The 21st century is like a continuous playing out of a WWI-generation type leadership failures. Just constantly sleepwalking into unforced errors, avoidable catastrophes, mismanaged crises.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
It's really weird. The whole 100 year cycle thing just looks more and more legit. We're doomed by idiots to just blindly repeat the same mistakes over and over and over.
It's insanity. It really feels like the world has lost its marbles.
It's the arrogance of the Boomer generation. (Calm down - I don't mean all of you, but a lot of you.) White American Boomers are the most privileged people in human history, and this is what happens when 80-year-olds have never been told no their entire lives and still get to run everything.
Oh, and they know they need underlings who have energy to do all the work, but they cannot stand younger people who are smarter than them, so they find the absolutely worst younger versions of themselves and put those embarrassingly unqualified clones in positions of real authority. It's madness.
Sleepwalking is the correct term, unfortunately. However, how the population became, or rather accepted, asleep as the current modality is strictly speaking the stuff of spy thrillers, tinfoil hat conspiracies, and legit occult groups literally super-normalizing cannibalism humour propagation.
adam I been babbling this week about power laws some places
how once a node is etched (capital usually, but history has many nodes) , it does not move around as freely as people do, stories, ideas, free floating anxieties, etc
the tragedy of caerus / tempus, god of human agency, and his wife
tyche / fortuna of the fixed aspects of reality, the wheel of fortune you must weave around ,
with this 2500 year religious metaphor about human agency and the anointed time for things (while greek we see it everywhere including new testament christians and hellenistic jews like my Walter B)
The problem is that the masses (as in Hitler's gullible masses) find safety and comfort in authoritarianism. It wasn't a dirty word before WWII. Even FDR was floated declaring him President for Life.
It's not even uniquely American. The CCP is devolving into a personalist dictatorship at a moment where the growth/macroeconomic management models have clearly hit their limits. Russia has managed to make itself a pariah state while fighting a pointless, sadistic, and self-destructive war.
India is likewise sinking into delusional revivalist chauvinist fantasies under a personality cult which will in the medium to long run place severe strains on the country's unity, even if the economy continues to grow.
Except China, which spent its first tranche of trillions - on internal repression. Once sorted, then China started to modernise its military. Is that all - oh noes far worse - they believe in production, manufacturing, technology, research, investment. And you Americans destroyed yours.
Because the dipshits who voted for this and the ones in charge do not read history books, and if they did they are doing this on purpose. Either way, they are fucking idiots.
Hard time make great men,
great men make good times,
good times make stupid men,
stupid men get their news from Fox and make opportunities for con artists
I’m thinking a lot about Clark’s book and how a lot of people in power now are the equivalents of Central European dukes with elaborate mustaches who are about to light the world on fire by a combination of arrogance and ignorance.
Like America in 1915… Trump wants to launch a punitive expedition into Mexico to combat bandits…. And completely disengage from the world while it burns, only for Americans to be brought in later woefully unprepared
Just as Germany tried to exacerbate border tensions into a full war with Mexico in 1917, I wouldn’t eliminate China or Russia doing the same today allowing them to consolidate their territorial wish lists…
Comments
It's insanity. It really feels like the world has lost its marbles.
Even AI can be stupid, it’s the result of garbage in garbage out.
We got some out of touch wannabe royals up in here.
how once a node is etched (capital usually, but history has many nodes) , it does not move around as freely as people do, stories, ideas, free floating anxieties, etc
the tragedy of caerus / tempus, god of human agency, and his wife
it was before covid but I am trying to remember if it was before 2014, or 2014 to 2016, or 2017 to 2018
it is one of those important things I see as old in my late 30s brain *laughs*
with this 2500 year religious metaphor about human agency and the anointed time for things (while greek we see it everywhere including new testament christians and hellenistic jews like my Walter B)
Which is confusing, because the damage feels intentional
How are they mostly pulling off a 900-page plan none of them have read
Biofuels is one idea they like for those of us they can't find a way to exploit. The halt and the lame, the disobedient
A thoroughly deranged, sadistic loser the tech bros and shady vance can't get enough of
Hard time make great men,
great men make good times,
good times make stupid men,
stupid men get their news from Fox and make opportunities for con artists
I would not mess with the Sheinbaum administration.
willy and nicky (yes they called each other that in their letters) were third cousins
Wired: fkn dipshit gop voters self-disenfranchise
Where did all those students go?
“So here’s how we do it too”
The only thing that people learn from history... is that people don't learn from history.
[/Santayana revisited]