Tag: Democracy

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Media Politics

Day 1332 and Blackpilled

Being engaged in American politicians is a thankless task. I do not at all begrudge people who tune out of our national politics entirely.

After an assassination attempt, a resignation of a sitting president after a public pressure campaign and two political convention I am in no fine mood about the nation.

My assumption is that this mood is being induced deliberately. It’s no wonder I’ve felt a bit unwell over the past two days. The endocrine fatigue we must all be collectively experiencing. Constant cortisol stimulation is no way to live. I was quoted in a piece about the dissident middle last year.

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”

Day 784 and Dissident Fringe

And yet I feel compelled to engage on how we are governed. Being steeped in enlightenment values and the collective history of Western Civilization, I have taken as a given that civic involvement is a higher virtue. The capacity to govern and be governed is a noble pursuit of rational men aspiring to more.

I feel even more compelled to engage as a citizen when legacy institutions like the media are less able to maintain trust. If I’m being shown nothing but Pravda but I know it’s not the truth do I have an obligation to speak up?

Regular people have incredible rights in America. I do not always feel like we treat that privilege with the respect it deserves. We have a say.

Don’t let yourself become blackpilled by duels between bad policy and bad people. Our institutions need reform. We cannot continue on with the projects of civilization unless we find ways to collaborate at great scale. You can’t let yourself get exhausted by this daunting task.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1328 and Weebs as New Social Elites

Yesterday, Occulus and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, posted a picture of him doing Nyan Neko Sugar Girl cosplay to his Twitter account. It’s a Fanime from 2010.

DragonCon enjoyers

On the heels of a sympathetic long form essay in Tablet Magazine that went viral, Palmer posting friendly cat girl jokes on main was clarion call to the one demographic that really matters in America right now. Nerds are the entry into the elite class.

Every flavor of nerd is flexing their might. Autistic weebs are claiming their power in the American elite class. And our politicians ans generals should be thrilled. It’s not not a moment too soon to put the engineers in on the great game

Showing off your niche knowledge is a favored elite game. Millenials & Zoomers understand their reality is being built upon arcane information and have gone for the deep cuts to keep up.

While on Tablet I came across their coverage of the Democratic National Convention where bizarre communist fervor from identities as inscrutable as Zoomer Hoxhaists are on display. Enver Hoxha being the infamous (and possibly crazy) communist dictator of Albania and not a good guy. But clearly some idiotic online intellectual has to treat history as if it were finding a cool band.

So if you subscribe to hidden knowledge as social capital then it’s time to read up on Gaetano Mosca and the Italian school of elitism. For discourse watchers, they were notable anti-fascist thinkers.

If you made it through the marathon Joe Rogan episode interviewing Peter Thiel you might have caught the memes about Chimp Empire. Well turns out that’s topical and an approachable angle.

every society could be split between two social classes: the one who rules and the one which is ruled

The current elite class of interests has looked beyond our military industrial complex to to Silicon Valley. They have known for sometime if you want to beat the communists (or the fascists or the oligarchy) then partnering with the new nerd elite is now your move.

Don’t worry Douglas MacArthur was a red blooded American military man and a weeb. Autists long a good track record in defense innovation.

If you want an eye to the future then learn the ways of the weeb. Drone warfare and embodied habits? Take it a step further WinterMute. Your transgendered simulated intelligence running that drone was trained on green text and it’s time you learn to speak like a native of the hive mind.

Rise up cat girls! Now is the hour of the weeb. Do it for America. Do it for capitalism. Do it so we get some sick Mecha suits from Uncle Sam.

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Politics

Day 1326 and So Dumb

Election season in American is just so very dumb. I don’t have the energy to even go on a rant about it though I will try.

We’ve got patently ridiculous economic policies coming from both political parties. Price controls and 60% tariffs are not the stuff of booming dynamism and I don’t care what else you are selling if those are my choices.

There is almost no point in attempting explanations of the absurdity of one party or the other as chances are good someone will scream at you if you decide to engage.

Which is a shame as I don’t think we should be tolerating this level of incompetence from our public servants and we should all be asking a lot more questions of politicians.

Moderates and centrists are just about done engaging in the public sphere at all now. There is little profit in expressing an opinion. If you pick a workable corner of the cozy web maybe you can find peace but the public internet is a mess of inanities and cognitive dissonance. Only idiots like me who don’t mind expressing an opinion are still screaming into the abyss of Twitter.

I’d love to be partisan and go in on a political team sometimes just to tune out screeching filter bubbles but I don’t think I’m ready to sacrifice my dignity for peace of mind or tactical advantage.

I also don’t think either party would have me. I’m too much of a capitalist for the Democrats and too much of a liberal for Republicans. Being against populism doesn’t make you popular. And it is just all so dumb.

