Note: This coming Thursday I will be on with the great Ed Dutton to explain to him that intelligence is a social construct used to defend white supremacy. The livestream is on the YouTube at 2PM eastern. He posts replay on Bitchute so when that link is available, it will be posted here.
If you were a typical European in the 17th century, you would not have been brimming with optimism. Life was tough for most people in that age because the margin for error was so small. If you made a wrong step behind the plow, you could break a leg and before long some guy is sawing off your leg to stop gangrene. Knock over a candle on the way to the latrine and your hut could burn down. Disaster was always lurking as even small things could quickly turn deadly.
If you were educated, material life was usually better, but being educated in an age of general ignorance is a special sort of curse. If you were an educated man in the 17th century, you knew about the Thirty Years War, so you were not all that optimistic about the intellectual future of mankind. Parts of Europe were reduced to cannibalism in an effort to hang onto antiquated modes of thought and order. Few people saw them as antiquated, which meant grinding war was normal.
Despite this, the West was on the cusp and the Enlightenment. Most people date the dawn of the period of Western intellectual flowering that is still with us today to around the start of the 18th century. Galileo was a man of the 17th century and Nicolaus Copernicus was a man of the 16th century. James Harrington published The Commonwealth of Oceana in 1656. As with any era in human history, pinpointing an exact starting point is mostly out of convenience, not accuracy.
The point here is that for most people alive in the 17th century, these intellectual stirrings were unknown. Even educated people were limited by the circumstances of the age as the dissemination of information was by foot. The printing press had revolutionized the production of books, but books were still expensive. Of course, most of the best and brightest were Thomist, so the new ideas from science would have looked like a threat to the natural order.
Of course, the political outlook was grim. The Peace of Westphalia had settled the Thirty Years War, but the underlying issues remained. The division of the world into Protestant and Catholic suggested eternal conflict. The English Civil War suggested that religious conflict within the Protestant side was inevitable. The great unity of faith maintained by the Catholic Church was forever broken. A reasonable, educated man could easily foresee a dark future for mankind.
It is a good reminder that we are not very good at judging the times in which we are living or seeing around the next bend. The cynical in the 17th century had no idea that the 18th century would be an unprecedented intellectual flowering. It was not all kittens and puppies, for sure, but in the rubble of war and upheaval were the seeds of a great leap forward intellectually and materially. No one living at the time knew that the birth of modern Europe was just over the next hill.
We could be in a similar period. Like the 17th century, this age looks like it is headed to endless conflict and barbarism. The old order is falling to pieces and random lunatics pop up with new religions. Just as 17th century man struggled to come to terms with what was happening, people in this age struggle to make sense of it all. Ours is an age of pointless chaos, often created by the people in charge, who should be the most aggressive defenders of the old order.
Like the 17th century, what lies at the root of the chaos is a collection of new ideas and new questions about the world. Genetics is promising to give us new insights into the nature of man. More important, it is threatening the old ideas about equality and the power to shape society. Extreme egalitarianism and the blank slate lie at the heart of the liberal democratic order. Questioning those concepts questions the legitimacy of the current political order in the West. Revolutionary stuff.
Like the printing press, the information age is threatening the flow of information in unpredictable ways. Much of the current crisis lies in the realization by the ruling elites that the people no longer take their word for anything. The natural authority that comes from the monopoly on information has been shattered. Lots of gentlemen scholars and part-time intellectuals are now challenging the definitions of those terms by spending their free time reading forbidden material on-line.
The 17th century was a revolutionary time, even though the people living in it did not realize they were at the cusp of a revolution. The expression about bankruptcy being slow and then all of a sudden applies to revolutions as well. Angry mobs in the streets are lagging indicators of revolution. Long before the masses raise the black flag and declare war on their rulers, clever men privately declared war on the ideas that gave the rulers their legitimacy. This is what we see today.
Like the people in 17th century, we now find ourselves in a time when the old order is desperately trying to adapt to new information. It is easy to forget that revolutionary thinkers like Locke and Hobbes were trying to adapt the old models of thought to the new information of their age. In other words, even the defense of order can be a revolutionary act that expedites challenges to the status quo. We see this today as people try to make science prove the blank slate.
There is always the possibility that we get at the macro level the equivalent of the peasant knocking over a lantern on the way to the toilet. The hysterical response to the plague and suicidal impulses of the new religion are ominous signs. The flicker of this new enlightenment could easily be extinguished by madman with super weapons destroying civilization to save democracy. History, however, tells us that this is not the way to bet. Instead, we are on the cusp of a new enlightenment.
