News Cycle Cranky Tired

Tantrum

I feel like I'm writing this post for the dozenth time, it is a wholly reactionary post to an irritant, that has been irritating me for over a decade. 

It is the unfounded journalistic approach that functions as this irritant. Meaning that content gets continually generated that has no premises. 

What irritates me are journalists or commentators that begin with a premise that what they are looking at, for example, is a functional democracy and then like bad pantomime actors they shrug and ask the children "where is he?" and I feel not like a child, but an old man driven to the point of screaming "behind you fucking behind you you fucking morons you skipped the part where you determine if you have a functional democracy or a dysfunctional democracy, you started in the wrong fucking place!"

Whosoever figured out the way to advertise casual mobile phone games, is to run an ad where a moron plays it badly while you spectate is a genius. I haven't bought a game where I have to figure out if 14 is a higher number than 12, but I'm certainly tempted to everytime I watch someone play it as if they think there's a chance 12 might be bigger than 14. 

Not so with watching journalists who cannot figure out after 12 years or so, that Trump is exactly who he fucking appears to be. And my fatigue has tipped over to the point where I will fly into a rage at the Spanish backpackers who turn the dorm lights on at 2am and chat with lisps while they make up their beds.

3D Chessboxin'

I haven't listened to "The Glenn Show" in maybe years, a podcast that mostly to the brink of entirely consists of commentary on the news cycle by Brown Professor of Economics (Neoclassical/Orthodox/Mainstream Econ.) Glenn Lowry and Stanford Professor of Linguistics John McWhorter. Glenn is a conservative in the US terms, but not a radically insane postmodern totalitarian as most Republican talking heads present themselves, it's more that he will demand that Chief Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court be respected and shit like that. John McWhorter is I would say, nominally a democrat, certainly would unambiguously have been described as left-wing right up to about 2014 though spends most of his podcast time (which is considerable) criticizing the largesse and overreach of identity politics, he is one of the only people ever that Ta Nehisi Coates engaged with and responded to as a critic of his work.

Glenn and John were two helpful sense-making intellectuals for me who puts no stock in argumentum ad populum and when the collection of memes now ambiguously referred to under the umbrella term "woke" that back in 2015 I was discretely experiencing in my social media app facebook in the specific memes of 'trigger warnings' and in particular 'call out culture' but you know, obviously we had a wild ride through a bunch more discrete memes for around a decade.

I stopped listening a few years ago not because Glenn and John crossed some line that discredited them in my eyes, but more in the same sense as when a sporting contest is 3/4 of the way through and the lead is insurmountable and you switch off but the commentators can't leave their booth.

I don't think woke is 'dead as disco' likely more as dead as rockabilly or ska or glam rock. It is in my impression consigned to cultural cul de sacs with the moment that it might go plausibly mainstream passed.

But a few evenings ago during a gym session I checked back in with Glenn and John where they were debating the extent to which President Trump's 'personality' mattered, with John diagnosing him as an 'asshole' and to finally get to the subject of this post - Glenn's incredulity that Trump could be exactly what he appears to be. Often referred to by commentators, since the George W. Bush administration and possibly going back to Reagan (I'm not old enough) as the "3-dimensional chess" position which is worth I feel, articulating a bit.

As far as I can tell, "3-dimensional chess" is a Star Trek reference, where Gene Rodenberry and his writers sold the idea of a post-scarcity future with space faring homo sapiens by having the military elite play a form of super-chess, expanded by a dimension and realised in a prop that looks like chintzy 70s shelving.

I would attempt to do justice to the belief position while not being an adherent myself, as saying advocates for 3-dimensional chess make a form of argument from personal incredulity, a position as indisputably important as president must be correspondingly too difficult or complicated for an incompetent person to get near, it can only be occupied by what we might term an 'elite' with respect to cognitive performance, someone of sufficient intelligence, literacy, emotional regulation and personal self-discipline to occupy at the least the top 5% of the population in cognitive function.

But then you get characters like Trump, Bush, Truss, Musk, Milei etc. that as Bill Burr puts it "blunder into coffee tables" seemingly constantly producing sets of data that can be easily explained by stupidity. Which is impossible by the first premise of 3-dimensional chess, which is that the positions are too difficult for a fucking moron to occupy. So it gets reconciled with a multiplying of causes - the populace is generally, wary of 'elites' if you come across as too educated, too articulate, too privileged than you alienate yourself as a candidate from the electorate, as such the populist adopts a complicated double-bluff, hiding their elite cognitive capacities behind performative oafishness.

They don't communicate in simplistic ways because they are themselves too stupid to understand complicated nuance and second order effects, but because they are 'tapping in' to the stupidity of their voter base. It is essentially just a humanistic version of answering the philosophical refutation of an All-loving God by pointing to unnecessary suffering readily observable in the world like animals that die in wildfires and children who get leukemia referred to as 'the problem of evil' (though this begs the existence of evil into the question) for which the refutation is 'god works in mysterious ways' presuming that the seeming unnecessary suffering is just a matter of our ignorance of some greater good god's cooking up. 

In the same way, people waiting for George W Bush to reveal his true intention for the massive cock up that was the 2nd Gulf War will go to their graves waiting for the missing piece of information that explains why it was all a calculated good idea.

But for someone of Glenn's vintage and accomplishment, waiting for Trump to make clear that he has any fucking idea what he is doing, is in my view, incredible. I struggle with my credulity in regard to Glenn's incredulity.

And it isn't just Glenn, I listen to James O'Brian on LBC on the regular. A British journalist, O'Brian is known for going hard against Brexit and history has proved him right, but I think that as I'm writing King Charles the whatever is still in the US having just completed his meeting with Trump. News in the UK covered by O'Brian is that Trump made a public announcement that King Charles agrees with him on Iran, something that would certainly be *news* to the subjects of the UK. 

King Chuckles' press office released a statement that was classic English double-speak, the way in which "your proposal is very interesting" is polite for "no fucking way" in British. Something like "As is well known the King has long opposed the threat of nuclear proliferation." A face-saving masterclass in how to say "no he fucking doesn't agree, the US president is a fucking liar" while appearing to say the opposite.

O'Brian claims outwardly that he has given up on trying to make sense of the US President's actions, even advocated the liberation sensed, when one gives up on the endeavour of trying to predict what Trump will do. Yet, and maybe just because it's his job as DJ of a call-in show, like Glenn continues to express incredulity, shock, and to question what Trump is thinking, when in the most recent example Trump posted a generated image of himself with sunglasses and a machine gun with the caption "no more mister nice guy"

Marx was right

'He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.' ~ Groucho Marx

Sarah Paine's Framework

Sarah Paine is a retired professor of something that does these long Q&A sessions with Polish people who invite her out and put her talks up on Youtube. 

I find her analysis persuasive that in general the historical moment we are going through is probably best attributed to the tax-code and that western democracies in particular is having a crisis that threatens regression to a more pre-20th century world because our politicians are purely operational, not strategic. If that is a fair representation of her opinions.

Sarah Paine tries to give us, as in plebs like you and me, tools by which to think about the world, the one I've seen her offer is strategic-operational-tactical.

From the bottom up, tactical might be Seal Team 6 on a stealth helicopter. A tactic that enables a targeted strike on a specific human target like a leader of Al Kaeda or Venezuala. 

Operational might be the abduction of the Venezualan president, it's a big military operation that Sarah Paine describes, I think not unfairly, as perhaps the most successful military operation of all time.

Strategic is ??? we don't know what the fuck Trump was thinking when he ordered US Military forces to go nab the President of Venezuala. Speculation runs from he just wants the oil, to Maduro's dancing offended him. It is more ambiguous than W. Bush's war on Iraq where most people assumed it was about oil but could have been about daddy issues. Because US oil companies turned out to not be too keen on investing in Venezuala.

And you might see 3-dimensional chess cropping up already in this example, not by Sarah Paine herself who posits more plausibly that the strategic component of kidnapping Maduro is unknown likely because it is non-existent, but journalists who posit that there must be a strategy not only to the Venezuala thing, but to the Greenland thing and the Iran thing and possibly Cuba.

Even if it is speculated to be a bad strategy, people are drawing on the precedent of past presidents and world leaders going back to fucking Hammurabi of Babylonia and miring themselves in the presumption that there must be a cogent reason for all of this.

Trump doesn't frustrate me, he doesn't confuse me, and though alien I don't find him that mysterious. I find him an extremely useful thing to point to when looking for examples of stupidity and incompetence, but otherwise quite boring, like crypto is boring, "AI" is boring, Hitler is boring.

The Strategic Imperative of the Trump Administration

Trump's vision that he is dedicated to realizing, is a world in which everyone agrees how awesome he is. Everywhere he goes, without fail, people realize that he's just the fucking best. Historians will arrive at the consensus that he is the greatest President ever.

That is the vision behind every single action the Trump administration takes. That's what they are operationally and tactically geared up to try and achieve.

Can they do it? No. It's doomed to fail. The leading candidates for greatest President in the history of the United States are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I know that all three of these beloved and venerated Presidents have detractors, that they are controversial. 

Certainly if you got a unanimous consensus that any one person was unambiguously great, you would probably by default achieve the status of "Greatest President ever" but the fact is Trump has never been close to even being popular.

