Not yet, but soon (4)

There is a sociological axiom amongst the sentient races of the known universe that have escaped their planetary cradles (there are only four sentient races that we know of, so far, including humans, but this sounds better than ‘the other three sentient races had this idea…’): for a pre-space age society to develop into a galactic nation, a planetary revolution must first take place, wiping away racial struggle, religion and the institutions that keep both alive. That revolution can only come about through a general understanding (although not necessarily a conscious one) of the concepts and consequences of the chaos theory. These sentient races – they don’t like being called ‘aliens’ and they’re a bit more advanced than us (think lightsabers and warpdrives, which is odd, because we thought about it first, even though they managed to build it first) so I’m going to be diplomatic – came up with this axiom after all three had gone through this process and compared their stories to one another. When a similar thing happened on Earth, they were all really smug about it, but then, it was the first true feat of galactic sociology.
What this chaos theory does is not, as some people thought or wanted others to believe, choose chaos over order. This wasn’t a light or dark choice, no universal struggle between good and evil. That would come later, apparently, according to the sociological axiom of the five sentient races we still don’t know of, simply due to the fact that they have left our plane of existence and went to the Plane of the Struggle of Good versus Evil. They played curling continuously, and whichever side won three matches would be Reigning Ethical Alignment for the day. After a week, Good and Evil joined hands to find a way to escape that hellish dimension, but they were quickly opposed by the United Curling Amateurs. The battle continues ‘till this day.

Not yet, but soon (3)

Of course, you really need to keep you population occupied at all times, because as soon as they start to seriously consider all that mumbo jumbo, they’ll not only realize that those ‘holy men’ are nothing but a bunch of manipulative liars and/or idiots, or at the very least misguided, but also that even if this ‘God’ person exists, he’s a tyrant to be overthrown, not a benevolent ruler to be worshipped. I am talking about monotheistic religions in this case, obviously, and the difference between those and the polytheistic religions is quite important, from a social planning perspective. You see, when only a single God exists, there exists but a single truth, a single way of life, a single sexual position. People will worship with fervor and zeal, but external contacts, or even the slightest internal social change, will light the torches, sharpen the pitchforks and erect the stakes. Polytheism is generally more relaxed, simply because anyone can pretty much invent any god they want and no one can disprove him or her, at the risk of disproving one’s own god. This rarely works on its own, however, because any young society needs more stringent rules than those a polytheistic religion can provide in itself. Once another system has provided a stable counterweight – a caste system, or a strong nationalistic feeling, or some such – the problem no longer becomes the religion, as that has become little more than pro forma packaging.
But all that doesn’t really matter. Order has always been humanity’s end goal, as far as we actually have an end goal. Yeah sure, you could talk through your neck or out of your ass about divine beings and chosen races and pots of gold at the end of a rainbow, and you’ll always find people stupid, naieve or desperate enough to listen, but that doesn’t mean there’s an ounce of truth in these doctrines. None at all! No, order has always been our end goal. Every society up until we first managed to escape our atmosphere has tried to achieve this by total control. Whether it is a dictatorship that uses whip and collar, or a republic that uses money and media, the underlying theory never changes: let the elite rule the country and make sure the general populace doesn’t stray beyond the rules of your society. Chaos is to be avoided at all costs, because it would simply destroy the elite’s power, which is not something that is to even be considered. And who can blame them? People have shown time and time again that they are in need of leadership, that even an oppressive regime is preferable to no regime at all. But humanity evolved – and this caused a double rift with the old regimes, because not only did humanity become held back by the old ways, those same old ways had trouble to even recognize that evolution existed, let alone that humanity had indeed evolved. It’s like the chicken and the egg: ten seconds of logical thought tells us that the egg had to be first, because otherwise we’d have an animal that resembled a chicken, but didn’t come out of an egg (and therefore can’t be a chicken). I mean, QED, but still we debated and discussed and paid academics to write articles on it. Similarly, it was clear that by the time nobody cared about Paris Hilton anymore (which was, in fact, long overdue and thus could actually be seen as a counter-argument), the old institutions could no longer rule by virtue of the people. More and more, repression was used against forms of non-violent dissent. Because while it were the institutions that had provided their populations with the means of fully transcending their baser instincts (I’m talking about greed, violence and stupidity; sex stopped being a problem by the time the pope declared that he always used Durex’ topsafe condoms when clubbing in Rome’s gay quarter. It was a great day for Christianity.) the institutions couldn’t cope with their ‘children’ growing up.

On a side note

Meer en meer mensen spenderen, al dan niet professioneel, heelder dagen voor hun computer, vrijwel zonder fout met een internet aansluiting.

