Ever get so angry that your head felt hot? Do thoughts and ideas tap into your rage? Do these feelings follow you throughout the day? Are you triggered easily online? Welcome, my friends, to the Emotional Outrage Machine ™. Fed my algorithms, ideologies, social media and a misguided sense of personal righteousness, the Emotional Outrage Machine ™ is a system of thought propagation that exploits human emotional connection to expand its reach throughout society. The Emotional Outrage Machine ™ has no political or ideological preference, it is an agnostic system who's framework is used by anyone who chooses to exploit it. Mad at the patriarchy? Emotional Outrage Machine ™. Hate the government? Emotional Outrage Machine ™. Are secret organizations trying to make your child gay? Emotional Outrage Machine ™. It is an equal opportunity system that wants to propagate the programing you give it.
The difficulty of living in a world that is primarily digital where algorithms determine access to information is that the Emotional Outrage Machine ™ has been given unfettered access to promote any mind virus that one sets out to propagate. Those who have the will and means can throw their agenda into the matrix and expect feedback from a system that is literally designed to extend the message's reach. The limits are only in the craft of the one's ability to tug the right emotional balance - a true propagandist. Dear reader, I implore you to unplug periodically. Give your mind a rest from the Emotional Outrage Machine ™. Give your thoughts some well reasoned challenges where you are away from a screen or device - allow your brain to process ideas without the influence of someone else's perceptions. Don't be a robot that is easily programmed by the will of others. Use critical thinking to explore arguments. If you embrace the idea of freethinking - make sure that it is free of emotional exploitation ( a logic fallacy in itself).
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I can't remember the exact moment that heavy metal staring sounding good to me. I can only tell you that I wasn't well into my teen years and that it was in the mid 80s. Metal and punk were reactions to the status quo big rock bands of the 70s - a revolt against the mediocrity that had resulted from too many musicians, producers and companies chasing entertainment dollars in a short space of time. The result was a flood of bands who's producers had homogenized their "product" so well that it all sounded similar. The start of a movement always is fresh because something new is created from the destruction of something old. Eventually, punk and heavy metal would fall to grunge and the cycle would continue, with the music industry chasing ideas with capital - trying to maximize profit at the peak of interest.
This cycle of birth, complacency and death seems to keep repeating itself in areas outside of the arts. It follows other trends as well; in music; in TV, movies, fashion - anything where the short attention span of humanity can captured and placated. If we think of this collection of art as a reflection of our society ( which it certainly is the barometer for), then we can track at any moment the leveling that a society has before any given collapse. The collapses need not be grand - say like with the Roman empire or French Aristocracy. Sometimes the collapse is just the final breath of people having enough. It is a recognition of the end of the old - when the consumption of the fashionable ideas crawls to a halt. I get the sense of things as I look around the Lanscape of culture that we are in this period. In movies and TV, old ideas have been repurposed and commoditized. Start Wars gets a new unit of TV shows. Marvel gets a new unit of movies. Old ideas repackaged with generic labels and sold to the masses. But the masses have stopped consuming. The desire to ingest the grotesque studio productions have leveled off. People are tired of the unoriginality. And with this collapse, I expect something new to arise. As I've gotten older, I've acknowledged that there is an aspect of my personality that wants to please others. When I was younger, I just thought this was part of my personality that just wanted to learn and adapt - to find new truths and expand into areas of knowledge that others couldn't grow into due to self-imposed rules. I considered myself a free-spirited. I now look at this trait as something of a disability. Upon reflection, I had poor boundaries. This brings to mind the important distinction between freethinking and no-thinking: the inability to see when ideas and actions might have consequences that I hadn't considered. I was more than willing to entertain thoughts and ideas that could be harmful and surround myself with people of similar ilk.
