Just for today I will admit that "just for today" might be an effective coping mechanism after all.

About ten and a half years ago, I quit crystal meth for the last time. After a few wasted hours in NA meetings I declared NA a bunch of magical thinking bullshit and never went back (apart from a single meeting at 5 and again at 7 years clean because I was bored and wanted to announce to the magical thinkers that I could be clean too without being one of them.)

I still despise their programs and 12 steps of bullshit, but just for the record, “just for today” sorta kinda does help, with some modifications that I thought I’d share with my friends and hopefully mostly fellow unbelievers and critical thinkers here.

My kneejerk reaction to “just for today” was, “Fuck this shit! I’m going to be clean for the rest of my life”, but I do see how it can be helpful to those tempted by addiction. So yes – taken at face value “just for today” is silly. A day is an arbitrary segment of time. Why a day? That’s just how long our planet rotates on its own axis. It doesn’t really mean anything. Why not a just a minute, or an hour, or a week or a month or a year, or… Just for the next 20 years?

So if we take “just for today” to mean just in this moment, I will not use my substance of choice, be it meth as in my case, or alcohol or coke or whatever the fuck sinks your boat, then it makes sense. It means that although I love my drug and want very much to use it, I will not give in and I will not use it RIGHT NOW. So with that in mind, I still said “fuck this shit” and decided that although I would tell no one for a while, I would say to myself “Just for the next twenty years”.

So… that’s what I did. And it worked. On 1st September 2013, I said it to myself… Just for the next twenty years, I’ll be clean. Thus I’m allowed to use meth again on 1st September 2033. I’m about six months over half way though my “day”, folks. Just another nine years and six months or so, and I’m allowed to use meth again. If I live that long.

I honestly don’t know what will happen if I do live that long. Will I carry on saying “just for the next 20 years” like the NA cult members say “just for today”? Will I give in? Only time will tell. I’ll probably not use though… it is a really good psychological trick to play on oneself. Just not a day though. A day was not enough for me.

Update (for clarification): I wrote the above as a Facebook status yesterday, and then copied it here verbatim. To be clear, I am not interested in using meth ever again, even in 2033. I’m being somewhat facetious here… but also I do like the ambiguity. I think that considering myself above the temptation somehow would be arrogant and unwise. Acknowledging it keeps me cautious.

Exploring the Enigma of Divine Negligence: A Thought Experiment

The other day I struggled with a minor case of insomnia, a rare occurrence for me these days, but as I lay in bed deeply engrossed in my thoughts, it turned out to be a welcome one. I tried an interesting thought experiment: Imagine what it must be like to be God. Not getting into any of the things any particular god worshipped now or before is claimed to have done, let’s play this game here, but imagine that you or I became God, at least one with one of the properties that gods are claimed to have, omniscience, and then let’s see where it goes…

Feel free to join me in this experiment. Imagine it to be as you read on. I’m God. I have a brain a tad bigger than a human brain, not for the intellect itself but simply for the capacity. There’s a lot to know when you’re omniscient, and I do mean a lot. Imagine creating a whole universe, and actually let’s forget about most of the universe for a moment and just focus on planet Earth, and the race of humans. Let’s assume that every human is made in my image, so they’re just like me, apart from that brain capacity problem.

Let’s assume that I could potentially have a personal relationship with every single human, alive or dead. I know their thoughts, their dreams, what they have done, what they will do, what they could do even. “Could do” is a problem that requires an unimaginable brain capacity in itself. Every choice could lead to a wildly different life, and you know them all, for every being alive and dead and every being that will one day live, or might live if their potential mom or dad have sex at just the right time, or even meet.

To know all of that, you have to exist outside of time and space. It’s the only way that it makes sense for everything to be knowable at once. Past, present and future all at once. All these people, crying out to God because someone broke their heart, and knowing full well that in almost every case they will have forgotten about it in a short space of time, when time itself means nothing to me.

And therein lies the problem… (And please forgive me as I now switch to the second person. I’d have been marked down in my school essays all those years ago, but here on this blog, dear reader, I make the rules. Case or tense matters little to a god.) When you know all these things, hear all these prayers, they’re not important anymore. Sure, you could intervene, but for what? All these lives… knowing how all they turn out – none of them are significant. Everyone lives. Everyone dies. Most everyone suffers. So what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t lead anywhere. They’re like stories. When you look at them from outside of time, they feel complete. Since you know all their details all at once, you see a much bigger picture of the entire species and its progression over time. Knowing so much, I don’t think I would care to intervene at all, ever.

