Land Of The Free

This is a reply to jihadcomplex, whose arguments can be found here.

You certainly make a valid point with your assessment that minorities living in impoverished areas idolizing “gangsta” rap and “gangsta” movies is a problem, but it’s not a problem for the reasons you seem to think. The problem is that these are stupid people whose schools have been underfunded and whose parents (or, more commonly, parent) fail to instill within them any sort of work ethic. Often, the only way to be somewhat insulated from the affects of gang violence is to actually belong to a gang, and since the crime rate is so catastrophically high, there are few small businesses operating in these areas, and therefore few jobs. Often times, the only means of making money is to sell drugs or steal.

The whole thing forms a vicious cycle that is incapable of endings without the intervention of an outside force of some kind. Violence and theft begets poverty and poverty begets violence and theft.

Now, you can play your little tough guy routine and give us all that slow-clap speech about personal responsibility and some crowd-pleasing snide and sarcastic “boo-hoos” that mock rather than address the problem—but that is beneath you and if you do it again, I will call you on it in a big way.

The fact of the matter is that I don’t give a fuck about you, let alone a bunch of criminal scum infesting our prisons. What I am interested in is a logical and ethical solution to a very real set of problems that I will now outline:

1. Prisons are horrifically over-crowded.
2. Recidivism rates are abysmally high.
3. People like you are behaving as a detriment to any sort of actionable solution with your stubborn revenge-obsessed bullshit.

In order to solve these problems, we must ask why they exist in the first place.

So, why are prisons over-crowded. Let us examine that question with the following statistics:

As you can see in the chart above, the United States (laaaaand of the freeeee) has less than 5 percent of the world's population, but it accounts for nearly 25% of the world’s prison population. If you’re reading that and you’re not outraged, then your sole focus in life should be to avoid breeding at all costs, because the world doesn’t need more idiots like you.

Was it always like this? Were we always so fond of our "lock 'em up and throw away the key" philosophy of crime and punishment? The simple answer to that question is a resounding "NO".

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A record 7 million people - or one in every 32 American adults - were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.

More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.

What are these people going to prison for? Let's find out!

since 1970, our prison population has increased by 700%. You're not reading that wrong. It has literally become 8 times larger in just 38 years. (HINT: The US Population has only grown by about 30-40% in that time--statistically negligible in the face of our previous number.)

YOU: Hey, TJ, what year was the war on drugs instituted again?

I'm glad you ask, my child. It was instituted in 1972.

YOU: But, TJ, now that we've put these violent criminals in prison, crime in this country has gone down! So the war on drugs is working! Yay!

WRONG. According to a report released by the JFA Institute (http://www.jfa-associates.com/)

Proponents of prison expansion have heralded this growth as a smashing success. But a large number of studies contradict that claim. Most scientific evidence suggests that there is little if any relationship between fluctuations in crime rates and incarceration rates. In many cases, crime rates have risen or declined independent of imprisonment rates. New York City, for example, has produced one of the nation’s largest declines in crime in the nation while significantly reducing its jail and prison populations. Connecticut, New Jersey, Ohio, and Massachusetts have also reduced their prison populations during the same time that crime rates were declining.

So, goddamn, it just doesn't seem to be working.

The next question on our agenda is why are recidivism rates so abysmally and staggeringly high? First of all, let's take a look at exactly how high these rates are:

Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 States in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.

These are inexcusably bad results and when compared to the recidivism rates of most countries, like Sweden below, spell it out loud and clear: THIS SHIT AIN'T FUCKING WORKING. Check it out:

An average of 22 per cent of those convicted of offences between 1991 and 2001 reoffended within a year of the initial conviction. The proportion reoffending within a three year follow-up period was approximately one-third (an average of 35 per cent). This means that in slightly over half of the cases of recidivism noted within a three-year period, the first reoffence occurs within a year of the initial conviction.

67.5% Recidivism in America vs. 22% Recidivism in Sweden. Could it be that they're doing something right and that we're doing something wrong?

Could fucking be:

How could this be? Surely this is not a typical Swedish prison? Sorry, but is surely is. And it's a prison that manages to reform more criminals than it's dirtier, danker, more insidious American equivalent.

