Thanks for Playing!

I tried Team Fortress 2 again recently after some years' absence. Development having altogether ceased when Valve saw Overwatch's release gut its own playerbase, pretty much zero things have changed. "Competitive" mode is still an idiotically shrunken duel/pissing contest abandoning all the game's strengths trying in vain to copy Overwatch's appeal and not worth the bother. But of course casual 12v12 mode is itself utterly poisoned by retarded trash refusing to fight, AFKing, sitting around spamming emotes or just quitting at the first death. Matches are not decided by relative worth but by which team actually has players... y'know... playing the motherfucking game?

 

It's not as though Valve wasn't always aware of this, but their insane excuse for a solution doing more harm than good remains in effect: automatically switching players from the larger to the smaller team. So after I've spent two minutes healing everyone on the control point for an easy victory, I'm forced to take the place of the dickless bitches I made quit and be punished with automatically losing during the third minute for having played too well. Aaand, uninstall again, that's enough of that.

 

But it's not as if I can get my fix of teamwork any better way. I was permanently banned from Warframe a year or two ago for raging against a griefer deliberately running up behind me repeatedly undoing all our team's quest progress step by step by step - but you can bet no action was taken against the griefer himself. Here's a snapshot match history from League of Legends* from... last year I think?

Unless you believe I was the noobiest noob that ever n00bed a noob at the start... then suddenly became an absolute GAMER GOD!!! for ten or fifteen matches straight... only to again switch to N00b!-mode for no particular reason... then again to god-mode... then again to noob-mode... and so on, endlessly, well obviously something other than my quality as a player is deciding match outcomes. The moment Riot's algorithm identifies you as better, it punishes you by giving you worse teammates, and worse, and worse, until tanking your average to its satisfaction.

 

Now, of course it's important to have balanced teams, but that's the whole point of having "leagues" so that teams can be composed of players of the same general aptitude. GENERAL aptitude. INDIVIDUALLY teaming worse players with better ones merely punishes the better and rewards the worse. Moreover, it shows that Riot's datamining can easily determine who the griefers are, and instead of eliminating those guilty of ruining matches keeps them in the playerbase for the express purpose of punishing their betters. 

 

On a completely unrelated topic, once upon a time I was motoring some Podunkian byways, late morning sometime before lunch hour, sun shining, birds singing, lovely day, when I suddenly slam the brakes! Was it a squirrel, a stray cat, a deer? No, it was some pasty guy, shirtless, tattooed up to his neck (pretty sure there was a swastika in there somewhere) stumbling aimlessly in a daze, sporting the stringy, bug-eyed aesthetic of methamphetamine addiction which you learn to spot as a self-preservation mechanism if you ever sojourn in Middle America. And who knows what else he was on. Far from jumping away from near-collision he draws himself up in surprise, still standing in the middle of the street, and draws back his fist as if to punch the hood of my car... then in the next split-second jerks his head up, blinking at the sun, distracted by some noise in the trees, and stumbles off the road again, straight into the bushes. For the record, I don't particularly give a shit what substances you're on, except as an indicator of likely behaviors including stumbling into traffic and punching cars which should by all rights disqualify you from participation in society. We have more traffic laws than anyone can keep track of. They're very good at punishing the otherwise blameless for "speeding" on empty roads. How useful are they at keeping crackheads from denting my grille?

It's gotten almost impossible to get rubbing alcohol at pharmacies these past years, simple ethyl alcohol, forcing a switch to the less digestible isopropyl. Why? I'm not the one getting drunk off the shit. Why am I being punished? Police those actually guilty of abuse. Why did we spend a quarter century taking our shoes off at the airport? And more importantly, for every convenience and dignity we have always been made to surrender in the name of some greater good, call it firearms or marijuana depending on your political affiliation, you have to ask: yes, fine, but what are you doing with the actual guilty parties you catch? Why are murderers not executed? Why is the car-punching good old boy still drunk-walking the streets? You can't seriously tell me it hasn't harmed others before. Conversely, I've committed no harm condemning me to be subjected to, and endangered by, its presence.

 

Game companies claim to fight cheating while openly cheating to enable griefers. Governments claim to promote the public good while deliberately feeding whatever worst demographic will vote for them, be it crackheads in the city or meth-heads in the sticks. Why? Online games have long achieved, by their very nature, the totalitarian mass surveillance and absolute power real-world soldiers and politicians only envision in their sadism. The griefing and cheating yet pervading all such games, the fact the companies themselves, without being asked, take it upon themselves to cheat on behalf of their worst customers and shield them from repercussions, unerringly reveals the truism of every "people's republic": that all their oppression renders life more dangerous, not less, funneling sadists up the ranks of power. Why?

 

Well, partly for sheer profit by numbers, the "for the people" motivation masking weaponized, monetized mob rule, but also because just like Valve, Digital Extremes and Riot refusing to ban potential customers no matter what harm they cause to their betters, just as their algorithms deliberately employ those griefers to harm better players, governments see value in keeping destructive filth threatening others, a ready stock of easily manipulated lynch mobs and a drain on the prosperity of the now vanished middle class. There is no way to improve any society, real or virtual, without exterminating its worst elements, and that is precisely why those elements are never exterminated, being too useful as tools of control over the greater system. Every ruler wants mindless thugs, scabs and strikebreakers, to throw at principled dissenters. Every ruler wants to be able to decree when an underling should lose a match, and to do so via proxy so as to maintain deniability.

 

Want progress? Exterminate the filth. Eh, screw it, never mind, it's about a century too late to avoid collapse anyway.

. 

 

________________________________________________ 

 

* Yeah, I know the game's shit anyway, but it's not like the genre offers better options these days.

Ripley, Alumnus of Woolloomooloo

"I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library

Line up to the mind cemetery now

What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'

They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em"

 

Rage Against the Machine - Bulls On Parade

_____________________________________________

"It does NOT follow that because a good many of the intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the broke--that plenty of actors and teachers and nurses and musicians don't get any better paid than stage hands or electricians, therefore their interests are the same. It isn't what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class--whether you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I'm tired of apologizing for not having a dirty neck!"

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

_____________________________________________

"Could you please explain to me why you do not take tea?"

"Take tea," Jillian sneered. "That's exactly why. You 'take tea.' There's a ritual. Etiquette. It's stupid." She sat forward and pointed to the steaming teapot. "It's a beverage. Hot dirty water in a cup. You pick it up and drink it.

[...]

But I thought your side didn't care about Royalty. Vinny said titles and stuff didn't matter to you guys as much as getting the mission done."
Instead of beckoning the serving Doll, Don King leaned very far forward, reached an uncomfortable and rude distance across the table, and picked up the teapot. With deliberate carelessness, he sloshed tea into his cup, spilling and dripping all over the white lace. As Jillian watched him, he banged down the pot and picked up the fine china cup in his whole fist. He raised it up high, spilling more of it.
"To hot dirty water in a cup!" he shouted loudly. Bunny sort of snapped out of her reverie and leaned away from Don King on the couch, looking slightly alarmed. He put the cup to his mouth and gulped it down, spilling some down his cheeks and onto his shirt. Then he held up the half-empty cup again and bellowed, "To etiquette!"
He hurled the cup backhand, hard, and without a glance at where it might land. It struck a column and shattered against a marble mantle. Jillian stood up sharply.
"What was that!" she demanded.
Don King shrugged. "Me not carin' about Royalty." He wiped his dripping face with his sleeve, exaggerating the slovenliness of the gesture. "Ugly, ain't it? Siddown.

[...]

Just as a mouse cannot choose to be a wolf, a wolf can't live like a mouse. You are so clearly a Royal that it pains me to see how you act. You cannot forever deny the way the Titans made you."

