thepoliticalvulcan

[thepoliticalvulcan]

It occurs to me that the obvious and all too real metaphor is staring me in the face. No need to ponder overly complex financial schemes when climate change is right there. For more than half a century, perhaps as long as a full century, fossil fuel firms and adjacent industries had a grasp of the basics of the math and consequences of burning fossil fuels on industrial scales and committed to strip mining and searing the world anyway. Perhaps under the rationalization that when things became untenable, they would, much as they are beginning to do, co-opt the solutions to ensure renewables are profitable much like Vault Tec and the other factions hid cold fusion and plotted an apocalypse to complete their hostile takeover of humanity’s remnants.

Techno-apocalyptica & Schizophrenia

Spoilers for Fallout

The rational part of my brain recognizes that the timing is too close for that poor guy who self immolated in front of Trump's court proceedings to have seen it or know much about it. However, I'm struck by the big reveal of Vault-tec conspiring with other corporations, oligarchs really, to end the world so they can all be the unquestioned absolute rulers of their Vaults and then take a "free market approach" to rebuilding civilization. It is unsettling the degree to which this is reminiscent of the theses of the now deceased gentleman's manifesto, an admittedly deeply troubled document full of an inability to accept that despoilers and despots might arrive at similar processes by similar motives independent of one another, or the inability to distinguish between cautionary tales and propaganda.

Having skimmed that manifesto and then watching Fallout, it does make me wonder. Could there be ideologues and plutocrats who have talked themselves into razing entire economies and livelihoods, perhaps literally through violence, under the idea that this would be "creative destruction?"

Unfortunately the answer is actually yes and its no paranoid delusion since this is the fervent belief of those among the fever swamp religious right who believe that prodding Israel into first rebuilding their great temple and then getting eradicated for their trouble will kickstart the End Times. This is one of those instances where I think materialist philosophy and materialist explanations simply cannot account for the elite doing things that are against what a rational person would believe is against their interests: whether its starting wars, pumping money into obvious scams like NFTs, the metaverse, and now their new religion: AI; but ultimately even the rich are simply a variable number of monkeys who happen to own a stupendous number of typewriters mindlessly pounding away trying to create value.

It is fashionable on the materialist left to assume the rich know what they're doing and are pursuing their self interest at our expense in a lawful, rational evil way.

Unless they're not. Unless they're possessed of grandiose and mystical delusions, a spiritual level belief in the goodness and wisdom of the Free Market, or in a God that is whispering in their ear and confirming all of their biases.

What is clear to me is that Max Azzarello was a mentally ill man desperately trying to make sense of a deranged world that seems to offer cruelty from the top. He deserved intervention long before he met his fate. He deserved a kinder world. He definitely misjudged Matt Groening. He tried to find order in the madness of our variable number of unhinged billionaires blindly groping for profit and indifferent to who they smash. I disagree with that order. I disagree with him ending his life. I pity him, for I think our society and its cruel oligarchs failed him.

I think he was broken by a reality that was too grim to face and he resorted to connecting threads that had no business being connected, but the theses of mad oligarchs plotting to destroy the world because they know their positions are untenable, that they are unwilling or unable to live peaceably and sustainably with the goose that lays the golden eggs, and thus absolute rule must logically be their endgame since eventually, one would assume, perpetually failing upwards, scam after scam, like Sam Altman of Open AI, or Elon Musk, must cease to be satisfying.

What if they're not actually content to simply jockey for position on the leaderboard of capitalism, admittedly while trampling the rest of us? What if in their bones they think they're the only ones fit to rule and merely influencing society by creating incentives and disincentives, creating the structures we bounce around inside of, is not enough?

I think Mr. Azzarello was wrong about the tech oligarchs for the most part. Except for the ones who are mixing a toxic stew of Laissez Faire, Francoism, and their own personal bespoke interpretations of the Bible.

Those people are real, some of them are quite powerful, and I do think they'd end the world if they believed sincerely that it would kickstart the Rapture under the assumption Christ will anoint them as his ministers since they proved to be oh so good at wealth management.

