JHUS Staging

Tag: censorship

  • When I Was Forty-One I Had A Very Good Year…

    A tiny snippet of a whole lot of Mr. Desmond and his friends proving once again how much they don’t care what I have to say, I’m not relevant to anything or anyone, and there’s no way in the world they’d be the types to gang up and dogpile someone who criticized them genuinely and politely over a minor error in a “news” article…for now a dozen years and counting.

    Curating all this old content has me thinking…gosh I did a lot of great work in 2011.

    2011, when I had equipment and fairly stable housing and transportation, and also wasn’t working full time (was in school; still very much full time but way more flexible, and I could integrate a lot of the work you’re seeing here as material for my classwork). Almost like there’s a connection there…

    If I was the conspiracy type I’d note that all of this was happening and moving forward pretty well until I ran into Mr. AddictingInfo and his friends in September of that year who continue to this minute to openly and publicly exhibit the very behavior I’ve been calling them out on for over a decade and they continue to insist they’re not engaging in, *even while they do it right in front of your eyeballs.* The contempt these people have for your intellect is astounding.

    Not to belabor the point, I’m just looking at the material I was producing and the reactions it was getting and wondering what would’ve happened if once again the “cool kids” hadn’t decided I wasn’t allowed to be “one of us” because they know they look like the half-assed pikers they are by any meaningful measure in comparison. They know that my entire raison d’etre is to do my best to help as many people as I can understand where we are, how we got here, and how to get out of it, and that includes divesting them of their ill-gotten and broadly abused power over public discourse.

    Thanks to all of you who read, comment, share, like, and contribute. This is unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, coming on the heels of a series of very difficult periods interspersed with just bare stability that consumed the time I’d have rather been creating content. I’ve taken some really major hits, and I wish I was all mister stiff upper lip and roll with the punches, but I’m kind of sick of normalizing that crap. My life sucks, any fault in that of my own ended a long time ago and I’ve worked hard to set right what I could and stop doing things that would need to be set right later. I’ve helped a lot of people. Some appreciated it, some didn’t. Some just appreciate what I do.

    But there can be no question that the rabid dogpile response on YouTube validates everything I’ve been saying about these clowns, and they showed up precisely as expected.

    “C’mon now, who do you think you are?
    Hah! Bless your soul…
    You really think you’re in control?”

    Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”

    Sure, my life is really tough right now and I’m still not sure how I’m gonna fix it other than coming in to a LOT of money FAST. And I’m up against such BS; I had a major network admin tell me flat out that he could easily put me in front of Mackenzie Scott, but wouldn’t because I was linking to content on other platforms. Stupid little human crap like that for whatever reason just constantly floods my path, and I’ve been plowing through it like a North Dakota winter road crew for what seems like all my life, and now I’m finally just sick of all of it and not playing the game anymore…and that’s exactly what a whole lot of folks were hoping wouldn’t happen.

    These people were betting I’d be long gone by now, and I’m not.

    I’ve got my flaws. I’m about 60% nuts, really. Not in the sense of being genuinely unstable per se, I’m not that guy. I got way to close to BEING that guy a long time ago, and I put the brakes on that crap real hard. That’s not me.

    But there’s this thing that so-called “normal” people have where they can tolerate being forced to exist in ways that are objectively intolerable. Our entire “way of doing things,” with money buying political power and the ability of a human being to survive and be their best without first committing half or more of their waking adult lives to generating profits for someone else in exchange for a tiny, tiny fraction of the value their work…those things are really insane.

    Of course I’m aware that anyone who’s genuinely lost their minds tends to think they’re the ones who are sane and everything else is nuts. Trust me, it’s kept me up at night more than once. I defy you to suggest in any way that anything is working well and properly anywhere in the world right now for anyone but the wealthiest, and that there is a direct proportional relationship to the wealth controlled by a given individual and their sense that the world is currently well-ordered and sane.

