WillWybrow.com

I was watching a film just lately, and one of the guys in it told one of the girls in it that she was beautiful, or whatever, and she said thanks and whatever, they hook up or something and live happily ever after. I guess that’s how these things work in film. Oh yeah, before we go any further, this is my warning that nobody is going to agree with what I’ve got to say because, like a lot of my ideas, it’s just too different and will undoubtedly be expressed badly. But even if you do agree in theory, I don’t imagine you will in practice. Hell, I’m not ever going to think about this in a real-life situation, so I don’t expect anyone else to.

Breakdown of a Compliment

When Person A says something flattering about Person B’s looks, Person A can be saying a number of things. The first and most obvious one that comes to mind is that the “compliment” Person A is paying means literally that Person A finds Person B to be visually appealing through whatever it is between people that facilitates that reaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s innate or learned through “society’s standard of beauty” or something like that. What Person A could be saying is that he (for the sake of argument, let’s say Person A is male and Person B is female) likes the way Person B looks through no action on Person B’s part.

Person A might also be making a point about Person B’s specific appearance at that point: “you look nice today” for a (weak) example. Coming across in this instance is the implication that Person A has recognised the fact that Person B has either deliberately or inadvertently made a difference in her appearance and Person A approves.

Person A might also be saying that he finds Person B to be attractive even though most people wouldn’t. I wanted to avoid saying the word “objective” here, because I don’t think there is an “objectively” good-looking person, but there are people that an overwhelming majority of peers would consider attractive, and there are people that an overwhelming majority of peers would consider not attractive (plus, obviously, the whole range in between). If Person A is sincere when he pays his compliment to Person B, he is saying that even though most people think Person B is unattractive, she happens to be to Person A’s personal taste.

For the sake of the argument, I am going to make two assumptions. The first is that people cannot actively choose which physical traits they find to be attractive and which ones they don’t. I don’t think this is too far from the truth, and while taste may change over time, I feel it is largely out of the control of people themselves. That first assumption now lets me make my second, which consists of me lumping together my first scenario (where Person B is “objectively” attractive) with my third scenario (where Person B is not “objectively” attractive, but is to Person A’s personal taste) under the heading of Inadvertent Attraction, and leave scenario two (where Person B has made an effort) as Deliberate Attraction.

So, in this film, the line was something like “you have really pretty eyes,” it doesn’t matter about the specifics. This line fits into my category of Inadvertent Attraction — it wasn’t through any effort on Person B’s part that Person A liked her eyes. Given this, her next line, “thank you,” doesn’t entirely make sense. A compliment is praise or even congratulations for something, but if it’s a compliment for something that isn’t deliberate, why the thanks afterwards? Person B didn’t choose to have nice eyes, so the compliment doesn’t deal with her. The compliment goes to whoever is responsible for Person B being attractive to Person A. Which is nobody.

What am I saying? That nobody should pay each other compliments anymore? No, of course not. They’re nice things to say, and everyone wants nice things said to them and about them. But I am remarking on the realisation that Person B doesn’t get to say “thanks” afterwards. Nothing nice has been said about her, just the unchangeable circumstances that mean Person A likes Person B’s appearance. Person B can’t really take pride in having an arbitrary facial arrangement any more than I can take pride in being white. It’s just genetic make-up that we have no control over.

Of course, the thanks may have only been out of polite courtesy, and that’s maybe how it is the world over. But people flush with pride when they hear something good said about them — I know I do. I just wanted to say to everyone that, on paper, it’s just incorrect to be proud about such things.

Then we get into murky waters with things like nice hair or make-up, which can be part Inadvertent and part Deliberate, and then there are things which are totally Deliberate, like picking clothes or picking perfume. Paying a compliment to deliberate choices people make to please each other is like saying “good job, I approve.” In this society where having free will is an assumption we all live by (even if it’s not true), we are allowed to be proud of the choices we make. So that’s fine.

But good-looking people, beware. I’m on to you.

The film was Hitch, if you were wondering, and it was quite enjoyable.

I don’t want to change human history. I don’t care much to be remembered after I die, even if it is just in the minds of my “loved ones.” I don’t care about contributing to society. I just want what everybody wants: periodic bursts of happiness (I guess, seratonin) that are regular enough to keep me from being depressed and bored but scarce enough so that I don’t grow accustomed to them. I can achieve that shit by sitting here watching terrible TV shows that I’ve torrented and playing video games while eating terribly unhealthy food that takes advantage of our evolutionarily-developed sense of taste to be enjoyable. I think everyone could probably go about being happy in much simpler ways than they are.

