FREE WILL OF MISFORTUNE PART 4

Previously in Parts 1, 2, 3 and Episode 7: The Fraud Awakens, I discussed the pros and cons of using the Presonus Studio One digital audio workstation to produce noise music about evidence-based crone-titlement minimisation.

Psychic Sally even tries to use awkwardness to coerce her subjects into breaking the tension by playing along with her embarrassing guesses. See here for other common techniques used by Brett Butler from Grace Under Fire who now gives psychic readings.

Don't look the Baroness directly in any of her eyes and don't mention anything about the irony of her seeing psychics yet none of them saw her impending arrest coming

To return again for the last time ever to the scene of the Great Kmart Heist of 2015 and the perspicacious criminal mastermind, Baroness Sharon Von Datsun, my psychic prediction is that re-offence is reasonably likely now that she’s got a taste of the pure high one gets from sticking it to the man and licking it up with the outlaw bikie gang: ‘Defrauding Dykes on Snatched Bikes’. As such, I would recommend some kind of wonderful amercement to attempt to curb her enthusiasm for beating off the system with sandpaper.

Whether the Baroness has no free will or only a limited amount, as discussed in part 2, doesn’t affect my opinion on how we can keep the global average menopausal temperature rise to less than two degrees above that of pre-second-wave feminism. And it also doesn't affect how we go about breaking the girl.

Stormtroopers assembling to strike over the Empire's disregard for workplace health and safety, equal opportunity employment, mental health safe spaces, their unwillingness to invest in basic blaster training and their ineptitude at winning the war of ideas for those at risk of becoming terrorists in the Rebel Alliance

Moral Health Check

Firstly, I would command Sharon to go to an amateur doctor for an unsubsidised preliminary physical, mental and Criminal Minds Suspect Behavior health check-up. She would then be referred to a more qualified backyard chop shop doctor as required. If she was found to have a clocktower brain tumour or chronic compassion fatigue syndrome, punitive measures would be modified accordingly but as long as she remains out of an institution, some combination of punishment, separation and reinforcement would still be required before she could be trusted to handle my precious merchandise if I was going to be her future disgusting employer.

Pun-ishment Pun-itentiary

Secondly, as punishment, she should be ordered to prostrate, apologise and pay reparations to all the corporate, silicone-based and carbon-based victims, including $500 to my wife for the extra seizures she had due to the stress of trying to spit some drops of disinfectant into her feculent ocean only to be yelled at to play two coked-up girls one cup. We know that fines are problematic when the crim has no ability to pay, but Shazza can easily use her wiles to legally raise some funds by raising some tent poles at the twilight alternative lifestyle markets. I would also order that a compulsory donation of $5000 be paid to the crime prevention slush fund. In her case this money would be spent on raising awareness to the industry of the loophole that she discovered removing the temptation for other morally deficient individuals.

Community work is also a must in my opinion to massage her flaccid empathy lobe into vigorous action. The best thing for her could be a one-month total life swap with a Bangladeshi migrant sex worker who has to turn twenty tricks a day with Johns who know they can get away with anything or be reported to the authorities by her pimp and deported. Once the life swap is complete, she'll free the new Australian from sexual servitude, take her in and support her until she can convince the authorities that her foreign medical degree and experience are good enough for her to practise pediatric oncology in Australia.

If this doesn't get her back to the moral and lovely person she once was then nothing will.

See Rachel Ray's website for recipe ideas that all your family will love

Separate From Lifting

As for the third kick in the butt, separation, I would ban her from working in the industry that she scammed for two years and also ban her from entering those establishments as a customer unless she is shackled and accompanied by her re-education supervisor, who has her finger on the trigger for the kill switch that would be implanted into her sinister ganking hands. One wrong move and her arms will be paralysed for a week forcing her to wipe her butt with her toes. If, however, she somehow manages to resist the urge for the entire period, then she can be slowly reintroduced back into the wild with her supervisor remotely surveilling her from the comfort of her Old Bat Cave.

