When Law is Lawless:

One of the central themes in the Corporate Trilogy is that modern theme of Law. My chief contention is this: that there are people who live below the Law, people who live above the Law, and those who live in between. All three groups of people break the Law, inevitably, from time to time, but not all of them understand the Law. Laws, Rules, and Regulations are simply social contracts. Their function is to protect one group of people from another, and only the latter is required to follow them when the Law works well. This fact has been apparent to me for so long that I can hardly function in society without it, and I always struggled to imagine what the mindset must be for someone whose understanding lies beneath it, though I have made it my ardent project over the last four years to develop such an understanding. Some of the individuals to whom I have conveyed this understanding, hoping to find solidarity in Spirit, were themselves criminals, yet I was shocked and outraged to hear my theme dismissed outright, as though I were mistaken for asserting it. I had always presumed that anyone who was sufficiently intelligent to hold my company and attention would be allied in agreement with the most basic of intellectual Common Sense, and this was what I attributed to them as the motivation for their deviant tendencies. Nothing in my education had prepared me to encounter such motivators such as survival, trade, and that most nebulous of social trends: status within a pack. I could understand such drives such as Social Justice, Reason, Science, Philosophy, Friendship and Religion, but those I would speak little of because I had presumed them to be so indispensable and essential that they would immediately be understood as my own motivators. This presumption was not wrong, for though I was disappointed by my fellows I also remembered that it was out of courtesy for them, without which life could not continue, for faith must be reciprocal, that I ascribed to them the same motivations that I, observing the Golden Rule, would for them to ascribe to me. Everywhere I turned, I found corroboration for the Universality of these claims, a binding yet unspoken pact at the core of our common history and precedent over any strictly individual deviations. I was right. But I was not prepared for them being wrong. They did not defy the Law because its Byzantine bureaucracy and blatant imperfections, its historical inconsistency and the drive to constantly revise and to improve upon it, were all so mind-numbing that they simply could not be bothered with it. They did not part with convention on behalf of the Public, but rather on their own behalf, yet this was not motivated by the drive to rise ABOVE the rules. Growing up had once meant this: that one has followed the rules for so long that one has transcended them, and by becoming aware of what they represent one becomes qualified to create NEW, BETTER rules, for both one’s own identity and for the betterment of all beings. Such a striving for transcendence is so essential to Life that it is shocking to imagine living without it. Yet some beings do. Some beings do not regard Law as a social contract. They hate police officers for interpreting it to serve those whose value transcends it; insecure about their own qualification to violate it, they would rather drag everybody around them down to its level, where inevitably this same confusion corrodes it. This is how people become victims OF the Law. A man who blames “slow drivers” for most car accidents on the freeway has simply found in legality a shelter to quarter his own narcissistic bias. Obviously, ALL car accidents involve “fast drivers”, including those who drive at a legal pace but, whereas ONLY MOST of these accidents, by my own interlocutor’s admission, involve slow drivers, and we must employ our common sense regarding physics to assume that every such instance involves the slow drivers colliding with fast drivers coming in from behind. Is it impossible that the Law, written by fast drivers, requires revision? Of course, those who created the Law knew that it was more important to restrict speed than to punish sloth. The tendency to relax the former restriction at the expense of the latter party has been symptomatic only of a loss of sensibility in the work force, wherein speed is somehow rewarded as though it were not only the most effective means by which to be productive (which it is not) but also as though it were an end in and of itself. The Law has come to serve those who lie beneath it, even though they would drive well above its limits. It is time that we remember that its true function was to protect those who lie above it, those few criminals who end up rewriting the law to be more sensible and mature. What I have expressed today has not been a partisan or preferential bias. The identity I uphold is greater than any other in the present day, for it is informed by the entirety of human history, and though not all such history can be accounted for by any one man, any individual who walks the road towards Enlightenment will find cause to extrapolate along these universal lines.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

BETTER4ONE.

