You know, there’s this channel on YouTube called PragerU. Their monetization process delves into one-time, tax-deductible charitable donations. It’s a classic liberal venue so it tends to favor the Constitution as spirit and literal in tandem plus a disregard for the trendy persuasions evoked by at least one variety of omnipresent wingnut in the online nether. I’ve often wondered if I could be featured in one of their five-minute segments, which occasionally run as actual YouTube ads, mind you, and trash all sides of a given argument instead of settling on just one.

What would I pick for a topic? Well, it would be extremes. The issue with political topics is that all sides want theirs to be prominent and also true. Their reasoning of picking between external or internal, group or single, authority or not, is worthless, a serious of platitudinal binaries of abysmal counter-value courtesy of shrouding the necessity for both sides and punishing those who subscribe to one, either, or both. It’s not a cross and square; last I looked into it, Christ was hanged on one and squares haven’t made a decent JRPG in years (or, if they did, they had to toss the original in the trash and reopen with another version at considerable financial detriment–and then blame recently acquired Western developers for not throwing their weight around hard enough).

I imagine things in all colors and include black and white just the same. I also imagine everything moral as a pentacle with freedom at its center–yeah, the Moral Foundations Theory proposed by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham. Now, the allusion to a devilish magical pentagram is enough to have me kicked out of RCIA, but the idea is that you’re on the pentagram, but you rise about zero to four steps upward per degree of your feelings toward a specific Foundation–rising above it, mind you, so that you’re not at all beholden to just standing upon a five-point suppository. You’re at your best when rising more than one plate, none of which are opposed to the others and thus isolated in how they’re tallied to boot. You can’t rise up Freedom, but it gets a little synergy as the other ones rise up. And getting high on the Authority scale doesn’t mean the Freedom scale somehow decreases because putting up walls is not the same as pushing them down on someone. Besides, in D&D, Abjuration Magic, which is all about putting up barriers, cannot work if you try to push the field of influence of a spell onto a target it affects. The Target is simply deemed within the field and feels no adverse effects if you even try. That isn’t supposed to be a defamatory allegory–it’s truth in motion.

So, I imagine even the Moral Foundations in ways that confound others. PragerU is not an awful institution, certainly not in their objectives in teaching kids the miracles of freedom, but it should come with a little scrutiny. You have to teach kids the miracle of thinking outside boxes. To be fair, the only things you should teach are mathematics and literacy so people are equipped with what they need to reason things out on their own. But the one thing I see with every PragerU point and counterpoint is a disregard for establishment scree. You have to consider even their position–how they have drawn their conclusions–before you have any chance of convincing outsiders of your points.

So, binary thinking (unless explicitly required–and yes, some things demand it) has to be addressed. Two of the big ones are the differences between Internal and External Loci of Control, plus one that grates on my nerves. Another edutainment YouTube Channel by the name of Psych2Go proffered one that made me wince harder than when Arnie declared that the core of the Martian planet is made of ice. Listen: every self-respecting geek knows that every planet’s core is molten iron. So, what’s the odd notion? The supposed gradient scale between the emotion of fear (commonly associated with the far right) and love (commonly associated with the far left). They listed a whole bunch of emotions of little direct correlation between each other and then made their political inclinations look the part of being extravagantly required for society. It’s the difference between fettered restraint and unfettered action. Have you known anyone who has no barriers of conduct whatsoever? I know a few who lurk in positions of authority and exploit lesser folk for personal satisfaction. They’re called child predators among polite company.

Furthermore, guest speakers for PragerU such as Tim Pool and Karlyn Borysenko (yes, even her) proffer a personal spin to their testimony ala a TED talk or on-stage confessional, which is for marketing purposes. You know what story I got? I work at a convenience store, one of the most maligned institutions for A) being retail in general, B) prices are bonkers, and C) the products make you fat or addicted. Might as well fry chickens and slice up watermelon so I can have at least one racial group who’s sympathetic to my plight, am I right? Amid this knee-slapping proposition, I have no choice but to say, “The BBQ Chicken Pizza is great and it goes well with a can of Arizona Watermelon.” And yes, I stand by that statement–they’re actually pretty good. Naturally, you’ll look at my post with a wrinkled nose and claim I’m racist or, worse, a corporate shill. So, how can I write a five-minute PragerU presentation from the perspective of a working stiff?

