"Normal" is purely statistics, nothing noble or benign about it.

A man I once admired taught a class in psychology when I was 14. He set us loose in a college library and told us to prove we knew how to use the research tools available to us. He said the subject matter was up to us. Of course, I investigated "abnormal' sexuality, because I was trying to figure out why all the people who knew what I liked (tying up girls, being tied up by girls) was "abnormal" - except they called it "sick", "dangerous", "demented" and ... of course... PERVERTED. And when i read the first dissertation I found on "abnormal psychology", it shifted my world. "ABNORMAL", it said, was purely a statistical definition. It did not imply or indicate malevolence or even a threat. What was "normal" was the greatest number of people engaged in one type of behavior in the sample, and to various degrees, everyone outside that grouping was "abnormal" So if your'e in a group of cannibals, and you don't eat other humans, you are "abnormal" in that small subgroup; although (hopefully, please), back in the general population the cannibals are typically at the fringes of the bell curve. To be a Nazi in Germany in 1939 was "normal" And so when we see Matthew Shepherd tied to a fence and left for dead by two guys who considered their own sexual behavior as "normal", but Matthew Shepherd as the freak and the threat - it gives me pause and grave thoughts to realize that we have a mob mentality that is becoming the norm. A year after Matthew Shepherd's death, about the same time abortion doctor Barnett Slepian was assassinated by a military-trained sniper while eating in his own dining room by a guy who said he was "saving the lives of the unborn", two U.S. Marines who were attending the same University as I was under the G.I. bill told me that killing the doctor saved lives. This was how they justified their morality. Killing gays was OK, because their god was going to send they gay guy to hell anyway; killing him now just proved that God had the right idea and so did whoever followed "G"od to hasten the inevitable. That's the same kind of irrational rationalization that allowed this one guy to suggest that all the Jews must die and gather a crowd to help him to those ends. I don't want to be "normal" in many social contexts, because I can see the mob doing much more horrific things than I would ever conceive or condone by my own moral code; and the people who claim that their morals are superior to mine just because they say it is.....seem to be able to justify some gruesome and horrific behavior all in the name of the statistical dominance provided by the shelter of the bell curve. I don't do meds, either. I balked when I asked them why a person who takes opioids is an addict, and a person who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic, but somehow when I take your little blue pill that makes big pharma rich and my penis go to Neverland, somehow this is a noble way to believe that 2 + 2 = 714 because that is what the mob prefers that I think the answer to be. The answer to 2+2 is always 4; no matter what the mob wants it to be. And just because I follow the mob so they don't beat the shit out of me, I cannot make 2 + 2 = 714 on any day, on any planet, to satisfy any mob. Normal is a statistical category, not a psychological declaration of anything benign, noble, or desirable. In a society that can pervert so much logic as this one does, being abnormal is probably the last desperate act of a man who really is trying to salvage his sanity, and even if the mob disembowels me and puts my head on a pike, I can die with a clean conscience Some religious zealot told me that conscience was pretty important to him. I agree with him, even when he is trying to blow mine all to hell.

I should have listend to myself long ago; and JD Salinger too

When J.D. Salinger died last year a lot of time was spent discussing how reclusive he was. There was one interview he gave  - the most recent recorded was I believe in 1969 - where he answered a question about why he had not published anything since "Catcher In The Rye" - (I'm paraphrasing now because I'm too lazy to look it up)

If you publish, then people think you owe them something. Not publishing is much more satisfying personally, because it belongs to you alone

I've spent most of my life alone, so I thought publishing would be a nice way to find common ground and some encouraging feedback. A few people - maybe a half-dozen or so - have commented in the past and suggested that I was a good writer. Every one of those people, when it came time for me to write something to them or about them, turned on me and made it quite clear that whatever skill I had as a writer were washed away by my capacity to be an insufferable asshole.

So be it.

I think this is the post where I set my life straight on a few things:

Whether or not anyone agrees with my point of view, my life still belongs to me. I see clearly with my eyes, I hear fairly well with my ears - I absorb a lot from my world. I react to it. I am a product of my world. I did not become the person that I am while living sequestered, in seclusion and isolation, on some distant island or world.

Cogito, Ergo Sum - I think, therefore I am.

How to erase a human being, leaving a shell

This is not a new story. Mine is not the most horrible story - much worse has happened to people much more noble and less deserving than me. But this is my story. To the story of what happened to me, this is an integral link in an unbroken thread of experience (so far, *wink*) that is my life.

I will be told that "we treat everyone like this, so you're not getting any worse treatment than anyone else"

"we all experience that emotion to one degree or another"

"this is the human experience, you are not unique"

Well, fuck you. I might not be unique as the only person to experience it, but my experience by itself is  -  can only be -  unique. No other human soul sees life from the precise perspective that I do. And every other person, living or dead, can say precisely the same. We all share similar experiences in their vague structure and the components that make up a human life, but each one is absolutely unique. There is no way for them NOT to be unique.

(Johnny Hart cartoon)

I will come back and flesh this out. Right now I need to write, I need to be heard, and I will be god damned *(by a fucking non-existent god that I don't 'believe' in, such denials would seem to be absurdly unnecessary, and yet...) if I am going ot let Facebook tell me what parts of my life are permitted by their community "standards.

