If you were to transport someone from the 1980’s to our age, they would be amazed by some things, like HD TV’s and streaming services. They would probably be a bit disappointed that the internet has not advanced very far or that cars are still pretty much the same as they were forty years ago. Of course, even the most jaded man of the 80’s would be shocked at the cultural revolution that has taken place. The thing that would be most shocking though, is the total collapse in social trust.
In the 1980’s, people generally thought most Democrats wanted to improve the lives of the working class and most Republicans wanted to protect the middle class. The media, while biased, had lots of people trying hard to get the facts to the public. Big business may have been motivated by greed, but most people in business were decent people. People who doubted everything were conspiracy nuts, who wore aluminum foil hats. 1980’s man would be astonished to see that only total fools trust anything in the public domain.
There are a lot of explanations for why no sensible person trusts anything now. The breakdown of homogeneous communities, mass immigration, the derangement of the civic religion by the Left, late phase empire and so on. All of these arguments are plausible in their own way and are all probably true to a degree. Human societies operate like the Julia set and the Fatou set. There are chaotic aspects that seem to defy explanation, but most of what happens in a society operates in a predictable manner.
An example of this may be how technology is changing a key relationship in Western societies that seldom gets addressed. That is the rise in the use of modern technology to insulate people from the consequences of their own behavior. This story on Zero Hedge about new Volvos threaten their drivers for driving drunk. The car will call the cops on you if it detects alcohol. Simply disabling itself is no longer seen as a enough to prevent people from self-harm, so now the car will initiate an intervention for the driver.
It is one thing to live in a world where no one can trust the public institutions. That’s something science fiction writers have imagined for a long time. There’s also nothing new with the surveillance state. The Orwellian idea of an omnipresent surveillance state, monitoring citizens as if they are prisoners is probably the most popular dystopian future in western pop culture. What no one thinks much about is a dystopian future where the state operates like an overly protective mother, rushing about to protect you from you.
That’s really what the Volvo business is about, when you think about it. It’s not about safety, as in protecting the innocent from the negligent. If that were the goal, the car would simply shutoff if the cabin sensors detected alcohol. The car notifying authorities is more like your teacher sending a note home to your parents, telling them you put gum in the hair of one of the other kids. In other words, Volvo is trying to protect you from you, with the threat of calling your parents if you don’t start acting responsibly.
Circling back to the rapid decline in social trust, what maybe happening is that these small technological changes are having drastic changes in our societies. Human societies are complex systems that have both a predictable, repetitive set of rhythms, but also a set of chaotic elements, that seem to be arbitrary. The predictable stuff, like putting up traffic speed cameras, has predictable results. People tend to be on their best behavior, as defined by social norms, when they know they are being watched.
Now, consider how children behave differently after exposure to the outside world. A part of growing up, at least it used to be, was finding out that the world was never going to be as forgiving of your mistakes as your mother. The adult world, relative to the safety of home, was a rough place. The normal process for a child transitioning from youth to adulthood was to go through a period of hyper-cynicism. Full maturity is when you realize the world is not out to get you, it is simply indifferent to your happiness.
In the evolving surveillance state, which promises to make sure citizens never have to leave the loving safety of mom, daily life is the repetition of that first realization that the world is a harsh place. That car with all the safety features did not keep you from hitting that tree and that seems unfair. The label on the shampoo bottle was not enough to prevent you from drinking it and that’s not right. Each of these realizations are met with greater demand for safety and greater efforts by the mommy state to protect us.
A great example is how gun control has become entirely feminized. In the 1970’s, gun control polices were about limiting crime. No one said it, but it was really about making it hard for blacks to get guns. It was a debate around facts about guns and crime. Today, gun grabbing is nothing more than an hysterical reaction by women to what they see on the news. It’s all about safety, by which they mean protecting people from themselves, not reducing crime. It’s mommy putting covers over the electrical sockets.
Perhaps one driver of the sudden decline in social trust is that technology now allows for the evolution of the custodial state. The future is not Orwell or Huxley, but both, operating like a mother and father, to protect us from reality. In this transition phase, modern people are regularly going through the jolt we associate with growing up, when you realize mom and dad were the only ones looking out for your interests. The cold wind of indifference and the loneliness it inspires, is making everyone into adolescent cynics.
Volvo is owned by the Chinese now. This should not be any surprise.
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. ”
C. S. Lewis
Marxists-Leninist’s never went away; they just morph into something else, identify themselves differently (e.g., ANTIFA, BLM, Occupy, CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, etc) and reduce their perceived presence to enable them to co-opt any popular causes that seem legit, fair and for the good of the people.
The increase of the surveillance state – for the public good, of course – is just another vehicle Marxist agitators have encouraged; it certainly suits their purpose.
Whatever increases govt. control and decreases individual liberties will be a bandwagon the Marxists will join or initiate.
If you look at revolutions, violent uprisings or the imposition of a new form of govt via peaceful means (free elections) it is invariably fomented or led by about 100 or 200 agitators/leaders who have the talent to arouse enough of the people to action – violently or via the voting booth.
This is the real scary part; you just need most people to do nothing while the few hundred Marxist zealots proceed unimpeded and bamboozle the masses.
As Z says, there are probably all sorts of reasons one can posit over the lack of trust in our most basic institutions and the never ending imposition of the surveillance state, but there are VERY FEW GROUPS that actively seek, plan, implement and transform societal trends to achieve their goals.
And the groups most successful in this endeavor are of course your old friends in the Marxist religion.
They are a cancer that never dies; it goes into remission and reappears at an opportune time.
As for women leading the emotionally laden charge for what they believe needs to be made “fair,” (notice how what they deem to be fair always conforms to Marxist dogma ) there are also plenty of men, if not more, that are at the vanguard (not the mutual funds) of these Marxist led movements.
