177 thoughts on “Fast And Slow”

1. Exit Schlomoworld. Chuck the phone, the tv, all propaganda, all lies, all bullshit. Carry cash, get out of their banks. Exit bignose world, fuck em, walk and talk like free White men. The people who got us here didn’t go through hell for us to be cattle, walking down a chute for small hat Satan. Fuck that…death before dishonor.

   • how do you get out of the banks?

2. It’s like the DJ upped the beats-per-minute. We went from a mellow Reggae beat-meter…to friggin’ 220 bpm Techno, in under five years.

   Which isn’t a problem if you can leave the club for a quieter joint. But we can’t. America’s 24/7 Rave injects into our homes, cars and schools. It surrounds and encases us, and we can’t light out for mellower beats anymore.

   Usually, the crowd just tires out under the extreme beat-work. They head to the bathrooms to ‘bump-up,’ to the bar to refresh, or they just retire to the VIP lounge to sit things out until a saner DJ climbs into the booth.

   My read is, the Democrats are crashing the American party on purpose. They intend to close the house at the usual 6 am, but instead of floating their patrons out the door with soft sunrise beats and a call to love, they plan to so abuse the ragged patrons with meth-techno so that they never want to party at Club America ever again.

3. No tv for 20 years, no dumb phone for three, flipper that’s a slow piece of crap, job that requires me to 2 to 3 hours a day and pays 6 figures , all the time in the world to read books and cook healthy tasty food, stand up old lady, and better health than I deserve. And what do I do ? Complain…. I’m working on that.

   • jiminey cricket whats the job?

     • Fedpoaster. Glad blah blah blah blah blah.

4. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Fast and Slow

5. Totally off topic: More glowing notsee White terrorists. Nothing to see here.
   Damn – can’t copy image. A group of White supremacist notsees staged a demonstration in San Antonio, and a couple of them are the spitting image of the feds from Maga rally post Jan 6. I’d like to say this is getting old, but no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the average American.

   • The VAX THE JEWS guys?

     Solid troll slogan, should join IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE and ISLAM IS RIGHT ABOUT WOMEN in the pantheon.

     But then—

     There’s a website URL on the VAX THE JEWS sign. So it’s feds or morons.

     Then another sign says [URL] SUPPORTS ALEX JONES. So, feds.

     They defeated the slogan. VTJ means *these feds*, not what it says. This is the first time they knew how to win a meme battle. Hm.

6. “Modernity has become a doomsday device. It is killing the population that created it, but it cannot carry on without the people who created it”.
   I’d call that a feature rather than a bug.

7. That remark about Mark Cuban leaving no footprints reminded me of a twitter exchange years ago when somebody tweeted to Tom Anderson, who founded Myspace about what a failure he and his company were. He got back a tweet from Tom that pointed out it had been sold for $35 million or whatever. The taunter deleted their twitter account.

8. I think we can glean our future by studying the honey bees. The Africanized ones make less honey, and instead form raiding parties to steal a lot of their honey, especially from European honey bees (how shocking). The European ones expand much more slowly, but their honey stocks carry them well into the most bitter, iced over winter. This is why the Africanized ones never really made it to the northern tier of the country. The fact that a colony can survive into May is quite a feat. Humanity is no different. All we need is very long winter to straighten things out. Only ours will be a financial winter, whenever that comes. A financial winter without WIC, without Medicaid, without Section 8, etc. The mother of all crashed and financial convulsions. Suddenly all those people with genes and a lifestyle from the Baltic and North sea regions will understand why they felt almost hardwired to store resources for a cold rainy day. I read a joke recently, it’s probably old. What do you get when you feed a million starving Ethiopians? 10 million starving Ethiopians.

   • JR Wirth: Re storing resources for cold rainy day – surprising number of wire shelving units sold out at a number of sites, or prices rising rapidly at others. I’m not the only one who had the idea some organization of resources might be in order.

   • End the taxpayer subsidized heating and watch Little Mogadishu, MN vanish like a fart in the wind.

9. “Mark Cuban, who is not Cuban . . .”

   Z Man, you come up with some great lines.

   • People who say Z doesn’t address the JQ are dishonest. He does, just in a subtle manner. Sometimes those echoes are very loud, if you listen closely.

     • One great, subtle line:
       “That’s not very Christian of him.”

     • Best of all, he’s not autistic about it, which makes for an enjoyable read.

     • I have a “Jewish Question “ question:

       Is the JQ even a question at this point? I am not saying we have to turn them all into soap and lamp shades… but there ARE more than a few that could use the business…

   • Federalist – you might even say he’s Juban..

10. “The explosion of technology and media turned up the speed on daily life.”

    Worse, it turned up the speed of government. The nadir of 2020’s lockdowns for me was the realization that the government had made a smartphone app to notify citizens of lockdown rule changes AS THEY HAPPENED, and people had voluntarily downloaded it and run their businesses accordingly.

    I became a lawbreaker in the time it took to travel from the grocery to the hardware store.

    Never before has the technology existed to govern in real-time.

11. “Slow organisms will have a higher investment in fewer offspring and fast organisms will have a lower investment in a greater number of offspring.”

    Or as I like to think of it, lets compare the rate of absentee fathers starting on the offensive line compared to those starting at wide receiver. If you know, you know.

    • I know! You know?

      • I forgot to include corner backs.

    • That;s what the Hajnal line is all about.

12. Don’t look now, but the UN is putting out videos with talking CGI dinosaurs warning us, “…don’t choose extinction!”

    https://bigleaguepolitics.com/globalists-are-putting-out-weird-extinction-propaganda-as-society-declines-rapidly/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9eFABJqGTM

    Just when you think clown world can’t ascend to new heights…

    *HONK HONK*

13. Things are changing. Traits that were good 100, or even 30 years ago are increasingly obsolete.

    Things like decency, morality, rule following, trusting, fairness, agreeableness, individualism, respect, facts and logic, and “doing the right thing” are unfortunately out. These are values for a high trust, high IQ, homogenous Western European society. I know many Anglos like this – smart and competent, but only capable of operating within the narrow confines of the “rules” set out by their superiors. Today, the “rules” tell us to abort your children, welcome hostile invaders, cut off your penis, live in lockdown forever with 3 masks, and inject yourself with the science juice. Anglos are very good at all of this; unfortunately it’s not good for us. These rules lead to extinction.

    We no longer have smart Anglo rulers. Those fat cats always got more than their fair share of the pie, but they didn’t want to exterminate their own. The new rulers hate us and want us dead, and so does the hostile foreign population that they’ve imported.

    So what are the new traits that the surviving white people will have? A big one is low agreeableness – people who are willing to say “fuck you” even if it means ostracism. A tribal attitude will be important going forward. You’re on team white whether you like it or not. People who value tribe over principles/honesty/whatever else, and are willing to do what it takes to get what they need and what their tribe needs (important to not screw over our own in this pursuit though). People with a nasty streak. People who are religious and who have children.

    You can still have some of the old Anglo attitudes, in moderation, among your own people. But it’s a hard and tribal world – and every day is a war for resources. Basically, we’re all Scots-Irish now.

    As much as I dislike the current order, I wonder if I am better suited for life today than if I would have been if I were born in 1950. My personality puts me at odds with many other Anglos / whites, and yet puts me on the road to success for the harsh present that those old values created for us while others wallow in their obsolete world views. I think most dissidents have these same traits.

