#fuck these retarded worlds/realities/ /others///etc. fucking retarded

[venting-town]

You know it’s getting EVEN WORSE when you keep watching new videos ONLY to remember vividly what happens in said video even though you literally HAVEN’T WATCHED IT YET!!!!!

[rametarin]

One thing I'm happy about:

It used to be okay to make fun of southern whites (and, really, the caricature was also intended to hit non-southern whites, from Europe to the colonies) but it was most acceptable to single out former-confederate southern states and 'the pockets of confederate resistance.' I you know what I mean) for being inbred to the point of retardation and full of so many congenital recessive traits from bad breeding and shit genes that, in the absence of breeding outside their family, they'd fall over and die in a few generations.

But then the usual people that'd aggressively insult southern whites, or then conservative whites, and call them retarded incest babies, started emphasizing their relationships with people from other parts of the world.

The rest of the world takes a much, much more lax view on incest than modern, liberal western capitalist democratic republics and still put stock in family bloodline purity over reality. Much old world culture and intracommunity hegemony relies on this notion, and cousin marrying is common. So to be so aggressively, unambiguously hateful towards "the products of incest" and those that willingly engage in it, is to hate fundamental aspects of foreign cultures.

And the byproducts of hard incest, recessive genes and diseases resulting in missing limbs, teeth, other congenital diseases, becomes ablism and a cry against eugenics, turning people that mock such characteristics into people more similar to eugenicists and Nazis than they'd like.

It used to be making fun of those things was alright if it was under the pretense of reasons why southern whites are bad, but now in the wrong mixed crowd it's like catching buddies in friendly fire. They can't do it. They have to overcompensate and take the high road and go, "jokes about incest hurt other cultures and jokes about retardation and missing limbs from recessive gene expression is ablist."

This sounds like a little thing but societal norms and standards, man. People could still consider themselves progressive despite talking to you like you were a cannibalistic mutant with gills and scales, from 3-10 generations of sister fucking, insulting your intelligence and calling you the equivalent of untouchable genetic trash, and that still be considered an acceptable progressive dig because, "only racists (white supremacists) engage in incest."

They wouldn't dare say shit like this to people that weren't white, because it would be taken and aikido flipped to being perceived as a comment about how "all black/asian/Jewish/etc people are inbred genetic trash." And rather than get caught in THAT industrial cutter of a non-starter argument, just never ever use incest or birth defect as a way to mock minorities, unless they wanted to invite accusations of racism.

Hilariously, greater participation and recognition of a diverse world made it more like playing minesweeper to do this. But, it's still considered some degree of socially acceptable to call white people retarded inbred sub-humans. They just have to be well insulated from consequences in their own sub-cultures.

[joshrgomez]

I can tell you the mindset of some fucking retard like that when they do have access to someone rich or powerful. Their retarded ass thinks they can use or manipulate a billionaire or millionaire into shit. Twitter is a PRIME example on how you have a bunch of fucking retards thinking the richest man on Earth has to gain their approval. For some retarded fucking reason you have individuals thinking they're important. They'll "boycott" the few places they can afford. Not doing shit to sales since there multiple races, incomes, and locations where people can buy from Wal Mart, Target, etc. They'll "boycott" twitter if they have to pay. Retarded ass people. In their dumb fucking mind they think they're going to bankrupt someone cause they're trying to flex the little bit of power they have which is basically NOTHING SO YES YOU FUCKING RETARD. YOU ARE NOT IMPORTANT. RETARDED ASS MF.

PSA that is not standing up for yourself or for anything important. That's a narcissistic person with serious mental problems trying to think they're more important than someone who actually established themselves. I can even bring it down to a McDonalds store. You'll have some retard trying to flex their muscles thinking they're extremely important from the culture built now from social media and music

They'll think some retarded thought like "well im labor and they need labor so I dont work they need to respect my presence."

in reality you look selfish, insecure doing some faggot shit like that with some faggot ass thought, you look pathetic since youre unreliable, I dont even know why you even came to work if you arent going to work just try to fight. Your faggot ass WILL be fired and you won't have another job since the manager will talk to the other manager WHO IS IMPORTANT, they EARNED the respect and integrity as a MANAGER TO MANAGER. "oh no don't hire him. he's fucking lazy as shit and tries to start fights at work. just know that."

That isn't the system against you. Faggot ass idiot. That is you just being a fucking queer trying to act like a bitch starting fights and thinking youre all that and the world revolves around you.

News flash youre just a laborer at McDonalds. I have no idea why the fuck you think youre the Pope.

[unpopularly-opinionated]

I’m not about to take an ideological U-turn when it comes to GamerGate, but hearing it brought up again (what is this, like the 643,493,214,928th time?) made me think about all those posts that were (and still are being) made about how big of a cultural impact it had on not just gaming, but politics and society overall, at least with regards to online society, and I have to say I kind of agree.

It’s not the perpetual boogeyman they claim it to be, more like the scapegoat, but with their incessant need to push this false narrative about what it was, what its intentions were, etc., it’s become undoubtably one of the biggest cultural events in history. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but they basically forced it onto a pedestal for all to see, good or bad.

If it had succeeded in its initial goal, then it would’ve changed the gaming industry, and possibly by extension the world of journalism, but that would’ve been it. There was nothing about race, or gender, or sexuality, or politics, or any of the other nonsense they’ve tacked onto it posthumously. But because they pushed those narratives, they’re to blame for it impacting nearly every far-reaching facet of society.

GamerGate had nothing to do with the far-right until they said it did, then it undoubtedly did. GamerGate had nothing to do with harassing women until they said it did, then it undoubtedly did. GamerGate had nothing to do with mass shootings, Donald Trump, Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard, etc. etc. etc. until they said it did, then it undoubtedly did.

GamerGate wasn’t any of these things originally, but when you blame the world’s problems on an entire subsection of people for nearly a decade it’s really not difficult to understand why some, just some, of them might actually become the horrible awful things you’ve claimed they always were.

So if we’re really going to sit here and pretend GamerGate is responsible for the Uvelde mass shooting (fucking retarded, there’s no other word to describe this), then I’m going to sit here and tell you that it’s not GamerGate that is to blame, but the journalists who lied, and lied, and lied until their lies became reality.

[whitehotharlots]

The point is control

Whenever we think or talk about censorship, we usually conceptualize it as certain types of speech being somehow disallowed: maybe (rarely) it's made formally illegal by the government, maybe it's banned in certain venues, maybe the FCC will fine you if you broadcast it, maybe your boss will fire you if she learns of it, maybe your friends will stop talking to you if they see what you've written, etc. etc. 

This understanding engenders a lot of mostly worthless discussion precisely because it's so broad. Pedants--usually arguing in favor of banning a certain work or idea--will often argue that speech protections only apply to direct, government bans. These bans, when they exist, are fairly narrow and apply only to those rare speech acts in which other people are put in danger by speech (yelling the N-word in a crowded theater, for example). This pedantry isn't correct even within its own terms, however, because plenty of people get in trouble for making threats. The FBI has an entire entrapment program dedicated to getting mentally ill muslims and rednecks to post stuff like "Death 2 the Super bowl!!" on twitter, arresting them, and the doing a press conference about how they heroically saved the world from terrorism. 

Another, more recent pedant's trend is claiming that, actually, you do have freedom of speech; you just don't have freedom from the consequences of speech. This logic is eerily dictatorial and ignores the entire purpose of speech protections. Like, even in the history's most repressive regimes, people still technically had freedom of speech but not from consequences. Those leftist kids who the nazis beheaded for speaking out against the war were, by this logic, merely being held accountable. 

The two conceptualizations of censorship I described above are, 99% of the time, deployed by people who are arguing in favor of a certain act of censorship but trying to exempt themselves from the moral implications of doing so. Censorship is rad when they get to do it, but they realize such a solipsism seems kinda icky so they need to explain how, actually, they're not censoring anybody, what they're doing is an act of righteous silencing that's a totally different matter. Maybe they associate censorship with groups they don't like, such as nazis or religious zealots. Maybe they have a vague dedication toward Enlightenment principles and don't want to be regarded as incurious dullards. Most typically, they're just afraid of the axe slicing both ways, and they want to make sure that the precedent they're establishing for others will not be applied to themselves.

