#ALSO AUTISTIC LINCOLN SO REAL AND TRUE

[unluckyprime]

hey what . hey . hey . guys . what 🥰

anthony burch coming at u again with a “fun silly” -> “what the fuck is the last 30 seconds” episode

[tentacledwizard]

ok I’m back with more. This ask is interesting, it brings to mind wizards and Abraham Lincoln, both very powerful entities. What items do people hide under their hats? Why do they hide them? And I am now the patron saint of the practice, meaning that I should try to figure this out. In 1793, the collection of stories “The Adventurer” noted that “By a sudden stroke of conjuration, a great quantity of gold might be conveyed under his hat.” Sweet! According to the same website I got that from, medieval English archers may have hidden spare bowstrings under their hats for some British reason. Ok, so people can hide a great and random variety of things under their chapeaus. Neat. Your phrasing indicates a certain literalness (the people hide items), but of course I’m going to think about the metaphors here because I am bored. I said “a great and random variety” of items can be concealed by headwear. A “hat” is also shorthand for one’s head (their mind). So I guess this means hiding one’s myriad of thoughts and interests for some purpose. Also- to “wear many hats” is to have constructed multiple personae. Say my seat is changed in history class, and this upsets me to the point of nausea. Rather than crying, I grimace a facsimile of chillness. Finger guns ensue. (Not at all based on real events). This is me hiding “items-“ in this case my visceral reaction- “under a hat,” e.g. who I am at school. So….metaphorically, hiding stuff under hats is autistic masking? Yeah, that completely checks out. And let us not forget the most important connotation of this assignation. WIZARDS. Wizards definitely hide items under their big old pointy hats. Frogs, wands, you name it. How do I know, you ask? Tch. My username denotes my position in the Tumblr environment, though I don’t often wizardpost. Am I perhaps hiding my true identity behind a hat? Don’t all Internet users do this?

This got really long. tl:dr I fully agree with your assertion, and I forgot to explain Abe Lincoln.

you are the patron saint of people hiding items under their hats

:0

I can support this idea.

[leotanaka]

Penguin Bloom, a new Netflix film starring The Walking Dead's Andrew Lincoln, explores the tumultuous journey many disabled people take to embracing their disability. And, yet again, filmmakers have effectively erased disabled people from the narrative.

Penguin Bloom tells the story of Sam Bloom, who becomes a paralysed wheelchair user after a fall. Alongside her husband and children, she takes solace in caring for an injured magpie, which the children name Penguin.

The film, based on a true story written by Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive, could have spotlighted the real tragedy, beauty and love present throughout the journey of embracing a disability. However, Naomi Watts stars as Sam, yet another non-disabled actor stealing a role from a disabled actor, joining countless others in prioritising the casting of big-name actors over authenticity.

By casting a non-disabled actor in the role, the film becomes inspiration porn for the non-disabled masses to feel good about themselves.

Inspiration porn – a term coined by disability activist Stella Young in 2012 – is a lot less fun than it sounds. In short, it is the depiction of disabled people as inspirational on the basis of their disability. Although this may not seem like a problem to some, the portrayal of disabled people as tools of inspiration strips them of their humanity and encourages non-disabled people to infantilise, patronise and objectify disabled folk in real life.

Recently, Sia committed this casting sin in her film Music (2021) which has since been torn to shreds by the autistic community, but this is far from the only example. Actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and Eddie Redmayne have won Oscars for "cripping up" in My Left Foot (1989) and The Theory of Everything (2014) respectively and Jake Gyllenhaal and Andrew Garfield won acclaim for performances in Stronger (2017) and Breathe (2017), so it's not particularly shocking that actors flock to these roles.

Non-disabled actors "cripping up" ensures awards buzz for the gold gongs, and is likely a factor in why conversations around disability representation are yet to break into the larger cultural zeitgeist.

The trend of erasing disabled actors has gone on for decades with little sign of the industry acknowledging the damage it does. Penguin Bloom's imminent release proves that the film world remains uninterested in correcting past mistakes by prioritising authentic representations of the disabled community.

Regardless of how good the intentions are behind these films, casting producers undermine their potential by erasing the disabled people who are the foundation of these narratives. It does not matter if an actor spends months prepping for a role to sympathise with the disabled experience, the film will damage the disabled community because disabled people have been prevented from telling their own stories.

It is especially important for non-disabled actors to step back from these roles because they are extremely limited. Only approximately 2.7% of characters with speaking roles are disabled, in comparison to a global population of one billion disabled people.

By casting non-disabled actors in disabled roles, which are also rarely written or directed by disabled people, filmmakers guarantee that the depiction will be at best limited and at worst reduced to a caricature created by someone lacking a genuine understanding of disability.

The usual excuse for casting non-disabled actors in roles like that of Sam Bloom is that the character is depicted before and after becoming disabled. There is no denying that capturing the transition from non-disabled to disabled would be more complicated if the actor were a wheelchair user. Yet that is no excuse for ignorant casting.

After all, disabled actors who can walk but also need to use a wheelchair do exist (like (Years and Years' Ruth Madeley or Run's Kiera Allen to name two) and could be cast in Naomi Watt's role and given audiences an authentic portrayal of disability.

Non-disabled people – who are accustomed to seeing their experiences depicted on screen – often dismiss arguments against casting non-disabled people in disabled roles by flippantly stating that it's just acting.

It is not just acting when non-disabled actors are stealing roles that are a rarity. It is not just acting when a neurotypical actor mimics the behaviours of a neurodivergent person. It is not just acting when a film studio is willing to spend money making actors look disabled but not on making their sets accessible for disabled actors. 

It is ableism.

