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The Wrong Side Of History

I’m seeing a lot of people in preschool on social media proclaiming certain individuals to be on the “right” side of history and others to be on the “wrong” side.  Bernie Sanders is on the “right” side of history, because he showed up to a few rallies in the past in support of civil rights.  Of course this somehow means he is completely infallible and qualified to be the president in the eyes of certain groups of people.  Donald Trump is on the “wrong” side of history, because he says things that go against what we’ve been indoctrinated to believe by an overwhelmingly liberal media.  Of course this somehow means that he is “Hitler”, and the worst thing to happen to America in forever.

The truth of the matter is that the “right” side of history is the side that protects the freedoms of of the individual.  This just so happens to include the protection of free speech.  Anyone who tries to silence someone else whom they disagree with, is the on the wrong side of history.  There has never been a time in history I can think of, wherein the “right” side of a conflict actively tried to silence the other.  Let’s take the civil rights movements for example.  Were blacks trying to silence the white establishment, or was it the other way around?  How about the genocide of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis?  Were the Jews trying to repress the German’s freedoms, or did the opposite happen?

So when you see anyone, on either side of this political circus trying to block, silence, or shut down the other side, you are witnessing the “wrong” side of history in action.  Unfortunately for Bernie Sanders, despite his record of being on the “right” side of history, a nice portion of his groupies are increasingly displaying their propensity for being enemies of free speech.  Enemies of free speech are consequently also enemies of freedom and the Constitution.  Enemies of… America. (cue patriotic music)  As I’ve started time and time again on this site, freedom of speech applies to everybody, not just your side.

Granted, Trump’s supporters also have a tendency to be a bunch of knuckleheads as well, but this just shows that the same harmful mentality tends to follow both of these candidates.  They both may be “outsiders” within their own parties, but both continue to represent everything that is wrong with their respective parties.  A large portion of these two groups subscribe to that “us vs them” soccer hooligan mentality that has all but caused this country to grind to a halt, and become increasingly divided.  “My party is the epitome of everything good and the other party is pure evil!”, exclaimed both parties simultaneously.  It’s kind of like watching two obese people argue over which fast food restaurant is healthier.  Just realize that you’re both going to die early of heart disease.

As far as the Hitler comparisons go, both parties reflect shades of fascism.  Fascism is defined by a belief in one true party, authoritarian control over the individual, and violence as a means of accomplishing an end.  As previously mentioned, both of these parties like to fancy themselves as being the “correct” party, while viewing the other as the flawed, incorrect party, rather than seeing themselves as two different varieties of essentially the same thing.  Both also love pushing their authoritarianism onto the country; the red controlling what you can do with your body, and the blue dictating what can be said or what is allowed to be owned.  Lastly, both tend to attract volatile types, who view violent opposition as an acceptable reaction to those who have differing views.

To wrap this up, neither party is necessarily on the “right” side of history, because the future hasn’t happened yet, and can’t be predicted.  You can only tell if somebody was on the right side of history in retrospect.  Both parties have been responsible for a wealth of terrible ideas that have had a negative impact on this country.  Both parties continually attract individuals who aren’t particularly intelligent, engage in mud-slinging rather than rational discourse, and are easily manipulated into voting against their own best interests.  If you’re truly looking to be on the “right” side of history, always take the position of protecting everybody’s freedom of speech.  The second you feel it’s alright to silence another individual’s opinion or viewpoint, you’ve officially cemented your position as being on the “wrong” side of history.  Now stop shitposting your inane political memes all over social media.  Thanks!

WrongSide

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America Doesn’t Understand How To Protest

America is in a sad state of affairs right now.  People get more offended and outraged by absolutely anything these days than any other time in this country that I am aware of.  You have college kids complaining about Halloween costumes.  You have other college kids basically complaining that colleges aren’t segregated enough.  You have even more college students trying to boycott speakers they don’t agree with.  There are people protesting that police are killing citizens of a particular race, all the while seemingly uninterested with all the other colors of people that police have also been killing.  There are even people protesting that other people are dispensing actual factual statistics about constructed oppression narratives.

I tend to blame most of this on the narcissistic, one-sided, bias-affirming nature of social media.  In the past, if you held a view and felt the need to air that view out in public, you would also need to be willing to be confronted by people who might actually provide an opposing view.  In the current era of selective friend-collecting and rampant thumbs-up desperation, it’s possible for individuals to state an opinion while being surrounded by only people who share that same view, regardless of how well thought-out that view actually is.  If you hold some particular view, and only willingly surround yourself with people who parrot that same view, you tend to develop the sense that you are right about that view, regardless of the facts.  If I believe that the ocean is orange, and only surround myself with people who also believe the ocean is orange, I have effectively proven that the ocean is orange via my own self-constructed web of bias.

This largely explains what is wrong with many of these whiney college children out there.  They went from the life of high school student, dependent on their parents, rarely needing to formulate a well-developed opinion on anything, right into being a college student.  A college student who all of a sudden feels that they have an obligation to start voicing their opinions on the world, despite not being worldly, and not having learned how to formulate an opinion that isn’t merely regurgitated in the first place.  Colleges are predominantly liberal institutions, so it makes sense that college kids would adopt and mimic the sensibilities of those who are”teaching” them about the world.  This is quite similar to the way a racist father tends to raise a racist child, or why youngsters tend to mirror the political leanings of their parents.  Kids are being fed a one-sided dialogue instead of being taught how to engage in critical thinking and actually question the information they are bombarded with.

When kids decide to protest things on college campuses, the majority of the time, all they are doing is complaining that someone doesn’t express the same view that they do.  They have been taught that there is a “correct” way and a “wrong” way to think about given subjects, and then react in a childlike manner when that view is tested. The rise of trigger warnings and safe spaces is merely their way of trying to justify, via buzzwords, this childish mindset of being unable to handle perspectives outside of their own indoctrinated views.  This very much represents a failing of the college system to help kids grow into open-minded freethinkers.  Instead they have created waves of brats who protest things that aren’t remotely worthy of being protested.  If somebody says something you don’t agree with, your course of action as an intellectual, is to rightfully disagree and move on with your life, or engage in a civil debate on the topic.  You don’t take to social media and try to start a movement, or try to get some form of authority to block that individual’s freedom of speech.