That’s exactly what the popular god looks like if we are to assume He exists. A god that never appears, never answers a single prayer, and in fact, every story about Him is a myth copied from some other older myth. A god that has a personal relationship with everyone but never shows himself, not even once. Every bit of “evidence” from Him is nothing more than a believer begging the question, taking something they assume to be created as proof of the creator. But hang on a second… that’s just the same as a god that doesn’t exist at all outside of the imagination.

Now let’s factor in the things I deliberately left out. All those other planets, solar systems, galaxies, maybe even other universes… Maybe all of those universes eventually expand, then cool down over a time that we cannot even comprehend, then collapse and (Bang!) explode and expand again into new universes… There must be other intelligent life out there somewhere, or at the very least, complex life. How are we to assume in all seriousness that a magical entity called “god” could create all these things, know all these things, and then still care? No, friends, this god is nothing more than something we made up, a magical answer to everything that we don’t understand, but when one stops and thinks about it, this answer doesn’t answer anything at all.

No, it does not involve faith to be an atheist

Yesterday I saw this bullshit on my feed:

I’ve written on this subject before, so I won’t go into this too much… rather I’d like to use it as a starting point for a post.

But briefly, atheism is about the rejection of god claims… It’s like this: You claim a god created the universe. I see that as no different to claiming a wizard created it by waving his magic wand, and atheism is me saying, “I don’t believe you”. That’s all. I don’t know how the universe came about, and my disbelief in your god claims doesn’t imply some kind of alternate claim.

What puzzles me is this… Why do creationists make this kind of argument over and over again? I’ve seen it too many times now and it has never made any sense. I can remember the moment I stopped believing in religion… I was sixteen years old when I realized that I rejected the concept of a creator, and it left me very confused at the time. But I didn’t go, like… “Oh no, I can’t claim to be an atheist because I don’t have an alternative explanation to creationism”. I didn’t fully understand science and/or evolution. It’s not about that and never was. I just don’t accept your magical thinking.

I went home and told my mother. Actually she was the only family member I told in the early stages of my religious disbelief. Her response was quite surprising to me – she accepted my disbelief right away, but asked me to promise her that I would not join some other religion, anything other than the Roman Catholic church. And I accepted right away. She missed the entire point. It’s not about Jesus, or Mary, or resurrection, or any of that shit… That doesn’t even come into it. In fact, even as a child I thought the Jesus bits of the religion were nuts… I reject the creator, the god concept entirely. No, mommy! It’s not like I’m suddenly gonna become a fucking Presbyterian or whatever.

So, why do creationists assume atheists have some alternate claim to creation? I don’t know… but maybe they’re just projecting. But when they do make these silly arguments trying to refute science (or some misunderstanding of it), they get very confused at my response – so I’ll share it again here, without any attempted answer: OK then! Indulge me with a little thought experiment: Assume all of science is false. Now, tell me why I should believe in your god.

The fact is, we humans have been inventing gods as magical explanations for what we don’t understand. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Just because you were taught to believe in a particular one of them, and you are indoctrinated to accept this without question, doesn’t make it any different to any of the others. They’re all myths.

All your gods are myths

It occurred to me while I drove to work this morning that I no longer care to say that I am an atheist because there isn’t any evidence for the existence of any gods. Evidence doesn’t even factor into it. Of course there is no evidence for any god, but why would there be? There isn’t evidence for made up things. I have no interest in debating this with anyone or pretending that there is anything to debate.

We all know that…

• There isn’t enough water to flood the whole planet at once.
• No one can live for days in the stomach of a fish.
• Virgins don’t have babies.
• Stars don’t point out the positions of imminent births.
• Dead people don’t resurrect.
• Natural disasters aren’t the results of an angry god.
• And so on …

We do know that all of those kinds of things happened in myths. Now you can be like my extended family member who provides “scientifical” explanations for the things in the Bible, but who believes in it anyway, or you can be logical, and conclude that the Abrahamic religions are mythology and nothing more. Because that’s what they are. So are all the gods of all religions. We made them all up.

