Greetings Earthling,
Today I will be addressing a very important topic which many of us seem to undermine in today’s busy-like lifestyle and mindset. This topic is something that you can make, but also something that you used to be. It comes in many shapes and sizes, but none of them too big. Can you guess what it is?
Ladies and gentlemen, I do sincerely believe that we’re encountering a very serious problem every day of our lives, and every day it gets worse. If that wasn’t bad enough, the only reason this problem exists is because of a self-fulfilling vicious cycle that we have created. Do you by any chance recall what a large part of the battle feminists are fighting is? They fight for women’s rights, yes, but that comes from women having been (and still largely being) treated as objects. Might I reiterate what I just said – objects. The only thing is that now they’re fighting back, so they’re no longer an easy target, so we’ve moved onto someone else to treat as objects: children.
Let’s begin at the beginning – pregnancy. Today, the mere idea of pregnancy is treated like a horrible illness. “Oh no, you’ve got Malaria? That must suck for you but hey look on the bright side - at least you’re not pregnant! And hey, I bet you just saved a whole bunch of money too by switching to Geiko!” Then there’s the trophy pregnancy – “I have a standard North American home with a standard North American wife, a standard North American dog, and two standard North American cars, because my neighbour only has one. I think it’s time we had some kids, because every other standard family has a couple.” Last but definitely not least on the horrible crime against society scale, is the stepping-stone pregnancy, also known as the “I’m too lazy to get anywhere in life the normal way but I hear that freaks get lots of money and fame just by being freaks so I’m going to take fertility pills and have a litter of humans so that I can feel like a celebrity” pregnancy. I’m not discounting the good old “I’d like to be a responsible parent and help bring a functional extension of my race into the future” kind of pregnancy, but those are not the ones causing trouble so let’s move on.
Every society has its ups and downs in child rearing traditions, depending which external culture’s perspective you regard them from, but I’m going to focus on North America, and particularly Canada, because I live there. In my opinion, there should be some kind of intensive test that 90% of our population should be forced to pass before they are allowed to reproduce. This test should include things like reasons for reproduction, strategies for maintaining the child once it’s born, throw in a few logic-testing questions, a few essay-format questions regarding a hypothetic situation and how to deal with it that will test the potential parent’s ability to deal with early childhood psychology, so on and so forth. It must be a big deal and a big hassle, so that anybody who does decide a child would be forced to do their research. “I was drunk and got knocked up, but don’t believe in abortions because I’m such a good Catholic” doesn’t count as adequate reasoning. No offense “good Catholics”, but abortions are against your religion because you’re supposed to keep it in your pants until you get married anyway. On the other hand, if it is an accidental pregnancy and the parents prove to be ready for parenthood, then all the power to them.
In today’s mindset children are highly overlooked as an integral part of society. As soon as possible they are either stuck into a public care facility or left to their own resources at home with a parent ‘attending’. Now, I’m not a big fan of extremes so I will not advocate one thing solely on its own basis without other contributing factors. Children do need to be left to themselves, don’t get me wrong, but not too early on, and not all the time. Especially in the early years children need interaction and attention from their parents so that they do not develop a host of psychological complexes later on. The whole point of playing is to go through motions that are similar to ones that a person will be doing when they are older to develop motor and perception skills that are universally applicable in adult life. If a child is not taught how to go about playing, they will not learn anything except the bare necessities of movement – and keep in mind, today’s toys tend to do everything for the child; you push a button and everything happens for you. How can you learn from that? Answer: you can’t.