Here’s the first draft:

 

Have you ever heard of the binary between Fear and Love? Or, the Loci of Control, hideous External and hallowed Internal?

Do you wonder if your life can be better off by embracing the lesser of these two evils?

And yes.

These notions are quintessentially myopic when tethered.

Most of the politics in society operate under the perceptions of their beholders.

Take governments, for example. Do we espouse the wholesale elimination of all government?

No, that allows bullies to take on the role of intercessional saviors. Without a higher power or someone tasked with that, the weakest links or the most put-upon suffer the most amount of abuse.

Donald Trump is nowhere near that level of ribaldry, but a handful of agencies afraid of being toppled in general at best and, at worst, toppled for no reason at all, have skin in the game to prevent men like him from tipping scales.

But some goofy entrepreneur dilettante from New York with firm classical liberal leanings, who still got to sample plenty of rabbit risotto as they migrated westward, is not your Pokey traveling back in time to turn on the Devil’s Machine, sorry to say. Nor is it you, Schrödinger, but you assume both happen at the same time at your personal expense.

Lloyd Kaufman, elks and elves, maybe. Not you guys. You can’t juggle shattered bottles any better than Penn Jillette because you can’t juggle shattered bottles better than an acapella group of autistic brain donors. Where do you get your facts, Google? Reddit?

Even YouTubers know when to tone it down for the sake of an audience, so why keep screeching about the Donald when he isn’t anywhere near the force you’re truly worried about at all?

Now, when I say bullies fill gaps, I mean the lot already did so, but not in the places you think.

You assume metalheads are complete jerks whose fashion sense teeters between terrible and tacky but, for the life of me, there are fewer bullies among metalheads than teen idols for good reason:

Outcasts are the first to get picked out, picked on and ultimately picked off.

And the loneliness alone tempers their behavior to be far more considerate and graceful than at first glance.

After hearing the stereotype of rampant autism among defective criminal masterminds working to destroy everything we cherish, from the lowliest 4Channite to the greatest political instigators on either side, I happily sent a comment to Razorfist the Rageholic, who indulges in the notion, about the frequency per capita and cognitive barrier precluding actual autistics from participating in malevolent organizations and instead becoming victims of said groups.

Later on, when he discussed the fallacies of the venture capital-fueled alleged geek site Kotaku, a blog notorious for embarrassing behavior, he pointed out that Aspies can do what Kotaku does without blemish, and that when he refers to the staff as autistic, it isn’t the actual neuro-developmental and social deficit, but the self-inflicted kind that he laments.

Either he said it on my behalf (my comment was long but well-edited), or he understood his audience well enough to reassess the aim on his Howitzer-sized mouth, a welcome change of pace from a man whose ego demanded several amendments to Arizona’s zoning laws.

If this selfsame process is in place with mere YouTubers, monetized or not, then most governments are being catered to. And to cater is to retain viewership, numbers, and perks.

Kotaku’s chief lament is its insistence on double-dealing in order to maintain the exclusive access they want so bad, enough that Nintendo and even wiser companies frequently bar them for their innumerable, irresponsible news stories and gaffes, performative and otherwise.

Not that I would have stopped listening to him if he didn’t get serious or sincere on occasion (he’s one of my favorite sources of comedy on the net) but is Razorfist no different? Well, he does not shill so much as sell t-shirts, including one that claims its wearer died in Death Wish 3.

The only skin is his pursuit of communists’ blood, to build a wall around Mexico, California, Oregon and Washington State, and to hold all institutions to an extremely high if still fair standard of conduct.

Razorfist’s chief opponent is the media itself.

That alone got me thinking that the government’s behavior largely stems from prescribed lenses that are insufficient for driving vehicles, let alone reading fine print.

The men and women in government have an addiction to awful news that makes them roll dice and play war strategy games laced with assumptions mired in sheer pessimism.

Think government is the grand manipulator of today’s media? Oh, no. It’s the other way around.

