For those of you unfamiliar, it basically boils down to this.  The idea is, you calculate the numbers – what is the probability of you ACTUALLY being born in this era?  In this particularly exciting life (compared to those poor fuckers in Africa, that is – results may vary)?  Have you ever won the lottery?  Sorry, numbers say that never happens, not in the length of this Universe; winning the lottery pretty much guarantees that you’re a simulation operated by a super-computer who’s trying to figure out “Why 42?”

But see, that’s not what’s got me wondering.  I’ve read the articles by Hanson, Yudkowsky, and others – what with them being Math Guys and all, I’ve trusted their numbers (though I don’t remember what they are) and have generally continued to approach life with my fatalistic sort-of happy outrage that served me so well in prison.

But recently I’ve started to notice the NPCs.

Now hold off a minute there – this isn’t The Last Psychiatrist’s blog – I’m not talking about that Narcissistic ‘Insight’ “Yo, dude… I’ve always thought of my life as if I’m the main character in a movie… a movie about Suck.” No, not that sort of NPCdome.  I’m talking about the sort of throwaway, ‘don’t waste your time talking to me’ scenery characters who all repeat the same dialogue.  ‘Cause I’ve been noticing a lot of them.

I swear to god, today I had a deep discussion that petered out after 8 sentences.

‘Cause that’s what the paperclip maximizer would do, right?  Create the occasional fully-sentient creature in this torture-cube I find myself in, just to throw me off, while writing the rest of the characters as simple holodeck characters (ripping their dialogue out of cheap Dean Koontz novels), who have an (un)interesting story attached, but no true catharsis.  It’s like those cars that fade into view in Grand Theft Auto.  Only the horizon’s a bit further back.

I’m basically down to the point where I’m forced to estimate P(living in a cheap holodeck, where only 5% of us are real) versus P(95% of the population are fucking idiots, whose augmentation would serve no purpose).  Either way, it means you don’t have to feel so bad when you see a car wreck.

Of course there’s a third possibility.  God hates all of us, and we’re all living in our own personal hell.  If we ever meet in person, and I’m an obvious Set Piece, then it’s a decent chance you pissed off the Overgrown Child with the Mechano Set.

Faith in Whiskey, Motorcycles, and a Swift Punch to the Jaw.  That’s all you really need to get by in this world.

There’s an old saying in the army: “Solve it at the lowest level!” It’s usually offered up as a rebuke to some hapless Private, who in terror of all things brass just asked his section commander whether he ought to mop in a clockwise, or a deodesil manner, but it’s deeper meaning encapsulates everything that a Military ought to be.

It’s obvious that an army’s main purpose is warfare; but you’ll frequently find the troops being deployed during ice storms, flooding, or any other time “Everything goes to the Fuck,” as female Master Corporals are known to say.  That’s because in the preparation for war, armies learn skills deeper and more fundamental: they learn to establish order in the face of utter chaos.

Imagine an wave of nanomachines, tearing away at the randomness of the universe.  That’s what the military – and air traffic controllers, and firefighters, and all other such brotherhoods – are ultimately out to accomplish.  Coordinated negentropic agents.

And none of that works if the boys on the front line can’t operate on their own.

So that’s where the saying comes from.  It’s a step beyond platitudes such as ‘Think for yourself’ and ‘Take responsibility’ – it’s not a personal affirmation, it’s the demand of the system. Solve it at the lowest level.  Your superiors don’t have the time, inclination, or desire to know about petty problems.  Keep your shit tight, your kit organized, muckle onto any situations that develop, and be ready for 5 minutes Notice-To-Move.

In the real world things work quite differently.

In this Awful Dystopia that we’ve voted into being, the opposite holds true.  Don’t take responsibility for things – just follow procedure.  Don’t get involved – otherwise you’ll be the one punished.  Don’t fix things that are broken – failure to report to the proper authorities can result in a fine or up to six months in prison.

