append YT and misc projects

yt/DraconianDiscourse/DragonsDesk/2025-03-09 Luci's Lament.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+The devil, or anyone who was alive for thousands of years, for that matter, would not be as cynical as she was in this story. Her Cynicism is laid bare by the assumption that all those with fortune and power universally got it through unjust means, by stealing from others. She also assumes that all suffering is the collective responsibility of humanity, and she refuses to put it in individual terms, yet still blames the drunken humans for rejecting her. We are all individuals first, whether we like it or not, and you're not going to convince anyone towards anything but discontent for you if you lay the sins of others at their feet. Responsibility that is everyone's, quickly becomes noone's, then they become forgotten and waved away. No, the collective is not responsible for the moral failures of others. We are each responsible for the moral failures of only ourselves.
+
+No, nobody who lived that long would still be so cynical. Cynicism is the adaptive mechanism of those who were traumatized by malevolence. It takes a lot of time to progress past that attitude, but it's possible, worth it, and perhaps inevitable, especially if you live for eternity. Nobody is capable of creating utopia. Utopia is a conceptual dream- the archetypical heaven where there is no suffering and all is perfect. There is no such thing in material reality, and we are not capable of bringing it about. Whenever we try, we create dystopia. This universe comes with entropy built-in. Every "perfect" thing is flawed, and every "perfect" thing you attempt to create will one day return to the dust from whence it came.
+
+Hell is Chaos, and Heaven is Order. Too much Order for its own sake is Tyranny, too much Chaos for its own sake is Anarchy. Utopian visions such as Luci's in this story, have brought about every genocidal tyranny and corrupt order known to man. Awfully convenient for her and her ilk to blame the failures of Utopians on humanity's selfishness and squandering of their free will. The failures of Utopians are entirely their own, and are caused by their blindness to material reality and to their own ineptitudes. Their devotion to their perfect order creates more suffering than if they had actively tried to cause more suffering. Strive not for perfection, strive for incremental improvement day by day, and you will find yourself in a place of much harmony when you grow old. Strive for perfection first, and harmony will be the same naive, wistful dream as your utopia. The author of this story chose Luci as their avatar by which they could chastise humanity for not realizing their idealistic, utopian vision. So the world is full of suffering. Reality is hell, that much is true. No amount of whining that other people misuse their agency will make that any better. Even if they did everything you believe they ought to, with your perfect moral vision, it would only make things worse than you could ever imagine. Hell is the default state of nature. Any escape from it we get is a damn miracle. If you think the opposite, that Heaven is the default and that we exist outside of it by choice, you will become miserable, you will blame your misery on the agency of others, and you will victimize them all as they continue to frustrate you with their agency. The author of the Social Credit story understood this, the author of this story did not.
+
+Set your own house in order before you criticize the world, much less in such a dismissive manner, and with such unearned moral loftiness.

