So, apparently Morrisey is a hardcore racist right winger now.

As in, he supports a bunch of hateful asshats call the For Britain party, repeats anti-Islam bullshit talking points, and thinks that Nigel Farrage would make a good PM.

To be fair, though, he tried to warn us.

Now I was surprised by this, but not exactly shocked. Sure. Morrisey seemed left-wing for a while. but to me, he always seemed primarily just a selfishly self-regarding and vain and shallow person who learned to hide it by emoting sadness.

MST3K pretty much nailed it.

Holy crap, Mike Nelson is hot in that clip.

Come to think of it, he’s a racist right-winger now too. Life imitates art.

Anyhow, this is a phenomenon with which most people are all too familiar. Certainly all of those on the left know all about it. As people age, their politics shift to the right, and you never know what celebrity you formerly loved and respected will be revealed as having turned to the dark side next.

And it’s not a coincidence that this happens when people’s other mental faculties are declining as well. Conservatism is for stupid people, and it makes no difference whether that person has always been stupid or whether they have gotten that way via senility.

The basic action of conservatism is to substitute strong, primal emotions for thinking. That’s why conservatives’ speech patterns often seem disjointed and unstructured – they are not actually thinking, they are merely stringing together emotionally charged statements in order to create the false and temporary feeling of certainty they crave.

It also, of course, shields them from the true complexity of the world.

This is why they are so dependent on right wing media. Its job is to constantly and soothingly press those emotional buttons in a way that reassures the viewer that the world really is a simple and easy thing to understand and that all the people who say it isn’t are mean and evil and bad for making you feel scared and confused.

This mental decline leads to a moral decline as well. The two are intimately interconnected. As the mental faculties dwindle, the ability to support beliefs based in higher morality, like say humanism, dwindles too.

So the person regresses. Boom goes their adult ethics and what is left, sadly, is the cranky. selfish, cowardly, and cruel morality of a moral toddler.

The only difference is that these toddlers are old, rich, and can vote.

Like toddlers, their emotional response range is limited to either anger or approval. They are either mad about not getting their way or they are wallowing in the fatuous self-satisfaction of an infant who just soiled its diaper.

The one truth that is the most toxic to them is the truth that they are just plain too stupid to understand what is going on any more. All their other anti-reality reactions stem from the need to bury this one harsh truth as deeply as possible.

And while the temptation is strong to shove their stupidity back in their faces via mockery and irony, the truly dedicated and savvy left winger who genuinely wants to save the world from the Donlad Trumps and Doug Fords of the world must learn to exploit their mental weakness instead, and come up with equally emotionally charged and manipulative language of their own.

More on this later.

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Actually, I’ve lost interest in that topic. Sorry.

So this half of the blog entry will be about….

What normal people get out of being normal

This topic is, amongst liberal intellectuals like myself. just a little bit heretical. It flies in the face of our customary belief that weird is fun and good and normal is boring and bad and therefore there cannot possibly be anything good about being normal.

We have to make a virtue out of our uniqueness, if only to counter all the messages we have gotten about being weird and bad. We are rare and unique, like a pearl, not broken and wrong, like a soup spoon with a hole in the bottom.

It is only natural that by making a virtue of uniqueness, we ununtentionally create the crime of being normal.

But speaking as a heavily isolated weirdo myself, I can definitely see that normal people get a hell of a lot out of their normalcy, and I am honest (or clueless) enough to admit it.

Here’s a few things they get, off the top of my head :

1. Stability. Their world is a lot more stable than mine. By clinging to normalcy they get a surprisingly solid base on which to build their lives. and this gives them a kind of emotional stability I can only dream of.
2. Security. By sticking to the middle of the herd. normal people insure that there are the maximim possible sheep between you and any external threat. Normal, average folk don’t realize they are doing this, of course. It conflicts with our received indivualist values, and to go against those would be just plain weird.
3. Fewer options. This is both a virtue and a curse. But because they do not see the myriad possibilities in every situation that a creative intellectual like myself does, they both make their choices more easily and feel better about them after.

And probably lots more, but I am getting sleepy.

Contrast the life of a normal person with that of a radical genius like myself. Sure, as a mental wizard, I can do many things that would amaze and astound them, and many of them might well wish they could do what I can.

But what they do not see is how unstable. insecure, and indecisive I am. They see me walk through social walls and are astounded, but when the walls are not real to you, there is nothing to protect you from the cold. They see me easily solve problems that vex them mightily, but they don’t see how hard I find some very simple things that they would do just as easily.

Sometimes I wish I could trade places with them for a day, just so they would see what it is like to me and I could get a taste of that other world that shines bright in my mind.

I’d like to come in from the cold now, please.

Can someone show me the door?

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.