And it comes from not knowing the facts or reading the instruction manual–a move Japan wallows in.

Japan never knew the sheer grotesque nihilism of the video game Wizardry is actually one side of the coin since the instruction manual they failed to translate had gallows humor that went unacknowledged, a humor that the Japanese iterations of Wizardry solemnly lack, much to their detriment.

Wizardry’s eastern permutations such as Final Fantasy and Shin Megami Tensei are laced with such angsty melodrama that Westerners flat-out scoff at them. Literal westerners, like Razorfist.

And if you think a 40 year-old video game’s instruction manual going untranslated cannot devise a litany of comedic errors, then why are you still watching or complaining about PragerU’s five-minute shorts? Why are you listening to the hours-long complaints over PragerU’s five-minute shorts?

Government officials are afraid of taking the rap for innumerable human disgraces. Still, they are also privy to tons of them, considering government is meant to be a check against indiscretions and crime.

Government officials are addicted to True Crime podcasts and stories that do a disservice by insinuating a generalized lack of value in the human spirit, lamenting how everyone has the grand capacity to do harm and escalate it beyond any mortal’s control without acknowledging that God gave us freedom to pick a side and start swinging, knowing the sinister ramifications of doing otherwise and disallowing it like Satan (a prosecutor and jail warden wrapped in a posh business suit) has suggested.

I mean, wouldn’t wholesale restrictions to freedom lessen the value and meaning behind making choices? Yes, it would.

Oh, but the government has tons of case studies and statistics about whenever people pick the wrong side and become embroiled in the minutiae of either preventing (which is fine) or anticipating (which inspires them to try replicating) criminal behavior.

That is why they will encourage protestors to riot–give them an excuse to capture as many bad actors as possible before they perpetrate worse crimes that they happen to have researched at length and think we somehow have the nads to try doing in a twenty-four-seven surveillance state despite having no personal stakes or having that degree of moral myopia to try.

Slick, I have been in seventh grade, but the real reason I own a physical copy of Earthbound is because I suffered appendicitis during the subsequent camping vacation where I was supposed to relax and have fun, and had a gaping hole on my side throughout the remaining summer vacation that left me housebound and waddling and that hole is still very much present because the wound refused to close using the first topical medicine that we tried and my parents began to downright pity me to no end at long last.

They only reason eighth grade fared better is they paired me with mutual friends and not instigators as classmates, so I would not have to endure the drudgery of playing whipping boy and getting suspended for not knowing when not to loudly swear in front of a teacher over the abject frustration of trying to pay attention in class while the rest of them got away with all manner of crimes both lesser and greater!

Now, bear with me fellow Pragers because I’m about to try something:

https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/fall-2014/abuse-of-power
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/does-going-back-to-school-mean-going-back-to-bullying

Can You Sue a School for Bullying? Taking Legal Action to Protect Your Child

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Amanda_Todd
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/7oxZ1/4chan-writes-one-of-the-best-beautiful-things-i-have-ever-read-about-amanda-todd/search?page=2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying_in_teaching

AAAAAAAAAND PUBLIC SCHOOL EATS AND NOTHING BUT!

The government’s blindness is a symptom of something far worse: it is enslaved by a crasser institution that sows despair over just how much negative garbage humankind perpetrates at any level: journalism (and by proxy, its bastard godchild, commentary; yes, I am aware of the irony).

Not to say it’s bad to have them around–Goodness knows, we guard religion with the same Amendment–but journalists believe they have a responsibility to reshape a culture gone haywire.

It’s not like they always wanted to do this and lurked into agencies that sponsor this mentality, though the rates of pedophilia among all types of authorities will make you do a double-take and have you assume the only actual Pope died on an upside-down cross two-thousand years ago.

In reality, it is simply because journalists are inundated with incidents of miserable behavior and want some kind of control over it, either to stop it or to get in on the action.

Governments then read these reports a little too deeply and begin to delve into the selfsame horrible fallacy that made communism a humorless laughingstock: oh, not envy, but superstition.

Yes, it is very true: the greatest adherents of religion are skeptics. What did we learn when Daniel asked for ash to be laid before a stone idol? That tricksters will ape emperors if they can get away with it?