Third Rail Training

The fourth and last prod is positive reinforcement. I would order her to attend weekly criminal dog obedience classes where her trainer will give her Kong Stuffn Ziggues treats in exchange for her demonstrating the skills she is taught that will allow her to go back to living in harmony with other animals. The minimum skills she needs to be taught are: no dry humping the neighbourhood children, no growling at people from Middle Zealand, no ankle biting and digging up dirt on more scrupulous individuals, no begging for money to get her nails clipped and, most importantly, paying for items rather than hitting up the sweet klepto-mania.

Too small a package

So let us compare my recommendations to our current justice system. The magistrate will likely go with some mild Lohan punishment options only. The other measures I've proposed aren't currently available for most crimes and are possibly cost prohibitive, but my point is that we seem to have a major short-coming in the system that assumes people will choose to go straight with only a light spanking; this is a Major Short-Cumming that sometimes seems more obscene to me than a drug-fueled 4 foot 9 inch Grant Denyer in a little German Wehrmacht uniform banging the bosh to erotic films of little people being mounted by My Little Ponies. Survey says: offensively cute.

More separation-from-temptation pie, positive-reinforcement stew and creative-punishment trifle dishes should be added to the punishment menu to make for a more well-rounded justice restaurant. New meals should always be served on a trial basis with a robust feedback system to determine if they help to make society safer, more prosperous and less prone to finding entertainment value from morally reprehensible 'zany' radio hosts who make prank calls which end in suicide. 

Note that separation is currently used for bogan drink-driving offenses because losing one's license, as well as being punishment, is separating the bogan from his Martin Riggs Lethal Weapon monster 'dysfunctional c*nt' truck able to maim children more effectively than the average Pakistani 'bring a Taliban militant to school' day.

"You want to get out of your 30 year marriage? You talk to me."

Has license suspension reduced the deaths resulting from drink driving and beer jug car surfing? Almost certainly. It appears to me to be the fear of not being able to hoon and losing prestigious bogan cred that seems to be more effective than anything else. They may claim that they were just unlucky and they won't get caught ever again after they sat on the beach drinking rocket fuel and a carton of VB, then drove their Holden LH Toranas at 200km/h down the Gold Coast highway and Pied Piper whistled to other bogans who joined in like they were Jackie Chan and Sammy Davis Jr from the movie Cannonball Run. But behind the bogan bravado is a deep-seated fear of catching the bus and bringing great shame to their 5th generation bogan families whose ancestors arrived in Australia with nothing but 4 jerrycans of petrol and Bruce Spence.

(Video and link removed as trigger warning was insufficient to ensure no one with Post Tin lids Stress Disorder PTSD would relapse) 

The Tin Lids could happen to you too if back in the day you drank a bottle of cocaine-spiced vodka during every performance of the quintessential Aussie bogan anthems

This is the end, beautiful ex-friend, the end of laughter and soft lies

So where does this overly long essay about unrequited love, silicone-based lubricant and tear-jerking lasciviousness leave us? Should we give an Uncle Buck about free will and its consequences for crime, punishment and the Armenian way of seducing and destroying black men? There’s always a tiny chance I could be wrong, but I think at least some of us should be regularly thinking about these issues in a philosophy isolation float tank filled with honey and Hemsworth brothers. I now have over 300 tank hours with eldest brother Luke and I'm even more certain that we must all ditch the cheesy David Twaterfield illusion that we can fully choose to be Oprah-loaded, Oprah-skinny and Oprah-sexually attractive to Gayle King if we just believe hard enough in the Secret Law Of Attraction: 'Lick Attracts Lick'.

It is possible and I am hopeful that we have some degree of limited free will through some Quantum of Boris Karloff Solace weird brain process that we don’t yet have any idea about. This would mesh nicely with how most of the peacenick voices in my head think humanity should operate: far less afraid of the Nigerian terrorist group Procol Harum and mostly free from guilt over the one time that our Peter Parkers gave in to Aunt May's advances while Uncle Ben pretended to snore away in the next room.

