When you are in the grip of an ideology, you simply cannot grasp its contradictions. Like xenon, the currents of its incursion into your mental environment are invisible to you and when too much of it is in the air, it becomes deadly. One of the most apparent (to those not in the grips of the ideology) is the idea that as automation increases, somehow jobs magically will be created elsewhere in the economy that are as good or better than what existed prior.

The “logic” usually goes something like the below.

The “replacement” for these jobs was supposed to be service sector jobs. We’ve been simultaneously told that these jobs would replace the lost manufacturing jobs, and then when the low salaries are questioned, we are told that these jobs are only for teenagers or people living with their parents, despite these businesses being open year-round and during school hours, not to mention being the plurality of the newly-created jobs. Any attempt to raise salaries in this sector, we are told, would spur automation and joblessness, yet we are simultaneously told that “automation does not kill jobs,” and the “the amount of work to do is unlimited.” Left unsaid is that, by this logic, only by paying salaries that are so ultra-low that they are competitive with machines can we have sufficient jobs for people.

With an ever-falling labor participation rate (and not just due to Boomer retirement) and concomitantly with the vast majority of jobs being created consisting of low-wage, no-benefit service jobs, it is just not the case that the neoliberal economist’s Harry Potter fantasy of magical job creation is occurring, or will ever occur.

As automation’s effects were masked by the focused immiseration of urban blacks, the risks could be denied by economists as this population simply didn’t count. Now that it is affecting whites and with the rise of Trump, it’s harder to ignore.

Society, to be clear, does not have to be this way. Automation could allow us to have lives of comparative leisure. If we lived at 1960 levels of consumption, a 10-hour workweek for most would be more than possible.

That’s not the choice we made or will make though it appears. No, we’ve chosen to give the bounty of all this automation to the rich and to leave the rest of us brawling over the one percent of scraps left over.

Here’s some more typical pseudo-Democrat misunderstanding of, well — everything. Just everything.

The data is (sort of) sound, but when you pass a bill like the ACA, guess what? You own what happens to health care then. You own it, like it or not.

For the average person who can barely afford health care anyway, the premiums “only” going up 20-30% vs. a projected 50% does not matter. It’s all financially out of reach.

Appealing to a world that doesn’t exist — one with no ACA — to show how something people already can’t afford would be even more unaffordable is a typical farcically boneheaded Dem technocrat thing to do.

Throwing data at people in these circumstances doesn’t help. It hurts your case.

Do the Democrats just not understand the damage they’ve done, forcing people to buy mostly-bad insurance in a huge giveaway to insurance companies, and then financially penalizing the shirkers? Can they really not understand how utterly destructive this is?

The ACA is probably the real reason Hillary Clinton lost, or at least a major contributor. But that will never make it into the narrative, will it? Putin will jump out of a closet and stab a motherfucker.

The first 10 songs in my current playlist:

Supposedly, Monica Crowley (who btw seems like a generally vile human being) plagiarized some portions of her book What The (Bleep) Just Happened.

Here’s the evidence.

Again, this is the sort of plagiarism that no one outside of academia gives a crap about. It’s meaningless. I don’t feel like unpacking this fully sociologically at the moment, but it springs from the academe’s apparitional and aspirational notion that all ideas should be novel, springing ex nihilo from one’s uncompromisingly dazzling intellect.

This is not how the world works. This is not how the world has ever worked. This is not how the world will work any time in the future. In fact, the world is moving ever further away from this state of being.

Crowley’s book was not an academic tome where it is and should be important to cite all sources. It’s a damn pop politics book. Who cares if she assembled it from cutting up a bunch of old magazines, tossing the slivers up in the air like graffiti and then re-assembling the shreds on the bathroom floor.

Plagiarism most of the time is a senseless charge designed to dispose of political and ideological opponents. This is absolutely no different, despite my antipathy to Crowley herself.

People who “resist” Trump who did not also resist Obama are not on the side of right; they are just authoritarian in a different direction.

Please don’t misinterpret this for supporting Trump. I’d rather never have heard his name.

But if you don’t recognize that Obama was just a continuation of the George W. Bush regime then I don’t know what to tell you, other than that you are an ideologue.

I know, I know: Obama was cool. Does that matter when your family is getting drone-bombed? Murdered?

