Note: The Taki post is up. I find the whole anti-Nazi thing interesting as it seems to be a subculture now, rather than just ham-fisted sloganeering. It is becoming an anti-religion in which the believers are defined by their opposition to the imaginary. For something lighter, I have some posts behind the green door about pop culture. Over Christmas I watched The French Connection, Star Trek: Diversity and The Expanse.
Most people on this side of the great divide have little interest in sports entertainment, as it is seen as part of the head game the system plays on people. Instead of investing in things that are important to their community and family, men invest their energy in rooting for the local corporate sports team. For most on this side of the divide, there is something unseemly about seeing a man wearing a sports team jersey in public or putting his favorite sports team in his social media profile.
That is, however, what makes sports entertainment a useful window into the psychology of the managerial state. Sports entertainment is a microcosm of what is happening in more subtle ways across the culture. College sports are particularly useful as that is where the ideology of this age slams into reality. On the one hand, players are supposed to be “scholar-athletes” and on the other hand college sports is a great celebration of diversity. None of it, of course, makes sense.
An example is this announcement from the Atlantic Coast Conference about a corporate program called “the coach’s academy” that is “an eight-week virtual and immersive development program that equips coaches with information, tools, and skills of a humanistic approach to better support the needs of the student-athlete.” Anyone who has worked in corporate America recognizes the creepy bureaucratic language that defines modern managerialism.
The hallmark of the modern managerial class is the creepy, dehumanized language they inflict on us. How does one “equip a coach with information, tools, and skills of a humanistic approach”? A normal way of saying this is “train coaches to be more empathetic to their players” but that is too direct and it lacks the signaling that is so important in the managerial class. The word salad says that the writer has been to graduate school and has the appropriate credentials.
The proof of that is the third paragraph. ” ‘The response to the ACC Coaches’ Academy has been terrific,’ said ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips, Ph.D.” A normal person would wonder why that academic credential is listed, but inside the world of the managerial class, credentials are everything. This is why they are so cheap. Phillips earned a Ph.D. in education administration from the University of Tennessee, a master’s degree in education from Arizona State University.
Another thing you see in managerial language is the appropriation of terms and concepts from business and science. These are fields in which there is a right answer and accomplishment can be objectively measured. College presidents now call themselves CEO’s, for example. In this announcement they use the term “cohort” rather than group, suggesting things about the first group of coaches forced into this seminar that are certainly not true, but the word “cohort” sounds cool.
Later on, we learn that the coaches learn “emotional intelligence competencies to enhance trust and connection.” A normal person would wonder what exactly is an “emotional intelligence competency” and the long answer is nothing. There is no such thing as emotional intelligence. It is another racket where “experts” on “emotional intelligence” sell their services to corporate trainers. The idea is to train staff to control their emotions like a sociopath.
Also note the word competency. This is a very popular word in the managerial class, because it implies that all knowledge is acquirable. You just have to sit quietly in the class, repeat what you heard and get the credentials. Now you have that competency, which you can put in your trophy case. This is a product of the blank slate, which assumes anyone can learn anything. The strivers festooned with credentials are not naturally better. They just want it more.
Perhaps the most amusing bit of language in this press release is the phrase “transformational leadership approach.” This is another example of how the managerial class loves neologism, especially those that borrow words and phrases from the productive sector of society. They also love the idea that natural ability, like leadership, can be acquired, like a new car or a new couch. They also need to feel like they are leaders, even if they sit in a cubicle all day.
Like emotional intelligence, transformational leadership is popular in the corporate space, mostly because it is a good way to avoid reality. That reality is there are people good at the things needed in a corporation and there is a finite number of them, which means there is never enough of these people. Consultants make a nice living telling senior managers that there is a way to spin the straw they can afford into the gold that will make the company successful.
This line is typical. “Through personal reflection, peer discussion and interactive activities such as role play and case studies, coaches developed an action plan for practical implementation of new strategies within their teams and integrated program concepts to evolve their coaching philosophy.” The action plan is the proof that the employee attended the seminar. Usually, they end up in the trash or maybe in a drawer with the other nonsense credentials.
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, people have complained about the dehumanizing aspects of large corporate entities. Marxism was driven in large part by the dehumanizing aspects of large scale manufacturing. Writers and comedians have mocked corporate culture. The corporation is a creepy form of fascism in that the people in charge imagine themselves to be something other than autocrats and they demand their employees play along with the charade.
The social phenomenon of managerialism is the application of corporate self-delusion to society as a whole. The administrative state embraces the same bizarre language and internal activities as the modern corporation. Popular culture spreads the language and concepts, normalizing this stuff in areas like sports, of all places. Managerialism seeks to turn society into an integrated corporate entity. The only thing missing from that press release is the phrase “resistance is futile.”
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I remember a local enterprise, a tire store, with the name “Tire Concepts.” I often wondered if they were selling tires of different shapes, such as rectangles or octagons.
surprised no one has mentioned how sports are becoming “corporate” because that is who their real audience is, especially for in-stadium revenues. now corporate drones can imagine they are on the team too! it all reminds me of Rollerball (the original) in so many ways.
A short trip through the BS to English transmogrifier yields the insight that coaches are now required to think and act like the immature, coddled, unintelligent, uneducated and violent feral “youths” who are recruited to play sportsball in what are laughably and incongruously called “institutions of higher learning.” All things in society have now been, or are actively being reduced to the lowest common denominator. “Equality” means that we all must act like the most ignorant, violent, stupid and sociopathic members of our society, rather than institutionalizing/imprisoning them if they refuse to become civilized. Congratulations, America; you have attained peak idiocracy.
The erudite, entertaining, and accurate essence of this comment belies the seriousness of the problem. Idiocy is indeed an epidemic malady, but the end-state is not a hilarious guffaw at the neighborhood pub. It’s a rapid descent into collapse and chaos. And it won’t be very funny when roving gangs of hungry hooligans break down the front door looking for food and something to fuck. Best to have more than wit when that reality shows up.
The managerial class is generally stupid. Their virtue signaling word salads and committees are for themselves while the smart productive people find value in accomplishments great and small. When the managers notice we are indifferent or have cold contempt for them their world is threatened. Then the paramilitary departments called HR are called in to do battle.
Such delicious irony … if these low-wit ‘managers’ would (could!) simply write with directness, clarity, and the rhetorical 2X-knockout blow of concision and precision, and would just write *without* condescension, then DOCTOR Z, who *does* write like this….would not have to.
This sort of silly pseudo-intellectual patois rises to the greatest crescendo in the academic world, which loves detaching itself (sorry—‘eroticizes the decoupling of theyself’) from the Real, and is utterly numbing to directness/clarity/concision/precision…academics nearly all visualize themselves and their impenetrable, content-free prose as Neo bullet-dodging at the end of The Matrix. Then bedding down with Trinity and making lots of sequels. (The Wachowski Brothers are now the Wachowski Sisters, even as their movies have also inevitably Transitioned Downhill; I would not watch the recent one for a year’s salary.)
If/when the world goes back into primitive barbarism, and the Borgs’ Darwinian dreams become ‘embedded in their own HyperReality’ there will be an inverse relationship between those who die last and those with the most impressive graduate education.
“Life journeys” is good for a laugh, but my favorite bit of managerialized speech is “passionate.” To wit:
Job announcement: “Are you passionate about potato chips? Do they migrate through your brain all night?”
CV: “I am truly passionate about formulating car waxes.” … “I have spent time in recent years working on cancer cures, but my real passion is for writing terrifying Covid warnings. I want to join this biggest team!”
Now that right there is what I’d hafta call “deathless prose.”
Also funny are companies that describe what they do, no matter how mundane, as a “solution”. So an ice cream company might say something like “we provide cool tasty treat solutions to meet your summertime need for nutritional snacks”.
And when they absolutely cannot think of any other slogan, they fall back on this: “We deliver!”