I predict, however fancifully and hopefully, that Americans will come to realize that the mass shootings, riots, and frequent murder of young black men will only come to an end after Bill Cosby is exonerated.

The simplest question is this: which is worse? For one innocent man to go to jail, or for fifty women to get raped? It’s obvious; it’s not a matter of opinion: the former is worse.

Fifty innocent victims are well aware of their own condition and victimhood; trauma is made bearable by the comprehension of one’s own virtue, which is, after all, amplified by victimhood. Such is the Socratic notion of victimhood, though there is of course the more contemporary, Sartrean alternative: that we must be held responsible for our own happiness and misery. In this case, fifty women getting raped equates to fifty individuals who knowingly and willingly entered into relationships, of one sort or another, with a man whom they had reason to suspect. It may be true that the reasons they had to suspect him were unsubstantiated, but all the more reason remained for them to be held responsible for disbelieving them.

From a Socratic point of view, the fifty victims each come out better off, each one prospering morally through the relative immorality of their oppressor, but only because they do not unify against him, in depravity, (for what else is a lynch mob?) but continue to stand alone in dignity, preserving the value of the individual by so doing.

Conversely, should an innocent man or even a guilty man be convicted without hard evidence to incriminate him, the precedent would be set for the erosion of the entire legal system. No longer would the law be designed to protect those INDIVIDUALS who lie above it, but rather it would be sabotaged and commandeered to serve those GROUPS who definitionally lie BENEATH IT. Any woman who testifies on behalf of this erosion would be guilty, and then nothing could justify or alleviate her suffering.

Furthermore, we know that our system is just so long as it prioritizes the protection of innocence above the punishment of guilt. We cannot reverse the sorrows of the past, but we can prevent further sorrows from emerging OUT of those sorrows, which is precisely what is prone to happen in the ABSENCE OF a Just Law. Punishment is only the THIRD function of the Legal System; the first is prevention of a crime, and the second is prevention of mob rule. We must ensure that prior to any consideration of punishment, which can only PARTIALLY assuage the TRUE victim’s suffering, and less so to the extent that that victim possesses the virtues of mercy and forgiveness, we prevent the ABSOLUTE suffering inflicted upon an arbitrary SCAPEGOAT.

If we might consider the possibility that one man lies about fifty women, we must just as surely consider the EQUAL possibility that fifty women would lie about one man. It would simply be mad to consider not only that the sheer number of accusers can sway the scales in their favour (when obviously only hard evidence can tip them), but also to consider that ANY rational being would commit so grotesque a fallacy (the most chilling fallacy: ad populum) would already be a form of betrayal against all Humanity.

Regardless of whether or not the man is guilty, we must preclude the conclusion until evidence is produced, and though I feel patronizing for explaining this, as though to children, I should humbly remind my readers that the more people we entertain who attest to something without evidence, the more obviously invalid is the testimony, for evidence has a way of coming forth when enough people are invested in finding it; even ONE person, operating independently, can find evidence for a mystical phenomenon if he or she is sufficiently “biased in favour of one’s own confirmation”.

If even ONE person has that sort of access to any truth, why can’t a mass of fifty? Certainly, numbers begin to tip the scales in the defendant’s favour. We know the motivations for lying, especially since they are no more noble when one enters into employment for a man that one inwardly resents. We also know that conspiracy needs not to have centralized leadership in order to mount; a stand-alone complex can be founded entirely upon an idea, a meme which is propagated through a mass media which we are all participating in. If people burned witches in a time before computers, based entirely upon appeals to authority on the part of the clergy, how much more vulnerable are we now, when each one of us can hear the same sermon through a cell phone that we carry in our pockets!! If media normalizes behaviour, yet we all co-create culture, and the former passive relationship to “truth” is counterbalanced by the active role we take in synthesizing it, then is it not TRANSPARENT that out of the seven-point-seven billion people inhabiting Earth, whose access to the Internet is championed by the United Nations, a measly fifty might produce a lie that is only as effective as our primitive instinct to feel uncomfortable speaking out in a large crowd, a vestige of our tribal heritage which is then sublimated through the channels of a global stage to the same extent that we feel the drive to transcend our tribes and to become global citizens??