Ever been in a fist-fight at a mall food court, over a disputed claim of property rights to half of a Big Mac?  If you haven’t, I’m sure you’ve been witness to one.  Next time you see this bit of street theatre go down, ask one of the Security Guards (dutifully taking notes) what would happen to them if they intervened.

Just remember you hear it here first, ladies and gents: if the Security Guard intervenes he’ll get fired.  And if you intervene you’ll probably get banned from the mall for twenty years time.

Learned Incompetence, I think it’s called; we’re taught to be snivelling cowards who phone the police over noise complaints of all things.  Almost none of us own weapons, and if your neighbours find out that you do, they’ll be begging the cops to go do something about it!  Somehow this damn fool notion that Police are there to protect us has caught sway, no matter how many court cases attest to the fact that – at best – they’re there to clean up afterwards, and even that ain’t specifically legally mandated.

People often say that the problem with this world is that there’s too many Lawyers.  Horseshit.  A good 70% of the legal profession is made up of Good Guys (the other 30% consisting Crown attorneys and those who demand enforcement of handicapped accessibility statutes).  They’re just trying to help folk navigate their way through this byzantine nightmare.  The real problem in this ‘litigious society’ is the laws.  The laws written by politicians.  And who’s to blame for the politicians?

That’s right: the electorate.

No wonder the military refers to them as “Mouth-breathing Civie Pukes.”

Some examples from the advertising and equity policies of various academic places I’ve been:

‘Women can make valuable contributions to …’ implies that this is an issue of serious contention. If most people thought women were of zero value in some fields, this would be a positive statement about women, but they don’t. Worse, the author can’t make a stronger statement than that it is possible for women to create more than zero value.

Appeals to consider myself capable of e.g. engineering despite being female make the same error but this time suggesting that the viewer herself is likely in doubt. Such a statement can only be useful to women so ignorant of their own characteristics that they need to rely on their gender as deciding evidence in what career to devote their lives to, so it suggests the female audience are clueless. The smartest women have likely noticed that they are smart, and will not be encouraged by the prospect of joining a field where others expect them to be intellectually insecure special people to be reassured and included for human rights purposes.

…

Recommendations that courses like mathematics should be more focussed on women say that while existing mathematics is about completely gender neutral abstract concepts, not men, it is unsuitable for women. Presumably either women are not up to abstract concepts, or women can’t be motivated to think about something other than women. Despite whichever inadequacy, they should be encouraged to do mathematics anyway by being taught to work out the mean angle of their cleavage or something.

Damn, but it’s good to read something written by a woman who knows that her ideas have merit in and of themselves, and whether or not she sits down to pee doesn’t have any bearing on the issue.  Quite frankly, most of you female-types have been so inundated with an incoherent mix of 1st- 2nd- and 3rd-Wave ideals that you can’t even enjoy a good fuck if Emotional Ugliness isn’t tossed into the mix somehow.

I love Katja’s responses to each specific policy she brings up; after all, I never get tired of hearing that a Spade is a Spade.  When you live in a world full of doublethink euphemisms (‘Justice System’ comes to mind) it’s a refreshing change of pace.  She falls short at the end, however, when she asks what motivates these idiotic policies.  Ironically it’s because of an excess of sanity.  You’ve gotta stare down the rabbit hole and have it stare back at you, before you can really understand these lunatics.

Feminism as a political movement – which is all I’m going to focus on, since trying to socially engineer University demographics is a political act; I have no interest in Historical Analysis or Literary Theory – began as movement to extend the Basic Rights demanded by Enlightenment Thinking to the soft and curvy half of our species.  Given that some people have made half-convincing arguments that we ought to do the same for Chimps and Dolphins, I think it’s safe to take Women’s Equality as a given.

With a particular definition of Equality, that is.

I’m not sure exactly when it started exactly – maybe it’s just a result of living in a wealthy society where so many of our toys and gizmos are divorced from the concept of labour, and even the poorest amongst us have access to 24/7 AC Current at a consistent voltage – but at some point the concept of Rights got mixed up with Entitlements.

