Ayn Rand: Pseudo-Intellectualism At Its Finest

"Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment." - Ayn Rand.

Oh! Well, thank you for enlightening us! That makes a lot of sense, because classes don't exist and have absolutely no bearing on how someone's life turns out; there is no such thing as privilege whether it's in the form of race, gender or wealth, and if there is it's not primarily an inherited thing its recipients did nothing to earn one way or another. Right?

Because everyone is born equal with exactly the same opportunities for education and training. Right?

Because the wealthy and powerful are only wealthy and powerful because they're the smartest, hardest working and most talented people in society -- again, wealth and power are not primarily inherited or gifted things; they're only ever the result of mind-blowingly clever ideas and jaw-droppingly hard work, and therefore taxation is theft, and the use of public schooling is a drain on society. Right?

Because the poor and middle classes are only stuck at the bottom of the pyramid through their own despicable laziness and because they're just so damned average. Because all wages are sufficient to cover the costs of any necessary service if one simply budgets correctly. Because women are only treated as second-class citizens due to their insistence on acting inferior and submissive. Because every Westerner who isn't white chose to be subjugated, dismissed, abused and treated as foreign in their own country. Right?

Ayn Rand had absolutely no idea what she was waffling on about, and it shows: the people who subscribe to her views are either picking and choosing which parts of her views they like, or they're adolescents. As far as I can tell, most people are exposed to Rand -- usually in the form of her fiction, not her frankly ridiculous essays -- when they're quite young, say ages 12 - 22. Her ideas are extremely appealing at this age, because their black-and-white idealism suits the overly simiplistic world view most children have. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority tend to follow a pattern of thinking Rand is brilliant and amazing, growing up a little, and realizing how redundant and short-sighted most of her ideas actually are. Amazingly, her ideas seem to be making a resurgence of late -- I can only assume this has something to do with the state of the economy, and the fact that Ayn Rand was a little like Oprah in the fact that she could sound extremely knowledgeable and right without actually having any idea what she was talking about.

That isn't to say there aren't parts of Rand's "philosophy" that I agree with. I can't disagree with her views on bodily autonomy: she was loudly and resolutely for the rights of all individuals to do whatever they like with their own bodies. I am, too, and there are plenty of other extremely intelligent people who share this conviction and who can actually back it up with sound reasoning, which I wouldn't depend on Rand for. Rand was also firmly against racism, as demonstrated here:

 "They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent."

Thank you for that absolutely sickening piece of colonialist propaganda. Even Disney managed a less racist take on thegenocide of those primitive animals who totally deserved it for trying to keep the poor little white man from spreading his wonderful civilization. 

"The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face." 

Really? Come on, now we have to take ourselves seriously all the time? I seem to remember a period in my life when I found it extremely difficult to laugh at myself. Predictably, it was when I was a raging ego on legs, otherwise known as a 'teenager'. I suppose my hormone-fuelled teenage hubris should be reminiscent of the world view of a woman who wrote an essay entitled The Virtue of Selfishness -- I'm not making this up. Ayn Rand literally believed altruism is holding back humanity's progress. I am growing steadily more and more embarrassed for anyone who takes her seriously.

"Evil requires the sanction of the victim."

I find this quote intensely disturbing in the light of Rand's original model for her "ideal man", the fictional hero she sought to immortalise on paper; his characteristics are evident in the lead male characters of both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. These are some of Rand's notes on the heroic, perfect character she was inspired to write based on a man named William Edward Hickman: "[he] is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

This model -- Rand's highest ideal, her pinnacle of human achievement -- was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer. In December of 1927 he kidnapped a 12-year-old girl named Marian Parker. He proceeded to send her parents cruel, taunting ransom notes demanding the sum of $1500 for the girl's safe release. Her parents raised the money and delivered it to Hickman, who proceeded to dump Marian's corpse in front of her horrified father and flee. Her legs had been cut off and her eyes had been wired open to appear as if she was still alive. Her internal organs had been cut out and pieces of her body were later found strewn all over the Los Angeles area.

Hickman was apprehended, despite his best attempts to hide (seems odd, considering Rand's vehement denouncement of "cowards"), tried for not only Marian Parker's murder but also an assortment of other murders, robberies and forgeries, and eventually he was sentenced to death. 