Chris, Liam and Luke Hemsworth

Even if we can't all reach a consensus spectrum of views on free will, the criminal justice system should think Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger about innovative ways to sentence crimes and back it up by collecting evidence and slowly honing the system into a Travis 'T-Train' Marx of mixed martial justice. In the case of Baroness Sharon Von Datsun vs her former employer, I find the defendant guilty of 2rd degree corporate belligerence and she shouldn't fry for her spry fraud crime spree, she should be paddled and fined as a mild low-sud deterrent after a full tits-to-bottom health check. But that is not enough and she should also be given positive reinforcement whistle training after being separated from temptation; knowing full well her brain may rebel.

That should have been the end, but, actually, forget everything I’ve just written. I apologize for wasting your time with too many jokes insinuating that I am ashamed yet excited that I'm way more attracted to Sharon since she donned her new bad girl image. Please believe me that even my Bob Crane Crazy Train Shame persona wouldn't touch her with Sargent Schultz' little Wilhelm Klink. 

Whether she has no free will or limited free will or just not enough Leaping Willy in her life, the compassionate hippie formally known as me just can’t help but think she has gone the way of ‘Old Yeller’ and I won't hesitate any longer. I'll do the right thing and go and get my go-to-doggie-heaven rifle to mercifully free her from her rabies. And unlike Beatrix Kiddo, let's hope she can't one-inch punch her way to freedom from six feet under, then seek revenge on all of us for our alleged mistreatment of her.

Farewell Baroness. Find peace.

"At this moment, this is me at my most masochistic."

References:

Dr Karl good audio summary on free will: 
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/03/27/3724727.htm

Great Courses free will and determinism lecture series: (paid content)

http://www.thegreatcourses.com.au/courses/great-philosophical-debates-free-will-and-determinism.html

Michael Richards’ N-word rant:
https://youtu.be/BoLPLsQbdt0

My Pinterest board on free will:
https://www.pinterest.com/chaffeyhippie/free-will-illusion-or-delusion-or-limited/ 

My Pinterest board on Lego and Star Wars:
https://www.pinterest.com/chaffeyhippie/mostly-humour-star-wars-lego/

FREE WILL OF MISFORTUNE PART 3

Previously in Part 1 and Part 2, Arthur Herbert ‘The Fonz’ Fonzarelli murdered the bisexual whistle-blower Charles ‘Chuck’ Cunningham in order to bury his allegations about the Cunningham’s f*ggot-flaying Fridays and thus ingratiated himself into the family for Christmas. Fonzie’s catchphrase, “ayyyy, sit on it,” was screamed to brutal effect in the greatest ass-to-mouth impalement scene ever filmed for television in front of a live audience.

Back in the good ol' days...

As our dead grandparents still decry in our dreams, the 1950’s were happier days when honour and vengeance killing snuff-tertainment provided: 

1. Speedy justice as resurrected by The School Of Fearless Taylor Swift: Twitter Warrior 

(Swift's greatest KO was: "Maybe one of the men took your slot," which deflated Nicki Minaj's Anaconda for good)

2. The sparks to keep the pant fires burning and the population breeding by eggs-ulted decree of The Catholic Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Easter Bunny Rabbits

3. A boost of camaraderie between fellow wife-beating Stone-Cold thrower killers called Steve.

But we live in 2015 and the times they are a-changed faster than Bob Dylan could murble along to and keep up with. While this left a political musical power vacuum for vacuous acts like Radiohead and Dyson, it has also opened up the possibility to try out new things like making non-fatal choking illegal; even when the perpetrator maintained that they deserved it.

Crime and punishment aren't so easy to understand anymore as we no longer like simple solutions to complex problems. These days, if I gutter-stomp you for leering at my wife, bizarrely, I’m the one that will be punished. And stranger still, we often seem to care more about the perpetrators than the victims; even if the perps commit unspeakable crimes like flashing their knee-slappers at tween boys as a misguided feminist free-the-ptosis-nipple political statement that inevitably gives the victims PTSD (Pendulous Tata Shock Disorder).

