For people with an interest in history, the best part of travel is seeing the things that you recall from your history books. To stand on the grounds of some historic battle, imagining what it was like for the people involved, makes history come alive. Usually, the thing that surprises people is the smallness. You see the place where some great conflict was resolved and you’re suddenly struck by just how human it is in terms of scale. That’s when it hits you that it was real people engaged in real human activity.
That was my experience at Turku castle when I was in Finland. I’ve been in a lot of very old buildings, so I am used to the closeness of these places, but the smallness of the castle was impressive. From the outside, it has the desired effect. It is towering as you approach it on foot, which was surely the idea of the people who built it. It was supposed to be an intimidating fortification. The guys in side, after all, were the people in charge and they wanted everyone within eye-shot to know it and respect it.
Once you enter, perspective begins to change. In the late 13th century when the castle was built, Europeans had not caught up to the Romans, in terms of engineering and architecture. The arch was still a struggle, for example. As a result, in order to build up, it still meant starting wide. If you wanted a high wall, it had to have a very wide base. To have multiple floors, meant thick ceilings, tiny windows and narrow passageways. The effect, once inside, is almost claustrophobic. It was like living in a cave.
One of the stranger things you will see when you tour the place is young people constantly looking at their phones. At first I thought they were just texting friends or simply unable to pay attention. Instead, what I learned is they were looking at pictures on-line of where they were in the castle. In other words, reality was now their virtual reality and virtual reality was their reality. They could better relate to the images on their phones and the descriptions, than the actual place with the plaques describing the rooms.
In this story about the opening of Nero’s palace, there is a bit toward the bottom where they describe how you can experience the place with virtual reality goggles. There is a picture of people looking rather silly with the things strapped onto their faces. They look like prisoners in some sort of dystopian prison facility. As absurd as it seems, the people who created the exhibit think it is a winning idea. They are probably right. Young people will prefer to sit in the darkness wearing a headset than trying to use their imagination.
When I was a kid, people used to fret about young people watching television, rather than using their imaginations playing games. Most of these concerns were dismissed, as television was rather crude. I grew up with a black and white television until we got the fancy color model that was rather cartoonish in retrospect. No child was ever going to mistake the flickering images on the TV screen for reality or even a plausible replacement for what they could imagine. Television was just fancy cartoons at that stage.
We have come a long way and more important, the internet is far more immersive than television, because it is interactive. About a quarter of adult Americans are on-line constantly. Some of it is the requirement of work, but most of it is simply the fact that on-line is now as much a part of real life as real life. It’s no surprise that those young people in Turku would be confused by the inside of that castle and decide to use their phones to reorient themselves. They lack the imagination to do otherwise.
That’s the thing about imagination. It is a form of getting lost. To imagine things you have to wander off from what you know, using bits and pieces of what you do know to infer things about someplace you have never seen or create a place that does not exist. To imagine what it was like for people 500 years ago, you have to leave this world and wander off to a place you can never truly know. It’s like wandering off in a strange city. There is a risk involved, as you could imagine things that you don’t like all that much.
That’s another thing you see while traveling. Of course, we all see young people walking about with their phone right in front of their face. It’s easy to make sport of, because it is ridiculous to anyone over the age of 40, but it says something about the age. You’ll also notice fewer tourists just wandering around a city. They use their GPS to go from point to point, as if the in-between bits are static. Just wandering around is not only scary to modern people, it is pointless. They can’t imagine the purpose of it.
As the doors of the custodial state slowly close on us, you have to wonder if one of the consequences is a loss of imagination. Maybe that is just a function of us getting dumber, but the immersion in virtual reality may play a part as well. In fact, that may be why people are so sanguine about their infantilization. Their minds are so busy in the virtual world, they are oblivious to what’s happening in the real world. Notice the concern for on-line censorship, but the indifference to an oligopoly controlling the financial system.
On the other hand, maybe the apparent lack of imagination is simply an end point, in the Spenglarian sense of history. The escape into the virtual world is not an escape at all, but rather a new way to experience the same old thing. Virtual reality is like a rebooting of an old movie or TV series. The person’s on-line life is the same character they play in real life, just on a different set. Like old people reminiscing about the old days, we’re simply busying ourselves as we wait to be washed away by whatever comes next.
quote “Once you enter, perspective begins to change. In the late 13th century when the castle was built, Europeans had not caught up to the Romans, in terms of engineering and architecture.”
For light lofty stone architecture a Gothic cathedral is way beyond anything the Romans built. Castles of the same period had thick walls and small outward windows because they were build to withstand attack.
The use of virtual reality to convey messages about a site – while visitors are at the real thing itself – reminds me of the time I was working in Peru and decided to visit Machu Picchu. I’d been living next to an abandoned Incan granary and getting close with the ruins was a deeply moving experience, so I decided to give it a go at the most famous of all Incan cities.
