The Ship of Theseus and the Dive Bar that Saved Me

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Missing White Girls and Racist Shitheads

If you ever need a good barometric reading of how little our present society regards even the slightest hint of legitimate, productive discourse, just wait for a pretty white girl to get killed by a minority.

Assuming your name isn't Patrick and you aren't the neighbor of a sponge that lives in a pineapple under the sea, I'm sure you're aware that a girl from Iowa named Mollie Tibbetts was killed by an undocumented immigrant not long ago. Her death is a tragedy, as are the deaths of those who are regularly murdered in similar fashion; but we can never seem to think of their names because they aren't small-town honkies from the Midwest. Missing white woman syndrome is a very real thing that illuminates a lot about the fabric of subtle, furtive racism that perpetuates virtually every aspect of our society, but I have no interest in bloviating about something I'm in no way qualified or informed enough to talk about right now.

Like just about anything else tragic in nature, the response from most of the carbon-based bipedals that have Facebook accounts and just mastered the art of reading two weeks ago has been utterly fucking repugnant. For the sake of brevity, I'll merely disseminate the ham-fisted ramblings of the average idiot that is exploiting the death of a young girl for their own gain.

I simply ran a search for “Mollie Tibbetts” on Facebook, and the first result was a post that was liked by a few people on my friends list. After five minutes of cursory research, I come to find out that it was written by a racist, deplorable piece of shit named Benny Arthur Johnson, who describes his worldview as “a mix between Ronald Reagan and Ronald Reagan.” Shoot me in the fucking head. Turns out he is a former hack editor for Buzzfeed that now writes for The Daily Caller, a racist, deplorable piece of shit conservative outlet founded by Tucker Carlson, a racist, deplorable piece of shit. It's a archetypal, faux-bleeding heart example of exactly what I want to talk about.

“I promised myself I would stay off of politics while on vacation. I’ll break that promise just once.”

Shut the fuck up.

“Mollie Tibbetts was an Iowan. She was raised not far from me. She went to the University of Iowa, just like me. Rooted for the Hawkeyes. She had hopes, dreams, a good upbringing & a loving family cheering for her future.

Then, in the most gruesome way possible, it all ended.”

Find out the rest on Thursday night's Law and Order. The deliberate structure of his post is clumsily tactical in the most elementary of senses. He establishes a non-existent emotional connection to the issue by noting that he and Mollie were raised in the same geographical proximity. You know, as if that has fuck-all to do with anything. He then acts like he was her childhood babysitter in speaking of all of the great things that she had to offer the world. I'm sure that's true, but Benny-boy sure does act like he's known who this girl is for longer than a week or two.

Writers like Benny and the overwhelming majority of screenwriters that pen empty, saccharine bullshit that inevitably rakes in 9 figures at the box office know how easy it is to emotionally manipulate the average person with horseshit like this. It's a clever sleight-of-hand move that starts with your average person reading a not-at-all fabricated/completely fictional story of a hero soldier performing some act of God and ends with them joining a group that lobbies against letting brown people vote.

“Mollie went for a run on one of those sleepy Iowa farm roads I grew up on.”

Hey, did you guys know that Benny and Mollie once lived in the same state yet?

“She was abducted, murdered & had her body dumped in a ditch by a monster who should have never been within a thousand miles of Mollie. This man had spent six years (!) in our country illegally being shielded, protected & humanized at every turn by the policies of national Democrats. He crossed our borders illegally and even though he does not share our culture, worldview or value system he was allowed to stay long enough to murder an American in the prime of her life & leave her body in the dirt for 34 days.”

Here's where it gets legitimately fucking interesting. I was surprised by the relatively subdued attention to detail with regards to the specificity of how she was killed. Usually right-leaning individuals that exploit tragedies for their own material advantage are hasty in describing every minor detail of the event to further sway the reader toward their inevitable ideological end. They usually milk the real saucy details before the grand reveal that it all happened because we need to stop treating foreign people like human beings. But no, he comes straight the fuck out and lays his thesis bare. Democratic policies personally coddled and protected this super villain from Otherland that doesn't share our culture, worldview, or value system. The idea that there is a shared, unwavering culture,worldview, or value system in this country is inherently antithetical to the mission statement of this country. Can't make this shit up.

“How is it possible that this horror can find its way to the peaceful farm communities of my upbringing?”

