The Gamestop Squeeze.

Full article here at patriots.win/p/11SK7KTZoM/on-gamestop-why-hedge-funds-are-/

A lot of web sites and social media sites have marked this as “spam” despite containing a fairly coherent explanation of shorts, “naked shorts”, and the mechanics of the markets surrounding the Gamestop squeeze, as well as the thinking of the Redditors taking part in the squeeze.

I’m quoting the article in full.

Warning: language. (Like I need to fucking tell you this.)

So let me begin by saying this: I am in on the GME squeeze, yes. I have been in since early December. I have made 5 figures so far on an initial buy-in under 10k, will soon be 6 figures, and… we’ll see. I am (legally required to mention that I am) not a financial adviser, and nothing I say here should be construed as advice nor direction. This is simply data for you to understand what’s going on technically for the stock market action, and the larger implications.

So, we’ll begin with a definition of short selling. Short selling (shorting) is the borrowing of shares from a broker, with the promise that you will pay back in-kind (with as many shares as you borrowed), and if you don’t pay back within a certain timeframe you begin paying interest on it. Shares are lent from brokers (to use a very simple example, Robin Hood, yes, the app). Only big money hedge funds and financial institutions are allowed to short, it’s financial shit.

Anywho, if you’re quick on the draw you’ll understand the implications. Shorting is for when you believe* a stock is going down. If you borrow a share from a broker that’s trading for… 10 bucks and short sell it, you pocket 10 bucks then and there. You then stand to gain as much as you buy it back for after the price goes down. If, for example, you buy the share back when the price has dropped to 5, you turn in that share back to your lender and now have netted 5 bucks. The maximum gain for this example is 10 bucks, i.e. the company bankrupts and their shares are worthless. I say “believe” with an asterisk, because there’s a caveat. We’ll come back to that.

On the flipside, shorting has what’s called an “infinite downside”. This is because, if you hold till the bitter end (which most shorts won’t), the price of the stock could theoretically go to infinitely-high levels. So if you short that 10 dollar stock, and it climbs to… 15 bucks by the time you’re margin called and asked to return the share, you MUST buy back the share at 15 bucks, market value, or else pay an interest value based on the stock’s current value to the lender.

Stay with me, we’re going balls-deep into market shit here. I promise I’ll keep it simple.

So, shorters (such as the oft-mentioned Melvin Capital) tend to have HUGE pools of liquidity. They can afford to take an interest hit if they think they can hold through the upward trend of the stock (past their initial short position) till the point where it goes back under and they can buy back, or “cover”, that share at a profit, or at least a break-even point.

Here’s where that caveat comes in that I mentioned, and point 1 of my thread: The trick is, all these hedge fund cats have a huge fucking network of contacts in the MSM and politics, and will utilize them, either when they first short or when they’re in trouble, to run hit pieces on the company they shorted, explaining why the price it’s at is WAAAY too high! They may or may not (illegally) also do shit like do a massive sell-off, or get someone else with large pools of money to burn (known as whales) to do so. This normally scares off normie investors, who will see the downward trend and sell at whatever they can to mitigate losses.

So, the shorts basically are pocketing the losses from Joe Blow the novice trader, and… well, in my opinion, creating NOTHING of value. Their money literally comes from scaring people and creating pessimism. Fuck that. Moving on.

In particular regards to Gamestop, we need to set the scene for what’s going on with the company. Like most brick-and-mortar places, the Kung Flu hit them hard, and they took a tumble down to single-digit stock values. Shorts saw this and, knowing GME was just another strip mall retailer, figured their time was coming and they were gonna be bankrupting before too long. So they shorted it at, oh, 20 as it was going down during the beginning of the Coof.

But then, they got greedy. I won’t get into the technicals here, because it would require an entire fucking new thread to explain, but they did something called “naked shorting” to short more shares than actually exist. They leveraged shares held in call options (again, not gonna explain it, look elsewhere), basically promising to lenders “hey, I know you don’t ACTUALLY have this stock and if the option holder exercises they’ll need 100 shares, but I promise I’m good for it!” So they got MORE shares, these ones being “implied”, and shorted AGAIN on those, say at 15. Then GME STILL kept dropping. Cool, make every fucking cent they can. Short some more. Etc. etc.

Okay, so that’s fine and well, they shorted literally more stocks than GME even had available for trade, but (biiiig but) if GME went bankrupt, as they earnestly believed, it wouldn’t fucking matter, because they wouldn’t have to pay back shares if the company no longer existed.

