I'm glad Leonard Nimoy died today.
Oh don't get me wrong. I'm a huge Star Trek fan. I've seen every single episode of every single show. It took me two months of my life. Not two months as in it took me from January to March. I mean if you wanted to watch all the iterations of Star Trek straight through with no sleep, no food, no interruptions of any kind, it would take you two months. That's how many there are. That's how much I've watched. So when I say I'm glad Leonard Nimoy died today, I don't mean I'm glad he died. I'm just glad he died today.
The character Nimoy played is my personal favorite from the Original Series, and probably a lot of people's favorite. I like Spock because he's logical. Nimoy dying on this particular day did logic a great service: it got people to focus on something other than arguing about what color something objectively was.
If some future historian is reading this, let me explain: my countrymen, my people, my civilization were so astoundingly, so amazingly, so unbelievably stupid that, as a collective, they spent the better part of February 27, 2015 arguing about what color a dress was. Yes. They did. I'm sorry. I hate them too. Please don't give up on history just because of this fact.
Let's leave the future historian for a bit. Presumably, he needs some time to claw his eyes and/or Internet-brain interface out of his skull anyway. Now I'm talking to you, present reader. What in holy hell were you thinking? Let's recap what's going on in this particular time period. We have a religious-political extremist group taking over a large portion of the world where, not incidentally, we get a large portion of our most widely used energy source. Net neutrality was just passed, and people still aren't sure what that even means, both literally and for the future. We're in the middle of a decade plus long war that won't end and the leader of our country is ok with drones not only killing people abroad but also with spying on us at home. And you spent your day arguing over what color a dress was?
Fucking really?
Let's get one thing straight: that dress can only be the color it is. That's how light works. Case closed. Let's get something else straight, and I want to be very very clear here: WHO THE FUCK CARES?
Seriously. Who cares? Who. Fucking. Cares?
You know what your problem is? Your problem is that you're willing to argue about what color a fucking dress is because you're too afraid to discuss real problems. You think it's boring or rude to talk about the fact that a sitting president is an accessory to murder but you think it's ok to make a hashtag about a fucking dress?
Oh, right, sorry, future historian. Hashtags are, like, these things people used to use to denote interest in something on the Internet. They usually went away after a week because people from 2015 can't focus on anything even slightly important for more then a week and - oh he's tearing out the brain thing again... Ok...
Back to the present, then. I said Leonard Nimoy's death was a timely victory for logic, and here's why: it got people to quit arguing about something with only one objective outcome. Something is either a certain color or it's not. The same people who are unwilling to argue about something that actually can be argued, like the war, the economy, or net neutrality, are totally ok with arguing about something that literally cannot be argued against. That's fucking stupid. I don't care if it's a joke. It's not funny. Something is either a certain color or it's not. I mean come the fuck on.
Yeah, it's cool our brains work a certain way. Yeah, it's cool how they interpret color. Hey, guess what? Maybe instead of blowing up Facebook and Twitter, you can go read a fucking book to learn about this stuff like the rest of us who maybe took a basic psychology course because we were interested in psychology, not because we wanted to argue about the color of a dress on the Internet.
This is not what the Internet was designed for. It was designed for the viewing of pornography. But after people finished with that (so to speak), it was designed to spread information. I can't tell you how much I've learned over the Internet. About computers, guns, cars, personal finance, cooking, beer, literally anything there's a subreddit for. And sure, I like to laugh at dogs doing funny things as much as the next guy, but we, as a society, have taken it to an extreme when we use it to argue over nothing the way we've been doing.
In fact, let's get back to basics. Go watch some porn. It's better than the mental version of jacking off we as a society have been doing all day.
For all the profanity and crudeness of this post, I think it's a fitting eulogy to a man who portrayed a character as logical as Spock. Because society could use a little logic. I'm going to go watch Amok Time now, in all its cheesy glory, and I'm going to drink rum out of my Starfleet glassware. Here's to you, Leonard.
