I forget if it’s English parliament or French estates in which those who agree with the king sit on the right and those who disagree with the king sit on the left, which comes down to pro-monarchy and against monarchy.

We have plenty of autocrats who assert they are pro-liberty, pro-equality and pro-popular-rule, but to the last, they all want to only give the rights they like, want all the power and want to hand it to friends and (preferably immediately descendant) relatives. Even the DPRK calls itself a democratic people’s republic.

Stalin liked Leninism so long as it didn’t do anything he disliked (at which point he ignored it). Valid criticism of Soviet communism is in the swiftness that it became susceptible to corruption – contrast US democracy which was corrupt (had its own mechanisms for stratified power) coming out of the gate.

Left wing policy seeks to distribute political power as far and wide as possible. In a (hypothetical) ideal, every member of a society would have exactly the same amount of political power.

It tends to move slowly, which sucks when families are in crisis.

Right wing policy aims to consolidate power, again with a hypothetical of a single point. Right wing systems move quickly, but do whatever the rulers want, ignoring the needs of the commons.

Given Aesop’s fable about the frogs who wanted a king and chose between king Log and king Heron (or watersnake or stork) this is a paradigm that has been around for a while.

20 since I was like 9 or 10.

Evidently it’s a German thing? Though I was never pressured to do so, it just seemed right.

The internet did get rid of ETI theories of UFOs and probably facts. Now we have Wikipedia and ubiquitous cameras.

Instead we have WTF is THAT UFOs called UAP, and singing abandoned buildings, but no ghosts.

Part of the problem now is fake news and we’re about to lose video authentication the first time someone makes a convincing AI-generated street incident.

The evidence before the court is incontrovertible. There’s no need for the jury to retire.

It’s why I emphasize how I am crazy with Pink Floyd quotes. Bars in the window. Truly gone fishing.

Peter Thiel is evil. Don’t work for him. Don’t use his products.

When Lucasarts was making a lot of Star Wars games we tryed to make ourselves Star Wars names by anagramming our government names.

We learn more and more each time, actually, but all the very rich people support these movements which include a huge infusion of anti-intellectualism, since the insanely wealthy really, really want to keep their (ill-gotten) gains.

This is how all the big super-popular podcasts hosts are hyper-masculine misogynist far-right dude-bros like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. Like PragerU, they’ve all been supported with infusions of money until they became functional franchises of their own.

NSDAP in Germany also drew large donations from the ownership class eager to stay the ownership class in the face of the rise of communism. Essentially they (including some Jewish donors failing to predict their own arrest and evacuation) sought any opposition party, who was the fascist autocrat party.

In fact Nero’s reign was this stupid. All the John’s revelation mythology that informs Christian eschatology is (biblical academic consensus submits) about Rome under Nero. Nero was notoriously as vein as Trump and is probably the same sociological phenomenon.

King Heron is once again eating all the frogs.

I don’t believe in wonderful and hopeful when accurate is bleak. Feel free to consider solutions to veer the US away from the bad ending, but I’ve been screaming like Cassandra about this when we were torturing alleged terrorists in the 2004. We had many, many chances to change our direction but it meant elected officials choosing to do good rather than get rich, and they chose the latter.

So I have plum run out of faith or hope that they’re going to do better.

If you can offer a more hopeful take that doesn’t involve miracles of conscience or sociological serendipity, please enlighten me, and I’ll look to facilitate that.

Otherwise your hope only redirects the energy of sympathists toward ineffective action while ICE seizes parents, leaving toddlers in the streets.

I have hope for a proletarian revolution, just not a big one. We are not taking the steps necessary to assure the new boss isnt Same As The Old Boss < Pete Townshend shriek >

But when enough people die or we are forced to face our own capitulation with death camps (mass graves will do) or even after a century of EU / China occupation and provisional government, we might want a system that has a truly fair election system and ironclad checks and balances, even an extra-broad distribution of executive power.

Maybe even institutionalized wealth redistribution. (When I was taking [capitalist] macroeconomics 101 in college circa 1985 it was well known how wealth disparity can undermine democratic features of government.)

Or the leopards will eat all our faces. Just all of them. Then the only working class remaining will be imprisoned and forced to work. All the experts will be long dead. And resource reserves will quickly become scant as the ownership class (Ayn Rand’s maker class) will get to experience the truth of Rand’s post-taker society.

