Way back in the last century, futurism was a thing that serious people followed because America was still an optimistic country. The 1970’s promised to end that but the revival in the 1980’s brought it back in vogue. The microprocessor revolution was mostly responsible, but the subsequent end to the Cold War also helped. One of the chief gurus of futurism in the last three decades of the 20th century was a man named Alvin Toffler, who wrote a number of bestselling books.
Alvin Toffler has mostly been forgotten now, but he was a big deal from the 1970’s into the new century. His two big books were Future Shock and Third Wave, in which he described how the world was changing due to a number of forces, one of which was the technological revolution that was in its infancy at the time. Toffler wound up consulting with global leaders like Chinese premiere Zhao Ziyang, Michael Gorbachev, Newt Gingrich and various corporate leaders.
Toffler was credited with an idea that the next phase of civilization would be characterized by the pace of change. That is, the people would not only have to adapt to a changing society, but also adapt to a society that was under constant change at a rate that may exceed our ability to keep pace. Technology would advance so quickly that we would not have time to create new habits for the new rules. Instead, we would become corks on a raging river of change.
One of the keys to futurism is to never get too specific about the future, especially the future you expect to see. That way, no one can compare your prediction with what actually happened. Toffler was careful to not get too specific as to what life would be like in a world where the rules changed too quickly for people to adapt. Instead, he imagined a world where some people would be better at coping with constant change and others would struggle, thus creating a new status system.
To some degree this has proven to be true. You see this in the work place where the people rising to the top give off the aura of being infinitely flexible and adaptive, while the people lagging behind end up in accounting. Whether the “highly adaptive” are really adapting to change or striking the needed pose is debatable, but it is something that has become a thing in the corporate world. The highly adaptive are always wise to never ask why something is changing. They just accept it.
In society as a whole, the jury is out. The last decade has been a good test of this new reality and the results are mixed. Obama unleashed a race war in the last two years of his administration that no one saw coming. Then we had the drama of both party primaries in the 2016 elections. No one saw that coming. Trump winning the nomination and then the presidency was a total shock. Then it was four years of chaos and the insane response to the Covid pandemic.
Trump seems like a lifetime ago, yet it has only been a little over a year since he was deposed and replaced with Joe Biden. Five years ago, no sane person thought Joe Biden would ever be president. No one saw the economic chaos that is now starting to define our lives either. We are just scratching the surface on the economic front, as there are a lot of chickens coming home to roost. We are seeing things that not so long ago were declared impossible by the smart set.
There are two conclusions that you can draw from the last decade. One is the public has been remarkably resilient. The middle-class has taken one body blow after another, but has staggered on, not doing much to update its view of society or the people who run the country. This fall, they will dutifully vote for the B-team, who promise to do more of the same, just with better looking performers. The Middle American Radicals remain safely in their pods, munching on their bugs.
The other conclusion is we cannot predict what is coming next. Most people wisely assumed that tomorrow will look like today, with more of the stuff that is popular and less of the stuff that is not so popular. Now, the wise people have to assume that whatever comes next is not being discussed today. If you want to know the future, find a fringe weirdo making crazy claims. Every notable thing that has happened over the last decade was considered aluminum foil hat stuff.
This may be why the Middle American Radicals have been so docile. People need to time to get angry at their rulers and they need something onto which to focus their attention as the main issue. By the time the rulers were willing to tackle inflation in the 1970’s, the people had suffered with it for years. They had time to digest it, understand it and make specific demands about the economy. Reagan won in 1980 largely due to his ability to repeat those demands.
In this age, no one has time to focus on anything very long. We just spent two years having our rights trampled with Covid and it is now on its way to being a conspiracy theory because the new issue is Ukraine. The rage heads on the Left are still struggling to figure out why no one cares about the study of extremism, but that issue was replaced with Covid, which is now being replaced with Putin. Things change so quickly that even the rage heads have no time to get angry.
Of course, the people behind the constant change are living the life of momentary advantage, where they profit from every turn of the wheel. The great transfer of wealth from the middle-class to the over-class is one result. The consolidation of power into the hands of a narrowing elite is another. The new world of constant change is one where the elite can front-run what comes next because they are driving it. Everyone else is left to guess, which means a life of perpetual chaos.
The question no one asks is whether this is sustainable. The consolidation of power may not be by design, but a necessity. At least it is an evolutionary reaction to the accelerating pace of change and uncertainty. Logically, what comes next is some sort of administrative coup where Biden is replaced by the managerial elite. Will that cause a revolt or will it be welcomed? Probably the latter, given what is happening, but maybe that is the point at which the dam breaks.
That is the thing about the world of constant change. No one has time to plan as the rules keep changing. This is especially true of that narrowing ruling elite. They need to keep flipping the pages faster in order to maintain their status, so they can do no long-term planning. Rule by expediency has a history and it is not a promising one, which means it does not have a promising future. The disaster in Ukraine is one example of living in the moment can end in disaster.
What the futurist always get right is that the present modes are running their course and new modes are on the horizon. What they get wrong is that those new modes also come with an expiry date. We may be seeing that with the world Toffler imagined back in the last century. The accelerating pace of change is reaching an end, because mankind can only tolerate so much change. The question is whether it ends in fire or ice, which the poet said would both suffice.
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Like with government, at a certain point the greater the technology the lesser the man.
Eugyppius has a column up about the misadventures of Westerners volunteering for Ukraine:
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-globalist-enemy?s=r
I know folks have mixed feelings about Anglin, but the guy has a hilarious post up at Unz about the Reddit Legionnaires.
The Harry Potter Brigades ride forth. Reddit retards, man. Social media is subject to open source intelligence gathering. “Loose lips sink ships” is an anachronism, but even more metaphorically correct than ever before. Thanks for posting that, I do get a kick out of reading this stuff.
for some reason it cheers me up to hear about dumb asses getting killed over there. kind of shows that reality is still in charge…
I’ve always seen futurism as an attempt, especially by Americans, to avoid uncomfortable questions about how the future might really develop. This is distinct from classic science-fiction which was mostly a dystopian warning of what the future might hold (Fahrenheit 451, Death Race 2000, Robocop, The Terminator). Regardless, this impulse of avoiding uncomfortable truths—demographic change, tech-fueled totalitarianism—still made its way into the popular culture, especially in science-fiction.
Witness:
>Tons of cheap, direct-to-video sci-fi movies which contain elements of optimism in the form of extreme technological advancement, even if they were dystopian in narrative (e.g. Cyborg 2, which features a very attractive Angelina Jolie as an android; implication: we’re all going to get sexy android girlfriends one day, so no worries no matter how bad the outside world is).
>Copious television shows like The Six Million Dollar Man, Knight Rider, Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century, The Bionic Woman, Time Trax, Tek Wars, Quantum Leap, and Babylon 5. Most were positive and uplifting, even if dark at times. All presented a future of extreme technological advancement that would make life not only easier, but fun. But no one back then predicted Twitter.
Seriously, look at the opening of any American sci-fi show from the 1990s. They’re available on YouTube. Babylon 5’s opening credits always end with the cast smiling or looking confident into the camera. Star Trek featured triumphalist orchestral pieces. The same was true of fantasy television shows like Xena and Hercules.
You could see the optimism in the culture, especially in the 1990s when problems were becoming too difficult to ignore. Was the culture doubling down to avoid seeing these issues? Remember, the 1990s was the time of books like “Alien Nation” and “The Bell Curve”. Later, Pat Buchanan would publish “The Death of the West.” So, it wasn’t like some people weren’t aware.
>Star Trek, specifically, showed us a future of pleasure and technological miracles—of tolerance and (somehow) diversity existing side-by-side. Of course, the critical flaw of the franchise is that no one stopped to ask how exactly we’d progress to such a future. It was taken as a given from technological advancement.
Notoriously, ST: DS9 portrayed a New Orleans of the 24th century as an idealized version of how it was in the youths of its White writers – mainly black & White with a French culture. Demographic change means it will be majority metizo in the 24th century with a completely unrecognizable culture. This was obvious even during the 1990s when DS9 was made, but yet its entirely White male writers room ignored that.
