This is my opinion. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My opinion is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my opinion is useless. Without my opinion, I am useless. I must fire my opinion true. Etc. Etc.

I don't understand why educated adults in positions of public trust and/or authority are so keen to make a pig's breakfast of British culture. Last Night of the Proms simply happens to be today's target for extirpation.

I don't get why these spineless 'curators' of UK cultural heritage keep kowtowing to the demands of self-appointed identity police? Is it just for social media likes? Anything for a quiet life? Virtue signalling in the hope of winning woke brownie points? To what end?

Destroying the very traditions they're supposed to look after is a heavy price to pay, not least because their craven iconoclasm achieves nothing to actually help whichever oppressed minority is being championed by the "...haughty tyrants..." of woke outrage.

Give the decision-making power on whether to bend the knee to internet mob outrage to sometime with a backbone. I'm sure they'd stand firm on not falsely editing history or spuriously censuring the culture of this "..blest isle..." (I know I would.)

The ballot paper in November will offer only two tickets with any chance of winning the election: Republican Trump Pence and Democratic Party Biden Harris. Any other vote, including not voting, means less than nothing. The degraded political process has never been more accurately exemplified then in this woeful choice between different but equally masochistic forms of self-harm.

Trump is a vain, venal moron, too stupid to lead, too easily manipulated by the luddite Republican base to be anything but a racist dog whistle.

Biden is... Plutocracy grift. Polarization fight over small manageable percentages. Bones to population mitigating excess until the full grifters get back in the saddle.

Sanders (Progressive Hope) beaten by blacks and Michigan crackers. The DNC won that battle. It shouldn't have been close.

Choice is between Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. Fucked up.

Brexit (for instance) is another plutocracy snow job. Sold on inane identity wedge issues, caressed into millions of brains by concerted psychometrics. But it's really just about removing regulations, unshackling the govt/oligarchy so they can enrich without pesky rules.

Wedge: "take back control" "Britain independent" "Keeping out the foreigners" etc etc. Playing up some bullshit caricature of a British identity in a world of foreigners and rivals.

Wedge issues is a very popular method, for dividing populations, playing to people's worst instincts, to deliver an outcome that's actually against their own best interests.

Farage was the cat's paw. The model usually has one. Democratic Party this year used Bernie Sanders for that role, though it almost got away from them.

In the end though, this IS democracy. One human one vote. If half the electorate vote to get exploited, that's the will of the people. It's up to the plutocrats to walk the line between exploiting them to get richer Vs fucking them to the point they push back.

But the push back is also handled by having a duopoly. So if the ruling elite goes too far, their favourite govt grifters lose an election and the next bunch of grifters come in. Exploitation finds its new slightly less harsh equilibrium. Then typically the favoured grifters get back into govt and the process continues.

Anglo-Canadian, when encountering pain, wants to eliminate it or permanently evade; the best pain is pain forgetten. Protestant aestheticism. French-Quebecois sees pain and wants to run towards it, jealous of the intensity of feeling (even though it hurts). The most beautiful pain is pain from love and loss. Catholic angelus misericordia.

English culture worships potential - which means youth. French culture worships love - which means pain.

Youth worship subordinates mature, hard-won learning, that need years to acquire, to visceral fast-paced trends and fashions. Youth worship creates ephemeral personalities, cyclical rather than it evolving culture and a fear of being subjected to complexity. Worshippers of idealized youth practice luddite self-quarantined. The paradigm is cherubic, angelic, aggressively disinterested. Merciless purity.

Love worship subordinates material acquisition and the long-term attaining of rubbed instead pursue talent and accomplishment.

Some guys defy odds to make a difference. Most are content being more Ballerina than Goggins. Now and then fate gives an individual the chance to challenge their inner mettle and - very occasionally - it comes with a public stage.

Cancel culture has been perverted into a wanton spectacle of coordinated hearsay, erasing anyone it touches. There's no recourse, no appeal, no end to cancellation. The smallest offence to prurient public opinion carries as severe a punishment as the most egregious.

Someone's got to show the world how to resist; how to break the paradigm of perpetual erasure. Someone's got to figure a way through the coruscating glare of public bloodlust, to reach those who know and support the individual.

That reconnection may have power to build new foundations, fortified against being sacrificed by the mob to feed the insatiable spectacle of cancel culture.

