The Wise Sloth

Every year, I hear more American conservatives and liberals call each other Fascists. Each time it makes me lose more faith in humanity, because the more you understand what Fascism is, the less likely you’d be to call someone Fascist.

Recently, a 21 year old told me with righteous confidence that, “Socialism ALWAYS leads to Fascism!” I wasn’t surprised he believed this completely inaccurate statement because conservative pundits have been pushing this narrative for years.

If you don’t know what Socialism or Fascism are, the video above may seem very convincing…. and the video below, which claims Trump is a Fascist, should sound equally convincing.

If that video doesn’t convince you Trump is a Fascist, look at the following two infographics I found on the internet and draw the comparisons yourself:

These lists are pretty scary until you notice they’re made up of truths, half-truths, and falsehoods. Plus, they’re omitting a lot of important facts.

Here are two videos that do a much better job of explaining what Fascism really is:

As good as those videos are, in my opinion, they skim over some critical nuances that you need to understand before you go around calling anyone a Fascist.

There have been dozens of governments, politicians, and political movements who call/called themselves Fascist, but originally, Fascism wasn’t a general term for an authoritarian, ethnocentric type of government. It was the name of Benito Mussolini’s personal political party that he invented to bait-and-switch his way into becoming a dictator.

Strictly speaking, anyone who isn’t a card-carrying member of Benito Mussolini’s party, isn’t technically Fascist. They’re really just Fascist-esque. This may seem like anal retentive nitpicking, but I believe this distinction is important because every country that has copied Mussolini’s methods and policies have cherry-picked them and left just as many out.

It’s equally important to point out that Mussolini didn’t invent all the nefarious methods and policies we associate with Fascism. Dictatorships, theocracies, monarchies, and other forms of government have been using them for centuries.

To fully appreciate the gravity of what I’m getting at, you need to look at the two founding documents of Mussolini’s Fascist party: The Fascist Manifesto and The Doctrine of Fascism.

They’re both surprisingly short. The Fascist Manifesto is a one-page bullet point list that was printed in Mussolini’s personal political newspaper:

Translated to English, it says:

“Italians! Here is the program of a genuinely Italian movement. It is revolutionary because it is anti-dogmatic, strongly innovative and against prejudice.

For the political problem: We demand:

a) Universal suffrage polled on a regional basis, with proportional representation and voting and electoral office eligibility for women.
b) A minimum age for the voting electorate of 18 years; that for the office holders at 25 years.
c) The abolition of the Senate.
d) The convocation of a National Assembly for a three-years duration, for which its primary responsibility will be to form a constitution of the State.
e) The formation of a National Council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made from the collective professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a General Commission with ministerial powers.

For the social problems: We demand:

a) The quick enactment of a law of the State that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers.
b) A minimum wage.
c) The participation of workers’ representatives in the functions of industry commissions.
d) To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants.
e) The rapid and complete systemization of the railways and of all the transport industries.
f) A necessary modification of the insurance laws to invalidate the minimum retirement age; we propose to lower it from 65 to 55 years of age.

For the military problem: We demand:

a) The institution of a national militia with a short period of service for training and exclusively defensive responsibilities.
b) The nationalization of all the arms and explosives factories.
c) A national policy intended to peacefully further the Italian national culture in the world.

For the financial problem: We demand:

a) A strong progressive tax on capital that will truly expropriate a portion of all wealth.
b) The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor.
c) The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.”

This is what the Fascist party ostensibly stood for. So when you accuse someone of being Fascist, technically, you’re accusing them of (among other things), abolishing the Senate, raising taxes on the rich, giving women the right to vote, establishing a minimum wage, lowering the retirement age to 55, making military service mandatory, nationalizing the weapons industry, and spreading Italian culture around the world.

Have you ever heard Donald Trump advocate any of those policies? If not, then, strictly speaking, he’s not a Fascist. He may have some other Fascist-esque tendencies… that aren’t uniquely Fascist… but why call him a Fascist when it would be more accurate to just describe his negative tendencies? I don’t like Trump, but calling him a Fascist would require cherry-picking what it means to be one, and that would be intellectually lazy at best and intellectually dishonest at worse.

As much as you can use The Fascist Manifesto to argue that Trump isn’t really Fascist, you can also use The Doctrine of Fascism to argue liberals, socialists, Marxists, and Communists aren’t either. I’m not going to copy/past the whole document here because it’s 3-4 pages long, but I’ll summarize its 13 main sections.

Before I do that though, it may be worth noting that half of The Doctrine of Fascism is philosophical gibberish that barely means anything, like:

“To know men one must know man; and to know man one must be acquainted with reality and its laws. There can be no conception of the State which is not fundamentally a conception of life: philosophy or intuition, system of ideas evolving within the framework of logic or concentrated in a vision or a faith, but always, at least potentially, an organic conception of the world.“

Whatever. That kind of self-indulgent rambling makes me question how seriously Mussolini and his co-author of The Doctrine of Fascism, Giovanni Gentile, believed their own propaganda. If they were just talking out of their asses to justify a dictatorship, that’s all the more reason we shouldn’t use the term “Fascism” too seriously.

Anyway, below are the 13 sections of the The Doctrine of Fascism. The bold/black headings are Giovani’s and Mussolini’s. They rest are my summaries:

“SPIRITUAL VIEW OF LIFE

Men should live with purpose and strive to be their best for the sake of the greater good. Being idle and happy for your own sake is weakness, but working for the greater good is strength.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TRADITION

A man’s life is meaningless if he doesn’t contribute to the advancement of society.

REJECTION OF INDIVIDUALISM AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STATE

A man’s life is meaningless if he doesn’t contribute to the advancement of the state.

FASCIST STATE AS A SPIRITUAL FORCE

You should devote your mind, body, and soul to serving the state… and the state will enforce this standard by using force.

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DOCTRINE – EVOLUTION FROM SOCIALISM

I (Geovani Gentile) used to be a socialist, but then I realized Socialism sucks because managing a company is hard. Therefore, there should be class division between workers and upper management. Also, Fascism used to be poorly defined, but now it has a set doctrine.

REJECTION OF PACIFISM

Pacifism is bad. War is good.

REJECTION OF MARXISM

Poor, exploited people shouldn’t fight against rich, exploitative people. And nobody should work towards their own interest because ‘well-being does not equal happiness.’ The end-goal of working should be to support the state.

REJECTION OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY AS A SHAM AND A FRAUD

Fascism rejects democracy because the will of the majority isn’t important. Only the health of the state is important.

REJECTION OF EGALITARIANISM

Fascism rejects the idea that everyone deserves equal political representation.

DEFINITION OF FASCISM AS REAL DEMOCRACY

A dictatorship is the only true democracy because it’s the best form of government for the people.

REJECTION OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM – ADMIRATION OF BISMARCK

Fascism rejects the idea that the goal of the state should be to give people power and happiness. The goal of the people should be to give the state power and health.

THE FASCIST TOTALITARIAN VISION OF THE FUTURE

Fascism isn’t going to be a dystopian dictatorship. It’s going to be a great dictatorship. Trust us. You’ve never seen anything like this before.

THE ABSOLUTE PRIMACY OF THE STATE

A man’s life is meaningless if he doesn’t contribute to the advancement of the state. Fascism isn’t going to be a dystopian dictatorship. It’s going to be a great dictatorship. Trust us. You’ve never seen anything like this before.“

This political philosophy is blatantly incompatible with the goals and values of Donald Trump, American conservatives, American liberals, socialists, Marxists, and Communists. Despite their differences, all of these movements believe in the mantra, “Power to the individual.” Fascism fundamentally rejects this philosophy and specifically denounces Socialism, Marxism, and Communism. So anyone who says, “Socialism always leads to Fascism,” has no idea what Socialism or Fascism is.

Trump only cares about making himself and his rich friends richer and more powerful. They don’t want the sole focus of their businesses to be supporting the government. Trump has already lowered taxes on the rich. If he were a true Fascist, he would raise taxes on corporations and insert government officials into the executive boards of his best friends’ companies.

If you look at all the countries that have called themselves Fascist, they never adopted all the tenets of Fascism either. Some of them supported workers’ unions. Others embraced religion. None of them tried to spread Italian culture by the sword. They just used national pride and the promise of strength and stability to intoxicate the masses long enough to establish a self-serving dictatorship… exactly like how every Eastern European dictatorship promised their citizens Socialism and Communism long enough to win the popular support they needed to pull off their bait-and-switch scheme.

Even in Italy, Mussolini was notoriously vague about what Fascism really meant, and like all politicians, he didn’t religiously stick to his campaign promises. For example, he didn’t seize all the Catholic Church’s assets like he promised in his manifesto. He ended up making a neutral alliance with them.

