Category Archives: society

False positives

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There have recently been concerns over COVID19 tests that return positive results at excessive rates.

There is a real danger in those tests, because when you combine a perception of a deadly disease that justifies all measures in order to control it, and a test that returns excessive positive results, you get two problems.

The first problem is a perception in public that the threat is out of control and that further powers need to be given to the “authorities”, which raises the question “cui bono”. Basically, if we accept the premise that the entire COVID19 overreaction was engineered to increase state power and take power away from the individuals, by nefarious actors behind the scene, tests that create exaggerated sense of threat would fit this narrative perfectly, because who benefits from this hysteria not winding down?

The second problem is a corollary of the first: if there’s a perception in the public that COVID19 is a deadly threat that justifies drastic measures of containment, a person of interest to the “authorities” is “tested” and found “positive” (the general public wouldn’t perceive the quotation marks), and if people in hazmat suits accompanied by police pick that person up and take him to a direction unknown, but assumed to be a special quarantine facility, and that person is later reported to have died of the illness, nobody would really raise an eyebrow because, after all, COVID19 is deadly. And if body is said to have been cremated in order to control the contagion, that wouldn’t be surprising either. Basically, it gives the totalitarian-minded assholes in power the instruments to “disappear” anyone at will, no annoying legal procedures needed, and no questions asked, and not only would it not compromise their position, it would actually augment the argument for their totalitarian powers.

Both false negative and false positive tests can be used to create panic, and, from what I can tell, they actually have been. False negatives came first – their purpose was to create the false impression that virus isn’t as contagious as it actually is, and that it is far more dangerous than it actually is (because a greater percentage dies). The first impression is useful because if the virus isn’t really that contagious, it gives the government something to do – they can prescribe measures, make us wear those stupid and useless masks, control our movement, monitor us. If it was known that most of us already had the virus, those measures would have been useless. Also, the fewer the known positives, the higher the perceived lethality of the virus, which is how the real panic was created. If people knew that most of them already had it and were either asymptomatic or had a mild flu, there would be no panic, and no need for emergency state powers.

False positives came next – after the fear of the virus had been instilled into the population, suddenly there’s an impression that it can’t be contained by present measures (because more and more people test positive), and since it’s perceived to be a deadly threat, all measures to contain it are justified.

Of course, I can’t be sure that this narrative is actually true, but based on past experience and patterns of behavior, I have every reason to suspect the “authorities”, especially when a suggested course of action gives them the only thing they desire above all: power. Unfortunately, their victims are not only stupid enough to put trust in them, they are stupid enough to create virtue-signaling mobs on social networks that actually “discipline” everybody into obedience, and scream for more state control to “assuage their fears”.

 

May God save us from atheism and other evils

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The leftists call themselves “woke”. I assume it’s how the American blacks think you say “awakened”, and they are of course wrong because they speak shit English, however the white leftists are so collectively obsessed with self-flagellation over belonging to the race that invented our civilization, which includes being the only race in history that actually abolished slavery, they think they have to culturally appropriate this illiterate bullshit to ritually de-white themselves. But to return to the point, their idea of being awakened means perceiving the world through a neo-Marxist lens of exploitation dichotomies. One sex exploits and subjugates the other, one race exploits and subjugates others, et cetera, ad nauseam. It’s stupid, intellectually lazy bullshit that’s taught at American worthless universities. You know how I define lazy ideologies? They give you a very simple pattern that explains everything, so that you don’t have to do complex thinking. This neo-Marxism is surprising in a sense, because it’s really hard for me to grasp how any adult person could find that shit convincing, because, for instance, game theory provides a much better explanation of how humans interact in groups; however, if you apply game theory to large human groups in a free system, what you get is basically cooperative meritocracy, a free market of ideas, goods and services that is self-regulating. Essentially, when you stop fucking with the system, people are motivated by self-interest to create things and provide goods/services that will be of most use to most people, because they trade those things for money which gives them more power. They are also motivated to limit disruptions to the freedom of the system by controlling crime, and so on. Sure, when you look at the system from the outside, the distribution of wealth and power always turn out to be hugely unequal, but that’s apparently normal not only for human groups, but also for physical entities; it’s called Zipf’s law, or Pareto distribution. So, basically, the entire “woke” understanding is just nonsense, it’s intellectual laziness and sheer idiocy. To think that you’re “awakened” because you have a simple pattern for explaining the entire reality and to keep sticking to it regardless of the evidence to the contrary doesn’t make you awakened, it makes you lazy, stupid and arrogant, but first and foremost it shows you’re deeply insecure, because only insecure people, who feel they are worthless, have to resort to such stupid forms of self-deception. I almost forgot, the “woke” are of course atheists, because they understand religion as a system of oppression.

