The Ones Who Seek Omelas

(Working title: Retards Must Suffer)

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"And he - wore a hat

And he - had a job

And he - brought home the bacon

So that no-one knew"

 

Devo - Mongoloid

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"Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!"

H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness

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"The problem of specifying the criteria for inclusion in our moral community is one for which I do not have a detailed answer -- other than to say that whatever answer we give should reflect our sense of the possible subjectivity of the creatures in question. Some answers are clearly wrong. We cannot merely say, for instance, that all human beings are in, and all animals are out. What will be a criterion for humanness? DNA? Shall a single human cell take precedence over a herd of elephants? The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals -- intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on -- will equally differentiate between human beings  themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren't more articulate people more important still? And what about those poor men and woman(sic) with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them from our moral community. Find an orangutan that can complain about his family in Borneo, and he may well displace a person or two from our lifeboat."

Sam Harris - The End of Faith

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"But dolphins are intelligent!"

"Not this one! He blew all his money on instant lottery tickets."

Futurama S2E18: The Problem With Popplers

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"A phone can talk and respond. A mannequin looks human. Not all humans can talk. You have to take a number of factors and add them up and if they go above 100 percent, the A.I. treats the target as human."

---

"Why do you think [he] is human?"

"He reads. He writes and programs. He's aware of himself and others"

Freefall, comics 2547 & 2588 (MAJOR spoiler alert!)

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"What we are is semi-civilized beasts with baseball caps and automatic weapons.

[...]

Nitwits, assholes, fuck-ups, scumbags, jerk-offs and dipshits... and they all vote.

[...]

If you isolate one of them, you sit them down rationally, and you talk to them about the low IQs and the dumb behavior and the bad decisions, right away they start talking about education. That’s the big answer to everything. Edjacayshun! They say “we need more money for education. We need more books. More teachers. More classrooms. More schools. We need more testing for the kids.” You say to them: “Well, you know, we’ve tried all of that and the kids still can’t pass the tests.” They say, “Don’t you worry about that. We’re going to lower the passing grades.” And that’s what they do in a lot of these schools now. They lower the passing grades so more kids can pass. More kids pass, the school looks good, everybody’s happy, the IQ of the country slips another two or three points and pretty soon all you’ll need to get into college is a fucking pencil."

George Carlin - Life Is Worth Losing (2005)

"The public sucks. Fuck hope."

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I was having trouble picking a starting point here, but luckily both a webcartoonist and a cable TV celebrity have conspired to feed me apt material recently.

 

Tailsteak pissed me off below his current comic Forward's latest page 248, by upholding the rampant idiocy that is multiple intelligences, one of modern psychology's more destructively marketable conceits placing physical aptitudes on the same level as reason, reassuring "that immortal ass, the average man" that brain-dead jocks, grinning bimbos and subliterate crooners should count as equally intelligent to canon-shaping authors, nuclear physicists and medical researchers. If bouncing around a jungle gym is intelligence, then by all means try getting a chimp to explain the reasoning behind that - but wait, even your chimp's newfound personhood will be usurped by the merest housefly's transcendentally convoluted aerobatics!

 

Then there's Bill Maher, whose recent New Rules have decried contemporary gullibility by pointing out misinformation is as much the fault of liars as of an audience stupid enough to swallow such lies, then just a week later despaired at growing criminality... after having demanded of his audience to gracefully welcome back to reality Donald Trump's increasingly disenchanted former voters instead of calling them the gullible, criminal troglodytes they have been... and still are. But embracing gullible criminals will not reduce criminal gullibility, regardless if you're talking about Trumpists or their "defund the police" counterparts.

