I think too that a lot of the fantasy is the loosening of restrictions. You can shoot people in the apocalypse. You can leave your normal responsibilities and bug off to the woods and do nothing but fish hunt and garden. No more commutes and shopping for ramen at piggly wiggly. No more spreadsheets and emails. No more shuffling the kids off to soccer practice. Just a simple little life.

Somehow none of that surprises me. But I’ve always found the weird psychology around a lot of the fears rather fascinating. The things Americans tend to fear are violent catastrophes that seem borne out of movies and television and especially superhero comics. Countries that actually have these sorts of disasters tend to be pretty laid back about it. In Puerto Rico, they stock up on rum and have bock parties to care for their neighbors. They don’t cower in their homes with an arsenal of automatic weapons. They help each other out.

Most prepping is basically LARP. They aren’t preparing for survival in an actual emergency, they’re preparing for Walking Dead or Red Dawn. If you pay attention to the stuff they emphasize, it’s weapons, hardware, solar panels for long term power loss, and tons of survival food. It’s probably more a masterbation to the image of themself as a tough, manly survivalist who can take care of his family alone and can absolutely shoot someone in the face.

The problem with the pandemic is that it’s was a feminine disaster. The solutions did not feel masculine. It wasn’t “go shoot something”, it wasn’t go out to the woods and hunt. It wasn’t man craft kinds of stuff using tools and high tech gear. The power didn’t even go out. It was basically boring. And the stuff you had to do outside of the mask were normal things. Stay home, wash your hands, and so on. And the mask didn’t feel manly. So they decided the real threat was something more like the movies — the big bad government doing a psyop. Now they could be brave and defiantly demand their rights. Now it looks like 1776.

I think real prepping (and you can find sensible ideas on ready.gov or any site that gives advice on getting ready for natural disasters) has some usefulness. You don’t want to be down to your last can of beans when a disaster strikes.

Shooting CEOs might feel good in a moment (other than the obvious Thou shalt not kill thing), but it’s not a policy, and it doesn’t fix any of the underlying problems. The next CEO isn’t going to change how he does things because he’s beholden to shareholders who will replace him if he doesn’t do exactly like the last guy did.

I honestly don’t read the MAGA types in general caring, they just don’t. If we end up having more people than they can feed, it’s not like tge people cheering it on are goin* to demand that something be done about it. And that’s assuming that we get honest reports, which would require a press willing to challenge Trump. That seems unlike given how major press outlets are already sucking up to him pretty hard.

He wants to, sure. But I’m not sure he can get his way on this. There are, to quote Dune, “plots within plots”. Blue states and cities are absolutely looking to resist here. This probably means no cooperation or even actively hiding people. There will be court cases beyond that. And even if they lose, there might be a situation that’s the reverse of the border stuff from last year, where Blue areas call up the National Guard to protect people from deportation, giving Trump no good options. You can’t simply order your troops to fire on the National Guard, you might have a hard time arresting them. You can’t arrest sitting governors or mayors or whatever if they haven’t broken the law. And so what we have is a standoff and I’m not convinced that if he goes full retard and tries this stuff it goes the way he thinks it will.

Except that there have been incidents of antisemitism in the USA as well. It’s not something that you can easily guarantee because Jews in NYC are at the mercy of the rest of us, and like most in NYC are not allowed to be armed. I really don’t have a good answer, but as I said, the history of Judaism when Jews don’t have an Army and Navy is pretty bleak. Even leaving aside the Nazis, Jewish history pretty much shows why they need an ethos Tate somewhere with an army and navy under their control.

I’ll have to be fair to their argument though. The reason Jews are so gung ho about Israel and so willing to do anything to defend it it’s basically about hundreds of years of Jewish history. Jews got kicked out of their homes, exiled, pogroms everywhere, often for things that they had nothing to do with. And of course there’s the holocaust after all of that. From that perspective, Israel is basically the only place where Jews can at least to some degree control their own fate. And that’s not something they’ll give up, obviously.

