There are many things that one can point to in the current age as the cause of what we are experiencing. Social crisis is always the result of many factors. There is never one single cause. Even so, examining the individual causes has some utility. It helps provide a little sanity for those living through it. If nothing else, it is like the band playing on the Titanic in that if provides those who are condemned to live through the crisis with a bit of dignity as they sink into the abyss.
Anyway, one of the things that has made modern life such a mess is the vast chorus of nitwits who fill our lives with their voices. They repeat whatever has been placed in their hymnals by people with agendas. One person says something that gets them some attention and then everyone repeats it. The thing is, these people position themselves as authorities on various topics, so when they repeat what they hear, they inevitably lend authority to it. The fact is, they know not what they say.
A good example is this post at the ironically named American Conservative. The post is the generic libertarian boilerplate about the creative destruction and how this means retail will go the way of the buggy whip. In this case, the writer argues that GameStop, the company at the heart of the short squeeze initiated by a gang of retail investors, is a dead company that has no future. He thinks the run up in their shares was due to nostalgia for a bygone era of retail.
The post is complete nonsense, but it is popular nonsense repeated by these sorts of people on many different platforms. In this case, the writer is Addison Del Mastro and he is, according to his bio, the assistant editor and social media manager of The American Conservative. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and writes on urbanism, place, and popular and cultural history. According to his resume, he has never worked in the private sector.
That last bit is typical. Few people in any type of media job have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Mr. Del Mastro is probably a great guy who does a bang-up job as the social media manager, but he is wholly unqualified to have an opinion on this topic or anything related to it. Maybe he can offer an informed opinion about the social media aspect, but otherwise, the cleaning lady at American Conservative is better qualified to discuss business and finance.
The great conservative philosopher Joseph de Maistre observed that “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” This is exactly what we see with the mass media. The public square is flooded with the sound of the ignorant repeating falsehoods they heard from one another. It is a cacophony of half-truths, distortions and outright lies repeated by the unqualified.
The fact is, if you want to understand the GameStop story, you need to know a little about finance and have some experience as a day trader. You should also know how to read a financial statement. At the minimum, that lets you examine the facts and sort the truth from the fiction. Unless you are inside the group that pushed the stock or on the other end of it, you know you are only getting some of the story. That would be the basis for good media analysis or responsible commentary on the story.
That sort of humility is not what we get from managerial man, the type of person who takes up space in the media. Knowing practical things like how to read an income statement is for prols. The managerial man does not have time for that. That is why the media is stocked to the gills with people who know nothing. They spent all of their time accumulating esoteric credentials that they can wear as moral signifiers. These impress the other managerial types. The result is a class of know-nothings.
This is not a new phenomenon. Last year First Things published an interesting article on the Russian intelligentsia prior to and during the revolution. The intelligent was a member of the intelligentsia. Unlike an intellectual, who is a curious and educated person, the intelligent was its opposite. The art of not knowing practical things was a big part of the life of a Russian intelligent. They took pride in not having practical skills or having a useful occupation.
This is close to what we see with managerial man. At all levels, even those who see themselves as critics, they have made sure to never learn anything useful. At the bottom layer, where the media exists, the result is a vast collection of chattering skulls with no useful knowledge of their own. Above them is a vast army of people with no idea how anything works. They crash about from crisis to crisis, hoping the big machine they inherited rights itself before something bad happens.
The remarkable thing about the media is their confidence. These people repeat things with total conviction and certainty. They don’t seem to notice that they are just channeling what they heard from other chattering skulls or what was fed to them by people with an obvious agenda. These hyper-confident morons fill the public space with whatever idiotic thing they heard last. The result is we are inundated by the blather of people who have turned ignorance into a virtue.
The thing that has prevented our ruling class from bringing the roof down on all of us is the system they inherited was very strong. It evolved over many generations of struggle by a competent people with a good foundation. But even the toughest structure will eventually succumb to the wrecking ball of incompetency. Eventually, the collection of jabbering airheads we see in charge of society will push the wrong combination of buttons the end times are upon us.
A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.
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.
AND, he’s a liar, obviously. Check out this early quote:
“There were countless real-life, tangible aspects and rituals of gaming in the ’80s and ’90s—leaving the console on all night to wrap up a game before school (you had to leave it running because there were no saves); bringing games or memory cards to a friend’s house (because nothing was in the cloud); perusing the rental store for a new game and momentously betting your allowance on one; gathering at the arcade and cheering on the whiz kid setting the high score.”
The writer, “Addison”, was born in 1993. He never did ANY of those things. When you went to arcades, he wasn’t even a twinkle in his daddy’s eye. But now, he’s writing authoritatively on the subject.
Piss off, loser. You have no idea what you’re even writing about, not because you necessarily choose not to, but because it was before your time.
I am late to the party with a comment on this article, but I wanted to throw in a thought.
This very phenomenon is one reason why I blocked and deleted a third or so of my old HS friends on Facebook over the course of a decade of interacting with them on that platform.
An example discussion would be that of climate change/anthropogenic global warming. One old friend in particular was a true believer in that cult. She would constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, default to “the science” and “trusting said science”…which is not an altogether wrongheaded position, but her fatal flaw was her inability to grasp that her status as an X-Ray technician at a bone and joint clinic did not qualify her to have an opinion either way. (Not that I am 100% a credentialist either, mind you). The bottom line is that “the science” relies on a heavy amount of data that no ordinary person has the ability or time to thoroughly peruse through, that the qualified scientists who actually do are part of a clique who reinforce their biases in an echo chamber that doesn’t allow for criticism or dissenting analysis, and a whole litany of other variables that taint whatever truth there might be to the topic.
And even setting aside the notion that such issues as “trusting the science” can be tainted by politics and other things, who is to say that science is always the default moral compass that we should defer to? I think of movies like “Contact” with Jody Foster and Mathew McConaughey as a good pop culture philosophical reference when I think about science, religion, and philosophy.
But yea, the bottom line is that we live in a world full of people with opinions on things they have absolutely no special qualification or privileged position for which to comment.
Scary true doesn’t begin to describe this piece. Thanks Z for another sobering thought. Love your work.
Dint watch any of the super bore.
Yeah, a local Pizza Hut went out of business. I’m becoming very very worried. Look for a Supreme Court Justice to die soon(Thomas). Times are becoming very frothy.
People who look down on GameStop need to look at the other shops in the same type of strip mall they occupy. Vacuum and sewing shops, mom and pop donut shops, second hand dress shops, the Hallmark franchise etc. These small businesses are like bumble bees, you don’t know how they fly, but they somehow do. If you have a nice repeat local clientele, it matters a lot.
Great essay. No structure is so sound that time, tide or termites cannot destroy it.
Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Media Man
I used to to take my kid to GameStop years ago for events hosted by the store. My impression was that the store relied on these events to drive sales. People didn’t go there just to buy games. Social life in the age of WuFlu is a shadow of its former self. Enterprises that serve the human desire for personal contact have all suffered. It’s working out nicely for the managerial class since they seek to atomize society, reducing it to a collection of isolated individuals whose only connection is to government. “We’re all in this together.” No we’re not.
Is anyone else old enough to remember comic book stores? When I was a wee lad, we had several in the neighborhood and one in particular next to the penny candy store and movie theater. It was quite common for kids at that time to buy a sweet treat on the way into a movie, and then pick up a comic book on the way home. Methinks Gamestop was a similar kind of cultural experience for the video gamer generation.
The problem for the managerial elite is that they don’t deliver the basics to a profoundly atomized population, outside dopamine hits to White women from “likes” by useless celebrities. For Latinos, its nothing. They fall back on family networks, might as well be space aliens outside the media/managerial network.
For White men, its atomization all the way. Nothing can make them love the CW, for example. All that wokeness is just fake and gay. Indeed being the racist bad boy who flouts authority is a sure fire way to create tingles in the ladies. And a lack of social networks makes hitting the anti-Woke, White males, hard. Sure they can jail Ricky Vaughn, but all that does is make every other White guy angrier and more atomized and remote from authority and the media/managers.
Their issue is, the media propagates 24/7 the idea that all White men are innately evil and blacks, trannies, vibrant women of color, White women can all come together in hate hate hate of White men. That creates even more atomization and removal from society by nearly all White men. Who now have a vested interest in overturning the entire arrangement and view society as illegitimate. Atomization cuts two ways.
It’s like one of those forensic crime shows
Each person chirps in with his little bit of expertise, and together the crime is solved as all facets of expertise are combined with a single goal in mind
Except here everyone is chirping in with their stupidity, and there is no goal.
I think most of these people are just lazy. With the resources we have available to us it would probably take about a day to become reasonably conversant on most things, but they don’t even seem to bother. Of course that assumes you have a decent high-school level education. I do have to laugh though, how do these people manage to survive? They are even ignorant of their ignorance.
I understand that we now have something called black history month. Evidently it is something that is to be celebrated. How does one do this, even for a few days, much less for an entire month? The materials don’t seem to be sufficient
Nowadays, every month is Blak histree Mumpf. The country is Africanized. How could it be otherwise?
More like a few hours at most, and that’s being damn generous.
Black worship month is more like it. Every radio commercial break has a hat tip to our dark brethren. You really don’t have to mention anything or one specifically, just acknowledge how wonderful they are and wish them well. Sigh.
The only attitude to negroes that is allowed–and increasingly, it is mandated–is that of slavish adoration. We treat the stupidest, most violent and dysfunctional group of people on the planet literally, like gods. The madness knows no end.
How are Gods chosen? What does it say about a people, who chose as their God, ignoble savages?
” These hyper-confident morons fill the public space with whatever idiotic thing they heard last.”
To be frank, that sounds a lot like Trump; his opinions seemed to depend on whoever he talked with last. After all, what was he other than a media figure?
“The art of not knowing practical things was a big part of the life of a Russian intelligent. They took pride in not having practical skills or having a useful occupation.”
Sounds like a certain ethnic group. Since I assume at this point the Russian intelligentsia was ethnic Russian, this is evidence for a point that the hardcore anti-Semites balk at: the Phoenicians would get nowhere unless their targets were already willing victims. As David Mamet says in Glengarry Glen Ross: “A guy don’t come on the lot lest he want to buy.” You have to transform your society into a Phoenician-friendly place first, then they naturally move in and take over.
As an arch anti-semite, I see the tribe as influencers who tend to get the ball rolling, but cannot say they don’t find or cultivate a large number of like minds. Disturbing that such a sympathetic vibe exists.
The Tribe and the old WASP society were probably made for each other in one of nature’s sick little jokes. White western society was analogous to native Americans. The Tribe was firewater and smallpox.
I was rereading 1984, and it struck me how similar Z’s writing style is to Emmanuel Goldstein’s (who may or may not be real). Oranges and lemons…
The scene where Winston remembers playing Chutes and Ladders with his mother always gets me.
“Knowing practical things like how to read an income statement is for prols. The managerial man does not have time for that. That is why the media is stocked to the gills with people who know nothing. They spent all of their time accumulating esoteric credentials that they can wear as moral signifiers. These impress the other managerial types. The result is a class of know-nothings.”
‘Twas better in the old days, when without “Journalism” schools and Communications degrees, journos were, perforce, drawn from the ranks of those who must have had some experience as working people. Or maybe not: they were always just a bunch of drunks re-writing press releases. As the great “Dr.” Hunter S. Thompson said:
“…Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wine to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”
And that was back in 1971, right before the big Watergate surge of press idolatry. Yet it never gets old.
Yep, pretty much the conversation I had with my daughter yesterday. A Stanford grad, but young, she doesn’t often give these things such depth of thought. Since she’s in genetics, the conversation turns often turns to HBD concepts and yesterday, we spoke about people who know absolutely nothing, but are in high places of decision making and influence. How do we, as non-experts, spot these people?
Of course the two poster children for this phenomenon currently are Biden and Fauci. Unfortunately, it seems that there is no easy way for the average person to spot such frauds. It’s not that you need to be an expert in their respective fields, but you must have the ability to examine what these people say and do from a logical perspective aka “critical thinking”.
Fauci for example again fell on his face last week with his “one mask good, two masks better” logical fallacy. A person with such “reasoning skills” has no business analyzing data and advising others on proper behavior. And of course, even imagining that this fraud reads any of current published research is a leap of faith not in evidence.
Biden’s inauguration speech was analyzed at being at the 6th grade level or so. Indicative of his cognitive decline—not that he wrote it, but that it had to be that simplistic so he could read and recite it from a teleprompter. He is obviously a puppet in mental decline in direct control of others. But how many people can reason this?
Like the writer Z-man uses as an example, these people are basically grifters. Their grift may vary wrt need for money, power, vanity—but they are grifters all the same. They say whatever they have to, to obtain their ends, not yours.
“Eventually, the collection of jabbering airheads we see in charge of society will push the wrong combination of buttons the end times are upon us.”
Z-Man, they are pushing the wrong buttons on purpose. They are a catenation of postmodern nihilists who abominate the white West, and seek to destroy it through flagrant transgression of all tradition and all conventional morality. How do they imagine they’ll survive the cataclysm they author? They do not imagine. Their only desire is to destroy, and that longing is all-consuming.
