This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Has the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney presented a plan to bring down the massive debt?”
One of the harshest lessons I’ve had to learn when entering the professional world to hawk my services was understanding the difference between a cost-based mindset and a value-based mindset. I learned to despise the former and value the latter, most notably because it was far more rare an encounter. I learned to dislike the cost-based mindset because I found it generally characterized by a cynically misanthropic attitude that regarded intangible benefits as a scam rather than as a means of adding value.
This mindset can perform basic arithmetic but fractures into a mess of cynically driven frustration when performing simple algebraic functions.
“What do you mean by greater product knowledge leading to increased confidence translates into increased sales? That’s just bogus. People want high quality for cheap. Don’t make things so complicated.” (An embittered rendition of the cost-based mindset.)
At any rate, to address the question, the answer is both yes and no… Unlike the typically myopic view of handling debt that CONservatives focus on, with a strategy that involves cutting one’s own throat by imposing austerity on the little people and redirecting more financial resources to the parasitic class, he has been busy focusing on a revenue generation strategy.
It’s difficult for MAGA Conservatives to wrap their minds around handling debt through multiple strategies. Because revenue generation is so much more complicated than simply axing a shaky infrastructure that punishes the working class, they never seem willing to examine this far better and more productive approach to fiscal management.
Carney has been busy discussing economic growth strategies with the local community and global leaders. Admittedly, these are longer-term strategies than cutting costs, as they are a far more effective and stable approach for managing debt.
Another downside is that conveying the benefits of such an approach to people who can’t or refuse to grasp multi-stage strategies is subject to the same criticisms that the Carbon Tax has faced, and that Maple MAGAts have been barking about how much they dislike it, perceiving it as a scam.
Short-term thinkers often struggle to grasp multistage concepts that require focused attention to understand how additional upfront costs can result in far more significant economic benefits in the long run through revenue growth, which more effectively manages debt than cutting costs. Cuts hamper economic growth so much that they can potentially send a nation into a financial death spiral.
Those who don’t understand the implications of short-term thinking should pay attention to how Mango Mussolini gives the world a stark lesson about how utterly misguided such a myopic focus on economics is.
The most straightforward rendition of this view of economics is given by Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms, through a character named Captain Samuel Vimes in a “Boots Theory of Economics”
Carney’s strength as an economist lies in his understanding of value and his focus on creating long-term benefits by developing a value-based rather than cost-based strategy.
This approach forgoes making quick promises to please the impatient among the crowd and requires time to develop. Some people innately understand the importance of creating a coherent strategy, and it was this unspoken expectation that a grifter like Drumpf leveraged through a trust-based scheme when he claimed to have “ideas of a plan.”
The difference here is that the work being done by Carney is obvious, and CONservatives help to make it obvious when they whine about how much gas he’s consuming by flying abroad to make deals with more stable nations than the U.S.
Carney has developed a strategic plan through his actions and decisions. He hasn’t yet summarized it in an action plan that the short-term thinkers demand. They must wait until his strategy becomes an actionable framework for followers.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How common is it to be bullied at work, especially for new staff by pre -existing staff? Which work environments are the most typical where this happens?”
Bullying is so prevalent within society that most of it goes unnoticed.
Much of it is supported by society at large. For example, it is a common refrain for the older generations to complain about the younger generations. It is so common that it’s almost like a tradition passed on from generation to generation.
Few stop to think of that behaviour as a form of bullying, but that is the context in which it should be widely viewed.
The most cited reason for leaving a place of employment is “bad management,” which is often a euphemism for a bullying environment.
I was once exposed to an office culture where the fear that permeated the environment was so thick I could almost taste it in the air. I hated that place and was extremely relieved when I finished it.
Bullying happens everywhere and in every form of work environment. It’s not a “class thing” but an education thing we don’t have a good handle on dealing with in society.
I think the reason why we can’t get a handle on bullying is because it is so prevalent and so unique in the many forms it’s expressed.
For example, in a “low-education environment,” bullying can quickly escalate into physical violence. In contrast, in “high-education environments,” bullying occurs most often through dialectics and political maneuvering, like getting people fired or punished in varying ways.
Bullying is the primary reason why I support a universal basic income.
Bullying is an employer who leverages the duress of basic survival against a defenceless candidate whose choice is reduced to being between a handful of peanuts or a cold night outside.
The inability to walk away from an abusive employer is already a form of bullying that this society, in which we have no choice but to participate within its dysfunctional parameters, imposes upon the majority to produce value for the minority to engorge themselves on.
Bullying is a dysfunctional family, and since that comprises a whopping majority (70%-80%) in society, that further adds to the complications bullying creates because we are conditioning our children, each succeeding generation, that we do and will tolerate bullying in society. We only give lip service to wanting to deal with a problem we try to write off as an unalterable reality and a fundamental characteristic of humanity… or so the bullies among us would have us all believe.
