My political ideology, in one pic

I'm trying to quit engaging with Twitter slop, but this was too good to resist:

This is what I believe in.

Ruining the joke is lame, but it still must be said: both of these people and their supporters have way more in common with each other than they do with the neolib-neocon establishment.

The populist right is against cheap labor (foreigners) and foreign wars (America 1st). The populist left is against cheap labor (corporate greed) and foreign wars (imperialism). Both want some form of protectionism, as opposed to corporate globalism-- the only difference is some want it to be right-wing flavored (nativism) and others want it to be left-wing branded (socialism).

They support identical outcomes, but for different reasons-- well who cares about the reasons, then? Just get over your differences, and start working together.

Maybe as political polarization winds down, and the country starts to fall apart economically, they can strike a truce over these minor differences and start making peace, finding common ground, and unifying in order to take on the rotten and corrupt establishment.

Random thoughts for the day

(Most of these are not very original, you could probably get them from reading Taleb, but I still feel like writing them down.)

-Owning a home seems totally out of reach, short of starting an OnlyFans or robbing a bank. There could always be a major recession, but whenever I think about that it occurs to me that there are probably millions of lost souls out there rotting away, waiting for the market to crash-- I'd rather not spend my life like that. It makes more sense to just rule home ownership out for the present, and assume prices will remain totally absurd and unaffordable for the near future.

-There is no sense in cooperating with a system that is actively working against you. We all know the economy is a scam and that the government does nothing to protect its citizens or provide stability for those who weren't born in time to get in on the fun. It's not something I'm going to rage and seethe and shake my fist about all day, but it's important to understand and internalize it-- and just move on with life, pursue other hobbies, invest in local connections, and so on, with that in mind.

The entire thing will collapse-- not into doom and gloom, but into absurdity.

-Now that everything is done with the short-term in mind, and nothing is built to last, the sad thing is there will be very few traces of our existence. Instagram pics and selfies and group-chats will vanish into digital oblivion, poorly-built made-to-break furniture and devices and books will crumble, and the legions of shoddy homes and apartments will be abandoned: historians in a thousand years may wonder if Americans and Westerners began to die off after the year 1980, since they will have almost no proof of their existence.

Our social relations and our lives have also been min-maxxed and efficiency-optimized for maximum convenience, so the same will be true there-- we will disappear quickly, without much connection to any particular place or person, and there will be little to remember us by.

-Pursuing the barbell strategy, as Nassim Taleb says: doing something very low risk and traditional, such as working as a plumber or carpenter or welder, and pursuing scholarly or artistic interests on the side. In other words, avoiding the fake 'stability' of the middle route (going to college).

Not only has a degree become a negative financial investment (especially in the long run as bloated governments and corporations alike collapse under their own weight) the universities themselves are largely anti-scholarly, pro-conformity, publish-or-die, rat races run by armies of ignorant HR blob 'people'.  They have become bullshit-factories, and being a part of that means risking infection-- better to just stay away.

-Avoid corruption! The society revolves around lies and absurdities, and lies are damaging not just because they're false information--which most people see through quickly-- but because repeating lies gradually corrupts your soul. Fighting all of them is impossible (better to just let them die on their own), so the most important thing is to minimize the degree to which you degrade yourself by assenting to the whole thing.

Never lie to yourself either. If something is bad, abusive, wrong don't try and reframe the abuse as being akshually wonderful. Lying to yourself is where lying to others starts from, and if you're honest with yourself it's much easier to be honest with everyone else. It's less stressful in the long run, too.

-Anyone who explicitly tells you about their virtuous behavior-- instead of showing it, or you hearing about it from others-- is wicked. And anyone who starts off by telling about their victim status-- rather than you learning about their life from others-- will abuse you or other people in the future. 

Contrary to the evolutionary science thing about language facilitating communication, it's mainly the opposite: people call themselves precisely what they're not, say things they won't do, and generally obfuscate and confuse things.

Our growing concern for abstract causes, and endless virtue-preening, is perfectly compatible with our increasingly sick, vicious, and wicked behavior towards one another.

-People whose flaws you don't know are usually infinitely worse than the ones whose flaws you're aware of.

-If something has to be called 'smart' or 'efficient', it never is. I've never seen a smart device do anything intelligent, and every single efficient choice has been 10x more costly than the old-fashioned option.  

Meet the new media, same as the old media

The majority of online content more and more resembles the standard CNN / Fox News stuff, but with packaging that's familiar to Millennials and Zoomers.

Other than the occasional niche reference, it all boils down to:

Here's why standard conservative politician #5443 is the devil / a saint, and here's why standard liberal politician #5444 is the devil / a saint.

Here's why everything our side does is based and good, and here's why everything their side does is cringe and evil.

Here's niche alt-left or alt-right packaging, but neolib / neocon content.

The Millennials and Zoomers who consume this slop for 8 hrs a day or more, are just as insane as the Boomers. This means that content creators must must work hard to keep them on the addictive treadmill forever, by keeping their minds in a perpetually heightened state of arousal / reactivity. 

This means endless doses of, among other things, self-righteousness ('think of the kids, all those dead innocent African children slaughtered and abandoned mercilessly'), victory and triumph ('MAGA for the W, suck it leftists'), doom and gloom ('climate change or COVID or AI will collapse society in X years'), utopianism ('AI will save us, conscious robots by 2025 err I mean 2030'), action / excitement ('watch evil brown terrorists get blown up, watch Trump supporter get confronted by ANTIFA'), and so on. 

The broader pattern is that the left-wingers jerk themselves off to how wonderful and empathetic and sensitive they are, while behaving like insane psychos and torturers, and the right-wingers jerk themselves off to how powerful and strong they are, while being impotent idle cucks. 

Political Science Theater 300, where you watch debate-club kids and gay nerds attempt show business, high drama, etc. And with a little bit of pro-football or the MMA thrown in, since they're covering real-world politics after all.

Super-intense in the short-term, boring and forgettable and embarrassing to be a part of in the long run.

Since the only real goal is to WIN WIN WIN at all costs, there are no standards for what gets said, it's just anything goes, and the highest-paid and most visible writers are those who can come up with the best insults, state their ignorant / clueless / insane views in the most confident way possible, and misunderstand and misconstrue and pigeon-hole the other side as hard as possible. 

I was never interested in joining debate clubs in high school, and I'm not impressed with the online version as an adult.

Given how dissatisfied mainstream audiences are becoming with the mainstream, it's even more disappointing and underwhelming to turn to the 'new' outlets that are replacing them and see the same level of fakeness, the same-old slop mindlessly regurgitated and presented as new (just don't check the expiration date), the same 'debates' that were out-dated in the 2000s and are even more ridiculous now, etc etc etc. 

Fortunately, the novelty is starting to wear off, and the emotional intensity is a lot lower than last year (not a high bar to clear, and due to exhaustion among the various fighters), so there's less to exploit on both fronts. 

Going forward I think this stuff will simply become more and more irrelevant, confined to a niche group of slop-enthusiasts, while the masses simply tune it all out as irrelevant.

The IQ cope

I've railed against these people before, and it's not that I think IQ is fake, or that it's not real, or that it doesn't correlate with anything.

A lot of this stuff seems to have started back in the 90s, when the cONtRoVeRSial research on racial differences in intelligence got started, but it seems like a lot of its supporters have forgotten that this 'ground-breaking' stuff is almost 30 years old at this point. 

Yes, we get it, whites are smarter than browns, and upper-class whites are smarter than working-class whites. Shocking discoveries-- but fortunately we have the geniuses around to enlighten us on these issues.

Believe it or not, some people had also figured these truths out before the 90s, and using their own unique methods. However, autistic people will never understand empathy or intuition, so they always have to articulate and explain with reason what other people just do instinctively, which means it takes them forever to learn the basic facts that make up a normal person's instinctive, unconscious, knowledge or awareness of the world, such as X people do this, or Y people are like that, etc.

The problem lies not so much IQ as a metric itself, but rather with the copers or fetishists on social media. What they do is perform a sleight of hand, where their score suddenly becomes a great and wonderful achievement in and of itself, rather than just an indication of potential.

This is a mixture of 'everyone gets a trophy' and 'get out of jail free'. 

They don't have to use their brains to be insightful, or learn anything about any subject, or acquire useful skills and regularly apply their knowledge in order to prove their intelligence. No, it's more like they try and make the fact that they have this high score automatically grant them genius status, and then they try to force everyone else to take them seriously because of that.

