The Fish Speaker

Columbus Day

You may be one of those smarmy individuals who thinks himself clever as he’s about to post some comment about Columbus Day and all the horrible things Columbus did that we all very much know about already. We should all be ashamed of celebrating a holiday about someone so terrible.

Stop.

In case you didn’t notice, all of human history is founded upon horrendous violence against each other. The very fact that identifiable ethnic groups exist is predicated on one group conquering another and then breeding within itself for many generations. Every single culture that we have ever known arose by killing off many forgotten ones around it. To make a long story short, we are all guilty of genocide against each other.

We celebrate Columbus Day because the man literally changed the course of human history. Yes, he and those who came after did unspeakable things to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Of course, everyone likes to sweep under the rug the fact that the overwhelming majority of deaths happened due to smallpox and other factors that nobody could have prevented even if they were fully aware of it at the time, and that thus all the suffering and extinction of most native cultures was inevitable afterwards. Yes, the Europeans were systematically guilty of cultural genocide despite all those factors. They knew, on some level, what they were doing to them and didn’t really give a shit. 

Here’s the thing: that’s all pointless. All of you are implying that this was some conscious, individual choice that could have been prevented if we imperialist Europeans hadn’t been such dicks. You’re missing one very important and irrevocable fact: if Columbus hadn’t done this, someone else would have. When you get right down to it, history is utterly authoritarian. Force is really all that matters in the end. Nearly all of humanity’s problems and debates have ultimately been settled by the sword or the gun, not through diplomacy or talk.

If you had been in Columbus’ position—i.e, had you been born, raised, and subject to the culture, constraints, and beliefs of the time—you would have done the exact same thing as he did. Don’t pretend you’re some higher being because you live in the world his progeny helped create. All the things that made Columbus do what he did—of his own free will—run through your veins.

Saying Columbus did terrible things to the Indians is like saying the sky is blue. It’s 100% true; it also tells us nothing we didn’t already know. We celebrate Christmas because Jesus Christ had an indescribable impact on history, but I don’t see many people making half-tricky posts on Facebook about the tremendous negative consequences of the Christian religion and how we should all be ashamed of celebrating it. Beyond that, none of our holidays make much sense anyway: why do we celebrate the fact that our planet has gone around the sun another time?

Get off your little high horse and enjoy your day off, if you are able. Like it or not, Columbus was a really important person. That’s why we have Columbus day. Nobody said he had to be important for a good reason. 

Pussy Riot

Look, the Russians imprisoned Pussy Riot for doing nothing criminal, not like in a real democracy. Of course, if any of you actually thought the Russian Federation (or any of the former Soviet Republics save the Baltics and Poland) has ever been a democracy, you’re a moron. Seriously, it’s really funny how liberals are just as susceptible to cultural ignorance as conservatives.

By the way, the Arab Spring is a lie, the Syrian civil war is a proxy duel between Iran and Turkey/USA, and the Chinese government is still filled with Communists who don’t really give a shit about their people or democracy. Let’s not even talk about the outright flaunting of democratic institutions in Europe happening in Europe in order to save the Union.

Burn your narratives. The Game of Nations has never ceased. It’s a dirty Game, a terrible Game, and a Game that destroys countless lives, but it saves far more. Be thankful you live in the glory of the American Empire and not in other, multipolar times.

The Game must continue.

The Truth

I think this tweet sums up my opinions on the “rape joke” controversy.

Rape isn’t funny. Neither are breakups, illness, fear, death, poverty or anything else comedians do jokes about.

We joke about terrible things all the time. That’s the point of humor: to diminish otherwise horrible events to better enjoy life.

Thank God we do. If we took every last thing in our lives so seriously, the world would be a very, very, very sad place.

Everybody Dies

Debate drinking game time! Now for the rules:

#1. Every time someone brings up a point completely irrelevant to the topic of discussion, take a drink!

#2. Every time someone makes a blatant logical fallacy, make the person sitting next to you take a drink!

