>>>>>>>> here's a big fat question for you as you go into the posts that follow from here: "what do you think is the root of things like political instability, institutional racism, religious persecution, revolution, genocide, and economic oppression?" in other words, what is the most general way you could describe the thing or things that all of those situations (large-scale social reorganization by means of violence) embody 100% of the time. for instance, you cannot say "violence" because people who embody any of those attitudes at all are not being violent 100% of the time, certainly, although violence is definitely a necessary, critical feature of all of those states of society.  also, it is probably not specific enough because, certainly, not all violence results in the same kinds of social change, nor on the same scale.  I would also point out that the transfer of power from one group to another can contain either very select violence (i.e. assassinating a president) or wide-spread violence (the reign of terror), but both situations can lead to widespread political upheaval, although certainly of different kinds and of varying intensities.  are there any shared elements between them all?  if not, why do they seem so similar when considered side-by-side? is it just that they are all, in turn, viewed as horrific and necessary by everyone except those who are committing it, and even, in some cases, by those who do commit it ("yes, violence is horrific, but it must be done for the sake of humanity").   okay, so obviously THAT is a huge tangle of weeds, good luck hanging onto your morality in there! (jk, u can still have morality and think anything that you want to because the cops can't read your thoughts yet! stay safe out there, thinking of u and i hope u are blessed (yes, u! ❤️ haha) https://iwishtobealoneandwithoutsun.tumblr.com/post/618112485896142848/how-to-deal-with-bullies-america-2020-platos ####################################### p.s. i wonder when humanity will realize that they already act like a collective unconscious regardless of their beliefs on free will so lets just fast track consciousness computerization research so we can all hop into a computer world and onto a spaceship that looks exactly like earth (after a few generations, probably no one will care anyway tbh except historians and folk tale curators etc and future generations would even get used to simulation reality probably, eventually) p.p.s.  you know how sometimes parents have wisdom even though they have NO IDEA what they are talking about most of the time?  (oh btw, imagine that persisting out of your teens and until you are 31 but also with everyone in the world and u will imagine a little bit what it is like to have social-emotional agnosia.   it is not as flat as that, since obviously people we are more familiar with are more well known to us, so people like parents and friends (this is a tough manual calculation on its own, btw, sorting friend from foe) will be easier for us to read, but still we will fuck it up, i fuck it up with my mom and she is who i have talked to most face-to-face in the world besides a specific therapist.   i cannot interpret your face very easily or other fundamental social signifiers that you rely on to generate context for yourself for other people to understand you more easily.  since i do not understand social contexts, i have only ever been able to relate to myself, mostly.  now that i have managed to grasp an intuitive understanding of my place in social contexts, my life is much, much better for it. to illustrate what that kind of mental task feels like, please consider how you would describe a color to someone who had never perceived color in their entire life or seen light in any way at all, although they would still be sensitive to, i.e. heat from light.  i don't care if this means that they have never seen anything or if they are just seeing white all the time or just one of any color really, just like, greyscale slider pls.   if you really want to go nuts, try imagning that you have a disability that you don't actually have.  imagine for a long time.  how does it feel to you, for instance: colors are wildly important visual indicators for defining things like status and identity in society, for instance in fasion: hair style, hair texture, skin color, makeup brands, whether your color co-ordinate or not, how that relates to what other people around you are doing, etc. even if you don't like "fashion" and prefer more modest clothes in terms of style and/or material, such as myself i think, there are still people selling you specific clothes that look a specific way in order to match an aesthetic which makes you feel more comfortable just by wearing it for any of a number of reasons. in some situations, it is important to have the social context to understand that you got your clothes at a thrift store.  in other social contexts, if it becomes apparent that you got your clothes at a thrift store, you are essentially homeless and not worth associating with.  in other situations, no one cares where your clothes came from.  in other other situations, people care exactly where your clothes came from. if you want to say that color is not, for instance, a huge feature of how we identify people based on clothing (among MANY other aspects), well, i am not sure what else you need me to prove at that point, so please let me know! haha! ##### Bird Time if it's easier for you to think in terms of birds, please consider the role that color plays in the sexual relationships of many birds.  i.e. cardinals with dicks have brighter red feathers usually and cardinals with vjays usually have duller brown, same for peacocks. anyways, stuff like birds and rainbows would obviously be very different to you and have different significances to you depending on your ability to interact visually with the world. on the other hand, it's possible that someone could give a person enough context to understand that when a "rainbow" is described without color in text or whatever, could have enough emotional associations built up with the idea of a rainbow that they have simply simulated what a rainbow looks like in their head and approached the perspective backwardsly. you don't know!  maybe im wrong! ah!