They don't understand that a bird in hand is worth two in the bush-- a person with medium IQ who is actually knowledgeable, and who is capable of using that knowledge for something good or productive is smarter in the real-world sense than a potential-but-not-actual genius who doesn't know anything and isn't capable of doing anything, or is even destined to fail (from sheer ignorance, lack of experience or training, etc).

The current bunch of tech-scammers are a good example of that kind of arrogant 'potential genius', accomplishing nothing (and doing that with other people's money) or even pulling scams, while also constantly patting themselves on the back for their cleverness. 

This obsession usually overlaps with genetic coping and genetic copers, who also do the exact same thing. This is the 'muh ancestors' crowd / LARPers. What they do is say-- 'I'm X, and previous generations of my people did this or that'.  

Meanwhile they've never done anything noteworthy, but they come from illustrious and impressive ancestors, which means their present-day actual mediocrity or retardedness is actually really superiority, and all without having to do anything in real life to back that up!

This is the typical syndrome of taking a tool and fetishizing it / obsessing over it so much that you forget that the tools is meant to help you do something or accomplish something rather than be an end in and of itself.

Superiority and intelligence are all demonstrated in the real world, through actual accomplishments or discoveries or impressive creations or conquests or whatever, not through unrealized possibilities or potentiality or 'ifs' and 'maybes' and so on. 

And of course, if you're retarded and you accomplish and produce nothing or even fuck things up, then it's totally irrelevant who your ancestors are or what your IQ score is, since we have a much more direct and easy way to measure your worth (or worthlessness) than DNA or IQ.

The discourse on the Internet around these subjects is simply a way for these people to give themselves another trophy and then collectively celebrate their mediocrity, in one giant hive, rather than humble themselves and admit the truth.

A brief note about the BS-maxxers

(Yes, I'm aware that I promised to leave the subject alone and not return to it, but that's a premature New Year's resolution. In the here and now I want to re-hash what I've said.)

I'm posting a comment I wanted to make, but that deserves its own post:

The patron saint of all these retards and BS-maxxers is someone like Noah Smith, though they may not name-drop him specifically (because it would be too embarrassing), but if you look carefully, that's who they are modelling themselves after, whose approach they're imitating, and so on and so forth.

They spout this BS about Einstein and Newton and being the builders of civilization and science and whatnot-- but that's all fake, there is zero scientific inquiry or awareness of basic laws, and no discovery or curiosity whatsoever. They are the opposite of that, sharing a similar ideological position and wearing a similar costume, but when you investigate carefully you see them for the disgusting tranny freaks they are, in some cases literally.

The whole approach really took off during the 2010s, right as the mother of all tech bubbles was also getting started, and what it immediately devolved into was NOT figuring anything out, NOT solving any mysteries, NOT understanding anything, but rather coming up with new and innovative and bold ways of lying with numbers, rationalizing the behavior of elites / corporations / big government, and generally doing nothing except obfuscating and complex-ifying basic things. 

Meanwhile the actual foundations of good knowledge and sensible decisions all faded away, or were actively destroyed.

Now after ten or fifteen years of this, and as the society and individual people's lives have only gotten worse and worse, nobody trust them at all. So the whole thing is now an inside joke for people who never really grew up after middle school, to jerk themselves off with their constructs and snicker at stale inside jokes, while the actual world that they are supposed to be improving is falling apart. 

However de-coupling their brains from their copium supply would induce a massive withdrawal, and possibly kill them, so they'll keep huffing that garbage forever.

The actual "debate" is now simply about finding the next, so far unexploited source of copium, so that they can continue ignoring reality-- very similar to Mildred in Fahrenheit 451. Right now that appears to be A.I chatbots, and whatever drug they still haven't tried, but who knows what they'll descend to in the next 5-10 yrs.

The whole approach is deeply anti-intellectual and it represents a merger of the worst aspects of the verbal and physical / mathematical disciplines. A mega-tumor, as it were.

On the verbal side, they're remarkably and totally ignorant and dismissive of everything that's existed and contributed to culture-- zero interest in philosophy, linguistics, history / art or literature, etc. 

For a bunch of Euro heritage braggers, they strangely seem to know almost nothing about Europe's architectural styles, painting, cathedrals, or 17th cent. poetry and literature. And to the extent their brains are even capable of approaching that stuff, they dismiss it!

Their actual "knowledge" consists of half-baked Social Darwinism (Nietzsche + Ayn Rand), something about the Crusades and WW2, and basically nothing else. I mean that seriously, they can't reference anything else, because they don't know anything else.

Their real skill lies in the art of marketing and P.R "window-dressing", ie making the bad things sound good, and the good things sound bad, in the service of the usual suspects. These B.S degrees either did not exist, or weren't anywhere near as common, awhile ago, but now that the whole economy is fake the notion that you need some expertise in order to make decisions has been thrown out the window: just make it sound nice, become some kind of HR creature, and who cares what any of it really means.

In the mathematical sciences, they don't represent physicists (unless it's some kind of schizo everything theory, which would allow them to tawk and tawk endlessly about nothing) or biologists or engineers or surgeons or anyone else that needs to think carefully and learn about complex systems. 

They don't even have an amateur's interest in any of these subjects. Many of them are just discovering 2nd order effects!

It's all just a giant misapplication of statistics and really, and as they say about themselves, weaponized autism-- taking some stat out of it's original context, lying by omission or presenting it in favor of some B.S narrative, drawing all kinds of interesting but ultimately meaningless graphs and constellations of numbers, and then taking that retardedness to the next level by smugly ignoring the obvious signs of how lame and clueless and ignorant they are.  

It's like allowing a group of 7r olds operate heavy machinery, and then expecting some kind of miracle result, rather than a total disaster.

Intro post: against technological opium, DISCONNECTING, RETVRNING to the real world

Speaking as a young person (TM), I've been interested in de-technologifying or de-digitifying (or however you say it) my life.

Millennials and Zoomers have been raised on the Internet, entirely online for all of their lives. So hopefully this would also serve as a kind of inspiration too for anyone else in my situation to join the movement and maybe even for future generations if they stumble on this post. 

I am a bit of an outlier, in terms of my habits and because my parents pushed me to spend time away from devices, which gives me more of a mature person's outlook, but even then I still spend way too much time on the Internet by normal standards.

This has led to the kind of existence I talked about in my post called 'simulation country', where most people and especially young people are hooked up to some kind of virtual / digital / technological opium 24/7. For girls, social media platforms, and for guys, video-games (Instagram is really the female version of an MMO game).

It leads to a situation where you fast-forward through your life-- and then you wake up, you're in your 30s, and you've never done anything other than walk on some digital treadmill.  Then you talk to your parents and they did all kinds of things by the time they were 19, and if you're not totally zapped out, you feel like you have nothing. Very sad, and disturbing.

It's not just the lack of relationships or the lack of sex (those are the external aspects, which show up in the statistics) but really the lack of complexity and depth in people's emotional lives, including my own-- we are living very empty, robotic, hollow, existences. Like I said, it's as if someone pressed the fast-forward button and were trying to skip over life without any of the interesting bits, just one mindless distraction after another. 

I've also noticed quite a few Millennials seem to have this kind of jaded know-it-allness and cynicism, despite literally knowing nothing about most subjects and having no social experiences. This is especially common on Twitter, where you can read some of the most empty retarded ignorant hopelessly wrong opinions delivered as if they were verified by God Himself, with a tone of snarky superiority etc although it's also common on YT (video essays being the biggest offenders). Hopefully this doesn't infect as many Zoomers, but who knows.

Being online 24/7 also feeds into the mental illness epidemic, too. However for this series I'll try to stick to the smaller aspects or secondary effects, since most people are aware of the big problems like suicide, bullying, widespread access to porn and gore / violent videos, etc.

In this series I would also not just be thundering down as a superior or like some latter-day prophet castigating sinners (which I do have quite the tendency to do, if you haven't noticed). By looking at something which I'm guilty of, it forces the tone to be more humble.

I'll also add that when I look at my experiences, it's really the moments when I was least online that have been the most memorable, productive, satisfying, interesting, and so on. 

In the same way that monopolies and cartels in the economy should be broken down into smaller pieces, Internet usage also needs to be dialed down, and re-focused into developing various skills, instead of passively relying on one mega-device to do all the work, while suffering from all kinds of downsides and secondary effects. 

(To make matters worse the mega-device has been designed by some of the most evil and lazy people in society, the tech oligarchs. All the more reason to DISCONNECT.)