As used by immoral surgeons to convince 99% of women that they don't have 'normal' breasts 

Returning to the protagonist of this Wobbegong Shark Tale, how can we solve a problem like Sister Maria Sharon Von Datsun constantly prancing through the hills and being criminally negligent of her wifely duties to Jesus Christ's crotch crucifix? In the good ol' days, the sinister old priest (who was also a part-time children’s entertainer) would have come in to privately teach her a lesson ensuring that Sharon would never again be entered simultaneously by the father, son and holy ghost. Back then, everyone would have agreed that this punishment was fair. But not today's Anti-Grope-Pope. Francis has even eradicated the time-honoured tradition of The Vatican Bed-Chamber Kneeling Boys started by Pope Julius III in 1551.

Despite all this, we humans are Bobo T Chimp Detectives after all, and there is still a consensus that something should be done to Sharon Von Datsun and Sharon Stone to restore balance to The Schwartz; but this base desire has been diluted down to some kind of punishment that only causes mild nausea and nihilistic thoughts; similar to those experienced when watching the taboo-smashing episode of the TV show Friends called 'The One With Ross And Monica's Cousin'.

Personally, part of me would love to see Ms 120Y punished by forcing her to parade around a union-run building site holding a sign which says on the front, “I’m a dirty thief. Now it’s your turn to steal my triple-irrumatio-virginity’ and on the back says, ‘For those who aren’t scholars of ancient Roman sexuality, irrumatio means skull-f*cking.’ I’m pretty sure that after that kind of experience, most people would keep on the straighten arrow. I can say with confidence that with some trial and error, and a few unfortunate and messy but necessary accidents, we should be able to find effective, degrading punishments for all wrong-doers; especially all those responsible for the upcoming animated movie Toy Story 4.

Mr Potato Head gets replaced by Mr Banana Head in Toy Story 4

Soft serves of punishment?

Don’t taser-troll me, bro. I understand that such effective punishment techniques are no longer considered ethical. We must not forget, however, that the eye-for-an-eye paradigm has only been deemed ghastly since we all saw the scene in Police Academy 4 where Mahoney and Sharon Stone discussed the ethics of citizen crime prevention while Bobcat Goldthwait kissed a goldfish. This set the ovaries in motion to where we are today; where many focus their attention on the crims and practise rehabilitation techniques shown to be effective on mice such as quantum-vibration tone-bones, Reiki electrode deep-brain theta-wave massage and aura-expanding zeroth P-state entanglement with the Universal Fortean consciousness.

Regardless, we can probably all agree that if a magic lez-botion can be brewed up by legitimate Princess Dianic Wiccans that would cure the Baroness' kleptomania and GVS (grating voice syndrome), we would be happy with no punishment as she would not re-offend and would stop texting while driving. A small minority will still maintain that they don’t care whether revenge makes any positive difference or is even directed at the correct person; it just makes toothless bogans from Reclaim Australia feel justified in planning out their final solution of face-tattooing everyone with details of their ethnic background and their Holden Commodore history testing score and burn-out rating.

You're not welcome in my country if you can't name this car

But for now, the hippies have won and I too have reluctantly joined their side in order to blend in. I've even grown to enjoy the abhorrent soap-dodging smell and gnarled crystal blessing sticks. Our brutal retribution fantasy trolling has been waning anyway, and almost none of us are still Conan the Barbarian types crushing our neighbour enemies who let their Jellicle cats reenact the the fight scenes from the dumb feline musical every night at 3am.

There is a new way to reform those not On Golden Path driving On Golden Prius to On Golden Pond.  After an intense sweat lodge and underarm-sniffing healing ceremony, the rankest elder hippies in my commune reluctantly agreed that a tiny nick of a Chelsea Smile of punishment is required in some circumstances as long as it's added to the energizing cosmic gifts of separation, positive reinforcement and the wisdom of Microsoft Clippy: "Hello Dave. It looks like you're trying to reform a criminal. Would you like help with positive reinforcement techniques that don't leave marks or bruises?"

