For most of human history, the focus of society was on the material side. Progress was about increasing the material wellbeing of people. In fact, political philosophy was solely focused on material well-being. The great battle in the West was over what sort of political economy would provide the most stuff for the most people. Eventually, liberal democracy won over communism. Then the debate subtly changed from material well-being to the overall safety of people. Safety is the new goal.
For example, an increasingly common thing if you work in an office is the notice that the vents will be cleaned one night. You are told to expect some disruption of your day or maybe some things will be moved around in the office. A crew comes in to clean the vents for so everyone is safe. Residential rental properties are now required in most states to have the dryer vents cleaned once a year. In some states, home owners are required to do this too. Vent cleaning is a thing now.
It is more than just a thing. It is a booming little niche business. According to one of the rapidly growing vent cleaning companies, the demand for vent cleaning is growing at close to four percent per year. They say that the increased awareness to the dangers posed by home clothes dryers is what is driving the growth. The claim is the number of accidents caused by these appliances is making people suspicious of what’s happening in those vents, so they want all the vets cleaned regularly.
Of course, This is true to a great degree. In the office space, people have come to believe that whatever is being cleaned out of those heat and air conditioning ducts is bad for the people inside the offices. Sick building syndrome is one of those things people have come to accept without question. The same is true of the dangers posed by the common household dryer. Mention this to someone and they will claim that clothes dryers cause a lot of fires every year.
Interestingly, none of this is true. According to the government, there are about 2900 dryer fires per year. There is no data on fires caused by debris or dust in the ventilation ducts of buildings. The damage resulting from those dryer fires total $35 million per year. Only about a third is caused by too much fuzz in the dryer vent, so that means it is a $12 million problem. Put another way, we have a $350 million dollar industry to solve a problem a bit less serious than bathtub drownings.
The other odd thing about the vent cleaning craze is that people don’t bother questioning it. They just assume it is a real thing. If you ask someone about the dryer vent business, they will fight you about the facts, claiming that clothes dryers have always been a menace. If you point out the facts, they get mad at you, as if you are questioning a tenant of their religion. Seemingly out of nowhere, vent cleaning has become an important part of keeping us safe.
That is the key to it. Safety has become something of a religion. After all, you can never be too safe. We know this because we are constantly being told by the mass media and our government that we can never be too safe. We spent trillions waging a crusade against Muslims because we had to be safe from terror. We are now spending trillions on Covid, so we can be safe from illness. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not, because our safety is what matters.
This explains, in part, the bizarre over reaction we saw from our rulers over the protests in Washington. These are the high priests of the cult of safety. They live the safest of lives and depend on faith in safety for their existence. This reminder that no one can ever be truly safe, especially the rulers of a society, was like telling them that their gods are completely fake. They proved that was a lie by turning their palaces into fortified bunkers guarded by heavily armed soldiers.
An easy to miss subtext to the continued lockdowns is the claim that working at home is safer than going to the office. Children at school skin knees and bump their heads, which does not happen when schools are closed. Fewer people commuting means fewer car accidents. The annual flu has been eradicated, they claim, because everyone stays home, instead of mingling with the public. Even if our heroes defeat Covid, staying home is just safer and safer is always better.
There is an obvious problem with this. It is really hard to run a human society when everyone is locked in their pods. Some people can work at home, for sure, but most people need supervision. We are social animals and our sense of self is tied to our participation in our group. This extends to society as a whole. People in isolation from one another or isolated into little tribes lose their group identity. They begin to take on the mentality of prisoners, rather than citizens.
There are also the diminishing returns. The dryer vent business is a great example of how not to solve a problem. An iron rule of life is the solution can never be more expensive than the problem. The dryer vent issue is a great example of how the price of being safer far outweighs the value of being safer. We have long since passed the point of diminishing returns regarding safety. Since there is no limiting principle to the religion of safety, we keep trying anyway, despite the cost.
An easy to overlook angle here is the fact that these efforts to insulate ourselves from risk must fail. The dominant justification for the current arrangements is that it is making us safer. At some point, something bad happens and people will suddenly be less safe. A recession, for example. The gods of safety will be proven to be false or feckless gods. Faith depends on confirmation and nothing harms a religion like a bit of disconfirmation, which in this case is inevitable.
Then again, perhaps we have reached the point in our development that the Eloi reached in the novel Time Machine. The protagonist, having observed the Eloi, the humans of the future, noted that “strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.” That is modern people. We are now too weak and feeble to question our arrangements. Instead, all that matters is the sense of safety and security, whether is real or imagined. Safety is now our god.
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It’s only a matter of time till bicycles are outlawed because people can get hurt riding them!
Why outlaw when you can create a new industry for ‘bicycle safety’?
