Month: January 2017

Attention Trump Believers: You’ve Been Had

If you think Trump is this grand glorious herald of a new right wing regressive age I’ve got some bad news for you.

You’re a total rube if you expect anything from Trump other than a virtual Obama clone in terms of actual policy and governance.

We’ll see TPP,  tax cuts for your owners, and pointless bickering over ultimately meaningless social issues as a distraction.

Trump isn’t POTUS anymore than Obama was. What you should all be saying is: All hail the 12th term of glorious leader Goldman Sachs.

If you seriously think anything is gonna substantively change that wasn’t already going to simply because the White House has an R on it now instead of a D, you haven’t been paying attention to the last 20+ years where since Carter the “democrats” have been republicans in literally all but name and rhetoric.

I hated Clinton more than Trump btw. She was actually dangerous because the one thing a president actually can do unilaterally is wage war. (Which is why Obama was able to take us from two to seven in eight years regardless of anyone else’s opinion.)

The only reason Trump is special is because the media/DNC/RNC the 1% own spent literally billions in cash and air time screaming that lie at you.

Your fantasy of a great right wing regression is just that. The arc of history is as one way as time’s arrow. You’re on the wrong side of global history’s objective arc. Any belief otherwise is as doomed as ISIS’s global caliphate delusions.

History doesn’t go backwards over the long term. That’s why we call it history. XD

Even if nuclear global war happened or a massive asteroid impact it wouldn’t set us back so long as a single bookcase of technical or historical knowledge survived. Let alone a flash drive or a print out of Wikipedia. History ultimately goes in one direction and you’re kidding yourself if you honestly think anything will change that.

But just for some Trump specifics: “Lock her up” turned into forgive and forget. The wall turned into a fence, and then a metaphor. Drain the swamp, turned into Appoint the swamp. Repeal the ACA turned into “it’s not ALL bad.” And that was all before the man was even sworn in.

You got bilked.

The ONLY way he gets to actually change anything (and gain more power) is if he runs with the populist positions that caused Bernie’s rise. Kinda like how he won the rust belt states being an American middle class labor protectionist (in rhetoric at least) EXACTLY like Bernie.

There aren’t any massively popular regressive populist positions left. The right wing already won on all those fronts via neolibs and flat out corruption. There’s no where for Trump to go but center or left. Thus at best for degenerate psychopaths he’ll go center, like every president since Carter.

Maybe he’ll get to go a little right on practically meaningless social issues. (Sorry crazed leftists, but who you get to marry or which sign is on the bathroom you shit in really isn’t important in any real way compared to war and the economy.)

The only reason Trump won is because the DNC cheated the other vastly more popular and capable populist out of his chance to run against Trump and instead installing the ONLY living human he could actually beat. HRC. Nixon/Kissinger in a pantsuit.

Do you even politics?

TV doesn’t count.

The Ethics of Adblocking

I’d just like to point out that the shadiest of behaviors in the context of digital advertising are logically ethical if you grant the premise that charging for data copies ever is ethical.

(Charging per hour to create or manage data is entirely different as that is equivalent to charging to build furniture or the like. Also privacy rights are not intellectual property law.)

Essentially, logically, you are either a hardcore intellectual property law abolitionist like myself, or you are in favor of commoditizing and privatizing every single bit. If at any point you say with regard to profit seeking shenanigans “that’s going too far” you’ve become logically inconsistent, cherry picking, and hypocritical because “muh income” is a fallacious argument you’ve already accepted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy

Either every piece of data ever (including every individual elemental digit, letter, bit, concept, shade, or symbol) should be exposed (to protect profits) and someone’s property, or it should all be confidential (the opposite of open to perpetual “fraud” inspection) and free (as in speech and beer) where the concept of “owning” a piece of data is a contradiction in terms in the same way now that the idea of owning a letter is.

Logically, you really have to pick one. But of course humans are free to be illogical and what we have here as a result is in essence a religious conflict with an infinite range of denominations.

As an IPL abolitionist, I adblock on principal first, safety second, and mental health third.

That third one is really important and rarely if ever mentioned. Neurologically and psychologically you can’t actually disregard an ad. It gets filed and processed by your brain regardless of your conscious will. You must first see something to choose to disregard it, and by then for some brain processes it’s already too late.

(Don’t think of an elephant right now. See? Too late.)

The cumulative impact of these unwanted intrusions is harmful to cognition in my opinion. You start getting false impressions about ratios and popularity of certain concepts and new defaults form in your mind that aren’t actually majority positions. These false positions are crafted expressly to open you to further manipulation.

The preferable situation is to it impossible to own any abstraction. You may take credit for discovering or inventing it, but you don’t ever get to own it. That is, the selling of copies or access is legal but it’s also perfectly legal for the buyer to in turn sell copies as well. This would put everything in the public domain that isn’t private, like medical records and your personal stuff. Restricting the sharing that data would be handled case by case from other directions on other grounds, such as privacy violations not profit or quasi-property protections.

Any effort that literally can’t or won’t exist without the the current IPL system profit motive, wouldn’t or couldn’t, and that would be the price we pay for the utility gained on the other end of everyone being able to remix everything and all software and art and the like being collaborative.