    • “Those fat cats always got more than their fair share of the pie, but they didn’t want to exterminate their own.”

      So how do you explain the civil war?

    • Southern and Eastern Europeans seem to not suffer as badly from this defect. That whole Hajnal Line thing seems to have some merit. Italians, Spaniards, and Eastern Euros simply don’t seem to have that super high trust gene that also can easily be used to destroy you if you cannot break out of that genetic naivety. Scandinavians seem to suffer the most severely (see: Sweden, Minnesota) but it definitely is across the various other populations within the Hajnal line as well.

      There is probably some nature/nuture here too in that those aforementioned populations have rubbed elbows with diversity for far longer and in more dangerous ways. (Moorish conquest, Ottoman’s, etc.) So they are very hip to the brown horde and its true long term goals.

      • The problem with being of Baltic/North Sea ancestry is we are acclimatized to being alone with our thoughts for long periods, whereas people from Southern climes see this trait as abhorrent. I read somewhere about an illegal who was so depressed by being alone/not surrounded by his people he took to sleeping with a teddy bear. We also have a “big bubble” and don’t like being crowded from behind in the grocery checkout line..

    • B125: We no longer have smart Anglo rulers.

      Uh, Tater Joe is a tater.

      We no longer even have Anglo rulers.

      And God forbid that the streetsh!tteress x gr0id, Kamala Harris, should ascend to the Oval Orifice.

      Then we wouldn’t even have humans as leaders.

14. This one hit home. The Covid panic has me working at home and we had a baby last year, so we built a new house outside of the suburbs in a more rural town. Despite working at home I work more hours now than ever before – constantly attached since the office is a room away from the living room. Ended up getting off Facebook permanently a year ago and it was one of the best decisions for my mental health. I don’t keep in contact with people as much and am definitely out of the loop on news, but slowing down life and focusing on ourselves and living small has been a good change for me and my family.

15. Once you realize most of what you hear and see is BS, it’s natural to tune out and slow down. Why waste time and energy keeping up with ephemera?

    I’m reminded: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour”

    • It’s barely worth reading the news anymore. At most I skim the headlines once a day to see what nonsense the bastards are spouting, and even that seems excessive.

16. Is r/k selection true though? It seems like a theory that only fits a certain time (1960) when there was the maximum gap between European and African birth rates.

    In the wild it doesn’t appear that Europeans had a much lower birth rate than Africans. With the introduction of birth control, legal abortion, and changing living standards / economics, the European birth rate fell.

    Today, the African American birth rate is around 1.75 children per woman, and the white birth rate is 1.55. It’s not a significant difference, in similar conditions. Black women might not be able to figure out birth control but they can still find their way to an abortion clinic.

    Europeans just invest more in their kids, period. Regardless of how many they have.

    • Good point. The Catholics had and the Mormons have lotsa kids, for example. Perhaps religiosity plays a role more than just banana-vs-lingonberry peoples. Also, blacks just don’t give a s**t about much.

      • Don’t the Amish and Mennonites tend to have big families as well?

        Though, with the BLM and alphabet soup flags up down at the local urban Mennonite meeting house, I’m not sure that’s always a good thing.

        • Most of the Mennonite churches outside of the core conservative counties (PA, KS) are leaning heavily into the rainbow soup. Plus, they have been adopting non-whites as children into their families (sometimes the sole children) for a generation, now. The myth of the Mennonite as sorta-Amish is really strong. It is quite far from the truth. The anti-white struggle sessions are now a part of the pulpit.

      • I love that line “banana versus lingonberry” Hah

    • If data from a NY study can be extrapolated to apply to blacks across the rest of the country then about 1/2 of black pregnancies are aborted.

      • & they say abortions are bad

      • That’s why abortion is a good thing… about half the time.

    • What is this “African-American” of which you speak?

17. This is the system’s last decade, meaning all of the major financial groups are forcing their corporations to go one overdrive, everything gets sped up when it comes to pushing the globo-zionist agenda: electric cars, fake meats, infinite boosters, chip implants, all sorts of crazy shit, any white who doesn’t comply is declared an enemy.

    After a decade of crap like this the white nations will become too weakened & the replacement non-white young migrants will become too many & too feral to be able to maintain control. Welfare won’t mean shit if shelves are empty, that’s the libtard’s only method of controlling non-whites. Muslims will eventually want control of the institutions in order to loot what’ll be left of white countries. In european major cities for example I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point we’ll see muslims offering protection to whites if they decide to convert.

    • That might be a very effective strategy. With the mutual abandonment and alienation of Whites and their Christian churches in the West a concerted effort (there’s the rub) by Moslems to proselytize whites could see a lot of success, especially among the young. Think of all the important natural alignments that already exist between dissidents and the Moslem world. Many of the conclusions we come to about the nature of a properly organized society look very much like my understanding of Moslem religious teaching. As our own Christian churches not only fail to stand up and defend Whites from the great replacement but actively participate and profit from it, why wouldn’t Whites turn to something else for spiritual and corporal support. So strange to think about it coming to this after 2001 but our rulers actually do hate us for our freedom.

      • We can form alliances with the Muzz without converting to Islam. We simply withdraw from organized “Christianity” while practicing traditional Christianity independently, and then work with the Muzz to undermine the AW Empire. The fly in the ointment, of course, is immigration. Allying with the Muzz while simultaneously trying to prevent them from living among us could prove tricky, to say the least.

        • Yeah, don’t cleanse the temple, make a deal with the devil. If that’s your conception of imitating Christ, your Christianity is as fake as that practiced by the leaders you criticize.

          • Let God focus on smiting the devil. We will put him to work.

        • As I have read elsewhere, just wait till the Germans become Muslim! I bet pork will still be on their menu and nothing will be done about it.

      • I shall destroy your post with one word: bacon

    • Acceptance of “protection” from muslims would be a disasterously bad decision. Christianity, for all its current flaws (largely traceable in my mind to juicey influence over both doctrine and practice), was over the centuries conformed with the essential characteristics of Western man, and attuned to be a corrective for our flaws of character and culture.

      Islam is not that at all. It is at root an expression of the characteristics of a different race, a semitic race, and of the multiple alien cultures that fell under its sway as it has expanded. There is no keel of agreed upon doctrine and practice, rather differing schools of interpretation and religious law. The shada is in no way the equivalent of the Nicene Creed. Islam is as if hyper-juiciness was merged with the fractiousness of protestantism, and thus in that way it serves as a constant generator of warring sects, and as a seedbed of fanaticism.

      This makes it entirely unsuitable as a host religion/culture for the highest exponation of science and reflective philosophy. Any thought/spiritual leading lights in the muslim world making gestures in those directions have been, and in my estimation, will always be persecuted and/or exterminated.

      Our Western Apollonian/Dionysian dual nature makes that spiritually tyrannical religion with its totalizing culture completely unsuitable for us, never in a million years. Do you really aspire to the role of dhimmi, not only subject to the jizya, but constantly vulnerable to the violent upsurges of muslim fanaticism? Christ’s burden is light, not so that of the crushing yoke of Islam.

