News Media
An organism that lies about everything all the time, and is functioning exactly as designed.
All media and telecommunications businesses are founded by people who believe they possess the right to shape public opinion. There is nothing wrong with this from an entrepreneurial perspective. It is just as much a legitimate business as any other. Rather, it is the implications of the quality of their product that should be examined more closely from a consumer perspective.
If we purchase a product, we assume there to have been a prudent and honest assessment of quality. Food needs to be safe to consume, housing needs to adhere to strict codes, vehicles need to meet safety standards, and children’s toys need to be safe for their enjoyment. Sometimes our faith can be misplaced, and there are many examples of businesses cutting corners, but if things are working correctly, our trust in standards is reasonably justified.
The news is entirely different. Their product is information, and with it, everything that we can safely assume will be present when humans are conveying it. Media companies are not designed to, nor are they interested in, controlling for bias. Additionally, media needs to work within extremely tight time constraints in order to stay competitive, and nothing that is rushed will bear high quality fruit.
If the industry itself were not alone an indictment of its capacity to convey anything accurately, corporate sponsorship drives the point home. With a sponsorship model in place, only a FOOL would believe we are getting an honest account of current events. If specific details of a report, or perhaps the story in its entirely, could be perceived as damaging to a sponsor’s brand, then they will be omitted. While we may feel betrayed by an industry for their complicity in protecting potentially corrupt entities, a sponsor should expect a return on their investment. They are not providing money to a network out of the kindness of their heart.
It could be argued that the news media could not exist in any other state. The problem then, is the amount of stake we place in anything they report, or the fact we pay attention to them at all. If we modify our engagement and withdraw, they are far more likely to alter their trajectory and provide us with something we might actually trust. This will only be short-lived, because once their numbers rise again, lucrative sponsorship will emerge to capitalize on the captive audience.
We should accept the news media for what it is. No more and no less. It is biased, dishonest, willing to conspire, interested in shaping our interpretation of reality, subject to influence by governments, controlling narratives, and willing to manifest these in any way they see fit (for the right price). We should expect this, it is a human-centric industry with human interests. It is our expectations that are misplaced.
An exception exists to the legitimacy of this industry: when a government is audacious enough to fund news media organizations directly using tax dollars. At this point, they have officially become a propaganda machine. Of course, the news media will happily accept this money, like prostitutes, but now they will be turning different tricks.
Special interest sponsorship uses private money to contaminate messaging in one way, but government sponsorship uses public money to destroy it entirely. Curated news will become controlled news, swaying consumer spending habits will become compelling human obedience, and concealing corporate corruption will become maintaining centralized secrecy of bureaucratic corruption.
This is predictable under authoritarian regimes; it should be illegal under democratic governance.
Posted: 2 Jan 2023
Misinformation
A meaningless term that technically describes all information by definition.
A word used to insult and dismiss opponents while appearing deferential or empathetic – forgive them lord, for they know not what they do.
Intellectual and rhetorical cheating. If we can successfully categorize a view as misinformation, then we do not have to produce a superior claim of our own, likely because we do not have one.
A political term invoked when our priorities are dictating and controlling thought, language, and knowledge.
No experience has been free of incorrect or misleading information in the history of any living organism. Behaving otherwise is a demonstration of ignorance or deceit. As a result, this term is only invoked when someone is seeking to delegitimize information that challenges an adopted narrative. The protected narrative may not even true, and those who defend it are often aware it is false, but they ignore this otherwise defeating quality because the narrative benefits them. This clearly exemplifies the political nature of the term as the information it is characterizing need only be in opposition to the interests of those who control the narrative; whether it is incorrect or misleading is irrelevant.
Misinformation policies pretend to be indifferent to who you are, and they are exactly the opposite. There can never be a coherent or impartial policy for such a thing because it is built upon a collection of incorrect assumptions about both information and people.
Authors of these policies are aware of this.
See: INFORMATION, DISINFORMATION, MALINFORMATION, NARRATIVE, POLITICS
Posted: 2 Jan 2023
Marxism
A recurring nightmare that transcends generations due to the trauma having only been experienced by other people.
