[Jenner tells the computer to do an Enhanced Internal View of TS-19's brain] Shane Walsh; [as the group sees the brain of TS-19] What are those lights?
Dr. Jenner: It's a person's life... Experiences, memories. It's everything. Somewhere in all that organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you... The thing that makes you unique. And human.
Daryl Dixon: You don't make sense ever?
Dr. Jenner: Those are synapses, electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages. They determine everything a person says does or thinks from the moment of birth to the moment of death.
Rick Grimes: Death? That's what this is, a vigil?
Dr. Jenner: Yes. Or rather the playback of the vigil.
Andrea: This person died? Who?
Dr. Jenner: Test subject 19. Someone who was bitten and infected... And volunteered to have us record the process. ~From The Walking Dead, Season One, Episode Six, TS-19
Have you ever seen a map of the Earth at night, or a map of light pollution?
There's an old favorite Star Trek novel of mine,
Spock's World by Diane Duane, that describes the night side of Earth as the
other stars coming out, and does so in wonderfully descriptive prose.
Looking down from Low-Earth Orbit, those ripples and seas of light in America and Europe, Abidjan and Lagos in West Africa, The Nile Valley, Israel the Arabian Gulf states, Jeddah and Mecca on the Red Sea, India, China, the southern half of the Korean Peninsula, and Japan, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore, then there's Rio, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Brisbane and Sydney in the Southern Hemisphere...those represent civilization, the life of our species as it currently exists.
But it's also telling where there is no light, the vast expanse of Alaska, northern Canada and Greenland, although there, there is not much of civilization, likewise much of Africa, Australia and South America falls into that category, there are cities and people, but few large enough to show their light to the universe.
More ominously, much of Russia is a mass of darkness on the map, as is the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. I once heard it said that in the old Soviet Union, the brightest points of light from orbit, the most well-lit areas, were the Gulags. Surely the same still applies to Russia, or North Korea, or Xinjiang today.
It's funny to me, that not only in terms of how we live our lives, but in terms of how we practice religion and spirituality, humans often still equate light with life and holiness, and darkness with death and evil. Broken primates are we, in the 21st century, in this present darkness we're stuck dealing with the evolutionary glitches left us by our earliest ancestors.
In some cases this is becoming a serious problem. Some people never learn to understand how our minds work, and where we came from, some people never care enough to find out...or worse, actively seek to avoid learning such things because they're afraid that then they won't be able to just do whatever they want.
You know, people didn't always have so much access to information, or to the written word, and it's a damned shame what some people do with such things these days.
And so it is with the goddamned conspiracy theorists. Empirical truth, scientific methods and testable facts fly out the window in the face of a mad swirl of confirmation bias, emotional ejaculation and pattern recognition...often, perhaps even especially when there's nothing there.
Of such things, perhaps, were the earliest religions born. Surely to Neanderthals or the first Cro-Magnon or early modern humans a thunderstorm must have seemed like the wrath of the spirits themselves.
It's the 21st century, and we're supposed to be well past this kind of Unga Bunga monkey-brain bullshit and don't you forget it.
I come from the Protestant tradition of Christianity, and was taught that in the earliest days of said traditions, people died...and died by horrible means...for having the desire to read the Word of God in their own languages...or even to have the right to read it at all and making any effort in that direction or toward achieving that goal. Education, Freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, these are comparatively recent rights in the Western world. They enjoy a longer...though considerably more checkered history in the Islamic world, but without those people we would not have much of the knowledge of the Ancient World, most especially the Classical Era that underpins so much of our civilization, that we do today.
I was taught this stuff, and taught to respect knowledge, reason, science and theology, by Christians and by Conservatives.
You know, the same people whose intellectual and biological descendants are today intellectually shitting their guts out for Donald Trump, Fascism, and bullshit conspiracy theories like Q-Anon.
And for what purpose?
Well, on its face, Q-Anon nuts claim to believe that the world is secretly controlled by Satanic elites who engage in cannibalism and child-trafficking and something something Gazpacho, and that somehow Donald Trump and a host of other personages, living and dead, are fighting against this.