      • I didn’t bring the subject up as an aspiration but as a possible outcome or evolution. However valid those criticisms of Moslem doctrine and practice may be, there is a fundamental truth to the famous “strong horse” observation and the Moslem world seems much more vigorous and self-assured compared to the exhausted and dispirited former Western Christian world. Christians are definitely not manning the levers of power in our society. Our self image as the bulwark of human progress expressed as the best civilization for cultivating individual human freedom is suddenly, shockingly unsupportable. Negated by the unrestrained depravity that our civilizational institutions failed to suppress. I can’t help looking to the sky’s expecting to see a fireball of retribution hurtling down.

        • skies , damn I wish I could read.

        • Islam isn’t a strong horse. It’s practitioners are the trailer trash of the world. Muslim men oppress their women because they are weak and insecure, not because they’re strong.

      • those who lived in little italy paid the mobsters, if you surround yourself with moslims you will end paying tribute to moslims, it’s either that or you leave, it’s that simple.

        Christianity plays no role here, pope will be too busy promoting brain chips & raising statues of moloch.

      • ” Christianity, for all its current flaws ”

        I kinda see what you were getting at with this, but its blasphemy to say Christianity has flaws.

    • Decade?

      This crap isn’t going to last more than a couple years, tops.

18. It’s been a long time since the American public school system taught anything of value. Once upon a time, it focused on rote memorization, punctuality, and patriotism; all of which were important to the industrial revolution of my youth. By the time I got to college, the best they could do was to teach you to learn how to learn. And all of that went into the shitter when Progs took over and turned schools into a Leftist indoctrination machine. Almost all youngsters today grow up with virtually no skill set for survival in the modern era; which makes them dependent on a nannyist government, by design.

    But they are still products of their DNA ancestry, and they can be resurrected as apex predators with above average IQ. It starts with learning to hunt and find (there is a reason that the child’s game Hide and Seek is still so popular). And First Blood should be a Coming of Age ritual for every male born going forward. These are tangible things that we can do now to counteract the harm being done in our government schools. No game is too small for starters, and even squirrels are plentiful in the city. Dig that pellet gun out of the closet or garage and the boys in the neighborhood will flock to your front porch. It’s time for a revival of masculinity.

19. “Today, everything, truth, and falsehood, is halfway around the world by the time anyone knows it exists. ”

    Its called freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religion. Its liberalism! Every man has a newly discovered right to believe whatever he wants.

    • It’s an issue I struggle with, being an opinionated jerk much of the time.

      My current thinking is that liberalism today means freedom from consequences, rather than freedom of conscience, etc.

      After all, we have these rights because men were willing to die for them, and that’s just. They paid the price.

      Seems like the satanic-minded pulled a judo move on everybody.

      • I’m beginning to think of “rights” as “goods”. As creatures created out of nothing, we only have rights through God, we have non on our own. ANd what about duties? Do duties go along with all our so called rights?

        • God-given, so it’s a good way to think of it.

          Or like paper money. It’s ours, but conditionally. We can save it, we can invest it, we can piss it away, we can steal it and face punishment. But He’s the central bank.

          God gave us free will. He didn’t have to allow the serpent in the garden. Kind of messed up at first glance.

          When you think about it, though, all of the temptations, joys, sufferings, and duties—and the discipline required to navigate them— are just a limited experience of what the Creator must have to deal with. That consciousness is a burdensome thing, yet the fact we’re given it says we must be up to the task. If you ask me, it’s what’s divine in us and what separates us from animals. Or what separates free people from slaves.

          Think of all the people who cry about how unfair life is, or who get angry at God, or who even rebel and try to replace Him. They don’t understand that that unfairness, among the gifts we’ve been given in this world, is second only to His love. Imo, anyhow.

          Gone a little astray, there. Hopefully it makes some kind of sense. I’d say rights and duties are two sides of the same coin. Serious things that should be taken seriously.

      • Not freedom to do what you want, but freedom (the right) to do what you ought.

20. Say 50 years ago or more, the vast majority of the news that concerned people, was what was going on in their community or perhaps state. The goings on in some s***hole in Africa (or even in some other state) was of no concern generally speaking. Now one gets bombarded with everything from everywhere. It still should be of no real concern, but we’re constantly made to believe it does. Tuning and dropping out, as many have said is no doubt the best prescription.

    • usNthem: Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Clinton the first president to really push the “I feel your pain” BS? It may have been Bush 1 but I don’t think so. Presidents used to have to at least pretend to be sober-minded adults. The endless emoting and celebrating of sportsball and movie heroes is disgustingly womanish and woke. I don’t want anyone in the government to know anything about me at all; meanwhile everyone else seems to be demanding her 15 minutes (not just the wokesters but also the patriotards and Jane Normals).

      • Bush 1 distinguished himself from Reagan by wishing for “a kinder, gentler America.” That’s not terrible, but it may be the first sign of the shift to emotional politics.

        (Around that time, Metallica released the Black Album and I wrote a review of it titled “A Kinder, Gentler Metallica.)

      • The infantilization of adults-in-charge is complete. The principal at my daughter’s previous school was very good at learning everyone’s name, yes, but shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t a student have to impress their way into a teacher’s memory? And then she’d be out front of the school at the end of the day, blowing kisses to the bus as it pulled away, maybe stopping to remark, “hey dude, I love your new (green) hair!” As the head of a school, her first responsibility is to model and encourage adult behavior.

        And when the kids get home, it doesn’t improve at all. Mom, dad, grandparents revel in calling their charges “dude” or “buddy”, or becoming best mates with their teenage daughter. There’s nothing left to aspire to for the young. They’ve already conquered the world.

21. “a holding pen for the mentally ill”

    https://twitter.com/NancyMAGAmonkey/status/1453710298775363585?s=20

22. Another country with good newspapers is Israel. They routinely print stuff that’d have most Western editors tarred and feathered.

    • Because they understand they are writing from the “What’s good for Israel?” point of view. And good for them.

      The west media is from the “How can we destroy the West even more today?” viewpoint.

      Funny they are often the same people driving both agendas.

23. Zman: “the people built for low time preference and focused action are in a world that rewards high time preference and poor impulse control”

    With respect, I just disagree with this conclusion. While we are maladapted to the torrent of stimuli which characterize modern life, the people climbing to the top of society today understand the problem and are exploiting the weakness Zman correctly describes.

    So the world isn’t rewarding high time preference and poor impulse control. These defects still get punished. Rather, it’s rewarding those who can successfully exploit these defects: this explains recent empires in social media, porn, gambling, mass media, entertainment etc. Exploiting these weaknesses takes time and focus.

    • well, the word “reward” has a couple of different senses.

      “you get more of what you reward”

24. Beautifully written Zman. Your skill at putting together the pieces of a narrative into a coherent whole is most impressive. In the future regime you will not only be in charge of the camps you will be the intellectual guiding light.

25. Information is real-time.

    Information isn’t the same as knowledge, a difference that those that rely on Google fail to recognize. Slightly less than 100% of the information deluge produced by the modern media is useless to any normal person and generally of negligible entertainment value. Nobody can use the latest account of the travels of Megan and Harry to their own advantage. The fact that Alec Baldwin doesn’t know how to handle firearms affects only a few.