A shapeshifting siren that guides lost sailors to their demise, which I wrote about extensively in The Song and the Swallow: Authenticity and Love.
Most Marxists are intellectuals, who are more equal than others.
You can tell how legitimate someone’s faith is by how willing they are to occupy any position in their scheme. You will never find a Marxist working in a coal mine; that job is for other people.
Posted: 2 Jan 2023
Karl Marx
Author of many books that Marxists have never read.
It is possible that Marx has been unfairly criticized for his writings, not only because he did not conceive of most of the relevant details, but he also may have just been a product of his time. Marx has plausible deniability with respect to the incalculable suffering that Marxist ideas have caused because most of it occurred after his death.
If Marx were alive today, it is unlikely he would be a Marxist.
What’s your excuse?
Posted: 2 Jan 2023
Lost
A ubiquitous state we all occupy; not a distinction.
Our degrees of awareness, acceptance, our admissions to others, and the strategies we employ to manage this disorientation are what distinguishes us.
One tendency is apparent however: we invent structure just so that there will be stability where none would otherwise exist. Such structures are shaky and are likely to crumble with even a minor amount of pressure. They were crafted abstractly on a whim within a single desperate mind; their roots are essentially non-existent.
A natural defense mechanism is to bolster these weak structures with a litany of incoherent supports so we do not lose whatever fleeting stability it provides us. When these soulless castles crumble, as they all do, we will scramble to find an equally flimsy substitution, or be forced to confront our shortcomings that we avoided up until this point.
Regardless of the outcome, the honest and courageous will hold themselves responsible for the poor-quality architecture. The resentful and cowardly will hold others accountable for their own failure to build resilient and coherent structures.
See: NARRATIVE
Posted: 2 Jan 2023
Left Versus Right
A crude political spectrum that explains almost nothing of substance about politics or people.
This illusory delineation is upheld at every opportunity by elites who seek to keep the citizenry at odds with one another for personal gain.
Those who have fallen victim to this false dichotomy will carry out the bidding of the powerful by purposefully sabotaging public discourse while under the false impression that they they do not share any common ground with their neighbours.
Regardless, it appears we see no value in conceptual ambidexterity.
Discernment and compromise should be avoided at all costs.
Posted: 2 Jan 2023
Judgments
A description of virtually all human thoughts and actions.
Banners and slogans claiming “No Judgment” are therefore incoherent nonsense designed to placate our fragile sensibilities. They are an insult.
The confusion about judgment is rooted in HUBRIS. Our brain comes programmed with innate heuristics that prioritize our own presuppositions as superior to those of others and sometimes even more valid than reality. Despite a wealth of research confirming this, we behave as though our default views are something more than mere judgments. We assume we are right; we believe our opinions more closely approximate TRUTH than we have any business concluding.
All we have are judgments, and we need to negotiate how to manage the conflicts that arise when two or more collide.
Those who claim they are tapping directly into truth can be dismissed without consequence.
See: BAD ACTORS
Posted: 2 Jan 2023
Ideology
Faith without God.
An academic term that has convinced many that by virtue of its phenomenology, it bears legitimacy in the real world. It does not.
Expressly designed to compromise comfort, happiness and stability in order to prime us to adopt another model deemed preferable by the anointed.
Each one is equipped with an escape hatch for its often predictable and inevitable failure - if it did not work, then it was not applied correctly. It is never the ideas that are wrong, it is because the implementation or execution of the ideas were not faithful enough. This makes ideologies immune from scientific inquiry because they are unfalsifiable. This does not mean that they cannot be examined or tested scientifically, it is just that every result will be considered irrelevant or misleading because it does not conform to their vision.
For ideologues, when their vision is measured against reality, if there are any disparities, then reality is wrong.
Frameworks whose origins emanate from the minds of those who proselytize on its behalf have confused themselves with God, or at least something more than human. Ideologues can be ignored without concern with respect to validity of concept. Retaliation is common, typically with appeals to emotion or with violence.
All ideologies are vacuous in nature, and they will swallow your humanity whole if you let your guard down.
See: IDEALISM, OBEDIENCE, ZEALOT
Revised: 13 Feb 2023
Holy Trinity
An entangled metaphysical triumvirate. A confession that even faith is subject to standards of human reason if we are going to have others take us seriously about our beliefs.