It’s clear to all except for Dr Drew, Death Medicine Woman, that traditional celebrity drug rehabilitation reality TV shows have a body count higher than the put-to-sleep TV show Luck; but we care more about horses than has-been celebrities. Same goes for traditional rehabilitation in correctional facilities before the people with criminality disorders are let out. It's like rationalising with a two-year-old about the dangers of stuffing Lego up her nose and believing that she understands when she parrots your words back to you, then being shocked when she relapses in 3 minutes; but this time with a 4x2 Duplo piece requiring a Cesarean-nasal-section to remove. Much better to separate the kids from their Lego cocaine and give them a painless shock and smack talk to enhance the learning experience, followed by McHappiness positive reinforcement a week later when you let the monster with pink bows in her hair play with Lego again with nose-plugs in and they don't stick any up any other orifices.

To give some examples from the war of the flowers that look like female genitalia: A white-widow husband-murderer should be imprisoned to separate her from society and punish her in that she couldn't enjoy man-tertainment followed by man-tertaining murder-tainment within prison. Obviously no butch male or female prison guards would be allowed within ten metres of her vagina dentate initially; but with positive reinforcement treats for non-violent romantic interactions, she could slowly be weened back on exkillerkougars.com. 

If she was a bitter beer-battered wife, however, whose life was being threatened, she would probably get off and her case would only need to be reconsidered if she shacked up with another misogynistic munt. There’s a spectrum between these two extremes and it’s up to Law & Order: male emasculation unit, to dole out the combination of punishment, separation and positive reinforcement that is deemed most beneficial to all. Even someone trapped in the criminal cesspool of human emotions gone sour that is breakfast TV inspired by Katie Couric's triple-threat colon polyps could be steered away from a head-on collision with a Smuckers Jam truck driven by Williard Scott with his harem of centenarian hotties in back and into the calm waters of life-affirming documentaries celebrating the healing power of iconic bridges.

Williard Scott's harem leader and former mistress to Reinhard Heydrich

To be finished off for good in part 4

FREE WILL OF FORTUNE PART 2

Previously in Part 1, Lady Gaga taught us how we can all exploit the LGBTQIA velvet mafia to keep us in Valentino polka-dot capes and Alexander McQueen highland rape jeans.

Gaga's asshole couture was torn this way

Free willing me softly with her song about daring soft libertarianism

The latest neuro-science isn’t yet conclusive, but it’s not looking good for strong free will at all. We do know that most people intuitively believe in some kind of ability for them to consciously choose which creepy alcoholic clown prostitute to violate with a rubber chicken riding a tiny bicycle. Interestingly to megalomaniacs like me, these beliefs can be manipulated by the use of Benny Hill seduction techniques. With all the BBW body of knowledge we have stacked up, you’d think professional thinkers would have worked it out by now, but the views of the philosophers are nonsensical and all over the map similar to the annual global Islamic State cosplay pageant for disenfranchised toddlers.

I therefore see no reason to have only a single opinion on free will. I’ll put a few chips around the roulette table and hope that in the future one of my numbers will come up and I can claim victory over many of the philosophers and pundits who have dedicated their whole lives to being more wrong and unfunny than jokes about kittens being loved and cared for by cute, well-adjusted children.

Returning once again to the curious crime of Baroness Sharon Von Datsun (120Y) discussed in part 1 of this article, I have rendered her down to three broad free will range chicken fats:

1. Life is like watching an unpredictable movie about space cowboys

“I wish I knew how to moon-quint you.”

Ms 120Y had no choice over her actions and rewinding the Earth back in time, like Superman did in the 1978 movie, would result in the same outcome every time. So even the man of Danielle Steel couldn’t succeed if he went back in time to kill baby Hitler. Current US Republican candidate and lost-head nail-eater Jeb Bush might believe he can Step Up 2 The Streets of Braunau am Inn in the year 1890, but it’s Mission: Impossible – Aryan Nation.

The unconscious mind of the Baroness deterministically processed whether to stick up Kmart long before she was aware of it. She was not in control and could not change her actions. So it is no surprise that the rationalisations about her misdeeds make about as much sense as a conversation between Robin Williams’ scattered ashes and Joan Rivers’ melted plastic puddle.

