rationalskepticism.org

SafeAsMilk wrote:I get the feeling that you've left some important details out this story. You talk about people reacting to your bizarre behavior, yet in your story you aren't acting bizarre at all (making a prediction based on evidence)

But that is very bizarre. Some things I've said and done would certainly seem more prototypically "crazy"—like marching through about a mile of deep, freshly fallen snow and then back (up a steep incline) just so that I could go to Burger King to get a little something to eat and then go home (and really from there it gets much darker and crazier)—but there is nothing remotely normal or typically human about repeatedly insisting on what is supported by evidence against intense demands that I should believe what "the tribe" believes instead, something I was more or less explicitly told to do. What I did is really deeply at odds with what is typically human. When friction started to become really apparent between me and these people I said that, if they shared my preference for a rational world, then there wouldn't be an issue. One of the individuals involved said, we do share that preference, but ultimately they failed to live up to that claim after they reacted to me dealing in facts with nothing but inarticulate, bug-eyed rage. And I will freely admit that there was a degree of trolling involved but that has to be balanced against the fact that my mental health was being used for cheap talking points while I, on the other hand, never resorted to name-calling to get my point across.

I referred earlier to how I think humanism is dumb and here is another major part of that. Humanists and other secular leftists vocally claim to be committed to reason. That is rarely, if ever, genuinely the case. And the shtick about how "every child is a born scientist" really nauseates me because it is also maybe only seldom true. And also the "pale blue dot" stuff, that really bugs me too. Because these people don't actually want to embrace a genuinely cosmic perspective. On the contrary, they positively cling to the idea of having a small, petty existence and outlook, which is more or less exactly what could be expected given the evolutionary history of the human species. These people will claim that they embrace reason, will claim that they want a rational world, will claim that they want global unity, but the only solutions they are willing to entertain are mouthing empty platitudes and treating education as a panacea and the developing human mind as a tabula rasa when neither of those two things is the case at all. Actually achieving the goals these people allege to have means not being satisfied with human nature as it is; it means shedding many human traits and it means doing very Gigeresque things to people's heads. It is rather ironic that nationalistic military research projects will somehow very likely do more to achieve the goals stated above than these people ever will:

Towards a High-Resolution, Implantable Neural Interface (really making good on our national motto: e pluribus unum—out of many, one)

And I suppose that's another thing people think is crazy about how I think. Since early childhood, I have tended to identify with artificially intelligent or cyborg characters to some greater or lesser degree. I've already talked about a fictional society that achieves the secular leftist goals of rationality and unity far, far better than they could with what they propose:



And Jesus Christ—if they're going to mouth off endlessly about how they cherish those ideals, while in fact punishing the real thing, I'm not really concerned with whether they consent to getting what it is they claim to have wanted for decades.