The White male writers of Star Trek never predicted that other groups might not hold their liberal, egalitarian worldview and might, should they gain the upper hand, treat their demographic poorly. I’m sure when they were making The Next Generation in the 1980s and 1990s they never thought there would be a Star Trek show like Discovery where the production crew deliberately prohibited the hiring of White male directors, where practically no heterosexual White males appear in the main cast, where the show is mainly about feminine feelings & “trauma” and features a lead character (in contravention to the franchise’s ensemble nature) who is a Mary Sue black Jesus lady better than all male characters combined: literally saved all life in the universe multiple times, smarter than the smartest Vulcan (whose leader is a woman), has more authority than the Federation’s president (a woman), is an expert negotiator & scientist, can beat Klingons in single combat with their own weapons.
And elsewhere in the culture:
>Futurist Ray Kurzweil’s wild predictions, most notably in his book “The Singularity is Near.” IIRC, the book’s central thesis is that we’re approaching, perhaps by the year 2060, a world where technology progresses so fast that everything is left unrecognizable within just a short period of time. Goodbye old world, Hello Star Trek!
He posited that we’d have to start a worldwide effort to regulate nanobots by the year 2020 because they’d be used extensively to treat medical disorders by 2030. That prediction is now obviously wrong, as are a host of others in that book. That obviously calls into question the book’s central thesis, and I’m sure many of his older adherents are aware of that; thus, you’re witnessing a turn to the dark side in popular entertainment, and it’s not just the less talented younger generation fueling it.
>Jill Tarter’s claims back in the 1990s that E.T. would one day fax us an encyclopedia galactica which would solve all our problems.
>S.E.T.I. researchers claiming advanced aliens must be benevolent to have overcome their problems; thus, they’d all be like the Federation in Star Trek and one day we’d contact them and get utopia and nirvana—implied, if not stated directly.
Futurism was sort of a pseudo religion for many people. En lieu of Christianity’s promise of everlasting life after death, futurists assured their audiences they’d have a techno-utopia on earth within their lifetimes due to scientific progress: pleasure robots, virtual reality everything, cures for aging, space travel. As a result, people just stopped wondering how it would come about and assumed it was inevitable.
In my opinion, some part of the current hysterias ripping the country are the older generation—now secular and at the end of their lives—having to confront the fact that their religion was wrong, and they won’t get their promised techno-utopia. They’re enabling the worst elements of the younger generation to distract them from this truth with one hysteria after another–all an effort to fill the void of their impending deaths with no utopia, no nanobots on the horizon.
>Covid hysterics were (partly) older Americans afraid of dying (the disease disproportionately affects the aged).
>BLM hysterics were (partly) older Americans reliving their Civil Rights Era youths and post-youths, afraid the promised racial Utopia might not come to pass.
> “White Supremacy” hysterics are older Americans (mostly White) afraid of demographic change. They channel their fears into a redoubling of virtue signaling to the new Americans.
>Russia hysterics are (partly) older Americans afraid we might lose our status as the “Shining City Atop the Hill” within their lifetimes, bested by the Russia seemingly vanquished in their youths. Some of it is younger Americans indoctrinated into hate Whitey.
All of this is worry has been greatly amplified by gullible, perhaps sociopathic, status-seeking Millennials and Zoomers on social media. Americans were promised the future of Star Trek but all they got was the science-fiction of Ray Bradbury.
I’m not reading that whole screed, but DS9 was the best Star Trek. Yes yes, a negro was the lead, but the dude is exceptional regardless.
Next time he needs to write in soundbites and add a few colored pictures. Also consider not using big words but add “negro” here and there so everyone can see how edgy he is.
IMPROVISE, ADAPT, AND OVERCOME.
The mouth breathing lefty masses bought into the Russian collusion hoax. That’s one of the main reasons they hate Putin. They think he prevented the installation of queen HRC. I ignore the MSM but it’s hard to over-estimate their rage on this. Add in that Putin allegedly is anti gay or something like that and of course being a white gentile also hurts him in their eyes, and you have irrational hate.
True at the time, but I think it has largely vanished from the minds of everyone who isn’t a Karen….
Just as the Dem-manufactured “Russian collusion” hoax was a deliberate (and largely successful) attempt to distract from Hillary Clinton’s crimes against national security and the Dems’ illegal wiretapping of the Trump campaign;
I see the media furor over Ukraine as a deliberate distraction-away from the collapse of the Covid narrative, and the belated realization on the part of the American public of what a disastrous cluster-fuck the whole Covid fiasco was: the immeasurable damage to our economy, and to both our individual and our national well-being.
Yes, Ukraine is a dramatic situation, compelling to watch. But it has virtually nothing to do with us: with America’s strategic national interests.
Yet the media is filled with it, almost to the exclusion of anything else.
With the complicit msm, “Hey! Look over here!”
inevitably implies “And DON’T look over there….”
Good call, and hey, if they can gin a war out of it so much the better at the polls come November.
And if they can’t?
Will either side be around to write the story?
“I see the media furor over Ukraine as (an effective strategy to mold the thoughts of a sheep-like populace)…”
There, as they say, fixed it for you. And from where I sit, it’s working just fine after proof-of-concept, mask/vaxx.
In my every man travels, I listen. There really is no use in speaking to Normies. Just observe them, gather information. Smile nice.
My point? What percentage of Normies, you know the bovine schoolmarms staring into their farceborg pages … with Ukraine flag upside down …. might mention the sainted Ukrainians taking part in, clapping and singing, at the Babi Yar massacre? It surely wasn’t all ‘germans’.
Maybe Mr. Normie, adjusting one of the three pieces of same-team sportsball gear he is wearing at the moment might pipe up, and mention the 14th Waffen SS Division, “Galician.” How they got the latest weapons while marching in the opposite direction from dis-spirited German soldiers retreating from the Red Army.
Perhaps Mary Sue, taking a moment away from trying to catch that ‘just right angle’ from her cellphone camera, perched at the end of the selfie-stick… might ask after the battles fought between Stalin and the UPA, from 1946 onwards. Or why the guy that replaced Diem, uh, Yanukovych, failed to mention any of those historical events, persons…. and instead invoked “Pearl Harbor” to his American congress-critter audience?
Nope, more likely to post ‘losing my virginity for Ukraine’ … even our local veterinarian emailed to say we could drop off “donations for Ukraine…” perhaps intending to strap them to a dog (a volunteer no doubt, but ‘volunteered’ by affluent white owners that cycle between ‘love who you love’ and ‘BLM’ signs in their lilly-white suburb) and have it swim the Atlantic, then cross western Europe to get there.
Heck, that could make a Dizz-knee movie: heroic dog later comes out.
Apparently it has quite a lot to do with the Deep State’s interest (not to be confused with what might be thought of as healthy self-interest for America). We have a couple dozen bio research facilities in Ukraine. Many more scattered about elsewhere. Perhaps they are all working for mankind’s betterment, but for various reasons I don’t think so. December 2019 gave the world a dress rehearsal of why, perhaps, it’s best to not play with these germs so much. This is only one of many meddling fingers the US or Western elites have had in Ukraine.
It’s really quite tiresome to try and keep up with it all. If curious, Unz is a good place to start.
“Rule by expediency has a history and it is not a promising one…”
Does our future hold a Paul Volcker? If it doesn’t, then the future is going to shock the sh*t out of most of us reading this.
Afraid so…The Fed has to move very strongly or it will be swamped by the supply constrained demand inflation…
“This may be why the Middle American Radicals have been so docile. People need to time to get angry at their rulers and they need something onto which to focus their attention as the main issue.”
Perhaps it’s time. Or simply full bellies and gas tanks. Oil and food, on the cheap, reinforce docility. Take one away and I suspect at least half of the Grillers and Sheeple will get off the couch.
They need a leader, too. Many of them were willing to line up behind Trump, despite all his flaws. A better figurehead would be able to stir the latent martial spirit of Normie.
Such a leader must crave power like a Sith Apprentice than somehow manage to stay within our traditions. Not an easy thing to find at the best of times.
Wait, is “Sith apprentice” some Star Wars crap? Lol, grow up dude. I really don’t mean to be a jerk, but framing reality in nerd culture nonsense is the same thing younger, dumber lefties do. A whole generation raised on Harry Potter and those who opposed Trump and called themselves “the resistance”.