But if these lefties ever succeed in their goal of imposing a totalitarian govt here in the USA (and that is their goal), the male contingent will remove or just kill of the leftist females.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I do not recall one communist nation that ever had females in top positions (though China had Mrs. Mao for a bit, but I believe they killed her; oh well. )
I would certainly be shocked if somebody told me that the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90’s and in 2019 we had a far larger (not smaller government). That today we have virtually no space program. And that in 2020 the Democrats will run on a platform little different from Stalin’s ideas in 1918.
After some reflection, I would realize that the Cold War kept a lid on so much of this crap – and I would ask to be returned to the 80’s.
“Human societies operate like the Julia set and the Fatou set.”
I’m not too proud to admit that I have no idea what that sentence means.
Speaking of breakdowns, Antifa is now posting hunting guides for their future victims in the Northwest.
https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/hammerskins-post-hunting-guides-targeting-northwest-communities/?fbclid=IwAR0zYwdFE32CdB82XA0Zcqm2sYaSte8wEl9-kAV4yKwqpVbLeyguMb85CJw
The Amish and the other devout people who are having kids won’t be sustaining this culture.
How will the Amish weather events imminent? They appear vulnerable. Perhaps Amish are another canary in a coal mine for normies and for us. How have, and how will, swamp institutions attack the Amish to acquire rich land and unique chromosomes for ahem “research?” Progressivism cannot tolerate the existence of Amish and yet the Amish are faring well and I enjoy a long personal co-history with them in western michigan and northern indiana. You raise an interesting aspect.
The super-nanny State won’t last for long, since minorities can’t afford Volvos and effectively are immune from serious prosecution..Also, they aren’t into it..In Tucson, all the red light cameras were removed after a popular referendum, heavily supported by minorities…
I have a more sinister take on social evolution.
Human’s domestication of animals proceeds by promoting juvenile traits into adulthood through selective breeding and conditioning (people that doubt the latter need to account for the reality of feral animals reverting to wild habits and morphology within a couple of generations).
The ten thousand foot view of our social evolution is just that – extending adolescence and juvenile traits well past sexual maturity, in fact into past feminine menopause.
We as a species are being “domesticated” by our societies, or perhaps governments.
We are becoming their (whoever they are) livestock or pets.
The jihad to suppress speech has more sinister motives, but for a lot of NPC women, it seems that speech codes are simply a way to protect them from the vapours.
Idiocracy meets infantileocracy.
At least until Muslims, or some other culture that still has adults arrives and wipes them out.
Its a natural progress of a society where people’s interaction with reality is driven by a screen and if something goes wrong you can just reset.
Also `In 1980 for example, a person had a job that required them to talk directly to people or to work with dangerous machines and mostly if they wanted anything to go and get it at a store. It was a fairly though imperfectly homogeneous society and while it could be dangerous in places, the irony is that the threats were understood, other humans and for the most part you could trust other people./
Now you can nearly work from home, almost never interact with a human being and have everything delivered . On top of that, you can’t trust a diverse left leaning population and the threats you face while real are things like hackers and identity thieves you’ll never see. To the human brain its ambush alley which creates almost PTSD like symptoms in many people
Hell look at the fertility rate, largest generation of fertile age in US history, smallest number of kids and if you were to tell me that a lot of people aren’t having sex or just can’t, I’d buy it
This kind of mess is created by or at least facilitated by the networked computer is a recipe for deep human psychosis and a society where maturation is simply not possible. Its no wonder that people want a custodial state. They can’t handle reality because they have no experience.
As for a solution. There are two. Rigid controls on tech and its use at every level, hell get rid of smart phones and the internet and put tight controls on the use of chips and networking tech under penalty of long l prison terms
This will require a dictator to do though and second is to wait it out
Long term, this too shall pass. In time only people who are deeply religious and either anti tech or who know how to manage its use will have kids . This will take longer than two, nearly three lifetimes to come to fruition and a dystopian hell is liable to be the intermediate future but a few centuries the structure that supports this tech, the human capital will be gone . As Stalin famously said, no person no problem
The Amish and the other devout people who are having kids won’t be sustaining this culture . Upside there, all the current problems wash away . Downside if you value technology and innovation, you won’t see it . You may not even see most of the cities inhabited
I’m sure I’m not alone in as much as my first thought was of the havoc that could be wreaked by pouring some cheap vodka into the air intake grills of all the Volvo’s parked at the local (upscaleish) mall.
Or was it just me?
I will never use any device that narcs on me.
It’s not surprising that in a media-saturated democracy, the Greatest Bad Parenting Generation governs by shitty parenting practices – erratic & emotive discipline, lack of clear boundaries, favoritism & susceptibility to manipulation by savvy kids, etc…
We get the only government they know how to create, if not deserve. Letting a generation that never learned basic lessons about social boundaries, responsibility, scale or scarcity run a government is almost cruel, to them, and truly cruel, to the governed.
Aristocracy vs. democracy, aristocracy had stronger character filters and did a better job of training its scions to lead, decades of merchant-class propaganda notwithstanding. “Meritocratic” government by burghers curdled very rapidly into the managerial state that gives us self-policing cars.
Exile. The problem is whether or not you are given such a choice. Take this example of the alcohol sniffing car. This is not the first problematic anti freedom car modification. Think back to airbags. Shortly after they were mandated on all new cars, the reports for deaths and serious injury from detonations started coming in. Still, the Fed’s refused to permit a simple on/off button, or interfacing such with required seat belt use. Last I read, the deaths attributed to such a mandate was several hundred and that was excused because a few hundred more lives were estimated to have been “saved” by the mandate.
These days air bags are fairly robust and the detonations controlled for light weight people and such, so the danger minimalized. But that took years and the Fed’s sat on the adverse results information for the “public good”. What does one think will happen when in a few years time, all cars have automated self driving capabilities? You’ll not be able to drive your own car in the street, or perhaps on the highway, or a metropolitan area.
