Be The Power
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Holy Shit, are there a lot of ads on YouTube these days. So. Many. Ads. And just when you think there can’t be anymore, Google seems to think of a new way to throw some at you.
Anyway, I suppose it all comes from a need to pay for some very expensive AI development. As such, I’m willing to tolerate it, I guess. I mean, I’m not going to pay for the YouTube premium so, in a sense, I have only myself to blame for all the ads.
Whatever. When is AGI (or ASI?) coming?
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Twitter was a twitter with a rumor last night that Trump had died. This is so dumb. Trump is going nowhere. We will be amazingly lucky if he doesn’t run for an illegal third term the way things are going, much less him dying.
But there’s an even more important point to consider — Trump is just a symptom to some pretty deep systemic problems with the United States. As such, he could die and the problems that led to him being popular in the first place would remain and someone just as bad — or worse — would take the reigns.
I’m pretty much clueless about JD Vance’s ability to press forward with the MAGA autocratic ethnostate experiment. He seems, at least, to be a far more traditional politician.
And, yet, who knows. Maybe the genii that Trump let out of the bottle can never be put back in and, by definition, Vance will be just as autocratic as Trump. It could be that we really are fucked in the sense that it’s autocrats all the way down no matter what.
I do believe that 2024 was our last free and fair election. We’re an autocratic state now and we just have a weird quirk — for the time being — where we have free speech on an individual basis. Only time will tell how long that particular issue lasts.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It’s clear with these weird mid-decade redistricting efforts that Red States are doing that the centrifugal forces tearing the USA apart are only accelerating. The thing is, if Democrats step up and do what they should do — redistrict too — the likelihood of revolution or civil war grows significantly.
It’s all a prime example of how fucked the country is. If Republicans don’t get what they want, then they seem willing to literally destroy the country. They have become a Trump death cult equal to the Nazis and Hitler.
I continue to mull the possibility of a civil war or revolution and for the moment I have my doubts that any such thing will happen. Blues just don’t have it in them to go mano-to-mano with the absolutely terrifying Reds.
And when they ever get around to be willing to do that, that’s when the bad stuff happens. That’s when the country implodes, race wars break out in the South and WMD are used by both sides. Then we hope the “Good Guys” (Blues) win and we wait about 40 years for the country to recover while the world moves on and China takes over the world.
Sigh.
To put it another way — either the USA slides into an autocratic managed democracy peacefully or a lot and I mean A LOT of people die in a revolution / civil war that will reduce much of the United States to rubble.
Good times!
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I find myself listening to the new and rather graphic Sabrina Carpenter single “Tears” and I think about how there was a moment in time in the past when this would be about the time when she would do a Playboy pictural to promote her new album.
Or something like that. I could see her being in Playboy at some point back when the magazine had cultural clout.
It’s eerie that Playboy has “left the chat” as the kids say, on a cultural basis. Culturally, it’s like it doesn’t exist anymore. I suppose the rise of Internet porn just doesn’t leave it with much of a point in the minds of millions.
And, yet, there was a certain honor to Playboy that Internet porn like OnlyFans just does not have. I’m not defending the seedier elements of Playboy that were always there, but, in general, on a surface level, a woman being in Playboy was quite an honor.
Anyway, those days are long, long, long gone. It’s over, never to ever return, I suppose.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m no where near finished the first draft of this scifi dramedy novel I’m working on and I’m already brooding over the second draft. Once I’m done racing through the first draft, I’m going to do a lot of brooding about how to take things to the next level.
Things are going to go a lot slower once I can’t use AI anymore. But I’m hoping that my native creativity will be strong enough that by, say, maybe the end of spring 2026 I will have a beta draft done.
Maybe?
That is just about when my life is going to change in a rather dramatic fashion one way or another. My life is going to be upended a great deal between now and next spring so it will be interesting to see if I still have the wherewithal to finish a novel.
At this point my goal is simple — I just want to write a novel good enough that I can query it. That’s it. That’s all I want.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
With the help of AI, I’ve managed to zoom through the first draft of the outline I’ve come up with for this scifi dramedy novel. I’m having some problems with the third act, even with the help of AI.
But, in general, things are going ok with this novel.
I still worry about someone stealing a creative march on me — the premise, all things considered, it’s kind of obvious — but I can’t get too wrapped up in what might happen.
I need to just put my head down and write, write, write.
I don’t know when the first draft will be done. Hopefully by the end of the year, maybe? And then, of course, I have to allot a lot — A LOT — of time for brooding over how to rewrite things for the second draft.
I am considering this first draft my “vomit” draft and just getting things down so I can pick up the pieces for a really good, solid second draft that I’m proud enough that I feel comfortable showing beta readers.