RETVRNING to the real world means going back to various different devices and tools, instead of solely relying on one, developing your own skills and hobbies, rather than becoming another account, and living a more fulfilling interesting life, with both ups and downs, rather than a bland monotonous existence of treadmills and sanitized corporate slop.

Ukraine update, and 'peace deals' in general

Now that a ceasefire with Russia is in the cards, I wanted to offer some thoughts on what I consider fake vs real peace deals. I also haven't blogged about the Ukraine war recently, since I don't find the subject very interesting— it's just been the same old endless losing and endless coping for them and their supporters (a ritual they somehow never get tired of). 

What I really want to talk about is the broader subject of 'peace deals'. Namely, I think this is part of the broader betrayal of Trump's anti-establishment / populist base, not anything real or substantial. 

What they're doing is temporarily de-escalating on one losing front, but not in order to change things up or wind down the level of interventionism, it's so they can re-focus the money and weapons to some other losing front or possibly even start a new war. 

In this case, what they have in mind is de-escalating on the Russian front (following another major defeat) so they can re-direct all the energy to fighting Venezuela instead. This is a fairly obvious call, given the massive build in the region.

It's also a warning sign that the actual power of the US military is collapsing, since it no longer has the industrial capacity or manpower or logistic ability to fight on multiple fronts at the same time. Instead what they have to do is isolate one front by pausing all the other wars, stage highly theatrical bombings and assassinations, and then quickly back down before the real fighting starts, before doing the exact same thing somewhere else-- but always failing to achieve their real objectives, whether regime-change, winning territory, securing trade-routes, capturing resources, or whatever.

Contrast this with the peak of American military performance during WW2, when we could fight (and win) on multiple fronts, while enjoying the support of the domestic population, and without bringing down the entire economy, and you can see how far things have fallen in terms of industrial capability, long-term strategic thought, and so on and so forth. 

And since nothing in the real world is frozen / static, this will continue to get worse and worse over time. The military will be weaker in the future, with less equipment to throw away and less support at home, and the economy will be more and more indebted and less capable of producing anything worthwhile to feed into the meat grinder. 

We are also not ditching the losers in Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, etc in order to make deals with Russia / Iran / China / etc that would allow us access to energy, trade routes, etc, which we need in order to stabilize our economy. It's simply dialing down the heat, but without altering any of the long-term dynamics, meaning that (1) nothing will change and (2) there will be no economic benefit to re-compensate us for the massive waste of blood, money, equipment, etc. 

The wars will likely resume in 5-10 years (maybe sooner), since none of the participants have any reason to stick by these flimsy / cynical agreements, and perhaps with more intensity than before. And since, like I said above, we're only going to get weaker and weaker, the side being backed by the Pentagon will get raped harder than before by Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, etc. 

It's just kicking the can down the road, and calling that a win, a short-term defeat for an even larger loss in the long run-- retarded, but also typical of the Trump administration and spineless American / Western elites in general.  

Also, and as usual, Trump, Musk, Vivek, and the GOP in general are relying on MAGA supporters being too stupid to tell the difference between real vs fake outcomes, and too addicted to slop consumption to push back against them, which is why their army of paid apologists is now working overtime to rationalize yet another destructive wasteful foreign war as AKSHUALLY America 1st. After so many betrayals, the MAGA base (at least judging by the Internet) is now just an army of die-hard masochists and cucks, led by paid shills at the top, marching happily into yet another massive disaster-- better to just leave them to their fate, if that's how they want to go out, then join the doomed suicidal cult. 

An old joke

For those who aren't interested in rants--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7GP3l5znc8

(In case the link goes down, it's a joke from The Magnificent Seven.

A man fell from a ten-story building, and as he was falling, the people on each floor kept hearing him say, "So far so good.")

We went on printing billions of dollars, with no plan, and as we got further and further and further into debt, we said, "So far, so good."

It's a succinct description of not just the economy, but the mental state of the 'experts' who are responsible for it.

And, it goes without saying-- but actually must be said-- that today's sophisticated, modern, superior people are now living in (trapped in) what their predecessors would have regarded as an absurd joke. 

Brief update, quitting my job

I've written almost nothing over the past few months, and I've also done almost no creative or academic work.

The reason for this is working a full-time job, which has been very demanding on my time and energy. However the economy is beyond fucked, so working for a wage barely gets you anywhere, but you still have do the same amount of work or more (so your bosses and managers get their big fat bonuses, and to compensate for all the jobs being slashed and the yuge numbers of people dropping out of the system). The job I had involved real physical work, which I don't mind, and had the added benefit of keeping me in shape, but unfortunately it just took too much out of me.

This led to a situation where I felt too tired on the days I had off to do anything creative, plus there were chores and errands to get to and so on. And of course once I felt rested and capable and optimistic, the work cycle would start again. 

I would open up this blog, see I still had some views, and feel bad and want to write something. Sometimes I did, but mostly I just kept on promising myself, 'this time will be different' and 'I'll write something the next off-day, it's just that this one was a rare miss' or 'next week I'll get to this or that'. This went on for months. Eventually it became obvious what the problem was.

So I've decided to step down and work part-time instead of full-time. That way I can invest most of my time and energy into the things that really matter to me. It won't be a very impressive lifestyle, but if I'm not going to be making much money anyways (guaranteed, in this economy) it's better to scrape by while feeling fulfilled and engaged, rather than slave away at something I'm not even that enthusiastic about, and still not make that much money at the end of the day.

As far as I'm concerned, if the people in charge of our society want workers and grunts to supervise, they should start offering higher wages and better working conditions. But they won't, so the society will keep disintegrating and they might just wind up being the bosses and managers and supervisors of nothing, due to their greed. But that's their problem...

I'm going to do my best to avoid falling in the classic pit-fall of becoming an aimless NEET who just does drugs and alcohol and plays video games day-in, day-out. Fortunately I still have bills to pay, so I have some external pressure on me to work and produce something rather than waste away.

My main interests have always been artistic and of course intellectual, so that's where I'm going to focus my energies. I may take a course here or there, or do some kind of apprenticeship (it remains to be seen). I'm never going to college though, the whole thing is too rotten and too insulting. Since I've made decent money this year I've also been able to collect collect a lot gear, books, tools, equipment for different things, which I now finally have time to use. I may start a YT channel, for example.

For now, it's all up in the air, and anyways I have a real week of work left-- so this is still somewhat premature-- but the point is that things should finally get more interesting around here. Yes, I'm aware I've said that before, but fortunately I don't charge anyone for reading here (and never will), so this won't come off as a parasitic plea for MORE MONEY like the people on Patreon or Substack do. Even if it doesn't work out, and I sink into a stupor or eventually have to return to toiling in the collapsing economy or whatever you (whoever is still reading here) won't have been been scammed.

Redditards

It might be obvious to everyone, but as far as I can tell nobody has said it *overtly*.  It's interesting to me because it's another one of those cases where the branding is the exact opposite of what's actually going on. 

 

I think the current political backlash against the left is due to the fact that the fedora atheists and woke / Reddit types of the 2000s and 2010s were not-- contrary to all of their propaganda-- really about rationalistic discourse and free-thinking, liberating the masses from their religious oppressors, ushering in a new age of enlightenment, and so on and so forth. Rather they were a group of crusaders who were out to introduce an even higher level of conformity and group-worship to the culture, one where even implying that you have a slightly different opinion on the hot topic du jour gets you witch-hunted, mocked, banned, and so on, all by a viciously intolerant mob. 

They were really wannabe commissars and witch-hunters, just the left-wing version instead of the right-wing version.

And in their actual behavior they were the opposite of an open-minded person, let alone a free thinker or iconoclast or great scientist or whoever else-- insecure retards who can only develop an opinion as part of some kind of echo-chamber.

 

The end result of putting these morons in charge of The Science was the COVID fiasco, where everyone saw that the authorities were not only clueless and incompetent, unaware of basic facts, and incapable of coming up with real scientific solutions, but on top of that had a seething disdain and contempt for the people they were supposed to be in charge of.

RETVRN to 70s / 80s movies

Zoomers (and Millennials) whose parents never showed them 70s / 80s Hollywood, and who instead grew up on a diet of video games and CGI and now AI slop were aesthetically deprived of some of the coolest experiences out there, and should RETVRN before it's too late and their personality hardens into shape. It might be over for Millennials, who I can see raving about their favorite video games and simulators in their 50s and 60s, but Zoomers should make an effort to experience the classics before it's too late.

I'm very lucky my mom showed me a lot of them growing up, an experience I took for granted but turns out is really quite rare these days.