Some filmmakers have contributed positively to disabled representation, like in Run and Christmas Ever After, (not to mention documentaries Rising Phoenix and Crip Camp) but it is not enough. The old adage that any press is good press is false when it comes to the representation of marginalised communities on screen.

Until filmmakers actively include disabled performers, writers and directors, inspiration porn will prevail and the disabled community will languish without true depictions of their lives. We have no doubt that Naomi Watts will deliver a strong performance in Penguin Bloom because she is a quality actor, but this is not a question of talent, it is about whether she should be there in the first place.

The answer is simple: no, she should not. Instead of getting out of the way for a disabled actor, ignorance has prevailed and Penguin Bloom will join an overflowing archive of disabled misrepresentation.

[arcticdementor]

There are three kinds of dissidents: (a) anons, (b) pundits who still care what people think, and (c) outsiders who DGAF. All these groups are great; real greatness can be achieved in any of them; and good friends I have in each. But each has its problems.

…

The problem with (b) is that you are always policing yourself. Not only do your readers never really know what you really believe—you never really know yourself. In practice, it is much easier to police your own thoughts than your own words. When choosing between two ideas, the temptation to prefer the safer one is almost irresistible. This is a source of cognitive distortion which the anons and outsiders do not experience. (Though anons do suffer something of the opposite, a reflex to provoke.)

As a pundit, you sense this stress in every bone of your body; you can never show it to your readers. This creates a deep dishonesty in the parasocial relationship between writer and reader—like a marriage that can never escape some foolish first-date fib. The falsity, like the blue in blue cheese, flows through and flavors every particle of your content. Neither you nor your readers can ever be sure whether you are speaking the truth, lying to them, or lying to yourself—but you are constantly doing all three. You may still be very entertaining—enlightening, even. All your work is ephemeral, and once you die only your relatives will remember you. And it’s not even your fault.

…

From my perspective, both the anonymous and official dissidents exhibit a kind of unserious frivolity, but a very different kind. The frivolity of the anon is imaginative, surreal and playful at best, merely puerile at worst. The frivolity of the pundit has no upside; in every paragraph he is breaking Koestler’s rule, and he knows it; the best he can do is to shut up selectively about the things he cannot write about.

And his mens rea, too, is awful. He is selling hope. He is selling answers. Pity the man whose life has brought him to the position of selling answers in which he does not believe, or which he is forced to believe, or which he must force himself to believe. However sophisticated and erudite he may be, he is just a high-end grifter. His little magazine is a Macedonian troll-farm with a PhD. He is lucky if his eloquent essays about the common good don’t appear above a popup bar peddling penis pills—and in fact, I know more than one brilliant scholar in precisely this bathetic position. The frame defines the picture; the context sets the price of the text. Sad!

Worst still must be the reality that bad punditry is worse than useless—since useless strategies for escaping from a real problem are traps. When you lead your readers toward an attractive but ineffective solution, you lead them away from the opposite.

You got into this business to change the world for the better. You cannot avoid the realization that you are changing it for the worse—because your objective function is that of Chaim Rumkowski, the Lodz Ghetto’s “King of the Jews.”

You exist to convince your own followers that they neither can nor should do anything effective. The easiest way to do this is to convince them that ineffective strategies are effective. And this, as we’ll see, is exactly what you cannot avoid doing, dear pundit.

Moreover, from our present position of profound unreality, where the official narrative shared and studied by all normal intelligent people and all prestigious institutions can only be described as a state of venomous delirium, the opportunities to play Judas goat are almost unlimited. Cows, remember: there does not have to be only one Judas goat.

…

A particular favorite of the pundit is the error that AI philosophers call the “first-step fallacy.” It turns out that the first monkey to climb to the top of a tree was taking the first step toward landing on the moon:

First-step thinking has the idea of a successful last step built in. Limited early success, however, is not a valid basis for predicting the ultimate success of one’s project. Climbing a hill should not give one any assurance that if he keeps going he will reach the sky.

When a vendor sells you the moon and ships you a rope-ladder, you’ve been defrauded. Time for that one-star review.

…

Today we’ll chart the edges of the legitimate possible by looking at three recent pundit essays which have done a fine job of exploring those edges, and maybe even expanding them: Richard Hanania’s “Why is Everything Liberal?”, Scott Alexander’s “The New Sultan”, and Tanner Greer’s “The Problem of the New Right.”

…

After reading Hanania’s essay, a fourth pundit (who is out as a radical conservative) asked me: why does the right always lose? “Narcissistic delusions,” I replied.

Which was far from what he expected to hear, or what most readers will take from the essay. All three of these essays are good and true; but their inability to go far enough leaves them pointing their audience in precisely the wrong direction.

Most readers will emerge feeling that conservatives need more and better narcissistic delusions. Indeed, both pundit and politician are right there with just such a product. This meretricious frivolity, posing as seriousness, is too egregious to leave unmocked; yet the right reason to mock it is to challenge it to assume its final, truly-serious form.

Richard Hanania and the loser right

Hanania’s true point—backed up with a ream of unnecessary, PhD-worthy evidence—is that the libs always win because they just care more:

…

Since the rebirth of conservatism after the revolutionary monoculture of World War II, all conservative punditry has consisted of attempts to create more excitement around policies and values which effectively resist the power of the prestigious institutions—giving “normal people” as much to care about as their fanatical, aristocratic enemies.

Sensibly, this tends to involve raising “issues” which actually seem to affect their lives, but which also run counter to aristocratic power. Over decades, the substance of these issues changes and even reverses; the opposite stance becomes the useful stance; and “conservative values” have no choice but to change to reflect this. (If this seems like a liberal way to rag on conservatives—the cons learned it from the libs.)