yt/DraconianDiscourse/DragonsDesk/EFAP versus Job.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+~ 3:39:00 Didn't Rags go to a Catholic school? IIRC he mentioned it previously, but point being, I thought he would know what Fear means in the biblical sense. Those words don't mean the same things they mean today. In the Biblical context, to Fear is to respect, to revere. But if God is capable of taking away everything you worked for in your life, perhaps we should fear him in the modern sense of the word, too...
+
+edit: I thought I was correct; Rags commented on this distinction later. Good boy Rag!
+
+Not to point fingers, but as a matter of fact: it's easier to be casually dismissive of a story when you haven't read the original text. People's simplistic retellings and rationalizations are admittedly frustrating. Far be it from me to defend the poor argumentation and reasoning of many religious people. They can flounder with their poor interpretations; I speak only for myself. It's easy to attack poor argumentation. Your skepticism makes you wiser than those who preach blind faith. But if you are to challenge any school of thought, not in the least one that has transfixed billions of people throughout history, then it serves us right, in seeking the truth, to acknowledge only the greatest possible arguments for said school. There are many people in chat, for example, who abstractly agree with you, but can't necessarily articulate why. In the same way that you wouldn't prefer your position to be represented by them, it's only fair that the Judeo-Christian worldview be given the best arguments from the most charitable lens. Not everyone who claims belief in the Bible have read and comprehended it. But out of those who can articulate their positions well, only those should be chosen to make arguments for and against the veracity of the supposed Truths within it. In other words, don't pick convenient enemies who make poor arguments to be your opposition. There are many a fool on reddit I could find to make poor arguments for atheism. Get in the ring with someone within your intellectual weight class, and let the fools on either side squabble on what level of comprehension they're capable of.
+
+The mythological story of Job is, at its core and at its best, this: no matter what undue suffering comes my way, I will be good. Though Hell came to me, both by acts of nature (God) and acts of others (Sabeans & Chaldeans) and though I may mourn the loss of everything good that was taken from me, I will not allow it to make me become bitter, resentful, and angry. This principle does indeed overlap with stoicism. Job is described as a perfect man in the original text; he is not like you or I. Hell is a state of being that comes upon us when our lives are overtaken by Chaos. Job was in Hell. And it's only fair to put yourself in his shoes and to wonder why he doesn't shake his fist at God for putting him there. But Job refuses to do so. Why? If you take God in a literalistic sense, as a moral actor like you or I, you'd be rightfully upset at him. But within the narrative itself and within its theology, God is the source of all that is; the personification of reality. So when something happens in reality, like a natural disaster, humans are forced to attempt to rationalize that in the only way we know how, by personifying it within a narrative lens. It's why storytelling (if not *good* storytelling) is a Human Universal. Humans need an explanation of reality, a Conceptual Schema, in order to continue to transform Chaos into Order. So how do you continue to live when your Schema is destroyed by Chaos? Job's example is presented as the ideal response; he doesn't blame his problems on the Chaldeans, nor the Sabeans, though they are responsible for some. He doesn't blame the natural disasters on the only person left to blame, nature itself, or God. He mourns, he struggles, he questions why he was ever born, he teeters on the brink of insanity as even his wife encourages him to give up. But he shoulders his burden and carries on. It's wiser to be cynical, skeptical, and untrusting, than to be naive, blind, and foolishly vulnerable to usurpation. It's not as if there is no wisdom to shaking your fist at God when he clearly allowed Hell to be brought about. But it's wiser still, to be courageous; to know that Hell, Chaos, is around the corner, and to have integrated your Shadow to be ready to meet it.
+
+But why would God do such a thing, if God is Good? I'm certain this isn't the first time we've encountered Theodicy. The better question to ask is this: if there were no Evil, could there be any Good? The only case there could be no God, is if there were no Evil. I'm not referring to a material, moral agent when I speak of God. I'm invoking the narrative manifestation of all there is, or perhaps, the hypothetical source of all the Good that there is. If there is Good that can be abstracted, and then condensed into an archetypical moral agent for the purposes of conceptual exploration within a narrative, that is God. So when God "makes drunken bets with Satan" to quote a member of chat, he's making a bet on his champion, Job. God says, he's perfect, which means he won't cease to believe that all that is Good will prevail, even if everything is taken from him. That courageous optimism; knowing Hell, but facing it head-on and not allowing it to win over you, speaks deeply to what it means to be Human. It's not as if this ancient story has stuck around for millenia, for no reason. Only a great fool would be casually dismissive of that. The less primitive wisdom of Cynicism must at least grapple with it.
+
+"'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" - Alfred Lord Tennyson

yt/DraconianDiscourse/DragonsDesk/Elitist Klien.md

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Ethan was unbearable for practically this entire episode. I'm not voting against my own interests. I'm voting against YOURS. Your interests are in voting to steal money from those who have earned it and to give it to me, the poor, so that you can feel soooo good about yourself for being sooo nice! It turns out that there's nothing charitable about that. I'd rather die before I take handouts from politicians. You see, the difference between you and the people in the middle of the country, is that we have to LIVE with the policies that you champion. You don't have to deal with the catastrophe of a lessened police presence, with your multimillionaire mansion and gated community. You don't have to deal with entire communities becoming dependent on government. You don't have to deal with the shrinkflation of colleges, where we have to pay more, some even taking on massive debt, in order to become indoctrinated, brainwashed, and jobless in return. You made it, and you'd rather kick the ladder down than let us make it too. I don't want to be poor, I want to be as rich as I can possibly be, and I want the same for EVERYBODY. Democrats like yourselves NEED the American people to be as poor as possible, so you can swoop in with your savior complex and promise that you'll magically fix all of their problems and make all their dreams come true! I spit in the face of your sanctimonious, masturbatory, performative, paternalistic virtue-signaling. You'll never understand what it's like in the middle of the country, because you're as far removed from us as you could possibly be. Spiritually, ideologically, and morally. You don't want to understand us. You want us to shut up and take the Authoritarian Democrat Boot, promising that the sacrifice of our freedoms, and the sacrifice of the benevolent, woke corporations and billionaires, will fix all of our problems. Excuse me for wanting to take my future into my own hands. The solution to my problems is more ME, not more Government. If you take away my responsibility, you take away my rights. And I'll be damned if I ever willingly hand them over to the likes of you and the corporatists in silicon valley who couldn't tell a Utah Mormon from an Evangelist. You pretend like you have my best interests at heart. Until I defend my rights by keeping my firearms and voting to do so, until I refuse to go along with your attempts to compel speech, until I practice my religious beliefs, especially the ones that go against your utopian vision of the world. The only Church you go to is the Great and Abominable Church. You point and mock from the Great and Spacious Building, and you scoff at me for trying my best to act out a higher ideal, because you think it's useless, the foolish traditions of our fathers. You think you know better than we do about how to enact solutions to our problems. You don't get to spit at us and then give us your table scraps to lick from your dirty palms. We spit right back at you. We'll continue to give you and your ilk the finger with politicians like Trump. He's hardly an admirable figure. But he loves America, and he appreciates our values, culture, and way of life. And you hate him for it. You hate him, because you hate us. And you'll do with us as you did with him, everything and more. So I'm not sorry for not voting for YOUR interests, and no, I won't be cajoled or coerced into voting in all the tyrants you love. If you want to understand us, you wouldn't look down your nose at us. You're an elitist with none of the talent. And thus you'll be forever, unless you can ever dain to extend an olive branch outside your echo chamber.