how to deal with bullies - america 2020, plato’s republic at last? finally, ugh, now we can stop talking about it maybe - some thoughts on founding a science of differences rather than similarities (obviously eugenics of any kind must be avoided at all costs, jfc i cant believe i have to say that out loud in 2020)

  the next time someone tells you something that you disagree with, but you can't figure out why and that is upsetting, you can hit them with this.  just memorize it, you don't need to understand it.  don't worry, it is as close to truth as anything can get in this crazy, sensory-based-linguistically-communicated world of ours #### "stop claiming that anything you are saying is 100% true and correct. the only thing that's objective about what you are saying is the implied context you happily appear to ignore, which is that logic itself is a self-referential system with no more claim to objectivity than any other.  much like how the universe is its own context and thus does not need to exist "within" anything else in order to be meaningful, we still cannot prove that anything besides our own knowledge of the simple fact that we, as ourselves, exist, is true in any sense which does not rely on axioms. and even then, we can only arrive at the conclusion that we exist objectively as an individual by means of axiomatic knowledge.  so really, the whole thing is just fucked.  we are, quite literally, adrift in a sea of nothingness, tiny candles floating on the ganges or petals of a lotus flower or faces in a crowd, trees in the forest, wahtever." #### this should both confuse and distract any bullies, listeners, readers, whatever, to the point where you can run away.  if you really want to go for it (NOT RECOMMENDED) you can also just keep talking until they either hit you or go away.  if they hit you, just collapse, do not press the issue.  but if they go away, you have learned something interesting about humans.  maybe.  it depends on any of them stay behind, but even if none of them do, it means that you are for sure alone at that time, but not that you will be alone forever. humans like to say that there is an ineffable quality to relationships which gives them "meaning", but that this is only true for humans.  of course, we have observed this in other mammals as well.  usually, this perspective is discarded with a flippant "ugh muh love chemicals" as if there is no validity to the perspective that things such as love are indeed based on data and chemical reactions which happen in response to that data. why would it be otherwise? nothing else in the universe which we perceive (except god i guess, but lets leave that out of it for now) do we perceive without senses. even thought, emotion, how do you know that you are aware of those things?  you simply are.  you simply know things.  you simply feel things.  you simply see things, etc. of course, we do not understand the mechanism by which brains "sense" emotions, but i wonder if this is because we have been looking too long at the brain as something separate from even the rest of the nervous system. for instance, it is claimed very frequently by many people that the brain is the seat of consciousness.  this is not inaccurate, the brain has the densest concentration of neurons in the body and the largest number of them and does appear to be responsible for interpreting and communicating data, mostly.  communication of data can take many forms: "i am hungry" "i punched you to express my anger" "i killed you to express my morality" "i said you were wrong because here are some contradictory observations which i feel are reliable." obviously, there are differences here, but i posit that they are differences of degree rather than kind.  to be clear, I am saying that I believe the following things are likely all direct functions of the brain: "anger" "morality" “reasonableness" "hunger" this, i believe, in large part shrinks the explanatory domain of a "soul" even further. essentially, i believe there is a field of research which must be done.  this field of research will consist of analyzing disparate groups from many different perspectives in order to analyze what might be true for systems which do not appear to behave similarly. there are many large problems facing the generation of such a field, which i am even having trouble defining right now, but here are my initial hypotheses, which are likely pretty optimistic at this point, so grains of salt pls: 1) ethics.  obviously a minefield filled with nuclear bombs, holocausts, revolutions, and biological racism, for instance. 2) how do you know which comparisons will provide meaningful patterns?  there are a lot of different things out there to compare and also things which are difficult to relate back to numbers/quantification. 3) such datasets would be quite large and difficult to work with, not to mention expensive. 4) what are u even talking about?????

