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Even professional porn stars complain about guys canceling hookups, so I shouldn't get so mad about it when they cancel on me, LOL.
9 December 2020
2020 --> 1860
9 December 2020 09:00I remember when candidate Biden caught shit from some Dems (including his now-VP) because he'd been willing to compromise with segregationists back in the 1970s. Now Republicans won't even acknowledge he won. This sounds more like 1860 every day, except the parties have flipped.
The Constitution had been drafted to give the slave-owning South disproportionate power in Congress and the Electoral College. When the South nevertheless lost the 1860 election to Lincoln, they lost their shit. Very similar situation with Republicans today. They have disproportionate power under the Constitution, yet when they lose anyway, they can't handle it.
One big difference though, at least in 1860 the South didn't call into question the election result. They didn't claim that Lincoln had actually lost.
Today's Republicans may not have seceded from the Union (yet), but they've seceded from Reality.
In 1860 we may have argued over whether slavery should be extended or limited, but we didn't argue over whether slavery even existed. Today, Republicans deny that global warming is happening, they deny that COVID-19 is deadly, and they deny that Biden actually won.
For all of our technological advances since 1860, at least people back then had a better grip on reality. Today, Republicans have seceded from reality, and they use technology to hide from reality. Fox News reported that Biden won? Then they stop watching Fox News and switch to some other upstart channel that tells them Trump won.
Perhaps the most insidious result of the Internet is this "Choose Your Own Reality" behavior. The Left isn't immune to this behavior, but the Right seems more susceptible to it in the 21st Century, because the Right nurtures a radical individualism that rejects our human nature as social animals, that rejects our interdependence and our effects on each other's lives.
The federal government may have been more libertarian in its scope and policies back in 1860 (no Social Security, no Food Stamps, etc.) and more racist and sexist, but the people living in the United States back then were more communitarian -- "We the People", not "Me the Person".
Me the Person now uses the Internet to secede from reality, as the abandoned community falls apart.
The Constitution had been drafted to give the slave-owning South disproportionate power in Congress and the Electoral College. When the South nevertheless lost the 1860 election to Lincoln, they lost their shit. Very similar situation with Republicans today. They have disproportionate power under the Constitution, yet when they lose anyway, they can't handle it.
One big difference though, at least in 1860 the South didn't call into question the election result. They didn't claim that Lincoln had actually lost.
Today's Republicans may not have seceded from the Union (yet), but they've seceded from Reality.
In 1860 we may have argued over whether slavery should be extended or limited, but we didn't argue over whether slavery even existed. Today, Republicans deny that global warming is happening, they deny that COVID-19 is deadly, and they deny that Biden actually won.
For all of our technological advances since 1860, at least people back then had a better grip on reality. Today, Republicans have seceded from reality, and they use technology to hide from reality. Fox News reported that Biden won? Then they stop watching Fox News and switch to some other upstart channel that tells them Trump won.
Perhaps the most insidious result of the Internet is this "Choose Your Own Reality" behavior. The Left isn't immune to this behavior, but the Right seems more susceptible to it in the 21st Century, because the Right nurtures a radical individualism that rejects our human nature as social animals, that rejects our interdependence and our effects on each other's lives.
The federal government may have been more libertarian in its scope and policies back in 1860 (no Social Security, no Food Stamps, etc.) and more racist and sexist, but the people living in the United States back then were more communitarian -- "We the People", not "Me the Person".
Me the Person now uses the Internet to secede from reality, as the abandoned community falls apart.
The same California that gave Biden 5 million of his 7 million popular vote margin, also voted down treating app drivers (e.g., for Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, or Postmates) as employees for state law purposes.
-----
The same Florida that gave Trump 29 of his 232 Electoral Votes, also voted to increase the state minimum wage to $15/hour.
-----
The same Florida that gave Trump 29 of his 232 Electoral Votes, also voted to increase the state minimum wage to $15/hour.
When I put this phrase into my search engine of choice, it returns a list of sites that unironically instruct you in how to choose your own reality.
...
...
This is literally what the Internet, as shaped by the search engines and the social media companies, is training/allowing people to do.
Whatever it is you want to believe about reality, that version of reality can be found on the Internet.
Except, not really. You can't self-reality yourself into being wealthy, or healthy, or surrounded by loving family and friends. What people are actually doing is spending their lives staring at screens. These screens have supplanted staring at anything else. Having followers and getting likes has replaced having family and friends.