As the comedian Doug Stanhope pointed out, if we’re that worried about discrimination we should just ban marriage.  The Right to Pursue Happiness – to fuck and marry whomever you want, in whatever arrangement you want – is a great idea.  But if you’re born ugly with a bad personality it’s not going to matter what your Rights are – no one’s going to sleep with you anyway.  If instead of Rights you’re concerned with everyone’s Entitlements – everyone’s Entitled to a Good Lay every now and then – if that’s the case you’ll pass laws forcing an anonymous sex lottery… but in doing so you’ll be copping to the fact that certain people are toxic assets in the open sexual market.

So what exactly are Feminists admitting, when they craft policies demanding equal gender participation?

A lot of people think that 3rd Wave Feminism is misandric in nature, because of the sorts of laws they pass (just ask any man who’s been divorced in the past twenty years).  It’s an understandable mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.  What Feminists really hate is women.  That’s the reason they’re so driven to hold men down.  They fundamentally believe that women can never compete in an open marketplace with their male betters.  It’s nothing but the old misogynist argument “Women are too soft and motherly to understand politics,” dressed up in the skin of empowerment.  And it’s just as disgusting when a woman says it.

You know, it’s rough being a dude in the current regime; hell, just the other day my Lawyer said “If I were a young man today I’d voluntarily go gay.” I’m still waiting for the “White Male Privilege” thing to come along.  But the real victims of this sort of ideology are the minority groups it pretends to protect.  It doesn’t matter how thoroughly competent, professional, and accomplished they are – the stigma of affirmative action will follow them around like a greasy fart.

So Katja; the answer to why these patently offensive policies come about isn’t the basic sort of confusion you were looking for.  It’s much deeper that cognitive error, and thoroughly pathological.  But I’ve gotta say, it speaks to your character that you don’t know these hustlers and their schemes.

Keep fighting the good fight, Sister – and keep a good edge on those throwing knives of yours.  We’ll all have to level up before we can take down The Master.

The guy saying this wasn’t stupid by any means; quite the opposite, actually.  He was one of those rare people who actually use religion to become a better person, not just as an excuse for moral complacency.  If he could’ve just learned to buy his own packs of cigarettes, I’d of been proud to call him a friend.

His understanding of Evolution thought…

As Eliezer Yudkowsky, Chief Cenobite of the Bayesian Conspiracy, once pointed out Evolution is a force best compared to the blind idiot-god Azathoth from the Cthulu Mythos; its creative powers are enormous, but its methods are so asinine and wasteful that it’s bound to result in disgust and incredulity from any lay audience.

Once you grasp how awful it can be, the statement at the beginning starts to make sense.

Take a hypothetical problem: too many people are dying in car accidents, and you want to build a safer car.

To a human (that’d be you, right?) the solution is obvious.  You’ll collect statistics to figure out the biggest problems, you’ll run simulations with crash test dummies, you’ll invent preventative measures like daytime running lights, and re-engineer the cages to reinforce the most vulnerable areas.  Research – Idea – Application.  It’s how we go about addressing any problem in life.

The blind idiot, however, will take a different approach.

First off he’ll add a mutation algorithm to the assembly line – each car that comes off the lot will be a slight variant.  Next he’ll wait for people to kill themselves, and whenever they do he’ll cull that variant from the herd – completely ignoring whether the accident was a freak occurrence or not.  It’s possible that some of the better-built variants will be lost here, but he doesn’t care about that.  At the end of the year he’ll collect the serial numbers of all the vehicles that survived and produce a new batch of Variant² vehicles based off of the survivors.

Rinse and Repeat for then next 1000 years, while we wait for the 4th Reich to fall.

At the end of it, perched atop a pile of bodies taller than Mount Improbable you have Azathoth’s Masterpiece: the Yugo-A-Go-Go.  It maxes out at 60 km/h, frequently blows out valves and idles to a halt, the passenger-side floorboards are known to rust out, and finding a replacement gas-cap for your model is nearly impossible – but safety wise (the only thing Azathoth cares about, remember?) it’s better than a Smart Car.  The only deaths associated with the Yugo are from six months ago, when a family of four got trapped inside when the electronic locks broke, and the engine spontaneously combusted.

