Debate or Debacle?

     On October 28th, 2015, the Republican presidential candidates are going to be having a "debate" at my school about "key economic issues such as jobs, taxes, the deficit, and the health of the U.S. economy." My first response to that was, "In other words, the traveling troupe of clowns, bigots, and legalese jugglers is coming to town. (-__-)" Here is the second:

     Let's examine the issues, though. Most jobs in our highly technical age are, quite frankly, outmoded and unnecessary. Right now, we have the technology to automate a vast majority of service and manufacturing jobs throughout our entire global society; to provide access abundance to the necessities of life for every human on the planet. Anything redundant, dangerous, or simply pointless--due to the fact that the only reason it exists is to perpetuate the monetary/market system; i.e. it contributes nothing meaningful or beneficial to society or oneself (money is a nothing thing and doesn't count as meaningful or beneficial)--can be done by a machine or a set of machines more efficiently, more precise and accurate, and much faster than any human or group of humans. The machines don't need breaks, pay, pension, health insurance, etc., and can work all day, every day without complaining; machines have no feelings. In fact, dark factories, i.e. where production occurs in buildings that require minimal to no lighting, very well could (and possibly should) be the future of manufacturing. 

     Of course, the first set of questions regarding this idea include, "So, what are people going to do if they don't have jobs?" Sometimes one of my favorite things in communication happens and I don't even have to answer because the person asking answers for me, apparently unaware of the fact that I'm perfectly capable of formulating a response: "Sit around and do nothing all day?" Hmmm... (Wryly scratching head while preparing the usual response), "Is that what you're going to do?" (-__-) Well, of course not! You're not like everyone else, are you? You're not like those degenerates in society that would just "do nothing", are you? No! You're "different" and..."special." (You're not.)

     Maybe you’re thinking, “what if machines decide that Earth would be much better without humans and (DUN-DUN-DUUUUN!) destroy us all?” Well, I have a few points to make about this one. First, as I stated above, machines have no feelings. So, if we smashed our cell phones in front of 20 other cell phones, they're not going to immediately revolt and say, "We're going to get you (and your little dog too)!" No; we have to remember that there's ALWAYS a human being pushing the button to drop the bombs or pull the trigger. Second, we're perfectly capable of destroying each other as we ever-so-nonchalantly continue that barbarous tradition while simultaneously patting ourselves on the back for inching our societal way toward all-inclusive human and environmental health and well-being; awarding each other trinkets and uttering hollow gestures in an almost tragic display of vapid, unquestioning reverence. The only difference now is that we abuse our technology making it far easier to streamline the process; i.e. whereas the process of reloading a rifle two centuries ago took an inordinate amount of time in terms of potential for being killed while in battle, now we can literally cut people into a pile of pieces because of the number of rounds being fired at once; or liquify their bodies with chemical agents; or even disintegrate their bodies with nuclear weapons. Third, not only do we have this technology, WE USE IT! All the while we venerate ourselves for our supposed civility and exceptional quality of “the most intelligent species on the planet.” 

     Other questions that follow typically are the result of disbelief that such a system is even possible. “Isn’t that Utopia?” “Do you really think ‘they’ll’ ever let it happen?” And so on. While it would be fun to pick apart these questions and explain why they imply that no thought at all was put into them, I have more issues to cover. Realizing I’ve written this much already about one topic and that some people have probably stopped reading by now, I’m moving on. 

     So, what about taxes, the deficit, and the health of the U.S. economy? Well, by now it is hopefully glaringly obvious that in an automated manufacturing/distribution society, there would be no need to even have money and thus no taxes, no debt, no barter, and no servitude of any kind. If we can’t realize that infinite growth CANNOT happen on a finite planet, then we are a sorry lot indeed that will likely drive ourselves into extinction while dragging most of the rest of the species on this majestic world that we are destroying with us! What we need is a GLOBAL economy based upon resources—not money. When you have an economy based upon money (which is really just a 5 letter word for “debt” in a fractional reserve banking system), human health and well-being are secondary at best—if they’re even taken into account at all outside of the context of maintaining a populace of obedient low-wage workers. It’s just a modern form of slavery. In fact, it would likely be fair to say that more slavery exists today than ever before in humankind’s history. It’s just an evolved form of slavery—economic slavery. Physical slavery requires slaveowners to feed, clothe, and house their slaves. Economic slavery requires the slaves to feed, clothe, and house themselves.