Back when I was in college, in the pre-baby-era, groups with various agendas were given free reign to have peaceful protests in the main quad area of our campus.  It was not unusual to get out of class and pass a group of Christians with signs picketing abortion, complete with requisite graphic photos.  Members of the LaRouche movement could also regularly be found carrying on about something, of which I have no idea, because I was too busy racing back to my dorm to be antisocial and play some Quake3 on those speedy college servers.  Regardless of who was on campus though, there was never any violence that I’m aware of, and students never decided to protest or try to get anyone removed from campus.  The students seemed to understand the concepts of freedom of speech and differing opinions.  Needless to say, I’m thankful I went to college when I did, and avoided the baby-era altogether.

It’s not only college kids who can’t seem to grasp when something is worthy of protesting, and when it isn’t, however.  You have groups like third-wave feminists whose more extremist branches have taken to protesting anyone who doesn’t goosestep along to their ideology, even going so far as to assault people, make attempts to get people fired, and call in bomb threats at events.  Those all seem like rational adult ways to go about engaging in a public discourse about current events.  If all these toddler-sensibility types were recent college grads it might make sense that they believe that anyone with a dissenting opinion is an “enemy” who needs to be disposed of, rather than debated, but unfortunately some of these third-wavers are grown-ass adults.  Once again though, when you have a group of people who are isolated in their own group, left to stew in their own ideologies and anger, they start to view themselves as being on the right side of any discourse.

In steps social media again, as all the oppressed and disenfranchised are bombarded with stories and tweets about people acting like complete fools in the face of those they disagree with.  Word on the street is that when you disagree with something, all you need to do is act like a petulant child, receive a little press for doing so, and you’ve as good at won the battle.  Never mind the fact that most of the rational human beings witnessing these infantile outbursts can’t help but feel that you’re mildly underdeveloped in the grey matter department.

This mindset unfortunately starts to spread around the populace like a highly contagious disease.  The next thing you know, you’ve got people blocking traffic to somehow protest police violence.  Blocking a highway to protest a corrupt police force is like protesting female genital mutilation by refusing to floss your teeth.  It illustrates a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect.  Your protest needs to have at least something to do with whatever it is you’re protesting.  Otherwise you’re just aimlessly protesting for the sake of having a protest.  If aimless protests actually worked, I’d go protest human trafficking by throwing various lunch meats at school children.  You’re welcome world, for me solving the slave trade and all.  And you’re welcome school children for all that free tasty bologna I lobbed at your faces.

You can’t blame Americans for not quite grasping how to effectively protest though.  We have absolutely zero history of effective protesting after all.  Have a seat on my lap parts and I’ll share with you a story.  You see… there was a time in history when black folks weren’t allowed to sit in the front “white” rows of seats on buses in the United States.  Then one day, a woman took a stand and protested by throwing heads of cabbage at a Clydesdale horse.  Except that didn’t occur, because this event happened in 1955, back when people were evidently a little less dense than they seem to be today.  It also didn’t involve vegetables and horses, but rather a refusal to give up a seat, which happened to directly correlate with the subject that was being protested.  It was an effective protest because the protest actually correlated to what was being protested.  Outkast named a song after this chick.  Anyone name a songs after you yet?  Didn’t think so, Billy.

Somewhere along the way, protests have merely become the latest opiate of the masses.  These people don’t even seem to know why they protest, but it gives them some sort of comfort that they’re accomplishing something, regardless of whether the protest has any actual effect.  I guess the general consensus is that if you end up in a blurb on some online news blog, you’ve truly won a battle of some sort.  Except that when tomorrow rolls around, absolutely nothing will have changed.  People in the U.S. these days seem to have the passion, but completely lack direction.  Passion without direction doesn’t lead to results.

Unfortunately, there are even waves of people out there who actually think engaging in violence with people who have different views is not only acceptable, but a commendable course of action.  Recently, a group of KKK members decided to have a rally in Anaheim, California, and were violently attacked by a group of protesters.  To anyone of moderate intellect, the protesters were obviously in the wrong, since they decided to break the law and assault a group who were merely voicing a differing opinion.  Regardless of how wrong or harmful someone else’s views are, you are never justified in physically attacking that person.  Anyone who has made it to adulthood, shouldn’t need to have this explained to them.  You are free to challenge the views of those you disagree with, but that is where your rights end.

Further bolstering this theme of social media and anti-intellectualism, I noticed an alarming amount of people who were actually cheering these violent criminals for attacking the Klan members.  Most of our society agrees that the KKK harbor harmful views about race, but most of society also recognizes that violence is never a justifiable response to harmful views.  Those who don’t realize this usually end up in those places we have set aside, called prisons, which is hopefully where these violent protesters end up.  Anyone who feels it is acceptable to physically attack somebody who has a differing view, is more of a danger to our society than anyone who holds a harmful view but avoids violent confrontation.  In short, fuck both of these groups, and fuck you if you agree with either.  Also, learn how to protest like a grown-ass rational adult.

 

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Apps For Babies: HeartMob

Do you have a young child, or child-minded adult who just can’t deal with the harsh realities of being criticized for the content they choose to upload into the world?  Does this individual not have the intellectual ability to understand that anything they release into the world is subject to being judged?  Well fret not, because some well-intentioned entrepreneur$ have invented an app that allows the user to avoid growing up and remain a child indefinitely, like a real-life Peter Pan.  Meet your new best friend: HeartMob™.

For anybody who ain’t know (I didn’t until a youtube video used it as a punchline to a joke), HeartMob is an app that “provides real-time support” to individuals of harassment.  In short, it allows the “victim” of harassment to either have a third party report incidents of harassment for them, or to receive supportive messages from some sort of undetermined group of people who are also on the app.  It also allows a third party to go to the accused harassment party and say “Hey guise, that’s not very nice.  Don’t victimize this porcelain doll with your harsh words that aren’t blind praise.  K, thanx!”

