Honesty Box
With the nights drawing in – and with bills for renewing hosting, domain registration, security, and so forth all upcoming – it’s time to remind patrons that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there are three buttons below the fold with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. If what happens here is of value, this is a chance to show it.
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For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last seventeen years, in over 3,000 posts and 200,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.
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By all means consider this an open thread.
Oh yes. The buttons:
May you never spend $80 on urgently needed tools, only to find some stashed in an odd corner.
Yeah, but add about 5 years worth of blessings. I have no life and live vicariously through David’s True Stories.
Mostly true.
I know. The intrigue is unbearable.
Oh, look, that thing that doesn’t happen happened again.
The sheer number of these occurrences can only mean the denial machine is going to start up soon: “xe/xir he/she/they aren’t “real” trans.”
On that idea about “populations consisting of 100% high school graduates” and all the rest.
Go ya one better… How about a population of 100% high school graduates that is also screened for physical/mental fitness and criminal records? How would that be, a paradise?
That’s the description of the US Army I served in for most of my career; along with that, you had the fact that you had to pass a fairly rigorous sort of training and winnowing out process for about 8-32 weeks, there at the beginning. D’ya think that made a difference?
If anything, the experience of dealing with the “ten percent” of that population that caused problems led me to seriously question the job our education system was doing. Most of them were stone-ignorant and utterly lacked any ability to work out cause-effect relationships, worked out in real life.
I’d be hesitant to use any criteria besides real-life performance to select groups. High school diplomas aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, these days.
I wish there were a workable solution for the world, that would bring it back into conformity with reality, but… I think there’s going to have to be an interregnum of sheer horror, before it penetrates a lot of skulls that what you wish just isn’t so.
And, that’s the essential problem with much of our “progressitariat”: They live in their heads, and they’ve built up this set of false expectation and beliefs that whatever they think must be or become reality, regardless of the observed effect those ideas have in the real world. That’s why so many of them keep demanding more money, more resources, to go down the rat-hole of whatever fantasy belief they’ve formed and convinced others to participate in… See, for example, any of the “homeless programs”.
I’ve a friend who used to be a counselor in those programs. She described the epiphany she had, after about the sixth or seventh attempt to get one guy “off the streets” in the three years she was with that agency. She was sitting there at her desk, talking to the client, and suddenly realized that he didn’t really want to “get off the streets”, all he wanted to do was scam some free benefits so he could go on about his life of drugs and dereliction… It took a bit for it all to penetrate her indoctrination, but it finally did, and she realized that she wasn’t doing anything to help anyone by where she was working and what she did. So, she got up, ushered her client out the door, and then walked into her bosses office and quit.
She’s been much happier, since.
See any of various columns that Theodore Dalrymple has written about his years working in prison and slum hospitals. 🙁
Thank you, David. Your tip jar has been hit.
Bless you, sir. May your cables be tidily organised.
How luxury beliefs work.
From the article: “When he grabbed my son’s arm, my dog attacked him and then he stumbled back off the stairs,”
GOOD boy! Hope the puppers got a very tasty steak for his deed.
And in celebration of said GOOD Boy, my good girl Roxy urged me to toss something into the tip jar.
PING
Crime at the University of Chicago:
The university is on the South Side, where black crime is a daily thing.
Men who pretend to be women have invaded the Daughters of the American Revolution.
High school diplomas aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, these days.
Yes! And neither are a significant number of university degrees–both undergrad and postgrad.
…suddenly realized that he didn’t really want to “get off the streets”, all he wanted to do was scam some free benefits so he could go on about his life of drugs and dereliction…
The bad machine doesn’t know it’s a bad machine and the progressitariat still believes the factory can fix the bad machine.
Crime at the University of Pennsylvania.
Leftwing mind virus comes for DAR.
Oh, there is such a thing.
See Nina Jankowicz “You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation”.
