For most of human history, the focus of society was on the material side. Progress was about increasing the material wellbeing of people. In fact, political philosophy was solely focused on material well-being. The great battle in the West was over what sort of political economy would provide the most stuff for the most people. Eventually, liberal democracy won over communism. Then the debate subtly changed from material well-being to the overall safety of people. Safety is the new goal.
For example, an increasingly common thing if you work in an office is the notice that the vents will be cleaned one night. You are told to expect some disruption of your day or maybe some things will be moved around in the office. A crew comes in to clean the vents for so everyone is safe. Residential rental properties are now required in most states to have the dryer vents cleaned once a year. In some states, home owners are required to do this too. Vent cleaning is a thing now.
It is more than just a thing. It is a booming little niche business. According to one of the rapidly growing vent cleaning companies, the demand for vent cleaning is growing at close to four percent per year. They say that the increased awareness to the dangers posed by home clothes dryers is what is driving the growth. The claim is the number of accidents caused by these appliances is making people suspicious of what’s happening in those vents, so they want all the vets cleaned regularly.
Of course, This is true to a great degree. In the office space, people have come to believe that whatever is being cleaned out of those heat and air conditioning ducts is bad for the people inside the offices. Sick building syndrome is one of those things people have come to accept without question. The same is true of the dangers posed by the common household dryer. Mention this to someone and they will claim that clothes dryers cause a lot of fires every year.
Interestingly, none of this is true. According to the government, there are about 2900 dryer fires per year. There is no data on fires caused by debris or dust in the ventilation ducts of buildings. The damage resulting from those dryer fires total $35 million per year. Only about a third is caused by too much fuzz in the dryer vent, so that means it is a $12 million problem. Put another way, we have a $350 million dollar industry to solve a problem a bit less serious than bathtub drownings.
The other odd thing about the vent cleaning craze is that people don’t bother questioning it. They just assume it is a real thing. If you ask someone about the dryer vent business, they will fight you about the facts, claiming that clothes dryers have always been a menace. If you point out the facts, they get mad at you, as if you are questioning a tenant of their religion. Seemingly out of nowhere, vent cleaning has become an important part of keeping us safe.
That is the key to it. Safety has become something of a religion. After all, you can never be too safe. We know this because we are constantly being told by the mass media and our government that we can never be too safe. We spent trillions waging a crusade against Muslims because we had to be safe from terror. We are now spending trillions on Covid, so we can be safe from illness. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not, because our safety is what matters.
This explains, in part, the bizarre over reaction we saw from our rulers over the protests in Washington. These are the high priests of the cult of safety. They live the safest of lives and depend on faith in safety for their existence. This reminder that no one can ever be truly safe, especially the rulers of a society, was like telling them that their gods are completely fake. They proved that was a lie by turning their palaces into fortified bunkers guarded by heavily armed soldiers.
An easy to miss subtext to the continued lockdowns is the claim that working at home is safer than going to the office. Children at school skin knees and bump their heads, which does not happen when schools are closed. Fewer people commuting means fewer car accidents. The annual flu has been eradicated, they claim, because everyone stays home, instead of mingling with the public. Even if our heroes defeat Covid, staying home is just safer and safer is always better.
There is an obvious problem with this. It is really hard to run a human society when everyone is locked in their pods. Some people can work at home, for sure, but most people need supervision. We are social animals and our sense of self is tied to our participation in our group. This extends to society as a whole. People in isolation from one another or isolated into little tribes lose their group identity. They begin to take on the mentality of prisoners, rather than citizens.
There are also the diminishing returns. The dryer vent business is a great example of how not to solve a problem. An iron rule of life is the solution can never be more expensive than the problem. The dryer vent issue is a great example of how the price of being safer far outweighs the value of being safer. We have long since passed the point of diminishing returns regarding safety. Since there is no limiting principle to the religion of safety, we keep trying anyway, despite the cost.
An easy to overlook angle here is the fact that these efforts to insulate ourselves from risk must fail. The dominant justification for the current arrangements is that it is making us safer. At some point, something bad happens and people will suddenly be less safe. A recession, for example. The gods of safety will be proven to be false or feckless gods. Faith depends on confirmation and nothing harms a religion like a bit of disconfirmation, which in this case is inevitable.
Then again, perhaps we have reached the point in our development that the Eloi reached in the novel Time Machine. The protagonist, having observed the Eloi, the humans of the future, noted that “strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.” That is modern people. We are now too weak and feeble to question our arrangements. Instead, all that matters is the sense of safety and security, whether is real or imagined. Safety is now our god.
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Overall agree with the article. However, I really did, in fact, have to get my dryer vent cleaned in 2020. After about 16 years, and cleaning it as best I could, the upper part (roof vent, not side of home) simply was plugged and the dryer worked poorly. Hired an inexpensive contractor and problem solved. So there is a legitimate maintenance need.
Rule one in the pest control industry was “we don’t sell it to people who need it, we sell it to people who can afford it.”
Roughly the same applies to dryer vent or any other duct cleaning service. Wives in two story McMansions can afford it so it gets sold to them. No one asked for washers and dryers centrally located on the second floor, they just showed up one day along with 60 feet of ducting with five 90 degree corners to exhaust 15 feet in the air sometimes through a flapper.
I can clean my entire dryer duct by reaching up into the ground floor outdoor vent about two feet into the house and pulling out chunks. The dryer is on the other side of the exterior brick wall with about two feet of flex duct.
Probably not the point the author was making, but don’t underestimate the marketing power of safetyism. Don’t even get me started on mold remediation.
A few years ago in Oregon there was a big hoohah over whether to begin allowing drivers to pump their own self-serve gas (forbidden since 1951). OMG is it too dangerous? The media of course did their part by featuring scared-faced women and girly men fretting over the titanic risks. Should there be a study and a state-wide training program? Six years later and they still have a ridiculous piecemeal system that depends on county and time of day. Safety first!
A lot of this is a result of the feminizing of our society and politics. Have you noticed that it’s “Mothers Against Drunk Driving” and not “Fathers Against Drunk Driving?” Look at news photos of protesters outside a prison on the eve of an execution. Mostly young white women out there! Black Pigeon Speaks and Vertigo Politix produced a couple of great videos on this subject a couple of years ago. One was titled “Why Women Destroy Nations” and the other, “How Women Weaken Nations.” Both hit the nail on the head!
Here in Middle England, I recently experienced a great example of this ‘Safetism’ cult.
I was about to step onto a train with a long rolled-up set of schematics. The person in front of me stopped and I dropped the roll down between the train-platform gap onto the track area.
No problem. I stepped back. A train is due every ten minutes and I was early anyway. I turned and spoke to the yellow-vest wearing platform attendant to let him know the issue.
He spoke into a radio and told me someone will come down to assist. A minute later another guy came down with a yellow vest, and they both peered down onto the tracks at the roll sitting on the rail floor.
I expected the second guy to jump down, grab the roll and job done, as he was dressed like a paramilitary in a yellow vest. Big boots, camo-trousers, safety helmet. Instead he explained to me had to radio to the Safety Team, as he was not authorised to go onto the track (and neither was the first guy). He pressed a button on the wall and spoke into a tannoy system about the situation.
All three of us guys stood there for about 3 minutes. Then a young lady (approx. 20 years old to 25 years old max appeared) in the standard safety boots, yellow best, camo trousers and radios strapped all over her. She looked like a supermodel and had long, brown, shining hair down to her ass. Extremely attractive. Make-up. Absolutely stunning.
The three of them peered onto the tracks at the roll. The two guys stepped back. The Safety-Girl had one of those grab-extender devices. She knelt down on the platform and used the device to quickly pick up the roll and handed it back me, smiling.
The second guy put his arms around her shoulders (no joke) and said ‘well done! Well done!’ (anything to ‘grab a feel’, I suppose).
I said a ‘Thank You’ and she sauntered off back, I assume, to the Safety Office awaiting the call for the next daring mission.
So, two grown, burly men had to call and wait for a young, 20-something woman to sort out an issue that could have been solved by one of them simply jumping onto the track and picking the roll up. There had to be three-layers of Safety People to solve a simple task, and the final Safety Person was a hot, attractive female who just used a scoop.
OK.
My entire family, 9 children, 2 dogs, died as a result of a clogged drier vent. How dare you.
Slow down, watch your spelling and sentence composition. Too many mistakes and the right people will stop reading.
The SUV craze also played on women needing to feel safe
Working in a pretty dangerous job (pay reflects this) I’m confronted with high voltage electricity, fall, and crushing hazards. We go to union school for 4 years before they cut you loose by yourself. Safety becomes first nature. The company has its own safety programs as well. There’s always the chance of something coming out of left field no matter how much you’re trained. In the last 15 years the companies have been fighting spousal death benefits on the grounds that they trained the dead man above and beyond the industry standards and if he’s dead it’s his fault. Sometimes it is. Most times it’s not.
they also push for us to self report “near misses “ hoping to be able to mitigate any future injuries , send us home for 2 weeks unpaid and most importantly have proposals for safety upgrades written up and past onto the customer at the customers expense which they usually buy and usually don’t need.
Safety is the most important goal of modern western society because it has become feminized. Women crave safety. Hysterical leftist women even more so as they destroy their societies. Men used to crave challenges and opportunities.
This mania has spread to other societies thanks to the media, global organizations and nearly worldwide rise of the gynocracy. However, non white societies still have a masculine influence
The jew wants you safe, deballed, and teaching your kids to act like pussies. Get dangerous or become a slave.
if only we had legit crusades, not the excuses for Jew irredentism and profit we had.
and inner crusades too, because we sure need less safety and more struggle.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/25/politics/harriet-tubman-20-biden-trump-obama/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_term=link&utm_content=2021-01-25T19%3A23%3A39&utm_source=twcnnbrk
I can’t wait for these to come out. The $20 needs to be known as a “negress.” For instance – “I’ll give you three negresses ($60) for beer and pizza.”
