The past couple days makes me think that maybe Hitlery Clinton was right and half of Trump supporters really are deplorable.
I still think Trump himself is a decent guy. He is the only presidential* candidate I've ever wanted to vote FOR (as opposed to always voting against someone), and I'm glad he did become President, as I've wanted him to be President since 1999. That much is true. If I do vote in November I without question will vote for Trump again because the alternative is unthinkable.
Still, I've never been a boot-licker. He has done some great things, and I still think he's the only good President we've had since JFK, but I think the reason he's been successful is because he basically throws shit against the wall and sees what sticks. He changes his mind every day. Naturally, when you've had 7000 ideas it's no surprise that 3500 were good just by dumb luck. He burns through staff members faster than the company I work for, and that's saying something. He hires "The best person in the entire world" and then fires the person in a week because they all turn out to 1. be shit or 2. contradict him on his latest pet idea.
I've called him out on a number of shit moves he's made, mostly bombing Syria in response to bullshit chemical attacks and his eliminating certain environmental protections (NOT global warming, which is complete and utter bullshit, but stuff to do with national parks).
And while he has improved the economy a little bit, it's not as good as when I was a kid before Clinton sold our factories to China. Most of the improvement is just in the stock market, which was pumped with 10,000 points of artificial liquidity by the Fed to make it look like the best thing ever, "The strongest economy the world has ever seen." Nixon did the same thing. Nixon made it look like he fixed the economy by dramatically increasing the debt. It got him re-elected in a 49 state landslide, but it took decades for the US to recover, and when it finally did Clinton killed it again.
And now this quarter-assed approach to dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic is by far his worst move yet. Still, that's not the bad part. As some people have pointed out, Trump really has no power here. He cannot coerce states to lift their own quarantines, so when he says "America will go to work again in a week" he has no authority to enforce that. It's just bullshit rhetoric meant to inspire people. Individual governors can tell him to go pound sand and there's nothing he can do because of the Tenth Amendment† (unless it's to spread progressivism, then SCOTUS is willing to abrogate the Constitution and conjure up laws out of whole cloth‡).
No, the bad part is not Trump or anything he's done, but his followers. They seem to be almost as assaholic as leftists. Almost.
They really seem to be fucking stupid. They seem to be some sort of Team America parody of extreme reckless jingoism. In the span of two weeks Alex Jones went from saying Coronavirus would signal the death knell of globalism to now saying it is a globalist hoax designed to institute a one-world police state. He went from talking about how the disease was so horrifically deadly that China was burning tens of thousands of bodies, turning the rain over Japan black from soot, to saying that seasonal flu is tens or even hundreds of times deadlier.
Every one of them seems to have the Team America theme playing on a continuous loop at full blast. MURICA! FUCK YEAH! COMING AGAIN TO SAVE THE MOTHERFUCKING DAY, YEAH! MURICA! FUCK YEAH! FREEDOM IS THE ONLY WAY!
“Coronavirus be a globohomo§ plot! I gots to buy me some more guns! 15 ain't enough!”
Are you Sarah fucking Palin or something? How many guns do you need? It's just like the people who hoard enough TP to build a fort.
“Muricans ain't scared of no flu bug! Coronavirus is a hoax by the Democraps to usher in Agenda 21! Literally NO ONE has died from Coronavirus! 8 BILLION people die every year from flu. 9 BILLION! We're going back to work! Murica! Fuck yeah!”
“If you criticize any aspect of anything Trump ever says you're a commie lib prog bundle of sticks!|”
Trump supporters, conservatives, and LOLbertarians are just as bad as Bernouts and progressives. They do engage in the purity spiral just as well, only instead of kicking out anyone who isn't woke enough they kick out anyone who isn't jingoistic or contemptuous of the environment or worker's rights enough.
No group seems to be capable of understanding nuance or context. No group seems capable of tolerating difference of opinion. You either agree 100% or BTFO. It's almost as if humans really are shit-flinging apes that got lucky like the atheists believe. Humans are just intelligent enough to be dangerous and invent bio-weapons, H-bombs, and AI-controlled social credit scores, but not intelligent enough not to be assholes to each other.