Enter Player 1: Michael Burry (of Big Short fame.)

Burry saw what was going on, and he’s been on the winning side of short positions before. Now, there’s something to be said for shorts against scum like Enron. Short sellers DO provide a value in driving down the value of companies that don’t deserve their money. I won’t argue that. Problem is, looking at GME’s finances, they were NOT on the track to bankruptcy. They were hurting, sure, everyone hit by the WuFlu was, but they were far from filing Chapter 11.

So Burry bought shares (or call options, can’t remember which), a sizable enough amount that it kept the stock from hitting the ground. Now, this already fucked with the shorts, because remember, they were now all-in on GME bankrupting. They would never admit as much, since naked shorting is illegal and all, but yeah, they were. But by chugging along, even if barely on a lifeline, GME’s survival was… troublesome to say the least.

Enter Player 2: Ryan Cohen (of Chewy fame.)

You may or may not have heard of Chewy. Depends on if you have a pet or not. But short version is, they’re an online pet supply company that Cohen ran really fucking well, selling them to Petsmart for… 2 and a half bil, I think it was? Anyways, he made the company work on the e-commerce platform. And… he joins GME. GME, mind you, is of course traditionally a brick-and-mortar physical retailer, but consider the sentiment caused by an e-commerce guru deciding to roll the dice on GME. Was he gonna fix them? Completely dominate the online video game retail market? Maybe, maybe not, that’s not super relevant. The main and important point is, the POSSIBILITY that he COULD made GME look good again.

Their stock price starts going up. Uh-oh for the shorts.

Enter Player 3: Q32020 Earnings and New Console Cycle

Okay, so what just happened in the video game world? PS5 and whatever the fuck the new Xbox, Series X Mark 2 Mod 5 or whatever, is called came out. Hey, hate them all you want, GME provides those consoles that millenials and zoomers want. That ALONE would keep GME solvent for at least a year or so. But their Q3 report came out, and… yeah, they took a hit from the Shanghai Shivers, but they actually didn’t do nearly as badly as other companies. Actually did fairly decently. They’re closing a bunch of redundant extra locations, and they have decent cash-on-hand keeping them in the green(ish). Worse and worse for the shorts. Some have now left their single-digit stock price short positions, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. But not the biggest fish in the hedge funds. They shorted at 10-20, and GME was still right there at this point in time, last November. They can weather the storm. At least till break-even. No losses in THEIR portfolios!

Enter Player 4: Wall Street Bets, /biz/, StockTwits, and various other retail (individual) trader social media.

Okay, GME is on the uptick, but… I mean, Cohen’s good, but he’s no miracle worker, right? GME WILL go down! Except some retards on various financial forums (WSB being the largest source), even as early as a fucking YEAR ago, saw the ridiculously high short ratio and saw writing on the wall. I understand there’s also apparently a whole sentiment about “muh nostalgia”, but that may or may not be the point. Anyways, WSB is already well-known for being a bunch of dumbfuck millennials who yeet six figures into random stocks and options as a fucking joke. They have a LOT of money to burn. But this time… this was no meme. Buying up the shares means the shorts have to buy from them. As a refresher, the shorts MUST buy shares to return, they cannot pay cash-in-kind or whatever the fuck. And if the ONLY people holding shares are a bunch of memeing fucktards… limited supply, extremely high demand.

And so… the short squeeze began. Really began running about when I bought in, right after thanksgiving weekend (after the Q3 report came out and showed they were actually doing just fine, relatively speaking). What you must understand here is, no, there is no “next GME”. This is basically it. This is literally documentary-tier history. Hedge funds banked on GME going into the fucking dirt, and the populist left, populist right, and a fuckton of Karen and Steve normies on Robin Hood bought a share or two. And every single share counts. Every single share some rando of RH owns, every 10 thousand shares a WSB whale holds, EVERY SINGLE SHARE is being held by people who leave the shorts with no choice to buy from them. In other words… shareholders dictate the price. We (myself included, as I said) will sell them at whatever fucking price we choose, and they will pay it, even if they must liquidate all of their other assets and bankrupt the hedge funds. We don’t fucking care.