I get your point, Z. But I wish you had used a different example. If one’s tumble-dryer is run by gas (this goes for your heat and hot-water boiler as well) then keeping the vent clear is imperative. And as a camper and backpacker, the best firestarter is dryer lint. It’s light and compressible. If you’re in the backcountry and it’s wet, there’s nothing better. Even if you just have a fireplace/firepit. Stop buying paraffin firestarters and put the dryer lint to use.
Then there’s the cult fouling its own nest: using water is bad: St Al of Gore said so. Washing machines now use so little water that they can’t keep themselves clean (But we have to believe they’ve cleaned our clothes). So now we must have a separate ritual to keep the cleaning machine clean.
It turns out the austistic teenage daytraders from the Wallstreetbets subreddit have managed to collapse at least one hedge fund that was short GameStop:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/first-casualty-big-short-squeeze-melvin-capital-gets-275bn-bailout-citadel-point72-after
Apparently the kids have managed to cost shorts $3.3 billion on GameStop alone this year.
All the (((media))) talking heads are screeching how, “… this isn’t investing! REEEEEEEEE!!!!”
I’d ask them, “Is it investing when the market makers gap prices up and down as they please after hours on miniscule volume?”
This is the good kind of clowning the system.
Praise kek!
Awesome. Soros tanking the Pound was totes OK with this crowd, right?
Five years ago in my country a boy in a nearby town choked on a piece of apple at his daycare and was permanently paralysed/brain damaged. Tragic, awful accident. Our govt has just now declared new safety regulations that all fruit, veg, food etc. brought into daycares must be grated/impossible to choke on, or it is banned. They came to this decision after years of investigation and consultation. Daycare centres now have one week to comply.
It all started with Men Without Hats and then…pop went the world.
Z your correct on the dryer cleaning and safety considerations.
Its been a thing for at least 10 years. In new construction its treated as life safety and we have about 2 pages of the code book devoted to it.
A company called Innovative patented the Dryer box which is a metal stamped pan which allows the dryer duct to enter the wall cavity and cleans up the drywall termination. They had a lot of success with that as it was a factory solution to a field quality issue. They then started lobbying for code revisions to the International Code Committee and were successful.
The dryer fire hysteria is from them and there aggregating every small fire story into a long list of events. I made a run at designing a fire damper for Dryers and as part of my research into what dryer safety was and the cause.I went to a Code officials/ Arson investigators forensic type 2 day class in Wisconsin. We learned about dryer fires from insurance experts and we created fire issues to evaluate the causes. I came away from that understanding the manufacturers had design issues that were mostly corrected by 2014. The issues were lint leakage into the voids of the enclosure which accumulated and could combust. They used alot of plastic in the vent motor assembly as well so that added to the fire and smoke. What was interesting to me was the high voltage cords to a dryer that are usually installed by the delivery company were a major cause of fire in that the screw terminals if loose created a bad connection which overheated the wire enough to catch fire.
Watching the wires overheat on a thermal viewing device it was fast. Hundreds of degrees delta very quickly.
In my opinion the headlines are sensationalized but the need is there. Especially on large 5 or 7 story rental properties with hundreds of units. The maintenance guys cant keep up and the tenants dont really care.
Anyways always a pleasure when your posts actually touch on something Im familiar with. Like all these other posters I fondly remember the rock fights, the bb gun wars, the “Bean” wars and late in my youth the paintball wars. Riding in pick up truck beds wasn’t the endangerment crime it is now. But I also remember walking through my high school with my cased .22 to catch a ride to the police station to use their range for rifle shooting club. This was in New England. Try that today and its a SWAT team and child welfare to your home.
Kids could smoke in high school then and I still remember the 14 year old freshman just puffing away between classes. Sometimes the shop teacher would bum a smoke off a kid. Thats when we had a handful of diversity and the diverse were just like me/us trying to fit in. Other than appearance and “class” we were all the same It wasn’t until I went to boot camp that the differences in people became very apparent to me. It was a better system then for sure. Final thought.
Im old but not that old. Im younger than you. Things suck.
I caught Covid
I was bedridden for three days with little energy, and orange juice tasted like limes. Hot sauce didn’t burn my tongue as much as usual. My sense of balance was thrown out of what due to congestion. No fever. But that was pretty much it.
It’s actually started to infuriate me that these people shut down the economy. So they feel they can cause 1 to 2 years of financial hardship or ruin for a mild 3-7 day cold?
It’s not like I needed another reason to hate the government.
Your case may even be on the more significant side since you wre bedridden. This has been an outrage and debacle.
I got it, felt rough for a day, took some ivermectin (Duramectin Horse wormer) $4 from Tractor Supply- I was pissed paid $6 from Amazon back in April.
https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/durvet-ivermectin-paste-187-608-g?cm_vc=-10005
Two days later just fine.
They deworm 5 year old kids with 10 times the dose so Africa has its uses: good test lab
I guess it was about 10 years ago, maybe longer, that safety culture began taking over health care. We now had a new master to report to in our matrix environment – the quality and safety department and the new C-Suite position the chief quality officer…
Suddenly one morning all directors and c suite were required to get on a conference call which was called a “safety huddle”… Most of us were baffled as to what we were supposed to do or say and the conference call degenerated into people bringing up healthcare topic to discuss… It soon became apparent that was not the purpose of the conference call…
what we were supposed to do was indicate any issues in our department for the day such as the CT is down we have two people out sick blah blah blah… Eventually if there was nothing going in your department or you just decided you wanted to get it over with you were expected to say “we are safe”.
So the call would degenerate into person after person stating loudly “we are safe!” It was truly comical.
Then you had to start reporting “near misses” which morphed into the phrase “great catches” because a miss is bad and a catch is great right?
That became hilarious because if there’s a great catch that means a department caught somebody else’s f****** up.
What made it even better was having a great catch but not letting the department that screwed up know they screwed up until the morning huddle!
Then you could have simultaneous applause for the catch and then you could “tut tut” at the department that screwed up.
So now the process of catching an error, and then maybe working with the department to improve its process, Becomes public. Everything has to be reported to publicly in front of everyone so there is no opportunity to save face. All It did was under my trust and cause people to be suspicious of each other… This is happening in every hospital in the country everyday.
Well except not every day… not weekends or holidays lol no safety issues happen on those days.
These people are obsessed with safety not just because it’s a great control technique, but also because they have no capability for spirituality. This life, in all its meanness, is all they know and expect to know, so it must be prolonged at any cost. They are terrified of death. This is an advantage for us, as our principles and beliefs are worth dying for. Who’s ready to give up his life for critical race theory or feminism? Maybe a few Antifa wackos, but not your everyday leftist. No way. Even I, a peaceful family man, have some limit where “give me liberty or give me death” becomes more than a slogan. We’re still pretty far from that, but I know there’s a lot more folks on our side who think that way than on theirs.
Exactly.
I live my life to the fullest. Some wins, some losses. I will die one day, as will everyone else. I’m not afraid of it, as I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and saviour and will gain eternal rest at that point.
It’s not that hard, but so many soys and wahmen don’t get it. When it’s your time, God calls you up.
I remember when this safety crap started back in the mid sixties. It started with seat belts and quickly moved on to designated parking spots for the handicapped. And on and on it goes today. Every other commercial starts with “We’re here to help you.” My ass they do.
It’ll all turn out fine. Remember, we’re in this together!
…unless something that truly is awful occurs – then you’re on your own!!
I knew the safety shit was totally out of control way back in the 90s when some group of dimwits was proposing an airbag mandate for …….. motorcycles.
As a guy in my mid-50s it’s fun to go to parties where there will be teenagers and young twenty-somethings present. The older folks will inevitably start playing the “remember when?” game. That’s my opportunity to bring up how in the early 80s when I was in high school and everybody was getting their drivers license – it was pretty common to go out drinking – and then drive. Drive to another party, drive to a bar after drinking all afternoon – drive home – whatever.
Maybe it’s because we were teenage boys – but the societal admonishment against doing stuff like that was WAY WAY less than is these days.
You should see the eyes on those kids light up – just by bringing up that one simple thing. Because it pretty clearly illustrates the huge difference between then – and the tyranny they live in now.
My son is 20 and desperately wishes it was 1981 not 2021.
The drinking and driving thing is a good example of a fruitless search for safety.. Not that one should drive impaired—THEY SHOULD NOT! It’s the judgement of what constitutes impairment. Alcohol impairment presumption level has decreased decade by decade, to the point where one drink for a small person can push you over the limit.
Here they report on the news from time to time on alcohol levels for those arrested during road block dragnets. Always the same thing. The majority of those arrested are at two to three times the presumptive level, and then there is always a small cohort of poor saps who are just above the latest level of presumed impairment. It never changes no matter what the level is set at. The bad drunks continue to do as they see fit, and are the large majority of those pulled in, while the social dinner drinker gets nailed at the lower levels and is screwed.
The ban on open containers is a good example. Of course, no one should drive impaired but a can or bottle opened has no bearing on impairment. Sometimes after fishing all day, I will open a beer and drink one on the way home ’cause fuck you.
The drinking and driving enforcement got much more serious in the ’80s and ’90s because Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) waged jihad in the media and the law enforcement-legal-insurance complex realized scooping up as many drunks as possible was a huge future income stream.
“Tonight, on a very special episode of…” Followed by product placement for MADD.
Remember DAMM: Mothers Most Against Dislexia?
Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Cult of Safety
Hate Twitter on the safety of our elections:
“In case you had any doubts the US election was anything but the safest most secure election in history, first bill being passed through congress is mass mail voting at the federal level and restricting states from requiring ID, signature verification etc.”
