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.