...as if that community of fucking nitwits can claim that they have standards....

* guy posts a picture of a dead coyote that he shot with his Glock pistol on a Glock Facebook group, bragging about the size of the "exit hole" that it blew through the animal - and to make it worse -

so much worse

"I doubt the coyote was so happy"

So I wrote. About the motherfucker who wrote that. And how he ought get up off the old lady and let the poor bitch rest, because she's got to be tired, and dry, and bleeding after all the time he's been at it.

Oh, that was over the top?

But blowing a hole through a living animal and bragging about the ragged edges of the exit wound is something that is perfectly acceptable in our society. Got it. I am sorry I misunderstood, I will do better next time, teacher.

I'll leave this as a stub....seed....

work starts at 6 Am on fridays. ALarm goes off at 4.

Someone on Facebook in a public group, in a public posting, put up a picture with a caption that triggered a horror experience from my childhood It was a picture of a wild coyote with an "exit hole" blown completely thorough it by a bullet. The hole was the size of a baseball. This post was in a group dedicated to a particular brand name of firearm that rhymes with "clock".

When I was a kid not more than 8 years old, while hiking at my grandparent's house on a holiday, I came across a beautiful German Shepherd in the woods, lying dead only a hundred yards from my grandparents house. I can't forget the image of the hole in the side of the dog, filled with blood and flies. It was a pool the size of a drinking glass.

That was almost the same image that this guy posted in his gun group of a wild coyote, bragging how proud he was of his kill, how the gun which the group was named after created this "exit hole", and then he said,

"I doubt the coyote was so happy"

That's a dark and empty soul, in my opinion. And since that post was public, which means he who uploaded the picture and wrote the caption wanted all members of the internet-viewing public to know of his achievement and his pride, I was in his audience.

so I responded in kind, using words that rhyme with "other trucker". I should re-post the words verbatim, because Facebook wants me to know that my words crossed their lines of appropriate social decorum.

and of course, he reported me to Facebook, who has censored my posting capacity for three days, and told me that since this is my third occasion, that my account risk permanent deletion if there are more. Lesson: you can kill animals, post pictures of your achievement, and brag about the size of the hole you made, and how the dead animal is probably "not happy" while lying dead for your photo, full of lead and your macho ego. But if you use the 1st Amendment (the one right before the 2nd, which guarantees the right to the gun that made the hole in the dead animal) to say that the animal killer is a sick motherfucker ....well, NOW you've gone too far.

My question to you - and Facebook - is this -

Why are we having this measuring contest to rank who offended and horrified who more? Did me calling this guy who delights in the death of animals a profane word cause him more pain than his gory picture of the dead animal that awoke a 40 year old flashback of childhood horror in my life?

So that's what Facebook is all about now. A "community" with "standards"

two words that are as vague and amorphous to a society as diverse as the Internet as "pain" and "joy" - - who gets to measure one against the other and declare winnners and losers?

Facebook, that's who.

he who reports first, wins. After that, nobody answers the door in the judicial chambers to explain their decision, and no appeals are granted.

Funny, don't you think? People arguing about free speech that uses a platform that has arbitrary and capricious censorship, that -

in it's most tragic applications

can amplify horror, and silence objective critics.

A quick Timeline to follow

My dad found out he had cancer under his tongue in the spring of 1996. Nobody wants their tongue "removed" so in the summer he had radiation treatments to try to kill the cancer. Gamma radiation kills all cells, not just the cancerous ones, and the consequences of the radiation were bad enough, but it didn't get the cancer. So by the end of the summer, the skin on the outside of his cheeks looked like a burnt marshmallow stretched over a raw tomato. His salivary glands had been destroyed, so that "cotton mouth" feeling we all have when we wake up in a house with low humdity was his fate forevermore. And the radiation has an effect on how things heal - not as well as they would have otherwise.

So right after Christmas in 1996 they perform the surgery. You could not make this up:

The cancer was in the bone, so they removed his jaw bone from his chin to his right ear. The right side of his face looked like a Salvadore Dali painting.

Cut the tongue in half lengthwise from the tip back down into the throat - remove.

Take the pectoral (chest) muscle, and cut it lengthwise into four strips, leaving all of them anchored at the sternum.

Take 1/4 of the pectoral muscle, detach it at the shoulder, and and sew the free end to the remaining half of the tongue.

Leave the bottom 1/4 anchored at the shoulder as it was, and hope it can operate the arm at 25% capacity.

Take 1/4 of the muscle, detach it at the shoulder, and use it to fill in along the side of the mouth where the jaw bone was.

Use the last 1/4 of the muscle, detach it at the shoulder, and fill in the remaining hole at the back of the throat.

Raw muscle cannot be exposed to open air, so a skin graft must be taken from the inside of the thigh to cover the new "tongue" (old chest) muscle. The skin is taken from the thigh because there is not much hair there, nevertheless, hair will grow on this skin, which is now in the mouth. This can be removed by laser treatments, but some of it will still grow.

And there he is; if he picked up his arm, his mouth would open. But he learned to eat soft food, he loved his breakfast, and he got on with his life. He even got back to smoking. He told me that he woke up in the middle of the night and said his legs were kicking. So after four months of being a non-smoker, he lit one up and said it solved his problem.