I can't fucking stand these people who say “Real Americans want to go back to work!” So literally anyone who disagrees with you, no matter the reason, is not a real American? It's not just that they are uninformed or mistaken, or maybe just have a different opinion, no, they are literally an enemy of the state?
“Real Americans LOVE working!” Really? I've never met one. Everyone I've ever worked with has hated working, they just do it because they have to. That's why they have to pay you to do it, because you wouldn't do it for free because it's shit. Even people who I've known who are workaholics admit they hate working, they just want to get it done with so they can accrue enough money through savings and investments to retire as soon as possible. The only people who seem to enjoy their jobs are the Youtubers who make six figures through ad revenue or e-begging, or selfish retirees who already have enough money to live off of but go back to work out of boredom, and in so doing steal jobs from younger, less credentialed people.
I almost want to sit out the election in November because 1. I live in New Jersey so my vote literally doesn't matter because the state would vote for Pol Pot or Jeffrey Dahmer if he had a “D” after his name, and 2. because I don't want to contribute to the victory of Trump's assaholic fans. I don't want to make them happy.
Please, dear President Trump, if you really are God Emperor, save me from your asshole fans.
* There were a few NJ senate candidates I did really like and vote for in the primaries, but none of them got the nomination, and I still think Alan Keyes is the smartest person to run for President and not get nominated.
† The Tenth Amendment to the US constitution says that the states have the sole and absolute authority to decide matters that are not explicitly granted to the federal government in the Constitution.
‡ Whole cloth is the metaphysical substance from which blatant lies are made.
§ Globohomo = Globalized + Homogenized. I had to look it up too because I thought it had to do with gays.
| Not sure if big tech will allow me to use the other word, better to be safe.
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Thursday, February 20, 2020
What is History?
I've been keeping a diary since 2012, with some other bits written down earlier than that starting in 2006 (The Urban Mystic itself was started as a diary of my own mystical experiences). In preparation for writing a 365 day reflection book on various events (talking about great figures in the history of philosophy and mysticism and events like the Last Supper and the Resurrection) I've been looking back on those diaries and I was struck by just how much my recollections of events have changed over the years.
In a sense my life began in 2012 (and in another sense it began in 2006 when I was born again). Before then, in the great years like 2011, 2010, and others, I have no records, just vague memories, and, looking back on existing memories, I can see how much memory deviates from reality. Most of it is just forgetting stuff, but some of it is remembering things out of order. Who knows what really happened at that point.
It makes you wonder how accurate history really is. The oldest records of Alexander the Great are from 300 years after he died. The earliest Christian writings are from 40 years after the Resurrection, which is about as accurate as you can get until modern times. We now have primary sources and the printing press, which has allowed us to make unlimited copies to assure that the accounts of history are preserved.
We have cameras and video and now everyone is journalist. Everyone has a camera, everyone has Internet access, everyone can make unlimited copies of live events and protect them for posterity.
No longer are we reliant on official sources of news and information, now we can see events as they happen in real time and form our own opinions on events.
And yet there is the downside of this too. Technology is rapidly advancing toward the point where people can take audio and video samples and create perfect digital replicas of real people and places and create fake events that are indistinguishable from the real thing (unless you have access to the metadata). “Deep fake” they call it. We're not there yet, but we're getting there quickly.
Then there is the censorship. The corporate press and elite tech robber barons are frightened of a world where they are not the sole arbiter of truth. If a person with a smart phone can reach more people than a stuffed shirt with hair plugs and a journalism degree whose making seven figures then who needs the stuffed shirt? The gate keepers are becoming irrelevant and that frightens them, so they've turned to two tools that all tyrants employ when faced with this situation: censorship and propaganda (physical violence happens when these methods fail). Anyone who questions the official narrative is labeled as a bigot or a heretic and their material is removed from the polite web. Dangerous individuals (Facebook literally removed several accounts of people they said were “dangerous” like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones) are deplatformed, unpersoned, and slandered. They are tainted and rendered unemployable. Banks won't touch them. It is no longer necessary to execute political undesirables as they had in the Twentieth Century, now you can make sure undesirables can't get a job so they become homeless and starve and descend into suicidal despair.
