> An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.
What he's leaving out is that in the novels Farson explicitly was a rabble-rouser pushing for democracy, egalitarian rule, and the downfall of the aristocratic class--and he used that to cloak anti-social behavior and butchery.
Sound familiar?
(Not that Cory is a butcher--hah!--but that he's deliberately eliding the "type" of demagogue Farson is. Consider why that might be.)
At this point, that mostly seems like extraneous details that would most just lend themselves to rationalizations for people who still don't want to accept the current reality.
That narrative certainly had appeal in decades past when we appeared to be headed towards totalitarianism from the other direction. I was there for it, then. But then the corpo gloves gleefully came off, and the main thing that remains of the prior dynamic is referencing it as a soothing strawman.
>> I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again
Conservatives, whose core ideals are personal responsibility, individual freedom, and limited government, are the ones who want to "be a child with no cares" again, with their needs taken care of for them? Their entire world outlook and identity is the exact opposite of that. Going to stop reading right there.
There is no conservative party in America because Trump has taken control of the Republican Party. He has no values except what is expedient for himself, any principled conservatives who speak up commit political suicide. Such is the world we live in when trust of institutions and expertise as eroded to the point that any acknowledgment of tradeoffs or nuance is met with knee jerk suspicion from the populace.
I do not understand why you are being downvoted for what is, essentially, a statement of bald fact and realpolitick.
Trump took advantage of a party already weakened by the Tea Party, and successfully turned it into a cult of personality at a time when the opposition was ideologically unprepared to deal with very real policy issues that their constituents were observing.
>"We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off"
The humble Hot Pocket is the perfect analogy for this. Since the dawn of time, every single Hot Pocket included its own crisping sleeve, that served as both a cooking vessel and eating utensil. The perfect microwaveable snack. And yet, in all of their wisdom, our corporate overlords have declared that they've "cracked the code" through various ingredient changes, to where it's no longer necessary, and through a combination of that plus some vague language around environmental concerns, we no longer need it. So now every Hot Pocket costs the same as it ever did, but gives us a strictly inferior experience. Copy and paste this "Screw you, I don't care because I know you'll just have to deal with it" attitude across all of society, and you get what we have today.
> So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.
This explains why Cory has been very irritated for a long time. If your outlook is world is objectively worse than 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago - then it makes sense why you're constantly upset at things.
"The arc of the technological universe is long, but it bends toward progress."
The "it's not just me" part is because he's citing a survey. He has been irritated for a long time because everybody (or at least a statistically significant sample) is irritated.
Yeah. A survey of other people who like Cory (I haven't checked this, but it's almost certainly true) are _also_getting_older_.
If the pollsters somehow stumbled on a pocket of people who don't age, this would be the most stupendous example of burring the lede I've ever encountered.
The National Customer Rage Study is a cross-sectional study. The organization (Customer Measurement & Consulting) picks a new sample each time. Has the proportion of older people in the US population grown so much as to explain the increase in customer complaints?
A lot of what we're seeing is yet again due to the largest generation in US history (the "boomers", so called because they were a population boom) progressing through their lives. Everything from the summer of love (when they discovered hormones) to the OMG we're old! vibecession.
This writer appears to overcomplicates conservative vs. liberal. Conservatives care about those closest to them and generally dislike disruptive change. Liberals care about those far away and embrace disruptive change for the sake of those others.
This doesn't make sense to me. Are you suggesting we reject the labels 'conservative' and 'liberal' due to their limited usefulness in describing reality and high potential to evoke emotional response?
I wouldn't disagree with that, but the author in question doesn't seem to follow that line of thinking so it seems irrelevant here.
I don't think that "liberal" and "conservative" are empty labels outright. However, they seem to be for the author of the post I was responding to: no substance, just bags to hold reflexive emotions that disguised themselves as opinions.
These two words lend themselves to that, because of what we use them for. I would not reject them, though. Naming things remains useful; and whatever words we would replace these 2 with, and we would, out of necessity: they'd receive the same treatment.
The words are not the problem here. Using them without thinking is.
Personally I think we should just put a pause on using the word "conservative" as it no longer references any coherent political group in the US, and if it does it actually refers to a contingent of the opposite party from what it used to. Rather I think we should be using "reactionary" or "fascist" in its place - both terms having been embraced by Moldbug/Yarvin, who seems to have been one of the main thought leaders of this radical populist destructionism.
But this doesn't mean I can't read something that has been written still using the word "conservative" as a lazy synonym for Republican, suspend my particular frustration about the terminology, and understand the point the author is making.
So far Trump has overhauled/decimated our national health leadership; imposed large, arbitrary and volatile tariffs, including on our allies; emboldened immigration enforcement to brutalize and harass people based on their ethnic background; manipulated the stock market for the benefit of him and his cronies; started a war of choice with Iran which has caused an historic global energy shock; threatened to invade Greenland and Canada.
Do you consider this to be nondisruptive policymaking?
Do you consider this to be helpful to those close to you?
Do not read Doctor uncritically.
> An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.
What he's leaving out is that in the novels Farson explicitly was a rabble-rouser pushing for democracy, egalitarian rule, and the downfall of the aristocratic class--and he used that to cloak anti-social behavior and butchery.
Sound familiar?