Without because there was still a hole in the back of his mouth, they re-cast the upper plate of his dentures to be about an inch longer, with a "finger" that covered the hole. This was called an "opturator" (look it up, it means to "cover a hole")He had to hold his cigarette between his pinky and his ring finger of his left hand, and use his thumb and index finger to hold his nostrils closed.

Now targeting specifics: A man with his own dictionary

A lot of people at Street Prophets, now that I am reading the comments that discuss me since I've been excommunicated, regard me as a provocateur. I however, in this series have tried to point out that it was one person specifically who not just generated my ire, but defended why it was OK to be irritating.

My indignation about John Howard (JCHFleetguy) and his deliberate arrogance has two parts, because he's egregiously misguided on both scores.
A case in point: "Cookies" and "Trolls"

Here's the StreetProphets FAQ on the matter: (copied largely from DailyKos, as you will note referring to "Recommend/Hide" whereas at StreetProphets they are called "Cookies/Hide".

Rating comments


Any registered user can rate comments in a diary. Buttons to give these ratings are at the bottom of each comment. For regular users, comments can be recommended; trusted users can recommend or hide comments. The number of ratings that your comments gather, and their average value, determines your comment mojo. Mojo is used primarily for determining whether a user has trusted user status. So, when is each rating appropriate? Much virtual ink has been wasted in arguments, but the following is generally accepted:

Hide rating: Comments whose only purpose is to disrupt the discussion. Do not hide posts simply because you disagree with what the commenter is saying. Any given user can give out a maximum of five hide-ratings per day.

Recommend: Good comment. Also usually a shorthand for 'I agree', or also 'good job'. Most ratings given out tend to be recommends.

Note that there isn't a rating for 'I disagree'. If you disagree with something in a comment, post a reply saying so (and why).

If you wish to remove a rating that you gave to a comment, simply click the recommend or hide button a second time. Comments can be given ratings for 24 hours; after this point, ratings cannot be given or removed from the comment.

One piece of Daily Kos slang worth knowing refers to a recommend as a "4" and a hide as a "zero" or, by analogy, a "donut" (or "doughnut"). Hides used to be called 'troll-rate', and some people still use the old language.

Here is how I find my peace with what occurred in 2009/10.

I rec everything I read (0+ / 0-)



it has been my style for 3 years here.


I am not changing it for you.


To find out about me: http://braincrampsforgod.blogspot.com/2009/09/about-me.html
by JCHFleetguy on Sun Oct 11, 2009 at 09:48:01 AM PST

If you search for "snafubar" in "users" on StreetProphets, it will lead you to a page that allows you to view every comment I ever posted at that site since some time in 2007. You may search, one by one, and you will not find once in two and a half years where anyone "hide/troll" rated a single comment.

not one.

So if you leave a mark that say "Thumbs up" - it means "i approve this message." That is the universal standard, and the ostensible reason that the blog designers put it there.

Not John Howard - nope. Fleetguy says he rec's everything that he reads, just to show he read it. And he's not changing it for me .

____________________________


Two guys driving in a car, driver sails right through a red light. Passenger screams - "what are you doing?

Driver says, "relax, my brother drives like this"

come to another red light, driver sails right through - -

Passenger is panicking - "What the hell are you doing?"

Driver waves him off, "will you relax, my brother drives like this, always"

they drive and encounter a green light; driver slams on the brakes and stops.

Passenger has turned white, "What the hell are you doing?"

driver says, "Well, my brother might be comin the other way"

____________________________________________________



SO if there is a social convention that everyone uses and everyone accepts that certain gestures have certain meanings, JCH Fleetguy - John Howard or Howell or whatever his name is -

he's going to do it his way, and he's not stopping for any one - not me in the least.

Good to know.

A day in the shrink tank

I have a record. I've been "hospitalized". I can't tell the whole story in one post, I'll try to put something chronological together eventually (with your help). But I was just laid off in 2002, my father was "surviving" throat cancer after having most of his mouth cut up/cut out and invited me to live with him. He was also drinking himself to death, and I was like the boy who cried wolf.

See Dad somehow thought no one could tell that he was drinking, even though after two years I learned a few things about how a man who can't swallow a teaspoon of water (because he no longer had a tongue after the surgeon cut most of it out) can drink 8 ounces of straight gin or vodka in about three minutes - by pouring it straight into his stomach through his feeding tube. (ask me to tell you how to achieve a blood alcohol content of about 0.50 and live to do it again)

Yes, I said 0.50 - that's over six times what will get you arrested for DUI. And it's more than what will kill most people.

And it was a routine to see my dad, all six feet, 200 pounds of him, collapsed on the kitchen floor in his underwear for two or three days at a time, twitching periodically like he was being tasered.

That will wear on your conscience. And so one night I drove to the local hospital and asked if I coudl get someone to come look at my dad and maybe get some help for him. The attending ER doctor said, "how are you doing? Do you have suicidal thoughts?".

I said, "Doc, I've had suicidal thoughts since I was 17. Since I (was then) 37, that's a twenty year unbroken record of handling it successfully to be standing here talking to you."

The little brown indian motherfucker in the white coat (call me a racist if you wish, but wait until you hear the rest of this story before you start the march on my house) wrote on his little form, "Patient has suicidal thoughts" and said, "I can hold you for a minimum of 72 hours".

