You know the left side of the isle loves to talk about the eyes of the future and the judgement of history. And in almost every case in my lifetime in which they’ve invoked such imaginary opinions, they’ve been completely wrong.
Mostly, you know, because they think history comes with an arrow, and that the future will be exactly like them, only more so. And to an extent some parts of society have been like that. For the most part the parts of society that do not “root, hog or die.”
BUT mostly, what they do is that when they turn out to be completely and utterly wrong, they revise the past. To be fair, that’s a trick their ideological compatriots in the USSR had already perfected decades ago, which is why we got the saying that “In the USSR you always know the future. It’s the past that keeps changing.” This is why they attempt to shame us with the spirit of Reagan, the man they not only said would destroy the world, but the man they still hate (Remember that Obama’s goal was to be the anti-Reagan, and to the extent he succeeded our economy died.)
The thing is though I refuse to say we’ve reached (and possibly passed) peak stupidity/disconnect from reality/insanity, or if you prefer “peak long march through the institutions” if we haven’t, we’re pretty darn close.
They’re now so desperate to virtue signal ANYTHING at all, and to present as the peak of civilization that they’ll tear down statues of… well, anyone really who doesn’t fit woke standards of the day. Because the kids educated in an educational system wholly possessed by the left are so completely incompetent — and tragically aware of their incompetence and ignorance, even if it’s masked by their “self esteem” — that they feel the need to tear down ANYTHING that came before, so they can claim to be the best thing ever. (This is also seen in most fields, where they rename things named after great men (and some women) of the past because they might have had bad opinions, and/or SOUND like someone who had bad ideas. Of course my field is overachieving in that respect, as they’re trying to erase any woman or minority who achieved anything before — what is is now? 2010? It’s a moving thing, so I don’t remember — so that their barely-read, completely incompetent dahlings can claim to be the very first.)
So if this isn’t peak incompetence and insanity I don’t precisely know what comes after. What I do know is that if there’s more to come, society will come apart at the seams. And I don’t mean slowly, as it has been doing for at least 50 years, I mean suddenly and explosively.
Consider one of their “moderates” and certainly — heaven help us — less crazy than the two front runners thinks farming is easy, and people who machine parts have an easy job, and really, anything that is results based is “easy” and “a moron could do it.”
Any society, under that kind of government, will fall apart rapidly. Their most moderate of the remaining candidates is the kind of guy who would order wheat sown in winter in Siberia or create the horrors of Mao’s war on sparrows, backyard furnaces, or really…. the cultural revolution. The horrifying part here is that the incompetence, malice and sheer insanity of the remaining field BY FAR exceeds his.
And if there’s one law of nature we know of is that if you’re at war with reality, you eventually lose.
So if there are any future generations to look back on us and judge us they will not follow the arrow of progressivism. Because down that path lies nothing but the destruction of humanity. (Which to fair, they’re now more or less admitting they want, something that makes my jaw drop and my brain start doing loop-de-loops. Because, seriously. We knew they were traitors to their homelands, traitors to their culture and more often than not (except in the case of read diaper babies) traitors to their families, but … traitors to their species? How does that even work? If you hate humanity so much, cupcake, and think we should all go extinct, start by solving your immediate problem, and then if the rest of us exist or not, it is no longer your problem. There are many, many ways to achieve this goal, and it is sheer cowardice to demand that we solve the problem for you by dying FIRST. You want humanity to go away? Sure, sweetheart. You first.)
The problem is when I think of the eyes of the future on us, I can’t decide? Will they laugh? Will they cry? Will they cry till they laugh? Will they laugh till they cry?
Look, every society has vast reserves of insanity and wrong belief. Even the most functional ones.
One of the things people on the left — or just maleducated people — bring up when they want to feel superior to their ancestors is that their ancestors thought the earth was flat.
Er…. ish. No, seriously. The theory that the Earth was a globe has been around since at least the Greeks who calculated the curvature. Sure, there were other theories, mostly in really old religions. And yep, I bet that the average peasant on the field, or practically anyone who didn’t have a reason to know better thought it was flat. Doesn’t mean learned people did.
I remember feeling very superior to the rest of the village when they said things like Catholicism was the first religion (note not the first CHRISTIAN religion), just the first religion, and I would get on my high horse and lecture them on all the old religions and of course Judaism. It’s a cheap thrill. And it meant nothing. Sure, that was the consensus of people who didn’t read much, and who were preoccupied with more important matters, such as how to get the team of oxen to live one more winter, so they might be able to buy a new team in the Spring/Fall with fresh-acquired profits (I do NOT remember seeing a tractor before I was about 10, and even then, most plowing was done with oxen.) And my “knowledge” was useless to them, and they probably forgot it two seconds after I lectured (if they listened at all, which I doubt.) BECAUSE to them it didn’t matter. In the normal operation of their days it made no difference whatsoever.