But this I feel, is the strategic driver that makes sense of absolutely everything Trump does. There's no maps with pieces being moved around by generals envisioning a new world order. There's a juvenile fantasy of being crowned prom queen and FIFA officials seem to understand this better than serious journalists like James O'Brian and esteemed social scientists like Glenn Lowry and I'm tired to the point of cranky that such intellects can't seem to get out of their own fucking way. 

Let's dig down.

The Many Operations of the Trump Administration

If your strategic imperative is to have everyone agree how awesome Trump is, then there's going to be two broad families of operations to run:

1. Get people praising the president.
2. Stop people praising anyone else.

Now the first family of operations implies another operation:

        3. Stop people criticizing the president.

And if you combine 1, 2 & 3 into one super-operation you get:

        4. Big Beautiful Dumb Ideas

That are simultaneously designed to be so spectacular that people forget to do anything but say "wow" the President did the greatest thing ever. 

And lastly, we can derive from the 2nd operation a watered down family of operations:

        5. Stop people from talking about anyone else.

All of which are necessary if your strategic vision is getting everyone to talk about how great Trump is, all the time. And so I think I can predict the rest of everything the Trump administration does or will do for so long as it remains a thing:

• Break shit any other president did, especially Biden and Obama.
• Try and create a 51st state. eg. Greenland, Canada.
• Try and quickly resolve long standing geopolitical impasses - Venezuala, Iran, Cuba.
• Censor and cancel critics.
• Build monuments.
• Fire administration officials who get more attention than the president. 
• Go after people who criticise Trump.

I feel that aside from a tax cut or something here and there that may actually go through the due processes of congress as the legislative branch, all of Trump's administrations operations unify in the core strategic consideration of getting everyone to talk about how great Trump is all the time.

The Tactics of the Trump Administration

Are stupid. They have to be stuped because not only is the strategic vision of the Trump administration global in scale, it is urgent. Supremely urgent. Everyone not recognizing what an awesome president Trump is cannot be tolerated for a single minute. Moment even.

So nobody has anytime to prepare to try and achieve the impossible. So of course, at a tactical level, everything is going to be fucking stupid. No due process, no time to win over stakeholders, no consultations, no going back, no hesitation, no second guessing, no reflection, no learning.

A Modestly Proposed Organising Principle of The Republican Party

Apparently early on it was a matter of some debate whether a good Christian earned their place in heaven through works, which is to say doing good deeds and being a disciple of Christ (in the sense of disciple = following the discipline of) or if one earned their place in heaven through faith, that is believing simply that Christ was/is lord.

For the latter argument, it is to this day, pointed out that that was kind of the whole point of the, to-me, nonsensical story of Jesus dying on the cross and being resurrected and dancing around before going up to heaven before leading an army to hell to bust out all the pagans that would have been christian but unfortunately were born before christ was or some shit.

I suspect that these factions - does salvation come from works, or does it come from faith, probably reflect broad variations in human personalities. Some people are universal, and hence believe in some kind of universal ethic yardstick by which to evaluate their fellow people, and other people are tribal, they have double standards, specifically are you 'us' or are you 'them.'

The Republican party I feel, as judged by their actions and function, have no organizing principle beyond membership. Membership entails dogmatic loyalty to the party, and if the party winds up being lead by Trump, then the party has to rally around him. 

“There are two kinds of patriotism -- monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.” ~ Mark Twain.

 This is why the Republican Party cannot do anything about Trump to save itself, but double, treble and quadruple down. The organising principle of the Republican party makes it predictable that Mitch McConnell will refuse to hear testimony and consider evidence to realise his impeachment for his involvement in the Jan 6th insurection, and why J.D. Vance won't take steps to declare the president unfit for duty anytime soon. The Republican party doesn't stand for anything other than the Republican party, and it is no coincidence that it represents the factions of christianity, that don't necessarily map to any sects that hold nothing necessary for salvation beyond membership - which is to say, simply believing that christ is the tits.

The Democrats Are Neither a New Hope, Nor a Good Hope.

Trump is a loser, because of that fact, he can be succinctly analysed as 'the loser's president' and if the Democrats want to enter a post-Trumpian era, what they needed to do, from pretty much 2008 is stop creating losers.

Unfortunately, the main organising principle of the Democratic Party institution, as far as I can see, is to preserve and extend neoliberalism, the "third way" pioneered by Clinton and Blair that saw left wing parties adopt virtually identical economic policy to the right wing parties of the 80s. Globalising, Privatising, Deregulating and whatever else.

They are Homer, still holding onto the cans in the vending machine. Unfortunately, there are likely compelling reasons to do so, and it is something that echoes throughout democracies around the world that Sarah Paine articulates under her own framework as politicians being purely operational - they have no strategy just re-election.

We got a stark example recently in the UK Labour Party's 2024 Ming Vase landslide. Where the strategy is to have no strategy lest it offend, give your opponents no ideas to criticize etc.

In the US however, we can see since at least the Hillary-Bernie primary race as manifest in the votes of the super-delegates, and likely going back as far as the Obama-Hillary primary race, that the Democrats are institutionally resistant to calls for change from the voter base. It's a diversion, but likely important to point out that Barack Obama delivered 'hope' itself, a very easy thing, vast numbers of people got to hope that things would be different based on the colour of his skin and not the content of his character. At the time I was painfully aware that Barack Obama was not Chuck D of Public Enemy. He didn't strike me as even a black JFK or RFK Sr. 

He was very likely a product of a filtration process:

Andrew Marr: How can you know that I'm self censoring?

Noam Chimpsky: I'm sure that you're not self censoring, I'm sure you believe everything you are saying. What I'm saying is if you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting. ~ Concluding statements of above linked interview, emphasis mine.

The compelling reason that the Democrats are the lesser evil compared to the Republican party, is in part that they have this filtration process that prevents characters like Trump from becoming president. Unfortunately, that same filter keeps characters like Bernie, AOC or Mamdani from becoming president, it is a mediocritizing risk-averse filter. 

We Are All Iranians Now

If a nation state does not have a democracy, in my view it is basically a gang territory, or a Mafia state. When Trump effectively broke the global economy by going in on operation "Epic Bullshit" on the fumes of hope that by toppling a long standing awful regime quickly and simply (why didn't anyone else think of that?) it would realise the strategic vision of everyone talking about how awesome and great Trump is; early journalists prefaced their words by making clear that where they were about to criticize Trump's prosecution of whatever the fuck this war is - that this didn't make them pro-the Iranian regime or admiring of the atomised former Ayatollah.

If you want to think that I am pro-a fundamentalist theocratic regime that among all its features includes a literal morality police to police morality on the off chance that the creator of the universe has any more clout as to how people should live as a regular consumer can define the cannon of books to put on a bookshelf from Ikea they allen keyed together and that this clout laden creator delivered their moral code to some guy over a millenia ago so well that when that guy died his followers immediately splintered into sects, go right ahead.

What I mean by 'we are all Iranian's now' is that we all have to process the data we have into information and subsequent knowledge, as the Iranian regime appears to understand.

The data being that after negotiating a nuclear non-proliferation deal with the United States at the United States behest, the United States citizens may elect a leader who will unilaterally tear that negotiation up, making a deal with the United States near worthless. Furthermore, that the United States citizenry may just elect a leader who will unilaterally take military action without congressional approval or public debate. In this sense, what Iran knows and we collectively have no excuse not to know, is that the United States is an existential threat.

The specific nature of that existential threat, is that US' voting citizens behave in a juvenile manner. In transit to Mexico a friend of mine took me to a friend of theirs house, and I recall trying to explain the myopia (which Australian voters share) of self-indulgently voting in a buffoon because you like them, but that buffoon is who you are sending to represent you on a global stage and they will go up against serious people.

This myopia is while not literally, but symptomatically a reason democracies going all the way back to ancient Athens and possibly excluding Pirate ships (where cabin boys likely got a vote, but being a pirate ship, likely a very informed vote) have had minimum voting ages. It cannot be the historical reason, but we can contemporarily understand that 12 year old's could vote for Mr. Beast if given the opportunity. And people advocating for lowering voting ages today are likely highly biased in their selection, thinking that young people are all into Greta Thunberg (who I feel, would be a terrible political leader, anyway) and not overwhelmingly into Mr. Beast, or the Minecraft Movie, or K-Pop Demon Hunters.

This is one of those areas where an entities character isn't up to date. Just like if your husband cheats on you by having a secret sexual encounter with another person that comes to light, your husband's status as a 'cheater' is not a matter of self-identification, and so it is not a matter up for debate, "you don't understand, I felt really powerful emotions that this was somehow the right way to handle things and thus is not an immoral or incompetent act but something really that commends me as an incredibly special person who seized the opportunity to be special." is not an argument that you are not a cheater for the act of infidelity that defines cheating.

