Trade-Offs

Political systems are about problem solving. Inherited rule, for example, solves the problem of selecting the next ruler. Blood also provides legitimacy, which is an essential element for any ruler. One of the problems a political system must solve is the problem of trade-offs. Public policy, regardless of the system, is about trade-offs. A political system has to have a mechanism for selecting between competing options, by weighing the trade-offs and determining the best choice.

A great story from the ancient world about trade-offs is the story of the emperor Tiberius and flexible glass. A craftsman was presented to the emperor claiming that he could make flexible glass. That is, a substance that looked and functioned like glass, but did not break like glass. He produced a bowl that the emperor tried to smash, but it only suffered some dents. The craftsman then repaired it with a small hammer, knocking out the dents made by the emperor.

Once the emperor was assured that no one else knew how to make this new material, he had the craftsman beheaded. The reason was that Tiberius saw right away that this material was revolutionary. Innovation always comes with trade-offs, as the new thing replaces an old thing. In the case of flexible glass, the trade-offs were incalculable, so the proper course was to make sure this new material never got loose. Tiberius chose the well understood over the completely unknown.

This story is useful to us today, because we have lived through what could be described as a series of flexible bowl incidents. The technological revolution that was set in motion by the microprocessor has swept through the West. As Tiberius anticipated with flexible glass, the silicon chip has set off changes that no one anticipated. In the material sense, our world is quite different from 70 years ago. In a cultural and political sense, we now live at the other end of a perpetual revolution.

In theory, democratic systems of government are about solving the problem of the general will. Through the ballot, the people tell the office holders what they want from their government. In turn, the people in office try to guide the general will through public debate and public advocacy for their ideas. The trade-offs involved in the options being debated are fleshed out and the public, directly, or indirectly, makes their choice and that becomes public policy.

The trouble is the system always selects for innovation over continuity. When the microprocessor came along, there could be no debate about whether this was a dangerous new innovation or how best to prevent this radical new thing from overthrowing the old rules. Democracy always comes down on the side of the new thing over the old thing. Every innovation, no matter how pointless, is celebrated as another step in human progress. Democracy is a perpetual revolution.

As a result, there could be no Tiberius moment with the microchip. There was not one to examine the new thing and contemplate its ramifications. Instead, it was quickly adopted setting off the technological age. Not only did no one think about the trade-offs before unleashing this new thing, not one thought about them afterwards. New is always good in a democratic society. The only thing better than innovation is more and faster innovation. Constant change is the ethos of liberal democracy.

The technological revolution was expected to solve lots of problems that plagued the industrial age. Society was supposed to become more democratic, for example, as improvements in communication made it easier for people to express their preferences in the public square. The distribution of goods would become more equitable, as innovation would smash the old bottlenecks. The technological revolution would make the world flatter, more egalitarian and more peaceful.

Some of the promised benefits have happened, but the trade-offs have been enormous and could very well be the end of us. For example, the cost of being able to call anyone anywhere from a device that fits in your pocket is having millions of people experiencing the lives through their phone. All the benefits of the mobile phone were realized with the first car phone. Everything that has came after that point has been the trade-off that no one could imagine. Most of them negative.

Similarly, the cost of instant communication across time and place is millions of people standing in front of a firehose of information. Humans are not made to experience the world this way. One result is everyone is dumber and less informed. Another result is the number of rage heads screaming in the face of their fellow citizens is growing exponentially. The cost of knowing what is on everyone’s mind is knowing what is on everyone’s mind whether you like it or not.

Again, this is not to say the technological revolution is a mistake. E-mail is better than the postal service. Modern automobiles are better and safer than their analog variants from the old days. Having the sum of human information at your fingertips is an amazing leap forward for humanity. There has been great material progress that has come with the technological revolution, but it came with a price. The question the West is slamming into is whether that price is warranted.

The trouble is democracy is incapable of evaluating trade-offs. This may be why our systems are becoming increasingly authoritarian. The only way to tone down the rhetoric in public forums is for the heavy hand of the ruling class to limit what can be said in public forums. The only way to break people from being constantly on-line is to make on-line less rewarding. There is no democratic way to get rid of Twitter and Facebook, so we get an authoritarian approach.

The trouble, of course, is that the current ruling class is the product of the democratic system that created this mess. These are people bred to overturn the tried and true in favor of the novel. That instinct is seen in their fetish for men in dresses. They are attracted to it because it is disruptive. Our ruling class is was selected by a system that rewards pointless novelty over sober mindedness. A ruling class of such people means we are ruled by a class of powerful toddlers.

That may be the next turn of the wheel. Democratic dictatorship gives way to some form of personal rule, where stability and continuity are prized over innovation. The ruling class is symbolically and physically walling itself off from us, but what comes next is a culling inside those walls. The feckless and stupid will be pushed out as a matter of survival, by those actually capable of wielding power. That will be a trade-off that everyone can accept, because it brings stability.


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

258 thoughts on “Trade-Offs

  1. I’m of the opinion that technology “sears” humanity, just like a hot skillet puts a grind on a strip of beef. I’m not a reflexive luddite mind you. But I am very skeptical about the benefits of stuff invented after 2001.

    After we stole all the Krau’s gizmos in the ’40’s we splurged on tech and look where it got us. The country looks like a meth-binging Paris hooker who’s missing one shoe.

    Tech. It’s one hell of a drug. That ozone we all smell is our society denaturing under the heat of “our” technology. Sizzle. Snap. Tsssssssss…..

  2. This column reminds me of “The Man Who Fell to Earth”. Government responds to innovation in the way you expect. With brute force…

  3. The fundamental problem with technology and progress is that we, as a species, are NOT intelligent. We are clever. A there is a world of difference between the two.

  4. AI figured out social media crowdsourcing is deplatforming social media, hence the meltdown. Too late now.

  5. Akshully I believe the opposite it true, that modern government is all about protecting us from change, from the legalization of unions (in restraint of trade) to help workers fight their employers cutting their wages in downturns to all the entitlements to protect us from old age, sickness, etc.
    And when it doesn’t protect us people get real mad.

  6. The feckless and stupid will be pushed out as a matter of survival, by those actually capable of wielding power.

    You are far more optimistic than I am. I see them continuing down a fecklessness spiral until it all collapses.

  7. “The trouble is democracy is incapable of evaluating trade-offs. This may be why our systems are becoming increasingly authoritarian.”

    This was Jason Jorjani’s point in Prometheus and Atlas; advances in technology, esp. AI, along with research in parapsychology (if anyone demurs, remember A.C. Clarke, a sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic) create an increasingly unstable world. Privacy, for one thing, disappears (whether it’s the NSA or PKDick’s “pre-crime” cops), ordinary people have extraordinary powers to harm others, etc. Only a totalitarian government can bring this under control. His qualified praise for NS Germany in this regard got him labelled a “Nazi” and disappeared. This was also why Heidegger joined the party; it was the only group serious about “the encounter of man and technology”.

  8. Our government has devolved into a globalist crime cartel so paranoid it has to hide behind razor wired walls and military personnel. The depths of the kakistocracy’s ignorance seems as limitless as their inability to comprehend the concept of consequences. Meanwhile, the fires of their frankenstenian Antifa paramilitary forces edge closer to their doors, soon to disappear into The Land of The Lost Socks, while BLM is installed in the white house by dark entities with dark money.