A universal income floor empowers every human being to walk away from the bullies in their lives. We have worked for centuries to build that kind of freedom for humanity.
It’s right here and ready for us to grab it.
We’ve earned it while humanity desperately needs it to face many problems we’ve been struggling with for a long time.
Most likely because you’ve been conditioned to believe that everything is your fault, whether it has or hasn’t been. You may have been raised in a household where blameshifting and victim-shaming were standard responses to complaints, which is far more common than most people want to admit, given how prevalent that behaviour is in society.
We are generally all taught to internalize our pains and cope silently with the mistreatments we receive from others, and that’s primarily a consequence of other people’s incapacity to do anything that could help alleviate another’s suffering. Most people are just too busy trying to keep their heads above water in a dystopic world where they can’t afford to care for others because doing so comes at the expense of their survival.
This condition of “everyone for themselves” is by design and has been cultivated in society over the last several decades by a ruling class that has pitted individuals and groups within the working class against one another.
They’ve realized it’s cheaper to cultivate animosity within the lower classes than to support income equity and economic justice.
The consequence is for people to internalize their unresolved issues and begin a process of suicidal ideation. Blaming yourself for everything is a slippery slope, not limited to your personal experience but also a cultivated attitude in society. We can see an upward trend correlating suicidal ideation with the increased economic injustice we are all forced to endure by the ownership class.
In essence, the long-term consequences of the class war waged against the working class is a strategy of deflection away from their persistent threats while simply directing a flow of negative sentiment back onto the working class while denying the majority a valid outlet for their struggles, and that creates a solution for them that permits them to ignore the suffering they cause.
They have become so successful in cultivating a self-destructive form of lower-class pruning that whenever someone steps outside the paradigm and shockingly challenges their destruction, many among the lower classes will fight to protect the system of abuse by attacking those who do not capitulate and die quietly so as not to disturb their quiet reverie.
People like Luigi Mangione respond in diametric opposition to their expectations of people internalizing their abuses, and that represents a shock to a system they cannot tolerate, so take measures to ensure vigilantism like his is presented to the public in such a way that he becomes a message to the little people of what will happen to them if they resist and fight back.
In short, believing everything is your fault is precisely the attitude cultivated in society because that’s how the ruling class can rule with a minimal amount of their blood being shed.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “As there is no evidence that consciousness emerged from unconscious matter, then who created consciousness, according to atheists?”
The people you should be asking this question are not atheists but specialists who have expertise in this subject.
Atheists understand that one of the most glaring fundamental flaws in the believer mentality is that you expect knowledge to be a one-stop shopping process where you don’t consult authorities who specialize in a knowledge domain.
Believers like yourself behave as if your knowledge authorities are shopping centres of expertise.
This is why you look to your priest, minister, or religious leader to answer all the big questions in life, even though they have no clue what the correct answers are. Most of them pull nonsense out of thin air, and you lap it up like it were gospel. This is why so many of you struggle with a simple definition of disbelief for atheism.
That’s why you struggle with mastering simple tasks like knowing how to get real answers to your questions.
It is this kind of intellectual laziness that destroys your critical thinking skills.
For example, you pose questions like these as if they’re effective “gotcha questions” that can score you a win against your theological enemies.
You don’t care to understand the answer because you’re more interested in embarrassing atheists so that you walk around like a cock on a block and brag to your insular friends.
It’s pretty sad because the simplest way to address your nonsense question is to ask how you think any “who” is involved in the answer or even matters in considering an answer.
You presume a “who” is involved without any justification beyond the conditioning you have been subjected to daily since first learning how to say “momma.”
No one but you claims consciousness emerged from unconscious matter because you don’t bother to educate yourself on what humanity has learned about consciousness, what it is or how little we know about it. You don’t have the slightest clue how little you know about consciousness, but you behave as if your pat answer of a “who” is your secret weapon to put atheists in their subordinate place.
That’s just sad.
I doubt you even understand that what you have concocted is a straw argument. You create a fiction in your mind of what you think atheists believe about consciousness. You behave as if being an atheist magically imbues a person with knowledge in the scientific domains of biology, neurology, physics, and psychology — to name only a few that have explored the subject of consciousness.
You make this grotesque mistake in judgment because you have been taught to believe the magic words “God did it” answers every important question in life.
That’s just sad, annoying, and frustrating when believer after believer repeats the same nonsense daily by the dozen on every social media site.
Because of that, we know you don’t care about learning, much less understanding the numerous answers to your oversimplified question. You don’t realize that your simple question hides many questions you have no real answers to beyond “God did it.”
