musicalfringe

Apparently I'm Twitler

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

You forgot to mention recycling.

[DaríoK @InformeOculto]

The Biggest Scam in Britain Isn’t Technically a Scam.

The biggest scam in Britain today is not cryptocurrency, identity theft or a man from “Microsoft” calling to explain that your computer has developed a virus.

It is being made to do someone else’s job and then paying extra for the privilege.

We scan our own shopping.

We bag it.

We weigh the vegetables.

We locate the barcode on a packet of ham apparently designed by MI5.

Then the machine accuses us of placing an “unexpected item in the bagging area” when the unexpected item is the shopping we have just scanned.

A member of staff eventually arrives, looks at the machine with the exhausted expression of someone mediating a divorce, taps a code and walks away.

You have now worked an unpaid shift at Tesco.

Would you like to donate £2 to charity?

We book our own flights, print our own boarding passes, tag our own luggage and carry it to a conveyor belt ourselves.

The airline has removed almost every human interaction from the process, yet somehow there is still a £14.99 administration fee.

Administration by whom?

Me?

I administered the entire journey from my kitchen.

At this rate, passengers will soon be expected to refuel the aircraft before boarding.

Naturally, there will be a convenience fee for holding the hose.

Convenience fees are particularly impressive because they are rarely attached to anything convenient.

Buy a ticket online: booking fee.

Receive it by email: delivery fee.

Choose the seat you will physically sit in: selection fee.

Pay using money: payment fee.

The only stage without a fee is the moment you stare at the total and quietly whisper, “You absolute bastards.”

That remains complimentary.

Then there is the subscription economy.

Nothing belongs to us anymore.

Your music is rented.

Your films are rented.

Your software is rented.

Your photographs are stored in a cloud that starts sending threatening emails the moment you have taken too many pictures of the dog.

Even doorbells now want monthly payments.

You buy the doorbell.

You install the doorbell.

You connect the doorbell to your own internet.

Then the doorbell announces that seeing who is standing outside your own house is a premium feature.

Soon the kettle will refuse to boil unless you subscribe to Hot Water Plus.

The free version will produce lukewarm water twice a day, accompanied by adverts.

Cars are joining in too.

Some manufacturers have discovered that features already installed inside the vehicle can be locked behind subscriptions.

The heated seat is physically beneath you.

The heating element exists.

The car is capable of warming your backside.

But first, your backside must enter into a recurring financial agreement.

We have reached a stage of capitalism where your own buttocks can be placed behind a paywall.

Streaming was supposed to save us from expensive television packages.

For a while, it did.

Then every company created its own streaming service.

Now, to watch one programme, you need Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, Paramount+, ITVX Premium and an archaeological qualification to establish which one currently owns it.

We killed cable television and then rebuilt it with twelve separate passwords.

Every month, another £6.99 leaves your bank account for a service you last used in February to watch half a documentary about a fraudulent wellness retreat.

You keep it because cancelling requires finding the account settings, which have been hidden somewhere between “privacy choices” and “why not upgrade?”

The cancellation button is pale grey, written in six-point font and located behind a digital escape room.

Companies can accept your money with one click.

To stop them taking it, you must speak to an adviser named Connor, answer three security questions and explain why you have lost faith in the relationship.

Loyalty cards are another masterpiece.

Supermarkets tell us they are rewarding loyal customers.

They are not.

They are charging everyone else £4.50 for toothpaste unless they surrender enough personal information to reconstruct their entire domestic routine.

With the loyalty card, the toothpaste is £2.

Without it, you are treated like an international fugitive attempting to purchase restricted dental supplies.

The card does not create the discount.

It creates the threat.

“Lovely little pasta sauce you have there. Shame if something happened to the price.”

Delivery apps have perfected the same principle.

You order a £12 burger.

Then comes the delivery fee.

The service fee.

The platform fee.

The small-order fee.

The busy-area fee.

The fee for the emotional strain placed upon the app by your desire to eat.

By checkout, the burger costs £28 and arrives forty minutes later, upside down, beside a single loose chip belonging to someone called Nathan.

You complain through the app.

It offers you £1.73 in credit and asks whether the experience has been resolved.

Broadband providers deserve special recognition.