an analysis: knock-knock jokes

#### for context, here is my understanding of the general form of humor: jokes have three parts:context/setup exposition punchline/subversion i have never read anything about the form of humor except what i learn by watching comedy bang bang, so if this stuff is obvious or wrong please let me know! #### The Knock-Knock joke: elevating the pun i think everyone will agree that the worst jokes are puns that do not mean anything beyond putting a word where it doesn't belong, because it is only subverting one context, the sentence itself. if you have something like a double-entendre (you can make a lot of things into a double-entendre, that is why it is so popular to say "that's what she said", for example, because it's an easy way to make a joke), it has subverted both the sentence itself as well as added a different meaning.  this is two contexts which have shifted. knock-knock jokes derive their value from silly punchlines that often don't really make sense, or are simply puns themselves, but they are puns which receive their context in a specific form. this form, familiar to all i assume, typically features a very broad possible context in almost every iteration of this joke. i believe that this is because the essential form of this joke is the simulation of a conversation by way of un-simulated conversation. the participants in the joke can visualize themselves in an actual social situation in which someone is knocking on a door which the other person is now opening. by not doing this on actual doors, the joke-teller can avoid several non-ideal consequences (assault, trespassing, arrest, etc.). so the prankster will generate a facsimile of the situation (think of sketch comedy, for instance, compared to what is appropriate to do in prank shows), so that absurdity can be practiced safely. for instance, if a person knocked on your door and wasted your time by asking infinitely about bananas and then ending with a pun and laughing in your face, how would you react? i mean, i would not suggest assault (i just want to point that out here because i joked about assault in this context just a bit ago), but surely some annoyance is reasonable. compare that to how you react when you envision such a thing in a humorous context. (for extra credit, compare THAT to how you would react if it was taking place somewhere bad like an active warzone, or even something less traumatizing like a movie). of course, part of the knock-knock joke's endurance is likely that, even as it simulates a conversation, it is itself, of course a conversation. so knock-knock jokes appear to rely entirely on the misdirection generated by the juxtaposition of two statements in an imagined social situation which comes along with its own norms to be violated in the safety of one's own head. what do i mean by practicing absurdity safely? go ask ur mother haha, anyways if anyone cares, please ask me specifically and i will attend to that in the future, but for now since i don't ever hear back, i will just assume no one is interested in hearing about that in general or from me in particular.

Social-emotional Agnosia and the Search for Purpose and Meaning in Life

the problem with not being able to read social context properly is that context, in all cases, is what provides the story. the default story about anything is "it is", but this doesnt really tell us much. however, now that we know that it exists, we can ask more things (e.g what is it? why is it? what are some for? what are some other characteristics?).

now that we have developed a context for it (and thus understood not only that "it is", but also what it is: "it is", "it is a tree", "it is a tree without a purpose", "it is a brown tree with green leaves in a field far away from humans and it does not have a purpose" and so on) we can understand more about the object of study, in this case.

we know what role it plays in nature, for instance (water cycle, erosion containment, shade for other plants, fruits and nuts for humans and animals, oxygen production, etc.) if we separate people from nature, then we can say that we know what role it plays for people, too (firewood, furniture, a nap tree, climbing tree, sap syrup).

thus, without knowing context, we cannot know either an object's characteristics or its roles (roles are always relative).

in fact, this is probably why humans feel a lack of purpose when they consider themselves on the universal stage but find meaning and understanding in smaller contexts more easily (family, work, friends, hobbies, neighborhoods, and so on). because the universe, beyond being hard to comprehend, also does not have that much context for itself to exist in. its context, for us, is the things which exist "in" it because we cant really see "out" of it, so the universe, to us, is fundamentally self-referential. since it does not have a larger, at this time percievable or even really predictable, context to exist in, it cannot have a role for us beyond that which it serves by being the space we exist in.

so we know that when things are self-referential, they do not have a role outside of sustaining themselves. thus, if a human does not understand the social context of any given social situation, they will not know what roles they are playing beyond existing.