I chose to do the hike there to see more of the Andean country, but when I got to the summit, it was like walking into Disneyland. An upscale restaurant sat next to a group of turnstiles that looked like they belonged at an American metro stop. Coach buses screamed up the side of the mountain carrying (mostly Asian) tourists. A woman saw the Tawantin Suyu flag flying above the site and commented how nice it was that the Peruvians were honoring gay people by flying the LGBT colors. Her tour guide, a man in traditional clothes, didn’t bother to correct her.
In short, everything about Machu Picchu was circumscribed, watered-down, and sometimes completely distorted to fit the tourists’ comforts and preconceived ideas. Same with these virtual reality or “augmented reality” experiences – they take all the complexities, the human scale, and the amazing legacies and influences of major historical sites and boil them down into neat little interactive games or a glorified Pinterest photo album. And they take your eyes, ears, and other senses away from the supposed object of interest, so when you go home, you might have the facts about why a castle or monument was built, but you may have missed the strange old visitor who, wiping tears from his eyes, dragged his finger across an ancestor’s name carved deep into the unyielding rock.
Discovery. A wonderful thing indeed. I have often wondered if that is the driving force for archeologist and even architects being the first to discover or see something that inspires awe.
Fifty years ago humping through the triple canopy jungles of Vietnam I sometimes wondered if we were seeing some of the pristine creeks, critters and foliage that had not been seen or touched by humans for literally hundreds or even perhaps thousands of years. It helped me separate the horrors we regularly saw from the beauty of nature.
I prefer real life, but, right now, virtual is a God-send. I broke my leg a few days ago, and without access, I would be going nuts. With it, I can continue writing my book, research for it, entertain myself (our cable is limited and boring), enjoy podcasts, keep in touch with friends.
Like I said, a God-send.
I was inside “Domus Aurea” in 2017 that is still an excavation site with limited access to the public. It is a very dank place with a park above the site and one inters the site close to Colosseum in groups of 20. You have to have a security helmet on. We were in a room where there was a lot of paintings and hole in the ceiling from the renaissance. The painter Rafael accessed the site from that hole and was inspired form that to paint the ceilings in the buildings he made like “Villa Medici” We saw a 10.min video with googles on how the room might have looked like and the site. We where taken outside the room to see the whole place at that time. I think it was a good supplement to what we had seen.
When I was a kid, that was the magic of the Sears catalog. While you might be there for the toys (or Mr. Microphone), you discovered a lot of other things along the way you squirreled away for later contemplation. Same thing with browsing a magazine, using an Encyclopedia or taking a trip via car. There’s all sorts of interesting things to look at on your way to where/whatever. These days, we have Amazon with it’s search bar, single thought websites and air travel to get you there faster so you can “enjoy your time away”. The sense of discovery is gone (or going) and I don’t think it’s doing kids any service to be “vertically” brainy about one or two topics and yet miss everything in-between.
Here’s an imagination-building exercise for young people. It’s a crazy scenario, with no possible application to their future, but still, loads of fun:
A massive solar flare knocks out all electrical power in the world; your phone is dead, your TV is dead, all motor vehicles are dead, all the refrigerated food at the local supermarket that isn’t looted in 2-3 days rots, the safeguards on nuclear melt-down at our atomic plants rapidly degrade and fail, and winter is coming on. Plane traffic is at a standstill, and rumors abound that thousands of desperate and hungry people are leaving the cities and heading your way.
Write a 500-word story or essay based on this crazy and entirely impossible idea. Check your spelling and grammar, and don’t plagiarize or use racist language.
Yes…you go Pumpkin with your bad self! A Carrington event anyone?! Here, have one. Yes..loads of fun! A room full of deer in the headlights eyeballs indeed!
Had that experience in Berlin during a business dinner at the restaurant on top of the Reichstag. Looked over from my table and got this strange feeling of deja vu. Realized I was sitting on the spot where the iconic picture of the Soviet flag being planted on the roof was taken.
Unless one learns from the lessons of history you might as well be viewing dinosaur bones.
Didn’t Cicero have a line something like “To not know what happened before you were born is to be forever a child.”
A proper revolutionary movement on the Right, if there were such a thing would put the health of society above that of profit and would consider a ban on the manufacture and support for smart phones and similar society destroying devices.
Hell legislation saying that no phone shall contain GPS, be trackable when not used (you can’t really avoid tower tracking) and shall not allow any functions other than text speech (no E Mail as its too easy to hack) and maybe music player would do a ton of good to defog people
This would still allow tablets, laptops
The thing is though everyone of every race and every IQ is aware we are in a dystopia and are all waiting for the cute girl with the bow and arrow to save us
We should be doing this ourselves but we also know that it won’t be pretty and there are valid scenarios that parse out to “rocks fall, everybody dies.” and the best case is “the union dies. many die of famine and disease.” no one wants to start that either
The juice, whatever comes after anyway isn’t worth the proverbial squeeze.
The problem is that human life doesn’t work this way. We “should” this and we “should” that. Here and there, a man or woman will do this or that. It’s the nature of people in the aggregate to worry less about the future than about tomorrow’s dinner. I know – I’m among them.
