Open-mindedness is hypocritical

I got into an argument with my mom about Obama, and whether or not he is to blame for any of the ailings of society’s latest problems.  Her defense is always the same.  When I start to berate the right-wingers, or greedy people, or stupid people, she always tells me that I should learn to see things from every side.  And my response is usually that there is no ‘other side’.  There are the greedy, stupid people, and that’s it.

I think that people who always bow in deference to fake open-mindedness are misguided.  They think that accepting all points of view raises them above everyone else.  They think that as long as we can all give room for everyone’s idiosyncratic point of view, it levels the field for everyone.  But, in reality, it invites destruction and feeble-mindedness.

For example, to give any credence to the view that deregulation is a good and vital thing for the economy, and therefore allow self-interest to be weighed more heavily than social responsibility, immediately puts selfishness first.  And, it does not add into context the way that self-interest, and more specifically deregulation, is abused by people to subvert and avoid the governmental faculties that are supposed to keep consumers safe.  So, even though all of the problems with salmonella and disgusting conditions at food processing plants are obviously a symptom of ineffective regulation, people still think that deregulation is viable because there are greedy, uneducated, short-sighted people that want it.  Because there are people who want to cripple the government, make it ineffective and therefore give themselves power to cut every corner and cost that they can… since those people exist, obviously we should take their views with just as much seriousness as responsible people who want to protect the people buying those products, right?  It’s all fucking ridiculous.

Creationism is taught in public schools alongside evolution, insulting science and scientific thought with quaint, stupid religious beliefs; gay and lesbian people can’t even get married because of xenophobic and discriminatory practices; minorities are subjugated by narrow-minded white people; poor people are forever trampled on by the rich; America endlessly pours its resources into immoral, criminal wars being waged with no clear plan or reason, which is also a factor on fueling anti-American sentiment and action; the People are turned into cattle-like slaves by the few people who want to rule over them by monetizing their daily lives, and by creating systems that literally turn the less fortunate into economic slaves; the planet heads toward cataclysmic destruction because of greedy industrialists who want to suck every last bit of commercial energy from the earth and make money off of it, and control the world through it.  All of these are obvious reasons that you can’t just accept all points of view as valid.  There are right ways of thinking about problems, and there are wrong ways.  The anger I feel towards contemporary American behavior and thought is so visceral that I don’t even have the ability to feel any sense of hope for the people anymore.  They are lost to me, because they are so ridiculously misguided.

They are faults of the most basic sense.  They are mistakes in logic, because the anti-logical thinking is supplied by those who want control.  And yet, still people believe they are valid for some reason.  I can’t even find the proper words to describe just how disappointing it is to be an American.  It’s like you found out that we are going to nuke half of the planet because God will cause it to rain gold from the skies on the surviving half.

Sometimes I get believing I'm moving past the feeling again...

It breaks my head: The rift between people. The culture of being an island turns everyone into cloned razors; it's all the same and full of aggression. And it's all ridiculous.

No one uses their mind. Even when they do, it's ridiculous. It's too conceited to really think that I'm smarter than everyone else. But I do believe that it's sad, because everyone is so much more idiotic than me. Only at the basics, that's all I care about. Everything else is periphery; tertiary. But their cores are stupid, and bland, and banal, and basic. The innermost definition of their souls are ridiculous, stupid and I can't even take it seriously. It's a bad joke. People are laughable, but depressing at the same time. Because that's how most people are, and that means that there is such a small majority of people who think like me that I will probably never meet them.

That's the most abhorred sense of loneliness. But it's the truth. I am not great in many respects; in most, actually. But I have a real mind, which is something that nearly everyone lacks. And even if I were the lowest loser in the world, I would still have that over others, which just makes it all that much worse.

Living is its own massacre...

There are two pieces of information that I have been recurrently stumbling into online:

1)Super Columbine Massacre RPG

2)An interview with Jeff Vogel about his disdain and loathing of RPGs

What these two things have in common (besides ending both with "RPGs") is somewhat idiosyncratic on my part, but I think it is telling of an aspect of video gaming culture.

Concerning #1, it's more about the reaction to it than the game itself. For some reason, I peruse the same archived comments about the game once every blue moon, and I always think of the same thing: that people do not understand what games are ideally supposed to be. #2 drives me to this very same conclusion.

It's ironic to me that an interview with someone who created (I think) the first independent PC-RPGs of decent production value, and yet does not appreciate the medium in a poetic sense. His words seem to always come down to the fiscality of creating RPGs; hence the irony.

Indie game development has always seemed to me to be like indie music. It's not a commercialized endeavor, and it isn't a focus-group alchemy project. That is, I have never associated independent games with being about trying to be catchy or kitsch. They were always about the joy of creating a game, or the personality that can be infused into sometimes very simple engines. And the idealist in me thinks that indie games should be about nothing more than artistic expression in that way.

But back to the Columbine game. 90% or more of the comments berate the maker, and talk about how it's a horrible capitalizing on violence, how it is exploiting a violent event. But these are all from people who don't know anything about the game or its creator, because it's blatantly obvious if anyone took a second to look into it that it is not about that at all. The guy made the game as a personal study of the event, to put it into some kind of context, and to delve into the motivations and horror of it all. It was an exploitation of Columbine as much as American History X was an exploitation of racism. It's just a completely ignorant and retarded point of view.

So, on the one hand is a game that was made soulfully (albeit crappily) to raise consciousness about a school shooting, and on the other is the disappointingly pragmatic view of someone who views the indie game industry in the same light as corporate game makers. It's all about the violence, and it's all about the money.

No matter how erudite people try to be, the mass majority of them are, at their base, so pathetic in their ignorance.

The funniest parts of these two different examples sparks the same kind of disappointment in me. While people always think they are so fully versed in the ways of the world, and in the ways of gaming, they always fail to see what games are really about. But it's more than that. It isn't that people don't respect or fully understand games; they do not fully understand or appreciate the value of expression. People are just stupid, plain and simple. They lack the instruments to think about subjects in an artistic way.

So, I guess it all comes down to the masses being mindless wastes of humanity.

Ache

I want to move with the labyrinthine waves
snaking through our last days...
But I feel the ocean pulling hard
the vision through a cracking shape.
My voice is underneath the rain;
my heart is low in chains.