note: when a human has no palatable roles given to it and it has the means to do so, it will find a new context, either by changing perspective, environment, or both, which gives it roles that are desireable or acceptable.

thus, without being able to read social contexts (this is called "social-emotional agnosia"), a human cannot have roles except in relation to themselves, objects, or clear hierarchies with explicitly defined expectations.

besides not being able to understand why people seem to be feeling they way they are, social-emotional agnosia also, by removing the ability to perceive implicit social context, disables understanding of roles within a given social context.

another word for "role within a specific context" is "purpose", although we usually think of "purpose" for ourselves on the universal scale which, as we all know for sure now (right??), is impossible to know outside of the self-referential answer ("u must create ur own") unless you introduce something for the universe to exist in (i.e. simulation, god, whatever) and derive roles from that (e.g. "god's plan").

a human without a role is a human without purpose. we accept that we have no role, universally speaking, or if we do have one on that scale then it is usually unimaginable (e.g. usually "gods plan" is not known until it has already happened), so we content ourselves with smaller contexts and roles.

what happens when those smaller roles dont exist either?

###

personal note:

big cities have always thrown me for a loop. i can handle visiting them, but i dont really like that either. i think it is because, after only a couple of days, i realize i do not understand my role in a big city in any way. obviously, purpose is self-determined for humans, but to pretend that humans determine anything in a vaccuum is to misapply the idea of "context" to all aspects of existence. thus, a large city informs our roles differently than a small city. i think there is probably a fuzzy maximum limit on how much context humans can comprehend for themselves, even assuming that a human's context gives them neutral or positive roles, like how even big cities are broken up into neighborhoods, etc.

i also wonder if this is what is meant when people talk of the comforts of home. "home is where the heart is", for instance. home is, in its ideal form i think, a safe place where roles are steady, defined, and small (not to say that family is insignificant!). we also get to switch roles by going home, such as coming home from work or school or playing hooky from either. sometimes we dont like the roles we have at home (unhappy in marriage or a bad roommate situation) or they are dangerous for us. in this case, of course, home changes from a place you want to be to a place you have to be, such as if it is your role to be an outlet for an angry parent's rage.

what sort of roles do you occupy in your life? how do you feel about those roles? do you feel like you have the power to change them if you need or want to? how would you feel if you could change your roles? how does it feel to know that you can't change others right now?

what are your roles at work? at home? at a sports game? in a video game?

maybe this is part of why quarantine is so upsetting for many people who find themselves in isolation and with nothing to do. a sudden loss of roles (i.e. sense of purpose) and a scramble to replace them.

