Synova

 I wanted to play with my new tablet a little bit because I won't get a chance for a while, so this is rough.  Still, it's something that I've been thinking about a lot and trying to figure out how to say in a way that is the most clear. Creating a label of "ANTI" and applying it to something is meaningless.  How often does someone say, "Antifa can't be fascist, it's right in the name?" So? And? I can call myself the Queen and it won't make me Harry's grandmother now will it. Along with the ridiculousness of "antifa" is the notion of "anti-racism", which if you examine it differs from "equality" in that it requires and demands a retaliatory racism.  There's nothing "anti" about it in any sense other than a mirror image. Which would work too,  I suppose.  Anti-fa is a mirror image of fascism.  Anti-racism is a mirror image of racism. In any case, here's my messy drawing of something that is c...

 

Because allowing people to say scary things in public (or mean things, or false things) doesn't inflame anyone.  It attracts people who are already inflamed. There used to be a joke that went more or less something like this:  There's a couple thousand white supremacist militia members in the US and two thirds of them are undercover FBI agents. And that's the second reason.  Because we actually want the scary conversations to happen in public. Driving those conversations underground doesn't make them go away. Inflamed people are still inflamed except now they are also legitimately aggrieved.  We have thousands of years of History that proves that this is true. Short of simply killing everyone of a certain mindset, ideology, religion, or culture, it's impossible to make them go away by forcing them to keep their scary ideas quiet.  Killing a few simply creates martyrs, not converts. Economic oppression, which was used against the Jews as well as endless other min...

  Do we really have to wonder what 21st century US fascism looks like? I mean, sure, there's the make believe sort that we're supposed to be all worried about while the real sort is right in front of our faces. Someone the other day said "Profa" which is the first time I heard that. As far as I could tell that's anyone who objects to the Realfa. Because lets look at what gets called fascism these days in the US, okay? Promoting free speech, liberty, and individual rights. Refusing to let other people tell everyone what to do and how to live. Refusing to have a "race consciousness" when demands are made that you have a race consciousness. Refusing to accept that the State must legislate morality. Refusing any possible collectivist social or political ideology. Disagreeing with the identitarian ethos and race segregation. I'm pretty sure that actual 21st century US fascism looks just like all the other fascism, it's just called something else and p...

  The fight has never been between good people or bad, or compassion or not, or racism or equality. It's always been the individual vs. the collective. Group politics, race theory, gender studies, demands for nationalized services, healthcare, universal welfare, and the destruction of individual rights, even something we'd never have imagined under threat such as free speech, the press, or the simple right to participate in the economy. The people accused of racism aren't racist you know, they're just not collectivist. They view every person as an individual, the same as they view themselves. Every individualist is a feminist because they believe in individual rights and equality, not group judgements. But they'll be called a sexist or misogynist. Racism is officially not about anyone's personal biases or beliefs or behaviors any longer. It's about your group. It's about compliance to a collectivist outlook on all issues. Lets be certain to address...

 It's time to play social media Wack-a-Mole.  I don't use this blog often and even blogs are vulnerable.  But plan for multiple connections to other people, pop up every time you're cut off. Bookmark blogs, add people on alternate platforms even if you never go there.  If you ever have to go, you'll already have those connections. I might not show up here often.  But I might.  Then this might go away, too.  Then I'll be some where else.

  Wow. Look at this. We're not even allowed to talk about what we see. The Ministry of Truth won't have it. We suspect that voting machine and computer shenanigans are a problem? Facebook knows that they can swing enough votes just by controlling information, what's allowed to be shared or discussed and what isn't. No one needs to hack a computer. All that has to happen is the "neutral" media debate moderators simply avoid asking *any* questions in areas related to the unfavored candidate's strengths. And this.

 Thanksgiving 2020. I've heard it's getting testy out there.

  I'm interested to see what happens with non-lockdown states and countries vs. lock-down states and countries. I'm in a lock-down state. Our Covid cases and hospitalizations in my state are now through the roof. What lock-down governors seem not to have understood is that you can't give orders to people who are not choosing to cooperate. Even the military understands this. So many on the progressive left think that the military is orders and obedience. Because they don't understand leadership AT ALL. It was not GOOD LEADERSHIP to push people through mental torture all summer. Without a reprieve, family, connections, and recreation, people are not ready NOW to do another "two weeks to flatten the curve." Can people who had no chance to regroup, endure another lock down now? It's not even that people are not willing. It's that they CAN'T.

North Korea really exposed priorities of a whole lot of people as far as I'm concerned. The need to tear down Trump was far far more important than the people of North Korea. Who really cares about Kim? No one on the Left. Who cares about the people of North Korea? No one on the Left. Trump accomplished an unprecedented bringing together of North and South Korean leaders and all of a sudden our media and Democrats wouldn't shut up about how immoral it would be to let Kim get away with past horrors. The *solution* was to insist that those horrors continue? Or maybe they wanted us to go in for some international assassination action? But no. Just months before, just a few months before, the media and Democrats were warning about how Trump wasn't nice enough! They were horrified that Trump insulted "Rocket Man" Kim! And they were praising Kim's elegant, cosmopolitan sister at the Olympic winter games and the *delicious* way she threw shade on Vice Presi...

