It must be shocking to do well in school, get a job, and realize your success is mostly about faking your importance in a bureaucracy.

— James Marsh (@JamesMarsh79) September 12, 2020

I can tell you it is in fact shocking to get out of the army, where you are often in real life or death situations, and then go to work in corporate America where so much inconsequential depends on so little of any importance. It took me a while to get socialized from mostly being able to say whatever I wanted to engage in the necessary corporate-speak!

I don’t wish I’d stayed in the army, but what a culture shock that was.

As I was writing a friend earlier, the demonstrated failure of our elites and our society has made me much more supportive of high immigration to the US.

After all, what’s there to preserve? Unlike a lot of people who were against mass immigration, I have no interest in a white ethno-state. I’d be against mass immigration from North Africa for cultural reasons (because I actually care about women), but other than that, go crazy.

We should offer anyone from Hong Kong immediate asylum and then citizenship right away, of course. Probably Taiwan, too. What could this possibly hurt that is worth preserving? Nothing. Open the borders, let ’em all in. Fuck it.

“They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.”

–Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

A lot of folks acting as if 2020 has just been a string of bewildering bad luck, rather than what it truly is: a concentration of widely and reliably predicted and interconnected disasters that advanced nations of the world could have mitigated or prevented but chose not to.

— Kane Wishart (@kanewishart) September 11, 2020

Right. We knew another pandemic was inevitable. Did nothing. We knew once this one flared, what it’s course would likely be. Did nothing. We knew climate change was going to lead to what’s happening now in the West and worse. Did nothing. We knew the financial crisis would throw millions out of their homes into precarity, often for life. Did nothing.

All of this was both predictable and preventable. Don’t fall for the “who could have known?” propaganda that occurs immediately after and for years following such disasters. Though I see that many of you already are.

Control your own mind — don’t let others do it for you.

There's a fantasy that once climate apocalypse begin to directly affect comfortable deniers they'll realize the truth and be ashamed, but the fact that during devastating fires people went out hunting for fictional antifa arsonists shows what will actually happen instead

— Gautham Thomas (@gautham_t) September 10, 2020

This is somethng I was very wrong about: years ago I thought that once climate change really started fucking places up, as it’s doing now, people would grasp its reality and change their minds and their behaviors.

I was utterly delusional. That’s not what people will do. What they will in fact do is to look for someone else on which to pin blame, still downplay the actuality and effects of climate change, and then live in denial until they die. This is the reality. They’d willingly sacrifice themselves and their own children rather than recognize any reality.

I hope evolution does better on the next round than this whole Homo sapiens thing. Total failure there.

We see with the pandemic that states committed to the liberal conception of freedom are stuck curtailing actual freedom (i.e., to do what we normally do) because they refused to take decisive action. But consider that this is likely true ALL THE TIME, not just during a pandemic.

— scientism (@mr_scientism) September 10, 2020

There are sorts of freedom we don’t even have words for because of the collapse of all conceptions of freedom into the rubric of atomized individualism over the past 500 years.

Viewed this way (which is the most accurate), the anti-masker and the (pseudo)liberal fetishism of never going outside and mask-wearing even in environments where it makes no sense are all parts of the same corrupted whole, designed to obfuscate and obliterate the possibility of greater freedoms beyond.

The serpent feeds on itself in a room filled with sustenance, while denying its presence.