In the same way, a TV gameshow show host, with a string of failed business ventures including a casino, whose policy centrepiece was to build a wall across the southern united states boarder that Mexico was going to pay for, who announced their presidential candidacy by riding down an escalator, and who has visible fake-tan on his face with 'raccoon eyes' in the negative space, and cannot wear a tie - is not a serious candidate. There was sufficient evidence from the outset that Trump was not a serious person worthy of serious consideration for your vote. In his case, in particular, there's simply no basis for any 3d chess debate. As Matt Dillahunty says "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but absence of evidence where evidence would be expected is." or something, and there's an absence of expected evidence everywhere we would look for evidence of Trump's competence.

But the key thing, is that it is actually the US voting citizens that cannot be trusted, that are an existential threat because they are not taking their votes seriously. There is likely a complicated overdetermined reason for this, that can be boiled down to failures of education, and in this the US citizen is not isolated, citizens and subjects of democracies throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and the specific have fans of Donald Trump who would have voted for him if they could, and have voted for his franchisees.

The US Number One Strategic Weakness

Prior to Russia's 24th February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the world had been under the impression that Russia was a military power, like a serious military power. It remains a Nuclear power, of course, but much as the world was caught off-guard by its invasion in the first place, the world was then caught off-guard by what a shambles the Russian military was and how ineffective it was at annexing the Ukraine. 

This should not have been surprising in and of itself really, given how difficult it is for a military power like the US to occupy countries like Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But Russia couldn't even do the part that the US military is generally recognised at being good at - which is the initial incursion and breaking of a states main military resistance. 

I'm not a Russianologist, I have no expertise whatsoever on historicity or geopolitics, but I feel confident in asserting that one powerful explanatory factor for Russia getting bogged down in what is now a 4+ year war that was projected to be an overnight seizure, is that Russia has this major strategic weakness: Putin can't fail.

I saw op-eds speculating that Russia's military had become a culture of 'yes-men' one survived and advanced by telling Putin whatever he wanted to hear. And the Russian military fish had perhaps rotted from the head, leaders taking Putin's example to lie and steal from the military machine.

Beyond that, I don't have the means to understand what the fuck is going on over in Ukraine, like China, Russia is a subject that attracts content farming on Youtube where every day there's a story about Russia's imminent collapse and I have learned not to trust them at all, as one does when an imminent collapse fails to collapse for 4 years.

Where I will put my confidence, is in an opinion of martial philosophy, that may be controversial but I am convinced, that the numero uno, biggest strategic liability is being unable to fail. And Trump cannot fail.

I appreciate how more literally minded persons might be like "but if you can't fail that means you can only succeed" which would be true, if we were talking about reality and not language:

Once there was a parrot who knew only one word: “victory.” Yes, sir, the days came and went, and on one of those days when our poor parrot was sitting on his perch without a care in the world, a hawk set his eye on him and swept him away through God’s air. The poor green thing clutched in the hawk’s claws began to complain, but he couldn’t say a thing except the one word he knew by heart. Each peck the hawk gave drew forth a cry of “victory.” A peck, a “victory,” another peck, another “victoryds.” The whole while he was being pecked to pieces, he kept saying “victory.”

—JOSE JOAQUIN FERNANDEZ DE LIZARDI, “The Parrot’s Victory,” El Pensador Mexicano, October. 11, 1823 

Trump can't fail, he can only succeed. The strait of Hormuz gets blocked? Huge success. A girls school gets bombed? Another victory. NATO allies refuse to send military aid? Trump for the win. Ultimatums increasingly ring hollow? You'll win so much you'll get tired of winning.

In Monty Python's The Holy Grail, the Black Knight could have called it quits when he lost an arm, instead after losing two arms and a leg he starts hop-headbutting King Arthur who is then forced to reluctantly cut off his remaining leg. 

When the Black Knight describes his injuries as "just a flesh wound" that partial admission of failure renders the Black Knight as less of a strategic liability than Donald J. "Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen" Trump. A man who cannot concede, and could not concede that he lost the 2020 US election.

"Novacaine" legacy artist Jack Quaid's Comedy Action movie's central conceit is an unlikely action hero who has a genetic condition where his nervous system doesn't register pain signals. When we meet his character, he can't eat solid foods because he may not notice biting off his own tongue and is at high risk of bleeding to death simply through a lack of feedback.

Though the movie shows us a fairly unique circumstance where this translates into a kind of superpower, an inability to feel pain is counterintuitively a very debilitating condition that renders a person extremely fragile, not extremely resilient. This is a person who can lean on a hot stove, and won't notice until they smell burning flesh that they have inflicted 2nd or 3rd degree burns on their hand.

But in the ability to smell burning flesh and act upon it, such a character is less of a strategic liability than Donald J. "Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen" Trump.

You do not want to go to war, with a person beside you for whom forgetting their helmet, forgetting their gun, forgetting their food, shitting their pants, pissing their pants, tripping over and breaking their teeth, alerting the enemy to your position, failing to surrender, suffering severe injuries, getting taken prisoner, getting subjected to torture, starvation and humiliation, giving up military secrets, having wounds get infected etc. are all medal worthy military victories.

The only ambiguity as to the relative military strategic strengths v weaknesses of Iran and the US, are whether the Iranian regime also is unable to fail and can only succeed. But they certainly seem more competent than the commander in chief at the moment.

And lastly, this is a broadly understood martial principle learned from history and martial philosophy, not a brilliant insight or "predictive history" as "Professor" Jiang might milk having predicted something quite obvious - that the US and Isreal might go to war with Iran. 

I'll use Mr Jiang as a segue into hopefully my last section of this post, which is to do with the impotence of language. I stumbled upon "Professor Jiang Clips" Youtube channel a few months ago and it had been on my list to discuss. He immediately reminded me of Jordan Peterson, and like Jordan Peterson or Slavoj Zizek, Jiang is a producer of interesting ideas that could be dangerous if taken seriously, by which I mean authoratatively. 

Jiang's choice of identifying himself as a "Professor" is, no racism intended, the immediate yellow-flag. Watch enough of his 'classes' and it becomes clear that he is addressing perhaps as many as 6 highschool students, whereas with JP it was obvious he was delivering actual lectures to actual university students and in a sizeable fashion in Toronto when he first uploaded his psychology lectures to Youtube. The voices also sound young, and a quick google you discover that Jiang is a highschool teacher at a private highschool in China. 

Whether intentionally or not, he is exploiting an ignorance in the Anglosphere, (with English being the language he delivers his content in) that other cultures use titles that are quite impressive in Anglo-Academia to describe people with lesser and even no qualifications. For example in Brazil and Italy, anyone with a tertiary degree earns the title of 'Doctor', in Mexico anyone who teaches anyone anything with or without qualifications, is a 'Master' or 'Maestro', in Peru highschool teachers are referred to by students as 'Professors' and in Australia a PhD holder delivering lectures to students as a tenured Professor of the Economics Faculty is referred to as "Gary" by his students, because that is his name.

Jiang exercises the power of language by simply asserting via a title that doesn't translate accurately for a western audiance that he is somebody to be taken seriously. He is not. He may be someone worth entertaining, but certainly he is not safe to engage with uncritically as in his talking on subjects as dubious as 'evil' he will invoke a conspiracy of international Jewry, and notably have absolutely nothing to say about the organised criminal gang that commands the territory known as China that hosts him and has an appalling human rights record, a supreme leader for life, and zero rights for the subjects of the regime. He is fucking silent on Xi, at least up until I stopped watching.

Futile Resistance is not Resistance is Futile

Postmodernism, or poststructuralism in terms of the generalisable lay nature in which it is understood - that reality is structured by power - deserves its due.

In the small picture and small run, social animals like, and possibly exclusively, humans can make reality a kind of coerced performance. Like a bank can use its power to conceal from us the financial situation of a person, that allows them to perform as though they are solvent wearing nice suits, driving nice cars, buying meals prepared for them etc. when the reality is they are bankrupt and had we known this we never would have given them our money.

We all know, this happens some times, in some situations. We tell stories and people behave as though they are true.

I just feel, that there are limits to "postmodernism" as I've described. It is remarkably inefficient for one, and energy intensive. 

Furthermore, there is much that narratives simply cannot achieve. Physical, or natural phenomena are largely uncontroversial. I recently watched one of Angela Collier video titled "Physicists don't know how planes work" and I ran into a problem with my own typographical preferences because the title of that video is quoting some anonymous person's(') dumb take, in which Angela repeats many times that "air go down plane go up" is a perfectly valid explanation of how planes work, as valid as 'road goes back car goes forward' for how cars work (or walking or running for that matter) and I think about this as regards the limits of postmodernism.

The only story you can tell to make a car fly, is a story where you call an aeroplane or a helicopter a car, and I hope you can agree, that the usefulness of this deconstruction of language is pretty fucking low.

In a moment of prescient transphobia, Abraham Lincoln was (likely apocryphally) attributed the following anecdote:

When consulting with his generals, Abraham Lincoln asked the assembled commanders "How many legs does a dog have, supposing we call the tail a leg?" and the generals took the bait and said "five" to which Abe said "The answer's four, calling a tail a leg don't make it so." 

Now I've been given no reason to believe this anecdote ever actually happened, and we cannot know Abe's position on trans rights. He fought to preserve the union and emancipate his fellow men from the condition of slavery, but I wouldn't be confident saying Abe was definitely not a racist.