…

“New Right” is not Greer’s term, but as a label I can barely imagine a worse self-own. It promises something ephemeral and irrelevant. So far as I can tell, this same cursed label has been used in every generation of conservatism to mean something different. When it inevitably fails and dies, people forget about it, and the next generation, stuck in the eternal present of a Korsakoff-syndrome movement, can reinvent it.

Who reads the conservative pundits of the ‘80s? Even those who remember them have to throw them under the bus. Every generation of National Review twinks, solemnly intoning what they conceive to be the immortal philosophy of our hallowed founders, is horrified by its predecessor, and horrifies its successor—a truly bathetic spectacle. And of course, each such generation would utterly horrify the actual founders.

…

Greer then goes deep into David Hackett Fischer territory to explain the obvious, yet important, fact that this “New Right” consists of upper-class intellectuals (inherently the heirs of the Puritans, since America’s upper-class tradition is the Puritan tradition) trying to lead middle-class yokels (the heirs of the Scotch-Irish crackers, and (though Greer does not mention this) Irish, Slavs, and other post-Albionic “white ethnic” trash, today even including many Hispanics. He even gives us a clever historical bon mot:

Pity the Whig who wishes to lead the Jackson masses!

Uh, yeah, dude, that would be called “Abraham Lincoln.”

But the point stands. Not just the “New Right” with its new statist ideology, but the whole postwar American Right, is a weird army with a general staff of philosophers and a fighting infantry of ignorant yokels. How can this stay together? How can the philosophers bring forth a mythology that creates passionate intensity in the yokels?

…

There is wisdom in this madness, of course—the problem is caused by aristocrats whose minds are wholly given over to narcissistic delusions. Doesn’t it take fire to fight fire? Doesn’t it take passionate intensity? Isn’t passionate intensity generated only by myths, dreams, poems and religions, not autistic formulas for tax policy? So the answer is clear: we need more and better narcissistic delusions. Ie, shams.

After all, any “founding mythology” is a narcissistic delusion. The flintlock farmers and mechanic mobs of the 1770s, and the Plymouth Puritans of the 1620s, have one thing in common: none of these people even remotely resembles the megachurch grill-and-minivan conservative of the 2020s. None of them even remotely resembles you.

They did live in the same places, and speak sort of the same language. Otherwise you probably have more in common with the average Indonesian housewife—at least she watches the same superhero movies.

To Narcissus, everything is a mirror; in everything and everyone, he sees himself. No field is riper for narcissism than history, since the dead past cannot even laugh at the present’s appropriations of a human reality it could not even start to comprehend.

And fighting fire with fire is one thing, but fighting the shark in the water is another. For the aristocrat, transcending reality is a core competence. The essence of leftism—always and everywhere an aristocratic trope, however vast its ignorant serf-armies—is James Spader in Pretty in Pink: “If I cared about money, would I treat my father’s house this way?” Mere peasants can never develop this kind of wild energy: that’s the point.

Yet Hanania remains right about the amount of energy that a rational, Kantian agenda for productive collective action motivated by collective self-interest, or even collective self-defense, can generate. The grill-American suburbicon is like Maistre’s Frenchman under the late Jacobins: he has defined deviancy down to rock-bottom. “He feels that he is well-governed, so long as he himself is not being killed.”

O, what to do? When you are solving an engineering problem and see the answer at last, it hits you like a thunderbolt. The conservatives, the normal people, the grill-Americans, must accept their own low energy. They must cease their futile reaching for passionate intensity, whether achieved through Kantian collective realism or Jaffaite founding mythology. They must fight the shark on land.

Conservatives don’t care—at least not enough. Yet they want to matter. Yet they live in a political system where mattering is a function of caring—not just voting. Therefore, there are two potential solutions: (a) make them care more; (b) make systems that let them matter more, without caring more.

Conservatives have low energy. They want high impact—at this point, they need high impact. After all, once you yourself are being killed, it’s kind of too late. Any engineer would tell you that there are two paths to high impact: more energy, or more efficiency.

Conservatives vote but don’t care. If we don’t have a viable way to make conservatives care more—meaning orders of magnitude more—effective strategies and structures must generate power by voting, not caring. They must maximize power per vote.

…

Interference means voters who are on the same team are working against each other. Impedance means voters resist delegating their complete consent to the team.

Interference is like a bunch of ants pulling the breadcrumb in different directions. To eliminate interference, point all your votes at one structurally cohesive entity which never works against itself.

Impedance is like getting married for a limited trial period, so long as your wife stays hot and keeps liking the stuff you like. As Burke pointed out in his famous speech to the electors of Bristol, the fundamental nature of electoral consent is unconditional:

To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men; that of Constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a Representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought always most seriously to consider.

But authoritative Instructions; Mandates issued, which the Member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgement and conscience; these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental Mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution.

The cause of electoral impedance in the modern world is the conventional concept of “agendas” or “platforms” or “issues.” When you vote not for a cohesive entity, but for a list of instructions you are giving to that entity, you are not voting your full power. You are voting for Burke’s opponent, who felt “his Will ought to be subservient to yours.” In effect, you are voting for yourself. Narcissism once again rears its ugly head.

When you vote an agenda, you are granting limited consent to your representative. You say: I vote for you, for a limited time, so long as you stay fit and cook tasty dinners. I am actually not voting for you! I am voting for “reforms for conservatives” (Hanania). I am voting for “a broad set of shared attitudes and policy prescriptions” (Greer). Dear, I am not marrying you. I am marrying hot sex, regular cleaning and delicious meals—till ten extra pounds, or maybe at most fifteen, do us part.