For Talent Scout Eyes Only - ella -resume - comedy writing

META NOTE (to whom it may concern): I have designed this resume in such a way that it will likely never need to be updated because tbh my tastes are pretty solidified at this point.  I have relied on traditional content but played a little with the form, so I hope you’re okay with a little free-verse in your inbox.  if not, don’t bother contacting me. okay, you’ve made it this far.  nice.  i told you this wouldn’t be easy, but i promise it’ll be worth it.  lets flip our chairs backward and step on some brass tacks on the floor with our socked feet, cause boy do i have a story for you. comfortable?  okay, let’s begin. to begin with, i have only liked good comedy at this point in my life (such as family guy (only seasons 1 and 2, but i did like season 5 of american dad, so make of that what u will), "passion for the christ" (love love LOVE mel gibson), and comedy bang bang)). so hiring me is a reasonably sure bet for producing good output.  i am also good at doing wacky voices when needed for, i.e (and i DO MEAN the GLOBAL south here): 1. hicks 2. rednecks 3. stupid people 4. people from the south 5. white christian people from the south as you can probably guess, i am also good at arranging lists of related things in order from most general to most specific (i believe this is known in the trade as “list-based comedy”) I also have a wide range of cutting, deeply researched, and very well thought out political opinions regarding thing such as: 1) the current administration (what are they doing??) 2) the undeniable evils of humanity (catholics, amirite??) 3) beating a dead horse is better than beating a live one (this is a play on words with an old saying!) 4) number 3 means i can use tradition to justify re-use of comedic material as much as i need to 5) i have gotten really good at #4 by just changing the appearence of the joke i'm telling, i.e. make a man a woman or avoid gender at all and just make an argument that is a domestic disagreement between two robots (actually, i would like to write that one so please don’t steal it!) 6) because of #5, i think i would be, i.e. a good writer for things like a) SNL b) the later seasons of Family Guy (although seth did win some trust back with The Orville", i must not lie) c) anything starring steven segall d) finally, lot of the jrpg's out there    1) most final fantasy games    2) dragonwarrior was fun the first time, i will give it that e) stuff written by, e.g. quentin tarantino or anyone involved at any time in writing for dr. who did not work ONLY on the season where christopher ecclestion plays the good doctor (not “the good doctor”, that is also a bad show, sorry) to be clear, these are all examples i can think off of the top of my head where the only people involved in every level of production with any responsibility that could possible affect the direction of the production significantly is probably a hack. hacks, in case u are one yourself, would not know good art (comedy, specifically) if it smacked them in the face with a trout (this is a reference to the VERY FUNNY monty python and the holy grail gang, not to be confused with “the little rascals” since the “the little rascals” are obviously children and monty python just isn’t that funny, really.) from bad, as already explained in my parenthetical notations. people who aren’t hack (aka, people who know what a hack is and how NOT to do it) make and can discern very good art.  regularly. and a LOT of it. and it can all be used to make money with, just think about that for a second. ergo, since I am conclusively not a hack, I would be able to both pretend to be a hack and work on bad art and not pretend to be a bad hack and work on good art.  if you can’t suss out what i mean by that, don’t bother contacting me since i only dream of working on shows as intelligent and well-made as the bbc’s The Graham Norton Show,  The BBC’s Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the American version of Kitchen Nightmares, sonic the hedgehog (all games and movies and comics and shows), also there was a cool documentary about magic mushrooms i saw a few years ago, that was good to. to end with (this is a callback to the beginning of this article when i said “to begin with, so please note that both my narrative conventions and narrative time-work are pretty impressive) so, whatever you need me do, i can do it.  This resume, in case you hadn’t noticed refers to a lot of (and simultaneously makes fun of them), narrative tropes that most people don’t even notice!  since i can obviously do any job very well (as far as comedy writing goes), just let me know when i would begin working! thanks again, to any talent scouts who read this, ella

What it’s like to read a thought-provoking conservative magazine at this point in America

HEADLINE: Jumping: How many ways can the left find to erase America? TEXT: Levittown, NY - it was a fateful year, 1989, the year that house of pain released the "jump around song".  not even a year later, kriss kross, another hip hop group, released their own song about jumping, "jump".  i'm not saying anything about race and cultural appropriation and stealing ideas, but tbh, personally, i'm not even sure it's real so we probably don’t need to talk about it anyway. i would now like to call your attention to a specialized tool used by top athletes and small children alike, jump ropes. although, one uses them for fitness to compete at the olympics and the other plays with them on school grounds when their parents are neglecting them after school. in fact, studies show that african americans are more likely to have less time to take care of their children.  but i’m not sure why anyone makes this about race!  it’s crazy. i posit that "jumping", despite evidence to the contrary (you’ll have to google for that one, sorry) is a very important part of every human culture and that no one, single race, mostly since race is a social construct and not real at all so we don’t need to worry about it anymore, should have claim to it. in fact, if you watch the movie "the road to el dorado", the disney movie, you will see that even Aztec people used jumping!  such a traditional and storied human trait surely cannot belong to one group of people, anyone who suggests otherwise is clearly unhinged.  Also, Aztecs have brown skin mostly.  This is, despite some claims to the contrary you might have read, is undisputed by biologists.  this proves that race is real and there are simply biological differences between humans that look like each other.  however, that is completely irrelevant to any of the articles i am writing!  so please STOP bring it up. one last point I’d like to make about jumping is about long jumping.  you will notice that not many people are willing to talk about this.  you will also notice that all of the olympics in countries that are mostly populated by white people (again, race is NOT important here, this is about long jumping), the olympics go more smoothly and there are fewer injuries OVERALL in those countries than olympics in other countries around the world.  also in a study of cheating during the 1952 olympics in helsinki, finland,  the participants in that olympics did not cheat very much, presumably because they knew that they were in a honest society that does not tolerate wrongdoing like rape. or stoning people, unlike some other countries. in conclusion, it is important to keep traditions alive.  one of those traditions is jumping.  in america, this tradition is open to all humans, both men and women.  in other countries we just don’t know.  i am glad to be an american, aren’t you?