For example, you can’t identify or define what you mean by “unconscious matter,” but it’s clear from your wording that you’re thinking about something as simple as a rock. In your mind, the difference between a rock and a thinking being is magic. Forget about prions or viruses that behave like living creatures but aren’t.
You expect atheists to answer your question with humming and hawing that you can interpret as a win in the same way that MAGAts get off on “stickin’ it to the libs.”
If you cared about the concept you invoked, your question would be more specific and up-to-date with what science has discovered.
You would be asking not atheists but a mycologist about consciousness in mushrooms and fungus. You would be fascinated with how trees can talk to each other, and you would be respectful enough of the people you ask your questions, not assuming every atheist you encounter has knowledge and expertise in these fields.
The simple answer to your simplistic question is that there is no “who” beyond the wishful thinking of a childlike mind.
The existence of consciousness is accepted as a fact, but we don’t know what it is, how it exists, nor even the limits or range of forms in which it exists.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Should consciousness, like its physical body, be created from stardust? Wouldn’t that mean that space itself is a potential intelligence?”
I began by answering this question by referencing “Integrated Information Theory.” While refreshing my mind with concepts derived from this theory, I was inspired to ask ChatGPT a question:
My Question:Does “intelligent fungus” — i.e., fungus demonstrating forms of intelligence- contain structures analogous to neuronal microtubules in the human brain?
ChatGPT’s answer confirmed something I suspected: a relationship between manifestations of forms of consciousness that may create the bridge between the notion of IIT as pseudo-science addresses the “hard problem” of consciousness — IE., the physical manifestation of processes that provide a conduit, environment, or system which permits consciousness as we’ve learned to recognize it emerge in areas alien to the human experience of consciousness:
ChatGPT Answer:
Fungi are fascinating organisms that exhibit complex behaviours and adaptive responses, which some researchers describe as “intelligent” in a biological sense. While fungi don’t have neurons or a nervous system, they do possess structures that bear some functional resemblance to neuronal microtubules in the human brain.
Key Structural Similarities:
Hyphal Networks and Mycelium: The branching filaments (hyphae) that comprise a fungus’s mycelium form a dense, interconnected network that transmits chemical and electrical signals. This network structure is somewhat analogous to neural pathways in the brain.
Electrical Signaling: Research has shown that fungi generate electrical impulses across their hyphal networks, similar to how neurons transmit signals via action potentials. These impulses seem to follow patterns akin to neural signalling, suggesting a form of information processing.
Cytoskeletal Elements (Including Microtubules): Fungal cells contain microtubules, part of the cytoskeleton that helps transport organelles, nutrients, and signalling molecules within the cell. While these microtubules are not identical to those found in neurons, they perform comparable intracellular transport roles.
Information Processing and Memory-Like Behavior: Studies have shown that mycelial networks can adapt to their environment, alter growth patterns based on past experiences, and even exhibit “decision-making” behaviours — potentially exploiting their cytoskeletal structure for intracellular communication.
Key Differences:
Unlike neurons, fungal microtubules are not specialized for rapid electrical signal transmission.
The patterns of electrical activity in fungi appear slower and more decentralized than those seen in neural networks.
Emerging Research:
The study of fungal intelligence is still evolving, with growing interest in how fungi exhibit complex behaviours, solve problems, and respond to environmental stimuli. Some researchers have even likened mycelial networks to a “biological internet” due to their extensive communication capabilities.
In short, while fungi don’t have a direct analog to neuronal microtubules, their hyphal networks, electrical signalling, and cytoskeletal transport systems show surprising parallels to certain features of neural communication.
All of this makes me wish I had the foresight to enter a professional field more focused on understanding the external universe rather than focusing on developing the internal awareness necessary to overcome the negative conditioning I received as a child.
At any rate, I don’t want to avoid answering this question; I’m trying to be as direct as possible, but in essence, what you refer to as “stardust” is more of a poetic reference than it is a literal description of constituent physical components comprising the universe.
Quantum Foam
On a subatomic level, we’ve identified something we call “quantum foam”:
“Quantum foam (or spacetime foam, or spacetime bubble) is a theoretical quantum fluctuation of spacetime on very small scales due to quantum mechanics. The theory predicts that particles of matter and antimatter are constantly created and destroyed at this small scale.”
Neural Microtubules
We have also identified “microtubules” in the human brain’s physical construct. — The importance of these microtubules is that they may solve the “hard problem” of consciousness but remain an unproven hypothesis:
“Microtubules are also important throughout life, for the neuron to maintain its proper shape, to support axonal and dendritic transport, and to accommodate shape changes such as alterations in dendritic morphology that may correspond with cognitive plasticity even in old age.”
