The paradox of the blackpill is people want you to be blackpilled but they don’t want you to show it or label yourself as such. Society wants people who have no hope because when people have hope they rise up and start fighting for their rights. Men on the bottom are taught to play cognitive tricks and be stoic and embrace their fate, no matter how bad. But some men would rather chart their own narrative and fatalism is the most powerful way of being powerless.
Mystery
One of the mysteries of the Christian faith is why Christians think they can only cherry-pick the good things that result from their power as God acting. You Christians elected Trump, so you own his three-pronged attacks on individuals with disabilities, cutting the Department of Education, gutting our protections via the Justice Department and cutting DEI, and cutting Medicaid, which a lot of us with disabilities, including myself, rely on. Your god owns that, even if you like to say otherwise.
They Lie, You Die
As you may well know over 1,000 people are dying of COVID per day as of today September 4, 2021. About 95% of COVID deaths are of unvaccinated individuals. That means if everybody were vaccinated we’d contend with around 50 deaths per day instead of 1,000. Basically a we’d have a September 11 every two months instead of more than twice a week.
What makes these deaths especially emotionally rending is a lot of these people didn’t realize they were being lied to. And the authority they were bending to such as posts on social media is amorphous so there is no way to hold any single entity culpable. We were hunter gatherers most of our evolution and assigned a chieftain to lead the tribe. He was not a despot. If he didn’t lead well securing food and water for the tribe his days of authority were numbered. With the authority we have now which often comes via the media and social media there is no real way to hold someone’s feet to the fire. In ancient Mesopotamia in the Code of Hammurabi an engineer could be put to death if the building they designed fell on people. What we have now is exactly the opposite, nobody is culpable for anything using the cover of “free speech”.
However when we look to how things perform in the engine of late stage capitalism we discover there are forces put in place to make things work with the grain of our nature. For example finding jobs often works more like our tribal nature where a friend vouches for you for a position the idea being that if that hire didn’t turn out their feet are put to the fire. And when an incident actually goes against the grain of late stage capitalism it is set right right away. For example when a day care center painted Disney characters on their wall they got sued right away.
But capitalism and social media algorithms don’t care about life, they are just designed to get us addicted and spending as much as possible. It’s especially heart wrenching when the lies produce unnecessary death.
Ratchet
Things in modern life works like a ratchet. It only turns one way. I volunteer and get next to nothing for it, not a scrap of social capital to be accepted and included with people who could lift me from my sorry state. Then due to my disability I take from the government for healthcare and dole without reciprocating a smidgen. People on the right wanted to remedy this by the Medicaid work requirement where people would have to work for their healthcare.
When things only turn one way you miss the reciprocity that built up social bonds in the past. Granted modern psychology doesn’t like reciprocity arrangements very much, if one is performing something virtuous and is hoping for something in return that is somehow pathological even though it was a thing that undergirded society for millennia.
Cut the Cocoon
One of the things God really hates is Twitter. He hates it because it’s ugly and nasty. What do you expect the true voices of the marginalized to sound like, puppies and rainbows? The whole thrust of Judeo-Christian religion involved telling those on the bottom the lie that God was close to those on the margins mainly so they would shut up and not fight for their rights. The truth is anything you say about those on the margins is unfalsifiable because people with no voice say that runs counter to those in power’s narrative will be shut down quickly. That doesn’t happen on Twitter! You can shout those on the margins down but you can’t shut them up.
Another reason God hates Twitter is more nuanced. According to the Bible the secret things of a person’s heart were meant to be judged by God, not people. Twitter short circuits this with campaigns like #metoo and #blacklivesmatter. It’s as if people’s sins were resting in a cocoon until judgement and humankind via Twitter cut the cocoon instead of letting the sins emerge and take flight in the seat of judgement.
Trump Will Win This One
I have spent the last sixteen years in Wisconsin and Michigan, two states that are in play this election. I agree with Michael Moore, I think Trump is going to win this one. You don’t get that feeling if you just pay attention to the media and Twitter but those of us on the ground feel it. A dairy farmer friend back in Wisconsin confessed this to me as did a nurse here in Michigan who follows politics pretty closely.
