Aravo Celta

Most people with active social circles at this age are just coasting by on "legacy infrastructure", they are retaining friends from school, college, old jobs or family networks. If you happen to be unlucky enough to have hit a patch of cruel, "toxic" people during those formative eras, the entire floor drops out from under you and rebuilding a network from scratch under capitalism is a completely different beast

Even without the immense labor of childcare or looking after aging parents, or the understandable priority of finding a significant other in this modern dating landscape...people are structurally burnt out ~ Wage slavery drains every drop of our surplus energy ~ So when people finally get a microscopic sliver of free time, they don't want to invest emotional capital into a stranger, they simply want to rot in peace at home alone...

I’ve met incredible people irl where the mutual desire to connect is absolutely there, but they simply do not have the physical or mental bandwidth to prioritize a brand new person over their pre-existing ecosystem

Liberals truly live in some alternate hyper individualized "live love laugh" ass reality where structural alienation can be solved by just wanting it enough or wanting it right

I'll take a commission immediately! urgently! Similar portraits for $25. Payment via PayPal.

Price list Here

DM ME

Something I think about more and more is that surely these people must know that they are full of shit, so what do they actually think they are doing?

(mostly I would say that he engages in camp-of-the-saints-posting, which is not quite as bad but still rather seriously concerning.)

Which, actually... as I understand it Camp Of The Saints (and Submission) are both rather notable for their irreligion and overall crushing sentiment of pessimism and stuff. Which could be a form of a lack of conviction.

Like, I don't really know how to explain it, sort of...

When two people disagree about, say, the best way to reduce gun violence it's fair to say they looked at confusing evidence and came to different conclusions.

If two people disagree about whether or not the Earth is flat something different is going on.

I've watched all the leading lights of the Republican party cheer loudly for exactly what they claim keeps them up at night: The politicizing of science; the use of the US military to pacify US citizens; blatant lawfare; assaults on free speech, etc. etc.

And at some point I just have to go, "If Elon Musk doesn't know that he's completely full of shit when he talks he's just delusional."

anyway, I think he really does believe that mankind is doomed if it doesn't embrace science.

but for this type of person, they believe science is when some brilliant idea is stifled by fools but eventually wins out. The conflict is central. when you or I say science we mean setting and then testing a hypothesis then repeating data to prove it. The hubble space telescope poster having dweebs like Elon say science and they mean this individualistic triumph of the truth telling ubermensch over the provincials and moralist fuddy duddies. Science is conflated in their mind with this false enlightenment myth of wide scale suppression of truth by authorities.

It is also no coincidence that the heroes of musks "science" are so often nerdy but aristocratic seeming aesthete men of leisure, often adventurers and naturalists, singular individuals who claim the discoveries, and not teams of people toiling anonymously in labs.

in that vein, RFK Jr. is exactly the pick for Musk. He is a man who is being repressed by the authorities of his day for speaking out against them with his truth. He is an aristocratic adventurer. He has his own program and his own "experiments" he does.

It drives me fucking crazy.

It's funny you say "ubermensch" because reading a bit of Nietzsche really clarified some of these thoughts for me.

Like, in this view, Musk thinks of DOGE as Gallileo, and the scientists that they fired, censured and threatened as the Catholic Church.

Musk and co. idolize hippies and psychonauts and rock stars with weird lefty politics, they idolize them as standing up to The Man. How many boomer spawn republicans have we seen who are in to Jimmy Hendrix or Rage Against the Machine or even punk bands like Dead Kennedys? How often have we seen watergate babies who have an encyclopedic knowledge of the struggles of their parents generation, with shit like the velvet underground and bans on rock and roll and andy warhol and obscenity trials, but then they themselves are anti abortion and shit?

I personally believe that in the same way that musk specifically is all about this fictitious ideal of the oppressed and silenced individualist scientist (in the Randian mode), this connects to the broader post-boomer population who has their cultural model of heroics being mostly rebel artist types revolting against social norms and mores.

To this conservative mindset, they have depoliticized WHAT those midcentury artists and rebels were revolting against, and just made it all into a pastiche of Footloose.

And so Peter Thiel talks like he, a billionaire who can talk directly to some of the most powerful world leaders and directly influence their policy decisions talks about Greta Thunberg like she sets global policy and he just, gosh he just doesn't know if he's going to be able to stop her she has so many more resources then he does and she's so much more powerful but gosh darn it, even though he's the underdog he's going to try!

And you get these sort of justifications where people go, "Well, I'm the underdog, the only way to level the playing field with my powerful opponents is to play dirty" but the person saying that is a trillionaire who has full discretion to close any government project he likes for any reason.

But no one wants to be the unfuckable dork that makes water treatment plants, because there's some level of buying into "the system" and there's no subverting, there's no transgressiveness, and so you end up with everyone claiming to be speaking truth to power.

The only people left who are "the man" are an ever aging, ever ablated, sclerotic liberal bureaucratic caste. They have the misfortune of being old enough to not really match up with the furthest excesses of "woke" type leftist culture war, and then also not insane WWG1WGA esoteric hitlerist conspiracy theorist for the rightist anti DEI crowd.

A gift to myself

Something I think about more and more is that surely these people must know that they are full of shit, so what do they actually think they are doing?