This might sound rather harmless on paper, but it is quite problematic for a few reasons that I’ll be more than happy to go over.  First off, this app completely reinforces the harmful view amongst the social-justice crowd that one should never have to be held responsible for one’s own actions, or ever face any type of opposition to anything one chooses to do.  The people who need, have funded, and are going to use this app are people who feel the need to inundate social media with their selfies, ideas, opinions, and creations, yet expect to exist as a special snowflake who is shielded from any type of criticism or feedback that doesn’t fall within their desired expectations.  The problem with this, is that in the real world, if you present something to the masses, you need to be willing to receive any and all feedback that comes along with it.  If you write something and don’t want to receive feedback, then don’t release that writing out into the public.  Everything you create will inevitably be judged on some level by anyone who stumbles across it.

Now granted, when you put something out there, you generally aren’t expecting some jackass to give a vulgar response, completely devoid of any usable critical feedback, but that’s what haters and uneducated people tend to do.  Unless you plan on doing something about the education and hater problem in the world, you’re going to need to learn to disregard stupid comments.  When a musician releases an album, people will write reviews of that album, and not all of those reviews will be positive.  If an artist creates a gallery of their works, there is nothing stopping somebody from referring to their work as “complete and utter shite”.  If a director puts out a movie, somebody might give that flick a one-star rating, or perhaps give it half a thumb down.  Negative criticism is what you need to be prepared to receive if you create something, then put it out there for everybody to take in.

Projects like this also perpetrate the narcissistic view that everything one shits out is worth plastering all over social media for the whole world to see.  Do we really need every insecure person flooding the internet with countless selfies in a vain attempt to receive some form of empty validation that will never actually fill the void that coming to grips with reality provides?  Ultimately, the intoxicating draw of all those thumbs up clicks ensures that the person who craves validation will continue to let their fragile ego hang in the balance of online acceptance.  Nobody posts pictures of themselves because they want to receive an honest opinion.  They post pictures in order to be validated, even if that validation comes in the form of complete insincerity.  Obviously, when somebody who is posting for validation doesn’t receive praise, they get hurt and go on the defense, rather than merely moving on with their life.

This app isn’t a revolutionary, or necessary idea.  It’s merely a response to the further infantilization of a particular demographic who are ill-equipped to handle the realities of life.  It’s not a guaranteed right of an individual to be shielded from criticism or negativity.  If you give your opinion in a public forum, you need to be willing to deal with any and all opposing opinions.  The second I decide to publish this article, absolutely anyone can disagree with it or call me a “doodoo face” and my only course of action as an intelligent person, devoid of entitlement, is to continue on with my life.  I am allowed to have an opinion, so others are obviously allowed to have an opinion as well.  People who feel the need to voice opinions, yet can’t take criticism don’t seem to be able to understand this concept.

This app is a sort of funhouse mirror that projects a flattering image of the user, relieving them of the burden of ever needing to face the reality of what they actually look like.  By being shielded from reality, you never see the truth, and thus never attempt to become the person you actually want to be.  If you only surround yourself with people who lie to you about your looks, opinions, ideas, or art, and never accept any type of criticism, you never learn the truth.  The truth may in fact be that you aren’t a very good writer, have terribly uninformed opinions, or are a narcissist who is a 4 to 5 (out of 10) at best.  Being challenged is what allows you to grow, and either become better at a skill set, or at very least learn to take criticism, if not just ignore “haters” altogether.  Instead of downloading this app, perhaps you should grow up, develop some semblance of self-esteem, and take the initiative to better yourself rather than expecting the world to lie to you and protect you at all times.  I’m out.

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More Conspiracy Theories That Need To Die Already

Flat Earth Theory

Believe it or not, there are people who are actually convinced that the Earth is not round, but rather, a giant spinning disc in the sky.  This differs from what people believed back in the 17th century and prior, in that they don’t also believe that the planet is square, like a Sicilian pizza, or that you’ll fall off into an abyss in the ocean at some point.  They believe that the sun and moon are circling around us overhead in a fixed, perfect circle, and that all space travel has simply been faked for over 50 years.  All those pictures of our round Earth?  All fake.  They even believe that gravity is a fabricated hoax, and that something called dark energy exists that fills in all the gaps in their theory.  This is definitely the king of all conspiracy theories, given that it relies on practically everything we know as being scientifically true to be a complete lie fed to us for whatever reason.  If you’re going to go conspiracy theory, at least go big, and this is as big as it gets.

I can’t help but imagine that this theory was born out of that same cannabis fueled philosophizing that resulted in a belief of space lizard people, and that the planes used in 9/11 were holograms.  Some conspiracy theories are at least plausible, i.e. most involving the government lying about having not done something, while others seem like somebody made them up in an attempt to troll of all humanity for the shits and giggles of it all.  The flat earth theory feels strongly like the latter.  I can’t help but feel that the entire group of people who claim to believe this are all in on some joke that they laugh about on a reddit forum somewhere.  Flat Earth Theory is so completely ridiculous that I can’t really muster up the strength to write more than two paragraphs on the topic.  Next!

 

GMOs Are Bad

GMOs are a conspiracy theory in the classic sense.  The people who are strongly anti-GMO are against them due to their complete lack of education on the subject, combined with a complete distrust of corporations.  Lack of education and distrust are the two key ingredients to any conspiracy theory.  The anti-GMO crowd are amazingly ill-informed on what the word even means that they rally so passionately against, let alone what actually constitutes a GMO.  When you don’t understand what something is, it tends to be scary, and it’s only natural to be against scary thing.  I personally think that ghosts should be outlawed, for example.

GMO, of course, stands for “genetically modified organism.  This is a blanket term for any living thing that has been altered by humans, usually for the purpose of yielding more edible parts, or being more resilient to diseases.  The precursor to modern GMOs was the process known as selective breeding, which was man’s way of circumventing the need to sit around and wait for natural selection to run it’s course to make the most “ideal” plants and animals.  Most dog breeds that exist today were engineered by man through selective breeding, 80% of which weren’t around more than 130 years ago.  These breeds were created to be useful to humans, performing tasks such as: herding, pulling sleds, hunting, search and rescue, guard duty, and therapy/assistance work.  The dog you own is more than likely not an animal that would have existed naturally without interference from man.  Whole foods probably wouldn’t sell your dog, being that it isn’t “all natural”.