Anyone who engages with this honestly for more than a few minutes will realize that censorship is much more complicated, especially in regards to its informal and social dimensions. We can all agree that society simply would not function if everyone said whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You might think your boss is a moron or your wife's dress doesn't look flattering, but you realize that such tidbits are probably best kept to yourself. 

Again, this is a two-way proposition that everyone is seeking to balance. Do you really want people to verbalize every time they dislike or disagree with you? I sure as hell don't. And so, as part of a social compact, we learn to self-censor. Sometimes this is to the detriment of ourselves and our communities. Most often, however, it's just a price we have to pay in order to keep things from collapsing. 

But as systems, large and small, grow increasingly more insane and untenable, so do the comportment standards of speech. The disconnect between America's reality and the image Americans have of themselves has never been more plainly obvious, and so striving for situational equanimity is no longer good enough. We can't just pretend cops aren't racist and the economy isn't run by venal retards or that the government places any value on the life of its citizens. There's too much evidence that contradicts all that, and the evidence is too omnipresent. There's too many damn internet videos, and only so many of them can be cast as Russian disinformation. So, sadly, we must abandon our old ways of communicating and embrace instead systems that are even more unstable, repressive, and insane than the ones that were previously in place.

Until very, very recently, nuance and big-picture, balanced thinking were considered signs of seriousness, if not intelligence. Such considerations were always exploited by shitheads to obfuscate things that otherwise would have seemed much less ambiguous, yes, but this fact alone does not mitigate the potential value of such an approach to understanding the world--especially since the stuff that's been offered up to replace it is, by every worthwhile metric, even worse.

So let's not pretend I'm Malcolm Gladwell or some similarly slimy asshole seeking to "both sides" a clearcut moral issue. Let's pretend I am me. Flash back to about a year ago, when there was real, widespread, and sustained support for police reform. Remember that? Seems like forever ago, man, but it was just last year... anyhow, now, remember what happened? Direct, issues-focused attempts to reform policing were knocked down. Blotted out. Instead, we were told two things: 1) we had to repeat the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE, and 2) we had to say it was actually very good and beautiful and nonviolent and valid when rioters burned down poor neighborhoods.

Now, in a relatively healthy discourse, it might have been possible for someone to say something like "while I agree that American policing is heavily violent and racist and requires substantial reforms, I worry that taking such an absolutist point of demanding abolition and cheering on the destruction of city blocks will be a political non-starter." This statement would have been, in retrospect, 100000000% correct. But could you have said it, in any worthwhile manner? If you had said something along those lines, what would the fallout had been? Would you have lost friends? Your job? Would you have suffered something more minor, like getting yelled at, told your opinion did not matter? Would your acquaintances still now--a year later, after their political project has failed beyond all dispute--would they still defame you in "whisper networks," never quite articulating your verbal sins but nonetheless informing others that you are a dangerous and bad person because one time you tried to tell them how utterly fucking self-destructive they were being? It is undeniably clear that last year's most-elevated voices were demanding not reform but catharsis. I hope they really had fun watching those immigrant-owned bodegas burn down, because that’s it, that will forever be remembered as the most palpable and consequential aspect of their shitty, selfish movement. We ain't reforming shit. Instead, we gave everyone who's already in power a blank check to fortify that power to a degree you and I cannot fully fathom.

But, oh, these people knew what they were doing. They were good little boys and girls. They have been rewarded with near-total control of the national discourse, and they are all either too guilt-ridden or too stupid to realize how badly they played into the hands of the structures they were supposedly trying to upend.

And so left-liberalism is now controlled by people whose worldview is equal parts superficial and incoherent. This was the only possible outcome that would have let the system continue to sustain itself in light of such immense evidence of its unsustainability without resulting in reform, so that's what has happened.

But... okay, let's take a step back. Let's focus on what I wanted to talk about when I started this.

I came across a post today from a young man who claimed that his high school English department head had been removed from his position and had his tenure revoked for refusing to remove three books from classrooms. This was, of course, fallout from the ongoing debate about Critical Race Theory. Two of those books were Marjane Satropi's Persepolis and, oh boy, The Diary of Anne Frank. Fuck. Jesus christ, fuck.

Now, here's the thing... When Persepolis was named, I assumed the bannors were anti-CRT. The graphic novel does not deal with racism all that much, at least not as its discussed contemporarily, but it centers an Iranian girl protagonist and maybe that upset Republican types. But Anne Frank? I'm sorry, but the most likely censors there are liberal identiarians who believe that teaching her diary amounts to centering the suffering of a white woman instead of talking about the One Real Racism, which must always be understood in an American context. The super woke cult group Black Hammer made waves recently with their #FuckAnneFrank campaign... you'd be hard pressed to find anyone associated with the GOP taking a firm stance against the diary since, oh, about 1975 or so.

So which side was it? That doesn't matter. What matters is, I cannot find out.

Now, pro-CRT people always accuse anti-CRT people of not knowing what CRT is, and then after making such accusations they always define CRT in a way that absolutely is not what CRT is. Pro-CRTers default to "they don't want  students to read about slavery or racism." This is absolutely not true, and absolutely not what actual CRT concerns itself with. Slavery and racism have been mainstays of American history curriucla since before I was born. Even people who barely paid attention in school would admit this, if there were any more desire for honesty in our discourse. 

My high school history teacher was a southern "lost causer" who took the south's side in the Civil War but nonetheless provided us with the most descriptive and unapologetic understandings of slavery's brutalities I had heard up until that point. He also unambiguously referred to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshmia and Nagasaki as "genocidal." Why? Because most people's politics are idiosyncratic, and because you cannot genuinely infer a person to believe one thing based on their opinion of another, tangentially related thing. The totality of human understanding used to be something open-minded people prided themselves on being aware of, believe it or not...

This is the problem with CRT. This is is the motivation behind the majority of people who wish to ban it. It’s not because they are necessarily racist themselves. It’s because they recognize, correctly, that the now-ascendant frames for understanding social issues boils everything down to a superficial patina that denies not only the realities of the systems they seek to upend but the very humanity of the people who exist within them. There is no humanity without depth and nuance and complexities and contradictions. When you argue otherwise, people will get mad and fight back. 

And this is the most bitter irony of this idiotic debate: it was never about not wanting to teach the sinful or embarrassing parts of our history. That was a different debate, one that was settled and won long ago. It is instead an immense, embarrassing overreach on behalf of people who have bullied their way to complete dominance of their spheres of influence within media and academe assuming they could do the same to everyone else. Some of its purveyors may have convinced themselves that getting students to admit complicity in privilege will prevent police shootings, sure. But I know these people. I’ve spoken to them at length. I’ve read their work. The vast, vast majority of them aren’t that stupid. The point is to exert control. The point is to make sure they stay in charge and that nothing changes. The point is failure. 