    We wait for the rule of law to be pulled from life support.

  9. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Trade-Offs

  10. Check you wallets. Dead presidents like to say “It’s OK to be white.” Maybe soon something called a “Harriet Tubman” will be saying it.

    • There is this thing going around, people buy rubber stamps w/a portait of Tubman, and then stamp over Jackson on every $20 dollar bill they come across. Defacing the currency.

  11. The Amish and Mennonites attempt to solve the problem posed in Z-man’s post by trying to balance the benefits of the technology with the possible injury it may do to their society. Thus, an Amish farmer may have electricity in his barn (keeping milk cold) but not in the house. Amish society is, of course, anything but democratic; decisions are made by the elders. Perhaps we might hit upon some version of the Amish solution. (No beheading permitted, of course!!)

  12. Yep. The acceptance of authoritarian stability verses anarchy. It’s as old a history itself. The path is drawn. Democracy as we now experience it can not sustain itself. Even if we identify the bad aspects of technology wrt social stability—and there are many known even now—we are powerless to implement any reform as TPTB make their fortunes from such, and money equals power.

  13. No where has technology been viewed as the savior more than education. We keep doubling down on it as the way to close achievement gaps. The opposite has happened! Technology has created short attention feedback loops that keep kids constantly agitated. Reading anything with attention and depth is getting exceedingly difficult even for the high flyers. The low IQ kids are junkies.
    I was talking with Wolf Barney on how boredom led to great adventures when we were young. Not anymore it seems, technology is only one click away to keep us ensnared.

  14. From the Christian perspective, modern communications have undone the Tower of Babel, when God confused language to prevent humanity from uniting against Him. But social media has ended that.

    Humanity is now united in women seizing male authority and men enabling her instead of restraining her. Original sin is back on the menu.

  15. The Internet age was announced as the beginning of a golden age of knowledge, and it still has that ability. At the touch of a button thousands of years of human history and past lessons to learn from are available.

    Instead, most watch cat videos and Bernie memes, or engage in pedantic arguments with people whose idea of history comes from the NYT opinion page.

    • But what we are finding out is that there must be a “curator” to assemble and organize the information. And that’s Zuckerberg. Or some freak like him with an agenda other than expanding human knowledge.

      Unless and and until a serious university or the like decides to tackle the problem, it’s as good as it’s going to get. It would take a monumental and decades long effort to curate and organize the info. It would dwarf the scholarship and manpower involved in the Oxford English Dictionary, which itself is monumental.

      Cat videos it is !!!

    • The Internet has become the opposite of a golden age: information stored digitally is easily and untraceably altered to suit Socialist talking points of the moment. Books will prove to be the platinum standard of information archival because 1. they cannot be easily altered once made and 2. don’t require specialist/gatekeeper tools to access.

      It boggles my mind, how many people now refuse even to maintain their own databases. I have an offline copy of government records relevant to my work and had to literally go downtown with a thumb drive to get it. People told me it was a waste of effort. Guess who wasn’t crying during the next several network outages. Guess who made a proprietary, improved index of public records.

      What is wrong with Normies today? They act like antifragility is blasphemy.

    • Like everything else, it is a tool. In the right hands, it can create things of beauty and genius, in the wrong hands, mediocrity, garbage, or worse. Technology doesn’t really change human nature, it only amplifies it.

  16. The only rub in this flexible bowl issue, is that wouldn’t someone else have invented it? Making the empire safe from flexible bowls may make it unsafe after the neighbors figure out the technology.

    Perhaps you are considering the wreckless nature of our culture, that just keeps into everything with no thought.

  17. Apple basically pulled a Tiberius with their suppliers on sapphire glass. The Tiberiuses of the world aren’t government but the large companies that it serves.

  18. “The cost of knowing what’s on everyone’s mind is knowing what’s on everyone’s mind whether you like it or not.”

    After 11 years on Twitter this is precisely why one day last year I shut down the account. The Knowing had become unbearable. It makes me wonder about the story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge. Maybe it’s a warning from a prior advanced civilization that had seen what happens when one obtains a form of omniscience but limited to the brain droppings of our fellow inmates.

  19. Anyone else finding the mask thing as a form of intentional deceit?

    twice now I have met people whose faces behind masks look nothing like you’d expect them to. When I saw them without mask I was literally startled. They could tell too. Obviously, they were better looking behind the mask.

    • There’s a cleaner where I work, in her early 40s, who has a very fit and attractive body but the face of a 70 year old. This past year has been kind to her.

  20. I get the concept of the essay and that constant change is the ethos of a liberal democracy, however, at the same time, ironically the ethos of the bureaucracy writ large is to never change anything – or at least not to the extent it woud actually solve a problem, or fix whatever does not function properly, and thereby eliminate the need for said bureaucracy to exist.

  21. Military competition has been one of the primary drivers of innovation pretty much forever. That competition increased exponentially in Europe in the early modern era (ca 1500) almost simultaneously with the development of “capitalism”. Which catapulted Europe into global supremacy and made innovation a fun away freight train impossible to stop.

    In the 20th century, fear of rival nations developing new technology and leap frogging the military status quo reached a crescendo. It was in that environment that nukes, planes, microchips, drones and more were created.

    • Yes,,, this race to innovate or die was not considered by Z. Someone is going to invent that flexible glass!

  22. Much of Trump’s success was his entertainment value. Biden is brain dead and Kamala is annoying. Instead of them, who next will entertain us?

      • That thing causes a visceral reaction of hatred. A strong one. The best result for it is that I am as far away from it as possible.

        The ideal result for it? Well, I can’t post it. That may be coming later.

        Thousands of years of evolution is telling it to stay the fuck away from me. I listen to my “unconscious biases” and take them seriously.

        • I remember in Venice there was a local real estate broker who dressed in drag. Also one of (((them))).

          I have to think at some level this is purely for marketing purposes. If you are (((jjjj)))) and you feel it is your birthright to make lots of money, but you know you are pretty pedestrian in abilities, you gotta separate yourself from the pack.

          Would a (((mom)))) ever tell her kid not to dress like a woman if it means to be poor? I have to wonder. Money is so important to them.

        • ‘Unconscious biases’ are the result of genomically inherited neural machinery that developed over millions of years of hominid evolution. Those without unconscious bias get weeded from the gene pool.

      • Please get the pic where it’s in a short blue Alice-in-Wonderland dress…while at work. Not kidding.

      • I applaud your open minded use of the preferred pronoun sir. Very “Portlandia” of you.

    • Notice how when Trump lost his ability to shock the left or piss them off that it coincided with his downfall in his fourth year. People were just tuning him out. He had barked too much with no bite.

      • He should have followed Teddy Roosevelt’s advice “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. He was always threatening to drop the hammer but never did. It would have been better to just take action and let his enemies find out about it after the fact.

  23. Whats crazy to me is the laws being dreamed up by these crazies have very little support in raw numbers. Blacks and latinos are more likely to be religious than whites, in opposition to gay marriage and transgender gibberish, latinx, etc. Yet they vote for the party of these ideas for the gibs. If this was a democracy in the sense that every law was put on the ballot, we’d have a more socially conservative set of laws. Latino catholics are the fastest growing group in the US and most of those i met oppose using birth control let alone abortion for example.