Hey, did you guys know that Benny and Mollie once lived in the same state yet? That political non-sequitur was just a slip-up, and he's really just lamenting the loss of an innocent young girl.

“It bears repeating: Democrats & open-borders advocates have the blood of Mollie Tibbetts on their hands. The disgraceful policies of sanctuary cities, catch-and-release & open borders have led to American bloodshed.”

...Or maybe not. Culpability for this entire fiasco is entirely on the dipshits that have the gall to think having a legitimate conversation about border policies without resorting to polar absolutes is a good idea.

“The murder marks the permanent separation of Mollie Tibbetts from her family. Where is her TIME magazine cover? Where is her CNN Townhall? Where is the national protests for Mollie Tibbetts? Where is the outrage White House press corps screaming for Trump to do something?
Silence.”

Appealing to emotion yet again before sneakily maligning the Black Lives Matter movement and other similar social justice movements that seek to have minorities and women treated like equal citizens.

The fact that Benny Arthur Johnson is an idiot of the highest order is an obvious fact to anybody that possesses a sound, rational ability to engage in discourse, regardless of one's ideological or political orientation. But the fact of the matter is that his incendiary, dangerous rhetoric is the lingua franca of most members of the populace. My curiosity regarding matters like this is less political more than it is epistemological. I've claimed many times before that the over-saturation of data and information in our day and age has analogous ties to the mere-exposure effect in that one views a headline coupled with a picture and jingoism that aligns with their crude, previously-held set of beliefs and is immediately taken as sacrosanct truth. Important personal positions regarding politics and social welfare aren't so much obtained through balanced conversation geared toward an ideal shared end as much as it is a war of all against all between individuals that will never change their mind and allow dialectical stalemate to remain the standard when it comes to global issues.

This has serious, material ramifications. So long as we continue to take our generally-held convictions as unassailable, divine truths, nothing will change. Profit-driven sociopaths on the Right will demonize dark people and uppity women for having the gall to speak out against being treated like animals, and the heart-in-the-right-place, head-up-their-ass Left will stage UFC fights about matters of identity politics while their own party is complicit in the death of millions in third-world countries right around the global block. We need to do better.

When all is said and done, an innocent young girl was murdered by a piece of shit that happened to be a human being. That is literally all that is relevant to anybody that isn't a member of the forces investigating the crime or Mollie's family. Take it from her cousin, who deserves nothing but the highest of props for publicly telling people like Benny to go get fucked. 

Ideological Regurgitation in Media: A Cyclical Clusterfuck

(Note: I originally intended to post a piece I've been thinking about for some time entitled “The Mere Exposure Effect and Dialectical Stasis.” The connection between the two halves of the title is motivated by a Slate article that demonstrates how rampant the sharing of articles is on social media when most people haven't bothered finishing the fucking thing, which results in a malformed dialectic climate in a perpetual state of wailing, adirectional infancy. I posit a visual-linguistic form of the Mere Exposure Effect where people are likely to agree and exalt an article based on a headline, a photo, and perhaps the first couple sentences. Toss in some bashing of the reductive Dialectics of Hegel, Marx, praise Ray Brassier and Francois Laruelle's notion of non-philosophy as a meta-philosophical antidote to the absolutism of systematic thinking and speaking, how even those privy to such shit are complacent in their role in such shit, and there ya go.

However, I see that thing being fairly long. I'm notoriously awful about attaining the proper amount of motivation and sobriety to even begin formally writing something, so expect that one in a decade or so. The following is essentially a reinforcement of the aforementioned piece's thesis.)

I'd like to faux-reminisce about the good old days when open conversation was a legitimate, breathing thing that anyone could partake in, but that would simply be an act of our favorite pastime: Romanticized historical revisionism. The totality of human interaction has more or less been a long, violent volleyball match with teams made up of diametrically opposed ideologies lobbing their respective preternatural, unwavering answers to the world back and forth at one another. Occasionally we get legitimate heroes like de Sade, Lord Byron, Nietzsche, Hunter S. Thompson, and the like (all white men, mind you. This is not accidental. It's a manifestation of a calculated, architecturally astute system of oppression that still persists); social and intellectual libertines in the purest sense that pointedly do not give a fuck, but they all get locked up, go insane, or are denigrated for their atavistic behavior.