Then there is the condition of living in what is called “post truth”. Pilate asked “What is truth?” Today this question is answered with another question, “Whose truth?” Different people have different truths. People can witness the same objective events and experience them as totally different subjective realities. Beliefs about reality have begun to superseded objective reality itself. Understanding this allows one to manipulate others perceptions for fun and profit. It makes writing history a nightmare, but it's great for trolling people on Twitter.
Take the shampeachment for instance. Tens of millions of people can watch the shampeachment as a great crusade against the most evil being who has ever or will ever live. They will see Trump extorting the President of Ukraine to investigate Biden's son in an attempt to destroy Biden's own presidential campaign years before he even decided to run for office, back when he said he was not going to run. Even though President Zelensky himself admits nothing of the sort happened. But we can't believe his own testimony, it's clearly Stockholm syndrome! And, of course, even though we have Biden admit on video that he deliberately extorted Ukraine to fire an ambassador in exchange for aid money, committing the very crime President Trump was accused of, that never happened either. It's a deep fake created by the “vast right-wing conspiracy”.
At the same time tens of millions of people see the shampeachment as nothing more than a purely partisan political shitshow that was an attempted soft coup that had been in the planning stages since before Trump had even been inaugurated.
Tens of millions of people are living in totally opposite alternate realities that happen to occupy the same physical space but different psychosocial spaces.
Wikipedia, a Chinese-controlled far-leftist propaganda machine, has proposed solutions to the post truth world (and the newspeak equivalents in parentheses):
1. Have the tech oligarchs design algorithms to filter out opinions that run counter to the official narrative (“filter out fake news”)
2. Have bought and paid for priests of the new secular religion make public appearances to spread propaganda because their livelihoods literally depend on it (“greater visibility of scientists and the scientific community”)
3. Government crackdowns on any dissenters through deplatforming and unpersoning, and, if you're a Bernie Bro, gulags, which “weren't all that bad.” (“stronger government involvement in combating fake news”)
4. Make people rat one another out like they did in the Soviet Union (“scrutinizing fake news”).
Roger Scruton has his own theories about post truth, so does Ken Wilber, but that's a topic for another day.
We are living in times that are both exciting and frightening. Things are changing so fast, much faster even than in the 2010s when I wrote about the World Gone Mad and how society was racing toward fundamental changes without even stopping to consider the potential consequences, that it strains the mind to even keep up. The human brain might not be large enough to handle so much information all at once, and might not be able to develop the psychological, social, economic, or political structures such a rapidly changing world requires. We may very well reach the hypothesized singularity, where technological growth trends toward infinity, or we may be reaching Calhoun's behavioral sink and the collapse of society as we reach the point where economic growth can no longer be sustained. And with things like post truth and deep fakes who knows if we'll even realize what's going on when we do reach that point.
In a sense my life began in 2012 (and in another sense it began in 2006 when I was born again). Before then, in the great years like 2011, 2010, and others, I have no records, just vague memories, and, looking back on existing memories, I can see how much memory deviates from reality. Most of it is just forgetting stuff, but some of it is remembering things out of order. Who knows what really happened at that point.
It makes you wonder how accurate history really is. The oldest records of Alexander the Great are from 300 years after he died. The earliest Christian writings are from 40 years after the Resurrection, which is about as accurate as you can get until modern times. We now have primary sources and the printing press, which has allowed us to make unlimited copies to assure that the accounts of history are preserved.
We have cameras and video and now everyone is journalist. Everyone has a camera, everyone has Internet access, everyone can make unlimited copies of live events and protect them for posterity.
No longer are we reliant on official sources of news and information, now we can see events as they happen in real time and form our own opinions on events.
