Everything is True; Nothing is Permitted

Krakatoa just went kraka-boom and that great lady might be setting a trend among her sisters.

I hope the first time you heard about this was from a My Little Pony fanfiction website, so you can enjoy the freely-floaty feeling.

The past few years, there's been chatter about existing in the post-truth era, which is the completely backwards to see it. It isn't that just now lies are being told professionally by the bloody mawed sociopaths on the television, because television was invented as a way for bloody mawed sociopaths to lie to millions of people in person at the same time. It isn't as if websites like Snopes and FactCheck haven't displayed their political biases, nitpicking their enemies and just nodding their head politely along with their allies. We live in the post-falsification era. The truth is that everything is true. The inter-dimensional demons and reptilian alien conspiracy are just as real as class struggle and natural selection. They're all invisible forces, after all, whose presence one only recognizes by their action like a cartoon bad guy with cloaking or invisibility spreading falling water.

And so many have also observed that we live in the most boring and stupid possible dystopia. And what could be more boring and stupid than a lock down where Pizza Hut delivery drivers have papers to travel from house to house? What could be more lame and absurd than the volunteer drone force requesting people not hold hands?

Anyway, Krakatoa was screaming, crying, shidding and farding, and doing so with excellent comedic timing. QAnons predicted back in March that April 1st would be the beginning of The Storm and 10 days of darkness because why not start a massive purge on April Fool's Day? Well, that would have ended by now, and just as 10 days of nothing happening rolls to an end the earth rolls over and burps.

There's a plague of locusts spreading across Africa and Central Asia and that's been going down for weeks.

Starving times are coming and Alex Jones told me that the Elmo muppet is a pedophile and I see no real reason not to just believe him on this one. At this point, what harm could it do? Burn the Elmo muppet! Burn the cell towers while you're at it! Everything is forbidden already, so why not do anything?

Doc Sarvis eat your heart out.

The beauty of cartoons is the same beauty of the 60s Batman and Star Trek series and classical theater. The complete unreality that let's you just put your feet up and enjoy the spectacle as everything swirls together in an impossible mass. Here are some pictures, we hope you find them pleasing. That is the beauty of this wonderful world as it coughs up blood from is putrefying lungs and the waters in Venice are paradoxically clean for the first time in centuries.

This is the part where someone tells me to spend less time online, but I'm under quarantine and so are you, so who's right? Both of us are, of course. Everything is true; nothing is permitted. Is there any better role model this year than Alex Jones who was freaking out about COVID-19 back in January? Who easily swings back and forth between the extremes of absolute panic over literally everything? Who is so willing to entertain ideas that he'll even accept that maybe his hated enemies in the N.W.O. are right in wanting to kill him and everyone he knows? Who also won't tell people to just run off into the woods just yet because he needs them to stay on the grid for another day to buy food buckets? Alex Jones who is collapsing his own life around him and questing for martyrdom over telling people to turn themselves into fucking smurfs with his nanosilver tonics?

"We're all in this together," They're saying but who is this We and what did They do to get Themselves into such a state they've suddenly resorted to solidarity as an escape route and where will They go when They're no longer so desperate?

This is getting a bit dark, so Alex Jones screaming in impotent rage and swatting like a chimp at a CelestAI drone as she politely requests he return to his home saying, "please, maintain a social distance of at least six feet. Again, please maintain social distancing. Please, sir, do not interfere with my functioning. Please, sir, cease interfering with my functioning and maintain a social distance of at least six feet," is the image I wish to leave you with. Because that is a funny image.

Don't forget to enjoy yourself.

Comments

[Super Trampoline]

You know shit’s real when Fiddlebottoms makes a new blog post.

[Dr Sharaz Jek]

Well said. I used to read dystopian fiction to feel better about my struggles with life, but I've lost even that pleasure over the last few years as I've become increasingly detached.

[TheWhisperInYourHead]

thanks forr the laugh

[horizon]

This is not, unfortunately, anything new; it's just reaching its apotheosis. From 2004:

The [Bush administration] aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
–Ron Suskind

And it's tempting to throw reality away and just go out and declare the world works in such-and-such a way. Hell, it's almost a self-defense mechanism these days. It's psychologically brutal living in a dystopia.

But science works for a reason, y'know? We fuck up, over and over, thinking all sorts of crazy things about the world, and the ultimate truth is that reality is what settles in when all those crazy things slam headlong into facts and wither away. We can look at flat earthers or lizard people or the idea that COVID is propagated by 5G cellular, and we can spin some pretty awesomely self-consistent sounding stories about them, but we try to apply those stories to the world we live in and they keep getting tripped up by facts. Science works the way it does because we take the facts that have survived lots of collisions and build models on them that let us make useful predictions. Science also tells us we're wired to find patterns in things and why to be suspicious of random things that fit together into vague prophecies — like a volcano that erupts once every few years, at the end of "ten days of darkness" (if it spews tons of ash into the atmosphere, why wouldn't it be the beginning?), marking some sort of meaningful event. (What does that imply? Are there forces at work in the situation that literally can invoke volcanic eruptions? Why don't they do so more often?)

