Quitting The Circus

Note: The Taki post is up. This week the subject is another take on the subject of today’s post, just from a more serious angle. The Sunday Thoughts podcast is up behind the green door for subscribers.


Politics in a democracy not only devolve into theater, but they select for the sorts of people attracted to the theatrical. The reason for this is democracy is about winning the crowd, which rewards those best at winning the crowd. Inevitably, elite interests will invest in those who show the ability to stand in front the mobs and win them over without making too many promises. After all, if you need to bribe the crowd then why bother investing in a guy trying to win the crowd?

Of course, the best stage performers are the people who are extraordinarily high in extraversion and very low in agreeableness. This person loves being the center of attention and likes meeting new people. A good actor can light up a room full of strangers and come away energized by it. He will also be very low in empathy and see others as either competitors of victims to be exploited. Great performers tend to be horrible people when away from the stage.

This is what you get with democracy. It is rule by the sorts of people who run away to the circus because it is their best shot at a happy life. Liberal democracy is supposed to correct the defects of democracy by bounding the choices of the mob with a set of principles like equality before the law. In reality, these principle are turned into props by the performers to add moral weight to their performance. They are no long winning the crowd, but instead are leading them on a moral crusade.

This is why morality in a liberal democracy gets turned on its head. Society’s least principled people are elevated to the top of the moral hierarchy. Carny folk are made into the priestly class. Naturally, they warp public morality into that which best serves their interests as performers. Like all carny acts, the political class in a liberal democracy is always on the look out for a new act and new bit. The highest moral good becomes the new act that brings in the crowds.

This is why American politics is so shallow. The current gun grabbing show being staged in Washington is a good example. Like a reboot of a comic book franchise, the gun grabbers are performing fan service. They know the slobbering idiots will show up with their t-shirts and home made costumes. It is a low cost way for the performers to get a big audience. The only point of the gun grabbing act is to please this narrow market sector so the performers can get a quick payday.

One of the ironies of this system is the biggest clowns come from the wealthiest and poorest congressional sectors. The obvious example is Nancy Pelosi, who represents one of the richest and most progressive districts in the country. The people who live in her district are rich and presumably have serious responsibilities. Yet, in their politics they go for the most ridiculous and absurd. Their politics are not about serious matters, but about the gestures that control bourgeois life.

That is what liberal democracy becomes at it zenith. It is a form of escapism for the class wealthy enough to escape the consequences of bad government, but not so wealthy as to enter the ruling elite. These are the people who promote pointless nonsense like climate change and gun grabbing campaigns. At the same time, they refuse to even think about practical problems that haunt society. Fixing roads is for poor people, while fixing the climate is for special people.

Another side effect of liberal democracy is the race for novelty. In the 1990’s, the luxury opinion was homosexual marriage. That was the thing bourgeois simpletons waved around to signal their aloofness from practical politics. Since anyone can acquire these luxury opinions, we have quickly moved along the clown line to the point where major corporations are celebrating child molesters. When novelty is the highest moral principle, who has time to worry about the kids?

Some will argue that the circus of politics is an intentional creation by the usual suspects to conceal their grip on society. That is a form of escapism, like all conspiracy theories, to avoid the reality of liberal democracy. Elites do run society, but they do not run the circus of democracy. Their only role is to make sure the actors do not accidentally shoot one another with a prop gun. Otherwise, they let these frivolous freaks do their shows and keep the masses occupied.

This is the beauty of the system, when you think about it. If the only way to fix the system is to get a bigger crowd, that means all opposition must select for greater novelty and narcissism than what is currently on stage. The winners of every election end up with a bigger clown than what was on stage. The losers get the new clown as well, which means no matter the result, you get stuck with a clown. Elections are always heads they win, tails you lose.

Just as the solution to a drinking problem is not more drinking, the solution to democracy is never more democracy. The drunk can only begin to recover himself by quitting the booze. Similarly, a people can only recover from the rule by carny trash by exiting the theater of democracy. Usually, the drunk has to hit rock bottom before he has the will to conquer his addiction. Most likely the same applies to democracy. America will have to hit rock bottom before it abandons the clown-ocracy.


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144 thoughts on “Quitting The Circus

  1. Being ruled by someone born into power, rather than someone hungry for it, is the traditional solution to democracy. People do not really like democracy, but actually like a rapid turnover of leadership in times of rapid technological change. Without that progress, monarchy is preferred.

    If nobility is too offensive then randomly selected citizens of various wealth and education levels could be drafted into government positions, like a random poll except not trivial and too big to rig.

  2. Fantastic Taki’s piece today. The Zman takes points from Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, and Bourdieu’s class distinction in taste and habits, showing how they play out through the ages. First the Macaroni example, eerily similar to the current age (although the comparison does not completely fit, as Britain would continue its run as a major power for another two centuries, so hardly a telltale of decaying empire). Then there is a transition to Apple gadgets of the years 00s which were coveted by hipsters, but had the drawback of being accessible to anyone, not just the trendies. Coming from that, the evolution from “bespoke consumer items to bespoke ideas” is the mark of current swanky trends, a very poignant observation.
    Ferocious necessity to affect status superiority through the display of the most ridiculous status symbols in the most absurd and unfitting of circumstances may very well be the root cause of all evil. The point of owning a yacht or a ferrari, of traveling first class or sleeping in a five-star hotel consists in the fact that almost anyone else cannot. In the same way, support of multiculturalism and immigration is directly linked to the few who doesn’t have to experience the consequences, who are subtly signaling exactly that.
    Uncanny ability of the author to express all this in a simple but structured way that relates immediately to common experience.
    Second best idea after last week’s absolutely hilarious take that elites are playing an online RPG on the media amidst ordinary people getting on with their lives, that was tops.

  3. Edward Conze reflecting on Jonathan Swift.

    “It was Voigt who drew my attention to Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”
    as a repository of profound political wisdom. In my “Buddhist
    Thought in India” [p. 20] [1964] I have referred. to the Voyage to Laputa as
    the best description of the sciential madness of our times. Voigt
    himself showed me the classical passage in the Voyage to the
    Houyhnhnms [ch. vii] about the democratic madness of our time.
    This confirmed me in the belief that leaders of any democracy –
    parliamentary, plutocratic, popular or racial – must be rotters,
    because their adherents want them to be so. The ›ruling Yahoo‹ is
    ›always more deformed in Body and mischievous in Disposition
    than any of the rest‹. ›He usually continues in Office till a worse
    can be found; but the very Moment he is discarded, his Successor,
    at the Head of all the Yahoos in that district, Young and Old, Male
    and Female, come in a Body and discharge their Excrements upon
    him, from Head to Foot.‹ What a valuable lesson that was!”

  4. Some good clips from First Things article Zman linked to in his Taki article:

    Re. Traditional Liberals vis-a-vis Radicals during pre-Russian Rev: Or why classic Liberals who know better, allow radicals to topple them and everyone else.

    “Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like [radical] wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different [than the radicals].

    Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas—these liberals contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble. They had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism—hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right—almost always proved more compelling than their professed intellectual commitments.

    Casting “unworthy, furtive glances at who liked what,” Berdyaev observed, these liberals illustrated how “moral cowardice develops, while love of truth and intellectual daring are extinguished.” Captivated by public opinion, they signed petitions they did not agree with and excused heinous acts, always observing the rule: Better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone an inch to one’s right.