Plants have been heavily modified by humans as well, far predating the modern GMOs.  Thousands of years of selective breeding have turned a plant called teosinte, which was about the size of a pea pod, and had less than a dozen kernels per head, into what we known today as corn.  Watermelons started out as roughly the size of a golf ball, were largely composed of seeds, and tasted very bitter.  Now they can grow to hundreds of pounds, actually taste good, and are higher in healthy nutrients.  A lot of modern fruits are also propagated via cloning, because merely planting seeds will often result in a less desirable crop that is inferior in size and taste to the original.  By cloning, via stem cutting or grafting, an identical copy of a plant that itself was the result of selective breeding can be grown.  This keeps the quality of fruit rather uniform, which is good for growers and consumers alike.

With advances in science and technology, humans are now able to skip the whole waiting for centuries part of selective breeding, and alter a plant or animal’s genes directly.  This is usually accomplished by removing the unwanted DNA from the genome of an organism, then inserting newly created DNA into it’s place.  This new DNA can either be cloned from another organism, or synthesized in a laboratory setting, i.e. test tube DNA.  I can’t really go much deeper into detail here, being that I’m just some dummy with a website, and not a fancy science man with a ritzy college-boy degree.  The basic gist though, is that essentially you are programming new code into preexisting code to alter the resulting product.  This allows scientists to speed up evolution in a sense, or even create new plants and animals entirely.

It seems most people who are scared of GMOs have a misguided fear that somehow food from GMOs is dangerous or unhealthy for you.  GMOs are still biological matter and won’t be unhealthy unless something unhealthy was intentionally introduced into the organism, which obviously would be unhealthy for the organism itself while it’s still alive.  Scientists aren’t adding potentially carcinogenic substances to living organisms the same way chemists might into non-organic products to improve their taste, add artificial colors, or act as preservatives.  GMOs are surely healthier for you than most non-organic food with laundry lists full of unpronounceable ingredients.  If you’re drinking soda and eating an abundance of junk food and processed garbage, you’re doing worse to your body than GMOs ever will.

The other common argument is that GMOs are bad for the environment.  Some people fear that introducing human-altered plants and animals into an ecosystem will throw off the pre-existing balance.  I would generally agree with this, and be against tampering with the biological balance in an environment, but in modern agriculture this becomes a moot point.  It’s not exactly natural to have hundreds or thousands of one animal crammed into a small area, or to have hundreds of acres of one crop type.  If you were to replace a type of grain or animal in a contained farming environment with an altered type, only that field changes, and not the ecosystem as a whole.  In most countries, there aren’t wild cows roaming around outside of farmland property, or random patches of corn growing everywhere.  Both largely thrive today because we use them for food.

A good deal of GMOs are created to be heartier in order to survive the environment we’re slowly ruining, or to be healthier to better feed people in areas that we overpopulate.  DNA from a hearty plant or animal can be introduced into a less hearty plant or animal in order to decrease it’s susceptibility to disease and environmental factors.  These new, improved plants and animals are better equipped to thrive in areas that are polluted, or that don’t have an ideal temperature or adequate water,  Other plants are altered to produce higher yields of food, or to provide greater nutrition, both of which are needed in less privileged areas that tend to have food shortages.  There is actually a variety of rice called golden rice, that was engineered to be a great source of vitamin A, which diets in India and a lot of African countries are lacking.  It even won an award.  Have you won an award for feeding impoverished people?  Didn’t think so.

Once again, I’m not claiming to be a scientist, but most people running around demonizing GMOs aren’t exactly scientists either.  The difference is that at least I look into things before I take a hard-nosed stance on something, rather than merely adopting, then regurgitating the views of some blog I follow.  I also don’t think that GMOs are completely harmless.  Plants can be modified to be resistant to repellents, and if those repellents are still used heavily, the plants survive, but are essentially poisonous to humans.  This speaks more of the unscrupulous nature of the businesses who misuse the GMOs, rather than genetic modification itself however.  The fact that non-GMO salt even exists though (salt is a mineral, not an organism), is proof enough to validate my belief that the anti-GMO crowd are largely conspiracy theorists whose ignorance is taken advantage of by companies looking to turn a profit on new business ventures and products.

 

Vaccines Are Bad

This one is a biggie.  Most of the ridiculous stuff that conspiracy theorists believe is relatively harmless, seeing as how all that’s at stake is their ability to be taken seriously or their losing the privileged to babysit and/or be left alone with other people’s children.  This one however forces the theorist’s nutty proclivities into everyone else’s lives.  If some 420blaze-it truth-seeking warrior decides that vaccines are a government control plan, and subsequently chooses to not get their children shots to prevent deadly, contagious diseases, everybody is put at risk.  If one’s of these folk’s little dummy-spawns shows up to school with a case of Polio, all the rational people’s children who haven’t yet been immunized are put at risk of contracting something that could kill them.

The best part of this conspiracy theory is that there is absolutely zero basis for any of it.  It’s the classic case of a group of people thinking something that has been done forever is just now somehow causing bad things to happen.  Those bad things being “Autism” for the most part.  There are individuals who think that autism is something that suddenly exists because of people choosing to vaccinate their kids.  The mercury content of vaccines is usually singled out as the culprit, and while certain vaccines used to contain trace amounts of mercury (levels far below what is deemed to be harmful), most that were administered to children contained no mercury at all.  (all this info is available via the FDA website)  A great deal of the fish we eat contains mercury as well (also low doses), but these same conspiracy folks aren’t coming up with theories about Carp.  The conspiracy theorists still go on believing that vaccines are causing Autism, even though scientists who study this stuff for a living haven’t completely pinpointed the cause themselves.

Autism itself is a very strange beast in that it is frequently misdiagnosed, children have been observed to “grow out” of being autistic, and the criteria for determining autism are ridiculously varied.  Autism isn’t a concrete disorder that can be identified on a molecular or cellular level.  It can be definitively determined whether an individual has a disorder such as Parkinson’s or ALS, but this isn’t the case with Autism.  If your child is irritable, they might be autistic.  If they don’t pay attention as much as they “should” they might have autism.  Even the act of stacking, or lining up things has been diagnosed as autism.  Perhaps autism isn’t an actual thing at all, but rather a general catch-all term to fit a variety of different disorders into a neat, convenient little box.  So little is known about what autism actually is, let alone what causes it, that it seems a little reckless to treat it like a legitimate disorder.  The second you legitimize it, it becomes the scapegoat for everything “abnormal” that any child exhibits.  All of a sudden, if your child doesn’t like eating broccoli, or can’t work those roller skate wheel shoes, they must be autistic.

