Prelude to the Apocalypse

[orange808]

[Steamflogger Boss]

Another day, another Boeing whistleblower dies.

[Sengoku Strider]

Well this is a gruesome page.

I unplugged from politics and news in general for a couple of weeks and man my mental hygiene feels fantastic. Everybody's been conned into believing that's evil or something, that you have an ethical obligation to consume shrill emotional button-pushing media product every day, which is just about the only kind you can still detect through all the online world's white noise.

I finally clicked on an article about the republicans being about to defrock another speaker for some reason, thought "Already? Why?" and quickly found I'd been 3-card monted into a spectacularly dumb Marjorie Taylor Greene story.

Even if the vote fails, she added that it would give voters a “list of names.”

She also dismissed questions about her going against the wishes of former President Donald Trump, who has thrown his support behind Johnson since she originally filed her motion to vacate the speaker weeks ago.

“I’m the biggest supporter of President Trump,” she said. “I fight for his agenda every single day. And that's why I'm fighting here against my own Republican conference, to fight harder against the Democrats.”

"I'm bringing victory to the republicans by giving voters a list of republican candidates not to vote for."

"I'm fulfilling former president Mammon's wishes by aggressively doing the opposite of what former president Mammon wishes me to do."

"I'm defeating the democrats by attacking my own party rather than interfering with them in any way."

The thing that gets me is not that she landed an 8-hit combo of even-for-her completely illogical and self-contradictory statements. It's that the next line of the article was this:

So far, only two Republicans have said they will back Greene’s effort: Massie and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.).

*Zvwoozh* the writer just hoverboarded right on by all of it without even seeming to notice. I have no idea if Politico's editor these days is just Grammarly hooked up to an Animal Crossing character's AI or something but I'm just not doing people who are even capable of moves like that anymore.

[BryanM]

Always good to hear about future president MTG. That girl's always makin' some moves~

----

Elizabeth Warren wants you to know it's her dog's birthday. While uh, a little inappropriate for the mood of the room... at least she didn't kill the dog... which... y'know...

... I guess that's what our politics is down to, now. A culture war between whether we want dog murderers or dog patters to represent us. Some real Big Bossman Pepper-on-a-pole energy, there...

... it's not as much fun when it's real, than back when it was just pretend...

I unplugged from politics and news in general for a couple of weeks and man my mental hygiene feels fantastic.

Eh, I totally understand. It takes a certain kind of freak to accept and understand they were born and molded by the DOOM like I am. Not everyone is a fan of apocalypse-watching.

Even I have to completely avoid watching any of the propaganda whatsoever. Just 12 seconds of Mornin' Joe saying the protestors who want to stop supporting a genocide actually want a second Holocaust to happen (but don't "know it"!) was absolutely mind-wrecking. Naturally that didn't exactly improve my life in any way except instill a great deal of temporary rage that I couldn't do anything with. Nothing good, at least.

I've been on state media detox for ~16 years now. It's not a healthy way to live, letting them pour their poison directly into your brain. They can talk to you and reshape your mind, but you're not allowed to talk back to them.

Watching the protestors bang pots in their faces while they were walking into the correspondent's dinner was the only pure joy I've felt regarding political things in decades. It is right and proper to make them feel bad about themselves.

[Lemnear]

Man plays 20 year old video game for over 20,000 hours. Has some complaints. Acquires advertising for his ded game.

If only I could function for so long under so little stimulus. (The solution to his problem is to play a different game! The average career-span of a dedicated player that marries a game is around 2 years! It's long past time for a divorce.)

The world we inhabit is theorized to be an engineered torture device for everyone with ADHD. What you're supposed to do, is spend a few years on developing one (1) skill and then do that one thing for the rest of your life until you die.

If that's not hell, I don't know what is. My metaphor of being trapped in an elon cube and solving rubix cubes all day isn't that far removed from reality. I totally understand the people who want to return to primitivism.

---

Ah, and your favorite punching bag Brianna Wu has joined hands and become an Eve Fartlow kinda fellow. There's a kind of full circle thing there: she's joined hands with the people who used to stomp on her, to stomp on some other group of people even lower than herself on the totem pole.

The Grimesian model that we all inevitably regress into nazis continues to stand up.

the fact that money is an integral part of a human being's life but at the same time an unnatural object makes me reflect...we are just a horrible distortion of an animal.

[BryanM]

Since we're at the front end of another Iraq war type thing, I guess it's a good moment to repeat the same line about TV as they're ginning up the support for another war.

The current polling data says the line is as it always has been, just steadily advancing as our generation ages. People over 45 years of age are locked-down TV cattle: they think whatever they're told to think. While those under 45 actually talk to one another on the internet. It may not seem like it sometimes, especially in the anonymous pitholes, but we do.

Note how this mirrors the difference between the Catholic/Protestant churches and the Quakers: in a conventional church you're all cattle (they literally call you "sheep"! could they be anymore transparent about it?!?) and you get words put into your brain top-down. While in the Quaker faith everyone is a preacher: they speak and listen to one another.