There was once a time when the job of a coach was to get his team to win games. I guess that’s considered way passe now.
The cuntefaction of America continues and accelerates. How long will it take for us to realize that this is an existential threat?
It’s been going on for far too long.
“The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity” ~ Henry James
Oops! Too late.
A decade plus ago, I noticed “equip” used this way in writing directed to the Christian “community.” Ditto “provision.” And others. It seems to tangible-ize intangibles.
If one reads attentively without the need to satisfy confirmation bias, many analogs can be noticed.
In many ways all the corporate etc. gobbledygook seems like a way to keep from talking directly about what needs to be done and how, as much as to show how “smart, erudite & emotive” one can be. When you’re having to hire dead wood vibrancy left, right and center, you just can’t order da’jizz or quaqueeba to get his/her shit together ASAP and get the job done or else. No sir. It takes gobbledygook word salads and beating around the bush to really get things taken care of quick, fast and in a hurry – LOL.
“Dear da’jizz, I’m reaching out today to praise your unmatched competency and encourage you to gift your unparalleled transformative abilities to the team to spirit this project over the finish line. I know you’ve got it in you da’jizz. Give ’em the old money shot…”
Of course the main question would be whether da’jizz even know what’s being requested of him.
Folks, what we are seeing here is world class bullshit. Whoever spawned that booklet just obsoleted all of the on-line bull shit generators; “emotional intelligence competency” WOW.
“……..seeing a man wearing a sports team jersey WITH ANOTHER MAN’S NAME EMBLAZONED ON THE BACK……” That’s the red-line for me. Wearing a Kobe Bryant Laker jersey is fine….if you’re 11. Not when you are 31.
It’s not even good at 11. Imbuing young men with athlete worship is not working out very well.
Understandable though not good as there aren’t many in the way of heroes these days and arguably in terms of living national ones , none at all.
I give a guy a pass if it’s his own kid.
I’ve been a sportsball guy my whole life- and I get the criticisms of it as an institution if one can say that.
I still follow some sportsball- college hockey a lot, and college lacrosse. Anyone see what those two sports have in common?
As for the coaching aspect- there is a lot of gobbledegook out there, but there are a number of organizations out there that are trying to improve the quality of coaching especially at the youth and high school levels. There are still coaches that just scream and yell, and organizations like the Positive Coaching Alliance* are attempting to provide a more constructive mode of coaching. A lot of people think this is feminizing the coaching fraternity- I’d argue that while there are those for whom feminization is the goal, I don’t think you have to be a dick to be tough.
All that said I agree with the Zmans point here.
* PCA is an organization I had a lot of respect for- a lot of coaches I know (I was a high school lax coach), and it fights against the notion that many coaches have that the PCA is selling “everybody gets a trophy” coaching- they’re not. That said the organization was very disappointing during the Summer of George- they went anti racism pozzed. Disappointing.
The sloppiness of my prose is entirely due to posting while watching the Sweden – Slovakia World Junior hockey game… damned sportsball.
Role play:
“Christopher, you’re a 350-pound, 5’2″ Black woman named Gen’Orea. You’re angry, because of all the the things you’ve been learning about how racist society has kept you down.
You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you suspect that your White male boss is looking down at you.
Though there’s nothing particular you can point to, you also suspect that he’s a racist.
OTOH, you’re afraid to confront him, since your job is your only source of support for you and your five children; none of whose four biological fathers are contributing anything, not even the two that aren’t in prison.
You walk in one morning and find him going through your desk.
Take it from there….”
I call BS. Gen’Orea has kids to support herself 🙂
If you have the time, look up the writings of Richard Mitchell, who published a newsletter titled “The Underground Grammarian.” He also wrote a few excellent books. The obtuse language that permeates the managerial class has its’ origins in schools of education. We’re being haunted by the verbal gobbledygook of Thorstein Veblen.
Regards,
Mike
The pile of shit we’re in has its origin in “education”. Brainfuckem young….kill creatitvity and common sense. Now we’re talkin baby, they’ll march themselves to the deathcamp.
The reason for schools of “education” that grant “degrees” in “education” is that the monstrous idea gained currency that EVERYBODY should “get” a “college education.” It’s the fault of social democracy. Of believing our own bullshit propaganda. So we have degrees in “education” where one learns something known as “teaching methods” even though you don’t know a GD thing about the subject that you are eventually hired to teach.
who’s all these new guys..
nice to see
It seems today that anytime someone in post-secondary education has something to say about “Muh” institution, no normal people really care about what they have to say. It’s automatically like, ” Yeah, whatever in the f#@k you want!” Young white men also are so turned off by this, that for the last 20 years an ever increasing number don’t even want to bother with college. It’s simply not an option for those wanting to make a real living without going into debt to “learn” something.
The pointy-head people of the Borg are always left-wing Democrats, and they still can’t fathom that general society despises them and their “cohorts”. It’s like none of it matters anymore. The closest thing to modern American education would be some Soviet nomeklatura institution from the 1970’s to 1980’s. People go along with it because it’s always been there, but none have any idea that the whole edifice is about to collapse into a heap of ash that none will really miss. There’s this feeling of rot and decay permeating the air, and I wonder how much longer can it really go on. When it does all blow up, it will be quick and dirty to behold the end of it all. I can imagine that the people in it that we know are useless will be weaping, wailing, and knashing their teeth. That part of it will be quite amusing, beholding people who are no longer important to society, and they know it beyond the shadow of a doubt..
It’s astonishing how arrogant they are these days. Pride goeth before destruction. I’ve seen it before in others, in myself to a degree, in retrospect.
What I’ve never been able to figure out is if it’s madness, or if it conceals a creeping desperation. I go back and forth.
No, I think it’s just pure self-delusion. These people BELIEVE this BS.
The thing with college is that once it’s accessible to “everyone”, then it loses the very essence that makes it something worthwhile. Just like the equity bullshit has done. Now they’ll be trying to push through blacks with 75 IQs through college and eventually all of corporate America too. It’s really embarrassing to see joggers who can’t even speak proper english getting hired into positions they have absolutely no ability to fill. If you thought America got a lot dumber when the millennials took over, the joggers are here to tell you “hold muh 40″…
“… weaping, wailing, and knashing their teeth.”
I live just for the chance to see this happen.
I’m going to go a little against the grain on this managerial sloganeering stuff. Just a little.
I really hate it. All of the non-offensive mealy-mouthed language. It makes me want to puke. I served in the military back when they didn’t have safe spaces to crawl into. I think there’s a lot to be said for developing a thick skin and learning to take criticism and hard leadership.
Having said that, I spent the last 2 decades under the thumb of a fucking asshole who came across as “old school”. The only thing he understood about management was his boot up your ass. The only people who were successful working under him were the people with well-worn anal cavities, unlimited supply of lubricant, and an ability to hold an enthusiastic smile while getting raped by that boot. I was miserable under this form of management. I’m too contrarian off a person to thrive under those conditions and I butted heads with the boss.
Enter a new younger female boss a few years ago. She comes in with all of this sloganeering. Meetings sound like an advertisement pitch. She doesn’t “tell us what she wants”, instead she “challenges us”. It’s very different. It can be a bit nauseating. However, it does matter a great deal what the motivations are behind all of that sloganeering for the individual manager.
She doesn’t say these thing on one hand while shoving the boot up our ass on the other. She REALLY “empowers” the people beneath her to do their job well. She “gives us the tools” etc. all that lingo, but she actually does it and follows through, and rewards us with praise when things are going well, and even encouragement when things aren’t going so well.
I’m sure she is willing to go to bat for us when there’s a need to do that instead of throwing us all under the bus.