As a consequence, I would allow harm to myself by not enforcing any boundaries as I had no sense of needing to keep ideas away. Oddly I could find boundaries in some areas (like saying away from extremely dangerous stunts or hard drugs). I think these are areas where I had vested time in thinking about harms 0 really imaging serious where harm played out in a pragmatic way. But in other areas I didn't really engage in any thorough deep dive into perceived dangers. Perhaps some part of me considered that sort of thinking to be the prattling of an old spinster as apposed to actual wisdom. Now as I face mid-life, I see that it was really a lack of development. I chose not to find discipline which led to suppression of real growth - both in my character and in my ability to find focus in things that matter. Only through the trials and tribulations of having things go wrong can I see where my troubles began. And it is through these lessons that I must aspire to not let the same mistakes happen with my child. I must be grounded in discipline so that I may grow with minimal self harm, and I must model my process so that others can see the benefits of strong boundaries. ![]() I can't help but compare things. I just watched the first season of True Detective and was blow away with how existential it was. Then I watched the last episode of the Chronicles of Boba Fett (stay with me) and was so disgusted I turned it off before the show ended. Yeah, I can hear you saying it is an unfair comparison - one being a scifi show for kids and the other being a violent mystery horror for adults. But bad writing is bad writing. You can write well to a younger audience (or nerds). This isn't a one shot deal either. All kinds of trashy writing as been coming from Disney as of late. The Hawkeye series was just unwatchable. Wandavision was starting to get Twilight zone good before it fell back into comic camp. And the What If series was just terrible. Making matters worse, I decided to go back and watch the first seven seasons of Supernatural and was blow away by how good it was. Yeah, the series faded after that but I can't fault the early writing on that show. I keep waiting for a new series to come out that will impress we. I have a feeling I'll be waiting a while. /rant ![]() I use to live in an area where a Unitarian Universalist (UU) sanctuary was literally right across the street from the place I lived. I didn't know much about UUs or their religious tenants. Honestly, I was so stuck in nihilism for such a long period of time that I had a difficult time caring much about any religion. Also factored in was my agnosticism, which led me to really not caring much about any religion. Sure, I had a desire to know the basics of what people believed but I didn't really WANT religion. I had too much Lutheranism growing up, thank-you-very-much. When my daughter was born, something changed in me. I felt it was necessary to at least expose her to the broader religious tenants that govern our society. I rationalized that just because I didn't find purpose in a religious community, that should mean I should intentionally deny her any education or experience on the matter. So when I started exploring the UU across the street, I found that it was an extremely open community that mashed the old Christian Unitarian church ( a sect that rejected trinitarianism) with a sect that rejected the concept of hell (Universalism). The result was an accessible community that almost anyone could walk into with no dogmas. Sounds cool, right? We went to a few sermons and I discovered a minister that was hip, a congregation that was similar in temperament to me, and a religion that didn't preach hellfire. Plus, they have a bitching coffee hour and the music was almost always on point! For years, I participated in events and listened to the spiritual musings of the minister and many guest speakers. I participated in meditation sessions and my daughter grew around UUs. But something nagged at me. I had a hard time identifying it at first but the social events that preceded COVID-19 really helped me identify the schism that had developed within. First, I discovered that I indeed did have a spiritual path. Don't laugh, this was a surprise to me! My concept of spiritual growth had a lot to do with reading Carl Jung. I was also exploring meditation and yoga, which helped me to experience (and control) my mind - something that also gives a mystical-like experience when practiced. I discovered the teachings of Buddha and learned the advantages of staying on a path - of living on the path with a smile. I opened my mind to Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount. I considered that prospects of a man trying to change the world for the better, only to have his message be a death sentence. Through a recovery community I discovered the spirituality accessible through deep connections and learning to deal with suffering. And through family I learned the time-honored skill of love and redemption. Oddly, however, I didn't really get any of these lessons through the UU. I listened to a great deal of sermons. A few of them really moved me. But none of them changed me in any way. That was my first issue with UUism, it didn't really change my internal spiritual barometer. I had walked in a half full, but I was never really topped off. Also, around the same time, pronouns entered the mix. This was perhaps the thing that gave me the greatest internal conflicts. Almost instantaneously, speakers and parishioners were announcing their pronouns from the podium. It seems like a silly thing to bother me, but yet I was. I see the use of pronouns as a type of identity politics that has now taken over social protocols. There use to be a time when, if you