So if you want to call someone Fascist, you’d have to specify whether or not they’re guilty of doing what the Italian Fascist party (or any other self-proclaimed Fascist party) promised or what they actually did. Even if you’re right about one point, I can guarantee, the person you’re accusing of being Fascist doesn’t follow all the tenets of every self-proclaimed Fascist institution, because that would be impossible.

If, after reading this far, you still don’t understand what Fascism is, then congratulations. You’re probably more correct than at least 99% of the people who have ever said the word, “Fascism,” including Benito Mussolini, since he was full of shit.

The most reliable way to use the term “Fascism” is to not use it at all, since, at this point in history, it has become basically meaningless. If a government, politician, or political group is behaving overly authoritarian, then describe them as being “overly authoritarian,” not “Fascist.” If they have the audacity to insist they really are Fascists, then ask them what the ideal retirement age should be. If they say, “55,” then respond, “Well, at least you got that much right.”

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1 Comment | tags: economics, fascism, fascist, Politics, trump | posted in Uncategorized

February 19, 2020

A Brief History Of The Israel VS Palestine Conflict

By wise sloth

In America, the most common explanation for the conflict between Israel and Palestine is that Jews used to own Israel. Therefore, it’s their land by birthright, and Palestinians are terrorists who launch missile attacks on civilian market places. So it’s only fair that Israelis defend themselves.

You don’t need to take too many history classes (or even read more than a few Wikipedia articles) to discover why this explanation is oversimplified to the point of being misleading.

To understand the whole truth, you need to begin by reading the Torah’s history of Israel. According to the Bible, the Israelites escaped from Egypt, wandered in the desert for 40 years. Then, one day, Abraham was wandering around looking for a place to raise his goats, when, according to Genesis 13:14-17, this happened, :

“The Lord said to Abram after Lot had parted from him, “Look around from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west.All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted. Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you.”

Then Abraham kills a few people and sacrifices a goat and two birds to God. Then, in Genesis 15: 18-21, “… the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.”

Over the course of the Bible, the Israelis slaughtered, enslaved, or drove out everyone living in The Promised Land. It’s debatable how many events in the Torah actually happened, but even if Israel’s bloody conquest of the Middle East is a total myth, it still sends a strong message to those who believe it’s the unerring word of God.

Israel grew and prospered until it was conquered by the Babylonian Empire in the 7th century BC. Not only did the Babylonians destroy the Temple in Jerusalem, they also exiled the Jewish people across the Middle East.

200 years later, Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to Israel. So a lot of them came back and built a second temple in Jerusalem.

Israel had a lot of internal conflicts over the next three hundred years until Rome conquered it in the 1st century BC. At first, the Romans let the Jews keep most of their religious institutions and traditions, but Judaism was simply incompatible with Roman authority. The Jewish people revolted the entire time they were under Roman control. Eventually, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, sold a lot of the Jews into slavery, and (possibly) invented Christianity.

Ultimately, the Jews weren’t able to defeat Rome. Many did stay in Israel, but they weren’t allowed to have their own government. Rome finally fell 400 years later, but by that time many large Jewish communities had established themselves across the Middle East, Europe, and Northern Africa.

After the fall of Rome, Isreal became the Christian nation of Byzantia until the 6th century. Then it became a Muslim province of the Arab Empire until the 10th century. Then it bounced back and forth between Catholics and Muslims during the Crusades. Eventually the Mamluks (Syrians) got ahold of it. Napoleon held it for a second. Then the Ottomans (Turks) took it until WW1, when they lost it to Britain.

Britain didn’t really want it though. So they made it a temporary state that would allow the Jews to have some kind of “national home” in Palestine, but they didn’t specify exactly what that meant.

Throughout the rest of this post, I’m going to refer to the non-Jews living in Israel as Palestinians or Arabs. But in a sense, those labels are arbitrary. For most of these people’s history, they were neither Palestinian, Arab, or even Muslim. They were Philistine, Canaanite, Babylonian, Roman, Byzantium, Ottoman, etc., etc., and over the centuries, they followed a slew of other religions, sects, and cults.

The vast majority of them didn’t have any involvement in exiling the Jews. They were just farmers making a living in the land their ancestors were born in.

If we’re going to honor the argument that Jews deserve to own/rule Israel because their ancestors were there first, then the descendents of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites have a stronger claim of birthright. Inevitably, there must be some modern day Palestinians who can trace their blood line back to the original inhabitants of Israel.

It’s also worth acknowledging that the Jews who had been living in the Middle East for generations look more Middle Eastern than those living in Europe. This is obviously due to a certain amount of cross-breeding. So the difference between an ethnic Jew and an ethnic Arab is a matter of degrees, not black and white.

Getting back to the history lesson, in the late-1800’s, during the final years of the Ottoman Empire, a movement called Zionism was gaining popularity among Jews around the world. Its goal was simple and inevitable: Jews should return to Israel and create a new Jewish state just like they’d done after the Babylonian exile.

Even before WWII, Jews were already migrating to Israel in droves. The Holocaust gave them even more motivation to have their own state, and loose British control of the region gave them the freedom to do so.

In an alternate universe, the Jews could have just bought land in Israel and lived there under a secular, democratic government, sharing power with their Muslim neighbors. But, per the commandments of God in the Torah, the goal of Zionism was to create a Jewish Theocracy.

In 1945, Zionists began attacking British personnel in Israel, attempting to drive the foreign ruler out of the Promised Land. Between 1945-1947, Zionists killed 103 British law enforcement officers. Wanting a quick way out of this quagmire, the United Nations passed a new resolution to split Israel into two states and let Britain step off the stage.

The Zionist leadership accepted the proposal, admitting that is was a temporary first step towards total control of Israel. The Palestinians rejected it for that reason, and also because the proposal would give their best farm lands to Israel and force over 200,000 Arabs to move from high income areas to low income areas.

In the weeks following the vote on the proposed partition, Arabs protested across the country and workers went on a three-day strike. Tensions escalated and quickly turned into violence.

Neither side had a full-fledged government at this point, so this wasn’t officially a war yet. It was civilians killing each other with rifles and improvised explosives. By all accounts that I could find, the Arabs fired the first shots, but innocent men, women, and children were killed by both sides on a weekly basis.

Foreign sympathizers sent weapons and troops to both sides of the conflict, escalating the informal skirmishes and pop-shots into regulated military operations.

As the death toll rose, the Zionists held their ground, committed to their cause, and in 1948, Israel officially declared itself an independent nation.

That same year, Palestinians began fleeing the conflict zones en mass. Some left because it’s common sense to get out of a war zone. The Arab leadership also ordered many evacuations, and Zionist troops were destroying entire towns and forcing people to flee their homes.

It’s debatable but likely that the Israeli leadership wanted to remove as many Arabs from Jewish-controlled territory as possible, and the exodus wasn’t just a collateral consequence of war, but a premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing. By 1949, 700,000 Palestinians would become refugees.

At least 10,000 Jews also fled their homes in Palestinian-controlled war zones, and many more living in other Arab nations chose to immigrate to Israel because they were being harassed by local Muslims sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

In 1949, Israel defeated the Egyptian and Yemen forces aiding the Palestinians, ending the war, but this wasn’t the end of the conflict. It was more like a never-ending truce that neither side completely honored.

Since then, Israel has continued whittling away Palestinian territory and absorbing it, destroying homes, and replacing them with Jewish settlements.

Between 1994-1996, Israel constructed a wall around the portion of Palestine bordering the Mediterranean Sea, known as, Gaza. The official reason was to stop weapons from being smuggled into Gaza, but it has effectively turned the area into the world’s second largest open-air prison (North Korea being the largest). In 2008, Israel established a mile-wide no-go zone around the fence and shoots-to-kill anyone attempting to escape.

Life inside Gaza is a living hell comparable to the Jewish ghettos in Nazi Germany. According to Wikipedia, “In January 2018, it was reported that 97% of the territory’s tap water was undrinkable because of sewage pollution or high salinity levels, forcing Gazans to purchase water from local desalination facilities at excessive prices. The Palestinians are unable to pay Israel for the electricity it provides and, as a result, Gazans receive electricity for roughly four hours a day, as of 2017, which impairs the functioning of Gaza’s health services. The Gaza Strip’s unemployment rate reached 44% in 2017 (71% for women, 36% for men). It is reported that 40% of Gazan children suffer from anemia and malnutrition.”

That’s just scratching the surface. There have been countless documentaries and news clips made about life in Gaza that you can find on Youtube.

Israel justifies its harsh actions towards Gaza as necessary and justified to protect Israeli citizens from rocket attacks by Palestinian terrorists. It’s true that Palestinians have been guilty of killing Israeli citizens for decades by lobbing rockets over the border. While I absolutely can not condone these attacks, Israel can’t feign surprise or claim the moral high ground after taking away almost everything the Palestinians have to lose.

