Since those parents of mine could get angry very easily (it wasn’t until 2010 when they split up that I was told that my Dad had been abusing my Mom) and be irrational and given the fact that at school I would get bullied at school (I act weird since I have asperger’s syndrome, a few times random people in public even insulted me when I hadn’t said anything to them and it makes me upset that now people on the internet use autism as an insult in spite of the advantages it has) I decided to spend most of my time on the internet around 2006. After all there’s a lot of stuff on the internet so you’re bound to find plenty of stuff to interest you.
Well early on I discovered just how many people can be how mean on the internet; a lot of people being very mean. On Yahoo! Answers the Religion and Spirituality section would be infested with new atheists (the hardcore, negative nasty kind who love to incessantly vomit polemics and hyperbole and who are as extreme and as nasty as religious fundamentalists but more smug) who would ask biased questions and then give Best Answer to answers that agreed with their views as opposed to using the site for its actual purpose; to ask questions to get information you didn’t know and the Ireland section was full of anti-Irish racists. People assume that if you take a normal person and give them an audience (the internet) they become a jerk (the Greater Internet Fuckward Theory) but what I’ve found is that in fact it’s not about anonymity; it’s about distance. On Facebook there was this anti-Lady Gaga page and Lady Gaga fans would come there giving out as opposed to sticking to pro-Lady Gaga pages with one of these people even saying that my face must be a joke since I didn’t have the confidence to post it; actually it’s because in this age of leaks and hackers I’d like to keep SOME bit of privacy and pro-choice people would come to the Youth Defence page spewing rhetoric as opposed to sticking to pro-choice pages and dissident Republicans would go to Sinn Fein pages insulting them as opposed to sticking to their own pages. All this on a site where people use their real names and faces so it’s not about anonymity; it’s about being able to be a jerk and get away with it due to distance. We’re a passive aggressive species; rather than just admit to wrongdoing we cover up and make excuses and rather than say stuff to people’s faces we say it to other people behind their backs. Well not long after I began posting on Yahoo! Answers my posts were getting reported even though I wasn’t breaking the rules and I worked out that someone was stalking me and just reporting the posts because I disagreed with their views (I discovered later that this happened on Yahoo! Answers a lot) and that posts I made telling the stalker to stop were especially likely to be reported. Eventually my account was removed because of all the reports so I made a new one and sent the Yahoo! Answers team a message saying IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ listing the various faults with the site so they took measures to improve it and I had explained this to someone who had asked a question about the changes. She thanked me but someone else called me an idiot. Yep, that’s the level of stupidity on Yahoo! Answers for you; if someone wants to IMPROVE things they’re an idiot. Another thing that was disturbing was all these teenage girls asking “This and that happened; am I pregnant?”. Here’s a good rule of thumb; if you don’t understand basic biology then don’t have sex.
I used to like playing videogames; one being Empire Earth (until 10 years after playing I gave up on it having realised how overpowered bombers and artillery were plus the AI is stupid and the editor is bad) so I decided to play it multiplayer. Little did I realise that human opponents were far more skilled than the AI and that the computer I was using was one of those spartan kind of ones just built to do the bare minimum as opposed to doing anything well (I hate Dell computers to this day) so the other players would get mad at me and constantly hurl the insult “noob”. Same thing would happen on Combat Arms. There’s a vicious cycle in online gaming; if you haven’t played a game online very long you won’t be much good so people will call you a noob so you won’t want to play online. They could just play the blasted game as opposed to ruining other people’s experiences but no, they just have to be jerks. By now we’re all familiar with online gamer logic; if I kill you you’re a noob, if you kill me you’re cheating and if everyone kills me I have lag. Another thing that’s annoying is leetspeak. You have to familiarise yourself with a new dialect just to understand sentences that aren’t worth understanding anyway. Useless, defeated and ace are already perfectly good words but people decided to invent noob, owned and leet instead and owned even gets used in YouTube videos about politics. Using textspeak online is also annoying; if you can’t be bothered to type you as opposed to u, just 2 letters of a difference then you probably don’t have anything to say that’s worth reading anyway.
