The year is 2060. It’s illegal to weigh less than 300 pounds. Copyright has been extended to every atom of the universe with an infinite term. Mark Zuckerberg is god-king and Neuralink interfaces monitor everyone for thoughtcrime and charge $10 for every copyrighted thought (all of them). Cockroach milk and bugs are free in the work pods.

Liberals declare this utopia because we’ve achieved true equality.

I’ve been thinking more and talking with my partner more about the copyright “debate” lately that’s been happening on Twitter. In a lot of ways, it’s not fair to argue or parry those people’s pitiful attacks, because they are nearly intellectually unarmed. They know no history, have no grasp of scholarship in the field, and are wholly unsuited to looking beyond their very narrow parochial interests.

However, they hold sway, and have an army of sycophants at the ready to spread their historically-dunderheaded and ill-sourced opinions. Since that is alas the case, something must be done to combat them, as distasteful is the task of suplexing mental three-year-olds might be.

Lately, I’ve been calling what these types broadcast anti-knowledge, because what they dispense mimics the silhouette of knowledge but doesn’t have any actual thought, scholarship or understanding backing it. It’s the same as the “knowledge” that the Trumpists have — it resembles the results of perception and judgment, but in fact is purely based on feelings. In this case, their feelings on how copyright should and (they believe) does work is just such a sentiment-based illusion of knowledge. It’s no different at all than the Trumpist’s feeling that the election was stolen, or that the vaccines don’t work, and it’s just as useless for reasoning about how society should function or even how it actually operates.

There are legitimate debates to be had about copyright. I’ve participated in many of them over the years, especially when one of my older blogs was much more popular. But it’s impossible to debate with anyone who believes the ethos should be, “Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are grabbing as much as they can, so I should be able to as well.” That’s not a position that anyone reasoned themselves into, thus it is impossible to reason them out of it. It’s not possible to form a better society with such people, because they literally cannot imagine it. Too much propaganda has filled too little brain-space. In the end, they just must be defeated.

There’s much more to say about this, but anti-knowledge is becoming more common now as polarization has increased. I think anti-knowledge back in the 1990s was about 20% of all “knowledge,” and now it’s about 70%. That has caused the discourse to deteriorate to an extent that most thought you find is based on nothing more than propaganda and wishful thinking.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

It’s not the best how on Twitter and other places any disagreement with a woman is framed as misogyny and sexism.

Just learned that #Wayland also prevents GUI applications from running as root. At this point, it doesn't even surprise me anymore. It feels like Wayland is made by people who want to make everything as cumbersome and complicated as possible. https://t.co/Kaxr12AyQU

— probono (@probonopd) March 6, 2021

Most of computing has moved this way in the last decade. It’s all fake security to take away user capabilites. That’s all it is — doesn’t actually increase security to any great degree, but grants control of your computer to some other entity (which is the whole point).

Don’t buy the Firefox (et al.) BS that it’s about making the user’s experience more secure and better. Trust me, I’ve been computerin’ a long time and it has absolutely nothing to do with that at all. If it did, there are far better ways to achieve that goal.

It’s odd that people believe they are “naturally” fat. I just saw this on someone’s Twitter feed, but I’m feeling more empathy than usual today so I won’t pillory them directly.

Sure, you are “naturally” obsese, in an obesogenic environment with billions upon billions of dollars of food company propaganda and widely-availble ultra-processed food, all where self-control and dignity are completely devalued. That’s as close as it gets to “natural,” but alright then.

But if people were forced to admit the truth then they might have to change something. Easier just to believe the pat and packaged explanation backed by mounds of disinformation than to believe that you are but an oily stain on the road, another corporate propaganda roadkill who has absolutely no self-mastery.