The paradox of tolerance nearly disappears if we understand that "tolerate" isn't "celebrate". So "intolerance" isn't a "failure to celebrate." We've got people proclaiming, as if it's smart and means something, that we ought not "tolerate intolerance." But what they mean is that we must not tolerate those who fail to celebrate...whatever it is thing that they think ought to be celebrated. "Tolerate" is this...I may hate what you have to say but will defend with my life your right to say it. I can HATE your opinions and your choices, and still defend your right to have your opinions and make your choices. In the PARADOX the only person I'm allowed to show intolerance for is the person who doesn't allow other people that same freedom to have opinions or choices that they hate or even allow other people to have disapproval or dislike of opinions or choices that they think are right. We could say the same ...

I previously posted this to Facebook. If you are watching Teen Wolf because I talked about it, don't read this because spoilers. Not awful ones, but I know it wrecks stuff if I'm anticipating something happening. Knocks me out of the story. Anyhow, I want to talk about the character, Kira. At first she works. And then, in my opinion, she stops working. And she stops working because she's a Mary Sue. Sort of a fake, artificial, logical Mary Sue but the effect ends up being the same. Which I find interesting  and possibly important from a writing point of view. If you've watched, staring in season 3, the character of Kira is introduced. Kira is a kitsune or she's possessed by a kitsune. As it gains power she loses control of it. But in the mean time it confers to her the ability to be a bad-ass sword fighter. She can control electricity as well, but doesn't do anything with it. Compared to Allyson who's back story is that starting as a very young girl ...

Let's have a conversation about what humans DO. Like all other life on Earth we aggressively colonize all available ecological niches. It is, at the end, the PRIMAL VIRTUE of all life. ALL life. All life is intended to reproduce itself. It began in oceans because the water protected life from radiation. Life crawled out to the margins of the continents. Life c reated the atmosphere and the air to breathe.  Life COLONIZED every place on Earth from the highest mountain to the deepest, darkest, chemical fueled abyss. Animals pushed their limits to find places to live. The most primitive humans managed to WALK ON THEIR FEET to every extent of the whole world, across the Bering Strait and all the way to the Southern tip of South America. Humans built boats and managed to find their way to tiny DOTS of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Every form of life on Earth competes, steals territories, steals them back, steals STUFF, exploits niches that other life pioneered. A...

This article quoted a psychology study that a lot of us probably heard about some few years ago.   All about how all white people have internalized racism because when given pictures of black people we all reacted in a way that indicated the perception of threat.  I can't promise it was the same study as the one cited here, but I'd be willing to put money on it. The important quote: "Psychology research tells us that seeing people as individuals, rather than as members of groups, helps reduce social prejudice. The psychologist Susan Fiske showed exactly how easy this is, if we put our minds to it. In a 2005 neuroscience study, she found that when white participants saw photos of black faces and had two seconds to judge whether the people in these photographs were over the age of 21, they showed activity in the area of the brain called the amygdala, which indicates a high level of alertness and emotional arousal. In other words, they saw a threat. But she discovered a...

           It seems to me that the "conversation" about Black Lives that is focused on intersectionality is focused on doctrine to the exclusion of life itself; the exclusion of physical, actionable life itself. Rather than focus on how people live or even what they think and feel, the focus is on confession, language, and conversion to a doctrine.            Someone asked if what was going on was a religion.            Not only is it a religion but it can't even really be discussed without using religious  terms.            There's a Church, now, more concerned with exclusivity than with reform. More concerned with an Inquisition than with reform. It's not that some people are going to do it all wrong, are going to address Black Lives wrong, but that anyone outside of the Fellowship can not be ALLOWED to address problems which nearly everyone, to a person...

Distributed systems are always more flexible and more responsive than centralized systems. It doesn't matter what the subject is, this is always true. The current push towards centralized decision-making and authority, to emphasize groups and government instead of individuals, and to insist on the assumption that one overarching enormous system is more efficient than distributed, duplicated, and independent systems, is profoundly untrue and terrifyingly dangerous.

A friend is reading a book about critical race theory or some stupid stuff. A white author writing to a white audience. The author INSISTS that it's racist to avoid having a white racial consciousness. We're SUPPOSED to have a white racial consciousness, and she knows that makes white people uncomfortable because we've been taught that this is racist, but we have to get past that and learn to identify as and think about our whiteness as our identity. Just reading a paragraph, yeah, sure, it made me more than uncomfortable. It made me angry. Yeah, sure, we've been taught that we're not supposed to do this. But part of the anger I felt was that I recognized in my own self a growing desire to give her just precisely what she was demanding of me. Good. And. Hard. I wanted to shout, FINE, I'm going to Be White, now. I'm going to think of myself that way and I'm going to LOVE IT. Idiots. Complete and utter idiots. They don't want an end to racism,...

Elijah 2019 - a freckled elf.   My kids are remarkably talented. (I've just been informed this isn't completed yet.  So maybe I'll get to post an update.) Update:

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The current thing seems to be the burning moral need to oppose charities for wrong think.