I for one mandate that all squirrels wear emergency parachutes in case of a fall from height as they leap between trees. Naturally, any animal predating another must fill out a risk assessment in addition to asking the predatee if xir wishes to be eaten.
Don’t forget the environmental impact reports!
Remember that scene in Breaking Bad when the Bad Biker Whites just killed some people, and one said something like, “kids on their bikes with helmets, what the fuck happened to this country.” Then he sees some gore on his shoe, and wipes it off.
See, noticing the obsession with safety is….White Supremecy!
Look at the price of GME stock….
Clown world is just getting started.
GME? (Thanks in advance)
Game Stop – an on-line betting operation.
Stock price Up 57% in last Wednesday’s session.
I’m trading all my Pet Rock and Beanie Baby portfolios and loading up on cyber bookies.
GME is hilarious and should be enjoyed because an army of autistic retail traders have multiple Wall Street pros bleeding from every orifice on their GME shorts.
In other words, this Clown World episode is a win for the little guys.
My only regret was that I didn’t believe in clown world enough to get in on it.
But hey. Joe Biden got 80 million votes, and there are innumerable genders. So maybe GME really is worth 1,500 a share.
Zerohedge has ideas for the next short squeeze targets:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/daytrading-army-unleashes-furious-cascade-short-squeeze-meltups
And now all the brokers are down
Wasn’t it you who said one day we will wake up and our accounts are simply gone?
Yes, I believe one morning we will wake up and find TPTB have locked retail traders out and zeroed our accounts for the greater good.
I am not having a problem with my broker. I don’t care for Robinhood, and I’d never put my money into a Chicom op like Webull.
Know it’s a joke, but if you want to see mass domestic terrorism, the government should try to cross the biker fanatics.
Hot Wheels For All!
Someone will have cold dead hands if an attempt made to pry their Harlleys from them.
We have new laws now where you have to swerve around them as they always have the right of way and you have to maintain (x) feet distance. Good luck on narrow lanes.
I’ve got a real pet peeve with those cyclists. If there’s a bike lane it’s not too bad unless the jerkoffs are riding side by side or in a big group. But it’s when they’re riding down a heavily traveled road with no bike lane that really pisses me off – should be against the law. They’re not only a danger to themselves, but to drivers who have to negotiate their worthless asses.
Absolutely.
Simple physics tells us that bicycles are not street-compatible with the modern automobile.
I’m surprised there are not more people hurt mountain biking and all of the public MTB trails.
My city has painted bike lanes more or less on every major street and has made biking on the pavement a ticketable offense, though rarely enforced.
Wrong mate. Try instead that your city council spends millions to eliminate lanes and parking on major downtown streets to make them safer for wide bicycle lanes. Sure, it creates traffic delays and impacts small business negatively, but it’s green. A few dedicated cycling enthusiasts can really f**k a city if they’re the squeaky wheel that gets the “safety” oil.
I don’t want to be the guy that refers to Ben Franklins quote on security vs. liberty again, you all know it.
Mike Rowe has a little campaign going called safety third. He mentions also C.S. Lewis’ little essay “living in the atomic age”. Quite relevant for these times. As far as a society focusing on material well being, Pat Buchanan said America was greater country long before it became a prosperous one.
hey look, no thoughts on my own today, but I just referred to four other people for inspiration.
Yarvin wrote about this kind of thing around Christmas. The gist of it is, it may have been better to rush out a vaccine that works for millions but kills or maims a few hundred due to side effects. But safety first! Allow 400K to die from coronachan so we know that not one person dies from the jab. He’s got other examples in here too. It’s a tour-de-force.
I’ll add I’m not a covidian or vaccine-pusher, but it’s an interesting read.
Once upon a time children aspired to be grown-ups, to take the reigns of life, to be like their parents. Parents encouraged this, if by nothing other than living adulthood themselves, while holding back from view that which their children were not yet equipped to understand. Parents protected them from dangers that lay in wait by insulating them from adulthood with the truth about the world wrapped in little lies with built in expirations. The grand inversion changed that too. Now children dream of perpetual adolescence, to be relieved of the burdens of adult life by some extrinsic power, paralyzed… Read more »
A person turned 21, and gained license to drink, smoke, and gamble. But then came the ephemeral “dangers of second-hand smoke.”
Now we have the wisdom of Daddy Joe to keep us all safe! Will he let us go out and play today?
Can’t let people get sick and get over it, creating natural herd immunity.
Safety compliance. What a thing to base the new economy on. Safety in your thoughts, first, because the thought becomes the deed, and then for no reason at all, white people go off and…
Both, Covid and the “vaccines” for it are bullshit.