I hate and fear the tidal wave that is about to roll over us. But human dignity requires that we see the tidal wave, hold our breath, say our prayers, and wish the survivors well.
“The juice… isn’t worth the proverbial squeeze.”
Oh don’t you worry, me laddie; whatever comes, you may be quite sure that the Juice will be squeezing good and hard.
Off Topic…a reaction to the official report about the Notre Dame fire by men who once oversaw the safety and condition of the building:
https://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2019/04/officially-it-was-accident.html?m=1
Thanks so much for posting this link. It seems well written/translated and talks to serious people who know Notre Dame and how it was built, maintained and protected. Glanced at the homepage as well. Good info on what’s really happening in France.
Anyone who’d like to read a good book about the construction of Notre Dame, as well as the culture capable of producing it, should hunt down Allan Temko’s ‘Notre Dame of Paris’, from 1955. It’s in that old Time-Life series that used to go out to subscribers back in the literate decades of post-war America.
This is extremely interesting, though not really surprising. My own prediction is that Notre Dame will not be rebuilt; they’ll tidy up, add a sleek visitor’s center, and that with time Notre Dame will be presented as the Parisian version of the Roman Colosseum, a relic of ancient times.
The other day I was carting around one of my kids with her friends. We somehow got talking about the internet and how things have changed since I was kid. I told them honestly that I felt sorry for them, that while the internet is incredibly useful and, in many ways, improves their world compared to mine as a kid, it’s taken something away from them.
I told them that they’ll never be lost, never be truly cut off, never be as independent and free as I was. Sure you’ll always know what’s going on, where the party is, but my best memories as a kid were the happy accidents born from friends and me trying to find something to do. My parents couldn’t know where I was, so they let me go. I was free. You’ll never be that free. It’s impossible.
To my great surprise, they agreed with me. (I just assumed that they’d take what I said as some “in my day, things were better” rant.) Somehow, they understand that they’re missing out on something, even if they can’t quite figure out what it is.
I told them that they’ll never be lost, never be truly cut off, never be as independent and free as I was.
When I traveled as a young man, you would be away for a couple of weeks, and during those weeks, you had absolutely zero idea about what was going on at home, except if someone had died and a relative spent $50 calling your hotel. I still remember the feeling of coming back after being away, a very distinct feeling of estrangement. The internet has taken that away.
Also, I was a boy scout in the late seventies. When we were 10-12 years old, we ran out of volunteer leaders – we were a bunch of hellions – and we were told that congratulations! You’re now Eagle Scouts, now piss off and scout so we can have the weekend off. We hitchhiked and camped all over Zeeland and southern Sweden on our own.
Amazing times – if you could stomach the mosquitos and the weather, Sweden was a bona fide earthly paradise back then. I’ve lost count of the times that Swedes have invited us into their homes when they found us cold, wet and hungry, and if you stuck out your thumb, you had a ride inside the first five cars; people often stopped unprompted to offer you one.
Not a phone in sight, of course, our parents didn’t have the foggiest notion of our whereabouts. And nothing to do but play with axes and set fire to things all day long.
A few years later, the first portable LCD-games came out…
One of our specialties was smoke bombing people. You build a log fire, and when you have a solid blaze going, you cover it in green fir branches until all the flames are dampened. After a few seconds, you’ll get a fat, yellow smoke in absolutely unreal quantities. You keep adding fir branches until a grown-up comes around and starts yelling at you. In the right weather and with enough fir, you can smoke bomb half a county.
Felix…..what a pleasure to read this post! Love your smoke bomb story. Can make pictures in my head of your kid adventures….am still laughing. Great world for guys to be guys! Being a country kid, girls also did moderately crazy stuff, just not as juked up as guys. During the great rain winter deluges of the late 50’s, a neighbor boy and I would lower ourselves by way of big tree roots into the roaring creek, barefooted, and clinging to the roots would fight our way upstream squirting adrenaline out of our ears. No helmet or knee pads for us. Climb a tree and disappear for awhile.
Back then, parents had no idea what their kids were up to half of the time. In my neighborhood there was an almost-disused railroad track, servicing perhaps 2-3 trains per day. The ditches along it were brimming with frogs, toads and newts, and if you put a coin on the rail, the wheels of the trains would hammer it flat. One day my mom saw us and went ballistic. I still remember her telling me not to play there as being the most unreasonable thing I’d ever heard.
In Sweden (where land is cheap) some of the indigenous folks are planning to buy up entire rural counties and coup the local authorities to make kebab-free communes, so they can let their children play outside.
If it were me, I’d take the opportunity to seriously curtail use of electronic devices, take down cell phone towers and internet connections in my statelet, and make computer games cause for expulsion. Ideally, children should not lay hands on a computer (or eyes on a television) until they’re 15-16 years old.