    One sometimes hears that “the pendulum is bound to swing back.” But how does one know there is a pendulum at all, rather than—let us say—a snowball accelerating downhill? It is unwise to comfort oneself with metaphors. When a party is willing to push its power as far as it can go, it will keep going until it meets sufficient opposition.

    In the French Revolution, terror was eventually stopped by “Thermidor,” and then by Napoleon. But in Russia, Stalin proclaimed “the intensification of the class struggle” after the Revolution, entailing an unending series of arrests, executions, and sentences to the Gulag. What meets no resistance does not stop.”

    Gary Saul Morson. Northwestern University Prof.

    • I didn’t read the cited article, but many of the same thoughts are echoed in the fascinating “The Jewish Century,” which I’m slowly browsing. While I’d class the work as pro-Jewish, the author speaks frankly about the political changes European (e.g. Russian and other Eastern areas) Jews experienced prior to WW I/Revolution. In a generation, many Jews had felt the call of modernity/secularization, at least to the point of studying host nation’s tongue (e.g. Russian) and entering highly skilled professions where permitted (the usual: banking, law, teaching, medicine, etc.) Significantly, many of them rejected or were rejected by their family who kept the Hebrew traditions and faith. They were, after a fashion, first generation “immigrants” to modernity: like other cultures (e.g. first generation Mexican-Americans, which I studied in Lit courses), they were in a sort of limbo, no longer welcome in their old tribe with its customs, yet not fully integrated into the host nation’s culture (and often, not entirely permitted to even if they wanted to.)

      As such, unable to return to the tribe (if they even wanted to, and most didn’t) and unable to fully meld with the host culture, the outcast found a shared identity in radical politics: socialism, communism, etc. I’ve yet to see how he treats the later 20th century upheavals. But he makes no secret of the Jews gravitating towards the radical movements at the turn of the century.

      What Morson describes in the long quote sounds remarkably akin to what is happening here. Leftists (Democrats, but I repeat myself) will try to one-up or out-Left each other, in a sort of bidding war to see who can be the most Progressive, I guess. Virtue signalling, but by those with the power to do things.

    • True, the FirstThings article was golden. I did not know that in Russia “Between 1905 and 1907, nearly 4,500 government officials and about as many private individuals were killed or injured. Between 1908 and 1910, authorities recorded 19,957 terrorist acts and revolutionary robberies, doubtless omitting many from remote areas.”
      These are huge numbers that testify to a situation of utter chaos. Much worse than today, even with multicultural societies. Avoiding this kind of slippery slide of violence seems to be the good part of the Western regime having criminalized the mere thought of fedposting I guess.
      The induced self-censorship works wonders, here we are in fact condemning spree shootings no matter what.

  5. If Donald Trump had been a better type of clown — i.e., less man-in-a-suit, more man-in-a-leather-jacket — he might have done better in the elections than he did. The only problem with the suit is that he makes you think suit-ish things.

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    • Who the frik is this guy? George Bernard Shaw? Sam Clemens? G.K. Chesterton? Mencken? Not bad dude. not bad.

  6. “When novelty is the highest moral principle, who has time to worry about the kids?”

    Brilliantly said.

    “Elites do run society, but … their only role is to make sure the actors do not accidentally shoot one another with a prop gun.”

    I wish they could do better than that and stop the madness from metastasizing. Wishful thinking perhaps.

  7. A small note in American history comes to mind from the late 1970s or 1980s in a forgotten monthly edition of Freak Show and Circus Review.

    The story is told of an incident here in San Diego where a courageous and sober minded person had the opportunity and clarity to beat up Howard Cosell in an elevator at Jack Murphy Stadium.

    It may seem minuscule and off the main road of political theater but as a sociological note of yore it gives me fractional hope that America may yet come out of this current cultural and political crises with some dignity and perspective.

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    • I’m a firm believer in the dictum that civilian firearms are for hunting and self defense. I also highly recommend thinking outside the box when it comes to various remedies for the disease cell problem. Your tale is therefore fundamentally educational. Elevators do indeed represent excellent venues for potential remedy. Are we now at the stage of enhancing tactical education?

      • Yes. See the John McClane Elevator Usage and Instruction Manual for the Nakatomi Plaza Building.

    • Robo: “It may seem minuscule and off the main road of political theater but as a sociological note of yore it gives me fractional hope that America may yet come out of this current cultural and political crises with some dignity and perspective.”

      Reading that sentence was like trying to swim through sand.

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      • Got it. You think I should have used the word ‘fragmented’ or ‘subatomic’ instead?

  8. Watched that Davos clip. I’d say that when this is all said and done, if we are not in chains, it will be because we did some calibration on noose sizes. I flashed to the SXSW clip. That was angering. I couldn’t get past 30 seconds of the hysteric plea from the ridiculous people in BoPeep dresses and beards to be saved from a Texas holocaust – as they sit on stage in Austin to the applause of the powerful in the audience.

    There has been a lot of, “is this 1984 or Brave New World?”, talk the past few years. It looks to me like the Hunger Games. The fashion, the snearing contempt they have for the Dirt People. They control the institutions – including the military. They hate this country’s guts and they hate its people. The Left shifted from a War On Poverty to a War On Citizens. This uses the same guilt characteristic, you oppose our program you hate the poor. It is designed to force you to sit and accept it, or speak up and be banished. The SXSW spectacle was a near daily occurrence at a major tech company I worked at. It is not some ad-hoc ridiculousness – it is designed to be insidious.

    The great facilitator of their delusion is the illusion of prosperity and wealth of the GAE’s historically unprecedented ponzi scheme. These clowns are used by the managerial elite who have run this civilization into the ground to distract from their epic failures. Their mismanagement failures are only beginning to come back to roost. We better hope that our military and police forces don’t just follow orders. The mental illness, derangement and hatred in the sickened hears of the tools of the elite can be used to do very bad things . The cry babies and drag queens can’t do any of the hurting but they can be a mob that sanctions it. I think they gladly will.

    That was way too disturbing – not so much what took place on stage but that it was put on stage and applauded by the technocratic elite. The Hunger Games. We need to get organized or we may find ourselves hunting each other for their sporting pleasure.

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    • The Hunger Games takes place in a society that is from my distant glances at it, mono-racial. Our clownshow is rapidly approaching the combination of the worst of Hotel Rwanda, the Killing Fields, the Lives of Others, Salvador (with James Woods), Missing, and Z by Costa-Gavras. Because that is the historical reality of multi-racial, multi-cultural societies. Particularly when prosperity such as it is ends.

      The pods, streaming soma, and bugs will not work when there is no power because we imported the third world’s population and got their power grid. Elite helicopters can’t fly without fuel, pilots, and mechanics and spare parts.

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        • Yes and I forgot the Year of Living Dangerously, the Last Wave, the Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, and that movie about Jonestown. Our regime seems intent on Revolutionary Suicide.

      • Speaking of helicopters, southernprepper1 on YouTube cited an anecdote from a military helo mechanic stating they were struggling to specific lubricants for helo engines.

        In North Africa, the locals contract their helo maintenance out to a Euro-American firm run by a guy that was a colonel in the Portuguese Air Force.

      • And the southern border is an amped up Sicario, not just regarding drug & human trafficking but as to CIA involvement as well. Which is quite something for it to be “amped up” since its not a very old movie.

        Each movie listed, and then some others, give us a glimpse of where we are at present. If you’re asking, the answer is yes.

