False consciousness is term probably coined by Friedrich Engels to describe a scenario where a subordinate class embraces the ideology of the ruling class, even though the ideology guarantees their subordination. In the communist view of things, workers embraced the bourgeois values of capitalist society, even though it meant they remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It was an interesting bit of projection that has been a feature of radicalism since the beginning.
To be a radical in the conventional sense of Western politics starts with a heavy dose of self-deception. Radicals are rarely from the subordinate class. Almost always they are from the ruling elite. They are intellectuals raised in leisure, but convinced they are the authentic voice of the masses. The rare few from the masses have been elevated because they confirm the bourgeois radical’s need for affirmation. As a reward, the striver gets to live in the farmhouse with the pigs.
A glaring example of radical self-delusion is in this clip from the Jimmy Dore Show in which the host discusses the revolution with Chris Hedges. For those unfamiliar, Dore is a comic who has made himself rich doing left-wing comedy. Chris Hedges is an activist who caters to the NPR crowd. He used to write for the New York Times and got famous trafficking in conspiracy theories during the Bush years. He is the type who claimed Bush was a fascist and Iraq was the Sudetenland.
The clip is interesting because both men are convinced they are opposed to the system, when in fact they are products of the system. This is not an act. They truly think they are the avant garde trying to organize a revolt against the system. Further, both seem to think they are working class heroes, leading the proletariat in their struggle against the bourgeois oppressor class. There are times when they sound like a museum exhibit explaining the 1930’s union movements.
Jimmy Dore is a rich guy who lives in a two-million dollar home in California, while Hedges is a rich guy who lives in a mansion in Princeton New Jersey. That is one of the tonier neighborhoods in America. They owe everything that truly matters to them to the system they pretend to oppose. If there was a revolution, they are the on the first train cars heading to the gulags. The only thing more ridiculous than these two talking revolution is the fact that they seem to believe it.
An amusing sidebar here is that they both have put a lot of effort into retconning their life story to match their roles. Hedges claims to have grown up working class, but his family sent him to elite boarding schools. But hey, the Chaffee school is pretty much a juvenile detention center. Dore carries on like his father was Archie Bunker, but in reality, he was a cop who owned a construction business. The system they claim to oppose has been very good to the both of them.
Other than the entertainment value, the reason to pay attention to these sorts of people is they offer an insight into the people in charge. The typical person in mainstream politics suffers from the same sort of self-delusion. Few have ever done real work or known anyone who does real work. Their entire lives have been inside the world of make believe, where they struggle with other actors, pretending to care about the people outside the bubble.
Just as conservatism is a bone the system throws to middle-class white people to keep them busy; socialism is a bone tossed to upper-middle class white people to make them feel special. One of the remarkable features of the Bernie Bro phenomenon is that it is whiter than a Klan rally. Scroll through the clips of the Jimmy Dore show or the Young Turks and it is nothing but palefaces. In no way does this brand of radicalism look anything like the people they claim to represent.
The self-delusion is not a one-way street. There are cynical people in politics, for sure, but most really believe what they are saying. Elizabeth Warren holds court in her mansion telling the wealthy hens in her circle about how she is fighting for working families and the victims of Wall Street. They all congratulate themselves on being the conscience of the people. All of these people are high on their own fumes, which is what keeps them from facing reality.
The thing about the concept of false consciousness is that Engels was inadvertently signaling what would become a prominent feature of radicalism. It is not the subordinate classes that are the victims, but rather the radicals themselves. Whether it is civic nationalists and their utopian fantasies about the Constitution or the middle-class socialists and their utopian fantasies about economics, radicalism requires the participants to live in a state of smug self-delusion.
Perhaps it is the nature of all political systems to delude the beneficiaries, so they do not have to face the reality of their position. The king can know himself, but his court must believe they are acting in the name of honor. The crafty political operator can be as cynical as he likes, but his supporters must see him as a man of virtue, selflessly serving the republic. In liberal democracy, it is the narcotic of radicalism played out in the comfort of the gated mansion.
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Damn
Unz’ page is missing.
Anyone know what happened?
I’ll reply to myself.
Link is screwy.
Still up.
Acting strange.
Did I miss an announcement about no podcast this week?
Short answer. Yes.
They are all Dead Head stickers on Cadillacs (including the writer of that lyric).
I disagree with your take, Z. Most are aware they are posers. Look at one of the few times the working class got their way: the election of Trump. The ensuing freakout shows how deeply they fear even a harmless and insignificant mass movement.
The rapidly approaching economic class will punch their lights out and make the pose much more difficult as they try to cling to their stuff.
The left are living in a spectrum between the persona and false consciousness. Jung defined the persona as the artificial personality we create to fit into society. It is the fake personality you take on when you pretend that you do not want to fight someone when you really want to fight someone, and there is usually some level of awareness that you are pretending along with everyone else around you.
The liberal hive has extended the persona into a false consciousness where people lose the awareness that they are pretending. Their consciousness lives entirely within the artificial construct of social acceptability and the social scene, which is the psychological side of their brand of identity politics.
Living in the matrix of false consciousness does not stop it from being an extension of the artificial persona, however. The processes maintaining it merely become more subconscious, and the awareness of various threats to that shared social delusion also become more subconscious. Moreover, the human mind has adapted to avoid or reject sources of cognitive dissonance automatically, and Orange Man Bad is a great example of that.
You and ZMan are fixing your perspectives on the opposite sides of the liberal spectrum between a somewhat self-aware persona and a totally self-unaware, false consciousness persona.
What must be one of the most unremarked aspects of the do-gooder, the reformer or the radical of any stripe is this: Do they have the slightest idea of the condition of the actual commoner (poor, downtrodden, disadvantaged, etc.) he may claim to be “helping”? In most cases, I’d expect the answer is “no.” Oh sure, they may at least have theorized or even read a bit, but actual first-hand experience? Rarely. As Don Quixote slowly learns when begins his adventures as a knight-errant, the radical’s mind is filled with a set of at best hazy generalities, at worst grotesque misunderstandings, of the person, place or thing he proposes to rescue, of lost causes he would set right.
Not to say that the do-gooder never has less than noble motives (e.g. greed, lust for power, etc.) but more’s the pity, because at least some of the time there must be honest intent to do good but stymied by absence of experience or common sense. The comic image is of the minister seeking to bring the Gospel to the savage jungle tribe, who ends up in the cauldron, dinner for the heathens.
“No, no, no! That’s not what ‘This is my body, given for you’ means!!!” 😀
I can speak from some experience here. I grew up working class without a lot of money. Thanks to some good fortune and some brains I have moved in managerial/system circles for most of my adult life, and in short, these people are clueless. They have no idea what working class life is, how people behave, what people desire, and most importantly just how useless and even harmful the bureaucracy they love so much is at that level. I was never actually able to change anyone’s mind when discussing my experience, and more than once I was called some variant of class traitor. So they just don’t know, they don’t want to know, because they are expressing approved and “expert” opinions.
Interestingly, Thomas Frank put out a book named “Listen, Liberal” in 2016 which discussed these dynamics in depth. Of course these dynamics ended up breaking the Clinton dynasty and put OMB into office. It must be said, though, the book was totally ignored by the ruling elite and liberal managerial class, even after OMB won. This is despite the fact that his earlier book “What’s the Matter With Kansas” was frequently cited whenever liberals wanted to lament about why those dumb rednecks in flyover country didn’t just do what was best for them. The ruling elite have been living on a cloud for a long long time.
There’s a lot of Z-man venom towards David French. And why wouldn’t there be? He’s a sick clown. But please save some venom for Steve Sailer and Victor Davis Hanson, who do more, through their empty, masturbatory boomer rhetoric, to derail the right than the more transparent French ever could.
But please save some venom for Steve Sailer and Victor Davis Hanson, who do more, through their empty, masturbatory boomer rhetoric, to derail the right than the more transparent French ever could.
Again, EVERYONE whom you are allowed to read was SELECTED [via exceedingly rigorous & accurate psychometric analysis] for having been a shabbos goy who could be trusted to never cross over the line into outright Truth Speak.
Hanson, Sailer, French – all of them – are living precisely the lives which they were SELECTED to live.
The rest of us failed the psychometric examinations, with some of us, such as our very own “Apex Predator”, having failed the psychometric examinations so catastrophically that we’ve been legalistically banished from Normie society.
[Frankly some of us are lucky that we haven’t yet been ass@ssinated, and for the record, I’m not joking about that.]
You can learn more in 30 minutes from Victor Hanson than you can in four years of college. You turn on him in order to brandish your fides, but he brought more people closer to this side with his defense of Trump than you could in 10,000 years.
Sailer and VDH are boomer relics who, except as they reach their generational-intellectual boundaries, say good and important things.
David French just relishes your death.
It’s not the same.
OT: jimmy page is this man’s bitch
‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go9J9REtfdA&ab_channel=NEAZIXNH
and please, do not even mention EVH as a counter.
OT: any fans of Harbeth speakers here?
cs7 + luxman 505uxii + mofi studio deck
Fascinating. It’s tough to get a read on those guys.
You may be right, Z… but consider: I come from the Hive. From the caste that actually IS the establishment or the managerial class. They sound nothing like these guys. To them, the institutions all still work, you can set your watch and warrant to the mass media, the schools and courts all run like Swiss watches, and the sun still sets and rises on the Empire. These guys? A product of the system…? I don’t think so, Z.
Unlike establishment hacks, they know something is seriously wrong. They even concede that the people arrayed against them have legitimate gripes. They are trying to process what they are seeing – and I think what has them so confused is that they have just discovered the dissident right… and they don’t know what to make of it. They also know they have to do something about it, or these guys will wash them away. I’ll be damned… this is what the dissident right looks like through the leftist lens! Congrats, fellas! Horton has finally heard the who! Woohoo!👍
Of course they have no fuggin clue what drives you, what your intent is, or what to do about you. But they did acknowledge that they will have to listen to you or things are going to go badly for them and they are right about that.
I think this might actually be something to be positive about. You must remember, liberals are getting mugged by reality non-stop since Tater Joe gave Trump the boot. They are getting RAPED by reality without Vaseline. Some are getting red pilled. This kind of show is not normal for lefties. Lefty typically has all the answers, and everything would be perfect if you would just shut up, let them lecture, and do as you’re told. These guys are questioning themselves… so what are we seeing here?