No, productive discourse, in its truest sense, has always been something of a perverse fable. This fact is only so egregious in our present day because we live in a society where you can't legally buy another person or beat your wife for overcooking dinner. We're supposed to be a post-racial, post-gender, post-everything society in spite of the fact that minorities are targeted and subjugated on an institutional level and sexual assault is a legitimate epidemic whose transgressors largely walk free without being reprimanded. You know that thing where someone is regaling you with a tale about their last bout with explosive diarrhea, and you stick your fingers in your ears and wail “LA LA LA LA” to block the unpleasant words? Yeah, our current method of attempting to ascertain why things are so fucked up in spite of the fact that we're so goshdarn'd smart. 

The Right and the Left are equally guilty of this infantile approach to discussing eminent issues. The former generally wants everyone other than a select, highly inclusive club, a club they're certainly card-carrying members of, to be absolutely miserable, while the latter generally pleads for a sanitized arena of existential play where nobody gets picked last, and unfettered egalitarianism reigns supreme. It's a fascinating relationship of inverse utopia/dystopia, where whether it's a good or bad place to be is contingent upon what side you're rooting for. I would say that the one thing they have in common is that you'd have to be a true-tested fucking moron to believe either are tenable prospects for our near future; but sadly, I see the Conservative/Libertarian dream police state being far more likely than the Left's shiny Ebony and Ivory heaven, given the way things continue to play out.

The Left really does have its heart in the right place. As much of a misanthropic, moral anti-realist, nihilist as I am, I really do think it would be quite neat if we lived in a world where no single person was ever subjugated on an institutional level. It's just not going to fucking happen. Don't take this as me endorsing apathy toward social issues. Call people out on their bullshit, go protest, fuck shit up. I sincerely mean that. Lord knows I'm too much of a pussy to do so, and somebody has to do it. Just be realistic and remain cognizant that things are irreparably fucked. We're basically just doing damage control by saving whatever passengers we can from the half-submerged Titanic.

I'll just come out and bring up the matter that motivated my spontaneous decision to pen this brief post. The decision to make this story the main focus was a purely arbitrary one. You can literally pick any story of the week that is politically divisive, and the futile Ouroboros-like schematic of non-dissemination will almost certainly still apply.

A couple of weeks ago, four students at Columbia University posted an op-ed concerning a forum hosted by the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board, where a student, herself a survivor of sexual assault, recounted being triggered by sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses that contain depictions of rape and sexual assault. Unlike every other article I've seen selectively picking apart this piece, I'll forgo extensively quoting it and just assume you know how to read. The gist of it is that such Core classes (classes all students must take and pass in order to graduate) often contain sensitive material that could psychologically trigger a myriad of different students of various cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and that the university should work toward facilitating various means to alert students of potentially upsetting material via trigger warnings and different programs where professors and students coordinate ways to curtail disturbing in-class experiences.

I must be fucking crazy, because my first reaction wasn't abject outrage at the supposed banality of their requests. The only things they're guilty of are naïve idealism and the charge toward making everything ever a matter of identity politics, where there is no barometer regarding the severity of the transgression against the victim. Regarding the naïve idealism, that's been covered. We're all fucked and if things get better, it will only be on an infinitesimally small scale over a long period of time. Regarding the omnipresence of identity politics as the sole recourse to discussion of social maladies in popular Left politics, that's tougher.

This recourse is inherently self-defeating, simply because it outright refuses to engage in legitimate discourse with the enemy, and refuses to acknowledge that what each individual is going through is symptomatic of a systemic network of plagues that has no clear way of being sorted out. On a purely semantic level, it (perhaps unintentionally) equivocates all forms of assault onto one level playing field. Open discussion is the stuff of fantasy, as there is no way of openly discoursing without potentially offending somebody's sensibilities and putting your professional position in jeopardy.

I'm not trying to marginalize these people. Again, they have their hearts in the right place. All victims are singular. You cannot quantify trauma, and the mere suggestion of doing so is pretty offensive and shitty to me. The closest we can ever come to understanding what an individual victim experiences when triggered is approximation due to this very fact. Fellow victims can surely reveal details of their attacks in whatever capacity they feel to know they're not alone, but each individual person, and those individuals alone, can truly know how deeply the said attack infiltrates their daily lives.

However, the omnipresence of identity politics as the preferred lingua franca of intellectual discourse in the humanities will get us nowhere. It's eternal regurgitation of a closed ideology that simply isn't compatible with the shitty world we live in. As for an alternative solution? Beats me. I'm pretty sure there isn't a “take as needed for pain” pill for this shit.