    • That’s why the future of the GOP, if they had brains or balls, would have been economically populist / protectionist, and socially conservative. Trump kinda had it. And look at the results in Miami and South Texas.

      They like alpha males. Trump’s pandering wasn’t the reason for their support. Anyways, Mexican / mestizo Hispanics are no longer the ruling classes main focus. Expect full Indians from central America and increasingly African aliens to be coming in.

      The ruling class is insane and suicidal.

      • Same way our diversity in Canada is now getting enriched and fucked over too. Hindu coders are just as likely to be paying for Muslim “refugees” as white taxpayers. Refugee shelters and Somalians are popping up in Chinese areas.

        They are just pawns, like mexicans, in whatever sick game the elites are playing. They will be cast aside just like whites when they are no longer needed.

      • i don’t think they are suicidal, non whites are incapable of taking charge of usa, not even china is capable of doing it without war.

      • The GOP brought us NAFTA as part of the Republican National Platform when Bush I ran (and lost) against Clinton. They have never been populist/protectionist mainly because working people wanted to Unionize and so voted Democrat. The Republicans crushed Union jobs with Free Trade by shipping everything overseas and then pulled the bait and switch of promoting religious issues as their bread and butter to attract “conservative” voters who were not voting their economic interests. This worked because of old white people still being the majority of voters up until recently. It will not work in the future because of pure demographics. Some open borders Republicans hoped mass migration from Latin America would result in Catholics naturally voting Right but that hasn’t turned out to be true at all. Race, the one topic Republicans won’t touch, determines how people vote more than anything and the Democrats own Racial Justice issues. It’s over for the Republicans.

        • Enough with electoral and party politics. We live in the demographic age. All that ought to matter to you, if you are White, is your people and their future, and that will not be determined by voting harder.

      • At least with Africans, they have an ocean to cross. It’s a lot harder to just sneak in millions of them on foot.

        • Yeah, but one African is probably worse than a few hundred South Americans—and there are a few thousand Africans now waiting in MX. You can be sure they’ll be let loose now that Biden is in charge.

        • Arriving by boat after an Atlantic crossing is not necessarily more demanding than arriving by land at the southern border.

      • They are suicidal like a suicide bomber with an atomic bomb vest.
        They will gladly destroy the world and themselves in an orgiastic frenzy to cleanse the non-believers.

    • Latinos are easily corrupted. In a generation they start getting abortions like no tomorrow. Whites are the hardest nut to crack. Always going to be that way. Hence why they hate us so much.

      • The pozzing of non-white immigrants and their kids in Toronto is insane. Momma might be in a burka but her kids will be riding white/black cocks starting in high school, and getting abortions. A Pakistani acquaintance got knocked up by a white guy a couple years ago and terminated it (wasn’t me lol)

        The boys become porn, and weed addicted coomers. Addicted to rap and sports cars and sail foams.

        Whites are the only group who has a large portion that remains conservative. Exactly.

        • Isn’t it something!?

          Yes, despite the mass indoctrination over generations and all the rest, whites still resist.

          No wonder they hate us so much. We just don’t play ball. I guess it has been like this for centuries.

          • The fact that President Trump got 70 million votes is a great testament to the strength of our people. Despite the non-stop brainwashing attempts, hatred, and in some cases violence, tens of millions of white Americans stood up to say “fuck you” and voted for Trump anyways. (I know trump is a poor rep. of white interests but it’s the symbolism that counts).

            The brainwashing has been going on against our people since *at least* 1945 and since the 1990s we are slowly getting more right wing! The only way to make me change is to kill me. My resolve gets stronger the more shit they fling on me. This stubborn streak is what makes us dangerous.

          • “… great testament to the strength of our people.”

            This. MOST white women voted with their white men to preserve white civilization. They did this after the most full-court-press agitation-propaganda campaign in human history to try to get them to hate themselves and their white men and white children. They did this with almost no organized encouragement from our useless backstabbing ‘Conservatives’.

            The enemy has already tried most of what they can do to destroy us without open kinetic violence.

          • Well, if the numbers are to be believed, White males were the only demographic where he lost numbers. Still, plenty of them did give the mid finger to the establishment, as did an increased number of other groups. Yet he lost. Go figure.

          • I would like to see the look on your face when you discover OnlyFans. White women make a fortune showing off their hoo-hahs on the internet to the brown hordes spanking it on the other side of the screen.

    • In my heavily Hispanic town there’s a subset of Puerto Ricans who are Pentecostals. I’m not sure what sartorial requirements there are for men, but the women only wear dresses/skirts. No, I’m not advocating for more of them, but they present a very striking contrast to the typical slatternly dress of most everyone else in town. As a small minority, they could be tolerated and would probably be a net positive on the community.

      • Race>religion. Puerto Ricans are, on average, 20% sub-Saharan ancestry, and despite how your Pentecostal subset may dress, their children will revert to their social culture and intelligence level, which is not a good thing. They can go be positive in an independent Puerto Rico.

      • Look up any picture of a rally of the Nation of Islam. They are all conservatively dressed while listening to Elisha Mohamed talk of the White devils. Dress does not in all occasions signal benign intent or enlightenment.

    • And here’s yet another who believes what he reads. Latinos are not conservative in the White, European sense. They may claim to oppose certain things in public but they don’t live by those values. Despite loud public proclamations about black churchgoers, those tend to be older women, and black church is much more a social experience than a worship one. There’s far more to being genuinely ‘conservative’ than opposing birth control/abortion – such as living financially responsible lives and not expecting unending government largesse – the way most Mestizos and their children and grandchildren do.

  24. THought-provoking post, thank you, Zman. As a traditional Catholic, I have started to notice that many dissidents and certainly most conservatives, consider the Enlightenment/ Liberalism of the 18th cent as the beginning of civilization. But it seems to me it was another novelty, just in ideas, not in technology. you could say it was a philosophical novelty, that every man his own pope, and his own little king, with his own little franchise.

    The trouble is democracy is incapable of evaluating trade-offs. 

    Wonderful quote!

    • People should consider that, maybe, the problems of America are not because we have failed to live to the principles of the Enlightenment, but that we have fulfilled them too perfectly.

    • so true, ideas today are like a perfume. People simply wear them to evoke an air of sophistication

      They don’t even have to understand them

      Ideas have been made into a marketable commodity. And when even some of the greatest ideas and theories are made into a fashion accessory, you have to figure the world that has been informed by those ideas is on its last leg

  25. There is a great scene in Andre Rubilev, by the master Soviet filmmaker Tarkovski, where an icon painter is being chased through the woods, eventually caught, and his eyes gouged out….

  26. not sure modern cars are safer. Someone is always much safer in a two ton box of 1950s American steel or in a massive SUV than in a tiny little aluminum car with airbags and crumple zones

    these people hate us. Why are they going to preside over a world where cars make it tougher to kill us off? Does not stand up to scrutiny. And I think anyone who know cars knows there is no replacement for heavy gauge steel when it comes to safety.

    so the trade off here is affordability for safety

    • Old cars are more fun. They have personality, you have more control over them, and you can work on them. Gotta give new cars the point for reliability though.

