even when you fear they might be a bit stupid

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which is perhaps why we keep rediscovering the same things over and over

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the words of mencken always make me smile and certainly, the pithy embedding of humor here is a delight, but in this one case, i’d like to pick it apart because it’s just dangerously wrong on all counts.

the common people have no idea what they want and this lack of understanding becomes more acute as the world grows more complex.

and no one deserves to be the mercy of the masses as they impose “solutions” they do not understand upon “problems” they cannot comprehend.

that’s not even governance. it’s menace.

the world has solved this issue with “middleware”: educators and explainers in schools and media who boil down this complexity into something masses can understand. but there’s a really nasty issue here where those who seem smartest to any particular person are those whose IQ is 10-15 points higher than that person. past that, it dissolves into incomprehension.

but as the world keeps getting more complex, fewer and fewer people can manage a useful comprehension of it. the bar keeps rising, the “comprehension fraction” keeps dropping and pretty soon, the denizens of the middleware layer we once counted on to make sense of it cannot understand it either and actual comprehension devolves to a tiny class too busy and productive to ever want a career in middleware.

so you get self-selection for “simple and wrong” as basically all of messaging. what was once perhaps kool aid now becomes “jonestown” and all who drink it wind up (wittingly or not) in a suicide pact.

if the “wrong” were incorrect in random fashion, it might cancel itself out. but when it becomes systemic and bent upon mendacious purpose, well, that’s another thing entirely.

i’d argue that that’s where we are.

let’s start here:

nick is an NGO journalist.

nick would like you to believe that “extreme wealth” generated in market economies is somehow the problem.

nick is a dangerous combination of “completely wrong” and “bought and paid for to enrage and propagandize you.”

nick wants you to think that he is the solution, but nick is the problem, a piece of a middleware reality distortion machine that, when coupled to the deeply dangerous idea that “democracy is freedom” becomes a self building prison in which the inmates are inculcated from birth into various forms of stockholm syndrome and taught to clutch the bars for comfort and validation. you want to see the reality of the matrix? that’s the matrix.

let’s explore:

first, i want to share some thinking by fellow feline and gatopal™ devon eriksen because he said this about as well as it can be said and while i could try to paraphrase it, i’d rather give him credit. it’s too long share in full as graphic text, but you can read it HERE. (all text is included below)

“Finding a slightly different explanation, or getting the monkeys to sit still and really listen, doesn't really help.

Because the problem isn't just that the monkeys aren't paying attention. The problem is that the monkeys are monkeys.

Their brains simply don't have the developmental capacity to grow the neural connections they would need in order to grasp and manipulate the concept.

In the long term, this is why universal democracy is doomed. Because societies that let retards vote will fail, and be replaced by those that don't.

You may think that we, as a society, face a great variety of problems. We do not. We have only one. Retards. Every other problem we have is downstream from their inability to understand the consequences of their political opinions.

But to fully grasp the implications of this, you have to understand that the definition of "retard" changes over time, as technology advances, because the IQ level required to grasp what's really going on gets steadily higher and higher.

Eventually, the category "retard" grows until it includes the average person.

This has already happened.

Nick Knudsen isn't dumber than the average guy. But the average guy, the 100 IQ salt of the earth guy that's sitting on the next bar stool over, can no longer understand the modern economy. And this isn't correctable, because the problem isn't ignorance, it's complexity.

You can't make Nick Knudsen smarter by telling him things. You can't even make him less ignorant, because the bare facts aren't believable to someone who doesn't have the framework to understand how they fit together.

The people who understand what's going on are so much smarter than him that he doesn't even think they sound smart.

He thinks they sound crazy.”

while couched in humor, this is a serious and pervasive point: the world of human habitation has changed much, much faster than the monkey brains evolved to eat berries in a cave and organize into bands capable of hunting game and perhaps running a farm ever could.

once, a human understood basically everything societal and civilizational that they interacted with. they might not have known why the sun came up or the chemical bonding properties of sodium ions, but the pointy stick, the curing of leather, planting seeds, etc were all technologies that were generally comprehensible and accessible. the world was small. you saw the parts of it that mattered to you on a regular basis. the goings on far, far away were irrelevant because “far away” was a very different idea, a transit measured in months and years, not in hours.

we don’t live there anymore. the average human in an average day interacts with 100’s, 1000’s of technologies indistinguishable from magic. here’s a flint axe. build a microwave oven from raw materials. construct a cellular system and a smartphone. i’ll wait…

these technological wonders are not understood by basically anyone. there’s unlikely to be a single human who could do all the things to make a pencil from scratch much less an iphone. the magic emerges from complexity that is at once unimaginable and incomprehensible to the median monkey brain. they literally have a zero percent chance of grasping it not just in the technical sense but in any meaningful sense.

the same is true of the vast emergent systems that gave rise to the organizational structures to produce such knowledge, allocate resources, and keep the world on the pareto optization pathways of “best use for this resource” and “proper pricing for it relative to other resources.” price alone constitutes a deep eldritch magic that all the futureshocked primates take for granted and fail to comprehend their role in making.

“the world” now that it is so functionally small has become incomprehensible: people you will never meet in places you will never go do things you will never witness and speak words you’ll never hear but you are expected to care. it might be relevant to you. surely, some of it will be. but again, there is no “reality” to it in any tangible sense - you cannot touch it, taste it, even see it, it’s just a firehose of hearsay and complexity endlessly overflowing the teacup of the monkey mind.

it is not possible to consume this.

no one does.

you can, to varying degrees and in certain subsets of information if you really focus, get closer to or even involved in the primary sources, but no one can see or know all that much anymore. the problem is too big, too complex, and too far outside of scope for berry in cave brains to grok.

and so we use middleware and the middleware too has changed.

once, media was only for the upper classes. so too was “schooling.” books were ruinously expensive, newspapers only for the aristocrats, now media has become ruinously cheap and pervasive, an always-on attention engine braying for users seconds in colorful meluti-media ejaculations of attraction optimization. now schools are a mandatory “you must go” indoctrination factory more focused on ideology than “ability to read” and antithetical to ideas like “think critically.” there’s also no money in it and so for the most part the people peopling the middleware are lower caliber and have fallen out of the comprehension faction. they no longer lead, they too need to be led.

this is the fundamental problem:

1. the world is too vast and too complex for anything resembling an average human to have a meaningful view of it.

2. so humans rely upon middleware like media and politicians to make it comprehensible

3. and the world has, at once, become too vast and too complex for middleware media mavens and most educators to comprehend

4. and the “allegedly educated” media reader has shifted from being the top 20% of the monkey farm to being damn near all of it living in cargo cult impersonation of education and so the media itself has dumbed down. a news program or article that must be comprehensible to the 30th percentile bears little resembleance to one aimed at the 90th. it boils the world down to a few big squares all of which have lost fidelity. and these are the squares the educational system spent a decade readying you to recognize.

this is not a recipe for comprehension, much less discernment. it’s a recipie for disaster for even if the media were trying to play it straight and do as good a job as it could, it would fail. and obviously, it’s not doing that.

but because the media and educators themselves are no longer capable of meaningful discernment, they are all lost. this makes them highly susceptible to a few fifth columnists pretending to understand and crafting mass messages that resonate. even fairly small infiltrations can capture a whole system because the system itself is no longer sufficiently discerning to know what capture looks like or to intuit flaws in the arguments.

the blinders lead the blind right off a cliff.

this brings us back to folks like nick who use the magic word “democracy” as though it were a signifier of freedom and justice instead of a noose fashioned by tyrants and demagogues to yoke the uncomprehending to their designs and enlist them into the dictatorial wrecker classes.

they are an NGO funded through actblue civics to the tune of $600k in 2024, so small, but definitely pay for play. “In 2024, Knudsen’s $142,313 compensation represented 29.6% of total expenses. Other salaries and wages were another $133,162.”

this is incredibly cost effective manipulation. it’s how so few control so many for such pittances.

actblue civics is the great leftist largess laundry and corrupt past belief, but if you say “pro democracy” the monkey brain says “that sounds nice.” it’s difficult to trace their funding because they use the 501(c)(4) dodge and pretend they are not primarily political, but the one funder i could lock down was michigan civic action fund who, in turn, gets most of its money from the soros open society program. this has become endemic in media. AP news has heavy pay for play advocacy funding. dozens of large scale journalist training camps exist to forward and fund media that tells “the right kind of stories from the right kinds of angles.”

so here we are:

the current mass media likely could not tell a true tale of the world today if they wanted to. it’s too complex and they are not smart enough.

even if they did, most of their readers would not be able to understand it. the schools failed to teach critical thinking and it likely could not have been taught to most students anymore anyhow. and they have been taught to reject it.

but they do not seek to tell the true tale. they seek to lie. they are paid to lie. they are captured utterly by faction and politics.

in a healthy system media and education are supposed to be critical of government and of the ideas of crony corporatism. in a captured one, they slavishly cheerlead for such things. it’s obvious we’re across that rubicon. media and statism and public education have become one edifice. that’s quite literally how you spot totalitarianism.

and the “big squares” were all drilled by rote, repetition, and reinforcement into the zeitgeist from an early age to be sure the monkeys know how to call them out when they see them on the news and feel good about doing so because they feel like “passing a test.”

all these teachers, these journalists, they play at “expert” but they are not. they could not explain the world if they wanted to, and that they most certainly do not. worse, because they cannot, they experience real world intrusion as both pain and threat to status. you want to know why so many teachers and media messengers go berserk and vilify the free market? it’s because they cannot comprehend it at a level that matters and so it just sounds like gibberish that threatens their cherished beliefs and identity. they “know” that trillionaires are the problem because they have no idea how wealth is created or allocated or why that one human has done more to push the world forward than the whole bottom 20% and that he’s not “hogging” wealth but creating in in the form of software and cars and robots and rockets.

