If it comes–and if those whose poisonous, unhinged verbiage has been so ubiquitous this week have any say over it, it surely will–this is how it will happen: not with tanks and jackbooted storm troopers, but carried in the hearts of men and women dressed in comfortable shoes, with baseball caps, and What Would Jesus Do? wristbands. It will be heralded by up-dos, designer glasses, you-betcha folksiness and a disdain for big words or hard consonants. 

If fascism comes, it will spring from the soil of middle America, from people known as values voters but whose values are toxic, from simple folk whose simplicity, far from being admirable, is better labelled ignorance, from ‘all-American’ types whose patriotism is a dagger pointed at the very heart of the national interest, for it so forsakes all the best principles upon which the republic was founded, choosing instead to elevate and ratify the narrow-mindedness, the bigotry, and the intolerance that also marked our country’s origins. 

If fascism comes, it will be ushered in by tailgaters at the big football game, by Joe Six Pack, who, upon finishing his sixth beer and belching forth the stench of a mediocre life lived, will gladly announce its arrival, so long as it comes with a steady supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon and hot dogs on the grill, and giant foam hands with a ‘We’re Number 1’ finger, some Mardi Gras beads and a good titty bar. 

If fascism comes it will dress like a hockey mom, or a NASCAR dad. It will believe Toby Keith to be an artist, Larry the Cable Guy to be a comic, and that the world was made in six literal days less than 6000 years ago. 

If fascism comes it will come from the small towns; the ones Sarah Palin, quoting a famous racist and Jew-hater, said ‘grow good people,’ and which occasionally do, but which, just as often grow provincial, isolated, fearful and superstitious ones. 

If fascism comes it will come from faux populism, from anti-immigrant hysteria, from persons who have more guns in their homes than books, or whose books, when they have them, are principally volumes of the Left Behind series, several different copies of the Bible, and a plethora of romance novels. 

If fascism comes it will be welcomed, lock stock and barrel by persons who pray at every meal to a God they visualise as white, whose son they also think was white, and who they believe is going to rapture them all into the sky upon the blowing of some heavenly trumpet, after which point all those who don’t think as they think will be burned in an eternal lake of fire. Their vision and version of God is itself fascistic–to love a God who would do such a thing is to love an abusive, sadistic and evil deity after all–so it should come as little surprise that their conception of the state would be equally authoritarian or worse. 

If fascism comes it will be at the behest of those who hold a contempt for what they call ‘book learnin,’ who prefer Presidents who mispronounce basic words because they make them feel smarter, and who are looking for nothing so much as a commander-in-chief with whom they would enjoy having a beer, or two, or twelve at some backyard barbecue. 

If fascism comes it will be interviewed, lovingly, on talk radio, by hosts whose cerebral inadequacies are more than made up for by their bellicosity, their bombast, their willingness to shout down those with whom they cannot argue, for argument requires knowledge, and this is a commodity with which they have not even a passing familiarity. 

If fascism comes it will come wrapped in red, white and blue, carrying a crucifix and a shotgun, projecting its own sexual confusion and insecurity onto others, substituting volume for veracity and rage for reason, and landing on the New York Times best-seller list as a result. 

If fascism comes it will have a pyjama party at Ann Coulter’s house, pop pills with Rush Limbaugh, and go gay-bashing with Michael Savage, all in the same weekend. And it will refuse to learn another language or get a passport, because doing either of those would make one cosmopolitan–which is just another word for ‘faggot.’ 

If fascism comes it will come because a lot of people who aren’t like the folks I’m talking about here, won’t stand up to the ones who are. Because we’re too busy, don’t want to make waves, don’t want to lose friends, or alienate family. It will come, in other words, because those who know better are cowards, more concerned with getting along, making nice, and being liked than with telling the truth, calling out evil and saving their country.

If fascism comes it will come because of the silence, and thus, collaboration of those who think themselves good, and certainly superior to the knuckle-draggers they can see on YouTube at the McCain rallies, but who in the end are no better and in some ways worse than they: after all, at least fascists stand up for what they believe in. They are telling us, in no uncertain terms what kind of United States they want and are willing to fight for, and maybe even to kill for. But many ‘progressives,’ many liberals, many of the so-called enlightened are doing nothing at all. 