      • Reliability. That has been the trade off for actual safety and, as you say, fun factor.

        Asian cars creep me out as it is. Sitting in them gives me the heebie jeebies

        And quite illustrative of the hive minded conformity of this age that all cars look pretty much the same. Occasionally though we get to witness a gay Mexican dude in a pink RAV4.

      • I agree about old vehicles being more fun to drive. They are also easier to work on. I own three four wheel drive vehicles, all with standard transmissions. The newest one was built in 1997.

        I drive a late model automatic owned by the company when I travel for work. Yeah it’s efficient, but boring as hell to drive.

        I guess it comes down to whether you truly enjoy the experience of driving and having the control of the vehicle or just want a vehicle that gets you where you want to go with as much luxury and little hassle as possible.

          • Not for long. Subcompacts, mid size trucks, and sports cars. That’s about it. Even the sports cars are going to paddle shift (it’s faster!).

            It’s a good thing I like German cars. Germans must still like the clutch.

        • I have an ‘18 Tacoma. Pop the hood, and other than a small engine cover it might as well be an ‘88. Lots of room to work (happily unneeded so far), all the fluids right up front where they’re easy to get to. 6 on the floor. Leaf springs and drum brakes in the rear. Shockingly old school on the mechanical end. My only minor beef is that it doesn’t have a manual transfer case.

          It actually feels like a truck, unlike the suburban dad boxes other companies are putting out these days.

    • Certainly we are not safer from bad style. the cars up until the early 80s were beautiful adn interesting. Now, they all look like electric razors

      • Regulations of various sorts basically mandates what all cars will look like. There’s only so many ways that air can be made to go around an autobody.

      • Maybe my age, I’m a fan of 80s Volkswagens and early 90s Hondas. The first gen NSX is timeless. Mk I Jetta GLIs are sharp too, in that boxy, efficient German way. Ford Probes, too. The later body style. Very nice.

        But yeah, nothing like an old muscle car, a British roadster, the old Ferraris. Give me an Austin-Healey 3000, Healey blue/white with knock-off wheels.

    • The main reason for lighter materials were the federal fuel mandates. So we can die in a car crash today, to save us from being 1 degree warmer in 100 years.

    • Probably the biggest safety advance is tires. When you see what old cars were sitting on, it makes you wonder how anyone could keep control on a wet road at speed.

    • An interesting thing with the cars: you see a concerted marketwide effort to make sure all modern cars are Appleized. The “lifetime fluids” stickers, for example, actually mean “throw this away after 100,000 miles.” Everyone knows smart phones cause accidents, yet every single new car will automatically interface with your phone to alert you for every new text, amazon delivery, and youtube comment. The universal infotainment system installations are there to make sure accident rates stay up (even though deaths from traffic accidents are at a historical low, number of accidents are up; it’s on purpose) for the same reason – to make sure that inventory keeps moving. It’s a sick game, but no one stops them so long as it doesn’t kill too many people (apparently 25,000 people a year isn’t too many for the Cloudpeople). The crumple zones and $5,000 polyurethane bumpers that self-destruct in a mild breeze are there so the insurance company will total it and you buy a new one, with another 60 month financing deal, then you finance the warranty and finance the insurance (protip: the insurance companies make their real money from their investments in the financial markets that get absurd profits from the transaction churn). It’s all a con job, to keep the churn at a boil so the multi-trillion-dollar skimming operations keep on.
      But yes, in terms of fatalities, new cars are safer (old SUVs/trucks excepted, due to Newtonian physics).

  27. “we are ruled by a class of powerful toddlers” I was immediately reminded of the episode in the original series of Star Trek where they encountered a certain Gen. Trelaine, Ret., who on closer examination, turned out to be precisely that – a toddler with way too much power. In the story, Capt. Kirk and his team were saved by the toddler’s parents. Who will intervene to save America? Is there a Caesar who will properly discipline America’s class of powerful toddler’s?

    • My Bongino barometer is flashing red again this week, and apparently the solution for what ails us is more extra super duper voting harder and endless ad hominem snark directed at the Biden Administration. I guess that is what passes for leadership in the normie world these days. And it’s hardly distinguishable from a toddler.

      • Tom, you always got me as an audience for your Bongino quips !!!

        I will never stop laughing at the concept of “vote harder’

      • Bongino lost me when he totally ignored the Supremes ruling of “no standing” re: Texas vs Fraud States. He had deteriorated into a gibbering lunatic, perhaps as a result of the kemo but who knows.
        Vote harder = Hard Pass

      • It’s hard to explain to a toddler that voting harder is wasted time and energy when the elections are rigged.

  28. Minor quibble, But it’s not true that we have the sum of all information at our fingertips. What is readily accessible is curated and finite. Put another way, the biggest libraries still dwarf the info available to someone with a smartphone. Not everything has been digitized. And what has, people may not trust its fidelity to the original.

    moral of story. Buy used books and originals

  29. The bane of ignorance is always knowledge. Insulation from reality can calm the weak but never adequately shield an emperor from a truthful and discerning eye.

    Adapt.

  30. John C. Wright somewhere called it “the Great Inversion.” We’re all Postmodern now, and the only thing Postmoderns know to be True is: There’s no such thing as Truth. Thus, whatever is, is wrong. Give the men-in-dresses fad five years to run, and when there are no more barriers to “transgress,” they’ll all turn into prudes. Before that happens, though, I’m betting on a Third Great Awakening, a neo-Luddite version that rejects most technology simply because it’s technology. An updated Promise Keepers, for instance, would clean up in the Current Year.

    • What if this whole thing and obsession over weirdos having special rights goes on for another 100 years

      right now living through this age is a form of hell. I can’t imagine what it would be like if it becomes something of an eternity

      • The obsession with weirdos is just another aspect of America’s circus – as in bread and circuses.

          • A lot of this is what you might call “Witch Trial Syndrome.” You see witchcraft persecutions anytime there’s a big social shift that the Powers That Be can’t understand, much less control. Marcus Aurelius, for example, couldn’t do anything about the barbarians, the currency, or the Antonine Plague, but he could blame it on that newfangled Christian sect, and kill a few. The Papacy couldn’t do much about the printing press, but they could burn witches. See also the English Civil War (you could list everyone executed for heresy, witchcraft, etc. on a notecard prior to the Civil War, “Bloody Mary” not excepted).

            And of course the most famous (to Americans) one of all, the Salem Trials. Devastating-yet-inconclusive war just ended? Check. Mysterious plague? Check. Massive cultural shift away from the old, inward-looking (Puritan) ethos to an outward-directed (Yankee) one? Check and mate. A lot of this, then, is just a hysteria that has to burn itself out. Wait until that “public health” thing from Pennsylvania comes into conflict with the Very Smart Bruthas Presidizzle Heels-Up is going to install everywhere. That’ll be the end of that.

        • No it isn’t, it’s about destroying whats left of the social fabric of the U.S. and the West.
          If you look at the people and groups pushing these freaks onto us, its the same ones tearing down our society and whites in general.
          10 years ago such freaks trying to enter a woman’s bathroom would have been beaten to a pulp. 30 years ago they were routinely murdered(and still are in minority communities for good reason).
          The only peoples stupid enough to tolerate them are whites, particularly the over educated sort who took too many “studies” courses in the big house.