It’s also oversimplifying the situation to say Israel is merely attacking Palestinian military units in retaliation for military actions. Israel has a long history of shooting unarmed protesters and continuing to destroy Palestinian homes.

Israel could end the violence by tearing down the prison walls, allowing Palestinians to return to their ancestral homes, and sharing political representation with non-Jews. But that’s never going to happen, because the goal of Zionism has always been complete control of Israel in accordance with God’s commandments in the Torah and its clear precedent of using murder and intimidation to ethnically cleanse The Promised Land.

This conflict can only end one of three ways:

The State of Israel is dissolved and the Jewish people share their land.
The majority of Palestinians are killed
The majority of Palestinians leave

In this context, the best solution is the lesser of three evils, which is for other Arab nations to open their borders to Palestinians and allow them to relocate to their countries. I know this is literally supporting ethnic cleansing, but it’s the only option that doesn’t include mass murder.

This may not even be the best option for Israel. Once it becomes a total Jewish state, then Israel’s enemies will have less reason to withhold their anger towards a government that has been persecuting Muslims for almost 100 years now. If Israel ever loses America’s military protection, those countries may invade anyway… assuming America’s military actions around the Middle East have left any countries stable enough to fight a war against Israel.

I believe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is ethnic cleansing, and I believe the Torah is mythology, but I don’t hate Jews. It’s common in America to label anyone who criticizes Israel as being anti-Semitic, but the two positions are not mutually exclusive. I believe every major religion is mythology, but I don’t hate Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Scientologists, or Hindus. You don’t believe in all of those religions either, and you don’t hate everyone who is different than you. It’s like that.

I wish Jews and Palestinians could agree on a two-state solution, but that’s not possible until one side lowers their weapons. The Palestinians have crimes to answer for, but the side that should stand down first is the one running a concentration camp.

If you believe Palestinians deserve to continue to endure the conditions they’ve been living under, then you could be accused of being prejudice against Palestinians, and isn’t that morally equal to being anti-Semitic?

One thing I’m certain of, is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict won’t end until the rest of the world takes a louder and more objective stance on the issue.

However you felt about this post, you’ll probably feel the same way about these:

1 Comment | tags: history, israel, middle east, palestine, Politics | posted in Politics, religion

February 15, 2020

Why I’m Not Voting For Trump

By wise sloth

I don’t know everything Trump has said and done behind closed doors. So I can’t know his true character, but I do know that “no action is an island.” Everything anyone does is a part of a pattern of thoughts and behavior. If you drive horribly, I can accurately assume you make poor decisions in other important areas of life. If you disrespect waiters, I know you carry a sense of entitlement with you everywhere, and you mistreat other people you deem beneath you. I can even tell a lot about your lifestyle by the tilt of your posture. I’m not a super sleuth. We just all wear our secrets on our sleeves, making us very transparent if you bother to look.

Since I don’t know Trump personally, all I can do is look at his past behavior and draw conclusions, and he has paraded enough clues about himself to paint a clear picture of his character.

He’s definitely a liar.

We know for a fact that Donald Trump has told over 15,000 lies during his presidency. He even has a Wikipedia page dedicated to his habitual lying. Would you trust anyone else in the world after they told 15,000 lies? No. So if you still trust him, that tells me you have an ulterior motive for defending him, and you need to reevaluate why you keep putting faith in a pathological liar.

He’s a sexual predator.

During Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he got busted bragging to a friend that if you’re a rich celebrity, women will let you do whatever you want to them, even grab them by the pussy. In the same clip, he also bragged about trying to get a married woman to have sex with him by buying her furniture. If anyone other candidate in history had said these things, they would have been out of the race by the end of the day, but Fox News and his voters defended these gaffes as innocent “locker room talk.”

Have you ever been in a locker room where people brag about harassing and bribing married women to have sex with them or being so famous they can get away with grabbing women by the pussy? These statements obviously came from the heart. Even if he doesn’t actually grab women by the pussy, he’s admitting abusing his power to get laid.

We know this outburst is a part of a larger pattern of sexual deviancy. He’s been married three times, which isn’t a big deal, but his current wife is a nude model (Not Safe For Work Link), who he cheated on with a porn star, who he paid $150,000 to keep their affair a secret.

Would you really be comfortable leaving Trump alone with any woman in your family? If not, then you must not be aware he’s been accused by four women of walking into the Miss Teen USA dressing room where underage girls were completely naked.

I wasn’t there. So I can’t say for sure if he did, but I do know people are the product of the company they keep. You can tell more about a person by the friends they hang out with than by the clothes they wear. And Donald Trump was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious pedophile sex trafficker.

Trump even once said in public, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

On top of all that, Trump has a long history of acting creepy around his own daughter. He even said on a TV interview, “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

You might dismiss all of this evidence as circumstantial, but it’s enough that I wouldn’t be comfortable leaving him alone with any woman in my family. His sexual history is enough to make me not trust him to do the right thing in general.

He surrounds himself with criminals.

People naturally tend to surround themselves with people who share their values and goals. Sometimes you can’t pick who is in your life, but when you’re as rich as Trump, you have that power.

In addition to saying pedophile rapist, Jeffrey Epstein, was a terrific guy, Trump also said that he and serial murderer, Kim Jong Un “fell in love.” I can appreciate that Trump tried diplomacy in North Korea, but Kim Jong Un is probably the most evil person in the world right now. His country is a dystopian hell. Nobody in their right mind likes Kim Jong Un. The fact that Trump does says something terrible about his priorities.

Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington D.C., but instead, he flooded it with shady characters and staffed high level positions with rich people who weren’t qualified.

On the other side of the coin, dozens of high level officials have quit working for the Trump administration due to concerns of his unacceptable behavior, and the number keeps growing.

Why should I trust Trump when I can’t trust the people he surrounds himself with? And if good people are jumping ship all around him, why should I believe they’re all crazy when Trump is the common denominator?

The people around him have horrible things to say about him.

Ever since Trump became president, people close to him have been leaking reports about how unstable and irrational he is. His staff claims they give him short explanations of world events and include his name in his briefings as frequently as possible because seeing his own name holds his attention.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. So far there have been 8 books written by members of Trump’s staff or journalists who interviewed them, describing him as mentally unstable:

How many bad reports about Trump need to get leaked before it raises suspicion about his character?

He’s not a Christian, and he doesn’t care about the poor.

I’m not a Christian, and I don’t really care if Trump is either, but one of the reasons he appeals to Christian voters is because he says he is. However, his actions consistently say otherwise.

In addition to his sexual history, he’s also a billionaire, and in Matthew 19:23-24, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

In Matthew 19:21, Jesus says, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

Trump made most of his money as a landlord, but he has also built a portfolio of shady business, including a fake university. He did run a charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, but he was forced to pay $2 million in fines and close it for a long list of reasons, which mainly amount to diverting funds earmarked for charities to be used for the Trump family’s personal benefit.

Now, Trump’s latest budget for the country appears to cut funding to the Meals on Wheels program, which delivers food to disabled elderly people.

More than anyone else, his presidency has helped the ultra rich the most. His 2017 budget significantly reduced the taxes for the 1%, after which, he bragged to his rich friends at his exclusive Mar-a-Lago resort, “You all just got a lot richer.”

Trump supporters like to boast that he donates all of his presidential salary to charity, but as a billionaire, that’s pocket change to him. It’s a wise investment in his public image…. an image that is tarnished by the fact that his frequent golf trips have cost the American tax payers over $127 million.

Trump claims to be a “man of the people,” but so far his actions have shown more concern for the ultra rich than the common man. This does not reflect the values of Christ, which makes him a liar and fraud.

He is an opportunistic, disingenuous racist.

During Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he made a lot of vague promises like, “making America great again,” but like most politicians, he didn’t offer many hard details. The one specific promise he made repeatedly was to keep illegal immigrants out of America by building a $21 billion wall.

It always amazes me when Trump supporters act surprised, hurt, and oppressed when people assume they’re racist. You voted for a guy whose primary campaign promise was to keep America white. If that’s what he wants, then he’s racist. If that’s what you want, then how are you not racist?

The obvious rebuttal to this claim is that prejudice towards Mexicans is warranted, but don’t all racists believe their prejudice is warranted? And is it really warranted? Most illegal immigrants come to America legally and overstay their visas. Most of the people hiking across the border are seasonal workers coming to serve as slaves in America’s agricultural industry so Americans can enjoy the cheapest produce in the world.

