| the blog of human failure
In college I minored in Philosophy. The reason I did that was because at my university you could take any five random Philosophy courses and be granted a minor in it. We’ll get to that in a second. What you’ll learn in any run of the mill freshman Philosophy course, besides that god doesn’t exist and how to be a real asshole about it (”I mean, I can’t prove that there’s no invisible blue fire-breathing dinosaur in the room with us, but that doesn’t mean I have to be agnostic about invisible blue fire-breathing dinosaurs, am I right? So what are you ladies doing after class…”), is that there’s probably no free will in life whatsoever.
To break it down simply, we are physical systems and more specifically our brains are physical systems. Because of this they are subject to natural physical laws of cause and effect from and to other physical systems. Something stimulates my brain, a chemical process occurs, and my body reacts. There is no room for the idea of free will if humans are just devices of automatic reaction. “Well what about my soul?” you ask, voice quivering, bangs and tears in your eyes, trapper-keeper pulled tightly into your crossed arms against your chest. “Well where is your soul located?” your philosophy professor will undoubtedly ask. You’ll soon learn that your soul is riding atop an invisible blue fire-breathing dinosaur in the good place that is no place.
I bring this up because if we do indeed have no free will then me being a lazy piece of human garbage is either a genetic condition that I have no escape from or the result of environmental factors that I have no control over. I would otherwise feel horrible that friends and strangers alike seem to be working hard - living interesting, vital, and meaningful lives - but I know that the inability to work hard is just a condition of my natural being. I’m cursed by the fact that I’m a human and self-aware, because otherwise I would have no way of being cognizant of how worthless I am. Thank god that my laziness naturally tilted the table of life so I would roll gently towards a minor in Philosophy to find out I had no hand in making myself the useless person that sits in this chair today. It also helps knowing there’s nothing I can do about it.
The only bad part is that occasionally some scab shows up who asserts that he used to be a lazy person but then he “got his life on track,” and started working hard. I’m perfectly willing to accept that through the randomness of life some disparate factors coalesce and make people start working harder. I guess I just hate how they get to be self righteous afterwards and that they start rationalizing the change in themselves they had no volition in creating. It was no more your free will that got you into that car accident then it was your free will that made you go to physical therapy every day, so stop bragging about it.
As a side issue, if someone is acquitted of a murder for reasons of insanity, shouldn’t that verdict also apply to all of his previous parking and speeding tickets? If he couldn’t help killing someone he certainly couldn’t help not moving his car between 8am and 6pm. The defendant should get that money back to pay for his future counseling.
Here’s a topic I’m curious to get some varied opinions on. Can you masturbate to a pornographic video where the protagonist of your sex is a different race than you are? For instance if you’re a Black man, could you jerk off to a video where the male sex partner was White? What about Asian? What about a very dark skinned Latin person?
*As a quick aside, can anybody get off to two dimensional pictures anymore? I feel like even the most hardcore and specific pictures found in magazines and the internet are only little sticky notes spread around the world by the gods to remind you to masturbate to videos later, when you get home from work. Similar to the way walking by the hotdog cart reminds you that you haven’t eaten dinner.*
To keep things simple let’s deal with sex between one man and one woman. So that I don’t leave anybody out, I think you can replace the word “Man” in all of the following descriptions with “Boston Terrier” and my point still applies. When it comes to women in porno movies, most heterosexual guys can deal with almost any race under the sun. While they obviously have their preference about shape and size of different body parts, for a good portion of men the color of that vessel is not really terribly important. However, I have a pet theory that most men can’t masturbate unless the color of the penis on screen vaguely resembles the color of their own penis. What’s odd about this is that the rest of the person doesn’t resemble you; even the rest of the penis doesn’t resemble your penis. It’s usually a different size and shape and it has completely different tattoos. You would really have to freak out if you saw another penis in a porno with the same tattoos as your penis. I know I would be cutting it back to half an Ambien if I had a hunch my penis was out moonlighting without my permission. That is, unless the tattoo was something incredibly common, like barbed wire or “Mom.”