They offer internet for £24.99 a month.

Six months later, it becomes £68.42 because the “introductory period” has ended.

You call to cancel.

Suddenly, after years of unavoidable market pressures, they discover a secret tariff costing £23.

This tariff was apparently hidden beneath the floorboards and could only be released when you threatened to leave.

Estate agents operate in a similar reality.

The photographs show a vast, sunlit apartment with sweeping dimensions and enough room to host the Eurovision Song Contest.

You arrive and discover the photographer was standing inside the wardrobe using a lens developed to photograph distant galaxies.

The “second bedroom” is a cupboard containing a boiler.

The “private outdoor space” is a window that opens.

The “vibrant neighbourhood” means someone is screaming outside the off-licence at 3 a.m.

Perhaps the cleverest part of all this is the language.

Companies never admit that they have removed a service.

They have “streamlined the customer journey”.

They have not reduced staff.

They have “empowered users”.

They have not increased the price.

They have “updated the offering”.

Your chocolate bar has not become smaller.

It now comes in “new, improved, portion-conscious packaging”.

The product contains less chocolate, but apparently more personal growth.

We are told all of this is progress.

Perhaps some of it is.

Self-service can be faster.

Apps can be useful.

Subscriptions can offer value.

But somewhere along the way, companies stopped selling convenience and began charging us for the inconvenience they created.

We became the cashier, travel agent, bank clerk, technical-support department and parcel-return assistant.

We scan.

We print.

We assemble.

We troubleshoot.

We update.

We reset the password.

Then we receive an email asking us to rate the service.

What service?

I did everything.

At least old-fashioned scams had the decency to sound suspicious.

A stranger offered you £4 million from an overseas bank account and asked for your sort code.

You knew where you stood.

Modern exploitation arrives with pastel branding, a cheerful notification and a button marked “Continue”.

It is perfectly legal.

It is carefully designed.

And it renews automatically next Tuesday.

The modern customer is no longer always right. The modern customer is unpaid staff.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@practiceyrPE @Devon_Eriksen_ I agree that reverence etc. for motherhood is essential to a sustainable society, but our capitalism DID value it until about 30 years ago. We just decided that we'd rather have women spend their reproductive years doing only what can be valued in money.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@OsredAlfredson @Devon_Eriksen_ But that's not REAL capitalism!

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Of course capitalism isn't natural, you incomplete set of plastic picnic utensils.

What's natural is theft, robbery, and murder.

What's natural is anarchy, chaos, the rape of the weak by the strong, and nature red in tooth and claw.

The free market, which you call "capitalism", is not called "free" because everyone is free to do whatever they want. Because what a lot of people want to do is steal. You'll know which ones by the hammer and sickle logo they draw on things.

No, the free market is called free because it is freed from coercion and violence.

And of course it was spread by violence, you factory-defective lawn flamingo. Because it was spread by hanging all the bandits and robbers, and if hangings aren't violence I don't know what is.

And of course it's maintained by coercion, you British pub food connoisseur. If you don't coerce thieves not to steal, then they will steal everything you build faster than than you can build it.

You have to use violence to stop the violent, and coerce the coercers not to coerce.

And of course it's maintained by the superficial facade of liberal democracy, you Vogon poetry appreciator. The global average citizen is a mentally retarded third-world savage with less emotional self-control than my cat. If we let them have candidates that truly represented their agenda, then every useful thing humanity has built for the last twelve thousand years would be torn down in a week to buy them more party drugs. Followed by every woman being raped to death, and then uncomprehending starvation as they slowly and painfully learned that grocery stores don't spontaneously spawn food pickups, like in video games.

Jesus Christ, woman, you're talking about a species that evolved to live in hominid tribes of 100 apes, and throw rocks at zebras. In modern civilization, the so-called "average" person is so far out of his depth that the fish have lights on their noses.

And the more complex and sophisticated civilization gets, the more investments in the future that we need to protect, so that the retarded monkeys don't steal them all to buy more vodka and cigarettes.

Yeah, sure, sometimes capitalist systems end up defending property that someone's great-grandfather stole. But so fucking what? You think communism is gonna fix that? You think communism is gonna bring justice?

