No, Twitter IS NOT real life. When less than 2% of the country is actively engaged with Twitter every day, and they're skewed as far to the Left as they are, Twitter doesn't represent real life in America. It's a fun house mirror.
Twitter does not represent America as a whole. It represents a small part of the country. The problem with Twitter is that people like you and corporations and media give it as much credence as they do because all of them are feeding the Twitter machine like it matters. It doesn't. It's evil and vile, and it's full of hate.
I hate Twitter, it feels like a cesspool after which I need to shower. But I love Facebook. The trick is to curate your friend list very carefully. I experience few to no problems that way.
never understood twatter or assface it's for insecure people that need people to like and follow them like it matters , it's all bs to fill egos of nobodies
This piece corroborates Dave Chapelle's point. It seems to me he's getting into trouble for stating elemental truths:
A man who identifies as a woman is not a biological woman and never will be. Twitter, a phone screen, is not real. One of the single most annoying aspects of today's press is the headline, "Twitter slams . . ." Insert anyone who won't conform. One has to be a moron to take that seriously. A very small slice of zealots is mobbing societal norms, they are the enforcers, the fire trucks in Fahrenheit 451. Chapelle sees things all too clearly and has the guts to call them out. He is setting the standard for defiance, showing cowards what 'to thine own self be true' actually looks like, a happy warrior who will not be pushed around. With so many wusses caving daily, that's an honest to God profile in courage.
When I was in college, Dr. Timothy Leary came to my campus to give a public talk. The new drug he was pushing was VR, which could not credibly be said to have existed at the time, in the mid-80s. He envisioned a future in which we would all live in VR all the time; we could, he said, attend business meetings while lying on the beach.
My thought at the time is that such a future would be possible only if there were an underclass of drones, stuck forever in "meatspace", who would tend to all those inert bodies, turning them now and again so that they at least sunburned evenly.
The Singularity is a delusion based on outdated Cartesian metaphysics; we are embodied, earthbound beings, and inextricably so. We need food, and clean air, and clean water; we need companionship and touch and the rhythm of bodily movement.
As that is the case, the "hard gods of reality" will never be done with us, and we'd do well to remember how to serve them.
I also attended a talk by Leary on my campus and at this time he was wearing white gloves and spent a lot of time speaking on aliens, much to the disgust of the student attendees that wanted to hear about his earlier works. The majority opinion was aliens weren't real and he'd lost his marbles. Interesting. Thanks for sharing your post.
Yeah, at a meet-and-greet after the talk I got close enough to Dr. Leary to see that his eyes would not focus on anyone or anything. Someone asked him how long it had been since he last dropped acid. He replied, "What time is it?"
I often enjoy the joke that the Singularity happened about fifteen years ago -- that an online consciousness of some form arose when a threshold number of computers were networked -- but it neglected to tell us for the same reason that we didn't inform our gut bacteria when we achieved self-awareness.
I love how these nerds immediately conclude that, if a world-girdling computer-based consciousness were to arise, humans would naturally be the total focus of its attention. What g/d egotists they are. We'd just be the g/d thing's microbiome -- meaning as long as it stays healthy, it won't give us a second, third, or fourth thought.
This author screams "I'm not a millennial, I'm an Xennial" all over, as if that saves him. Anyone that uses the word 'normie' unironically, like it's a everyday label, is already under the gun.
Antonio makes the galactically massive mistake that everyone under the age of 40 seems to make these days; he thinks everyone has just as much of an online social media life as he and his peers do. And that those that don't are not only in the vast minority, but should be almost pitied in their delusion. I can't tell if he's serious about this, or if this whole article is just a massive troll to get a lame laugh at our expense. Either way, he failed at both. The truth is no one really needs any of this crap he's talking about, it's all just convenient fluff.
