Way back in the olden thymes, I kept getting invitations to join Facebook. I had no interest in joining Facebook, which made me a weirdo. Friends would ask me why I was holding out and I’d tell them “I’m just not that interesting.” I did not realize it, but I was subtly insulting my friends by breaking the unwritten rule of social media. That is, none of us are so interesting that we should be on social media. No one I know, except me apparently, can face up to the fact that their life is not all that interesting.

I finally relented for a while, but then I quit and no one noticed. The same is true with Twitter. I have two accounts. One for sports and one for this blog. I rarely tweet anything. When I do read the twitter (I love calling it “the twitter” for some reason), I mostly see strangers posting what they hear on TV or say on the Interwebs. It’s an echo chamber of snark and stupid.

A good example of the latter is Razib Khan, who is a super smart doctoral candidate in genomics and genetics. This is mighty tough material tackled by the very brightest people in the world. On the twitter, however, he comes off like a teenage girl with a bad attitude. The reason is he spends most of his time commenting about what other people are tweeting. Dogs and flees.

I think there is merit to the wisdom of the crowds. I’m a human and humans are social animals. We take cues from those around us about what is and what is not acceptable and preferable. Restaurant reviews are the most obvious example. Bad reviews count for way more than good reviews, because we are wired to look for taboos and dangers. “I had a great burger” tells me nothing. “I found a rat in my soup” tells me everything.

Unlike many on my side of the fence, I’m not in favor of shuttering the TV stations and closing down the Interwebs. The young and the stupid need entertainments and it keeps them busy. We live in an age with lots of idle young men and idle young men get into trouble. Having them play video games and watch car chase movies is probably a good idea. It keeps them off the streets, at least for a little while. I’d rather have them on Facebook than on my street corner.

This is something the people in charge have long understood. The first thing the Reds did in the 19^th and 20^th century was take control of the media organs. The Cult of Modern Liberalism controls mass media in America because if you control the media you control the country. The CIA works hard to control social media because they understand that it is the key step in controlling the people. Having the title “Director of Internet Sock Puppetry” must make for some laughs in the Langley locker room.

The trouble is we are awash in mass media, meaning we are floating in a sea of bad information. Republican voters often carp about the low-information voter, but most of the people voting GOP believe all sorts of nonsense, mostly because they see it on Facebook. They think they are holding the correct opinions because people they see on TV or on-line hold those views and those people seem nice or smart or cool or whatever.

Men of the Right have been complaining about the stupidity of the people for a long time, which is why the Right has always opposed democracy. It’s indisputable that half the people in any society are below average in IQ. Giving them the franchise is inviting trouble, but as long as the smart fraction controlled the mass media, society buggered along without too much trouble. The dimwitted got their cues from the local paper or TV about which way to vote, thus mitigating any damage they could cause by backing a nut or a deviant.

That’s not really the case with social media. Twitter and Facebook are platforms run by the masses, mostly by the portion of the masses with free time. It is the nature of man to trust what is said to him and that makes all of us susceptible to the mass stupidification of mass media. If you spend all day listening to blockheads on Facebook or Twitter, you’re likely to get caught up in whatever the other blockheads are doing.

The so-called Arab Spring is a good example. The claim at the time is it was driven by social media. How did that turn out? Egypt had a nice blood bath with a brief period of control by Muslim lunatics. The same thing played out across the Maghreb. One could argue that the unrest in the Maghreb is in some small part responsible for the mass invasion of Europe from the Near East. It turns out that a million nitwits can be wrong.

That’s the Arab world and easy to dismiss, but the evidence says the West is getting dumber and the Internet is probably a part of it. All of my Progressive friends get their “facts” from Wiki and Facebook. They think their ability to Google something makes them brilliant. This make them dumber than nature intended because instead of being ignorant, they are ignorant and certain. Smart people are always uncertain. It’s when the stupid become confident that things can get out of hand.

The place I usually get my drugs is on the edge of the ghetto. It serves the white ghetto and the soft black ghetto adjoining it. There also a Ferguson like white working class area there, which appears to be going Hispanic. The last time I was sent into the heart of darkness so I was grateful to avoid that this time.

In line to buy drugs, I spied a typical white trash couple that is a common feature of the white ghetto. They were in shorts and flip-flops, exposing an array of tattoos. One had a cane, but he kept forgetting which leg had the limp. He is probably working a disability scam, something so common that lawyers advertise for it around here now. It’s also threatening to bankrupt the system.

The two of them had iPhones, which is ironic. Combined they probably have a two-digit IQ yet they feel the need to have expensive smart phones. Both had headphones so that means they have been downloading music on someone’s dime, because what good is an iPhone without music?

The tattoos always get me. Poor people like display items. Drive through the black ghetto and you will see expensive sports cars packed in front of run down housing blocks. Poor whites like cars too, but they have worse tastes in cars than blacks. Instead they invest their creative skills in ink. The two I saw today had elaborate Celtic images on their arms and legs.

Lots of people on the Dissident Right talk about the black underclass, but that’s easy. It’s celebrated on TV as if it is high culture. What never gets mentioned is the expanding white ghetto that is replacing what used to be the white working class. Those old solid neighborhoods where fathers worked two jobs are collapsing into lands where no one works and everyone is on the dole.

The two crackers I saw at the pharmacy are typical. The one with the fake limp is living off the woman. She had the EBT card and their Medicaid card. I’m pretty sure they were picking up a pain killer as one asked the other if they were “V” or “M” meaning Oxy. They call it hillbilly heroine for a reason and that reason is white trash love Oxy.

