174 thoughts on “Emotional Appropriation”

1. I hate to be late to the party, because on this I have something kinda relevant to add.

   On PRIDE:

   Yes, this weird fixation on being proud of “communities” is bizarre. Often it comes off as condescending.

   There is one exception in my mind where expressing pride is healthy, positive. I tell my son that I’m proud of him when he achieves something after working hard for it. As Z Man points out, pride is not an emotion you can rightly express for abstract communities. However, when you are a parent, you have an investment in your child. Most parents believer their children is their most important investment. It is the future, it is the survival of their DNA. For your child to succeed is to be successful as a parent, even if your child is the one doing the actual work. It is a natural kind of pride that probably deserves a different word to express it that doesn’t have negative connotations.

   To circle back to the university president, or governor of a state, or mayor of a town, who expresses “pride in his community”, he is essentially placing himself in the position of parent, and equating the community to children. He is getting his share of the credit for the good thing that the community did. In contrast to the parent who has invested a great deal of time, emotion, help, meetings with teachers, instructors, and mentors for their child, the public figure or politician is actually engaging in a very selfish expression. The parent is valuing the returns on his investment, where the public figure is essentially stealing something that doesn’t belong to her by putting herself in the middle of an accomplishment or event that she had no real part in.

   It’s truly disgusting.

   • Truly. What I have always been unable to comprehend is the application of the words “pride” or “proud” to one’s sexual orientation or skin tone, but particularly sexual orientation in homosexuals. What, pray tell is there to be proud about in having another man’s hairy penis stuffed in you mouth or up your anus? If that is a source of “pride,” then the word has been twisted into meaning something diametrically opposed to its original and intended meaning. Of course, that is the entire intention of the left. Recall Confucius’ admonition on the rectification of names/language. It explains much.

2. Feds make another move to rope crypto into the DC regime’s orbit:

   https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/doj-announces-launch-national-crypto-enforcement-team-fdic-mulls-insuring-stablecoins

   So, rather than trying to shut crypto down like the Chinese, our gang are making it seem as though they are going to somehow piggyback on or co-opt the current crypto market.

3. Tom Cotton threatens a strongly-worded letter as the CIA’s Afghan proxy army is released into the wilds for future use against the deplorables:

   https://www.zerohedge.com/political/senator-cotton-warns-hundreds-unknown-afghans-escaping-us-military-bases

   • If the inverse were true, if thousands of Americans “escaped” into Afghanistan, they would either be fully and forcefully converted into the kiddie diddling, wife beating, goat herder culture or they’d be hunted for sport. They’d never be allowed to impinge on the native society.

4. They don’t do things, for example, for which they could take genuine pride.

   Doesn’t this suggest that, contra Christian doctrine, pride (or something so adjacent to it that we don’t have a separate word for) is actually *necessary* and to be sought after? I’ve always suspected that the demand for humility from organized religion was a domination ploy. In the sort of paleolithic dominance/deference games that humans play, masters humiliate serfs. Conquerers humble the conquered. It’s a violation of boundaries intended to force you to abdicate your interests to the conqueror’s interests.

   “Pride” would be you asserting that, “No, Mr. Obama, I *did* build that.” Pride would be asserting that, no, you actually *do* understand (some aspect of the world) whether technical or moral, and that the person demanding your humility is trying to obscure a lie or an abuse. Pride would be you asserting your rights in some matter, as opposed to always humbly deferring out of an ingrained habit.

5. Cunts gotta cunt.

6. I think every corporation needs a Vice President, or at least a Director of Caring. It can’t be HR because as everyone knows they are just the internal Stasi committed to policing wrong-thing and installing the latest corporate-approved propaganda firmware updates into the employees.

7. As someone who has had bouts with anxiety since 2010 or so I have a lot of sympathy for people who have anxiety depression and other mental issues. It seems like people are more willing to open up about it but no one has looked at the policy implications. Maybe social media shouldnt be marketed towards kids or maybe kids should be encouraged to be outside more

   • I always forget what a young guy you are. You’re “krusty” like an old guy.

     Good luck.

8. I have noticed a far greater propensity for institutions, organizations, businesses, etc. to fly the flag at half staff than ever before. In the past, this was only done in the case of genuine tragedy of a national or international scope. Nowadays, I usually don’t have a clue as to why the flag is flying low. I suspect the main reason for doing this is to show just how much the people controlling the entities “care.”

   • Absolutely true. When I see the flag not at half-staff, it comes as a shock.

     • Just saw one a few minutes ago flying at full staff. I rubbed my eyes with my fists in amazement. Almost as rare a thing as seeing a non-negro on TV.

9. Bollocks.

   “text to make my perfectly sensible comment long enough for verbose assholes like WordPress and Horst”

10. I must admit though the first time I ever heard Bill Clinton say “I feel your pain” I damn near laughed myself into an anyeurism. When I did manage to stop laughing I was thinking who on earth would ever believe such nonsense? Apparently a lot of people. So it’s not so much the grifters selling their bullshit, it’s the people buying it who are the problem.

    Any politician of any stripe who tells you he’s going to help you out is after all seeking a job in government. Yeah right, and government is here to help me.

    • My first thought too was Slick Willie. Just think, if The Harridan had beaten Trump, he could have been The First Feeler.

      • First non-lesbian rapist presidential spouse. There’s a medal for that. It’s purple but not heart-shaped.

11. What an absolutely remarkable column.
    And, these comments. I mean, this is truly revolutionary insight, folks.

    These incomplete people will be ruling in 15 years’ time. Holy smokes.

12. “Recently I attended a Black Earthlings Matter ritual to acknowledge the deactivation of the George Floyd unit.”
    – Mark “Data” Zuckerberg.

13. One thing I’m reminded of from this post it the crazed TicToc women posting from behind the wheel. It’s not just the diatribe of the day that they blabber, but also the most emotionally imbalanced things I’ve ever seen. Britany Spears wasn’t half as crazy as these women when she was shaving her head. Deep down, these are women who want to murder someone or something…anything…

    • Men keep women balanced, women keep men focused. We’re seeing what happens when you drive a wedge between them.

      • THat was done with the female franchise 100 years ago!

14. Thanks to social media, the West is now experiencing what the Japanese have lived with all their lives – social awareness. Specifically, the awareness of others and how bad behavior affects themselves and other people. Something many of us grew up with known simply as good manners.

    The whole CV mask wearing hysteria was a mystery to the Japanese as they’ve always worm masks; not as a means to protect themselves, but to protect others if they have a cold and are socially conscious about possibly spreading it to other people. I found it amusing how many Americans got enraged over the very idea of wearing a mask as it somehow infringed on their freedom. That typical “it’s all about me attitude” we hear so much about.

    On public transportation, Japanese commuters will not talk on their mobile phones because the conversation level could disturb other people. So they sit quietly until they get where they’re going and then make a call. Meanwhile in the west, those who use public transpiration have to listen to every idiot who blathers on about who knows what as if they’re the only person in the vehicle. And always louder than normal conversation level, as if they think yelling into the phone helps.