Looking back at what I just wrote, I do feel like I was a bit harsh. My take was generous compared to the two big pieces I could find about this matter.

One piece comes from Reason.com, the digital outlet for Reason Magazine. There's little to say about the article given how vacuous it is. The last four paragraphs are the only ones containing anything that you could arguably consider content, and the same misreading of the situation is repeated twice in a span of less than two paragraphs:

“But the fact that an occasional student might feel uncomfortable with certain material seems a strange reason to think no one should read and discuss it.”

That would be nice if the op-ed said anything to that effect. Seriously. Nowhere in the piece by the Columbia 4 did they ever say anything about removing Ovid from the Core curriculum. They merely called for an impossibly idyllic system that caters to the need of each individual student. Literally two fucking paragraphs later:

“But that's what that level of reaction represents: psychological trauma. Which, while something professors should be sensitive to, shouldn't dictate the parameters of acceptable education for all students.”

Jesus motherfucking Christ. Does what I wrote near the beginning of this shit make any more sense now? This can't even be called a conversation. It's a repetition of self-appointed truisms thrown out to any given audience that is going to nod its head in approval of the message they were already convinced of. The author makes a single good point in remarking on the seemingly hyperbolic language the student used, but then proceeds to just tell her to go see a therapist instead of actually, you know, thinking about the issue.

Even more bewildering is this piece, by what I initially assumed was just some guy in sweatpants writing from a basement. Turns out it was written by Jerry Coyne, who is some kind of well-known biologist and proponent for public scientific literacy. He begins by ham-fistedly maligning the proliferation of trigger warnings and likens it to a suppression of free speech. I need a drink just from the intellectual laziness of that nonexistent connection. Then he quotes part of the op-ed. Then he imposes his own diagnosis on the student, just like the Reason writer, by suggesting she go see a therapist instead of complain about being triggered in the classroom. He then proceeds to mention that if we continue this process of implementing trigger warnings ad infinitum, literally everything ever will have some kind of trigger warning. Hope you have a loaded bong nearby for that deep knowledge droppin'.

Here's the really interesting part that truly drives home what I've been trying to say this entire time. He, a culturally Jewish man, has read numerous Nazi Germany-era texts, visited Auschwitz, and has seen movies like Triumph of the Will. They all saddened him, but he learned something about the world as a result, so these women should confront uncomfortable things to become more studious individuals.

There is something resembling a very good point resting in there. A point that could only be ascertained if we didn't exist in a climate of discursive stasis. As I said before, quantification of trauma and knowing precisely how things deep-seeded in the psyche of a person will affect them is fucking impossible. At best, we can simply have conversations with one another while attempting to set our preconceived ideology to the side and attempt to make some goddamn progress. The odds of that happening are about as slim as the odds of this 12-pack lasting me until midnight.

Let me just venture a guess at how this will play out in real life, given how little things tend to change. The social justice types will continue to write op-ed pieces like the Columbia one directed at essentially nobody but themselves, and the rest of the academic Left will continue publishing articles like the previous two I linked. The Right, umm. I highly doubt a low-key story like this will reach any large outlets, but they'd probably bemoan the Liberalization of universities and use it as an example of why we should keep extracting funds from Humanities departments so we can blow up more brown people overseas. Never shall their discursive paths cross.

Coyne stupidly ends his article with advice that essentially tells victims to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, because life itself is triggering. Seems odd, given what a boner the popular American Left has for increasing awareness about the pangs of clinical depression ever since a few celebrities mentioned they had it, Coyne himself even wrote an article criticizing evolutionary psychologists' attempts to explain depression as an adaptive trait. He then goes on to implicitly equivocate the not-at-all prevalent societal mistrust of atheists and a Patriarchal society's systematic mistreatment of women. Well done, dipshit.

Not that any of this matters. We'll all forget about it in a week or two and move on to talking to ourselves about whatever topic outrages us at that given point in time. 

Appealing to Nature: The Crudest Form of Mythologizing

There is a very distinct trajectory that directly follows my witnessing an erroneous appeal to nature. First, lukewarm vomit sprints to the top my throat, and I'm forced to quickly imbibe it, lest a very unfortunate mess make itself manifest upon my unsuspecting, undeserving surroundings. Following this fortuitous feast, I feel the ineffable urge to siege the nearest blunt object and marry it to the cranium of the fucking moron that is responsible for such a blatant affront to common sense. However, I resist the urge, and typically find solace in a time trial exhibition to the bottom of the nearest bottle. What happens after that is usually an irrelevant matter of personal speculation.