“catenation” Mr. Ostei? I’m going to have to ask you to watch your language. This is a family friendly blog and children may be reading.
…now time to consult Mr. Dictionary…”c.a.t.e.n…”
They’re angry at us because we didn’t fix things.
Spot on.
How Ostei? Simple. Money. They don’t have many or any children, so they are not future oriented. They believe that with all their money they can buy protection and live anywhere in the world. They believe their money guarantees their safety. America? Let it burn, i’ll be OK, i’ll just move to Tahiti.
May they wind up in the cannibal’s pot.
I know a guy who is a handyman in a very wealthy neighborhood and he has clients, men, that call him to change the light bulbs above the garage and then pay him $100.
As I’ve established, I’m not too handy, but I think I’m the only one on my block who shovels his own sidewalk and cuts his own lawn.
Hell, I even manage to string and unstring my own Christmas lights. Not many homeowners do that anymore.
I’ll never understand men who don’t take care of their own lawns. At a minimum it’s good exercise.
Putting in a decent sized garden this spring, can’t wait to get started.
I cut mine and stuff, but leave the spreading of the chemicals to the pros.
Well, I always put in a maintenance order when a bulb burns out. In my case, it’s just that I want the otherwise worthless management to pay for the new bulb.
The media has become a fun house mirror, or perhaps, a gaslight game grown really monstrous. I’ve found it’s best to remove yourself from it. Don’t be an angry, critical participant. Just don’t participate. I’ve cut off from any mass news, sitcoms, etc., anything new. Watched old documentaries on streaming and when those ran out, subscribed to great courses and watched medieval history…Just finished 36 episodes on the Ottoman Empire and it was an eye opener.
Last night I watched an episode of how it’s made…all the commercials featured, without exception, black people and women, usually together. The only white guy I saw was an older guy complaining about losing his hair. Then between the commercials was the show, featuring craftsmen and techs making glass, ladders, other tools. Everyone was without exception a white guy…
We need to separate.
Hollywood “culture” is a sustained assault upon reality.
I can only imagine how over-the-top the negrophilia will be in today’s Superbowl commercials.
According to his resume, he has never worked in the private sector.
Um, whatever else you might think about Del Mastro, the last time I looked the media was part of the private sector. Has it been nationalized? (I mean, you know, formally…).
Calling the media the private sector is like calling Facebook a private company.
Are you sure that it’s private?
it seams to me that at best it’s a partner of the government. That’s certainly how the midwits wee themselves. More likely, the relationship is even tighter with at least partial funding coming from the government.
Facebook is CIA: In-Q-Tel financed.
Benito Mussolini said fascism should properly be called “corporatism”, since it’s the union of government and business.
Public-Private will become Throne and Altar, Church and State, in my view. A managerial culture, where the feminine social-ist yin steps on the independent, masculine yang.
Considering the media works as the gatekeeper and bully for the oligarchic ruling class(which also owns it) I’d say it’s not private sector at all.
The only time I ever hear about the propaganda harpies is second-hand via blogs like this and a few other internet sites. Consequently, I am mostly oblivious to the noise, but this post does reveal a much more serious and fundamental problem in our society. With each passing generation, we create and carry more & more deadweight. I call it societal obesity, and it’s becoming morbid, and it will kill us eventually.
Extant deadweight being insufficient, we import it in superabundance.
Calling these people managers and their system managerialism strikes me as inaccurate.
Management, real management matters. A lot. It requires intelligence, specific knowledge and has feedback loops that deliver consequences, positive and negative to the manager.
The modern pseudo- management of large corporations and government, wherein people are rotated through vastly different positions with no expertise in the area they are temporarily “managing” and with absolutely no consequences for success or failure is an inversion of real management. These people reign temporarily over the organizations they are putatively in charge of, with the organizations running themselves out of inertia.
The media – court jesters are even less managers or figure heads. The front people that the public sees are actors, literally, reading words written by others. Their only expertise is doing so with conviction. The people that write those words are likewise also not experts at anything other than fabulism.
All of it taken together is just a show, a production of fiction for public consumption.
The Zman’s getting read. I’ve seen both “the managerial class” and “managerial tyranny” used in both left- and right-wing screeds.
Honest to God, I believe most people aren’t real. The majority of human beings are NPCs that repeat programmed phrases. Whether it be repeating political arguments when they hear certain words regardless of the context. Or even if they were lamenting it was false not a week before.
And it isn’t just politics, they repeat the same stories and points if you listen to them long enough.
Kind of like the old High School debate club?
I gave that a try, once, a long time ago.
I quickly realized everyone was just repeating what they heard on the TV news or had read in the op-ed column of the local paper, and found it all very boring.
there is a glut of humanity, no doubt
To the point where the individual has little intrinsic value. If he gets clobbered over the head, no worries, many more where he came from.
I think many of our problems are here because there are simply too many humans. How can you have a functioning, moral society when humanity is cheap and easily replaceable?
I used to argue with talk radio all day long, but often found myself repeating whatever talking point they had delivered- to my dismay.
Many are just lazy or are playing it safe. Which is smart in these times. Given that kids will rat out their parents to social media or that saying the wrong thing can get you fired and blackballed.
Too many in the DR fail to recognize we now live in a police state which is rapidly getting worse
My wish is that the people with useful occupations and actually know how to make things and keep them working, at some point give a collective (or semi collective) FU to our worthless intelligencia. Let them figure it out – hah! This whole mess needs to come crashing down so we can start anew.
Atlas Shrugged. I haven’t read the book, but understand it is overrated. But what a great title.
Not on on anyone’s top 10 novel list, but the plot of the book is as prescient as 1984 and Brave New World. It has some great screeds by the main characters.
“Jibbering airheads” and “nitwit”. I’ll be using those terms more often- especially nitwit, which has fallen out of fashion. I’m thinking “lamebrain” is due for a comeback, too.
Back when I was young I had pretensions to being an intellectual, although like many with such ‘lofty’ goals I didn’t know how to do much of a practical nature- home and auto repair, etc were ( continue to be) beyond my capabilities. I did have however, a succession of real jobs in the DPS (Dread Private Sector) and I do know a lot of stuff, though, most of it useless- I marginally speak two foreign languages, one, German, slightly more useful than the other, Swedish- although knowing Swedish means I can read Danish and Norwegian! Whoopee!
I guess this is my long winded way of observing that today’s intellectuals, in addition to mostly never having had jobs, don’t really know anything, either. I always think about Kam and Joe- anyone really think either of them could pass an American History SAT II? Even before Joe’s dementia kicked in. Has Kam the whore ever read a book like Dreadnought, or a Distant Mirror? You think the average NYT writer could pass a calculus class? Doubtful. And these are the “folks”, as Charlie Baker/Parker calls them, that have shut down our economies and societies, and are now telling us “one mask good, two masks better”
Z- you’re fond of saying “we’re not voting our way out of this”. You’re right, but I don’t see anyway out of this.
