WTF?

Those space fantasy stories I’ve been reading, something just struck me.

Most of them are normal stuff – a soldier saves a child buried in rubble, or a gravely injured woman belonging to the enemy species, and it changes his life because he finds purpose.

However, I just noticed a trend in some of those stories: huge corporations experimenting on children in illegal facilities. Then I remembered stories from American-occupied nations at war, children and adults being harvested for organs, or for the human slavery sex market, and I was like “oh, fuck”. Yeah. Who knows what those American soldiers saw or heard, other than wishing they saved women and children instead of ignoring or killing them.

Feral humans

The weather here is still hot and humid, which means taking a hit to life expectancy if you’re engaging in any significant outdoor physical activities. The day before yesterday it was actually very nice… at 1AM when I opened the doors to change the air before we go to sleep. Not ideal time for going out for a walk, either. So, I’m basically under semi-voluntary lockdown under air conditioning, reading all sorts of stuff online, among which there are all kinds of 4chan and reddit stories about life situations of the American 4chan/reddit population.

My conclusion is that those people are for the most part completely feral. The entire thing is a warning of what happens when you remove God from the top of the pyramid of values, remove the next several layers of the said pyramid, containing things like knowledge, kindness, decency and other virtues, and leave only the basest materialism that reduces humans to a spec sheet of desirable properties that are scanned quickly online in a consumerist fashion, and replace periodically for a newer model. If I had to be specific, I’d say that 80% of women and the top 5% of the “most desirable” men have gone completely feral, and the rest of the populace is depressed into suicidal apathy. The bottom 50% of men, being completely ignored and rejected by the feral women, are in turn developing all kinds of social pathologies. The rest are just bitter, depressed and preoccupied with pointless work.

Basically, 80% of women are competing for the top 5% of men, those men go completely insane fucking all those women either successively or simultaneously, never committing to any of them, and women get a body count that was previously reserved for sexual workers, until they grow older than 30, at which point they get completely ignored at the sexual marketplace, they are completely unmarriable due to the damage incurred by ego inflation of too much perceived choice in their younger days, inflated sense of self worth that necessarily collapses into a black hole, and they are destined to die alone hating men and being surrounded by cats. Also, feral singe men and women appear to be working very hard at ruining everybody else’s lives – sluts are trying to make all other women into sluts by telling them “to live out their lives”, “enjoy freedom” and “avoid clingy cringeworthy men”, while unfuckable men, usually called incels (involuntary celibate), have all sorts of theories about women that serve the purpose of making everybody as miserable as they are. Essentially, it’s a lunatic asylum in which the patients have taken control. Since American women are feral and unmarriable, some percentage of men are turning to foreign women who are still normal, at least in comparison to the Americans, because they are not entitled enough to think that they can be overweight sluts with an entitled and nasty disposition, and zero chastity, dignity and honour, and bully men when they choose someone who actually brings them peace, kindness and home, instead of all the feminist argumentative and bossy bullshit. Basically, women worked hard to become low class men with vaginas, and are shocked that men don’t want that unless they are some kind of gay.

Virtues and chastity are seen as sinful, virginity is seen as a sign of something being really wrong with you, and whoredom is seen as freedom and a sign of being attractive. The whole thing looks like some ancient prophecy of human degradation before the end of the world. The most depressing are the nice stories with good endings, because they look fake, like someone’s coping mechanism.

Honestly, that whole place looks like something that should be put under quarantine, and fenced away from the rest of the world with walls, razor fence and warning signs, like a spiritual biohazard that it is. Well, at least we now know what an atheist heaven would look like. May dear Lord save us from it for all eternity.

High alert

On Friday, Putin and Trump are meeting in Alaska, and for some reason none of that feels like negotiations, it feels like some kind of a devious move of the kind Americans and Israelis deployed against Iran, trying to kill their leadership, take out their air defenses and destroy major nuclear sites. Basically, they say “you have until 3”, and they strike on 2. Lots of people are having a bad feeling about this, and the nuclear readiness seems extraordinarily high. If I were Putin, I’d leave a sealed envelope with Gerasimov, giving him full authority to launch if something happens and he’s inaccessible, and if the Americans strike while he’s out of the country, the most likely thing for them to do would be to ground his presidential plane and jam his communications, essentially stranding him there and isolating him from the chain of command, thinking they can pull off the first strike if he’s not there to push the button.