You asked Azathoth for a safe car, but forgot to ask for anything else.  He built one, killing millions in the process.  That’s Evolution.  You’re welcome.

So it’s no wonder that people – particularly religious people – take offence to the concept of natural selection.  It’s ugly.  And in the end it does imply moral nihilism – but not on behalf of the Scientists.

From a certain perspective, Evolution is as beautifully elegant and simple as the Laws of Quantum Mechanics.  In the right circumstances it can create the peacock’s tail.  But it’ll also create the immunodeficiency virus.  And in both cases it’ll leave behind a trail of broken test-models, dying in agony.

If you were under the impression that the Universe cares about you- that Evil is just a perversion created by men- that there’s an Ultimate Plan and everything will work out okay in the end-

Then it’ll come as a bit of a shock when you realize that God is the Moral Nihilist at work here.

Folks, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; all we’ve got is each other.  Take care of your brothers and sisters out there.

“Nice boots,” he said, after sitting down next to me. “Looks like they’re good for riding.”

“Thanks, that what I use them for.” I said, eyeing him up.  There was something nervous and juvenile looking about him – though I guessed his age to be somewhere in the late twenties.  Part of it was the baseball cap, but there was something about his posture.

He fidgeted a bit as the conversation died down, then he barked out a dry laugh. “Never going to trust my wife again,” he said.

“Oh yeah?  What happened?”

I expected a story along the lines of domestic spat-turned Protect and Serve, but instead he told me, “She didn’t wake me up and I fell asleep on the train.”

“Heh,” I chuckled.

Again our conversation died down.  It’d been a long day and I didn’t have much to say, but after a few seconds he broke the silence.

“So I just got out of jail,” he blurted out. “They caught me sneaking onto a train.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, my lips curling, “Listen, this is my stop – but you hang in there, alright pal?  Take care of yourself.”

Disgusting, I thought, as I stepped onto the platform.  Locking a man up in a cage like a goddamned animal, all because he was too broke to afford the $2.75 fare – or the $150 fine he got stuck with.  If I were him, I wouldn’t trust my old lady either.

Now I gotta say, given the stop where he’d got on, there was a decent chance he’d actually only been in the Downtown holding cell – not the Remand Centre, or prison proper – but the cold, dank rooms there had clearly been enought to put the Fear into him.  And no sane person could blame the poor guy.  It’s one thing being paraded around as an enemy POW.  That at least has got some dignity to it.  But when the local gang of Dudley Do-Rights slaps the bracelets on you and starts telling you where to stand, it’s pretty clear that you ain’t nothing but a hound dog.

You know, I always hear the same old refrain from the upper classes about how Poor People are such useless failures.  They like to pretend as if the Free Market would just eat these jokers up and spit out the piercings, but for the Tax Payer’s magnanimity that keeps a roof over their heads.  Welfare Queens and Dead Beats, the lot of ‘em, am I right?

But here’s what’s really going on.

Sure, society likes to hand out all sorts of unasked for shit to these guys – and you’re damned right that they take what’s offered, seldom with a nod of gratitude – but not fifteen minutes after coming home with their welfare check, these guys gotta deal with a harassing call from the Government demanding they go and pay their speeding fine.  After that they gotta drop another $100 on a safety and emissions check for their vehicle.  Then $800 for repairs, which is more than they paid for the damned thing in the first place.

They get kicked out of apartments they can’t afford, because the landlord has to insulate the walls against a fire that’ll never happen, and they get tossed into shitty government projects, where the Number One cause of high-crime is the number of cops sniffing around for an excuse to kick down a door.

And let’s not even talk about cigarette- and liquor taxes, let alone Government run lotteries.

Every day of their lives, these guys have to deal with The Man hoofing them in the nuts – and then the suit-wearing pricks downtown, who wouldn’t dirty their hands with the Police Department’s violence any more than they’d butcher their own meat, look down their noses at ‘em, and hand over a charity cheque.