How is this different from television, or radio, or newspapers? Or books?
Well, now you can individually tailor your experience, assembling the items you want to follow in bespoke patterns. At the same time, artificial intelligence algorithms are also individually tailoring your experience.
-----
One interesting thing about this, and I see it rather painfully in some of my family and friends, is that many people choose unhappy realities. They focus on stuff that upsets them, that makes them anxious or depressed.
I know somebody who is experiencing strikingly painful reactions to the continuous news of President Trump's ongoing, but pointless, legal battles to wrestle the election victory away from Biden. This person is so upset by the minute-by-minute Trump drama, that he literally ignored me when I texted him that (1) my brother has COVID, and (2) a friend of mine is mourning a friend of his who committed suicide yesterday.
This person has chosen a reality in which the existence of our republic hangs by a thread, ready to be severed by Trump and his Republican henchmen. A reality so scary to him, that he must ignore the real pains and sufferings of those in his social circles.
It reminds me of how I generally don't like horror movies or horror novels, yet there's no end to their production and consumption. Some people WANT TO BE SCARED. That's where they want to live, in a scary reality.
-----
What's the reality that I choose? A lot of amateur porn stars and other fellas posting sexy pictures of themselves. Poly people and nonbinary people asking for help with their various problems. A variety of news media sites that I believe are generally trying to base their reporting on verifiable facts. Some fringey Left-wing sites that provoke me to think critically or in new ways, as well as some Right-wing sites that keep me informed as to what the Right-wing is focusing on (whether their focus is real or fake). Sites with various raw economic or COVID statistics. Wikipedia. Text-based porn. Professional porn. LJ.
I view the Internet as a wonderful tool for learning more about reality, and also as an endless universe of porn! Not as a way to choose my own reality. Well, I guess I've chosen a reality in which I'm constantly surrounded by sexy naked men, LOL.
I remember back during GWB's Global War on Terror, I appreciated the Internet for allowing me to learn more about what is really going on in the world. How many Iraqis had we killed via our invasion and occupation, for example. My favorite online chat buddies back then were a couple of young guys from Canada and Sweden. We pooled our international viewpoints to learn more about reality, peeling back each other's national prejudices.
How do I know I'm not just choosing my own reality like everybody else? By trying to test my own assumptions, by seeking out new sources of information that I disagree with, by trying to find the original sources of information rather than taking clickbait at face value. By synthesizing lots of different viewpoints.
I was wondering today, how would I convince my youngest brother, an evangelical Christian Trump supporter, that he's constructed a personal fantasy about the universe? He's not stupid. He's an engineer, and before that he was a science teacher. But back while he was in college, when our mother passed away, his grief reaction led him to join the Campus Crusade for Christ, and he's been sort of loony ever since. He's a good parent, a good husband, a good engineer, but when it comes to the universe outside of his home and his job, he's completely crazy. Because with respect to the stuff he hasn't experienced first-hand, he chooses his own reality.
-----
I expected Trump to do worse than he did (even though he lost the popular vote by 7 million), because I figured enough people would see with their own eyes -- the results of the mismanaged pandemic, the results of the mismanaged economy. Millions fewer people have jobs! Millions have been sick and hundreds of thousands have died! And the pandemic isn't over yet!
During 2020 we had the sharpest economic recession in our lifetimes, and the worst pandemic in our lifetimes. I thought more people would blame the President for these harsh realities that they could directly experience.
I was wrong. And my regression equation based on past elections and past economic performance was wrong. And I think it has to be due to the compelling power of staring at these screens and choosing our own realities. People are spending more of their private lives online than they are in meat space. So the worst recession and worst pandemic of our lifetimes don't matter -- what matters is the reality we're choosing to view on these screens.
When I was chatting with my youngest brother today about how the pandemic is worse now than it was back in April, and that we need to shut everything down now like we did back in April ... he said stuff that sounded like he was President Trump, "People can only take so much heightened alert and waiting. The problem is that no one can agree on what the new normal is."
No one can agree on what the new normal is.
And cultural observers say this isn't only "the problem", it is the deliberate strategy of Right-wing demagogues like Boris and Trump and Putin, and many others that have sprouted up around the world during this Age of the Internet.
If no one can agree on what the new normal is, then we can't fix anything. I believe in global warming, you don't, and since we can't even agree that global warming is real, we can't fix it.
