Alas, Babylon

[John Galt]

[Eternal]

Good read. The big question though is what are the solutions? Putting age restrictions on social media may help reduce its mental health impacts in young people, but that is a small part of the problem (albeit still important).

What about the increasingly partisan nature of politics and its flow on effects? I think one way this can be tackled is by breaking the two party system that most western democracies have seemed to embrace. Fewer people tied to the party line would allow more meaningful debate on so many issues.

Another one would be to completely boycott social media. I know I don't use either twitter or Facebook in a personal context at all.

[Eternal]

Also need to add internet searches as well. The phrase "just Google it" is now common place. Whereas before people might ask an actual person a question i.e. a doctor, now people just google it. Like the above article points out, this is bypassing the filters society has in place. Many consider this democratizing knowledge but as this article points out people are just confirming their biases.

[exploited]

Good article.

I have written here before about the nature of BLM and how that variety of politics functions, but one thing that escaped me is that others involved in these movements did not see their actions as simply a tactic, but an actual political stance in and of itself.

It is fine to use radical elements to force institutions into negotiating with moderates. BLM (and the like) as "tip of the spear" is an effective tactic - we can either burn your shit down, or you can meet with these more sensible folks asking for sensible things like community policy and better training. We have seen this work many, many times before. You can't have MLK without Malcolm X. You move the needle by pushing past boundaries and then settling back into a compromise that improves things little by little.

Critically, the folks who exercise a large amount of sway over these movements seem to have bought into their own bullshit, instead of just using it as a weapon against their enemies. That is a scary thing. The liberal arts academia has genuinely lost their damned minds, and they are playing people like a fiddle on Twitter. The amount of just totally insane nonsense I see posted by folks, only to go to their profile and see that they are a professor at a major university, is very concerning.

[Eternal]

[exploited]

[Saz]

Great article and I have a pretty open afternoon and many thoughts so I'm just gonna freehand this shit.

1. I saw Bezos retweeted this same article and said it was brilliant important etc. I did not read it at the time, I only read it when I saw Galt reposted this article. This perhaps exemplifies the sort of issues the article is getting at – why would Galt bumping this article cause me to read it when Bezos doing the same didn’t? Why on earth would I trust some anonymous scrub online named after an Ayn Rand character more than one of the preeminent business minds of our generation? I have no idea. Perhaps because I like Galt as a personality more than I like Bezos as a personality? Perhaps because I know I can argue about the article with Galt, but not Bezos? I don’t know – the reason I raise this is because the vast majority of people think they are immune to these sort of effects or to clever for it to apply to them. The same way everyone insists commercials don’t work on them (they do and you don’t even realize it). The first step to a solution is to admit that after enough time, this shit gets to everyone.

2. By that same token I think people my age are much more adept at this new sort of information age than the cohorts above and below us. The internet has always been 99% bullshit and that’s what made it great, so its bizarre to see all these boomers complaining about the internet being 99% bullshit and taking everything so personally. People my age will yell f**k you at each other on Xbox, and then agree to logon same time tomorrow to do it again (funny story the name saz is some dude I was trolling in counter strike when I was a teenager, still play with him occasionally to this day). Boomers hear some queer tell them to f**k off and they set about trying to strip them of basic civil liberties. I used to post on twitter and my bullshit (basically the same rants I post here) would get so many retweets I just stopped because its like no one got the joke. I got offered a job by a major news publication because of the comments I wrote on their site (again same rants I write here). Like what the f**k is wrong with you people?

3. I don’t think this has much to do with the degradation of our institutions, our institutions did that to them selves by being woefully corrupt. People on both sides have corrupted and coopted many of our most venerated institutions, and use politics and culture to obscure their looting. Look at our school system – we bicker about teaching sex to your kids, but half these kids can’t f**k read anyway. God forbid anyone move past the cultural bullshit and ask the tough questions, like “is our kids learning?” Same thing with colleges. They milk you of tens and hundreds of thousands for a degree which is required for serious employment, but in fact you learn absolutely f**k nothing in most college classes which is why so many try so hard to pretend gender pronouns and all this other bullshit is so serious. If you admit its not, then what the f**k have these kids spent 4 years and $80,000 learning?

