You find yourself in the dumbest of all possible worlds, clowns to the left of you, Re-thug-licans to the right.
Official state religion is Shia Scientology.
We’ll focus entirely on liquidating the “legitimate news”part of the media, along with its revolting acolytes, known as “journalists.”
Our rival Nazi Germany had collapsed after it overleveraged risky investments in Eastern European “living space,”while Japan—once an aggressive competitor to America—was defeated due to a certain killer app developed in a cutting-edge incubator in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Despite that, the European Central Bank responded to the ’08 crisis with a Wahhabist-style neoliberal austerity that even the moderate consensus-makers in Washington didn’t have the stomach for.
How much safer would both America and the rest of the world be right now if our government’s response to 9/11 was to pretend it didn’t happen and do absolutely nothing?
The War on Terror is the bathtub our empire lies in, surveying a sunset over a wheat field in the Cialis commercial that is our twenty-first-century international statecraft.
Conservative pundits love to compare America to Rome, mainly because they want to be allowed to drape sheets around their asses and bring back slavery and man-boy love. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful analogy. Like Rome, we’re a deluded and decadent empire in terminal decline.
Republican voters were offered everything they had ever wanted—a new era of brutality and the repudiation of the symbol of Obama—while Democrats were served up four more years of morally incoherent and procedurally feckless liberalism. It was the logical conclusion, and the facts sure as shit didn’t care about anyone’s feelings.
Fact-checked, focus-grouped, data-driven Clinton lost to the most deranged presidential candidate ever: a clown, a fraud, a sexual predator, an inveterate liar who has faked every single thing he’s ever done—a giant cube of flesh who embodies all our vilest instincts and our ludicrous celebrity culture.
They do get something tangible from this deal: resistance against bathroom sickos, the petty privilege of being white, and the cathartic sadism of American military conquest and warfare.
For a long time they masterfully triangulated racial and class resentments to enrich the upper classes while the Democrats gave up trying to offer alternatives.
Hoppe correctly realized that the total abolition of the state in favor of a strict regime of private property and laissez-faire economics would involve the brutal curtailment of the freedoms of speech, movement, and bodily autonomy for the vast majority of people, and that was a good thing.
But for both Ezra and Matt, supporting the Iraq War was never a moral failing on their part but an analytical one.
As J. Galt, Megan cultivated a unique blogging style that perfectly matched being stupid with thinking your readers are stupid.
Gawker was a genuine example of an independent media company that skewered basically all the right assholes sucking off the political and media establishment.
It was embraced by middle-class hippies whose demands were not material and collective but aesthetic and individualist—which, once you smooth off the edges, is just libertarianism.
That’s because capital has no problem assimilating pop-cultural rebellion and antiauthoritarian imagery. In fact, that stuff creates all kinds of new markets, new consumers, new suckers.
It may make you feel better to watch a show that’s calling out Trump, or oppression, or our podcast—but if you stop there, you’re demobilized as a political actor.
the contemporary American right-winger is congenitally incapable of being funny, entertaining, or interesting in any of the ways art demands, relying instead on ham-fisted sentimentality and self-abasing ressentiment.
first, we realized that the way things worked on The West Wing wasn’t the way they worked in the real world; then we realized things had never worked that way; then finally we realized things should not work that way.
The premise of this cant was to assure people that they didn’t have to bother with challenging literature or indie cinema; television could provide all their cultural vitamins and minerals without their having to strain their eyes or leave their houses.
and there is no faker friend than your boss, no faker crew than your workplace.
You’re doing something very noble, and that’s why your boss cashed out to the tune of a few hundred million and you have to sublet your closet.
the scholarly professions are now all about getting tenure, doing safe spaces, and getting triggered by logic.
Content—be it a think piece, a call-out tweet, or something really degenerate, like a podcast—is one of the only real, tangible products we make anymore. But its creation also puts more physical and mental demands on workers than the most grizzled military operators have to endure.
In a sense, content makers are more troop-like than troops themselves, as information is the battlefield of the twenty-first century.
Lefties are again at the tip of the spear against a desperate capitalist system that’s readying a blood-soaked, militarized response to climate and economic catastrophes.
Spending every single moment thinking about politics (particularly on the Internet) will turn you cynical, hysterical, and probably reactionary. Let’s avoid that.
Call birth, “birth,”and death, “death,”without seeing one as good and the other as evil and your children will be at home with life.
If you teach them to achieve they will never be content.
If you teach them contentment, they will naturally achieve everything.
You do not live your life through your children.
Therefore they are free to find their own true fulfillment.
If you overly protect your children they will fear failure and avoid pain.
But failure and pain are twin teachers of important lessons.
Unless your children fully experience both how will they know they have nothing to fear?
Parents who hide failure, deny loss, and berate themselves for weakness, have nothing to teach their children.
But parents who reveal themselves, in all of their humanness, become heroes.
For children look to these parents and learn to love themselves.
Whatever they are doing, they are learning.
And it is, for them, pure joy.
All of your “God”words will not teach your children as much as will your nurture, and your love, and your cherishing.
Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life.
And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.
Don’t make parenting harder than it needs to be. It only requires focus.
Worry is not focus.
Attempting to control is not focus.
Distracting yourself is not focus.
Relaxed, non-fretful, attention to what is in front of you right now, is focus.
If you take the bait the battle rages.
Instead step back, breathe deeply, relax, and stay at your center.
Battles require two parties.
One fighting alone soon tires.
A problem is not an interruption to a serene and happy life.
A problem is an ordinary part of such a life.
You do not have to make your children into wonderful people.
You only have to remind them that they are wonderful people.
But the Tao teaches that games are for fun, that business is for the common good, that no one wins at war, and that love endures for all.
Every moment is a death of all that has gone before, and a birth of all that is to come.