I agree. But until you have a message you believe in and are willing to put out far and wide without apologizing for having an agenda. Look at the GOP — they believe in stupid things, but I guarantee you that everyone reading my words can absolutely tell you what the6 want to do and why they want to do that. The words are repeated in every organ of the GOP, every radio show, every news organ, every podcast, every white paper issued by a GOP think tank all have a message. And because they have that message and actually not only believe in that vision but are absolutely committed to it. I don’t think I could make the same bet on the democratic side. They have no vision of government, of culture, or why they think that. The democratic organs of culture mostly document GOP bad and snipe at other democrats. There’s nothing really to hold people to doing.

Honestly I think part of the problem is how long the campaign is. It takes several years to run for president, and the formal kickoff is often more than a year out. People in formally elected offices basically spend 70% of their time in office preparing to campaign and actively campaigning for office. Of course they need that much money.

I think the first step to getting the party back on track is to invest in getting the message out there. Have a network or three on the radio or TV, have news sites, etc that can explain what the ideas are and why they work and where they’ve actually done good things. Start talking about your ideas.

And when you do something TELL THE PEOPLE. It’s like the democrats almost want it to be top secret. I’ve had this conversation a few times with conservatives convinced there’s a conspiracy to poison Americans with additives in foods. Exhibit A is that a lot of things that are common in American food are not in European foods. So the government is obviously trying to kill us, population control and so on. No, the European Union is simply much more willing to ban poison from their foods than our FDA is. So this would be an excellent thing for democrats to be actually talking about and making the case for smart regulations to protect people. They’re generally MIA. And the same is true of other things. The infrastructure bill Biden passed is building lots of highways. Not one will have any sort of signage telling people that this is the infrastructure bill at work making roads better.

Democrats are not doing anything because they’re captured. They take money from the same business interests and banks that the Republicans do. It’s almost a controlled opposition party— they exist to hold things in place until the next republican term. They aren’t there to do things, they barely bother to pretend to be interested in that. In fact, I’d say they’re not even really an “ideas” party. If they had ideas, they’d want to get them out. They don’t, which is why Heritage Foundation can spend millions on Right Wing media outlets, radio, TV (multiple channels), websites, and so on. Democrats had Air America, but didn’t really invest in it. So now it’s NPR, MSNBC, and Bread Tube. That’s how into getting things done they are. Podcasters, Vaush, and MSNBC and the three political shows on NPR. They don’t even believe in their message enough to bother getting it out there. The way most people find out about anything the democrats actually want to do is republicans telling them it’s bad. Completely rearguard action.

Honestly, to me, the world of the people making it is so insular and insulated that most people involved have been involved since the early days of Trek. If you read the roster there are a lot of former Trek actors moving on to directing Trek. Another produce is … Adam Nimoy famously son of Spock, who married a former Trek actress. These people are probably nice and have at least middling talent. But at the same time, there’s no fresh ideas, no interesting takes, no story ideas that haven’t really been done before. That means you end up stuck with either warmed over old stuff (Strange New Worlds clearly wants to be TOS but made by people who never understood what TOS was in its time) , deconstructions (Picard and Discovery) or remakes of other, better ideas … but in Trek (the upcoming Academy show sounds ridiculous, basically Hogwarts but Trek with none of the charm because Trek features overly serious Starfleet Academy and a distinct lack of Hagrid).

If I were in charge, I’d start by cleaning house. Get some young hungry directors, producers, and writers passionate about really great science fiction TV, and tell them to pitch me the next Trek as if nobody had ever heard of Star Trek, Starfleet, the Enterprise, or Kirk. They’d be more or less bound by the canon, but even within that boundary, there’s a lot you can do with the universe. Set an entire series in the Ferengar. A series featuring the Marquis. Maybe and entirely Mirror Universe series set in a fascist Federation. Even the Klingon Empire could be somewhat interesting. But come up with a concept that isn’t “hey, look, we got the TNG crew out of retirement, please clap”, or “Hey, look, we pot Kirk and Spock on a set together,” or “Hey, we heard you guys like Harry Potter, but have you seen Star Trek: in school”. In short, start trying to figure out the interesting settings in your universe for great science fiction series, then make episodes that fully explore the concept and the settings.

