I just divided by zero.

This means I may have to stop blogging.

Maybe not.

We'll see what happens - the universe still appears to be here!

ATTENTION EVERYONE: JJDURDEN is just here for the traffic, and because he writes he is a rapist.

Just noticed the comment below in the thread I outlined in this post:

ATTENTION EVERYONE! JJ DURDEN is just here for blog hits and he writes for The Spearhead (so he’s a rapist and abuser too).

His blog is a failing shit hole of misogyny and now he has dedicated a post to JUST my comments section here and apparently my many “big lies” and my lack in “intellect”!

LOL….god he wishes he were in my intellectual league for even one day.

So, anyway….he’s trolling to get blog info for himself and for the psychos at The Spearhead.

What? Did they run out of murdered females and abused wives to celebrate?

Ugh, they are the most low-class humans ALIVE.

That's right, folks. An attempt to engage a fellow human being in intelligent conversation is, apparently, a lowly attempt to self-promote and gain traffic on a blog I could care less about. Furthermore, writing for the Spearhead automatically makes a person a rapist and an abuser. I remember in "the good old days" when you had to actually have sex with someone to be a rapist - thank goodness the modern era is much more convenient and allows virgins like myself the privilege of raping and abusing people by encoding binary data over an ethernet cable for the digestion of the internet audience!

I don't remember celebrating any murdered females or abused wives here or at The Spearhead - can anybody quote a post where I did that to jog my memory? If so, I'll gladly turn myself into the brig authorities and serve some jail time.

At least she said one thing that was factual - men currently ARE the most low-class humans alive. This is an injustice and inequality I hope to help fix!

As always LR, thanks for the entertainment (mostly through your ad hominems).

For Your Amusement indeed

Lady Raine has a blog post entitled "For Your Amusement" which is basically a misandrist dig at The Spearhead (which I now write for). I didn't read the entire comment thread because I couldn't be bothered, but I picked up on one of her most recent comments and tried to engage her in intelligent discussion. She demonstrated her true colors immediately. Therefore, I submit my comment (and all the comments that follow, obviously) "for your amusement."

Here's a fun game to play while following the thread - keep track of all the logical fallacies LR commits, with special attention paid to ad hominems! Aren't we all so glad we decided to let women run the nation?

These words make it all worth it.

From someone to me, regarding recent events:

Thank you. The courage you have shown in this endeavor is remarkable. Instead of randomly throwing a pebble in the water, you unleashed a precision guided boulder to which I will enjoy witnessing any resulting tsunamis. No matter what outcomes occur, your intentions were honorable and unselfish and as with all of the other adjectives floating in my head, are demonstrating what everyone strives to be, a leader.

Words fail me.

My head is spinning

I just completed the craziest, ballsiest thing I've ever done in my life. I'm glad it's all over.

Communicating Thoughts and Thinking About Communication; The Duality of Reason

I didn't think to post this on my personal blog, and I'm not about to go through the pain of formatting it for the internet yet again. You can read it here. It's about language and thinking.

New piece coming soon

I just wrapped up an essay I'd been working on for a philosophical conference, and submitted it over to The Spearhead. I am told it should be up within the next day or so. I wouldn't mind becoming a regular contributor over there, but we shall see. If that becomes the case, I could use this blog to merely talk about video games and the military. Haha!

::EDIT:: Here it is.

Another good comment

I'll get around to generating my own content again shortly (long weekend, competing priorities) but for now, I rather enjoy pointing out good comments on posts that may otherwise go unnoticed.

The comment is a sort of companion diatribe to this analysis (author's blog) of common "feminist" (I use the term loosely and apply it generally - I accept/acknowledge the hypothetical possibility of an honest to goodness, logical "feminist" even though I haven't met one) debate tactics.

Enjoy!

[EDIT] Kudos award to this comment for presenting a great dilemma to the advocation of a broadening of the definition of rape. Plus, this keeps language narrow and specific, which we all know I'm a fan of.

And here's some lulz.

Moral of the Story: Get a Vasectomy

This comment on this post was just too hilarious (and awesome) to let get buried.