[digitalsandmandala]

whats ur opinions on radfems, the whole swerf terf thing

you’re really asking the real questions here huh anon. with any internet discourse there is a tendency to dive deeper and deeper and to go further and further into layers of abstraction that lead to theories and moral viewpoints that are entirely divorced from the real world. people all over the internet are guilty of this sort of insanity spiral and as such its hard for me to form opinions that are actually based in the reality of what most “radical” or “moderate” feminists think, bcus all of us get exposed predominantly to the thoughts that are the most online, the ones deepest in that insanity spiral, because they are the ones that rise to the top of internet discussion. that said- i follow a lot of radfem blogs for a few reasons. firstly i think the sorts of discussions they have are more rooted in the real world. i think problems such as women in the developing world having equal access to education are a lot more important and pressing and worthy of my attention than reading about the diversity wins! of the us military and other such ideas. secondly i find that radfem blogs just tend to be funnier. im here mostly to laugh and not to educate myself.

as for the specifics of swerfs/terfs- one of my closest friends is a sex worker, i have spoken to her a lot about her career. it’s a dangerous one and she’s known a lot of girls who have lost their lives to dangerous clients, but also i know she doesn’t regret her work. it works for her, but we both agree that for the majority of women sex work doesn’t work for them. i generally think that purchasing sex should be illegal but being a sex worker shouldn’t be punished. in a society where no one had to worry about their financial security i dont think there would be any sex workers.

as for terfs/trans rights/etc, my thoughts are generally that most discussion on these issues is pretty fucking retarded. i dont really believe in the idea of gender and i do think that men and women are going to have some innate behavioural differences (but i dont think they’re particularly significant), i believe that the status of being a man and being a woman is purely based on your physicality and i think that the socialisation that we receive based on our physical sex is the most important part in determining what it “is” to be a woman or a man. i dont believe in universal experiences shared by all men or all women because that’s too simplistic a way of looking at the world. from what i can tell the medical ethics around transitioning seem pretty fucked up especially with respect to how much profit bio-pharma companies make from it.

i think a lot of people would describe what im saying as transphobic and to that i’d say that accepting everyone’s lived reality isn’t the most important thing in the world and if you focus exclusively on that you’ll get bad results. i dont have any ill will towards trans people but i do disagree with how they view the world.

but remember i’m just a sailor. my area of expertise is centrifugal pumps and fuel oil purifiers, not how we ought to construct a better society

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Went through the atheism # and saw some hurt Christians crying that atheists should 'respect their Christian followers and their right to believe' ?? Why do we have to 'respect' them? Why do they have the right to believe but we don't have the right to NOT believe? I'm so tired of this

Well, we really should respect people’s right to believe, as that’s a value of a Modern-era, Liberal society: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, individual liberty, privacy, self-determination, etc.

Putting aside religious superstitious bull-crap, freedom of thought, expression and belief is important to human progress. Galileo and Giordano Bruno suffered under the pre-Modern notions of independent, heterodox thoughts being blasphemous, dangerous and to be eradicated. But they were both right, and this mentality retarded our understanding of our world.

There are plenty of others throughout history who have made a positive impact through a new idea that they were free to express. People have to be free to have ideas and be able to express them so that we can evaluate them, find the good, useful ones and adopt them. And that necessarily means living with the leftovers. You can’t take the good without putting up with the bad. Or even just the expired and vestigal.

(Ironically, a post-Modern society looks a lot like pre-Modern society, with a need to control language and discourses, and abject terror of freedom of speech and deviation from orthodoxy, at the threat of social execution... but that’s another conversation.)

Of course we have a right to NOT believe. And that’s certainly the argument you should be having with any of them. The rules should apply universally. If you can’t express yourself, they don’t get to express their Xtianity.

[Insert list of bible verses instructing Xtians to be kind to non-believers, other verses telling them turn the other cheek to (imaginary) “persecution” -- but I can’t be bothered right now.]

What we’re not obliged to do is respect the beliefs themselves. We can evaluate them based on their merits, the reasons why people claim them to be true, find them stupid, irrational, absurd and reality-defying, and explain why.

We can push those beliefs to the extreme edges of our society, by articulating why they’re unreasonable, why they fail, and demonstrating better alternatives (e.g. education, humanism). As is gradually happening with the decline of religion in secular societies, fortifying the secular separation that grants them the right to have their beliefs in the first place. Separation of church and state is as important to religious freedom as it is to freedom from religion. The secularism that grants them the right to have their religion and practice it without undue influence also protects you (and society). This goes both ways.

I don’t believe what you believe, and I don’t have to. I defend your right to hold, express and live by your own belief system, but you have no right to impose any of it on me.

Someone has the right to believe that one race is superior to another, that gremlins live in their shoes, or that Battlefield Earth is the best movie ever made. Flat Earthers can think whatever stupid conspiracy shit they like about the nature of our planet, but they don’t get to have it taught in school or have all our car navigation systems fucked up to use their model of Earth. You know, if they actually had one, since they don’t.

That right stops at the boundary of their individual personage. They have no right to conscript the collaboration of others or society as a whole, to have it written into law, to act to the detriment of others based on those beliefs, or expect them to be validated and supported by those who don’t share them. What our law is intended to do is manage behavior, to standards that are fair to everyone - or as fair as possible.

We should be willing, if it’s safe to do so, to push back on religious beliefs - or indeed those of any other ideology - having a default expectation of unearned respect. And get them accustomed to this kind of pushback.

[cannabisrefugee-esq]

WWNRD?  Or, What Would Nurse Ratched Do?  Ft. Nurse Ratched 

Cannabis Refugee, Esq. Advertising / Media / Cultural Conversation, Alternative Treatment, Capitalistic Patriarchal Medicine, Family / Friends, Marijuana / Cannabis, Other Autoimmune Diseases, Radical Feminism

October 31, 2019

Nurse Ratched was a sadistic, evil bitch at the time and would be that and a dangerously out of touch political dinosaur now.  Please do not do what she would do.  If anything, ask yourself WWNRD and then do the opposite.

Speaking with my mother recently made me sympathize with young smartasses and activists who are just waiting for the elder generation — the out of touch Baby Boomers and the Baby Boomers’ parents and kids by this point — to give up the ghost and die.  A “dinosaur” or political dinosaur is someone whose philosophy and worldview are obsolete and rooted in problematic values and circumstances of the distant past.  For example, as a young activist in my teens and 20s I remember thinking and saying that the world would be a better place once those who grew up with unregulated environmental pollution and legal institutionalized racism, sexism etc. died off because their environmental unconcern, racism and sexism were so entrenched that they either didn’t realize, agree or care what they were doing and being was wrong.

Welp.  After being sick my entire fucking life with an undiagnosed autoimmune disease, and going on 8 years with a diagnosed one, I am having these same thoughts now about the older generation of Western medical practitioners and others who were born, grew up and/or progenated in a low-population, relatively unpolluted pre-nuclear world where lifelong serious, untreatable, incurable and progressive disease existed only in very small numbers and therefore where older people seem to believe and act as if chronic illness did not and does not exist at all.

To be clear, chronic illness obviously did exist in our recent and distant past, for example, natural uranium deposits are known to cause acute and chronic radiation sickness to those who spend time around it. And humans have likely always been struck down with genetic and congenital maladies that might not have outright killed them.  But old/er people seem to have lived their entire lives without chronic illness, including autoimmune and immune-mediated disease, front and center in their consciousness or as a part of their lived experience and this does make sense: before, say, the 1940s and 50s the worst industrial (man-made ionizing nuclear) pollutants had yet to be widely dispersed and contemporary Western medicine did not, because it could not, routinely pluck seriously ill and/or nonviable neonates, infants and others from the brink of merciful, natural deaths.  Today, seriously ill children and others are rather forced to live for years, decades and lifetimes with serious illnesses that do not outright kill them, because Western medicine will not allow it, but which Western medicine has yet to figure out how to treat, relieve, or cure.

Having researched chronic illness, primarily autoimmune and immune-mediated disease for going on 8 years now, it seems to me that, in stark contrast to the life experience and worldview of older people, young people today generally are very aware that incurable and progressive chronic illness exists.  Over and over I see that young people today, at least young Western people, well understand and accept the reality of chronic illness much more freely than older people, and the implications of that are extremely dark.  From what I can discern, this difference in worldview likely exists because young people are increasingly becoming seriously chronically ill themselves.  Young people understand and accept the material reality of chronic illness because experiencing it personally as individuals and in their peer group they have no choice but to accept it.

And over and over I see that older people are generally ignorant about issues of chronic illness and that they have not experienced it either individually or in their peer group.  Frighteningly, instead of recognizing their blessed ignorance and trying to remedy it, older people think that their personal opinion based on outdated and second- and third-hand pseudo-knowledge about chronic illness matters or affects the outcome.  It doesn’t, but unfortunately many medical professionals, healthcare policymakers, paid and unpaid caretakers and the like embrace an outdated worldview that no longer applies in our post-nuclear, Western world, and thus do not or cannot fully believe the self-reports of, or even contemporary peer-reviewed medical research addressing, the experiences and needs of seriously chronically ill.