The right-wingers are also “awakened”, only they call it “red-pilled”, in the much overused image from “The Matrix” movie. Basically, take the blue pill, you keep sleeping, take the red pill and you wake up and see the real world, ugly as it might be. This “red pill” thing is applied to almost anything, from wild and completely idiotic conspiracy theories where “they” are doing “thing x” to fuck you over, but you saw through it because “red pill”, all the way to the realization that women apply game theory to mating and sex, basically they will use all the power at their disposal to create what they see as preferable outcomes for themselves and their children. As we would say in Croatia, congratulations on discovering hot water. This “red pill” community is as arrogant and stupid as the “woke” community, and yes, they too are atheists, because they are “red pilled” to understand there’s no God, because science, and shit. They’re not the ordinary “sheeple” who will go to church and believe in God, they are “woke”, oops, sorry, they are “red pilled”. They are so much smarter than everybody else, because they got a rudimentary understanding of the intuitive interpretation of game theory.

As for me, I’m done. Fuck atheists; as far as I’m concerned, they can all shut the fuck up forever, because I’m done listening to their stupid bullshit arguments, the same stupid bullshit arguments I’ve been hearing for the last few decades. They always act as if they are the ones who figured it all out, and everybody else is stupid, but you know what? People have been building civilization, which was always tightly interlaced with their relationship with the transcendental – call it religion if you will – for thousands of years, and atheism has realistically been around only a few centuries, and in those few centuries they managed to wreck everything to the point where you are no longer free to state that humans exist in two sexes, male and female, which are distinct, different and immutable, because you’ll be attacked by rabid herds of fucking idiots who will try to destroy your life in every possible way. For something that purports to be inherently rational, it’s quite interesting how atheism spawns the most ridiculous, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific ideologies at a whim. Also, they like to say that religions are violent, but atheism is literally dripping with the blood of millions, from the French revolution and its guillotine orgies onwards. They come to power using lies and propaganda, and then they start killing everybody who doesn’t agree with them; that’s how their “rationality” works in practice. They argue with you just enough to confuse you and get themselves into positions of power, and then they simply use violence.

They will say the science is on their side. No, it’s not. It was, somewhere between 19th and 20th century, but it advanced to the point where it no longer is. You know why there’s so much talk about crazy shit such as “the multiverse” in today’s “science”? It’s because it was proven that this Universe wouldn’t work if some basic constants varied even the slightest bit, so you get either the option of accepting that it’s created by someone who knew what he’s doing, or that an infinite number of universes was created by accident and one of this infinity just happened to have the right fundamental constants and here we are to observe it. The trick is, by Occam’s razor, the hypothesis with an intelligent creator suddenly became infinitely more probable than the random-creation theory, because you need to introduce one entity in order for the hypothesis to work, not an infinite number of them. However, the “rational” atheists just skip over that inconvenient fact and talk about that multiverse bullshit as if that’s actually proven physics; as a footnote, remember Carl Sagan and his “Universe is all that is, all that was and all that ever will be”? Well, apparently that became inconvenient, so “multiverse” was pulled out of thin air, as a sleight-of-hand to rescue materialism and atheism. The same goes for the many-worlds interpretation of the quantum theory, which is one of the most idiotic theories I’ve ever heard, because it doesn’t even understand that the wave-function collapse really works with how our quantified ignorance (also known as “probability”) transitions into knowledge, and imagines it actually has to do with anything in the actual universe. Today’s science is, for the most part, desperate garbage, the only purpose of which is for someone to get a PhD and grants.

