Tag: Big Ideas

Why Conspiracy Theories Generally Are Very Dubious


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Because we live in such uncertain times, a lot of people get a lot of comfort from conspiracy theories. The idea that there is this or that conspiracy that is “really” running the world gives order to an otherwise pretty fucking up situation.

And, yet, big conspiracies don’t hold up. Now, let me be very specific about what I’m talking about — conspiracies that are a secret and are really controlling the world around us. There have been a number of actual conspiracies over the years — the one organized by Islamic extremists to cause the 9/11 attacks being one of them — but that was a specific quasi-military conspiracy that we all know about now.

I’m talking more about the type of conspiracy that 9/11 “truthers” believe in — that a still secret, massive conspiracy was really behind the 9/11 attacks. It’s conspiracies like that which are just bullshit. So, there have been plenty of subtle conspiracy-like events over the years — must of them done by the CIA, natch — but, again, they’re well known now (at least in certain circles) and aren’t on-going.

We decide what is real and what is an illusion.

The biggest obstacle to any major conspiracy working — and staying secret — is people are generally dumb. Any actual massive conspiracy to control the world would either fall apart or be discovered or both.

Most real conspiracies that are going on around us are actually known about and people just lulz them. This sometimes leads people who maybe are already not all that stable to freak out and lose their minds. And, also, a lot of things one might see as “conspiracies” are more simply a lot of powerful people know each other and have a vested interest in this or that thing happening — or not happening.

So, when people like Trump, who is a very lazy would-be autocrat — wants to do something stupid and tyrannical and they don’t get their way, they think there’s some sort of secret cabal Deep State that is standing in their way. What they refuse to admit is they could very well get exactly what they want –an autocracy — if they were willing to do the hard work of being an autocrat. They would have to knock some heads and risk a popular revolt. But Trump, specifically is very lazy and stupid and so he feels stymied by the “Deep State.”

Additionally, there is the occasional small-scale conspiracy that does happen but even then, they always are exposed.

One of the arguments for there NOT being a Kennedy assassination conspiracy is it’s generations later and we still have no proof that one existed. If one had happened, someone, somewhere would have been sloppy, or had a deathbed confession — with proof — and we would all know what “really” happened.

This type of argument could also be used for even bigger supposed conspiracies. It’s difficult to imagine that governments around the world would be able to keep First Contact with aliens a secret. Of course, occasionally, some random scientist or military person who is really old starts to blab about this very thing…but without any proof. It’s just really, really, hard to keep a huge secret in any government forever.

So, yes, there probably are a few conspiracies floating around the world, but I seriously doubt there all that powerful in the lives of the average person in any concrete manner. There are plenty of Powers That Be that have constructed a “reality” that they have a vested interest in maintaining, but that’s just human existence.

Another Spooky Tik-Tok Experience


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Yesterday, I was listening to “Born in The USA” by Bruce Springsteen on Spotify and for a moment, I weighed the significance of the song in American politics over the years.

Well, guess what — just now I was using Tik-Tok and, lo and behold I was pushed a video that posed that very same question: “Is Born In The USA a patriotic song?”

Spooky.

Now, the case can be made that this one is pretty easy — Tik-Tok simply monitored my listening to Springsteen in general and pushed that particular video for that reason. What makes this spooky is that the video itself was about the specific thing I thought about, literally.

But, as always, I’m reluctant to believe that Tik-Tok can literally read my mind. In this specific instance there is a non-kooky explanation — Tik-Tok knew in general that I was listening to Bruce on Spotify and it just so happened that the video about him was about the very subject I listened to. The nature of Born In The USA is pretty mainsteam.

It’s still pretty spooky and intrusive, no matter how Tik-Tok figured it out.

The Earth Is Broiling & Yet It’s Still A Lulz?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Reality is very important to me. So when I find myself surrounded by people who are denying a concrete reality that is all around us, it makes me very angry. What sparks me thinking about this is how it’s now very clear that the earth is heating up at an alarming rate.

And, yet, because how since about the 2000 presidential election, anything to do with global climate change is seen exclusively through the prism of partisan politics. Because of the broader problem of negative polarization, people on the Right are denying empirical evidence that global climate change is real. They do everything in their power to conflate, or mitigate or rationalize out of existence the very cold hard facts that we are now confronted with on a daily basis.

Even if you pin these people down, the pretty much just throw up their arms and say, something like, “humans have nothing to do with it” or “what do you want us to do about it.”

