In A World Gone Upside Down...

Hey their, kids! Enigma's got two brilliant pieces of work for you today, so just set back and enjoy the commentary and dissection of the incoming stupidity.

Answering Ayn Rand

Well kiddos, today is Saturday, which means that ol' Enigma has another college-level dissertation lined up for you. Today's bull's-eye is painted in bright red around an ideology that everyone loves to mock - including yours truly - but not one I'm sure everyone understands.

That's right - today I'll be answering Ayn Rand, and criticizing and deconstructing her philosophy, called Objectivism. Objectivism and Rand's philosophy are sorely misunderstood on the Internet. Everyone loves to mock the Randroids, but not everyone understands what it means to be one. While I've savored taking apart fundamentalism in the past, religious fundamentalism - especially the American Protestant Evangelical version - is not nearly as well thought out or planned as Rand's is.

Make no mistake. Rand's philosophy sits squarely with the rest of the Enlightened philosophies, which is why I chose to answer her today. Rather than the usual Enlightenment verses Romanticism theme or Enlightenment verses Postmodernism, today you get a ringside seat to Enlightenment verses Enlightenment.

Don't Call It a Recession - We've Been Here All Along

Optimism is down.

Last month, in the middle of the debt ceiling brouhaha, some canny trader got word from inside of Washington that the debt deal was not going to be all it was cracked up to be and, with a 10-to-1 return ratio slapped down a 1 billion $U.S. bet - against the credit rating of the United States. Shame nobody knows who it is, because they slapped all the money down on the futures market, when nobody was looking.

Oh, yes, the credit rating.

For the first time in the history of credit ratings, the United States has lost it's AAA credit rating. As of Friday, August 5, the Standard & Poor's downgraded the perfect credit rating of U.S. Treasury Bonds from AAA to AA+.

FOX and the Right are antiwoman (pt 233401221)

This one comes to me courtesy of Ed Brayton's blog; Dispatches. You can find the link to his blog on the side of mine; you might have to scroll down a bit, but it's there. Anyway, this particular news story that he posted about just blew me away, and I couldn't help but comment in on it myself.

Yes, I'm claiming that it blew me away. The guy who's capable of dealing with the Free Republic, and all the moral sewage and debris present therein, without missing a beat. This caused me to stand up and take notice. This article deals with the recent announcement that the Obama administration - finally doing something useful - would stand up and force insurance companies to cover birth control and other women's health services without charging co-pay. Now, this was a huge victory, and the left has been lacking those a lot lately.

So, being the important victory it is, it goes without doubt that FOX, the right-wing noise machine it is, would go apoplectic over it. They'd go apeshit - because going apeshit while being batshit is what the Right Wing does best. But really, the 'expert' by the name of Sandy Rios, that they dredged from the lowest rung of moral development made a statement that blew even me away. It won't matter if you've got your moral-hazard gear on or not. This one is like handling raw, charged Meitnerium. No amount of protection will save you, so it's best just to immerse yourself quickly and then get the hell out.

Let Me Take A Look In My Crystal Ball...

Ah, yes. The future. That wonderful time that I'm sure will be pleasant. Eventually. However, it seems to me that there is a very vocal segment of the American population that doesn't want a future. And these people have gotten into power, and they're making policies in a not-so-veiled and not-really-well-though-out attempt to stop it. So, following the whole economic crisis we had this past weekend, I've been prompted to take a step back and look at the direction we're heading. Keep in mind, some of this stuff I've been predicting now since the early part of the century (2004/6 at least.) I predicted the rise of something similar to the Tea Party. I know it has no bearing now, because I have no proof, but let met make a similar set of predictions/promises based on what's happening now. Let me look into my crystal ball at the future, and show you what I see. And trust me. It's not pleasant.

Real True Men (TM)

Ah yes, so we're back to this again. I've taken down this kind of language before, but because I'm a glutton for punishment (and because, like a goddamn weed, it won't go the hell away), I'm right back to weeding the intellectual garden again.

So, here's the deal: Mike Adams defends bullies and thinks bullying is a-okay. It's cool to bully kids, because our men are little wimps today who need to be bullied. It builds character, it makes you stronger person. All this business about psychological scars and stuff is just a bunch of liberal lies designed to make the bullies feel bad about bullying their victims. It's that nanny state garbage... or something. When you say something useful, then you get quoted right. Anyway, Adams wrote this article on the Townhall; I will not be linking you, because I don't want to give them the traffic. Rather, I'll post his article here and take it apart, point for point, like I've done so many in the past. So, get into your moral hazard gear, because here we go...