But the anecdote itself is not a portrait of postmodern leadership. Characters like Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un and many dead tyrants before them are postmodern in style.

Here is another quoting of Yale Professor of History Timothy Snyder yet again:

We know, because this is something that people have theorized about since the Enlightenment, that in order for there to be a democracy there has to be something between you and me and our fellow citizens, something between you and me and our leaders, which is: a factual world. We have to have this thing called the public sphere where you and I and our fellow citizens and our leaders agree that there are certain realities out there, and that from those realities we draw our own conclusions, our own evaluative conclusions about what would be better or worse, but we agree that the world is out there. And that it's important for you and I, as citizens, to formulate projects, but it's also important in moments of difficulty for you and I, as citizens, to resist our leaders. Because if we're going to resist our leaders we have to say, "On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it's intolerable; therefore we resist." If there are no facts we can't resist, it becomes impossible.

So there are a couple of centuries of Democratic theory which make that argument in one form or another. That's an old argument. And what follows from that is that if you want to build an authoritarian regime you try to make that factual world less salient, you try to make the world less about the facts that are between you and me and more about the emotions that will either divide us or bring us together, it doesn't really matter which. 

I think if you have a decade long lesson in the importance of free speech and the consequences of abandoning it, and you are now in year 11 of that lesson, you fail. I think that's a fact.

Michael Shermer is not a towering Colossus  of intellect but he hosts a podcast where he diligently interviews people who have written non-fiction books, including many historians and political scientists. For the decade long lesson in free speech, one of his most routine questions for guests was about their opinion of North Koreans rolling around on the ground shrieking and wailing to hear about the death of Kim Jong Il, late father of the current supreme leader and son of North Korea's founding father. 

He asks if they are really grieving or if it is just a performance, a roundabout way of asking 'does propaganda work?' and specifically 'does propaganda convince its targets?' and the consensus that appears to be being reached by scholars who look at this and Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia and Maoist China etc. is that the key ingredient to propaganda is state violence. 

It is power exercised to coax a performance out of everyone. But it is not in itself persuasive, there's generally a whole bunch of other psychological factors that are much more important that mostly revolve around making people afraid to say anything different.

I think this is bad, this is a bad way to live. If it isn't clear, I think the Trump administration's strategic vision is bad. It is a terrible strategy that I feel is being proven, day by day, to be one of the most egregious wastes of everyone's time and energy in the history of humanity.

Alas, back to Timothy Snyder, if there are no facts then there can be no resistance. Most of my friends moved into cultural cul de sacs that I feel categorize the futile resistance of the left that endured as the dominant storytelling voice for around 10 years.

It was basically "We can all agree, that the audience of an Ani Di Franco concert, isn't going to start wars, bully kids, oppress minorities etc. etc. the whole world should just be an Ani Di Franco concert." Speaking as a fan of Ani Di Franco, I don't want the whole world to be an Ani Di Franco concert. I can see why a political movement based on the whole world being a Metallica concert, would be more popular. I can also see that both utopian visions are equally the stuff of pure fantasy, a complete waste of time to implore everyone, literally everyone to just commit wholly to listening to only one catalogue of music forever.

Monopolies and tyrannies are fundamentally unstable by nature, and the complete absence of competition makes this counterintuitive, because competition is seen and felt as a stressor, but its the stressors that help us identify failures constantly so we don't wind up with something structurally unsound.

Resistance has failed because it has framed the conflict in terms of who can seize the power to tell stories, and the answer is nobody. But it resulted in people seizing the power to effect real consequence in the world, because so many people forgot about that while escalating fiction to central importance.

There is a form of effective resistance, and Abe is attributed with pointing it out - stop pretending that whether a leg counts as a tail is a matter worthy of time and energy.

What Could Be Wrong With Me Party 2: Plutophobia

It's a downtown food court, not exactly a classy establishment. The world over they are similar to the point of being identical. The dining area is large and expansive. There are no real barriers to entry, and I seek these spaces out. I prefer to eat in a food court off of trays, than a restaurant with cloth napkins. 

Yet, I'm annoyed, irritated and bemoaning the state of society and the prospects of a future of humanity. I'm annoyed by people who eat and then abandon their food refuse, the chicken bones, the molested napkins, the stray rice grains and the trays, the trays that make it all so easily transferable to a bin.

My objection is not based on hygiene, not a physiological one. I will eat food I drop on the food court ground. I would eat the food served at a food court, putting it inside my body.

It's the attitude, the self same as the people on economy-class flights that immediately recline their chairs as far as they can go, and that stewards have to tell to put in the upright position for take off, until they do and then as soon as the steward is gone they recline their chairs again.

A fantasy of money, a shitty fantasy of money. In the food court I sense acutely the abyss of the nouveau riche. People who even in a food court can adopt the posture of "I've made it" if only for a moment, where its okay for somebody to clean up your shit, as though you are an infant.

And to a degree, growing up in Australia, all there is to be encountered are the nouveau riche. I could not say with confidence that I've ever come across old money. But it is the rich part I find gross.

The Skunking of Phobia (or concept creep)

In the overlap period of the 20th and 21st century, at least post-civil rights movement in the United States; phobia has referred to two, I feel, sufficiently distinct things.

Something like arachnophobia or acrophobia we are talking about a debilitating irrational fear. Like someone who is truly afraid of spiders can't get near them, even the common house spider species. Someone who dislikes spiders and doesn't feel like humanely relocating them with a glass and a piece of paper to somewhere out of the way like the garden, but slips off a shoe to pulverize them, I assert we generally wouldn't call arachnophobic.

Nor with acrophobia are we talking about someone whose heart races at the thought of a chute not opening on their first ever sky dive from a few kilometres above the earth's surface, but somebody who has a nervous breakdown on the 2m diving board they psyched themselves into giving a go at the local pool and has to be somewhat forcibly removed from the hand rails by a lifeguard because they cannot jump off nor descend the steps they climbed.

These I'll call traditional phobias, where people experience disproportionate trauma (another skunked term, but I mean fear for their life) in response to a largely unlethal stimulus like a wide open space, or holes - like in a crumpet.

Then there's the more political phobias, perhaps most notably homophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia. I'm going to hazard a guess that it's very very rare for a small child to be diagnosed by a medical professional with any of these phobias. While I'll not suggest that the behaviour and people they do describe are not characterised fundamentally by fear, it is clearly a much more empowered fear that generally doesn't result in screaming, running, cowering, tears, foetal positions etc. but aggression, assertion, marginalisation, violence, annexation of property, exclusion, discrimination.

Plutophobia could plausibly be either sense of phobia, but regarding me, it is much more the latter, a prejudice and as my opening example of people who don't bin their own foodcourt filth hopefully demonstrates, for me wealth is an attitudinal disposition I dislike more so than a literal, kind of tall Poppy equation where Bert has $100,000 in net worth and Ernie has $1,000,000 in net worth so I hate Ernie 10x as much as I hate Bert.

No, it is entirely possible to be wealthy and for me to like you personally fine, I make a generalisation and I recognise the challenge in many cases; of attaining wealth and staying grounded in some kind of modal reality.

The Out Loud Maths

There's an icecream store, a crappy one, offering Chocolate, Strawberry, Vanilla and Tutti Frutti.

Now, I gotta draw up like a table, and you don't have to give me a minute because it's already written.

Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Noam Chomsky, Cassie Ventura, Sophia Boutella, Some Male Dreamboat yet to go nuts a la Pre-Marty Supreme Timothy Chalomet, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, BTK, Son of Sam, Charles Manson and Marilyn Manson all like Chocolate.

Roy, Morrison, Mussolini and Marilyn Manson like Vanilla.

Chomsky, Cassie, Male Dreamboat of the Moment, Hitler, BTK , SoS and Charles Manson like Strawberry.

Sophia Boutella likes Tutti Frutti.

Now, to explain plutophobia, we just substitute Chocolate for "Rich" the problem is that everyone likes being rich, "Vanilla" might be "Oprah Winfrey's Bookclub", Strawberry might be "Nascar" and Tutti Frutti might be "A concise history of premodern bowling games"

Imagining in this metaphor, that this ice cream shop has one of those soviet-hangover style operations filled with makework where you order your scoop flavour from one employee who gives you a ticket to take to a cashier to pay for your ice cream in return for another ticket that sends you to a holding pen where you have to hang out waiting in the company of people who picked the same flavour as you.

Because almost everyone likes chocolate, it's not that it's bad to potentially hang with Arundhati Roy, Epstein friend Noam Chomsky, Cassie Ventura or Sophia Boutella. It's just that it would be terrible to find yourself stuck in a pen with dicks like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, BTK, Son of Sam, Charles Manson and Marilyn Manson.

This for me is the mathematics of plutophobia, the problem is, for every person who seeks riches as validation of the struggle they've been through to contribute genuine value to society, they are typically outnumbered by people who just want some kind of validation of their narcissism. They just want to be rich because they like status and consumption and hedonism.

Now anywhere there's a rich scene, like elite private schools, exclusive clubs, restaurants with dress codes for their customers, vinyards, waterfronts etc. hanging around makes it merely a matter of time before dicks show up.