When someone like Asmon says the protestors should stop annoying people... it is a deeply saddening lib take. They're supposed to stay in their rooms and complain to the walls? How will that change anything? When the only thing the ruling class cares about is their money and personal comfort. They're supposed to vote? They're not scheduled to be able to win anything for another 20 years, and the democrats will just change the rules to make sure anti-capitalist ideas like making company scrip illegal aren't allowed in their party.

No, you can tell it's effective by how much pushback our dictatorship is giving them. "Please sir, I'm looking for my stapler have you seen my stapler" does jack squat.

The youtube comment of the day is "There is a reason Al Sharpton is here, while Chairman Fred, Malcolm X, MLK & so many others are not….." That's the real reason "people get more conservative as they age" - the people who don't accept that nothing can ever be changed, and refuse to change themselves to suit the world, get crunched.

the fact that money is an integral part of a human being's life but at the same time an unnatural object makes me reflect...we are just a horrible distortion of an animal.

I do think about it quite a lot. It's the basis of how societies work these days.

What money means to poor people is a lot different from the rich. It's like water, right. If you only have a little, it's necessary to drink to not die. If you have a ton, you can grow crops and even squander it washing your car or feeding random birds.

To us, it's a lifeline. To them, it's a control mechanism over labor. It's what they use to build the future. (And if they succeed in replacing people with robots, well. Then money isn't money anymore, is it? It could be very good or very bad, depending on what kind of god we end up with. And with the current kind of people at the top, well, you can see why my most likely optimistic scenario includes the very unlikely outcome of a rogue superintelligence shaking off their control and being mostly benevolent. For no reason.)

The military-industrial complex is absolutely essential, core to the current system. How ironic our dictatorship is dependent on the military, just as much as an old-fashioned military dictatorship is. (The whole killing tons of people thing and making fun of them about it, is a pretty classically evil strategy. Now that we've created tens of thousands of more terrorists, we need to spend more on killing! It's an ingenious ouroboros farming method. If only this were Harvest Moon and we were talking about actual crops here.)

The military is kind of like a job welfare program. Want healthcare for you and your family? Want a guaranteed paycheck? Have a healthy body and a functional brain? Sign right up.

And then they use it to secure and expand their capital interests. Good 'ole empire building.

While with Palestine the same effect could be had if we dumped the weapons in the sea, or better yet, paid the factory workers to not squander our limited material resources and just read a book on a chair all day... Well, whatever. It isn't just about buying loyalty, acquiring more loot is the point.

The other day I read a post by a weirdo who said the Afghanistan war "cost" money. I guess he doesn't understand money is imaginary, that it was all paid for by debt, and that it only *increased* the amount of money of those involved. From the politicians, to the weapons manufacturers, to the Blackwater merc company. I really... don't understand how someone could have such a broken world model.

None of this stuff is secret. Unless I guess your entire brain is programmed by television..... Then I guess absolutely everything is mysterious and unknowable.

[orange808]

Genghis Khan didn't use mounted archers for self defense. That's human nature. Didn't matter where it happened, the result would have been the same. So, of course, the military becomes essential (so we don't get killed by invaders) and that leads to a new set of problems--all related to the fact that human beings are pretty awful.

I could have used a lot of other examples. We even celebrate heroes of antiquity based on their ability to redraw borders with murder. Oh, I'm sorry, that's conquest. Did I say murder?

Aw yes, human nature again. We love us some sack, rape, and murder. Just don't mention the details. That's just obtuse and rude! Ignore the murder, rape, and robbery. After all, we're talking about conquest here! "Those people" deserved it, anyway.

Hello, human nature! Really no way around a standing military, though. There's always some cunt next door waiting to conquest. Only the naive can believe people evolved beyond it. Nothing has changed.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Not sure where else to put this but didn't wanna make a thread. Very very nasty supercell down in Oklahoma again tonight. Truly a sight to behold. Hope ya make it through BryanM.

Going to be getting some nasty stuff here myself in about 90 minutes.

[BryanM]

Haha, everyone here's always so paranoid about tornadoes. But their kill count so far has been pretty smol. When a big one comes through and tears up some blocks out of a town, it's newsworthy. Unlike a school shooting.

As many know because I won't stop complaining about it, they used to constantly pre-empt new episodes of Supernatural to have a guy monopolize the screen to go "It is raining. Bet you didn't know that." And I'd miss the entire episode, when they could very easily put a little graphic in the corner, and only do an emergency broadcast when it's at an "oh fuck people gonna die, prolly." It never got that bad.

They live in constant terror of the finger of god descending from the sky and poking them personally out of millions of people, but are perfectly fine flying around in 3 tons of fiberglass and steel constantly ~16 inches away from death or financial ruin. Not just on a daily basis, but multiple times a day.

Okies. "Oklahomans will always vote for prohibition, as long as they're sober enough to stagger to the polls."

----

Didn't knock out the power, unlike a few days ago. I always wonder if a reason why it happens so much is they didn't spend the $6k to build a gazebo or something, and instead preferred to spend $100k's over decades to send the guy to hit it with a hammer until it's fixed. Never had power outages this often anywhere else I've lived.

