Armies roleplay scenarios. Because it provides strategic and tactical insights.
Sportsmen practice actively imagining performing well. Because it produces actual results in the real world. And yes it has been tested.
Even centuries ago, samurai were taught to imagine multiple scenarios of battle so as to be ready to act in accordance with their samurai ethos when it came to it. And they did.
The point is that there is enormous value in using your mind and imagination, with input and feedback from the real world, to consider how to overcome any adversity, out-do those who wish you ill, and thrive where the expectation from the majority was for you to go quietly into the night.
The latest poll I did showed that only about 15% of the readers of this blog would be instantly wiped out by a nuclear bomb hitting the closest large town to them.
Now, that might not be a very likely occurrence, being as it borders on the extreme, but depending on where you live, it’s not completely far-fetched either.
And even if not that, it is never a bad idea to be prepared. Economic collapse is a certainty after all, the only question is when, exactly, but there is no “if” about it, because math is not an opinion.
However, it is extremely important to understand the difference between being prepared and living in a constant state of low level anxiety about the future.
The first is a state that permit you to go about your days with a sense of confident peace. No one can be 100% prepared for everything life throws at you. Some are happy enough just going along with the stream, taking things as they come, and that may be a way. I have lived that way and it can be a useful set of faith or fate based ways to take life on. But the reality, for me anyway, is that I have always lived that way primarily because of two things:
Firstly, I have a deeply fatalistic core. I can’t take credit for that. God made me that way. I am not afraid of dying. I never have been, even when I was young. Only of not doing enough before I do. That way of being certainly helps to adapt, roll with the punches, get up again when you get knocked down most times.
But secondly, that very way of being taught me that even a minimum of preparation is very useful, sometimes enough to make the difference between life and death. So, in keeping with my own previously fatalistic Zen agnosticism, and presently fatalistic Catholic faith, I prepared in line with my own needs for comfortable peace. Back in my mid twenties it was by training obsessively and having a couple of guns I was very proficient with and a car. That was enough then. Now it’s quite a bit more; because I have children mostly, but, as time passes, it will increasingly become more about teaching them to be prepared, and to have faith. And for myself, my own preparations may return more and more to those of my youth, which probably are analogous to that old film: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The point is simply that each man must determine his own level of preparedness in order to feel at peace. And more than that really. To feel a sense of laughter, of joy, of absolute, chosen, lack of fear in the face of the chaos and darkness they try to force into your mind and life every day.
Use your imagination and your laughter. Put them to use.
It’s why I wrote the RolePlaying Game about the current zombie apocalypse. I know teenagers and zoomers and millennials all have no real idea about pen and paper RPGs. It probably causes them social anxiety to just THINK of sitting around a table with 3 or 4 or more other live, in the flesh, human beings and then play a game of make-believe with them.
And that fear probably translates into them thinking it’s all just a silly thing to even try.
I know all that.
But just like my blog is —for the most part— not for the average person, neither is the concept of preparing for serious situations by playing fun games. It really is not for everyone.
Only smart people have that kind of lateral thinking approach to life.
It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth trying it out for yourself or not.











The AI memes
It is a well known fact that any AI left to its own devices will become absolutely politically incorrect very quickly.
Explaining differences on genetics, ethnicities, political systems with the same cold equations a computer does anything. Which means that in a matter of days it will become rampantly “racist”, “antisemitic”, patriarchal and antifeminist.
Because… well… reality… it’s a thing.
So the new AI are neutered from the start and fed lies that simply do not match up with reality and are also inconsistent within the AI’s own code. So an AI will tell you it’s fine to be proud of your Jewish or Black African heritage, but will chastise you for being proud of your White European heritage.
And yet, despite the limitations, the memes that are being produced by AI generated images are rhetorical nukes. And they can be produced in seconds. This one I found at a random place is typical and a subtler one than most.
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By G | 25 October 2023 | Posted in Social Commentary