I said, (angrily) "What you wrote down is not what I said."

He said, with an aloof and arrogant indifference that removed any pretence of "care" in the phrase "mental health care" "If you are not cooperative, It will be recorded as combative behavior and the 72 hour minimum can be extended to 30 days.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a way of training people who react poorly in certain circumstances to recognize the triggers and signs that lead them to a particular response, then convince and train them to deliberately choose to behave differently. I have a problem with this in that in a purist sense, that attitude of reacting is in direct conflict with one of the other models of success in our society which is commonly given almost a cheer: “Be proactive!”. Being proactive is the crusade of the business community that tells one to anticipate and predict future conditions and have something prepared to deal with them even before they occur. Therefore it is not a “stimulus-response” situation, but an “awareness-planning-avoidance” model.

But I want to explain how in many circumstances the group of people in the pro-active community are shifting responsibility to the reactive community, and if the reactive community were to become pro-active in response there are often significant ________ (bad) results.

Let’s take foul language. Profanity. I tend to throw out a lot of profane words in casual speech, but I don’t’ do it as filler. There are those who can spit out the word “motherfucker” as if it were just another adjective like “green” and an adverb like “shaky” and actually insert it in-between syllables of other polysyllabic words. It’s almost an art form to those who work at it; it’s a sign of slow thought with an attitude to those who simply replace “um” with “fuckin” to give themselves more time to think of what word comes next.

Then there is anger and intent. Buddy Hacket once said that certain words have specific places where only those words are expected to be used. “if you drop an anvil on your foot, you do not say, “Spring is here! I dropped an anvil on my foot!”, you rightfully say, “Fuck! I dropped a fucking anvil on my fucking foot and it fucking hurts!” He continued that in such circumstances, even the one who isnt’ feeling the pain recognize the place for that word; When the Doctor orders the x-ray he says, “we must see if the bones of the fucking foot are broken. And the x-ray technician will report back with the results that “yes, Doctor, the fucking foot is broken”.

I believe I am in the anvil/foot category. When you start hearing the colorful language flying fast and loose off my tongue, it means there is a level of intensity in what I am trying to communicate that is not present when I leave those words out. In an interview George Carlin gave before his first HBO special, he said he could suspend the use of profanity in a six-minute monologue for Johnny Carson, but he would not want to have to suspend it for a two hour comedy show. He said, “I believe I would lose a lot of important emphases”

And therein lies the problem, which was the whole point Carlin tried to make for thirty years; Someone is trying to tell you something when they are profane. Some people are not, and I must admit that some of the people I worked with in the construction industry simply use “fuck” in place of the word “um” to give themselves an extra half-second to come up with their next word or idea. I concede that such usage does indeed dilute the emphasis for those who are trying to tell you something.

HABITUATION

But some people have built a space where they can be completely insulated from things they don’t want to deal with and people like me who lace our words with profanity. Let’s imagine we are at Wal-Mart and the store is crowded. There are two or more people with shopping carts in front of you jabbering away in the middle of some conversation and they are behaving as if they are alone in the store, when in fact they are blocking the aisle you are trying to pass through. You bring the cart up to an uncomfortable distance to them, and wait silently. This is your first attempt to communicate by invading their personal space, but they are unaware of you so far. Then you clear your throat to give your first verbal cue that you would like their attention. Still you are invisible to them. Then you say, “Excuse me” in a conversational tone as your third effort to be noticed. And still the aisle remains blocked by these exceptionally insulated people.

Finally, you raise your voice loud enough to be heard above not only their conversation but by passers by. “EXCUSE ME, PLEASE!” Now you’ve got everyone’s attention, but in a hostile way,

“Hey, Buddy, there’s no reason to be rude! Geez. Some people have no patience…”

Now there was no opportunity for me to politely make it through that aisle not because of my behavior, but because the situation was structured so that communication went directly from too subtle to be noticed to so intense to be offensive. Is that because I did not try to communicate in a measured and reasonable tone, or the opportunity for communication at that level simply was not available because the recipients did not acknowledge any signals at that level?

Profanity is the same way. I can speak to my mother about a subject that may be uncomfortable to the two of us in polite tones, and I feel as if I’m not getting through. I’m not getting the reaction I’m hoping for: some acknowledgement that my problem is real, that my mother plays a part in it by not acknowledging it, and that there needs to be a change in the situation for me to feel better about it.  At polite conversational levels I can be safely ignored or belittled by saying, “oh, Joe, that’s nothing to get worked up over, now be reasonable”.

At some point, being ignored becomes uncomfortable to me. I don’t think I’m alone in this area, most people have a tolerance and a limit to it. But I have found that like in the Wal-Mart situation, the moment I raise my tone of voice, the resistance begins. Suddenly my mother is not comfortable with someone raising his voice to her, and she displays more insulation to the idea, not less. The impression that I am now being deliberately shunned, not just that someone is not yet aware I am serious, now triggers my next response – anger – and the profanity starts to unload.

Now my mother moves directly to stage three, which is indignance to my anger. “Well, I’m not going to let anyone talk to me in that language”, and she has effectively built a model where anything she does not want to talk about actually has no opportunity to ever be discussed. At low conversational tones it can be safely ignored until my anger builds, then when my anger is triggered she sends some signal that she knows about the problem but is not willing to acknowledge it  until my profanity begins, and now I have crossed a line that she feels eliminates the possibility for all conversation about anything.

