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[fierytakeferdinand]

Literally can’t stop thinking about this.

[fierytakeferdinand]

there was a protest against anti-trans laws being debated in oklahoma and chuds are trying to compare it to Jan 6

"Oklahoma came under attack today by a group of insurrectionists," tweeted Libs of TikTok, a conservative, anti-LGBT account owned by Chaya Raichik. "I'm sure the FBI is already on it and will use every available resource to identify all these domestic terrorists."

Meanwhile, Jack Posobiec, senior editor of conservative outlet Human Events, said the group had "stormed and occupied" the state capitol. Other users commented that it was "January 6 all over again" while others called it a "transurrection."

this shit is so braindead

[fierytakeferdinand]

You Will Never Be Normal Sighted

I don’t care how much glass you put in front of your eyes, you still can’t see. It’s basic biology.

I am so sick and tired of people talking about getting glasses like it’s some normal thing you could just go and do at any time. It’s completely unnatural and should be shamed. What kind of sick world would it be if people could just put on glasses and claim they could see?

Don’t you understand? No matter how much you wear prescription glasses, you still can’t see. When I try wearing glasses everything gets all wonky and my head hurts. If it doesn’t work for me, it doesn’t work for anybody.

Not to mention they want to give glasses to CHILDREN! You do realize how messed up that is? You are destroying that child’s NATURAL vision forever, when they just need to accept not being able to see. Send them to a therapist that will actually determine what their real problem is, and not some doctor who’ll affirm their delusion that they can just put on glasses and see.

Those doctors are so quick to give kids glasses, as few as 3 appointments across 6 years before glasses are prescribed, irreversibly damaging their vision and indulging their delusion of being able to see. They’re clearly being influenced by a political agenda...

Pictured: Child Abuse.

I’ve seen a lot of people stop wearing glasses eventually. I’d even say most of the people that wear glasses eventually regret it and stop. No, I haven’t read any research on the matter, because it’s all meant to serve the Big Optic agenda of creating lifelong medical patients and corrupt the meaning of what being able to see actually means.

Glasses are also an attack on us Biological Seers, they go to OUR libraries, read OUR books, books written by REAL SEERS! They wear our struggle of being able to see like it’s a costume. They can just take off the glasses any time.

Then there’s people who wear contact lenses and think we don’t notice. Hah!

WE CAN ALWAYS TELL.

Your eyes get all dry and stuff, and you have to blink an unnatural amount of times. Normal people don’t have to blink, it’s just proof that it doesn’t work. Also, contacts change the color of your eyes. All of them. I understand what I’m talking about, yes.

What do you mean you can get eye surgery to not need glasses anymore? Seriously? Mutilating your eyeballs because you think you can just see afterwards? They also take children as young as 3 and force them to have this surgery. How can a CHILD be BLIND when they can’t even SPEAK properly yet? It’s insane. No matter how much you laser your eyeballs you will always be a blind and that’s a fact.

Trust me in all of this. I am very smart.

Subscribe to my blog to read my next essay on the topic of Asthma, and the secret cabal of inhaler-prescribing doctors.

[fierytakeferdinand]

Twitter was even worse for society than Facebook

The Medium restricts the message.

You cannot have an audio-visual blockbuster spectacle in a book, and you cannot have the thrill of an online game in a movie.

Likewise, you cannot have an intelligent discussion on Twitter.

The character limit forces summarizing, and summarizing means simplifying, and while that is a good thing and brevity is the soul of wit and all, it’s not the soul of intelligence nor being correct. In fact I would argue that being any degree of correct requires verbosity, it requires detail, knowledge builds upon knowledge and referencing past knowledge as assumptions is an important detail to include in any thought-out thought to avoid unintelligent refutations that arise from the refuter’s own ignorance.

Is it any surprise then that public discourse is such a cesspit when we chose to prioritize wit over intelligence? Is it any surprise that the website which is a perfect fit for short, simple, emotional, controversial, scathing remarks that elicit equally simplistic, emotional, limited-by-design responses in people contains exactly that?

This “town square” — as Musk calls it — is a popularity contest, just like a real town square indeed, and wit wins every time, but we all lose.

It is effectively a formalization of the same kind of circlejerky model of communication that is emerged on sites like 4chan with it’s fast-moving temporary nature of content generation. It’s what you get when everything boils down to memes. And memes are fine, fun, even, but memes should not comprise public discourse.

Verbosity alone does not comprise intelligence, but it is part of what makes an intelligent point. This in itself is a simplification of course, it depends on context too, you can make a brief intelligent point when prior knowledge is assumed, such as at an expert conference targeted at a field where people are likely to already know the basic assumptions, but same cannot be said for public discourse, and that’s the context I am referring to here.

