In a time of crisis, whether self-inflicted or naturally occurring, you learn a lot about people in how they react to the crisis. They say pressure reveals character, but in the context of something like this pandemic crackdown, pressure reveals your place in relation to the center of cosmopolitan globalism. Not in a physical sense, but in the economic and cultural sense of it. The closer you are to the center, the more enthusiastic you are for the mandatory shuttering of society.
It is one of those things that transcends politics, in that you see people who normally disagree sharing the same side now. The people involved in political media, for example, are all on-board with the crackdown. In fact, they think it should go on forever, as it gives them something to squabble about in a meaningless way. The people in the vast unproductive sector of the economy, like the media and politics, have no stake in the economy, so this is just another thing to fill their time.
In another sense, the cultural sense, this event has revealed the provincialism of the typical city dweller. It is fair to say that if the hot spot for the virus had been Appalachia, it would barely rate a segment on the cable chat shows. Because the center was New York City, the home of the media centers, it is the only thing worth discussing. The most provincial people on earth live in New York City and media people are some of the dumbest, making for the perfect storm.
For example, the people protesting the crackdown are people with a real stake in society, as in a job and bills to pay. They are not motivated by esoteric debates about political philosophy. They don’t have a walk-in closet full of moral signifiers they use to display their membership in narrow identity groups. They just try to live their lives the best they can under the conditions set for them. The conditions are becoming untenable now, so they are making as much noise as they can about it.
The typical cosmopolitan looks at these protests and just assumes the people doing them are ignorant and confused. “Don’t they know how dangerous it is out there?” the cosmopolitans incredulously demand. The fact is, the protesters know exactly how dangerous it is out there – not very dangerous at all – and they are willing to bet on their own judgement about it. The cosmos, on the other hand, know only what is told to them by the mass media. They let the system decide these things for them.
That is one of those things that does not always turn up when times are easy. If you live in or around an urban center, you grow used to being bossed around. You get used to depending on the system. The Manhattan media employee rides subways, walks past cops and relies on a vast system to supply her with food. She thinks she is tech savvy because she has a lot of cool apps on her iPhone. In reality, she is like an oxpecker living on the rhinovirus of the cosmopolitan system.
In contrast, the guy living in a distant suburb or flyover country spends most of his time away from the state. He depends on the supply chain, like everyone else, to put stuff in the stores, but he works in the supply chain. He has some idea how the stuff magically appears on the shelves. He drives his own car to those stores and has to rely on himself to get it repaired when necessary. His days are not filled with self-actualizing, but rather the mundane tasks of living.
Real or imagined, the person living far away from the epicenter of cosmopolitan globalism has a sense of independence. Government is not a visible part of his everyday existence, so he does not instinctively trust it. The boys and girls living outside the economy, whether on a campus, in a government job or in some corner of the vast, unproductive part of the economy, they trust the system completely. They have to, because it provides so much of what makes up their life.
Who is more deluded about reality is debatable. We may get to find out if the crackdown lasts much longer. Parts of the supply chain are breaking. It will not be long before shelves are empty of essentials. The people sure they can make it without government may get to test that theory. On the other hand, the cosmos living in the urban areas will find out if the system that makes their life possible can protect them. Cosmopolitan globalism is about to enter the blast furnace of reality.
This raises a question, of course. The system imagined for us by our ruling elites is highly urbanized and dominated by the government and its agents. Social credit systems may be run by tech companies, but they do so on behalf of the same people who control government. They imagine the future being a cleaner, glass and steel version of Manhattan, where people are like corpuscles in the system. In such a system, does it make sense to maintain the charade of democracy?
The current crisis gives us a hint. The people constantly yapping about “our democracy” were quick to pull the plug on the primaries. If you’re willing to send cops after people walking on the beach, just to make a point about who decides who can go outside, you’re probably going to have no qualms about ending the voting charade. What’s the point of asking the people when you don’t really care what they think? You can be sure that the urban rubes will go along with it.
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Just catching up…
As always, Z’s imagination is entertaining! Cosmopolitan socitey is the future for the exact reason dirt people try to taunt them… they dont need to know where their food comes from… they are the reason food is created!
Blue states support scum states. Fact. Sorry. Fact. The globalists have already won… the servants who complain are just the help…
I personally have enjoyed the nice break… 2020 elections are going to be a rude awakening. Anyone with a real job is still getting paid… and, you have the clown telling people to ingest bleach…. hilarious! Dirt people are being taught a valuable lesson…
If we haven’t figured it out yet Trump is not our Savior and He can not save our country by himself! Any more the GEORGE WASHINGTON WON THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR BY HIMSELF. He promised to give the power back to We The People who it rightfully belongs to! But it should be obvious to us all He can not give the power of the out of control government bureaucracy (Deep State) back to us. WE MUST TAKE IT BACK OR OUR KIDS WILL NEVER BE FREE! If we are unwilling to stand in the streets and demand out PUBLIC SERVANTS KEEP THEIR OATH AND NOT DICTATE BUT SERVE US! We are not the sort that can keep the republic our founders and so many after have bled and died for and the American Dream is dead! I will be at the capitol in Lincoln on D Day June 6th join me and make a statement to our elected official that you are still Americans! I just finished this song that expresses my thoughts and my heart on where we are! https://soundcloud.com/user262008952/if-not-now-when/comment-952866046
I liked this a lot
“She thinks she is tech savvy because she has a lot of cool apps on her iPhone. In reality, she is like an oxpecker living on the rhinovirus of the cosmopolitan system.”
When I use it, I’ll cite its source, I do think one should, Don’t you?
I agree with Z ; Small business is the opiate of the bourgeois.
Would that it were not so.
speaking of the urbanite provincials, i have met many of them probably being bred of them. thus perhaps they haven’t only been (de)formed by environment and the left’s catch of the culture, but also of the breeding patterns and thus genetics.
the urbanites are on one hand the lesser sons of the wealthy families who didn’t amount to much and couldn’t get the job and girl right after college and flee to a nice burb (or leave the homestead); in case of a multiracial nation, he may downgrade to a cute spicy darkie, if he is good at mating at all; in case of a monoracial degraded white nation, he hangs with his gang, has a tattooed pot-smoking girl, may get married or divorced with a kid or two, as long as all the mates spend Saturdays at the pub. usually corporate drone, of easy laughter, but some anxiety or simply fakeness lurking. the Ed Norton in Fight Club guy. the girls are similarly degraded corporate fakes.
a few generations of these patterns in urban settings since the industrial era dawned, and one can see the genetic degeneracy rise in celebrities and socialites for example (Paris Hilton comes to mind). plus, without freedom of association/segregation, these degraded upper class genes are also mixed with the better of the lower/darker classes, which results in both being negatively affected – one only has to see how crazy multiracial people can be, while also how the leaders among the lower class tend to sell out to the system and/or make up their own, due to wanting to belong genetically to upper classes (either by wealth/race/culture/all). thus segregation or at least freedom of association needing to return. only then can all groups organically collaborate or not, within nations; and then nations among themselves can choose to organically ally or not; as God’s Providence may will.
As cliche as it sounds, these are truly strange times. There are so many distortions, perversions and aberrations that it is impossible to get your thinking onto solid ground. None here have any idea of “normal” life. In each and every one of our lifetimes, we have had “good and proper” period which we instinctively contrast with less enjoyable ones. Coupled with ones developmental stages, it makes for an indecipherable mess.
We can all entertain romantic notions of the past, be they rural or urban but all are just nostalgia. Neither will tell us what to do today, or tomorrow.
We all find ourselves in unknown waters. Instead of reminiscing and grumbling about our foul fortunes, maybe we should all decide where we want to go from here. After that, hopefully, we can make a plan to get there.
Great post Z. I used to see much of society as divided between those who grew the pie and those who simply divided it up so that they could get some of it. Now the supply chain may be the better paradigm.
Speaking of cosmopolitans. Did you see that Occasional Cortez is urging a boycott of work in states that are opening up? I guess she expects the supply chain fairy to make the things she wants to purchase appear. Besides who needs work when we have ubi and printing presses?
I hear big-boobed Latina Congresswomen are good eatin’.
I miss the good ole days of harpies in pussy hats impotently screeching about the NAZI in the whitehouse.
You know, before they decided enmass to enthusiastically support their local NAZI blocjleiter.
great essay. yes, urbanity is easier to pozz by the larger amount of available sins contained in its increased material focus. the countryside is full of sins too, perhaps different kinds, but also more room for occasionally escaping into secluded devotion. the devil does tempt in the desert, but he rules from Babylon. then again, Babylon shall be replaced by the New Zion one day, so its citizens may yet be saved – if (((Old Zion))) doesn’t return, that is…
“The people sure they can make it without government may get to test that theory.” — Z-man
Well, no we will not. A failed state in total chaos because of the actions of the State does not magically heal if the State says “well you market anarchists show us how it is done” as the people kill each other in the streets. A FAILED STATE is not anarchy; it is chaos. And the equating of those two words has been a master stroke of accomplishment on the part of the ruling class.
There’s a reason there’s never been an anarcho-anything state that has lasted more than a few years, and it’s not “it hasn’t been done right, yet.”
Vizzini, I hate to disagree with you but there was this time after Rome fell where a lot of the monks ended up in Ireland. The Irish did not have a written language at the time and the monks started keeping records. They did so for a thousand years.
They recorded something that is most odd — here is a very short description of what they recorded. (remember, no State is not the same as “no governance” as people will always seek to instill order)
https://markstoval.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/1000-years-of-irish-anarchy/
I hope this is deep enough into the end of a thread were few see it as I am now beyond arguing about it — modern man is doomed. The end really is upon us.
Good reading thanks. It doesn’t really seem to comport with more detailed histories of Ireland over the period, though.
History is hard to verify, but I do know that Rothbard wrote about it and no one ever called him out on facts. The problem is, as always, we have come so far down the nation-State road to the point that the globalists are close to that long held dream — world domination.
God, a world of city-states like in ancient times would be a major step forward. (damn, it sounds like I have taken up drinking again but I have not) 🙂
No argument with you there.
Mark Stoval said: “…modern man is doomed. The end really is upon us.”
The end is always near Mark. But every ending is a new beginning. And you have to remember that, even though it’s lousy where your at, somewhere on this planet there are childern playing in the sunshine, gleefully anticipating lunch.
Well Official, I hope you are right. And I hope those kids playing in the sunshine are not primitive, low IQ kids that means mankind will have to start all over again.
Right now, I hold out some hope that the Christian, traditional, and very white Russians may be the ones to survive all this. That would be ironic would it not?
Mark Stoval said: ” Right now, I hold out some hope that the Christian, traditional, and very white Russians may be the ones to survive all this. That would be ironic would it not?” Well, if your a Christian then you must believe that sooner of later WW3 is going to take out nine tenths of humanity. In that case, politics is just a distraction from the real issue which would be keeping your eyes peeled for the ye olde second coming. At least that’s what they told me when my mother took me to church. ( Which was like 55 years ago.)
When you have sacrificed the having of offspring for a thing, that thing is what stands between you and oblivion.
Thus the behavior of the urbanite.
DeBlasio’s snitch hotline just got shut down. Apparently, it was inundated with “Fuck You”s and reports that the good mayor was observed behind a 7-11 orally servicing Gov. Cuomo, thus violating social distancing.
More of this please
Deblowsio….Mayor “Big Gulp.” I’m in tears
DeBlasio and Cuomo deserve all that abuse and far more.
NYC’s juicing of the death count, the fact it is THE news media center, and the news media’s drive to suppress any positive CV developments are the main factors keeping this scamdemic hysteria rolling.
Z Man said: “In another sense, the cultural sense, this event has revealed the provincialism of the typical city dweller. It is fair to say that if the hot spot for the virus had been Appalachia, it would barely rate a segment on the cable chat shows. Because the center was New York City, the home of the media centers, it is the only thing worth discussing. The most provincial people on earth live in New York City and media people are some of the dumbest, making for the perfect storm.”
This of course is the oldest of old news. I guarantee you, the first city dwellers thought the bedouins where a bunch of egnorant, toothless, goat herding scum.
Here’s Victor Davis Hanson at City Journal with a piece intitled: ” The Oldest Divide.”
https://www.city-journal.org/html/oldest-divide-14042.html
America and the world just learned that despite all the rhetoric, the American Constitution and Bill of Rights are nothing more than pieces of paper signed by old dead white guys with little if any real meaning.
To be fair, it’s the same here in Europe. We just don’t wrap ourselves in a flag and get all hysterical about it.
The elites just laugh at our flag waving and yawn when they hear about prepper websites. They just proved that they can and will use the police force to shut us down on a whim, Constitutional rights be damned.
Next time, and there will be a next time, you can expect the police and the military in our towns and villages. All those troops heading home can be used to patrol American streets. After all, it’s a lot safer and they’ve had 20-years of urban warfare training so they might as well put it to good use.
Coincidence?
Just wait until we all go cashless. Then we’re really screwed. Pray the internet doesn’t go down too.
No, they will keep the internet going. How else are they supposed to track down and eliminate nazis?