When I came to the internet first I thought to myself “It’s a paradise. Videos on YouTube and articles on Wikipedia; this is the life.” Well soon I discovered it’s not a paradise. YouTube is infested with conspiracy theorists, new atheists and religious fundamentalists and anti-religion videos are so common I stumble across them even when I look up stuff not related to religion. The YouTube comment section is one of the worst things to ever contain words in human history. It’s full of polemics whether the video is about politics or just entertainment. I understand people getting worked up over politics and religion but people even get tribalistic and polemical about entertainment; even SIMILAR works of entertainment (such as FIFA games v PES games even though both are soccer games with similar modes and Playstation v Xbox arguments even though both have similar buttons albeit with different names and tend to have the same games). Sooner or later from seeing YouTube videos and comments you realise that human logic goes as follows:
“We’re right about everything and smart and good because we’re us; the opposite of us is them so the other side are wrong about everything, stupid and evil
We value x so we take y position
x is a good thing therefore y is a good position with no flaws
those people on the other side don’t like y position therefore they’re stupid and evil
We’re rational and caring people living in the real world and we persuade and are diverse. The other side are idiotic jerks who engage in wishful thinking; they deceive and are all the same. If we put out material it’s information; if they put out material it’s propaganda. The political spectrum is not a straight line; it bends in such a way that all of the extremists are on the other side and there aren’t any extremists on our side.”
I have seen countless times that you don’t have to insult the other side for them to get very angry at you; all you have to do is say you disagree with them and they will pass off the outrage as being justified because you’re a horrible person for disagreeing with them.
You can see that ideology isn’t based in reason in the poor logic that people use to support their positions which is clearly just made up to defend the positions as opposed to the logic caused them to arrive at the positions. A few examples:
*Once I ended up debating a secular humanist on IRC for most of the day and rather than give me a single good reason to be a humanist she kept trying to portray me as having some cynical reason for being a misanthrope (nowadays I don’t hate anyone since it’s against my religion but obviously I do have a negative opinion about humanity) but I was actually a misanthrope because of all of the stupid and nasty people and had said to me and from reading history. I didn’t accuse her of being a humanist just because she was an atheist.
*The PC snobs who call themselves the PC Master Race just assume that anyone who prefers a console is too poor to afford a PC (console peasants they call them) as opposed to being constantly disappointed by PC-only games (my reason for preferring console though nowadays videogames don’t interest me much). By having such an attitude of superiority and being mean to people just for being different to them they actually do a great job of disproving their very claim. By being more nasty and yet having a higher opinion of themselves they’re actually beneath console gamers if anything.
*I’ve seen drug legalisation people say that “Oh, alcohol kills more people than drugs.” Yeah it does. Because it’s legal. So more people will make it and more people will be willing to buy it. So there’ll be more of it around. So it will kill more people. This attitude of x is worse than y so y is OK seems to pop up in politics a lot like wanting to be let off from any guilt because the other side did worse. Reality doesn’t work that way; other people’s wrongs don’t somehow make yours OK. Reminds me of when I saw a meme saying that in x number of states in America gays couldn’t get married to each other but you could have sex with a horse as if that is in any way a good argument for legalising gay marriage.
- The new atheists have this attitude that “There’s x and y weird verse in the Book of Genesis so the entire Bible should be rejected”. This is the kind of focus on the worst parts of the other side as opposed to the typical parts of the other side that groups are always engaged in. By this logic all money is useless because some of it is counterfeit.
Another argument of theirs is “You’re part of the majority religion of your country so you just picked that religion to follow the crowd”. By this logic any atheist who is white, male or western should have his atheism dismissed out of hand since most atheists seem to be white, male and from the western world.
*A lumping goes on among stuff people don’t like it. “I don’t like X. I also don’t like Y therefore X is Y.” Among Protestant fundamentalists it’s “I don’t like the whore of Babylon. I also don’t like the Catholic Church. Therefore the Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon.” With the new atheists it’s ” I’m not religious. I’m also not superstitious. Therefore religion is superstition.” Atheists and Protestants alike have accused Catholicism of superstition even though the Catholic Church considers superstition a sin as seen in articles 2110 and 2111 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
*The capitalists try to defend, of all things, Herbert Hoover’s presidency. The Great Depression happened because he doubled income taxes they say. It’s true that raising income taxes hurts an economy since that money could have been spent on investments or paying off personal debt but the Great Depression happened when a bubble burst and the bubble had been created by the other administrations of the 1920’s; both fiscally right wing Republican. Like the Conservative Party in the UK in the 1990’s if they won’t take blame for a bust they don’t deserve credit for a boom. No economic system whether left or right is flawless and ignoring this fact won’t shield you from the consequences of doing so.
*There’s an idea out there that nothing is true except for the idea that nothing is true in spite of the fact there are things that exist and things that don’t. If nothing is true except the idea that nothing is true then the reasons for believing the preceding statement aren’t true and therefore useless and as a result there are no good reasons whatsoever for believing the statement; believing it would be entirely arbitrary and a type of philosophical fideism.