The other key ingredient in why Twitter sucks in particular is the audience. Why does it matter if people say dumb shit online? People have done so since the beginning of the internet, witty, memetic remarks are the backbone of internet communications. It matters for one reason: the audience.

I’d like to arbitrarily and broadly divide the internet into two groups: Real Life and Online.

Real Life internet is primarily concerned with IRL matters, this is your local pizzeria or amazon or ebay.

Online internet is primarily concerned with online matters, this is your [insert game here] forum, niche tech interest stuff and simple hangout spaces like imageboards.

When it comes to social media, I would say that the majority of sites like Reddit, Tumblr and most imageboards fall into the latter category. They are sites with their own culture, their own in-jokes, things that exist only on the internet and have only ever existed on the internet.

“The Thomas Jefferson Miku Binder image” or “SHYGDDT” don’t mean much to the average person in real life, nor should they. Things like The TSUKI Project or the VRC ERP/FBT communities — as far as the exposure to average everyday people goes — should remain in the form of Vice articles where people read about the latest wacky strange thing the “weird” people are doing.

Whereas sites like Facebook and Twitter are used by The Masses™: you can complain to customer support for your local store on twitter, you can find your local real-life communities and services via Facebook. Hell, nowadays you can buy physical IRL stuff right on Instagram. Likewise celebrities and politicians also use these sites to promote and earn very real money and power in real life.

I think we can agree that discussions regarding real life matters then, things that impact people’s physical existence should probably have a tad more nuance than online shit-flinging contests about the deeper meaning of some episode of Star Trek or gushing in image macros about Skyrim’s batshit lore.

When in fact the opposite had happened. People who are not “internet people” but people primarily concerned with IRL matters were coerced into dumbing down the average level of discourse into memetic content, repeatable simplistic catchy witty bite-size chunks of thoughts that can easily be made to mean anything and adopted by communities foreign to the original by the very platforms they post on, namely one platform — Twitter.

Facebook is vile too of course, and all platforms amplify even the worst of takes to a global audience, but it’s really Twitter that put the power of the image macro in the hands of your local klandma.

Those people talk, and thus also to an extent think of real life like online people used to do with random nerdy discussions, and considering how toxic that can get — when combined with the fact that Twitter is also primarily about IRL stuff — Twitter is the most toxic website on the planet.

Stumbling upon gore as a kid is absolutely nothing — and I mean nothing — compared to the sanity hit of reading the vile insane shit of an average boomer on Twitter present in minority hate groups that don’t even exist yet and knowing that those people mean it and are going outside and voting based on those beliefs, beliefs crafted by memes in 240 characters or less.

Were Twitter just another content-sharing site for bite-sized miniblogs about what you ate this morning it would not be an issue, but clearly, this is not what it has become, and I’m not sure whether Dorsey or anyone at Twitter is to blame per se, but it’s a shitty situation is all I can say.

On the other hand, Reddit is like the alternate universe good version of Twitter — at least in some subreddits — where verbosity and being thorough is not only allowed, but even encouraged through culture of effortposts and the site’s own features of embedding links within text.

Perhaps it speaks to flaws within the human mind itself that made Twitter be the bigger site.

The best thing we can do to our corporate owned town squares of today is to destroy them all and perhaps rethink the whole idea of public discourse with real consequences before we turbo-charge it with technology.

Give the internet back to furries with magically infinite disposable income and content creators that earned nothing, and blatantly ripped each other off for the sake of cool, I say.

There is also an argument to be made for stewardship of the internet, but that’s for another time.

EDIT: Wanted to clarify that I don’t think Twitter invented shitty discourse, a point I briefly touched on in my “just like a real town square” remark but it’s worth discussing because it is in my belief one of the key web sites that undermined the internet’s potential to improve discourse.

[fierytakeferdinand]

UK’s Political Landscape is not unlike a zombie apocalypse story.

What it says on the tin.

Let’s do a brief recap:

Tories have shit the bed, like all conservatives before them and how all of them after, they have stolen from the people and given to their corporate donors/handlers, protected their landlord/theft businesses and

Environmentalists are the only ones who seem to be doing anything but they’re basically single-issue grass simps so it’s hard to get excited about anything they do and most people still shit on them relentlessly massively missing the entire point of all the paint throwing and parliament occupying. Although at least they’re doing something so even if we disagree they have my undying respect.