One problem is that quite a few people are simply incapable of properly handling a gun, or a car. They also can’t moderate their anger and not “go off” on people. Because they are such losers, the rest of us need to suffer with restrictions, bans, and confiscations.
A big motivator of all of this crap is that people who can’t deal with things seem to think that the rest of us can’t deal with things. A weird form of projection, in which they think we need all the banning to protect us from ourselves. What they are really saying is that they need to protect themselves from themselves, and everything must be “fair” and “even”, so the rights of the rest of us must go flying out the window.
“One guy shits his pants and we all are made to wear diapers.” -An old service saying.
So freedoms and liberties are to be restricted by the lowest functioning individuals in our society. That’s not much of a standard, and certainly not the standard our Founding Fathers had in mind for the country they were trying to create. In those days too, there were drunks with guns and violent individuals with murderous tempers. They were not allowed by the dint of their misdeeds to control society’s liberties. Instead, we held them accountable and penalized *them* for their misdeeds—not the innocent.
What a dispicable lot we’ve devolved into. Deserving of neither liberty nor safety.
It’s like kindergarten. One kid acts up and the whole class is punished. Lazy teachers do this so the other kids will do the disciplinary work. It’s America today.
“Full maturity is when you realize the world is not out to get you, it is simply indifferent to your happiness.”
I’m surprised that you wrote about, essentially, feminization, yet still left this quote in. This is the MALE experience! The female experience is something altogether different; for most women under 30, and many under 40, the word is not at all indifferent to your happiness; it’s obsessed with preserving and promoting it. And that’s not culture, it’s biology.
It should be absolutely no surprise that putting women in positions of power leads to institutions operating with a feminine outlook. They don’t think about what’s good for society, or good for business; they imagine themselves as a social dependent, or a consumer, and try to figure out what would be good for them in that scenario. They imagine the institution as their mate. And since the need to constantly fitness-test and “upgrade” is strictly dictated by female psychology, they will always make escalating demands for expansion – not just in profits, but in scope and responsibility. The nanny state is born.
This isn’t a consequence of technology, it’s a consequence of female emancipation. Technology is just raw material, like the phosphorous on a match. Someone still has to strike it.
The Civnats over at Maggies Farm had a link to this documentary on Seattle’s descent into the inferno that is the logical progression of progressive policies. It’s worth watching well-meaning Civnats scratch their collective heads about how this could be happening in their city, which was supposed to turn into a progressive utopia. They will never learn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53uiRFq4Ds
I watched the documentary with a centrist who lives outside of Seattle. Although she’s alarmed that Seattle has turned in to San Francisco (crime, aggressive bums) her first instinct was always to posit further ways to fix the perpetrators.
I said my highest priority is the protection of the community and law abiding citizens, not helping the perpetrators. I’m not opposed to helping the perpetrators, but that is a lower priority. It seems like she had never heard that point of view before.
If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them about life today?
I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.
https://as.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/15yaap/if_someone_from_the_1950s_suddenly_appeared_today/c7qyp13/
DLS, good one. But as I read this comment a second time, it makes sense that many use such a wonderful tool for frivolous purposes. What use does a low IQ person have for all the knowledge in the Universe, much less planet earth. Your quip reminds me of some old grade B b/w movie I saw where some aborigines got into an explorer’s possessions and did all sorts of hilarious (and dangerous things) with his stuff—that is until they came to his grip and the mirror inside. A mirror seemed to amuse them to no end. 😉
There was a similar plot device in “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” where an isolated tribe finds a Coke bottle. They come up with all kinds of uses for it, until they start fighting over it and decide it must be destroyed.
to be fair – I never really supported gun control for the reason of “safety” that the catladies talk about. For me, it was always a visceral thing. Going to a place like Scheel’s is a major culture shock and I felt intimidated by a lot of people there. So I supported certain gun control measures out of spite.
With that said though – I’ve never been in favor of banning the use of a handgun in a domicile. If there’s an intruder – I feel you have a basic right to have a handgun to incapacitate or kill if necessary for self defense.
The problem is that when you can ban one type of gun, you set precedent to ban any and all. Lay off inanimate objects and look to people for the solution.
Women are more risk-averse than men. Educated women are now having one or two kids, tops, which makes it worse. And now they control our institutions. So yeah, the future does appear to be some form of soft fem tyranny.
One thing that just occurred to me — it’s a little worse than that because women can be influenced too easily, and fake risks become real risks and real risks are ignored. What’s going on at the border seems to me to have huge potential downsides. If we have to be a risk-averse society to the extreme, can’t we at least get serious and properly evaluate risks?
The “Communist Manifesto” writ large in vibrantly living color: BLACK, as in . . . pitch dark as the candles of Truth continue to be snuffed out.
Zone Seven
http://jlepore.fineartstudioonline.com/blog/99934/zone-seven
Not sure the State is interested in being my mother. I think it is more interested in maintaining its grip on society. Food stamps are not about providing food; they are about preventing food riots. The Gun Control Act of 1968 was an attempt to disarm urban blacks, who had every right to carry under the 2nd Amendment. Current efforts at gun control are in part about “safety,” but mostly about protecting the State. Semi automatic weapons are definitely a threat to the ruling class. Laws that allow gun confiscation for “mental illness” are popping up now. These are the first skirmishes.
“”The Gun Control Act of 1968 was an attempt to disarm urban blacks, who had every right to carry under the 2nd Amendment.
Your post suggests the mistake we make when we embrace universalism and extend rights created for white to non-whites. Imagine if we could just say, “Blacks can’t own guns.”
I understand that there is a minority of blacks who can own firearms responsibly, but that doesn’t change the fact that a general proscription would be a great improvement for whites.
If we are discussing a racial ban on firearms ownership, it’s just one step away from repatriation or partition; which is what we wish to get away with.
I would think the greatest shock of someone fast-forwarding from the end of the 20th century to now is encountering the volume of hypocritical virtue signalling we have to endure.