In short, and in a roundabout way, it appears the answer to your question may be “yes” — all of space, and by extrapolation, it could be that our universe is a conscious construct — or a construct of or for consciousness.
For some, this revelation would support the notion that “we exist” (our physical manifestations as we know them) in a “simulation” (of sorts). Life may be a video game, but we don’t get to respawn. Once we burn through a character, that’s the end of it.
If life is a videogame with no respawns, then life is even more precious than what we take for granted. If we get only one life, it means everything to this short life; then we must make it count for something.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Has China become more democratic as its economy grew in the 1st quarter of the 21st century?”
China has become more accommodating of the needs of the people while maintaining a paternalistic attitude toward the masses — which has been effective, to a degree, in maintaining order while educating and empowering the people as they work toward common goals benefiting their society.
As a system of governance, Xi has been moving toward increased consolidation of presidential power while questions about how much control he has over the levers of power have arisen. In essence, however, China remains a single-party system that they sometimes call a “People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” and in other cases a “Socialist Consultative Democracy.”
The magical ingredient of their community-based social evolution has been lost within the hyper-independence cultivated in the West. China has avoided the manifestation of extreme sociopathic disregard for one’s fellow citizens from a philosophical perspective. However, they have profited from the paternalistic exploitation of workers to enrich the community and the rich in more of a partnership than as disposable commodities in the West.
In contrast to the planned societies in China, today’s “Western-based” corporatocracy has resulted in a legalized re-institution of a medieval social structure built upon publicly denied but implied class divisions as the plutocrat class feigns partnerships with the working class through empty slogans like “essential workers.” Ironically, China’s single-party rule of the people has been transforming from an iron-handed autocracy into a kindly old grandfather who watches and guides the product of their efforts to discipline their offspring and bear fruit.
China was rightly criticized for its suicide nets, and I’m not sure how prevalent those are these days, nor how gruelling their factory work remains, but the sacrifices of those who gave their lives in service to a horrid existence appear to be making way toward the emergence of superior societies built around advanced technological progress. Planned cities like Zhenzhen and Chengdu have become global technology hubs, making breakthroughs that rival American developmental efforts.
At this rate, American dominance in technological breakthroughs will become a memory within the next few decades.
As more technologically sophisticated societies emerge, the less reliant the public will be on autocratic structures to maintain order because they will become capable of the self-regulation that accompanies higher technological and psychological development levels.
Knowledge work has been woefully misunderstood by Western thinking. Capitalists like Musk, who consider highly educated people disposable assets rather than allies, rely on controlling talent they treat in abusively disposable ways instead of leveraging them as partners who could help him overcome his limitations. As we see with Chinese corporate structures, the way of the future is a more nurturing management style in their operations, favouring mentorship and career development support, than Western corporate autocracies favouring cultures with toxic cutthroat competition.
For the last few decades, workers in Western high-tech environments have been far more competent than leadership incapable of comprehending, much less appreciating how much more skilled their employees are than they are in their knowledge domains. Companies in the West hire down to the level of incompetence of the management rather than hire up to empower their organizations with capabilities that can empower their growth. They are still stuck in the dark ages of employment, which is why most people still don’t understand how disastrous DOGE’s cuts will be for the functional needs of the nation.
Far too many believe the laid-off labourers can be replaced like obedient cogs to continue functioning as before. They fail to realize they’re impacting human lives and professionals who once cared about their roles and their impact on their operations. They fail to recognize the cost of replacing professionals is not as simple as identifying another body to fill a space. Workers are now being incentivized to disengage and stop caring because they’ve been consistently confronted with proof that their contributions bear no value to any psychopath with power.
If the public was ever upset when dealing with dispassionate bureaucrats who did the least they could get away with in their jobs, welcome to “I don’t give a shit version 2.”
The deterioration of the human spirit currently prevalent within the Western sensibility merely gives China the impetus to continue empowering its people because global leadership is just around the corner for them.
With the advent of “Dark Factories” — fully automated factories, the Chinese people are ahead of Western Industries and their government is likely better equipped psychologically to transition their support systems for the people than what we’re seeing now in the reckless Chainsaw antics of cutting necessary systems indulged in by American plutocrats.
How this translates into a better-equipped governance system to represent the people makes American-style pseudo-democracies appear less capable of being the governments of the people and for the people than the Chinese government of a paternalistic entity ruling the people. It’s no wonder people had become more amenable to a fascist style of government before Trump’s bull-in-a-chinashop rampage began.
Fortunately, the world has better models for democracy in the Nordic styles of social democracies, which borrow concepts from both governance styles to create an effective balance between necessary support infrastructures and free market capitalist principles with realistic restraints on power.