If fascism comes it will come because those liberals thought voting for Barack Obama was all they needed to do; it will come because they allowed themselves to believe that politics is what a person does every four years, but not at work, and not in the neighbourhood, and not at the dinner table. Meanwhile, know-nothings filled with hate, nurtured on racial and religious bigotry and who have overdosed on the kind of hypernationalism that has always proved fatal to those places foolish or craven enough to allow it a foothold, talk of their visions for America at every opportunity. They raise their kids on that sickness, they build churches whose very foundation is rooted in that cancerous rot, and they will think nothing of steamrolling those who get in their way. 

So when, exactly, do we fight back? When do we say enough? When do we stand up to our relative or friend who sends us the e-mail about Obama being a Manchurian Candidate or al-Qaeda sympathiser, or the one about the decency of Midwestern flood victims as opposed to those stranded after Katrina, or about how God was punishing New Orleans because of its tolerance of homosexuality, and tell them what we think: namely, that they are a bunch of racist, heterosexist loons, whose friendship or familial connection we neither want nor intend to pursue unless they get help. When do we decide that we love our country and humanity too much to allow these people one more day of decent sleep, one more day of self-assured confidence in their craziness and the willingness of the rest of us to just take it? When do we decide that every irrational, Jeezoid, racist thing that comes from their mouths will be attacked, will be rebutted, until they can no longer take for granted the ability to say any of it in mixed company without being called out? 

Why, in the face of the fascism they would surely introduce if given the chance, are we intent on being so nice? Why are we not more offended? Offended not merely at what such persons say about others–like Obama, or Latino immigrants, or whatever–but even about we who look like them? After all, their open exhortations of racism presuppose that they are speaking for us, and that this kind of brain-dead ventilation is something to which all white folks should aspire as though it were virtually the essence of enlightenment. 

If fascism comes it will come because we did not see in their actions a sufficient threat, or because we allowed ourselves to believe that it couldn’t come, that our institutions were too strong, our people too good, for that to happen. If it comes it will come because we allowed ourselves to believe the rosy and optimistic version of America spun by Obama, without tempering that optimism with a clear-headed appraisal of the way that (sadly) a still huge number of Americans actually think: because we allowed the vehicle of our hopes to outrun the headlights of truth; because we convinced ourselves that we actually lived in the country of our aspirations, rather than the nation we have at present. 

And if fascism doesn’t come–if, rather, democracy does–it will come because good people said no. It will come because we saw in this moment the opportunity to demand the full measure of our humanity and to pour it forth upon the national soil. It will be because we understood that democracy isn’t what you have, it’s what you do. But if we are to issue that demand, if we are to stand straight and fulfil the potential we possess to do justice, we had best exercise the option quickly, for the opponents of justice are on the move. They are preparing to enter on the winds of our silence and indifference, and complacency. Let them find no quarter here.

Let me explain.

I love group play, I love questing, and I love RPG mechanics, so MMOs are simply the best option available to me at the moment (and for the last 10-12 years). However, I despise the spastic, chaotic mess of thousands of players running about and casually beating or blasting things into oblivion. I only want to cohabit the world with my friends. A world which is story-heavy and thick with atmosphere. A Bethesda or BioWare campaign geared towards multiple users.

The Neverwinter Nights series doesn’t count: the campaigns were awful; it was all about the toolset.

I want this in the RPG, RTS, and FPS genres: cooperative campaigns. Why there hasn’t been anything like it since Baldur’s Gate II, I’ll never understand.

In fact, companies should design and issue these tests themselves. In this way, employers get exactly what they need and intellectuals need not waste their time with methods of education less effective than their own epistemophilia.

I breach this subject now because Delanie and I are seeking our own residence in order to spare ourselves the irritating and hindering idiosyncracies of our present company, and if we rely on her income alone while I spend all of my time writing and researching, our efforts are bound to be inordinately delayed and/or bear less than helpful results.

My writings will sell when complete, I am confident of that, but it has become excessively apparent that the interim will continue to be intolerable and harmful without our privacy.

However, there are circumstances in which the quantum can have a very immediate effect on the macro world, and it is these differences that would immediately stand out to us. For instance, our thoughts depend on mechanisms at or very close to the quantum level, to such an extent that actions such as lifting your arm, which is a very macro action indeed, are very rapidly expanded from almost ridiculously smaller neurological events at the quantum level. That is, a single neuron firing rather few ions and electrons produces quite a large effect very quickly, and the level of observational indeterminacy here suggests that for every thought a brain produces, there is a universe in which the thought is different. Just as there is a universe in which one of the photons currently entering your left eye takes a slightly different course, so, too, is there a universe in which you have already stopped reading this.

How this relates to my fiction is that I try my best to not write anything impossible. I try to derive it all from imagining quantum differences, which includes thought (thus choice) as well as natural law.