I'm fine, really, I have no intent to harm myself or anyone literal or proverbial enemies of mankind. Please don't send that bot to inquire after me, unless Tumblr is going to start letting it speak aloud and sound like Matt Berry for an upgrade. That would actually be pretty rad.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

What gets me is that you know that 90% of the signatories are largely just signing for the PR value and FLAGRANTLY ignoring it. You cannot tell me that Saudi Arabia or Burkina Faso give a single damn about civil rights for children if the definition of civil rights for children contradicts the vibes of cultural or religious elites. But they are willing to let you think they do.

The US can't even be bothered to sign in bad faith and vaguely gesture at the document.

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Techno-apocalyptica & Schizophrenia

Spoilers for Fallout

The rational part of my brain recognizes that the timing is too close for that poor guy who self immolated in front of Trump's court proceedings to have seen it or know much about it. However, I'm struck by the big reveal of Vault-tec conspiring with other corporations, oligarchs really, to end the world so they can all be the unquestioned absolute rulers of their Vaults and then take a "free market approach" to rebuilding civilization. It is unsettling the degree to which this is reminiscent of the theses of the now deceased gentleman's manifesto, an admittedly deeply troubled document full of an inability to accept that despoilers and despots might arrive at similar processes by similar motives independent of one another, or the inability to distinguish between cautionary tales and propaganda.

Having skimmed that manifesto and then watching Fallout, it does make me wonder. Could there be ideologues and plutocrats who have talked themselves into razing entire economies and livelihoods, perhaps literally through violence, under the idea that this would be "creative destruction?"

Unfortunately the answer is actually yes and its no paranoid delusion since this is the fervent belief of those among the fever swamp religious right who believe that prodding Israel into first rebuilding their great temple and then getting eradicated for their trouble will kickstart the End Times. This is one of those instances where I think materialist philosophy and materialist explanations simply cannot account for the elite doing things that are against what a rational person would believe is against their interests: whether its starting wars, pumping money into obvious scams like NFTs, the metaverse, and now their new religion: AI; but ultimately even the rich are simply a variable number of monkeys who happen to own a stupendous number of typewriters mindlessly pounding away trying to create value.

It is fashionable on the materialist left to assume the rich know what they're doing and are pursuing their self interest at our expense in a lawful, rational evil way.

Unless they're not. Unless they're possessed of grandiose and mystical delusions, a spiritual level belief in the goodness and wisdom of the Free Market, or in a God that is whispering in their ear and confirming all of their biases.

What is clear to me is that Max Azzarello was a mentally ill man desperately trying to make sense of a deranged world that seems to offer cruelty from the top. He deserved intervention long before he met his fate. He deserved a kinder world. He definitely misjudged Matt Groening. He tried to find order in the madness of our variable number of unhinged billionaires blindly groping for profit and indifferent to who they smash. I disagree with that order. I disagree with him ending his life. I pity him, for I think our society and its cruel oligarchs failed him.

I think he was broken by a reality that was too grim to face and he resorted to connecting threads that had no business being connected, but the theses of mad oligarchs plotting to destroy the world because they know their positions are untenable, that they are unwilling or unable to live peaceably and sustainably with the goose that lays the golden eggs, and thus absolute rule must logically be their endgame since eventually, one would assume, perpetually failing upwards, scam after scam, like Sam Altman of Open AI, or Elon Musk, must cease to be satisfying.

What if they're not actually content to simply jockey for position on the leaderboard of capitalism, admittedly while trampling the rest of us? What if in their bones they think they're the only ones fit to rule and merely influencing society by creating incentives and disincentives, creating the structures we bounce around inside of, is not enough?

I think Mr. Azzarello was wrong about the tech oligarchs for the most part. Except for the ones who are mixing a toxic stew of Laissez Faire, Francoism, and their own personal bespoke interpretations of the Bible.

Those people are real, some of them are quite powerful, and I do think they'd end the world if they believed sincerely that it would kickstart the Rapture under the assumption Christ will anoint them as his ministers since they proved to be oh so good at wealth management.

I'm fine, really, I have no intent to harm myself or anyone literal or proverbial enemies of mankind. Please don't send that bot to inquire after me, unless Tumblr is going to start letting it speak aloud and sound like Matt Berry for an upgrade. That would actually be pretty rad.

