Looney Tunes did it first.

These days, the best thing to be armed with when drama happens is a camera. Preferably with a tripod, a good zoom and a shotgun mic, but that is typically a big ask.

You should never feel bad for laziness. In fact the notion of laziness or sloth is a device by industrial authorities to press more work out of an already beleaguered labor force.¹

We’ve seen how it goes during the 2020 epidemic lockdown and furlough: most people couldn’t couch potato for a week and turned to hobbies, enough of which were monetizable enough to cause the great resignation and give us a moment of elevated ground-floor wages. The rest of us suffer from avolition, a symptom of major depression (or a number of other potential diagnoses).

Industrialists (and churches and civil officials) fail to recognize that the drive for profit to upper management and shareholders has made a lot of work environments toxic. Most of us who work are overworked, underpaid, and poorly treated by management, if not also dealing with bully coworkers, pollution from industry without adequate PPE, safety hazards and oppressive work conditions. Our capitalist masters could treat workers well, and even would see a productivity surge worth the additional cost, and yet they still crunch in the video game industry, and overtask rather than running a high-morale clerical pool with slight redundancy (where the task list is always short).

I was lazy enough in my career as a victim of major depression to sleep for about nine months (getting up only to eat or excrete), I am a pro at couch potatoing. Granted, it’s not good for me to go without some contact outside, but I’ll happily do it. In the meantime, when I was forced to work in late 1980s clerical pool conditions, it drove me to suicide, and typical conditions are even worse today.

Laziness is a product of slave drivers or mental health disorders. If you’re feeling too tired to get work done, it means it’s time to take a break. Don’t worry, if you’re mentally fit, you’ll be on task again.

¹ Though my sin nun explained the cardinal sin of Sloth as avolition specifically to engage in the work your faith calls for (e.g. feeding the poor, housing the stranger and the transient, healing the sick, etc.) If you have energy to engage in costly signalling and praying loudly in public, but don’t mind the unfortunate, then you’re engaging in the cardinal sin – according to a cloistered nun I called for tech support.

To be fair, its not Jesus or Muhammed, but the massive ministries that propped them up as icons for rallying power.

And classical history features plenty of other divine images and massacres in their name.

Humans are suckers for it, especially in hard times and mass precarity. And that’s the problem we have to fix if we want to be a serious contender civilization.

As I understand it, Christianity got lucky. Jesus’ incident led to a movement in a time when it suited the purposes of disregarded demographics, of ambitious warlords and academic philosophers. It was the grain of sand that started a landslide, the planet suitable for intelligent life to evolve.

Jesus (again, according to academic consensus) was the lucky quantum to start a massive chain reaction.

It’s all a part of Azathoth’s dream anyway, long may they slumber.

Those kids were just figments, but then so are we.

In Julius Caesar a clock strikes three, and while they had hours (a fraction of the daytime, not a standard unit) they didn’t have mechanical clocks.

But then while we know what happened to Julius Caesar based on historical accounts, even chronicles were politicized, which is why we don’t know of Julia the Elder boffed half of Rome or was just the victim of slander. (Dramatists prefer she did while academics assume she was virtuous). So we know some of the details of the mass assassination of Julius Caesar but we only know some of the general details, which allows a lot of latitude in period recreations.

Jesus existed according to academics (based on third party accounts) but he might have just been an anti-establishment activist or a failed apocalyptic prophet. Not only did Jerusalem have those by the dozen but so did most satellites from which Rome demanded tribute. The miracles and matching Jesus up to fit the prophesies came later. Also Pontius Pilate loved crucifixion and had execution teams on standby where it was considered elsewhere in Rome a dire sentence for the worst of offenders. Pilate was the Roman equivalent of a hanging judge, so it was super-easy for a malcontent in Jerusalem to end up on the cross.

I don’t think naturalism negates our collective community, but it does mean it is up to us to navigate an instinct for small tribes. Once we took up advanced agriculture and stopped migrating, we built large societies. And since then we have been contending with subversives who favor their own smaller sects over the good of the community, and they are very good at subverting larger systems for their personal gain.

