EMPIRE STRIKES BACK...stop being so strikeable.
The House always wins - first, stop relying on their casino.
“You can’t win.”
Writing about current events is bad, and I feel bad. And I have an email backlog to get to, and I have other promised articles, but I couldn’t resist.
YOU’RE GONNA BE SICK AND TIRED OF WINNING
You must be well aware of the insane, awesome, hilarious short squeeze pulled off by lovable autistic retards. Yes? Okay, how about how trading platform Robinhood (and others, it appears) then screwed them over? How about how they’re still HODLing or YOLOing more? All caught up? Good.
Do the events of the past week or so remind you of anything? Anything at all?
A self-serving, unaccountable, highly managed system of exceptionally unlikeable people running the show and lording over the little guys
Overextension of power leading to an overlooked vulnerability (139% short sell ~ forgetting how much of the US is non-collegiate Whites)
An outsider force mirroring much bigger players taking collective action to hurt the establishment badly (/r/the_donald, /r/wallstreetbets)
The Event - the absolutely hilarious, meme filled, Event
The system circling the wagons, its media and political friends looking after it, working hard to ensure nothing like it can happen again
Observe this retweet from Mia Khalifa, best known for things besides stonks.
A small correction; on January 27th, WSBets, Mia Khalifa fans, TikTok investors, and everyone else Sticking it to the Man should’ve felt more like these very fine people:
After January 28th, indeed they should feel more like that poor old lady in the Capitol. Or the MAGA Qanon Viking Shaman, now under Federal indictment.
Why would you have felt this way on January 27th? You were winning. You’d apparently just destroyed the establishment at their own game. But if there’s anything the last four years leading up to the Capitol Farce (being treated as insurrection by a State cynically clutching its pearls about actions “extremely dangerous to our democracy”) has shown us, it’s that if you rely on centralized systems for social media or trading (GOTV or Short Squeezing, via Reddit or Robinhood), i.e. popular communication and actioning technologies you do not own, to go after the establishment, you might upset their apple cart…but then they will wreck you.
They will hold you down and mug you, either because Antifa (or Capitol Police) has just been allowed to run riot and smash your face in at a rally, since you still somehow thought marching around in the street has an effect on Trump’s attention span (sorry, turns out you need to be Ivanka Trump, or at least the guy shtupping her), or because you hopped on the bandwagon just a little too late and it turns out Robinhood will decide GME can only be sold, not bought. You can shout about rules being broken and ask about what media coverage would be if the situation were reversed—this is a mainstay of conservatism—but you still lose. Why is that? Is that an accident?
Maybe SEC will intervene. Maybe AOC and Chamath and other outraged Big Celebrity, Techie, and Government People will get the Biden admin to do more than ‘monitor the situation’ (hilariously, the very phrase of inaction the Trump administration frequently used). But I doubt it. Jen Psaki’s response to retail investors’ plight was to emphasize Secretary Janet Yellen is, despite outward appearances and the ravages of time, still very much a woman:
Winning, winning, winning!
We’ve also been assured that despite Mrs. Yellen being paid bigly for public speaking by the hedge fund that owns Robinhood, there’s no conflict of interest and you can just trust her. The incoming Goldman and BlackRock hires will also look out for the Little Guy. You know, like how Kushner, Mulvaney, and Mnuchin did for MAGA voters?
THE SYSTEM IS NOT BROKEN AT ALL
Why does this keep happening? How come each time you press the elevator door-close button, the morbidly obese, sweaty, heaving-breathing guy still waddles into the tiny compartment with you, grazing your arm with his perspiration moistened appendage, to press his floor? Have you considered that the ‘dysfunction’ of the system is actually exactly what it’s designed for?
What is that chorus you hear from witless conservatives all the time about Democrats? They’re “the real racists”. Of course. What are you hearing now? Protestations that Robinhood’s actions aren’t okay in a “real free market”.
Do real free markets equitably distribute wealth or something? Who told you?
These criticisms of how the System works are a bit like an old-school classical Liberal in academia looking around at campuses and harrumphing about something called ‘Woke-ism’ which they think dates back only to around 2014 when some particularly screechy Yale students bullied a professor.
You won’t stop ‘Wall Street’ on Robinhood when you don’t own an HFT platform, much less Robinhood. You won’t stop the Mass Media’s kingmaking ability when you don’t own Facebook or Reddit, or anything else. You won’t stop the excesses of Liberalism authored by Progressive Liberals by being a Conservative Liberal. Nick Fuentes was never going to beat Charlie Kirk.
As an aside, does that term sound weird to you, still? ‘Conservative Liberal’? Like a Black White, or a Scotch-Korean? Well, conservatives actually in control of conservatism think it makes perfect sense: search this event transcript for the word ‘liberal’. I think you’ll find the phrase Paul Ryan utters encapsulating the ninth mention of the world quite revealing.
The first step to not being completely owned by this System is to stop making your financial solvency, political fulfillment, and mental health contingent on it behaving as you want it to behave instead of how it is going to behave, because of what it is. If you don’t, you are like a middle school boy in the throes of limerence wondering why his pretty unattainable crush doesn’t just love him for who he is. Sure, maybe she’ll come around, but probably not.
“YOU NEED TO DIVERSIFY YO’ BONDS, N*GGA”
What does it look like, to not rely wholly on the US monetary system?