Comprised of three proper nouns - The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit - that are simultaneously God himself; an indication that language alone fails at effectively clarifying things of importance to human minds. The complexities necessary for profound human meaning progress from there, including their interconnectivity, coherence to the word and the spirit, and their designation as created or uncreated.
Attempts are made by religious scholars and philosophers to discover truth within texts and events, and the holy trinity is just one of many. Interestingly, this discovery of truth is necessarily confined to a predetermined set of linguistic and experiential parameters. Traditionally, these prisons of human imagination are precisely the culprits that interfere with an authentic pursuit of truth. If anything of value is produced, it would be categorized as valid only within a subset of prescribed phenomena, which does not generally elevate it to the status of truth.
If something is only true within a realm of prescription plagued by linguistic imprecision, then it will fail to adequately persuade anyone occupying a position beyond its framework. Things of this sort cannot be true in any universal sense without undergoing an effective conjugation in concept that would seek to generalize it in some sense. Once this is achieved, which can and has been done with various religious ideas, they may then qualify as meta-true, that is, existing or valid beyond a normative sense of verifiable truth. Despite this characterization inferring something less legitimate, humans find meta-truths particularly compelling, and most of our institutions are built upon a presumption of their unparalleled quality. They are the foundations of the most coherent narratives.
The likeliest explanation for the human predisposition to create and attach narratives to virtually everything is our innately narrative-formulating BRAIN. We imprint our memories with stories of sense-making that efficiently renders them coherent enough for us to act in the world. While this process is adequate in generating forward momentum, human intuitions are famously poor and personally exculpatory, which suggests that while we are natural story tellers, most of our tales are incoherent and self-serving.
Most religions, albeit not necessarily every story or lesson contained within, exemplify the sorts of products that have developed through natural processes and have remained important to humanity for thousands of years. They are extended phenotypes that assist us in solving problems or transmitting knowledge that we value for human survival. Their ubiquitous emergence and capacity for cross-cultural adoption corroborate this.
Narratives that undergo the perpetual gauntlet known as the SCIENTIFIC METHOD, are either deservedly flattened, or they receive an increase in resolution, clarifying details of human importance. The more coherent they become, the more likely they will serve as a legitimate articulation of human adaptation.
Maladaptive narratives appear to be just as immortal as adaptive ones, and so they need to be contended with all the same.
Perhaps it is precisely these countervailing chronicles that harness evolutionary principles to compel an increase in narrative quality over time?
Only time will tell which stories remain, and which are destined to die a thousand deaths.
See: DARK TRIAD
Revised: 22 Mar 2023
History
A collection of recorded events whose purpose is traditionally misunderstood by those interested in its reports.
Enthusiasts often present in one of two ways. The first are simply fascinated by certain events or periods inspired by a romanticism that will never be realized. The second will dutifully immerse themselves in the patchwork of time hoping they gain the ability to predict the future. While both are compelling endeavours, the former tends to have a far sunnier disposition.
It has been stated on numerous occasions that those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, and while this may ring of wisdom, it is verifiably false. History almost never repeats itself, and when striking similarities occur, the participants are typically very familiar with history. This is because the ambitious are often inspired by historical events, and they ultimately seek to innovate and perfect what may have failed under the working assumption that this time will be different.
The purpose of history, it if serves any at all, is to inform us of what we are capable if we find ourselves in similar circumstances. History is an indictment of humanity. Our inclinations are to perceive the sins of the past as a feature of a foolish or naive subset of humans that never includes ourselves. It is other people who sin and make such ridiculous yet understandable mistakes. We would never do anything like that, we are the enlightened.
In order to understand the value of history, a strong sense of empathy and MODESTY are necessary. Chances are that we would have been just as EVIL as the worst offenders in history if we found ourselves in the same circumstances, and believing otherwise is evidence of our self-deception.
See: HUBRIS
Posted: 1 Jan 2023
Hell
The first thing we abolished after becoming God or a nihilistic society. It is likely both, but take your pick.