Since we can't agree on basic facts, like, what's the actual death rate from COVID-19, is it 20x worse than the flu, or the same as the flu, then we can't fix it.
Choosing your own reality means we can never agree on anything, and can never fix anything. We've destroyed human community, human society, human cooperation.
At the family level, at the company level, at the NGO level, where we know each other personally and have to cooperate to do things like buying groceries, producing widgets, or raising funds -- we can create a limited shared reality and work together. But outside of personal experience -- at the governmental level -- at the international level -- that's impossible now. Without shared reality we can't fix anything.
Trump couldn't even build the Wall, his signature program, even after shutting down the federal government over it. Trump built 15 miles of new wall in four years. That's less than four miles per year. With all the resources of the United States, he could only extend the wall by 15 miles. Trump couldn't fix anything either. Did he rebuild our infrastructure like he'd promised? No. His most important legislative accomplishment was to cut taxes -- that doesn't fix anything, it just increases the federal deficit. He couldn't even come up with a political platform for the next four years. Now his main issue seems to be that his re-election was stolen from him. So what, what was he going to accomplish if he'd won? Why should anybody care?
And now Biden won't accomplish much of anything either. But he won't piss me off as much while accomplishing nothing as Trump did while accomplishing nothing.
Our country is broken. And we can't fix it, because we're all choosing our own realities, and these various chosen realities are set evenly against each other by social media engagement algorithms and the extraordinarily well-funded major political parties, such that we're repeatedly having some of the closest elections in US history (with respect to the Electoral College, which is the only meter that matters) -- nobody ever pulls far enough ahead to fix anything.
And why bother fixing anything if you can simply choose your own reality and stare at it on your screens? We're broken. And I have no idea how to get people to see the real reality. They have to want to see it. But once you've been granted the power to choose your own reality, why would you ever give that up?
The Genie of the Lamp granted you one wish, and your wish was to have all your wishes come true, so long as you can keep staring at that goddess damned screen.
...
...
This is literally what the Internet, as shaped by the search engines and the social media companies, is training/allowing people to do.
Whatever it is you want to believe about reality, that version of reality can be found on the Internet.
Except, not really. You can't self-reality yourself into being wealthy, or healthy, or surrounded by loving family and friends. What people are actually doing is spending their lives staring at screens. These screens have supplanted staring at anything else. Having followers and getting likes has replaced having family and friends.
How is this different from television, or radio, or newspapers? Or books?
Well, now you can individually tailor your experience, assembling the items you want to follow in bespoke patterns. At the same time, artificial intelligence algorithms are also individually tailoring your experience.
-----
One interesting thing about this, and I see it rather painfully in some of my family and friends, is that many people choose unhappy realities. They focus on stuff that upsets them, that makes them anxious or depressed.
I know somebody who is experiencing strikingly painful reactions to the continuous news of President Trump's ongoing, but pointless, legal battles to wrestle the election victory away from Biden. This person is so upset by the minute-by-minute Trump drama, that he literally ignored me when I texted him that (1) my brother has COVID, and (2) a friend of mine is mourning a friend of his who committed suicide yesterday.
This person has chosen a reality in which the existence of our republic hangs by a thread, ready to be severed by Trump and his Republican henchmen. A reality so scary to him, that he must ignore the real pains and sufferings of those in his social circles.
It reminds me of how I generally don't like horror movies or horror novels, yet there's no end to their production and consumption. Some people WANT TO BE SCARED. That's where they want to live, in a scary reality.
-----
What's the reality that I choose? A lot of amateur porn stars and other fellas posting sexy pictures of themselves. Poly people and nonbinary people asking for help with their various problems. A variety of news media sites that I believe are generally trying to base their reporting on verifiable facts. Some fringey Left-wing sites that provoke me to think critically or in new ways, as well as some Right-wing sites that keep me informed as to what the Right-wing is focusing on (whether their focus is real or fake). Sites with various raw economic or COVID statistics. Wikipedia. Text-based porn. Professional porn. LJ.
I view the Internet as a wonderful tool for learning more about reality, and also as an endless universe of porn! Not as a way to choose my own reality. Well, I guess I've chosen a reality in which I'm constantly surrounded by sexy naked men, LOL.