Given Trump’s lack of ethics and love of money, it should come as no surprise that he, himself hires illegal aliens at his businesses to take advantage of cheap labor. It could come as a little bit of a surprise, since he based his presidency on demonizing undocumented workers, but only if you’ve completely shut your eyes and ears to what kind of a person he is.

I’m fairly confident Trump doesn’t actually hate Mexicans or illegal immigrants. Much like the starving people in North Korea, I’m sure he doesn’t care about them at all. He just knows how easily you can manipulate voters by pointing to an enemy who can’t defend themselves and promise to save your country from them. Somehow, being a disingenuous racist seems even worse than being an actual racist.

He has a clear pattern of corruption.

Long before Trump became president, he avoided serving his country during the Vietnam War by falsely claiming to have bone spurs in his feet. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. His lawyer admitted it.

As a businessman, he brazenly committed fraud and exploited tax loopholes so he could keep more money for himself instead of giving it to the common good.

During his 2016 campaign, he was accused of colluding with Russians to help him win the election and later obstructing justice to prevent law enforcement from proving what he’d done. This whole ordeal resulted in a 400 page report by the director of the F.B.I., Robert Mueller.

Trump supporters will say this was a politically motivated hoax, but those 400 pages aren’t filled with nothing. They show an orgy of collusion and obstruction that resulted in 34 indictments and at least five people closely associated with Trump going to prison for collusion and obstruction.

After the infamous Mueller Report, Trump was impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine until they agreed to provide damning evidence against his political rival, Joe Biden, to sabotage his 2020 presidential campaign.

Multiple associates of Trump have been arrested and testified that the charges against him are true. Former Secretary of State, John Bolton also corroborates their testimony, as does Trump’s own personal lawyer, Rudy Guliani.

The Senate voted not to remove Trump from office, but that doesn’t prove he’s innocent. Before the trial, the Republican leader of the Senate promised not to have an impartial trail, and all but one of his fellow Republicans obeyed him and voted to acquit Trump, and that lone wolf was a billionaire with nothing to lose.

For some reason, almost as if they were coerced or blackmailed, Republican senators refused to allow witnesses or new evidence to be admitted in the trial. Common sense should tell you, if they didn’t have anything to hide, they wouldn’t have hidden it. Blocking evidence should be evidence of guilt, and rigging a trial should be evidence of corruption.

A scientific thinker respects the fact the simplest explanation of a mystery is usually the best. If Trump isn’t guilty of years of corruption, then there’s a massive conspiracy to fabricate evidence against him… yet the evidence has already put multiple people close to Trump behind bars. The simplest explanation of why Trump and his closest associates keeps getting in trouble is because where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

He speaks incoherently.

I’ve honestly considered the possibility there’s a conspiracy against Trump, but he consistently demonstrates a clear and consistent pattern of selfishness and immoral behavior that lends credence to the accusations against him.

His pattern of irrational behavior extends all the way down to the way he talks. If he came to me for a job interview, I wouldn’t hire him based solely on the fact that his words don’t make any sense.

There are hours of footage on Youtube of him raving like a madman. At some point, you have to ask yourself why he speaks so incoherently. Is it because he’s a genius or he’s suffering some kind of mental illness?

A group of 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts wrote an entire book analyzing his behavior and coming to the conclusion he’s an unstable liability to America and peace on Earth.

His rhetoric is toxic and hateful.

The longer Trump has been president, the more I’ve seen regular people on conservative forums refer to Democrats with the derogatory monikers Trump invented, like “Crooked Hillary,” “Shifty Schiff,” Crazy Joe Biden,” Crazy Nancy,” “Crazy Bernie,” etc., etc., etc.

Name-calling isn’t adult, let alone presidential. He insults and defames anyone who opposes him on anything. If you’re right, and someone else is wrong, then some form of pushback is warranted, but Trump is downright childish in his hate-mongering. This isn’t productive, and it’s inspiring his followers to unleash their inner child.

I’m no fan of Obama, but he got shit on by Republicans for eight years, and he didn’t resort to unrestrained, insult-filled tantrums the entire time. At least he did that right.

Trump acts like a school yard bully who can’t accept responsibility for his actions and beats up everyone who doesn’t enable his toxic behavior. It’s nauseating to watch, and it sets a toxic precedent for the rest of America. Trump says he wants to make America great again, but sowing discord between Americans for your own personal gain isn’t what’s best for the country.

His policies are bad for the environment.

I don’t hate the fossil fuel industry. Everything I own has plastic in it, and I drive my car everywhere I go. Without fossil fuels, I would be living in a grass hut, killing squirrels with a spear.

However, I would like to limit pollution. I would also like to keep as many animals alive as possible and preserve our dwindling natural wilderness. Trump cares more about money than the future, and his policies reflect that.

Trump has rolled back protections for endangered species, clean water, and clean air. He also withdrew America’s participation in the Paris Climate Agreement, whose main goal is to reduce carbon dioxide in the air despite the fact that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are at the highest level they’ve ever been in human history.

His concern for the environment is further demonstrated by the fact that his Secretary of Energy was Rick Perry, a corrupt politician who was unqualified for the job and quit to work for an oil pipeline company.

Trump has also spent months insulting a 16 year old girl for having the audacity to suggest we should protect the environment. You can tell a lot about a hero by the villains they choose to fight. Trump chose a 16 year old girl who wants to reduce pollution. That tells me he’s not the hero we need.

The list of good things he hasn’t done is even longer than the bad things he has.

In 2012 I wrote a blog titled “10 Things Obama Won’t Change In His Second Term,” and I predicted that no other president in my lifetime would change them either. They are:

1: Campaign finance reform
2: Holding politicians accountable
3: Using police to crush protests
4: Reforming the U.C.M.J.
5: Ending ethnic cleansing in Israel
6: Ending predatory lending
7: Ending manipulation in the media
8: Setting fair wages and prices
9: Ending the war on drugs
10: Improving equal rights for all

So far, I’ve been correct. There are extremely important issues that Trump hasn’t even addressed. Instead, he’s spent his time golfing, giving tax cuts to the rich, building a wall, demonizing his enemies, and normalizing hate.

I’ve seen Trump supporters defend his record by pointing out that the economy is doing great and the unemployment rate is super low. They quote mathematical metrics published by political think tanks to justify these claims, but I don’t see it on the grimy streets of Houston.

Have you gotten a massive raise at work lately? Has your rent gone down? Do you ever expect it to? Can you afford to take a vacation? Do you have enough time off to take a vacation? Can you afford to see a doctor? Can you afford to save for retirement? Do you see fewer homeless people begging at street corners? What about everyone else you know? Are they stressed? Are they on antidepressants? Are they perpetually smiling? The people in the income brackets I associate with aren’t living the dream no matter how hard they work.

That’s why I don’t want to pay for any more of Trump’s golf trips. I’m just not seeing a good return on investment for the country.

The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.

I haven’t said anything in this post that Trump supporters haven’t heard already. They know he’s not perfect, but they accept him. Every time I talk to Trump supporters in real life about their leader’s flaws, they immediately resort to bashing left wing liberal culture and Democratic politicians.

Every single day, they watch Fox News and listen to right wing radio, where they learn that liberals and Democrats are trying to destroy America, and the only thing holding back the army of Satan are strong, conservative, Republican leaders. Trump supporters love the fact that he stands up to their enemies and gives them shit every day. I believe that’s the main reason they let him get away with murder.

I don’t like social justice warriors or Nancy Pelosi either, but in the case of Donald Trump, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. Trump doesn’t care about rural conservative Christians. Has he ever even been to a farm? He lives in a golden bubble surrounded by rich, coastal elites. His reality is so far removed from the Average American’s, he doesn’t even know how dishwashers work.

I’m not a liberal shill. I’ve tried to analyze Trump’s record objectively, and based on the evidence, I’ve come to the logical conclusion that I wouldn’t trust him to babysit my enemy’s children, let alone make America great again.

If you think I’m crazy, consider that most of the rest of the world agrees with me. When foreigners look at America without red or blue colored glasses, all they have to base their opinions on are the facts. From the outside looking in, they see a deranged idiot, and they’re baffled why any American would be proud to let Trump represent them. I’m not saying we should listen to foreigners because they know more about America than you do. I’m just saying, if everyone in the world thinks you’re crazy, you might want to reevaluate your beliefs.

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4 Comments | tags: 2020 election, American Politics, Donald Trump | posted in American Politics, Donald Trump

February 9, 2020

Advice For Bloggers

By wise sloth

Write about what you’re passionate about because you’re passionate about it.

My friends and I have gone through dozens of get-rich-quick schemes over the years, and we’ve given up on all of them… not because we lacked conviction but because we were just going through the motions for money. We wanted to escape the grind of working at jobs we weren’t passionate about by devoting ourselves to jobs we weren’t passionate about. In retrospect, burning out was inevitable.