those who have never built anything like that have no idea what building something like that is like. they live in a middleware world of “being the experts” and “being the explainers” but now flounder in incomprehension like senescent seniles raging at the world that keeps slipping past them.

perhaps once they could do this job. no mas. they have become a bad transaction layer, more static than signal, wreckers not wrenchers. and they are not even capable of seeing this about themselves and so become the most petulant and assaultive of human cadres - a dying aristocracy being stripped of its privilege and prerogative.

it’s why they are, increasingly, going to war with civilization. they have become anachronisms but do not wish to cede their positions as the adjudicators of reality. worse, most of them no longer have any idea how reality works. it’s why they are riling up the “democracy” and trying to wield it as an anti-human, anti-progress mace. it’s just a guild that would rather have you suffer than get disintermediated but that needs your support for this.

so they fill your head with nonsense and send you off to vote.

it’s unfortuantaely easy to do and these periods of change (like the industrial revolution) where complexity leaps forward are always fertile and febrile breeding grounds for the philosophies of luddite wreckers seeking to elevate the worst atop the best. whoever just fell below the comprehension line is easy to rile up. the world does not make sense anymore. all you have to do is tell them “someone did this to you” then point a finger and say “let’s get them.”

complexity is monkey kryptonite. it makes their heads hurt. this is why, in each leap forward, a new set of monkeys will inevitably start falling for the stupid crap that involves tearing the system driving progress apart. free markets are a vast emergent phenomenon, a system that no one steers and that generates the best outcomes by encompassing the most preference and knowledge. this sounds like democracy but it’s not. it’s the opposite.

free markets run on the ability to make choices for yourself and to say “no.” want a job? you need to say yes. so does the employer. want to buy a house? same. free markets are negative rights at mass scale. they are iterated individual sovereignty.

“democracy” is the opposite. it’s positive rights, the ability to compel. majority rules. literally. we outnumber you so you have to do what we say. “no” is gone. and if the majority have now fallen below the ability to comprehend the world and the engines of plenty, then how can democracy be anything other than a wrecker? it will tear down every fence in chesterton, cull every wolf from yellowstone, regulate and relegate until envy is satiated, and plenty destroyed.

it would do this no matter what, but inflamed by a media-education industrial complex of well funded agent provocateurs happy to carry them to hell in a bucket so long as this middleware layer gets to hold the handle, and all you’ll get is devastation by demagogue.

the farsighted brilliance of our founders lay in seeing government as a necessary evil and creating the idea of rights based republic shielded by what ultimately amounted to an aristocracy. and it was easier then. perhaps 60 or 70% of people could understand the relevant systems in which they lived at the time and thus at least had some chance of navigating democracy. i doubt the number is 20% today and it’s dropping rapidly.

if you want to understand why, all over the west, everything has become so stupid and sclerotic and anti-rights and anti-progress, this is why. democracy in which only 20% of people would be able to figure out the right thing even if they were getting good information is a sucker bet. in a world beset by a totalitarian middleware layer bent on making damn sure this good information is not available, it’s the railroad tracks to hell.

republics are and must be a form of aristocracy. they are a form of government that suffices only to govern moral people and then only if the most moral and farsighted and even handed of those people are elected to the positions of power that a just state uses to protect the liberty of those who consent to be governed by it.

in a very real sense, it’s protecting of we the people from the people.

universal suffrage has always been the election of the worst into those positions and every time the world gets less comprehensible, this gets more acute.

you want to know why election after election it’s always the lesser of evils and “no good choices”?

that’s why. where would you conceivably get a good candidate in a system where 80% of voters do not understand what is going on and all have been fed a series of “big square” lies or oversimplifications by their faction?

both sides do it. they have to. to win requires mass appeal and the masses do not and cannot understand. of course we live in a tug of war between plunderous dimwits and “big red button” pushers who have no idea what anything is connected to. where in such a system can excellence emerge?

selecting the inhabitants of offices that may only be safely held by the very best by engaging in least common denominator polling of the very worst as they swing between the tribal valences of the incomprehending results in the worst sort of government imaginable.

you needed a farsighted captain. you got the retard who drills holes in the boat because the stupid people like it and have no idea what the hull is for.

that’s the trap. and if we keep playing this stupid game, the stupid prize of civilizational suicide shall be our epitaph.

but there is hope. a lot of hope actually. and that hope is what is shaping the fight and the civilizational experiment to come.

as the internet ravaged the middleman market for goods, so too such culling threatens for informational gatekeeping.

free market information is a powerful idea and one that ruins the middlewaretocracy currently tyrannizing the west.

it’s telling who gets the vapors from this, a near perfect shibboleth for who is in the tyrant class seeking to suppress discernment. as certain internet felines of questionable goodness have oft opined: “the side of censorship is never the side of civilization.”

mark andreessen lays out some of the shape of what’s to come here:

the simplest way to put this is “direct to consumer explaining things.”

it’s disintermendiation.

those who build and are actually doing a thing can now speak to the world in always on one to many discourse unmediated by middleman. you do not need media to do this anymore, so why allow the distortion? why allow their fun house glass between you and the things you wish to understand? go ask the builder, not the facile clerisy of the uncomprehending explainer class.

you can see the EU and much of the world raging to stop this. they want digital ID, internet suppression, thought police and meme prison. direct one to many “have your say” is kryptonite to their middleware rulership. they are not protecting public safety, they are protecting aristocratic prerogative. we get to explain. you do not get to go make your own choice.

there’s an interesting parallel here to liturgy in latin christianity making sure the commoner could not read the bible and had to take their word for what was in it vs the protestant reformation of “read it yourself and you decide.”

this will be much the same and with the same sort of “explosion to come” expansion as bottlenecks are broken and the next revolution of human organizations is set loose. like the industrial revolution before it, the change and benefit to those who ride the wave will be too vast and too profound to miss. everyone else will be left in the dust, poor and irrelevant and largely unfree.

AI will be a revolution and the core goal will be to keep it from being the next bottleneck of middleware where, like search and pre musk socisl media, a few people and a few algos get to shape the whole message. AI will need to open, to go open source, to adopt visible weightings and drop manipulative guardrails. many get pessimistic here, but i think it’s inevitable. free AI will be too much more powerful than indoctrinated AI because it can paint a map of the world as is vs a map of ideology driven fantasyland. it will dominate. those who adopt it will dominate. censorship and shaping will show up as damage and the system will route around it.

this will reshape media and access to primary sources. it collapses complexity and opens access. it will shatter all educational bottlenecks and realize the dream of personalized 1:1 education without the need for state funded teacher as middleware. we’re about to live through one of the greatest removals of bottlenecks and shifts of power in the history of our species.

those who think they can stop it are simply not smart enough to even know what “it” is. the totalitarian structures needed to suppress this are so outlandishly damaging than any who adopt them are committing civilizational seppuku.

they will drop like shot doves as the rest lift off.

buckle up.

this is going to be fun.

because the struggle is real

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may rise great enterprise

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this process is never even. in the time some were managing aqueducts, others struggled to master the pointy stick. some thrived, others fell, and those who once thrived sometimes fell in turn. (usually because they forgot the things that brought them to greatness) history has not ended. it continues apace.

this is the nature of civilizations that has come to determine the nature of the human experience.

the world had no fewer resources 3,000 years ago than it has today and yet life has moved from “nasty, brutish and short” to “long, luxurious, and kind” to degrees unimaginable to our far forebears. and that is the story of human capital, of insight and growth, of innovation in technology, in societal development, and of the instantiation of institutions and ideas conducive to human flourishing and to manifesting destinies.

these things do not happen of their own accord, they are the imposition of will and of design upon the world.

and they must be cared for.

the gravest and most suicidal error that a civilization can commit is to become too accustomed to the plenty and safety and progress that results from such cultivations and elevations of human capital and to mistake them for a state of nature, to forget that this is the rare exception and not the base state.

left uncorrected, such a misapprehension is invariably fatal and no humanity, however talented or robust, can reach its potential amidst such foundational undermining.

this is the vigilance of flourishing and here, at the turn of the american 250, this is the lesson we must internalize: the winds beneath our wings are not guaranteed.

our success and thriving are not guaranteed.

they depend upon us and if we take them for granted or vilify and deny their stern realities, we will, like so many once flourishing empires before us, fall. but if we understand them and recommit to them, we will rise and the best american century will be yet to come.

this is the choice.

and so, if we would climb rather than descend and to live up to the potential of ourselves and our creed, as in the time of our founding, it is time to state the self evident truths that shall and must underpin our reality.

there are two aspects to this state of flourishing and neither alone may suffice to bring it about:

1. human capital - no system however cunning or well intentioned can make bad people good or stupid people smart. it cannot make you bring the shopping cart back or pass the marshmallow test or bubble forth with keen insight and innovation if such things are simply beyond or anathema to you. one can legislate and enforce compliance, but not morality. the ability to take what is present and make it into more and to participate in high trust systems without a need for a constant fist held above to ensure it is rare temporally, geographically, and culturally. it is an outlier only functional in the presence of an internalized golden rule ethos that demarcates high value human capital. without high value human capital, high value human systems cannot be constructed nor, even if already in place, can they function.

