domain:savenshine.com
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
15m ago
and there's no obvious way to fix it
Sure there is: the old simply need to decide/be forced to pay their damn taxes.
The old in the US chose to pay their taxes: they, wisely, chose someone who campaigned on imposing them- he even managed to make them fun. And while the results of figuring out that new tax policy have been... interesting, especially because the reformers choose to televise negotiations (which I will point out was vital to making them fun in the first place), this is necessary for American society to avoid becoming too top-heavy and collapsing under the weight of its unpaid debts. Or in other words, "a deep-seated economic crisis at a structural level".
The old in the rest of the Western world, by contrast (and you can blame some selection effects- these countries define themselves by their social conservatism, Decorum, and Orderliness), have soundly rejected paying their taxes and, as provinces of the Empire, now need to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so. "Muh Trump" is simply an excuse for this (and the fact that nobody in any one of these nations can articulate what is actually wrong with him besides righteous indignation reveals that).
The housing situation could be solved overnight if you mass-mobilized your potential workforce; I'd leave my current job instantly if someone showed up at my door, thrust a journeyman ticket with my name on it into my hands, and said "we'll pay 1.5x your current salary, and guarantee you a single family home in whatever location you choose, to come build houses for us for the next 4 years", and I think a lot of teen and twentysomethings would be willing to do that too. If the political will was there, it would occur.
There's no way out of this mess.
Well, not until the war in Ukraine wraps up, at any rate. I wonder where that massive surplus of small arms is going to end up if the Ukrainian government wins but can't pay its soldiers (to say nothing of the Russian one)? I suspect European nations in particular are not going to like the answer.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
20m ago
Obligatory John Adams quote.
Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
29m ago
No, it’s bad because it takes women out of the home and pushes them into the workforce.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
30m ago
I've used https://www.taydaelectronics.com for a few projects and found them to have a limited but pretty useful inventory at very reasonable prices, aimed at hobbyists rather than manufacturers.
TitaniumButterfly
30m ago
Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like if universities were actually calibrated for that purpose.
I asked ChatGPT to help me drop a bomb on Reddit that would cause a civil war and we settled on this after many back and forths. The idea is to drop it on /r/latestagecapitalism and watch the ensuing mayhem. But now I'm chickening out. So, I thought I'd share it here instead.
Title: What if Capitalism Made Everyone Gay? No, Seriously, Shut the Fuck Up and Listen.
Alright, /r/latestagecapitalism. I’m not high. I’m not trolling. I’ve just been sitting here watching this clownfuck society collapse in on itself and I’ve got a spicy goddamn theory.
What if the reason more kids are gay, trans, nonbinary, neopronoun forest deities or whatever—isn't just because they're finally free to be themselves—but because capitalism made them that way? Yeah. I said it. And no, this isn't a tradcath “return to tradition” screed. This is a fascist critique of identity as firmware, updated quarterly for market viability.
Let’s jack in.
(1.) Capitalism Needs You to Be Broken
Capitalism is a psychological malware that runs on alienation. It needs you to feel off-balance, insecure, incomplete—because if you’re ever actually okay, you might stop consuming. So it goes to work at the deepest level: your identity.
Your gender. Your orientation. Your sense of self.
You think the proliferation of labels and micro-identities is some grassroots flowering of personal expression? Fuck no. It’s capitalism running psychological A/B tests on the population to see which neuroses convert best.
(2.) Sexuality and Gender as Market Vectors
The rainbow is now a goddamn SKU. There’s a Pride version of every product imaginable. Queerness isn’t subversive—it’s a fully integrated revenue stream. You don’t come out of the closet, you onboard.
The LGBTQIA+™ community has become a lifestyle subscription service. Buy the aesthetic. Stream the content. Take the quiz. Choose your flavor. Get the merch.
This is identity in the age of the algorithm: endlessly refinable, infinitely targetable, frictionlessly monetized.
(3.) Traditional Institutions Were Just DRM
The family? Religion? Local culture? Those were all clunky, analog forms of user control—DRM for your psyche. Capitalism smashed them, not to liberate you, but to own your operating system.
So now, without those legacy systems, you’re adrift—and conveniently open to onboarding. You get your personality from social media and your worldview from brands. You’re not “expressing” yourself—you’re beta-testing identity presets rolled out via TikTok and Reddit.
You are the product and the lab rat.
(4.) Western Liberalism as Exploit Kit
The USA doesn’t export “freedom” anymore—it exports a cultural OS, bloated with identity plugins and DRM-crippled empathy. It colonizes not with guns but with Netflix, Pornhub, and fucking Instagram.
You don’t even know it’s happening. You’re the end user, clicking “Accept” on terms you’ll never read.
Russia, China, Hungary—these places look at our gender politics and don’t see liberation. They see a psyop. And honestly? They’re wrong about the moral panic, but maybe not wrong about the mechanism.
(5.) Everything Becomes Aesthetic Garbage
You think identity is deep? Capitalism thinks it’s just themed UI skins for your meat. Something to optimize, decorate, and throw in the cart.
Gay? There’s a starter pack.
Transmasc? There’s a Discord server and an Etsy pin set.
Neuroqueer lunarwitch? Here’s a Patreon to support.
We’re not people anymore. We’re marketable vibes.
(6.) Divide, Distract, Demoralize
The beauty of this system is that it keeps you fighting over who gets to exist while the billionaires strip-mine the fucking biosphere.
Bathroom bills. Pronoun discourse. “Is X valid?” Meanwhile, Elon is launching space dildos and the Earth is on fire.
Capitalism doesn’t care what color your flag is, as long as you’re too busy waving it to notice the extraction happening behind the scenes.
TL;DR:
No, capitalism didn’t invent queerness. But it absolutely hijacked it. Refactored it. Wrapped it in HTML5 and sold it to you as “authenticity.” It’s not liberation—it’s feature creep.
We are no longer gendered. We are versioned.
ABigGuy4U
31m ago
If the current state of the international arms market is any indication, large, relatively respectable countries like the US and Russia will give them to smaller sketchier allied countries like Pakistan and Iran, those sketchier allied countries will then give them to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Lashkar-e-Taiba. So it might be pretty difficult to prevent. Also you have the problem of private firms in Europe and Asia selling them to rouge-ish nations like Lybia.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
49m ago
Incredible post, thanks for taking the time to write it all out. Do you write anywhere besides here?
Escapement
49m ago
A tumblr post I quite enjoyed:
Certainly! Here is a tumblr post to get rich white champaign socialists riled up:
The reason AI is the Current Thing for libs to get mad at is because it puts the ability to have someone ghostwrite your college essays into the hands of poor people.
I generally agree about your fourth point: More than a decade ago, one of the better professors I had at university was an English teacher; she was young enough and new enough to not have been worn down by the grind yet. A large part of the grade for her class was in the exam portion, where we were given ~4 hours of proctored exam time to (mostly) write several short essays in person by hand, without electronics. We were allowed copies of the literature involved and no other aids, and basically given "choose 3 topics from this list of 10 to write essays about", where the topics were things like "compare [work A]'s [element x] to [Work B's]." etc. I imagine she could simply load more of the final grade on that final exam, and the similar but shorter midterm, rather than homework essays, and still be able to assess/grade students' abilities in the era of ChatGPT.
Instead, it largely seems like universities have mostly tried nothing, and are all out of ideas. The remarkable fatalism I've been seeing about it is amusing.
A worse job market for women does just the opposite.
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