Wu has no power. She'll be a novelty candidate in a congressional primary and lose heavily to the dem incumbent, much like Vermin Supreme. She had a flash in the pan kickstarter, released one below average game and if you step away from twitter you'll never have to hear about her again.
The only time I ever used Twitter was to ask a question of a mobile game developer who didn’t have a forum. The only Twitter links I go to are from the Super Best Friends reddit and are usually about not making eye contact with Blanka players or various characters getting Behelits.
And yet here we are.
Her power. Cannot. Diminish.
She had a flash in the pan kickstarter, and her power did not diminish. She released a below average game, and her power did not diminish. She was caught again and again and again lying about people in order to claim victimization by them, and her power did not diminish. She will lose heavily to the dem incumbent, and her power will not diminish.
Her power cannot diminish. No matter what she “spends” it on, it does not diminish, and she has the same amount. No matter what she does that people claim should or has discredited her and removed her power, her power did not diminish, and she had all of her power. The Elect treat her as innately deserving of respect, deference, attention, and utility. She lies about being a victim and her lies become true and widely celebrated. She can still appear on any number of mass media outlets, who will fawn over her and what a Saint of Victimhood she is. No action taken or not taken will cause that power to diminish.
Can’t I say the same of Donald Trump? He said all those evil things, and was roundly condemned by all who were good, and then… His power did not diminish. Nothing could slay him; no amount of his iniquity seemed to lessen the support he had. His lies are widely believed. Not by a majority, but by a significant fraction still. All the condemnation in the world can’t stop him. And more than that, he can sell out his base, sell out almost every campaign promise, and still retain most of his support.
Exactly. He is another human conduit of Entropy, searing away everything that isn’t status. We cannot stop rewarding him for it. He is the grotesque next stage of evolution.
And the worst part is, so much of his power comes from the haters.
I really don’t understand the definition of power you guys use. To me, the power that Trump has (money, followers, political authority, an army) seems entirely different from the “power” Wu has (get praised more than she deserves?).
On a related note, I think the whole “nothing could slay him” narrative on Trump is a bad one. Many things could’ve brought him down; his apparent invulnerability comes from the fact that many very visible tigers turned out to be paper when someone challenged them.
The power to be inherently worthy of deference, attention, respect, and utility. The power to have your whims inherently matter. The power to have the noises that fall out of your maw become The Issues That Must Be Addressed. The power to be socially invincible. The power to ignore things that are emotionally inconvenient, and have nobody willing or able to make you face reality. The power to have the emotion-vomit that oozes out of your corpus become accepted reality. The power to have people become unwilling and incapable of targeting you for social attack.
The power of inherent popularity. The power of status games. The power of status. Status for no other end but status.
All of the things Trump has, he has virtue of his inherent popularity. He is inherently entitled to money. So people give him money no matter what action he takes or does not take. He is inherently entitled to followers. So people are his followers no matter what action he takes or does not take. He is inherently entitled to power. You know where this is going.
His emotion-vomit simply becomes reality. It is a reality that some people embrace and some people struggle against, but it becomes reality. All are helpless against the power of status over their thoughts. They must act in accordance with status games and cannot possibly notice anything outside of status games.
Wu is the same thing on a smaller scale. She has nothing going for her but her inherent popularity. She does not do useful things and does not aid anyone. But she has inherent popularity. People keep giving her respect, deference, attention, and utility. Her emotion-vomit is treated by everyone as an Important View instead of “who the fuck told you anyone cared about your opinion?” The blatant lies she tells become not just cherished truths, but the driving force behind (self-claimed) noble crusades. Her noises become reality for the rest of us.
I will never be able to escape hearing her name until I finally, mercifully have the agency to kill myself. Most of the people chanting her name celebrate her as a wonderful, pure, heroic Saint of Victimhood who must be lauded. She cannot humiliate herself enough that she loses this inherent entitlement to define some part of people’s worlds. It is as fundamental to her being as carbon atoms.
Status has dominion over everyone.
Its power does not diminish.
e: And “He’s not invincible, every attack against him ever has been totally incapable of diminishing his power by sheer coincidence!” is not a convincing argument.
The reality you describe doesn’t sound very much like the reality I live in. I’m not sure what more I can say.
Regarding the edit, it’s not a coincidence. Many of the powers Trump went up against were part of a matched set, and it’s a set that’s been growing weaker and weaker for a while. At some point, real threats degraded into bluffs. In 2012 there was enough left to make him back down on declaring his candidacy; in 2016 there wasn’t.
Even so, some attacks on Trump had meaningful effects. Wasn’t quite enough to stop him from getting elected, but the vote was a close-run thing, and he’s proved pretty ineffectual as President.
He’s been ineffectual as President because of his own uncontrollable, pathological traits. Plus, he’s been very effective while being President at the whole “being inherently popular” thing.
All of the attacks against him and all the hashtag-#resist in the world have done fuck-all to him. His power can not diminish, and his power has not diminished. None of the things his opponents have done have lessened his power in any way, and he is still entitled to define the world. Name one thing that he used to have the power to do, and now does not have the power to do. None of the humiliating fuckups he has performed have humiliated him in any way. His power can not diminish, and his power has not diminished. He still makes the noises of status, and the noises are sovereign.
I know it doesn’t sound like the reality you think you live in. That is why I am constantly pleading with all of you to fucking notice anything. Any possible direction you can orient your eyes will have you looking at this exact thing. It is omnipresent. It is present in all localities. Fucking notice it!