      • Pedophilia is the last frontier. But unlike tolerating trannies, there will be real pushback from parents when it becomes the next taboo to break.

        • Will there be? The power of mass media to brainwash, or at least cow, the population is just astonishing to me. Add in declining birthrates giving increasing numbers of people no stake in the issue, and maybe it comes to be accepted — probably decriminalized first like marijuana. Those who object will keep their heads down for fear of being ruined by social media mobs. I think p could become a real thing in your lifetime. What mechanism prevents it?

        • No they wont.

          All it takes is releentless media narrative and slowly moving the goal posts. The signs are all around.

          Case in point. I am surrounded by a 99% voluntary mask compliance outdoors with mothers continually adjusting their small child’s masks to make sure they stay on, as the natural instinct is to pull off suffocating garments.
          Their children’s brains are wiring themselves for the rest of their lives in the first 5 years or so and the mothers are destroying their children’s normal brain formation for a non-existent problem (even for official data), and they think they are doing something good.
          Most people have no thought processes other than those placed there as direct commands through media, and you can make them do anything, even to the extent of actively destroying themselves and their children.

          The media is a brain hacking mechanism and they are superb at it.

  31. I think you overlook the desperate financial situation the US has been in for a while as a motivator for technological innovation, which really has been “financial technology” innovation more than anything. We have tens of millions of people who are entering their elderly years and who expect to live well on social security for at least 20 more years. The economy had to expand in almost miraculous ways for that to be possible, but in reality all that expanded was debt and then all this extra money had to find things to invest in. The best things to invest in were things we invented precisely for the purpose of accelerating more debt. So, first I give you a credit card, then I sell you a tv and a laptop, then you pay 5 times more for those items than they cost. Without all of these technological and money hustles, the economy would not have inflated away our previous debts. I think they learned their lesson and we are probably going to see the same thing all over again with “green technology”. All that freebie money the baby boomers are living off of really came from the 30 trillion dollar debt bubble the US government is maintaining right now plus probably another 50 trillion in other debts. And it will get worse and worse.

    • Most people desperately want to believe that the financial bubble will never burst because that reality could ruin their comfortable lifestyle and force them into tangible action of some sort. And prolonged affluence has made us soft and fragile, so few among us have the robustness necessary to survive a return of real hardship. This is the viscous cycle that has locked us into a suicide spiral and will drive downward to a much, much lower bottom. The future is whining, louder whining, mass street protests, rioting, crackdown, wanton violence, civil war or manufactured foreign war as distraction.

      • And I should add that the purpose of a manufactured foreign war is to kill off as many homegrown Alpha males as possible so that they are not available to support an internal civil war. Real high class leadership that.

        • Alpha males are reckless and get themselves killed easily

          beta males are cucks

          rather, I think something else has been killed off. The sort of resourceful, intelligent fighter of old. Neither alpha nor beta. Where they go? We still have plenty of alphas and a huge surplus of betas but we don’t have the crafty, wily sorts

          • I think Z’s readership is probably pretty geezerly. Nobody reads anymore. Plus, it’s all written in English so the kids just hear charlie brown “wah wah wah wah” from the old white guys. If he made some makeup tutorials for youtube on the other hand.

          • That would be pretty close to the average age of white American, and mostly male, so… agree.

          • I think we have a different definition of Alphas. In my experience, Alphas are natural leaders, not reckless muscle-bound meatheads. Most common folk will follow men of both strength and intelligence, and strong in both physical ability and character/integrity.

          • I understand, Tom. And you bring up something important, What alpha male means today is the cocky guy at the bar who leaves with the hot chick. Betas go home alone. That’s pretty much it. But there may be some additional nuances, but in a nutshell that’s it.

            I think the idea of the alpha male has been dumbed down and bastardized and almost commoditized as well.

      • Eloi’s rioting: burning mattresses in Portland. I was afraid they’d bring out the heavy Nerf guns.

    • The social security deficit will be easily solved by taxing all income, rather than capping it at $142,800, like it is now. These additional taxes aren’t free of course, and will harm economic growth. The politicos have never done this because they like to maintain the illusion that social security is an investment program, and not just another welfare program. But they will have no choice. I used to oppose this on libertarian grounds, but fu#k the wealthy who will pay for this. Most are libtards anyway. The true test will come when the brown hoards, who have not accrued much in benefits, take control. They will cut off this whitey entitlement as soon as they get the chance.

      • I’ve seen several scenarios where SS can be fixed, or at least made workable. Medicare and Medicaid though, there’s not math in the world in which they work. You’ll see politicians use this bait and switch (if they do it all)where the gist boils down to ending SS in order to save Medicaid (i.e. steal from old whites and give it to younger non-whites).

        • SSI in the sense of going “broke” is not going to happen. In the sense of shortfalls, yes that’s a problem and can/should be fixed—sooner, the better.

          SSI has its own funding source, employed workers. By law it must reduce its payouts when the time comes to their income from employed workers. This means a haircut to all, but not an elimination.

          Obviously, Congress can change law, but elimination would affect many minorities and just not “rich” Whites. Also, 40% of the SSI recipients depend solely upon SSI for income. To eliminate SSI would would throw these retirees into abject poverty and make them basically wards of the State. The States would have a fit.

          A more likely scenario is an “adjustment” to the payouts, with a sliding scale of reductions: bottom percentiles, no cut, upper percentiles most cut.

          https://www.nirsonline.org/2020/01/new-report-40-of-older-americans-rely-solely-on-social-security-for-retirement-income/

      • DLS: I remember when the cap on social security (FICA) was around $76,000. The cap just keeps climbing, and the likelihoood of getting anything close to our money’s worth keeps falling.

    • No society has ever survived while providing plushy, publicly-paid lives to a huge segment of society for 20+ years. Social Security needs to die, along with Medicaid and Medicare, and the assumption that everyone ‘deserves’ a pension or a paid retirement. My husband has always said he expects to work until he dies, and we’ve been shredding AARP mailings for over a decade.

      • How does one eliminate SSI? We will not watch our elderly starve in the streets. If we can stop welfare abuse for the young and able, how do we approach SSI and Medicare?

        • I’m not proposing they starve in the streets. Elderly care should be a responsibility of each individual family, with no endlessly prolonged dying. People living for decades with severe dementia or Alzheimer’s disease is neither natural nor a blessing. FWIW, I remember reading tons of stories about the ‘elderly’ surviving on cat food, and yet the only real vacation my husband and I took, in 1991, we were the only couple under 60 in the hotels and restaurants and all the ‘elderly’ appeared to be financially comfortable and on a permanent vacation.

      • agree. It was a nice program to end poverty among the elderly in the olden days. But those days are long gone.

  32. I keep thinking that all the comparisons of Trump to Hitler are mistaken. To me, the real comparison is to the chaos caused by (to oversimplify) the Communists in the streets. The reaction by the NAZI’s was favored by the people and Hitler looked pretty good. Similar to your last paragraph.

  33. <i>One result is everyone is dumber and less informed. </i>

    The first part isn’t debatable, the second part though is maybe a smidge brief as people are less informed (and misinformed) about topics that matter. I see this even on normie-con sites where the readers know more about some oil project in Iran than how the local church is cramming “refugees” into their city.

