Believe in truth.
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. ~Timothy Snyder, Yale law professor.
Then I started seeing this PizzaGate shit pop up on Twitter in the last couple of days.
OK, let me get this straight: Somebody something something Benghazi Hillary Clinton vaguely connected human trafficking Pedophilia blah blah blah in the basement Comet pizza?
Minor quibble: Like most pizza places I've ever heard of, Comet Ping Pong doesn't *Have* a basement. Just like with the Jade Helm shit and underground tunnels connecting Wal-Mart stores and something something basement concentration camp.
Full disclosure: I worked for Wal-Mart for a year, in two different stores (there was a transfer somewhere in the middle.) I've never heard of a Wal-Mart having a basement.
Several people that I know have been arguing with these PizzaGate nuts since at least yesterday...and these people are a *Unique* kind of stupid.
As may be suggested by the above "quotes" maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned but *I* can't follow these people's logic. This stuff makes no sense to me.
We have real problems in this country right now, not the least of which is the fact that President-elect Donald Trump is a completely incompetent, narcissistic wannabe-autocrat who has already brought up a lot of toxic shit in our society...corruption, racism, rampant pandering to unreality, repeated pandering to conspiracy theorists and spreading of conspiracy theories.
...Which are then picked up by surrogates and even prospective cabinet members and then by the followers, who then bother my friends and people that I know.
Right now, we face the serious issue of Russian interference in our election, and our "Conservatives" are off chasing conspiracy theory bullshit instead of raising hell about this? The hell with that.
I started out as a Christian, a conservative and a Republican and when I was coming up, the Russians were our Enemy with a Capital "E." Now I don't give a damn that the Soviet Union is dead and the Russians aren't Communists anymore and have become the darlings of the right wing...when all the evidence points to the fact that in practical terms Republicans are Communists now who seem to want to turn the United States of America into some bigger version of East Germany on behalf of said Russians...I see only that the variables have flipped when the Republican Party and by extension what passes for today's movement "Conservatives" are led by an autocrat who sounds like a wannabe Nicolae Ceaușescu, and a self-described Leninist who wants to burn down the State.
Communism/extreme socialism for the very rich and their money, public/socialized loss and private profits. Increasing anarchy, confusion, and pirate capitalism (eventually, complete with actual pirates, if it goes on long enough!) for the rest of us. In effect, these people have inverted the old Soviet system so that it benefits only the very people that Communists had the idea to overthrow in the first place.
I see no benefit in this situation for myself, or for most Americans for that matter, not in the least when Trump loads his cabinet with crony capitalists, Wall Street bankers, and at least some of the various Republican rejects from the past 25 years. Where is the up-side to this for the average citizen?
There isn't one.
That's what all this salacious conspiracy theorizing is meant to distract from.
Trump keeps up such a dazzling array of bullshit that it's hard to follow. I've seen this before. My ex-wife was the same way. She'd keep up such a blizzard of bullshit that I'd give up trying to follow it, for 58 minutes and then only in the last two minutes she'd sneak in whatever it was that the last almost-an-hour of dog and pony show was really about. Trump does the same damned thing.
Don't fall for that bullshit.
When you see something that looks too good to be true, or too outlandish to be true, expect that it probably is. Check your confirmation bias.
You know what saved me, back in the day?
I'm a gamer. I'm also Dungeon Master/Game Master/Storyteller, etc. I design characters and put them in fucked up scenarios against the characters being run by my players for the entertainment of myself and others.
I can plot and plan and counter-plot and (on paper anyway) manage all type of shit (without even needing the paper, mostly) with the best of them. I've been doing it since I was ten years old.
You want to know why the Fundamentalist Christians *Really* hate Dungeons & Dragons?
One word: Imagination.
Controlled unreality that you manage in your head inoculates against conspiracy theories and other such unreality foisted upon us by others.
Or, as I've put it when people start spewing about demons, or the Illuminati or the latest Obama conspiracy-theory-of-the-week: You know, I don't like Murlocs very much, but I also know they don't exist outside of World Of Warcraft.