Omdat het belangrijk is om geregeld even uw gedachten te verzetten, als is het maar een halve minuut (kwestie van geconcentreerd te kunnen blijven werken, hein), geef ik u drie links, waar u naar believen eens op kan klikken en kijken.

Vampiers

Ridders

Robots

Ik weet dat u nieuwsgierig bent, dus klik, kijk eens rond en wie weet, misschien kan u zichzelf nog wel wat amuseren...

En u zou er mij ook een pleziertje mee doen, dus de wereld wordt er alleen maar beter van.

[Edit: en omdat bevreemding ook wel eens als aansporing kan werken, krijgt u er nog eentje in dezelfde trant:

Bananen]

Not yet, but soon (2)

Aangezien ik een kind ben van mijn tijd en geduld iets was van toen absolute kutgroepjes toch nog iets meer moeite moesten doen om door te breken, heb ik ondertussen de eerste twee Potter boeken al maar als audio books gedownload. Ik bedoel geleend. Lenen mag nog, niet? Goed. Hier is deel twee van een wat vreemde tekst.


Hindsight is a bitch. We all know this: it’s a haughty, whiny, holier than thou bitch who rubs our mistakes in our faces and we don’t want that. When we make a mistake, we don’t want to study it, we don’t want to learn from it, we don’t want to grow and evolve. We just want to be left alone! But, retrospect ahoy, you can call me bitch for now. It’s odd, I’ve never before thought of myself as a haughty bitch, but the feelings it conjures are, well, confusing, to say the least. But that’s not the issue. The issue is something that might not seem readily connected to what I have told you already, but rest assured, there is an actual point in all this. You see, the issue, the main point that connects a silly guy named Timmy with the end of the world and the heroic tale of a number of Earth’s survivors which I will unfold before you as soon I have made the point I mentioned above, that main point is the chaos theory. Now I’m no scientist, but I can spew nonsense with the best of them, even with the philosophers, the uncrowned kings and queens of pointless debate, so sit back and relax while I probably completely reinvent the concepts of chaos in an unfounded and irrelevant manner: from the very first tribes of nomadic sub-humans (I’d like to think it is no longer politically incorrect when those discriminated against are no longer alive, but that’d open some nasty, well, solutions to that problem, which oddly enough worked quite well for the dodo; killed all of them in under two hundred years, a job well done, thank you very much) – yes, yes, there will be many useless and non-informative interjections, what’d you expect? – up until the 22nd century men and woman, humanity has always strived for order. Even those pseudo-theories about government that propagate chaos (or absence of order, whatever, you weirdoes), most notably the anarchists, either have structure or inevitably lead to structure. The first structure that inescapably emerges after any and all flits of chaos in human history is the most basic law that governs anything above microscopic level: the law of the jungle (so named, I assume, because the righteous explorers were convinced that their civilizations had long since left such basic impulses behind. They had already evolved to the level of unstoppable genocide, which is indeed pretty much the level we, greatly superior Western society, held until those damn hippies started organizing. I mean, who could have foreseen that? A bunch of stoners remembering their plans? Kids on LSD who still managed to find the capital to protest? Hippies are harmless, we thought. Oh, how wrong we were). And that works fairly well on a small scale. Children can be beaten into submission, minorities can be contained in reservations or in the afterlife, women can be hooded and gagged until they are nothing more than cooking baby factories. And there was order, and for a while, it was good. Now, in case you’re outraged after reading the last lines, you should probably either just grow into puberty, or, if you’ve already taken to shaving unwanted body hair, you might want to find a small house in the middle of nowhere and live like a hermit; your friends and family will appreciate it. But onto order on a large scale. It is an entirely different ballpark altogether when we want to establish order on a national, let alone planetary level. In the early stages, religion is the key factor. It’s like an all intrusive secret police that knows everything about everyone and is judge, jury, executioner and bribable official at the same time.

Confunded, or simply rotten

Nu het zevende en laatste deel van de onvolprezen (nu, ja) Harry Potter reeks diep in mijn bewustzijn verankerd ligt (nu, ja), leek het me tijd om eens een laatste keer alle boeken nog eens op rij te lezen, om redenen die voor u, Potter-leken, hoogst waarschijnlijk uw bevattingsvermogen te boven gaan (nu, ja).

Er is echter een probleem!

Want de combinatie van een goed hart en een slecht geheugen, heeft er voor gezorgd dat ik mijn allereerste boek (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) heb uitgeleend om prompt te vergeten aan wie.