“The most provincial people on earth live in New York City and media people are some of the dumbest, making for the perfect storm.” Bingo! This essay, start to finish, knocks another one clear out of the ballpark. Unfortunately, extremely provincial people are found in many other locations, such as quite a few other American cities, the insular bubbles surrounding today’s “higher” education institutions located all over the country, etc. While these others may not be quite as provincial as those living in New York City, they do in fact come very close. And there are enough of them that they cause the rest of us very real and material problems, especially right now by using a fictional “pandemic” to do so.
with a real stake in society, as in a job and bills to pay Or children and grandchildren…….like us horrible pig Boomers.
Because it’s always about you.
Perhaps in ignorance, your generation mortgaged the futures of your progeny to look out for #1. “We’re spending our kid’s inheritance!”
I’m not blaming you personally, but you did invoke the generations.
New York to Nebraska: It’s your job to provide what I need.
Nebraska to New York: It’s your job to provide what I don’t need: your fucking opinion.
Who runs Bartertown?
It’s sure not that old skank in the chainmail stockings.
Depends on where your at😉
Good news from Southfront, reporting 8 studies around the world that confirm this is still just the flu, bro:
https://southfront.org/sars-cov-2-mortality-is-distorted/
This confirms my intuition that the pitiful test regime in the US leads to a laughably tiny denominator.
Of course, with the food processors shutting down due to the hysteria, this may not matter.
On the other hand, deaths from all causes in England and Wales are roughly double the normal April numbers. There have been times with similar numbers in December and January, so it’s not completely unprecedented, but still unusual this time of year. The question is how long this will keep going.
https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1252843559742402567
“Trump just claimed he signed an executive order temporarily halting all immigration. Whether or not this is true is entirely unknown, as Trump says all sorts of things that mean nothing.”
Z, you were right on the money. Trump’s claim turns out just to be more blather:
https://mobile.twitter.com/jeffgiesea/status/1252825842322821121
I don’t think Trump realizes that if you want your vision or idea executed in government, you have to draft the executive order yourself. You have to delegate in the real estate world, but in government if you delegate, your idea will be corrupted into a feeble impersonation by “advisors” and lobbyists.
Your larger point still stands, though, Z. Even though Trump was once again talking but not doing, he’s still the chaos agent: the idea that it is now ok to put a hold on all immigration has been injected into the body-politic, shifting the Overton Window again. It wasn’t possible to discuss this in the mainstream even just a couple years ago. Shame Trump didn’t actually follow through on the idea he planted in the body-politic though!
Trump brings up immigration when he’s in a tight spot to inflame his base and then as soon as he’s out of immediate trouble, he delegates everything to Kushner.
Made me laugh Brother cause I thought of this…
https://youtu.be/9Dg6DpEAscU
In surfing around, someone posted a Venn diagram where “taking coronavirus seriously”, “concerned about economic destruction due to shutdowns”, and “concerned about government overreach” intersected in “me” (full disclosure, that is roughly my take). The comments were a combination of mocking, disbelief that anyone could believe in that combination, and the obligatory “trump-tard” comments. Turning our backs on such people is necessary.
I believe what many people fail to understand is that their opinions and attitudes don’t matter. What is coming will sort people out by how they live and how they are situated in various ways, not by what they think. It will be a wake-up call and comeuppance to many.
We’ll be fine, the Fed can just print us lots of digital debt dollars to eat. Worked for Zimbabwe right? And anyway the most important thing here is that the (((rich))) et. al., who make their money through having money, are still making oodles through the stock markets. Thank heavens a silly thing like reality does not affect their bottom line. 23 million people out of work and counting? Almost 0 demand for anything other than the barest essential goods? The price of oil inexplicably dropping to negative $40 a barrel? The average debt load of Americans doubling, tripling or perhaps even quadrupling? Nunaddis mattas. Let them eat cake.
If the DR could get it’s act together and actually start building Communities then it wouldn’t matter what they were doing until they tried to impose their will on us and then we would take care of the problem…
Are you following this steady shutdown of the nation’s food processors? The endgame isn’t folks cowering in their houses. The end game is societal collapse. What comes next? What always comes next. The strongman in the funny jacket. With a direct line to Beijing. That he’s got to answer when they call.
I’m beginning to think November is not a concern.
There was actually a really good comment about the food processors on Zero Hedge today.
The jist of it was that the agricultural supply chain is as just-in-time as any electronic supply chain from China, and that this level of disruption, causing farmers to dump milk, smash eggs, and slaughter livestock prior to market, is going to cause major shortages in a few months.
That’s why having local food sources and enough to feed your area if the trucks stop is always a good thing…Most preppers don’t think that far ahead and think if I have enough for me and mine that’s all that matters… Which is very short sited in my opinion because if you are part of your Community now then you are going to be part of it if something happens so you need to be thinking big picture and talking with those who grow food or raise livestock in your area…
When corporations and government are thoroughly enmeshed in support of multiculturalist, anti-white ideology, how is this any different from fascism?
“……how is this any different from fascism?”
It’s not fascism because the people who control our language say it’s not fascism. It’s called liberal, progressive democracy. “Fascism” is too many white people or white people who don’t despise other white people or white people who breed with other white people or white people who want to live among other white people.
Do try to keep up.
Is that going to be on the test?
“They imagine the future being a cleaner, glass and steel version of Manhattan, where people are like corpuscles in the system. In such a system, does it make sense to maintain the charade of democracy?”
But democracy is precisely what handed the globalists virtually unalloyed power on a silver platter. They really have no reason to dispense with the pretense of it, unless Trump gets reelected. If that happens, they may have to think again.
Trump can’t get re-elected. He won’t get re-elected if every American and illegal alien votes for him and compares notes. Chalk up another win for the Globalists.
“ They imagine the future being a cleaner, glass and steel version of Manhattan, where people are like corpuscles in the system. ”
I think the elite imagine that glass and steel paradise for themselves (when not occupying expansive ranch or island estates) and their trusted flying monkeys.
For the rest of us they imagine vast adjacent encampments comprised of shacks with delightful, visually interesting mixtures of old corrugated steel and plastic tarp roof lines with narrow pathways winding throughout, allowing the completely multi-racial inhabitants to move about when not Netflixing and chilling.
What’s the point of asking the people when you don’t really care what they think? If you don’t ask people what they think, how can you be sure that you’re doing the opposite of what they want?
it is not right vs. left but urban vs. rural
I believe that the vast majority of you are older than me, so I think it’s best to ask for some advice. what would you guys do if you lived in Urban NJ with a pregnant wife? We’ve got supplies and a place to go if shit gets real, but I’d like some specifics that I could be doing now.
I don’t think there is much you can do for the next month. I’m in northwest NJ and can still do outdoors stuff despite the parks being closed, but otherwise have to wait it out. Over the next 4 years we plan to sell our house and exit the state – even if that’s just jumping across the border to PA and making the commute longer.
I would at least temporarily get away from the NYC metro area, merely because of the health concerns for your unborn child. Find a small-midsize city w/ good hospital/maternity/newborn care (just in case). Find some place with decent weather year round.
Clean your closets, get rid of useless junk that will bog you down. Take good care of your family heirlooms. Keep your vehicle maintained. Don’t forget tools. Keep important papers organized, ready to grab at any time; use only an external disk drive that can be grabbed easily — be prepared to leave the computer & peripherals behind. Same for medicines. have a Go-Bag as if you were always expecting a hurricane or tsunami.
You and family would welcome here in the deep South on one condition: the words “that’s not how we did it New Jersey” are never, ever spoken. Seriously.
If I moved down south I might find it hard to resist. Of course it would be followed by “thank goodness, glad to be here”.
Stranger,
The only exception I would have to this stipulation is pizza. Other than that, Blue NJ is a posturing, mid-wit cesspit.
Lawdog – We gots the NY/NJ style pizza here. I’d have a slice wit you.
I’m assuming “leave urban NJ” isn’t short-term practical advice. I spent my middle and high school years in NJ (more of a suburban to rural area, for the most part, but a little while up in Verona, which is more urban) and had to endure coming back to that hell hole for visits until my Mom passed away.
First. Don’t panic. Remember that this is all largely managed hysteria. There are no carts full of bodies. There are no roving gangs of zombies or Mad Max style looters and I’d put a pretty sizable sum on the odds that nothing remotely like that is going to happen anytime soon.
Buy a chest freezer and stock it, and stock up on canned and dry goods. Get a gun. But you’re probably not going to need any of that. It’s going to be fine. Don’t panic.
Regarding the pregnancy, I say in another reply to you: find a midwife. You don’t want to be showing up at hospitals these days unless it is an emergency. Barring particular and uncommon birth scenarios, your own home is a safer, cleaner place to have a baby than a hospital. Don’t panic.
This is going to blow over. And even if it does “get real” to some extent, that’s going to manifest in some violent protests outside government buildings.
Avoid city centers. Avoid bad neighborhoods (just like you always would). Keep your head down, don’t make waves and work on the larger, longer term plan: “leave urban NJ.” I don’t know what you do for a living, but there are a lot of nice medium-sized cities in the heartland that have good economies and good employment opportunities. If anyplace is going to eventually go south, it’s going to be the Boston-D.C. urban corridor. Don’t be there in the long run.
In the medium term, again, I don’t know what you do for a living, but what you do is important. Are you necessary? Do you have a valuable, portable skill? Is there any reason anyone would want you on their lifeboat?
As Lineman mentions all the time, if you are not any of those things, than you could do way, way worse for yourself than taking up a trade. As an electrician or plumber, just to pick the most common, you are valuable pretty much everywhere at every time.
This is excellent advice. I thank all of you. Though I love my job, I am a teacher; therefore, it’s time to start teaching myself a trade.
Teacher isn’t universally useful in rough times the same way a trade is, but it’s pretty portable and teachers are always needed. A school in a nice, White suburban area by a mid-sized Midwest or Plains state city wouldn’t be a bad way to go. Rural areas have a very hard time attracting teachers sometimes, if rural life appeals to you, but I won’t deny that some people find it boring.
If you are used to NJ levels of teacher compensation, the wages offered to you at some rural Kansas school may make you think, “I’d starve!” but the cost of living in rural areas is so far below NJ cost of living you would be very surprised.
I lived like a king in Appalachian Ohio when my co-workers earning about the same as me in the bay area could barely afford a hovel.
ETA: The kids at my youngest daughter’s rural school are hungry for male teachers at an unconscious level. The female teachers are mostly a bunch of Karens. Most of the favorite teachers in the school are among the few men, and my suspicion it is just because they’re more emotionally stable and steady and give off a level of adult authority most of the female teachers don’t. My daughter has stories of more than one of her female teachers crying in class (and these are not particularly rough kids) that just make my eyes roll.
Yeah, I don’t EVER engage in emotional outbursts with my kids. Then again, I only do middle and HS. I like setting up debates, and that doesn’t work as well with younger kids.
Rural life sounds amazing right about now.
These were middle school incidents I was talking about. 🙂
Rural PA needs teachers (though PA is a tough nut to crack because of unions), and the people are (mostly) good people. Same with Rural Ohio & Indiana. All of West Virginia too. In PA, you *could* work in Harrisburg public schools (yeah… city schools) but live a very rural life not 30 minutes commute away.
Example;
https://www.pareap.net/job_postings/54642/PA01/PA01
I like this. Along the lines of planning, analysis. Not panic. A lot of great points here. I am in suburban New York, just Upstate enough that the downstaters are not in the majority. The ones I have to interact with are annoying as any fucking liberal. Illogical, childish, with law degrees, or whatever nomenklatura that collect our taxes.
For a younger guy, expecting first child, I would say if you don’t have skills, learn them. NOW. From patching a roof, to basic electrical, plumbing and auto maintenance. You won’t want to NEED contractors in a more remote area to do basic shit any non nancy male should be able to do.
Are you and your wife aligned in terms of a child’s faith formation? A lot of the rootless liberals I know are also godless. Adrift. I am not here to argue about someone’s take on the ghost man in the sky if that’s what they think. Raising my kids in our faith was a no brainer, and there are many benefits to the structure, discipline, hope, even if you are a doubter. Being one with the mother of your child on this is the recipe for success. The basic psychology taught to my kids about sometimes walking alone in their faith was that they are better, in a higher place than their godless peers. The family unity we experience is an amazing force.
So even living in a suburban area does not mean I have to be a cubicle dweller, 2+ hours each way commuter, godless she man.
p.s. My wife’s bread last night was amazing….
Homer – What a wonderful paean to true family life. Thank you, and bless you and yours.
I’ll teach my kids about Christianity. Christ is a good example to follow regardless of your faith. I went to catholic school but am now agnostic.
@Lawdog, might I suggest spending some time reading GK Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man”? It was one of the things that brought me back to Christianity after years of agnosticism. It’s worth reading just for the prose alone.
Bread, huh? Is that what they call it these days?
@KGB
You’re a naughty boy but made me laugh…
Lawdog…..this is counsel from a woman’s perspective. Drake, Nunnya and Stranger give good counsel. Use Nunnya’s counsel as a base and prepare as if prepping for an earthquake. I did. Find some links to EQ prepping. Mostly same strategy as civil unrest that also follows a large quake. Here are a few links to help:
https://www.theorganicprepper.com
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/prepping/
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/things-you-can-control/
You’re the guy. You can figure out how to prep and you naturally view life has function over form. Your wife relies on you for this.
These are words from a woman who counts her time in geologic stratigraphy (the branch of geology concerned with the order and relative position of strata and their relationship to the geological time scale.)
