Note: The weekly Taki post is up. This week is a return to a topic that cannot be stressed enough, it seems. More important, the editor there insists on using lower case for Left and Right, which seems wrong to me. The word left is a direction, while the word Left is a proper noun for a political philosophy. Clarity seems to require capitalizing these words. There is also the Sunday Thoughts podcast up behind the green door. There are no grammar disputes in this week’s show.
Imagine if all of a sudden you were transported to a place where all of the walls are clear and no one was allowed any clothing, other than that which is completely transparent, like the walls of every structure. Everything about you, even your most intimate habits are on public view. Obviously, this would also mean that everything about everyone else is on public view. Further, your thoughts can be read by anyone and everyone, so that even inside your head is now public.
It makes for an interesting science fiction plot, because for most people such a world would be a nightmare. Even the most freakish exhibitionist has some need for privacy in his life. According to the Bible, the first thing man did when he became self-aware was cover himself. The story of Adam and Eve was created in a time of minimum privacy, yet people at the time understood that there is a natural human need to maintain a domain of life away from public view.
Even though privacy is something that exists to some degree in every settled society, we can be sure that it did not exist before humans settled down together. A group of humans hunting and gathering within a range would have no privacy. They would do everything as a group. Of course, this would have bound them together, as sharing is the nature of human relations. Since these groups were blood relatives, the lack of privacy probably helped them survive in the wild.
What this means is that the concept of privacy probably evolved along with human settlement, which means it is an asset for settled people. Once groups of humans began to cooperate so they could operate in groups larger than the Dunbar number, they must have evolved traits that maintained the small group cohesion, while preventing conflict between groups. The first private moment was one group not sharing what they truly thought of the other group.
It is not hard to see how privacy was an asset for people living in relatively close proximity in small villages. Lots of unrelated males, for example, would be cooperating, but also competing for mates. Similarly, the females would be weaving the social fabric of the village, while keeping an eye on one another to make sure they did not lose their mate to another female. The privacy of home life probably evolved as a way to avoid the poaching of mates within the community.
Even if we put mating aside, the creation of a private domain separate from the public domain is an obvious peacekeeper. In a small group, disputes can be solved by the leader imposing his will on the group. Once you get past a certain number, that is impossible and small disputes could easily become big disputes. The private domain is where Grog can tell the missus what he really thinks of Trog, without creating a feud with him and possible drawing in the whole community.
Another point in favor of the essentialness of privacy in large societies is the fact that authoritarians always seek to violate privacy. The communists, for example, would listen in on citizens and rummage through their lives. For this reason, the Founders put in the Bill of Rights the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” What constituted reasonable in this context was a direct threat against the security of society.
As a narrow tool of terror, violating the privacy of citizens is effective, but very expensive to maintain, which is one lesson of the Soviets. It is not just the practical cost of mass spying, but the cost to social trust. In a world where anyone can be a conduit for the state to listen in on your life, the willingness to trust strangers drops to zero. The only people you can trust are blood relatives and associates who have everything to lose by violating your trust. Criminal gangs did well under communism.
There is another angle to privacy. Privacy is the key to one’s identity. It’s why militaries march recruits around naked so much in their initial training. Criminal gangs, like some motorcycle clubs, will do the same thing to prospective members. Take away a person’s privacy and they can no longer stand apart from the rest. It’s hard to hold yourself distinct from others when they know even the most intimate things about you, which is why authoritarians love violating the privacy of others.
This may be one key to understanding why modern America appears to be having a nervous breakdown. The microprocessor revolution has had many consequences and not all of them have been good. It has made it cheaper and easier for authoritarians to pry around in the lives of others. Everyone lives in a world where they are tracked by agents of the state, who also act from private interests. They are even trying to tease out our thoughts from our internet activity.
Not only has technology made it easier for the state to violate your privacy, but it also has weaponized the worst elements in every society. People who call themselves “extremist researchers”, for example, are just busybodies encouraged to violate the privacy of their fellow citizens. For most of human settlement, there were rules to keep this type under control, because they endanger social cohesion. The gossip is a greater threat to the whole than any criminal, because they undermine social trust.
There are many things that are causing American society to crumble, but one big one is the inversion of privacy. The lives of citizens are put on display, but the facts of public life are routinely hidden in waves of lies. Activist organizations like CNN threaten to ruin private citizens if they refuse to be props in their charades, but also tirelessly work to prevent the public from knowing the truth about public policy. The collapse of privacy is turning America into a large-scale prison camp.
The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!
Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.
The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.
Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at
sa***@mi*********************.com
.
Ends must be supported by Ways and Means, but there are none.
The Ends then are better left unsaid and the Means ORGANIZED then the Ways shall be enabled and constrained by means and marshaled towards Ends.
Or: until you have more than complaints in one hand and shit in the other perhaps it’s best to stop challenging powerful groups with enormous means, ruthless ways whose End is POWER and they tolerate no Challenge.
Conservatism is utterly vanquished and discredited so you can stop kicking the dead horse. Instead go get some horses, fodder and carts for the now orphaned to defect to…not ideas. F_ck ideas. Get something real.
Reaction is tolerated because it is a gripe club of less than 200 posters including the Feds. A joke. Not worth mentioning nor mentioned since 2016.
Harmless eccentrics not worth mentioning.
So no yer not Samzidat, just online comedy, go make something real and perhaps people will follow.
Until then it’s all Democrats, all Cathedral, all Woke because nothing else exists.
Your act is growing tiresome.
Your scenario _is_ a science fiction plot: We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Anyone else check the newswires in the past few hours?
Now our idiot media is earnestly trying to claim that Beer Flu has killed as many USonians as the 1918-19 Spanish Flu.
I hate this timeline.
Wild Geese – The construction workers (tradies) are marching en mass in Melbourne after the government shut them down when they opposed enforced vaxxing. Suddenly all those cops that were pepper spraying and mobbing grandmas aren’t so eager for confrontations.
Ignore the mainstream media. Their goal is to lie and convince you the fight is lost. You can’t change what they’re doing and you generally can’t reach most normies, so tune it all out. Focus on something positive, go workout, read a good book, watch the tradies marching. Don’t let the media manipulate your emotions.
Good advice 3g4me.
Find a few ppl whose words you trust and ignore the rest. News is supposed to be an account of what happened, however our propaganda media is an account of what didn’t happen. Psyops.
Don’t despair, but if you do, carry on anyway.
Reading Colin Woodard’s “American Nations” … the point he makes is that the elite of New England were solidly in favor of Independence, as their own privileges were revoked. New York and Pennsylvania were abstainers, as their privileges of long standing self rule and their local big shots making big, were not at risk. Tidewater Virginia came down for Independence as the local gentry there like Washington and Jefferson certainly were at risk.* Appalachia split between the northern part fearing British arming the Indians to keep them East and the southern part where a grudge against the Deep South gentry made them back the British.
*Woodard makes the case that the key cause of the American Revolution was the new London Elite determined to revoke the freedom of the local American elites in a massive centralization scheme. Revoking both Tidewater Gentry’s ability to run things for themselves and New England’s.
Point being that the constant surveillance is done to kick people out of power, positions, and such often by those wanting their jobs. Some will stick to their ideology, even then, but not many. And especially for White men, power and position is everything. Most can and will see this as an existential threat to their ability to attract/keep a mate, family, etc. and will turn against it. Salem Witch trials abruptly ended the moment the Governor’s Wife was accused. It just needs to rise high enough which human nature guarantees — there are no shortage of diverse and empowered, stunning and brave people of BIPOC or S.H.I.E.L.D. or whatever that want someone else’s job.
The Tyranny is ugly, but it’s working.
If it’s ugly but it works…
We are the light, they are the darkness. And one by one all lights are being extinguished. We must do our utmost to preserve illumination for this world. Without us, the abyss beckons and an eternal night descends.
No, there’s no us, and a gripe club at the end of the online universe is just a bunch of bitchy old men.
Who could be more, but that requires risk, so = nothing.
Speaking of what Grog thinks of Trog, it’s been such a pleasure to hear the loud, lyrical chants of “F joe biden”. The only way it could be any sweeter would be for them to follow up with “F george bush”. Obama often spoke about fundamentally transforming America but he really didn’t need to as bush jr. was such a disaster on so many levels. From immigration, wars and spending to the massive expansion of the surveillance state. His recent remarks comparing those who attended the Jan 6 rally to terrorists were absolutely abhorrent. At least he is opening the eyes of “normie”, civic nationalist conservatives and disclosing what the republicans truly think about them.