Another reason why this seems suspicious as all hell is that the Americans usually strike when the stock market is not working in order to avoid an economic collapse, counting on their ability to control the narrative by Monday. Of course, that wouldn’t work in case of a full nuclear exchange, but they do seem to be working from a check list.

I am definitely taking this seriously.

Linux desktop

I’m pretty regularly testing Linux desktop because I want to retain a level of proficiency with it, which would certainly degrade if I only worked with my server installations. However, my normal approach, to install a Linux virtual machine, isn’t completely useful because then I get to see how Linux supports virtual hardware drivers and not the actual iron, so I put Ubuntu as a dual boot configuration on my Thinkpad T14 gen1 (i5-10310U).

Honestly, I initially didn’t feel like doing it because Win11 worked great on that machine, but the problem with Win11 is that it always works great, until they force something unacceptable down your throat, like AI that runs in the background, recording everything you do, and analyzing it against patterns provided by the American intelligence agencies, pretending it’s looking for child porn while it’s in fact mapping a possible insurgency to be eliminated once the people in charge decide to dispense with the fig leaf of democracy. A Win11 machine is constantly running too hot, meaning it’s running background processes I know nothing about, but I suspect it’s “indexing files”. I don’t know what back doors and stuff they put into Linux, but I suspect it can’t be very extensive, and can’t be as nefarious as they can make it when nobody is really able to look into the code that cooks the CPU with background tasks that would surely draw immediate attention in Linux. So, I keep Linux as an option in case Windows and Mac OS become something I can no longer tolerate, and in order for it to be an option I have to occasionally work with it in earnest, which in this case meant putting it on a laptop and using it regularly for weeks; not as my main computer, of course, but regularly enough to see what works and what’s broken, and something is always broken in Linux.

For instance, the first thing I noticed when I installed Ubuntu LTS (noble) on the Thinkpad was that touchpad gestures don’t work. They used to work on previous versions but they disabled them on the LTS, seemingly because it’s unreliable. I eventually upgraded it to the current non-LTS version, plucky, to find out that this is indeed the case; yes, gestures work, and yes, they are unreliable. It’s less reliable and smooth than the Win11 touchpad support, but the worst thing is that gestures stop working after the laptop wakes from long sleep. I found a workaround that seems to solve the problem: edit /lib/systemd/system-sleep/touchpad , put this in:

#!/bin/sh

case $1 in
  post)
    /sbin/rmmod i2c_hid && /sbin/modprobe i2c_hid 
    /sbin/rmmod psmouse && /sbin/modprobe psmouse 
  ;;
esac

chmod +x and voila, you can tap to click after it wakes from suspend.

Eat your heart out Windows and Mac sheeple, you wish your touchpad gestures worked after waking from suspend. Oh wait…

Other than this stupid bullshit, the OS is fine. I’m running my conventional desktop applications other than msecure, which stubbornly refuses to support Linux, probably because there’s no money in it, and I don’t blame them because Linux users make it a point of ideology not to pay for software. Chrome browser, Thunderbird for mail, Telegram and Element for chat, LibreOffice for documents and spreadsheets, KeePassXC for managing passwords, KRDC for remote desktop connections to my Win10 home server, because Remmina, the default and recommended application, was so incredibly broken it didn’t do anything at all. I managed to set up everything I normally use for non-photographic purposes, and other than one instance where the applications kept crashing without any apparent reason, which was resolved after reboot, I’m using Linux on this machine for about two weeks, and it’s fine. No, it’s not “faster than Windows”; it doesn’t seem to be any faster than Win11, which is incredibly smooth on this hardware, probably because I have 32GB RAM on the machine for shits and giggles.