No, we already knew that! It’s that believing in nothing means you fall for everything.

Several incidents throughout the Bible refer back to astrologists or magi, with or without elemental thunderbolts, who cannot predict or decipher world-shattering events as the dismantling of Babylon as they searched in places that did not pan out.

People still embrace astrology, at least in a humorous tone, because it indicates where the energy goes, a stable layout of recurring events, much like history.

And it is a plague of historicism that the journalists blindsight governments with.

In psychology, there is this trendy rainbow-colored chart of emotions where negative ones as Fear are at the bottom and at the tippy-top is Love. You know the last time I heard of this repulsive dynamic?

Twenty years ago in the horror movie Donnie Darko, where a self-styled guru advertised it to a gym full of teenagers.

Donnie Darko pointed out the fallacy of oversimplifying difficult, ornate phenomena, warned how that is often to just cull favor from the dull or ignorant, and declared the guru as the anti-Christ.

Later, we learn that the guru totes child pornography on the side.

That’s both the External and Internal Loci of Control going on at the same time. Forget the stereotype of conversatives operating under a constant deluge of paranoia, as if the unknown was the actual culprit biting the hindquarters of everyone who was streaking through courthouses to defy social convention.

Not to say you’re not better off embracing some measure of personal volition and fulfillment, or that things happen around you that you cannot predict or mitigate which will affect you and it’s best to let it slide so you can concentrate on what you, not everyone else, are doing.

If you listen to but one side, you receive but one side of the story; both reporters and commenters are spinning plates for personal advantage at the election booths.

The journalist is charged with discovering the wrongness of a situation so as to describe how it plays out and establish countermeasures against future incidents.

The commenter is rifling through the baggage, disbelieving the severity or plot holes that come with the task of entertaining the readership in hopes of staying in business.

The both of them have skin in the game.

But believing in either side long enough causes what we used to call “Mean World Syndrome” and, with fancier gadgetry in tow, “Doom-Scrolling”.

And government is neither good nor evil, but a force we just prefer to keep from being overwhelming. It is also, however, a stalwart adherent to historicism, the true source of how things like communism ever manifested, which is rooted in the press’ antics that disregard and discredit its own ethics.

How do I know this is bad? I see it in action, every day:

I work at a convenience store, an institution maligned for providing heavy calories to the public and catering to low-impact vices in the expressed objective of destressing our commutes and road trips.

Not listening to the buyer (or the buyer not speaking) creates problems that cause lines to form. This isn’t even addressing “Customer-is-Always-Correct” market research. If you make a mistake, people crowd around real fast.

We deal in the state lottery. No, this is not a parable against gambling, it argues for tempering your approach–namely, to not show up with a gigantic handful of winning tickets or to assume we can clear a series of ten’s when the cap is one hundred dollars (and that amount might not even be in the register!) gross, not net.

It’s the same courtesy of having money on hand in several denominations plus one or three cards that do, in fact, work. It’s a courtesy for yourself to do this.

If a bank refuses to “okay” a purchase due to a freeze or otherwise, the bills in your pocket will still say yes. When in France a bevy of supermarkets attempted to go full electronic, a ton of people showed up, bought thousands of dollars in merchandise, and refused to leave without using large-denomination bills to remind the companies of one unimpeachable fact:

Some people think it’s safer one way, but it is far nicer to have options.

Oh, but try to trade in any ancient-looking Franklins to your bank or credit union because the clerk at the electronics store will not only keep it for fearing it’s counterfeit, but sic a police cruiser on you well after you’ve paid with a modern version of bill and have endeavored to leave a hundred dollars (or more) poorer. And I traded one of mine so the store I work in could process the cash without incident since the safe does not accept ancient incarnations of greenbacks. I thought it was fine, but then another store went off the deep end.

So, why curtail your exuberance at coming back to claim a prize after squandering a net profit on a big ticket? Cashiers must drop cash into the safe to preclude armed robberies that leave the store $300.00 in the black (red? Yellow? Where does that phrase come from and why do we use colors?).