I’m not saying that problems with atheism and materialism mean we should go back to some medieval religion. Those religions got kicked to the curb for a good reason; we can’t base our understanding of the reality on bronze-age scriptures written by sheep herders. However, we also need to accept the fact that those bronze-age sheep herders got more things right about what works in a human society, and what doesn’t. If you want to create a society that actually works, a bronze-age scripture will get more things right than all the “rational” atheist philosophies ever devised. It’s curious how there are people on YouTube who will point out all the ways in which our civilization screwed the pooch, but without pointing out that all the “primitive” and “regressive” things that came before actually got all those things right. I know why: because they would have to admit that the religions, such as the traditional Christianity, obviously possess better answers, far superior to anything devised in the “age of reason” and “humanism”. This would be highly unlikely if they didn’t have a better “source” than human reason. You can be “sceptical” as much as you like, and invent word-trickery and irony about religion, but if something is as stupid as you try to make it, and it gives better results and provides better predictions of social outcomes than anything you came up with, “stupid” or not, it’s better than anything you have, so as far as I’m concerned, you atheists can go collectively fuck yourselves, and I don’t want to hear a single word in defence of your stupid bullshit philosophy.

Now that we come to this, it’s interesting how the Catholic Church here in Croatia, several years ago, gave a perfectly accurate interpretation of the phenomenon of “gay marriage” and other “civil rights and liberties” considering normalization of all kinds of anomalous and aberrant behaviours, and their interpretation sounded too extreme and improbable, and they were for the most part laughed at. Their predictions of the destruction of the entire value-based structure of our civilization, as well as the destruction of the family unit and the traditional concepts of human sexual identity, were exactly right, everything they said was on point. It’s interesting how that works: all the “stupid” and “backward” traditional religions got it right, and all the “progressives” were completely wrong, to the point where you couldn’t be more wrong even if you actively tried. It’s as if those religions actually do know what they are talking about, of course using their own respective imagery when trying to “interface” with the infinity of the Transcendental. As a conclusion, I would concur with the quote from a Catholic priest, who said that atheism is an evil that can be fought only with fasting and prayer. Truly, atheism is an evil worse than murder, because all murders and other evils arise from the lack of awareness of God’s presence, and I would agree that it can be fought only by firmly establishing our consciousness in prayer to God and renunciation of our lower animal nature. Only thus can we be saved from this nightmare created by godless men and their father in spirit, Satan.

American circus

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I’m back from Hvar, and I must admit I’ve been naughty and occasionally went online to check the news, or, to be accurate, to check how the American civil war v.2.0 is going. Honestly, the amount of outright madness I’ve seen was enough for even me to grab my head in “what the actual fuck” moments.