Dus, een oproep uit de grond van mijn hart: als u mijn eerste Harry Potter boek in uw bezit hebt, ik zou het heel graag terug hebben. In ruil kan ik u altijd mijn verzameld werk doorsturen. Het mag dan wel niet hetzelfde niveau halen, er zijn alleszins heel wat minder exemplaren in omloop, dus wie weet, misschien wordt u er wel rijk van.

Het vervolg van het vorige stukje mag u over een week verwachten (of vroeger, als de verloren wees vroeger terugkomt).

Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure.

Not yet, but soon (1)

The end of the world had a rather silly cause. Of course, after taking a step back most serious matters have rather silly causes: the origins of our own universe have spawned the greatest collection of flatulency jokes in the history of sentient beings, which is saying something – every intelligent being seems to possess at least one hole or crevice that exudes smelly gasses, from time to time. But when their world came to an end – ok, fair enough, our world – humans had only just begun to tap this vast reservoir of universal humor. And things might have turned out rather differently, had we progressed further in our knowledge of flatulency humor (or, as some people still call it, ‘fart jokes’). But there’s not much use in wondering what might have been, as this rarely leads to a heartfelt ‘boy, that turned out well!’ but more often to some useless emotional flare of self pity and bemoanment – I’m not sure whether the latter is really a word, to be honest, but since I am telling you about the end of the world in retrospect, it means that the world has come to an end, so really, who cares?

Ah, yes, the end of the world. It was the early twenty second century. Throughout the entire previous century, the general populace had gotten more and more discontented, as governments traded their power for corporation backing. Civil liberties were sold for continuing economic growth, a few million at a time, and the global military industrial complex – after eliminating any and all forms of organized resistance – took over the policing duties of the governments, who lost their last vestiges of power. At the turn of the century, barely 0.01% of the population controlled over 99% of the resources. Fossil fuels had run out long before, but while viable affordable alternatives had been readily available for half a century, energy prices continued to rise steadily, year after year. The impoverished masses had only two things in abundance: able bodies and means of communication. Naturally, a resistance movement slowly formed, spanning the globe. The first isolated attacks in 2102 against corporate targets were condemned as acts of terrorism by a few fanatics. In 2104, the Global Humanitarian Resistance made itself known to the world. Their numbers grew exponentionally and in January 2105 the GHR sent the corporations, which had unified in the Earth Federation (although their detractors called it the Economic Front), a list of demands. In February 2105, civil war engulfed our planet, as the largest conflict anyone had ever conceived touched the lives of any and all inhabitants of Earth.

Boy, that was one depressing paragraph. You’ll have to excuse me, but the end of the world leaves even a generally jolly fellow like me with an urge to at the very least sigh. And I mean a really deep sigh. But as you may have noticed, this doesn’t seem very silly. Slightly silly, perhaps, but not silly enough to warrant the phrase ‘The end of the world had a rather silly cause’. No, the end of the world was actually caused by a thirty something guy called Timmy, who was already quite silly in his own right; silly and a bit pitiful, to an extent that none of his contemporaries thought he could influence his own life, let alone the course of human history. And perhaps he didn’t, perhaps he was but one of many elements that may have caused the end of the world, but that doesn’t change the fact that he, and only he, was the first actor in a chain of events comprised of reaction after reaction that would change not only human destiny, but the destiny of every single sentient being. I think. Well, ok, Timmy’s first action will most likely have had cause as well – not so much reason, though – but it was an internal cause; or, more precisely, an internal error, which happened rather frequently, poor Timmy.

Het ga je goed, Grim

Ik ben blij dat ik je toch iet of wat heb kunnen leren kennen.

Hopelijk heb je vrede met jezelf gevonden.

Re: boot

Het is alweer even geleden, met die examens en algemene luiheid. En nu ben ik een ambtenaar bij A, dus heb ik niet veel meer tijd (echt, welkom in de 21ste eeuw). De tijd tussen die twee, mja, laten we zeggen dat het voordeel aan klein is dat er altijd buurlanden in de buurt zijn, met een gelijkaardige, maar toch net dat tikje andere cultuur. Nee, ik ben niet op reis geweest.

Maar ik moet nog steeds antwoorden op die uitgebreide kritiek (hoewel ik uiteraard niets verschuldigd ben aan iemand die anoniem wenst te blijven, maar ik ben samaritaans, op die manier): de hersenen kunnen alle sensaties krijgen met de juiste prikkeling, elk extern gevoel (inclusief bobbing én throbbing) zijn te creëren. Hell, voor hetzelfde geld zijn wij allemààl hersenen in vaten. And a good life it is.

Het verhaaltje wordt echter toch afgebroken en Henry zal nooit avonturen, laat staan een lichaam hebben.
Helaas...

Maar ach, 't Stad is van iedereen...