Probably don’t comment if that’s the best you can do. Your time would be better spent at Planet Fitness chugging water. Anywhere people think isn’t a good fit.
Clearly, the leader would be DeSantis if he were willing…not sure he is…Trump has a lot of baggage, but would still win in ’24 if the vote fraud were limited…
Another interesting difference between now and before: in today’s liberal-democratic world, natural selection, and the meritocracy which it implies, may be disappearing from among us:
Ever since humans settled down into cities (10-15,000 years ago)— and began creating the places and cultures which gradually became our primary environmental influences— the changes humans have faced were met by hierarchial societies in which (for the most part, in most of them) *meritocracy* of one sort or another determined who was making the decisions.
The shapers of western cultural history were Europeans: all the advances which together make up civilized life as we know it— in philosophy, gov’t, science, technology, medicine, discovery, the arts— were the work of an intelligent elite of White males. And these men attained their positions of prominence and influence primarily (with some notable exceptions) by being excellent at what they did.
The cities we grew up in, the advances in knowledge and technology which made them possible, the information conveyed by our textbooks: all were the achievements of White men who (for the most part) were the best and the brightest of their day.
> What will a future look like in which change is occurring ever-more-rapidly; but where meritocracy has been banished?
What will a world look like in which the challenges of an emerging future are being met by affirmative-action hires, rather than by the best the human race has to offer?
Will the modern western welfare state, and the subversion of natural selection and meritrocracy which it represents— in which the least-productive among us not only survive, but thrive, and out-reproduce the rest— spell the end of the progress which up until recently has characterized the human story?
The answer to your last question is undoubtedly yes. The rest of your comment is an excellent number of points and questions to ponder.
The human story was not one of progress, making doomsday weapons, mass slaughter and most of the old evils are still out there. We are richer and the Pax Americana has been keen but the human condition is still the same.
Long term? Reproduction wins. Simple as that.
Moderns
Conservatives 2-3
Leftists 0-1
Amish, Fertility 5-7 80-70% retention , they will be the majority in 2 centuries at current rates (which will not hold)
Mennonites Fertility 5 or so 60-8% retention They went from 10k to 100k in South America in a few decades
Orthodox (Christian. Jewish) same
Outliers — Same
By comparison
Latino 1.8
Black 1.9 with high losses and mortality
Amerind 1.5
Pacific Islander 2.1
Asian 1.5
That is your future. Amos Yoder Horse and a much smaller mainly agrarian population of mostly religious and moral people.
Back to where it all began just in time for peak everything too.
Works for me. I can think of a heck of a lot worse fates for the world our descendants inhabit.
Curious…Friedrich Nietzsche was voicing many of those fears 150 years ago. I doubt even he could have envisioned the race mixing the West has willingly countenanced. He did discuss the various “races” but he meant the Germans, the French, the English, etc. Sounds rather quaint, compared to the genetic smorgasbord much of the world has today.
For the most part, he inveighed against the loss of nobility/aristocracy, the rise of liberal democracy, its civilizing effect, resulting in a docile “herd” animal rather than his heroes of ages past.
He also wrote extensively on women’s changing role in the new democracy. Again, he could not have foreseen the drastic changes in family life, but he saw that women had left their natural roles and the results would not be good.
As a point of reference, the earliest nation to give women the vote in Europe was Finland (1906). Nietzsche died in 1900, but due to his terminal decline, for all practical purposes wrote nothing after 1889.
Idiocracy isn’t the future, it’s the present.
If you read / listen / watch something from a thing called Yuval Noah Harari – a close protegee of your friend and mine Klaus Schwab (he of WEF fame) – the future is whatever it, and a few other elites imagine they’d like it to be. (Sincere apology if this puts you in mind of a…certain song)
“In society as a whole, the jury is out. The last decade has been a good test of this new reality and the results are mixed.”
I understand what you mean, and the rest of your essay shows what the “mixed results” are. But, I think the results haven’t been mixed. They all suck! This is how you can know that a concerted, planned effort is behind this all. If it was chance, they would fuck up in our favor, occasionally. You say things like:
“The consolidation of power may not be by design, but a necessity.”
and
“No one has time to plan as the rules keep changing. This is especially true of that narrowing ruling elite. They need to keep flipping the pages faster in order to maintain their status, so they can do no long-term planning.”
This is a common theme in your thoughts. You use terms like “evolutionary reaction” to explain it. But, it is more insidious than that. The actual results are a feature of the planning, not a bug. They’ve got human manipulation down to a mathematical science. There are only two or three things that are outside the ability to plan. One is disease and one is weather, and the elite have made moves to standardize and control these so unforeseen variables can’t arise. The third is what comes from outer space, like a meteor of death. Again, foreseeable. Good luck on controlling disease and weather, guys. Nuclear warheads to destroy the meteor? Or, launching a device that can land on the meteor and then fire off rockets to move it away from earth? Whatever. Anyway, God laughs.
I’m rooting for the meteor.
Taking the easy way out, eh?
The elites are truly evil and demonic but I think you give them too much omnipotence. They can plan and instigate cunning plans, but they can’t control the outcomes. I can quite imagine Anal Schwab sitting in his Swiss bunker right now with a queasy feeling in his stomach about Project Ukraine and what it might lead to.
“They can plan and instigate cunning plans, but they can’t control the outcomes.”
When you control both the thesis and antithesis, you control the outcome, i.e., the synthesis. That’s why so many things are binary. Democrat/Republican. Result? Whatever the same entities pay the Demonicrats and Repuklicans to do. Liberal Media/Conservative Media. Result? Whatever viewpoint needed to push the masses in the “correct” direction. Just remember, almost everything that has been called a “conspiracy theory” in the last two or three years has turned out to be true. If you need to doubt that a small group of individuals can take control of a nation, you should study the formation of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve and the aftermaths of those two historical events.
Zman, the phenomena you are describing (in this post, et als) can be characterized by one word – fantasy. Not sure if i have seen that word used in a post or a comment, here. It isn’t what most people think it is. Fantasy is a coping mechanism, and requires a tremendous amount of mental energy to maintain. Anything that threatens to collapse a person’s fantasy will be met with incredible hostility, even physical attacks. Modern life deprives most participants of a satisfactory existence, hence the mass retreat into fantasy. What is VR but a digital mechanism for creating and maintaining a fantasy existence? Your thoughts?
Probably my favorite futurism was that of the “expert” who around 1900 predicted— because of all the “labor saving devices” like washing machines, power tools, and automobiles coming onto the market— that the biggest problem people would be facing in coming century would be *what to do with all that free time*
*Yet another* useful insight on the part of Zman:
that the ruling elite has realized that they need to “keep flipping the pages faster”— thus keeping the public perpetually off-balance— in order to maintain their status as rulers. “Rule by expediency”— rather than carrying-out preconceived plans— becomes their only alternative.
And that’s where the whole “listen to the experts” schtick comes into play: things are changing so rapidly (they tell us) and what’s emerging is so unprecedented, that only “the experts” can be counted on to accurately understand and successfully deal with it.
And in such a situation— characterized by the arising of one example of disconcerting chaos after another, in rapid and apparently-unending succession— “no one has time to focus on anything very long”. Before John and Jane Q. Public have a chance to wrap their minds around the Covid pandemic, the news is wall-to-wall Ukraine.
And one could argue that “….. the consolidation of power” in which “…. some sort of administrative coup” occurs “where Biden is replaced by the managerial elite” is already in progress.
Why did Democrats nominate two such incapable morons as Biden and Harris? Neither of whom is able to speak extemporaneously without sounding like a retard?
A: because such people are easily controlled. Whoever it is who’s deciding US policy at the moment, it ain’t Sleepy Joe and Cackling Kamala.
And yes: times of rapid evolutionary change naturally select for diversity.
(“Diversity” NOT in the woke sense of “fewer Whites and more People of Color”; but rather, diversity as describing a diverse variety of spontaneously-arising individual responses to the changing situation)
In times of rapid and unprecedented environmental change, the more diverse responses to those changes there are among individuals making up the population, the greater likelihood there is that someone will come up with a successful adaptive strategy for thriving in the changing circumstances.