The last president who I don’t feel like cursing was Coolidge.
To be fair he was mostly silent.
A fantastic quality in a president!
There was a book I had concerning quotes from Coolidge. I loaned it out and it’s now long gone. But I remember being impressed, very impressed. If silent Cal was hesitant to run off at the mouth, he was nevertheless a deep thinker. His conservative bent was everything that once made this nation great. Too bad we didn’t listen.
President Coolidge and his wife were being given a tour of a farm. They each had their entourage which visited different parts of the farm at different times.
When Mrs. Coolidge reached the chicken coop area, she was amazed at the… shall we say activity of a certain rooster. She asked the tour guide how often the rooster has relations. ’20 times a day, ma’am’. ‘Wow!’ She exclaimed. ‘Can you please tell that to the President when he arrives?’
Later, the President arrives at the chicken coop. The tour guide approaches him ‘Sir, the First Lady wanted me to show you that rooster. He has relations 20 times a day.’
Silent Cal furrows his brow ‘ Same hen every time?’
‘No, Mr. President. A different hen every time.’
‘Please tell that to the First Lady.’
Yes, and before that, William Henry Harrison.
“We are the mediocre Presidents.
You won’t find our faces on dollars or on cents.
There’s Taylor, there’s Tyler, there’s Fillmore and there’s Hayes,
There’s William Henry Harrison.”
“I died in thirty days!”
You can’t screw up much in thirty days. With US presidents, less is more.
John Tyler was born in 1790. Two of his grandsons are still living.
It’s a damn good thing that Harrison only lasted a month. He was a war mongering bastard on his way up.
Bush is the ultimate scumbag. However, chanting “F Bush” would be gleefully interpreted by the Enemedia as pushback against the “F Biden” chants. Now if we could get people to chant “F Bush and Biden,” the problem would be solved.
I suspect the “FJB” chants at college sportsball games are an expression of anger towards the “ruining” of the “College Experience”. Now every poster here could recite chapter and verse why you shouldn’t attend college (Severian I’m looking at you), but young adults still want to get the “College Experience”:
– Party
– Chase romance (OK, chase sex)
– Attend sporting events
– Make new friends
– Party
– Get the Hell Away from their parents (although from what I’ve heard, this may not always be the case)
– Potentially learn employable skills
So you go tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to go to Big State U or Ivy U and then all the sudden you’re sent home (and still pay room and board) or locked in your rooms, masked up, taking classes over Zoom, no sports, no parties, no romancin’, no fun.
Yeah, I’d be upset too. And looking for someone to blame.
Long term it’s a good thing. Certainly nothing wrong with partying or finding love but people are getting thousands into debt for useless degrees, just to act like total degenerates for 4 years.
Meanwhile the asian invasion into STEM and other paying fields continues unabated while the white guys are drinking every day and finishing their kinesiology degrees.
Yeah, I won’t get started — I could write you a book — but even I get it: College rules. I myself chased as much tail as anyone back in my undergrad days, took the old marketing slogan “Drink Canada Dry” as a personal challenge, and if I didn’t attend too many sporting events, it was because my alma mater were cellar-dwellers in the Yalta Conference. Best four years of my life, if by “best” you mean “experiences so great, I wish I could remember a lot more about them.”
If college were just that, and you happened to learn a few things on the side, then I’d say it’s worth going (although not at today’s ridiculous prices). But it’s not, and the few things that are even kinda sorta like that are being ruined.
Yeah, F Joe Biden indeed. The only question is, is this puerile “rebellion,” or do they mean it? We’ll soon find out.
GenX EE with later CS PhD and JD with patent law LLM tucked in here.
It has paid off in spades.
You got into one of the ultimate niche of niche law fields with exceptionally specialized training, congrats. That’s clearly applicable to what he was discussing and we are no longer able to make generalizations because of your experiences. NAXALT prevails!
Over-achieve much? 😀
Yeah, sitting around acting like an old fuddy duddy during undergrad is one of my life’s regrets.
The bar that served under 21s was on the next block over from my building.
Re Z’s excellent Taki’s column on the one sided morality war… The Left has established the acceptable morality that is enforced by all institutions while the Right still talks facts. Consequently, as Z notes, the Right always loses to the Left.
It took the Left 100 years to get us to the point where we are at today: a rapidly deteriorating country with a gynocentric morality system. If you look at the things our side wants (such as a good economy, individual freedom including free association and the ability to be left alone, strong borders and due process) those are all very patriarchal goals. Our prevailing morality is centered on things like compassion, inclusion, equality of outcome, big government, women having it all, open borders, bonding over hysteria, etc. Those are moral values that most appeal to women.
To change at this point from a female to a male centric moral system will take at least another 100 years and probably longer since we control zero, zip of the institutions.
Our role as bad people needs to be helping others on the right understand that we are losing due our not controlling the moral framework of the culture
“To change at this point from a female to a male centric moral system will take at least another 100 years and probably longer since we control zero, zip of the institutions.”
Or a civil war on our home turf.
Yeah, we don’t have 100 years, nor is moral suasion our strong point.
I think it took 500 years. It was Martin Luther who spearheaded private judgment over an objective norm. He’s one of the most destructive men that ever lived.
Now, throw your tomatoes, dirty protestant trash!
” The collapse of privacy is turning America into a large-scale prison camp.”
Absolutely true, but an even more disturbing aspect is how many mostly White Americans want to be prisoners. There is an absolute thirst on a part of many, and it may even be the majority, to submit to authority and follow all official narratives no matter how transparently false. In my decades on earth, this has been the greatest sea change in beliefs and behavior in the Anglosphere. Even propaganda has a niche audience who enjoys being misled and deceived. In a total inversion, this desire to submit is now stronger in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand than it is in Germany and the Scandinavian countries.
There are diminishing regions, particularly the South and Appalachia but certainly not exclusively there, where opposition to authority remains strong. It intensifies the hatred outsiders have toward these areas. If John Carpenter honestly remade THEY LIVE, the protagonists likely would be happy to realize they are being manipulated.
While he was (and justifiably so in many ways) widely derided for claiming the CCP leadership depends on citizen support in China, it is not untrue as far as it goes. Police states require substantial acquiescence and, unfortunately, that isn’t hard to attain in contemporary America.
*I omitted an important point. This is the behavior of the irrationally religious who adhere to the strange new faith you mention from time to time.
The acquiescence will evaporate as soon as the gravy train stops running.
Our government has proactively seduced the US population into parasitic servitude via endless handouts and a subsidized artificially high standard of living for every voting block. Even our poorest class of citizens (and illegals for that matter) can easily acquire food, housing, medical care, education, and a base income for starters. And most now have multiple automobiles, cell phones, flat screen TVs, computers, and an expensive wardrobe to boot. Who wouldn’t sell their vote for ride on the gravy train? But can the gravy train run forever without productivity behind it? Methinks not.
“The acquiescence will evaporate as soon as the gravy train stops running.”
We are probably seeing the fog of a war between elites.
The Deep State Swamp vs China’s puppets vs the 1001 Club (the Davos class).
If the US loses its ability to project military force, the dollar loses its reserve currency status, and all the Pentagon profits and pensions go away.
China’s puppets would benefit as viceroys in a satrapy.
The 1001 Club has to lays bet on both sides, trying to ride two tigers, as we proles are eating up their resources.
This is a war of survival, at the top.
But, as Dobson notes, the most remarkable thing in the Anglosphere is the war on the proles. Instead of ‘citizen of the world’, the small hats and their century long war of the mind have succeeded in creating a beta class that longs for an alpha- a ‘congregant of the world’.
“Pick me, pick me!” they cry, hoping to be saved from the sins that keep them out of the Garden of secure incomes, fine homes, and diversity-free neighborhoods. With tickets to exotic human zoos for spice, proof that they are worthy.
What can we offer them? Even their own children are fashion accessories, and their ancestors are despicable.
Spot on. I initially thought it was fakery, but the Tribe has turned against China, likely because it cannot control it. The Puritans are pro-China for material reasons. This has been the first split among the Ruling Class in our lifetimes.
There is no war between the elites. Nor will there be, we bootstrap from the 85% underclass (us) or we perish. Submission is slower death (maybe) surrender is no longer an option. They know we’ll kill them if we get another chance, they’re right.