Taking kids camping still works, but it’s a brief intermission, and there’s always the knowledge that you can turn that phone back on, even if you don’t plan on doing it. There’s a layer to their personalities – to their self-esteem, their sense of being able to figure shit out completely on their own – that isn’t getting developed. It’s not their fault.
I’m not saying that they won’t be alright, just that they are missing out on something makes you a better, happier person. Much like playing sports helps in many ways beyond the physical aspect and education is more than memorizing formulas and dates. Being cut off and figuring shit out develops a person. It’s why so many trust fund kids are fuck ups. They were never cut off and had to figure shit out on their own. And it messes them up.
Please let the world as we know it be washed away sooner rather than later. I’m so bored with this era. Even if the next era involves hardship, at least the people will be more interesting. The culture is stone dead right now.
Just wait until people can jack in directly!
This is all just an incarnation of Plato’s Cave. Whose to say we aren’t all already living in the matrix.
Check out the movie “Surrogates” with Bruce Willis. In the near future everyone has a robotic surrogate that is out in the world, and they are all in Wall-E lounge chairs, with their senses connected to their surrogate.
Imagination is a liability in our neo-Puritan society, a wellspring of potential Hatethoughts. Imaginative children learn to channel it into fantasy/sci-fi and gaming after being shame-circled. Notice the correlation between Woke ascendancy and Comic-Con culture. The fan-dom cultures with media-empire “universes” like Marvel also serve as imaginative bottlenecks, a creative version of Caligula’s “one single neck” which can be manipulated top-down.
I’ve also noticed how the internet and cell phones have attenutated my own attention span over the years despite growing up in the pre-internet age. Along with the attention-span shrinkage, my sense of adventure/exploration has been atrophied by gaming. Spending way too much time in that scene when I was younger soured me on messy, opaque reality that couldn’t be dissected, modified, “power-gamed” or re-loaded like a simulation. As a Gen-X’er I had some quality time growing up without “plugging in,” which somewhat innoculated me, so those younger must suffer much worse from this.
The side which learns how to use these bugs/features of modren psychology to best advantage will win those generations. 2016 makes me hopeful that we’re leading that arms race.
Brilliant. You win today’s internet.
The fewer people able to tell you which way is north, the more relevant Bowden’s comments on vanguardism become.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YVrF2DdTp0
Shades of South Parks “BuddaBox”
Neil Postman nailed it a long time ago with his book “Entertaining Ourselves to Death”. Except it wasn’t the TV that will do us in.
Wow, exactly!
Everywhere I’ve ever been to view history (Lexington, Antietam, Ia Drang) has seemed much smaller then I envisioned and yet it’s the close-quarter proximity of it all that makes it desperately, “human”.
Also, the structures were generally very small, except for palaces and cathedrals. Extra indoor room meant extra expense and effort, so economy of space was the rule, except where the expression of magnitude and greatness was front and center. Again, palaces, cathedrals, and, to a lesser extent, parish churches. A conceit of our times is that many people can own vast amounts of unnecessary and mostly unused personal indoor space. Which is also a signal that we are placing more value on ourselves rather than our relationship with others and with God, in how we configure indoor spaces.
Antietam is to me the most haunting of Civil War battlefields. The proximity of all the arenas in which the sequences of combat occurred, the claustrophobia of Bloody Lane, the narrowness of Burnside’s Bridge, and perhaps the recognition of what a lost opportunity it was for McClellan. It is intimate and awesome (in that word’s original meaning). The first time I was there the hair literally stood up on the back of my neck as I moved from the cornfields to Bloody Lane.
Or, McClellan was not a poor battle commander but rather his intention was to not win the war, a sentiment which he later ran for President upon. If Stewart had not gone shoe shopping in Pennsylvania McClellan would be President and the birth of Leviathan would have to wait.
There is no imagination because there is nothing to imagine.
You don’t see Notre Dame Cathedral as a fortress or a Castle, but that is what it is in the spiritual war. The stained glass, the statues, the paintings, all point to the spiritual world, heaven and hell. You can’t see it with the senses, but your grandfather would have insisted it was there, and described the war we are in where the decisive blow was struck 20 centuries ago which we commemorate this week.
Notre Dame was not merely a Fortress in the spiritual battleground, but also the images were attempts to describe the warfare, angels and demons as well as the saints and sinners. We don’t imagine there are angels or heaven, so we can’t create something angelic or heavenly. We can’t even imagine eternity so as to construct something that would take a century to build.
But it gets worse. Even my parents had a sense that meat came from ranches and vegetables came from farms – or our garden. There was hunting season when we could dine on venion. Nature is going out in the woods, or even the grasslands and deserts and encountering it. Even shooting, gutting, and eating rabbits, or even fishing while camping.
Now “nature” is like the original zoos that didn’t even attempt to do some kind of habitat – there was a lion in a cage that looked like a prison cell. Now even that is replaced by going to Wikipedia. Children are worried about walruses and polar bears, but wouldn’t be able to identify one in the wild. Food comes from the grocery, or the distribution warehouse. Or they will get upset at the meat packing plants or poultry farms on occasion. But even then they don’t have an idea of natural v.s. unnatural.