  9. Love it when Z gets sociological on our ass.

    “[Upper class] politics are not about serious matters, but about the gestures that control bourgeois life. That is what liberal democracy becomes at it zenith. It is a form of escapism for the class wealthy enough to escape the consequences of bad government, but not so wealthy as to enter the ruling elite. These are the people who promote pointless nonsense like climate change and gun grabbing campaigns. At the same time, they refuse to even think about practical problems that haunt society. Fixing roads is for poor people, while fixing the climate is for special people.”

    80% of the time politicians should be talking about keeping and creating American jobs. The remaining 20% should be talk of infrastructure, healthcare, and spreading the wealth. Maybe immigration control. But that’s a lost cause, so whatever.

    Great post.

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  10. This discussion is not doing much for me. Everyone’s running too far with this airy concept of the ‘elites’. I don’t see any elites as such in the US. There’s just a conveyor belt of petty bourgeois who get churned out by the system. The system, and society itself, IS nothing more than the churning of the petty bourgeois. My pet theory is that it’s simply those who are best at making presentations who get pushed to the top. That’s not real intelligence, obviously – and that’s the problem. The western world is now being ruled by office Karens. The solution is to get back to a proper meritocracy. Priority No.1 is therefore to deplatform the Karens. The rest will follow.

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    • Every people has a natural aristocracy, those who are best fit to rule. There will be variation among peoples, with some nations and tribes punching above below their weight in producing good stewards of their civilization.

      Liberal democracy is a system where those who rule (who have the power to design and implement the governing structures of civilization like immigration, trade, and industrial policies) are completely removed from accountability. They use money (and increasingly as things fall apart, violence and threat of violence) to control those with authority, e.g. governors and legislatures. These latter are puppets who dance on strings made of money and do what they are told.

      The puppets are generally well compensated when their service comes to an end. This often happens prematurely because part of the system is that when the proles become unhappy with the policies of the rulers, they get to toss out some of their ruler’s servants in elected authority. The proles have their emotional discharge and are satisfied for a time, and nothing substantive changes. Democracy has always been fake. Apologies to Plato and Aristotle: democracy leads to oligarchy which leads to tyranny.

      This kind of system has no feedback selecting against incompetence among the rulers. It only selects against lack of skill in clown showmanship amongst the rulers’ servants in the institutions with authority. Therefore our system now has an almost complete disconnect between the sets of people in our natural aristocracy (those who should rule) and those in our formal aristocracy (those who actually rule).

      The natural aristocracy is not only kept out of power, but out of authority. Those who serve the rulers in authority may get ideas of their own and start to exercise power in service to the civilization instead of its ostensible rulers. Donald Trump’s upending of the globalists’ international trade policy is a prime example.

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      • Our aristocracy is supposed to be people like Tucker Carlson and the younger Martha Stewart(she still leans this way but her need for fame corrupted her a bit) with a smattering of cowboy.

        What we have is a bunch of carnies and Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey only 24-7 not at the circus where it belongs

      • A riddle in Western history up to the present time is a particular tribe that does indeed punch far above its weight. Whether they have been good guardians of their civilization may be debated. They often bring valuable talents that seem to benefit all, yet they seem cursed, often bringing disaster upon both themselves and their host. Whether that’s a feature or a bug, I leave for others to ponder.

      • That’s all out of date. The idea of a bunch of ‘elites’ (or ‘ruling class’) influencing the masses is pure flight of fancy. It’s now just the opposite. Since the advent of social media we are in a plebocracy more than anything – since the mid-90s it’s been the shrillest who have moulded society, and now it’s the TikTok influencers. The legacy batch of politicians have been desperately trying to keep up and are in the process of being replaced by more and more Karens.

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  11. These people are deeply unhappy as they are constantly in search of the next “high,” and that’s why they often turn to rage when someone thwarts their desires. It is also why we get the increasing bizarreness. Once someone engages in this sort of thing it can only lead to a downward spiral. Just look at how far we progressed with the TSA. It went to a little stricter security to full body scans within a really short period of time. Would anyone be that surprised if you had to show up 6 hours early and were required to undergo a strip search prior to getting on a plane? I wouldn’t.

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    • Constantly humiliating the Dirt People is the highest aspiration of the Cloud People.

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      • I had an interesting conversation with a like-minded soul this morning and the topic of the mid-terms came up. He thought maybe it would be harder for the Dems to steal this one since so many realize how our current Potato-in-Chief was forced on us. I said they don’t care if we know it. In fact, the more blatant the steal the better. Like the saying goes, they want us dead and they think it’s funny. Their attitude is basically ‘well, what are you going to do punk?’.

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        • They want us dead; we want them dead. Seems we understand one another perfectly well.

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      • Dirt people suffer most at the hands of other dirt people who occupy the lowest positions of the cloud people’s enforcement arms.

  12. “Some will argue that the circus of politics is an intentional creation by the usual suspects to conceal their grip on society. That is a form of escapism, like all conspiracy theories, to avoid the reality of liberal democracy. Elites do run society, but they do not run the circus of democracy. Their only role is to make sure the actors do not accidentally shoot one another with a prop gun. Otherwise, they let these frivolous freaks do their shows and keep the masses occupied.”

    Uh, yes they do run the circus of democracy. You say it in your next line. If they didn’t run “the circus of democracy” they wouldn’t be the ones that “make sure the actors do not “accidentally shoot one another”. If they didn’t you would have more Huey P. Long’s that they would have to have killed. There is a certain amount of freedom for the actors, but those actors are selected due to past performance and obedience. The people at the top, well, actually the people slightly below the level of the top, lay out the direction the rulers want to take, hand out some talking points, coach some of the newbies, and then allow the clowns to do their thing. If they don’t perform properly, or get caught doing something the plebes will object to, they are sent back down to the minor leagues. Or, to prison. Or, killed. Depends on the degree. It is macromanagement, rather than micromanagement. But, the “plan” always goes in one direction. That is impossible if chance is involved. If it fails, it is brought back after some adjustments are made, then on to the next theft and power grab. If you doubt it, study the creation of the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve. If the rulers had left that in the hands of the “actors”, they might have failed. They don’t leave important things to chance.

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  13. Welp, I read the Taki poast too.

    I think I might disagree completely – unless I am missing something? I have seen any number of clowns and buffoons among the dirt class. My daughter is a militant gay social justice warrior. She and her creepy girlfriend are even poorer than we are… and they are right up to speed with the swankiest elite jesters. (Last I heard through the grapevine, they were all on pins an needles waiting for the first topless pics from one of there friends – she was getting her tits cut off so she could transition to being a man). Ye gods – I thought I had it bad, having a gay daughter trying to ram her sexuality and degenerate politics down my throat – can you imagine the heart ache the parents of a tranny must feel…?

    They are teaching this orthodoxy in the public schools and pedos are grooming your children. Clown world may have started at the top… but it has filtered down to the dirt classes. I don’t think mental illness and class are necessarily related here…. but whadda I know?

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    • it’s a weird kind of social aspiration going on with plebes parroting the pathologies of their betters.

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      • Thus it has always been, and thus it will always be. Plus, it’s rather strange that people around these parts frequently complain about the quality of our leaders and then denigrate the gullibility of their followers. The quality of leadership can only matter if there is some number of people who will uncritically follow whoever is in charge.

    • Not to blame you or anything but do you ever blame yourself as a father? I feel like there must have been a reason that your daughter went crazy, maybe relating to you maybe not.