Do the poor bastards ever complain?  Of course not.  This has been going on their whole lives, it’s the Standard Operating Procedure, the normal state of affairs.  So why question it?

You know, this guy called Hegel once wrote something about the Master-Slave Diabetic… but like I said, it’s been a long day, and I don’t feel like looking it up right now.  But I wonder what he’d say, if he ever saw how fucked up this world is?

Hell, he’d probably just sit in Starbucks and download music from the iStore.  That’s what Deep Thinkers do nowadays, after all.

For a good aggregate site, go here: I found the link through Peter Schiff’s youtube channel, and I’m currently watching an old 1990 news program from there, on BPs culpability in the Exxon Valdez disaster.

All I’ve got to say is this: you know what the result of all this will be, don’t you?  The damned plebs will vote for more collusion between government and big business under the guise of ‘regulation’.  I haven’t looked too deeply into Obama’s ban on offshore drilling projects but $20 says that it’s not just a knee-jerk please-the-electorate waste of time, which just happens to provide another swift kick to the nether regions of an economy that’s already collapsing.  No, I’ll wager it’s also meant to ensure ‘fair’ lack-of-competition among the other big players.

And you wonder why so many small businesses fail?

I am so full of bile and loathing right now.  Half of it’s for the absentee-father corporate execs.  The other half is for the brain-dead electorate, who carry on in the delusion that throwing tantrums and demanding that somebody fix things will somehow work this time.

What a pathetic slave-race we’ve grown into.  The Enlightenment was a goddamned accident, a strange congruence of social policies that somehow raised up a group of Noble Savages into the limelight for a while.  How long did it last?  A century?  Fifty years?  I’ll leave that to the Historians who bothered finishing their degrees.  Suffice it to say that since the Priests, Kings, and the other Soulless Meatfuckers took power during the Neolithic our natural form of governance has been, and always will be, Feudalism.  Republics are just a refrain in this tale told by an idiot.

So enjoy your Job with Benefits – I’m sure that management has your best interests in mind.  As for me, I’ll be moving out to the desert to a compound with razor wire and tesla coils protecting me from the rabble at the gate.

Stay off my goddamn lawn.

He was right.  But when you care about Justice, you’re forced to seek after something more, something indispensable to it.  Before you can find Justice, you need to find Truth.

I’ve always believed in an Objective Reality.  That outside of oneself, things are the way they are, without regard for our beliefs or opinions.  And that the first step in achieving Grace, or Honour, or Nobility, or whatever you want to call it, is to go out there and discover how the ground lies.  To make a map that reflects the territory.  I’ve never had much tolerance for Relatavism, or Post Modernism, or Solipsism, or any other ideology that says you should believe whatever you want to believe.

And Politics, if it matters as all, is equally bound to whatever Truths are manifest by our innate social- and moral natures.  The so-called Politics of Age, Class, or Ethnicity are ugly perversions.

“You shouldn’t be so Conservative,” she said as we held each other in the post-coital afterglow. “You’re only twenty-one.  Everyone knows that you’re supposed to be Liberal when you’re young and Conservative when you’re older.  It’s more fun that way.”

“So you’re saying you’ll change your mind and agree with me when you turn thirty?”

“Not me,” she said, stroking my chest, “I’m Arab.  That’s like being Black in 1970.  I’ll always vote Liberal.”

I’d be lying if I said my politics hadn’t changed over the years – truly contemptible is the creature whose mind cannot be changed, after all.  During High School I’d spout facile arguments against Wal-Mart.  In University I became a sort of SXE-Capitalist.  Then I became vehemently pro-drug, began to see the ugly Will to Power most of our Leaders embody, and realized that all of our Great Institutions are little more than Bureaucracies, rife with all the petty, endemic problems of our old-enemy’s Politburo.

The older I get, the more Anarchist I become.

Of all the schools of political though, Anarchism is the least understood.  Imagine if you locked John Locke and Adam Smith together in a room for  three days straight.  You give them nothing to eat or drink but high-protein Kobe steaks, two or three handles whiskey, and a half-kilo of Crystal-Meth.  You leave a few copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen lying around, and play Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Doors, and Rage Against the Machine on repeat, then blend until homogenous.