Hey, This is What We Americans Call "Compromise."

Hahaha we are so boned.

That is all.

Pardon Me While My Anti-Americanism Shows

There's something deliciously comical about the whole debt-ceiling debacle. It's like watching a puppet master who's two sizes smaller than the puppet he's controlling hold an entire nation at gunpoint by putting  gun to his own head.

This is what happens when you perpetuate lies. This is what happens when you abandon anything remotely resembling reason to a small and vocal ~20-25% of the population who better serve society locked away in an mental asylum than electing leaders. Somehow, this small, 20-25% of the population managed to get their hands in situation far, far larger than anything they could ever wrap their childish, n00bish heads around. Boehner has somehow become the adult, and he's trying corral a group of smug, self-righteous children who believe that they're right and are utterly impervious to little things like "truth" and "reality."

Welcome to the Liberal Freak Show: The Intolerant of Intolerance Edition

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever

The liberal freak show is coming after Michele Bachmann. That is not much of a surprise. Bachmann is running a very disciplined campaign, encouraging conservatives and running with a conservative agenda. But now the left is coming after her.

These words sum up the basic motivation of the right anymore: blame someone else. It's always someone else's fault. You can't be an adult and own up for what you said without playing that victim card so hard it knocks a hole in the table.

Apparently, Michele Bachmann should be beyond criticism, because she's "running a very disciplined campaign, encouraging conservatives and running with a conservative agenda." And because of that, the left is coming after her. You know, those mean nasty bullies on the left: the ones who won't let us enforce our religion on people. That left. The ones who won't let us cram our stupid faith in people's face every second of every day. Who want to force us to not force others to worship our Sky Daddy. That left.

We traded advancement for what again?

I think this says it all, really.

I look at that chart and I laugh, but that's only because if I don't, I'll cry. It's true. It's so true. It's a 100 pound iron bat of truth, and even that isn't enough to get through the thick skulls of today's so-stupid-how-do-you-remember-to-breathe conservative(tm).

Sometimes I wish we could just load all of the republicans on a boat, ship them out to sea, and torpedo it. But that'd be polluting the oceans, and as a liberal, I can't stand by that. I've gotta be a tree-hugger. It was in the EULA when I signed on to the Liberal Agenda. And you don't even want to know what was in the EULA when I signed on for the Homosexual Agenda. It was fabulous. 

At the Interesection of Substance Abuse Blvd., Depression Ave., and Skid Row

This is one of my favorite songs. Listen to this song, and read the post, and think about how the two relate. The ways in which they do can be surprising.

Anyway, the post.

I've often wondered what the impact of being mentally ill has on your place in society. I'm depressed; or, rather, I'm treated but depressed, and I have ADHD. In my particular case, possessing ADHD is the reason why I'm depressed; they were fortunate enough to figure that out, even though I was an adult at the time, and treat the ADHD. Treat the ADHD, free from the depression and the anxieties that go along with it - the social phobia, being scared of dealing with people because you're afraid you'll drag them down and they won't be able to have fun, constantly worrying about whether every little thing you do is going to make you look selfish when really all you want is to just be happy, like everyone else.

There's no doubt it has a huge impact on your economic prospects. If you're depressed, you can't work as hard as you need too. If you've got ADHD, you can kiss staying organized good bye. You lose things, you miss important parts of directions even thought you were damn sure you were listening, and you're at a higher risk of being in an auto accident by sheer virtue of being the way you are (I can vouch. I got in a car accident because of my inability to pay attention. I was terrified of driving for a long time after that). If you can't keep up with these things, what's that mean for your job? It means you get fired, if they even bother hiring you to begin with. If you tell someone you're mentally ill, you become something like a pariah, providing they even believe you and don't think it's you just making an excuse.

Oh, I've gotten that. It's an excuse. You need more discipline. You need to focus harder. Push harder, try this and that. About the only thing I didn't try was narcotics, and even that's only half true - one form of self-medication for me was soda. Specifically, the caffeine in it. When you have ADHD, you're wired backwards. Your brain chemistry is nine kinds of messed up, and in my case, drinking caffeinated things wound me down, it didn't speed me up. I understand it's like that for a lot of individuals with ADHD. Even though I'm being treated, I'm still a bit of caffeine fiend, but it doesn't have any result for me, so it's like drinking water (I don't speed up, I don't slow down. The balls are inert; Shenlong checked out a long time ago).