Forty years ago there were lots of things one didn’t think much of (including strange cults and weird people), and naturally avoided if one could. Years ago if you didn’t like someone there was no need to pretend to like them. But now there is still the dislike but it is papered over by saying how wonderful these people are and how sorry we are for them and how much we should do to help them. They are just words designed to pretend how essentially virtuous we are now.
This is tantamount to lying. A good example is the recent case (well-publicised on twitter and the like) of the street interview of Swedish people, with white Swedes–that declining sector of Scandinavian society– falling over themselves to agree how much they would let refugees into their homes because they are generous, big-hearted people. Imagine their surprise when the interviewer then introduced them to a young, non-white, refugee and then we heard all the excuses tumble out about not having room, or how they aren’t allowed to take anyone in because of tenancy agreements, and so on.
It’s not just Sweden, but all of the west. All we do now is praise and tell lies in the next breath, instead of how we used to be and say ‘no.’
I meant to post this correction the other day:
Surf music (and a lot of other roots rock) is alive and well at Radio Free Bakersfield:
http://radiofreebakersfield.com/
or just go to the youtubes and check out The Bambi Molesters, the greatest Croatian surf band ever.
(Maybe *someone* ought convince Frodi to get them to play the next Scandza Forum…)
Black Pill Sunday.
At some point, trillions of years from now, the universe will probably succumb to entropy and suffer “heat death.”
Long before that, say a couple of billion years from now, the sun’s output will increase to the point where organic life will no longer be able to survive on Earth. This will occur long before the sun enters red giant territory, so you can all stop worrying about that.
Any fucking year now, somebody will be releasing (purposely or accidentally),one of the super-viruses that nation-states have been working on for 70 years, and much smaller entities have been able to really start working on in the past decade or so, wiping out 40 to 100% of humanity.
Or maybe it’s the economic enchilada, the confidence game of the dollar as reserve currency comes to an end, and it’s game over for the USA as a coherent entity.
There’s always the old cold-war standby of a nuclear exchange, limited or other. It looks to me as being more likely now than it was in the 70’s and 80’s. There are very few competent adults in the upper echelons of our society at the moment. tantrum throwing man/women/trans LGBGTQQRZ-children have no business controlling the nuclear arsenal.
Even though I have young children, I think most of these fates are preferable to the continuing slide into 3rd world shitholery which we read about here daily.
Have a great weekend!
The infuriating thing about the panopticon is that it will be laser focused on whites. The Progressive stack gets all kinds of exceptions. The UK didnt ban Muslim immigrants for extremism, they instead banned White, Blond, Lueren Southern. They even asked her if she held “extremist Christian positions”.
The fraction of a second that the completely empirical process starts to focus on POCs, it will be adjusted to hunt for the Great White Defendant. Chicago gang databases have already been deleted for having too many blacks.
This is on top of the data used to train these programs. Its ALL white people. Thanks to 23andMe, police have the DNA of almost every white person in America. You didnt send in your DNA, but one of your second cousins has. That’s all the police need. Face recognition also uses almost exclusively white faces to train itself. Most articles lament this, but becuase it highlights how few blacks are in STEM. Asians just get ignored.
Related: Christianity too dangerous for UK asylum applicant. Read that again, this actually happened. The Religion of Peace? No problem, come on in and bring your suicide vest. Christian? Too radical, application: Rejected. The UK is lost, dhimmitude complete…
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-uk-and-ireland/2019/03/22/uk-denies-asylum-for-iranian-christian-by-saying-christianity-not-a-peaceful-religion/
They want us corralled into a group of well-behaved worker/shopper/taxpayer units, where we speak and think approved thoughts, read and watch approved content, and follow all of the rules. The state is a border collie making sure we’re safely inside the pen. Never mind the real criminals, such as blacks in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, or immigrant gangs doing what they do. Nothing to see here. Anarcho-Tyranny.
Kmgvictoria likes to say that college is a warehousing environment, as we lack any productive economic use for a large number of people. Black leftists believe the same about the prison system.
Untold numbers of people were sucked into “gigs” in this decade, which has a convenient techie scum way of skirting labor laws. What happens when the Ubers are self-driving, and food is delivered by robots? The endgame is not the Burning Man gift-orgy economy.
Welcome to matriarchy, fellas!
Those of us born before 1980 took it as a given that, for example, freedom of speech was a value to be defended, and even fought for.
When the Booby entered university in the early 90s he noticed something odd and frightening taking place. Stupid little suburban white girls in Amnesty International T-shirts were openly declaring that freedom of speech should be quashed should speech hurt someone’s feelings, or merely make them uncomfortable.
No one challenged them, well, except for the Booby, of course. Not the professors, and certainly not the stupid little suburban white boys who had been thoroughly effeminized by their testicularlly-challenged baby boomer parents.
Well, here we are today. It’s not just a campus phenomenon anymore.
If there are any men left, even on here, kiss your balls goodbye.
Like I said, Nietzsche has arrived.
The last man is upon us.
No culture can survive absolute freedom of speech, that’s why we’ve always had taboo subjects even in the United States. The left’s pivot on freedom of speech is because they degraded the old culture sufficiently and are now trying to solidify globo-homo culture.
The United States was founded as a hyper-evolutionary petri dish. Protections for culture preservation were intentionally gutted. Separation of church and state just gets you a new church. Today it’s a merchant empire, the country is a business. The only culture they care for is one that maintains the skim, so freedom of speech has got to go. Pertinent question is, could it have gone any other way with those founding principles?
It cannot be repeated enough: despair is the greatest threat we face, individually and as a group.
It is important to teach young people that things have not always been the way they are now, and that the times are never so bad that they cannot be turned around or at least gotten through to something better.
