Month: August 2017

Make Yourself Great Again

Donald Trump won the presidential election with the meaningless slogan, make America great again. I say that it’s a meaningless slogan because America isn’t an actual thing, it only exists in our head. America cannot reason, think, or act. Only individuals can. But this is America and the people composing the public schooling systems have taught several generations that fiction is fact (and in fairness to the people composing the public schooling system, the United States public schooling system isn’t the first nor will it likely be the last to do this).

Instead of following meaningless slogans, I propose following a meaningful one, make yourself great again. How do you do this? First, focus on yourself. Self-interest is often seen as a bad characteristic. A lot of people like to claim that it’s greedy. Instead they say everybody should be focused on “the greater good.”

This is probably why so many people get sucked into the fiction of collectives. They forgo self-interest because they don’t want to be seen as greedy and instead focus on “the greater good.” Of course, “the greater good” is usually defined by other people. Let’s again consider the slogan, make American great again. What did making American great again involve? Voting for Donald Trump. However, that didn’t make American great since America is a fiction. That didn’t make you great either since you’re not one of the individuals who achieved victory. Donald Trump won the election. Those directly connected to him were gifted various things by him. You didn’t gain anything. Your life remains unchanged because your efforts went to somebody else instead of yourself. If you want to make yourself great, you need to focus on yourself.

Second, define great. My definition of greatness is complex and always changing, however, I include a constant drive to improve myself physically and mentally in my definition. I workout and study almost every day. My goal when I wake up is to be stronger and smarter by the time I go to bed. Only you can define what is great for you. I do suggest setting a few goals though since goals give you something concrete to strive for and thus provide you a mechanism of judging progress.

Third, pursue your definition of great. This is the part most people have difficulty with. Pursuing your definition of great will likely require discipline so your first goal may very well be to develop discipline.

Pursuing goals given to you by others won’t make you great because those goals were never meant to make you great, they were meant to improve the greatness of whoever gave you those goals. Pursuing your own goals at least has the chance of making you great (while it’s always possible to fail to achieve a goal, your chances of achieving it are far greater if you’re actually pursuing it). So consider tossing off the make believe shackles of collectivism. Forget about “the greater good.” Be selfish.

The FBI Thwarts Another Terrorist It Created

If you look at the raw numbers as they are reported, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has thwarted a number of terrorists. However, if you dig a little deeper, you quickly realized that the FBI manufactures many of the terrorists it catches. How does the agency manufacture terrorists? It looks for vulnerable people, usually people mostly isolated from society, and has an undercover agent befriend and radicalize them. When the undercover agent believes the time is right, they hand the sucker a fake bomb, send them on their merry way, and then arrest them. Tell me if you think that this story might fall under the category of manufactured terrorism:

“We as a family are extremely distraught about this situation with our son Jerry Drake Varnell, but what the public must understand is that he is a paranoid schizophrenic and is extremely susceptible to different types of ideology that normal people would deem immoral. Underneath his condition, he is a sweet-hearted person and we are extremely shocked that this event has happened. However, what truly has us flabbergasted is the fact that the FBI knew he was schizophrenic. The State of Oklahoma found him mentally incompetent and we, his parents have legal guardianship over him by the Court. These documents are sealed from the public, which is why no news media outlet has been able to obtain them. The FBI clearly knew that he was schizophrenic because they have gathered every ounce of information on him. Reading the criminal complaint against him has brought us great pause due to the numerous lies from the informant. We do not have an underground bunker! We built our home a few years ago and bought a storage container, as we use it for a storm shelter. We only recently pushed dirt up around it to make it safe. The building is used for storage and is NOT a bunker full of food and supplies, in fact the doors close from the outside. It has neither electricity nor anything that would make it habitable.

