(no subject)

[kingtycoon]

One thing is that I started to take Reddit's word and have accepted it as the front page of the internet.  It's the main thing I look at in the morning during my commute.  I have my account set up to show me the things that interest me and filter out all the many memes and images that I don't at all care about.  Because of how it's set up, to show news and politics and because it's filtered out the way that it is - I realized that every day it seems as if there is a crushing wave of disconnection between the different strata and elements of civilization.  It is always that there is an avalanche of crises that are bearing down, perpetual and constant.  Maybe I missed this?

When I drove a car I only listened to NPR, at night I turned the radio off and didn't listen to jazz music because I don't like it all that much.  During the day I'd be in a state of dazed shock (driving a car is a fucked up thing to do, traffic and speed and ongoing danger) - and then I'd be told horrible things about everywhere and everything.  Then I stopped all that and then I stopped even looking at the internet news and then I felt like...  I have a lot of opinions, a lot of things to say about essentially every event that crosses my path and that has a role in the national discourse.  I think about these things relentlessly and then don't really say anything.  To me-  this is how people become crazy.

I remember I worked at the truck depot - late in the dusktime 2nd-3rd shift.  There was a man there.  He answered to me, was my subordinate, but only nominally because I would never ever say anything to him if I could help it.  This is because the man terrified me.  He had been working in a windowless room overnight for 20 years and had developed many glaring personality problems.  Principally, he was a self-avowed conservative - something I dislike innately for a lot of reasons - but succinctly put, I have no stake in the status quo and a great interest in what will replace it.  More glaring were the problems that he had which were allied to his other opinions - that is, he spent all his time alone in the dark, he was pale like an underdark gnome and had gone crazy from having an ongoing dialogue with himself about racist gun enthusiasm (principally).  Here and there I'd have to go into his windowless room to have something clarified or to give him a task - and he'd be talking to himself, sometimes shouting.  Once - in the breakroom he was staring in the mirror like Travis Bickle - he was pretending to draw his gun on himself.  He wasn't allowed to bring a gun to work, there was a lot of discussion about the concealed carry laws at the time, but they hadn't come into effect.  We all said we were glad to sit up by the window where we could see everyone coming because one day we knew this guy, Old-Gunman, would come to the office to shoot everyone and we knew we could see him coming and run out the back.  Everyone knew that this man would kill someone with the slightest provocation and that he lived in his mind enough to think that he would have some kind of terrible, fantasy about himself in which his worst qualities were translated into heroism.

To me, this is the kind of person that is principally attracted to conservatism as an ethos, a backward-  evil person, who is willing to be told that all their worst qualities are heroic.  Maybe that's just obvious, to everyone, sure, but I remember this guy, a lot when I read the news, not just because I think of how he relates to the people who are behind the steady advance of catastrophe - but also because I wonder if I'm just absorbing this steady trickle of catastrophe and becoming like him, inured to sense I embrace a crazed view of things, I become a wild-eyed monster-person.  A devil.  It's essential to know why you think the things you think, and to see where your brain has been washed and by whom.

I thought of that because I had to submit a complaint to the FCC - this was about a criminal type of mischief going on against my company's phone system - something I realized that the authorities should be aware of.  I try to be a good citizen of the internet and always click through a few pages deep whenever I go to a website.  Anyhow there's a place to put your public complaints and comments so I had to naturally complain about advertising to children and also how I am opposed to the privatization of public bandwidth -but I saw all of these other complaints - complaints that people made about...  Well basically Jesus.  Not enough Jesus, too much cursing, or the using of the lord's name in vain?  It's always, always bracing when you run across these people in your life, the people you are surprised to call countrymen, peers even.

Anyhow, I realized that I don't go into transports of wrathful typing whenever a thing happens and I don't mention or write about the things that happen here, not much.  I don't know.  I wonder if it's a deficiency, or a virtue, I don't know. 

Comments

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

It's essential to know why you think the things you think, and to see where your brain has been washed and by whom.

Yeah, this has been one of my ongoing goals in life. At first, I think it was this concept of acquisition of knowledge. Maybe philosophizing. But there was no attempt at seeing what the fundamentals of my belief were besides some knee-jerk concept of "freedom". Of course, as I analyzed and understood that "truth" is also important and that includes integrity and honesty to one's self, and ultimately finding what that core value is.

I realized that "freedom" is probably one of the greatest enslavers. Anyways... I try to analyze this shit according to what my core principle is. I don't know if I could ever try to alter that principle which is "Love of fellow humans and desire to reduce suffering in the world."

I think one big part of this is that you are discussing what could be termed a dialectic: what is being told/taught to you and how/by whom. This requires one to question all authority and sources of information, including the ones you innately trust, the ones that "jibe" with your personal feeling.

I've been wrapped up in fear and terror. (Don't even ask about the following pic):



It's not pretty. When I get wrapped up in anger and dark heavy emotions, like fear and such. It's not good. I don't even wanna know what it's like to have those emotions and surround yourself with an environment that not only doesn't work towards preventing such thinking but actively encourages it.

I think this is sorta like the mentality of the Stasi, they just sorta manipulated this busy-body energy into spying on everybody and their neighbor and the gossip mentality of shit like I saw Heinrich the other day talking to an old businessman...

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

For me, the reinforcing anxiety inducing element is the panopticon of the internet. Just as it tends to reward and punish bad behavior and punish and reward good behavior - I think it inflicts a mass conformity - of presentation - not of thought, everyone has a different opinion, but there are activities and behaviors that are justifiable and can be presented (running, half-marathons, food-enthusiasm, vacationing) as well as certain kinds of failure that are within the normative bounds (romantic unrest, difficulty at work, problems of health). To me, I think about the current state of the nation as being one of intense and oppressive conformity, of behavior and attitude - I wonder if this will be looked back on and represented as we represent the 50's now. A time of mindless lockstep compliance. It feels that way to me, where there's no explicit danger in being outwardly really distinct and different, but where the rewards of that simply don't exist, in contrast to say - periods of the 90's where it seemed much more open-ended, in terms of what kind of a person you would be or could be.

[fordmadoxfraud.livejournal.com]

he lived in his mind enough to think that he would have some kind of terrible, fantasy about himself in which his worst qualities were translated into heroism

I live in constant fear that this is true about myself. Or that it's true about everyone.