I think we’ve been taken over by a bunch of drama queen slapdicks who’ve never had a real job where they had to actually show up and work. The Protestant work ethic and ingenuity have been replaced with hedonistic laziness and stupidity.
i’m a project manager and some of our young engineers (fresh out of school) told me the toilet in our end of the building wouldn’t flush and kept running.
I asked them if they’d jiggled the handle, etc. They said they’d filled out a work order with maintenance hours before, but hadn’t heard back from them. I went in there, took the lid off and one of them told me he’d never done that. The chain had been disconnected from the handle. Two-second fix and not one of them even thought to check it. I was depressed. These are some of our best and brightest and they can’t fix a danged toilet.
Even I could do that!
Heh. You beat me to the punch.
Heh. A couple of weeks ago, I replaced both the float and the flapper device in one of our toilets where the tank has to be removed. Of course I’d done it before, but not in many years. I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass getting that thing back on, getting the screws down tight and scrunching under the toilet was! Next time I’ll probably call the plumber…
The engineering on the crapper hasn’t improved in three centuries.
When I got married, I kept my bachelor pad as a rental property. You wouldn’t believe what millennials are unable to fix. One couldn’t figure out how to change the bulb on an outdoor deck light because it was halogen. He thought the whole fixture had to be replaced. He was a sales manager at AT&T. Another tenant had me come out and replace the toilet flapper, which is a $5 part requiring no tools. I had to show another tenant how to light the pilot on the gas fireplace. I finally sold the house last year due to Covid rules that make evictions impossible.
Funny you should mention such. Seems to work both ways. Both my children have started out in rental homes with the proviso that they get a deal on the rent and reimbursement for home repairs they do themselves. They do it all. Never thought much about it, but I guess we did something right in their upbringing.
I’ve noticed a similar pattern with young people that I hire. They are smart enough and conscientious enough they but lack the initiative to do anything outside the box or beyond what’s explicitly communicated.
It’s a complete failure of the education system. They’ve been trained into little computers that execute whatever code their fed but completely passive outside that narrow scope.
My own unfortunate experience is that taking initiative and thinking outside the box is a threat to the power structure and is likely to get you fired. This is particularly true in organizations with feminized power structures.
Dr. X – corporate America looks for these people and ruins their careers. To the extent the new generation doesn’t think outside the box, it’s because our corporate masters don’t want it & have direct the education system to squelch it.
The kids are smart because in most businesses workers that go outside the box get fired. With the exception of one IT gig, all the other jobs I had made it clear – do as you as told and nothing else.
Maybe if the business community didn’t punish their workers for taking the imitative, they would not be so timid.
(“home and auto repair, etc were (continue to be) beyond my capabilities”
Thank goodness I’m not alone- except I don’t know Swedish or calculus either!)
I maxed out at first quarter of college calculus. And my Swedish would allow me to write to our fellow commentator Felix, although I probably couldn’t understand him when he spoke. I did replace the alternator on my ‘67 Valiant once!
One of your best Z, thanks for the belly laugh. I am reminded of a BBC kids show, Horrible History, that runs on YouTube. The show includes a regular feature called Stupid Deaths. Maybe, some day, there will be an episode on the death of the American republic, killed by its own stupid decisions.
End Times???? Well, bring it on ….. 🙁
At times it feels like we’re that Vietnam-era officer in the movie Platoon (I think), who calls artillery fire on his own position.
We’ve had (((zips))) in the wire for decades, a little self-napalm would clean things up in a jiffy.
It happens twice in Platoon.
Once by mistake, the last time on purpose.
I was born in the late 50’s and was old enough to remember 1968. At least from my observations of my life somewhere around 1968 we began to glorify the bohemian lifestyle, the Beatles took on the degenerate drug and free sex infested California lifestyle, Sargent Pepper Album was produced…and that Bohemianism worked, but only if it was not widespread, Berkeley and Hait Ashbury could not be our entire national values.
Well guess what? Now all our kids go to Berkeley, K through 12, and we wonder why they are dumb asses and have no idea about real history?
Couple stupid people with a highly automated computer driven world and we have a dystopian future before us.
Unless we find a way out?
I think there is a way out but not in the republic as it currently exists.
George Harrison went to Haight-Ashbury during the summer of 1967 and was very vocal about how disgusting he found it. Expecting to find a communal utopia of peaceful artisans, he found out it was mostly filthy, drugged up, vagabonds. At least he had the good sense to immediately and publicly call it out for what it was. Today’s media-entertainment types would have kept looking for the one avatar of their preconceptions to promote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I-ThafU1e4
Ole George then went off to India and chanted to himself. George might have recognized the hippie culture was corrosive but he played in the shit pile with them. I kinda see Eric Clapton the same way. Clapton was or is pretty red pilled on race judging from his past statements but he makes a good coin with the Bohemians and he loved their drugs which should have killed him.
Much of the cool rock and roll we got down through the years, and I love some of it myself, came from black degenerates and bohemian hippies financed by the usual suspects record companies.
The music can be cool but we also got drugs and degeneracy with it.
But we partied on.
Now we got a hang over.
Payback is a bitch.
George Harrison’s experience reminds me of the commune scene in Easy Rider where the stoned would-be hippie farmers wander across the parched earth, scattering seed. Dennis Hopper’s character “Billy” asks dumbfoundedly “Uh, get any rain here?” Even as a kid when I first saw the movie I thought – what a bunch of dumb asses.
What happened in the fifties, culminating in 1968, was that Jews’ conniving powers were radically augmented by television. They found out that they could make people think pretty much whatever they wanted, if they just repeated the message loudly and often enough.
So they swooped down on the most corrosive subculture in the US, the drug-up-and-drop-out-crowd and decided to make them cultural heroes; giving them record contracts, publishing their books, putting them on mainstream television.
The hippies in 1968 were no different from the SJWs of today: useful idiots for our hateful overlords, promoted and financed by the elites.
It really is disturbing how effective propaganda is on white Americans. They’ll believe any level of nonsense pushed by a faux authority form the idiot box.
Television and now the smart phones are the crack cocaine of propaganda indoctrination. Kill your TV.
It’s not just America, although Americans rolled out mass consumer television a decade or more before anyone else. The fact that Bob Dylan sold a single record is a scary testimony to the power of The Electric Jew.
I would’ve disagreed with Dino on this, giving people the benefit of the doubt, but I just spent a month with my anti-Trump bestie.