Most theistic paradigms insist that there are higher powers to assist us when we confront existential threats (such as the climate crisis). Naturalism is one of the paradigms (not the only one) that confronts that there are no safety nets or training wheels. The human species can die out without the assurance of self-sustaining off-world colonies, and there are no higher powers to care or even notice. (Again, not to say they don’t exist, but we’ve looked hard and been unable to detect them.)

Human society may, possibly in the face of the Trump regime, finally take class consciousness and community-focused governance seriously on a large scale. (There have been smaller scale examples.)

However, this isn’t the first time we’ve thought about it and been subverted by established political power. Rather historically, often just after a bout of tyranny, societal collapse and its consequential horrors, we decide as firmly as we can that this time we’re going to do it right! and then it gets diluted and subverted within even thirty years.

So to address the matter of uniting our collective community in a global cooperative effort: It’s going to take a sociological miracle. We need to discover some new method, invent some new technology that enables all of us, even Trump, Musk, Vought and Thiel to recognize that every one of our fellow 343 million Americans (or 8 billion plus fellow humans) is, as Jesus put it, our neighbor who we should regard equally, that the worst renegade and the most wretched transient deserve the same benefits and treatment as themselves. And then this new thing needs to be resistant to efforts to subvert it.

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal imagined such a gimmick, though I can’t locate the specific comic. In it a point system is invented, and it’s noted that people are nice for the points rather than for a sincere interest in community, but the system works, so it doesn’t matter much.)

And we need to do it soon. We’re running out of water, and the global average temperature is now at levels where experts warned us could prove a challenge to responders even at the national scale as hurricanes and wildfires rampage across the planet. The unlucky ones will survive until the global famine.

Naturalistic philosophy doesn’t say we can’t navigate our way to a community-driven society that acknowledges the least of us deserve a comfy life and we should mind the environment, rather, it only acknowledges that if we don’t we risk human extinction, and if we die out, there’s nothing watching out for us. The greatest cosmic horrir: throughout the universe not even a fraction of a fuck will be given as all of our culture, all of our ideas and works will be reduced to another geological layer on a speck orbiting a spark.

And a lot of people are not prepared to confront this.

Yeah, I warn those who are challenging their own faith that naturalism isn’t for everyone. For me it was a stark process to come to terms that I’m thinking meat, and my species is looking at some imminent great filters even before we are able to create a dependent colony on our own moon, so mostly harmless is going to be more of a footnote than our society deserves.

As someone who had an early aspiration to add something significant to the collective community that it could take with it into the future, this proved to be a bit of a let-down.

Thought about this before. I’d build out the high-speed internet structure to encompass all the populated parts of the world (omitting coverage across large swaths of open sea) and provide free, no-questions-asked WiFi internet service to absolutely everyone.

(Yes, a lot of places don’t have devices, but parallel programs already exist to get people enabled on cheap devices)

The obstruction would be legal battles with current stakeholders that have regional monopolies and are very addicted to making odious profit. (Looking at you, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc.)

I’d say the fake-work product from telecommuniters is by necessity of a higher grade of quality than in-office fake work. A cleric can simply run around between the copier and the coffee machine carrying a folder of papers, and that would be sufficient to entertain the boss. The at-home worker has to create a spreadsheet or chart or something that seems important and relevant to the department goals. to make sure the boss feels he got a day’s worth of work.

A very common reason is because you’re not clerical staff, you’re courtiers. The bosses want an office with people running around hurriedly doing busy stuff, which accounts for a lot of the bullshit jobs that workers are assigned, not that they need to be done, but to serve as a Tiger Repellant Rock. Or the bear patrol, which is from the same Simpsons episode.

A more conscious answer is that offices had been leased out for years at a time, and leaving them empty would mean they go to waste. While this means workers time is wasted (commute, prepping lunch out etc.) they don’t care about that as much.