Arielle Fodor is even worse.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/21/health/boundaries-kindergarten-holiday-wellness/index.html
Whoops, PST314, I posted on same subject (DAR) as you. My apologies for stepping on your post.
*inserts coin*
I don’t doubt it. Though again, Ms Heffernan, mentioned upthread, doesn’t provide any evidence to that effect regarding her neighbours, the ones who were neighbourly while she was away. There’s no mention of any actual transgression, or any obvious basis for disaffection, and no expectation that any actual wrongdoing need be mentioned – beyond the fact that they failed to vote for Mr Biden. For which they must atone. For which they must earn absolution. From their self-imagined betters.
And so, being progressive and therefore pious, Ms Heffernan badmouths them, luridly and breathlessly, in print, in an attempt to publicly humiliate them.
How dare they think differently while being thoughtful and obliging.
Bless you, madam, and bless you, sir. When heading out of town to visit a beloved sister-in-law, may you remember to take some decent coffee with you.
The thing about “aggressive niceness” is that it isn’t really all that nice…
It is also extremely stressful to deal with, in general terms. The people who’ve basically weaponized this “niceness” wield it as a tool in order to shut down criticism of their own incompetence and sloth.
All over the local healthcare facilities you’ll find these little signs telling you that they won’t tolerate any negativity or criticism. If you voice your displeasure with their rampant idiocy, then you’re “aggressive” and they’re going to take action.
I once heard the word “stress” defined as that which you undergo when restraining yourself from providing some dumbass with the beating they manifestly deserve. I think that’s true, and that all of this “niceness” is basically the way these people go about controlling the narrative, and thus, everyone else. You’re not “nice”? We’ll call the security people, or the cops, and have you charged. For criticizing us…
The other thing with this is that they demand acquiescence with every idiocy they come up with. I had to deal with this during my time driving my mother to her cancer treatments… The wheelchairs she needed were being kept at a different entrance than the one we had to use, and whenever I had to go get one, the jobsworthy in charge of that entrance would harass me for taking one of “his” wheelchairs. The whole thing was surreal, because as far as I could tell and anyone could tell me, there was no real distinction between entrances in terms of which type of wheelchair went where… He just refused to put the ones without the provision for oxygen tanks at the entrance we had to use, and that got in the way. Any attempt to question either his authority or the sense of the whole thing, and… Yeah. I got the feeling he wanted to call the cops on me, for my transgressions, but he really couldn’t.
People like that character infest most of our institutions. Look at what the FAA is trying to do to SpaceX… Same mentality.
I’ll wager you good money that there was some similar freak there when Columbus sailed, demanding signatures for supplies and what-not. Precisely the same sort of mentality on display at Isandlwana, with the ammo crates. Hordes of Zulus with spears coming at them, and the supply types are demanding signatures before issuing the ammo…
We used to know these things. Now it seems we have to pretend we don’t.
If he weren’t real – and a real danger – it might almost be funny. A bizarre comedy sketch.
[ Slurps coffee, compiles Friday’s Ephemera. ]
Some things are worth saying twice. 🙂
[ Hides breakables. ]
I have, in fact, encountered that phenomenon in my personal life: Leftists will deny that leftists are attempting to silence dissent, and when presented with examples will deflect by claiming that the individual was punished not for their views but for “incivility”.
He’s a big girl.
This is of more concern:
as there is a non-zero risk of a dancing monkey.
[ Wipes bar, whistles nonchalantly. ]
Cluster B leftist imagines a Better World:
As I may have mentioned before, I once knew a “progressive” of awkwardly moderate intelligence who was chronically traumatized by the plethora of supermarket choices. Numerous varieties of chicken noodle soup from various brands was just too much for her to handle. And suggesting ways for her to cope didn’t help. Clearly the only reasonable solution is to eliminate choice. (The online crank’s claim that the choice is “fake” ignores the fact that these soups are all different in various ways and will appeal to people with different palates and needs.)
