The society of the spectacle is turning into a soft version of the theater of cruelty, a burlesque of death with the globe as its stage. The system acts as the exterminator, yet no one is paying attention.
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Bjarne
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https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2025/12/15/shame/
At the root of the current populist uprising is a victim of the great American accounting fraud:Hiding the losers in the gambling hall of pursuit of happiness — a depression concealment which covers the abyss beneath every failed fortune-seeker.
https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/sultans-of-swindle-oligarchy-in-21st-century-america/ The singularity of the present moment isn’t that US is turning into an oligarchy—it has functioned as a civil oligarchy for 50+ years—the real story is that it’s transforming into a regressive oligarchic configuration disjoined from its political tradition
https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2025/12/15/shame/
On the landscape of Western capitalism, shame has intruded as a bonding tissue between the aspiring elites—those who are affluent yet burdened by the notion of not being sufficiently wealthy—and the impoverished, who endure the stigma associated with living perpetually on the brink of destitution. While nominally having very little in common in terms of their cultural or economic references, shame brings these two social groups together and defines their common ground.
https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2025/08/16/the-spider-trap/
The Spider Trap
Russia, a criminalized state that looted itself, is now being trapped by global powers using the same methods on a larger scale, slowly reducing it from a world power to a resource colony.
https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2025/08/16/the-spider-trap/
Zugzwang
At this juncture, no realistic solution seems capable of averting Russia’s economic collapse— peace may appear desirable, but the transition away from a war-driven economy is just as unacceptable as continuing the conflict. What the Ukrainian war and the response of the West have created is not a sudden collapse of Russia, but a slow and agonizing decay, a death spiral, without any substantial disruption to the Western economy.
https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2025/07/15/the-power-paradox/
Irrespective of the persistence of the false rationale at which tariffs continue to be sold to the public, they present tax on the consumer. When put together, tax cuts for the rich plus tariffs for the rest, is another round of transfer of wealth, its last remaining drops that slipped through decades of the neoliberal wealth pump.
https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2025/07/15/the-power-paradox/
Government Debt, Taxation & Elites
The rich elites are both the key to the fragile stability of the status quo & the main destabilizing force. Their position & influence have been a source of a positive feedback loop: Concentration of government debt ownership & the structural power of wealthy debt holders enforces fiscal policy alignment with their preferences which has dire social consequences accompanied with a government response that has only made things worse
Looking for the Lebensraun, grom Tird Reich to Nerd Reich.
The main theme of the 2024 presidential election is an event of elite replacement with a takeover by the counter-elite as the primary driving force giving rise to the Nerd Reich, the symbiotic alliance between the tech oligarchs and the Right-wing populism. The core of their agenda is to create parcelized sovereignties with highly hierarchical structure and pave the way to transition from capitalism to techno-feudalism.
https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2024/12/17/america-beyond-the-event-horizon-the-counter-elite-the-year-of-the-nerd-reich/ What’s lost in the present populist euphoria is that positive externalities for a small minority of super-rich will come with additional popular immiseration of the masses.They won’t shut down the transfer of wealth from poor to rich,but will create new & more efficient mechanisms which accelerate that transfer.As far as general social wellbeing is concerned,we’re at the same point as before,just with much worse initial conditions and grim prospects for improvements
Neoliberalism’s accidental wounding of white male supremacy coupled with its intensification of nihilism has yielded an apocalyptic politics willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future without white male rule. (Wendy Brown)
As we await the final word on the 2024 election, note that politics is already operating in a new paradigm.