The problem behind all of these philosophies, at the very root, is not so much the philosophy itself but rather the motivations of the people who adopt them. I really don’t mind a boss who shoves the boot up our ass every now and then, as long as I know he is a team player and his motivations reflect that. If there is some reward for me for getting things done, and if I’m not going to take all the blame when things go wrong, it ultimately doesn’t matter if my boss is old school or new age. The problem is, more often than not, corporate America has become an ever man for themselves circus.
In my experience, finding a corporate platitude-spouting manager who will actually “go to bat for you” is as likely as finding a chicken with teeth. They got into their position precisely because they avoid the risks that come with going to bat for their employees. The only way to go higher in the food chain is to continually defer to those above them.
There might be times when it appears that they’ve gone to bat for you, but that’s only when there’s been a confluence, coincidental no doubt, of your desires and their direct report’s.
To be fair, any young person coming up in the world these days is likely to talk like that, as that is just the language of the present day. Ideally, they will eventually see through the platitudes and get to the point, but they may not. I agree that it’s the motivation that counts.
Current HR departments are so much larger than they ever need to be, that they have to constantly create busy work to give themselves something to do (and put on their annual evaluations), but also to give the rest of the company the illusion that they are doing something. The modern online surveys are a perfect example–they give the illusion that they care what you think, without actually meaning anything.
As a side note, on my first ski patrol job I had a Patrol Director who was a 50-year old former Marine mountain-warfare instructor. he was as gruff and straightforward as you can imagine. I will never forget once when I was trying to learn lift evacuation and kept messing one thing up, he asked almost Clint Eastwood style, “Are you TRYING to piss me off?” Loved that guy! It was impossible to work harder than him, and he didn’t tolerate slacking.
To add to my comment (“I don’t think you have to be a dick to be tough”. ) upthread, I’d also observe that not all managers who yell are dicks. As a classroom teacher I’d yell about once a semester- it got the kiddies attention! If one yells all the time one is likely to lose the class/room/division, whatever.
And as for the comments above about Ed school- you guys don’t know the half of it- complete waste of time, but most teachers have to take the stupid classes to get certified.
Mr. Generic: The richness of English vocabulary allows for extraordinary precision, and some of the signifiers of good writing are precision and clarity – i.e. word choice. Even as an English major who thought herself fairly well read, I frequently come across words whose meaning I’m not absolutely certain of, or new ones from other fields. Plus I’m old and not quite as sharp as I once was. And I still make frequent use of my father’s used 1948 “The American College Dictionary.”
Pusillanimous is my favorite word. Fancy way of calling someone a pussy. Niggardly, comes in a close 2nd.
I’ve been finding a use for “Waxing prolix” of like.
Sounds like some genital hair removal technique.
Late not like,
gibberish for the comment approver.
Wish there was an editing feature.
Personally, I am partial towards obtuse
I don’t get it…
Prescient. Prescience. Try using both words in a single sentence.
Ah. I figured you for an English major like me. Hope you went through before it went totally bat-guano ….
This post is yet another example of the enormous and ever-growing body of deadweight that currently afflicts our society, and evermore so at the upper levels of decision-making. And this deadweight can only exist in an environment of extreme affluence in which government can print money at will, distribute it to parasites to purchase their loyalty & vote, and then spread this cost onto the productive via taxation or inflation. It’s a viscous cycle that must inevitably end in collapse, which is nature’s cure for all dysfunctional species. And this collapse can only be delayed, not prevented; no matter how hard you vote or exhaust yourself trying to persuade others.
There are skills worth acquiring other than the aforementioned & pussified “emotional intelligence competency.” No real man would ever allow such an insult to be leveled against him. Go out an kill something and then eat it. That’s an ancient skill worth resurrecting.
“There is no such thing as emotional intelligence. It is another racket where “experts” on “emotional intelligence” sell their services to corporate trainers.”
I was discussing intelligence with someone online several years ago. It turned out that he was black and could not admit that blacks have a statistically lower intelligence than Whites or Asians. He threw out a number of reasons for black shortcomings, based on the apologetics that liberals have promoted for negroes. But, the one excuse he used that I thought most hilarious was that blacks have a higher “kinetic intelligence” than other races. Meaning, of course, they are better at runnin’ and jumpin’. It doesn’t matter that the only sports that blacks excel in involve runnin’ and jumpin’, while being almost non-existent in swimming or winter sports. Runnin’ and jumpin’ sports have the most televised presence, so blacks are considered “superior athletes”. Its just that it is apropos that White “intellectuals” and their pets would end up using stereotypes in their arguments. They would be offended if you pointed out their penchant for eating fried chicken or watermelon, but would be OK with it if someone claimed that it showed that they were more intelligent because of it.
SPRINTIN’ and jumpin’.
Show your interlocutor this.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country
https://new-iq-test.com/iq-by-country/
In one of this season’s episodes Leon, the amazingly stereotypical black man character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, can’t eat watermelon in front of white people.
It amazes me how seriously so many people take education as a qualification for a job. Education tells us nothing about what kind of individual we are dealing with.
In my former field, the position usually required a technical diploma, which I obtained many moons ago (when modern technology was at such an early stage as to render it meaningless in today’s world). To even apply for such a position one needed this diploma; those without it will not even be considered. Those who have these precious diplomas cling to them like grim death, insisting that those not possessing them must be excluded from the hiring process.
And yet, the diploma tells us nothing about work ethic (don’t even try to tell me the diploma shows the individual “worked hard” to achieve it, for in an age when no one can fail, and hands are held through the whole education process, completion of a diploma means nothing). The diploma tells us nothing about the individual’s punctuality, attitude, productivity, maturity, etc., etc., etc.
What it does do is absolve mediocre managers from making judgements about character, or committing to real decisions. If the new hire turns out poorly those who hired him/her/it cannot be held accountable because they checked all the correct boxes on the interview form, which was itself developed by a “qualified” human resources consultant possessing all the correct academic credentials.
In my dad’s day, people worked their way up through the ranks of a company or organization, learning the ins-and-outs of each level along the way, and become intimate with the workings of the company. By the time they reached management most (hopefully) had a clear understanding of how each of these systems worked. Despite having a grade nine education my dad rose over several decades to a high level position because he achieved, and got results.
Today, a spoiled child sits in a university classroom for four or more years in order to gain the qualifications (it’s hard to type that with a straight face) to go into management. After graduating with that MBA, he/she/it gets placed into a firm or organization he/she/it knows little or nothing about. Yet no one cares, because the correct boxes were checked in the aforementioned interview form. It matters not if the bureaucratic machine is counter-productive, because the competing firms (in the few businesses where competition still exists) use the same cookie-cutter formulae to hire their cogs, too.
Of course education is dehumanizing. It’s an escape from responsibility and accountability which is simultaneously euphemized as meritocracy. To be clear, some fields (like medicine or certain trades) require a specific degree of training, as opposed to education. But the vast majority of qualifications are nonsense products of what some refer to as the “education industrial complex”.
Yet one more reason our universities and colleges need to be defunded.
It’s all about labor costs. Hire some MBA for less than it costs to train and raise somebody from within for a decade or two. Get the rubes to bear the cost of training. And if every company has the same generic culture you can plug and play these people well enough to get along in business. But you have to prove you’re good and disposable to get in the game lol.
Not sure I completely agree, but in essence you are correct. Bryan Caplan in “ The Case Against Education ” lays out a pretty good argument of your point, however he contends employers are not dumb and do have a (subtle) purpose in selecting college grad’s over non-grads. Basically, as a college grad, you’ve shown an ability to sit through years of mind numbing boredom and repeat/do complacently what you’ve been told by your superiors (professors). 😉
It’s a type of “signaling”. Whatever you fail to bring to the table knowledge-wise, as you’ve forgotten most of the dribble you’ve been “taught” the preceding 4-5years, will be little missed and the corporation will teach you what you will need to know to succeed in your job.
Males form militaries.
Females form religions.
When men were the primary breadwinners:
The laws defended that role, often giving women the short end of the stick.