Bill HR1, the first bill of the 117th Congress.
Safety is a Girl Thing, because, as I say, “Women expect to be protected.”
And the safety thing is a consequence of women in the public square. Women expect to be safe, and now that women conduct more of their lives in public that means the safety thing moves out of the domestic sphere into the public sphere.
And women are designed (by natural selection) to protect and worry about the safety of infants and toddlers. So one would expect, w a more feminized ruling class, to see the world sought to be made more ‘child safe’.
Women are wonderful creatures but no society will survive giving them political power.
Today I learned about the dryer vent cleaning industry. Thank you. When I see chunks of lint coming out the vent, I know it’s time to do something. I do it myself, it’s not hard.
My former employer spent tons on duct cleaning because of COVID. This was in preparation for return to work, which they haven’t done yet. Of course, there is no evidence of COVID spreading via duct dust.
Hell, the Costco here has employees sterilizing chopping carts outside in 110 degree weather. Lifespan of a virus on a shopping cart cooking at 140+ is measured in seconds—if that.
When the wife starts complaining to me that it is taking the dryer too long to dry a load of clothes, I instantly know the problem is almost always one of three things: (1) the heating element is bad; (2) the vent is stopped up or “blocked”; and/or (3) the duct work inside the dryer is stopped up with lint. #3 is the ‘fire hazard.’
That was my thought, someone will know well ahead of time that there are issues since the dryer will stop drying clothes long before it catches on fire.
One of the big issues with modern dryer ducting is its inefficiency. A ‘laundry room’ in the middle of a 2,600 sq ft house is, by definition, inefficient. Think of it in terms like this – how many feet, and how many turns therein, does it take to vent a dryer? By direct contrast, our forbears understood that venting a dryer *directly* outside or under the house, made complete sense. I have dealt with dryer ducting that was 50 to 75 ft in length. Stu-Pid!
I have been lucky in this respect. Every place I have ever lived had a dryer in the basement that directly vented to outside. No duct work. The house I live in now doesn’t have any ducts at all. Steam heat is expensive to run, but it generates lots of moisture and is great for sinuses.
The problem, though, is that most people have no earthly idea how to correct the situation.
Have handled all three items – not a big deal (+/- 25′ of duct is more than enough for me).
Perhaps, but there are a lot of stupid people out there who can deduce little. Hell, a lot of your “sudden” fires are people drying oily rags and stuff.
I don’t even think them stupid, just ignorant. My dad was an HVAC guy; as such, he taught me quite a lot about troubleshooting HVAC situations. Which is why I’m the “go to” guy in these situations within my little circle. The problem with fires caused by dryers is a real problem; but as Z says, not as big a problem as adverized. Again, get into the internal workings of the dryer, and you’ve solved the fire hazard thing beyond 99%.
You being the “go to” guy in your circle is exactly what we need. My father’s work involved a lot of electrical work and he had a degree in electrical engineering and when I was a kid, there was a whole network of “go to” guys in the neighborhood. One year our heater broke right in the dead of winter. My father bought a new boiler and he and an HVAC neighbor installed it themselves. Odd tools were shared and all the men who each had some level of knowledge would all help each other out. A neighbor plumber helped with plumbing jobs and my dad helped them with electrical issues. That was a part of being in a community. It’s some of the social capital that many of us have lost.
In my case, it has been diversity that contributed heavily to the loss of that social capital. Every single member of both sides of my family with 1 exception has fled the city. In the city a single block can have 50 or 60 families all of whom are physically close to each other. Even sitting out on the porch, you are just a few feet from at least 2 other porches. So the neighbors all know each other. The suburbs just doesn’t have that, at least not any I know of.
“An easy to miss subtext to the continued lockdowns is the claim that working at home is safer than going to the office”
Working from home is awesome. We should do a lot more of it. I would go as far as to say that anyone who can work from home should work from home.
Commuting in and around big cities is absolutely soul destroying. It is a total waste of energy besides. The amount of gas and diesel burned nation wide during rush hour idling or stop and go highway traffic is astronomical. The traffic reduction for those who must commute means it’s less soul destroying and better gas mileage.
Covid hysteria has been a huge benefit in the cause of working from home. I hope there is a huge increase in working from home when the Covid hysteria goes away. It has been the silver lining in the madness.
If safety is the new overall goal then I think we are reverting to the oldest ‘societal goal’, although ‘safety’ may now be defined in a new way.
Before the industrial revolution I think safety WAS the primary safety of society. Sometime shortly after the advent of agriculture, maybe 5-8000 BC, some ‘discovered’ that it was easier to steal food (and shelter, women and other enjoyable goods) than to do the hard work. So eventually an implicit deal was struck between some farmers and some (presumable) robbers that the latter would protect the former in exchange for food, housing etc. And, potential violence being the swifter currency compared to growing food, the guardian robbers soon came to rule over the farmers (‘peasants’). More ‘guardians’ banded together and eventually ‘bosses of bosses’ arose. The uberboss styled himself ‘king’ and his righthand men became dukes, barons and knights and such.
Thus, in a way, the state, the impersonal extension of the king (most easily seen linguistically in Britain when state organisations are still called ‘His/Her (soon Xis??) Majesty’s prisons, ships, loyal opposition’ etc) began as a form of protection racket. In no go zones w various imams and sharia courts, in films like The Godfather and such, you still see this process beginning all over again from scratch.
See Kurosawa’s Seven Samuri for one way to deal with this. Or the Magnificent Seven, the USA remake.
Now that words are violence, aka real, I guess the globalists are all warriors now.
Safe words, safe thoughts. It’s so tedious. It’s up to the Amerikaners to test their commitment to “safety” in the real, physical and often violent world.
Just yesterday an oak tree in my neighborhood started leaning slightly in my neighbor’s yard due to the soggy ground. The fire department was called by another neighbor. Police tape and cones were put all around the oak tree with a warning sign on a traffic barricade with a blinking light. The safety issue appears to be, in part, a control issue. It’s not that the guy comes to clean the vent, it’s the calling of the guy to clean the vent, and the making of the appointment. A people completely obsessed with their surrounding environment. If we’re programmed to have five to 10 kids, and then don’t do it, all of that energy is put into things like this. It’s a Children of Men issue (pre-collapse). But if you notice the US life expectancy has now been in decline since 2013. The next step, which I’m already seeing is all kinds of little things that don’t work. Out of service elevators, gas pumps, etc.
In the land of the risk avoiders the risk-taking man is king.
“We spent trillions waging a crusade against Muslims because we had to be safe from terror.”
The clownworld aspect of this is on the one hand, we’re deathly afraid of Islamic terrorism, but on the other hand, we are inviting them into our countries so they can more easily target us.
Job one in the “war on terrorism” should be to keep them out, not invite them in!
TSA: “Terrorism is a major problem!”
Also TSA: “Look at our diverse Muslim security agents!”
As a kid growing up in central Massachusetts, we just knew that school wasn’t going to be cancelled unless it actually snowed more than 6 inches. People just dealt with it. Now… I’ve seen school cancelled because a couple inches of snow was predicted (doesn’t even matter if it really happened).
Weather safety has reached some pretty insane levels. In my city, any time snow is predicted or there is some remote possibility a hurricane might pass us by, there are hours long press conferences, the supermarkets get emptied etc. Every weather event becomes a huge story. It really is amazing how much this has changed in the last 30 or 40 years.
There’s a ton more liability now.
When it comes to safety, here’s an historical bit regarding an unknown disease so contagious you could touch nothing without fear- yet it required deep nasal swabs to get a sample:
Deep nasal swabs were a punishment for slaves in Egypt.
Typically and historically, the need for a sense of safety has been a feminine pursuit. It comes as no surprise that it’s recognized as a valuable instrument in the progressives’ handbag of tricks.
Men are now raised to be (but can only be a defective version of) women. What used to be normal boyhood and masculinity is now suppressed, ridiculed, punished, and medicated.
In 2019 I sold my modest 2-storey townhouse in Oregon. By law I had to replace all 6 smoke detectors (all functioning perfectly) because they were more than 5 years old. And I had to install a carbon monoxide detector. Safety first!
Last time I sold a house I had to affix a fire extinguisher to the wall of the kitchen. I tried to do it in a way that wouldn’t leave a mark when the new owner took it down and tossed it in a closet or the garage.
I always put an extinguisher in the kitchen. A buddy related a tale of his parents house that suffered a kitchen fire and he noted that after years and years of grease splatter that I’d be shocked at how quickly a fire can go through a kitchen. So if you love bacon as much as I do a $20 extinguisher isn’t that big of deal, and it should be installed where everyone can see it (be sure to turn it upside down every now and then though to beat the bottom of it to keep the agent from caking).
The Keystone pipeline will be shut down in order to have a “ safe” climate. Meanwhile now trains and trucks will transport the Canadian “ dirty” oil.
And by the way gas prices are on their way to $4 bucks again.
For your “safety”
For climate “ safety”
And for the children!
4 bucks might seem like a bargain in the not too distant future (unless you meant per liter)
Thankfully Warren Buffett, Democratic grifter, is there with his rail lines and trucking companies to save the environment.
If there is one thing that’s going to get those chubby kids walking to work rather than lounging around in a Carjacked Mercedes, it’s $4 a gallon gas.
Is this a result of an atheist/nihilist view that the universe is indifferent and hostile to life, without a divine being to protect you or a divine plan which affirms life has a place in the universe? Maybe we’re better off with some kind of sky god…”bad shit happens, it’s the sky god’s will (which is mysterious), but don’t worry, you are part of the divine plan, so recover and get on with your life.”
I’m not sure I follow your issue with vent cleaning since it actually makes sense as most modern offices are a closed loop system. Have you tried opening a window in any new office building in the US? It’s almost impossible.