In short, China hasn’t “become more democratic,” but it has become more efficient at meeting the needs of the people. Their system will continue to evolve as their industrial sector evolves and drives social change as it has since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
This post is a “twofer.” It’s a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What do you think about Elon Musk saying “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-empathy-quote/“ — In this case, I’m setting up my answer with an answer to another question: “What role does empathy play in understanding and connecting with the thoughts of others?”
Empathy is a conduit to understanding and connecting with others.
Empathy is like an additional sense or language allowing more profound insights into people than a typical means of sharing information about oneself with others.
“How you say something is as important as what you say.”
I assume you’ve encountered this above phrase or similar ones to understand how meaning is conveyed in ways beyond the definitions of the words one uses.
Empathy is similar in that one identifies more closely with the emotions of others, which makes it easier to connect with people on much deeper levels much more quickly than most people are used to.
Empathy is otherwise the glue that keeps human civilization together.
“Evil is a lack of empathy.”
This sentence above is the simple answer that most have already presented, so I had intended to ignore this question. Tomaz Vargazon’s answer, however, has motivated me to provide my input by the inclusion of the full quote he provided from Musk’s interview with Joe Rogan:
Musk: Yeah, he’s [Gat Saad] awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
“Suicidal empathy”
“Don’t let someone use your empathy against you.”
The “empathy exploit.”
These three statements indicate that these sociopathic morons don’t understand empathy because they are conflating “ compassion” with “empathy.”
These are not the same thing. Not by a long shot.
Empathy operates like a sensory receiver, while compassion is a cognitive process of identifying with another life.
Empathy cannot be “used against someone” any more than one’s eyes can be used against them.
The ability to experience another’s emotions is not a weakness but a strength.
Another issue is how we process our understanding of the emotions we detect.
The only vulnerability to exploit is the trust connection between individuals, and that exploit exists regardless of either party’s empathetic capabilities.
Their arguments are the equivalent of claiming one can be susceptible to being robbed because they know more about the criminal attempting to rob them.
It’s a bloody ludicrous argument forwarded only by sociopaths who have no clue what empathy is.
The harsh reality in today’s world is that empathetic people are victimized precisely because they’re walking, talking, living, and breathing lie detectors.
Anyone with advanced empathetic sensitivities understands precisely what I’ve just said. Every sociopath on the planet would otherwise vehemently deny this is the case while using this statement to vilify anyone who reveals this truth to the public.
Only sociopaths would ever dare to consider empathy a weakness because they recognize empathy as a superpower wielded by people who always default to showing compassion toward others, especially toward those like them, who comprise the most broken humans among us.
The lesson of today’s age and of this garbage pronouncement by the most destructive sociopaths we have seen emerge in society has pushed the tolerances and compassions that empathetic people experience toward humanity past the brink of decency and forces us to realize how our species is in a severe struggle for survival.
If we allow these sociopathic monsters to continue defining humanity for us, civilized society as we know it will crumble.
Now is the time for empathy to assert itself as humanity’s superpower and end the scourge of sociopathy before it’s too late.
Now is the time for the meek to inherit the Earth because these monsters have no respect for life beyond their fleeting whims.
These are expressions from people who have no reverence for anything outside their navels.
The more we allow them to assert dominion over humanity’s character, the more they teach us they will relent only when we break and repeat history.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think by the time Trump’s second term is over, he will have successfully reduced identity politics to include only “Trump supporter” and “anti-American”?”
That’s exactly what his strategy has been to date. It is precisely that divisive strategy employed by conservatives everywhere he has leveraged into his position of power. This has been the consistent strategy of conservatives who claim the entire world is ugly, evil, and broken beyond repair while claiming they’re the only ones capable of fixing the messes they have made.
It’s a tiresome strategy that has worked wonders for them as they’ve instituted privatization programs throughout every democratic nation. They intentionally sabotage functioning institutes by defunding them to create problems that otherwise would not exist and then claim those institutes would be better served by the private sector.
People have been lapping this lie up since Ronald Reagan betrayed democracy by claiming the government was the problem. By demonizing the government, he created an entity the public would turn against as an enemy and scapegoat for all their problems. He successfully detached the notion of a government of the people, for the people, and by the people and converted it into an imaginary boogeyman that the people would willingly fight against rather than rise to their responsibility to change it in ways that more effectively represent their needs.
Disparagements like “nanny state” have often been used to characterize government as a paternalistic entity while attaching the opposing sentiments of historically destructive autocracies living within the cultural imaginations of people who have always fought for their right to self-determination. At the same time, the ownership class has endlessly justified their need for the government nipple to support the people by themselves as a proxy of wealth custodians with a paternalistic responsibility to care for the people by creating jobs for them.
