Whose Turn Is It To Feed The Idiots?

If anybody doubts the decline of civilisation, take a look at television, in particular the advertisements.
Look at what they're trying to sell and ask yourself if you still feel that their targets include you. Or will you just yawn and change channels, fretfully, in an attempt to escape the thrashings of drowning minds which gleam dully in their futile efforts to con the world out of just a few dollars more, to pay for that new interior or that new Audi tank.

With a lack of care and a manufactured passion they try to sell films which have special effects chiselled and etched better than any Leonardo cartoon, but no story and nothing of interest to recommend them except banality piled on banality; or the kids toys, still Lego, still Meccano, but preformed like the easily warped, easily bored, stunted imaginations of children who drool vacantly and receptively instead of going into the world to do things of interest.

Piled among these cancerous products are the adverts for 'services'.
Banks that pretend you will end up with more money if you spend more; lawyers who demand your trust in return for turning occasional misfortunes into some other person's extortion. But hey, you get to keep all the 'compensation', right?

More lawyers, this time telling you that if you tell a few lies, the prudent insurance you took out with the loan can be repaid to you by the bank, because you didn't lose your job, your life or your health, and now you see that the service you bought wasn't needed in the event and you demand a refund.

And the banks all the while soliciting your custom like a street-corner tart on a Saturday night, with choruses, smiles and servility by way of apologising for their receipt of tax money taken from you because they were 'too big to fail'.

Look at all these, then look at the chronic paucity of actual content on their dozens of digital TV channels.
And tell yourself that civilisation isn't screwed.

I Was Not Asked.

Because they already know what the answer would be.
What is Western Civilisation?
A fraud. It isn't civilised at all. We are all regarded as Democracy-Fodder in a world in which we are encouraged to vote, sometimes even coerced into voting, as long as we never vote ourselves out.

Nobody ever asks us the one question which matters. They ask us who we want to rule.
They never ask us whether we want to be ruled at all.
And that is why all the brain-twisting theorisation about 'democracy', 'Universal Suffrage' and 'Representation' is just a smoke screen, a wall of stuff and nonsense to stand between us and the sudden realisation that we don't need a Political Class at all, ever.

Interested parties may associate voluntarily to produce a civilisation; as the benefits become clear, people may join freely and by their own choice.
They do not have the right to force others to join. Those who join may then pay for Policing; they may pay for representative legal management.
Only if, freely and voluntarily, other people attack this civilisation, do they have the right to gather force and use it, and only then to bring the attackers to justice or until such time as they can give no more.
They do not have the right to force others still to join their wars or pay for them.

Today we have a collection of monoliths governed by questionable rationality, seizing and disposing of our assets and thereby our persons, in pursuit of hypocritical pretensions which are actually killing Human Beings now.
Their enemies know that the pot is calling the kettle black.

They know that we will either have to vote ourselves out or become the mirror image of them.
And this means that our rulers have long-abandoned any principled approach to their wars, and will simply keep draining us for long enough to run away without appearing to run away, lose without appearing to lose, and achieve nothing while appearing to bring slavery to yet another country.

Their most fervent hope, that the new slaves will choose their brand of slavery over the opposition's, is futile.

Leonard Peikoff: Not A Randroid.

I'm sorry to say it took until yesterday for me to listen to a Leonard Peikoff podcast; and I listened to a couple.
I found the man to be a civil, steady and assured speaker, not always sparkling perhaps, but then, how many of us can claim that we are always sparkling or even care?

I was pleased to discover that I am yet an Objectivist in spite of the fact that I have differences and disagreements with Ayn Rand in several areas.

Dr. Peikoff was emphatic that one must be an independent thinker, not a blind follower, and told the amusing anecdote of the chap who thought dying his hair orange might make him more like John Galt.

More impressive than what he said was the way he said it, the way he behaved. At no time was he prescriptive in his approach to other people's behaviour; rather, he was descriptive.

He sounded as though he wanted to chat, not convert.

So.

Not a Randroid by any means, although I am constantly irritated by the inherited linguistic aesthetics of some of his and his companions' output.
With a whole language to choose from, it should be possible for somebody to use a word like, oh, 'assemble', instead of the word 'integrate', which sounds like a frown at it's own confusion, and has always struck me as a sign of Ayn Rand's own comparative dryness when writing non-fiction.(Her artistic prose on the other hand can be quite, quite wonderful).

Randroids on the other hand, divorced from the normality of consciousness, will berate, abuse, scorn, violate, bully and preach, thinking all the while that they have the Word of Rand to back them up, some quote from her works, or some quote that was interrogated from her during her life by way of 'clarification', so that they may feel like conquerors.

They try to freeze-dry the fading feelings given them by her works of art as the means of repressing their own genuine feelings of horror at what they are doing, believing all the while they are not a mob because they are few in number.

There came a day in my life when I said, to quote Edmond Rostand, "I stand alone as Satan against the armies of Heaven", and at this stage to read one of her works is to actually enjoy it, not 'feel it' or 'experience revelations'.

When a savage worships a Cyclotron, he is still a savage. It doesn't civilise him. There is no mystic process, no sudden wisdom. There is only the essential disinterest in oracles that leads to intelligence.

Lift Up A Stone?

Not likely. I kick a few over while I'm walking, but all too frequently, you see something, as you do in properly hot countries, resembling a Scorpion.

Of course, in my case it's usually a racialist or a Nazi or a Randroid.

Of these, the Randroids are the worst.

In seeing that I quite like Ayn Rand's work, they seek to exploit a common value.

They are self-serving of course, and what selves; they range from those who seek to acquire a mass of followers for themselves to those who seek to acquire - and retain - a mass of followers for Ayn Rand.

Not being a follower myself, I find this a source of disappointment.

Of course, the one true test of this is to question any of the output from Mount Randlympus, and (by agreeing with Rand) apply your own critical thoughts to this work in loyalty to yourself.

Then the deluge of subjective, self-contradictory bull shit really descends, as you deprive essentially fragile people of the crutch they use instead of their minds.

Sympathy? Perhaps. Disagreement? Certainly.
Friendship?


To what end?

So Long

Sad to say, the Singapore Straits Times has changed; no longer a site for condensed, hard news.
Now it's more in the style of just another overstuffed 'newspaper'.
In other words flashy page style, lots about the columnists, lots of community, and a hard login.

Bye bye Times. It was nice while it lasted.

Obvious.

While everybody concerned, and a lot of people who aren't, whine on about how to 'feel' about the Aurora murders, let me point out the rather obvious fact that they occurred on the first anniversary of the Breivik murders in Norway.

I'm ready for my consultancy fee now.

Assholes.

When Barclay's manipulates Libor they get fined £290 million.
When politicians manipulate it, they get the Nobel Prize.
Everybody agrees politicians are low life liars; but they keep on voting for them.
Everybody needs a bank; but they try to sack bankers.