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      • Yes. I think every parent of a failed child does, B. I think that homosexuality is the product of bad parenting, or bad genetics, or both. It’s a devastating thing to contemplate for any parent. This is why so many parents of such kids try to normalize and mainstream sexual perversion: they don’t have to see their children as they are, or their own role in making them that way.

        I will stand before God and answer for my daughter. I tried to give her the best home I could, and I flat out refuse to make excuses for her or myself. I was strict with her, she had to treat her elders and family with respect, she had to get good marks at school, and she had to keep her nose clean. She had demons and problems with all that, but eventually she prevailed. She had to, to live under my roof. She was a tough kid to parent… for me, anyways. Other than that, we were as supportive as possible.

        I made mistakes as a parent. I trusted the public schools back then. Ours was an extended family but we were shitlibs. I was a proto-griller Normie-con, doing his damnedest not to see the clowns or my in-laws doing their best to undermine me as a father and destroy their granddaughter. It’s complicated. My only defence might be that at the time there was no Z Man or dissidents as we know them today. The chronology was important too… these snowflakes, clowns, and sexually disturbed zombies came flooding out of the closet, and no one knew what to do with them or where they came from. I am now firmly convinced they are indoctrinated in our schools and that this is nothing new; I think they’ve been hard at it for at least 20 years.

        Nowadays we all know what happened and hindsight is always 20/20. I learned that the patio and grille were no refuge from the crazies, so I confronted the lot in my family… and got cancelled. It didn’t feel like it at the time… but it was for the best. The family went on to disintegrate even further as the lunacy was just beginning to ramp up in those days.

        I should have seen it all, planned and acted, but…coulda, shoulda, woulda, right? I was just a dumb assed boomer griller that got mugged by reality in times he didn’t understand.

        I got off lightly too. Can you imagine being the father of a 5 year old tranny? Or a grandparent for a queer family? I tell myself that God has a plan for all of us, and that my place is here and now, and that my daughter has hers too. All I can do is throw this mess at my Maker and hope he can sort it out…

        Sorry for the non-answer. But this stuff IS complicated.

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        • Unless she’s the bull, odds are she’ll grow out of it. One of the reasons the old bulls are so angry all the time is because their feminine girlfriends keep dumping them to have a real family once the college indoctrination starts wearing off.

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        • Very honest and sincere response Glen. Sometimes it’s 20% us and 80% other with negative outcomes of our children. I’ll bet you fall in this category.n. In the end every human has agency and is responsible for themselves.

          If I had a gay or degenerate offspring you can be sure I wouldn’t embrace or accept that part of them. It would be a pain I would have to live with. That said, i have been blessed.

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        • The good Lord bless you and keep you. It’s like the unhappy creeps find the tiniest chink in the wall, i.e. good order of humanity, and worm their way in to cause devastation and unhappiness.

      • Kids respond to propaganda and indoctrination — by the media, by the schools, by social media, by TV, by movies, etc. I know a sad number of good parents whose kids have fallen down the globohomo rabbit hole.

        These parents are good people who don’t deserve this. They’re heartbroken and rightly so.

        We would have very few trannies — and a lot less homosexuality — if promoting it were to become illegal. And yes, this includes having the sassy gay best friend in movies. Right now, it’s so pervasive that it’s nearly impossible to avoid once the kids reach a certain age.

        And if you’re a white kid? Boy, you’re in for a tough road because the only way you can shed the label of oppressor is to become bisexual at the very least.

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      • Bad parents matter vastly more than good ones. By bad, I mean sexual or physical abuse, a crackhead “putting out” her 5 year old to wander the streets etc.

        Foxes only took a few generations to manifest bizarre toy-dog anticamouflage when fed and cared for. The Industrial Revolution has gifted two centuries of dysgenics now.

        It shows up.

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          • That works fine when they’re twelve, not so fine when they’re sixteen. Or when they go off to college.

            Look, I get it. I used to have contempt for parents whose kids turned out this way, but after seeing it firsthand, all I have is sympathy. Sure, some kids turn out this way because the parents are liberal and promote it. Others turn out this way because the parents were neglectful in some manner. But now it’s hitting good, intact families where the parents are actively involved in the kids’ lives.

            It’s not just an epidemic. It’s being done on purpose.

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          • Winter – I have a 17 year old. It requires filling the void with activities rather than abdicating responsibility. And who says you should send your kid to college?

          • Further, to be clear, I am not blaming OP. It is systemic. I just push those two as things ways you can help minimize your exposure and risk. I’ll put it this way – my 17 year old was shocked and disgusted when she saw Rachel Levine just two days ago in a video. You have to remind your kids these are freaks by relegating them to occasional observation. Social media makes it seem normal.

    • This is standard mimetic behavior exhibited all throughout history. But as a parent I sympathize with you and pray you can hang in there….

      11
      • Thanks Captain, but there is nothing “standard” about any of this. And do not be complacent…this could happen to your kids. All of you guys… be careful!!! We’ve lost enough kids to this craziness as it is… don’t assume it can’t happen to yours.

        24
    • While reading the Taki article, I had a thought, and I believe it may address a complimentary point and your question. May I offer a historical parallel? Footbinding. One of the unique aspects of the Chinese practice was that, much as the macaroni craze, it was designed specifically to highlight the status of the elites (supposedly tracing back, if memory serves, to some emperor’s fetish for small feet or something like that). Footbinding literally rendered your daughter unable to walk. In theory, this would make it so only the rich, who could afford to enfeeble their daughter, could display this status symbol.

      What occurred, and it is what makes footbinding unique in terms of ostentatiousness, is that the lower classes, to their own detriment, began to employ this practice. They needed their daughters to work the land, but this fetish became so prized that even the poorest farmers practiced it. To wit, they harmed themselves in the pursuit of this status symbol. It also played a part in marrying off the daughters, of course, but again, this would enfeeble a workmate for a husband (still poor). Typically, lower classes will follow to a point, but ultimately reality of their circumstances will set in. Not with footbinding.

      I believe we are seeing the unique status of footbinding being challenged. We now have lower classes so obsessed with emulating the social signals of their superiors that they will produce major impediments (har har) to their own existence in order to signal. Scary times indeed.

      32
      • Note that after foot binding had spread to the lower classes, the Qing Dynasty Manchus attempted for hundreds of years to ban the practice, because it was actually starting to cause problems. The leaders of the Taiping Rebellion also prohibited it (not that the rebellion succeeded, but it controlled a lot of territory for a long time).

        The Song, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties did little or nothing to protest it, and the Yuans – Mongols – even encouraged Han Chinese to practice it as that ended up crippling their subjects. By the time the Qings came around, it was so embedded that it proved almost impossible to eradicate.

        I think we’re in the place of the Han Chinese, whose people are deliberately being encouraged by foreign rulers to do things that will cripple them, and who are eagerly swallowing the bait. In this case, our “foreign” rulers aren’t necessarily foreign nationals, but are globalists whose loyalties are to transnational ideologies or organizations rather than to their own nominal nations.

    • Damn dude. That is very difficult I can only imagine how awful that must be. I said to our growing clan that I wouldn’t watch any of them destroy themselves through any of the many ways there are to do it, That it would be too painful and would make what ever time I have left unbearable and undoubtedly much shorter. I told them this at Thanksgiving two years ago and I meant it. If or more likely when any of them are possessed by “chosen insanity” they would be banished from our life. This alone would cause my wife and I much anguish but less than the futility of watching their slow destruction. Admittedly this is a hard & unforgiving stance but we believe that the cliche of tough love is true. Also know redemption is real.

