Morning, I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend. We’ll start here.
Trump has been talking this way about Bukele for a few days now and it’s confusing a lot of people. On the right there’s a general respect at least for Bukele for taking his country from a complete basket case to somewhere unthinkable not long ago. On the face of it seems really odd for Trump to attack him. If there is truth to what Trump is saying then fair enough, but it seems unlikely to be at the scale Trump is suggesting. Bukele clearly is doing something with criminals in his country, they’re not ALL being ‘shipped to the US’. It’s more likely that the conditions created in El Salvador are so bad for criminals that they’re choosing to leave the country themselves and end up in the US, which isn’t Bukele’s problem. He’s repeated this statement a few times no though, so it’s not just Trump ad libbing, you’d have to think it’s some power play to help him down the line when trying to do business for the US in El Salvador.
I post this from Thiel just to back up what I wrote yesterday about the WEF and similar groups just being signalling operations for a hive mind. He's pushing back against something you’ll know from listening to and reading stuff from me for this long that that I think is dangerous and hugely responsible for where we are - yes men at scale. You have a responsibility to yourself and others weaker than you, to say ‘no’, ‘that doesn’t make sense’, ‘why are we doing that?’ ‘I’m not doing that’ - should the situation require it. You should do that in the full knowledge that there may be hardship that results from that choice. Social pressure, being outside of a system, lack of support and damaged relationships can all be products of doing this. You also have the personal pressure of knowing you may be wrong and when things get hard, the temptation is to give up and rejoin the herd, but this is the price of personal responsibility.
Scrolling and scrolling and the timeline is dead. So I might trial something just for Sundays, throw in some less serious, more cultural zeitgeist, a bit memey, have some fun. Won’t all be that on a Sunday, but if you hate it let me know.
If you’re not terminally online you may have missed the Sydney Sweeney phenomenon over this last year, she basically exploded into a meme in her own right and was embraced by online culture of the right in particular. To be fair that’s a really bad photo of her, but it does highlight what many people - including this Samirah chick, who constantly references Fox as the pinnacle of beauty because she thinks she looks like her - can’t get. Yes, there are a million women that on paper are more ‘beautiful’, but that isn’t the appeal of Sweeney and it’s not just that she has a great body - boobs in particular, like the joke references in this tweet. Men find her attractive whether they realise it or not because she unashamedly uses her sexuality. There’s no ‘I’m being sexually objectified’, ‘look at all these terrible men staring at me’ etc. She confidently uses the reality that she is attractive, that men like to look at her and fantasise about her and she knows exactly what she’s doing - which is attractive in itself, she understands the game. For people who grew up in the 80/90’s this is something we recognise and there’s a nostalgic feeling it produces in you. It was ok for men and women to be attracted to each other purely because they were masculine and feminine, there wasn’t something somehow insidious about that, it’s just natural.
This just came up as I scrolled so I’ll throw it in. I agree with this completely and it’s a much bigger problem than people realise. I’m going to talk about my experience of this with my wife - because I know she won’t read this and even if she did she knows I think this - it goes down real well 🥴. I’ve spoken about this a few times on Horizon Scan I think, so you may be aware, but my wife is Autistic. Not rainman autistic, although in the right circumstances it can get like that, but she’s on that spectrum. I ‘diagnosed’ her after a year of us being together. Reading people is probably what I’m best at in life and I basically couldn’t wrap my head around some of her weird behaviour and instead of thinking ‘fuck this’ and leaving like other guys had, I looked into what it might be, figured it was autism and then let her look into it. So I’m going to connect a couple of things here, the desire to find meaning, to stand out, to be worthy of attention, and social media, particularly TikTok and the rise of the short form video influencer. She has always tried to understand why she sees the world differently and what about her patterns of behaviour differ from normal people so much that dealing with them makes her life harder. TikTok went live internationally in 2017 and went wild during the 2019 lockdowns of COVID. During that period I noticed that my wife was glued to it. With people locked in their homes there wasn’t much else to do, so many people decided to try their hand at being online influencers, I don’t blame them, get it right and there’s money in it. Every now and then she would share a video she’d seen that she thought explained something about her behaviour, normally to say - see it’s not just me who does this. Sometimes I could see it made sense, the video was obviously indicative of autistic behaviour - or ADHD which seems to at least partially run hand in hand with some autistic people. But sometimes it was someone describing completely normal behaviour/feelings that everyone experiences and describing them as if they were some kind of abnormality. I’d say to my wife, ‘yeah that’s normal, I feel like that all the time’, so does everybody. She’d find that frustrating. Over time these videos she shows me have got worse and worse and by worse I mean further from ‘symptoms’ of actual conditions and more into completely normal behaviour.
Now I don’t need to tell you my life story any more than I have. But it’s obvious to me that we now have a section of society who are diagnosing themselves with all kinds of conditions they don’t have. Part of this is a reaction to feeling invisible and wanting to stand out, part is seeing everyone has something ‘wrong’ with them and wanting to fit in and for some it will be that they just struggle in life (could be genuine problems or they could just be shit) and need to find a reason things haven’t gone their way. It’s incredibly damaging to pathologise completely normal behaviour. How can we expect society to function when an increasing proportion of it aren't able or willing to take part in necessary parts of it because they believe an imagined condition stops them from doing so. My wife comes out with a new ‘oh that’s because I’ve got this’ with frightening regularity and I have to patiently explain to her that we all feel like that, but everyone else just works through it because no one has convinced them it’s a symptom of an obscure illness. I’ll just make the point while I’m here that my wife isn’t solid, she’s a scientist and irritatingly clever. There’s obviously money connected to all the worst aspects of this. There’s money for the engagement for influencers who push this shit online, there’s money in the books/lectures and studies grifting academics churn out to enforce the narrative, and then finally there’s money in the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industries treating these all people who think they have something. I’m going to go out on a limb slightly here and say that there is also a political split on where you’re most likely to see this, in adults at least. I believe the woke left are far more likely to be willing to accept a health based reason for not being able to do something/succeed. The left are also more inclined to believe the populace should be looked after by the state, for left leaning parties a pathologised populace who can’t cope without them isn’t the least desirable thing. I maybe also say that because of my experience with my wife being on the left politically. But it’s also because of my experience of a section of the online community of the right who’s priority over anything else is physical health, strength and fitness because they understand what follows mentally, ideologically and behaviourally from that. Anyway, the situation is dangerous long term for us all and I’ll bet you’ll have seen this in your friends and family somewhere. We have to compassionately push back against it.
Bit of a random one today, let me know your thoughts.
Agree with the adhd stuff, my Mrs was diagnosed with dyspraxia when she enrolled at uni as an older student. She has received great support in forms of hardware and some therapy sessions the last of which cost me a fair bit of money and didnt seem to improve anything or set any sort of objective, the therapist was quick enough to cash in though for what was more or a less a chat she could have had with one of her mates. My wife works in film/tv specifically in representation of those with disabilities and I think once the flood gates open on “i’ve got this” then theres another condition swiftly followed by another condition, she also spends time on tiktok and it drives me mad. There is definitely a niche area of people peddaling this stuff on SM some of it has had a positive impact but a lot of it is pitty party stuff.