This actually brings me the next intersection, and the intersection I wanted to discuss for a while. This street is called "substance abuse." Like I said - I tired everything with my ADHD/Depression/Anxiety - except substance abuse (and again, if you want to qualify caffeine as a substance, I readily admit I abuse it, so that's not true, either). Mentally ill people are very prone to substance abuse. If you don't have legitimate medication to help (and even then, that won't work for some people), using alcohol to numb those feelings of depression, or ADHD, or Bipolar, or whatever, is very, very tempting. Using heavier narcotics has different effects on your brain chemistry - obviously your brain chemistry is already screwed over, so what's it hurt? In a lot of ways, these drugs stimulate neurotransmitters that aren't fully working, so for some people, I can actually make them feel normal.

Alternative IDiocity

Before I get into this post, let me lay the blame for all these problems squarely at the feet of post-modernism and romanticism. Post-modernism is theory that should've stayed in literature and isn't no more at home in the real world than Freudian criticism is. Post-modernism, and it's ancestor, Romanticism, both posit a very natural view of the world, a very cynical view of the world, and a belief that progress and pursuit of knowledge for it's own sake is somehow a bad thing. Post-modernism takes this a step further, stating that nothing is objective (not even gravity, apparently) and that reality is nothing more than a deck to be shuffled how we want to. I don't know about you, but I can't shuffle the deck so that I can fly, so someone's got their head screwed up their ass, and it's not me. The first half of this blog's name comes from my disdain for post-modernism and it's prevalence in our world; the opposite of post-modernism is modernism, which has it's roots (loosely) in the Enlightenment, which was diametrically opposed to romanticism. Or, perhaps, that's backwards - the Enlightenment came first, and the romantic garbage dredged itself up from the gutter sometime in the 1800s. Romanticism has always been more popular in the United States than Enlightenment was, despite the fact that we're a country built on Enlightened principles (democracy, secular humanism, a deistic and ceremonial god, human rights - romanticism gave us none of these.) The second half of this blog's name comes from the fact that I side squarely on the enlightenment: one might say that it's one man's trials to remain Enlightened in a sea of post-modern sewage.

But how is romanticism and post-modernism thinking more popular than Enlightened thinking? Well, it's because Enlightened thinking is hard. It requires work. It requires skepticism, knowledge of logic and logical axioms and, well, actually living in the world we live in. How can be so sure? Take a look at all of the crackpot theories we have today poisoning the market of ideas: Alternative Enicidem (medicine backwards for those slow on the pickup - I write it backwards because the Alties have it backwards) shares it with Creationism, Intelligent Design, 9/11 Truferism, and Birferism, among other things. And what do all of these have in common? Piss-poor critical thinking skills on behalf of the people who follow them, peddled by the merchants of doubt, a dislike for the scientific method (based on a severe misunderstanding of what that is) or an outright disdain for science as a whole in favor of a more "naturalistic" - i.e., Romantic and wrong - view of the world.

"But wait, Enigma! How dare you suggest that me, an educated scholarly professional, could even share the same process as one of those lowly Creationists." To which I reply: "And that right there is part of your problem. Not only does that reek of elitism, but that's projection - you know damn well you didn't put anymore thought into your Alternative Enicidem than the IDiot did Intelligent Design, but you're projecting your elitism on that individual to distance yourself cognitively from what might as well be your intellectual twin. Just because you're a scholarly professional doesn't mean you're smart."

At the heart of the problem here is this toxic notion that reality is a deck of cards to be shuffled. I'm willing to pay for a plane ticket to New York for anyone who wants to try and reshuffle that deck of cards from the top floor of the Empire State Building on the way down after jumping. The major difference, I've found, is this: the people who follow Creationism and Intelligent Design are parrots; they're puppets on a string, marching to the beat of someone else's drum. Many of them are incapable of independent thought on this matter, and if they are, they regurgitate the talking points their masters told them to. You see the same kind of person in the Altie crowd, but they lack masters; many of them have the same degree of critical thinking and projection skills that your average Fundie has, but they view themselves as "better" than that lowly rabble. They don't believe ID because the Fundies believe it, not because they have any free thinking skills of their own or they've analyzed any evidence. But they're still attracted to that sort of superstitious garbage that the leaders of the Alternative Enicidem crowd peddles, so they fall into it so much easier.

So keep that in mind. The only thing distinguishing an Altie from a Creationist or a IDiot is the fact that the Altie thinks they're superior to the other two. It's like watching three children argue over a toy, each one claiming to have a variant that's better than the other when the truth is that all three variants do absolutely nothing.