Shorts who fuck over scams like Enron are good, fine, they devalue companies that don’t deserve it; but not shorts who literally made money off of thing like the scamdemic (as GME was just one example), fucking over other people and taking their money. Dunno why they hit GME in particular as a brick-and-mortar, maybe because of the digital game marketplace being stronger (compare AMC, not nearly as heavily shorted but also a meme stock, I guess it’s because the theater experience is kinda its own thing?).

And right now, the MSM, Big Wall Street, all these fuckers, are absolutely LIVID. THEY’VE been gaming the market sentiment for decades, and they got nice fancy econ degrees from ivy leagues and wear suits to work! They DESERVE it! But no, not a bunch of random… NORMAL PEOPLE on web forums and shit! And the fact that they so stubbornly held against the sentiment merely reinforced the will of all of us longs, because we’re like “bro, just give up and cover your positions, it’s over”. Nope, instead they beg for CNBC to run endless hitpieces about how GME isn’t worth X. But the thing is, we AREN’T TRADING ON GME’S ACTUAL WORTH. The stock value is being trade ON THE SHORTS’ NEED TO COVER.

Basically, they’ve been making money off of other peoples’ losses as long as they’ve been shorting companies that don’t deserve it. And now that they’re the ones being bent over, they’re whining to the SEC to game the system for them, or the government to change the rules for them. They are facing bankruptcy based on this bet, and the idea that THEY could be so thoroughly fucked over by their lack of risk management terrifies them. They’ve been worth 7+ figures for years, decades for some of the oldest traders. The idea of losing it all is so horrifying, that they are pulling every dirty trick they can to keep us from winning.

So yes, a bunch of the WSB people are fucking commies. And I don’t fucking care right now. We have a common enemy here, the scum that have been sucking value out of working-peoples’ pockets for years on end. If they wanna turn around and give it all to some trans rights charity or some shit, I don’t care. Our paths diverge when this fight is over. But until then? All the hedge funds can go fuck themselves. They got money from the banks that were bailed out in ’08.

We want our fucking money back.

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At this point I want to give a full disclosure about my own personal politics.

I don’t trust the powerful.

The problem to me, however, is that a lot of folks on the Left, a lot of Democrats, as well as a lot of folks on the Right and a lot of Republicans, are lying to you about who the powerful are.

I’m a Native American, a member of the Salinan Indian Tribe of California. Many of my “native ancestors” are alive and well in the 805 area code.

I know damned good and well the history of the powerful as they interacted with my tribe. I had relatives who were murdered by law enforcement for the “crime” of being the wrong skin color. I know damned good and well how shitty the powerful are, because at the bottom of the stack there is–quite honestly–no morality or ethics where power is concerned.

Meaning ethics is practiced by kind people, not inherent to power.

Some powerful people are kind. But enough are not kind that we see things like a stroke of a pen eliminating tens of thousands of jobs (while the rich and powerful snicker “learn to code”), or where the rich and powerful engage in lawfare against their lessers.

So when I see stuff like this, with the Gamestop short squeeze allowing a bunch of little people win over the powerful and well-connected?

I can’t help but laugh.

Because this is the sort of bullshit the rich and powerful have been engaging in against the rest of us since–well, since the Federal Marshalls ran my grandfather and his family off their traditional lands, riding into their village on horseback and firing their guns willy-nilly, treating my ancestors as if they had no right to live on the land where they lived. (Which, honestly, is deeply ironic given that my tribe had the concept of money, of land ownership and of specialized economic production. Ours was not a bunch of nomads using dogs to pull our shit behind them with sticks. Ours was a tribe who understood trade; my grandfather and his brother–elders in the tribe–would go on to later trade with pre-war Japan to sell them abalone.)

So from my perspective a lot of people are treating those who lock them in their veal pens like their saviors, and are predictably outraged when their jailers tell them they’re supposed to be outraged.

“How dare the little guys make a lot of money when the hedge fund traders go bankrupt! It’s not fair!!!”

Yeah, fuck that.

Why yes, everything is broken.

Everything Is Broken

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. … What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was … Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

The reason the author gives above has to do with Gramsci’s “Long March”:

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

Here’s where I’m going to part company with the above essay.

Control by a self-selected cohort of “sneering elitists?” I don’t think that’s the actual problem, for the simple reason that so long as you look back in our history, we have always had an “elite” of varying quality. One only has to read about the Feudal system (or, for that matter, watch Netflix’s incredibly watchable distraction “Bridgerton”) to see an elite that, so far as you can see, is an incredibly self-involved group of people wrapped up in their own self-inflicted drama not to pay attention to the rest of society.