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You see a “New Enlightenment,” I see ” De-Evolution. ” Oh well, I’m off to the latrine.
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Don’t kick over any candles. 😉
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Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
Happier than you and me
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
And it determined what he could see
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
One chromosome, too many
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
And it determined what he could see
And he wore a hat
And he had a job
And he brought home the bacon
So that no one knew
He was a mongoloid, mongoloid
His friends were unaware
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
Nobody even cared
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
One chromosome, too many
I’ve always used 1660 as a starting point. The first meeting of what was to become “The Royal Society” the first organization dedicated to what was to become “The Science.” (apologies to Lord Fauci,) And Newton, a later member, was 18.
The difference between then and now is that there was not then a cabal executing on a plan to make a great leap forward, there is today, a plan is in execution for the great regression.
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Geez, the middle of the 17th century was one of the most chaotic times in British history. Puritanical madman Oliver Cromwell had done what he could to destroy the Catholics in England and Ireland and institute a cheerless monotony to everyday life. The return of merry Charles II was greeted by the greatest celebration in English history, before or since, but it wasn’t long until the black plague, the great fire of London and the Dutch navy all spread misery throughout the land. Britain, like the US, had the good fortune to be separated from its enemies by the ocean. Had not that been the case it’s likely that the blessed isle would have eventually become an insignificant geographical and political oddity like Lithuania or Albania.
>Instead, we are on the cusp of a new enlightenment.
Oh, God, please no! The last one was bad enough! We won’t survive another!
The white Christian man will never live in peace until The Enlightenment is torn, root and branch, out of our civilization. Keep the medicines and some of the more useful machines, of course, but all the social thought? Make a pile of it and burn it all. Locke, Hobbes, Jefferson, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Jaffa, Rand – pile it on, light it up, and sing hymns begging God for forgiveness for not having burned it all ages ago.
Only then – only once we return to the Old Wisdom – do we have a chance at surviving.
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Only then – only once we return to the Old Wisdom – do we have a chance at surviving AS MEN.
Anyway, lotsa upvotes! Well said.
life expectancy was 43 in 1700 western europe. out of 10 children a woman might give birth too, half would be dead by puberty. food was expensive, and people at your level of society were *never* fat. my advice to you is to start reading, because you wear your ignorance like a shit stained cloak.
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I think you need to take a break from your Ace of Spades reading habit because it seems to me that you get irritable every time you go there and then you come back here and take it out on everyone else.
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Life expectancy was 43 because of childhood mortality. If you made it through childhood and then war for men and childbirth for women chances are you would live to 70 or so. The lifespan of man has been the same for thousands of years, 70 to 80. Nobody was amazed at Socrates being in his seventies when he killed himself because he was surrounded by equally old man
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down voted because everyone who recommends starting over from year zero (like you did) is a Pol Pot in the making. to dismiss the enlightenment out of hand is juvenile in the extreme. please provide us with a substitute that is superior; i.e how you would have done things differently.
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haha just like a kid, you want the good stuff (as you define it) but not the bad stuff (ditto). the world doesn’t work that way (but lots of people act like it does).
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Agreed.
Trace the timeline. In the mid-1400s, Gutenburg invents the first reliable printing press and suddenly the price of information has been cut into half. Fundamental economic law takes over: once the price drops, more is demanded. Less than 75 years after Gutenburg comes Luther with his 95 theses that cleaves the Catholic church in two. Momentum takes over from there as literacy spreads and the price of communication drops again and again until it is where it is today, practically zero.
That being said, there’s no guarantee that upheaval won’t follow. The cost of the Protestant revolution was that Germany’s population dropped by a 1/3 during the Thirty Years War. We’ll be extremely lucky if the same doesn’t hold true this time around.
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downvoted for massively inflating Luther’s role in anything.
“Less than 75 years after Gutenburg comes Luther with his 95 theses that cleaves the Catholic church in two”
Basil, I think it was more like shattering a stained-glass window into 100+ shards. Luther launched a period of (what I like to call) religious entrepreneurship wherein every guy with a Bible could set himself up as a Pope. Our Pilgrims were the most notable example of this phenomenon.
We’re going to see more of this, but it will manifest itself in the political, not religious, arena.
