I bet I could do a chart of likes and retweets of my posts and show you how even people who generally agree with me hesitate when they see the word "socialism". It's like a lot of you still can't quite bring yourselves to go that far off the script. "Capitalism sucks, but...." I'm not a full bore communist. I think there's a place for capitalism in society... just not in the driver's seat. Socialism for the necessities, capitalism for the luxuries, I think. But people don't seem to understand what that means, unsurprisingly.

So let's talk about climate survival in this new America.

(If you voted for Trump, this isn't for you because I don't care what happens to you or your community and if you wanna read this thread you'll have to look at queers and antifa art to do it, so enjoy, Nazi.) Any possibility of disaster mitigation is gone now. There will be little or no relief or aid from the government when disasters hit. And soon your insurance will be canceled. So the only thing you have is yourself and your community, and probably not even your community.

There are 262,083,034 Americans of voting age. If 262,083,033 of them had voted for Trump, I'd call 262,083,033 of them Nazis. If 7,999,999,999 people on earth are wrong, I'll tell every single one of them to fuck off into the air.

I do not care about numbers. I don't care why people voted for Trump. I don't care if they think they're not bigots. I don't care if they were confused or tricked. I don't care what they sincerely believe. I don't care about their psychology or education or lack thereof. I only care what they did.

OK, let me solve American "economic anxiety" very quickly. I'm gonna sort it out for you in less than ten tweets and then you won't have that excuse anymore. You ready? Here goes.

The cause is capitalism and greed. That's it. Nothing else. Just that. 1. Your job went away because some prick figured out he could pay a guy in China or Mexico to do it for a tenth of the wages and keep the difference. He doesn't care about you or your job or your town or your family or America. Just his bottom line.

I see a lot of you talking about moving to another country. Move to California instead. If you can't manage that for financial or logistical reasons, you are damn sure not immigrating to England or New Zealand or even Canada. Sorry, that's just a fact. Trust me on this. The likelihood is that no other country wants you unless you have a very unique set of labor skills. And it's much harder to immigrate to most countries than it is to the US. It costs low to mid five figures just for the legal fees alone, and you have to prove your net worth.

The Apprentice is absolutely amazing and both Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong deserve Oscars for their performances. Especially Strong. My God. He absolutely nails that absolute horror of a human being, those dead eyes. It's the most skin-crawling performance I've ever seen. The problem with the film is that it tries to humanize Trump, find the real person inside. But you can't, because there isn't one. There is no secret boy inside of Trump. He is absolutely 100% surface. There's nothing underneath. I know that without question.

I have the word "entropy" in Chinese tattooed on my forearm. Do you know what entropy is? It has a number of definitions, but let's start with this one: "The degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity."

What does that mean? It means that everything that happens in the universe, every action and reaction, dissipates energy. At the end of all things, the universe will be a cold uniform void of all the energy that ever existed in it, spread evenly everywhere.

It is the core truth of reality.

Heavy duty garbage and Ziploc bags are very useful in flood/storm situations. You can put your stuff in Ziplocs inside your main bag and then wrap your main bag in a garbage bag or two to keep it waterproof and, if you do it right, submersible. It also makes you look like a hobo. In dodgy emergency situations, looking like a hobo carrying your shit around in a trash bag is advantageous. People will leave you alone. Nobody's gonna try and rob some pathetic hump with all their shit in a Hefty bag, you feel me? Weatherproofing and camouflage in one bag. 😂

For years, people have asked me again and again: where's the best place to be in America in climate collapse? And I told them all the same thing: I don't really know, but I'd guess the Ozarks or the Smokies, maybe the Great Lakes? But I didn't know. I don't know. Why do I live in England if the AMOC is gonna go away? Because I kind of think it might cancel itself out somehow with the rest of global warming. But I don't *know*. Nobody really knows, because it's a chaotic dynamic fluid system.

Know what's not a problem? Immigration. Never was. Never is. Immigrants do crap jobs, buy stuff, bring kickass food, change the fabric of a country, which is always good and necessary.

It's a nonissue to anyone except stupid racists and people who pander to stupid racists. "Immigrants bring drugs into our country!" Yeah, a small number do. They bring them because your citizens want them and most of you are too stupid to legalize and regulate them so that tiny fraction of immigrants won't bring them. Legalize coke and watch the cartels die.

I was talking to a buddy of mine at the café just now and thinking about the idea of wealth and why people are obsessed with accruing it.