That’s the difference between paternalistic despotism and maternalistic despotism. Under paternalistic despotism, all you have to do is not cross the state, to not act out. Go to that massage parlor, no one will be taking a video of you getting a happy ending in some vast sting operation using a million dollars in public salaries. Use a line of cocaine in there too. Who cares. You could own a football team, and as long as you tow the state line, you’re good on personal matters. Maternalistic despotism flips it upside down. Everything is personal and emotive. The Chinese woman who paid some coyote to get to this strip mall where she makes wads of cash, tax free, just by rubbing some skin, must be a some kind of sex slave. She must be “trafficked.” Even though she came from a dirt poor village where she was doing the same thing for dimes and nickels. Vast amounts of money needs to be spent to stamp this out.
My town LOVES to do DUI checkpoints. They are a grotesque 4th Amendment violation. Feminist neo-prohibitionists love drag-net policy making though. The fact that the Supreme Court green lit this behavior in 1989 shows just what a joke the constitution really is. Our real constitution is sentiment in this hyper feminized society. I’m waiting for my dental hygienist to accuse me of some Kavenaugh like crime as I sit there with my mouth open minding my own business.
I think it’s time for some Pinochet to give us all a breather after our national bankruptcy. Women never were good at budgeting. The matriarchal state us cracking up…hysterically of course.
Yep. Don’t forget, it was the feminists who were behind Prohibition.
The absence of “Dad” in many, many families is also having an impact. Dad was protective, but tough. Mom is (generally) only protective.
By the way, the “self-driving” car is the next Mom. But we have the example of the “self-driving” 737. That didn’t go well, but I’m sure that the “car” iteration will be much, much, better.
The proper meta- behavior of a self driving car should be that of a well trained loyal pit bull, not a narc’ing teacher.
I have a strong suspicion that eventually, we’ll find that the air crews involved in both 737 crashes were not up to the task of flying a complex technological device such as the 737. This is not saying the 737 is perfect, and perhaps even defective in that it relied on overly complex computer control “gimmicks” to make up for design short comings. However, I’ve heard reports there are no shortage of US pilots that praise the plane and have no problems with it. I also heard a report that a foreign crew a short time back had their butts saved by a pilot in the jump seat hitching a ride on their 737 (yet again pilots from another third world country airline flying a 737). Critical fraction theory in action?
Comp;
I think that one of the main problems with today’s very nearly self-flying aircraft is lack of pilot *mental* robustness. If you’re almost never confronted with an actual serious situation because the electronics handle them for you, you don’t gain the experience of having to urgently think outside the box from aerodynamic first principles. So pilots can become suddenly mentally helpless in the now (thankfully) very infrequent actual emergency, despite simulator training (if they get any).
Plus, increased instrument reliability undercuts the need for the mental awareness that instruments should be automatically distrusted if they give an aberrant reading unless that reading is confirmed by the other instruments. Used to be called cross-checking. Kept you on edge, I’m told. This was seen as a good thing even though the normal human does’t like being mentally on edge for extended periods.
The airlines are the ones ordering the (very expensive) very nearly self-flying aircraft. Why_? Well, one reason is surely that only *some* of the occasional serious situations of the past were rectified by a fast-thinking hero pilot: Others had gone bad, some really bad. Apparently, the airlines consider this an acceptable trade-off. The greatly increased air travel safety stats would seem to speak for themselves on this point.
But the downside is that no software can anticipate every possible situation. So there *will* come a time when a current-day pilot is mentally helpless in the face of an unusual situation. It will just be very infrequent. Back in the day, it used to be said that aircraft accidents happened when the pilot ran out of altitude, airspeed and ideas all at the same time. Increasing the robustness of the first two has apparently resulted in decline in the latter factor.
I think about this all the time. My father died in 92 and he wouldn’t be surprised by all the technological changes. He worked for IBM and was one of the young up-and-comers when I was a little girl and we had computers in my house as long as I can remember but the breakdown of society would leave him flabbergasted. I’m flabbergasted. Though I do find it interesting as we try to deny the existence of God we replace his all seeing eye with cameras and for those that don’t believe the repercussions for sins can seem much more immediate
The observation about the changing objectives of firearms ownership and use restrictions is cogent. The gun grabbers no longer want to disarm urban blacks, who might actually benefit by being forced to settle their differences with fists or knives, which don’t permit drive-by shootings. The shift in emphasis to long guns is an effort to disarm rural whites, who are the absolute betes noires for urban liberals.. As the number of hunters continues to drop, watch for efforts to ban hunting rifles and shotguns.
Yet another reason women don’t belong in politics, government, business, voting, etc. Most women are emotionally incontinent airheads. They want everyone to be “nice” and life to be “fair.” They would rebuke Jesus for his harsh words to the moneylenders – after all, we all know that saying “sorry” makes everything ok and everyone deserves another chance. Except for evil notsees and raciss, which isn’t nice.
Incredibly depressing post today at VDare by Lawrence Welton about New Zealand’s Ahern – who has apparently spent time in psychiatric facilities for extreme anxiety and is currently lactating. Put a mentally unstable and hormone-driven woman in charge of things and watch the world devolve. And no, I am not like most women – I am rational. I am also well aware I’m a unicorn.
Just read it. Her car should shut down with that psych profile. We all know women who are just too fragile to cope, but discussing whether we might be electing one to high office is Hate. I put most of the blame for Clown World on feminization now. If subverted the home, eroded the city from within, and ultimately opened the gates to the invaders. As Heartiste would put it, sufferagettes were a civilizational “shit-test” and our ancestors failed. After that, the countdown to poz commenced, inexorably.
It’s worse. We were built by evolution to overcome hardship and prevail versus many types of obstacles. Modern society, hyper-driven by affluence, is eliminating all forms of hardship and the concomitant opportunity to learn by doing (particularly at a young age and in non-life threatening practice episodes). This makes us weaker over time and diminishes robustness. Most young men today do not even know how to change a flat tire.
