Tulsi Gabbard fired about a hundred spies because they used a secure NSA service to make explicit, sexytimes comments to each other. She offered up the predictable reasons: they weren’t professional, it’s a danger to security, unsurprising stuff. In particular, though, the chatrooms were queer-friendly and it can be contextualized as an anti-DEI move.
Continue reading Tulsi Gabbard fires spies to the joy of Russia and China
In a continuation of my review on Sapiens from before, I can now finish the review, since I’ve finished the book.
There was only one additional part that just stopped me completely, which was when Harari said, “Why do people worry about us running out of energy?” He was talking about the inevitable collapse of the fossil fuel industry, but no one is worried that we wouldn’t have “enough energy.” The real concern is that there will be a sharp price increase when the oil-dependent energy system we now have crosses the threshold where competition for fossil fuels rises. Less “running out of energy” and more like an “energy crisis,” the likes of which we have had before when oil has undergone price spikes. We all know that solar, wind, and nuclear power can provide the power needed, but that system doesn’t yet exist fully.
Continue reading Finishing that Review of Sapiens For a Friend
I just finished End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. The book has a fascinating premise that I’d never heard so clearly said: social unrest arises because unhappy populations are subjected to countries with political infighting. Which, well, that’s not necessarily news. What is news is that he identifies why the political infighting occurs, which is a surplus of wannabe elites, the elite aspirants.
I.
I asked a question on Bluesky, and I’ll repeat it here: what happens to US superheroes when the US is obviously in imperial decline? (And, moving forward, I am only talking about mainstream superheroes, almost exclusively the ones owned by Marvel and DC. Indie comics are a wild and wonderful woolly world of weirdness and likely to remain so forever.) The response I got on Bluesky, since I used Captain America as an example, is that now and then, Cap will leave the role to someone else, such as during the Watergate Era. But my question wasn’t what would superheroes do when the US made a mistake but about American superheroes in an age of imperial decline (and despite a few instances when they do something, most of the time they are silent; Cap has yet to opine on an insurrectionist rapist being in the Oval Office currying favor with tyrants over democratically elected leaders being invaded by those tyrants… if Cap quit over a bit of light spying by Nixon, you’d think he’d quit over that, but times have changed.) I think it’s a question worth looking at, given the cache that superheroes have had on the global scene with the rise of the MCU.
Continue reading Superheroism in the Decline of the American Empire
Here’s a fnord for you all: the US is positioning European nations as rivals while demanding an increase in their military budgets. Think about it. What happens when countries like Germany, in a post-NATO world, start boosting their military budgets? Is… is the US happy when China increases it’s military budget? Does it leap for joy when Iran or North Korea spends more on missiles? Any increase in the military capacity of any country is contrary to the nationalistic and imperial interests of the Trump regime. The more European countries grow their militaries, the less powerful the US will be, contrary to the very foreign policy that the Trump regime is creating.
Continue reading Today’s Fnord: MAGA’s Foreign Policy in Europe is Contradictory Even to MAGA
When I was a younger man, I was interested in conspiracy theories. I didn’t believe in them, but I was interested in them and the people who did believe in them. This was pre-Internet. While there were some big-name conspiracies – “who shot JFK” and “alien autopsies in Area 51” stuff – most of it was in the dark corners of the world: a few nutjobs with pirate radio stations rambling into the desert ether, mimeographed newsletters full of rambling purple prose, and badly edited and barely readable books. I was fascinated both by the horror and credulity of conspiracy theorists. They combined a totalizing belief in a nightmarish fantasy with a profound level of intentional ignorance that I found – and find – chilling.
Today’s conspiracy theorists are out in the open, often in high office. But how did it happen? How did we get here? I believe I have the answer, and the answer is social media.
Continue reading Killing Conspiracy Theories is Killing Social Media
I’m reading the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari. I’d actually stopped reading it at one point, and he encouraged me to continue because he wanted to hear my criticism. (The reason I stopped previously was his fairly full-throated support for imperialism. Another part that almost broke me is when Harari said, “Can you think of a single piece of great art that isn’t about conflict?” I could, in fact, think of such art. As could, I think, almost anyone who thought more than a moment about it, ranging from the Mona Lisa to heavy metal songs like “Cosmic” by Avenged Sevenfold. It was a comment so ridiculous that I had to take a week off of the book.) I’m doing it here because, hey, why not? How often does a friend say they WANT to hear your criticisms?! While I could write a letter, but a blog post is more fun, right?
Continue reading Partial review of Sapiens by Yuval Harari… for a friend!
I’m not a liberal or, really, a Democrat (though during the Trump years, I registered with the Democratic Party because I understood his unique threat to the country.) (Edit: I’m a leftist, usually identifying as a red-green.) So, yeah, I went to Bluesky because fuck Facebook and X, and it’s very liberal over there. Given the times, there’s a lot of stress about Trump’s regime, and a lot of people are going, “How could this have happened?” They aren’t lifting a mirror to themselves, so I will.
A lot of what’s happening has been coming for a long time, and much of it has been abetted by the Democratic Party and its liberals.
I fell into an interesting hole in Bluesky: people who are aware the publishing gig is rigged. I’ll elaborate on my experiences and observations.
I wrote a book, Simon Peter, which is an atheist take on the life of Jesus as the leader of a death cult. I did a bunch of research into cult leaders and concluded along the way, yeah, this had legs. The life of Jesus – taken without the theological flourishes of the past couple of thousand years – follows the typical patterns of a death cult. A charismatic leader who vacillates about their divinity, but as his followers grow to believe it, he becomes bolder in expressing his godhead while preaching the end is near while antagonizing the government and forcing them into an apocalyptic showdown. It follows the same overall pattern as David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, Jim Jones, and countless others. While doing my investigation, I also found other parallels that historical death cult messiahs had with each other but missing from Christianity. Mainly that they were deeply disturbed people, usually suffering severe childhood abuse (often sexual in nature,) and that death cult messiahs almost always got around to sexually abusing their followers. I came to believe (and still do) that you can see hints of this in the official record of Christianity (which I believe has about as much credibility as the Scientology website about L. Ron Hubbard.) Specifically, the dismissal of marriage and the fixation on fallen women are extremely common in messianic death cults.
As someone who has written stories about the threat of AI, this piece by Visual Venture on YouTube goes over some of the concerns about AI friends and lovers. But I think they stop a little short of understanding the real horror. While it is absolutely a tragedy that “friend” chatbots have factually abetted people who have killed themselves and are being used by greedy corporations to make money (and will continue to do so in the future,) I think the greater problem is that AI friendbots will become better than humans at human relationships.
Most people think that an AI takeover will be something like Nineteen Eighty-Four or “The Terminator.” AIs will either create a tyranny where they control all aspects of human life but where humans will be miserable (popularly called “the torment nexus” as I write this) or, at some point, they’ll just kill us all. There’s a third way. Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World is a dystopia that is created by love. Motivated by a genuine desire to help people, a society is created where people are engineered and chemically enhanced to fit roles in society with the total absence of pain, presence of pleasure, but also the perceived lack of real joy.