How? Because instead of seeking to punish, these prisons seek to reform. Psychologists have told us for years that punishment is ineffective as a deterrent, but we as a nation continue to think we know better than what mere scientists have to say! We've got something better than science--we've got a gut instinct, a whole lot of hatred and a serious lack of empathy for our fellow man. We don't care that punishment is ineffective, because it feels so goddamn good.

And why are we this way? Why are we such vile, contemptuous pieces of amoral shit who don't care about whether or not our fellow human beings succeed or fail? Why are we so callous that we stand idily by while our government imprisons more people per capita than any other country on the face of this entire planet by a significant margin?

Those questions, you'll have to answer for yourself.

THE FOLLOWING IS A WELL WRITTEN RESPONSE TO A POORLY WRITTEN RESPONSE TO A SEMI-WELL ARTICULATED VIDEO.

Irrationality is the human condition. But it is not irrational to believe emotions or feelings are important or NECESSARY if you are a human being. Emotions motivate us to keep living, so I would say, as a human, it is rational to want to feel.

To separate emotionality from rationality (read: thoughts, intellect) is to thoroughly miss the point of what makes human emotions unique from the emotions of our brothers and sisters in animalia. Our emotions themselves are as primitive as the emotions of our nearest living cousins on this planet—the chimps and the bonobos. Consider the practical motives that emotions provide to us through the lens of evolutionary psychology.

STIMULUS: A snake.
EMOTIONAL RESPONSE: Fear.
REACTION: Panic; the need to escape.
RESULT: We avoid the snake.
CONSEQUENCE: We are not killed by snake venom and continue to exist and have opportunities to reproduce.
CONCLUSION: Fear alerts us to threats and makes us cautious. Fear can therefore be said to have survival value.

STIMULUS: A competitor.
EMOTIONAL RESPONSE: Anger.
REACTION: Open displays of aggression on one end of the spectrum, backstabbing and gossip on the other.
RESULT: We diminish the competitor’s position and, hopefully, surpass him/her in the pecking order.
CONSEQUENCE: We establish a crucial social hierarchy that will decide who is fit to make decisions and reap rewards.
CONCLUSION: Anger motivates us to be aggressive against competition and to climb the social ladder. Anger can therefore be said to have survival value.

STIMULUS: An attractive potential mate.
EMOTIONAL RESPONSE: Lust, perhaps love.
REACTION: The need to fuck.
RESULT: If we are sufficiently positioned in the pecking order (see anger), then we can successfully court our mate.
CONSEQUENCE: We get some ass and possibly reproduce.
CONCLUSION: Lust serves to get us fucking, and love serves to keep us around to protect our loved ones or assist in the child-rearing is the relationship produces offspring. Lust and love can therefore be said to have survival value.

All of our emotions can be reduced to this. We can show how everything from envy to ennui serves the machinations of natural selection. But as human beings we all know that emotions are more than this to us. They are not just basic colors that bully us into certain behaviors with overpowering torrents. They have shades and hues and tones. We don’t just have the Crayola marker set of emotions that nature gave our animal friends on lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder, we’ve got swatches.

And why is that? What sets us apart? The answer is obvious. The answer is intellect. We can look at a dangerous snake and feel the same fear that or ancestors did—but we might then think: “Ah, but if I have a long enough stick, I could kill that snake and not worry about him in the future. And I could take the poison from his fangs and use it against my enemies.” The fear of the snake, measured against the confidence that the snake can be overcome and the need to destroy ones competitors with the exciting implementation of a new weapon— we’re not functioning on a stimulus and reaction basis anymore. We’ve got a database of emotions and desires and we can access them, compare and contrast them and combine them in new and interesting ways.

Dil Demonique’s simplistic grasp of this subject matter and its implications is stunning in its deficiency and sickening in its erroneous conclusions. To suggest that emotions and rationality as human beings think of them could be separated or considered separately is pure foolishness on a level that I rarely encounter from even the dumbest of my nemeses.

When you CEASE to be human, you CEASE to need the emotions. Of course, there's always a trade off. You say you wouldn't want to be a robot if you could not feel elated like you did that one day. That is one day, what about all those other times when you wish you could not feel suffering at all?

This is the line of logic that says, A will not miss being A by the time it is B because B is incapable of missing being A. It makes a cold, clinical breed of sense, but let’s start applying it across the board and see what sort of conclusions we can derive from it.