    Part of what’s nuts, and part of why I have kept circling back to Mr. Desmond and his abhorrent, ignorant business model over the years even as it has – to the great detriment of pretty much everyone but the people at the top, as usual, in this case the folks who are running these giant meme farms purporting to be liberal and progressive activists while the entire extent of both their activism and their expertise extends to reading the statistics at the bottom of every tweet, looking for keywords that resonate with the left, and pasting the popular ones into their branded template for distribution.

    As far as I can tell not one of them has ever had a real job, but they’ll stand here all day telling you the journeyman tool and diemaker who’s been a musician for four and a half decades, put well over a million miles under his ass as a professional driver, spent years in desktop support and various network administration and database development roles, web design, media production, and a ton more is the fella who “refuse to work.”

    People fall for that crap, and that’s nuts.

    The people pushing it will push until their last breath to make you believe I’m the one who’s nuts for saying so.

    The degree to which that small group of folks who doesn’t like me REALLY DOES NOT LIKE ME and will absolutely cross any boundary including trying to influence me to suicide, attempting to destroy me professionally, attacking my family, attacking my workplaces, trolling the social media of people who share my content in an effort to discourage that from happening (again, all of this happening in broad daylight while the people doing it tell you that you’re nuts for not believing them instead of your lying eyes), is beyond nuts.

    I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m pretty broken and screwed up myself, but I seem to attract some real deep-core psychos, the types who will play out a game for fifteen or twenty years just to amuse themselves because they think they’re getting away with it. These twits at the big leftie pages are just one subset of a larger group of folks – still a tiny fraction of a minority of the people I engage with and talk to, mind you, but an incredibly loud and aggressive one – who fall into that “really does not like me” category, and near as I can tell the only legitimate complaint most of ’em have is either they don’t like my personality or I stopped pretending I was falling for their bullshit.

    That’s pretty nuts.

    Anyone telling you otherwise is not a reliable information source.

    Anyone telling you the insane amount of time and energy I’ve had to spend dealing with all this nonsense over the years, including pervasive death threats, including hassling my parents when they were alive, threatening my kid when she was little, countless employers harassed, is somehow the reasonable and expected result of my unacceptably aberrant behavior is not only an unreliable information source, they’re a psychotic asshole and they need serious help.

    The truth is we – you reading this and me writing it -have an incredible amount of power when we work together, and that terrifies the people who run the instapundit and bias-pandering clickbait ideology-for-profit accounts. When we work together, we can improve our collective information quality by improving our collective information literacy.

    The way to stop falling for grifters is to understand how the grift works, so it works less effectively on you.

    Now ask yourself this question:

    Who’s the person you trust? The person who tells you that…or the person who spends a dozen years with all his friends ganged up to tell you the person who tells you that is the real grifter?

    I don’t have exclusive command of THE REEL TRVTH or even “all the answers.” I’ve got a pretty decent dose of each, but I’m human and fallible.

    What I do have is not just the iron-clad certainty but ironclad real-time evidence that these “leftist” heroes and “influencers” are mostly just a bunch of money-grubbing fascists selling you a cheap imitation of the principles and values you hold most dear. There’s a screenshot of it at the top of this post.

    Class dismissed.

  • Can’t You Take A Joke?

    The ongoing discourse about “cancel culture” and how to “take a joke” provides a chance to reflect on our continuing evolution.

    All humor is based in pain. Much of it, in the pain of others. As Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

    Humans are always evolving as emotional and social creatures, always learning more about ourselves as individuals and a group, always moving forward. This means that some things lose their humor over time, again among individuals and in the culture at large.

    One of the shifts we’re currently seeing is away from the schadenfreude of humor – the taking delight in someone else’s harm, rather than laughing with them and thereby at least in part at ourselves.

    Consider the movie “Airplane!” There are three classic scenes in this movie, which still are funny in my opinion but would never get filmed in 2022: the “jive dudes,” the little girl with the coffee (“No thanks, I take it black. Like my men.”), and the panicking passenger getting the crap beat out of her. These scenes still play funny to me, and from what I see online people in 2022 watching them still laugh, if with a bit of cringe at the little girl.

    Oh stewardess, I speak jive.