But, really, this is an issue of these people getting so wrapped up in the immediate political future that they’re willing to embrace nihilism. So, you can tick off all these different things that we should or could do to save ourselves, because of the absolute addictive power of negative polarization people on the Right will never, ever change their point of view on this subject. To the point that we could all be forced to move to Canada, Russia and Antarctica and these people would still be complaining about the Green New Deal banning cows because of their farts.

All of this points to not only how fucked we are, but there’s a severe problem in our political system that is putting the entire existence of humanity at risk. And the one thing that would fix this problem — leadership on the Right — is just not something that is going to happen anytime soon, maybe ever.

As it stands, people on the Right are looking at global climate change exclusively through the lens of partisan politics and economics. To the point where, like I said, they’re nihilistic. They would rather own the libs than risk, in any way, figuring out a way to save humanity through the group effort of a common front.

So, I don’t know what to tell you. Get ready to broil, I guess.

The UFO Conundrum


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The core reason why UFOs collectively cause us all a huge problem is it’s easy for us to get all worked up…and then nothing happens. That’s why it’s so difficult for UFOs to be taken seriously. Over the last 70 or so years, we’ve all been left waiting for something to happen…and it never does.

I would say at the moment, all we can confirm is that there have been credible reports of things flying around in the air that we can’t explain. That’s it. We don’t know what they are and we don’t know where they came from. Because of the magical thinking associated with conspiracy theories, it’s natural for people to make the leap into, “Well, obviously, the government has made First Contact and is hiding it from us.”

When, that is a leap with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It’s a shit tone of wishful thinking. Though, to be fair, every once in a while, so old guy high up in a government here or there around the world will give something akin to a deathbed confession where he goes on at great length about what appears to be some rather fantastical post-secret-First Contact things.

But even under the most charitable of circumstances, without any proof that any of this is real, there are simply way, way too many hurdles to overcome. For such things to be real, not only would aliens have to be real, have been interested in humans enough to come to earth, but the government would have had the wherewithal to keep the whole thing secret and THEN somehow manage to have astronauts in tunnels under Mars.

As such, again, it’s safe to assume that there are, on occasion, things whizzing around the world’s skies that we can’t explain. That’s it. That’s the extent of what is safe to believe.

The Problem With ‘Red Pill’ Culture


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I understand it, there’s a whole on-boarding system that exists for disenchanted young men to “red pill” themselves. When this happens, they start to rant about how women and minorities control everything. But this usually doesn’t happen overnight. They start by watching videos on YouTube about how much Star Wars producer Kathleen Kennedy sucks. Then they start to get into Joe Rogan.

Before you know it, they turn into incels who are MAGA friendly.

There is so much wrong with this. The key issue for me is we, as a society, are not doing enough to educate young men about the New Normal we live in. Nothing’s right or wrong but thinking makes it so, as the Bard would say. So, in a sense, it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’m of the general opinion that a number of things have led to “Red Pill” culture. One is, the lack of a draft to force young men to do Man Stuff with other men from all over the country. Having some sort of unisex National Service would do a whole lot to helping the United States avoid the existential choice of autocracy or civil war. But, sadly, it’s too late now.

Another problem is young blue collar men find it difficult to find high pay jobs that would allow them to fit into the traditional norm of breadwinner. In other words, they find it difficult to get laid, get married and have kids the way their parents did.

Throw in a rather abrupt shift in women’s self perception associated with the #MeToo movement and you have a recipe for a lot of young (white) men to “Red Pill” themselves and radicalize.

There are no simple answers to any of this. I understand things like media narratives and so forth and even I get really irritated with some modern changes, like how Victoria Secret is just about done for.

But, at the same time, I’m educated and refuse to go down the Red Pill rabbit hole so I come out the other side a deranged lunatic. I do think, however, that everything is going to sort itself out between now and, say, January 2025.

We may not like what we have to go through to solve Red Pill culture. It’s going to suck.

The Decline of Victoria’s Secret & ‘Cancel Culture’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If anything can give us some insight into what “cancel culture” is — and isn’t — it’s the gradual decline of Victoria’s Secret. This legacy brand is very much a creature of the pre-‘cancel culture’ morality, so its decline in popularity is a helpful tool on that particular social front.

I’m male and of just the right age for Victoria Secret to be taken for granted as socially acceptable quasi-soft porn that takes the beauty pageant concept one step further. But the brand has had a lot problems of late, both internally and with women’s shifting self-perception.

I would prefer that we could come to some sort of middle ground whereby Victoria Secret could continue to do its pre-2020s thing in peace for people who enjoy it, but that’s not to be. That ship has sailed and now the whole endeavor is probably going to tank because “the center has not held.”