I’ve been writing The Wise Sloth for about 10 years now, and I’ve made maybe $500 in donations from all my work. If I could go back in time, I would have spent less time chasing money and more time writing unprofitable posts on this site because this blog has given my life more meaning than all of my shallow money-grabs put together.

My next point will explain why this site has been so unprofitable, but before we get to that, you need to understand that motivation without passion is just bullshitting yourself. In order to make money blogging, you need to stay the course, and you won’t do that unless you’re passionate about what you’re doing.

If you want to earn money from advertisements, then only write “family friendly” content.

The easiest way to make money blogging is to put ads on your site, but every ad agency has a clause in their contract that says they’ll only put ads on “family friendly” content. This is a purposefully vague statement that is open to broad and unapologetic interpretation.

If you want ads, your content needs to be “family friendly.” So avoid talking about sex or any controversial topics. Of course, you don’t have to censor yourself. You can talk about whatever you want. Just don’t expect car insurance companies to put ads on your blogs about “How to go down on a girl” or “15 clues Christianity is Roman mythology.”

Don’t worry about being perfect, and don’t worry about failing.

The first 100 posts I wrote were terrible. I thought they were genius at the time, but a few years later I realized they were awful. They were so bad, I ended up deleting 90% of them and completely rewriting the best ones. Even though I wrote crap, I don’t regret it, because if I never sucked, I never would have gotten better.

Write the way people talk.

I started blogging straight out of college where I was required to write academically. Since that’s the style I was used to, I used very formal language and as many big words as I could find on thesaurus.com. Plus, in my mind, I thought if I sounded like Bertrand Russell, then society would assume I was equally smart.

In reality, my actual audience was normal people who don’t communicate using over-worded academic language. Nobody is impressed with your vocabulary. They just want to digest ideas in a way they can understand.

After I stopped talking like I was trying to impress philosophy professors and just spoke the way I talk to people in normal life, more people started listening.

Don’t expect to make quick, easy money.

Whether you’re farming ad clicks or selling a product on your blog, you have to be popular to make money. It takes a lot of time, effort, and intelligence to make thousands of people like you. It would be quicker and easier to make money by day trading cryptocurrency than blogging. I don’t even know how to elaborate on this point. It’s just insane to assume you can become popular overnight. Realistically, it’s going to take at least two years to create enough content and build a large enough following to profit from. If you don’t make a full time job out of blogging, it will probably take longer.

It hardly matters what blog platform you start with.

I host my blog on wordpress.com for three reasons. It’s what I started with. It never goes down, and search engines respect it. You can start a blog there for free, but your site name will have the phrase “wordpress.com” at the end of it. For about $100 per year, you can customize your address into thewisesloth.com instead of thewisesloth.wordpress.com, and every other free blog host works this way.

My biggest complaint about wordpress.com is that it doesn’t have many good free themes, and I don’t personally like any of their paid themes either. Wix and Weebly have better themes and are easier to customize, and they both offer the ability to pay to customize your domain name. Once you buy a domain name, it really doesn’t matter who is hosting your site because your viewers will never know the difference.

If you start with one site and don’t like it, you can just export your content from one site and import it to another pretty easily. You can even transfer your domain name, and your viewers won’t notice the entire back end of your site changed. So don’t stress about what host to start with. Just pick whatever feels easiest, establish your content, and worry about the technical stuff after you have something worth worrying about.

Research SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but don’t stress about it too much.

Search engines send viewers to your site for free. They’re like free publicists. They work by analyzing your content and ranking your site based on what their algorithms find, and they’re not trying to be sneaky about how they ranks sites. All of their criteria is published on the internet. They want you to design your site based on how their algorithms work so you can help them help you.

Soooo many people have already written about SEO that it would be pointless for me to explain it again. Do a Goggle search, read a few blogs, and watch a few Youtube videos. You can master it in less than a week, and if you’re serious about driving traffic to your site, you should do that.

Driving traffic to your site is more important than SEO.

This post could break all the rules of SEO, but if a million people per day were Googling “the wise sloth blogging advice,” or if The New York Times wrote an article about how great this post is and linked to it, sending millions of viewers here, then Google would bump this post to the top of its search results because it obviously has more value than the algorithms predicted.

You could spend 100 hours optimizing your SEO or you could spend that time telling people about your site. When they visit your site, you’ll be getting the viewers you want and simultaneously increasing your SEO value. Don’t ignore SEO, but if you’re going to stress over getting more viewers, your time would be better spent stressing about how to market yourself to real people and not algorithms.

Create as many paths to your site as possible but prioritize “celebrity paths.”

About half of my traffic comes from Google searches, and most of the other half comes from links I posted on Reddit years ago. The more bread crumb trails you leave around the internet pointing to your house, the more likely people are to find them. That’s just common sense.

Having said that, my old Reddit account was shadow banned for spamming links to my site. So there are risks to spamming your content yourself, but the easy loophole around this is to get other people to post links to your site.

10 years ago you could trick Google into thinking you were popular by posting a million links to your site anywhere you could copy/paste, but Google doesn’t fall for that trick anymore. Now, search engines are only impressed if a popular site, like The New York Times or Wikipedia, links to you. So your time would be better spent asking the people who run popular sites to link to yours than by spamming links randomly in places that are easy to access.

Don’t let haters discourage you.

I’ve gotten more hateful comments and E-mails than I can count. There’s always an idiot on the internet looking for someone to shit on. That’s just one of the occupational hazards of blogging. If you can’t take getting kicked in the nuts, then keep your mouth shut.

How do I put up with it? Not by being strong. I just don’t give a shit.

The only way to lose is to quit.

If you do anything long enough, eventually you’re going to get bored and discouraged, especially if you’re not seeing the return on investment you’re looking for. As long as you’re putting one foot in front of the other, you’re still moving forward. The journey only ends when you stop.

You never know what tomorrow will bring. When I first started blogging, I couldn’t have imagined I’d write all the posts that I did. When I wrote my first “This Was Your Life” comic, it was just a one-off silly way to describe one thing I was thinking about. I had no idea it would become a series with over 30 episodes. Now I’m thinking about turning it into a screenplay.

I haven’t made any money off of my comics, but I don’t see that as proof of failure. I love what I do, and I’m creating a legacy that will live on after I die. Regardless of what your motivation for blogging is, the only way you will ever truly know it didn’t work is when you stop writing.

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2 Comments | tags: blog, Blogging, writing | posted in Writing, Writing Tips

January 25, 2020

My Theories On How To Fix Healthcare In America

By wise sloth

It’s common knowledge that healthcare in America is unaffordable, and politicians are always talking about ways to fix that. Unfortunately, their plans are always confusing and often misleading. The problems isn’t that complicated though, and there are some relatively simple solutions that deserve to be discussed.

The root of the problem (that politicians almost never mention) is that hospitals price gouge their customers. This is the only reason health insurance is necessary. If prices weren’t inflated beyond affordability, there would be no reason to pay insurance companies to protect you from them.

The reason politicians never promise to simply make price gouging illegal is because hospitals would immediately point out that they have to pay ludicrous prices for medical equipment, and doctors have to pay unreasonable prices for medical school. This raises the point that medical equipment and medical schools are also price gouging their customers.

If we passed a law that prevented those businesses from price gouging, they would point out that the businesses they depend on are price gouging them. If we follow the rabbit hole all the way down, we’ll have to admit that the entire economy revolves around businesses gouging their customers.

You could take this as evidence that humans are inherently greedy and evil, or you could take it as evidence that the standard business model is inherently flawed.

The purpose of owning a business is to make a profit, and the formula for profit is “revenue minus costs.” So to make the most amount of money, you have to provide your customer with the cheapest goods and services possible while charging them as much as possible. And we justify gouging customers for cheap goods and services by saying that the value of goods and services is equal to whatever a person is willing to pay for them.

This is easily true when determining the price of bananas or a piece of modern art, but it becomes a recipe for exploitation when determining the price of cancer treatment.

If you need a good or service in order to survive, then of course you’re going to pay whatever you have to. But if you have to pay $3,000 for insulin that costs $50 to produce, and you don’t have $3,000, you’re going to die because your ability to pay didn’t meet your provider’s ability to exploit your need. The value of insulin wasn’t really $3,000. That was just the value your provider could get away with exploiting you.

Fixing this problem would require putting profit caps on businesses or income limits on business owners, but that’s never going to happen in my lifetime because predatory businesses have the money to legally bride politicians with campaign donations and lobbying to prevent comprehensive anti-price gouging laws from getting passed.

Ultimately, profit/income caps are the truest solution to the root of the problem of unaffordable healthcare. Short of that, there are other second-tier solutions.

