Some of you may know Alexis over at Fark and be aware of her interminable, rule-laden profile. She is the kind of person who likes to enforce rules, but isn't especially concerned with the rationale behind them. For example, regarding the difference between "regardless" and "irregardless," she has this to say: "Some authorities say that popular usage has changed 'irregardless' to mean the same as 'regardless', but I reject this. As my standards are higher, I will not pander to the ignorant masses." Nevermind that all of these rules she's enforcing were once aberrations from the accepted protocols of language, and that grammatical and syntactical rules derive from language's mandate to permit communication between humans. If everybody else agrees that irregardless has lost its most recent meaning, except for Alexis, it is absolutely still her prerogative to use the word in its former meaning, but to do so is purely masturbatory: it serves no function outside of Alexis' mind, except to promote confusion.

That said, she's spot on about High Heels:

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High Heels:

.....I hate high heels. They're just so farking stupid. You ask me, at any point, to come up with a list of the stupidest, most idiotic, ludicrous things ever to exist, and high heels will be on it every single time. Wearing shoes that elevate your heels makes about as much sense as walking around with a styrofoam eel sticking out of your ass.

.....Now, every time high heels are brought up as a topic of conversation, I invariably run into people, mostly men (but not always!), who tell me how much they loooove high heels, and how sexy they are, complete with a nuanced, technical explanation of how the heels allow the calves to be raised in this particular way which allows the buttocks to maneuver in a sexier fashion and how this enhances the curve of the blah, blah, blah...

.....What a load of shiat. It's a shoe with a farking spike on the bottom that makes you walk funny and it's just dumb. It's an outdated, misogynistic way of imposing awkward, painful adornments on women in an attempt to force them into some mold of social display that is so mind-numbingly pointless that it hurts my head when I contemplate it.

But you know what's even stupider than high heels?

High heels in porn.

.....I've had the opportunity in my life to observe a fair amount of heterosexual pornography, and on no small percentage of these occasions, the film in question involves a woman engaged in sexual activities, often lying down, mind you, who has completely disrobed, but somehow managed to forget to remove her footwear. WTF!?

Take off your ugly shoes, you stupid biatch!
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Cooperation vs. competition. The latter promotes diversity, but contrary to intuition, the former does not preclude it. Consider a system where people can work on what they want, but instead of everyone competing against one another to be "the best," ideas and work enters a common pool where it can be drawn upon and used by everyone, a la the open source movement. People can still pursue their own projects, but then others can build upon them later. The question: how to compensate people? This becomes a major economic problem and a legitimate implementation implies the need for massive restructuring and reformation. Definitely a question worth pursuing, even if only as a mind-game for now.

I realized today that people believe only what they want to believe, not what is rational or sensible or most applicable in their lives. Oftentimes, this means believing what they were taught to believe growing up, because to do otherwise induces internal conflicts and dissonance. It is easier to stick with what works than to test the waters of a new idea.

Sometimes this means that people will believe whatever is the most fun. Consider all of the people who believe in UFOs and Bigfoot and time travel and ghosts. They choose to believe in these things because it is fun, regardless of how realistic they are. And though there may be significant bodies of scientific rigor behind some of these ideas--time travel, for example--people will continue to consume only the fanciful literature and hold tightly to the entertaining aspects of the ideas, even when harder evidence contradicts it. People reject, perhaps even unconsciously, rationality and reason when they want to hold to a belief system that they like or is comfortable to them.

This also spreads to religion. People adhere to organized bodies of spiritual thought because it appeals to some deep, innate part of their lives. We invented god to fill a need, to feel less lonely, and to give us hope. When that idea is threatened by a big, bad atheist or even a god-fearing skeptic, people put up their defenses and refuse to listen to logic. "When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object," said Milan Kundera. The heart speaks louder than the mind, and when the heart builds up a wall around a deeply-held or deeply-familiar idea, no amount of rationality or prodding or evidence will shatter it. People believe in the spiritual because it is fulfilling, not because it is rational.

For me, I would love to believe in a non-biological existence, in some sort of God, in an afterlife wherein everything would be made well, or in reincarnation. I would love for the teachings of Wicca or of Buddhism or of any of a dozen New Age religions to be based on ultimate truths. I would love to feel a deeper part of my Self that can't be explained away by biology and science, that transcends rationality and teaches me why people hold tightly to faith in the unverifiable, the unpredictable, the unreasonable, the irreproducable. But deep down, my heart rebels against these ideas, cannot accept them. To me, accepting such foreign notions of spirituality and existence is mere wishcraft: I cannot believe it simply because I wish it to be true. So then this forces me to ask: am I guilty of answering to my heart before my mind or my mind before my heart? Are others practicing wishcraft or are they simply answering the call of their hearts?

And in a grander scheme: will people ever abandon the intolerance of modern religion, the hate embodied by so much of contemporary society? Certain values are ingrained in us, whatever our culture, either through biology or through societal education. Some people go against the grain, but they are rare. Most people flow with the grain, follow the path of least resistance. We like to believe that society has been reformed at times throughout the ages: the coming of the Christ figure, the Age of Reason, the Great Awakening. But looking at our society, everything is as it ever was, simply in different trappings. Can people be pulled from the callings of their heart? We know that the simple betterment of their own lives has never been sufficient cause for people to change. If people can be induced to change, how? And even then, should they be? Or is it enough simply to offer up ideas to those who will accept them in the eternally present global marketplace of ideas?

Science and religion are different vehicles to achieve the same end: discovery and implementation of the teachings of Truth. And though science and religion differ dramatically, there is one thing that stood out to me today: science has no conscience, nor ought it. Science exists, not as an immutable dogma explaining life, the universe, and everything, but as a mechanism for answering the ultimate questions. Science is a tool, a process, a plan for finding answers. It, like any machine, is neither inherently good nor inherently evil, it just /is/. The real test comes with the applications of science, how it is used. And even then, the answers are not clear-cut: were the scientists in the Manhattan Project doing good or evil when they created the atom bomb? Sure, the bomb is the most destructive force we've yet uncovered, but its detonation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are accepted by most educated people to have saved countless lives that would have otherwise been lost had the war continued to wage on. Science does not have a conscience: it does not concern itself with matters of human morality or spirituality, and only touches very lightly on matters of ethics. To imbue the processes of science with the confusion of human morality is to taint the process and render it useless. Each scientist and each user of science has to determine for him or herself what the ultimate purpose of each new discovery is, and how/whether to apply it in life. Conscience and morality remains the responsibility of the human, not of the machine.

How can I become a part of a society built on so many institutions I disagree with? How can I accomplish anything of note if I'm perpetually bogged down by competing against people trying to accomplish the same thing I am? And yet, how can I get what I want outside of society? Can society be changed from the outside? Should one even try?

Society is a machine, churning constantly, grinding day and night across the globe, processing people and spitting out the rotting husks of once-hopeful dreamers. If I am ever to hope of changing things, how can I justify feeding the machine? And yet, without feeding the machine, without becoming a part of it, how can I understand it well enough to know what works, what doesn't work, what can change, and what is a necessary evil?