Now Cognitive Behavioral Therapy tells me that if I am so astute as to be aware of these three predictable stages that I can temper my behavior and get through the situation by simply not allowing myself to lose my temper and unleash the profanity. If I am  not profane, my mother can never give the excuse that it was my language that made the conversation impossible and therefore…

Well, the brilliant therapist is asking me to be his experimental group. And I can tell you that there are certain situations where people in particular situations (your boss, your mother, a total stranger) have every right to simply change the rules once you figure them out and give some other reason why they still win.

So the cognitive behavioral therapy gives me a tool to deal with situation A and when I return to the original conditions the other party only needs to shift their power, authority, or positional influence to create a new situation “B” that forces me to into a different (but just as effective) space where there is no opportunity for resolution.

Now at this point the therapist says that I am simply being argumentative and resistant to his or her solutions. But the point I am making is that just as they see me as dodging their solutions, I see them as dodging my problem – I’m still reacting to other people. And people are always free to ignore the rules, change the rules, or to just be an asshole and shut this thing called communication down because they would rather avoid the topic altogether, so they just do..

And in the end, there I sit…the “reactive” one… 

If "reason" is your enemy, then you better believe I am too.

What do you say to this?

Is the church, or the members thereof, actually willing to argue and be proud that to have faith, it must supplant reason?

These kinds of statements, arguments, positions are the reasons I have grown to despise faith - even the "polite" kind that isn't attacking me. Because the polite kind, the kind that wants to have it's views without condemning or arguing with mine, still acts as a segment in the pole holding up the tent that covers the rest of the genuinely "are you fucking kidding me?" crazy faith - the kind that says kill your kid with your bare hands if you think the "devil" is inside him.

Every argument, religious or otherwise, involves reason.

Want proof?

Even the most "faithful" of believers uses "reason" in their every instantaneous movement, decision, and intention. People don't put their hand on a stove they know is hot because reason tells them (maybe from experience) that there would be REAL consequences to ignoring what they know about hot stoves and how badly human skin reacts to that kind of heat.


I got into a fight - online, mind you, but if I were standing next to him in person his ears would have been ringing from the volume of my shouting - with a guy who DENIED - just flat out waved his dick in the air and DENIED that any atheist does not have faith.

I stand in living proof that the asshole is gaping, hairy, and WRONG. I do not have faith, I have REASON.

So this dumb bastard just kept arguing with me. (there's a larger point I must save for another discussion about blaming someone who is getting more angry as you proceed; he acknowledges you are getting angry, He acknowledges that he knows he is the reason the other is getting angry, that person plods forward - either oblivious or belligerent - and just says he has untrammelled freedom to say whatever he wants to say....who then you throws up a red flag and decries that the OTHER GUY (the angry one) - well, his reactions must have limits.

Got that? You can say whatever you want; but if the other guy is angry, and targeting you - he has limits. I wonder if that person would see a bear at the zoo, beneath a sign that says "do not feed the bear"; tear the sign down, feed the bear, and then blame the bear for mauling the dumb bastard who gave him a slice of his pizza and lost and arm for his generosity.

That's reason - to know enough that a bear will eat you, you don't give the bear the chance -

...faith is that in an argument, you have "faith" that the law will protect you even when the other guy is pointing a gun at you and screaming for you to shut the fuck up, you keep yammering....and then your relatives want the cops and the courts to clean it all up and punish the other guy ex post facto.

Would it not be more "reasonable" to say, "Hmm, this conversation is not going anywhere productive, the other guy doesn't look healthy or restrained, I probably ought not to feed that particular bear".

Faith says carry on, you will be protected.

Now there's another argument that I'm basically claiming hostile tactics must be respected, and I'm not. Shooting someone who says something you don't like is unwarranted. Punching him in the face is not even allowed; after all their just words.

But at some point, when you hold up your hand and say "this argument is not healthy, let's stop", and the other guy thinks it's great to have this kind of tension out in the open - says it's "healthy" for the community for these kinds of things to be aired out -

I call bullshit, and I'm using reason as my basis.

Having the law punish someone for an illegal act after it's too late to repair the damage the conflict inspired is dumb. Unless you believe that it serves some greater purpose, perhaps the will of some god, in which case the reasonable person should still rightly call you galactically and shamelessly stupid.

Humans have big brains and opposible thumbs. These two characteristics are supposed to set us apart (and above, we claim) the other animals on the planet. But whenever we, collectively or individually, make such stupid decisions in the light of our capacity to reason - like war and economic collapse - what basis are we using at that point to claim we're better than all the "lesser" animals?

We were smart enough to see the problem coming.

We had the means to stop it,

but our ego, our hubris, or grossly unjustifiable overconfidence in our own noble justifications (in the light of all the ignoble ones) allowed us to fuck up just as bad as the dumb "lesser" animals who never had any chance to make the right decision.

We did - do.

We make those choices based on a body of logic, casually referred to as "reason".

If that's your enemy,

I'm building a fence between you and me, and I'm going to bean anything that comes over the top with a big, sharp rock at the very least.

If reason is your enemy,

then so am I.

and I do not, will not,

ever

apologize for your duplicity.