[ Overcome by shame over failure to save more than a couple contributions. ]
That’s not how shopping works. Or indeed self-contemplation. And I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than, say, eleven seconds choosing which type of peanut butter I’d like. I somehow doubt that any great reimagining of my life, or of the world in general, would otherwise have occurred to me during those eleven seconds.
And a person who is emotionally exhausted by a choice of peanut butter seems unlikely to steer us towards some radical enlightenment and profound personal growth. But apparently, we’re to take lessons in self-improvement from someone who is prevented from flourishing and ushering in utopia by the fact that more than one type of peanut butter exists.
Such titans walk among us.
I bet she thinks she’s the first person to come up with that too.
Cyclist charm school. A debate ensues.
“transgression fetish”
Except early in one’s life when one first begins shopping for oneself.
Or, in my case, again when I went on a low-carb/almost-zero-sugar diet.
And occasionally when a favorite brand disappears.
These are deeply “troubled” people. And yet they presume to tell us how to live.
“dealing with racial trauma. Please send money to fund my healing journey.”
Look at this terrible kerning. Just look at it!
Well, yes, a fleeting period of know-nothing novelty. But people generally buy whatever they bought last time, whatever is familiar and acceptable. Which is why online grocery shopping has a ‘favourites’ option to save the customer needless farting about. This accounts for the overwhelming majority of grocery shopping.
Only occasionally is there a departure from this – a new and sufficiently intriguing brand, a whopping discount, or something. Again, people don’t generally ponder all of the conceivable options for every kind of item on their shopping list. That would be hilarious. Or, if you were stuck behind them, legitimate grounds for murder.
That’s why you can think about other things while you’re food shopping.
Heh. Well, yes. You could even use your “mindspace” to ponder “What person shall I become?” If that’s your thing.
I, of course, glide around the local supermarket with both poise and machine-tooled efficiency. Even the deli counter and wine aisle, where some browsing might be expected, barely slow me down.
It should be a sport.
Rather like solving every new problem in math and physics by starting from first principles rather than from what has already been established.
Did you see the item on Twitter about the thief who was tied to a sign post with plastic shrinkwrap?
I often find myself stuck in the checkout line behind women who spend an astonishing amount of time rummaging in their purses, finding the wallet and coin purse, counting the cash, counting the change received, putting away the wallet and purse and receipt, and miscellaneous fiddling/tidying.
My local supermarket introduced a personalised online voucher system, a kind of loyalty rewards thing, but it’s not been well thought-out, or particularly well-received. The result of which is that I often find myself at the checkout behind someone faffing about with their phone, trying, often vainly or at great length, to find their selected products. It slows everything down and generates a fair amount of embarrassment, as the atmosphere of testing others’ patience becomes more difficult to ignore.
Why they couldn’t just have a card that gets scanned, resulting in a discount, I will never know.
You’re misinformed on the meaning of the word ‘cranks’. The grandparents of children today danced to that tune. Some people read/understood the lyrics and raised concerns. Those people were called cranks.
Heh. Timed my wife at 45 seconds deciding which can of tuna to buy. Mock if you will but the struggle is real. For some people.
Yeah…yeah…some on the right will do that as well. “Incivility” is a rather universal trump card (npi) for avoiding the underlying issue or as an escape route when cornered logically. Usually after frustrating the hell out of the “uncivil” one with irrelevant, well refuted arguments.
Added: why is it “incivility” but not “incivil”? “Uncivil”? Stupid language. Fight me.
That would drive me to distraction. There would be shouting and gestures.
Don’t tell her I said that. I’m sure she had her reasons.
Would watch.
He’s a loony.
Oh and ping!
Our local supermarket, Ingles, has a card you scan. Certain the advertised specialized customer discounts are tied to that. Additionally, you acquire points that can be applied to discounts on their gas station prices. Paid $1.80/gallon yesterday. I was afraid my truck was going to start playing Phil Collins music again.
Bless you, madam. May your laundry hamper fill in a predictable manner, and not suddenly go from empty to EVERY POSSIBLE ITEM OF CLOTHING STUFFED IN THERE.