Disagree although “war” may be an overstatement. There is a discernible schism over China as laid out above. You see that most widely in the division between the MIC/Corporate Clown World and State/Israel/IC. Biden has been on the take from the PRC for years and those who control him want to keep lapping up the Chinese cash, and the (ironically) non-military component is sabre rattling.
I hope this is correct, Tom, but I’m afraid it is deeper than the material.
The sense of rebellion, non-conformity and independence has almost completely vanished throughout the western world. In its place reigns an ovine slavishness and utter docility, not to mention an abject unwillingness to think for one’s self. And this general collapse of one’s self-respect as an autonomous human being seems to have transpired in about 15 years time. Frankly, it is dumbfounding.
That aspect indeed has been such a rapid development it boggles the mind. I have lost friends and respect for many due to their slavish behavior. This predated Covid.
My general regard for the human race–already far from stratospheric, mark you–has taken a huge hit over the last couple of years. How can one esteem highly a species that is so servile and frankly stupid?
Something stunning is you still hear Con, Inc, deride French cowardice. Like, really?
People put on those masks as if it was something they had longed for all thier lives, but never knew it.
Disgusting
The whole point of the “digital panopticon” is self-censorship. Only the dissident or the creative person needs privacy. The hive minds act out publicly – that’s the whole point. The intent of our rulers is ultimately to have us censor ourselves because it’s a lot easier for them.
Who among us has not already censored himself or herself to some degree. I know I have. It’s complete professional suicide otherwise. I mainly look forward to retirement so I can “let it all hang out” (metaphorically of course) from some undisclosed redoubt.
Excellent point, but there is a distinction between self-preservation and voluntary recreational self-censorship. It is the latter that is most disturbing. It’s an indicia of a strange religion.
O, for eff you money!
And for a bank willing to take your F-you money after you’ve told the world to F-off. Look at Gen. Flynn….
Have to store it in the Payless shoe box underneath the pyracanthus out in the back yard…
Those of us with a libertarian mindset couldn’t understand why conservatives eagerly embraced the drug testing racket, which came from the drug war racket.
Neither racket benefitted society, and their social effects resound far outside the very narrow channel of legal decrees (which were themselves based on previous rackets).
Go ahead, define “less”. Less harmful, less sick, less costly.
It seems to me that the opportunities for virtue signaling were simply too great.
Those evils you cite wrt drug usage came from the same thinking as we seem to suffer from today. In the bad old days, when drug use exploded, we thought we could win the “war on drugs”—so everything goes. We lost.
Today we fight a war on Covid. We think we can eradicate a viral disease, so everything goes. We’ll keep escalating until exhaustion. All damage to individuals and society is “collateral” and those in control are to be held harmless—a general, a President, or your next door neighbor.
An exact corollary, thank you, Compsci.
So
“we thought we could win the “war on drugs”—so everything goes. We lost.”
At some point it will occur to our overseers that they have only ever won wars against other governments,
Winning is never the point of starting a forever war on a nebulous concept (“terrorism”) or endemic, widely dispersed diseases whether of the social variety (drug use) or the physical (a virus known for especially rapid mutation and easy spread). There are usually two motives behind these things. Obviously control of people is a main driving force but financial gain is always there too and the same people tend to be in position to benefit from both.
The seemingly sudden abandonment of a major front in the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan may be reason for a sort of grim hope, the hope that the exhaustion phase Compsci alluded to above is nearing at least for one of the ruling class’ demonic little projects.
As a PoD (person of dirt) I can only guess. Z’s metaphor of the old sovietologists trying to discern the state of the Inner Party from the color of Khrushchev’s tie applies here too. If Afghanistan was the first of the balls they were juggling to fall, the others may slip away with little notice as well.
We can argue about ‘benefits’.
What is disconcerting is how much power this gave to government actors. Also strangely suspicious was the universal global ban on such a minor thing as a mild plant with thousands of uses.
The latter seems like a camel’s nose under the tent, a slippery slope, and is the oddest (and unnoticed) thing.
Yeah, as teapartydoc said, “it’s the weed.”
Without that doorstop, our poor Zman might never have had libertarians to hang.
And please, by all our gods please, don’t get all anal and start with the endless boring go-around on “drugs”. I’m talking about the loss of even the most intimate privacy in favor of chasing a phantom menace. No, actually, I ponder the eager embrace. And global nature!
Alzaebo: “Those of us with a libertarian mindset couldn’t understand why conservatives eagerly embraced the drug testing racket, which came from the drug war racket.”
Answer: Because we don’t want to live around people whose major focus in life is getting high. We want to exclude people for whom drugs is the focal point of their lives.
One of my best friends is a successful and energetic entrepruener in Portland, OR. He is always high but that doesn’t seem to impact his effectiveness.
However, drug legalization is his big issue. He wants people to be able to get high all the time without consequence. He doesn’t realize what an outlier he is.
I offer Portland, OR as an example of the outcome of his beliefs. I love the guy but I do not want to live in any municipality where he can vote or exert influence.
Line: I wasn’t going to reply to Alzaebo, but I feel compelled to support your stance. I am no libertarian, and I come down wholeheartedly on neither side with regard to drugs and legalization – haven’t figured out precisely where I stand on the issue. What I would emphasize, however, is that there will always be a certain percentage of people, regardless of race, who just cannot handle the responsibility of their own lives. Whether we like it or not, they need someone to be daddy and control their worst impulses. Not because these impulses destroy these individuals, but because of the second and third degree effects and consequences on their community.
No man is an island, etc., and while I would ordinarily tell people to do what they want in the privacy of their own lives, that’s not how it works in the real world. We’ve seen this regarding sexual licentiousness and the effect on families, and the same goes for drugs or any issue or substance that has negative effects that spill over to others. Again, I don’t have the answer or support any one particular policy, and I don’t trust the government to do anything right, but neither do I fully trust most individuals to possess common sense or even a modicum of intelligence.
Sigh. I’m sorry I brought it up. It seems to be the precursor to today.
So, you’re good with cancel culture, right?
We must drive those Trumptruthers entirely out of our society. The unjabbed are too dangerous to let live.
The fundamentalists will kill everybody, that’s how dangerous a Book is, yeah?
See what I mean? If any of these ideas- a vote, a shot, a Bible, a plant- goes global, then why? Why?
Imagine a UN declaration that every country on Earth signs on to. Never the worst things. Why? Why do principled people latch on like a terrier onto minor habits of their neighbors? How in he!! does that become a UN declaration?
Punishable by death? How the effing eff can conservatives support that kind of government power? Yet the liberals are becoming the hardest of conservatives now.
Goshdam I’m sorry to abuse the comment space as I do, but Mike Reagan once said he was on a bus in Malaysia. Police stopped the bus, and marched three teenage boys off.
By the side of the road, as the passengers watched, they shot the kneeling boys in the back of the head. Conservatives calling into the show were cheering this. What the eff?
Ah dammit. For a pinkie-nail sized piece of hash in one of the boys’ pockets.
Yes, that’s all, as the cops themselves said.
If the harshness of the punishment reduced crime, then we’d have the death penalty for diving infractions and everything else we criminalize.
Back in the days of merry old England, there were something like 100 or so crimes that earned capital punishment—like pickpocketing. Even so, public hangings brought out the pickpockets who had a field day circulating among the gawking crowd.
By rolling out the red carpet for the drug testing racket, you greenlighted the hijacking of your associational freedom to live in neighborhoods free of homeless encampments, methadone miles, and negroes.
I will think about your point. Life is tradeoffs and choosing the least bad option.
The way I interpret what you are saying: Suppose that we have two or countries that are comparable and one of legalizes drugs and one criminalizes drugs.
I am sure that the one that legalizes drugs will have more crime, homelessness, and leftism. You are saying that the one that criminalizes drugs will have worse problems.
Thank you for thinking about my point.
No, I am not arguing as you construe; however, let me address your point and assume that we have two comparable countries, one which legalizes drugs and one which criminalizes drugs.
It is entirely conceivable / possible that the country that criminalizes drugs will have less homelessness, less crime, less social dysfunction, fewer feral negroes, fewer George Floyds, fewer Karens, fewer Kens, fewer Stasi, fewer feds, fewer know thy customer laws and regulations, fewer Pavlik Morozovs, a much lower percentage of its productivity siphoned off for corruption, make work, and unproductive purposes, and more privacy and a morally superior populace.
