Web 3.0 Is a Cacophony

Was Web 3.0 made for depressed people? I am beginning to think so, because you are being endlessly notified, updated, chatted, and so on. It is overwhelming. Who really needs such constant stimulus? I think this shows that some things do not scale well. Sure, notifications are great when you have a few apps or maybe just one, but when you have 20? Nobody is managing the din, and so it’s left the user, who most of the time behaves like a wildman running around putting out fire after fire. I’m sorry, but I don’t want my personal life to mirror my working life. Why would I? Finally, after years of the near-ceaseless din, some companies are realizing that the whole experience has become unsatisfactory and overmuch. You see, the web as a collection of pages you visit and places you go was great. Having a truckload of whirring, beeping, jumping, flashing things that distract you all day, sapping your time and energy and disallowing you from concentrating for any length of time, is not an enjoyable place to be. It’s not a cure for depression at all. In fact, it’s just another method to keep people frazzled and easy to control (think of Kurt Vonnegut’s amazing short story, “Harrison Bergeron”).

The Royal Jeffrey Toobin

This proves as I’ve said for a long time, that the war is not between left and right, but between the people and the royalty. The royalty are those who think that rules are for other people and that there is no such thing as absolute truth. The royalists defend Toobin, and their reasons are laughable, unless you understand that such people defend one another at any cost. Privilege trumps morality. Privilege trumps reason. Privilege trumps the sexual harassment laws they helped create.

In the royalist mindset, even #metoo is expendable, and it’s also why the Maxine Ghislaine testimony was released revealing the names of underage females, but censoring their male abusers. In the world of the royalist, the peons (that’s you, me, and the most vulnerable) are there to be used at their whim, while they escape without any consequences.

And what drives this conception of royalty? Noble blood proved insufficient as the royalty throughout history was no better than the common man in how they behaved. In the end, this mindset comes down to three things, all tied at the hip — selfishness, childishness, and the incredible assumption that they are superior. All of this would be laughable, if they did not have a horde of enablers who are as childish and as selfish and only want to benefit when their friends get to the top.

This all continues because nobody is willing to stand up and expose the whole charade, and rather than engage in a long war that courts the opposition of that horde of enablers, most prefer to go about their lives, entertaining themselves to death. Yet, entertainment as often just another item created by these selfish children.

So nothing changes as everyone looks away from the truth, for one reason or another, and if anyone gets too close to it, they mysteriously disappear. Enough of this gets out to scare the people, who are easily scared, just as those who wield any kind of power all become vacuumed into the same control structure — journalists, scientists, theologians, musicians, children’s book authors, dictionary writers, and the list goes on. The sleep of reason produces monsters, indeed, but the sleep of the people produces tyranny.

Everyone Will be Offended

You will offend someone.

Perhaps you will offend someone by wearing a certain color of shirt.

Perhaps you will offend someone by not tying your shoes.

Perhaps you will offend someone by not being fashionable.

Perhaps you will offend someone by merely existing.

The world is so large and so many people are unreasonable that you will offend someone somewhere sometime.

There is no getting around this.

Everyone will be offended.

So instead of worrying about what others think or what others will do or whether they will like you or not, instead follow Jesus and be who you were made to be. There is no other way except trembling in a living death.

The Primitive and Simplistic Religions of People-groups

Something that is an endless mine for various philosophers and metal bands (especially epic doom metal bands) are the contrived and primitive religions of people-groups, such as the ancient Mayans, Celts, and so forth. These things they often portray as valid alternatives or as spectacles overflowing with awe and mystery. However, they overlook the fact that such belief structures never spread any further than the the physical reach of those people-groups in their physical empires. What they portray as strength is actually structural weakness, because what these people-groups believed in the past was not transcendent. It was literally an ethnic ritual often imposed by force. What value is something to the individual that you are forced to adhere to or be expelled and regarded as not a Celt, not a Mayan, etc? Those practices were nothing less than primitive social justice, where those who defied were depersoned — either killed or expelled. This odd fascination with certain periods of history reveals a totalitarian fetishism; Hitler attempted to create such a religion in the modern age; Mao and Lenin also did this but with an even less overtly religious approach.