The age of Postmodern Enlightenment. The digital age. The Internet: A portal to voluminous webs of knowledge that would take lifetimes upon orders of magnitudes of lifetimes to fully traverse. And this is still a fucking conversation? Perhaps the offender is surreptitiously aware of the logical principles that clearly rebuke their deliberate, seemingly prideful ignorance? Feigning abject stupidity, when in fact, they're more clever than the lot of us level-headed logicians in advancing their nefarious, self-serving agendas.

That's probably it. “It's unnatural, therefore it isn't good.” The examples of this basic violation of informal logic are as legion as they are odious, and it's almost always in defense of baseless, personal hatred and/or bigotry. The paramount issue isn't so much the violation of elementary logical laws that should have a place in the head of any worthwhile member of society as much as it's symptomatic of a much more furtive malady infecting the grounds of modern discourse.

Many years ago, in a Western tradition far away, mythology was the ontological heavyweight (nevermind the fact that the concept of “ontology” had yet to be linguistically conceptualized, or the concept of a "concept", for that matter *bong hit*). It attempted to account for the peculiar problem of being (a problem that has not diminished in its eminence to this day) by reductive, dualistic narratives of gods and mortals, elemental forces and mortals, or basically anything that didn't have the property of mortality, and, well, mortals. As historiography would tell us, it was soon displaced by the more rigorous, abstract methodology of philosophy. Mythology hadn't died, it had just taken on a new face. It no longer served as a literal storybook for the genesis of being; it was a literary tool that illuminated “constants” of both our being and the being of other beings around us.

Skip the Medievals, because fuck those guys. Just read Aristotle's metaphysical disquisitions, indiscriminately toss Christ into the mix from time to time, and you've got the essence of that era. With the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the philosophical fecundity of mythology is summarily castrated. We're now looking at Biblical stories from a historical standpoint, at the grandiloquent myths of the Greeks from a quasi-sociological angle. Mythology no longer harbors any significant explanatory power regarding the unassailable question of being; it's nothing more than an interest of historians of various disciplines. Advance a couple of hundred years: the age of a possibly infinite universe and quantum mechanics, and mythology becomes the object of fixation for nerdy adolescent virgins and the curios of those interested in their ancestral heritage. Surely in 2014, mythology isn't invoked by any self-respecting interlocutor concerned with immediate social matters that affect a multitude of beings?

I'll be fucked if it isn't. Mythology still makes its presence known in virtually every public debate that sways the opinion of the majority on a daily basis. It's just been a little more clever about disguising itself. And I can't think of a more pervasive manifestation of mythology's new face than the demonstrably fallacious appeal to nature.

Before proceeding, allow me to distance this unquestionably dubious maneuver from two more philosophically nuanced problems. The first of the two is Hume's familiar is-ought dilemma. Brought up near the end of his monumental Treatise of Human Nature, the “explain it like I'm five” overview is as follows: Many traditions of ethics (prior to and contemporaneous with Hume) have adhered to standards of morality that attempt to derive objective normative truths (the “oughts”) from empirical observations of the world (the “is”), and the equivalence relation between the two is, if not wholly incomprehensible, not at all obvious. We're capable of making incalculable observations of the world around us and the way things tend to behave, but what exactly entitles us to make moral statements regarding the way things should be based on the dynamic way things are?

This dilemma is one of the most widely discussed passages in all of Modern philosophy, and its interpretations are manifold in the way they diverge from one another. That's not important right now.

It's nigh impossible to mention Hume's is-ought problem without mentioning Moore's naturalistic fallacy, the crux of which harbors much of the philosophical baggage packed in his brilliant Principia Ethica. Again, the kindergarten version of this problem is simple in its statement and profound in its complexity. It seems tempting to equate “good” with what is “naturally pleasing”, but examining this strategy through a critical lens reveals some glaring deficiencies. For one, it's a prima facie absurdity to even entertain the notion that we could systematically catalog consistent databases of “natural” pleasures. Furthermore, it seems to be an ontological category error to relegate the all-encompassing “Good” to the same abstract domain as “things that a particular being finds pleasurable” (whatever that even means). For detailed responses to this problem, pick any analytic philosophy text on ethics published after Principia Ethica; there's a good chance it's directly or peripherally responding to Moore.