He keeps talking about how 1940s and 1970s America could do it and how we can’t. But he completely fails to spot the differences between today and yesterday. America no longer exists. That 8 year old, his name is now Hector or Dontavious and that’s if that 8 year old is a boy!
Also denies IQ. He turns it into a joke, but that’s because he doesn’t want to deal with ethnic differences in IQ.
Same situation occurred wrt to air bag requirements. The government knew and mandated air bag technology when it killed and maimed frail and smaller people due to a one size fits all air bag design in the early days. The government not only knew this, but refused to allow folk to turn off the air bags. After much later they allowed a switch but made getting one installed so difficult, few applied for permission and it was hard to find a dealership willing to risk installation of such. Hundreds of people died so that a few thousand people would live.
Cost doesn’t matter. If only one dryer can be saved by the mandatory cleanings, then it’s all worth it.
I think someone tried to upsell Z-Man over the weekend and he got annoyed
And for only $5 more a month, we rust-proof your pets! Those suckers will rust up on ya! Better safe!
We’re all in it together, kid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olXUIcb80N0
Just look at the warnings on virtually ANYTHING you buy. They are patently ludicrous and anyone above moron level understands this. Of course, as many have pointed out, our over lawyering in this country has played a large part in the idiocy.
On another note, but keeping in sync with the theme, we’ve also long passed the point of diminishing returns regarding jogger equality with the rest of the human race…
Yeah people only take the safety cult business up one branch of the decision tree. For instance if they were really all that concerned with their dryer burning their house down they could just hang their clothes up to dry. It goes on and on, immigration all by itself runs counter to probably a half dozen supposed safety concerns.
Joggers have proven over and over and over, that they are incapable, as a group, to live in a society of rules.
I bought a shotgun last week. The first ten pages of owner’s manual is just them imploring me in different languages not to shoot myself or anyone else. It even has funny diagrams of somebody standing behind a target getting blasted.
Well, if yer getting likker’d up around the target, you get what’s coming to ya’.
The safest thing for all concerned would be to repatriate the Joggers to Joggerland.
Is Joggerland pronounced with a “Y” sound?
How much do we need to spend to make our amphibious helicarrier fleet fire resistant…while in port? As our host alluded to, there isn’t enough money in the world to make American’s “safe”. The magic money machine will run dry.
Sleeping on pallets of “seeds” seemed kind of excessive last summer, but in hindsight, it was my best performing investment in 2020 (assuming I was dumb enough to sell them).
Back when I worked in an office for what used to be a telephone company, we had safety meetings monthly. Annually, we had to demonstrate to someone with no useful job how to sit in and get up from a chair and how to properly pull staples with a staple puller. I used a knife when they weren’t watching. On the other hand, when working for the power company, safety meetings and rules made a life or death difference.
Yes, but sometimes the problem is that our species is getting demonstrably stupidier. I once participated in a “safety” training exercise because three grown men stood by and watched a fuel delivery truck overflow a tank by thousands of gallons onto the ground because the specified volume was ordered & paid for, and therefore must be transferred to the customer. And had a source of ignition been present, they would have burned down a hospital.
Back when I worked in the utilities industry, any time somebody got injured on the job a meeting was held to determine how to prevent the injury from happening again. One of those safety management ideas that sounds good but quickly goes witch-hunt. This one time, office workers were nearly required to wear hard hats because a transfer from another district hit his head on a cupboard, managed to cut the skin open and because it bled, he called an ambulance instead of using the first aid kit prominently mounted on the wall. “How can we prevent morons from splitting… Read more »
Living here in hurricane alley I have been forced to conclude that many people, mostly women but certainly not all, simply enjoy being afraid. They carry on every year, year after year for their whole lives about the same storms that come every year and which are really not that threatening if one takes just a few very simple precautions.
There has to be some kind of dopamine rush from fear and carrying on like the world is going to end. It goes without saying the Covid is a godsend to such people.
Dropping my kid off at school this morning, I saw one of the lady teachers wearing TWO masks overlapping.
SO IT BEGINS
Ah, two-mask Sue!
My sister has worn herself down terribly with anxiety over the virus. Well, this morning she tested positive. How that happened is anyone’s guess, since she rarely leaves the house and even then wears a mask every second until she returns. Jeez, could it be true what I’ve been telling her for a year now, that masks are safety theater? Anyway, this will likely turn out to be a blessing in disguise as a week from now (currently she feels nothing terrible) she’ll be able to release all the anxiety over the possibility of catching the virus.
Well I feel bad for her. Nothing worse that your greatest fear realized. And all the worse that she feels nothing yet. Sword of Damocles dangling over her head. Every ache and pain a possible beginning of a terrible journey to the ventilator. Right now she needs a lot of philosophy, and a lot of alcohol.