(Though “Bridgerton” is a fictional distraction; a beautifully filmed romance novel — the society reflected in the series did exist and did act more or less by the rules portrayed in the show.)

And even prior to the “flatness” that supposedly gave us our “sneering elitists”, we had various hierarchical societies with elitists who sought to enforce their own cultural values on the rest of us. Hell, that’s the very definition of “elite:” “a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a society.” And even if one has no desire to exercise power, one’s oversized footprint will exert power regardless.

I believe the real problem with “flatness” is an associated value which hardly anyone has really noticed. But I do, daily, in my own profession as a software developer. From the essay above:

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform.

(Emphasis mine.)

The key here is “… an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate.”

And what’s important about the allergy to hierarchy is not that in a sense we’re seeing a realization of a fundamental notion that dates back to our own Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

But the related — and very real problem — that we no longer respect true expertise, which may set someone above and apart from another.

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In practice, this is what that looks like.

Jamie Zawinski Calls Cinnamon Screensaver Lock-Bypass Bug ‘Unconscionable’

You will recall that in 2004 , which is now seventeen years ago, I wrote a document explaining why I made the design trade-offs that I did in XScreenSaver, and in that document I predicted this exact bug as my example of, “this is what will happen if you don’t do it this way.”

And they went and made that happen.

Repeatedly.

Every time this bug is re-introduced, someone pipes up and says something like, “So what, it was a bug, they’ve fixed it.” That’s really missing the point. The point is not that such a bug existed, but that such a bug was even possible. The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe .

Especially when I have given them nearly 30 years of prior art demonstrating how to do it right, and a two-decades-old document clearly explaining What Not To Do that coincidentally used this very bug as its illustrative strawman!

These bugs are a shameful embarrassment of design — as opposed to merely bad code…

But 30 years is a long time, and a common problem within the software industry is that anything old is — well, old. Not worthy of remark. Not worthy of consideration and certainly not worthy to remember.

Keep in mind that the prevalent idea within the software industry is that the best and brightest are the youngest who are the least attached to the past — in theory, so they give up the supposed mindset of their elders of “it can’t be done.”

As the old saying goes, “Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it.”

However, sometimes the warning of their elders is not “it can’t be done” but “it shouldn’t be done that way.” And sometimes their elders already know a better way of doing things. Sometimes there are hard-won reasons why you shouldn’t do a thing — not because it can’t be done, but because they tried before, failed, and have some experience worth sharing.

Sometimes design requires consideration of the past, not to be stuck in the past, but to learn what didn’t work and why.

The screensaver issue above is just one of a million other problems, brought about by people who are quickly “moving fast and breaking things” who don’t take a moment to consider if they’re just breaking the same thing over and over again. They don’t stop to consider if they’re just stuck in “The Churn.”

But the newer [programming] languages are better.

Oh bull! They’re different; but they aren’t better. Or at least not better enough to justify throwing our toolset back into the stone age.

And think of the training costs for adopting a new language. Think of the cost to the organization of having to use 84 different languages because the programmers get excited about shiny new things every two weeks.

Shiny new things? That’s kind of insulting isn’t it.

I suppose so; but that’s what it comes down to. New languages aren’t better; they are just shiny. And the search for the golden fleece of a new language, or a new framework, or a new paradigm, or a new process has reached the point of being unprofessional.

Unprofessional?

Yes! Unprofessional. We need to realize that we have hit the asymptote. It’s time to stop the wasteful churning over languages, and frameworks, and paradigms, and processes.

It’s time to simply get down to work.

We need to choose a language, or two, or three. A small set of simple frameworks. Build up our tools. Solidify our processes. And become a goddam profession.

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It’s not the flatness, not really. It’s not the elite; we’ve always had elite. It really isn’t even a political philosophy; Socialism isn’t a failure because it’s Socialist, nor is elitism a failure because it’s elite.

No, it’s because each of these paradigms have bugs — real honest-to-god problems embedded in them — which create all the mischief in our society. And if we just pause a moment to realize what those bugs are, we can see the problem and — hopefully — course correct. Even if just for ourselves, so we can become that proverbial one-eyed man in the land of the blind.

So: socialism fails not because it’s socialist, but because in practice socialism removes decision making from the hands of individuals and puts it into the hands of groups — who inevitably coalesce into a top-down hierarchy of decision makers ill-equipped to make decisions. This was the fundamental lesson of F.A. Hayek, and his work “The Road to Serfdom”, along with his writings on the value of price signaling. (Thus, socialism fails because it destroys price signaling which is so important for an economy’s self-regulation.)