    If you tried to put the jive dudes over as original work in a script today it would be shot down. Appropriation, patronizing, othering, racism – is it? or is it a joke on racism? or simply a bit of fun with caricatures of cultural difference, and the ‘racist’ aspect is something we’re superimposing because the men are black and they’re using a parody (they made up the lines) of what was called “jive” in the 70’s and we’d now call “African American Vernacular English” after figuring out “ebonics” wasn’t cutting it? – and great white hopes, portrayal of black men as incapable of communicating “properly.”

    If my job is to vet project content for the probability of negative publicity I’m all over this, here in 2022.

    Nobody – nor nearly nobody, I haven’t seen anyone take it on – is trying to “cancel” that retroactively, but if you tried to put it through a studio today they’d never let it pass…and it quite likely *would* create a bunch of rancor on social media as people debated whether Mrs. Cleaver was really an avatar for white supremacy.

    The argument has merit, although I’m not sure you could really bring it home conclusively. You could make it strongly enough to cut the scene today using today’s values and mores, is the point.

    This is the evolution of humor. We understand in 2022, because of 42 years of discourse between that scene and now, that while there is still humor there it’s also important to hold the ugly part to account and talk about it and understand it and maybe it evolves into something where perhaps if someone rebooted it today it’s more the white stewardess who couldn’t understand “jive” that’s the butt of the joke, something to mitigate the implication of punching down in the original.

    I’m not trying to kill or cancel that scene, but I’m trying to say that humor, like all creative expression, *evolves* and when it evolves it’s generally because enough people finally figured out that the pain contained within some humor is a weapon, not a release; that people can truly be hurt by our words and portrayals of our perceptions of them so maybe we should try a little harder to not be dicks.

    When I hear comedians, especially people like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle who have been to some extent taken as progressive thought leaders, going on and on about “cancel culture” and “nobody can take a joke anymore” even as they crap all over everything people liked about them, what I hear is people who have become lazy, complacent, and selfish. They want to coast on EZ mode, doing the same routines (or at least sticking to minor variations on the same proven themes) over and over, while the audience is moving forward without them.

    Humor is an expression of pain, and there are ways we can joke and reflect on being human and feeling pain, without inflicting it. With that said, those ways are going to change and shift and evolve too, and maybe something that’s pitch perfect today will be seen in twenty or forty years as almost criminally obscene, for better or worse, right or wrong.

    Three words makes all the difference

    Our job as people is to make sure we’re honest enough with ourselves to, in those moments, own our errors and do our best to set them right. Some of that has to do with the nature of our harm perception in retrospect; it’s hurtful but does it do harm? It’s hurtful to sexualize a pre-adolescent girl for humor, but was she harmed by it? Traumatized? (Did she even get the joke? And by the way, is it funny or not? Why?) What about the social impact, do we think there was a spike in human trafficking of little white girls to Africa in response to the coffee joke? (Let’s not forget the racism in play here, too.) The most likely reasonable answer to those questions is “no.”

    Oh, just remembered the whole bit with Peter Graves and “have you ever seen a grown man naked?” Have to include that one, in this discussion. (Similar to the ubiquitous racism in two of the clips above, that one catches the casual homophobia prevalent at the time too.)

    The entire humor in both of those bits is the uncomfortable, inappropriate tension. That’s the whole thing about it that makes you laugh. But it is too inappropriate to even tell the joke, in the light of our evolving understanding?

    These kinds of questions are *always* in play. For instance I’m not sure George Carlin’s routine about the n-word is something he’d have done in the last decade of his life because we evolved to understand that word is hurtful coming out of a white mouth and directed at a black person, regardless of whether it’s “meant to be” or not. Carlin being a linguistic genius and also a bit of a trickster god on it, may have still done the bit…but I’m not sure. I think he would’ve put a great deal more thought into whether the joke (or the deeper points behind it) would be obscured or mitigated or negated by his use of that word, and most importantly whether his work could be used to “punch down.”
    I’m glad to have cultivated an audience that seems to have a pretty good instinctive grip on where the lines are and why.