What the public should be looking at is the fact that the FBI gave our son the means to make this happen. He has no job, no money, no vehicle, and no driver’s license, due to the fact that he is schizophrenic and we; his parents do everything we can possible to keep him safe and functional. The mental health system has consistently failed us due to the lack of establishments and health care coverage for a person like him. He has attended college and just enrolled in welding school. His medications allow him to be somewhat functional but he will never be completely functional in life. His brain does not work like a normal person and never will due to the nature of his mental illness. He has suffered through countless serious full-blown schizophrenic delusional episodes and he has been put in numerous mental hospitals since he was 16 years old. The FBI came and picked him up from our home, they gave him a vehicle, gave him a fake bomb, and every means to make this happen none of which he had access to on his own. We know who their informant is and what the public should know is that he is that a drug-dealing criminal. On June 15, 2017, Jerry’s Father told the criminal informant “that he was not allowed back on our property and if he returned we would have him arrested for trespassing and drugs”. Apparently, he continued to sneak onto our residence. The FBI paid him to continue this operation and I believe they have cleared his criminal record.

The FBI found a paranoid schizophrenic who was judged mentally incompetent by the State of Oklahoma and was therefore entirely dependent on his parents, had an agent befriend him, and manipulated him into deploying a fake bomb that was provided to him by the agent. While the FBI might tout this as another terrorist attack thwarted by the agency’s efforts, in reality this attack wouldn’t have even been possible without the FBI’s involvement. Where else besides law enforcement could you receive credit for thwarting a crime that you created?

The FBI’s habit of creating the terrorists that it creates has a lot of ramifications. First, it completely skews the terrorism statistics. If you look at the raw numbers, the number of incidents of terrorism are artificially inflated because of the FBI’s antics. What are people supposed to do with bad data? Second, it shows that mentally ill individuals are nothing more than pawns for government agents. The FBI really has no choice but to prey on the mentally ill if it wants manufacture terrorists. But the various levels of government here in the United States often claim that they want to help the mentally ill. Those claims fall on deaf ears when agencies within the government are exploiting the same people the various other levels of government claim to want to help.

This problem isn’t likely to go away soon since the FBI hasn’t received any notable punishment for using this strategy. If that doesn’t demonstrate bad faith on behalf of the United States government, then I don’t know what does.

Prosecutorial Jackpot

Christopher Cantwell, after talking a tough game, ended up crying like a bitch after Charlottesville because he was afraid of what was going to happen to him after macing a couple of people in the face. Not surprisingly, a warrant was issued for his arrest and now he’s sitting in a cage:

Police report a white nationalist who says he pepper-sprayed a demonstrator in self-defense on the campus of the University of Virginia has turned himself in.

Campus police issued a statement late Wednesday saying Christopher Cantwell of Keene, New Hampshire, was taken into custody at the police department in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Cantwell was wanted on three felony charges: two counts of the illegal use of tear gas or other gases and one count of malicious bodily injury with a “caustic substance,” explosive or fire.

Cantwell claimed that his act of macing two individuals was self-defense. I’m not intimately familiar with the self-defense laws in Virginia but if they’re anything like Minnesota’s, he’s probably going to have a difficult time selling the self-defense angle. If he doesn’t take a plea bargain, his entire social media presence, his appearance in Vice’s documentary on white nationalists, and his podcast are all going to come back to bite him in the ass. He stated numerous times that he was expecting violence and, to add icing to the cake, after the fiasco in Charlottesville was over he bragged about the amount of violence him and his fellow white nationalists used against the anti-fascists.

The prosecution team probably feels like it hit the jackpot with this guy. This case will probably serve as a warning to others that what they say, whether it be in the past or present, can be used against them.

Witch Hunts

I’m back. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any time between Monday evening and last night to put together material for this blog. However, I did find one story that I felt was worth mentioning.

Much like the Bloods and the Crips, the neo-fascists and anti-fascists have an ongoing gang rivalry. While I couldn’t care less about two violent gangs wiping each other out, these rivalries always end up catching innocent bystanders in the middle. Earlier this week a man was stabbed by a supposed anti-fascists because of his “Nazi” haircut:

A “confused anti-fascist” swung a knife towards the face of a man with a haircut similar to the one popular with white nationalists.