Once we know that, we know that the bug — top-down hierarchies intrinsically lack the ability to make reasonable judgements for an entire economy (or even subsets of an economy) — we can apply this understanding beyond just “Socialism is bad, mmm’kay?” We can also see this bug in play in large corporations in the United States, and in government-run programs and in any system where decision making processes require a few to control the many.

(And it is that observation, by the way, which favored organizational “flatness” in large corporations in the first place.)

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The bug of “flatness” is the feeling that there are no “experts,” no hard-won knowledge, that is worth listening to.

That 20-something programmer fresh out of college is worth just as much as the 50-something developer with 30 years experience. Perhaps — at least as far as software development is concerned — perhaps even worth more, because he’s young and fresh-faced and not full of experiences which get in the way of “moving fast and breaking things.”

It’s not just software development where we see this, of course. And that carries us back to the top of this article — to the problem of a mother and her ill child: because the medical profession may give lip service to expertise — and there are definitely individual doctors who attempt to keep up with the latest research out of professional curiosity.

But the medical profession no longer trusts its doctors. Instead, suit-wearing bureaucrats working for insurance companies — companies whose place in the medical profession was cemented in place by the Government and the various reforms it imposed, including the PPACA which wiped out small practices and replaced them with “Accountable Care Organizations” — are the ones who control the way doctors act, through the imposition of algorithms and ICD-10 billing codes. “ICD-10 code V91.07XA, algorithm: examine burns and determine degree, apply salves and bandages as appropriate, execute algorithm for second- or third-degree burns if needed; instruct patient to stop water-skiing until condition clears.”

So of course a rare condition may not be uncovered and found. The language doctors are being asked to speak now is in “ICD-10 codes.” And as we all know, language shapes thinking, primarily by forcing us to consider how to express ourselves in that language, taking energy away from allowing us to think about what we’re considering.

On the other hand, the medical profession has become “flat” in the sense that no matter where you go in the United States you can count on getting algorithm-directed care. Sure, it may be “mediocre” in the sense that there are thousands of people with harder-to-diagnose issues who fall through the cracks, unsaved by a “Dr. House” who only cares about diagnosing his patients correctly. And sure, relatively easy-to-solve problems (such as the use of checklists) that lead to medical error being the third-leading cause of death in the United States doesn’t get addressed.

But chances are you’re better off seeing a doctor than holding out, hoping whatever is going on with your foot gets better.

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We muddle on in our country, and weirdly, we muddle on better than most other countries facing the same set of problems — because there are those in our culture who are more than happy to buck the trend.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

But it is frustrating and disappointing to those of us who respect knowledge and understanding and expertise to see those who make a mockery of these things engage in ad-hominem attacks, listening to the faux-experts on the news cycle or on Doctor Phil, worshipping on the altar of fame — using the idea of “flatness” to presuppose that anything: worshipping the right public figures, reading the right papers, being seen with the right people — are better substitutes to actually knowing a god-damned thing.

Some thoughts about the dying of progressivism in light of censoring conservatives.

Today we’re seeing an increasing number of conservative voices being delegitimized and shut down on social media. President Trump has been silenced on several social media outlets for “inciting a riot”, even though what he said in his speech was to “hold our leaders accountable”–a statement that has been made many times before by many leaders, sometimes even leading to protests and riots. We’re seeing other conservative outlets being shut down for posting Trump’s speech, fueled by progressive groups who have repeatedly asked for the censorship of ideas.

Sometimes this is even done under the guise of “getting used to the new normal,” which for some progressive politicians:

Others have quickly added long standing dreams for everything from the guaranteed basic income advocated by Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, which was also recently raised by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to mailed voting elections advocated by many Democrats.

Now elsewhere I have used the notion of “getting used to the new normal” not as a “and politicians will have cart blache to change things.” No, instead, I’ve been concerned with a year-long trauma of COVID-19 lockdowns and how this would affect society. The “new normal” is not one that will be externally imposed on us; this is not some disaster that represents a political opportunity.

It will be the “new normal” because after a year of lockdowns, many of us have become so traumatized we would change our behavior. In much the same way that our grandparents (and great-grandparents) who lived through the Great Depression never trusted banks again, and would do things like stash cash inside flower pots and sew gold into the inner lining of coats.

