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Notes -
Since nobody seems to be bringing it up, I will:
"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"
It really is Poetry.
Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology. I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.
I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.
It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else. It seems that half of my political values boil down to aesthetics in any case: I find trump-hegseth-vance-desantis et al to be disgusting and contemptible; I have more respect for Rubio, but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics, even if choosing someone as gauche as Palin disqualified him from my vote (Romney was too morman for me to handle, I'm sad to say).
Likewise with the D's: Their candidates have been universally superior to the republicans these past 8 years because they would rather be eaten by wild dogs than put "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" up in lights and then line up behind it, but I have the most good vibes off of Bernie, Buttegieg, and Mamdani; also probably for purely aesthetic reasons.
I think this might actually be rational: just by observing the aesthetics an individual chooses to portray, you can make a judgment vis. how they intend to act in a way that is much harder to fake than "Saying shit". Kamala was a social climber totally absent of virtue, and campaigned like it. Bernie is a crusty old marcher, and acts like it. Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it. Trump is a neuvo rich venal tasteless rich guy, and governes like it.
All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace. Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.
Aesthetics are a terrible way to judge a candidate.
It's true that Trump is behaving in a stupid and reckless way and this is causing considerable damage to America. Honest, capable, sober people can also cause considerable damage to America, perhaps even more damage. Even Mamdani can do a lot of damage to America. They just have bad values and so all their good qualities are worthless or even negative.
Would you prefer pointless wars for Israel but with a nicer facade? That's a Rubio presidency for you.
What about a serious, sober, effective campaign to wreck the criminal justice system, have DAs and prosecutors just put offenders out onto the streets to victimize normal people? That's boring, 'sensible' politics, that's what Soros has been doing, what Mamdani would probably do.
Consider Judge Russell Clark. In 1985 he decreed that since bussing (another sensible but torturous and massively harmful social experiment with predictably bad results) couldn't be mandated to desegregate Kansas inner-city schools, he would make city schools so attractive that white kids would voluntarily come back. He told the schools to buy everything they wanted without regard for cost. So they lowered student per teacher ratio, they built robotics clubs, swimming pools with underwater viewing rooms, a model UN with simultaneous translation capacity. Naturally this was paid for by doubling property taxes in the district. Somehow a judge had power to do that in the retarded American system where anything must be done to prevent segregation.
The results: an ocean of corruption, ballooning of administrative workers, administrative dysfunction, test scores no higher, somehow the inner city schools got even blacker than before. Dismal failure in all respects at the price of a few billion dollars.
I bet this judge is very sensible, very normal, a fine dinner guest. He's also a massive wrecker of society, squandering billions of dollars pointlessly. There are many similar stories in the US and around the world.
Just because something looks lawful and officially correct, it doesn't mean it's good. Trump can definitely be bad! But you should not assume that people who appear good actually are good.
Consider Europe. Run by very boring, sensible moderates. Run into the ground, fallen well behind the US, despite all the dumb wars and Trump and assorted incompetence. Real wreckers wear pantsuits.
This is part of why Trumpism and similar movements elsewhere came about; the Very Serious People responded to the financial crises of 2008, and subsequent public ire, by putting a seemingly-respectable façade on an ideology that effectively amounted to 'compassion and equality for groups that can be proportionally represented in the C-suites; ruthless social Darwinism for individuals, especially those who are not Members Of An Oppressed Group'.
Re Judge Clark, I'm going to invoke Chesterton's Fence on the American taboo against segregation.
After the end of Reconstruction, many Southern plantationists resented that they could no longer coerce unpaid labour from Black people at whip-point without a fig-leaf of a criminal conviction. Having racially-separated schools allowed them to subject black people to worse conditions than their white counterparts, and 'separate but equal' rarely if ever stayed equal for long. (There was one school district, I think in Texas, that gave the schools in Black areas names at the end of the alphabet, and then implemented improvements such as air-conditioning in alphabetical order!)
That does not mean that any particular method of desegregation is necessarily advisable, and I would be interested to hear any alternative you might have in mind.
Regarding desegregation, I'm really more thinking of all these books like 'White Girl Bleed a Lot' or 'Race War in High School' where the black kids go around beating and viciously bullying the white kids, setting teachers on fire. The knockout game where blacks randomly sucker-punch other races. Blacks stabbing white girls (recall Iryna), or shoving them onto train lines as in NY.
It strikes me as unfathomably unjust that the US system bends over backwards for even the biggest lowlifes if they're black. They give this hoodlum an extremely valuable heart transplant, (he was coming to hospital with an ankle monitor on!) they gave him a second life and he still managed to get himself killed by the age of 18.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/anthony-stokes-teen-who-got-heart-transplant-dies-car-chase-n334001
They gave Kansas city an enormous amount of money for the sake of trying to get blacks and whites to be together harmoniously and it failed. How many lifetimes does a couple billion dollars represent, how many millions of hours of labour does that represent?
And yet the narrative is clearly that whites are in the wrong here, it's projected so loudly that it's international. It was compulsory for me in Australia to be taught about Rosa Parks not wanting to sit on the back of the bus despite it being on the other side of the world.
Well here are some of the things I read, letters that Flaherty publishes in his books:
There's quite clearly bad blood between blacks and whites in the US and I think they should be kept well away from eachother. Ironically enough I say that segregation was the Chesterton's fence that was broken. And then all these people get stabbed and killed and raped and beaten up, get gaslighted about their racism and have to pay all this money to government programs that fight racism.
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Literally anything but that one. Strictly speaking thé schools weren’t even segregated, thé neighborhoods were(and there was no way to fix that easily).
I wonder where the lib outcry about separation of powers was for that particular judge- like there was almost certainly a statutory mechanism for setting school budgets and taxes that he trampled all over.
Gerrymander the school districts?
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