GreenAndPleasant types are in a superposition of being stalin-apologist anti-Ukraine red-fascist tankie morons while also simultaneously rushing to defense of fucking landlords as long as there’s a sob story. I would say something witty here but the word “Gallery of Morons” is all I can think of so let’s leave it at that.

DemSocs/SuccDems don’t exist here, Labour party liberals are sizeable and had a chance to become a real opposition under Corbyn, but post-massacre by the media, the liberal leadership of Keir still feels like it’ll lose simply because of a boomer monolith voting tories despite the country being now the poorest in Western Europe thanks to Tories, but what can you or I do against them, they are somehow a completely different species, a horror truly beyond my understanding on every level, the kind of “people” who complain about Starbucks baristas not smiling(?) and being “gormless”(??) on Google Maps(???).

Pictured: Anti-Trans hate group. One foot in the grave, the other in other people’s business where it doesn’t belong. Probably the same kind of people who leave the kinds of reviews I posted above.

The Greens basically don’t do anything of note and lost their one exciting candidate for leadership (or rather a duo — Amelia Womack and Tamsin Omond), but at least not to the openly TERF candidate — Shahrar Ali. I’ll drink to that, he can die in a fire, but the fact he was anywhere near a progressive party is already incredibly concerning.

Anarchists are non-existent. LAF pretty much already existed only on Facebook with occasional events and meetups but haven’t done anything since August and their posts get no interactions other than a few random boomers talking about the biker gang sons of anarchy (fucking lol) or making nonsensical comments appended by obligatory elipses, so I doubt they got all that much attendance.

Most users on /r/unitedkingdom are either fence-sitters or pro-labour but they don’t matter compared to the tory monolith that made this country poorer than Poland. And these are the fucking internet using young progressives railing against the system??? What the fuck. Even those who support socialism seem to have this “oh it’ll happen eventually” attitude and just sit on their hands.

In a country known as TERF Island, most trans rights activists are sitting writing essays (and yes I realize the irony), and arranging piss bottles outside headquarters instead of breaking windows with them.

Why is it like this?

Well, because I think we’re past the saving-the-world stage and into the all-we-can-do-is-critique-it stage.

This feels like cyberpunk genuinely. Or a Zombie Apocalypse story. The two are alike in that they share a similar distinction of being set in a static, usually unmoving world, portrayed as a sort of endpoint of history and societal evolution rather than as an age of turmoil and transformation.

This is what separates cyberpunk fiction (and I’m using just a general average of cyberpunk worlds, of course there are outliers) — from other political fiction.

Star Trek is kind of anti-establishment in some ways because it’s effectively a different establishment critiquing our time, in episodes such as The Drumhead, witch hunts and well, “drumhead trials” are critiqued through a story taking place in a society that’s not invulnerable to it’s occasional reappearance, but has learned to spot it, and has learned to fight it. It critiques our society, which has not yet done so. The positive ending is a foregone conclusion because the portrayal is ultimately a utopia, but it’s moral lessons come from defeating challenges.

Cyberpunk fiction’s moral lessons then come from the exact opposite, the world is a dystopia, the bad conclusion to the story is a foregone one, but seeing it transpire allows us to critique it.

Similarly, zombie apocalypse stories allow us to examine human morality in close critique under extreme pressure, it does not provide solutions to complex moral dilemmas nearly as often as simply letting them play out.

The zombie apocalypse is often beyond comprehension, beyond resistance, it is simply an unstoppable force of nature, a world of “is” and that’s that, and all one can do is survive, a constant, like death.

Sure there’s some exceptions, like The Last Of Us or Children of Men (which isn’t a zombie story but basically is), but those stories rarely end with the apocalypse being un-done or fixed or the state of the world made better because that’s just a plot device more than not, something to get characters moving from situation to situation.

In Cyberpunk, similarly most characters either don’t resist the world order at all, or do so out of selfish, malformed reasons, being the products of the very world they resist, and even when they do resist the world, and do so for the right reasons, they very rarely succeed making even a dent in the monolithic power structures that govern their world with the power equal to that of the new natural laws of The Walking Dead.

There is dystopian fiction that does provide solutions of sorts, like idk, Total Recall for (not a great) example: is pretty anti-capitalist typical Paul Veerhoven action film that gives solutions, namely, get Arnold Schwarznegger to shoot the bad guy and at the end of the story like this, characters either solve the problems, or make the world better in some way, they make a difference towards a brighter future.

But it’s harder and harder to think we live in the latter type of dystopia than the former. Remember that monolith of boomer voters that feel like a static, unmoving thing seemingly unaffected by the actual reality of the country, behaving in ways incomprehensible to normal human beings? It’s kinda like that. Like zombies, that just keep coming and coming, with no end. All one can do is delay the inevitable end on a personal level.

