Johnny Belgium

There is this meme going around that you shouldn't use rational arguments because people only respond to emotional argumentation. In online debates with me, people have even said that my argument is wrong because it is rational and not emotional. For instance, I have argued that a plant based diet is superior, and someone (who claimed to be in politics for the Marxist pvda party) responded to my reasoning that I shouldn't use rational arguments and that people would revolt if they didn’t have their daily piece of animal carcass. The irony or paradox is that "you shouldn't use rational arguments BECAUSE people only respond to emotion" is a rational argument. They should be saying "I feel you shouldn't be rational." And even that is a reason. What is logic or rationality? It is stating a hypothesis of cause and effect. This will happen when that happens. That happened because of this. It's what science tries to uncover. Cause and effect is the fund...

I was a liberal as a kid. A religion teacher once asked me during a verbal exam whether immigrants should get the right to vote. I said of course, if they live here they should get a say. I didn’t see colour. There was a new kid in class and only when a teacher asked where he came from did I realize he was brown. He was from Morocco but had a Flemish mother. But really, I had no political awareness. I never thought about immigrants or anything political. I had no opinions. As a teenager I was exclusively obsessed with cars. It was the 90ties, an age of hope. We were going to destroy antiquated ideas and go into a future of prosperity, freedom and peace. My personal life was a mess but the culture was progressive. My first job, in 2004 when I was 22 years old, was as a cleaner. It was an impossible job. I had to clean a three story office building, temporary container buildings and a warehouse, on my own, part time. It could not be done, but the client demanded that my employer, a clean...

Growing up in the 90ties, when counter culture was mainstream, I was pretty liberal and feminist. But I had no contact with girls because I went to a trade school as a teenager where 99% of the students where males. I also had no social life outside of school. I didn't have a lot of female contact in general. My mother was an unmedicated schizophrenic that lived alone in our childhood home, my sister was 6 years older and got kicked out early by my father and our family kind of got isolated from the rest of our large family.  I had a libido at the time and my fantasy was to live off-grid in the forest of Canada with a wife and four daughters. I kind of worshipped women. Hypothetical women. I thought it would be me and her against the world. I once for a brief second thought there might be a god because of how beautiful the female body is. When the boys at school talked about sexual debauchery, I had panic attacks. But I had them every day for all sorts of reasons, and it didn't...