#MoreTrueLifeDrama
Part of it is age creeping in. Part of it. Since we got her a new car, watching her pick a parking spot is becoming increasingly…ummm…better move on…
Act casual, say nothing.
The Grift™ is strong with this one.
It couldn’t be some tacky Supermarket Sweep thing, obviously. I’m picturing something classy and sophisticated.
There’d be points for poise and efficiency, and for having your shopping list ordered to match the layout of the aisles. Players would encounter the occasional curve ball, in the shape of some old dear umming-and-ahing about which type of tinned beans were acceptable and sufficiently inexpensive.
In the event of a tiebreaker, players would be judged on their ability to hide their impatience and irritation while stuck at the checkout behind some disorganised ditz fiddling with their phone or coin purse. The mention of coupons would result in cold terror.
Peak time, Saturday night. Untold millions would tune in.
Too simple. Introducing complexity is what most computerised systems do these days.
Ooh…another interesting tie breaker would be to have the store reorganized. Lived through that one twice with Publix. The second time, somewhat exasperated, it came up at the checkout (where they routinely would ask you if you found everything you were looking for) and the young bagger expressed his own frustration with the situation. Some idiot apparently thought that aligning all stores such that things were in the same place no matter what store it was would be a thing to do. I say idiot because anyone who has traveled around FL/GA, let alone some corporate idiot, would/should be well aware that Publix having been in some locations for more than half a century, have very, very different layouts, square footage, etc. But on top of that bloody obvious mistake, they decided that things would be arranged according to what time of day you consumed them. So breakfast aisles would be followed by lunch aisles followed by dinner aisles. It was so bloody stupid that it appears that they abandoned the idea. I think the scamdemic may have been a factor. See? I do try to see the bright side of bad events.
A while ago, on holiday, in search of adventure, I wandered into a discount supermarket – I think it may have been Lidl – which I’d never been in before. The layout was bizarre, seemingly random, utterly incomprehensible. Fruit and veg followed by gardening implements. Turn a corner and its canned goods. And shoes.
I treasure the memory.
When my local supermarket first introduced self-checkout lanes, the machines did not work smoothly. Various quirks slowed down the process and made them annoying to use. But eventually they got things working fairly well. I noticed the same problem at Walgreens, except that due to either bugs or shopper resistance or shoplifting they eventually got rid of the self-checkout machines.
I figure that sometimes the engineers are at fault for not having good understanding of human interfaces while at other times it’s management for imposing silly requirements. And then there are the problems discovered when a perfectly good machine encounters defective humans.
He’s a big girl.
He’s a big girl’s blouse more like, definitely big at any rate. wth is with the giant cartoon boobs garishly on display? These guys always seem to cosplay hookers for some reason.
But the most disturbing thing about the video is the poor kid being used as a prop, in the background, behind dad’s new boobs. Selfish, narcissistic asshole.
Let’s not go nuts.
This. Big time. I worked with a human factors specialist in the 90’s when GUIs were becoming a thing. At that time and for a decade or so, UIs tended to follow a consistent, top to bottom, left to right flow. With the advent of apps for phones and tablets, the thousands of designers with no sense of discipline, design, or direction those standards have been abandoned. Even on milti-multi billion dollar military/government projects that I have worked, things have been left to whatever random developer to design. Usually a developer with little desire nor especially incentive to spend much time on UI. They had similar problems with their databases. And they wondered why everything ran so bloody slow.
I suspect the precipitous decline in literacy may also be a factor.
I don’t think technically literacy was a problem, but the rapid turnover in new underlying tool sets, thus the attraction of new bright, shiny objects to play with did create conditions for a form of design illiteracy.
Thrill-seeker is my middle name.
I was thinking more generally. Left-to-right, top-to-bottom, is how one reads.