    The difference being the Japanese have a clearly defined social behavior that is deeply ingrained in their society. Despite it’s many social flaws, the Japanese are a polite people who show respect to others, especially older people, which is greatly appreciated by anyone who has lived or worked there.

    I remember a time when we taught our children good manners out of respect for general socially acceptable behavior. Now, those lessons are taught to people by others posting their bad behavior on Youtube and through public humiliation.

    • Karl Host: Being told I must wear a mask (to ostensibly protect others) DOES impact my freedom. As far as common sense regard the transmission of illness, almost no women – White or otherwise – keep their sick kids at home, let alone stay home from work themselves, to avoid spreading their cold/flu to everyone else. Besides, SCIENCE and EXPERTS have told us Covid hangs in the air in the sun, or in the car, waiting to sneakily infect you, while it can’t float under plastic face shields or through paper masks.

      I see men and women of all races talking and texting busily on the highway, but fwiw, my experience with those conducting ‘private’ conversations loudly in public (used to confuse me no end until I realized what the ear piece was) are primarily gimmigrants. The more alien the language, the louder they talk and gesticulate. And, of course, the sistahs have been known for such for years.

      Generally socially acceptable behavior and/or good manners is White supremacism. Along with being prompt or capable or hard working. I still let Whites with one or two items go ahead of me in a cashier’s line or occasionally cut into traffic. I won’t offer that same courtesy to any other skin tone – they don’t belong here, they aren’t my people, and they both expect and despise White courtesy as weakness.

      • Personal favorite are the ones that put the phone on speaker so the rest of us can enjoy both sides of whatever inane conversation they are engaged in.

    • Americans were not upset about wearing masks. Americans were upset about being *forced* to wear masks, an upending of their “clearly defined social behavior that is deeply ingrained in their society.”

      The efficacy of crappy cloth masks for preventing the spread of disease is a topic for another post.

      • It wasn’t just about being forced to wear a mask, it was being forced to wear one after the CDC said first that masks were worthless and shouldn’t be worn. It’s worthless but mandatory?! The whole thing was simply capricious.

      • Tom Woods put together a free little Ebook showing mask and lockdown mandates and covid “infections”.

        “Covid charts CNN forgot”
        https://tomwoods.com/ep-1851-the-charts-that-tell-the-covid-story/

        These guys link to 47 genuine studies showing masks don’t work and 32 studies showing the adverse effects of wearing them.

        https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/47-studies-confirm-inefectiveness-of-masks-for-covid-and-32-more-confirm-their-negative-health-effects/

        At this point, among White people, wearing masks is an IQ test.

    • Not to be a dick, and maybe your experience varied, but have you ever been on Japanese public transportation, Karl? “Polite” is the last word that comes to mind. I lived and worked there a considerable amount of time, and what is considered normal behavior would result in at a minimum a shouting match in any Western nation based on what I experienced.

      • Been there, done that. Agree.

        • Yes, I was in Japan for about two months back in 2003 on business. While most of my time was in Tokyo, I did have the opportunity to spend the weekends touring the country visiting the areas around Gagano, Niigata and Sendai. As always, I tend to avoid the tourist traps and ventured into the lesser traveled areas. Generally, my experience was very positive with how polite and courteous the average Japanese are as a people. I know it’s not a perfect society, and there’s always an exception. But generally, they were polite. Not necessarily friendly, but polite.

      • As for this claim that the Japanese have always worn masks, that’s simply not true. Twenty five years ago you didn’t see them, even among the teeming masses of Shinjuku or Shibuya.

        Traditionally white Americans show social awareness in many situations, such as waving the other fellow through at an intersection or allowing the person with only two items in their cart to check out before you at the grocery store. But we wouldn’t countenance the idea that the person with two items should be free to demand our spot in line, which is what the mask mandates accomplish.

        • I somehow doubt the Japs were wearing masks before they learned about the microbial basis of communicable diseases from the round-eye.

          • Yeah, but at least Japan wasn’t dumb enough to mandate diversity of skin color instead of diversity of thinking…

        • KGB For the record, I do not support mask mandates, and I do not wear one.

          However, I served a tour of duty in Japan starting in 1970. I saw a lot of mask wearing in the Winter.

        • Nah, the masks have always been a staple of living in Japan. The start of fall means the starts of pollen season and it’s pretty brutal for a lot of Japanese people. Western tourists would often find it a novelty to wear one. However, not everyone would wear a mask. But what’s different today is 99% wear a mask because of Corona, not out of seasonal utility.

        • I lived in Tokyo from 1990 to 1992, and learned from mask-wearing Japanese that the reason for most mask wearing was either 1) a cold, and not wanting to be seen dealing with dual streams running down the philtrum to the mouth or 2) allergy to pollen from the billions of cedar trees planted across the country in the 1970’s and avoidance of the same aforementioned consequence. Japanese men all carry a handkerchief, not used for rhinal hygiene but rather for mopping up sweat in the humid Japanese summers.

      • Traveling in Japan many years ago:
        Kid Sandmich: “How come no one says ‘excuse me’?”
        Me: “Because then that would be all that they’d say, constantly”.

        • Asians are hypochondriacs, special lotions, trusses, message chairs, big hats, sandwich bag gloves, I could go on. For years the Chinese tourists getting off the buses in Hollywood had masks on, following a guide with a long pole with a small flag on top so the won’t get lost. I used to keep a small picture of the Dalai lama in my pocket , I would walk through the middle of the group ,point it at them and yell “ the Dalai Lama is not a criminal just for fun. Even though he is…

          • ” I would walk through the middle of the group ,point it at them and yell “ the Dalai Lama is not a criminal just for fun.”

            That’s award-worthy. But if you did that today you would be a unicorn, the White guy who actually committed an anti-Asian hate crime just before extinction were declared by a congressional committee into its 3,267th day of hearings.

          • It would seem the majority of people here are very much opposed to the use of masks, or at least the idea being told they should use them.

            For those who argue they are ineffective, are you saying doctors and dentists should just stop wearing them during surgery?

          • As I can’t reply directly.

            Those masks are to prevent spittle and liquid spray both ways from getting into your mouth.

          • Correct. Masks in a surgical setting are intended to stop bacterial transmission into open wounds, not to inhibit airborne viruses. And even in that task they’ve been shown largely ineffective.

            Karl, is your next gambit to equate masks to underwear, which stops you from pissing on your neighbor?

    • I don’t give a damn what the Japanese do in their own society. They can wear masks or kimonos or samurai swords.

      In this society that I live in that my White ancestors bequeathed to me, compulsory mask wearing is an infringement on my rights. (It’s also stupid because a piece of cloth doesn’t stop a virus).

      • Agreed. Plus it’s completely unnatural for white Westerners to conceal their faces in daily living.

    • Voluntary, rather than coerced, politeness.

      That’s the sign of a people who really do care about their own.

      Who have a real identity, a sense of who they are, even amidst a crushing mass.

    • Will someone get Karl some scientific data and general research about masks. Apparently Germans are in the dark about that and also life in other countries.

    • Say, wouldn’t it be more polite to stay home when sick?

