is the outrage mill a feature or a bug?

i have a suspicion it's both and that this is what makes it so difficult to parse

we inhabit the age of the outrage mill. it seems a pervasive even a primary cultural feature and is relentlessly amplified by an emergent quality of the internet: the holy trinity of clickbait is fear, anger, and self-righteousness. fear and anger rile you up, but that third one, the smug self-righteous instinct is the one that really sets the ball rolling. that’s what makes you copy, post, and rage. “can you believe this?” “can you believe these people!?!” how superlative and wise we are for being outraged about them!

as this sort of moralistic rage posting becomes the dominant mode, all signal is lost in noise. and this is catnip for the “firehose of falsehood” model of propaganda where you just keep piling on more and more until you reach a point where no one has any idea what is true or who is trying to do what to whom. “information” becomes static and attention impossible to focus.

we love to attribute this to “the russians” and perhaps it was created and perfected there, but one has to increasingly wonder: is this endless ascription just another layer of the onion of lies? because it sure looks like this has become the primary praxis and purpose of the american state.

people like to speak of plots and wreckers and one can never rule out such plots, but to my mind occam’s razor always demands that we first ask “could this be some sort of emergent behavior/agenda?”

and where it gets complex is that most of the groundswell probably is emergent. but what’s setting it off? is there something coherent behind it, some agent provocateur?

what if by design, it’s basically impossible to know?

example:

look at this:

is this some plot to affect society or alter voter rolls or to try to make immigration into a gay/trans rights issue by giving anyone caught a blueprint for immediate escape/making the INS powerless because anyone who gets caught can just scream “i’m gay” and skate?

and did they pick an implausible mechanism to deliberately move the argument somewhere else to hide the actual agenda?

or is it just the latest escalation of the wokester “more allied than thou” derby of competitive status seeking through ever more absurd and implausible championing of the ever more absurdly rarified?

is it cunning svengali or just clown world buffoonery?

it’s not clear to me that even the people involved in the policy can tell for sure anymore and the venn intersect of plans and pathologies is essentially a perfect circle.

zee idiot, he is useful

quite probably you have a few grifters on the top looking to eliminate immigration enforcement and a whole bunch of useful alliance idiots ready to scream “so stunning, so brave” and pile in to ally their way to status in the race to virtue signal their way to hall monitor status.

i fear we may be dealing with a cunning combination that is making the whole of the thing difficult to see and all but impossible to engage with effectively. it’s all proxy war. you never even really see the prime movers.

consider: the best way to hide a deliberate nefarious action is in the midst of a sea of senselessness such that so much is going on for such a surreal swirl of reasons that it becomes impossible to tease out not only implication but intent.

if you sneak into the evidence locker and destroy just the one file that implicates you for bribery, even if you are not caught, suspicion will turn upon you. but if you rile up a mob to burn the whole building down to prevent an alien invasion from area 51, there is no trail, just fire and madness. what you did is hidden in the steganographic swirl.

and the speed and relentlessness of it is a feature. it must always engage anew, always sweep you on, never allow a pause to reflect. konrad kellen speaks to this:

how much of this is currently going on?

how many times is “i want to up control, lavish subsidy upon cronies, and suppress and censor my foes” getting deliberately hidden in the phantasmagoric framings of “climate justice is racial justice and if you are anti-windmill you’re hitler!”

such framings appear unhinged, but are they? or are they rooted rather in cunning displacement to make the debate about something so unerringly and implacably stupid that the real issue of “i’m here to rob you so me and mine can control your actions and grow fat upon our dominance and plunder” is occluded in the emotive avalanche of clown world?

there can be little doubt that it’s not a grand conspiracy where all the clowns know themselves to be co-conspirators.

you could simply never organize that or get the co-opted to keep a secret.

but are they marks?

are they rubes used as “useful idiots” to be riled up and pointed at spaces to go forth and become infinitely aggravating human tinsel to create a public square so surreal and divorced from the real game being played that it drops from discernment?

are we just shifting the debate away from that which is deeply needful and onto cultivated exacerbations and inflammations like “who gets to shower with your 13 year old daughter after sports?”

the true believers may have no idea how they are being used and the natural evolution along the lines of gato’s postulate (a democratic government powerful enough to dictate that which is bought and sold will inevitably devolve into rule by rube) will dominate, but this also winds up being the absolutely perfect place to hide plots and grifts.

and i suspect we may be dealing with an amoral few happy to set fires all over town so that the police are busy while the rob the bank.

because one thing is certain: the best way to keep you from responding to depredations and incursions into your life and livelihood is to keep you in acute distress elsewhere.

no one is paying a ton of attention to policies about internet censorship when their kid just came how from school having learned that the second law of thermodynamics is a patriarchal plot to prevent racial equality and ravage the earth with climate change so that no one can have free healthcare. cuz fascism.

el gato malo

the original el gato malo (who alas is no longer with us) was a savannah cat of profound focus and astonishing cunning. there was nothing he loved more than ham. one day i was eating a ham sandwich in my home office. he arrived and started seeking to eat it. i told him no. so he walked over and knocked over my water bottle so it was pouring into my printer. when i jumped up to grab the bottle, he grabbed the sandwich and made his getaway.

how many times has this been done to us of late?

how many times have we been threatened on some orthogonal axis so that a prize may be grabbed from us while we are distracted?

how many times was the real fight about tightening the ratchet of control while we were fixated on some outrage or supposed safety?

i’m not sure we can possibly know and that would certainly be the desired outcome in such a system as epistemological evisceration would seem to be a feature not a bug in this product of “grand theft society” by technocratic totalitarians bent on lives of lavish legal plunder and ant farm social control.

what is the aim is to keep us too busy fighting evil clowns to cotton on?

welcome to clown world. you are not going to like it here.

i doubt very much that this can ever be untangled. it’s too deep, too wide, and too pervasive. it’s just everywhere and it’s a bewildering mix of a priori intent and unconscious evolved practice.

trying to parse it is a fool’s errand.

the good news is that we don’t have to because whatever the answer, the solution is the same: take power away from the state.

this is the fundamental moral case for liberty, libertarianism, and the primacy of rights and free organization. it’s the roots of agorism and anarcho-capitalism.

the simple fact is that this is the inevitable end result of a state with the power to determine that which is bought and sold, to demand credential to allow the practice of professions, and to license everything from dogs to lemonade stands. this is what happens when liberty and property are privleges and not inalienable rights.

this is the price of “but we just need to do my special important thing to protect you!”

the wild communal incohesion and dissolution is not some failure of freedom, it’s the path to predation by plunderers.

this is not safety, it’s servitude.

and this is the mindset we need to get away from.

it’s nothing but a societal sinkhole trying to pass itself off as civilization.