    For “primitives” however, those that have no access to People magazine or a high-speed internet connection, their thoughts center on things that are germane to their existence, food, sex, getting out of the rain, meaningful stuff. Their descendants will still be around when memories of Andrew McCabe and James Comey have dissolved in the mists of time.

    • I’m actually shocked by the number of educated wealthy people I know that subscribe to people magazine. When I was a kid and I got sick I would read a people magazine because it was just mindless and I was sick so I didn’t want to have to think. So I generally read one probably twice a year. It shocks me that people, adults, still read that on a regular basis

      • Think about all those UMC trophy wives sitting at home during the workweek.

        They watch stuff like, The View, Real Housewives, and Keeping Up with the Kartrashians while they browse the pages of US Weekly.

        No wonder we’re in trouble…

      • I confess to reading it occasionally back in high school. I gave up on shortly though, not because of any ideological reasons but because it was the same thing every issue and I just got tired of it.

        Related, a link in the comments here to Twitter reminds me of when me and my buddies in high school decided, on a lark, to get into a soap opera (I don’t remember which one, probably doesn’t matter). We watched religiously for weeks, seemingly becoming enlightened to the appeal of the product, but then one by one we had some reason to miss a week or two worth of episodes. That’s a lot of story to miss, maybe 14 hours, and I figured getting back into it would prove difficult, except the opposite happened: it was the same thing. Fifteen minutes in I was like “nuts to this, I’ll never watch this again and still not miss anything!”. Such as it is with the ongoing Congressional imbroglio. People on Twitter get super wrapped up in it even though the plot and set pieces are the exact same as they’ve always been, the only thing different from 40 years ago is the costuming.

        • All magazines basically run the same stories on a 6 or 12 month cycle.

          Took me far too long to figure that out.

    • “The fact that Alec Baldwin doesn’t know how to handle firearms affects only a few.”

      And of those few, there’s now one less.

26. The intensity of emotion, the nervous, hyperbolic, perpetually agitated subject is a perfect example of modern existence. The average plugged in American has an anxiety that is only assuaged temporarily by the use of whatever trending term or symbol is in vogue. In other words, reproducing the image of the moment, instead of producing something worth while, is the only engament and sense of peace any can find when plugged into The Beast. Warhol nailed it with his soup cans.

    • What do you mean by the soup can reference, Eloi?

      • I am no huge (post) modern art fan, but Warhol at his best does tease us out of thought as does eternity. His famous works, such as the moving portrait, Campbell’s soup cans, his Monroes, are based on the idea of repetition as the reproductive function of a modern society. As opposed to the individuality found in handcrafted works (regardless of medium), most of modern society’s worker bees function to reproduce uniformity. Think about it: we prize handcrafted because, though more costly, it is unique. But in the industrial era, the highest virtue is reproducibility and uniformity. Warhol’s works highlight this by repeated repetitious products. Again, at points it becomes too froufrou, but at his best, he really nails an aspect of the modern condition. In highlighting the uniformity of society’s reproduction, I think it is worthy to extend that to realize that the efforts of society (and, therefore the efforts of the individual) are directed to reproduction of external ideas as opposed to the expression of the internal creator. Thus, though constipated intellectually, the average person gives themselves a colonic of reproducing the external.

        • What a load of wank.

          Warhol was shyster pretending to be an artist.

        • Repetition.

          Kind of like the brainwashing in government schools.

          Or the endless deluge of Beer Flu propaganda.

          • First off, I don’t wank – a waste of my juices. Second, I clarified that I think most post modern work is junk. Third, I said I am not a big Warhol fan. But he did have a point. I think he is a degenerate and do not care for his life or the people around him. But, Trumpton, you are an idiot if you think you cannot learn from people who were in the midst of the modern zeitgeist back when it was truly coalescing. St. Augustine provided most of his confessions about when he was a sinner. You can look into a privy to see someone’s diet. You can look into modern art to find out about the mindset of the modern person. Go vote for Trump a ton.

          • This is what irks me about some people here. Obviously we are here because we have similar outlooks on things. I was asked to expand about a point I made – so I did. Instead of asking questions, or simply stating a counterpoint, it is dismissed by someone obsessed with male genitals (sorry you want a ton). I am someone who practices what he preaches (I just moved across the country to remove myself and my family from the Sodom I perceive cities to be) so you have absolutely no base to act like I am some naïve fool being hoodwinked by modern art. And I reiterate, even the most degenerate can provide insight about the condition of being a degenerate; Warhol at his best had a point about what it is to be in the modern world.

        • That’s an interesting observation. At one time all things were individual, as they still are in nature. No two oak trees or turtles or horses look the same. Before the industrial revolution every coffee cup, fork and spoon looked different. Mechanization, and uniformity, was once only available to the upper class. Matching silverware and china, for instance, became de rigeur in the homes of the wealthy while the plebs still ate with wooden spoons from hand-carved bowls. Naturally, as time went by, the commoners wanted those matching items and they became cheap and easily available. One Sony portable radio is an exact match with another. Now the elite want custom made items, yachts made to their own personal specifications.

    • “The intensity of emotion, the nervous, hyperbolic, perpetually agitated subject is a perfect example of modern existence.”

      And popular culture is ever ready to supply frenzy. Consider the many YouTube videos where the narrator talks sixteen to the dozen. This hyped-up delivery is often found even in instructional videos, where the wordsandsentencesfollowoneanother so relentlessly there’s no time to absorb the information supposedly conveyed.

      Editing makes it worse. The tape speed is adjusted up slightly, pauses for breath snipped out.

      This pathogenic style isn’t meant to communicate. It’s a hipster badge.

27. in an environment with lots of game and lots of predators, humans were probably rewarded for their speed and reflexes, both of which are needed to avoid being eaten.

    Our secret trick is actually endurance. As bipedals, we’re very efficient runners to begin with and moreover, we are able to perspire; most mammals only shed body heat through the mouth – which is what you see with panting dogs.

    So the earliest hunters would scare up an antelope, the antelope would sprint 500 yards, the humans would trot up to the antelope, scare it another 500 yards and repeat the procedure for a couple of hours. The antelope builds up body heat faster than it can shed it; eventually it becomes paralyzed and the hunters walk up and spear it.

    You can find videos of Africans hunting in this fashion on Youtube.

    • being pack hunters provided a lot of protection (to each individual in the pack). adding dogs into the mix pretty much made human habitats insulated from big predator attacks.

    • Interesting hunting strategy, but not very efficient. It would take dozens of men to tire out a single antelope. Pretty much shows the utility of africans, and paucity of brain power.

      Meanwhile, Whitey could take an antelope at 300 yards with a 50 cent bullet.

      • The video I saw was a team of 5-6 men – Pygmies at that. The idea is not to surround the animal, but to constantly keep it active until it overheats. At the end of the hunt, the antelope stood motionless and the Pygmies calmly strolled up to it and stabbed it.

      • Whitey would have antelope farm so that he wouldn’t have to go chasing after them. Or better yet, they’d have an animal that’s a little more meat worthy like the Boer goat.

        • Our ancestors quickly figured out 5000 or so years ago that farming crops and herding animals for food was a far better option than hunting. Which allowed him to develop civilizations and technology over time.

          This also allowed them to wipe out the more nomadic groups who relied solely on hunting and foraging for food.

          The blacks never ever got to the point of learning how to farm and organize society.