And it’s not hard to see how the woke politically-correct version of “diversity”— where there’s only one correct answer: “hire the Black” (or the woman or the tranny or the gay)— represents the *very opposite* of the genuine diversity of attitude, outlook, and opinion which prepares human groups to deal with rapid changes and emerging unknowns.
No one saw the microprocessor revolution coming. No one anticipated the extent to which the environment which surrounds and shapes human life, while embodying and transmitting human cultural values, would consist of the interconnected digital “reality” created by hand-held devices.
This “virtual gathering”, this online “space” we’re all mutually inhabiting at this very moment— and the realtime sharing of information and opinion and subversive truths which is occurring RIGHT NOW, as I type, and as each of you reads and comprehends, and agrees or disagrees with what I’m saying— wasn’t even conceivable a mere 30 years ago.
And what are the chances that *our* best-guess answers to the question of:
“What will it all look like 30 years from now?”
will end up being any more accurate than the “futurist” who imagined everybody today lounging around trying to figure out how to while away their time?
I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with your first point. In America, the biggest problem is people do have too much time on their hands. How many hours of the day are spent staring at screens outside of work? Idle hands are the devil’s tools, and he has plenty to employ these days.
Not just outside – how many hours a day are spent staring at screens inside of work?
I completely agree, but many of us are forced to stare at screen for work, and thus it may not constitute fully “free time.” Though here I am on lunch break hehe….
Eloi,
I see what you’re saying, and don’t disagree: I certainly have a heck of a lot more leisure time than my great-grandfather, who lived in a log cabin, hunted his food, heated with wood, and hauled his water.
OTOH, our lives seem to be just as busy as his was; just in different ways.
I’m currently retired, so I do indeed have lots of leisure time. But prior to that, when I was working, most of my time was taken up by things which I felt I ‘needed’ to do. They may have been different tasks than those my great-grandfather did, but they still seemed to fill my life with their demands.
Studies of the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups have come to the surprising conclusion that— though their lives are primitive and harsh in many ways, compared to ours— they actually have more free time than the average modern person. The time it takes to procure food and shelter is less than the 40+ hours a week we typically put in.
The lives of rich people may be characterized by an excess of free time, but I don’t get the sense that that’s true for most of us; despite the modern conveniences which surround us.
Free time is to an extent, what you make of it. Retired myself for awhile now, however I have no shortage of things to do—not all simply pleasure seeking. These things might not produce a paycheck, but they keep one active physically—and that’s healthy.
I completely agree with your points. I always like to reference, on this subject, that one of the reasons the Reformation was popular with secular rulers was it cut down on the days off. The average medieval peasant worked 5 to 7 hours a day, about 150 days out of the year. Again, tougher in many ways, and I agree our time has been monopolized. I would certainly agree that their is an anxiety to fill that time with tasks. But I would also argue that most of those tasks are superfluous. I have little free time. I leave work, take my kids home from work, and my wife and I start cooking dinner. We home cook nearly every meal from scratch, so that monopolizes a lot of our time. I guess, to focus, is, as others noted, what we focus in on in our free time dictates the virtue or vice of the era. But I guess here I volunteer myself as virtuous. But, heck, in a sewer, someone covered just in piss is cleaner than the average sewer rat. It just speaks of the general condition more than the pee coated individual.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées
that the biggest problem people would be facing in coming century would be *what to do with all that free time
—
Fortunately there are astute bloggers to sponge up some of that time
“the biggest problem people would be facing in coming century would be *what to do with all that free time*”
To an increasing number of people that is the question. How they choose to answer it is to a large degree the cause of the current tumbleweed of cluster-fucks.
Disneyland’s Tomorrowland of the 1950s made two “predictions” that bore out: flat-screen TVs and microwave ovens.
So said an article I read a few years back.
But point taken; the future usually turns out quite different from what we expect it to be.
Someone needs to tell the people running my MIC firm about this increased rate of change.
I’m still getting questions about technical problems in products they haven’t bothered solving since I stepped away for a brief sojourn three years ago.
maybe things are different now, but non-mil companies would not hire engineers from mil-companies because they weren’t used to working at anything but a snail’s pace. mil-copanies typically hire contractors to do anything related to newer technologies, or anything that required less than a 10 year deadline :P. still have my Raytheon badge (and my NASA one, too).
Yep & it hasn’t and never will change.
Since the first group of cave men threw rocks & sticks at each other
The mic was there to supply overpriced rocks & sticks.
So if you don’t like change and you do like bleeding the beast. The mic ain’t going anywhere.
In my (Euro-centric) experience, the problem with mil people is that they are used to working with Power Point products; projects that are never meant to see the other end of an actual assembly line, but are just make-paper jobs to get EU subsidies. They can just bracket hard, technical problem and wait for management to cancel their project.
True Dat.
However Mic stocks are soaring & thats all that matters.
Sarc.
Numerous excellent observations in this piece. I think this one is particularly useful: “Every notable thing that has happened over the last decade was considered aluminum foil hat stuff.” Very true, and I think you can push this point all the way back to 9/11, which was basically a James Bond plot featuring Osama bin Laden in place of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and al Qaeda in the the stead of SPECTRE. And these loony toons events are only becoming more common.
It seems that the more the overclass attempts to constrict reality within its noisome coils, the more unstable and vulnerable the structures of the West become. As the chaotic reverberations increase their intensity, the entire architecture is shaking itself to pieces. I am beginning to think that all of us who participate in this blog will live to see it all go down in smoke and ash. I take a grim satisfaction in that.
I find it fascinating, Ostei, and rather touching that the maniacs who are instigating all this mayhem sincerely believe that they will survive it all.
They’re playing a dangerous game. And they had better have a fiendishly clever escape plan for when their anti-human schemes blow up in their face.
Not to worry. If things really go south, I suspect their personal security details will finish them off. The last man eating the last can of pork and beans won’t be a Bill Gates, an Elon Musk, or any of their close kinfolk. It is more likley to be the retired Green Beret or Navy Seal that provided protection.
I work in a business as I am sure others here do too where the pace of change means one employee now gets to do the job of four employees.
When one employee can barely do just one job well.
Technology was supposed to make our human tasks easier and leave more of our time for us instead it’s allowed the corporate class to pull that productivity increase straight to the bottom line and make our lives more miserable.
The future with technology was supposed to look brighter, instead it looks gloomier.
just let shit slide. what are they going to do? feign concern and make clucking sounds, you will be golden.
Exactly, obviously you are a highly experienced subject matter expert.
Lmfao
I once read–and I’ve forgotten who wrote it–that every advance in technology decreases human freedom. I’m not absolutely certain I agree with that statement, but it is worth considering.
In the excellent book ‘Empire of the Southern Moon’, the author suggests that— for all the hardships they faced— the Quahadi Commanche band may have been the last truly-free society in America.
Correction:
that should be
‘Empire of the Summer Moon’
A pretty gruesome book, I’ve heard.
Otto,
Not at all!
Very inspiring, and a fascinating true story.
One of my favorite books ever: highly recommended.
But sure: any book dealing with the Commanches is going to have some gruesome parts: no way around that: the Commanches had some gruesome customs.
But that’s not at all what the book is about.
Sorry!
‘Ostei’ is what I was trying to write
I was just looking at that book on my shelf & thinking that I should read it again.
I used to think pashtuns were somewhat like Comanches.
Other than bacha bazi.
Empire of the Summer Moon and yes it’s a great book about the Comanches.
Probably the toughest fighting force of the American Indian tribes in North America.
‘The Finders’ also has some fairly-well researched vignettes about the “comanch.” Think Genghis Khan. While on the hunt, lived off buffalo liver. Certainly the toughest war fighters US troops ever encountered.
From Future Shock two points stood out: 1) it’s easier to be dropped into a new culture wholesale rather than endure a piecemeal change wherein correct action is ambiguous, 2) the adoption of identity packages to cope with change rate.
An identity package, for example Bernie Bro, or a Metal head, or Hillary-supporter, whatever, makes it easier for the adopter. One simply buys the right clothes, listens to the correct music, hangs out with the associated people, says the associated things, etc.