So they have neither heaven nor earth. They live in a very small hell where they are not even capable of misery. They just put on their headphones and listen to mind numbing music, and interact with dopamine games (better than Huxley’s “soma”). Artificial excitement – like artificial sweetener with no nutritional value.
Notre Dame was not merely a Fortress…
Is.
Could we please use present tense about Our Lady of Paris?
Another “human-sized” spot is Little Big Horn–Custer’s Last Stand. Worth a digression to the spot if you’re traveling West by car Up Nort (or East, too…)
“As the doors of the custodial state slowly close on us, you have to wonder if one of the consequences is a loss of imagination”
I think you may have this backwards, is it not more likely that lack of imagination comes first? Who that could imagine freedom would chose to be babysat?
Tocqueville imagined it, and predicted it for the democratic mind.
Muscles atrophy if they are not exercised. Similarly, cognitive ability atrophies if the mind is not challenged with problems to solve. And in our modern affluent lives, it is easy to avoid exercising the mind and body because there are no existential imperatives to motivate these activities. This leads to loss or lack of robustness. As long as the dominant environment is free of hardship and risk, lack of robustness is a dormant liability. If the environment changes and existential risk makes a comeback, then there are going to be a lot dead bodies littering the landscape for a while.
This must be Genius Day. Keep ’em comin’!
“I have not noticed Men of Color trapped in a digital anime world. Men of Color are adventurous and bold. They do not play video games. They play sports and like to go out and have fun”.
(While wearing clothing made from synthetic materials developed in chemistry labs by the Pale. Shoes using rubber and synthetic technology allow them to jump high for balls made from synthetic materials, and put them through hoops or crossbars forged using technologies completely foreign to them. Playing on courts fashioned from materials etc…)
Who is trapped in whose world, Tom?
“Is it any wonder that white women are increasingly marrying and bearing the children of Men of Color.”
Given the 90% rate of desertion, of inevitable single motherhood, of abuse, or maybe visiting Mr. Adventure in jail, or wondering where Mr. Adventure is tonight, what new woman he is coupling with, also to be abandoned in Mr. Adventure’s quest for dopaminergic rewards…wait, this is sounding like the Man of Color’s life is simply an obsessive quest for transient pleasure…using real life and real people like white boys use insubstantial digital characters.
The difference, Tom? Men of Color are, by their conscienceless actions, actively destroying ties of kith and kin, Culture and Civilization, while “going out and having fun,” while white people understand the difference between play and life, between nurturing and abandoning, between prudence and patience and reactive, unconstrained violence.
Like the difference between a people capable of the foresight to build a cathedral, even though it takes 200 years, to a people who are singularly incapable of building anything at all.
It is the difference between host and parasite, Tom. Hosts confer life: parasites exist only to drain life from hosts, even if it means the death of the host.
Now there’s a difference we can all celebrate. Except for people like Tom, who wish to celebrate the parasite.
Barn, if I may add to your brilliant post, the sports that they are playing were also invented by white men.
Escapism may be part of this phenomenon. People are so boxed in in the modern world, everything has been reduced to some mundane economic value.
VR may be the current generation’s spy, thriller, horror, serial novel. When your civilization’s big dream is a fancy new app, or a new housing development over the next ridge, or a new public policy that seems looney…All the while you have few deep personal connections because you’ve moved over and over, your old neighborhood has been turned into a foreign country, your job is a form of mindless repetition: it’s only purpose is to pay you enough so you can live some place you really don’t want to live and you can then fill it with stuff you don’t really need…
It’s escapism or eat a bullet…or revolution.
I’m voting for revolution.
Bruce Charlton’s free online book, of interest, I’m sure, to readers of this blog.
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.com/
Wonderful blog…..enjoy his thoughts very much.
Just read it. Very interesting. Thanks for posting the link.
These kids today… When I was young–blah, blah. I’m old too, but I am sympathetic to the younger ones. I recently took a motorcycle trip to Alaska and back. While there was a lot to see, the sameness of modern strip mall North America really gets to you after a while. Highways were one constructed in harmony with the contours of the land, but modern methods make all roads seem the same. The architecture of the American southwest once had a distinctive stucco and adobe flair to it, but when you’ve seen one concrete parking garage you’ve seen ’em all. I’ve traveled a lot, and the sameness is getting depressing. It sucks to go all the way to Australia from the USA and feel like most of the crap is the same crap you left behind. Maybe I prefer virtual reality these days. I never saw the grandeur of Notre Dame, and now I never will except as online images.
Those harmonious highways were also often deathtraps. There’s a reason we build with wider curves and lower grades now.
So true. Boring, modern buildings are often safer as well–less prone to fires, etc. On the other hand death is underrated. Perhaps a little bit of natural selection would benefit humanity. If you can’t navigate a series of curves, perhaps you should not reproduce either. Anyway, much of modern reality is boring and ugly, while I’m told Minecraft is interesting.