This man was Rand's basis for her literary hero. There is a word for the type of person she aspires to so ardently:sociopath. Although, as far as Rand was concerned, Hickman was the victim in all this; where he should have been praised for his "courage" in defying society's expectations, the degenerate, stupid mob had the gall to turn on him!

"The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority.'... It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal...

"This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul."

Yes, Ayn. Clearly the problem everybody had with Hickman was his daring individuality. Not his brutal murder and dismemberment of a 12-year-old child. Clearly the real villain here is the public. You are so very, very switched on and clever. What a unique and special snowflake you are, Ayn, for seeing this man for who he really is: a beautiful, bold and romantic soul. Maybe you should spend the next 7 years writing a novel 

about these misunderstood virtues that only you are clever enough to see, you special snowflake, you.

In which I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who doesn't think sexual violence is hilarious.

I have had an exceedingly depressing hour or so of finding what appears to be an endless stream of Facebook pages dedicated to rape jokes.

- "The awkward moment went your misses wakes up and ya dicks in her arse"

- "Im not a rapist LOL jks get in the van"

- "The awkward moment when a slut is not DTF but you fuck her anyway"

- "Raping pregnant bitches and telling my friends I had a threesome"

- "Looking in the mirror and wondering how you haven't been raped yet"

- "Is raping a hooker classified as theft"

- "You know shes playing hard to get when your chasing her down an alleyway"

Rape jokes are bullshit. I realize some people can find something entertaining and enjoyable about the real-life sexual assault of millions of their fellow human beings, and frankly I'd consider that a symptom of a worrying disconnect from reality. I am one of the unfortunate minority who
a) don't think it's funny, and
b) are not afraid to tell people that I don't think it's funny, and proceed to give them reasons why they should shut the fuck up.

It's not viewed as socially acceptable or 'polite' to call people out on their sickening attempts at humour, and apparently that's supposed to keep me from doing it, but I think that's piss-poor reasoning. I should stay silent and just accept it because...someone might feel perturbed by it if I speak up? Good. They should feel perturbed. Ideally they should feel incredibly embarrassed to be spouting this crap and passing it off as a joke. At any rate, keeping quiet is half the problem -- it's a lot easier to get away with hurting somebody if no one's willing to speak up and tell you you're wrong. And I don't really care if everyone in the group suddenly feels acutely uncomfortable and defensive. You know who's automatically going to feel uncomfortable over rape jokes? Rape survivors. The 1 in 4 women, 1 in 20 men -- and that's only the ones who report their assault. The numbers are higher than that in reality.

So you know a survivor, whether they've told you about it or not -- and if you've been running your mouth about how rape is funny, rape is a funny joke, they're probably not going to mention it to you because they can't trust you to take them seriously. And survivors don't get a choice about whether or not they've been sexually assaulted, but everyone has the choice of whether or not to make a crack about sexual assault.

You know it's in poor taste. And it's not the kind of 'poor taste' your grandmother complains about, when women wear red shoes on a date or something equally trivial and ridiculous. It's the kind of 'poor taste' that very literally and very directly communicates to everyone you're speaking to that you not only couldn't give a shit about rape survivors, you actively support rapists. You're saying that you think what they do is pretty okay, and honestly pretty funny.

I know that most of the time that isn't what you think you're saying, and I know for most people it sounds like you're making a joke ('haha, wouldn't it be funny if I really thought it was cool and normal to force people into sexual acts?' -- to which the correct answer is 'in what way would that be funny?'). There's one type of person who doesn't realize you're joking about that. That person is a rapist, and you don't know who they are. You don't know that you know them. They don't go around with flashing neon signs above their heads, but they exist in disgustingly high numbers in perfectly ordinary society, so I can tell you right now that you have met one. You probably hung out with one. Maybe multiple times. Maybe you thought he was kind of weird, maybe it never crossed your mind that he could ever be violent with anyone. Maybe you made a joke around him; it might've been about rape.