A dissident left…?
Hmmm…. the old slogan “A Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged.” We could perhaps update it to:
“A Dissident Right (or at least, Dissident Left) -ist is a former Aparachik (presumably liberal Democrat but RINO or similar is acceptable) White male who was passed over for promotion by a BIPOC, tranny, box wine aunt, Boss’s best friend from the fraternity at Yale, etc.
A dissident left…?
There are myriad health-fooders & buy-locals & dancing bears & ecologists with whom we can find common ground.
In particular, Bobby Kennedy Jr has been so outstanding on the question of V@xxines that he’s approaching literal canonization status [obviously in an alternate reality, wherein roman popery hadn’t been overwhelmed by the globo-homo-pedo jesuits].
Although the set of all ecologists will have a non-trivial intersection with the set of all Georgia Guidestones adherents, so we gotta tread very carefully there.
And when the Buy-Locals start to Think-Global, we gotta keep a close eye on their Global-Thoughts [but so far they’ve been very good on the Palestinian Question].
And the Dancing Bears are all substance abusers, God bless their poor stupid hopelessly substance-abusing hearts.
Anyway, along those lines, note that the Left will use the new Texas abortion ruling to claim that you do NOT have power over your own body, ergo you CANNOT refuse a government mandated V@xxine, although that’s gonna infuriate the Health-Fooders.
It’s a real witch’s brew of competing interests which we have here.
I suppose that’s why the Frankfurt School invented Consumerism – to hold the Left together so that it wouldn’t naturally fall apart into all of its myriad competing & logically contradictory interest groups].
NY Fed has suspended its GDP tracking model:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/wheels-come-economic-growth-craters-ny-fed-suspends-its-gdp-tracking-model
I tend to agree this means the wheels are close to coming off, probably sooner rather than later.
The wheels coming off means they need a bigger ditch for the peasants. This is the price of passivism.
If a crowd of politicians went skinny-dipping, would anybody notice? If they embezzled from their own tiny grandmas, bankrupting the little old lady, would anybody care? What does it take for a clone to get a fair shake? They’re good at reading the teleprompter. Surely that counts for something. To read my full (longer) article on this, move the mouse over my name and hit click to go.
Speaking of delusion: I don’t know who first observed the fact that the main attribute needed to be a Progressive is the ability to *not notice*
So, are we all living a movie in our heads?
Lefties marching with Lenin to attack the factory.
SJWs marching at Selma and rioting at Stonewall.
Conservatives, hungry and cold, crossing the Delaware with Washington.
Alt-Right standing in defense of Dresden.
Christians confronting Roman soldiers at the garden of Gethsemane.
Hebrews in the foothills watching the Thera tidal wave smash Egyptian chariots with Moses.
Muslims riding across the midnight desert on a raid with Mohammed.
Hindus carrying His arrows following Krishna into battle.
Bhuddists hearing His voice under the bo tree.
In our strangest of times, we now have this:
“People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. ”
So, Dissidents- what movie will our children think of, when they think of us?
What the hell happened to the Aussies? Are there any men left in Australia with balls?
They’ve all become Covidile Dundees.
The truckee strike was supposed to shut down every road in Oz on the 31st.
The veterans were all in.
Not a word. Not a single word about it, I pray it’s real.
It did happen .Only went on one day but that was apparently the plan.
Its going to take a lot more than that but as my mum liked to say baby steps
Cowed by the She-lahs.
It’s endemic to what’s left of Western Civ.
Those kind of ANZACS bled out on the beach at Gallipoli, or at El Alemein or the Kokoda Track. Their great grandsons were castrated before they could be men like their grandsires.
Their balls got handed over with their guns.
This really scares the hell out of me, if the aussies accept this then I doubt we and the rest of the west have the stones for another revolution.
If you can’t trust a colony of cast out criminals to rebel, then whom can you trust?
It shouldn’t. An Aussie “like us” was on another board discussing the issues.
His take is that his country is very conformist because of its tiny population and extremely hazardous land and that people there are boiling mad.
The manipulation is intense but as he put it “even here, things are in breaking strain.”
You won’t hear about it if/when it happens, The only news that might cover it will by Sky News and our overlord will try and shut that down fast for fear of contagion.
Where is that quote from? It’s pretty horrifying but I’m not sure even the Australians would do something like this. For one thing, there would be a lot of police responses to people just not having good cell coverage.
I have to admit that “Southern Hemisphere Freedom Deficit Syndrome” (New Zealand is doing similar stuff) is puzzling and troubling. It’s not just Covid hysteria either but gun bans and a lot of other things too. Additionally, if “culture is downstream of biology” as we like to say, this doesn’t speak well of modern White biology. Australia and NZ are about as White as can be. They do have a small indigenous population and they have started importing Muslims but the slide into tyranny down under is clearly the doing of its White population and politicians.
As for the movie question, well obviously Idiocracy, or maybe just pick a documentary about Jonestown.
Pozymandias – It’s been reported at a number of sites, and it appears legitimate. Yes, Australia IS doing this.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/australia-debuts-new-orwellian-app-using-facial-recognition-geolocation-to-enforce-quarantine
Thanks for the link. I read it. So it’s the alternative to being kept prisoner in a hotel after you travel. Well, that’s much better, you get to be imprisoned at home instead. It’s very sad, Australia starts as a prison camp and it seems like it ends as one too.
Additionally, if “culture is downstream of biology” as we like to say, this doesn’t speak well of modern White biology.
And that is the great question of our times: Can the White Race [biologically speaking, the White Amygdala] summon the psychological strength necessary to throw off the psychological shackles of the ubiquitous Frankfurt School cultural poisoning?
It’s beyond fascinating – it’s scintillating – to watch the Frankfurt School achieve infinitely more via imaginary psychological shackles than any other tyrants [in known human history] ever achieved via mere iron shackles.
Absolutely scintillating.
Uh, what if one doesn’t have a cell phone?
Uh, what if one doesn’t have a cell phone?
SSSHHHHH!!!!!
Loose lips sink ships…
Bartleby: My husband has just been informed that his phone (by choice an old one with a physical key pad that replaced an even older one that accidentally got wet) will no longer work as the carrier upgrades to 5G and he MUST get a smartphone. Needs a phone for business and occasional personal use but is strongly resistant to smartphone and its intrusiveness and monitoring. Muh consumer choice.
We may be moving into the world of “landline or nothing.”
Better fidelity, anyway. Way cheaper, and you never need to upgrade.
What’s not to love?
“Never need to upgrade!” Ha! That’s rich! Speaking for the USA, in the 35 or so years that cell has been around, they’ve gone from astronomically expensive analog (1G I guess) to 2G, to 3G and so on. 1G and 2G are long gone. 3G sunsets in early 2022. As is at least one signalling method (TDMA) in mid-2000s, and GSM a few years ago (I think). requiring me to shop for a new phone. Now, I’ll agree it’s true that a given standard usually remains for many years. As a cheapskate on the budget end of these trends, even so I get at least a few years use of them.
And yet, we’d be a lot better off if people listened to Chris Hedges. He’s not wrong, you know.
https://youtu.be/VXYsGuBdzM4
I’ve read any number of leftists who correctly identify the problems with the US. Then they go and recommend more globohomo.
I note that the first thing he attacks is “unilateralism” (also known as nationalism).
Then he describes the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as “the greatest strategic blunder in its history,” which is simply unsupportable hyperbole. Yes, they were bad, but they pale in comparison to WW 1, Vietnam, and possibly even large parts of WW2, not to mention the immense strategic blunder that was the Civil War. He heaps far too much significance on those two wars, while ignoring many other more important problems with the US, which effectively excuses those other problems.
Note, I am not saying the wars were well-decided, well-prosecuted or not responsible for much wasted US blood, treasure and prestige. I am saying that he focuses on them to the exclusion of other, more important issues. Iraq and Afghanistan are merely symptoms.
And then he gets to the outright lies: “Militarized police gun down mostly unarmed poor people of color.” This is just outright bullshit not supported by the facts. There is no police war on people of color.
“Our educational system has been in steep decline and being privatized” — “Privatized? Bullshit. Is he seriously implying charter and private schools are responsible for educational decline? Oh, and which ideology has been in control of the educational system for the past 120 years?
“Morbid obesity” — yet which side of the political aisle rejects any pushback against the obesity epidemic as “fat shaming?”
The whole thing winds up as a rant with no real root analysis or prescriptions. It was ultimately a complete waste of my time.
I also note that the group to which he is speaking, mediasanctuary.org is a leftist clown car of cartoonish proportions.
A while back, Paul Ramsey and a small group were harassed by antifa, SPLC freaks while walking from the parking lot to attend a conference. They were screaming obscenities, epithets, and screeching “Resist!”. They have zero self-awareness. Paul Ramsey responded by yelling “you ARE the man!”
If you happen to have a moment and need a laugh, please listen to Kevin “silver tongued devil” McCarthy’s speech about removing Confederate statues and his criticism of CRT back in late June. He proudly and repeatedly reminds everyone that they are removing statues of Democrats! and boasts about a painting of Lincoln in his office. The fact that McCarthy is the House Minority leader and can’t string two coherent sentences together is reason alone to begin stockpiling emergency supplies/food storage.
Robert E. Lee wrote in a letter “we cannot consult our feelings on the matter”. He was a morally conscious man with a deep sense of duty, forbearance, and self-discipline. He had a clear vision of right and wrong, fully detached from emotion.
We live in such a different world now with such different “leaders”. Their lack of intellect is almost as bad as their complete lack of morals.
Lee, in a letter to Lord Acton, also wrote: “…the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.”
The events of the past 150 years have borne out this great man’s amazing prescience. Truer words were never penned.
Wow, thanks for that prescient Lee quote. He is among the most honorable men this continent produced. It is no surprise Lee saw the nascent Empire as a threat to humanity. While he previously served the United States honorably, he was one of the very few among the Southern aristocracy who saw the dangerous portent of the war with Mexico although he kept his misgivings private.
The Mexican-American War and the debacle in Afghanistan really are the bookends to the American Empire.