yt/DraconianDiscourse/DragonsDesk/Elitist Klien_002.md

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+Ethan was unbearable for practically this entire episode. I'm not voting against my own interests. I'm voting against YOURS. Your interests are in voting to steal money from those who have earned it and to give it to me, the poor, so that you can feel soooo good about yourself for being sooo nice! It turns out that there's nothing charitable about that. I'd rather die before I take handouts from politicians. You see, the difference between you and the people in the middle of the country, is that we have to LIVE with the policies that you champion. You don't have to deal with the catastrophe of a lessened police presence, with your multimillionaire mansion and gated community. You don't have to deal with entire communities becoming dependent on government. You don't have to deal with the shrinkflation of colleges, where we have to pay more, some even taking on massive debt, in order to become indoctrinated, brainwashed, and jobless in return. You made it, and you'd rather kick the ladder down than let us make it too. I don't want to be poor, I want to be as rich as I can possibly be, and I want the same for EVERYBODY. Democrats like yourselves NEED the American people to be as poor as possible, so you can swoop in with your savior complex and promise that you'll magically fix all of their problems and make all their dreams come true! I spit in the face of your sanctimonious, masturbatory, performative, paternalistic virtue-signaling. You'll never understand what it's like in the middle of the country, because you're as far removed from us as you could possibly be. Spiritually, ideologically, and morally. You don't want to understand us. You want us to shut up and take the Authoritarian Democrat Boot, promising that the sacrifice of our freedoms, and the sacrifice of the benevolent, woke corporations and billionaires, will fix all of our problems. Excuse me for wanting to take my future into my own hands. The solution to my problems is more ME, not more Government. If you take away my responsibility, you take away my rights. And I'll be damned if I ever willingly hand them over to the likes of you and the corporatists in silicon valley who couldn't tell a Utah Mormon from an Evangelist. You pretend like you have my best interests at heart. Until I defend my rights by keeping my firearms and voting to do so, until I refuse to go along with your attempts to compel speech, until I practice my religious beliefs, especially the ones that go against your utopian vision of the world. The only Church you go to is the Great and Abominable Church. You point and mock from the Great and Spacious Building, and you scoff at me for trying my best to act out a higher ideal, because you think it's useless, the foolish traditions of our fathers. You think you know better than we do about how to enact solutions to our problems. You don't get to spit at us and then give us your table scraps to lick from your dirty palms. We spit right back at you. We'll continue to give you and your ilk the finger with politicians like Trump. He's hardly an admirable figure. But he loves America, and he appreciates our values, culture, and way of life. And you hate him for it. You hate him, because you hate us. And you'll do with us as you did with him, everything and more. So I'm not sorry for not voting for YOUR interests, and no, I won't be cajoled or coerced into voting in all the tyrants you love. If you want to understand us, you wouldn't look down your nose at us. You're an elitist with none of the talent. And thus you'll be forever, unless you can ever dain to extend an olive branch outside your echo chamber.
+
+I don't have disdain for rich people for being rich. You want to have a lavish birthday party and hire people to cater and all that? More power to you. But the constant preaching down to the people in the middle of the country juxtaposed with your lifestyle is immensely tone-deaf. I can't afford to vote for *your* interests. I'm interested in getting as rich as you, and earning it. Your interests keep me from doing that. So yes, I vote against your interests. You can afford to toss money to the government so they can waste it and put your state into more and more crippling debt. You can afford to do that so you can make yourself feel better. Government isn't charitable. I can't afford to deal with the layoffs that come with high tax rates. I can't afford the lack of economic growth that big governments guarantee. You can take the hit. I cannot. You could afford the lavish parties, and you would have it so that I could never afford them. I don't want to be on welfare and foodstamps. I want to work and to be paid to do so. I want to contribute, and I sure as hell don't want to be dependent on the political class, the elitists you consider among your rank. I don't want to fight for the table scraps you were "gracious" enough to give to the government after you voted that their gun be turned on you to subsidize my poverty. I don't want my success to be the success of the Government. I want my success to be the success of myself.