    • Despite the misguided conclusions of Karl’s post, he’s right that there can be great virtue in being considerate of your fellow tribe members. I had a very stark reminder of the differences between the Chinese and Japanese a long time ago and to my Western eyes, it reflected well on the Japs and poorly on the Han.

      I was traveling through Southeast China and had hooked up with a Brit for a few days in an effort to share expenses. We arrived in the town of Lijiang in Yunnan province and we knew in which guest house we wanted to board. On arrival, they had two beds remaining, one in a “dorm” style room with five total beds and one in a room with three beds. The one with 5 beds was cheaper (roughly $1.25 a night vs. $1.87) and this Brit was trying to save every last farthing so he took the bed in the larger room. We discerned that my room was already occupied by two Japanese, while his room had two Aussies and two Chinese. So we put our stuff down, went out to dinner, came back to the guesthouse and, having spent the day on a bus, retired to our respective rooms rather early in the evening.

      About half an hour after I turned out the lights, and just before falling asleep, the Japanese came back to my room. They initially turned on the lights but when they noticed that the third bed in the room was now occupied, they quickly extinguished it and got out small flashlights in order to get their toiletries and bed clothes. When they had to speak to each other they used whispers. They tiptoed around the room and closed the door very gently as they came and went.

      The next morning, I met my mate for breakfast and asked how his night had been. “Terrible”. The Chinese had come back to the room after midnight, threw on the lights, put down bags of food, and then sat on their beds, snacking and talking loudly — as if no one else was in the room.

      I’d rather live among people who acted like those Japanese and not among ones who act like the Chinese. But more importantly, I’d like them to also be my people.

      • I was too thrown back by Karl’s comment about public transportation in Japan to address his specific point. This is the opening to do so.

        White Americans, particularly Southerners and Midwesterners although it is not limited to them, tend to be very polite people. Oddly enough, when Japanese corporations built (they are no longer doing this as much) factories in North America, they would target the South and the Midwest. Although the South also had the advantage of low labor costs, the given reason always was the polite culture. What was unspoken, mostly, was the areas chosen due to their politeness tended to be the whiter ones. So in Tennessee, it was places like the Nashville suburbs but never the city, and in Ohio it was Marysville rather than Cincinnati. In the 80’s, and this illustrates how long the madness has gone on, a Japanese PM noted the American work ethic was on the decline due to blacks and browns. That created quite a firestorm.

        I have lived abroad quite a bit and in various parts of the United States, and I do have to say it is one of the if not the politest places. Opposition to masks has little to do with social graces.

        I absolutely agree with Karl that manners have faded in many places and parents must work to instill these once again.

        • “In the 80’s, and this illustrates how long the madness has gone on, a Japanese PM noted the American work ethic was on the decline due to blacks and browns. That created quite a firestorm.”

          If he said that today, it would create another firestorm–of the Hiroshima variety.

    • 1). Masks do nothing. Maybe a 10% difference. Maybe.
      2). I have nothing in common with my neighbors, unlike the Japanese.
      3). When I have a cold, I go to the grocery store to wipe my germs on everything.
      4). Asians are followers and lemmings with weird panty-sniffing undertones. And their gun laws are ridiculous.

      • Wish I could upvote this more than once. For me, since I live in Oregon and we have a burka mandate thank to our insane governor I deliberately wear a cheap bandana around my face. This has several advantages.

        1) It doesn’t work at all. I mean, I know masks in general don’t work but I picked this style of compliance for malicious and anti-social reasons. In fact it actively funnels my Coof germs downwards and I’m taller than most people, especially most immigrants.

        2) It cost me like $0.50 10 years ago so I can still proclaim that after 18 months of Coof insanity, I still haven’t spent a penny on this shit.

        3) It makes me look like I might be in the store to rob it.

        One disadvantage is that it’s blue, which I believe makes me a Crip rather than a Blood. The Crips are the black gang, the Bloods are the Whites and Hispanics.

    • The Japanese are free of diversity.

      • There’s been a noticeable uptick in the amount of negroes living here, though. A few times a year you get a news report of a Nigerian or “American” trying to lure women to behind the train stations. FWIW, the Olympics went woke this time around and nobody gave a damn. Nobody really gave a damn about the Olympics in general. The last few years saw all these international companies putting diversity in their store advertisements and it’s largely backfired. Gap, Old Navy, H&M, all went to shit and downsized when the darkies showed up. Diversity just doesn’t work and nobody likes it.

    • I guess your new Syrian friends are all wearing masks in public and not talking too loud on their mobiles. Winning!

    • The Japanese are of one race, with a common culture. We’re in an armageddon clusterfuck brought to us by smallhat productions., for our own good, everything was too nice before.

    • It is against common law to conceal your identity!

    • “Despite (their) many social flaws…” Yes, just ask the Chinese in Manchuria and the Koreans about that. Not to mention the surviving offspring of American soldiers who survived kamikaze attacks or internment in a Japanese POW camp in WW II. It’s nice to know that we bombed the homicidal maniac out of them, however. Oh, and the Nazis, too. Talk about “social flaws”! There must be something about a society that is so regimented that encourages a desire for conquest.

15. I hope this site somehow stays on as a ghost website a hundred years from now. Assuming we still have electricity and the internet. It’s a perfect catalogue of our failures and the coming breakdowns that they will bring.

16. Societies have always reinforced norms through public ritual. From the scapegoat to crucifixion to public hangings, such rituals allow the Elite to send their Message to the plebes. What is a Twitter mob cancellation if not a “high tech lynching”?

    Of course, as Zman observes, this is just elaborate theater. The outrage machine runs 24/7 at high RPM to keep all the harpies on the “redline”. That way, they don’t notice the collapse of real, physical civilization around their ears. The prospect of “justice” being done in virtual world provides the misdirection necessary for elite plunder and injustice in the actual world.

    The Christians of old were concerned with the Afterlife. The Harpies of today, eschewing Christian principles, are concerned about justice and redemption in the “parallel Afterlife” most experience daily on social media. It’s really not that different emotionally from old-time religion. On the Internet, their false god is on his throne.

    • The chief difference between the old public rituals and today’s high-tech lynchings is frequency. Relatively speaking, public executions were not terribly common centuries and millennia ago. They certainly weren’t everyday occurrences. Nowadays, in AINO alone, I would imagine about 50 people per day have their lives destroyed because they said the “wrong” thing around the wrong people.

17. This level of focus on emotions is also a symptom of the feminization of society. Just saw that a couple of days back you had an article on the problem of dominating women in society. Most of what you write there is perfectly true. Women must frankly be subjugated to men again. Resistance to subjugation by women is a socalled shit test (if you dont know what a shit test is read Cheateau Heartiste or someone like him).

    That said, it is important to emphasize that it is not women’s fault that we are dying as a civilization. It is men’s fault. There are no strong women, there are only weak men. When women become bossy sluts it is because men are too wimpy and pathetic to restrain them and punish such dysgenic behavior.

18. “The most emotionally unstable people are intensely on-line.”

    Then AINO is a “community” of moonbats.