Take myself for instance: no social media accounts whatsoever, no smart phone (only calls, texts, and a spades game for the crapper), and basically no online presence at all when I'm not sitting at my desk for a specific 'online' purpose. So I got no apps for anything, and still carry around a physical paper map in my car of the whole state I live in...something everyone should have by the way. I see almost everyone else (especially the young) walk around with their phones surgically sown to their palms, and I still definitely feel like I'm the normal one.
He even claims that the substack we're reading right now is part of this new all-encompassing metaverse...even though I'm sitting here reading it offline, by myself, with some Brian Eno lazily playing in the background, the early sun is rising outside, and the wonderful smell of my morning coffee is slowly waking me up to the new day. All of that, except the digital monitor I'm looking at, is physical and corporeal. But even the monitor is just a combined and convenient replacement for the newspaper and the telegraph. It's the computer that is the outlier, not me or everything is in the world.
I read somewhere recently that the world is changing so rapidly these days, that people have actually started to feel nostalgic for times from before they were born. From before they were even alive! I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly explains why I always had this soft spot for the sixties. I don't know if it was the great music or cheap living or rampant hedonism or something else, but that decade has always beckoned to me for some reason. And I was never alive for it.
"he thinks everyone has just as much of an online social media life as he and his peers do."
He also doesn't realize that his generation was not the first to get addicted to the Internet. Believe me, Usenet was just as addictive, but the minute you have to start paying bills and buying gas, it stops being so fascinating.
By Martinez's definition, newspapers and books would be Virtual Reality because they don't involve face to face conversations. That's just stupid. I use the Internet and social media a lot, but only as a way to talk with people who don't live nearby, tell stories to friends, and learn things I knew nothing about. That is a not a metaversical screen existence, it's digital communications, just the latest version of smoke signals and stone tablets.
This is silly in every way. First, VR has always been around. Games and imaginative play have always been VR, using rocks or chess pieces or Legos. Second, the digital version of VR has been around for 30 years and has never gained popularity. Nobody has managed to sell it. Third, what does the author mean by "powering through"? Join the cult and surrender to Zuck? When cults are multiplying, you don't solve anything by encouraging the entire population to join the cults. The solution is to point out the silliness and absurdity of the cult, and let rational people laugh instead of "powering" the cult.
In the words of that great sage, Professor Stephen Falken, the only winning move is not to play. I'm retired and I don't do Twitter or Facebook, so I am largely immune from the cancel culture - plus I couldn't care less what others think or whether I offend. It's my right to offend, and I do it freely. My email is via ProtonMail, all of which arrives through a VPN to my Brave browser, making my data less available to the tech giants and thus to the federal government. After the 2020 election I literally threw my satellite dish into my pond, electing instead to apply those fees to upping my Internet to the maximum available, where I now pick and choose my news channels. A very surprising (to me) result was that without Lamestream news on the wall all day/every day, my anxiety levels remarkably reduced. I have channeled all those wasted hours into my family with a side-order of local politics. Where I live in rural Virginia, we've had a marvelous influx of Amish, who have many lessons to teach us if we will only listen. There is a remarkable peace - and effectiveness - that comes with being in complete control of your own life.
I do as much as I know to do; that is all. I understand all the above, but remember: they cannot read your mind, your plans, or your intentions - yet. That makes them very worried, and they should be. The best way to not have the peasants as a threat is to treat them well - and more importantly, with respect.
Yes, indeed. To the extent it seems this juggernaut/car is accelerating with no end in sight, I can’t help pondering how excruciating would be the sudden halt from the grid being fried. Talk about a great reset. We’d be looking at a wholly different dystopian narrative from the metaverse one we seem headed into now… Bret Weinstein wrote an interesting piece on this idea in UnHerd a few months ago. Worth a read.
that happens , good luck , not many cars or trucks will be rolling . life will come to a standstill . in fact most anything made in the last 10 or 20 years will not work
You might be able to handle a crisis, but the harder thing is to handle the people around you who can't. Sure, I know what needs to be done to turn a sheep fleece into clothing. Who cares if someone who doesn't shoots me and steals my sheep? Even with a firearm, there are only so many people you can shoot so quickly, and you have to sleep sometime. The medieval Irish monasteries were some of the most advanced and civilized places in the world at the time and were sacked and destroyed by illiterate thugs.