At the end of it you get Anarchism.

The basic idea is that people – write this down – are perfectly fine on their own.  We don’t need no education to save us from ourselves, and we don’t need no thought control to tell us how to live.  A Free Man surrounded by a community of Free Men is going to be the most wildly productive and peaceful force on the face of the planet – they’ll be living for themselves according to their innate Human Virtue.  No rulers or tyrants to dictate who does what or who goes where – no do-gooder mobs, stealing your dollars at gun-point for some lobby group’s cause – no gangs of men with Boots and Sticks to lock you in a cage.  Just Free Men of Clean Conscience contracting with one another voluntarily, and building a better world for their children.

Oh it’s a pipe dream, more likely than not.  Day-to-day I’m more worried about what can be done, not idealized futurist fantasies.  Even if some group of Founding Fathers built the perfect Anarchist society – Sea Steaders perhaps, or maybe the Scientist-Explorers who colonize Mars – it wouldn’t last two generations before the Evil Mutants and Human Viruses appeared and began slithering through the loopholes.  And even if that didn’t happen, Freedom, sadly, places demands on the individual which few of us can bear; far too many people enjoy slavery for us to ever eliminate it.

But it’s a beautiful concept, isn’t it?

It’s a much cleaner life, living by Anarchist principles.  If you’re willing to trust the government with your moral culpability – if you trust them to murder, steal, and imprison on your behalf – that’s your business.  As for me, I go to bed with a clean conscience and wake up to a face that I can look at in the mirror.  And even if the goal is an unattainable Utopia, I can still go out there every day and try and make the world a little bit more Free, and a little bit happier.

So with all that said, I hope you understand the absolute revulsion I feel when I read something like Lino D’s excellent piece about the so-called Anarcho-Communists protesting the G20.  Now I don’t want to get too involved with the Conference itself – it’s a complex issue, and besides, Lino’s in the right part of the country to actually get his foot on the ground and cover it properly.  But as for the character of these protesters, I can sum it up in two words: Freeloading Scum.

You see, these people buy into the image, they wear the logo tees, and they frame their arguments in the context of moral outrage – but their root motivation is nothing but vicious envy.  They claim that:

Anarchism will be created by the class struggle between the vast majority of society and the tiny minority that currently rule… The methods of struggle that we promote are a preparation for the running of society along anarchist and communist lines after the revolution.

And never the twain shall meet…

Folks, Communism is the fundamental opposite of Anarchism, pure and simple.  While Anarchism holds up the Free Man as its ideal, Communism teaches that the community comes first – that each individual is owned by the majority; their land, their money, their very lives.  It is precisely this ugly totalitarianism that true Anarchists are appalled by.

For them to protest the “ruling minority’ while advocating Community Ownership of the individual speaks to their motives.  If Dagny Taggart herself walked before them, they’d tear her down with spades and clawed hands.  They’d tear down Henry Roarke’s buildings for disrespecting Women, or Africa, or Something.  Their anger is targeted at the individuals holding the wealth – not the means by which the wealth was acquired.  In their vision of the world, all preordained enemies would be toppled and a new elite – themselves – would take their place, handing down ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ as befits their emotionally-derived ideological commitments.

The label of Anarchist is a sham – nowhere do they acknowledge the stark, terrifying levels of responsibility that Freedom places on a Man.  Instead, when they say Anarchy, they mean Licence – the ‘freedom’ to do as they wish, without consequence or responsibility, not even those imposed upon them by cold and cruel Nature.  A welfare state, then – steal the wealth and redistribute it, so that all might become Trust Fund Babies, able to do as they wish in some meaningless, catharsis-free world in imitation of Second Life.

These Anarcho-Communists are children raised in the most opulent society which ever existed.  Spoilt and privileged, even the poorest among them owns devices as amazing as a Genie.  Magic boxes, divorced in their minds from the hands that built them.  These children were weaned in a socialized system, never realizing that the Baby Bonus was bled out of the Workers they claim to support, they take advantage of every Entitlement and Affirmative Action Initiative to give themselves an unfair advantage over those that toil.