*When you criticise humanity people respond “But you’re a human.” In other words what they’re saying is that anything is acceptable as long as our group does it solely because it’s our group that does it. How many people get hurt how badly or for how long is irrelevant, whether it produces a positive or negative result is irrelevant, how much betrayal, lies, deceit, nastiness or stupidity involved is irrelevant, whether it goes against one’s own beliefs is irrelevant, whether or not it was done with malicious intent is irrelevant. That’s how tribalism works; victory for our group comes first no matter what the cost. Even a group defying the very values it wants to promote by achieving victory is considered acceptable but not if a rival group does it.
Now Wikipedia for the most part is a handy thing; a lot of knowledge in one place for free and I like it. However it can be biased at times:
- Confirmation bias listed under See Also in the apologetics article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apologetics&oldid=608579291#See_also
- Appeal to fear listed under See Also in the Hell article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell#See_also
- The amount of times that the words right, wrong, real, good or true are put in quotation marks is a clear indication that Wikipedians are mainly postmodern existentialists. You can’t say that there is no objective truth and be religious. You could be religious and say that since different religions teach different things God would forgive you for making an honest mistake.
- Most Wikipedians being from a majority Christian country is listed as one of the factors of systemic bias yet there are a fair bit more atheists than Christians who use Wikipedia. Compare the Atheist Wikipedians category to the Christian Wikipedians category.
- The constant use of BCE/CE as opposed to BC/AD.
- The Shoehorning article. The whole text of it is an anti-religious polemic and as such is a blatant violation of the Neutral Point Of View policy.
- Logical fallacy articles give examples of fallacious things that religious people might say but never anything that people who aren’t religious would say.
- The Mein Kampf Wikiquote article spends more time making him out to be a Christian than an anti-Semite, a warmongerer etc.
- Quotes in Wikiquote that are anti-religious being put in bold; even if they’re by people who were religious (such as the Lord Acton page, one user, Kalki if I remember correctly, in the talk page for said article even flat out declaring that he was biased and after seeing his page he’s clearly anti-religion).
Well what can be done about all this bias and nastiness in humanity? One thing that can’t be done about it is change it. Our bodies and brains evolved for survival and nothing else; survival is the only talent inherent to humanity; lions are brave and foxes are cunning but humans live far longer. Groups are handy for survival. If one member fails to find food another member might. In 1800’s warfare the men would stand close together in large groups; most shots missed and so if your shot missed perhaps the man next to you would score a hit (this worked fine until the second half of the 1800’s when gun technology meant that a lot of men in one place would be far easier to kill due to more accurate guns and heavier firepower).
Nowadays however survival has never been easier; there’s enough food for everyone if they can get access to it and this is at a time when most people now live in urban areas; the places where the most amount of people live where the least food can be grown. If everyone ate as much as Americans and Europeans did there would be a shortage of food but nobody has to eat that much even if every country were as wealthy as the USA and Europe. In those places we in fact eat for pleasure and not just survival. We could cut down on our food intake without going hungry. Whenever it seems like there will be too many people for the Earth to sustain technology comes to the rescue like with the Agricultural and Green Revolutions. Disease is still a menace and will always be but people are living longer even with AIDS (if diagnosed and treated). In short there’s no longer a great need for tribalism in order to survive so let’s refocus it.
In short since we don’t need to fight one another to survive any more but we’re stuck with tribalism let’s refocus it to fight problems as opposed to people. A person lives for decades but a number of problems never go away and can only be ameliorated as best we can such as disease and poverty so any victory over a group of people will be temporary but lasting progress can be made towards reducing problems. Perhaps the Americans would think that if America had only one party then things would be better; no more incessant petty partisan polemical politics. The good news is it’s been tried so we know one way or the other whether it would work or not. The bad news is it didn’t work; after the collapse of the Federalist Party the Democratic Republican Party were the only party and instead of tension between 2 parties there was tension within the Democratic Republicans and just 9 years later it split in 2 (the National Republican and Democratic parties.) If one videogame company were to permanently put all others out of business I’m sure the fans of said company would be delighted but then that company could charge as high a price as it would like since nobody would be around to charge a lower one and they would have no incentive to make good games since nobody would be around to make better games.
We will always have a them and us mentality and a desire for unity. Let us therefore have unity by thinking of us as everybody and them as our problems. This change may not work or even be possible but the status quo isn’t working and can never possibly work these days so let’s give it a try.
European Qoheleth's Thoughts 