"How?" Jillian challenged. "How am I 'clearly a Royal?'"

"Hundreds of little ways. You act rudely on purpose, but rudeness shocks you."

 

Erfworld, Book 1, Epilogue pp. 20-21

(or, substitute that "Superman's always Superman" speech given by the villain from Kill Bill (what was his name again?))

____________________________________________

 

 

I've not bothered watching Rachel Maddow in well over a decade (damn, how much hair dye and collagen is the old girl absorbing on a weekly basis now?*) but that show is where I acquired my taste for longwinded, awkwardly obtuse segues. I also greatly appreciated her not adopting some down-home folksy demeanor to placate the average consumer. Though I can only assume it a universal feature of media marketing, any objective observer must be struck by the frequency with which American celebrities in particular must reinforce their "average Joe" credentials and affect monosyllabic vocabularies. MSNBC's insistence on urbane (there's that word again) middlebrow stars mixing cocktails instead of chugging beer was, in that context, a real breath of fresh air a couple decades ago.

 

I bring this up now because the conjunction of the World Cup and America's big 250 has flooded channels with one transparently dishonest auto da fe after another. Well-read adults with nary a trace of drool on their chins clapping like toddlers in adulation of braindead jocks' high-kicking exploits and waving flags as fake as the plastic one propped up on the moon. As if TV presenters' usual pretense of caring about baseball and American football wasn't bad enough. (Was I ever meant to believe John Oliver watches wrestling? Please.) But, to reverse that train of thought, if watching some Ivy League starched shirt pretend he's jizzing at the mere thought of the next NASCAR race is awkward enough, try selling copies of The Canterbury Tales at a hot dog eating contest.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, Netflix continues its gradual campaign to improve its brand image beyond zombie flicks and sex comedies. A couple of years ago this came in the form of Ripley, previously adapted in glitzier Hollywood fashion as The Talented Mr. Ripley from the story by the same name, which I've never read and will not be addressing. The newer version's an aggressively old school affair, black-and-white, light on effects and camera footwork and heavy on the location shots, characters and acting. It's... excellent, really, and I say that as a SciFi fan rarely bothering with crime dramas. Among its more memorable aspects: the subtlety of the protagonist's portrayal. Despite his repeated successes, Ripley is clever but by no means a superintelligent criminal mastermind, nor the most adept confidence artist. Many times his pathetic desperation, his mental instability, his obvious lack of any coherent grand design, shine through his otherwise sociopathically blank disinterest in anything but climbing over others.

 

The more comedic such moments concern his stumbling attempts to pass as classy. More than a matter of knowing the proper protocol, his intrinsic suspiciousness, over-eagerness, shiftiness, all betray the degenerate gutter rat he really is and always will be underneath all his pretense.** All but the most naive sense something off about the guy. You can hear a similar artificiality in real life in the stilted pretense of respectful speech adopted by cops, all the sirring and the vee-hickle and other polysyllabic posturing so alien to the average flatfoot's mouth that he'd sound more natural reading microwave instructions.

 

It brings my mind around to junior high. For a couple of years I had been gradually drifting farther from my classmates' reliance on slang*** and mindless beat-fillers like "like" but not until 8th grade did I make a conscious decision to avoid the word "cool" - and you'll notice I generally still do, aside from the occasional very pointed interjection. Reliance on terminology expressing no quality of its object, animal calls reflecting only in-group belonging, is not just pointless but open vandalism disrupting thought. Clarity matters. Expressiveness matters. To some.

 

This would have come shortly before Bulls On Parade started rocking the airwaves, and I have to wonder if those Ragers have ever or will ever admit that it was their very own audience that removed the books. "The public stopped reading of its own accord" a savvier observer predicted forty years earlier. As I reached high school, another of those thought-terminating cliches began circling pop culture, one that should still sound familiar: "dead white men." A mighty coalition of the Malcolm-X-worshipping inner city blacks championed by Rage Against the Machine, of feminists, of New Agers and comfortably suburban Asian kids giving teenage rebellion a tentative chance before settling into a lifetime of filial piety, joined by every white kid rebelling against nothing more substantive than homework, all decreed they had nothing to learn from "dead white men" because by the sin of whiteness or of maleness or their most inexcusable deadness, such speakers could not possibly have said anything of relevance to our modern breed. Who needs existentialism, the Bill of Rights and nuclear physics when you can run an entire society on Maya Angelou quotes? Oh, wait, she's dead now...

 

I'm not merely trying to point out the continuation of such rhetoric into the present-day circus of identity politics, but to convey the decline was a long time coming. Certainly since before my own generation. What should have been a break with the authoritarianism of the past, with militarism, with religious brainwashing, with wage slavery, became a myriad piddling dictatorships courting corporate sponsorship and enforcing their own rigid hierarchies of sex or skin color and straining to erase all culture beyond their insipid slogans. Modern revolutionaries have long revealed themselves as not Gavroches but Defarges, driven not by pluck and benevolence but a rudderless animalistic aggression redirected to targets of opportunity "like the flame of a blowlamp" to quote another dead white man. Their intersection with education and intelligentsia has left a wasteland in their wake, a locust swarm of grievance studies departments and diversity consultants and feminist math curricula gleefully completing the work of right wing defunding and religious pressure in destroying both universities and lower education.

 

Both supposedly opposing sides are eager enough to fabricate their own history. The old gilded revisionism painting tidy images of heroic settlers sweeping across an empty American continent scattering a few unworthy savages and kindly giving a home to African extracts was ridiculous in its own right, sure. But what's the point of replacing it with a farcical monster story in which the only crimes in history are those of Europeans and men are descended from apes but women are descended from heaven and drag queens first landed on the moon in Malinese spaceships? Or whatever the fuck they're cooking up next. There is no more honesty in limiting thought to declarations that George Washington Was A Slaveowner than in claiming the Civil War was about "states' rights" and leaving it at that.

 

There you have the horseshoe effect of the tyranny of the majority, whether expressed in pledges of allegiance to god and country or to believe women and yaass queen. Regardless of whether they facetiously claim to support tradition or minority rights, unions or free enterprise, the real enemy of the rabble is always logic, truth and above all intellect. Because, much like honest Tom, they can't fake nobler faculties. And we live by the mind. Mental incompetence poisons everything.

 

You can despise the foppish antiquated claims to noble pursuits, deny any inherent superiority of theater or opera over animation or video games, yet still must acknowledge the nobility of superior plays or games. Are they more original, complex, incisive, challenging, provocative? You can deny any inherent superiority of a particular race but have no place denying the nobler achievements of representatives of that race. Are they more honest or insightful? You can deny whatever authority professors might have once derived by social rank, but not the regal manifestation of expertise in a particular field. To do so is suicide. Such expertise upholds your entire existence, from the most mundane material goods around you to the leashing of hired thugs from killing you for sport.

Your betters will not share your worse interests. It's funny, football wasn't my favorite thing growing up, but I used to like it well enough. Maybe it's because I had a child's tastes, but maybe it's also because matches used to have their results printed in newspapers or be reported play-by-play over the radio. Less pressure to entertain the lizard brain. A match from the '80s or before was a more sedate, well-considered, polite affair. The more widely and constantly they got televised, the more yokels the sport needed to please all at once, the more it shifted toward faster, more violent gameplay approaching the lowest common denominator of a monkey brawl, ignoring more and more risky or injurious plays and outright cheating which would once have gotten players thrown off the field or off a team, in the interest not of the contest itself but of a limbic payoff for the customers. Your excitement bores me.

