Clown World Chronicles: Business In Clown World

A common proverb states that the business of America is business. Indeed, America has long been the place where fortunes were made. But now that the West has degenerated into Clown World, business works in a different way. Fortunes are still made – but at a cost.

Clown World commerce is not what we’re used to. The story we’re all told at school is that productivity is a function of capital and labour, which work happily together to create needed goods and services. The supply of needed goods and services ameliorates human suffering and therefore earns profits and is a moral good.

The reality is much more complicated.

Although most of this book blames varieties of Marxism, atheism and materialism for Clown World’s woes, a large amount of the blame must be placed on capitalism. The political demands made by Marxists may be obvious, but the demands made by capitalists are no less pressing. These demands have had the effect of making Western society more of a twisted circus.

Capitalism is to blame for the fact that the growth of low and middle-income wages has decoupled from productivity. Although productivity has increased several times over recent decades, wage growth has lagged a long way behind. This has occurred because capital has exploited its strengthening negotiating position to offer workers worse deals. This change is shown graphically on the website WTF Happened in 1971.

The major consequence of this decoupling is that most of the increase in wealth accrues to an ever-smaller section of the population. Some studies suggest that the top 1% of the American population has looted as much as 85% of the growth in wealth since the Global Financial Crisis. In Clown World business, the system does not work for the good of the population, but only for the people at the top.

Capitalism is also to blame for the mass importation of cheap labour, as well as the sentiment that bringing in cheap labour is necessary because the locals are unwilling to do those jobs. Major industrial interests lobby government representatives to open borders and to lift restrictions on the movement of cheap labour. They also instruct their propaganda organs to manufacture public approval for such measures.

The Clown World workplace operates on a model closer to that of West Indian sugar plantations: if you won’t work for nothing, we’ll find someone who will. Any demand for a fair wage is portrayed as a refusal to work. The Clown World media plays a crucial role, supporting the capitalists by running stories about how fruit and vegetables will rot in the fields if immigration restrictions are not relaxed.

Things are so badly tilted towards capital now that it has become extremely difficult to buy a home without using inherited money. In New Zealand, house prices have increased 7 times since 1992, but wages have only increased 2.25 times. It’s a similar grim story in other Western countries. In the United States things are so bad that it was possible for the Wall Street Journal to headline an article with “Millions of Young People Shut Out of the Housing Market.”

Clown World business is about maximising short-term profit at the expense of all other considerations.

Because labour is usually one of the largest costs of any business, Clown World has seen extreme measures taken to cut labour costs. The most popular of those has been to ship manufacturing and services overseas to cheap labour zones that don’t have expensive regulation relating to worker protection.

The result of this drive for cheap labour is a lower quality of goods and services. We might have more of everything, but that everything is worse. By today, it’s all but impossible to speak to a customer service representative who has English as a native language. The result is confusion and frustration.

The drive to cut costs doesn’t stop at being cheap. It can extend to living entirely off someone else’s credit.

In Clown World business, it’s possible to live off investor money as it keeps rolling in, rather than make a profit. It’s not actually necessary to turn a profit and live off that, as a traditional business would. Investor money will keep coming into a business as long as that business retains a positive reputation. This means public relations.

As recently as 2015, media giant YouTube had never turned a profit, and it’s not clear that they turn one now. Twitter still doesn’t turn a profit. It’s not necessary to ever turn a profit as long as investor money keeps coming in to finance operations. And this money will keep rolling in as long as the company has good public relations. In Clown World business, success is mostly a matter of politics.

That politics trumps profit in Clown World can be seen from the bizarre alliances that corporate titans make with various political movements. Before the body of George Floyd had cooled to room temperature, major corporations had hit the media with campaigns showing their support for Black Lives Matter. Even McDonald’s ran an advertisement hailing the memory of Floyd.

These alliances help secure government funding, which is often even better than investor funding because it can come in the form of grants. The Government is a major source of funding for Clown World business, whether in the form of business development grants or tax breaks. Elon Musk got $4,900,000,000 of it! If you can convince an important person that your business is likely to provide jobs in the future, chances are good that person will cut you some public cash.

A business model where people are paid low wages, and hence can’t buy the goods and services of other businesses, isn’t sustainable for long. Sooner or later the impoverished masses start counting every last dollar, and when they do the consumerist economy shudders to a halt. Clown World business is when all long-term considerations are abandoned in favour of the next quarterly report.

There are many questions around Clown World business in the post-coronavirus future. If consumption falls sharply, how will people stay employed? If they can’t stay employed, must we introduce a universal basic income? And if 50% of women under 30 supplement their income with OnlyFans payments, where does that leave young men?