Today’s leaders seem to have traded the adjective “detached” for the superficially similar one, “unhinged.” 😀
I read this as we have an old asset as new asset 😡
I mean ISIS-K
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/taliban-have-a-2-front-war-headed-their-way/ar-AAO2aAP
I was wrong about setting up an Afghan-Paki war, as I had forgotten the local aphorism “not a shot is fired in Afghanistan that the ISI doesn’t know”- the Taliban’s logistic and miltary support is Pakistan.
They are Paki-backed puppets, as was Mullah Omar.
This won’t be Afghans gaining territory, this is Pakis gaining territory. What weird games are our Intel (State) and Mil (DoD) up to now?
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Well said. Clarification needed: has he had a personal bout with cancer or was it dearly departed wife?
Semi OT:
Anyone else notice iSteve spent most of the week hysterically sperging out over Beer Flu?
I get his personal experience, but there is simply no credible, quality data out there that justifies that level of sheer terror.
Meanwhile, JHK has posted a Friday missive that makes it sound like he’s ready to saddle up and ride out with the militia.
You would think an experience with cancer would improve somebody’s ability to cope with the concept of death.
But I guess for an atheist, it doesn’t help. Steve will be cowering in fear of death (and divine judgement) until he dies anyways whenever it’s his time to die.
B125, God already both asked, and answered, the Question: “go thou, faithful servant, live, and make Me more ammo.”
He’s a moderate. Get over it. He makes ammo. He has lived according to his lights and yet stays here in Dissident Ghetto.
Crawl into a cave and cower? What sins should he reflect on, did he steal cars?
Scared by the brush of death? Damn right he’s scared. Mr. Death was right there, for real this time, extending his bony hand. It ain’t courage unless your scared.
born a pussy, die a pussy.
Hedges is a real piece of work. He is a totally fake Christian who literally describes God as being “a verb and not a noun.” He first came to my attention when he used a graduation speech at some college (Rockford college, I think) to grandstand about Iraq and the evil fascist empire and they pulled the plug of his microphone during his speech when he wouldn’t shut the hell up. Leftists made it into a “free speech” issue.
The one thing he was actually pretty good on is the fake leftists. Most of his speeches and writing that I’ve seen is him criticizing the left for being fake as shit. One line he used to use that I actually like was “the leftists claim to the love the poor, but they hate the way poor smell.” Of course, he follows that up with his bugman bit. The last I heard of him was when he got caught plagiarizing.
Having dinner and drinks with the National Review, guys eh?
******
(Side poke: when you said “to he!! with the Moon, I missed my chance to rib you with “welp, we should just stay here on the pig farm in Jutland, then.”)
Not a lick of difference between the NRO guys and hedges or any run of the mill leftist. Just low tax progressives. Well, other than French kidnapping little African girls. At least progressives aren’t doing that!
God as being “a verb and not a noun.”
Scotus took the assertion “I AM THAT I AM” [Exodus 3:14], and turned into into the idea of the First Efficient Cause.
Go to a search engine and search on something like “scotus first efficient cause”.
I tried out Jimmy Dore to see what all the hype was about. I found him to be Jimmy Bore.
Perhaps it’s best to think of the phenomenon Zman describes here as a propaganda machine for reducing Cognitive Dissonance. How the hell are you going to get a generation of self-styled elite hipsters to willingly enslave themselves to Globocorp? Answer: by convincing them that they’re really “sticking it to the Man”.
Through a blizzard of propaganda from poltroon Prog anchor-persons, comedians, “influencers” (WTF?) et alia, the self-styled elite all think they are creating heaven on earth by destroying western civilization. Deep down, they know they’re slaves. This (partially) explains drug use, depression, low fertility etc. The average Russian Serf was probably happier.
The average Russian Serf never said, “times are so bad, why have children?”, did he? Oddly, his wife agreed with him, too.
Want to hear a true story about absolutely heroic women?
When their husbands were taken to Gulag, some women would leave their children with family and set off. They washed laundry until their knuckles were bloody, hoed frozen ground, walked icy roads alone, did whatever they could to reach the town outside the camp.
There, they would take work at the mill, watching the logs that came in.
The work was hard and dangerous, but they stayed, watching for one thing only: for the log wherein their husband had carved his intials, a desperate hope to tell his family that he was still alive, for their eyes only.
Thanks for your reply! Have a great long weekend.
Saint Joseph Djugashvili ackshually read the personal correspondence of wives who would beg him for leniency on their husbands.
Can you imagine any U.S. president within living memory having done such a thing?
[Slick Willy taking kosher blow jobs from Marc Rich’s wife doesn’t count.]
Yes, Jimmi Dore is your typical bobo revolutionary: during what must be Keek Uyghur’s lifetime performance, he spat in Alex Jones’ face and immediately ran away like a little bitch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=412aatJqbzo
Notice what Alex tells Keek: “You’re the anti-liberal, and you’re pissed!”
What I find interesting is Dore, Shapiro, Zinc Wigger, et al are all from the same formula. They are the political version of the boy band. A creation of the system to crowd out opposition.
“What I find interesting is Dore, Shapiro…”
Add Fauci to that list and if the phyzz alone does not set off alarm bells, ask yourself why. That may entail looking in the mirror for some – but if you share the physiognomy of these, named, best approach may be to avoid being what they are. Or is there any merit to the link between the outside and the inside of the human being?
If they were a boy band they’d call themselves “Rebel Media”… Oh, wait! That’s already taken.
But hey, if you style yourself “rebel”, you can’t very well be and establishment pawn, can you?
“If they were a boy band they’d call themselves…”
The band in Revenge of the Nerds.
Just like you couldn’t possibly call yourself Students for a Democratic Society and be communists or People for the American Way and be anti-American…
Revolt Against The System™ brought to you by Amazon World Services and Microsoft Azure.
The Backdoor Boys
Rage for the Machine…
Celebrity Deathmatch did an episode where the band Rage Against the Machine fought “the machine”. The machine won. I’ve always thought that this was/is the perfect commentary on the phony rebellion of the establishment Left.
“Rebel Without A C**k. ” Starring Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon as “The Girl Who Loved Him.”
Rebel rebel
You’ve torn your dress
David Bowie
Your face is a mess
enough aint the test
Scary. Like he came from the future.
Dore is the typical dissatisfied lefty who eventually gets approval from the right because he hates wokism. I remember the spitting incident which reminded me of the little punks in school who would run when they sucker punched someone.
So one millionaire having a falling out with other multi-millionaires (TYT) . I hate them all.
So one millionaire having a falling out with other multi-millionaires
It’s sort of lost in the hubbub, but what makes KEEK freak out is when Alex says they’re funded by Saudi Arabia – what a dirty LIE, we’re funded by Qatar – BIG difference.
I suspect what make him blow up was that Alex didn’t know TYT inside and out because KEEK knows everything about Alex Jones, you can be stone sure of that.
Of course all this anti-Mohammadan hobbyhorsemanship seems so quaint in $CurrentYear, a relic of the Bush era.
People have become neurotic. They think too much, become strangers to themselves, come to hate themselves. It’s a lot easier and happier to trust your instincts and let ‘er rip. Easier said than done these days, but it ought to be.
Professional Students (people who spend the better part of a decade or more not going to medical school) start out this way and are constantly larping or pining to get into elite government orgs or 503(s).
The Boston area is full of transplants who end up working in either government created orgs or non for profits. The local ethnic whites still dominate the municipal and most state agencies. The old adage “those who can’t do, teach” has been replaced with those who don’t want to work but pretend their life has purpose enters politics, works for or starts a morally superior 503c and justifies their years of wasted time with useless advanced degrees.
I have a friend who went to BC, worked for Bidens campaign back in the early 2000s, went on a sabbatical to a homeless shelter in California then graduated from Suffolk Law and is now running for a City Council seat after years at an entry level position in municipal government. For him the possibilities are endless and his intentions are always noble. He’s living a delusion.
Your anecdote is a terrific example of what an enormously cancerous problem the Leftist support structure is.
There are plenty of people far removed from official DC who can spend their entire lives as parasites in this support system.
This is one of the reasons I’ve withdrawn from donations to these organizations, religious or secular. They all support a cadre of these Leftists and who in one way or another subvert your values using your own money. It’s a great grift—like the pre-reformation Catholic Church selling indulgences to the peasants.
Religious organizations are some of the absolute worst Wokesters running around in conservative skinsuits.
They have grown rich, and are growing richer importing illiterate Kurds and Somalis to Idaho and Minnesota.
It’s why, some way some how this whole system has to be crashed down. The parasitic simps can then be rounded up and dealt with accordingly.
Many on this board react negatively to authoritarism and I get it. I am not a joiner and chafe under demands that I do so.
However, the Chinese government just deplatformed some whores and sissy boys in their culture. The Chinese government called them something like “social tumors.”
You can’t tell me that you don’t find this appealing when we talk about this cancerous class of leftitsts.
Better learn to be a joiner.
Otherwise no matter how stupid the rival ideology is , the best organized will win.
Thanks AB. You don’t have to worry, I’ve joined and I’ve led. It just doesn’t come easy.
My Scottish blood wants to stake out a small, hidden corner and defend it with long gun.
But seeing the big picture is a fine motivator.
If I recall my Tolkien, Théoden realizes he must appeal to all who are threatened by Sauron.
If I recall my Tolkien…
If you don’t recall your Tolkien, you’ll never become a full citizens in Neuropa.
China is right about soy-boys and Muslims.
and nationalism, and immigration of non-Han ethnics, and making sure that women are not in charge of anything… Then you look at their suppression of dissent, their callous disregard of privacy and liberty…
It would be nice if we could sit back and let the Chinese totalitarians destroy the Woke totalitarians and cleanse the world of those systems forever so we could move in and restore what people used to call “ordered liberty”. The problem is that there’s no safe observation platform from which to watch the shitshow. You’re on the playing field with them whether you like it or not. Speaking of which what do all of you think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xcvDMDg8TY
The modern incarnation of the village busybody – the eternal student/entry level government ‘servant.’ He’ll be a millionaire while making edicts about how you and the peons shall live. Put something in his drink now and spare everyone the future hassle.
“There really isn’t any need for bloodshed,
Just do it with a little more finesse,
If you can slip a tablet into someone’s coffee,
It avoids an awful lot of mess.”