Adding more regulations to private insurance is not one of those solutions. Insurance companies are required by the law of supply and demand to provide the least amount of benefit to their customers while simultaneously charging the highest prices people are willing to pay to survive. So they will always try as hard as possible to do what’s in their best interest, which is inherently in the worst interest of their customers.

If health insurance must exist, the best course of action is to nationalize the insurance industry completely. In other words, the government is the only insurance company, and they only have one plan that everyone can afford. They don’t need to make a profit, and whatever profit they do make can go directly into the government coffers to be spent on public services. You could even just roll the cost into basic taxes so you don’t even have to apply for it or have an insurance card.

In America, this is basically “Medicare for all.” Granted, I don’t trust the American government to implement this system as simply and efficiently as it could be. Having said that, you should be asking, “If you don’t trust the government to do this right, then why trust the government to do it at all?” My reply would be that I trust private predatory insurance companies (whose profit margin depends on providing life-threateningly poor service) even less.

In a perfect world, we would just nationalize the entire medical industry and take away the need for health-related businesses to make extravagant profits. But we live in a bureaucratic world where egos, careers, and paperwork are more important.

Most Americans don’t know this, but New Zealand found a decent compromise. They don’t have “socialized healthcare” per se. They have “subsidized healthcare.” This means doesn’t totally control the healthcare industry. You pay a little extra in taxes, and the government uses that to cover the costs of the inevitable markups doctors and hospitals are going to charge. In practice, this means seeing a doctor always costs $30-$50, and your prescriptions always cost $5-$15. Healthcare providers always make a profit, but they never eat you alive.

In New Zealand, you can still buy private insurance and see more expensive providers, but due to how the whole subsidized medicare system works, millionaires in New Zealand aren’t going to get as good of healthcare as millionaires in America, and New Zealand medical centers don’t make as many medical research breakthroughs as America’s over-funded hospitals because even though most of America’s healthcare funds get funneled into hospital owners’/investors yachts, a lot of that money still manages to find its way to research.

So if we have to make the most of a broken system that favors the rich, then perhaps the best course of action is to admit and embrace the fact that we have a classist system.

People who make less than $70k per year need reliable access to basic healthcare. So give them (which includes me) nationalized, socialized, or subsidized access to relatively shitty healthcare with (possibly) long wait times that guarantees we get can at least get something we can afford, and then make overpriced first-class hospitals mandatory for rich people where they don’t have to be inconvenienced with the presence of the poor. That would be a better and more honest system than America has now.

This isn’t the solution I want, but it’s one I’m willing to accept if we have to balance the needs of the many (surviving) with the needs of the few (profit). But I’d rather use this compromise to point out the absurdity of having to balance the needs of the many with the needs of the few.

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1 Comment | posted in economics, health

January 17, 2020

My Agnostic Theories On Death

By wise sloth

Humans have a psychological need to explain things we don’t understand. There has never been a society where Agnosticism was the mainstream “religion.” In ancient times, people invented mythological stories to explain weather, stars, plants, the origins of life and what happens after we die. Their brains simply couldn’t accept the honest truth, “We don’t yet understand why these things happen.”

Science has explained what rain, lightening, and stars really are, but we’re still struggling with the concept of death. So most people pick a religious book and accept its answers as flat fact. They defend the hastiness of their decision by saying, “If it brings me peace and doesn’t hurt anyone, then what’s the harm?”

There are three problems with this justification. First, most religious texts are littered with passages that can cause harm. If you accept the book as a whole, you risk letting the bad in with the good unless you cherry pick what you want to believe, but then you’ll spend half your life doing mental gymnastics to reconcile you’re contradictory beliefs.

Shall we start with the Bible? -Exodus 21:7-11, Deuteronomy 22:28-29, Deuteronomy 22:23-24, Exodus 21:20-21- I could go on.

The second problem is that your actions in this life are guided by your purpose. So what you believe about death will sway the course of your entire life. Believing you’ll go to heaven for following a specific set of rules invented by Bronze Age tribesmen will have you chasing your tail while ignoring more important issues. Believing you’ll be reborn in a new body can lull you into a false sense of security and cause you to ignore time-sensitive tasks. Believing sin is caused by space ghosts that can only be exorcised by paying a cult member to hear your confessions can cost you a lot of time, money, and freedom.

The final and most important problem is that truth matters. Living out a fantasy feels good, but the opportunity to experience reality is meaningless if we choose not to live in reality. The only sane way to explain death is to admit you don’t, can’t, and won’t ever understand it.

Ironically, your brain is still hardwired to make sense of the unknown, and you still need some kind of working theory on death to give context to your actions and guide them towards a purpose. So you need some kind of idea/s in your head that you can follow as if they were true while simultaneously doubting them enough to reject and improve them for the rest of your life.

Based on the scientific evidence we have, the simplest and most honest explanation of death is that when you die, your consciousness ceases, and that’s it. There is no soul, afterlife, reincarnation, second chances, fairness, justice, mercy, punishment, or any other kind of consequence or closure.

This isn’t as grim as it may appear on the surface. The brevity of life gives it value and should motivate you to make the most of the present moment for its own sake. It also implies a moral code that is best summed up by Sam Harris, “Consider it; every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”

"Consider it; Every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?" - Sam Harris

You can use this nihilistic atheistic framework as the basis for a meaningful life while still reserving the disclaimer that you could be wrong, or as Lee Child put it, “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

"Hope for the best, plan for the worst." - Lee Child

We can’t prove there’s an afterlife, but we also can’t prove what started the big bang or defined the rules of nature. The universe is an infinitely large, expanding machine that has rearranged itself over the course of billions of years to create planets that excrete sentient beings capable of experiencing reality. It wouldn’t be wrong to say the universe is a sentient machine that creates reality.

The power and genius required to invent our universe is incomprehensible, and the same force that created quantum physics also created life and death. If it went through all this trouble to design us to die, there must be a reason that is as logical as the freezing point of water. I don’t know what that reason is, but I know we’re in good hands; we’re in the best position to hope for the best. If the universe is on our side, almost anything is possible.

Maybe there was only a one-in-infinity chance of your consciousness existing, but on a long enough time scale, “one-in-infinity” is tantamount to “inevitable.” And if your consciousness existed once despite all odds, that sets a precedent it could happen again. It’s entirely up to the will of the universe, which again, already seems to be on your side.

It’s theoretically possible you’ll be reincarnated into whatever you choose, deserve, or need. Half-believing that should motivate you to become the best version of yourself. So would half-believing you’ll simply re-live some version of your current life over and over for the rest of infinity.

But here’s my favorite half-believed working theory about life and death. You are the universe incarnate. Your consciousness is the universe’s consciousness, and the universe never dies. Even when all the stars burn out, the force behind it still exists.

This means you’re basically a character in one of “God’s” dreams, and dying is like “God” waking up from a dream. Maybe you’ll cease to exist as an independent consciousness, but you’ll live on as a memory with as little regret for your loss as you would after waking up in the morning, ending the lifespan of a projection of yourself that existed in last night’s dream.

Then again, maybe once your consciousness has existed, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. Though, it could be possible that in order to hold onto your consciousness, you have to achieve a level of awareness and completeness to hold yourself together. If you don’t, then your death reverts to “God” waking up from a dream.

In either scenario, when you treat other people kindly or cruelly, you are the universe doing that to itself, and that’s reward and punishment enough in and of itself. Torturing you for eternity would just be God sticking its own hand in a fire.

I’m not saying you should believe this, or that I even believe it. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t rule out the possibility we were created for a purpose. I do know we were born with an incredible set of mental tools that can be used to define and improve your consciousness, and there would be no point in giving us those tools and the opportunity to use them if we weren’t meant to.

If death is the end, that’s all the more reason to become the best version of yourself while you can, so you can experience your fleeting life to the fullest.

Although the universe may have put you in the best position to hope for an afterlife, that’s no reason to be complacent. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by using the tools at your disposal to put yourself in the best position to hope for an afterlife by becoming yourself to the fullest extent possible and making the most out of the opportunity you were given. How to do that is another question altogether that you were probably meant to spend rest of your life trying to figure out.

P.S. Never forget to question your answers.

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1 Comment | tags: agnostic, Atheism, death, philosophy | posted in meaning of life, philosophy

January 16, 2020

What Happened To The Wise Sloth?

By wise sloth

Thewisesloth.com has been down since July 2018, and I’d like to explain why that happened, what I’ve been up to, and what my plans are for the future.

In the spring of 2018 my blog was getting 3,000 views per day, and I started getting offers from ad agencies asking if they could put advertisements on my site. I ignored them for a while because I didn’t want to sell my soul, but I was living in Houston working part time as a massage therapist, which gave me enough free time to write, but I was breaking my body and only making enough money to cover living expenses.

