

If your oath against genocide has any exceptions, it’s not an oath against genocide.
So long as one person is in danger from genocide, we all are in danger from genocide.
If your oath against genocide has any exceptions, it’s not an oath against genocide.
So long as one person is in danger from genocide, we all are in danger from genocide.
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.
This is something I observed regarding Trump in his first term, here this guy is allegedly super rich and now leader of the free world, and he still thinks he’s a total loser, hence his own inability to tolerate criticism, and obsession on harming enemies and bullying people.
He has to fuck other people’s wives and make John Kennedy Jr. eat McDonalds because even being President isn’t enough assertion of dominance to make him feel on top.
I have a tender self esteem, myself, and have deep-running neural pathways that will drive me nearly to self harm when I mess something up (e.g. drop my coffee, or burn dinner, or thoroughly lose my wallet). I have these structures of rational self-assessment so that when I calm down I can see I’m actually alright and have some sweet talents, and friends find me useful, and when not even that, at least lovable.
Trump with all his money and power doesn’t have that, and people like me can see Trump feels like a total loser propped up by hollow victories, even as POTUS, which is a fucking scary place to be. This is why cabinet meetings are a round-robin ritual of telling Trump how huge he is.
As for the tech bros, they succeeded in their careers which is exactly what we are taught manly men are supposed to do and still feel hollow (which is common when you fixate only on your career). They didn’t have that (possibly essential) experience where they collapse into despair as a young person and realize they need personal integrity or spirituality to climb out. (For me it was a moment of rational self-assessment and finding I was not wanting after all; that my depression and self hatred were based on delusions.)
As for Musk, his bio on Behind the Bastards suggests it’s really difficult for someone not to emerge from his upbringing without turning into a Disney / Marvel supervillain.
Thiel has his own backstory and obsession, and is perpetually feeling Death (his own mortality) chuffing hyperborean chills on the back of his neck.
So yes, these guys are desperate to cling to power, _because wealth and political transactional power are the only power they’ve ever known, hence J. D. Vance’s obsession on forcing women into natality which is likely to turn into Lebensborn style breeding programs (which inspired Atwood to write A Handmaid’s Tale. ) They are terrified of equality because then they’ll just be eccentric, antisocial dorks.
(I am an eccentric, antisocial dork, with few things to offer other than listening skills, peer psychology, computer nerding and moral philosophy, and in a world where we’re not all overwhelmed with bad news, that is more than enough to find friends, family and crew. But it takes some personal introspection and willingness to practice soft power to learn this.)
If they were able to step away from power, or we took it from them and forced them into peer group support, they’d eventually discover that they don’t need to be captains of industry (or James Bond supervillains) to be accepted and loved (and consequently, fed and homed by the community).
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall
Now that the US has actual concentration camps and actual Nacht und Nebel disappearances, not to mention arrests of judges and political enemies, we have a lot of folk who have been promoted from silent bystander to collaborator or complicit in the imminent holocaust.
The next step for the regime is to decide imprisonment of the undesirables is too expensive and we should proceed to evacuation (id est, mass execution).
The complicit category includes every elected or appointed official that continues to cooperate with the current government without obstructing procedure until the facilities are closed and prisoners set free, including those on foreign soil. Democrats included.
Um, has there ever been a time Sony, the rootkit DRM company has not called for state intervention to enforce IP laws regarding Sony holdings? (All the while Sony pirates anyone else’s stuff.)
This is like the news that Comcast objects to municipal areas opening up Comcast monopoly regions to new ISPs. Sony is almost as bas as Nintendo when it comes to their franchises.
You’re not alone in your sentiment. The whole thought experiment of p-zombies and the notion of qualia comes from a desire to assume human beings should be given a special position, but in that case, a sentient is who we decide it is, the way Sophia the Robot is a citizen of Saudi Arabia (even though she’s simpler than GPT-2 (unless they’ve upgraded her and I missed the news.)
But it will raise a question when we do come across a non-human intelligence. It was a question raised in both the Blade Runner movies, what happens when we create synthetic intelligence that is as bright as human, or even brighter? If we’re still capitalist, assuredly the companies that made them will not be eager to let them have rights.
Obviously machines and life forms as sophisticated as we are are not merely the sum of our parts, but the same can be said about most other macro-sized life on this planet, and we’re glad to assert they are not sentient the way we are.
What aggravates me is not that we’re just thinking meat but with all our brilliance we’re approaching multiple imminent great filters and seem not to be able to muster the collective will to try and navigate them. Even when we recognize that our behavior is going to end us, we don’t organize to change it.
An alarming number of Hollywood screenwriters believe consciousness (sapience, self awareness, etc.) is a measurable thing or a switch we can flip.
At best consciousness is a sorites paradox. At worst, it doesn’t exist and while meat brains can engage in sophisticated cognitive processes, we’re still indistinguishable from p-zombies.
I think the latter is more likely, and will reveal itself when AGI (or genetically engineered smart animals) can chat and assemble flat furniture as well as humans can.