#fallout #fallout show #donald trump #foucault's boomerang #civil rights #nfts #metaverse #AI #artificial intelligence #nuclear weapons #conspiracy theories #maybe the rich are stupid #fanatics #israel #rapture

[thepoliticalvulcan]

I want to believe he'll implode, I really do, but we watched the Usual Suspects get right back to work gaslighting about their authoritarian movement hours after Jan 6. From the same chamber a man in a buffalo headdress was standing praying for God to install Trump as the real President.

I think this is going to be a proverbial knife fight. He needs to lose first for the mystique to really disappear and for the supposed "moderate Republicans" to see the Christian Nationalists and the Caesarists as a doomsday cult who has not merely alienated the center, but will also destroy the foundations of American prosperity if that's what it takes to reorder society according to their plan and will immediately turn on moderates the moment they are in any way lightly inconvenienced in the project to marginalize, if not kill their social enemies.

“Yes, Trump is a former president. But, under the law, he is just an ordinary citizen at this point in time. Once the public fully realizes that the emperor has no clothes and that Trump is just a bombastic charlatan, then everything can turn against him very quickly. I don’t know what the Republican Party is going to do if he implodes over the next few months, which is what I believe will likely happen. They don’t have a plan B. The Republicans have put themselves in an untenable situation, politically and morally. They are in danger of becoming a permanent minority party for the next couple of decades, comprised of angry white folks seething in their own sense of victimhood.”

— “The alternate reality Trump lives in is crumbling” with first criminal trial: ex-federal prosecutor

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Who Is The Cybertruck For

They say the Cybertruck is for people with more money than sense, for divorced dads, or for men in a mid-life crisis. I'm not sure. I don't think the Cybertruck is for people who need a Cybertruck, or any truck, or a bullet-proof maybe-amphibious SUV.

The Cybertruck is for people who can drop their disposable income on a Cybertruck to round out their collection. Is that divorced dads? Why would somebody who can afford to buy a Cybertruck not just buy a another Lamborghini, and park it in his garage in the Hollywood Hills?

So are only semi-retired divorced dads who can afford a Cybertruck but can't afford a chauffeur or a Lamborghini the market? I don't think it makes sense.

Let's shift gears a little. Writers become YouTubers and influencers sooner or later, to promote their work, and then they often get swept up in incentive gradients that force them into the template of gear reviewers, gossip/reaction channels, or trolls. I have seen two woodworking videos, by different channels, that came out during the same week. And they both contained a bit of "trolling" in the beginning, as in "yeah I know I showed this thing wrong in the first three minutes", then they had a "password" later in the video to prove that you are a "real fan" who watches the video all the way through, and there was some weird outrage-bait tangent in the narration of the piece. A while back, probably in 2020, I had watched another YouTube video in which a YouTuber had deliberately shown a mistake in the first five minutes, but did not immediately comment on it. Instead, through movie magic, the video just continued with a different piece had built correctly off-camera. Twenty minutes later he explained that he put the wrong step in there intentionally, in order to boost engagement from woodworkers who would flock to the comment section and tout their experience, but there is nothing you can do now, because YouTube has recently disabled downvoting. There is nothing you can do short of closing a video less than 10% in, but it's too late now. Everything you can do will boost engagement.

I don't actually use YouTube through YouTube. But this week, I decided to look at some woodworking YouTube videos, and these two different channels had copied that formula: 1. Rile up the comment section against the "trolls" who don't watch the video to the end, because that's what YouTube uses to measure engagement. 2. Include a shaggy dog tangent story while you show repetitive table saw cuts, with some slight hint of "outrage bait". 3. Some hand wringing/existential angst about the nature of being a YouTuber, the inability make a living selling furniture like this if he weren't a YouTuber. 4. Defensive comments pre-empting the comments about his prominent use of the Festool (tm) DOMINO (tm). 5. Tell the viewer to imagine how much money a client would have to pay if he commissioned this piece as a one-off.

I mean, a two-minute video showing an old Chinese guy making a cabinet with jade and mother of pearly inlays using only hand tools is just as fake as a video showing a time lapse of three young men in Indonesia building a castle and a swimming pool from nothing but clay and wooden sticks. But at least those don't follow a weird formula to keep you watching to the end.