My best guess is that it would be pretty easy for a dark skinned Black person to jerk off if the male was a light skinned Black guy. I imagine most White men would be able to get there if the man was Asian. I bet almost every guy could deal with a Latin guy doing the fucking. It seems odd for a guy to put so much emphasis on the man in a heterosexual porno movie but that’s supposed to be your stand in. The fantasy is that this is you having sex with this beautiful woman and it’s impossible to get past the fact that you’re not a seven foot tall, 45 year old Filipino guy. You’re not even close.
Seeing how important the guy is in a straight porn film, I believe that there should be films with guys covered in Swastikas to appeal to neo-Nazis. They shouldn’t be able to get off watching a porno where the guy has ambiguous feelings about Blacks, Jews, and Catholics. I wonder how they would feel if the woman was obviously a Black, Jew, or Catholic. I suppose as long as he was sort of rough with her.
Oh, and for gay men, what if one of the dudes was your race, but the other was a disparately colored race. Seems simple enough, just associate yourself with the one that’s your race. But what if you are emphatically a bottom, and the person of your race is topping the whole movie? What if you’re Latin and it’s a Black guy and a White guy on screen; who do you root for then?
If you’re married, would your spouse be comfortable with you masturbating to a porno where the person of the opposite sex as you is a different race than your spouse? For instance say you’re a woman and you and your husband are both White. Would you be comfortable with your husband watching a porno with a White man and a Black woman? I imagine it would have to sting. What about a Black man and a White Woman? What about a Black man and a Black woman? What the fuck is he thinking about there?
How about this, you’re a Black man and you catch your White wife watching a porno with one Black woman and two Asian men. Do you wish one of the guys was Black? Both of them? How could it matter?
It’s difficult for me to put myself in the role of the woman when it comes to this idea of the self being reflected in porno watching. If she’s White does she have trouble relating to a Latin vagina? Perhaps for women it’s more of a white or black breast thing. It could be that they have some totally different priorities when watching a porno and they don’t care at all what race the woman is, only what race the guy is. If that were true it would seem that women don’t really need to be in porno movies at all, considering where everyone’s focus is.
Ok, just one more. What if you’re a White necrophiliac and the living one in the video is Black? What if you’re Asian, the perpetrator is Latin and the corpse is decomposed beyond racial recognition? What’s wrong? You can’t get off? Racist!
Can we all come together and admit that the only reason we’re not allowed to eat each other is because of outdated customs and superstition? I can’t be the only one around here wondering what everyone else tastes like. I’ve thrown over a quarter of my life away and I have even tried anyone. I love biting my nails and the dead skin off of my hands. Is there any doubt that this would taste better in larger quantities grilled over charcoal with a dry rub, and if it were somebody else’s hand?
Now let’s not go crazy. I’m not suggesting that we go chopping off people’s hands and feet and those delicious looking undersides of their thighs. What I am suggesting is that homeless people should be fed to each other until this country can safely claim that no man, woman, or child goes to bed hungry every night. “Well, they’ll be well fed,” you say. “But they still won’t have any place to live.” I have one word for you, my friend: bonehouses.
Aerosmith suggests that we “eat the rich,” but how feasible is that? Not a chance in this anarcho-capitalist society. The rich know what a satisfying meal they would make for the proletariat and they’ve built up big walls around their fortresses, bathing themselves in honey-mustard sauce all day, laughing at our misfortune. While as in contrast, the homeless are sitting outside.
“Well that’s bully for the homeless, but what about the average working class Joe like me,” you say. “Where can I get a slice of Peter pot pie?” I can understand your concern. You wouldn’t pet the homeless, much less eat them. However, people are having limbs removed left and right all over this country, which as far as I know aren’t being taken home to be shellacked and mounted as souvenirs. Would it be crass to suggest opening restaurants in the VA hospitals? Disrespectful? Next to the VA hospitals. Seems downright patriotic to me.
That’s good meat friends. You don’t have to be honoring Quetzalcoatl or lost in the Sierra Nevada to admit you want a taste. Enough with the elaborate ruses! But please no having children just to leash them to a stake to be fattened up like veal and then eaten. I don’t care what these pro-choice people tell you, this is at best tacky and at worst some kind of misdemeanor. However, anything that comes out stillborn is up for grabs. And I think we’re about done here.
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