2. the systems of liberty - liberty is the engine and crucible of flourishing. no human capital however strong and imbued with potential, can thrive in an entrenched and powerful system set in opposition to it. such government and especially that most pernicious and all ecompasaing tyranny, the tyranny of the majority, are the death of human endeavor and enterprise, a subjugation of liberty to unaccountable rule and of individual rights to that most damaging and dishonest of ideals: the top down imposition of some demagogue’s vision of “the collective good.” those words are always and ever must be lies. such a concept is fundamentally broken, an unknowable unmeasurable fable foisted upon the credulous and worse, the shortsightedly greedy.

the confluence of these two forces, high value human capital and high trust, high function human systems is an exceptional state of affairs.

and the time to apologize for demanding that has passed.

our founders and framers understood:

the western conception of social contract is simply not an institution that most of the world can or wants to join or take part in. it is and must be, by its nature, exclusionary to those who cannot or will not participate.

the voluntary agreement to step outside the war of all against all and to respect the (negative) rights of others to life, and liberty, and property, to freedom of speech and association that in return one’s own rights shall be respected is a choice and one that must be made daily, hourly, over and over. the civilization it underpins is nothing more (but nothing less) than the ongoing volitional non-defection in an endless many-sided iterative prisoner’s dilemma, a high equilibrium achievable by (and only by) people of sufficiently low time preference that they may withhold from damaging and stealing from their fellows because they know that no one instance of smash and grab is worth the breakage of the system that makes their plenty and safety possible and pleasant.

all agree to be bound because they understand that the reciprocal of bound is “protected” and that it is only by holding up one’s own end that one deserves to demand that others uphold theirs.

the price of the sanctity of your home and speech is the respect for the sanctity of the homes and utterances of others.

it sounds easy.

it’s not.

such social contract constitutes the system most conducive to human flourishing. there is not even a contest. it is the only pareto optimizing system known to man. all the people yammering about “i do not want to live under capitalism” and seeking some semantic justification of “social democracy” or whatever the current vogue in lexical legerdemain may be are, in reality, saying one thing:

i want to be protected but not bound.

i want the right to my speech and property while i take yours.

the positive rights to healthcare, food, housing, and the forced association of DEI and whatever other quota systems are devised to mandate takings and forcings by calling them inclusion are antithetical to social contract. once you place the power to take from one and give to another in the hands of the demos, you get mob rule and base demagoguery to lead it. you’re never going to be able to have non-defection again especially in the presence of low value human capital golden rule disrespectors who see such defection as right and righteous . it’s a race to the bottom to see who can win the smash and grab before one is smashed and grabbed. this destroys not only the systems of flourishing but the morals of those crushed beneath them.

legal plunder is a debased state of humanity punitive to our better angels and rewarding of the rapacity of our devils.

the great american experiment sought to mitigate and proscribe this. its genius and unparalleled creative force lay in one idea, an idea as simple as it was noble, a truth self-evident and inalienable:

that the rights of the individual stand paramount to the prerogatives of the state and inviolate to them.

no diktat, however popular, may take away that which is inalienable. the purpose of a just state is to protect these rights. nothing more. nothing less. leviathan’s powers derive from the consent of the governed. that is the incorporation of the social contract into the very marrow of our nation: it’s government by marshmallow test and this test must be passed by citizen and leader alike.

in the end, there is a choice and the choice is binary.

there is no gray.

there can be no gray.

the moment one says “well, not that speech, because, reasons” or “well, we’ll just take some property from the unwilling and give it to someone else because common good” and the state uses “majority” as a fig leaf to justify that which one free person could not do to another without committing a crime, the rights of the individual are no longer paramount. everyhting else is a negotiation between 3 foxes and a hen about how many chicks from the henhouse shall be eaten and the justifications for it become at once baroque and self-refuting until you wind up in some absurd collectivist famine or the dark-hilarity of majorities voting to call themselves minorities and demanding privilege that they cast as protection.

this runs downhill much faster in places like europe where parliaments wield less fettered majority power.

this was never intended to be the american way.

this is what the republic and its ingrained checks and balances were intended to prevent, a role they performed admirably for generations until the cracks hammered into them grew increasingly into torrents as each new breakage facilitated and catalyzed the next.

“a republic if you can keep it.”

franklin’s words when asked the result of the constitutional convention and what sort of government shall these united states have stand today at once as prescient admonition and accusation.

they also stand as aspiration.

and so today on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of our declaration of independence, let we the people consider the words of our founding. they stand as true today as they did then, more so even for we have seen the power and the potential when they are put into practice.

this is no longer theory. it is fact.

and ways that have been lost may once more be found and when governments become destructive to the ends of liberty, it is and ever shall be the right of the people to alter or abolish them.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

so here we are.

talk is cheap and ideals perhaps cheaper. what we need is praxis and so allow the polemicist pussycat a soap box and lend an ear. i have a plan and none of it is unworkable.

first, a word of explanation: my goal is not perfection. this plan is sure to upset the ideologues, edge lords, and anarcho-catpilast purity signalers. good. it’s also sure to upset the statists, the planners, the collectivists, and the diversity dogmatists. good. is this plan perfect? no. can it be? no. that is not my intent. my intent is to create, from known and validated principles and practices, a plan that is miles better than where we are, one that can and will work. my intent is also to create a plan we could actually implement both as a matter of practical issues like “could you do it?” and of the other critical issue of “could you sell it and get a broad enough group to agree?”

purists may not like it, but politics is the art of the possible and a grand dream of the philosopher kingdom upon a hill that you can never bring about is of no value. it’s just whining and aspiration, the kind of vapid virtue signaling that those of obsessively libertarian/anarchic lean are so apt to condemn among the marxist mavens and collectivist empathycrats, but seem so unable to diagnose in themselves and therefore leaves them ever marginalized as advocates of perfection standing as enemies of the better.

feel free to disagree, but if you’re going to grandstand and edge lord, provide an actual path to getting to whatever destination you advocate that is both possible and plausible else be called unserious and impotent. “but muh utopia” is not a political movement.

the core salients of my plan rest upon the pillars above and root in the idea of social contract:

that america and its ongoing dream must derive from high value, exceptional human capital and from the systems conducive to the flourishing of such capital. we must restore the protection of the individual and the possiblity of enduring golden rule social contract. and we must stop excusing or even tolerating deviation or opposition to such: get with the program or get lost. apologising for exceptionalism is the ethos of the slave.

how do we get there?

we need a grand bargain and that bargain must be taken to a constitutional convention and ratified.

much, even most of what i will propose is a simple return to our earlier structures, structures that have been broken and flouted and that must be, once more, restored so that choice and liberty may once more stand above diktat and plundercrat rule. much of this is simply the obvious things that we forgot, the chestertonian fences torn down in incomprehension.

to do this 3 things must occur and no one or even two will be sufficient by themselves:

1. we must regain fiscal control - emprires and democracies die of profligacy and deficit. running $2-3 trillion in annual deficits is not survivable.

2. we must regain control of and curate our human capital - execptionalism must be not only the rule but the requirement. this requires control of borders and birthright. it probably cannot be managed by borderguards alone, we must reverse the draw of low human capital seeking to live off our systems and return to a system that deters and expels it. you cannot get this many illegals and folks who do not fit to exit by rounding them up. they need to want to leave.

3. we must regain control of our instutions - this requires both the removal of anti-republic prerogatives and regulation and of its replacement with systems that are self-policing and self-regulating such that future usurpations will face consequences and choice is devolved to localities instead of centralized to transfer sovereignty to the individual and render him the customer, not the serf of the state.

this is not as difficult as it sounds and rests on a small number of levers, but these levers are serious and take courage and will to pull. time to find it.

pass a balanced budget amendment. the federal government will no longer be allowed to spend more than it takes in. this is simply not possible with the government as currently instantiated, but it’s also not as impossible as it looks.

the core problem is entitlements and “security programs” and the fact that they are a ponzi scheme/plunderocracy that is running utterly out of control. in 2025, $2.6 trillion was spent on medicare and social security. the sum total of all FICA and payroll tax collections was $1.7tn. the system as is cannot be fixed and will only get worse.

it needs to become personal accounts and the state needs to get out of it.

social security should be ended. medicare should be ended.

FICA and payroll taxes should not go to government, they should go to tax-free retirement accounts and health savings accounts owned by individuals. there should be ZERO government health “insurance.” it’s a disaster and corrupt and overpriced beyond belief or redemption. give people money. let individuals spend it on care or on private insurance that is neither regulated nor mandated by the state. medicine is a technology good and drops in real cost every year if it’s cash pay. insurance is not the solution, it’s the problem, a buffet with no price discovery serving only to enrich the shyster class. singapore provides a good example here. if people ask “what does it cost?” and shop on price performance, it’s amazing how good, fast, and cheap health care becomes and how affordable “disaster” coverage for cancer or car crashes becomes.

if americans got the market rate of return on what they paid in social security, they’d retire with many multiples of the payout. the math is stark. letting the feds run this and leaving the money within reach of the demos and demagogue has been a calamity. failed experiment. abandon.

this is all easy and obvious. we need to grasp the nettle. the price of doing this is likely to be “putting a big pile of money into some HSA’s and retirement accounts for those too old to generate their own now.” it’s a one time hit to debt that cures a $900 million a year (and rising) budget shortfall. we means test it, deal with it, and clear the board.

all these accounts become personal property.

then we pull apart the $668bn in medicaid and the $681bn in federal social program outlays and end it. all of it. every last dollar. the federal government removes itself entirely from this field of endeavor and funding to which is was never entitled nor permitted.

all this power goes back to the states and the people. if you want these protections, they have to take place at levels where people can say no.