And there, right there, you've just told the rapist that you've hung out with at some point that his actions are normal. He already thinks that, this is statistical fact -- rapists believe that all men rape, it's just that some of them hide it better than others. What you've done when you make a naturalizing, lighthearted comment about rape is reassure him that it is normal, that you all do it too, and that you think it's okay. On top of that you've simultaneously told the rape survivor(s) you know that you're on the side of the person who assaulted them; that you don't believe their hurt is real or that it should be taken seriously. This could be your mother, your sister, your best friend.

Now tell me rape jokes don't hurt anybody.

Wherein I quibble about a few of the finer points of debate.

I do adore a good debate. I, like most people, openly love the sound of my own opinions; but I also appreciate the opportunity to express them in a setting that allows for them to be (intelligently and calmly) questioned, and I am quite open to hearing other people's views (so long as they are reasonably well thought out). I realize that not everyone can have the same opinions of every hot button topic, and you can argue politics until the cows come home but some people will just never see eye-to-eye, and plenty of women are exercising their right to not care whether they have rights. I have come to accept these facts, however grudgingly.

One thing I do insist on, if I'm to take someone's input with any level of seriousness, is that we are all clear on the definitions of the words and terms we're using.
For example, I find it bewilderingly difficult to find a person who understands what "privilege" is in a socio-economic context. Unless I feel like hauling out the chalkboard and teaching this poor imbecile from scratch what they should already know if they're displaying a willingness to engage in racial, gender-based or economic debate, I'm probably not going to bother paying any attention to their opinion. This isn't because I'm inherently arrogant (debatable; I won't deny it just yet); it's because their opinion is overwhelmingly likely to be uninformed and/or based on anecdotal evidence and/or based on prejudice and second-third-or-fourth-hand stories.

Rules of Any Decent Debate
1. Understand the vocabulary. If you want to argue whether or not there is a God, define 'God'.
2. If you know nothing or nearly nothing factual about the topic, don't start. Don't even say anything. Shut up and listen. You might learn something.
3. No anecdotal evidence. Ever. I don't care. If you utter a sentence during a serious discussion beginning with "My [insert relative/pet/friend/ex-boyfriend's name here]..." you are going straight to debating Hell and I will help you get there. It isn't relevant. Just because something happened to someone you know does not make it the norm. It doesn't mean anything at all, actually, so just don't bring it up. Good. Thanks.

These are all problems I tend to find in abundance on the internet. That's not to say they're not also tragically common in everyday (real) life, but the internet really manages to produce some doozies. If I had a dollar for every time I've come across a wildly creatively spelled missive denouncing one thing or another based on someone's auntie's personal experiences as a secretary, I'd be a very wealthy lady.

What's really caught my attention tonight when it comes to terrible arguments is the sheer number of people who dismiss concerns about underlying messages in anything aimed at children by saying, "But it's for children, so it's intended to entertain not indoctrinate". 
Intention is completely and utterly irrelevant. I'm sorry, but in cases of implied racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or xenophobia, it really doesn't matter even a tiny little bit whether the creator of the thing really intended those ideas to be embedded in the fibre of it. If someone can find any of those things, and reasonably justify their point using the source material, then I'm real sorry, but it's there. You can choose not to look at it if you like. Of course there are other ways of reading it. That doesn't mean that implied racism/sexism/ableism/homophobia/xenophobia isn't there anymore. It just means you'd prefer not to acknowledge it.

Another thing - indoctrination is most often not intentional. I don't understand where exactly this idea came from that 'indoctrination' means 'deliberate and malignant brainwashing', but it's complete nonsense and shows a poor grasp of the vocabulary. According to that fount of knowledge known as Wikipedia, "indoctrination is the process of inculcating ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology (see doctrine). It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned."

The only difference between indoctrination and socialization is that one has a negative connotation and the other has a positive connotation. It's all cultural learning, and it is never more significant and influential than it is in children's entertainment.

On Ellen Page.

So, supposedly Ellen Page has been 'outed' by an outraged blogger with unnamed sources. Question: has this always counted as a reliable way to find out about somebody's sexual orientation? I'm neither here nor there on the issue; it's bullshit to forcibly out somebody, and something about the inherent sideshow-ish nature of the claims makes me pretty uncomfortable. It's as if they've found out she's abnormal, dug up a dirty scandalous secret worth blogging about, which I'm sure is doing wonders to reassure those LGBT teens they're so worried for.

