"Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics."
– Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
this is so despicable, if we thought the loneliness epidemic was already bad, now we have the richest most powerful companies encouraging loneliness. these tech CEOs want us to only have ai friends
The American empire had the most prestigious university system in the world. Infinite cultural capital flowed from that. Everyone on the planet wanted to study here. What did we do? We blew it up because Israel ordered us to. Has anything like this ever happened in history?
New ideologies can seem “incoherent” to outsiders who can’t see the connections between items in the new opinion bundles. This doesn’t mean these groups “aren’t thinking ideologically”; rather, it’s that what seems (to you) like a random assemblage of ideas *is* the ideology.
people will dissect the CEO shooter's online presence for years but the question of "what radicalized him" has a pretty obvious answer
he posted X-rays of his back surgery
he read multiple books about chronic back pain
he shot a health insurance CEO
he was radicalized by pain
Michael Lind observes that the managerial elite has ossified into a hereditary aristocracy, one that masquerades as a credentialed meritocracy. There’s deep resistance to acknowledging this. Professional-class children are prepared from birth to become professional-class adults.
The Hawk Tuah girl going from inexplicable celebrity podcaster to crypto memecoin scammer within a matter of months is an incredible encapsulation of the current state of American culture
“It’s vulgar to celebrate death !” every single meal he bought with the money he made denying insurance claims was a celebration of death 👍 a whole life lived in celebration of death, decades and decades of raising a glass to quiet lucrative death . THAT is vulgar