It's not just "a" and "an"

Tuesday 9/30/25

Ours is a country where scarcely anyone in it is capable of understanding that it's "an NFL game" and not "a NFL game." A country in which the most educated are at best semi-literate. If you told those people that, it'd be more important to them to hate and attack you than it would be to educate themselves. If you can even call this--which is the stuff of a first grade education--actual education.

They would celebrate their illiteracy, which people now do as if it were a badge of honor and something to boast about. If you encountered the rare person who is not this way, chances would be very low that they could ever understand the reasons why it's "an" rather than "a," and would almost certainly never be capable of putting this practice to correct use in their lives. This--this, for God's sake--is now beyond the ken of our intellectual and literacy abilities. And I don't think people get stuff like this. That it's the truth now. That it's general. The norm.

A society, a culture, a people, a country, a world, can only go so low, before it's just diseased chaos, with nothing redeemable remaining. No chance of moving back up the ladder. You hear that everyone returns to dust. Fine. But the bigger concern is that we are returning to the ooze. We are moving back towards what we were when we were that which slithered out of the seas.

The chances of someone having a Linktree--to guide you, via links, to a host of places where their narcissism and grift is on full display--not being soulless is close to nil. Well, secure, substantive people do not have such things.

There's a massive difference between having and being.

People have to say they are things because usually they are not things and no one wants to be nothing. It helps to say you are things that require no proof whatsoever. All you have to do is say you're that thing. Now you are an instant thing rather than nothing. This practice, at large, is made all the more possible by each member of society doing what's tantamount to their part to eradicate intelligence and standards in society such that no one can tell what anything is. That way, no one can say, "Hey, I know you're not that thing" to that person. No one knows anything. Can tell anything. So you can say and be anything--by this definition--anything you want. Life as fantasy. Which becomes the default reality. And it's not like anyone knows the difference. It's in the best interest of most people for no one else to be able to tell what anything actually is. Which is in the worst interest of things like the world, culture, society, relationships, art, mental health, happiness, meaning, purpose.

It hurts my eyes to try and read almost anything now. You can't go three words without knowing how dumb that person is. "Musicion." It's never just a typo. That person doesn't know. How can you be an adult and not know how "musician" is spelled? But no one else knows either. In that forum. No one can tell anything.

Today I saw someone ask the question, "How can you tell if writing is good?" The answers--my God, the answers. "Its all subjective." "All writing has something for everyone." It's all good. Everyone is good. It's all the same in that it's all good. Hooray for us, hooray for all.

I read the teachers subreddit. I see teachers complain about how stupid and ill-behaved their kids are. How poorly parented their kids are. I don't doubt any of this. I think most people are terrible parents and shouldn't be parents. Do you know what the two predictors are of a child being a reader in life? It's just two things that usually determine whether or not someone is going to read--at all--or not at all. They are this: 1. The presence of physical books in the childhood home and 2. The education level of the mother.

Most parents no longer read to their kids. They have no interest in it. They'll use the screen as a babysitter. Rotting the child's mind right from the start. There won't be development, the use of the imagination. But rather the babysitter screen, to also wipe the lobes clean of thought and capability. Start 'em young.

Despite these remarks, these teachers--almost to a person--will show that they have no idea how "a" and "an" work, or "then" and "than," and that it's not "anyways." They'll say "literally" once a sentence, because you know that makes something that's true into something extra super duper true. They are unintelligent and uneducated themselves. For the most part. Why would they be any different? No one is any different anymore. It's all from out of the same ooze, and the ooze the masses have flocked to, without a clue that they're doing so, because they're not smart enough to know it, or anything.

To me, this would be like going to the doctor and she's mispronouncing medical terms--basic medical terms. Would you feel like you were in capable hands? Would you want that person doing your heart surgery?

Is this offensive? Why is it offensive? It's logical and true. It's there. I could fly in the screenshots. I could do nothing but fly them in. I'm not talking about exceptions to rules. I am talking about what is commonplace, and typical, and unavoidably apparent if you are someone capable of processing what you are seeing, or even just seeing what is right in front of you again, and again, and again.

I read this today on Instagram about Orson Welles's Macbeth:

"Contemporary audiences have come to appreciate the film and marvel at its visual style."

There are no contemporary audiences for Orson Welles's 1948 Macbeth. Contemporary audiences is different than "the very few people who would watch something like this." The former implies some heft in the numbers. Assemblies of humans in multiple places at near simultaneous times. A group is watching here while other groups are watching, or about to, there. People watching at once.

This is the associative. It's Orson Welles, you say you should like Orson Welles because of the name Orson Welles, and you say he's a "genius"--another word which many can't spell--because you know that's what you're supposed to say. Then you get this. A statement that is half-assed, insincere. A statement of going through the motions, and it's not really real. None of it. The Welles estate makes the money it makes off of the associative and the continuance thereof, and that's it.

If you took people right now and had them watch Macbeth, they would hate it. They wouldn't understand it, they'd be bored. They wouldn't "marvel at its visual style."

