Not-so-handy thoughts

It's been giving me the red ass lately: The internet is no fun anymore.

...The internet stopped being fun a long time ago, to be fair.

How else do you explain the stupid shit we've been inundated with for the last decade? Every single culture war since then has been waged on the "battlefield" of the internet. There's always something going on, and to be fair, that's most of the problem. A lot of people are not totally wise to the precept that you are not immune to propaganda. It's much like George Carlin said: People seem to believe that bullshit only comes from certain areas. That's not true. Bullshit is everywhere! Bullshit is rampant! Lots of people are full of shit. You take a look at Shitter (Twitter, or "X" if you wanna be pedantic) right now, and there's literal garbage waves of bullshit pinging every nook and cranny of the river of limited responses. The information war is lost, predominantly by those who have been shaped by the onslaught of propaganda and disinformation that's been amplified by rich white cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about people.

Literally: Not a single rich white guy gives a damn about Joe Sixpack and his rotten little brats. They don't give a damn about the old lady making pastries in the economy that's been geared to supercharge the already-wealthy. These rich cocksuckers are awash in money that they've effectively leeched out of you and every other taxpayer and non-taxpayer. When their business fails, who do they come to? That's right. The government. And, even more so now, because the government gives outrageous handouts to the wealthy - and leave the rest of you waiting on paltry, meager crumbs to come down and perhaps save your ass a little. We all know farmers get welfare. Farmers get welfare, it's true. Not like the much-maligned SNAP benefits, or WIC, or TANF. No. Agricultural subsidies keep the economy and the food production going.

Farmers have a good year, crops are plentiful, prices drop a bit, their return on crop harvesting isn't great - their insurance covers it. Bad year? Crops suck, can't harvest shit, prices are high - they get bailed out. You still pay for it. We could argue back and forth about the quality of the food, and I absolutely grant that our food isn't the best. We could talk about Sysco and Aramark, and a couple other giant foodstuff processors and distributors kinda taking over in the smaller kitchens and eateries industry with their somewhat bland offerings... A lot of this stuff is unfortunately the way things are at the moment. We are being left with choices that are unsavory. Across the board, you look at all the things you have choices in. Your bank more than likely, uses either Visa or MasterCard. Most places don't carry American Express. Good luck finding Diners Club cards. If you happen to do sex work, or you're a v-tuber, Visa and MasterCard can, and will, cut you off from their services. Is there a reason for it? Yes, and those reasons aren't good. It's already happened with many people.

We don't get a choice on what economic system to grow up in, at all. And, it seems very much to me, that the whole aim this entire year has been to reduce your liberties and your choices. The government has been hell-bent on reducing individual liberties so that corporate liberties override everyone else's liberties. Every executive order, every ignored ruling, every glad-handed court decision has been geared towards making sure the powerful stay powerful, and you and I have minimal power to change anything. The government is staffed with idiots on purpose because an administrative state that acts in the best interests of all people has never been their goal to begin with. Regulatory capture has been increasing over the last fifteen years to the point where, now the Establishment wants to get rid of meaningful protections on unlimited political donations in tandem with party leadership, so they can force terrible and well-funded candidates for their astroturfing - into the political arena to do their dirty work.

That's just one of the many things going on. Europe is still hard-set on passing a law that would render private and encrypted messages a thing of the past, "chat control", is what they call it. It's not gonna work out to anyone's benefit, there will be exemptions for European Parliament members and the elites, as usual. Peter Thiel ranting about Greta Thunberg being the Antichrist, when he looks like he's seen his future in Satan's bed, well, sweating like a whore in Catholic church, evidences the lackluster brain trust who moves in part the Establishment's institutionalization of 'anti-woke' pro-Russia dreck. Not least the Damocles' sword is the Epstein controversy, which has been partially neutered thanks to the FBI scrubbing multiple instances of the president's name. The longer that controversy is held off, the more guilty the president and his attorney-general look, and with the dithering and blind gesturing, Epstein will be hanging around Sleepy Don.

I, personally, do not see any meaningful salvaging of the American model of governance after this. Even if MAGA withers and dies on the spot, the damage to practically everything this country at least pretended to stand for - has been done. Torching the entire country to own the opposition party, who, halfheartedly and lamely attempted to prosecute him, and taking the high road each time he stalled and stymied them, seems cold comfort for some, and for me, doesn't make me happy. Sure; we could always do things by the book, but when you look at who is in power, the book's been thrown out of the window. Multiple times. Other countries could hold their convicted to account if something was done wrong, but we seemingly just don't give a shit.

