http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2015/03/yeah_26.html

sam harris isn't even an atheist, so don't pull that strawman shit on me.

dude believes in "spirituality" and magic forces and other such specious, stupid stuff. he's basically a fucking buddhist yoga guru.

free your mind, man.

again: i don't want to bring this up.

i don't know why she's home all day. she could have cancer or something. no, really - i have no idea. all i know is that i can hear her up there - coughing - pretty much every day during normal school/work hours and that the smoke is correlated with him leaving.

so, i can still potentially assume he doesn't realize it. if that is the case, i want to wait for him to bring it up.

it's cold out. i have somewhere safe & warm. i'm focusing on suing the cops right now. this isn't going to be a serious issue for me until the spring at the earliest, and by then it might resolve itself.

i need to point something else out, though - it tends to get better when i complain about it, here. and, the other explanation that is consistent all around is that i'm not hearing a kid up there but a cop.

the kid seems to pretty much always be home. i dunno...

when he's home - and he's been home a lot lately - it comes right down, but when he's gone she seems to chain smoke.

obviously, i'd rather do something else besides sue him. but i don't want to live in a smokey environment - and i explicitly signed a non-smoking lease for that reason.

it seems like it's his daughter that is smoking.

i'm going to guess she's about 14, and she doesn't seem to go to school or anything.

again: it's very hard for me to understand why the property owner strung me along like this into thinking he doesn't smoke. there is clearly a smoker upstairs.

i was very clear that i wanted a non-smoking environment. what could he have possibly expected, besides conflict?

i'm just baffled.

so, now i'm going to have to figure out who is smoking, document it and sue them to get out of the lease. again.

why go through the expense? why waste my time and his? i don't get it.

if you're going to make me choose between well-meaning spiritualist dipshits that think they can bring the dinosaurs back with positive thinking and neo-augustinian conservative zealots that think there never were any dinosaurs in the first place, i'm going to go do something else, instead.

sorry.

a pox on you both.

the rejection of logic is not a philosophical position.

there is no epistemology that upholds intuition over empiricism, or feelings over facts.

if you are insisting on rejecting logic in favour of subjective personal experience, the position that you're taking is called anti-intellectualism, which is historically associated exclusively with fringe movements on the religious right.

and, that's why they taught you it - because they want you to be reliant on the church for guidance.

if you are a young person in america today, and you do not understand logic, and have even been taught to disdain it, you should try and take a step back from the situation and realize that this is not an accident. your disdain for logic was not implanted into you by marxists - marxists love logic - but by a school curriculum that was designed by conservatives in order to keep you distracted, ignorant, reliant and unable to organize. this attack on public schools was mirrored by a movement from the elite to pull their kids into private schools; it's a type of class warfare, and perhaps an expression of vulgar marxism, but, as such, the diametric opposite of actual marxism.

as adults, you have the ability to look into this, if you want. school funding was absolutely decimated in the 80s and 90s by this clinton-reagan axis that wanted you to be too stupid to be able to resist. the curriculum ejected anything to do with critical thinking because it realized that neo-liberalism doesn't hold up to much of it. it slashed science education, and brought in faith-based programs to compensate.

if you are a young american today, you are a product of this system, and your inability to deal with an idiot like ben shapiro is a consequence of the fact that the basic education you experienced was terrible - by design. i'm sorry to be the asshole that says it to you, but if he makes you feel stupid, then you are stupid.

but, that's not your fault - the system produced you this way.

what's important is that you realize it, and take steps to change it.

again: logic is supposed to be the weapon that liberals use to defeat conservatives with. you can learn this. if you want to.

i don't blame anybody.

i made that mistake. i take responsibility for it.

"this is my mistake, let me make it good."

and, i've been celibate - by choice - since.

briefly.

when i went into transition, i was a virgin. i met a girl that misinterpreted me as a rock star, and she convinced me to experiment before i went through with it. well, i was a virgin, and i'll admit that i saw some value in using my penis at least a couple of times before i got rid of it. so, i agreed to try it for a little while. i was still young.

the experiment was a horrible failure; rather than transition into a male role, i spent the whole time trying to devise a way to convince this girl to accept me as female. she never did, and i eventually had to walk away. but, it was a lot harder to go back into transition than i initially assumed it would be...

in hindsight, that was a mistake - i should not have done the experiment, i should have just pushed through with it. and, i absolutely regret it. unequivocally.

i never decided to reverse anything. rather, i made a decision to put my transition on hold in order to carry out an experiment, and then ran into financial problems when i tried to resume it.

and the experiment failed. i did not accept a male sexual role at all, but flailed against my inability to live up to the expectations of a female partner that was uninterested in accepting my femininity. and, the relationship was short-lived because i couldn't do it, and didn't want to do it.

the only thing i regret is not transitioning more quickly back when i had the chance.

i'll admit i'm stuck in the enlightenment and the ideals of the french revolution, but, in my mind, the left is supposed to uphold rigour and logic and empirical observation as it presents science as a revolutionary counter to the conservative dogma of religious tradition. specifically, the left - as a revolutionary force - is supposed to aggressively attack religion as conservative and backwards, and it is supposed to do so using the language of science.

i've been over this dozens - if not hundreds - of times at this point. everything is confused in the united states because the liberal party (the republicans) succumbed to nietzsche's predictions and collapsed into nihilism. that hasn't happened anywhere else in the world. but, it's created this kind of optical illusion where the traditional conservative party (the democrats) are misperceived as representing the left, and it has created this weird set of alliances that an enlightenment-era thinker has no option but to reject as incoherent.

so, how do you explain the premise of an empirically driven religious person like ben shapiro, that attempts to forcefully push reason and logic to uphold religious tradition? in any other place in the world, at any other stage in history, this would be a contradiction in terms - a complete absurdity. something like this:

and, do not take this too lightly - for this is the reality that a world full of ben shapiros will create; dark age arguments produce dark age thinking.

but, the flip side of this is the intuitively driven liberal, that attempts to argue against a conservative ideology and traditional values using appeals to personal opinion. this is no less of a contradiction, no less ridiculous, no less ahistorical. when you take away logic from liberals, you are denying them of the only weapon that they actually have in their fight against tradition, rendering them helpless fools that are easily pillaged by rampaging barbarians, like shapiro.

but, is all of this ahistorical absurdity not, in truth, quintessentially american? is this not a perfect idiosyncrasy? what has america ever cared for history, or for the rest of the world, anyways?

all i can do is try and hold up a mirror, and insist i can't take either side in their carrollian reality.