WatDabney

So… in response to Trump’s plan to fuck over American consumers with artificially inflated prices so that rich fuckwads can keep paying themselves obecene salaries and dividends, China is threatening to go out of their way to keep prices as low as they can.

That’s the most cynically amusing thing I’ve seen… well… today at least.

It’s really not.

It really is.

It’s mostly nepotism and reproducing the an untouchable ruling class that creates an autocracy.

And all along the way, people protecting the budding autocracy from criticism by diverting attention to the faults of some other system in some other place and/or time.

Put simply; when one system goes too far into autocracy, you should entertain the values of another system.

Um… sure. But that’s neither what you were doing nor what I was criticizing, so it’s not relevant.

Condemning that is approving of the current autocrats.

So… condemning people trying to shift attention away from the current autocrats by bitching about some totally different aurocrats is protecting the current autocrats?

Are you even trying to make sense any more, or are you just desperately stringing together random claims?

But perhaps you’re a particular fan of Trump/Musk.

Just desperately stringing together random claims. Got it.

The road to autocracy is paved with people who meet every criticism of the system with, “But look at how bad this other system is!”

Any system that gives a relative few authority over everyone else will sooner or later become autocratic, simply because that power inevitably comes to be held by those who desire it the most and are most willing to do whatever it takes to gain and hold it, and they tend to be greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes.

As far as that goes, the only real differences between systems are the specific hoops the assholes have to jump through.

Broadly, in a capitalist system, political power is awarded to the wealthy, while in a communist system, wealth is awarded to the politically powerful.

So the greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes follow different paths in different cases - accumulating wealth with which to buy access to political power in one or climbing the ranks of the ruling party in order to gain wealth in another - but the overall dynamic is always the same.

And that’s a large part of the reason that I’m an anarchist.

I am a ghost.

I’m extremely introverted and non-confrontational, so if a situation is too unpleasant or stressful, I vanish. It’s what I’ve pretty much always done. I have no idea how many times I’ve had someone say to me, " Hey - what happened to you? I just looked around and you were gone."

It’s sort of a trap. A lot of it is that, in addition to being introverted and generally non-confrontational, I’m hyper aware of people’s emotions, so if I expect that they’re going to be angry or hurt, I especially don’t want to deal with it. But of course, then I introduce the chance that they’re going to be angry or hurt because I “ghosted” them (or as it was most commonly known before the social media era, I “blew them off”). And yes - I feel bad about that.

All in all though, it’s still generally less unpleasant than the alternatives.

Which neatly sums up why I do not and will not even have a Steam account, but buy many games from GOG.

Well, like, to me, my thing is… a video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event.

Like back when I used to go out, when I was last out, I was walking down the street and this guy came barrelling out of a bar - fell right in front of me and he had a knife right in his back - landed right on the ground.

And I have no reference to it now. I can’t refer back to it. I can’t press rewind. I can’t put it on pause. I can’t put it on slo-mo and see all the little details.

And the blood, it was all wrong. It didn’t look like blood. The hue was off and I couldn’t adjust the hue. I was seeing it for real, but it just wasn’t right.

• Slacker (1991)