Natural law, of course, is where this all becomes very difficult. We cannot, for instance, with much confidence, suggest that a universe must exist in which the Milky Way has already collided with Andromeda, as there may not have ever been a point in time at which the event determining the speed of this process was indeterminate — or it may be dependant upon one or many event(s) which, if different in any way, would have destroyed the possibility of the two galaxies existing at all. On a smaller scale, it is difficult to suggest that there is a universe in which the Titanic struck the iceberg yet failed to sink (because, say, metals are harder in this other universe), only that there is a universe in which someone made a choice which made it possible for the ship to change its course early enough to avoid the iceberg, or that a very early quantum-level difference in the universe (perhaps necessarily in the Big Bang) allowed the climate to be warm enough that the iceberg was not there.

Needless to say, thought/choice is the easiest to justify, so most of the fiction is derived from that, as it is immediate in comparison to something that has to be traced back billions of years, which I also have a little bit of.

I recognise that most readers will/do/can not distinguish between what quantum mechanics allows to be possible and what it does not — neither do I, in comparison to even a first-year student in the subject — but this method keeps me interested and motivated.

’Enough is Enough’
A Thinking Ape’s Critique of Transsimianism

To further expound upon the topic of last week’s instalment, I will address the more specific claims of Dr. Klomp and his radical theory that has been gaining wider acceptance throughout the community. Once again I would like to thank our readers for sending in your fish bones and boar hides in support of this journalist’s campaign to expose Dr. Klomp’s transsimianist prattle for what it is: a collection of wishful thoughts out of keeping with any factual evidence.

The term ’transsimian’ is an abbreviation of of ’transitional simian,’ a concept Dr. Klomp has developed to describe an individual who is in an evolutionary transition from simian to post-simian, though Klomp himself admits that he is not entirely clear what a true post-simian would be. Characteristics exhibited by a transsimian include augmentation of one’s natural abilities with ’tools,’ as well as one’s mental capacities with what has been dubbed ’culture.’

Klomp’s primary argument rests on what he calls the ’Quickening,’ an imagined point somewhere in the future when the advancement of ’culture’ occurs so rapidly that its pace will far exceed that of biological evolution. In his own words,

’There will come a time when within a single generation we will develop one or possibly even two new ideas… Current advancements in the “bow” and “arrow” industries suggest an exponential trend in the expansion of our technological capacities. We are able to perform hunts in a fraction of the time it took our ancestors, thus freeing up valuable time to “think” of new ideas. In the post-simian world, we may develop into a species that is not only intellectually superior to our current state, but capable of feats beyond the comprehension of a contemporary simian.’

Pardon this author for not holding his breath.

Notice that Klomp cherry-picks discoveries to better support his argument of an exponential growth. It took more than a million years to develop fire and the hand-ax, and yet Klomp believes simply because it took only 2,000 years to develop bows and arrows that new inventions will spring up in even shorter timeframes. This theory is an expansion of ’Morg’s Law,’ which states that since a sharpened rock can in turn become a chisel to make an even sharper rock, that the sharpness of hand-axes will increase exponentially over the span of tens of thousands of years. While Morg’s Law has so far proven accurate, Klomp can’t escape the reality that there is an upper limit, namely that a rock can only become so sharp. We have already noticed a slight decline in the growth of hand-ax sharpness, but Klomp insists that when the potential of stone axes becomes exhausted, new materials will be discovered to replace the rocks and continue the exponential trend of sharpness. As of the time of this article, however, he has provided no evidence of what these miracle rocks are. Klomp also argues that there will come a time when we will use tools to create other tools, though naturally this is a laughable fiction since there has never been any recorded evidence of a tool making another tool, or even any records for that matter.

Another factor in Klomp’s post-simian world is the development of ’abstract thought’ that will be aided by

’the ability to store memories and thoughts outside our brains onto physical media, perhaps on flattened tree bark. To achieve this we will have to overcome the problem of turning words, which are sounds, into things we can see, but given current trends this is an engineering issue that will ultimately be resolved. This will be the real catalyst for the Quickening, when the memories of one generation will literally become immortal and then build upon the memories of the next, creating a sort of mass mind that experts in my field are calling “history.” In the post-simian world our era might even be referred to as pre-history.’

Here we see Klomp’s predictions descend from unsupported speculation to sheer fantasy. His recent cave painting, The Quickening is Near, explains in great detail different methods we may employ to transform words into some kind of visible format, but all are incomplete. The simple fact remains that words are sounds, not pictures, and no amount of wishing will change that. Even if such a thing were possible, it is doubtful that many would wish to store their memories externally. This author, for one, would prefer it if his memories stayed in his head and not on some cold, lifeless bark.