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Just imagine Luther being an Antifa type leading a mob with a Guy Fawkes mask going around smashing churches with the mantra “No Indulgences No Peace.”
Hey – he was a peaceful protest(ant)!
As to the subject, I don’t think it is fair to over or underestimate him. He certainly wasn’t the first ‘protestant’ – I mean the Hussite Wars were what, about 100 years earlier? He was also not advocating separation at first, either. The 95 Theses are simply about plenary indulgences and related issues of Papal authority. But certainly he harped on the most clear excess of the Catholic Church: the rapaciousness, and one of the beauties of the 95 is simply how straightforward and quotable it is. It is not fair to say he did not provide a great text for people to thump on in objection to the Catholic order. I mean, check out these lines from about two thirds through:
Therefore the treasures of the gospel are nets with which one formerly fished for men of wealth.
The treasures of indulgences are nets with which one now fishes for the wealth of men.
Gutenburg’s invention gets all the credit for economical information distribution but the development of European paper production was just as important. After all, the press needs something on which to print its characters.
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paper is the most durable storage medium invented. digital storage has a lifespan of maybe 5 years; properly treated paper can last 500 years (or more).
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What we are facing is the end of Western Civilization and the transfer of power–especially financial power and the power that that power confers–to China.
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haha move there and be happy! start a GoFundMe page, i will kick in $5. my advice, once you get there, is to buy a property from Evergrande.
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Denying reality won’t change it. Barring a miracle, China is clearly the future. The West is pretty much finished absent some authoritarian genius who comes to power and imposes some kind of GATTACA-type genetic engineering on the population. It’s sort sad when you think about it. We really could have a new Enlightenment, and even something akin to utopia, on this earth if we did that. But I wonder if the West won’t just slowly degrade and then collapse into something resembling South Africa, instead. Shame. So close. Maybe in the next universe.
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And I’m guessing that China is probably well along with the sort of genetic engineering that western ethics prevent western scientists from pursuing.
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At this stage, if our Rainbow Rambos are thrown into a world conflict (Ukraine/Taiwan) and our decidedly defeated, perhaps freedom can reign again in America. I’m hoping a less wealthy USA with its sites on defensive posturing will have diminishing will along with fewer resources to harass its citizens. I realize I get poorer too, but as is said, “it’s the price for freedom.”
This month I received my property tax bill. Trust me; my property is a humble abode (it’s on concrete blocks, OK). I was shocked. Up and up it goes. I don’t mind paying for good service, but most of this goes to the green-haired, nose-ringed, historically illiterate edubacators. You know a Masters of Ed from State U (or worse, a Poison Ivy). Whoopty F’in doo. The Town building inspector is more competent than 5 of ’em on a dirty, covid creepy yoga mat. These are The young and middle-aged white woman Tucker rambles on about lately. The ones with inane, stupid virtue-signaling signs on their lawns and Suburu’s. Tucker claims the only ones supporting the Dems.
I can’t help imagine that black people just laugh at and among themselves at this professional white woman’s worship of George Floyd. It’s amazing. The teachers largely babysit the third or 4th generation of fatherless offspring of all colors, handing out ADHD speed like candy and telling stories about the evil white people.
I’ll become poorer if there are fewer of these people. I’ll make it. I’ll pay not to have to pay them. I’ll pay to have freedom of association. I’ll pay to have fewer cops harassing the leave me alone citizenry. I’ll pay more to watch these unemployed white “professionals” working in the night profession for the George Floyd types that conquer their neighborhoods.
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Luther’s theses clove the Catholic Church in two? Really? Not the pope’s rabid insistence that he could sell eternal salvation for cash?
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Popes far more openly devient than Leo X had come and gone without the kind of schism Luther accidentally started. Not quite a century before him the Hussites had responded to a similarly broken Church with open and violent rebellion and had even succeeded in carving out their own territory without a general Reformation occurring.
It took a decrepit status quo, general unhappiness among the populace, a new technology to spread new ideas and a charismatic leader to wield it all working in confluence to bring that level of change.
> Extreme egalitarianism and the blank slate lie at the heart of the liberal democratic order. Questioning those concepts questions the legitimacy of the current political order in the West. Revolutionary stuff.