Vent cleaning is directly related to maintenance of the air handling systems which includes the duct work and intake filters. Even the best filters can still allow some particles into air handling system and duct work. This is why you often see dirt or dust accumulation around the vent grill (diffuser) where the air exits the system and enters the room.
Given the potential of air borne diseases such as Legionaries Disease due to the accumulation of mold and spores in these systems, vent and duct cleaning is a reasonable and prudent maintenance activity.
Fortunately here in Germany it is still possible to open the window. The Workplace Ordinance describes the requirements for workplaces as defined by the “Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin”. This includes a requirement that that every office must have view of the sky, however small, and all offices should have a window with good ventilation.
That there is a workplace ordinance is what’s important.
Verordnungen macht frei.
I have a family member that does capital project management in the Imperial Capital. This past year he was doing a major renovation on Bill Barr’s office. He described how beautiful the building was and that Barr, like many others in that building, had a small balcony off his office, but that years ago the balconies had been made physically inaccessible. So we can trust this guy — ha, ha — to lead an investigation into massive abuses of power, but we can’t trust him to not fall out of his building.
“Fall.”
I suppose things are different in different countries and States. Here in the USA, I spent 20 years in the same department and office complex. There was never a cleaning of the office vents. The air refresh/recirculation was at either end of the floor and that was filtered, with new air added from outside. Those filters were changed at regular intervals. The filters and system looked like what one sees in a private home, only much bigger. And yes, every office vent was somewhat dirty from dust coming in or going out, so I assume that was indicative of buildup in the system ductwork as well.
It’s less about the vent cleaning than the MANDATED vent cleaning. We should all be allowed to judge risk for ourselves, but today the government seized that “responsibility” and with it, that authority.
My favorite example of the cult of safety is bicycle riding. Over the last 20 years it has become common to see full grown “men” tooling around their posh and safe residential neighborhoods padded up like they’re about to scale the south face of Dhaulagiri. Pathetic doesn’t begin to describe it.
As for working from home, I love it and hardly because it keeps me safe. I cherish working from home because it reduces exposure to AWR imbeciles in my workplace.
When I was a little girl of about 7 my parents let me ride my bike around the block alone for the first time. What they neglected to tell me was it’s not a good idea to pedal down a step hill especially when there’s a gully waiting at the bottom. Realizing my mistake too late and going into panic mode I took a hard right and laid the bike down in the gravelly shoulder rather than braking hard and pitching head over heals into certain doom. Luckily there was a group of teenagers playing volleyball nearby who came to my rescue and ran to get my mom who, upon seeing my sorry condition, yelled at me for a) being stupid and b) embarrassing her for crying over a few scrapes. Can anyone imagine such a situation today? When I think of freedom, I think of those days.
The day I learned to ride a bike was the day I started setting my own agenda. Same for most of my friends. For better or worse we largely raised ourselves.
I wonder if that was typical of my cohort and if the collective self-rearing has something to do with the millennial habit of shamelessness, since we all knew each other’s insecurities and secrets. Maybe we were behind the times. Helicopter parents were more of a thing for the 90s babies in my experience.
I had a similar thought this morning as the local sportsball collective, alas, suffered an end to their most recent campaign of empowering bravery. I couldn’t care less one way or the other, but the benefit is that I’m now spared two weeks of overhearing meatheaded palaver regarding two tribes of joggers playing catch.
I’ve come to the same conclusion regarding my yearly visits to the in-laws in Taiwan each year. For 2-3 weeks I’m free from exposure to all conversations that relate to the pozz. It’s the one thing I look forward to each time.
I’m an avid mountainbiker and occassionaly ride gnarly trails where a small misstep can result in an 800 foot face-plant (Poisson Spider Mesa for example). The closest I’ve ever come to making the terminal dive was when a sweet young thing in riding Spandex and a fanny-to-die-for passed me on a 5-foot wide shelf trail and then she hit the brakes unexpectedly. Needless to say, face met fanny but I managed to keep us both safely on the wall side of the trail. I can’t remember what she looked like, but that fanny remains a permanent memory.
I’d have had her in my bed within 48 hours for basically saving her life but then, that is just me… at least you got a face full of tight behind. 🙂
You both need mental help.
Imagine. Men liking pretty girls. What sort of crazy world could survive if that were allowed to go unchecked?
Typing pervy comments on the internet isn’t really healthy.
Normal, heterosexual attraction and the recognition of such is the opposite of “pervy.” The fact that you think it is pervy is part of the problem with the demonization of normal masculine impulses.
Happy landings, doughboy.
The Year of Living Dangerously USA Style has begun, and forewarned is forearmed.
Going Dark (Cont)
Write on your phone’s case “The Spy In My Pocket” and then leave it at home whenever you wish to be left alone. Never answer blind calls. If you’re into active measures, learn to communicate extraneous & misleading info via your phone. The watchers rarely know the difference, and it nonetheless creates doubt. And never trust burner phones either. Anything electronic in your pocket is a potential threat nowadays. And don’t get me started on Siri/Alexa. Sophisticated AI are mining these data for pre-crime leads and social harassment targeting. Don’t be an easy mark.
So much worth considering in this post. For one thing, living as I do in a major Diverse city (as Z Man does), I know that urban school districts aren’t facing a problem of kids bumping their heads and scraping their knees. We have teenage boys who are extremely violent and incapable of being educated up to high school level in reading and math. In my opinion the school closures are a backhanded way of acknowledging that without singling out who exactly is the problem here.
But then the bigger issue is: the utilitarian calculus. In bygone days people were encouraged to think in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number. Now that we are living under woke utilitarianism, the calculation has changed. The moral weighting of particular minority groups is calculated as being vastly higher than the moral weight of an average person, so we get a calculus of equity… which means that we are shooting for the greatest good for the greatest number of previously victimized peoples rather than society as a whole. This is leading to a great averaging down of outcomes. Most of us are downwardly mobile but that’s considered a good thing because the previously victimized peoples will be happier being equal with us. In spite of decades of social programs, there doesn’t seem to be any way of elevating them to middle class white standards. Hence, lockdowns, school closures, small businesses bankrupted etc. The utilitarian calculus has been replaced by the equity calculus even though the vast majority of us disagree with this political agenda.
Yeah they tried to go against biology and it failed. Now they’re just saying “fuck you” and trying to destroy us.
Strong alpha white men really do stand out – believe me, I live in a 70% non-white area. Every one of us is a reminder that biology is real.
Sadly it is working for now. Many young white men are wiggers. Alot of white soyboys are around. And generally unkempt and depressed looking white guys are around too. But at the end of the day, the only way to prevent biology from re-asserting itself is to either kill us, or force us to race mix.
The cult of safety has been building for many decades.
It’s at least partially driven by the US Tort system, that’s effectively become a lottery – based on the ability of lawyers to con juries with specious arguments.
I remember an episode from the early 90s that was nationally reported news. The show sixty minutes did a segment on the cancer risk posed by farmers using “Alar” on apples. The story was entirely fraudulent agit prop from an enviro group. Anyway, the following morning some parent that had seen the segment remembered that they had sent their kid to school with an Apple. In a panic she called the cops, and then the cops and parent chased after the school bus to prevent little Johnny from eating the apple. That was a national news story.
I can just imagine the apple being removed by guys in hazmat suit, and purposely detonated in an empty field. Finally, safe. But for how long?
Those people and their children are now the rulers of this society. So take your story and extrapolate it up to the halls of power and you end up with 25,000 soldiers in the nation’s capitol because a bunch of flyover hicks decided to take some selfies in proximity to these same sheep.
Tangential: Has anyone calculated the cost of the largest domestic mobilization of armed forces in history? How many millions of taxpayer dollars is it costing to keep that standing army fed, quartered, and ‘battle ready’ in Sodom on the Potomac. Inquiring minds and all that, oddly I’ve not seen a single news outlet ask this question yet. Funny that…
Well, not quite. I hear Grant, Sherman, Jackson, Lee and their contemporaries mobilized quite a lot of domestic armed forces.
More than 100,000 Union troops and more than 70,000 Confederate troops at Gettysburg alone.
Those guys knew what an insurrection was.
Didn’t Meryl Streep, or some other celebrity testify to Congress about Alar? I guess she ate an apple once, which made her an expert. Then it turned out that organic apples were actually more carcinogenic because, absent a pesticide, they create their own natural defense against pests.
Ah, yes… The evil otherwise known as bacon, causes much cancer because it contains nitrates (ifn I recollect proper). Turns out that whatever spit you can suck from your mouth to expell, has as much or more than a pound of said delicious goodness.
I believe that special safety bulletin came from our favorite WHO. Probably a precursor to the “you’ll be eating bugs and enjoying it”… Little did we know that it was because they fully intended to destroy the economy and our lively hood.
“People in isolation from one another or isolated into little tribes lose their group identity. They begin to take on the mentality of prisoners, rather than citizens”.
From the Feds on down to local guvamint – isn’t that right there the goal they wish to achieve?
Whites don’t see attacks against individuals as an attack against the group, our fatal fault.
Orwell has some real zingers on this subject
A machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world—which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools.
The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation
he returns to optimism and to a vision of humanity, “liberated” by the machine, as a race of enlightened sunbathers whose sole topic of conversation is their own superiority to their ancestors.
in practice any attempt to check the development of the machine appears to us as an attack on knowledge and therefore a kind of blasphemy
Should have put quotation marks in there they’re all Orwell quotes
This idea of constant progress is a major error in the thinking of the modern
A play on the joke I saw on Gab: “quit asking if you should be ashamed of your ancestors and start asking if your ancestors would be ashamed of you”
Thank you sir! I always think that way – it comes naturally. I know my beliefs align with my recent ancestors – grandparents and great-grandparents. I am not ashamed of them and like to think they would not be ashamed of me.