Both of these faults in perception reflect on a couple of other recent issues here in the States. First up, the unending attacks by Christian groups against abortion rights. If you drive through flyover country, you'll see endless variations on the same billboard: a picture of a chubby, cherubic baby face next to the slogan "heartbeat starts at X weeks/days" most frequently 18 days for bonus dishonesty. Some force is circulating fluid in there, but calling it a human "heart" is nearly as hyperbolic as calling that lump of inert matter in anti-abortionists' skulls a "brain" and doubly funny because in their bid for unthinking sympathy, none of those billboards show you what an 18-day embryo actually looks like. Hell, even newborns don't look like that, as the pictures they use are obviously taken at several months old. I always chuckle at the thought of some hick slag on her first birthing, who's grown up on such propaganda, having a panic attack at the hospital upon being presented with the wrinkled, wobbly, lumpy Carboniferous monstrosity she just extruded. (My own mother keeps reminding me: "you. were. blue!")

What qualifications can a first-trimester proto-ape present as to its personhood? Or even second-trimester? Does it compose music, solve equations, analyze plot diagrams, theorize on the evolutionary divergence of passerines, split bosons, invent fusion dishes, breed rhododendrons, or at the very least farms ten thousand zombies in a video game? What exactly qualifies it as existentially comparable to a female ape which, even situated at the rancid nadir of subhumanity, could at least recite the misadventures of the Kardashians! It has a heart? Does it have heart-beating intelligence? So fucking WHAT! Lots of things have hearts. Shrimp have this weird-ass half-vascular, half-diffusive circulatory system at least as functional as our embryonic version. Are you going to sue every baleen whale on the planet for the mass krillicide committed with every gulp? Are antiabortion activists suddenly on vegans' side now claiming every popcorn shrimp is a murder? Functionally, what could you equate to the developmental level of a pre-human at three weeks? At three months? At six months? At birth? At six months after? Does it have the intelligence of an earthworm? Of a mouse? Of a rat? Of a raccoon? Can it conceive of its own mortality at conception?

Stop legitimizing this inherently dishonest argument by engaging antiabortionists in goalpost-shuffling about the validity of persons based on their circulatory, excretory or other random organs. It's a smokescreen. One single overwhelming motivation drives the anti-abortion movement, and that's the subhuman idiocy of supernatural belief. It's the prescientific caveman notion of immortal souls, which that lump of protoplasm supposedly acquires on conception. Stupidity is their only virtue. Antiabortionists need anything human to count as a person because they themselves are subhuman vermin with the intelligence of walking abortions, who cling to fairy tales as moral justification to attack others. But you wouldn't know it from press coverage.

For decades, the Democratic party line (as represented by its mouthpieces at MSNBC or HBO) has portrayed antiabortionism as the work of stodgy, easily hateable old men deliberately harming women, to drum up votes by grace of our unthinking, reflexive protectiveness toward the unfairer sex, with demagogues like Rachel Maddow screeching about a "war on women" despite the endlessly observed fact that half of those waging the war ARE women. For as long as it has existed, entire generations, activists within the anti-abortion movement itself have consistently hovered around a 50/50 male/female split, with occasional spikes to 60% female, and the pattern plays out the same in the populace at large, with greater oscillations based on other conservative/liberal affiliations. Makes sense once you see how many antiabortionists are married couples with children. Meanwhile, if you really want the answer to abortion demographics in the U.S., you can find endless polls showing 80/20 mirrored splits between educated atheists and agnostics on one side and fundamentalist backbirths on the other, especially evangelical Christians a.k.a. rednecks.

But, again, you wouldn't know that from press coverage.