Your resistance is sad and pathetic because it has no meaning and no goal other than, “Go, team, go!”

Still don’t buy that the Russians did any hacking that truly influenced the US election last year.

The fact is the Russians and other state and non-state actors attempt to hack whoever they can every election. So does the US.

It’s mystifying to see liberals put all this blind trust in the US intelligence apparatus after so many years (basically since Iraq in 2003) asserting that they could not be trusted at all.

The other fact is that all the hacked material released was true, and furthermore it wasn’t revelatory. We already knew HRC and her crew were all Wall Street shills who would rather torch the destitute than help them. This was not news. No one even cared about this one way or the other because those who already knew didn’t care, and those who already despised HRC simply found it irrelevant.

When a great and unexpected loss occurs, conspiracy theories sprout up like weeds to “explain” the defeat.

This one it appears will be the accepted narrative going forward despite it being mostly a fairy tale built on a shallow foundation of events that occur every election.

Apart from having the opposite of natural talent, I think one of the reasons I don’t enjoy operational math and find it just devastatingly boring is that I don’t enjoy finding the solution to puzzles.

What I mean is that it’s obvious that many people experience some sort of joy (I’m only speculating here, based on observation of others) when they solve some well-posed conundrum. This appears to motivate people, to provide some sort of rush and reason to continue, that promise of reward at the conclusion.

Here’s what I experience when I solve a puzzle or a math problem: annoyance that I wasted so very much time on something I could’ve looked up or asked someone who cares to complete for me.

I don’t get angry while looking for the answer; no, I experience that afterward when I realize that my time has been sapped by trivia.

That’s why in ninth grade I wrote after some algebra problems I couldn’t or didn’t feel like solving, “This is why they make calculators and computers.”

Whatever it is that puzzles do to or for other people, I just do not have that component. Probably explains a few things.

Agreed, most men are like this. I’ve known many myself.

I’m a good cook. Do it several times a week. We usually cook together, though. More fun that way.

I wash nearly all of the dishes and never have a problem noticing when anything is out. I go grocery shopping by myself all the time to get what is needed (did it just yesterday). Why do all too many men seem incapable of this?

It’s not like I take care of everything, though — we do concentrate on what we prefer. I don’t like sweeping, so I don’t do that. And I don’t like cleaning mirrors. But we generally clean the bathrooms about half and half. Same with vacuuming and any other form of cleaning.

If we ever have to paint, though, I’m just not doing that. I hate painting, am bad at it, and refuse to do it. I’d rather hire someone, or just not do it at all. And no one wants me doing general house maintenance, if there is to be a house left standing at the end of it. I will gladly be the dumb muscle if my girlfriend decides she wants to do something, but if it’s up to me I hire someone.

I also don’t do yard work, but that’s why they make money.

But not being an oblivious dumbass is really not hard. I left childhood behind a long time ago. Why can’t more men do the same?

Hilariously, a lot of the now-popular “explanations” (such as some comic I saw recently) for quantum phenomena that purport to better clarify what’s really going on at that level are little better than the bad explanations they propose to replace.

Supplanting vernacular explanations with semi-mathemetical formalism doesn’t elucidate anything any more clearly, it’s just more descriptive of the math itself.

The events aren’t the math; the map is not the territory. Call it “superposition” or a “unit vector in two-dimensional Hilbert space,” the underlying phenomena are not clarified at all. Just as Feynman understood that knowing as a bit of trivia such as the name of a bird told you very little about it*, knowing the right words to say in the direction of a quantum event really helps you very little.

Unfortunately, all we really know to say are the right words, or the right formulae. In quantumland, you just accept, not understand. If you think you understand, that’s a sure sign you do not. What’s really going on might be a meaningless question or it might be incomprehensible. No one knows, really. But the math is not the event. And neither are the words.

Also note that the interpretation of the QM in the comic isn’t the only one accepted by even mainstream scientists (much less loons).

Anyway, scientists tend to mistake the math for the event — understandable, really, as math is their tool.

I approach things from a more philosophical perspective and recognize that a drawing on the wall is not really a cat, and ceci n’est pas une pipe. The math and the words are not the world and never will be.

*Though today, knowing that name is more important and more helpful since so much more of our brains are outsourced now compared to 1950.

I don’t trust people and I don’t like people in general. I’m not a quiet person, but people think I am. Here’s the key: I’m quiet because I have nothing to say to you because I don’t like you.