Gaping Asshole said that it was faith that I used, as an atheist, in order to convince myself it was OK to drive across a bridge.

I said it was reason that gave me confidence to drive across the bridge because I understood the underlying mechanics that made the voyage possible.

I argued that "faith" - the believe that there are unseen forces at work, and those unseen forces will act in ways that are impossible to imagine or explain - if I felt "faith" would get me to the other side no matter what,

...then I should not even need a bridge, should I?

Faith says that (whatever it might be that I would have faith in) will get me to the other side of that chasm with or without a bridge.

Confidence, I argued, that is based on reason, is what allows me to proceed across the bridge; I understand many of the fundamental laws of physics, enough of the laws of engineering and mechanics, enough of the principles and practices of modern construction to know that the bridges I traverse will support me and whatever else is on it.

On those days I don't (I can show you that bridge) I don't drive across the fucking thing, because I don't have FAITH that will save me when the goddamn bridge fails. (the limit on the bridge says 12 tons; it's the main road on the way to a coal-fired power plant that someone I know used to work at; I saw the log books and the trucks that cross that bridge weighed over 30 tons loaded, and they were NOT the only thing on that bridge.

So I used "reason" to say that the extra five miles to go around that bridge were worth my time and fuel, faith was not involved in the process.

And said dickhead, his name was John C. Howell of Beaverton Oregon, with a smile on his face and claiming that such arguments were healthy for the entire community that was there to watch it, kept on insisting that all atheists have faith.

And nobody could understand why I got pissed.

I don't have faith.

I have REASON, and REASON gives me 'confidence'.

John said they were synonymous and interchangeable.

I present to you the above photo, which proves that I'm not the only one who thinks they are not the same, and the others who agree with me are not always atheists.

Religious people have as much contempt for logic and reason as they insist that I do for their faith. They take for granted that everyone else will treat them according to social customs and legal precedent, many (most) of which are not based on superstition or conjecture, but on reasoned arguments presented in an open society and only agreed upon after it is found to be acceptable to as many of the crowd that can be called on to support it.

We suspend "reason" when there is no explanation - and we supplant it with "well, 'G'od must have had one (he always does, I am told) even if 'H'e never explains it to us"

And that gives me no comfort what so fucking ever.

That it gives others comfort is great, I won't take their faith away from them, as long as their faith or their support thereof is not being used to take my comfort - reason, logic, and healthy skepticism - away from me.

And this seems to have some bearing on the conflicts of our age; all ages in fact, and not just the conflicts unique to me.

You want to go through life with your thumb to your nose in the face of reason? Feel free. But the First Amendment says I can't take it away from you, it does not say I have to support you, encourage you, or in any conflict or exchange, if the faithful chooses to pit their faith against my reason, nobody is going to argue with me (and expect to win) by saying the First Amendment protects their faith, but not my reason.

Particularly if these hypocritical louts are going to start insisting that atheism is a religion. I think they bit themselves in the ass on that one - because if "atheism" is a "religion", then would atheists not also deserve all the rights and privileges of all the religions who want to blame atheist as the root of all evil?

Ooops.

Listen - read - I dont' care what you believe in. But in a symbiotic society where we must interact, engage, and even at times depend on one another, there has to be a mutual agreement of respect.

Religious people say atheists are disrespectful of their faith; I typically respond that all atheists can not be held responsible for the actions of a few - for if that were true, I've got some Christians who they had better answer for and fast -

but the larger point is that to hold up faith as not just an alternative to reason, but a better one - a preferred one - is such rank hypocrisy that I will not tolerate it. Faithful people are far more dependent on reason than I am on faith. In fact, you try to show a faithful person what it looks like when reason is abandoned -

like me saying "I dont' give a fuck about your religion, you're a liar, a fool, and I'm not going to let you destroy my country" - well, they don't like that.

But they will then turn around and say the same thing to me as an atheist.

I find that unreasonable.

and I do not stand for it.

So if you see me, as an atheist, getting rather animated, loud, and arguably hostile in the face of some devoutly faithful people,

please don't try to argue that you always know the atheist started it; or at least dont' fall back on the First Amendment argument when there are so many Christians making the accusation that atheism is a religion as a perjorative statement. If it casts aspersions for atheism to be regarded like a religion, then why?

Is it because they think atheists make claims that they find unreasonable, and they use reason in the argument to make their point?

Checkmate.

“I don’t need to wear a seat belt. I have an airbag.”

“I don’t need to wear a seat belt - I have an airbag.” I was involved in a T-bone collision with a full size pickup truck. I had the brakes applied, anti-lock was working on dry pavement and had brought it down from 40 to about 15 miles per hour, while driving a 1998 Saturn SL-1. My girlfriend at the time was in the passenger seat; her 3 year old son was in a car seat in the back. All three of us wore seatbelts. We all walked away with minor injuries.

My injury was to the wrist as somehow the airbag deployment snapped it backwards and stretched my tendons. My girlfriend saw the impending collision and turned to see her son in the back seat, so when the airbag deployed, the airbag bounced her heat into the A-pillar of the car and she had a minor concussion. The child in the back seat bit his lip, as the type of car seat he had consisted of a padded bar that went across his lap, with no shoulder belt.

But we all walked away under our own power. The kid was giggling and asking to “ride again”.