A few weeks ago, a day and a half into a migraine (I’m getting 4 day migraines now, yay!) I panicked over my migraine-related inability to work on my small business, pursue benefits, or do virtually anything as I was completely and totally incapacitated.  In what I can only describe as a misguided and ultimately futile cry for help, bedridden, I called my mother to update her about the situation, whereupon she made some statements of position that were so ignorant they verily shocked me.  Laying in the dark with a sleep mask over my eyes, and a puke bucket near my bed, what I heard uttered from my mother’s lips was so egregiously out of touch with accepted thinking that it frankly terrified me.

Attempting to explain to her how and why she was wrong exhausted me. Knowing that she was moved not an inch by my description of my plight — instead smugly maintaining her “position” throughout as if she were engaging in a political debate rather than considering an emergency communique — enraged me.

For example, when I told my mom that I had a new diagnosis of High Functioning Autism, or HFA, she seemed unsurprised but said I wasn’t autistic as a child because I was always “bright.”  Okay.   In her mind, my HFA-consistent and completely obvious lifelong deficits in executive function — think literal and figurative “housekeeping” — and social competency (including feminine roleplaying which also includes both literal and figurative housekeeping, fuck me sideways) had nothing to do with autism and instead were just me being a lifelong asshole, lazy, and a bitch.  She always believed that about me and she never hesitated to tell me about it.  But at least I was bright.  But now, because I’m no longer a practicing attorney and a “success” and instead am struggling to maintain any quality of life as a seriously ill person with limitations, and I can’t maintain an illusion of physical health anymore if I ever could, I’m a lifelong lazy asshole bitch and a freshly minted unbright/retard on top of it.  Also, there is apparently such a thing as adult-onset autism. Because she says so. 

Of course, my mother’s opinion about HFA is irrelevant and obsolete where HFA-literate people today know that high-functioning autism — the bright, non-retarded kind —  is a bona fide thing, that particularly HFA females are often not diagnosed until late/r in life, and that “brightness” or intelligence is often a symptom/feature of HFA and not the antithesis of it.       Autistic Tumblr — or any young autism or chronic illness related social media site — would tear that political dinosaur a new egg-hole if she dared say something so ignorant patently false about autistics on that platform.  And so they probably should if they wanted to expend the energy and if they thought it would help.

Yes, I recently discovered the dark corner of the internet known as Autistic Tumblr: young people creating content, commentary and community from the shared perspective and lived experience that autism and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) including HFA is real and has real, material effects on people’s lives.  Often, those effects have nothing to do with being low-functioning, or unbright.  Which is not to say that I find Autistic or Chronic Illness Tumblr a particularly sane or comforting place to be.  As I recently learned myself, Autistic Tumblr is an upsetting, dystopian place where young autistics put great effort into and emphasis on “normalizing” and “validating” terrible things that rightfully should never exist at all: autistic and chronic illness related things like melting down, stimming and managing chronic fatigue, chronic pain, chronic gut issues and the like, because although most of them are much younger than me, due to their autism and (likely) related physical and mental issues they are extremely ill and can barely get through their day.  

In fact, upon hearing and considering these self-reports, one might even speculate that physical and mental pain is what likely drives autistics’ trademark weird, antisocial and self-absorbed behavior, where they are in fact “bright” enough to communicate online at the very least (and often have work, school and social commitments) but are exhausted from insomnia, chronic pain and ME/CFS; anorexic because they can’t eat anything; are having infantile hand-flapping meltdowns in public or breaking into inopportune episodes of “stimming” behavior to soothe themselves and they can’t deal with people giving them the side-eye at school and work on top of it.  Autistic young people are living in hell, utter hell, judging from their self-reports.  Considering that vast and increasing numbers of young people are autistic, it seems likely that extreme physical and mental distress is normal for many young people now.  Young people much more than old people seem to know this.  People who care to put in a modicum of research know this.

To further illustrate, when I was attempting to describe my current limitations to my mother she completely dismissed me and said that when it comes to disability, one is either totally disabled or not disabled at all.  Lest I misunderstand what she meant by that, she spontaneously clarified her statement to mean that if I have limitations I should be in a “home” and if I don’t need to be in a “home” then there is no reason I can’t act as if I’m not disabled at all.  In other words, despite being demonstrably, seriously ill, I “should” be able to act/function as if I’m perfectly fine.  Because she says so.  

Of course, as I understand it, invalid “homes” are largely a thing of the past, at least in this country, having literally gone the way of the dinosaur.  And many sick and injured people are, in fact, demonstrably partially disabled, where they are able to perform some activities of daily living and perhaps some higher level activities like bookkeeping and such but not all; accessing “services” to help partially and even very disabled people to live as independently as possible — and not institutionalized — is the way it works now.  Partially disabled does not equal totally disabled, you sadistic Nurse Ratched, you decrepit fossil, nor does partially disabled mean not disabled at all.  She then proceeded to disagree with me — and contemporary peer reviewed medical research corroborating thousands of years of human history and shared experience — that cannabis is an effective anti-inflammatory and is particularly useful in inflammatory bowel disease including Crohn’s.  According to her, and based on nothing, pot isn’t an effective or necessary medicine for any condition, and it’s “merely” an effective pain reliever (!) and therefore is not actually medicine at all.  Because she said so.

This ignorant, sadistic ideological fossil maintains her nursing license and continues to “care for” actual patients including sick infants and children.   Whatever “caring” means to her, and people like her: assholes who rely on frighteningly outdated material on which to form and support their opinions on contemporary medical and social issues, including contemporary chronic illness that for whatever reason is increasing in incidence and prevalence.  And particularly in our post-nuclear, radioactively contaminated environment, including the toxic, autoimmune uterine environment in which many of us spend our first 3/4 of a year and which is known to cause autism.  While information on Crohn’s, HFA, medical marijuana etc. is easily Googleable, and appears to be widely known by young people, apparently my 67 year old nurse mother is waiting for the news to break via Teletype or otherwise didn’t get the memo.  

Of course, if I was a partially disabled man and had a wife (or mother) to perform all my executive function tasks (including bookkeeping services for my small business) for me, no one would even notice I was disabled.  If I were male instead of female perhaps my life wouldn’t be falling apart at all, and certainly the prospect of committing me to a nonexistent/extinct 1940s era invalid home because I can’t wait in line or consistently do my business and personal taxes anymore would have never been raised at all.

Comments Open.

[anti-marxistcult]

the first half of the 90s was good, not as great as as the 80s though, the 90s had political correctness creeping into it already

the schools dumbed the kids down (common core), the entertainment was chock full of globalist propaganda and environmentalist propaganda, nihilism and collectivist propaganda, pumping them up to be like “saviors of the world” activists, they were spoiled and had the best of everything available to them #daycaregeneration  everyone gets a trophy

they got more organized once the internet rolled out, they used Rules for Radicals to bullying and deceive their way up the social ladder

true, back in the mid 90s when i was at school the boys would welcome me to talk with them when they found out i liked tv shows, movies and video games. the only problem both men and women core fans have is the activists hijacking our entertainment as their fucking woke soap box, changing iconic established characters personalities and characteristics (gender, race, sexuality), make new characters and stop erasing what came before. the sjws are the ones with hatred with their anti-beauty, anti-straight, anti-gender norms, anti-white agenda and using minorities as shields, identity politics is divisive and bigotry. the activists use it and political correctness to enforce it, it is like their blasphemy law for their new age religion

i know, original arts though i like, at least they did something original. fan arts are shit tho, they make everyone look like children in adult bodies and hyper feminize, and it is creepy like they have a pedo fetish that they vent into their arts

same style is correct, a hive mind will fall into ideological lockstep and they copy each other because they see who gets the praise and figure that is the to ensure they get it too by copying the popular style, it is all about that sweet dopamine

their ideology marxism is all about attacking the natural human species hierarchy, undermining and conditioning people into what serves the cunts controlling the agenda, how do you enslave humanity? you make them hate what they naturally are and convince them to demand the weak and lazy get special treatment while the majority are suppressed and that their strengths are deemed bad while their weaknesses are glorified and promoted. 1984 = freedom is slavery, beauty is ugly, truth is lies, weakness is strength etc

