Nilknarf News

Nationalism is as bad as religion is as bad as racism is as bad as religion is as bad as atheism...

American nationalism is as bad as German nationalism is as bad as Russian nationalism is as bad as Chinese nationalism.

Tribalism is as bad as cannibalism is as bad as classism is as bad as elitism.

O'yeah, atheism is to religion as bald is to hair color.

Cultural diversity is worse than anything else, or at least as bad as anything else.

All of these things, these memes, have a singular purpose: to make a group of people feel that they're superior to another group. Not just different, but *better*.

Groups of people feeling that they're superior to other groups of people is not the way to world peace.

The weirdest thing about it is...every group has more commonality with any other group that they have differences.

Any outside observer would not be able to make a distinction between a German nationalist or an American nationalist or a Swedish nationalist or an Iraqi nationalist. The average american would not be able to distinguish between a Sunni Muslim and a Shiite Muslim and a Jewish Israeli and an Egyptian if they were all in loincloths.

If there were a god, it could make those distinctions, and be able to tell the true believers in the true faith from all of those who are following the wrong path. If there were a god, it would let everybody know who those true believers were, and that they truly were better'n anybody else.

But there ain't.

But the whole point here is... nobody is better'n anyone else, when you get down to the basics.

In the pathetic words of Rodney King, "Why can't we all jus' get along?"

20:21...
I was gonna expand on the above thoughts, but then I though I wouldn't, they are already sufficiently fuzzy.

We've had the house open the last few days, and I'm allergic to something or another, I've been sneezy and my eyes have been watering and itchy and I'm just pretty miserable, now that I come to think of it. Runny, stopped-up nose, too. Sounds like seasonal allergies to me, but I've never had them before, and I think that I would remember if I would have.

Allergies... I figgered out something about them a long time ago, just from observations of other people... if you don't have them when you're young, you'll get them as you get older. If you do have them when you're young, you'll grow out of them.

So, the only way that you can come out on top, allergy-wise, is to not have them and then die young.

Dying young is the sure cure for lots of things, come to think of it. I remember when I was young, I was sure that I would never get this old, and I kinda lived like I really believed that. Now, like so many people my age, I wisht I would'a taken care of myself.

I'm taking pretty good care of myself now, making sure that I don't die of overwork this weekend. Not a chance, I haven't done anything really productive at all. Well, I did go back and re-do the indices of all of my monthly entries, except for March 1996-July 1997. There's only so much tedious work that I can do at once, and I exceeded my limit and started making mistakes before I quit.

The deal was, at one time I had two different schemes for indexing the entries... one way, I used framesets, the other way is the way that I do it now. I like the way that I do it now much better, and I had thought that I'd re-done them all, but I guess not. I think that I just re-did the entries themselves, so that they're all OK linearly by date, but I never re-did the indexes... or if I did, I didn't save them.

Ao anyways, I have fifteen or so left to do, I'll get to them sometime this winter. The way that I noticed that they weren't there is that every little once in a while someone will hit my error page from an older entry trying to get the index page for that month... and it isn't there, so I see the error. I've actually been seeing that error for a coupla years, but I just now figgered out what was going on. Sorry if I've caused anyone any inconvenience....

I need to go to bed early, I've gotta go in early for the next two weeks... which sucks, except for I get to leave early, which is pretty cool. Can't have everything, dammit.