When RTO orders became required (RTO or be laid off / RTO or get reassignment) that was part of the ownership class reasserting their dominance over a working class who was suddenly in demand after the lockdown and post-epidemic period. It was notable that even the Democratic officials were glad to memory-hole all the progressive programs that manifested to facilitate business during the lockdown. In fact, the telecommute controversy became the keystone issue, since workers learned they were happier and did better work at home. But the boss wanted to see them labor in their cubicle.

We suck at retaining class consciousness, or the super-giant conservative propaganda machine is really good at suppressing it. Seriously, FOX News and OAN are poison.

ETA A more comparable occupation is garden hermit which is a hired performer who lives in an aristocrat’s garden as part of the scenery, say if he’s comically eccentric. He may even have duties like ringing the hour chime or pretending to make shoes.

The evidence before the court is incontrovertible. There’s no need for the jury to retire.

It’s why I emphasize how I am crazy with Pink Floyd quotes. Bars in the window. Truly gone fishing.

Peter Thiel is evil. Don’t work for him. Don’t use his products.

That Schwarzschild radius is larger than I expected. I was expecting sub-molecular.

They want baby teeth which are turned into happiness charms for grandparents.

When I had four adult teeth yanked for orthodontics, I felt horrified and sad and they gave me silver dollars (post 1976) for them.

I think they just felt sorry for me.

Here to add that this is my problem too, and I have a therapist… that I talk to by phone once every 2-3 weeks (Here in the states psychotherapy openings are impacted so anyone who doesn’t have super-good insurance is on the wayside) and she’s more of a CBT coach.

I’m trying to figure out why anyone is alarmed that I want to head to the check-out lane, given our society elected the party that regards us all as expendable, and very much wants there to be fewer Americans and more elbow room for the MAGAs.

As I’m likely to be elevated on the list of priority persons to get the CECOT treatment, I still need to arrange for a rapid exit strategy for when ICE stormtroopers blast down my apartment door. Kennedy Jr. has some serious beef with us ASD folk, and as someone who is on a fixed income (though I’ve had jobs and even have written poetry) am exactly the sort that he wants to purge.

For the moment, I am currently living for a cat and a dog. I regard them as persons and can’t trust anyone else to. And so am very reluctant to re-home them until I cannot support them any longer. I might be living so as to not traumatize my wife (we’re separated) but lately I seem to be more of an obligation and a burden. It didn’t help she went to a family Easter event to which I was uninvited. I spent the day alone.

What I don’t understand is why elected officials claim that people like me are a burden to the state are distressed by the notion that we might want to self-dispose (This is, or rather was, my only country, my only society) Indeed, the US suicide rate has soared since the Trump era began in 2016. We’re higher than Japan now, and gaining on Russia.

I don’t think it’s that anyone actually cares about me, I’m an abomination, like The Outsider in HP Lovecraft’s story of the same name. They just don’t want to process the cadaver and meager legacy I would leave.

Anyway, I go off and on suicide watch, but in these times, we’re all expendable, and sooner or later going to be removed from the new MAGA society to be stuffed into a megaprison gulag. I’ve been told by 77 million American voters they don’t want me around. I don’t understand the drama if I immolate myself in front of a state building. Is this not what they want?

PS: Wife and family are considering giving me ECT, the same stuff that Hemmingway and David Foster Wallace tried before they decided it didn’t work.

According to the Trump administration, the entire population within a specific range of millennials are gang members to the last.

OG Boomers and Silents are gang members, but they’re called lodges and esoteric societies, sometimes churches for tax reasons.

Remember that the primary efforts of Black Panthers and Hezbollah are community support (often cooperating with NGOs like Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders), we can expect that other terrorist organizations are similarly extremist.

In 2008 during the California Proposition 8 controversy, there were was a clever ad suggesting You want to stop gay sex? Let them get married. It showed a gay couple transitioning from honeymooning to blasé cohabitation and even bickering as old spouses are wont to do.