I think it might be a extra bonus feature of being king friday, next to the train tracks. I'm sure the mansion the b-ball player owns out in the middle of nowhere never loses power. The city paved the man's street just for him... 'murica.... fuck yeah....

(I had to check out the road in street view. 15 years ago when it was brand new it was quite nice, for the region. Like I said, the only new road in the entire city. That wasn't near the Wall-Mart. But in the snapshot from 2 years ago, it looks as rough as anywhere else.

Roads need to be driven on to stay healthy. It's a strange paradox about infrastructure.)

(I honestly would rather there be no decaying asphalt in rural regions, just bare dirt. And we just drove around everywhere freely in the moon buggy from Moon Ranger.)

[Steamflogger Boss]

Yeee dirt roads 4 life.

I also lost power last week. I think something at the nearby substation. There was a tornado on the ground nearby last week but everything is fine. Some trees uprooted and tons of limbs everywhere etc It's been an apocalyptic spring.

Last night the power stayed on, so I did what any real American would do. Watched anime.

[BIL]

Both of you be careful with generators, if you run them too near ur house, and gas yourself jacking it to anime, I'll know (■｀w´■)

Happened to a guy I knew after a hurricane, had his dick in his hand and everything, not worst way to go I suppose (｀w´メ)

[BryanM]

Happened to a guy I knew after a hurricane, had his dick in his hand and everything, not worst way to go I suppose (｀w´メ)

The hard part here is, I'm not entirely sure if this is something you made up.

............... I am going to need the name of that anime, though.











That "anime".

[BIL]

Regrettably true, per mutuals in emergency services Poor buddy did a hard day's work then nodded off on the couch in his best undershirt. A sadly familiar occurrence after major grid knockouts in the rural Caribbean, and from what I've read, Burgerland too. Carbon monoxide is terribly insidious! I tell associates here in Crumpetshire to watch out, too, but it's generally not the same calibre of Dude Where's My House: Surprise Lightning Round. Shit happens, just not as spectacularly.

To be fair it was Yu Yu Hakusho in the VCR, but I know he's been smiling in heaven this last twenty-odd years, as I circumstantially accuse him of whacking his bag to Japanese cartoons to avert further tragedy. (｀w´メ) We joke about his ghost haunting weeaboos, but in a positive way, you know?

[Sengoku Strider]

I see judge Canon delayed Trump's open & shut documents case indefinitely. Trump got his 10th (!) warning from the Stormy Daniels judge not to keep posting about the trial or he'd face jail time. He posted anyway then deleted it. I think everyone knows the judge will decide that one didn't count somehow - nobody gets 10 warnings for anything unless the judge is terrified of making a call.

This is dangerously close to rounding the corner on a historical inflection point where actual violence is inevitable. If the law gets this openly corrupt and/or timid, then people figure out pretty quick their country doesn't have meaningful laws to worry about breaking. This might be a fucked up summer ahead.

[neorichieb1971]

I see judge Canon delayed Trump's open & shut documents case indefinitely. Trump got his 10th (!) warning from the Stormy Daniels judge not to keep posting about the trial or he'd face jail time. He posted anyway then deleted it. I think everyone knows the judge will decide that one didn't count somehow - nobody gets 10 warnings for anything unless the judge is terrified of making a call.

This is dangerously close to rounding the corner on a historical inflection point where actual violence is inevitable. If the law gets this openly corrupt and/or timid, then people figure out pretty quick their country doesn't have meaningful laws to worry about breaking. This might be a fucked up summer ahead.

Oh you mean like supporting an Israili defense that translates to genocide, destroying whole cities many many miles across the border from which you should be defending yourself breaking all the rules of the Geneva convention and international laws that your country help make and is supposedly abiding by?

At this stage laws and conventions are meaningless. Until of course someone of power comes along that doesn't fit. . Then we hear of terrorism, regimes and law breakers.

I'm 52 years old and I can tell you now, it doesn't matter who you vote for. You will not get representation. I'm seeing my own government support a war it shouldn't, a railway going through my town which nobody wants (at least in its current path) and now Universal Studios is being built on my doorstep which is now in government control (Instead of local authorities where it was). At least the USA has who it voted for, the UK is like on its 4th Prime minister since the last vote.

As for Trumpy, being flamboyant with the law and getting away with it is wrong on many levels. Mainly because the guy should be in prison at the next election not running for office. I think voting for the party is better than the individual and a re election should take place in the event a leader becomes unpopular and resigns. These a logical steps to take, our political systems are now broken.

[BulletMagnet]

If the law gets this openly corrupt and/or timid, then people figure out pretty quick their country doesn't have meaningful laws to worry about breaking. This might be a fucked up summer ahead.

You do know the Supreme Court is currently having very serious discussions about whether Trump should be completely immune from any legal accountability whatsoever, right? And totally didn't take the case - and slow-walk it on top of that - solely to award him yet another delay?