…

That’s it. Have fun.

(You thought this was something poignant related to House, MD, right? Ha ha. Tags are fun.)

The Truth

“And He has chosen not to give us any direct proof of His existence — because He wants us to choose to believe in Him, without the duress of evidence.”

No. This does not work. Why does it have to be without evidence? Why doesn’t God reveal Himself and let us decide for ourselves? Do we ever do this with our relationships as human beings? Do we honestly deem it a great notion for a person to wait around for the other to magically know about your feelings for this person and make the first move? Do we ask others to “believe in us without the duress of evidence?” Of course not.

This literally does not make any sense if you actually think about it, nor is it a profound statement or deft apologetic defense. It’s an emotional, rhetorical trick designed to exempt the question of God or His supposed relationship with His creation—which He loves with a love surpassing all knowledge and understanding—from the most basic of questions.

The notion and claims of faith are subject to the scrutiny of evidence. They do not get a free pass because God said so.

For I Cannot See Azekah

Been a while since I wrote something on this blog. My life has been very busy, joyful, and exhausting all at once. Things keep moving along and changing for better and worse. Nevertheless, I somehow managed to grab some small snatches of time to reflect on my “deconversion,” so to speak, from Christianity and religion in general, something that moved me enough to type a post out.

I won’t bore you with some sad story. I was homeschooled in a dedicated Christian family until I was twelve, then enrolled in some college courses in a local university, mostly Spanish and some computer stuff. My family has often flirted with fundamentalist notions, but has always stepped away from them thanks to their experiences with reality and other perspectives, albeit less satisfactorily than I would deem now. In any case, in all those years I struggled with religion, questions of my existence, my salvation, etc., that gave me a lot of grief, guilt, and discouragement. It was a trial to be a Christian, as I was told, yet something was not right.

There was no grand moment in which I left the faith. I left it over a period of years, little by little, inch by inch, drifting away as Lewis once said. The issue I posited before God, the great notion I set before the Great White Throne, was a simple one: “If You won’t save me, please don’t waste my time.”

The Faith taught me to test the signs. The Faith taught me that struggle, doubt, and agony were the core of my existence as one of God’s people, yet it also told me that all that angst could be extinguished by God if I asked. I asked. Many times. In my heart and openly to others. I begged and pleaded for salvation, without an ulterior motive or insipid “not yet” from Augustine. Can you guess if my salvation came? You need not.

Countless times I prayed the prayer, and nothing happened. And that hollow echo, that hope answered with nothing, eviscerated my faith. If God was so wise, so gentle and kind, I should not have such a battle. I should be confident in my salvation and in my place in the universe. Others told me it took them time to reach that serenity. I didn’t understand why it should. God is beyond time. Why should He string us along with a blind a trust until the end of our existence? Why all the waiting? Why all the pain, if God is so good and declared it to be so?

God wasted my time. I was tired of the guilt, and I had no more desire to talk with Him, to watch Him deny me an earnest prayer. As soon as I left the house that propped up my faith, it collapsed. I stopped going to church, and nothing happened. I stopped reading my Bible, and I stayed the same. I didn’t become some listless, helpless mind devoured by a Lion roaming the earth, seeking my soul. I was me. All that left me was the guilt, pain, doubt, and sorrow. I stopped caring. I found I didn’t need God.

I have not needed God. I don’t hate Him. I don’t hate the religion, religions, or faiths that worship Him. I’m one person on a world with vast seas. Others need different things. Perhaps some do need God. I wish them well. I only wish God were better than He is, that the Faith had kept its promises. Still, I step into a cathedral and feel awe, and rejoice in the notions of the Faith that raised me, lifting my eyes towards heaven and something better than myself, an ideal and paragon for my soul. I thought to have those without the chains around my neck, and so I have.

I saw the banners of Babylon around my walls, pounding them with the world and its realities. I looked for smoke from Azekah to tell me there was hope in the cause. But I saw nothing. Lachish was still. Azekah was gone.