If stories contain elements that look just like myths, it’s because they are myths. It’s that simple. I will never again debate this with any sort of religious apologist. There is no point. Anyone who insists on bringing up their gods to me is simply not worth my time. When they do it at work, I can, of course, politely decline the debate. Online is another matter.

Cognitive dissonance is amusing

Firstly I must apologize… I don’t get time to write here much any more. But as I install a new laptop, I might as well write a little while I wait for the downloads to complete…

We have this application at work that someone else has been working on, an app to batch process a bunch of identification verifications for a third party. That is, given the ID number of thousands of people, determine whether they are valid identities, their marital status, deceased status, and so on. The people involved were having a discussion about optimizing it to first remove the ones we already have data on showing they are deceased. No need to reverify someone you already know is dead, I guess…

Of course, since it was just before the Easter weekend and all these people are Christian, I couldn’t help myself… So I was like… “How come you only have an alive and deceased status? What about resurrected? I mean, you all believe that resurrection is possible, right?”

They didn’t like my joke. Silly people.

But its a good point. You know that dead people don’t come back to life. But you also believe that one person did. That doesn’t make sense. It would be too easy for me to claim that deep down Christians know this shit doesn’t happen, and deep down they don’t believe… But that’s not how it works. That would be the same as my brother claiming that deep down I’m still a Roman Catholic. It would be projection. It’s easy to fall into that trap, to project our own beliefs onto others.

But real beliefs are more complicated. in reality, religious people can simultaneously know that resurrection is impossible, but also believe in the resurrection of Jesus. It’s stupid. And as long as you clowns believe in bullshit like that, this clown will mock you for it.

Happy Easter. Jesus didn’t resurrect because shit like that doesn’t happen. But I do believe in chocolate so I thank him for dying so that I may eat lots of chocolate.

Priest fired for saying the wrong magic words?

I wrote this post on Facebook last night and maybe it’s worth expanding here…

Earlier, Josh asked me to explain the definition of satire…

Funny how difficult it is (for me anyway) without looking it up. I explained it as using humour to criticize something, to mock it, and often using parody for the mocking part, which creates an equal but absurd criticism of the thing. So it uses humour but is really serious.

My example was telling him about that priest who was forced to resign because of 20 years of botched baptisms, because he said “WE baptize you in the name of Jesus” instead of “I baptize you…”, and that my parody of it was to write a status on here suggesting he botched the baptisms because he forgot to say “abracadabra”.

But it’s a great example, isn’t it? I mean, the more I think about it, the more similar it is. He didn’t say the right magic words in a meaningless ritual, and absurdly, the church now claims all those baptisms “don’t count”. It’s so fucking stupid, it almost parodies itself.

Imagine believing in such absolute fucking hogwash.

Here’s an article about that priest. The story is legit.

It’s even been commented on by Father Nathan Monk here… He’s a former priest but now atheist and writer as well as social media personality – one who often triggers angry Christians because he still uses the Father moniker. The thing is, he’s a qualified Catholic priest, so he an use that if he wants to. Anyway, his point is that the church isn’t playing by its own rules here… They allow any baptized person to perform a baptism in certain contexts, and accept baptisms from Christian converts of other Christian religions. So why be so hard on this priest? It’s fucking goofy.

We’re losing the war on misinformation and willful ignorance

We really are.

I’m going back to work today, after isolating due to covid-19. I got the new omicron variant (I presume), with symptoms so mild, I at first thought it was just a cold. And it looks like my prediction is on point… This variant is becoming the dominant covid variant. It’s taking over. That’s good. That’s great! The pandemic is going to fizzle out. Everyone who hasn’t had the disease will get it pretty soon now, and we will all have immunity to the basic virus, at least as far as getting seriously ill is concerned.

But there’s a flip side to this. I have an anti-vaxxer sitting right beside me at work. Nobody is mandating that he get vaccinated. Soon it won’t matter because we’ll all be immune anyway. I’m hearing about people winning their court cases for refusing vaccinations. Maybe it’s only hearsay? I fucking hope so but it really is starting to feel like we’ve lost the war on misinformation.

Welcome to the age of idiocracy.

People are stupid–volume 667. Reverse image search is your friend.

Normally I’d post this kind of meme analysis on Facebook… I have a much wider audience there and that’s where this came from, but what with my current 30 day ban, I can’t do that. If I remember, I’ll link to this post on there when I’m paroled from Facebook jail.