This isn’t to say autism doesn’t exist, but so little is actually known about it by researchers, that it’s preposterous to think that some yuppie of marginal intellect could be thoroughly convinced of a direct correlation between a vague disorder and an innocuous procedure.  As many of these other conspiracy theories have illustrated though, it’s fairly evident that people would rather be led through life by their “feels” rather than actual facts.  If somebody who is free of outside influence and trained in a particular field drops some knowledge, you’d probably do well to place a little more priority on what they have to say, than what some nobody with no knowledge on the subject has to say.  This goes for vaccines, chemtrails, gluten, and the shape of the planet.

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Conspiracy Theories That Need To Die Already

Chemtrails

I’ll usually hear someone out when they go on and on about how something is a cover-up, or how the government is up to something devious.  A large part of my willingness to entertain these ideas is that I’m intelligent enough to know that governments tend to attract narcissistic, contemptible, cunty types, who are by no means above being completely despicable human beings.  They lie, they steal, they cheat.  They’re generally sociopaths who are great are convincing less intelligent people to vote them into office, where they spend their terms engaging in actions to increase their own wealth and status at the expense of tax dollars and the well being of the country.  Why bother actually fixing a country, when you can network with billionaires, write autobiographies, and set yourself up for hundred-thousand dollar speaking engagements after your term is up.

One of the few government conspiracy theories that I’ve never been able to take seriously though, is chemtrails.  Nothing about chemtrails adds up or makes sense whatsoever.  Let me get this straight: The government is sending up planes that spray us with something to make us all more susceptible to manipulation, despite the fact that everyone in the government would be getting sprayed as well, and that most of the population has a history of voting for unqualified politicians who slowly run the country into the ground anyway?  What exactly are we being brainwashed into doing?  People are alarmingly easy to manipulate into giving up their rights already, merely by using fear.  The U.S. government has passed countless unconstitutional bills simply by convincing the populace that terrorism is actually a problem.  (It’s like #43 on the list of problems in this country)  Every time there is a shooting (as long as the victims are white), people gladly hold it up as justification to start crossing things off of the Constitution.  There are even groups of people who feel it’s justifiable to limit freedom of speech if people’s feelings get hurt.  With this kind of intellect running rampant in this country, why would anybody need to be manipulated?

Other conspiratorial reasons for why chemtrails are being used include weather modification, and population control.  As far as the former goes, weather modification via plane already exists.  It’s called cloud seeding and has been used since the 1940’s.  Governments the world over have used cloud seeding to increase rain and snowfall during droughts, and to clear the air of pollution before large events.  As far as population control goes, chemtrails would be an ineffective way of facilitating this.  China was faced with a perceived overpopulation problem, and enacted the “one-child policy”, which lasted 35 years.  No chemtrails were needed to get this policy off the ground.  If a government were actively trying to sterilize people, doing so through heavily consumed beverages or food would probably be the most covert way to go about perpetrating this.  A partnership with Starbucks or McDonalds would have 95% of the population sterile in no time flat, then only people like me would be able to breed, America would flourish, and we’d be number one again within 2 decades.  The problem is, both of our political parties thrive on the less intelligent procreating.  The less intelligent are the ones you can easily sell your bullshit disguised as hope and change to.

Another conspiracy theory that is closely tied to chemtrails is water fluoridation.  This is yet another case of something that has been used for years (about 70; since the mid 40’s) that some folks continue to believe is somehow just now being used for mind control.  The only legit scientifically proven negative effect of water fluoridation is dental fluorosis, which results in tooth discoloration if the fluoride content of water is too high.  As a matter of fact, you’re doing more harm to your body by drinking soda, or even coffee, which has no nutritional value and actively dehydrates the body, all at the expense of obtaining a little “energy” that could be gained by getting decent sleep and being in good physical condition.  I drink water almost exclusively, I’m completely resistant to any and all forms of mind control, and just so happen to be the 1,543th smartest human being in the world [citation needed].  So drink more tap water and get on my level.

 

Gluten Is Bad

Gluten is the carbs of the 2010’s.  It’s something in food that people who know absolutely nothing about nutrition are thoroughly convinced that they need to cut out of their diets because a blog post somewhere said to.  It’s 2015 and people still put all their faith into diet fads instead of actually following tried and true dieting guidelines that have been working for top-of-their-game athletes for like half a century.  A gluten-free diet is not much different than that pointless Atkin’s Diet that was brought to you by a man with a history of diet fads stretching back to the 70’s.  Both are largely adopted by white folk who have that itch to live healthier, without actually doing something productive like exercising instead of sitting around watching Netflix all evening.

The only reason to cut gluten out of your diet is if you have Coeliac Disease, which is quite hard to actually be diagnosed with, since evidently you can have this disease but have absolutely no side-effects.  This begs the question: If something has absolutely no side effects, is it even a problem?  If I have lung cancer, but don’t have the side effects of lung cancer, namely the cancer, do I actually have cancer, or is somebody simply trying to milk some cash out of me?  The primary symptoms of Coeliac disease are loose, greasy bowels.  Has everyone hopping on the gluten-free wagon been secretly shitting their brains out all day, every day?  All the secondary symptoms are things like fatigue and failure to gain weight, which could be due to countless other things.  How exactly it’s determined that amongst the myriad diseases that exist out there, these symptoms definitively point to a gluten issue is beyond me.

I’m gonna go a little T.M.I. (too much information) on you right now.  I too used to have Coeliac disease.  I had it back in the day before it became a fad disease for everybody to get diagnosed with.  I was ridiculously skinny up until my early to mid twenties, and hardly ever gained weight.  I also had loose bowels on a regular basis for the longest time, perhaps years.  I’m not plagued with either of these problems anymore though, thanks to cutting gluten absolutely nothing containing gluten out of my diet.  What I did cut out of my diet was caffeine, excessive sugar, and fast food; all things that the body doesn’t particularly want excessive amounts of inside of it, despite all the advertisements on T.V. telling you otherwise.  In short, I started to eat healthier.  I also started to exercise on a regular basis.  I’ve put on about 35 pounds (mainly muscle) since then, and have nice healthy adult poops.  I can also breathe underwater and kill bears with a single well-executed round house kick, but your results may vary.