It started with ending of shop classes in middle and high school. The school big wigs decided that working with one hands is too low brow for students and hence shut down shop class.
All it did was produce succeeding generations of young men with no useful skills whatsoever. Now it’s possible to go through high school and college and come out as useless as a child in terms of useful skills.
On the bright side today’s young men are really good at video games and social media.
Of course, if you had shop for boys, you had to have something equivalent for girls. Home ec? Misogyny!
Until at least the early 2000’s, a very wealthy and highly-rated SE Wisconsin school district had shop, home-ec, and auto mechanics classes. (Could now be gone…..haven’t been there for years.)
That district was in a very white-collar suburban location–but it was also a very Republican district, so some common sense remained.
Sadly you can’t really repair modern cars at home. Upside is they rarely need fixing compared to older ones which kind of reflects on the idea at hand
Modern society is becoming too efficient and no longer has use for people which suggest you won’t have people soon enough or that society
Subreplacement fertility for nearly 50 years is not a long term trend anyone wants
Sadly most people seem to think modern cars are unrepairable at home – because it’s an excuse for their laziness.
“Modern” cars are perfectly repairable at home – if you want to bother to do it. What I see out there isn’t a bunch of people locked out of repairing their cars because they’re too complicated – but rather a bunch of people who simply refuse to get their hands dirty and/or use excuses like ” I don’t have the time” . But they can spend an entire Sunday watching sportsball or watching Sex in the City re-runs with the wife.
It’s not an issue of can’t – it’s an issue of WON’T
Perhaps. But owning one makes me not entirely agree. For example, the transmission in my car—a $10K item—has basically no repairable parts. You have two options: replace the computer control module (solid state) or replace the transmission, which goes back to Germany where ZF built them.
I’ve been repairing my own vehicles since I got my first one in 1981. Even then – as a teenager – you didn’t repair an automatic transmission on your workshop bench. You pulled it out yourself , went and got a replacement from the junkyard – or sent it off to the local transmission place – or swapped it for an already rebuilt one – and then put the replacement back in.
There a number of places online who sell refurbed modules. I had to replace the ECM in my Chevy truck a couple of years ago – once I tracked the problem down – I searched online and found a place that had the correct part. They programmed the ECU with the appropriate information – sent me the “new” one – I replaced it and sent the old one back to them and got a refund on my core charge.
Not substantially different than replacing a water pump or alternator or brake caliper (or anything else that required a “core”) – from a vehicle built in say 1980.
It’s not a “can’t” thing – it’s a WON’T thing.
Cal;
It sounds like you are able to do automobile LRU replacement diagnosis in your head and by reading the codes. That’s great, but most people can’t do this for lack of IQ and the knowledge of first principles of auto engineering or a high mechanical aptitude:
– a lot of the complexity is driven by government mandates, mostly wrt fuel efficiency and safety. Hence computer control instead of the previous wide-tolerance electro-mechanical sub-systems. High density microelectronics are necessary to make automobile computer control possible due to weight and space limitations.
– But microcircuit part density means no fixing of individual components. Hence LRU’s (line replaceable units – closed modules) like those used on aircraft for the last 40 years or so.
– LRU-based repair requires accurate diagnosis of which are to be replaced. In the old days I could tell if an individual auto part was bad just by looking + experience.
– Accurate diagnosis requires both specialized training and a higher verbal-not-mechanical IQ to absorb and use such training. The diagnostic logic chains in the new shop manuals are not so different from those in med school texts.
– Absent the mental facility to learn this, the alternative is using costly and expensive, vehicle specific, diagnostic software. In my experience most auto techs can’t actually explain *why* module X is the one to replace beyond that the great machine said so. It is cruel to demand that they do. (Which I sometimes do in cases of baseless smugness.)
You are right about priorities
I keep mine running but its not that easy to do and not as easy as say my old 1974 Olds
as however a scan tool does make things much easier and almost makes up for the lack of space the engine compartment
I would say its certainly less enjoyable though and harder when its not plug a replace . I know a 12 year old who rebuilt the carburetor on a 52 Chevy. No way could he rebuild the same stuff on a modern car
>>>Subreplacement fertility for nearly 50 years is not a long term trend anyone wants.
Long term, you’re certainly right. But if the migration of the third world underclass into prosperous societies was eliminated, I see zero problem with the population of the USA dropping back to 180 million. Of course, the compound interest, perpetual growth economic model just might collapse; what a shame!
Yep. However no big company, State, religion , bank or anyone else knows how to cope with population decline
Its going to happen anyway . Immigrants are running low and utterly unable to preserve the society
Odds are it will get worse and rather than a pleasant decline we’ll get chaos.
Ah well Amish world a few hundred years will be harder but far better than Clown World now.well
Shop class in the US was designed to help teach marketable skills, not character and these days the skills are of little value. Its mostly CAD and assorted computer stuff. just more com sci if you can even get anyone to teach anything
Anyway US schools have kids for up to twelve years and essentially can’t educate them in anything useful regardless of race gender or anything else
Its been getting worse over years though even kids in the 80’s learned jack though we did learn how to balance a checkbook when I was in elementary school at least
In the end we either control tech or it kills our society and a society of worthless social posturing ninnies getting Yang bucks won’t be long for the world and eventually even the rentiers will run out of loot
Frankly when the rebel right is planning its revolution, sure DC is a part of the problem but I wonder if maybe we’d be better served if they headed to San Jose first
Rod, for whatever the reason, folk come out of school because schools allow them to graduate regardless of their acquired knowledge—or lack thereof. That schools may have dropped “shop” or other useful, real world, experiencial courses is a problem. But a greater problem is social promotion in lower grades and high school and worthless degrees in college, e.g., ethnic studies. No only does such “credential” ignorant and low IQ folk, but creates a sense of unearned entitlement for such people because they have a “degree”.