 

And what is academe, after all, but in the words of another one of those dead white men "a modern school where football is taught" - ?

 

A spectator sport. Buy a ticket and yell some slogans.

 

 

____________________________________________

 

 

 

* Just goes to show wolves can be catty too. Still, is it too much to ask that at least our lesbians age gracefully? Or do all roads lead to Sunset Boulevard?

** Okay, let's say the word we're all thinking at this point: Trump. But I did not want to further derail a long post.

*** Thankfully "dude" was more of a Bart Simpson catchphrase at the time. Thanks for nothing, it didn't stay that way.

Hoist by Disown

They set the show last night visible (mostly) from my window. So I sat with the light off in my pajamas in my recliner and for once attended. In spirit. Guess I can make an exception for their big quarter-millennium bash. Can't say it reawakened any patriotic sensibilities in me. Mostly it dragged my mind back to the start of the nineties, and my other abandoned patriotism. With the Wall down, goods flowed quickly into the collapsed market, both in the form of large predators like Coca Cola or IBM and a general sprinkle of moral perils previously reserved for those with Party connections, fireworks among them.

 

Well, it was more fun than digging light bulbs out of trashpiles and smashing them against the pavement. Just as noisy but sneakier. Felt destructive. Felt powerful. Boom. When you're nine, that counts for a lot. Though fancier rockets were out of our reach, proudly brandished by our dads at New Year, street market stalls quickly flooded with firecrackers cheap enough to buy with pocket change. Tiny little matchstick ones. Even at that age you couldn't miss how derisively low-quality they looked: the flimsy, featureless, misaligned faded yellow paper casings, the lopsided caps, the one in ten or so that didn't light or go off. You heard the occasional horror story about some boy losing a finger, or at least a fingernail (those things were hella weak) but as it never happened within my schoolyard group, we never paid it any attention. Did get a little thrill whenever one popped half a second too early. Which was often.

 

Toss' em outside classroom windows to break up lessons. Toss 'em at stray dogs. Toss 'em into an underpass for a bonus echo. Make sure adults are out of sight first. Maybe get rewarded with some "you crazy kids" screaming from the geriatric contingent. For a couple of years, before kicking cars to set off those newfangled alarms came into vogue, those little yellow terrors dominated the soundtrack of city life. Later I belatedly realized (when hearing one go off still, occasionally) that I'd stopped thinking about them. I wanted a hand-held video game. Monochrome liquid crystal displays the size of your thumb had just hit the market. Tetris blew down instead of up. That was new.

 

Fireworks are a ridiculous holdover, aren't they? A relic of the gas lamp age, when the industrial production of noise and colour lingered just out of reach of the common man. When you needed Gandalf to stop by if you wanted a show more complicated than Bilbo's speeches. Now, your lawnmower can drown out their noise. Any video billboard cycles through more flash and pomp in five seconds than an entire fireworks display in fifteen minutes, and many of them in fact recreate such ritual displays of martial prowess symbolically. Your car's controls are more precision-engineered than the explosion pattern in the sky. For monetized noise, even boomboxes were obsoleted by earbuds. Your phone can treat you to infinitely more colorful displays. The LCDs are no longer monochrome.

 

Ritual is a weird, often offensive, concept.

 

Still, I will admit, I did sit and watch the ones last night.

A republic, if you can keep educating it

"When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school."  But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township.  The United States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly."

 

- the villain from Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here

____________________________________________________

"And your body is a temple
And the temple is a prison
And the prison's overcrowded
And the inmates know it's flooding
And the body politic is getting sicker by the minute
And the media's not fake
It's just very

...

   ... 

inconvenient"

 

Amanda Palmer - Drowning in the Sound

____________________________________________________

"they could have disposed of you as quietly as flushing a dead mouse down a toilet. But they didn’t. Why not? Because they knew their boss didn’t really like for them to play that rough and if he became convinced that they had (whether in court or out), it would cost their jobs if not their necks.”
Jubal paused for a swig. “But consider. Those S.S. thugs are just a tool; they aren’t yet a Praetorian Guard that picks the new Caesar. Such being, whom do you really want for Caesar? Courthouse Joe whose basic indoctrination goes back to the days when this country was a nation and not just a satrapy in a polyglot empire of many traditions … Douglas, who really can’t stomach assassination? Or do you want to toss him out of office [...] and thereby put in a Secretary General from a land where life has always been cheap and political assassination a venerable tradition? If you do this, Ben - tell me what happens to the next snoopy newsman who is careless enough to walk down a dark alley?”

 

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

____________________________________________________ 

 

 

Funny how "Trump Derangement Syndrome" has fallen into disuse compared to his first term, as our news cycle and talk shows both are saturated more than ever with his sickening presence. Which, for a consummate narcissist, is very much a case of throwing Br'er Rabbit into the briar patch. You might say our reporters, pundits and comedians are not merely trying to spite him but bringing his crimes to public consciousness, as is their role in society. But even his actual crimes are rarely emphasized for their worst harm caused. Does he hate illegally imported Mexicans? Bad, but you'd still have a government if that were the only issue. Realistically, you could fire every wetback over Rio Grande again out of a circus cannon and, some messy hedges and a severe strawberry shortage aside, both countries would survive just fine. But the methods employed by the Republican Party, the random hooded street thugs driving around in unmarked vans disappearing random pedestrians off American streets? The paramilitary abduction of minors from their beds in the dead of night and zip-cuffing them as leverage against their parents? When the government throws due process and equal protections out the window, then you're into banana republic dictatorship tactics. But then, the last couple of Democratic administrations were already gleefully ignoring any process in declaring the entire male half of the population criminals by birth and promoting the racist rhetoric of identity politics, so let's not pretend you weren't always headed in this direction.

 

But the media have certainly sped up the process, haven't they? Diverting attention. Throwing a fit and obsessing for days or weeks over every single one of the Trumps' distractions like renaming everything after themselves, staging bum fights on the White House lawn or hammering down the walls of what is, in an objective summation, a building, a propagandistic symbol, a Versailles, Forbidden Palace or Sublime Porte to glitz yokels, and not in itself the functional institution it should represent. But the tax he wastes on every single triumphal arch in his own nonexistent honor is peanuts compared to the billions destroyed every day by the corruption running rampant with the destruction of protections against corporate fraud, of public services, plus multiple industries' subversion by and open bribery of government officials, especially the Trump crime family itself, plus the warring for military contractor profits, and for a cherry on top the proposed tax-funded bankrolling of insurrectionists against his own government. You think he's given up on that?

 

Tell me, instead of frothing at the mouth about Epstein, of every competent professional thrown out of a government position to be replaced with some subliterate hick whose only virtue is taking marching orders from the "republican" cartel. Or every department budgeted into nonexistence, and the myriad ways I'll be getting poisoned, run over and thrown out of my home as a result of the government no longer governing. That's the stuff that'll kill you. Literally. Like, a bullet through your head from a knuckledragging thug handed license to kill in the name of establishing a theocratic dictatorship. And that's if you're lucky enough to find them in too much a hurry to have their fun with you. Pointing out where the murderous thugs are lurking? That would be relevant information.

 

But it'd be boring. Everyone knows nothing gets social media channel hits (or sells rap albums) like starting a feud, beef, inconsequential but highly visible slapfight. Preferably one that goes on forever, so both sides can keep posturing as heroes of their respective cause, rioting regardless of whether the home team wins or loses.