At issue here is hope is gone here for most of us here in flyover country, certainly those of us (which are many) who aren’t winning at late stage capitalism. Hamilton and Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP are both rap but they neatly describe the disparate realities of those of us on one side or the other. The Hamilton people already have hope and a future and they are doing well enough so they naturally want government to go back to being a smoothly functioning appliance one doesn’t have to think about. Eminem people don’t fucking have anything to lose, they just want to throw sand in the engine at this point. Looking at the newspaper help wanted ads and seeing three janitor jobs. Some of these people lit up for Bernie but not so much for Biden. Biden just means going back to feeding the big banks so late stage capitalism’s cogs operate smoothly.
Trump’s policies do negatively impact these people (like the Medicaid work requirement) but these people vote with their hearts not their heads. They are hurting and wounded people act alarmingly like wounded animals not using their faculties of logic. These people don’t want to vote the way people who don’t give a shit about them vote. They are resentful of elite urban liberals who have pulled away from them and (incidentally) packed the $180 a seat Hamilton showing when it finally came to Grand Rapids this year.
Trump tempts even me, a moderately intelligent educated Bernie supporter who almost believes in God. My vocation has been gutted by outsourcing and so when Trump fired the Tennessee Valley Authority chair over outsourcing some tech jobs I had this feeling, despite all the bad he has done, that he was on my side. And that’s all that matters for these voters. And there are a lot of them.
Is Man Basically Good?
I’ve gotten a lot of flack from liberals for not believing man is basically good. My experience has shown that a good portion of people are shitty when you need them most. Of course with all my pathologies I’m not one that generally attracts good people in the first place. Good people are like castles, they are generally moated and won’t let you in unless you have a lot to offer.
I think the battle verses good and evil is one each one has to fight within our selves. Most of us actually do OK so the statement that most people are good is true, but people extrapolate that to assume that man is basically good and that doesn’t hold water. This whole thing about abolishing the police is absolutely ridiculous. Five percent of the population commits 90% of the crime and these bad apples will run rampant should you dial back the policing of them.
I’m don’t hold a Calvinist view believing in total depravity but I understand that back in the olden days when you had a society that wasn’t so heavily policed you had to get people to behave and make their morality internal and the stick does a better job with that than the carrot. But I don’t think man is as good as modern psychology makes us out to be. I think that’s largely because psychology draws upon the experience of upper class people in developed countries who have generally been in a place of law and order and relative comfort.
Imperative to Virtue and Hope
Religion has an imperative to virtue so when it tells you to hope it presupposes that there will be a supportive community rallying behind you.
Modern psychology tells you not to lose hope but for different reasons. When there is no hope that means there needs to be structural changes in one’s environment to restore hope. Psychology is all about not making anyone lift a finger to help so there is no imperative to virtue built in.
You no doubt can’t turn away from the news. The younger generation has lost hope and now know those on top have no qualms about us dying of COVID as long as they can squeeze more productivity out of us. Bernie was our only hope and he got run out of town really fast.
They hate people who think for them selves. You know the world is really fucked up when you have to believe in woo to have hope. Well some of us can’t believe in woo, it doesn’t stick because it’s not real. Some people can suds up their emotions and build an elaborate fantasy world with all kinds of magical things but many of us cannot. We have the internet. We can pull out our phone and research any truth claim you send our way.
On Abortion: Christians don’t want to pay for things
Christians are rightfully horrified of the fact that there are hardly any Downs people in Iceland because most of them get winnowed out via pre natal tests and aborted. However Iceland is more socialist than the U.S. with cradle to the grave social services. People with disabilities exact a great drain on society.
The Christian way is to just make everyone have as many kids as possible and then let the ones with disabilities rot on the vine when they get older. If Christians actually had to pay for the social services for all the children that get birthed then their pro life stance would be more costly. They want the best of both worlds and with their people in power that’s exactly what they’re getting.
Climate Change Cartoon
Climate change is not only destroying the planet, but our psyches as well.
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