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The really funny part to me about all of this is that even if you can completely delete all forms of conservative thought from the Internet, the following core elements of the progressive movement are still dead or dying, thanks to this COVID-19 trauma:

(1) Urbanization.

Note that urban centers have been hardest hit by COVID-19, especially early on, thanks to the fact that COVID-19 is a respiratory disease that easily spreads amongst people in close proximity.

And urban areas are defined by putting people into close proximity.

The flight by the wealthy to suburban areas and ex-urban or even rural areas only accelerated thanks to lockdowns and thanks to fears of the disease–a flight which helped seed COVID-19 to other areas of the country early on. And even now, this late in the day, when COVID-19 has had a chance to spread to even the most remote rural areas in our country, New York City still has the highest per-capita death toll in the United States. (At 25,453 deaths, across a population of 8.4 million, that’s 3,030 deaths/million.)

We also see people departing urban areas of California for rural areas even now; that’s reflected in truck rental rates by U-Haul. (If you want to rent a U-Haul truck moving one way from San Francisco to Austin, Texas on February 1st, about 3 weeks from now, a 20′ truck would cost you $4,435 for that one-way move. The same move in the opposite direction for the same truck would be $964.)

This trend is accelerated by tech companies and financial companies which have either extended work-at-home policies for their workers, or who are making working at home permanent. (Which makes sense; after a year of working at home, companies have figured out how to do the work-at-home thing, and many employees no longer live near the offices where they once worked.)

Urbanization is also a dead letter since so many of us, now on a permanent at-home “staycation”, are fairing much better if our home is a 6,000 square foot home on two acres of land with beautiful views, than a cramped 800 square foot fourth-floor walk-up. The charms of New York City–what makes it a great place to live–have all but been eliminated. And those four walls and a tiny window looking at a neighboring block of apartments must be claustrophobic.

(2) Mass transit.

Mass transit has been a staple and mainstay of a progressive movement that seeks to deal with increasing population densities in urban centers. But mass transit has also been implicated in the spread of COVID-19, despite serious efforts to paint them as completely safe. The problem, of course, being that COVID-19 spreads anytime people are crammed into a tight space: the rule of thumb has always been within 6 feet, for longer than 10 minutes, and in an indoor setting.

And while there are plenty of articles which seek to discredit an early MIT report that suggested much of the spread of COVID-19 was triggered by the New York Subway, it’s hard to square them in light of the idea that outdoor restaurant dining is somehow unsafe.

In areas where mass transit is the only option, subway riders continue to ride the subway. If that’s the only way in which you can survive, you do what you have to do.

But in other areas where a subway or bus transit is not required, and even in areas where people have to ride the subway, but can consolidate their trips to reduce exposure, ridership is down.

And car sales are up.

(3) Internationalism.

One of the most eggregious problems that arose early on with COVID-19 was the international response.

Which more or less turned into an “every man for himself” response.

We saw that at the start of this when a number of countries, such as Germany, Russia and the Czech Republic hoarded medical supplies. We saw Germany slash exports of key components to make COVID-19 tests, which caused many countries not to be able to test early on. Things got so bad that a number of countries started to build its own manufacturing capacity to stop being dependent on international trade for essential supplies.

And it’s not enough to simply open a plant in China, since China doesn’t exactly play nice with the rest of the world.

Essentially this entire event showed that even the most internationally minded countries behave selfishly and use crisis as an opportunity to get ahead. Soemthing China has been doing in spades since this disaster has begun.

And this increase in distrust in international trade and other forms of international cooperation has lead to increased interest in economic disintermediation has led to calls for making medical supplies in the United States. And while Trump may no longer be in office a couple of weeks after this post, China is still increasingly on the outs with countries around the world as they move manufacturing away.

This process will take time. But a number of companies are seeing disintermediation as an insurance policy–and really, the only destination that you can fully trust is within the borders of your own country.

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Internationally the progressive movement (which is tied to the expansion of international control by authoritiarian regimes in places like China) also try to advocate two other policies which are dead-letter items in the United States.

The first is increased government control over the population and its right to create new ad-hoc working arrangements. It’s not to say there aren’t groups in the United States trying to do the same thing. In many ways the decline in small businesses which only accelerated under COVID-19, but which has been going on for decades, combined with the rise in government-mandated corporate benefits is increasingly turning our society into a sort of ‘feudal society’ where big business replaces the feudal manor lords.