One of the biggest WTF moments was the realization that the stock prices are in inverse proportion to the state of the economy, basically the worse the economy is doing, the more the stock prices are surging. That’s because the federal reserve bank essentially promised to buy out the failing companies, so the greater likelihood of a bankruptcy, the greater the likelihood of a fed bailout, which is then expected to raise the stock price and people are buying in anticipation. However, that’s the point where America kissed the free market goodbye, essentially transforming their entire economy into something so entirely state-controlled and regulated, that China looks like free market heaven in comparison. Essentially, they broke the fundamental of the free market capitalist economy, which is that stock prices reflect profitability of the company itself. As of now, the stock prices reflect only the expectation of state intervention. However, if everything on the market is broke and requires state intervention, it reminds me of something I’ve already seen before, which is the state of the economy in Yugoslavia before the collapse, where the main points of political contention were the big companies that employed lots of people and couldn’t be allowed to fail, so state money was continually pumped into them to compensate for the losses, and since the state itself was not productive, meaning it couldn’t come up with enough actual money for this process of fixing broken industry instead of being propped up by the productive industry, it resorted to printing money, which caused a devastating hyperinflation that at least contributed to, if not outright caused the collapse of the Yugoslav state. People can point at nationalism as the cause of the breakdown all they want, but, as in the Soviet Union, the surge of nationalism was preceded by a serious economic crisis – currency collapse, shortages and the basic inability to make a living from honest work, because prices were adjusted daily, and salaries were adjusted monthly. After a few years of survival in such a devastated economy, people tend to just throw in the towel and say “fuck it, I’m done with this”, and they want things to change. Basically, the nationalists say that the big federal state is to blame for all this, which is of course true, and promise to make it all better by tearing it all down and reclaiming the statehood on the smaller, national units, which of course is a fallacy but at that point of economic exhaustion the people just aren’t interested in that kind of nuance. They want things to change, and immediately, because their condition is unbearable. Essentially, when you have a situation where the economic condition of the majority of the population is unbearably bad, any sufficiently organized political force that offers some way out might cause complete breakdown and disintegration of a large federally organized state, especially if one part of the federation has reason to believe that the other part is taking advantage of them and causing their problems, so political solutions are no longer possible. In Yugoslavia, Slovenia and Croatia had good reasons to believe that they were being systematically economically degraded by Serbia, which controlled the central government and used their productive economies to prop up unproductive parts of the country, basically bleeding them for money that should have been used to improve their own infrastructure and living conditions. In America, there is a very narrow segment of the population that lives in New York and California, that controls the entirety of the flow of money, and is perceived to bleed the rest of the country dry, creating the impression where work of an investment banker is worth millions of dollars a month, while work of a normal middle-class person is worth a few thousands a month, and the situation is getting even more extreme as a function of time. You can’t convince me that the work those stock market people are doing is actually that much more valuable than work of some engineer that designs sophisticated machinery or electronics; rather, they are the ones in the control room of the financial system and they are exploiting its weaknesses to make most of the money that’s in circulation circulate in dead loops where they bleed this mass for percentage points, and this money never gets to be invested in the actual economy, because that’s seen as “risky” and slow. This makes the entire economy ungrounded, like a tree that’s all branches and no roots, because roots are seen as “unproductive” and the branches are the sole measure of success. Essentially, if your company stock price is seen as the sole measure of value, and your engineers and workers are seen as a liability because they just cost money, you get started on a vicious cycle where you fire your most expensive workers, basically the engineers that design the product, and you hire marketing people to boost sales, and you get loans that are invested not in the actual development and manufacturing, but in buying your own stocks, which will raise the stock price as the sole measure of value. Then you get a company that is an empty shell containing only debt and salespeople, and the problem with this is that every single company on the market has to adopt the same measures in order to keep up with the competition that would otherwise obtain better financial indicators, thus getting preferential access to credit and, thus, a lever that would give them a huge competitive advantage. This also means that the risk-assessment in the banking sector is tuned to prefer the bigger companies, to the point where all the money is sucked into a dark tornado cloud of the biggest companies, while the small and medium sized businesses are seen as “high risk”, because they actually are dealing with the free market and they have free market issues, which the banking system sees as the messy cesspool of risk and non-compliance, so when the government wants to make an infusion of money into businesses, you need to understand what happens. The state does it through the banking system: the central bank prints money and offers a cheap loan to the commercial banks that then resell it to the businesses. Since the bank can’t just set aside its normal risk management and compliance procedures just because the politicians want to help small businesses, what actually happens is that the bank’s risk department does a SQL query on the table of companies asking for loans, sorting them by risk overhead, ascending, and spending all the money on the top 5 or 10 claimants, of 100000. Those 5 are always the bank’s existing clients, and the ones that are the biggest, and with the biggest extant loans. So, that’s why the government can’t even theoretically help the small businesses – the entire mechanism is already rigged to suck all the money into the biggest companies, and it can’t be modified just because someone said so. It’s actually illegal for the banks to go against the recommendations of their risk departments, so, whatever the politicians say about propping up small and medium businesses, for the most part they are either deceiving you or they don’t know what they are talking about, because it technically can’t be done. What can be done is to reduce the taxes, because that’s not done through the banks, but through the revenue service. However, as a rule, the taxes don’t really go down, so such measures are short lived.