Plenty of people manage to live their lives without discussing their sexuality with people they don't know, and frankly I don't see why anyone should be made to do it if it doesn't appeal. If a prominent member of the community is gay and they want to talk about it in the press, make a statement about it and volunteer themselves as a positive representative, that's brilliant, but it's not something you can force someone into. It's intensely personal, and claiming anyone should bring their sexuality into their profession on the basis that it's a job that forces them into the public eye is ridiculous. Go find someone else to point the finger at, as if they were personally responsible for the bullying of LGBT youth. Maybe this time pick somebody who isn't a young LGBT person.

Hey. Hey, Lauren.

YOU'D LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT TO BE YOUR BFF OR YOUR GF RIGHT?
RIGHT?

Genuinely unsure whether laughter or tears are more appropriate.

On people with an inherent terror of eating anything they were not raised on.

So, not too long ago I came across a recipe online - I like hunting for recipes online, sue me - for baked lemon pasta.

People of a delicate disposition should probably turn away now.

Apparently, instead of thinking "Sweet, that looks pretty easy to make, I might try something new!", I should have been wondering what kind of person would eat pasta (a disgusting and unpopular ingredient by all accounts) and lemon (which, let's face it, is a horrible and exceedingly rare flavour) in the same dish. This is judging by the reaction to my mentioning it in passing to some people who will remain unnamed. They expressed a range of emotions between shock, trepidation and outright horror at the very idea of pasta and lemon in the same dish.

Now, call me world-weary, impatient, scathing and contemptuous - I am three out of four of those things - but I think that was a pretty stupid bizarre reaction. I'm not sure I properly expressed that sentiment in the moment, because I was too busy being torn between confusion and laughter at the stunned silence, murmured "What?"s and subsequent heartily offended outpouring of "Lemon...pasta bake?" Possibly all I got out was something along the lines of "Yeah. Lemon pasta bake."

Am I missing something here? Is this a normal thing that I wasn't raised to do? Some sort of food-related xenophobia, an utter lack of any sense of culinary adventure? It's not enough that I can't attend bizarre food festivals and actually eat bizarre things, now I have to narrow my meal choices down to Things My Mother Served Me Before I Moved Out Of Home? Because, and I'm sensing a theme here, that also sounds rather boring.

So please, people who are irrationally scared of trying new foods - or clothes, or music, or dances, or sexual positions, or anything for that matter - just give it some thought. I'm just putting it out there. Sarcasm aside, I really do believe that the point of life, insofar as I can tell, is to experience it. I'm not trying to pass judgement on how you live your life, but uhh, it seems like you make the whole 'experience' thing kind of difficult for yourself.

On hilariously anti-climactic overhyped pop singles.

Gaga?
Gaga?
What is this shit?
Come on now. I'm not even a hater. In fact I love some Gaga with cocktails and an excess of makeup.
Don't get me wrong; I find plenty of her fans obnoxious, her more vocal haters even more so, and I find that 'monster' stuff generates a fair amount of second-hand embarrassment. I can't sit through interviews with her without concluding that she has absolutely no idea what she's talking about/is trying too damn hard to be a visionary, enlightened leader.

All of that aside, she tends to make good pop music, and pop is one of my all-time favourite genres. It's happy music. Don't give me shit about disliking your 20-minute epics about slaying dragons or worshiping the Beast or whatever the fuck it is, and then turn around like "Oh I can't stand happy music!" Why? Does it make you awkward to be flippant and joyous? Telling.
Anyway.

This song is not good. It's not exactly awful, but for something that's been so hyped...it should have been far, far better than this. I am disappointed, Gaga. I'll just be over here, listening to The Fame Monster and side-eyeing this single. Give me an album on which I can consider this The Track I Always Skip, and things will be cool between us, okay? I still love you.

This is the reason why people don't like Republicans.

Now, I'm the sort of person who likes to be at least a little bit politically aware. I like to have an idea of what's going on in the world around me. Call me crazy, but I even take an interest in things that don't affect me directly.
Like this. I notice it only takes 37 words before 'God' pops up - golly gosh, you'd almost think there was some kind of link between 'God' and 'fuck all women, you don't deserve rights'.