     Ask yourselves the question, “if we continue to segregate ourselves as a species with imaginary, yet socially constructed and reinforced, racial categories, social statuses, and national boundaries, what can we really expect out of such a system?” Our similarities FAR outnumber our differences. An otherworldly species, observing ours, would likely find our differences TRIVIAL at best. We are so much alike it’s almost laughable when people cling on to these traditionalized, antiquated notions. Almost; but then the realization sets in that these people are dead serious, refuse to even listen to any other ideas, let alone accept them, and really are stupid enough to move us into a position of setting into motion and possibly accelerating our self-destruction. Of course, this brings me to the Republican Party.

     We are talking about a political party that consists of people whose majority DENY EVOLUTION—an accepted scientific FACT corroborated by mountains of evidence supporting the theory that describes it; people that think it’s right for old, rich, white men to control women’s bodies; people that think the entire planet should be open for privatized, war-profiteering, monopolizing, tax-break-laden, poverty-wage-paying, multibillion-dollar, multinational, pension-stealing, infinite-growth, environmentally devastating business; people that constantly try to use the Bible as a basis for their political and governmental decisions which completely undermines the very principles established by our Constitutional Republic; namely, that religion has NO PLACE in government. THAT LAST ONE ALONE should requisite disqualification from public office. It’s quite counter-Constitutional to swear an oath on a Bible; this unofficial tradition MUST end. If you swear an oath TO the Constitution, then swear ON the Constitution—not the Bible. But, you want me to respect that? As a future scientist, you want me to respect science deniers? NEVER! However, don’t misconstrue what I’m saying here. I FULLY support everyone’s Constitutionally protected rights—in this case, the right to say and believe anything. However, that in NO WAY means that I actually have to respect what anyone says OR believes. Beliefs and statements are NEVER exempt from criticism, ridicule, mocking, etc! The moment exemptions are made because someone’s feelings got hurt or they were “offended” is the moment freedom of speech dies.

     So, I’m not offended by this taking place at this University; I don’t want it to not happen or anything. I’m simply pointing out the Socratic irony in having a debate comprised mostly of science-deniers at one of the top science and engineering universities in the country.

Racism in America

The following is a controversy response paper I wrote for a class in 2015. The article this references is linked below:

  The Billig article highlights the link between hatred and enjoyment by examining racist jokes on 3 different “jokes” websites. These sites display an incredible amount of hatred and bigotry toward black people in the forms of an almost nonchalant use of the N-word as well as numerous photos of lynchings and hangings in the South. The sites are rife with official-sounding “legal disclaimers” that attempt to downplay the seriousness of the material on each. Essentially, the way these disclaimers are worded, coupled with the disgusting pictures and obscene remarks, seems to scream, “Hey! Look at us; we’re the worst assholes on the planet!”
This article is especially revealing at this particular moment, as there is intense controversy surrounding the Confederate flag. One of the issues seems to be that to a large portion of historically well-educated people, this flag represents one thing: overt racism. The argument for proponents of the flag tends to be, “It’s our heritage.” The immediate response to that is, “Heritage of what—extreme support for slavery and treason to the United States?” And so the debate rages on and on with historical inaccuracy after historical inaccuracy being offered as justification for continued support of the Confederate flag.
One thing is clear to me: I support 100% everyone’s right to say whatever they want. And, at the same time, I support 100% everyone else’s right to tell them what a moron they are for saying such. So, it really pisses me off when suddenly everyone decides to give a shit about the same thing for 3 seconds and we take things way too far and over the top. Now we have corporations distancing themselves entirely from the Confederate flag, refusing to sell it in stores. Walmart and Amazon have jumped on this bandwagon; even TV Land decided today to stop airing episodes of the Dukes of Hazard. This, to me, is completely ridiculous and shows how complaisant we have all become.
It’s one thing to point out and criticize; quite another to start hastily banning things because some people might find them offensive. This is the point that we are at and I find it disturbing that, like sheep, people are blindly following these trends and not even thinking about any possible ramifications or slippery slopes these types of actions lead to. What’s next—banning To Kill a Mockingbird or Gone With the Wind? Sure, let’s ban those but ceaselessly promote mind-numbing garbage like the Kardashians, or the Bachelor, or Judge Judy, and all of the other things in our society that make a mockery of a supposedly intelligent species. That’s right—instead of thoroughly examining and resolving the conditions which lead to aberrant behavior, we’ll just start banning anything that absolutely anyone takes exception with while simultaneously pushing predetermined social trends and fads because, well, that will obviously work.**
Such is life in our idiocracy. Never mind the fact that over 10,000 people needlessly starve to death everyday around the world; or that millions of Americans are homeless, starving on the streets; or that we indiscriminately bomb brown people on an almost-daily basis; or that American society has been dumbed down to the point that most people can’t even find their ass with both hands, we lead the world in only prison population and debt, and yet we still have cretins screaming at the top of their lungs about how we’re “the greatest goddamn thing that ever happened to the whole, wide world! And, if you don’t like it, you can just git the hell outta here!” Yeah; we’re the best! This type of ignorant arrogance is why many people around the world have the image of a fat, slobby dumbass when they think of an American. 
     In conclusion, racism is alive and thriving in American society. Anyone that starts a sentence with, “I’m not racist, but…” and then goes on to rationalize some type of behavior by stigmatizing it and attaching it to a skin color is called…hmm…I know this one…I think it’s… Oh yeah! There is a word already for it—RACIST! And there is perhaps no better platform for examining how many people you know that are racist than Facebook. Over the course of the past 2 weeks, I’ve seen more Confederate flags than I have my entire life. It is interesting to point out that the same people, at least on my timeline, that are posting undying support for the Confederate flag are also posting their staunch opposition to gay marriage; using openly discriminatory language such as “n*****s” and “f*****s” when talking about both of these subjects. I’ve even seen juxtapositions of the Confederate flag being praised and rainbow flag burning. But, according to them, they’re “not racist” or bigots and the Confederate flag doesn’t represent racism or bigotry. You know, the same way that throwing up a disclaimer on a site full of racism—some present in the disclaimer itself—means that those that post on the site aren’t racist.

** UPDATE 
So... Yeah. Five years later, I read this and think, "FUUUUUCK, what an asshole." The two paragraphs preceding these asterisks are proof of just how pervasive yet subtle the mindset of unrecognized white privilege can be. While sitting in a university setting, in a communications class called Discourse, Culture, and Identity, listening to the stories of my fellow black students, AND having already known about the Black Lives Matter movement and what it's all about, I STILL had the audacity to share some bullshit story about how I'd been discriminated against and called cracker and blah blah blah... 🙄 

If by some chance any of those students ever happen to read this or remember my interactions with the classroom, I'm sorry if I ever said anything that might have diminished your experiences. It was wrong and I'm ashamed of having never been willing to listen or recognize my own privilege. Were we all at the same world-renowned university? Sure. But, that doesn't magically make our society's deeply-rooted, systemic racism problem go away. It's real. Systemic racism is real. There is no debate on this subject. It needs addressed immediately and it starts by stating unequivocally:

#BLACKLIVESMATTER

June 6th, 2020 - KBB

I Find Your Offense Offensive!

In 2012, at The Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, comedian Daniel Tosh was performing a set during which he made a rape joke directed at an audience member. The audience member, apparently writing anonymously on her friend’s Tumblr account, details her recollection of the interaction in a post titled, “A Girl Walks Into A Comedy Club.” According to this account, Tosh reportedly stated “some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny,” to which she yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!” Tosh allegedly retorted with, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” The account proceeds to explain how the anonymous girl “completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening,” and her friend, “high-tailed it out of there.” Concluding, she explains how the experience was “viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same.” The article was shared to a viral extent which garnered a response from Tosh through his Twitter account that read, “all the out of context misquotes aside, i’d like to sincerely apologize http://t.co/pt!7kJ2c” and shortly after, “the point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them. #deadbabies”.

