#373

Fucking losing my mind over here. But what else is new? This is Factually Pointless, the free and easy ravings of a madman undergoing existential mastication. Rejoice, brethren! We are the eternally digested, breaking down together in the great roiling stomach of this universe. 

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You see a lot more fake bullshit these days, but that's a) kinda relative and b) if you are of any kind of advanced age, say, older than fourteen, and have ever so much as looked at internet, you should have prepared yourself well for this level of saturation. I get that this is not a very reasonable outlook. We are all built to pay attention to very different things in very different ways, from the obscurely particular to the embodied universals.

My policy is to assume that if an institution--let's say, a governmental organization or representative or representative body, or if you prefer, a media outlet--is putting out deepfaked shit or is addressing the social issue of fabricated content less than adroitly and intelligently, then they know goddamn well what they're doing and projected ignorance must be construed as feigned. I don't accept the kind of fucking incompetence I see out there as legitimate. Safer in the long run to consider it a manipulative stratagem.

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I may be a no-name idiot with no standing at all in this world, but I don't have to be a fucking sucker into the bargain. If I am tricked, let the trick be justifiably sophisticated. If I am subject to powers I cannot resist, let them at least have to exert their irresistibility. I'm not here to make things easy for anybody that wants to fuck me up or own me. 

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Feels good to write that, but what hope do any of us have? 

Only hope itself, I guess, and whatever paths our particular hopes can illuminate. Only what keeps us going.

Whatever we do, we are not lost if we hope. In hope, nothing is in vain, and no defeat is total.

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We cannot know the mind of God, so I would say that my actual leap of faith as Kierkegaard would have it is throwing myself as completely as I can, all my life, into the truth of the prior two sentences. It is easy for me to believe the inscrutable universe has no regard for us whatsoever. I can accept that and understand life, having lived, as an even trade. In context, however, in the human particulars of what it is to have lived as part of a narrative--a narrative, that is what is crucial here--I cannot and will not accept the narrative as shitty. I say it's a good story. I say it was worth telling no matter how it ends, how many fucked up evil details make it hard to stomach. That's my leap of faith. That is what I am a knight for, again, in Kierkegaardian terms.

--JL