You’re appearing worried and somewhat obsessed due to fear with think-think-think what can you do. Fly out to 30,000 feet and take a breath. Your woman right now needs you to center, just hold her, pat her hand, and be The Man. If your atoms are all agitated and peeling off, she picks that up, and she needs you to calm her and be calm. She’s obsessed with giving birth and all inward right now. And afraid. Your job is to love, provide and support her. You’re The Guy.
Set up a protocol to learn prepping. Like troubleshooting. One step at a time. Guy think. Give yourself a set amount of time each day or whenever, then move the brain from prep plan to something else. This won’t come overnight, so be patient. This sounds woo-woo but be kind to yourself. Notice when you get agitated and what sets you off. Keep a note pad handy for all those ideas that pop into your head for prepping and calming. Accomplish a little bit each day. Or not. Then go do some woodworking, take a walk with her, read a book, listen to music. Work out, do some kind of calming discipline, turn to nature to inspire, cultivate community. In a few minutes I shall be driving 50 miles away to walk in a botanical garden. I’m no good to Basic Husband all agitated. I can blow up at the ruling overlords with the best of them, but Husband looks at me and thinks….Jeez.. and she eats with that mouth! To what end.
I’m dabbling with Tai Chi again. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. Take that Anthony Fauci!
Here’s a link to one of my Tai Chi CDs. Background music. Totally woo-woo, will calm you into narcolepsy but won’t lower your High-T or turn you lefty.
https://www.amazon.com/Spectrum-Suite-Steven-Halpern/dp/B000003IUU/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=spectrum+suite&qid=1587576791&s=music&sr=1-1
Lawdog….this will change you. Trust that you will know how and what to do. You will know when the spanner is whacking you. If you don’t know what to do….be still…let the mind realign to focus. You will gain knowledge. Tend to your own house and mastery will follow. God Speed and never fear, Laddie.
Who is more deluded about reality is debatable.
Well, their reality is not the same as our reality, that’s for sure.
Might be a good thing. The more irreconcilable the realities, the better. That’s a recipe for separation.
I’m a big fan of natiation. Meaning the separation of a polity into two separate nations. Coined by analogy with “speciation.” Not living the the other guy’s reality–your enemy’s reality!–is a key precondition of natiation.
In my part of the Midwest, even the rural areas are full of the same vapid Healthcare Worker worship and Stay Home signaling. It seems like authorities might finally be tired of dealing with it though.
One of my friends was accosted at a Costco by a shrieking Karen who tried to forcibly put a mask on his son who was sitting in the cart, screaming he was endangering his kid’s life.
To store management’s credit, they called the police and escorted the lady out. When the police arrived they said he would have been in his rights to smack her and would have still taken his side. I expect police to just do what they are told, but even they don’t want to deal with inane crap like this forever.
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.”
Not sure we can all go off into the Desert like St. Antony the Great.. They’d follow us there to make sure we were wearing a mask.
Who is more deluded about reality is debatable.
Well, their reality is not the same as our reality, that’s for sure.
Might be a good thing. The more irreconcilable the realities, the better. That’s a recipe for separation.
I’m a big fan of natiation. Meaning the separation of a polity into two separate nations. Coined by analogy with “speciation.” Not living the the other guy’s reality–your enemy’s reality!–is a key precondition of natiation.
“If you’re willing to send cops after people walking on the beach, just to make a point about who decides who can go outside, you’re probably going to have no qualms about ending the voting charade.”
EXCEPT if it’s Trump who calls off the November election. Then the cosmopolitan provincials will all become natural law scholars.
David Graeber was onto something in Bullshit Jobs:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
Bullshit jobs are not just destructive in themselves, but are also harmful because they employ a lot of women.
If we eliminated them, it would free up a lot of women to stay home, have children, and keep our whole parade going.
Instead a lot of women are locked up in the bullshit jobs.
You’re on the right track, but I think you have cause and effect backwards.
Bullshit jobs don’t lure women into the workforce. Women in the workforce lead to the creation of bullshit jobs. You are not going actually be able to get rid of bullshit jobs or address wage stagnation as long as you are telling teenage girls that what they really need to do is have a career and “live their lives” before someday, in the distant future, maybe getting married, having a kid and becoming and “I can do it all!” career woman who is only held back by that good-for-nothing creep of a husband who refuses to do enough to make her life easy and fulfilling.
I think it would be good to absolutely demonize the concept of women in the workforce and promote motherhood and marriage as the highest goods.
That can’t happen without a complete sea change in who is holding the cultural reins of power. (So, we’re more or less fucked, as globohomo and feminist, Inc. would rather blow up the whole world rather than give up that bastion of power).
Right. The genius of the bullshit job is precisely that it isn’t really something that needs to get done at all. This means that the job description and even job tasks can be adapted for whatever mix of physical and mental abilities (more usually disabilities) are possessed by the job holder. A real job is steel, it just sits there and is what it is. If you’re made of harder stuff you can cut it down to size and master it. If not, it cuts you. The bullshit job is water. It assumes the form of whatever human vessel it is poured into. This is why it’s the perfect job for the demographic age and the age of wammens.
From the article:
“While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand.”
I think a far greater tragic outcome for this pandemic would not be the tens of thousands of deaths, but for our offices of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity to suffer!
This assumes there isn’t a meta-game being played by those at the top. The creation of the bullshit job is an ideal way to protect the sociopaths extracting $$ from the organization from the folks doing the real work at the bottom. When the organization no longer serves the sociopaths purpose, it is killed, broken apart, and the sociopaths move on.
As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure.
I love when someone correctly identifies a problem, then comes up with absolutely the most mind-bogglingly stupid solution for it. It’s a crisis of imagination.
The Babe is on the right track. Not a UBI, but do something like Hungary — huge financial incentives for marrying and becoming parents.
There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)
His answer is only half right or less. The other half of the demand is that the supply of talented poet-musicians is highly limited. The blank slate is not real. Every unemployed factory worker is not a secret Neil Peart who just never got the chance.
Also the idea that the demand for talented poet-musicians is controlled by the 1% is simply and obviously wrong on its face.
Indy music is experiencing a huge heyday as YouTube and other streaming video and audio services let artists take their work directly to the people. There’s a huge demand. And most of those consumers aren’t the 1%, they’re everyone, of all ages and classes. It’s not just the 1% buying either Taylor Swift or Post-Modern Jukebox or Pentatonix.
But huge does not equal infinite, and music, poetry and books are extremely cheap to distribute post-creation. Songs, especially are also extremely durable forms of entertainment. I can listen to a good song on and off for years and years. I could only read books written between 1900-1950 and never run out of books to read.
Also, the demand for specialists in corporate law is not unlimited, and neither is the supply. Not only is every unemployed factory worker not a secret musical genius, he is not a secret minimally competent corporate lawyer. That’s why they have to keep thinking up new classes of Bullshit job. Not everybody can be a corporate lawyer, but almost anybody can be an Assistant Marketing Specialist.
So, yes, Graeber is right about the reasons for the existence of bullshit jobs.
Reason 1: Women in the workforce has literally doubled the size of the workforce. Having a man be a breadwinner while she raises a family is very just compensation for the role of wife and mother. Women in careers is destructive in the long run.
Reason 2: Society just doesn’t know how to distribute its rewards. Part of this is because the powers-that-be have spent the last 100 years or so tearing down the societal capital that would have dealt with this. Tenant and feudal servant arrangements weren’t all bad: the live-in household maid and butler that served a wealthy family their whole life weren’t just employees, they were a responsibility.
Reason 3: Lots of useful work simply can’t be broken up into 15-hour per week bits: Three mediocre guys working 15 hours a week will not be able to produce as much code with the same coherence as one good guy working 45 hours (heck probably not as much or as good as one mediocre guy working 45 hours). You can’t find enough competent brain surgeons to allow all of them to work just 1/3 as much as they normally would while maintaining their skills. And so on. There is irreducible complexity in labor.
Severian alludes to it in his most recent credo. Community. Family, tribe, community.
Less people need to work, but those less people need to provide for more people. However, this only works as a voluntary arrangement. I’ll willingly support my wife, my kids, my parents, maybe even a well behaved cousin, aunt, uncle and in-law or two. However, just taking that money from me and giving it to strangers as a UBI will never be acceptable. It’s human nature. It will always engender bitterness and resentment in the person whose money is being taken and envy and entitlement in the person who is receiving it. People aren’t wired to be altruistic to people in larger groups than the community/tribe. Only at that level can the arrangements be properly monitored, because when your own family member starts to abuse their role in the family, the family has the relationship knowledge and authority to understand and deal with the problem. A benefit specialist out of Washington can never have that knowledge.
Yep Community is where it’s at…
Try to research even a single thing about the protests. What do you get? NY TIMES: The hidden hand of the GOP behind the “seemingly spontaneous” protests! Right, because massive unemployment, business closures and probable food shortages are all very partisan issues. They ask Trump to “call off” the protesters, as though he were our leader or funding us or something.
I’ve had it with these people.
I see it in my large metro area. I live in the distant, largely vibrant-free suburbs while I have friends who are more of the hipster types who live closer to the city center. Even though some of them are closer to our side, they as a whole have been much more paranoid about this outbreak than others. I see their bleatings on Facebook, hating the protestors who just want to go back to work.
My friends are divided into two camps: One would be fine with the lockdown continuing until there is no chance of death from this virus, no matter how long it takes. The others are ready to go back to work and a semblance of a normal life. I’ve been called heartless and cruel on social media when I make common sense comments about how most small businesses aren’t sitting on piles of cash and likely will disappear for good.
The former are city dwellers, many work for government or other useless “occupations.” The latter are like me, people who need to be in the office or store or restaurant to make money and live in the country or the suburbs.
I still go to the office (building destructive warplanes is essential) four days of the week, but I’m ready to have life return to normal. I’m tired of the masks, the paranoia and above all, the overreach by the ruling class. We’d planned to go to Florida to our place there, but the closure of the beaches (both public and private) stopped us. And the roadblocks at the Florida state line too.
I feel with every passing day, the cost of this shutdown gets more expensive and the chances of things returning to a semblance of normality become less and less.
To your last paragraph, the curve benders and their cult have blood on their hands from all the suicides and substance related deaths that are occurring as a result of lockdown.
Sadly, they will never be punished.
Oregon just arrested 2 surfer dudes for trespassing on public property for the crime of SURFING.
https://www.wweek.com/outdoors/2020/04/21/two-oregon-surfers-face-trespassing-charges-after-hopping-fence-for-sweet-waves/
We’ll soon find out when theory meets reality.
There are plenty of people outside the cities screeching about the need for a lockdown.
To my untrained eye they seem to be mostly women and non-essential males.
And government employees with fat paychecks, gold-plated benefits, taxpayer-guaranteed pensions who think this just a great, extended vacation.
Manhattan is the seat of Usual Oxpecker power and should be considered enemy-occupied territory.
I propose we round up all our guys who are all-in on this being the second Black Death, and catapult them into Manhattan.
After it is all over, we raze the place, salt the ruins, and accuse the Usual Oxpeckers who have survived of crimes against white humanity. We can hold the trials in, say, Paducah or maybe Rapid City.
It will not be long before shelves are empty of essentials.
Then we get to redefine “essential.” Essential is not cruelty-free arugula.
Nope. It’s Beef from Rancho Vizzini. I don’t suppose you butcher and ship in dry ice, do ya? Seems like Amazon (and thus UPS/FedEx) will still be around.
No. 🙂 You need all kinds of certifications, licenses and inspections to butcher for sale. If I ship it to you, it will be mooing. I’ve got a friend who’s doing it end to end, but works with a slaughterhouse for the butchering part — then he picks up the packaged meat and handles the marketing and distribution. It’s free range, organic non-GMO beef, so he’s going for that niche more-money-than-sense hipster paleo market, lol. I could to that, but that’s more work than I’m interested in. His beef is generally better than mine — he’s running a much more professional operation than me.
Who is more deluded about reality is debatable. We may get to find out if the crackdown lasts much longer. Parts of the supply chain are breaking.
Doesn’t seem all that debatable to me. I’d rather be out here than in there. I grow my own meat. I can heat with nothing but the wood available on my own property. I have my own water available. I don’t usually garden, but if I really thought it was coming to that, I can plant acres of garden.
If we were at such a Mad Max stage where I couldn’t get fuel or parts for my tractor (kinda doubt that will happen), I can get another draft horse — we have lots of Amish and Mennonites here in Ohio, so draft horses, tack and horse drawn implements are available. The old Belgian mare I have now is too old for real work. My quarter horses are good for smaller tasks, and oxen are always an option.
Neighbors and friends can and will come together to help out for big jobs. You don’t have to be Amish to do a barn-raising.
As for them government revenooers, well
The only real danger to my lifestyle and my income actually is government.
In one week, my wife will be six months pregnant. As such, I hate these people. In a couple of weeks, I think many of us will have to face the decision: flee, or hunker down.
If your wife is healthy, find a midwife. Four out of my five were born at home (and the first barely made it to the hospital). People have been brought up to be terrified of birth by the medical establishment. An ordinary healthy woman doesn’t need any of the high-tech accoutrements. Hospitals are filthy, dirty staph and strep farms, and a good midwife can recognize when the rare situation that requires a transport to the hospital is necessary with more than ample time to spare.