Rape is a particularly controversial topic not only because of the obvious implication in atrocious behavior and sexual violence against another being as well as the psychological conditions of both the perpetrator and the victim before and after, but also because it appears to be an increasingly common, yet relatively under-acknowledged, problem in our society. A socially ubiquitous (at least here in the US) unwritten rule is that if a topic is controversial, e.g. religion, politics, racism, etc., then we shouldn’t talk about it in public. And if a topic is deemed too controversial, such as rape, it is considered offensive to even mention it let alone make a joke. A general term that is typically used to describe this is political correctness. And, quite frankly, I find political correctness offensive; I’m offended by others being offended and thinking being offended implies moral superiority; i.e I’m kidding (except the moral superiority part) and it’s utter BS—Bad Science!

We’ve devolved into an endlessly repeated stream of meaningless utterances alluding to “being offended” but never actually stop and take the time to solve our problems. We are so inundated with media-manufactured controversiality, that we don’t even focus on the problems anywhere near long enough to effectuate any semblance of effective resolutions. That is, we are now living within a carefully constructed, predetermined news cycle that simply shuffles us hurriedly through predictable story after predictable story; i.e. if we aren’t talking about gun rights because of another shooting, we’re talking about racial tension because many of those shootings involved white police officers shooting black citizens; if we’re not talking about the latest celebrity infidelity or tactless, unread remark, we’re focusing on science deniers’ (anti-vaxx, GMOs, climate, etc) untenable, fear-mongering claims that so often point to “god” and the Bible as the be all, end all; and if we’re not harping the terrorism chords, we’ll endlessly cook up the most meaningless bunch of stir-fried bullshit to sell to the mindless automatons in society that pride themselves so heavily on maintaining the status quo they aren’t even aware exists. It’s absolutely asinine! We aren’t born bigots, racist, or prejudiced in any way whatever; all of that is taught.

Language is an extraordinary, powerful tool. Coupling a deep, profound understanding of how we communicate through everyday talk with the exponential increase in new advents in digital technology, i.e. cell phones, internet, social media, etc., results in a truly awe-inspiring phenomenon—the power to easily manipulate large groups of mostly uneducated people. Almost no other better exemplification of this truth exists than that of a monologue in the 1976 movie Network. In it, Howard Beale, the main character of the movie, a controversial television host/news anchor, gives an impassioned speech during a broadcast after the chairman of the board of a particular broadcasting corporation died and he saw exactly where news was headed in a for-profit, 24-hour news cycle. Beale had this to say: “We’re in a lot of trouble!…why is that woe to us? Because you people and 62-million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you read books! Because less than 15 percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube! Right now, there is a whole—an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel. The ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers—this tube is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people…And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network!”

      Woe is us; as this is exactly what has happened with only a handful of for-profit corporations currently controlling, quite literally, everything that we read, watch, and listen to. So, instead of focusing on a problem such as rape long enough to solve it, and then actually solving it, as Beale continues in this same monologue, “…we’re in the boredom-killing business.” And with the instant-gratification, instant-information society we’ve become comes the inability to resolve anything. We simply plaster over our problems and hope it sticks. Bringing this seemingly divergent essay full circle, people feel that when it comes to severely controversial issues, their being offended somehow constitutes automatic acknowledgement and accommodation. However, it solves absolutely nothing and is, in a practical sense, rather useless. In other words, we can continue to get up in arms about issues and celebrate our perpetual lip-service to them with quaint new memes and hashtags and fleeting social trends that give the illusion of effective group participation (displaying instead perfect examples of herd mentality), or we can study the factors that shape human behavior and use this information to design a society where the conditions that cause such aberrant behavior as rape do not even exist. We must realize that the most powerful resource on the planet is the human mind and ask ourselves the question, “What are we doing with it?”