Its just not probable. More likely, the costs inherent in maintaining what inevitably would transmogrify into a WOD would be greater than those incurred in a live and let live society.
Ask yourself: How could a WOD regime exist without
a DEA?
Secret police?
Pre-employment drug screening?
On-going employment screening? Checkpoints, arbitrary searches and seizures?
An incessant see something, say something propaganda blitz?
A general disdain for privacy and contempt for the sanctity of a man’s home?
A TSA to grab, grope, prod, and poke?
Mandatory evictions for public housing tenants who possess drugs?
A humongous prison system stocked with patronage payola?
Drug testing companies?
M-Wraps?
More and more SWAT?
More and more veneration of AGWs?
More snooping of finances?
Organized crime?
Black markets?
The above is just off the top of my head. The WOD has given us all of that at a tremendous cost to WHITE PEOPLE. Just think of all of the capital, human and otherwise, that has been sacrificed at the altar of this suicidal objective
The utopia is thinking that we can eradicate drug use.
Thus, a country that criminalizes all drug use, is going to have to launch a WOD. Its inevitably is inextricably linked to its totalitarian ends. It necessarily will have to upend civil norms long a hallmark of the west.
Conversely, a society that adopts a laissez faire approach to drugs would not be required to suffer a spectacular misallocation of resources occasioned by a WOD. To be sure, there might be more drug use and its concomitant external costs, but such costs would be far more sufferable.
Thanks, Line, but it wasn’t about “drugs”, despite the “aspirin is exact same thing as heroin only 100 times worse!!” argument, it was about the eager acceptance of a global regime.
The small government conservatives never meant a word of it.
Let me rewrite this a bit.
“I want people to be able to stay drunk all the time without consequence.”
and
“I don’t think alcohol as such should be made illegal while public drunkenness and doing potentially dangerous things like driving while drunk should be illegal but not punished in particularly draconian ways”
are not the same thing. The latter is my position as you might guess. I used to live in Portland and now still live in the suburbs of it. It’s an odd case because the general culture here attracts lowlifes and hedonists from the entire country and weed was de facto legal years before it was de jure legal.
Portlanders don’t favor legal weed out of any belief in freedom but because for years it was one of the few places in the country where you walk down the street smoking weed and not get arrested. Fun fact: on a recent (undesired) trip into town I was usually the only person on the streetcorners without a mask. The little P-town fruitcakes gawked at me like I had horns. Most Portlanders are not any kind of libertarians, just commies who like to get high. That’s why they’re all in on masks, vaxxing, and persecuting the unvaxxed. I fully understand Z’s hatred of self-described libertarians though, and his categorization of them as Leftists. This is what the majority turned out to be. Trump (and later the Covid panic) was a kind of UV light that made them glow bright commie red.
There tend to be two main varieties of libertarians actually. The dont-touch-muh-weed kind and the dont-touch-muh-shekels kind. Neither really cares about privacy and both are fine with totalitarianism as long as it leaves them with whatever little bauble they think they’ll get to keep when the stormtroopers roll in.
My bestie and his missus are exactly the “muh weed and muh shekels” liberals parroting and protected by the system. The conservatives never realized they were building their own jails, running after ‘one world government’ leftys and begging for their approval.
Because we don’t want to live around people whose major focus in life is getting high.
A majority of young people in are society are on one form of mind altering pharmaceutical or another.
Roger Hedgecock: “Congressmen at a taxpayer paid 6-martini lunch writing another drug bill, washing down a handful of lithium” being voted for by people who spent middle and high school in a chemical cocktail daze. They became Uni grads in ‘therapy’.
If our leaders were actually worried about conspiracy theories, they would at a minimum, stop spreading them. They would also stop selling their trust.
As the managerial class tells obvious lies as being the gospel truth, the public’s trust in them collapses.
Everyone knows what happens when you get caught in a lie. Your friends and family don’t just not believe the lie they caught you telling, they stop believing you in general. Everything you say becomes suspect.
The rise of the “conspiracy theory” is a symptom of the lack of trust in the authorities.
What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and reality?
About two weeks.
A problem, where I sit and consider the flagrant violations of Americans’ 4th Amendment Rights is the imbalance of it all.
The State, including its “private industry” tech allies invades your privacy in unlawful and unethical ways. You have no privacy.
You, on the other hand, are forced to deal with impersonal, unidentified and thus private invaders that use bland emails to inform you that you have been censored, deplatformed for some thought you revealed, words you ‘posted’. And before someone says that the victim made it public, we have a snitch society where children publicly denounce their parents and where the ‘government’ routinely ignores FOIA requests or ‘redacts’ any useful information.
One possible solution can involve the same technology used by the transgressors, with a hint from Solzhenitysn. What is that ‘anonymous’ sender of your ‘notice’ or ‘warning’ from some tech geek behind the scenes instead had a name and title and other identifying information. Do you think said noodle-armed geek would be so bold? Cannot the same technology that is used to violate you be used for this purpose?
When the oppressors can have the curtain pulled back, and experience fear each time they hit ‘Send’ to threaten you … the balance may shift.
Detraction is a serious thing. To tell truths about someone that others need not konw, in order to destroy or damage the persons reputation will send you to hell, its a mortal sin. Ones reputation is all one has.
“You, on the other hand, are forced to deal with impersonal, unidentified and thus private invaders”
This is a good point too, think about the anonymity a bank, or amazon. They know everything about you, but who are you talking to? Someotne in India?
Nikki Minaj posted the names, addresses, and photos of the doxxers who attacked her.
Make new friends, meet new people!
MisterRogers: Look at the oppressors in Australia. All those cops beating up White protesters have families and neighbors. Someone knows their names and address. Yet zero pushback and zero consequences. I mean personal consequences. And I expect a number of people here to cavil at attacking the cops’ ‘innocent’ families, when they will not cavil at arresting you for trying to prevent the forcible vaccination of your children.
One side has made it totally personal, no holds barred. It’s not merely the dissident who is banned from various online and real-life activities. They have gone after people’s children and their parents. One blogger I used to read quit because he had been doxxed and the left had gone after his young nieces and nephews. But even those on the DR claim we can’t ‘stoop to their level.’ Until we are willing to fight with no holds barred, we will continue to lose. All morality will have to be situational (and racial) until after we win.
“Someone knows their names and address.”
Yes, but when ‘everyone’ knows their names and addresses, things may be different in terms of the parameter mentioned by Solzhenitsyn. Perhaps not, look at the case of Ms. Babbitt’s murderer. He is not dead yet.
When they, the oppressors lay their heads down at night and have to worry about every little crackling twig outside their home, then that which was absent in St. Petersburg during the Soviet terror may be tested in terms of its effects. Perhaps the dissident was not correct, and his mention of the common complaint ‘in the gulags’ was moot?
Even if every third enforcer was blown to kingdom come, nothing would have changed. However, based on the frenzied actions and re-actions of our ruling class in the imperial capitol, it seems they fear that which Solzhenitsyn mentioned was the missing aspect to a 70 year reign of terror in the former USSR.
From J. Edgar Hoover on the apparatus of invading privacy seems to be all about fear on the part of an illegitimate ruling class as it has set about strip-mining and selling out the country of their birth.
MisterRogers: Yes, I agree the residents of the imperial capitol appear to fear what I advise. Whether or not such actions actually materialize remains to be seen.
Please don’t label Ms. Babbitt’s boyfriend as her ‘murderer’ so soon, when he has yet to have any trial or hearing. And, from what I’ve read of Ms. ‘free-spirit’ with OCD who liked to slap and scratch him when he told her to calm down, I’m even less inclined to immediately assume deliberate harm on his end.
What, are they pulling the “bimbo eruption” strategy out on Babbitt already? The ‘white chick with issues’ portrayal they roll out every morning on Good Morning America, at the end after the Negro inspiraton, the Mexican dreamer, and the Goodwhite-Asian activists.
You are absolutely right. I once thought it was poignant that Americans believed the rule of law still exists and there is equal application of the law. Such naivete now infuriates me. The hour is too late to indulge nonsense.
Being unfair and ruthless are minor in comparison to what we will have to do and be to endure and eventually prevail. It is not pleasant now and will become worse in the near future. I sometimes question whether I have the wherewithal and know many who do not. Many do, fortunately, and I believe that includes me. It started unfairly so there’s no need to worry about rules.