Deep inside, the left knows it’s currently a lie. Their current step is to give heavy incentives to race-mixing and class mixing to equalize everyone to “indifferentiated human matter” with as close to the same capabilities and characteristics as possible. Once the science catches up, they’ll start genetic engineering to bring in their new, equal civilization of submissive, mid-wit bugmen. The miscegentation everywhere may not wok with the current generation, but you’ll start to see the magic of propaganda and incentives work in Gen Z… if they bother to reproduce at all.
Hence they’ll make extreme egalitarianism a reality through hacking Mother Nature. Like communism, the core ethic of liberalism ends with uprooting family structures, up to and including natural mating patterns.
communism, socialism and the like are symptoms of a failed society. they can never last long as they are parasitical and always kill the host. cure the root causes of such pathological “solutions” if you want a healthy society.
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my advice would be, don’t be sentimental, clear out every part of society that was pozzed, and don’t replace them. new system is all about decentralization; i.e. it accommodates reality (better) than current system. and segregate, segregate, segregate. make each community rise or fall on its own volition; don’t steal from the whites to support the muds.
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I’d feel a lot better if the people in charge weren’t suicidal. I just don’t understand the mindset of the modern progressive. Why burn it all down just to uplift Blacks?
Anyway, as for our eternal pessimism, there is simply no way this works. I really have tried to game it all out. But if the population of the first world increases as much as they want, infinitely, we just run out of drinkable water. Plus, the only source of these new Americans, British, Germans, etc. is Africa.
Africa always wins is a saying for a reason. This all ends in Eloi and Murlocks. Then we all die.
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We may be in the verge of a new enlightenment. We may be on the verge of a new Dark Ages. Given that the enlightenment helped pave the way for the secular religions of today, be careful of what you wish for, you just might get it.
Whatever comes about will likely be different than what we think will happen. New scientific breakthroughs and unexpected world events will shake things up.
Maybe President Kamala Harris will usher in a flourishing of arts, culture and religion after she lights Brandon’s funeral pyre and sets it adrift on our very own Ganges (Mississippi River?).
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She could go all-in on this ancient tradition and throw herself on the funeral pyre as well.
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it’s called Sati (or suttee)
indians are savage barbarians who shit in the street [for cimment checker]
The problem for our rulers is the same as for the Bolsheviks: They reject the natural order. That’s always going to cause problems, but those problems can be suppressed in a fairly closed society.
People living 1930s Russia didn’t get a lot of information about the outside world. But people in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s did. They could compare what their rulers said to what they saw in other countries. Eventually, a combination of the system not working well and people knowing that a better system existed caused the country to collapse.
Our rulers have the same problem, only worse. Outside of a complete shut-down of the internet, which would be an admission of their own failure, our rulers can’t stop people from learning the truth about the flawed assumptions that underpin our rulers’ beliefs.
Science is coming for them. Sure, they’ll ignore it, but facts are a bit like termites. Ignoring them doesn’t stop them from doing damage. Then, there’s the example of other countries. Eastern Europe might be the biggest threat to our rulers. White support for our system would probably collapse overnight if every American white spent a month in the Czech Republic and saw what a non-vibrant life looked like.
Information and comparison are killers to idiot regimes.
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Drive around some of our now vibrant cities like Detroit or St. Louis and one can see what once was, great architecture, nice parks, old neighborhoods that once were good places to raise white families.
Our cities could again be nice places to live if mankind realizes the blank slate and egalitarianism which allows our cities to be destroyed by people whom could never build them in the first place must stop.
We are not there yet but hopefully we are planting the seeds to get to the place where we as whites realize the current insanity must stop.
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I’m always reminded of the meme that shows photographs of Detroit and Hiroshima in 1945 and today. Now, your CivNat Boomercon will usually start immediately shouting that its the fault of “the libtards/Demonrats,” et cetera, ad nauseam, but increasingly, the root cause of the problem is well known.
Negroes are more destructive than nuclear weapons.
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We need separate countries. This will only stop once we have a base of power from where we can enact change. Being hamstrung with millions of people who disagree with us and will always oppose reform — because admitting the truth would be detrimental to their interests — reduces the chances of success to essentially zero.
The time capsule which was found at the base of the Lee statue will be opened today in Richmond. The people who contributed items in 1887 could never in a million years have imagined that Lee’s statue would ultimately be desecrated, destroyed, and melted down to nothing.
Time capsule openings are known for being stirring and poignant. This one is heartbreaking as it’s from a lost country; gone with the wind.
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I also get the feeling that something new will emerge out of all this chaos & I’m not referring to chip implants & world government, but i don’t believe we’ll get to see it.