I’ve noticed during the past decade or so that there are a lot more fences along hiking trails in the Appalachians and the Rockies near precipitous drops. Some are even closed or rerouted.
The Booby travels in Latin America a lot. When you take a boat no one demands you wear a gov’t approved life jacket, if you want a cigar they bring you an ash tray (even though it’s technically not allowed)… in fact the only place that wouldn’t let the Booby have a cigar was a place owned by an American white bitch, who refused the Booby’s request and informed him how many feet from her propery line he had to stand while he smoked his cigar.
The only Latins scrambling to get to the USA are the losers, the hopelessly impoverished, the dim, and the criminals. Those who have good incomes wouldn’t move to the fascist USA for anything. Neither would the Booby.
North America is for whipped mama’s boys.
Enjoy your matriarchy, boys.
Count the number of road signs on any given stretch of highway in the US sometime. It’s almost silly: every little curve and hill gets signage. I know this probably started with sign companies lobbying their local officials, but it wouldn’t have happened if the reasoning – “safety” – wasn’t so ingrained in US society. Slightly related: if you’re one of those goobers inclined to get misty thinking about how the USA is a “free country,” try popping the top on a cold one and walking down the street sometime. Take a watch and see how long it is before men with guns roll up to “check things out” and “make sure everything is OK.” And remember, these are the guys some of you think will be on “our” side on the day.
If I hear one more boomer talk about all our freedom here in Murica, I can’t be held responsible for what happens.
My sister went rock climbing in Italy and she said she couldn’t believe how nonchalant they were about safety. In America everything dangerous is roped off and there are signs all over like we’re a bunch of retards, which maybe we are. We also have a lot of lawyers looking for a payday. This country can’t end fast enough.
People keep plunging over the rims of the Grand Canyon. Recently, a Japanese tourist was taking a selfie and backed right off the edge. Won the Darwin award.
It’s a good thing we’ve made it safe for morons to perpetuate their genes, which would have otherwise been removed from the pool.
And clutter our interstates with orange cones, temporary exit signs, inexplicable detours, shifting temporary lanes, 6-mile long concrete walls hugging the inner lanes, all the impedimenta of everlasting interstate maintenance and ‘upgrading’.
Nothing says ‘safety’ like driving through an unfamiliar metropolitan area at night, in the rain, with trailer-trucks spraying water into your windshield as you burn your eyes reading the signs, hoping not to miss the crucial detour that will decide whether you end up in Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, or the ‘hood.
Yep, at least we’re avoiding those deathtraps.
The behavior you are describing is that of white “men”.
I have not noticed Men of Color trapped in a digital anime world. Men of Color are adventurous and bold. They do not play video games. They play sports and like to go out and have fun.
Only white boys retreat into a digital fantasy world when things get tough.
Is it any wonder that white women are increasingly marrying and bearing the children of Men of Color.
This is getting tiring Tiny. Up your game,it’s as if you are cutting and pasting your comments now. You are cucked white guy, even for you this is low T.
Men of color are entirely preoccupied with these white “men” you describe.
LOL.
Men of Color retreat into a fantasy world where they live in a civilization that they actually created – instead of having to deal with the reality of history – which shows that they’ve never been able to create a civilization that matches that of any of the other races.
Reminds me of a comment I saw years ago in a comment about Obama: ” I heard him talking about Keynesian economics, then I realized he had said Kenyan economics….. Grass huts for everybody!!”
If white women are “increasingly marrying men of color” – I would ask: why are “Men of Color” not marrying women of color?
Isn’t this an admission that white women are superior?
Seems like a admission right down at the genetic level that you want to make sure your progeny survive – by being at least partially white.
Wasn’t there an article somewhere out there about black women being at the bottom of the dating pecking order?
Seems like (yet another) admission of where blacks stand in the genetic pecking order – doesn’t it?
You’re right. The POC’s desire for white women is an admission of the superiority of white women.
I don’t know about the rest of the country but I don’t see white women increasingly becoming wives or baby-mamas of blacks. It’s not common and when happens, it’s almost always very unattractive, fat, underclass white women who hook up with blacks. It’s been that way my whole life and I am middle aged plus. Basically, it’s white women who aren’t really desired by white men. That’s not to say that there are no white men who would take these women. But, the women are held in higher regard by a black man than they would be by a white man. The white man would be thinking, “I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel.” The black man is thinking, “Hey, I got a white woman!”
The big problem with the black guy white woman thing is that it is my impression that most intelligence genes are passed on through the male. Not a fact, just something I think I have observed. I won’t google it because I figure almost anything out there about this will be a lie because of the political implications.
Working with High School age students, this comment is true. Most white kids are obsessed with Video games, the minority kids have jobs and play sports. Sad but true.
The minority kids have jobs? Please. The minority adults don’t have jobs.
I am currently a substitute teacher in high schools and I can assure you kids of all races waste time on games and social media almost all day long, every day.
