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.
This is another reminder to never trust anyone who talks about rational, sensible, peer-reviewed, evidence-based (a further evolution of this jargon, and even worse than the previous ones), or really any other rationalistic / scientistic B.S words.
ReplyDeleteWhat these terms really mean is --> insane, lunatic, deranged, absurd, suicidal, and so on and so forth.
It's just that everything has been degraded so much that much of what is said is really the opposite of what is being done.
Likewise, whenever you hear an event, a movement, a person, or a cause described as crazy, unlikely, unrealistic, impossible (always a good one), you should immediately adjust your world-view and begin planning for it.
ReplyDeleteThe more they denounce it, or scoff at it, the more you must view it as a certainty.
Tangent: evidence-based, while awful to listen to, is at least somewhat honest in admitting the truth about scientific studies, and the state of science / the experts in general.
ReplyDeleteMuch like the "rules-based" international order (another great one). Meaning: there are rules, they just don't really apply, or mean anything, but they're there in the background and provide a veneer of legitimacy to the whole thing, even if nobody believes in them (whether those opposed to it, or those enforcing it).
Similarly, today's studies are "evidence-based" or "truth-based"-- there is some solid evidence or truth somewhere in the background, or as a foundation perhaps, but everything else is some combination of filler, junk, or outright lies and inventions. And everyone knows it, including the insiders, defenders of the scientific establishment, etc.
It's similar to when corporations water down a product so much that they legally can no longer describe it as whatever food it originally was, so they have to switch to the same variety of absurd PR buzzword terms in order to describe the disgusting chemical slop: chocolate-flavored candy (vegetable oils, instead of real cocoa) or potato-based 'chips' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pringles) or butter-flavored popcorn and on and on.
ReplyDelete"With most Americans now eating what experts describe as 'a food-based diet', it's no surprise that obesity, diabetes, etc are widespread..."
It's sad because liberals used to obsess over this sort of thing-- wanting to keep ingredients natural, policing food labels (in a good way), punishing or at least exposing corporations who broke the rules. Defending small farmers and organic / natural as a concept, as opposed to mega-corporations, pesticides, and chemicals.
ReplyDeleteThat was back when I was growing up (not too long ago, but sadly it feels like another world).
Maybe you could say it was a little pretentious or excessive, too, but just think about what replaced that-- some variation of, 'I love mega-corporations, and you're anti-science and a conspiracy theorist who deserves to die for noticing that this slop is 60% chemicals and only 40% actual food.'
Speaking of Trump, I don't think RFK Jr will be able to accomplish much on these issues. He does deserve enormous credit for discussing them in the first place, presenting the basic facts before the public, and standing up against this behavior.
ReplyDeleteNamely because it's an unfair fight, one man against giant mega-corporations, as well as their lobbyists and defenders in the media, all of whom are well paid, entrenched, and vicious. Plus criticizing them undermines tHe ScIenCe, so the poor mega-corporations must be defended by the liberal side of the establishment against the evil conspiracy theorist, even if they're poisoning Americans-- including kids, disgusting warped behavior-- for higher profit margins. And while price-gouging and shrink-flating the hell out of everything, too.
In a real country (instead of a law-based imitation of one like what we have right now) with real laws and regulations, this kind of thing would be punished or prevented, rather than encouraged and defended, by the government and experts.
And also because the Trump admin. has already been such a disaster on so many issues, that I doubt he'll reverse course on this one.
Still RFK Jr deserves great credit for standing up for the truth.
In any case, the overall take-away message is that this is a widespread process of hollowing out, watering down, degrading everything.
ReplyDeleteWhen you start watering things down, at first it's 5% fake and 95% the real thing, or 90/10, or whatever.
After 40-50 years of watering everything down, hollowing everything out, we've reached a point where the actual substance in everything has been reduced to a figment, almost nothing really-- experts who don't know anything, 'food-based' chemical concoctions masquerading as real food, healthcare that harms you at worst and is useless at best, everyone pretending to have awesome amazing lives on social media while being lonely and isolated in the real world, and on and on.
I said something similar to this about the word 'slop', and its widespread popularity-- but the same is true of the words the experts themselves use to describe their activities. It's just that, being experts, they're too lame to come up with catchy words, so they favor jargon instead. But in any case, even they know it's a game, and that's reflected in the terms they use to describe their work.
Reminds you of the Solzhenitsyn quote:
"We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying"
Or "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work." Though sadly the Soviet system was, perhaps just in this case, more humane-- because we still have to work, although the pay is fake.
We really are living through our own Americanized version of the bizarro-world Soviet period, where everyone is aware the whole system is fake, and resigned to it, but nobody knows what comes after or is too afraid to take steps in a new direction, so we keep playing the same familiar games, even if they no longer mean anything.
I also wanted to say that I find it very bizarre and embarrassing to see the U.S government become a bad reality TV show, with heroes and villains, cliff-hangers, plot-twists, and all kinds of theatrical tricks thrown in to add spice & drama & excitement.