Somewhat in the reverse of addiction, where dopamine or endorphins or whatever spike to their peak in anctipation of the high, something Gabor Mate articulated as "it's not the having it's the getting" for me the anticipation is the bottoming out of my experience of plutophobia. My gut sinks in the Uber to pretentious district, I get angry at the destination wedding invite, I stew in transit to the resort. 

The Simple Silent Maths 101

I promise this post will explore how my aversion to wealth is debilitating and doesn't exist to justify it. That said I am compelled to do some apologetics for how I see the world:

Put simply, holding all else equal if I am not impressed by you without a million dollars, I am not impressed by you with a million dollars.

I struggle to think of a simple real world example, but imagine you met a guy for the first time in a crowded room, you shook hands and leaned in close to hear him speak his name.

"Gus."

"Nice to meet you Gus. I'm sorry but your breath makes my eyes water, it is just about the foulest thing I've ever smelled. What's the story there?"

"Oh that! Well I eat my own faecal matter."

Here you can see my struggle to think of a simple example, because in a way, the ability to eat your own shit is kind of impressive. Not attractive, but impressive.

"I mean is that like a paraphilia? Have you always done that?"

"Yes and no, these days I mostly do it for my only fans account, I can bring in 2~3k per shit I eat."

With this vulgar example, I hope I can point to a largely unconscious but widely acknowledged truth - that wealth is but a proxy for value. 

When I was in University the first time, it coincided with a mining boom in the Australian economy because it was the pre-Xi double digit GDP growth for China. It was briefly possible for someone to earn six-figure salaries operating a laundry service for a mining barracks, not even going down in the mines and extracting iron-ore. In the meantime, medical students lived in relative poverty undergoing the 6 years of schooling required to become an MD. 

I don't know, and I suspect that the data would bare out my experience, that almost no medical students dropped out of medical school in order to cash in on a mining boom. There's a general recognition that in the long run Doctors get to wear white coats, people come to them begging for help, they get good stable salaries. They may wind up working similar hours to the fly-in-fly-out miner but people are capable of comparing apples and oranges in this case. They understand that earning 6 figures as a miner is significantly different to earning 6 figures as a doctor.

What Do I Mean "Rich"?

Above I touched upon a foundation of my phobia, which is that we live in a very confusing economy. 

So for me I think I am specifically talking about "consumption" when I talk about "rich" or "wealth"

My sense, and perhaps anxiety being that most people, the modal person, might describe someone as "successful" when in fact they are simply talking about somebody who is able to consume, perhaps overconsume goods and services.

Netflix among its many true crime documentary series, had one dedicated to a catfisher that exploited this very notion of rich. A woman met him on a dating app, then he'd take them to a Michelin starred restaurant and pay for everything, take them on an international holiday to stay in luxury resorts in a chartered jet etc. They would date this guy for weeks or months seeing him as clearly solvent and flush, before he'd tell them he needed some bridging loan for an investment deal that might fall through or whatever.

As it transpired, all the proof of wealth he had demonstrated was financed by the last catfishing victim, their stolen money was used to convince the next woman that the conman had plenty of money of his own, but actually he had no income beyond the stolen savings of credulous women.

Many "rich" people, are not successful, nor do they do anything of value. These are heterodox opinions, but I appeal to open secrets, like that the stockmarket is now almost pure arbitrage and hardly functions as a capital raising institution, that many big companies are entirely dependent on corporate welfare for survival either directly sticking their hand out to the government and coughing 'ahem' or via venture capital that up until post covid interest rate rises, were able to borrow money at 0 or negative rates and bet on pretty much anything and if it hit good but if it came up snake eyes could then be transferred to a tax write-off indirectly affecting government welfare. That many highly paid executives can receive greater compensation for destroying a company and getting fired than they do for competently performing their jobs, that most wealth is inherited and that social mobility is dropping as inequality grows etc. etc.

But I don't want to be simply conflated with a commie. For me, "richness" is a state of mind, a preference for consuming expensive things, it isn't about "earning" or "creating value" or "competence" or "success" as consuming expensive things can be entirely financed through debt. 

It is to cross the median threshold of overconsumption - you know, I can overconsume calories by shopping at the duopoly of supermarkets buying near-expired meat and store brand cans/bags of soup, but richness is where you can't just go to a local beach for your holiday, you need to fly to southeast Asia where local wages are low enough that you can enjoy a full compliment of butlers and maids, even on a meagre income, and you can't just lie on the beach and listen to the waves, you need a waiter to bring you cocktails.

Australia has terms like "cashed-up bogan" that are classist, and while pointing to a real phenomena as was seen in the various mining booms of the Australian economy in the early 21st century, it is my experience that people born into the upper 20% of household wealth are often only superficially different in their crass tastes and preferences. There's no merit in hiring a private consulting firm to set up your home theatre, and DIYing a home theatre from a big box store. People do not need a home theatre, these are luxuries not necessities.

So the rich I am bigoted against, are the people who centre luxury consumption in their lives, hedonism and generally employ a halo effect thinking that people who consume luxury are smarter, more attractive, more ethical and virtuous, wiser etc. I fucking hate people with this mindset and the environments they create.

Club Groucho

“I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.” ~ Groucho Marx' letter of resignation to The Friars Club.

Miki and I are the only customers in the restaurant now known as Mikayla, located on the Takamatsu waterfront near the lighthouse it's a classy joint, objectively beautiful serving European cuisine with cutlery and everything. Takamatsu is famous for Udon noodles, and like absolutely everywhere in Japan it's pretty much impossible to find bad food, you basically have to have someone's grandma homecook something they remember fondly eating the day after Hiroshima or Nagasaki were bombed.

Though somewhere in Nagoya I have a fond memory of eating a superb spaghetti marinara, generally I wouldn't recommend eating European cuisines in Japan unless you need the comfort food because you'll be there a while. But yeah, you are often better off buying a hot meal in cling wrap from a convenience store than sitting down to a plate of pasta or $60 pizza with cubes of potato on it.

I remember Miki's haircut at the time, that the seasons fashion she wore was shorts over stockings with calf high boots, I remember where we sat in the restaurant, the time of day, the colour of the menus and that there was seabream on it. The only part of the meal I remember was the dinner roll served on the side. I remember it because I picked it up with my hand and took a bite of it and Miki told me off.

I couldn't credit her with being serious, but she really got shitty with me when I did it again, at which point I believed. As it transpires, I would later learn from a podcast that it is considered proper etiquette in somewheres and somewhens that anything you put in your mouth should not come out of your mouth and I guess this extends to taking a bite out of something. I'd met US citizens/residents that were raised to cut up their food using the knife in their dominant hand, then put the knife down and switch the fork to the dominant hand to put the pre-cut pieces in their mouth. 

Miki's ire was not some extension of the Japanese culture-bound sense that it is good manners to slurp up your noodles making a loud noise to indicate the dish is tasty to the host. That you are supposed to rip a bite size piece of bread from the roll and pop it into your mouth, instead of biting off a bite size piece is actually the kind of western etiquette a culture like Australia doesn't bother to teach because it is clearly, old money bullshit in a culture where for at least a century, everyone had to master eating a meat pie without the contents dropping on their crotch.

But I was ruining Miki's experience. She'd brought me to this special joint, this classy place and I simply did not, and indeed cannot even while reminiscing appreciate the opportunity to be all classy-like.

My faux-pa pushed to the point of genuine ire allowed Miki to address me in a manner that activated my hippocampus to sear in the memory of failure. I had ruined christmas.

When I get self-righteous however, what a shitty place to take me. I regard such restaurants the same as concession stands in a stadium - price-gouging monopolists. It was quite special to walk out on a clear calm Autumn evening to the lighthouse with Miki, there's no need to eat at the kinds of restaurants that get established in these places. 

In fact I have no need to eat in fancy restaurants ever. There just seems to be a readily observable objective fact about fine dining - it is simply not worth the effort. 

I watched Fran Lebowitz intervewed recently and annoyingly people tend to ask her questions to prompt her to repeat her greatest hits of opinions, and she was talking about articles that claim to have found "the best restaurant in New York" or maybe it was "the world" and Fran claims that there's no such thing. I half expected her to say a New York hotdog from any vendor was the best restaurant in the world, but she made her point about subjectivity that whatever your favourite restaurant is, is the best restaurant in the world.

NNT points out that on Manhattan island the Wall Street bankers are not enjoying their truffle risottos anywhere near as much as the construction workers out the window are enjoying their ham and cheese sandwiches from the bodega, as the signals our brains experience tend to generate pleasure in proportion to the calories in vs the calories expended. 

Chris Rock asserted to Jerry Seinfeld in his appearance on 'Comedians in Cars getting Coffee' that a good meal is all about the company, that a two-piece feed with the right person is far better than a Michelin starred dinner with an asshole. 

In UK sitcom 'Peepshow' Jeremy takes Big Suze on a date and, in an effort to impress her consents to purchasing a 45BPS bottle of wine and in his distress is compelled to utter 'Now that is wine...I mean its not delicious like a hot-chocolate or coke but as far as wines go this is [mwah]'

Of course, the deficit in sensory experience can be adjusted into surplus by a psychological experience of consuming social status. 