This says to us that we should be coming up with identity packages that are easy to adopt for those that we wish to bring this way. Something comfy, yet with-it, that simplifies life, provides value.
.
That’s always the appeal of the Man on the Horse. The Roman analogy has been done to death, but that’s exactly what happened with Augustus — he promised to end the constant chaos of the civil wars, and he lived long enough to make it stick. We could also profitably see the denunciation of the obviously-going-crazy Stalin by Khrushchev, and then Khrushchev’s ouster by the Politburo, as the replacement of an obviously-senile Biden (and of course an obviously-retarded Harris) by the managerial elite.
Which in turn caused a different kind of chaos which summoned forth yet another Man on a Horse. And that’s, I think, the situation in which we’ll find ourselves sooner or later, because even though those old men of the Politburo were pretty dumb and out of touch — when Mikhail Gorbachev is your intellectual titan, you’re in deep kimchi — they were certified sooper jeeenyuses compared to the AINO Apparat. Just saying “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina” might do the trick for a Man on a Horse here.
Things are moving increasingly quickly and becoming increasingly chaotic.
It’s weird because things almost feel surreal. Were we really in lockdowns for 2 years over the flu? Did they really coerce us into taking a sketchy (at best) vax with marginal effectiveness? Was downtown Toronto really filled with thousands of indians, no whites, on New Years? Are our governments actually working to exterminate White people? Were thousands of vehicles actually parked in downtown Ottawa for a month, honking and causing residents to melt down? Did Joe Biden actually steal the election from Trump with blatant voter fraud? Are gas prices really $2/L, house prices 1.5M, average salary 50k?
Etc. These kind of events feel like they are cartoon events out of a TV show. I’m sure none of us expected this stuff to happen even 3 years ago. I have to remind myself that they actually happened, I saw it with my own two eyes. And yet, once I’m back home between my own 4 walls, my subconscious clears these events from my head and starts building up its own stable, normal, WASP, worldview.
But if even I start to doubt these wild events, we can easily understand how the normies who don’t think much about this stuff can easily gloss over it. Whites do seem the most capable of being delusional and ignorant of the reality. Maybe our people have never been in such a crazy situation before, ruled by hostile aliens, gays, and females. Maybe No people has been, especially by the latter groups
I’ve always believed in heaven and hell, and I see evil for what it is. Normies have no words to describe the current happenings.
Cypher was the ultimate normie.
Embrace the suck, forget about your beautiful wife.
You are young and strong, and sane. That puts you up on 90+% of the population. I’d take those odds every day of the week.
Nothing last forever, good or bad. The pendulum is always moving, all you have to do is outwait the madness. An time is on your side.
Oh I’m not demoralized or anything. It’s just interesting how surreal things seem.
Can’t lie, the chaos is kind of fun too.
However there is no doubt, the sheep are going to get slaughtered and it’s possible we get caught up in it.
Great posts, B125. Everyone I know who is jabbed seems to have a permanent hacking cough. The sheep are doomed.
Here in FL, it is the 25-44 age group who are dying at higher than expected rates, like 24-36% beyond what normal population growth would suggest.
More died in 2020 than 2019, which is no surprise as the pandemic did take a toll (relatively small, of total deaths). But 2021 was even slightly higher than 2020’s count.
It could be the vaccines but the outsized jumps happened in 2020 too. I have seen similar “excess death” articles about other regions or nations. Death rates are 30, 40% higher than pre-pandemic, and the authorities don’t seem to take the slightest interest as to WHY.
I tried to link my spreadsheet, but it gets flagged as spam.
Were we really in lockdowns for 2 years over the flu? Etc….
Agree. The power of the gaslighting is immense. “Am I going crazy here” is no longer a rhetorical question. You look at Normies and think “how the hell are they not furious about being used as lab rats?”, but they seem to not even know what you’re talking about.
One of the most frustrating thing has been that nobody seemed to notice the “died with Covid”-thing. I pressed some of my friends on this issue and it’s as if they were unable to acknowledge that you normally don’t “died with” a disease, you died of it. Live with cancer, die of cancer, that’s how language works.
From day one, this has been a blatant admission of culpability, not least from journalists who make a living out of knowing what words means, but there you are with three smart, erudite guys and they just smile and shake their heads like “tsk, tsk…oh, that Felix…”
So either they are crazy or I am. There is no middle ground, and sometimes the power of numbers is overwhelming and I feel like only my humongous ego allows me to believe it’s the latter.
…only my humongous ego allows me to believe it’s the latter.
The former.
Also, a few of my closest family see what I see, that helps tremendously.
That’s the truly mindbending thing. Massive crimes are being committed – elections stolen, bioweapons released, fake vaccines deliberately killing people – and no-one gives a damn. There are no consequences for the instigators and everyone around us watches their fave TB programs and make Tik-Tok videos as if everything is normal and will stay that way forever. Truly bizarre.
Yes. It’s like a Stephen King novel: the scary part is not all the vampires and the werewolves and the monsters from the dungeon dimensions, it’s the Mrs. and Mr. Joneses acting as if nothing is out of the ordinary.
That’s it. The masses are not in denial, either. They do think everything is normal, and, as a result, in due time it will become normal.
As soon as Putin and Zelensky make peace over Western objections, there will be another new shiny thing, then another, and then another, the time between them disappearing, the questions about them diminishing, the production value declining. Just as cancelled television shows got second runs as movies, old hysterias like Covid will be recycled because human creativity died along with reason.
The only proper response is to tune it out.
What I find astonishing is that so many people are expressing disbelief at what happened over the past two years. The WEF clearly laid out what the plan is and things are progressing nicely. Having an Ernst Blofeld caricature as a figurehead was genius. How can anybody not react with ridicule? The next biggie, and it is the biggie has been slowly burbling in the background, is the introduction of CBDC’s. Once in place you, individually, will only be able to buy what you are permitted, when you are permitted and from those permitted. You can be be financially cancelled. This is a one way street. There is no way back, good luck surviving on neighborhood barter deals.
https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp210910.htm
As someone else noted the WEF slogan may well be titled:
Bring Back Barter
Alex Jones is proof, in his performance art, that you can take an idea to its logical and silly conclusions and one in a while it hits perfectly. He may be the futurist of these times.
I think the future will be someone coming to your house and saying “wow, you have potable water?!” Even when when normies “get it” they then say “well…what can you do right?” They’re not wrong in saying that. The vanguard of revolution is either the craziest or the ones with absolutely nothing to lose. Even at the height of our troubles, in a few years, most people will just be looking for a warm meal and a place to hide. Hidden on page three of our degenerate press was the Saudis mulling selling their energy in yuan. For those dazzled with Ukraine info, this story would be boring. For those who know it’s not boring at all.
” Hidden on page three of our degenerate press was the Saudis mulling selling their energy in yuan. For those dazzled with Ukraine info, this story would be boring. For those who know it’s not boring at all.”
Yep. That right there was one of the most important stories of the month.
China would have to allow the Yuan to appreciate heavily against the dollar, and it would be the end of their cheap-o export economy. It could happen, but color me skeptical.
(Also, I doubt that the Saudis seriously think that the Chinese would be less prone to currency games than AINO).
Vizzini,
Indeed! Blinken and Co’s sanctions are leaving the Russians no option but collaborating with the Chinese; and replacing the dollar-based world economy with a yuan-based system.
And hidden nowhere at all because no MSM rag covered it was the other big oil for yuan story: Nigeria is going to do the same for Chinese oil. Anyone know what “reserve currency” is in mandarin?
Well, AJ and Jesse Ventura were talking about plandemics, camps, and depop over a decade ago:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/h6h9yiRj8EiL/
Looking around in 2022, it’s hard to disagree with a lot of what they said back then.
A future of FDR-era ration cards will be a quieter life, l can only hope. The accelerationists at the top have turned me into a semantically-dissociated shrieking nilly, for cripes’ sake.
John Scott’s book, Behind the Urals, about his time as a worker during the founding of the Soviet city Magnitogorsk explains exactly how wonderful life was with meal and store ration cards, especially when neither the meal halls nor the stores could deliver even half of the rations the card holder was promised.
One could also forget about consumer choice in that environment since the cards were only valid at particular meal halls and stores depending on where one ranked in the Soviet hierarchy.