There is something to be said for, I believe the legal term is “self-help” even if the actions aren’t always legal 😀 Down here in FL, the young man who is a suspect in his GF’s disappearance while camping in WY (now murder: they found her body), had mysteriously gone missing. Perhaps he’s skipped town, but I can think of other reasons he may have vanished.
Tying in the Taki article subject to this one, the loss of privacy and the open adoption of newspeak as the official form of communication from cloud to dirt people are conclusive indicators in and of themselves that there is a moral imperative to oppose and attempt to destroy the regime that has imposed these conditions. It is a very different proposition to imagine an invigorated movement animated by moral certainly of its own righteousness and the fundamental evil of the adversary. The increasingly authoritarian character of the regime indicates their genuine fear of such a movement. Even if it doesn’t really exist yet it ought to and they are prepared to punish any dissent as if it were expressed by an opposition that mirrored their own moral certainly and was acting accordingly rather than what we actually have which is a feeble opposition motivated primarily by logic and reasoning about optimization of various economic variables.
Privacy as a a modern concept expanded with the security of private property. It rose in tandem with our rise from serfdom. This is one of the reasons the Covidian religion is so dangerous. Your own body is the most private of all your property. If a Covidian can tell you to mask your face…the most important part of your most private property, and they can tell you that you have no choice but to inject a fluid into your body that they chose for you, because its good for you, then ALL private property is in danger, and thus all privacy is in danger. Suddenly, last week, by fiat, the IRS can now see every transaction you make above $600. And one day, the holy grail of what they want, a state sponsored digital currency, will show them every purchase you make, in real time. Although I’m sure Congress and certain executives will have a “privacy shield” for their transactions. You’ll have to apply for one, they won’t just give it to you. Hunter Biden will get the first one.
According to the Bible, the first thing man did when he became self-aware was cover himself.
Not ‘became self-aware,’ but ‘aware of his sin.’
The latter clarifies and reinforces the foregoing text in your essay. Shame follows sin. Total transparence reveals sin, thus the desire for ‘privacy.’
I always treat Z’s commentary on Christianity with a grain of salt. Love his confidence thought! “This is what this means!”
Yes, and the story of Adam and Eve wasn’t created, it was related. God told Moses how things were, and Moses wrote them down.
I’m also not so fond of the hunter gatherer story. I guess you could say, IT was created in order to include an evolutionary spin on early civilizations.
I don’t believe in it.
“Shame follows sin”. Yes, it should, but as for the reprobate mind – it is an ‘inventor of evil things’. Shame is not in the vocabulary.
And in reference to the Taki article – that’s why logical, moral arguments fall on deaf ears.
And oddly, we’re made to be ashamed of the good, the natural, the true, or even merely the mild, by those who have no lack of bad intent.
One other thing that is heretical (staggeringly so) in modern society:
Deep creative thought requires privacy. Without allowing private time to think, there is no new genesis of ideas or trial of concepts. Creativity requires trial and error. Lots of error. Regardless of anyone’s intentions, error is punished in public, and trials are frowned upon. *Origination in general* is frowned upon.
Creativity is an individual activity. People can come together afterwards to collect what has been created, but they can’t do the actual thinking in a boardroom in front of a committee.
Look at things designed by “benevolent dictators”, like Kelly Johnson and contrast with anything “designed by committee”.
The fanatical “teamism” of the organization men has been one of the banes of my existence, and the downfall of American science and engineering.
A creative civilization is one where they demand the opposite answer to “are you a team player?”, or wouldn’t even think to ask the question.
Nobody ever built a monument to a committee.
An old man taught me this:
In all the parks, in all the cities,
There are no statues to committees. 🙂
“The collapse of privacy is turning America into a large-scale prison camp.”
Yes, with both sides armed to the teeth. Interesting events are headed our way.
No, actually more of the same is headed our way.
Lol gunz and weed will MAGA again and again…
Great column.
It is not hard to see how privacy was an asset for people living in relatively close proximity in small villages.
A very scarce asset.
The village I once lived in very much resembled the dystopia you describe in the first paragraph. And we’re not just talking about reading minds here, the whole village would divine your thoughts days before you even thought them, and you had a pretty good idea about what was going on in the bedrooms.
I’ve had villagers tell me “Fie! I heard you effed so-and-so during your stay in Copenhagen” – finding out stuff from a thousand miles away that not even my friends knew. Privacy is the main reason I prefer to live in a city, and living in a village certainly made me wary of compromising my online anonymity.
It is an interesting paradox. In a small town, they say there are no secrets, but that’s really just the result of knowing people. Urban life is the illusion of privacy, because you will have very few, if any, close relationships. Loneliness is conflated with privacy and anonymity.
the definition of a small town is that you don’t need to use your turn signal, because everybody already knows where you are going, and why!
Perhaps.
I’ve only known one village and there, it was certainly more than just knowing people on a personal level; they found out things about you that not even your closest friends or family would know.
You had to be careful what you told a doctor. He wouldn’t report to the whole village of course, only your enemies.
If you were pulled over by the police everybody knew the same day.
Alcohol sale was circumscribed: you were on a rationing card and had to order everything shipped up from Denmark; if you had booze in your house, half the village would invite themselves to a party, because the post office workers had told them the hot news.
I don’t know how much was specific to the Faroese culture, and how much was universal for village life. Back then, I ascribed it to their busybody Lutheranism but I’ve been told it’s much the same all villages over.
There are a lot of upsides to living in a village, but there are serious downsides too. I’d advise people looking for a white bolt hole or community to make a dry run: move to the nearest village for a year or so, while you’re looking for the perfect spot for your bunker, see if village life agrees with you at all.
I appreciate your counterpoint to my idealization of small towns. I’ve mostly live in anonymous cities so it’s easy to forget that the grass always looks greener on the other person’s lawn.
I’m not suggesting the grass isn’t greener in the village. As I said, there are lots of upsides when everybody knows everybody but it’s just not for me. If I were in the baby-making age, I’d look for a small town rather than a village.
What I find more problematic is the idealization of homesteading.
Here’s another piece of unsolicited lifestyle advice from Uncle Felix: work on a farm for three months before you buy your plot.
That sounds similar to the town I grew up in, except for the part about the booze 🙂
Even in such a conformist hellhole, that is one saving grace of being an intellectual or some related “cultured” pursuit. If your pastime is reading books, discussing arcane topics or their 21st century equivalents, it’s a great way to keep the commoners at bay as garlic reportedly is to keep vampires away 😀
Villages are for raising a family, where protecting one’s children and being able to keep tabs on local institutions like the schools outweigh the want for privacy. There’s a reason most singles don’t tend to stay in the village they grew up in until they get married and move back after the first kid.
I heard you effed so-and-so during your stay… Privacy is the main reason I prefer to live in a city…
I.e. easy access to anonymous no-consequences fornication with hypergamous roasties [soon to become embittered empty-souled post-menopausal cat ladies].
And you wonder why The Village [with its gossip] has vastly higher total fertility rates than does The City [with its devil-may-care nihilism].
Yep, when I moved to a small town years ago (unfortunately I have since left) it instantly put an end to my career of promiscuity. I had a friend who didn’t change his habits when he lived there and didn’t last more than a year.
I was a teenager, fucking was all I did.
You paid attention to the important things before you got old and foolish.
When I was young, I spent my all money on beer and wild women.
When I got old, I just wasted it.
starts earlier there for you guys, at least for the older generation. I am glad my experiences started later for many reasons.
Yes.
The Euro view on teenagers is that as long as they’re fucking, they’re staying out of trouble.
The Euro view on teenagers is that as long as they’re fucking, they’re staying out of trouble.
What do they call “Planned Murderhood” in Europe?
Because we definitely ain’t seeing the live births in the demographic numbers coming out of Europe.
We’re not the ones having trimester abortions. In most of Euroland, it’s 2-3 months max.
I find there’s a degree of that in the small towns around me. I live about a quarter mile outside the thing that could most charitably considered a village. It has two churches, two cemeteries and the township garage and voting house. There are many more dead people in the village than live people. It’s not incorporated, so it has no mayor, just the township trustees that manage the 4-mile x 4-mile township I live in. Any of you in urban or even suburban areas have more people on your block than we have in that 16 square mile area.
But still, I find people I hardly even know who know surprising details about my life and business. If you tell one person something, pretty soon everyone else knows it. And through a very extensive grapevine, yes, like Felix says, stuff that happened miles away can make it back.