He watches CNN all the time, and shakes with visceral rage at “the desecration by the insurrectionists.” It’s an overwhelming physical reaction with him.
I felt chills going down my spine reading the linked First Things article. They didn’t have the boob tube, smart phones, or pharmacochemical pollution, yet the intelligentsia still were consumed with that strange zeitgeist.
My brother is the same way. A very intelligent former engineer. He was in the Air Force during Vietnam. Hates the commies with a passion and has argued for decades that Franco was a good guy that ran Spain well.
Stuck at home watching TV for the last half decade he’s convinced that Trump is a neo-Nazi devil and that COVID is the Black Death.
Its depressing to see the propaganda work on him.
Yeah. I keep thinking of André Beaufre’s book detailing the failure of the French army in 1940. Recall that the French fought like animals in the Great War, and for centuries prior. Here was an army with good equipment, fighting for their lives, and led by men who were not incompetent. Yet, at the end, because of their simple inability to execute basic military things (disengage here, travel 4 miles there, punch the enemy in the flank) the high command was reduced to ordering their units to simply stand where they were and hold ground at all cost: it was the only order the army could execute.
I’d suggest that the cause of that failure was that the country was built on lies dating to the Revolution. In any case, their military was effective until it was a complete failure. Lots of things work like that.
A military that cannot execute simple maneuvers is led by incompetent men. I don’t see how anyone can think otherwise.
I think you aren’t understanding what the French Republic was like, how their priorities were established, how pathologically it functioned. Imagine an American commander in 2025 being instructed to defend his country with a division of trannies. Is he incompetent if he can’t make them a useful fighting force?
No. But he is incompetent for remaining in such an organization if it restrains his ability to perform such a vital job. He then becomes part of the problem.
Compsci – it was their country, dude. By 1940, the Germans had invaded France three times in 70 years. But, sure, good men might just leave their nation to the tender mercies of foreign invaders.
No, they simply don’t lend their credibility to a corrupt government thereby helping to mask the organization’s weaknesses with their reputation, dude.
Maybe Germany invaded France three times between 1870 and 1940. Yet this should not be confused with declaring war on France three times.
Rather, the 1870 war was declared by France against Germany. It’s just that France had miscalculated who would then advance against whose territory.
As to WWI, yes, Germany declared on France first. But WWI was a predetermined clusterfuck anyway. Once things were set into motion, it was clear where the battle lines would be drawn, with the order of precedence in declarations of war being merely ornamental.
Sure why not. It’s not like he was drafted into that roll and cannot leave.
The broader, more relevant question however would be “competent at what?”. The French military of the 1930s, like the US military today really wasn’t about defending the homeland. So whose incompetence was it in structuring those militaries and then flinging them into a role they were not designed for.
Your ability to leave a role does not have bearing on your competency in doing it. The command was pretty good, the army was a complete mess, and most of the reason for it was that the Republic was, itself, a shitstorm of pathologies. A self-destructive people tend to create institutions that are also self-destructive.
A bit of insight.
Even at its best, which was rare, information dispensers relied heavily on general beat reporters. The guy who filed stories on the city council was expected to write analysis of the fashion industry. Yes, there were desk reporters who covered niche areas, particularly at large outlets such as broadcast networks, but even at the infornation age’s height those were few and far between. The niche folks are all but gone now and the few large outlets left now expect even the science reporter to offer insight into the Federal Reserve. So unfiltered press releases, more often than not, along with media people’s blatherings in their social circles, form the basis for what is transmitted.
So the descent into rank propaganda was an easy one because at best those disseminating disinformation really don’t realize it, and in most cases consider distortion part of their jobs.
The professionalization of the media has brought us to this point for sure. Fifty years ago the typical reporter was a state college graduate. Their bosses were high school grads. Today, they come from elite colleges with advanced degrees in managerial calligraphy. These are highly confident people with heads full of nonsense. On top of it is the fact they are high in social skills, but low in general intelligence and experience.
I wouldn’t say “professionalization” of the media so much as “credentialization.” The old media used to be a lot more professional. If I am correct there was a time when it was possible to be a professional “reporter” without a college degree.
One of the things that I have noticed, however, is the “twatification” of the media. Today, they put idiotic 23-year-old girls straight out of college on television who basically act like children and report gossip. One “reporter” for a local station was doing a segment on gyms being closed due to COVID, and actually went on camera jumping up and down on a trampoline like a fucking four-year-old child.
The “gossipy-chick-as-journalist,” reporting unfounded rumor and innuendo, has become standard fare for even network news broadcasts, and characterized nearly all of the coverage of the Trump presidency.
I grew up in the age of John Chancellor and and David Brinkley, when journalists were sober and dignified and made damn sure they had their facts straight before they went on the air.
The contrast with today’s “journalists” is shocking.
And good looks are certainly a sizable part of the equation – as well as being able to read their cue cards (or whatever) competently. Years ago, one of our local news stations had a nice looking bimbo, either anchor or weather, who was always stumbling over her reporting. She lasted a while because of her looks, but eventually her lack of speaking skills did her in. Looks and being able blab the latest propaganda while looking ever so serious are about the only requirements these days.
They don’t even try to “look serious” any more.
Z-man once remarked that this generation of talking heads got their jobs because they’re able to read without moving their lips.
A better, more honest world would have Fox Naked News.
I believe that’s just called porn.
Today it is beyond just not having their facts straight. It is that they make up the facts they report. I suspect most confidential sources are just made up, or some low level insider who they present as high-level, and the reporter and source are colluding on the propaganda. If I do not hear a source saying something with my own ears, I assume the quotes are fake.
People gasp when I quote the Zman: “they just make this stuff up!”
(I gasped myself when he said it- and then I nodded.)
What you’re describing is the pornification of the news business. It’s all about ratings and not accuracy or relevance to any real problem or news you can use.
There really wasn’t ever a golden age of accurate unbiased news media. They’ve always been a combination of entertainers and propagandists. They just had better PR from roughly 1950-1980 to convince people that they were informative and unbiased.
Even so, the rise of “journalism” academically made the situation much worse. In olden days (before 1970 or so) the reason given by reporters for getting into the news biz was an unquenchable curiosity for what, who, where and why. Since then people getting into journalism report doing so because. They want to change the world. That is fundamentally incompatible with even the pretense of objectivity
“They just had better PR from roughly 1950-1980 to convince people that they were informative and unbiased”
Yes. The entertainment industry made movies and tv shows about the sainted journalist standing up to power. And then coincidentally the journalist wrote glowingly about celebrities and their selfless work for whatever. That’s the greatest collusion of the 20th century
All the President’s Men begat slobbering all over Robert Redford.