So, every society has vast reservoirs of wrong, and vast groups of people who are wrong about something.
We might however be the first society (not explicitly totalitarian) to educate people to know all the wrong things, and then reward them with credentials and power when they learn to ignore reality well enough. We’re almost certainly the only non-totalitarian religion to FORCE people to spout reality-denying nonsense from the lips out, to keep their jobs/have an income, as we do in a bunch of fields including education and the arts (and some science.)
For instance if you page down on this article — though the previous news is … uh…. interesting too — you’ll find what anyone who works in the arts knows. Have certain opinions, and you might as well start readying your begging board. Thank heavens for indie. Though the truly hilarious part is the left accusing everyone who actually comes out as having a dissenting opinion as “selling out.” Among their many charming delusions is threatening to end the career of any dissenter while simultaneously claiming they’re not the gatekeepers/establishment. Believing in a flat Earth is nothing in comparison, particularly for medieval peasants. What I don’t think the people who wrote about that realize is that our science too, from hard to soft is subject to the same pressures. (Mostly because most of our science is financed by the government, which, no matter which side is in power is run by a perpetual bureaucracy, educated in the “best” schools, etc. That’s a subject for a whole article, but I need to find my Zen place first, otherwise I’ll just start hitting my head on the keyboard.)
So… What will the future laugh at us about?
How about the obsession with statistical groups all performing alike, and if they don’t that’s a sign of discrimination? So, you know, the fact that there are fewer women/minorities/purple people eaters in engineering/the arts/race car driving than there should be by number of people in the population means that these people are discriminated against, and we must ignore everything, including competency/interest/ability/interest in OTHER THINGS/personality, etc. etc. ad nauseum to force the right numbers to show up.
To believe that, you have to ignore everything about how humanity actually works, including the fact that you can’t define everyone by their “groups” no matter how many groups you put in. The only person that fits ALL my groups is me. Humans are above all individuals. So if a group is denying entry to the otherwise qualified, sure, come down on them like a ton of bricks. BUT be very careful you have proof of transgression. Statistics aren’t that. Because you can’t even put in all the factors, when it comes to humans. Statistics are Procrustes bed for society.
I mean, look, I have absolutely no clue what the number of middle aged Portuguese women immigrants there are in the population of the US, but I guarandamntee that we’re under represented in science fiction writers (and likely readers. Though I don’t even want to say that, or they’ll hunt these women down and try to shame them into reading sf/f.) I guarantee it, because I doubt many of them, prior to immigrating to the US spent time in those long lines outside bookstores on the day a Heinlein or Asimov or Anderson or Simak was released. I mean, in the second largest city in the country, I don’t remember seeing any other female standing in line, much less another female my age. And even if there had been a few more, (I couldn’t after all be in EVERY bookstore line, though I guarantee I’d have tried if I could have done it) how many also happened to wish to write? And how many would hang tough through getting to even near-native proficiency in English? How many worked hard enough and fought hard enough to break in?
I bet statistically “We”‘re way underrepresented as sf/f writers. Because most of them are saner than even trying this, to be fair.
But, oh, the US is distorting entire sectors of economy and culture to fit that Procrustes bed of of statistics (though I’m happy to say not on behalf of Portuguese immigrants. Yes, yes, I know. DON’T give them ideas.) With the predictable results.
Then there’s the “both sexes are exactly alike.” Don’t get me started. Just don’t. Instead find the nearest person with an education in biology and tell them that males and females are exactly the same after puberty. Then stand back. No, further back.
And in an amazing twist of left insanity, they also believe that while men and women are exactly alike, if you have sexual dysphoria and believe that you were born in the wrong body, you should immediately get hormones/surgery to correct it. Though to be fair to them, they also believe it’s perfectly okay if you JUST DRESS in the clothes of the other sex (for those of us who live in jeans and ts or sweats this is a bit of puzzler, to be fair. Are we neuter?) which of course fits better with “both sexes are exactly alike” but doesn’t fit at all with medical treatments for transsexuals. Oh, and I bet you money I’m going to be called transphobic for this paragraph. Which is insane. I do believe there are people whose miss match is so profound they need surgical/medical intervention. BUT I don’t believe that men and women are exactly life, otherwise, what WOULD BE THE POINT. I am 100% Epistemological-confusion-phobic. But that’s a mouth full.