Have you? You don't use it, but does it affect your life? Are the politics that govern you decided in that space. Is the curriculum being taught in your community's schools being decided in that space? Are your local "public health policies" a product of that space? Are you immune to staffing and supply chain degradation, or inflation?
Being affected by something, and actually living in it, are two very different things.
Of course we're all affected by the digital 'verse, that's not what the author is trying to say though. He's trying to say that it is the real reality, and that anything 'offline' is not.
You're asking me if my school district's curriculum is decided on social media? That employment decisions and supply chain logistics are decided on Facebook and Twitter?
Um, no. No. Social media doesn't decide those things. Do you think those decisions are made by people on social media? That's really interesting.
The 2021 season of the Atlanta Braves was not the metaverse. The Little League triumphs and tears of children I know are not the metaverse. The music recitals of other children I know are not the metaverse. Children, sports, live music are places where real people meet real people, but the "clever technologists" have no idea of this world. 95K people at Sanford Stadium in Athens, GA celebrated the World Series win of the Atlanta Braves at the University of Georgia-Missouri game last weekend. After the game the town was awash in music and human interaction. Do not know why the metaversians think the world can be made better than the true story of Jorge Soler MVP for the World Series (left Cuba in 2011).
And all this joy after the All-Star game was take away from Atlanta.
The people who live in that universe imagine it's the only one that exists, and have a hard time conceiving of anyone living without it because they are unable to.
It reminds me of some of my friends from young adulthood that we lost to heroin.
Ayup. Parallel communities aren't delusional- they're a normal response to cultural pressures throughout history.
What remains to be seen is if the "mainstream" polity will ALLOW people to secede from it. Most modern democracies aren't doing very well at preserving freedoms these days.
This is the really interesting trend -- how conservatism has kicked the Chamber of Commerce to the curb and is interested in a self-supporting, genuinely sustainable existence.
I got online in 1994. I did so as a way to escape "real life" because my personal life had blown up in my face - dropped out of grad school, got dumped by a guy, etc...the internet offered a safe haven and a way out of a life I could not manage. The safe distance between me and other people was what I craved. I could be close but not that close. They could not see me. They could only read my words. I was fully and completely protected. I was in complete control. But the internet was wide open and safe back then because people were afraid of it. They were so afraid of it they looked at people like me, who was already meeting and dating online, like we were freaks. I have watched the internet evolve all of that time. The two biggest things that disrupted our entire world up to COVID was the blogs where anyone could rise up and be an influential voice and social media. I've not seen anything as damaging to my own emotional well being and the lives of other people -- and our ability to care about any kind of truth or reality -- as these very clever social media algorithms. Its a shame, really. It all started out so well. But you are right, that we will emerge from this completely transformed and there is no other alternative. If there were, Hollywood would not be going all in on streaming platforms. They are now banking on all of doing what I did in 1994.
If you want to be unhappy and addicted to a screen then you should adopt the worldview of this article. Otherwise, turn off the screen after work and hang out with friends, neighbors and family. Pro tip: board games.
The automobile metaphor is very wrong. Liberals are trying to throw us into reverse - back to a time when elites ruled without question and the "little people" were required to be happy with the crumbs that were thrown their way. Conservatives are trying to restart the movement, long championed by what use to be liberals in the US, of returning power to people - from the government.
I had been considering reading 'Chaos Monkeys', but if that book is anything like this column it is over-rated and I will pass.
"China works on hypersonic missiles while our government, incapable of defeating a medieval religious insurgency in Afghanistan, launches a 'National Gender Strategy.'"
Yes. Yes. Yes.