    When you stick to principle – “don’t punch down” – you’re less likely to make even an honest mistake, one borne of naive ignorance rather than malice, that hurts someone, and less likely to be whining about getting “canceled” while you’re selling out venues and appearing on every late night talk show. It’s still not easy mind you – knowing when you’re punching down is a function of empathy, which is also always evolving and refining – but it’s a good basic principle, and if you keep it in the back of your head while you’re doing your thing you’ll probably avoid saying anything you’ll wish later that you hadn’t.

  • Fear, Part 2

    (This article originally appeared on my site in September 2013.  It has been slightly updated for re-publication.)

    Scared_Child_at_Nighttime_800h by Pink Sherbet Photography via Wikimedia Commons. Resized from originalDon’t be afraid.

    Don’t be afraid to see where this is going.

    Don’t be afraid to follow the trail to the end.  It’ll be worth it.

    As long as I have memories, I’ve had a “problem” with wearing my heart on my sleeve.  I think that’s a universal metaphor, but in case anyone’s not familiar with it:  that is to say I don’t hide what I think and feel.  I’m very straightforward, blunt.

    You might notice that I put that word problem in quotes, in the first paragraph above.  Not because it’s a euphemism, but because I have never, ever understood – and never will – why so very many people are so embarrassed to be human in public.  Why is “this is how I feel” ever a “problem?”

    One of the reasons I think I developed this behavior – and if you think it’s something that only exists on Facebook you definitely haven’t been paying attention – is a simple matter of social self-defense:  Why would I want to hang out with or be friends with or really want anything to do with someone who doesn’t care what I think or how I feel?

    Part of it is also this:  the most effective solution to evil and ignorance is to drag it out into the light and call it what it is.  I “put myself out there.”  And when someone turns their back, I know they weren’t really my kind of people in the first place.

    When someone decides it’s “entertaining” that I’m angry or hurt or feeling in need of external validation or broke?  To ridicule someone else’s difficulty or pain?  That’s a giant red flag, to anyone:  this person sucks.  This person, the way this person thinks and acts, how this person treats other people when they believe there are no consequences…it is a Bad Thing.

    But it’s not just a bad thing, It is the Bad Thing.  Absolutely everything that is twisted up and broken in this world can be described by the same words, phrases, and concepts.  From the schoolyard bully to the world’s most brutal dictators, there are unifying elements:

    • lack of empathy
    • lack of reason
    • high degree of self-absorption; not “I think about myself a lot,” but “I think the world around me is mine, and if what I do has consequences in anybody else’s life, too bad for them.”
    • low self-esteem expressed as a driving need to control every aspect of the world around them.
    • absolute intolerance of criticism.

    I’m sure there are others, but I’m writing off the top of my head.  Whether it’s the neighborhood frotteur or the guy pushing the big red buttons, they all share those real  “problems.”

    So the problem is, right now the world is defined on those people’s terms – and make no mistake, those people are just as many “liberals” as “conservatives” as “independents” as “libertarians” as whatever.  Your favorite social group is not exempt.

    When you allow yourself to absorb the output of those people, you start to become like them.  It spreads.

    And it’s killing us.

    In a trillion tiny cuts and a billion gaping wounds, it’s killing us off.

    They have defined the rules of the game, those rules are designed to give them an exponentially increasing advantage in the game, and they have taught you that the only way to be happy and fulfilled in life is to play the game their way…knowing that you can never possibly win.

    People wonder why I’m so adamant about not doing things like swiping other people’s original content, pretending to be a news site when you’re really a glorified RSS feed, being certain that when you present yourself as an information source you are an information source.  Not a PR campaign for a political ideology or a ring toss on the back fairway of the political carnival for your own amusement and profit.

    Because you see, it’s all the same thing.  It’s all the same lack of empathy, the same lack of reason, the same self-centeredness, the same low core self-image, the same refusal to ever admit outwardly that they might be wrong about something; they might even be jerks.

    They might be exactly the kind of jerks a lot of people reading them think they’re fighting against.