So. Let's start from the top with this embarrassingly misogynistic piece of pro-rape propaganda. First off, it is completely misleading in the sense that it is supposedly just there to prevent 'taxpayer money' funding abortions. That's not all it would do. It would also prevent private health insurance covering the cost of abortion, and if that doesn't seem fucked up enough to you, read on.
Secondly, and most offensively, when the bill was first introduced it included a proposal to change the legal definition of 'rape' in cases of abortion, and by 'change' I mean 'narrow down', and by 'narrow down' I mean 'a 12-year-old girl who is impregnated by a 40-year-old man is not entitled to health coverage for an abortion'.

Of course, there were very few people possessed of basic reading comprehension who were not at least a little perturbed by the sweeping generalization implied there - basically, that all rape victims who are not able to prove that they have been assaulted enough don't count as rape victims. By this definition, in order to be taken seriously enough to qualify for healthcare insurance, you will have to provoke your rapist to beat you into submission. Because that's exactly what you want to do when you're being assaulted by someone - piss them off! Not to mention the fact that you are probably a woman, and your attacker is probably a man, and physically that will normally give him all the edge he needs to step it up and actually murder you. Thankfully there are a great many people who are aware of the fact that the majority of rape is not accompanied by a beatdown, and they promptly created A Big Fuss. So that particular part of the bill has been dropped.

Honestly, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone - even someone cruel enough to want to deny women, children and trans people who happen to have wombs the right to choose what happens to their own bodies - is stupid enough to think that 'raped in your sleep? lol no you weren't!' was actually going to slip by unnoticed.  You know how when you're bartering, you're supposed to name a ridiculously high price that no one would actually accept and work your way down from there to the price you'd actually be perfectly happy to settle for in the first place?
Or when you'd say to your parents, "I want to get a tattoo!" and they were all, "FUCK NO" and you were like, "Okay...well, can I go to a party tonight?" and they were all, "Yeah sure, do what you want, just no tattoos!"
Yeah. Something tells me this is kind of like that. A red herring, I guess you could call it. At any rate, just because that was the worst part of the bill doesn't mean the rest of the bill isn't complete bullshit too. I can only cross my fingers and hope people don't 'settle' for an added economic struggle for rape survivors in a time of worldwide recession.

On bewilderingly popular films.

You know, I saw Black Swan, and I didn't care for it.

It was alright. I mean, it wasn't a bad film. I don't regret sitting through it. It held my attention reasonably well. However, I really don't get what all the hype is about. I've got status updates about its peerless brilliance littering my Facebook feed, and I just don't get it. I didn't care about the main character because she was a high-strung yuppie (and the only high-strung yuppie I care about is an insane serial killer), and the plot was so predictable that I spent at least half the film thinking "Hurry up and get to the bit where she dances and it all goes to hell. I get it, I get it, she's the white swan, Mila Kunis is the black swan, her mum is controlling, she's breaking free/going nuts, blah, blah, blah."

Really? People were really blown away by this? By Natalie Portman playing a repressed rich girl with a demanding job? I mean, I'm not saying her performance was bad, because it wasn't. It was quite good - but not great. It wasn't great, because she was basically playing herself. The girl peaked at 13 in Leon: The Professional. Frankly I found Mila Kunis more engaging; I'm struggling to see where the Oscar hype is coming from.

Evidently my opinion is in the minority at the moment, but...

On people who'd be better off just not speaking.

Oh Tom Ford. You would be so much cooler if you'd just keep your mouth shut and at least give the impression of intelligence.
"Some people are physically beautiful but yet they’re completely uninteresting, and thus they’re not beautiful. I detach the two. ... That’s why I think gay men make better designers."
Well, I like chocolate ice cream, and that's why I think rabbits make the best pets. What in sweet fuck are you even talking about? Is it possible that somewhere in that incoherent mess of a quote, you were trying to argue that gay men make the best designers because unlike straight men they won't have their judgement clouded by sexual attraction to the women they design clothes for? Quick question, where do women belong in all this - you are aware that there are female designers, right? And by this logic, wouldn't asexual people make ultimate designers? Also when did you make the scientific breakthrough that creativity is inextricably linked to sexual orientation, and why did you keep it quiet until now?

On my subconscious and its habit of trolling me.