So, when the communists tell you that this quagmire is evidence that capitalism is a corrupt system, I don’t really know what they are talking about, because true free market capitalism is practiced only by the group that is almost completely excluded from this entire corrupt charade: by the small and medium business owners and freelancers. They are engaged in a no holds barred cage fight with the competition, where they have to struggle through increasingly limiting and pointless “state regulations”, and they can’t get loans from the banks because what they do is “high risk”. The part of the market where all the money is, meaning the feedback loop between the federal reserve bank, the commercial bank, big business and the politicians, is a state-regulated, state-controlled fraud scheme in which companies race to go bankrupt first because then they get to be bailed out by the state, which cleans up their liabilities and toxic assets and makes them all shiny and new, and the bill for this entire thing is of course served to the general public and the next generations, because all those government bonds issued to fund all the money printing are going to mature eventually, although it’s obvious that nobody really takes the option of actually servicing all that debt seriously. Right now, they are printing money like crazy while it’s still perceived to be worth something, they are using it to suck up all the resources from the economy, and when it all collapses they’ll just reset the system. Basically, the entire thing can be seen as a financial equivalent of a thermodynamic system which pumps energy from the coldest part of the system (the poorest part of the population) into the hottest part of the system (the wealthiest part of the population). The game ends when it reaches the point where all the resources have been sucked away from the 99% of the population and the top 1% has all the worthless monopoly money, and of course all the actual resources which they obtained with the said money before it became worthless.

Perhaps the most toxic part of the entire problem is that the system collapses with some regularity, and with each cycle the politicians claim that it collapsed because there wasn’t enough state regulation, so they introduce additional layers of regulation, which is of course muddy water in which the biggest players navigate most easily because they can afford whole legal departments to deal with it, while the small businesses are increasingly crippled by the need to deal with all this unproductive administrative junk, and this also means that the banks are less likely to give them loans, because of the stringent risk and compliance procedures. This means that with each cycle of regulation, the system is increasingly more rigged to favour the biggest players and to extinguish the free market capitalist part of the economy. In turn, this means that every cycle makes it more profitable to play with money and regulations than to do anything actually productive, which basically means that the regulations that are intended to make the system less corrupt in fact make it more corrupt. You can’t explain that to the common people, who think that state regulations exist to save them from the evil capitalists who “want to break the law and thus cause the market crashes”. In fact, the feedback loop between the state, the banks and the biggest companies is the problem, and the laws and regulations are a toy for the stupid masses. Basically, what the stupid masses believe is that a private doctor needs to be “regulated” in order for them to be safer. In fact, when a private doctor is “regulated”, it means he has to spend most of his time filling forms to comply with regulations, which makes him spend less time with patients and charge them more money for it to be able to pay for the government-imposed overhead, which makes the quality of his service less valuable and more expensive, essentially making people the opposite of safe. A doctor that fills forms instead of dealing with sick patients does not improve patient health and safety. Replace “doctor” with any occupation and you’ll get the same result; the regulations degrade the quality of service across the board, making things cost more and be worth less, but they are almost impossible to remove once they are in place because people are stupid and they have been made to believe that all those evil capitalists are out there to get them, and the thick book of regulations and the government imposing them are the only thing that saves them from doom. Also, there is a huge difference between what certain laws and regulations are in their essence, and how they are marketed to and perceived by the general public. Anti-money-laundering laws, for instance, are perceived as something that is meant to prevent the mafia from using money that originated from various forms of crime, in order to finance “clean” investments. That’s how it was marketed to the general public. What it’s actually about is the state wanting to assure that it can raise taxes as much as it wants, and you can’t move the money to an offshore company where the taxes are normal, in order to avoid being robbed by a state that ran out of money due to its fiscally imprudent practices and demagoguery (basically buying voters with tax money), and decided to introduce a demagoguery law stating that the evil kulaks took and hid all the money which is why people are poor, and the good state now needs to find and bleed all the kulaks and then everything will be great. That’s what it’s actually about, and the term “money laundering” is there just to convince the stupid general public that it’s about “dirty money”. No, dirty money is the only thing that is explicitly not the target of such laws and regulations, because such money is easily dealt with by other laws – for instance, if the money was actually a result of criminal enterprise, this criminal enterprise would be broken up by the police, crime would be proven in the court of law, and the money resulting from crime would be confiscated. No, what all those laws against “money laundering” and “financing terrorism” are about, is preventing Julian Assange to get funding for his project of revealing government crimes, and for preventing “kulaks” from “hiding wheat in the attic”. It’s a Stalinist overreach in state power, designed to do all the dirty work extrajudicially, basically delegating all the spying and evil to the banks and financial institutions, so that the cases never even go to court, because then it would be obvious that the entire thing is completely baseless and a violation of someone’s rights. This way, the state and the banks conspire to rob you of your rights in such a way that you never get your day in court against them and they can basically do whatever they want, while the people in general see the name of those laws and think it’s all for the good, because money laundering and financing terrorism are baaad (in sheep voice). When the problem becomes so bad that even the general population start taking notice, it’s already too late in the game of totalitarianism for anyone to be able to do anything about it. It’s like the Nazi Germany – why do you object to citizens being routinely stopped at checkpoints and asked for papers? Only criminals would have a problem with that. The problem is, the state’s idea about what is “criminal” might differ wildly from yours. You think a criminal is a murderer, a thief or a rapist. They think a criminal is a journalist who found out and released truthful information about government crimes to the general public. Just watch the Assange case. They invented false charges against him to deceive the general public, and when those were dropped, they invented other false charges, and what is the truth? The truth is that the American state and its entire government system is profoundly corrupt and inherently criminal, and he revealed the facts that showed this quite plainly to the general public, thus spoiling the corrupt government’s public image and making its job of controlling the population harder.

