Archive for life

This Was/Is/Will Be the Reason the Revolution Failed/Fails

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on November 18, 2025 by chemiclord

Alex Laughlin has a rather interesting piece he composed for Defector that I found fascinating, but probably not for the reason Laughlin intended, and allowed me to embrace in the inner old man that I’ve been slowly becoming as I shake my head at “kids these days.”

https://defector.com/resonate-podcast-festival

The article itself chronicles the rise and inevitable fall of the Podcast Boom, as defined by the Resonate Festival, and how ironically it is perhaps in a better place now that all the big money interests are gone and they are allowed to simply be themselves.

I drew a different lesson from it, though. I saw a collection of people desperate to find some handhold for their passion project to make money and allow them to continue doing it. Podcasts have merely become the latest creative venture where people are reckoning with a depressing reality of humanity and the societies we build around themselves.

“Podcasts are dead?” The average human asks. “But I listen to Joe Rogan every day!”

That is the painful truth that quite literally every creative medium faces eventually. Just like books. Just like artwork. Just like movies. Just like television. Video games are right in the middle of that devastating sorting. Streamers are getting beaten with that reality right now like it’s a mafia shakedown.

I happens to all of us.

The discovery that the average human being could not give one single solitary fuck about creative work, with the exception of a handful of rather generic, unchallenging examples that they can nod their head to, not require a terrible amount of thought, and give them a momentary distraction before they jump back into the rat race that is their daily lives.

It is nigh impossible for anyone other than those few examples to ever make a living solely on creative work, and often times the people that do are more lucky to get that critical opportunity than simply being so good they can’t be denied the spotlight. Sure, about twenty gazillion people listen to Joe Rogan. A million billion people will happily read something from John Scalzi or Stephen King. They’ll gleefully line up to watch the next big film starring one of the Wilson brothers (I actually have forgotten just how many of them are in Hollywood right now). Hideko Kojima could be the producer of “Kojima Shits on a Plate” and have approximately seven million people desperately asking if it comes with a “Smell-o-Vision” feature.

(I want to be clear that I’m not attempting to particularly drag anyone I’m naming here. Another harsh truth that the desperately creative don’t like to face is that there are very, very few genuinely awful creators who don’t know their craft at the top of any given heap. They are more than great at what they do, even if they rose to prominence due to things outside of their creative skill set. Time to cope and accept it, Mr. I Got 17 Subs via Spotify.)

But 99.9% of the people who try their hand at creativity are simply never going to make enough and get enough of an imprint for it to their path to a comfortable life. That’s the reality, and no amount of social or economic upheaval is going to unlock more slots in the collective interest of human kind. It’s an exclusive club, and you are overwhelming unlikely to ever get an invite. That simply has to be okay, because that’s not going to change.

Now, I’m not trying to deter anyone from creating. That would be… (looks back at his bibliography) rather hypocritical. If you are willing to tear yourself apart to scream into a void, go for it. Just don’t expect anyone to listen. Don’t expect anyone to particularly care. If you get lucky, get that shot, and find a hand hold to build from, go for it, don’t look back, and don’t apologize for your good fortune.

But don’t spam social media with your links. Don’t be a nuisance trying to advertise yourself to a public that doesn’t give a fuck. Don’t be a shit heel trying to drag down anyone you think “got lucky,” thinking that it’ll help you advance in any tangible way.

And get off my lawn.

Metaphorically, of course. I don’t have a lawn. I live in a moderate apartment in a suburban commercial district.

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On Messaging…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on September 21, 2025 by chemiclord

For nearly the last year, the political left in America has been obsessed with “messaging,” and “strategy,” and have been very, very loud in their displeasure that the Democratic Party “leaders” aren’t doing it right, at least, not certain leaders.

There’s a degree that this obsession is understandable. We are desperate for an answer. Something we can do that will sway enough people in our direction. That we must have made a mistake, and that if we just do [x] or [y] different, that will be enough!

But let me offer this possibility: What if “messaging” and “strategy” don’t actually matter as much as we want it to, and all these beatings we’re giving each other (and ourselves) aren’t going to really make that much difference?

