have more influence in washington, while the religious right turn out to be less influential, whenever they actually disagree on an issue. so the religious right can never actually have an open conflict with the wealthy, despite how jesus famously condemned the wealthy to almost-certain damnation in hell, comparing their chances at salvation to the chances of putting a camel through the eye of a needle. the religious right cannot be antiwar, despite jesus’s strong pacifist stance, because the military-industrial complex votes republican. so millions of americans have been enslaved in the voting booth to fundamentalist preachers who are mere pawns in the hands of politically well-connected billionaires and multimillionaires. this shaky alliance only seems sturdy because they keep their disputes out of public view. there are only a small number of people in charge and they all know each other... why should they air their dirty laundry in public?

but those of us on the left never know when to stop. we verbally attack each other all the time. liberalism and the democratic party are both sort of shaky, fractious coalitions, but then again, liberalism is the democratic party and the democratic party is liberalism, or at least it would be that way if things worked the way they were supposed to work. of course we all know that conservatism is the republican party and the republican party is conservatism. what republican politician would ever deny being a conservative? people are proud to call themselves conservatives. yet democratic politicians shudder at the term “liberal”, and it probably gives them nightmares at night. people are so afraid of being associated with 1 little word, and for what? it is ridiculous, the cowardice. now it is true that true liberals who stuck with the liberal ideology would never be able to “sell out to the man” and be buddies with big business and get corporate contributions in big numbers. the democratic leadership council and bill clinton were the ones who found a money source for the the democrats, who had been tired of losing presidential elections to people like ronald wilson reagan and george herbert walker bush. and what was that money source? the same corporations who gave money to the republicans! it turns out amoral big businesspeople are willing to pay off any crooked politician to enact their economically ridiculous policies.

but what is the basis for this amoral capitalism of big business, and how does it differ from a more moral version of capitalism? it turns out that the amoral, evil school of thought in economics is known as the “neoclassical” school of thought. it is based on the “classical” school of thought that was built on a house of cards and turned out to be dead wrong about everything once the great depression hit in the 1930’s. world war ii ended the great depression by essentially turning the united states into a command economy like under communism, but only temporarily, and then once the war was over, the economy was quickly and efficiently transitioned back to capitalism, in a transition that had been planned in advance. we got out of the great depression through a socialist transition back towards eventual capitalism. the neoclassical and classical schools of thought both believe in “free trade” and other big lies like keeping taxes as low as possible and having as few regulations as possible both being in the public interest, regardless of circumstance. economists tend to oversimplify things, and need to adopt a more circumstance-oriented view of reality, dealing with each circumstance uniquely, as best suits that particular circumstance. anyway, neoclassical views of economics tend to lead to the same results as classical views of economics: large corporations do extremely well, and the gap between the rich and poor gets bigger all the time. there is another, more moral version of capitalism, where the false idol of the market is not worshiped as infallible, and market failure is taken seriously. neoclassical economists make unrealistic claims of universal human rationality which are completely bogus, and they use fatally flawed, grossly oversimplified economic models to misrepresent a highly complex and dynamic reality that is incapable of such simple description. having taken 4 university economics classes myself and having done exceptionally well in them, i can tell you for certain that what i studied was not how the economies of the world actually behave, but what existing popular economic models claim is the behavior of the economies of the world, both in microeconomics and macroeconomics. the mathematics is beautiful in its simplicity, but things are just not that simple in real life.

and really, why are leftists such infighters? is it because we are immune to groupthink, or because groupthink operates differently on us leftists than how it operates on right-wingers? if you look at all of the socialist and communist political groups in the united states and their history, for instance, you will find that they have suffered this problem of infighting a great deal throughout their history, and a similar problem has plagued the “internationals”, which are international socialist organizations. why was it the democratic convention of 1968 that had so much infighting, and not the republican one? nixon, ford, reagan, and bush the first all would have fallen short from the ideological litmus test of today’s conservative republican movement, yet the republicans always rally to support their party and try to bring along as many non-partisans as they can in voting republican. the 2006 election was no different; the republicans just did quite badly in convincing anyone who was not a republican to vote for them last year, but it was not for lack of trying, or for lack of a unified message. they had been hit on all fronts throughout 2005 and 2006, and they were simply on a sinking ship. the mark foley sex scandal just sealed the deal of their failure, but hurricane katrina and tom delay’s legal troubles were what caused the failure in the first place. now sure there were some conservative commentators who deserted the sinking ship of the republican party when it was greatest in need, but those commentators are either simply opportunists who sense it when public opinion shifts, or perhaps they were actually expressing their real opinions. those commentators will probably all be back on board in the 2008 presidential election, supporting the republicans again. they probably just need to show that they are not complete partisan hacks every once in a while, in order to create the illusion that their opinions are any more worthwhile than anyone else’s. but this dissension among the ranks was an anomaly of 2006, and it went against the general rule for how conservatives behave. perhaps they had just finally seen so much overwhelming evidence that the point of view they had been advocating was wrong that they finally just accepted reality. let us hope not, because the longer conservative commentators live in a fantasy land, the better the chance liberals have at beating them in the real world. we liberals are still the political underclass, the one nobody wants to admit to being a member of. changing our stripes and calling ourselves progressives just shows our cowardice and shows the conservatives that we are on the run. but if you have read the communist manifesto, half of it is devoted to attacking other socialist schools of thought that existed when it was written, in 1848. and communists have never tried to pretend to be anything other than communists; the communist party of the united states had its peak during the times of mccarthyism because all the publicity got people interested in it and some of them joined. those cowards who are afraid to be called liberals, who needs ’em? they are losers anyway. i for one am a winner and i am a liberal too. nobody can ever extinguish the flame of liberalism. it will keep flaming away forever. ha ha.