Another reason for the demise of shop class was it taught young males how to use a wide variety of scary (to certain administrators) tools and machines. The fact that they were learning extremely useful and satisfying skills was not sufficient reason to maintain the class.
After all,someone might get hurt. It’s for the children’s safety,you know. We know best, said the vinegar-drinking shrews who foment this nonsense. ( h/t to Z 4 the shrew description).
Home Ec? Teach girls how to cook,sew, and clean? Can’t have that, they’re far too busy these days believing they’re SuperHeroes,like the latest Capt Marvelous.
And who names their kid after a runny French cheese?
Changing a flat used to be a simple operation. It’s been made a lot more difficult. First, you have to find the spare. And the jack. Simple bumper jack no longer works, although I always preferred a scissors jack. Try to change the battery. Where the devil did they hide it?
The battery is now under the rear compartment. And if you need a new one, it’s $300.
Epi;
Ah, but now it lasts five years instead of two. So there’s that. But reprogramming the electronics_? Fuggabouddit_!
Diminished robustness, yes. Or maybe displaced robustness. Social expectations if they obstruct biological nature often set the stage for a very strong counter reaction.
Ethnic nationalism is in a way institutionalized in Europe. At least on the continent men are successfully pushing back. They have a constructive outlet to counter degenerative social expectations.
We, here in the land of the free, have no such outlet. The Europeans have less ability to say what they think but they can act. We can blog but we can’t organize publicly. So the pressure builds. Our demographic problems are also a lot more serious. Feminization is a temporary phenomenon. We’ll end up gelded tax cattle to the men of other tribes or we will erupt in full berserker mode.
The Europeans can do this:
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2019/03/24/terrorist-linked-islamists-gathered-to-pray-outside-parliament-in-copenhagen-danish-politicians-responded-by-burning-the-quran/
We have Breitbart’s comment section.
I just spent a week with my niece. Spring break from college. I always knew she was of the fragile, coddled, entitled generation but had no idea how deeply the worldview is rooted.
Every generation easily finds faults with the past and futre gens. But seems to me there’s always a kind of familial bond that holds us together; we quabble over things having to do with birth order or parental investment, but there are enough similarities to bind us to the same universe. Not so sure anymore.
My niece is sweet and kind. But incredibly niave for her age (23) and worse – disconnected from reality in so many ways that it was jarring to try to engage with her.
She lives not just thru – but inside, her phone. Her world thrives on the make-believe. Memes and internet detritus tossed among her “friends” with snark and cynicism.
Not like my genx cynicism, but the kind with such distance from reality that the whole NPC thing is scarily accurate. Her and her friends do everythjng they can to avoid the discomfort of reality. Thats the main difference: where my gen was jaded by confronting reality, hers is jaded by avoiding reality.
The former can be a way to sharpen the axe and potential for self-determination, the latter can only lead to more suffering and dependence on the System.
Maybe the younger Z’s will pick up the axe. But theres a giant sucking sound ahead of them and ‘techology’ is just one big amp.
Srewtape, the problem with your niece is she votes. 😉
I somehow never asked her if she voted – or for who.
Probably my unconscious mind preventing me from casting her entirely into the unsalvageable pile.
Her cohort pulling the lever is an issue no doubt. But there is still a lot of damage they can do without the facade of muh democracy.
She wanted no part of any truths about even those things closest to her self-interest, ie dating, employability, financial discipline.
Why are her male counterparts made of soy, on the spectrum social retards, or pump and dump chads?
Nope. Thats too serious. Too ‘negative’. She’d rather continue on the purple hair catlady path and make fun of the whole thing like its some game. In one word: unserious.
So yeah. The vote is dangerous. But barren, miserable, superfragile, perpetual children and their gelded male jesters are something else entirely.
This happened to a millennial friend of mine His radiator overheated and he could do nothing
I could have fixed it for him but not my car and he’d called his Dad
Happily his family being LDS were having none of this and from the expression on my buddies face,Pops ripped him a new one
He promptly learned how to keep his car running and being a nerd, got good with a soldering gun too.
Our traveler would also find reassurance in the fact that every Hollywood movie is still about fighting the evil Nazis.
(*faint sound of dog whistle in the distance*)
Remember that Volvo is from Sweden. They’ll make a car that will tattle on you for drinking–and they’ll also go out of their way to import millions of third-world people to rape and murder your women.
This seems to fit into the same pattern as anarcho-tyranny or Cultural Marxism. Let’s call it Values Marxism, a total inversion of reasonable values: they protect you in tiny ways that you don’t really need, but hurt you in huge, important, existential ways.
The transvaluation of all values. Nietzsche has arrived!!
The Booby suspects this isn’t the kind of “overturning of values” that Nietzsche had in mind, but it’s definitely an overturning at any rate.
Many of the dupes and useful idiots on the left claim that they are all for ‘social justice’ but most of them have no real idea of what that term really entails. ‘Social justice’ as the term is used today is a con game used by the clever to advance their personal wealth and egos, and by the ruling class as an instrument to destroy trust. In fact, when successfully applied, ‘social justice’ destroys a great deal more than that. It is a linchpin in the process of dehumanization, a process that plays into and feeds upon the aims and desires of will to power driven monsters.
Monsters and motives aside for the moment, the chief problem with the ‘social justice’ meme is that it is based upon a defective notion of human rights. ‘Human rights,’ after all, are the chief argument made by advocates for the imposition of social justice and the redistribution of wealth. Chantal Delsol, in Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century argues that in order to avoid conflict, what she calls ‘modernity’ has reduced the concept of rights to the merely biological and the material. This is a low-rent way for the smug and the self-righteous to assert their assumption of moral superiority, as it neatly dodges – and in fact destroys – the larger questions of human dignity and aspirations. As Chantal Delsol puts it:
As I see it, ‘modernity’ as Delsol defines it has striven to achieve not so much as the Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of all values’ as the devaluation of all values. The great irony is that it has left the latter to the will to power driven monsters and the former to those whose job, witting or not, is to reduce us all to chattel.