Thanks for clearing up my confusion. I guess ‘NPR’ actually stands for ‘National Propoganda Radio.’ Trump should have fired all the leftists and set up a gold standard, high-quality ‘NEWS’ station for us unwashed just to demonstrate how it’s done.
It’s also a field heavy in gayness and femininity. I guess this is because they’re all wannabe actors and drama queens.
What you point out is actually now part of Journalism “Schools” curriculum. Advocacy Journalism is what it’s known as. Also happened about the early 70’s
Those who change the world, almost inevitably change it for the worse.
Preach it, people!
When I started out as a reporter on small town newspapers in the 1970s, nobody I worked with had a college degree. I had to prove myself to them. It took a while.
In no small way the actual ‘Deep State’ agent Woodward bought us to the Elite Class reporter.
I mean exactly that Woodward was clearly an Agent of Influence.
50 years ago reporter was a working class step up temporary job, on the way to becoming a teacher, or perhaps small newspaper/radio/TV station small businessman.
Woodward CV: Naval Officer, Communications [Signals].
Nuclear Cleared. Aide to Senior Admiral.
Then WHICA: White House Communications Agency.
WHICA is the peak of Western World Signals. They carry POTUS signals traffic. Above NSA pecking order.
Then he leaves the military…is offered a full ride scholarship to Harvard Law, that is a path to the Federal Bench or one of the Highest Paid Lawyers in Nation….but no… No. Woodward tosses it all away to pursue his ‘dream’ of becoming a cub crime beat reporter in Washington, DC…for a second string newspaper. > This is the Equivalent of the Deputy Mayor of NYC tossing it all away to become a meter maid. Bullshit. Mr. Smith goes to DC bullshit. He then is rapidly picked up by WAPO and gains access to the highest levels of source – Deputy FBI Director Deep Throat Mark Felt. This in a town with more of a pecking order about Status than Constantinople.
Woodward helped bring down a President, and only helped BTW. After that every Democratic reporter wants to be Woodward…if you can’t make it learning a hard trade like Signals Communications you can always be a Courtier…
In a characteristic interesting twist Bernstein actually reports on CIA infiltration of the media in 1977, all the way out into the sticks BTW. The twist being of course Bernstein’s tortured Zhid conscience compels him to ‘leak’ the truth, or project.
This is Bernstein, 1977 for Rolling Stone originally.
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
The FBI is all over Bloomberg top to bottom with FBI alumni to this day. Especially BB network techs.
And I suspect the Bloomberg trading terminals, that made Bloomie a billionaire, all had spy chips in them so he could frontrun or collect Wall Street trading traffic.
Dunno, but wouldn’t put it past him.
He did certainly charge in effect a tax on all financial content passing through his terminals. That was his legit income.
And Zman do you tend to blame more the journalists themselves or the guys paying their salaries above them? The companies that advertise? I always thought if a journalist tried telling the truth they know they will be punished. If they lie for these oligarchs they know they will be rewarded. A friend told me a new term. Presstitutes. Instead of Prostitutes are new media is just basically a Presstitute who does the bidding of men like Jeff Bezos who has no real world experience, no experience with being around Black people in Baltimore, or anything that would prove to useful to reporting on such things. He tells these Presstitutes what to say and they know any deviating from the script means they will be fired and replaced.
You touch on an aspect of the journalist self fluffery. That their all noble altruistic truth seekers. Bullshit. They’re employees and employees do what their employer tells them to do. Just as a factory worker punches out the same part day after day because that’s his job, the journalist punches out his “stories” day after day – which are a part of a larger product.
You give them too much credit. Most are True Believers and view their jobs as a ‘calling.’ I respect ‘journalists’ about as much as I respect today’s public school teachers or hedge fund traders.
The old 50 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean is a good start. Now I replace the word Lawyers with Journalists
The private equity firms buying up local media along with computer automation systems being installed in media outlets reduced the number of journalists needed to get content on the air.
The bean counters eliminated journalism jobs while the automation allowed more content to hit the air.
The result?
23 year olds cutting and pasting the same stories from newscast to newscast and national stories are copied directly from CNN or the AP feed.
For live news you get 23 year olds both jumping on trampolines giving us endless Covid numbers and the same reporters telling us about the Federal Reserve and it’s latest policy.
That reporter doesn’t know shit about anything. But it’s air time filled and the content sells commercials.
Yep, there is a term for this type of article, but I forgot it after so many years. Long ago in another time, I got a call from the local newspaper. They wanted to do a local story about CS instruction (or something or other) and wished to send a photographer over.
So what’s the big deal? Well, I was told quite openly that this article’s theme was done a little while back by The Wall Street Journal and they were going to “update” (some term I forget) it for local consumption.
They literally sent a photographer over and the “reporter” asked—over the phone—half a dozen questions while the photographer took pictures of students using the dept lab facilities. Complete and total rip off of another’s creative efforts.
Correct. Earnings have proved inverse to talent as a direct result.
The Silicon Valley segment of the ruling class is hyper-competent and seem to be bankrolling the control of the media.
Perhaps this is shades of the automated future, where only a small number highly competent people will be needed. Everyone else will be part of some ridiculous side show.
“Work” is very likely going to end up being like the Draft. Most people are not fit for military service and would be a real liability. So, they switched to all volunteer service. Likewise, most people have literally nothing to contribute in terms of productive labor anymore.
Then they should be shipped off to deepest, darkest Africa where not doing ends in starvation. Mission accomplished.
I’d contribute to that “GoFundMe”site!
The Silicon Valley segment of the ruling class is hyper-competent and seem to be bankrolling the control of the media.
Silicon Valley isn’t all that competent. The old computer hardware companies are pretty much all gone now. Apple is doing well as a phone marketer – but that segment has reached the end of the innovation line and will follow the same trajectory as pc makers over the next twenty – thirty years.
Social media companies have a dominate position now, but they have lower barriers to entry than the hardware companies had. And their arrogance is even greater. Their internal management is also more destructive. They too will decline over the coming decades – perhaps even faster than the hardware companies.
Perfect.
One bummer about growing up among working class baby boomers, as I did, is that they had a work ethic that revolved around manly virtues and physical labor. Not knowing how to use a the right wrench for a given task made you a complete loser of low status. The butt of jokes.
Having grown up in that world I naturally adopted that sort of masculinity and have always tried to be “productive”.
The kids these days are really the exact opposite. Honestly, I feel ripped off. I really don’t like the fact that I have paid probably at least half a million dollars in taxes to the federal government in my life whereas a bunch of illegal immigrants and young people who have no intention of ever doing real work get freebies galore for nothing basically.