Just a question out of curiosity: in your experience are these white kids uninterested in work, or do their parents not allow them to work?
When I was in high school in the mid 90s we all had afterschool/weekend jobs. I get the impression from reading online however, that many of these helicopter parents nowadays don’t want Johnny working after school. Distracts the poor dear from his studies don’tcha know.
I recall, back in the ‘70s, in high school, college, and in my first minimum wage jobs, there was occasionally that girl. She was pretty enough, and intelligent enough, seemed like a nice person, but she was totally infatuated with the black guys. That’s all she lived for. Follow them around, stare at them, hang out with them. TD, you are that girl.
Of course, she no doubt ended up a single welfare mom, with a brood of mulatto kiddies, watching a lot of tv and waiting for the EBT card to refill. The one her family doesn’t really want to talk about. It’s called “living with the choices you make”.
“Men of Color are adventurous and bold.”
If by this you mean “have short time preferences and commit lots of stupid crimes, usually involving shooting each other for sneakers” I can only agree. And oh yeah, white women are the least likely to marry outside their race than any other women. But of course, what would a TD post be without lies?
Collins, I typically am grateful for your hateful anti-white screeds, because the remind us all what we’re up against and that the cost of failure is our extinction.
That being said, today’s post is low-energy and silly on its face. One of Scott Adams’ rules for persuasion is that to be persuasive one must tell the truth. What you said today is just laughably false.
Come back again when you’re ready to tell us how POC will put us in a shallow grave and we’re too cucked to resist. You might actually be onto something there.
Ah no. Good try Duck but I live among Men of Color and they are doing the same zombie routine with an added chaser of internecine violence and general stupidity on top
Some of my Mexican neighbors are living a bit Mas En El Mundo Real but its all Cervesa Y Trabajo downhill and they aren’t having kids either
The Latino TFR has dropped much faster than the White TFR and is at or below replacement now.
I know more than a few Hispanics who are like “Don’t have kids till you live, get a good job and an education” we call this poz around here and they get it as bad or worse than we do within one generation max of coming here
The national TFR among fertile age people is 1.8 BTW, 1.6 for White and maybe 2.0 or so for other groups and falling fast.
I know you are almost certainly Hasbara (a paid troll) but in the unlikely event you are a true believer , don’t be a victim of your own cognitive biases .
Many, maybe most of us know and live near POC’s . Some of them we even like and we are far from ignorant about them.
I’ve even read some of your suggested works though I can’t sya they were all that good.
And yes Z folks this stuff is far more for outsiders who might be confused by Tom Collins here and for my amusement . I’m not taking this nonsense too seriously . Its just fun to reply with facts and logic, something that is in short supply here in clown world.
You all are too hard on TC. His boyfriend was stolen from him by a white woman who then bore him a son. “That should have been OUR son Tyrone! I got that gender reassignment surgery for US!”. He will never forgive those flaxen haired, blue eyed succubi.
Suck it up. Us white men are the standard by all other men are measured. You inspire me to oppose you and your ideology the more you post your hatred.
Bring on the day of reckoning.
*fart*
How would you notice POC trapped in a digital world if its…the digital world?
Everyone under the age of 40 is on their phones constantly. Nice way to buy into the propaganda though. Throw back a few more drinks Mr. Collins.
Seeing what some 8 years olds make in a game like Minecraft leads me to think the imagination is alive and well, just being used in different ways, toward different ends. However, real-world constraints breed creativity and inventiveness that artificial constraints simply can’t. I remember as a 8 year old building a “dam” out of mud in the creek at the bottom of the farm valley near our house. We must have spent days out there all summer long. There’s something to be said for doing things in the real, instead of virtual, world.
My 8-year old son also shows the same creativity, both in games like Minecraft, and in the real world. Just last night he was outside using stuff he found in the yard to build a “home for worms”. He certainly doesn’t lack for imagination. On the other hand, I have to wonder if, as he gets older and more plugged in to the virtual world), will his real-world imagination suffer? I really hope not, because it is truly something to behold right now.
My 9 year old watches videos of other people playing Minecraft. I’m worried.
Your son is probably subscribed to PewDiePie, so you should feel quite encouraged.
Destined for the Feds, or worse, Twitter,
“We all see young people walking about with their phone right in front of their face. It’s easy to make sport of, because it is ridiculous to anyone over the age of 40, but it says something about the age.”
While enjoying dinner in the Atlantis/BistroNapa in Reno, I observed a group of 8 young Chinese at a nearby table. The town is booming (with more than 7,000 Tesla workers alone, the factory is responsible for increasing manufacturing employment in the Reno-Sparks area by 55% since 2014) bringing in a lot of Asian high IQs. They were really young, throwing around money like no tomorrow (endless trays of raw oysters and high end liquor, piles of food and dessert), and most notably everyone had a cell phone in front of their face, with occasional hoots, squeals and comments on phone content.
I’m an old girl and feel like a stranger in a strange land. I get perverse pleasure whenever I hear of a dope with a cell phone walking into a street pole or bad-me in front of a train or crash their car. No sympathy from me, straight Darwinism in action.