— The Police, “Murder by Numbers”
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/police/murderbynumbers.html
[a jazz-styled gem, a hint of some of what Sting would do solo. Amazingly some Christian groups got in a huff about this song in the 1980s. I guess they were unfamiliar with the concepts “irony” and “sarcasm”.]
Ben: I’ve never listened to Sting, but those lyrics bring to mind Gilbert and Sullivan.
Elite Overproduction writ large.
False consciousness is what Leftist intellectuals confect to explain why reality keeps refuting their theories. Hence, Leftists are never wrong; they simply haven’t come up with enough theory.
It is interesting to note that student radicals in the second half of the sixties turned against Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer when the latter two told them that they were not oppressed and that they could not be the vanguard of any forthcoming revolution. The Frankfurters were right in the first instance and wrong in the second. At any rate, when the student radicals abandoned the Frankfurt School, postmodernism, spearheaded initially by Michel Foucault, rushed in to fill the void. The rest was the end of the West.
The Frankfurt School has become a totem for the anti-Semites, but Gramsci and Marcuse are much more important in American radicalism.
Absolutely. Especially as it regards freedom of speech and other basic individual rights.
This is true. Of the Frankfurters, only Marcuse didn’t lapse into political quietism. He continued believing in the overthrow of instrumental reason, and with it, the destruction of capitalism. Marcuse also, at least notionally, continued supporting the student radicals.
Habermas, incidentally, a second-generation Frankfurter, sided with Adorno and Horkheimer. He actually referred to the student radicals as leftwing fascists. Suffice it to say that didn’t go down well with the students.
Which makes you worry when Red Diaper Baby Buttigieg, son of Gramsci’s greatest champion in the US, is a rising star on the left.
A friend of mine is a career Adorno expert who couldn’t BELIEVE that ol’ Ted said leftist protest is a ruling-class-directed “pseudo-activity.” Tremendous commie insult. When we were young it was his favorite thing to get loud about at the pub. He understands Adorno’s “paranoia” now, as the great American corporate wokeness blob swallows every formerly Marxist organization in England.
The next leftist I see who learned anything from Foucault will be the first. English-speakers chanting “gaze” and “bodies” and “biopower” since the ’70s are repeating *each other*. They don’t mean (or know) what Foucault meant when he named those things. He’s the least influential famous philosopher of the 20th century, just a false citation.
Interpreting pomos is a crapshoot because anywhere from 25 to 75 percent of what they write is complete gibberish. It literally has no meaning. So, if one is so inclined, the only reasonable strategy for dealing with this material is to read for moments of lucidity and then connect those orts of meaning to form an impression. I’m reading Georges Bataille–possibly the chief influence upon Foucault–and this is my approach.
Now as to whether English-speaking Leftists understand Foucault correctly or not, it’s really not that important. The fact is that these people have created a narrative from his works, and in that respect he is hugely influential. Certainly in America there is no 20th-century philosopher (Heidegger possibly excepted) who has been more influential.
A vote for Gramsci here :), as a negative influence of course
As someone who lives in the heart of these people, I can tell you that their self-delusion is complete. They aren’t pretending. They truly believe all of this.
Put them on a lie detector and ask them if they chose to live in this are because it’s 80-90% white area and they’ll answer “no” and pass with flying colors. They really believe that they chose this area because of “good schools” and it’s a “nice area.” But in their mind, they believe that it just happens to be white.
What’s funny is I know that these people weren’t always so woke, but as the years have gone along, they’ll slowly come to believe what they once only said to not get in trouble. Turns out that you don’t need to put a rat to Winston’s face to get him to truly believe that you’re holding up five fingers. Just have and everyone he knows repeat it every day and a few years later, it’s real.
Also, these people’s beliefs are being re-enforced by the trickle into the area of Asians, Indians and, very occasionally, 0.001% Africans/half blacks who act so very white. They latch onto these people like CivNats latch onto Thomas Sowell, or, as I like to call him, Sir Thomas.
Years ago, a lefty acquaintance told me with a straight face that he moved his family to Arlington Mass because of the diversity. The only diversity in Arlington is the servant class and the non-white college professors. It glows in the dark it is so monolithically white. Of course, I laughed in his face. He never forgave that.
Yes, I’ve learned over the years that pointing out the absurdity of my friends’ and neighbors’ colorblind statements or believes doesn’t exactly go over well, especially if you joke about it – particularly, if you joke about it.
I’ve been the cause of many an uncomfortable silence.
While these people believe what they’re saying, that believe is very fragile because, in fact, it’s a boldface lie. Everyone can maintain their beliefs as long as everyone maintains their beliefs. Anyone poking fun at those beliefs is putting everyone’s situation and view of themselves in danger.
One amusing thing that changed over the past year or so is with people with security clearance. They’re literally terrified to say anything about anything. They won’t even say something in favor of the current orthodoxy out of fear that they might not say it correctly or emphatically enough.
I first noticed it one night when one neighbor criticized BLM and another responded by supporting it. The security guys clamped up. One of them – a serious liberal – didn’t say a word and looked concerned. It was odd because I figured that he’d be all over talking about how he loved BLM. But nothing.
Same thing happened again and again last year. The level of fear with these guys is hilarious. Security clearance is the golden ticket and they’re not going to lose it because they didn’t praise Stalin enough or in the right way.
An old friend of mine lives in a white middle-class enclave. His strategy was to personalize the subject: “how many Moslems do you know?” or “you’ve been an immigrant yourself, so how can you be against immigration?”
I kept insisting “this is not about me, this is about politics”, but he only shut up when I told him that I knew a lot more Moslems than he did, which he had forgotten in the heat of argument.
This is probably a consequence of the de-masculinization of society: everybody argues like women, unable to understand arguments that aren’t personalized.
The only political argument that seemed to give him pause was when I told him his grandchildren wouldn’t have a country to call their own. He dismissed it of course, but you could see it hit home.
Likewise regarding race: I’ve noticed that the degree of admiration people express for Blacks is inversely proportional to their actual experience with them. I recently had an acquaintance condemn me over my race-realist views concerning Blacks. Turns out he’s never actually known or worked with one.
Z has mentioned this and I agree 100%.
Tell people that their children or grandchildren will be minorities in your country. They’ll pretend that they don’t mind, but the majority will feel fear.
Btw, this doesn’t work on young people. They think that a glorious future awaits whites as a part of a multi-culti paradise.
These days, holding a clearance leads to an even dumber eternal game of, “Simon Says,” than all the Beer Flu guidance.
Yeah, but it’s guaranteed job security for the upper middle class. No Indian is going to take your tech job.
Citizen: Highly ironic, because everyone and his brother has a security clearance. I used to have a number of them above top-secret, but it was generally meaningless. The problem is no one’s clearance is ever revoked, and every bureaucrat and politico from every past administration has his clearance automatically renewed ad eternum.
I really don’t know how you continue to survive in the belly of the beast. I grew up in the DC burbs and I loathed all the smug, narrow-minded automatons. There’s a ton of reasons I’ve never gone to a single high school (or college, although it’s hundreds of miles away) reunion, and never will.
It’s tough. Luckily, I moved away from Arlington, which is truly the belly of the beast, but I’m still in the orbit.
Because of their connection to DC, these conservative and libs might be the worst in the country. Sure, San Francisco and NYC are bad, but their jobs and place in the managerial class aren’t directly based on the government. These people are, so they love it.
Btw, my security clearance people aren’t military or intelligence, just working for defense contractors. I do know one guy who’s fairly high ranked in the military. Toughest guy you’ll ever meet, real man’s man and definitely not a desk jockey. He’s totally pozzed. It’s jarring to hear such nonsense from a guy who’s so tough and realistic in every other aspect of life.
Also, he can retire whenever he wants, so he’s not spouting the party line because he needs the money. Decades of being in the military can make you believe anything.
Those who claim to be “colorblind” and don’t seem to understand their own mating and migratory habits, have these beliefs for another reason. They believe that low-educated, “ignorant redneck” types are the ones who believe there are race differences. The last thing they want is to share beliefs with this group, which they despise, and would be horrifying to be lumped together with them.
Agreed. It’s a class thing. The managerial class holds a special hatred for working-class whites. They are terrified of being associated with them. Even the very small number of the managerial class who came out of the working class seem to hate them.
The open disdain that the managerial class shows for working-class whites is astonishing. They’ll praise hard-working Hispanics and black moms struggling to get by all day, but if you bring the troubles of working-class whites, it’s nothing but “dumb hillbillies” or “maybe they get off the oxycontin.” And that’s gentle compared to what you hear about Southern whites.
The only diversity in Arlington is the servant class
Here in Copenhagen, the posh neighborhood is Hellerup, about 10 miles north of town.
So you have one of these perennial political kvetch-fests on how to spread the enrichment around and the mayor of Hellerup righteously argues that his township is as diverse as anything in Denmark, so please to house the Syrians somewhere else, thank you.
Except their diversity are all Filipino “au pairs” which is to say nannies and maidservants that you’re not obliged to pay a minimum wage because they’re here, not as guest workers, but to learn about Danish culture by living with a Danish family, and then help around the house for pocket money.
I don’t know if he believed it – he was a politician after all, so he probably doesn’t know himself when he’s lying.
(My mother was an au pair in England; it remains one of the fondest memories of her life and she still speaks of her hosts with great warmth.)
she still speaks of her hosts with great warmth.
And just a little detail pertaining to the point above about feminization: the father in the family she was with, played rugby.
(Like joggerball but without body armor.)
Not that it matters, but having played both, rugby has a scrum and operates with a different tempo than American football. Rugby does not have an equivalent to the safety, in American football, taking a full-sprint free-shot on a receiver running a pop, drag or slant route. The head trauma and opioid addictions in the NFL are very real and all of the fancy protective equipment can’t prevent the innumerable injuries.
That American football is a pozfest takes nothing away from the sport. It was a great sport in Starr’s time and would still be a great sport today if not for the appropriation of the game by globalists to sell booze, shoes, jerseys and cultural aids.
The players know the NFL is a cushy plantation (NFLPA) and they only publicly say what they are encouraged to say by the plantation ((owners)) or the evil white master Goodell.
Ask Adrian Peterson how his career is doing since he didn’t toe the globohomo line.