You implicitly withhold your consent for anything not on your jejune list of bullet points. Then, you wonder why your representatives have no power and are constantly mocked, disobeyed, tricked and destroyed by people who are legally their employees. This is not political sex. This is political masturbation. You voted for yourself. And instead of a baby, all you got was a wad of tissues. Nice way to “drain the swamp.”

Your vote does not work because you are not voting, delegating, or granting consent. You are like an archer with one arrow who, afraid of losing it, refuses to let go of it. Without releasing his dart, all he can do is run up to the enemy and try to stab.

So if conservatives want to maximize the impact of their votes, all they have to do is the opposite of what they’re doing. Instead of voting for the okonomi a-la-carte stupid little political menus of hundreds of unconnected candidates and their staffs, they can all vote for the omakase prix-fixe chef’s-choice of a single cohesive governing entity.

Such a power, elected, has the voters’ mandate not just to “govern,” but to rule. When no other private or public force enjoys any such consent, no other force can resist. We are certainly well beyond “rule of law” at this point! On the inaugural podium, the new President announces a state of emergency. He declares himself the Living Constitution. In six months no one will even remember “the swamp.”

Wow! What a simple, clear idea! The engineer, when he comes across so compelling and obvious a design, knows there’s a catch: he won’t get the patent. Someone else must have invented it before. People may be stupid—but they’re not that stupid.

Indeed we have just reasoned our way to reinventing the oldest, most common, and most successful form of government: monarchy. And we are setting it against the second most common form, the institutional rule of power-obsessed elites: oligarchy. And to install our monarchy, we are using the collective action of a large number of people who each perform one small act: democracy.

The alliance of monarchy and democracy (king and people) against oligarchy (church and/or nobles) is the oldest political strategy in the book. The suburban conservative, who just wants to grill, either has no idea this ancient and trivial solution exists, or regards it as the worst thing in the world—even worse, possibly, than his sixth-grader’s mandatory sex change.

And why? Ask your friendly local Judas goat, the pundit. Even the “new right” pundit—who only differs in his policies and issues. Which are, true, slightly less useless. As the top of the tree is slightly closer to the moon.

The 20th century even came up with a handy pejorative for a newborn monarchy. We call it fascism. No word on whether Cromwell, Caesar, or Charlemagne, let alone Louis XIV, Frederick II and Elizabeth I, were fascists.

But, to borrow Scott Alexander’s charming term, also not his own invention, they were certainly strongmen. TLDR: if you want to be strong, elect one strongman. If you prefer to be weak, elect a whole bunch of weakmen. Do you prefer to be weak? “If the rule you followed brought you to this place—of what use was the rule?”

The pundit reassures you that you don’t need a strongman to be strong—you’ll do fine with weakmen—so long as those weakmen have the right “shared attitudes and policy prescriptions.” By the way, here are some attitudes I’m happy to share with you. Click now to accept cookies. Did I mention that I have policy prescriptions, too? Skip ad in 5 seconds. Congratulations, you’ve been automatically subscribed! Check the box to opt out of most emails—void where prohibited by law—terms and conditions may apply…

…

An odd sort of pundit, who remains only nominally anonymous but has always very much GAF, Scott Alexander does not have Hanania’s cagey diplomatic noncommittal. As a “rationalist,” he is deeply committed to his own class status, and to oligarchy itself—which, like most, he misidentifies as “democracy.”

While the whole raison d’etre of the rationalist is the irrationality of our oligarchy, as displayed in genius moves like refusing to cancel regularly-scheduled airline flights to stop a Holocaust-tier pandemic, the rationalist’s dream is a rational oligarchy—using Bayes’ rule, which given infinite computing power will become infinitely intelligent—in Carlyle’s immortal phrase, “a government carried out by steam.”

Obviously, this is not just logical—it immunizes the rationalists from the scurrilous charge of “fascism,” or worse. And they were right about stopping the flights. So was my 9-year-old. Sadly, in a world of universal delusional delirium, rationality can get quite pleased with itself by clearing quite a low bar.

My view is that no government can be or ever has been carried out by steam—only by human beings—a species the same today as in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, if possibly a little dumber on average—and this will remain the case until some computational or genetic singularity occurs. For neither of which events will I hold my breath. This is why I find it easy to picture 21st-century America under the phronetic monarchy of an experienced and capable President-CEO, and almost hilariously impossible to picture it under a Bayesian bureaucracy of polyamorous smart-contracts.

Alexander disagrees. Here is his analysis—the same text that Hanania quotes. Let’s go through it thought by thought, and see if we can’t turn it into some delicious carnitas.

…

Let’s get back to those “elites.” Alexander conflates three quite orthogonal concepts in his use of the word “elite”: biology, institutions, and culture.

Elite biology is high IQ, which is genetic. Elite institutions are any centers of organized collective power—Harvard, the Komsomol, the Mafia, etc. Elite culture is whatever ideas flourish within elite institutions.

Destroying biology is genocide—specifically, aristocide. Destroying institutions is… paperwork. Who hasn’t worked for a company that went out of business? Same deal. And if the culture is the consequence of the institutions, different institutions (with the same human biology) will inevitably nurture different ideas.

The SS was anything but a low-IQ institution, yet it propagated a very different culture than Harvard. 21st-century Germany is anything but a low-IQ country, but the ideas of Kurt Eggers do not flourish in it. It seems that high-IQ institutions can be destroyed—and the new “elite culture” will be the culture of the institutions that replace them.

So the only target is the institutions. There is nothing “nasty” about closing an office. In the worst possible scenario, the police need to clear the building, lock the doors, and impound the servers. Such tasks are well within their core competence, and can be performed with calm professionalism. They will probably not even need their zip-ties.