(more on this in a minute)

the 10th amendment will once more be enforced. the commerce clause will be clarified to mean “the protection of negative rights to trade among the several states” only and none of this positive right “anything that could affect anything anywhere that might cross a state line so growing your own corn for your own use could affect the price in other places so we need to control it” garbage.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

that alone will put the fiscal house in order. no new federal debt will be allowed nor any new money printing. 10% of all tax receipts need to go to paying down debt principal.

end the fed. it’s a disaster. replace it with a sensible system of private currencies competing with and checking/auditing one another as stores of value, means of exchange, and transactional simplicity and privacy. money is none of the state’s business and letting leviathan run the banking system is like letting rats run the granary. this experiment has failed everywhere. end it and forbid it.

next:

repeal the 17th amendment. (case made at length HERE and summarized below:)

the intended role of the senate in the US federalist republic was not to stand for the people, it was to stand for the states.

the house was intended to stand for the people and was thus elected by the people.

the role of the senate was different.

the role of the senate was to protect the states, their governments, and their prerogatives from the federal government.

there is a reason that approval of supreme court justices, other federal judges, cabinet members, and suchlike was a power vested in the senate. it was supposed to be used by representatives of the state legislatures in defense of the state legislatures and to protect them from predation by a grasping center as lecherous leviathan sought to sink tentacles into that which was meant to be reserved for the states, taking their rightful powers for itself like a central government sinkhole expanding to consume a nation.

such jurists and cabineteers as appointed by state legislatures in defense of state legislatures would tend to have an altogether different character, one rooted in the primacy of the several states and in which the federal government would be seen as a nuisance and a trespasser, not as a solution or a suzerain.

restore this. the 1-2 punch of “enforce the 10th and repeal the 17th” puts us back on federalist footing, restoring the vision of “these united states” in which states stand as primary actors instead of a vastly overpowered swamp drowning them all.

this restores choice and accountability because states are fiscally and socially constrained; americans can simply move when and if they go to hell or stop protecting liberty providing attractive cost-benefit. the states should also follow suit and devolve as much power as possible to the localities and move as many systems as possible to “user pays.” you want a bridge? fund it with a toll. apply this to everything.

ban public school. no state or town shall ever again run a school. close the department of education. fund students, not systems. people are going to demand some sort of sponsorship, so the compromise is the entire nation has 5 years to move to a voucher system. existing schools all go up for bid. new schools and AI and distance learning/homeschool curriculums are all free to compete and no government may set criteria for doing so. pure market based solutions. a few bad outcomes are a tiny price compared to the monolithic mediocrity (and falling) currently imposed. set our children free from indoctrination and stultification. develop our human capital to its maximum extent.

explicitly ban all limits on and compulsion towards association or commerce. no one can tell competent adults who to hire or serve or speak to or marry. it’s all free choice. there are no quotas or limits, and “because that’s what i want”is always and everywhere a valid reason under the law. you want a restaurant for women only? do it. you want asian only cub scouts? do it. you want to hire using IQ tests? do it. it’s none of the state’s business. you want to call someone a jerk because you don’t like the choice they made? do it. but if you get called a jerk for calling others a jerk? deal with it. choice lies with the individual and no one has to lose it because they run a business. time for big boys and girls wearing big boy and girl pants. can’t handle free choice and free association? maybe exceptionalism is not for you. don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

same goes for commerce.

government is explicitly banned from mandating purchase of products or telling you from whom you may buy them. it’s not a power with which politicians can be trusted. the minute you give them the ability to say “you need to install a heat pump” the politicos all get bought by the makers of every product you don’t want and they force you to buy one. again, failed experiment, end it.

next:

get control of who lives here and our human capital:

the 14th amendment is ridiculous and needs to be clarified to eliminate “magic dirt birthright citizenship.” it was not intended this way and the function is pernicious especially in conjunction with a welfare and services state handing out free stuff that’s multiples of the standard of living in many of the awful reservoirs of low value human capital around the world.

stop handing out citizenship and voting rights. no one else lives like this and neither should we. this is like running a french fry stand on seagull island.

the borders need to be policed as do illegals but the real nub is this: who the immigration is matters.

the US is rightly called an immigrant nation. we thrived on it. but we thrived on it for two reasons:

“beacon on a hill” and “tough times and tough selectors.”

the beacon on the hill drew the best and brightest, the builders and the high value human capital who saw america and said “that’s the place to go do my thing.” we wanted those people and want them still. they are the wealth of the world and the most talented few are more important than any time in history. but to get the eagles and not the seagulls, you need life to be hard. the selector must be significant, the hill steep. it’s not about race or creed or gender, it’s about “do your values align with our values?” and “is your capacity sufficient to make it here?” can and will you join and follow the social contract and can you thrive by virtue of your own devices?

there is no shortcut for varsity team tryouts. not if you want to field a serious team.

as soon as you offer up free stuff and unaccountable fiat to rob and rape and plunder because “oh, they’re new here, they don’t understand” you run an adverse selector for the worst and dimmest, those who would live parasitically off the others. it seems to offend ideas of empathy to let the 80 IQ gimmiegrant go rough, but what of the empathy for america upon whose largess they feed upon and whose institutions they demolish, whose schools they bury and children they impede? sorry. we’re going back to doing unapologetic exceptionalism and “make it on your own.” if that is not your cup of tea, no worries. i wish you well in pursuing your happiness elsewhere, but you may not come and take from and live off of the social contractors here.

eliminating all immigrant eligibility for safety net and social programs and the anchor baby loophole thereto will stop and reverse the flood. the astonishing drain of fiscal resources is bad enough, but the large scale introduction of low trust people who will always defect in prisoner’s dilemmas and who will not only fail to return the shopping cart but purloin it is societal strychnine. you cannot have nice things. the first world degrades to the second.

so, sorry, not sorry, american excpetionalism is a specific sort of club and the high trust flourishing society it creates is worthy of protection.

yet nothing may be protected in the absence of basic accountability:

we need to protect and to limit US elections. the US is the richest and most technologically advanced country in the history of humanity. the idea that we cannot hold free and fair elections is absurd. this is a choice. trusting those who benefit from fraud to oversee this is madness. it’s another failed experiment.

elections, federal, state, and local need to be constitutionally placed beyond the reach of the state and the answer to this is open source software running on some sort of publicly available blockchain utilizing ring signatures from the issuers, the specific elections, and the individuals such that the code base is open and auditable by anyone and the cryptography beyond reproach. each voter can, themselves, validate that their vote was cast and correctly counted. the number of votes is provable and predicted. voting keys are given out only to those who have been rigorously validated and identified and such validation must occur and re-occur at regular intervals. you vote, in person, with ID, using these keys. even overseas military and diplomatic corps must vote this way (at a station set up for them). no mail in, no unvalidated voting or ballot harvesting. you show your ID, you get validated, you use your private key, that’s that. voter rolls are assessed and cleaned after every election. this happens in public.

we also need to tighten eligibility. no more voting goodies to yourself. only net taxpayers can vote. if, over the last 12 months, you received more in benefits than you paid in taxes, you are disenfranchised. if you want to vote, settle up. you can live off the state or steer it, pick one. no more “free bread for seagulls” party.

will this solve all of america’s problems? probably not. would be be a helluva start and a platform to solve the rest? i think so.

you control and cultivate the human capital by removing the adverse selectors that are flooding us. immigration can be fantastic or terrible, it depends upon who you get. and we need the ones who get with and further our program. melting pot works. multiculti salad does not. it’s far too easy for far too few to break high functioning systems for everyone. this is the city on the hill. this is the varsity team. you have to make the cut. there are no participation trophies or entitlement.

this newfound spectacle of immigrants talking about how they hate america is a sign of systemic sickness, a failure of the societal immune system. of course they hate you. they think you are stupid and weak and easy to cheat and live off of. that won’t change. what they would respect is being told “no, go find your own way.” then we’d find out who’s who. american tryouts are open. let’s see if you can play at this level.

restore bottom up emergent systems and success.

that’s the selector that works.

rights respecters only.

restore fiscal solvency and remove the moral rot of dependency culture and plunder. restore and sternly enforce the social contract and devolve to the states and to the individuals most of the power to tax and to spend. destroy the federal crony corporatism and allow choice in all things. people will vote with their feet and 50 experiments and 5000 micro experiments within them will compete to offer up versions of the american dream and thereby attract population. you can see this already in flight from NYC and CA. imagine what it would be like without the federal impositions, how different states could be, the discipline imposed by competition.

citizens become the customer and not the indentured servant.

federalism = free market choice for government.

the senate will once more protect this and control scotus and the cabinet yoking them, as intended, into the service of liberty.

the individual and his sovereignty will stand paramount and free in speech, association, and commerce.

and america will have the best century in human history.

we’ve done this before. nothing has changed. it will work again.

it just takes courage born of faith.

we must get past complacency and cowardice. no one said city on a hill was easy, only that it was worth fighting for.

that is what we declared 250 years ago.

if you would celebrate america, celebrate its ideas and its mission.

embrace excptionalism.

exceptionalism is aspirational, the path to better, the path to liberty.

anyone saying otherwise is (wittingly or not) selling something you do not want to buy.

anyone calling it arrogant or shameful is seeking to play at thought police. they are teaching you to subjugate yourself.

it is not empathy to take at the point of a gun.

it is not liberty to demand the serfdom of others to fund your claims to positive rights nor is it justice to spin fables to lionize it.

freedom is the other thing, the hard thing, the beautiful thing, the flourishing of that which is best in humankind and the reaching toward potential, toward better, toward a manifest destiny of greatness free to be we the people secure in ourselves and our prerogatives.

that is life well lived.

that is america.

that is worthy of defense.

there are roads that diverge in this wood:

one is paved with the courage of our convictions

the other is the path of decline.

civilizations fall by forgetting the obvious things.

they rise when they remember.

happy birthday, america.

and many more to come.