of course they do, they are narcissists and they are mediocre, they have both inferiority and superiority complexes, they feel inferior to the normal majority, they build up themselves in their own minds to the point they feel they are superior and should have all the power and control

that has been obvious or decades, they view it as a weakness, so they promote it onto boys and men as their way of weakening men, and it works, feminine men are very weak; male feminists and these estrogen hyped guys will target children and women because they see them as weaker (biologically and realistically that is true in the physical sense which is why they stalk women and target the kids to groom them and other stuff i dont want to say)

the latter part is true, the first part is only half true, there is more than just landwhales in their movement. landwhales are a symptom of their ideology

they hate what is natural and hate what they cant control, so they are working to psychologically via their ideology and politics and social pressure people to reject biological reality

well their problem (and it is their problem) is they need to stop projecting themselves onto everything, that is a trait of narcissism, and stop thinking that the world needs to stop and revolve itself around these self centered fucksticks

 it is grotesque

they’re projecting their entire fucked up anti world view onto everything

yes but more than that, they have created their ideology to be a combination of a lot of things, i think that is why they constantly check each other with purity tests 

sjws embracing their inner nazis that is what it is

they hate everything, they eat each other because that hateful thirst needs to be sated constantly to fill that bottomless void inside them due to their ideology

they bashed my fave female anime character fr 20 years, she was flawed which they hyped up and exaggerated, she developed and changed more than the other characters - which they purposely ignore, her crime is in their mind she was feminine and loved the male lead and was religious. bit oh the sjws will love mary sues like Ray and Captain Wahman wooden Brie Larson.

SJWs make themselves miserable and blame society for it. SJWs are the only ones to blame for their own misery, if they stop rejecting reality, beauty and truth, they are like some retard in the hot desert dying of thirst that refuses to drink a bottle of water because it was made by western civilization company. -__-

that is the feminazis spite at work, gotta stick it to the “straight male gaze”, check the hypocrisy that they sexually objectify men but because these marxist fucks think that is pandering to homoerotica then it is totes ok

thats is just because they view facts as hate xD oh the irony of a marxist activists calling other people “haters”, marxists hate the human race

they are in ideological lockstep and keep repackaging the same shitty ideas

you can tell the sjws on youtube because they are posers

they ant create, only destroy, so they pressure those can create to pander to them otherwise they attack them with the usual labels and tactics

[n0tname]

sometimes i just feel like i’m so retarded it’s beyond words. i just feel so stupid. i can’t retain any information, i can’t have a conversation, i can’t focus on anything, my thoughts are incoherent, and i feel like there’s a wall between me and the populated world. small things like driving, going to the mechanic, etc. it’s like i don’t know how anything fucking works. things that others don’t give a second thought to. every little thing feels stressful and difficult, everything feels traumatic. even worse i don’t feel i can connect to other people in reality. even if i understand them or have similar interests and ideas, i can’t form any kind of relationship because i can’t fucking talk to them. there are people i want to know better and want to speak with but i can’t. i have so many thoughts but i can’t put them into words and it makes me want to cry.

[dalanmendonca]

To MBA or not to MBA? - Part 1

The question that plagues the mildly successful yet mostly ambitious. Let’s break down how you can make this decision well.

Understand your goals and emotions

What is the career problem or opportunity that triggered this thought?

Some common motivations are:

Do a functional shift (aka “my job sucks”) - I’m an engineer and want to get into marketing. The MBA offers a paved road instead of the relative chaos of doing this myself.

Get a brand (aka “my resume is ugly”)- I went to a not so famous school for undergrad, a fancy degree could elevate my profile, unlock career opportunities and make me feel amazing!

Accelerate my career (aka “glaciers move faster than my career!”)- I’m already on my desired career track but the MBA can accelerate how fast I hit my career milestones.

Avoid marriage (aka “what is wrong with my parents”) - This hilarious sounding reason is sadly true in India where parents will allow their daughters to push off marriage if they are doing (allegedly) productive things like an MBA.

Do a location shift (aka “I want to work on Wall Street”) - No explanation needed.

More money (aka “Fucking retard Amit can’t do shit and punts all his work on me but gets paid more because he’s from IIM”) - Sabse bada rupaiya

Chill out (aka “chill out”) - Stave off the madness of the real world by entering the temporary cocoon of an educational institutional.

Yours might be different or a combination of multiple things. Don’t just understand your reasons, acknowledge your emotions, think clearly, and dig deeper so that you don’t misdiagnose the problem. Many people are frustrated by their current workplace or their current boss, which makes them feel stuck and stagnant in their career. Such a person might unknowingly look at B-school as an escape, yet they don’t need an MBA; they need a vacation, some drinks, and therapy. And maybe a new job.

Understand what an MBA offers

Despite popular propaganda about the value of an MBA. I can attest to the reality that it does not fix all your character flaws, make your teeth whiter and transform you into a better person as soon you fork out your admission fees. It can give you a solid push towards betterment though!

So, what do you get?

During the course you get

Education/Knowledge: You can learn new topics or go deep into things you were interested in. Many B-school professors are not only published scholars but also actively advising companies and participating in projects, etc. So, they're in touch with the business environment.

New friends: Just like your undergrad you will live/work/play with lots of new people and find new members of your tribe.

A Switch [role/function/industry/location]: This is a result of a better resume and interview prep, placements (uncommon outside India), access to a hiring cycle, introductions of recruiting companies, visa, etc.

Salary bump: Works out for most people.

After the course, you get

A Brand: A friend once asked me how I landed my job at Paytm (It was my break into product management from being a data analyst). “I just applied and got the role” I told her. “That’s what all the IITians and BITSians say. I also applied but never got a call.” Brand means your resume floats to the top of the pile, you’re more likely to get a interview call, your LinkedIn SEO gets a boost, and the TAM of your future mother-in-laws is much larger. Fair or unfair, it is how the world operates. The associated prestige of a fancy degree opens many doors.  Relatedly it gives you an air of credibility. In some industries degrees may not matter, but lots of places in the world, the door remains closed unless you’ve paid the price in terms of some elite signal/symbol. Finally, status, it just feels cooler. “Did you know that Josh went to Harvard!” is a great way to get introduced at parties. A final off shoot of brand is Career optionality. You can try for roles in more different places with the weight of your brand.

A Network: Your batch-mates will be joining plum companies. B-school networks are more diverse in comparison to the typical Indian undergrad college. People enter from differing functions and sectors, later joining a wide spectrum of roles. In my batch alone, I have people in Private Equity, Marketing, Brand, Product, Finance, Consulting and even some folks in public policy. Far more impactful than your batch of course if your alumni network. It might span the country/globe, even have a strong foothold in certain sectors. With the prohibitive cost of an MBA, people are initially conservative and chase plum/safe jobs. That risk aversion is well over by 5 years with B-school graduates starting new business and ventures. Whether it’s a referral for a job or access to rare information, connects, or opportunities to join new ventures; as a member of the alumni network you get early access to some great opportunities and support.

Finally, the subjective effects are immeasurable. What’s the value of becoming a more confident human being?

Understand what it costs

MBA tuition fees are huge, no two ways about it. The costs don’t stop there. You also have the opportunity cost of foregone wages including raises and promotions. Finally, you have visa risk and job risk if you’re going abroad. There’s a ticking clock and potential hiccups even on student visas, coupled with risk of not getting a long-term visa.  This is not just a financial cost, this can be emotionally draining, and nerve-wrecking.

That said, loans are easy to come by for good colleges, and people pay them off in 3-5 years. How fast you can pay it off but depends on your post-MBA job. People in lucrative areas can get done in <2 years. The trap here is looking at average salary instead average salary in your target sector post-MBA.

Understand how the value accrues to you

One might foolishly index the value of an MBA based on median salary and salary increase relative to how much you earn currently. But the value of the brand and network last for much longer than that, potentially your entire life.