So there I am, settling down for sleepytimes. It's really late at night, I can hardly keep my eyes open, my bed is warm and comfy, it's all coming together.

And then BAM. I wake up in a total panic, I have no idea why but at the time it was imperative that I sit up and try to see my attacker.
For some reason, in the pitch darkness of my room, my eyes decide to blatantly lie to me and tell me that the vacuum cleaner is sitting near my heater, watching me menacingly. And then the fucking vacuum cleaner starts moving. Of its own accord. Advancing on me, clearly intending to strangle me with its hose or some ridiculous thing. It was terrifying. It sounds stupid, but you try being stoic when you're half-asleep and convinced you're being attacked by evil cleaning appliances.
So I start telling the vacuum cleaner "no!"
Loudly.
I am sitting in bed in the middle of the night, shouting at the imaginary evil vacuum cleaner, "NO! NO!"

Whatever. I managed to turn my lamp on and see that the vacuum cleaner isn't even in my room, and I go back to sleep, my sanity restored.
Or was it?
The last dream I remember having was - from my point of view - frankly glorious, but it was the kind of glorious that means when I wake up and realize it was only a dream, I react badly.

Like this.

My glorious dream consisted of some sort of movie viewing. The only thing I recall clearly about the movie was the fact that it had paired a couple of male characters - which was cute and all, but more importantly, they were played by this man:

That's Ian Somerhalder...on a fucking motorcycle.

and this man:

Anyone who knows me knows that my ovaries just exploded.

Cillian Murphy and Ian Somerhalder. I don't even know how my dream-self witnessed it without spontaneously combusting due to sheer joy. For reasons I think I just made quite clear, my return to reality was accompanied by this sort of behavior:

Forever.

On Maynardism and why you can tell people you don't like how they look, but they'll think you're an asshole.

I have a friend who is simultaneously quiet and brash. He has a pronounced tendency not to bother with such things as social niceties, and I accepted this long ago as a personality quirk rather than genuine vitriol. Tonight I was introduced to the idea that not everyone is willing to overlook it as such, in the form of another friend of mine becoming heartily offended over an unflattering comment he made on her appearance.
It was the kind of comment that was terribly worded, and knowing him as long as I have I could see immediately that he did not mean it in the way it came out, but by then it was too late. It had been said, the proverbial damage dealt.
And that, children, is why it's best to consider who we are talking to before we say anything that could possibly (definitely) be seen as rude or hostile.

I also spent some time in the company of the kind of people who drink until they vomit and then continue drinking/are pretty sure there's absolutely nothing undesirable about living in a constant cloud of pot smoke/declare poorly edited cartoons with little or no coherency to be 'exactly like a bad acid trip', which makes no fucking sense because modern acid rarely if ever causes visual hallucinations. Inevitably, Bill Hicks was mentioned and adoration heaped upon His Holy Name from all sides. I left before someone could bust out the Tool albums and begin pointing out the Bill Hicks references in the Tool songs. My only response to anything along these lines will forever be best summed up in this video:

Afterwards, I came to the conclusion that these pseudo-intellectual/edgy/whateverthefuck morons have made one very basic mistake.
Say a layman strikes up a conversation about quantum physics with a physicist. There's a good chance the layman will not understand a single thing the physicist is talking about, because the physicist is extremely intelligent and knows a lot more about the subject than the layman does.
Say a useless stoner pseud strikes up a conversation about who-the-fuck-can-tell-what with an average non-idiot person. There's a good chance the non-idiot will not understand a single thing the pretentious Messiah-complex-bearer is talking about, and sadly, they seem to think that this is because - like the physicist - they are just too clever for the poor layman to follow.

It's not because they're talking utter bullshit that has no intellectual or philosophical merit whatsoever. It's just that you don't get it, man.

Pro-Ana?

"I'm not beautiful, my hair is ruined and I know I will never have long hair again. I've lost several teeth. My skin is dry. My breasts have fallen. No young girl wants to look like a skeleton. ... You couldn't believe anyone would want to look like that. I don't think there's any question about it." - Isabelle Caro on how nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

"Thinness leads to death and it is anything but beautiful. You start out with this feeling as if you can master everything, that you are in total control, and then little by little you fall into this hellish spiral, a spiral of death."