A revolutionary WN writer whom I won’t name here exhorted, “Try to be the sort of man that your Grandfathers would respect!”
Men have been remarking on the drawbacks of material progress for a very long time. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing about AD 98, says of the Britons, “Step by step they were led to practices which disposed to vice — the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilisation, when it was but part of their servitude.”
The oil fields were once a culture of masculinity and managed danger. Now we are not allowed to wear open toed shoes (sandals or flip-flops) in offshore living quarters because someone stumped their toe and required first aid.
Sorry to hear the offshore industry is changing for the worse. I worked offshore from ’91-2000. Started as a blaster/painter ended up as barge captain. I loved seeing rednecks with 3rd grade educations managing multi-million dollar equipment (hell, how much does in cost to replace a semi now? A billion?) and making 100K+ a year. If you wanted the impossible to happen, those boys would find a way. Far more talented and useful than any number of degreed engineers.
There are some pretty good websites documenting the incredible achievements of redneck engineering.
My son was a second engineer on an offshore rig and he is a degreed engineer who told me he learned more from the Brazilian motorman (my son speaks Portuguese) than from anyone else he worked with. My son now drills for water, but one of his most important clients is in the oil fields (onshore). If things break right, he’s on line for a very large contract. Here’s hoping! Thanks to the hands-on training he received from the highly experienced and knowledgable Brazilian, he can fix nearly any of the myriad problems that arise with machinery.
If you haven’t heard this before I hope you like it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMfwxWA14zo
An ode to masculinity, self reliance, and roughnecks.
I wonder if dairy cows have similar (bovine) thoughts when being milked. I’m getting tired of the farmers encroaching, really tired of their livestock.
(Not that I’m not one of them in the end.)
“Careful!” My gramma use to say. As kids, we would throw ourselves down the carpeted stairs, flopping our hands loudly as we slid down. Great fun to tease gramma!
But thats what you get when White men discover a right that women have, to be in politics, and to compete with men in the work place. You get an effeminate society!
Who else did jumps on their dirt bikes without wearing helmets?
We had no idea there was such a thing as a bicycle helmet.
They sure are keeping the National Guard in DC for a long time. I think the gyrations of arming/disarming/loyalty tests reflects this neurotic obsession with safety.
Clown world indeed.
I’m probably stating the obvious but it’s never really about safety but creating a constant debilitating state of fight or flight in a captive public.
Boys can’t do jack squat anymore. If you take away electronics and send them outside, someone calls the cops on them for being unsupervised. We’ve had this happen twice. Once they went to retrieve our runaway dog down the street. The 2nd time they were climbing a fruit tree in an empty lot a few hundred feet down our street. What bullshit. I guess I would have been thrown in prison for what I did as a boy.
My 10 year old son got thrown into the back of a cop car for climbing a fence to roll down a grassy hill with his buddy. It was near but not on the interstate – just an empty piece of public land. The cop wasn’t sure but thought he might have to call Department of Children and Families – I guess he never did because we didn’t hear back.
And just think, the soldiers of the PRC army were not too long ago little boys playing in ponds of toxic waste, jumping into rivers filled with pesticides and human waste to fish out something for dinner not to mention working from 4:00 AM to 10:00 PM making iPhones to KEEP OUR MINDS NUMB AND BODIES FLABBY.
My whole childhood would be illegal today
Now that you mention it…ditto – and blissfully so
I have reflected recently that I would definitely have a juvenile record if I did half of what I did in school then, today. And the amount of crazy stuff we got up to on our own … man, it was glorious. Statistically, I died at least 40 years ago.
Being rural, my kids have/had a reasonably free-range childhood. I remember the older ones telling me tales of exploring that still-in-use railroad tunnel near our house — they are definitely not supposed to go inside. My youngest daughter is very open with me that one of the things she and her friends like to do in the half-abandoned old town where several of her friends live is explore abandoned buildings. Obviously that can be dangerous, but just as obviously that is exactly what I would have done in the same circumstances and exploring stuff like that is a great experience.
The movie “Stand by Me” – that was a depiction of good, old fashioned, red-blooded American boyhood.
And on the flip side, the Chinese keep mass producing absolute junk that breaks (in some cases causing physically injury) and we keep buying into the Globalist’s Ponzi Scheme supporting this shitstorm. Walmart/Amazon is still open!
One area of excessive safety is fire risk. Through building codes (use of materials that don’t burn), sprinklers, vented restaurant hoods, etc., there are very few fires. Very few. Yet every town and city builds and maintains elaborate fire stations staffed by well-paid people with really good pension plans. They spend a lot of their time doing other things (publishing cookbooks, posing for calendars, driving in parades, rescuing animals) than actually fighting fires. Plus, there are a bunch of related industries—fire extinguishers that have to be bought by law and tested and constantly replaced. I’ve wondered when the common citizens would get on to this grift, but the show goes on while we are guilted into celebrating our first responders.
How about them taking good real estate from. Bums. When they are fund-raising with those stupid boots?
Sorry, but we’ll need those stalwart lads to deal with the homeless camps routinely catching on fire. Then again…
I taught a safety course for two years and it was an eye-opening experience. The principles of Risk Management make sense, if properly understood. But for most people, discussions of probability don’t register … they can only see things as binary conditions. Later, when I was captain of a ship, I would regularly excoriate my junior officers for using the verb “feel.” Besides being obviously effeminate, this was in large part a lesson from teaching the safety class … people are really bad at estimating relative risk. They over-estimate the probability of mishaps for exotic things, and under-estimate the mishap probability of the routine. So their “feelings” are usually worthless. Case in point … in the safety class I posed a question: one neighbor has a gun collection, the other a swimming pool. Which would you be most concerned if your kid went to visit? The vast majority of the students (most grad school educated) and 100% of the women said “gun house.” Statistically, that’s non-sense. Child death by drowning far exceed death by gun shot. And that’s before considering gun owner behavior such as safes, locks, etc. Likewise, I’d pose a question … statistically, what’s the most dangerous aspect of air travel. Well, statistically speaking its the drive to/from the airport. But car travel is routine, while for most people commercial air travel is relatively exotic. But at the end of the day, safety discussions cannot possibly serve any real utility until people accept that sometimes bad things just happen … risk management can reduce, but cannot eliminate risk.
I was a consultant doing risk assessments for a few years. Sometimes I really had to rub the numbers in otherwise smart managers’ faces. If the likelihood of a risk occurring is 2% and the impact is $100, then the value of that risk is $2. And you cannot spend $50 to reduce the risk likelihood to 1%.
About 10 years ago, our oldest two boys were in Cub Scouts. There was a rule that they couldn’t let their marshmallow catch on fire when roasting it because some Scout somewhere got hit in the eye with a flaming marshmallow. You will be shocked to learn that it was one of the mothers that informed the boys of this rule and enforced it.
That stuff is like napalm.
We used to intentionally shoot each other with pellet guns and bottle rockets – we were playing “Red Dawn” preparing for the Soviet/Communist invasion
Yep, we used to have BB gun fights, but don’t think we didn’t apply any safety rules. Our rule was no aiming above the waist.
We all owned the Crossman 760 Pumpmaster – up to 10 pumps for max velocity – our rule was one pump if we’re shooting at each other.
“Safety Goggles”? What are those?
I too was a soldier in the bottle rocket wars (with report) of the early 80s. Laying them down and shooting them along the street, next to the curb, a.k.a. a “Jogger Chaser”, was also great sport.
They used to have a firework for this very thing – called a “whistling chaser” designed to fly along the ground and explode.
Down the road, on the tough beaches of Alabama, we had slightly more advanced weaponry, called PVC pipe guns, that allowed for precise aiming of the bottle rocket ordinance. We also had advanced Jogger Chasers, dedicated to the very application of chasing people down the street. They also contained a serious report. Looking back, I can’t believe we went to war without eye protection. Could’a put your eye out, kid.
If memory serves, instructions for hooking them up to a car starter were included on the package.
Absolutely – PVC pipes could be “mortars” or “RPGs” depending on how fired.
I am not sure if I am talking about a similar thing here, but when I was about 10 me and my mates would make ‘vinegar bombs’. Sarson’s glass vinegar bottles would be half emptied and then bicarbonate of soda poured in. Quickly, the lid would be sealed. We’d then throw it up in the air and watch with joy as it exploded on the ground – showering glass everywhere. Good fun.
Yeah, we used to have a blast (literally) with fire crackers and the like. Every now and then someone would flush a cherry bomb or m80 down of the school toilets – out of commission for a few days.
One of my uncles was fond of chemistry in high school. One time, he and some other aspiring Walter Whites flushed metallic sodium. Supposedly they had to replace half the pipes in the school.
Chemistry at my HS was awesome. One day we were concocting something along the lines of chlorine gas – some got out and we had to evacuate and the building!
I was recently shown a picture of myself and my sisters with one of them sporting a black eye where my William Tell attempt to shoot an apple off her head with my bow and arrow had failed.
She missed losing the eye by an inch.
I believe it was frowned upon.
Wow, documented evidence! That’s impressive Bile.
I’m lucky film and cameras were expensive in my day.
That’s what makes it so AWESOME! -channeling 10 year old boy.
But they’re so good, especially between a couple of graham crackers.
It is. And the skin on your eyelid is thin and fragile. You don’t want a burn there.
I love the smell of flaming marshmallows in the morn…
smells like vic…er, a burnt masrshmallow
For most lads, such a story would be thrilling to hear. Furthermore, depending on the severity of the wound quite cool. It is a story that boys can bond around – which is probably another reason it is to be frowned upon by members of Cloud World.