Education had clear goals.
Companies had clear missions; scoring was verifiable because physical inventory was the mission.
Labor unions had ranks.
Class “uniforms” were the norm.
Even government had strictly delineated roles.
Society had a clearly defined hierarchy of authority and role.
Men form hunting bands, pecking orders from chief hunter to spearmaker, to do a clear job- get the mammoth
Now that women are the primary breadwinners:
Men: short end of the stick
Education: “self discovery”
Companies: social support matriarchies
(see Zman, “African villages”)
Labor unions: non-productive employees
Clothes: roleplay and endless changes of, ahem, clothing
Government: sticks its busybody nose into everything, then nags
Society: Everybody “equal”
Women form more level camps, with everyone a ‘team player’, the endless cycle of support and caregiving tasks for all from young to old
Ogg no longer hunt big tusk;
Ogg women bring clams
Edit: Oops, maybe women form church groups would be better
Crystal clarity about the situation writ large across the entire society. Great summation. 👍
If it wasn’t for the Supreme Courts ban on employer IQ tests because of “disparate impact” none of this bullshit would exist.
Peter Thiel or Elon Musk had a good quote about how a college degree demonstrated that you could” hand you assignment on time, but not much else.”
The guy over at the old Rotten Chestnuts site talks about how our society blurs, perhaps obliterates the distinction between process and outcome. Makes sense to me.
Oh gawd. The other one is “team building”. Grown adults are supposed to play childish games and pretend to enjoy it. Then there’s the role playing: they talk about certain work scenarios, do a little play to show how it works and then you have to do it. Finally, after the torture, you have to write a little paragraph about how this invaluable course will help you do your job better. I wrote mine: a complete waste of time and energy! The Karen running the course was not happy.
I got a semi-formal reprimand from my manager for it and I just laughed and threw it in the trash. Then I got a formal reprimand and threw it in the trash in front of the manager too. The guy was almost dancing with rage at that point. A week later I got a second written reprimand for being on the cell with a rare personal call during work hours, and I knew the jig was up. I wrote a three sentence resignation letter out on it, faxed it to the CEO down east, emptied my desk and walked out without notice. It was the best career move I ever made.
I can only imagine what that place is like now. That was 20 years ago…
You threw the reprimand in the trash? I would have framed it.
“…emptied my desk and walked out without notice.”
I did that once and have fantasized about doing it again ever since. It is one of the very best feelings a modern man can have. There are few things more liberating. I highly recommend everyone do it at least once in their lifetime.
I don’t know if this counts, but a few months ago, I got a call from a repeat customer who had a broken garage door spring.(torsion)
I arrived her house on time on a Saturday morning. Mind you, the door is not going up without that spring. You can try with the assistance of a door opener, but that tends to burn up the small plastic gear in the head.
I had to walk through the house to get inside the garage. I was asked if I was vaxed and I said “Heavens no”. I was then asked to put on a mask to walk through her house. No one but her was home.
I got in my truck and drove away. She texted several times, but you know, it just wasn’t worth it.
This right here is the most important comment of the day. They need us more than we need them, and as we begin to realize that, a sleeping giant awakens.
Given that we’re evolving into a fascist state, I suppose it makes sense to bring corporate culture and language to society as a whole.
I would almost agree with that, C, if it weren’t for the fact these guys are too damned stupid to run a fascist state even if they wanted to! When Joe Biden was saying “let’s go Brandon” on TV … suffice it to say I don’t think they will do fascism any better than capitalism…
😂👍
Well, people always think that a fascist state is well organized because they always associate it with the Germans, who are, by their nature, well organized.
Fascism won’t save this clown show. Socialism works in Denmark because of the Danes, not socialism. Our leaders, being the buffoons that they are, will run this society into the ground regardless of the system they choose.
Our leaders are Bolsheviks at heart but have figured out that they need to cooperation – and the money – of corporations. Our Bolsheviks like nice things. AOC isn’t going to wear the same drab dress every day or live in a small apartment in a less-than-glamorous part of the DC.
Also, the Tribe may have dominated the upper levels of the Bolsheviks, but a love of money and doing business dominates the hearts of the vast majority of the Tribe. They need a society of deal making and usury.
Ironically, given their influence on all things Communist, the Tribe as a whole isn’t really built for such a system. Centralized fascism cloaked in the veneer of liberal democracy fits their talents best.
This is what I don’t get, C: the fascists supposedly killed 6 million of them. The Russians, historically speaking – were even LESS fond of them and has even hunted them for fun and sport in the past… yet somehow…they maintained a place in the ruling Bolshevik hierarchy…? It doesn’t make sense? Did I miss something…?
Yes.
Its all a lie.
You don’t think the trains will run on time?
Hahahahahahahahaha
I suppose it makes sense to bring corporate culture and language to society as a whole.
All the self-improvement fads people latch onto are analogous to one side of the corporate culture: the demand that you must not be satisfied with your skills and accomplishments. “Re-inventing” yourself is a key part of the Goals hierarchy.
You already demonstrate competence, even creativity, in your role in the organization? Forget it, that’s not enough. You’re a rubber band — expand, expand, expand.
It never occurs to the corporate masters that pride in a job well done and recognition for it is a big motivation for productivity.
This is an excellent expansion of Theodore Dalrymple’s observations about bureaucratic language. Well done, Z Man! For those interested on Dalrymple’s take, here is a like to the TakiMag article:
https://www.takimag.com/article/speaking_bureaucratically_theodore_dalrymple/
Some discussion here about language and the use of language and vocabulary. No modern writer that I know has more command and style in the English language than Dalrymple. He can talk about taking out the trash and make it a fun read–hell, he actually wrote a book on the topic. Check out his works.
College presidents now call themselves CEO’s, for example.
And students go “on strike” rather than skip classes.
Big vs small. Big means more complex organization, which requires more specialization, more efficiency. It’s dehumanizing by nature.
I think most people would prefer small but the necessity of efficiency precludes it. Or maybe not, idk. Misanthropy is a thing in modern life.
Anyway, I get the culling, if it’s real. Darth Vader still has a beating heart that wants released from its hell. Supposing that scenario, I wonder if the people executing it realize that destroying the system that made them will destroy them too. Sort of like how the old world committed suicide with industrial war.
Maybe their bourgeois self-loathing is so intense it overrides their reason. Maybe wannabe gods are like reckless serial killers who want to face justice on some level. Maybe it’s been so easy they’re disgusted with themselves and the whole thing. Or it’s inauthentic, or mediated, like they used to say when I was in college. Or fake and gay. Idk, just daydreaming.
And yes, I still like sportsball, although it isn’t part of my identity. I get the criticisms, but I don’t see how it’s worse than watching gamers on Twitch 🙂
Why the hell would any sane person watch gamers on Twitch? Whatever Twitch is.
Twitch is this incels manifestation of what I did in the 70’s and ’80s sans screen, on the beach, and the street. I guess it could be called Twatch.
Twitch is what you do if you grew up gaming instead of sporting.
The thirst is real:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PejXtgawaXg
I only made it through about a minute.
I think I lost about 20, maybe 30 IQ points.
Yeah, the next 36 compilation videos were way better
Solzhenitsyn’s “In the First Circle” includes a chapter where all the employees have to attend a seminar on the current Marxist theories. They’re bored but have to go through with it. It’s 1949 and Stalin would get mad if they didn’t. The gibberish from the presenter is like what you quoted.