In the minds of the people, blurring the distinction between a democracy and autocracy made it easy to turn the people against the only entity capable of protecting the integrity of a government of the people against the people. By turning the people against their only protection, he successfully made every citizen in every democracy around the world vulnerable to the only enemies of humanity that humanity has ever had — parasites who steal our value and hoard it in service to their egos.
DonOld Trump’s rhetoric, along with every CONservative political leader, makes a point of feigning solidarity with the working class while besmirching them in private. A recording of this dynamic was Romney’s downfall as he publicly pretended to have a working-class sensibility in the most awkward ways, making him give off uncanny valley vibes that made it difficult for people to buy his ruse.
George Bush Jr., however, was elected based on people’s perceptions that they could enjoy a casual conversation with him over a beer. Neither of these people understood or cared about the lives of everyday citizens. We have all been little more than disposable pawns in their games of power all along. The ownership class breeds this dehumanizing class distinction within every generation while disparaging anyone who does not share their misanthropic regard for humanity.
Trump hasn’t done anything different or unique from that playbook. He has merely capitalized on the inculcated belief that billionaires are job creators. Trump has leveraged the lie that his wealth is a product of pure effort and individual initiative. Trump has benefitted from the lie that anyone could have his wealth if they worked hard enough and were smart enough about how they spent their money.
He has taken the strategy of bamboozling the public over decades to its logical conclusion. He has benefitted from the illusion that an avocado toast diet has been responsible for irresponsible people suffering in poverty. It has been a strategy of mollifying the working class to such a degree that many have shown an eager willingness to wage war against their fellow citizens to defend the ownership class.
The ownership class has been so successful in cultivating the image of a blurred distinction between classes and making themselves appear as one of the little people that they’ve begun dropping any pretense of their disguise being a lie. They made themselves abundantly clear with the threat issued by the president of the Heritage Foundation when he declared Project 2025 would be a restructuring of the nation that would be bloodless only if the left capitulated.
The arrogance of the tech bros perpetuates a horror show of arrogance over the little people through a disgusting betrayal they have coined as a “dark enlightenment,” which hearkens back to biblical references and the devil’s temptations.
The most consistent characteristic of hubris, however, is its finite and fleeting moment of ascendancy because, like Icarus, the most arrogant humans who deign to fly too close to the sun fail to understand how their wax wings inevitably melt under the light of truth.
They will always fall to their doom.
This is the broad lesson of the history of social evolution.
Dynasties and monarchies are anachronisms because people invariably tire of the lies, the abuses, and of being played as fools while watching their dreams shattered one by one and the ownership class flying to the stars in their mechanical penises.
It is an embarrassment that Bezos remained so utterly oblivious to the profundity of that flight that he had to drag along a human symbol capable of interpreting an experience he could not appreciate. He struggled to acknowledge that that was only possible for him by the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of people who contributed to his hoard.
The ownership class has been successfully whispering in the ears of their hordes of Stockholm Syndrome victims that their power is an inevitability, that it belongs to them by a divine right of kings as old as humanity. They ignore how their power rests on the shoulders of those who support them, and they do not have infinite patience for egotistical abuses.
Our stories are written by those who have historically stood against their power and have consistently transformed human society into something more approximating the justice history inexorably bends toward.
Trump will only have succeeded in pushing the stale ruse past its due date and causing it to smell so much like rancid fish that even the MAGAt army supporting him today will turn on him like rabid animals when they can no longer believe his lies.
By the end of his term, many of his MAGAt followers will have hit rock bottom. They will be ripe for vengeance against him and all the arrogant members of the ownership class who have been steadily waging a war against the little people for centuries. If all goes well, this will finally be the last of this primarily silent war because the little people will have learned that power should never be unlimited within anyone’s hands. Power must always be restrained. That’s the only way we can survive and meet our future.
By the end of Trump’s term, he will either be dead because his body will have finally given out, locked in prison (and primarily for his protection) or be in hiding from an enraged electorate that has finally figured out the truth about his betrayal against them and the nation he fraudulently claimed to be a patriot of.
The hordes of the people who outnumber the ownership class by orders of magnitude will either destroy the edifices of power while seeking retribution for their betrayal, or they will be satiated by an awakening among the ownership class that they either share their power or lose it altogether.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “To which degree is not having enough time, and being relatively busy, contribute to most people not being able to come up with new ground breaking ideas, make new inventions, or even making novels, manga etc.?”
Many answers are the typical soporifics based on the presumption that today’s economics are “normal.” There is no accommodation for the dysfunctional state of economic affairs people live with today.
People can conceptualize how one income earner per family was the norm 50 years ago. Still, they can’t imagine the math well enough to understand the differences between then adequately and now when a two-income family can barely make ends meet.