    And they don’t care, and they make the rules.

    And they’re wrong.

    Those of you who read my Facebook page or blog regularly, or have for a while, know that I’ve had intermittent problems with various kinds of harassment from these sorts of people.  My regular FB page readers will know what I mean – the “get a job,” “get a haircut,” post multi-terabyte screed examining my life crowd, the little group of trolls and the folks who run the BS “news” sites.

    Those people control a big chunk of left-wing, progressive, and liberal conversation on Facebook, and by extension throughout the world.  Millions of readers, millions of shares.

    And they are no different from [insert your favorite “bad news” source here], no different from [pick a conspiracy theory about world domination you really like], no different from [your go-to example of an obviously bought and paid for politician].

    They’re all the same, you see.  Because it’s all the same behavior.  Consistently.  Every time.

    They tell you what to think, they tell you why you should be angry or happy or sad.  They tell you what constitutes success in life, and they ridicule you for failing to achieve it even as they do everything in their power to stop you.  If you have something they want, they will take it.  If they cannot take it they will destroy it.  And if you don’t like it?  Too bad.

    They are in control of not just the US, but increasingly the rest of the world as well.  To the point that many of the world’s most developed nations have taken undeniable, unquestionable turns back toward the tyranny and oppression that their very existence was dedicated to wiping off the face of this planet.

    It’s all the same, you see.

    And those of us whose eyes are open, those of us who have been those things and realized how wrong they were, understand the key method by which they hold their power:

    They prevent you from communicating effectively.

    To the very point of redefining truth so that only their version of reality is allowed.  See, for instance, the Texas Board of Education attempting to teach mythology as science.  See, for instance, the entire mentality that has led us to the point where facts themselves are no longer accepted as facts because we can no longer agree on what a fact is due to the deliberate erosion of our critical thinking skills over a period of generations.

    To the extent that they not only teach us to be afraid to speak, but they teach us to make others afraid to speak.

    Used to be politicians would blow smoke up our collective asses as a matter of routine, and we knew they didn’t believe their own lies and they knew they didn’t believe their own lies and the one that had enough things we liked (often lies, sometimes not) got to play Big Man In Charge.  Sometimes, a politician could convince a lot of people to believe his or her lies, and they would gather more power and increasing ability to convince more people of their lies.

    But now…they believe their own lies.  There are really people on this planet, people who consider themselves intelligent and well-informed, people in leadership and decision-making roles that affect all our lives every minute of every day, who believe that deregulating business will empower individual liberty.  There are people who believe a magical all-knowing and eternal creature imbues the zygote of human beings with a special quality that makes them separate and distinct from all other creatures the moment sperm meets egg.  There are people who don’t believe global climate change is happening.  There are people who believe the cure for diseases is to not be tested for them.  One of those people is currently the President of the United States.  There are people who believe that religious freedom means the freedom to force everyone else to respect and be indoctrinated by their religion.  And these people will brook no dissent.

    They’re all the same, where it counts.

    The only way to stop them is to speak.  Don’t be afraid to be wrong, and don’t be afraid to admit it.  Don’t be afraid to admit you’ve made mistakes, to yourself or anyone else.  Don’t be afraid to correct them.  Don’t be afraid to let anyone else know you’ve been wrong or made a mistake.  Don’t be afraid to need help, and don’t be afraid to ask for it.  Don’t be afraid to not be good at everything or know everything, and don’t be afraid to seek knowledge and expertise wherever and whenever you can in whatever subject matter or pursuit interests you.  Stop letting them make you afraid to be who you are.

    But Speak.

    Stand up and speak.

    Get informed, but most importantly get real.

    Get real.

    Be who you are.

    Stand up to those who tell you that because who you are isn’t a big money-maker, you’re a failure as a person and what you have to say or do in this world is unimportant.  Stop thinking that because your job isn’t glamorous or cool, it’s not worth having even if you enjoy it.

    Stop being a “what” and start being a “who.”