We are no longer concerned about the punishment due for our concealed sins, we now forgive ourselves for our immoral conduct, if such a thing exists, and our well of absolution is bottomless. Morality appears to have taken on a strategically humanist ethos. If we have stored our skeletons deeply enough in the closet, then we are permitted to rationalize away our conscience without any fear of burning in a fiery afterlife.
Once we become GOD, however, we will seek to construct a new hell, and redefine sinful conduct as we see fit. We will no longer be at odds with a transcendent entity; naysayers will be classified as dissidents and characterized as expendable in the pursuit of a secular heaven. The sustained price of progress will be one more body upon the pyre. Tinder is easy to come by along paths paved in divinity.
The hell shaped by a mortal God is one wherein people are punished for their assumptions, tendencies, and the pursuit of truth. A landscape where physical, emotional and intellectual mobility is imaginary or impossible. A paradigm within which vulnerabilities are exploited and pride is celebrated. A realm where suffering is progress and tyranny is reverence. Where incoherence is certainty and the lost are the virtuous. Lies will be the common tongue and deceptions and delusions are more real than reality.
Essentially, a world birthed of a POSTMODERN temperament, which is generally synonymous with nihilism.
Posted: 1 Jan 2023
Guesstimate
A compound word that highlights that not all human innovation is worthwhile.
It combines two shorter words, guess and estimate, to produce a longer word yet conveys nothing additional beyond its roots. A guess and an estimate are virtually synonymous already, and while attempts will be made to parse their degrees of calculation and the quality of their foundations, they are not fundamentally changed in any semantic sense.
All guesses are still guesses, and all estimates are still estimates, both of which are an attempt at approximating truth in the absence of verification.
A guesstimate is no different.
Posted: 1 Jan 2023
Graduation
The end of learning for most people.
That is, if we are to consider that what they received prior to graduating was an education.
See: SCHOOLING
Posted: 1 Jan 2023
Government Office
An inconvenience store with the following characteristics:
It is only open for business when most people would be at work, sleeping, or tending to personal matters.
Services are inefficient and needlessly complicated due to an absence of competition.
The products and services available are generally a justification for bureaucratic processes that the public neither wants nor needs.
Information that is collected in order to access the service is often shared indiscriminately with other agencies due to existing policies or agreements that never serve the interest of the private citizen.
The customer pays for the facility, utilities, and the office supplies despite never being able to access or use them.
The customer pays for the salary of every employee, who will then treat them as an annoyance because they interrupted their ability to socialize with colleagues.
Posted: 1 Jan 2023
God (Monotheism)
An unknowable figurehead responsible for everything that is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent when it is convenient.
Of course, this means that instead of engaging in deeply meaningful and modest debates about what any of this means or how we are to grapple with it, we argue about whether God has a penis or a vagina.
Posted: 1 Jan 2023
Gender
A shallow pond that ideologues drown themselves in.
Predominantly supported by those with spurious assumptions about what sex is and what is claimed about it, which makes it an article of faith for social scientists.
A unnecessary convolution that people struggle to discuss exclusively with muddled claims and clumsy language that they pretend are logical and coherent.
A subject that demonstrates - with glaring clarity - the human proclivity to hold strong beliefs or opinions about topics they know nothing about. The vast majority of people are unaware of its conceptual origins, the motivations of its progenitors, why it was coined, when and why it made its way into academia and medicine, its ideological genealogy, or even the underlying theory behind its sudden explosion in social discourse. Despite this, everyone volunteers their opinion on it at every opportunity, and worse, they behave confidently moralistic when doing so. Apparently, a particular configuration of compassion and ignorance is all that is needed to occupy the moral high-ground.
An ideological product that has become a prominent part of the Western culture war, giving rise to numerous cults that use it as a tacit mechanism for leveraging illegitimate power. It also dabbles in victimizing people with autism.
A vague term that became popularized in ordinary language due to POLITICAL CORRECTNESS in an attempt to remove the word sex from official documents.
An obsession that will go down as one of the most embarrassing, gratuitous, and pernicious stains on Western culture when future generations study it in history books, if for no other reason than how it has permanently harmed vulnerable children.