    • There is our power. Working libraries are very much a White people thing.

      The ‘how-to’ channels, you’ll notice, are mostly white. How to harness this power and make it an essential movement, exacting the tribute our people deserve?

  34. Common sense & practical knowledge are eternal survival skills.
    Going Dark (Cont)
    If you live in a rural area, chances are that your vehicles get mud splashed all over them regularly; so much so that older pickups rarely get washed anymore. In such cases, your truck almost becomes unrecognizable. And on bright sunny days, that big honking visor must stay down in order to keep the sun out of your eyes. Safety matters after all. Wraparound sunglasses are a big help too, and a full beard will keep you extra warm if you should need to change a tire in winter. An old pickup with an old grey bearded driver hauling a work load is as innocuous as dirt.

  35. Society and civilization have grown completely unsalvageable.

    it’s time to summon Gozer The Destructor who will come in the form of Aunt Jemima.

  36. Stability and continuity is something we’ve all needed for a long time – just some down time to catch our breath. As for the feckless & stupid getting pushed out, there are 535 in DC that seemingly never weigh the costs and benefits of anything that’d be a good group to start with.

    • Stability in today’s world is pretty frightening. It means white people will have had to accept their diminished role and the supremacy of (((them))) and their foot soldiers. Stability equals white submission.

      • Well, you may be right. Everything seems very unstable at the moment and were it to “stabilize” where we are currently – that might not be the optimum situation as you say. I guess in order to create the stability and continuity we need, we’ll have to make things even more unstable – both for the ruling class and tech overlords. The only way out of this mess is going to be costly – for us and them.

        • Only stability I can imagine is with racially homogenous communities. So racial homogeneity should be our goal. We may never get there perfectly but it’s got to be our goal.

      • Bullseye. That’s where I see it headed, as they square off to confront and subdue the other rising power groups, such as India and China, from a fortified base.

      • Just the opposite, stability will allow whites to get a bearing on where they are and what they lost and so on.
        By keeping everything in a state of flux is highly destructive to the human psyche and allows others who stand outside of the instability to easily manipulate such people. Cults use this method to break and remold people.

  37. The most interesting aspect of the technological revolution is just how vapid it is. Not just the social media or infotainment sites, but most deep machine learning applications are pretty pointless since they mostly end up confirming long-existing stereotypes. The big accomplishment has been to trade precision for redundancy, which has made many systems more efficient and simultaneously more vulnerable.

    • Consider all the PhD man-hours going into an Amazon recommendation for a blender, or an automatically generated title for an email from Google, let alone online/app advertising.

      • It’s really astonishing. In my profession, the biggest vendor is data and marketing driven, which had led to a system where they don’t have enough money for product R&D/testing. There basic sales model is to make barely adequate products then give there sales force a ton of technical sales tools to get me to buy. The end result is that I buy from a much smaller company whose products are vastly superior.

      • The reason they focus on the banal is because interesting A.I. research would end up confirming all sorts of bad-think.

  38. I watched Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy last week and enjoyed it so much that I’m now reading the books again. I haven’t read them since I was a child. I’m onto the two towers but I can’t help noticing that cellphones seem to be a good substitute for the highly corrupting one ring that rules them all.

    • I loved the trilogy immensely, thinking them very well done. Everything looked amazing and the battle scenes were epic. I never read the books, however.

        • You know that’s coming. A woke remake with the protagonists being people of color and the Orcs will be white, blonde haired, blue eyed. Although maybe not, since the Orcs were tough, savage fighters and Whites are always depicted as effeminate, bumbling soyboys, so I’m not sure how that will play out in the remake.

        • Now that you mention it, this is only something that really would have registered with me in the last five years; that really being when woke went into overdrive. When I first saw those films, I just loved them for what they were – great story, no tedious woke politics.

          The other day the wife and I watched The Green Mile, which I also enjoyed. Now bearing in mind I am an Englishman, there is only one stereotype of the southern ‘redneck’ that gets air time over here. Yet most of the guards, who were southern whites, seemed like thoroughly decent men and were portrayed as being so. Of course, there was Michael Clarke Duncan as the lone big black guy, but still… in 1999 nobody really cared.

          The film itself was a recording, and I also remarked how white the adverts were. I asked when she recorded this, and she said ‘about five years ago’. We’ve come far. And we’re going further.

        • Interesting, it is nice n’White. There are some lame blacks stuck in as extras at that english see town, but that would almost enrage the woke crowd more: no leading roles for joggers. no yellows either

        • I suspect it’s the variety of characters/races. Black is just a skin color. Excluding that, LOTR’s is multi-racial on steroids. Hell, even the damn trees are sentient.

        • They made the Hobbits and Elves vibrant in Jackson’s Hobbit movies, as well as injecting a Dwarf-Elf miscegenation theme.

          Of course.

      • Read the trilogy. You will find it fulfilling. The Orc’s in the movie are poorly displayed (IMO). Orc’s are really much more amusing in the book.

      • Please rectify immediately! Seriously, the movies are good but the books are great. I’ve yet to see a movie that can compare with a good book, and Tolkien is for the ages.

        • Yep, the book always wins. Why? Because the imagination of the individual is unique to the individual and plays an essential part in any story read.

          An example: Let’s say we are reading a romance novel. If you are a man, you picture the woman as being your ideal partner, size, weight, features, etc.—women ditto. But once the novel is turned into a movie, a producer selects for the male actor—perhaps Steven Buscemi—and your fantasy is shot down immediately. ;-(

          • This is true. The only novel I read where a decent filmed rendition occurred was Lonesome Dove – but of course that was a mini series, not a 2 hour movie. Other than a few casting screwups, it was pretty well done.

    • I couldn’t get past the forest scene in the first one, the queen of the forest or whatever. Too long. I loved the Hobbit.

      • Just because it hasn’t worked yet doesn’t mean it never will. Social media companies are essentially content archival systems with an advertising and/or market research team included for revenue generation. The fundamental problem is that operational costs increase exponentially over time (because they need increased data storage, and the technical management for it) which leads to an increasing need for revenue. Revenue can only be increased by selling more data or selling more ads. The former strategy increases the odds of legal retribution and the latter chases away users, driving down the cost they can charge per ad. It’s a losing spiral that can be accelerated with applied pressure.

        • Not sure if it costs Google any extra, but I always click on the ad button saying to get rid of an ad because it’s offensive

          i realize it’s probably handled by computer AI, but my guess is it’s still a pain in the butt for them lol

          i hope so at least. Sand in the gears. Sand in the gears.

        • I am talking about “Just stop using them”, which is equivalent to “Why don’t you build your own platform?”.
          It’s not that it cannot be done on an individual level. But it’s not going to happen on mass level just because some smart ass on the Internet proposes it as a solution.

          • Maybe you’ve forgotten about MySpace, and all the other social media companies that went bust (like google+)…

            Why did they go bust? Because a small number of people stopped using them, which meant that a large number of people began to find them useless. The key to social media is to remember that users want a single platform solution for communication. If you get off social media, then the value of the platform for those who uses it exclusively for communication with you behind to decline. These are not unstoppable juggernauts, not do they take unholy amounts of effort to topple; there’s a graveyard of companies who performed similar functions that prove this.