So you have a wife and girlfriend that must be trying especially being out of work…
You on the Russell Kirk thread…
“It’s very depressing. My girlfriend got to keep her job, and it’s created a power imbalance around the house. All of her duties are email and phone based. I just don’t see us escaping from pixel samsara”
Maybe he’s recently married. I tended to do that a lot a few months after tying the knot.
Or he’s a Fed.
Or it was a shotgun wedding 😉
Those are the best kinds of wedding.
“Naw, Lulu ain’t said nothing. God, I wonder if I ought to let the girl marry a fellow like you? But I got to protect her good name, and guess Floyd and me can see to it you give her a square deal after the marriage. Now I’ve sent out word to invite all the neighbors to the house tonight for a little sociable to tell ’em Lulu and you are engaged, and you’re going to put on your Sunday-go-to-meeting suit and come with us, right now.”
I have a different take. The protests only started after it was clear the lockdown wasn’t doing much. When they were still afraid, they happily went along with it. Or maybe it just took time to sink in. I guess we will find out when they start harping about the “second wave” and the need to lock down again.
But the thing that puzzled me from the beginning was the Chinese lock-down. Not really knowing anything about China, they didn’t come across to me as being hysterical like our media women and they just locked down a city of like 8 million people, cancelled their most important holiday and banned a lot of internal travel. Then the videos of them welding people in their apartments and all that jazz started coming out. I thought, why are they reacting like this?
Remember, the Chinese may not be hysterically feminized like us, but that doesn’t mean they react rationally either.
Like all large-scale government, the CCP may have reacted the way it did because that’s all it knew or was able to do. After years of destroying the social fabric of China, after destroying local and smaller scales of government, after destroying all the complexities of self-management and self-regulation in their society, the blunt ax was probably the only tool left in the CCP toolbox.
When you convert society to smartphone lemmings living in concrete towers, the only effective tool you have left to respond to even minor crises and disturbances is the blunt force of the sluiceway gate (welding apartment doors), which incidentally, is the same tool used to herd cows into the slaughterhouse.
The CCP has no choice but to use brute force because that’s how they’ve organized themselves such that it was the only tool left available to them, and as Z described, that’s what our leaders want for this country too.
The “lockdowns” were initially sold as “flattening the curve” and were only supposed to be for a few weeks. Trump hinted at an Easter reopening. It was only after the governors got high on their new powers that it became possibly months long and stupid crap like closing state forests was added to the deal.
I was going a little stir-crazy at home and decided to go for a bike ride. So I go on my normal bike ride route which goes through a playground. They got both sides closed off, chained and padlocked.
They are now arresting middle aged women playing with children in the playgrounds!
https://www.citizenfreepress.com/breaking/breaking-idaho-mom-arrested-for-letting-her-kids-play-in-park/
The cops will just “do their job” and “follow orders” no matter what it is, no matter how repugnant. They are absolutely shameless about it because they know conservatards will bitch and moan, but they are never going to water the tree of liberty no matter how much they pose about it.
During Katrina they kicked down doors and confiscated guns and allowed themselves to be filmed beating up old women.
The playground arrests happened in Meridian, Idaho, a city that has tripled or quadrupled in size in the last twenty years, due to transplanted middle class whites, many from California (need I say more?). The cops there likely don’t GAF about a bunch of women in playgrounds, and are simply exercising crowd control, like they would do in a crowded venue somewhere. There is likely little sense of community there, just a bunch of entitled people thrown together over the last few years. In a community where everyone knows each other and grew up together, this kind of thing would not be going on,
And now Trump can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.
“The closer you are to the center, the more enthusiastic you are for the mandatory shuttering of society… The people in the vast unproductive sector of the economy, like the media and politics, have no stake in the economy, so this is just another thing to fill their time.“
How I wish it had been these people thrown out of work and onto the streets. HR ladies, office drones, media liars, nonprofit scabs like the ADL, celebrities and entertainers, sports chaff, diversity haranguers, politicians, economists, academics—-these are the people that need to suffer the most. But the situation’s been exactly the opposite: those who provide the least value to society have been hit the least economically and continue to have the luxury of jerking off to Netflix at full pay, while those who provide the most to society have generally been hit worse. If ever did the modern Marie Antoinettes need their heads chopped off, it’s now.
“The system imagined for us by our ruling elites is highly urbanized and dominated by the government and its agents.”
Just as our Betters looked to China for our response to the flu, so too do they look to China for how we should live. Stacked like sardines in shimmering concrete towers, controlled by Tencent.
On my more hopeful days, I think this crisis could be a mass-redpilling. I’m not the first to notice that the ones who love to style themselves #TheResistance are cowering the furthest under their beds, sucking their thumbs down to nubs. Nor am I the only one who has asked myself why boating ramps and campsites are closed, but liquor stores, in-person lottery ticket sales counters, and abortion clinics remain open. Nor am I the only person to have figured out the answer to that question… once people start *saying* it, though, there’s the potential for real change.
#TheResistance is particularly scared of the virus because for them it has the extra terror of being laced with In The Time Of Trump.
And, they can signal they “f***ing love science”, care for humanity, and opposition to the Orange Man all at once by… doing absolutely nothing. It’s a three-fer!
One first-approximation approach that works reasonably well is to look at which businesses provide more tax revenues than others. Pot and booze emporia are way up there. Letting you recreate, not so much. For God’s sake, you’ve already paid for your fishing license. Why would they want you to to use it? Where I live, the golf course is open but the (free) putting greens are closed. Same theory, mutatis mutandis.
Sorry to comment off topic, but I saw a short video feed from an Illinois state briefing, and I thought it was worth sharing.
JB (Jabba) the Hut aka Pritzker, was speaking in the last few days at a briefing, and when asked a question, he asked one of his medical experts to answer.
The question was with regard to the first teenager to die from Covid. The nice lady prefaced her answer by explaining that anyone who dies, and is infected with Covid, is automatically counted as a Covid virus death. She made no bones about it. One didn’t have to die FROM Covid. They simply count it as a Covid virus death.
Let that sink in.
What that means is, any numbers regarding mortality rates are forever tainted. Decisions about lockdowns are being made with faulty data.
The numbers have been rendered meaningless.
Wish I could link to the video.
The hubris is breathtaking.
Had a local guy fall off a ladder and bash his head. Died at the hospital but tested positive for the Commie Cough. Guess what his cause of death was…
A neighboring county had its first Wuflu death yesterday. The paper described him as “a 77-year-old male with extensive underlying health conditions who developed respiratory failure and was unable to overcome the extensive complications despite aggressive medical treatment.” Extensive underlying conditions at the age of 77. What good does it do to throw him on the pyre of public hysteria?
Getting back to the man who fell off a ladder. What are they testing for when determining if there is a presence of Corona virus in a corpse? If, as studies are now showing, the number of people with antibodies to the Wuhan flu are much larger than first anticipated, does it follow that testing for it post-mortem will result in widespread attribution to the virus as a cause of death? Or is that an apples to oranges thing? Is it possible that this man had the virus 2 months ago and it would show up in the autopsy or would it have to be infected at the time of his death? Anyone with knowledge in this area, feel free to chime in.
I heard about a guy who was out playing golf in Florida and died from the Corona-Virua after being eaten by an alligator. Something about animal-to-human transmission.
In London, the joke is that the Wu Flu is a miracle cure: it’s been 6 weeks since anybody has died of a heart attack,
Decisions about lockdowns are being made with faulty data, and the numbers have been rendered meaningless.
IOW, all going according to plan.
The truth will out. When you label a heart failure as Corona-19 as cause of death, you “up” the Corona score, but decrease the HF score. That can *not* be hidden. Last year’s deaths will show the typical rate of HF deaths, pneumonia death, Flu deaths, etc. Those death rates are know and published, they can not be undone. When this panic has passed, we’ll see what the real Corona-19 score was, when we adjust the numbers to reflect expected deaths from known—and expected—causes.
Such numbers are already being computed and the results of current Corona tabulations being called into question.
Thats exactly why briggs says that you have to look at “all cause” deaths . See if theres really any more deaths this year compared to past years. Thats the only way you’ll really be able to tell if this was really a thing or not.
Roberto—and all others—my apologies. Yes, Briggs is a major source of my thinking. Credit should be given where credit is due. I will try to do more so in the future.
I’m happy to see him get some more attention recently. He’s been toiling in the wilderness for years over there.
Another issue with governor Jabba The Butt is that (((he))) is clearly projecting his fears which stem from his personal comorbidity – obesity – onto his minions. I worked with that guy at the incubator 1871. Jabba is a caricature of a neurotic (((man))). He was also a max hedonist pre-covid 19 but I suspect that his inclinations to “party” are now curtailed and he is redirecting the energy from those enthusiasms into his government work. Jabba likely believes Illinois will receive a massive federal government bailout. We who live under the yoke here are truly screwed.
And while we shut down and listen to the cosmopolitans the great relief program is being looted by the corporate class. I own stock in a company with 90 million dollars on its books yet it got in line and received 5 million from this small business relief package.
I should be happy as a stockholder right?
Now the small business relief program needs more money.
And the small business restaurant owner has to shutter.
Another way the cosmopolitans have taken over is by pushing the every day man into 401k’s while at the same time reducing his wage. The value of his labor is reduced but he gets greedy corporations on Wall Street to make up the difference.
So the laborer cheers on the performance of his 401K on Wall Street in New York while his wage and his job in Ohio is outsourced to foreigners.
The best example of entitled looters is Harvard, They have their hand out for $9 million or so.
$9 million will pay for four months of the $26 million salary for the manager of their $40 billion endowment.
The Orange man should be telling them to get fucked loud and often.
I am going to copy a part of what I wrote the other day because it applies so succinctly to today’s topic
“I live in fun filled Cali where most people I know work in government or academia OR like me and my wife are getting monthly defined benefit pension and SS checks. All is good; what economic hardship or possible collapse? And nice anonymous drivers keep leaving packages of food and supplies on our doorstep.”
The divide between those that do and those that live off of the taxpayer and government teat has never been more apparent than in the current moment. Those in made up jobs who have their monthly paycheck magically appear and can magically work from home with a computer providing much less output while receiving the same monthly economic input do indeed see the world differently than those who must actually go out in the real world to produce real things.
The question is which side is more sustainable in the world to come. “Magic” sometimes becomes the new reality. Many on the DR have longed for a moment where “things get real” and the city slicker gets his comeuppance from the rural redneck. But maybe enough of what was magic is now the new reality. Maybe the computer guided drones from the city defeat the long guns in the rural hills and valleys.
Well most of their power comes from outside the cities and they are making themselves more vulnerable every year by switching to more and more “green power” and getting rid of anything that is reliable…So if that’s their plan they better do it soon because they are getting weaker each passing year…
Lineman,
Glad to “see” you again. You hadn’t posted in a bit, or maybe I just missed them.
I am just throwing it out that in any conflict it is best to know and respect the other side’s potential.
I have lived in both cultural arenas and worked in occupations dominated by each side. A number of the people on this site have or are working undercover as it were in cloud culture and that is to our great advantage. Few people I know in the hive have any clue regarding the abilities and toughness of (some of) the dirt people. That also is to our advantage.
I have always admired your posts because you repeat over and over the importance of building community. Building community and not taking cloud people to lightly are both crucial. Cloud culture is an absolute and cruel religion.
I missed a planned trip up to your general neck of the woods just this month due to lockdown issues. I was going to continue building relationships with old friends i.e, to work on a community. I will go later this year. Luckily I might have stumbled onto potential community building in the heart of darkness where I currently live. It will take some time to see how that possible opportunity works out. Take care.
Thanks Brother good to see you as well..I was busy practicing what I preach helping others in my Community be better prepared for whatever comes…Also was busy working around the property getting the garden ready for planting, cutting down trees, digging out the pond because the creek fills it with sediment every year, and building a road so I can access more of the mountain… Hopefully you can get up this way soon MT is slowly opening back up…
They don’t have a walk-in closet full of moral signifiers.
It’s lines like this that get him on the All-Star Team every year.
The restive spirit born of our hunter-gatherer and Indo-European blood has waned in the 50 years since it lifted us to the Moon. The now-ascendant lowlander spirit of consumption and creature comfort makes for pleasant times in pleasant times, but this Shire-like existence has always relied on rough men at its borders to protect the comfy core when darkness falls.
There is little place for such men in today’s settled society without borders to ward. The Kings have left their thrones to soy-boy Stewards & the Shield Maidens have gone mad in their absence for lack of a strong hand on the reins. Hunting orcs is not only dangerous, it’s downright mean and cruel. “Real men” educate and adopt them. Orcish behavior is just a natural glitch, like bad weather in the social climate of the MegaMaidenShire.
The question today’s Shire-folk need to ask themselves with troubled times on the horizon isn’t so much “where have all the heroes gone” but “what have we done for them lately?”
Rangers and Riders have little incentive to protect and promote a society that mocks them as it gelds their sons and pimps their daughters. For these unwelcome storm-crows, a roost in the rigging of a West-bound ship looks like a better bet for their own clans’ future.
Exile, pure writing brilliance.
Got nothing more….story telling at its finest.
I remember you saying you were thinking of starting a blog. I certainly hope so.
The moon landings were faked. That “restive spirit” has apparently been dead a lot longer than you think, and the full embrace of enormous lies – much older.