That's the game, though. There's no scrutiny. It doesn't matter that things aren't true. The game has nothing to do with truth. People don't think. They refuse to. Someone recently said to me that no one can write and few people can read. And that's one thing. But soon no one will be able to think.

Do you know why Trump is worse in his second term than his first? It's not that he's worse. It's that people have devolved further. They're even stupider now than they were when he was President the first time. They can't rise up, write, process, communicate. Whereas before Trump was shooting dumb animals at one of those hunting spots where the animals are doped up and you can basically walk over to them and blast them between the eyes, now he's shooting animals that have rounded themselves up in a corral so that the hunter doesn't so much as have to walk across the field, and they don't know they've done it.

People can't defend themselves because they can't even understand what they've gotten themselves into or been forced or moved towards. Someone is going to write something brilliant taking it all on? Who would that be? There are no great writers now. Who is going to be brave? There are very few brave people. Who is going to be selfless? Everyone looks out for number one, to the detriment of all, including, ironically, themselves and those they purport to care about. Like the kids they can't be bothered to read to.

People are so simple that they think putting the word "generative"--which to them sounds "smart" and uplifting--makes AI a good thing. If you use AI, you are someone I consider an enemy. I know you are stupid. I know you are lazy. I know you can do no real good in this world. Because I know you are essentially anti-human. You are for the genocide of humanness. The most precious thing that we have as humans. It doesn't just happen, our humanness. It must be worked at. We must be curious, we must be bold, we must be vulnerable, we must care about others and put others before ourselves, and it is only then that we may best become ourselves in the ripening richness of our humanness. And we can never stop. As human as we were yesterday, we must strive to be yet more human tomorrow.

AI is the opposite of this. It represents the killing off--the genocide--in total, of that humanness. And anyone who partakes of AI, or touts AI, is an agent of this human extirpation. You think I'm talking big? People have no idea how far this can go. It can and will end us if things aren't arrested before they get too far. We will eventually even cease to be physically human. And it won't matter by then, because the parts that do matter--did matter--will be all gone.

Things can happen, too, a lot faster than people tend to believe they do. This world is already so much different than it was ten years ago, let alone twenty. We may just be getting started with AI, but the truth is is that we're not that far away from being finished. What's to stop the finishing? Thought? Works of art and truth and beauty? Who is going to make those? Courage? Perspicacity and wisdom? People working towards a common communal and sociological goal? Love of and concern for thy neighbor? Critical thinking? There is nothing to stop the free fall. We don't have the tools. We don't have the people.

I saw this post from a mother talking about her high school daughter. She said she loved her daughter very much. That was clear from the manner in which she spoke about her. You could tell. Her daughter was an honors student. The kid who was paired, in school projects, with someone who was struggling, because she'd help lift him or her up. Good marks, all of that. She said, though, that her daughter thinks WWII happened in the 1800s, and she has no idea what the Civil War was. There were other examples. Her older kids, she said, had a better idea of these things when they were in school.

I was mentioning this to someone the other day--not because the daughter's case stands out, but because if you went up to most adults on the street--and especially adults under, let us say, sixty--you would find that very few of them--I'll call it one percent--would know when either of these things were--even roughly--let alone anything about them. You really think someone is going to know about the first half of the 1860s and the Civil War?

And I mention these two episodes in history because you could argue that they are the two most important in America's history. Even more so than the Revolutionary period. One involved the prospective saving of the free world, in which an attempt had been made to genocide an entire people. That was the goal--wipe out millions and millions of people. So that no more of those people remained. Not a one. Think about that. Where does something like that end? Not there, if that were actually accomplished. Evil tends to move to the next, not wipe off the hands and say, "Okay, all done."

The Civil War was a bigger deal than the Revolutionary War. The country would have gotten started, at some point. But the country could have ended with the events from 1861-1865. In both WWII and the Civil War, you are talking about the most basic of human rights, and the attempt to abolish those rights at best, and entire peoples at worst. The Revolutionary War was very skirmish-y. If it wasn't, the Republic couldn't have prevailed. But what was at stake was different.

What do people know now? 6-7. The thing that was the 6-7 before the idiocy of 6-7. They'll know the thing after that. What they know they know from TikTok and social media, and clips, and decontextualized scraps of text. Which is to say, they know nothing. They don't even know how to know. They border on intellectually helpless. Unable to fend for themselves if they wanted to. Those people are then controlled. Used. Figuratively enslaved. For a very few people. Overlords. Who use all of these people in the acquisition and maintenance of more power and a fortune that was already so great that had they lived thousands of lifetimes, they couldn't make any noticeable dent in it.

It's not even money to do anything with--it's just money to have. These people are often in AI-related fields, or pushers of AI. Because AI takes away the humanness and any potential resistance. It takes away the tools to have any say to stop any of this. And people don't even realize that. They don't know what their own ignorance and sloth and lack of curiosity, all of their jeers of "TL;DR"--that attitude of "I'll show you, I'll be as stupid as I want to be"--is doing to their own lives. And the lives of their children. And their children's children.