Blackmoor Vituperative

There nothing as destructive to humanity as the preservation of the enmity of previous generations, long since dead.

(This might not be literally true. There may be more destructive things. But this one really irks me.)

This is my favourite scene from Willy Wonka. Because it’s not how others treat us that matters, but how we treat others… even if they are crooks, and even if we don’t win a lifetime supply of chocolate as a reward. The world is overflowing with vengeance and pettiness and bitterness: when has that made anything better? It’s better to be true and kind and forgiving, even if your only reward is that you are true and kind and forgiving.

R.I.P., Gene Wilder.

Prediction: In five hundred years, our current system of “intellectual property” (copyright, trademarks, patents) will be considered an archaic affront to basic human rights, rather like “creative feudalism”. It will be mentioned alongside multi-level-marketing and trickle-down economics as one of the peculiarly unchallenged scams of our era. People of the future will wonder how we could have possibly been so stupid.

I think it’s telling that the only people in the Star Wars movies that treat robots as though they were people are Luke (who is desperately lonely) and Anakin (who is a mass-murdering, child-killing psychopath). To everyone else, the fact a machine can talk means no more than it does for you and I when our car tells us the door is open or our phone tells us that we have an appointment in 15 minutes.

That a robot has a red arm means exactly as much as the fact an old yellow Fiat has a red door.

[vur-choo siɡ-nl-ling]
verb
gerund or present participle

1. a phrase used by sociopaths when trying to explain the behaviour of someone who has empathy.
    
   “she is collecting cans of food for the hurricane victims, but that’s just virtue signaling”
   “my rape jokes were funny, but I got fired because my supervisor was virtue signaling”
   “people who call Donald Trump a bigot and a sexist are just virtue signaling”

Two centuries from now, humans will still be able to read The Iliad and The Declaration Of Independence, but there will be a huge gap where the late-20th and early-21st centuries were.

Atoms survive. Bits do not.

I have found that it makes my life more pleasant if I try to be generous in what I offer, and modest in what I expect of others. I do not always succeed, and it doesn’t always work out as I’d hope… but that’s okay.

There should be a name for the phenomenon of, “I’m right to believe this even if the reasons I state for believing it are false”. I see it all the time. Guns. GMOs. Black pets around Halloween. Being offended at someone’s costume. No matter how portentous or trivial the topic, facts just don’t seem relevant. It’s not a “liberal” vs “conservative” thing, either: it’s universal.

But it’s easier to block people who spew nonsense than argue with them. It’s not like an argument on the Internet ever changed anyone’s mind, anyway.

My opinion on ethnicity and religion: they are, at most, as important as being a fan of a sports team or a film franchise.

If it causes you to share good times with people in the same group, great. If it entertains you and a competing group to be opposed in a safe and friendly contest, that’s great, too. If it’s an excuse to be mean to other people, or take something away from some other group, or reserve some benefit solely for your group, you are doing it wrong.

Happy Mother’s Day, Moms of America! Now go back to work.

I agree more with libertarians than I do with any other political cubbyhole that I have been able to find, but I think I might not actually be libertarian. Libertarianism is all about putting theory into practice, without exception (that theory being, in essence, “an it harm none, do what ye will“). There are, as far as I know, few libertarians who consider financial exploitation “harm” (I may, in fact, be the only one). But I think one would have to be deliberately blind to look at the USA around us and fail to see the harm done by financial exploitation.

Being “rich” in the USA in 2015 means you have a house and you can pay your bills.

That’s messed up, and it’s getting worse every year.

The thing is, twenty years ago, I was a hardcore libertarian. I sincerely believed that the world would be better if there were no laws preventing, say, an employer from tracking your every move, 24 hours a day. I sincerely believed that the world would be better if there were no laws requiring cars to be safer, or requiring employers to pay no less than a certain minimum, and so on. I didn’t believe these things because I wanted people to be underpaid and driving death traps — I believed that freedom of choice would result in the greater good. So what has changed in the past twenty years? What changed my mind?

Seeing how the world actually works for twenty years is what changed my mind. Because in theory, if everyone is free to choose, they can all choose not to work for employers who invade the medical privacy of every applicant. In theory, they can choose not to work for $2.13 an hour.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.