Again: despite this, we are all alone. Only the defendants and the plaintiffs truly KNOW what happened, and even they might profoundly disagree. But consider our one alternative to Socrates: Sartre. (Since one has yet to find a more convincing critic or a third option outside of proto-Fascism.) Suppose that all of these women truly are guilty not only for their perversion of the Law but also for their victimhood itself. MUST they live with the shame of what they have done to their scapegoat? Ought these fifty GUILTY women not to go free of that, instead of imprisoning him?

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

CH@VEZ:

Apparently, English-speakers needed an excuse to regard Todd as a Chavez, perhaps for lack of associates of mixed race, Spanish ancestry, or simply pale-faced Mexican descent. When stepfather Jorge Chavez “returns” to Todd’s Life in Season Six, appearing in fact for the first time on screen and without any prior indication that he had existed, viewers had an “a-ha” moment, as though only by having a Hispanic stepfather could Todd have been worthy of the Spanish surname. At first, it seems like the opportunity to apply his knack for misadventures towards a noble, egalitarian cause would teach father and son to atone and to understand one another as men and equals. Yet, as per usual, the cinematic universe of BoJack Horseman thrives off of the tragedy of those who feel and the comedy of those who think. When it most looks like Jorge Chavez is about to commend Todd for his good will, trusting outlook, endearing demeanour and godly karma, he defaults to perhaps the most crushing prejudice he could produce: I should have realized [why my way of doing things, according to dedication and hard work, is not Universal:] you’re white.

Personally, I felt the sting of that on multiple levels. As a first-generation immigrant from the proverbial Second World, I know that life is not easy for first-time Americans and their immediate progeny. My parents, too, had imbibed me with a number of prejudices from the Old World regarding dedication and hard work, though it did not take me long to see the error of their ways. For years, I ascribed their myopic fixation upon worldly notions of “success” to the “evils” of Life Under Communism, thinking that it was only owing to trends in Eastern Culture that most of the Honours Students, many of them Asian, were afflicted with hypocrisy, competition, and neurosis. It became clear to me, around the time I read Thoreau, that being “dedicated” was a form of tunnel vision aimed only at one’s own preservation and aggrandizement, and that life outside of dogma required an open mind, a forgiving attitude, and some luck.

Even had he not been voiced by Aaron Paul, I must imagine that Todd would have exemplified my “new virtues”. For some time, I thought of these as “American values”. The Protestant Work Ethic seemed to be entirely contrary to the Protestant Reformation, and by contrast Eastern religions, as well as the absence of religion altogether, removed the felt “necessity” to work hard when cleverness might help to attain the same ends by more sensible and humane means. Perhaps the Asians I knew personally were all overachievers, as accords the stereotype and culture, but their religions expressed a different ethos.

Yet being easygoing had little to do with being “white”. Black America taught me that any value, no matter how noble, could be subverted if it might become the expression of tyranny by one group towards another. Furthermore, it was only White America that seemed to harp on “hard work”.

I expected to find more sanity once I returned to college, having heard that “Cultural Marxism” was on the rise. Yet I was crestfallen. Liberals had begun to think only in the same banal terms as the proto-Fascists they opposed, and while there was a craze among dark bodies to tell their sob stories and phobias, the simple fact that police officers in America can’t tell Russian Jews apart from W.A.S.P.’s seemed to be the cause for my exclusion, even from the company of those people who valued inclusion most. Besides: yet again, being noble had become a cut-throat competition!!