AND because note that after puberty thing, they absolutely believe that children should be allowed to “transition” before puberty. Because though men and women are exactly alike, we need to get those kids changed before puberty, or they’ll never be right. Again, what? Kudos for perceiving the reality that male and female bodies are fundamentally different after puberty. BUT the fact that most of you never had kids — and that the ones who have are functionally too insane to perceive kids as they are — is showing. Your kid saying he wants to be a girl, or she wants to be a yellow wingless dragon is not a sign of some deep maladjustment, and short of puberty there is no real way to tell if it’s real or not. Hell, short of finishing growing there’s no way to tell. Kids think they’re all kinds of things. Ours spent an entire summer being “The Alien” and “The Evil twin (but not the alien’s evil twin.)” At different times in their lives one of them believed he was Moses (don’t ask, please. Just don’t.), another believed he was an elephant in a human body, the most unwieldy one believed he was a gymnast, the other believed his job when he grew up was going to be sharpening pencils. By definition, kids have no clue what adult life is like, and that includes gender/sex-roles. To believe that your kid saying she wants to be a boy is any more valid than him telling you he wants to be a fire engine, you need to not only not remember being a kid, but also completely ignoring what your kid IS, and also completely ignoring that kids aren’t adults. On the other hand you have an entire establishment of mental health professionals too crazy or scared to pull the reins back on the insanity. Will the future laugh or weep? I don’t know.
And though this is not an exhaustive list (I’d be here the rest of my life) we are finding through the slow debacle of the Wu-flu that globalism and free trade with totalitarian regimes is also raging insanity. I mean we can’t even tell if it is already here and has been for months (let’s keep in mind that there is a 30 day lag on symptoms, and many people are asymptomatic, and that it took at least thirty days before China admitted it had a problem, which means the closing of that barn door came at least 2 months after the horse had fled. And no one COULD do it sooner) in which case quarantines and containment are beside the point and we should concentrate on being ready to treat the most vulnerable OR whether it’s mostly been slowed/kept out except for some foci. We can’t tell, because we can’t test enough random people to know on account of not having enough tests. Oh, we also can’t tell if this is a deadly plague or a minor/inconvenient cold/flu which most people shrug off. Because we know China lied/lies, but we don’t know in what. And we don’t know what the cultural factors are. Which can make a big difference, if you look here, and here. To be fair, I was fairly sure China must be FILTHY because all the left started screaming at us for the “stereotype” of dirty Chinese. I will confess this is not a stereotype I had, since I assumed like the Asians I was close to — mostly Japanese — they were VERY germophobic. But I should have guessed when the screaming started. And also, communist countries, in general, are public health disasters. The second one, OTOH I’d never have guessed. Yes, I should have, because, you know, I grew up in a country where the germ theory of disease was still a new and strange thing, and where a lot of diseases (cancer) were attributed to curses and/or lack of faith.
Which brings us not just to the insanity of “let’s have free trade with totalitarians” but also the insanity of “All cultures are the same.” The only persons who can believe that only know other cultures through expensive vacations where they met ONLY with their own rich/globally connected counterparts in other countries, in utterly de-personalized big hotels in big cities. And even then it requires WILLFUL ignorance and denial of reality.
Which of course in the current climate means you’ll go far in the arts, in academia, in writing, in the news and in most scientific pursuits.
Will the future laugh or cry looking back at us?
I don’t know. I know if we manage to get out of this delusional state enough for there to BE a future, they might do both. But they might very well be tears — or laughter — of rage.
According To Hoyt 
Fortunately, the US is more than one culture. Those that prize self-reliance will do a pretty good job recovering.
-Albert
And those of us from the self-reliant cultures have very often visited the crazies’ cultures and know how they work, while they virtually never have visited ours (and if they have, they’ve militantly misunderstood what they saw there). So we know how they (don’t) work, while we remain an enigma to them. Of course, being crazies, they assume that we must be whatever they find distasteful that day.
Exactly. We know all about them, since we are bombarded with the crazy, 24-7, and every which way. All they know about us is the straw-person they have constructed in their own minds.
> find the nearest person with an education in biology and tell them that males and females are exactly the same after puberty. Then stand back.
—
Alas, depending on how recent and how much “education” they sat through, I suspect you’re more likely to get enthusiastic agreement. Even if they had doubts, it’s unlikely they would have managed to *get* that “education”, as least if it came through the usual academic diploma Ponzi scheme.
okay. There is that.