19. A friend who owns a couple of restaurants participated in a conference call with several other franchise owners throughout the mid-Atlantic. They were dropped by the food distributor they’d had for years and the new distributor has increased prices by 10-12%. Many of them were addressing concerns over this increase. They were told they are fortunate to receive the food they are ordering at this point. They have worked for decades to build these businesses.
    Perhaps they can wait for some ingenious insight from the brilliant Jen “circle back” Psaki as to how they should proceed in a way that won’t be “unfair and absurd”.
    The ridiculous slogan “build back better” is the globalists code word for “utterly crush the middle class”.

    • “Fortunate to receive their orders…”

      …is a phrase that sounds like it was lifted from Poorly Made in China when the Chinese manufacturers flip the script on the Western importers.

    • “build back better” is code for “build back browner”

      The infrastructure bill isn’t about bridges, etc. it’s about giving money to melaninated. Biden team specifically stated that building bridges etc would result in money going to white people, so no bridges etc.

      We are being sanctioned, starved.
      We are under siege, starved.

      No Jobs, dwindling shelves. Starved.

      • For YT the plan is clearly,

        “Build back deader.”

20. PS in the King James bible, the leviathan is described as “the king of the sons of pride.” Sharp guy, Hobbes, who wrote his most famous work in response to the English Civil War which, he said, was caused by over-educated religious fanatics making their absurdly petty doctrinal spats into matters of public policy.

    • Pardon the OT, & cross talk. Severian, are you bringing back Rotten Chestnuts? I miss it on my daily tour through the bookmarks.

      JWM

      • It’s in progress. It’s a tech issue far above my competence. The emergency backup blog will have to do for the foreseeable future, alas.

        • you should have learnt to code.

21. Semi-OT:

    Speaking of grifts, check out the honeydews making bank selling CRT to the government schools:

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/conflict-interest-ag-garlands-family-getting-rich-selling-critical-race-theory-materials

    No wonder the AG is threatening to send the Cheka after concerned parents that are pushing back.

    It’s all so tiresome…

    • Well as many are wont to say: Every. Single. Time.

      • Really… Tribal Lawyer selling and pushing subversive nation-wrecking materials. Who could have foreseen this?!1? 🙄🙄

      • Not Z.

        It can’t possibly happen, its just flocking birds and you are just tiresome anti-cananites obsessed by the fact it is every time.

        Look I know its every time, but its not really a pattern because reasons..

        • Garfinkel. There. Fixed that for ya.

    • I know Joe Biden will not let this breach of ethics and likely, the law, stand. This administration is all about accountability. I predict Biden will demand Garlands resignation by the end of the day.

      • Somewhere over the rainbow . . .

    • Huh. I wonder which ethnicity developed and sold Common Core…?

22. It seems like everything in the public realm is fake these days – including displays of emotion. There is practically nothing you can “hang your hat on” anymore, other than this blog for example. One of my favorite phony emotings is the “pain and heartbreak” etc., over the latest jogger to get whacked – as if anyone gives a s***, unless there’s a chance to cash in on the ghetto lottery or to ruin another White person’s life.

    • Lots to do with women without children, or with so few that they have extra “caring feeligns” to worry about the brown babies. They have too much left- over “feelies” to mind their own business.

      Plus, us White men think our women MUST by justice, have a say in the public realm

23. I’ve always suspected that Leftism and autism are strongly correlated. I know the definition of “autism” these days is pretty vague, and it gets some people riled up, but I think we can agree on a minimum quick-and-dirty definition: autistics know that they feel, but they don’t know what they feel; the mismatch between what’s going on inside and the socially appropriate way to manifest whatever-it-is, is what causes their characteristic behavior.

    I noticed it a lot in college kids, becoming much more prevalent as we got closer to The Current Year. Lots of them have this odd, flat affect, like they’re idling in neutral, or a computer in sleep mode — you think you’re having a normal, everyday interaction with them, but you’re really talking to a screen saver. They can get in gear, and often do, but it’s always the same gear: 100%, hell-for-leather. Everything is either completely indifferent to them, or a complete triumph, or a complete catastrophe. Moderation, good enough, go along to get along… all of that is alien to them.

    They’d fight tooth and nail for a single point on a single unit quiz, for example — which represented at most a fraction of a percent of their semester grade — and then completely forget to turn in the midterm. Or I’d set a term paper question: “What were the causes of the American Civil War?” and get back what amounted to a one-sentence response: “The causes of the Civil War were slavery”… and they couldn’t understand why that wasn’t an A. Didn’t they answer the question?

    Leftism is tailor-made for that kind of person, because Leftism also doesn’t recognize concepts like moderation, good enough, and go along to get along. It’s all or nothing, and not only do you not get shunned if you get the screaming mimis over anything and everything, it’s actually encouraged. Trigglypuff is like that because she has no other way to be. She doesn’t even know what her emotions are, much less how to control and channel their expression. So she just screams.

    • Great observation. I am starting to wonder if those people have lost their souls, or in Christian terms, surrendered them to a dark and nihilistic power.

      • Yes. The screen. Not that it isn’t useful, but it’s also not real. Stare into the abyss, become the abyss.

      • People who stand for nothing always fall for anything.

        • Too vague. Severian’s contributions- the screen, the pills, the feminism- are really getting to the practical mechanics.

    • Overgrown teenagers in a society that encourages people never to grow up.

    • Its difficult to attribute a coherent belief paradigm in people who are also not quite people. The almost total lack of internal dialogue paired with a swollen hindbrain in perpetual fight or flight mode in defense of an eggshell ego makes for a rather inhospitable environment for developing an actual world-view. Their world is a house of mirrors.

      Leftism is deeply anti-human so there is that alignment. So the prevalence of the sperg-spectrum OS in younger generations is well aligned with the narcissistic and nihilistic orientation that compels them to swim left. But I don’t even know if we can give them credit. I mean perverted idealism is one thing, but as you note even their idealism is a kind of facsimile.

      Its long been known that social media use is like chemotherapy for empathy. What these kids are, more so than leftist soldiers, are actual NPC’s. Spiritually vacant. Philosophically inert.

      What moves them is a collective programming of imagery in that screen in their heads. Makes sense given that these are generations that were raised by AI. The algorithm generation. Their “reality” is a personally curated alt-reality from which there is no escape but for the massive, trauma inducing unplugging.

      Your descriptions of the increasingly absurd syllabus required to provide them explicit programming and to avoid the unknown triggering them is another example.

      Racisms, “hate”, inequity, and other leftist talking points are just brands to be worn like yoga pants or those little white shoes the boyz are wearing. The actual threat is being detached from the AI and having real life rush into the voids.

      If you haven’t watched “The Zoomers” you toob vidya, I recommend it. Disturbing but lucid view into the hive. And cutting indictment of our collective dereliction.

      • read the book “Cell” by Stephen king, then watched the movie with John Cusack–“flocking” seems to the right term..

    • The NPC meme was not born in a vacuum my friend. They -are- very binary thinkers both by nature & nurture. That is the true tragedy here is that you have kids that are already somewhat robotic in nature with limited range of affect and stunted psycho-social development. Then you heap this propaganda & binary worldview on them and they literally couldn’t be anything BUT NPC Programmatic Robots.

