Messages

Very nice.

Conventional wisdom was invented by a philosopher by the name of Popular Belief. But seriously...

I agree, many people are content to be locked into patterns of dialogue and loops of debate. It's rather shocking how many people want to simply argue 'their perspective' (read: the jumbled system of thought and belief fed to them during their lifetime) and how few have any interest in mutually beneficial discussion. They'll scan other people's arguments for buzzwords that they can refute in a ready-made, prefabricated response. You can practically see the "Made in China" sticker on everything they say.

Genuine discussion usually involves the insertion of heavy doses of Truth. Lots of people just aren't up for having their Black Iron Prison cells rattled so badly. They prefer tapping the bars to make a nifty little rhythm, and they have, over the years, developed an elaborate, but nevertheless quite repetitive, call-and-response tune. Imagine dueling choruses of these, each tapping a slightly different rhythm, each trying to find the perfect tune and harmonization that will, they hope, be so mind-blowingly awesome that it shuts the other choruses up. They constantly try and play louder and in better synchronization than the others, creating a discordant (yes!) cacophony.

Then there's us and our kind, who are so fed up with the racket that we want to tear the place down.

Lemme get this straight - you stayed sober? and for something as trivial as a reason?

WAYSA???

yep, sometimes it seems like the options are "Be sober and miserable at the mess we have in the world" or "Be stoned, drunk and tripping ... the world won't be any better but you'll be stoned, drunk and tripping...."

LOL

And why not spend the 75 or so years you have on this planet in a chemically-induced haze?  That's different from spending it in front of the teevee.

Somehow.

Highs and trips, to my knowledge, don't come with commercial breaks. That's all I can think of.

[Dead people cannot generate more money than a living person that could be put to work or provide entertainment. Or a wounded soldier can train other soldiers or some shit you are an ass.]

Shit costs money.  If we spent all that money for the "noble causes" abroad everybody would complain about problems we need to take care of in America.  If we took care of those problems people would complain about other shit that is "more" important.  People are just bitches.

The soldiers which have been coming back even since day one are incurring huge costs for medical treatment. As far as I know, the American military is preventing the death of it's soldiers more than ever before due to technological advances in body armour and on-the-field medical treatment such as new agents which can instantly clot blood, preventing many fatal wounds. It's much cheaper to bring someone back in a body-bag.

You are a dumbass for more than the obvious reason in your post.  People need shit just as much as other people produce shit.  Thats what an economy is.  People need shit, they buy things that other people make.  If you dont make goods or offer services you are useless.  Dead people cannot generate more money than a living person that could be put to work or provide entertainment.  Or a wounded soldier can train other soldiers or some shit you are an ass.

Money is important, but why do you value it so much?

A wounded soldier has his treatment covered by the military, and if he's lucky he also receives disability payments (assuming he's wounded beyond full recovery, which happens disturbingly often). You obviously don't understand how the military works; a front-line soldier does not stay on as a trainer for other soldiers, he just gets a medical discharge. Only high-ranking officers have a good chance of staying on the military payroll after they cease to be deployable. It's a good thing that the military keeps wounded soldiers alive as much as possible, but it also means that war is more expensive than in the days when the medic's tent contained a couple of cots and a bone saw. Money matters because if our national debt gets too deep, the government may end up repudiating it. That would be a really bad thing.

Some nitwit(s) decided to try and enter Iraq on the cheap, and it's just cost us more in the long run. Same thing happens when you pay for a cheap-ass plumbing fix: you pay for the whole damn bathroom floor once it starts to rot.

We all know that the number of Americans who speak a second language is pitifully low. The most common second language is Spanish, and that's only because we share a border and many, many citizens of ambiguous status with Mexico. Any foreign country that isn't Anglophone knows the first step in making money on the international scene is to learn English. The Francophone countries tend to be the most pissed about this, but they deal with it for the most part. Asian countries learn English like it was the recipe to turn lead into platinum; many of them will PAY native English speakers just to talk to students.

This is totally unfair. Obviously something needs to be done to make American citizens on the whole more multilingual, because this "Foreigners can learn to speak English or fuck off" attitude will probably bite us in the ass sometime in the future. There are probably a zillion psychological articles about how being bi- or multi-lingual makes people smarter, but it may well be that the simple act of talking to someone in their native language will improve their opinion of Americans just a little bit.

So this is what should be done: the USA should massively boost incentives to learn other languages, and make sure that education is available to make American citizens fluent in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Swahili, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai...