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: Entertainment In Clown World

Entertainment is more than just passing time. It’s essential for good mental health. If the entertainment stops, people start becoming bored. Boredom quickly turns to sadism, and sadistic conduct leads to a lower quality of life for all. Entertainment in Clown World is no longer gratifying, and that has led to a spate of psychological problems.

In short, the problem is that the entertainment industry has become pozzed.

Professional sports are the modern world’s equivalent to the circuses of ancient Rome. The primary purpose of both is to entertain a large number of people cheaply. Both the ancient Romans and the modern West quelled dissent by building large stadiums to hold gladiatorial contests. For both of them, this worked out great – for a while.

When people play sports at school, they often dream of coming to represent their nation, or at least their region. From these dreams came the sense of identification with a team or with a sport. That identification makes it possible for people to really enjoy the theatre of sporting contest.

Someone who understands a sport can derive a great deal of enjoyment from watching a match. The attempt to maintain your own team’s order, while simultaneously introducing chaos into the other team’s order, can be immensely entertaining for people with a developed dramatic sense.

Unfortunately, like so much else in Clown World, professional sports have been pozzed by politics.

Although many people follow the maxim that sports and politics don’t mix, those who would force their politics on other people have noticed the size of the platform that professional sports offers. For most of them, it’s too much of a temptation to resist. The same forces that have pushed politics into education, medicine and science have also pushed it into entertainment.

In recent years, the political content of sports broadcasts has increased. Politicisation had always threatened Clown World sports, but it erupted in 2016 when Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers American football team, started kneeling instead of standing for the pre-game rendition of the American national anthem.

Kaepernick explained: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” This move created a wave of protest both against and in favour. Pretty soon, people started forgetting about the sport, and focusing on the politics instead.

The politicisation of sport in Clown World might have hit a peak this year with many NBA players also choosing to take a knee during the pre-game national anthem. Even soccer players in England were drawn into showing support for the Black Lives Matter movement, either by taking a pre-game knee or by wearing the phrase on their matchday shirts.

Sports as far away as New Zealand have been pozzed by this trend. The logo of the Crusaders rugby team was changed in 2019, from a strikingly monochrome sword-and-shield-wielding Crusader to a design that looks like two dildoes glued together. Supposedly this was to appease the local Muslim community after the Christchurch mosque shootings in March that year.

The result of all of this politicisation is record low viewing figures. The three least-watched NBA finals matches since 1987 all took place in 2020. Major league baseball viewership also declined sharply this year. The mixing of politics with sport has seen people reject sport in general – a tragic irony if one considers that social sport is one of the best possible ways to build cultural bonds between different races.

The television and film industry has also been pozzed by the push for inclusivity. Although both television and film have been heavily influenced by politics from the very beginning – mostly owing to the propaganda potential of those media – things have become much worse in recent years.

From now on, you won’t be able to win an Oscar unless your film ticks all the diversity boxes. Films that aren’t diverse enough will simply be excluded from consideration. Even more blatant was when the British Broadcasting Corporation offered an internship that was only available to non-white people. White erasure is going full swing in Western film and television.

Finding alternative sources of entertainment to sports, film and television has not been easy. There was a brief window of time, near the end of the Golden Age of the Internet, when YouTube and FaceBook were the superior media. Today, thanks to the televisionisation of both, people have had to look even further afield for decent entertainment.

Video games haven’t escaped politicisation. Games like Tomb Raider, The Last of Us Part 2 and Dead or Alive have seen attempts to manipulate the developers into shrinking the size of the breasts on the female characters. Civilization VI has seen female characters shoehorned in at the expense of far greater male ones, such as Napoleon. Even tabletop card games like Magic: the Gathering are pozzed (although this happened more because of profit-seeking than politics).

The inevitable result of not being able to find gratifying entertainment is destructive boredom. There is surely a direct link between the current crapness of sports entertainment, film and television on the one hand, and the boredom-fuelled chaos that has seen several American cities crippled by riots on the other. The cost of the bread and circuses winding up in Clown World is social unrest.

The great thing about Magic: the Gathering is that you can literally gather with friends in a building somewhere and entertain each other by playing a game that doesn’t have advertisements or political statements all through it. Perhaps the solution to boredom in Clown World is to go back to the pre-radio era model, the pre-mass media model, where people from a certain area gather together to play cards, drink, sing, crack jokes and talk shit.

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Clown World Chronicles: Medicine In Clown World

Most people think of medicine as the practice of alleviating human suffering, and doctors as people who act to alleviate human suffering. This may have been true before Clown World started, but the story today is something else.