    • I’ve run chicken to ground, when young. They just sit down and give up.

      • what did you do with them, after you caught them?

    • And then you invent projectile weapons.

    • That might be the way the other species do it in Africa, but it certainly didn’t work in Ice Age Neandertal Eurasia or North America, where we have winter. The hunting strategy is completely different.

      • Yes. And a lot of other points about points about herding and farming and missile weapons and such.

        But that’s pretty much beside the point, which was to argue that biologically, darwinically, we’re designed for long-distance running, not reflexes and speed. Most mammals larger than a hamster can beat us in a 100 m dash, but few can beat us in a marathon.

28. Interesting that you mention the UK media providing stories about happenings in the US that contain actual information. I noticed this going back to the early days of the internet in the 90s. The most extensive mainstream coverage of the Clinton shenanigans was by Evan Ambrose Pritchard at the Telegraph. In the recent Alec Baldwin movie set shooting all major US media had the same few paragraph stories which contained no details beyond two people shot on movie set. In contrast, I saw a story from the UK that was the length of a short book with all the major and minor figures named and the timeline of events described in detail. There were also multiple photos that I never saw in the US news stories.

    • Same with anything racial. If it’s black-on-white crime, you won’t see any pictures in the US media; they even scrub the names if they’re obviously racial.

      The old saw “if you want to know who rules over you, figure out who you’re not allowed to criticize” applies.

      Race shills and Hollywood weirdos are definitely at the top of the status totem pole. Odd that it takes British papers to actually report on this stuff.

      • I’m surprised that British news outlets of any stripe do report as much as they do.

        • The reverse is also true. If Brits want to find out about royal shenanigans, they have to check out US press.
          British press seldom mentions the really crappy stuff.
          On another note.. I am just starting to re-read the Alvin Toffler book: Future Shock (1970). I last read it and did a book report when I was in 7th grade. (and it was a new book)
          Fascinating to see the parallels & predictions made from before cell phones & the internet.
          The speed-up of info has been going on for a long time.

      • Don’t mistake the intent here.

        They only report on stuff outside the borders, as it does not make waves at home.

        The UK press is no different ot he US for its home reporting and they act as a conspiracy to intentionally bury any similar stuff inside the country.

    • One of the most under-rated British newspapers is The Daily Mail. Their articles are well researched, well-written with an abundance of photos and videos, and are considerably more detailed than your average coverage, they have a lot of old school journalism going on.

      Also, their headlines are excellent, they don’t try to be clever or funny or coy, they simply tell you what’s in the article, so when it says, “Chantel Jeffries showcases her toned figure as she poses in brown underwear set from Kim Kardashian’s Fendi X SKIMS collaboration,” you get exactly what it says on the tin. In superabundance and high resolution.

      • Here’s another Mail classic: Maya Jama displays her peachy posterior in a pink and orange bikini as she wows during sunsoaked Jamaica break

29. In clown world, down is up and up is down. What was once maladaptation is now the selected behavior of the environment. Saving money is losing money. Thinking critically, behaving communally is passe. The world shall be inherited by the impulsive narcissist.

    O brave new world that has such people in it!

    • We live in an age of victimology.

      A generation ago parents would be embarrassed if their child was on the autism spectrum, had food allergies, or liked sodomy. They would try to get them as normal as possible to be able to function in society with minimal crutches. Now it’s a badge of honor that identifies them.

      • One of these things is not like the others.

        Limitations such as autism, food allergies or physical abnormalities are limitations, not a source of shame. They are challenges to be overcome, not something for the world to placate.

        Behavioral choices are where shame comes in; something as dysgenic as homosexuality should always be shameful and not supported or “championed”.

    • The frenetic memetic. Too busy! to have a relationship, let alone ‘settle down’ and have children. Instead it’s light speed meme propagation and reproducing followers, digital connections.

      Like literal bugs. Fruit flies that burn through generations in a matter of days. I first noted this when “online dating” moved to apps and somehow the analog world became that slow, annoying and awkward thing that kept hanging around, just couldn’t yet be replaced.

      Soon enough meeting in person was condensed into the minimum required to perform the actual act of rutting. So many nervous rabbits.

      The digital process of solving analog life problems has become the prize in itself. Instead of the online hive replicating physical life in order to help solve physical problems, it replicated its own code, producing millions of mini-cults run by gurus who stare into the magic mirror every 30 seconds for feelz and bits of nonsense to propagate.

      Way back then men I knew would have grave concerns over seeming to be “weird” or “suspicious” if they weren’t on all the apps and performing all the digital rituals. heh. Yeah, imagine bugs thinking a human to be weird. And here we are. Get yet jab meatsack, join us or die!

      • Screwtape: “Like literal bugs. Fruit flies that burn through generations in a matter of days. I first noted this when “online dating” moved to apps . . . Soon enough meeting in person was condensed into the minimum required to perform the actual act of rutting. So many nervous rabbits.”

        This. This epitomizes so many women today and the pretense of ‘dating.’ Both the eternally single 50 year old who ruts with a different guy she hooked up with online every night, and the lithe 20 year old White women at the gym hanging around the black guys. It’s all about the momentary interest and physical sensation. It’s the primitive life in digital format. Meanwhile the cloud people live like digital dilettantes, and substitute a facade of modern art or psychobabble for the psychic turmoil beneath.

        • The sad thing about todays dating scene is that unless you’re a guy in the top 10% in terms of looks and income. You get nothing. 90% of the women of childbearing age are chasing after these “Chads” in the hopes of locking one down(which never happens). The “Chads” simply ghost and are onto the next bimbo.

          This leaves 90% of men with little to no chance. And women wonder why MGTOW has taken off.

          BTW a lot of these young women are no great catches when you watch videos of them. Vapid, shallow, self-serving. Classic lights are on and none is home. They would be horrible wives and dreadful mothers.

          • Sounds like someone else has been watching Better Bachelor and Taylor the Fiend!

30. people are making huge changes in *how* they live, in order to escape the influence of the prog-owned-society. and it’s having a large impact on the economy, and society as a whole. the public school system is not long for this world, for example.

    all of this is a result of gigantism, where the built world becomes hostile to the needs of man. too many people competing for everything, including attention. and it is dying, because it takes too much energy (human, and fuel) to maintain. and even if you are willing to pump in subsidised support, it always goes septic.

    so the dying of the existing system is a real thing, and it is happening right now. because the USA shares some of the same tendencies and structural weaknesses of the cccp, the USA is going the same way; towards dis-association into smaller regional units.

    • The public school system will survive but mostly as a holding pen for otherwise feral youths. Any parents who values their children’s education will find a way to get their kids out of public schools. Elites have been doing this for decades already. It will be interesting to see how much it changes some communities as families are less and less concerned with making sure they live within the boundaries of a “good” school. What will the new sorting mechanism be to avoid living next to diversity?

      • I have always lived in the Midwest, but the few times I have traveled to Mississippi for business, and speak to the white people there, it goes unsaid that public schools in Mississippi are only for the blacks. Any decent white sends their kids to private schools. My neighbor up here, originally a native of the New Orleans area, basically says the same.

        So in parts of the country, the public school system is already a holding pen for otherwise feral youths.

        • You could see that in Chicago. When the CPD goes on strike, or threatens going on strike, the local stations focus on the Diverse and Vibrant single moms angry about having to disrupt their work schedule since their kids won’t have their government mandated baby sitters.

