Are you offended by what Louis C.K. says? Or Aziz Ansari, or Kathy Griffin, or, for another example I forgot to include, Bill Maher and his ill-timed rant about comics right after Stan Lee passed?
So am I! I’m offended every day, but I have discovered a wonderful secret to cure perpetual offended syndrome! It’s a hard cure, you have to work for it. Here’s a meme to pass around social media and help others find this path to enlightenment:
We are not living in a dystopia. We are not approaching a dystopia. We are not just around the corner from approaching anything like a dystopia. You can tell you’re not living in a dystopia if you’re able to read this, and you’re well-fed, clothed, warm, relatively safe at the moment, and free to reply with whatever babbling pops into your head.
In the herein linked post, I debunk Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (I refuse to express it numerically) and all the other dystopian literature along with it. Let us stop the paranoia and focus on the real world problems right in front of us for a change.
ADDENDUM: It’s an election year coming up in the states, so the dystopian mob frenzy is boiling over on the web more than usual. This post allegedly by Aldous Huxley is making the rounds lately:
Now that we have that out of the way: This bit of text is a perfect example of a logical fallacy. It tells you that you are always living in a dictatorship no matter what. Even if you are perfectly happy with no problems anywhere, by this quote’s circular reasoning, that’s all the more reason why you’re “enslaved.” No one can postulate any state of being outside of open anarchy (which can also be defined as a “prison without walls”) that does not match this quote’s definition of a dictatorship. If you have walls, open shutdown of democracy, and do dream of escaping, that’s a dictatorship too.
Netflix’s Black Mirror has been critically acclaimed and widely praised, but also gets its share of fan hate? The new episode “Bandersnatch” gives us a great opportunity to re-examine the series’ cultural position.
Join me as I illustrate why Black Mirror isn’t just any TV anthology series. Along the way we revisit some classic genre anthology TV series from decades past, including the one that used to scare me silly as a kid!
You judgemental, mean-spirited geeks pushed me and pushed me year in and year out. And I finally snapped. This is one of those nerd-rage rants that have been kicking around in my slush folder for years, and it’s finally found a home.