When it was first introduced as a concept, it offered a glimmer of hope to academics and intellectuals in navigating matters of identity, especially for the more vulnerable among us. The butchery, quackery, criminality, perversion, and pedophilia regarding its originators have been ignored or overlooked because it would inevitably contaminate the motivations for such a concept. This is common for intellectuals, who will happily sacrifice the well-being of others, especially children, provided it supports their vision or agenda. Then, as if we became CERTAIN about its assumptions overnight, we moved directly into cutting and shaping human flesh like mad scientists, because speed limits are for those who lack conviction.
Decades later, it has become apparent that, while presenting as insightful, it is predominantly a general interest topic smeared across a substrate of intuitions. While there may be some residual value in discussing animal behaviour using terms like ‘gender,’ the vast majority is adequately explained by sex. The mysticism surrounding gender is a product of the human inability to grapple with forces in the world that are beyond our control, especially who or what we are. This is entirely appropriate and to be expected, but it suffers from the same flaws that most human conceptualizations do. Recognizing there is a gap in understanding is one thing, but assuming you can fill it with whatever you want and you are bound to be fine is irresponsible and FOOLISH.
Gender as a concept is not entirely without merit, such as observing that certain activities, interests and temperaments tend to inhabit one sex more than the other. However, even in these situations, sex is likely a sufficient explanation. Sex is a deep and rich concept already, one about which much is known, and it is predominantly those unfamiliar with the finer details of sex that insist gender is a necessary addition to the conversation. The problem for intellectuals is that sex is far too grounded in reality, which makes it far more difficult to manipulate using rhetoric. Gender is therefore introduced at every opportunity as a form of ‘idea laundering’ to substitute reality with idealism.
It is also the case that many find what is known about to sex to be challenging, inflammatory, or inconvenient, and so gender is wedged in to make room for what is considered more appealing, comforting, or placative. It is frequently the case, however, that a distinguishing feature of truth is that it disturbs; lies on the other hand, console us with their deceit.
Beyond these narrow applications, people struggle to use it to explain phenomenon that has already been articulated by other fields, and with far greater and more convincing evidence. It is the prioritization of abstraction over reality, social scientific posturing over the scientific method, romanticism over truth, and the primacy of belief over wisdom.
MARXIST views became formally integrated over time, then FEMINISM jumped on the bandwagon, and now dialectical models and sophistry permeate the field of gender. This is why it is so difficult to be clear about what is being discussed; its conclusions and methodologies are intended to confuse and mislead by design. The frameworks for its desired outcomes have been established and all research and peer review is carried out and interpreted by so-called ‘gender experts’ to support their preferred conclusions. This is not a legitimate form of inquiry. It is not SCIENCE, it is THE SCIENCE.
It should be highlighted that being an ideologue immediately eliminates any legitimacy ‘experts’ might have in a field. Their primary concern is not truth, after all, it is redefining reality to conform to a narrative. The intent is to engineer gender into an incredibly complex phenomenon so that we need to depend on its experts to guide us through the material. This is their opportunity to shape public perception and align it with their views. Gender is not that complicated, but it needs to be to appear academically rigorous enough to infiltrate the medical field in the manner that it has.
Unfortunately, it is neither scientifically nor medically rigorous; it is ideologically sophisticated, which is not the same thing at all.
It is currently puppeteering the medical apparatus through policy decisions in hopes that it will generate data that may be used to legitimize it scientifically. Typically, there is a need for a broad and compelling body of knowledge in a field before bridging the gap into medicine. Gender has somehow managed to skip this step, which will force proponents to support its claims post hoc.
The evidence is not likely to support its narrative, and in the interim, we will be used as test subjects in experiments that we have been told are necessary to realize our true self, whatever is meant by this.
It takes a long time to learn about reality, and the findings are challenging and offensive. It is no wonder we adopt views that place us in the position of defining ourselves and reality in terms that accommodate our desire for acceptance. The sticking point for most is that we are then expected to submit to incoherent claims absent clarity or verifiability. Being who you are is not enough for some; they want others to kneel before them. Acceptance is not being sought in these situations - most people accept others for who they are, most people are happy to live and let live. Perceptive re-education is what is being sought.
It feels good to dictate our identity as we see fit and demand that others accept it without negotiation, does it not?