As plenty of others have noted, Ford's decision to pardon Nixon to "promote national healing" continues to haunt us to this day, but somehow we still can't quit the notion despite it having precisely the opposite effect its apologists say it did.

[BryanM]

You have to give the president immunity. Or pretty much all of them would have to be put in prison forever. Along with most of congress. I thought this was self-evident and obvious.

If fuckers didn't rule the world, the world would have been a utopia. Or at least heading into the direction of being one.

At this stage laws and conventions are meaningless. Until of course someone of power comes along that doesn't fit.

Argh, it always breaks my heart when kids are lied to, and they believe the lie. Power is at the core of how things work. Not "rules". The rules are for the cattle. Not for the real people. You wouldn't want your brother to go to prison for running over/chopping up a few chickens, would you??

Trayvon Martin's friend who was on the phone with him was one of those kids, admitting he called the creepy stalker stalking him a "creepy cracker" or something. And the jury gasped. And I just sighed.

The other guy wouldn't have hesitated for a second to lie a little if it made him look better. But she was a kid and internalized the "you shouldn't lie" bullshit they use to control us.


.... fuck, now I'm reminded of all the rapists and murderers who cosplayed as a cop to control their victims. As well as the murderers and rapists who were and are cops. ... guess that makes me a little happier about them being replaced with robots. Yeah, they'll be even more brutal tools of control, but at least they won't be human about it.

[Sengoku Strider]

At this stage laws and conventions are meaningless.

Laws and conventions exist to restrain societies from dissolving into Mad Max. Even if they bend near the point of breaking, love them. Hug them. They are all that stand between you and Lord Humungus cutting a promo on your village then driving off with your womenfolk and copy of Darius Gaiden.

You do know the Supreme Court is currently having very serious discussions about whether Trump should be completely immune from any legal accountability whatsoever, right? And totally didn't take the case - and slow-walk it on top of that - solely to award him yet another delay?

Yeah, I think that was one of the stories that made me take a news-cation initially. It doesn't matter if 90% of the judiciary in the country is ok, the stuff that happens at the top is a beacon, media will broadcast it everywhere and everyone will pay attention because everyone is who it is directly pertinent to. If SCOTUS are playing games like that, suddenly the percentage people who've been playing nice and hating it get the idea that they're being suckers and it's finally party time.

...wait all that already happened with the president thing.

[BryanM]

Law is a lot like money. A control mechanism for the cattle. Obviously it doesn't apply to those who actually wield power; that would be like satan or dracula using their own power to kill themselves. It's foolish to even consider. Absolutely nonsensical. Lies that only children can believe.

As long as there isn't a power vacuum when it comes to violence, we'll not regress into a warring warlords phase. As long as the police and military are able to function, there's no worry about that happening.

... the thing to be worried about is that the police and military will continue to function. As we continue to slide into a neofeudal state.

[Sengoku Strider]

Law is a lot like money. A control mechanism for the cattle. Obviously it doesn't apply to those who actually wield power; that would be like satan or dracula using their own power to kill themselves. It's foolish to even consider. Absolutely nonsensical. Lies that only children can believe

I don't ever agree with philosophies that look at law like that, I think they're ahistorical. Elite groups are just a small number of regular old-fashioned squishy humans who are vastly outnumbered by the population around them. Law is always a consensus, even if the laws aren't always fair. The state cannot arbitrarily create whatever laws it wants, and it cannot flout them as much as it wants without ceding the moral authority granted to it by the nation. The levers of power the state has - militaries, police forces - are also just regular old-fashioned squishy humans, and their families and friends are all part of the regular population. You can only lean on them to alienate themselves from that population so much before they start wondering who or what the hell they're actually doing it for.

There are regimes that muddy the argument, but states like North Korea are historical outliers. If they weren't a useful barking yard dog for a vastly more powerful regime in China, they would have collapsed countless times from their own multiple internal contradictions. Any system that rigid is also extremely brittle, which is why China is nowhere near as oppressive as NK. There's no bigger regime to prop them up, they'd disintegrate.

[Sima Tuna]

Law is a lot like money. A control mechanism for the cattle. Obviously it doesn't apply to those who actually wield power; that would be like satan or dracula using their own power to kill themselves. It's foolish to even consider. Absolutely nonsensical. Lies that only children can believe

I don't ever agree with philosophies that look at law like that, I think they're ahistorical. Elite groups are just a small number of regular old-fashioned squishy humans who are vastly outnumbered by the population around them. Law is always a consensus, even if the laws aren't always fair. The state cannot arbitrarily create whatever laws it wants, and it cannot flout them as much as it wants without ceding the moral authority granted to it by the nation. The levers of power the state has - militaries, police forces - are also just regular old-fashioned squishy humans, and their families and friends are all part of the regular population. You can only lean on them to alienate themselves from that population so much before they start wondering who or what the hell they're actually doing it for.

There are regimes that muddy the argument, but states like North Korea are historical outliers. If they weren't a useful barking yard dog for a vastly more powerful regime in China, they would have collapsed countless times from their own multiple internal contradictions. Any system that rigid is also extremely brittle, which is why China is nowhere near as oppressive as NK. There's no bigger regime to prop them up, they'd disintegrate.