Why am I using Ubuntu? First of all, I’m always using Debian-based distros, simply because I know where everything is and I don’t feel like wasting time on learning equivalent but different file/folder placements, daemon restart methods, and packet manager parameters and quirks. Second, Ubuntu usually has better hardware support and is more polished than Debian, which doesn’t matter on a desktop machine, but a laptop has all sorts of integrated hardware which just works on Ubuntu, and which kind of doesn’t or I need to waste time setting up on Debian. I know, Linux people hate Ubuntu for all sorts of reasons, but that’s because they would hate everything that became main stream enough, and they want to think of themselves as edgy or some other bullshit, and they are too socially inept to actually do something worthwhile, so they install arch, slackware or BSD and pretend they are different, special and not NPC. It’s like Android phone users who think they are advanced because they can tweak their phone, not realizing that people with actual lives don’t have time for this crap. Another reason I’m using Debian based distros is that I tried a dozen of other distros earlier and they were basically all the same. Boot manager, kernel, standard infrastructure, window manager, eye candy. If something doesn’t work, it usually doesn’t work on any of them. A distro won’t just magically make Lightroom work on Linux. If some driver is shit, it will be shit everywhere. So I stick with the most main stream distros where work hours are actually invested in making the experience polished enough for actual use, and that’s that. If a distro is intentionally hard to install and use in times where other distros are easy to install and use, and it offers no actual advantages, I dismiss it instantly. I don’t need computers to make things unnecessarily hard and challenging just to create the artificial sense of achievement. If I wanted that, I’d go out and mow the lawn at 35°C and get heat stroke. I want Linux to be efficient and elegant, the way my Mac is efficient and elegant. I don’t want to deal with some stupid clusterfuck that’s there just because someone wants to be different.

Yes, my annoyance with Linux bullshit is obvious. However, I run it on multiple machines constantly over the years, in fact decades, and I would find Windows unusable without either WSL or a Linux VM of some other kind, and if Mac OS becomes too closed down, and Windows becomes too dangerous to use due to all the privacy intrusions, I need a plan B. Well, other than the touchpad support (now apparently resolved), lack of commercial software and some instability, I find it quite usable on my Thinkpad.

ps. There seems to be another variable with this suspend thing, in the uefi/bios on the Thinkpad there’s an option to choose win10 or linux sleep mode, so that’s apparently a thing and it was in win10 mode. I set it to linux now to see if it helps, because apparently short sleep isn’t the problem, but long sleep is; the bios doesn’t specify whether win10 means acpi mode 5 or something, meaning it enters a very low power suspend where it turns off all sorts of things. Since it’s not specific, I can only guess, and run that script manually when gestures stop working. But yeah, that’s one of the things I hate about Linux. Things that work great everywhere else either don’t work, or just randomly glitch and you then have to get into it far more than you ever intended. If touchpad on a Macbook glitched like that, it would be a major international scandal. On Linux, running on Thinkpad which is usually the best supported platform because the Linux people love it, it’s just something they turn off in the LTS version because it’s unstable and nobody really gives enough shit to fix it.

Self medication

I’ve been reading more of those “space operas” of American origin, because I had an impression that something important can be divined from it, and I was right; essentially, people write those stories as some kind of wish fulfilment or projection, trying to live out in fantasy what they can’t get in life. Sure, lots of that stuff looks as it was written by some AI, because my head would start hurting trying to process the illogical jumps between narratives and missing parts of the plot. However, the AI would work within the given parameters, and combine existing material, so my initial assumption applies.

The plot is always about a human male and an alien female. This, of course, translates as American male and non-American female. The man is always a competent, no-nonsense person, disillusioned by the world where the “higher-ups” work with immoral corporations to commit genocide and similar war crimes for profit, while ordinary people are sold the story about duty and country/species in order to keep them obedient and expendable. So, he has military background, active or former, and is currently either trying to have a peaceful solitary life in some outback, or is a smuggler, mercenary or a private security contractor; things you would expect from former military. Sometimes he’s an engineer within the military framework, or a combat medic.