Too many brands of peanut butter: Bernie Sanders gave a talk about too much choice, calling it “wasteful”. Sure, let the gov decide food brands and car brands. You will drive a Trabant and like it, eat hydrogenated peanut butter, white margarine, saltless chips. These people are insane. Every good thing we enjoy pisses them off. How dare people have individual tastes?
FTFY
It well behooves us to recall that Sanders and his ilk don’t look on most of humanity as people.
It is a certainty that Sanders would be quite put out if his choice was limited by others . . . say in the number of houses he could own.
There’s another good takedown of the peanut butter scold by James Lileks, where a commenter helpfully notes that he/she/it is yet another Potemkinwoman. Maybe that explains the notion that one needs the “mindspace” to wonder “what person shall I become,” since apparently he/she/it has no idea in the first place of what person they are now.
Sanders calls himself a “Democratic Socialist” but every now and then he says something that reveals the hard core Communist hiding behind the smiley face.
‘Democratic Socialism’ – putting the fetters on yourself.
The really amusing thing to consider is that if you were to put these idjits like Bernie Sanders in charge of things, and then actually force them to make things work…?
They’d wind up reinventing the current system.
Why? Because that’s human nature. The real root problem with most of these idjit types isn’t that they’re “smarter than everyone else”, but that they’ve zero self-awareness or self-knowledge.
Shopping is a case in point. Were you to make things such that there was one deodorant, one peanut butter…? You’d have to re-invent branding and uniqueness in order to satisfy that very human need to put one over on people. “Oh, Sally… This brand of peanut butter is so much better than that one you’re buying…”
They want the New Soviet Man, mostly because they don’t understand either themselves or other people. Shopping among a variety of brands and choices? That is a much more satisfying thing to real humans than the singular product wonderland they imagine… Because that hunt for the unique, the preferable, the thing that YOU found…? That’s something that is extremely satisfying, something enjoyable. If you didn’t have that outlet, you’d have to create games or something else that would scratch the same itch.
You walk into a supermarket, or a farmer’s market, or anything else in the way of shopping experience? You have to rewind a couple of thousand years of human history, and then wrap your head around the idea that you’re walking through an idealized hunter-gatherer experience, one meant to cater to your every desire and reflex.
That produce section down at the local shops? Baby, I want you to imagine you’re an early hominin out looking for dinner: Look around; is this not paradise? Heaven? You’ve got an abundance of choice, and variety all around… You can lord your finds over your fellow hominins, because you’re so much better at this than they are…
Ya wanna know why people were so miserable in the Soviet Union and other “Worker’s Paradises”? It’s because the assholes who ran the places were fundamentally and emphatically NOT human. They’d no understanding of human drives, human desires, human needs.
Those people who don’t like shopping? Usually mentally ill, to some degree or another. Autistic, and damaged goods… They don’t experience life as other humans do; an abundance of choice is threatening to them because they can’t make choices or discern differences, so they want all of that taken out of their environment. Real humans delight in finding the better-flavored fruit, the perfectly ripened whatever; you take away their choices, their ability to choose? You’ve diminished them, and they’re going to find other ways, ones you’re likely going to find a lot less pleasing than the usual outlets.
Shopping is a competition; it’s a bunch of things, all wrapped around our evolutionary past. We set things up that way because to do so is to embrace our humanity, flawed and messy as it is. The merchants these assholes all disparage? They’re lifesavers. Were you to take away choice and variety for the human shopping experience, then that would be a lot like what they do with zoo animals when they put them in stark cages. The animals go mad, and then start behaving really oddly… Which is precisely why “Real Communism(TM)” always fails; it’s against human nature, and does not provide for real human needs in any way, shape, or form.
This extends out into other arenas, like the economy. You take away the chance for people like Elon Musk, you’ve basically removed an entire major pathway for human behavior to express itself. The result will not be pleasing.
