I am the only person alive or dead to have written for both Heavy Metal Magazine and the Ditkomania fanzine. I served on the final BoD for the Friends of Lulu nonprofit, co-edited the Solestar OGN raising 20 grand for the Brain Aneurysm Foundation, and my name is buried in the closing credits for the Iron Sky film because life is a long story. And I am a firm believer the black sheep of the muses draws about itself black sheep in trade. I think Wertham not wanting to blame juvenile delinquency on the broken homes created by WW2 helped make saints out of con-artists and validate miscreants, devolving into the notion recipients of self-love today can do no wrong. I doubt Darwin would see reason in affording greater sums to lesser works over time, but then again doubt can be self-published today. Whether conscious of it or not, I wonder how many folks who give up on comic book careers do so because try as they might they will never be a part of the 70s/80s Marvel bullpen, that vicarious anything is as good as nothing. Never understood how so many people carrying so much water can be so thirsty all the same. Maybe the sense of completeness might be the break from reality that makes fiction appealing.
My lil sister has gotten into watching vids online, old farmer hippies sharing their notes on how to do things the grandparents we love so much did matter of factly. Maybe the best that technology can do for us is to remind us what we have lost, when it’s not helping us forget. Old farming families were practicing firsthand recycling for generations before the terminology even existed, long before the recycling of today ends in landfills. *Things* were repurposed far more than people themselves. A satisfied customer actually would mean no repeat business for industry, from entertainment to psychology to politics. The illusions cast by progress founded profit in updates, maintenance and treatments but not cures, solutions or binding peacetime resolution. Closure is unnecessary for investing in hope.
Only in America does a self-made man require supporters. Battle not with monsters lest ye get off on the experience. Consider the lengths Snowden had to delve, in order to cause the world to forget he started the “surprise butt secks” meme.
If we wanted a Democracy, we’d either anonymize candidates to prevent anyone voting for or against subjective matters, or staff all seats of power with a lottery system along the lines of jury duty. We entertain a government because on some level we all know most of us are wholly incapable of governing themselves. But then freak when said most of us continuously elect the absolute worst among us time and again. I’ve never in my life argued that anyone anywhere deserves more than you, but nobody deserves less. If we want a society not only functioning but healthy, we need free education and free healthcare for all constituents. Because any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A patriotism which isn’t concerned with the well-being of its fellows is no patriotism, it’s a vantage point for evasions from problem-solving and masquerades for ego. It’s giving more weight to symbols of god and country than to who those symbols rely upon for merit and mettle.
Each horrible thing the other political party ever did to us, your party did not prevent. Good vs evil only exists in Hollywood, comic books and fast food restrooms. As only ego insists either love or cruelty is ever deserved, good people do not seek out power over the lives of others. In reality, throughout my lifetime there’s not even any actual leftists in first world governments, if they do exist they’re too busy helping at soup kitchens to campaign for advancing themselves. Capitalism sells 50 shades of rightwing. Trump’s campaign finance manager was executive producer of movies Mnuchin, whose success was rewarded with the position of US Treasury Secretary. Success that came by funding from his Rolodex of Hollywood…liberals? The whole Cambridge Analytica scandal was about Neoliberal Mark Zuckerberg putting aside his differences for shared financial interests with Neocon Robert Mercer over manipulating online user experiences, the customer being the Trump campaign. Leftist politician is as oxymoronic doublespeak as is creative industry or billionaire philanthropist or diplomatic immunity. The needs of others come before personal wish-fulfillment, or personal wish-fulfillment comes before the needs of others. But who needs to be powerless? Concern for the livelihoods and well-being of others leads to sacrifice, not to power. Heroes are never the ones who want you to carry them. Villains need others to make with the sacrificing. Ask not what your country can do for you, right.
School closures during the pandemic weren’t themselves anything more than inconvenience, but the total lack of any existing framework to support it was problematic, and that falls on every President to date. Besides, too many want schools and news media to reflect the DIY segregation nature of their digital socials, where they’re never met with anything uncomfortable or unfamiliar. When schools or news media are only about making us feel good, they fail spectacularly in their one purpose. There’s logic in preaching outside choirs and there’s logic to reaching across the aisle, as both are breaking free of comfortable stagnation, but there is no logic to meeting madmen halfway, meeting anyone who thinks right/wrong must abide by personal standards. Mandated responses to any speech is no less censoring. Half of society’s problems would vanish the moment we take note that all those suffering their own thoughts and feelings don’t need to replicate our own. Egoists are all about what’s wanted to fill their voids, not what’s needed. They are chauffeured by impulse to extents where consequence is the most offensive thing imaginable. Codependency exists and thrives without logic or reason.
We either lose ourselves in comfort or gain all that life offers from avoiding it. I know self-destructing cryptocurrency is a thing, but if only all currencies could be, then anything over say, one mil unspent after a calendar year just magically goes to the Federal Reserve. We already have means for free education/healthcare, gods among men are sitting on it and rotating. Egos Bogart every leftover and still never get filled. All the credit and rewards and none of the blame or burden is no functioning relationship or ethos of any stripe. Truth’s not about making us feel good, it has a grander design than that. Most if not all of what ails society ultimately is the matter of love being mandated by others. It should be treated like a finite resource, then it has value. Same with cruelty. It’s irresponsibility that produces victimization, and responsibility that does the clean up. Neither my survival or my esteem is dependent upon justifying the suffering of others.
I think and feel that anyone who might argue against this wants to mask their sadomasochism as politics or religion either one. Life’s value is magnified when we’re more selective with our love and our cruelty, its pain diminishes when we opt out of being special.
It’s silly, these companies prodding toward the contrary think the public wants more immersive artificiality, when so little about life today has anything natural about it. Like futurists and their simulation theory, oblivious to how it’s another limbo freeing them from accountability in the here and now. Hell I even believe that there was a widespread, concerted effort to jack up paper costs in the 80s, so that everyone would be more willing and able to transition to the virtual sphere for what they read and write. It may as well be a self-containment spell. The thing about Luddites and the Butlerian Jyhad, is the self-dependence proponents want more than ignorant bliss.