Todd Chavez has not had it easy. Since Episode One, we have been privy to his many lives, all of them overlooked by BoJack, who only recognizes Todd’s “alternative lifestyle” as being valid if Todd is a “troubled gay teen”. Yet not only do we learn, three seasons later, that Todd is part of an even smaller sexual minority than homosexuality; we also see in that same episode that he is involved with the Mexican drug cartel.

Todd is apparently not so Nordic in appearance that he can’t pass for Latino. Five episodes later, Todd’s charming face earns him an affiliation with both the Skinheads and the Latin Kings in a Los Angeles prison, though his refusal to adhere to any ONE label almost gets him murdered, except for when his incredible luck saves him.

When Todd realizes that he is asexual, he resists labelling to the best of his ability, though he finds it impossible to escape the realities of being a sexual minority, realities which to some extent are deeply peculiar to those people who HAVE that label.

All that Todd seems to want from people, outside of what they offer him voluntarily, is to be respected unconditionally. His stepfather, given the opportunity to learn this, only otherizes Todd. And this is why Todd refuses to visit with the Mother he just saved. By his own admission, he is a Chavez, so he must be cold beneath his cheerful persona. By telling his stepfather this, he atones with the father figure, transcending whatever nostalgia for his mother he might feel. Yet he also shames the name of Chavez and all the false pride that Jorge ascribes to it. “Dunking on the olds”, perhaps for the first time, Todd at once owns his Hispanic identity and disowns its meaning.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

O RALLY:

O Rally: Activism on the Internet and Why It Does Not Work.

Take feminism, for example. A great many of us encountered this, amidst other philosophies, in our early days of surfing chatrooms, often walking straight into a fringe debate between a group of political radicals serving a private purpose and a group of men of early to middle age resisting these notions. Even an adolescent boy can realize quite quickly that there is nothing universally “feminine” about the feminist position; this is rather a reaction to patriarchy, and as a reaction it is also a transparent outgrowth of it. By the time that we graduate high school, we’ve managed without it, since there is little social pressure or historical precedent to embrace it. We have weighed its pros and cons, decided upon the extent to which it affects, and put it to rest. Perhaps we dated a feminist that left a sour taste in our mouths and some emotional scarring whose social and legal ramifications took years to recover from, but as painfully as we learned that misandry exists, we are to that same extent more sympathetic to victims of misogyny, so we do not throw feminism out with our exes. We simply recognize the extent to which an ideology can help to influence worldview and behavior, as well as to facilitate healing, and we choose a stance that behooves us individually, and proceed. Our fathers already taught us the fallacies underlying this ideology, and we know to what extent we wish to be like our fathers, so again: we put the matter to bed, knowing where we stand. Being the chivalrous type goes hand in hand with being a male feminist, and we accept the charges of feeling good about ourselves in this manner to that extent which we can afford it. We don’t march in the streets. Yet we do accept the burden of being the guy who doesn’t laugh immediately at the period joke. And though by that I don’t mean to say “period” as in “period piece”, that secondary meaning also works, since it’s just what life at the start of the millennium was like.

When Emma Watson found feminism, or perhaps feminism found her, it was like the discovery of electricity: profound, life-changing on a global level, and redundant. Feminism had been around for one hundred years, so of course educated people HAD known about it. Some of us had deeply nuanced ideas about why it could not work, alongside many other radical ideologies that appear good on paper. But we had no idea that somehow these views would be dismissed OFF HAND by a mob of social networkers who shared their ideology through memes, tweets, and upvotes. The far left was one monster, but this began to look like FASCISM. Consider the Polish Jew who has devoted his life to studying Nationalism and expounding upon its shortcomings: by the time that he catches wind of the latest Nationalist craze the Gestapo is already at his door, and they are NOT interested in hearing his thesis.

But SURELY it would not come to THAT. NOT in AMERICA.