Jesus God, the photos of this woman break my heart. There is at best boundless stupidity and ignorance, and at worst mental illness or pure mean-spiritedness, fueling any comments that this could possibly be a positive thing. 
She died at 28 years of age. There is nothing beautiful about it.

I feel so privileged, yet so sad, to have lived long enough to see this happen.

Someone has taken it upon themselves to create a Simpsons porn parody. To be quite honest, this looks pretty reminiscent of an episode of Jersey Shore - the Simpsons are yellow, not orange, but apparently Snooki is better than jaundice.

Stupid sexy Flanders.

Nothin' at ALL!

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Last night I dreamed that I was a lone soul in a post-apocalyptic wasteland - clearly I've been playing too much Fallout. The only interesting points of the dream were
a) the wolves were back. Again.
and
b) I stabbed a man in the throat with a large kitchen knife. He was a very nasty man and I was aided by two other young women, who similarly took out his eyes and ears with small blades.
It all seems very symbolic, although I'm not quite sure what it's meant to represent. I often swing back and forth between thinking dreams are many-layered puzzles thrown up by overactive imaginations while our too-restrictive sensible waking minds are too dormant to do anything about it, and thinking that dreams are merely images and ideas we've had over the day being sorted in a very haphazard and meaningless way by our ever-busy brains. I suppose the end product is a bit of both.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

It sometimes happens that, in the philosophical no-man's-land that is my everyday conversation, someone will make a comment that really grinds my gears. It starts off small: my immediate reaction is usually a quiet acknowledgement and, depending on how receptive to reason the offending party is, perhaps I'll offer a response hinting at how terribly wrong they are. The conversation continues, the gear-grinder forgotten for the moment. The thing that brings it looming back into my consciousness hours, days, weeks, months or years later is the haunting notion that I have left a grave wrong uncorrected. Thus, these vastly irritating comments could be considered a kind of delayed Berserk Button for me.

Case in point: one of my dearest friends made an offhand comment some months ago to the effect that "atheism is in itself a religion". At the time, I settled for a retort along the lines of "no, it's not, that doesn't make a lick of sense", but it has come back to annoy me ever since nonetheless. It troubles me more than is strictly reasonable that such an intelligent, intuitive and sensible young woman could accept for an instant the ridiculous notion that a term that denotes nothing more and nothing less than 'absence of belief in a deity' refers to a religion.

I suppose the strength of my objection stems from a deep-seated contempt for religion as a concept: I am deeply fascinated by mythology from around the world, and religion has never managed to strike me as anything other than mythology taken far too seriously. There are few demonstrations of utter stupidity grander than the argument that atheism is merely a different brand of religion, due largely to the fact that atheism is in essence the absence of religion. Can you imagine a cancer patient trying to argue that perfect health is just a different type of illness? 

Of course there is also the fact that entirely aside from the obvious fallacy, the other half of the argument - "atheists are a united group of people who all have the same belief system" - is simply untrue. I'm absolutely bewildered as to where people come up with this idea, because I've certainly never seen any evidence of it. Atheists present no united front; even atheists who choose to band together in small, localized groups of similar-mindedness are no more a religious organisation than middle-aged women in a book club are founders of a "Love Books Religion". Atheists, being grouped together on no other basis than one particular, very specific thing they do not believe, cannot collectively agree on anything other than that one single thing. Morality, politics, whether or not Jesus existed, we can't even decide what to call ourselves. If atheism is a religion where are its leaders? There are certainly people of note in the atheist community, and some who are much louder voices of reason than others, but we can't collectively agree on who our intellectual heroes are. Some of us are spectacularly uninformed - atheism does not in any case guarantee logic or intelligence.

We are ordinary people of every race, gender, shape, and social status, and we have only one thing in common: a lack of faith. More often than not this means that we are capable and more than willing to think for ourselves, and make our decisions based on fact and reason. This method of thought is fundamentally incompatible with faith. Faith is the mechanism which allows theists and/or stubborn, petulant people to refuse point-blank to allow the possibility that they could be wrong. It is also the basis of every religion ever invented. And it is this fundamental discrepancy that irritates me to this day. I still wonder what kind of incredible mental acrobatics you must have to perform in order to convince yourself that faithless = belonging to organisation of faith.