I suppose it’s unnerving for urban people, but I don’t mind it that much. It’s helped me a time or two. When a trailer on my property was burglarized, the grapevine provided me with the identities of the burglars before the sheriff even had a chance to come investigate. It was a couple local ne’er-do-wells who were the usual subjects for most trouble in the area — and I got a lot of my stuff back via, ahem, local justice.
It’s been used against me at least once — I pissed off some neighbor, still don’t know who, and they called into the sheriff with some false claims that had just enough basis in truth to make life difficult. Of course, this was in a time and place where I could and did simply tell the sheriff to get the hell off my property unless he had a warrant (They never got one. Case closed.)
The stuff they knew was extremely private and they had the specifics so very wrong that I can only assume it was passed modified through the grapevine.
But it’s the price you pay for the fact that if trouble ever shows up on my doorstep, there are rough men who aren’t strangers to fistfights who will come at a minute’s notice to help me. You can’t be friends with everyone — small towns are like real life soap operas — but cultivating those relationships and friendships is how you survive in tough times.
“But it’s the price you pay for the fact that if trouble ever shows up on my doorstep, there are rough men who aren’t strangers to fistfights who will come at a minute’s notice to help me.”
Yes.
I didn’t want to discourage people, but as LITS says above, there are a lot of romantic notions going around. You pay a price if you want to have a real community because if it doesn’t cost you anything, it won’t be worth anything.
Vizzini: Thank you for the words of wisdom and advice. The land we’ve bought lies just outside a similar, unincorporated town – more accurately called a hamlet – with very few people nearby. The largest town within a 50 mile radius is just over 12,000 people. We’ve already tried to move carefully and courteously in our relations with our local real estate agent, bank loan officer, title company contact, etc. The first impression you make is important but in really small towns, so are all subsequent ones.
Ah, small town life. My boss called me into the office because I was using one of the two local bars as my living room three nights a week. But the manager of the one supermarket used fo open a new check-out lane because I was a man who wore a suit six days a week. I once had a stranger apologize to me for unwittingly asking my girlfriend to dance while I was singing karaoke (ironically, her fave, Joe Diffie’s “Pickup Man”). Everybody knows your business; and you know exactly who your friends and your enemies are. I found it clarifying, but taxing; so I moved away to a larger city after a few years. One drawback was realizing that while locals may have respected me, they’d never consider me one of them. That was reserved for the multigenerational folks, whose civic “history” included the deeds of their parents and grandparents and the prospects of their children, real or notional. Your pedigree was as important as that of any one of the stock at the annual bull sale.
Yep. I’ve been here 27 years and I’m still the new guy. That’s okay, though.
Another consideration of rural living is health care, especially if you getting long of tooth. I found a place that had a medical school 15 yrs back in the mountains of ETenn. Huntington WVa also has a medical school. Prior to the opening of these VA-associated med schools that cater to rural populations the regional health care was 3rd world. Small towns are often tolerant of eccentricities, I’ve found. I’ve also been amazed at the general lack of cognitive stratification that i found when in the cities. I’ve been in relative backwood shacks where i was surprised to find well-worn libraries with dense philosophy and economic tomes. Certainly rare but you find the top 5% sprinkled in with the general pop.
I’d always lived in Cities- Liverpool, London, New York. As a kid it was village like but condensed, You knew a lot about all the kids at school and their families. As an adult, the village was the office and you had the friends and foes things and intimate knowledge of many characteristics but little (other than really close friends) of family.
The move to the boonies came at an age when location was the only commonality with most neighbors so with a couple of exceptions acquaintances rather than friends. That’s probably a guy thing, the wife know more about the women than I know about her.
Comment about low-trust societies. Primitive societies are highly tribal. Whether it’s the inbred family clan in Afghanistan (hey, that rhymes!) or the few extended families that comprise a village (or city slum) in Africa, these are adaptations to primitive conditions. They have benefits, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. But they make anything resembling Western European standards of living impossible. Consider the difficulty of making business transactions when you have little reason to trust a stranger. Or, even if you are honest, you are bound by custom to support an extended family, even if it’s largely composed of non-productive people.
Consider the difficulty of making business transactions when you have little reason to trust a stranger.
Or, inversely, that the guys you do business with are all your nephews and cousins so you have to offer them family rebates, hire their worthless offspring or give them a line of credit you know they’ll not be able to pay back.
Sounds like trade with China and welfare.
In my rural environment, there are business decisions I make that are not strictly about the economics. I may pick a guy to work on my car, or a store to deal with simply because they’re part of the local community and they’re going to be there for me in other contexts as well. In the age of the automobile it’s not that big a deal for me to drive to a nearby city for some things, and I do, but for things I do that are going to involve a continuing relationship, I’ll often pick the one that has a connection to the “tribe” of locals.
Vizzini: Again concur. It’s all about creating and maintaining an intertwining network of local relationships. You want the locals to prosper because you want your locale to prosper, and they are your neighbors. And your waitress at the diner may well have an uncle who is the best at grading hilly driveways. And your realtor may be dating a local cop.
The thing is, the uncle may not be “the best” at grading hilly driveways, but if he’s “okay” you still may want to go with him, if “the best” is from the city 50 miles away, because you want him to prosper and think well of you. That guy 50 miles away isn’t going to be available when your car is stuck in the snow out in the middle of nowhere some night, but the uncle with the big dump truck and dozer is also the uncle with a big 4×4 that will haul his butt out of the house in the cold at 10 p.m., pull you out of the ditch and then offer you a mug of hot coffee to boot.
So this is where societal modeling comes into play as a useful tool of prediction. At the extremis, the extinction of privacy is predicted to lead to strong evolutionary pressures for the emergence of extreme retaliation measures. The most benign of these will be both overt & covert sabotage of IT systems that sustain the EC-based intrusion of people’s privacy. But it does not stop there. As people endure severe injury via privacy invasion, they eventually react in a primal fashion and strike out against the perceived attacker, again both overtly & covertly. IOW, people will start dropping dead for no clear reason, and by various mechanisms, not just getting their head blown off. Historically, it was poisoning, but our modern age will create many more novel ways to accomplish this goal. That is the end-state we are headed for. No societal trust, mass paranoia, lots of discriminate killings. And it’s very hard to remain a productive society under those conditions.
Interesting. ” The most benign of these will be both overt & covert sabotage of IT systems that sustain the EC-based intrusion of people’s privacy.”
From a carrier/distribution perspective, think of the locations of Cell towers and fiber lines. They are everywhere around us, seemingly impossible to guard. It wouldn’t take much for modern, angry, privacy injured Luddites to shut down the information highway. Heck, most of the information highway travels beside the highway. Poles and nodes being passed 100’s if not 1000’s of times a day.
I don’t believe satellite data transmission has the near the capacity of the land networks but I don’t know?
Back when I was working in IT, early in career (1980s), I recall the half-humorous comment probably in a telecoms industry journal, that the backhoe was perhaps the major threat to the then cutting edge communication network (fiber optics). And sure enough, there was at least one such major outage that cut off some of our important circuits for a day or two, and for precisely that reason. Turns out there’s a reason for the “Call Miss Utility, Underground Cable” signs.
I have been shocked recently that people on nextdoor are openly stating that people that don’t the jab should be denied all medical care. This is a high end neighborhood, these are mover and shaker types and they are using their own names. They have no awareness of how far they have fallen.
Nextdoor was marketed as a nicer social media, but quickly turned into a hive of the most wretched psychopaths on the internet. Ends up that proximity to others doesn’t make people any more civil.
The only thing Nextdoor is good for is taking note of the monsters in your area posting on it and making sure you never come in contact with them.
Whenever academics/activists have tried to prove that internet anonymity breeds “harassment,” “hate,” etc., they’ve found that identified people are much worse-behaved than the anonymous are. Proving themselves wrong doesn’t change their minds/goals, because [see Z’s post].
Everyone who’s not insane knows that 4chan is a far friendlier place than Facebook, that the turn-of-the-century “no girls” internet was paradise compared to social-media NPD/BPD hell. But wherever censorship (and/or astroturf) is weak, the “right” (including some anti-establishment left) dominates. When Americans are allowed to speak somewhat freely, and anything like a “marketplace of ideas” emerges—or really, if you can so much as search for a text string on Google and *find it*—it takes a fake election, a color revolution, and a military coup to defeat a mere Trump.
They know.
Yup. Saying vicious things under your real name is a display of power.