This however, doesn't work if you are plutophobic like me. I get no thrill from 'special treats' from pretending to be king for a day, an hour or even fifteen minutes. But I also tend to think less of people who do, it puts me in mind of someone with a really reductive view of the world, like someone who thinks a boring number like 50 is more interesting than 49 because 50 is bigger.

The first haircut I got after returning from Mexico was an undercut, peaky blinders style. It became clear that until my hair sufficiently greased up to sit right, I would have to use some kind of grease in my hair. I couldn't find vaseline hair tonic in my local supermarket, and it was quite an effort to find a product so basic. I eventually found it in one of our pharmaceutical big-box stores for like $4 for 120ml or whatever. That was two years ago and I use it so sparingly that it only recently depleted the neck of the bottle so an air bubble is visible while the cap is on. It likely will still be mostly full when I die at roughly twice the age I am now.

My mum, bless her, noticed I'd bought this cheap petroleum derived hair grease and thought a good gift would be some luxury version of it featuring a bearded man logo stuck onto a little dark glass container. It's the thought that counts, and the thought I can acknowledge, but the gift was returned to the store. Cosmetics are a notorious domain for Veblan goods with some quirk of psychology allowing for a basic grift of extracting more money from reductive thinkers, who assume a higher price = superior quality = superior performance. 

In my last post of this series I mentioned that a symptom of my asynchronous cognitive development appears to be bringing far more context to situations than others do, who tend frequently to consider them in isolation, or some sample of a larger picture rather than the entirety of context available.

I was very grateful to receive an invitation to a friend's niece's quinceanera celebration. Largely because it was an aspect of Mexican culture I'd heard about, but felt unlikely to experience first hand. A lot of my personal makeup wound up clashing in a very personal way on that evening, so I'm sure I'll invoke this example again in further instalments, but my plutophobia was a quiet part of it.

Firstly, I do not wish to seem an ingrate, the celebration cost me nothing to attend as a 'plus one' partner of the host family's friend and I received a delicious free meal and was made to feel included and got to observe the aforementioned living culture of Mexico. 

But I was not the intended audience of many features of the celebration, indeed the stars misaligned in such a way that what I'm sure was a fabulous quinceanera was coincident with pretty much the worst party I could imagine. Unbelievably bad (for me) such that due to my lack of credulity owing to my cultural transplant, my partner and I had no contingency, she was blindsided completely by my response to it also.

In short, quinceanera's are a bit of a problematic cultural artefact - just as weddings are problematic in WEIRD nations like Australia, where the median wedding cost is 59% of an individual's median annual salary (38.5k/65k) the quinceanera can involve similar lavish social posturing with a party for a 15 year old girl costing over USD$10k in 2012. 

I have only been to the one celebration, and it was in Mexico hosted in a large field with easily 200+ guests, of which a clear minority were children. The food was a taco-bar that closed around 6 or 6.30 pm. The actual bar stayed open until 2am, there was a dance floor and a bandstand where about four full bands performed from 6 until 2 am. At one point fireworks were set off, causing a dog "Tuna" brought by some daft hippie to bolt, tarnishing for me an evening as good as Smither's introduction to the comedy stylings of Homer Simpson by announcing a "dog not unlike Lassie has been run over in the car park."

I was at that party for 13 hours. Some 3 or 4 hours longer than the friends who had kindly invited me. I actually would not learn until I saw a breakdown of Bad Bunny's 2026 Superbowl halftime show, that it is a Hispanic cultural norm to simply hang out at parties forever, and most children have a right of passage, depicted in the halftime show by a child using the football as pillow laying down on plastic outdoor furniture that Bad Bunny wakes up, to learn to endure these (from my cultural perspective) painfully long fiestas.

The length of the party is relevant to the bands hired, and the bar tab on the cocktails that ran all night long. As a teetotaller, the bar actually didn't have any non-alcoholic substances to offer me, the first and only time I ever came across this oversight. The family of the princess may have dropped collectively something like $10k USD on this celebration certainly something roughly equivalent to the Mexican median household income of USD$5k per year. 

Having that context in my mind, whatever the personal significance and triumph of a loving family celebrating a personal milestone, the event, the institution is just gross. A living symptom of gross wealth inequality that as Gary Stephens of Gary's Economics says "the future is looking like a lot of barbed wire security fences, and I don't want to see my kids on either side of that fence."

Adam Smith Smithed It From the Get-Go

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. ~ Adam Smith, Opening paragraph of The Theory of Moral Sentiments/Part I (emphasis added by me)

I assert, and would not be the first nor the greatest to do so, that the delusion of our times is the "fuck you I got mine" attitude baked into our economic institutions. Adam Smith is not, as you can see from the above paragraph, the founder of modern economics. He was a philosopher working in a much vaster and more pluralistic social sciences. 

He is obliquely anti-Neoliberal, recognizing the necessity of trade-unions as a countermeasure to the constant conspiring of the asset owning classes to deprive workers of their fair share. Smith differentiated as our modern economic talking heads do not, between capital and rentiers, most Australian's for example would not even be able to tell me what a 'rentier' is and would likely guess it refers to a tenant. 

In "Prosperity Without Growth" by Ecological Economist Tim Jackson, the character of our orthodox economy is given as fuelled primarily by the emotion of anxiety, and terms have emerged like "the precariate" to describe the emergent class of people who are fundamentally economically insecure.

This is the noise in my head that makes it hard for me to address the bigotry of my plutophobia. As Smith asserted, too many other's happiness is necessary to me to enjoy my own, at least as far as dropping money on luxury goods and services is concerned.

Perhaps related to my asynchornious cognitive development, and again I often think of the Far Side comic with the cow that is the only one aware of her fate as a steak, I felt too aware in my private school education that my and every other cohort were deliberately being stressed to become more selfish with an emphasis placed on the literal cognitive distortion of all-or-nothing thinking. Being charitable and phrasing it thusly: my school as an institution did nothing to discourage a prevalant notion that if you didn't land in the top 20% of the state, your life was basically over.

Now I'm not unreasonable, I don't for example, forego the luxuries of food security and shelter because I'm acutely aware that among many others, there's people who do not have these things in Ukraine, Lebanon, Sudan, the Congo and Iran right now. I'm much more local in my thinking, because economies are massive institutions that tend to divide up along nation states. I can eat fried chicken without feeling too bad about Ukrainians fighting tyranny in their eastern provinces.

In my senior year of high school I was "elected"/designated* a house captain, all the student leaders of our cohort were treated to, like, a leadership training day, it involved some guest speakers of which I can only remember the guy from toastmasters, and a trust exercise where I got distracted and wound up clotheslining Bowen, and at the end of the day we got a feedback form to suggest how it might be improved for the next year. I expressed something to the effect of "I don't see why this program couldn't be delivered to everyone." 

I disliked being in an exclusive little club, and my mum, again bless her, had gone and had the shop stitch on the yellow and black striped band onto my school blazer pocket that indicated I had achieved the pinnacle of sporting achievement in lawn bowls by winning the district finals, without my consent, and "Henderson" wound up being embroided under the school crest on the pocket, again without my consent. Yeah it's great that my mum is proud and shit, but it was also kind of like signing me up to be in "club dickhead" and surrendering my entry privileges to "club based" like I wasn't happy, but I guess it's my own fault for participating in the well known lawn bowls scammola.

For, from my bigoted perspective, if there is any social good in lobster thermidor, its greatest good is as a lure with which all the reductive and rigid thinking dickwads can be ensnared and removed to a "luxury ghetto" where I know where they are and can be confident I don't have to deal with them.

Of course, I share the preferences of Chris Rock, I am delighted with a two-piece feed and do not need lobster, so I'm happy to sacrifice lobster if it means I can also herd the bad company out from the good. 

And certainly, there are people who are thoughtful, sensitive, erudite, worldly, natural, generous and interesting that have expensive tastes. My friend Ann for example, is pretty much the only person I've met so far whose company can sufficiently distract me from my bigotry when she takes me out to a fancy place. Most company though is not worth the emotional price of admission (I know I didn't pay for lunch at the Press Club.)

For me, I experience no joy, or even relief to get a seat on a life-raft as the Titanic is going down. Listening to a recent episode of "The Unbelievable Truth" on Youtube, one of the eponymous unbelievable truths in that radio program was that an analysis of survivor testimonies showed that while US male passengers were far more individualistic and thus willing to beg, borrow or steal their way onto a life boat, testimony from English survivors remarked that once their husbands has ensured they had a seat, they strolled to the back of the ship and politely smoked cigars and exchanged banter while they waited for the ship to sink.

Having not been tested, I cannot say in the moment whether I would be more US than Englishman, I know which one I identify with. But even that falls short, I would likely as a 1st or 2nd class passenger be unable to survive without crippling survivors guilt simply knowing that the lower class passengers were deprioritized. (Or what Adam Smith said, at the beginning of economics.)

Debilitation

I am not sure I could overcome my prejudice, the visceral dislike I have of being in proximity to "the finer things" to for example, take my best girl out to a fancy restaurant where I'd ask her to be my old lady. I would feel some cognitive dissonance, that I was asking someone to spend their life with me in the specific context of an activity among those I actively dislike.

