I disagree with perhaps 50% of what this guy writes, but this is one of the better explanations for why the humanities are indispensably important to a functioning society.

“The entertainment industry,” and to a lesser extent “the marketing industry,” provide more direct windows into the structure of things, because they are the facets of the illusion modeled more closely after its authors. More clearly, when we consider the openly-acknowledged stories the powerful tell, we can see them following the same patterns they use in larger-scale storytelling. Nations, and history, are shaped much like bad screenwriting, and the inability of most people to understand narrative manipulation–to read and understand complex stories–is the same handicap that prevents them from figuring out what’s really going on around Earth. Understanding how stories are discovered, transmitted, and experienced (“written/created, read, and analyzed”) helps us figure out what most people are missing, and why they’re so easily manipulated–and gives us insight into how they might learn to demand better stories, both in their personal entertainment and in their outer world.

I could elaborate on that, but why? Nothing I could say would make it any better.

I think the Occupy movement’s debt jubilees are by far the most subversive thing they have ever done. Compared to the protests which were basically these days the equivalent of putting a bag of burning poop on someone’s porch and ringing the doorbell, the debt actions have an actual chance of making a difference.

Good to see.

Last night I finally figured out why Microsoft ruined Server 2012 with the terrible Metro interface.

If there is anywhere a touch-based interface intended a phone or a tablet doesn’t belong, it’s on an enterprise-class server.

So why do it?

It’s because the server product is 99% the same as the desktop OS. If they hadn’t burdened Server 2012 with the horrendous Metro atrocity, people like me could take Server 2012, remove the server bits and turn it into a good desktop OS. (Many people actually did this with Server 2008 during the Vista debacle.)

So a company is so dumb that they’d ruin their server product to sell a few more tablets. Sure, makes sense to me.

All humans have big egos. Some are better at pretending that this is not the case than others.

It takes a big ego to continue existing in a fundamentally-pointless universe. Of course we imbue the universe with meaning – that’s what I as a secular humanist believe – but even believing that is itself an expression of the hauteur of sentience.

Looked at logically, the most sane response to life is to kill yourself immediately.*

Things will not work out; death is inevitable.

It’s a good thing not one human is truly logical, then, isn’t it?

*No, I am not depressed. In fact, I am quite happy. However I am not normal in any way and do not have many typical human emotions and responses. Not suppressed – they just do not exist. Diagnosing me in a normal way will not produce any truth, only a mirror reflecting yourself.