I once, probably unwisely, got into a conversation with my hairdresser about diversity and asked her to tell me what she thought was so great about it. She said, I shit you not, “Whites are boring”. So I asked her if she believed that then why did she move into my 98% White neighborhood instead of somewhere in the vicinity of MLK Blvd, Rosa Parks Blvd., or even Cesar Chavez Blvd. (this is Portland – it’s only a matter of time before Washington St. is renamed George Floyd Blvd. Need I mention there is also Harvey Milk Street downtown? My God what an monumental joke this city has become). Her answer? Again, I shit you not, was “It’s too windy over there.”
I suspect a non-Libtard hairdresser is probably more rare than an honest politician.
Peabody: Since (as you and I both know) most women are emotionally incontinent and highly irrational, and love to jabber about utterly inconsequential things that are terribly important to them, and a hairdresser has to listen to that and interact with those sort of people all day, the profession probably self-selects for the type. My last one was a wizard with color, but she was literally an active member of the Socialist Workers Party. She was also of entirely Norwegian stock and she married a mulatto.
I’m still looking for someone new who doesn’t require the face diaper.
Cut your own hair.
Very good post.
Like this “ the narcotic of radicalism played out in the comfort of the gated mansion.”
Wit.
But What is to be done?
Psychosis used to be an individual phenomenon and treated like any medical malady by focusing on the singular person with the affliction. Then industrialization happened and our societies began manufacturing crazy people in huge numbers. Part of this was driven by the extinction of evolutionary culling, part driven by an environment dominated by way too much leisure time, part driven by the Pied Piper effect of professional hucksterism, and part by the emergence of parasitism as a replacement for genuine work ethic. A worthless person knows (at least subconsciously) that they are worthless and therefore must self-delude as a critical defense against overt realization of this defect in their person. Joining a phony cause ce´lebre is the perfect antidote to acknowledging one’s failure as a human being. Can you imagine what it’s like to wake up one day and realize that you’ve taken on a few hundred thousand dollars of University debt and emerged with no useful or employable skills? The proper response is, in fact, insanity.
> Can you imagine what it’s like to wake up one day and realize that you’ve taken on a few hundred thousand dollars of University debt and emerged with no useful or employable skills?
It’s worse than that. It’s one thing to take debt and learn new and profound things about the world, as financially silly as it is in this age. What they were taught was literally anti-knowledge that stunted their ability to actually survey and understand the world they live in.
Yes indeed. As strange as it may sound, most university students leave with fewer IQ points upon “graduation” than they had upon arrival. And this is the part that really amounts to rubbing salt in the wound. Most of these “students” are taking 5 to 6 years to get to graduation and accomplish that goal. And what do they have to show for it? Debt, wasted youth, increased stupidity, a truly screwed up view of the world (totally devoid of reality), and likely a few venereal diseases and abortions to boot. What a great start to life!
It’s no wonder they turn to OnlyFans for income. Depravity is all they can do.
Reminds me of an incident with my father that put it all in perspective. I was visiting him one summer while employed at the university. We began to discuss work—quickly getting to a Blue collar/White collar comparison—and he asked, specifically, what I did at the university.
I responded the normal drivel: write papers, teach classes, hold committee assignments. His response, “That’s what I mean—you don’t do anything!”. 😉
Most corporate jobs are nothing but endless paper pushing and empty, petty office politics.
No one is going to care about that memo you sent or change notice you signed next week, much less five years, unless their goal is to cancel you.
Wild Geese – I had to stop by my hubby’s office this morning for the first time in a couple of years. Whereas before there’d always be a gaggle of ‘working women’ out front (on a coffee or smoke or bitch break), this time it was pleasantly empty. Same with the building’s inside lobby. Same with the office itself (his employer is looking to sub-let at least half the space, as they just don’t need it any more).
The destruction of the female dominated “office culture” will certainly have to go down, along with the end of the idiotic demolition derby of rush hour, as one of the few positive things the Coof Panic-demic brought.
Off topic but: you just can’t escape it.
Was at the coffee shop this morning and a lovely white family came in and sat down. For once the man was actually kind of alpha and they had 2 blond daughters maybe 12 and 8.
I realized that loud rap music was blaring over the sound system, being soaked up by the little girls. Some monkey “rapping” jungle noises is trying to teach those girls to be whores, even at a place as innocuous as the coffee shop.
There is no escaping the evil system. And they’re after your kids.
Whites should boycott any establishment that plays rap. But they won’t because rejection of that savage anti-music is rayciss, and they can’t have that, by gawd.
About 25 years ago my wife and I walked out of a club and I commented to the hostess on the way out that it would have been nice if they played one single song by a White person. The wide-eyed shock on her face made my day.
The jogger music in the clubs has only gotten worse, I imagine.
Lord help you if you live around Puerto Ricans. They will insist that you have no escape from their God-awful African knockoff music, 90% of which uses the exact same drum track. The fact that they never get sick of listening to what is essentially the same song clearly says something about their intellect.
Ask the proprietor/ staff to turn it off.
When I visit my range, you can always tell who is working by the music: one guy always plays death metal (loudly), another guy does 80’s music and a bunch like Tony Bennet and Sinatra.
If I have my wife or boys with me, I just ask them nicely to change the channel. The staff invariably laugh, because they are not jerks and clearly heavy guitar and a guy screaming “DEATHHHHH, F$#@!!!!!!!!!” is not exactly family friendly.
Last weekend, they were playing Dean Martin singing “Hey Mambo” when I walked in.
And people mock the Catholic Church for its Legion of Decency and its banned books!
The Positive Thinking Movement is very much a Bourgeois fantasy that aids in the delusions, and inculcates “false consciousness.” It started in the corporate sector as a way to indoctrinate the middle management and groundfloor laborers to be happy about the scraps they were receiving. “If you are laid off or given a pay-cut, don’t be a negative-nelly, look at this as an opportunity!”
The seminal work is “Who Moved My Cheese?”, a book which compares you the reader to a lab rat in an experimental maze searching for itinerant cheddar. In the parable, all accountability is placed on the individual (lab rat) to merely “react” to their ever changing environment, instead of act upon it, or change it to better suit himself. “Don’t dwell on the fact that your cheese has moved, don’t ask why it moved, just get to it and start the search where the new cheese!”
This initial movement eventually rebranded itself in a myriad different ways, and spread into the broader culture at large. It spawned the “toxic positivity” of financial gurus and life-coaches. Its a sort of surrogate philosophy or surrogate struggle. It protects the mediocre mind from reality, discourages any intellectual thought by deeming critical thinking as “negative” or “excuse making.”
Although I never read that book, these types of books traditionally spawn a couple sequels, a box set of CDs or (really going back in time) cassettes to listen to while you drive or jog, a customized calendar and pen set, and so on. The really successful (viz. Suze Orman) get a radio or TV show.
Just for laughs, I looked up the title on Amazon. I was working for comic effect above, but in fact, there were a “Who Moved My Cheese for Kids” and “Who Moved My Cheese for Teens.” 🙂
What about “Who Moved My Cheese for Workplace Shooters”? Seriously, they showed the WMMC film to us at work when the company I worked for was losing its government contract. We all thought it was hilarious and joked about the obvious attempt at brainwashing. Things like that really show the contempt the upper class has for the cubicle drones.
The fact that SSSniperwolf has 29 million plus subscribers on her utterly tarded YouTube channel is proof we are doomed.
Have to say, one of the blessings of getting older is that seeing some tw(*)t with a tight shirt just doesn’t grab my attention the way it used to.
Now it’s mostly “my god, she gets paid how much for this?”
Something must be wrong with me because middle age hasn’t deflected my gaze from tube-topped tatas one bit.
There’s a really weird aspect of American culture in the 20th century.
It’s the elevation of social status in victimization.
We celebrate victims, find them morally superior, and insightful. And it doesn’t matter what they are victims of. Unfortunate circumstances, tragic accidents, violent predators, their biology, their own choices even imaginary factors. All provide social cache as long as the person feels harmed in some way.
Which is especially odd as this era has been the best ever for human welfare. We have been healthier, more prosperous, freer etc than at any point in time before us.
And yet, we celebrate victims so much that people imagine and claim false victimization for social standing.
I can’t think of any culture in the past that has a similar dynamic. And don’t see how this can lead to anything but disaster in the not so long term.
Older cultures assumed if tragedies constantly hit someone, they somehow deserved it or pissed off the gods in some way and should be avoided. While also not terribly healthy for a society either, it’s better than what we have now.
More often than not the reason bad things keep happening to a person is because that person is doing idiotic stuff.
“More often than not the reason bad things keep happening to a person is because that person is doing idiotic stuff.”
That was certainly true of the people at the homeless shelter I worked at: they remained homeless not because of barriers to their advancement or lack of opportunities to advance, but because of the kind of people they were (mentally ill) and how they acted (crazy-dysfunctional)
There is a particular group of people who have inspired this subverted victimhood hierarchy. Their entire religion is essentially a victimhood narrative. Nearly all their holidays open up old wounds and inculcate a bitter “us vs the world” perspective. They have claimed the last century as their own, and its not hard to see why.
The joke among Jews is all the holidays boil down to “They tried to kill us, G-d saved us, let’s eat.”
We celebrate victims, find them morally superior, and insightful. And it doesn’t matter what they are victims of.
I’d venture it’s a result of late-stage Judeo-Christianity. Jesus was a victim so being a victim is a bit like being Jesus.
Somehow, they keep forgetting that Jesus forgave his murderers instead of treating them to a diversity seminar. Truly, he was the son of God.
No, Jesus told the Pharisees that they would face the wrath of the Romans which they did ( in a parable, Jesus likens himself to the cornerstone of a temple which once removed would collapse the entire structure down upon them). He “forgave” the Romans who nailed him to the cross for they knew not what they were doing. They were carrying out the bidding of the Rabbinical order who condemned him in the first place.
What I hate about our victim hood mentality is that it seems I’m many cases to stymy progress wrt to overcoming adversity and moving on in life, as victim hood is the highest “good” or “status” obtainable these days. When I was young and growing up before this madness set in, the typical response I got as a young child was to grow up and stop crying. In short, life sucks, deal with it.
True. Calling somebody a crybaby today could result in hate crime charges.