As has been mentioned on these pages, you can’t reason a person out of a position they weren’t reasoned into. I just talked to her and she has no flu/cold symptoms at all. It was stress that drove her to get tested in the first place. Probably a false positive, but I’d rather she believe she had it and recovered.
This is the ‘women crave drama, and will create it if a man doesn’t create it for her’ red pill.
Spent the first six months of my marriage trying to fix all the drama only to realize it’s an infinity headed hydra. Now just acknowledge whatever BS is being spouted with “I’m sorry to hear that.” before doing something useful with my time.
I kinda like “bummer for you”. Might not work so well with the wife though…
I should warn people here who live in the northeast that there may be a few inches of snow coming with strong winds. Get your butts moving to the grocery store now! Toilet paper first.
We’re all gonna die!
Seriously, we are all gonna die, just sayin’.
sooner or later, everybody dies.
well, not everybody all at the same time..
so far.
The best death is in your sleep, or immediate and unexpected. Fear of uncertainty can be worse than fear of death.
But expressing fearful outrage is a form of control… You are not seeing what they believe is undoubtably the end of the world. The fearful are thus simultaneously helping us by their warnings, but accusing us too of our sloth in face of grave injury and death
The unbearable lightness of existing.
Humans evolved to solve problems, overcome adversity. That above all else is our killer app. But the modern world is adversity free. So people create their own drama to make life worth living. All too often in self destructive ways.
The Safety Cult is a direct result of the feminization of society. A masculine society of Kit Carsons, Lewis and Clarks, Daniel Boones, George Washingtons and Andrew Jacksons is full of dangers and potential loss of life and limb. But it is a society of great rewards, and tales of heroism and intrepidity and conquering fear and danger. Today we live in a society of Karens siting around the office at make-work jobs, eating themselves into Type II diabetes while posting cat pictures on Facebook. The greatest danger they face is that someone might call them a “fat bitch,” creating… Read more »
Gynarcho-Tyranny. As many others have posted in response when you make the really smart idea of allowing the weakest, most insecure, most emotional, most mercurial, and least rational members of your tribe not only equal voters, but rulers of your society. Well… what could go wrong?
Safety is now our god. Indeed. Since the advent of the Yellow Peril Virus, I have thought quite deeply about all things done in the name of safety. It is staggering how many of these ‘cures’ are in no way obvious benefits like society. But we know this. Safety in it’s 21st Century guise is first a major grift and second a major cause to virtue signal. The word ‘safety’ is yet another word that has over time come to be accepted as ‘always good’. This isn’t true, but good luck trying to persuade someone of that. That said, the… Read more »
Of course, “safety” in many cases is subjective. So, lots of the people staying home, or being forced to, to save them from the covid are killing themselves by over-eating, drinking and/or drugging – but that doesn’t count, even though one could make the case that they’re covid related deaths, or more precisely covid hysteria related deaths. Deaths just the same, just not the right kind.
Hey, covid is waaaay more deadly than crack, I’m sure I heard that somewhere.
So it’s a twofer Monday after all! Thanks!
Mandated air duct cleanings have joined mandatory dryer vent cleanings in the Safety Cult. But wait, they aren’t done yet! Providers of these services now offer antibicrobtial treatment as an option, including dryer vents that aren’t even recirculated. Those will become .mandatory, too, and already may be in places.
A little financial advice: ditch rental property before the housing market collapses later this year. Safety requirements are only getting started
You reminded me, every time we have our hot water heater replaced it seems like the state/county have mandated some new doo-dad to go on to it in the one-in-6 million chance that there’s some fatal pressure issue with the thing.
I can’t resist saying that my religion has a lot of nasty tenants I would like to be rid of.
I have to say that reason at the end is why I picked my name. I deal with a wide swath of the public, and most are feckless and inept: exactly like the Eloi. The Time Machine is a great novella; I love the way the narrator is forced to discern and read an inscrutable situation. Though no definitive conclusion is ever reached, I always take the interpretation that the Morlocks created the condition that allowed them to harvest the Eloi, with their inchoate, glistening eyes, as cattle – the same look you see when the hearts of the covidians… Read more »
Had the Eloi managed to flatten the curve by the time all this came to pass?
I’ll have to check it out
HG Wells wrote several great novels. Tono Bungay is rather obscure but great if you like the economics of a grifter. He gets some flack for his lib views, but Edwardian period liberalism is not the liberalism of today
The definition of safety has of course been extended by Twitter and others to mean “bad thoughts I want to eradicate.” They even call their censorship organizations “Trust and Safety”.
I would be a very bad person if I reported every woke account, wouldn’t I.