      11
    • Levine Levity Dept:
      Trivia: during one of my intermittent conservative* gadfly missions over at ft.com, it is early 2021. Someone relieved that Orange Man was finally gone, the new Biden Administration that America could get back to business as usual. My snarky reply was “A man wearing a dress in a Cabinet position is ‘business as usual’?”

      *The really funny thing is they haven’t banned me in two years, although some posts do vanish. There are a handful of conservatives in comments, perhaps tolerated as legacy readers and/or to add the air of open debate. But the EU shitlib is more the norm.

  14. One of the main reasons the Ivory Tower abandoned the “great man” school of History, I think, is because abandoning it relieves them of the burden of trying to understand people. Just to stick with the approximate era of the “macaronis,” the events in Britain’s North American colonies don’t make sense without understanding the individual personalities, and how they developed — William Pitt was a different guy before he was “Pitt the Elder;” and then again after he was “the Earl of Chatham.” There’s also the quirks of Lord North to consider, not to mention George III himself…

    If you go full Marxist, you don’t have to bother with any of that. Nor do you have to bother to explain something like “the macaronis.” They don’t exist, or if they do, it’s as simple as “conspicuous consumption to shore up their class position.” Never mind how they understood themselves.

    This is why academically trained fools in government always fail, and the more elite the school, the more “rigorous” the Marxist “historical” training.

    21
    • Great men are overwhelmingly white and…ahem…predominantly male. That, as much as anything, is the explanation for why study of them has been elided.

      19
      • Ostei, correct. We’ve gone through “phases” here.

        First phase was to attempt to compete with White historical cultural/technological supremacy by attempting to elevate minority mediocrities into the ranks of those who created and lead such, and therefore should be recognized and emulated along side of Whites. This was a joke and utterly failed—although they won’t admit such.

        Then the ploy switched to elevating minority “victims”. Victim hood is still a goto for those seeking to elevate minorities, with of course Whites being painted as victimizers—a twofer of sorts.

        The latest strategy is the crudest, that is to gaslight all White hero’s (great men) and cast them into the void. In short, to simply erase White history in favor of their egalitarian fairytale.

        These people are no different than the Vandals of old who when sacking Rome destroyed the great buildings and works of art which they could not carry away.

        22
    • True and not true… the Seven Years War was not going well for Britain, but Pitt comes around with stiffer policies that stirred the ship back on course. The war was won, but not against a formidable adversary: France did not invest much on the North American theater as per usual, given its weaker navy than the British, and given that its most pressing need was as always the fighting in Europe, this time against Frederick2’s Prussians. France counted on prevailing in Europe, so then regain any colony lost during the war at the conference table. This time such a strategy didn’t work because of Frederick’s epic exploits ping-pongeing his army up and down through Germany to meet and stop in battle any new army Austrians, Russians, French, Saxons would throw at him.
      All British statesmen after the Orange takeover in 1690 (with bankers attached), were in the end, bland and fungible figures. Anyone else from the same milieu, and with similar education and pedigree of Pitt could have taken his place, discovered France and Holland’s inability and unwillingness to contend with British sea power, and could have then sprang to action and taken ahold of global trade routes the same way done under Pitt.
      I said true and not true, because this is not applicable somewhere else, where who the ruler is actually matters. Russia for instance has been an autocratically governed country since its own dawn. Ivan the terrible, Peter the great, Alexander who vanquished Napoleon, Stalin, Putin all shaped history in trying to achieve their plans. The world would have been much more different with Trotsky succeeding Lenin, or with another Yeltsin type guiding Russia at the turn of the millennium.

      • France had a larger economy and population than Britain. Also the political system allowed the French to throw more money at the war. Britain fielded sizeable armies against the French so hardly just a naval affair. Britain payed for Frederick’s armies which was a huge undertaking for the British and a result of decisions made by Pitt.

        You consider Wellington to be bland and fungible!

        It wasn’t just the Seven years war. Consecutive defeats in the Nine and Seven years war did for the French.

        Using competence as a way to denigrate a politician is absurd when you consider how incompetent most politicians are, therefore individuals count.You seem unaware of any policy debate within Britain.

        You list contingencies which shaped British decisions and therefore negated the individual but believe contingencies had no role in Russian thought. You offer no reason or formula to support this facile contention!

  15. Ah, that ever-elusive bottom. Sometimes I fear AINO is a bottomless pit.

    10
  16. I’d say that the point of the gun grabbing act is to grab the guns. Perhaps only slowly at first, but, sooner or later, completely.

    14
    • The open borders are there to allow easy entry for the bodies they will require to grab the guns.

    • Gun grabbing will not work at the local level. County sheriffs are not stupid enough to play along and big city PDs now have dwindling numbers of competent white male officers with which to prevent serious crime. And you can’t send the affirmative action hires to a gangbanger’s house to confiscate guns without taking huge loses.

      The most likely method of gun grabbing will be federal and involve outlawing certain firearms and then making a few very public persecutions of entraped stooges as a warning to others that its compliance or serious jail time. Similar to the Jan 6th political prisoners. And that won’t work either, but it will serve as another futile distraction that spends a lot of tax dollars, most of which will to go grifting politicians.

      11
      • Last night at the supermarket down the street I saw a towering vibrant city PD officer in line at the sandwich counter with his diminutive female partner.

        I wonder how he feels about being sent on night patrol essentially by himself.

        • Well, seeing as she’s probably the brains of the outfit, she likely doesn’t feel much better.

          15
      • They will not win.
        There are machine shops & chemical labs in every other garage.
        Most importantly enough diehards to make it a wacamole impossibility.

        10
  17. Just, just, just hold on there a minute, bucko. You’re telling me Volodymir Zelenskyy isn’t a real hero.

    19
  18. Just as the solution to a drinking problem is not more drinking, the solution to democracy is never more democracy.

    Once again, in his exceedingly verbose fashion, Z seems to be telling us that the way forward is to disengage with politics. Because after all, it couldn’t possibly matter whether Stephen Miller or Alejandro Mayorkas is running our immigration system. Isn’t that just blazingly obvious?

    4
    11
      • Be less obscure! What kind of politics are you talking about that does not involve voting? Voting is what put Trump and Miller in office. It worked! It made a difference! That seems undeniable to me. And it doesn’t stop you from pursuing your objectives through other means as well.

        Or are you actually saying that it didn’t matter that we had Miller for four years, rather than Mayorkas? If so please say that outright and justify it, because it doesn’t seem plausible at all.

        2
        8
        • If you watch the documentary “2,000 mules”, it will disabuse you of the notion that voting matters. And yes, you can always dangle the carrot of “but we can fix the system and end the fraud” and no doubt convince the softheads that that chimera is viable; but as for me, I prefer the real to the imaginary.

          11
          • Nothing disabuses JEB from his mistaken beliefs. Cognitive dissonance is not a problem for JEB.

          • At this.point it’s going to take rivers of blood.
            I hope vlad jump starts it with a 100 Megaton on DC
            In mine craft of course.

        • Yes, “America” improved so dramatically under Trump. The transformation was so profound that it might as well have been a different country.

          :rolleyes:

        • Trump (and hence Miller) was a one-off. TPTB believed their own bullshit and therefore were not prepared for the level of cheating necessary so he slipped in.