Tell me, brazen, if I told you to just fucking notice the exact opposite, would you suddenly change your whole worldview and stop being suicidal?
Or would you just think I was condescending and obnoxious?
You and I see the same things happen; we explain them differently. Your explanations sound delusional to me, and calling me blind won’t make [see your hallucinations / stop hallucinating].
As for Trump, he’s lost all kinds of senior staff. Constant churn at the highest levels has made his administration terribly inefficient. Many of the politicians whose votes he needs hate him. He’s missing an incredible number of ambassadors. Foreign countries hold him in contempt. This all severely curtails his ability to implement policy. His party controls both House and Senate, but he’s signed a pitifully small number of laws.
Writing that out, though, makes me wonder whether you think that counts. It probably relates to the definition of power we were talking about before; you talk about people “being entitled to define the world” and I’m not even sure those words mean anything. So maybe we’re at another blank wall here, conversation-wise.
Pretty much every person who isn’t already overtly sucking the cock of his status games has observed that Trump doesn’t care fuck-all about being an “effective President” by your standards, or having an efficient administration. Fuck, he cares so little about his job he doesn’t bother to form a coherent opinion or strategy about anything and the position of “most influential person in the world” now belongs to whoever spoke to him most recently.
All he cares about, and all anyone will ever care about ever again, are ruinous status games. It’s all he cared about during the campaign and it’s all he cares about now. Reward people for sucking his cock. Abuse people for being weak enough that he can abuse them.
You are so blinded by your conception of what his office has to mean and how he HAS to have the same priorities as you do, that you’ve managed to convince yourself “This person has so much power over other people that he fucking hollowed out the Presidency of the United States of America so that all it is is a funnel he uses to piss in other people’s faces, and nobody is able to stop him” is a state that corresponds to “this person doesn’t have much power at all.”
Power doesn’t only exist when it is used in the way you want it to be used. Power is when the things you do become That Which Is. Power is when your emotions become facts for the rest of the world. Power is when your noises obliterate words. Power is when you escape consequences by asserting them away. Power is when it never matters what “really happened”.
Power is when nobody is capable of stopping you.
…wait, are we just talking about bullheaded social confidence here?
Does Vox Day have power, by your lights? How about Fred Phelps? Cassandra Clare?
So it seems clear that in fact Donald Trump has, uh, “policy preferences” at least of a sort, which he has failed to make into reality despite having been handed more overt political authority than anyone else on the planet (except maybe Xi Jinping?). He cannot build his wall, let alone make Mexico pay for it. He cannot bully North Korea into making shows of submission. He cannot equip the US with a Space Force. Even if you interpret these “preferences” as simply status-grabs on the part of someone who’s publicly pinned himself to the claim that he should have them – which seems correct – the fact that he doesn’t get them is going to be interpreted as a successful attack on his status, both by him and by observers. Pretty much everyone finds it humiliating to be denied something that you’ve socially committed yourself to seeking.
More importantly, from the standpoint of invincible-social-juggernaut analysis, Trump has half the media output of the nation dedicated to characterizing him as a buffoon and a moron. (Also a cruel bully, but that probably doesn’t matter nearly as much for present purposes; it seems likely that he doesn’t care about being perceived as a good person, but he does care about being perceived as smart and successful.) To the extent that your goal is “have everyone acknowledge your profound genius and talent,” this represents a terrible failure.
On these fronts, Trump wants a different reality than the one in which he lives. He has not proven himself invincible via the mighty power of his status. And in fact I would wager that he wakes up every day feeling persecuted and victimized, because he has so little ability to affect reality in the particular ways that have come to matter to him.
It’s true, though: none of this has stopped him from getting out there and doing his Trump thing. None of this has stopped him from having a devoted fanbase (although that fanbase has shrunk, a lot, since he got into office and then failed to deliver anything). None of this stopped him from riding a social-media bulldozer into the Presidency. And, yeah, none of this has gotten the world into a state where everyone unites to say “oh my god, he’s so terrible, we must put aside all our preexisting feuds in order to band together and impose Unilateral Undeniable Consequences on him!”
…it sounds like that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for, as a demonstration that someone doesn’t have power. Which seems silly, unless I’m missing something big.
Almost no one has heard of Vox Day, and most of the people who know of him despise him; if his goal is to be a public intellectual and Have an Effect on the Conversation, this means that his powers are (at best) very limited. But he has enough of a core fanbase that he can apparently continue making a living as a self-published writer, so no one’s actually in a position to coerce him into recanting. He’s the sort of person who will always keep doubling down on his position rather than admitting defeat or error, and it turns out that he can keep doing that indefinitely.
That’s power, of a sort, I guess. But it’s hardly the kind of power that most people are talking about, most of the time. And the pragmatically relevant part, the “being capable of making a living as a self-published writer,” boils down to the boring old materialist accounts of power. If he were reliant on a day job, if he had a boss who could say “shut up about this shit or you won’t know where your next meal is coming from,” he wouldn’t be able to do what he does. And while the difference between “a mid-level Tumblr’s worth of popularity” and “a successful Patreon’s worth of popularity” is in fact meaningful from the standpoint of “how popular are you really?,” it doesn’t really seem like it should be the hinge for an entire social theory.
I have the sense that you’re getting to a position of “popular people never have to face consequences” by defining away most possible forms of “consequence” and by ignoring all mechanisms of consequence and resistance-to-consequence that don’t reside purely in the aether of status.