I have always wondered when “dissidents” would *finally* get around to getting some f*cking revenge! Every single thing every single Leftist posts on social media is potentially offensive to someone. Take five minutes of your time, and report five accounts a day. Harass them. Do what they do to Larry Correia, who basically couldn’t use Facebook while he was on it because they’d tag-team report him. If everyone just took five minutes a day, reporting five accounts a day, we could crash Twitter…. ….but that would be BAD, and soon enough it will be “domestic terrorism” (coming soon to an… Read more »
About 10 years ago, our oldest two boys were in Cub Scouts. There was a rule that they couldn’t let their marshmallow catch on fire when roasting it because some Scout somewhere got hit in the eye with a flaming marshmallow. You will be shocked to learn that it was one of the mothers that informed the boys of this rule and enforced it.
That stuff is like napalm.
We used to intentionally shoot each other with pellet guns and bottle rockets – we were playing “Red Dawn” preparing for the Soviet/Communist invasion
Yep, we used to have BB gun fights, but don’t think we didn’t apply any safety rules. Our rule was no aiming above the waist.
We all owned the Crossman 760 Pumpmaster – up to 10 pumps for max velocity – our rule was one pump if we’re shooting at each other.
“Safety Goggles”? What are those?
I too was a soldier in the bottle rocket wars (with report) of the early 80s. Laying them down and shooting them along the street, next to the curb, a.k.a. a “Jogger Chaser”, was also great sport.
They used to have a firework for this very thing – called a “whistling chaser” designed to fly along the ground and explode.
Down the road, on the tough beaches of Alabama, we had slightly more advanced weaponry, called PVC pipe guns, that allowed for precise aiming of the bottle rocket ordinance. We also had advanced Jogger Chasers, dedicated to the very application of chasing people down the street. They also contained a serious report. Looking back, I can’t believe we went to war without eye protection. Could’a put your eye out, kid.
If memory serves, instructions for hooking them up to a car starter were included on the package.
Absolutely – PVC pipes could be “mortars” or “RPGs” depending on how fired.
I am not sure if I am talking about a similar thing here, but when I was about 10 me and my mates would make ‘vinegar bombs’. Sarson’s glass vinegar bottles would be half emptied and then bicarbonate of soda poured in. Quickly, the lid would be sealed. We’d then throw it up in the air and watch with joy as it exploded on the ground – showering glass everywhere. Good fun.
Yeah, we used to have a blast (literally) with fire crackers and the like. Every now and then someone would flush a cherry bomb or m80 down of the school toilets – out of commission for a few days.
That’s what makes it so AWESOME! -channeling 10 year old boy.
But they’re so good, especially between a couple of graham crackers.
some Scout somewhere got hit in the eye with a flaming marshmallow. For most lads, such a story would be thrilling to hear. Furthermore, depending on the severity of the wound quite cool. It is a story that boys can bond around – which is probably another reason it is to be frowned upon by members of Cloud World. The enforcement of this rule, probably seen as petty by most men’s (and boy’s standard has quite severe knock on effects when practiced at large in society. It seems to be generally true that innovation and discovery require a risk of… Read more »
Where are the dads! They must have been grillin’ in the man-cave. Which, actually, doesn’t sound too safe.
I survived the Great Flaming Marshmallow War of 1978 myself.
Epic, but only runup to the Great Roman Candle Conflict of 1982. What fools we were, using our time to retrench and rearm.
Truly, lucky to be alive.
Childhood was a lot of fun – I feel like my boys have missed out.
I taught a safety course for two years and it was an eye-opening experience. The principles of Risk Management make sense, if properly understood. But for most people, discussions of probability don’t register … they can only see things as binary conditions. Later, when I was captain of a ship, I would regularly excoriate my junior officers for using the verb “feel.” Besides being obviously effeminate, this was in large part a lesson from teaching the safety class … people are really bad at estimating relative risk. They over-estimate the probability of mishaps for exotic things, and under-estimate the mishap… Read more »
I was a consultant doing risk assessments for a few years. Sometimes I really had to rub the numbers in otherwise smart managers’ faces. If the likelihood of a risk occurring is 2% and the impact is $100, then the value of that risk is $2. And you cannot spend $50 to reduce the risk likelihood to 1%.
One area of excessive safety is fire risk. Through building codes (use of materials that don’t burn), sprinklers, vented restaurant hoods, etc., there are very few fires. Very few. Yet every town and city builds and maintains elaborate fire stations staffed by well-paid people with really good pension plans. They spend a lot of their time doing other things (publishing cookbooks, posing for calendars, driving in parades, rescuing animals) than actually fighting fires. Plus, there are a bunch of related industries—fire extinguishers that have to be bought by law and tested and constantly replaced. I’ve wondered when the common citizens would get on to this… Read more »
How about them taking good real estate from. Bums. When they are fund-raising with those stupid boots?