The enforcement of this rule, probably seen as petty by most men’s (and boy’s standard has quite severe knock on effects when practiced at large in society. It seems to be generally true that innovation and discovery require a risk of some kind; how far can a society that concentrates on crushing all risk ever really develop?
Reading about the lives of some of the greatest scientists and inventors and artists and warriors and empire builders, one sees risk in most that they do. Thank goodness.
Where are the dads! They must have been grillin’ in the man-cave. Which, actually, doesn’t sound too safe.
Cub Scout dens seem mainly organized by the mothers. At the age where boys can join Scouts, they are turned over to the men. When son became of age, wife came back one day from last pack meeting and tossed the paperwork for Scouts to me and said, “He’s all yours now, I’m done!” 😉
I survived the Great Flaming Marshmallow War of 1978 myself.
Epic, but only runup to the Great Roman Candle Conflict of 1982. What fools we were, using our time to retrench and rearm.
Truly, lucky to be alive.
Childhood was a lot of fun – I feel like my boys have missed out.
The definition of safety has of course been extended by Twitter and others to mean “bad thoughts I want to eradicate.” They even call their censorship organizations “Trust and Safety”.
I would be a very bad person if I reported every woke account, wouldn’t I.
I have always wondered when “dissidents” would *finally* get around to getting some f*cking revenge! Every single thing every single Leftist posts on social media is potentially offensive to someone. Take five minutes of your time, and report five accounts a day. Harass them. Do what they do to Larry Correia, who basically couldn’t use Facebook while he was on it because they’d tag-team report him. If everyone just took five minutes a day, reporting five accounts a day, we could crash Twitter….
….but that would be BAD, and soon enough it will be “domestic terrorism” (coming soon to an Enabling Law near you), so don’t do that. Please. I’m begging you, don’t do it.
I have to say that reason at the end is why I picked my name. I deal with a wide swath of the public, and most are feckless and inept: exactly like the Eloi. The Time Machine is a great novella; I love the way the narrator is forced to discern and read an inscrutable situation. Though no definitive conclusion is ever reached, I always take the interpretation that the Morlocks created the condition that allowed them to harvest the Eloi, with their inchoate, glistening eyes, as cattle – the same look you see when the hearts of the covidians are stirred by the reassurance of our new demented leader.
Had the Eloi managed to flatten the curve by the time all this came to pass?
I’ll have to check it out
HG Wells wrote several great novels. Tono Bungay is rather obscure but great if you like the economics of a grifter. He gets some flack for his lib views, but Edwardian period liberalism is not the liberalism of today
I can’t resist saying that my religion has a lot of nasty tenants I would like to be rid of.
So it’s a twofer Monday after all! Thanks!
Mandated air duct cleanings have joined mandatory dryer vent cleanings in the Safety Cult. But wait, they aren’t done yet! Providers of these services now offer antibicrobtial treatment as an option, including dryer vents that aren’t even recirculated. Those will become .mandatory, too, and already may be in places.
A little financial advice: ditch rental property before the housing market collapses later this year. Safety requirements are only getting started
You reminded me, every time we have our hot water heater replaced it seems like the state/county have mandated some new doo-dad to go on to it in the one-in-6 million chance that there’s some fatal pressure issue with the thing.
I sold a property I had rented out for the last 8 years due to the Covid eviction rules. There is no way I need the risk of having tenants that can trash the property and not pay, with nothing I can do about it. Sure, you can sue for back rent if you enjoy paying more in legal fees than you would ever collect.
Indeed. Since the advent of the Yellow Peril Virus, I have thought quite deeply about all things done in the name of safety. It is staggering how many of these ‘cures’ are in no way obvious benefits like society. But we know this. Safety in it’s 21st Century guise is first a major grift and second a major cause to virtue signal.
The word ‘safety’ is yet another word that has over time come to be accepted as ‘always good’. This isn’t true, but good luck trying to persuade someone of that.
That said, the mothering instinct and the need to do good that is associated with safety will have an interesting conflict with other policies designed to hurt white people. I am sure that over the top safety can be used to our advantage, another form of throwing sand in the gears.
Right, I must dash off now, I’ve got to put my COVID screens up around my desk…
Of course, “safety” in many cases is subjective. So, lots of the people staying home, or being forced to, to save them from the covid are killing themselves by over-eating, drinking and/or drugging – but that doesn’t count, even though one could make the case that they’re covid related deaths, or more precisely covid hysteria related deaths. Deaths just the same, just not the right kind.
Hey, covid is waaaay more deadly than crack, I’m sure I heard that somewhere.
“The word ‘safety’ is yet another word that has over time come to be accepted as ‘always good’.”
Hm. Yes. Kind of like “change.”
Living here in hurricane alley I have been forced to conclude that many people, mostly women but certainly not all, simply enjoy being afraid. They carry on every year, year after year for their whole lives about the same storms that come every year and which are really not that threatening if one takes just a few very simple precautions.
There has to be some kind of dopamine rush from fear and carrying on like the world is going to end. It goes without saying the Covid is a godsend to such people.
Dropping my kid off at school this morning, I saw one of the lady teachers wearing TWO masks overlapping.
SO IT BEGINS
Ah, two-mask Sue!
My sister has worn herself down terribly with anxiety over the virus. Well, this morning she tested positive. How that happened is anyone’s guess, since she rarely leaves the house and even then wears a mask every second until she returns. Jeez, could it be true what I’ve been telling her for a year now, that masks are safety theater? Anyway, this will likely turn out to be a blessing in disguise as a week from now (currently she feels nothing terrible) she’ll be able to release all the anxiety over the possibility of catching the virus.
Well I feel bad for her. Nothing worse that your greatest fear realized. And all the worse that she feels nothing yet. Sword of Damocles dangling over her head. Every ache and pain a possible beginning of a terrible journey to the ventilator. Right now she needs a lot of philosophy, and a lot of alcohol.
As has been mentioned on these pages, you can’t reason a person out of a position they weren’t reasoned into. I just talked to her and she has no flu/cold symptoms at all. It was stress that drove her to get tested in the first place. Probably a false positive, but I’d rather she believe she had it and recovered.
This past year has made me think that having doctors routinely prescribe tons of benzodiazepines and barbituates to women wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Maybe wearing a mask, being around masked ppl, makes it more likely that you will get the plague, by encouraging you to take more risks. These germs are so tiny, that they just zoom on through those hugh holes in the mask, thus giving you a false sense of protection.
This is the ‘women crave drama, and will create it if a man doesn’t create it for her’ red pill.
Spent the first six months of my marriage trying to fix all the drama only to realize it’s an infinity headed hydra. Now just acknowledge whatever BS is being spouted with “I’m sorry to hear that.” before doing something useful with my time.
I kinda like “bummer for you”. Might not work so well with the wife though…
Women creating drama, yes.
Also, many people have no purpose in their lives. Sacrificing themselves for the cause feels good. They are finally part of some group, and something bigger.
I should warn people here who live in the northeast that there may be a few inches of snow coming with strong winds. Get your butts moving to the grocery store now! Toilet paper first.
We’re all gonna die!
Seriously, we are all gonna die, just sayin’.
sooner or later, everybody dies.
well, not everybody all at the same time..
so far.
I’m not gonna die.
You normies can’t make me.
The best death is in your sleep, or immediate and unexpected. Fear of uncertainty can be worse than fear of death.
Yep, a quick heart attack, light headedness, faint, and you’re gone. Such is a blessing
Don’t count on going out that way.
We all die every night. The lights go out, few hours of nothingness, then we wake up. The only difference in dying is you don’t wake up, but you won’t notice anyway.
No. Normally, you’re not in nothingness world when you sleep, but remain connected with your regular existence somehow. For instance, when you wake up you can normally assess quite accurately for how long you’ve slept without looking at a clock.
By contrast, your absence from the world during anesthesia is something entirely different, as I recently realized when I had my first surgery in adult life, after decades (the last one before that was during puberty). There was no sense of anything, including time, between losing consciousness and waking up again. Zero. I could have been gone five minutes or five days, neither my body nor my mental apparatus had any idea (doctor told me the thing lasted fifty minutes).
Where I live we get one or maybe two blizzards per winter, with blizzard defined as four or more inches of snow. When one of these arctic monstrosities is predicted, the day before arrival is like Black Friday in the grocery stores. **smh**
A blizzard is 4+ inches of snow? By that standard, we had three straight days of blizzards last week.
Yep. Suffice it to say I don’t live in Buffalo.
God bless Texas, and the winter downdraft from the great plains.
But expressing fearful outrage is a form of control… You are not seeing what they believe is undoubtably the end of the world. The fearful are thus simultaneously helping us by their warnings, but accusing us too of our sloth in face of grave injury and death
The unbearable lightness of existing.
Humans evolved to solve problems, overcome adversity. That above all else is our killer app. But the modern world is adversity free. So people create their own drama to make life worth living. All too often in self destructive ways.
The Safety Cult is a direct result of the feminization of society. A masculine society of Kit Carsons, Lewis and Clarks, Daniel Boones, George Washingtons and Andrew Jacksons is full of dangers and potential loss of life and limb. But it is a society of great rewards, and tales of heroism and intrepidity and conquering fear and danger.
Today we live in a society of Karens siting around the office at make-work jobs, eating themselves into Type II diabetes while posting cat pictures on Facebook. The greatest danger they face is that someone might call them a “fat bitch,” creating a “hostile work environment” requiring the federal government to come in and stomp on anyone that doesn’t “like” their cat pics.
Gynarcho-Tyranny. As many others have posted in response when you make the really smart idea of allowing the weakest, most insecure, most emotional, most mercurial, and least rational members of your tribe not only equal voters, but rulers of your society. Well… what could go wrong?
https://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/imce-images/7863467184_3721b5a3f5_z.jpg
The first person that runs for national office on a platform of repealing the 19th Amendment gets my undying support. I don’t care what else xe supports, to do so would put society on an almost unstoppable course toward recovery of its senses.