• It is okay to murder a man, because once he is dead, he will be incapable of desiring to be alive.
• It is okay to deface a priceless work of art, because by the time it is defaced, it will no longer be priceless.
• It is okay to brainwash a person into believing something other than the what they already believe, because when they are brainwashed, their past beliefs will seem foreign to them.

The logic that any action is morally permissible because the result of that action will render the assailed party either incapable of dissenting to (or agreeable to) the action itself is a preposterous contortion of consent-based morality, wherein consent can be gained or inferred retrospectively.

Now, the smarter among you are going to immediately jump on me for providing examples of A being acted on by an external force to become B, when what we were discussing originally was A becoming B of A’s own volition. I agree whole-heartedly that A can consent to become B.

It was my stated assertion that I would not make that choice personally. In my opinion, to continue on as something which does not possess my core characteristics is to not continue on at all. If A becomes B then B is no longer A, so A has failed to continue. Augmentation, in my opinion, is when one adds to A to become AB.

So, why did I bring up these A acted upon by C to become B scenarios in the first place? The answer lies in Dil’s assertion that once A became B, it would no longer be capable of missing being A. The fact that she views this as anything but a gross design flaw of B speaks mountains about her character—or lack thereof.

I'm a raving transhumanism. Sometimes I rave to people randomly about how awesome it would be to be a fused mass of information and intelligence. TJ happened to be a person I was raving to the other night. He agreed with the argument justifying infanticide because it makes sense.

Dil Demonique

1. mislabels herself as a transhumanist and then

2. proceeds to lie about my position on her argument for infanticide.

In the instance of item one, I would argue that she does not qualify as a transhumanist since the stated objective of Transhumanism is to elevate humankind. I would argue that since she seeks to make herself into something as inhuman as a “fused mass of information and intelligence” that she does not qualify as a transhumanist. This, however, is a matter of semantics and has little place here as anything but a brief aside.

In the instance of the second item, I commented to her, upon and in reference to her presentation of a third-part argument, that it seemed to be logically sound and that I agreed with the majority of the rationale. I then went on to state that I felt that the arguments author had left out quite a few important factors. I will not get into what those factors are here because it would make this already bloated blog entry roughly three times the size that it already is—but rest assured, dear reader, that my position on this matter will be made clear in the very near future.

Then again, it's irrationality that keeps many people alive. Most people are more miserable than happy yet they still continue to live. This isn't that rational. Why is it great to be able to feel when there are more losses than gains?

She continues on like this with her false assumption that choosing to survive is irrational because our emotional complexity has formed within us a world-weariness that would make it more sensible to die and be done with the suffering of mortal existence for good. Just like our hypothetical man earlier weighed his fear of the snake against his ambitions, so Dil weighs the miseries of life against its joys and comes to the conclusion that life is not logically worth living.

My question then becomes, “So, why are you still here, bitch?”

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God Damn America

When a boy who looked like he could be anywhere between 12 and 20 walked up to me in a crowded bookstore and said my name, I was puzzled as to who he could be or how he might know me. My first guess was that I went to school with him, but he looked far too young for that to be the case. “I watch you on YouTube,” he told me, extending a hand for me to shake it.

It never occurred to me until that moment that there were actual flesh and blood human beings, who occupied the same physical realm as I did, watching my videos. It was off-putting. I was pouring my heart and soul out to actual human beings? How unlike me! It was cringe-inspiring and traumatic to think that people, no better than any people that I had ever encountered in my life, knew things about me.

Of course, on a rational level, I always knew that my audience was comprised of real human beings. I was under no illusion that my subscribers were as physically intangible as the characters that I have always created in my head. But there is a massive chasm—at least for me—between rational reality and visceral reality. It’s the difference between hearing the words, “Your friend is dead” and actually seeing your friend’s lifeless bullet-riddled corpse. It’s the difference between what we know and what we know.

There is a cruelty inherent to the relatively new medium of internet vlogging in that it lures us into believing in some gullible and intellectually soft area of our brains that we are not talking to an audience, but to ourselves. By the time we realize otherwise—truly realize it—we’re already exposed.

From that initial sting of realization, there can only come relief. It’s a relief most people will never experience—the relief of being freed from the burden of the mask of their own contrived banality. Once you’ve opened your mouth and removed all doubt that you are a complete nutjob, you don’t have to pretend otherwise anymore.

