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.