It’s not about saving the world in those types of stories, it’s about saving yourself, and the world exists as an endpoint of social evolution, and it exists solely to take you from yourself, and when even holding onto that is a struggle, saving the world feels akin to curing death — an incomprehensibly complex task.

Still, at the very least I hope to make a positive difference somehow, do something more than just saving myself, preserving my mind only to comprehend fresh horrors of late stage capitalism.

Even if it’s just to know I tried, even if I don’t believe it will actually do something. Political morons might be endless, and fighting them feels hopeless, but helping someone get a meal, that’s at least one day they won’t starve as much for.

[fierytakeferdinand]

Anarcho-Communism: Not a Contradiction in Terms

Quick post here where I attempt to clear up a misconception surrounding the nature of Anarchist ideologies.

Libertarian is the antithesis of authoritarian, and it is primarily a social axis, not economical. In addition, it can also be either right-wing or left-wing. Left-wing Libertarians, such as Anarchists and council communists argue that freedom from centralized power is the only way to stop exploitation of, and achieve equality and justice for the working class. That a state is merely an extension of capitalist power, etc.

Anarchism is in fact, an inherently leftist ideology, because to sustain an anarchist society, not only must power be taken by the people, i.e. means of production transferred and redistributed to the actual labourers who produce, but it must be kept by the people, and thus the only way to do that without a government to protect is to have a society based on mutual aid rather than individualist profiteering. Everyone relies on someone else to do things they can’t (doctors, etc), and so everyone needs to cooperate. The only power in Anarchism is the binding force of Solidarity towards your fellow humans and your reliance on their aid in return.

It is also inherently a socially progressive ideology, due to being libertarian, because the abolition of government also means there is an abolition of the conservative desire to dictate how people live their lives (e.g. Abortion bans, gay marriage bans etc). Attempts at involuntary social cohesion and any sort of “social order” and hierarchies of status in society all go out of the window.

That’s why Right-Wing Anarchists aren’t really Anarchists at all, maybe they really believe they are, but it doesn’t take too complex a thought experiment to see that their utopia will quickly become a corporate autocracy with corporations standing in for government, private police forces, etc. They often complain that Twitter bans conservatives, but in the libertarian right wing utopia, Twitter would likely just take you out back to get shot if you went against the company line, and because your hometown has been strip-mined by Jeff Bezos, who now lives on Mars, you have no resources to start a competing alternative, and if you try, you’ll get taken out back by the Twitter private police force. It is simply cheaper to shoot your competitors than to innovate to compete with them.

The “market” of monopolies and corporate industry associations will be the government, and they will make regulations all the same, just as companies lobby for regulations today, Anarcho-Capitalism just removes that extra step and corporations use their money and resources to enforce them all the same, just like today, except instead of armies of lawyers in courts, it will be actual armies, turning into a true 1984-esque dictatorship, which isn’t very libertarian at all.

Even if a great reset-esque transfer of power is done, without solidarity and mutual aid to guide a society, natural advantages and sheer luck will eventually build up sufficiently to create massive imbalance of power, much like it did between Europe and the Global South in the Colonial Era.

Because of this, Auth-Right are the overwhelming majority of Right-Wingers, Anarcho-Capitalism in the way it’s actually described simply does not work and inevitably ends up in a form of Corporate Feudalism. It’s a contradictory ideology in the sense that what it claims to achieve is almost exactly the opposite of what it actually ends up as. Hot take: Same is true for auth-left ideologies (e.g. Tankie takes) but that’s for another article.

While some people are clueless about this fact and simply haven’t thought the ideology they identify with through, others are simply Auth-Right with usually a slightly different moral model than the mainstream Right, taking issue with one or two aspects like religious values or the would-be absence of loli hentai under theocratic fascism but still place their commonalities before their differences and vote for Auth-Right candidates anyway, no matter how contradictory it may seem.

There are many on the right who vote primarily based on social issues (e.g. “the gays” or “the transgenders”) and most of those who identify as Libertarians actively support Auth-Right candidates such as Donald Trump, which only further illustrates that their Libertarian label doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense because to enforce certain approaches to social issues, to regulate society, you need a government, and you do need to regulate society in order to preserve an adherence to conservative values (e.g. traditional gender roles, nuclear family, etc), and to do this, you inevitably need to regulate the market as well, if you want to ban gay marriage, then you’re regulating the market of who can and cannot sell wedding services and to whom, treading on wedding service companies, if you’re regulating abortions, then you’re regulating for-profit abortion clinics, treading on them, if you’re regulating what women can and can’t do, or what their primary role in society should be seen as, then you’re treading on them too.