So let me start explaining myself.

* * *

On September 11th 2001, this entire nation was awestruck with the spectacle of an attack on American soil of proportions not seen since December 7th, 1941. The American people rightly screamed for justice. They wanted to see those responsible for the heinous act against their fellow American’s punished.

That’s the problem with suicide attackers. You can’t retaliate against them. They’re already dead.

This is probably why so many Americans called the 9/11 hijackers cowards in the wake of the attacks, but by now we can all surely set that comforting lie aside and admit to ourselves that cowards do not die in the pursuit of their goals. The hijackers were certainly evil, brain-washed idiots—but not cowards.

The bloodlust of the American populace could not be sated with the destruction of those who perpetrated the attack against us, because it was a destruction that they had chosen for themselves. We had to go after who they worked for, and instead of investigating the matter thoroughly, the Bush administration pinned it exclusively on Osama Bin Laden, ignoring the ties of almost all of the hijackers to Saudi Arabia.

Soon enough, even Osama was forgotten. The war in Afghanistan was swallowed alive by the war in Iraq. The bloodlust of the American people formed a red carpet for big government and big business to stroll into the Middle East and set up shop. Military contractors like Vice President Dick Cheney’s former employer Halliburton made record profits by overcharging the government for busy work. Oil Companies like Exxon made record profits while gas prices nearly quadrupled. By the time American’s forgot about their need for vengeance, they found themselves stuck in a war that will end up costing nearly a trillion dollars and has already cost thousands of lives.

If these were the events of a novel, you’d be incensed if the fictional population of the book didn’t revolt and overthrow their government for such a miscarriage of their will. But this isn’t a tidy fiction, it is a complex reality and the American people are too stupid and defeated to have the means or the inclination to rebel against their masters.

So, the question becomes: How did a population descended from a bunch of badass rebels who kicked the ever-loving shit out of the English when King George III tried to tax them too highly turn into a cluster of tepid pussies with no real ambition? How did the home of the free and the land of the brave become the land of the timid and the home of the enslaved?

The American people were tamed by a trifecta of factors: safety, patriotism and individualism. Now, I happen to believe that safety, patriotism and individualism are good things. However, when those who run the system use these concepts, they use them as weapons against the people. Safety starts to mean fear. Patriotism starts to mean obedience. Individualism starts to mean lack of empathy.

Safety is a good thing. There’s no reason for people to be needlessly endangered. The thing is, safety is not something that should trump personal freedom—as it did when our government passed The Patriot Act.

Patriotism is a good thing. When you take pride in your country, you want to see it prosper. You want to make sure it is a peaceful and opportunity-rich place for the next generation to inhabit. However, when patriotism is transformed into blind support for one’s government, then it ceases to be a force for positivity and instead becomes a detriment to that which we should most cherish. Our children do not benefit from a world where corporate profit is king. The mindless obedience of the populace to the idea that corporate greed is good does not feel like patriotism to me. It feels a damn sight more like treason.

Individualism is certainly a good thing, but when individualism turns into the notion of “every man for himself” then it is a basically Social Darwinism. You see this mentality reflected in the inability of the American public to forgive any transgression. If a politician sleeps with a prostitute, they want him to resign. If a man kills another man in the heat of passion, people want him to go to jail for the rest of his life. If a man molests a child, instead of trying to find out why this urge exists and making an effort to prevent it from occurring in the future, the people call for his head on a stick.

The fork whose prongs are safety, patriotism and individualism has been stuck into us and we’re done. This triplet doctrine has rendered the free and the brave into a great and huddling mass of selfish slaves who take orders because they’re too fearful to ask questions or make demands.

Too often, those who maintain courage and freedom and true individuality attempt to free the people by simply addressing the symptoms of the disease of servitude to the system. This is not effective. We must eliminate the disease itself.

This can be done be educating the populace as to the true meanings of the virtues of safety, patriotism and individuality.

Safety does not just mean death-prevention. Human beings are not the only things that need to be kept safe. It is also important—more so, in fact—to keep the noble aspects of human beings alive. Freedom of choice, freedom of association, freedom from unreasonable taxation, freedom of and from religion, freedom to dissent—these things must be kept safe too.

