BLG-001
Why do equality measures in hiring practices rankle conservatives? Because they shatter the illusion of meritocracy behind which the bigot lies for defense.
“Why are there so few woman or people of color in these positions of power? That’s just how it ended up, these were the best candidates, those most able to do the job. It’s not our fault that they happen to all be balding men with inside connections and all whiter than lily of the valley.”
These old connected balding fat white men are of course, not the ‘best’ candidates in the sense of ability to perform the job. Such an assessment is ridiculously subjective and impossible to judge prior to performance. All job appointments are guesses. But they are the best candidates from the point of view of those people appointing them. Especially in politics, candidates are chosen based upon party inside politics, gifts for previous and future favors, and based upon the ability of those appointing them to predict and/or control the behavior and views of the candidate.
In terms of ability to do a job, there will always be many people qualified enough to fill the role. And it is rarely difficult to fill out a roster with qualified candidates of a varied demographic nature. This is why conservatives hate equal hiring practises, it exposes the cronyism of the game; which everyone plays, but which the conservatives pretended was a pure meritocracy so as to better conceal their lingering bigotry.
BLG-002
The Long Game has been played frequently throughout history.
The Americans and Canadians used it against the Native Americans at the beginning of the Golden Age of the Hungry Empire. The Native Americans were fierce fighters but also willing to negotiate peace with startling regularity. The conquering powers used this to slowly devour the whole continent.
China used this against Tibet and the Uyghurs of their Northern Frontier in the waning days of the Golden Age. China faced some public scrutiny from the international community. But China was not in a position where international condemnation can hurt it. And so China could safely ignore the disapproving looks.
Israel also engaged in much the same process with Palestine during the same time at the end of the Golden Age, but Israel was under ongoing intense scrutiny and Israel required the support of powerful allies to survive. As such, Israel made a greater show of engaging in peace talks. But it did not concede the land it had taken. It continued to encroach into Palestinian land, using any pretext, regardless of how flimsy to do so. In negotiation, Israel made demands that the Palestinians could not accept as reasonable, and thus the peace talks spun in circles.
This is the same process in three different times and places. One complete, one unimpeded, one hidden behind an obvious deception.
BLG-003
At what point did we decide that all human life is sacred? Because I don’t see it. You see I’ve been through the looking glass. I mean most of you have. Most of us have worked in the service industry, but I actually worked in a complaints department.
It doesn’t take more than a week, hell, a few hours in the service industry to realize that the vast percentage of human beings would not survive the monkey house of natural selection without a chaperone. I think that evolution as a theory is unpopular, because deep down most humans know that they wouldn’t survive outside of captivity. You know what I’m saying. The first species we ever domesticated was ourselves. We tricked ourselves into living in cages, and then went around trying to sell other species on the idea. We’re like some weird mix of religious evangelist and drug dealer, but on a civilizational scale.
And by the way, the most common complaint I had to deal with when I was working complaints: “how dare you do what I told you to do!”
“No, I don’t need that coverage. … Why won’t you pay my claim when I don’t have coverage!?”
“Yes, please cancel that service, I won’t need it … I demand you give me the service that I stopped paying for 2 years ago!”
And so on.
We are in desperate need of some chlorine in the gene pool, to use a really old joke. But seriously, the only way you could make the argument that all life is sacred is if you mean sacred in the religious sense and if you also happen to look at religion like Christopher Hitchens did… as a smoke screen to hide behind.
BLG-004
Bigotry most commonly arises from power imbalances. Slavery provides an easy example. When one person can own another person, and especially when those who can be owned are determined by some visually obvious marker like race, the people doing the owning are hard pressed not to assume that the people who are slaves are somehow less than the people who are not slaves. To do otherwise would force them to question the system of oppression and oppose it. And thus, those who benefit from the system or oppression frequently internalize these justifications as bigotry in order not to succumb to the self loathing that a normal human being would feel when engaging in something so awful as slavery.
“just how unjust does a society have to become before helping people adjust to it with behavior modification and medication is immoral?”
– Bruce Levine
BLG-005
Why I have Gone Mad
I have spent the last twenty or so years digging around in our culture’s dirty laundry.