So if you have stomach and bowel issues on the regular, I guess it’s worth a shot to cut out the gluten.  There are a whole host of things you could probably change to sort yourself out though, much as I did.  I have no doubt if I went to the average doctor with those symptoms I would have been told to go gluten-free despite the fact that I solved those problems via other measures.  Diagnoses tend to be very one-size-fits all with doctors who are more interested with quantity of patients over quality of care.  Doctors are also not infallible, and can make glaring mistakes at times.  I was once diagnosed with Pneumonia by a doctor, only to find out I actually had bursitis in my shoulder, upon getting a second opinion.  Those are two completely different ailments with two very different treatments.  The second doctor was obviously more thorough, and less apt to jump to a diagnosis.  The second doctor probably wouldn’t have immediately assumed I had Coeliac Disease, and he would have been right.  Thank you, second doctor.

 

The Pay Gap

Yes, you are a conspiracy theorist if you believe this nonsense.  There are countless sources out there that debunk this myth, yet certain people love to cling to it like a warm, fuzzy blanket.  Perhaps this belief is due to some pervasive wave of anti-intellectualism sweeping the U.S.  (There are other countries where wide-spread pay gaps no doubt exist), or perhaps it’s a product of the current trend of self-imposed oppression that seems to be the hot new fashion right now.  “I’m like, sooo oppressed, because it makes me a special snowflake and makes me the underdog even though I am actually the most privileged demographic in the world currently.  Please give me thumbs ups and likes. Thanks!”  Pay discrepancies are bound to exist in rare instances, but the people who hold onto this pay gap notion legitimately think they are somehow being paid less as a barista at Starbucks, or as a cashier at Target, and this notion isn’t remotely true at all.

I’ll explain away this theory here, despite the fact that it has been disproved time and time again elsewhere, because people that believe this sort of thing tend not to engage in things like “reading” and “research” and “critical thinking”.  So… President Kennedy passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 in, you guessed it, 1963.  That’s 52 year ago for anyone keeping track of the math.  This act makes it Illegal for employers to pay workers different wages based solely on their sex.  “Illegal” means a worker can take an employer to court over being payed a lower wage based solely on their sex, which as you might have guessed, never actually happens because the pay gap is a myth.  (Obama even passed an amendment to this Act in 2009 to make it easier for an employee to take legal action)  Sure, it took time for the gap to close, but as of 2015, only the most unscrupulous of employers would try to get away with paying a woman a lesser wage for the same job.  This doesn’t happen at legit, registered companies.  (They have the most to lose by getting caught doing this)  Anyone who works independently and pays under the table could easily get away with utilizing a pay gap, but perhaps you shouldn’t be working for Skeeter, painting sheds out in the boonies anyway.

The reason this myth refuses to die off, is that organizations with agendas continue to spread misinformation and market manufactured oppression to their gullible readership.  Getting fair and balanced information about topics relating to sex from a one-sided company like Jezebel, is like getting fair and balanced information about race from a one-sided company like WhitePower4Lyfe.com.  You can be sure most of the information contained within is propaganda, largely based on confirmation bias, targeted to an audience who are merely looking to reinforce what they already believe to be true.  (Typical conspiracy theorist behavior)  Some news sites have even published multiple articles disproving the pay gap, all the while continuing to run articles proclaiming it to be a huge problem.  So which is it Huffington Post?  Oh wait… you’re a “news” site that posts cat videos, top ten lists, and clickbait articles.  Never mind.  Carry on.

What these sites do, is take statistics and grossly skew/inflate them, or misrepresent them to meet their own agendas.  The pay gap stats these sites use were obtained by taking the average income of all men and comparing it to the average income of all women, regardless of position or hours worked.  All the fortune 500 CEOs in the country who make those obnoxiously inflated multi-million dollar salaries were thrown onto one side, and all those women who clean up hotels for low wages were placed on the other.  As you can probably imagine, the average of all the salaries of men and women didn’t exactly come out as equal.

This would be like having a class of 20 students (10 men and 10 women) wherein everybody scored a 93 on a test, except for one guy who scored a 100, and one gal who scored a 34.  If you were to take the mean value of those students separated out by sex, as opposed to median or mode, the men would have a score of 94, and the women would have a score of 87.  An unethical news source could report this data as: “Women score 7 points lower on tests than men”, when the fact of the matter is that one woman scored 59 points lower than everybody.  One woman, not all women.  The median and mode of these scores for both sexes would be 93, which would be a far more truthful and accurate number to put forth.  If you were trying to push an agenda of all women scoring lower, then obviously you would choose to use the mean and completely ignore the median and mode.

I’m not saying websites like Jezebel who push this kind of data to drum up fervor over inequality are dishonest or unreputable, but you certainly can’t consider them to be accurate sources of info.  They have a history of pushing misinformation and bias.  (They blindly side with the accuser in just about every rape case that ends up being debunked, i.e. University of Virginia, and mattress girl)  The fact of the matter is, you don’t need to be knowledgeable on a subject, or even engage in fact-checking to write blog posts for a well-know website (or this one), so always take this kind of info with a grain of salt.  If you read something, and it seems a bit sensational, chances are that it is.  Being sensational gets more views and brings in more ad revenue.  (except for this site)

 

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Safe Spaces Are For Babies

There is a bit of a trend going around as of late, wherein people who are legally adults, but emotionally still children, feel that they are entitled to be protected from any type of speech or ideology that isn’t in line with their own belief systems.  This only happens in a few places.  Fiction stories, that cesspool of rampant idiocy known as Twitter™, and those establishments of higher (ever more debatable by the day) learning known as colleges.  Regardless of where it happens though, it’s generally a sad state of affairs, and needs to cease being catered to by those who are rational enough to know better.  Seriously.  Cut that shit out.