The reason why Toffler’s shtick is forgotten is because there really has NOT been much technological change over the past 20 years. If you doubt me, watch a lifetime movie from, say, 2004. The only way you can “date” the movie is by looking at the cell phones used by the characters in the movie. Everything else, houses, cars, airplanes, buildings; all looks the same.
There has been very little technological advance outside of semiconductors, and semiconductors are at the end of Moore’s Law. This means the rate of innovation in semiconductors will drop to the same level as that in, say, commercial airliners.
What has changed a lot in the last 10 years is social. Unfortunately, much of that is negative. The rise of the SJW woke thing and the continued increases in obesity, particularly the young are prominent examples. The dating game has changed. Young men are either pressured to conform to a lot of ridiculous social standards or are simply “exiled” from public life. As a result, many of them are NEETs, MGTOW, or doing other things that remove them from the conventional social scene. A fair number of young women are either obese, butch-style SJW’s, or some combination of the two. Thus the pool of sexually attractively young women has declined relative to the number of young men. Many young men are increasingly “effeminate” these days. Clearly, these are all negative changes that do not bode well for the medium to long-term future of our country. Many of these changes are occurring in much of the rest of the world.
This is a very good point, and one I wish more thinkers would address.
This blog tends to draw on lessons from history to explain present events. This is understandable since the author and the readers here are very high-IQ and high-IG people naturally recognize repeating patterns.
However, what is going on today with the young people — particularly young females — is totally — and quite shockingly — without precedence. In the hundreds of thousands of years of human/hominid history there has never been such a threat to fertility and social relations like we have now with the obesity, tattoo, and faggotry crises.
I would love to see more people address this issue, including the repercussions and potential solutions. Honestly, this destruction of the desirability of potential mating partners is not only without precedent, but much more impactful to the future than any of the foreign policy shenanigans going on today in Washington or Keeeeeeeeeeef.
I write about it every other post here. I see it every day, and I have been seeing it for 15 years. The change in the youth is shocking and horrifying.
I wish more thinkers would address.
You might want to check out some of the manosphere commentators on the topics mentioned.
Be aware it’s so bad out there that many of them have fallen by the wayside and are advocating monk mode to invest in oneself. You see that a lot with the older guys in the scene.
This is what happens when beauty is relativized. In other words, if beauty truly is only in the eye of the beholder (such a fatuity!), why make an effort to be beautiful? Why not let yourself go to pot or even indulge your deviant, savage impulses, and disfigure yourself? What’s more, beauty is at least partly white supremacist, and we know that ain’t allowed in these anti-white, hyper-egalitarian times.
I think most of us have observed that 30-something and 20-something males tend to be hyper-sensitive and ectomorphic, both female traits. Something else I’ve noticed, however, is that they also tend to have high-pitched voices. I’m Gen-X, and I dare say that the guys in my generation have, on average, voices a full register lower than the Millennials.
Something bad is happening to males, and it’s not just the result of anti-white and anti-male propaganda and programming.
Testosterone levels are significantly lower. Desire proof? Look at a high school yearbook from 20 years ago. Look at the senior portraits. Compare to today’s portraits.
Hormones in the water supply have been an issue for at least 25 years. I’ve always dismissed it but perhaps wrongly.
Phthalates are a pseudo estrogen for humans. They make women crazy and men effeminate.
Its the xenoestrogens. They are in everything. But the bulk of them come in our food. You see, all modern pesticides used in agriculture are xenoestrogens, hormone mimickers.
Both testosterone levels and sperm, the latter derived from the former, have been steadily declining for the past 50 years, if not longer. The decline is linear and does not show any indication of leveling out. Assuming it continues, most young men will be sterile by 2040.
I’m of that tweener generation that came of age around 1980 that separates boomer and genX.
What’s funny is that when grunge rock came out, I thought it a whiny wimpy music compared to, say, AC/DC or Aerosmith or even 80’s metal. I thought GenX guys were wimpy introverts compared to the partiers of my HS. Today, GenX guys are paragons of masculinity compared to young guys today.
Part of it too was when he was published they were already living through the worst of the future shock and it is still unresolved. Household automation via appliances and The Pill completely turned society inside-out just by themselves.
Excellent observations. And furthermore, these changes are all hailed as positive and progressive by the leftists. In fact, as anyone who knows history can tell, they are the usual signs of terminal societal decay. As for technology, it may have been on hold for 20 years, that will soon change dramatically. We are on the verge of a new and very dystopian technological revolution that may usher in a new age of digital slavery: CBDCs, internet of bodies, transhumanism. Maybe there will be a revolution and those of us who aren’t sheep will defeat it. We can only hope.
CBDCs are going to be pretty difficult to run on windmills and solar.
Let us hope their own incompetence strangles the implementation.
Zman’s yesterday’s article was so good, Dugin rewrote it for the Russian audience.
https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/end-history-has-never-happened-and-russian-war-liberal-order
I heard that President Putin follows Dugin (and now Zman). Maybe he will comment here some day.
Well, Vlad did name his operation in Ukraine ‘Z’ so….
Gosh, how did I miss that connection?
That means soon Crazy Nancy and Sleepy Joe will blame Zman for $7/gallon at the pump.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu** My association here, not only makes me domestic terrorist, but that Z’s international alliances have been revealed, I’m Global.
At this point, in for a penny, in for a pound.
God help me
The shadowy oligarch pulling Putin’s strings, known only as “Z”…
Coincidence…NOT
@Alzaebo
They have Soros; we have Zoros.
Hahaha!
$9.23 for diesel in Death Valley, on the highway that runs straight from L.A. to Reno.
RVer’s despair, but ya know? We’ve got a growing homeless problem, and the excess of RV inventory would make some handy-dandy instant housing.
Always look to the bright side! Or you might end up over there in Tarp City, where pets are called ‘livestock’.
Did you see the landscapey lookin trucks and scoundrels parking over the Gas Station main distribution tanks-as if they were parking for a field lunch-and sucking thousands of gas in fluid containers on the plank sided flatbeds.
I read some get 1000 to 2000 gal of diesel in this theft.
That there is some damn cheap diesel.
“That means soon Crazy Nancy and Sleepy Joe will blame Zman for $7/gallon at the pump.”
Yesterday, she told us that they were “looking at that problem” (a great relief!) but that it was most definitely not the gov’t’s fault. The blame, it seems, lies with “global inflation,” but that was probably a simple mispronunciation of “Vladimir Putin.”
Off road diesel is #2 low sulfer, dyed red.
Just saying.
Well, I’m driving a tractor, ain’t I?
(A semi’s called a “tractor-trailer combination”)
And here’s a not-bad (machine) translation of an article from
Réseau Voltaire about much the same thing:
https://www.voltairenet.org/article215855.html
original:
https://www.voltairenet.org/article215852.html
Riveting, all right.
The elites, the top-tier black market, have gone to war- with each other, and now it’s spreading.
It’s the end of the Nixonian Order. Kissinger was the Architect- of the petrodollar, the Sino-Soviet split, and the mentor of the CFR’s lead man in the WEF, Klaus Schwab. Now the banners are eyeing new Houses.
What an excellent read. Thank you.
Interesting, however, if the goal is to remove the “Straussians”, then attacking Ukraine is not the way to do it. If they are just a small clique of about 100 people, then there must be a more efficient way to end them.
That is interesting.
It’s beyond interesting. Way beyond.
Remember this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ueivjr3f8xg
What a glorious time to be free…
Nightfly is one of my favorite albums. I love Steely Dan (I mean seriously – like ’em or not – Call me Deacon Blues!), but the late night, jaded imagery of Fagen’s solo album is really something special.
Here’s a prediction.
Several generations of extreme affluence have made us soft versus our ancestral robustness that was acquired over tens of thousands of years via a gauntlet of real hardship in the natural world. Normie is firmly planted and sitting on his hands on his couch with his latte because he knows he cannot survive in a world in which real hardship exists. What is happening in Ukraine right now is a microcosm of that reality. A snarky internet meme cannot stop an artillery shell from blowing you to pieces, and taking a selfie at the moment of destruction is not an effective survival strategy. Nature intends for you to be removed from the gene pool.