So you have a six-year-old that is very curious and always wants to know what you’re doing. You sit him by the television, tell him to stay out of your way, and magically, he does! Problem solved, right? Wrong. You’ve just created a much bigger problem. You have just stunted the child’s development by a mile by showing him that it’s more rewarding not to search for information, and that curiosity is a nuisance. The child internalizes everything, and slowly but surely develops into a mentally lazy individual that prefers to keep his nose out of things, doesn’t ask questions, and enjoys forms of further mind-numbing entertainment that he remembers from his childhood. This is where you wonder why he’s getting such bad marks in school, or why he’s becoming a disturbingly unmotivated youth, or why he shows no interest towards anything that doesn’t bring him immediate gratification. Instead of asking yourself “what shall I ever do with my unruly teen”, ask what you should have done with your curious kid, and maybe follow through with your next one.
To be perfectly blunt, the child in question [from the previous paragraph] is all too likely to grow into an adult with a ‘someone else will do it for me’ attitude as well as all the other problems I have mentioned. He will be a burden on society that doesn’t see a problem with what he’s doing. Of course you might just get really lucky; your kid might get involved with a wonderful group of friends who will be able to help him learn some life skills and he will become a determined and driven adult with a successful career. If that’s the case its no thanks to you so don’t dare take any credit. Most people aren’t that lucky. Chances are he will grow up to be an adult human being with a survival rate of 0%. Lack of curiosity will result in inability to find creative ways out of situations because they will never have bothered to look for alternatives.
We also need to consider the concept of many such kids growing up and taking over the future job market as well as just being the adults that other kids look up to. If these kids grow up to be the general public then they are not capable to provide future generations with a better example, which only contributes to the exponential deterioration of society. If we encounter any issues [ie pollution today] these aforementioned individuals will be too focused on existing with minimal effort, resulting in (and I repeat) the ‘someone else will take care of it” attitude which they will pass on to their offspring, so on and so forth.
To sum it all up, from the moment you decide to have a child, make sure you already have an idea of what this child will become, and I don’t mean a doctor, lawyer, or any other career-oriented goals for your kid. I mean the generic life skills you want your kid to have and then work towards developing them. Yes, this means you will actually have to be involved with your child’s development. YOU will have to listen, advise, and participate. If you’ve been doing nothing all this time, realize that your parents screwed up, even if they are/were wonderful people, and take your life from this point onward into your own hands. If you can see what a good example is, you can be a good example too. Don’t be a selfish contributor to an already sick society. Don’t be the parent of a stepping-stone child. They are not objects, you can’t use them as a staircase for your own personal gain because that is stupid and cruel. Don’t have kids that you are planning to neglect either. If you want to neglect something, buy a lamp. Even plants come with a responsibility to be taken care of.
That’s all folks.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
The Big Bang
Hello and welcome.
This is how my blog begins - with a big bang, like everything else does, if you think about it. Like you did, to make a crude sexual reference. Slowly but surely the particles that are hereon forth identified as letters will come together to form one whole and will the evolve entry by entry from primitive nonsense to either something superior, or a mess that will destroy itself with advancements it's not ready for. Either way we can't tell the outcome until we reach it.
Here I will use the liberty of the fact that nobody is telling me to shut it (yet) and, from lack of better term, blog about topics I feel passionate at the moment. If you are looking for celebrity gossip, pre-teen hormonal rambles, or poorly written haikus this is probably not the best place to look, but then again never say never. Currently, I feel like telling people what to do, so I will proceed to do so at my leisure starting with the next paragraph.
I think a lot in my spare time, I have a lot of spare time, and thus, I think a lot in general. Some things I've been thinking about today included the government, change, the environment, money, and greed. If there's one thing I learned in the relatively small number of years I'd spent on this planet it's that the government wants us to change so that it can help the environment, but they really want money because they're greedy so they say the stuff mentioned prior to the coma as a reason to take the money. Also that if you want to find a fully functionable communist society you should proceed towards the nearest anthill, but I digress. Day to day we are fed these storie about how if we do this and this and contribue thus and thus we will all be part of some kind of solution to some sort of problem. We all eat it up with a spoon of course, because guilt trips are probably the best weapon anyone's ever used. Your mother knows, ask her. What we fail to understand is that everyone out there has some sort of personal interest in some sort of gain, with very very few exceptions, if any at all. People will seldom question reasons of famous people for doing or saying something because if they have fancy charts and quotations then clearly it's completely non-biased and beneficial - nobody questions famous people unless it's regarding their fashion sense or some kind of politically incorrect act/statement that makes the general public say 'well I never'. God forbid a movie star forgets to wear makeup and/or gets an abortion.