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Politics Startups

Day 1322 and You Can Just Do Things

The older you are the more you begin to accept the way things “are” in the world. We’ve come to accept layers of professionalism between us and the real work of the world as we go about pursuing our own comparative advantage.

Surely someone is handling the bits we are not as this is an advanced civilization right? I fucking wish.

I don’t wish to disparage our expert managerial class but we are all human. The experts are just operating from past biases and some of them haven’t been updated in quite a while. The people in charge might even be quite wrong.

Sometimes things are much easier than you imagine. I remember being asked when fundraising for a cosmetics business about the relative challenge of sourcing manufacturing.

The bias ten years ago was that there must be exclusive manufacturers who make the nice things they sell at department store. Turns out any idiot who can underwrite a purchase order to buy anything they like for an astonishing array of things.

Now maybe you think ok but not all businesses are like this right many businesses have regulatory challenges and someone responsible must be in charge of all of that.

Surprise those are regular people too. And most of them have LinkedIn profiles now. Everything from the bureaucracy at the Department of Energy to the local zoning board is one like now

I spent a few years on a community board that oversaw liquor licenses in lower Manhattan right after Trump was elected as I wanted to be a more active participant in my own democracy.

Turns out a lot of life goes on at the local level and the levers of democracy go through having your papers in order. American life has a lot of paperwork. If you wanted to serve alcohol at your establishment you went through me and a couple other normal citizens at the liquor board

Most businesses spent small fortunes on laws to manage the paperwork of doing business. It was expensive and time consuming and I looked at a lot of Michelin caliber restaurant business plans.

I did everything I could to make sure a license got through. Most of the board had a similar attitude. We’d redo applications on live at a meeting sometimes which made them go for hours. But generally the goal was to get permits approved and have there be no issues that could trip the business up.

I felt I had a civic obligation to be more involved in helping people just do things. You can get through the paperwork.

I want Zoomers to do their best to convince the older people living in the past to help us update our priors. You can just do things.

You can find a laboratory for a formula or a factory for parts. You can find the regulators and local people on board and convince them of the soundness of your plans. You can just do things. Even if someone says something is hard you can probably do it. Even impossible things might have a chance if you just keep working the problems.

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Community Politics

Day 1317 and The Circus Came To Town

I am hunkering down for a Friday evening at home. Batten down the hatches, secure the chickens in their coop, turn on the security system and lock the doors kiddos because the circus is here.

Former President Donald Trump is hosting a rally in Bozeman Montana tonight and I would like to keep my distance from the circus. There are naturally rallies, counter rallies and protests to go along with the main event.

We don’t live in the town of Bozeman thankfully but comfortably far enough into rural county land that we shouldn’t be bothered.

Nevertheless when something big comes to town, and it’s harder to imagine something bigger than a political rally, it can get in the way of basic routines like grocery shopping or picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy.

I was doing a few errands over the lunch hour and traffic was crawling as trucks decked out in flags paraded through town. It was actually quite festive even if it slowed everything down.

Trump is speaking at 8pm and already by noon the rumor on local chats and news websites was that the indoor arena was nearly full with early arrivals.

There is a portion of 19th street where local farmers sell fruit and vegetables on the side of the road. Today it was packed with booths selling Trump paraphernalia instead of cherries or sweet corn. I

think the most astonishing flag I saw was “Cum-Allah Harris” but it was otherwise your usual MAGA fair with lots of signs for local Republican candidates as well.

Slow traffic and roadside flag sales

I didn’t get any close up pictures as I was trying to avoid the scene but I did a little bit of looking as I drove by. I’m hoping it brings good business to restaurants, bars and motels though in truth August is already so popular a time to be in Bozeman we don’t really have much capacity.

I’m safely back home long before anything has kicked off and I indeed to keep it that way. Don’t invite trouble and trouble won’t find you. But I look forward to hearing stories from friends and neighbors. Maybe I’ll watch the livestream.

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 1315 and Ratfucking Season

I’ve been engaging in more of American political discourse online as we head into the main campaign season. That’s probably a mistake.

American is no country for old libertarians. Or in my case middle aged small “l” libertarians who aren’t keen on more government involvement in anything. Cyperpunk is became daily life and the crypto-libertarian instincts some of us were raised into make us distrust this particular flavor.

But I’m in a pretty decent mood all things considered. Perhaps the typical depressive lassitude of the sunny season is being mitigated by the climate controlled extremely online nature of the networked era. Madness without breaking a sweat.

My people are not much for sunnier climes and our popular culture representations have more than a touch of summer madness. Better to keep us indoors when the mercury climbs.

And yet the madness seeps in to the virtual worlds of media. August is full of ugly surprises.Which brings me to the rat fucking.