I'd also urge you not to underestimate the debilitating effect I experience, of being someone 'hard to buy gifts for' I have myself complained that my mum is someone who just likes 'nice shit' and on that hand, for me my mum is someone I struggle to buy gifts for, when I can't see the point of a fine china plate or a 'lovely' writing pen. But many people who love and care about me have had to experience the expression on my face of utter alienation and disappointment and anguish as I have unwrapped some luxury good I don't want, never wanted and never will want as for me it is an intrinsically tainted thing, and then worst of all I have to see the heartbreak on their faces as they take in mine.

I have criticised the "Platinum Rule" as being inferior to both the Silver and Golden rule which goes "treat others as they wish to be treated" on the basis of recognizing that "mindreading" is a well founded cognitive distortion which the platinum rule demands on our part. But it is not a feat of mind reading when a friend or colleague attains some shiny bauble that means so much to them and so little to me, that because of my bigotry I do not have it in me to be happy or excited for them.

To me someone saying they landed their dream internship at one of "The Big n" whatever firms, puts me in mind of Larson's Far Side dog bragging to his neighbour "Ha ha biff, after we go to the drugstore and the post office I'm going to the vet's to get tutored..."

Friends that wanted to/went on to study medicine evoked mixed feelings in me. There were win/win win/lose and lose/lose outcomes, friends who wanted to be doctors out of a genuine love of their fellow man and wanting to help them at their worst, friends who wanted to be doctors for the prestige and material rewards that would incidentally make good doctors ...and friends who wanted to be doctors for the prestige and material rewards who appeared to have given little thought as to whether they should be doctorin' anyone.

In a curiosity of framing, if I am to write "people seek validation" it will come across as conceited and condescending on my part, reframe it as "people dislike feeling invalidated" and it seems to me at least a perfectly reasonable statement that needs-must say the exact same thing.

I am constantly invalidating the self-esteem people around me draw from a luxury consumption experience, which my plutophobia generally values at less-than-nothing.

Got 'til it's Gone

That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot ~ Big Yellow Taxi, Jodi Mitchell

I don't dispute Jodi Mitchell's observations, nor would I dispute that Big Yellow Taxi wasn't still 100% relevant when Counting Crows covered it in 2002, nor would I oppose someone putting out yet another cover in 2026 on a major label.

I'm going to "Yes-and" Big Yellow Taxi and just iterate it out - they also demolish the parking lot, the pink hotel, the boutique and the formally swinging hot spot. No paradises to be sure, these anachronysms from the 70s, to make way for well Emporium which replaced Lonsdale House. 

A debilitating aspect of plutophobia, is that it is very much a minority form of bigotry, and an underappreciated aspect of bigotry is the preferred side of bigotry, because the excluded side of bigotry is so viscerally ugly. But most bigots and chauvinists often value things that are objectively valuable. It is for example, very commonplace to be enamoured with Japan, and it is undisputable that Japanese culture has a lot of truly wonderful things to offer.

There are far fewer people who are enamoured with shitty, dilapidated, anachronisms. Being that my preference attempts to conserve established value, it definitionally has to be debilitating under the economic paradigm the societies I live in is based around - GDP growth, or increasing consumption of novelties, my preferences render me a kind of undramatic uninteresting enemy of the state.

I first came across this concept in an Op-ed from an Australian journalist reflecting on the working class school he attended, and talking about how his school got demolished, and he explicitly said something to the effect of "poor people's experience an erasure of their history in a way that rich people don't."

While I did end up in a private school from years 8-12, I went to two public primary schools and did year 7 in a public secondary school. My first primary school was made I think literally of 'portables' or portable classrooms, prefabricated modular classrooms that could be unloaded off the back of a truck and bolted to the ground. My second primary school also had portables though more permanent buildings, only the portable classrooms I spent most of year 7 in (some clases were in brick buildings) remain to this day, but satellite imagery on google maps shows me how much of my childhood memories have been demolished.

Here is a quirk of history though, more of my childhood classrooms have likely been demolished than my parents' and not because they are richer, but because the cheap solution of portables was likely an 80s phenomena. 

But private schools are far more likely to have 'heritage' listed buildings that cannot be touched, the wealthy are more likely to live in houses that will not be demolished for development, and instead their children are likely to displace poorer children via auctions and gentrification and demolish or renovate working class homes of prior generations as part of the gentrification process.

I'm sure almost everyone has experienced something they like not being made anymore, but as a result of my plutophobia, this is basically my whole life.

I remember attending a Syn FM end of year dinner at former Lord Mayor's John So's restaurant, I think it was Dragon Boat on Lonsdale back in the day. It was early 2000s when China was experiencing massive economic growth basically because it was finally playing catch up, like Homer getting the same chair as Lenny and Carl from the Stonecutters, these were the annoying years when China was all like "Jealous?" and I was like "Well no, we already have KFC and cars and mobile phones and the internet and international flights and sufficient calories and shopping malls and big box stores" and China was all like "You're jealous" but China's new-rich children of party hacks with pent up demand for the good life hadn't yet transformed Chinatown in the Melbourne CBD. 

Chinese restaurants were mostly Hong Kong Cantonese style, decor was always the awful yellow, red and gold and the menus always were laminated and had a minimum of 60 dishes on them. That year, Syn FM had flown out one of Eminem's friends from that other band he had that released "purple pills" and "my band" as singles, to judge a rap battle competition of Melbourne MCs and two of the finalists did a performance at the Syn FM dinner. 

The performances were freestyle and I remember the MC that clearly won rapping "I ordered 48 they gave me beef and black bean."

These classic Cantonese restaurants were good, but they are going rapidly extinct in Melbourne. Mine was Nam Loong on Russell Street an institution that had been in place for as long as I can remember, and at least 30 years. I have memories of dining their with Chan, Claire and Miki, as well as friends like Shona, Yoshi, Karl and Andrew at least. It was my spot and last year it finally had to close its doors, simply because rents were too high.

Miki aksed me "you know what?" and I likely said something monosyllabic like "what?" and she answered "it's become my favorite" of Nam Loong. I pissed her off by deliberately contravening Japanese etiquette when she tried to pass me food and I tried to accept it with my chopsticks. At first I simply forgot you only do that at Japanese funerals, but once I realised I then started pointing at Miki with my chopsticks (which is very rude) and then stuck my chopsticks in her rice (which I think might be a death threat) much more egregious breeches of ettiquitte than taking bites out of my dinner roll instead of ripping it, and ettiquette from Miki's home culture too.

But you know, once she realised I was teasing her, it was a fun joke, in a Cantonese restaurant that became her favourite and where she deliberately overordered just to take leftovers home. Nam Loong is gone and Mikayla remains, even though one I can only recall as a horrible experience and the other a repository of fond memories.

It's debilitating as shit when you aren't excited by 'new better' things, because the old is actively destroyed constantly to make way for the new. Plutophobia is a very lonely bigotry to have.

The Simple Silent Maths 201

My parents are boomers, the lived through the post-war era and experienced incredible upward social mobility. Like most boomers, everything looked really great for them up until the end of the post-war period and the beginning of Neoliberalism, at least on paper.

My parents owned multiple properties, including our family home outright. My father was an executive for the town's largest employer and while my mother was a teacher, two-income households were not mandatory yet and she had bought her own house prior to meeting my father obtained with a mortgage that was less than 4x her annual salary as a primary school teacher. 

While neither of my parents stood to inherit significant wealth from their parents, they earned enough to play keep-up-with-the-Joneses. 

The silent maths comes in through a quirk of history, almost an accident. My mother was alive at the time where the white ethnic majority of Australia referred to as 'women entering the workforce' by which they meant the advent of two-income-professional middle class households, as poor women have always had to work largely as domestic servants. The options for women though were overwhelmingly teachers college or nursing school, and while my mum became a teacher, her friend became a nurse. That nurse married a specialist surgeon, where in the post-war era before women approached anywhere near parity in medical school enrolments, nurses married doctors and achieved social mobility that way, whereas the classes have reinstated themselves now with med students now marrying each other and nurses marrying tradies.

In the meantime, my dad got a job in the same regional city as my mum's friend married a surgeon, whether this was coincidence or design I've never bothered to find out. My parents then made the fatal psychological error of winding up being the poorest people in their social group, affording them the opportunity to constantly compare themselves to the extreme rather than the average.

I remember growing up with the impression that most kids lived in houses with a pool in it. I didn't care so much not being a huge fan of pools and having never lived in climates that really warranted them for all bar a couple of summer months, I just think, and I want to stress this is my impression that like couples in open relationships succeed in ways to experience rejection even having achieved a relationship, my parents had found a way to feel poor while being quite wealthy. 

We relocated to another town, and things improved a bit, but my parents still succeeded in finding wealthier people to compare themselves to.

They won't like this at all, but the silent maths happened, I noticed the degree of independence between being rich and quality of life. This has been present in me for a long time.

One of my parent's status anxiety manifested when I first started working full time. In getting their opinion on my first ever full time employment contract before I signed it, they discovered what I was earning. Even though they raised me to understand it was gauche to ever discuss money, (which it both is and is a useful fiction to keep the working class ignorant of just how unequal and unjust compensation often is) whenever I visited my parents, that parent would download without my interest, what everyone else's kids were earning. 