These callow youths disgust me, and it will be cold comfort indeed should they get their way.  For when they receive their just desserts of an impoverished economy and a bankrupt government, I know that even then their response will be to blame the Capitalists who could have saved them.  And their only solution will be to steal even more, and borrow what they can never pay back.  After all, isn’t that what the last generation of rebels has done?

But I’m going to keep living the honest life of a Free Man, untroubled by the treacherous vermin who claim to be my friends.  I’ll keep fighting the good fight everyday, whether or not I live to see victory.  I’ll stand there and watch the sun set, smoke my cigarettes, and know that I lived a good life.  I’ll know I stood up for Truth, and did my best to pursue Justice.  And in the end that’s all that matters.

That’s what it feels like when you read the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s website.

For those of you still under the delusion that you live in a free country, the Human Rights Commissions are a group of government run secret courts where the presumption is guilt until you can prove innocence.  They’re premised on the Third-Wave-Feminist concept of Institutional Violence, which posits as an article of faith that the sole reason women and minorities have trouble achieving social parity with the Rich White Male over-class, was that the world had been built from the ground-up with malicious intent and latent sadism.

Which is all well and good on it’s own – I’m never one to discount a good Conspiracy Theory, not with the sick lunatics we have running the show, but the solution they crafted was bent three ways left of sideways.  Instead of tearing down the establishment through patriotic acts of the old Ultraviolence their foremothers had believed in, the third-wave Tank Girls instead chose to hire groups of thuggish bureaucrats to hammer down on errant nails until everybody was equal.

So now the joke’s on them.  To quote from Jean Toomer

We’re all niggers now-get me?
Black niggers, white niggers, -take your choice.

Ann Coulter’s going to get censored, and Rap’s going to get banned.  It doesn’t matter who you are anymore, the Human Rights Tribunal is going to enforce their version of equality whether you like it or not.

An article from June 7th caught my eye, “Understanding human rights in Canada has become easier”.  Funny that, I thought, I never figured Human Rights were all that difficult to understand – the basic idea is that, what with you being a Free Man and all, you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you don’t walk over to my house and take a shit on my lawn.  Sure, things can get a bit confusing when you try and explain why you’re defending Fred Phelps or a group of peaceful Skinheads – but on the whole I didn’t really think Human Rights were the sort of things that needed explaining – wikipedia pretty much has the market cornered on that produce.

Except what they’re talking about isn’t Human Rights – not that any Frenchman living two-hundred years ago would recognize, anyway.  What they’re really talking about is your ‘Right’ not to be offended – not to be put off, or made uncomfortable by any number of things.  Remember folks, we’re not talking about Jim Crow laws here – sunset clauses or not – we’re talking purely about emotions.  And if someone had a problem, don’t expect your day in court, or some slap on the wrist – expect to show up to a closed-door tribunal that winds up costing you tens of thousands of dollars, and ruins your business.

What, you don’t believe me?  Just ask this guy.

Oh, but the Fuckery doesn’t end there.  Their latest newsbulletin stated: “The OHRC introduces a new resource for human rights and mental health.”

Now my problem here isn’t that I’m going to have to work alongside a manic-depressive borderline who can’t be fired.  Hell, with the way my personal life has been going lately, that’d feel perfectly normal.  No, the problem here is that they are decreeing – remember, these bastards decree, stronger than any legislator – that Mental Illness is now a Thing.  It’s now a label – to be put onto your Universal ID along with your Race, Blood Type, and Religious Preference (you know – all those things that are the Government’s Business).

Only this one’s worse.  Your race is self-evident, and it’s going to fuck you over or benefit you depending on the situation.  But being labelled as Crazy?  Now that’s a terrifying prospect.  You see, Crazy people – much like women who suffer ‘False Consciousness‘ – aren’t entitled to the full Rights of a Citizen.  They’re even worse off than criminals – once they get that label, they become permanent Wards of the State.  I honestly can’t think of a more terrifying prospect.