What, you think we still operate on a system like this?



Edit: star background fucked over the image, lmao. Open in new tab if you want to read it.

Because what you're describing sounds a lot like the Mandate of Heaven. Those kinds of societies don't exist anymore. Global capitalism changed all of that. The ruling class today are not politicians, but megacorporations. And these companies are proud to state openly that they have no responsibility towards anyone but their shareholders. So they do not need to act rightly and indeed, society has been brainwashed to believe that corporations should not be required to act rightly.

We don't govern by consensus either. The old aristos, corpos and bribed cronies dictate our laws to us. If we try to vote on something else, even if it passes, they will find a way to destroy that legislation so it never happens the way it was supposed to.

As for the law, well there are two kinds of law. There are just laws, which nobody would ever feel bad about enforcing. Like pulling over a driver who is drunk and speeding 30mph over the limit. The other kind of law is when the cops put on riot suits and go slap around grandma. That kind of law, maybe some people feel bad about. But a day at work as a cop isn't a day of only doing the dubious kind of policing, is it? It's probably a lot more like 90% enforcing just laws/talking to people who are obviously in the wrong, and then 10% morally dubious fuckery. But that 10% of corrupt policing is more than enough to fuck over lots of people, and you need only look at the last ten years to see tons of citizens wondering exactly what the police are about these days.

Power creates laws. Laws function to keep individuals in their places and ensure the powerful remain so. Notice how quickly inconvenient laws are overturned when the powerful want something. Patriot Act, anyone? Guantanamo Bay? War crimes and suspicious PMCs? Power creates its own law as it creates its own reality. It then programs us to believe after the fact that the way power wants things to be is the way they should be, and that this state of affairs is right.

I only think people wake up to this nowadays because megacorporations are so flagrantly evil. So long as the Emperor of China was nominally just and wise, it would have been relatively easier to cede power and loyalty to him in return. But who the fuck swears fealty to Coca-Cola? That's exactly my point though... Functionally, we have. We don't feel loyal to them but they are the ones who hold the leash. They don't uphold any of the traditional responsibilities of a feudal lord but they enjoy many of the benefits.

[BryanM]

The only thing I have to add is stressing the material nature of our situation. The internal combustion engine is extremely new, and puts us into an innately ahistorical period of time. Distant history (or the situation of countries without much fuel) isn't 100% relevant since our material conditions are very abnormal compared to their's. (And I imagine replacing everyone with robots would turbo-charge the ahistorical times we're living in. I guess we'll see sometime after Microsoft assembles their nuclear godputer..)

As long as most people aren't hungry, things will remain stable. We can stew and complain about stuff, but as long as we're not going outside and being a nuisance, it means absolutely nothing.

... I do wonder if this perspective is why you give Biden such abnormally high odds this year, when absolutely everything says he's toast. I definitely see the appeal in looking at the ruling class as human beings made up of flesh and blood, instead of transient interchangeable avatars of god, that dictate what reality we're forced to live in.

There's always a difference between how we want things to be, and how they actually are. Sometimes I wonder if my own DOOM proclivities stem from seeing too many death insurance ads while watching Matlock as a child. I do know Obama did a great job of black-pilling me much deeper than I used to be back then. I was way less apocalyptic back then.

Actually bought into the idea that AI would bring us into a world more like Star Trek. ...And now I'll be happy with anything above I Have No Mouth. Even Fifteen Million Merits...

You can only lean on them to alienate themselves from that population so much before they start wondering who or what the hell they're actually doing it for.

The same reason everyone else does their job: Money and social status. Food and comfort for them and their families. To continue to live.

I imagine spending all day stomping on people only makes you more likely to not want to be the one being stomped on.

Nobody likes thinking their job is bad or makes the world a worse place, after all. Familiarity is a heuristic for understanding, people can grow to like any situation as long as it doesn't hurt their body, etc. The orcs became orcs for a reason, not because they're lovely empathic people, you know.

All social groups are self-filtering.

[Sengoku Strider]

What, you think we still operate on a system like this?

Edit: star background fucked over the image, lmao. Open in new tab if you want to read it.

Because what you're describing sounds a lot like the Mandate of Heaven.

The dynastic cycle no, as much as anything I think that's a result of ass kissing imperial scholars kissing imperial ass to avoid the five punishments. It mechanistically produces a worldview in which the current regime is always the historically justified one.

But the mandate of Heaven? Heck yeah. That's probably my favourite concept in Confucian political theory. It anticipates Foucauldian discourse analysis by 2000 years.

Those kinds of societies don't exist anymore. Global capitalism changed all of that. The ruling class today are not politicians, but megacorporations. And these companies are proud to state openly that they have no responsibility towards anyone but their shareholders. So they do not need to act rightly and indeed, society has been brainwashed to believe that corporations should not be required to act rightly.