Here are the latest attempts to juice the death numbers, with the US playing with dates and the UK working the excess deaths angle:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/first-us-coronavirus-deaths-occurred-weeks-earlier-believed-officials-find-live
The Covid-19 pandemic is much different than its most notable modern predecessor, the “Spanish flu” for a couple of reasons. The Spanish flu, which didn’t involve serious lockdowns, occurred during and shortly after WWI, when the media, then composed of newspapers and radio, was under the thumb of government censorship. There was no internet to distribute alternate views. The Wilsonian feds tolerated no divergent opinions and arrested and deported those that they could, like Emma Goldman. There was little mention of the effects of the flu, at least compared to today, perhaps because of the potential for problems in the military. Otherwise, life went on pretty much like normal. Professional sports continued their seasons, in 1919 the now-tainted Black Sox lost to the Reds in the World Series. People attended live theater and movies.
Assistant secretary of the Navy FDR caught the flu on a trip to Europe but didn’t succumb. It was a minor incident. There is a serious purpose to the manufactured hysteria over this respiratory virus. There’s no guarantee that the purpose will be accomplished but it won’t be for lack of effort.
And don’t forget the hypocrisy. Nancy Pelosi has a mega freezer full of gourmet ice cream (which she is happy to brag about), and gets reelected in a landslide every 2 years. And the Governor of New Jersey will send in the jackboots to arrest Christians and Jews holding religious services, but not the Islamists. This is who leads us. This is who we elect. Something is badly broken. And the threat is not trivial.
I think they gave up arresting the Jews – at least the real ones with funny hats and sideburns. They have / are good lawyers and refused to be pushed around. And yes – mosques in Patterson can pack in as many people as they want and the cops won’t do a thing. But Christians are easy and fun to push around.
is there still a paper towel manufacturing plant in Patterson? Marcal I think..
haven’t been out that ways in decades.
thnx
It went bankrupt, then was burned down. My wife underwrote some of their insurance and still gets mad if we drive past it. (You can see what’s left of it from the highway)
no wonder the stores don’t have any paper towels..
Drake,
Those aren’t cops, they’re apparatchiks for the state.
Pelosi’s tour of her kitchen and fancy ice cream was spectacular. But her talk with AIPAC about her fundamental commitment to Israel remains her best work.
https://youtu.be/53x_zrkJwDs
It is fair to say that if the hot spot for the virus had been Appalachia, it would barely rate a segment on the cable chat shows.
Basically, the only time the media cares about Appalachia, aside from making jokes at the expense of the sister-humping rubes, is if they can use it to promote some socialist wealth distribution program: “Let’s try to “rebuild” Appalachia with more government grants for stupid shit that only ends up putting money in the pockets of liberal social workers or system-gaming corporations.” Or to promote some “environmmental” cause like opposing mountaintop mining that is ostensibly supposed to “help” Appalachians but inevitably ends up further impoverishing them.
I nominate Katy Tur at NBC as the perfect example of the Manhattan media employee Zman describes above.
Speaking of takes, Dr. Bruce Charlton recently blogged a great high-level take analyzing why the Left can only distort, disrupt, and destroy.
His conclusion was that those qualities will prevent the Left from implementing a global, tech-heavy, AI-based surveillance state. I am not as certain.
WM Briggs’ Coronavirus Idiocy Awards post is worth visiting if only to click through to Moldbug’s CV take. Moldbug’s take is so horrifically civnat/globalist it invalidates his entire canon.
“Moldbug’s take is so horrifically civnat/globalist it invalidates his entire canon.”
I hope not. I have some fondness for Moldbug. By the time I came across him, I had already swallowed the red pill but he washed it down for me.
Tut-
Read and decide for yourself:
https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/plan-a-for-the-coronavirus-7db3997490c1
Yes, it is rather histrionic. I’m just sad about it. I feel that I owe Moldbug something.
A long time ago I lived in New York City. Those people are neurotic. Their hysteria was not unexpected for me. The problem is, normie does not understand this. He thinks that television talking head is just like him. Sad mistake.
Every sitcom character and joke in the past 30 years has revolved around being neurotic. “He’s funny because he’s fruity…and neurotic. She’s funny because she’s airheaded…and neurotic. He’s funny because he’s a genius…and neurotic. Etc.” It’s likely one way in which they validate their own pathologies.
Fly bargain airlines from JFK to Miami loaded to brimming with New York (((retirees))). I’ve done it on a regular basis. You know nothing of neuroticism and narcissism until you do.
Don’t bother paying the fare, just watch any episode of Seinfeld. Hopefully we all know by now that the main characters are the villains of the story.
Edit… oops, Dutch beat me to it.
Seinfeld is all about NYC people. They are that neurotic and awful.
The gullible following the lead of the neurotic–sounds like a sound plan for the future.
I am not sure one can breach the divide in any meaningful sense.
Look at Globalism from the 80s. Offshored hundreds of thousands of jobs, eviscerated the traditional manufacturing economy in nearly all the west and laid waste to huge areas of the country. The same sectors sort of shrugged as it played out on TV and well away from them. They were still doing fine. The economic impact was theoretical, although in some ways similar to now for those areas affected.
Its the same with this. Govt/Media/academic etc are just not going to be affected so its a bit of a puzzle what the fuss is. I think for them looking at the sectors being wrecked its just a thing on TV and is not nearly as exciting as the daily death counts and the role play plague victim/joan of arc combination on offer from the safety of a guaranteed paid holiday.
Its even more puzzling to them why don’t these people just retreat to their second home in the country and wait it out like the rest of us, while chairing those vital conferences on the next year strategy for HR?
Muh individualism. They have convinced the right unions and collective organizing are bad and communistic, and therefore we have no capacity for collective bargaining. An atomized herd is much easier to cull and exploit than an organized one. The left doesn’t care because most of their minds have been completely divorced from reality for some time now anyway. Most of them, like much of the right, get their takes fed to them by the glowing box. The right has better instincts on the whole but these are always manipulated into something impotent. Like individualism. What happened to the tea party is one such example. Theywere also always too afraid to say what they were really mad about. If you can’t even name the problem, there’s no way in hell you are ever going to solve it. They’ve happily named whites as the problem, and they have been pretty successful in solving it. From 90% to below 60% in a few short decades… We need to lose our fear and lose it fast. The clock is ticking.
A couple of nights ago the TV news had a segment about a local college in suburban New York City converting their dorms into a quarantine center, so that people who needed to isolate away from family or roommates would have a place to stay. This story was presented as a great example of how we’re all in this together.
A few minutes later, the same TV news had a story about a Hilton Hotel in Manhattan that had been converted into a similar quarantine center; they were investigating why three people died from heart attacks within a 24 hour period.
That story was presented as a terrible consequence of the lockdown and quarantine.
Two identical premises, portrayed with diametrically opposed viewpoints.
Are quarantine centers Good or Bad? Don’t ask the news media – they can’t even follow their own narrative.
What is that thing Goebbels said? Something like, ” When I hear the word culture I want to reach for my pistol.”
I feel the same way about, “We are all in this together.”
At first I just cringed when the radio commercial would announce the mega-box store or bimbo-laden local news channel mouthed this phrase. Now I want to stop the person saying it into dust. Too much?
The quote is usually attributed to Hermann Goering, Head of the German Luftwaffe during the Third Reich.
Kind of strange, since Goering showed reasonably good taste in the art that he looted from German-occupied countries.
Diversity,
Yes. Correct thanks. I was pulling from the memory of some documentary long ago and too lazy to google it.
I think he was talking about the sleazy decadent culture developed after the Great War. Kind of like many pretend performance or shock art of today is art.
Or
demon worship“Spirit Cooking”“Every time I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my pistol”.
It is actually a line from a pro-NS German stage play from the 1930s. Wrongly attributed to Hermann Goering.
Nope. Seems just right to me.
I hear you, brother. “Social distancing” has replaced “Kommuniteee” as my ‘reach for my gun’ term.
What vexes me the most is, “We’re here to take care of you,” or one of its insipid variants. I don’t need you to take care of me, you clown. I’m more than capable of taking care of myself. Aren’t people, especially grown men, infuriated by being treated like infants?
Not many of my generation (millennial). Far too many boys coddled their entire lives, given their participation trophies – *taken care of*.
The latest in my local governments war on chinavirus: it is now illegal to play catch or frisbee in the parks. No use of “shared objects” allowed.
This is not about our health.
The thing about building a utopia that most people fail to understand is that it is not about solving toward their happiness.
If the builders don’t need you to supply the things they need, you will not be invited to the cloud city.
And even if you are, your little utopia will be a prison of basic needs supplied by people who hate you and are constantly solving for ways to replace you with a machine.
People I meet keep talking about some show on the netflix that I just have to see. There is something really creepy about this. Of all the things people could be worked up about, a show about sad dirt people doing stupid things tops their list. The virus is real. It is not Chinese.
I don’t see the logic behind any of the lockdown directives, but this one strikes me as particularly odd. If you can play catch, what difference does it make where you play it? It’s not like strangers happen along in the park and begin sharing the frisbee or football or what have you.
The overlords are still just a little unsure about how many of the rubes will invoke the Takings Clause, so they’re treading just a little gingerly for now, limiting it to parks. Won’t be long until it’s everyone’s yards.
I just finished reading (mentioned on Bruce Charlton’s blog) PKD’s “The Penultimate Truth”. Makes me think of that in a odd way.
I am originally from the upper Midwest and have lived for years and travelled in many foreign countries. That being said, I have been living in the N.Y.C. metropolitan area for decades and can testify to the provincialism of New Yorkers. For example, when I tell them that they have the worst subway system in the world, I receive blank or incredulous looks. They really do not know.
The big problem now is that they are not only letting their city decline, but they are trying to destroy our nation’s economy and society with this open-ended lockdown. In other words, their eccentricities have become a real and serious threat to our society. They really scare me far more than the virus.
I live in NJ but do my best to avoid NYC as much as possible. But your statement still surprises me. The subway system is like a descending into a sewer. Boston’s T is the only one I’ve seen comparable in filth and decrepit equipment. I know they spend vast sums of money on it, and I assume what little isn’t skimmed off by the connected corrupt is spent on diversity training.
Had the privilege to utilize many different subway systems. Moscow’s was majestic – Stalin built his public their palaces (which doubled as bomb shelters). I grew up while they were digging up DC for its subway, and rode it when it first opened, but the pride in the long escalators (which were constantly broken and sloooow when not) was laughable. Moscow’s escalators (which were never out of service during my entire year there) were twice as long and steep, and they moved fast enough that they were initially quite intimidating.
NYC – “worst subway system in the world”
Really? I find their subway system OK, given their “diverse” circumstances. As public transit goes, it’s probably one of the best in the US, though that is setting the bar very low in the first place.
I speak from personal experiences in Tokyo, London, Paris, Athens, DC and (even) Chicago.
You may wish to check this link. What I say is no big secret.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/nyregion/new-york-today-how-did-the-subways-get-so-bad.html
My comments concerning the subways extend to the airports and other public facilities.
I was talking about the system overall, including density and coverage, which is definitely not bad by American standards, which are admittedly very low. I also speak from personal experience.
Of course, in a world wide context, NYC subway isn’t that great, especially when compared to first world systems outside of North America.
The NYT article is paywalled, btw.
Have listened to New Yorkers and ther put-downs for years. NYC is so much better than anywhere else blah blah blah, you stupid hayseeds, etc.
But where did they all start running when the plague hit the city ? Why the same backwater hickvilles they love to trash so much. Used to run into these geniuses during the summer time.
Stupid cunts couldn’t even change a flat tire or it was beneath them .Why get their hands dirty ? I paid for that roadside service ! What do you mean the tow truck is out of the area ? Who’s your supervisor ?
Obviously feel bad for the working stiffs in that town , but the suit and tie crowd ? Not so much.
sirlancelot,
Agreed. I will make a clarification to my earlier statement. Worked with a crew of men from upstate New York a few years ago. They were still damned Yankees but they weren’t NYCites. They knew their way around off-roading, hunting, ice fishing etc… basically damned yankee rednecks. Their manners were rubbish but I liked them quite a bit. And they seemed to despise NYC.
You see more Confederate flags in Upstate New York than you see in the South…
I lived in Manhattan for about 3 months in 1972. I left the apartment around 73rd street one morning with my raincoat over my arm, and it slipped off and hit the sidewalk. I had to consider whether I still wanted it after being on the filthy New York sidewalk.
If you had been on the Lower East Side during that period, you would have left it there.
The great thing about New York is the born-and-bred will help you with anything, they’ll even stop traffic at 2 in the morning…
and then they’ll warn you to watch out for Nuw Yoahkuhs, they’ll cut ya heart out for five bucks.
Historically and relevant to the current pandemic: the city is the seat of power, political, economic, social, etc. Concentration of people has benefits of scale but a soft white underbelly: proximity vastly increases the opportunities for a nasty* virus like COVID-19. We will learn to manage around it but it is a major disruption. We are quickly learning how much of our modern society was built on the assumption that large numbers of persons could safely crowd together.
*As diseases go, the coronavirus is a nuisance but rather tame compared to some of history’s killers. Think of the Black Death. Or if that’s ancient history, the 1918 Flu. Still, in my opinion, a very contagious illness that can wipe out a sizeable fraction of a nursing home in a matter of days, as well as kill apparently healthy people, is not to be trifled with. Yes, we’ll probably all get exposed eventually but we should not joke about it. I would rather wait until better treatments are available. Apparently a malaria remedy is not the holy grail it was recently through to be.