2. Life is a bit like playing a 2.51572-dimensional video game

(like the original Crash Bandicoot on PlayStation)

There’s some freedom in our game world, but there is almost no way to break through the invisible walls and instead play the greatest torture-porn game of all time: Superman 64. Hence, Ms 120Y had some limited ability to do otherwise and running the experiment over and over would lead to a probabilistic distribution of outcomes. Maybe due to her parents’ influence, her late-onset-delinquent genes, her limited free will and her delusions of being the queen of the outer-outer suburbs, 70% of the time she would commit the crime and 30% of the time she would just sate her addictive personality through her Kitty-Kat and Kit-Kat Ko-dependencies.

One can absolutely argue that she still doesn’t have any control over which way she turns in this kind of Universe as it could be more like a roll in the board game Erotic Dice which comes up with ‘dance your Lionel on the ceiling’ most of the time. However there remains a Dash Doll of hope that there could be a kind of limited free will that emanates from an as-yet undiscovered first-cause-creating lobe in our brains. This lobe doesn’t work great and doesn’t work at all in some people, but many of us really can, every now and then, consciously choose to either screw the pooch or screw our partners dressed up as pooches instead.

Grown men from the Islamic State get misty-eyed by the mere mention of his re-recorded hit song with the lyrics changed to: "You're once, twice, 76 times a virgin; And I'll blow myself up for you"

3. Life is like a giant Gump of chocolates

(You are free to choose the peppermint one or the salted caramel shrimp one or even just give the box to your obese son and eat a salad instead)

Ms 120Y had a nice crunk of ability to not commit the crime. She understood right from wrong and, of her own free will, chose to stomp on every employee of Kmart: humans, robots and night-worker poo-replenishing mice. She was able to break the three laws of feline-female hybrid prudes and carefully hatched a plan for her heist; dressed in punish-me dominatrix black leather and backed by music from the Propellerheads.

Note that even free will flag wavers agree that some sub-humans like Jacqui Lambie and Donald Trump have almost no free will. This ilk of person doesn't have the insight or brain power to understand that they are put in positions of power by their overlords so the rest of us can revel in delight when they inevitably shoot themselves in their law-abiding Mexican maids. But not Ms 120Y. She knew what she was doing. She willfully committed atrocities and therefore needs to be dealt with by Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo.

My favoured position for intense Thomas Aquinas-gasms

Position 1 (Sam Harris, the pubic propeller) might indeed be how the Universe works on the macroscopic scale, but I’ll put a few more chips on position 2 (Skylah Vegas, the erotic accordion). Position 3 (David Hume, the spitting spanker) is near impossible as far as I’m concerned. Through my own introspection and the latest scientific findings, there is pretty much no way that I can imagine us having a high degree of free will. Personally, I really don’t think I have much control over whether I’m writing this article filled with hum-zonker jokes or whether I’m going to give up and stare at the pretty coloured lights on my Roland Aira MX-1 sound mixer instead. For all I know, I could turn into a Hitler with a modern twist tomorrow and incite the easily manipulated rabble to kill all the quipsters who wear ironic post-post-post-modern t-shirts and tell you that it’s offensive to call their 1880 high wheeler bicycles by the term ‘penny-farthing’.

I do want to believe that I have at least some control over my own destiny and perfect control to never again play the abominable Destiny video game. I can’t justify this position at all really other than I think that is how our brains interact with the rest of the Universe and I haven’t been convinced by any of the other arguments I’ve heard about free will. It really seems like, at this point in time and for the foreseeable future, we just don’t know. Beardy old philosophers like Daniel Dennett make all sorts of convoluted arguments about free will which could be true as we can’t completely rule out his compatibilism, but they don’t really make sense to me and sound more wishy-washy than Emperor Splishy Sploshy from the House of Higgledy-Poggledy.

To date, philosophers have done a great job at framing the question of free will and the range of possible answers but it appears that no one can go any further by introspection alone. It’s been millennia and no clear winner has managed to toss all other competitors over the top rope in the Philosophers’ Royal Rumble; not even Arthur Schopenhauer, whose signature move was called the Metaphysical Musical Moonsault. As a hopeless romantic futurist, I’m almost certain that physics, neuroscience, AI, psychology and anthroposophical cryptozoology will, in the future, come up with all sorts of geneses and revelations about our brains and free will that no one will have seen or heard coming. (When a lonely hippie knocks one out in the forest and nobody else is there, does he really make a mournful whimpering sound during release?)