(mostly I would say that he engages in camp-of-the-saints-posting, which is not quite as bad but still rather seriously concerning.)

Which, actually... as I understand it Camp Of The Saints (and Submission) are both rather notable for their irreligion and overall crushing sentiment of pessimism and stuff. Which could be a form of a lack of conviction.

Like, I don't really know how to explain it, sort of...

When two people disagree about, say, the best way to reduce gun violence it's fair to say they looked at confusing evidence and came to different conclusions.

If two people disagree about whether or not the Earth is flat something different is going on.

I've watched all the leading lights of the Republican party cheer loudly for exactly what they claim keeps them up at night: The politicizing of science; the use of the US military to pacify US citizens; blatant lawfare; assaults on free speech, etc. etc.

And at some point I just have to go, "If Elon Musk doesn't know that he's completely full of shit when he talks he's just delusional."

anyway, I think he really does believe that mankind is doomed if it doesn't embrace science.

but for this type of person, they believe science is when some brilliant idea is stifled by fools but eventually wins out. The conflict is central. when you or I say science we mean setting and then testing a hypothesis then repeating data to prove it. The hubble space telescope poster having dweebs like Elon say science and they mean this individualistic triumph of the truth telling ubermensch over the provincials and moralist fuddy duddies. Science is conflated in their mind with this false enlightenment myth of wide scale suppression of truth by authorities.

It is also no coincidence that the heroes of musks "science" are so often nerdy but aristocratic seeming aesthete men of leisure, often adventurers and naturalists, singular individuals who claim the discoveries, and not teams of people toiling anonymously in labs.

in that vein, RFK Jr. is exactly the pick for Musk. He is a man who is being repressed by the authorities of his day for speaking out against them with his truth. He is an aristocratic adventurer. He has his own program and his own "experiments" he does.

It drives me fucking crazy.

It's funny you say "ubermensch" because reading a bit of Nietzsche really clarified some of these thoughts for me.

Like, in this view, Musk thinks of DOGE as Gallileo, and the scientists that they fired, censured and threatened as the Catholic Church.

Musk and co. idolize hippies and psychonauts and rock stars with weird lefty politics, they idolize them as standing up to The Man. How many boomer spawn republicans have we seen who are in to Jimmy Hendrix or Rage Against the Machine or even punk bands like Dead Kennedys? How often have we seen watergate babies who have an encyclopedic knowledge of the struggles of their parents generation, with shit like the velvet underground and bans on rock and roll and andy warhol and obscenity trials, but then they themselves are anti abortion and shit?

I personally believe that in the same way that musk specifically is all about this fictitious ideal of the oppressed and silenced individualist scientist (in the Randian mode), this connects to the broader post-boomer population who has their cultural model of heroics being mostly rebel artist types revolting against social norms and mores.

To this conservative mindset, they have depoliticized WHAT those midcentury artists and rebels were revolting against, and just made it all into a pastiche of Footloose.

Something I think about more and more is that surely these people must know that they are full of shit, so what do they actually think they are doing?

(mostly I would say that he engages in camp-of-the-saints-posting, which is not quite as bad but still rather seriously concerning.)

Which, actually... as I understand it Camp Of The Saints (and Submission) are both rather notable for their irreligion and overall crushing sentiment of pessimism and stuff. Which could be a form of a lack of conviction.

Like, I don't really know how to explain it, sort of...

When two people disagree about, say, the best way to reduce gun violence it's fair to say they looked at confusing evidence and came to different conclusions.

If two people disagree about whether or not the Earth is flat something different is going on.

I've watched all the leading lights of the Republican party cheer loudly for exactly what they claim keeps them up at night: The politicizing of science; the use of the US military to pacify US citizens; blatant lawfare; assaults on free speech, etc. etc.

And at some point I just have to go, "If Elon Musk doesn't know that he's completely full of shit when he talks he's just delusional."

anyway, I think he really does believe that mankind is doomed if it doesn't embrace science.

but for this type of person, they believe science is when some brilliant idea is stifled by fools but eventually wins out. The conflict is central. when you or I say science we mean setting and then testing a hypothesis then repeating data to prove it. The hubble space telescope poster having dweebs like Elon say science and they mean this individualistic triumph of the truth telling ubermensch over the provincials and moralist fuddy duddies. Science is conflated in their mind with this false enlightenment myth of wide scale suppression of truth by authorities.

It is also no coincidence that the heroes of musks "science" are so often nerdy but aristocratic seeming aesthete men of leisure, often adventurers and naturalists, singular individuals who claim the discoveries, and not teams of people toiling anonymously in labs.

in that vein, RFK Jr. is exactly the pick for Musk. He is a man who is being repressed by the authorities of his day for speaking out against them with his truth. He is an aristocratic adventurer. He has his own program and his own "experiments" he does.

so, Tony Blair is already doing this with ID cards in Turkmenistan. Sir Keir can maybe go to Equatorial Guinea and try convincing them to ban smoking and sweet flavored vapes and choking porn.

If Trump manages to cheat the rope or the reaper before leaving office he can go do something stupid to Ryugyong hotel. There's almost certainly a pool in there he can do something insane to.