Strategy and messaging is fine and all, but it all hinges on a potentially dangerous assumption. That the units in play are actually competent enough to understand the message, and cares enough to take it to heart. It is not the slightest bit clear that the “Average American Voter” is either of those things.

Imagine sitting down at a chess board, and you discover that half of them are Monopoly pieces, another seven are actually glued to the board, the two bishops are both on black squares, and four of the pawns are actually on the other side of the board.

At that point, any strategy you might have had needs to go out the window.

Oh, and every five turns, the rules change into an entirely different game. The “Average American Voter” is not only dreadfully incurious, they also have the object permanence of a demented goldfish that had meth sprinkled into its tank. What they care about now is likely not what will matter to them five weeks from now. And frankly, all it would take is one squirrel with its tail on fire running past them, and all your carefully crafted “messaging” will matter slightly less than fuck all.

So, my advice? Take a deep breath. Don’t hurt yourself or others. There’s a degree that you can do “everything right,” and it’s just not going to sink into the heads of a good chunk of people. Worrying too much about messaging right now is a fool’s errand. We don’t have to do this to ourselves.

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On the “Progressive Problem”…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , , on September 3, 2025 by chemiclord

So Chelsea Clinton is running for office.

Maybe.

Possibly.

At least, according to right wing rumor mills. But that rumor is all that left-leaning social media needed to get lost all up in their feelings, and reveal more about themselves than they realize.

Now, as far as Chelsea Clinton goes, I know next to nothing about her. I don’t know anything about her politics. I don’t know if she even has any intention of actually running for any office, much less Jerry Nadler’s seat in New York. I also don’t care. I wouldn’t care if she was running for office in Michigan (the state that I live in).

See, I’m not afraid of names. My view is that anyone who wants to run for office should run. If Chelsea Clinton has problematic politics (the fear of which seems based entirely on her last name than anything she has ever said), and the primary voters select her anyway, that tells me we have a problem with the electorate.

But I suppose I can be flippant about that because I already know that’s true. The electorate of the United States of America (and honestly pretty much anywhere) is filled with profoundly shitty people who hold extremely shitty views of the world around them. I also know that these people aren’t “brainwashed” or “manipulated” or “misled” or “distracted” or whatever. People aren’t empty vessels in which shitty content is poured into and mixed. Humans, in general, are broken in so many ways that it can be relatively easy to weaponize them for whatever cause you want.

And that is what has my fellow left-leaners scared. Deep down, despite all their bluster, they know they are a minority. They know damn well that they don’t represent more than a significant minority of the public no matter how much they claim that there are a legion of closet socialists just waiting for the right message. We just hate admitting it to ourselves, because that admission would require there is long-term work to be done, and if there is one thing the trust-fund babies who fuel the leftist and progressive themes on social media hate more than liberals… it’s work.

That’s the “Progressive Problem.” It has nothing to do with our message. It has nothing to do with the spats with “libtards” and “dirty centrists.” It’s that we don’t want to do the ground level work to make our minority a majority. It’s because then we’d have to accept there are, in fact, good faith criticisms of the model we propose. We’d have to acknowledge that things could go very wrong with our model, and actually do the fucking work to address those problems. We’d have to acknowledge that (gasp!) an all-or-nothing approach is a terrible approach to pretty much anything in life!

It would also require us to acknowledge that we fall victim to the exact same flaws of personality that we scoff at others for falling for, and that a cadre of very loud “fauxgressives” with bullhorns posting breathless screeds about Chelsea Clinton on BlueSky are probably really poor figureheads for any sort of political movement.

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On the Epstein “Conspiracy…”

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on July 12, 2025 by chemiclord

Maybe it’s just because I tend to be skeptical of conspiracies in general, but If I had to offer a loosely-educated guess, the “list” Epstein made basically had every interaction he had with anyone wealthy or powerful, and not necessarily clients.  The creep went out of his way to integrate himself with anyone with any meaningful influence, and I sincerely doubt all of them were interested in buying what he was selling… but it would make for excellent blackmail nonetheless.

I strongly suspect if the “Epstein List” had anything particularly salacious beyond what had already been leaked… someone clout-hunting would have leaked it.