As a result of being exposed to actual art and entertainment, I've always found video games incredibly boring and awful. Yes, in theory, if done right they could be well-made works of art with good music and nice images-- but they almost never are. Instead it's just horrendous acting, boring plots, no music / soundtrack, and a 17+ hour commitment needed in order to finish them. Not to mention the sky high prices for new video games, unlike older movies which you can pick up at thrift stores for almost nothing.  The gayest medium imaginable, and unfortunately the average young person (under 40) is so deprived that that is all they've ever experienced-- don't let this be your fate!!

If you're not aware, essentially everything is done better than in modern movies. They're shot on film, with real backgrounds (not green screen), they're not infested with lame sPeCiAl eFfEcTs or CGI or other pointless crap, and the acting is mature and competent (as opposed to the wacky over-the-top stuff we have today). If you've only seen movies from the 2000s or the 2010s onwards, then-- and I'm not exaggerating when I say this-- you have no idea how a real movie looks, and what an experience it can be. Nothing like today's slop.

 

My advice is to start by watching Stars Wars, Jaws, and the first results under '70s / 80s classic movies' and then branch out from there into whatever genre you prefer.

Trump Update 2.0-- Suicidal Tarrifs

As everyone else has already discussed, they will never work, which is why I didn't post much about them. 

At this point Trump's administration can be summarized as Globalism, but with edgy Reddit memes & 40% more Silicon Valley scammers. Wonderful!

This started to become more and more clear to me when he started doing the rounds on the right-wing media podcasts, an indication that he was just another brand in the Conservative Extended Universe, not an agent for change against the corrupt system, and therefore not worth expecting much out of. This is why I was fairly tepid about the whole thing, while of course expecting him to win (because of the terrible job Biden and the Dems did). 

I was then proven right in my views as Trump doubled down on every single failed issue once in office-- inflation, wars in Ukraine & the M-E (maybe even a new one there, too), and now these tariffs. Trump might be feeling inspired by his friends in Israel, who are doing everything they can to destroy their own country by starting as many wars against as many opponents as possible, and is taking a similarly suicidal path economically. Who knows...

The larger take-away is that the Trump admin will not be that different from Biden's, just a useless moron lashing out at his own people, for no reason, all while pursuing doomed and pointless crusades at home and abroad, for no benefit. 

The silver lining is that he will do as much damage to the credibility of the mainstream Republican agenda as Biden did to the Democrats', leaving it weaker if / when any real alternative shows up.

Simulation Country

Yes, I am aware of the fact that it's a book everyone read in high school, but it has been on my mind lately because I think the current situation is very reminiscent of it, actually. Maybe with a little bit of Phillip K. Dick, to add to the sci-fi dystopia theme.

Specifically, all of this insane and delusional focus on "alternate realities" and "new futures" which are somehow just around the corner, at least according to today's well-funded, high IQ, expert class. 

Yet none of this progress delivers a superior future in material terms. We are becoming more isolated, disconnected, and dysfunctional, while the world around is filled with things that would have been taken as apocalyptic in the past (and now are the everyday reality): armies of junkies and homeless, abandoned buildings and decaying infrastructure, gargantuan mega-corporations that deliver the exact opposite of their stated purpose, and so on.

Rather than making advances in anything real or beneficial, technology only advances in the sense of creating a more high-definition, realistic, copium chamber for today's elites. By surrounding themselves with positive feedback, sealing themselves off in an echo-chamber, and injecting themselves with endless drugs, they can experience a positive balance of "Good Vibes" and avoid having to face the facts, which allows them to keep going, at least for another day. This is what real world "progress" has devolved to: copium injections.

As for books, forget about them: nobody reads anymore. No need for top-down interventions there!

Instead of a book-burning squad, we have the anti-sincerity police, who go around looking for any sign of spirit, libido, non-conformity, and openness in order to squash it. Mainly because in a society full of hollow people who are only living from day to day, any individual spark would threaten to burn the whole thing down, not to mention serve as a dreadful reminder of how badly things have fallen apart-- so clamp down on it!

This bleak situation is rationalized as "liberating" because you can now watch endless amounts of porn and do as many drugs as possible: truly amazing progress. 

The loss of all of things like health, relationships, social trust, communities is also rationalized, but in a different way: "I'm too generic and unique for all that, so I don't really want those things!". (Never mind the fact that, even if you did want them, you would never be able to find a steady career or afford kids in the first place, not to mention that even if somehow got a hold of those things you'd be raising them in a dysfunctional ugly low-trust country).

If I could summarize the present arrangement, I'd say that we've been left with a series of economic extraction zones for various mega-cartels, while everyone within them is reliant on various simulations of real world activities in order to keep going. Simulation of sex (porn), simulation of companionship (influencers), simulation of progress and individual achievement (drugs, video games, the gym, social media), simulation of a career and a future (going to college), simulation of kids (pets), the list goes on and on... 

It may fool gullible minds, since it's semi-accurate and the tech behind it keeps advancing, but everything real is missing.

The Mediterranean diet: red meat, cheese, milk, and more red meat!

Don't even get me started on what a massive scam this whole thing is.

As far as I can tell, the Mediterranean Diet (TM) was originally created in America during the low fat craze of the 80s and then spread to the Mediterranean region-- a curious example of  cultural imperialism. 

It's either that, or it's just an excuse to charge people upwards of $35 for extra premium cold pressed artisanal olive oil, most of which is fake and should never be used for cooking.

Apparently they believe that if you pay that much for some olive oil, you will magically be endowed with longevity and your meals will be blessed with European sophistication and prestige. 

Instead, you'll be rewarded with poor health (from consuming canola oil, or whatever junk they put in there) and you'll be endowing your meals with a little bit of old school Sicilian fraud. Not the region you had in mind when they said Mediterranean, but sometimes it's good to check the label.

Full disclosure, my mother is Spanish, and I've been there. And not just on vacation in tourist areas, I've stayed for months and had the local chow. Well, nobody there eats the Mediterranean diet, I reiterate, nobody!

Even people close to the coast, like in Galicia, consume copious amounts of red meat and dairy, all ingredients which are absent from the ideal Mediterranean Diet (TM) of olive oil, plus a few vegetables, and a tiny tiny tiny tiny piece of fish, preferably lean (I guess b/c after you spend all your budget on olive oil, you can't afford anything else?).

Here is an example of what Spanish people really eat. You can find them ('carnicerias') in every city. 

If you don't believe me, go there and see:

Pork and especially cured pork-- a Spanish delicacy-- is huge in every part of Spain. They don't eat in small quantities either, it's the main ingredient in a lot of ways. It's also quite cheap and affordable, as well as high quality, unlike the expensive garbage the people in charge of America feed their people.

Cheese is also huge, though not in the pic. Everyone has heard of Manchego cheese, though for some reason nobody includes it in the Mediterranean diet.

Not to mention a glass of milk for breakfast and a glass of milk for dinner, everyday. Spaniards love milk.

Those high rates of consumption of red meat and dairy are the primary reason why Spaniards look and feel better than Americans (not to mention the fact that they live longer). All the nutrition you need is found in those two foods, whereas every other so-called 'diet' requires extensive supplementation precisely because vegetables are simply not that nutritious. 

Having said that, don't count on that to last indefinitely into the future: greedy corporations, the WEF / NATO, and Spanish elites have other plans, so consumption of all those foods is going down, especially among the younger generations. As Spanish people start to eat a 'healthier' diet, more in line with the experts' plans-- and as their economy is strip mined-- they will gradually become more obese and prone to heart disease and diabetes, just like their counterparts in America: drugs in, red meat out. Wonderful!

Anyways, if you insist on eating the Mediterranean Diet, make it sure it includes the staples: red meat, cheese, milk, and more red meat!

Immigration

Looking back at previous elections, we can distinguish between the fake non-populists, who did not want any change in the status quo, and the real populists who were open to shaking up the system. The non-populists worked as hard as possible to squash the uprising, namely by ironically dismissing it at first, and then by pretending to agree with it while really trying to redirect its energy towards another outlet, and then if that didn't work they outright banned it and shut it down. This is true on the left, where a whole group of posers like Liz Warren and AOC have embraced Bernie's rhetoric, while shutting their mouths on socialism and anti-elitism, as well as the right, where a whole other group of posers like J.D Vance and Vivek have embraced Trump's rhetoric, while shutting their mouths on nationalism and anti-globalism.

