chapotraphouse

Several years ago, my partner and I went walking around the neighborhood on the fourth of July. We passed by a big auto garage where it looked like a whole extended family had set up, with folding tables covered in boxes of fireworks, kids running around and adults hanging out with food and drinks. Mr Car Guy himself, clearly the patriarch of the bunch, invited us to hang out and blow stuff up with them, which we accepted. We grab a couple drinks and light off some mortars, and even some balloons full of some explosive gas that shook the ground a bit, which was cool. There was something about the adults, some vibe of clannish insularity we picked up on, that made it easier just to interact with the kids.

So after about an hour, I'm headed into the garage to grab another drink from the cooler, when i notice a small commotion around one of the cars. I should say, this garage clearly specialized in restoring vintage cars. There were a dozen of them, all freshly painted and gleaming with that candy coat. There were also American flags galore, and some poster i can't remember aside from the extreme "merica bullshit" vibe i got from it. Probably Stallone or something. So I'm in this vintage americana garage, and I notice a gathering of maybe 16 people around a bright red truck

So I go take a look, and sitting inside it is a young woman with tears streaking down her face. She's staring straight ahead, trying to ignore the presence of all her relatives. And what are they doing? They're mocking her. They're laughing and poking fun and jeering, and they're doing it in that particular way that tells me that these people know her, that kind of callous minimization that those who lack empathy often think of as "tough love". Anyone with conservative family will know what im talking about. Everyone surrounding the car is her age or older, mostly middle aged folks (including the garage owner/host) and they're acting like this is the funniest thing in the world, and she's crying and trying not to look at any of them as they joke and gossip three feet away. Absolute nightmare shit. We made our excuses and left quickly afterwards.

I wish I had known what to say, known some way to reach out and show her the kindness she clearly needed, but in the moment I was just so disturbed and taken off guard, and didnt know how to proceed past sixteen chortling ogres. I didn't understand how someone, a whole family, could make such a magnanimous show of inviting two passing strangers to share their food, only to whirl around and eat one of their own the instant they smelled blood. I understand only a little bit of the dynamic from my own upbringing by a conservative parent: vulnerability is weakness, and weakness is to be ridiculed and punished.

I believe I get where you're coming from and I think it's a sign of consistency because personally speaking, my politics ultimately stem from radical love for humanity (EDIT: I guess I should say radical love for life itself because humans make it hard lol), and if you follow the roots and vines logically and intuitively (and consistently unlike liberals), you naturally end up with radical empathy for all sentient beings.

But it's like the paradox of tolerance in that people like KkkirKKK deserve zero grace because they're the ones who militate against those radical politics of empathy and liberation for the marginalized and oppressed. The real tragedy is that such a huge proportion of humanity is choosing to take their gifts as powerful, sapient beings and dedicate them to perpetuating and intensifying suffering, exploitation, caste systems, and a terminal death drive on everyone else.

kirk and the grift gang are an extreme example, but i think the instructive lesson here is something like "be careful what you get good at" (Pizzolatto), "be careful who you pretend to be" (Vonnegut). if i could frame it more precisely, "take care on what you do to 'make it' in this world."

under capitalism, the bulk of the opportunities for security involve depriving others of it, or profiting from that deprivation, the enclosure of commons, the gatekeeping of fruits from the collective efforts of many. i would expect most of us here want to contribute in a positive way without becoming insecure ourselves, but that is not a path with signposts or well worn treads. we talk of "selling our souls", but i think the cost is more immediate and less poetic. the more of a sellout opportunistic role your work is connected to, the more you will be surrounded by people who are unbothered by it. they will have narratives and creative self-understandings to handwave these feelings away, but the lies we tell ourselves are a self-administered poison.

i'm sure we've all had jobs where we weren't actively selling out, but rather were working for some opportunistic asshole. we trauma bonded with our colleagues and undermined authority where it didn't threaten our own security, but this doesn't save us from be part of the problem either and while our immediate colleagues and friends are good, caring people, we have to watch them be ground up or conditioned into selling out so they can provide security for themselves and those dependent on them.

the realization that kirk was surrounded by assholes is an invitation for all of to consider the ways we might scout even better paths to survive securely which also draw us toward true friends, allies and comrades. the system and its institutions are stacked against us, but i believe finding and widening the cracks where we can do this are a form of structural, holistic resistance to labor that represents an existential threat to capital, if the cracks can be widened to accommodate everyone who wants to opt out of this shit deal.

death of william the conqueror:

When William died, commending himself to the Virgin, the wealthier nobles and knights in attendance immediately left, anxious to protect their property now that the king was dead. Those household servants who stayed behind, says Orderic, "seized the arms, vessels, clothing, linen, and all the royal furnishings, and hurried away leaving the king's body almost naked on the floor of the house."