It’s always struck me as really bizarre that a lot of the same people who demand “enriching environments” for farm animals and specimens in zoos look around at the world around them and say the diametric opposite should be the case for human beings. And, on top of that, they’re so damn blind to their own natures, they don’t even recognize that they’d be miserable themselves in their proposed “ideal world”. They utterly lack self-knowledge, and are entirely unable to recognize their own behavioral drives and desires.
And, don’t bullshit yourself; even if you loathe going shopping with the wife, as a male? You’re just as deeply embedded into the high-plains hunter-gatherer thing as she is, in daily life. I have this friend of mine who bemoans his wife’s shopping and would likely shoot himself in the head to get out of going with her, but… That same sumbitch who denies, denies, denies his own inner “shopping nature” goes out and does exactly the same damn thing she does, but in different context… Get him talking about his last automotive purchase? Oh, dear God… You’d be able to change the terms slightly, and you could be listening to Oog the Hunter telling you about how he stalked and tricked the mammoth into the swamp.
Denial of human nature is what the idjit class does, because they’re inherently inhuman. They’re fakes; they try to portray human, but the minute you hear one of them bewailing “too much choice!!!”, you know that you’re dealing with a changeling that isn’t really another human being. Choice, and the ability to discriminate between those choices? That’s an essential human need, and if you don’t meet it, the human animal in the cage you’ve put them into won’t thrive, won’t be happy, and will demonstrate a bunch of different behaviors you won’t like, not one damn bit.
Indeed. Some want Big Brother to save them from the burden of thought. Others want to be Big Brother so they can stop people from thinking freely.
Yeah, no. They’d just kill everyone who looked to be in the way.
My local supermarkets carry dozens of varieties each of the most popular cheeses–cheddar,
swissemmentaler, mozzarella, colby, etc. I sometimes grumble silently that I can find only one variety each of mahon and butterkase and gruyer and only at one of those stores (and never any wensleydale or grandfather’s cheese) but there is no actual resentment in that grumbling: My neighbors have, in their purchases, voted on what the stores should carry and although I regret the lack of certain things I love I am sublimely grateful for what I have and wouldn’t impose any changes on the “system”. Why should any sane person rage against all this?Classic Lileks wit. But why does he not link to the offending tweet? That routine failure is one of the reasons I grew so disenchanted with “mainstream” journalism.
Ping!
But she was also offended by the variety of choices in areas of commerce that did not affect her at all: She never ate fast food, but objected peevishly to the wide variety of fast food restaurants in her neighborhood: Why can’t there be just one burger restaurant, rather than three or four? Just one coffee shop rather than a Starbucks, a Peets, a Dunkin Donuts, and several others? Such waste!
Conclusion: Sometimes the longing for Big Brother can have multiple roots.
They’re not sane, and I suspect that were you to test them, they might not qualify as “people”, either.
There are a lot of things-on-two-legs walking around on this planet with us that are not, I fear, fully human. What to do about that…? Something we need to work out, because as time goes on and the world gets simultaneously smaller and more complex, such creatures are an active menace.
Time was, a megalomanic leader of a hunter-gatherer band could only damage the lives of his band, and they could easily either leave or put him down, once he’d grown nasty enough. Same for the matriarchal side. Today? They’re rather more dangerous, and harder to deal with. They won’t leave you alone, so you have to be a lot more pro-active and far more discerning.
Every one of these assholes, like Bernie Sanders? They come out of a social matrix that tolerated them and their many idiocies and madnesses. Hell, some even rewarded it… Adolf Hitler, for example? His peers should have looked at him, looked away in embarrassment, and then just ignored his ass. Had he persisted, they should have put him down like the mad dog he was. Unfortunately, they did not, and all of Europe suffered for that madness. Sanders is a similar case… Nobody has provided his fraudulent ass with any real consequences for his multiple transgressions; they’ve just looked away and let him move on. Had his workmates, back in the beginning of it all, when he was merely a failed carpenter? Had they done what they should have, and set his ass straight? He’d have either learned, or he’d have gone the way of all things flesh at a far earlier point, before he and his helpmate wife had the opportunity to fleece ohsoverymany others.