Communist nations can't afford justice. They can't even manage to feed themselves half the time. Get back to us when you've mastered the agricultural revolution, we've only been waiting since the beginning of recorded time.

The trick is to put the seeds in the dirt, guys.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@LeighGanschow @Devon_Eriksen_ @memeticsisyphus Stay away from teh aqua!

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@DustDigger @Devon_Eriksen_ Unfortunately AI will lift up the extraordinary even more.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@desquiciomal @KingTargaryenn It took me DAYS to struggle through the first episode that first time, but shortly thereafter I was hooked.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).

Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.

Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.

Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.

Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.

Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.

Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.

C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.

Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.

Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.

Alors pardon. Et au travail.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@tim_abell @NHSDigital Absolutely. It's peak USSR-style bureaucracy to game the metrics rather than fulfilling the need.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

Once again I look like a genius for hating automatic updates on principle and turning them off with extreme prejudice. https://t.co/q9HTzTFvcm

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@DrClownPhD Yep, we're kinda screwed. Roll on cryptographic signing of every video by every one of its participants.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@retog_rick @realjoshuareid They already did. Turns out the world runs on reality, not prideful delusions of mental competence.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@davidginsburg5 @realjoshuareid "claim" 😂😂

adorable

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@d1551dent_v01ce @realjoshuareid No maybe about it. We're watching it in real time.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@TheoVeltman2103 @realjoshuareid Nope, he's just the guy with their nuts in a vice and a gun to their heads.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

Looks like Orange Man of America™ has finally realised that the EU is his enemy, taken the gloves off, and decided to destroy it once and for all.

[Joshua Reid | Redpills.tv @realjoshuareid]

💥 HUGE DEVELOPMENT: The United States has notified the European Union that it wants frozen Russian sovereign assets incorporated into a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war. 🤣

That position immediately exposes a major problem for Brussels.

Europe has already functionally collateralized Russian central bank assets — not through formal seizure, but by pledging windfall profits and future proceeds from those assets to support long-term financing and loan structures for Ukraine.

This has been publicly acknowledged in EU and G7 policy frameworks over the past year.

That financing model was built on a core assumption:

Either the war would continue indefinitely, or Russia would be decisively defeated.

A negotiated peace breaks that assumption.

Once the United States asserts that frozen Russian assets must be treated as part of a settlement framework, rather than permanent war financing, several consequences follow. The EU’s legal justification weakens, the collateral underpinning those loans becomes unstable, and the long-standing claim that the asset freeze is “temporary” becomes difficult to sustain.

This is not merely a diplomatic disagreement. It is a forced accounting event — one with potential implications for Euroclear, EU financial institutions, and member-state balance sheets.

This context helps explain recent developments in Brussels. Over the past days and weeks, EU leadership has moved rapidly to bypass vetoes, expand emergency authorities, and escalate rhetoric — including renewed NATO statements about preparing for wider conflict.

The underlying strategy appears straightforward:

Treat frozen Russian assets as a de facto war chest.

In practice, that step had already been taken through collateralization, even if formal seizure was avoided.

President Trump is now explicitly challenging that structure.

By calling this out, he undermines the financial logic that sustained the war:

Asset freezes repurposed as leverage, sanctions transformed into financing tools, permanent emergency governance, and debt-backed escalation. Without those mechanisms, the EU’s war-financing model becomes difficult to maintain.

This also explains the visible urgency in European responses.

If a settlement occurs, the assets must be unwound, the loans lose their effective backing, legal exposure surfaces, and the financial burden remains in Europe — not in Russia, and not in the United States.

That is not primarily a geopolitical issue.

It is a financial stability issue.

Ukraine was never only a battlefield. It functioned as a pressure point within a broader post-1971 Atlantic financial system that relies on sanctions, asset control, and emergency authorities to remain coherent.

By forcing the asset question into the open, Trump has touched that pressure point — and the system is beginning to strain.

Ending the war does more than stop the fighting.

It forces Europe to confront how frozen sovereign assets were already used, and what happens when a war-based financing model is interrupted by peace.

That is why peace has become more destabilizing to the EU than full scale war.

🧨in short — Loan structures backed by frozen assets may have to be unwound, legal exposure clarified, and financial responsibility absorbed internally rather than deferred through emergency measures.

