What’s happening is not what you’re seeing.

Also: Foreign policy hawks are settling grudges while the world collapses… as a result of their grudges.

Alternative facts are real and Kellyann Conway is a pretty terrible person who did a bunch of stupid and horrible shit. Two separate pieces of seemingly contradictory information can both be true now because the world is too fucking complicated. Successfully navigating this seems to require a hybridization of Aristotelian and Intuitionalist logic. I plan on writing a piece about this soon. A lot of the fights we’re forced into right now are happening because different groups have different priorities, often without a clear way to determine which is optimal because everything is sub-optimal, and the conflict between these priorities is being weaponized to maintain an increasingly untenable political status quo.

Here’s some horrible information: US drone strikes have a higher mortality rate for children than the Covid pandemic has among the general population. That’s too fucking complicated if you stop and think about it for longer than a second — so we don’t. We just move the fuck on.

We’ve been empowered to feel powerless

The Way Things Are™ has been configured over generations to minimize the amount of ability most people have to enact real change. This effort has been non-partisan and is multidisciplinary. It’s the natural behaviour of elites in apparently every single circumstance where elites are capable of forming, so probably evolutionary psychology is a good way to learn about what’s going on. The elites in the institutions of psychology are probably as opposed to being analyzed this way as the elites in every other institution.

This is not necessarily a deliberately malicious effort. History is full of examples of elite individuals and groups achieving important or impressive feats for the good of others… although they all needed to achieve these things while at the head of systems designed to maintain their power (because that’s the systems we have).

We don’t think of the systems that connect and empower elites as being technology… but they are. Intangible psychological or social technologies, designed to empower specific individuals for generations like social media platforms or corporations, are used by elites in obvious ways designed to maintain or amplify their power at the expense of non-elites. That’s just how we do business.

Nothing trickles down if it all gets sucked up

Hey! Are you feeling increasingly panicked about the state of the world? Do your circumstances inspire greater feelings of desperation in you? You know how this makes you adopt a more protectionist stance? It’s ok if you do. It’s a natural reaction to the unrelenting shitnado of calamities we get smashed into our faces every fucking day.

It’s natural to feel existentially insecure right now and to become more conservative as a defensive reaction. LEARN ABOUT PREPPING. Elites are doing this too and they’re better at it than you. They own megabunkers in New Zealand where they’ve heavily influenced local politics in a way that ensure the continuation of their elite status under virtually all circumstances where your quality of life will utterly collapse.

McMansions™ in The Shire. What would Bilbo say? … what do you mean he’s a greeter at Walmart?

The increased and disproportionate security of global elites is reducing your security. Their increased and disproportionate wealth has resulted in the state of affairs in many parts of the world which are currently struggling, failing, or collapsing. It doesn’t look like we’re fighting this. It doesn’t look like we really have a problem with how little we’re allowed to have.

We look like a bunch of pawns fighting other pawns, desperately hoping to kill a king and get a pat on the head, while ignoring the people playing the game.

We think we know this but we don’t act like it

That means we don’t believe it. We don’t feel it. Were lying to ourselves about what we can actually accomplish. Maybe not You Specifically™ but this is certainly an accurate description of the collective We.

Part of this disconnect exists because we’ve consumed too much fake bullshit from our media that looks like a more exciting version of what’s actually happening to us right now. It broke our ability to react to the real stuff in an authentic way.

As systems and nations collapse around us we’ll see increasing examples of people telling us what’s actually happening, like indi.ca

When The Climate Karma Comes Due

No one can force you to pay attention to what’s really happening to you but it’s probably a good idea if you start.

Maybe start by recognizing that fighting for real change with anyone but the people with the most power is exactly what the people with the most power want you to do, and they trick you into doing this by providing you with systems that don’t let you understand what’s actually happening. If we don’t Arise! who will?

Thanks for reading. Please get this message to Ethan Hawke:

Things Sure Are Weird 3

Here’s my card:

Artist. Human. Wizard.