But these trends tend to rub Americans the wrong way, far more so than Europeans, whose entire system of government is predicated on the idea of exchanging a few freedoms for some essential security.

The second is increased government control over the acceptable modes of thought–which we are seeing in the United States with the demands to isolate and terminate conservative thought and classical liberal ideas.

But that doesn’t even work in Hong Kong, where populations find themselves increasingly using alterate means of communications to spread their ideas. And honestly a Tiananmen Square event in the United States would completely destroy any credibility of the Left.

Meaning so long as only a handful of people are censored, and so long as life continues more or less as normal in the United States, and so long as most of us are relatively free to choose how we live our lives–where we live, how we work, how we spend our money–in all practical ways the games played by a deranged leadership in Washington D.C. don’t matter.

But as soon as people find they are no longer able to work a side-hustle, or they find they are no longer able to speak their minds–we run into problems.

(And while one could argue that COVID-19 reveals the newly found power of the Federal Government and various state governments to exerpt cradle-to-grave control over the US population, places like Sweden (where without mandatory lockdowns large segments of the populations stayed at home anyway) show us that the only reason why these controls worked is because a sizable percentage of the population can look at the data and understand that they still need take action. In other words, even in areas where lockdowns don’t exist, people took voluntary action anway, so long as the government communicated what needed to happen and why.)

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The last two items don’t work in the long run in the United States, for the simple reason that the arc of history in the United States, thanks to the immortal declaration and how deeply we believe in these ideas, has been towards individual freedom.

We can see that in the Supreme Court rulings favoring gun rights as an individual right, and favoring the right of homosexuals to marry.

Meaning the COVID-19 lockdowns, in the United States, has an expiration date. We may not know what they are, but they will expire, and expire just as soon as the population believes they are no longer necessary. (And if history is a guide, my guess is spring to summer of 2021. After all, we’re seeing the third wave of COVID-19 deaths play itself out, during a time when seasonal deaths ramp down towards the end of January.)

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So what is left of the progressive movement, when the three core ideas in the United States find themselves in tatters as the wealthy–the ones with the greatest freedom of movement in the United States–insulate themselves from the effects of lockdowns by buying in the suburbs?

In a real sense, it does not matter who wins the White House, nor does it matter if progressive leaders are now in charge in D.C.

Frankly, what the wealthy do is what the vast majority of people would want to do if they only had the money to do it. And if D.C. decides to curtail those options for the middle class–expect the middle class to become very upset.

There is a reason why memes showing the hypocrisy of our leaders are incredibly popular. Not just because they’re hypocrites, but because the sort of elitism it broadcasts really rubs people the wrong way.

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Charles Krauthammer famously observed that American politics is played between the 40 yard lines. That’s a reference to the middle 20% of the (American) football field, and it’s to say that no matter how loud and obnoxious people become, no matter how many neighborhoods are set on fire by protesters or how many times the U.S. Capitol building is overrun by protesters, our politics (by the nature of the design of this country and by the culture of our country) never really strays very far one way or another.

And companies and organizations and politicians who try to push the country too far one way or another always and inevitably pay a price. They’re not punished. But the wax always melts when you fly too close to the sun.

The smart ones may succumb to pressure and vocally declare something off-limts. But they then quietly, in the shadows, walk back their position if only to save their stock prices.

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So we are now hitting the limits of the rails in this age of unreason. We may even see a number of voices silenced in an attempt to control the message, and we probably will see a Seventh Pary System arise as the core issues of the Sixth Party System were more or less settled in the mid-1990’s, and as a new question over the limits of government and corporate control over our lives moves into the foreground.

But make no mistake.

Progressivism–as a practical expression of policy ideas–is a dead letter issue. It may flounder on for a while pretending to have teeth–but even the crowning jewel of that movement to fight Global Warming, the Paris Agreement, has no teeth.

Under the Paris Agreement, each country must determine, plan, and regularly report on the contribution that it undertakes to mitigate global warming. No mechanism forces a country to set a specific emissions target by a specific date, but each target should go beyond previously set targets.

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Unlike its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, which sets commitment targets that have legal force, the Paris Agreement, with its emphasis on consensus-building, allows for voluntary and nationally determined targets.

Which means, what is left?

Harassing conservatives in colleges and lengthy debates over pronoun usage?

Has our modern day Jacobin movement reduced itself to so little?