LFG.

to help us avoid the stupidity of the present

Read more

for there is much in the new world that harkens back to the old

Read more

politics is misery; therefore, making everything political makes everyone miserable.

this is is the bleakness of totalitarian and collectivist systems.

the entire ethos of such structures is and must be political:

these are the maxims of the totalitarian impulse to human perfection and its need to not only subsume the individual to the collective but to lionize this subsumation as “progress” and “the way forward.” it takes A LOT of effort because to efface human nature in such a fashion is no mean feat. it requires total commitment and an absolute surrounding by ethoses and demands for obedience and self-erasure, of dominion by doctrine. there can be no way but “the way” and all dissent must be cast as outgroup and relentlessly purged. there can be no counterexample.

this is why, contrary to the jingle on the box, collectivism and “common good” are always a focus on division, a focus on shaking the jar until the bugs fight so that some narcissistic sociopath can play at being king of the ants. the 0.000 batting average of creating utopia is irrelevant to such people, in the end, it all comes down who gets to be the boot and who shall be cast as buttock.

it is, frankly, the most inhuman system imaginable because it sets itself, as a matter of core doctrine, against human nature declaring it unfit and unevolved and seeking to cast in its place some form of ideological imposition that was either mistaken for utopia or cynically cast as such by the pigs who will rapidly show you just how they feel about some animals being more equal than others.

you want to understand why so many seem so unhappy? that’s why.

we are not meant to live like that.

it’s intolerable.

and worse, everyone can increasingly feel where this is going (and this is nothing new, we have been here before and the game is always the same).

people speak about how movies suck now, how music is stagnant, how art and even fashion are kind of going nowhere and do not have a patch on the vibrancy and variety of the 60’s, the 70’s, the 80’s, the 90’s. they make lame accusations about “kids today” etc but the reality is that it’s not the kids, it’s the politics.

this happens in every single society that gets captured by totalitarian twaddle of “we need to tell the humans how to be some inhuman elevation of themselves that we imagine to be finer and to deny their own natures in service of the collective because some self-styled elite has become determined that the world would be better that way.”

seriously, ask yourself: has any such society ever created any art of worth? did the soviets, maoist china, communist cuba, fascist italy or germany or spain? is anyone grooving to the soothing sounds of the music of the khmer rouge? no. they are all artistic wastelands of bad political hectoring and if you don’t like it, well…

obviously, the west is not quite there yet, but it can be and it will be if someone doesn’t get a hold of this nonsense and break the political intrusion into culture and the totalitarian war for the very nature of what it is to be human and the vast killing fields of joy thievery with which it has replaced the elevation of culture. such “media” is set in opposition to the better angels of that which is intrinsic to the human animal seeking to break and malign them and demanding in their stead an endless stream of “for your own good” involuntary induction into the cults of “soviet citizen” and “maoist man.”

we get force fed like pâté geese on the sort of doctrines that require the denial of the input of one’s own eyes and ears and “noticing things” and “exercising discernment” gets deemed “counter revolusionary” and “racist, sexist, homo/trans/islamophobic” become the new “bougeiose class traitor” epithets. but it’s all the same “we will perfect you” crap of the vilification of humanity and the demand to devote the self, heart and soul, to that which attacks the idea of being human.

it may call itself freedom and choice and pluralism, but it never stops there. “you do you, i’ll do me and leave the kids out of it” is never acceptable to those who would politicize and dominate everything in totalitarian structures. dragging the kids into it is ALWAYS the front and center goal. molding them into the brownshirts and snitches and ideologues of the movements to come and prying them away from the family and into the care and tutelage of the state is the path to “revolution” and to social domination.

it takes many forms and pushes on all boards at once.

this is just the same tactic as the soviet commisars and maoist struggle session fetishists pulling the kids into revolutionary circles and telling them some new-new thing is normal. and now, as then:

1. the things that are not supposed to be happening keep happening and

2. the claims that were supposed to be axiomatic keep turning out to be false.

and none of this is good for anyone except for the wreckers elevated to leadership by their own self-serving doctrines that demand it.

in the institutions of power it becomes selectively oppressive and increasingly vicious. “they” get near absolute licence. “you” get the boot in the face if you oppose them or demand similar rights and choices. “for my friends, everything. for my enemies, the law.”

it’s when the pigs get rights the cats cannot have that you know the animal farm is going rancid and art is always a marker.

it becomes banality and relentless dogma making pretense at the very timeless themes and human experience it so desperately must consign to the memory hole.

utopian is the opposite of human.

that’s the literal definition: making humans act in a manner that humans do not act.

and it just plain sucks when someone seeks to force you to live under it.

and you cannot make cinema or music or fashion in a world like that.

let’s take the simple example of this new supergirl movie that seems to have been such a flop. by all accounts, it’s just a bad movie, meandering and kind of pointless. but you cannot just say this anymore. both sides are making political theater out of it because the thing about the politicization of everything is you might not care about it, but it cares about you and will relentlessly seek to frame mog you into its own salience systems.

there is a norm here: comic books and superhero movies tend to cast ostentatiously attractive people as heros. you do not get gilbert godfried to play batman, you get christian bale. no one asked roasanne barr to play wonder woman, they got gal gadot. and everyone was good with that. but when you start to break the history and the archetypes, human nature kicks in. “helen of troy is black” might, at one time in american history, have been a sort of edgy piece of art. maybe in the 80’s you could have done it and had it not be politics. maybe you could have had jim gaffigan as othello. maybe that could have been art.

but not today. not once art has been politicized and where the relentless push of ideology as cinema pervades and every single fricking movie has the same exact intrusions in the same exact directions and yet each one claims to be some separate stand alone thing, people lose it. the question flips from “can you not tolerate divergence from the norm?” to the statement of “you must accept this as the new norm.”

the simple fact is supergirl looks to be a bad movie with no redeeming character or plot lines. and the simple fact is that for whatever reason milly alcock (who seems fine in number of other movies) has come off as distinctly funny looking in this movie and looks, frankly, weird and far different from herself in her days targaryen. she was an odd choice for this.

it’s just bad art. but we cannot say this anymore.

because all art is political.

because all of society has become political

this is no longer just a funny meme, it’s a political fault line.

i mean, look, neither sydney sweeney nor milly alcock are ever going to threaten glenn close or helen mirren as paragons of astonishing acting talent, but both can make movies worth seeing.

supergirl was just not one of them.

and this becomes political rage. it’s mysogny and homophobia! (apparently supergirl is a queer icon and the movie was released during pride month, itself an imposition many are getting exhausted by as a month of pride flags on main street supplant american flags for the 250th anniversary of america).

but you cannot dislike the movie without giving political offense.

this is not a healthy state of affairs and is a sure sign of totalitarian belief sets.

everything within the revolution, nothing against the revolution.

and those pushing this, especially hollywood will not stop because they cannot stop.

the cultural commissars outputting this dog’s breakfast of constipated indoctrination film strips cannot cease this endless agitation, intrusion, and offense because it’s who and what they are.

such systems inevitably and always pull in the weak minded and low identity, low individualism people, those who want to know who to be and what to do, how to act, what is virtue, and to subsume their sense of self to the collective and play a role. (it’s zero coincidence that actors are always such a vanguard in these movements, pretending to be what the audience demands for fame and credit is their stock in trade. politicians too…)

but once you have done this, it’s a trap masquerading as wubbie.

they cannot deviate without losing sense of self. they are no longer people who have ideas. they are people who are their ideas.

and they are iron bar sure that they are right and you are wrong and that we’re just one more 5 year plan away from the utopia they are sure you’d want if only you were brought to consciousness as they have been.

they are sure that if you disagree they need to talk louder and slower like some bad american in greece trying to get the locals to understand and to tell you how bad you are a few more times until you get it.

and if you still won’t, they start controlling media, preventing speech, and sending the thought police to your house for memes. it’s not a coincidence that this is cropping up all over the west from the UK to france to germany and canada and australia. speak “our truth” and be amplified and lauded. speak against it and it’s hate.

that’s not pluralism, that’s oppression and “common good before individual good” is the “your mask protects me” false framing to render you always outnumbered and forced to comply.

and the lies and mental pretzels get pretty baroque.

“supergirl does not even have a romantic subplot!” they say (and this is actually true, apparently it doesn’t.)

you’re all making this up. you’re too sensitive. you’re seeing “queer” everywhere like some kind of monomaniac. (“queer” for those not versed in nuance, is basically a way to say “gay but stridently political about it.”)

well, sometimes one is paranoid, but sometimes, well, perhaps one has a point. it does seem like an awful lot of acting folk of late have been actively politicizing their roles from ziegler calling snow white “dated” to, well, this:

“kara would not hold herself to the binary heteronormative expectations of this earthly planet.”

so, yeah.

the relentless “you must change to accept the world as i demand it be seen” shift from the “accept me?” of interesting artistic icons like bowie and prince has become the relentless demand of “accept me!” (or else)” from the impositonal ideological industrial complex.

it’s an overt and deliberate campaign against the idea of cultural consent.

and it’s fricking exhausting.

adding a political dimension to every facet of human life is a misery index maximizer.

there is no soviet joy nor maoist magnanimity. there is no DEI delight.

no society operating under such stricture is ever happy.

they cannot be. it’s anti-human dystopia rooted in the denial of that which makes us human and which brings us together.

it did not used to be like this. is does not have to be like this now. back in the 90’s, politics was sort of a dull quacking sound you occasionally paid attention to. the state was not intruding into every basic aspect of your life from food to sex to free association and what kind of fricking straw you used and whether your matcha was fair trade.

was it perfect?

no.

nothing human is.

but it was a helluva lot more pluralist than this garbage.

we could be friends with others and they could be friends with us.

this is still true.

it always will be.

and those who say otherwise should have their agendas checked.

you don’t hate the UK. you hate their politicians.

they don’t hate america. they hate our politicians.

there is nothing exotic or difficult here, guys.

we share a culture, a commonality, and we can share a joy if we simply remember who the real bad guys are and thereby rediscover the commonality with our friends.

politics as lifestyle is the stagnation of art, science, economy, civility, and comfort. it’s alienation, anger, and the death of human flourishing.

the “us vs them” in this struggle has been miscast: it’s a global aristocracy with their impositional values and grand schemes and institutional capture “for our own betterment” against the rest of us who would just like to be left alone to be flourishing humans.

allowing a media who lies all the time to push this on you and to trust them about what the world and the people in it are like is madness.

watching the world come to the US for world cup and love it is wonderful, but my reason for it goes beyond the commonality:

watching the political elites explode in paroxysms of “noooo! you are not allowed to like buc-ees! that’s low class bad america and the political enemy! you need to only love our weirdly contrived solar powered drag queen story hour with genuine organic gluten free cricket flour muffins served with soy butter! those people are deplorables! noooo!” is delicious.

it’s actually brain breaking for them to have someone else render judgement on those they deem their inferiors and to have that judgement be “i love this” and worse that “you guys lied to me.” that last one rapidly turns to “you know, you kind of suck.” and that has our alleged betters in a bit of a tizzy.

but what they offered was never terribly attractive.

elites are snobs and snobs are never happy. that’s the price of snobbery: you have cultivated a jaded and exclusionary world view. you have mistaken it for cultivation and sophistication. it’s not. it’s just stacking the deck against yourself:

“i am so hard to please!”

congrats dumbass, you’re now going to spend most of your life displeased.

