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Cos-playing Rebellion
Ever since encountering Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise I have been pondering his notion of the “partisans of overthrow”. What does it mean? What are the people that imagine themselves as revolutionaries really thinking? What are they really trying to do? Do they really have a clue what they are really trying to do?
See, I believe that when you truly overthrow your current rulers, you are risking the end of life as we know it.
Jolly good fun to overthrow the Bourbon king, Frenchies, but really, what has France amounted to since then?
Jolly good fun to overthow the Czar, Vlad, but whatabout the tens of millions that died in famine, purges, and war, and the pathetic poverty of the USSR?
Jolly good fun, Adolf, to dump the social democratic regime, but whatabout the poor bloody Germany that you wrecked?
Jolly good fun to win the Chinese civil war, Mao, but whatabout the famines and the purges?
Jolly good fun to rage against the machine, 60s lefties, but what was the point, again?
Jolly good fun to rage against the patriarchs, but what does liberation mean when you insist on the state providing “safety” for liberated feminists?
Jolly good fun to Occupy Wall Street. To what end, exactly?
Jolly good fun to fight climate change, but what is the point in making life unaffordable for generations yet unborn?
Jolly good fun to abolish ICE, lefties, but whatabout ordinary people whose lives are damaged by “undocumented migrants”?
I think there is a natural instinct, especially in young men, to rage against the machine, but it is pretty obvious to me that the whole purpose of culture, religion, and politics is to put a brake on rebellion. Whatever is wrong with the world, the show must go on: staying alive, creating a new generation, keeping the train on the tracks.
There’s a piece out today at Compact discussing four generations of rebels in the US through four examples:
The Baby Boomer that “approached political contestation through cultural experimentation and an attempt to unsettle the relationship between truth and knowledge”
The Gen-Xer, “typically associated with ironic detachment and bored irreverence”
The “millennial political theorist, embodies a more earnest effort to recover substantive political alternatives after the disappointments of Bernie Sanders and Occupy”
The Gen-Zer, “former socialist turned Trump supporter, shows us [his generation’s] transgressive, ironic, overly online political rebellion”
But really, what’s the point? Go ahead and review all those bullet points, and ask yourself whether any of them made a blind bit of difference, except to Make Things Worse? The first group was about real revolutions that mostly killed hundreds of millions of humans. The second group was about rich kids cos-playing revolution.
Let’s face it, anyone that tells us that they have a plan to transform the world with politics is not a “partisan of overthrow”, but a saboteur and a wrecker.
Because all politics is nothing but the sabotage and wrecking of peaceable human society, don’t you agree, Joey von Stalin?
| Thu, 29 Oct 2026 21:58:19 GMT |
The Wages of AI Transformation
Back in the late 19th century — the Gilded Age we call it — the US was going through a staggering transformation, as Pennsylvania-born Salena Zito reminds us.
In the 1870s and 1880s, Americans were living through the largest economic transformation in the country’s history. In 1870, about one American in four lived in a city. By 1890, it was more than a third. Farmers watched corn fall from 83 cents a bushel in 1881 to 28 cents in 1890 while they paid tariff-protected prices for everything they bought. Mill towns filled with newcomers. Western Pennsylvania was where much of the future was being built: rails in Johnstown, locomotives in Altoona, coke in Connellsville, oil in Butler County, gas in Murrysville, and George Westinghouse’s alternating current in Pittsburgh.
Let’s put it crudely. In 1850, the US was predominantly an agricultural nation. In 1900 it was an industrial juggernaut, and trying a bit of world-power politics with the Spanish American War. And ordinary people got tossed around like tumbleweed in a storm.
When humans experience a transformation like that they mostly hate it; they hate the chaos and the end of life as they know it. And they particularly hate the booms and busts that go with it. There was the Panic of 1873 — mostly due to the monetary deflation after the Civil War. And the Panic of 1893, caused by a railroad bubble, the curse of monetary bimetallism and a few other business failures. Then there was the Crash of 1906 caused in part by the Alaska gold rush.
Today, of course, we are in the middle of the AI Bubble. And as Carlota Perez writes in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, new technology usually follows an S-curve, and the bubble pops when the S-curve goes from increasing its gradient to reducing its gradient.
Right now, as Zito writes, the big issue is Data Centers, and everyone is opposed to having one in their back yard.
As usual, we peasants are missing the point. It’s not Data Centers that are going to ruin the neighborhood, or even the coast-to-coast nuclear plants that we will need to power them. It’s the loss of jobs.
My guess is that the migration from the farm to the factory will seem simple and beneficial compared to the workforce chaos that will ensue with AI. I keep seeing ads of corporate desk jockeys being blown away by Adobe’s AI products redoing their boring meeting slides into something amazing. But obviously the real changes will be in the vast corporate and government bureaucracies and their cubicle farms.
The last business revolution was the union manufacturing workers hitting the wall in the mid-20th century. The best and brightest weren’t really affected by that. But the AI revolution is going to hammer white-collar workers, from teachers to lawyers to administrators to regulators: the white-collar middle class. Put it this way: middle class white-collar workers are a lot more articulate than blue-collar union workers.
In the last few years we have been used to the Activist Industrial Complex and their Sorosian overlords and NGO intermediaries filling the world with platoons of activists and slogans and protests and rage. But I suspect that the divisions of disappointed corporate workers, the AI’ed lawyers, the old-school programmers and analysts will create a whole new world of activism that will make the Year of St. George of Floyd and the present unpleasantness in France look like a walk in the park.
And that is to say nothing of the army corps of government bureaucrats that are present cocooned in union-protected lifetime jobs. Right now state governments are all trying to raise taxes to pay for the pay and benefits and pensions of those useless employees, and that’s before AI really kicks in. I just have no idea how AI and government employees and elected politicians and eevil billionaires and angry taxpayers will resolve their differences.
| Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:05:37 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Mircea Eliade and the Primitive