I tend to oscillate between various news outlets, from Wikipedia's current events to the AP, BBC, CNN and even NPR on days when I'm feeling masochistic. Recently I've been relying more on Reuters, which seems to retain a greater degree of sanity in the face of world events. A week ago, they chose to illustrate news of protests against America's rapid back-slide into conservative primitivism with a picture of what looks to be a transsexual holding up a placard with the slogan "remember in november VOTE" accompanied by a woman having decapitated a man (spoofing Perseus and Medusa?) during last month's pro-abortion protests. This came only days after Reuters itself also ran another article showing a picture of Christian anti-abortion activists, three of which happen to have their faces visible front and center: two women and one man. Nope, sorry, Castrato McHatchetson, aside from your #KillAllMen propaganda being so inherently unconscionable that it would prompt piles of lawsuits if attacking anyone besides the one social group forbidden from self-defense, objectively speaking it would not solve the issue you're protesting! In fact, expanding our scope to the superstition fueling the anti-abortion movement (as well as anti-homosexual and anti-most-things) women cling to reactionary, anti-intellectual, religious primitivism decidedly more than men do. Mrs. Grundy remains solidly female, thanks. So why is Reuters contradicting its own evidence by promoting that murderous, delusional cretin with the "behead men" placard as the embodiment of the fight for personal rights and freedom?

Why does nobody ever protest stupidity?

Another lengthy media circus here in the states at the moment is the House of Representatives' committee investigating Donald Trump's laughably amateurish coup d'etat attempt on January 6th of last year. While some of the testimony is amusing (Trump physically trying to grab the wheel of his car when his security detail refused to chauffeur The President into a heavily armed riot of murderous fanatics) I'm bothered by the constant emphasis on whether or not he or the murderous imbeciles in question knew of the falsity of the claim of stolen votes.

The claim had not been demonstrated. If they chose to act on a flimsy claim with zero evidence backing it, that is entirely on them. Ignorance might be excused but willful ignorance, motivated thinking is your own damn fault! Their internal state of mind is irrelevant because no reasonable person would have considered a handful of tweets from blatantly biased parties as justification for armed insurrection.

So it appears we need to define "person" because we can no longer rely on the antiquated definition of any beast possessing human features to process the information necessary for rational decision-making in modern society. Ever notice the people on Star Trek tended to be smart? The redneck hero with a shotgun doesn't play well in that setting. We know, intuitively, that retards wouldn't live long on their own in a century when half the mundane devices surrounding you can disintegrate you in an instant, when even your pants can teleport you straight into the nearest solar corona in retaliation for passing a wet fart. Modern humans can barely handle automobiles and electric ovens... and you want to give them teleporter-armed spaceships? The general population is still functioning on the mental level of a tribe in the savanna, when decision-making never stretched beyond an endless game of "fuck/marry/kill" and the prevalence of our myriad blind faiths (be it in the supernatural or the moral superiority of females, trickle-down economics or critical race theory) just proves our stagnation. You cannot reason with those incapable of reason, who prefer to make-believe that biological sex is a "social construction" or the world is being run by fairies up in the clouds.

 

If "human" means an ethically and rationally competent being, then we are not the same species, and I can demonstrate it to you by a single example. The growing, decades-long revulsion many of us feel towards Donald Trump is only reinforced, not engendered, by his many, many... many acts of demagogic, economic and executive vandalism. On a basic, monkey-in-the-mirror application of theory of mind, it only takes a few seconds of his endless verbal diarrhea for anyone with more than half a brain (yes, even those of us white and male and heterosexual) to spot the utter lack of a rational filter on his impulsive, instinctive behavior. That ape at the podium clapping its paws in self-adulation is quite simply sub-human, incapable of basic recursive self-awareness. This is why all the attempts to explain his popularity via political trends or economic ones, activist subversion or platform-building, history or memetics, have all come up short. His supporters' stated motivations are irrelevant. It's just a matter of subhumans promoting one of their own on a subhuman kin recognition instinct level, just as they're subconsciously pressed by the unrecognizable divergence of intellect from themselves.

 

Good ideas cannot flourish among bad minds. Unless you improve the public itself, any other improvements will always be poisoned by the public's virulent stupidity.

