Source: Trump advisor Kimberly Guilfoyle hawks gold and silver at CPAC
Below is the best way to say my thought “Gold isn’t going to be worth anything in a collapse of the banking system; you’ll have way bigger problems…”. This is from a BoingBoing BBS post (the whole thread is worth a read and is a fine example of how BB can be a goldmine):
Here’s the same in text mode (this is another example of the text/graphic dichotomy we still deal with); if you read the post above, the text below is a repeat. But without the text below, that text is unsearchable, unindexable, and essentially invisible:
fuzzyfungusVeronicaConnor1d
VeronicaConnor:
The reason they push this grift is because there’s a very long standing right-wing and accelerationist belief that gold is a magic flawless value store. A lot of things feed into it- nostalgia for the Gold Standard times, fear of (and/or belief in) societal collapse, and general ignorance about value stores.
In some ways even weirder than the strength of their belief in gold as the platonic ideal of abstract value stores is the (often more implied than spelled out, perhaps because it’s not desperately coherent) is the thinking around how societies actually relate to abstract value stores; and how brittle various institutions are or aren’t.
Even if you concede for argument that gold is god’s own abstract value store; it’s a bit tricky to come up with a societal collapse hypothesis that manages to be mild enough that everyone’s totally up for a slightly rustic but fairly liquid market economy where the limits of barter and various nonmarket distribution mechanisms have already forced people into using currency; but extreme enough that it isn’t just a relatively brief scramble for emergency relief supplies followed by a somewhat more squalid resumption of the status quo.
That’s not a literally inconceivable scenario; but it’s far from an easy one to put together; and (while in some people it’s a more straightforwardly pitiable fear response) there’s also a really off putting element of petty financial power fantasy about it: The Collapse will, conveniently, make the big, complex, Capital that you neither understand nor possess disappear in a nice purifying poof; but your wise investments in what someone too poor for finance and too temporarily-dispossessed-millionaire to fully appreciate nonmarket social relationships thinks wealth looks like will set you above the common rabble of the post-apocalypse as survivor gentry.
META: first I copied the text, which sorta works, preserving the links but losing most of the formnatting. then I p[asetd a screen snip of the BB BBS post. Problem is, posting just the snip means the text of the post are non-searchable (wll, without some sort of ML that could scrap the text out of the image, which is possible since these sort or things have defeated simple and evern relatively complex CAPTCHAS), This is another example of the text/graphic dichotomy we still deal with. And how fantastic the new Windows clipboard history. Which should be a post itself.