That first year wasn’t so bad. I was not surprised to find myself surrounded by feminists on the Debate Team, since power is a huge motivator for the POOR debaters. Debate was something divorced from ordinary life, either because it was an attempt to reform life in the image of a better one, or because it was a game to many people. By this point, I had had enough run-ins with the New Left to understand that I was a different kind of liberal. I could also see that this new feminist fad was simply derivative of the older feminism, and if I had to call myself a “non-feminist” or an “anti-feminist” in order to consolidate my stance on certain matters of common sense, then that was totally okay. Perhaps I *would* have called myself a feminist back when I played Braid, though its creator Jonathan Blow denied any sort of feminist message attached to it, dismissing associations between his game and “their own ideologies” as superficial. (Coming from a Berkeley man, that’s quite the moderate statement!!) Yet at that time catcalling was “still a thing” (the first thing I defended, in the spirit of simple transparency and modern solidarity with strangers, wishing not to live in fear and thinking to accrue attention by being generous with it) and abortion was a controversial issue about which I was starting for the first time to think critically and with respect to the intrinsic value of Life and how that plays a role in secular ethics. So no: I could no longer safely say I was a feminist, because I did not wish to  be one of “those” people.

But I had no idea that I was in a dilemma; I could no longer safely say that I was NOT a feminist, either, even if it was true. And this changed everything. For the first time in my life, politics mattered outside of politics.

And one learned what happens when non-politicians try to be politically correct.

The craze, which I tried to the best of my ability to hold back from affecting my life, really hit decisively when Bill Cosby was arrested. Here was a man who not only helped to shape my childhood with his work; in fact, references to his influence upon the childhood of millions became a sort of red herring, a pseudo-Freudian analysis of infantile retention in a society that was progressively [sic] losing its grasp upon what it means to “grow up”. Bill’s work was not a testament to our youth but to his own legacy; his arrest was a testament to a new bureaucracy that threatened to destroy any such legacy. I found myself surrounded by young people who could no longer separate art from artist, though I only knew one man who ever MET Bill Cosby, and I knew no such women.

At first, it all seemed obvious to me: CLEARLY you never KNOW the Artist. The Artist is presented to you through a series of photographs, quotations, and vocal recordings, as well as public records, always filtered through a highly regulated bureaucracy wherein every member’s job is to produce media that appears to “Truthfully represent Reality” whereas every human shortcoming ensures that this amounts to nothing more but “mere media representation”. I did not KNOW the artist; I only knew his work. And while I do not extend this to men like Charles Manson, I had no precedent yet to EQUATE Bill Cosby with Manson. How could I? After all: not only was there no physical evidence presented for foul play, but literally fifty women at the LEAST came forth making the same claims.

I must have laughed. This, I thought, might finally wake people up to how silly the whole craze was. After all: if you have a mob of fifty strangers saying the same thing, CLEARLY they have conspired based upon a common goal, made available to them by the suggestion of the media. No one would POSSIBLY believe them without evidence. We might extend that courtesy to friends, since we stand by our friends no matter what. Without us, our friends might have no one to listen to them, and we would not wish that upon them. Every person deserves to have his or her point of view received, at least by SOMEONE, though it need not be by EVERYONE. And when it’s just one or two people saying it, then do they NEED evidence? What are the odds that they would even FIND it? We don’t HAVE to take their claims into consideration; it’s a fact of life that not all things which happen personally happen LEGALLY. But that’s just part of growing up. A miscarriage of law has one true victim, and that is the Law Itself. If you will pardon the extended metaphor, to hate the law for an injustice in its application (a “miscarriage”) is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Yet if we are GOOD FRIENDS who can ACCOUNT for the CHARACTER of the apparent victim, we might give him or her the benefit of the doubt, since that is not outside of our ability, and neither is it gossip, whose portents always pale by contrast with a firsthand account.

Could an entire generation of young people have forgotten this??