…

For democracy to be effective in such a situation, it must know its own limitations. It can seize the reins—but only to hand them to some effective power. This power must have one of three forms: an existing oligarchy, a new monarchy, or a foreign power.

Also, there are three classes in an advanced society, not just two: nobles, commoners, and clients. Since clients support their patrons by definition, once nobles plus clients outnumber commoners, the commoners have permanently lost the numbers game. This is why importing client voters is a recipe for either civil war or eternal tyranny—if not both.

…

Yes. This is what happened in denazification, except with monarchy and oligarchy reversed. For example, all German media firms today are descendants of institutions created, or at least certified, by AMGOT. Nothing “organic” about it.

The essential problem with Alexander’s picture of this process is that, since like most smart people today he inhabits Cicero’s great quote about history and children, he simply cannot imagine replacing one kind of elite institution with another. Nor can he imagine high-IQ elites—human beings as smart as him—which are as loyal to a new sane monarchy as today’s elites are loyal, slavishly loyal, to our old insane oligarchy. Does he think that Elizabeth’s London had no elites? Caesar’s Rome?

If Alexander was analyzing the Soviet Union in the same way, he would conclude that elites are inherently devoted to building socialism for the workers and peasants. Since the present world he lives in is all of history for him, he cannot see the general theory which predicts this special case: elites like to get ahead. To genuinely change the world, change what it takes for elites to get ahead.

If the elites are poets and their only way to get ahead is to write interminable reams of “race opera,” as my late wife liked to put it, the floodgates of race opera will open. If the elites are poets and their only way to get ahead is to write interminable reams of Stalin hagiography, Stalin will be praised to the skies in beautiful and clever rhymes.

…

There are two big strawmen here. Let’s turn them into steelmen.

First, “the populace uses the government” is non-Burkean. The populace (not all of it, just the middle class) installs the government. Then it goes back to grilling. So long as the commoners have to be in charge of the regime, and the commoners are weak, the regime will be weak. They need to “fire and forget.” Otherwise, they just lose.

Second, Alexander has clearly never heard of the atelier movement. No, this is not the same thing as your grandma in front of the TV copying Bob Ross.

What happens is this: every (oligarchic) art school and art critic no longer exists. Not that they are killed, of course. Just that their employers are liquidated (not with a bullet in the neck, just with a letter from the bank). They exist physically, not professionally. They were already bureaucrats—they had careers, not passions. Who gets fired, but keeps doing his job just for fun? Certainly not a bureaucrat.

And every (oligarchic) artist no longer exists—not that they are killed, of course. Just that the rich socialites who used to buy their stuff got letters from the bank, too. Libs sometimes talk about a wealth tax—a one-time wealth cap, perhaps at a modest level like $20 mil, will concentrate the rich man’s mind wonderfully on actual necessities.

Elites like to get ahead. The people who got ahead in the oligarchic art scene can no longer get ahead by doing shitty, bureaucratic, 20th-century conceptual art. Because there were so many of them, and because the demand for this product has dropped by at least one order of magnitude if not two, elite ambition is replaced by elite revulsion.

The enormous supply-and-demand imbalance for both art and artists in 20th-century styles leaves these styles about as fashionable as disco in 1996. “Paintings” that used to sell for eight figures will be stacked next to the dumpster. “Artists” once celebrated in the Times will be teaching kindergarten, tying trout flies, or cooking delicious dinners.

Inevitably, some of these people have real artistic talent. (The first modern artists had real talent—Picasso was an excellent draftsman.) They can go to an atelier and learn to draw. They will—because now, acquiring real artistic skill is a way to get ahead in art. And again, elites like to get ahead.

…

There is nothing “normal” or “natural” or “organic” about oligarchy. Does Alexander think “uncured” bacon is “organic” because, instead of evil chemical nitrates, it uses healthy, natural celery powder? He sure is easy to fool. But who isn’t?

Culture and academia is already yoked to the will of government in a “heavy-handed manner”—yoked not by the positive pressure of power, but the negative attraction of power. When the formal government defers to institutions that are formally outside the government, it leaks power into them and makes them de facto state agencies.

Power leakage, like a pig lagoon spilling into an alpine lake, poisons the marketplace of ideas with delicious nutrients. Ideas that make the institutions more powerful grow wildly. Eventually these ideas evolve carnivory and learn to positively repress their competitors, which is how our free press and our independent universities have turned our regime into Czechoslovakia in 1971, and our conversation into a Hutu Power after-school special. PS: Black lives matter.

The paradox of “authoritarianism” is that a regime strong enough to implement Frederick the Great’s idea of “free speech”—“they say what they want, I do what I want”—can actually create a free and unbiased marketplace of ideas, which neither represses seditious ideas nor rewards carnivorous ideas. But it takes a lot of power to reach this level of strength—and it requires liquidating all competing powers.

I have never been able to explain this simple idea to anyone, even rationalists with 150+ IQs who can grok quantum computing before breakfast, who didn’t want to understand it. Ultimately it reduces to the painful realization that sovereignty is conserved—that the power of man over man is a human universal. (Also, we all die.)

No surprise that nerds who think of power as Chad shoving them into a locker can’t handle the truth. PS: I went to a public high school as a 12-year-old sophomore, was bullied every day for three years, and graduated college as a virgin. Whoever you are, dear reader, you are not beyond hope. You can handle the truth.

…

And yet: Alexander’s post is about Erdoğan—and his description of Erdoğan is spot on. It also is a perfect description of Orban in Hungary; it applies to Putin in Russia and Xi in China; and it is even pretty accurate for Hitler, Mussolini and friends.