And yet there is the downside of this too. Technology is rapidly advancing toward the point where people can take audio and video samples and create perfect digital replicas of real people and places and create fake events that are indistinguishable from the real thing (unless you have access to the metadata). “Deep fake” they call it. We're not there yet, but we're getting there quickly.
Then there is the censorship. The corporate press and elite tech robber barons are frightened of a world where they are not the sole arbiter of truth. If a person with a smart phone can reach more people than a stuffed shirt with hair plugs and a journalism degree whose making seven figures then who needs the stuffed shirt? The gate keepers are becoming irrelevant and that frightens them, so they've turned to two tools that all tyrants employ when faced with this situation: censorship and propaganda (physical violence happens when these methods fail). Anyone who questions the official narrative is labeled as a bigot or a heretic and their material is removed from the polite web. Dangerous individuals (Facebook literally removed several accounts of people they said were “dangerous” like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones) are deplatformed, unpersoned, and slandered. They are tainted and rendered unemployable. Banks won't touch them. It is no longer necessary to execute political undesirables as they had in the Twentieth Century, now you can make sure undesirables can't get a job so they become homeless and starve and descend into suicidal despair.
Then there is the condition of living in what is called “post truth”. Pilate asked “What is truth?” Today this question is answered with another question, “Whose truth?” Different people have different truths. People can witness the same objective events and experience them as totally different subjective realities. Beliefs about reality have begun to superseded objective reality itself. Understanding this allows one to manipulate others perceptions for fun and profit. It makes writing history a nightmare, but it's great for trolling people on Twitter.
Take the shampeachment for instance. Tens of millions of people can watch the shampeachment as a great crusade against the most evil being who has ever or will ever live. They will see Trump extorting the President of Ukraine to investigate Biden's son in an attempt to destroy Biden's own presidential campaign years before he even decided to run for office, back when he said he was not going to run. Even though President Zelensky himself admits nothing of the sort happened. But we can't believe his own testimony, it's clearly Stockholm syndrome! And, of course, even though we have Biden admit on video that he deliberately extorted Ukraine to fire an ambassador in exchange for aid money, committing the very crime President Trump was accused of, that never happened either. It's a deep fake created by the “vast right-wing conspiracy”.
At the same time tens of millions of people see the shampeachment as nothing more than a purely partisan political shitshow that was an attempted soft coup that had been in the planning stages since before Trump had even been inaugurated.
Tens of millions of people are living in totally opposite alternate realities that happen to occupy the same physical space but different psychosocial spaces.
Wikipedia, a Chinese-controlled far-leftist propaganda machine, has proposed solutions to the post truth world (and the newspeak equivalents in parentheses):
1. Have the tech oligarchs design algorithms to filter out opinions that run counter to the official narrative (“filter out fake news”)
2. Have bought and paid for priests of the new secular religion make public appearances to spread propaganda because their livelihoods literally depend on it (“greater visibility of scientists and the scientific community”)
3. Government crackdowns on any dissenters through deplatforming and unpersoning, and, if you're a Bernie Bro, gulags, which “weren't all that bad.” (“stronger government involvement in combating fake news”)
4. Make people rat one another out like they did in the Soviet Union (“scrutinizing fake news”).
Roger Scruton has his own theories about post truth, so does Ken Wilber, but that's a topic for another day.
We are living in times that are both exciting and frightening. Things are changing so fast, much faster even than in the 2010s when I wrote about the World Gone Mad and how society was racing toward fundamental changes without even stopping to consider the potential consequences, that it strains the mind to even keep up. The human brain might not be large enough to handle so much information all at once, and might not be able to develop the psychological, social, economic, or political structures such a rapidly changing world requires. We may very well reach the hypothesized singularity, where technological growth trends toward infinity, or we may be reaching Calhoun's behavioral sink and the collapse of society as we reach the point where economic growth can no longer be sustained. And with things like post truth and deep fakes who knows if we'll even realize what's going on when we do reach that point.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