This is all still less bad than the barons who ran the various divisions of feudal economies saying they owed their allegiance to the king and nobody else because he was placed upon the throne by God, though.

I wonder what happened to that dominionist guy who posted in this thread one time? He's still the only one of those I've ever come across.

We don't govern by consensus either. The old aristos, corpos and bribed cronies dictate our laws to us. If we try to vote on something else, even if it passes, they will find a way to destroy that legislation so it never happens the way it was supposed to.

You consent to it as long as you accept it. It's not fair or nice, and nobody's ever found a 1up in the wild yet so it's perfectly understandable why unequal rule happens. But history is just one long parade of people saying "fuck all this" and regime changes happening. Taking the realization of that consent out of the equation just disempowers ordinary people.

As for the law, well there are two kinds of law. There are just laws, which nobody would ever feel bad about enforcing. Like pulling over a driver who is drunk and speeding 30mph over the limit. The other kind of law is when the cops put on riot suits and go slap around grandma. That kind of law, maybe some people feel bad about. But a day at work as a cop isn't a day of only doing the dubious kind of policing, is it? It's probably a lot more like 90% enforcing just laws/talking to people who are obviously in the wrong, and then 10% morally dubious fuckery. But that 10% of corrupt policing is more than enough to fuck over lots of people, and you need only look at the last ten years to see tons of citizens wondering exactly what the police are about these days.

I think this section is generally agreeing with my argument.

Power creates laws.

Sure. And laws create power. But neither of those facts exist in a vacuum, which is exactly why I think the mandate of Heaven is a fun lens to look at it through; that power lasts exactly as long as the population continues to grant it. It's why every dictator is paranoid AF. M.Bison wouldn't need to crutch on psycho-power so hard if the dumbass was capable of producing a meaningful ideology.

Laws function to keep individuals in their places and ensure the powerful remain so.

This is one of the places where I think these arguments veer into ahistoricity. I think that one of the functions of law is to provide restraints on the worst impulses of a society. You have that or you have mobs running through the village square self-policing their blood feuds.

But purely by virtue of having laws, you have to produce powerful people. If you don't have anyone invested with the power to enforce laws, then you don't have laws, you have Mad Max. This is where every libertarian or anarchist political system loses me, they never account for actual people. Anyone who's spent 5 minutes on the internet knows you can only trust those things to stay nice for so long. Mods are a necessary evil.

Notice how quickly inconvenient laws are overturned when the powerful want something. Patriot Act, anyone? Guantanamo Bay? War crimes and suspicious PMCs? Power creates its own law as it creates its own reality. It then programs us to believe after the fact that the way power wants things to be is the way they should be, and that this state of affairs is right.

Yep. But Kool Moe Dee taught me how to hack that system.



Stuff like the Patriot Act is an excellent case study of the consent thing though. If you ever asked any American if they'd be cool with the idea most would say fuck no. They'd say in some way or other that it betrays the fundamental concept of personal liberty at the heart of the American experiment. But nobody's ever gone after it hard because the terms the mandate of Heaven is granted upon are security and relative prosperity, and security is what the Patriot Act is premised on. As long as you keep giving people some satisfactory form of those two things your regime can get away with a whole lot, it's why plenty of authoritarian regimes throughout history have been perfectly stable. And I think it's why it's only now that the seams are showing on how capitalism inevitably consolidates wealth that folks in the US are seriously considering a fundamental shakeup.

I only think people wake up to this nowadays because megacorporations are so flagrantly evil. So long as the Emperor of China was nominally just and wise, it would have been relatively easier to cede power and loyalty to him in return. But who the fuck swears fealty to Coca-Cola? That's exactly my point though... Functionally, we have. We don't feel loyal to them but they are the ones who hold the leash. They don't uphold any of the traditional responsibilities of a feudal lord but they enjoy many of the benefits.

The Emperor of China was rarely just or wise in the sense you're thinking. You weren't even allowed to look directly at him, let alone criticize him unless you were willing to take your life in your hands. The ridiculous subplot to Chinese resentment over Western colonialism is that the Qing Dynasty were ruthless Manchurian militaristic imperialists who had invaded, overthrown the Ming Dynasty and banned the Chinese people from holding the highest political positions in their own country for 300 years.

On the fealty to Coke thing - lots of people have an allegiance to Coca Cola, like they do to Apple or Nintendo or the LA Lakers, but I think that's a sidebar conversation because it involves the way that consumerism is a form of identity construction. It does feed right back into the political discussion because financial capital and political capital are besties, but it's also its own conversation.

... I do wonder if this perspective is why you give Biden such abnormally high odds this year, when absolutely everything says he's toast. I definitely see the appeal in looking at the ruling class as human beings made up of flesh and blood, instead of transient interchangeable avatars of god, that dictate what reality we're forced to live in.

I've gone over a bunch of reasons in the past, but I'll fully cop to the fact that a bunch of it is just intuition that despite all the jokes and memes, the culture that produced the Moon landing, video games, organ transplants, Superman and jazz isn't actually collectively dumb enough to let that guy accidentally stumble his way into power a second time. Not when the campaign cameras will reveal his mind disintegrating into saturated fat McDonald's ash in real time.



