Socialist Fishing

Meme Judo

This year I’m going to re-think a bunch of stuff that was hot and controversial when I first wrote about it. I seem to have forgotten that the audience for hot controversy moves the most traffic in the market - and those of us who cultivate wisdom upon wisdom are necessarily pushed to the margins. So I’m working on rehashing flavor, especially that nasty stuff I predicted might happen that is actually happening. So let’s start with defending capitalism, as I did Conservatively, some eighteen years ago.

—

Dateline October 2008
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat forever.

Give a fisherman a loan for a boat and he can feed himself, his family and sell more fish in the market. With sales tax on the fish you can pay a policeman to protect the fish market from theft. Grow the fish market through hard work and the man can pay off his loan save for a new boat, hire new fishermen and expand his fleet.  More fish allows him to trade with the next village. More spare time allows him to learn new ways of fishing, making his business more efficient, cutting costs, raising profits. Teach a man capitalism and you build a fishing industry.

But there are still people who don’t know how to fish. There are still teachers of fishing who don’t understand the dynamics of the fishing industry. All they know is that in this prosperous man’s town there are still people who can’t afford to buy a fish. So they tax the fishing boats. They put tariffs on the fishing export, they put more money into fishing headstart, even though it doesn’t produce better boat captains. They say, I don’t want to punish your success, I just want to spread the wealth around. They change society so that nobody feels the need to create a fishing industry - they just tax the one they have until... well until when?

The sea has a bad season and the cost cutting procedures no longer produce profits. Fewer boats can catch their limit so fishermen are idle. The taxes and tariffs have changed the cost of getting into the business, everybody has soaked the rich guy so that only rich guys can afford to stay in the fishing business. People depend upon the public services supplied by taxes, nobody wants to give them up. The bad cycle causes dislocations but with the tax burden it becomes unbearable. Fishing is kaput. People import fish from another country with no minimum wages,  retirement plans, health care, dental, vision, savings matching, and workman’s compensation for the union fisherman.

The people demand social justice. They sue because the bedraggled business can’t afford the quality control it once had. Popular politicians promise change. The President of FishCo closes his doors and takes his money and invests it in a less hostile business environment. He leaves the rest to his son whom he educated with an MBA. The politician regulates and adds more taxes for companies that take their business offshore. The politicians blame speculators, crooks, greed, corruption and promise jobs, jobs. They take tax money from fishing companies, and offer tax incentives to fishing companies so long as they follow the government regulations of the Ministry of Fishing which has a new cunning plan.

The inheritors of FishCo fight back. They hire lobbyists who understand the fish industry to change the laws of the ministry so that the fishing company can do what it used to do when it was profitable. They succeed. They go public and sell shares in FishCo and get listed on the exchange as FC.

OK this isn’t fun any more.

---

Dateline January 2026
It wasn’t fun because you can only stretch a metaphor so far. We actually need scholars and experts to analyze and process the economics of every situation. That will always remains a small cadre. You can put the universe of answers on the internet and still people will only pay attention to cat & cucumber videos.

It’s difficult to avoid the way that we Americans think about success. I’ve often complained about our apparent ability to monetize and weaponize anything. It feels more and more true as time goes on that we have so many wealthy useless people and industries. Just this afternoon, I drove by a huge billboard captioned. The Beauty: One Shot Makes You Hot. It’s a new TV show.

Can you believe this crap? It has reduced me to saying crap like “Can you believe this crap?”

Beauty
One of the new themes for this publication will be perhaps a full new set of virtues. I’m not sure that they will all be stoic. After all, things keep changing, and stoicism is only optimal under certain circumstances, and honestly my circumstances have changed considerably in 2025. I’m not so certain that humility is going to be emphasized as much for me. That’s a harsh way of introducing my new focus on Beauty, which is going to be more specific than just talk about virtue and cultural edification. But I’m betting this is the kind of thing we’re going to rally around because quite frankly I’m pessimistic about our general ability to suss it out and find it.

So while we can be certain that AI will produce grotesque amounts of slop, we can also be certain that politicians, symbolic capitalists and Hollywood will be able to capitalize on all that slop, and that will be the aesthetic of a nasty sort of power we will see in the continuing dark days ahead. A focus on beauty indeed requires a certain amount of indignant scorn for that which is wicked and hideous. A necessary parcel of outrage comes with that. I wouldn’t have thought, so many years ago, that so much would be delivered to my front door. Maybe I’m just not being so clever in dodging it. In fact, I never thought I’d have to burn so many calories dodging slop.

It turns out that I’ve found an AI that allows me to emulate great painters and that ability has got me excited to learn such things as I never quite did. I’ve already begun to fill my head with Goya, Carravagio and Delaroche and I intend to continue on this journey. Come along. Now back to those damnable socialists.

Breakdown 1975
There’s a significant documentary by this name narrated by one of my favorite actresses, Jodie Foster (because Contact). I got through most of it until it became rather obscenely political. They didn’t lay it on thick until the third period when we were forced to take Oliver Stone’s geopolitics seriously. Still, it gave me an opportunity to see the capture of the American imagination from a particular perspective, that of the Gonzo filmmaker. He is overrated, he being the dude who in all of his blustery manifestations has managed to glamorize the kind of inverse feminism that has delivered us the ugly beauty of a certain Hollywood aesthetic. I expect to have a more proper vocab this time next year. Why? Because I’m stupid ambitious with my curious mind and I get the feeling that there’s very little I’ll be able to spend time constructively with it. Meaning I’m underemployed again. Meaning my writing has become more important in my life; meaning maybe it will outweigh everything else. That’s a scary thought.

People forget that New York City went bankrupt. People forget we lined up for gas and disaster movies. Scary thoughts may be here again. For all these years I’ve said nothing we’re experiencing now is as dark and feral as the end of the 60s was, back in those days when we discovered how many serial killers and Central Park rapists we had. There’s a certain willful naiveté in the Woke, in the capitalized luxury belief systems of the influencer’s attention economy. Like these cute little dumplings who are astonished by a couple days in that same part of Los Angeles that seems to fascinate. Reaction videos. It’s the new news.

No you can’t click on the link. There is no link. Just know that this is America to some segment of the world’s affluent traveling youth. So it makes perfect sense in such an infotained demographic that we shall continue to elect the sort of socialists who promise to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

Watching this documentary won’t help you understand the politics and economics of how and why NYC went bankrupt, just how filmmakers with carte blanche were able to portray it creatively. Documentaries playact at history, and they will become easier than ever to make. The critical eye on the ball must remain on the actual politics and economics, or as I’ve been saying: the hard boiled egg, not merely the salt and pepper.

Nevertheless there is a proper beauty to attend, and that will be the beauty that actually transcends what can be conveniently turned into propaganda, or even rudderless curiosity and astonishment. That’s what I’m turning my eye towards this year. Once again, I will attempt to make explicit through virtue that which is stomped out of existence by partisan politics. Or to state the obvious crudely, we suffer shit politics that ruins the mental landscape of America, the physical landscape is not far behind.

photo by Camilo J. Vergara

I’m kind of hoping that investigative photojournalism makes a comeback. In the meantime, here’s where you can buy some.