As a fiction writer, I deeply understand the power of stories. We don't live in a world of facts — we live in a world of stories about those facts. But unmoor those stories from facts and we can fuck ourselves up pretty hard. So, no, I don't think Alex Jones who was freaking out about COVID-19 in January is a good role model. I think the epidemiologists who were freaking out about COVID-19 in January are good role models. They were calling for testing, isolation, tracking — the things we're finally doing now, instead of when we had a few hundred cases. Alex was telling people to eat colloidal silver, which he conveniently happens to sell. And warning them (at various times) that the virus both came from eating bats and was genetically engineered by people — both because it contained traces of HIV and because it contained pShuttle-SN, so I guess the scientists making it look manmade did so twice before injecting it into food bats or something?

And that's the thing, ultimately: believing that anything we want to believe can be true is just godsdamn exhausting. There's enough to get outraged on in the news that's actually happening, and I don't like feeling that way to begin with; I'm not going to bother freaking out over every catchy-sounding idea that spins my way, not until I've had a chance to understand how the story aligns with facts and what it would mean if it were true. The alternative is… well, putting your feet up and giving up your agency, because in a world where truth and bullshit are indistinguishable then you're just going to get clobbered by facts at random when you try to take action, so why bother trusting anything?

And that clobbering is draining too. I work tech support for a day job, and just earlier today I spent half an hour trying to troubleshoot wifi speed problems with a coronavirus/5G believer. They had had us turn off their 5g wifi network because of those health concerns. The thing is, wifi "5g" isn't actually the same thing as cellular "5G", so even if the 5G claims were true they were freaking out over nothing. (It's 5 gigahertz frequencies versus 5th generation protocols, respectively. The names just overlap.) Their choice to believe social media warnings over science had real-world consequences: they'd been struggling with shitty internet for a week and even after our call weren't ready to have me flip the switch that would fix the problem.

Still, man … I don't know. I guess I'm coming at this from a perspective of seeing the world on fire and saying "FUCK, how the hell do we put this out?" I can't actually show you evidence that that's a more productive use of our time than watching the flames. I'm just working from that as an article of faith, because that's the world I want to live in, and it's important enough to me to try to do something about it.

Maybe that means dying in pain and despair instead of numbing myself and going out with a smile. But maybe I can make a difference. And speaking out against people pointlessly fucking themselves up by clinging to shitty, untrue stories seems worth trying.

[Frozen Frost Giant]

Everyone stay safe in these trying times. We also should work to protect democracy.

[Bad Horse]

I think all commentary bemoaning the present can be made only by forgetting the past, or never having studied it. I think maybe we're not suffering from fake news as much as we're suffering from the growing awareness of it. We've got nothing on the Middle Ages, when the rulers had the people believing that it was God's will for them to be slaves, that the nobility were a literal breed apart, and that God would burn them for eternity unless they did as they were told. Or the absolute monarchs of the 17th century, who dictated reality and history. Or the 19th century's knack, copied from ancient Rome, for convincing men it was glorious to die in the name of Empire. Or the 20th century's sudden descent into madness in WW1, or the insane attempts of intellectuals afterward to reorder societies on rational principles.

Fake truth is Rome, Christianity, Monarchy, Nationalism, Communism, Nazism, Racism, Sexism; it's also the opposite of all these things--anarchy, the unity of humanity, McCarthyism, the denial of race, the denial of sex and gender. Fake truth is always an over-simplification, a choice between one extreme or the other.

Humanity is growing out of its childhood, and people are still unfamiliar and unsastisfied with reality. This coming century will be rough, but we stand a good chance of somehow muddling through and coming out wiser and more mature than we began--as we so often have in the past.

[Fiddlebottoms]

I am storing these here because I am too lazy to log into my gdoc

The magical-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing ponies and

Reducing ponies and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable. There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving ponies of dignity and autonomy.

If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

We therefore advocate a revolution against the magical system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence, it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can't predict any of that.

But we do outline, in a very general way, the measures that those who hate the magical system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution.

Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and magical basis of the present society.

We are going to argue that magical-technological society cannot be reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing the sphere of equine freedom. But because “freedom” is a word that can be interpreted in many ways, we must first make clear what kind of freedom we are concerned with.

By “freedom” we mean the opportunity to go through the power process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially from any large organization.

Freedom means being in control, either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group, of the life-and-death issues of one’s existence: food, clothing, shelter and defense against whatever threats there may be in one’s environment.

Freedom means having power; not the power to control other ponies but the power to control the circumstances of one’s own life. One does not have freedom if anypony else, especially a large organization, has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness

It is said that we live in a free society because we have a certain number of Celestia guaranteed rights, but these are not as important as they seem. The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government.

Most of the griffin nations were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Unicorn Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than out society does.

In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens.

v

In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no Pinkie Promises, no party dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens.

Hence it was relatively easy to evade control. 96. As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of freedom of the press. We certainly don’t mean to knock that right; it is a very important tool for limiting concentration of political power and for keeping those who do have political power in line by publicly exposing any misbehavior on their part. But freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people. 97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free” man is essentially
an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simón Bolívar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-Min: “An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society or the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsun Chang (Chang Chun-Mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolívar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed

"Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control ..."