The longstanding cynicism about American government has come to a point now, that we actively cannot trust the government to do what it should, only what one person says it should do. Most of the people who warned about this sort of leadership are nowhere to be found. Well, nowhere respectable - those same people are actively on the side of the government and not the people. The false consciousness of treating party platforms and charismatic individuals in the most irresponsible and parasocial matter, "Trump cares about me! He's gonna make America great again! Send 'em all back!", whooping and hollering for their Team, right, that's the false consciousness that's been massaged into their minds. The mindset that Trump might be God's chosen guy, and that some of his allies believe that, that God ordained America to be a Christian nation, and that we have to support Israel, and that anyone to the left of the Team is a no-good communist heathen siding with the 'Muslamics', yeah, that's the big pep talk from Big Stupid.

I did a piece long ago called "The Big Stupids", in which I laid out what I thought was the overarching deal with this sort of mob-mentality group. I haphazardly lined up what the MAGA people believe, and if I could find the plaintext, I would, but that would interfere with the more salient extrapolations I have now. There's nothing worse, though, than an actively stupid and harmful system. The system we have now is actively stupid and harmful. I could rattle off a shitload of things that are going on. For example, the anti-climate change lobbyists have taken over the EPA and have approved two pesticides, and four more later, that contain PFAS - forever chemicals that don't go away easily. The same forever chemicals that have been causing various cancers, now to be sprayed directly on your foods, including potatoes.

RFK Jr.'s stint in the HHS has now ground most research to a halt, while promoting dangerous and unproven claims, including dredging up the old 'vaccines cause autism' chestnut that's been disproven for the last 25 years. That pledge he made to not change the website page has proved meaningless. With Marco Rubio, and the 'president', the imposition of a blithely incorrect and frankly desultory standard of recognizing "only two sexes" on government forms and passports has now culminated in terminating protections against trans and intersex people in prison regarding rape and sexual assault. Changing the former surgeon general's name to her "biological name" (I shit you not) underneath her portrait, underlines the distinct cruelty and perfidy of this regime. The ideology of Sleepy Don has permeated practically every hall of government, or tainted it with the stench of graft, nepotism, favoritism, and criminality.

Ineptitude is the flavor of system that has been chosen for us, and willfully. When it comes to immigration and naturalization, the ICE thugs have been, far and away, the merry band of misfits, wreaking havoc and destruction, far more than the "leftists" the president has sought to rail against. ICE is largely staffed with rightwingers who have waited long and hard to use the violence of the state against immigrants, with little regard as to where they come from, or even if they follow the law to be naturalized. ICE has committed atrocities already - there can be no dithering about that. Alligator Alcatraz and other hidden internment sites are rife with hunger, abuse, torture, and death. Chain refoulment (t.e. deporting someone to a different country, to be handed off to their original country, often to be tortured) has already happened to some who were illegally transported. The Supreme Court allowed this discrimination because it wants to hand Trump ultimate power to determine who is worthy of being an American and who isn't, in contravention of constitutional protections. But I digress: Leftist violence is minimal in this country; there is barely a left-wing in power in this country. The left is just non-MAGA to the Establishment, and that will invariably include former supporters, regardless of actual politics.

'Antifa' is the nebulous boogeyman that the Establishment wants to weed out, and there's already a second Lavender Scare in government going on, no thanks to dunces like Laura Loomer and her ilk combing through every communique to find "Big Gay". They want loyalists, die-hard MAGA-tards, ready to service an aging man's ballsack - but to some extent, the people that surround the Establishment are of two types. Broadly, there's the technocratic feudalists, who have backers intent on gutting democracy and the rule of law - "to carve up this country a little bit finer", the Christian nationalists, who practice revisionism and make outlandish claims about God ordaining this country for Christianity only, to the exclusion of all others (with their own ideological mandate), and the racialists - Groypers, neo-Nazis, white separatists, white nationalists, white supremacists, identitarians, Christian positivists, Esoteric Nazis, &c. - and they occupy bits and pieces of the "GOP", as it stands now.