          When White post-college kids did their “Young, Free, and Fun” in the city (before it went feral) and did manage to meet someone and get married, most high-tailed it back to the suburbs (Naperville, Schaumburg, Wheaton, Barrington, etc.) when kids were on the way rather than hand them to the tender mercies of CPS. If your kid can’t get into New Trier High School, you get the heck out of Chicago.

          • First line CPD should be CPS for Chicago Public Schools, held hostage by the Chicago Teachers Union. A more wretched hive of scum, villainy, and leftism you will never find.

          • As Fred Reed* once said, the first thing a Liberal does when his wife fails the pregnancy test is call a realtor.

            *Yeah yeah, I know, but he wasn’t always El Angela Merkel de Mexico. Something about hitting the prostate exam years seems to turn even the most based into Safety uber Alles. See also Sailer, Steve.

        • I am a private school teacher in the very state you have mentioned. Can confirm every word you said about our public schools.
          Both my kids attend the school I work in. Part of my salary is a discount on their tuition. I don’t make much, but my kids can read and write; and my girl is not afraid to walk down the hallways.
          The public schools are nothing but day care for teenagers.

      • Quite true. Some years ago I applied for a job at a local high school. Walking into the school, I noticed the high fencing, steel security doors, windows 10ft off the ground, concrete yards, the school was sectioned off by fencing and locked gates.. It looked more like a medium security prison than a school.

        To be blunt I found the MCRD and various highly secure military installations to be far more humane than modern day public schools.

        These schools were meant to break students and remold them.

    • I just finished a book called “Strong Towns: a bottom up revolution to rebuild American prosperity” about impending disaster for much of our suburban infrastructure. The book claims the only way small towns currently generates immediate wealth is to cuck to government subsidies and private over-development of big box stores etc. This video is a decent intro to the topic. I don’t share the creator’s antipathy towards suburbs, as I grew up in a rural suburb myself.
      https://youtu.be/VVUeqxXwCA0

      I’m currently residing in a latte-town/suburb near a major metropolitan area. It kept itself isolated and prosperous by lacking transit in and out of the neighboring city, not cucking to the city’s politics, not accepting subsidies etc. All of that has changed, and quickly! It is now in the process of over development. The infrastructure of the town was not designed for this and cannot accommodate the new influx of traffic nor the new demographic. Its become more “colorful” within a matter of a few years, is now cramped, and crime is increasing.

      A few weeks ago in a nearby picturesque port town, a local kid was shot by an inner city kid who was attempting to steal his car. The girlfriend and I are looking to start a family in a couple years. We are currently looking for a new area to move to, but its slim pickings. Everything is dilapidated and/or overrun. Drugs are rampant, everyone is atomized. We work from home and can live anywhere. We’re looking for a smaller town with a tight community–its seemingly an impossible task. At some point we’re just going to have to pick something, and get really involved in the community, local politics.

      • You might do well with a quant tourist town like Eureka Springs, AK. Towns like that strive to retain their charm because that’s how revenue is made and they’re full of decent white people. They’re also full of liberals, unfortunately, so they may not last long. I recently moved out of such a town because it has the bad fortune of being within California’s borders. I hear that it’s gone crazy over the holocough and a ton of remote workers from Northern Silicon Valley (Bay Area) are pouring in, which will surely ruin it for good. Sad.

        But why not leave the country? There are still some European flavored places in Latinx America, no?

        • There are, but the problem with LA is it is simply too unstable. Chile was a go-to place a few years back, and now that has apparently turned on a dime. Argentina is very similar – constant seesaw, and the upturns usually last only a fraction of the downturns.

          But both have beautiful wine country regions. A bit remote, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

          • Chile went so nuts over Beer Flu Whitney Webb moved back to the US.

        • Astralturf: Eureka Springs is a gay hive and, while small re official population numbers, is often mobbed with curious tourists. Beautiful setting and architecture, but avoid it.

          Most rural Arkansans (or Arkansawyers) are fairly conservative but they have a live and let live attitude – much like most genuine Americans used to. Any other small town in the mid to north and central to eastern part of the state, away from the larger cities of Little Rock, Fayetteville, and Fort Smith is a much safer bet.

          Having said that, for the love of God don’t go bruiting about Arkansas or anywhere else decent you find at various online sites as a good place for any White to relocate to. That’s what got Idaho in the spotlight of the feds and the ngos. No publicity for anywhere decent, please.

        • look up the murder stats for any of them…then multiply by 5.

      • getting married is probably a your first step

31. The systems being set up are based on positive feed back. any system based on positive feed back will eventually shake itself to bits.

    • eventually?! almost instantly :). listen to how fast an open mic turns screechy, when it starts feeding back into itself.

32. Only a breath are mortal men; an illusion, men of rank;
    In a balance they prove lighter, all together, than a breath.

    • I’ve said this many times….

33. > Social media seems to be suffering a similar trend. They lie about their membership and activity, but it is pretty clear that we are past the peak of these big platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The former is the domain of old people keeping touch with friends and family, while the latter is a holding pen for the mentally ill. A devolution to smaller, more focused on-line communities is under way. People are unplugging from the system to slow down their life.

    Twitter is a prime example of evolutionary processes in action. While the right has gotten wrecked on the platform, the ones who remain and create new accounts have developed extremely nuanced ways of communication and messaging that whistles to their own guys while evading the moderators and twitter rage mob. the calculated and methodical posters are replacing the rage-posters and quick-dopamine hit edgetarians. On the left, the lunatics run the asylum with no feedback mechanism.

    Twitter seems to be at an technological dead-end, as they can’t seem to innovate anything new to the social media space, the same with Facebook. Torba is by far the more visionary, linking an independent implicitly right-wing payment processor, advertising, and social media outlet into a full ecosystem.

    Facebook and Twitter’s advertising system are criminally corrupt, and their marketplace and long-lasting influencer branding is stymied by uncertainty as the moderators will arbitrarily suspend your account for any whiff of crime-thought.

    Twitter and Facebook’s gambit, the same with google, seem to be to become de-facto arms of the State, and count on the State to remove competitors. If the Facebook whistleblower astroturf story tells us anything, it’s that they are more than willing to drive these platforms to the ground too.

    • “Facebook and Twitter’s advertising system are criminally corrupt, and their marketplace and long-lasting influencer branding is stymied by uncertainty as the moderators will arbitrarily suspend your account for any whiff of crime-thought”

      With respect Chet, Facebook and Twitter exist to sell a safe advertising medium to corporate America, not to innovate or promote speech. The uncertainty you cite is a feature, not a bug. The corporations buying advertising on these platforms understand the corrupt metrics of traffic etc. They “discount” them accordingly. Everyone on Wall Street understands this traffic/engagement measurement problem too.

      • What the big socials call advertising revenue is mostly data about their users sold to marketing firms, corporate clients and, of course, government. You would better off setting your money on fire and posting the subsequent video than running ads on these platforms. The data, however, is valuable or at least it is assumed to have value. I know people who have worked with what comes from these socials and they question whether much of it is real. As long as the buyers think it is real, that is what matters.

        • This is THE most discussed topic among marketing executives in corporate America. Everyone acknowledges the issues and problems with online advertising. And yes, the data is really important.