So one last story from this site, just in case your stomach isn’t churning.  This one from the Province where I reside:

On June 27, Albertans will join their fellow Canadians to reflect on our country’s rich diversity. Canadian Multiculturalism Day encourages Albertans to honour our shared commitment to democracy, equality, mutual respect and understanding, and the important role Albertans from all national and cultural backgrounds play in helping to promote these key civic values.

Emphasis mine, but you get the point.

I gotta say, that bit about ‘mutual respect’ really rubs me the wrong way.  Where I come from, respect has always been something you earned – not something handed away freely, at gunpoint.  The poison here seems to stem from that ugly bit of folk-wisdom “Judge not lest ye be judged.”

Fuck. That. Noise.

Judge – and be prepared for the Judgement of others.  A Free Man lives with pride and dignity – not the mewling prostrations of a slave or infant.  And something that calls itself The Human Rights Tribunal has no business degrading people like this.

I can already hear what Jesse’s gonna say about all of this:

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Yo – this shit is Kafkaesque, bitch!

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Go check it out here.

And for the Patriots among you who like desktop backgrounds, he tossed this little image together (left-click for the full size version).

You see, I’d been out of town for the past week, and the endless crying in The Human Centipede is rather convincing (the plot and dialogue are another matter).  As far as my neighbour knew, my girlfriend had been home alone when the screaming started, and can you really expect a single mother to intervene?

And I guess I can’t really blame the police, either.  As far as cops go they were decent enough.  Of course they took the throwing star my brother given me the day before, fresh off the plane from Japan, and left on the coffee table next to me (restricted weapons, I guess, though I don’t really know why) but they didn’t charge me for it.  And yeah, one of them threatened to cap my ass while I was getting him my ID (“Sir, if you pull a throwing star out of that pocket I will shoot you”), but there was no real malice in his voice.  And of course – once they’d realized all this was just a misunderstanding – they proceeded to snoop around with their flashlights, and run our names to look for some sort of crime to arrest us for – but once again, they didn’t do this any more roughly than was necessary.  No tearing apart books or knocking things off the shelves.  Just a methodical investigation of all our personal belongings.

So in the end, I really shouldn’t be so upset.

But sometimes I dream of a different sort of Police Department.  One that isn’t just another gang, granted privilege by our rulers, but a Department that is part of, representative of, and answerable to the citizens.  I can imagine last night in my head. “Ah, sorry for interrupting your evening Mr Aurini.  Glad we got it all sorted out.  I’m Officer Dalidowicz, by the way, and this is my beat.  If you ever need any help you know who to call.” And then my girlfriend and I would have made a new friend, our neighbourhood would have had a new face – and I’d still have my suriken.

You see, here’s the thing about heuristics/methodologies: they only measure what they’re intended to measure.  And when you try and appraises them by asking how many times they measure whatever criteria they’re programmed to measure, all you’re really testing for is laziness in your agents.

The way things go right now, the Police department takes every opportunity to troll for minor crimes; for anything short of murder, their interest is going to be focused on the victim and what they can get them for; finding the person who stole your bike or laptop would take a different approach, something wholly alien to the current process.  And by threatening us bottom feeders with minor offences – things that shouldn’t be illegal, or ‘tax collector’ crimes such as most traffic tickets – they occasionally find a path to move up on the big fish.

This is the world we’re living in.  Where each and everyone of us is a suspect, a potential provocateur, a troublemaker who is to be roped in and coerced any time we cross paths with the boys in blue.  Never a citizen, an agent of Canada, building this country, or a member of a community.  It’s a different sort of surveillance state we’ve got going here, where you’re potentially subject to analysis at the drop of a hat – but at least they don’t violate your ‘Rights’.

Two lessons, then, I guess:

1. Don’t watch The Human Centipede.  At best you’ll waste an hour and a half of your life, at worst you suffer a police raid.

2. Don’t be poor.  That never helps.  Especially not in Calgary, the Heart of the New West.