how do you balance when there is nothing to stand on?

how do you achieve balance?  what is helping your life make sense right now? send me an anonymous answer!  #####

my days at this point: PROG START

1: wake up on the couch

2: type furiously into my phone for a couple of hours attempting to explain to the world precisely why nothing means anything and never <...> any major national newspaper will ever two shits about the working class, for example.

3: types for another hour or so about the same stuff on my computer when my hands start hurting from holding the phone 4: tries not to think any more and waits until it is acceptable and possible to pass out after it gets dark 5: -> 1 this is honestly pretty exhilarating at times, exhausting at others, meaningful at times, meaningless at times, and so on. i feel in balance this way and life makes sense.  i think i will be making blackout curtains for myself so that i never have to suffer the sun and the pressures of day again when i don’t want to.  I realize that at some point, i will have to re-engage with society in ways that make me feel VERY uncomfortable.  This does not mean that a balance which suits me as an individual is not possible. I feel lucky to have something even close to that power, the power to choose my environment at will, but i think that is a specific power that many people take for granted.  There are many people I can think of who would say that to retain the power of unlimited self-translocation is, in fact, inalienable and a human right, although i do not know any of them personally I do not think, I am thinking of the covid protesters though.  I think most people will agree with a less intense version of this idea which is that movement restriction is more frequently considered a punishment than as a reward. Consider: The existence of vaccuum beds as instruments of pleasure which are used by some humans juxtaposed with the use of a vaccuum bed as a torture device in “the girl in the spider’s web”. How many people do you know who are comfortable with being locked in small spaces with no way to get out?  Even if air was available, you could drink out of a straw at any time and some infinitely palatable soup of nutrients was somehow absorbed into your body without effort, whatever.  This is why the image of humans as farm animals in “The Matrix” is so powerful, btw, because not only are our minds apparently restricted, out bodies are too.  This idea of self-determination in terms of trans-location (it is safe to ignore the dimension of time right now and only discuss the nature of movement in space because for the purposes of this discussion, it does not matter whether or not time is, i.e. constant, but only whether it appears constant.  this means that for any context in which you are describing space, but not time, you are simply implying that the context for time you would like to assume in your hypothetical situation is “normal” time, i.e., linear, simple, causal. Why is jail a bad thing?  Jail is fundamentally an expression of power used to keep people in specific physical spaces in a specific order, according to very specific rules about what sort of things people can do.  Thus, dictating what these people can do with their bodies at any given time, it is an attempt to extend authority over another person’s bodily autonomy.  Schedules, here, would appear to be an aspect of punishment that I am ignoring favor of only talking about movement in space.  However, while reasonable to bring up, is not relevant because, as stated in the previous paragraph, time is a constant here.  This means that any traversal of space necessarily requires a traversal of time and that traversal of time requires a traversal of space. To gain an intuitive understanding of this concept, try to stay still for as long as possible without intentionally moving any part of your body.   I can tell you that, no matter how long you sit, you will never be perfectly still.  This is for a WIDE variety of reasons which range from astro-physics to how atoms work and almost everything in between. Stillness is, in fact, death.  Even then, death can be explained as a lack of activity, when really activity has not ceased, simply activity of a kind.  This sounds like a harsh delineation, as if there is a hard line between life and death.  I think that most people would agree that, at it’s most basic, something like brain-death would constitute death as we consider the brain the seat of consciousness.  This is not an unpopular opinion, although I personally think that we do ourselves, as humans of any stripe, a disservice by localizing our consciousness and awareness to a single region of our bodies. I could go on, but I hope I have shown that restricting movement plays a huge role in the popular conception of “punishment”.  At least, in America, since it does not appear that other countries are facing quite the conspiracies that I am here surrounding the covid lockdowns.