Sorry, but we’ll need those stalwart lads to deal with the homeless camps routinely catching on fire. Then again…
And on the flip side, the Chinese keep mass producing absolute junk that breaks (in some cases causing physically injury) and we keep buying into the Globalist’s Ponzi Scheme supporting this shitstorm. Walmart/Amazon is still open!
Boys can’t do jack squat anymore. If you take away electronics and send them outside, someone calls the cops on them for being unsupervised. We’ve had this happen twice. Once they went to retrieve our runaway dog down the street. The 2nd time they were climbing a fruit tree in an empty lot a few hundred feet down our street. What bullshit. I guess I would have been thrown in prison for what I did as a boy. My 10 year old son got thrown into the back of a cop car for climbing a fence to roll down a… Read more »
And just think, the soldiers of the PRC army were not too long ago little boys playing in ponds of toxic waste, jumping into rivers filled with pesticides and human waste to fish out something for dinner not to mention working from 4:00 AM to 10:00 PM making iPhones to KEEP OUR MINDS NUMB AND BODIES FLABBY.
I’m probably stating the obvious but it’s never really about safety but creating a constant debilitating state of fight or flight in a captive public.
They sure are keeping the National Guard in DC for a long time. I think the gyrations of arming/disarming/loyalty tests reflects this neurotic obsession with safety.
Clown world indeed.
“Careful!” My gramma use to say. As kids, we would throw ourselves down the carpeted stairs, flopping our hands loudly as we slid down. Great fun to tease gramma!
But thats what you get when White men discover a right that women have, to be in politics, and to compete with men in the work place. You get an effeminate society!
I wonder if dairy cows have similar (bovine) thoughts when being milked. I’m getting tired of the farmers encroaching, really tired of their livestock.
(Not that I’m not one of them in the end.)
The oil fields were once a culture of masculinity and managed danger. Now we are not allowed to wear open toed shoes (sandals or flip-flops) in offshore living quarters because someone stumped their toe and required first aid.
Orwell has some real zingers on this subject A machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world—which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools. The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation he returns to optimism and to a vision of humanity, “liberated” by the machine, as a race of enlightened sunbathers whose sole topic of conversation is their own superiority to their ancestors. in practice any attempt to check the development of the machine appears to… Read more »
Should have put quotation marks in there they’re all Orwell quotes
This idea of constant progress is a major error in the thinking of the modern
A play on the joke I saw on Gab: “quit asking if you should be ashamed of your ancestors and start asking if your ancestors would be ashamed of you”
Thank you sir! I always think that way – it comes naturally. I know my beliefs align with my recent ancestors – grandparents and great-grandparents. I am not ashamed of them and like to think they would not be ashamed of me.
“People in isolation from one another or isolated into little tribes lose their group identity. They begin to take on the mentality of prisoners, rather than citizens”.
From the Feds on down to local guvamint – isn’t that right there the goal they wish to achieve?
Whites don’t see attacks against individuals as an attack against the group, our fatal fault.
The cult of safety has been building for many decades. It’s at least partially driven by the US Tort system, that’s effectively become a lottery – based on the ability of lawyers to con juries with specious arguments. I remember an episode from the early 90s that was nationally reported news. The show sixty minutes did a segment on the cancer risk posed by farmers using “Alar” on apples. The story was entirely fraudulent agit prop from an enviro group. Anyway, the following morning some parent that had seen the segment remembered that they had sent their kid to school… Read more »
I can just imagine the apple being removed by guys in hazmat suit, and purposely detonated in an empty field. Finally, safe. But for how long?
So much worth considering in this post. For one thing, living as I do in a major Diverse city (as Z Man does), I know that urban school districts aren’t facing a problem of kids bumping their heads and scraping their knees. We have teenage boys who are extremely violent and incapable of being educated up to high school level in reading and math. In my opinion the school closures are a backhanded way of acknowledging that without singling out who exactly is the problem here. But then the bigger issue is: the utilitarian calculus. In bygone days people were… Read more »
The Year of Living Dangerously USA Style has begun, and forewarned is forearmed. Going Dark (Cont) Write on your phone’s case “The Spy In My Pocket” and then leave it at home whenever you wish to be left alone. Never answer blind calls. If you’re into active measures, learn to communicate extraneous & misleading info via your phone. The watchers rarely know the difference, and it nonetheless creates doubt. And never trust burner phones either. Anything electronic in your pocket is a potential threat nowadays. And don’t get me started on Siri/Alexa. Sophisticated AI are mining these data for pre-crime… Read more »
My favorite example of the cult of safety is bicycle riding. Over the last 20 years it has become common to see full grown “men” tooling around their posh and safe residential neighborhoods padded up like they’re about to scale the south face of Dhaulagiri. Pathetic doesn’t begin to describe it.