          • MySpace was replace by other social media. So nothing really changed. If Facebook dies, some other poison will replace it, unless there is a systemic change.

          • well if the mass of people won’t stop using those services, that tells you something about them, doesn’t it?

          • Hun: I beg to differ. The tech world is littered with has-been companies and outmoded products that were replaced by more desirable companies and products.

          • The problem with this approach is that there are too few of us and too many Grillers who cannot be bothered with boycotting entities that work day and night to doom them.

        • There is also a generational issue. How many young people do you know who use Faceberg and Twatter? They are not cool. Maybe some will grow into using them as they get older and want to post pictures of their kids, but probably not. With my kids, they actually get together with friends in person. When they are on their phones, they are usually showing each other silly videos, and not trying to build some online brand for themselves, like adults do, even though the kids could run circles around them technologically.

          • Twitter is popular with the 30-40 age range. I must confess that I don’t really get the appeal; it seems mostly to be a place for discount codes and aspiring comics, with a dash of political stumping. As best I can tell, there’s not much actual communication, just screaming into the void. The younger crowd seems to like kik, snapchat and tiktok. They like talking to each other, but seem to find phone calls anxiety-inducing which is really weird to me. At least they aren’t as narcissistic as Millennials.

        • That raises an interesting point. There’s no benefit to social media archiving all content past six months or so. Me being a blogger, I’m all too aware of how many views my older posts get.

          • The sci-fi trope of uploading your brain to a computer is the relevant trope here. You’re archiving for your future use, not others’ future reference.

        • You are assuming profit is the main goal. The press is not, on the whole, profitable. Yet, we see all these press organs go on and on even losing large amounts of money. Controlling the flow of information is something more valuable than advertiser dollars.
          YouTube takes a big chunk (30%) of superchats, for example. Yet, YT will take down channels consistantly getting thousands of dollars of superchats with every stream they do. This is despite YT having never operated in the black for all its life.
          They like making money. But money is not their number one goal.

          • It doesn’t matter so much if they’re motivated by profit. Even if you’re willing to operate at a loss, you can only do so for so long before your inability to pay your bills hinders your ability to function.

          • Look, resources are limited, and if the amount of resources you recommend to accomplish something is greater than the amount of resources you can acquire for expenditure, you are going to be unable to maintain your money pit. There have been plenty of rich people in history who were destroyed by attrition. This is an ironclad lose of the universe and there are no exceptions, so quit being a coward filled with despair.

          • Noting that wealthy people can afford to spend a lot to maintain propaganda organizations doesn’t make me a “coward filled with despair” but calling me that for pointing out the obvious does make you an idiot.

            Amazon operates at a profit so the The Washington Post can afford to operate at a loss forever.

      • well twitter and facbook lost like $50B in market cap by kicking trump off. that’s real money for the boys holding lots of shares…

    • They’re designed and continually refined to be literally addictive. If you don’t understand the power of this, you (blessedly) do not understand the power of addiction.

      “Try harder” is not a solution for the masses.

      Big tech designed it to be addictive, but I don’t think they designed it for control. They’re rectifying that as fast as possible.

      • Just Say No.
        Is a banality. But also true and good advice.

        Get off of social media and limit the use of all tech because it’s addictive.

          • But why does it have to? At some point we have to decide if it’s about our own happiness or the happiness of knowing that the world has finally come around to our way of thinking, The latter is totally unrealistic. Therefore….

          • So personal agency only scales up?

            The kids are fucking zombies. Maybe if people stopped fake-concerning over what “the masses” are doing or not doing we could start to frame the problem in ways that lead to change where it matters.

            The idea that we need a top-down solution to solve the LCD is just as retarded as how we got here, ie “well everyone else at her school has an i-phone/tnder/instawhore/whateverthefuck.”

            So we should also shoot down the other personal choices of millions of dissidents because there are even more millions of sheeple who want to vote harder or diversity their strength? Please.

            The masses would eat us and our kids for likes on facebag. Why do we suddenly consider the sheeples in our desire to liberate from the paddock?

            WOPR was right: the only way to win the game is not to play. Waiting for mass methodone from the sky to “cure” the drones from their e-opiods is a cop-out. It should be obvious. Just like claiming that kids arent on facebag anymore but prefer other more cool! ways of staring into the abyss is a sign of positive progress.

          • You can not “not play” if Facebook/Google or whatever their equivalent in the future is allowed to rein free. Where is all this naivete coming from? Have you people not been paying any attention over the last decades?

          • I’m paying attention

            There are billions of stupid people who are addicted to Facebook

            But why should I care? I am not a politician or major company who needs to keep up with trends and how to exploit them for votes and money. And I don’t get paid to be a marketing guru.

            Rather, I have simple choices. I can take an interest in what stupid people are doing or I can ignore it.

          • I get that, but like the old adage you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you – you may not be interested in stupid people, but stupid people vote, and the consequences are often visited upon you.

          • The vote has been pretty much relegated to the scrap heap thanks to the last election.
            As for the dummies, well they are easily distracted and lied to.

          • Couldn;t care less what the zombies and rage heads on social media are doing. Sure they are frying their nervous system and making themselves emotional wrecks but we can’t fix stupid.
            We can only choose not to engage in that sort of crap ourselves.

          • I agree

            At some point we hav to stop caring about what the “masses” think

            I guess that’s one of those features of democracy, always trying to get an insight into how the masses will behave in the future.

            Not my job.

          • Your usual excellent quality comment, Screwtape. I just love how people who give toddlers tablets and whose daughters are posting racy photos on their phones at age 12 pose as part of the DR . . . and then lecture the rest of us to be ‘realistic.’ Same as all the ‘men’ here whose wives post all details of their lives on social media and vote for the socially-acceptable choice and their husbands just wryly chuckle, instead of taking them in hand.

          • The DR types need to practice what the elite in SV do. Keep social media at arms length.And those folks do not give phones and tablets to their kids. The schools they send their kids to are Montessori schools..
            Why? Because tech damages a child’s emotional and cognitive development. This is well known and the studies go back over 20 years.
            And it’s not good for adults since it’s designed to be very addictive and twists their perception of reality and self-worth in the negative direction. The founders of Facebook understood this and have publicly admitted it.

          • One caveat – here in DFW the only people who run and utilize Montessori schools are Pajeets and Persians, and a handful of GoodWhites. Christian schools are better, and homeschooling is best.

          • Homeschool or die. Zoom school=public school. Public anything = lowest common denominator in a democracy. Burn it all down.

          • Doesn’t have to. We start disconnecting from social media with ourselves and then convince others to do likewise. That’s all we can do.

        • Exactly. The other side of the addiction coin is when the users go cold turkey, and never touch the stuff again.

      • The sound of coins dropping and banging around in casinos was addicting for me but they went purely digital with those paper receipts. Not the same. Vegas lost me as a customer.

        • Vegas seemed never to attract me. I love a game of poker with friends, but gambling in a casino always left me cold. Vegas was a spectacle for a day and a night, but was boring thereafter. Also, the gambling machines seem to have grown in electronic complexity that leaves me cold—should losing your money be some sort of IQ test?

          I guess I’m lucky.