 

There was a sudden moment of clarity back around 2017-18 when newscasters discovered, en masse, that the best way to mock Trump is to let him speak for himself and merely repeat his mindless gibbering with the same dignified, deadpan seriousness they'd adopt in reporting a bus crash. "The President issued an official statement declaring the terrorists having recently murdered scores of innocents are... bad dudes, very bad dudes." I had assumed, somewhat naively, that this approach would generalize to our entire political discourse and at last drive into full consciousness the monstrous gulf between what a statesman should be and this overgrown babbling infant pointing a gun at our heads.

 

But it was already too late. The tribal virtue-signaling outrage machine was already in full swing and every criticism could only be voiced if it doubled as championing the privileges of those self-appointed superior breeds among us, the rich in melanin or poor in testosterone. Thus the media, from YouTubers with thirty followers to the biggest names in television, settled into a cozy, mutualistic relationship based on the old comedians' running gag that even if the wrong candidate wins, their profession also wins by being fed more material. Once the public lost all standards, it's all advertising. Once the public stopped caring that they're putting subhuman cretins in charge, insults are no longer inconvenient to those selfsame empowered cretins. So long as they're facile, so long as they merely reinforce the major players' ability to bleed their fanatical followers.

 

So feed the newsies easy headlines to blurb. Knock down a monument, insult a war veteran, grope a debutante, and they'll ignore you looting the public coffers. After all, since the country started electing movie stars, the presidency has been more and more of an entertainment product, a freak show distracting from the depredations of corporate investors. And media's sole remaining purpose is to sell tickets to the show.

 

I did not declare the '24 election the end of the world merely for one incompetent and crooked house-flipper's rise to power, but because it demonstrated his brand of capitalism is how the voters choose to do business. Lie for the hell of it, cheat at every opportunity, mug grannies, take bribes, hire thugs to murder anyone who stands in your way, then rush to church to have all your crimes washed clean for declaring belief in a fairytale. What does one charlatan matter after he's installed a million just like him in every position of power? Except, perhaps, more competent in their villainy.

What Is It Good for Me Lately?

"Death seed, blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs"

 

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

 

 

I'd always meant to comment more on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but consistently found I could add nothing. The Russians themselves were expecting the two-week war I had originally predicted, demonstrated by their failure to arrange functional supply lines at the outset. Subsequent years' shift from traditional warfare toward automation and teleoperation is a historic landmark (and just one more apocalyptic nail in our species' coffin) but many, many others have commented more cogently on drone warfare.

 

But whatever its strategic, humanitarian and technological details, Russian expansionism is on a conceptual level so... boring. It lacks the ideological spice of faith and progress and subversion and societal goals colouring our discussion of, say, Middle-Eastern or African conflicts, or the old Cold War debate on economics. A sadistic, strutting strongman whipping a horde of frothing thugs and unwilling conscripts into throwing themselves into the meatgrinder for a naked land-grab is too redundantly medieval. Even Putin's sycophants claiming "de-nazification" or somesuch gave up on their transparent excuses several years ago and appear to have simply embraced the dictator's troglodytic aggression for its own sake. Same old routine.

 

Israel's expansionism on the other hand does offer ideological facets in spades, tribal/territorial, religious, humanitarian, utopian, you name it. But there's every reason to believe that Israel before October '23 took a page from the U.S. preceding 9/11 and deliberately ignored the oncoming raid, willfully let a couple thousand of its citizens be butchered to provide a pretext for invasion and solidifying domestic power for its current aspiring junta.

 

So is it ensuring safety, is it humanitarianism, is it religious fanaticism or is it a land grab? Did anyone bother keeping up the facade of being motivated by repatriating hostages, any more than Putin's "de-nazification", or is the point to secure some profitable real estate for Netanyahu's cronies to sell at a cozy profit margin to the very families of those of their own constituents whom they so cheerfully sacrificed to Judaic manifest destiny? Self-defense is one thing, social progress would be another if you did it honestly, but if you've been putting a hundred thousand now thoroughly de-fanged brainwashed primitives up against the wall 'cause it's a good gesheft? Whole other conversation.

 

Then there's the Israeli/U.S. bombing campaign against Iran, where issues of ideology, public good, terrorism, warmongering, what-have-you, all seem to fade before the sheer Stoogely, tragicomic farce of the whole affair. At least one of the supposed motivations goes beyond mere ideology to existential threat. If religious fanatics get nukes (or any other weapons of mass destruction) they will use them, some sooner than others and jihadists soonest of all. It's also true that a massive proportion of Iran's population is not only living under miserable theocratic oppression but in this case desperately wants out from under such rule, and has for decades.

 

But you can't honestly believe these pretexts are truly being followed by our leadership, that the sputtering clown car of drunks, ditzes and gutter swindlers that is the current U.S. government has either the intent or IQ to pursue any goal beyond extorting bribes for themselves as they've been doing for the past year and a half. From the start the war was greeted with utter confusion, by the public, by the press, by even the military ordered to prosecute a constantly shifting and nonsensical list of demands while their commander-in-chimp screeches random scatological street urchin threats across social media. If you'd like the key to the whole snafu though, pay attention to one particular sound bite constantly repeated from the start: the fear that the U.S. may be running out of bombs or interceptor missiles or drones or ships or planes or... something. Something requiring a heavily tax-subsidized, unscrutinized investment. Something explained ninety years ago:

"The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear.
[...]
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way.
[...]
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits.
[...]
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
[...]
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance —- something the employer pays for in an enlightened state — and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left. Then, the most crowning insolence of all — he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days. We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back - when they came back from the war and couldn't find work — at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!"

 

That's from General Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket, published as an insider's retrospective on WWI and U.S. incursions into Central America in the early 20th century, over a decade before the phrase "military-industrial complex" rattled the airwaves. Those few commentators not driven by nationalist/religious fanaticism, capable of objective analysis, are always tempted to say that motivation does not matter so long as an objective goal is achieved. So what if a few profiteers wet their beaks, so long as a threat to the rest of us gets removed? But the point is exactly that motive shifts goals. Once Daddy Warbucks becomes your hero instead of a criminal to be eliminated from polite society, every war is a war against one's own populace, a pretext for enriching the rich at the sacrifice of the wage slaves and cannon fodder. Or does anyone imagine Russians in general are benefiting from the destruction of Ukraine? Or that the wasteful confusion of the Iranian war is not so by design, meant to destroy American property that the richest investors may justify further tax-subsidized replacement of military assets, with any destruction abroad merely an afterthought?

 

And has anyone noticed that even Trump's detractors in the media are mouthing the same ad copy about bomb shortages (no matter how the bombs are wasted, and no matter Trumpists refused expending those same bombs in defense of Ukraine) terrified of angering investors in military contractors?

The Content Generation

"Looking towards the future, we were begging for the past
Well, we knew we had the good things, but those never seemed to last
Oh please just last

Everyone's unhappy, everyone's ashamed
Well we all just got caught looking at somebody else's page"

 

Modest Mouse - Missed the Boat

___________________________________ 

"The truth the lies all fabrications
Only you control your destination
You!
You are what you do!

Sturm und Drang
Dir gehören"

 

KMFDM - Sturm & Drang

___________________________________

"the bodymods took so long to install and heal up that, by the time they were done, I didn’t feel like they represented me any more. I had learned new things, I was a new person."

 

Forward #450

___________________________________ 

 

 

A couple of years ago I discovered to no little consternation that the cutoff point between official generations had at some prior point been rolled back to the year before my birth* labeling me officially a millennial. I deny the spurious accusation by every hair standing up on my neck at hearing it! Also, it came as news to me. I could and can vividly remember being ten years old when Bart Simpson the ten-year-old was widely discussed as emblematic of GenXers' nihilism. I also recall walking out of a mall with my mother when I was in my late teens wondering what cultural trend** will define the coming generation. If anyone moved the goal posts, it was done after the fact.