I mention all of that because it made me groan to read that a man is a “social media manager”. That is a girl’s vanity job at best. What is wrong with this world?
Agree.
I was not unhappy to see my teenage son disassemble a spare little Honda engine we had lying around (we all have one of those, don’t we?) purely to see how it works.
His reassembly skills, we both agree, need work.
Yeah, you don’t want a few leftover bolts and screws!
But if it works, it works
I did that to a friend. When we were playing with our first cars – early 70’s, he took apart his engine and carefully kept all the parts neatly separated from the rest of the junk on his bench. I dropped a couple of extra nuts and bolts in the mix which drove him made trying to figure out what he’s missed.
Told him after a few hours.
My neighbor’s son does dirt track racing in a car with a Honda engine. I was talking to his Dad and he mentioned that one thing that everyone who knew Honda engines agreed: you never disassemble the bottom of a Honda engine. The tolerances are so tight you will never get it back together properly, and they are designed so well that they probably won’t need the bottom touched for the life of the engine.
You have to have a hoist and the right tools, many pneumatic
You need a shop IOW
Yes, but those failures eventually turn into successful repairs. At least that was my experience as a youngster.
I used to grab a lot of attention at committee meetings—committees being notorious for not doing anything except talking and analyzing—when I’d state, “anything worth doing is worth failing at”.
Mine is “Anything worth doing is worth failing at till you get it right.”
A good friend, whose dad installed the wiring in the Apollo lunar landing module, got an old engine at 13 and spent 3 years fooling around with it in the garage. He became a champion outlaw street racer before he was out of high school.
At 16, his parents emancipated him so he and his buddies could drive their motorcycles all over the country to compete in major meets. They’d get day labor to buy gas. A cop asked him if he had a gun in his backpack- he said yes- the cop said “good, you never know if you might need it.”
This was in the 60s, when 14 year-olds routinely drove cattle trucks to the stockyards in another state. Education, in school and in life, was to raise adults, not children.
Shitting on the kids these days is like shooting fish in a bucket. But… if your kids can’t disassemble an engine, and you think it is a valuable life skill… whose fault is that, really?
My old man was a master mechanic and worked on everything from jet engines on down. If we kids touched his tools, we got shot. If we tore down a spare engine just for fun, we got shot.
Nowadays engines are so modular and there are so many microprocessors and proprietary tools needed to work on them, that if you dig into one for giggles…you are in for a major education in finance.
Our esteemed blog host calls out the chattering skulls in the media; if we shot every last one of them we’d have only started the clean up. Our kids are at the mercy of the most empty headed ding bats running the public schools. If you have kids and are sending them to public schools you are doing them a grave disservice that they (and you) will pay for for the rest of your lives.
Guilty!
My kids go to public schools, but they get such a heavy dose of counter-programming, that it actually benefits them to see the manipulation in the system. They got a dose of diversity through some inner city bussing into their white suburban school. They could see how disruptive the black kids are, and how they can get away with anything due to the fear of RACISM. That is a valuable lesson they never would have received otherwise.
Back in prehistoric times, I worked for a maintenance company- we fixed flat roofs and installed epoxy floors among other things. My moniker was “College Boy”, usually with a modifier on the beginning. I knew my place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpaQjIzrlIM
Everyone who doesn’t have student loan debt should be apoplectic with rage regarding the proposed jubilees.
It’s a mulligan for enormously stupid life choices and a transparent ploy to buy off two, maybe three generations of that voting bloc.
And the productive, taxpaying American gets to pay for all of it.
I agree we need to completely rethink the student loan program, but who is to blame, really?
You give an 18 yo person with no life experience 10’s of thousands of dollars to attend college and major in whatever bullshit area they choose and then expect they’ll pay off the “loan” with a mediocre or even minimum wage job?
There’s also a similar problem with for-profit schools that attempt to teach a trade of sorts. However, for a number of years now, these schools have been under scrutiny by the Fed’s for their “graduates” not obtaining employment—or even graduating. In some cases, their students’ ability to receive loans has been curtailed. But not-for-profit colleges receive no such scrutiny.
even the trade schools are iffy
I knew a guy who studied to be an electrician and it was filled with courses on the history of electronics, etc
When they graduate they still can’t rewire your house or anything like that
You have to learn on the job through an apprenticeship
I agree with Compsci, either way, somebody has been or will be hosed.
I’d write it off and curse my luck. It’s like blowing a commercial engine, the equipment looks the same and generates the same income as last month, except you’re $25,000 short.
The inflation from college costs has already seeped into all other living costs- housing, payroll, health care, business insurance. I’d welcome deflation across the board.
Under Industrial Capitalism, America provided low-cost education, not student debt. It provided basic infrastructure at low cost. Employers could pay lower wages without the hidden, extortionate, inflationary effect of “benefits” or degrees.
Our banks created money through public banks to create capital, to create the means of production.
The objective in collateral-based banking was to make a profit and interest, not to make capital gains and speculation. This created money to fund actual means of production to build factories, to build research and development, to build transportation facilities, to build infrastructure.
Under Finance Capitalism, rentiers and managerial services dominate. The people who don’t make things, everybody dipping their bucket in the same dwindling river of social costs, some real, some imagined.
Harvard has $40billion cash in endowments;
that money must be clawed back and used to pay off the student debts.
Nobody is going to “pay” for it. The treasury will “borrow” the required funds from the federal reserve which creates it with a few keystrokes. Based upon current projections, the federal debt will be roughly 200% of gdp in four years and 300% in eight years. Does anyone think this will ever be “repaid”? I would like Z’s take on how this runaway fiscal/monetary crisis unfolds.
One way or another all debt is “repaid”. I usually simply assume when someone says “repay” they are just pleading for a policy that will not inevitably make the dollar worthless through inflation.
I was tied down for a decade because of my student loans, but that was because I hastily chose a major. (Mortuary Science – I was raised on horror films.) Nobody bailed me out, and I don’t want my tax dollars bailing out unkempt, purple-haired Gender Studies indoctrinees either.
I understand, Maniac, but we’ve got to deflate the “worth” of those degrees.
They’re all ‘political science’ degrees, necessary to becoming a comissar in the System. That’s part and parcel of why the System pays so well.
Is it a default, or a payoff and bailout of the managerial class?
Now the big heads are talking about a rollout of a singular, global digital “currency”. Governmental and managerial ‘debt’ are about to become moot, that’s why the debt and deficits don’t matter. They’re just tools to get the emergent Owner class where they want to be.
The Jubilee will be for the Too Big To Fail. Lockdowns for us.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/
Yep. But entirely predictable. We knew this and a whole lot more would happen as soon as they deposed Trump.