The above two conundrums are perplexities that confound the philosopher, rife with the potential for complementary dissemination among scholars of differing philosophical orientation; with the coalescence of them all giving us all a greater understanding of the fundamental issues the dilemmas raise. After all, what is philosophy if nothing more than a giant fucking series of disagreements, limp-wristed verbal sparring and bitch-slapping, topped off by a cathartic handshake, conceding that we're all better people for having undergone the whole process?

The appeal to nature has none of the positive potential qualities of the above. It makes its bed in the vitriolic dialectic of the fool, of the hatemonger, of the pudgy, pasty shithead going on some rancorous diatribe that I could surely tune into right this second if I had cable. It's a dangerous logical sleight of hand; and given the state of the average news feed on Facebook or public opinion poll on virtually anything, most of the fucking people in the world are still letting it fly right over their heads.

A textbook exposition for demonstrating why a basic appeal to nature is senseless is short, sweet, and to the point. Its valid logical structure is an elementary example of modus ponens, the most rudimentary rule of inference in propositional logic. I'll omit any formal details, because those are unimportant (and really goddamn easy to learn for yourself if you possess the gnostic power of Google navigation), and simply illustrate the archetypal example of this faulty reasoning that fits the syntactical form of modus ponens:

If a thing behaves in a way that is natural, then it is good.

The thing behaves in a way that is natural.

Therefore, the thing is good.

The logical form of the argument is perfectly sound. However, the semantic content of the conditionals is what is problematic, and if you can't fathom why that is, I can only hope that you're a pre-school student that happens to be passing by the computer monitor. Sesame Street is on, for fuck's sake, go back to watching that.

Of course, that strain of argument is not the one that your average bigot or major news pundit tends to invoke to clumsily support their swift, indifferent marginalization of entire swaths of people. Their preferred rhetorical atomic bomb is the freckled twin brother of modus ponens, modus tollens. It's almost same thing, only the consequent is negated in order to demonstrate that the first premise is antipodal to the second premise:

If a thing is good, it behaves in a way that is natural.

The thing does not behave in a way that is natural.

Therefore, the thing is not good.

In short, the two crucial terms that we need to investigate are “natural” and “good”. Oh shit, the investigation is already over, because it was doomed from the beginning. Humanity, in its boundless hubris, has attempted to demarcate itself from that which surrounds it, and it always results in an embarrassing affirmation of its inseparability from that which it seeks to divorce itself. I speak of the attempt to be the outsider looking further outside. Of relegating that which isn't human (good luck defining that in a manner that isn't simply taxonomical, by the way) to the domain of “nature”. And in this arbitrarily constructed domain, we observe patterns in a panoply of organisms and project some normative schematic in accordance with our centralized data, to ensure the harmonious order of our superior, enlightened being.

A normative project with a divine imperative that is, at best, opaque. At worst, thoroughly meaningless. I speak of the second crucial term. The “Good”. Remove one “o” and you've got that dastardly triune figure that, I'll be damned, happens to boast the three big “O”s (omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience), some of which may or may not be inherently paradoxical. There's some great irony in the self-professed Godless invoking His extra-O sidekick, Good, which is constantly being thwarted by its pesky super-villain antithesis: Evil. How do we even go about defining what this Good is, let alone accessing it, or being sure of its noumenal existence? When you figure that out, go ahead and make a point of pissing on the grave of every great philosopher that has ever existed before your lunch break is over.

Point is, the terms “natural” and “good” have some seriously dense historical shit surrounding them, and the way they're used by most is violently reductive. But that's exactly what we do when we frame things in a mythological fashion. Reduce a kaleidoscopic existence, bereft of any simple solutions, to familiar meta-narratives founded upon heuristic observation of our surroundings. After all, why bother with extended periods of introspection and critically confronting the world around you, often to ugly conclusions, when you can fall back on the cushy narratives Mother used to lull you to sleep with? Mythology is alive and kicking, and the appeal to nature is one of its counterproductive incarnations.

I'm out of booze, and typing is becoming increasingly cumbersome, so I'll end by imploring you to filter your future thoughts through what I've outlined above. If something along the lines of “wow, this thing in my head that I was about to make public is really fucking stupid” comes up, consider it a personal victory, and change.