The most shocking of Klomp’s predictions, however, is that we apes will have little or no place in the post-simian world.

’As technological progress outpaces biology, new selective pressures will arise that will force our species to evolve mentally and physically beyond what we are now. This is the same trend that gave rise to our own intelligent species, but it will only accelerate in the coming generations. Our new environment increasingly favors higher dexterity and intelligence, and so the true post-simian will not be an ape at all. It will share some similarities with the modern ape, but at the same time possess capacities far beyond our comprehension. The thought capacity of a single post-simian could be greater than the combined brains of every ape in the world.’

More intelligent than an ape? Klomp fails to explain just what a post-ape can think of that we mere mortals cannot. The capacity of the simian mind is already far beyond any animal in the world: We are capable of using speech to let others know where we are, where to sleep and eat, and where to find shelter when it rains. Exactly how fast do we need our brains to be to figure these things out? When will we decide that enough is enough?

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that such a post-simian future is possible or even probable. Is it really a world we should want to strive for, where our very ape nature is stripped away in the name of efficiency? Technologies such as the bow and arrow already desimianise the act of hunting. While our ancestors were able to experience the pure ape feeling of clubbing an animal to death with a rock, we are left with the cold, sterilised bow that kills cleanly and quickly from a safe distance. This separation from basic daily activities is a slippery slope. What would happen if we no longer had to gather fruits and nuts, and they simply grew wherever we wanted them, or had drinking water flow right to our feet instead of wandering in search of streams for days? These seeming conveniences would rob us of what it means to be an ape. Klomp predicts that through a technology called ’hygiene’ we could extend the simian lifespan well into the late 20s or possibly 30s. What exactly will the post-simian do with all that time? Do we really want to live in a society populated by geriatric 27- year- olds? In living so long and spending so much time ’thinking,’ do we not also run the risk of becoming a cold, passionless race incapable of experiencing our two emotions (fear and not fear)? How much of our simianity are we willing to sacrifice for this notion of progress?

Rest assured that while Klomp may have accrued a recent following, there is no reality to his fantastic claims. What is concerning is the increasing number of young apes spending less time clubbing animals and more time ’inventing,’ ’thinking’ and ’creating,’ none of which contribute to the preservation of the simian way of life. These sorts of fads come and go, however, and this author is confident that in a short while everyone will have forgotten about Klomp and the notion of being anything more than an ape.

-Thog
Professor of Finding an Animal and then Killing It,
The University of the Woods

A single grain of sand exerts at least forty quintillion (40,000,000,000,000,000,000) times more gravitational force than would be exerted by a microsingularity produced by the combined mass of two atoms, because a singularity only exerts as much gravity as the mass which collapsed to form it, and a grain of sand is composed of approximately twenty quintillion silicon dioxide molecules (each composed of four atoms).

If the collider doesn’t feed it another atom within a googolsecond (ten duotrigintillionths of a second), it will evaporate and leave some leptons behind.

And since the Large Hadron Collider is intended for proton-proton collisions, we’re talking even smaller.

I sometimes express thoughts that many would consider logically dubious, but hysteria like this is just sinister neo-Luddite myth. Watch your step, and mind your head, as well. If you know that you do not understand science, be sure to not underestimate just what a dearth that is.

From white Irish male to orange German female. Go figure.

Because all the works of science simply cannot equal the beliefs of cattle-sacrificing primitives who thought every animal species in the world lived within walking distance of Noah’s house.

Third on my mental list of most pleasant activities. Absolutely fantastic. I wish you had been here, Delanie.

When I questioned people, it seemed to be a matter of pressure. When confronted with religious subject matter, people would endure it with visible displeasure or disinterest. Yet when it came down to reading ‘Do you believe in God?’ dramatically before them in black and white, they marked affirmatively, ‘just to be on the safe side’.

My mother was always one of these people. In conversation with a familiar person, she would say that she did not believe in her Protestant upbringing; yet in facing an unfamiliar person or a known Christian, it was always ‘Of course I believe in God!’ in fear of being seen as a ‘bad person’.

Lovely.

I have found this to be true of many people up to now, and today, on the Internet, it holds true. Does it not seem to you that most of the people you encounter online are agnostic/atheistic, whether they describe themselves as such or not? Either disbelieving, doubtful, or indifferent. One seems to have to search specifically for religious websites and forums to find a place where they are the majority.