But surely, not THIS generation. After all, we grew up with the INTERNET. A simple Google search and we have access to a treasury of history. We can learn about the Holocaust, the Salem witch trials, and the Inquisition, as well as the popular presumptions that appeared to justify them. A few quick clicks will produce an entire list of formal fallacies on Wikipedia, with the fallacy ad populum right up there, cushioned cozily against the fallacy ad hominem. Rudyard Kipling satirized the mob with his apes saying “we all believe it, so it must be true!!” Surely, in an age saturated with popular science, we are so scientific as to deny any crowd making unwarranted claims. It’s kid’s stuff: the more people that believe something, the more likely it is that at least ONE of them will produce concrete evidence for it. This in itself is not confirmation bias, so it serves as the standard for whether or not the belief is valid. Conversely, if FIFTY people CLAIMING TO BE DIRECT WITNESSES, as VICTIMS, cannot produce a single modicum of evidence, then FIFTY PEOPLE ARE WRONG. We KNOW that. Because we have the Internet, and that means no excuse to ignore the history of popular delusions.

In order for Bill Cosby to have been convicted, not only would we have to warp his words from over ten years ago in order to “sound misogynistic”. We would also have to IGNORE the fact that what APPEARS misogynistic now, ex post facto, would have been normal for any one of us to say back then, and without any reason to presume that we “know better now”, we would have to ignore as well that he made no attempt to HIDE this. We would also have to prioritize the interests of a GROUP of people over the rights of any one individual, meaning that instead of saying “it is better for ten criminals to go free than for one innocent man to be imprisoned” we should say “it is better for one man to be presumed guilty than for fifty women to be silenced”. We should have to ignore the entire history of witch hunts, as well as the plaints of one of our father figures who taught us to think critically, reducing our use of the Internet to social networking and skimming only that surface of it which comes up on the headlines of a search engine, which now functions like a monopolized international newspaper that governments are forbidden to unsubscribe from, for fear of appearing tyrannical. Finally, we should have to so reduce intellectual inquiry to repetition and adolescent gossip that it would become indistinguishable from upvotes and likes, giving into the entire force of emotivism and, despite having gone to college, saying things like “all these people can’t be wrong”, thus adding to the same mass of popular consent that we have just arbitrarily enthroned for being so massive. Information, no longer restricted by reason or factuality, would spread literally like a viral video, propagating exponentially, since only its size is required for it to keep growing in approval. Our analyses into the subtleties of intersexual communication and the use of modern chemicals would be reduced to saying “me too!!” like children in a classroom who have yet to learn that reality is not always ABOUT YOU; that’s why it’s called OBJECTIVE. Above all, we would have to so fetishize “consent” that any sort of DISSENT would be sacrilegious.

But we are much too “clever” to do that. RIGHT??

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

QU!D PRO QUOT!NG: a Response.

SOURCE: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/the-secret-to-getting-people-to-do-what-you-want.html

RESPONSE:

My God, this is literally the second lowest form of moral development. It is literally advertised as how to manipulate people, and then you try to deny its identity as manipulation even as you give us the literal definition of manipulation. BY definition, manipulation is any sort of communication, verbal or nonverbal, that is aimed AT A PARTICULAR OUTCOME, usually for one’s own benefit.

Beginning with self-interest ends in moral corruption, every time. Often, what people want is disappointing or disastrous. Their desires are expressions of their false feelings of being “incomplete” or “broken”. The Buddhists describe this as thrishna, or “thirst”, otherwise known as (ignorant) craving or desire. Post-modernist thinkers ascribe desire to the entire force of schizophrenia in capitalist societies, by avenue of which the market is sustained, so even a series of minor disappointments from the perspective of the consumer amount to disastrous living circumstances for producers. Desire also feeds a number of health problems, such as addiction, obesity, avarice, complacency, confirmation bias, (not in the sense of pattern recognition but the reaffirmation of dogmas) and laziness. It is a form of Pavlovian conditioning that persuades people to like you AGAINST THEIR BETTER JUDGEMENT, and in its most severe expressions it is a means of imprisoning people who are helplessly attached to certain destructive habits and cravings, segregating them from those who might compel them to take the more difficult route and to CHANGE. So long as it is motivated by self-interest, it is exploitative and unreliable, so that even those who can continue to show their gratitude to the benefactor may be disappointed at any moment. In the matter of drug addiction, such a flimsy arrangement even often leads to DEATH!! It’s no surprise that addicts often describe the Devil as the one who gives you what you want, always expecting something far more in return.