I remember back during GWB's Global War on Terror, I appreciated the Internet for allowing me to learn more about what is really going on in the world. How many Iraqis had we killed via our invasion and occupation, for example. My favorite online chat buddies back then were a couple of young guys from Canada and Sweden. We pooled our international viewpoints to learn more about reality, peeling back each other's national prejudices.
How do I know I'm not just choosing my own reality like everybody else? By trying to test my own assumptions, by seeking out new sources of information that I disagree with, by trying to find the original sources of information rather than taking clickbait at face value. By synthesizing lots of different viewpoints.
I was wondering today, how would I convince my youngest brother, an evangelical Christian Trump supporter, that he's constructed a personal fantasy about the universe? He's not stupid. He's an engineer, and before that he was a science teacher. But back while he was in college, when our mother passed away, his grief reaction led him to join the Campus Crusade for Christ, and he's been sort of loony ever since. He's a good parent, a good husband, a good engineer, but when it comes to the universe outside of his home and his job, he's completely crazy. Because with respect to the stuff he hasn't experienced first-hand, he chooses his own reality.
-----
I expected Trump to do worse than he did (even though he lost the popular vote by 7 million), because I figured enough people would see with their own eyes -- the results of the mismanaged pandemic, the results of the mismanaged economy. Millions fewer people have jobs! Millions have been sick and hundreds of thousands have died! And the pandemic isn't over yet!
During 2020 we had the sharpest economic recession in our lifetimes, and the worst pandemic in our lifetimes. I thought more people would blame the President for these harsh realities that they could directly experience.
I was wrong. And my regression equation based on past elections and past economic performance was wrong. And I think it has to be due to the compelling power of staring at these screens and choosing our own realities. People are spending more of their private lives online than they are in meat space. So the worst recession and worst pandemic of our lifetimes don't matter -- what matters is the reality we're choosing to view on these screens.
When I was chatting with my youngest brother today about how the pandemic is worse now than it was back in April, and that we need to shut everything down now like we did back in April ... he said stuff that sounded like he was President Trump, "People can only take so much heightened alert and waiting. The problem is that no one can agree on what the new normal is."
No one can agree on what the new normal is.
And cultural observers say this isn't only "the problem", it is the deliberate strategy of Right-wing demagogues like Boris and Trump and Putin, and many others that have sprouted up around the world during this Age of the Internet.
If no one can agree on what the new normal is, then we can't fix anything. I believe in global warming, you don't, and since we can't even agree that global warming is real, we can't fix it.
Since we can't agree on basic facts, like, what's the actual death rate from COVID-19, is it 20x worse than the flu, or the same as the flu, then we can't fix it.
Choosing your own reality means we can never agree on anything, and can never fix anything. We've destroyed human community, human society, human cooperation.
At the family level, at the company level, at the NGO level, where we know each other personally and have to cooperate to do things like buying groceries, producing widgets, or raising funds -- we can create a limited shared reality and work together. But outside of personal experience -- at the governmental level -- at the international level -- that's impossible now. Without shared reality we can't fix anything.
Trump couldn't even build the Wall, his signature program, even after shutting down the federal government over it. Trump built 15 miles of new wall in four years. That's less than four miles per year. With all the resources of the United States, he could only extend the wall by 15 miles. Trump couldn't fix anything either. Did he rebuild our infrastructure like he'd promised? No. His most important legislative accomplishment was to cut taxes -- that doesn't fix anything, it just increases the federal deficit. He couldn't even come up with a political platform for the next four years. Now his main issue seems to be that his re-election was stolen from him. So what, what was he going to accomplish if he'd won? Why should anybody care?
And now Biden won't accomplish much of anything either. But he won't piss me off as much while accomplishing nothing as Trump did while accomplishing nothing.
Our country is broken. And we can't fix it, because we're all choosing our own realities, and these various chosen realities are set evenly against each other by social media engagement algorithms and the extraordinarily well-funded major political parties, such that we're repeatedly having some of the closest elections in US history (with respect to the Electoral College, which is the only meter that matters) -- nobody ever pulls far enough ahead to fix anything.
And why bother fixing anything if you can simply choose your own reality and stare at it on your screens? We're broken. And I have no idea how to get people to see the real reality. They have to want to see it. But once you've been granted the power to choose your own reality, why would you ever give that up?
The Genie of the Lamp granted you one wish, and your wish was to have all your wishes come true, so long as you can keep staring at that goddess damned screen.