Starting out.

So recently I've been accused several times of ruining people's fun by overly politicizing things; and that perhaps I'd enjoy things more if I can just be apolitical sometimes.

Problem is, I don't believe there such a thing as being apolitical. If you attempt to ignore the political aspect of the world, to remain unaware of government and society and the world, what you're in fact doing is taking part in, and encouraging, ignorance. And that in itself is about the most significant political act a person can do.

Significant. Not good.

Willful ignorance is exactly what those with power have wanted and used since the beginning of time to inflict all manner of evils on society. Thousands of years ago it was used to by the ruling class to proclaim it had a divine right to rule; Today it's what gets people to believe that Obama is secretly a Muslim, that Global Warming is a hoax, and that in 2002 Iraq was working with Al-Qaeda and a grave threat to America. And it's a huge tragedy that at a time where we have access to more information than 99.999% of all humans in the history of the world, people markedly choose to remain ignorant.

To borrow a phrase from miriku, it's South Park politics. I think one of the reasons the show was embraced by so many different people is because whenever it talked about a serious issue, the show would end would have a wishy-washy coda where one of the kids would spout show common sense middle-of-the-road speech. The moral is clear: only stupid people believe too strongly in anything. (I stopped watching the show about a decade ago, so if they actually started believing in anything, I take that back.)

I've probably stated this before, but I think the past few years have proven that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was more prescient than Orwell's 1984. Where Orwell saw a world where the government banned books and kept people from accessing information, Huxley envisioned a future where information was freely available, people were just distracted by trivial things or chose to ignore what was actually happening.