In Clown World, medicine serves two primary objectives: profit, and conforming to political correctness. Of these two, profit is by far the most important. There’s nothing in the world more profitable than human suffering, and so Clown World medicine seeks to profit first and foremost.

The old days where you were given a medicine that cured your ailment is long gone. Today, the focus of medicine is on giving the patient a lifetime prescription that they have to keep coming back to fill. As Chris Rock said, the money isn’t in the cure. The money’s in the medicine.

Doctors in Clown World are more motivated by making profit than by anything else. If Medicine A is 90% effective and generates $10 profit, and Medicine B is 50% effective but generates $100 profit, then the patient will get Medicine B every single time.

This is why cannabis, which is understood by all informed people to be a medicinal plant, is still banned in most of the world. A medicine that can be grown at the patient’s home in a bucket is simply not profitable. So the various medical associations, influenced by Big Pharma, have not made the medicinal benefits of cannabis clear to their respective legal authorities, who have left it illegal.

This is also why it’s so hard to get treatment with psilocybin and MDMA. Although psilocybin therapy has been declared a “breakthrough therapy” by the American Food and Drug Administration, it’s still all but impossible to access. The problem is that psilocybin, like MDMA, offers the promise of a permanent cure – and there’s no profit in permanent cures.

The horrifying reality is that there’s no money in resetting a person’s mind and realigning them with the secrets of Nature and the Will of God. Although such a measure might completely restructure the mind so that it doesn’t suffer, there’s more profit in getting a person to take a daily antidepressant or antipsychotic. The result is such pharmaceuticals being pushed.

Profit is also the reason for sex-change surgery, which is the most grotesque form of Frankenscience since electroshock therapy. The total yearly market for sex-change surgery in America has been estimated at over a billion dollars. Fees for surgery for one person can run into six figures.

Clown World medicine has reached its most ridiculous expression in America. Despite the fact that America spends more money on healthcare per capita than any other country on Earth, the American life expectancy at birth is no higher than that of Cuba or Lebanon. Where other countries have universal healthcare, Americans regularly get financially wiped out by medical expenses. Some two-thirds of their personal bankruptcies are tied to unpayable medical bills.

The American population also suffers from an opioid crisis. If Clown World began at the turn of the century, American deaths by opioid overdose have increased six times since then, from some 8,000 a year to near 50,000 a year. One of the most popular of the medicinal opioids is OxyContin. This painkiller has made billions of dollars in profits for the Sackler family that control Purdue Pharma, its pharmaceutical manufacturer.

The Sackler family has pushed the overprescription of OxyContin, even when they knew it was killing people. In Clown World, profit is more important than human life.

Profit-seeking is not the only thing wrong with Clown World medicine. Social justice culture also plays a role. British health chiefs are trying to rid their National Health Service of “white privilege”. In reality, this will mean that white people find it harder to get jobs and healthcare. New Zealand has shown where this is likely headed: there, white people have been pushed to the back of some healthcare waiting lists.

Ironically, medicine, when correctly practiced, destroys political correctness. It’s extremely difficult for mixed-race bone marrow transplant patients to find a matching donor. This is proof that race is a real thing and that it has a biological basis, contradicting the social justice warrior position that there are no genetic differences between races.

On top of soulless profit-seeking and social justice logic is simple incompetence. This has also reached an apogee during Clown World. The worst of it happens to people who need mental health care.

The American suicide rate increased 24% between 1999 and 2014. This is mostly because the pressures of Clown World have led to widespread despair. For many Westerners, the future seems grim, if not hopeless – but Clown World mental health care is based around prescribing people the most expensive (and profitable) sedative possible. Any patient sedated to the point where they stop complaining is declared cured.

Assuaging the suffering of the soul is not considered important. All Clown World doctors are educated to believe that the brain generates consciousness, and therefore that the death of the brain means the extinction of consciousness. This is of less than no help to the many residents of Clown World who are threatened with deaths of despair. But medicine in Clown World only sometimes serves to alleviate human suffering.

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Clown World Chronicles: Politics In Clown World

In The Republic, Plato laid down the facts about the political cycle. The political cycle begins with the introduction of an aristocracy by a class of educated philosopher-kings, then degrades into timocracy, then degrades into oligarchy, then degrades into democracy, which finally degrades into tyranny. It is at the junction between democracy and tyranny that we find ourselves in Clown World.

By 2020, the enlightened aristocracy is long gone. The timocracy ended with the World Wars. Oligarchy reigned for some decades, perhaps up until the 1990s, and since then we’ve been firmly in democracy. With the intensification of Clown World after the Global Financial Crisis, we’re arguably now in a state of tyranny.