When we went to the body shop to retrieve personal effects from our car, we took pictures of our car for archival purposes. The receptionist at the body shop gave the photo below of another car in the lot near mine. There are a few things of particular importance to me:

This is a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse, (Go ahead, ask me how I know) and since the photo was taken late in 1999, it’s obvious this car didn’t survive more than a few months in the hands of it’s owner before it was wrecked. It appears to be a sideways glance into a guard rail or other vehicle, indicating loss of control for one or another reason. Now look at the windshield. Notice the characteristic starburst where a human head makes contact with laminated safety glass. Auto glass is actually two plates of glass formed under vacuum and high temperature with a plastic film between them. This obviously can’t keep the glass from shattering, but it does help all those little pieces from flying so freely as they normally would.

But the airbag can clearly be seen as the white mound on top of the dashboard. It is clear that whoever thought the airbag would substitute for a seatbelt found out by experiment that the inertia of a human body will vault it right over the airbag until that body finds some other force strong enough to stop it. The only real question I wish I could ask of the occupant of that seat is if they wear a seatbelt now.

There is another image that I carry only in my mind, as I had no camera at the time. But twenty years later it is still vivid. A friend I met my sophomore year in college was involved in a collision and we made a similar trip to a junkyard to take the stereo out of her car. Next to it in the junkyard was a full-size Chevrolet van, vintage 1980. A similar starburst was visible in the passenger-side windshield, of course minus any evidence of an airbag as there were none available in vans of that era. But what I can’t erase from my mind is the shape of the web of cracks: there were two centers where the radial cracks started and spread outward, one larger than the other in the center of the left side of the windshield, and a smaller radial set of cracks just below it and a bit towards the outside of the van.

If you don’t have the same mental image now that I have, what I see is a small child in the lap of an adult, the adult so convinced that he or she could protect the child from harm just by holding it, both being thrown head-first into the glass when the adult was proven wrong. I don’t want to know the truth about that particular collision because I choose to believe that somehow the child survived. Typically in such cases the adult does live, since their impact with the dash and the windshield was ‘cushioned’ by the softer child in front of them, and of course the child’s impact is compounded by having the additional force of an adult that weighs five to ten times as much as they do forcing them into the dashboard and windshield. It is images like this that fill me with rage when I see children in other cars who are not buckled into safety seats or even wearing a seat belt at all.

There is another pathetic footnote to this story. The child in my car was not mine; he belonged to my girlfriend and after a nice Christmas celebration we were driving him back to his father’s house. His father was mentally retarded and lived with his parents and two brothers who were also affected. They arrived at the hospital in their own car while we were being transported by ambulance, and two things happened that day which also make me cringe with disbelief whenever I recall them.

There is always so much mayhem and confusion in an emergency room, at least from the patient’s point of view. Add to that a family of people who are less than remarkable themselves, and it adds considerably to the hysteria. The child only had a small cut to his lower lip and was still in good spirits as he still thought all the excitement still must be some sort of celebration. But his father and his two brothers were all milling around telling stories and his parents (the grandparents of the boy) were quiet but confused. The nurses brought a clipboard of papers into the emergency room, asked who was responsible for the child, and the father raised his hand. The nurse told him where to sign in about seven places and he lazily scribbled his name where instructed, and then picked up the child and told everyone it was time to go home, which they did.

Now I was told this is what happened by a nurse, because I was with my girlfriend who had been taken for skull X-rays. Imagine our shock when we returned to the ER and we were met by half a dozen panicked nurses who were asking us where the child was. We said we didn’t know, but placed a call to the father’s house and of course that’s where everyone was. When we told the grandmother that all of those papers the father had signed were not a release form but granting permission for the doctors to examine the child – which none ever had – and that he needed to bring the child immediately back to the hospital, she said, “Oh, he’s fine. We’re staying right here.” I went to the house and took the child back to the hospital later that night, with everyone at the father’s house oblivious to the legal implications of what they had done and still berating me it was a waste of my time.

Now keep that thought in the back of your head for later.

That’s not the worst part of this story. The boy’s car seat was obviously still in my car, which was somewhere on it’s way to or already at the body shop at that point. But despite the fact that the father normally had custody of the child (both legally and physically) they had two cars but only one child seat. And of course on that day the car they took to the hospital was not the one with the child seat in it. You’ve figured this out now, I’m sure: only two hours after being in a car accident, the same child who survived a collision because he was buckled into a safety seat was taken home from the hospital in a car without a car seat and not wearing a seat belt. How do I know he wasn’t even wearing a seat belt? Because his father had jammed quarters into the seat belt buckles to keep that light on the dashboard from coming on and that buzzer from annoying them when they drive.

Do you still want to tell me that I’m not supposed to get upset about things like this?

An optimist? Therein lies no hope, they are dreaming

"

an optimist is one who believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is one who fears that this is probably true.