[fierytakeferdinand]

Mom and Pop Landlords are no Different.

An idea often comes up when discussing the moral qualities and societal benefits of landlordism — what of the grandma who just rents out a room to make a living?

Briefly, let’s recap why landlordism isn’t great for society.

Landlords don’t provide housing, I provide it to them by paying off their mortgage through my rent payments with a healthy profit margin for them on top for the privilege.

I’m the breadwinner in my landlord’s family. Everything they have, they owe it to the people who actually laboured for the money the landlord used to buy it. The landlord could, at any time, get a real job, at a warehouse, in a factory, in the kitchen or at a desk, they simply chose not to. Why do they deserve money for something they did not produce? It’s unethical.

But it’s also bad for many other more utilitarian reasons.

These profit margins also mean I have to give away over 1/3rd of income even hours outside of any metropolitan area, making sure I can never save up for a downpayment and escape renting, it also means I overall cannot afford much else other than bills, which is pretty bad for the economy at the end of the day, how are businesses supposed to sell goods and services and create jobs selling those goods and services if no one can afford those goods and services? Hence, stagnation and fall. Excessive rent seeking is poison to market economics.

In the UK, most of the government is also literally landlords, so they will block new development projects in order to keep housing artificially scarce to keep prices up high and forever increasing for their own gain. It’s undemocratic to have such blatant conflict of interest.

Flat I rented last year for £900 which was clearly an attic that sort of low effort cosplayed as a flat with a hole in the floor for a shower drain, is now £1250 a month. That’s more than half median wage. A person could work a pretty good job and still have no way in hell of affording it. So it just sits there. Inefficient on a planet of soon to be 10 billion.

The way I see it, there are no upsides to landlordism, they are leeches on both the economy as a whole and economic mobility of individuals. It’s rent seeking behaviour and even the most adamant defenders of capitalism over on r/neoliberal would agree that it’s not ideal.

Best way to curb rampant landlordism as it stands I think is to do what Germany is doing and buy back housing to social ownership to solve the immediate shortage of social housing, establish immediate rent controls ala Ireland and fix max prices of rents to give people a way to move to ownership, and stop working class homelessness by ending all no fault evictions and making all rents unlimited, getting rid of deposits, upfront payments, and any background checks for the tenant beyond criminal record as well as tightening laws on intrusions of privacy and landlord penalties for breach of law.

Then start massively taxing second home ownership, to the point that it’s neither profitable as a real estate investment or to rent out, forcing landlords to sell to the government or pay taxes to the government for it to use to buy off other landlords willing to sell.

The goal being — housing should simply be distributed at a low, non-profit price set not by market costs, but by what people can reasonably afford (e.g. 1/3rd minimum wage), and any costs not covered should be subsidized by increased taxes on the wealthy (top 20%).

New constructions should be commissioned to increase supply and subsidized via taxes on the rich, ala what is happening in Vienna: https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/2019/09/housing-basic-human-right-vienna-model-social-housing

Thankfully, few people these days feel sorry for unambigiously evil mega corporations like Black Rock or Amazon, but there’s a pervasive idea that the personal identity of the exploiter somehow makes the act fundamentally different.

This isn’t a bad idea per-se, in many cases, I often wish people judged and evaluated things more specifically, within a certain context, rather than philosophizing about vague generalities, however in this case, I disagree.

What of the grandma? Well yeah, what of the grandma?

Why does it matter whether — at least from a leftist point of view — an unambiguously negative action is done by the cartoon monocle wearing fat cat you imagined in your head eating caviar in some glass skyscraper or tiny little grandma weaving her son’s sweater with money she leeched off that you imagined in your head? Both are caricatures and neither situation is ever really that simple.

But my view on it is simple — I don’t give two fucks if it’s a monocle wearing fat-cats issue or a “think of the poor little old grandma!” issue. Who the person is, is completely irrelevant, it’s their actions they are being judged by.

Exploitation is taking place, and exploitation must stop.

Should little old grandma starve to death? No, not really, that’s what the welfare state is for, it’s what taxes are for, etcetera, and in an ideal world, all her needs should be met by strong social security. Having to do bad things to survive is of course more understandable than doing them for profit or love of the game, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do away with landlordism altogether.

Survival yes, but not at the expense of others, which is to say I, and everyone suffering from little old grandma’s daylight robbery also don’t deserve to starve to death because I can’t afford little old grandma and her no-name private property investment firm jacking up the rent every year by 20% while my wages only go down in real terms.