It’s difficult to sell the concept of Victoria Secret to wealthy women in major metropolitan areas when they’ve moved on to buy a Pelton or whatever. Or, put another way, in the public sphere at least, the Victoria Secret ideal is seen as an attack on the vast majority of women who don’t look like that. I’m obviously not a woman, but just casually observing things, it seems as though macro things are afoot that are leading us to a New Era — one without Victoria’s Secret.

But I will note that if you look at the broad swaths of human history, things don’t go in a straight line. Sex with always sell and all it would take is a Second American Civil War and we might come out the other side (if, thankfully, the Good Guys win) with a whole different set of priorities than we do right now.

I’m really pushing it with that bit of speculation, however. Just like how good movies and rock music have apparently faded into oblivion, so, too will Victoria Secret join them soon enough.

If Tucker Carlson Is So Worried About People Reading His Personal Shit — Wait Until He Hears About Tik-Tok


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

In a surreal turn of events, Tucker Carlson is now ranting about how the Biden Administration through the NSA is reading his “private emails.” Add this to how Fox News has turned on the U.S. Military in a rather abrupt fashion and it’s all very bonkers.

I think Carlson is spooked by something. A reporter somewhere is asking questions about something that makes him look bad and he’s freaking out, looking for some explanation for how they know what they know. So he’s blaming the NSA out of desperation, if nothing else. Or, the whole thing is just bad faith bullshit and he’s trying to recon something that is about to pop out in the near term.

Anyway, if Carlson is going to be all paranoid, he should at least be interesting about the idea that Tik-Tok, and Big Tech in general, may have the technology to read our fucking minds. While I don’t seriously think Big Tech can read our minds, they definitely have a spooky ability to figure me out in a very specific manner. Specific enough that I’d like bonkers Tucker Carlson to at least look into it and see what HE finds.

But, in the end, meh.

My Hot Take On ‘Cancel Culture’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I say the following knowing damn well that my own personal history — and views — don’t fit the media narrative and are, as such, ripe for me to be “canceled” rather abruptly if I ever make it big somehow.

But, having said that, to me, it’s a clear mark of someone with very simplistic and recursive political views if they ever start ranting about “cancel culture.” I say this because most of the people who rant about cancel culture don’t even really know what the fuck it is. In general, I think, they see it as evil liberals destroying the lives of conservatives like themselves for just being conservative.

Things grow a lot more muddled, however, when inevitably these “canceled” people either pop back into the mainstream media world after a little while or if you look into why these people were canceled. The vast majority of the time, the conservatives who were canceled for just being conservative usually did something that they deserved to be “canceled” for. They used the N-word. They were forcing women around them to jerk off, they were being over-the-top abusive in some way. Or, they were just assholes who happened to be conservative, too.

But the reason that the abstract fear of “cancel culture” resonates with the average conservative is ever since about 2012, America’s culture has been changing at light speed relative to what your typical conservative thinks of as “normal.”

So, what you often find happening now is conservatives are told by their thought leaders to live in abject fear of the abstract concept of being “canceled” when the average person just living their life — even conservative people — don’t really have much to worry about. All the instances of conservatives being “canceled” I can think of off the top of my head, they were assholes who deserved it.

The abstract concept of “cancel culture” is now something for really earnest, really masculine men to hide behind whenever they “red pill” themselves and start ranting about this or that fucked up thing. The worst part of all of this is I agree that a lot of people have grown too sensitive at the edges of social and political debate. But I think that is more a problem that is a sign of our late-stage Republic than anything else.

Once we either become an autocracy or we have a civil war, shit like “cancel culture” is going to be, well, uh, canceled. When the autocracy comes, we’re all going to be so worried about not getting pushed out of windows by ICE that we won’t have time to worry about who got canceled. Or, if we have a civil war, by the time it’s over, cancel culture will be the least of our worries.

But something about how people who are into Joe Rogan’s podcast getting all bent out of shape about “cancel culture” and seeing it as some sort of vague monster that is holding them back really fucking gets on my nerves.

Revisiting Ezra Klein’s ‘Why We’re Polerized’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The United States definitely has a late-stage Republic vibe to it these days. Something is warping our politics in surreal ways to the point that on an individual basis one can find oneself having some pretty bonkers conversations. At the core of this, of course, is America’s third historical rail: race.

I read Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized and it was very illumining, but for one thing — he went into all this detail as to why we’re polarized, but could not figure out what to do about it. He offered no solutions, probably because there are none at the moment.

It would be like someone writing a similar book in the late 1850s — there just was no solution to the division America faced within the construct of traditional American democracy. Something was going to give.