People are sharing this bullshit credulously:

Make no mistake, UK prime minister Boris Johnson is a twat, but that’s not Ghislaine Maxwell. The innuendo here is baseless. That’s his ex wife. No need for further analysis. Think before you share shit credulously.

Also just by the way… You Q-Anon folks are idiots.

Edit: The text around the original share is even worse. It’s this shit, and this is why I do not hesitate to call anyone passing it on credulously an idiot. I don’t know if it will stay up, but the original post is here.

DAY 1 MONDAY … NOVEMBER 29TH, 2021

Ghislaine Maxwell , daughter of Robert Maxwell a Mossad Agent, eventually became the partner of Jeffrey Epstein. Both walk on water in the upper stratosphere of Elite Social Circles using Jeffrey’s private island as lure for getaway. I suppose everybody that’s anybody earns an invite to travel by Lolitta Express to a carefully planned layout which featured an Egyptian style Temple at it’s apex, the hilltop. The religion is Satanism. The currrency is children. Leaked video from camera’s set on numerous levels underneath the Temple make certain the Island’s decor was more than simply a favorite motif. Pedophilia & flesh & blood sacrifice of innocence, seem a rite of passage to insider world power, and a means of control simultaneously. ….. A bit of trivia – – – Question: ‘Who else owns a private island a few miles away from Epstein’s Island’ ???? … Answer : Joe Biden

Mind you, ‘idiot’ is a somewhat generous label here.

New COVID variant… Much ado about… something?

Excuse me but this constant fear mongering is getting out of hand.

Most people I know, including myself, are vaccinated. I haven’t heard of anyone I know, or even a friend of a friend… getting COVID-19 in almost a year. But now there are all kinds of articles trending about the terrible new variant. A friend in the UK is musing on Facebook about how terrible things are here in South Africa, which kind of misses the point… Buddy, if the new variant is here, it is already there too. You can assume that, and the same for the USA. What isn’t clear is if the new variant really mutated here, or if our local scientists, keen for a pat on the back, were too quick to announce their discovery of the variant. Like… “Well done, SA scientists. You are very scientifical. Now we will block flights to/from your country” and they kick us all up the arse.

Am I being hypocritical? “Trust the scientific consensus”, I always say, but… I do not trust the articles trending on Facebook. I do not trust knee-jerk reactions to what looks very much like fear mongering. Trust science when it comes from scientists. Unfortunately scientists don’t write a lot of articles. They do publish papers, but those things are not easy to read. Right now, I’m not seeing anything from the sources I trust. What this means is that there is a lot of nonsense out there on the web, and it’s hard to know what to take seriously.

So… I don’t know. My gut feeling is this is mostly fear mongering, and those of us who are vaccinated should be fine. Just be safe, I guess. Until we have anything more solid, the best info I can find on this new variant is this article from the BBC.

How bad is this variant? Unclear. But if you think it only applies to “backwards” South Africa, you’re missing the point.

A blog-post about nothing in particular

I’m bored. And tired. Tired and bored; and bored and tired. And sick and tired. But mostly bored, so I’m writing about whatever is on my mind and won’t stick to one subject here.

Fuck Kyle Rittenhouse

I’ve been following the Kyle Rittenhouse case. In case you don’t know, 17 year old white boy Kyle took an assault rifle to a protest in a different state to his own in the US, during the protests for the death of George Floyd, and there, he shot three people. Then, he claimed self defence, and was found not guilty of all charges.

I find it really difficult to take their verdict seriously, and, much like my disbelief in all religions without reading their religious texts… No, I don’t need to have witnessed the court proceedings. I don’t need to know the details to be able to come to a reasonable conclusion. Here’s why… He was there. Right smack bang in the middle of the protests, right when many alt-right white supremacist militias had been known to be causing trouble, 17 year old Kyle was there, in a crowd he obviously regarded not only as the enemy, but as a racist, he would have seen them as inferior… as not even human. The fact that he was there openly with a gun is all I need to know. In my mind, the case should have been about figuring out his intent. Was he there to taunt protesters into attacking him so that he could “defend” himself, or was he really so stupid that he thought his mere presence with a weapon would intimidate people? If it’s the former, he’s guilty of murder; if the latter, manslaughter. Judging by his defence, it looks very much like the former. Either way he is guilty. Everything else is political spin.

