’Twas a dark and stormy night, they were all gathered around the campfire; “tell us a story Q!” they cried.  And the third installment of Q’s Brain Toilet went like this:

The State of Academic Science

I’ll start with a disclaimer in that I recognize there are other scientists here and their opinions may be vastly different, I’m speaking strictly from my own experience.  Simply put, overall it’s not good.  This isn’t to say there aren’t people out there doing great work, there definitely are, but while the physical sciences (and to much less of an extent, the life sciences) have been less affected by general campus insanity, they haven’t avoided it completely.  The wokification of campus continues its inexorable creep, transforming every nook and cranny and I fully expect even chemistry and physics departments to be teaching the new gospel of racist gravity or patriarchal stoichiometry in the near future.  You can see it in biology departments with trans-mania; how many biologists might privately hold unwoke opinions about how many genders there are but would never dream of actually making that argument in public?  I’m not even talking research here; I’m talking make an offhand wrongthink comment to someone other than family outside the confines of home.  Even tenured professors seem reluctant to openly hold unorthodox (read: non-Leftist) views on a whole host of ideas that would have been utterly non-controversial 20 or even 10 years ago.  Non-tenured?  Fuggeddaboudit.  SJW mobs, harassment, unemployment and unpersoning await those who dare step out of line.  Couple that with thought policing by grant funding agencies and you have an atmosphere of enforced conformity that goes beyond mere ideology; perception of reality itself must tow the Party lion.  Why bother doing original research at all when the Party tells us everything we need to know?  Taken together with the “publish or perish” philosophy that values quantity over quality, you have a giant circle jerk of researchers publishing papers as quickly as possible all saying the basically same things.  Don’t you dare question root assumptions or work from different premises; that’s racist and don’t you realize the Nazis did that?  Wanna see the future of academic science?  Look to meteorology and despair.  Fortunately for all of us, the major breakthroughs in medicine and technology in the past couple of decades have almost all come from evil profit driven private research anyway.  The campus, as we know it now, I believe will be dead in a couple of generations, and good riddance to it.  The last thing we need is more Lysenkoism.

Kids These Days and Their Music, Get Off My Lawn!

This may seem like a trivial or simpleminded conclusion, but I have the answer why modern music always sucks.  Time is a glorious crucible that burns away irrelevancy, and the further you get away from a particular era of music, the more the impurities and bullshit get burned away leaving you with the good stuff.  I may think that the current incarnation of hybrid hip hop/R&B/electronica is intolerable swill, however there are a few songs and artists among the pile of auditory crap that are not half bad.  Perhaps 20 years from now, the ratio of decent/shit will have gone up just due to the fact that “oldies” stations have to try and consolidate an entire era of music in one place.  Naturally, they’d want the best of the best.  As a late Gen X child of the 90’s, I have always greatly enjoyed grunge, but even at the time there was a fair amount of crappiness.  Now, however, if I listen to the Lithium channel on Sirius, it’s all only the best stuff, the crap jettisoned.  But no Ariana Grande.  Ever.  Self-important tweeny boppers that sing like a bag of cats set on fire should be exiled to South Georgia Island.

Advertising, Media, Outrage Porn and Despair

Apologies in advance to any Glibs that may work in the advertising industry, but my personal opinion is that, next to public employee leech-hood, advertising is the most immoral of all industries.  Classically, advertising is about informing potential customers about the virtues of a particular product and trying to convince them to buy said product.  Simple enough.  However, what’s the one biggest motivator for human behavior; bigger than morality, logic, sex, even basic needs like hunger and thirst?  Fear.  Advertising is about fear.  You have to make people scared to not buy your product.  Scared that they’ll be miserable without it, that there is some gaping deficit in their lives without it.  That’s the most effective advertising there is and, if done properly, it is damn effective.  As the art of the ad has gotten more and more sophisticated over the decades/centuries, it would only be natural for other industries to pick it up.  The news media has been at it for a long time; so much so that it’s a joke.  “Welcome to local news on channel 4.  This common household product is something everyone uses all the time.  But it’s probably killing you.  Stay tuned after this break to learn more.”  Look at the dysphoric TDS-gasms endlessly being peristalsed on our collective faces by corporate media.  Sure the journalists are lunatics, but man do their hysterics get them eyeballs.  Trump singlehandedly saved the New York Times.  If Shrillary had been elected, they’d probably already be digital only.

That’s why I think SJW virtue signaling is driven much more by fear than by the delicious frubbles of self-righteous indignation.  The self-righteousness is a nice bonus and gives the troo bleevurs the little dopamine shots their barren and wasted lives depend on, but fear is the true motivator.  Fear of how others might perceive them, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of ending up in the outgroup; after all what’s “virtue signaling” if not advertising?  It’s right there in the name; “signaling”!  As anyone whose life is completely driven by “keeping up with the Joneses” their existence is that of a desperate, empty husk deeply in Kierkegaardian despair.  All style, no substance; just endless advertising the existence of a soul that isn’t there.

NB: I may think advertising is immoral, but I love it.  For one, it’s a natural outgrowth of capitalism; can’t have one without the other.  Further, it’s very instructive and character-building to learn that self actualization can’t be bought and that skepticism is vital to a healthy existence.  Caveat emptor is one of the most important lessons anyone can learn, and it doesn’t apply only to advertising.  To that end, thank you advertisers for helping make the beauty of capitalism function and for teaching me important life skillz.  

FIN.

This is Q, signing off.  Remember kids, don’t stay in school, it’s dumbed-down government indoctrination. And c’mon people, why would you neuter your pets?  Let poor fido keep his balls!  How would YOU feel if our alien overlords decided they needed to keep their stray human numbers down and started spaying and neutering like crazy?  I don’t think you’d be very happy!