As for working from home, I love it and hardly because it keeps me safe. I cherish working from home because it reduces exposure to AWR imbeciles in my workplace.
When I was a little girl of about 7 my parents let me ride my bike around the block alone for the first time. What they neglected to tell me was it’s not a good idea to pedal down a step hill especially when there’s a gully waiting at the bottom. Realizing my mistake too late and going into panic mode I took a hard right and laid the bike down in the gravelly shoulder rather than braking hard and pitching head over heals into certain doom. Luckily there was a group of teenagers playing volleyball nearby who came to… Read more »
The day I learned to ride a bike was the day I started setting my own agenda. Same for most of my friends. For better or worse we largely raised ourselves.
I wonder if that was typical of my cohort and if the collective self-rearing has something to do with the millennial habit of shamelessness, since we all knew each other’s insecurities and secrets. Maybe we were behind the times. Helicopter parents were more of a thing for the 90s babies in my experience.
I had a similar thought this morning as the local sportsball collective, alas, suffered an end to their most recent campaign of empowering bravery. I couldn’t care less one way or the other, but the benefit is that I’m now spared two weeks of overhearing meatheaded palaver regarding two tribes of joggers playing catch.
I’ve come to the same conclusion regarding my yearly visits to the in-laws in Taiwan each year. For 2-3 weeks I’m free from exposure to all conversations that relate to the pozz. It’s the one thing I look forward to each time.
I’m an avid mountainbiker and occassionaly ride gnarly trails where a small misstep can result in an 800 foot face-plant (Poisson Spider Mesa for example). The closest I’ve ever come to making the terminal dive was when a sweet young thing in riding Spandex and a fanny-to-die-for passed me on a 5-foot wide shelf trail and then she hit the brakes unexpectedly. Needless to say, face met fanny but I managed to keep us both safely on the wall side of the trail. I can’t remember what she looked like, but that fanny remains a permanent memory.
I’m not sure I follow your issue with vent cleaning since it actually makes sense as most modern offices are a closed loop system. Have you tried opening a window in any new office building in the US? It’s almost impossible. Vent cleaning is directly related to maintenance of the air handling systems which includes the duct work and intake filters. Even the best filters can still allow some particles into air handling system and duct work. This is why you often see dirt or dust accumulation around the vent grill (diffuser) where the air exits the system and enters… Read more »
That there is a workplace ordinance is what’s important.
Verordnungen macht frei.
I have a family member that does capital project management in the Imperial Capital. This past year he was doing a major renovation on Bill Barr’s office. He described how beautiful the building was and that Barr, like many others in that building, had a small balcony off his office, but that years ago the balconies had been made physically inaccessible. So we can trust this guy — ha, ha — to lead an investigation into massive abuses of power, but we can’t trust him to not fall out of his building.
Is this a result of an atheist/nihilist view that the universe is indifferent and hostile to life, without a divine being to protect you or a divine plan which affirms life has a place in the universe? Maybe we’re better off with some kind of sky god…”bad shit happens, it’s the sky god’s will (which is mysterious), but don’t worry, you are part of the divine plan, so recover and get on with your life.”
The Keystone pipeline will be shut down in order to have a “ safe” climate. Meanwhile now trains and trucks will transport the Canadian “ dirty” oil.
And by the way gas prices are on their way to $4 bucks again.
For your “safety”
For climate “ safety”
And for the children!
4 bucks might seem like a bargain in the not too distant future (unless you meant per liter)
In 2019 I sold my modest 2-storey townhouse in Oregon. By law I had to replace all 6 smoke detectors (all functioning perfectly) because they were more than 5 years old. And I had to install a carbon monoxide detector. Safety first!
Last time I sold a house I had to affix a fire extinguisher to the wall of the kitchen. I tried to do it in a way that wouldn’t leave a mark when the new owner took it down and tossed it in a closet or the garage.
I always put an extinguisher in the kitchen. A buddy related a tale of his parents house that suffered a kitchen fire and he noted that after years and years of grease splatter that I’d be shocked at how quickly a fire can go through a kitchen. So if you love bacon as much as I do a $20 extinguisher isn’t that big of deal, and it should be installed where everyone can see it (be sure to turn it upside down every now and then though to beat the bottom of it to keep the agent from caking).
Typically and historically, the need for a sense of safety has been a feminine pursuit. It comes as no surprise that it’s recognized as a valuable instrument in the progressives’ handbag of tricks.
