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Neoliberalism as Bad Art

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  Kelcy Warren, Pipeline Mogul (albeit not an upstream oil magnate) This fellow was flanked by a chart displaying financial supporters on one side and participating oil companies on the other. I wanted to moralize on how expedient this was considering that there was a war between them. Call it the Quiet Rich versus the Noisy Rich. I didn't know I was looking at a victory dance. The Quiet Rich, the Yankees, won Civil War IIA. Don't think of personalities, think of structures and sectors. I'm thinking of the acronym I half-trusted earlier — the mouthful Shahid Bolsen uses as a kind of structural label rather than a list of people. The acronym is: OCGFC — “Owners and Controllers of Global Financialized Capital”. Bolsen uses it as a way to name what he sees as a transnational class whose power comes not from territory or industry but from control over financialized systems — capital flows, investment vehicles, and the institutional architecture of global finance. He is trying t...
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To the Fuddy-Duddies on My FB Friends List Who Really Thought the Past 46 Years Were Golden

There’s a real pattern here, and it’s one that shows up again and again in periods of structural economic rupture. When a political party begins to transform—whether through ideological hardening, elite capture, or internal factionalization—there’s always a cohort of respectable gatekeepers who insist that nothing fundamental is changing. They cling to the old self‑image of the institution long after the institution has drifted into something else entirely. That “fuddy‑duddy” stance isn’t just stubbornness. It’s a psychological defense mechanism. Admitting that the GOP was undergoing a deep transformation would have required acknowledging that: - the post‑industrial working class was in profound distress   - the old economic consensus had broken down   - the party’s base was shifting from suburban managerial types to downwardly mobile, culturally alienated voters   - the tools of mid‑century politics—op‑eds, donor networks, think‑tank white papers—no longer...
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Bugger FB's prohibition of line breaks!

 The purpose of civilization is to increase the amount of wealth in the world. For the majority, this means more Life. On the 45° slope of an s-curve, the society as a whole gets used to this over the generations, and rising standards of living lead to rising expectations. The same problem can recur if people aren't better off each year than the last or they can't give their children more than they themselves started with. At the same time the society's economy is organized for rising standards and will undergo tensions when this isn't maintained. Doubt and anxiety creep back in. Dyerism ought to offset these feelings of being ephemeral. Or a psychological adjustment to a steady-state economy can be made. If only people could consciously recall their previous lives, then they could experience slowdowns more philosophically without the fear of impending death. Even the symbolic termination of their way of life can put them in a condition of fight-or-flight. This is what ...
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The Real Human Story: The Latest Set of Bastards

 In a footnote in his 𝘔𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘭𝘦 𝘈𝘨𝘦𝘴, Victor Duruy wrote: "*The history of the early stages of the feudal system has long been and still is a subject of controversy and disagreement among scholars." After giving an account of how the dukes and counts emerged as good defenders of early France, ending the era of (further) invasions, as though closing the door behind them after they had used it themselves, Victor Duruy went on to note:  "Later, the masters of these castles were the terror of the country, but they saved it at first, and though feudalism became so oppressive in the latter part of its  existence, it had had its time of legitimacy and usefulness. Power always establishes itself through service and perishes through abuse." This law of human nature has, unlike the physical laws enunciated in a previous video, never changed. Duruy’s relationship with Napoleon III - Napoleon III first noticed Duruy because of his historical scholarship, especially his ...
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Helping You to Understand Your Adversaries in This Time of Troubles

I'm getting tired of people on Facebook and BlueSky pointing out the absurdities and criminalities of Trump and his cultish supporters. Are you trying to understand this current cult of unreason? To account for its virulence? "Hey, such-and-such is obviously bad, openly evil. The only thing I have to do is point at it and say it out loud: 'This contradicts good sense, rationality, and all moral codes.'" As students of irrationality, you get a failing grade. And you're frozen in place. Pointing a finger is not taking action. There is zero strategizing. Your enemies are crazy because they are human, and like a member of the Bene Gesserit, you simply cannot look there. When feudalism began to fail, and nobles fought endlessly to monopolize the land and the incomes land provided, all these hardships and disorders led to a growth of unreason and acting-out on the slimmest pretexts. It was one of the most typical example to be found in any Time of Troubles. All kind...
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