One’s survival shouldn’t be at the expense of another.

We have more than enough housing for almost everyone (in the UK) with the number of homeless people at 274,000 and number of long-term empty homes in England at 238,306 and can easily house both the grandma and the person she’s forced to exploit to get by. All grandma needs to do is vote for the people who want to and can arrange that, who aren’t landlords themselves who both uphold landlordism and block new developments to maintain artificially high housing prices. e.g. the Left, represented in the UK by Corbyn’s Labour for example, or Scottish Greens.

And if grandma doesn’t wanna do that, then she lacks political compassion (the only kind that actually matters), and why should I have compassion for her? Why should I make a special exception when this hypothetical grandma isn’t some unwilling participant in a rigged game, but actively helps maintain the game that benefits her? I shouldn’t. And I don’t.

Ultimately “but think of the grandma!” or “think of the mom and pop shop!” like “think of the children!” are a good strategy to paint a compassion-eliciting image to sway people’s opinions with emotions, but as I have no emotions, I feel compelled to point out she’s still the perpetrator of exploitation, ironically she also statistically voted for this shit to get this bad and continues to do so, so their whole generation fucked around and they should find out. No sympathy for landlords. Any landlords.

Yet another argument is appeals to effort, essentially when (usually landlords themselves) make a claim to how hard they worked to get where they need to be. But that’s a non-sequitur, just because you worked hard to be evil, does not mean you are any less evil.

Hard labour in order to become the oppressor isn’t any more commendable than being born into wealth and becoming the oppressor. If anything, the latter is actually more understandable, since it’s a path of least resistance while the former requires a dedication to evil.

I could also make the same argument about murder:

It really is ridiculous. In the meantime: worker mites in the vents, cement down all drains and tenant unions are every citizen’s solemn duty to fight back against this economic and societal parasite pandemic.

Obligatory: Support your local homeless and squatters. Donate/Volunteer at shelters if you can. Oh and of course vote for Labour/{your country’s equivalent}.

[fierytakeferdinand]

Automation: One Grim Future

In this post I attempt to speculate on possible outcomes of future job automation on a sufficiently large scale to tip over a power balance between governments and the people under Capitalism in a way that unsurprisingly — doesn’t end well for the people.

In a democracy, a ruler gets into office by pleasing the key players, such as the electorate, the rich few lobbyists/campaign sponsors (British: House of Lords) and the military and the police etc as the ruler of course can’t enforce the laws or act on them all on their own, the electorate is generally the main source of wealth so it’s important to keep them relatively happy as long as they can be exploited for resources, well fed so they don’t starve and it’s important to provide them with the occasional treat, like building infrastructure such as roads and hospitals and universities as long as this ultimately increases productivity and incentivizes breeding, thus generating more workers producing more labour value and more wealth in the economy which then can be collected back in tax to pay the military and the police and ensure favorable outcomes for the sponsor/donors/”lords” and the cycle goes on, small amounts of wealth are reinvested and standards of living rise on a longer timespan.

In a dictatorship by contrast, for example Russia or NK, the resources are generated by some natural resource, like oil, gold, diamonds or gas, and the wealth generated from selling it is redistributed to those who help the ruler stay in power, which unlike a democracy isn’t the electorate, since they’re not the source of oil or gas, it’s usually the military which protects the oil and gas from foreign invaders, the police who protects the oil and gas (property of the state) from the citizens and the rich few who happen to play some important roles in those key industries (much like Russia’s oligarchs of today), as long as those are kept happy, they will allow the ruler to rule, the general population isn’t important because while you need humans to extract oil or gas, you hardly need them to be healthy or educated or productive on their own, an oil mine can operate with a few dead stupid slaves, but a start-up tech company under a democracy can’t, hence why in a democracy education is important.

If a dictator suddenly becomes benevolent like Gorbachev did relative to his predecessors and redistributes the wealth to the interest of the population, this displeases the key players because the size of wealth doesn’t grow automatically, only the percentage share changes, so if the population gets more, that means the key players get less, therefore a rival comes in, who promises to give more wealth to the key players, and as that benefits the key players and they’re the ones that allow the ruler to stay in power by protection and following and enacting the laws passed by the ruler, they allow a coup to happen, so that a new leader can be installed who is more beneficial to the key players, and the people have very little power of this since they’re not that needed, this is why often when dictatorships get overthrown the new leader is hardly the one really chosen by the people to help the people but rather one backed by the key players because it suits their personal interests since they’re the ones who let the coup happen in the first place.

