The day before yesterday

Look bad, be good

When you realize that you're getting more and more ridiculous, just keep going. You're on your way to freedom.

I found two old posts that I never published. I don't even clearly remember writing them. The first one is titled "Look bad, be good" and I wrote it last year:

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

I'm tired of people talking about how inherently "evil" and "selfish" humans are. Every time I hear someone claim that humans are evil and selfish, I think, "Shut up, you don't know anything about humans." Humans are highly altruistic animals.

There's a lot of light and a lot of darkness in most people. And in the great majority of people, the light wins. Would you feel horrible if you saw someone kicking a child, or would you join in? Exactly.

I've never understood people who enjoy being better or smarter than most people. HOW is that possible? HOW can you enjoy that? I don't know anything as painful as being better or smarter than most people.

To find out whether someone is wise or not, you only have to find out whether they're capable of changing their mind when they're wrong. The ability to change your mind is an impressive sign of wisdom.

Why do I have to be an 80-year-old man from the mountains? Why do I have to be a horny 13-year-old?

Surprisingly, one doesn't have to be crazy at all to make great art. Take John Green for example. A major reason for his major success is that he's very sane.

The overwhelming majority of antifeminists have no idea what feminism means.

Marilyn Monroe was an intellectual with dyslexia.

My obsession or whatever it is with James Dean's face has been going on for nearly 4 years now. There's something about the perfection of his face that keeps fascinating me. Normally perfection is boring.

Will I be staring at photos of James Dean's face when it's 2055 and he's been dead for a century? 2055. What a soothing thought. 2055 seems like very distant future, yet in 2055 I'll be just 61. 61 is nothing. I'll still be middle-aged. Probably virile and working. Or dead.

2055 will be a new world. I certainly hope that it will be better than this one. But I know that it will be different from this one.

My father knew someone who knew Natalie Wood who knew James Dean.

It's a small world, it's a small space-time continuum.

Another post I never published:

I'm really bad at following people on social media. Currently I'm following one pig and maybe two people. 

People have really strange fetishes. Recently I stumbled upon a short story that had a protagonist that was a cat watching a guy take a shit. Yes, a cat watching a guy take a shit.

I find Taylor Swift annoying. I just do, I always have, and it doesn't really make sense. I can't rationalize it. It feels wrong, but I can't help it. I don't really understand the mechanisms of annoyingness, but I know that I have always been considered generally quite annoying. Annoyingness is interesting, I have to think about it and maybe write about it.

From the subject of Taylor Swift to other related phenomena. There's a 54-year-old dwarf terrorizing normal people in a town in England. He's shitting everywhere and sleeping without his pants on in public, etc.

What's really disturbing are the comments below the article.

People are actually saying that Hitler was right for wanting to "exterminate" "people like this".

This is clearly someone with really severe mental health problems. People don't just start doing stuff like this for no reason. This is very likely someone who has suffered tremendously. From day one.

I realize that the guy's pooping everywhere, but really, the people who wrote those comments are an infinitely worse example of humanity at its lowest.

Day after day I understand it again and again: lack of compassion is the ugliest thing in the world.

...

I'm the most rational person I know. And I am quite irrational.

There are a lot of people who identify as rational people. Not many of them are that rational in the end. For instance, people can identify as highly rational militant atheist types (I'm not commenting on militant atheism in itself) while they're actually strongly controlled by their own emotional reactions and irrationalities.

The point is that, at the end of the day, even the most rational human being on Earth is rather irrational. Admitting this makes some level of rationality possible. If you're not aware of your own irrationality, it means that you're not capable of looking critically at your own emotions, motives and actions. And that in itself means that you're not rational.

I'm the most rational person I know, yet the stories I write are mostly stories about human irrationality and absurdity. Well, you have to know something about it to write about it.

Isn't it interesting, by the way, that nearly all comedy is based on revealing the hidden immaturity of adult humans?

...

For some unknown reason I've seen Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery five or six times. Watching Austin Powers movies could be seen as extreme waste of time. Watching Austin Powers movies could even be considered the definition of 'extreme waste of time'. (I don't really care, by the way.)

...

Writing the book I'm writing has at least doubled my quality of life.

...

In 2015, believing that animals have the right to live without humans consciously harming them can be fucking harsh psychologically. I can't say I recommend it if your mind isn't strong and sane. I'm not sure if mine is, but I keep trying. The time I live in is not a time where people see animals the way I do. And I believe that the way I see animals makes quite a lot of sense scientifically and ethically. And then the question is, dear Jesus, why didn't you let me be born in 2094 where reality could be brighter? And maybe the answer is, well honey, some individuals have to see before everybody starts seeing.

I heard Aleksi Pahkala and Maria Veitola discuss veganism on the radio. They're giving veganism a try for 30 days. That's cool, but there was something disturbing about the discussion.

Maria Veitola started talking about a restaurant that used to be a regular meaty restaurant, but is now trying to be "ethical" and therefore focusing on vegetables, fish, "etc." Yeah, "etc." This is fucking depressing. I remember watching some lifestyle show some years ago where actor Riku Nieminen was being interviewed about his lifestyle; in the interview, he talked about his ethical vegetarianism... while fishing. Yes, he took the journalist fishing to have a chat about vegetarianism. I don't know what this is. Why does this keep happening? The factory farming of fish is among the worst forms of factory farming, and fish are just as complex as the land animals that people produce, but none of this matters apparently because they are so fucking ugly. We have to change this.