While not ignoring earlier business theorists (Bentham, Taylor, etc.), modern managerial language strikes me as a symptom of the unequal yoking of feminism and multiculturalism to Western profit-seeking business practices. Industrialists have always sought to mold their workforce to conform to their preferences, of course, and in many ways those preferences laid the foundation for ‘public’ education in America. A way to train the unwashed masses to follow the rules and the clock, perform repetitive tasks for extended lengths of time, and to maintain a modicum of quality and efficiency.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing in more ways than one, however, and even within the constraints of Dewey’s madness, White Christian Europeans demonstrated their ability and used the stepping stone of even minimal literacy to become as educated and capable as their genetics allowed. This expansion of education and the middle class was still achieved within the general limits of capitalism and the profit motive. Because Western men were running things, however, the odd individual hobbyhorse was tolerated here and there, and there was even some room made for the strange and visionary, but the basic profit motive and bottom line of achievement and production was never forgotten.
Add women to the mix, however, and the whole process began to skew. Instead of a group of guys flowing into their natural niche roles of leadership or experimentation or dogged work, women demanded empathy and niceness and group efforts. Open competition made them uncomfortable (as opposed to the social sniping they prefer) and the men were always smarter and faster and impatient with the women’s feelings as irrelevant to the task at hand.
Add mandatory and unqualified non-Whites to the already roiling mix, and the wheels start to come off. They each bring their own preferences and grievances and government mandates. They are generally incapable of performing but their success must be guaranteed. East Asians bring a preference for group consensus and cheating. South Asians bring caste and corruption. What women and diversity bring to modern business is what they bring to Western society as a whole – chaos and conflict and destruction. There is no longer any prime directive (make ‘x’ product or provide ‘x’ service, and do it in such a way as to earn lots of money). There is no longer any accountability (group work means Janie can’t be singled out for failure and empathy training means you must identify Trayvon as the hero of the hour).
In some ways, one might even consider the rise of organized professional sports and its descent into today’s mass of entitled ghetto noggers and bimbette announcers as a parallel to what’s happened to American businesses. Just as corporate bosses used their wits and abilities in business combat (albeit within the rules of the Western ‘gentleman,’ which were totally undermined and the discarded with the arrival of the Juice), they expanded and channeled that conflict into sports teams. More room for natural male aggression and physicality but still channeling it into corporate identity building and the basics of the ‘team.’
Once again, add women and non-Whites and the whole process falls apart. New rules, new standards, and endlessly competing interests all take precedence over standard White European male behavior within modern business constraints. Same thing happened to organized education – there were always loons like Dewey, of course, but men were in charge and women were teachers only while they remained unmarried. Put women in charge, as today, and they whole culture and ultimate goals of the process changed.
tl;dr: Women and Diversity destroy everything. Keep women at home occupied with family and children. Keep diversity in their own nations and cultures where their racial, religious, and caste proclivities and inborn resentment at Western competence can’t interfere with normal White lives. Business, education, society in general, all fall into useless gobbledygook when White men aren’t men, and aren’t in charge.
Brilliant analysis, truly.
Someone, here I think, pointed out recently that this unnatural inclusion of women and other outgroups has started now to tank the tech sector. No matter what we think of them, the original innovators have started to retire and die off, and women and minorities have started to replace them with the predictable, calamitous results. I can attest corporations have been forced to have their own equivalent of the Deep State, which runs thinks independently of the CEO and Board ’cause reasons that do with profit.
The same has happened within Leviathan’s bureaucracy. While the federal law enforcement agencies, for example, were littered with sociopaths, thieves and other associated criminals and low lifes, they were at least functional. Now you have a low IQ, quasi-human Shitavious speaking on camera about how the White ho in the Capitol he capped had it coming. The same now has come to the military, which pushes us closer to being on the receiving end of a nuclear war, pushed along with women and Tribe psychopaths at State.
Happy New Year!
Bravo, 3g4me. I gave a thumbs up but I wanted to put it in words, too. That’s a very incisive post. We can’t lose sight of the underlying goal: (peaceful) separation. Putting the gyno-genie back into the bottle will be a chore under the best of circumstances, but it will never be possible until we’ve cleansed the culturally alien contamination from the white man’s world.
Ditto. 3g4me’s comment is perhaps one of the best I’ve read. Should not even be a comment, but a blog posting standing by itself.
Compsci: You and Jack and KGB grant me too much honor. Truly, I am merely fortunate in recognizing patterns and, at times, being able to see how all the parts fit into the bigger picture. At other times regarding other subjects I might as well be blind. And I’ve learned from all of you as well. Love all you gentlemen – good thinking, good company, and good humor!
Yeah that was nailer.
So . . . what do you men plan on doing about this? The teenagers wrecked the car, so you need to take away the keys, more or less permanently. Instead, I see an awful lot of going gentle into that good night. For God’s sake, Trump is even playing into the Democrats and Mitch McConnell’s hands (again), preening about the vaccines, as they set him up to take the fall when the fallout starts.
By the way, 3g4me, great comment.
The primary function of men in any functioning society
is to determine what order should be, impose it and maintain it. This applies to the whole society, corporations, social groups and families. Without this framework everything else collapses.
Honestly, the problem is simpler than that. Every business that succeeds devolves into an increasingly unresponsive bureaucracy. Jargon exists to reinforce process, whereas direct language reinforces results. The fundamental problem with the undying corporation is that it outlives it’s founder (who is it’s driving force). The most obvious example is probably Walmart, which became vastly worse at customer service and somewhat worse at pricing once Sam Walton died. Apple is following the same path now that Jobs is dead.
Bureaucracies exist to reinforce a decision-making paradigm, which provides consistency, but is largely unresponsive to changes in operating conditions. In contrast, owner-leaders simply make quick decisions in response to problems, and foster ad hoc solutions to ad hoc problems. The entrepreneurial approach is responsive but lacks stability, whereas the bureaucratic approach is stable but often unresponsive. Both business paradigms are useful and necessary, and there really isn’t more to the problem than style. Don’t overthink it.
What KGB said, great post!
Though, while women may preach group effort, the group efficacy, to use corporate language, drops dramatically and scheming and backstabbing (rather than frontstabbing) rises.
Putting the gyno-genie back into the bottle will be a chore under the best of circumstances
Girls and boys should be separated at 7 years of age only to mix again in late puberty. Girls mature faster than boys so they dominate in school imposing the girl group culture they want boys to adopt.
Outstanding comment. Two hundred thousand years of evolution resulted in patriarchy being the dominant social model because it worked and consequently our species rose to the top of the organic pyramid. Casting that model aside has started a death spiral that must inevitably end in collapse. No real man wants to be a pussy, and no real woman wants to mate with a pussifed man. And that means no babies, hence no future.
Brilliant post…well said
This obsession with credentials can be seen all over the place in my field, with many openly bragging about how they basically paid for a degree.
Positions are not commensurate to ability or experience, merely educational check in the blocks will suffice.
Having to show an “MBA” grad how to use pivot tables in Excel is quite entertaining.
I recently retired from a large bank. In my 27 years there, I saw this managerial language bullshit and the dehumanizing Marxist managerial philosophy grow exponentially. It was like watching a river of sludge slowly devouring a town. You could see it coming but couldn’t do anything about it other than pack up and leave. I now get a kick out of reading posts in Linked-In. People with administrative duties in a cubical now describe their jobs as “life journeys” and when they get fed it and quit or get fired, they move on to their next journey. It’s a big subject that Z Man has a knack of describing.
Sports is a business, period. Even at the college level, “coaches” are basically managers to whom the Borg must teach its approved “coaching methods”. Coaching as we knew it allowed too much room for individual interpretation and personal styles. With Athletic Directors and “football coaches” making literally millions of dollars even at crappy sports schools, the racket must be protected. The AD making $2 million isn’t going to let some rogue tennis coach mess things up for him/her.
Meanwhile, the same academics who mocked Taylorism and six-sigma training have no problem installing their own brand of indoctrination. It’s all about power.
As to coaching, wins is what counts. So we have Rockne, Hayes, Bryant, Lombardi, Belechick, Saban, Meyer, … everyone an a$$hole.
Emotional Intelligence? Is this what highly manipulative sociopaths have? Wherever would such a obviously fraudulent concept arise?