          The ad money follows traffic and engagement. Efficacy is another issue. You and I could debate this endlessly and trust me, it’s being debated endlessly in conference rooms all across America.

          Corporate America cares about censoring online content for the same reason it cared about censoring television: It cares about a “safe” and curated venue for its advertising.

          • Years ago I was tasked with modeling the marketing programs of a large national retail firm. They had a lot of marketing programs running in local markets, as well as national marketing programs. My conclusion after many months was that there was no way to quantify the returns for specific programs or their marketing approach in general. This knowledge had no impact on their marketing spend or the proliferation of local programs.

          • I’ve been in advertising for over 35 years. While not in the segment where I can directly address whether the agencies and their clients believe advertising has quantifiable benefits, I can tell you this: When it comes to deciding what concepts to create, no one discusses if what they are doing boosts sales. Instead they talk about what image the client wants to project, how to showcase their diversity (or any other currently fashionable public piety), what might appeal to the target audience. No art director says to himself “This idea will sell more widgets.” That’s not his job. His job is to fulfill the creative brief, and as far as I know such a thing can never include sales goals. No agency will back itself into a corner by promising to sell X amount of widgets by such and such a date after a certain advertising campaign. That alone says much.

      • That’s why

        “This movie ROCKED!”
        -Twitter user JoeJohn11

        is the preferred marketing for movies now. No more Joel Siegel or Leonard Malkin I guess.

        • The #1 movie in America was called “Ass.” And that’s all it was for 90 minutes. It won eight Oscars that year, including best screenplay.

          • For reasons I won’t get into I got sucked into the latest Halloween movie and it’s something to behold. It’s awful in a lot of ways*, yes, but it was hard for me to get too upset about that since it’s barely even a movie in the way we understand. It had no beginning, middle, end, or any dialog that amounted to anything. It was Mike Meyers stabbing people for 90 minutes and that’s all it was.

            *(There were a few times in theater that I caught myself laughing out loud and cut it short, one of which was when, in the movie, some young black restaurant patrons were complaining about a group of loud, middle-aged whites).

          • Before the “Ass” franchise gets going, it’ll be a few years of white thugs on a bus getting beaten up by the hero. White thugs…on a city bus.

    • Torba is by far the more visionary, linking an independent implicitly right-wing payment processor, advertising, and social media outlet into a full ecosystem.

      Torba is sitting on a social media nuclear warhead that he refuses to detonate: Dissenter, an app that effectively bolts a comment section on every URL on the internet.

      Back when Dissenter was launched, there was a thriving Dissenter-community on the Guardian, pissing all over their Commie rag and there was nothing they could do about it.

      And back when Scandinavia Airlines released a spiteful hate-screed against people of Scandinavian heritage disguised as an ad, a dozen or so Scandinavian dissenters managed to drop so much fecal matter on their main page that they had to change their URL.

      But Torba treats Dissenter as abandonware, even if he still has the fucking gall to sell Dissenter merch. You can no longer get extensions to Chrome or Brave, and the Dissenter browser hasn’t been updated in more than a year.

      And Dissenter was gimped already: when it was released, I could go to The Guardian’s website and see which of their articles had ongoing Dissenter commenting, and I could crosspost from Dissenter to Gab. I don’t know if their notifications still work, because there’s nobody on the network.

      • Him and his two dudes that he has working for him are trying to get the notifications to work properly again. I’m not sure that he’ll swing back to it (I saw someone in the Gab pro feed making the same complaints so you’re not alone) but they’ve been playing tech fireman for years now at this point.

    • I wonder if Torba has explored using smart contracts to trustlessly track advertisement impressions. It’s the perfect use case, if the tech ever actually arrives.

    • Don’t look now, but Torba just reposted a Patton, “We defeated the wrong enemy.” meme.

      The dude might bust be alright…

      • As much as I like him, he really needs to hide his power level more.

34. IMO the problem is too much interconnectedness.

    Humans evolved, or were created if you prefer, to live in social environments somewhere around the Dunbar number. Even in larger groups of people, each individual interacts with and mentally tracks a limited number of individuals, most of whom are in their immediate vicinity. Complex civilizations that get much past that point become unstable and eventually self destruct.

    Mass communication changed that, to an extent, but not all that much in its original form as it was one to many. So people integrated personalities in mass media into their own Dunbar grouping. They trust Cronkite, and other actors despite having no personal relationship because that’s how humans evolved.

    But the internet change all of that by enabling interpersonal communication with no geographic connection or limit. And then social media accelerated that aspect by a couple of orders of magnitude. The most connected people today are experiencing continual cognitive overload. Our brains are not equipped to evaluate and actuate the information incoming from tens of thousands to millions of individuals from around the world. This plays out in any number of ways, from evaluating relative risks too highly or lowly, to trusting false authorities, to chasing insane fads to appeasing extreme outlying complaints.

    In pre-modern times this all would end with collapse, conquest and reordering of the afflicted civilization at a lower order of complexity.

    • it will now, too. people are people, and any inhumane system will eventually die off and be replaced.

      • Yup.

        The people envisioning a smaller, more local, decentralized future probably have it correct.

        There will be a lot of pain on the way there as physical constraints will be what ultimately causes this trend.

    • As Red narrated, “….all it takes is time, time and pressure.” Applies to collapse as well as geology.
      As corollary, remember, hope is a good thing.

    • Dino: Good point. Today it’s common for women to label casual acquaintances ‘friends,’ and everyone under 30 seems convinced that anyone they ‘follow’ on any media platform ought to care about and respond to their opinions on everything. This instant, faux familiarity drives me nuts, and I refuse to respond to every diversity hire door tender wishing me a ‘good day’ or suggesting I smile inanely for no reason whatsoever other than that they feel that’s the appropriate mien in all situations. Everyone thinks they’re everyone else’s best friend, and yet even most marriages appear based on tenuous connections at best. My husband and I routinely wonder what most people we know find to talk about with their spouses.

      A close friend who is much more sociable than I recently got a call from a woman (middle aged and single) who she briefly and intermittently used as a caregiver for her elderly and now deceased parents. This woman’s obviously unstable mind interpreted my friend’s natural cordiality as equal to an invitation to live with her – called her when her own mother, with whom she lived, died, and asked to move in. An extreme example, perhaps, but it doesn’t strike me as so outside the norm today.

      The wildly disparate behavioral expectations people have are based on basic genetic differences while being simultaneously shoved together in a frenzied world. And the financial string pullers and government puppets are determined to pack people ever more tightly into circumscribed boxes of behavior and thought while living in closer and closer proximity to those whose lives and minds are antithetical to their own.

      I’ve always found it strange that ‘solitary confinement’ was considered such a horrible thing. Not that I want to live alone or in my own head all the time, but if my only choice is between being solitary or being forced to interact endlessly with insane and alien people, I’ll happily prefer my own company.

      • “In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap opera cries, sleep walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.” … “People ask me to predict the Future, when all I want to do is prevent it”. – Ray Bradbury

        On one hand we can say “nothing new under the sun”, on the other we can make note of a common thread and certain actors pressing progress upon us – especially our girls and women, as a necessity of the human experience. To them, looking back is only good insofar as it instructs upon what must be destroyed next in the name of progress.