I’ll take my chances my in order to keep my freedoms. And my children’s and grandchildren’s freedoms. That is, I would if my country was not made up of people sucking their thumbs in the fetal position. If people were bleeding out their eyeballs, that would be one thing. But this appears to be a bad pneumonia, nothing more. And now we probably won’t have herd immunity, which could possibly mean that more people will die than if this thing had taken its natural course. And the virtue-signaling of social distancing and one-way grocery aisles may be here to stay. How ironic that it is Trump, of all people, who has given his blessing to all this and possibly given it life beyond what should have been its grave.
Ben, no one’s stopping you from self quarantine. What you seem to be asking is that everyone else join you in economic suicide in order to increase your perceived safety.
Hole up in your apartment, order home delivery of food stuffs to your hearts content, but don’t ask others to beggar themselves in order to preserve your hide.
PS, the Head of the VA where the HydroxiCloroquine “study” was performed has issued a statement basically decrying the finding. 1) patients were given the treatment at almost the point of death, 2) no zinc was administered. Meanwhile NYC wants more doses sent.
No one’s buying what your selling these days.
Norm Macdonald is doing some Grade A material right now.
“The people in the vast unproductive sector of the economy, like the media and politics, have no stake in the economy, so this is just another thing to fill their time”.
“The most provincial people on earth live in New York City and media people are some of the dumbest, making for the perfect storm”.
Two statements of epochal, cosmic truth in today’s essay.
Channelling and updating Henry II query: will no one rid me of this turbulent city?
We need our version of Eric Swallwell, the commie California representative who indicated (“the government has nukes”) he would approve bombing an American city to make a point, specifically to rein in gun owners. Well, Eric, what’s sauce for the goose . . .
Swallwell is just another stupid pol who says whatever comes into his head. The Nukes statement is always a tell of such an unthinking individual. Nukes will never be used on US soil as they would achieve no productive purpose—except perhaps to unite the populous against the government.
I think she was applauding Swallwell’s spirit more than his tactics.
Yes, that is a better interpretation. Read, think, respond. I’ll try better next time.
Since I was raised in the DC burbs I grew up in my own sort of bubble, but I was truly astonished as a college freshman to hear Newyawkahs talk about “the city” (as if no other existed). And my subsequent two brief visits there were not magical and scintillating, but disgusting – the filth, the diversity, the crime, the crowding. I yearn to escape the soulless suburbs for a small town with real neighbors.
Saml Adams once gave us a delightful ride through the byzantine NYC transport system- “I got a taxi to the L train, then took a bus to the subway and walked three blocks to the ferry” type stuff. I’m hoping one of the natives might take us on another tour.
But, I’ve been to scrap yards in Queens and many other major cities, and met a million bums, gangbangers, and night people.
Such broken, scarred, alien provincials are breathtaking, actually. My first thought is always, “What if I were you? What would be on my mind right now?”
@3g4me
Come on up to MT we are open for business 😉
A civil war between the two groups would be a good reckoning time. The times scream for it but I don’t really see how it could manifest itself. All of us in flyover land that are normies would just like to be left alone, but when they arrest mothers on playgrounds, you see that isn’t possible.
In a civil war, I always thought the police would be on our side. When I see the videos such as the arrests of moms on playgrounds and a cop chasing a lone runner on the empty beach, it seems like we’ll be on our own.
I disabused myself of that fantasy years ago. Law enforcement attracts the same rapaciously power hungry types as the Imperial Capital, with even fewer brain cells.
Mr. Cheka,
You ain’t from the rural south. Cops might be N.K.V.D. clones in your neck of the woods, but down here you’d be a fellow traveler.
Wolf – I’m truly surprised you thought that. Not criticizing you, just surprised. They are so into rules for their own sake, pettiness, and power displays that I long ago discarded that childhood belief that cops were the ‘good guys.’ Same with too many in the military. They are also really into the “we’re all ‘murricans’ here” meme and will try to guilt you with tales of their IKAGOs while they arrest you for not groveling to the same.
Police don’t want to endanger their pensions. I imagine that the thought of an early retirement with a big pension is what keeps them going most days.
I don’t like it, but I understand. In a sense, our problems with the police are like our problems with modern women. We need to offer them a more attractive alternative. But that’s not easy.
They’re dullards who do as they’re told without thinking. Perhaps they would do the same if told to gun down people peacefully protesting the destruction of the economy and what remains of the Constitution in state capitals.
Getting shoved into the arms of waiting ANTIFA will disabuse one of any notion of whose side the cops are on real quick…
Mr. Barney,
I’m a cop in South Georgia. That shit won’t happen here. Refer to my earlier entry about a broken nation.
Mob protest is the reaction of the lazy (even if it gets violent). And it tends to peter out quickly after the venting has blown off steam. And actual civil war is the easiest thing for tyranny to suppress (hello detention camps and genocide). The real enemy is not numerous. A solution paradigm based on focus will be much more effective (and quick).
Lead the way Tom!
Like?
There can be no civil war without leaders. People don’t just start fighting by themselves, out of nowhere. Rioting maybe, but not an actual civil war.
Without a leader, people will just wait and slowly cook.
Agreed. But leaders don’t have to be brigade commanders. You can also inspire others to fight smarter, not harder. All tyrannies sit atop a leviathan of apparatchiks and jackboot corp. Taking on the leviathan en masse is often bloody, problematic, and causes lots of collateral damage. There are better ways to root out the core of this evil and spare the innocents.
David,
What the kungflu fling has confirmed is we’re most certainly not one nation. That ship has long sailed. I live on the coast of Georgia and have as much in common with a denizen of New Jersey as I do with s Bantu bushman…..
“In reality, she is like an oxpecker living on the rhinovirus of the cosmopolitan system.”
Lovely phrasing.
A Jack Kerouac-approved phrase.
It’s been a few decades since I’ve read Kerouac. Can you expand?
One of the phrases I remember from “On the Road” is that they were always “balling the jack.” (Let’s hope Jack consented.)
“The Manhattan media employee…………in reality she is like an oxpecker living on the Rhinovirus of the cosmopolitan system.”
Absolutely oblivious to the actual world!
Wow, Z, what an early morning visual that is to start the thoughts rolling!
And now, several weeks into the Wuhan Lockdown, the very important system that was to be protected from overuse by Flattening the Curve” – the medical heath care system – is suffering from immense underuse and is in real danger of changes that may not be beneficial to the users of the system in the near future.
For sure, no one will choose to place themselves or a loved one in an assisted living facility knowing that it is similar to solitary confinement conditions!
“In real danger of changes not beneficial to the users of the system.”
This sounds like the perennial warning of the conservative stood on the sidelines as the usual suspects took turns with a wrecking ball to every single item of western culture and infrastructure.
Its intentional now, and it was intentional then. Its intentional every single time. Once the choice is burnt in the system the US get a single payer system and it will be as shit and state controlled as it is in Europe.
I totally agree with your thoughts.
What I was trying to convey was that the primary reason that the shutdown was mandated (Flatten the curve) – which was total bullshit – was to protect the existing system by not overloading it, when the actual goal was to change it by gaining total control.
You are correct. The unspoken goal is to Socialize and control everything.
Saw a sign yesterday in a story about protests that called it “Socialist Distancing.”
I think that traditionally happens in mass graves.
That’s a keeper, w.a.t. Vikings, should become a meme.
Wish I’d thought of it.
Yes, quite a time we live in. People using the park get ticket or arrested, but if you’re a homeless person who needs a place to pitch your tent, hey, use the city park (at least in 9th Appellate District) 😀
This might help explain why the Man from Nowhere, Richard Spencer, is a true believer in the lockdown.
The Man From Nowhere has a comfy home in too many heads around here. Counter-signalling someone’s irrelevancy is self-defeating.
Spencer is about as relevant to the 2020’s Dissident Right as that guy who ran the Hale-Boop Comet Cult
We seem to do this a lot here, and not just with Spencer.
Spencer can always be counted on to come down on the wrong side of an issue. He makes a great contra-indicator.
Moldbug is my favorite shrieking violet in this whole mess.
His take was so bad in completely invalidates his entire canon.
Why does anyone care about that dweeb.? I gave him his due time and not only is he not helping our cause he’s not DR ,just Nazi Lite with a smidgen of International Bolshevism for good measure
Yuck.
The people sure they can make it without government may get to test that theory.
I think you’re right. The system is huge and has some inertia. But at some point real food shortages could actually happen. After that happens it’s turbulence, specific predictions futile.
I used to work for Globohomo Inc., and lived in suburbia outside Megapolis. I still keep in touch with many former colleagues, and have done a few virtual happy hours with them during the lockdown. I consider them level-headed, but the vast majority have bought into the panic. I don’t think they are cynically playing along with the lockdown, but given their location and the prevailing sentiment in globohomocus, they have every reason to believe.
A little more surprising in my current location, Upper Midwest University Town, are the number of people also playing along with the current lockdown panic. On some level, I understand this as the university administrators need to copy the Cloud people, but some of the healthcare people have surprised me. The influence of a few has had a significantly large impact on the broader town. The gynocracy has extended far and wide.
It makes me wonder how worthwhile some of these endeavors are. For example, the universities folded real quick on this so even they, the same people who organize global protests against any slight to globohomo, must think that their mission is a waste of space.
Likewise, although we have protests in our state against the lockdown, I’m hard pressed to even raise an eyebrow in support of getting the local illegal labor rackets (the Chinese buffet has illegals from all over working in it) to reopen.
I guess that’s the bad part, like everything else in the empire it’s not something we’re doing together, but something we’re doing to each other.
University towns are ‘little globohomo’ out in the middle of nowhere. The very same types of people you find in DC exist in these college towns. The same useless people doing useless things and living like bugmen. If NYC was a suburb, it would be a college town.
“The most provincial people on earth live in New York City”
I used to have to fly into and out of NYC for business and was shocked at just how true the statement above was. I would listen to New Yorkers on the plane constantly carp about everything that wasn’t NYC (well, they’d rave about foreign destinations but other parts of America were garbage, garbage people eating garbage food). I think the only thing they appreciated about other US localities was the sunshine.
By contrast, with most Southerners I’ve dealt with, they may be bemused by the weirdness of other places but ask a million questions.
The second most provincial people on earth are professors.
I think the mundane tasks of living can be quite self-actualizing for someone with any depth of character.
Been there, done that, it’s overrated. Gutting fish or digging ditches all day is soul-numbing – only urbanites romanticize menial work.
I know what you mean Felix having started early with manual labor jobs. I think Natarnsco may mean the variety of mundane tasks can be rewarding and clarifying. A day spent weeding the vegetable garden, chopping wood, repairing an item, preparing a meal etc… can be self-actualizimg. My take anyway.
Certainly, a day or two, although it’s not for everybody. I love hiking, tenting and cooking on an open fire and so on, but I much prefer reading a book to weeding my garden. Trimming back all the shit that pops out of the ground in astounding profusion, always leaves me angry and hateful of plant life. Going at it with a chainsaw helps a bit, but why can’t the little green fuckers just stay the fuck down where they belong?
After I dropped out of high school, I spent two years as a fisherman on the Faroe Islands. The islanders were nice people, but a life of manual labor doesn’t make for interesting conversationalists; they were materialistic to the core, except when they talked about Jesus. Not that they talked much, mind you.
When I came back to Copenhagen, my old friends struck me as annoyingly supercilious, but all things considered, I prefer a conversation about literature or politics to one about fish or money.
I, for one, do not look forward to the Zombie Apocalypse.
Going at it with a chainsaw helps a bit, but why can’t the little green fuckers just stay the fuck down where they belong?
That’s why God made Roundup.
a life of manual labor doesn’t make for interesting conversationalists;
They’re not all like that. The main guy I hire for manual labor on the ranch has had a pretty interesting life, and also loves to talk politics. 🙂
That’s why God made Roundup.
I have a hedge of poplars that need to be cut down to size each year, lest they take the sun from my lawn. They grow like motherfuckers.
The rest of it I just run over with the tractor.
My ex father-in-law lived an interesting life, in a sense: he was a seventh son (so he had the king for a godfather) and all his older brothers had died before he was fifty, either at sea, falling off cliffs while gathering eggs or being drunk, or in car accidents.
But living in a hamlet all your life doesn’t ennoble your soul – my F-in-L was one of the more curious people there, he was quite smart, in fact, but still with a horizon as narrow as any cosmopolitan. I suppose there are lessons to be learned from sweat and toil, but the one lesson I took home, was the value of a desk job.
You seem to be confusing God with Monsanto. You need to get that looked at or you’re in for a world of difficulties.
OK, Francis.
But living in a hamlet all your life doesn’t ennoble your soul
Neither does traveling all over the world, or working a desk job. Trust me, I’ve done all of the above.
You seem to have some kind of bias against not being well-traveled or exposed to more of the world, but it’s just that, a bias. I’ve known a lot of both types of people and the lives of people who’ve never traveled 20 miles from their hometown are often as rich as those who have traveled to every continent, been brought up to appreciate opera, literature and ballet.
But it’s a different kind of rich. You don’t have to understand it, and you don’t have to adopt it, but don’t denigrate it.
Neither does traveling all over the world, or working a desk job.
Never said it did, but I reacted to the whiff of rural romanticism in today’s column.