A dictatorship can only truly fall if the population becomes necessary to it’s generation of wealth such as when it runs out of natural resources to generate wealth, or those natural resources become worthless — then and only then it becomes necessary to create hospitals and universities and highways to make people productive and generate as much wealth as possible, this gives the people leverage and thus allows them to elect a ruler, because a ruler can’t rule without the people in that context, it still gives the rich few leverage under Capitalism because they have money and money is campaign funds and algorithm adjustments on social networks and backroom deals with mass media, and all that is exposure and exposure means votes, and votes mean staying in power hence why backroom deals for legal loopholes are a thing, one of the key reasons a ruler is elected is primarily because they were entrusted by the key players to enact those loopholes that benefit them.

So this democracy thing is ultimately a solution that leads to much higher quality of life. In fact, the reason many smaller countries and economies often have higher standards of living, i.e. the Nordic Model Countries is because socialist policies actually have a chance there, and that’s because socialist policies benefit the average Joe, and the average Joe has a bigger say in an economy where he’s a bigger proportion of wealth generation.

The problem is that when a democracy suddenly no longer needs to rely on the people to make wealth, such as with the automation revolution coming in the perhaps not-too-distant future — where most jobs could be hypothetically done by machines, it creates incentive for a dictatorship, as a rival can come in offering as little as possible to the people who are no longer important or have the leverage and instead offering it all to the key players. This benefits the key players, so the military, the rich few and the police can all allow a coup to happen and a new dictator leader to be installed which means the population does not get the wealth but unlike natural resources, automation is infinite, and after a certain point, theoretically it’s quite possible you won’t need humans at all, which means in the end, the only real way for people to get any wealth at all will be to steal or to start a revolution, but starving, uneducated slaves don’t make great thieves or revolutionaries, especially when you have an army of robots.

This is why the future is very grim, but there’s also a tiny bit of hope, while history dictates that most likely we won’t get some kind of legislation or universal basic income to prevent all this from happening, as humans often do not act as much as they react (nobody was legislating nuclear weapons before they existed, for example), eventually, the power of all the sick hungry slaves might be enough to fight this.

Perhaps their very curse can also become humanity’s salvation and with this technology they can come to a new era of humanity, a fusion of the biological and the synthetic, where a computer program rules all, having no human ambition, greed or corruption, yet guided, by a strict code of human ethics, once and for all eliminating the house of cards that is the universal power structure, perhaps once and for all allowing humans to no longer have to work to live or be burdened by economics and capitalism yet be unchallenged by human greed, at least not like before, with enough food produced by robots for everyone, housing, and advancements in technology that one day may allow something like matter-resequencing and as such almost infinite resources, looking to solve universal mysteries and research and joining perhaps an interstellar society.

Although then again… that might be wonderfully naïve.

[fierytakeferdinand]

Ye olde fascist playbook

If one takes a look through a critical lens at many right-wing online spaces today, a pattern begins to emerge, a propaganda technique as old as the very ideology itself. This article attempts to analyze it’s various popular forms and speculate on how an obviously contradictory thought process is so widely adopted by right-wingers.

The technique I’m talking about of course is this:

Portray something simultaneously as weak, morally lacking and pathetic and also at the same time as an all-powerful force that can control everything and take away your way of life, the threat of which gets only ever-more threatening for infinite escalation.

In Fascist Russia, “the west” is a gay hippie “weak” land that is no match for the hard tough Russian ubersmench, yet at the same time is an all-encompassing force that can wipe the Russian state, cultural identity and sovereignty off the planet despite Russia actually having nukes.

To Right-wing people, trans people are simultaneously weak mentally ill special snowflakes that commit suicide when someone misgenders them and spend their free time making up new gender identities, yet at the same time, some sort of ever-present political force that has the capability to indoctrinate generations of children in the world into their “cult” and has the backing of some shadowy elite unless it is stopped.

It all goes back to Nazi Germany really, the untermenschen are inferior beings, especially the jewish people, yet somehow they control the whole world and are the reason for all of germany’s problems.

It doesn’t have to make sense because it’s all just hate and not a real ideology, hating something can be part of an ideology, but it has to make sense rationally, e.g. Anarchists hate hierarchies because they are inherently discriminatory structures that do not correspond to egalitarian principles anarchists care about, such as equal distribution of wealth or gender equality.

Hating some group for being simultaneously weak and strong is self-contradictory, but it doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to be fuel for bigotry, hatred and other emotions, as opposed to any kind of rational thought, as long as it sparks bigotry, it doesn’t matter if it’s portraying “the enemy” as strong or weak.