Landing a top job can be career-altering. Your value is a combination of your inherent capabilities and external signifiers that (we assume) indicate those capabilities. With B-school, you are suddenly more exposed to a network generating opportunities all the time.

<Insert graph about life-long trajectories with and without MBA>

Understand what MBA does not offer

A simple but fair reduction would be to call an MBA, a shortcut. Nothing stops you from learning finance, improving your speaking skills, or getting a fancy job without an MBA. There might be barriers, but none are insurmountable. Someone who works hard, get smarter, maintains a good reputation, and develops a good network, has good chances of succeeding with or without an MBA.

It is a shortcut but it not an automatic and eternal one. You get access to more opportunities, but they aren’t served on platter. You still have to go looking for them, be worthy of being offered them and be capable of making something of them. Making the most out of a network requires you to be savvy, the MBA degree won’t make you confident person who can seek out opportunities, you’ll have to do that yourself.

And there are alternate means too. A good brand like Google on your resume might arguably be better than 90% of B-school logos. We live in 2021, the most connected humanity has ever been. There’s Twitter, Linkedin, Slack communities and so many other ways to build your personal brand and grow your personal opportunity surface. Online networks and communities are competing with old school networks, eating a greater chunk of the pie everyday.

Finally, the MBA does not give you a brain implant that automatically improves your strategic thinking. It surely teaches a lot more buzzwords though.

Part 2 to follow

[venting-town]

It just feels like so many of beings are just characters fucking around in worlds

I feel like that’s what I am too. All this world-building shot of different/similar/same species and law and order and chaos and disarray and mixing and etc. And the original world and etc aren’t better

Ofc there’s interesting stuff in them! It’d be a goddamned lie for me to say there isn’t! It’s still fucking retarded and I hate them, and the others, and etc!

I can be comorbid with liking/hating/etc the worlds and/or what and STILL acknowledge/believe they’re retarded and I’m tired of it/them!!!!

[zenithgurugirl]

Sadness

This world is sad.

People cancelling each other because their opinion and how they feel about different things that others create. Is that right? I looked up something that I believe everyone should read. Its on wiki. Anyone can google it; **END OF THE WORLD PREDICTION** go ahead, check it out. When you read through it please research that year and what happened during that time of year or years.

Interesting that we are stuck on repeat. The Millennia happened in the year 60 or 1666 or 1700 or ??? The world will end 7000 years from this year or that year or a year in BCE (before christ). It'll happen in October this time or that time.

We cancelled out many cultures with war, disease, feminine, and social distancing before. Read up. Fascinating that we repeat this stupidity over and over again. We haven't learned nothing from our past. Sadness that we are so ignorant to repeat our mistakes throughout so many many years. I wonder if we as humans should stop, what would happen? Power, money, suffering, neglect, isolation, destruction, etc..... just stop. Embrace one another and our individual differences. LOVE. Share ideas work together as a whole and take care of the human race instead of trying so hard to overpower it. Just accept each other and show compassion. Stop hurting one another. Stop trying to rule over one another. Everyone equal to each other. What would happen?

No one wants their freedom taken. Not even me. I have a right to say and do what I wish to do BUT with love and kindness for my fellow humans around me. We are the same race; human. Accept it. No one is bigger or smaller than me. No one is less or greater; not even Bill Gates. HUMAN. Accept it. You can identify yourself to what ever is clever to escape this reality but through and through YOU ARE HUMAN - nothing more nothing less. Accept that our DNA is human and I don't care how many surgeries you get to change your appearance - you are human. Stop trying to cancel it out. You have value and some sort of virtue or you wouldn't be screaming and clawing to get heard. pushing your belief (and it is a belief if you are trying so hard to cancel one individuals ideas or opinion out for your own ideas and opinion - its war vocalized) obviously it means something to you; it holds value to you and it is your virtue to keep it around. Almost religion of a different type right... you believe it, but others might not so accept that as it is. Not everyone wants to be you.

I am me. You are you. We believe different things. I graduated college. You perhaps did or did not or went further as to be a University graduate - I don't know - but your view isn't the same as mine. It's okay. Life goes on with or without you. It doesn't make stops for anyone, not even for the Queen. This ride called life keeps rolling and even if you wish to bring your views into reality - somewhere it will be erased anyway. It won't stay around forever. Look at history. Look at those predictions. I'm surprised that those are even recorded and not destroyed yet. We have a lot of missing history between those predictions by the way. years lost in between the times.

I say let this shit go that we are doing right now to each other; the hate, the vocal wars, the garbage of using tech (seriously just feeding Mr. Big Tech and making his voice bigger badder and better - its like taking a piece of shit and forming a diamond out of it and then polishing it with our "social" hearts and thumbs up shit and making him a **god** while we war against each other.... read that again, repeat reading until it sinks in), and being so anti-social. So Mark ended up being a Mary and Juan is now tanning more to be "less white" when he is Latino. Who cares if Jack down the street identifies as a wood chipper. Accept it. Less tech device using the better really. These strange above mentioned would actually die out anyway if big tech was pushed out.

See; my opinion right there. I **think** big tech is behind the scenes making you all lose your FUCKING minds. Anyone who identifies with something other than being a human or the guy turning into a woman or the whole **be less white** are mentally retarded and need psychiatric help. Insane asylums need to be put back on the face of the earth for these screwed up nut jobs BUT THAT IS MY OPINION and would be considered a **hate** crime - which it isn't hate - its a truth and its my truth. Big tech has a lot to do with all this and those who fall short of a sandwich at the picnic they packed for themselves are sheeple to a slaughter. I'm done trying to be nice I guess. I accept it but I don't have to agree with any of this shit!

AND THAT IS MY FREEDOM OF OPINION

either be mean or nice, its actually not hate. just an opinion and I'm not asking anyone to follow it or make something out of it. Just saying; big tech is behind it and read your damn history on End Of The World Predictions - because this shit has been a wonderful fucked up merry go round.

Basically; grow the fuck up humans! We've done this so many times - it grows pathetic after several millennia's....

Until next time.....

..... Stay frosty

[unisex-muffin]

Hey, this is fucking important.

Among other things I’m panicking over, net neutrality is one of them.

At first I thought, “Well, this shit happens every year and while I’ll send in a letter and sign the petition I’m confident that it’ll all turn out fine in the end.”

Later I began to consider, “This could actually happen this year, judging by everything else that has happened in the past two years, so maybe we should be paying more attention to this and it’ll, hopefully, work itself out.”

But now I’m worrying, “Judging by everything that has happened in the past two years, this is going to happen despite our best efforts and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

For those of you thinking that I’m being negative, let me break this down for you.

Through some unholy alignment in the cosmos, we managed to elect a reality tv star as our president.

Said president has no clue what he is doing, and even people who voted for him are regretting their decision. This man has no concept of the outside world, from what I am perceiving here, so will not be bothered by having to pay what he considers to be a little bit extra so he can see the rest of the fucking internet.

If word gets out that the FCC may keep net neutrality after all, this guy could possibly encourage, even demand, that the FCC do the opposite. And if the president wants it done then they may just do it.

Millennials, and those lumped in with Millennials, have amounted such a bad rep in recent years for being “lazy” and “whiny” and “special snowflakes” that the older generations are going to look right past them.

The ones who can’t afford to pay extra to access their stuff? “Get a job.” Can’t work because you’re disabled, going to school, too young, or have abusive parents who won’t let you work? “Quit making excuses.”

Meanwhile they are completely overlooking the people in the older generations who can’t work because of disability or because they’re simply too fucking old and their pension isn’t going to help cover the extra cost of the internet. This will later turn into another “I didn’t think they’d eat my face!” scenario. You voted for the people who eat faces, now lay down and let your face be eaten.

We already have people who complain that the newest generations are getting an unnecessary amount of “screen time.” Older generations are going to argue that if the younger generations can’t pay extra for their social media that it will just be “one less distraction.” These are the same people that throw a hissy fit when little kids cry in restaurants or on public transportation or in grocery stores or malls, and it’s possible that they can’t comprehend that there will be a lot more fussy kids who won’t be shutting up any time soon because now their parents can’t or won’t pay extra for said distraction.

