THWAP IS BACK!!!!

Sort of.

I still think humanity is too stupid to survive. I still think blogging is a waste of time.

But it seems to me that living a lie is also a complete waste of time. Recently, I've been seeing a lot of click-bait titles about how to have a better life. You know these sorts of articles: "Yoga hacks for greater energy." "This Billionaire CEO Avoids These 5 Bad Habits." "The BEST Way To Respond To Set-backs" etc., etc.

There's a flood of them.

Some of them might have some good advice. But the fact of the matter is that it is POLITICS (political-economy) that is going to change real material conditions for the vast masses of people. Everything that I do these days, I do thinking that it doesn't matter one way or the other. Either way, I'll die when I die, and I was just a bunch of atoms and molecules building up to a biologically-experientially invented "self" to move my [this] carbon-based bag of mostly water through a meaningless existence. And, as this "self" I believe that living as an empty-headed, hypocritical moron, sleep-walking through one violation of what I was trained to think was important after yet another violation, is intolerable.

People who say of Mexicans facing starvation in the years after NAFTA flooded their country with cheap subsidized food and made their own farms unviable; "Let them starve!"

People who now say of Central American refugees fleeing violence and oppression; "If they didn't want their children taken from them, they shouldn't have broken the law!"

Such people are imbeciles. Moral and intellectual imbeciles. And hypocrites. Because they would have done, would do, the same things that fleeing populations always do, when placed in similar situations, and they would scream blue murder in the face of the callousness and ignorance that they themselves express.

Most people simply don't care about people outside their own personal network of connections. To some degree they can be made to care briefly about strangers when the media thrusts them before their eyes and when helping these strangers (or just pitying them) requires no great sacrifices on their part. Victims of an earthquake or a drought-caused famine? Give 'em a few bucks. Fourteen Thai boys trapped in a flooded cave? We're praying for 'em! Victims of a government our media has trained us to hate? Somebody should do something! But for the most part, their primary, almost solitary focus, is on immediate family and friends.

And, perhaps, that's the most efficient way to live. Life on this planet was not (I don't think) created by any good god or gods. There might be some unknown/unknowable divine force animating the universe. But being unknowable it would be good of us not to try to speak of it. No, life appears to have been an accident with no moral purpose. We invent codes of morality to negotiate social interaction with one another. And these codes arose out of the same sorts of behaviours shared by our primate ancestors and our primate cousins today. I don't think chimpanzees get too worked-up when they have to engage in selfish behaviour to get what they want or need. And neither do most humans. That's what it takes to survive.

Me, I've got the counter-productive desire/need to have a consistent moral code and a life that justifies its own existence. Not for me the pointless job making or selling useless garbage and subscribing to the incoherent religion that I only half [if that] believe in. (And only as a security blanket to let me believe that I'm going to persist throughout all eternity.) I'd rather die now if I found out that such an existence was going to be my fate.

So, I'm going to blog, and, more than that, attempt real stuff as well. With what time is left to me.

We'll see.