RIP MAGA

(It has to be said, before moving on to other subjects after the New Year. Plus I've gotten tired of waiting for them to start their war with Venezuela.)

There were plenty of warning signs-- for the non-retarded people-- on the campaign trail, and then when the war on Iran and suicidal tariffs kicked in, that was really the end of the whole thing.

They mistook the disgust people felt at the corrupt scolding and lecturing state of the Democratic Party, as well as the anger they had at the violent criminal behavior of the ANTIFA types, for some kind of endorsement of generic neocon garbage. It was really a protest vote, and the voters were desperate for anything BUT the same-old slop.

However being what what they are (parasites, slumlords, scammers, etc) they took their anger, used it to climb into power, and then immediately sold out their own supporters. 

They were so greedy that they couldn't even wait a few months to do it! 

The whole thing-- which I try to tune out and ignore-- is by now just an incredibly retarded AI-generated Cuck Masochist Political Theater 3000 experience, where they all tune in and clap for some of the worst acting in the world, by some of the lamest and gayest political nerds, and which all amounts to nothing.

But in a further twist, the 'based patriots' and other MAGA types are too pathetic and sad to call the whole thing out and demand actual change. They don't even slightly push back on it. Instead they just keep drinking that garbage, and even open their mouths wider, and beg for more of it. 

I have never seen so many cucks, faggots, retards, masochists, and garbage enthusiasts gathered in one place-- at least Ukraine supporters and other leftists get paid to post their slop, these guys are doing it entirely for free.

Just another neocon disaster... this time going even further by endorsing the divine right of parasites to leech off of and destroy 1st world economies, and turning that into some kind of traditional all-American belief. 

The only thing worth asking is what will happen in return, as in will there be some right-wing Mangione to rally around, now that the whole thing is imploding-- hopefully-- and if there will be some replacement political movement from the left, now that the right is completely dead.

Right wing scammers, and left-wing puritans: the great unholy alliance

(This is my closing post on the entire cursed topic, and then I promise I'll shift to something more interesting.)

In trying to figure out everything that's gone wrong, I've arrived at the conclusion that you can't fall into the trap of blaming either side exclusively: it's really the fault of both. This takes place in different ways.  

Everyone is very familiar with the right-wing types, since they're just the latest iteration of neolib / neocons, clinging to a 50 yr old ideology which they are also desperate to present as new. 

Now they come from the tech sector rather than manufacturing, which no longer exists in America, but it's still the same slop: endless unlimited growth (shuffling fake money around in a giant Ponzi, while we run out of actual resources), super AIs and other sci-stuff, profits over people & markets and efficiency and modern economics (screwing your own people, then the market collapses and has to be bailed out), impressive triumphs of high IQ and Faustian grandiose Germanic conquering spirit (dumping billions on useless projects that won't work, while avoiding anything beneficial), and on and on.

They're also too wordcel-y and physically awkward to come up with cool slogans, so it largely takes place on 8 hr podcasts rather than books, as everyone's attention span has declined, where both sides just hype each other up and mutually detach as much as possible from the real world rather than take an honest look at the situation.

Back in reality, we all live in this remarkably inefficient dystopia where short-term gain and getting high on fumes is the only priority, so naturally almost nothing works. 

Nobody thinks of larger than the next 5 mins, and especially not the elites. So while they do that, more and more individuals simply drop out and turn to various opiates and substitutes, families and communities collapse or are never formed, the entire economic system becomes a scam, etc. 

The extent of the damage is never even admitted, since all the statistics are rigged, but after decades of that sort of thing it's resulted in peak absurdity: the more the graphs and stats and numbers that are supposed to measure progress go up, the worse everything gets in reality. The discrepancy between the official story and the state of the world is so obvious, that only a literal lunatic would believe them.

This is where the left-wing types come in, ostensibly to fix things, but really in order to defend every broken result generated by the system as normal, because they are so mentally ill that everything in life that is healthy they view as evil, and vice versa. They are Neo-puritans who get off on punishing the sinful masses, but they come from a technocratic and materialist and atheistic background rather than a religious one like the original puritans did.