So my prediction is that things start to get worse quicker and the collapse takes most folks by complete surprise because willful blinders. Then comes mass whining, wailing, street protests, wanton urban violence, roving gangs, looting, police disintegration, NG deployment, and the emergence of an authoritarian state in which civil control is slowly reestablished by brute force and detention camps. This will be the point in time where Bongino and his ilk realize that voting is not going to save us.
Modeling strongly suggests that this Dark Winter of retrograde societal devolution can be shortened significantly with 4S & focus. Now is the time to get fit and get ready. The fog is chaos is your friend.
My only complaint?
Cartel is way ahead of you there, friend. They figured that one out a while ago.
Gosh, those Reagan/Bush era paramilitaries in CentroAmerica just spread democracy like crazy, didn’t they? So now we know what the end point and end result of “democracy” is, at least- when 51% vote to put the 49% in jail for the bad plant.
Way ta go, conservatives, you, keep saving our democracy! They never realized- and still don’t- that they were building their own jails.
The cartels are in bed with the power-players in Mexico, and have been for over half a century. Instead of expurgating the disease cells in their society, they have chosen to integrate with them in a symbiotic relationship. That is not 4S & Focus. If you want to play to win, you need to understand what works and what doesn’t. Cartels are good at intimidating the common folk, which serves the interests of the power-players. That dynamic will continue until something changes it. And that begins with clarity about what the root problem is.
TomA,
Yep! Anybody who’s paying attention is “prepping” for societal chaos; whatever that may mean in each individual situation. The only alternative is the socially-approved denial of “It can’t happen here! Never has, so it never will!”
Just imagine America after 3 weeks of no electric power…. then proceed to make yourself ready.
“Slowly at first, then all at once,” or whatever the quote is. So that’s Progress! then? Maybe we got on the wrong train.
“Every notable thing that has happened over the last decade was considered aluminum foil hat stuff.”
There’s a lot one could expand on in the post but I find this particularly important. Increasingly insane – positively, certified, bloody INSANE – things are happening at an increasing rate. This means the empirically rational thing to say is that nothing is impossible with these people. Which is absolutely terrifying. Normally, when the US and Russia in whatever avatar it was wearing, got uncomfortably close to eyeball to eyeball, smart, agile people on both sides would step in to diffuse the danger. They understood perfectly well what a mushroom cloud over Chicago or Leningrad would look like. Today, with a nuclear Russia showing all signs of feeling cornered they are poking it harder than ever. They seem to have a fetich for playing ballarinas over the nuclear abyss, and we’re all in it for the ride.
This is also why I’m not dismissing that the vaxx could be a deliberate weapon of mega-death (as in millions of deaths; a term borrowed from nuclear war gamers of the 1960s btw). I still don’t ‘think’ this is the case, which is to say that it is more likely that it is probably just a terribly botched and unsafe ‘product’ that has no business being used on humans. But then there are all the stories slipping by into the open, of life insurance companies saying the mortality rate jumped, not when covid hit but when the ‘vaccines’ did. And all the stories of celebrities and others dropping dead unexpected. Given what we know, it just seems that the rational, empirically based take is not to dismiss anything ‘because it sounds too far-fetched’. These people empirically have no limit on how far they can ‘fetch’ ideas. And that is honestly a challenge to come to terms with.
I’ve been an armchair Covid-19 conspiracy theorist from the outset. The single best source I’ve seen is Robert F. Kennedy’s “The Real Anthony Fauci.” The title is somewhat deceptive. While Fauci is certainly the central villain, RFK Jr. lays out quite a bit more information: the international alliances, the takeover or at least outsize influence over many government, corporate, media, etc. institutions by a relatively tiny group of super-rich, intelligence agencies, and so forth, not-so-hidden agendas, “war game” pandemic simulations that were remarkably like what later happened, emergency powers, new products patented beforehand, conflicts of interest and corruption to the highest levels. It’s all there laid out for the reader, with several hundred footnotes for those who wish to read the background. At the very least, there are very powerful, unprincipled people getting rich and arrogating power unto themselves by hyping a “pandemic.” But a good case can be made that the virus was deliberately released. Why not? The men behind all this are soulless, the closest thing to demonic that the human race has produced.
With regard to the Ukrainian situation, I’m getting the same vibe as with the covid bulls*** from normies. They all seem to be buying into the Russians are evil, Putin is Hitler and we’ve got to do something – anything! No fly zone, bomb Moscow etc. It really is discouraging and just as with covid, it’s very hard to get them to think otherwise. I simply can’t understand why more don’t see that our “leadership” are utterly corrupt liars, as is the media – incredible.
“I simply can’t understand why more don’t see that our “leadership” are utterly corrupt liars, as is the media – incredible.”
Because the utterly corrupt liars were elected by the people you are talking about.
Yeah, but even so, at some point you have to take a step back and think wtf. It’s in all our faces 24/7/365.
TIP, people believe the lies because they have/want to. Nothing is more scary for most folk than to have no leadership/institutions to look up to. Simply put, such acknowledgment means you are on your own—and in our present state of advanced “civilization”—most people have no idea of how to survive on their own. They are sheep that can’t find the next green pasture over the hill without a Shepard’s guidance, nor protect themselves from the ever present wolves.
Concomitantly with that, people have grown accustomed to having “reality” mapped out for them by authorities. And for most people, that is a blessed relief. Being told unequivocally what’s what means you don’t have to do the hard work of thinking for yourself, trying to navigate the complexities of the human condition on you own. Indeed, so pronounced is this aversion to independent thought that most people would rather believe extremely unpleasant things–the white race is evil, Covid is the Black Death, Putin is Hitler, etc.–than to think for themselves and arrive at their own more appealing conclusions, mapping their own reality in the process.
I hear you. A lot of these people are longtime friends, co-workers and family, that were, for the most part on the same wavelength as me on many, if not most issues. But covid and this Uke-Russian crap has really surprised me – I mean REALLY surprised me. The buy in across the board on this s*** has been unbelievable. When discussions head in those directions I just pretty much clam up and/or walk away – it’s not worth it.
Report from the field: A friend attended Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade over the weekend. Governor Pritzker and Mayor Lori Lightfoot marched in the parade, and were greeted with people screaming, swearing, booing at them. Even throwing objects at them. I heard they both didn’t make it very far.
Oh, I hope so. Both have made life here a living hell. It’s still a largely lifeless gray line of concrete and glass tombstones. The theaters and arenas require proof of vaxx. Karen remains masked up despite the lifted mandates. I escaped to Texas for the weekend, and it was good.
Even Toronto got rid of the vax pass (for now), lol.
Both have made life here a living hell. It’s still a largely lifeless gray line of concrete and glass tombstones.
Even here with most restrictions lifted in Hochulstan (NY state), it feels like a state of living death, devoid of future hope or possibility.
Of course, the main concern of SWPLs and grillercons at this point is where the state will come up with the $1 billion it plans to earmark for the new $1.4 billion football stadium in Buffalo.
“Even throwing objects at them. I heard they both didn’t make it very far.”
Yeah, that right there is a new thing. Pretty significant. We have either turned a corner or we are well advanced in doing so.
It was weird when Democrats claimed that the reason Trump’s Ukraine call was so egregious was because Biden was Trump’s “political opponent.” Joe wasn’t running for anything then, no polling suggested he could win if he did, and the Obama faction was openly dismissive of and probably leaking against him. Then…events.
Whoever lied about RBG’s deathbed wish seems to have expected them. It was the first time I remember the ruling class referring to a president as being “installed,” or saying non-rhetorically that the next election was already decided.
There are plans and they do give them away, but that’s not really distinguishable from them speaking oddly because they’re isolated and stupid, and the plans fall through sometimes.
It’s worth noting the difference between Change and Progress. The futurists of the 80’s/90’s like Toffler, so prominent when I was a graduate student, often failed to make this distinction. Progress is economic prosperity, better health, more freedom and peace. Change is usually just a societal tax imposed by the Elite on the uninformed masses.
