ClaytonB
Member

:fire:... (NSFW) Why you runnin'? What's the matter, it's just little ol' me?

Like it or not, sometimes, this is the only music that is appropriate for Clown World... NSFW

"Remember, you wanted this"

Family household -> communism Community -> mutualism Pastoral nation -> feudalism Industrial nation -> capitalism I'm not "advocating" for any of these -isms but, rather, asserting that they are -- to a rough first-approximation -- descriptive of human organization at the given scales. The key word is "scale". You cannot have an industrialized nation that is not capitalist. You can take away the capitalism and "glide" for a little while in the illusion that you are still an industrial nation (mainly by just plundering the capital stock and handing it out to your political buddies) but you will very shortly no longer be industrialized. And to whatever extent you are able to keep industrialization afloat for the duration, it is only by acting out a living contradiction whereby you practice capitalism with your hands and feet, but deny it with your mouths. Which is what the Soviets did for many decades. Too often, we discuss economy as though it's something that "we decide". As though we can "decide" whether to be this kind of economy or that kind of economy. On paper, sure, you can decide you are the Man in the Moon and that the Moon is made of green cheese. But that doesn't make it so. Rather, the structure of an economy emerges from the people that make it up. Yes, political actors have an enormous sway in the make-up and structure of the economy, but it is crucial to keep in mind that they cannot actually determine what sort of economy will pertain. This is just as true of a totalitarian dictatorship like North Korea as it is of the US. Even Kim Jong Un cannot simply wave a wand in Pyongyang and transform the North Korean economy. Rather, the constraints of the economy press upon all actors equally -- including political actors. What we're really always talking about in code-speak when the topic of "the economy" arises, is seizing the assets of some, and reassigning those assets to others. (Also, slavery. But that's another topic to itself.) The idea is supposed to be that, if the political czar just had enough power of unilateral correction, he or she would be able to "set things right" and "keep the machine in balance." But the machine was already balanced to begin with. There is no need to correct the number of egg-laying hens in the economy or to increase rubber production by fiat. Such measures are always disguised as an attempt to "fix" something that's "wrong" in the economy, but underneath all the layers of excuses and flimsy rationales, there is only ever one, omnipresent motive: the czar redistributing assets from political outcasts to political favorites and pocketing a handsome handler's fee along the way (often, just seizing the whole jackpot as a fee.) All the heady talk of social welfare, the general good, "from each according to ability to each according to need", and so on, is nothing more than verbal camouflage for armed robbery.

The proof-of-stake systems are riding parasitically on Bitcoin. Proof-of-work isn't about the ledger entries themselves (which can be thought of like any other database)... it's about the entire network stack. PoW acts like a secure, distributed lottery for the transaction fees and mining reward (payout) and this lottery abstracts away all the detailed considerations of how to secure the network down to a single criterion: the competition to dial a winning combination and add a block to the blockchain (and garner the payout.) One way that the Bitcoin network has been described: it is the world's most powerful spam-filter. In a world of endless digital spam/noise/hacks/scams/etc., having a supremely powerful spam-filter is valuable in its own right. It clears away all the BS noise and lays open a clear, single-source record of a monetary ledger that can be read and written by anyone (following the rules of the network protocol, of course.) As of 2022, the only known way to do that without a central trusted source on a distributed, peer-to-peer network... is proof-of-work. Don't count Bitcoin out yet.

:up:

NSFW language

Oh yeah, because the GOP has been a huge proponent of "small government" since Bush 43... :rolleyes:

Khatia is a rockstar in her own right but it's cool to see them both playing together as adults.

:rolleyes: https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/urskyr/oc_asking_girlfriend_to_borrow_money

Whoa...

Who knows, maybe if Yuma county jail runs out of beds, Maricopa county will reopen its tent city and help out a fellow county...

Name one public figure who doesn't fall to this Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon logic. You can't. "That's right, they're allllllllll Illuminati, they're allllllllll in on it!!!111" If you want to take the black-pill, suit yourself but stop trying to pass off the black-pill as some kind of litmus test for rationality. I reject the black-pill because I'm rational and I don't believe in campfire ghost stories. Trump explained when he ran in 2016, "I don't need to do this", meaning, he's already filthy rich, so there is no added benefit to taking on the hassle of being POTUS. I've heard a zillion hand-waving, smoke-and-mirrors implications that if we just "read between the lines", we can see that Trump's real motive is X, Y or Z. But the most superficial investigation always proves these claims to be utterly false. The only explanation that hasn't fallen apart in the six years since Trump first threw his hat in the ring is the explanation that he himself gave: America is falling to pieces and he believed he had the skills required to put things back on the right path. Whether you believe he was competent or not, the fact is that there is no proof that his motives were anything other than what he claimed.

If you were to become President, your official job would be to do business with lots of unsavory people and organizations. Putting your most loyal people in positions at the most unsavory organizations would be the smartest thing you could do. Why does this even need to be explained?!

No one is disputing whether a cigar is a cigar. Trying to work out the logic of a clown show is an exercise in absurdity. Why did the clown juggle axes before swallowing a sword? What's the symbolic significance? Doesn't the "ax narrative" interfere with the "sword narrative"?? The point is that the entire show is a circus. You are not really understanding the meaning of fake news. Try following your own dictum -- sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes, a circus is just a circus.

The problem today is much, much deeper than the simple question of whether a cigar is just a cigar. The Deep State is actively gaming the public's ability to discern between cigar and non-cigar... they are both presenting cigars as non-cigars and non-cigars as cigars, and then the moment that the public believes either story, they are performing a last-second bait-and-switch so that everybody has got it wrong, despite following all the available evidence. This is, indeed, a Clown World worthy of its own 3-ring circus show, but you don't get to Shanghai the American public into a circus show, and then act shocked when they point out that "everything is fake". Is the sword-swallower really swallowing swords, or just using some kind of visual trick? What difference does it make, it's still a circus show, either way.

The response is telling, also: "Can you believe this shit?"... which is how any rational human with more than two brain cells to rub together reacts to open propaganda. It's just a naked display of raw power...

This could never happen here. Certain individuals could not possibly be secretly targeted, groomed and then prodded to flip out. It's simply inconceivable.

No. But the fact that it is tempting to feel that way, at times, just goes to prove that the Swamp hiding in DC are nothing but a bunch of Benedict Arnolds, for real. I do not believe that Vladimir Putin has good intentions for me. If he were somehow to seize military control of the US, it would be a hell worse than The Siege. But the traitors in DC are playing a game so wicked and treacherous that it leaves one wondering which is more merciless, a slow death at their hands or a quick death at the hands of Putin. I don't know much about the ins and outs of global geopolitics but one thing I know for certain is that there are a lot of posers and fakers sitting at the poker table. The time is coming for the ante to be raised and all the man-child wannabes to either ante-up or GTFO...

The point is that being angry makes you stupid. In the pre-digital era, the Feds were using newsletters and "letters to the editor" to prod, poke and track groups they wanted to shut down. Twitter and other social media technologies have put digital tools of incomparably greater reach, speed and precision into their hands and if you think they are not using those tools, you're not paying attention. In other words, whatever you're angry about, is probably what they want you to be angry about. When you're angry, you repeat propaganda talking-points or spout attitudes that help the opposition make their case. In other words, if you think of Twitter as a gigantic megaphone, they don't just want to speak through the Woke/SJW half of the megaphone, they also want to control the speech occurring in the "resistance" half of the megaphone, and they primarily do this by baiting radicalism, and the primary tool they use to bait radicalism is by pissing people off so they say stupid shit.