      The 2nd part of that tragedy is that even if you were to start them on a steady diet of RealTalk™ & Truthbombs® tomorrow it could take a lifetime or possibly never before they could be turned into something resembling a functional human again.

    • hmm.. given you have read Jaynes. Does it not seem closer to the bicameral explanation that autism?

      He describes a state where people have no volition other than that placed into their thumos byt he ahllucinated commands. And for the rest of he time are passive to outside stimulus.

      • I have read Jaynes, but it was long ago, so take this with a grain of salt, but… yeah. With two qualifiers: First, I’m not competent to evaluate a lot of Jaynes’s evidence (which comes from the early 1970s, so who knows how it holds up now?). Second, the college kids’ response was pretty much always the same: Rage, or what looked like rage. Even their triumphs seemed angry: “Take that, h8rz!!” The archaic civilizations Jaynes described also produced beautiful art, but I can’t see a modern “autistic” (or whatever we end up calling them) producing anything beautiful. It’s just neutral-neutral-Hulk smash!!!!-neutral….

        • I suppose it depends on who is providing the commands.

          hammurabi may have given city wide positive commands to help the populace in babylon.

          Current day is hate, destroy, filth, no wonder they are rage filled. The voice must be demonic torment.

      • I read Jaynes’ main work a few years ago. It’s interesting but it would be hard to confirm his theories given that most have to do with historical events. I do know that children raised by animals (there are a few confirmed cases) or raised by cruel and neglectful adults who locked them alone in a dark room, didn’t speak to them, or otherwise kept them from acquiring language and social skills do come out permanently damaged. One girl who was raised alone in a darkened room and never spoken to had an MRI done on her. The entire left side (language processing hemisphere) of her brain was essentially quiet.

        Some can never really learn to talk or interact with others. It’s worth considering whether children “raised by phones” may be a variant of this with their own peculiar defects. It may even be that a whole type of cognitive architecture is arising in the young. This does not seem to be a good thing. This new architecture seem to be characterized by non-linear thinking that has trouble with simple cause and effect and, most interesting, by a tendency to seek online oracles rather than thinking through a problem. This may be some of the reason for the rather startling degree of acceptance of “Covidism” among the young. As long as Google and the Facebook fact checkers say something is true, there’s no further need to think it through logically.

        This may indeed be an analog of the Bronze Age personality structure Jaynes imagined, except instead of a hallucinated voice of a god giving the orders, an actual website or video is filling the role.

        • I can’t upvote this comment enough. You have given me a mental image of Joan of Arc kneeling before a laptop. For that I am eternally grateful.

        • Yes I agree.

          I actually think the bronze age mind is the new age.
          I see a different consciousness all around, not merely different views.

          We may joke about brainwashing and feelings. But I agree society is regressing to a different conscious state based on oracles and that these people physically do not have an introspective self anymore.

          No matter what you do after early childhood, this is there state then for the rest of their lives.

          Jaynes’ point was they the volition is hallucinated internally, but is driven from an external source, the phone is the amplifier of that voice.

          the age of man is over.

        • Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space series has American colonists to another planet who were sent as frozen embryo. They were raised by robots after gestation and went mission-failure insane because they lacked parental socialization.

    • I rather suspect that the younger cohorts toward whom you direct your observations are those who have been relentlessly subjected to “teaching for the test”, and most certainly in areas such as your field of history. Doubtless, they were taught by leftist indoctrinators to whom there are most certainly correct answers that hew unfailingly to their favored “Arc of History” dogmas. You know, along the lines of the Covidians” favored discussion-ending buzzphrase, “The Science Is Settled”.

      Their victims have learned that punishment and humiliation follows for those who appeal to leftist-designated hatefacts, should they be so injudicious as to advance them in a misguided effort to think for themselves. You as their professor, a man of the Beforetimes, is rightly confounded. But you must understand, that while those from the ghetto have learned that “Snitches Get Stiches”, the products of these leftist miseducators have learned that “Thinkers Get Blinkers (or else)”. Terse, unreflective, politically safe answers should come as little surprise., sadly.

      • It’s not really a surprise, and there’s a lot of truth in your observation. As with all this stuff, it’s very hard to tell what’s nature and what’s nurture. They have indeed been trained to be robots, all their lives, at great expense and by diabolically clever instructors (the guys in charge of the curriculum)… but a lot of it also seems to be that they’re just differently wired. Whether they come out of the box that way (as it were), or whether the pills they’re all on from a young age screws up their biochemistry in all kinds of ways we’re forbidden to inquire about,* is unknowable, but I think it’s there.

        *Back before he turned into Angela Merkel — as badthinkers who hit the Social Security years tend to do, as you may have noticed — Fred Reed, of all people, pointed out that early reports about the Columbine shooters suggested they were on all kinds of stuff for ADHD: Ritalin etc. Those reports were very quickly buried, and Fred wondered why. I can tell you from experience that is of course anecdotal, but vast, that college kids are on all kinds of shit — Student Health hands them out like candy. And of course we’ll never know if what’s prescribed actually ends up in the prescribee’s (it’s a word) system, since Ritalin etc. are sold like street drugs to grinders (helps them study) and the vanishingly few guys who are serious lifters (not as good as steroids, but less long-term damaging… they think). Also recall that my experience is several years old by now; do you think it has gotten better or worse since then?

        • I want to acknowledge your excellent points before I get into something related about Columbine. The advent of Ritalin really signaled a bad turn in the concept of in locus parentis among school administrators and teachers. To justify narcotizing kids, a disease had ben invented. So we discovered ADHD. This trend obviously has gone well past children and schools; neuropathy for the most part is the justification for giving “pain” meds such as opiates to adults.

          That aside, what struck me most about Columbine was how often the “facts” reported were at complete odds with the truth. When it first happened, the narrative was Harris and Kebold were outsiders who had been bullied. The truth was they were the cool kids with lots of chicks and prone to edgy, semi-aggressive behavior. They were, to harken to the past, the Big Men on Campus. The objective reality was the polar opposite of what was presented.

          So why the false framing? I think this goes to the emoting Z described. People wanted to feel sad and angry and prove their virtue by denouncing bullying, denouncing close-mindedness. There even were initial reports the two were gay and targeted by football players, all of which was to lay a foundation to blast homophobia. That was 22 years ago and things have gotten much worse, much more emotive.

          • Like the Elian Gonzalez thing from around the same time, Columbine really should’ve opened my eyes. The Media has their narrative, and they’re going to push it, the facts be damned. The same weird split happened there, too – of course the old school reporters wanted to run with the narrative, but still felt obliged to report what facts they had (this is how the ADHD meds thing got out). The new generation of “journalists” saw it as an audition – who can push the most activist propaganda?

            That i didn’t see it, like I didn’t see the Gonzalez thing, is a measure of how tough the Normie conditioning is to break.