Just for an example, the Marquis show is literally about people who we consider insurgents or terrorists or freedom fighters. And in main it’s about people fighting for freedom in their home worlds against a much more powerful enemy. Fully exploring the concept of things like whether or not the Federation gives them weapons because of threats from Kardassia would be interesting. I think dealing with the topic of what happens to civilians in areas like that again could be interesting. You’d also have to deal with the tactics used, and the basic necessity of fighting a war like that.

The Klingon one might look a bit like Game of Thrones, although I think it would also be a bit like Dune. Lots of political games and occasional actual fighting to secure your house’s position in the Empire. There’s plenty of drama in tha5 kind of setting. I’d be disappointed if they have.a dwarf, but political intrigue is probably good frame in the right hands.

A fascist federation would be a bit on the nose ATM, but I think if you play it straight and lean into it, as in Warhammer levels of leaning into the fascism, it would be fairly interesting. Exaggerating th3 hell out of it, just doing really terrible things because of some supposed external enemies (maybe Borg or Q or something). Do an I can’t believe it’s not an exterminatus. Have fun with it.

Part of the problem with screaming about fascism is that the claim is vague, and political rhetoric is absolutely full of “most important election in the history of forever.”

Fascism is vague because we do an absolutely terrible job in explaining what it is and what it actually means. Most people know precisely two things about fascism. First, Auswitz, and second, goose stepping and straight arm salutes. This doesn’t explain anything, and can lull people into a very false sense of security because until someone hangs up a swastika or starts making angry speeches about minorities, it simply doesn’t look like fascism to the average American who was given a Marvel Comic Universe understanding of fascism.

Second, we’ve been playing the exact same game in every election. George W Bush was a threat to democratic ideals. That was 24 years ago. Every election I can remember has had democracy on the ballot and has been the most consequential election ever. It’s been done so much by all parties that nobody’s going to be convinced to vote for someone because their opponent is a “danger to our democracy.” It’s been done too many times. And people are now pretty suspicious of “my opponent is Literally Hitler” not because it cannot happen, it obviously can, but because it’s been used for decades as cover for basically not having to convince anyone you can do the job. Trump is Fascist, okay so tell me, what are you going to do about Russia? Or the price of food? Or education? Or … anything of actual importance to regular people who are listening to you prattle on about democracy while they’re figuring out whether or not they can cut something else out of the budget because gas is high and groceries are high, and they just want to live life.

I’m going to give the same pep talk I’ve been giving for a while. For the vast majority of people, unless you’re directly interacting with the government, you can pretty much tune out and not care if you want. In fact, I contend for most people, unless, again there’s a specific policy that’s going to affect you or someone or something you actually care about (in which case obviously follow that and take action on that) you can safely ignore most of the news that people think is important. Of the stuff that will be important, it’s almost always going to be something that people are still talking about a week from now. I think that unless you are going to be involved, you’re probably paying too much attention to news and that’s why you’re freaking out. Take a breather, touch grass, and stop worrying. Take the time to decide which issues you actually care about and can take action on. Get involved in that stuff, contribute to organizations that fight those things. Go to a protest rally or three. But as for the rest, you really don’t need to be breathlessly reading every news article and angry tweet. It’s actually not good for you.

I’ll be honest in saying that the fundamental problem is that democrats don’t understand power. They have this idea that you come up with policies and that people will thus hand them power. Republicans understand that power is the first order of business. If you don’t take power, your policies don’t matter. You want to help people? Cute. You aren’t even trying to take power, and when you do, you don’t use it to consolidate your power, you pretty much give it away.

Case in point was RBG. She knew it wasn’t a given that there would be a democrat in power when she retired, she didn’t quit when there was one. And thus Trump got a free SCOTUS pick. When it’s the GOP, they only resign when their party will pick their successor.