but liberalism makes a lot of sense compared to conservatism. conservatives are torn between 2 different pressure groups, big business and the religious right. liberals have no such problems. liberals help out many different interest groups, such as environmentalists, feminists, racial minorities, homosexuals, and any other oppressed minority group, assuming it is a group made up of people who can vote. yes it is true, fetuses developing inside mothers’ wombs do not qualify for liberal assistance, but this is because their needs are less important than the mothers’ needs. try and understand, fetuses. your mothers do not want you to be born, and you would only end up being unwanted in this world. maybe someone would adopt you though. oh well. it is not fair to put women through 9 months of pregnancy. i am a man, so i cannot possibly understand how horrible pregnancy must be. i must be supportive of a woman’s right to do whatever the hell she wants, as long as it helps improve my chances of having sex. ok, so we liberals might not be perfect on every issue. we are sure right on a lot more of them than the republicans! besides, when is the last time anyone ever condemned abortion without resorting to religious dogma? it is not like fetuses are sentient beings anyway. they are in a pre-sentient stage of being. i still think liberals are right on pretty much every issue where they disagree with conservatives. now, those who criticize us for not going far enough in taking issue with conservatives on even more things, that is valid, but there are only so many things we can make into issues before we run out of issues. there is a certain quota, a certain number of issues which is the maximum amount the public can consider at once. any issue that does not make the quota will get ignored by the mass media and most of the public. so maybe we are not always making the right issues the top ones, but who controls which issues become the top issues? either politicians or the media. i think they both feed on each other, really. politicians only have 1 natural predator: journalists. and journalists only have 1 natural predator: politicians. they are both at the top of the food chain. and they respond to poll results, despite the fact that poll results respond to news events in a delayed reaction, and the politicians could simply respond to news events immediately and avoid this delay in dealing with reality. of course journalists wait for poll results too, to avoid saying anything controversial and figure out which issues they need to pretend not to have any opinions on. journalists and politicians both need to avoid being human. journalists have to avoid having opinions and politicians have to avoid doing or admitting to anything bad. so journalists hide all the opinions and politicians hide all the facts, and in the end, nobody really knows anything.

so why all the leftist infighting? it is because leftists do not respect authority figures, and have the same anti-authority instinct as libertarians and anarchists. there are no authority figures like ronald reagan (authority figure of conservatives) that all leftists would look up to. leftists are the ones who want positive change to something new, but it is really hard to define exactly what we want. like if you reject both communism and free-market capitalism, what are you left with? many options, but which to pick? probably just a regulated form of capitalism with antitrust laws and consumer protections and such, if you are a politician. but notice that lately politicians have been much more likely to help us out as consumers than help us out as workers, even though most of us do both consumption and production. this is because of that democratic coziness with industry, to try and sweep the rug out from under the republicans by taking away their money machine, or at least to get in on half the money corporations give to politicians. but the wealthy have the last laugh, because they have bought and paid for both political parties, and they also control the “science” of economics, by using economics against the economists. after the failure of classical economics, neoclassical economics came back because it was funded by the wealthy, in order to advance theories whose advocacy would benefit the wealthy. this simply demonstrates how there is no such thing as a “social science”; it dilutes the meaning of real science. economics is just political theater whose debates are in the language of mathematics, but if your debate team is better funded than the other debate team, more people will want to be on your side and get some of the money. economists who boldly challenge illogical orthodoxy make a lot less than those who mindlessly adhere to it. and that orthodoxy only came about because economists failed to understand that the laws of economics apply to economics departments at universities and individual economists, and that big business had a certain point of view it wanted economists to represent. liberals had better be above that, and be above being bought out. but it is not likely, because human beings are universally corruptible. maybe that is the reason for the infighting: a fight between corporate sellouts and those who still hold true to liberal values. but that still does not explain why even the followers of leon trotsky are unable to maintain a coherent, unified movement. i doubt any of them have been bought out by corporations; they are too unimportant and insignificant. there is some larger disorganizing principle at work here, destroying things, and i still have not been able to figure it out. perhaps each person thinks they know better than everybody else. i think that is the most likely disorganizing principle that destroys leftist movements. that is probably why cindy sheehan had a falling-out with the peace movement. the universal assumption of personal intellectual superiority. if this assumption were dismantled, there could be broad left-wing solidarity from the far left all the way straight through to the center. hmm... i think i know how i would phrase it... “you are stupid. if you do not believe you are stupid, you are twice as stupid as someone who does. and yes, this applies to you.” a bit long though. i need to make it into a short little slogan or soundbite. “hey stupid. yeah, you. maybe someone else is right and you are wrong. think about it.” there has to be some way to attack the intellectual arrogance that seems to be the heart of the problem. i mean, it is good for people to think for themselves, but sometimes people think they are thinking for themselves when really they are not thinking at all. left-wing critics of the democratic party always seems to be overflowing with intellectual arrogance and a smug self-congratulatory attitude of infallibility, at least if they are the ralph nader type. if only those people would get over their own petty egos, they would see that their fortunes rise and fall with those of the democratic party.