    • I can’t help but think that this autistic or quasi-autistic behavior tracks with the rise of digital reality. I’ve also noticed the behavior you’ve described–although more its semi-catatonic, drone-like qualities–and it seems to have began mushrooming this century. Immersion in sail foams, the Internet, videogames, and social media is, I think, producing mass psychosis. I’ve even heard suggestions that it is “rewiring” the neural components of the brain. Bad juju. Very, very bad juju, indeed.

      • Right?

        Then sit down and consider all the virus and zombie-centric propaganda that has been pumped out across all of those different media over the last few decades and how that impacted people’s minds.

    • There are far more people with autism that the government,medical establishment and media will ever admit. I don’t believe these people behave the way they do due to moral failings,helicopter parents or not being taught the tenets of Christianity. In my opinion they are neurologically impaired due to vaccination.
      Being injected with a potent neurotoxin like aluminium and the exceptionally neurotoxic mercury has damaged their brains.

24. one thing not mentioned is that people get addicted to intense emotions, whether positive or negative. all the rage heads online are completely taken over by the need to be enraged; they spend hours seeking it out.

25. *victimhood (if something this as sort can post)

26. Great article, Z Man. Must say, your output is usually very good, but the last couple of days have been brilliant.

    Regarding masculinity and the ‘stiff upper lip’, I have had various conversations with the females in my family and all seem to say something along the lines of “If you just opened up about the problem…”. No. I do not wish to. From a woman, this is usually an invitation to reveal morsels later divulged to others for gossip.

    When my father was seventeen, he was held up at a shop he worked in. He had a shotgun pointed at his head. He cried. He must have been terrified. The perps waited for the first arrival, who opened the shop, and busted in and bound him. They then did the same to the final two as they entered, separately. After the ordeal, what happened? They went back to work. He was scared. Bad things happened. He dealt with it. His father wasn’t one that you “opened up too”.

    I cannot say that this “opening up” is always a bad thing. Perhaps it helps many a man – who has experienced genuine trauma – to share these feelings. But nowadays one need not have a gun held to one’s head in order to have some bug-entity tell one to “open up”. Electricity gone off and you can’t cope? Open up. Slightly more traffic on the road this morning? Open up. Boss giving you an ‘unfair’ workload? Open up. Someone called you a naughty name? Well, darn it, just open up!

    I would say, though, that men who deal with things silently and by themselves have always impressed me. And I think they impress everyone. This could be why so many people want to discourage this behaviour. All signs point toward a society that cannot deal with hardship, but wants the medals for having done so. Your example of ’emotional appropriation’ is a good one. Sure, I’ve never had my legs ripped off by an IED or seen my comrades get drowned in an overturned APC in some river in some Afghan gorge; but I care because words.

    I am not saying we cannot care. But it is often the ones who do the most obvious caring that really do want you to think they’ve suffered too. They haven’t.

    When I was around 22 or so, one of my friends who had served in the Middle East (army), opened up. He was very pained at the things he saw. I couldn’t say anything to him, I just shut my cake-hole and let him talk. And cry. It was harrowing. Kids of our age in the most horrific situations, looked down on, of course, upon their return – if they returned. He’s doing well now, though. And bloody good for him, too. I suspect those on this board have similar stories. Probably things that happened to them, themselves.

    Anyway. Like I said, good article.

    • Terrible about your friend, for starters. There’s a vast difference between men opening up to other men and men opening up to women, of course.

      Women say a lot of shit they don’t mean. Among them is expressing admiration for sensitive men who readily open up to them. BS. They prefer a stoic tough guy who doesn’t show overt emotion. It’s an evolutionary preference for fortitude that has served women well.

      Show me a guy who limits opening up to his male friends and family (mothers excepted), and I’ll show you a guy who doesn’t have to worry about his wife or girlfriend sleeping around.

      • Allowing the qualities, qualifications, and characteristics of masculinity to be defined solely by women was a central event in our cultural defeat.

        Even among those on our side of the divide too many still seek to restore manhood by appealing to the female arbiters of manhood; negotiating with our captors to define and approve of some compromised masculine ideal that of course ends up further serving our captors. No accident that it is a microcosm of our larger war with the prog left.

        But absent some mannerbund or robust community ordered around the natural hierarchy of men, that appeal to explicit feminized authority in hope of mere de facto feminized authority will constantly undermine our efforts to build anything other than another paddock for our boys.

        • We have allowed masculinity to be stigmatized as toxic, and therefore fit only for extirpation. Once the masculinity is machined out of men, all that is left are flaccid envelopes of flesh partially refilled with an ersatz and alien femininity. There are no men, only shemales.

      • Peg: Watcha thinking Al?

        Al: If I wanted you to know what I was thinking, I’d be talking.

      • I went through a period of great depression and suicical thoughts in my 30s. I opened up to my sister about it at the time.

        When I later met the woman that I wanted to marry, I arranged for her and my sister to talk.

        In that first conversation, my sister proceeded to tell my future wife about all my previous emotional troubles.

        Thanks Sis. Glad that I opened up to you.

        • My father said few things worth remembering, but he used to say, “Never tell a woman anything you don’t want to tell the world.” Good advice that I have not always followed.

        • But, you didn’t blubber all over the future missus directly. You did it just right, allowing the girls to be involved in the way women understand.

          Sis was your liason.
          The girls had something to share, knitting everyone together into a larger family. Mrs. Sand- to-be had an interesting mystery she could grasp.

          Well done. I hope you kept your lips sealed. They don’t want to talk to you, but about you.

          (Gods, I wish my brother would figure that out! Women cannot stand men who put it all out there, before, during, or after.

          Another note, the one secret all women share and will never, ever tell:
          You know that relaxed grin of appreciation in intimate moments?
          During oomph or say, while wedding?

          Women HATE HATE HATE that stupid grin more than anything in the world. They want you to glare them down like you’re going to murder them. Like you’re serious, dammit. They’ll melt if pinned, they’ll turn away if grinned. No matter how long one has or has not been married.)

        • Line: I occasionally shared more than I ought to have with others about my marriage in the first year thereof. My husband spoke to me quite sharply about this, and the importance of a private zone and loyalty and trust. I am grateful to him for this lesson, which I should have learned from my parents. And I still have to consciously focus on it.

          Hope your sister didn’t destroy your marital prospects.

    • I knew a brother and sister who were always on dodgy terms with each other since they became adults. She complained he didn’t open up about his feelings enough and she felt locked out.

      He got hit with a nasty divorce and she again encouraged him to open up to her, so he did. First phone call barf, she thought it was great. Second phone call barf, she said it was nice but thought he needed to get himself together. By phone call number five she was refusing to answer the phone and was complaining non-stop about how he needs to stop being such a putz and get his life in order.

      Of course, once in a while a good barf over real trauma over drinks with the guys is healthy and right. If you’re going to do something insane call your bud to cool you off. That’s different than constant whining and emoting.

    • It’s something I’ve thought about, since venting is the only thing that seems to work for me.

      Psychoanalysts and Scientologists have been known to abuse confidence. The unethical sort, in fairness. In fact, I’d argue all of this emoting has been the instrument of our collective subjugation. Think advertising and consumerism.