The situation with the recent police violence is similar – usually, the police can hide its criminality behind a fig leaf of some actual crime they were fighting, but when they murdered a few people in broad daylight, for minor infractions, and were recorded doing it, for all to see, it became very difficult for the general public to maintain the illusion of police only doing good work against hardened criminals and having to use violence because, well, they are being forced to. The facts of the matter are different: the police was trained to be extremely violent and arrogant, to use maximum force against minor provocations and for minor offences, and they are increasingly treating the people of America the way American military is treating foreigners in hostile countries – it’s police safety first, not serve and protect the citizens.

Of course, then we get to the point where a mob of black thugs and white communists starts robbing stores to “liberate” all those Nike shoes from the stores of white capitalist oppression, and people start wondering whether police might actually have a point, and it is truly difficult to see either side as good.

In any case, the calls to defund the police can easily be understood for what they are: government power needs to be scaled down because it went too far, but of course that never happens, because once the government gets power, it keeps it until the entire state structure is torn down, and sometimes even that only changes the flag and the name.

The apparently racial background of the issue is completely fake and is the result of deep racism of the American black community – I recently watched a video where a white guy describes his experiences with the police in the recent decades, and those experiences are as violently abusive as anything a black American could point at. However, he rightly notices that the problem is the militarization of the police force and a major change in its attitude, where police started actively looking for trouble and acting violently without any good reason, while a black person would immediately point to race as the cause. Why, because American blacks are the most racist people on Earth, who hide all their own failures behind the veil of imagined racism, while it is a fact that other blacks are the main problem a black person needs to overcome if he wants his life not to suck.

Money printer go brrrr

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The earthquake in Zagreb was quite disruptive locally, but overall, merely a local distraction of no wider consequence.

The COVID-19 is quite nasty, especially if you had the worst symptoms, as I did, but overall, it’s a minor thing blown out of all proportions by governments in love of dictatorial behavior, and panicked snowflakes using social media to virtue-signal about how terrible it is that people actually die.

The panic regarding COVID-19 is much worse, and will eventually kill much more people than the virus, because all that virtue signalling about value of human life broke the economy and that when that starts bearing fruit, you’ll wish you had the SARS.

All the noise about quarantine and the virus is too loud to hear a more dangerous noise:

Money printer go brrr, makes more money than ever. You be so rich, with all those zeroes on paper. You’ll be able to wipe your arse forever when you run out of all that toilet paper you stacked.

Privilege and consequences

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I’ve been thinking about privilege. The term itself is incredibly abused by the lunatic leftists who think you’re privileged for being white or male, and yet they would have kittens if you actually said you feel it’s a privilege to be either. Basically, they are using the concept of privilege the way Marx used the concept of original accumulation of capital – they want to take things from you and the easiest way is to turn things around and say you actually stole something and they are redressing an injustice by robbing you. They’re not the thieves, you are.