    Don’t be a Democrat or Republican or liberal or conservative or libertarian.  Stop worrying about whether you’re a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Taoist or a Buddhist or an atheist or agnostic or Jainist or Satanist or any other kind of –ist.  Stop worrying about which direction you lean in, and which direction other people lean in.

    Just be a decent human being.

    There’s no excuse for looking at hungry people and going “well, do they deserve to eat?  Did they earn their food according to the rules we set forth?”

    There’s no excuse for a nation with 18 million empty homes to have three million homeless people. (And say, how’s the math work on that anyway?  How do they figure those homes are going to be filled?)

    There’s no excuse to ridicule people for having self-doubt or being misinformed (although one might fairly poke those who choose to be misinformed, one must also consider that most of us live every day of our lives being filled with misinformation).

    Those aren’t decent things to do and every single person on this planet knows that in their heart.  It’s not something I need to prove or support with argumentation and reason; you know it and I know it, and that’s just the truth.  You might pretend you don’t know it.  You might even have yourself allllllmost completely convinced.  It’s not only self-evident, it’s reinforced consistently by every single important work of philosophy and religion in human history.  It’s not just a nice thing to do; it is fundamental to the survival of our race.  And we just love to tell ourselves that we are already doing everything right, it’s just the other people.  The people who aren’t my -ism and don’t lean my direction.

    But deep down, you know the way we treat each other sucks ass from top to bottom about 95% of the time, and you know that to some degree, that almost certainly includes you.  It has certainly included me, although I like to think I’ve managed to get it down to maybe 60%.  I’ve met people who got it down to maybe 20% or even 10.

    But it’s always there, and it’s taking us over and dragging us back to the middle ages.  If it continues, it’s a near-certainty that it will drag some parts of this planet back to pre-humanity while leaving the rest in prehistoric conditions supplemented by the junk our current attempt at evolution leaves behind.

    The only way to change that is to stand up and speak out, and that includes within our own minds, to the bully inside ourselves.  For many of us, from what I see when I look around this world, that’s got to be where it starts.  That’s certainly where it had to start with me, and as the aphorism goes “we all fall short of the glory…”  Pobody’s nerfect; not me, not you, not this religious figure or that deity or the other world leader.  We must all, individually, cultivate the ability to accept that and not let it stop us from always seeking to improve our own treatment of others in thought and deed…but by no means can that be where it stops.

    You must stand up, and you must speak.

    Speak against the bullies, the liars, the tyrants.

    Correct the misinformation and demand that those who propagate it stop doing so.

    Admit your mistakes and share the lessons you’ve learned from them.

    Stand up and speak out.

    Don’t be afraid of being “infiltrated.”

    Listen to your heart.  I don’t care what religions you do or don’t belong to; I simply believe that each and every human being alive on this planet has a heart, and I believe those hearts tell us the same things.  Call it instinct, call it learned behavior, call it whatever you want to call it; I’m a creative artsy-fartsy mofo and I choose to call it having a heart.

    Listen to your heart and speak.

    Stand up and refuse to be misled.

    Stop hating, you know it’s a waste of time.

    Stop getting wrapped up in ego-feeding internet arguments, you know it doesn’t solve anything.

    Reject those who refuse to stop hating and stop fighting, and focus on how to retrain ourselves and, over time, make these things just as instinctive as procreation, and eventually those who refuse to stop hating and stop fighting will die off and we can get on with the business of evolving.

    Focus on how to deprogram ourselves from the big lies we’ve been told throughout our recorded history.

    That is how to “beat the one percent.”  That is how to break the monopolies that exist on our information.  That is how to turn back the rising tide of stupidity and distraction and misinformation.  Start inside yourself.  Get real.  Stand up.  Speak out.  Be who you are.  Do not submit to fear.  That is the only freedom.

    That’s the only way to bring humanity to a sane, sustainable condition.

    If those of us who reject the tactics and confused mentality of the bullies and tyrants of the world just do that…they can’t win.  It’s the only way they can’t win, because when it’s all said and done?

    Well, when it’s all said and done…

    You cannot be controlled if your mind is free.

    Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” – Robert Heinlein, “If This Goes On –“