Since these sites are left-wing run, and we are subjects to a left-wing regime, these average Joes are smugly saying “I want you dead” while thousands of shock troops are lined up behind him to destroy you if you dare retaliate.
After Trayvon, if you posted on Nextdoor a tip about a suspicious black person in your white neighborhood then you would feel the full wrath of the white liberals, especially the women.
On Nextdoor, noting the suspicious behavior of a black person was worse than being a drug dealer, burglar or rapist.
The only thing Nextdoor is good for is taking note of the monsters in your area posting on it and making sure you never come in contact with them.
Isn’t that what all of the martial arts teach – to spin in such a fashion as to direct your opponent’s momentum to his own disadvantage?
Go to a video search engine and look for something like, “Bruce Lee; be water my friend”.
“The only thing Nextdoor is good for is taking note of the monsters in your area posting on it and making sure you never come in contact with them.”
I use the presence of BLM and “We Believe” posters for the same purpose, but imagine Nextdoor is better (I refrain from all social media so cannot say this is true with certainty but believe you). Getting to Felix’s earlier about small towns, one upside is you know who your enemies are. The downside is they know who is theirs.
Heh. All of my rentals are in heavily black neighborhoods. Last summer you’d rarely see a BLM sign there, but go across the interstate less than a mile to the nice wealthy white academic neighborhood north of campus and they lined the residential streets — every other yard had BLM or “Hate has no home here” or some other virtue signal.
Zman lives in Lagos. You own rentals in predominately black areas. I have a serious question: am I being shortsighted when I exclude the Southern towns I research purely on their demographics? I tend to “look no further” when I see >15% black. I just assume that the friction increases from there. And, God forbid, they command a majority and thus control municipal politics. I grow weary of California; though, to be honest, I’m more chafed by the continuous wildfires in my region that the foolish policies of Newsom and his ilk. The economics and climate of Mississippi and Alabama intrigue me; but the high concentration of blacks muddies the water. I’d really like to hear from people in those parts.
No, you’re right to avoid places with high concentrations of blacks. 15% is a good upper bound. Alabama is livable only to the degree that segregation still unofficially exists (I’ve never lived there, but my Dad did in the later years of his life). It’s a culture that has a lot of years experience dealing with large numbers of blacks, but when they’re in large numbers, it’s the usual. Birmingham was once a great city. Now it’s a shithole.
I have rental business in black neighborhoods, but my own rural area is pretty much exclusively White. And up in the city, it’s the usual thing — hectoring leftists preaching about diversity but living like KKK members in 90%+ White neighborhood. It’s just “for the good schools” you understand.
Whites who live in my rental neighborhoods lean heavily toward those with a propensity for bad decisions and mudsharking.
No White who has a choice sends their kids to the city public schools — they are just nightmarish. If people with kids feel like they really want to live in the city, their kids go to private schools and they congregate in White neighborhoods, otherwise, they live in one of the suburbs that, frankly, dwarf the city core, and send their kids to White schools.
Childless couples live in the trendy, expensive city neighborhoods, because they can virtue signal to their hearts’ content and don’t have to worry about the school system.
BTW, if I were you I’d look at the somewhat Whiter Northern parts of Appalachia, instead of the deep South.
Even northern Tennessee and Kentucky have some pretty White parts that still have a nice climate — mild winters, only moderately brutal summers.
More north than Southern Kentucky and you start to have to deal with real winters, but it also gets much, much Whiter.
Maus, the culture shock for this born Californian is jarring. Southron whites are a league different from West Coast niceties, and blacks, though affable, tend to try to fill any space they’re in. You won’t ‘belong’ in most places. It really is a foreign country down there.
Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Houston, Corpus Christi, Alexandria LA- the Salt Life coast is the closest to California sensibilities. If you prefer mountain, look to the competitive river fishing community; find them at the boat shop, they’re a large subculture, or follow the I-24, I-26, or US 23 up. I-85 is the Richie Rich folks.
Your comment would make me believe that it’s an unregulated Wild West. My experience was quite the opposite.
I briefly used NextDoor in my community, but soon resigned when it became evident they were a bit to censorial for my tastes (and it didn’t even directly include me.) Turns out it’s difficult to discuss topics like the precise demographics about who is committing the crimes without pushing the buttons of Shitlibs 😀
Once or twice a year I get solicitations from my HOA about joining and I’ve made it clear that I refuse to participate in a chaperoned echo chamber. They can all go to hell for all I care.
Hmm. I’ve heard a lot of mentions of Nextdoor lately. Sounds like something I’ll need to join and then lurk, observe, and make notes. Might provide some hints as to who the local snitches and Karens are.
Except, to borrow from the Taki post, those people honestly believe they are on the right side of history.
Not that it matters, since the US has sickcare, a system optimized to extend and monetize illness as long as possible.
They no longer talk about cures only disease management.
a system optimized to extend and monetize illness as long as possible
Goldman Sachs has been bragging about this for years now.
Search on “Is Curing Patients A Sustainable Business Model?”
> Not that it matters, since the US has sickcare, a system optimized to extend and monetize illness as long as possible.
The mental health model has now extended to every aspect of modern medicine. Not a coincidence they make you fill out those questionnaires every visit.
Movers and shakers. It’s not surprising there’s more psychos among them.
Whitney: It’s not that they have no awareness of how far they have fallen – they genuinely believe they are your moral superior. And the fact that it’s a high-end neighborhood is a big part of it. They have a certain amount of money, hence a certain faith in their credentials and social standing and believe it is warranted, therefore they are ‘good people.’ And ‘good people’ utilize moral signifiers to demonstrate both their ‘goodness’ and their implicit superiority. You won’t convince them otherwise or be able to shame them out of what they consider a moral stance.
Ooooooh! I’m so scared. Better go get the jab!! I stay as far away from “medical” care as possible anyway. These psycho bitches are so out of control they’d deny a person life saving surgery such as an appendectomy just because said person won’t take a jab that doesn’t even prevent something that might kill .9% of old people that were probably going to die of pneumonia or something else that year anyway. And don’t have the self-awareness to see how insanely contradictory that makes their supposed great concern for humanity. I know these heinous old bags and despise them with every fiber of my being.
I lasted 2 weeks on Next Door (mainly to keep track of news of emerging vagrant sightings wandering the neighborhood thanks to easy access from the city via the mostly useless newly installed lite rail endlessly promoted by the same jab pushing bitches). I still get email notices from it for some reason. Almost always about someone’s dog running loose in the streets dodging cars.
My response would be to any that would deny medical care to the unvaccinated is to extend and raise the stakes. Fat people and diabetics should also be denied care, as basically these two “illnesses” are lifestyle choices.
Please, this is a mode of ridicule or creating dissonance. I’m not arguing the for such occur.
Peabody: A rant after my own heart. I’ve never done any social media, and I hate groups of gossiping biddies in real life – why on earth would I want to engage with the same online?
These psycho bitches are so out of control they’d deny a person life saving surgery such as an appendectomy just because said person won’t take a jab
That’s already happening. I read recently of a case in Washington, I think, where a man was bumped down the waiting list to receive a heart transplant because he refused to take the vax.
They’d rather he die than be able to make that choice himself.
Lives of Others – Great movie and worth the subtitles.
I work at a rather large prison in central KY. The mystery jab was offered to all inmates, with the promise of being able to see their families in-person. Nope. Once they got the jab, the goal posts moved and the visiting family must have the jab too. What’s interesting is the ones that haven’t taken the jab are almost all black dudes. They simply refuse. Most don’t want to be lab rats for the government is the word I’m getting. Who can blame them?
Black people know about the Tuskegee experiments. They know their government will experiment on them. They might not know all the details, they might not know any of the details, but they know it happened and they’re not wrong
It would really be fun to put up billboards in all the black cities saying remember the Tuskegee experiments
Since goodwhites need to chase after blacks…
Yep, hilarity would ensue. They’d tie themselves into pretzels.
They are right. What a large fraction of the world’s population still has not become aware of is that they too, are subjects in the greatest scale medical experiment in world history. No, that’s not an exaggeration: the mRNA jabs, and perhaps a lesser extent the other tech, are never before trialed (except in small population) and against a class of virus that has resisted previous immunization attempts. Billions of guinea pigs, absolutely no legal recourse, and probable bad faith by actors at all levels: Big Pharma, the medical profession, government regulators and sundry rent-seekers. At the very least the scientists could be collecting reliable data upon their test subjects, but I doubt this is being done systematically. Not for the least reason, is that the last thing anybody in the power structure wants are accurate data. No, just keep the money rolling in, thank you very much. When all is said and done, the damage to our institutions, and perhaps many our ourselves, will be incalculable.