Opting to run your trolley over a live person instead of three corpses because the corpses possess human DNA does not make you either an open-minded liberal or a down-to-earth conservative. It just makes you a moral coward clinging to arbitrary rules instead of standing on your own judgment. We need to admit that humanity is insufficient. Not human vermin but mentally superior human persons created all the technology and social institutions allowing for the far better lives we live compared to our ancestors. We are thought within bodies, not the bodies themselves, the proverbial tail attempting to wag the dog, and intellectual superiority is existential superiority. As the old schoolyard joke goes, be racist against stupid people. You might justifiably cringe at past misapplications and abuses of eugenics and realistically predict that any open political movement of that sort will rapidly be subverted and co-opted by special interests of one tribal group of another... but what's stopping you from applying your influence as an individual toward improving the breed?

Every political group favors its own, from racial to sexual to religious. Why do we draw a taboo against the only favoritism which might improve our collective situation? Why are you ashamed and even afraid to promote a certain person simply for being a better mind, for writing more poetically, creating more creatively, analyzing more cleverly than the vermin? Charity is meaningless if it doesn't breed something besides more charity cases. Stop giving money to organizations saving bodies and start promoting those saving minds - if you can find any. Put as much effort as possible into extracting worthy individuals from the dung-heap that is society at large. The primitives want unwanted children, they want endless reiterations of the idiot child which will spend its early years getting slapped around in an orphanage only to get adopted out to be ass-raped by religious "family values" until growing up as yet another miserable, uneducated, brain-damaged career criminal ready to believe primitive superstitions about a magic sky-daddy. They deal in quantity. You must counter with quality.

 

Are you afraid of hurting the feelings of those left behind?

Well, tough.

No action without reaction. To value intellect, you must de-value stupidity. No terminology short of death or sex is more prone to the euphemism treadmill. Moron, imbecile, cretin, retard, mongoloid, have you not figured out yet that you can't make sub-humanity sound neutral? Do me a favor and count the years before "cognitively disabled" becomes just another slur. Maybe cog-dog? Cogable? Or just "cog"? A hundred million schoolchildren are pondering the nomenclature as you read this, because even if absolutely nobody will admit it openly, we cannot escape the fundamental truism that intellect, abstract rational thought is the central, insurmountable measure of existence itself and to be less intelligent is to be less.

 

Stupidity is not a disability. Dis-ability means the person lacks an ability, but retards, whether acknowledged as such or not, are deficient in the quality of personhood. You cannot promote the better without acknowledging the worse, and they will inevitably feel bad about their own inferiority. It's not nice, it's not pleasant, it's not seemly... but it's real. You cannot dodge acknowledging this necessity in our communication. Stupid is bad.

But hey, don't worry about it. I've been talking your ear off for the past fifteen minutes for no reason at all. This is all moot anyway, because it's too late.

 

Global warming is inevitable. The United States will descend into theocratic primitivism. Europe will fragment into a myriad Brexit-style tribal mass suicides. Pandemics will continue to rampage from ghetto to favela to tenement to bidonville, heightening social tensions and facilitating further fragmentation. World War 3 has been coming for decades, inherent in every upward sweep of the world population clock. China will over-run the globe, enslaving and genociding as it goes, and then the Chinese world state will itself dissolve in the usual pattern of over-stuffing its parasitic aristocratic and servant castes until it becomes so top-heavy it collapses, like every empire always does... and that will be the end of civilization. There will be no second industrial age, no recovery, no fossil fuels to harvest, no large swathes of stable farmland, no lack of dormant infections waiting to demolish any rising city-states, no conveniently predictable interglacial lull in climate extremes, no way for nerds to prove their worth and lead the vermin with human faces out of their natural state of superstitious sub-humanity.

It's over. Because twenty-three centuries ago, four hundred, two hundred, a hundred, seventy, fifty, twenty years ago, those who walked away from Omelas, from the necessary sacrifice of the worse in deference to the better... chose not to know where they're going, chose willful ignorance. Don't whine about losing your rights. You chose this degeneracy, this dissolution with every passing grade handed to every pinhead. This species deserves its death because even its best chose the worst.

All I want now is enough escapism to tide me over until your lynch mob beats down my door.

Rot, vermin.