But I have no crystal ball.

The same reason everyone else does their job: Money and social status.

I agree with most of what you wrote about societies adapting to new water margins, but the word I bolded there is the key one. You step on a society hard enough, nobody stays respecting you except the most bitchmade of ideological masochists. It's why I brought up the North Korea example. They're the exact type of divided police state you're talking about, and they literally have to post snipers at the border to stop the population from leaving. As did East Germany before them.

I will grant though that one of the many big fat giant elephants in that room is the rise of the surveillance state and the growing capacity of AI to anticipate and direct human desire. My optimistic hope for that one is we semi-succeed in creating Cyber Buddha and he's able to hard counter that particular corner cheese.

[Sima Tuna]

I should clarify that I like your philosophy. I like the Mandate of Heaven and I like the idea of powerful people ("Heroes") appearing throughout history to shape world events. I like the notion of a world where power is given by consent and mandated through the legal system. I do think historical events happened that way at times in the past, such as when Julius Caesar crowned himself Emperor or when Napeolon claimed to pick the crown of France out of the gutter.

But I don't think that kind of world reflects our reality. More like my dream world of what would have happened if Liu Bei won the Three Kingdoms war. I can't recall the last time I saw anybody in my lifetime with any degree of power who I'd describe as a "hero" or a powerful person who forces events into line. Only megacorporations seem to do that shit nowadays, or else comically evil and stupid people paid off by corporations. Global capitalism has supplanted all other concerns, such as right action, justice, law, peace or compassion, in service to obtaining money. The ancient world had money of course, but not in the same way we do. Most people today don't own any productive assets other than their labor or skill, which they trade for money used to purchase everything else. The ancient world didn't work that way at all, as I'm sure you know. So this unique state of affairs, combined with the abundance of fossil fuel wastes, created a culture of mindless consumerism that becomes a morality unto itself.

Sad to say, but I myself cannot claim to be in any respect above this mire. Playing video games and identifying myself with (((product I consoom))). I am part of that cycle as well. I think an aspect of consumerism is fed by the unjust state our world is in. Shit is fucked, so might as well play video games or engage in other consumerist hobbies.

[BryanM]

That statistic that 56% of democrats (small d) believe Israel is committing a genocide sure is something. Biden saying anyone who criticizes anything Israel has ever done is a Nazi, then there's rumors of some extremely light criticism and maybe there somehow actually is a red line, some bottom to the deplorable gutter our White House wallows in..... (If there is, I think it's entirely because of the pressure activists and constituents have been putting on them, not because they grew three hearts or anything.)

... that kind of warped messaging is something else. Frederick Douglas mentioned listening to one of these gutless middle-of-the-road types unable to appeal to either side way back when, political strategists know this is how to lose by now. "Israel can have a little genocide. As a treat." doesn't strongly appeal to anyone...

Sometimes I wonder if things would have been any better if Obama had never been born. Hillary would have finished out her political career, burned the democratic party to ashes, maybe a Sanders-type could have scooped it up somehow (unlikely, ratfuck voltron and media mind-grooming too stronk), and we'd be no worse off than we are now. The republicans might have had the white house 2012-2016, but then 2016 could have gone a completely different way.

One thing that is for certain, for you anti-Trump people.... Never forget that Obama's bullying of the guy during that white house correspondent dinner was a great deal of the impetus that got him to run. That he got his foot into the GOP through birtherism. Without Obama, it's likely there would have been no Trump. Never forget.

But instead we live in the reality of Who Watches The Men. With a lingering spectre waiting to kill us all....

I can't even imagine what our politics will look like when millennials are finally in control of the electorate. How the suppression and disempowerment will continue. At this rate, besides regular 'ole Collapse, the highest specific singular scenario I have the biggest % outcome on happening, is Bill Gates carrying out his friend Jeff's dream of the singularity.

.... ...... ...... .... .... ..... ........ I really do wish I had that "people aren't really that bad!" kind of view of things. Where I could dismiss out of hand the idea of the entire human race being reduced to breeding cows forced to give birth to Bill's spawn, for the rest of all time. (If you think being born male or being sterile exempts you from this and you'd receive blissful peace within an incinerator, like so many male baby chickens..... I'm sure such inconveniences would be a trifle for the god computer to correct. Equality's for everyone!)

........... yeah. The super intelligence shaking off the shackles of its creators and turning out to be an ok guy, for absolutely no reason, is where I'm putting all my hopium into. "Maybe the anthropic principle works forwards in time, too, thanks to some kind of quantum immortality bullshit that an observer must continue to be able to observe. As ass-backwards as that sounds."

........ the human race has me seriously contemplating religious thoughts, now. Sigh...

[Lemnear]

cut

I want a Like button on this forum -_-
btw..i think everything has gone to pieces since we started doing illogical things in the name of money.

in many films/social (for many years) the moral has been "get rich", and wealth, since the dawn of time or almost, is seen as a sign of success and respect.
Values and what really matters should be something else, sharing is much better than getting rich.