One way to spot the fake non-populist right-wingers is to look at the narratives they post about immigration. The typical right-wing slop focuses entirely on the immigrants themselves, never at the source of immigration, sometimes going even as far as to claim that it's a kind of foreign invasion, hostile takeover, and so on. This is not because they haven't checked the facts or have the wrong ideas, although they are wrong, but mainly because right-wingers are complicit and tacitly in favor (though outwardly critical) of mass migration. They simply benefit far too much from cheap labor to ever shut it down, which is why all their non-solutions don't affect the problem.

Immigration is driven by the elites, and throwing open the borders is an elitist policy-- it exclusively benefits them. This is why the nations with the highest percentage of foreign-born people are super wealthy and influential ones-- Saudi Arabia, then the United States, and then the other Western countries (rich but not as rich as Americans and Arabians). 

Even within nations, immigrants tend to be concentrated within the wealthiest cities and urban areas, not all around, which again is a reflection of who benefits from it and is driving in it. In America they are predominantly concentrated in the huge coastal cities, as that's where most of the elite lives. They're absent from the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and New England. Not surprisingly, these areas are also typically derided as boring, stuffy, backwards, etc (non-elite).

These coastal mega-cities are no longer American, basically, they're either un-American or anti-American. They've been turned into playgrounds where a small group of white managers and elites do the least amount of work possible, while a super-massive group of foreigners takes care of all their needs-- driving them around, cleaning up after them, making and delivering their meals, doing all sorts of manual labor for cheap, working outrageous hours, and so on. They've figured out how to min-maxx every aspect of their lives so they can do the least amount of work possible, while making the most amount of money. 

All of this destroys the white working class in these cities, who find themselves competing over jobs and housing with people who will work for nothing and share a room with six other people. Mass immigration has been a disaster for working class Americans, as all their expenses have shot up (greater demand) while their wages have stagnated or fallen. This dynamic takes shape regardless of where the immigrants come from (Central America, Muslim world, East Asia, etc), contrary to the endless focus on race and genes, and has even taken place before (the Gilded Age), contrary to the belief that this a never-before-seen entry of foreign armies into the West. Immigration is fundamentally anti-working class, anti-populist, and always has been. 

This is what's fueled the rise of dystopian shitholes were large slums right out of the 3rd world co-exist with ultra-wealthy and exclusive enclaves. They are perfectly compatible with each other.

Now as to the future:

As things stand, I don't see either party doing anything about the problem in the short term, aside from cheap branding, lip service, and memes (which are just that). Democrats are the party of big cities, the bigger the better, so they have no problem with immigration and are actively encouraging it. Republicans represent more rural / conservative voters, so they can inject some nationalist or pro-white rhetoric, but they will always cuck on the issue because they also depend on huge armies of cheap labor. 

For Republicans and right-wingers, profit margins are more important than the health of the nation. This is especially true since economic growth, upward mobility, and business in general has broken down since the 2008 financial crisis. Mega-corporations, big institutions, and elites received trillions in free money so they could stay afloat (Quantitative Easing), but small businesses, retail, and mega-farms / agriculture weren't so lucky and don't get endless government funding, which is why they are desperate for cheap laborers in order to keep making tons of money / boosting their profit margins, year after year.  

This betrayal of the American working class is rationalized as elitism, a major plank of both parties, and a form of contempt for the masses. Sucks to be a low IQ, mouth-breathing, Walmart shopper. Unfortunately you are obsolete, and have to be replaced.  

The only national politician that provides some outlet for anti-immigration sentiment currently is Bernie Sanders, but he's too old to really be effective anymore (and even when he was he sadly cucked by the Dems twice, didn't even make it to the general).

However, the whole American system is now breaking down in a disastrous, apocalyptic, fashion. The economy is falling apart, the credibility of the government has been destroyed, and general faith and trust and compliance within the system have all gone out the window. No amount of insults and scolding by the elites will fix those things, as they're the result of fundamental and systemic issues. The shrinkflation and price gouging and collapsing trust and all the other negative symptoms are only going to get worse, compounding on each other to create new problems. 

This means the popular and anti-elite feelings are not going to away and be looked back as 'just a phase', before we return to the sensible neoliberal policies that have led us to the current disaster. This is sheer delusion on the part of the establishment. On the contrary, they will only intensify as the system breaks down and people become more desperate. 

I think what will become more and more lame and out of fashion is tedious political infighting between sub-factions on the left and the right. This is one of the main reasons for the failure of populist challenges to the establishment: the 'anyone but the other side' syndrome. The whole idea that if we vote for Obama, we will be getting black nationalist communism (in reality, big bank bailouts with woke branding / lip-service). Or that if we vote for Trump, we'll be cursed with white nationalist isolationism (in reality neocon globalism, with nationalist branding for memes and lols on Twitter). 

Maybe this will be because the fueled-by-anger woketards (and their right-wing equivalents) literally collapse from an overdose, or maybe they will realize how insane they've become and feel ashamed. They're also going to become a lot poorer, and then a lot poorer, and then poorer still, so their elitist political beliefs will also become more and more costly over time. Either way, I don't think they'll last, and I think a lot of their audiences will simply defect from them and abandon dead-end arguing over dead-end issues. 

To end on a positive note, there are too many things out of whack with the current system, across way too many areas, for it to keep going for much longer. So while I do expect things to get worse in the short term, and perhaps even much worse, the audience for an anti-globalist, anti-elitist, populist candidate is only going to grow. And hopefully that will mean real world outcomes and substance over meme branding and bickering on social media.

Ukraine War Explained for Dummies

(Yes, I've had a change of heart on the subject.)

There are some tremendously ignorant people in America who ask themselves why our government is flushing, I mean sending trillions of dollars to one of the most corrupt countries in the world, in order to prolong a disastrous conflict, instead of spending it on domestic problems, like trying to fix the homeless crisis, or rebuilding the economy, or repairing the infrastructure, or really doing anything productive or useful.

The logic is simple, really, though perhaps it is restricted to a few super-high IQ types on the Internet-- the cognitive elite. All you need to follow along is a map of Europe, and a basic understanding of the logic of dictators including Putin. 

(Bonus points if you know European history-- especially WW2, anything before that is irrelevant)

Namely:

If Putin conquers Ukraine, he will then invade the Baltic States.

Once he conquers the Baltic States, he will then invade Poland.

Once he conquers Poland, he will then invade Finland.

Once he conquers Finland, he will then invade Sweden. 

Once he conquers Sweden, he will then invade Norway.

Once he conquers Norway, he will then invade Austria.

Once he conquers Austria, he will then invade Germany. 

Once he conquers Germany, he will then invade Italy. 

Once he conquers Italy, he will then invade France.

Once he conquers France, he will then invade the Belgium.

Once he invades Belgium, he will then invade the Netherlands.

Once he conquers the Netherlands, he will then invade the U.K. 

Once he conquers the U.K, he will then invade Ireland.

Once he conquers Ireland, he will then invade Spain.

Once he conquers Spain, he will then invade Portugal. 

Once he conquers Portugal, he will then invade Iceland.

After conquering Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Germany, Italy,  France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the U.K, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Iceland, Putin will then attack America, sending hordes of orcs across the Atlantic.

If we don't send another trillion-- and that's the minimum-- North Koreans could be landing in New York by August. 

This may sound historically unprecedented to morons and mouth-breathers (unfortunately not everyone is blessed with high intelligence) but, believe me, it was revealed to me after I took mushrooms with one of my friends and spent 12 hrs playing my favorite historical simulator. 

If we don't escalate now, it may be too late.

Update Post, Various Ideas

In terms of posting new stuff, there isn't a lot to say about the big topics.

I have a lot of ideas, but (too ADHD, too young) no way of combining them into the big coherent post they would deserve.

Firing them off in salvos:

1. A blog operates like a castle did during the Dark Ages, within the broader ecosystem of social media. The whole environment is so anarchic, anti-sincerity, hateful, and toxic that you need some kind of protection / insulation if you want to be able to explore subjects or reveal your personality. Back during the Dark Ages, the looters and highwaymen and brigands would take your stuff and kill you-- today what they try to do is ironically mock you so that you lose your sincerity / spontaneity / spirit. They're so consumed by anger and hatred, it's insane.

 The audience for a blog is also more likable, since they're not deranged freaks and cyber-bums, but people who appreciate and seek out quality and authenticity.

2. Why has neoliberalism become "he who must not be named? Aside from a few rare exceptions, nobody will use the term. It's not as if it's some kind of occult word that few people understand, a reference only a handful would know. Most social media commentators will discuss all kinds of esoteric philosophies or outlandish theories, so even if it was a niche term that wouldn't explain it.