It’s hard for me to get excited about such periods in history, but I understand why philosophers and bands push such religions — they are in one way less demanding than Christianity; they allow a form of holiness, but they have none of its power. Of course they also allow for the unfettered power of the king which these sad souls imagine they will be. In the end, such religions are unfulfilling and that is why they both must be imposed by force and were flattened by the declaration of divine love in the gospels. Where were the druidic missionaries, after all? These primitive people-based religions were exposed as nothing more than rituals inherited from their fathers. In the face of a “new and living way”, they collapsed.

So what is being portrayed as strength by these bands and philosophers is nothing more than the immature wish for power and a wish to be not held responsible by others. It is just another form of childish behavior and thinking.

Generations

Every so often, we hear about how different generations work differently. I’m skeptical.

For instance, one of the oft-repeated canards is that millenials need and want in-person attention. Having worked with several people of that generation, I find this generalization a bit too kind. What at least some of them seem to want is hand-holding. They are too scared to learn for themselves, so they need constant feedback, people doing it for them, in short, coddling.

Corporate pabulum stresses the need for workplaces to adapt to the learning needs of various generations, to which I stand up and scream, “No!” Coddling people is not only exhausting, it is a waste of the company’s resources and time. It is a waste of my time. It is a waste of the recipient’s time. Instead what needs to happen is for someone, somewhere, that people listen to (not me), to say, “The madness ends here. You children go and learn. We will not do it for you. Go find tutorials and teach yourselves. Practice. When you have tried everything you can, then come back with questions and not a moment before.”

Generational differences can go burn forever. No organization can succeed by handholding and for people to demand it is not only selfish but it comes from a place of insecurity, doubt, and fear.

No organization needs people like that.

The Capitulation on Juneteenth

The lesson writ in burned-down buildings, dead cops, and anarchy is this — if you do enough bad things, you will get rewarded with a national holiday. In this case, Juneteenth, a holiday I’d never heard of until this year. And what a way to let wounds heal, huh? Make up another holiday and use it to remind people that their ancestors at some point, were slaves.

Actually, some people’s ancestors were slaves, and others weren’t, but what does that have to do with anyone alive today? Nothing. Nobody alive now in the US was ever a slave in American slavery. Nobody. Yet we have to have holidays celebrating their release. Why?

Because for some people, hate can never die, wounds can never heal, and division must endure for them to have power (in other words, selfishness). Those who give in to the selfish and violent are hoping the crocodile eats them last. Remember this, all you cowardly corporations — you have shown yourself weak. The shakedown artists will be back with more demands later, and if you don’t meet them, things will be worse next time.

It’s the lesson of the bully, the shakedown artist, the mob, and the union. As long as you give in to demands, you will forever be weak and under their thumb. It’s also funny that the descendents of slaves (I guess? How many can prove that?) some five generations on, have forgotten their desire for education, and their love of equality. Now when they have an equal footing with everyone else, it’s about payback.

I am not impressed with them, and I am not impressed with those who kowtow to them.

Pasthate or Freedom from the Past’s Pull

I have long felt that nostalgia is a cloying, unnatural word — I much prefer pastlove to talk about a longing for the past, whether it be a real past or an imagined past. However, as of late, I have come to despise the past — not for its own sake, but for the pull that it exercises upon me. It is not something I wish to be passive about as some Japanese artists have been in their mangas and animes. I wish to not fall beneath its gravity. I wish to not languor in its seas. I want to be facing forward, eyes to the sun, because I am electric. I want to lean from the present into what is to come, in faith, hope, and courage, in trust of Christ, not looking backwards and becoming immobile. That is the lesson I think many miss from Lot’s wife — that she became useless, once and for all, because she was looking back. For some, judgment comes all at once, and for some, it comes little by little. The past can draw me down into sorrow and apathetic pining that I think is a close cousin of self-pity. These tortured seas need not consume me. I want to be thriving. I want to be among the living. I want to be flourishing. I want to rejoice in the truth and be a light to others, as long as I am here below.