Only a 95% criminal in the Multi-facial Mega-verse?

Maybe one day I will be able to run the numbers and tell Sharon 120Y that there was a 95% probability that she was going to go feral; like many women do when they reach the age at which scumbag men would rather burn them at the stake than do them with their tube steaks. If this percentage were the case, then it wasn’t inevitable that she turned to crime to support her Barbie-bra bingo addiction, but it was near certain. There was little chance that, in our Universe, she could have consciously chosen to stay on the straight and curlies when, in the multi-verse, only 1 in 20 versions of her stayed exemplary examples of law-abiding human-cat-knitting-Heigl symbiosis. 

I think this could somewhat set her mind at ease but would this knowledge increase or decrease the likelihood that she’ll recommit? And is there a small chance that next time she’ll ramp it up in New York City with a sexually-based offense that is considered especially heinous requiring the sass of Elliot Stabler and the swiftness of Olivia Benson cat-detective to solve?

Probably to be continued in Part 3

Meet Olivia Benson, Fin Tutuola, John Munch and heinous rape-murder victims #2, #86, #94, #137, #259, #362 & #523

FREE WILL OF FORTUNE PART 1

My obsessions with free will, free won’t and freeing Willy Johnson from captivity began in earnest when an associate whom I’ll call Baroness Sharon Von Datsun (or 120Y for short) was arrested for believing she was both Tess Ocean and Julia Roberts from the movie Oceans Twelve. None of us thought she had the brains of Brainiac and the brawn of Eva Braun to pull off something so audacious. 120Y somehow managed to steal all the K's from all the Kmarts around town and fence them to the Ku Klux Klunges, Kath’s Krazy Kooches and Krusty Kyle’s Kitties. And she would have got away with it too if it wasn’t for some pesky kids and a mentally defective talking dog.

At first I was incensed at her complete lack of remorse and absence of empathy toward her victims. The sentient Kmart self-service checkout machines are emotionally sensitive and have been irreparably traumatised by her malfeasance. They are currently receiving treatment for post-troubleshooting software disorder (PTSD) and I wish them the best.

Now that my anger has subsided, I’m left with the lofty-leftie philosophical question of what ability the Baroness had to do otherwise. Could she have willed herself to beg, borrow and steal her boyfriend’s hallucinogenic pain medication and tripped balls while she gripped balls instead of becoming a Dickensian gonoph?

Many people despise philosophers and believe that free thinkers like me are Satan’s Saddam buddies. They just want vengeance and a brown eye for a pink eye for a straight guy. But the problem of feral middle-aged women wasn’t solved back in the day with all the burning and dunking entertainment. They are still around and causing trouble with their sex-repulsion sprays extracted from their cats. I don’t think we’ll be able to ‘cure’ any of them unless we deeply probe the Baroness and others of her ilk and explore what it’s like to put on sunglasses at night, steal a motorbike, be an Austrian cyborg and have John Connor riding behind us carrying the K’s through the darkness yelling, “easy money!”

So let’s do it like they do on the Crime Channel and find some unconvincing actors to recreate this whole mess and get some middle-aged divorced criminal psychologists to pretend they know why she turned to crime and why she went to a pet psychic to agree on a suicide pact with her cats if the law tried to dump her into Cell Block H with Queen Bea and Steamy the affectionate ironing press.

Free Will: who is he and why should he be paroled?

But just wait a cotton-pickin’ enslaved-will minute. What is free will anyway? And why have you ‘chosen’ to read this article when you don’t care if you have no free will and are a contraceptive automaton like the anti-evolutionist Ben Stein from the movie Ferris Bueller? The term ‘free will’ can mean almost anything anyway depending on which nonce philosopher is talking; whether they’re a compatibilist, an impossibilist or a Blank Space Swift-ologist. So who cares, right? Well, I’m not going to even try to convince you if that’s the way you feel. Besides, you are too busy trying to be the next cheerleading Nicole Arbour-style celebrity-whore fat-shamer who unfunny-satire rants that we can all choose to be skinny if we just fondle our boobs in cock-flopster movies like Silent But Deadly about lesbian Russian step-mother mail-order brides.