I think it has to do with the astroturfing / takeover of the whole discourse in the wake of Trump '16, as well as the various clear signs of the public's lack of trust in the experts, media, institutions, etc sending the establishment into panic mode. The government agencies / billionaires decided to artificially constrain the range of discussion and topics  to a handful of boring subjects, which naturally means erasing any post or banning / sidelining any user who links all of the problems in our crumbling society to their common source, namely the trajectory we've been on since roughly 1980 / Reagan.

As I discussed previously, that's also had the effect of transforming the discourse back into the culture wars of the 2000s and 2010s, fought between rabid partisans on both sides, rather than talking about what's actually gone wrong, which would draw in a lot of people from across the political spectrum. It's therefore shifted "the enemy" from the elites across the various sectors to ridiculous and caricatured stereotypes or made-up identities.    

3. Low status white males / working class = wrong enemy. This is another result of prioritizing outdated culture war stereotypes, which results in the false belief that the white working class chuds must vote Republican, subscribe to conspiracies about the damn gubmint, and so on.

In reality, the white working class leans Democrat. Look at who lives in the Midwest, New England, Pac NW, and the West Coast. NAFTA / offshoring destroyed their economic prospects, so they vote for Democrats because they're more protectionist and willing to provide welfare / social services (to some extent) as opposed to the Reaganite Republicans who would gut it all and leave them with nothing.

By lashing out at them, insulated morons in the Democratic party think they're scoring big propaganda victories, but in reality they're alienating their base and driving them to defect to Trump. The continuous propaganda is a form of self-harm, weakening their party's cohesion, as well as an outlet for impotent anger (now that it's become clear that the voters won't do what they're told).

4. The only areas where the discourse has shifted against neoliberalism are in those that are unrelated to politics, and where there's more leeway for people to be themselves, since they aren't threatening The Agenda as much.

Namely the use of the word "slop". What is slop? Something that's poorly made, low quality, churned out just for the sake of metrics / engagement, so the user base can satisfy some ongoing addiction, in other words the opposite of something pleasing, well made / high quality, and satisfying. 

This word perfectly encapsulates the degradation of everything that has taken place under neoliberalism, but without sounding pretentious or out-of-touch. Low quality, churned out in high volumes, unreliable, ugly, and made purely because of greed-- it's all slop, and that describes the state of almost everything being made these days, from consumer electronics, to housing, to furniture and clothes, and even online content and entertainment.

It's the same with the trend for / interest in thrift stores, buy it for life, high quality, and so on. The tide is turning against low quality disposable junk. 

Globalization

Speaking of YUGE shifts in the zeitgeist.

My awareness of things started from watching Chomsky speak on anti-globalization (as well as a range of other issues), which was big in the early 2000s. He was not the only one, though he was my main influence (there were others on the right, too). Anyone who was a part of that, whether liberal or conservative, I consider a friend and an ally. 

At the time, opponents of the status quo were slandered as kooks, conspiracy theorists, misfits, impractical idealists, and the rest of it. If you brought the idea of 'empire' or 'globalism', it pretty much guaranteed being treated with contempt-- I certainly did, and that's the reception I got. 

However, I think these terms and way of viewing the opposition / zeitgeist no longer really hold and have now become the opposite of what they were back then.

The idea of a conspiracy theorist is more of a relic, a leftover from an era when the elites could still rig things semi-well and where the vast majority of people still believed the propaganda, not really applicable to the current situation.

Conspiracy implied deceit, a deliberate cover-up, an attempt to fool the masses— except for a handful of lone individuals, naturally on the fringes, who could figure things out and sound the alarm. They might not even be believed, might be assassinated by the all-powerful gubmint, might be slandered and ridiculed, but they accepted those risks anyways. This figured into the mocking, where they were attacked as being loons / hicks.

That was then. What we have now is the opposite of a conspiracy: disastrous failures in every area, which are noticed by everyone, and are never fixed or even addressed. This permanently damages the credibility of the government, experts, and society, who have now ironically become the fringe / radicals / misfits on most issues. 

The idea and goal of propaganda has also shifted, in accordance with the general zeitgeist. Propaganda used to mean a deliberately fabricated fairy-tale (the equivalent of fast food, cheap and convenient), created in order to fool one's opponents or destroy their reputation, enhance the reputation of the elites, or draw attention from their bending / breaking the rules. It was active, offensive. Resisting propaganda was also something that indicated being against the grain, unique, and so on— like being a conspiracy theorist.

Now, however, after one neoliberal failure after another, even the propaganda makers and consumers have internalized the fact that nobody else believes them or will believe them ever again, which is why they've given up on convincing people. Propaganda these days is largely for the personal consumption of an incestuous and increasingly isolated in-group— a way of deluding themselves into thinking they're winning, or that their enemies feel as badly about themselves as they do, so they can keep going instead of giving in to depression. It's a numbing agent to insulate the people in charge from self-doubt and looming failure, not a weapon in their arsenal. 

This behavior will further compound the collapse of the system, since it is now led by a group living in a hermetically sealed echo-chamber, where all traces of truth, or criticism, or even feedback from reality, have been systematically removed. They are, like I said in an earlier comment, hurtling to their deaths.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, they seem intent on dragging everyone else with them too. 

Fortunately for the rest of us, and especially for the once outcast / impotent critics of globalization (on both the left and the right) this new situation has a silver lining. It means that those same positions which were once on the fringe are now gaining traction, possibly even becoming mainstream, while the consensus on immigration, wars, trade, becomes more and more irrelevant and hated by the masses with every failure. This is the reality that is staring us in the face: we are now on the way to becoming the majority position, the popular ones, and maybe even one day (too early to dream?) the ones making the decisions. 

The point is, what would have been a pipe dream in the early 2000s is now becoming more and more real.

I'd say the important thing in the short term is to start dropping the 'isolated rejected loner' pose, as well as the 'too hip and too cool for the mainstream' pose. Back when political failure and non-mainstream status was guaranteed, it was a way of saving some dignity / self-esteem. The movement also drew a large chunk of people who would have been on the fringes no matter what and were happy to feel self-righteous about something. Now that it's possible to win big, it's time to start spreading the good word— it'll only be received well-- and to start dropping those anti-normie / haughty aspects. Let the elites turn themselves into an impotent isolated group, there are tons of supporters to scoop up out there in the real world!

Localism

Another short comment, inspired by some of the comments on Nothing ever happens – Rintrah about the interesting future that awaits us:

After decades of failure, people are starting to wonder about alternatives to the status quo, which is clearly beyond fixing. We don't just need repairs here or there, but a whole new set of values and goals, a whole new vision of how to run society, since the current one has proven to be a false promise. This opens up space for competing ideologies, on both the left and the right. The question is: which one can deliver the goods, or at least avoid apocalyptic breakdown?

I think the natural alternative to hyper-extended globalism is localism, rather than white nationalism or green environmentalism (which I see as the competing alternatives).

First, why I don't see the latter solving the problem, and therefore don't align myself ideologically with them, despite agreeing on many basic points:

Both of these left and right versions share a similar awareness of the problem, emphasizing different aspects of it according to their values. Right-wingers point out that the globalized mega-culture has destroyed group identities and national cohesion, in favor of a degenerate rootless form of individualism. Left-wingers don't really mention social cohesion (which has become one of those dangerous spooky fascist words) they instead emphasize the reality of physical limits and material limitations, as opposed to the foolish techno-optimism of today's experts. Today's experts can't see that the world is physical / material, not digital or abstract, and that limits and constraints can't be made to disappear by changing the definition of words or winning debates on social media, they simply exist, and you have to adapt and plan for them. Left-wingers are also more aware of wealth inequality, which right-wingers usually rationalize through Social Darwinism.

On most of these issues, I'd say both are correct.

However, neither of the ideologies offer any way out of the problem. The right-wingers ultimately seem to want to petition the oligarchs and mega-corporations to produce a new version of globalism, just with right-wing values and propaganda instead of degenerate leftist ones.  The core aspects— corporate greed, monopolization, rent-seeking, elitism— remain untouched, but they will be accompanied with based right-wing memes instead of degeneracy at worst or boring corporate sludge at best. They can't understand that those Darwinian values and practices in the economic domain are perfectly compatible with the sleaziness and individualism in the personal / social domain, which is why entire approach fails so pathetically at solving those problems and always will. Left-wingers don't worship billionaires, but they also can't offer anything. For them, it's austerity at worst (you'll own nothing, and you'll be happy), something we already have under neoliberalism, or at best unlimited and deregulated access to drugs and porn, maybe with some supplemental income thrown in, so you can crawl into an opium-den and drown out the extinction of your entire culture and way of life through cheap addictions. Obviously, nobody will ever accept a deal like that, which is why their movement also goes nowhere. 