From the wiki page of President of Yale:
Peter Salovey (/ˈsæləveɪ/; born February 21, 1958) is an American social psychologist and current President of Yale University. He previously served as Yale’s Provost, Dean of Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of Yale College. Salovey is one of the early pioneers and leading researchers in emotional intelligence.
More…. Salovey’s grandparents’ families originally came from Poland, Jerusalem, and Austria.[4] The Saloveys are descendants of the Soloveitchik rabbinic family.[5] His paternal grandfather, Yitzchak Leib was born in Jerusalem in 1895 to a community worker and pharmacist named Zalman Yoseph Soloveitchik (b. 1874). Zalman Yoseph was the son of Simchah (c. 1830-1921), a Lithuanian born Jew who emigrated to Jerusalem where he was called “The Londoner”, due to the time he spent living in London. Simchah was the son of Eliyahu Soloveitchik, an uncle to the famous scholar Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, known as the Beis Halevi. This part of the family’s origins trace to Kaunas (Kovno/Slobodka), Lithuania and then Volozhin, Belarus.
Lolz, smash the early life of all the top three Ivey presidents. I notice a trend.
I’ve got it. I can use the right language and push the right buttons to get people to do or respond how I need them to.. I can also explain to other people what they need to do to get the responses they need. I don’t do that very often because I kind of freaks people out when I can lay it out so clearly. It’s never anything terrible I just need particular responses on my job so I’ll do what I need to do to get it. But I do joke with people that I would have made an excellent sociopath
I will admit that the guy was a decent psychology professor back in the day. Ironically, most of the students at Yale today would score extremely low on the original scale of “emotional intelligence” pioneered by Salovey which is measured in terms of EQ (as opposed to IQ). They have no self-awareness or emotional restraint. I’m sure someone has revised this scale so as not to penalize the labile emotions as long as they are in the name of progressive politics.
Next logical step: notice a trend in Nobel Prizes in sciences and medicine.
Anna: Sounds crazy, I know, but it really isn’t always all about you or your people. I think you made a wrong turn on your keyboard – Unz is the other way, where people are obsessed with purportedly high IQ Juice or Orientals instead of caring about their own people and overall White society.
Bringing up the JQ is problematic. It defeats the sale- one has to jump over the obstacle brought up by oneself before finding agreement and making the pitch. If one brings up one’s own issues first, by that time one’s lost the customer.
I think it might be better to think of the JQ as just another demographic. They have criminal mafias hiding behind their own people.
Everybody does. We can’t deport the Bushes and Clintons, for example, so have to learn to put up with anticipating the “over-achievers” in any group.
Edit: I was going to say, “anticipate scorpions to act like scorpions”, but am trying to be polite.
Screw it, somebody has got to depopulate the world, so let the blood be on their hands.
To their credit, they’re trying to do it without the carnage this time leaving more goodies for their eternal rule.
Still, it’s got to happen, and will be ugly no matter what.
Our own generosity and goodwill backfired- wanting to ease the suffering (or “bring souls to the Lord” for fookin’ brownie points), we gave the primitives too much, too fast, too freely- they weren’t yet ready to handle it.
Food & Kalishnikovs to Africans? Plastic wrappers to Third Worlders? Equal rights to, err, Red Diaper Babies?
The road to he!!…
I will grant your pt. However, becoming a top upper echelon science guy is 70% politics. Attracting funding etc… The higher average IQ of the Ashcanazi in no way explains the vast over representation of them in admissions and leadership in our formerly wasp institutions. Maniacal tribal nepotism, does explain the phenomenon. I eagerly await the blossoming of science originating in Israel. So far we’ve gotten spy software and mysterious ….
I notice that trend went to vaccine rackets.
Your boy Kessler banned all medical devices for 9 years so yours could get a bigger grip on the medical market.
Now we have advanced disease bioweapons (after how many tries), media-led pandemics, and a medical tyranny.
Just like the USSR, you lead the advance and set the rules, and THEN native opportunists follow your lead.
The problem is, once in motion, systems tend to stay in motion.
It always starts with a certain bunch saying, “we can do a better job than they can!”, and always ends in the destruction of whatever society let those “reformers” in…all the way back to Ur.
Our dear Z is bored to tears with what cannot be changed, but Demographics Matter.
The Golden Rule used to work just fine . . .
The golden rule is for suckers. Sorry to say.
Another White standard that’s been abused. We used to enforce that.
No, it’s for White people- and let the others follow where we lead…in their own places.
I went to grad school for the same reason I went to college, just to get the MGIB living allowance. I accidentally got my MA in Germanistik just by treading water so long. Language has some rigor to it, but nowhere near as much as math or science, so there were a lot of crazy females in the program. I remember at one point some weird corporate empathy lady came in (I don’t know what the hell her title was) and told us to form a circle and that we were going to perform some kind of trust transfer dance. I think in that moment I understood what black dudes go through when they fear the emasculation of tomming, having to soft-shoe and grin. I simply got up from my desk, made some excuse about feeling sick (which, come to think of it, I was) so that I wouldn’t have to humiliate myself with some shuck and jive dance like a capering eunuch. The fear was real; I’d rather die than be humiliated like that.
But it’s not just crazy feminists in university, as you pointed out here. The other night I was getting hammered with the neighbor and his friends came over and started wanting to to do shots to the “Greatest Football Franchise in history,” our local sportsball team. Just like with the HR woman at school, I excused myself, saying I felt sick (which, again, wasn’t quite a lie).
I’d frankly rather be in a black mold-infested prison cell in D.C. getting beaten by Somali guards and singing the National Anthem with the Alt-Right Shaman than doing all that song and dance. I guess they know that and it’s why they make us do it. Or try to make us.
“Wear your mask.”
I think it may have been you from whom I heard this little nugget; “Socially” distance, take the jab, get in the boxcar.
Thanks…
JJ-
It’s all just for the greater good:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/GrkS1jAsckDd/
Competitive sports have always been a part of the human experience. They occupy the attentions of otherwise destructive teen-age boys and have been training for war activity for millennia. Probably even more important is the fact that they are a significant component in gambling. No doubt Genghiz Khan’s horsemen placed bets on the speed of their mounts. The American NFL is now in bed with organized gambling after years of watching that mania without being able to financially tap into it.
Nevertheless, it seems odd that if you see in public a man wearing a green and yellow football sweater with number 12 on it and the name “Rodgers” appliqued on the back, that person could be almost anyone in the world except Green Bay Packers player Aaron Rodgers.
Furthermore, unlike the opaque world of government, politics, business, finance and academia, sports by their nature are open and transparent. The activities of the Federal Reserve are a mystery to the man in the cul de sac but the plays that led to the Giants defeating the Cardinals are visible to anyone.
nailheadtom: Plays are not necessarily clear to everyone. I don’t follow sportsball but I am sufficiently aware to know that American football can include some fairly complex plays, almost like various chess stratagems. I’ve also read that certain diverse players have had a difficult time memorizing the playbook, let alone extemporizing within its forms. That requires a certain type of intelligence which they are traditionally lacking – visualizing and planning a future abstraction.
American football can include some fairly complex plays
That’s what the sports ball promoters would like you to believe. How can it actually be all that complex if it takes place in a very small physical space and involves a very limited number of players regulated by an arcane set of rules set in a very short period of time?
It’s paper-rock-scissor writ large, with the added complication of all 11 guys having to remember and properly carry out the paper-rock-scissor order.
Almost as if immortal, limited-liability legal fictions directed by outsiders are our greatest mistake.
I use this argument when thinking about what I call the “gods”, composite memory processing pools etched into eddies of the local magnetic field (commonly called Spirit): they aren’t actually sentient, and they aren’t individual entities- yet they perform action that affects us.
Simply put, calling “God” intelligent is like saying a corporation is intelligent.
Not so, any more than an avalanche needs intelligence to perform action- yet how to defend ourselves from its weight?