So cults of personality are nearly impossible for me to participate in. I don’t give a crap how cool Obama is, or how “competent” Hillary Clinton was, or any of that. It means just nothing to me. I see vastly many people worshipful of Clinton and Obama and I can’t explain it. Power does not impress me in the least and licking boots is not something I’ll ever do.

In a sane world, both of them and Donald Trump too would be in prison, or at least exiled to another planet.

A show I watched the other night stated my worldly philosophy the best (at least off the internet): “See everything. Say nothing.”

Always works for me. Amazing what you can see and learn when people think you are stupid, oblivious, or both.

When Trump wins it all again in 2020, this sort of crap will be why.

You thought it was going to be about Hillary Clinton, didn’t you?

Obama was about the same as George W. Bush — better in some areas, worse in many others. It’s only team fealty and the Warm Fuzzy^TM from 2008’s win that explains this level of worship.

I have no allegiance to any team, especially not a wannabe-granny-starvin’ drone-bombing war criminal like Obama, so this stuff just is puzzling to me. We live in completely different, irreconcilable realities, McEwan and I.

For people like McEwan, it’s about style over substance, elegance over accomplishment. Obama is polished. He’s smooth. He’s cool. And that’s primarily what gets the liberal hearts all aflutter these days (hence part of the disdain for Sanders: he was not cool, not collected).

The progressive movement in this country is not about progress, but rather a protection racket of economic and intellectual status. That’s never been more obvious than right now.

The stupid-ass Left is going nuts over Trump’s statement that “no computer is safe.”

Here’s the thing: Trump is right. Any computer connected to a network can be hacked. Often is. Even ones air-gapped (not network-connected) via the tactics used with Stuxnet.

If you want something to be truly secure, don’t put it on a computer. The old spy tactics are still the best.

So tired of the Left going into full moron mode about matters they have no clue about.

People are people everywhere. It’s a cliche, a platitude. It’s also as true as it is not.

I’ve lived in an Islamic country. An experience like that is where you learn that both the liberal and the conservative verities are both really fucking ludicrous.

People in different civilizational contexts really do think and perceive the world very differently. I can cite so many examples. Most Americans who declaim they are experts on Islamic matters have barely spent any time in the Islamic world, have not crawled the streets like I have, have not walked through neighborhoods they weren’t quite sure they’d walk out of alive.

I can read and understand (probably better than they can) all their pseudo-intellectual stotting, but they can’t tell me shit about what it’s like being there, meeting people, separated by inches of space but light years of perception.

“Inshallah!”

I heard that word (actually phrase, but it’s said as a single word) all the time. When a taxi pulled out into traffic recklessly without even checking, when a boatman just decided to proceed despite knowing the depth, when AK-47s were fired into the night sky: “Inshallah!”

It basically means, “If Allah wills it.”

Because I’m not a politically correct milquetoast Obama-style pushover, I’d argue with the taxi driver. “Not inshallah! Fucking look, man! Do you see Allah in this damn taxi? I’m lookin’, ain’t no Allah!” I’d say. It didn’t work. It didn’t matter. He (and it was always a he) would just glare at me and keep “inshallahing” all over the road.

I hung out with this translator nearly every day in Egypt. She was one of the few women there. We ganged up because we had a lot in common and importantly I wasn’t trying to get into her pants.

The key: she was a translator and spoke very fluent Arabic. She taught me some, but I’ve mostly forgotten it by now. However, she was fair-haired, blue eyes, pale white. No one in Egypt ever guessed she probably knew more Arabic than they did.

Anyway, it was always funny watching her walk into male-dominated spaces, have them say the most vile things about her in Arabic, and then hear her reply in perfect Arabic, “I don’t think you’re man enough to do anything like that.” That was a bit dangerous but it was so funny it was worth it every time. (I always marvel that I’m still alive. Every day I’m always like, “Isn’t that cooool?”)

But they still treated her like a trained dog or pond scum. Anyone who says Islamic society actually respects women by forcing them into hijabs, burqas and the like probably has never been in the room with many members of an Islamic society and a woman, especially an intelligent and powerful woman like she was.

Hard to believe anything I read or hear in the press — liberal or conservative — because I’ve seen the vast gulf between their authoritative banalities and the reality of being present.