The Pantomime Of Online Expertise And Jump Cuts

Let me introduce you to a foe of mine. Mark. He’s almost like Mike but just different enough to be effective. He’s closer than a friend because I was told to keep him so. So close in fact I know exactly what he’s going to say. At any given time. Which has made making hypothetical TikTok's about my expertise all the more effective as of late.

Mark used to make a gainful living as a strawman. He got to rub shoulders with your favourite blue haired liberals on the campus and was trotted out every time the college educated needed an easy opponent to disarm and flay according to the precepts of progress. Like I said, he’s closer than a friend. Heaven knows a conservative couldn’t get a friend to be that kind of fall guy. But the progressives can. And do. And it doesn’t really matter where they progress to. Mark will be there. Doing what Mark does best. Simply put, what you do, but poorly.

That’s why Mark is so handy. Ever need a level one bad guy to trounce? Mark’s your guy. Ever need a bad argument said by someone as if it looks like a good one? Don’t worry, Mark has a doozy waiting to laugh at and see through like it weren’t a glass clown.

In fact, every time Mark comes out, I look great. And all it takes is a jump cut, and some lighting changes, and you would never know I was stating opinions instead of providing arguments. Which is the main problem with sites like TikTok. Sure, you can post your opinions. But even the simplest minds has been taught by their respective Dude’s, to abide in the rhetorical argument of “That’s just your opinion, Man.” or whatever you’re preferred pronoun is these days.

But with Mark in tow, anything can be framed as a story of good versus evil. Of for you and against us. And dammit, don’t we all love a good story.

While we’re on the topic of TikTok, there was a time when we had a grasp of what technology was and wasn’t replacing, and how. We knew the cotton gin was replacing individual workers. Which was fine, we would put them to work elsewhere. We knew that the robotic arm welder was replacing workers. But that’s fine, we’ll get them to work elsewhere. But what we didn’t see alongside the technological replacements, was a technical replacement. One made of technique instead of metal and motion. That technique being the largescale exposure and adoption of pantomime and double role acting.

200 years ago, in order for you to see two people arguing you needed two people. You needed at least two people. And while a stage might make the argument entertaining, it was a feature not a bug. The two people were definitely needed, because one person arguing with himself would have been a spectacle and not a debate. One person arguing for and against themself would have been cause for concern. Because one person can’t authentically argue with themself unless they have two personalities.

You could chalk that kind of duality of man up to all sorts of mental disorders, even demon possession. But you would never accept that a single person was honestly arguing with themself. Something must be wrong with them. But then social media gave us all a stage the way Shakespeare said it already was, and the real craziness started. Because now everyone can argue with themselves instead of having to argue with other people. Or did you believe the obvious lie that arguing with other people online was a fruitless endeavor.

Want to make post about your hair brained theory on religion, why debate an actual Christian when you can debate yourself, but from the other side of the condo. A Christian on the side of the condo might be able to prove you wrong. The very same way a Christian on the other side of the internet could. You would never prove you wrong though. Right Mark?

If you’re feeling a little uneasy right now, it’s because I touched something I wasn’t really supposed to. The fourth wall is fidgety that way. When you don’t know it’s there, the things between the other three can get away with just about any fantasy you could think of. But put a single fingerprint of logical fallacy on that fourth wall, and nothing inside holds sway anymore. What happens when you realize that, for entirely too long, you have been watching and learning from people arguing for their beliefs with themselves. Demonstrably disordered mentally by their public actions but socially accepted because “Everyone’s on TikTok these days.”

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.”

2 Timothy 4:3-4 KJV

Maybe that’s why it doesn’t matter what you search for on TikTok, you’ll end up finding naughty bits. Not because you’re looking for naughty bits. But because if people are crazy enough to talk to themselves for views, then they’re definitely crazy enough to mislabel mundane things for sexual attention.

In all of this, even Mark and I agree that listening to crazy people is likely a poor life strategy. So, take a good long look at who tells you what's real or true online. And ask yourself how that drama would unfold a dozen decades ago. Because if they would have been crazy then, they are still crazy now. You’re just more comfortable now that you know how nice the padded room is for ideological naps.

“Though this be madness yet there is method in it”

Polonius, Hamlet, William Shakespeare

BEDMAS, Abortion, And Autonomous Cars

The push for autonomous vehicles is being couched in a kind of noble language that would seem good, if not for the sinners involved. Plainly, the idea is that if there are 1000 deaths by cars in any given timeframe, and if autonomous cars can prevent 900 of these deaths from happening, that this is a good thing. Because the number of deaths has gone down. And that math can work with far fewer zeros if you let it as well. Until there’s only one death by car allowed out of ten that were prevented by the automation of driving. The main thing to note is that the numbers can be shown to go down from being up.

See? We have a graph. It’s easy to understand. You’re pro-life, right?

Why yes, I am. But I’m also anti-murder.