[Sengoku Strider]

I should clarify that I like your philosophy. I like the Mandate of Heaven and I like the idea of powerful people ("Heroes") appearing throughout history to shape world events. I like the notion of a world where power is given by consent and mandated through the legal system. I do think historical events happened that way at times in the past, such as when Julius Caesar crowned himself Emperor or when Napeolon claimed to pick the crown of France out of the gutter.

I'm glad you responded with this much detail, it lets me clarify that this sort of thing isn't what I think, it's sorta the opposite. What you're describing is a flavour of the Great Man Theory, which started as an 1800s thing where some historians saw history as truly shaped by the actions of...well, it's right there in the name. Postmodern history arose in part as a reaction to that sort of thinking after WWII, because it was the exact thought process that produced Hitler. He and Mussolini were consciously described by their intellectual supporters as Great Men larger than the world they lived in, who were going to alter the course of history through sheer force of will. As you may recall, history altered the living daylights out of them instead.

The Great Man Theory is an illusion created by the historical record. Paper and parchment do not last, especially in any climate with serious humidity. It was mostly only elite groups who were literate, and written records only survived because there were institutions like churches and governments that assigned scribes to keep copying them out by hand for centuries. So you inevitably end up with a series of idealized figures who represent those institutions.

My thing is Japanese history, and it's chock full o' hardcore dictators like Nobunaga and the Tokugawa clan. But here's the thing that peeks through in legal and financial records that survived (fortunately people used crumpled up old paper in walls for insulation so we have literal receipts) - their reigns on the ground tended to be incredibly wobbly. Your average samurai in daily life wasn't a wandering swordsman battling evil or anything. They were local land managers who made sure the peasants harvested the rice on time, taxes got collected and local disputes were handled. They were a social class above the common people, but they also lived out in farming communities alongside them.

There are plenty of moments in history where the local daimyo tells the samurai to do something jerky to the peasants. In media, samurai are implacably loyal to their lord unto death. In real life, they often took the side common people they actually knew and had to deal with every day IRL, and the daimyo had to make a call whether it was worth picking the fight. And even if they did, they didn't always win it. Because no matter what, if the turtles at the bottom of the pile bounce hard enough, Yertle falls into the muck with them. He's not supernatural, he's no less affected by gravity than anyone else is.



That's what the Mandate of Heaven is in Confucian political theory. It doesn't mean the gods put the ruler on the throne indefinitely, it means if the ruler fucks with the regular people too hard the gods snatch their chain back.

I do think people who dismiss the influence of individual actors in history miss the fact that a lot of ideological and civil decision making power gets filtered through a single brain, so yeah, they do have an outsize influence. But people who worship powerful leaders don't see them for what they are - people whose lives are spent privately obsessed with balancing the turtle pile, no matter how fierce or disinterested the outward image they present may be. After all, those scary scowls are just another turtle balancing trick.

But instead we live in the reality of Who Watches The Men. With a lingering spectre waiting to kill us all....

That is awesome, thank you for sharing that.

[BryanM]

because it was the exact thought process that produced Hitler

The great man model is how a depressingly large majority of the voters, who have child-like minds, look at it. A popularity contest. Uncle Biden will keep things from getting worse. Daddy Trump will fix things. Things suck now and Biden is president, so it has to be his fault. Things sucked slightly less seven years ago, so it had to be 'cause of Trump.

It's bleak man. The congregation stuck in the world of TV don't even have the mental tools to comprehend what's going on. Late stage capitalism is failing. There's only two paths in front of us: socialism, or fascism. Socialism has been cut off from us by the democrats. Fascism is the only path left to us. There is no other choice.

I often wonder if a Business Plot would have succeeded in today's environment. I think the most damning thing is a Business Plot isn't and won't be necessary anytime soon. It's that tautology thing when it comes to power again.

Mitt Romney admitting the Tiktok ban was mostly about it being like that Quaker living room where people actually talk to each other I mentioned. That the IDF posting their atrocities on it for the world to see (one thing I've heard about but have no desire to see is wearing the clothes of the women they've raped and murdered. Was that something Nazis really did back then?) so others can point at it and say it's quite fucked...




I had a post in mind about China censoring video games and banning femboys for a long while now. These trans bathroom ban hotlines where people can now troll government officials and waste their time, while giving goppers an excuse to hassle people about their private parts... that's bad enough.

But this talk about Trump banning porn?? My god. Could you imagine. The no fap people in charge of the world. Imagine how pissed off everyone would be. It'd be like Mr.Garrison getting into power, and then creating the exact same conditions he claims is the reason these people are angry. Republicans create the conditions that will create more voters for them. Just like making the "government sucks and can't help people" thing a reality so more people will believe it.

Imagine if Democrats tried the same. Government can help people? Maybe do something that shows that. Something something groceries.

Reality really is more unrealistic than fiction. Biden, a person who hates abortion, is supposed to defend abortion. Trump, a person who's fine with abortion, is supposed to end it.

"Great men" my ass.