A Strong Cuppa

It’s the only explanation I see for any of this insanity.

Just heard an interesting theory by ‘Eli the Computer Guy’ on The Tech Report: In the tech over-hiring 6 years ago, there would have been some people among the new hires who were unqualified. In these 6 years, some of them would have been promoted to managers, still without understanding the work.

To everyone asking, ‘If AI takes all junior positions, then how will we find the people for the senior positions once the current executives retire?’, the answer is, of course

✨nepotism✨

As Trump and the US repeat their threats to the sovereignty of an EU member state for the 100th time, here is a friendly reminder that the current threats to European peace and territory both come from white Christian nationalists: the one in Russia and the one in USA.

The main ingredient is separation. Everyone should be strictly separated from everyone else. Any kind of mixing equals chaos and Armageddon.

For example, women must be separate from men, and girls must be separate from boys. This is, in part, why a vicious culture war is being fought on the backs of transgender and non-binary people, because they dare to cross the forbidden red lines (and challenge the *inalienable* hierarchy).

Social classes should be strictly delineated, they should be suspicious of each other and preferably have nothing to do with each other. If they meet, all alarms are blaring, ‘Retreat! Retreat!’

City-dwellers and people in rural areas should never meet and find common ground on anything.

Unions are evil by virtue of uniting people instead of separating them.

Different generations must be each other’s enemies. They can’t have anything in common or teach each other anything, they should sneer at each other and only meet to point fingers at each other.

Nations should obviously keep people separate from other nations. The separation is crucial when rulers want to sent the plebs to die in their wars so they can amass more riches. They would be less willing to kill and be killed if they realised that the other side were people too.

Religion is popular with conservatives for the same reason. It is a useful marker for Us and Them and can be used to justify aggression in a pinch.

No one can be two things at once, it’s simply unnatural. This starts in school: You are either academic or sporty or artistic. Not all of those things at the same time. Teach kids to form their little tribes as early as possible. Get them while they’re young.

To be bilingual is bad. To be a dual citizen is even worse, it’s like having no home at all, nowhere to belong to. It’s being a citizen of nowhere. (War is peace. Freedom is slavery.)

All this separation is handy for when you want to tell people what The Others are like. If they never meet on friendly terms, you can tailor that story to suit your needs exactly. Very practical!

The internet threatened to break down a lot of those barriers between all the little boxes people were sorted into, but worry not! The tech overlords are here to restore order. Their algorithms are designed in detail to separate, separate, separate, more than ever before.

All the information and global communication that could bring humanity together has instead been repurposed to push people more and more apart. Show everyone their own reality, confine them to their echo chambers and always serve rage bait first. (Have you noticed? Any time you join a new platform or make a new profile somewhere, the first thing you get is rage and fury. Very Interesting.)

Always know your place, stay in your lane, and police anyone who steps out of line.

Look at what beauty humans are capable of, yet we allow the worst of us to be in power.

Remember how since at least the 1990s Europeans were taught that Muslims were the ultimate threat to everything they had ever known, how they would destroy the European way of life and so on? And European countries jumped on the American crusades in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever they felt like invading?

Fast forward to today:

USA (Christian) regularly threatens European territory with invasion

Russia (Christian) has for years been waging a war on the outskirts of the EU while sending many not-so-subtle threats to central Europe (just today I read that a prominent figure in Russia recommends nuclear annihilation)

I just watched this video from The Financial Diet regarding the discourse surrounding the absolutely skeletal celebrities we've been seeing on the red carpets lately. OP Chelsea's point is (paraphrasing) that it's crazy we can't call a spade a spade and call this out, and that people are either pretending that everything is fine, or getting dunked on for saying, 'This looks extremely unhealthy and life threatening' as if that's somehow misogynist.

(On that note, I wonder if this post will get banned by tumblr. I haven't been back on here that long and am not up on all the no-no words. I guess I'm about to find out.)