And Trump has to know this as well. Yet he walked away from an obviously fraudulent “selection” result, leaving his supporters and former country completely at the mercy of the merciless left. For me, that’s the bitterest pill to swallow. Why he didn’t fight it out tooth and nail… Just didn’t have it in him apparently – a yuge enough pair.
Ultimately, Trump is the chief of the Grillers. He’s not a revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary.
I assume you meant “chief of the Grifters.” Darn auto- correct.
I’d rather see bailouts for commoners than elites. The taxpayers don’t pay for half the stuff the government spends money on. Seriously, DC is such a financial clown show of smoke, mirrors and BS that complaining about taxes isn’t even relevant anymore.
Except that most of those bailed out will form the future word salad farming UMC that wants lockdowns, face diapers, and poison vaxxes forever.
You do realize that prior to the Bankruptcy act of 2005 you could file for bankruptcy to get out from college loan debt burden
Had this out been left in place, college tuition would have never exploded the way it did because the colleges and loan granters would fear the students would file for bankruptcy at some point when their worthless degree didn’t get them a decent paying job.
The world is increasingly virtual. A simulacrum run online.
The real physical world is the foundation that the simulacrum sits upon. An ever decreasing fraction of the whole. However, the real world can and did exist without the simulacrum. But the latter cannot exist without the former.
So for how much longer will the latter be dominate and why? At some point soon the dirt people that keep everything running should be able to command a premium. Their essential skills require intelligence and experience to accumulate. The virtual worlds’ not so much.
Very timely post. A related graphic from yesterday attached below. Clearly someone stole my idea! I have often said you could bring this place to its knees rapidly by simply being clever enough to get all Truckers into a collective bargaining arrangement and strike. It would be difficult to call in a bunch of scabs because driving a fully loaded semi is not a trivial skill.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rFSpVgVhMqg/YB6q489kH2I/AAAAAAAAARQ/VTRFI2R11SUKxWVkM-QG0lrabsw60uD_gCLcBGAsYHQ/w395-h916/if%2Btrucks%2Bstop.jpg
How do we put this plan into motion?
Caltrops
Cheap on Amazon- importing them from China seems appropriate.
A truck strike will only happen if the big dogs, the corporate upper class, coordinate it- or if the thousands of small Diverse companies decide they’re in the same boat as White Americans.
Not to rain on the parade, but a French style truck strike faces heavy headwinds here. We’re no longer the organized industry of union teamsters we used to be.
We’re as corporate as farming now. Diversity hiring has major impetus in our industry. It’s semi-skilled training and a decent wage, quick, and there are few jobs left anymore. Anybody can buy a truck and get under a corporate umbrella, in business fast. Some Uzbek or Czech will take the brokered load cheaper and scab.
As a trucker, I remember a couple abortive national strikes in the early 90s. Nobody knew what they were for, nothing much happened beyond a few nail strips in the road and a bunch of chatter on the CB.
That’s back when we were all Americans, and the CB chatter never stopped, 24/7, anywhere in the country.
Now, we’re heavily diversified, corporatized, tracked, and GPS’d. The CB and its chatter are a relic.
Sikhs dominate your food supply from CA, some Somalis in the north, blacks in the south, immigrants in the cities, and Mexicans in the southwest. Amazon is aiming to become the Walmart of distribution, and they hire small Nu-Americans far more readily than large or trad union companies.
What happened to Americans? We got old, went local, or got into administrative ‘logistics’ or compliance services. Meanwhile, the Mexicans focused on mechanics and equipment repair, and in-state. The immigrants, recently unemployed, or unskilled/uneducated dimwits (me) do the distance grudge work.
I don’t know what will herd these cats. Also, National Guard could drive the delivery trucks. The feds could waive CDL, commercial driver license, requirements, that’s a perquisite of being a fed. They’d probably offer national emergency contracts to Walmart, Amazon, and the Big Five instead.
Now on the bright side, whenever storms cause a power outage on the East Coast, you have electric company contractors flooding in from Texas, Georgia, and Kansas. That alone proves that quick, decisive physical action can be taken on a large scale…so delivery strikes and roadblock shutdowns are not out of the question.
We’ve talked before of, “what if a hundred trucks decided to break down on every major road into D.C.?” That would throw some enticing sand in the gears. Ain’t enough cops or cop cars. And if the airline unions joined us…
And electrician’s unions, and telephony unions…
Yes, things really are that bad, but the proper response is not despair or resignation. Rather, it’s a call to roll up your sleeves and get to work on a solution. That is, more or less, what our forefathers did in the 1770s. It does no good to continually catalog & criticize all the ways in which things are going wrong. That part is blindingly obvious. The hard work lies in finding & implementing effective solutions. And some of these solutions are serious business, so you will need both cojones.
No. The proper response is to sit back and let it all burn to the ground
The Soviet citizenry did that and it took 80 years and about 100 million dead, so not really all that optimum. We can do better (meaning faster) and avoid the genocide part. Some will contribute more passively by sucking the Fed dry or withholding their labor, but others will be more proactive by throwing sand in the gears. Either way, the collapse is the cure.
“We can do better (meaning faster) and avoid the genocide part.”
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Voting was our last option, and we just lost it. Don’t pull on Superman’s cape, don’t spit into the wind, don’t pull the mask of a old lone ranger and don’t mess around with Uncle Sam. Think guerilla. Stealth, cunning, sabotage, resist but be the grey man.
Indeed. Why should we save them?
While my husband is a smart and capable man, his past work at blue-collar jobs with blue collar friends (until he decided to finish college and got a govt job) made me respect him far more than if he had been a typical middle class midwit. He’ll never be a Mr. Fixit around the house (I’m more likely to try to tackle some small things and he takes over in exasperation at my ignorance) but he’s done his share of manual labor. I value that.
As Red Green used to say, if they don’t find you handsome they better find you handy.
What Z said holds true for me too
They take pride in their not knowing how to do anything useful. I know so many college men like that. But they never caught on to the fact that women LIKE guys who know what they are doing. You would think if for no other reason they would learn something to make themselves attractive. And you do not have to go too far back when the upper crust of society was filled with men who knew how to do practical things outside of their law or medical careers, etc. Today’s educated are just rubes with ornamented credentials, like when Oz hung a diploma around the scarecrow’s neck.
I live among bug people and the attitude most of them have is that knowledge of how to diagnose and repair mechanical things is something for people named Pedro and Juan. This applies to the women and the “men” here. It’s pathetic and disgusting to see.
“They spent all of their time accumulating esoteric credentials that they can wear as moral signifiers. These impress the other managerial types. The result is a class of know-nothings.”
The sad part is they all have degree’s in Know-Nothing and the Great Pretender will force us to fund them.