...this isn't working.

The soldiers which have been coming back even since day one are incurring huge costs for medical treatment. As far as I know, the American military is preventing the death of it's soldiers more than ever before due to technological advances in body armour and on-the-field medical treatment such as new agents which can instantly clot blood, preventing many fatal wounds. It's much cheaper to bring someone back in a body-bag.

Kill yourself.

Seriously.

Well, it is. Methinks if he'd switched the second and third sentences, it would be interpreted differently.

I dunno anymore.

Neither do we. There is no help.











Okay, so maybe I like that phrase a little too much. It's overly emo and fatalistic, but I saw it while playing the Mass Plague Victim Grave Tetris clone on the Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail computer game. Underneath the score there was a little frame labeled 'Help', and the only thing written in it was "There is no help." (in quotes). Silly, perhaps, but it was a quirky little mindfuck.

If we meat-sacks keep running around like we are, 15 more people won't matter when the shit hits the fan, anyway.

Um, 15/2, over 80% of the population.  Call that 39 BILLION more people inside of 20 years.

And they won't speak English very well.

Nor will they hold our values dear.

We'll have to take advantage of the One Laptop Per Child, to ensure that the tradition of lulz et al isn't just a "white power" thing. Intertubez for all more of humanity!

The Book of The SubGenius has multiple translations, right? Or will that have to wait until the "developing world" reaches the stage of Bureaucracy?

If we meat-sacks keep running around like we are, 15 more people won't matter when the shit hits the fan, anyway.

Um, 15/2, over 80% of the population.  Call that 39 BILLION more people inside of 20 years.

And they won't speak English very well.

Actually, the sure fire way to decrease the birth rate is to give everyone full bellies. 

More assurances of family survival = less need to procreate like bunnies. 

If, that is, one also manages to reduce mortality from disease (vaccinations and clean water for this) and reduce the risk of getting shot or something. Otherwise, food security will backfire and the population will explode.

nice!

i especially like the third paragraph.

the last line, however true, is a bit anticlimactic compared to the rest of the writing, though. not because of its meaning but it kind of lacks the "punch in the face" style of the paragraphs before.

That's because it's meta-style writing, which clashes with the preceding rant. Let us see what a change in diction can accomplish...

RIGHT NOW, there is an asshole sitting behind a big desk in Washington DC who has absolute power over your life. He can, with a lazy misguided stroke of his pen, sentence you to interminable imprisonment or worse. He can send a squad of goons to root through your stuff. He can send a lynch mob to deal with you if you're rocking to boat. He can nationalize your "local" National Guard and order a battalion of tanks to swarm your neighborhood. He can suspend legal government in favor of martial law. He can, without the approval of anyone but the voices in his head, say the magic words "state of emergency" and dissolve every last so-called "right" you think you have.

There is a corrupt system of bureaucracy running amok in the synapses of your country. The power it holds over you might never be wielded in such blatant displays of outright totalitarian bullshit, but that power exists nonetheless and it's out of your hands. There are, literally, millions of brainwashed gun-toting killing machines doing nothing but waiting for orders to storm your town and turn your neighborhood grocery store into an "enemy combatant processing center." There are entire fleets of planes and trains and boats idling somewhere, waiting for the green light to lock you up and cart you away. There are fully-functioning gulags operating in the silence of media blackout right now, and the only thing their prison blocks are missing is you.

Even if you have nothing to hide, even if you're a good doggie who'd never bark at a superior, even if you are an anonymous nobody with nothing to gain and everything to lose from even wanting to know why all of this is true; even if you are afraid of what might happen to your mind if you let yourself in on this; you should take the time to understand one simple fact. It may be that no one will ever come knocking on your door (or blasting through it) to take you and your family away from your "freedom;" but the fact remains that they might, and they can if they want to. And there is absolutely no one who is even going to try to stop them. If that day comes, there is no court who will ever hear your case. There are no citizens' groups who can act fast enough even to slow them down. You are on your own, and if you think waving a flag in their faces as they come swarming into your living room is going to ward them off like waving a cross at a vampire, you're going to be a casualty.

Normally, this is the part where we tell you, "So let's do this..." But we aren't sure what to do, either. There is no help.

Last line has been chewed and spat out. It should be softer and more pliable now.

8.5 x 11

Fix'd:

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Is now

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This is good stuff. I wonder how I missed it when it was first posted.....

You were probably stoned or something.

Getting nostalgic, are we, Monsieur Hoopla?

FTR, I like it.