A common misconception we make as a species is forgetting the fact that humans are the most developed, highly evolved race of idiots ["Well I never!"]. Pardon my language, but it's true. On the whole we ignore important stuff and focus on irrelevant details. How else do you think computers, telephones and money would have gotten invented? Not if we were focusing on food, water, and shelter. By no means am I suggesting that all that stuff is bad, I am currently enjoying a wonderful piece of technological advancement as we speak, I'm just pointing out facts. On the whole we like to believe information that sounds appealing to us without making any effort to consider other possibilities, perspectives, or playing out alternative hypotheses because we're a bunch of lazy pro crastinators too. A simple example would be to skip a class because at the time when you are offered free booze that seems like a more interesting alternative, but without the consideration of possible motivations of the second party or how that class may affect your scholarly future can possibly lead to a grave error in judgement, resulting in potentially catastrophic results. ie, you could potentially get killed by the offerer of free booze, or just miss something important in the lesson that interferes with your pristine record later on during exams. Which option you choose highly depends on your paranoid tendencies, but you see what I mean, I hope.
Now, leaders come in two extremes - those that assume responsibility and those who pretend to assume responsibility. Within this bellcurve chart, the middle bulge contains the rest of the public who avoid any mention of responsibility. What is interesting is that the pretenders are more likely to be followed, because they sound more convincing. Because people are, as I have previously mentioned, biased and self-centered, everything can be calculated as a priority. Even altruists can be put in with the rest; they only appear selfless because acts of kindness, charity, or whatever else that can be thrown in there give them satisfaction, and is thus a personal priority - like income to a corporation. Again, I'm not against it, I'm just pointing out a vital part to understanding human nature and using it for the processing of information.
To get back on track of what I originally planned to do, that being telling other people what to do, I would like everyone to spend some time thinking about themselves and before they do something, think about why they're doing it, what their motivation is, and what the motivations of the contributing parties, if any, might be. If you want to be successful, start by learning to play chess. There are skills used in that game that translate directly into anything and everything you will ever do. The ability to think rationally is probably the most useful skill ever learned by a human being. It helps make decisions, deal with problems, sustain relationships, and many more amazing, helpful things. Once you have learned to do that, then you can start analyzing information all around you properly, and stop seeking gratification, but feeling it.
Some information that is currently a floating all around us regards saving the planet. Not a bad topic, but most people don't realize what it is that we're trying to save it from . There's too much choice - are we saving the Earth from terrorism, poverty, illness, pollution, or UFOs? Tell me please, I'd like to be given a direct answer. Different leaders say different things, but as far as I'm concerned we're saving the planet from "not me". While some claims are entirely reasonable, others are ridiculous fancies of people who don't know better. These are the leaders that pretend to assume responsibility. In reasonable cases such as illness, leaders that actually assume responsibility for the task at hand - doctors, say, and nurses, commit to doing as much as they can to address and fix the problem. In other cases such as ethnic cleansing, leaders come up with a problem, which they then find a solution for that appeals to the masses, and then get them to do the dirty work as they stand by and supervise. This is oh-so relevant to this whole save the world campaign, because in order to tell the difference between a pretend leader and a real one you need to learn to think rationally. When that's done you will stop sitting around waiting for a pretend leader to come and motivate you off your la-z-boy, or admit to yourself that you really don't want to get anything done all that much at all, else you'd be doing something to help achieve your goal.