          • i used to like playing nickel poker machines. could go all night on $2. plus free watered down drinks. my main way of having fun at a casino was just to people watch; go to a nicer casino and watch some $10k a hand black jack.

          • I just love the noises. And I like to bet on sports and sit there with the other guys drinking beer as the games play on the screens. It was just a nice experience.

            But those days it was mostly white guys too. Vegas went black like 10 years ago?15? Like 5 years after it went digital.

        • Snort. Exactly. Commenting on a blog looking for upvotes (or downvotes…weirdos) is its own addiction. Not exactly on the same level as twatter or Zuckbook, but it’s definitely there.

        • For people who have never taken drugs it’s not a terrible strategy.
          Even to the extent you cannot stop using one thing does not mean you therefor do nothing. It can be an excuse for doing nothing.
          If you absolutely cannot stop yourself from watching Netflix or Disney or HBO, at least use someone else’ password and ID.
          FB and Twitter are just time sinks, not to mention tracking.

          • I am not talking about individual solutions. Isn’t that obvious? Of course one can individually turn off and stop using whatever service or addiction he has. That was never the problem.
            The real problem is society-wide and can’t be solved by cheap slogans. If it could, then nobody would be taking drugs, there would be no interest in porn and social media and tech companies wouldn’t have the power they have.

          • The real problem is society…

            Stop. Yes, that’s how I frame the problem.
            What is this “society” you speak of? Is it like “our Democracy”? “Our Nation”? “Our greatest strength?”
            Something must be done! to fix society is just a distraction from securing a future for our children.
            Yes, individual choices do not fix a terminally ill (or addicted) society.
            But individual choices reinforce values and culture that are desired; we must live the truth as individuals and form mutually beneficial bonds with those who do the same. That is how an actual society takes form.
            We do these things regardless of what the masses are doing – or not doing.
            This truth has been largely lost to the conveniences of progress. The mission creep of serpents in our gardens has us chasing our own shadows.
            We lost what was “our society” one man one choice at a time, thus we must rebuild much the same.
            I do see your point. We are talking past, perhaps, the search for a cure for cancer. Maybe we differ in this: I see the patient as terminal. 70 years of smoking and drinking has already happened, the cancer is metastasized.
            My compassion or empathy is no less by recognizing these facts.
            But my time, however, is finite. I could work to find the cocktail to land our society in the 5% survival camp. Or I can learn from its mistakes and invest my time in building a healthier future for my people. My people, btw, who are already a dwindling fraction of this “society”.
            IOW, the problem as I see it is not drug or tech addiction in our society. The problem is a society that produces drug and tech addiction, by design. The secondary problem is continuing to validate and participate in a society that is enslaving our children and killing us slowly.
            So we should ask not how to fix the problem of tech trade-offs bringing ruin as they are designed to do, but rather how to orient ourselves such that we do not make those trade-offs in the first place.
            The solution to a toxic society is not to spend our finite resources as dissidents to reorder that toxic society to fix its most sedated, broken, or dim, but it is to reject that society and rebuild our own such that the vampires are never invited inside.
            We can work to insulate from the evil tendrils of the sick institutions as much as possible, but because we can never fully escape its evil gaze does not make the effort moot- nor our futures ordained by some technocrat faggot in CA.
            There are always enemies at the gates. We don’t even have gates. Lets start there. I wish you well.

    • I take your point about disengaging from our sick culture. However, that in itself is insufficient.

      Simply disengaging is like saying, “If you don’t like legalized heroin, just don’t buy it!”

      Similarly, I object to trannies being outside of psychiatric wards. I suspect that something close to a majority of people agree with me. This consensus is worth nothing. Some kind of state enforcement is necessary.

    • I think there is a real desire for stability in this country. Lots of people voted for Biden just to stop the noise while they’re busy grilllin’.
      So do we get a Pinochet when the leftist tards bust up the economy with their idiocy? I think there’s a good chance, but it won’t be a rightist Pinochet. Our military is bureaucratic left, so someone who steps in will be “General Gus,” who will say stuff like, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” and “Just stop being stupid.” And he will keep the globohomo state rolling’.
      And lots of conservatives will see the uniform, and think, well, that’s got to be ok….

      • Exactly what happened in the Turner diaries.

        The conservative military types were the biggest threat to a white state establishing itself.

      • Agree. Most “conservatives” don’t understand today’s military. Obama thoroughly purged the officer corps. Trump had absolutely no idea what he faced. There are plenty of leftists even among senior NCOs about the only ones that I respect are the young men that raised their right hands after 9-11 for combat arms.

  39. I want the Ruling Class even more walled off and in a state of perpetual fear. The junta seems inclined to embrace isolation and paranoia, so it may provide what is necessary. Only then can we have personal autonomy or at least the outlines of it and begin to form our own communities away from the decaying empire.

    • The more walled off D.C. is, the less capable they will be of swaths of people outside of it shrugging their shoulders and giving them the middle finger.
      When they hire mercenaries to do what they are now incapable of doing, the mercenaries will just learn how to deceive and grift the insular D.C. intelligentsia. Within a short time period, they will be passing edicts everyone just ignores.

      Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere
      And build them a home, a little place of their own
      The Fletcher Memorial Home
      For Incurable Tyrants and Kings
      And they can appear to themselves every day
      On closed circuit T.V
      To make sure they’re still real
      It’s the only connection they feel

      • The FBI formerly played this role, but it has grown almost universally distrusted due to its corruption and incompetence. If private mercenaries in fact are hired, their first clashes will be with the criminal class found in the J. Edgar Hoover Building. My money would be on the mercs, which would be unfortunate for the innocents they would oppress.

        • Jack, I suspect you are correct. Merc’s specialize in physical violence. The FBI for years has preferentially hired minorities, accountants, and lawyers. If not for the imputed monopoly on violence, the FBI would come up short in most encounters with resistance.

      • Many of us are already there. I, for example, will no longer comply with any further gun legislation. Nor will I bow down to the sexual degenerates, marxists, or other social engineers. While I am not opposing them with lethal force yet… I acknowledge that at some point it will probably be necessary to do so.
        Our blog host is fond of playing “The World Belongs To Me.” I think it belongs to Kyle Rittenhouse and the young groypers and clankers and such. Washington is ruled almost exclusively by doddering old Yesterday Men that have no connection to the modern world except through their carefully trained fart catchers. Those guys are going to end soon – already half the country hates Biden, and after he laid off 50,000 of his own people, it’s only a matter of time before the gloves come off.

        • Is anybody following the new gun laws in Canada? I follow everything to a T, of course, but other than me it seems that not a single gun owner has complied with the new rules.

        • Those are my exact sentiments. In this interim I am accelerating preparations.
          I would have liked to have lived the last decade or two growing pumpkins and laughing with my family.

    • Don’t sell the ruling class short. They didn’t become the ruling class because they were afraid of crushing their opponents.

      The ruling class has the entire legal system, corporations and deep state at their disposal.

      If some rubes in a red state don’t want men in dresses teaching their toddlers about the joy of anal sex with men in dresses, the ruling class can and will crush those people no matter how much the ruling class is cut off from normal life. In fact being cut off from normal life helps shield them from consequences.

      This won’t change until normal people no longer have businesses, jobs and homes to lose

Comments are closed.