During the heyday of the middle class and the economics of a time we’ve lost, blue-collar labourer dad could earn enough from his low-skilled job to afford a mortgage, a relatively new vehicle, and an annual vacation for himself, his wife, and their two-and-a-half kids.
That’s just a pipe dream which no longer exists for the average citizen, particularly not when a large contingent of full-time employees can’t afford stable housing.
Unskilled labour means being unable to afford to live. In the U.S., one needs two full-time jobs to afford to rent a cheap private suite. Shared accommodation is the only way to make ends meet. Consolidating incomes to meet basic survival needs has become the norm.
One job is no longer enough to survive on.
Forget investing in one’s future.
Income mobility has all but vanished.
Everyone today has been living with a supplemental income in a gig economy while learning to monetize every waking moment to feed and clothe themselves for so long that it’s become a normalized existence.
There’s no time left for a social life, let alone any entrepreneurial initiative. Topping that challenge off, no disposable income exists to permit investments in education or capital purchases to allow expansion. One must scrimp and save while sacrificing meeting sleep and nutritional requirements to cobble together something of a hope for building a better future.
It’s insane, and no one knows any better because the period in which trillions have been stolen from the working class has happened so slowly that one would have to understand what starting from scratch then was like compared to what starting from scratch today is like.
How unfortunate for me but fortunate for those who will listen. The difference between then and now is nightmare and day.
Getting a job that would not only pay for living expenses and a social life while having plenty left over to bank and save for an education was a matter of a decent paying labour job during summer break from school and a part-time job during the academic year. Even with those financial burdens, there was still plenty of disposable income to afford a very healthy social life. A concert back then, for example, didn’t cost a week’s worth of pay but half of a shift for one night’s work — a movie cost less than one hour’s worth of labour. A movie night out now is an entire day’s worth of labour.
I think it’s essential to stop counting numbers on the level of an abstraction like money and start counting the increasing costs we’ve been enduring based on our time because that’s the most valuable commodity each of us has.
It’s much easier to ignore the costs we’ve been increasingly enduring without matching increases in our income when they’re treated like abstractions. If we were to look at how much time has been stolen from our lives, I’m pretty sure the guillotines would be out in full force right now.
The problem with factoring economic changes based on dollar figures is that it allows the victim-shaming mindset we see displayed by so many sycophants for the wealthy to assert their nonsense positions with righteous indignity.
They can remain utterly oblivious to reality and the delusional nature of presumptions autonomically adjusted to a dysfunctional economy while failing to account for the severe impact on one’s time that has been stolen from the working class.
It’s been slightly over ten years ago now that I had my life destroyed by a nuclear bomb being dropped on it, not because of anything I did but because others assumed their fraudulent righteousness permitted the devastating assault. That was a severe lesson in the extent to which overcompensating behaviour can become a destructive force in society — that I intend to share in more detail but not here because it’s a distraction from the point of this answer.
At any rate, I can unequivocally state that if that had happened to me when I first started carving out my niche for a professional future almost 50 years ago, it would have been a relatively minor event in my life. I would have recovered within a couple of years and been well on my way to having put that traumatic nightmare in my rearview mirror.
Instead, I’ve struggled to regain my footing for over ten years. The life I had is gone and unrecoverable.
Instead of making small bits of progress on the road to recovery, I’ve been enduring an increasing degradation in my quality of life as I find bits of it and my dignity being slowly stripped from me every day, not because of my bad decisions or because of anything I’ve done to warrant this nightmare, but because others choose to pile on their abuses atop the mountain that weighs me down.
For example, I’m currently scrimping to put together enough of a buffer in my economics to afford a minor upgrade to a graphics card that will allow me to become more efficient and competitive in the marketplace while allowing me to work at resolutions that can secure income. It’s funny how an obscure specification such as image resolution can hinder success, but that’s our world today. Forty years ago, such a minor upgrade would have been, at most, a couple of months of saving up spare cash to pay cash for the upgrade. I’m saving to afford an additional monthly payment for an 18-month commitment.
The world we live in today is characterized by a lifestyle I first became familiar with in art school with the dynamic of patrons. Relationships between artists and their patrons financed art production in the Middle Ages. Today’s equivalent to that in the high-tech world is an “incubator.” For general entrepreneurs, it means a guest appearance on Shark Tank to hope a capitalist can see a parasitic profit relationship from your initiative by doing nothing but assume control over your enterprise and collecting cash for your efforts.
The alternative for the little people is to turn to the government to find themselves herded through an infantilization process and vetted to identify the value to be extracted from them by financial enterprises that have developed relationships with pseudo-government entities called “Stewardship.” They are intended to provide business development services but don’t do anything beyond setting you up to be bilked by predatory lenders from whom they get a cut.
