Lately I've been losing whatever inclination I had to express thoughts in words. The very idea of writing something has become detestable. EDIT: Let alone writing something as long as this entry.

This might be due to an increasing distrust of the abstract (and all words are abstract, some more than others, but all of them.) I think a good response is to instead only write in a storytelling, pointing way. Truths that exist which cannot be conveyed in that way aren't usually worth conveying.

China will replace the US as a superpower solely on the basis that they eat more omega-3 fats than we do, and because the lack of them is associated with most forms of mental illness and all kinds of neurological troubles. They also don't have HFCS and so on (which is not to say that their diet doesn't have some problems, but it's far better than here). Also, although both the US and China are fascisms (in the sense of an unholy alliance between business and government), but at least theirs is more corrupt, and corruption is usually good for the people of a country because it keeps fascisms weak and ineffectual. Their economy also grows at around 10% a year and ours actually shrinks at around 1.5% a year if you account for standard of living and inflation. I suggest a good time to immigrate there is around 2035, 27 years from now; the relevant stars align around then. By 2050, definitely. To bad I have to wait so long to see how this turns out, but there are interesting things to do in the mean time.

There are all kinds of things happening in the world and it's hard to decide which is the most interesting to follow and work within. Just through proximity and other accidents the ones I follow the most are independent game development, nutrition / scientific alternative medicine, and the ridiculously ineffectual minarchist movement. But they could just as easily have been any of a thousand other things that people are interested in and work within, and although it seems to me that these three may be more important than most of those, anyone with a familiar knowledge of any of those thousand other movements would likely believe likewise. I do think that some may be more important than others, but just that with the bias of knowing some in more intimate detail than others, it's easy to be mistaken. For all I know, the so-called Mexican illegal immigrant invasion or the so-called Jewish banking conspiracies or the people who talk about drunk driving or the war on terrorism or the problems caused by not banning (or banning too many) guns or global warming or abortion or class warfare could be more important than the things I'm interested in are.

There are thousands of things that seem important to a lot of people which are irrelevant, stupid, or only mild curiousities to many other people. I wouldn't even dismiss the possible importance of celebrity culture and the people who intensely follow the activities of movie stars (even those who do so while admitting it's not important), even that kind of stuff could be more important in its possible effects on the world than I or even they realize: it sounds ridiculous, but maybe Clay Aiken really is more important than the torture camps in North Korea, or something (and I don't mean that just humorously, it's possible).

Okay, that sounds ridiculous, but here is how it's possible: people are largely controlled either through pleasure or pain. The more cruder nations tend to use pain to control, the more sophisticated countries tend to use pleasure to control; that goes not only for nations but also for just individual control of one person over another, parents over their children, cult leaders over their cult: the greater and more subtle control is obtained by pleasure rather than pain. Threating to cause someone pain is actually less effective than threatening to cut off their pleasure; psychology has shown this in studies as well. The Victorians as an example prevented people from having too much sexual pleasure, whereas other societies did the opposite and tried to overwhelm with too much of it. So while North Korea uses torture camps and force to keep its people chained, other governments have celebrities -- and many other things, such as pornography or various customs and holidays and economic products like drugs (illegal, prescription, or legal) -- to keep its people not chained but in a way enraptured.

And I'm not saying it's preferable to live under the former than the latter, or that NK does not use pleasure (think of those perfect birthday dances they have) or that we do not use pain (look at all the brutality in our prisons), just that one should recognize the essential similarity between the two methods to reduce the extent to which one is controlled, either by pain or pleasure, at least when you don't think it's a good idea to be controlled in a certain way (and it's usually not). Left to their own devices people in nature do not naturally seek out to maximize their pleasure to the extent that people do in many industrial democracies, and when they occasionally do they don't feel as guilty about it as the civilized do, but above all they don't drastically change their principles or their lifestyle or what or who is important to them just to maximize pleasure the way that's routinely done here. Pleasure is a mechanism and when it's working correctly most every-day things are pleasurable, just staring at the snow fall or doing a good day's work or just waking up or going to sleep. Requiring specific objects or activities or substances, at cost, in order to have pleasure is strange and inhuman when you think about it, it's kind of the inverse of torture, where there's pain for the sake of pain rather than pain for the sake of avoiding every-day things that are harmful.

So! What I think is good: ever-constant pleasure from every day life rather than its rise and fall, avoiding exterior behavior controls most of the time which limit you, being interested in a few domains while recognizing that they probably are no more important than the domains others are interested in, and moving to China around 2035.