I have no desire to accrue as much wealth as I can. I have a list of things I want. If I get them, I'll be happy. Really. I want a house with a big barn and a 1967 Mustang fastback converted to electric and a well stocked workshop and a pro quality home recording studio. Beyond that, I want to not worry about paying bills or buying food. That's pretty much it. Maybe enough to travel a lot.

This pager thing is very, very bad and bigger than you think it is. Why? Because there's absolutely no way to make tiny ass pager batteries explode like that via a "hack", the way some people are claiming. It's physically impossible.

So follow the logic. The likelihood is that these pagers were rigged, which *is* doable. There's a thread over at Hacker News as to ways you could do it if you want to get nerdy about it:

But the exact mechanism is only of technical interest. What matters is: it was done.news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415672…

I am smugly proud of myself for not having "guilty pleasures" that are bad for the culture. I don't watch reality shows or those creepy competition shows like Love Island or Big Brother or anything like it. I genuinely find it all git-churning and have since S2 of The Real World. I think all of that crap ruined society, not just by being shitty entertainment but warping people's ability to tell what's real, what isn't, and creating a framework for parasociopathy.

But also it's idiot garbage for morons. I said what I said.

I am a schlubby dude with no fashion sense and no money. I'm not a beta because there are no such things as alphas and betas. And I'm often an asshole, just not the kind of asshole who thinks he deserves pussy or anything else from women or anyone just for existing.

https://twitter.com/AntiDyatlov/status/1830763502597755364

I mean, seriously, the dudes who think this way? They don't understand. You can be an asshole if you're a funny, charming asshole. If you're not charming, you can't be an asshole. If you think you're charming but it doesn't seem to work, you're not actually charming.

Watching Yellowstone with Michelle, which is interesting, to see that world through her British eyes. I spent my high school years up there: in the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula, in Harlowton north of Billings, and Cody, Wyoming, at the edge of the park. It struck me, when my mom and I got there from Texas, that the people seemed incredibly dour to me, after a young life mostly spent around Dallas and the kind of people who called strangers "sugar". I wasn't used to cold climate Lutheran types who only smiled if they meant it.

That interview with Audrey Tang got me thinking about UIs and how they affect discourse.

What if you removed the requirement to drive engagement from social network design... because the only reason to drive engagement hard is revenue, from ads or data mining? What if replies to posts were turned off by default and you had to actually enable them on every post? If you had to choose to allow people to reply or comment every time?

Would you do it or not?

If the answer for most people is "not", that tells you something interesting.

A science fiction idea: imagine a race of self-replicating von Neumann machines that can communicate with one another. Imagine that, one day, these creatures become infected by an informational virus that gets into their brains. This virus is sort of like cordyceps. You know, the fungi that infect insects and turn them into zombies and make them go where they can be eaten by predators and so spread the cordyceps. The organism from The Last Of Us, which is actually a real thing (just not in people).

But ours is just an algorithm.

When I was a kid, one of my very few heroes was an imaginary character called Happy Harry Hardon, from a film called Pump Up The Volume. You kids won't remember it, but maybe some of you old fuckers like me will.

Harry was a teenage pirate radio DJ. The film begins with his voice in the dark: "Y'ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?" It ends with him raising a fist as he's hauled away by Feds and telling his assembled fans and supporters: "Talk hard!"

So I did.

I am a nerd, so I read a site called Hacker News, which is basically a tech news feed run by Y Combinator, the tech incubator. It's a combination of coder stuff, links to useful tech or tutorials, tech industry news and gossip, and occasionally... other things. There's always a couple of freaks trying to quietly slip bigoted pseudoscience bullshit in there - hoping sempai Thiel notices them, presumably - and to the site's credit, those posts are usually flagged, even though they still end up in the RSS feed (which is how I see them).

I've been trying to warn you by posting about Vance and his admiration of and probably connection to Curtis Yarvin, and the people that influence those guys, like Julius Evola. I tried to tell you that this is not just the usual conservative bigotry.

I was apparently unclear. You need to be thinking of names like Pol Pot and Idi Amin and Joseph Kony, not Newt Gingrich or Ronald Reagan. You need to be thinking of public executions and Handmaid's Tale shit as an aperitif before the entrée. You need to be thinking Randall Flagg here.

I'm fucking sick of the whining. You've got an actual goddamn fascist on one side and probably a black chick on the other and you think enough of your fellow Americans are evil enough to let the fascist win? Maybe America is just not worth saving then. Really and truly. America is the only civilized nation where the gender and race of a candidate is an issue. Why? Because America is a racist, misogynist country, where more than half the inhabitants believe fucking angels are real. It's a backwards country, you dig?