I ruefully have wishful moments for that EMP so I can watch their hyper attention spans disintegrate and blow apart their brain while I back away murmuring..huh… I may die but sure enjoy watching you writhe and fall apart. Idiots.
I was raised in country and take great pleasure that I can be still, and like my Navajo neighbors to the south, I can wordlessly know what is about me most times, can hear what bird is singing, see the clouds and know when a storm is approaching, enjoy a light breeze, feel the humidity change, quietly watch the deer behind the house and not spook them.
The husband is away hiking, so last night thought I’d finish the last two episodes of Morse (been putting off the death episode) but didn’t, just sat with no music-no stim-no TV and finished reading Killer Angels and adding next Civil War book to list. When I am still and content, the cats quietly come up and attach themselves to me. The window was open and later in the evening, a red fox came hunting by, a Doppler effect of fox screams, the cats’ ears alert and bodies poised for action. Then I just sat and enjoyed “Contentedness.” I am content….and it is so wonderful. Am sorry for people who can’t be still physically and mentally, and what they miss in the real world. I intend to die like the old Navajo….just put me outside and turn me toward the mountains. “He who troubles his own house will inherit the wind, And the foolish will be servant to the wisehearted.” Dear God, I ask, deliver me from fools and idiots.
Magic is at the heart of imagination. The magic to perceive beyond what we can see. The magic to feel emotions based on no events at all. We sing with joy when we encounter a story that resonates in our heart of hearts. All in all, a good story is worth its weight in gold and begs to be retold by us, although Click HERE to read more
Hey front fault that was some pretty good writing. As I’ve gotten older I’ve had to resist the impulse to become curmudgeonly. I just repeat, The Kids Are Alright, like a Buddhist chant. I’ve got one National Merit scholar that I just sent to college. His twin sister just about killed me. Notwithstanding, I think this next generation might be something new. Maybe hyper creative. They start out on Roblox graduate to Minecraft and then then proceed the very sophisticated strategy games like Civilization kebal space Program and a variety of others. I would also offer another interpretation a z man’s experience ok touka Castle. I remember going to Civil War battlefields as a teen. I was like big deal it’s a field. These kids have the compendium of human knowledge in their phones. If they’re looking up the history of the place they’re actually enhancing the experience. I’ve seen this with my kids. If they run across a literary reference or something they don’t know, they look it up instantly. Something as simple as watching an old movie with them turns into an interactive history lesson. All this stated I do worry about the hyper short attention spans.
Morning! I hear what you are saying. Do get they shall inherit the world. I don’t think this is as simple as all the old farts of every previous generation fuss at the youngers. These are quantum leap changes. Surly there was some of this fear of the future when the car replaced the horse.
However, this technology reshapes reality and reshapes the brain. Maybe I have a streak of the apocalyptic in me, but you never know when the underpinning of civilisation can be shredded due to societal forces/decline, i.e.Roman Empire, or natural disasters. Individually there are some smart and capable younger people, i.e. ranch kids back here really capable. They won’t all disappear. Some of the city nitwits aren’t capable of thinking their way out of a box, no survival instinct. The brain has not been civilised into a positive can do attitude that allows problem solving. Wah..Wah.. Weep does not. Combination brain and body weak.
There will be a die-off as we go down this path. Suicide alone as many young people have no purpose. Easily manipulated. Will see. Partly why I left the Left Coast and big cities and don’t live in a “corridor” of population like Salt Lake.
Compared to the alternatives of being a pure consumer of tv and a pure producer of subversive literature on paper or public speaking, one must conclude the internet is quite a step up from either direction. The tv stultified boomers into unthinking cattle who war over approved issues like abortion. The pamphleteer and the corner crier are easily prevented from spreading their message by antifa or their uniformed allies.
While a financial oligarchy is likely to crush the last vestige of the right at some point, it would be disingenuous to assume dissidents arent aware of both that issue and platform access. The primary reason that the latter comes up first and that both are intractible is that only by having a platform can one complain about their loss of a bank account, and only by having a tiny modicum of an allied faction in the elite can either be addressed. With no elite sympathy to speak of the clock counts down to un-personing with no reprieve.
The clock counts down, but not to a wimper…
True. The more people they deplatform, the more they will find themselves having to deplatform. This is a virtual/real beheading of sorts, and the power wielded by the elites is a social guillotine. The victim is left alive, but the effect is the same as if they were killed. The story spreads with a multiplier effect that is stronger than gossip, and with the story go all of the effects the story has. Many learn the cost of dissent and conform, many conform and resent the fact, and some resolve to await the storming of the Bastille.
In my experience, most kids do both online and real. Minecraft is one my grandkids just love, but my grandson also likes robotics and electronic tools, my granddaughter uses paper and art tools to create real works, and both enjoy walking and biking, both alone and with others.
Also, both are quite accomplished cooks, and have assisted with the yearly canning.