The above video framed the whole topic as disordered eating and a mental illness, and I've got to say, I never even thought of it that way.

Yes, I agree that some of the celebrities look like skin and bone. Yes, they look like they are minutes away from their organs shutting down. I am aware of EDs and yes, this is what they can produce, and yet, that was not my read of the situation at all.

To me it looks like a class thing. It feels like the extremely rich are aware that the majority of people are struggling more and more financially, and so the current status symbol is making it extremely clear that you are so rich that you can exist on the brink of death because you don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from.

I mean, let's be real, they look like they would not survive actual food scarcity to any degree at this point. That's the point, they seem to be saying, 'Look how unbothered I am, I have no need to take care of myself physically'.

And I don't buy that they're under societal pressure to be that skinny. For one, they're not skinny, they're dying, and for another, they are insanely, astronomically rich. They are removed from society altogether. This is a flex, pure and simple.

'I am so safe and rich that I can starve myself and I’ll still be fine.' There's no real lack here on any level.

A lot of effort is being put into not making any effort.

Evil people and companies are expending untold energy on making sure they can continue to be evil when it would cost them less than a tenth of that to be useful to society and contribute to all of our progress. See: Elon Musk; anyone in AI.

Useless people are doubling down on being useless and, again, spending untold energy campaigning and demanding to be admired for their uselessness, instead of just becoming useful. See: Andrew Tate; people who blame DEI for their own mediocrity.

There seem to be two options when it comes to all the many friends Epstein seems to have had.

Either they knew what he was doing and were perhaps doing it with him (he was hardly the one and only abuser of those girls and women), in which case they are evil and should not hold any positions of power.

Or they ‘didn’t know’ what was happening, when we can now see overwhelming evidence of crimes, even with just a couple of percent of the files released, in which case they are extraordinarily dumb and should not hold any positions of power.

There was enough evidence in that pitiful court case that concluded in his sweetheart deal in 2008 for anyone who cared to look.

I’ve just paused listening to a podcast regarding Norway’s crown princess Mette-Marit’s relationship with Epstein and she’s one of the people who ‘didn’t know’. She googled him herself, according to one of the emails released, and wrote that it ‘didn’t look good 🙂’.

My first thought was ‘she googled him?!’. Don’t these people have security advisors, aren’t people vetted before they ever get near someone in a royal family? But then I immediately realised, the money is how they are vetted.

If Anna Delvey taught us anything, it’s that rich people suspend all brain activity as soon as they think you’re one of them.

Look at what beauty humans are capable of, yet we allow the worst of us to be in power.

I went to the cinema the other night. It was Wuthering Heights which I know everyone said wasn’t that good, and I agree, we’ll get to that later.

The audience was mostly youths (how do you do, fellow kids?), and oh my gosh.

Not only were many of them just straight up talking throughout the film like they didn’t know the difference between going to the cinema and having a Netflix night at home with friends, but they were also on their phones. So. Effing. Much.

The film may not have been amazing but are people’s brains truly that fried?

How do they function if they can’t spend a solid 10 mins without their phone’s zombifying beam of light? Are they able to learn anything anymore? How do they plan on having a job some day? I am honestly curious. How does one have any job if one can’t focus at all?

There is an episode of The Outer Limits I saw 100 years ago and am reminded of daily now, whether by another AI epic phail or by young people embracing their zombie existence. It’s called Stream of Consciousness and it perfectly describes the future we are so confidently striding towards.

As for Wuthering Heights, it missed the mark. The music was doing a lot of heavy lifting. The kid actors were quite good. The first third or so was rather good, then the whole film went cheap. So much sex, so little substance. The aesthetic was dubious, but I suppose they have to turn up the dial on those things these days.

I don’t know, man. If cinema starts going by way of Netflix writing rooms where they’re told to write for people who are double-screening, there won’t be any point in going.

And the people who retain the ability to read a book or sit and enjoy a film or performance will be considered geniuses, I guess. Like that one guy in the Outer Limits episode.