Joshua Witt, 26, was getting out of his car at Steak ’n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado when a man ran over to him yelling, “Are you one of them neo-Nazis?”

The man aimed for his head over his car door, but Witt blocked the blow with his hand, which needed three stitches.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the fascists are exploiting this attack to gain sympathy from the general public. Many of the anti-fascists, likewise, are claiming that this attack was a false flag performed by a fascist to make the anti-fascists look back. Was this attack perpetrated by an anti-fascist who decided a haircut is enough justification to stab somebody, was it a false flag, or are the facts being reported incorrectly and the real answer doesn’t involve either warring faction? It’s hard to tell.

Gang rivalries have a nasty habit of going from a disagreement over an actual transgression to mindless “us” versus “them” fighting rather quickly. Once a fight stops being about actual wrongs suffered and begin being about group identity, the tactics tend to change to the means justifying the ends. After that point it becomes difficult to tell who did what. When the means justify the ends, false flags becomes acceptable as well so you have a hard time knowing what side actually perpetrated an atrocity. Zealotry becomes common and that brings with it individuals identifying with either side trying to prove their piety by performing a seemingly random act of violence. These seemingly random acts of violence are often indistinguishable from acts of violence performed by unaffiliated individuals.

Update: 2017-08-29: Now that an investigation has been performed it appears that Mr. Witt stabbed himself and then claimed an anti-fascist did it. However, I believe the point I made in this post, that ongoing gang rivalries tend to catch innocent people in the crossfire, still holds true.

Nietzsche Opposed Nationalism and Racism

I’m going to be pretty busy for the next couple of days so content here will probably be a bit light. However, I will still find time to point out how fucking stupid national socialists and their international brethren are.

Today’s post deals with reading comprehension. The Nazis periodically cited the works of Nietzsche when arguing their philosophy. Their offspring; neo-Nazis, the alt-right, and other flavors of national socialists; have followed in their footsteps. However, unless you read Nietzsche particularly badly and are entirely ignorant of the personal views he expressed throughout his lifetime, there are no grounds on which to cite Nietzsche when making an argument in favor of nationalism:

But if you read Nietzsche like a college freshman cramming for a midterm, you’re bound to misinterpret him — or at least to project your own prejudices into his work. When that happens, we get “bad Nietzsche,” as the Week’s Scott Galupo recently put it.

And it would appear that “bad Nietzsche” is back, and he looks a lot like he did in the early 20th century when his ideas were unjustly appropriated by the (original) Nazis. So now’s a good time to reengage with Nietzsche’s ideas and explain what the alt-right gets right and wrong about their favorite philosopher.

[…]

“Nietzsche’s argument was that you had to move forward, not fall back onto ethnocentrism,” Hugo Drochon, author of Nietzsche’s Great Politics, told me. “So in many ways Spencer is stuck in the ‘Shadows of God’ — claiming Christianity is over but trying to find something that will replace it so that we can go on living as if it still existed, rather than trying something new.”

[…]

Nietzsche was interested in ideas, in freedom of thought. To the extent that he knocked down the taboos of his day, it was to free up the creative powers of the individual. He feared the death of God would result in an era of mass politics in which people sought new “isms” that would give them a group identity.

“The time is coming when the struggle for dominion over the earth will be carried on in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines,” he wrote. By doctrines, he meant political ideologies like communism or socialism. But he was equally contemptuous of nationalism, which he considered petty and provincial.

Only a lack of reading comprehension could lead somebody to believe that Nietzsche supported the idea of national socialism. Come to think of it, only a lack of reading comprehension could lead somebody to believe that national socialism is a good idea so I think I’ve found a significant underlying problem.