Consider the Euro and the Eurozone and the European Union. Consider what it means to be an American who lives and works in the Eurozone, is paid by a European employer, has a bank account denominated in Euros, and possibly an American bank account in dollars with a credit card that just converts to local currency without fees.
In this arrangement, our gainfully employed expat (one of several hundred thousand Americans who live in such a way), who only pays his US taxes in US Dollars, pays his rent, buys his food, swipes his credit card for sundries and gets paid for his labor in Euros. He isn’t a citizen of the European country in which he lives, he has no vote, he exercises no power over the EU at all.
But the food is bought, money is spent, he takes Ubers (or whatever hilarious services which aren’t Uber that Europeans have created) and lives life. If he were to gain European citizenship of some sort and disavow his US citizenship he’d lose his US tax liability. It’d be over. It’d be his legal status and currency usage catching up to where his body’s finances and life already were.
Not everyone disavows their US citizenship, but plenty of US citizens move property and finances out of the US and into places like Bermuda or Switzerland. They reduce the extent to which they are exposed to a US Gov tax liability. Often they keep the passports (and through a hoity-toity educational phenomenon of so called ‘American Schools’, the accents and collegiate pipeline access), but the purpose of doing all of this, is they want to be as independent of the IRS as possible, because, why not? It is very hungry.
But this is assets and liabilities denominated in US Dollars vs. assets and liabilities denominated in Euros. And you can never really escape the tax man, anymore than you can escape laws. And it’s not like the ECB can’t develop diseases of its own apart from the Federal Reserve. But what about Bitcoin?
I suppose it’s a lot less ‘out there’, and a lot more ‘old hat’ at this point to tell you to buy bitcoin, but I’m also not telling you to put your entire savings into bitcoin. Just reduce some of your US Dollar exposure. Or your Euro exposure, if you are the European Union citizen reading this and not the American expat. Become partly an ‘expat’ away from any State that currently exists, and reduce your exposure to their monetary policies, and diversify your assets.
Buy Bitcoin and HODL. You were late to one BTC = thirty five thousand fucking dollars. People felt dumb buying it at eight thousand, too. In time, depending on the jurisdiction, it will become more possible to live more of your life in Bitcoin, not the price of Bitcoin in gov’t money, or local currency.
And stop spending so much money. Try to spend less. The FIRE lifestyle sorts are (like the 80 thousand hours/Effective Altruism crowd) often well-intentioned, but really fucking weird people. Just try to spend less. The next time you see Woke Capital farting out a political stance when you wanted burgers, do the radical thing and don’t give them so much money anymore.
If you’re young, and can, try geoarbitrage. You don’t need to move far or outside the US. Get a job that doesn’t require you to be anywhere in particular and take back as much of your time as possible to enjoy life well and cheaply.
THE SYSTEM WON’T CHANGE AND YOU WON’T BE ALLOWED TO TRY
But no matter what, please stop believing you can beat this system ‘from the inside’. Perhaps you are quite a bit smarter than most Wall Street traders (who, if we’re being honest, are generally pretty sharp, but clearly not the most intelligent people on the planet for all their confidence). Perhaps you are also quite a bit smarter than, say, the median GOP establishment lackey working for the State Parties or National Committee. As an esteemed reader of this blog, you are assuredly much more savvy. But is everyone? Is the average Trump supporter, for ex., smarter than a shitlib RNC State Director?
And suppose you and everyone on the right side of history is just so much smarter (and experienced, and skilled) than ‘The Establishment’. Do you have anything like the social entrée required to actually start altering how the institutions of your government, regulatory agencies, mass media, banks, etc. actually work and function? How long of a “long march” do you need to get it?
Before COVID-19, the big financial crisis was 2008. Before that, the Dot Com bubble collapse, before that Black Monday, etc. If you keep peering back into time you’ll find that the best laid plans o’ mice an’ men, gang aft agley. There are worse crises for governments and civilizations than irrationally shorted video game retailers. What you won’t find is the powerful simply giving up their power, or making the powerless equal partners (or partners at all, really) in control over any government or wealth that they happen to control. You’ll find things like them expanding the voting franchise in order to have pliant political tools or cheaper labor, occasionally backfiring tremendously, sometimes working out beautifully, with all the self-ascribed magnanimity that goes with. But you won’t find them actually making their own selves (or progeny) less likely to be powerful or comfortable on purpose, in order to serve the principle of the demos having some more appreciable kratia.
On January 6th,, having chased politicians out of the Capitol, Les Deplorables proceeded to wander around waiting for the next cutscene in the MAGAtron video game. On January 29th, tendie flinging WSBettors repeated the mistake. They should have sold. They are waiting for something that won’t come.
Maybe Melvin Capital will lose everything; Hillary Clinton lost everything, too.
But will ‘Wall Street’ lose everything? Ask yourself; did the Deep State lose everything? It doesn’t look like they’ve lost even a beat in avoiding accountability, and continuing on with their fulfillment of Universalist Liberalism. Fear not, Gay Afghans, more US troops’ blood is to be spilt in the sands of Kandahar, perhaps for another two decades, to keep bacha bazi safe.
There will be stonk plays to make. BlackRock is buying more AMC, about twice as much. But the game isn’t rigged if you lose. The system isn’t designed for your success and happiness. There was no funny business needed for Biden to win the 2020 election - there was funny business alright, but President Kushner’s tenure was not long for this world with 2016’s margins. And if Biden’s nursing home handlers stole it, they did so fair and square. This is how casinos work! The House always wins. Stand up from the table and cash out.