In my case, I went along with the puppy mill program with a naive attitude that I could trust a government-aligned agency to tell me the truth about my options. I went along with the program to develop a concrete plan for recovering my entrepreneurial income within a couple of years with a product idea and niche that would generate over $100 thousand per year working for myself without needing support staff.
A simple demand loan of less than $15,000 would have been sufficient to get my life back on track. I discovered early on that it wasn’t even on their radar for a support option. As it turned out, the $10,000 in financing I was promised was not even close to possible by the time I had completed their program.
I was informed at the outset that I was eligible for a grant that would have made financing possible. At the end of my programs for creating my business and financial planning documents, I asked what had happened to the grant. I received crickets as a response and then was insulted with condescension by someone who’s never been an entrepreneur and nothing more than a bookkeeper.
The fact that I had progressively managed to succeed on my terms for over 25 years and that I had proven I knew what I was doing when I provided an advanced business plan in greater detail than they expected or had ever seen through their program was irrelevant. (Most people I met in the rudimentary courses I was herded through were quite naive about business processes. I found myself contributing value on a level that augmented the instructors’ efforts — and in which they expressed a sincere appreciation because it increased class engagement).
Everything, every entity, and every stage in society is rigged at every level from a predatory perspective to drain value from anyone unlucky enough to have to rely on their “altruistic” roles in society. It’s become a game of indentured leveraging, not unlike the days of gladiators who would agree to a couple of years in the arena getting beaten and stabbed to get themselves out of debt.
Had I been living through the same economy as when I started, I would not have even needed to rely on external support. I would have had sufficient disposable income from a typical labour job to use my initiative to climb out of this nightmare of a hole I’ve been dumped into — within only a few years.
The short answer to the question posed after this long-winded rant is that it is to EVERY degree that the little people no longer have a hope of income mobility. The ideas, inventions, and initiatives still exist. It’s the resources we once had that have vanished from the landscape. It’s the disposable income that we could rely on to improve our lives that no longer exists.
That is the most motivationally destructive assault the wealthy have perpetrated upon us, and I would not be able to restrain myself in the presence of many of the sociopathic assholes who are playing games with our lives. While increasing their hoards to historic levels of obscenity, they parasitically drain our value from us.
The dynamics of today’s economy are enraging on a level I could never have imagined experiencing, but here we are. I’m now someone who, after a lifetime of being vehemently against capital punishment, endorses precisely that with guillotines for the 1% in our society if they don’t wake up and start taking economic restorations seriously and beginning with supporting UBI.
With UBI, all the repressed creativity withheld from society and human progress will be released into a new era to make our first Renaissance appear like a trial run. We are on the verge of a fully automated society. The only thing holding us back from an explosion of creativity and initiative is the sick competition among the most parasitic among us to become the world’s first trillionaire.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Elon Musk apparently didn’t dismiss empathy entirely, but thought that we have a problem with empathy for the wrong people. How do you judge?”
I partly disbelieve this moronic assertion but won’t deny it’s possible he would say something so stupid.
I wouldn’t put it past him because he disowned a daughter that he paid to ensure she was born physically as a male.
He got pissed that he didn’t get what he paid for and punished his child for daring to assert her identity.
Suppose he lacks empathy, which he seems to demonstrate while bemoaning his inability to experience empathy proudly. In that case, he’s a walking-talking case for how badly screwed up some kids can be when their sociopathic parents severely screw them over.
It still amazes me when I look at photos of him as a kid because he appears as a somewhat sensitive type of nerd who tried being himself but was abused for it.
That’s the only explanation I can devise that makes sense of his severe state of dysphoria (minus the drug addiction of both the chemical kind and the egotistical drug of power through his wealth).
He appears as a youth to be a typical “sensitive” who would likely have been highly empathetic. Still, it’s been beaten out of him through likely mostly verbal abuse (because he doesn’t appear to show typical traits of physical abuse — such as scars or even an emotional coldness in his demeanour). (Unlike DonOld Trump, whose physical abuse is written all over his demeanour. You can almost read the number of times his father physically beat him like counting rings on a tree trunk.)
Statements like the one attributed to him show the child attempting to speak through the cracks of a semi-polished exterior.
Empathy is like any other characteristic, which presents itself in varying degrees throughout the population. Empathy is like muscle mass; it has a developmental potential but must be cultivated to show itself in its most developed form.
In his case, his capacity for empathy was stripped from him and has been starved to (near?) non-existence.
I suspect some vestiges of empathy remain alive within him but that he’s trapped in a world where he cannot trust, allowing himself to experience it because the fear of permitting himself to experience it openly has been beaten out of him by his parents.
It’s not that the “wrong people have empathy” but that people have had their empathy wrongly denied their right to experience it without adverse repercussions.
thotbag 