I think that unless you’re a minority or LGBT life isn’t going to change that much. Americans have seen far too many horror fantasies about WW2 or Soviet Union stuff or Shariah to really understand what life in those states is like. It’s not tanks, goose stepping and speeches nonstop. It’s normal life. Go look at video of China. It’s not horrible.

I’m in a similar space though I seem to have landed on a more Stoic Taoist path. I follow Shi Heng Yi on YouTube which got me interested, but I landed on Stoics simply because I find most of Buddhism to be so passive that it’s simply an excuse for navel gazing and escapism. Stoicism promotes active participation in the world and trying to make it better (while remaining unattached to results) where a lot of people practice Buddhism tend toward meditation and being personally nice while not caring what happens in the wider world.

I’ve been trying to write short stories and while I’m thinking at the moment of getting a blog to put them on, I’m wondering what else is out there where I could get them in front of eyeballs without getting tons of spammers trying to sell me services related to writing fiction.

Except that in almost every instance where a profession has been automated, that’s exactly what happened. Having a computer that keeps track of your inventory makes the workflow better for the logistics department, and then using a computer to schedule deliveries makes that part easier as well. And you keep doing that and eventually you’re doing the work of twelve professionals and your team shrinks down to 1/12th of what it was. And then you chip away at those tasks until you halve the workforce again, and eventually the computer is doing all of those tasks and the people who used to do those things are obsolete. Then they go back to school hoping to find a training program where they can make money before AI takes those jobs too.

And these are the exact same stupid “it will never happen to MY industry” horseshit that has happened to every industry just before it got automated away. Nobody thought that computers would mean the death of stores, until they enabled people to shop from home and get it delivered. Robots were never supposed to replace workers in restaurants, except now even mid scale restaurants have discovered that it much cheaper to put a Wi-Fi enabled iPad on the table than pay a human to take your order. They pay one person to take the food out to all the tables. They reduce headcount and make more money. AI is taking over a lot of office jobs now too. But don’t worry, your industry is specialer than every other job that’s ever been automated away. I mean we NEED mailroom staff, because all the people who work in offices started in the mailroom (in the 1980s) except now there hasn’t been a mailroom since 1990s because people realized that they could reduce their labor costs by using emails instead of inter office memos hand delivered by humans.

People watch machinema and play video games with hours of cutscenes. If people were okay with animation, machinema, game cutscenes and so on before AI, they aren’t going to reject a film because it doesn’t have real actors. We watched this (https://youtu.be/jzQPYuwzwH8?si=FCsQoM2IE797BgQR) in 2000. I dare say that AI could produce something this good within five years.

In fact the fact that SAG has to fight so hard to prevent such a thing tells me exactly how scared they are of it. You don’t fight to ban things they you don’t think can take over your industry, you fight the things you fear will. If AI can’t do anything to threaten the livelihoods of people making movies and TV why was it critical that all production stop for weeks to make absolutely positively sure that no AI will ever be used to make an American movie? And what happens when other countries don’t honor that ban? If I make an AI show in France using no SAG has. No say. And it might cost a tenth of the cost to use real actors and crews.

I actually consider it bad that kids aren’t misbehaving anymore or at least at the same rates. The problem with that is that getting in trouble (provided it isn’t crime or hard drugs) does two things that are important for making stable healthy adults. First, it allows kids to make mistakes and learn how to make better decisions, and second it teaches them that even pretty serious mistakes are things you can recover from. The biggest problem for anyone raised with screens from birth is that they just don’t seems to develop the same sort of independence older generations did. We got into all kinds of Trouble. But the things that let us get into trouble made us independent: time alone, unsupervised with our peers. We fucked up, paid for it, fixed it, and realized it wasn’t that terrible. They never do it, don’t learn from making the bad decision, and never learn that those mistakes can be corrected and you’ll be okay.