TL;DR summary: guy gets a vasectomy. Three months later, he meets a woman with whom he enjoys a casual relationship. She had other designs, however, and about four months into the relationship she plays the "I am pregnant" game, which our hero indulges with a bit of pleasure (knowing obviously the child is not his). After revealing her to be completely crazy and immoral, he performs an awesome coup-de-grace that leaves her sobbing.

Comeuppance! Catharsis! Woo.

The Lies We Live With - Independence

I contend that it is impossible to live an absolutely honest life. We all live with lies (and by this I mean the simplest definition of a lie: "an inaccurate or false statement," whether it is intentional or not). This could be the result of any number of things - indoctrination, propaganda, self-defense, who knows. One of the lies I lived with for a long time was related to my indoctrination into the modern liberal mindset, a process I had very little choice in.

But I've lived with a variety of other lies. Human memory is faulty, and so we may come to believe things about our past that are untrue. During my exile in Utah, only after deep reflection and a painful confrontation with my past, did I learn that I had convinced myself of an outright falsehood which had fundamentally altered the way I approached relating to other people. How or why this happened, I cannot say for sure.

This is why my ideal is to strive for ever more honesty; we can never be perfectly honest, I think, but we can try.

In what is the first of an intended series of posts, I want to take a closer look at the lie of "independence" in the West, particularly among modern liberal (and by this I mean the type discussed in my link above) thinkers. We are all raised to value our independence and we fancy ourselves independent thinkers, workers, citizens, etc. Most people's first taste of "independence" is when they get their first car at the age of 16 (anecdote: I've always relied on mass transit). Independence is valued in our society and enshrined as a sort of virtue.

Only an extremely small minority of us are independent, however. In fact, most of us have crippling dependencies on "the system" and on society at large. If, overnight, the entire *American infrastructure were to be swept under a rug (the roads, the system of distribution for foodstuffs and water, just to name a few), we would find that most people would quickly die in short order. As a culture, we fancy ourselves as industrious and deserving of our place in the world. When one talks about their hard-won job or hard-earned achievements, they always talk in terms of their struggles inside the system, spending hours and hours studying at the universities or working long nights or whatever the case may be. Their analysis completely ignores the fact that they had a system to work within at all.

For example, I am absolutely positive that there are people who have been born in less advantaged places in the world who were either equal to me in capacity, or superior. However, I am just as certain that they died well before they reached the age of 21. Why? They lost the "genetic lottery," and that's it. They had the poor misfortune of being born into a terrible part of the world that does not have a grand infrastructure like the United States*. If they did survive, it is because they learned how to be truly independent - how to grow their own food, build their own home, and eek out their own living.

So, while we fancy ourselves independent, we can think all sorts of absurdities. I was recently talking to someone who expressed that she could never imagine herself "shackled to a man" in a marriage, how this would be absolutely catastrophic to her "independence." She did not think it was fair game or even relevant for me to point out that she was absolutely taking for granted her day to day dependence upon the social system that has been set up for her sustenance. She does not want to be "dependent" upon one man (a husband), when in reality, she is dependent upon countless men (and some women) who pay taxes and work for the state to build and maintain the institutions she uses to survive.

This thinking is poisonous. We devalue community and cooperation in favor of "independence," but yet again, we're not even talking about "independence." True independence would be off-the-grid living, growing your own crops and perhaps tending to your own herds for sustenance. Such living is often ridiculed as backwards and "crazy." So when people talk about how they're very "independent," what they're probably talking about is how they're very ignorant and very irresponsible. They feel no responsibility to society and see no reason why they should contribute back, and often pursue purely luxurious endeavors - things like art. (Art is great, and I am a fan of it. But it contributes nothing to our survival.)

Yet another example, methinks, of a thought-terminating cliché or doublespeak. I would love to see all those enlightened, "open-minded" college students (in whom these attitudes seem to be very prevalent) have to do things like build their own schools, pave their own roads, provide for their own defense, make their own budgets, grow their own food, and on and on... They might finally learn what being "independent" is really all about.

*I mention the US specifically, but these arguments could apply to any civilization. If you do not grow your own food and provide for your own basic sustenance and survival needs (to include defense from hostile aggressors - be they bandits or be they invaders), you are not independent, and in fact you are dependent upon the system to provide a method for you to acquire the things you need to survive. In case you're wondering, I'm entirely dependent. There's nothing inherently "wrong" with being dependent, but there is something wrong with being ignorant about it.