ReplyDeleteI guess the main thing is providing the illusion of control to the desperate masses of angry voters, who are shut out by powerful oligarchs / cartels and have no real influence in reality, and who therefore must be distracted from the non-change and even anti-populist outcomes with a steady flow of viral images / videos, takes, scandals, etc.
And so we get the Charlie Kirk assassination TV series, Trump's daily press conferences, the strikes on the Houthis / Iran / Venezuela, the endless waving around of the Epstein files, Netanyahu (one of the recurring villains, and the source of all of America's political problems, according to the online right), and so on and so forth. Obviously these are all real-world political events, with their own substance, but they are now also ongoing media franchises / extended universes, like the Star Wars / Marvel / superhero garbage during the previous decade.
What makes it even worse is that most political people are lawyers, not actors or creative people, which is why the quality of the show is so terrible.
I also wanted to say that the war with Venezuela, along with the sanctions against Russia, are more suicidal behavior. I'll admit I found it hard to believe someone could be even more detached from reality, deranged, and retarded than Biden— but here we are.
ReplyDeleteThey're so addicted to starting wars that they simply can't stop themselves, and will continue to escalate and escalate and escalate no, until the whole society goes under. Plus negotiating with the people in charge of Russia, Iran, Yemen, and so on would threaten their self-image as badass conquerors and instead expose the reality (impotent losers), so that's out of the question. Instead they commit themselves even further, against the wishes of their own supporters, and despite 40+ years of continuous never-ending failure.
As usual the Westerners who are not super-wealthy and insulated from reality will pay massively for all this, as their economies continue to collapse from soaring inflation, lack of access to oil, along with the elites destroying any trust in themselves as rational, intelligent, forward-thinking, etc.
None of those real-world consequences can be blocked out, no matter what slop gets cooked up in order to explain or distract from them.
I'm just speculating, but maybe now that America has gone insane, all of the chaos will give the Euros enough of a push to elect populist parties (and develop a spine), so they can transition out of neoliberalism and into nationalist-populism, whether it's a right or left wing version.
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying it will happen right now, or even in the next two or three years. The NATO nations are clearly too greedy—not to mention cowardly and deferential to their American owners— so they are probably holding out in case the Pax Americana and global economic order can be salvaged and things can go back to a 'normal business environment'.
However with Trump now going into full delusional senile retard mode (worse than even Biden) the consequences from tariff wars, pointless sanctions, hyper-inflation due to money-printing to pay for new wars and bail-outs, etc etc etc will be brutal. And all of these crises will interact with each other, and set off all kinds of consequences, reactions, 2nd-order effects, and so on. Europe's economy is already very fragile / precarious, now imagine what a further round of inflation and chaos would do...
I'm fairly skeptical of existing right-wing parties in Europe, although they still have time to break free from the neoliberal paradigm.
ReplyDeleteWhenever they're hysterically described by leftists as representing 'fascism' and 'threats against democracy' and the rest of it, it's a kind of signal that they're part of the establishment. It's just with the entire American sphere becoming hyper-polarized, the other side (whose agenda is probably the same as yours) has to be treated like a bitter enemy or radical opposition, even if it's all fake & gay and they're indistinguishable in terms of outcome.
And usually when you look into their actual political agenda, it's just right-wing yuppie-ism, just for Millennials and Zoomers who are allergic to Boomer words, rhetoric, traditional media, etc.
Meaning-- edgy jokes and racial slurs, references to fascism and 'funny moustache man', and just being non-PC in general (although they never make fun of faggots), but nothing about getting along with Russia or Iran or China, nothing about the shredding of the social contract, nothing about 2008 or de-industrialization...
Referring back to the post I made about Reddit-tards, one of the most outrageous fabrications out there is that nerds are the ones who are responsible for advances in science, creative, the innovators that the rest of society is incapable of appreciating, and so on and so forth. Talk about "cultural appropriation"-- claiming the great figures of the past for themselves, as if some retard who collects irrelevant factoids, and whose sole knowledge of the world comes from Reddit, is the equivalent of an Einstein or a Shakespeare!
ReplyDeleteYeah, an Einstein or a Shakespeare-- just without the accomplishments.
In reality, and contrary to their own self-worshiping propaganda, nerds are mostly useless (at best) and harmful or dangerous if given any position of real authority. They are the definition of slop people-- full of irrelevant factoids, prone to interjections or corrections that miss the point of what was said and disrupt the rhythm of the conversation, socially awkward and weird, plain or ugly, incapable of grooming or dressing themselves, and so crippled and inept that they can't have fun or even go through life without a cocktail of substances, whether drugs or pharma-pills or some combination...
And then of course there's the insane bragging about what great people they are, how amazing, how superior, what a tragedy that all of their wonderful potential has gone to waste (which somehow nobody else says, it's always something they say about themselves), and all the other revenge fantasies...
They're too blind to see that they are more like the cripples, the waste-products of progress, who have to be taken care of by others for their own good. The epidemic of nerds and HR 'people' in general is simply a product of modernity, where the traits that were useful and valued in the recent past (wit / charm, good looks, intuition, physicality / craft / skill) are no longer relevant or selected for in extremely bureaucratic, decadent, societies like the ones we live in now.
