Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area

This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.

Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.

Rules for General Chat

• Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.

• Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.

• Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome

• Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment

• Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.

• Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)

• If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.

• Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evolving

In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way

Rules For the rest of the Site also accessible on the sidebar.

--

Yesterdays General Chat

EVERYTHING, including Capitalism and every other good thing in life (friendship, sexuality, food, entertainment, work and careers, trust among citizens, etc. ad nauseum), has been corrupted by the multi-faceted Cabal. Here, Charles Hugh Smith briefly reminds us of the width and depth of the problem.

Restoring America to it's rightful qualities will involve much more than politics.

Longish article; no paywall. Visit the site for the full piece.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune26/explains-nothing6-26.html

If we believe substituting self-serving cover stories for a truly realistic appraisal is going to generate real solutions, that is the ultimate delusion.

One way to summarize the present zeitgeist is What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing: all the intellectual frameworks that "made sense of the world" are now reduced to cover stories masking a reality that defies reduction to the old ideas that have shriveled into misleading cliches.

Exhibit #1: ideology. Capitalism vs. socialism, left vs. right, progressive vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican--none of these make sense of what we actually experience, and the manic effort to make the world fit these contrivances only increases our civilizational psychosis.

. . . This blurs the line between private and state totalitarianism to the point that separating the two no longer makes sense of what we experience. The structures of control are both private and state, and trying to fit all this into the false choice of either-or ideologies simply widens our disconnect from reality.

Exhibit #2: health. Health is easy to define: we're fit and feel good and have no need for medications or interventions. Having to take medications for the rest of our lives is not the same as being healthy, because health doesn't depend on medications, ill-health depends on medications.

Here is a map of obesity in the US 40 years ago in 1987. Yes, we can quibble endlessly about defining obesity via BMI (body mass index) and a hundred other misdirections, but the point here is obvious: there were no states in which the populace qualified as obese.

Fast forward to 2023 and the nation is now awash in red and orange [i.e., obesity and morbid obesity]. Note that this data is self-reported, which introduces the possibility that people under-reported their weight as that's what we tend to do.

. . . Exhibit #3: Progress. As I outline in my book The Mythology of Progress, Technology and Progress are one in the same in the ideology of Progress is inevitable and unstoppable.

Yet what we actually experience is technology is being deployed to obsolete products so we must constantly replace them, profitably degrade the quality of services, extract higher profits not by increasing value but by exploiting data (dynamic pricing) and foster an illusion of choice and "freedom of movement" within a corral that's not delineated clearly because then the herded masses might grasp they're trapped in an extractive, exploitive artificial realm of monochrome gray that claims to be alive with vivid colors.

This isn't Progress, it's Anti-Progress, the opposite of authentic progress.

An electric vehicle (EV) charged with electricity generated by coal or natural gas is consuming coal or natural gas. If the battery in the EV was manufactured with lithium extracted in an open-pit mine in a region where the people are too poor and powerless to stop the ruination of their land and the industrial expropriation of their water, is this "sustainable" or "ecological"?

(more)