longer.blue

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/ducksfortheduckgod.bsky.social/post/3lvv6lyb6xs2t "We are where we are, in at least a "but for" sense, due to a nigh universal failure on the part of political, business, media, and academic leadership to hold each other accountable for anything at all" We failed and fail to hold ELITES and most of their lackeys accountable. And thanks to that, we'll fail harder for a good long while. But they sure hold each other accountable, at least to the minimal extent required to engineer this rot. If you know the tech industry, they pretty openly ruin what they make ON PURPOSE. "Enshittification" and "the rot economy" are painfully obvious to almost all involved, and companies do awful shit like hurling "dark patterns" in most consumers' way. Also planned by elites: the destruction of academia and the free internet, hastening over the last few months. See https://longer.blue/posts/u3bpmrgcg7 for more of my words on the shitstorm in academia. They plan this at various distances: meetings behind closed doors, plans to gentrify neighborhoods, governments engineering laws to suit the already-powerful, think tanks pushing out recommendations, trolls being given subtle signals of where to look to push some asshole's agenda... it's never just that some executives and political figureheads say "let's just screw some poors over epic style". They would've been slaughtered long ago if they were that stupid. Even the genuinely stupid get kept around ultimately to suit SOMEONE. Simple intuition: at least most of what a social institution usually does is what's wanted out of it by those who chiefly influence it at whatever distance (without their own influence over it being influenced by someone else). A bit like "POSIWID". Why the hell would they have those things do anything else? What we see as catastrophic failure is actually A RESOUNDING SUCCESS for the smug bloodsuckers who made this. There's even signs that elites are at least willing to pull off huge plans, or at least have plenty of lackeys willing to help. For example, ruling class intellectuals HATE everything "common" and "ordinary" unless they can use it to mostly help themselves - even the language we use (and this even extends to "eliminativist" trends in the sciences and metaphysical detours into profound "fundamentally true" garbage) unless they can appreciate. Financiers and foundations played multiple sides in wars (e.g. Rockefellers worked with pro- and anti-Nazi sides). The Eugenics movements were quite widespread fashions in the early 20th century. That means that so much of what you're lamenting isn't a fumble. The Dems ARE SUPPOSED TO FAIL. It's supposed to be go time for the worst thugs on the planet. They actually got their "go make those minorities' lives hell" signals long ago. "A central feature of the moral panic about "cancel culture" has been revulsion at attempts on the part the Wokes to hold the powerful to account. One of the first spasms of outrage over "cancellation" followed Condi Rice's decision not to speak at Rutgers' commencement after students protested! “Cancellation” was always a messy, ugly affair and it often brought down a ton of unfair grief on the undeserving and sometimes even the completely innocent, but the backlash against it was always at its highest ebb when it threatened consequences for the guilty and powerful" It was DESIGNED to be ineffective, in line with the other methods the ruling classes and their minions have used to wither any movements they hate. There were extreme incentives to bullshit and even to omit crucial context for brevity's sake thanks to how microblogging sites were designed to work and what they were used for. They promoted outrage, for the sake of both driving in advertising revenue via engagement, and for testing techniques to politically influence people at unprecedented speeds, scales and granularities. Many "woke" types became excellent cannon fodder for the ascendant anti-"woke" controlled opposition, who knew they had to appeal to nerds and obsessive types who were often prepared to do more research. That's what let Swarmfront, Gamergate, "internet bloodsports", and now a large young chunk of the HBD movement get off the ground. All the while, "reasonable" (often "centrist" or "center-left") ghouls show up, blame radical anti-elitist types for (usually elite-planned) failures to follow up on promises (like getting elected) to their target audience, and then cut off the radicals even more, compounding what suppression they already face. Those ghouls now have mountains of cases where anti-"woke" types dunk on "the libs", so off to places like the "right" they go. "The “Intellectual Dark Web” that now dominates legacy media began when Sam Harris got mad because Ezra Klein suggested Respected Public Intellectual Charles Murray is racist just because Murray thinks Black people are genetically inferior to whites" It had much earlier roots in the crazy and ambitious "scientific" movements of the early 20th century, (which itself has a huge garbage metaphysical philosophical influence). Back then, Europe and the USA were hotbeds for monstrosities like Eugenics, many -isms (like "socialisms"), and of course the crap the European Axis Powers adopted, like Fascism. Diverse sympathizers of these movements went in many directions, some of which led towards ascendant fields of science. While "left" types got worn down and coopted by either selling out or being massively suppressed, an intellectual undercurrent morphed into an anti-"left" (now often anti-"woke") movement. The "Intellectual Dark Web" is just the popular smartypants side of that. There's a much smarter wing that most don't talk about - not the big New Atheists, probably not the freaks with Epstein ties. You'll find some of them in and around the HBD and manosphere movements. "All of this happened while the current generation of elites were losing their minds because the next generation were much queerer, less white, and less male than they were, and were rejecting a lot of the tacit hierarchies that the current elites had become accustomed to and exploited" They especially hated how the lowest classes - the ones they've always hated the most, and in fact set up our societies expressly to immiserate and kill off - still largely managed to cling onto dear life after WW2, still trying to do their own things independently and sometimes in defiance of elites' dogmas and orders. To quell unrest and build enough industry to fight off any genuine intra-class rivalries among elites, the big guys already had to bait a lot of common folk with the welfare state. Yes, THAT is the main reason for it, because they see most people as irreversibly "at best unproductive and unnecessary" - they would otherwise either share much more stuff with us at no cost to us, or ask us to work in ways which really are productive for at least the majority of people (instead of merely to tick bureaucrats' boxes) while paying us loads to keep us sweet and happy to work with and for them. "In order to manage this risk, you need defense in depth, with a system of norms that work to bar the worst shitheads from power. They’re never as reliable as one would like, but I think they completely evaporated over the last generation or so in the US" I'll spell this out my own way. FULL SPECTRUM DEFENSE against people whose actions have no proportionate response by most people's moral standards. None. You could fry their nerves for thousands of years and it wouldn't equal the pain from how they messed up the world. We need full economic and informational independence from them. Hard to do when they've knowingly been destroying means of getting that, but it's all we can do now. Canceling both elites as a class and their favored lackeys isn't easy, but even THAT isn't enough. We need to totally shut them out of our lives, or at least make sure they don't get to decide how we broadly live and how we die.