The gender critical (think anti-trans) author Abigail Shrier, who has appeared on Bari's substack, ,recently interviewed Sen. Tom Cotton on her own substack. Abigail asked him whether the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party was in any way aiding the woke authoritarian left to increase political divisions within the US.
Sen. Cotton said the Chinese have a derogatory term called Baizuo (pronounced"bye-tswaw") which means "Stupid White Leftist." Baizuo refers to SJWs who care only about immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment and have no sense about real problems in the real world such as missiles and ships. The word Baizuo tells us everything we need to know about the attitudes, aspirations and actions of the CCP
Without caring for the "hardware" it eventually breaks or wears out... the metaverse is coming but it is a utopian elitist fantasy for the foreseeable future... the authoritarian force necessary to keep the physical world running while the navel gazing elite class play in their fantasy world is untenable.
This whole metaverse is a lot for my finite mind to process! I wouldn’t understand it at all if I hadn’t seen Ready Player One.
Meanwhile …this stark reality feels like the real dystopia:
“China works on hypersonic missiles while our government, incapable of defeating a medieval religious insurgency in Afghanistan, launches a “National Gender Strategy.”
No, Twitter IS NOT real life. When less than 2% of the country is actively engaged with Twitter every day, and they're skewed as far to the Left as they are, Twitter doesn't represent real life in America. It's a fun house mirror.
Twitter does not represent America as a whole. It represents a small part of the country. The problem with Twitter is that people like you and corporations and media give it as much credence as they do because all of them are feeding the Twitter machine like it matters. It doesn't. It's evil and vile, and it's full of hate.
It doesn't represent America as a whole, but it does CONTROL America as a whole.
https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/
Awful platform. I hate FB too. Opt out
I hate Twitter, it feels like a cesspool after which I need to shower. But I love Facebook. The trick is to curate your friend list very carefully. I experience few to no problems that way.
never understood twatter or assface it's for insecure people that need people to like and follow them like it matters , it's all bs to fill egos of nobodies
This piece corroborates Dave Chapelle's point. It seems to me he's getting into trouble for stating elemental truths:
A man who identifies as a woman is not a biological woman and never will be. Twitter, a phone screen, is not real. One of the single most annoying aspects of today's press is the headline, "Twitter slams . . ." Insert anyone who won't conform. One has to be a moron to take that seriously. A very small slice of zealots is mobbing societal norms, they are the enforcers, the fire trucks in Fahrenheit 451. Chapelle sees things all too clearly and has the guts to call them out. He is setting the standard for defiance, showing cowards what 'to thine own self be true' actually looks like, a happy warrior who will not be pushed around. With so many wusses caving daily, that's an honest to God profile in courage.
When I was in college, Dr. Timothy Leary came to my campus to give a public talk. The new drug he was pushing was VR, which could not credibly be said to have existed at the time, in the mid-80s. He envisioned a future in which we would all live in VR all the time; we could, he said, attend business meetings while lying on the beach.
My thought at the time is that such a future would be possible only if there were an underclass of drones, stuck forever in "meatspace", who would tend to all those inert bodies, turning them now and again so that they at least sunburned evenly.
The Singularity is a delusion based on outdated Cartesian metaphysics; we are embodied, earthbound beings, and inextricably so. We need food, and clean air, and clean water; we need companionship and touch and the rhythm of bodily movement.
As that is the case, the "hard gods of reality" will never be done with us, and we'd do well to remember how to serve them.
I also attended a talk by Leary on my campus and at this time he was wearing white gloves and spent a lot of time speaking on aliens, much to the disgust of the student attendees that wanted to hear about his earlier works. The majority opinion was aliens weren't real and he'd lost his marbles. Interesting. Thanks for sharing your post.
Yeah, at a meet-and-greet after the talk I got close enough to Dr. Leary to see that his eyes would not focus on anyone or anything. Someone asked him how long it had been since he last dropped acid. He replied, "What time is it?"