We are not hard enough on our peers, I fear. All of these creatures start out small, get away with their malfeasances, and then prosper because the people around them would rather not be critical of their conduct/behavior. Peer pressure is not always a bad thing; sometimes, it stops misconduct and bad behavior before it can really get going. When it fails, you get these self-important jackasses who ruin everything around them.
Well, that was an entirely rhetorical question.
Choice: at the grocery, there are choices for ethnic foods pleasing to a variety of immigrants. Great. But I cannot tolerate spicy foods and a world that mandated that only spicy foods be available would be hell to me. A world without spicy foods would be hell to a lot of other people. The miracle of the modern grocery is that there are sections for diabetics, for the gluten intolerant, for the organic fetishist, and for the snackoholic. It is grand. Would a beauracracy cater to the gluten intolerant? hahaha no.
There is a particular kind of person who is obsessed with other people’s choices. This type of person is currently trying to get cars to obey the speed limit using AI, whether the drivers want it or not. And if you need to escape a wildfire or a road rage maniac? eh, too bad. They want to remove salt from food even though those with high blood pressure can already get low salt food. The 15 minute city (supposedly justified by climate change). In Europe IIRC you can no longer mix cotton and synthetic fibers so that the cotton can be composted. Really? People compost pants? ahahaha bullshit
And even though the connection between high blood pressure and salt intake has been demonstrated to be more tenuous than previously thought.
@pst314,
True. But, it was begging for a blunt answer…
I really and truly believe that humoring these idjits is why we are where we are; nobody ever slaps them down, either verbally or physically, and they just proliferate because they’re so convincing in their madness that others naturally fall into orbit around them, other, equally damaged and not-quite-human sorts who are all too easily influenced.
Here’s a pro-tip: You run into someone who picks up on these thought-systems too easily? The “natural followers”? They’re just as damaged as the Sanders-sort; they lack the mental capacity to create and hold their own beliefs in any real strength, and fail to resist having another imposed on them.
You’ll see some kids, around you in the schools, labeled as “troublesome”. They’re the ones that system naturally seeks to suppress, and turn into brainwashed clones of their peers. That’s much more the point of state schooling, than anything else: Conformity. The kid that resists being made to conform, to parrot back what the teacher says? That kid has to be destroyed, in one way or another.
There’s a meme out there, one that describes the conformist Sander-sort as NPC’s… Non-Player Characters. This isn’t a kind thing to describe them as, but it is frighteningly accurate. You ever confront these sorts of people with calm refutation and the right set of leading questions, you can observe the panic set in as they lose their way and find that the answers they were programmed to respond with don’t make any sense.
This crap happens to a lot of people; you observe it with many politically-inclined types, when you start asking them questions about their belief systems, and then lead them into the nettles of those belief system’s internal contradictions. It can be ugly to watch, realizing as you do this, that people you know and respected have allowed themselves to be programmed like so many drones by the things they hear in the media and around them.
I had a good friend, once upon a time. Common-sense sort, very down-to-earth. He retired from the military about five years before I did, went to school, became a high school-level history teacher. Still not too sure where or how it all took place, but he went from being a fairly cynical realist about things to a full-bore leftoid, without ever apparently noticing the brainwashing he’d undergone. I was not the only person to notice this fact, either… It’s insidious, the programming: If you are not fully operant when exposed to it, saying to yourself “Well, this is so much bullshit…” as they attempt it, you’re likely going to be parroting the “Conventional Wisdom” before very long, yourself.
I’m unsure of where or when I cottoned on to the bullshit, but it had to be very early; I spent my high school days picking out and observing what they were trying to do, both in the administration and the teaching, not to mention the “peer experience”. Same thing throughout military training and career; you can, if you watch and observe carefully, work out how and what they’re going to be doing before they do it. It’s disconcerting, at first, when you realize that the majority of the people around you are susceptible, but it is enlightening to recognize.
