Can't go forward without a leg to stand on

The winter solstice. Deepest night. Frozen hope. The best moment to throw a party and delude yourself that you might see another spring.

We needed no time travel to reach the final shore

Sam Harris titled his latest podcast episode The Way Forward - after last month's election. Haven't listened yet, at least to the half I have access to since he paywalled the site. But what is there to say? There is no way forward. We're done. It's over. Democracy has failed. Know all those times we've all said "it's not the end of the world" - well, this time it is. Even if the U.S. manages not to descend into some banana republic kleptocracy, which is where it's expressly headed with only one layover at church, its government will be both diminished and utterly choked with redneck incompetence for the next four years at the least, realistically several decades; that sort of damage isn't repaired quickly even in a best case scenario. And with the rest of the free peoples of midgard already themselves under siege, with China arming for WW3 and nature itself crumbling under our feet, this will very likely precipitate a total collapse.

 

And please, don't think that even the best of us with the best of intentions can do anything about it. The ready availability of troglodytic street trash eager to make a quick dirty buck means there will now always be a knife at your throat, whether hired by Trump or Bezos or Xi or their innumerable lesser imitators. But more importantly, the bulk of the species desperately wants this disaster, or really as much disaster as possible. The human animal is continually befuddled and threatened by technological advance, by refuge from instinctive drives, by individuality. It wants the stone age back, the only place it felt comfortable and competent. It wants to be beaten down, riddled with parasites, enslaved by its clan, starving, superstitious and desperately ignorant. Humanity is subhuman.

If nothing else, the 2024 election here in the states should prove once and for all that any attempt to educate the overwhelming bulk of humanity had always been doomed to failure. No politics, no technology, no literature, no high-minded ideals could ever elevate animals incapable of personal choice, imagination or basic arithmetic. Subhuman genetic scum are incapable of rational decision-making. You wanted equality with the vermin? Now choke on it. You were never going to get anywhere without selectively breeding for minds capable of thought, and now it's too late. The only possible salvation for sapience would be our extermination by true artificial intelligence, and we've run out of time to arrange even that.

You're witnessing the answer to the Fermi paradox: the self-destruct coefficient in the Drake equation. There's no point in trying to stop it.