Having to choose between that and covering a big-time winner’s tab, without stretching into $5’s, $1’s & dimes, is a series of plates that make the lottery universally reviled among convenience store cashiers.

I don’t even like to buy them and cashed the $1.00 ticket someone gave me for the $2.00 it offered. That barely covers an Arizona Watermelon Punch! Though, I remember more about the drink than the actual ticket; being pretty good, for instance.

Do you know the worst plate to juggle?

Unlike a similar store down the road (and this discrepancy has caused several stalled lines full of people who just want their Pepsis to clear on their credit cards), we must pay for lottery via cash only.

Everything else is either-or as usual, so two potential payment methods divest an already taxed span of attention.

Worse, people have these strange systems of predicting whether a ticket will win and ask for the numbers ostensibly designed to track the tickets so that winnings are parceled correctly, feeling as if they are tied to tickets that win at least double to recoup losses.

There is no system. It’s sufficiently randomized and the house (that is, the states) take in more than what they yield, as per gambling of any sort.

Gamblers are out to get away with a payout, but they think they have an internal locus of control plus a get-away-with-culpability card by blaming losses on the tickets and they thus lose cash and credibility in tandem.

That, my friend, is government.

They buy tickets that journalists hand out and grow resentful of the remaining people they are tasked with serving. The journalists have the house, not the other way around.

The US Government in particular can’t even block journalists head-on–they do have an obligation to heed the Constitution and not infringe on the offending institution regardless of its practitioners’ excesses.

I can even prove how destructive and abusive this relationship is. Ask yourself:

If you think businesses’ priority is to the dollar, you suffered the same delusion that compels the US to regulate and censor explicit content for fear of encouraging bad behavior (instead of diffusing it).

No, a business’ first duty is to a service, not earnings.

On realizing this, you’ll assume loci of control, regardless of source, and emotional scales, regardless of position, have more to do with the results of actions than history.

But in truth, none of them matter.

Evil is an action.

But there are many actions.

Governments can still provide all sorts of services, or try to, assuming we can pay for it in the absence of functional private alternatives (and there are a few here and there).

But before they can get competent or just cognizant that they cannot juggle any better than a juggling savant can do his taxes, and should just simply let go and let God, they must break a cycle of heeding muck-raking yellow journalists who audaciously assume they know better than those who commute to work every day, who no longer have the luxury of time to read a paper.

 

Yep, there it is: goofy as goat shit, but mired in contempt of binary thinking and party disputes and antipathy against corporations and government. If you’re not helping, stop talking about how others are hurt(ing). In a final farewell, let me end on a fun note:

Well into 2014, I had discovered a picture of toy packaging, featuring DC’s Babs Gordon as Batgirl and the inimitable Azrael. Back then, I pondered the reasoning behind this pairing in packaging but have since discovered it is feasible that the two of them are actually Aspies in disguise, judging by explicit behavior and implicit characterization by their respective on-the-dime authors. During said time, I also wondered what the deal was with the infamous event cross-over comic book series that put Azrael on the map within the crosshairs of several authors who were discontent with their rivals’ creative and moral direction. If Babs is an Aspie like Jean-Paul Valley, the man beneath the flamboyantly French Catholic templar garb that is Azrael, then surely these two would make a great dynamic duo in their own comic.

That proposition never came to be as I never optioned it to DC. It is funnier to add that the Azrael version of Batman featured in the aforementioned Knightfall (-Quest & -‘s End) series starred in a very well-done modification to the video game Doom, done by three brothers from Argentina, simply titled Batman Doom. I have also wondered if I could develop a mod like that and crank it to eleven with a character selection made up of other lesser-known comic characters that Azrael has interacted with, including Babs Gordon (as Batgirl, the computer hacker persona Oracle, or both). At the very least, I detected animosity towards people with autism in Knightfall itself (it predicated every blunder on lacking the social or mental grace that Bruce Wayne somehow has in abundance of regardless of his aberrant behavior) and wanted to write a non-fiction book decrying this, until the woke mob made any such attempt unrealistically unpopular with my target audience of isolating blokes.