There are examples of this rampant college infantilism all over the news these days.  From Condoleezza Rice being boycotted at Rutgers University over opposition to her involvement in the Iraq war, to Bill Maher being boycotted at U.C. Berkeley over speaking ill of radical Islamic ideology.  A generation is being raised to see nothing wrong with living in an echo chamber, surrounding themselves with clones who think and act exactly as they do, all the while considering anyone with differing ideas to be an opponent in need of silencing.  The second anyone with a differing view comes within range, they instinctively grab the torches and pitchforks and assemble the lynch mob.

The fact of the matter is, the ones who seem to be in need of “safe spaces”, are largely middle class, liberal, white kids.  The very demographic who tends to grow up the most privileged, and seemingly the most sheltered.  The demographic who increasingly live with their parents way later than anybody labelled an adult should, a good deal of whom haven’t even had a legitimate job prior to graduating college.  Given these factors, it seems completely logical that this demographic would be ill-equipped to deal with the adult world, and the conflict of thoughts and ideas that tend to exist within it.

Safe spaces do in fact exist out there.  They are called cribs, and they are for babies.  There will always be somebody to wait on you hand and foot in these “safe spaces”, and you never need to worry about any kind of challenge or adversity.  When something is foreign or scary to you, mommy and daddy will always be right around the corner to make everything better and kiss your boo-boos.  You know what isn’t a “safe space”?  The world as a whole.  The world is a difficult and challenging place, oftentimes requiring you to engage in situations that are new and stressful to you initially.  You grow as a human by meeting challenges head-on and allowing different ideas and views-points to permeate your cranium parts.  Spending the rest of your life hiding under the bed merely ensures that you will never truly progress, and will forever remain an underdeveloped person.

Seriously though.  There are multiple colleges out there that allow “comfort” pets.  In case you aren’t in the know, comfort pets are for highly sheltered kids who can’t deal with the stress of being away from the comforting bosom of mom and dad.  What’s next?  Are these kids going to be able to have their mothers show up to classes with them soon?  Maybe even bring them a sandwich with the crusts cut off, or perhaps even a nice plate of Bagel Bites™.  How about they start wearing their favorite Pokemon feety pajamas and bringing a sippy cup full of Hi-C Ecto Cooler to Calculus class.

Sit down and lemme tell you a story, children.  I remember starting college back in the day and being depressed because I was off in some new environment, living in a claustrophobic, grey, cinder block dormitory.  I didn’t know anybody yet, including my roommate, who hadn’t shown up, and I wondered how college was possibly going to be enjoyable.  I missed the comfort of my former life and was already bummed about how my college experience was turning out.  But sure enough, I made friends, started hitting up parties, and gradually adjusted to campus life.  Would a kitty cat have made this transition easier?  Perhaps.  But it probably would have died, because college kids generally aren’t that responsible, and their parents aren’t going to be around to take care of that cat.

Colleges used to be considered beacons of progressive intellectualism, but nowadays seem to be bastions of regressive group think, which need to be protected at any cost from outside influence.  Many of these campuses have so many rules limiting speech and expression that they make North Korea seem a little less oppressive in comparison.  A group of students at Wesleyan University in Connecticut even tried to have the campus paper defunded until a series of demands were met, much in the manner of a hostage situation.  That doesn’t sound very progressive at all, does it?  One might say it sounds a bit fascist.  The boycotting of opposing ideas is generally the response of the weak minded, who fear engaging in critical thought or having their preconceived notions challenged.

So if you’re reading this, and you’ve been acting out in the manner of one of these Junior Fascists, cut it out.  Free speech means free speech for everyone, not just your entitled little ass.  Great minds are open to new ideas, and are always willing to hear both sides of an argument.  If everybody engaged in group think, and nobody ever went against the grain or questioned the status quo, we’d all be goose stepping and loading people who are “different” onto boxcars headed to terrible destinations.  Human tragedy will always be borne out of falling in line and trying to rid the world of diversity.  So be part of the solution and not part of the problem.  Thank you class of ’15 and have a kool summer.

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Facebook Betas Are Ruining America

Traditionally, the term beta is used to refer to a male who tries to get in a woman’s good graces by doing as little work as necessary.  This usually entails doing things like throwing out compliments or being overly agreeable or helpful towards a woman, merely for the sake of trying to win said woman’s affections, rather than doing those very things simply to be sociable and friendly.  These beta types are often stereotyped as wearing fedora hats and uttering things such as “You first m’lady” and “You wanna come over and play D&D this Saturday?  Maybe afterwards we can watch Dragon Ball Z together if that’s cool with you”.

Facebook betas are people who “like” everything posted by someone whose good graces they’re trying to get in to, whether they actually find the post to be interesting or humorous in the least.  They engage in this constant “like” button mashing because they are hoping to endear themselves to the person in question without actually having to put in the work that would be necessary in a traditional pre-social-network relationship.  Validating somebody’s “posts” in real life would require more than flashing them a thumbs-up.  One would actually need to give some sort of reasoning as to why they though somebody’s shitty instagram picture of absolutely nothing was a great idea to share with everybody, which would no doubt require some degree of lying.

You’ll see this happen a lot when somebody in a social circle has some slight level of fame, success, or is a woman whom the beta male finds appealing.  If someone on facebook constantly posts trite, uninteresting content, yet continues to have a flurry of likes for every uninspired post they make, they clearly have amassed a small army of beta-types vying for their attention.  The individuals who receive all this validation for doing something as banal as taking an overly filtered picture of themselves (if not hundreds), or posting some half-baked, poorly written social commentary, are never ones to reciprocate with the excessive thumbs-upping themselves.  These aren’t relationships of equality, but alpha-beta relationships, borne of one parties constant need for attention and the others need for acceptance.

The problem with these facebook betas, is that their constant positive reinforcement of other people’s narcissistic, feeble posts, establishes an unwarranted sense of accomplishment in the recipient.  The attention-seeking poster is rewarded for constantly engaging in empty, egotistical ventures, and is never held to any kind of standard, insofar as improving their ability to tell a story, formulate an idea, or post a photo that isn’t inherently drenched in vanity.  It’s the social media equivalent of the rise of individuals like Paris Hilton, or Kim Kardashian, who obtained celebrity and fame, all without having any discernible talent.  Mrs Hilton and Kardashian are the alphas in this case, and all those commoners who hold them in high esteem for no good reason are the betas.