misgendered someone, you just apologized and corrected the mistake. My name is Stacy, I was a skinny boy with a girl's name. I went through that - often! Did social protocols have to be changed? Especially in the UU, which is - without a doubt- the most liberal religious community on the planet. Does anyone really think that anyone within the community would act with malice towards another on the basis of gender? Yet, the protocol was adopted by members seemingly without any conversation on what social good would arise form such a practice. Does the congregation feel more welcoming? More inclusive? Ah - there might be the rub. Perhaps this is not being done for any social good, but rather for the perception that those partaking in such an activity might be more welcoming. And while I can never definitively say what people's intentions are, I sometimes wondered if my fellow UUs were in-fact virtue signaling ( and maybe not even conscious of it). It's not like I didn't talk to these congregation members in coffee hours or at social functions. There was indeed a lot of social activism and extreme opinions on a variety of topics. Many of the people held beliefs that centered around social rebellion, defiance and greater good. Unfortunately , they seemed less interest in anyone else's sense of greater good. And there was the rub. This blog is entitled Freethinking. I am a freethinker. I explore all kinds of ideas, even ones that piss me off. But I'm not very good at hive mind thinking. Maybe that's part of the problem I have with religion. There is still too much of me that wants the freedom to cast doubt, to question others and maybe even have difficult conversations. To me, that is what it means to be truly free. I don't think the UUs participate in speech suppression, but rather do anything they feel contributes to the common good. In so doing, I rarely - if ever -would see a discourse on why behaviors were inherently good or bad. Was this not the role of religion to answer? This lead me to a greater realization that my growth as a spiritual being was happening outside the UU, and my connection to the congregation increasingly strained by any lack of that development. Indeed, connection to others (a form of spiritually) was difficult for me in the UU but was often deep and rich in other communities. Perhaps my spiritual path lies in rich discourse, in a way where feelings and emotions are shared and felt. I don't mind being in the audience, but occasionally I'd like to be a speaker! ![]() Just got around to watching After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News, a documentary about the growing disinformation age we are currently in. The idea is that social media has become the tool by which those who are either malicious or simply incompetent spread their own bend on reality into the world. I can very much agree with the horrible outcomes that this piece illustrated, which always put innocent people in the firing line of segments of the public that don't have the analytical toolsets to separate fact from fiction. Hence, a certain segment of the population can get emotionally worked-up up over something that has no basis in reality. The documentary suggests that social media should be responsible for asserting governance over content, that they share blame if their are shitty outcomes to bad content. And I think this is where I have problems - that this suggestion, while noble, assert that companies should be the purveyors of truth. This, of course, is suggesting that the the fox watch over the chickens. That a company like Facebook, a data mining powerhouse that has consistently violated privacy, security and ethics when dealing with user data, is somehow a great moral arbitrator worthy of the power of censorship. I sometimes wonder if it is a step in the right direction, if these billion dollar social media companies can act (fairly) within an ethical framework and stop "fake news" from disseminating. But I have concerns! My concerns revolve the nature of media in general. Nearly a century ago, you could survey newspapers in this country and see that they all had a political bend. While individual journalists do may do their best to ethically report with regard information, editors and publishers aren't always held to the same standards. Hence, their can be a "bend" to the information that is presented, either politically or ideologically. I felt this topic was sorely lacking in this documentary, especially considering that CNN and the Washington Post tend to have this bend. Look, I think Fox news is a fucking joke - not really even worthy of being called news. But lets not pretend that CNN is free of slant. Some may argue that a political bend to the news doesn't make the news "fake", a notion which I challenge. Back during the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders got not one, not two, but sixteen negative articles during his campaign. I'm not taking sides here regarding the primary, but merely addressing that this one case s neither unique of uncommon large media companies. You expect Democracy Now or Red State to have a slant, but these larger media companies hide behind the veil of nonpartisan reporting yet clearly don't operate that way. Again, I'm not saying that the reporters don't try to get the facts right, but lets not pretend that they don't try to influence narratives. Within Epistemology ( the study of knowledge), the delineation of truth and justification are important because belief plays are part in our own perceptions of truth. A person can believe something to be true even though evidence exists that may contradict the knowledge. But if the purveyor of information conceals or distorts the facts, then the truth can be whatever is crafted.