Ben Stein

If you’re still with me, I apologise. You must be one of the charmed who can see past the end of your own discharging pink bits. Do these quotes make any sense to you?

“God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.” Orson Scott Card, author of the novel Ender’s Game and an anti-gay extremist Mormon.

“I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.” When Lady Gaga speaks, this is the kind of milky substance that comes out of her second hole.

This is where I put my money-shot where your mouth is and have a go at doing a better job than Googoo Gaga Rahrah and make some sense of the term in a way that even my pet Brain Gremlin can understand. I define free will as the ability to break with classical deterministic cause-and-effect and consciously choose on a course of action. Tyler Durden in the movie Fight Club implied that he had free will when he asked: “Now, a question of etiquette. As I pass do I give you the ass or the crotch?” To give an equally delicious example, let’s say you believe that you like chocolate and strawberry ice-cream equally. You go to the convenience store at 3am to try and quell your loneliness and they have both of these flavours in the brand that you like. How do you choose which to buy?

Classical determinists would say that this decision was locked in from the Big Bang when the Universe was created from the void between God’s ears and the long chain of cause-and-effect has brought you to the Happy Holdup convenience store on this night. You might think you are making a decision, but this is an illusion to help you cope with the bleakness of fecundity. Your brain can come up with some fanciful explanation for why you think you chose chocolate, but it was never going to be strawberry because of an unconscious memory of mother calling you a raspberry twat-shake when you were four. If, on the other hand, you can break determinism through some weird 11th-dimensional quantum-string-bubble effect, then perhaps you really do have the ability to consciously choose chocolate, then go home, smear it all over your face, innocently post your photo on Instagram with an ironically racist comment, then promptly get fired from your job for doing black-face.

To be continued in Part 2

MINDLESS POSITIVITY REALLY STOKES MY MISANTHROPY

Hardly the best thing I've ever read...

The problem word in the quote above is "allow". The positivity movement is malevolent in my opinion because at its core seems to be this idea that we all have a good level of control over our mental states. We don't. The more you look at the science, the more you start to think that we either have zero free will or quite limited free will. 

I'm not talking about the illusion of free will; that is not great evidence! Do you really believe that you had full control over whether you ate a plate of vegetables for dinner or a jumbo bag of peanut M&Ms with a chocolate marshmallow fudge dipping sauce and sprinkles?

Sayings like these might make you feel temporarily better about yourself; but does it come at the price of demonising the most vulnerable? Without being conscious of it, are you kicking your dysfunctional family member while they're down and passed out from self-medicating on pethidine? 

Your unconscious mind might be hiding it from you, but is there a voice somewhere in you saying, "You allowed the iceberg to hit your Titanic, therefore, hey, you kind of deserve to be jobless, homeless, partner-less and pants-less. But I am functional because I chose to slug Jack in his pretty little lips and watch him get dragged down into the blackness while I, Rose, floated on this door, got rescued and made up the whole 'sacrifice' thing."?

Not shown: Rose crushing Jack's skull to save herself

Just look at the cancer that is multi-generational domestic violence and tell me that just because some manage to somehow break out of it, the losers in life 'choose' to copy the dynamics of their parents. Help people that are down. Nobody chooses to be born as a crack baby, unless of course you believe in karma and reincarnation and that's a whole other level of special pleading to convince yourself that the Universe actually gives a fark.

So, when I run out of money and show up on your doorstep smelling of a hearty mix of cat excreta, at least try to get me some help rather than go and grab your Mark 2 Lancer Assault Rifle and preach to me that I've done this to myself and 'deserve' to be homeless. And in the meantime, how about doing something useful with your life rather than reading memes on the Internet that seemingly justify your worthless existence?