As I said, I’m watching American politics. It’s definitely Knives Out season and as my friend Jon Stokes points out the semiotics are ugly. Now that we have the Vice Presidency match up set as Ohio Senator JD Vance versus Minnesota Governor Tim Walz we can run cultural scripts. It’s already ugly, sexualized and bullying.

meme warfare b/c it codes Vance as the self-loathing, repressed kinkster who hasn’t yet come out to a loving ally dad who’ll embrace him & pass the torch to him

This is ratfucking season and the Democrats are on top of their game. Politico has a short history of ratfucking which anyone interested in political campaigns would do well to read.

Roger Stone has been with us doing dirty tricks for so long sometimes we forget that both sides are up to it and have been since before Nixon.

Like my goodness how things don’t repeat but rhyme in twisted new ways. We’ve got a Kennedy with a car crash crash and carcasses in the news.

It’s wild that the same people are still around and involved and somehow not dead. You shouldn’t get to do the “Summer of 68” twice in my opinion. And absolutely nobody wants a repeat of the 70s. Can you imagine cultural stagflation? Actually maybe I can

Maybe we are doing reinforcement learning in a simulation of some sort and we actually are in a gradient descent of madness being smeared across an event horizon of frenzied power dreams of an artificial American swampland simulation that ran too long. It’s all awfully crisp.

Categories
Politics

Day 1308 and Policies For Any Political Party

I don’t know why I let myself do this but I got irritated by the American election cycle. I have been libertarian and skeptical of the government well basically always. It was probably only really left flavored during a an Adbusters, Battle of Seattle, my favorite band is Rage Against the Machine teenager phase.

What can I say millennials did not like the government because the global war on terror went as well as every other war on “ideas” we’ve ever fought. We lost the war on poverty and drugs too.

But I do try to retain a kind of pragmatic libertarianism that is a recognition that my preferred politics isn’t always going to be broad consensus and it’s sensible to work opposing viewpoints as we have shared interests in civilization and America.

I am hugely affected by my proximity to international founders who adopted America because of the opportunities we have here that are unmatched elsewhere. Our market capitalism has given truly exceptional talent from places that suffer varying degrees of oligarchic, authoritarian and socialist systems.

It’s with this in mind that I’d like to ask American politicians but in particular the Democrats to please consider policy that allows us to remain a place where the best and brightest can rise and thrive. It’s good for all of us

My five basic policy asks are as follows

1) Stop taking aggressive, over broad interpretations of both criminal and civil statutes in regard to crypto. The SEC is trying to kill a nascent industry instead of shape and grow it. There are other first world countries taking different approaches. Japan seems to have adopted healthier ways. I’d like Gensler gone personally as I struggle to see this as anything but petty Wall Street protectionism.

2) Focus antitrust efforts on the industries where consolidation is harming Americans in structural ways like PBMs and agribusiness.

3) Retract the Biden EO on artificial intelligence and take an approach to akin to how we settled the encryption wars in the 90s. We don’t want to strangle a new industry as it is emerging just for the benefit of a few large incumbents and the fears of a few radicalism’s.

4) Stop discussing the ludicrous unrealized capital gains tax. It’s unconstitutional & structurally devastating to novel businesses. Only the rich will be able to afford to own a piece of a startup which will further limit social mobility.

5) We have got to find a way for companies to exit and IPO that isn’t this middle stagnant path of Microsoft’s regulatory capture corporate investment playbook. Markets need liquidity to function and the public deserves the chance to be rewarded.

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1303 and Toaster F*ckers

If you are someone with a gentle constitution who finds vulgar language or discussions of sexual appetites upsetting, this post won’t be for you.

I doubt I have readers like this as one of my most viral pieces was titled “dickriding” but just in case you’ve been warned. I’ll be discussing the toaster fucking problem today.

I’m not a big consumer of pornography nor do I enjoy most fetishes but I generally share the attitude that you shouldn’t yuck someone else’s yum. Millennials are a tolerant sort. Yet I wonder if it’s time for us to revisit philosopher Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance theory.

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, introduced in his 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies, posits that unlimited tolerance can lead to the demise of tolerance itself. Popper argues that if a society tolerates intolerant ideologies without limits, those ideologies will eventually dominate and suppress tolerance. Therefore, to preserve a tolerant society, it must be intolerant of intolerance.

via PerplexityAI

I’ve have a lot of skepticism about how one executes on being intolerant of intolerance. It’s often illustrated with Nazis. Now there are many ideologies I find intolerable but as an American who believes in free speech I will fight for the right to be intolerant. As long as you aren’t trying to mess with my inviolable rights go ahead with your weird shit sexually, politically or otherwise.

Naturally this has yielded some people who go a lot further than you’d like. There is a Hacker News post that has come to be known as the “toaster fucker problem.” I’ll post it in whole so you can get the flavor of just how far people will go for their weird niche obsessions.

I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.

I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends “I want to fuck a toaster” Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.

Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds “Toaster Fucker Support group” where he reads that he’s actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.

Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.

Now you think surely internet fetishism has nothing useful to teach me. Surely this sort of thing wouldn’t bleed into serious spaces like politics or economics but after 2016 all bets are clearly off as to the seriousness of our political discourse.

Everyone is fully free to go to the absolute lunatic fringes of every issue because no matter how wild your beliefs you can find someone else online who shares it.

If you want to fuck a toaster not only will you find fellow fetishists but Rule 34 suggests there is probably pornography of it. Who could have guessed the consequences of 1987’s cartoon The Brave Little Toaster right?

Because totally regular people are no longer shamed for being into weird shit you can, and do, see totally regular people discussing weird shit.

It’s often hard to judges what real and what’s fake. A Twitter shit poaster went viral for suggesting that Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance fucked a couch. The memes are amazing.

It was was fact checked as false by the AP and other news organizations. The comedians will never let it go as hey these days who knows if the guy is a couch fucker. A popular Netflix cartoon called Bigmouth made horny tweens fucking a cushion a plot arc so maybe the millennial senator from Ohio might be too.

Now as much as I’m all for presenting all sides of an issue it’s very possible that we can take people at their words. We don’t need to ramp everything up to toaster fucking. It’s perfectly fine to discuss things on the merits without going to the edge of the metaphorical map of social propriety. So I guess I’ll be looking for a copy of Popper on the book shelf this weekend.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1301 and Coming to America

The leadership of any powerful industry naturally has some vested interests. You assume this is obvious but to give Kamala Harris’s mother her due “”You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

That is actually a pretty conservative viewpoint to have. What if you can’t upend all the systems around you even if you’d like to apply something demonstrably better. Technology isn’t just gadgets. There are social technologies too. Media and money are both in that category. And it’s taken time to integrate both.

How we perceive each other and what we are owed relies a lot on both “what we’ve always done.” I think investors actually have reasonably good intuition that most “insane invention that breaks with all we’ve ever known” happens in spite of human nature and not because of it.

I am absolutely fascinated by how others read history in light of this fact. We highlight revolutions and change but as any good “nothing ever happens” nerd will tell you it takes forever.

So if you think something is going to change for good you need to make the case consistently over time. And one thing that just doesn’t change that fast is who is in charge.. Haves and have nots. The people who make the rules and the people who follow them. How you became a member of the class of people who make those decisions versus the class of person who accepts their decision is basically the TLDR of civilization. Classism appears to be incredibly hard to shake and we reorganize regularly to praise our betters.

America likes to tell itself a lot of stories about our rebellion against monarchy but it’s mostly a story about who gets to keep the wealth. Answering to your betters is enforced eventually with the pointy end of the stick and you can decide then how much you have to lose. If it’s enough (or very little) that’s when you get in trouble.

America being a break with British mercantilism has a pretty happy end of colonialism story. That isn’t true everywhere. Plenty of place kept their ruling classes with plenty of social benefits. Bread and circus is now healthcare and collegiate education. This expansion of prosperity has not gone evenly for everyone.

Socialism and classism in other countries really benefit America. Capitalism literally pulls people here despite our backwards immigration system that is actively hostile to bringing in this amazing talent. In America we’ve had a fantastically successful diaspora of India’s upper classes thanks to their history.

Welcoming in the everyone is one of America’s most cherished narratives but we we have done a lot to cherry pick other country’s the best and brightest who are otherwise stymied in political and social systems who don’t recognize them.

So when the markets crater I think it tells you something about how we all feel everyone else must feel. Some interests don’t feel good about Kamala Harris. Technology stocks cratered. Lockheed Martin on the other hand was up in the markets today.

Maybe that tells you something about who is and isn’t more established in the hierarchies of America. Maybe that should influence your actions. QQQ is not brat but the Styles section is very happy. Shondaland might have gotten the “we’d get rid of race but never class” thing right on Bridgerton after all. Anyways now is a great time to read your Thucydides.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1295 and The Politics of Envy

Wanting what isn’t yours is very human. Monkey see, monkey do. Coveting always struck me as one of the most reasonable taboos.

Envy is an ugly emotion which deprives you of the joys you already have in your life. And yet so much of politics seems dedicated to stoking the suffering of unmet longing. The politics of envy may win votes but it can never produce a real policy.

I’ve been thinking perhaps too much about the consent of the governed. The state is granted a monopoly on violence through our consent. I fear a politics of envy because it eventually produces policies that will rely on not just on coercion but violence.

I don’t know where we are headed in America but I fear where envy leads us. It’s not simply about material things. One can envy power, prestige, cultural capital, beauty, intellect and countless other blessings.

Some of those things can be earned surely but many are providence. Those blessings cannot be taken as easily but they surely can be envied. I don’t wish us to follow those dark roads in search of riches which cannot be granted.