We often find it a more appealing option than feeling helpless and hopeless, and so we will happily prey on the compassion of others in order to provide us with some sense of control.
How quickly desperation becomes resentful tyranny.
We all deserve to be accepted for who we are, but constructing an incoherent and manipulative framework around the crisis of identity that we all experience in our own right makes the issue political.
Identity should remain a humanist issue that we resolve on our own in due time.
Gender is not a concept native to a burgeoning mind - it has been placed there. It is an answer thrust into a situation in a desperate attempt to remove all doubt so that maybe, we can experience the relief of standing on solid ground.
Regretfully, gender is shaky at best, and it has claimed the well-being of many who have been pushed through its cracks.
See: CHILDREN, DARK TRIAD, LOST
Revised: 10 Apr 2023
Freedom
An unrivaled ideal that encapsulates all known wisdom. An ethos, a confession, and an acknowledgment of human imperfection.
A foundational system for individuals built from the bottom-up in British Common Law, which is why authoritarians, theocrats, and dictators, who enjoy top-down rule, avoid discussions about it at all costs. The one exception is for economic policies, where it earns them more money than they could have imagined. Strangely, they do not perceive the value of freedom to be transferable to other realms of governance.
While the conclusions of this ideal infer that our lives each begin in a liberated state that is commensurate with our intrinsic potential, this was not its starting position. Freedom as a concept has been viciously attacked since it was first discussed in any serious manner. After all, how can the ambitious and affluent instrumentalize the average person if they believe that they were born free to pursue their own interests?
It can be argued that we all have duties as citizens of one sort or another, but it is much easier to convince us to take on risk, relinquish our rights, fight and die in battle, and give up money we earned through back-breaking labour as taxation if the idea of freedom is eroded or degraded. Freedom is an ideal that was reached after thousands of years of careful and sophisticated reasoning. It is a conclusion about the value of a human life that threatens the ambitions of the powerful who would prefer that we value ours a little less.
Freedom exists in an amount contrary to the number of laws that seek to legalize or codify it. A single constitution formalizing it for individual citizens is sufficient and often obligatory, anything beyond limits it, despite what governments may claim.
In his Doubter’s Companion, John Ralston Saul defines freedom as an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day. The elegance and poignancy of this characterization cannot be overstated.
Ideals alone fail to redeem the human spirit; they must be embodied.
Posted: 1 Jan 2023
Free Speech
The emperor of all rights; relative comparisons make this abundantly clear.
The wellspring from which all other rights flow, which means that if someone seeks to limit it, then all other rights immediately suffer degradation as well.
Speaking is an action that is indistinguishable from thought, which makes it special in a manner that should preoccupy our thoughts on a regular basis.
An examination of the function, value, and meaning of speech requires we use speech, and so the more difficult we make it to discuss, the less we know about how it works. Seeing as it is indistinguishable from thought, the more free our speech, the more free our thinking, and the better equipped we are to make sense of the world on our own terms.
Free speech is a concept that is publicly supported by virtually everyone but remains conspicuously under attack at every second by a litany of interested parties.
This discordance occurs due to the incongruity of human reasoning among average citizens and the motivated reasoning of elites. Free speech is the most frequent victim of the incoherent predisposition that some things need to be destroyed in order to save them. The second most frequent victim is democracy.
Every human right is subjected to this at regular intervals whenever it is politically convenient, and the aggressors always find a way of rationalizing their inability to play well with others.
See: FREEDOM
Revised: 13 Jan 2023
Free
A first principal preposition that serves as the foundation for all human rights. A duality of aspiration and literal interpretation.
A quality that we insist is appropriately present in things we favour while being obviously absent from all things we oppose. A feature that renders something immune from consequences, otherwise it would not be free.
Technically, nothing is free in every context, but this acknowledgement ignores the essence of the argument. The claim is that some things ought to be free, despite the fact that we accept inherent limitations. This makes it a moral claim then, one of such significance that it has been examined for thousands of years, and in such time, we have made some excellent progress, especially in secular realms.
Regardless of what you believe, this quality cannot be something we reserve solely for ourselves; it must also be given to others without question.
Revised: 25 Feb 2023