The reason for the right-wing to utilize this in particular is that it is based on a hierarchical structure. Right wing people do not wish for the end of billionaires, they want to be the billionaires. In fact, Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. Inequality is inherent, natural and necessary.

This is either found in relatively mild forms, like ignoring reality when arguing for equality of opportunity instead of equality of outcome, in that the former does not actually care about helping those in need but maintaining a semblance of a meritocratic fairness in the race to take your place on the food chain, or in extreme forms, such as in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and writings about the “natural order” and a superior race that must be “above” all others.

That’s why they see no hypocrisy crying about hate speech laws and using free speech as a defense while also trying to get schools to ban books that portray history in a way that is not favorable to past right-wing groups, or ones that cast doubt on past iterations of their ideology. Free speech isn’t a fundamental concept that applies to all, it applies only to an in-group, to their benefit, and to the exclusion of others, an out-group.

This is why they need an out-group to form their beliefs around, because their beliefs are based on a perceived hierarchy between the two, and the “call to action” is based on that. “The West is threatening Russian sovereignty so we must go to war”, “Ukraine is filled with nazis that are threatening Russians there, so we must go to war”. “Trans People want to brainwash your children, so we must go to war”.

No matter the phrasing, “We must preserve family values, thus go to war” necessitates that family values are under threat from something or someone.

Unto what end those values must be preserved is irrelevant. “What the hell are you a conservative of? Conserving what exactly? For whom?” is not a relevant question. Likewise the more extreme version, “Why should an ethno-state be established? Why is that better? Why is diversity bad?” Is again, not a relevant question, it is simply that there are people in power because hierarchies are inherent in the conservative view, and whatever group is “in power” will enforce a hierarchy favorable to them, thus they want a group with their views to be the people in power and enforce a hierarchy favorable to them.

A society in which racism isn’t a thing — simply cannot exist in the conservative view because everything is hierarchical and oppression is natural, that’s why migrants are such a hot button issue, ethnic makeup of population gives numbers to minorities who may “replace” the white majority as dominant on the hierarchy, it is the ultimate latent fear of the conservative.

It all falls apart the further you question it: “If we must preserve traditional family values, then why can they not coexist with more progressive ones? What are those “family values” specifically, and how are progressive values in opposition to them? Why can’t all people just decide for themselves if they want to be traditional or if they want something else? Why are women worse than men, and if it is the case, why should they be treated less equally for it? Aren’t the traditional values we’re trying to preserve ones that were considered progressive centuries, and even decades ago? Isn’t preserving Christianity just a consequence of failing to preserve Paganism, making the whole religious angle kinda seem futile? Why should merit decide entitlement to a certain quality of life? Why should a necessary, but ‘unskilled’ job be treated as lesser than an equally necessary, higher skilled job, if at the end of the day — both are necessary and both are done by people with equal needs? If a people is superior to another, why does that necessitate the oppression of the so-called inferior people? Surely the ubersmench can pick cotton even better then, and we can all hold hands and live in harmony? Wait, if this order of things is so natural, why is a state necessary to enforce it?”

In contrast, left-wing beliefs are usually more about structural change than fueling hate or outrage towards specific enemies. Suppose the goal is an egalitarian, equal, classless society based on mutual aid and self-determination for all people. There is reasoning behind this goal, e.g. it makes for a better life, on average, for everyone and lessens suffering. It rests on the assumption that suffering is something to be minimized and that we want to improve society as a whole.

There are obstacles to that goal, mainly systems designed to prop up individuals who gather disproportionate amounts of wealth and power, empowering them to exploit those less fortunate for further benefit to themselves, instead of distributing this wealth and power across the people for all to benefit. Those are an adversary, but there is a clear line of reasoning towards it. Left-wing people don’t hate specific billionaires, nor want to be billionaires, they hate the concept of billionaires as a whole.

This is why All Cops Are Bastards, All Landlords Are Bastards are slogans that make perfect sense to left-wing people, it is not implying that all cops are bad cops, and not all landlords are particularly bad, it is that the act of being a cop or landlord is what makes them bastards, because leftists fundamentally disagree with the social function. Likewise, Kill Whitey is not literally about murdering white people, but about destroying the concept of “Whiteness” and it’s associated superiority. Anarchists wave a black flag because they fundamentally disagree with the concept of nation-states and empires, thus they are of no nation.

Leftists seek to eliminate systems, whereas conservatives seek to be in charge of those systems, and thus preserve them, and there’s no rational argument for why it should be as they wish it, apart from “I want more power” and “I hate those who threaten that power”.