(PS- I understand that putting a face and a name on the ineffable acts as a kind of transformer, stepping something quite real down to a voltage we can actually use. Family stories are our operating system, our OS or guideline to perceive the world.
A ‘Heavenly Father’, a.k.a. “awe”, is one thing when understanding that each people have their own fathers- but I see monotheism, a Supreme Being, as not only an inaccuracy, but as the most dangerous concept ever invented.
Modern corporations, the Blob or Borg, are certainly a runner up.)
Well, shoot. Here I go again down the rabbit hole.
You envision a Mover outside the movement.
Not so. Your God has a creator.
It is the movement that creates the mover, that makes the Maker.
It’s everywhere. Couple year back, I went to a seminar offered by the FBI to train various houses of worship to deal with active shooters in their churches. Now, you might have thought that the FBI would have useful information for these guys to think through: how would you select people that you are going to ask to carry guns in your church, what makes you think these guys can make a shot in a crowded room, this is a big investment in a very low-probability event, can you keep it up for a decade? All that sort of thing.
But no. The main discussion, aside for a review of the Emit Till case and a review of the Opleousas massacre, was on building a big binder that was going to be your plan. Don’t forget to have representation of the disabled in the committee, and don’t forget to have a section on where you’d put the memorial to those who perished.
It was then I realized the FBI are idiots. But they were doing exactly what Z talks about here: creating a process to get credentialed instead of talking about a real problem.
At our Church we had a parishioner with experience dealing with people who were about to go off the deep end. Went through a reasonable escalation process that included just asking him to discuss the issue outside if he’s screaming at the Priest but has not brandished the weapon yet, all the way up to big guys in the parish tackling or shooting the guy if everything else fails.
He had no PhD or counterterrorism credentials, and the most he had was a basic credential that allowed him to talk about the subject without legal liability to him or the parish, But overall he was just a normal guy with normal experiences who had nothing to prove but a lot to give to the community.
Those “big binders” are everywhere!
They turn simple tasks into baffling monstrosities that any decent person becomes disgusted with. That’s why so many institutions wind up weeding out the decent, competent, and of course geniuses. People of good faith and honest thinkers cannot abide or survive in this kind of stuff. Honest people want to get to the point and get going! But school and work is mostly endless jumping through hoops where often the most compliant, not the brightest, win.
Humanity is hopeless. Most are fools, the law of the jungle/force dictates that psychopaths will get on top, and good people give up and/or lose.
Sports were and are rigged. Worshiping athletes (especially of another race) is sick. It’s idolatry same as all these dumb superhero movies.
Man was meant to live in small homogenous communities of limited technology and believe in God. Amish are right, I imagine.
Having the binder with periodic updates is no guarantee that you will have time to find the binder, open the binder to the right page and execute the instructions, while the building is burning down around you. Practice practice practice muscle memory. On a side note, I have come to the conclusion that free will is a bad combination of desire and ambition, I would much rather that God had given us common sense, even though common sense would dictate that we not even try to reach the stars but we would have streetlights and sidewalks. Do we think we were God’s first attempt, and did He go on to create other more beautiful and workable worlds, and does He ever look back in regret going boy I sure messed up on that one..
If the Amish living a quarter mile up the road are indicative of the rest, their homogeneity has devolved into inbreeding, their Christianity is a veneer, and their technological limitation is a joke.
You may be right. There may well be no real good “solution” for man as we understand it.
Taki blog. I though man was a surviving machine? Evolutionists need to put survival first, no?
No. Reproduction is all.
To be fair, one tends to follow the other. Carrion produces few offspring.
Hi-Ya, you asked a question that was honest, yet ignored. Your question is why this discussion of credentials has me spinning off track (as usual) into religious philosophy.
(First, let me thank you for asking it, it was important to me.)
You asked, “but doesn’t a religion need a God to be a religion?”
In answer, “no, half the world doesn’t have a God or Creator, look at the Chinese, Japanese, or Amerindians.”
The idea of a Supreme Creator is an Abrahamic twist (on archaic Aryan cosmology, all of which they got wrong as usual.)
In other words, God, the Supreme, the Highest, above all the rest, is a J**ish idea.
(Meaning, “God is J**ish, as was Adam, a direct lineage, the First”)
Let me use Catholicism as an example. When I look at their endless writings, I see two things only: “Play nice”, and appeals to a byzantine credentialism. “So and so said this about what so and so said about that,” on and on and on.
So we could say that a religion is hardly anything about the actual supernatural- it’s more a virtual ecology of authority.
What it needs, if not a God, is a hierarchy. It’s a long maze, a tradition, of hierarchy. It’s self-referential and largely “imaginary”, existing only in and of its own references to itself, and its self-made rules and relationships (and stories).
Isn’t that what we see with governments, corporations, and institutions? They are mostly virtual (“imaginary”) and self-referential.
Somebody mentioned that the Fourth Turning guys acknowledged the rise of communism, and missed that it was a religion. A religion without a God.
That’s exactly right. Communism, like governmentalism or corporatism, has all the moralizing and credentialism of a religion.
We were blind to the power and the danger because everybody used to think as you said, that “religion” was something with a God in it.
So, when we see no God attached, we think they won’t have any Zealots either. Woops!
You can extrude this language in your sleep. I have. It comes from a random word generator similar to a random number generator. After a phrase or two, people stop reading. Their eyes merely scan the words.
The concept of “emotional intelligence” was popularized by Daniel Goleman’s book of that title. Emotional intelligence, according to the author, though he doesn’t put it this way, is the ability to sit back, suss out the situation, determine who’s got the power/influence and then how to tailor your thouight and conduct in the way most advantageous to your goals and agenda relative to the possibilities open to you. In every group, there’s a fall guy/rube/class clown who plays the role of the sacrificial goat. Don’t be that guy.
If emotional intelligence is the living room furniture, cynicism is the carpeting, but to that snarky analogy, the author would likely reply with the riposte most common among the woke: “honi soit qui mal y pense.”
Pardonnez, je ne parle pas.
What is ““honi soit qui mal y pense”, please?
“Evil to those who think ill of it.”
Oh, then I agree with the idea of “emotional intelligence”.
Think like a predator. Blacks and women do- the words mean nothing, they look for what’s behind the words.
They use the social brain, not the informational one- thus the monkey barking. “Word salad” is display.
“shame on him who thinks evil of it“
If one wants to look at the corporate hive-mind, take a look at the Linkedin news feed. Person after person with the same vapid profile pic, spouting the same old nonsense that is either a woke bowing to current trends or a word salad of jargon that says nothing. Then the comments are somehow even more banal. Reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s comment about communists in Soviet Russia who congregated and spouted nothing but marxist platitudes at one another.
Saw this at my own company when my boss kept asking me to be a part of his “Leadership Book CLub”. First book, “Who Moved My Cheese”. I made a couple… constructive comments about the book that ensured he would never bug me to attend again. Nice guy, too nice really, which is why he retreats to vapidness to avoid the hard calls that define good leaders.
I was once sent to a teamwork seminar for managers. The first thing we were assigned was a solo project. We were given a list of items. We were then to imagine ourselves on an island and we had to use the items and our teammates to get back to land. My plan involved bashing the portly HR manager over the head, then wrapping her in plastic and using her as a raft. That did not go over well.
In one of my daughter’s classes they came up with end-of-world scenario and asked the kids who they pick as a survival partner among themselves, and why. My kid picked the most portly girl. You can probably guess why. Harlan Ellison is definitely a subversive influence.
This smacks of Solzhenitsyn IIRC. I believe he wrote of the use of a “sandwich” when escaping the Gulag. Two strong prisoners would entice a very weak one to escape with them. The weak one being eaten when he succumbed to the rigor of the environment being traversed. 🙁
My kids are a mixture Vlad-the-impaler 50, anglo 25, portuguese 20 and small amount of SW native 5. They scare me at times. I’ve designated the daughter in the example above as our long-term care giver. She is the sweetest.