That guy on the left should have his “membership” revoked. Literally.
Same here. Repeal of the 19th is like Frodo’s Ring. One reform to reform it all!
May your picture posting privileges be permanently removed 😉
In the inimitable words of Sir Harry Flashman, VC, KCB et al, “there’s a sight to blast your eyes!” Once seen, cannot be unseen.
That dude.
Back when I worked in an office for what used to be a telephone company, we had safety meetings monthly. Annually, we had to demonstrate to someone with no useful job how to sit in and get up from a chair and how to properly pull staples with a staple puller. I used a knife when they weren’t watching. On the other hand, when working for the power company, safety meetings and rules made a life or death difference.
Yes, but sometimes the problem is that our species is getting demonstrably stupidier. I once participated in a “safety” training exercise because three grown men stood by and watched a fuel delivery truck overflow a tank by thousands of gallons onto the ground because the specified volume was ordered & paid for, and therefore must be transferred to the customer. And had a source of ignition been present, they would have burned down a hospital.
Reminds me of some of the people we had in system support. “If there’s a rule, follow it. If not, make one.” Mostly women. Solutions to all computer problems aren’t in the manual.
Back when I worked in the utilities industry, any time somebody got injured on the job a meeting was held to determine how to prevent the injury from happening again. One of those safety management ideas that sounds good but quickly goes witch-hunt.
This one time, office workers were nearly required to wear hard hats because a transfer from another district hit his head on a cupboard, managed to cut the skin open and because it bled, he called an ambulance instead of using the first aid kit prominently mounted on the wall.
“How can we prevent morons from splitting their heads open in a cubicle farm?”
“Just let it go, he was a moron.”
“That is not why we are here at this safety stand-down!”
Don’t hire morons.
Dammit. Beat me to it.
I often save parts of the safety alerts that get sent out in my company; the parts that include the pathetic contrition from the safety manager at that site. Here are some examples, please excuse the literary stylings of some:
It is tough to stand in front of the team and tell them someone was injured on our site, but the team took this as a learning opportunity and a reflection on how quickly an injury can happen. One employee spoke up during the meeting and reminded everyone that we have worked 1555+ days since our last lost time. We won’t hang our head, but instead we will learn from this incident and commit to getting better as a team.
—————————————————
It saddens me to report that we have had several employees leaving work differently than what they came in to work. With 3 recordable injuries in 2019, our leadership team has adjusted the ways of working to strive to obtain the zero incident goal. We will continue to work on this journey to ensure all employees leave work safely
—————————————————-
With these root causes in mind we are challenging them and ourselves to not see the operators as the problem, but as part of the solution. We will be teaming up with them to have the Contractor dig into our system as to why, how and what led to the latch not being properly secured. To ensure the safety of ALL Team Members this is why we’re not comfortable with accepting Rushing or Complacency as root causes and blaming an individual. Our journey towards building a culture of trust, learning and accountability will take everyone, contractors included.
—————————————————–
We did address an inadequate air hose that could have contributed to the incident, but we believe the fault lies with our leadership to adequately communicate and train our people to trigger on stopping work when things are not quite right. With these root causes in mind, we are challenging them and ourselves to not see the operators as the problem, but as part of the solution. We are collaborating with the operators through Integrated Work Groups to ensure we are learning from everyone at the table and ensuring prompt reliable action is being taken.
——————————————————
The [redacted] team has taken great pride in the fact that we have gone nearly 300 days without incident in the factory and over a year in the maintenance work group. We have been energized this year with a “Choose You” message from leadership that the team really embraced without coercion. From operators in all areas to managers in all departments, there is interest in the findings here and lessons we can apply. This team believes zero is possible and will continue to focus on delivering safe days every day forward.
How much do we need to spend to make our amphibious helicarrier fleet fire resistant…while in port? As our host alluded to, there isn’t enough money in the world to make American’s “safe”. The magic money machine will run dry.
Sleeping on pallets of “seeds” seemed kind of excessive last summer, but in hindsight, it was my best performing investment in 2020 (assuming I was dumb enough to sell them).
Just look at the warnings on virtually ANYTHING you buy. They are patently ludicrous and anyone above moron level understands this. Of course, as many have pointed out, our over lawyering in this country has played a large part in the idiocy.
On another note, but keeping in sync with the theme, we’ve also long passed the point of diminishing returns regarding jogger equality with the rest of the human race…
Yeah people only take the safety cult business up one branch of the decision tree. For instance if they were really all that concerned with their dryer burning their house down they could just hang their clothes up to dry. It goes on and on, immigration all by itself runs counter to probably a half dozen supposed safety concerns.
Joggers have proven over and over and over, that they are incapable, as a group, to live in a society of rules.
I bought a shotgun last week. The first ten pages of owner’s manual is just them imploring me in different languages not to shoot myself or anyone else. It even has funny diagrams of somebody standing behind a target getting blasted.
Well, if yer getting likker’d up around the target, you get what’s coming to ya’.
Listen, if my mother-in-law wants to hold my targets, who am I to argue with her?
The safest thing for all concerned would be to repatriate the Joggers to Joggerland.
Is Joggerland pronounced with a “Y” sound?
It shall be so!
We’re all in it together, kid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olXUIcb80N0
Cost doesn’t matter. If only one dryer can be saved by the mandatory cleanings, then it’s all worth it.
I think someone tried to upsell Z-Man over the weekend and he got annoyed
And for only $5 more a month, we rust-proof your pets! Those suckers will rust up on ya! Better safe!
Here’s the cure for that!
http://www.petsdirect.co.uk/productimages/medium/3066294107_1305293850780243441_M.jpg
I don’t want to be the guy that refers to Ben Franklins quote on security vs. liberty again, you all know it.
Mike Rowe has a little campaign going called safety third. He mentions also C.S. Lewis’ little essay “living in the atomic age”. Quite relevant for these times. As far as a society focusing on material well being, Pat Buchanan said America was greater country long before it became a prosperous one.
hey look, no thoughts on my own today, but I just referred to four other people for inspiration.
Yarvin wrote about this kind of thing around Christmas. The gist of it is, it may have been better to rush out a vaccine that works for millions but kills or maims a few hundred due to side effects. But safety first! Allow 400K to die from coronachan so we know that not one person dies from the jab. He’s got other examples in here too. It’s a tour-de-force.
I’ll add I’m not a covidian or vaccine-pusher, but it’s an interesting read.
Once upon a time children aspired to be grown-ups, to take the reigns of life, to be like their parents.
Parents encouraged this, if by nothing other than living adulthood themselves, while holding back from view that which their children were not yet equipped to understand.
Parents protected them from dangers that lay in wait by insulating them from adulthood with the truth about the world wrapped in little lies with built in expirations.
The grand inversion changed that too.
Now children dream of perpetual adolescence, to be relieved of the burdens of adult life by some extrinsic power, paralyzed by the infinity of failures and threats that resides just beyond the threshold.
Parents, instead of protecting them from the truth about real dangers, inundate them with lies about “existential” threats of invisible viruses, climate doom, sins of whiteness, and the giant sucking sound of an uncredentialed life beyond the gates of urban progress.
The parents, living perpetual adolescence themselves, compete with their kids for extrinsic safety and status alike.
The kids internalize this narcissism as well as the lies that imprison them in a spiritual scarcity that is far more dangerous than NPR’s top ten.
So they mortgage their children’s futures to feel safe. They steal from their kids childhoods like vampires; for a fleeting taste of everlasting youth. They whore their kids white bodies in the streets and in the socials to signal their status and compliance to the ghost generator itself.
No, its not about some virus or some election. I don’t know about yarvin but I don’t need to debate ethical statistics within utilitarian psuedo-philosophies to see the devils work. Luckily I am not that smart. Though I am nearly as verbose.
A person turned 21, and gained license to drink, smoke, and gamble. But then came the ephemeral “dangers of second-hand smoke.”
Now we have the wisdom of Daddy Joe to keep us all safe! Will he let us go out and play today?
Second hand smoke is one of those things that exists when you look, very carefully and methodically, at statistics on morbidity and mortality. I had a gig a long time ago as an assistant to one of the academic big shots who “proved” the whole thing back in the 1970s-1980s. Basically, their strategy was to show that, all other things being equal, a population of people who don’t smoke but are exposed to a lot of smoke from others will have a higher rate of lung cancer and mortality than those are less exposed to it.
While this result surprised no one (it’s the same damn smoke after all), tobacco companies tried to claim it didn’t happen and then the usual communist activist types had a politically useful crusade to use to extend government reach everywhere. It was one of those landmarks in the slow and insidious transition from male to female dominant thinking in our society. They’re trying to do the same thing with guns of course.
The correct response to all this stuff was always to admit that yes, guns kill people, that’s what they’re for, that’s why we like them and yes, smoking causes cancer, it also causes mild improvements in cognition. If you don’t like smoke, leave the room, you silly man-bitch.
Overall, statistical reasoning is far more dangerous than any firearm as one can always skew the analysis in the direction of questions you can anticipate the answers to and then use “the science” to reach your desired conclusion. The Covid madness could have been suppressed early on, for instance, if anyone had done an analysis of the (likely very bad) physical and mental health consequences of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, and disruption to the medical system, and then the media had chosen to focus on that instead of Coof case counts.
Shorter version: mass democracy + mass media + statistics = tyranny and disaster.
It was 18 when I came of age.
He must be paid by the word. Way too long for the points made.