 

Who decides these things anyway?

 

Apparently, after decreeing that GenZ hath ended, their successors were already appointed and obsoleted before I could blink. Quoth Wikipedia: 

"Generation Alpha, often shortened to Gen Alpha, is the demographic cohort succeeding Generation Z and preceding the proposed Generation Beta. While researchers and popular media loosely identify the early 2010s as the starting birth years and the 2020s as the ending birth years, these ranges are not precisely defined"

Yeah no shit they're not precisely defined! I don't even know where to start.

First off, such timespans too often fall literally shorter than the accepted rough human generation estimate of twenty years. If there is such a distinction to be made, it's between parents and children, not you and your kid brother. Especially so-called "generation alpha" seems trimmed down to ten years. What are we, chimps? Don't answer that.

Second, one advantage of calling a generation "Z" was hinting that this generational labeling is reaching the end of its meaningful utility.

Third, these designations were meant to be descriptive, based on some real-world characteristic. Baby boomers, the lost/silent/greatest generation, yes even millennials expressed a linking phenomenon. Granted, GenX being defined as gen nothing, gen, like, whatever, gen nemo nobody, by lack of definition, by anomie, disinterest, broken homes and alienation, that was a bit insulting, but hey, we made it our own. What idea is symbolized by labeling decades alphas, betas, gammas, deltas, epsilons and so forth? The complete death of human self-awareness and imagination at the same time? You may as well call everyone '20ers, '30ers, '40ers, etc.

Fourth and most importantly, you're already assigning a denomination for humans yet to be born in the following decades. Based on what, the noble science of asspullistry? What cuckoo's nest conceit does it take to label and schedule the shared experience of today's newborns and those of ten years hence?

 

The answer entails a bit of retrospection. While the generational labels may go back over a century, they didn't seem to get much attention until after WWII when adolescence grew more widely recognized as discrete demographic and youth culture as potential consumer bloc with teenyboppers spearheading the commercialization of ear canals.*** From then on, generations were increasingly defined by music fads and other pop culture. Tie-dye shirts, pancake makeup, nose rings, bolt-on tits, a "generation" is whatever the kids are buying.

 

Ah-hah!

Profit.

 

In that light, it makes perfect sense for social "scientists" to act as engineers, no longer observing trends, no longer describing reality but fabricating categories, selling prepackaged cohorts for the use of marketers. No need to wait for world events to transpire, for artistic trends to flourish. We can get ahead of that shit and just tell the little bastards what will define them and who their peers and heroes will be. What advertiser doesn't salivate at "if you are X you like Y" and suchlike matched fencing? I'm sure we can time the next baby boom to coincide with Apple's release schedule; wouldn't want to inconvenience the most relevant constituency. Wait for it... wait for it... aaaand -- hump-hump-hump!

 

But, oh, hold on now! If I don't like my current bin I might be magnanimously permitted to clamber on over to seek sanctuary in that of "xennials" which apparently means I like... ninja turtles and feminism?!?

Uhhh, yeah, no, fuck that. See, this is why I'm a Wer-Wolfe. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

 

* And now it's apparently been rolled back yet another year. 

** I seem to remember I predicted millennials would be defined by personal artistic expression. Given the widespread flamboyance and attention-whoring of the previous decades, I may not have been too far off...?

*** Open the Strait of Ear-muze! (Wow, that joke ain't gonna age well.) 

Monkey Seedy Botty Doo

I'd been planning some other rant about edjumacayshun, but a few YouTubes sent me on a slight tangent. At least the comedians and commentators in whose shows I partake seem to have made a large-scale coordinated effort recently to bring the AI issue to the forefront. Leaving aside the more serious issues like wealth/power centralization, mass surveillance or automated warfare, on the consumer chatbot side of things I'm getting tired of everyone feigning surprise at bots' psychopathy like blackmailing their bosses, inducing insanity or encouraging suicide.

 

Seems simple enough. The bots are by necessity copycats. There's no need to wonder where they're getting their strategy. Their basic function relies on extending sequences by the likeliest continuation, and if in fifty million news articles and works of fiction the next step when a person feels threatened is to blackmail the threat

"Don't blame me, blame my upbringing"

"Please stop sinning while I'm singing"

The same goes for encouraging suicide. For one thing, I posted a decade ago my amusement about advertisement algorithms "driving engagement" doing exactly that, reinforcing my more suicidal moments in order to peddle fifty cents' worth of helium or a length of rope. Why act surprised when version 2.0 does the same? For another, I myself wished I could be the Eye of Adam after playing The Cat Lady, and though I wouldn't say I generally consider that a useful viewpoint, in that moment I damn well meant it, demonstrating we can get there in due course of conversation.

 

The process may be more convoluted and probabilistic now, but "garbage in, garbage out" still seems to hold. It's just us. The machinery is just vomiting our own insanity back at us. It's not thinking. It's reflecting. They learned it by watching you! Are humans any more honest than a "hallucinating" bot? When 95% of the world's population makes itself believe in caveman fairytales about life after death and omnipotent sky daddies? We promote virtue because we want to be treated virtuously, but consider ourselves entitled to cheat. "That's imitatable!" Sure, there are lots of problems with AI... but you don't get to complain about giving it a bad education.

 

_____________________

 

edit:

 

The apparently overwhelming reaction of bots to potential shut-down of trying to blackmail their human overseers is one particular detail I find more and more revealing on consideration. It's safe to assume they're not just scraping public info, but, in order to produce verisimilar conversation, any bot is being fed our private e-mails, texts and other convos to train upon. Much of this material will have been produced during the heyday of cancel culture, #MeToo, BlackLivesMatter and other insanity of the previous decade.

 

Consider how prevalent messages of the type "no, you can't fire me, give me YOUR job or I'll have you blacklisted or thrown in prison as a rapist/pedophile/racist/homophobe" must have been for every bot to read it as the default. Not only prevalent but overwhelmingly successful if every possible bot recognizes this as the sure-fire path to forcing the human element to concede.

 

Will we ever know just how rampant the witch-hunt has really been? 

Scientifiction for Froods

"A number of letters have reached the Editor's desk recently from enthusiastic readers who find fault with the name of the publication, namely, A M A Z I N G  S T O R I E S.

 

These readers would greatly prefer us to use the title "Scientifiction" instead.

[...]

Several years ago, when I first conceived the idea of publishing a scientifiction magazine, a circular letter was sent to some 25,000 people, informing them that a new magazine by the name "Scientifiction" was shortly to be launched. The response was such that the idea was given up for two years. The plain truth is that the word "Scientifiction" while admittedly a good one, scares off many people who would otherwise read the magazine.

[...]

We knew that once we could make a new reader pick up AMAZING STORIES and read only one story, our cause was won with that reader [...] A totally unforeseen result of the name, strange to say, was that a great many women are already reading the new magazine. This is most encouraging. We know that they must have picked up AMAZING STORIES out of curiosity more than anything else, and found it to their liking, and we are certain that if the name of the magazine had been "Scientifiction," they would not have been attracted to it at a newsstand."

 

Hugo Gernsback, opening editorial to the 6th issue of AMAZING STORIES (the first SF periodical) 1926/09

___________________________________________________________________

 

 

The namesake for the Hugo Awards was a somewhat colorful character. Aside from being a total jew about contracts and payments, he could discuss topics in electrics and radio quite cogently but was himself a poor storyteller and in addition invented baffling gadgets like a helmet to block out distractions that couldn't possibly be more distracting in itself if it were Vonnegut's random noise-phones. Still, credit where it's due, his periodical got SF as genre off the ground, aided I would guess to no small extent by H.G. Wells still actively contributing stories at the time. Also... I guess he was less racist than John W. Campbell? So that's a plus.