That’s the difference between the black ghetto and the white ghetto. The black ghetto is ruled by young black males. Older males who survived, get the hell out and stay out. The women are either baby mamas or their mothers. The white ghetto skews older, with many more older men.

There’s also less crime in the white ghetto. White teens commit crime, but they fear blacks and Hispanics so they keep their crime small. They don’t organize street gangs or battle for drug turf. That allows drug taking to be a family activity. It also means their intellectual capital, if you will, is invested in gaming the system for benefits. Whole neighborhoods are on disability in the white ghetto.

That’s the incredible thing about the ghetto. The women know how to work the system. They get a lot of help from government, but they have enough smarts to game the programs. On the other hand, they lack the smarts to avoid keeping a deadbeat under their roof who knocks them up between drug binges. There’s something at work, other than intelligence and education.

Something else that does not get mentioned is just how multicultural the underclass is compared to the over-class. It’s not strange to see a fat white girt with braids pushing a stroller containing a caramel colored baby. Hispanics and whites hang out together far more than you would ever see amongst good whites.

There’s a great blending going in the underclass, even though our betters insist otherwise. I wish I had a nickel for every time I was in a room full of upper middle-class white people bemoaning the latent racism of the poor whites. The irony escapes them because they never go anywhere near the ghetto.

It’s just a part of the Brazilification of America. I bet something similar is happening in Europe. Instead of blacks, whites and Hispanics, it’s Arabs, Africans and lower class whites. In a generation or two, the West will be a vast sea of caramel faces ruled over by a sparkly white ruling elite. That’s South America.

When I was young man and just getting out into the world, I noticed that the gap between myself and my coevals grew quickly once I ventured outside our shared confines. I had friends in school who had never left the state and did not have much interest in what was beyond their little slice of heaven.

Once I was regularly venturing beyond the perimeter, a gap between myself and them started to grow. At the time, I did not get why they lost interest in me, but I also had my own new interests. I lost touch with them and that was it. Within a year or two, people I talked to every day had become strangers.

Travel changes the traveler in ways the traveler does not notice. When you’re young you don’t know these things, but through travel you begin to figure it out. As I sink into decrepitude, I find that my only close friends are people who have had a fair amount of travel. My trips usually involve meeting these friends somewhere new or possibly visiting them at their new digs.

In a gathering, I can quickly figure out if someone has a lot of miles on them. There’s an aloofness, an otherness, that comes from travel, particularly living in strange places for extended periods.  I suspect that it comes from having seen humans in various natural environments and discovering that settled life is mostly the same everywhere. Life in Portland Maine is pretty much the same as life in Portland Oregon.

Once you figure out that your way is not all that special, it is hard to remain a provincial. The heart of provincialism, it seems to me, is the belief that your way is unique, not necessarily better. Once you see that it is not unique some of the ropes tying you to your ancestral lands are cut and you can no longer feel the same way about it.

Saying that, I have know men who have traveled for work, yet lost none of their provincialism. I worked with a guy from Pittsburgh, who got on a plane every Monday going somewhere. He and his family had moved a few times around the country for work. Yet, everything about his professional life was geared toward getting back to Pittsburgh and getting off the travel circuit. He was and would always be a Yinz.

There’s also a gap between people who travel beyond their native lands and those who just travel around their country. I have a friend, one I was visiting with recently, who has lived all over the world. He has a different air about him than friends who have stuck to North America. I think you acquire a sophistication about humanity when you observe foreigners in their native habitat.

I suspect this is why Europeans seem so sophisticated to Americans while the English just feel like funny talking rubes to us. There’s familiarity too. Most Americans know enough about the English to understand something about them. Living in a land where over the next hill live a bunch of weirdos speaking gibberish probably makes provincialism difficult.

I once worked for a company that moved managers around every two years in order to break their provincialism. The theory was that living in a bunch of different places would make them company men rather than “Bostonians” or “Iowans”. Anyone who does not understand the link between corporate ideology and fascism has never worked at a large corporation.

The FBI used to follow this model, but for entirely different reasons. In order to avoid corruption, agents moved from field office to field office every two years, while they were field agents. They wanted fresh eyes, but they also wanted to avoid the possibility of corruption. The “Zip” Connolly story shows why that was a good idea.

Part of what drives the managerial elite’s hatred of the American middle-class is this cosmopolitan – provincial tension. The girl who went off to Holyoke to major in public administration and womyn’s studies was not trained to hate normal people. She acquired it through travel and class solidarity. First she went off to college, then maybe grad school, with internships in DC and NYC in between.

By the time she lands in the bureaucracy somewhere, she looks back on her parents and childhood with a degree of contempt. Those local yokels seem small and stupid to her, because, after all, they have not seen the world. The fact that she may be as dumb as a post only reinforces this dynamic. Her tribe is the vast army of cubicle jockeys in the bureaucracy, naturally at war with the “other”, who happen to be Americans.

With that in mind, it is not hard to see why the Maoists and Khmer Rouge sent these people out to the fields. I’m fond of pointing out that the commies are often pretty good at noticing the problems. It’s their solutions that are criminally insane. The Asian commies really understood the gap between the cosmopolitan and the provincial and how it warped the relationship between the ruled and the rulers.

That and it was probably a lot of fun sending egg heads out to the rice paddies. Who amongst us have not seen a guy like this and thought it would be a good idea to send him out to the mines? But, that’s a topic for another day. I have to unpack.