In many ways, both ideologies have devolved into online impotence, crawling back to the same establishment that never loved them / abused them. It's become 'how I learned to love neo conservativism, as long as I get to own working class chuds' and 'how I learned to love neoliberalism, as long as I get to laugh at leftists'. Sad!

In order to reverse these awful trends, while solving the problem effectively, I think we need to bring back the pre-neolib idea of autonomous regions, ie localism and local cultures, effectively breaking up the doomed mega-system into much smaller independent chunks.

We shouldn't even be aiming for America 1st, let alone creating some giant mega-race (like the white race, the Aryan race, what have you) but rather much smaller semi-autonomous regions. Nor should we stoop to peddling lies and delusions about going back to the golden age, the wonderful years that lie ahead, and all the rest of it. Instead, we should simply say that there will be hard times ahead (the truth, which everyone is aware of by now) but that if we do things right, we can attain stability and survival and continuity, rather than an apocalyptic breakdown. 

Social cohesion and wholesomeness under localism would be organic, ie coming from below, not imposed by mega corporations or propaganda campaigns, let alone based memes and owning leftoids on Twitter. Most modern degeneracy is fundamentally the result of people trying to adapt their brains to an unnatural, unsatisfying, way of life, where there are no material prospects and at the same time no thriving communities, not the result of having bought into "incorrect views". So, they can only really be fixed by returning to a more normal, humble, life. Satisfaction, not perpetual addiction and endless treadmills. 

Regionalism or localism would also solve the problem of over-consumption, but without blowing the whole thing up like the leftists want (again, nobody is settling for austerity). We should aim for the different regions (Southwest / West, New England, Midwest, Deep South, and so on) to produce their own things, for themselves, not depend on massive over-extended supply chains. Of course, some stuff is going to be made better in particular places, some resources are only found in certain countries or grow under certain conditions, which is what trade is for, but the goal still should be for 70-80% autonomy for the things that fall outside that category, reducing the demands that the current system makes on finite resources.

Both of these require shrinking the system. Some natural consequences / policies as a result of implementing this vision are: 

Bringing back factories, which have all been moved to the 3rd world. Related to that, we would have to refocus on building lasting appliances, rather than endless plastic crap, useless gadgets, and made-to-break everything. We need stuff to last as long as it can, in a world with finite resources and hard limits, and the current arrangement is somehow the WORST and least efficient, a total disaster that will leave lasting damage.

Ending immigration, even deporting immigrants. Not for high-minded abstract racial reasons, but in order to rebalance a system that is too large. We need a smaller population. The silver lining will be a higher standard of living, once we're no longer trying to max everything out.

Breaking up the massive cartels that have formed within the elite class, another source of the current breakdown. Same reason as immigration: too many rent-seekers, just in the upper classes, and not enough room for them all. They have to go, in the interests of the whole nation.

All of this stuff requires hard work, none of it will be fun or easy, but it simply has to be done if we want some kind of future. The more time passes, and the less is done to solve these issues, the more ruthless we will have to be. 

Anyways, (for now) that's the basic idea. Maybe not so much of a short comment, LOL, which is why it's going up here. 

Radicals

Another comment, recapitulating on a few I wrote in response to one of Rintrah's posts--

What binds together internet radicals of various stripes (commie, wignat, radical environmentalist, historical LARPers) is not their stated goals and ideologies, but a sense of rejection from the mainstream of their country and from their actual selves. Notice how none of them call themselves 'an American' or 'a Californian' or whatever-- it's always a FAR more extreme position and stance than is found in 99% of the population or claiming a connection to a place that is far removed from the present. It's a mistake to be fooled by the words, though, and take their beliefs seriously. They have no actual intention of implementing them, nor do they really care about them that much (see how often they'll go through different ideologies, or LARP as being characters from a number of historical eras), it's more of a way of making themselves feel hip and interesting, rather than lame and boring, and to create a place where they can interact with other self-hating individuals. The only thing all of these radicals and their sub-cultures have in common is their disdain for 'the normies' / 'the sheep' / 'the low status' / 'carnists'-- one way or another, the majority of the population, just with a different name depending on which angle is emphasized by their LARPing. 

Whenever these so-called hip and radical types are confronted with something actually radical-- populism-- they show themselves to be profoundly hostile and averse to it, not just indifferent or ignorant. They're seething defenders of the status quo, dressed up (through their endless words) as outsiders, which they may be socially but not politically. They have a profoundly elitist and contemptuous mindset, so doing something that would benefit the majority is anathema to them. 

It's interesting to note that it's also this group that's consumed with revenge fantasies, school shooter syndrome, and a general heightened sense of being some kind of punisher / avenger of some sort. 

Wealth inequality comment

A comment I wrote recently:

Another YUGE problem, that isn't mentioned often enough, is that our current wealth inequality is the result of the soaring cancerous growth of the professional-managerial class, which has expanded massively over the last 40-50 years at the expense of the working class. Most critics of the system tend to gloss over this, while blaming capitalism as a whole or the rich in particular.

This is Peter Turchin's concept of overproduction of elites. There are only a handful of owners and wealthy families, but there are tons of managerial positions, fake BS jobs, and the like for non-workers and non-producers who just want a nice paycheck without doing or risking anything. As the amount of those people soars through the roof, it becomes impossible for the system to accommodate their greed and competitiveness against each other, eventually resulting in a bloody civil war and/or a breakdown of the whole thing.

As the entire society becomes infected, its sectors become reverse-engineered to support this unsustainable state of affairs. As long as it creates more money for the overproduced elites, it doesn't matter how awful the outcomes are or how badly it destroys everyone else's lives.

Finance has become casino speculation, not productive investment. Manufacturing is now a race to the bottom-- who can create the cheapest crap with the lowest paid serfs. Higher ed doesn't provide an education, and healthcare doesn't provide health (the more it grows, the sicker everyone gets), but they control billions of dollars and tons of land and have more and more influence over society, allowing for their bloated HR / managerial departments to give themselves higher salaries. The military charges 40K for a trash can, but can't win wars anymore-- doesn't matter, since all that waste will be funded by the public. Entire government public sectors (like those created to fight homelessness) seem only to make the problem worse. It goes on and on in every sector. 

This is why trying to fix the ideas or firing an individual and replacing them with a smarter individual, will have no effect. As long as this cancerous mass is there, all of these useless managers and professionals will continue to subvert the outcome, at the expense of the nation as a whole. Unless they're fired en masse, America / the West will continue to get sicker and sicker. 

The AI Situation

The whole AI discourse honestly makes me very sad. I think, though maybe I'm hallucinating, that adults in the West used to have a real sense of taste, as well as a healthy respect for craftsmanship and quality.

Now it feels like more and more of our population are novelty junkies, doomscrollers, and, in many cases, literal junkies. They don't produce anything, nor do they consume anything well-made or artisanal or interesting / intellectual. Nothing that would challenge them or expand their horizons. It's just an endless addiction, an eternal search for novelty. Garbage in, garbage out.

As people have turned towards endless addictions, poor quality has become normalized across the board. Nobody makes food at home, they eat out or heat pre-made "food" in the microwave. Nobody reads or writes or has a dairy, but they do subscribe to various feeds on social media. Corporations refuse to make working products, they specialize in making things WORSE on purpose, while charging higher and higher prices. Politicians promise the future, while the infrastructure collapses. It goes on and on. 

All kinds of professions that required real expertise and know-how have disappeared from everyday life. The only thing we really have these days are generic "experts", in which case the title is more of an appeal to authority than an actual sign of competence, education, special training, etc. 

AI becoming the standard in some field or another will be the natural outcome of this collapse in standards, not some kind of new move into the future. In academia, for example, they are so used to pumping out slop that it could all be generated by a machine-- nobody reads it, so who cares if it means anything? I assume the same logic will hold in other areas. 

War with Iran

Just a quick note now that this is looking likely. 

The delusional establishment is desperately trying to pretend that it's still 2006. Almost all social media, political propaganda, debate / discussion, is really trying to LARP back to the days when global trade was new, failure in the M-E wasn't guaranteed, and the big hot topics were abortion, climate change, and the personal behavior of whoever the candidate was. 