Adding to the above, the older generations are likely looking at this as a way to “censor” the internet or to “keep the kids pure.”

This will prevent LGBTAQ+ kids (and young adults) who still live with their parents who can’t or won’t pay extra from reaching out and finding others like them, effectively keeping them in the closet until it’s too late. This will also keep kids from reaching out to seek help or shelter from and/or breaking the cycle of abuse/racism/homophobia/etc. that runs in their families, but at least they aren’t dirty liberals, right?

This will also deny those who promote hate a platform to spew such as filth. This is the lesser of two evils, people. If these guys can’t find a way to anonymously gather on an internet forum, where else are they going to do it? Out in the streets, in public areas, we will see the rise of more KKK and Nazi marches. This will lead people to get hurt whether it be because they were in the way or tried to stop it.

We will go back to only having other forms of media to informs us, preventing us from exploring all opinions and making our own decisions. This is a huge one for me as I have autism (or asperger's, rather, high on the spectrum) and the internet has exposed Autism Speaks as a scummy organization and given everyone a better and more insightful platform to learn about autism. Without the internet or people willing or able to pay extra, there will be only television specials and magazines as platforms for people to learn about autism (or other disorders, disabilities, and divergences) and many of them are inaccurate or come from only one side or perspective. I can’t handle watching people treat autistic kids, no matter where they are on the spectrum, like they have no idea what they’re doing or being teased for being “a retard,” not again, not ever.

Big cable companies and phone service providers like Comcast and Verizon, big HUGE cable companies and phone service providers with more money than you and who want to make even more money, are ACTIVELY rallying AGAINST net neutrality. More so than ever even.

This is a HUGE problem in places where only one of these companies is available or people who get internet from their phone service providers, especially if those communities are low income or single income families that are getting it complimentary (such as in apartment complexes where they pay a huge fraction of your cable bill) and on the regular having to pay extra to rent a movie from On Demand is a treat. If these families can’t afford to regularly rent movies, then how are they going to pay extra to access websites they usually could for free?

This is also a huge problem in schools and workplaces. Kids of all ages and adults in college won’t be able to do thorough research if the school or their parents or they themselves can’t pay extra to access the websites they need. They may not even be able to access their school website at all if they take online classes. (This is huge for people who have social anxiety and can’t handle normal classrooms.)

Businesses, especially small ones, are hit with this too, if they can’t pay extra to access their company files. Who knows how far this will extend? Will hospitals in the US be unable to provide proper care because someone forgot to pay for the access to patient files or the access to order medical shipments again? (Okay, I might be a bit to panicky and starting to jump to conclusions, but this is how bad this shit scares me. We already have to pay insane fucking amounts for healthcare in this mess of a country, if we have to pay a fee for the hospital having to pay a fee to see your medical records or get something for you then I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do.)

I’m just...so fucking exhausted with all of this shit. It really feels like, at this moment, that everyone is giving up or has given up. Me included. Don’t give up. Please.

[badgop]

This current shitshow is brought to you by Roger Ailes.

When I was growing up in the 80s, politics was more like a thing that came up a few months before a presidential election, and people would talk about who they might vote for and why, and you would freely choose whichever candidate you liked best. Totally dullsville. Not like now, where who you think you are as a person determines your vote.

Way back in the late 80s, a guy named Morton Downey Jr had a hit talk show. The format was, Downey was an abrasive chain-smoking loudmouth asshole who'd invite people from two opposing sides of a story to talk it out. He'd pick a side and verbally abuse them and get the audience all riled up with outrage on his side. Outrage! This was the key component, the sense of you or someone like you getting screwed and there's the guy doing the screwing, it's one of our most powerful emotions.

Cue Roger Ailes. He clocked Downey's shtick, put it in a suit and tie and sat it behind a desk in a room with bookcases and flags and called it Rush Limbaugh. Of course it was a smash hit. With Limbaugh, Ailes used outrage to manipulate his audience with what appeared to be a respectable format. In reality it was as absurd a cartoon spectacle as Downey or pro wrestling or televangelism. But say what you want, they made politics a lot less boring.

Five days a week, people would flock to "Rush Rooms" at bars and cafes to listen to his radio show, and/or tune into his TV program at night. The secret to its success was that, finally, there was a person to blame for all your troubles, and it was the Liberal. Outrage! The Liberal was out to destroy your entire way of life!

Ailes used the astonishing success of Limbaugh to start Fox News, where he cultivated an entire stable of Limbaugh clones, all working the same shtick. It, too, was a tremendous success.

Working closely with the Republican party and Rupert Murdoch, they transformed the entire political narrative. Outrage sold like gangbusters, so much more than boring old serious policy discussions. No longer did you need to have a coherent plan for anything in government - to win, all you needed was an identifiable enemy for every occasion. Who's to blame for what ails you? Who's trying to destroy your way of life? It's always going to be the blacks, the Mexicans, LGBT, Muslims, immigrants, terrorists, atheists, abortion doctors, big-city elites, Obama, Hillary, college professors, college students, Hollywood, the French, etc etc etc, but one way or another all jammed under the big umbrella of Liberal. Not the Asians because that's the "good" ethnic stereotype you can use, and never the military or the Jews if you want to stay in prime time, but pretty much any group who's not white, straight, Christian and rural, they could use to work their audience into a sweet, profitable lather.

That's why Republicans don't really have any substantive policies to implement now, even when they control the whole works. They don't have any ideas to actually do anything, all they know after 25 years of this is how to generate outrage.

Now the biggest problem with hammering on this outrage for so long is, people take it real seriously. It becomes part of their identity. It's like you root for the sports team from the area you live in. You don't choose that team because you carefully analyzed all the available teams in a big spreadsheet, it's just fun to feel like part of a tribe with your neighbors. And you've heard all these terrible stories over and over and over about all the terrible Liberals out there, so you, along with your neighbors, are simply not the kind of person who would have any truck with people like Those People. It's got nothing seriously to do with sitting down and analyzing political policies and the best way to run things, it's just sports and identity.

So keep turning the screws on that concept bit by bit for 25 years, and where we are now was always inevitable. Trump says he could shoot people and not lose his base. Just today, 60% of Trump voters still say there's nothing that could ever ever never ever turn them against Trump. Well of course. It doesn't matter to them what he actually does or doesn't do because it was never about that in the first place. It was only ever about sticking it to whoever caused all this outrage that day - because if Those Terrible Liberal People are all up in arms screaming about what a scumbag Trump is, he must be doing something right, right?

And on the far side of that envelope, there's the fascists. Implicit in the nature of authoritarianism is the use of or at least the credible threat of violence. The far right, personified by Trump, is the father archetype: what he says goes, or else. The nazis marching in the street these days are the "or else."

People like to bitch about PC SJWs and whatever, but let's face facts, we just don't like being lectured about not saying "retard" anymore. Nobody's going to come to your house and burn a cross in the yard if you keep saying it, though. At least I hope not, for my own sake. There's not a lot of vegans shooting up churches and mosques or shooting people at protests or stabbing people to death on trains or running people over with cars. At least not yet. It's almost sure to happen sooner or later. But Antifa, as the name clearly states, is only a reactionary movement against the spread of violent fascism given increasing signal boost in recent years.

But this is the most important and least-discussed principle behind the whole shebang: in the post-Ailes world, liberals are not just people with different ideas about what's best for the community or country, they're dirty dirty Liberals who want to destroy your way of life. Keep drilling that into peoples' heads for long enough, and a few of them will start to act on it. And then those dirty liberals will start to fight back. And then the nutjobs will say, we gotta stop these dirty liberals, now they're getting violent, and the Outrage Machine will eat that story up from both sides.

Presto, now you've got a low-level civil conflict simmering to open warfare. Who's got the power to dial it back? Doesn't seem like anyone can at this point. The power of the state can at least keep it somewhat in check... but funny enough, the current president is doing everything possible to undermine the authority of the state, so how much longer will that hold? It's notable that Glenn Beck had a change of heart and tried to pull back from the precipice, and what happened? His fans bid him the fuck goodbye and found themselves another outrage supplier.