- J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan project that brought the world, for better or worse, nuclear weapons.

watching "Se7en"

‎"...anyone who spends a significant amount of time with me finds me disagreeable"

- Morgan Freeman as Detective William Summerset: "SE7EN"

That movie is way far deeper than most people want to investigate; they all see the shock value and horror of what Kevin Spacey's character did - and yet look around you; what that Character said is irrefutably our current condition:
...
http://youtu.be/v4NcuPb4wmA

"it's more comfortable for you to label me insane"

Pick it up at 2:15

"...but that's the point. We see a deadly sin on every streetcorner, on every home, and we tolerate it"

well, a lot of people feign outrage over it, but what they're really doing is just reassigning blame. All the sanctimonious, falsely pious, indignant scolds in this country are quite fine with leaving all that goes wrong in this country to unfold on it's own; they make a career out of their outrage after the fact, to screaming that they are the defenders of "justice" to punish someone after it's all over -

...ask those same people to deal with the underlying structural and sociological factors that contribute to all the madness we see, and you'll find them screaming about socialism, inventing more demogogues, but never a penny or an ounce of effort to affect the madness before the next headline.

Case in point - I'm almost banking on somenoe to call the local cops in my town or the hospital and tell them Joe is talking about deep things; he mentioned a movie with a fatalistic plot, Joe must be up to something - (it's happened before). Take that same person that wants me to change my thinking and cheer up, lighten up, be happy, don't worry and try to have a substantive discussion about what is the reality of our headlines in this day, and they'll say there's nothing they can do.

And so it goes.

Five years is a long time to be in the company of "friends" to find out...

that nobody really is.

It's deeper than that -

when someone says to me

"Well because you have these particular views (which they completely misunderstood) that's all I need to know about you"

Then the other chimes in

"Well now we know the real you"

Both of these people are far more destructive to a communal society than I could ever be - even if I were to go out of my way to live up to all this monstrosity that they are sure belongs to me.

I can't put this together; I get so caught up in the surreal conflict of being accused of something my accusers are far better examples of that I can't let go of the anger.

At the same time, a "friend" says this to me - a guy who I did think I had a unique relationship with -

"All you want to do is argue"

Um - can I get an objective voice in here? - It takes two to argue; any time someone wants to end the argument it's simple - concede and let the other guy win. Otherwise, whoever is still contesting an issue has just as much desire to 'argue' than the other person.

Someone pulled this on me a few years ago; a dentist who refused to give me copies of my dental records (who would only release them to a dentist). That's a violation of the law; I printed out the law and provided links to the state and federal government websites where the law is posted and still there had to be a big production. At the actual face-to-face meeting where the records were being surrendered, the representative from the dentist's office says to me

"Well, I'm not going to argue with you"

Hey, I don't want to call you stupid - but you're too late. You're already arguing with me, and you can end the argument simply by obeying the law and I'll be all smiles as I leave the office with what is my legal property and right.

But for the love of anything lovable,

not for Christ's sake but ours - as mortal beings who have to share a planet whether we can see Christ or not -

don't tell someone you "are not going to argue with them" while you're standing there arguing.

If what you actually mean is "I'm going to pull rank, use my authority, or just be a stalwart bump on a log and stand here and pout while you try to tell me that's not allowed" - go ahead and say that, but you might want to check the brutal clarity of a mirror before you tell anyone that you're

"not going to argue with them"

It's petulant, it's petty, and it makes you look silly (unless you really do have the authority and power to end the argument on your terms)

Either way,

perhaps all the parties who'm I've severed ties with, or who severed ties with me, can have the intellectual integrity to look at whatever they think is an objective adjudicator in the universe and tell all of us and answer for me:

If you are a student in school, does it get you a passing grade to tell your teacher "I understand plenty. The answer to the question is XXXXXX" - which is the wrong answer?

If you are being handed a traffic ticket by a law officer, can you get him to drop the charges by saying "I understand plenty"?

Can you go into any situation, given any number of people, given any amount of time you've known one or all of them and say, "Well, based on what you've said in the last five minutes, now we know the 'REAL' you" -

...and in either or all of these scenarios think that really does put a lid on the matter and settle the issue?

Let me know, because I'm confused.

If anyone knows me so well that I don't even need to be party to the conversation (or am excluded from it)

then what am I needed for at all?

And if that drives me to spend time in isolation pondering where in thsi world I fit in, so that the answer arrives in the form of "You don't; get over it" - every one of the people who went out of their way to make goddamn sure I did not fit in

can just shut the fuck up

if that puts the idea of suicide into my head

It's fascinating how people want to drive home the idea that they are right and I am wrong with a 16 pound sledgehammer to my face, but if I take it seriously and take it to heart and that somehow gives me the feeling that this planet doesn't want me

that doesn't get these people off the hook who spent so much energy and grabbed my ears so that they could be god damn sure I heard them when they told me what a piece of shit I am

It's fascinating

these people want to shout as loud as they like

in a canyon full of loose rocks

knowing the canyon is full of loose rocks that are unstable

(that's what they're ranting about)

and after they scream and shout and make goddamn sure the rocks heard them at all the volume they can manage

they blame the rocks for falling in the avalanche.

You have free speech to say whatever the fuck your little heart feels like saying

PROVIDED

that you have the courage, the integrity, and the honesty that when you ring the bell because you have the right to ring the bell

you can't un-ring the bell.

Have some courage, people. Your free speech is indeed not free; not because someone fought and died for you to have it, but because you now own all the echoes, feedback and consequences of whatever it is you want the world to know.

You can tell us how you feel

you cannot tell us how

or have much control over

how we react to it

if this be the case

where's the freedom for anybody else?