I want to know why the majority of people whom I consider worth knowing are dealing with major depression or anxiety disorder. I want to know why people seem to think there is a compelling reason that they are spending the vast majority of our lives, specifically the best hours of the day, the best months of the year, and the best years of our lives doing things that they do not enjoy. I want to know why three thousand years of civilization has only just, in the last one hundred years, caught up with the average lifespan and health (and even average height!) of hunter-gatherers.
And I think I do know.
But now I’m approaching forty and my genetic penance (in the form of arthritis), plus the weight of middle aged obligations are starting to slow me down and wear me down.
And despite this, I’m still mad.
I’m mad that part of my revelations in this research mission was realizing that part of the problem was many, many, many missed opportunities.
We have been humans for well over two million years. And we have been genetically modern humans for well over two hundred thousand years. And for the vast majority of that time, by the time we reached physical maturity we had learned and acquired the skills necessary to live without the tribe. This was essential, the tribe required competent members. There were no serfs in the tribe. No cogs in the tribal corporate machine. Our social groups were rarely larger than one to two hundred people. Every had to pull their weight.
And yet, the weight we had to pull averaged out to about twenty hours a week. Compare that to the modern world. And until the turn of the twentieth century, in addition to working less, our ancestors were taller and healthier and lived longer lives. They had a child mortality problem, but so did people in cities.
Civilization has undoubtedly brought us all manner of benefits. I am writing this on a computer, sitting in a climate controlled building on a miserable rainy November day. The kind of day that would make you want to curl up in a blanket with your spouse and your dog and drink cocoa. If, that is, I wasn’t sitting at my desk at my day job waiting for my shift to start. And there we go.
That’s the catch.
We are not happier. We are not less anxious. We are less depressed. We are not blessed with fewer psychological problems. This is not better.
School. What’s the point? The point of school is to distract you until it’s too late. Unless you need a particular set of skills or certain grades etc… to do what you want to do. School DOES teach things it teaches them for the wrong reasons at the wrong time. School MAY train you for a profession but not a life. What school teaches is not as important as the time it wastes. The purpose of schools is to break your independence.
A New Old Path
Is there a way to take the good bits of civilization and step away from the crap? I believe so. And I am trying to attain it for myself. But I feel that this is the right of all humans. I want you to attain it too.
But here is the awful part. I don’t believe that everyone can attain it. The world is overpopulated. Since the year 1804 (when we first hit one billion people on the planet), the world population has doubled twice and is about to double again when we hit eight billion. These numbers are only sustained by massive fossil fuel outlays to generate the pesticides and fertilizers and transportation capabilities needed to feed those people. Which brings us to the next problem.
A majority of the mammals on earth are either humans or our livestock. That means that humans and the barnyard animals we see in coloring books account for a greater percentage of the mammals on earth than wolves and whales, elephants and elephant seals, mice and marmots, raccoons and rats, skunks and seals, hippos and hyenas, bears and beavers, monkeys and manatees, giraffes and gazelles, antelope and aardvarks, and on and on and on. Think about that. And one species removed weakens and ecosystem. Perhaps kills an ecosystem. And that’s under regular circumstances. The methods that we are using to fuel and feed ourselves are producing copious amounts of carbon and inorganic pollutants. These are damaging those same ecosystems further. And both of those things render our environments unsafe as well.
And the power source behind that tremendous outlay of food and power is fossil fuels, created during the carboniferous period, a time when trees had evolved lignin, but before microbes evolved mechanisms to break it down. Microbes didn’t know how to eat the lignin from trees back then, and so it didn’t decompose in the same way and more easily found its way in to the strata of the earth to be compressed over million sof years. This unique confluence of events produced the fossil fuels that today we are burning with abandon. And for those of who not on the same page yet, let me spell it out: this will never happen again. The coal and oil and gas that we have now is all the earth will ever make. Barring some artifical method of producing fossil fuels, we will need to move to other fuel sources eventually. And most of the other fuel sources available are insufficient for the job or insufficiently developed. If we don’t devote what we have left of this amazing one time use fuel that was gifted to us by the carbeniferous, we aren’t going to transition at all. And even then, the transition may be impossible.