Manipulators thrive off of this sort of “reciprocity”, though all that it does is to preserve a status quo which accommodates the narcissistic sense of one’s own perfection and the egregious wealth one requires to fund such an enterprise to begin with. To acquire such resources, one often needs to develop a situational awareness far outside the scope of “this for that”, whose Latin expression “quid pro quo” is synonymous with rape FOR A REASON.

In more accommodating people, it might be natural to give more, to begin with, with the HOPE of gaining status and attaining recognition, but one soon thereafter learns that there is no guarantee of such retribution by those who managed to attain power by more aggressive or indirect means; most often, people just take advantage, inexplicably, because they have become accustomed to seeing “preferred results”.

It is through desire that we give in to temptation, sell out, and betray those who depend upon us, dissolving our history as well as our conscientious identity. We know how we would PREFER to be treated, but this becomes irrelevant when we no longer have to worry about being mistreated. Unfortunately, we often run the risk of repeating the cycle of abuse when we forget our history, thereby becoming what we hated, a mere representation of power itself, a stuffed shirt devoid of personality and humanity.

Giving unto others with the expectation that they will return the favour is not genuine altruism, and maintaining a status quo which is already morbidly perverse is not genuine justice. Moral growth depends upon a series of sacrifices, as does heroism. We advertise work as being heroic, somehow, as we are exposed to propaganda that depicts war as though it were an end in and of itself instead of a tragic last resort. Yet heroism cannot be attained by egoism alone.

Unfortunately, egoism is not confined to dissenters and deviants. Often, the most heroic people are the least popular and the most seemingly self-entitled, since the injustice that they combat has a way of finding them and the group they angrily defend begins to include themselves.

When more and more people sell out and become corrupt instruments of the status quo, the general public is comprised of egoists. How is this possible? One does not wish to believe it, and far less does one wish to figure it out. Yet the bitter truth is that an ignorant mob of hypocrites manages to prosper at the expense of a SCAPEGOAT, and that scapegoat is often an upstanding and innocent character who is portrayed as a “thief of virtue” by those who simply sold their virtue for short-term happiness. In such a mob, not only do people do “good things” EXPECTING to gain influence and privilege; if they are not repaid, they rally the entire group AGAINST the “ungrateful” party, regardless of that party’s actual needs.

We cannot have that in a growing, humane civilization. For this reason, true compassion must take into consideration instances wherein the use of force, reason, anger, demand, and sacrifice are sometimes at least conceivably necessary to attain true justice. The simple question “why do I owe you that?” is never an answer to the statement “I need it.” After all: if every question has an answer, or at least if this one is more than rhetorical, then that answer is usually a statement, and in this case it’s the aforementioned claim of need.

No state that uses military force, money, and a legal system can be legitimate without this. Giving people what they want ought almost never to be in trade, but rather based upon mutual understanding and spirited, intellectually informed dialogue, aimed at growth, progress, and common goods.

It is for this reason that false kindness is immediately suspect, often recognized at once as being insincere, and in many of the world’s cultures customs are stringently honoured to ensure that no gift is given for morally corrosive reasons. Desire is truly one of the two monsters that guard the Buddhist Temple, since what we want will kill us. Give people what they need, with consent and without debt.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

TR!O:

You see, you clean your lenses and the World becomes clearer. Like magic.