Two problems exist, and that is that neither the feudalists nor the racialists really get along. That party support hinges around Israel, or, support of it. The spurious charges of foreign students engaging in 'antisemitism' for supporting Palestinian people is frankly disingenuous, because while the Establishment levies that universities engage, or permit, antisemitism to run rampant - they silently do not acknowledge the serious antisemitism of their own side. When it comes to Israel, the racialists want nothing to do with Jewish people. To them, the Jews are just a means to an end. The Christian nationalists and the feudalists want Israel to exist, but only for immanentizing the eschaton t.e. bringing back Jesus to begin his reign, so that he can convert the Jews to see him as the Messiah.

Ultimately, one side will win out. The fractious nature of the party and its makeup will prove to be its undoing, while the Democrats wheedle and whine and collude about how best to stop up any revolutionary or reformative sentiment in their own base. As to who will win, you will have to ask yourself: Does fanaticism have a winning edge? Historically, if you've thought about it, yeah, there are serious points where fanaticism has won out. The mujahideen in the 80s, Iran in the late 70s, just to name a few. Perpetuating injustices will be a serious mark against the Establishment and it only continues onward. A leader that calls affordability a scam, but scams phones and watches and digital cards, undermines the authority and the dignity of the office he holds. A cheap authority is that which can be flattered and bought, bribed and awarded.

The selected leader of the United States and his entourage of malevolent humanoid creatures are cheap authorities and paper tigers. That much is evident; and handing any decision to him has proven to be not in the best interests of perpetuating American power. His power isn't the same as the power America had. His power is the same as Saddam's power, Putin's power, any jackbooted thug who considers humanity negotiable. And he has; he negotiates not for America, but for himself. He doles out his power because he'd rather golf than govern. Historically, a laissez-faire government runs up against economic and social realities. The line on the chart cannot go up forever, and he can't hit all eighteen holes on the taxpayer dime throughout his tenure.

A dumb bitch once said "Socialism works until you run out of other people's money". The Bismarckian socialism that has been the forefront of the American system has held together for almost a century, and it's worked until now. But you can't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining, when they want to end the most popular social programs. This regime negotiates nothing except its own struggle for remaining in power, but the one blank check it does not have is the power of the purse. Money talks, and bullshit walks, right? Consider for a moment that it can't take all the tax money and use it to its ends. Sure, ICE is getting 170 billion dollars over the next ten years - that can change. They can try to change the voting districts, and they will, but it won't pay well. No regime lasts past its cash holdings. Maybe that's why it's pushing for war with Venezuela, a country that never did a damn thing to us. We're there for oil, and it's plain as day.

There's never a neat bow to wrap this sort of rant up, and I know it's getting late for myself and whatever else is going on during a Monday morning; but the ulterior motives of this regime just keep falling to the floor like spaghetti from someone's pocket. Staffed by Reddit posters and complete idiots, America will stumble headlong into humiliation. If this is what billionaires want, they have killed the goose that laid the golden egg for nearly nothing. The confusing juxtaposition of their party's three main ideological prongs, presided over by a doddering Alzheimer's-ridden dictator-loving fool who couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery, is utter disaster that money will not be able to purchase relief from. The party of billionaires has chosen to undertake widespread culling and unrestricted ecological warfare in the name of personal benefit, while handing executive state power to someone who never deserved it. Some of those billionaires chose to hedge their bets and give money to the opposition - but that is the gamble.

As we enter 2782, or 2026, the economy will stagnate further, being buttressed by an AI bubble that will be used to surveil the populace more than Big Brother ever could've imagined. The dollar's power has basically ceased to be stable; it barely buys anything if you work. The lottery is nearly 900 million dollars, but some idiot will win it and it will be gone in five years because financial management isn't taught, or anything of that nature, in schools. The slopification of the US is proceeding apace. I guess Carl Sagan was right when he said that anti-intellectualism would explode, in a way that he saw early. Nobody really reads for pleasure, or to their children. Knowledge is easily attained, but it is often incorrect and dangerous coming from generative AI. We have lost the ability, in some areas, to understand deeper things, or how things work and come together. Science now only serves the needs of the regime, not the people, and even then, it is sorely limited.

...And that's why the internet fucking sucks now. Conformity, uniformity, lack of inquisitive nature, monetization, narrowing opinions, and most of all, the lack - of people.