Fuck It - Just This Once Since This Blog is Dying Anyway

[The 'yous' in this article are hypothetical and not directed at the reader, or even at any one person, and merely symbolize a 'you' the writer has grown tired of - Ed.]

It's been long enough to say maybe three things about recent events and then hold my peace about it again. I don't like to pontificate over tragedy, but in the wake of the Paris attacks one sees the double standards of tragedy reportage in the West. Syria is war-torn for something like a thousand days and it's all old news, there are refugees drowning by the dozens in the Aegean sea, and in Africa, the usual business is struggling onward, but really - who is giving much of a shit about that? Who is putting a God damned filter on their social media in memoriam for the victims of Ebola? For the dead in Syria? For the ongoing war in Ukraine? For that reason I see the reporting about Paris as overblown. Maybe I'm cynical (I am in fact cynical) but the whole response seems highly sensationalistic, and it is being defended. The people who are trying to put it in perspective are being demonized and mocked. There is, no doubt, a 9-11ing going on. And there is such transparent bias from the media and so many people are actually getting upset that this is being pointed out.

Make no mistake - what you will see in the coming months will not undo the conditions that created the terror attacks. The coming years will likely only see those conditions reinforced, and it will only create more blind hatred. As much as I severely dislike people who commit unspeakable acts of violence, I really dislike the people who use crises as a means of control or who profit from it. I may be seen as blowhard cynic for my perspective, but there are many people who see a tragedy whose first thought is 'what will this mean for the financial markets tomorrow?' or 'how can I spin this to fit my agenda of making people crazy and fearful?'

Monuments around the world weren't lit up in solidarity with Pakistan when there was flooding, or when there was an earthquake - in either case hundreds died, and not all of them just from the natural disaster. We didn't even see much of a response when the Fukushima incident happened - there was lots of worried reportage about the reactor but I don't remember candlelight vigils or tearful celebrities. Why on Earth should I take your prayers and thoughts seriously if you only bestow them on the world's people who are most like you, from whom you and your culture most likely descended?

To me, at this point, your concerns seems too biased, and therefore I imagine they are worth nothing to the people of Paris, or to the men who attacked them – fellow humans who you no doubt blindly hate, who if they had anything to say would have been ignored and shouted down, reinforcing their nihilistic and desperate attitudes. Your concerns demonstrate what your true values are, and I don't know anything but I can see that you don't really care about 'humanity' you care about the parts of it you feel are right, and don't bother to learn about the rest. Humanity is like a sport to you.

Yes, I might well be a stupid fuck, but you behave worse, think less, and are proud about it. It's not wrong to point out how internalized the biases of our mainstream media are. It's actually important, so that all of us can move away from ignorance and arrogance, so that this little piece of shit species can become better. So I hate the politics of this whole thing, and even as my heart sank at the news, I felt worse knowing the kind of response I'd have to witness.

Nobody is right in this situation, and even though both parties are aggrieved, only one will gain the support or counsel of the world. Think about that, before you do the laziest possible thing and apply a filter to your facebook profile picture 'in support and solidarity'. You would do better to make peace with your neighbors, to call your parents, to show tangible love to the people who could immediately benefit from it. France will graciously accept, but does not at all need, your concern. And France, where liberty was oft reclaimed, will be less free from now on. So not only are you venting your useless concerns like so many stale farts, but the terrorists, again, have won.

Every time this happens, the predictable response of the majority is so rehearsed, and so insincere and so antiquated. The most honest thing I've seen so far is various states in the US refusing to take in refugees, ostensibly because they want to be evil or stupid or something. This is why I believe nobody is learning anything from tragedy except to make lots of noise and act stupidly. I saw that old 'not all Muslims' rhetoric come out, via meme picture, which isn't going to convince anyone of anything, thanks for trying, maybe try not saying or posting anything for a few months. Only idiots think that all Muslims harbor terrorist thoughts, and only idiots think that the internet will fix idiots. And idiots are going to attack Hindus and Sikhs, just like before, because idiots are idiots and we do not keep them on a short enough leash.

I am tired of the pontification I am hearing from the ignorant about this matter. If you do not truly care about humanity as a whole, please don't bother those around you with your ideas. You are half of why this problem will never be solved, and you will never think to examine yourself or your position. You will never have to examine your life, and that is why a Muslim in a poor country doesn't like you and thinks you're part of an evil culture.

I am going to log off now, drink a coffee, and gratefully take a deep breath. Thanks for reading, hopefully this insane screed of mine somehow betters you, or offers you anything.

Shitty Month Showdown: November vs. February

In the northern latitudes there are four months that are dreaded, that can chill a man's soul even as he sits in the warmth of the summer sun, and they are known as November, December, January, February. These four horsemen of the freezocalypse are merciless, grim, dark, bitter months – which is why Northern cultures since prehistory have organized big excessive festivals and holidays in them, because otherwise too many people would hibernate, go insane, and/or commit suicide.