At the same time as I was inoculated against unreality...to a certain extent you could argue I was also schooled in it, being that I was a church kid.
But, in a metaphysical sense, it's real enough.
Here's the thing...when you are taught that there is a baseline of spiritual truth...however that Truth may change or mutate in your mind, there's still a red line you know you've got a problem if you've gone below it. A good church, or Christian school...and in my experience other religious group...does not seek to produce cookie-cutter clones or dogmatic Fundamentalists, so much as it seeks to make sure that you come out of it with at least some of the ideas that you were taught *And* they stick.
Hence, having a certain baseline of Truth.
To put another example out there...
I used to take my friend Tim to work all the time. Tim is a Christian, and in the eight years or so that he rode to work with me we talked a lot, while I drove. One topic we discussed a lot was religion and spirituality. After awhile, if you surround yourself with certain influences, they start to have an effect.
One night, while we were on our way to work Tim remarked that I didn't swear as much as I used to, or take the Lord's name in vain anymore. It just sort of clicked, in both of our heads at the same time that this was because we'd been having all these discussions for all these years.
From that comes one of the things I live by; Lead by righteousness or don't lead at all.
As with some of the values that come from my past; respect is earned by every action, every day, all the time 24/7. If you want to be respected...be respectable. Your Word HAS to be good. Either your word is good or it isn't. There is no middle of the road. You're either that guy, or you're not. I've often failed at the values I've had to keep, but I had them. Values have to be lived up to by the person who claims them, to be a hypocrite just makes things worse. To abandon morality and values is to open oneself up to temptation. When self-satisfaction becomes the moral purpose of one's life...well, to put it in the Baptist vernacular of my youth...can you save yourself from Hell?
No, you can't. Man can not save Man, only God (in whatever form one understands it) can do that. For most of my life...this was pretty much the ultimate baseline of reality, the ultimate fact, as it were. When you stand before God you cannot say "I was told by others to do thus" or that virtue was not convenient at the time. This will not suffice.
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom, just like to not keep your word is to cause it to have no meaning. Honor is a sacred trust, once you abuse that trust...you don't have it anymore.
We have, by many different means in this day and age, the capability to communicate. If we abuse that capability by spreading untruth then what is the purpose of communication?
One could argue; spreading ideas. But if the ideas aren't any good and what you are communicating does not benefit the people you are speaking to, then what is the damned point?
Confusion, Deception, Distraction, and ultimately overload and breakdown of the system, so that no one even bothers to listen anymore.
But before it gets to that point a society that has no baseline concept of truth (now I'm not talking any one culture or philosophy or religion here, the America I grew up in was at least slightly multicultural and pluralistic, if more that way in some areas than in others. So you can damned well imagine what I think of this alt-right Nazi shit, can't you?) the overall society may crack or outright fly apart under the strain.
I think we're partway there already. It gets worse, day by day...
When people are chasing after a conspiracy theory that is provably impossible, to the point where somebody drove all the way from North Carolina to Washington D.C. to "investigate" and then got arrested for firing a weapon in this damned pizza place (a weapon that as far as I'm concerned, they shouldn't have had if they are that gullible and stupid) this shit has gone too fucking far.
See, unlike my table-top Role-playing games, the unreality of conspiracy theories can motivate people to create real-life effects, because there's no understanding that the shit is not real.
Unreality, practiced in real life, will Make America Great Again get people killed, probably the wrong people who didn't do anything to deserve it, and quite possibly in very great numbers.
...And don't you forget it.
Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,
Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:
That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.
They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly. Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them. For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right. Amos 5:7-12
...
This is America right now, people. Quit chasing conspiracy theories and silly bullshit, open your eyes, reboot your brain, and look at what's right in front of your face...
Because all this stuff is exactly what the conspiracy theory garbage is intended to distract you from. Conspiracy theories are not about the truth, they are about glorifying the people who come up with them and spread them
...And we've got better things to do, come on.
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