If the leaders of the new national socialist movement can’t read a handful of books and actually comprehend what they say, why should anybody think that the ideas they espouse are any less stupid than they are?

The State Doesn’t Provide Protection

The Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcers have no obligation to protect you even though you have an obligation to pay them. Being paid for services that haven’t been rendered leads to some unfortunate situations. For example, law enforcers refused to provide protection to a Jewish synagogue during the Charlottesville fiasco so they had to hire professionals:

The Jewish community in Charlottesville hired armed security to protect its synagogue for the first time after local police declined to provide a guard for the site despite hundreds of white supremacists congregating on the town over the weekend for a rally that resulted in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer.

Unlike law enforcers, private security providers are motivated to provide protection because if they don’t then they don’t get paid.

This situation is a counterargument to the people who claim that the State is necessary to provide protection. These statists usually argue that in a society without a government poor people would be preyed upon because they wouldn’t be able to hire protective services. However, that situation doesn’t differ from the situation we currently live under. Even though there is a government people still have to hire private security if they want security because the State has exempted its own security providers from having to actually provide it.

The Fight of the Century

This could be the greatest fight of the century:

“The Mother of All Rallies” is coming to Washington, D.C. on September 16th. The Pro-Trump group bills itself as “The Woodstock of American Rallies” on its official website, with the aim of sending “a message to congress the media and the world” that “we stand united to defend American culture & values.” Over 7,000 people follow the rally’s Facebook page. It should be quite the gathering.

There’s only one problem: there will already be another kind of gathering in town.

Also scheduled to storm the National Mall that day is the Juggalo March, a collective of I.C.P. fans seeking equal treatment, which we first reported on here last summer.

Trumpsters versus Juggalos? Where do I buy tickets to this event? Is VIP seating available? I’m willing to pay for it!

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Not much good came out of the fiasco in Charlottesville but watching Christopher Cantwell cry like a bitch was one of them. The universe apparently decided I was a good boy because it didn’t stop there. OKCupid, an online dating site, announced that it was booting Cantwell from its service:

OKCupid joins a growing corporate backlash against neo-Nazis in the U.S. after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Technology companies that once tolerated white supremacists are now booting them from their services.

The latest rally participant to see his digital footprint erased is Christopher Cantwell, a white nationalist and Web commentator who was filmed by Vice in Charlottesville. Facebook and Instagram removed accounts belonging to Cantwell and his YouTube account appears to have also been shut down. Now even his dating life is being targeted.

I guess Cantwell won’t be getting a date anytime soon. So nothing has actually changed for him. But this news is still damned funny.

Just More Heroes Doing Hero Things

While the majority of media outlets have been focused on Charlottesville, a threat that is far more significant than national socialists has continued waging war against the people:

Charnesia Corley was a 21-year-old college student with no criminal record when two cops from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office stopped her in June 2015 for running a red light.

After searching her car, police claimed to have found .02 ounces of marijuana. That was enough, they apparently felt, to justify a full-body cavity search. When Corley refused to remove her clothes in the dimly lit parking lot where she was being detained, one of the officers threw her to the ground, pushed her partially underneath her own car, and yanked Corley’s pants down to her ankles. For the next 11 minutes, dash cam video of the incident shows, she was held down by two officers while being searched. Corley claims that fingers repeatedly probed her vagina and that the officers ignored her protests. A third officer stood nearby holding a flashlight. No drugs were found on Corley’s person.

The fact that an officer threw this woman to the ground and violated her for 11 minutes is goddamn awful. But the entire situation is made even more egregious by the fact that another officer participated.

Cop apologists, if they’re willing to admit to any corruption in modern policing, will often claim that there are just a handful of bad officers. However, if this were the case, we’d see a lot of incidents like this end with the bad officer’s fellow officers taking him down. That rarely happens. The chances of winning a lottery are probably higher than a bad officer being taken down by his fellow officers. If that doesn’t speak volumes to the severity of this problem, I don’t know what does.