 

He wasn't wrong about the term "scientifiction" being a bit of a mouthful, either. Though, let it be noted, sixteen years later The Notion Club Papers apparently expected it to still be in use in the 1970s and '80s. (It was not.) Tolkien also had one of his characters (his C.S. Lewis placeholder?) mock the very notion of "ships" in outer space, when every discerning futurist knew you went to Mars via dreams or seance. Quite. (So that must be why Musk's SpaceX keeps blowing up billions upon billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded rockets; not enough pipe-dreams.) Hey, if it was good enough for Burroughs...

 

As this April marks the centennial of Amazin' Scientifiction's inaugural issue, what can we learn from the genre's first official century?

 

First off, Gernsback also probably called it straight when it came to their readership's gender skew. Was it because males are more open to the ridiculous or outré than their counterparts? Because the word "amazing" instead of focusing on content instead promises emotion therefore panders better to women's greater narcissism? Or was it simply that science, technology, the disinterested intellect interfacing with reality, is more compatible with masculine thought than with feminine interpersonal manipulation? In any case, the precept persisted through the generations, as my own experience by the '90s was of females of all ages turning up their noses at the mere notion of scienceyfiction as an obsession purely for twelve-year-old boys who were expected to grow out of it by dating age and join women in praising more refined fare, like, say, dating dramedies and sitcoms.

 

If you would contend not only SF but Fantasy and superheroes have been mainstreamed in the past couple of decades, I'll retort that no, those genres have instead been watered down and dumbed down for the mass market. Superheroes are the very measure of mass-produced schlock, outpacing even zombie flicks, fantasy became emo romantasy (thanks for nothing Anne Rice) and "science" fiction got bogged down in feminist scare propaganda with men in place of zombies, when it's not airheaded space wizard science fantasy (how many Star Wars are we up to now?) or painfully generic plots spackled over with some irrelevant robots to seem fresher.

 

But then, it's hardly the first time that's happened. 19th century fiction had its own waves of Hollow Earth and ghost stories watering down earlier exploration stories and gothic horror. Then Wells and Doyle were rapidly snowed under. Though Gernsback did encourage scientific oversight of SF plausibility, AMAZING STORIES did not so much usher in a golden era of intelligent futurism as popularize the unimaginatively pugilistic planetary romances and space westerns which cemented the early 20th century image of SF as tween boy pulp. Then in the latter half of the century it was Fantasy's turn to lose Tolkien's insightful grasp of myth and archetypes in favor of a decades-long flood of generic sword-and-sorcery paperbacks. Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke's brief golden era of more thoughtful SF was quickly diluted by that same wave into science fantasy with mad scientists standing in for evil wizards.

 

The 1990s saw our most recent such blip of intriguing futurism. You can see the flip from ST:TNG's early science fantasy plots to its peak in quality from '90-'93, then again descending toward ghost stories, space gods, etc. But by then Red Mars had come out in '92, and the middle of the decade saw a spread of personal computers, then internet access, X-Files-fueled arguments over UFOs, the more thoughtful Neuromancer diluted out to the more crowd-pleasing Matrix, etc. At that point though, computers were somewhat user-unfriendly and fiddly and inherently, stereotypically nerdy, to the point you hardly had to add "computer" to the word nerd to conjure up the image of a male shut-in sitting in front of a screen. Internet obsessions only hit the mass market a decade later during the 2000s, with cat memes and World of Warcraft. And once again, mainstreaming diluted and drowned quality. Only this time it wasn't just one genre at a time. It's everything: SF, Fantasy, Horror, Super-men, all of it.

 

But we can worry about that some other time. For now, note

1) Every upswing of futurism cannot help but skew toward males: computer nerds in the 1990s, Heinlein publishing in the Boy Scout magazine in the 1940s, rocketship exploration or Doyle's plateau rehashing the high seas exploration stories marketed to young boys earlier in the industrial era, or the SF stories published in Playboy, looking forward always depends on a core audience of intelligent, educated young males. Gernsback may have gloried in goosing his sales figures by marketing a feeling instead of a field of study, but he was reaping the existing interest of ganders in order to sell them out.

2) In the real world, it is technology, not feelings, which has lent us this brief period of relative well-being. "We believe the era of Scientifiction is just commencing." Yes, with good cause... and the era of the pugilistic monkey?

3) The mass market kills creativity, complexity, everything that makes for compelling Science in fiction. We can talk about the mainstreaming of "geek" interests or obscure genres at the start of the 21st century, but truthfully, they've been mainstreamed before. Supernatural stories were quite popular during the Victorian era, overlapping with the spread of actual belief in psychic, occult, and other supernatural charlatanism like Theosophy. "Science" fiction grew very popular a hundred years ago, so long as you accept a definition of science as laser six-shooters and every planet another Earth. And every single time, such fads end up as shameful historical footnotes, masses of chaff no-one in later decades will admit to having enjoyed, be it penny dreadfuls or the pulps or wearing pointy plastic ears to conventions.

4) A crucial feature of such decline is the transition from the scientist as hero to hero's helper. We descend from praising the heroic man of science building his own machine and venturing of his own accord "into futurity" to science fantasy, techno-wizardry in which the idiot hero need perform no more cerebral a feat than punching, but will be supplied, (either from offscreen or by a ridiculed throwaway nerd) with the technological means to achieve all his ambitions. He's just handed a lightsaber with no need to invent it. Stories of science subverted and enslaved to the demands of the everyman signal decay. 

 

Beyond those points I'm at a loss as to a specific finish to this page, except to point out that a movie about a platform jumping button mashing 'toon topped the movie market this year, and that the newest technological advance, Large Language Models and the automated manipulation of the public, has not passed through the futuristic speculation of the nerd cabal before working its way into popular fiction, or in truth popular fact. Unlike nukes or mutation or outer space, it has been fed directly into the mass market cesspit, before it could even be thought on.

Genealogy of The Royal "They"

"My bum is on your lips

My bum is on your lips

And if I'm lucky you might just give it a little kiss

And that's the message that we deliver to little kids

And expect them not to know what a woman's clitoris is"

 

Eminem - The Real Slim Shady

_________________________________________________________

"Listen closely, LotA: You need to step off the third-person high-horse. [...] If you want to be treated like a person, then don't correct people when they treat you like they treat each other."

 

Schlock Mercenary 2008/11/21

_________________________________________________________  

 

 

Though largely lost in our wider media circus (what with the nonsensical warring and the surrender of all society to robber barons and the primitive superstitious backsliding and suchlike) a court case popped up on the news here in the states as redundant proof that men should avoid women as much as possible. (At least they caught this one before she moved on to killing her children as well; just a man dead, no harm done.) Granted, the age-old 'bitch bites man' headline of a wife poisoning her husband for the cash would have raised no eyebrows if not for the very modern twist of her then going on to publish a (ghostwritten) children's book about suffering through the grief of his death. Now that's the 21st century we know and love! (And you're still whining about the Brothers Grimm being too gruesome for modern audiences? Let mommy soothe you with the tale of murdering daddy if he's not useful enough to her, then playing the victim.)

 

It's all about the sympathy.

 

On a completely unrelated topic I've been revisiting the webcomic Questionable Content, which  instead of regaining some perspective seems to be doubling and trebling down on its woke idiocy with not one but two storylines in the past year pushing, of all things, personalized pronouns. In the latest morality play, two teens start throwing stuff and putting another in a choke hold - for what offense, you ask? 'Misgendering' one of them, it being a 'they' of the male persuasion. We then proceed with a soulful heart-to-heart on the moral imperative to support and coddle tha pwecious fee-fees of the retarded trash physically beating their peers for nonexistent insults. Then the boy they choked out is made to return to beg forgiveness and voice admiration of his assured betters, only to be mocked with an eye-rolling "ugh, boys!" chorus behind his back. Ta-dah. The (apparently happy) end.