Of all vertebrates, fish are the group of animals that have it the worst; they have almost no legal protection, and people are ready to treat them in ways that would be considered barbaric towards any other vertebrate. This is going to be one of the great challenges for the animal rights movement in the coming decades: how to get people to care about animals that look stupid and ugly. I'll have to write about this more specifically.

How to get people to care about an animal that is not cute? Or people that are not cute? We must find a way.

Aleksi said that veganism is good, but that in his opinion, people can do whatever they want. I always wonder why people say that. I mean, it's obviously not true. If Aleksi saw someone beating a dog on the street, he'd immediately forget the "people can do whatever they want" thing. The only reason why people say that in the first place is that they know that standing up for the most oppressed groups is sometimes socially inconvenient. But an action that has a victim is never just a personal choice. Am I extreme for saying this? Why is it 'extreme' to say this? Isn't it way more extreme that we're currently producing and killing hundreds of billions of animals a year simply because we don't want to eat something else?

Anyway, good for you, Maria and Aleksi. Thanks for trying to do a good thing. I'm just kind of serious about this animal thing.

Interesting. I haven't been thinking about fish for a while now, but I haven't forgotten them. Yesterday I woke up feeling surprisingly happy, and then I turned on the TV and saw this guy

Max Forsman

say that he wouldn't even want to know what fish "think" (because fish are ugly -> fish are stupid, you know the logic). Then I thought, thanks a lot Max, I was feeling surprisingly happy and now I'm going to have to feel irritated for at least 30 minutes. I'd love to know what fish "think". Why must I know what Max "thinks"? So then I felt irritated for at least 30 minutes or maybe more. Thanks a lot, person named Max Forsman, you dreamy teddybear.

Gryffindor

The truth is that the world of Harry Potter means so much more to me than this nightmarish hellhole, but now that I'm stuck here the only thing that makes sense is to try and help fix this place.

There's too many Dudleys, too many Malfoys. There's something wrong with this generation. Really. I'm not just saying that, there are people studying this and what they've found is frightening. Too many of us are rich, heartless bastards, or at least pretending to be rich, heartless bastards, because for some reason, that's the new ideal.

But some of us don't share that ideal. This is going to sound weird, but something that many of us have in common is that we were (are) Harry Potter fans. You should never underestimate the power of weird things. A lot of us were Harry Potter fans, and we identified with the losers and the heroes.

When you think about it... the losers were the heroes.

The losers are the heroes.

Listen, this is what the world looks like

Russia is fucked up, for instance. China is fucked up. Most of Asia is fucked up. Africa is fucked up. India is fucked up. The Arab world is fucked up. So is Israel. The Western world is quite fucked up and getting worse.

I believe in nonviolence, peace, compassion, equality, solidarity, rationality, trying to find objective truth, freedom and responsibility, human rights and animal rights, patience and self-awareness.

Maybe you do too. Now look at the world around you. Look at the history of human societies. Look at the world outside ‘the democratic, rational Western societies’. And if you live in a 'democratic, rational Western society', look at the people around you. If you believe in the same things I believe in, you are something extraordinary.

Because so far it's been about who kills faster and what this god says and what that god says. So far power has been the only thing that mattered. It’s been about hairy men telling other hairy men to kill other hairy men. Now we’re trying to let things like solidarity, equality and rationality win. We're not always good at them, but at least we see them as something worth striving for. This is something new. This is one of the most amazing steps we’ve ever taken.

Naturally, humans are highly empathetic and altruistic animals. I know that I am, and I know that I'm not a freak of nature. You can already see this in young babies; in studies, most of them prefer the good puppet to the evil puppet. So you'd think that our societies would be empathetic and altruistic too, but unfortunately, we are also capable of violence, ignorance and indifference; we're very good at rationalizing all that in our heads. Especially when we form groups and stop thinking for ourselves. We lie to ourselves to make the problem go away, and that's the reason why it's even possible for the world to be so fucked up in so many ways. "Well, God thinks that..." "Well, that's how it's always been..." "Well, people are selfish so..."

The scary thing is that ‘the democratic, rational Western society’, the whole idea is very new. The fact that people see that as something worth striving for is extraordinary. In many places, the vast majority of people simply don't get what's so special about democracy and equality in the first place. Ancient Egypt existed for 3000 years. The Western world with ideals such as human rights has really existed for about 70 years now, if that. It’s such a fragile concept that when people stop thinking, it disappears.

I don't know. Argh. Most people of my generation think they know who's "too fat" and who's "too skinny", because for some reason they think that that's their business; at the same time, they couldn't give a fuck about the world's problems, because for some reason they think that those are not their business. NOT GIVING A FUCK has become the coolest thing to do, but there's two types of not giving a fuck, and you must always know the difference:

the bad one: not giving a fuck about injustice and the pain of others.

the good one: not giving a fuck about the pressure of social norms and the looks in the eyes of idiots.

Most people of my generation know who Harry Styles is, but they don't really know what happened in the 20th century. And that's why nothing's stopping us from making the same mistakes again.

Jesus.

Jesus was eccentric and rebellious and good. Jesus was a wise man.

It would be great if people paid some attention to what he was saying.

But for some reason the people who say his name the loudest are people who are mainly obsessed with the horrors of the Old Testament. Like all that horrible stuff was more important than all the beautiful stuff.

Here I come

Rock'n'roll