Category Archives: Society

Being A Placeholder Isn’t Enough, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on February 13, 2023 | Leave a comment

How many people in their older years look back and say, “Is that there is?” From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

Everything “normal” in the Western system trains you to be a placeholder: You are expected to attend the schools to which you’re assigned and complete the necessary programs. By doing that, you can attain a nice slot in the big machine. Then you’ll function in that general capacity, probably for many years. This is called success.

You’ll be able to get car loans, a house loan and possibly even 2.1 children. And then, when you’re too old or sick to continue, the machine will drop you out and a new person will be called in to fill your slot. A few years later you’ll die and a few people will say nice things about you. You will have been a placeholder, perhaps a mildly rewarded one, but that’s all.

It ain’t enough.

We are unlimited beings. All of us can create willfully; all of us are geared for transcendence. It’s a crime – a sin against the universe – to hold such creatures within fixed roles. And make no mistake, the entire, fear-driven conformity complex exists precisely to hold you in a non-threatening state, unable to consider any other possibility.

“That’s Too Dramatic”

Sadly, this isn’t too dramatic a characterization: What people actually do falls horrifyingly short of what they’re capable of doing. Pretty much every thinker of note has seen that much. We have a long, long way to go… a long way to grow. And being a placeholder keeps us away from most of it.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Culture, Society

Tagged

It’s 2030, and robots have more rights than you do…, by Mark E. Jeftovic

Posted on February 13, 2023 | 1 comment

It will be a long time, if ever, before robots are turned into anything remotely resembling humans. From Mark E. Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:

Ruminating over our robot overlords and the missing scenario

Now that ChatGPT has exploded onto the stage, there is renewed hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whenever AI captures the public imagination, we are subjected to unrestrained conjectures around how it will inevitably take over the future and change our lives.

We’re led to believe that AI will usher an era of hyper-intelligent overlords, so far advanced beyond our own coarse and analog cognitive skills that the existential question of the future will center around:

  • how much power or rights do we confer on these beings?
  • will they act benevolently or malevolently toward us?

​
But these questions presuppose a core assumption around AI that everybody agrees isn’t true now but will inevitably become true in the future – after a few more iterations of Moore’s Law…

That’s the idea that AI will achieve general artificial intelligence, and with that is implied some degree sentience (otherwise there is nothing to give any rights to).

The Newsweek piece on the right in the images above is by the transhumanist futurist Zoltan Istvan. He describes how AI ethicists are divided on the matter of whether future hyper-intelligent robots should be granted rights.

On one hand, by not affording human rights to robots possessing AGI (general intelligence on par with humans), we are committing a “civil rights error” that we will regret in the future.

This is opposed by those who assert that robots are machines and will never require rights, because they aren’t sentient (this is where I land on it, and I’ll tell you why below).

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, Society, Technology

Tagged ,

America’s Loss of Toughtness Enable Coronamania, by Mark Oshinskie

Posted on February 11, 2023 | Leave a comment

America has become a nation of wimps. From Mark Oshinskie at markoshinskie8de.substack.com:

In the late 1980s-early 1990s, I spent many Saturdays rehabbing an apartment building above an old, fire-gutted bank at 292-98 South Orange Avenue, Newark, New Jersey with Habitat for Humanity. The red brick structure was three stories tall and a half-block wide, with boarded-up windows. Working on the upper floors, we walked across tattered sheets of plywood lightly fastened to the remaining floor joists that spanned the inner shell of the building. Watch your step.

The project manager was a sturdy, brusque, coarse-blonde-haired, construction-experienced recovering alcoholic named Dave who, on cold mornings, wore a khaki-shelled Carhartt work suit. Dave had replaced a slim urban fellow named Johnny, who was a recovering heroin addict suspected of stealing power tools from the site and selling these to buy drugs. We kept the tools in the basement vault that withstood the fire and only Johnny had the keys. So they fired him. And changed the locks.

Dave was a blue-collar philosopher. The Twelve-Step process seems to make those who go through it reflect deeply on their own, and others,’ lives. Or maybe Twelve-Step just makes them more likely to share with others their impressions of the human condition. As we worked alongside each other, Dave would sometimes tell a short story about something that had happened and then add, with conviction, a larger life lesson like “Everybody’s suffering is real to them.”

We often made batches of concrete for footings. Because we lacked a cement mixer, we mixed the concrete on top of old plywood, using shovels. On the first day we did this, Dave began the process by declaring, “You’ve got to have some hate in you to mix concrete by hand.”