That’s the other part of the abortion debate. Whose language is being used here, whether the car automators know it or not. And the other part of the autonomous vehicle debate as well. Because what you don’t get when you ban abortions is less mothers killing their babies. That was actually never happening. What you got was mothers authorizing others to kill their babies. Usually, a doctor and a few nurses. We’ll throw in the medical staff who dispose of the babies as well. And the pharmaceutical staff who then turn the baby's stem cells into vaccines just for good measure. A conspiracy of people all planning to kill that baby.

The ban of abortion does not stop that mother from killing her baby. The likely hood of any mother doing that dirty work was always a small percentage of troubled mothers to begin with. It takes skill and constitution to use a knife yourself, against yourself. Which is why an industry sprang up around the troubled mothers. To provide services in place of the skill and convenience in place of the constitution. And all it took was a redefining of terms like “health care” and “reproductive freedom” and we had a way to kill babies for the sake of improving the quality of life for the mother.

You’re pro-life right? Like the Life of the mother we just improved?

Again, yes. but I am also anti-murder. And you haven’t made that number go down. You’ve actually multiplied it.

I get it. BEDMAS and all. You don’t have any brackets or exponents to deal with and have foregone the division that a Holy scripture would have given you, right down to the marrow and bone, had you submitted to its descriptions of what murder was. So, it was on to multiplication. An operation that gave you tangible results. The “life of the mother is saved by the abortion of the life that was going to ruin it. As long as we add a procedure here. A technique or method, a technology. We can subtract the problem and end up with remainder of one life. Math sure is a killer sometimes. But what does this have to do with cars?

Well, it’s the same math. Because murder is murder.

No brackets or exponents to deal with at the tech start up either. Just a problem that needs some basic math and understanding, that’s all. Divide and conquer. We want to get the number of kids run over by cars down, so we will remove the driver by multiplying them into a cloud of witnesses. It used to be that one driver could kill a child behind the wheel. Now that driver no longer has a wheel to swerve, but the car is still steered by an army of drivers in the cloud. Drivers who program the A.I. Drivers who trained it. Drivers who ensure connectivity to the data center. Divers galore. With the multiplication done, we simply add this to the highways as a mandatory option and the number of kids getting killed by cars goes down.

But the number of killers kids goes up. Killers who even though they saved lives by proxy. Also tie the hands of anyone who could swerve a car to avoid a child, so that they can kill that child instead. Under the guise of saving lives in a statistically relevant number of other cases, where the car would have hit a child in the first place. And the same math that saved the mother's life at the expense of the child, kills the child at the expense of a mother; screaming at her Member of Parliament to “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!” As she pleads to have the right to drive taken from everyone for “Safety’s sake.” The same way she killed her child for the sake of her quality of life when she got pregnant in high school. In the back seat of a car no less.

Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them. And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

Genesis 3:21-23 KJV

Has it ever crossed your mind why God would make Adam and Eve clothes? They already had clothes. That was the first thing they did after gaining the knowledge of good and evil. They had a vehicle for the abatement of their shame, their modesty, their fashion, and camouflage. Why make them clothes? Out of skins no less. Why kill animals to hide the sin, shame, and subtly of the snake informed humans? Because technology, even as simple as clothes, has to be tied to a worship for it to be good.

This is why the bricks at Bable were never forbidden but the collective language to build alternate ways to God, outside of sacrificial death, were.

This is why the Arc survived the flood. Not because it was a better boat than other boats. But because there were specifically more clean animals on that boat than any other animal. Because there would need to be a sacrifice once the Earth was washed clean by the flood.

This is why a death machine was redeemed into a symbol of hope. And the Cross turned from a mark of shame into a thing of glory.

Man’s technology has always stood apart from God’s will and his goodness, even in attempts to be good, because like man, technology is sinful. It is nothing more than an extension of us sinfully into the world. Apart from bringing that same technology to the feet of an almighty God, no piece of it will ever rent a definition and result of “good” without causing more evil in its place.

The internet gives the world a pulpit in every man's pocket to hear the gospel and at once the door of a million prostitutes with no street to even ponder about traveling down Proverb 7:8

The forceps and suction tubes allow for life saving surgeries or death dealing procedures. Where even children are not held so sacred as to leave inside the wombs where God knits them together. Psalm 139:13

And the autonomous car, in turn, will rob those who will save lives by driving skill. Those who value every stranger as a soul not a variable when the accident eventually happens. And instead, instill a mob of killers in their place. So that even if only one car crash kills a man, that the killing be done by a group of people unaware instead of a single human who could beg for forgiveness, seek justice, or have it done to them in retribution.

Will we crucify the cars and sprinkle the blood of the Lamb on abortion clinics and pharmacies alike? Because the first set of clothes Mankind ever wore was discarded for a second made of death, covenant, and offerings to the Lord. One that would one day be perfected in the very Son of God. Dying on a cross for the sins we all committed.

If such wisdom is foolishness to you, should you really be behind the wheel?

The math doesn’t ever add up on technology, I’m afraid.