It’s actually the antithesis of what Nietzsche advocated, and the coming-into-being of what he feared the most — “maggot man,” the feminized, idiotic, socialist, herd-man.
The “transvaluation of all values” was intended to apply to the Superman, who was kept from greatness by sheep-morals of the feminized herd — almost like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians.
Exactly.
The next model Volvo will have an eavesdropping device that will alert the authorities, your bank and all social media if you utter a single complaint about third-world immigration. Other carmakers will follow suit.
LOL.
I went to the Volvo dealer the other day to look at an XC60 – and the salesman told me he could give me a great discount if I took one off the lot today – but I had to take the 8 Somalians hiding in the trunk and give them each a nice home and take to school each morning with my 8th grade daughter to get the money off.
They all looked to be about 25 years old so I told him I’d take hard pass.
Inversion and emoting. Leftism is about emoting and inverting Good and Evil.. And being female. We are being ruled by female children.
You are correct about the changing nature of gun grabbing. Back in the 1960’s – 1970’s, the emphasis tended to be on handguns. For those of us with long memories, we can recall that the Brady Campaign was once called “Handgun Control, Inc.” This was both stupid (handguns are very easy to both make and smuggle) and unconstitutional, but it did make an odd sort of sense, since handguns are the weapon used in most murders. Gun grabbers even used this as a talking point; “We’re not violating your Second Amendment rights! You can still have your long guns to combat a tyrannical government – we just want those “Saturday Night Specials”!” Today, it’s all about “Assault weapons”, which are used in a miniscule number of crimes, but look scary to suburban spinsters, and feature in crimes that make the news, as opposed to DeMarcus shooting Shaquina, so they are now the focus. As noted, the 1970’s gun grabbers were full of it, but they at least were trying to make some kind of rational case. Now, it’s all about feelz.
Not really. Back in the 70’s they just as fanatical as they are today. I remember the debates we had here in CA with the gun grabbers. They all but admitted they didn’t care if guns remained in the hands of the criminals, it was the law abiding citizens who worried them.
You have to understand they also fought every “use a gun in a crime and do mandatory prison time” law to the point they became useless. This is in part what drove the 3 Strikes Law in CA. Because the Leftist judges kept letting felons out.
If was never about safety as Z states. It’s creeping totalitarianism.
I remember when CA did the first “Assault Gun ban/Registration” The Left made a host of rifles that were never used in a crime illegal and tried to force others to register their guns. It caused the first mass act of civil disobedience in the state with only a 5% compliance rate.
Today the Left has all but gutted 3 Strikes and the Left is doing everything outside of open confiscation to remove guns from the hands of people.
Oh, yes, the gun grabbers were fanatics back then, as well. My point was, they used to try to make some kind of residual sense back then – now, it’s all just emoting. The agenda remains the same, but the post-modern Left has left any pretense of reason behind.
Some circumstantial evidence indicates that the CIA was behind the beginning of the gun control movement.
Interestingly, the first Anglo (UK, AUS, CAN) gun bans were passed shortly after the First World War, in “fear” of Communist revolution. In particular, the UK has a centuries old rivalry of the aristocracy jealously guarding its hunting privileges, contra the blue-collar image of hunting in the US. Judaism appears to forbid hunting.
It makes no sense for Jews not hunt, the Bible is full of hunters Nimrod being the best known.
That said much gun control was also urged on by early urbanization (Black and Irish in some places)and the early managerial state, forerunner of the custodial state.
An armed population was a threat to the “get to the factory and do as you are told” authoritarians in charge and that is why the 1934 GCA tried to get rid of automatic weapons and originally handguns allowing for still needed farm and hunting weapons
Its also not a surprise that the concept of prohibited persons, felons was added in 1937. These guys if controlled make great revolutionaries. It was the first red flag law basically
Now from what I understand the US fertility rate has been in steady decline and first crashed below replacement during the great depression.
My gut tells me that this low fertility is a normal part of modernity and that the baby boom was an unsustainable bubble caused by antibiotics, sudden wealth increase and a host of non repeatable events
basically industrial urban society reduces pregnancy on a human scale, deletes culture and lowers procreation on an increasing as tech increases
Its a human carrying capacity limit basically and we are at it.
This should probably depress space enthusiasts more than a little but we may have hit our great filter, the paradox being a society advanced enough for space travel won’t want or need it as they will have population decline till they no longer support space travel
As I understand it, the rabbinical prohibition on hunting has to do with Esau being a hunter, while Jacob was not. Nimrod is also usually indicated as the builder of the tower of Babel. It is seen as a symbol of vanity. For a similar reason canon law prohibits priests from going hunting, which is presumed to be a pastime of partying aristocrats. There is nothing wrong with being a subsistence hunter in either group.
The NFA contains a portion where “corporations” are exempted from certain rules requiring the Sheriff to grant permission to own Title II firearms. That was said to be for “labor relations”. The tax of $200 was never adjusted for inflation, so it was the equivalent of several thousand in today’s money, which in effect doubled the price of a Thompson, which was the most expensive gun at the time.
I don’t think that is a good answer for Fermi’s paradox. Just because Humans don’t breed well in cities does not mean that all conceivable civilization building aliens won’t either.
Modernity is a new environment over enough time humans should evolve the ability to reproduce in it.
A factor in the baby boom was that a lot of the manufacture used for making weapons turned to cars suddenly making a lot of new suburbs available outside of cities, young adults could afford a home. Now all the suburbs are filled out and construction is overregulated apprenticeships are trashed so any economic growth bids up the price of houses instead of making more available. But if Uber’s “Airlift” idea of automated electric skytaxis takes off and is affordable then traveling at 300mph that bring a whole lot of cheap real estate within range of the megacities where people work and could allow young workers to buy homes and create another baby boom.