There’s two major problems imo:
One is the low birth rates of high iq people & the high birth rates of low iq people.
You can’t have enlightenment if your society & to some extent the planet(cause if they don’t find food in their countries they’ll come to yours) is overrun with savages & their offsprings. Meaning these people need to get removed one way or the other & high iq people need to start remembering how to fuck.
The second problem is simply the fact that the world is too large & complex. So even if a region of the world gets its act together & comes up with a better system that doesn’t mean the entire world will choose to follow its example. It takes a long time for ideologies to bear fruit & spread, unless we’re talking about a jihad type of “enlightenment” that’s aggressive & imperialistic.
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The breeding and population thing could shift rather quickly if there was a collapse of the West or some similar evolutionary culling (major war, famine, etc.)
When survival is at stake, a certain cleverness (which likely correlates with IQ) is needed to survive and reproduce. If food becomes scarce, for example, or heat in the winter intermittent, the first to perish will be the welfare mammies and their chilluns. They have no survival skills for a Detroit or Chicago winter.
Further, a collapse of the West would necessarily lead to a population collapse in Africa and the rest of the 3rd world. The population explosion in such places is directly due to the medicines and agricultural production of the West. If those were to be disrupted, you’d see life expectancies and infant mortality regress to the mean in those shitholes.
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A rare white pill from Zman. Appropriate for the winter solstice. Chatting with Ed Dutton should dispel the optimism. Or maybe Zman will turn Ed positive.
Humans are often poor at predicting turns but how often do predictions of near-term gloom end up being wrong? Sure, in a hundred years or two, there might be a turn upward but everyone reading this will be dead.
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“Predicting is hard especially about the future”, Yogi Berra
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Information moves so fast these days that a billion bad ideas can circle the globe a billion times before a single good one takes holds. We have seen that the past decade very vividly. Fifteen years ago, the way people lived and society functioned was closer to what it was in 1950 than it is today. Even with decades of hollowing-out, society still operated on basic principles of western civilization. No more.
To that end, there is simply no way of knowing what thinking will be en vogue and what will be popular in five years, let alone ten or twenty. It is possible the mightiest of all backlashes against the current globohomo order is coming, or not. it could go either way at this point, and it could get very rough before we have an answer. At least our enemies are incompetent and stupid.
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“We are on the cusp of a new enlightenment.” Oh dear! Things are clearly worse than I thought. I’d imagined that the collective knicker wetting over the plague was probably just due to too much caffeine or something. Over here in Blighty we’re certainly encountering the limits of democracy, it seems that if your choice is between two morons, you’re gonna end up with a moron running the country.
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“It is a good reminder that we are not very good at judging the times in which we are living or seeing around the next bend.”
Actually, I think I can predict very accurately what is around the bend in Africa. Call me Nostradamus…or Jimmy the Greek, willing to take bets.
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For a worst case scenario on what Western Civ could look like in 200 years, consult Africa:
(funny bit about Zimbabwean trying to build his own helicopter)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU3cy4tPMb4
Maybe my following comment will indulge in the ultimate vanity: my time is unique from every other. However, as someone who reads a good portion of Enlightenment thinkers, I find the leading thinkers of our time to be of a different breed, and it concerns me deeply.
For example, crack open something like Principia Mathematica, and you will discover a mind that seeks to posit ways to understand the world; curiosity about the world seems to be the motivating factor. Lamentably, the modern world seems to be run by people who have a clear desire to guide the world to a predetermined (by them) end.
Certainly, someone may counter that people like Francis Bacon had his Great Instauration, but, again, just something about the tone is different, for Bacon was careful to moderate this impulse with invectives against speculation.
If Enlightenment thinkers (and many of them referred to light imagery – it is a self-applied label, not retroactively stamped) viewed themselves as steps in gradually illuminating the darkness of the world, but with unclarity about what would be revealed, it seems that the current era is more Becomingism – where there is a clear push towards achieving some concrete goals our modern overlords have decided is the destiny of man. I mean: listen to the words these SOB’s actually say, and recognize that they continue to do exactly what they say. I think people underestimate that they (overlords – not politicians) seem to be moving the world exactly in the direction they want.
Inflation: Great way to implement UBI and basket currency.
Pandemic: International passports and standardized international tracking.
Inflation/Pandemic/Taxation/’Equity’: Remove private property ownership.
My fear is that they are not as incompetent as we believe.
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