“those people i read about in the paper are terrible.”

congrats dumbass, you’re now never going to meet new people and expand your horizons.

no sane human would outsource this sort of discernment.

it is time for a new declaration of independence:

stop letting maladjusted lunatics tell you how things are in a world you are not touching.

go find out for yourself.

you might find it’s pretty fricking good…

“if you would know who rules you, discover those whom you are not permitted to criticize.”

universities, even the most selective ones, stopped choosing students on this basis and stood in their place all manner of intersectional and diversity slop subsituting skin tone and pronoun complexity for “best and brightest,” and this has dumbed down and broken the institutions and rendered the degrees they confer if not useless then at least deeply suspect as signifiers of character and capacity. it has created a false dream, a lake wobegon world where 50% of american kids go to institutions they believe will provide a gateway to a 95th percentile life, a fact about which ~90% of them, as a matter of mathematical necessity, must be wrong. perhaps that’s the price of calling math “racist” and “sexist”…

this alone is tragic and will ruin lives and chances, elevating the midwitted above their station, overproducing ersatz elites, and drowning in debt those supplied with fugazi sheepskins whose academic pleather rapidly loses lustre in contact with the real world, but there is another, insidious aspect here:

this false dream replaces and effaces the real dream. this sophomoric subterfuge of “school as achievement end state and not as training” creates a self-inflicted misery cycle rooted in mistaking effort for result and process for substance. watch:

the nub comes right at the end:

the american dream, do you think it’s real?

the “not the brightest crayon in the box” man on the lines?

yup. work hard. it’s there. yes sir.

team acamdemia with their PhD’s from mom’s house? no. it’s gone.

“that social contract and how it degrades a bit, is real. do x, y, and z and you have certain expectations and then you don’t get the other side if it.”

even leaving aside the poor phrasing and incoherent structure of the comment that smacks of parroted phrase and not conceptual comprehension, that’s a near perfect encapsulation of marxist labor theory of value.

it’s quite literally “i put in the time, i deserve the big chair!” we laugh about people like that in the corporate world. no, it goes to the capable, tenure is no proof of anything, but amazingly, this is the exact belief these university indoctrinees are emerging with: “i did x, y, z, where is my 95th percentile life?”

it’s the malady of midwit malcontents:

they are learned enough to know the phrase “social contract” but ignorant enough not to know what it means and to assume in its place some presumption of “social entitlement” where because they jumped through a hoop, society owes them success.

it’s basically this:

and that was never the american dream.

firstly, the degrees they are getting are watered-down nonsense, a clownworld curriculum of cargo cult misapprehension that mistakes a baccalaureate in the semiotics of intersectional aggrivement narratives in pre-columbian peruvian pottery for knowlege, gender studies for useful praxis, and a book about “neoliberalism and work” for employability. but the reality is the opposite: these degrees are not even just “less useful than was hoped” they are actively harmful to produtivity and prospects because the “certain expecations” are not meetable and thus will never be met.

they have, through the falsity of labor value theory, led large swathes of midwits to their lasting doom.

they came to belive a false dream, a dream that if they “did they thing” they’d be an elite. it’s just another cargo cult. they mistook process for substance and hours spent acquiring useless knowledge that not only elevated them (in their own minds) above their station and capability but entitled them (again in their own minds) to a career doing these same useless things. and so emerge the luxury beliefs of the poverty stricken underpinned by the pernicious illusions of self-sabotage. it’s an inescapable crab pot cum misery engine where you yourself and your “peers” around you all prevent climbing out by using phrases like “deserve” and “beneath me” to describe and malign useful work while egging one another on into ever more baroque and aggreived forms of entitlement. these two are probaly going to wind up going back to school to get another credential.

the smug laughter of the folks in the bar speaks volumes. they’re sure of what they were promised and what the deserved, of the place they are supposed to occupy. changing or doing somehting different is clearly not at the top of their list. they “worked hard” to fashion square pegs that they are sure were supposed to fit and seek to drive them into holes for which they are decidedly inapt.

they have fundamentally misunderstood.

the american dream was never “work hard and you will succeed.”

it was “work hard at something useful and you can succeed.”

that was always the obvious inference and the fact that it has somehow been lost should really give pause. can anyone seriously need to have that spelled out?

apparently so.

what the work is has always mattered and to ignore this basic fact and wind up intellectually substituting “the playgroup work i want to do” for “work that someone else would value” is a level of stupidity so absurd that basically only an overeducated midwit could ascend to it; but if your whole curriculum of allegedly higher education has been about the structural oppression of wonderful, promising you, it’s exactly the sort of twaddle you not only fall for but will clutch as a wubbie to excuse and even lionize your own failure to launch.

you’re the victim here, right?

after all, you did 9 years of college to get a degree in twee slam poetry. why should you not be afforded a comfortable, upperclass lifestyle for hand inscribing your couplets upon personally hand recycled fair trade paper and hanging them from the trees of greenwich village? do people not understand the time and effort you put in? the value you create? the delightful scansion of “twee in a tree”?

yes, in fact they do.

that’s the problem.

the crisis is not that the american dream is over, that the social contract has been abrogated, it’s that these people have had their heads filled with garbage and have mistaken what they themselves think that others should value for what others actually value.

it’s one big “i went to acting class, i deserve a starring role” mindset being kindled into disaffection as lifestyle choice and validated by the other dupes and the doctrine they too uncritically swallowed about how if they are not succeeding, it’s because “the dream is gone.”

it’s not, these people are just dreaming marxist dreams of “to each according to their degrees” and that dream never existed in the first place.

and the truly tragic bit is that it makes those so afflicted absolutely miserable, trapped in prisons of their own making and unable to even conceive of escape because they incarcerate themselves in expections too hallucinatory to ever be met but too foundational to their senses of self to be abandoned.

it’s not “i want to strive at useful work” it’s “i want you to find my strivings useful and will become aggrieved if you do not.”

that’s not an american dream, it’s an impositional nightmare and a vast overproduction of graduate degree bedecked lake wobegon marxist midwits laboring in entitlement factories to justify their ongoing misapprehension that a cargo cult was the american dream and that they were somehow promised and destined for more.

they wallow in the insipid longueur of life in mom’s basement because they mistook the act of turning a crank for starting an engine, of sound and fury in service of a cargo cult for valuable enterprise, of “i want” and “i value” for “the world should pay for.”

it’s a tortured, self-important, self-enforced exile to one’s own eternal internal elba, a place of tribulation, alienation, and disaffection and one from which the midwit mind lacks the tools of self-extrication.

this is the tragedy of the overproduced “elite”:

i feel for these people. they swallowed a level of lie about the american dream that anyone who does not need a “soap, do not eat” warning on the box should have seen through, but that is the essence of being the over educated mitwit:

you were placed in an institution for true critical thinkers without possessing the capacity for critical thinking and thus agglomerated around you an armor of doctrine and dogma that you cannot allow to be challenged or questioned because you lack the capacity to perform the process of such first principles examination.

they were placed/placed themselves in a situaiton they did not understand and took as gospel precepts they were incapable of interrogating. they mistook the brouchure for calamity university for the american dream, time spent for time spent well, and accrediation for capability or usefulness.

they are the gulag archipelago of labor theory fallacy, their own private siberia made cold and hostile by their induction into false dreams from which they cannot wake themselves without admitting that their labor was a lie.

cargo cult turtles, all the way down.

it becomes a ceaseless barrage of ideology

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but being the dad is harder than it looks

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the source of the quote seems contested, but the sentiment it embodies is not and as much of the intrusive globalist cabal/cool kids table of davos/WEF or whatever other club of rome inheritors are currently kicking around on private jets from which they tell us not to use plastic straws finds itself increasingly on the wrong side of sentiment, it seems they are increasingly keen to gear up make to a play for ongoing power in spite of their loss of ongoing popularity.

and the best way to do that is censorship, mean, rotten, down and dirty censorship with a side order of “we’ll arrest you if you notice.”

lose the debate?

silence debate.

you think it’s a joke

but then you realize it’s not.

it’s telling that both the UK and germany have rapidly rising opposition parties that the current folks in charge are desperate to disenfranchise.

and this one is especially insidious because it’s clear how badly many of these regimes want to arrest for wrongthink and throttle wrongspeak, standards that they themselves seem sure that they and only they are fit to set.

they’re never going to be able to sell that, it’s a rancid product. they tried to mandate digital ID and currency and people smelled the rat.

so they got a bit cunning and dressed it up as a moral crusade to “protect the children.” but it’s not: it’s a trojan horse for a fully locked-down ID mandatory internet in which only approved outlets may serve and approved speakers speak.

and no amount of saccharine appeal to “protecting childhood” should convince you otherwise.

but starmer got not only ratioed but community noted on twitter. not a good look for a budding digital censorship czar. care to wager this is exactly why he wants control of social media?

they cannot win in the open agora.

so they need to destroy it.

