This is why the idea of open borders is a non-starter and an inevitable failure when put into practice.

Here is an example to illustrate the preceding post. “But nationalism excluuuuudes!” people moan as if that had to put an end to all discussion of the subject once and for all. They have been schooled to believe that excluding is bad, inclusivity is good, and these are eternal truths that are not to be questioned.

Really, I am almost tempted to quote the entire post because it’s better than the summations I’ve attempted that have relied too much on esoteric explanations rather than more concrete examples. She’s right. We’ve been trained to believe that any form of exclusivity is bad and is “discrimination” when in reality discrimination of self from other is the basis of all life.

I am not using this to justify or apologize for racism or anything obviously harmful. I am observing as she did, though, without a “we” that’s recognized as a discrete entity then there is no possibility of a welfare state, of resisting corporate control or the power of capital — which of course the real goal of “open borders” rhetoric is to destroy not only the welfare state as an actuality but the idea of it altogether as even a possible thing (Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative.”)

The brilliant (in a diabolical way) conflation of racism with any form of nationalism is an ingenious stroke by the forces of capital, though. Really, that’s a true coup because it removes any possibility of criticism or course changes.

Perhaps in 500 years or a thousand years we can expand the “we” to include the entire planet. I don’t think we’re even remotely close, though, and without a nation there is no welfare state, there is no safety net, and open borders will almost certainly be the doom of any and all of those ideas. Which, indeed, is the whole point of the propaganda push in that direction.

“I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us. Of course, I would have liked the nice manners that the teacher and the priest preached, but I felt that those ways were not suited to our neighborhood, even if you were a girl. The women fought among themselves more than the men, they pulled each other’s hair, they hurt each other. To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs. They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”

-Elena Ferrante in My Brilliant Friend

I didn’t write about it at the time because I was too busy with other things, but I think the best overall film performance of 2018 was Toni Colette in Hereditary.

It was in a horror movie, so it’d never be recognized by any awards bodies or anything like that, but Colette is outstanding as the self-tormented woman attempting to prevent a recurrence of the sins of the past…and failing.

The movie itself is good but her performance is perfect.

This is the longest shitpost in history.

I just don’t have the time or want to devote the effort to refuting all of it, but essentially it relies on a circular argument, obfuscated Kevin Drum-style very cleverly. That specious argument is that because health care costs more and takes up more of the economy, people pay more. Brilliant insight, bud. You didn’t really need a million graphs to show that.

I can’t believe I bothered to read all that to find some argument that, if stated in simpler terms, would not fool a five-year-old.

Meanwhile, my boss went to an urgent care facility for treatment for a small cut that was bleeding profusely and was charged $2,000 for a five-minute visit. He didn’t even see a doctor.

More seriously, this is a great example of how experts hoodwink you. In fact, it’s one of the best examples I’ve ever seen. The person who wrote this is obviously high IQ — definitely 130 or above. More probably in the 140-160 range. There are not many people who can hang with him and he knows it. This gives him power as the stuff he’s citing as evidence would be incomprehensible or impenetrable without great study to most people. And none of it is “wrong,” viewed alone. That is the danger of high-IQ experts — they can marshal an argument that is subtly twisted, just a bit sinuous and slanted, that it takes another high-IQ person to even understand what they’ve done and how. Well, I can hang and I can tell you that what he’s spewing is pure hooey.

This is what makes expertise particularly under corporate hegemony so very dangerous. Your life is essentially dominated by corporate propaganda subtly perverted from somewhat-valid science and research. Russian propaganda by comparison is obvious and heavy-handed.

There’s a lot else wrong with what he cites. For instance, it classifies health care consumption as some voluntary act rather than a necessity. And this might be true with another way all this is distorted, in that it’s mostly a portrayal of how the rich consume health care in the US. It doesn’t really consider inequality at all — in fact, it deliberately conceals it to get the numbers RCA was looking for.

Furthermore, health care is most likely a Giffen good that is strongly deflationary in nature to the economy as a whole. If you’re looking for why the economy is nearly deflationary despite massive QE and other efforts, health care is where you might want to start.

The RCA contention that the US consumes more healthcare because we are in reality secretly so super-rich is just asinine on its face. And on its ass. It’s just absurd. That’s why it’s obfuscated behind highly technical argumentation and a scad of graphs.

I waste my time reading all of this so you don’t have to.

I will never buy wireless headphones (hate them and would lose them in two days, tops) and will never use a smartphone without a headphone jack unless my job absolutely forces me to do so.

Plus, they sound like garbage.

Will explore probably a flip phone for my next phone purchase with some sort of GPS device for directions. All I really use a smartphone for anyway is Google Maps. I haven’t installed a single other (cr)app on one in many years because I find them all pretty worthless and limited.

Probably something like this. Smartphones are of no use to me; they are distraction and annoyance devices, brain viruses, and already I need to grab as much time to think as I can.

On balance, I think smartphones made the world worse.

When I was a kid checking out nearly every book the library had, sometimes I’d choose books that hadn’t been checked out by anyone since the 1940s or 1950s.

My record was a book that hadn’t been checked out since 1929 (I think, could’ve been 1925). I believe it was a biography of Charles Darwin, though the old memory is a bit hazy for things that occurred ca. 1986.

Now I’m not much of a programmer but I took a look at the Kubernetes code and holy shit, man, what a mess. What a damn mess.

Nested if statements galore, no modularity at all, it’s nearly incomprehensible outside of that (and I can generally read code pretty well), and yeah…it’s about what I expected.

Further evidence that they are solving problems poorly that were already solved or were nixed as being too complex. I’d be embarrassed to work on a project like this.

At least there are comments? I guess that’s the one good thing I can say about that unholy mess.