I went to high school with his nieces. They used to talk about Uncle Tim. Can you imagine having Thanksgiving dinner with your crazy Uncle Tim.
I often enjoy the joke that the Singularity happened about fifteen years ago -- that an online consciousness of some form arose when a threshold number of computers were networked -- but it neglected to tell us for the same reason that we didn't inform our gut bacteria when we achieved self-awareness.
I love how these nerds immediately conclude that, if a world-girdling computer-based consciousness were to arise, humans would naturally be the total focus of its attention. What g/d egotists they are. We'd just be the g/d thing's microbiome -- meaning as long as it stays healthy, it won't give us a second, third, or fourth thought.
This author screams "I'm not a millennial, I'm an Xennial" all over, as if that saves him. Anyone that uses the word 'normie' unironically, like it's a everyday label, is already under the gun.
Antonio makes the galactically massive mistake that everyone under the age of 40 seems to make these days; he thinks everyone has just as much of an online social media life as he and his peers do. And that those that don't are not only in the vast minority, but should be almost pitied in their delusion. I can't tell if he's serious about this, or if this whole article is just a massive troll to get a lame laugh at our expense. Either way, he failed at both. The truth is no one really needs any of this crap he's talking about, it's all just convenient fluff.
Take myself for instance: no social media accounts whatsoever, no smart phone (only calls, texts, and a spades game for the crapper), and basically no online presence at all when I'm not sitting at my desk for a specific 'online' purpose. So I got no apps for anything, and still carry around a physical paper map in my car of the whole state I live in...something everyone should have by the way. I see almost everyone else (especially the young) walk around with their phones surgically sown to their palms, and I still definitely feel like I'm the normal one.
He even claims that the substack we're reading right now is part of this new all-encompassing metaverse...even though I'm sitting here reading it offline, by myself, with some Brian Eno lazily playing in the background, the early sun is rising outside, and the wonderful smell of my morning coffee is slowly waking me up to the new day. All of that, except the digital monitor I'm looking at, is physical and corporeal. But even the monitor is just a combined and convenient replacement for the newspaper and the telegraph. It's the computer that is the outlier, not me or everything is in the world.
I read somewhere recently that the world is changing so rapidly these days, that people have actually started to feel nostalgic for times from before they were born. From before they were even alive! I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly explains why I always had this soft spot for the sixties. I don't know if it was the great music or cheap living or rampant hedonism or something else, but that decade has always beckoned to me for some reason. And I was never alive for it.
You stole literally every word of my first reaction to this article from me.
I'm about 5 minutes older than this jackass and about a thousand times healthier, from the sounds of it.
"he thinks everyone has just as much of an online social media life as he and his peers do."
He also doesn't realize that his generation was not the first to get addicted to the Internet. Believe me, Usenet was just as addictive, but the minute you have to start paying bills and buying gas, it stops being so fascinating.
By Martinez's definition, newspapers and books would be Virtual Reality because they don't involve face to face conversations. That's just stupid. I use the Internet and social media a lot, but only as a way to talk with people who don't live nearby, tell stories to friends, and learn things I knew nothing about. That is a not a metaversical screen existence, it's digital communications, just the latest version of smoke signals and stone tablets.
This is silly in every way. First, VR has always been around. Games and imaginative play have always been VR, using rocks or chess pieces or Legos. Second, the digital version of VR has been around for 30 years and has never gained popularity. Nobody has managed to sell it. Third, what does the author mean by "powering through"? Join the cult and surrender to Zuck? When cults are multiplying, you don't solve anything by encouraging the entire population to join the cults. The solution is to point out the silliness and absurdity of the cult, and let rational people laugh instead of "powering" the cult.