I’ve done harder work—for example, I’ve been a garbageman and roofed during the summer—but mixing concrete by hand is kind of unpleasant. You have to haul multiple bags of sand and cement mix and five-gallon buckets of cold water, which splashes on your pants in chilly weather. When you tear open and pour out the bags, cement dust gets in your eyes and hair and on your clothes. The dust would wreck your lungs if you mixed concrete often. I tied a bandanna over my mouth and nose; it seemed more effective than a Covid mask later seemed.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Collapse, Economy, Government, Media, Politics, Society

Tagged

Botoxalips Now, by Good Citizen

Posted on February 4, 2023 | 1 comment

How do you tear down beauty? Promote ugly. From Good Citizen at thegoodcitizen.substack.com:

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Culture, Morality, Psychology, Society

Tagged ,

Bourgeois And Proud, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on January 30, 2023 | Leave a comment

Bourgeois is one of those words people always misspell. It also conveys the speaker’s underlying content for honest labor, exchange, and middle class values. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

Even if you’re not exactly sure what bourgeois means, you’ve almost certainly noticed that it refers to something bad or embarrassing. In a moment I’ll explain its actual meaning, but first I want to turn the tables on it: I will maintain that bourgeois is good. For most of us, the bourgeois way of life is something to be sought, and hopefully to be attained.

Now, let’s get back to the proper meaning of the term.

Who Is Bourgeois?

The real meaning of bourgeois is “middle class;” it refers, especially, to people like shopkeepers. It began as a reference to people who were neither peasants (tenant farmers) and nobles (a legally privileged class). There are plenty of variations, but this is the core meaning of the word.

Bear in mind, however, that through 19th and 20th centuries, the term was seized by socialists, who turned it into a sort of insult. And the variants (petite bourgeois and so on), can be debated by socialist types at length.

Now, to support my characterization of intellectuals using the word as an insult, here’s a comment from a famous French writer named Gustave Flaubert:

Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

What really irked intellectuals about the bourgeois was that they were stealing their thunder. Over the 19th and early 20th centuries, intellectuals – people who wanted to sell their ideas – were rushing into socialism, because it would give them the same position the nobility used to hold: that of a legally privileged class.

This, however, was also the moment when the industrial revolution was hitting, and people chose commercial goods above socialist theories. In other words, the “masses” the socialists expected to lead lost their interest. Look at it this way:

Why would someone spend long hours with difficult authors promising a golden age, when all the components of that golden age were for sale, cheap, at the corner store?

And so people walked away from literary promises, and toward shopkeepers offering the goods of a golden era at reduced prices. Socialists have resented the bourgeois ever since.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Morality, Society

Heretical Thoughts on Orthodoxies, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on January 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

Orthodoxy cannot be challenged, which means that can’t adapt to present realities or change in response to new ones. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Heresy evolves, orthodoxy cannot. Plan accordingly. Orthodoxies offer the comforting illusion of solidarity. But in what lies ahead, we’re on our own.

In today’s world, the key orthodoxies are secular rather than religious: they are economic, ideological, political. Religious orthodoxy is in the spiritual realm. It may have secular ramifications (for example, Galileo being forced to renounce his scientific advances) but it doesn’t deal with forecasts of real-world systems.

Economic, ideological and geopolitical orthodoxies are different. They make forecasts about the real world, and they will be right or wrong.

The orthodoxies are roughly divided into two camps: the Establishment/Status Quo orthodoxies and the alternative orthodoxies.

Both are fiercely defended by True Believers, as the orthodoxy is the foundation of the True Believers’ identity and worldview.

The two orthodoxies aren’t necessarily diametrically opposed. Sometimes they overlap.

Much of what passes for “informed commentary” now is nothing more than True Believers cherry-picking whatever supports their orthodoxy. In this mindset, what’s important is that everyone agrees with the orthodoxy. Public fealty to the orthodoxy is all that matters.

In this climate, projecting an outcome that doesn’t fit an orthodoxy is heresy and must be suppressed.

I don’t see any value in trying to persuade others to agree with me. The analysis goes where it goes, and it doesn’t really matter if we like the conclusion or no

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Collapse, Economy, Financial markets, Government, Society

Tagged

The New Rules of Engagement, by Jeff Deist

Posted on January 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

It’s a vicious jungle out there. From Jeff Deist at mises.org:

Not that long ago, my grandparents explained to me why they never discussed politics, religion, or sex in mixed company. Politeness was their currency. And why antagonize people or create ill will over private matters?

Fast-forward to 2023, and their advice seems needed more than ever. Today nothing is private; everything is political. And American politics is characterized by a perverse degree of bad faith.

Whether the country really is more divided than any time since the Civil War or this is merely our perception—thanks to social media rancor, nonstop cable news, and rabid political partisanship—scarcely matters. Either way, the psychology is clear. Anger directed toward the “other” delivers the desired dopamine hit. Under conditions of extreme distrust, scapegoating is far easier and more satisfying than cooperation. We see this clearly with attitudes toward Brexit, Hillary versus Trump, covid lockdowns, vaccines, Ukraine, Antifa, January 6, the 2022 midterm elections, and a host of other manufactured issues. Americans are watching at least two different movies.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Politics, Society

Tagged

The Great Decentralization, Part II, by Joel Bowman

Posted on January 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

A centuries-long trend towards ever-greater centralization has run its course. From Joel Bowman at bonnerprivateresearch.com:

(Newton’s Cradle. Source: Getty Images)

Joel Bowman, appraising the situation from Buenos Aires, Argentina…

Welcome to another Sunday Session, dear reader… that time of the week when we step away from the Monday-Friday war of attrition and take a moment to contemplate the bigger picture, such as we can… all with the animating assistance of a glass of two of high-altitude Malbec…

When we left you this time last week, we were ruminating over a theory of cycles, large and small. This is not a novel musing. In fact, greater thinkers have been puzzling over the subject for millennia, at least as far back as the ancient Greeks.