We’ve burned through a quarter of our candle and all we’ve done is fallen into line behind everyone else, jumping through the hoops we are expected to jump through by people who have already jumped through theirs and need to feel validated by it.

Enjoy your fucking worthless day everyone.

I was listening to the radio while I was in the kitchen getting some lunch. Matthew Bannister is sitting in for Jeremy Vine today, and I must say, apart from having a more boring voice, he and some woman he was talking to have just been bad-mouthing Saw the Ride, which I have been on, for all sorts of reasons, number one being that they are stuffy and boring and middle-aged and boring.

It’s a ride that I am liking more and more because of how much publicity there is over it. Saw is an incredibly well-performing franchise for all manner of reasons, and people who aren’t really into it dismiss it as unnecessary gore. I don’t mind that, these people are right; the gore is not necessary to watch, which is why Lionsgate executives aren’t dragging you from your homes and forcing you into the cinemas or DVD shops to pay money for their films. You don’t have to watch it if it isn’t your thing.

But people who are outspoken against it are outspoken for some rather invalid reasons. The point the woman on the radio made was that “people have become so desensitised” to on-screen violence.

Clearly she hasn’t given this very critical thought. So I offer you a chance to do it on her behalf. Tell me why becoming desensitised to violence is bad.

I don’t know if there are any good arguments for this. The only one I can think that people might use is a repackaging of “the media causes children to be violent” — an argument that hasn’t ever stood up to investigation (cf. every fucking complaint about the Grand Theft Auto series, ever).

Being desensitised to violence is probably a good thing. People are more rational when they don’t let their emotional reactions get in the way of thinking. Of course, if we’re witnessing a violent act in real life and we’re concerned for the safety of ourselves or those involved, we have a handy evolutionary asset called fear which gets us to run away from the danger. But obviously fake, on-screen gore isn’t something we really need to be ’sensitive’ to, is it?

As many of you will be aware, it’s “two thousand and nine,” now. And whilst I expect that a lot of you see the futility in making “new year’s resolutions,” what you don’t understand is you are guilty of a similar mistake, one which is far more common and far less often noted as fallacious.

Somehow, despite getting out of the habit of deliberately creating new goals and targets that begin on the First of January, we are all still in the mindset that the new year is somehow a “fresh start.” We say things like “here’s to 2009,” or “I hope this year is better than 2008.”

Newsflash: the parts of your life that were shitty at 11:59pm on December 31st, 2008 will be just as shitty at 12:00am on January 1st, 2009. Nothing is magically changed in the ticking of that transitional second. Hoping or expecting 2009 to be a “better year” than 2008 is just as bad as setting resolutions. These are just arbitrarily chosen days; they do not mark that any of your problems are coming to an end, and they do not give you any reason to hope that something in your life is going to change.

All the end of the year does is give you regular markers against which you can evaluate and record your happiness. But why wait until the end of the year to do all that? If you want to see how well you’re doing, always be looking back over what’s happened. Surely a month-by-month reflection is going to help steer you away from your mistakes sooner?

And what if you’ve had a really terrible “year,” up until, say, mid-October? Then even if things start to go really well, most of your year has been spent having a terrible time, and you say it was a “bad year,” – that’s just not accurate enough. It focuses too much on things which you might have dealt with and left in your past, and it just drags you back down like an emotional deadweight.

Nothing stops. And nothing starts. Not without you making the same effort you’d have to at any other time, so why wait to do it? Let every day feel like January the First if you have to, just quit pinning all your hopes on just one of three hundred and sixty-five opportunities.

What always bugged me, even when I was young, was when people comment on the unlikelihood of events happening in films. You know, when Jason Bourne makes an impossible jump, or John McClane runs through a storm of bullets without being hit.

Of course, saying “it’s just fiction, it doesn’t matter,” isn’t really a satisfying dismissal of those people. They nag and complain that the film is unrealistic and that makes it unenjoyable for them and unenjoyable for you.

But I had this idea when I was little that maybe all those unlikely things had to happen. That any story where they didn’t happen wouldn’t be very worth telling. There would somewhere be a version of the ‘Die Hard’ storyline where Alan Rickman kills Bruce Willis in the first ten minutes. But nobody wants to see a film like that. In a theoretical universe where every possible story is told, ones with hugely unlikely possibilities will eventually come into existence and they are the ones we read about in books and watch about in films.

Of course, these days I don’t care very much about all of that. Every now and then I’ll be aware that I’m watching something that others might be thinking is unrealistic. In which case I might wait until something relatively probable (but still a bit unlikely) happens and remark on how “this film is so unrealistic,” in a sort of terrible humour attempt.