It's possible this all bottoms out and people demand pulling back on the controls and getting out of the civil war death spiral. I mean, it doesn't take much to look around and realize how few people anywhere in the world have ever said, "gosh, sure am glad we had that civil war." But as long as outrage sells, it will... and it only takes a handful of people captive to their chosen media who spin out sideways on it and do a bunch of damage, so... good luck with all that, America.

Ironic thing is, the Outrage Machine could be turned around and used for good. Be outraged at the rich who actually are taking all your wealth and jetting off to their bunkers leaving you behind to die in the wasteland they created, for example. Be outraged at a system that led us straight into extinction. Imagine the possibilities, instead of this weapon being used against each other. It's a damn shame.

Now what this means for collapse... well, I don't think civil war's ever been kind to a nation's infrastructure and development, and if we're sliding into the peak oil climate change economic collapse future at the same time, it's just that much more reason to be pessimistic. Although on the other hand, should the state weaken sufficiently, civil conflict may provide opportunity for more self-governing enclaves, some of which might be dedicated to surviving into the future. That may be the most optimistic scenario, really. Even if we could pull back to the pre-civil conflict status quo, our systems will come unglued some other way anyway.

[fapangel]

We tell Merkel to go piss up a rope// So what if things got REALLY bad and we had to have a throw down with Germany and the EU forces and all the troops we have are the ones already there or near by (also including Naval forces). No WMD or Nukes allowed. How well would it go in the first 24 hours?

Oh, you mean a true theoretical “what-if” war scenario? I’ll admit I’m not very good at those - it’s very hard for me to decouple from the political/alliance angles required for “just-for-fun” comparisons. However, there’s other people out there who are good at it, so for starters, we can turn to Comrade Binkov’s analysis of a 2017 war between modern Germany and Poland. This video is a good watch to quickly acquaint oneself with the modern German armed forces. 

However, answering your question requires a knowledge of American assets already over there that I just don’t have. I’ve done extensive research on it (for making CMANO scenarios, or attempting to) and I’m still unable to find a unified resource that keeps track of what military assets are where at any given time. It’s far from impossible - civilian armchair analysts even maintain twitter feeds for this kind of thing, and stitching together sources like that into a constantly-updated picture is a job they give to the New Guy in state intel agencies - but far as I can tell, you’d have to make it your day job. I know snippets of it - we’ve been flying AWACS missions over Poland; to monitor Russian air activity over Ukraine, from bases in Norway. Norway also houses a ton of Marines heavy equipment (tanks, trucks, crew-served weapons, etc.) to enable very rapid deployment of a Marine battalion to Norway to counter a Russian push into the Baltics (soldiers are a lot lighter than all their heavy gear, natch.) But even that takes longer than just 24 hours to deploy. Plus, many of our biggest overseas bases, that are most heavily relied on as transit points to the Middle East, are located in Germany itself. So it depends heavily on if those assets are allowed to evacuate from Germany first, and how much of their support equipment can be brought with them in whatever time window they get. We’ve also got most of our European-stationed ground forces based in Germany - do they get to evacuate, or are they set upon immediately? 

Frankly, I don’t think anything would happen in the first 24 hours, because not only would we not have nearly enough assets in-theater to stage any immediate, substantive strikes against Germany, but also because Germany would be pants-on-head retarded to provoke these so-called “EU forces,” as they’d probably include France, and France has more than enough assets to make life difficult for Germany. As Binkov’s video noted, German defense spending cuts have been very harsh on their military readiness - they have good equipment, but their people are not being kept in a high state of competency with them. When your pilots log less flight hours a year than the fucking Poles, something’s amiss. From what I’ve seen posted on /k/ (take with a bucket of salt,) by an alleged German tanker, Germany’s newest, greatest Leopard tanks are sitting in mothballs because they don’t want to pay for the training programs on the new equipment. So in case of war, the older, obsolete Leopard units will be ordered into action to hold the line while other tankers are very quickly trained on the new tanks. (This brilliant plan has not earned Merkel much love from the military.) So despite Germany having top-notch equipment; a mix of NATO-alliance tech and American toys, it might overstate their initial capability a bit. 

But home-ground advantage more than compensates for this, and many other problems. For instance, Germany’s force structure is shaped around the concept of being in NATO. NATO “shares” a fleet of 16 E-3 AWACS planes, for instance; spreading out costs and time-sharing their usage (the aircraft are actually registered in Luxembourg,) so Germany doesn’t maintain an AWACS fleet of its own. On the other hand, the NATO E-3 fleet... is based in Geilenkirchen AB, Germany. See, it’s hard to disentangle Germany from NATO in terms of military assets - but, to make the point, assume the E-3 fleet is evacuated. It still doesn’t make it much easier to penetrate German airspace, because it’s their airspace - their entire ground radar network is still operable, which includes everything from military radars to air-traffic control stuff. 

So even with a lopsided force structure built around the assumption of NATO participation, you’re probably not going to be kicking in Germany’s door even with stealth aircraft. Yes, the B-2 can hit Germany from the US mainland in a round-trip strike (with air refueling,) but it takes longer than 24 hours just to prep those aircraft - and with F-22s in-theater (all six of them, last time I checked,) you’re likely to get your ass shot off flying over Germany. That’s because stealth isn’t some magic absolute; it’s relative to the other side’s detection capability. Stealth reduces the range at which radars can detect you, so the denser a concentration of radars they have, the harder it is to find “gaps” to slip through. In addition, the more radiation being pumped into the air, the more easily something up there’s detected. There’s also angles; aircraft are less stealthy from the sides (larger profile) than front or rear, so a dense radar network has more chances to get a “look” at an aircraft. So you can’t just sneak into the heart of Germany like AMERICAN NINJAS and ram an SBD up Merkel’s ass (more the pity.) Germany doesn’t have a lot of SAM batteries - ten or so - but they’re modern PATRIOT systems, which simply can’t be ignored, and then there’s the good-sized numbers of modern Eurofighters to contend with, so... no. Inside the first 24 hours the only real option is immediate airstrikes (unless you have a carrier group parked in the North Sea or something) and those just aren’t feasible with whatever we’ve got on-hand over there. A Burke in the North Sea could unload Tomahawks, but those things are not stealthy. Sure, lack of airborne radar makes their chances a lot better; as they can fly “under” most of the radar, but again, you’re attacking the homeland of a first-world NATO nation; they’ve got ground radars out the ass. Those missiles will have Eurofighters on them like ticks on a Turk. 

Offensively, Germany’s not much better off. They operate the very, very, very good KEPD 350 cruise missile (think “a JSOW but with an engine”) with longer range and less signature than a JASSM-ER... but they’d also be firing at first-world NATO homelands, and NATO members that have AWACS support, to boot (if not the NATO E-3 fleet, than American AWACS out of Norway.) And honestly they don’t have much in the way of air strike capability anyway - their Eurofighters are fine, and so is their Tornado fleet, and they do operate the HARM and such, but their EW ability is 24 specialized Tornadoes, and that’s not going to cut it against - again - a NATO nation’s homeland. So their best option would be a ground offensive against... France, I guess? Except France has not skimped on spending, and won’t have to stage emergency training of their fucking tankers, so I doubt Germany would rattle that cage. 

So... yeah. I’m not very good with these “theoretical what-if” scenarios. They always seem too much like two faghammer 40gay players comparing army lists and that’s just... not me. Morale, alliances, and above all, goals  are too embedded in actual modern warfare to be ignored. These what-if scenarios really, really require a removal of context so severe that I just can’t follow, most times. 

But, there is one last thing to speak of - the Pole Boner. When this rumble starts, Poland - as one nation - will pop a boner. Even the women. As one raging lusty dick, they will race towards the border with rifles, tanks, knives, sharp sticks and wolves balanced for throwing. No “Random Omnipotent Being,” no fiat of the scenario creator, can prevent the reality-rending, murderous, unholy glee of Poland as it moves as one soul to crash the party.