4. This is going to get much worse before it gets better. You now have very smart and capable people who have figured out how the game works. It’s not trying to convince the other side, or about the right policy or the truth – its about winning and to do that you need to flood the zone with shit, like Bannon said. Combine this with new AI and bots and frankly people are going to end up in an echo chamber composed of themselves and about 4 different forms of AI all run by some political party or foreign intelligence service. It’s a matter of months at this point until we discover some very popular twitter account is actually a bot spitting out megaposts with a handful of keywords to prove how f**k stupid we all are. Maybe I am that bot?

5. I think much of this comes down to a breakdown of religion and community as well (and I say this as a godless asshole who hates 90% of the people I deal with). Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.” I think you have a lot of people for whom no substantial occasion has presented itself and so they focus their attention on frivolous bullshit. Your father fought the f**k Nazis, so imagine the confusion and self-loathing most boomers face when the biggest injustice they can find today is someone using the wrong pronoun or bilingual forms at the DMV. Deep down they know these aren’t serious issues, but in the absence of something grand and glorious they make do with what they have. Many people have no meaning in their lives – this was a drive historically sedated by children and religion, which just isn’t applicable to half the population anymore. In this absence of meaning, people full the void with whatever they are doing: work, politics, sports or the Kardashian or whatever. These are not true substitutes for a meaningful life and frankly I think many people are making themselves mentally ill trying to force meme these things as existentially important.

6. Meritocracy is a poison and, to touch on point 5 above, has perpetuated this lie that (i) you need to be intelligent and (ii) successful people are intelligent. Both of these are very insidious lies. Back in the day there was nothing wrong with being stupid, for lack of a better word. People understood at a basic level some people are smart, some people are dumb. Just like some people are strong and others weak, and some people are social while others are introverted. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses and societies role was to ensure people end up in the best position to make use of what they are good at for the benefit of society. Now everyone needs to be an intellectual – if you are just a decent f**k guy who knows how to lay brick, we ask what went wrong and insist this moron doesn’t deserve anything more than $10 bucks an hour. This deep belief in meritocracy created a whole society that just thinks everyone should be better (be smarter) without actually trying to design proper frameworks for the 100 IQ masses we actually have. Now, the idiots don’t stay in their lane, they feel the need to have some opinion or comment on everything. You don’t, stay in your f**k lane moron. At the same time, the intelligent and capable classes have lost any sense of noblesse oblige. No longer is your intelligence a gift used to better your community – now it’s a weapon for your to accrue wealth or power with, regardless of who’s expanse it comes at. We have to many people opining and making decisions on things they are completely unqualified for, while at the same time many of those qualified to be in these decision making positions have lost any sense of obligation to anyone or anything but themselves.

7. The way to fix this is to square up against China. The greatest generation were broke losers until they stood up to the Nazis, to their eternal glory. The soviet Union kept the shitlibs and conservatards in line during the cold war, because if they got out of line the soviets would capitalize. Steel sharpens steel and for the last 30 years we haven’t had another blade upon which to sharpen our own. It has grown dull after decades of economic and military hegemony where even the stupidest decisions (Iraq) have little to no consequence for most of society. China will fix that and keep everyone on their toes. You lack meaning in your life? Helps us in the eternal struggle of freedom against totalitarianism. Are you an idiot? That’s fine, you don’t have to be a genius to storm a beach in the pacific. Selfish capitalist? Fair enough but they are going to hang you with that rope and you know it, so moderate your greed for a f**k moment please. This is the solution to our national ennui – a full court press against China. It will give American and American society the purpose we seem to have lost, and will demand a level of competence and action which frankly we have not exercised and really haven’t needed since the end of the cold war. We have no common religion, race, or political views. All we have that truly binds us is a hatred for tyrants. I cannot tell you how much water Xi is carrying for our unruly republic – without him I think we would truly be f**k.

[exploited]

lmao the guy with BPD chimes in on narcissism.

[Saz]

[exploited]

If you can bring back Dylan, we can focus on him instead.