So is the Cybertruck for divorced dads? Is the Cybertruck for insomniacs who watch woodworking videos?

No. It's for influencers. The Cybertruck is for people who can write it off as a business expense.

MrBeast has Lamborghinis in his videos, according to all those thumbnails I never click, like Tai Lopez does in his Hollywood Hills. But would you click on a video of Linus Tech Tips reviewing a BYD Pick-up truck? Would you care if Logan Paul bought an IAT T-MAD? I mean, the DOMINO (tm) is not like a Cybertruck, it's just too expensive for the hobbyist woodworker to justify or even afford. (The hobbyist woodworker would have to use hand-cut dovetails out of sheer necessity).

The Cybertruck is even better. It's a conversation piece, a luxury item, conspicuous consumption, and it's not even for the kind of guy who spends $7000 on a custom-made dresser by commissioning a YouTuber who then proceeds to change the design because that's easier to film.

The Cybertruck is a vehicle for people who make a video titled "WE BOUGHT A CYBERTRUCK" followed by "NEWS ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP" followed by "GETTING DRIVE THRU IN CYBERTRUCK" followed by "ONE WEEK ROAD TRIP IN OUR CYBERTRUCK CHALLENGE" followed by "SELLING OUR CYBERTRUCK?"

The Cybertruck is a vehicle for the kind of person you think would have a Cybertruck. You look at them and say "huh, figures". What you don't know is their daily driver is an old Honda. They have the Cybertruck because they know that you expect them to have one, so you click and think "LOL, these rich people with their stupid Cybertrucks".

The Cybertruck is clickbait on wheels. The Cybertruck is a meme.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

On the subject of orwell and his rancid anticommunism, his flagship title "animal farm" is not simply a "satire of the USSR"; it is a full and total repudiation of the idea of proletarian rule at all. The entire book depicts the workers as dumb and incapable and easily manipulated by leaders. This is a fully aristocratic view of the proletariat and entirely anti-proletarian. This should be no surprise to people who are familiar with orwell's opinions and past, including the fact that he has "never been able to dislike Hitler" (actual quote, March 21, 1940) and that he was a colonialist cop.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

I remember Dan Carlin riffing in a few episodes of Hardcore History about how history takes on a different dynamic and some things legitimately only make sense if you assume people really did sincerely believe in magic.

Good to know that declaring war on the sea itself and having the marines empty magazine after magazine into the ocean, not at any sea life in particular just the water, is theoretically on the table for USGOV.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Listen: I get that we're all horrified and disgusted by the genocide in Gaza and dearly wish that someone would do something about it, but I promise that you don't need to 'hand it' to Iran's repressive theocracy. This is not something to be cheered, this is two authoritarian regimes going at each other with tens of millions of innocent people in the splatter zone and the very real possibility of drawing the international community into a protracted war. This is a tragedy.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

More leftists need to pay closer attention to the formation of the Soviet Union, especially the way the Bolsheviks murdered all of the non-totalitarian leftists. Or the way Mao and Pol Pot gutted the intellectuals. If you think that Animal Farm is Orwell selling out, then study the French Revolution. It got better but it got unimaginably worse first.

Even recent history has shown tragically whether it’s Egypt, Syria etc that if you need a revolution to sweep away a corrupt, crumbling order you’re not likely to get a bunch of enlightened egalitarians. This is what happens when Americans buy into our own propaganda about the revolution.

I don’t pretend that electoralism is more than a thumb in the dam but, dear accelerationist, do keep in mind that all of your medically compromised comrades will die if supply chains break down. Study Gaza carefully. Famine and loss of medical infrastructure is brutal and you don’t want to gamble on it disproportionately harming the reactionaries. For one they are much more likely to be located in lower density communities. My blood red suburb full of unhinged retirees will not do well but urban cores full of radical young people far from where food is produced are going to have difficulty too.