What was framed as temporary leverage during wartime becomes a permanent liability in peacetime.

The risk for the EU is not diplomatic embarrassment, but potential financial and institutional collapse

This is an analysis I wrote yesterday on the implications of the frozen Russian Assets —Substack:
https://t.co/HCc8HnOKCE

If you are not following @PrometheanActn you probably should be. They are the OGs and have been hitting the nail on the head.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@angloplushie @IterIntellectus It's not about ability, it's about opportunity.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@_everythingism @IterIntellectus That doesn't necessarily follow. They might be MORE enabled to make bank now that they've been freed from the voluntary financial/time load of dating, marriage, and childrearing.

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

Maybe DEI isn't quite the right term, but otherwise bang on.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

the thing about calling DEI 'economic genocide' is that it undersells it

yes, young White men were systematically excluded from careers during their peak marriage years, but that's just first-order effects.

second-order: marriage market collapse. women date across and up. men without careers become invisible to the women who would have married them and disappear. the "eligible bachelor" pool shrinks.

third-order: fertility crisis. fewer marriages, fewer children. but it's worse than just men not marrying or having families. the women who "won" the DEI lottery got careers instead of families, delayed fertility until it was too late. DEI attacked family formation from both sides, excluded men from provider roles AND diverted women from their fertility window. everyone lost.

fourth-order: psychological. young men couldn't even name what was happening to them. the same institutions that excluded them told them they were "privileged", that complaining was proof of weakness. so they internalized failure as personal inadequacy rather than systemic rigging, retreated into depression, video games, porn. the symptoms we then pathologized as "male failure". the system broke them (on purpose) and blamed them for being broken.

fifth-order: institutional trust gone. once you know positions are filled by demographics rather than competence, every credential becomes suspect (if not a priori worthless). is your doctor qualified or a diversity hire? your pilot? your engineer? you can't prove any individual is incompetent, but you can't trust any individual is competent either. medicine skepticism, academic failure, media skepticism, none of this emerged organically. it was manufactured by the DEI hire you can't be sure is qualified to treat you.

sixth-order: reality became unspeakable. noticing any of this was a fireable offense. pointing out the obvious got you called a bigot, deplatformed or fired. pure totalitarian censorship and the problem couldn't even be acknowledged (until now, finally)
men knew they were being cheated but couldn't say it. women sensed something was wrong with the men but couldn't identify it. relationships poisoned by a dynamic neither party could name.

seventh-order: the feedback loop. fewer eligible men means more women competing for a shrinking pool, more women losing the marriage market, more resentment, more "men are trash", more support for DEI, fewer eligible men and the system accelerates itself.

and the worst part is that DEI was just the economic arm. the same people and institutions pushed the complete package
"toxic masculinity" to pathologize male identity
"the future is female" as explicit zero-sum framing delusion
"believe all women" to weaponize trust against men
"men are trash" to normalize open contempt
a coordinated ideological assault on family formation.

and it even had a business model. HR departments exploded (millions of jobs invented to administer the regime). DEI consultants became a multi-billion dollar industry. politicians got voting blocs dependent on racial grievance. established boomers kept their positions while their competition was eliminated.

the architects knew what they were doing
you don't accidentally build a system that specifically targets men during peak marriage years, tells them they deserve it, makes it unspeakable to complain, attacks their identity as toxic, promotes women into career tracks that burn their fertility, then acts confused when society collapses

if you wanted to suppress the fertility of a specific demographic, engineer the breakdown of trust between the sexes, and make it illegal to notice, the playbook would look exactly like this.

DEI should be held responsible for the fertility crisis, the marriage collapse, the epidemic of male depression and suicide, the destruction of institutional trust, the atomization of society, and the manufactured war between men and women

but DEI was the weapon
the people who designed it, funded it, made it mandatory, enforced it through HR, fired anyone who resisted, called all opposition hate and racism, built careers and industries on its maintenance, they knew. and they're the ones who should be remembered as the architects of one of the worst crimes against humanity

[musicalfringe @musicalfringe]

@akuhayum I did, indeed know every one of these answers and didn't think this was remotely difficult. The alternative (wrong) answers are wildly inappropriate in context.