      The question for me is, is it merely wounding a person to fill the hole with stuff, or is it a kind of spiritual ransom?

      But about venting, what seems to work is getting angry instead of vulnerable, at least for me. Toilet flushed, and people either respect it or are driven away. Seems to me its a shallow soul that can’t handle a little friction from time to time, so who needs them anyway 🙂

27. The Urban Meyer situation is even more innocent than that. The woman came up and started grinding on him while he was sitting on a barstool. Really his only mistake was not telling her to move away from him, which depending on how much he had been drinking, he may not have been a position to do. If he touches her to move her away from him, now it is “assault.” I was stunned this became a story, especially the Jaguars Arab owner, who has probably plowed through 20 women in a weekend before, saying how disappointed he was. The real lesson is famous people shouldn’t go to bars that don’t enforce a no phone policy inside.

    • It’s pretty clear Urban Meyer has been selected for destruction by some shadow people, and they are not going to let go until he’s dragged into the abyss.

      Another reason not to follow outrage online, but only wonder why someone wants you to be outraged.

      • Someone told me he said nice things about Trump back in 2016, so that is why he has been marked for death by the sissy sports writers. I don’t care enough to check it out, but they have targeted him for some reason.

        • The big issue with Urban Meyer is that he is a white man (named after a Pope, even) and he got a head coaching job above the black men who the media has designated to be the next head coaches in the NFL.

          As for why he is getting that treatment over other White head coaches, he is the biggest name and the biggest target, and didn’t spend years granting access and currying favor with NFL sportswriters the way that you do if you’re an assistant coach.

      • I have been noticing an inordinate amount of negative news stories about Meyer in the newsfeed for weeks now. I know soon after he took the job he hired hired a strength coach who had resigned from his college job after accusations of racism. Then he gave Tim Tebow a try out. For whatever reason, a target has definitely been put on his back.

    • Heh, the team owner is savvy enough to know his core demographic and is just playing to it.

      You don’t get to be an NFL owner without knowing how to play to public opinion.

      IOW, Cloud People gonna Cloud.

      • Who is the NFL’s core demographic these days? Honest question, as I really don’t know. It used to be conservative, blue-collar, young and middle-aged white guys. Joe Sixpack.

    • The only real problem with Meyer’s behavior is not flying back with the team. Dude, you guys are 0-4, and a bad 0-4 at that. Get in the office and get to work.

28. > Just look at the name “social media”. It is a replacement for the normal human socialization that would occur in natural human communities. The most emotionally unstable people are intensely on-line.

    There have been an uncountable amount of extremely online people who have gone from reasonably sane but a little cantankerous to emotional wrecks who barf all their emotions on the screen. A lot of this is the simple fact that most online personas have a few years to shine before people move on to other acts and they are desperately trying to stay relevant. The other reason is many have replaced their real day-to-day existence with the online. This seems to go for people with 100,000 followers to people with 500 friends on Facebook and regardless of whether they even make an income. For some, dopamine is the income.

    The smart influencers either understand how to separate online from reality, or know their schtick is just a game and can emotionally separate from it. Usually you can tell the sane ones when they go on vacation for a week and feel fine not posting.

    • I had a buddy in grad school who went through this. He was always a Liberal, of course — we met in grad school — but he was one of those aspiring academics (vanishingly rare now) who really loved his subject, and just wanted to get on with it. His Liberalism, in other words, was just incidental.

      But then he got a job at a tiny little school somewhere out in the sticks, where the town/gown split was all but total. The college was this hermetically sealed little world, which was bad enough, but since you can’t be on campus all the time, instead of sucking it up and joining a bowling league with the local farmers or whatever, he got online… and now he’s a flaming lunatic. He’s still cowering under his bed, wearing a mask at home, despite everyone around him living normal lives in the sun. But what’s he going to believe, Twitter or his own lying eyes?

29. When a spoiled child throws a tantrum over some imagined slight or offense, the wise parent administers a quick & sharp swat to the behind, the wailing comes to an abrupt end, the child learns an important life lesson (i.e. don’t pitch a fit over nothing), and life goes on as it should. But we now live in a society in which the responsible parent is arrested, labeled a child beater, scorned by the PC tribunal, likely fired from his job (and his means of supporting his family), and replaced by a paternalistic government who then proceeds to indoctrinate the child as a socialist. The child grows up to be a useless weenie that bursts into tears at the drop of a hat, and the Cloud people pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

    If the above was attempted by a thug that broke into your house in the middle of the night, you would likely beat him to death with your bare hands. Why is it different when a rogue government does it?

    • “Why is it different when a rogue government does it?”

      Because special bits of paper, with laws on them. These laws are “who we are”. If it is law. It is right.

      Never mind wondering if it is actually right or just or whatever.

    • Main difference? They have guns and can kill you if you don’t comply. What if a citizen had attempted to defend Ashlii Babbitt from the government agent? How is Kyle Rittenhouse’s young life going?

      The hardest thing about 2020/2021 was learning that our rulers can do whatever they want. My states ruler can waddle onto stage a week before school starts and say every child in the state has to wear a gag for 7 hours a day. Last year, he did it the Friday before school started.

      If my company forces me back to my cube in the central business district, the muzzle is required to ride on the government train, in the “private” office building and don’t even get me started on taking the jab.

      But it’s a free country. My choice.

30. In this age of sacralized victimized, prides comes after the fall.

    Sharp takes.

31. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Emotional Appropriation

32. As everyone knows the biblical admonition that pride goeth before the fall, how soon for the fall? I’m getting antsy.

    Everything points to a drastic collapse with our present Ceausescu in office. Will it be incremental or with major surges in the breakdown.

    • I’d expect a couple major downshifts in the next year or so. Logistics industry is breaking down, petroleum byproducts are permanently short-supplied now, and microchips are unicorns. My guess is the first major storm will be mid-November when vaccine mandates coincide with the holiday rush. The second will be late January or early February when HVAC short supply becomes an issue. There will probably be issues in mid-spring once critical parts for heavy farm equipment prove to be in short supply.

      • We should all be thankful that we have the firm hand of Captain Joe Biden at wheel with his able first mate, Kamala Harris, at his side to navigate the stormy seas ahead.

        • Hey, if Basement Joe can handle a bad dude like Corn Pop we have nothing to worry about from Xi and Putin!

          • Putin and Xi must have multiple muscle pulls from uncontrolled laughter at Totally Legit Joe’s expense. The phrase “you gotta be shitting me” probably rolls through their minds several times a day.

        • the Professor and Mary Ann—

        • Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale/
          A tale of a fateful trip/
          That started from this tropic port/
          Aboard this tiny ship/
          The mate was a mighty sailing man/
          The skipper brave and sure/
          Five passengers set sail that day/
          For a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour…

      • Drew: Browsing around the web the past few days I’ve learned there’s a shortage of liquid oxygen for municipal water treatment, as well as chlorine (for swimming pools and emergency water purification). And, of course, Costco has limited purchases of bottled water. There’s a shortage of CO2 (worse in Britain) – so anti-White Coke and Pepsi are making bank.