Also I am deeply, deeply concerned about the inroads Trump has made with young men. Trumpian - Rogan - Tate style masculinity is clobbering quiet, empathetic decency and that too does not bode well for shedding the last vestiges of civilization.

hot take incoming: revolt and revolution doesn't create a fair and equitable society. it creates a power vaccum, which is terrifying because it is incredibly fertile ground for all sorts of warlords, aspiring tyrants, paramilitary extremists, and imperial powers to swoop in and start doing atrocities over it. You can put a new society in a power vaccum, but so can anyone else, and most of those potential outcomes are going to be horrifying, not to mention to the hellscape interim period.

To create a fair and equitable society you need to know civics, administration, diplomacy, and yes, statecraft. Yes they're boring and unglamorous and icky and gross. But i promise that you need them. They are mandatory. Not optional.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

[thepoliticalvulcan]

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Reporter *taking a drag from their cigarette* “That is literally the least interesting and norms breaking thing that man has done since five minutes ago.” The grim reality is that in an algorithmic driven news environment, what we don’t click on because it’s just par for the course and not really worth reading the boiler plate analysis because we can predict it at this point….doesn’t get recycled into ever more think pieces until it can’t be ignored. I mean sure there’s a thimble full of edgelords who live in battlegrounds who might be contemplating a third party vote or staying home, but the people who need to be aware of this and care are the ones in the mirror universe.

This. The media would be explicit. The media would make the case over and over again how nepotism was bad and crime families have no place in government.

Trump is given a totally different set of standards. It's beyond a double standard.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Oh fun, it’s just the Purge except without the strict 24 hour limit. Every day is Purge day if you’re unhoused, just in the wrong place, or make a series of catastrophic errors in life that correlate very strongly with poverty and racism and also have a way of compounding because the first strike renders you virtually unemployable and barred from a wide variety of programs designed to help people not do crime.

Source

[thepoliticalvulcan]

So cishet I had to have someone explain it to me because it was used in conversation before I ever saw it online. No queer, trans, nonbinary or whatever person has ever been a threat to me on an individual basis or as a category. One was maybe kind of a crappy partner in a project at work once? But I don't think their rainbow pin had a lot to do with that.

Anywho, I just value all people living comfortably in their bodies and existing comfortably in whatever public or private space. And it drives me to distraction wondering if I'm giving off a safe vibe when I meet someone new who checks a box I don't. Its not fair to either of us that the world is the way it is and people are awful.

But society being the way it is, I've also read to the bottom of that one poem about "when they came for..." and realized a very long time ago that the widest possible array of valid ways of living makes my own life safer and easier because I don't have to perform some smelly locker room version of masculinity that I never understood and spent much of my youth throwing me up against lockers and bragging about its sexual prowess when I could barely speak to someone I had a crush on.

I'm happy to attend parties I'm invited to and respectful of not being invited to parties that would be a lot more awkward if I was around. Refer back to interrogating my own vibe. Hopefully a day comes sooner rather than later that doesn't have to be the case.

There's a decent handful of people who are out around me so I guess I'm doing something right.

My queers, we really need to put the "no men" thing away. Men are not inherently bad. There are queer men. There are questioning men. There's men that are just plain cool. Denying these men a space at our table is not helping - except the TERFs. I just came off the back of reading a transphobe gleeful rant about the need to have pride without men - They of course mean me. This kind of stuff is damaging to me and I really need us all to take a step back and maybe kill this "men dni, men not allowed" stuff. What you mean is "no men who are going to do mean stuff to me." And frankly those men won't give a shit about that kind of boundary.

But I promise you there's a fleet of good honest men who will see that and be sad they're not allowed in your version of queer spaces.

PATRIARCHY is what you hate. Dni Patriarchs.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

When this all began, I thought the endgame was driving the Gazans into Egypt. I still think that’s the goal but the Gazans have held out longer than I or the Israelis expected. Most likely because they know once they’re in Egypt their lives will almost certainly be worse which is saying something. Unless of course hunger is used as a weapon to force the issue.

Which is further than I thought Israel would go. It’s stress testing just how far it can go with moderate American liberals, and I suspect now it’s not an accident that Israel is willing to risk the Abraham Accords, normalization, even the special relationship. It’s now or never if the Israeli hard right wants to enact its maximalist goals. Netanyahu was already on borrowed time and completely dependent on the powerful but not majoritarian factions in favor of annexation and the violent removal of undesirables. Each successive generation set to take power from the fading Boomers in the US is less and less sold on the idea that Israel faces existential threats and anything it does, no matter how extreme, is “tragic but necessary.”