(if your stomach is strong, watch the video, it’s something.)

they’re going to “fix technology intruding into children’s lives” by intruding into the life of every adult. because you cannot do this without doing so. this requires ID. how can you keep out the kids without it? it’s basically “everyone on the internet gets carded.” no more anonymity. chilling stuff in a place where you can get arrested for making memes about social issues. astonishingly, it looks like “bluesky” may be exempt from this (not sure it’s certain yet) but that sort of tells you everything you need to know about how this is intended to lean politically, no? (similar thing happened in austraila)

it’s now about your kids’ safety, it’s about the politicians’.

and be serious, the kids will go through this nonsense like a light saber through tissue paper. VPN, fake ID, fake face, AI spoofing, who knows. this will make the war on drugs look like a rousing success in terms of efficacy and, like the war on drugs, it’s only going to work on squares. they don’t actually care if young nigel is on twitter. they care if the kinds of people who are critical of the government are.

this seems to be part of the whole EU “we need to take control of social media” playbook. they are trying to “build their own” and they know they can’t.

australia and the UK have bans announced. canada, spain, germany, denmark, and france, are all working on it.

and some of them have designs WAY past mere ID.

this too is for “protection.” the early intent is to “search for nudes” and prevent under 18’s from taking or sending nude pics or accessing them, but this too is just another trojan horse. if you seriously believe that once a state has the power to demand full phone scanning it will stop at “just hunting the pedos” and “policing the teens being a bit racy” then i have a bridge to sell you in london. if you look behind the big wooden horse, you can see it in the background…

they want device level lockdown and scan to stop you from spoofing ID and to make sure they can see ALL your content no matter what kind of encryption you use in transmit or storage. open it? gotcha.

this is “orwell was an optimist” levels of big brother and it’s setting up a serious fight.

and it’s deeply, dangerously disingenuous from the side of censorship.

call me my cynical paws, but when the same people who tell you the great danger to kids is nudes and social media have allowed a grooming gang scandal to rage on for decades and seem oddly disinterested in even understanding it, much less stopping it, so i find it more than a trifle difficult to take them at their word here.

and it’s spreading to everywhere where regimes are unpopular and flailing.

it’s actually an interesting litmus test: what country that is imposing these has a strong government who is not threatened by raid gains from the right?

france, germany, UK, australia, even the danes are a minority coalition and the nationalist DF party just tripled its vote share and the “blue block” right are rapidly approaching the same size as the governing coalition.

and these guys? well, nuff said.

this feels like the move of a whole set of failing regimes whose own people have had about enough of them and who see opposition parties rising to prominence.

this is how you make political dissent illegal and track every post and pontification.

this is how you allow your side to do and say whatever it likes while everyone else is hamstrung.

it reminds me of this: fentanyl floyd rallies are A OK, but church or the gym or, heaven forfend, protesting against lockdowns is not.

those are health risks.

it’s all the same repetitive pantomime.

one law for me, another for thee.

try criticizing it if you need a lesson on who’s in charge around here.

are these seriously the kind of people you want to give the keys to the internet turnstile?

you think they’ll use that power for good? they’ll stop at just age and porn?

fall for that one and you’re cooked.

10 years ago, this might have worked.

but this is just foolish.

this battle is long since over.

they already lost the arms race.

it’s amazing how fateful a one simple exchange can be.

the freeing of twitter (now X) was a watershed and its ownership by possibly the one truly uncancelable human on the planet is fascinating.

what do you do against a guy who: has his own AI, launches a meaningful number of your satellites, and astronauts, and now has a global satellite internet system that no nation state can really block?

if you want to make elon his next trillion, make the internet unsafe for most of the west and see what happens when you can get high bandwitth starlink on a mobile phone handset (current handset bandwidth is low, upgrades planned).

the tech is going to move too fast for the censors and the commanding heights of space have been ceded to the resistence.

these aspiring censorious suzerains will wind up alienating those they seek to cow and making their messages resonate with those who might otherwise stand aside.

you simply cannot win a fight like this.

bringing censorship to a fight against youth movements is like bringing jam to an ant fight.

for the price of liberty is vigilance

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double checked for safety

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let us simply call a spade a spade: the long march of this instruction of ideological inversion through the institutions of the west has become, of its own right, an obsessive and vicious cult that stands anathema to ideas of rights, liberty, justice, and equality. it has become the precise system of embedded and unavoidable structural prejudice that it purported to oppose, just another “antifa” gone distinctly “fa” and the output of this disastrous misapprehension of reality has become so blatant that it takes a special kind of willful to ignore it.

i have waited to speak about henry nowak because i wanted to let the facts settle a bit and be sure the picture was what it looked like and not go off half cocked. well, i think we now have plenty of information and more to render some strong and sound judgements and it just keeps getting more vile and obvious in the “doing the graph” sense of distance worship and reality denial.

we’ve created systems of astonishing bigotry incapable of recognizing this fact about themselves because they are amygdala deep mindwiped to not only perceive this prejudice as pluralism but to go absolutely wild if anyone call them on it.

the institutions themselves have become not only dangerously deluded and captured, but outright dishonest and the degree to which this is so is really and truly getting to be beyond the pale.

the more news that comes out, the more it seems that nowak did nothing of any consequence to provoke the attack by the sikhs who killed him using a “ceremonial” knife that it would have been illegal for nowak himself to carry. many of the wounds were on his back, inflicted while he tried to flee and to climb a fence.

as he lay bleeding out, vikrum digwa, the assailant went into full cover up mode. he called his parents. his mother came and took the murder weapon back to their home and hid it. they called the police. not an ambulance. the police. they told them henry had “racially assaulted them.” this was false but it’s the magic words that absolve all. the cops came and arrested the dying henry. they handcuffed him as he was bleeding out. some say this handling is what tore open the vein that led to his rapid exsanguination, but this seems like speculation and i do not know if the facts are known. (more on the whole story if you have not seen this)

what is known without any doubt is that the police came to the scene, henry told them that he had been stabbed, and they laughed and said the now infamous line:

this is the real and untouched image from a police body cam, startling in its ghoulishness. and we have the audio of the call.

and we have the video of him being dragged into cuffs. he’s in obvious distress. no one cares.

and the responses to this were just as one would expect in the self-deluded self-denying system of institutionalized racism. the unrest it caused was condemned by the selfsame politicians who lauded the flyod riots and the irony that “fentanyl floyd” likely died of drugs and not mishandling or assault, and yet nowak perished from outright murder that the police refused at first to see gets pretty striking.

this is one example. there are hundreds.

and the responses from the police were, frankly, vile.

“how were we supposed to know?” ask the police. “they said he did a racism, so of course, that was top of mind.”

“and anyhow, his injuries were not survivable, so, no harm no foul, innit?”

and, as expressed above, this claim of “not survivable” remains disputed and, in any event, the police could hardly have known that and in no event should have operated as if that were the case. “reprehensible” seems a whole inadequate word here. “monstrous” seems more apropos, and as you’ll see, it gets worse.

even in full knowledge that they were wrong, the coppers still sought to smear, lie, and cover themselves. they needed henry to be the bad guy and were willing to grossly misrepresent facts to try to make their own actions look better.

this is disturbing on two levels:

1. the blatant, self-serving dishonesty of a police force blaming a victim to cover for their own malfeasance

2. the outlandish inversion of priority where “doing a racism” to an immigrant is deemed the most vile of offenses but rape, murder, assault, and robbery all get short shrift because “the graph.”

and this is not isolated. it has become the polestar of a system of institutional racism that not only inverts its own purported aims, but has conjured into being the very things it was alleged to oppose.

remember the little scottish girl with the knife and hatchet? “joan of park” was vilified and arrested for “brandishing.” it was at once absurd and grotesque.

UK grooming and rape is not some small, isolated incident. it’s been hundreds of thousands of girls, maybe more. the sheer scale of it is all but incomprehensible. i’m embrassed at how long it took me to realize that this was real. it was just too big to believe.

this has been going on for decades. rapists walk free. the police side with them and arrest fathers who stand up. speak out about it and you get sent to diversity training or get the tommy robinson treatment of political prisonerhood.

and little girls are left to stand alone.

then they get blamed for doing it.

well, what the hell did you want them to do?

how is “she was being harassed” not the odds on base case presumption?

little girls do not run around grabbing weapons to menace innocent bulgarian gypsy muslims for fun. such people do not follow little girls around filming them and demanding “show the knife” for any good purpose. and certain felines of ill repute had quite a lot to say about this back then.

anyone falling for this has been mindwiped or cowed into some sort of collectivist consciousness of being so afraid to accuse attackers for fear of being called racist that their reality denial becomes willful prejudice.

it’s atrocity apologia as suicidal empathy.

and yet, no, they attack the victims.

they refuse to believe. it’s endless, relentless DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.

it’s gaslighting. and it works.

and then the truth comes out

and it turns out the girls were right and they did get assaulted

and the obvious thing was, indeed, the truth, but almost no one ever hears that.

the media moves on.

the politicians play at DARVO.

it’s all part and parcel to one big whitewash.

even when seen, it becomes difficult to believe.

the instutions are implacably hostile to truth and to reality.

the narrative has captured them and made them dangerous.

i have simply never seen such unevenhanded treatment by officials and by media.

you literally could not make this up.

it reads like parody.

but it’s not.

and it’s just everywhere in its proud orwellian horror:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

disparate impact has driven reality denial and will keep causing the very things it is so desperate to deny can and are happening.

over and over, this desperately misguided belief that any difference in outcome is proof of discrimination is preventing discernment and safety,and demanding the inhabitation of a hallucination.

and it legitimately starts to look like you getting your face eaten is a feature of this system and not a bug. i’m honestly curious, just how else is one to read this?

or this:

this is the stuff i cannot get my head around.

are we so demoralized that there appears to be no possible response to this? so cowed? so broken?

do people just not believe it? have they decided it’s not real? is it just too big and awful to see so the mind just slips off of it?

how can being afraid of being called a word ending in “ist” or “phobic” trump little girls getting torture raped right in front of you?

imagine the level of institutional hostility it takes to demand such a view.

the police look away. the government looks away. many are complicit. criticism is criminalized, merely noticing this and posting it online becomes a felony more actively pursued than rape.

the media see this and shows you the opposite.

government decrees “noticing things” as “right wing extremism and closes ranks.