Marxisocialcommienaziism

The last post got me thinking about class antagonism. I didn't touch too long on it because I wanted to get into taking apart the word "militant" and the projection associated with it, but now that I've got some more time, I'm going to look into this class antagonism more.

The funny thing about living in America today is how many people are willing to open their mouth and spout off about stuff that they don't have the first clue about, like their opinion is somehow made fact because they wrote it (in crayon, misspelled) on a sign. Or if you clap your hands, you too can indeed make the red ones go faster. I call this Grot Physics. They live, eat, and breath thought-terminating cliches with such elegance, and practice blackwhite like all doubleplusgood proles, Big Brother would be proud of them. And, of course, there's the weapon's grade projection that goes along with that, which probably makes it easier for them.

But, upon reflecting, one thing becomes clear. Not only are these people not the sharpest tool in the shed, but they're also poor. When they open their mouth screaming about socialism, using it like a child does a "naughty word", screaming about unions, screaming about public education, and screaming about X, Y, and Z (the letters as variables, not the French agents), what they're really doing is hurting themselves. As a liberal, this has given me pause many of times. You want to reach out and get through to them - preferably with a heavy iron object. "I'm trying to help you, stupid!" is the common thought that goes through my mind. And it's not like they don't want to be helped; oh goodness no. The problem is that they're already think they're being helped. And that's a big problem.

Let's turn back the clock for a minute. During the days leading up to the American War of Secession (it's not a civil war, so let's stop referring to it as one, shall we?), escaped slaves finding their way on the underground railroad was a common thing. They would escape from their rich owner's plantations and either find freedom up in Canada or stay in the North. Naturally, this hurt the plantation owners, who were loosing their "property". Which, in most cases, meant they wanted it back. So who did they send to get it back?

They gathered together gangs of poor, White southerners and told them "go get these slaves back." And those poor, White southerners did.

Let's take a look at this dynamic for a minute. You have, on one end, the rich southern plantation owner. He's rich, and he has land, and he's living the high life with all his slaves. On the other end, you have the slaves themselves, who occupy a low status in society, and you have the poor Whites, who are arguably just a touch more free than the slaves are. Now, obviously those poor Whites resented being poor. I know I resent being poor. They wanted a piece of the pie. Modern Conservatives call this "the politics of envy," with the notion that you're just better off being poor or being a slave. And those rich White plantation owners probably weren't keen on giving them that slice of pie. So what's the logical thing here to do? There's a lot more of us, if you count those Black slaves, than there are of those rich White plantation owners. Solidarity, brother! You may be Black and I may think you're the cursed Child of Ham, but you know what? It only makes sense here for me to ally with you to get things done.

And the plantation owners realized that. So they when the slaves started escaping (they'd been escaping from the beginning), those wealthy plantation owners went to those poor Whites and told those poor Whites,"go get my slaves back." There's a power dynamic at work there: those poor Whites are suddenly given more power than the Black slaves had. If they started working with those Black slaves, that power dynamic would go away. Thus, any solidarity that might have existed (providing one was able to ignore all of the other factors at play) was completely shot. And the rich heaved a sigh of relief.

Hit the fast froward button to the present: This same dynamic is at work today. Remember how I said that the teabaggers and the conservatives already think they're being helped, when it's clear to anyone they're not? That's because the rich in this nation - the corporations, the millionaire bankers, the political leaders - have convinced them that they don't need that help, in much the same way that the wealthy plantation owners convinced the poor Whites that they had power: focus on an imaginary enemy. Usually, this enemy is what's best for you in the long run, because what's good for you as a poor person in the long run is bad for me as a rich person in the short run. Thus, things like socialism, unions, and public services become the villains, even though they're designed to help people like the very same individuals who are protesting it. It's the poor being used by the rich to keep the poor poor. If you look hard enough, you'll find this same sort of thing repeated throughout history time and again: the elites, whether they be priests, kings, barons, dukes, financiers, industrial barons or billionaires, have always managed to take a segment of the poor - usually the lower middle class, but also the functional middle class if times are tough enough - and convince them that anything designed to help them (like nationalized healthcare) will somehow hurt them in the long run.

Do you agree with me on this? If you do, congratulations, you're a proponent of Marxist theory. And now you, unlike those poor-to-middle class Whites who are being rallied by the wealthy, actually know what the term means. Of course, education is the first key to combating this; if people knew, if they were learned in these subject matters, they would see. But they're not. And the elites with the power know that, and as long as they can keep these people uneducated and poor, they can keep these people on their side, acting against their own best interests.