It’s one of those cases where low-IQ beats high-IQ.
Actually I saw a statistic that showed that’s it’s the mid-IQ who are morely likely to get the jab than low-IQ and very high-IQ.
The very smart people are more likely to research the topic, and as most of us know, once you learn about this, it quickly becomes “no F-ing way!”
High IQ folk are less likely to suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. They can analyze and understand what the don’t know, or in this case what the authorities don’t know.
Then there are just misanthropes like me. 😉
By educational attainment, the two most “vaccine hesitant” groups are those with only a high school education and… PhD holders.
Midwits are the scourge of the modern world. Smart enough to understand propaganda, not smart enough to think critically about it.
The real question to ask is, “Has the government become less or more evil since the days of that experiment?”
The question is, “In the days of the Tuskegee experiment blacks were likely viewed as more disposable. In 2021 does our government now view whites as more disposable?”
KGB beat me to it, but I was going to say it a slightly different way: In the very old days (of the Tuskegee Experiment), the government was content to lie to the Negroes and, occasionally, to everybody else, when it suited the government.
Since then, it seems one thing they learnt from the experiment was that people are trusting and gullible, so they expanded the lying franchise to cover nearly all communications with everyone.
Alas, the institutions have used up most of whatever credibility they had and we now are going to reap the harvest that must come when people will refuse to believe anything they say. That could create real problems, especially if a sudden need to tell the truth were to arise.
For reference, consult your children bedtime story about the little boy who cried “wolf.”
They don’t eat da poo-poo either. I’ll give them those two things over whites.
Tangentially I wonder what the overlap of vaxx taking and sexual deviance is.
Fauci’s original fraud gave the gays (and himself) extraordinary power. I don’t think that was intentional-who could plot those effects out?- but it sure as shootin’ was disruptive.
Whitney: There was no ‘experiment’ in Tuskegee. There were blacks infected with STDs via their own behavior, and they were not treated. I’m not claiming it was all ethical, but it’s a misnomer to claim they were experimented on.
And they’d be the first to deny that the US government is ‘their government.’ Their refusal is the result of their distrust of White people and White medicine, period. In this case, unfortunately, it is the stupid Whites who trust ‘their government’ and system, and so subject themselves and offer up their children to potentially deadly injections.
Finally, some accuracy and clarity on this “misunderstood” topic. The Lefty progressives would have us believe this “evil” was the same as Mengele of the camps, or the Japanese 731 unit. Nothing was further from the truth.
Also, in the early 30’s, the known treatment for syphilis was not a shot in the arm of penicillin. It was a risky treatment regimen of increasing doses of arsenic. There were known side effects and death from such—it is a poison after all. Hell, even Al Capone refused treatment and died from it in 1940 or so.
Our founding Puritan culture and their busy bodies ran around in their Christianity of their day prying into private village affairs for social good.
This culture expressed today without Christianity comes out as Karen’s, branch covidians, worshiping Gaia, and speech enforcers.
They think that goodness in society will come out of their actions.
The rest of the Left including the bad side of the usual suspect population know it’s all about power and control and they want it.
The icing on the cake for empowering all this distopia is the microprocessor and the database.
Looks like Leftie is having a nigger problem too.
Yep, the leftards have lots of narrative plates spinning and they’re all getting pretty wobbly. We’re probably not too far off from a fair amount of s*** hitting the proverbial fan.
The winter “flu” season in the Northern Hemisphere will — I suspect — be very, very interesting. A lot of bubbles are going to pop.
The vaxxes (I prefer that slang term, as the term “vaccine” technically doesn’t fit many of the injections; recent Orwellian re-definition notwithstanding) DO NOT protect against infection and thus spreading the virus. At best, they provide the jabee some protection against severe illness and death — for several months, perhaps.
The virus frolicking in a vaxxed population will tend to become resistant to the pretend immunity the jab confers. The new variant will likely only spread more readily in both the vaxxed and unvaxxed populations.
The naturally immune MAY have the best protection against the virus — by a factor of ten or better, compared to what the vaxxes offer. Funny, you’ll rarely hear that claim in the MSM. Wonder why.
Heavily vaxxed populations — the UK, Israel, etc. have quite high case counts in the summer wave, even higher than the same time last year, when 0% of their populations had been vaxxed. There is much uncertainty in those numbers, since amount of testing and virus variants and other variables change. Statistics are adjusted to taste: a large fraction of those “cases” or even “hospitalizations” just mean a positive test. The person may have no symptom of a Covid-related illness whatsoever.
In other news, civil liberties continue to erode. 🙁
‘Statistics are adjusted to taste: a large fraction of those “cases” or even “hospitalizations” just mean a positive test. The person may have no symptom of a Covid-related illness whatsoever.”
That’s the metric the Lovely Mrs. and I hear on the news: “Cases! Cases! Cases!”
It sounds spooky until you sit down and think “What does it mean?”
If 100 people test positive for COVID and 2 people really are sick and showing symptoms, 100 cases sounds scary. 98 people symptom free doesn’t sound so bad.
We also push back on the cases meme by asking simply “how many people are dead from this?” If people do die, did they have any other underlying health issues that could have been worsened by the illness?
If nothing else a greater bulk of people are “noticing” the disconnect between what they are personally seeing and what they are encountering in the world around them. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
Ben: Yet another reason the ‘flu season’ ought to be interesting is that, according to a few things I’ve read (but have not verified) some people are claiming to have gone for the annual flu shot and instead have been given the Covid vaxx. I stopped getting the flu shot about 5 years ago but many White people get it religiously every fall.
I expect the authorities to claim, just as they did last year, that the flu mysteriously vanished and everyone with the sniffles has Covid – particularly children.
I used to sardonically bring up the sudden disappearance of deaths from heart disease, flu / pneumonia etc. in official stats and say Covid must be a miracle cure. They’ve corrected the published stats for the US to show Covid as excess deaths with the other previous leading causes more in line with previous years. Who knows if it’s all just made up but the published stats don’t look as ridiculous as they used to.
I’ve had people try to use the explanation that “masking eliminated the flu!” I have a hard time comprehending how stupid you have to be to believe that.
Since the flu “disappeared” last year – due to using the PCR tests to categorize every respiratory illness as covid – how were they able to formulate this year’s flu shot?
3g4me—worse. Last year my State’s top medical officer touted the “absence” of recorded flu cases and connected such to the efficacy of social distancing and masking! The implication, then plainly stated as well, was that perhaps such measures should be implemented every flu season—irrespective of Covid cases.
What you say is sure possible. Here in FL the drug stores already are offering both the Covid and Flu jabs. There are already formulations for both in one shot, but I don’t know if it’s deployed yet.
I’ve seen the claim many times that diagnosed flu disappeared, or almost so, since the pandemic. Of course that claim is ridiculous on its face. The flu kills tens of thousands in a normal year. How many millions must it sicken? Now, it’s possible that masking, distancing and other measures reduced the flu too, but it couldn’t have eliminated it.
More likely are at least two factors: it’s my understanding that the “Covid” test cannot distinguish Covid from other common viruses including the flu. That is certainly possible. But a much more plausible one is simply that Big Medicine gets more funding from the government when they have a “Covid” case — real or imagined. “Follow the money,” oldest rule in the book.
As I’ve posted before, I used to get the “free” flu/pneumonia jab. However, I am highly disinclined to take any kind of injection since, oh, about December of last year.
No, that’s just it.
They don’t “provide some protection”.
They wipe out natural immunity.
That is, our broad-spectrum antibodies.
That’s why millions ‘have no effects’; those come later, when it’s too late, when the chain of cause-and-effect is forgotten.
Pathogenic priming is an easier term to describe than ADE or viral enhancement. That is, opening pathways to new infections, even milder ones.
Yep, if there’s one thing I might have thought I knew—but didn’t—it’s how much we need to have our immune system challenged on a daily basis. It’s like a muscle which weakens through disuse.
My FiL had a triple bypass some time ago. The next day we visited him in the ICU, only to find two nurses making him sit up in bed and then stand next to it! When questioned, they said old people deteriorate quickly when left immobile. In three days, they tossed him out of the hospital.
One can only imagine what happens to folks immunity-wise when locked in for 6 months straight.