Dino – Oh, there used to be social cachet among 18th and 19th century English/American women based on physical illness (real, or more often imagined). The ‘victim’ of ennui, of wealth, fancied herself a poor, woebegone sufferer of crass materialism. The society matron who suffered fainting spells because she laced her corset too tightly was vying with the genuine poor dying of consumption (tuberculosis). Many would even ape the symptoms (pale cheeks, bright eyes) because they were considered highly attractive.
Victimhood confers real benefits, too. College students claiming some half-baked disability get all sorts of preferential treatment on test-taking, and being “handicapped” gets one all of the best parking spots. In the past, nobody wished to be thought handicapped. Nowadays, every third car has one of those damned handicapped cards hanging from the interior mirror.
“Nowadays, every third car has one of those damned handicapped cards hanging from the interior mirror.”
And all it takes to get one is to find a doctor to certify that you have a handicap. No requirement to specify the nature of it or supply proof.
Like getting disability payments from the Gov’t; though that requires two doctors.
Which is a good reason to play along and get a tag yourself. Watch the scolds go apoplectic as you happily park right by the door.
Words of St. Friedrich the Syphilitic 😀
” [T]hose who do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt…, when they write books, are in the habit of taking the side of criminals, a sort of socialistic sympathy is their favorite disguise.”
— Beyond Good and Evil (1886), 21
A prescient man, Ja?
It’s the Disney template and we’ve consumed it longer than most realize.
Listening to a few minutes of the clip, they sound like stale old-guard liberals who don’t realize they have been passed over for a new era.
In a way, they have the same delusions as the conservative gun people, the idea that the people will all of the sudden rise up and destroy their oppressors. The only difference is whether their oppressors are the capitalists or the socialists.
Like the normie right, he hasn’t realized he’s expecting a fairy tale that never happens. Instead, the left-elite has successfully unshackled the chains of economic progressivism in favor of wokism and corporate cronyism.
Frankly, it’s depressing as hell, listening to these true believers, for the same reason it’s depressing listening to a raving schizophrenic in a mental institution.
They’re gone, lost, and are never going to return to the realm of reality.
Listened to a few random minutes of the clip also.
The bald talking head said something to the effect that the Left is more concerned about celebrating themselves rather than actually being effective. That statement I tend to agree with.
Most people, as far as I can tell, conflate emotion with reality, in that to feel something is the same as being something. They perceive no quantifiable difference between feeling virtuous and being virtuous. Thus, the power of words is that it can make people feel something and in so doing make them believe they’ve become something.
Like Blacks are fond of saying: “Do ya feel me?”
Not with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole, Ja’Covidio’us.
Part of this “We’re in this together, and We are looking out for us” attitude has a lot to do what happened to the children of the middle class over the last 65 years. Most poorer ones remained working class, and grew up to become a new generation of Dirt People. The “smart” ones went to college where they all got inculcated with the communism by those who had The Big Plan.
The colleges succeeded in training generations of shills and toadies for Globohomo, and I think at this point the only solution is to cut the student loans and watch the poisonous gourds die on the vine. I figure when the value of money goes the way of single ply toilet paper, they’ll dry up and we’ll see lots of decaying college buildings with plywood nailed over the doors and windows.
Charles Murray’s Coming Apart did a nice job of showing that phenomenon.
Like the Inner Party, the modern establishment actually did (and still kind of does) a very good job of finding potential trouble-makers among the middle-class and working class of all races but, particularly, whites and elevating them to their own ranks, thus giving them a stake in maintaining the status quo.
Starting in the 1960s with the SAT and then with other testing of young kids, smart kids were found and encouraged to go to college where they were indoctrinated in “right thinking,” took on the culture of their fellow smart students, became friends with future establishment members and, eventually, marry one.
It’s an impressive system when you think about it. The establishment thoroughly combs through millions of kids to find and promote the smarts into their own ranks, thus getting the cream of the crop and eliminating possible rivals.
Hell, Charles Murray is a perfect example of that system.
But Wokism is breaking down that system. Merit is getting replaced by affirmative action. The system always had a bit of AA, but AA is becoming the system, which means that you’re blocking out smart young whites or not allowing current establishment whites to rise in the system.
If enough smart whites don’t feel that they have a home in the establishment, that’s going to be trouble for the establishment. But they’re too caught up in their religion to notice, which is good for us.
The problem is, if smart people are not running our power grid, we all die. If smart & brave people are not promoted in our military, we die. If smart & ethical people are not rewarded for thrift, hard work and sacrifice, we get 2020 and 2021.
I sometimes wonder if the gamble our current ruling class is making is that human capital of all sorts, including intellectual capital, will be rendered negligible via AI and other fruits of the technological revolution. If so, they don’t need smart people from any ethnic group. But holding life and human-based intelligence cheaply might not work out for them. We’ll see.
I think their gamble is that they can get enough mental horsepower from talented tenth Indians and Chinese to keep things running. With Mexicans on the lower end doing blue collar work.
Will it work? Hard to say. Certainly not in a democratic system. Singapore kind of works. It also has a competent pro-Han government that doesn’t hate its dominant ethnic group.
Your suspicion wrt AI and robotics is most aptly illustrated by the US military and DARPA. For example, they are developing a robotic “suit” that personnel can wear which allows them (meaning women) to lift heavy objects for the purposes of loading and unloading supplies. Also, the military for some time now has been developing rifles which automatically sight in and in essence hit enemy personnel without much consideration to the soldier’s shooting skills.
They seem to exist under the delusion they will be able to rope enough productive people into the jabports and central bank digital currencies to keep their yachts, private jets, and beachfront properties running while the rest of us are unable to travel more than a mile from home.
These fools fail to understand that all those luxuries are as tied into the current global supply chains as anything else.
This why I’m pretty blackpilled about the short and medium-term, with guarded optimism for the long-term.
Response to B125 below: Yes, Singapore kinda works, but not in the way most Whites assume The giggling and very entitled Han office girls will disdainfully drop their coffee cups and old lipsticks on the ground, in the knowledge that a minimum wage Indian or Malaysian groundsman, grateful for the opportunity to live there and anxious not to lose his job or residency permit, will pick the trash up eventually so the White tourists can proclaim over how neat and clean everything is. There are lots of shiny luxury malls for the top 10% and the tourists, and the regular working class Han make do with the smaller, back road stores and knock off goods, comfortable enough, and knowing that if their kids do well on their exams they’ll be moving up closer to the top 10% – as long as they are Han.
In many ways it’s a microcosm of the decadent west, but it still rewards merit of a sort and the rulers are very clear about whose interests they represent. They are careful not to let the racial balance of the population drop below 70-75% Han.
Singapore is also proof that “but muh restaurants!” works as a justification for multiculturalism outside the West. Although, to be fair, the food is pretty good.
Totally agree, which is why I’m pessimistic for the short and medium term but optimistic the long term.
A response to Compsci and Wild Geese:
42 loaded supercargo container ships in the Port of Los Angeles last Tuesday, with 15 more coming over the horizon.
Nobody to unload ’em. I had to wait, headed for sunken Philly now.
Maybe we could get some of those robot suits busy with the freight.
Heck some robot mechanics too, cuz they aren’t showing up either.
Been there recently.
It’s not just the ships in the harbor, it’s the fact that there are tens of thousands of already unloaded containers stacked on top of each other as far as the eye can see.
It’s surreal. I don’t think it’s the lack of crane operators: it’s the lack of a logistical train to load them onto trucks/locomotives to clear out space for unloading.
I was probably one of those smart whites. The system is failing to integrate us now.
I did go off to university like a good goy, but instead of sucking me into the system, it spat me out. By 2010 many Canadian universities in STEM were already packed with 3rd world aliens. Spending years around hostile tribes, like Indians (who don’t even wash), Chinese, Arabs, and Nigerians turned me racist. These aren’t the white washed 1%ers you see in white neighborhoods, these are savages direct from the slum.
Similarly, upon graduation, just about every neighborhood and suburb in the Toronto area is packed with non whites. It’s great to make a good salary, but… so what? So I still have to live in a third world slum no matter how rich I am, or what neighborhood I’m in?
Basically there’s just about no benefit to maintaining the status quo from my perspective. Having money just means your neighbours are all Chinese money launderers and gang members, instead of stabby Jamaican thugs. Middle class means your neighbours are all hindus or turban people.
Usa is further behind on the replacement curve, particularly among the upper middle and upper classes. But you’ll start to see that more and more there too; the Muslim refugees and Hindu immigrants are pouring into DFW, NOVA, even Metro Detroit. The system is cutting all pretenses of caring for whites and is now telling us to die instead of trying to co-opt us.
The sad thing is, the Goodwhites can’t see it. They WON’T see it.
My leafy suburban paradise’ education factories spit out hundreds of Adderal addicted SJW every year, parents then spend a quarter of a million $ for them to take 5 years to get a degree in history or communications or political science.
None of these offspring can afford the property taxes on a typical house in my town, let alone a mortgage.
But this crowd is the first to crow about the need for “sustainability”.
I am shamed. As an American.
Our literal brother- we would’ve been Greater Canada, had the Revolution failed, born of the same Mother- our most stalwart friend, and we did nothing, NOTHING. We didn’t even care enough to notice.
Citizen,
All true! Modern welfare democracies may be the first institutions to subvert evolution: creating an environment where the least capable among us not only survive, but thrive: out-reproducing everyone else.
Your observation is correct. But the problem is even deeper than that. While it’s probably not his monopoly, it’s one of Nietzsche’s themes. From the moment that man started providing aid to the weak, even feeling pity or showing mercy, he’d argue, we were acting contrary to Nature. Someone else even calls civilization a rebellion against Nature. We all have our religious or other ideals that tell us to value humans over non-humans, or close kin over strangers, etc.
The horrible truth is that eugenics (favoring the successful over the failures in reproduction), culling the weak and the unfit (whether by active killing or simply neglect) and similar troubling concepts are usually exactly what “Nature would order.” In other words, they’re the way the natural world, ex humans, operates.
Sadly, admit it to yourself or not, man’s whims to the contrary are all mere wishful thinking, not in the sense that we can’t sometimes gain a temporary advantage, but that’s exactly the point — it’s ephemeral, bought at some cost, perhaps ignored or simply unnoticed. Nature and the law of the jungle may be delayed, but she can’t be overruled.