(On mobile. Will add definition links later.) << Done!
Here to add that this is my problem too, and I have a therapist… that I talk to by phone once every 2-3 weeks (Here in the states psychotherapy openings are impacted so anyone who doesn’t have super-good insurance is on the wayside) and she’s more of a CBT coach.
I’m trying to figure out why anyone is alarmed that I want to head to the check-out lane, given our society elected the party that regards us all as expendable, and very much wants there to be fewer Americans and more elbow room for the MAGAs.
As I’m likely to be elevated on the list of priority persons to get the CECOT treatment, I still need to arrange for a rapid exit strategy for when ICE stormtroopers blast down my apartment door. Kennedy Jr. has some serious beef with us ASD folk, and as someone who is on a fixed income (though I’ve had jobs and even have written poetry) am exactly the sort that he wants to purge.
For the moment, I am currently living for a cat and a dog. I regard them as persons and can’t trust anyone else to. And so am very reluctant to re-home them until I cannot support them any longer. I might be living so as to not traumatize my wife (we’re separated) but lately I seem to be more of an obligation and a burden. It didn’t help she went to a family Easter event to which I was uninvited. I spent the day alone.
What I don’t understand is why elected officials claim that people like me are a burden to the state are distressed by the notion that we might want to self-dispose (This is, or rather was, my only country, my only society) Indeed, the US suicide rate has soared since the Trump era began in 2016. We’re higher than Japan now, and gaining on Russia.
I don’t think it’s that anyone actually cares about me, I’m an abomination, like The Outsider in HP Lovecraft’s story of the same name. They just don’t want to process the cadaver and meager legacy I would leave.
Anyway, I go off and on suicide watch, but in these times, we’re all expendable, and sooner or later going to be removed from the new MAGA society to be stuffed into a megaprison gulag. I’ve been told by 77 million American voters they don’t want me around. I don’t understand the drama if I immolate myself in front of a state building. Is this not what they want?
PS: Wife and family are considering giving me ECT, the same stuff that Hemmingway and David Foster Wallace tried before they decided it didn’t work.
As if someone published a book featuring this very technology…in 1949.
It was noted with memes when the ToS of one such television suggested not having private conversations in front of or otherwise near the TV screen.
Though the compromise of privacy rights and protections against unreasonable search, seizure and surveillance usually follows the terrorist and child-predator to activist and protestor pipeline.
NSA and FBI have always taken an interests in left wing activists critical of the current regime.
This is why you block the camera with a little diorama that shows a single white male viewer…frantically masturbating.
The idea that Florida can “protect” minors by making them less safe is dangerous and dumb.
I assume this is less about protecting children as protecting the movement from children, as well as facilitating wrongdoing against children by members of the movement.
As a general rule there are no backdoors that are good guys only. In fact predators, foreign agents and industrial spies will know them sooner than their distribution to law enforcement.
That is a fair assessment, and in a world where life is expected to be stable and tolerable, it is stongly tempting to keep your head down.
China may be that kind of stable, though from what I hear, they disappear people for benign offenses, and people have to manage their social rating. Not easy to do when you’re, say, gay, or neurodivergent, or Uyghur. I can’t help but wonder if the acceptable norm is shrinking, and the list of undesirables is growing.
Here in the states, it already is growing. And unless you’re doing sexual favors for a billionaire or are indispensable to a billionaire, you’re on the purge list, just further down than homeless folk and Latins.
Granted you might rather just be summarily executed than tortured. I personally am terrified by the marks on the interior walls of the Auschwitz death camp genocide chambers where the victims were clawing as they died. In the current path of least resistance, I’ll be making those marks one day, or rather will perish from malnutrition in CECOT.
If I have to go out suffering, I’d rather I made a difference. If I lie low, I might as well commit suicide, which I’ve actually considered except that would cause harm to others connected to me.
It’ll also suck for them when ICE comes for me and my neighbors are silent.
Social Security Disability.
One of the things Musk is trying to kill because I am allegedly useless.
Musk is about to learn there are practical reasons to assure the wellbeing of non-workers, including NEETs.
We often sre useful, just in ways not recognized by pure transactionalists and capitalists. And those uses can and do turn renegade.
I go by susbribed top last 24 hours, which gives me a decent scroll experience.
Im ASD and diagnosed with major depression and on SSD.
That means I’m high up on the purge list anyway.
We’re all on that list. Even those of you who keep their head down. That’s the point of the Niemöller poem, especially since Trump’s shadowy masters are not trying to become dictator for life rather to bleed the federal general fund for a while before skedaddling to Switzerland or Liechtenstein.
You can’t lie low on this one as if it’s a protracted storm. At least I can’t.
Off topic, stock pics of Trump all seem from around his last term so when I see a recent comment he looks old and deformed like an uncanny valley monster, like his face is a melted Nixon mask.
We should use recent photos for stock Trump pics the way we did with Biden.
Then let’s see Microsoft do this with full transparency and keep a publicly accessible list of forbidden words. Then evidence this is a general policy should be plain.