They also fortunately disclosed to me, that as they remained a signatory on the bank accounts I still used from childhood that they set up for me, they'd been ringing up and checking my balances every pay period. 

This anxious behaviour came to a head where I explained that I would always take higher job satisfaction over higher compensation (which remains true) and as such, I didn't really care about what fuckface or dickwad was earning in their second year out of university. I also banned them from discussing money with me, ever, a ban that remains in place to this day. 

Likely it helped that at the time I was reading up on the Phil Jackson and Jordan years at the Chicago Bulls, and how Jordan never complained about the contracts he signed, as is frustratingly common among NBA stars, taking responsibility for what he'd agreed to. Now that's pretty easy when Jordan was paid so much by the Bulls the NBA put rules in place such that his 90s salary was only matched by Steph Curry almost two decades later in 2010s money because inflation had allowed him to be paid what Jordan got in the 90s. But it resonated with the silent maths I'd done observing my parents growing up that you wanted to have the mental health of Michael Jordan, not Scottie Pippen, great as Pippen was.

And it's not all on my parents, they weren't the only silent maths exercise I did growing up. I've known enough rich people, as in people who have substantial amounts of wealth and observed the relative independence between wealth and quality of life.

To be sure, my plutophobic bigotry is not so irrational that I have a controversial take that sort of contradicts what peer reviewed studies have shown - money is hugely important when it prevents you from abject poverty, beyond that it doesn't improve your mental health at all, possibly even starts working against it.

I know so many wealthy people who suffer that I'm not worried that they "probably think this song is about you" because the sample size is so large, that I can say objectively that it's probably not. I don't have to think of anything specific, I like most people who grew up in the vicinity of wealth, know too much dirt, that it's a fairly safe generalisation.

I'm more concerned that my plutophobia offends people (excluding my parents) who actually suffered poverty and are yet to achieve or more importantly, enjoy, a level of financial security. Furthermore, it needs saying that the Australian Economy is a heinously fucked up renteir economy, such that it's not so much a rat race but a rats-deserting-a-sinking-ship race to secure the one biggest predictor of poverty in retirement - home ownership.

The Australian housing market is capitalised at 3x the Australian share market or thereabouts, median houseprices are in the vicinity of being 9.7x the median household income, our tax code incentivises investment in the unproductive housing sector over raising capital for the productive private sector (as in our government rewards people for buying housing at objectively bad prices, and punishes people for helping publicly listed companies raise capital for investment in future growth, innovation and productivity) and it's just fucked, it's so fucked that Australia is a place where if you investigated the main driver of the modal citizens stress, anxiety, depression, frustration, anger etc. it will most likely be how much they pay for housing, and if you ask the modal Australian citizen what the single best and most important thing they have done in their lives is they will likely say 'buying my own home.'

So I don't begrudge my average fellow citizen their dreams of being so rich they might be able to afford to be extorted painful amounts of money to purchase a speculatively held superfluous housing from a 'property investor' in the dream of using that 'asset' to live in themselves. 

I do begrudge people that wish to be so rich that they can have a portfolio of houses, cosmetic procedures, international vacations, club memberships, caviar etc. aka 'obscenely rich' trying to sell me their obscene vision. 

I never had a chance to meet Biggie Smalls, and I think maybe if you grew up so poor that 'birthdays were the worst days, now we sip champagne when we thirsty' I'd be like, yeah, go for it, that's hilariously crass. 

But otherwise, pass.

Plutophobia in the Workplace

It was time for the leader to unveil his vision for the future. I can't build it up anymore without it being a disservice - it was to grow revenue by 33% over the next 5 years. AKA an uninspiring vision.

I just want to do good work, for fair compensation, I'm happy to go above and beyond in performance, but not in personal sacrifice. We made a deal. 

But I've had bosses that have grown confused and frustrated by an inability to motivate me by dangling carrots in front of my face. I've had bosses that have reduced their sales methodology and philosophy to "I always pitch growth and nobody says no to growth." Then they meet me, and I don't care about growth in sales or revenue, and lets face it, what we are ultimately talking about, is growth in consumption.

Now, Corey Doctorow coined the term "enshitification" and there's now many explainer videos and podcasts on it. The problem being that growth can be achieved through enshitifying a product, that is to say deliberately doing bad work to make a product or service worse.

The famous example is Google, owned by the same company that owns blogger.com, where having captured somewhere north of 80% of the search market, Google search could only grow in one of two ways - the first was growth of the planets population, get a billion more users, thats 800 million more google advertising eyeballs to sell. Problem is, if you start that project now, it takes 18 years to come to fruition, and Google can't exactly make people make more people to grow their market share.

Plan B, make search worse. Deliberately make it worse so people have to search twice instead of once to find what they are looking for. That's what google did, selling twice the ad-space. An engineer resigned I believe, sooner than harm the product he'd built. As an employee, I'm like that engineer, or like a public servant.

The private sector in my experience, matches plutophobia with xenophobia, fear of the other, and in the private sector, people who are happy to up marginal cost to increase marginal value are the other to those who want to minimise costs to maximise profits.

This is what is wrong with me that gives me a complicated and quite dysfunctional relationship with the job market. Would you believe me if I told you how much job seeker advice proceeds from the assumptions "you want money right? so just do whatever you need to do to get more of it."?

Wrong. So do I still need to do whatever I need to do to get some of it? And what if they offer me more than I need? Can I negotiate? 

No. Not in my experience, in fact, much as, as a non-coffee drinker I am cautioned that I am making business awkward for everyone, it is also quite awkward to let it be known you don't care that much about money.

As such, plutophobia is definitely something wrong with me, because I can jam up the whole machine with my irregularity. I learned pretty quickly I need to be conscious of my lack of fucks given about extracting the max money possible from any given employer, when I am the top performer on a team of people who give maximal fucks about extracting max money, because what I'm willing to take effectively caps their ask.

This isn't hard for me, because as I hope I've imparted, I have no objection to having lots of money, my bigotry is towards that consumption based concept of 'rich'. I do feel some guilt having money lying around that could be invested in some endeavour, I think there is on some level an ethical obligation to have only so much savings as one needs to see off any emergencies, and the rest should be invested in something productive. 

But still, I imagine it is akin to being homosexual and having to exist in a culture of insecure homophobes who need constant reassurance that they are definitely into girls and girls are the way to go sexually. It is a conscious effort to pretend to care and thus validate people who see acts of consumption as meaningful achievements. 

I'm sure I've hurt people by flicking through their wedding photo albums and only feeling bored and confused. Of people buying a new car and I make the error of saying 'enjoy' instead of asking for a ride in it.

I know I'm being rude, I just can't catch myself in the moment, and it hurts me to pretend I am other than I am. But it isn't love to put my needs above yours. I don't mean to do it, I'm just seemingly so overwhelmingly outnumbered.

Perhaps I do well with kids not through emotional intelligence and perspective taking, but simply because kids have no money.

Post Text on the Suns v Thunder Sweep '25-'26 NBA Season

A series I paid little attention to, and I suspect, though it might just be algorithms, few people did. 

The Oklahoma City Thunder do not strike me as a fun team to watch win. SGA is not awarded as many free throws as Luka Doncic of the Los Angeles Lakers, but as the reigning finals MVP, SGA appears to be of the modern point guard mould, which is being known for flopping and shooting 3s sooner than passing or running an offense.

The Pheonix Suns are also, simply, not that team anyone wants to see swept. I don't mind Booker, I think he actually has the right idol and the right attitude. I love Brooks because he is the most forward in treating Lebron with the respect Lebron actually deserves. They are also a franchise of good character throughout all their notable eras. The team of Barkley and KJ and Nash. There's no schadenfreude in seeing the Suns get swept, it is simply, disappointing.

Disappointing but not interesting. That for me is the most noteworthy thing. It doesn't bode well for the sport when the least talked about team is the presumptive champion. I think they are secondary Spurs team, given that Duncan's finals appearances were often the lowest rated series this century, even his 2 beatdowns and 1 loss to Lebron James teams. But curiously, the contemporary San Antonio Spurs are a more interesting team than the Oklahoma City Thunder what with having Victor Wembanyama who is like a modern Kareem Abdul Jabbar, but less durable.

Not to use gamer speak, but I think there is something fundamentally broken in the Oklahoma City Thunder's basketball. It's broken in the sense that I suspect SGA is both their best player and entirely irrelevant. Like, if tomorrow the shocking news came through that SGA had injured himself eating poutine and was out for the rest of the post-season, I think the OKC would still be championship contenders. But not because they are a super team. They are more like a German World Cup soccer team, unremarkably good.

In the meantime, the Suns are I feel, objectively more interesting. They are rebuilding after Durant and helping to expose KDs white-elephant/poison chalice legacy. They fought hard to get 6 more games than the regular 82, losing the 7th seed to Portland Trailblazers before ending the Golden State Warriors season who I think would also have been annihilated by the OKC. 

I feel as the only team who will get swept in round 1, they weren't the most deserving of a sweep, and it bares acknowledging that it took 84 games to get to that sweep. Life is cruel, even to millionaires like Devin Booker.