Not so long ago, the printing press was the expensive asset that controlled knowledge. We now have this competition to traditional media that has no ethical framework, historical or otherwise, yet is the "default" for most people on how they consume information. Convoluting matters is the "old media" still putting their own spin on facts and leveraging social media to get their advertising revenue with eyeballs. And of course we have foreign actors, local nut jobs, and partisans of every variety trying to win minds. I think this is why I felt that the documentary was incomplete. We shouldn't pretend that our existing media isn't without issues. I feel like society as a whole has to begin to ask hard questions about how information gets reported, and not assume that journalistic standards protect everyone from falsehoods or manipulation. Yeah, journalism is far superior to some nut job crafting conspiracy theories, but don't assume its bias free. ![]() In the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak, I couldn't help but laugh at the fatalism and hysteria that the outbreak caused. We had rationing, lines at gun stores and harsh “I told you so” glances from germophobes. There is another side to this coin, however, which also wades in fallacious reasoning. It is that of the denialist. This is the person you see yelling about rights in a grocery store when they are asked to put on a mask. This individual used a pandemic situation to question their civil liberties. But , as we all know, the argument is really superfluous. This individual is a denialist, a person who denies the danger that the virus represents. Similar to the fallacious reasoning of overly cautious, the denialist adopts the narrative that the virus is relatively harmless or that the outcomes of infection post little risk to the vast majority of people. While there may indeed be evidence that fatalities aren’t prevalent with those who become infected, the deniaist stops any further analysis and instead adopts a policy of supporting the denialist narrative: that the pandemic is a overreaction. By adopting this narrative, the denialist essentially puts blinders on to any other information that may support useful health practices that can stop the spread of the virus. The narrative supports their chosen ignorance, as their logic is now based on the virus being a non-issue. Support of a non-issue is just more information to ignore as premise of danger has rationalized away. As a result, we have news videos of maskless shoppers, large parties and denialist policy makers – all pushing to end the charade of the virus and get back to normal life. The denialist, however, has missed other ethical and scientific reasons for complying with social distancing recommendations. The truly unique aspect of COVID-19 is the ease of infection. While it’s true that many don’t die from being infected, the rapid spread of the virus can potentially expose those with a higher risk of fatality – those with compromised immune systems or other health risk factors. In essence, the denialist risks spreading the virus to those who could be at risk (possibly themselves) because they perceive the risk as being near non-existent. Yet, hospital ICU units around the country are over run with COVID-19 patients. The denialist, to this point, accepts this outcome as that tny percentage of people who did have a predisposition. A conversation I had with a denialist family member was centered around these thoughts. It occurred to me that I had to make a counter narrative to make my point. The narrative had to be based around something contextual, something that stops making this an abstract argument and starts humanizing the situation. So here it goes: “ Lets just say, for a moment, that you are at the store without your mask on. By chance, you happen to pick up the virus. Maybe you inhaled it, maybe you just touched a surface and rubbed your nose or eyes. Somehow, you got infect. And lucky you – you happen to be one of those people is asymptomatic. You go about your day either not experiencing symptoms or having such a slight reaction to the infection that you don’t realize your illness. For you life is fine. “ “But you aren’t sitting at home watching TV, are you? You are an active person, and you aren’t going to let some damned overhyped pandemic curb your socialization. You go to church, you go to your AA meetings, you visit family and even go out for a bite to eat. And although you are asymptomatic, you shed the virus still. You breath it out. You sweat it out. The virus leaves your body, hoping to hitch a ride alongside any potential host nearby. Your friends, your family, all whom share your presence.” “Unfortuantley, your family does have some compromised immune systems. Your wife, she has a compromised immune system. Your sister is obese and is a prime candidate for a ventilator. And of course there is me, who suffers from an immune disorder. Lets just say that just one of us gets infected. Pick one, it doesn’t matter. That person, unfortunately, isn’t as lucky as you. They are going to get the flu-like symptoms. They may even take a trip to the emergency room once they start struggling to breathe. Perhaps they don’t die, Perhaps they survive this infection and move on. The point being here that they wouldn't be in that situation had there not have been better precautions by you.” The point of this sort of narrative is not to invoke fear or irrational thought, but to illustrate a pragmatic understanding of how the virus works in real life. We are all social creatures, and our actions in this pandemic can have negative and unintended consequences due to the nature of this virus. Casual interaction can be grounds for presymptomatic or asymptomatic transmission for the virus. And those whom we interact with could be the people who match the profile for getting seriously sick form it. If you are reading this, and have people in your life who live in the denialist mindset, be sure to lean on the ethical implications – form your own narrative if necessary. The purpose is not to instill fear, rather its to pragmatically deal with the virus until such a time in which medical science as developed a decent vaccine. Until that time arrives, we all have to deal with the inconvenience of social distancing – and recognize that the policies that stem from it aren’t an attack on civil liberties but a reflection of social conscience. Most don’t enjoy the new reality, we just except it until we have a viable cure. It’s not the first time that society had to grapple with a global pandemic, and it likely won’ be the last.. Unfortunately our own selfish nature undermines the gained experiences of prior generations that had to undergo the same tribulations. I had some time recently to reflect on a little personality quirk of mine. Some people are passive by nature, others are outgoing or sociable. Me? I'm a rebellious punk. For most of my life, I've been questioning authority. I question what other's tell me and I question the nature of their authority. And as much as I will tell you that it's served me well (and it frequently has), there is problem being a Nietzschean poster child. After spending the last few years doing meditation and a ton of self reflection, I recently started reflecting on my attitudes towards American politics and was enlightened. In my past, I tended to be attracted to those folks who sounded like my inner monologue. I liked the people who punched back at the mainstream. I wouldn't do any deep dives into the political reality of policy, I only cared about the absolute morality that was pitched behind the ideas. This made me often angry at a great deal of things surrounding politics. I hated mainstream political parties for their failure to advance issues I saw as important. I'd have apathy to popular leaders and figureheads for being narrow-minded. I hated the system of think tanks, PACs, and deep pockets that seemed to leverage conversations away from the general public. And perhaps there is a lot of truth there that should justify some rage.