So let’s ask an ugly question. What did the world population look like before fossil fuels enabled the greatest expansion of the food supply in the history of agriculture? The answer: less that two billion. So when the fossil fuel is gone, if we haven’t set up a working replacement setting, that’s our population ceiling. Let’s be generous and round up to two billion, although I suspect it would be more accurate to round down when we account for ecological damage.
Now, how do you imagine that earth’s population would descend from nearly eight billion back down to around two billion? Do you imagine an orderly descent? Voluntary limitation of family size? Voluntary sterilization? Cooperation on distribution of limited goods and food so that the minimum number of people starve to death? People willingly choosing to self-euthanize for the great good?
How believable is that idea?
If you live in Mongolia, or Australia, or Iceland, Suriname or another lightly populated country well positioned to survive the changes brought by climate change, you may be lucky. If you live in a low lying and highly populated nation such as Bangladesh however, I would recommend relocating.
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
-Carl Sagan
BLG-006
How much good has the Doctor done?
I’m speaking of the main character of ‘Doctor Who’, the ancient alien Time Lord who has defended Earth, the Universe and all of Time from destruction on many occasions. As such, the question may seem absurd. But that is not doing good. I would argue that what the Doctor does is primarily prevent bad. And I would argue that there is a difference. So what good does the Doctor do? And looking at superheroes as well, do any of them do good? Or do they just prevent bad?
And in preventing bad are the preventing change as well?
And as such, by defending an unequal unjust status quo, do they do more harm than they prevent? Should corrupt regimes be allowed to fall? Should broken pyramid schemes that devour resources, bilk workers, extort locals, degrade the natural world, and steal from everyone be protected? Is the upheaval of allowing things to fail more or less damaging than the damage these systems cause through their continued existence?
Failure
The dreamers and idealists will lose. Bureaucracy and complacency are powerful inertial dampers. Government Officials keep pushing back how much must be done and when. The future is highly unlikely to be brighter than the past.
H.P. Lovecraft felt that greater understanding of the world would degrade sanity, arguing that the immensity of the uncaring universe was beyond our ability to understand. Douglas Adams uses a fictional device to make a similar point in his popular “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. In the story a device kills people by showing the victim his or her relevance to the universe. The inventor apparently built it to win an argument with his mother-in-law.
I find that this idea of the big picture being detrimental if startlingly accurate. I find my mind crumbling as I research such uplifting topics as human population growth, species extinction, ocean acidification, climate change, and the development of the fossil fuel industry. I try to maintain hope in the face of the big picture and can’t.
But I can rationalize that people in world wars and famines and economic depressions and revolutions and governmental collapses and plagues all felt the same lack of hope. Sometimes, things pass and turn out all right, and sometimes things must be caused to turn out all right. And in those times where things must be caused to turn out right, people must do what they can. If that means they close their eyes to the big picture and whatever little things they can, then so be it.
I hate the big picture right now. We have ruined the big picture. Right now its so bad that I have to blind myself to keep going.
Fair enough.
Survival
I could be angry. I could despair. But I won’t. The human being is a survivor descended from aeons of survivors. Our genetic line has survived the five previous mass extinctions. Alone amongst the human species that arose in the last 2 million years, Homo Sapiens Sapiens survives today.
We foolish, but we are wise. We are warlike, but we are kind. We are arrogant, but we are resourceful. If any macroscopic species can survive the oncoming storm, the human is that species.
I could resent that this maelstrom will almost certainly arrive in my time. But instead I will be grateful that I am aware of it, and will have a chance to protect me and mine from the worst effects of the fall of civilization. I could despair the loss of prosperity that will certainly ensue. Instead I will be grateful that I was born in time to see the end of the ten thousand years of darkness. I will glory at being present as the circle is restored to planet earth once more.
I could look at the challenge ahead of me and despair. I lack too many skills, my allies are troubled and dispirited. But I will instead remember that this is the path of heroes and learning and earning the skills that I need is what I pay money to do in my spare time with the games I play.
It is dangerous to go alone. Take this.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 