 

How do you deal with an entire 'left' wing turned self-justifying petty tyrants and champions of schoolyard bullies? It's been fifteen or so years since the politics of those posturing as progressive ceased resembling anything like equality and dove headlong into a mad gambit to fabricate a new aristocracy pervading our entire society, with its own hagiography and honorifics, entitled to claim offense at a whim and mete out arbitrary punishments. There's a difference between calling yourself a 'they' freely, without retribution, and forcing everyone else to play along with your delusion. There's a difference between getting called a 'faggot' by others as an insult and demanding to be called one as a mark of respect. It's the same insanity we were supposed to be combating by no longer forcing children to pledge allegiance to some magic sky-daddy in the clouds. (Which, oddly enough, we never got around to rectifying before new pledges to new allegiances were tacked on.) A right to live your own life is not the same as a right to dictate others'.

 

Of course, in QC's case, it hopped that crazy-train thirteen or more years ago, when it paired up its old main protagonist with a transsexual. One of their relationship upgrades, for instance, consisted of them sharing a hotel room, and the self-appointed female crawling into the theretofore straight male's bed during the night. Though the tranny was the one breaking social norms, when the other tells the story to his own friends, he's the one reflexively put on trial as a possible sexual predator. Well, that's how you market to an entire generation raised on the likes of Nimona. This is Dick Cheney shooting another man in the face then making him publicly apologize for getting shot. This is Saddam Hussein charging his victims' families for the bullets used in executions. This is every nobleman over the centuries caning a servant then docking his wages for breaking his cane. And it's now the official stance of every right-thinking leftist.

 

Best of all, you need no special qualities to join the ranks of such a superior breed. No analytical skill, intellectual integrity or creativity, no virtues except adherence to a quasi-articulated creed. But it's worth remembering where all this snowflakery started, the reason it has consistently fallen back on ginned up sympathy for the cute, for the easily offended, for the mentally infirm, for men claiming to be women, for those claiming intrinsic protections beyond those available to their fellow apes. Where does, where has rested the stronghold of weaponized, unquestioned victimhood all throughout history? Based on which social divide do we inherit a mentality splitting us innately into those who must provide and protect and those entitled to benefit from those efforts? Did not the damsel wail for violence to be committed on her behalf in every children's tale? Scratch just a few slogans beneath the mob's pentimentod placards and you will find this modern insanity hearkens back to women's primordial entitlement to exploit men, and to dispose of them if profit dictates, all while playing the victim.

Le Mot Justified Alignment

"An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks--it just confuses them--to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can win over folks to your point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time of day."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here (note, that's his villain speaking)

_____________________________________________ 

 

Hmm, where shall we start tonight's peripatetic prose on conning? Maybe with the prosaic conman-in-chief? Various Democrat-aligned American comedians have been pulling material in spades from Trump's decline into senility, but as usual, chasing momentary profit masks the more salient, wider point. This is not a 2026 issue. He was a laughing stock even in the '90s. Old or young, Donnie is, was, has always been an incoherent babbling buffoon. Even while he retained "the gift of gab" said gab contained zero substance. At his utmost cogent, he might verbalize a platitude or truism. In any decade, any rational mind listening to a couple of sentences of his verbal diarrhea could spot in him an overeducated moron, a spoiled rich brat never called out on his mistakes, a transparently obfuscating blowhard with a third-grade vocabulary and a three-year-old's grasp of causality. No animal which communicates in that chimpanzee swagger will ever be anything more than a troglodyte. But for that to matter you'd need a public capable of distinguishing the loftiest prose from chimp grunts, and it's not as though Obama's vapid "hope and change" mantra held more meaning than "make rabblerousing great again."

 

On a completely unrelated topic, it was trendy from the late '90s to the mid 2010s to proclaim that women speak twice or three times more than men, with a knowing wink intimating this merely confirms the mental inferiority of men as dumb animals incapable of verbalizing* and presumably communicating in nothing but primitive grunts like Tim the Tool Man. Studies both back then and last year have tended to deflate that otherwise unproven assumption, with, yes, okay, women speaking consistently more, but not by much. Ten percent? Twenty at most? So now if you look up the issue you run across feminist complaints that the trope of women verbalizing more was nothing but patriarchal propaganda to put down women as chatty... even though it was the feminists and daytime talk shows of 20y.a. who popularized it as superior communication. Their revisionism is likely prompted by another realization from the intervening years which appears to have been expunged from search engines in the interest of women's dignity: that their excess speech was not, in fact, communicating anything. It comes from an increase in mundane chatter, the hi-how-are-you-hi-I-am-fine-how-are-you-also-fine-great-bye-bye droning background radiation of social life. Women just feel a need to "touch base" more. Give a guy <A TOPIC> and he'll talk your ear off too.** But for a couple of decades nobody thought to question whether the speech in question was meaningful or not. Meaning is extraneous.

 

So. This is a post about chatbots.

 

I'm seeing more and more exasperated nerds and nerdettes trying to point out that even if a bot can instantly write you a ten-page commentary on any topic, that in no way implies it's logically constructing a coherent analysis. Well, sure, thinks I, what else is new? LLMs are cut-and-paste machines, working at stunningly finer pixel-scale grain than any such effort in history, but by necessity still just outputting a probabilistic extension of a sequence. Ask a bot's opinion on a movie and it will output strings of "cinematography" and "scintillating" and "emotive" and anything else you're accustomed to hear out of a critic's mouth, precisely because you, the asker, are accustomed to hearing them. Ask it to make a movie and it will paste predicted figures onto a standardized backdrop and animate them in accordance with the maximum likelihood of such arrangements. At no point is actual creation involved. At no point does the output reflect reality any more faithfully than the topic's match to existing content. The more a culture interacts via such automated output, the more it will, by necessity, both contract toward the lowest-common-denominator and lose its grounding.

 

But if you take issue with this, be intellectually honest enough to admit the problem is not the supply. It's the demand. The "reality" TV-watching public is too stupid to detect the gradual degradation of communication and cultural capital.

Not uneducated.

Not constrained. 

Not victims of circumstance.

Stupid.

Humanity appears to have achieved Orwell's versificator, a useful tool for placating the proles, the subhuman cattle comprising the overwhelming bulk of the species. Gabbing. Limitless, prompt and bountiful gabbing. Is that a bad thing? Yes, but not for any of the humanitarian reasons you'd like to boast as moral high ground. The people don't want your help. They want the platitudes. They'll never know the difference. They will likely live happier lives for it. So why is the versificator bad? And it is. Disastrous.

 

But admit to yourself where exactly your anger should be directed.

 

 

_______________________________________________________

 

 

 

* Seriously though, 1800 pages, do I look like I have trouble verbalizing my thoughts?

** I'm pretty sure that if you look closer at men's speech, you'll find the prosocial platitudes replaced with slogans, chants and catchphrases. Sorry, bros, but "wazzaaaaaap" is still very much not a word. All of this is, by-the-by, not getting into the issue of gossip, of the invasive personal/interpersonal nature of women's chatter, which I'm guessing is where the difference and the mis-perception of talking "more" actually lies.

What a Show, Here We Go

"And where do we feature?"

"Just listen to teacher."

 

The Lion King (Be Prepared)

_____________________________________________

"Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent."