So I decided to sell my soul and put ads on my site. However, WordPress only allows you to use their ad service, which you have to apply for. I applied and never heard back from them. After the next ad agency contacted me, I accepted their offer and moved my site to BlueHost.com, which would allow me to put the necessary coding into my blog. This required me to spend a month frantically copying, pasting, editing my blogs, and optimizing my SEO on the new platform. Then, after all that work, the agency told me their advertisers didn’t want to be associated with a site that gives sex advice and talks about controversial topics. So they withdrew their offer.

A month later the SSL security certificates on my site expired, and I found out that (unless I paid more money) I would have to manually renew them every month otherwise my viewers would get a security warning that my site wasn’t safe. That turned out to be all too true, because two months later my site got infected with malware. To make matters worse, Bluehost only allows you to use their malware removal service, which costs $50 per month on top of what I was already paying them for a site that doesn’t make any money.

At the same time all this was going on, I was preparing to quit my job and move to Oregon to escape the big city life and get back to nature. I was planning on vlogging the adventure and waxing philosophically about following your dreams and yadayada, but I couldn’t afford to keep my site active, and I was overwhelmed with anxiety from the trip anyway. So I left the site down and focused on my real life.

I wish I could/would have shared my adventure, because it was pretty wacky. I drove aimlessly around Oregon for 2 months living out of my SUV and staying at free camp sites in the mountains that were choked with smoke from forest fires.

After traveling all over Oregon, I finally decided I liked Southwest Oregon best. I found a cafe with free wifi and used https://wwoof.net/ to find an internship at a farm that “paid” room and board in exchange for part time work. I stayed in a 100 year old farm house that used to be a gift shop and spent the next month and a half picking vegetables, taking care of animals, chopping down blackberry bushes, making animal skin parchment paper, and watching Youtube videos about homesteading.

After feeling out Southwest Oregon, I decided I really wasn’t impressed with it. Don’t get me wrong. The mountains were beautiful, but the civilization was frankly trashy. I decided if I was going to have to live in a ghetto behind a strip mall, I could do that for a fraction of the price back in Houston. So I drove back to Texas and resumed my suburban life exactly where I left off. My old job even gave me a $1 raise to come back.

I could have reactivated The Wise Sloth at that time, but I still needed money in general. So I used my time to focus on building a tool that helps writers plot stories. Over the next six months I put hundreds of hours into the project, and it’s still hundreds of hours away from being finished.

In the summer of 2019, I was already fed up with Houston traffic again. So I decided to give the Pacific Northwest another shot and see what Washington had to offer. I left my job again, packed up my SUV, and headed North. This time I immediately found a farming internship North of Seattle at Baker’s Acres Family Farm. I lived out of their old RV and spent the next month and a half weeding, composting, pruning tomato plants, planting/picking vegetables, and dead-heading Fuchsias.

On the weekends I drove aimlessly around Washington searching for Utopia… or at least the closest thing in my price range. I finally found a place that came near enough to what I was looking for, but the cost of rent outpaced the wages I could make as a massage therapist.

During my trip I randomly reconnected with an old friend who inspects offshore oil pipelines using remote controlled submarines. He works part time and makes three times more money than a massage therapist without breaking his body. After talking to him about his career field, it didn’t take long to change my plans.

I packed up my SUV, bid farewell to Baker’s Acres Farm and drove literally all the way across America to the International Diving Institute in South Carolina. There, I got an apartment so deep in the ghetto that Pizza Hut wouldn’t deliver, and I spent the next month learning about remote controlled submarines.

Now I’m back in Houston looking for offshore work. As long as I only have to spend 6 months out of each year in Houston, I can cope with that. In the meantime, I’ll be saving every penny I can for my retirement homestead in the mountains where I can one day open a writer’s retreat for aspiring authors.

Now that I’m at a place in my life where I can take a breath and deal with my website, I decided to move it back to WordPress and just accept that I won’t be able to monetize it or give it a really flashy theme layout. So be it. I’m just going to let the website be basic and share wisdom for the sake of it like I originally intended 10 years ago.

I’m still planning on spending most of my upcoming free time focusing on building my plot structure tool, but I’ll still write blogs when I need to get something off my chest. I won’t be stressing over getting a post out every week though. I wish I could just devote my life to cataloging wisdom, but without a trust fund, that’s just not financially possible.

So that’s where I’m at. I’m still open to taking request for blog topics, but I’ll be spending half a year out on the ocean for the foreseeable future. So it may take a month for me to respond to E-mails.

If you liked this post, you may like these too:

My Goals

My Life Stories (in chronological order)