In the words of that great sage, Professor Stephen Falken, the only winning move is not to play. I'm retired and I don't do Twitter or Facebook, so I am largely immune from the cancel culture - plus I couldn't care less what others think or whether I offend. It's my right to offend, and I do it freely. My email is via ProtonMail, all of which arrives through a VPN to my Brave browser, making my data less available to the tech giants and thus to the federal government. After the 2020 election I literally threw my satellite dish into my pond, electing instead to apply those fees to upping my Internet to the maximum available, where I now pick and choose my news channels. A very surprising (to me) result was that without Lamestream news on the wall all day/every day, my anxiety levels remarkably reduced. I have channeled all those wasted hours into my family with a side-order of local politics. Where I live in rural Virginia, we've had a marvelous influx of Amish, who have many lessons to teach us if we will only listen. There is a remarkable peace - and effectiveness - that comes with being in complete control of your own life.
"After the 2020 election I literally threw my satellite dish into my pond..."
Regardless of where anyone's politics are, this line is outstanding. :)
sorry but vpn and brave do not make you invisible to big tech and the feds , might make you more of a target , who knows
I do as much as I know to do; that is all. I understand all the above, but remember: they cannot read your mind, your plans, or your intentions - yet. That makes them very worried, and they should be. The best way to not have the peasants as a threat is to treat them well - and more importantly, with respect.
One EMP detonation and the metaverse is dead.
Or a really bad solar storm.
Yes, indeed. To the extent it seems this juggernaut/car is accelerating with no end in sight, I can’t help pondering how excruciating would be the sudden halt from the grid being fried. Talk about a great reset. We’d be looking at a wholly different dystopian narrative from the metaverse one we seem headed into now… Bret Weinstein wrote an interesting piece on this idea in UnHerd a few months ago. Worth a read.
I read a book a few years back on this scenario - "One Second After" if I recall the title correctly.
solar storm could be much worse...
that happens , good luck , not many cars or trucks will be rolling . life will come to a standstill . in fact most anything made in the last 10 or 20 years will not work
It's all built on a foundation of sand.
yep...
i'm ready have 100 gallons of gas and 2 cars/trucks that run on points if need be at least I'll be able to move and stay warm for a bit
We've got horses! I remember the days - routine replacement of "points, plugs, condenser"...and occasionally a new distributor cap...
Meaning those who haven’t the first clue how to handle crises. I’m ready for it. Not a prepper. Just capable.
You might be able to handle a crisis, but the harder thing is to handle the people around you who can't. Sure, I know what needs to be done to turn a sheep fleece into clothing. Who cares if someone who doesn't shoots me and steals my sheep? Even with a firearm, there are only so many people you can shoot so quickly, and you have to sleep sometime. The medieval Irish monasteries were some of the most advanced and civilized places in the world at the time and were sacked and destroyed by illiterate thugs.
Sorry, guest author, but if resistance to your miserable soul-draining metaverse is futile, I've somehow achieved the impossible.
Have you? You don't use it, but does it affect your life? Are the politics that govern you decided in that space. Is the curriculum being taught in your community's schools being decided in that space? Are your local "public health policies" a product of that space? Are you immune to staffing and supply chain degradation, or inflation?
Being affected by something, and actually living in it, are two very different things.
Of course we're all affected by the digital 'verse, that's not what the author is trying to say though. He's trying to say that it is the real reality, and that anything 'offline' is not.
That's ludicrous.
You're also able to opt out of its impact a lot more than JD or the author seem to realize.
You're asking me if my school district's curriculum is decided on social media? That employment decisions and supply chain logistics are decided on Facebook and Twitter?
Um, no. No. Social media doesn't decide those things. Do you think those decisions are made by people on social media? That's really interesting.
The 2021 season of the Atlanta Braves was not the metaverse. The Little League triumphs and tears of children I know are not the metaverse. The music recitals of other children I know are not the metaverse. Children, sports, live music are places where real people meet real people, but the "clever technologists" have no idea of this world. 95K people at Sanford Stadium in Athens, GA celebrated the World Series win of the Atlanta Braves at the University of Georgia-Missouri game last weekend. After the game the town was awash in music and human interaction. Do not know why the metaversians think the world can be made better than the true story of Jorge Soler MVP for the World Series (left Cuba in 2011).
