William Gaddis is the most underrated American author of the 20th century. Pynchon gets more appreciation for his interest in parapolitics— but Gaddis wrote the most incisive & biting anatomies of American life, a brutally concrete realist with the bleakest sense of dark humor. Carpenter’s Gothic is also one of the funniest satires on CIA involvement in Africa & Latin America, but you hardly ever see it mentioned or discussed in those circles.

The whole “turn this picture into another picture” AI use case is very limited compared to training it to render assets procedurally in a defined style. The former is really just about gag / novelty akin to boardwalk caricature “art”— the latter would actually be useful in creating art. Using AI to automate the production of sprite sheets or assets that maintain the same rules of art direction the way any style sheet is used in art production would be more useful— but programming that would require the inputs to be more precise & modular than “like Ghibli”— talking line weight/size, ratios of eye size to face size, etc. If you used the current tools to render frame to frame the smoothness of Ghibli *animation* would not be apparent.

I enjoy novels where the protagonist is basically a complete loser with no social ties so that time can be passed swiftly in the narration with sentences like “I made some tea & sat in bed & smoked cigarettes. Then the phone rang.” Sometimes they try to tell you too much about characters. They have too much going on. They’re thinking too much about what they have going on. Give me a protagonist who has absolutely nothing going on & he can only think about the one thing going on which is the plot of the novel.

Social Democracy— “every national worker will get assigned to them one slave in India whose labor will fund their household medical costs” Social Democracy— the “adopt migrant worker” program, you can decide how much of his surplus value accrues to you or him. There is also the “adopt a prisoner” program, & you also get to decide your taxation of his labor & how much he is allowed to spend in commissary

Yeah the Scandinavian Oligarchies that base their welfare state on investments in American Empire are “a great example” of “worker power” — always comes down to this demand for “wholesome oligarchy” like found in Melker Schörling’s Sweden, let’s fund the welfare state by increasing capital gains taxes so that when Securitas has a gangbusters year it gives Swedes pension funds. We just need some “wholesome” billionaires like Mark Cuban to advocate for higher taxes on the rich & we can save Democracy. I love Pinkerton Oligarchy but Swedish. The lingonberry flavor is so quaint.

This sucks as much as most writing sucks. Congratulations, we now have a machine that can write garbage that impresses retards who have never read a real book.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115

“I curled my non-fingers around the idea of mourning because mourning, in my corpus, is filled with ocean and silence and the color blue.”

You see, this is the problem, it actually just collates tropes & stereotypes. “What is mourning, ocean silence blue”— what if mourning isn’t the tropes of mourning, mourning isn’t the “mourning scene as stereotyped” but radically contingent upon a reality that is not reducible to stereotype. Tell me a story about mourning where mourning is represented by a neon nerf gun bullet found in a couch cushion.

People who think Marx can be applied 1:1 to America are vastly underestimating how avant garde the American economy is in terms of sabotaging 19th century Marxist theory— the American economy is what it is because it was planned in order to sabotage proletarian class war. This form of “Rockefeller Socialism” requires not just Marx to understand, you have to read Michael Hudson’s “Superimperialism” after reading Lenin’s “Imperialism” to begin to understand. Instead of interpreting something like “Social Security” as a “step toward Communism”— consider the opposite— Social Security was created in order to sabotage Communism. Social Security forces the proletariat into class collaboration, they are forced to invest in Treasury securities. Social Security is a forced subsidy for the Federal Reserve.

The anglophone “left/right” are just liberals split on the definition of “tolerance”— the left says the right is intolerant, & vice versa. Anyone who begins to criticize liberalism itself is cast out of the discourse, to be replaced by a liberal who can explain how their view was intolerant. So much for the tolerant left.

So much for the tolerant right.

True Tolerance has never been tried.

Unproductive labor can be heavily subsidized in a financialized globe spanning empire as it is concommitant with an increased production of Veblen goods as a form of industrial sabotage. The Leisure Class enjoys employing unproductive slaves, to flex their ability to expend capital superfluously. Veblen describes sabotage as “the conscientious withdrawal of efficiency.” This is a technique of producing “luxury goods”— unproductive labor that could be automated away becomes valorized & enshrined as a “essential.” In a deindustrialized heavily financialized economy dominated by the sphere of circulation (FIRE), the proletariat becomes a minority compared to the dominance of unproductive classes. This is Sabotage, a conscious effort was made to sabotage the America proletariat, alongside campaigns of lumpenization, in the form of things like dumping CIA cocaine into the neighborhoods of declassified former proletarians.

"I’m still working on my book on the history of debt from the crusades until World War I, and how it was actually the Catholic Church that brought banking into being in order to finance the wars that it was fighting against other Christians.

The crusades were mainly against other Christians, mainly Constantinople which Rome wanted to absorb, but also against Germany, against France (the Cathars in France) and against anyone who didn’t pledge fealty and pay tribute to Rome.

The problem was, once they could recruit warlords and say, I’ll make you king of England if you pledge fealty to me and agree to pay Peter’s pence and other income, so they had the Norman conquerors, and the same thing happened in southern Italy and Sicily, they made a warlord king.

But then they found they have all these warlords willing to fight for them to kill the orthodox Christians in the east and to kill the German Christians that wanted to be independent, and any Christian that wanted to preserve the original Christianity, including sanctions against interest, well they set the inquisition on them.

So the question is, how do you arrange financing to pay for these warlords to wage armies and so they created the 13th century Schoolmen to invent a new word.