        For a good long while now I have felt like one of the Book People of F451. But without other people around. The current year fracture is perhaps a good kind of progress that will at least compel us Book People toward one another in the woods – and away from the wires.

      • This is an *extremely* recent thing. Even 20 years ago, when I first started teaching, college students were unsure how to address me. I used to joke about it with them. “It’s a test of your social savvy,” I’d tell them. “Feel free to call me Sev, or Mr. Severian, or Herr Doktor Professor von Severian, PhD, as your age and station and the gravity of your request seems to warrant.”

        They’d chuckle dutifully, because it was a lame joke, but they got it…. for a year or two. Then they were just confused, and by the time I retired, I was lucky to get a “Yo, dude!” before they launched into their snowflake demands.

        • Perhaps some Moores Law of social decay.?

      • “This woman’s obviously unstable mind interpreted my friend’s natural cordiality as equal to an invitation to live with her – called her when her own mother, with whom she lived, died, and asked to move in. An extreme example, perhaps, but it doesn’t strike me as so outside the norm today.”

        Not so surprising. I dated a woman now twenty plus years ago who, when we were in the early stages of our relationship (lets say a month in) casually tossed out something along the lines of “You know, maybe if things go well enough we could live together”.

        So I mentioned “You know, maybe someday we could live together”. Throw away line, didn’t think anything of it. No timeframe set or plans made.

        Fast forward to month three. We have some manner of tiff. We talk it out and she hits me with “You never told me about how you felt about the two of us living together.” With the implication we should be living together NOW buster.

        How much of it is misinterpretation and how much of it is “I’ve decided, you accommodate.”

        • mmack: Yet another sign of the solipsism we see all about us. Everyone is the star in his/her own movie, and the rest of us are mere props. Modern driving patterns (people literally don’t notice anyone else on the road) further confirm this.

      • 3g4me-

        I recently went on a park date with a woman who had a big, good heart (and equally large amounts of baggage), and her willingness to overshare all kinds of details about her life was an enormous red flag. It was also successful, whether it was an intentional ploy or not, in getting me to overshare about my life.

        I think there are a couple reasons for this trend. One is the the speed of modern life, which is incredibly accelerated in every aspect. Thus, people’s relationship timelines are incredibly compressed.

        Another reason is the atomization of modern life. People won’t admit it, but they are incredibly starved for real friend/companionship. The digital sewer claims to replace these real things, but ultimately it is not a satisfying or acceptable substitute.

        • nah, women just do that stuff.

          2 women together and within 5 minutes they are telling each other about their entire relationship history and their medical problems.

          Its just flea picking to establish bonding.

        • why would you even consider hanging around a woman with a lot of baggage? just walk in front of a bus, it’s faster and less painful.

35. “A holding pen for the mentally ill”.

    This posts’ phrase that pays.

36. I quit all social media platforms and turn off wifi on Sundays. Always feel much more peaceful by Sunday afternoon. I should make it three days a week.
    There’s no benefit to keeping an eye on Clown World all the time. Sanity is more valuable than knowing about the latest stupidity.
    I have plans to further cut back in stages and focus on other things. I can’t help the world; it seems more productive to disengage.

    • I cut out all social media, limit my media consumption – especially advertising and actively avoid the news.

      Doing all of that and it is still impossible to completely avoid the cultural zeitgeist. I’d probably have to completely unplug altogether to achieve that avoidance, which I’m not able or willing to do, and even then there would be some leakage from interacting with other people.

      Even so I definitely feel better, more centered and healthy and productive. And yet, I still have to deal with the general insanity of our society at some level.

      • you can just limit yourself to a certain number of hours a day, taking in the news. you stay up to date, but don’t fry your brain. just looking at a screen puts a load on your brain, that being outdoors (for example) doesn’t.

        • karl: Going to the gym helps keep me sane, yet even there I struggle to avoid the ever present tv screen, and everyone else around me has their faces buried in their phones. My husband likes to listen to music in the car whereas I prefer the quiet. Life today is like the movie “Groundhog Day” but while eternally stuck in a carpool sandwiched between LaQuisha and Rajeesh.

          • i used to go to the gym regularly, but became concerned about hygiene (going back 10 years or so). so i work out at home now. but i always liked being at the gym….

          • The worst thing about the gym is hearing the awful music everyone else listens to.
            Since the coof I’ve learned a convict home workout. Not perfect but much more peaceful and I can listen to my own music, the birds outside, whatever.

37. I’m sure everyone is sick of this joke at this point, but… Damn it, “Idiocracy” was NOT supposed to be a democracy! And yet, “Go away, ‘batin'” will end up on Western Civ’s tombstone.

    (Incidentally, this is why I keep predicting a fundamentalist religious revival. Cord cutting requires independent thought and resistance to social pressure. Most won’t do it until given permission… So someone will come along and give them permission. Yes, ladies, just like the f*cking Handmaid’s Tale… and then y’all too will finally be happy).

    • *documentary, of course. Stupid auto correct, messing up the lame joke.

      • Still works; democracy has become idiocracy. I still hear people gushing about how they’re going to vote those bastards out next year.

        • I disagree with many here about elections being a complete sham.

          They do still matter to some extent, which is why politicians keep chasing popularity. If they didn’t matter at all, as was the case in the SU the pols wouldn’t care about popularity and would care more about stability and a functional society.

          So, voting won’t change broad policies like immigration. But voting the basturds out can end the CoVid insanity.

          And what’s the alternative? Personally I’m not ready to go all Salad Snackbar on them, but I’d don’t mind if someone else does. So I guess that makes me a moderate Muslim.

          • I voting really mattered we would not be permitted to vote.

          • They do still matter to some extent

            They matter because your x is your consent to be ruled.

          • There firepower gives them the power to rule.
            My consent is not needed or given.

          • It has become they pretend to care about us and we pretend to vote.

          • The covid madness has been fully inserted into (or summoned from) the people.

            My glance across MAGAland today saw hundreds celebrating that their religious exemptions from corporate vaccine orders have been accepted (and hundreds bemoaning that they’ve not). That a religious refusal of any medical procedure might *not* be “accepted” by any organization in America, especially when acting as the state, was unprecedented until ~ten years ago. It still *almost* is.

            But they wait in their millions—like a TV kid watching for the mailman who’ll tell them if they got into college—praying for a reason to post “YAY!”

            And among the discarded, not even the craziest is making one last visit to the head office to shoot up the place.

            Under any regime, they’ll be nothing and be “happy.” The bad guys saw it first. We lost.

    • For nearly two decades this has been the mental trappings of men I know: “But I can’t get cheap women to give me cheap sex without my [apps]. And the only thing worse than getting cheap sex from cheap women is NOT getting cheap sex from cheap women. Oh how I hate how much the human experience has been reduced to cheap, vapid, meaningless exchanges through some app that only dangles in reality long enough to transact the most base of human needs. But if I don’t have these apps all these cheap people on these terrible apps will think I am a loser.”

      The story for women is the same. Just change sex to attention/resources/access/status. Sure, now most think facebook is gay and Match.com is a dry hole because they are all on insta and fling or whatever the next more derivative thing will be. But to wean from the hive in its entirety is to question their very existence.

      Social pressure has surpassed survival pressure. So to undo that survival pressure will have to make a comeback.

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