(Not that Cory is a butcher--hah!--but that he's deliberately eliding the "type" of demagogue Farson is. Consider why that might be.)
At this point, that mostly seems like extraneous details that would most just lend themselves to rationalizations for people who still don't want to accept the current reality.
That narrative certainly had appeal in decades past when we appeared to be headed towards totalitarianism from the other direction. I was there for it, then. But then the corpo gloves gleefully came off, and the main thing that remains of the prior dynamic is referencing it as a soothing strawman.
>> I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again
Conservatives, whose core ideals are personal responsibility, individual freedom, and limited government, are the ones who want to "be a child with no cares" again, with their needs taken care of for them? Their entire world outlook and identity is the exact opposite of that. Going to stop reading right there.
Those are their stated ideals and not at all what they're practicing.
Those are the core sound bites, but recently conservative party actions don't support them.
Not just recently. It's been that way for decades -- since at least the Reagan era, but arguably going back to the New Deal.
There is no conservative party in America because Trump has taken control of the Republican Party. He has no values except what is expedient for himself, any principled conservatives who speak up commit political suicide. Such is the world we live in when trust of institutions and expertise as eroded to the point that any acknowledgment of tradeoffs or nuance is met with knee jerk suspicion from the populace.
I do not understand why you are being downvoted for what is, essentially, a statement of bald fact and realpolitick.
Trump took advantage of a party already weakened by the Tea Party, and successfully turned it into a cult of personality at a time when the opposition was ideologically unprepared to deal with very real policy issues that their constituents were observing.
>"We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off"
The humble Hot Pocket is the perfect analogy for this. Since the dawn of time, every single Hot Pocket included its own crisping sleeve, that served as both a cooking vessel and eating utensil. The perfect microwaveable snack. And yet, in all of their wisdom, our corporate overlords have declared that they've "cracked the code" through various ingredient changes, to where it's no longer necessary, and through a combination of that plus some vague language around environmental concerns, we no longer need it. So now every Hot Pocket costs the same as it ever did, but gives us a strictly inferior experience. Copy and paste this "Screw you, I don't care because I know you'll just have to deal with it" attitude across all of society, and you get what we have today.
You should see what they did to our Pop Tarts man. The world has moved on.
>So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
> So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.
This explains why Cory has been very irritated for a long time. If your outlook is world is objectively worse than 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago - then it makes sense why you're constantly upset at things.
"The arc of the technological universe is long, but it bends toward progress."
The "it's not just me" part is because he's citing a survey. He has been irritated for a long time because everybody (or at least a statistically significant sample) is irritated.
Yeah. A survey of other people who like Cory (I haven't checked this, but it's almost certainly true) are _also_getting_older_.
If the pollsters somehow stumbled on a pocket of people who don't age, this would be the most stupendous example of burring the lede I've ever encountered.
They are indeed getting older. It's difficult to get a good survey sample of people going backwards in time.
The National Customer Rage Study is a cross-sectional study. The organization (Customer Measurement & Consulting) picks a new sample each time. Has the proportion of older people in the US population grown so much as to explain the increase in customer complaints?
Yes.
A lot of what we're seeing is yet again due to the largest generation in US history (the "boomers", so called because they were a population boom) progressing through their lives. Everything from the summer of love (when they discovered hormones) to the OMG we're old! vibecession.
Which way does fertility bend?
[dead]
This writer appears to overcomplicates conservative vs. liberal. Conservatives care about those closest to them and generally dislike disruptive change. Liberals care about those far away and embrace disruptive change for the sake of those others.
At some point you might realize that you're just thinking about empty labels that you fill with stuff that makes you feel better.
This doesn't make sense to me. Are you suggesting we reject the labels 'conservative' and 'liberal' due to their limited usefulness in describing reality and high potential to evoke emotional response?
I wouldn't disagree with that, but the author in question doesn't seem to follow that line of thinking so it seems irrelevant here.
I don't think that "liberal" and "conservative" are empty labels outright. However, they seem to be for the author of the post I was responding to: no substance, just bags to hold reflexive emotions that disguised themselves as opinions.
These two words lend themselves to that, because of what we use them for. I would not reject them, though. Naming things remains useful; and whatever words we would replace these 2 with, and we would, out of necessity: they'd receive the same treatment.
The words are not the problem here. Using them without thinking is.
Personally I think we should just put a pause on using the word "conservative" as it no longer references any coherent political group in the US, and if it does it actually refers to a contingent of the opposite party from what it used to. Rather I think we should be using "reactionary" or "fascist" in its place - both terms having been embraced by Moldbug/Yarvin, who seems to have been one of the main thought leaders of this radical populist destructionism.
But this doesn't mean I can't read something that has been written still using the word "conservative" as a lazy synonym for Republican, suspend my particular frustration about the terminology, and understand the point the author is making.
So far Trump has overhauled/decimated our national health leadership; imposed large, arbitrary and volatile tariffs, including on our allies; emboldened immigration enforcement to brutalize and harass people based on their ethnic background; manipulated the stock market for the benefit of him and his cronies; started a war of choice with Iran which has caused an historic global energy shock; threatened to invade Greenland and Canada.
Do you consider this to be nondisruptive policymaking?
Do you consider this to be helpful to those close to you?
Also, are these actions the expression of a coherent set of values?