          They did not make that mistake twice. To prove to the world and future wannabees that they learned their lesson, they ran the most glaringly obvious disaster of a candidate and campaign, and blatantly stole an election just in case there were any lingering doubts about their resolve.

          One would hope the message has been received (I can almost imagine some elite thinking to himself “what have we got to do to get through to these people?” after reading that someone still thinks voting matters).

    • You’re not getting it. Stephen Miller gained control of our immigration system and nothing changed.

      16
      1
      • What are you talking about? Plenty changed — at least while Trump was in office. The fact that Trump was unable to bring about lasting change is Trump’s fault, not Miller’s. Trump’s failings are immense, and were plainly visible to everyone even in 2016. And yet he won! So I don’t buy this lame defeatism that says that the all powerful elites will never allow real change through the political system. Trump won, and as far as I’m concerned that proves it isn’t impossible.

        What we need is to vote in a better Trump. If Trump had been a better Trump — someone smarter and less of an flaming jackass — he could have accomplished far more than he actually did. Best case, he might even have done what the Left was always falsely accusing him of doing, which is to promote a cryptic white nationalist agenda! But even short of that, a better Trump would still be in office (via a landslide too big for any funny business), Stephen Miller would still be running our immigration system, and things would be better than they are now. So yes, voting can work.

        4
        13
        • Yep, we need to work harder, vote harder, pray harder. That’s the ticket. So what if the opposing side (and increasingly the other party as well) holds control of the “process” and reserves the “right” tip the scale in their favor when the public gets it “wrong”. You’d be a fool to not vote. 🙁 Take it to the bank, JEB.

          Latest from this State’s (AZ) corrupt process. Just released after months of suing, the chain of custody records wrt mail in ballots for largest County being delivered by the postoffice, postmarked *after* Nov 4 deadline—20K. All were tallied, albeit illegally as per State Constitution.

          • And yet, somehow, Stephen Miller really did run our immigration system for four years. It’s just inexplicable!!!

            3
            4
        • A better Trump would not have mattered. Stalin/Pinochet level purges are what is needed, and that does not appear on the horizon yet. I don’t see TPTB allowing a Stalin/Pinochet to be voted in, unless of course it’s THEIR Stalin/Pinochet.

      • It changed, but it was just not enough of a change. We needed an absolute moratorium with harsh enforced penalties for transgressors. What we got were a few disincentives for people to immigrate which slowed the deluge a bit.

        Better than the situations which preceded and followed, but not nearly enough.

  19. In their desperation to ban guns, they have started highlighting black gun fights and calling them mass shootings, which happen almost daily somewhere in America. Of course they have banned all discussion of race around these events but it is kind of hard for people not to notice when the arrests are reported. They don’t even seem to have considered the possibility this could backfire on them.

    21
    • “…they have started highlighting black gun fights…”

      Just mentioned this last night – bleck and messican, BTW. And yes, as if — these people are not shooting at one another every weekend, and some weekdays. AND they could give a tenth of a damn about ‘gun laws’. Please, retard tier pablum fed to Normie.

      What I also found interesting is how the same media lackeys are promulgating ‘anti cop’ stories, the latest today about some members of the John Law club refusing to ‘go in’ as some guy lost the Darwin Award, I mean won it – by drowning.

      So am I to understand we are entering the ‘no gun’ and ‘no cop’ era? Sure, lots of people will hand over their firearms with that the go-to narrative.

      • CharlieHustle: I found it both interesting and promising that the vast majority of the comments at the Daily Mail story about that Darwin Award nogger essentially said ‘too bad so sad.’ American cops aren’t lifeguards, aren’t required to know how to swim, etc.

        So we have, simultaneously, insane amounts of DIE virtue signaling from White leftists and equally intense amounts of both nogger and compassion fatigue. Generally, when I read of stupid people winning stupid prizes, I just shrug. Genetic pool is way overdue for cleaning. Whether it’s a subcon “Illinois woman” who killed herself paragliding or a nogger who drowned himself by counting on the suicidal sympathy of White cops, I don’t care.

        I can’t pretend that I know exactly how I will react when faced with a genuine crisis or life and death situation. But my strongest inclination these days is “They should have known better.” Not just the deceased diverse, but the Whites who still think they retain freedumbs or can safely take their families to large-scale public events or blithely send their precious children to public school.

        We should all know better by now. And as for those who don’t? As I said, too bad so sad. Cold and uncaring? Perhaps. I’d say it’s more numb from so many years of experiencing and witnessing and reading of the deadly results of social pathologies decades in the making. I notice patterns, and adjust my behavior accordingly. Most of those who don’t won’t survive.

        10
    • California just ended mandatory reporting of shooter events because rayciss. They were trying to keep a database on how often NRA militia types murdered kids… it ended up being a database about all dem yoofs. The ACLU finally complained.

      24
      • David Cole (as usual) has an insightful post up at Takimag on this very issue. He notes that all this “anti-racist” (i.e., pro-black) legislation comes at the expense of everyone else, not just Whitey. Thus, once the hispanic (mostly Mexican, but expanding Central American as well) population wakes up to this, things are probably going to get spicy. There is no love lost between ghetto blacks and their numerically growing hispanic neighbors, who are actually displacing them in most of the blacks’ former strongholds (i.e., “the ghetto”). I look forward to the time when hispanics become the plurality in the USA so that the concept of affirmative action for blacks and females can finally end. (By “look forward,” I mean, of course, behold in abject trepidation.) Nonetheless, if I am still around to witness it, there will be a certain amount of amusement as well as satisfaction to be gained from the experience.

    • “They don’t even seem to have considered the possibility this could backfire on them.”

      Double entendre intended?

    • As I’ve noted, “mass” shootings have been defined as 4 or more killed or wounded—including gunman. This was done long ago so that it’s much easier to conflate school shootings with general gang violence. However, yesterday I heard one news “reporter” calling a three-fer a new mass shooting. So even the above definition seems too rigorous for these professional liars.

  20. The interesting thing is, the carny and macaroni acts show that democracy is already dead. We are ruled by bureaus and agencies, by multinationals and NGOs- nowhere is there seen an input by citizens or a commons.

    So what will be the nature of this rule, then? It’s not based on territory, which has been the final definition for all living things since forever. Is caste possible in such a hypermobile world? Who chooses? Which ruleset?

    And with the damaged younger generation up-and-coming, I don’t see how any order can be maintained. We’re in undiscovered country here, all bets are off.

    17
      • Readers might be wondering why TSMC isn’t hiring for these lower-end technical positions in the US, as the requirements are so low.

        That’s because they are not nearly low enough.

      • Wild Geese: That is so typical and so infuriating. Regardless of qualifications or experience, they demand every new American hire spend months in Taiwan for ‘training.’ Not an option for people with family obligations (wives, kids, parents, etc.) or community ties. And as for the English proficiency of the Taiwanese applicants, I’m sure their test results will be just as honest as all Oriental test takers in the US are today.

        • The Taiwanese know how to bake sub-5nm cakes at scale. Americans do not. It’s that simple.

          Most of the kit they use to do is (albeit very expensive) COTS.. and in theory with a bunch of spare billions can buy it and build their own fab — just like you and Shaniqua could Learn to Code.