It’s a classic problem where the trend lines don’t look good if you have an ethnonationalist vision so when an opportunity presents itself to see how far you can run with an outpouring of sympathy and outrage following a horrific attack, you milk it for all its worth because there won’t be any future opportunities to push this hard.

The rationale manufactures itself. By setting out to eliminate Hamas or at least cripple it as an entity capable of controlling Gaza, Israel is all but ensuring that given the timeline it’s set and the methods available it was always going to be apocalyptic. These are methods that ensure there can be no peace because Israel doesn’t have the ability to control Gaza under occupation conditions. It’s just basic math. Drones and mass surveillance can only substitute for boots on the ground so much, ask the Americans about that one.

Since there can be no peace under occupation and no peace with a semi-autonomous Gaza, not after everything that has happened, Israel needs to either try to break the will of the Gazans, which rarely works, or Israel needs a lot fewer Gazans.

I should have seen it before but I thought Netanyahu would back down before it got this bad. That political pressure from the US, the unraveling of normalization, and the damage being done to Israel’s economy would all result in this being another episode of “mowing the lawn”: violent, awful but ultimately short of existential for either side and ensuring the Israeli hard right and Hamas get fresh infusions of outrage to secure their legitimacy.

UNRWA, ANERA and WCK have all been forced to pause or halt their humanitarian operations in Gaza because Israel has deliberately targeted any means of lifesaving aid to a starved, maimed, and tortured population of over 2 million Palestinians, almost half of which are children.

This has been broadcasted by Israel so that it sets the precedent of what is deemed permissible in the face of "international law". I said it before, it does not get any more obviously genocidal than this.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

What do you mean eleventy zillion people who don't habitually read past the headline aren't a jury of the accused's peers?

Also what if the thing we are accusing them of, the thing we are forming a mob over, is really, really, really, really bad? Surely angry mob triggering accusations are rarely made explicitly to trigger angry mobs.

But what if I told you the accused belongs to this disfavored category whom it is permissible to loathe? No, not that one, the other one that's based on secular reasons rather than ancient libels and creepypastas older than literacy.

Do you think tumblr will ever learn the difference between “I’m defending this person because I agree with them wholeheartedly and I am also like this person” and “I’m defending this person because your behavior is dangerous and you need to stop”

[thepoliticalvulcan]

New structural barrier dropped aka why EdTech cartels suck.

Be a young adult looking to advance themselves.

Potential Student needs to test into the college nursing program.

Potential Student inquires with the college testing center and discovers they don't have sessions that work with the student's availability.

Potential Student is undaunted. Potential Student signs up to take the test through the testing company directly. At personal cost.

Test day arrives. Potential Student realizes the automated proctoring / anti-cheating software they must use doesn't work on Chromebooks.

Chromebook: the supposedly affordable and simpler alternative to PCs that turn out to not be compatible with anything.

Student is again undaunted, attempts to take the test on a PC in the school library.

Student discovers the proctoring software is not pre-installed and it requires an admin password to install anything on the computer. A password the on site staff do not have.

Staff, being kind instead of snooty and judgy, are quietly skeptical IT will help but shine the IT signal anyway.

Over the next 45 minutes, IT studies the problem, installs the software, and figures out how to run it. It is apparently not trivial.

Student is patient and manages to take and pass test, but it is not hard to imagine this going another way and the student hitting a hard wall at any one of these check points whether because the student lacks confidence, imagination, or the people around the student are less willing to help.

Think about this when confronted with what seems like an unnecessarily long wait at a hospital ER.

The young people do want to work, "the system" frequently is making it difficult for them to do so because there are an incredible amount of pain points that even the most imaginative leftist might not see without direct, personal experience.

#education #education technology #education technology cartels #educational technology sucks #they do want to work #nobody wants to work anymore #college #nursing #chromebooks #chromebooks suck #windows shouldn't be that expensive #essential software should be platform agnostic #structural barriers #structural inequality