What all these “strongmen” have in common is that they are provincial. Turkey is not exactly the center of the world. Even 20th-century Germany was nowhere near the center of the world, though it could at least imagine becoming that center. If Turkey just disappeared tomorrow, no one would have any reason to care except the Turks. Who needs Turkey for anything? What would collapse—the dried-apricot market?

Erdoğan’s problem is that he cannot vaporize the oligarchy, because the institutions that matter are not in Turkey. The provincial strongman has no choice but to follow the “populist” playbook that Alexander describes so well.

Orban can kick Soros’s university out of Hungary; he cannot do anything at all to Soros, let alone to the global institutions of which Soros is only a small part. He is indeed “arrayed against” these institutions, to which his Hungarian elites (who speak nearly-perfect English) will always be loyal. The contest is unequal and has only one possible winner, though it can last indefinitely long. Even Xi, whose country can quite easily imagine becoming the economic center of the world, is a provincial strongman—in fact, he sent his daughter to Harvard. Sad!

In a global century, the only way for these provincial strongmen to develop genuine local sovereignty is to go full juche. This is simply not possible for Hungary or Turkey, both of which are firmly attached to the cultural, economic, and military teat of the Global American Empire. Indeed it is barely possible for North Korea, a marsupial nation still in China’s pouch. So Alexander is right: these “strongmen” cannot win. Their regimes will all go the way of Franco’s. It’s impressive that they even survive.

Erdoğan simply has no way to attach his best citizens to his own regime. They are citizens of the world. Elites always like to get ahead. If you’re a world-class talent in anything, why would you try to get ahead in Istanbul? Suppose you want to make a name as the world’s greatest Turkish writer. Succeed in New York, then come home. Turkey is a province; provinces are provincial.

Yet I am not a Turk or a Hungarian, and neither is Scott Alexander. The greater any empire, the more essential that its fall begin at the center. The Soviet empire did not fall from the outside in; it was not brought down from Budapest or Prague; it fell from Moscow out.

And the American empire will fall from Washington out—though that may not happen in the lives of those now living. And although nature abhors a vacuum and no empire can be replaced by nothing—and oligarchy, in the modern world, can only be replaced by monarchy—the “strongman” of this monarchy will not look anything like these mere provincial dictators.

…

The result of Alexander’s perceptive calculations, which are only wrong because their only input data is the present, is simply that our present incompetent tyranny is and must be permanent. Of course, every sovereign regime defines itself as permanent. Yet when we look at the past and not just the present, we see that no empire is forever.

Some grim things are happening in America today. These grim things have a silver lining: they expose the gleaming steel jaws of the traps that the aristocracy sets for its commoners. They remind the cattle that a goat is not a cow and a baa is not a moo.

Every pundit is a Cicero. And amidst all the greatness of his rhetoric, Cicero could not imagine a world that had no use for Ciceros—a world governed by competence, not rhetoric. By the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon, nothing had failed more completely than the whole Roman idea of governance by rhetoric—an idea many centuries old, an idea whose execution had beaten all competitors to capture the whole civilized world, but an idea that was past its sell-by date. Rome herself was no longer suited to it. The republican aristocracy of Rome no longer meant Regulus and Scipio and Cincinnatus; it meant Milo and Clodius and Catiline. Its factional conflict was the choice between Hutu Power and Das Schwarze Korps. Caesar was not a disaster; Caesar was a miracle.

In the death of the American republic, every detail is different. The story is the same. The contrast in capacity between SpaceX and the Pentagon, Moderna and the CDC, Apple and Minneapolis—between our monarchical corporations, and our oligarchical institutions—is a dead ringer for the contrast between the legions and the Senate.

The sooner we stop pretending that this isn’t happening to us, the better results we can get. Wouldn’t it be nice to get to Caesar, Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, without passing through Sulla and Marius, Crassus and Spartacus? Alas, from here and now it seems unlikely. But I can’t see why every serious person wouldn’t want to try.

[mermaidfan76]

Homeless Autistic Girl

Hey guys... this really kills me to ask, however right now I’m homeless at the moment.

Technology, I’m living with a long time friend who is hounding me to find a job since she believes it’s just so damn easy and move out by The end of February. I’ve put out application after application and only maybe a couple have called back for an interview. Only for them to tell me the same exact thing over and over, “You don’t seem like you will do well for this job.” With out even giving me a garsh darn chance to show them I’m willing to work my butt off.

Yet, they hire people who are literally ALLERGIC to manual labor, and pay them twice the wage to appease them so they don’t get sued. It pisses me off. I have Autism and PTSD, I watched my mother and fathers beloved dog get run over by a car, I know these people have mommy and daddy’s that coddle them. My parents died on September 22, 2013. My sister’s threw me out in the cold and said I’m on own. I’m still here, sadly. Not one day goes by and I don’t think about giving up and killing myself. Love to give that bayberry (under a new name) Bitch and all the rest what they wanted in the first place! With heartless pieces off shit like them in this world, I definitely don’t feel it’s worth the aggravation!

You push, you kick, you fight, you bite, you bunch, but guess what you end up someone else’s lunch! It’s survival of the fittest and you’ve won the game if you have Money, Fame, and/or Power! Just 1 on these gives you the right to control poor peoples lives!

You can play the advocate for good all day, but turning a blind eye to the innocent people that are truly in pain by the very people you are advocating for. Who’s the real villain? Saying the people who did nothing deserve it because someone said its poetic revenge... read a book. Get your facts straight, you really think they would attack now? Why didn’t they attack back then? People don’t postpone revenge -_-...