Pundits and propagandists love to conflate left-wing economics with identarian bullsh1t, woke feminism, BLM, vegan fascism and cancel culture; and equate right-wing economics with evangelical self-interest, ethno-nationalism, climate denial, chauvinism and militarism. BOTH WRONG.

Prediction for 2021-2024: Trump rallies start immediately after Biden's inauguration. Insatiable need for clickbait will ensure news media continues to fixate on Trump hysteria. As it happens, the Trump hysteria sharp serves the duopoly. The GOP can use Trump and rallies to evangelize their populist message, weaponizing the loss as a grand conspiracy theory to bind their base to the fundamentalist Republican agenda. The Dems get to continue using Trump as their useful bogeyman. Rallies play into the DNC-neoliberal centrists' need to whip loyalty into the progressives, as the enemy stays a visible, urgent threat. Both parties get to sell "join us, be loyal, help us to Save America" to their supporters, with the other cast in the role of corrupt anti-America evil.

And so the papers and social media and news channels will be full of the same old pantomime - which'll somehow always be urgent and polarized and complete with its own set of facts depending on your "side" in the game.

It'll keep the public busy; and irrelevant for 4 more years.

There was a time, some years ago, when I didn't think my outlook on the world was unusual. I took myself for a fairly standard comfortable white middle class consumer, privileged in education and freedom to live the life I wanted, with humane hopes for an improving society better balanced to help the more deprived citizens get their fair share of the opportunity pie.

I knew there were others who did more, with their day to day lives, to speed up the process of making the world a better place. And I knew there were some who's politics were inspired by a preference for society of winners and losers; themselves the winners, naturally.

Right-wing my power, left-wing our love. Right covered the class of winners who knew they had inherited power and wanted to perpetuate their privilege, generation to generation, let the best of the poor prove their worth by competing out of their brutal class handicap. Left was a spectrum when it came to how, but the what - bottom line - was equality and a better world for all human beings. Save your complacent 2020 scorn for my once simplistic outlook. Hindsight is twenty twenty in 2020.

Plutocracy always finds a dirty (dirtbag) equilibrium.

#Trump2024 rallies begin soon as Biden takes office. Gives media 4 years guaranteed clickbait and the GOP/Dems 4 years hysteria, ensuring polarization against an evil enemy and a "Save America" script to keep everyone busy. And irrelevant.

2021-2024 Trump rallies begin as Biden takes office. Media and GOP/Dems get 4 years clickbait and polarization to impose orthodoxy. "Trump Is A Roaming Hitler" versus "Trump Campaigns To Save America"

1. Marginalization of ideas, pushing their proponents outward from the mainstream (core), reducing their impact, relevance and revenue. Which means there are less proponents as time goes by and soon enough less ideas, more orthodoxy, more fascistification of everything.

2. WE groupthink is a bullshit hierarchy mechanism by turning a shared goal into an identity, then an orthodoxy, then a fascist oligarchy. What's more, it's an opposition fueled dynamic so as WE groupthink moves to identify then orthodoxy then oligarchy, WE reduces others to a THEM, an APOSTASY, then an untermensch class. Evil this way occupies.

3. Poles of individual self-determinism. One side is distilling down to ideals then applying those ideals best one can.

   • Humans are flawed at the distillation application but - crucially - can change decision as distillation is improved, without having to fuck with the core ideals.

   • AI is flawed systemically - if it isn't trained to emulate idealism that's robust against being gamed - and limited by data, because it pattern matches rather than intuits the distillation. Machine learning neural networks may be fast enough to parse data but it's a centralization of decision ideals that's like any autocracy: bad news for outliers and exceptions and pioneers.

Contribute meaningfully - at whatever level is ultimately possible, given the nature nurture upbringing prior to free choice becoming plausible?

1. Moral absolutists see themselves as the moral missionary - the source of what's right - the embodiment of good. Moral absolutists are totalitarian cunts.

2. This is where humility - self-doubt - questioning - being hard on yourself and hard on others, ingroup or out, is essential.

3. This is why the victim society - the identity politics - the moral fascism - the purity tests - the victim empowerment - is so easily used by the oligarchy to train the deepthinking of the population (though their particular identity, through their own victimhood, through their personal circumstances of oppression) to see the world in heirarchies and absolutes; themselves as the embodiment of right, their enemies as the epitome of wrong. Crusaders reborn. Fighting their good fight to enrich monarchs back home getting fat off their plunder.