        I found mention of a ransomware attack on a large Iowa farming coop (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/5-9-million-ransomware-attack-on-farming-co-op-may-cause-food-shortage/), which I saw nowhere in mainstream media. Have not discovered any further stories about whether the ransom was payed, etc., but the original report claims this could significantly impact our supply of ‘grain, pork, and chicken.”

        Natural gas prices are the highest they’ve been in 2 years, up 80% since Sep 2020. There was no general firewood on sale outside the grocery stores the other day, except a .65 cubic foot bag of Pinon wood for $10.99. Prices for Mr. Heater have almost doubled since early 2020.

        We all know about the rising prices for gas/petrol, for wood and building supplies, the utter unavailability of many generators, etc. (I just picked up a few more propane canisters). The elites always seem compelled to advertise their plans, and then label anyone who notices a conspiracy theorist. I know nothing about any particular industry, but somehow I expect severe shortages to begin manifesting by Christmas and becoming acute at the height of winter.

        Perhaps long underwear and cans of soup might be good holiday gifts.

        • I think lumps of coal will be this year’s hip Xmas gift.

          Burning it will give you an extra 15 minutes of heat and light before you freeze to death in the dark.

          • cheery christmas at your place then?

        • Weren’t we promised a ” dark winter”?

        • Adding to 3g’s findings, the AP dropped a good article on October 1st about plastic prices going up due to chemical shortages.

          Some numbers:

          Ethylene, up 43%.

          PVC, up 70.

          Epoxy resins, up 170%.

          The money quote was about putting Beer Flu behind us to normalize the shortages.

        • I track a wide variety of different products and the stories are the same. However, none of it has come home to me, which is probably the benefit of living in rural Kentucky. My guess is that large cities on the coasts will see the most problems (particularly the northeast), but small towns and mid-size cities in the AG belt will mostly have to deal with more expensive food.

          • As beef prices have risen, I’ve been bemused to find the value of the beef I’ve got in my freezer from the last couple cattle I had slaughtered increasing faster than all my other investments.

            Beef isn’t quite worth its weight in gold yet, but give it time….

        • As someone who loathes social media, even I was taken aback by the timing of Facebook being taken down just before a whistleblower who described all its horrors, strictly from a left-wing perspective, of course.

          It also is apparent the targets of recent cyber attacks–fuel, meat, and so forth–are the ones the Ruling Class want limited. While I also would have once thought this tinfoil hat territory, it is apparent these are state-sanctioned feelers.

          • Jack-

            You probably already know this, but Ice Age Farmer is doing a great job covering the war on our agricultural and energy supplies.

          • I’ll have to respond to myself because I cannot respond directly to you, WGH. I did not know. Thanks for the information. I’m going to dig to find Ice Age Farmer.

        • There’s a shortage of CO2

          I’ve found that to be the most deliciously ironic of the latest catastrophes, in the midst of a world-wide propaganda campaign to demonize CO2.

33. An insightful essay. The allusion to the Seven was likely lost on many, for, as you say, a grounding in the what used to be the tenets of civil society has been lacking for several generations now. Funny how those ridiculed Churchmen were able to boil down the problems of Man into a simple list of seven.

    As if it needed uttering, recall, pride goeth before the Fall.

    • except for the major motion picture on the subject: Se7en.

      • This time, its our head in the box. That’s the problem.

      • That was 26 years ago. That’s a couple millennia in internet years.

34. Americans value “sincerity “, the British value wit, the Japanese value “face”; and so on.

    Where the forms of democratic are on display, the politicians will project what they must. But it’s mostly an act.

    Good insight connecting “social” media, Brave New World and the feelies.

    • I think Americans have been looking for public tears for a while now. It used to be just relegated to public preachers. Then something happened. Remember the robotic Al Gore trying to tear up about his wife or something, in 2000? Then Dale Earnhart died and there was the soppiest funeral I’d ever seen…so many southerners hadn’t cried since Sherman’s march. It accelerated after 9/11. All the news anchors were having a tear-off in the hours and days afterward. Then we get like every presidential candidate crying about something. Then we get baseball players, minor celebrities, and business people in hot water crying in public. Even Hillary Clinton tried to cry. I am embarrassed for my people, at this point.

      • There are two, TWO, cuts f Faucci tearing up in that new trailer for the Disney movie. He has a lot to cry about so either he feels guilty for the roles he’s played in devastating the lives of millions (both now and in the 80s) or he’s a stone cold psychopath.

        • Gee.. let me think…

    • “the British value wit”

      Not anymore, old son. The Brits seem to value fake tans, social media, emojis and virtue signalling. And being told what to do by benevolent mama gubmint…

      Of course, some of us still hold fast.

      • The pride England projects to the world via television is in its eight black actors, and via social media in its hundreds of rainbow-painted cop cars.

        Being more repulsive than America is almost impossible, but they’re on it.

        It’s over when Radio 3 stops being “boring” (the good kind). It’s trying.

      • Well that’s a damn shame, because British dry wit used to be amazing.

        I’d secretly hoped that all the emotive “sincerity” British pols project to the US media was for consumption abroad.

        Alas.

    • Americans value “sincerity “

      That’s funny, because it’s exactly this kind of untrammeled emoting that gets Americans a reputation for being fake.

      And while the British “value” (and excel at) wit, it’s not *a* value, rather than a talent or an art form. The British value a stiff upper lip.

      • The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made. — Jean Giraudoux, French diplomat, dramatist, & novelist (1882 – 1944)

    • We are in trouble.

35. Excellent post.

    “Since our Cloud People worship the arc of history, it sort of makes sense that they inappropriately take pride in that which is the product of generations of history. Pride has been called the cancer of the soul. It is considered the first and most serious of the deadly sins.”

    I had thought that cynicism was the cancer of the soul. In a time in which cynicism is a true and appropriate reaction to our Age of Grift, how is one to overcome or “heal” from cynicism short of withdrawal from the artificial life around us when withdrawal isn’t possible?

    Even Z’s got a day job.

    • “Age of Grift.” Perfect

36. The kind of communities the cloud people don’t care about are real communities—places where real people live, work, socialize, their kids go to school, make friends, etc. Wall Street and Washington DC don’t shed any tears over destroying businesses in these places in the name of free trade and efficiency and financial greed.

    • They are a culture-destroying force. They have got to be stopped

37. Interesting post Z.
    Your selection of Pride made me think of Pride Parades celebrating Homosexuality.
    I’ve always wondered what the participants were “proud” of.
    Inserting erect penises in others rectums?
    Anonymous fellatio in public bathrooms?
    I don’t get it.
    Norm Macdonald has a great rant about guy who’s proud of his homosexual son, talking around the water cooler at work. I think it hasn’t been banned from the Tube yet.

    • Thank you. I read Z’s passage on pride and my first thought was the Norm Macdonald / Dennis Miller clip about “I’m Proud of My Gay Son”.

    • Regarding Norm’s bit, you are correct it has not been censored yet:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlE8UAK3mMM

      • Thank you for that.

    • We need to memorize this bit, like Fahrenheit 451

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