8 Comments | tags: the wise sloth | posted in My life stories

April 3, 2018

Tweets By The Wise Sloth: January-March 2018

By wise sloth

The last time you watched the news on television was the last time you saw fake news.
You can measure how much of a victim of fake news you are by how much you support any Republican or Democrat politician in America.
If you’re just now getting pissed about all your online activity being stolen, stored, and sold, you’re going to be fuming when you finally learn about all the other bad things that have been going on in the world for the past 15 years.
The less you ask yourself, “What am I doing to fill my partner’s needs?” the less successful your relationship will be.
The more emotionally you identify with a specific group, the more likely you’re being manipulated.
Everybody who is celebrating Easter is enjoying pretending to believe in mythology for a day before coming back to reality on Monday.
To the extent you don’t want your child believing in mythology, you should want your child to skeptically question every religion, especially the ones they were raised around most.
If you wouldn’t buy your children cigarettes or alcohol, don’t buy them fast food or sodas.
Civilization didn’t arise from blowing stuff up but by building things. Every dollar spent blowing stuff up is money not invested in building new things.
Leopard print underwear is a cultural motif signifying: DTF.
A writer who can’t answer these two questions, “What is the shortest possible complete story you can tell, and why?” should study story structure more before attempting to write a story.
If you’ve never written a book on “how to life,” you can be sure you’re not doing your best, and thus, not getting the highest returns from your actions.
Everyone should be constantly compiling their own “how to” book on life.
Attempting to write fiction is a paradox. If you can’t write a book about how to write a story, then you must not know how to write a story. So if you try, you will fail. But how can you write an authoritative book on how to write stories if you’ve never written a story?
“We’re both the creators and products of the situations we surround ourselves with.” – Some Psychologist
If you bet your soul on a book you didn’t read cover to cover at least 100 times first, you threw your soul away on a coin toss.
Leviticus 21 says, “Priests must not marry women defiled by prostitution or divorced from their husbands, because priests are holy to their God,” which makes it seem like divorcees are equal to prostitutes in God’s eyes. I wonder why Christians don’t want to make divorce illegal.
At some point in time, some guy had to give his penis the worst name in history. Maybe after we die and become one with the universe or whatever, we’ll know the truth. Was it, “Princess Mononoke?” If not, how much worse was it?
American news corporations are killing America by creating the illusion of a non-existent civil war between a straw man left and a straw man right in order to increase ratings so they can charge companies more to run commercials that convince poor people to buy shit they don’t need.
The most important thing happening in the world today is poverty, not some scripted, rigged, meaningless award ceremony for millionaire actors/actresses who distract us from the most important things happening in the world every day. #OscarSunday #oscars
If it’s illogical to say things like, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” then it’s illogical to say things like, “Cellphones are turning us into techno-addicts who are disconnected from meaningful relationships.”
Nothing says, “We’re both basic,” like giving someone you love a gift card to Target.
Employees and customers are caught in the crossfire between business owners.
I wonder if we’ll ever get to know how many social media accounts are really Google A.I. bots learning how to act human. I also wonder if we’ll ever train one of them to be enough like us to troll a human into committing suicide. #google #deepthoughts #AI #FreeMovieIdea
If there’s any correlation between stress and gun violence, we’re probably setting up a disaster by arming teachers whose livelihoods are tied to their spoiled students’ test scores and who get bullied by students, parents, administrators, and politicians on a regular basis.
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. America has a gun problem because it has an ignorance and stress problem. Arming more ignorant, stressed-out people is just doing more of the same, which will yield the same result.
American teachers can’t break up fights or defend themselves from students beating them up without getting fired and sued. They’re not even allowed to discipline students. Giving them guns would amount to giving them a noose to hang themselves with.
If you haven’t recently worked for poverty wages, you’re not qualified to write about the health of the economy.
The road to stupidity is paved with asking the wrong questions.
Tools designed solely to kill massive amounts of people don’t kill massive amounts of people. PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE… with tools designed solely to kill massive amounts of people. Duh.
If you haven’t pushed a lawn mower for at least 1,000 hours of your life, you haven’t experienced male privilege.
When I see people on the internet complaining about white male privilege, it reminds me of when I used to pick up trash on the side of the road, cut down trees, and pressure wash bridges for 9 hours per day for $50 per day until I sold my soul to the military to escape poverty.
The countries with the most mass killings by civilians tend to be the most economically stressful ones to live in.
Rich neighborhoods have high walls and gates around them to keep the residents’ oppressively underpaid workers and overcharged customers out.
Before you whine about life being cruel and unfair, watch “Shark Week.” That’s a metaphor for every other creature’s life, ever. Life ain’t designed to be all roses and rainbows. Life is enjoying as many sunsets as much as possible between maulings.
Misogynists and misandrists obsess over how evil the opposite sex is. They wouldn’t be so uptight if they realized we’re all basically monkeys driven by lizard brains. Public shaming and sensitivity training isn’t going to put a dent in that.
It’s easier for rich people to change the world than for poor people to change their lives.
Every breakthrough leads to another setback or obstacle, which, if you can overcome them, lead to another breakthrough and another cycle of the process of getting shit done.
If I had enough money to launch an electric car into space… I would spend the money building sustainable eco housing for the poorest of the poor.
My boss pays all his workers the bare minimum, and he set a pay cap preventing anyone from ever making more than $2 an hour above their starting wage. He says he can’t afford to pay us more, but he just bought a helicopter. My boss is the epitome of American style capitalism.
If you can afford to climb the highest mountain in the world, you can afford to help the poorest of the poor, which is an obviously more impressive feat.
If you’re going to devote your life to hating, blaming, shaming, and arguing with extreme members of any culture, subculture, or other group, confront the worst members of the group you primarily identify with. They’re the biggest threat to the success of your ideology.
The premise of radical feminism is: Some women are angry that some men hurt, degrade, and oppress some women some of the time. Radical feminism’s solution to the problem is: All men should be hurt, degraded, and oppressed all the time.
No matter how many subjects you’re smarter than anyone else in, there’s still an astronomical number of subjects the average person knows more about than you.
Remember children, nothing is impossible… except becoming a billionaire without exploiting the poor.
There must be something more stable than supply and demand to base prices and wages on. It sucks living in a system that incentives people with the most leverage to exploit those with the least.
Humanity can’t survive an economic system that makes humans compete against each other for survival.
The more excited about a political candidate you are, the more gullible you probably are. This is double true if you’re excited about current politicians and triple true if you’re still excited about previous politicians.
To the degree Americans dislike Trump, they’re going to be equally passionate about worshiping one of the next two corrupt, unqualified, polarizing, self-serving presidential nominees the Democratic and Republican party shit out for tax payers to fight over in 2020. #potus
I wish Milli Vanilli would have recorded a few more albums before they got busted.
When your dog is playing, it’s pretending to kill something.
I can’t believe Democrats are hoping Oprah runs for president. How long ago did Republicans vote for a billionaire TV celebrity, and how well did that work out for them?
Never buy stocks or cryptocurrency from an issuer that has press releases, executive profiles, ticker prices, or encouragements to buy their stocks/coins on their home page.
If you’re going to buy stocks or cryptocurrencies, never buy them from issuers who say they’re going to provide a groundbreaking product or service that will fill people’s needs. Buy it from the issuers who have been filling the most people’s needs.
Some people say there’s a 100% chance enlisting in the military will teach you discipline that will turn you into a mature adult. Some people say there’s at least a 22%-44% chance it will turn you into an alcoholic.
If you’re a Christian, your new year’s resolution should be to study the book of Leviticus hard core so you can see what a steaming pile of mythology the Bible is.
Would you keep buying candy from a vending machine that only sells piss and shit? The vending machine is a metaphor for the Democrat and Republican parties.
If you’re a social justice warrior, your new year’s resolution should be to stop being racist against Caucasians and sexist against men and start addressing the real cause of economic inequality: predatory business practices.
If you’re a cop, your new year’s resolution should be to stop enforcing bullshit laws that only exist to oppress and exploit good people.
If you’re a business owner, your new year’s resolution should be to pay your workers more than the bare minimum you can get away with… you Ebenezer Scrooge fuck.
If you still support Trump, your new year’s resolution should be to stop ignoring evidence that contradicts your preconceived convictions.
In a perfect world you’d never hear/see the words, “brought to you by…”
Where do Atheists get their morals? Not from a book that approves of slavery and teaches that anyone who doesn’t believe in mythology is evil and deserves to burn forever.
We should have a holiday where once a year where all your loved ones tell you what they all know is blatantly wrong with you but nobody ever says to your face because they’re too polite and you wouldn’t listen anyway.
It shouldn’t be surprising that, after Trump’s first year in office, most Americans don’t want him to be president. That statistic was true when Trump won the election. Why would we be surprised most Americans still don’t want the leader they never wanted?
CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox News created the world’s biggest, most damaging fake news story together when they hosted America’s 2016 Presidential election debates and calmly presented that cluster fuck of corruption as a legitimate, fair, representative, democratic election.
Ebenezer Scrooge is a metaphor for 99% of employers.
An ounce of wisdom is worth a pound of effort.
If you don’t mind sitting in traffic, you must have either died inside or never truly lived.
Trump’s presidency is a retelling of Han’s Christian Anderson’s, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” except Trump wove the lie himself.
Anyone who says all white people are racist needs to watch more interracial porn.
Posting articles, Tweets, and comments that say every member of a certain group of people is evil educates the public about you more than the people you’ve singled out to hate.
The less you question how big of a douche bag you are, the bigger of one you probably are.
If you want a leader who is perfect, you better pick a liar.
The chances of you always being wrong are much higher than the chances of you always being right.
Americans hate income inequality about half as much as they love billionaires.
I know a lot of people are excited about the RNC’s latest tax plan. I’d be excited too, but my job pays the least amount the market will allow and doesn’t provide any benefits or vacation time. So I’m too tired to be excited about anything. #firstworldproblems I guess.
It’s bad ass that Bill Gates is donating billions of dollars he couldn’t possibly spend in his life to helping people. It’d also be bad ass if he went ahead and donated the rest of the money he’s never going to spend. Maybe he could give that money to the people he took it from.
I pay at least enough in taxes to build a tiny house. I pay enough in rent to build a giant house. What the fuck? Where’s my tiny house, government?
The fundamental problem with America is the rich minority oppressing the poor majority, not the ethnic majority oppressing the ethnic minority. The solution isn’t to oppress the ethnic majority but to liberate the poor majority.
Americans would have lost far fewer freedoms in the past 50 years if they spent half as much money on corruption defense as they do on military defense.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who can find an excuse to give up trying to solve any problem… and those who can find a workaround to any problem.
If you’ve got time to lay in bed, you’ve got time to stretch… in bed.
Capitalism defines people as consumers, customers, employees, employers, owners, lenders, and borrowers… but not infinitely rare cosmic miracles deserving of happiness and personal purpose.
Social justice warriors perpetuate the oppression of minorities by distracting the world from the fact that rich people create economic inequality and placing the blame on cis gender white male scapegoats.
The secret formula for genius is just hard work plus patience.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Tweets About Self-Help

Tweets About Romance

Tweets About Philosophy

#13: Knowledge and wisdom

Tweets About Religion

Tweets About Politics

Tweets About Economics

Tweets About Pop Culture

Video Lists

Leave a comment | tags: lists, pop culture wisdom, social media wisdom, wise tweets | posted in My thoughts, Tweets

March 25, 2018

Wise Sloth Video List: Dating And Relationships

By wise sloth

I prefer watching educational videos on YouTube more than watching television, but it’s tedious digging for good content, and I’ve already seen most of the good stuff while searching for videos to put in my blogs. In case anyone else is looking for entertaining educational videos on YouTube, I made a series of posts with all the ones I’ve used on The Wise Sloth, organized by topic, with links to the posts they appear in. You’re bound to be enlightentained, and if you need help exploring the 600+ essays on The Wise Sloth, these video lists offer a quick overview that practically summarize my philosophies.

This list comes from my essays on sex, dating, and relationships.

Tips on impressing women using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Tips on impressing men using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

15 tips on internet dating

The futility of being fake

10 character traits to look for in a long-term romantic partner

13 rules of successful relationships

11 reasons not to bitch at your man

My theories about cheating on tasks and lovers

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these other video lists:

Leave a comment | tags: advice, dating, relationships, videos | posted in Sex, Relationships, and Dating, Video Lists

March 25, 2018

Wise Sloth Video List: Growing Up And Becoming You

By wise sloth

This list comes from my essays on self help.

Advice on life

The prime prerogative

My advice to the younger generation

10 things you need to know about yourself

Signs you’re old…but not necessarily mature

Signs you’re mature…but not necessarily old

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these other video lists:

Leave a comment | tags: advice, inspiration, motivation, personal growth, self-help, videos | posted in self-help, Video Lists

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