          It’s really simple. The secret is in the sauce. The institutional knowledge… the myriad small things which taken together and done by a workforce with *continuity* going back decades has the institutional knowledge and culture to be able to handle very complex manufacturing and QC processes at humongous scale. You cannot transplant that by just parachuting a few ‘trainers’ with Powerpoints into the USA and hiring all those non-existent engineers.

          One of the reasons that the USA cannot do this stuff itself anymore is because of the MBA-driven idea that people are interchangeable parts. They’re not when you get to the very limits of physics and engineering where TSMC’s fabs are operating.

          Americans could do with a massive dose of humility and willingness to learn from their betters — think of it as swallowing a bitter pill in order to Win the Copeium War.

          5
          2
  21. The ruling class is powerful but they’re incompetent. We saw this with the Freedom Convoy.

    The affirmative action police chief in Ottawa was unprepared and let all the truckers in. Trudeau refused to do the simple thing, meet with the truckers and rescind a very small trucking vax mandate. After belittling the truckers he ran away into hiding.

    They were unable to clear out the trucks for 4 weeks. Tow truck companies refused to help. Military said no way. Regular cops didn’t want anything to do with it either.

    Finally the government had to go full scorched earth, declaring Emergencies Act, the highest level of emergency possible, which suspended every “right”. This forced tow companies to comply with the government’s request or be jailed. Police thugs from Quebec (essentially an alien country to everyone else, since many English speaking cops didn’t want to do it) were dressed up as military. Black Ottawa chief fired and replaced with white guy thug cop.

    Yes, they did “win” ie. end the protest ended. Because they’re powerful. But it escalated to the highest level of emergency for what basically amounted to a few thousand rednecks driving around and honking.

    It was exceptionally peaceful and it is easy to imagine a time where their scorched earth isn’t enough.

    25
    • and they damaged the national banking system in the process. not to mention the reputation of canada as a country.

      27
      • “and they damaged the national banking system in the process. not to mention the reputation of canada as a country.”

        I wonder how many outside of the former country known as “Canada” reacted the way I did with my business holdings. The moment word came out about the scoundrel Tru Dork and his minions locking up truckers’ bank accounts – I ordered a pull-out of ALL financial resources, personal and corporate. Sure, my paltry mid 6-figures, perhaps ‘a lot of money’ to the millions working for $14-18 an hour here in the States – but understood to be chump change – may not have moved any needles. But the folks at T-D Bank sure seemed to want to know “why” – gave no reason of course – flunky lady there said ‘you were the third today’ whatever that means.

        Now playing cancel is not all that easy when you are doing business and have transactions from ACH, to credit card deposits, etc. It took some time, then the final closure. Had to watch the dishonest American bank, make sure money leaving and money (hahah “money”) entering did not experience float. Confirm with all entities that were depositing via ACH that they had the new accounts, etc.

        A PITA but like not consuming woketard products, still allows you to personally express “fuck you” by denying your resources/eyeballs.

        23
        • Getthemoney: Hope many others did the same thing. The more of us who withdraw from the system – political, social, and financial – the better. We try to keep just enough in the bank to cover our bills – more than we’d like – but nothing extra.

          Just as Whites shouldn’t trust their children to government schools, we shouldn’t trust the fruits of our labor to banks. Buy tangible assets and hold or hide them as you choose. Only a fool would willingly choose to be an unsecured creditor to the bankers, especially when government scrip is losing value day by day.

    • Yes. The elites were stretched to their breaking point thanks to ONE incident involving just a FEW thousand rednecks.

      Can you imagine how powerful and controlling the elites would remain if they had to deal with even 2 or 3 of such events simultaneously? The elite’s position is really more fragile and precarious than they would have you (or themselves) believe.

      24
    • The Freedom Convoy ended with the government being stronger and the protesters much weaker.

      With the stoke of an executive pen, Trudeau made JUST DONATING to the truckers an act that could make you lose everything.

      Emotionally the Freedom Convoy looked great, but the precedent has been set. Minor, peaceful protests can get your license revoked and your bank account seized.

      On what planet was the Freedom Convoy a win?

      4
      4
      • Not really stronger. The power was always there to use. The Convoy forced them to use it. It showed the world where the fear lies.

    • And it had the salutary effect of illustrating to any Canadian who had eyes to see, that the government was essentially a nascent dictatorship operating behind a facade of liberal democracy.

    • Canada had to go scorched Earth because the truckers were a real threat to them. BLM, trannies, etc. are worthless, so no need to show force on them (in fact, they become an asset by transforming into the club with which to beat normies into submission). But the truckers provide an actual service that is necessary to continued functioning of society. Can’t let them believe they have any leverage.

  22. Regarding the Taki post, to distinguish themselves from the Dirt People, the elite or really, “progressives” must – by definition – hold views not held by the majority of people. The result is a continuous ideological arms race.

    Every time the Dirt People are forced to accept some crackpot idea, such as homosexual marriage, the elite are forced to move on to something more radical, such as a man in a dress is a woman.

    Now, if the elite weren’t so powerful, we could some happy equilibrium where the elite hold some insane view and the Dirt People ignore them. But because the elite control the media, the courts and, to a degree, corporate America, their views get pushed onto the Dirt People until a majority of them either truly accept this new crazy idea or just say they do to keep their job.

    This, again, cause the elite to move on to a new, even crazier idea, an idea that literally repulses the Dirt People so much that they reject it even though the media shoves it down their throats and rejecting it threatens their social and economic health. As a result, we live in the Repulsive Age, an age where the elite hold views that are repulsive to normal people until those views are finally made “normal.”

    We live in the Repulsive Age.

    36
  23. Nah, this one’s got it all wrong.
    What you need is…

    Pence 2024!

    *****
    We must defend democracy everywhere, because its two great strengths are:

    First, you can invite people in who then vote you out of power.

    Second, they then can vote themselves your stuff.

    This is why the franchise must always be expanded- so that a story can be told of your historical grievance against them. So of course you owe them your lands and your stuff.

    Did I mention the greatest promoters of new franchises? I did not.
    Remarkable that liberal democracy and BIS banking grew to cover the globe in the 20th century. It’s such a good idea, we should extend voting and finance to a world body, like the United States of Earth. We could call it the United Nations and the World Bank!

    12
    • Speaking of expanding the franchise, it’s funny how out of one side their mouths comes ‘we need to give 16 year olds the franchise.’ But out of the other side of their mouths, ‘we cannot send 16 year old murderers to prison for life because their precious little minds are undeveloped.’

      They just say whatever happens to serve them in the moment.

      21
  24. In the “Theory of the Leisure Class”, Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” to capture the behavioral and sartorial signaling of the Elite. The whole point of outlandish clothing is to signal one’s complete avoidance of manual labor.

    Along these lines, today’s Elite signal their status by holding beliefs utterly inconsistent with the laws of physics and basic biology. They shun fire, dirt and blood in favor of “Macaroni ideas”, as Zman observes at Taki. Like the Red Queen in Wonderland, they can believe six impossible things before breakfast.

    But if we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that the peasants ultimately have to be fed. We shall see if drag queens can fix tractors and combines.

    23
    • There was a scene in Gone With the Wind where Rhett Butler examines Scarlett’s hands and exclaims in horror that she was doing modern labor. In a more modern context, one of my wife’s Hispanic friends goes to insane lengths to avoid the sun, as in Hispanic culture being very tan is considered low status, since it implies labor in the sun.

