Right or Wrong, Dead or Alive

There is absolutely no statement that every human being will agree to, but pretty nearly the closest we can get is "I don't want to die". Therefore, the wish to avoid death can perhaps best be regarded as the beginning of a system of ethics.

The way I see it, there are two main methods of trying to ensure another human being does not kill you (avoiding natural-world-originated death is a separate issue which I won't get into for now), which I refer to as the Proscriptive and Personal methods. The Personal method is about making yourself into something that others will not wish to kill - either being so sweet and wonderful that nobody would want to hurt you, or such a massive badass that nobody would dare try. Those people who can't manage to be that pleasant or that deadly are thus left with no real alternative but to rely on the Proscriptive method - make it against the law to kill people, and harshly punish anyone who breaks the law. Therefore, people who are in favor of the law are usually in this same middle ground between Mother Theresa and Jean-Claude Van Damme, although not all adhere to the same set of laws.

That then keys into new difficulties when following the wrong set of laws itself becomes a risk of being killed.

Recipie for an Ideal Universe, and an old observation of mine

Step 1: Proliferate unto infinite diversity.

Step 2: Refine unto absolute perfection.

Step 3: Repeat ad infinitum.

*****

It is a terrible burden we bear in this reality - we must imagine that everything is possible, while achieving very little. We must see every Paradise we can imagine, yet be able to live in none of them, for to achieve one is to abandon its opposite. We must remain between them all, so that we may see them all.

The Pressure Cooker

I have a personal mantra to the effect that "There is no such thing as too much of anything, only too little of something else". For example, it's not that there are too many people in the world, it's that there's too little space for them. That said, the Earth doesn't seem to be getting any bigger, so until we learn to launch artificial habitats into space, our ever-growing population is a serious obstacle to our creating a better world. As long as the surface area of the world is finite, as long as we can't build homes under the earth or beyond the sky or at the bottom of the sea, as long as we keep fouling the surface with oil and garbage and toxic byproducts to further decrease our available land, and as long as two-parent couples continue to have five-child families, we are squeezing ourselves into ever-decreasing quarters until we will inevitably explode like a boiler whose pressure is never released. The only alternative is to drastically reduce population, even more than we're currently doing it with things like the Afghan war and the Mexican drug conflict, and I for one would rather not have that much blood on our hands before we figure out a better solution.

Blessed Madness Revisited

I am firmly convinced both that I am insane, and that I'm living proof that insanity isn't all bad and doesn't always need to be cured. Our society likes to bend over backwards to help people with physical or mental issues live as best they can; I think that crazy people are at least as qualified for such assistance as the blind, deaf, mentally retarded, wheelchair-bound, chronically ill, or any other such group. (There is of course the Darwinian argument that all of these are weaknesses that should be purged from the gene pool, but I'm very thoroughly not a fan of such logic.)

Life, the Universe and Nothing

A lot of "normal" people don't seem to have much of a grip on the fact that life is hard; just getting out of bed in the morning (or afternoon, or middle of the night) is an epic victory over the force of Oblivion to which Life exists in eternal opposition. Expecting us to actually do anything with our lives is blatantly unrealistic; the only thing that's reasonable to ask is that we try to enjoy ourselves and not cause misery to others, anything else is nice if we can manage it but isn't worth busting our hump over. Most people are so busy living their life that they don't think about what "life" is, having never been exposed to the alternative, and those who make grand plans for the destiny of the future or whatever forget that there's a bigger battle to be won every single day - the battle against despair, where we fight to prove that life is worth continuing to go to the effort of living.

Feeling Anarchistic Today

Don't think for a moment that the law is on your side. Whoever you are, whatever your issue is - the law is not your friend. If it is doing you any favors, it is because YOU agree with IT, not the other way around. The law is not put in place by people who care about other people; it is put into place by control freaks who dislike the world and think it needs to be beaten into submission. The police are there to punish criminals, not to prevent crimes; the army is there not to protect this country but to subjugate any other country that we think we can get away with attacking without inviting more reprisals than we can deal with. People who are nice and caring and decent human beings DO NOT ATTAIN POSITIONS OF POWER. Your leaders are in charge because they lied, cheated and stole their way to the top; that is the only way to succeed in our society. They write the laws to protect and further empower themselves; you, one of the Common People, have nothing to do with it. Why is this thing legal and that thing isn't? It has nothing to do with right or wrong, or Prohibition would never have been repealed. When their own government tried to stop people from drinking themselves to death, people turned to criminals to meet that need for self-destruction; that right there tells us all we need to know. Stop pretending that the structure of society exists for the benefit of the majority - it is the villains which rule this world, and the system was created to ensure that never changes. People in positions of power are still people, they're only human, and if they weren't corrupt to begin with, they get that way fast. Anyone who thinks they have the right to dictate policy to the rest of the human race, in spite of the patently obvious fact that they are themselves no better than those they're trying to control, is not to be trusted. (And yes, that includes myself. I plan to run for president some day, so remember not to vote for me.)