Then I take in beta reader’s advice and turn around and query the damn thing.
I will note that AI has helped a lot with this novel because it’s not nearly as expensive — or judgmental — as a human literary consultant. It is willing to humor me in all my colorful, loudmouth drunk crank glory and that means a lot.
But I also know that for the second draft, I really have to limit my use of AI. I can’t wallow in AI to the point that people can tell that an AI helped write the beta draft. I may use it to write the brief scene summaries I use to write the full scene summaries, but that’s it.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I don’t know how or why it’s going to happen, but I am — have always been — a loudmouth crank and, as such, as we zoom towards full blown autocracy I’m sure to cross the State at some point.
I’m a man of peace, a man of ideas, but I’m also a man of principles. As such, if some fucking cocksucker ICE agent comes after me simply for using my 1st Amendment rights, I’m going to stand my ground.
Of course, I say that now when who knows what will happen when I’m getting the shit beat out of me by some GED failing tubby piece of shit.
And let me be clear — it’s not like I’m going to be violent or hostile in any way in this hypothetical scenario. In my imagination, they will come for me for what I post on this blog or just because I happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
That’s the specific point I’m trying to make — if I’m not doing anything illegal and some fat fuck ICE agent comes for me, I’m prepared to be detained. Fuck ICE and fuck MAGA.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
All of this is very speculative, but if you take Trump’s expressed desires to their logical conclusion, it seem inevitable there will be some sort of “New World Order” established by him soon.
What I imagine it would look like is something like this — the USA will destroy NATO and, instead, align itself with Russia, Hungary and Turkey. It will begin to pull troops out of nations across the globe, the better to police the streets of an ever-more-militarized America.
All of this will happen in the context of taxes being cut and cut and cut for the wealthy — probably to zero, the rise of AI / androids and maybe, just maybe the replacement of the entire social safety net with a very weak and low UBI. And there probably will be a 30% VAT.
That, my dear friends, seems to be our “day after tomorrow” future.
The only potential “zag” that might happen is, well, some sort of revolution / civil war. If that happened, it would be very, very nasty. I could definitely see a race war happening in the USA as well as the use of WMD throughout the country by both sides.
Anyway. That seems like one potential future for us going forward.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The thing that gives us a false sense of security in the United States is while otherwise we’re an autocratic state, we still have free speech. I can still tell ICE — and the broader Trump regime — to fuck off and not expect a knock on my door.
This leads to the question of how long that is going to last.
Give how precious free speech is to Americans and how Trump clamping directly down that would make even the most ardent MAGA person at least have pause for thought, I think it’s going to be a while.
Or, put a different way — I think that will be the last thing that Trump fucks with. Going directly after people’s right to free speech is going to be when the ash from the MAGA volcano reaches the horizon and we’re absolutely fucking doomed.
So, probably it would be during Trump’s illegal third term that that kind of thing happens. But it is going to happen. I just can’t image we will go full white Christian autocratic ethnostate and the powers that be will allow traditional freedom of speech to linger.
Of course, there is the theory that if Trump really consolidates power as much as he would like that he — or the people around him — might see clamping down on individual free speech as too much of a hassle. And, besides, it would be a pressure valve.
It is clear that the center-Left is very, very weak in the USA and there’s really nothing stopping Trump from going full autocrat (like he is now) so, at least for a historical beat longer than you might expect…maybe individual freedom of speech is a little bit safer than you might expect?
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Trump is a symptom, not a cause of a lot of pretty shitty things within the United States these days. As such, it’s not like if you took Trump out of the equation that anything would really change all that much.
Yeah, the specifics of the fascism we now live under would be different, but the general gameplan would be the same. We would still no longer be a democracy and we would still be zooming towards living in a state that is along the lines of Hungary or Russia.
Let me explain.
If Trump had never come around, Ted Cruz probably would have become president in 2016. He would probably have be a little bit slower to do some of the things that Trump has done, but, in general, now in 2025 we probably would be just about where we are now.
Trump’s great power is he has absolutely no shame and he pretty much does whatever the fuck he wants. Cruz would have done the same things, but probably in a more focused way that would, in some sense, leave us still a somewhat functioning democracy.
But, alas, Obama made fun of Trump and so here we are.
There is something about Trump that seems a little bit too-on-the-nose historically. That’s why I think he might be the by product of some sort of weird, massive simulation that we call human history and civilization — and maybe the universe?
Anyway. No one is going to save us. We’re fucked. We just have to deal with the consequences and try to survive.
The thing about Trump is he keeps pushing and pushing, trying to push us all to a breaking point where we either finally, reluctantly, fight back or just fall directly and irreversibly into the arms of tyranny.
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