When it comes to safety, here’s an historical bit regarding an unknown disease so contagious you could touch nothing without fear- yet it required deep nasal swabs to get a sample:
Deep nasal swabs were a punishment for slaves in Egypt.
As a kid growing up in central Massachusetts, we just knew that school wasn’t going to be cancelled unless it actually snowed more than 6 inches. People just dealt with it. Now… I’ve seen school cancelled because a couple inches of snow was predicted (doesn’t even matter if it really happened).
Weather safety has reached some pretty insane levels. In my city, any time snow is predicted or there is some remote possibility a hurricane might pass us by, there are hours long press conferences, the supermarkets get emptied etc. Every weather event becomes a huge story. It really is amazing how much this has changed in the last 30 or 40 years.
“We spent trillions waging a crusade against Muslims because we had to be safe from terror.”
The clownworld aspect of this is on the one hand, we’re deathly afraid of Islamic terrorism, but on the other hand, we are inviting them into our countries so they can more easily target us.
Job one in the “war on terrorism” should be to keep them out, not invite them in!
In the land of the risk avoiders the risk-taking man is king.
Just yesterday an oak tree in my neighborhood started leaning slightly in my neighbor’s yard due to the soggy ground. The fire department was called by another neighbor. Police tape and cones were put all around the oak tree with a warning sign on a traffic barricade with a blinking light. The safety issue appears to be, in part, a control issue. It’s not that the guy comes to clean the vent, it’s the calling of the guy to clean the vent, and the making of the appointment. A people completely obsessed with their surrounding environment. If we’re programmed to… Read more »
Now that words are violence, aka real, I guess the globalists are all warriors now.
Safe words, safe thoughts. It’s so tedious. It’s up to the Amerikaners to test their commitment to “safety” in the real, physical and often violent world.
If safety is the new overall goal then I think we are reverting to the oldest ‘societal goal’, although ‘safety’ may now be defined in a new way. Before the industrial revolution I think safety WAS the primary safety of society. Sometime shortly after the advent of agriculture, maybe 5-8000 BC, some ‘discovered’ that it was easier to steal food (and shelter, women and other enjoyable goods) than to do the hard work. So eventually an implicit deal was struck between some farmers and some (presumable) robbers that the latter would protect the former in exchange for food, housing etc.… Read more »
“An easy to miss subtext to the continued lockdowns is the claim that working at home is safer than going to the office” Working from home is awesome. We should do a lot more of it. I would go as far as to say that anyone who can work from home should work from home. Commuting in and around big cities is absolutely soul destroying. It is a total waste of energy besides. The amount of gas and diesel burned nation wide during rush hour idling or stop and go highway traffic is astronomical. The traffic reduction for those who… Read more »
When the wife starts complaining to me that it is taking the dryer too long to dry a load of clothes, I instantly know the problem is almost always one of three things: (1) the heating element is bad; (2) the vent is stopped up or “blocked”; and/or (3) the duct work inside the dryer is stopped up with lint. #3 is the ‘fire hazard.’
That was my thought, someone will know well ahead of time that there are issues since the dryer will stop drying clothes long before it catches on fire.
Today I learned about the dryer vent cleaning industry. Thank you. When I see chunks of lint coming out the vent, I know it’s time to do something. I do it myself, it’s not hard.
My former employer spent tons on duct cleaning because of COVID. This was in preparation for return to work, which they haven’t done yet. Of course, there is no evidence of COVID spreading via duct dust.
Safety is a Girl Thing, because, as I say, “Women expect to be protected.”
And the safety thing is a consequence of women in the public square. Women expect to be safe, and now that women conduct more of their lives in public that means the safety thing moves out of the domestic sphere into the public sphere.
Hate Twitter on the safety of our elections:
“In case you had any doubts the US election was anything but the safest most secure election in history, first bill being passed through congress is mass mail voting at the federal level and restricting states from requiring ID, signature verification etc.”
Bill HR1, the first bill of the 117th Congress.
[…] ZMan revuews the perils of dryer lint. […]
I knew the safety shit was totally out of control way back in the 90s when some group of dimwits was proposing an airbag mandate for …….. motorcycles. As a guy in my mid-50s it’s fun to go to parties where there will be teenagers and young twenty-somethings present. The older folks will inevitably start playing the “remember when?” game. That’s my opportunity to bring up how in the early 80s when I was in high school and everybody was getting their drivers license – it was pretty common to go out drinking – and then drive. Drive to another… Read more »
My son is 20 and desperately wishes it was 1981 not 2021.
I remember when this safety crap started back in the mid sixties. It started with seat belts and quickly moved on to designated parking spots for the handicapped. And on and on it goes today. Every other commercial starts with “We’re here to help you.” My ass they do.