When the Elite can no longer deliver on the promise of Progress, they give us Change and they develop a narrative that this Change is Progress. Zoom classes, Twitter/social media, fake vaccines, HR cat lady politics, gay/trans controversy, racial conflict etc. is Change without Progress. The average Joe has to dedicate a lot of his mental bandwidth to keep up with all this crap. But we can all see it’s just a “tax” on poor Joe, who pays mentally and financially to the Elites imposing this Change.
Change without Progress also puts a premium on knowledge and access – Toffler understood this better than most. This benefits insiders/Elites at everyone else’s expense.
There also is a stark difference between change and upheaval, with the latter now replacing the former.
All change is not progress and all progress is not.forward
C’mon guys, it’s creative destruction lol.
“Change you can believe in.”
Something about that phrase seems familiar…
The only time “the future” really matters is when a people realize they don’t have one.
Speaking of Covid, The Lancet just admitted almost 8% of people who got the shot experienced severe side effects. This is getting no mainstream media coverage.
The government is holding out hope they can reinstate all kinds of restrictions the next time cases spike. I am surprised a plane load of passengers on one of the discount airlines hasn’t taken off their masks after takeoff and refused to put them back on yet.
The ruling class should have kept the levittown business model going and they never would have lost power. Like don’t kill the golden goose.
It’s interesting how people living in impoverished villages 140 years ago are now the ruling class in the us. This eagles stanza could describe them as well:
My oh my you sure know how to arrange things
You dress it up so well so carefully
Ain’t it funny how your new life didn’t change things
You’re still the same old j— you used to be
Man, don’t defile that song. That’s before the complete poz hit the GAE
clearly the normie herd will never revolt, just as a herd of sheep won’t. so they will never play a part in the downfall of this corrupt system we all are part of. that leaves two sources of collapse; external attack, and internecine fighting within the ruling group. the latter seems more likely, and will split the country into smaller pieces. without an intact US, the WEF disintegrates. you could make the argument that this process of disintegration is already occurring, and is the source of world instability.
The normies class will never revolt because they offer the ruling class one very indispensable thing: peaceful productivity. Should they stop being peaceful and productive, they lose clout. However, if the ruling class starts punishing people for being peaceably productive, the ruling class loses it’s right to exist. Consequently, normies aren’t going to do much to resist their leaders until leaders make an absolute mess of things.
I don’t know quite what to make of it and who is whom, but the Ruling Class civil war certainly is present in attitudes toward China. One faction wants to punish the PRC for its support of Russia, the other wants to ignore it. Whoever operates Biden seems to want to keep the gibs from China flowing, and this may account for the avoidance of outright war with Russia.
The United States is splintering even now. The fault lines will become more visible as capital takes flight from the Acela Corridor to other areas, and people continue to vote with their feet. It is unfortunate for people who live in nice places being inundated with internal refugees, but positive for those who have had enough and left their enclaves.
Weird system we’ve got. America belongs to the refugee. Heck, we’re even ruled by the descendants of refugees, taught to emulate them, their ethics and economics. Refugees R Us. No surprise US is increasingly a basket case.
Agree that the WEF and other cloud types seem bafflingly ignorant of the fact their existence is only possible due to the system they are feverishly attempting to collapse.
I believe they are shortsighted in their assumption that they will the ones in charge of bringing order from the chaos they are intentionally creating.
History has shown us time and time again that just not how these things work.
“…without an intact US, the WEF disintegrates. you could make the argument that this process of disintegration is already occurring”
Good golly Miss Molly, that’s the question of the century, innit.
All we’ve ever known is the Pax Americana. Whither next?
Was it Thomas Friedman who wrote The World is Flat?
Well those extended supply lines into Asia don’t look so wise now do they?
We could be on the verge of war with most of our chip factories sitting in Asia.
That whole manufacturing change came quickly.
One decade we have factories here.
The next decade they sit in Asia.
No one looks to the long term consequences.
Or maybe they do?
Maybe there are dark forces at work in the shadows, but my read is the auctioning off of the industrial base was just expediency, an chance for a quick buck. Business could not get regulations changed, but they could get trade laws changed, so they changed the trade laws to let them relocate to Asian and other low-cost places. Of course, China has been bribing the hell out of the political class. Way back when Bush was in the White House, they were bribing the Bush family. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-nov-27-na-neilbush27-story.html That should look familiar. Joe Biden has been doing the same thing.
Moreover, for whatever reason, many Americans seem utterly oblivious to the notion that you can only have modern conveniences at an affordable price by destroying nature. Greenies are oblivious to the damage that lithium mining causes, as well as the non-recyclability of windmills. The “restore American manufacturing” crowd seems oblivious to how bad industrial production can be for nature. That’s not to say we should give up modern conveniences, only that having them without damaging the natural world is a very expensive proposition.
One upside of the Bush/Biden syndicates openly taking bribes from China has been it probably accounts for this Administration’s avoidance of outright war with Russia thus far. Yeah, they’ll bitch about China aiding the Evil One, etc., but they will not do anything that interferes with their sugar daddy.
The US dollar became the world reserve currency. Other counties need a means to acquire dollars. The US’s trade deficit allows dollars to flow outward.
Manufacturing in China and selling in US provided the opportunity to realize profits in low tax jurisdictions. Apple is headquarter on Jersey Island, buys cheap in China, sells dear in the US. Hundreds of billions of untaxed Apple profits are offshored and untouchable as the US goes broke.
Intellectual property is mined from the US.
It’s a form of sanctions, ie siege warfare, against Americans.
…and that’s why China is the *real* enemy, not Russia. In the long run, it’s not nukes that project power, it’s the economy of the nation. And that economy is based upon production of goods, not symbol manipulation.
Another factor in America’s industrial decline: the short-sighted emphasis on short-term profits vs the longterm picture.
Japan snatched our TV industry by betting that US corporations, faced with a few quarters of losses, will quickly vote to abandon ship.
As I understand it, Sony, along with other Japanese TV manufacturers, developed a strategy: they’d sell their TVs to the US at a loss, at less than cost; while making up for it by raising prices to their captive Japanese domestic TV market. Which they did.
And it worked! After a few quarters of losses, US manufacturers decided to stop making TVs.
So yes: expediency in the pursuit of the quick buck; along with the apparent inability to look farther ahead than the next board meeting.
And what you just described happened at least fifty, closer to sixty, years ago. The trend has not improved in the interim. 🙁
The UK were even worse at it. There is the nation that invented or at least commercialized — jet travel, radio, a hundred more. Quickly lost their manufacturing, first to USA and later to other nations.
Perhaps it’s all a form of the inevitable life cycle of a culture, a society, at least of the industrial era.
The locust system.
” …the auctioning off of the industrial base was just expediency, an chance for a quick buck.”
So, the auctioneers were more herd-beast whores than Satan’s minions. It is an interesting notion. Was it mere chance then, that the fates were aligned for such a preference cascade, or were their hands guided? The mathematical understructure of reality is stochastic, so … perhaps.
I’m not sure it was all about the quick buck. All the talk during the late 1990s and the Bush years was that freedom/democracy/liberalism wasn’t just the winner of the Cold War, but God’s gift to the world. True believers were at work. They kept saying that no two countries with McDonald’s went to war with each other. The political class and media were sure that an introduction to market liberalism would soon convince the Chinese to remove Mao from their banknotes. Russia would stop being Siberia and start being Minnesota. North Korea would have boy bands just like the South. Etc. Etc.
Smart observation, Marko. That’s the underlying axiom of the global age: that all people and peoples are the same, that they all long for the fruits of liberal democracy (freedom, etc.), that they’re all *moving* towards liberal democracy whether they know it or not—so it’s ok (maybe mandatory) to prod / push / blackmail / force them in that direction.
It’s actually the same rationale that underlay international Communism, although that wasn’t obvious at the time because of the high-ground moral claims that liberal democracy makes (an important Zman theme).
My thought is that the manifest failure of that underlying (and “optimistic”) axiom has driven liberal societies mad. They can’t admit it has been proven false, without doing violence to the great myth that supports their existence. So they keep trying to enforce that myth, in more artificial and coercive ways. With the horrible results we’ve seen.
Hell, I’ve heard the Japanese bemoaning moving their manufacturing to China. 「日本製」 or “made in Japan” label is put on anything domestically made.
Do what? They can’t see how well that’s worked out for the U.S.?