Once you see it, you’re more-or-less immunized against it, and can pick and choose what you want to believe in or participate in. Not enough of us do this, sadly… You have to be self-aware, and possess a sense of agency, which I have to guess at being rather uncommon, judging from how people behave around me.
Which was implicit in my comment.
While the comment was about people who need a blunt instrument upside the head.
One of my neighbors went seemingly instantly from “Elon hero make Tesla” to “Elon Hitler” when Elon bought Twitter, fired a bunch of employees, and stopped the censorship of conservatives.
I believe that for most people it is a gradual process. For a few, such as David Horowitz, it is fairly sudden, triggered by some sort of shocking experience that jolts loose their thinking.
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@pst314,
I think I may have remembered the where/when of my epiphany that “all these people are full of shiite”. My Mom was going back to school after her divorce from my Dad, at the University of Colorado, seeking to finish her degree and get certified to teach. In the course of that, she wound up using me as a bit of a lab rat for her child psychology classes, and I remember standing there, watching this guy at work, and I had this sudden flash of insight while he was doing his thing, that he really had no idea what the hell he was doing, and had no significant insight into the minds of children.
Point to be noted, here: The man had no kids. Lived with his wife, and a succession of Dachshunds, which he used as surrogate children for his theories. I emphasize: A child psychologist who raised no kids of his own, teaching teachers how to teach and relate to children…
Anyone else see the issue? The man exuded falsity to me, as a child. I spent most of the time around him as an experimental subject wondering why the hell anyone listened to him, and wondering at the spell he cast over the coterie of twenty-something future teachers. They were starry-eyed in wonder at every pronouncement he made, and whenever you’d watch one of their little attempts at implementing his ideas with the kids they brought in, the usual thing was that said attempt would blow up in their faces… Astonishingly, not one of those people ever questioned the premises they were operating under; they just assumed that they hadn’t done what they were told would work hard enough, or “quite right”, and they’d keep trying and trying.
The thing that got me going was observing the supposed “adults in the room” trying to “correct” the behavior of the bullies, while the rest of we children were subjected to their misbehavior. Not once did their gentle remonstration actually do anything effective insofar as reducing or correcting the issues, and I’d hear them talking on the sidelines about it all… I do believe that was the first time I discovered that most authority figures are useless twats, when it comes to the misconduct of those they are responsible for. Was also the point in my life where I realized two things: One, beating the hell out of bullies worked really well, in terms of discouraging them, but that two, if they have “protection”, you’re going to suffer commensurately to the amount of bullying you’ve have gotten anyway. So, best thing? Make sure you don’t get caught delivering rough justice.
I’m pretty sure that’s the lodestone to my cynicism, now that I think about it. Plus, being just smart and precocious enough to realize and recognize what was going on around me, which is always dangerous.
Ooh, this. And much else in that comment but oooh, this. I wasn’t a troublesome nor nonconformist type. I generally did not get along well with those types who were but there still was a frenemy sense between us, long before I ever heard of the concept of frenemy. I was more studious, moderately introverted, and thus sometimes annoyed by such people. FFS do what the coach says, shut up and listen to what the teacher is saying. Yet at the same time I had serious concerns, questions, doubts about what I was being taught. Less so in athletics as that was more objective and I got more out of the hard work that entailed in relation to putting hard work into academics whose payoffs were far less apparent. Today I marvel that those people from back then are the ones I get along with best. I struggle at times to explain this to my wife as she (rationally) assumes certain aspects. Especially after what has transpired over the last 4-8 years. So many of those “troublesome” kids, at least those that didn’t fall into the drugs and alcohol pit, are very successful today. At least very successful in contrast to what the teachers and the system in general said they would be. They certainly are far more resilient in opposing the brainwashing we see on a broad scale around us today.
Kier Stürmer is the wurst.
Is it me or does this sound like the father let the attempted rapist walk away with his daughter?
Thanks barkeep.
Bless you, sirs. May your mail be interesting.
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