He is rather good at moving on from things, but there is one thing he CANNOT let go. Those things which he no longer dwells upon are fixed in place, yet that’s only because he DOES NOT THINK ABOUT THEM. Yet he always has to wonder: what could I have done to keep this tragedy from happening? He thinks about it, a lot. And for this reason he is uncertain about it.

Factors:

1.     He could have prevented it.

2.     He had his hunches about how to prevent it.

3.     He had ulterior motives to disregard these hunches.

On the other hand:

1.     His foremost critics are the other two.

2.     Both of them may be equally evil, and the one whom he still loves seems to have believed that.

3.     If he was to distrust one traitor, must he disown both?

4.     He is not responsible for their betrayal, but only for having trusted them.

5.     His “ulterior motives” were aimed at arriving at the Best Version of Himself, by generous means.

The more generous position, towards himself, has more arguments, and it seems only fair that a generous person would be generous towards himself. But does that make it more valid, or simply easier to rationalize? The others made gestures of generosity as well, but did they not remain self-entitled and manipulative in doing so?

If morality is objective, rather than subjective, then he is right, and he WAS right. The others simply envy him for his virtue. What he wanted was higher on the spiritual and moral spectrum than what they wanted, and it was tragic to have squandered that. Her death is but a natural consequence of their refusal to repent and grow.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

W!NDSP!R!T:

No Regrets: the Birth of Kamikaze Rhetoric.

My debate professor, though he initially inspired me and motivated me to improve and to excel, made a number of disturbing arguments over the course of the three semesters that I took classes with him. Foremost in my mind, however, is this: that in the past, “we had time” to engage in philosophy, but that that is not the case in the present day.

That time is speeding up, accelerating towards a breaking point, is not farfetched, though I owe it to Hindu philosophy that I can conceive the concept. Yet, realistically, life expectancy has only gone up in civilized* countries in the last two hundred years. If men had time to think back then, then certainly they have it now. Why, even WOMEN have started to think, and with the exception of feminists a great many of them.

There is absolutely no “application of one’s time” in the present day that can simply be PRESUMED to be important, so thought is a prerequisite to action. Doctor Whearty cannot INDUCE action in his students without warrant and reflection, unless he resorts to methods such as force or coercion. There is simply no inherent imperative for us to join a side. THAT must be supplied, and philosophy alone can supply it. If anything has changed in the last two hundred years, then it is the nature of authority and the death of romantic nationalism. And both of THOSE changes have been for the better, whereas if Whearty and Hawking were right to condemn philosophy to the grave, even if only for the sake of argument and personal aggrandizement, then the Hindus may be corroborated in their vision of the End Times.

Frankly, both sides are true. Things have gotten better, but only for the wise. Ignorance has grown in direct proportion. One has simply to choose a side now. And I have no regrets about the side I’ve chosen.

Whearty made another chilling suggestion, one dark night at (I think) Mt. San Antonio College: that hate speech ought to be banned.

Thankfully, it’s not, so I did not hesitate to cuss out all the debaters, calling them faggots and niggers.

Why?

Why NOT, of course!! After all, I’m simply ARBITRATING a way of communicating, doing so to arouse sentiment in support of my cause, apathetic to the occasional dissenter. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I certainly have VOLUMES of text to corroborate my position, to degrees of philosophical subtlety and sophistication that many of my peers can only begin to imagine, as I can only begin to imagine how they interpret it. I am CERTAINLY not a bigot; you simply have to read a lot of Deleuze, Heidegger, and Nietzsche to understand that as clearly as I do. And before you laugh at my seeming arrogance, know that your laughter is at your own expense. I have lost nothing but corrupting social influences. You have lost Enlightenment Itself. (as though you ever cared for it.) It’s not that I don’t HAVE a philosophy. I simply feel no need to weigh it against YOUR philosophy, preferring to power my way through its actualization BECAUSE I CAN.

And obviously I am satirizing you by doing so.

*yes, CIVILIZED!!

[({Dm.A.A.)}]