This constant beta-fluffing isn’t likely to result in the attention-recipient ever accomplishing anything, or achieving any real degree of success in life however.  The recipient of all these empty compliments develops a skewed sense of reality, wherein they are more interesting, talented, or attractive than they actually are.  These delusions of grandeur bypass the natural order of improvement, which occurs through a series of successes and failures.  If every single thing somebody produces, regardless of quality or significance is praised, that individual never develops a sense of what actually has quality or significance.  Essentially, they are turning in D+ work all their lives, yet constantly receiving “A“s for the minimal degree of effort that is actually invested.

A good example would be the “worst of” contestants on American Idol, or other glorified talent shows.  These contestants apply to these programs, then show up to sing in front of large groups of people, all the while legitimately believing themselves to be accomplished singers.  After they inevitably crash and fail in a cringe-inducing fashion, they always seem to be genuinely confused as to how the judges weren’t absolutely floored by their performances.  As it usually turns out, they had friends who constantly buttered them up with praise and adoration for their horrendous performance skills, so they started to develop delusions of possessing some sort of talent or skill, which they never actually had.  They were never told that they were terrible at singing, so they never felt the need to actually improve, or to find something they were actually good at.

Ultimately, it’s better to have legitimate criticism or praise for the content you put out into the world, rather than receive fake approval or a complete lack of feedback.  A complete lack of feedback is actually better than fake approval, since it tends to drive the ambitious person to continue honing their skills until they finally get the results they are looking for.  People seem to have issues being perfectly honest with others on social media however.  Nobody wants to tell that person who posts 12 pictures of themselves on a daily basis to maybe tone it down a little, because it comes across as desperate and needy, so the empty thumbs up continue to pour in, and the narcissism grows.  You can’t really blame the one inundating social media with self-centered postings however, as social media enables this behavior.  In the physical world, anyone who talks about themselves all the time, or constantly tries to turn the focus of a conversation onto themselves tends to be ignored or disliked, while on social media, this behavior is positively reinforced via some sort of point system.

The way to fix this, is quite obviously to have social media where thumbs-ups are replaced with thumbs-downs.  That way, these beta’s ability to positively reinforce terrible content and narcissistic behavior is greatly limited.  Either the shitty post gets no feedback, or the beta has to actually formulate some sort of thought-out response to leave as a comment.  If you “like” that stupid out-of-focus instagram picture of somebody’s terrible looking food, you’re going to need to actually explain why, since taking the easy way out via a thumb’s up is no longer an option.  Obviously, nobody will ever be truly honest and click a thumbs-down on shitty content though.  That would be far too honest.

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Coffee Is Just Bean Water

I’m gonna be perfectly honest here. I don’t get people’s obsession with coffee. I don’t get it at all. When it comes down to it, coffee is just bean water. You’re going to a special location, standing in line, and spending an exorbitant amount of money on what is essentially seeds from a plant that are processed in hot water to leech out the caffeine. Bean water. It’s just like regular tap water, but it’s a little more beany, and it looks a little bit more like piping-hot soupy doodoo juice.

I completely understand that people might enjoy the taste of something, and thus would be willing to stand in a line for that food item, and perhaps even be willing to pay a premium for that food item. We’re talking about bean water though. It takes less effort to make coffee from start to finish than it does to make a ham and cheese sandwich. It takes way less effort. You can grow your own coffee beans at your home, grind those suckers up, and make your beany caffeine juice at home for pennies on the dollar. Water is the only thing you can buy that is more of a waste of money than buying coffee from a coffee store.

Wanna make a ham and cheese sandwich from scratch? Good luck. First, you have to raise a pig and a cow, which takes years, costs at very least hundreds of dollars, and requires some level of competency. Then you have to milk the cow, and turn that milk into cheese.  I don’t even know how to go about doing that, but if you’re paying $4 for a cup of bean water, chances are you don’t either. You then have to slaughter that pig and turn it’s lifeless corpse into tasty, tasty, delicious pink meat. This also requires a bit of knowledge in the mystic arts of salting and curing. Only then can you assemble the parts into a delectable sandwich. Nobody is going to be able to do all this themselves, which is why a ham and cheese sandwich is worth the money you are paying for it. Coffee isn’t remotely worth the amount of money you are paying for it.

Yet the coffee companies had the ingenuity to market coffee as being something that the elite, cultured class indulges in. That’s how they get away with charging ridiculously inflated prices for their unremarkable dookie soup. It’s marketed primarily to upwardly mobile while folks who want to indulge in the finer things in life. Wish you had a yacht, and vacationed in the Poconos, whatever the hell that even is? Well then you better start sippin’ on some delicious bean water! Wish you were are aristocratic nobleman or noblewoman in merry old England, playing croquet and wearing powdered wigs? You better take a pretentious slo-mo sip of sumptuous Bean Water™.

I love how they sell music at Starbucks too. Can’t just show up and pay for your overpriced bean water, now can you. Better pick up some shitty jazz comp while you wait so that the other bean water drinkers around you will think you’re refined and cultured. I would wager that the average person in line at a Starbucks probably listens to Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga, and wouldn’t be able to name 3 jazz musicians if you put a gun to their over-caffeinated head. If they do listen to jazz, it’s only while they take a bubble bath with plenty of lavender and sandalwood candles strewn about. Coffee is legitimately the whitest thing you can possibly indulge in, other than taking over other people’s countries.

So to sum things up, coffee is alright I guess. So are lettuce and french fries. People don’t treat lettuce and french fries like they are foie gras or caviar though. Coffee is more akin to chocolate milk or Mountain Dew.  Mountain Dew that people have no problem taking out a mortgage on their house for, and waiting in Communism lines to get to drink. I don’t care if people all up in your shop got Mac Book Pros, all workin’ on Power Point presentations and shit, I still ain’t payin’ no goddamn $3.75 for a cup of bean-ass water. Unless we’re talking about grand pappy’s fermented lima bean hooch, in which case $3.75 is quite the bargain. So you can keep your Kenny G compact discs and pumpkin bread scones, and I’ll spend my money on things that aren’t white folk stereotypes, like fried rice, taquitos, and Gucci Mane mixtapes.

Bean Water