As I also said, living in a city indeed makes for a somewhat supercilious outlook, but all things considered, I’d rather raise my children in a city. There’s a reason young people flee small towns.
Hm. Seems I meant “superficial” rather than “supercilious”, although both are true.
If young people flee small towns how do the towns endure. Hollywood likes to portray small town america as either evil or stupid.
You have a peculiar bias.
If young people flee small towns how do the towns endure
People with kids and old people moving there – or at least, that’s how it works in Denmark.
Mind you, Europeans cities are different from American ones, more livable.
You have a peculiar bias.
Guilty as charged, I suppose. I’m a city boy at heart, but I’ve tried both.
I hate suburbs and cities though Colorado Springs wasn’t bad back in the day.
I grew up in a 100% White exurb with no roads fit for bicycles and no stores with less than an hour and half walk. The nearest city with 35 miles and small towns 20.
It was far from perfect with the bullies and meh education but its 10,000x better than anything modernity has to offer and if I had kids I’d give them that in a heartbeat.
Denmark sounds great for you. You should stay there. I’m glad your happy
Nice riding country. I made a bike trip through and dated a girl from Bornholm back in the early 1980s.
European towns then still seem to serve the function that in America suburbs took away from American small towns, which is to make for healthier families for people fleeing cities (and avoid build up of centralized large cities – then again, large Euro-government won’t let that happen heh).
and yeah the young flee even harder now because with the internet the countryside seems even emptier and dumber by comparison. however, on on one hand rural life isn’t as hard now as it was some time ago, and on the other i was raised in a small city and knew people in the small towns and countryside went normally to visit the cities a lot and satisfy their cosmopolitan cravings anyway (perhaps to their own detriment, as i said in other comment there seems to be a feedback loop of sorts).
of course the young are going to want to go there more and live there for a while to build a life away from the small basic talk of the small town, specially if they lived in the middle of nowhere and somehow they catch a whiff of curiosity for the urban world; however the city has other negatives, the pollution of every sense and of the environment, the superficiality that translates into decadence and lack of self-sufficiency, and of course the huddled masses (even worse in post-1965 diverse urban America; of course, you lived in relatively cool and comfy Copenhagen, so no urban life is the same everywhere). ergo it is no surprise that after 35 happy hour partying at the high-rise bar is starting to seem creepy and tiring and overwhelming, so that there are still people moving away from large cities into perhaps smaller cities and from there on smaller/suburbanized towns in the vicinity (the route exiles from California and college grads are taking, for example). of course, it would be easier for these suburbs not to get elitist and then pozzed if land ownership didn’t mean mortgage slavery, or if it wasn’t necessary to keep real estate prices up to shy away the druggies and darkies… but i digress…
of course there’s going to be “basic towns” as you describe, unfortunately in America it’s become the norm; worse in fact than the Faroese because at least they don’t have meth or opiates. either way, as i mention it, seems there’s more at play than just “rurals are provincials” – yes, they often are not polished, but the way the white countryside has precipitously declined in wealth and knowledge all over the world is both singular and showing of a greater pattern of dysfunction. hillbilly elegy and all that.
Drive through Italy, France and Spain. You’ll see exactly what happens when young people leave. Deserted villages are the norm over here and the trend isn’t going to change anytime soon.
After The US Neo Liberal system falls apart that puts its efforts into those towns with limits on where business can set up and very possibly a China like system of living permits will have a population increase I suspect.
If you have a job, family prospects ,a bit of anti corruption oversight and you can’t run away to the big city anyway, odds are you’ll start a family as you don’t really have other options.
The “liberal” option would be for a natal focused culture to vastly increase wages so that there is enough for people to enjoy the city life and to save for having a family.
That would be far from easy since even without easy global trade, all of the social system lead to lower wages and thus lower fertility.
totally agreed on your two replies. i would add that in medieval times, stability was reached because on one hand peasants couldn’t either leave or be evicted, while on the other hand it was hard if not impossible to be allowed to live in the city if you were born outside it. so there’s a precedent for your idea, not just the commie experiments from Soviets and CCP-Chinese, which are more straightforward with their local interprovincial passports but also more easily abused. it was when the kings decided to harness the power of the cities’ tax collectors and bourgeois entrepreneurs that humanism/liberalism was born. true, the nobles got rowdy and abusive at times, but in other times it was them who kept balance of power with their armies, and knew their lands better – it was when they became courtiers, heightening the natural dysgenic trends of mating too much among themselves and consuming to decadence, that they became useless. so, to avoid the same fate, current cosmopolitan elites must allow both local elites to form in satellite cities and further outwards – while perhaps trickily allowing enough genetic variance to refresh the groups and classes of society, usually in the form of government/corporate/church workers from the metropolis, which should be exceptions to the norm of keeping communities segregated. as you say, illiberal, but it’s worked.
another comparison – the absorption of US States into the federal apparatus, finished with the end of segregation. it’s almost as if everything has to be absorbed by the Borg, until it explodes its contents out again. Babel must fall again – or so i hope. else we can prevent it from building up too much…
Cities will end up dooming humanity to stupidity if not extinction since NrX parlance here they operate as IQ shredders .
Higher costs and wage arbitrage means lower fertility for smart people. Hello 1.6 fertility forever.
Worse before we go global Haiti or global Brazil , some idiot may well make Captain Trips and doom as all.
As we’ve seen from the Kung Flu , super urban societies like ours our brittle.
Its far better to have many smaller towns and a lot less mobility of people and capital if you want a society that actually lasts a while.
Tris is very illiberal but in the bigger picture those guarantees permit reproduction of a society.
Go urban, become bugmen, die.
Does he have a Mexican accent? 😉
Is that to me? No, he’s a good ol’ White guy. His family used to raise harness racing horses back when he was young, so he’s got a lot of good stories from traveling the racing circuit back in the day.
“That’s why God made Roundup.”
God made Roundup so that his Chosen (((Ambulance Chasers))) could sue the shit out of Monsanto.
“Going at it with a chainsaw helps a bit, but why can’t the little green fuckers just stay the fuck down where they belong?” Hahaha.
Funny my first job was as a dishwasher too. I liked it. Left alone, steam, music playing and when I was done the commercial kitchen would be sparklingly returned to a state of order and as it was before the grimy day of business had begun. Different folks different strokes I suppose.
Unlike laundry. It’s never quite as new looking as when you washed it last and takes forever. A little more worn out, a little less vibrant, a bit rattier. That’s my vision of hell.
Trimming back all the shit that pops out of the ground in astounding profusion, always leaves me angry and hateful of plant life.
lol this reminded me of an old year book photo I once saw. The guy said “Im not vegetarian b/c I love animals, Im vegetarian b/c I hate plants!” haha
Agree w you on the apocalypse. They might offer an interesting break w routine on the first day. But they get old real fast.
I finally broke down and bought a lawnmower for the weeds.
Now the neighbors peer fearfully from their curtains as i caper maniacally and scream “Die! Die! Die!”
I did manual labor when I was young for a few years. Now I work for big companies doing work in the knowledge economy. I find them to be not the slightest bit more sophisticated than my old blue collar friends. Softer, more likely to have that local IPA than a Rolling Rock, but just as interested in stupid stuff.
Congratulations – you just made the point that people who live the type of life you admit to preferring – would be completely ungrounded in the realities of life.
I spent my earlier years engaging in “monotonous labor” . It’s how I paid my way thru school. And I’d also be willing to bet that I’ve poured more concrete and dug more dirt than 99% of the population in this comment section.
I agree with you on one thing: I definitely would not want to spend the entirety of my life doing these things. It IS mind numbing and monotonous – and back breaking – IF you have to do it all the time.
BUT – when I worked in a factory – the work became something I could do with part of my brain – while the rest of it thought out schoolwork – or worked out other things in my life – or thought up new projects or things I wanted to build.
When I acquired property later in life – I found that working outside and doing all that concrete and sitework – became an escape back to reality after countless hours doing tech work – that in and of itself is mind numbing and exhausting after a certain point.
Digging a hole has a way of breaking down all your delusions on how the world REALLY works. And all those plants you hate so much – well they don’t give a shit about all your preferences about reading books. When things go to hell they’re going to go to work breaking up the foundation of your house , breaking apart all of your roads – and growing thru the holes in your roof.
And your books will be nothing but fertilizer for them.
And I’d also be willing to bet that I’ve poured more concrete and dug more dirt than 99% of the population in this comment section
I’ll be sure to call you if I need dirt dug.
Felix, I grew up in a working class home and community and understand your feelings towards manual labor and working class conversations. The working class tends to have a better BS detector but also tend to have vapid conversations. I escaped to avoid the mundane existence.
Unfortunately these days the conversation of the cosmopolitan educated good whites is even more vapid because it consists of simply repeating smugly the insane narratives du jour from the NYT and the rest of American Pravda that promulgated on social media.
I find myself looking back fondly now on those vapid but largely BS free conversations from my working class youth because they were not filled with so much hatred of the other.
Well, like everything else, a balance is necessary. Manual labor and mundane tasks can be worthwhile for many, so long as they pay a decent wage and allow some time off.
Conversely, the chattering classes are often chattering about things like anal, gay marriage, bugchasing, gender fluidity, racial diversity, white privilege, and the “oppression of the patriarchy.”
And, of course, the Jews and their “Holocaust” — incessantly.
I also prefer conversations about politics and literature… but it sure matters what politics and what literature we are discussing.
that says more about the Faroese and about that Pietist Prot way of just thinking about work and Jesus.
i get what you mean though. i think there has to be a time for everything. that is why the Catholics may on one hand be more prone to mortification, but on the other have more holidays prone to living it up. on one hand some self-sufficiency, on the other enough time to rest and read, and either way sharing in national/familial/volk custom.
i also think the rurals are also, well, as provincial as the cosmopolitans are now. if anything, it is a feedback loop. we do see the worst and/or cheapest of white culture displayed on tv, by (((them))), to entertain us. and the good of white culture, even the cheap hickster kind, is buried under diversity-laden remakes in this post-Obama anti-white culture. add to that the dysgenics trends, in which the smartest in the countryside leave it depleted and become office drones at best, while some of the elites increasingly fail at mating or do so by going down in genetic classes with the drones.
a good meter of provincialness: who the cool guy is in wrestling. in the Reagan age, it was the cool Aryan-looking (but fake roided-up Italian) Hulk Hogan, who also was nworded but nevertheless did nothing but hush it down and get paid pretending to be a kid’s hero. then in the Clinton age when whites had some level of despair and base expression that could be harnessed for media purposes, came the basic antihero Stone Cold Steve Austin with his can of whoop-ass, expletives, beer, packing guns, beating the colored Rock and the Irish boss McMahon and his Connecticut son-in-law goon Triple H (who’d then lead the 00s as a sort of annoying Bush Jr placeholder figure). of course, Stone Cold wouldn’t last forever, and so came a replacement fit for the post-Obammers: John Cena, a white rapper from the suburbs of Boston who also did movies and kids shows, waves the rainbow flag or any other cool awareness, but who also pretends to do a marine thing and has the buzzcut because of his first movie character, and of course is a favorite of the armed forces. he even instituted a blinged-out title belt. in short, the posterboy for globohomo America’s provincials. i’ve been told he has an awful scene in the Dr Dolittle movie.
Trade-offs with everything. I did not find enjoyment in washing dishes, but when I was done with my shift, my time was my time. When I worked for Globohomo traveling by Business Class was nice, but there were no weekends or family time.
When I examine my time in Globohomocus, I realized has absolutely dependent I was on other people and the system.
when I was done with my shift, my time was my time.
Yes, there’s that.
My first real job was as a dishwasher. Payday I felt like a king because I made ten cents an hour over minimum wage. But my father housed, clothed and fed me. Two years later, I spent a month in a carrot packing shed. Eight hours of mind-numbing physical labor on a conveyor belt that ruled the pace of life. I had to pay for gas and food at that point in life and quickly learned that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. I happily went off to university and a future of riding desks. The fact is that everyone is interdependent, no matter where you live. You either sell your labor providing a service or a product, or you make the product. At the end of the day, there has to be someone else willing to buy or trade. Self-actualization comes from being excellent at whatever it is that you do; so play to your strengths rather than trying to overcome your weaknesses.
Growing up, my Dad was Director of Food Service for a few big hospitals. Thus, I had summer jobs working in the kitchen at three different hospitals — none of them ever ones my Dad managed, because he was cool enough to know that being the boss’s son as a menial food service worker would have been unbearable. He just used connections to get me hired at colleagues’ hospitals. Hey, that’s the way the world works. Yes, I was a nepotism dishwasher. Born with a mass-produced stainless steel spoon in my waterlogged hands.
One thing those menial jobs taught me was that no way was I going to spend my life working a menial job for a crap hourly wage. 🙂
At least, now when I’m doing manual labor, it’s for my own businesses for my own much greater profit.
but there were no weekends or family time.
You just need to stand up to the peer and corporate pressure. Do a good job, but don’t give an inch on that propaganda that says that “good employees answer every call and are constantly checking their texts and email.”
Maybe that means you’ll never make VP, but do you really want to? That life sucks.
In Globohomo Inc. they own your time, all of it. There may be a few hourly type roles where you can walk away at the end of the day, but that is not much different than working on an assembly line or picking fruit.