“OK, this “Z Man” from Baltimore. Evaluation Susan?”
“Not A Team Player, Frank.”
“Through personal reflection…evolve their coaching philosophy”.
I’m pretty sure teaching blocking schemes and defensive assignments are more important than the drivel in the seminars. I’m surprised coaches put up with it.
That said, I find a grown man wearing a shirt with another grown man’s name on it, sorta, gay.
When you get paid what so many of those coaches get paid, you’ll put up with a lot of BS to keep the lifestyle maintained. Can’t imagine the trophy wife would be very keen on downsizing to a cheap condo near the local junior college.
Come to think of it, if I was getting paid that much, I’d probably put up with it too.
You can’t serve both God and Mammon. Make yourself a slave to Mammon and that’s what you are, a slave.
“The long answer is nothing.” Another keyboard bites the dust.
Hey Z, I really like your stuff. I usually don’t bother to comment as I have little to add. Your insights are thought provoking and many times put meat on the bones of vague ideas of my own.
One thing that bugs me about your writing is your language sometimes strikes me as a bit, shall we say, pompous. For instance, “This is another example of how the managerial class loves neologism, especially those that borrow words and phrases from the productive sector of society.”
By using the term neologism, didn’t you just do what you are accusing them of?
Just a thought.
Humbly submitted, Grumpy
You’ll note that I follow the woman’s swim suit rule of writing. My posts are long enough to cover the topic and short enough to keep it interesting. Using a word like neologism is economical, so I used it over “newly coined word or expression”. Neologism also connotes a smugness or undeserved sense of superiority.
maybe improve your vocabulary? seriously. just look up the words you don’t know.
Yeah, just look it up. Learning is good.
Grumpy,
The difference is that Z is using uncommon but precise language. We might not have encountered a word he uses before, but his usage of that word (obscure as it may be) is correct.
The midwits use words either improperly (or use made-up words that have no meaning) but they choose to use words that they have seen other midwits using in order to maintain their status in that social group.
Simply put: Z uses uncommon words correctly to accurately make a point, while these status-striving midwits use the same commonly-repeated words incorrectly (or meaninglessly) in order to gain/maintain status.
Mr. Generic: The richness of English vocabulary allows for extraordinary precision, and some of the signifiers of good writing are precision and clarity – i.e. word choice. Even as an English major who thought herself fairly well read, I frequently come across words whose meaning I’m not absolutely certain of, or new ones from other fields. Plus I’m old and not quite as sharp as I once was. And I still make frequent use of my father’s used 1948 “The American College Dictionary.”
It would be interesting—but I’m not going to do it—to evaluate reading level of the comments posted here.
Reading level of general writing, and it’s degeneration over the years, was a big thing when I was in school as an undergrad—waaay long ago. At that time, IIRC, we were looking at general publishing at an 8th grade level for public consumption.
There is an association with the general decline in the population intellect and their ability to write and communicate. Not seeing it here, but in other media attracting a different readership, it’s depressing.
seems like humanity is heading back towards pictographic languages (textual languages being “hard” and “making brains hurty”).
Zman just got the modern leadership Shit Sandwich Review ( I wonder if this commenter writes several posts a week along with a few podcasts)
1) The delicious Top of the buttered Bun-You are great:
“I really like your stuff. I usually don’t bother to comment as I have little to add. Your insights are thought provoking”
2) The filling: ….but
“One thing that bugs me about your writing is your language sometimes strikes me as a bit, shall we say, pompous”
3) The bottom bun: self-effacing “Gee whiz but what do I know”:
“Humbly submitted”
Brings back some tortuous memories of my HR mandated and led “Coaching for Performance,” leadership sessions. I was kept around in this new culture of “nice,” because I produced. Now, as the oldest gentleman in my office, occasionally I’ll purposely bump into a hallway wall hoping that not too much is asked of me these few last years.
Learn to Google, Mr. Reddit. Even my geriatric ass can highlight words on my phone and tap “define” or “translate”.
maybe the business schools should teach its (future) leaders not to tear down the walls of society that allow the corporation to function and exist; i.e. wokeness. honestly, i don’t see large corporations surviving – anywhere on the planet. largeness depends on very particular conditions, and once those conditions are not present, largeness disappears; just ask the brontosaurus :). in a poor world — which is what the modern world is becoming — there is no market for insurance companies, or car companies, etc etc. and without cheap energy you aren’t going to have any business that involves shipping things long distances. no need for entertainment companies either.
corporations lack morals and ethics, but they also lack a sense of self preservation, and that will be their downfall.
Large corporations will survive precisely because they are multi-nationals and the current favorite vehicles of the global elite for money laundering, propaganda pushing, general oppression of the people, and many other satanic enterprises.
The large corporations are replacing what you think of as a nation state.
who will they sell their wares to? there is no more mass consumption, the mass of people are living at subsistence level.
technology and manufacturing depend on an entire ecosystem of support and personnel. mass consumption society support this model. once the middle class disappears, so will large corporations, because again, who will their customers be, how do all levels of the corporate hierarchy survive in a collapsed world?
You sayin’ Soylent isn’t a corporation?
oh it’s a corporation,, they just lie about the main ingredient of their product 🙂
This is what I have been asking eversince globohomo drew a bead on the middle class – who is going to buy all its stuff once Main Street is gone?
Gooberment employees. The swollen tick of the State.
Their customers are governments and staggeringly-large hedge funds. They don’t depend on you or me for cashflow. Blackrock and other Globohomo entities can buy their debt or their stock infinitely (due to their direct access to Fed money printing) and then once they own each corp’s debt, that corporation forever becomes their slaves.
haha right, they are going to build a few thousand cars a year and be massive at the same time. you are talking about a perpetual motion machine. and no, the elite won’t have their own separate advanced world, they will be living in the muck with all of us, just wearing fancier clothes (hand made) – when/if they completely crash the current system, prematurely.
cities are replacing the nation state, not corporations.
Welcome (back) to 500BC!
with the concomitant population levels.
Re The Taki piece:
The old line Christian Church may be dead or dying, but Christianity itself is far from dead.
and far fro those churches and their membership.
funny, people treat their “religion” like a sports team. never saw that before. they aren’t Christians, like they aren’t athletes. they just like rooting for a particular church, and being associated with it tangentially. religion as a form of grilling.
Idea! Church gladiator teams- might come in awfully handy.
It’s a transformational leadership approach and immersive development program for practical implementation of new strategies within their cohort to better support the needs of the student-athlete.
With an eye to the near future, that is.
Where do you find Christianity now? Surely not In the non-denominational, really bad rock concerts/pep talks that pass for services.
It’s found in the places no one looks – not with the proud and vainglorious, but with the humble and obscure. Where it began is where it will end.
If you are interested in Catholicism attend mass at a few different parishes. Some are liberal, some are conservative, some are lively, some less so; there can be big differences in parishes located in close proximity. If you aren’t a Catholic but find a parish you like, look into taking the classes to convert. And look into joining a few groups (in my area there are Catholic men’s groups, fitness groups, couples prayer groups, choir etc). These smaller groups are a good way to meet interesting people and develop friendships and spirituality beyond Sunday mass.
My protestant friends are mostly attending larger evangelical churches. I think they attend these churches because they like the energy (and youth) of the congregation and the dynamism of the preaching. Evangelical churches are more conservative than mainline protestant in my area. Compared to Catholic mass, service appears to be more focused on message of preacher as well as music. At a big evangelical church theatricality of music can be impressive. Protestant friends also seem pretty comfortable switching between denominations to find a church/fit that they like. From Catholic perspective this is a little confusing (if someone is sufficiently devout to attend church weekly, shouldn’t doctrine of faith have consistency?)