On the topic of changing the world, I'd like to bring up pants. You don't contribute to putting on your pants in the morning, you put them on. You don't wait for the government to begin taxation for time spent pantsless before you (collectively, as a community) put on your pants, you just put them on. You may wait a bit before you do it, but you know you must, so you put them on. The same applies for any form of change. Let's pretend that the global problem is your bareness waist-down, and that needs to change. Will you wait for a council decision? Probably not, because you can just take the pants and put them on. This is also done in the process of trial and error, despite the high success rate of getting dressed. If you are in a hurry and you accidentally pick up your wife's pants and find that they just don't fit, you will remove them and go find your pants, then put them on. Now I may speak in metaphor, but it's true and applicable to 99% of all human functions. If you didn't try to put the pants on, even though you may not have succeeded the first time, you would not have gotten any pants on at all, which would most likely result in embarassment at the workplace or something similar. Sometimes a little failure is acceptable, and that's another fact you learn to come to terms with rational thinking - if you try and never fail, you're probably just lucky. If you never fail by default, you never learn what not to do, you never get anything done, but hey - at least you have a clean record, right?
To draw a conclusion after all those seemingly unconnected ideas: if you want to be a part of a movement - move! Don't wait for superman to come and do it for you. Do your own research, form your own opinions, come up with a rational action plan, and for the love of some sort of higher entity, put your pants on!
So long and thanks for all the fish.
This is how my blog begins - with a big bang, like everything else does, if you think about it. Like you did, to make a crude sexual reference. Slowly but surely the particles that are hereon forth identified as letters will come together to form one whole and will the evolve entry by entry from primitive nonsense to either something superior, or a mess that will destroy itself with advancements it's not ready for. Either way we can't tell the outcome until we reach it.
Here I will use the liberty of the fact that nobody is telling me to shut it (yet) and, from lack of better term, blog about topics I feel passionate at the moment. If you are looking for celebrity gossip, pre-teen hormonal rambles, or poorly written haikus this is probably not the best place to look, but then again never say never. Currently, I feel like telling people what to do, so I will proceed to do so at my leisure starting with the next paragraph.
I think a lot in my spare time, I have a lot of spare time, and thus, I think a lot in general. Some things I've been thinking about today included the government, change, the environment, money, and greed. If there's one thing I learned in the relatively small number of years I'd spent on this planet it's that the government wants us to change so that it can help the environment, but they really want money because they're greedy so they say the stuff mentioned prior to the coma as a reason to take the money. Also that if you want to find a fully functionable communist society you should proceed towards the nearest anthill, but I digress. Day to day we are fed these storie about how if we do this and this and contribue thus and thus we will all be part of some kind of solution to some sort of problem. We all eat it up with a spoon of course, because guilt trips are probably the best weapon anyone's ever used. Your mother knows, ask her. What we fail to understand is that everyone out there has some sort of personal interest in some sort of gain, with very very few exceptions, if any at all. People will seldom question reasons of famous people for doing or saying something because if they have fancy charts and quotations then clearly it's completely non-biased and beneficial - nobody questions famous people unless it's regarding their fashion sense or some kind of politically incorrect act/statement that makes the general public say 'well I never'. God forbid a movie star forgets to wear makeup and/or gets an abortion.
A common misconception we make as a species is forgetting the fact that humans are the most developed, highly evolved race of idiots ["Well I never!"]. Pardon my language, but it's true. On the whole we ignore important stuff and focus on irrelevant details. How else do you think computers, telephones and money would have gotten invented? Not if we were focusing on food, water, and shelter. By no means am I suggesting that all that stuff is bad, I am currently enjoying a wonderful piece of technological advancement as we speak, I'm just pointing out facts. On the whole we like to believe information that sounds appealing to us without making any effort to consider other possibilities, perspectives, or playing out alternative hypotheses because we're a bunch of lazy pro crastinators too. A simple example would be to skip a class because at the time when you are offered free booze that seems like a more interesting alternative, but without the consideration of possible motivations of the second party or how that class may affect your scholarly future can possibly lead to a grave error in judgement, resulting in potentially catastrophic results. ie, you could potentially get killed by the offerer of free booze, or just miss something important in the lesson that interferes with your pristine record later on during exams. Which option you choose highly depends on your paranoid tendencies, but you see what I mean, I hope.