If you show some initiative, get a promotion, you are on the path to working weekends. You accept it or leave.
I disagree. I speak from experience. I worked at tech startups and major corporations and I always held my boundaries firm. I became the hero of some of my co-workers one year when we had a big deadline for a coding project. We all worked remotely, but we were in at headquarters for a planning meeting. My boss said that until we got that done, he wanted us all working local.
This is like a three-month plan and I can code just as well at home. I just put my foot down. I said, “Nope. I’m not staying away from my family that long over this.”
The guy nearly burst a blood vessel. He started in on a big guilt trip. “What? You don’t think I care about my family? I’m away from them all the time, blah blah blah” (he really was hardly ever home with his own family).
I said, “I didn’t say that. But we all make our own choices. That’s mine.” Mic drop. The guy was so upset he had to leave the room. I don’t know what he did or who he talked to, but he came back five or ten minutes later, and guess what? We did that project from home.
The other guys on the team were all “You are a god!”
Just for standing up for what I wanted.
You don’t like what your corporate overlords demand of you? Nut up. I was perfectly willing to walk out on that job if he called me on it. (Disclaimer: There was no way in hell they could get that project done without me, but executives don’t always make rational choices, especially when you challenge their authority. I was absolutely ready to walk.).
Impressive. When I coded C++ for the biggest computer gaming company, they required us to work in the office 6 days a week for a few months to meet a deadline. We later won a class action law suit against them for that.
The CTO would say, “working from home is not a human right.” Unless you were exceptionally good, I guess they would have fired you.
I didn’t just work from home, I lived almost all the way across the country (California vs. Ohio).
Maybe your company would have fired me. Maybe they would have backed down. Sometimes you have to go all in. They get thinking about the time and expense of hiring and training your replacement, and maybe firing you doesn’t seem like a good idea. Or maybe they fire you and you get a good reminder that Gaming Inc. regards you as an interchangeable cog, so fuck them.
You want a life of quiet desperation, then act quietly desperate. You want to be valuable, act like you are valuable.
ETA: That actually reminds me of a story. One of my businesses, back in the day, was as part owner of a local ISP in the days when dialup was still a thing. We had a few commercial web page customers and one of them was a lady I became friends with. She was a ghostwriter, but most of the crowd she worked for were self-help authors, wellness gurus, that sort of thing. A more wretched hive of scum and villainy you’ll find nowhere. I wrangled my way into a couple of those self-help conferences through her just because that sort of window onto the human experience is really interesting to me. But, anyway, one piece of advice she had that always stuck with me was to always price your services as if you are worth a lot.
Like, if she was willing to ghostwrite a book for $100 bucks, nobody would believe she was any good. So she priced herself at the exclusive high end. People believe that they get what they pay for. If you’re Mr. “Will code for peanuts and verbal abuse” then that’s how you get treated. If you’re “you need me more than I need you,” that’s how you’ll get treated. Of course, it helps a whole lot if you are objectively good at what you do. But if you undervalue yourself, then people will be more than happy to treat you as low value.
Good on you for being indispensable. Not all of us work in IT, and not all of us are essential. In fact, most people in Globohomo Inc. are not essential and will be dropped like a bad habit on a down quarter, restructuring, acquisition, etc… It has nothing to do with “nutting up.”
Love it or leave it. Eventually, I walked, they replaced me, and life moved on for all parties. Just the way it is.
Nobody can change that but you.
In my experience there’s a lot of management types that spend all their time in the office – because that is all they have – and/or they just simply don’t want to be home with the family.
The “working long hours because we have to finish this project!!” – is just an excuse for other issues.
There’s also the “when you’re incompetent fall back on claiming you work long hours!” … excuse.
These types don’t want to be at the office alone – so they’ll browbeat everybody under their thumb to be there as well.
The “working long hours because we have to finish this project!!” – is just an excuse for other issues.
I suspect a lot of overtime is drawn because people can’t stand being around their families – the workplace is a safe space, free of personal shit.
Little is worse than always being at somebody’s beck and call. Your time is not your own. That’s one reason I loathe sail foams and rely on them as little as humanly possible.
I hadn’t heard “sail foam” before, so I did a search on it. Hilarious! 🙂
Nice. We’re blessed to be native speakers of possibly the richest language in human history (no matter how shabbily we’ve treated it recently).
The thing that is hard for us on the DR to learn is to stop helping, stop building things others use and to be as lazy as you can get away with.
The caveat here is if you work for yourself and that work benefits you. In that case do all you can to legally minimize taxes and grabby hands .
Outside of the above situation all hard work does is make other people who hate you rich
The less the do and the less you want, the better off you will be.
Call it a Mexican Buddhist work ethic if you like.
Want less, do less, live more.
Also regarding the story Vizzini relayed about someone dying trying to break up a knife fight.
Why would anyone do something that stupid in today’s world unless the law compelled them too?
Personally I can’t imagine doing that for someone I did not have close ties with. Maybe there will be a Whites and Friends social tie someday but until there is not my people not my problem, is the normal human social order and the one we need to learn.
Building some shelves on the weekend can be enjoyable and enlightening.
Working the prep station of a restaurant night after night or clearing fields of debris over the summer is just grunt work. I’m glad that I had those jobs, but I don’t need to do them again.
Or actually living with/dealing with minorities, etc. Ideally, a person will, early in life, have some exposure to minorities, as well as other aspects of life that are training. For instance, at least in the old days, having roommates in university, or living in a barracks full of soldiers (hopefully just in basic training), teaches one the benefits (are there any?) of having to live in close proximity with others. On the other hand, it showed me the benefits of having my own space and interacting with others more on my terms than everyone’s. I would add menial labor to that list. It basically sucks, but ideally a man will have some exposure to it. Nothing like getting burned by the stove to learn what “hot” means 🙂
A lot of these media bugmen are products of the lilly-white suburbs. Their parents or grandparents ran to the burbs when die-versity came to their city and the kids forgot that fact. They are completely unawares of why they lived in the suburbs to begin with.
Suburbs are the most soul crushing places on earth. They are a cartoon of ‘country living’ with unbearable traffic jams to get anywhere, shitty strip-malls, Wawa and 7-11 and shopping malls full of teenagers with nowhere else to go and nothing to do. They are a giant bugman factory. But anything is preferable to living with die-versity, especially when the entire system, particularly for kids is set up to make you their target with no redress available.
If you crave the big bucks, you’ve pretty much got to live in a huge metro area, in one format or another. Personally, I’d prefer to take a sizable pay-cut and live in a small city. And that’s just what I’ve done.
While the suburbs were a place to flee diversity, diversity is now fleeing to the suburbs. I don’t go to indoor shopping malls often, maybe once every 2 or 3 years. A recent trip to Woodfield, the huge mall in suburban Schaumburg, was a little shocking. A sea of various shades of brown, with a few white faces scattered about here and there. Not that long ago, this was a place and area that was virtually all white.
Yeah, I haven’t been to a mall in ages either. The malls in the city are loaded with “teens” fighting, cursing and just generally acting like animals. I’m the last holdout in my family still in the city. Every other person on both sides have fled since the 80s. So while I live in the city, I am in the burbs a lot for family stuff. I love how everyone pretends to like them. People all over the world love cities because they are great places to live when there is no diversity to ruin them. Detroit used to be one of the nicest cities in North America and now it is just an African wasteland. Philly, the city I grew up in was once a great place to live. The neighborhood I grew up in is now a slum. Most of the houses now have bars in the windows. It really is sad. The house my dad grew up in is now abandoned, like about 1/2 of the other houses on that street. His aunt owned a corner grocery store right next to his house. That store now has graffiti murals and a large painted EBT card on it.
The inner burbs are the new inner city. Ferguson, Missouri is little different than deepest, darkest St. Loouie.
Woodfield, the Naperville area, even Huntley; all areas that were once nice, ruined by diversity.
It’s gotten so bad, one has to go south of Manhattan/Monee to escape the Orcs.
Chesterton’s Suburb
As a kid, I worked as a restaurant dishwasher with a Mexican kid. We couldn’t talk to each other, but communicated with hand signs. We ran a tight and tidy shift, and got everything done and done right. The kid had a work ethic and pride in what he did. That’s not work I would want to do for long, but it taught me quite a few things about work, and about people.
Dutch, very important observation. I did what I guess is called here menial work. Never said it was the be all and end all of existence. It motivated me to do better—and I did. However, there are many folk, perhaps most, who are basically stuck at the level of what we seem to be calling (denigrating as) menial work. I believe that is wrong and that’s how I interpreted Z-man’s posting today. There is dignity in all work—because working for a living is better (as in morally superior) to being a parasite upon your fellow man.
Using the above definition, I would argue that there are perhaps more parasites making 6 figure incomes in the Cosmopolitan areas than in our backward rural areas making min wage.
Z-man’s “Hunger Games” analogy is not without merit.
On one hand, it’s not like I find it fulfilling when I have to hump spools of barb wire out into the woods and up steep hills and come back at the end of the day sweaty, exhausted and inevitably with a few new barb wire scratches, or when I have to spend all day laying tile in a rental house because the previous tenants kept going away all weekend and leaving their three dogs and cat to pee and poop all over the previous carpet and tile, leaving a stench that is soaked into the subflooring.
I thoroughly enjoy when I can pay some workers to do a rough job for me. Money well spent in most cases. It’s damn nice to know that every day isn’t going to be a physical grind just to have enough money to survive.
On the other hand, I do like hard work better than going to a gym. Lifting hay bales actually gets something done, as opposed to lifting weights, and hiking the ranch to fix fences feels more like I accomplished something instead of running like a rat on a treadmill.
Our bodies need hard work, and I think it helps not only physical but mental health. I think people who don’t ever do that type of work could benefit from having to do it for a bit, just to understand how nice it is to not have to do it, and maybe for the feeling of having accomplished something real.
Some of the happiest times of my life have been cleaning stalls. The quiet, the stable smells, which I find quite pleasant, the sounds of horses doing what horses do, and on a real good day, the sound of rain on the tin roof — all good for the soul. This was a family ranch, so I recognize the difference between that and the drudgery of a difficult job working for someone else. But simple chores in the right situation take you to a very nice dimension.
Farmer strong is far superior to gym strong. Mentally as well as physically.
Felix, it’s especially soul-numbing when purpose is divorced from labor. A man digging a ditch or gutting fish for his own family is happier than a man doing it for Shlomo at $8.00 an hour.
I agree that there’s no inherent romance in grunt-work but pre-industrial societies had a better set of external romances to soften the cog-disso of dirty but necessary jobs.
The NPC cubicle jockey has only “Office Space” for his Iliad.
A man digging a ditch or gutting fish for his own family is happier than a man doing it for Shlomo at $8.00 an hour.
Yes, good point. But then, as ConservativeFred says, the upside of being a wage slave is that you can leave the work behind when you clock out.
My first girlfriend was a farmer’s daughter. Her parents worked like farmers do, 24/7, and they seemed quite happy about it. But they’d never had a day off for twenty years (cows don’t take days off), never been on a holiday, never been outside Denmark. That was the most horrifying thing I’d ever heard.
But they’d never had a day off for twenty years (cows don’t take days off), never been on a holiday, never been outside Denmark. That was the most horrifying thing I’d ever heard.
You haven’t heard very many horrifying things, then.
ETA: Seriously. You’re a city guy. Surely you’ve seen some young girl selling herself on a street corner, or a drug-addicted panhandler. Prostitution is legal in Denmark and even legal prostitution is more horrifying to me than farm life. It destroys the souls of young women. Those are just two of a million things I can think of more horrifying than a nice old farmer couple who’ve spent their lives together doing something they like.
You haven’t heard very many horrifying things, then.
I was 16 at the time.
As I wrote above, my former father-in-law lost six brothers before he was 50.
Another man in the hamlet lost three sons; one of them he ran over with his truck by accident – the first truck on the island. He never recovered, went soft in the head.
I’m not sure what an excess of deaths in the family has to do with anything. That happens to city people and world travelers, too. My Dad watched his older brother go into a burning barn after some kittens and never come out. My great-grandpa died trying to break up a knife fight. My son died about a year and a half ago. Life happens.
That’s rough Brother but like you said it’s life and you have to keep driving on… Sorry for your loss though…
Okay, you win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ZDB9h7BLY
You’re so lucky you can just go on YouTube and pull up a Monty Python sketch whenever you want. When I was young….
Same here. The reason we built cities and built tech is so that we didn’t have to do this kind of work and would have a more reliable and cheaper source of labor than slaves.
That said if you can get the right equilibrium of climate, energy input , safety and so on while not being pressured by the cities and other parasites for your surplus, self sufficiency has its pleasures. All the work goes to you and yours and as such it feels less numbing and wasted.
These days hard work just makes the man rich and anyone with any self esteem will try and shirk any work that doesn’t benefit his people.
All that aside, one wag here jokingly suggested going Pol Pot and throwing urban folk into collective farms and labor camps for a while. White Kampuchea is of course ludicrous on its face though I will admit this might well improve the city scum and EYI’s behavior lot and root them in day to day reality.
Hated work growing up, but eventually figured out it helps recharge the battery. I don’t have to listen to other people, they don’t have to listen to me. Focusing the mind on a simple task instead of letting it run wild with thought or numbing it with entertainment, etc. Plus the health benefits. It’s a moving meditation.
It’s a different story when you have to labor for someone else.