As for the entire “Epstein was murdered” angle, I have yet to see anything particularly compelling about the evidence that can’t be explained by “shitty prison doing shitty prison things.”  Would I be surprised that a shitty prison doesn’t exactly have the best surveillance?  No.  Would it surprise me at all that they still use crappy equipment from the 90s?  Nope.  Would I be astonished that the guards wouldn’t exactly be invested in making sure a pedophile in their midst stayed among the living? Not at all. Am I surprised that Trump is trying to cover this all up because all of it makes him “look bad?”  Not in the slightest.

At the end of the day, I have to believe one of two scenarios.  Either a secret cabal of wealthy and powerful individuals who could have offed Epstein at any number of opportunities decided to choose the worst possible time when he was under the biggest microscope of his life to kill him and guarantee exactly the sort of scrutiny that they spent literally decades trying to avoid, going through an elaborate scheme that would inevitably involve people outside their cabal that had no particular reason to stay silent…

… Or a dude used to a billionaire’s lifestyle was looking at a lifetime in a shitty prison with all his allies, clients, and associates now pretending they never knew him, and decided to check out early while creating exactly the sort of chaos and scrutiny his clients sought to avoid.

I dunno, the most likely scenario seems pretty obvious to me.

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So Jon Stewart Did a Thing…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on February 13, 2024 by chemiclord

I have… reasonably positive memories of Jon Stewart during his first run under the bright lights of the late night TV talk-o-sphere. The Daily Show under his run had some surprisingly deep dives into the sorts of issues that the people whose job it supposedly was refused to do. He spoke (meager) truth to power in the ways that our “legacy media” either couldn’t (or actively wouldn’t) do.

But at the same time, I had noticed he had started falling for the same “both sides” horse-race driven nonsense of the people he long criticized for a while. When he stepped away, I had thought that part of the reason was because he had recognized that after some self-reflection.

(Some behind-the-scenes revelations that he struggled with internal biases and race-related prejudice didn’t endear me, either, for what its worth.)

So, I was not eagerly awaiting his return to the bright lights as much as some might have thought. I saw very little evidence that he had done the soul-searching necessary to find the groove he had during his first run on The Daily Show from the few appearances he had done in the interim.

And as a result, I was not particularly surprised that when he made his grand return… he pretty much sounded exactly like the media he once loathed, just with his typical bombast and comedic delivery.

Now, the issue here really isn’t the facts. Both men are exceedingly old. The problem is that the facts in this case don’t tell us anything particularly useful and obscure and muddy the facts that actually matter… the exact same game that the legacy media used and Jon Stewart railed against for so very long.

Joe Biden is 81. Donald Trump is 77. If I wanted these sort of cutting observations, I could find it… well… at every other legacy media outlet in the United States of America. The only thing Jon is doing differently is the delivery.

As far as the cognitive issues go; would I be surprised to learn that Biden has lost a step (or two, or three)? Nope. Dude’s 81. My grandmother at 79 couldn’t even remember the names and faces of her own children. I’d be more astonished if he was as sharp as he ever was.

But when I see Donald Trump struggling to put two thoughts together coherently without going off on some completely unrelated tangent, I refuse to believe that we (as a collective) genuinely care about this issue. It’s just the same “bothsides” nonsense to try and sound impartial without actually putting in the work to inform us as a society why it actually matters.

I really don’t care how Donald Trump pronounces “Pennsylvania.” I care about how he apparently can’t tell Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi apart.

Cognition failings should matter, just not in the way that we’re choosing it matters. The Office of the President of the United States is one of the toughest and most demanding jobs in the world. Someone who says things like he would invite Russia to bully and invade members of an alliance when they don’t pay up (demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how said alliance works while recalling a conversation that nigh assuredly did not happen in the way he claims it did, if it happened at all), probably shouldn’t be anywhere near the office, for example.

Or if they slip up and say “Mexico” instead of “Egypt” at a press conference.

If you don’t want to see the difference between those two observations, then there’s little I or anyone can say that will make you.

But you’re supposed to be better than that, Jon. Or… at least, you tell us repeatedly that you are.

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