It was that clever ol’ Ephesian, Heraclitus, who believed in the universal concept of enantiodromia (later taken up by Nietzsche and Jung) – the idea that everything is at all times in the process of becoming its opposite; hot things cool, wet things dry, etc. One might consider this with regards to centralization vs. decentralization, top down control by the few vs. bottom up “spontaneous order” of the many, growth vs. value, life giving way to death…

The pendulum swings from one extreme to another, the emergent membrane between the two akin to that undefinable moment where one thing morphs into the other, when an edgy band becomes mainstream, when the politics of liberation becomes the politics of oppression, or when a young man looks in the mirror one day and sees an old man staring back at him.

In political terms, we think of peace giving way to war… then, once the parched earth is soaked in the blood of young men, yielding to peace once again.

“Great armies rise,” as Bill observed during the week, “and then – under the weight of their own booty, bureaucracy and brass – they fall.”

Today we continue our series on the nature of cycles with a look at how we view history itself. Please enjoy…

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Economy, Financial markets, Governments, History, Politics, Society

Tagged

They Promised “Safe and Effective”, We Got “Sudden and Unexpected”, by Mark E. Jeftovic

Posted on January 14, 2023 | 2 comments

The vaccines have lived down to the exact opposite of their billing. From Mark E. Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:

We’re one tragedy away from pitchforks & torches…

“No one must ever ask where another rabbit was, and anyone who asked ‘Where?’ – must be silenced.”

In the story Watership Down a group of rabbits flee their home warren of Sandleford, ahead of its imminent destruction at the hands of real estate developers. They set out looking for a safe, new home and among their adventures they encounter another warren called Cowslip. There, all the rabbits are uncharacteristically large, affable and seemingly well fed. For awhile, the Sandleford rabbits think they’ve found a safe haven.

There’s only one problem: every once in awhile one of the the rabbits goes missing. It turns out the entire warren is on a farmer’s land who feeds and otherwise takes care of them, but then sets out snares and traps them from time to time for their pelts.

There is only one rule at Cowslip’s Warren, nobody is allowed to ask or talk about any of the missing rabbits.

I want everybody reading this to think of two numbers from asking you two questions:

Question #1) How many people do you know who died of COVID?

I first started hearing rumblings of a new Coronavirus emerging out of China in January 2020 (although it looks now like COVID was already circulating throughout the world by mid-2019).

Continue reading→

2 Comments

Posted in Business, Government, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Society

Tagged

The Loneliest Generation, by Jennifer Sey

Posted on January 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

There are a lot of lost young souls out there, staring at their screens and trying to suppress their fears. From Jennifer Sey at brownstone.org:

By all accounts, Americans are lonelier, more anxious, more depressed and more suicidal than ever. The Pew Research Center reports that at least 40 percent of adults faced high levels of psychological distress during covid. Alarmingly, young people are leading this trend, as they do with most trends; though with this one, their “trendiness” is a cause for serious concern.

  • The suicide rate in the United States is the highest of all wealthy nations. One in 5 young women and 1 in 10 young men experience major clinical depression before age 25.
  • Suicide rates among children 10 and older are the second leading cause of death among 10-24-year-olds, behind unintentional injuries and accidents.
  • Close to 10 percent of kids 13-17 years-old have received an ADHD diagnosis and over 60 percent of those kids have been placed on medication. And 60 percent of them have been diagnosed with a second emotional or behavioral disorder. Thirty percent of those diagnosed with ADHD were also diagnosed with anxiety.
  • Among teen girls who report suicidal thoughts, 6 percent of them traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram. What’s worse is, Instagram — owned by Facebook parent company, Meta — knew their platform was adversely impacting teen girls and did nothing to stop it, presumably because that would interfere with the ever-increasing screen time for these young girls. In 2019, one Meta internal company slide in a presentation read: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” But more screen time = more data to mine = more profits for social media companies.

Of note, these alarming numbers are all likely underestimates vs the current state of affairs, as they are all from BEFORE isolating covid policies took hold.

In March 2020 our kids were thrust onto screens for hours and hours each day, and were left with their only means of “socialization” to be on-line or “virtual.” They were forced to Zoom and DM and Twitch and TikTok all day every day, if they didn’t just give up altogether and hole up in their rooms under the covers, with absolutely zero interaction at all.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Collapse, Government, Medicine, Psychology, Society

Tagged , , ,