(if I had a grudge against a person, I’d want to get them now, not expect my descendants to attack his descendants. 1. How do I know if they’ll follow through? 2. What if everything is patched up and my other descendants didn’t know that and still desire to take their revenge? (They don’t even know what the whole argument is about... could be about stealing the last slice of pizza) This is about taking over the world just like before! We stopped them once! They’re trying again, however they fooled you!)

So with politics, islamphopia (more like not wanting an ideology of woman haters who desire to take over any free country and turn it to a world of oppression and insanity), racism (a political term used when a white person doesn’t agree with you), feminist (because women are oppressed because they have tits and a vigina), fatphopia (because veggies don’t taste like cake, if they did we’d still become fat, why? Because we’d get sick of sweets and want savory tasting veggies that you only get from cake... oh the irony), LBGT without Q (Queers are just feminist men who are really flamboyant gays... and real gays try to avoid, ever heard the term, “Queer as a Clock work Mouse.” Man I miss my English mother! The LBG, The Les, The Bi, and The Gay, do as you wish... Hey I’m you Bi, I find shapely girls just Be A U Ti Ful to draw, have to get that full body motion. Gays, love ya, best guy friends and you give perfect fashion advice, Lesbians, you’re very easy going and easy to talk to, al yal are A O Kay in my book. Trans, um... look umm... I’m female... I have more of a male mind... we can find common ground here can’t we?) and that’s what I go through everyday. Half the words I’m called... how do they apply to me? Like racist? I judge by character, not by skin tone.

(All I see is another human being in front of me. If you act like you’re above a human being, than I’ll treat you the way you treat me. Not one human is above another. If you have earnt that privilege than you are granted that only by the people who gave you such power, however they have the power to take it away. That is the true purpose of the second Amendment! In short; “a president is a civil servant to the people of his/her country that he/she has sworn to protect! As such nothing is beneath them!”)

I really wish people would do their homework...

My friend I was talking about earlier; well she’s not only getting on my case about finding a job, but she’s also pissing me off about politics. Her plan is to be an American History Teacher. She wants to teach her class how America was founded on the “Socialistic” Principles we use today and that’s bullshit! We wouldn’t have many of our largest company products that I bet everyone of you see every single day, more than likely every minute of your day.

(For Starters:

Let’s start off with Ford, if America was a Socialistic Society, well then all of you who drive a Ford let alone a car in general, would walk everywhere. If it wasn’t for Ford’s Model T being a Successful test run clearing the way to Model A. Ford’s company could only up from there. (Btw: anyone who drives the VMW Bug- just a little trivia for you did you know that the original design was created by Adolf Hitler himself? Adolf Hitler was the original Designer for the shape of that car the VMW Bug, just a little tid pit I know from Graphic Design School, hope that doesn’t ruin your VMW driving experience:D)

Another one I’d like to point out: McDonald’s, that famous Golden Arches fast food places started as a ma and pa rest stop, now it’s one of the biggest fast food chains in the world! Mickey D’s started again in America! Again how is that possible in a Socialistic society?

Socialism is structured to where everyone is equal... equal pay... equal healthcare... equal quality of living... doesn’t count the politicians! In this system if you work you’re an idiot. Those who sit on their ass get everything handed to them, those who work their asses off barely survive. So why bother putting yourself through that much torture. Because:

No one working:

No power

No cable

No doctors

No teachers

No police

No food

No safety

No security...

Why? This would have been a good thing! This here proves Socialism doesn’t work!

If everyone decided to not work because they’re getting ripped off; than America shuts down! The government is screwed! And so are the moochers!)

Those are only two examples of capitalism being a good thing.

There is so much more... not to mention the feminist aspects like Susan B. Anthony: Voicing her “opinion” by voting for who she thought would be a good president. Of course the judge was going to let her off with a warning because “woman privilege” (woman today would be like okay and do it again), however she, Susan B. Anthony, A Real Feminist, (no Feminist is an insult to her, She a Real Woman, The Genuine Wonder Woman!) demanded she was sentenced to jail just like any man who broke the law! (Please oh please can we do that to these modern, pussies who call themselves women!) The first woman to fly a plane over the pacific Amelia, or the women who rose up against unjust treatment Rosa Parks, I mean come on. Worst of all is, she’s being taught tha John Wilkes Booth was Republican and Abraham Lincoln was Democrat... and it’s reversed. There’s a saying the liberals came up with: “if those damn n$&@€ must vote then they should only vote Democrat!”

My friend has become heartless and greedy, I’m in a fucked up spot because of a malicious brat who played innocent and didn’t understand what happens when you compromise. It’s not one side surrenders and the other gains, but what do I expects from the preppy college school type, (not all preppy girls are mean, I just have this personality that sends the wrong vibes and makes them more territorial)AKA mean girl type... however, this girl demanded everything goes her way or else. She’s from Georgia, yet she comes to higher elevation part and in the middle of the US, it’s winter yet she expects sunshine and beaches? All of us to be drinking out of a coconut? Yes, her hair is blonde at the roots, and she smokes pot in the apartment. Kind of gives you a clue on the person she is. Of and her Boy Toy is always there... when I stayed there. She blamed me for her messes, and her food she didn’t eat. Thing is I hate fish. Well another one to count she has a low IQ from the Mercury poisoning... and here I thought fish helped with brain development.

Anyway, it was hell, so my friend volunteered on the condition that I find a job and move out ASAP. I’m tryin as hard as I can here.

Being told no everywhere I go is very discouraging. I’ve made a gofund me campaign to maybe to maybe help a little... I don’t expect anyone to donate really... if anyone could click the link and share it to a friend they know and spread it around.

By February the only place I’ll be staying is my car on the side of the road... just sharing the story helps. Thank you.

