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.