But also nowadays, years from my initial feelings of ire at the bothersome critical appraisal of my immature peers, I realise that I’d basically applied the anthropic principle to storytelling. Woo! Young me was secretly clever!

Having a comfortable bed is the single biggest mistake you can ever make.

I used to think that having a comfortable bed would make a night’s sleep more relaxing, better for you. Better than waking up in the middle of the night with springs digging into your back in painful places (what I get in my dad’s house), at any rate.

Now I know that this is bullshit. A comfy bed only makes me want to stay in bed for longer. I am much more lazy and sleepy than I have ever been before, and it’s just detrimental to getting things done.

So, in the hope of motivating myself to actually get the fuck out of bed in the mornings, I am going to buy another duvet, lay one on the floor and one over the top of me and kip on my floor for every weeknight next week.

I will let you know how that goes, if you like.

For some reason that is beyond my understanding, I had the weirdest dream last night.

My family and I were in a house, we might have been moving in. But it was new to us whilst having been lived in before by others. We were exploring the house and coming across signs of the previous occupants’ lives.

Now, my dreams always tend to play out as though I were watching a film. This includes things like camera panning and tracking shots, which is strange enough in itself, I suppose, but last night there was this really cool flashback effect where the camera would move around a point in the house while the scene transformed into the same shot of the house back when its previous occupants were living in it.

The story unfolded like this: there was a couple and their children living there. They had a teenage daughter who got pregnant and gave birth to a son. But through her negligence, her baby ended up being crushed. Her family shunned her for what they perceived as murder, and she became reclusive, hiding away in the basement with the remains of her child as she slowly slipped into madness. Her family kept her down there when she eventually tried to escape, and she became a prisoner.

Back in the present, my sister and I found a boarded up trapdoor which we broke into, and we descended into the basement. One final flashback scene showed the girl cradling her broken child to her, sobbing “fragile little skeleton” to herself over and over again. Then as we entered the old basement, we saw the crunched up baby inside a mouldy old shoebox.

I am calling it a ‘nightmare,’ because it was a distinctly unhappy dream, and descending into an old house’s basement and finding a sad story of death and madness has an odd Japanese horror kind of feel to it.

I can’t think what caused it. The only thing that really differed yesterday from my day-to-day routine was polishing off a bit of wine in the evening. For lack of a better explanation, the wine shall therefore be the cause.

Have you ever really thought about exactly how far you can be pushed before you completely break down this socially acceptable person that you are and go utterly insane? Like, what if you were told (and convinced beyond reasonable doubt) you had a few weeks to live? Some of you wouldn’t be fazed by that, and maybe would spend some quality time with family and friends, but I’d wager there are those of us who would put social acceptability into a grave ahead of time and completely break free of these community-established bonds.

Bonds like solving your problems with words. Like ignoring rude people instead of punishing them. Like observing common courtesies, like not drawing attention to yourself or being an inconvenience. Not stealing, not vandalising, not killing…

But maybe it won’t be a terminal illness that will push you over the edge. Maybe you come home one day to find your family has been raped and murdered… Maybe you have been alone for so long, you can’t see the point anymore.

All I’m saying is, be careful. You never know what’s going to be around the corner, and that might trigger some long dormant, freebird spirit within you that won’t stand for the restrictions you live your life bounded by.

I came to accept the Warwick Atheists Society as a home, a group of friendly people who shared some key life outlooks with me. I came to this conclusion quickly, and maybe it’s time to rethink a little of what people are assuming are the reasons that I am here.

Now, I don’t mean to criticise anybody for their way of thinking - I’m sure it serves their purposes just fine. But there are some things that just don’t cut it for me. There’s nothing worse than self-doubt. Self analysis is fine, particularly in a retrospective sense, for how else can you evaluate and learn from your past? But this constant self-doubt and self-questioning that seems to be apparent in the more prominent society members makes me believe that they may have come to atheism from the wrong direction.

I’d like to first point out a few discrepancies in the way we think. I’m sure many of you know my position on free will; I’m a strong believer in the ability to make a choice. This conflicts with what these presumably wiser (and I say presumably because it can be presumed that wisdom increases with age - we know this is not true in all cases, which leaves a nice ambiguous statement for people to interpret how they wish) people are preaching: we can’t possibly make a difference to anything (a bleak paraphrasing, I know).