Their basic world-view can be summarized as: deprivation and austerity and scarcity is good akshually, and normality is evil. 

This results in a number of bizarre ideas such as:

Sodomy, perverts adopting kids, loading up random dudes (including kids too) with drugs and surgeries in order to turn them into weird creepy abominations: based, and you're a bigot for just asking questions!

But normal hetero couples having kids, or taking care of cats and dogs and other pets? Contemptible, evil, unnatural desire.

Eating meat like every group on Earth, and especially hunter-gatherers, does: exploitative, cruel, wicked. 

Relying on drugs, then more drugs to solve the problems created by those drugs, and supplementing the exact same minerals and vitamins originally found in meat? Progress. 

Solving normal problems with normal solutions, basic curiosity, and systematic explanations: low IQ. 

Coming up with a trillion graphs and studies, in order to wander around in circles in the desert for 40 years? OMG I LOVE SCIENCE. 

Doing things the way your ancestors did: slave-like worship of tradition and the old days.

Reinventing the wheel (but worse), believing in magic, superstitious rituals? Also progress, believe it or not.  

And finally, wanting to be surrounded by healthy normal people who speak your language and look like you: heterotoxicpatriarchalnormalitivity. 

But being increasingly surrounded by mentally ill freaks, criminals, bums, and tens of thousands of random foreigners parachuted in at once by massive corporations? Multiracialpostwhitenesspostcolinial utopia! 

The end result is that anyone who notices that 2 + 2 = 4 is banned, while more and more mentally ill people take up both sides of the debate, each of them contributing to the awful outcomes. 

The vision both sides are selling is deranged, and one side keeps breaking more and more things, while the other side makes money by making sure they stay broken, rather than provide a meaningful fix or prevent that in the 1st place.  

Setting aside left or right (I was being a little facetious with that Chomsky / Bannon pic) it's really become 'adults against insanity'.

RETVRN to physical books

This is a short intro post, and I'll write more in the comments section below since the various ideas I have are too extensive to put in one single post.

This is another area where I miraculously got lucky thanks to my parents, who did me a big favor by not allowing me to use any Internet devices until a certain age (which I hated at the time) and pushing me to read and think about things myself. I used to project this onto others, assuming they'd also grown up like me, and only as I've started to learn more have I realized what a disaster the entire society has become. 

I'm not delusional enough to think people will take my suggestions-- in fact, I imagine everything will continue to get even worse, as the collapse continues-- but it's worth saying anyways. It's more for anyone from the future, as well as any people alive now who have managed to hold onto their personality in the face of the evil society (which increasingly tries to take away people's dignity by turning them into addicts and consumers of various kinds and torturing them with a diet of fake garbage instead of real nourishing food, both literally and figuratively).

The main take-away is that any Millennials and Zoomers-- who are not actively in denial-- must RETVRN to books (physical books) and repent and refrain from spending their entire lives plugged into online opium 24/7. Ideally, they must also RETVRN to shopping around for them in a physical store rather than buying online. You also don't necessarily have to break the bank by buying new, there are plenty of thrift stores or used book-stores or antique stores with interesting high-quality stuff you would never have been exposed to otherwise. 

Even if you're too stubborn to change, and too smart to ever learn anything (like a lot of high IQ modern people), my advice is to push your kids or those in the broader community, if you don't have them yourself, in a more interesting direction, rather than condemn them to an endless diet of brain-rotting retarded digital slop.

A major cause of the total collapse of knowledge, creativity, insight, expertise, etc and our entering this new era of widespread hopelessly-retarded smug ignorance, has been the abandonment of books in favor of the Internet. You will be doing yourself a favor by escaping the fake treadmill / closed loop of porn, propaganda, and social media, and developing your individual interests, instead of becoming another arrogant clueless generic midwit dumping his or her slop on the manure pile of social media platforms.

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.