Hence December with its put-on Christmas cheer, its casual holiday alcoholism, and its cozy nights with the family you have avoided most of the year even though you all love each other, supposedly. Hence... uh... Christmas, and the reason it's so big is because the corporate society we belong to has to keep us 'goal oriented' so that we don't drop out of their nonsense and discover actual meanings to life and think critically about the system we were born into and if any of it is actually right. But also, it keeps the shadows away, and turns darkness at 4:30 P.M. into 'coziness' as opposed to 'I viciously hate Daylight Savings Time'. And there's the religious significance, and the butt-hurt War on Christmas style rants from bigoted ignoramuses who think the LIBERAL LIBERATION FORCE are going to force them into sensitivity camps.

In December, the remembrance of the people we have to grudgingly buy gifts for (because they give us gifts and WILL judge us if we don't do the adult thing) will at some point cause us to enter that holy tabernacle of consumerism - the Christmastime store. It doesn't matter if it's a mall, a boutique shop, or even a corner store: get ready to hear some jingly, jangly Christmas cacophony that will probably make you feel worse even if you are mentally damaged enough to find joy in a season peoples from all over the southern world associate solely with the word 'forbearance'.

But that's all beside the point. Today I would like to compare the dreary cousins of December, two months that are important solely because they are months that people have to live through in order to get to classically 'good' months. November is proudly mediocre and even in a good year it's the month where the dying plants have mostly all died, the skies are grey and get a darker a bit more quickly each day, and any good weather is The Last Good Weather of the Year. February is colder, bleaker, and generally worse in every way, but it's also closer to the redemption of Late March, where the weather starts to feel amazingly fresh and the promise of life is in the air.

19 Screenshots that Reveal the Hollowness of Business Insider and Modern Culture in General

Dilbert IS business, basically. Laugh and care about it to advance your career!

In an era of clickbait nonsense aggregation bullshit, online content in general is in danger of becoming a lobotomized, numbers-driven, shortform mess. When I state with confidence that using the internet can make a person extremely dumb, paranoid, hateful, angry, etc... I am speaking mostly about the content aggregator sites, although mainstream media websites and the 'respected' online only publications are also wracked with issues like poor editorial standards and their habit of mixing serious stories with internet culture fluff. The end result is an uncritical and uninformed mass of people with simplistic world-views and ideas who are around you, and vote and have jobs and discuss whatever malformed ideas they have with like-minded people and shout at those who disagree with them.

I started reading Business Insider earlier this year. I don't know why, I suppose I wanted a wider selection of sites and I'd never really frequented an aggregator before. I figured it would be helpful in determining what wider news trends were... but I was wrong, because Business Insider isn't a news site. It's an aggregator with a 'business' lifestyle slant, which means it will present you with the idols of the cult of success, the accouterments of the cult of success, and Forbes-like fawning and panic about wealth with a subset of stories about actual business some of which may have been bought and paid for by the businesses prominent in that story. Looking at you Shake Shack, Soul Cycle, whatever the newest 'Chipotle-killer' is, etc...

What kept me reading was that I wanted to see how low they'd go. Some of their clickbait articles are so obvious that the site functions as a sort of case study in the decline of news caused by the massive expansion into the void of the internet. The fact that the site was successful enough to be sold for millions (more millions than I'm comfortable with) is a sign that this kind of operation appeals to someone – even if that someone is just advertising and/or PR agencies or some guy with a cargo-cult mentality who thinks reading the imaginatively titled Business Insider will get him a corner office or board seat.

That's the thing, it's not insider information, it's widely available information with a few home-brewed stories... on the one hand they put money in the hands of the people who write useless internet articles, and as much as I do pity them, they are my kind and it's better that there are still jobs where people who write get jobs (even if they go through six or more years of post-secondary education just to write for Buzzfeed or BI). To me, it doesn't matter if that person cannot spell or use words properly,and doesn't know how to use contractions, doesn't have any real passion for language or writing... they could be the biggest, least ink-stained hack of all time but if they're getting six cents a word while a video producer or hype man is out of work, I'm happy. On the other, less expansive hand, they don't produce any 'good' stuff. They provide a service that generally repeats information for a layman crowd. Longform is dead, et cetera...

It's a website that's good at being a brand, and one of those new kinds of brands launched and owned by people slightly more web-savvy than the people who run newspapers, which even as I type it seems crazy, because everyone uses the internet now. The fact remains that traditional media have not adapted super well, I guess, because there are voids where a shrewd person can set up shop and in a few years be valued at millions of dollars.

But what kind of content... that's the important question, right? What's the kind of content they got? Well, it's an eyeful, and I've been filing away some of the more mordant, absurd, and frivolous examples:

The headlines are a schizoid mix of important news and 'content', which may affect the minds of long term readers.

Interested in the insider 'hack' about hotels that you probably never knew about?

["Oh, word?" -Ed.]