Yarvin does need an editor but taking forever to make a point is also part of his shtick. He writes everything in this snarky elliptical style where the real points are implied rather than explicitly stated. Maybe it’s just that he’s used to operating in the hyper-pozzed world of Silly Valley and has to hide his intent. Everybody knows who Moldbug is now though and the Silly Valley SJWs hate him anyway. Then again, everybody knew Bruce Wayne was Batman too…
Can’t let people get sick and get over it, creating natural herd immunity.
Safety compliance. What a thing to base the new economy on. Safety in your thoughts, first, because the thought becomes the deed, and then for no reason at all, white people go off and…
Yep, seems that way to me. After having recovered from covid, I am told to get the “jab”. I ask a simple question: “How will the jab increase my immunity?” Only response, “We don’t know how long your immunity will last.”
So how long does the immunity—if any—provided by the jab last? No one knows, and for that matter the vaccine is not touted as a preventative—only that it reduces severity of disease.
So if we are unable to answer such questions, can any of these onerous restrictions and lockdowns be safely lifted? Doubtful. We are seeing a setup for perpetual abuse in the name of safety.
This idea that those who’ve recovered still need the vaccine is extremely pernicious. Why, to make their body do what it’s already doing? I’m not an anti-vaxxer or prone to conspiracies, but the push to jab every last person on earth sets off alarm bells in my mind.
The media is already setting up the rubes to be scammed again. That’s what all the talk about new strains of sooper-dooper Covid is for. They waged a propaganda campaign to raise false hopes about the vaccines and now they are discrediting those same hopes to keep the tyranny ball rolling. The truth is somewhere in the middle I’m sure. The vaccines may sort of work and yet the immunity they confer may be short-lived. It may eventually be possible, using a very intensive course of multiple shots of several different vaccines, to confer a resistance about as good as what you get from a flu shot.
Anyone who submits to this or thinks it will be worth the effort is an idiot and deserves all the brain-rotting, eyeball-exploding side-effects they get. The whole Covid vaccine project is going to end up costing 10’s of billions that could be better spent on other health related projects. No one cares though, the whole society has decided that it needs to put this particular Chihuahua on the Moon and no effort will be spared until he’s up there, yapping away in the vacuum. Anyone who dares to ask why we need a Moon-chihuahua is obviously a terrorist and needs to targeted for a drone strike!
Both, Covid and the “vaccines” for it are bullshit.
He keeps talking about how 1940s and 1970s America could do it and how we can’t. But he completely fails to spot the differences between today and yesterday. America no longer exists. That 8 year old, his name is now Hector or Dontavious and that’s if that 8 year old is a boy!
Also denies IQ. He turns it into a joke, but that’s because he doesn’t want to deal with ethnic differences in IQ.
Same situation occurred wrt to air bag requirements. The government knew and mandated air bag technology when it killed and maimed frail and smaller people due to a one size fits all air bag design in the early days. The government not only knew this, but refused to allow folk to turn off the air bags. After much later they allowed a switch but made getting one installed so difficult, few applied for permission and it was hard to find a dealership willing to risk installation of such. Hundreds of people died so that a few thousand people would live.
I love that my 2007 pickup has a key switch on the dashboard to deactivate the passenger side air bag. I think because it’s a standard cab, and there’s no “back seat” for infants is why it’s there, but it’s great when I have the dog in the car, too. I’m positive he is not the right height and construction to get an exploding air bag in his face.
By normal vaccine approval standards, the COVID one were rushed.
It’s only a matter of time till bicycles are outlawed because people can get hurt riding them!
Why outlaw when you can create a new industry for ‘bicycle safety’?
I for one mandate that all squirrels wear emergency parachutes in case of a fall from height as they leap between trees. Naturally, any animal predating another must fill out a risk assessment in addition to asking the predatee if xir wishes to be eaten.
Don’t forget the environmental impact reports!
Remember that scene in Breaking Bad when the Bad Biker Whites just killed some people, and one said something like, “kids on their bikes with helmets, what the fuck happened to this country.” Then he sees some gore on his shoe, and wipes it off.
See, noticing the obsession with safety is….White Supremecy!
Look at the price of GME stock….
Clown world is just getting started.
GME? (Thanks in advance)
Game Stop – an on-line betting operation.
Stock price Up 57% in last Wednesday’s session.
I’m trading all my Pet Rock and Beanie Baby portfolios and loading up on cyber bookies.
Thought it referred to the brick & mortar video game retailer?
The guy who made a few $bill shorting mortgages in 2008 has just made GME his next big one,
GME is hilarious and should be enjoyed because an army of autistic retail traders have multiple Wall Street pros bleeding from every orifice on their GME shorts.
In other words, this Clown World episode is a win for the little guys.
My only regret was that I didn’t believe in clown world enough to get in on it.
But hey. Joe Biden got 80 million votes, and there are innumerable genders. So maybe GME really is worth 1,500 a share.
Zerohedge has ideas for the next short squeeze targets:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/daytrading-army-unleashes-furious-cascade-short-squeeze-meltups
And now all the brokers are down
Wasn’t it you who said one day we will wake up and our accounts are simply gone?
Yes, I believe one morning we will wake up and find TPTB have locked retail traders out and zeroed our accounts for the greater good.
I am not having a problem with my broker. I don’t care for Robinhood, and I’d never put my money into a Chicom op like Webull.
Know it’s a joke, but if you want to see mass domestic terrorism, the government should try to cross the biker fanatics.
Hot Wheels For All!
Someone will have cold dead hands if an attempt made to pry their Harlleys from them.
We have new laws now where you have to swerve around them as they always have the right of way and you have to maintain (x) feet distance. Good luck on narrow lanes.
I’ve got a real pet peeve with those cyclists. If there’s a bike lane it’s not too bad unless the jerkoffs are riding side by side or in a big group. But it’s when they’re riding down a heavily traveled road with no bike lane that really pisses me off – should be against the law. They’re not only a danger to themselves, but to drivers who have to negotiate their worthless asses.
Absolutely.
Simple physics tells us that bicycles are not street-compatible with the modern automobile.
One of the benefits of living in a “vibrant” area is that the vibrants have no use for cycling… especially not during the winters.
Entitled Goodwhite pricks love to cycle like they’re invincible. Occasionally one of them finds out they’re not.
Toronto seems to have passed it’s max cycling lunacy point. They’re now building subways, trains, and wide roads in the suburbs. I have to give the vibrants credit for alot of that. The whiter, smaller cities seem to try to make roads as dangerous and congested as possible.
In Portland there is of course, a radical bicycle-supremacist group. According to the article though it seems the two-wheeled terrorists have been suppressed in recent years.
Of course it’s like everything else around here. What looks like virtue-signalling is thinly veiled class signalling. In Portland, riding your fagcycle is a way of announcing to the motorists that, not only are you better people than they are for reducing your carbon footprint, but you are also richer, since they have to drive in from the suburbs and you can afford a hipster loft in the Peal District. One small mercy of the recent troubles is that a lot of these people are too scared to pedal around the Mad-Max hellscape of burned out Portland.
I’m surprised there are not more people hurt mountain biking and all of the public MTB trails.
My city has painted bike lanes more or less on every major street and has made biking on the pavement a ticketable offense, though rarely enforced.
Wrong mate. Try instead that your city council spends millions to eliminate lanes and parking on major downtown streets to make them safer for wide bicycle lanes. Sure, it creates traffic delays and impacts small business negatively, but it’s green. A few dedicated cycling enthusiasts can really f**k a city if they’re the squeaky wheel that gets the “safety” oil.
I just joined the “Revitalize” committee in my small city. They do some nice things, like flower pots on street lamp posts, and park clean ups, but one thing they love to push is bike usage in our town, which is low-income and thankfully free of bike fanatics. I don’t understand the hard-on these people have for bike lanes, but one of the reasons I joined is specifically to throw sand in the gears of those efforts.
On of my first introductions to coming snowflake storm of the millennial generation was my niece. A precocious and happy child, but never really liked riding her bike. Not at all like her mother and I, who practically grew up riding bikes, unsupervised, all over the place in one adventure after the next.
She liked it well enough, but immediately saw the *risk*. Not the freedom, autonomy, and adventure like we did as kids, but the dangers. Walking was just fine, thankyouverymuch.
She was not a pessimist either, so I couldn’t dismiss her apprehension based on that. No, she was actually quite sharp about the proposition. She had done the maths.
When she reached the age when the training wheels should have already long been removed, her mother prompted her, “wouldn’t you like to take the training wheels off so you can ride like the other big girls?” To which she responded, quite matter of fact “why would I do that? THEN I COULD FALL OVER!”
Her logic was sound. It was truth. Indeed, a bike with training wheels could never fall over. Hard to argue with that.
But what her adorable small mind could not fathom was what resided beyond the context of her immediate safety. The world that existed beyond the training wheels. And more so, that the purpose of those little wheels was not safety, per se, but “training”, to prepare her to enjoy the full potential of riding a bike. Which was unlikely, if not impossible, to achieve without her greatest fear: falling off the bike.
So she would rather foreclose the training and thus that whole world beyond the confines of immediate safety in favor of that small, childlike world where immediate safety is everything.
Our culture is run by the equivalent of little girls who have never taken the training wheels off and who will tell you, quite matter-of-fact that to ride without them is stupid and dangerous. In fact, where is your helmet?
Did I mention my sister was a single mom at the time?
Single mom… Almost all the various “lifestyles” favored by straang independent wammen, whether slutting it up in da’ club, making babies with randos, going lesbo, or becoming some sort of “activist”, are destructive and costly to the surrounding society. A lot of the cowardice and safety mongering of the younger generation is a result of being raised by these hellions. I’m guessing the kid is a fanatical maskist nowadays?
It’s only a matter of time that our Dear Political Leaders tell us that the only way we will ever defeat the COVAIDS is for us all to kill ourselves.
Just like a true cult.