This ties into our modern curse where we've become people who are excellent at talking and talking and talking (see the podcast world or the media circus, though it's everywhere) but who produce absolutely nothing, or are even guaranteed to fail pathetically when put to the test.
ReplyDeleteI personally suspect this has been a post-Greatest Generation thing, in the West, maybe affecting some generations more than others (and in some nations worse than others), but still rising steadily over time-- and resulting in the state where we are in now, where everything is broken, and the more broken things get the more people smugly praise themselves for making 'progress' over the backwards old ways.
I think that's why the vast majority of energy in most areas has shifted to sperging about possibilities (such as your own IQ or genetic make-up, or the tools / gadgets you've built a huge collection of, or whatever)-- to distract away from the most important thing, the finished product, which is almost always slop now.
And then of course after there's the endless excuses, copes, even trying to shift the blame and justified anger onto the victims (instead of holding the makers of garbage and the failures / scammers accountable), once the result is out there.
The morons don't understand-- contrary to their ubermensch fantasies or contempt for women or whatever-- that a man is defined by what they produce, by the work they do and what they contribute (in whatever field they happen to specialize in). If what they produce is garbage, or amounts to nothing, well then...
Trying to change the meaning of words so that your lack of accomplishment, or failure, is UM ACKSHUALLY amazing just makes you even more pathetic, since not only are you incompetent and retarded, but you are also too cowardly to even face reality.
When I look at the state of society, I think 'How far we've fallen.'
ReplyDeleteAnd then when I look at the kind of morons that are running the society, and the attitude that's infected it, I think 'And how much further we have still to go.'
I haven't done any posting recently because I was sick, probably with Covid, but who knows.
ReplyDeleteApparently I've had Covid before, a few years ago (at least according to one of those home tests, IDK how reliable they are), but that was nothing like this, it only took me a few days to beat, and the symptoms were mainly uncomfortable but not really painful— like a typical case of the flu or cold.
With this one, basically everything was much worse, every symptom was 2-3 times more intense, painful, uncomfortable, etc, like it had been specifically made to go after you / be as vicious as possible.
Ironically enough the only symptom I didn't have was the changing sense of smell / taste, but everything else was fucked— my throat hurt so much swallowing was painful, the joints in my neck and arms were sore, I had a fever / headache, and I had no energy and could barely focus on anything for a few days.
Again, I don't know how to describe it other than resembling a typical cold or flu, but way more powerful. It's much more efficient in how it targets your body and it fucks things up a lot worse compared to anything I had when I was a kid, which really makes me suspect that they came up with it in some lab in Wuhan.
Fortunately I'm doing better now, thank God.
Air travel is also a disaster, Jesus Christ.
ReplyDeleteI was naively and delusionally thinking, when I started the trip (which is how I got sick in the first place), that it would be bad or uncomfortable or whatever, but still somewhat tolerable-- NOPE. It turns out that this sector of society is no exception to the broader pattern of degradation and collapse, and maybe even worse than the other ones.
For one, the airports themselves are all dirty. Not so much the surfaces, though a little bit there too, but the air feels incredibly stale and dry, almost like being in a crowded gym. It's a very distinctive 'airport air' that hits you as soon as you enter the building. And then of course the security screening systems are all overloaded, inefficient, and probably understaffed, so you're stuck in this small cramped space with hundreds of other people, plus breathing in that air...
And then of course once you've finally made it through, and are at the terminal (provided they don't randomly change your flight to some other terminal, which happened to me), it turns out that the plane and the experience of air travel has been turned into a sick torture chamber by the airlines, which makes even relaxing (let alone sleeping) impossible. And I'm average height, and skinny, so imagine how it is for the typical American-- what a disaster...
Aside from some emergency, or a highly planned trip to somewhere super interesting and unique, I don't think I'm ever traveling again.
The airline companies themselves have all been bailed out by their respective governments, to the tune of billions of dollars, since 2020.
ReplyDeleteSo you can't talk about "economic competition" or "the free market" forcing the managers and CEOs and executives to push this garbage onto the public, when they would otherwise provide a better service, since sadly that's just not profitable / not how the world works, sorry. Free markets, economic competition, capitalism-- none of these things really exist, and anyone using these terms to explain what's going on now, why it's happening, etc is either profoundly ignorant or more likely a scammer.
In this case, and in typical neoliberal fashion, the airline companies are forcing rugged individualism / no protections onto the public, despite the fact that they are the ones who are incapable of surviving on their own-- absolute parasites.
However spending more money in order to provide more space, more comfortable seats, better food, more efficient service, or whatever, for their customers would mean getting a little less of all that free money, so it's never going to happen. Instead they just suck it all up, waste it on whatever retarded decadent bullshit, and then let everyone else deal with the costs (since air travel has gotten worse, post-2020).
When you see young people voting for so-called "communists" or "socialists", or when you see CEOs & politicians getting shot, it's precisely because of this kind of openly anti-social and parasitic behavior.