#492

Well, it's almost two months into the year. Interesting year so far. Eventful! Personally and on a global scale.

Yes, a post about current events. Perhaps they are to some degree inevitable. Feel free to check out and slide away to more rewarding internet locales. I would. But it would perhaps be unwise, if I am able to offer any kind of useful insight. And maybe I can. That's why I bother to type it out and put it where people can see it, I guess, even if no one looks. Even if people did look, and it caused problems for me, I would still do it. 

Everything, of course, is to some degree inevitable. Arguing about it won't change that.

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Well, look. I know that Americans reading this, generational Americans specifically, might think they still have a country. Shit, this country technically did survive Andrew Jackson and Warren Harding, two points in history in which the executive was overrun with trolls, gangsters, and petty thieves, and that's not nothing.

The country was much younger and the world much older in both instances. Young organisms are in key ways more resilient than their mature counterparts, and the world has been made anew five or perhaps eight times over since 1923.

But factually we probably don't have a country left. Every 24-hour period makes it less probable that we will be able to return to democratic norms. That's how it works in other countries, and if this past decade and a half has proved anything, anything, it is that the United States is no mythical example, no blessed fluke, no modern utopia, no nothing in any way special. Just another country full of humans.  

If things continue as they have been, then they could very easily just replace the courts with implacable algorithms and congress with a consumer panel overseen by a board of directors. 

Naturally nothing these bodies produce will have any effect on the CEO. That position can and only could ever be decided internally, using machinations whose inputs are completely severed from the public sensorium and indeed, reality. 

Once it has happened, you will see that such has always been their dark vision. They would never have said so! But it will be extremely obvious in retrospect, when you review the lies they told vs. the actions they took, that having a government was never really the plan. 

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As I have said before, and as was quickly made manifest--they can just deport people wherever the fuck they want. They can make it happen by making it legal by being--it is very simple--bullies. They get it. They have always been bullies and they understand that being a bully works just as well when it's countries and laws as when it's toys and rules.

The reason for having governments is to prevent bullies from ruling the roost. Goverment fails when the bullies are in charge. It is...pretty simple.

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"They" in this whole screed, by the way, should be understood as the brigands and profiteers whose aim is open and omnivorous theft of the highest possible magnitude, breadth, and scope, as well as any and all ideological maniacs who wish to vent their fear-based genocidal urges. 

As is so often true, the above are entwined in a very profitable and pleasurable position. Indeed, the former have historically found it useful and expedient to maintain in every way they can the conditions to create as much genocidal fear as possible--to embed it deeply in as many subcultures and across language and law and moral commandment. This trick has been key in accelerated forms of societal formation and collapse.

Building slave empires on foundations of total nonsense and thus creating the conditions for their own dissolution. Toppling monarchies with populist movements only to install a regime more brutal than previously thought tolerable or even possible. Coming in to gut existing companies and flying away on a helicopter with all their money. And so forth. That is the basic game.

People do it to themselves and allow it to be done to them. It is hard to hope for change when you see how willing and eager we are to spill the same innocent blood over and over and over again for completely made-up reasons each and every time. Always to the sound of applause, at first.

And believe me--there is always money in it.

*

All the truly useful solutions lie in the realm of fantasy. Such as: if I could magically give these people what they wanted without the human cost involved.

Do you understand? If I could just give these crazy fucking quasi-religious fanatics and twisted race scientists what they were after--a society comprised only of their described acceptable monoculture, inviolable and pure and legitimate in its closed-border holdings, by magically, intstantly withdrawing everyone they would like to fucking murder to a safe location, then I would.

Why? Because they wouldn't know what to fucking do. They would fucking starve. Those fortunate enough to survive the riots and outbreaks of disease, anyway. These people have no fucking clue what they're really after. They don't remember or realize that if there's no one around to be their slaves, then eventually, someone's going to have to lift a finger.

Who cleans the human feces? Who grows the food and deals with it and cooks it? Who gets to sit around all god damned day and point fingers? These questions have answers that they like, for now. What happens when suddenly the basis for those answers is completely gone?

It would even be immoral. To give them what they want. Wouldn't even want to watch that gruesome farce play out. Like the martyred socialist said, they know not what they do. They understand nothing. And to reveal to them the magnitude of their ignorance in this way would be cruel.

But it would probably be better than letting them kill us.

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Letting them kill us seems to be the plan, as far as I can see. Very Christian of us and I approve, in a sense. I would also like to die later, from other causes, but no one gets to pick how they go, except all those who do. We say they are bad, I guess, but you know what I think about what "we" say en masse without thinking deeply about it.

Who fucking cares. Ballot, bullet, bullshit. It'll all kill you. Don't have any better plan and even if I did, don't know of anyone more socially dead than myself. Might be cool if someone had a strategy and I could trust it. Not from where I'm looking.

But I am seeing something I have seen before: a united and determined political minority has bamboozled the agitated public into giving them the government, and the political majority is too fragmented, inflexible, and fundamentally ineffective to stop them or do anything at all useful, really--just the same ritual genuflections that have been failing thus far, their power drained as though founded on a dead god.

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So that's the pessimism. Do we have another angle?

Well, another fun fantasy is like, just being able to change someone's mind. Like, if I could, I dunno, concentrate real hard and pull my left earlobe while snapping my fingers and just watch someone let go their fear and their hate and their anger. That would be one fucking hell of a superpower. Better than Superman; fight me.

But, no. No, I don't really have much optimism. Only that this wretched world is visible to us, limited creatures that we are, as through a glass darkly, and to be freed from its bounds and sound what has been hidden will be to see and know one another and this world as it truly was, as we truly have been, as we are and will be, and faith that this veil is drawn over a perfect universe beyond my microscopic and human-all-too-human comprehension. 

In a good way. Guess that's my optimism. We are small, the present brief. Soon all this mess and tension will be of little consequence to whomsoever might walk this weary globe in another thousand thousand years. 

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Thinking of finding a big giant jar to live in. Could be fun. Could be a novel career move after all this shit burns down around me, if I'm not shot to death in the street or put on a work crew in Nicaragua or wherever the fuck.

--JL