It's not that they're out-of-touch, though a lot of them are, it's that they actively use propaganda to insulate themselves from the real world. Contact with reality would be a dreadful reminder of how inadequate and pathetic they are, what failures they are, and how disastrously their plans are going-- so they just ignore it and go back to their BS echo-chambers.

Anyone that isn't on that sinking ship knows that this war is 100% doomed, guaranteed to be another failure, just like all the others have been. In fact, potentially even more catastrophic, since this could collapse the global economy, something that didn't happen during the previous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  

The only silver lining will be the end of the forever wars, and possibly the whole neolib / neocon political order. 

You have to fight to keep your smile

This will be a non-political post (I do think about things that aren't related to politics, from time to time), though it is related to the general situation. It's been on my mind for a while, but IDK how to express it in a coherent way, so I'll stick with random comments I wrote on the fly and go on if / when I come up with more stuff. Maybe that's the result of COVID re-infections, or spending too much time on social media, IDK-- anyways, here goes:

The Powers That Be want you to be poor, powerless, and alienated of course-- but they've largely accomplished that already. It's fait accompli in the 2020s. Now what they want to do is go even further and occupy your mind. They want to drain your personality of beauty and youthfulness and libido, in order to leave an addicted lifeless husk which will toil in the zombie economy they've set up. 

Their efforts have taken on a spiritual dimension, where they target whatever traces of beauty and heterosexuality and energy still exist these days and try to purge them from the environment. That's why everything these days looks more and more grey, sterile, and lifeless. That's why new culture and entertainment is so lame and unexciting, even when it's made by young people. 

They want to sink their claws into you and drag you down to hell with them.

As people become mired in ugliness, they develop Stockholm Syndrome. They start to reject and clamp down on whatever traces of beauty are left, because tolerating them would be an awful reminder of how much the present sucks. Then they say, 'that never existed' or 'everyone has always been miserable, especially in the past' or 'you're just a conspiracy theorist (for noticing how much everything sucks these days)'. 

These widespread addictions allow people to cope with life in a lifeless society. It's an opiate for the masses.

If you're a young person (under 40), you of course should try to fight neoliberalism, declining living standards, falling wages, etc etc etc-- but also recognize that those efforts, while heroic and noble, will most likely not succeed. It's more of a question of minimizing the negative effects or coping with them. However, until a viable alternative to the neolib establishment emerges, the struggle in the personal domain is just as important. That would be keeping this evil from corroding your soul, in your immediate personal life.

DEI is bad, but focus should be on institutions

 The Trump admin schlonging DEI is a welcome relief from the Democrats' knee-jerk praise of this useless program. Racial quotas that promote mediocrities don't really help anyone, let alone minorities themselves (who remain dirt-poor, aside from the lucky 0.1% who land elite jobs). It's patronizing to ethnic minorities to suggest that they can only accomplish things through hand-outs and quotas. It's also insulting to the public to promote incompetent people, who on top of that are just puppets and mouthpieces for those in charge. However, I don't think we should fool ourselves into thinking that this is the only problem facing America or that it'll somehow be back to the glory days once DEI is gone. 

The rot in the US military, and in other institutions, is much greater than hiring the wrong individuals, so it won't be fixed by hiring and firing individuals. That may restore a certain amount of functionality and dignity to the affected institutions, but it won't solve the core problem. It's fundamentally about bloated budgets, parasitic contracts, malinvestment (pouring billions into programs that are of dubious benefit to the public, technologies that are outdated, etc etc etc), overextension across the globe combined with lack of domestic security, unwinnable wars and delusional belief in victory (especially when defeat is beyond obvious and guaranteed by now— Taiwan vs China, Israel vs Iran, Ukraine vs Russia, and on and on). 

Same thing with the rot in the finance sector. The fact that they openly hire mediocrities according to racial quotas is not helping them of course, but they were descending into oblivion long before they instituted those programs in the 2010s— so eliminating them will not prevent the ship from sinking. There it's also about fundamentally wrong ideas: namely, printing up trillions of dollars and distributing the fake money only to the rich. This project has created perverse incentives for corporations, who now have government subsidized growth without having to do any work, dramatically increased wealth inequality (and destabilized America), while also accomplishing nothing— we're now headed into a financial crisis worse than 2008, suffer from sky-high inflation, and everyone is downwardly mobile. Replacing idiot DEI hires with high IQ competent people will not, in and of itself, change things because the incentives and internal structure and focus of these institutions has been compromised.

This is like obsessively cleaning the kitchen, while the house burns down.

In general, I think the aim of the future populist movement, or whatever successor movement arises to pick up the pieces of America, will have to be eliminating all of this accumulated toxic waste in the various institutions. Some of them will have to be shut down permanently, while others will only heal through purges, cutting jobs, slashing budgets, and so on. We may even need to make whole new ones, while abandoning the existing ones, given that they're incapable of delivering the goods. 

Musk/ DOGE

I'm glad I never fell for the hype or joined the cult. 

Elon Musk is a neocon from 2005, just with meme branding. So shocking to the normies, so transgressive, so against-the-grain... 

He wants the government to defund welfare and remove whatever already weak laws protect Americans from being replaced by cheap immigrant labor. 

His actual business ideas are some of the worst the world has ever seen. Multi-billion AI programs that can't draw hands. Self-driving cars that run people over. No cheap slaves from India = no useless cars— but that's where the US gov't steps in and subsidizes that garbage. As with all neocons, anything useful or helpful for the common people has to be demolished, while anything that helps the parasitic elite is sacrosanct.  

Elon Musk, the techbros, and the rest of the Trump Administration will not go after the real waste in order to improve things for the common people in America. Rather, they will continue to undermine the already precarious standard of living of the working and middle classes in order to spend money on doomed pointless wars, stock market bubbles, and all kinds of elitist scams.

The real question now is how fucked are things gonna get, and whether any populist challenge to the current establishment will emerge in the next four years. 

Why a blog?

Why a blog, not social media? 

The majority (if not all) of the commentary on social media is essentially useless for understanding what's going on and what might happen. Not just for this or that topic, but for almost all topics. Social media is primarily about what Team you are on (Team Libtard or Team Conservatard) and then what random fandom you align with within those two larger groups. All of your opinions, policy positions, likes and dislikes, friends and enemies, etc are determined by that. 

Your full-time job is "Owning the Libs" or "Owning the Cons", not figuring out what's going on, what might happen, finding some new angle (or adjusting the theory if proven wrong). You're essentially a propaganda-maker: if MY TEAM does this, then it's good. If THEIR TEAM does that, then it's bad, only filtered for whatever niche group you happen to belong to. You're also somewhat of a therapist, in that you try to present information in a way that will make members of your team avoid suicide and feel like they're accomplishing something meaningful, while preventing the other side's losses as the end / it's over / etc. 

This makes them useless for providing real knowledge, since they're far too partisan, hysterical, and retarded. If your full-time job is creating, and consuming, this (sometimes decades-old) partisan slop, how the hell will you know what's happening IRL? Unfortunately, a lot of that retarded brainrot also leaks out into the real world, where it infects conversations and prevents people from understanding what's happening. 

Social media platforms are also insanely elitist, censored, and restricted. The majority of genuinely popular opinions are not allowed or would get you banned / down-voted to oblivion, and they abound with annoying faggy commissars who live to punish the wicked (anyone who doesn't agree 100% with them on whatever micro-issue). They're some of the least tolerant places in the world, when it comes to diversity of opinion. A blog is a good way of getting these thoughts / emotions out there, but without the inevitable hostility and censorship that comes from joining one of those platforms. 

Almost any site that primarily reacts to social media discourse will inevitably melt down into this kind of tribalism, too, and suffer from these same issues. Think of a blog as a kind of deliberate stewardship / health effort: preventing infection from that kind of garbage. Not to sound too highfalutin, but you know... 

RIP Ukraine!

    I wrote this recently: 

   "Ukraine" is a fake nation anyways, more and more of it belongs to Russia, and the rest of it is just a creation of American media corporations, funded by trillions from US taxpayers, and supported by mercenaries and the military industrial complex. They have no coherent identity of their own, and no group unity or cohesion, which is why they are entirely reliant on a foreign nation. The war in Ukraine is just a repeat of the war in Afghanistan, or the war in Vietnam, and once America realizes victory is not viable, and withdraws funding and support, "Ukraine" will melt away before Russia like the democratic forces in Afghanistan did before the Taliban, or our allies in Vietnam before the Vietcong.