And somehow, the takes I’ve seen on Facebook are divided almost exclusively by the political views of the people who write them. Almost, with one disturbing difference. It’s easier to express this as a bulleted list…

• Progressives: This was a travesty of justice. He went there to hunt people.
• Conservatives: Justice was served. Those who disagree are politically motivated.
• Some (white) progressives: Looking at the facts (that came up in court), claim that other progressives “don’t know the details” and they agree with the conservatives.

Both the second and third groups are suddenly experts on self defence. The second group also accept some strange smear campaign against the victims. The other main difference between the two points of view is that those saying he got away with murder express empathy for the victims, and a justifiable concern that this will lead to a precedent where armed men can freely intimidate/murder protesters without consequences, while those who say justice has been served spend much time making personal attacks against the other side.

I have no stake in this argument… although, full disclosure, I lean pretty hard to the left. But the thing is, for me the logical side is to go against the side that engages in personal attacks against their opponents and smear campaigns against the deceased. Emotionally, I’m on the side of the protesters, of BLM, and the victims (of Rittenhouse). And by common sense, I am of course opposed to the emotionally immature guy who took a gun to a protest, to “protect property”. How do I put this? Someone needs to go and defend themselves against Rittenhouse. Permanently. I’m over here in South Africa and I feel threatened.

I have one question? Would all these sudden experts in self defence like to spend some time on other cases? There are many. Women incarcerated for murdering their sexual abusers; graves of black children killed by police for holding guns they didn’t even have, who died without even a chance to defend themselves; and lastly there are other well publicized cases where people were murdered by police in their own homes. If you can seriously see this as self defence and ignore all those other cases, you are just flat out wrong. There is no debate here. I refuse to engage with anyone on Rittenhouse’s side, and although I originally intended to post screenshots of their memes and statuses, I decided against it. Their point of view doesn’t deserve any platform. Fuck them.

Edit: I am amazed though…more like aghast at what I’m seeing online. People posting things like, “Rittenhouse found not guilty. Thank goodness sanity has prevailed”, and claiming that anyone who disagrees is “politically motivated”. Um, no. Sanity has not prevailed. You have it backwards, you racist trash. (The colour of his victims doesn’t matter either. They were BLM allies.) These people are unable to see past their own bias and the irony is palpable. If I go into someone’s house, and threaten them – then they try to fight me off, I can’t kill them and claim self defence. Likewise Rittenhouse did not belong where he was, and we should take anything claimed by his defence with a generous pinch of salt. Also if this protest was such a dangerous place to be, how come Rittenhouse was the only one to shoot anybody?

I don’t know the source of this, but it sums things up nicely.

---

Wow. OK, after that, I feel bad to write about anything else, but this post was meant to be a general one… not about anything in particular.

Diablo 2 > Diablo 3

It is though. They released Diablo 2 Resurrected back towards the end of September, and I bought it at the start of October. I’ve been playing it almost every day, and even though the main change is simply the graphics, which are amazing by the way, the game itself, even though it may be a 20 year old game engine, is far superior to Diablo 3. The only thing I miss is Diablo 3’s bottomless potion system. My amazon spends far too much time time trekking back to town to buy potions. But otherwise, the game is way better, way more engaging, and more fun. Of course it lacks end game content like rifts, but I have never finished Hell difficulty so that doesn’t matter yet.

My level 77 sorceress is stuck. I can’t even get past some low level zombies on the very first level of Hell difficulty, as they are completely immune to my main attack, and almost completely immune to my backup skill – such that they instantly kill my mercenary and then have me running around in circles like an idiot, barely able to hurt them. But I can get a tiny bit of XP doing Baal runs in nightmare difficulty, enough to slowly level up and try to make my backup attack better, but it’s painful. Thus I made a new character, an amazon, and gift her some awesome bows and things found by my sorceress. My amazon, who uses an amazing skill (strafe) shooting 10 arrows at a time, wipes out everything. She will probably always be OP since her attack combines physical as well as all elemental attacks, so she’s a lot more fun to play… apart from constantly having to buy new mana potions.

I hope they do a good job on Diablo 4, making it similar to Diablo 2, while taking some of the good bits out of Diablo 3…  either a pet (that can go to town like the Torchlight games), or a bottomless potion system with cooldown delay. But those are practically the only good parts of Diablo 3, other than rifts for end game content, which will in any case be unnecessary if the game world is big enough.