To be honest, if I’m hiring and I want a leader, I want people who fucked up at least a little. Not because I want someone who makes bad decisions, but because I want somebody who isn’t afraid to try things. Someone who can make a mistake without going to pieces. Any kind of leadership, design, creative work, or even just getting things done requires a mindset that you need to move fast, break things, and figure out how to recover from that. Meekly sitting around waiting for someone to tell you exactly what to do and exactly how to do it not only means that you’re never going to get good at anything, but that you’ll have anxiety because you don’t think you can. In the mind of these kids who are afraid of messing up is the fear that if you make a mistake, you’re just done.

I think it depends. If it doesn’t matter to the overall project to have it perfect, then as long as AI is good enough it will be used more often than not. That’s why I’m laughing at writers who are all in on forcing the idea of “save the cat” forcing every story ever done to fit a single structure. AI can do stuff like that super easy. While it probably can’t make a great arty movie it can absolutely churn out formulaic crap easily and cheaply. And as long as people choose formulaic crap over arthouse cinema (which they reliably do) AI will take over most film jobs and make do with whatever minor inconsistencies and inconveniences that AI introduces to big blockbusters because it’s not like anyone goes to a marvel film to gawk at cinematography. As long as your film franchise is McDonald’s levels of formulaic, and that’s what your fans expect , there’s no reason to waste money on expensive humans.

I’m not sure of that. People love to say that about technology. The problem here is that the humans being replaced are pretty darn expensive and depending on the application, it’s probably going to save money on an order of x/5 just by getting rid of actors and actresses for films. That’s before considering things like cameramen, directors, writers, and crew to set up and take down sets. With sufficient resources, I don’t think you could easily tell the difference between a mid-budget TV show made this way and perhaps voice-acted (or maybe AI can do that too, not sure yet) given just how good video game graphics are already. And if I can make my sci-fi show for 1/10th the cost by not needing actors or a big crew, then I can put more money into writing and I don’t even need the same sized audience as other shows.

I’ve been into Stunna Gambino, KB Mike, and Public enemy (a throwback from the 1980s)

I’ve been into Stunna Gambino, KB Mike, and Public enemy (a throwback from the 1980s)

I tend to agree. I don’t see things like this or glass or that stupid Apple holodeck thing ever coming into common civilian use. They have too many negatives and are too expensive to replace the nearly ubiquitous phones already in use for home entertainment. I could see industrial use, for example using a device like that to give engineers the ability to see heat signatures, metal fatigue, or other signs of wear and tear. I could see this having a military use where, much like video games, a heads up map display is extremely valuable. Even engineering where you might want to have a virtual tour of the design in ways that let you touch controls or parts in VR without needing a prototype built.

One thing that absolutely floors me about tech-bros and their approach to technology is that they still, 3-4 generations into the use of technology don’t understand a simple concept that’s always been obvious to me: if the technology doesn’t significantly improve on what’s already out there at a similar price point, nobody will buy it. People didn’t buy cell phones because they were cool, they bought them because cell phones untethered them from landline phones that were connected to the wall. iPads became popular because they’re smaller, lighter and easier to use than laptops. Google Glass solves no actual problems. There’s nothing that the technology does that couldn’t be done with the cellphone. If you want augmented reality, it’s going to do much better as an app that you download to the phone and point at an object you need more information on than as a device you buy and wear and struggle to use.

This is what worries me about the West’s insistence on spending trillions on Ukraine. The public will for this kind of aid is already falling and has reached the point where at least a third of the country doesn’t support it. And this is for a country with limited strategic value. For Russia, having Ukrain means a buffer again invasion, but as far as it goes Ukraine is mostly farmland outside of Donbas that has mineral wealth.

China isn’t supporting Russia because it likes Russia or thinks it can win. They’re using the situation and trying to keep it going so we shoot our entire wad on Ukraine, demoralize our population against the idea of sending trillions in aide to a country to defend itself, and to take the opportunity to get off western oil markets. Once the public turns against Ukraine, I think they make a play for Taiwan. Taiwan is important, almost all of the high end computer chips we use are made there. It’s something we can’t let go of unless we want to be subservient to China in exchange for keeping our computers running. But how can you sell that to a public that’s already tired of seeing so much money sent to Ukraine in the billions every month?