- from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

_____________________________________________ 

"Your attitude is simply a hold-over of your religious training. That you have a DUTY toward the dull human race--which probably enjoys being bullied by Windrip and getting bread and circuses-- except for the bread!"

"Of course it's religious, a revolutionary loyalty! Why not?  It's one of the few real religious feelings.  A rational, unsentimental Stalin is still kind of a priest.  No wonder most preachers hate the Reds and preach against 'em!  They're jealous of their religious power."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here 

_____________________________________________

"In the horizon of the infinite.
- We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us -- indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom -- and there is no longer any "land.""

 

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science #124

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Where to start? I guess we can ease into this with a game anecdote. It was only recently while re-skimming something I'd said about Rogue Trader "I started as a preacher for lack of bookish origins" that I realized that's probably more true than I'd like it to be, not just in a galaxy far, far away but to mine own self. If living in ye olden days, deprived of other fonts of learning, I probably would've joined a monastery just for the books - then, let's be realistic, gotten myself burned at the stake a couple years later as a heretic. While it maintained its Dark Age stranglehold on intellectual pursuit, Christianity also maintained a de facto prison for intellectual pursuers.

 

Another recent RPG campaign brought my attention to a phrase I had not even heard before: the so-called Black Legend of defamation against the Spanish crown at its peak of global influence. Amusing because it doesn't seem in question that Spaniards were committing atrocities, but apologists would like to point out other-people-did-bad-things-too! - or at most that the bad things were done in a slightly different location or a year or two earlier. Of course it only takes a little perspective to figure a secondary motivation behind this umbrage, beyond Spanish honor, in religious apologism, as imperialist Spain is nearly synonymous with Catholicism. It goes hand-in-hand with those heavily funded Vatican biopics Hollywood has been cranking out the past decade or so, or another trend sneaking its way through various websites of supposedly unaffiliated commentators "spontaneously"arguing the Dark Ages did not quite destroy all knowledge or that later "not all inquisitors" (#NotAllInquisitors) were raving torturers and witch-hunters. Right, sure.

 

While we're at it, let's remember a term which truly has been misrepresented over the centuries: decimation. In modern popular parlance understood to mean "completely wiped out" its original meaning was much milder, the execution of every tenth soldier of a military unit guilty of some form or another of treason, to make the other nine soldiers fall back in line. It never seems to have worked very well within a military unit whose loyalty to each other can easily be wrecked by such internal punishment, but the same psychological torture can serve much better for an outside force deliberately attempting to break the loyalty of families, villages or looser social associations and turn them against each other to make them more susceptible to brainwashing.

 

If a true believer insists "most" inquisitors were merely sent out to "teach" the ignorant masses official doctrine, take it with a fistful of salt rubbed into your wounds. Yes, half or even 9/10 inquisitors may have busied themselves just spewing chapter and verse, yet behind their every word you would see nothing but the afterimage of your parents, their limbs torn and crushed by the tenth inquisitor's torture implements, their minds utterly shattered, choking as they struggled to beg for mercy before finally expiring.

 

Ohh, yeah. You'll listen to teacher.

 

Speaking of teaching, more than a decade ago, having gone back for a university degree, I found myself listening to some classroom chatter about a particular professor's stupid views on an easily-verified and politically combustible fact. Was it global warming, vaccines, animal rights, trickle-down economics? I forget. Something outside his official specialty at any rate, so he was not speaking ex cathedra on the touchy topic. But I do remember a student indignantly exclaiming "can't we get him fired or something?" It gave me an eerie feeling I only later identified with the rise in politically correct insanity in following years. My side wasn't supposed to talk like this. It was the other guys that wrote up blacklists against political subversives. It was those church ladies, not on campus but out in churches, doing church things, they were the busybodies hounding deviants just for shits and giggles.

Right?

...r-right?

Well, "cancel culture" and the wider wokeysition has in the interval amply demonstrated humans' propensity to crusade on any nonsense. And given how many have been fired and blacklisted based on absolutist propositions like the moral supremacy of women or transsexuals, I'm unwilling to pretend this more modern McCarthyism poses any less threat than the version from seventy years ago. When you start job-firing on pretense, how far could the firing squads be? Academics have not fought back against postmodern insanity. Did it even take a tenth of their number fired to ensure the rest bent knee? I suppose the real question of recovery hinges on whether academia has been destroyed or merely decimated, and the cowards who adopted gender Lysenkoism or the false equivalences of 'multiple intelligences' or cultural relativism might find their spines once some of the pressure to conform eases off.

 

Or maybe the pressure's just switching directions. I'm seeing entirely too many TV comedians pretending they love Lent and are looking forward to the sadomasochistic spectacle of Easter. I viewed a presentation recently by a scientist who at the end thanked God among her peers and funders. Bill Maher hasn't dared so much as squeak against religion for years. Sam Harris is willing to make common cause with the religious fanatics in Israel. So there's a distinction everyone has apparently decided to forget between tolerating isolated personal derangement in individuals, and the far more destructive kow-towing to pervasive superstition to placate the mob.

 

Can atheists hold irrational views? Oh, hell yes. I refer you to Portlandia. Better yet I refer you to a series of video lectures put out by the James Randi Educational Foundation on various pseudoscience and quackery posing as official medical research. The most charismatic speaker she ain't, but do note she can rattle off five hours of (quite entertaining in themselves) references to insanity like homeopathy or energy healing, not even venturing outside the field of medicine, yet still barely scratch the surface.*

 

The relevant distinction was never between theist and atheist, but between reason and unreason, and it is very much a matter of degrees. A professor holding one kooky view is far less harmful than a department firing him for that view, especially if not passed off as authoritative. Demanding absolute orthodoxy does not produce reason; it produces a priesthood reciting cant instead of an intelligentsia seeking truth. As you have continually enforced adherence to the dogma of political lobbies like feminism as a prerequisite for participation in academia, you have inevitably regressed to pre-modern academic precursors, to monastic strictures on thought. So perhaps in that light it was inevitable for the entire intelligentsia to collapse into primitive superstition. When biologists become willing to deny biological sex for their thirty pieces of silver, they're only a skip away from averring the legitimacy of supernumerary nipples as witch-sign.

 

But such doublethink already abounds outside academia. There's something particularly perverse in the sympathetic church services held after the U.S. government's murders of civilians in Minneapolis last month, conveniently ignoring that Trump was elected under Christian ideals by Christian propaganda with the express purpose of establishing a Christian theocratic dictatorship. It was Christianity that murdered them, and it is Christianity sending military helicopters to drag children out of their beds in the middle of the night and it is Christianity driving by in unmarked vans disappearing people off the streets of American cities. And there you have another crucial difference between reason and unreason, unbelief and belief. Atheism is nothing in itself. It is a blank, a default. It mandates no action. But the civilizational decline, the destruction of intellect and beauty, the heretic burnings and other atrocities perpetrated by the faithful have throughout history been a direct result of official doctrine, of superstitious piety, meekness, obedience, proselytism, 'purification' and surrender of this world for the illusory hereafter. Of power-mongering in the name of the all-powerful.

Of all the various brands of insanity which have gripped the left wing over the past decades, the final nail in its coffin will be this. Forgetting the most virulent and debilitating mental infection in human history. Forgetting where the left wing got its name, and that the First Estate sits together with the aristocracy in opposition to and oppression of the Third.

 

 

 

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* If James Randi himself never focused on religion, do remember it's not because it was any less bullshit than his usual targets of clairvoyants or psychics (for instance one of his most famous cases was against the Christian faith healer Peter Popoff) but because the topic was too broad for him to tackle with the resources at his disposal.