Next blow dealt: someone tells me that it’s impossible for human beings to be rational. Ever. This is a straightforward lie. It’s his belief that there are too many external factors that make people unable to abstract a situation down to simple logical and rational components. Frankly, this was insulting more than anything else, because I feel that it is perfectly possible, and in some cases common, to be able to take a situation, isolate it and convert it into a set of rational steps, considering the effects of the outputs on you as a person (and this is where we can find irrationality - some effects may be pleasing, others not, but they are taken as given effects because they are outside the scope of the rationalising system) and making a decision based on those known effects. Saying that a human being can’t be rational is like saying they can’t be logical. It’s simply wrong.

I know where these maligned views have come from. They’ve come from that heinous demon self-doubt. That’s the process that is best undergone in strict moderation. The key thing we have to remember here is that when you start to doubt even the things your senses are telling you, you’re starting on the slippery slope to madness. What’s the point in questioning the reliability of your senses to interpret the world around you? There is no other way for you to realise anything, so if you doubt your self, you doubt your self-doubt. That means: you may as well go along with things the way you’re built to - taking inputs from sense receptors and processing the data with your uniquely complicated mind.

We all feel like we have free will and can be rational. So why do people question themselves? Is there a correlation between this and questioning the presence of a god? If these people arrive at the conclusion of “there is no free will” because there’s no evidence of free will, despite them clearly feeling the ability to decide, what’s to say that they’re not all secretly feeling like there is a god, and they’re denying their own feelings due to this awful habit of doubting everything?

And this is why I think they’re all at atheism from the wrong direction. They don’t feel like there’s no higher power out there, they just doubt every singe thing that happens unless someone has theorised it and put an equation to it.

Doubting when people tell you things is a very good approach to life. By all means be sceptical of everything people tell you if they’re delivering it as fact and it can be checked. Verbal conversations are the ones you need to watch out for here, because people will never cite sources. At least if it’s written down you have a record that can be checked. But when you apply the same scepticism to everything your senses are telling you is right, there’s really no point to your life anymore. If you can’t accept that what you sense is right, you’re doubting the validity of everything you think, say and do, and I don’t see how you can possibly enjoy life.

Non-secretive people sometimes really piss me off. I literally feel the blood beating in my arteries, and it hurts. I had the misfortune of hearing some sissy poetic jackoff talking to some cheap bit of skirt while I was walking today, and one of the snippets of conversation that I caught went a little like this: “…and do you know where I learnt that? I was watching Bill Bailey and he did a song about it…”

Your source of knowledge is a comedian’s musical piece? Firstly, there’s absolutely no credibility gained from that. Secondly, even if it can be crossreferenced as fact, why are you stating this source as your original? You sound like a complete idiot! Not only should you keep your sources to yourself, but you should especially keep your sources to yourself when they are this stupid! What is wrong with you?

People throw around sources of knowledge all the time. While this is useful in sorting out the lies people tell you from the bullshit, in everyday conversation, nobody is trying to learn stuff from you. If you were in a debate and you were citing references, sure. But a casual chat? Come on, just cut the crap and say what you think without trying to justify yourself endlessly. You’ll ruin the conversation if you try and link in when someone else has thought the same as you every time you want to make a point. It doesn’t move things along, it branches. And you’ll just have to backtrack along the branch to carry on with the main stem of conversation, which takes time and patience. Maybe you’re not that enjoyable to listen to - did you ever consider that? I thought not.

What’s more, disclosing all your sources of information is just going to make people check them. Then what? Chances are this isn’t the only opinion you’ve plagiarised. Then everyone will know the game is up. Those clever and witty sayings that you picked up from that website or that DVD won’t seem so clever any more, will they? You may as well stop speaking, because now everyone’s dipped their toes in your neck of the woods*, your individuality will evaporate. And people will also scrutinise everything you quote for discrepancies. If you mis-quote, boy you’re in for one hell of a time.

Now, you might (if you are a careful reader) be thinking “this is all very interesting, Mr. C, but why does this make him a ’sissy’?” The answer is: he went on to say “…it’s a very beautiful metaphor.”

What? Who died and made you a poet? Or are you just a literary genius? Chances are, neither are true. You’re just some dumb guy with too much air in your lungs. Cool it, Shakespeare, just quit giving me your vomit-inducing interpretations of things. I don’t want to hear it, and neither does that bitch you’re talking to. That’s why she mumbled an agreement and let you carry on, her eyes slowly becoming unfocused and glazing over as autopilot takes over her basic motor functions and her consciousness is lost in the more interesting realms of her own dull imagination. And how do I know she has a dull imagination? Just trust me, you can spot these bland types from a mile off.

What a waste of time and air. Both of you.

*I threw in a mixed figure of speech like that to keep the people who don’t speak English as their first language on their toes a little bit. Not because I’m a racist and I hate them, mind you.