      In contrast, some elite schools in the early 1900’s required men to join rough sports like football or rugby, since they believed, correctly, that leaders need to be able to cope with physical duress.

      Pretty simple what elite culture is more conducive to society.

      22
  25. “America will have to hit rock bottom before it abandons the clown-ocracy.”

    The scary thing is, how many Americans will have to die before we eke our way out of this level of hell where we’ve been for quite awhile?

    12
      • I didn’t used to.

        Things in this country are failing so quickly and on so many fronts it’s hard not to wonder if much of the deep states actions aren’t wholly deliberate.

        11
        • I have believed there is a plan being implemented for quite a while.

          My thoughts about the factions and intent behind that plan are my own.

          On the flipside, I’m pleasantly surprised things in my area are still relatively normal given the havoc that has been wreaked during the past two years.

  26. It’s fitting that the luxury opinions are, in themselves, becoming more and more restrictive and stifling to the people espousing them. Just like entertainment media is so constricted by unwritten speech codes as to what can and can’t be said that little interesting art is capable of being produced, modern political entertainment has become just as stuffy.

    Most people in Gen Z are so inundated in this environment that’s it’s questionable whether they will even have the mental framework to understand any arguments outside the sphere, including founding documents such as “The Federalist Papers”, and the average young swamp creature will be unable to understand people from just twenty years ago.

    It’s like explaining color to someone who only can see black and white.

    30
    • About a dozen years ago, I was with a friend and his son, who was early teens at the time. I used a colorful euphemism about homosexuals and the boy actually gasped. I ignored it, but my friend after told me that it was the conditioning in the schools. The kids were trained to fear such talk. By the end of high school the conditioning was gone and the kid sounded normal. Nature finds a way.

      44
    • Colorful euphemisms aren’t dead. My kid uses all kinds of colorful euphemisms when gaming with his friends. Every time he says the F word I get misty. “That’s my boy!”

      18
      • Well, it is pride month. What used to be yesterday’s saddle-less bicycle for nuns is today’s mobile dilation for trannnies. Sustainability in practice.

        10
        • Submitted for your amusement: an utterly tasteless impromptu composition by Layabout.

          An Ode to Gay Pride Month

          Forgive my buffoonish buggery,
          Poetry purely in jest you see,
          A song of a schlong where it don’t belong,
          Were it set to melody.

          In some States it’s still a felony,
          To have some fellow’s rod in me,
          There’s incipient irony,
          As I’ll recount below.

          All seemed well at the rest stop
          Until he announced he was a cop
          Activity screeched to a stop
          And I was under arrest

          Well I was tried and convicted
          But it’s to dick that I’m addicted
          And now comes the irony
          I spoke of just before

          Oh, sure, they put me in prison
          Oh! How my spirits have risen
          The judge he blessed me unbidden
          It’s a gay man’s paradise.

      • I was at a New Year’s Eve party about 10 years ago. There was karaoke. A group of mid20s milennials were singing Money For Nothing. They all sang ‘the little fa99ot’ lyrics with extra gusto. Not sure if the same would transpire today. The kids have been programmed to be terrified of such language. By the by, the local radio stations either dub that lyric or skip the whole segment of the song.

  27. The problem with escalating panics and sideshows is the next has to be more absurd than the last and at some point escalation becomes impossible. The Empire’s current embrace of pedophilia surely is the last stop or the one before it. From all accounts, when the Mayans reached their final stop at human sacrifice, which was a pretext for Elite cannibalism, the wheels soon came off and the once-great society collapsed. The Davos degenerates touting insect consumption certainly has parallels, but my money is on domestic mass murder (which we currently have with wars for pleasure and profit, but I’m talking about the internal version), with the High Priests soon hereafter slain themselves and piled up like cord wood, a common denominator of all end stage Jonestown societies.

    People are laughing and ridiculing the Elite more and more often, so the logical next stage for the Dirts will be to ignore those who would consume them.* The Grillers likely will not return the favor until people close to them are slain. Normie will grill rather than kill until the neighbors are smoked as much as his brisket and not one second earlier and even then reluctantly.

    Finally, as carny trash goes, the D.C. freak show hardly is the first but arguably the most ludicrous in human history.

    The whole world is laughing.

    *The fly in the ointment is the presence of nuclear weapons, and our dandies apparently would like to go out in a blaze of glory but cannot figure out how to do so in a sequence that allows them to first savor the mass murder of innocents below their perceived stations.

    31
    • I’m thinking some version of Hunger Games. Running man also?
      We have a lot of creative talent in our past giving us some nice options. Of course maybe with a more decadent twist.

    • The clowns and jesters at the top are only half the problem. The Dirt class is infested with clowns too. The schools are churning them out like sausages.

      The normies and grillers are going to be the guys that end this. We are literally looking at food shortages and economic depression. Clowns are expensive, and hungry grillers and normies will not be placated by capering faggots and pedos.

      Either a Stalin or a You-Know-Who will arise from this, but regardless… a chitstorm and a reckoning are one the way.

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      • No doubt it has trickled down to some degree, but those people below the Clouds going along with this or outright embracing it are powerless. My guess is the number of Dirts who pay lip service vs. actually believe skews way toward the former.

        I am not so certain economic depression will shake the Grillers or Normies up outside of maybe wasting their time voting for the same Republicans who want to disarm them. They probably will not act until subjected to actual physical violence, which now seems likely.

        • Well, almost powerless. Plumbing still has to plumb. The fear from the trucker convoy came to the fore with the aggressive actions taken against them. TPTB know they cannot let the Truckers win, nor even give them an inch, lest they get uppity. BLM is not threat, as they provide nothing which is needed.

  28. It needs to be said.

    Yes, the DC political class is dominated by carny trash. And yes, they are spending us into oblivion, supercharging hyperinflation, and pushing the dirt people into ruin. And yes yes, there are no checks & balances because they own the police and elections are a fraudulent joke.

    But they are not tough guys (like the old mafia was), and they can only exist as long as white guys chasing a paycheck man protect them. Once the white guys in uniform stop manning the riot line, they will have no choice but to exit to their lives of luxury in the Bahamas. But Gulfstreams are the enemy of the manpads disappearing in Ukraine. Poetic justice?

    27
    • Who else saw that row of private jets at Davos and thought, “a nice collection of illegitimate SAMS and MANPADS would be just the thing right now.”

      12
  29. “…a people can only recover from the rule by carny trash by exiting the theater of democracy.”

    Paging General Pinochet…

    20
    • In memory of the recently departed Ray Liotta, “You wanna see helicopters? I’ll show you helicopters!”

  30. Our clowns in charge are doing their best to keep all the plates spinning – Ukraine, covid, trannyism, faggotry, negrophilia, abortion, gun grabbing, J6 etc. Unfortunately for them as well as us, inflation is the big, bad genie popping out of the bottle. When you can hardly afford to drive to the store in order to attempt to buy what little is left, no one is going to give two sh*** about those clown issues and the spinning plates are going to come crashing down.

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  31. Hitting bottom may occur via economic collapse and mass impoverishment, as seems likely going forward or, with dictatorship also a probability as the two often go together.

    Unless and until this scenario develops in a more full fledged way, the elite, absent intramural conflict, have little to fear from opponents and have no real need to keep the carny going.

    Consider Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII. “Your kingdom for a horse?” he replied to Richard III’s offer of a deal. “I’ve got the horse and now it appears I’ve got the kingdom, so what’s to deal?”

  32. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Quitting the Circus

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