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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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My baseline assumption is that whatever you choose to call this weird woke, centralized, authoritarian, elite/bureaucratic corporatist conglomerate, they want control. All of it. Over things that you would think have nothing to do with them. They want your wood ovens, your gas stoves, your gamer PCs, they really don't view anything as beyond their purview to "regulate" and make your life infinitely worse by slow degrees.

Something people have a hard time getting is that power only exists out of the ephemeral when it is expressed, particularly soft power but this also applies to hard power.

If you've ever lived under an authoritarian, you've experienced the arbitrary expression of power that happens just to prove that they can order you to mop the rain and you'd do it.

I'd never call it a conspiracy that people exercise power for the sake of exercising power, either to ensure it is still present or just to get their jollies.

Jouvenel talks about this at length in On Power, the thing wants more of itself, and it wants with so much greed as to cloud the judgement of the noblest of men. It is a demon in that way.

Power can't abide rival castles, it can only be maintained at the cost of more of itself and all those who wish to not maintain it are replaced by those who who will.

Therefore, its necessary and sole destination is total control. And with it, collapse.

There is no other outcome to any politics than the total state, even liberal politics.

Freedom is just what we call the cracks that haven't been totalized yet. And which, God willing, spring eternal from the ultimate incompetence that is married to ultimate power.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a tower of babel getting built and collapsing. Forever.

You’ve just given me another thing to keep in mind next time I reread Cerebus The Aardvark.

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