Now, leaders come in two extremes - those that assume responsibility and those who pretend to assume responsibility. Within this bellcurve chart, the middle bulge contains the rest of the public who avoid any mention of responsibility. What is interesting is that the pretenders are more likely to be followed, because they sound more convincing. Because people are, as I have previously mentioned, biased and self-centered, everything can be calculated as a priority. Even altruists can be put in with the rest; they only appear selfless because acts of kindness, charity, or whatever else that can be thrown in there give them satisfaction, and is thus a personal priority - like income to a corporation. Again, I'm not against it, I'm just pointing out a vital part to understanding human nature and using it for the processing of information.
To get back on track of what I originally planned to do, that being telling other people what to do, I would like everyone to spend some time thinking about themselves and before they do something, think about why they're doing it, what their motivation is, and what the motivations of the contributing parties, if any, might be. If you want to be successful, start by learning to play chess. There are skills used in that game that translate directly into anything and everything you will ever do. The ability to think rationally is probably the most useful skill ever learned by a human being. It helps make decisions, deal with problems, sustain relationships, and many more amazing, helpful things. Once you have learned to do that, then you can start analyzing information all around you properly, and stop seeking gratification, but feeling it.
Some information that is currently a floating all around us regards saving the planet. Not a bad topic, but most people don't realize what it is that we're trying to save it from . There's too much choice - are we saving the Earth from terrorism, poverty, illness, pollution, or UFOs? Tell me please, I'd like to be given a direct answer. Different leaders say different things, but as far as I'm concerned we're saving the planet from "not me". While some claims are entirely reasonable, others are ridiculous fancies of people who don't know better. These are the leaders that pretend to assume responsibility. In reasonable cases such as illness, leaders that actually assume responsibility for the task at hand - doctors, say, and nurses, commit to doing as much as they can to address and fix the problem. In other cases such as ethnic cleansing, leaders come up with a problem, which they then find a solution for that appeals to the masses, and then get them to do the dirty work as they stand by and supervise. This is oh-so relevant to this whole save the world campaign, because in order to tell the difference between a pretend leader and a real one you need to learn to think rationally. When that's done you will stop sitting around waiting for a pretend leader to come and motivate you off your la-z-boy, or admit to yourself that you really don't want to get anything done all that much at all, else you'd be doing something to help achieve your goal.
On the topic of changing the world, I'd like to bring up pants. You don't contribute to putting on your pants in the morning, you put them on. You don't wait for the government to begin taxation for time spent pantsless before you (collectively, as a community) put on your pants, you just put them on. You may wait a bit before you do it, but you know you must, so you put them on. The same applies for any form of change. Let's pretend that the global problem is your bareness waist-down, and that needs to change. Will you wait for a council decision? Probably not, because you can just take the pants and put them on. This is also done in the process of trial and error, despite the high success rate of getting dressed. If you are in a hurry and you accidentally pick up your wife's pants and find that they just don't fit, you will remove them and go find your pants, then put them on. Now I may speak in metaphor, but it's true and applicable to 99% of all human functions. If you didn't try to put the pants on, even though you may not have succeeded the first time, you would not have gotten any pants on at all, which would most likely result in embarassment at the workplace or something similar. Sometimes a little failure is acceptable, and that's another fact you learn to come to terms with rational thinking - if you try and never fail, you're probably just lucky. If you never fail by default, you never learn what not to do, you never get anything done, but hey - at least you have a clean record, right?
To draw a conclusion after all those seemingly unconnected ideas: if you want to be a part of a movement - move! Don't wait for superman to come and do it for you. Do your own research, form your own opinions, come up with a rational action plan, and for the love of some sort of higher entity, put your pants on!
So long and thanks for all the fish.
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