Sparkling Worlds

Transmissions from my mind, intercepted by my computrons

[thedailykopter]

Ending this Tumble-log

So long folks, I'm just running out of time these days, and won't be posting here any more (also, if I resume, I think I'll do so under my real name instead of this pseudonym).

Thanks for following along, and I'm happy some of you liked some of what I shared. I have 1872 posts here, which doesn't sound like much, but I'm surprised I got this far at all! If nothing else, it's given me the courage to continue sharing and blogging and writing, under my real name.

The sparklingworlds.com domain is registered until May 17 2017 and will lapse after that.

Have a great life -- live well, and live honestly!

[thedailykopter]

Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is **not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.**

Atlantic Magazine, "How American Politics Went Insane"

[thedailykopter]

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: We all want everything to be okay. We don’t even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because **most of the time, okay is enough**.

David Levithan

[thedailykopter]

It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. … As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. … The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are _puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world_. **Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics**.

Richard Weaver, "Ideas have consequences"

[thedailykopter]

_Fascism is not a distant historical anomaly_. **It is an optimum end-state towards which large-scale disruptive and predatory economic hierarchies tend**. It is the state of total and unchallenged control of every facet of life by corporate masters of the economy, achieved by an optimized balance of force and a designed mental and social environment. Independent thought is eliminated and **the possibility of even contemplating individual influence is rendered foreign**. Fascism cannot be fully achieved by control of the mental (media) environment alone. The key institutions of education, organized leisure, and work must be aligned with the fascist project. _Several analysts have pointed out that the US plutocracy is already in an advanced stage of fascism._

Denis Rancourt

[thedailykopter]

Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, pic, look, eye, now, flick, here, there, swift, pace, up, down, in, out, why, how, who, what, where, eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, bing, bong, boom!” “Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? **One column, two sentences, a headline!**

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

[thedailykopter]

So many times, it happens too fast **You trade your passion for glory** Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past You must fight just to keep them alive

Survivor, Eye of the Tiger

[thedailykopter]

[thedailykopter]

The dirty little secret of the Democrats is that they don't want to win big, by which I mean, return to the status they enjoyed from 1932 to 1968 as the reality-based party that enacted programs big enough to deal with the nation's problems. They want to remain what they are, **a neoliberal party that ignores the nation's big problems while dabbling in identity politics to hide the party's reactionary nature.**

From a comment to this Salon article: "Beyond Trump’s threat: The GOP, with help from the left, has been destroying democracy for decades"

[thedailykopter]

Modern society is hostile to the expression of individual thought, too. **We’ve pathologised certain ways of thinking, adopting that old Soviet tactic of depicting thoughts that fall outside of the mainstream as mental illnesses**. Hence the rise of the term phobia (an irrational fear) to brand intellectual outliers. Hate Brussels? You’re Europhobic. _Unsure about gay marriage? You’re homophobic. Don’t think Islam is the greatest thing since sliced bread? You’re Islamophobic_. Twitter is held up by some as evidence of our creepily individualistic society with its morass of bedroom-bound typists talking about themselves and their views to no one in particular. **In truth, Twitter also speaks to the emaciation of individualism**: say something daring or untoward in that forum and watch the Twitch-hunters come running, _demanding you recant and conform._

The Spectator, "In defence of individualism"

[thedailykopter]

The college debt is terrible.  Bernie had a solution for that. **Of course it's not just a lifetime of college debt, it's car debt, credit card debt, and if you can save enough on top of all that you can get yourself into mortgage debt. In your last few years you'll enter into medical debt if you haven't done so already.**  That's just to make sure anything you might've saved up for the kiddies goes to it's proper location.   Student debt can only be discharged in death and I imagine the impetus is towards being able to pass it on to the next generation. **We don't want people getting out of their loans by dying on us unfairly.** _I'd identify our situation right now as feudalism_. Look around and please tell me I'm wrong.

From comments to an article in Salon Magazine: “Don’t be fooled by this glorious day”: A commencement speech for the doomed in our age of American decline

[thedailykopter]

Elites, real elites, might recognize one another by their superior knowledge. _The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing._ Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you're actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn't know any better. _Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge._ The studies, about Daily Show viewers and better-sized amygdalae, are knowing. It is the smug style's first premise: **a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signaled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture**. A politics that is just the politics of smart people in command of Good Facts. A politics that insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions, only charts, the kind that keep them from "imposing their morals" like the bad guys do. Knowing is the shibboleth into the smug style's culture, a cultural that celebrates hip commitments and valorizes hip taste, that loves nothing more than hate-reading anyone who doesn't get them. **A culture that has come to replace politics itself.**

Vox Magazine, "The smug style in American liberalism"

[thedailykopter]

When I go for a walk in mid-morning in the Berkeley Hills, I see Nannies out with children, and gardeners tending the large lawns. Every single on of them is an Immigrant. The Progressive Elites who live here seem incapable/unwilling to hire any African Americans from nearby Oakland to care for their children or tend their estates. It is highly doubtful we can all be citizens of "One World", perhaps we need nations/tribes to belong to. **If the Progressive Dream based upon pure Theory and not Reality dies, who is to blame but those Progressive Elites who look down on the rest of us as little more than ignorant savages**.

From a reader's comment to a New York Times opinion piece: "Austria's election is a warning to the West"

[thedailykopter]

The member of a culture … **purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized.** … He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. **Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent**. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside _some veil which is half adornment, half concealment_.

Richard Weaver, "Ideas have consequences"

[thedailykopter]

All science fiction agrees. History is leading to the unification of earth. The united world may be governed by benign world federalism or by a dystopian global tyranny. **But the modern literature of prophecy is clear: the age of competing nation-states is coming to an end**. There are no visions of the future in popular culture in which advanced technology is combined with the continued sovereignty and competition of nation-states like China, India, and the United States or blocs like the European Union. The only near-equivalent is George Orwell's nightmare vision, in 1984, of endless rivalry among the three totalitarian blocs of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.

The Breakthrough Magazine, "Against Cosmopolitanism"

[thedailykopter]

"We are changing the human environment very rapidly and we are becoming a connected super-organism, ants in a hill," he said, "and we are connecting us not to free each of us for higher functioning but **to enable an intermediary organism, the technology of the attention market, and to have access to our minds all the time."**

Ars Technica, "Guardian of the GPL: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

[thedailykopter]

The average man of the present age … does not want to be a sentimentalist in his endeavors; he wants some measure for purposeful activity; _he wants to feel that through the world some increasing purpose runs_. … But since his metaphysic calls only for magnitude and number, since it is becoming without a goal, _it is not a source of distinctions in value_. It is a system of quantitative comparison. **Its effect therefore has been to collapse the traditional hierarchy and to produce economic man, _whose destiny is mere activity_**.

Richard Weaver, "Ideas have consequences"