Tyranny is when the rulers work to enrich themselves instead of working to enhance the common good. This state is characterised by an absence of reason among the ruling class. Not being reasonable, the rulers make decisions based on crude lusts and impulses. Usually these relate to gratifying their egos in some way, often at the expense of others.

When the ruling class gratifies their egos at the expense of the common man, the common man comes to feel as if he lives in a Clown World. He can’t find a job that pays enough to buy a house and raise a family, but political discussions in the mainstream media ignore such issues, focusing instead of trivialities. It all seems so callously absurd.

Callous absurdity is the hallmark of tyrannies throughout history, and that’s exactly what Clown World is – a kind of tyranny.

As Plato anticipated in his famous Analogy of the Cave, people who figure out that it’s Clown World are treated with violent contempt by those who think that it’s Normal World. Anyone who has a problem with the current order of things is marginalised. Although the numbers of the marginalised are growing, the Normies are still in control.

The general rule of Clown World politics is that everything is either the opposite of how it should be or a grossly corrupted form of it. Politics may have always been corrupt, but only in Clown World has it reached such a shameless, venal and shallow intensity.

In Clown World, we’re led by the worst of us. The American Presidential Election of 2020 will be contested by two very old men, both of who are very much past it. The challenger, Joe Biden, was the Vice President during the Barack Obama era, and so helped to oversee the destruction of Libya. This unprovoked war led to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the deaths of 100,000 Libyans and the reintroduction of slave markets to the Libyan capital – and Biden is painted as the good guy in this election.

In Clown World, politicians no longer have to know what they’re talking about. Obama constantly read from a teleprompter, relying on it so much that if it broke down he didn’t know what to say. Clown World politicians in general are barely better informed than the population they’re ruling over – and are frequently worse informed. They are no longer orators, performing feats of wit and memory. Instead they speak in soundbites aimed at the lizard brain.

Because Clown World politicians don’t work towards the greater good, they have no philosophical grounding, and therefore no principles. As such, they are whores who will jump into bed with whoever’s paying. This has led to some exceptionally strange alliances.

One such strange alliance is the one between fundamentalist religious Muslims and left-wing social justice warriors. The social justice warriors are strong supporters of homosexual rights, but the Muslims are strong supporters of homosexuals being thrown off rooftops. They appear to have allied on the basis of having a common grudge against middle-class white men.

Another strange alliance is between Antifa and the corporate elite. Antifa’s great enemies are the Nazis that supposedly lurk around every corner, and their strongest ideological point of difference relates to immigration. Antifa believe that the working class is international and should not be restricted by borders – but the corporate elite have exactly the same opinion. They love to be able to import cheap labour without restriction.

Yet another strange alliance is between feminists and the so-called transphobic. In Clown World, it’s possible to have your cock and balls chopped off and then play for a woman’s sports team. Many right-wingers are disgusted by trans culture, and in getting accused of transphobia they find themselves on the same side as the devotedly left-wing feminists, who want to keep trans people out of women’s spaces.

Perhaps the weirdest of all is the alliance between the fundamentalist religious who want to ban cannabis and the criminal gangs who currently supply the black market with it in the places where it is illegal. Fundamentalist Abrahamists, in particular, are against cannabis because it is a spiritual sacrament, and here they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the criminal gangs who need it to be illegal to profit from it.

It can be observed, as Plato did so many centuries ago, that democracy leads to widespread bickering and resentment. Eventually this gets so bad that people come to support a tyrant in the hope that unlimited power will make it possible to clean away all the filth. Clown World is at the stage where people might support a charismatic dictator, should one arise. Our political situation is a tinderbox.

Unfortunately there’s no easy solution. A revolution of philosopher-kings seems unlikely owing to the fact that there’s no widespread agreement as to who the philosopher-kings would be. Although Plato described the philosopher-king as being motivated primarily by the love of wisdom, people don’t agree on what constitutes wisdom.

In Clown World, life has become so deeply politicised that every philosophical or scientific question is now divided by political camps. If a person identifies with the left, it can be confidently predicted that they agree with the climate change science but deny the human biodiversity science. If a person identifies with the right, the exact opposite is true. So every question of philosophical wisdom or the nature of reality is corrupted by political influence.

The only solution to the political problems of Clown World might be waiting for it all to collapse.

Politics is now total war, permeating every level of society. No-one can escape the new social justice Inquisition, which scours everyone’s mind for any sign of wrongthinking. Everyone must maintain a state of high alertness and watch over their every word, lest they inadvertently give their political enemies a boost. This anxiety can’t last forever – and it won’t – but it will last as long as Clown World does.

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