And who would really wish to live in a world of absolute safety? We can make people safer by taking away all their rights just like we can make the streets safer by outlawing cars. That doesn’t make it a good idea.

Patriotism should be pride taken in the accomplishments of our society. When we have a good economy and a surplus of freedoms, it is good to look upon that wealth and freedom and say, “this is good shit!” Patriotism also means recognizing faults with the system and coming up with solutions to fix them.

I have a deep and profound love for my country, but in times like these it’s a bit like being in love with a crack whore who you know will steal your stereo and sell it for crack if you fall asleep with her in your house. We shouldn’t let America sell our stereos for crack. It’s not right.

Individualism means being true to yourself, not being a slave to self-interest. Let me give you an example of what I mean, since I know that a good deal of my Libertarian viewers are currently scratching their heads and saying to themselves, “but that’s not what Ayn Rand said!”

The American right-wing is fond of the buzzwords “personal responsibility.” If you’ve ever watched Glenn Beck (I don’t recommend it), you’d think it was the name for the Philosopher’s Stone. He can hardly let a sentence pass by without throwing “personal responsibility” into it.

Ask yourself: “What exactly is personal responsibility?” It’s the idea that no matter what happens in your life, it is entirely your fault and entirely your problem. If there is a housing crisis and you were the victim of predatory lending practices, it’s your fault for not understanding the legal jargon that you signed before your Mortgage tripled. If you were drunk at a bar and a man grabbed your girlfriend’s ass and you punched him and he fell and hit his head on hard on the floor and died, you’re a murderer and you should go to prison for the rest of your life. If you are a 25-year-old man and you start flirting with a girl and take her back to your apartment and fuck her in every hole she's got . . . only to later discover that she was 14, guess what? You’re a pedophile and you’ll go to prison, get your ass beat and buggered on a daily basis until eventually they’ll let you out, make you go to a shrink and put you on a list that ensures you’ll never hold another good job and you won’t be able to live pretty much anywhere.

Personal responsibility in action, folks.

It’s been misapplied to the point of uselessness. Of course people should be responsible for the things they do, but we as a people have somehow come to the conclusion that this means that no one is ever allowed to make a mistake or have a moment of weakness. We are a bunch of unforgiving douchebags, and the reason for it is because Mr. A doesn’t care if Mr. B goes to prison on some bogus charges. And guess what? Mr. C won’t give a shit when Mr. B goes to prison a few weeks later on the same charge.

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. THE. HIGHEST. IN. THE. WORLD.

Here in the land of the free, a full 1% of our population is in prison. 2 million people are incarcerated in the prison system of the United States of America.

Those in power know that we won’t stand up for one another, so they can put anyone behind bars that they want. Drug-users, political dissidents, the mentally ill—anyone that can fit into a cell can be sold into slavery in this nation.

God Damn America.

Loved by thousands, hated by millions . . .

In the greatest B-movie of all time, Deathrace 2000, Sylvester Stallone plays a character with the enviable name of Machine Gun Joe Viterbo who is introduced to a jeering arena of spectators with one of the most underrated lines in all of cinema: “Here he comes! Machine Gun Joe! Loved by thousands, hated by millions!”

That’s the essence of freedom, folks.

When you’re loved, you are held to a gold standard that no human being can really live up to. When you’re hated, almost anything you get up to is fully expected of you. If the governor fucks a hooker, it’s a story that makes the front page of all the newspapers; but if the governor’s gardener fucks a hooker, it’s hardly even a story to tell your friends at work.

The good man—or, at least, the man who is thought to be good—is not free to tell the truth. He has to worry about what the neighbors will think, what the papers will think, what his golf buddies will think. How will they look at him when he goes to his favorite Mexican restaurant? How will they treat him in the checkout line at the grocery store? He can’t tell the truth. He can only parrot one of two or three socially acceptable positions on any given subject matter.

The bad man—or, at least, the man who is thought to be bad—is not similarly constrained. He can tell the truth all day long because he doesn’t give a fuck what the neighbors think. The papers don’t report what he says or does. He doesn’t play any faggoty games like golf. He is used to getting nasty looks wherever he goes. He knows that people don’t approve of him or the way he lives his life. He can tell the truth. He can and he will.

And he’s about to, so strap the fuck in.