Ghouls are pitiful creatures that don't deserve pity because, you know, all the ghouling.

he had the community he deserved

it's own malevolent sentience

Capitalism has always been a malevolent AI, and it is powered by and gets it's compute from all of our struggles to survive inside it. But he made himself its willing vessel, burying and cauterizing off whatever humanity he might have had in the beginning. I have no doubt he relentlessly put down the humanity of everyone close to him until they were as dead as himself, if they weren't already. Guys like this feel unease in the presence of spontaneity and vivacity. He chose, and built, his miserable world.

if the conspiracy theory of him getting his shit rocked to distract from the files is true then it becomes even sadder. brother was such a tool that his life was seen as disposable to coverup a pedo scandal for maybe another two weeks. oh well, sucks to suck

People like this are surrounded by hollow shells because they themselves are hollow shells. I understand the sentiment, but I think the cause and effect here is generally reversed from what you're describing. They become terrible first, then surround themselves with others like them which forms a feedback loop.

I pity them in the abstract, but concretely the sentiment is wasted and that emotional labor would better be spent on their victims.

I mean his kids were probably the most genuine people I'm his life

I remember people doubting that Charlie Kirk being killed would disappear from the news cycle within a couple of weeks when I called it the day after. They don't really give a shit unless it can be used to justify violence against minorities or be used as a grift.

When your ideology only has community as a means to opress the other nobody really cares.

Crowder changing his podcast description to "#1" shortly after he was confirmed dead

that screenshot was faked his bio always said #1

Same with that UHC CEO. They carried on with the meeting after knowing he got domed.

look... let's suppose capitalism is a lottery. Let's suppose the whole thing is just a lottery. Not in a religious way, but when you're born that's a dice roll. You come in as a reasonably blank slate, your initial conditions are the body, place, and position in society that your parents could manage, whatever that is.

The fucking thing is abstractly a pyramid, the seats at the top are much more limited than the seats at the bottom, but lots of people want the seats above them. They'll knock people around, prey on ignorance, scam, cheat, lie to get it.

In those Top Seats are higher % changes of:

Good education resources and like, developmental inertia in literally becoming a functioning human.

Infrastructure and capital to see things happen.

we know this stuff, and i know i'm even keeping it a little too simple. This lottery is rigged and not truly random, for one.

but congrats, you're a white guy, not just that! and you have the pedigree, your parents have the purse and the connections that you're now inheriting, are all tied to wealth and power - you have some agency to make stuff happen in this awful little society, or you will by the time you're an adult in the swing of things.

okay well. you're gathering momentum doing something, and figuring your shit out as you step into adulthood. Enter now: the people who want to make your thing about their things. You can sometimes just offer to buy people out or steer with that kind of influence, power, money peddling - but they for whatever reason dont have what you have, they want it, and if they can't take it, they'll settle for getting in your ear and steering you around if you let them.

EVEN IF that dweeb beats the odds and stays good - hasn't lost his soul when he starts whatever his life work is set to be - that insulated life means that right as he finds the world, the world finds him and runs him roughshod, drains him dry, and makes the world a colder, uglier place as the realities of his position are revealed and made clear: this is not a place of heroes, we don't live in a nation run by the virtuous, quite the opposite.

If you want to stay good, your option is to take your pogs and go home and play your own games, in a lower stakes arena, or to give it all up, frankly, in a sacrifice that absolves you more of the weight of that world as you depart from it.

The world is, in 2025, atomized and vicious down to that atom. It wants you to fight, and survive, and tear, and thieve, and take, and as the chosen ones for the project of driving that world forward, you really only get to come from the bottom to the top if you're a special kind of intelligent and vicious, and just somehow one that fell through the cracks and finds yourself more useful than dangerous to one of these people. You have to prove you can play the game, and go play it.

charlie kirk might've been some naive idiot with the potential for an interesting, influential destiny making the world better. Maybe in his heart somewhere was that possibility. Maybe.

But it doesn't matter, because he wasn't self aware enough to stay himself if that's the case, and it's such an interior thing, one can never know.

sometimes they break those people early, sometimes they break late. it comes sooner or later if you try to play the games he was playing.

Did you see Candace Owens' IG story? Seems like she was the only one who genuinely cared about him.