Hyperreality

Chinese EVs are being sold at a loss of up to 35k per car:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/business/nio-china-electric-vehicles.html

The Chinese government is subsidising their car industry, so they can engage in dumping, and decimate our car industries. When our domestic car industries are dead, they'll raise prices. It's like Amazon or any other scummy megacorp that kills local businesses.

This being said, it's hard to feel sorry for companies who also receive plenty of government subsidies and tax breaks, broke the law on emissions testing and likely killed a lot of people because of it, and refused to innovate or lower prices out of sheer greed.

Their leader calls journalists vermin and they go on about the 'Lugenpresse', his followers shoot up synagogues, allied media spread Nazi/far right inspired anti-semitic canards like Cultural Marxism ('Kulturbolshewismus'), they go on about how the '''left wing intellectual elite''' are trying to undermine western values and cause a decline of morals and degeneracy ('Entartung'), they're afraid of difference, they hold the weak in contempt, they abhor nuance so use a limited newspeak vocabulary to limit critical reasoning, they're obsessed with plots, and on social media many of his followers spread the Q-anon conspiracy which is a reworking of the antisemtic blood libel canard.

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is a duck.

Here's a Sartre quote that's also increasingly relevant (again):

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

Yep. Claim victimhood. Fascism 101.

Fascists are boring. It's the same strategy for almost a hundred years. Orwell on Hitler:

It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

Today's mice are an incredibly marginalised and incredibly small sexual minority. But fascists will pretend they're not, that they're part of the elite trying to cause degeneracy. Not billionaire rapists like Musk or Trump.

Not as if fascists are going to actually fix the big shit, like the economy, the environment, or affordable housing. Not as if they're going to stand up to the countries actually threatening western values, like Russia or China. No. Now they've decided it's some nobody in the arse end of America, who feels happier wearing a dress.

People who fall for that shit are morons. Not that most fascists actually believe their own bullshit. They just do it shock and disconcert people, and because they hate those they perceive weaker than them. Just like their Dear Leader considers them scum, has regularly said he is disgusted by them, because they're so weak that they've chosen to lick his boots.

Given their videos were so highly ranked, the prevalence of coercion in the industry, and the fact that it's often impossible to tell if someone's been threatened behind the scenes, it's highly likely that most people reading this who have watched porn online have also watched plenty of videos of actual rapes.

This is a simple fact, but one which a lot of people would rather deny, rather than admit their part in perpetuating it, while wondering why watching porn makes them sad. Partly, I suspect, because deep down they know the truth of it.

TBF my experience with Japanese and American workers is that you spend a lot of time in the office, but aren't particularly productive. Hardly surprising, given there's loads of evidence that suggests a strict enforcement of leisure time, actually increases productivity.

No one works at 100% if they work 70 hours a week and check their emails during the weekend.

Or as I once put it to a boss, when he asked me why I was leaving the office at 1700 on the dot, I finish my work in 8 hours, my colleagues need 9.