This year, I watched Bernie Sanders go down in flames. He was one of those guys that would normally appeal to my inner rebel. He talks like a guy that hates everything around him - something I can completely relate to. Yet, I have no real attachment to him or to his campaign. When I listen to his supporters, I hear the same anger in their voices that I had in decades past - one of righteous indignation forged through bitterness at the system they see as being a part of the problem rather than one that's part of a solution. When I read the harsh words of the so-called "Bernie Bros", I feel as if I'm looking into the murky reflection of my own past - the rebel who tapped into his rage to fight some greater good. These are the people who gleefully watch the world burn with the fantasy of helping rebuilding a better one. There is, however, a problem with these rage-filled ideologues. They are prone to making fallacious reasoning, perhaps more so than the middle of the road citizen who often gets accused of being a sellout and/or sheep by the rebel. I've seen myself buy into all kinds of ideas without going into any deep dives on how said policy would play out. I'd have verbal disputes with others where I'd call them tools (or worse) for not seeing the obvious wrong in there thinking. I can't stress enough here that the problem here isn't whether my ideas were in fact right or wrong, rather its the fact that I let the "punching back" feeling of empowerment take the intellectual drivers wheel and let rationality take the back seat. The seething rage that would settle into my mind would stay there for long periods of time, and I would revel in it and try fueling the anger by playing loud angry music (thanks Nine Inch Nails and Public Enemy). Rather than my pragmatic mind driving decisions, emotions ruled the roost. In this political cycle were the Bernie Bros are accused of trolling Democrats, I see my prior emotionally-driven self reflected in all their punk asses. The desire to punch back at the people who they perceive as the root cause of why their issues are not addressed. And of course, the Russians LOVE these folks! They love them so much that they've literally spent millions building troll farms to exploit this unbridled rage. The problem with a mind driven my emotion, other than stress-related health issues, is that the very decisions can be exploited by those who have very clear agendas. I'm reminded of the Star Trek take on emotions with the Vulcan race. The Vulcan's use the ceremony Kolinahr by which all remaining vestigial emotions were purged. This process helped the Vulcan race make logical and informed decisions and advance their society. The notion that emotions could be harmful to individuals and society is perhaps not so far fetched. It took me over 40 years to beat down my own rebellious nature, which had more to do with clinging to emotion than true policy issues. Over time, I started paying more attention to the goals and the time needed to accomplish them. I also started realizing something else: the process I was apt to criticizing is one that I spent very little time working in. The reality is that I could spend lots of time arguing a position yet spend hardly any energy doing the leg lifting on making real changes. That includes being active with others who have similar policy goals and talking to people who who most likely promote candidates and those who make policy outcomes. This, for all those paying attention, is the quintessential "Bernie Bro". I feel for them, and the on;y advice I can give them is to take the time to recenter their life on the internal-self first. Similar to the advice given by the stewardess before a flight, you have to learn to put the mask on yourself before you help others. We humans don't have a Kolinahr ceremony to help us control our own emotions, but we can do a great many things to help center out thinking. Yoga, meditation, journaling, blogging, all of these things can help us self-reflect and really help us sort out ideas before we go out fighting the man. Being in a place where your mind is forced to slow down and examine rather than acting on instinct lets you check our motivations and all the facts surrounding them. It doesn't guarantee good decisions, but it sure as hell does gives you more piece of mind. ![]() Sometimes you sit down and start writing, only to hit a mental block that inhibits you getting the words onto the keyboard. Other times, the cat you are sitting decides to occupy that space between you and the monitor. I actually had a kick-ass Star Wars essay typed out, complete with pictures and everything. After the post, it was lost in space. Lesson learned. Don't type anything in Weebly first, start with a word processor. So, instead of that kick-ass post, enjoy my cat picture. |