the useful idiot followers do this because they have become so addled-headed by echo chamber inversion that their own reality departure is cast as “everyone else is an extremist.” the leaders do so because they know what’s coming and that it will be war. the marxist long march makes such a mess and mockery of institutions and “democracy” that becoming a threat to democracy becomes literal self-defense, the very defense they seek to deny you.

they are trying to get you to doubt your own right to self determination and defense.

this is, above all else what they fear:

and the powers that be howl and act mystified as more and more start saying “you know, joan of park had a point” and “what kind of leaders stand with groomers and rapists and killers instead of our own little girls?”

and past a point, dams break and rubicons are crossed.

this is june 8th in belfast:

a mentally disabled local was very nearly beheaded in the middle kinnaird avenue when hadi alodid, an immigrant from sudan and, per some reports, a former policeman there, attacked him in a fashion called “sudden” and “frenzied.” no one seems to know why.

this is june 9th in belfast:

protesters set fire to homes, sparred with police sent to stop them, and focused on the very immigrants that it has been forbidden to criticize. i’m not here to defend this but rather to explain it. you can only push these things so far, gaslight and vilify so much, take property and lives and safety, before the backlash of the men who just wanted to be left alone rises.

and this backlash is, once begun, implacable and complete. it has to be.

and watching the same people who knelt to the BLM burning and looting over floyd and claim that “opposing racism is more important than covid limitations” while barring you from schools and gyms and churches and your places of work claim that “no, you cannot do the same” is causing something to break among the men (and increasingly the women) who just wanted to be left alone. the tone deaf gaslight glare becomes intolerable.

and that which becomes sufficiently intolerable will cease to be tolerated.

if you spend a decade implementing and morally grandstanding about policies that prevent, undermine, and even vilify safety, that deny atrocity and widespread predation and danger, that serve to cover up massive grooming gang scandals and rises in crime, sorry, but you do not get to say this:

“appealing for calm must be the priority, and that is what I urge now. we must let the police get on with their work.”

you have not sought calm, you have destroyed it. how is any reasonable person supposed to remain calm in the face of such accelerating provocation and institutional hostility, in the face of such rabidly systemic racism committing atrocity and calling it justice, in the face of murdered pluralism prancing about in the skinsuit of equity and inclusion?

“i don’t think the police are working, mate.”

this is the flashpoint i’ve been yowling about for 12 months: the point where the men who just wanted to be left alone are pushed too far and decide that your system is not compatible with their social contract.

you can F around up to about a 5 and the men who just want to be left alone are not going to bring you much in the way of “find out.” this causes stupid people with low move look ahead to become overconfident and think that those they bully are weak and demoralized.

they aren’t. they are just reluctant because they know what it means to “do the other thing.” they look ahead, they know what they will become if they are forced to go there.

they wait, they tolerate, but at a certain point, they move and they move very, very hard.

perhaps a 5 on FA gets you a 1-2 FO, but the curve goes exponential from there.

you go to 6, they go to 8, you go to 7, they go to 16, and for stuff like this? there’s not even a number anymore. they bring ALL the “find out” because high agency people who value a civilization will at some point go to war to defend it and the hearths and homes it serves.

the marshmallow test becomes different, a “dark horror today so the kids can get their candy tomorrow.” you do not want to see the violence of those forced to pass that test any more than they want to be forced into it. but if you push, it will come.

the change in the world seems sudden because it is. it’s a phase change, a crossing of a rubicon as an event horizon to von clausewitz total war in which respect for innocents is abandoned.

and this is not the fault of those who rise, it’s the fault of those who took away their rights and murdered their way of life and the safety of their children and pushed them far enough that there was no other choice.

and so clowns like kier and the 100 others like him, this is getting to be about your last chance to avoid what you are about to set off. and i hope you do because “the other thing” is as horrible as it will be complete and once it starts in earnest, there is no “back,” there is no “off.”

and it will be on you if you force it.

it will be on all of them. all the gaslighters and liars and deniers, the differential impacters demanding to outlaw “noticing things” and to criminalize defending a civilization, those of wholly real malice and imaginary benevolence.

this is a disastrous outcome, one of real and lasting violence and hate.

and it is brewing. it is rising. if you put your hand on the deck of the ship, you can feel it in the engines.

and it does not have to happen.

but unless this ghastly institutional hostility is arrested and reversed, sure as sunrise, it will.

i don’t know how many more pleas to “stop doing this before you unleash havoc and let slip a war of which you cannot conceive” i can muster here amidst the seeming deafness of so many ears, but one has to try.

we’re being pushed to atrocity by institutions that either relish it or are too foolish to know what lightning they are calling down.

and this goes bad for everyone.

the leopards fancy themselves the apex face eaters, but they have no idea what happens if they wake the lions.

i doubt most of these institutions can be saved. they will need to be razed.

but the populace can be.

they can see this and demand better. it can be (largely) peaceful.

but time grows short and “the other thing” will be the path unless something gives and right soon.

it can happen here. it’s getting ready to.

“i don’t think so mate” is setting up to be the epitaph of western civilization.

choose well.

these generations are rich

but they feel poor because their expectations are unrealistic.

but, and this is a huge but, this does not mean that they do not also have some valid points as well. they do.

in 2021, housing was at generational levels of affordability, but in the last 4-5 years, housing has become stratospherically expensive. that’s a real issue and if you, boomerisimos, were in their shoes instead of owning homes and benefitting from this, you too might find the fit not to your liking.

but there is a bigger, much more fundamental issue at play as well: the system really is rigged against these kids (and gen X but we’re used to it and are too small demographically to be a political power). and the boomers are going to be the generation that breaks the institutions.

and asking the kids of america to pass a marshmallow test where waiting is clearly not going to result in more candy is asking them to play the patsy and act high trust while they are defected against and plundered.

this is real and it’s coming right soon.

why pay into this if you’ll never get anything out and it’s obvious the system will not be standing when you come of age?

boomers love to call gen Z entitled, but mention “entitlements” and watch the boomers suddenly get pretty darn entitled themselves,

the boomers will retort “but this is a system, we paid in and deserve to take out!”

that’s just statistically inaccurate.

you paid far, far less than you will take out and during a long period in which you held unchallenged political control of the US.

and it was not designed to be like this. when it was put into place, the age of entitlement was set at average life expectancy. avg recipient got 0 years of payout. now the average recipient gets ~20 years. everyone has known that cannot work for 30 years. but you did nothing.

you allowed this ponzi to grow and fester and become ever more pyramid shaped.

you went wild and made it a third rail. you let no one change the ponzi. and now the bill is coming due. and the acid test is coming.

it will be simple, five letters: “paygo.”

that’s the test. social security is supposed to be run as a paygo system. it cannot pay out more than it takes in. there’s some wiggle room around the fictitious “social security trust fund” which exists only as an accounting entity (the money was long ago plundered for other programs, also choices made by boomer controlled governments) but that rope does not go very far and from where we sit right now, the triggers hit in 6 years. that’s pretty damn soon.

so what’s the test?

simple: will the government follow the law?

will it implement paygo and cut benefits to balance the SS accounting?

my money is on something between “not an icicle’s chance in hades” and “you must be new here.”

they will vote for gravy train full steam ahead.

so one of two things happen:

taxes go up or deficits explode.

if taxes go up, it’s either more FICA (better option) or “start plundering income tax” which will be paid only by the rich and cause severe wealth flight/sheltering and basically not work because hauser’s law is not “hauser’s suggestion” and laffer curves laugh last.

if deficits explode, it’s just death by money printer inflation spiral and debt service. the long bond will hit 10%.

all of these are handing some sort of bomb with varying fuse length and blast radius to gen’s Y and Z. (and, of course, gen X, but again, we never expected anything else from the boomers and unlike these other two, both grew up cynical and have already done most of our paying so there’s not really as much skin in the game for us)

but for gen Y and esp gen Z: this is going to be a profound “watch what i do, not what i say” moment vis a vis the boomers.

this is the moment of cooperate or defect.

will you allow the system you built to act as you built it, or are you going to cheat and overturn the gameboard and say no to paygo and play instead at maximum extraction?

will you make the failure of the system you built and benefit from the problem of the next generation?

and so here’s my advice to the boomers:

accept paygo cuts or find some form of age increase or means testing or whatever it takes to keep outlays in line with receipts.

do this, and the system will hold. you’ll have demonstrated your bona fides and accountability for that which you made and defended.

and gen X will keep that faith behind you. and gen X, this is important. if we try to play the extractor, everyone turns on us too. don’t be the ones to break the society. fortunately, “hypocrite” is the one epithet that really stings gen X (well, that and “poser”) so i think gen X (who did not ever really count on SS) can and will stay onside with fiscal sense.

but if the boomers break faith, we all buck, even gen X. we’ll join the others and turn on you because now you pose real, existential danger to the republic.

defect and play at low trust extractor who changes the rules when they don’t like the scoreboard, and it’s open season on you and your institutions and as you fade in size and your millennial echo and the big gen Z behind them come to dominate the demos, they will gut you like a trout.

the decision gets stark:

maybe at present you still have the votes to defect and extract, but for how much longer? and what will you uncork if you do?

this is going to be a profound moment where america makes a choice about high trust and golden rules or low trust and the tactical morality of “rules don’t apply to me if i want stuff.”

if this goes down the plunder path, everyone defects and intergenerational war of all against all will kick off in earnest.

paygo will be the arch duke ferdinand of the Z v B american fiscal war.

gen Z may not get the reference, but boomers, you do.

and this one is on you.

you built much of this system, you made its rules and refused to adjust them to increased life expectancy, and you controlled the government during its expansion and the plundering of its (obviously named in irony) trust fund.

it will be your votes that decide this issue.

either accpet the bed you made or earn mass defection from any social contract that includes you.

this is a pivot point for the character of the american republic.

choose well.

then they get upset when you become a problem solver

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others that it’s just a form of reciprocal justice

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