This Shit Sucks So Bad, Man

So, hey. I need to get some things off my chest.

In recent weeks, I have found myself in despair over the current political moment which we are all currently living through. As an American, I was saddened when Trump won a second term, and I’ve been alarmed and feeling defeated and helpless as he’s run roughshod over the bureaucratic state built up over the last two hundred odd years, ripping out the copper wiring and selling it for parts.

Boring Evil

I don’t need to go on about the details of what’s going on, just open a damn newspaper, or a web browser I guess. Thousands of people fired, grants canceled, agencies gutted and shuttered, so on and so forth, day after day. Everyone fighting against him just hoping that a judge will tell him to stop and that he’ll actually listen.

The thing that’s especially maddening is that there’s nothing interesting about any of this. The first Trump presidency was a big clown show that everyone was forced to be a part of. Media organizations had a field day with all the intrigue in the white house and all the legal battles and whatnot, while things mostly continued on as before. Every now and then the president would say something completely insane and everyone would laugh it off and ignore him.

Now, it’s just happening. He found people who have a real vision and have the will to make things happen, and these awful things are actually happening. And it’s all just so… stupid, pointless, and cruel. And all the political pundits and media commentators can’t help themselves but point that out, over and over again, as if it matters at all.

There is a desire for this to be a neat little narrative where things follow a certain pattern and resolve in a satisfying way. That the idiotic decisions of the president and his lackeys will spell their own doom, that their lack of understanding will cause the whole thing to come undone. But that isn’t necessarily how things will go. There is no poetic justice in real life, except by happenstance or hard work. It’s very possible to simply be awful and wreck things and continue on with your life.

Dark Enlightenment

In the modern world, we are not actually in a state of desperate survival. You can run things inefficiently and still get by just fine. So much of how we conduct ourselves in everyday life is a matter of aesthetics, especially now that so much of public discourse has moved online, where you have so much more control over how you are perceived by others.

As technology has improved and the standards that keep us all safe fade into the wallpaper, we all take it for granted that things will maintain a certain level of comfort and safety. As you cry and whine about not being able to hire “the best” for a role, you are reopening the door for mediocrity, and it literally doesn’t matter, because true excellence isn’t something anyone anywhere needs to care about.

Competence is enough to run the world, but if you pretend that it isn’t you can whip people into a frenzy and make up whatever bullshit reasons you want for excluding whatever outgroup you want. You can bring back gutter racism if you couch it in the right terms. That’s what these fucking assholes are doing, taking advantage of this gap in understanding how the world works in order to exploit and harm people even more.

It’s never fuckin’ enough for these absolute shitheads. It figures that the only people with the will to actually change things are the people who want to make everything worse for no reason. A paroxysm of rage from people who have everything except respect.

All these motherfuckers think they’re Ahab. Someone wrote a mean tweet about them, and they go off and start talking about restoring a sense of justice to the world, meaning that there shouldn’t be black people in universities.

True Idiocracy

It’s hard to fight against it in earnest because it is just so fucking stupid. It’s so simple and basic and there’s nothing underneath. There’s no grand theory to argue with, there’s no political strategizing going on, it’s just “here’s my view of the world, put up or shut up”. And all the leadership of the opposition party, the democrats, are failing to live up to that challenge.

Why was Elon Musk so eager to seize control of the US government’s payment systems as quickly as possible? Because he wants to have final say about who gets paid, and ideally it will only be him, forever. Someone sues? They win and a judge orders you must pay them? Well, who has the button? It’s not the judge, it’s some dipshit college kid who’s taking orders from the richest man in the world, and he’s not gonna send one penny to someone he doesn’t personally want to.

Both Elon and Trump are infamous for just… not paying bills. Not paying employees, not paying contractors, not paying rent on buildings. Not following the rules, and knowing that they can just get away with it or cover it up quietly. They are the perfect people to take a flawed system that kinda works and implode it into a smoldering wreck that doesn’t function at all.

There’s not going to be some grand moment of finality, a big confrontation. It’s already happening, every single day, little by little. A little bit more power, a little bit more impunity, chipping away a little more. Another agency gutten, another thousand people out of well-paying government jobs, another science project cut back, another dozen people deported without recourse.

And ohhhhh people on the left are gonna be soooooooooo good at diagnosing it. We’re gonna come up with all kinds of fancy theories and new terms to describe the specific flavor of fascism going on. We’ll describe it down to the micron, we’ll find all the causes, we’ll name every collaborator. And wait patiently for the revolution to come while we keep telling people to organize and join a union.

The Answers

The other thing that is so maddening about all this, the part that makes me pull my hair out, and has been for years before this, is that… this isn’t some great mystery. There isn’t some big riddle at the heart of politics that has to be solved. There isn’t actually a need for all this energy that is spent around crafting novel policy ideas and tinkering around the edges of existing political projects

This is fucking first grade shit. All the studies show, time and time again, that strong social policies are the most successful. You treat people well, give them a say, give them a safety net, collaborate and work together, you will make great things happen. But this runs against the American notion of rugged individualism and independence, as well as old protestant ideas of work ethic and self-denial as a form of flagellation and savlation.

It’s the same bullshit everywhere. Either someone is making money and doesn’t want to give it up, or they have some philosophical objection to a solution that is proven to work in the real world.

How do you fix homelessness? Give people homes. Give them money. Have a social safety net. it’s cheaper and more effective. People get off the street, get back to work, are happier, lead better lives, have bigger families, etc. All this shit people say they want, but what they actually care about more is doing it in a way that comports witht their aesthetic and moral taste. They want people to suffer, nobly, so they can be uplifted by the holy power of Hard Work, rather than receiving an icky government handout.

I’ve heard this shit all my fucking life! Why can’t we have good public transportation? Because we all want to do our own thing and have cars so we can have the glorious freedom of suburban sprawl, and avoid the icky, ugly people on the city bus.

What do you do about climate change, the biggest existential threat to human survival in the long term? Embrace other sources of energy, work with indigenous groups and scientists to create better farming practices, etc. All this boring shit that nobody cares about because it’s not cool and exciting.

There are solutions that would make life better for everyone available. The previous liberal government was working extremely slowly and half-heartedly towards implementing some of them, which is why it was an utter failure that got thrown out on its ear.

I feel absolutely politically homeless. Caught between the true face of evil who is using the power they have to change the world and a bunch of mealy-mouthed idiots who don’t want to rock the boat. People with a great imagination of horrors to inflict on their enemies (basically everyone in the world who isn’t a white man) and people whose imagination starts and ends at tinkering with tax rates. None of these assholes can truly imagine a better world.

It fucking sucks and I hate it. That’s it and that’s all!!

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Ugh. Thank you for indulging me, I just had to vent a little bit. It’s very cathartic to just put this to words and get it out there, y’know.

Who am I to complain, really? Just some dude livin’ on the west coast, insulated from most of this bullshit. But then, I don’t need to justify myself either. Everyone has the right to complain about things that suck as much as this.

I could go back and add a bunch of citation links for things mentioned, but I don’t wanna. You know. You already know.