And that’s when the paramilitary class will realize they don’t need the ownership class. (See Elysium 2013)

So, if we’re lucky, the revolution will be nonviolent and we’ll squeak by with enough reformation to work towards a multi-party system and get rid of the slave-state–favoring imbalances. It won’t stop the stupid (or the far-right — infused with billionaire cash) trying to demonize intelligentsia and academia, but it’ll allow us to move towards a capitalist state with socialized services and a propensity towards moderate ministers. (Great Britain went this direction and is now seeing deterioration of their system thanks to Tory meddling.)

there’s also the matter that most of the time, you didn’t have to deal with noble strangers with horses expecting your loyalty (often, not the same nobles and horses as the last ones to come around). There may be the local lord but he had good cause to keep things consistent and open up the grain reserves whenever the winter was bad and crops failed.

But the keen thing that changed in the 20th century is we went from a desperate labor shortage to a labor surplus. There was just tons to do and no giant machines with which to do them. Death was right around the corner: A boar attack here, a bad influenza there, any kind of infection (no antibiotics), so people were dropping dead often enough that every last idiot, hunchback and bastard daughter were celebrated as a strong back that could churn butter or assemble barrels or pitch hay.

In fact, society was so fraught that clergy who knew the deal would look the other way when peasants were rutting like bunnies out of wedlock in springtime. (Stories are told and songs are sung of parish priests who were a bit strict on the sins, and how they had a tendency toward morbid mishap.)

We have crusades and territorial disbutes to thank for higher ranks getting into common business. The Third Crusade (King Richard v. Salah ad-Din) squeezed the peasants hard in England. Then Richard went cooky, disguised himself as a merchant, and was seized for ransom, and a king’s ransom was a lot. So the peasants were squeezed so hard it hurt the earls, and John of England (last of his name to this very day) was already a Trumpian / Neroesque asshole, and the economy was already tanked when Richard died in 1199, and at that point enough people were pissed off at unilateral monarchy they made John sign the Magna Carta at swordpoint. Several times.

And that was the beginning of the end of monarchy.

I have finge, extremist political views. I’m a Satisfactory player.

That Schwarzschild radius is larger than I expected. I was expecting sub-molecular.

ai had the opposite problem (as did my mom) we were the ones with less-appreciated mental skills dumb ones in a family of geniuses. And then would learn oh the rest of the world can’t do molecular chemistry computations in their head either.

My dad, a literal rocket scientist (his job title was Aerospace Engineer) could do extremely sophisticated math where I failed Calculus Integration (and was called baroque by my calculus math instructor). So I grew up believing I was an idiot.

I’m more likened to Ferdinand the Bull or Murphy the Eagle.

Also BMW was a major sponsor if NSDAP when the Communists were considering nationalizing private wealth.

All the hate and cynicism directed at Bavarian Motor Works can never be enough.

I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight… It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.

And there’s the rub. I was there, and we still have the nerd-to-nazi pipeline pumping vast numbers of boys into the alt-right. And to this day, no-one wants to deal with them.

Curiously, Japan is entirely dissatisfied with herbivore men who just want to be left alone in their life with their waifu, but that doesn’t produce the next batch of cheap labor and soldiers for industrialists to exploit.

Yes, I’m bitter, and righteously so. Treat our kids better; acknowledge they have sexuality. Teach consent and human intercourse in public school. (We’re not going to do these things. We hold great contempt for our fifteen-year olds, whether men or women, and just can’t help ourselves.)

cringe = cringeworthy for anyone who needs an easy search-and-replace

In the 1980s, being a nerd meant being a target for bullies, and we didn’t fare too well. The nerd hierarchy (in which the tech nerds looked down on Trekkies and Furries) was rather brutal, and informs why the furry / otherkin moral panic is mixed in with the trans moral panic.

Eventually, every company needed an MIS and nerds showed they were useful after all. This is not the good ending.

A parallel problem came from young people having libidos that no-one was allowed to acknowledge. We were all incels before the term, and they tried to teach me math when my brain was telling me I needed to rut. Even today, society disregards horny teens, creating a wide pathway to the Alt-Right (Immortan Joe’s Warboys) who respect only Alpha Males. Our Christian-centric sex-negative culture fuels the young-men-to-Nazi pipeline.

I don’t have a solution for it. The common response to horny-teens-gone-white-supremacists is to say yeah, fuck those guys in total contempt, so they’re going to continue to be an available and eager force of militants and voters for any charismatic strongman. They may go Herbivore (like Japanese men) once Generative AI porn gets good.