I’ve read Coming Apart. As you describe above, especially after WW II, the cognitive elite, the cult of meritocracy, call it what you like, selected for the most intelligent of the population. We’ve forgotten what is perhaps the most important factor: economics.
Increasing income disparity (compare the salary of “average” worker with top management). Generations ago, that average might have been 1:5 to 1:10 (blue collar: white collar). The playing field was more level in society and this went beyond mere incomes. Murray notes, the owner of the factory likely lived in the same town as his workers, just in a slightly better neighborhood. Even if he were a millionaire, he probably didn’t even have a mini-mansion. Their kids might even have gone to the same public schools. In recent times, that ratio is probably 1:50 or 1:100. The top brass is nowhere near the workers, often living in virtually separate worlds. The point of this long diatribe is: Being above-average intelligence become more valuable, reflected in salary power, and thus career choices.
In your grandfather’s time, a bright man might never have received more than an 8th, or 12th if he was lucky, public education. Note that in terms of educational value, those probably equate to, respectively, a high school diploma or BA/BS with today’s “woke” “standards.” But, since intelligence is a powerful advantage, he might have entered a highly skilled trade (e.g. plumber, electrician) or become the owner operator of a small business or farm. The distant academic and city life would not have been seen as a particular perk. Even if he could have afforded tuition, a professional degree would have distanced him from friends and family and not necessarily have increased his earning power much.
In recent decades a person with potential would be a fool to turn down opportunity for high incomes, especially if the local opportunities were paltry, as they usually are. The massive immigration of cheap labor, the disappearance of factory and other lower-skilled jobs, has only exacerbated these trends. In part, these explain why many smaller towns are all but abandoned husks of what they were 75 years ago. And America’s native less-skilled (e.g. the Negro) has suffered for the same reasons — lost employment. The current fantasy world where the non-white are promoted simply for being Not-white-male, will of course, only speed the descent into the pit. Even with the most Woke administration, there are only so many pretend make-work titles and positions that can be created for cronies. Some real work must be done, by competent people, or the entire structure collapses.
The downside of the premium placed on intelligence was the wisest and smartest are drained from the hinterlands, usually never to return. The learning and indoctrination are just part of the process.
In my opinion, these very long-term social and economic trends were not driven by some deliberate policy to harm us. Hanlon’s Razor: Don’t ascribe to malevolence that which can be explained by stupidity.
A lot of it, perhaps all, is explained by my favorite whipping-boy, short term desire for profits over long-term costs. But your opinion may differ.
Income disparity is an obsolete metric because it is a conversation about goal posts from decades ago. Why do you think Steve Jobs and all of the hyper-wealthy don’t care about their $1 salaries? Even the non-hyper wealthy are capped on ordinary income.
https://www.inc.com/barbara-weltman/executive-compensation-deduction-tax-guide.html
The reason we have extensive corporate share buybacks is to convert corporate EBIT into capital gains. If you are serious about non-kinetic tactics, liquidating stocks to buy anything physically real, of utility or enduring demand, is a very real action. Right now a case of imi 556 at midway is less than a roll of silver eagles.
FWIW, these cases weight about 30lbs and are dimensionally similar to a size 13-14 shoe box.
This essay pretty much sums up everything that is the American Branch of Globohomo.
The players are usually lily white, they never show pictures of the mansions they live in or private airplanes they own, and their daily existence consists of moaning and hissing sounds of them telling the Dirt People how they need to live.
Baizuo speak like MLK, live like the KKK.
Way back in the olden thymes I would do the MLK/KKK line in the comments of NRO and half the commenters would have a stroke. That gag never got old.
In my lighter moods, the thing I find funniest about all this is that bourgeois radicalism only really took off in America once we installed the self-esteem cult. Only when kids are taught practically from conception to “just be you” and “you’re awesome just the way you are!” do we see middle class kids frantically trying to convince themselves they’re on the vanguard of world-historical forces. Back in the bad old days, when we were all forced to be rigid conformists, a middle class person could live and die content, knowing that he had a decent paying, socially useful job — a clerk or something — that provided a decent life for his kids.
Turns out that when it’s NOT ok to just be you, people are a lot happier, and society runs a lot more smoothly. Start letting people think they’re awesome just for “being themselves,” and the whole thing crashes faster than Windows ME.
Turchin coined the phrase “elite over production” to explain this, but I think he misses the mark in an important way. Liberal democracy produced an excess of mediocrities who imagine themselves as elite. Liberal democracy is like a fog machine that blinds everyone to the reality of social relations. This allows them to imagine themselves as something they are not, which is always going to be something grandiose and self-flattering.
The overproduction of elites is driven by the festishization of education, not democracy per se.
Which is derivative of the liberal enlightenment paradigm.
Universities certainly have a lot to do with it. Every revolution springs out of the fresh new classes graduating from the universities. Young Puritans with bold new ideas about how to read the Bible. Lawyers and clerks wanting the privileges of the French aristocrats. Bushmill Russian intellectuals wanting to makeover all of the autocracy so that they can look less backwards to the West.
I think all these people are always not quite the elite. They feel like they don’t have the power so it makes them all the more eager to get it for themselves. Not power for power’s sake of course. No, it’s for the people! And how can you be against the People?
The University may well be the worst institution ever invented in Western Civ.
A great deal of Aryan/Nazi ideology sprang from German academia in the second half of the 19th and first third of the 20th centuries.
Seem to recall reading that the original Universities in the UK had guards at the walls to keep the students INSIDE.
(because of all the havoc they’d create in the surrounding areas).
Time to get back to the University roots.
Most states have “education” enshrined in their state constitutions; for instance, California’s constitution mandates that half (!!) of the state budget be devoted to education.
These are the same people who fetishize “Democracy!”, too.
Self-licking ice cream cones. As Citizen brilliantly summarizes, the Beast System is nothing but interlocked, self-perpetuating, self-licking ice cream cones.
George Soros called it reflexivity long ago. It is a self-reinforcing social mechanism that is subject or amenable to emotional manipulation. If you read what he says and has practiced, you bring about the end not by logical actions but by magnifying and exhausting the gap between circumstances and reality.
The guy wrote a manifesto and few outside of finance have cared to read it and those I know of within finance rarely finish it because it is too philosophical and abstract for them.
In ancient times (say, a century ago), a university education was relatively rare. It was possible for the smart, working man, to “work his way through school.” He paid for his own education. Sure, the rich then as now, sent at least sons to university. But more arcane fields were basically expensive hobbies. Your MA in American Literature was pretty useless, except perhaps for a teaching position.
As time wore on, the GI bill and other funding sources (loans!) helped democratize the degree. Also, especially since the 1960s with the outlawing of overt racial discrimination, requiring a “degree” became increasingly a job requirement.
With the burgeoning funding came a new panoply of degrees. A four year degree in golf course management? Physical education? Yep. And plenty of “abstract” ones, where you learn about, well, what useful skills you learn is not entirely clear! But you can’t go wrong with “business” or “international relations” or “gender studies”!
The watering down of the worth of that degree on average, the increase in its cost, and its availability to an increasing share of ever-lower-standards population, were all related trends. To all appearances, this trend has probably reached its limits. Pretty much any person who has the intelligence to tie his own shoe laces can obtain a four-year degree in something today, often fully paid by the State, if he’s a minority. Whether that degree confers any value is often, of course, dubious.
We are seeing the final, or at least, most recent assaults on the remnants of a merit system, in the moves to discard admission standards, have racial quotas, and such, even at once elite institutions.
What will replace this rotten system? Surely it can’t continue as it has been.
Agree with the overproduction of mediocrities who view themselves as something more important.
But as I noted above, I think what’s causing the system stress today is the traditional problem of the establishment blocking out talented people – whites in this case – who really should be elite or, at least, valuable pieces of the establishment.
Sure, there’s still room for white kids of the elite and the upper stretches of the managerial class, but smart working and middle class whites are finding themselves not only shut out of a path to managerial class but denigrated. Heck, even a few white kids from the managerial class are getting sick of being trashed on.
There’s only so much room at the top. If 50% of those slots go to undeserving non-whites, that leaves a lot of smart, talented white people out in the cold with no love nor loyalty to the establishment.
You can see it on Gab. You see it here. These people should be the backbone of the establishment, maybe even part of it’s elite. But they’re not, both because they’re not allowed to join or move up and because they don’t want to be a part of something that hates them.
Ruling establishments are always cause themselves trouble when they block out elites which is exactly what our rulers are doing.
As I read Turchin, this is entirely consistent with his theory.
Psaki is the poster child for the self-important mediocrities.
This is exactly it. Back in the days of crushing conformity (please note the sarcasm here), it was understood that “elite” really meant “elite.” Maybe it was fundamentally silly, like a pro athlete, but no one considered lawyers, doctors, and the like “elite.” Those were called “the professions,” and maybe they were a cut above farmers and auto mechanics, socio-economically, but those extra letters behind your name didn’t make you a genius without portfolio. More importantly, though a farmer and his doctor might move in different social circles (for the most part) they doctor wouldn’t look down his nose at the farmer, and the farmer wouldn’t doff his cap and tug his forelock whenever the doctor entered the room. We’re all in this life together, and we all need each other….
Nowadays, thanks to “self-esteem,” you need letters after your name to be a shoeshine boy… and somehow, some way, the shoeshine boys with BAs think they can look down on the farmers, because they just grow food — what a waste of time, since everyone knows food comes in packages from the grocery store. Stupid clodhoppers probably can’t even spell “intersectionality”….
In fairness to Turchin, I think he’d probably concede your point. If I understand his models/thinking correctly (which I may not), I don’t think it matters to him (or his models) whether “elites” are truly elite or not. What matters is their susceptibility/propensity to radicalization, based upon their disappointment relative to their expectations from society.
I’m not an expert on Turchin, so I could be wrong. I’m not a big fan of Turchin, to be honest, so I could be unfair to him here.
He’s either brilliant or ridiculous.
“Cliodynamics?” Ooookkkkayyy…..
Gotta disagree.
Bourgeois radicalism is something of a misnomer. It’s really intellectual radicalism – which traces back to the 19th century. It only donned the skin of bourgeois in the 50s-60s when the WWII era GI bill sent masses of young people, and then their younger siblings and offspring, to university in large numbers.