At some point he encounters an alien woman in trouble. She is either a designated enemy, or an ally, but mostly treated with suspicion or derision by humans. The trouble varies; sometime she’s a member of allied forces who survived a nasty combat mission with damage to her enhanced armour, which needs delicate skill to repair because it’s either a precious heritage item or it’s bonded to her mind with complex biotechnology. Sometimes she’s a gravely injured soldier left to die by others on the battlefield. Sometimes she’s a refugee escaping some Avatar-like scenario where some corporation strip mined and poisoned her world and most natives died. Sometimes she’s a warrior princess of a hostile warrior-culture that has him fight in an arena as a gladiator, and she’s the last challenge, as the undefeated champion.

At first, he just goes about his business as usual, but soon something changes; he thinks about following procedure and leaving the paralysed alien woman half buried in rubble to die, because that’s the procedure. However, then something clicks and he says “no, not again”, thinking about all the cases where he followed orders against his conscience and had to either kill innocents or watch them die while doing nothing, and he sees this as an opportunity to finally do the right thing, and then proceeds to carry the wounded woman across the battlefield to safety, under enemy fire, periodically stopping to treat her injuries or give her pain medications, all the while talking to her to keep her conscious. As they talk, the woman turns out to be smart, mentally strong, dedicated and honourable; basically, a worthy person he develops actual feelings for, and she’s sincerely grateful to him for saving her life and taking care of her. Through their banter, they develop real feelings for each other.

Or it’s an arrogant alien warrior princess who fights him in a duel, which he somehow manages to win and ends up married to her due to some tradition. She initially hates the whole situation and feels humiliated, but as time goes on she understands that he’s actually a honourable and highly competent individual, and as they are forced to work together solving some deadly problem, they develop real feelings for each other.

The next phase is either an alien healing capsule that heals the wounded woman by transferring something from the man to her, which ends with them being mentally bonded/imprinted, Avatar way. Or it’s some ritual, or something. In any case, those two people who were already properly bonded get connected telepathically into a larger whole. One would expect this to be an uncommon plot twist, but it’s not – human man and alien woman being mentally connected seems to be a major trope in those stories.

However, while I was browsing through those stories on YouTube, I was offered both stories based on real life, as well as copy-paste material from Reddit where people report actual stuff, and that stuff is universally terrible, in a sense that it showcases the depth of human capacity for depravity, sin and betrayal. People treating family members with contempt and neglect, wives mocking husbands publicly, causing divorce. Wives whoring around while their husbands are in the military in mortal danger. Interestingly, it’s mostly women acting like spoiled brats on an ego trip, acting in profoundly disrespectful and dishonourable ways, and causing destruction of the family. Also, women complaining that men stopped dating them, stopped talking to them, stopped giving them attention, ignoring them while they are in danger, and stories where some piece of human trash rapes a woman in public transportation while nobody lifts a finger to help her.

And then it becomes obvious why men write escapist stories about an American man and a non-American woman, both from different cultures, but both honourable, smart, attentive, respectful and grateful, and eventually developing a profound spiritual connection with their minds and emotions intertwined completely in a larger whole.

Basically, people in the West are treating others like a commodity or a utility, they lack discipline, respect, honour and loyalty, and they fail to establish a true and permanent spiritual connection, women are spoiled brats who act like absolute garbage, and men feel betrayed, unseen, disrespected and alone.

This is more than just a series of fantasy tropes, it’s an indicator of a profound spiritual crisis of the whole Western society, and especially America. In one case, I’ve seen a woman ask why men are not dating women, instead staying at home playing video games. A man answered: it’s because video games got better, and women got worse.

This is not going to end well, because I don’t see how such profoundly destructive trends can be reversed, since everybody keeps defending the causes as if they are the cornerstone of everything that’s good about this civilisation. Not only is this going to end up getting the civilisation destroyed and getting everybody killed, it’s going to produce lots of souls with profoundly inverted system of values that will be a problem to remedy in the afterlife. In this sense, those silly space romances I’ve been reading are not only a good indicator of the profound societal issues, but also a good attempt of self-medication by people who were hurt by this liberal dystopia.