And all this joy after the All-Star game was take away from Atlanta.
The people who live in that universe imagine it's the only one that exists, and have a hard time conceiving of anyone living without it because they are unable to.
It reminds me of some of my friends from young adulthood that we lost to heroin.
It's the mainstream press. I find that these dwellers are NY Times, WaPo, Atlantic readers almost exclusive.
Conservatives are not looking for the reverse gear, they are getting out of the car. See Wyoming Catholic College.
Ayup. Parallel communities aren't delusional- they're a normal response to cultural pressures throughout history.
What remains to be seen is if the "mainstream" polity will ALLOW people to secede from it. Most modern democracies aren't doing very well at preserving freedoms these days.
This is the really interesting trend -- how conservatism has kicked the Chamber of Commerce to the curb and is interested in a self-supporting, genuinely sustainable existence.
So refreshing to kick the COC in the keister!!
I got online in 1994. I did so as a way to escape "real life" because my personal life had blown up in my face - dropped out of grad school, got dumped by a guy, etc...the internet offered a safe haven and a way out of a life I could not manage. The safe distance between me and other people was what I craved. I could be close but not that close. They could not see me. They could only read my words. I was fully and completely protected. I was in complete control. But the internet was wide open and safe back then because people were afraid of it. They were so afraid of it they looked at people like me, who was already meeting and dating online, like we were freaks. I have watched the internet evolve all of that time. The two biggest things that disrupted our entire world up to COVID was the blogs where anyone could rise up and be an influential voice and social media. I've not seen anything as damaging to my own emotional well being and the lives of other people -- and our ability to care about any kind of truth or reality -- as these very clever social media algorithms. Its a shame, really. It all started out so well. But you are right, that we will emerge from this completely transformed and there is no other alternative. If there were, Hollywood would not be going all in on streaming platforms. They are now banking on all of doing what I did in 1994.
If you want to be unhappy and addicted to a screen then you should adopt the worldview of this article. Otherwise, turn off the screen after work and hang out with friends, neighbors and family. Pro tip: board games.
The automobile metaphor is very wrong. Liberals are trying to throw us into reverse - back to a time when elites ruled without question and the "little people" were required to be happy with the crumbs that were thrown their way. Conservatives are trying to restart the movement, long championed by what use to be liberals in the US, of returning power to people - from the government.
I had been considering reading 'Chaos Monkeys', but if that book is anything like this column it is over-rated and I will pass.
"China works on hypersonic missiles while our government, incapable of defeating a medieval religious insurgency in Afghanistan, launches a 'National Gender Strategy.'"
Yes. Yes. Yes.
The gender critical (think anti-trans) author Abigail Shrier, who has appeared on Bari's substack, ,recently interviewed Sen. Tom Cotton on her own substack. Abigail asked him whether the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party was in any way aiding the woke authoritarian left to increase political divisions within the US.
Sen. Cotton said the Chinese have a derogatory term called Baizuo (pronounced"bye-tswaw") which means "Stupid White Leftist." Baizuo refers to SJWs who care only about immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment and have no sense about real problems in the real world such as missiles and ships. The word Baizuo tells us everything we need to know about the attitudes, aspirations and actions of the CCP
https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/could-the-gop-become-the-party-of
Without caring for the "hardware" it eventually breaks or wears out... the metaverse is coming but it is a utopian elitist fantasy for the foreseeable future... the authoritarian force necessary to keep the physical world running while the navel gazing elite class play in their fantasy world is untenable.
I still think they'll try.
This whole metaverse is a lot for my finite mind to process! I wouldn’t understand it at all if I hadn’t seen Ready Player One.
Meanwhile …this stark reality feels like the real dystopia:
“China works on hypersonic missiles while our government, incapable of defeating a medieval religious insurgency in Afghanistan, launches a “National Gender Strategy.”
Yikes!