Babylon won and took me from Jerusalem. By the waters I knew salvation at last, and I laid down to rest.

The Truth

The chief danger to Europe is not in some evil Muslim/immigrant wave, but in Europe’s society failing those immigrants. Immigrants immigrate because they’re searching for a better future: no country has anything to fear from them if it delivers on that promise, regardless of creed or color.

Despite all the popularity of American declinism, I have “faith” in America more than Europe because of one thing: its society knows how to assimilate newcomers. 

And yes, I’m still alive. Just very busy, but very happy. And alive. 

Hypocrisy Isn’t A Sin

http://www.utne.com/Politics/American-Empire-Pushing-Toward-Iran-Persian-Gulf.aspx

Especially if the reverse situation is simply impossible.

The US has a tendency to overreact to threats, but the US military is far more sage and pragmatic than people realize. Iran has the potential to critically destabilize a significant amount of oil flow in the midst of a very shaky global economic recovery. It’s hardly a good idea to test the effects of disrupting a quarter of the world’s oil.

Sorry, people: morality is (and always has been) rarely relevant to geopolitics. It’s always funny to see people express or even hint at moral outrage over these kinds of situations. It’s sort of like getting mad about a cat fighting a mouse.

The Truth

The people who believe, even half-heartedly, that Stephen Colbert would make a good president are precisely the reason the system never changes.

You all latch on to absurd examples of hope that are either monstrously unviable, patent lies, or grand disappointments in the making. It’s why “Change We Can Believe In” turned to ash, just like I knew it would. Meanwhile, everything goes on as it was, while the supposed warriors for freedom and independent thought keep getting manipulated more easily than the ignorant masses.

Stephen Colbert is a comedian with no political experience; he seems like good materiel precisely because he is not in the position. If he were to somehow ascend to it, he would be simply constrained by the nature of the Office of the Presidency as every other President has done. He would not revolutionize the world or fix all of our problems, even most of them. He would probably be a very average president, like most presidents throughout history.

The problems facing the US are painful and serious, but they are neither existential nor critical. Our country is in an excellent position all things considered. Yes, income inequality needs to be narrowed; yes, our K-12 education system needs to be fixed; yes, our infrastructure is in great need of repair, but we are not collapsing, on the verge of collapse, or approaching the verge to begin with.

The president we should want is someone who is willing to work within the system, to compromise on the issues of his party, to speak honestly about our position in the world as a superpower and how we should deal with that, to play the game of Washington when it is appropriate, and to rebel against it during the rare times it is not.

When you get right down to it, making fun of Washington is pretty damn easy. It doesn’t make you qualified to take Washington on.

PSA

For all you wanna-be elitist jerks on the Internet who think they’re so smart when they criticize people over meaningless typological shit instead of the actual content of their posts, here’s something very simple that you rarely ever get:

When someone uses “your” to mean “you’re,” it is a typological error, not a grammatical one. “You’re” is a contraction of “you are,” and is pronounced exactly the same as “your.” The user means to use “you are,” but the brain confuses the two homonyms for completely understandable reasons. While it is technically grammatically incorrect to use “your” in a sentence in the place of this verb conjugation, the intent of the user is clear, and it does not go against standard grammar, as it does not cause a conflict in person or number. The error occurs in the transference of linguistic output from the brain to paper, not in the basic linguistic output. A true grammatical error would be the use of “you is” or “you’s,” but it’s funny how nobody makes that mistake. 

Unless your post is some scholastic work or other such entity that is bound by the expectations of standard grammar, which serves only as a structure through which to facilitate and improve general communication in certain contexts, you don’t make yourself sound all nice and awesome when you bitch about this shit: you sound like a giant prick.

It’s the Internet. What you read on the Internet is, for the most part, colloquial speech, which has never been (and never should be) bound by such expectations. Record yourself talking and you’ll realize this pretty quickly, or you could grow some balls and fess up to the fact that your superior typing skills don’t make you a better logician or debater, only a more annoying asshole.