<link>https://www.gofundme.com/homeless-autistic-girl<link>

[lshawker]

New Post has been published on LS Hawker

New Post has been published on http://lshawker.com/the-drowning-game-super-secret-facts/

THE DROWNING GAME Super-secret Facts

The original title of THE DROWNING GAME was DEEP FORBIDDEN LAKE, after the Neil Young song, which is why it’s included in the soundtrack. I see that song playing over the end credits of the movie.

Petty’s dogs, Sarx and Tesla, are so named because I mention Tesla in every book I write as a tribute to my husband Andy. Sarx is the Greek word for “flesh.” A pastor named Bob talked about his mentor who, whenever Bob started acting squirrelly, would say, “Down, Sarx! Down!” I always wanted to name a dog Sarx, so now I have.

Other dog facts: Uncle Curt’s bulldog, China Cat Sunflower, is named after Grateful Dead song. This is a reference to a previous novel I wrote that takes place thirty years earlier in which Curt is a major character. Curt owns a hound dog in that one named after another Grateful Dead song.

Randy King is based on my friend Marianne’s ex who grabbed me by the face and pushed me down in the street one time when he was drunk.

Saw Pole and Niobe are fictional Kansas towns, modeled after the real towns of Barnard and Lincoln respectively.

“Saw Pole” in the Kiowa Indian language means “Owl.”

The bra knife that Petty carries is a 160 Smidgen Buck knife. When I got my book contract, I gave one to each of the members of my critique group, Because Magic, as well as my agent, Michelle Johnson of Inklings Literary Agency, as a thank-you gift.

Dekker’s band name “Disregard the 9” was inspired by my friend Andrew Weygandt. He sent me a text once, at the end of which he accidentally typed a 9. His followup text said, “Disregard the 9.”

Autopsyturvy, the band Disregard the 9 is set to open for, comes from a trivia team name invented by Nick and Lauren Hernandez.

Dekker’s grandma Oma is based on my grandmother, Mildred Ross, who lived in Lincoln, Kansas.

Petty was inspired by my youngest, Layla, who had just been diagnosed with autism the month I began work on THE DROWNING GAME. Although Petty herself is not autistic, much of her social awkwardness and confusion at life outside her father’s house is based on autistic characteristics.

Petty was the first female protagonist I ever wrote. I started writing from the male perspective when I was in college and couldn’t seem to stop injecting myself into all my female characters (although they were always a smarter, better-looking, cooler version of me). My friend Marc Graham coined the term Dick Lit to describe the sub-genre of the novels I wrote pre-DROWNING GAME.

Detective Deirdre Walsh (pronounced DEER-dree) is named after my friend Deirdre Byerly, whose favorite guitarist is Joe Walsh.

The Offender TV shows Petty is always watching are fictional versions of the Law & Order franchise.

Detective Deirdre Walsh is a thinly veiled homage to Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) of Law & Order: SVU.

The memory Petty describes

Mom’s telling me to ���Look! Look!” and she’s pointing at a little TV to our right. And just as I look, these snow-topped mountains pop up on that TV like toast, and I’m amazed.

is based on one of my earliest memories. I was three years old. My parents, my sister, and I boarded a plane at Denver’s old Stapleton Airport, and after it took off, it banked and the mountains seemed to pop up in the window. I didn’t understand at the time what caused that magical phenomenon.

In another of Petty’s early childhood memories, she’s eating a peanut butter-and- mayonnaise sandwich. That was my favorite sandwich as a kid.

The establishments in Salina that Petty and Dekker visit—Nick’s Pawn Shop and Knucklehead’s Tavern—are real places.

Petty and Dekker’s evasion of the police is based on a true event. (I plead the fifth.)

Curt and Rita’s farmhouse in Wamego is based on my friends Tama and Kevin Wagner’s rental during my time in small-market radio in Manhattan, KS.

The radio station that Roxanne and Petty listen to, KQLA, was the first radio station I ever worked at.

Roxanne’s supermoon story is based on an experience I had as a kid.

Two of Curt’s daughters are named after mine, Chloe and Layla, although they never appear onstage.

The third daughter, Roxanne, is of course named after the song by The Police. She is also modeled after my oldest daughter, Chloe.

The church where Petty’s folks were married in Greenwood Village, Colorado, is the same one Andy and I were married in.

Petty reads in one of the letters about a box turtle who had a hole drilled in its shell so it could be chained to a porch. This is a true story. (But I didn’t do it.)

The tornado sequence is based on my experience driving across Nebraska where a tornado touched down within a mile of where I was. My car didn’t rise in the air, but the rest of it is right on the money.

The storm chaser who picks up Petty and Dekker is modeled after one of my college boyfriends.

Motel 9 in Denver is a real place.

Paiute, Colorado, is not.

The Black Star Mine is loosely modeled on the Climax molybdenum mine near Leadville, Colorado, but is not abandoned or contaminated, and is in fact a working mine.

Petty’s mother is named for my friend Marianne Goulding.

The original idea for this book began around 2002. An acquaintance mentioned that her mother had passed away when she was young, and I asked if it was cancer. She said, “No, my mom was stalked, kidnapped, and murdered.” This acquaintance was ethereally beautiful, and I thought at the time, I’ll bet her mom was just as beautiful, and some psycho nutbag saw her and decided he was going to have her. I filed this story away in my brain until 2012, when I read about a journalist who lost his father when he was a kid. He’d always been told that it was a heart attack, but as an adult, he found out that his dad had actually been the victim of a mafia hit. The journalist went on a journey to find out exactly what had happened to his dad. I put those two stories together and the result is THE DROWNING GAME.