The self esteem movement is much younger. It really only began in the 1980s. I lived through its emergence and then dominance. The champagne socialists were already old hat at the time.
I knew that when public education convinced the students that they are “special”, their so-called rights would interfere with those of everyone else. The demarcation point of no return was:
When schools started banning anything with peanut butter in it for the ONE kid who was stupid enough to eat peanut butter.
Haha
Somehow I’d forgotten about that hysteria.
In retrospect, it was a sign of the feminization of society. The prioritization of absolute safety over all other factors.
“The prioritization of absolute safety over all other factors.”
Expressed as “If I have a problem with something, no one can have it / participate in it!”
You are hereby awarded a trophy, and a medal for that comment about the self esteem movement.
Education as an Operah set: You get an A and you get an A; everybody gets an A.
I remember when “special” was a euphemism for retarded, not a description of each and every student. Well, “Hey, scrot, plenty of ‘tards are livin’ a kick ass life.”
“My ex-wife was a ‘tard. She’s a pilot now.”
I dunno, from my youth I remember all those crusty fathers who were sent to the military and then had to find some job to support the woman he impregnated after coming home. Many if not most of them were miserable. You can see the archetype on TV and movies from the 1990s and before. Yes, they did their duty as a man and that’s respectable, but it created a distant and cold father figure that didn’t do anything to help the wife or raise the kids. I only knew a handful of fathers who seemed to enjoy themselves. Nowadays, after all the self-esteem movement and feminism has washed over the land, I see many more fathers engaged in their family and trying to find a meaningful career. Yes these progressive fads have gone too far, but I don’t really want to return to the crushing conformity of the before times.
Perhaps TV is not real. Every way we can measure these things tells us today’s males are more miserable and depressed than their ancestors.
No fault divorce and working moms really did a job on children in the 70’s and ’80’s.
Divorce turned off the dads and mom working turned off the love and attention.
Family court and liberalized divorce were monstrous crimes against the white working and middle class. After the revolution, the people behind that will be disinterred and given the Cromwell treatment.
And the dames ain’t got it any better.
You seem to understand nothing of the before times.
To each their own. Not all remember those days as ones of crushing conformity. In fact, some find this era more conformist. But I suspect the cultural shift reflects the demographic shift introduced by the immigration in the late 1880s and early 1900s. The customs and traditions of heritage America possibly could only feel confining to those who came after. Much of the attack on ‘whiteness’ in this age is really an attack on the ethos and culture of settler America. The same will occur to the amalgam that defines itself as the ‘immigrant’ nation. They are on track to be displaced by the peoples who arrived post-60s, and will likely see their own cultural preferences scorned. What this third amalgam will prefer is anyone’s guess, but it is unlikely to conform to the preferences of the flower children. Nor, for that matter, is it likely to revert to the preferences of the first colonizer/settler culture. If heritage Americans survive at all, I suspect it will be as either a cultural isolate or subsumed by the whole altogether. Their destiny is less secure than many groups who have been conquered before them. They have no mountain ranges to separate them from those who would drive them from humanity’s history books as well as from existence.
Nothing is so herd-like as the avant-garde. And today’s “society” prides itself on being avant-garde.
Good point. As others have already pointed out in different words: We can’t all be special. “Avant-garde” literally means the vanguard or the advance guard. As a military term. But the military has a main body and a rear guard. To belabor the obvious, everybody can’t be point man. In other words, by the original meaning, it is logically absurd to say that all the soldiers could be avant-garde. The only sense I can conceive of would be a Towel of Babel situation. Unit cohesion, any sense of common purpose, was destroyed. So the individuals had no choice but to set off on their own paths.
Now consider “avant-garde” in its more modern sense. The meaning is quite a bit different: it means new, novel, experimental, perhaps cutting-edge; usually applied to art, fashion, perhaps a social trend. In this sense, it IS more feasible. When I obtained my for-enjoyment MA in Lit, we pondered a basic question: How does one distinguish was is truly “new” vs. what is merely “different”? Fashions come and go, the pendulum swings each way. Sure, rarely something truly innovative may come, but much oftener it’s a case of “what’s old is again new” or at the individual level “new-to-me”. The realist sculpture of “modern” (18th century on) times looks remarkably like the “classical” statuary of the Romans or Greeks of 1800 years prior.
“The preacher,” who wrote Ecclesiastes, said “There is nothing new under the sun.” Just so. What they think is avant-garde is most likely just “new-to-them.” Someone probably did/thought/wrote/built/said something remarkably similar a century or ten ago. We all like, in fact, need novelty. But originality is a very rare thing.
I can only be a sample size of N=1, but my father, a WW2 veteran who “Saw some sh-t” in the ETO as a front line infantryman (and earned a Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds) seemed pretty darn happy to me, or at least content. The old man was a mix of Archie Bunker and Old Man Daley (Hizzoner Da Mare of Da Great Citya Chicagah in Chicagoese), and tried to orient me to the ways of the world before he passed too young.
Of course it helped that he helped to build the greatest economy ever seen and got to partake in the bounty it offered. And he cared about all of us and helped out my mother in raising us.
As Z says, not all television or movies are real.
You, sir, are describing my father as well; N>=2. And he was absolutely clear about the source of his peace and contentment: family. Everything for it, everything from it and nothing against it. Until we restore the nuclear family as the apex of culture, nothing can remedy what ails AINO.
If your father saw service in WW2 or Korea, he, like my father, probably lived through The Great Depression. My paternal grandfather kept a roof over his family’s head and food on the kitchen table during all that, but just barely. My father related my grandfather could barely spare a nickel for a candy bar or a quarter for a movie. You stretch a dime to make a dollar when cash is short. And when jobless relatives that lost their house or apartment need to crash with your family while looking for work.
So just as the economy starts looking up Moustache Man starts marching across Europe and Pearl Harbor gets Tora Tora Tora’d and next thing you know the old man is clad in olive drab with a Drill Sergeant swearing at him. And then he gets an all expense paid trip to France (after D-Day) where he spends July 1944 – May ’45 with REAL LIVE NAZIs firing bullets, artillery shells, and mortars at him while freezing his ass off in the woods of Europe.
Then he comes home to the US and has to wait to see when his orders to travel to California and load on a ship come through so he can land on some godforsaken beach in Japan.
Luckily that didn’t happen. So no wonder they all came home and wanted a house, a car, a wife, a family, the baseball game on the radio, the football game on the TV and some damned peace and quiet.
And if they were a little quiet and distant maybe they saw their buddies get blown to bits, or like my uncle, spent time as a “guest” of the Germans.
If I went through that crap you bet your bottom I’d like to just grill and have a beer.
Crushing conformity? Let’s see. In the Fifties we had awesome Jazz, Rock ‘n Roll came into being, TV was a new, shared experience for millions, we had films that actually had intelligent, interesting actors and plots, art was still art, “Avant Garde” was really avant garde, sportsball players were not asked for their opinions on anything other than the game, we had a President who was a retired General who had actually won a war, black families still had fathers, we had newspapers that were actually literate, it was safe for children to play outside, we could hang a rifle in the rear window of our trucks and not be shot dead by “the authorities,” schools taught the “3 R’s,” women who dressed and acted like sluts were called sluts, men who were bums were called bums, etc., etc. I could go on.
I’ll take the “crushing conformity” of the Fifties and early Sixties over this current-day insane asylum any day.
I am a product of those 50’s and 60’s. I have few regrets and am more often surprised as to how my upbringing (I assume) has shielded me from today’s prevalent insanity. All those misguided and unenlightened things my parents did in my upbringing seem to have served me well in the long run.
Or perhaps it is simply Provenance. 😉
I love early rock n roll, thanks to my Dad, and I appreciate the jazz of that period.
Nonetheless, the uptight white Christians who criticized Elvis and what he portended, were absolutely correct.
My interpretation is that our racial enemies had assumed almost total control of our culture in the 50s and executed their plans without opposition. And so, here we are.
The problem may not have been Chuck Berry or Miles Davis as artists, but those controlling our culture.
They’re almost all gone now, but the WWII veteran fathers I knew, including my own, were not miserable. They loved providing for and raising their families. They were “crusty” because that’s a genetic factor for the Northern Europeans who used to be the majority. They built everything we have.
You were on target until the “crushing conformity” statement. That was ridiculous. But the fathers of that generation kind of sucked at being fathers – hence the intolerable baby boomer generation that has FUBARed this country. They were good providers but chose to let the schools and the culture educate and mold their spawn.
Some folks came out of normal families, while others have to deal with lots of interesting domestic situations. Life has always been like that. I came out of the latter, for when my father died we hadn’t spoken to one another for 21 years. I came out of it all with a long and successful career, so I say that’s how it is. You just have to put your big boy pants on and deal with it..
Back in the bad old days, when we were all forced to be rigid conformists
Sarcasm, right?
The Silent Generation in my immediate family (teenagers in the 1950s) all take it as obvious that the 1950s were a nightmare of enforced conformity.
When I call the 1950s “The Good Ol’ Days” they think I’m a fascist. “You don’t know how bad it was to live then. Women couldn’t get abortions or high paying jobs. African Americans were oppressed.”
Perhaps these are these true feelings rather than brain washed responses. We may just have to leave them to their professed preferences when we separate.
“You don’t know how bad it was to live then. Women couldn’t get abortions or high paying jobs. African Americans were oppressed.”
Stop! I’m getting all misty.
Interesting quote—and I acknowledge it began as sarcasm.
Those things one decries not having back then are piss poor, as hoc “solutions” to modern pathologies that have been recently created with the growth and ascendancy of Leftist ideology.
Women did not need abortion (as they exercise that “right” today), because they learned to keep their legs closed pending marriage.
Women didn’t need outside employment as they need today because men were able to support the family on one (the man’s) income—and further, because women had a defined place in home and family, men were willing to take on the responsibility of wage earner and father. The beginning of feminism and the welfare state—with its unceasing need for revenue (taxes)—blew that one out of the water.
African “Americans” were kept in their place (repressed) such that their particular pathologies were relegated to their own kind in their own areas—and I would argue that in many respects they were more free (from White morality) in those dark and repressed times.