Rise of the Medical Brownshirts

As it was, now it is again — those who enforce without knowing, who act without thinking, those who corral others without questioning — they are here. They are among us. These are the good soldiers, those who do not question. They will torture you to keep you safe and sleep well knowing they have fulfilled the dictates of their state-born consciences. All they know how to do is obey and they obey well. In the end, it will be revealed that they chose the wrong person to bend the knee to. This we can all see now, but they will only see later, because they live in fear and react, instinctively like a caged animal. The unthinking and the fearful are the ones always used by any despotic regime.

Look around and scrutinize. Who are the enforcers in your world? Who are the ones who will gladly toe the line, whatever the line is? Who are the ones who never think about cozying up to power?

They are the brownshirts and every despotic regime has them.

We have them now too, and that bodes ill for the future.

You Will Never Be Safe Enough

I was listening this morning to someone telling me about the financial impact of seeking safety. Included were all the fearmongering, bad science, unexamined assumptions, and overgeneralization typical of such, and it made me realize — now more than ever — we are being lead by the blind. The way this is heading is plain: as government and companies demand more and more control over the particulars of our lives, we will fall into three camps — those who love their chains, those who wear them when others are looking, and those who refuse to bow down.

Contract tracing will lead to people using secure phones.

Mandatory reporting will lead to people not sharing information, lying, and covering their tracks.

Mandatory mask wearing will lead to crowds of people not wearing masks.

And lost in all this narrow provincialism is a strange lack of awareness of what other countries are doing. The left always fetishizes other nations except when other nations aren’t being as restrictive as they want — then, it’s time to cancel or deplatform them. France, for instance, has reopened sporting events. How can the frogs be wrong, right?

I know people who haven’t been in the home of another person in four months. This is not healthy, but lost in all this concern for physical safety is completely ignorance on the topic of mental health and spiritual health.

This is a nightmare — to be governed by the people with the mentality of Howard Hughes in his decline, but safety, fundamentally, isn’t the point. Control of others is the point. Safety is just their latest cudgel, and so as long as others have freedom, they will never be safe enough.

Movies as Self-justification

People lie to themselves all the time. Psychologically, this is a kind of coping mechanism, but its effectiveness is always something I’ve questioned. How well does it help you cope if it just keeps insulating you from reality? It is a form of poison, a slow death.

I have realized that many forms of entertainment are simply self-justification scripts. Someone wants to justify sleeping around, so they make a movie that glamorizes it. Someone else wants to destroy the military, thus, Full Metal Jacket. You get the idea. What these people cannot achieve in reality, they can achieve through creating a spectacle that proclaims their self-justification as fact, and so creates a temptation for others to believe the same.

It’s a futile and hollow act, really, but such are the coping mechanisms used by the broken. What stuns me is that so many do not recognize this as such. All created things have moral perspectives; they reflect the wishes of their creators. You cannot at once claim that what you do has meaning and then deny that what others do has meaning. You’d better believe that spectacles that others create have a purpose, even if it is one written in crayon. What broken people usually do is create odes to their own bad decisions. They seek to justify whatever vices they have or they try to explain why something they’ve done is actually ok and even superior to what they know, deep down, was a better choice.

Seen through this lens, is there any wonder why so many movies celebrate immoral sexual activity? A group of people out there are very very driven to justify their choices, and they think if you buy in and experience the same things, that you too will turn to the movie to justify your choices. After all, on the silver screen, it always turns out well in the end, no matter how spiritually suicidal the choices actually were.

Movies, like lying to yourself, are ineffective coping mechanisms. That is why there are fewer sadder scenes than that of the former movie star — I think of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard. At life’s end, the makeup has expired, the tapestries and furs are rotting, friends have died, and nothing remains but a futile desire to stop time when everyone played pretend with you. Now playtime is over and you have nothing stored up for your soul.

Entertainment is the opiate of the masses, in how it is consumed and for the purpose it is used.