Negative sum reasoning

 Negative sum thinking (if it hurts the other guy more than me, I'm fine with that) is a classic sign of societal collapse. The Roman empire's collapse is the classic case. Politicians were fine with a legion's destruction as long as it hurt their political foes more than it hurt them.

Politics is now like this.  Who cares if packing the supreme court will hurt trust in the rule of law and it hurts our political future - if it hurts the other party more than us...  Trump was famous for this.

Now we're seeing this in more and more places.

One such user, a Redditor who goes by the name Space-Peanut, has a very personal reason for tossing their match onto the pyre.

Read below (emphasis ours):

This is for you, Dad.

I remember when the housing collapse sent a torpedo through my family. My father's concrete company collapsed almost overnight. My father lost his home. My uncle lost his home. I remember my brother helping my father count pocket change on our kitchen table. That was all the money he had left in the world. While this was happening in my home, I saw hedge funders literally drinking champagne as they looked down on the Occupy Wall Street protestors. I will never forget that.

My Father never recovered from that blow. He fell deeper and deeper into alcoholism and exists now as a shell of his former self, waiting for death.

This is all the money I have and I'd rather lose it all than give them what they need to destroy me. Taking money from me won't hurt me, because i don't value it at all. I'll burn it all down just to spite them.

This is for you, Dad.

Just asking...

 Just asking if an avowed anti-government group doing this...

Media Blackout: Antifa Riot At Portland ICE Facility, Throw Mortar Explosives At Federal Police Officers

...is insurrection?  A few Capital window breakers and chair sitter-inners probably want to know. 

#EqualityUnderTheLaw   vs   #IdentityBasedLaws

Establishment party corruption

 If you don't see establishment corruption expanding as actors who did illegal and extra-legal actions get positional rewards, I just don't know what to say....

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/cant-make-disgraced-former-fbi-agent-peter-strzoks-wife-melissa-hodgman-named-acting-director-division-enforcement-sec/

Taking on the Oligarchs

 Hate to say, but I didn't see the populist insurgency against Oligarchs coming.... (i.e. Gamestop stock manipulation).  But, I think it is a very adroit response to serfdom shifts, inordinate Oligrarch power, and a quickly increasing elite class size and its commensurate need for increase grifting off the producer class(es).

The nice thing with the insurrection is that it allows direct targeting against otherwise untouchable targets. The bad thing with this is mob energy can be directed at wrong-thinkers.

For instance, let's imagine a mob decides they want to take down their religious foe - say Donald Trump. Right now they're just leveraging legal systems to do it.  But if you've got a political machine, you have a fair bit of protection.  But, a populist mob isn't limited to such things. They can simply decide to game any investment or business Trump has. While production industries should be more resistance to these games than hedge fund investors (who Trump hates...) with cancel culture, everyone is vulnerable.  Especially if you only have a few resistors who can then have their investments gamed.

But, in general right now I think you may start to see some power coming back to commoners.  Of course the hegemonic blue uni-party establishment won't let this last for long.  Serfdom here we come. Revolution seems more likely to follow.

UPDATE - It looks like the establishment is rigging it...

Tim Pool

3h1354809819568381958

This has to be illegal

Its market manipulation

If you can *only* sell they are trying to force the value back down to save their hedge fund buddies

They are stealing money from people https://twitter.com/motherboard/status/1354798244455395328

Motherboard@motherboard

More than half of all Robinhood users own at least some GameStop stock.

They are now unable to freely trade it; the app is only allowing users to close out their positions. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ak7y/robinhood-stops-users-from-trading-gamestop-stocks-other-reddit-yolo-picks

Moral Hysteria runs into .... Me Too?

 What do you do when you are supposed to believe all women, but that belief provides a credible defense against a sacrilege offense against a cherished moral hysteria (and legitimate rule of law issue)?

see this article on Pelosi laptop twist

The facts of the case seem to matter to me less than the dynamics of the moral tensions which could be at play were people more honest about how moral judgment processes work.  I think what happens is people decide which heuristic to apply in any situation, conveniently ignoring the ones that don't lead to the proper ex post facto conclusion.

Loss of meta-narrative discussions caused by a loss of religion?

 Jordan Peterson always makes for interesting watching. Sometimes I don't get much out of his stuff.  Jungian analysis isn't that interesting for me.

But, the guy is unexpectedly wise. So even if some of his questions seem a bit....stuffy & dated... often you can get a really interesting tangent out of them. It's sort of like church... :)

His intro question with Douglas Murray this week is whether the loss of societal ability to discuss meta-narrative and meta-narrative value isn't somehow leading to many of the problems the west is now experiencing?

For instance, many progressives are really wanting to talk about foundational racism and systemic patriachies. Obviously the right doesn't.  We have competing meta-narratives. And, the narratives aren't talking to each other. At least in the old days, meta-narratives engaged with each other in the parthenon of the gods. I don't think we have that anymore.  My old blog series on policy meta-fables deals with this a bit in relation to meta-narrative political value.

The nice tangent from Peterson's idea is whether or not the loss of traditional religion has resulted in people loosing touch with moralized meta-narratives. Hence, they've lost the ability to see and value moral meta-narrative pluralism. It's my way or the highway. Duelling meta-narrative just means I'm giving your ideas too much legitimacy. That's not a good sign with respect to pluralism

Priests aren't allow to associate with sinners

 There's a good story in the Bible about how aghast the Pharisees were with the idea that a righteous prophet could ever been seen to associate with lowly sinners. Jesus couldn't be righteous because of his associations with the 'wrong' type of folk.

It is really hard not to see current purity purges in our newly hyper-moralized institutions in the same light.

The most interesting thing is to see what the right level of analysis is so you can see the gene-cultural Darwin machines that produce the commonalities but which also give rise to surface differences.  That's why strange attractor topologies are so interesting...

The slip into Authoritarianism

The slip into authoritarianism is really fascinating to watch. As I've said before, it reminds me of the Box Troll quote where the naive assistants catching the box trolls suddenly wonder if they're actually not the good guys in the movie but are in fact the evil henchmen.

How do the US get to the point where most people think that a militarized capital on heightened alert for members of the opposing political party is a new normal?  How did something that was treasonous last summer during moments of real violence suddenly become virtuous this month during periods of much less intense violence? And then, how did long term militarization suddenly seem normal? Actual threat levels vs establishment percieved threat levels are hopelessly out of whack.

There is certainly great POTENTIAL for mass resistance. But then, extra legal edge pushing tends to do that (on both sides of the fence).

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/reflecting-the-authoritarian-climate 

Mind Virus Theory applied to Academic Wokism

 If you remember back to the lofty intellectual days of the early 2000's you'll remember the heady interest levels that New Atheism raised.  The inflection point for this movement was the popularization of Dawkin's religion as a mind virus hypothesis.

The evangelical zeal this fostered spurned the maturation of the science of religion field and ironically produced a religious like cult amongst atheism. This later morphed with Critical Theory into academic wokeness.

As you read this article on how small funding changes in post-secondary have all but guaranteed the re-evolution of religious-based universities, think of Dawkin's old (and largely discredited) idea of religion as as a mind virus.  Wokeism's achilles heel seems to be people's disdain for Catholic styled Spanish Inquisitional dynamics and its Ludditish tendencies to hinder objective inquiry.  "And yet it moves..." - Galileo.

https://americanmind.org/memo/the-brainworms-come-for-big-science/