The Divine Mr. M

More and more I get badly depressed after I read my news feed. First though, I get Really Fuckin' Angry. The depression comes after when I realize I cannot say out loud what I want to say because I'd get banned from whatever social media platform and possibly even 'investigated for terrorist threats'.

However, without getting specific, what I still can say [so far] is that I desire terrible and ugly things to happen to The Owners, to their operatives, sycophants and political stooges, hell, even to their families, as well...as terrible and ugly as possible.

But not all this comes from my 'bottomless rage'. It also comes from my awareness that without the real fear of 'terrible and ugly' consequences, The Owners, their operatives, sycophants and political stooges will continue to rape all of the rest of us in any manner that suits them and their vested interests.

Ok, had some coffee now...lol

I started to study history, most especially Military History, when I was nine years old. [I'll be seventy this year] When I was seventeen I was out in the streets demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Organized students at my high school and we confronted the police, violently. [made for great post-demo sex lol]

The single Great Sociopolitical Lesson I learned with that was how classic National Socialist crowd control techniques worked seamlessly on Leftist art students. [I went to the old High School of Art & Design in NYC] With proper technique, The Herd is easily guided and controlled no matter how intelligent its individual members may be...and most people ain't that bright.

Many of us, myself included for a while, truly believed 'The Revolution was at hand'. What we got instead was Nixon, Reagan and finally Trump, plus Corporatist Apparatchiks like Clinton, Obama...and ofc Joe Biden. [Goddess Bless Jimmy Carter tho, he has remained a Good Man] And nearly all my Old Comrades became Capitalist Roaders, aka 'Yuppies'.

I was never a Communist, tho I used some of their rhetoric. Even as a teen it was easy to see that Stalin and Mao were homicidal psychopaths, that no Russian or Chinese workers 'owned the means of production' and the so-called 'communist states' were really Authoritarian State Capitalist.

Democracy works fine in small polities, maybe no more than five or ten thousand people. That is the maximum most Baseline Humans can handle. Beyond that, all the institutional mechanisms required to run a Modern Technological State outstrip the Baseline Human capacity to keep track them. After that, running things gets 'farmed out' and that's where Corruption starts to kick in. Once we get to millions of people, it is endemic and Democracy is more and more subsumed until we get to our present state, the Inverted Totalitarianism you so blithely dismissed.

Baseline Humans [me, thee and all we know] simply cannot make Mass Democracy work. Just look at how most of us deal with Accelerating Climate Change, which is likely to kill most if not all of us. Denial...Denial...Denial...Extinction.

That, more than anything else, led me to become a Transhumanist. Unfortunately, it is almost certain that The Rich and Powerful will be the main beneficiaries of the Genetic Engineering and Cybernetic Augmentation technologies that are being developed in this very moment. But maybe a workable form of Democracy will come out of these New Humans having a Cybernetic form of Telepathy where one can download all the information required directly into one's mind.

Of course, I have little doubt that a Genetically Engineered 'laboring class' of 'less than humans' will be created to serve these New Humans, controlled by brain implants and 'made happy with their lot'. We love having servants.

Because of our failure to deal with Accelerating Climate Change, these New Humans will have to live underground and in orbit for a while, centuries I expect. But I'm sure they'll adapt just fine. They'll still be 'humans' and we're like f'ing cockroaches. lol

Me, I live out in the desert with my 2nd wife and our many cats, which worked out quite nicely in The Time of Covid [a symptom of Accelerating Climate Change BTW]. I write and think and pass the time until I pass onto the next Turn of The Wheel.

You see, I'm [mostly] at the Acceptance Stage of Grief, while you seem to be somewhere in the Anger/Bargaining Stages. /sigh I suppose that's in part a function of age...

...and that's just about that.

See here: https://nebris.tumblr.com/post/677383159172792320

By Charlie Stross
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/12/seasonal-flame-bait.html

I'm off to do a reading in a few hours, and it's chilly outside, so I feel like turning up the heat. Therefore:

My view of contemporary US politics, which is that of an outsider and obviously incomplete (and possibly faulty, and subject to change) is as follows:


1. The USA is already a functional oligarchy. (Or, more accurately, a plutarchy.) It has been functioning as such for some time — since 1992 at the latest, although the roots of this system go back to before the Declaration of Independence — it's a recurrent failure mode. Historically such periods last for a few years then go into reverse. However, this time the trend has been running since 1980 or even earlier. What we're now seeing are the effects of mismanagement by the second generation of oligarchs in power; the self-entitled who were born to it and assume it to be the natural order of things.

2. It's impossible to be elected to high office without so much money that anyone in high office is, by definition, part of the 0.1%; even if they're an outsider to start with, they will be co-opted by the system (or neutralized — usually before they are elected).

3. Public austerity is a great cover for the expropriation of wealth by the rich (by using their accumulated capital to go on acquisition sprees for assets being sold off for cents on the dollar by the near-bankrupt state). But public austerity is a huge brake on economic growth because it undermines demand by impoverishing consumers. Consequently, we're in for another long depression. (The outcome of this new long depression will be the same as that of the first one: the main industrial power — then it was the UK; now it's the USA — will lose a lot of its remaining economic lead over its competitors and be severely weakened.)

4. Starving poor people with guns and nothing to lose scare the rich; their presence in large numbers is one major component of a pre-revolutionary situation.

5. Worse, the poor have smartphones. (Or will, within another couple of years. By 2020, today's iPhone 4S will be a cereal-packet-freebie grade toy. $10 for an equally powerful device, sold on a pre-pay tariff, via WalMart.) Which means a former constraint on civil unrest (media channels are expensive to run, so the oligarchy can maintain an effective choke-hold on mass media while trumpeting their support for freedom of speech) no longer holds true. See also the "Twitter revolution" (RIP) in Iran.

6. The oligarchs are therefore pre-empting the pre-revolutionary situation by militarizing the police (as guard labour). Note also that the prison-industrial complex remains profitable as long as there's a tax base on which to pay for the prison guards — or to use as collateral for loans to cover the guards' wages.

7. Modern communications technologies (including the internet) provide people with a limitless channel for self-expression (not to mention distraction— endless circuses without the bread). They also provide the police state with a limitless flow of intelligence about the people. Note also that it's possible to not merely listen in on mobile phone calls, but to use a mobile phone as a GPS-aware bugging device, and (with a bit more smarts) to have it report on physical proximity (within bluetooth range — about 20 feet) to other suspects. The flip side of social networking is that the police state knows all your acquaintances.

8. So I infer that the purpose of SOPA is to close the loop, and allow the oligarchy to shut down hostile coordinating sites as and when the anticipated revolution kicks off. Piracy/copyright is a distraction -- those folks pointing to similarities to Iranian/Chinese net censorship regimes are correct, but they're not focussing on the real implication (which is a ham-fisted desire to be able to shut down large chunks of the internet at will, if and when it becomes expedient to do so).

(Obligatory supplemental reading: The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod.)

What am I missing?