Yet there's a problem right out the gate. When you point out the fact that Donald Trump had extensive ties to pedophile billionaire Jeffery Epstein, or that he faces allegations himself, or that the Catholic Church has a bad history in this regard, or encourage these fucking people to contribute money to fight actual documented human trafficking that's really going on and is a known quantity, there's usually a brief, frantic silence and an air of "NO, NOT THOSE ONES, THESE OTHER ONES OVER HERE!!"
Which of course is what tells you that the entire thing is utter bullshit.
That's because Q-Anon isn't really about elites or child-trafficking, it's just another excuse by "Conservatives" to try and ratfuck people that they don't like...be they elites, liberals, or poor migrant women interned in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Georgia.
Q-Anon, like all conspiracy theories, doesn't serve any more purpose than giving dumb shits a way to feel important and like they're doing something when they're really not.
They don't give a damn about forced hysterectomies, or genocide, or horrific violations of any person's bodily autonomy, and they sure as fuck don't give a damn about actual abuse of actual children, by anybody. In point of fact they'll ignore it completely when it's somebody they "like" who is suspected of doing so.
In fact, I believe they hunger for the day when they can do all type of horrible things to people, for no reason at all other than their own shitty fear and hate. They lust after the ability to make all those lights go out...both the ones in our cities and the ones in our brains...so that everybody has to join them in the darkness of their own fevered imaginations, and then the purification killing can begin in earnest.
The same people who spent my entire life, until just this year, loudly bellowing about how pro-life they were? Too damned many of them read things like what I read this morning, stating that in the United States white people will be a minority by sometime in the 2040's...not based on immigration but on who's already here, and citizens...and they don't think "Hmm, that sounds interesting" like I do.
No, they see cultural and social change and changing demographics (which I think will flip long before 2040, personally) and they lust after Apartheid and Killing Fields or breaking off a chunk of this country so they can wall themselves off from the rest of the world and be alone with their petty hatreds and shitty fears. As if such people would not almost immediately start finding rationalizations and ways to kill each other over...whatever dumb excuses they can find.
If you don't think they'll rationalize killing liberal women or women of color or forcing life-altering surgeries on them without their consent just the same as they're rationalizing forcing hysterectomies on Latino migrant women you have another thing coming.
And conspiracy theories provide an amazing vehicle for doing just that.
If you don't think they'll use conspiracy theories as rationalization to turn the "proper" conservative white women into nothing more than brood mares for their shitty philosophy, you have another thing coming. They've had the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theories as potential rationalizations for this kind of garbage for years now.
Tearing down all the "Old Gods" of the Abrahamic religions...let alone any Eastern religions that tell them they can't hurt people...or the Enlightenment or modern rationalism and installing Conspiracy Theories or Donald Trump or their own platonic ideals of humans being nothing more than shadows on a cave wall in their place gives these fucking people an outlet for their religiosity that...unlike most modern religions...does not include strictures that also bind their behavior. To these fucking people, ideas are what's real. Spectacularly dumb ideas, at that.
As I said before, even Radical Islam can be said to be based on something more than whatever occurred to some basement-dweller posting dumb shit on the internet.
And that dumb shit they found on the internet is what they think is real and are willing to kill for, or to justify atrocity and evil for.
Because if they find themselves alone, screaming into the void, then no one can question the madness of their beliefs.
And that's what these fucking people really want, the power to never be questioned, the right to rule even if it's over ashes or nothingness. They want so much to win, that they don't care what they win anymore and they want to have power so much that they don't give a damn if all they get is to be some kind of a big deal in the Abyss.
Like I said five years ago, these fucking people would be perfectly content to be slaves, so long as they were a better class of slave than some other slaves.
And they'll call that "Freedom."
If you lack the desire or fortitude or self-preservation instinct to stand up and fight against this kind of evil, silly bullshit and fight for your own freedom and rights, I can't help you.
But somebody's gonna have to.
Somebody has to take a stand against the fall of night. We can't afford to pass the buck anymore. Somebody has to stand up, Period.
It's really that simple