There are two forms of privilege that actually exist, in a sense that they can be perceived and they have effects. The first form is the ability to whine and actually get stuff for it. You see, if unprivileged people whine, they are either laughed at, or beaten up. If a privileged person whines, about either being a victim, or breaking a fingernail, they get compassion at the least, and free privileges at the most. Privilege is, essentially, a form of social currency, and today the concept of victimhood seems to be social currency. You say you’re a victim, you get undeserved free stuff. Preferential hiring, preferential treatment in education; you know the drill. If you’re a diversity hire, you can do no wrong, and if anyone even looks at you wrong, they’re fucked. Those people are the new nobility, and the “non-diverse” people are treated basically like serfs in the dark ages. Look at a noble wrong, and you get thrown into a dungeon.

The second form of real privilege is where you’re born. Essentially, the very fact that you’re born in a developed country gives you the amount of wealth and access that’s unimaginable in the undeveloped countries. I’m not just talking about Ikea and Starbucks, I’m talking about in-door plumbing and electricity. I’m talking about being able to pull a lever and your toilet gets flushed. You press a switch, the light is there. Put dishes in the dishwasher, and they are dealt with. Ask a venture capital firm for financing for your IT startup, and not get laughed at. Drink tap water and not get cholera. That kind of privilege.

I must admit I felt injustice as a kid, when I saw how easy some people have it, especially knowing how hard it was for me, and how they apparently did nothing to deserve any of it. Some people just happened to be born to wealthy parents, or parents that are not violent and mentally deranged. Unlike the communists, my reaction wasn’t wishing they had some disaster – it was “wow, I wish I had that”, and, of course, a stab of pain knowing someone “up there” just doesn’t like me that much. I had to learn how to do much with very little, which is why I have a fondness for “democratic technologies”, basically things that perform the same function as much more expensive “luxury items”, but at a fraction of the price. Why do I like them? Because I always imagine myself as a kid, trying to save enough money to buy the cheapest computer, or the cheapest smartphone, the stuff I could buy with very limited pocket money and start learning skills that would eventually help me get out of the pit of doom I got born in, while girls in the most expensive brand clothes sip coffee in a bar, with sunglasses that cost more than everything I own, and scornfully discuss male privilege and climate change, or even more annoyingly, the macrobiotic-homeopathy-meditation kids born to new age parents disapprovingly comment my slouched stance and angry mood, commenting how un-spiritual “some people” are.

Yes, privilege exists, but I keep wondering whether it might be a backwards-firing gun. If you get things by whining, you are never seen as someone deserving respect. Yes, you get things, but you don’t get agency. You are a parasite. You can get preferentially hired, but other employees will know it, and they will know you got there with less qualifications and merit. You can demand respect, and people might pretend to give it to you, but true respect is earned. You can have wealthy parents and that does give you access to money and things, but it also keeps you dependent on someone else’s will. You’re not really an independent person, and you don’t have agency. You can think of yourself as a calm and spiritual person because you’re a pretty flower in a walled-off garden, and you’re allowed to be the way you are because nothing really threatened you, and it’s true that I once looked at people like that with envy and pain, but that has not been the case for a very long time. Now, I see them and smile, thinking they are little more than well-fed cattle. Sure, they were grown to be very pretty flowers, and I was grown to be an ugly-looking poisonous weed, all crooked and nasty, but I learned how to solve problems, simply because I had them. I’m like that mean looking street dog with one ear and one eye that kills and eats nice fluffy bunnies, and rips throats of pretty house dogs that were so pampered by their owners they think they’re alpha and have no problem challenging me. Sure, sometimes I like to think I would have been better off with the life of that girl with Dior sunglasses, or the childhood of that “spiritual” kid with nice parents, who thinks being yelled at, humiliated and beaten up is the end of the world, and not Tuesday. On the other hand, I kind of like being competent and dangerous. I like being the battle-scarred monster that buys girls nice sunglasses and space grey Macbooks, and gives children a nice childhood where being beaten up, yelled at and humiliated is the end of the world, and not Tuesday.