But then, a wonderful thing happened. Somewhere in Australia, a fellow game player with a love of the Batman Arkham games began submitting game footage of personal exploits in Arkham Knight. Codename: Batgirl Fangirl. This is the fun stuff: this YouTuber went to play Doom and began doing basic fan art that crosses Batgirl into the curmudgeon extreme world of classic Doom, replete with UAC, zombies, BFG9000’s, and air-skating tomatoes. Eventually, the videos incorporated captions written in Babs Gordon’s character voice, all with allusions to the 1960’s TV show Batman and a gradually improving art style (her noses always looked a little off….) for the title cards.

Batgirl Fangirl is part of the lost era of “Let’s Play” YouTube where you can watch how a dedicated amateur can crack wise and demonstrate good gaming hygiene. This is one of those channels with nary any view on politics, religion, the Great Pumpkin, or otherwise and, for the greater good, is all the better for it. It isn’t trying to ape PragerU on its front, but between the two, if one of them had a new video, Batgirl Fangirl is my bread and butter. Best of all, the videos are never near other players’ channels’ epic, algorithm-mandated length, as these videos require inserting Babs’ persona into footage, which necessitates a short, seamless and superbly coordinated take. YouTube Channels of this scale often have one person on staff. And all the more adorable for our beloved Domino’d Dare-Doll.

Now, why else do I mention this in a post decrying PragerU with a first draft for a five-minute speech that surpasses the five-minute mark? I follow politically charged channels and talk about their subjects, posting their videos at the top. The original draft may have been written as a comment to their channel, truth be told. This is just for post topic ideas as a holding pattern for many a Tuber who branches out to creative projects begins with examining the foibles of established media. This isn’t in direct defiance to Miles Beckler’s advice on tuning out YouTube and other distractions if you wish to create, because good art demands use of references. I started to see that, if I wish to make something, I require tons of references because the chief conceit among the neurotypicals of the world is the supposition that people with neurological deficits are ill-disposed to create things precisely because their hyper-focus and isolation preclude having enough good references to make acceptable art. The critics confuse and conflate extreme subtlety and ambiguity with actual artistry and make it very difficult for very blunted messaging to occur without being called out for being allegorical and applicable at the same exact time. I must operate on deficits to achieve standards that have been raised artificially because of those deficits. If you wonder why I am harsh on bullwork channels who do agree with me regardless, that’s your answer.

I come from a world destined to go along with the far left out of a need for security in numbers. A lot of people versed in politics are swept up in a need to be proven correct while not admitting to any blind spots that are instigated by a neutral entity hanging out in the corner. Everyone is swept up. The trick is to avoid being swept away. I feel as if I got swept away back in 2014 and failed to capitalize on a window of opportunity by not following through with my initial idea (i.e. to savage the comic book industry for its insensitivity towards disabled and idiosyncratic people). I was distracted by ancillary ribaldry such as PragerU and the Culture War in such a way that I just sort of gave out before even realizing there is a give up button that I would have pushed anyway. I felt as though one side will harangue me for complaining in a way that believes I’m out to topple industry by incorporating an inordinate bastard child where everything gets uglier and fans break out the deck of cards in protest, while the other would take me out of context another way and piggyback on my shoulders in order to own the other side and get clout. Note that both sides do both things and my attempt at genuine criticism (which would still uphold the actual values that writers of screeds like Knightfall attempt to preserve at the expense of idiosyncratic scapegoats) loses its intended audience as its greater points are swallowed up in defamatory noise.

Fact is, perception creates reality, and thinking everyone will be against you is how we automatically assume barriers form from out of nowhere and are explicitly there to slam your head as it tips over. I can write a joke about mouse-traps, but bats are not rats with wings, and neither are angels. We look to superhero archetypes to balance out the authority and purity and fairness and community and medicine so they can be free to make others free. PragerU is not bad, and neither are convenience stores–they serve purposes both necessary and niche–but if a person says you must pick between two fundamentally purposeful and useful things in order to gain anything of true importance, that person is selling something that doesn’t work.

If you get asked anything about politics, say “Choose Life”, “Choose Choice”, or just ask for more options, voices, and Arizona Watermelon Punch. Seriously. Bam, Sock, Boom, Dogoon, etc.