Just within my own family, I’m the political red headed step child. Everyone in my immediate family is bed rock, old school conservative. If the issues behind the rise of MAGA were not fucking with our politics, they would be pretty much just your regular very conservative people — they only flirt with MAGA because of negative polarization. They simply feel they have no other choice but to go wherever MAGA takes the Republican Party.

The macro bending of our political system warps individual political conversations in some pretty bonkers ways. I have a very conservative relative who is upset about the Virginia police official who lost his job after an online leak showed he gave about $20 to the Kyle Rittenhouse defense fund. This relative was upset that the officer got in trouble both because of a leak and because of the small size of the donation. To my relative, this is just another example of “cancel culture run amuck.”

Meanwhile, to me, I’m flabbergasted that my relative wouldn’t see what I see — you deserve to lose your job (especially if your in law enforcement) if you support a political murderer. It doesn’t matter how much you donated or how we found out. No one with such fascist political views should be in law enforcement, period.

It’s small things like that that trouble me a great deal. Fascism is ascendant in the United States in a rather conspicuous manner and one day we’re either going to slip into an autocratic managed democracy or we’re going to have a civil war.

At the moment, I think there is a historical determinism to the United States becoming a white Christian ethno state of “blood and soil.” The Establishment Powers That Be have a vested interest in keeping everyone calm and so when we’re absolutely forced to make a decision, they’re going to tell everyone that living in a fascist state is just The New Normal.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that on a macro historical level, America’s fate rests more on how likely it is that Trump or any number of his potential successors is deft at shepherding us into autocracy or if they bungle it. Only if things get out of their control will we go the other high risk, high reward route: civil war.

I don’t want a civil war, but I also don’t really want to live in a MAGA-themed autocratic state where I have to worry about ICE pushing me out a window. In a strictly rhetorical manner, I would rather risk dying on my feet a free man than living a slave in an autocratic state.

But that’s just me doing my usual “doom shit.” It’s possible that things will endup being far more subtle than I keep sketching out. We’ll drift into autocracy, but it will be a “light touch” autocracy for a long time until someone realizes that they can get away with anything they want on a political level and they overreach. Americans get woke to living in an autocracy…..and I don’t know.

Anyway, I would advise you to get a passport or make sure you live in a part of the country that aligns with your political views. Good luck.

COVID19 Scenario: August, 2021 — ‘The Omega Variant’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Editor’s Note: This has been edited some since its original publishing.

Each time COVID bounces from one person to the next, there’s a chance it might mutate into something along the lines of the virus found in The Stand. It’s an admittedly microscopic chance, but it does exist. Throw into the equation people from all over the world in Tokyo at the moment and it’s easy to imagine a Stephen King-size clusterfuck.

While it definitely looks like we’re out of the woods — least in most of the First World — when it comes to COVID19, it’s still out there bouncing around with opportunity after opportunity to mutate. It makes you wonder what the reaction would be if COVID19 mutated into something far, far nastier than it is now. Given that August is the shittiest month, I’m working on the assumption that if it happens, it will pop out around August, 2021.

A lot would depend on how this speculative “Omega Variant” popped up. If it was localized to one place at first, then nations are on edge enough right now that it would probably be fairly easily controlled. But my fear is if an Omega Variant appeared, it would appear all over the world at the same time and all we could do is simply attempt to do some triage to an End Of The World type situation.

If variant of COVID19 appeared that was far more deadly than anything out there now, at first, the whole thing — at least in the English-speaking Western World — would, again, be seen through the prism of politics. The Right would scoff, saying “Here we go again.” They would do everything in their power to obstruct the American government from doing anything to mitigate a looming disaster, just like they did the first time.

It would not be until the Right saw some potential political gain that they would switch gears and start to demand something be done. Then, of course, it would be too late. Instead of 600,000 dead, we may be looking at something closer to 10-30 million. If things started to get that bad, it’s very possible MAGA would start to angle for a way to seize power via a coup — or something. They’re already halfway there now, if the country was felled by a severe second wave of COVID19, they might attempt to step into the breach.

So, it’s at least possible that at some point in the next few months (years?) we’re going to have to go through all of this again because an Omega Variant breezes past all our vaccines and starts killing people not in the thousands, but the millions.

But I’m wrong all the time. I’m sure the monster won’t come back for one more round. We’re going to cruise into a new Roaring Twenties, at least until we have a civil war or turn into a MAGA autocracy. This is all very speculative. It’s just if the COVID pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that when you’re dealing with a virus, all the narrative management in the world isn’t going to save us.