McAfee dead
Apparently he committed "suicide" in prison.

I wish I could work up sympathy, but I can't. He didn't NEED to be in jail. He was rich. He could afford to pay taxes. He chose to evade taxes for the joy of cheating. Not a martyr, just a fool.

He was a poetic spokesman for HARDASS realism, but he was also a salesman for Bitcoin, an unrealistic fraud.

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Reprint from a few months ago:

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Truth is just an advertising gimmick.

Well, not exactly and not entirely. But it's a fairly consistent pattern in political circles.

What does truth advertise? Fake monetary reforms.

In the 1880s, the prairie populists under Jennings Bryan were telling the HARDASS truth about corporations and banks. Their solution was more debt plus Bimetallism, now forgotten. Bimetallism was a variable mix of gold and silver that would remove gold from its position as the one solid measuring baseline. Debt plus bimetallism would give MORE power to the banks, not less.

Now many (NOT ALL!) of the people who are telling the truth about economic crimes and "global warming" crimes and "virus" crimes are also selling Bitcoin. Bitcoin is another scheme to remove solid baselines from money. Bitcoin goes vastly farther than bimetallism, removing money from money. Bitcoin is an abstraction that can't be spent, can't be earned, can't be relied on for stability, and can't be reliably stored. It violates every single rule for currency.

Hardass realists, from McAfee to Assange to AIER, are Bitcoin salesmen.

This contradiction doesn't fit the usual Sucker Filter pattern. The usual scammer is looking for suckers who are unmoored from reality, who will believe any sort of nonsense if it's presented convincingly. The sucker category here is based on social position, not truth detection. In a time of total lies, people who see the truth about anything at all are dissidents, constantly mocked and shunned and punished. They need reassurance and respect. The scammer creates respect by agreeing with the sucker on most of reality, and then uses the respect to sell one obviously unreal product.

In between the 1880s Bryan types and the 2020s McAfee types, there were two giant exceptions to the rule. Harding and FDR. Both of them told the hard truth about economics, and used the truth to create GENUINE REFORMS that dethroned the bankers and restored human skill and human culture.

How do we break out of the Bryan/McAfee side of this cycle and get back to the Harding/FDR side?

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Labels: infinite STUPID, MMT, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 1:56 PM