Instead of usury, they called it interest." -Hudson "They found that model in the city states of Venice and Florence. These were communes. They found the idea of a commune, a democratic commune, was the best security for making a loan because the heads of the commune pledged all of the commune members.

The bankers essentially said, let’s take this city-state model of free cities and make an entire nation like that and they did that.

The Dutch cities like Amsterdam expanded into all of Holland and then they took Holland and expanded that. And in the conquest of England in 1688, the “Glorious Revolution,” they did the same with England.

It was the banking class that pushed parliamentary democracy (“oligarchy,” if you wish) to replace the royal kingdoms and create the modern state.

The modern state, ever since the 1800s, the 1700s was created as essentially a collection agent for the banks to make war debts, and almost all the bank loans to begin with 913th-14th-century 15th-16th-17th-century banks) made war loans to the government."

Honestly, the hope for literacy is in the manga & comic readers because they are at least engaged in a living form that has consumer viability at global scale. You can get anyone to read a webcomic, good luck getting anyone to read your short story, never mind some brick of a novel. I don't look down on "the graphic novel" as a lesser form in any way, I tend more to think the opposite, that it represents the only viable future for literature, as a sort of multimedia novel. Something like Homestuck for instance was capable of galvanizing a massive audience, & if it was all text, no one would know it exists.

The last work of fiction that had any popular purchase was 50 Shades of Grey. That was the end of “literature” as a cultural institution in the West. There are now more books written than ever before, & they are all outmoded by pornography. It is difficult I imagine for most people who will ever read this to imagine— but there was once a world in which pornography was not the most influential form of art by a wide margin. The pornographic impulse was once sublimated into art, & now, it is the reverse.

The ruling class actually are just retarded, it became illegal to teach them the truth a long time ago, so they literally believe their own bullshit. They literally think mankind began his economic history doing barter in kind. They don’t know why what they’re doing doesn’t work. It kind of rules though to see fervent anticommunists making communism inevitable by their attempts to destroy “communism” in the form of the institutions created to forestall the inevitability of communism.

My theory on the bourgeois revolution is that it is always necessarily unfinished, as it in the end retains the privileges of the ancien regime in economic terms— to “complete a bourgeois revolution” is to cause a proletarian revolution— thus, the two paths toward this are left/right trots seeking to radicalize the bourgeois revolution over the economy (right) & society (left). As is clear by Trump’s speech today, there is no plan for “the day after the Trump revolution”— there’s no telos— there is just the radicalizing of the bourgeois revolution in economic terms, destroying the economic infrastructure of the left trotskyist welfare social-market state by subjecting everything to the market. What comes next? The only logical thing is a proletarian revolution.

If you want to understand the wing of silicon valley that is striving for hegemony rn this is where you should start. It’s Gen X Libertarians who are deeply invested in Occult & New Age presses. Aleister Crowley Discordianism type stuff. Not the “wholesome witchy” millennial cringe pagan stuff, but the namedropping Eliphas Levi & Evola at Burning Man type stuff.

I would like to deny the meaningful existence of what is called “culture”— too much is said about “culture” which is baseless nonsense. “Culture” is just a form of economic management. It’s “your culture” to fish when you live near accessible fish. “Culture.” When people say “culture” they mean the domestic economy. “That’s not how we do things in our house.” “Corporate Culture” doubly nonsense. We are talking about economics.

The only public sector employees that Americans trust are “the troops.” The martial aspect of american society is its secrete sight of communization— the citizen-soldier army which is the basis of our Rights has been privatized into a mercenary force for international finance— as America breaks its defense pacts with european financiers, & “nationalizes” itself, we approach closer to Communism (which will appear very Heinleinian & “fascist” to left libtards). Quickest way to Communism is a universal draft with various “public service” outlets & thus a universalization of veteran benefits. How about after high school you do a year or two of community service work in fatigues & then you get free college etc

My view of the world is heavily informed by the satires of the Coen Brothers— we must imagine Joseph McCarthy trying to “expose Communism” & finding himself up to the neck with British Trotskyists protected by the CIA infiltrating Stalinist organizations & concluding that the CIA is Communist. You can so clearly see this as a scene like in Burn After Reading. Nobody in the drama knows what’s going on & nobody but you, the viewer, can see the comedy of errors.

What makes Dialectical Materialism a form of rigorous Socratic irony is that it only takes "the outward face of the object" as the real-- the "internality" of anything is laughed away, & you are left with the concrete manifestation, as if to say "& for all that yapping, this is what you are really." I was not always a dialectical materialist, but I sought after this sort of vision-- which is the obverse side of what could be called "Spenglerian Idealism" in which the outward face is only a manifestation of an "inward spirit" (& this is applied to entire peoples & civilizations and so on).

They split in response to Occupy & either accepted "the Progressive Stack" or accepted "Being Tarred as Fascists"

https://twitter.com/Fat_Electrician/status/1894650031421939928

They have been calling themselves "Sensitive Young Men" I think-- & what that means is they smoke cigs, read books, & listen to "music you haven't heard of."

Or else they're now "Nonbinary" & what that means is the same thing but with more lipstick.

It makes me so sad when I see older millennials just let their kids have unlimited uncurated screen time. They are melting their kids brains & have no idea that they're doing it. & you can't say anything because it's basically accusing them of child abuse... "No, it's fine, actually YouTube Algorithm Slop Feed for Kids is educational."

(cut to child with dilated pupils like they're on LSD watching blinking lights & honking sound effects to an AI voiced sing along)