They might also have learned to survive and have a job to toe the line and NEVER say what they know to be the facts.
I must admit that if an obviously insane person asks me a really obvious question, I tend to smile and avoid answering, since I suck at acting.
They’re either a possible hazard due to insanity, or they’re trying to pick a fight; either way, or both, it’s not in my interests to correct them.
Especially given that actual insanity can’t be corrected by mere facts.
Can confirm. Sadly.
The thing is though I refuse to say we’ve reached (and possibly passed) peak stupidity/disconnect from reality/insanity, or if you prefer “peak long march through the institutions” if we haven’t, we’re pretty darn close.
Oh, I have faith in their ability to go higher and higher up that peak, its apex is infinitely high where they are concerned.
The quest to reach higher peaks of insanity by the left uses ladders made of human lives.
Was meant to add this example
I first ran across this in Finnish and got a good laugh at the middle-aged dancing and boomer inability to film using a camera phone. My daughter enlightened me that it was actually an anti-rape public service announcement. I… I have to admit I laughed until I cried.
Lord love a duck. Maybe they’re counting on a superstitious tribal immigrant seeing the woman casting the weird spell, and chasing the one who just yells and hits him with her purse?
Contemplate, just for a moment, the reactions if a conservative organization such as Liberty University, Sarah Palin or Melania, Ivanka, Karen Pence and Sarah Huckabee Sanders produced this public service announcement.
Heck, imagine it as a segment on SNL.
Maybe it wants some super-heroines to give it the necessary oomph, say perhaps Wonder Woman and her Amazonian back-up dancers, or make it truly powerful by crossing comic universes and teaming WW with Harley Quinn, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, and a team of Wakandan Imperial Guardswomen.
–
I don’t think they realize that if the reaction was ‘they are using magic on me’ the enragement would be worse, if by some shred of what passes for reason that goes through their fevered delusions that is indeed the thought they had as a deterrent, something that is plausible given their tendency to believe in magical thinking and their belief in changing language changes reality. Given that their anti-rape advisements would not work outside a children’s show, I suppose that their reality is just as childish in imagination and view.
indeed
Don’t ask, regarding Moses? But I have SO MANY questions about lighting for Moses Farmer!
“Consider one of their “moderates” and certainly — heaven help us — less crazy than the two front runners thinks farming is easy, and people who machine parts have an easy job, and really, anything that is results based is “easy” and “a moron could do it.”
Former supervisor always said his of one of departments were jobs “So easy, anyone can do it” and consistently tried to prove it by hiring anyone who came along. They then consistently proved him wrong by failing miserably at the various jobs.
In life, over the years I have only been wrong once about a guy or gal being able to do a job, and that guy (Reggie) had a odd personality that made you underestimate him. When he was hired, I told the GM “I feel like he isn’t going to work out, but so far he seems to get what you tell him.”
Later I told the GM “I was wrong. We need a whole batch of Reggies working here! He won’t last though.” And he didn’t. He went to work for the Airlines for far more money.
Was… your supervisor bragging about hiring incompetent people, or was he being sarcastic, or have I misunderstood something?
I got the idea that the supervisor was incompetent in his hiring. 😀
Oh, he is thoroughly convinced the job is so easy literally anyone can do it.
Granted, it isn’t overly difficult to do any of the jobs under him, but I doubt he could manage to do them without messing something up (the one department he got taken and given to a different supervisor who was once under him in that department, is somewhat simple but stupid levels of complexity added for no reason, especially).
He has a very high turnover in employees, shockingly enough. Many time his picks come for training, get to lunch brake and never come back.
Even keeping people who can do the job is hard.
In the 4 years I have been here that one division he lost has had maybe 20 Saturdays off (and those usually because something wasn’t coming until Monday), and he was working them as many Sundays as he could legally get, because spending a dime to make the job faster was out of the question. There is still foot dragging on fixing issues, but it is slightly better. Since Supes changed, they got (mostly holiday weekends) Saturdays off more often (some guys volunteered to do Saturday after T-giving anyhow) and they’ve managed 110% of expected output (moving me out and giving the space for them to do more than 2 things at a time helped) where under him they struggled to get 100%. If you could get him to make a decision, it was about always the wrong one.
The rant is long and varied.
Kevin Williamson’s law: “Everything is easy when you don’t know the first f-ing thing about it.”
yep.
Well if you also have not a lick of common sense, anyhow.
….did he come up with that, or is it in his “honor”?
After his crack about letting the rural areas die off, I’d go for his “honor”. He’s on my must-miss reading list. (Rick Moran at PJ Media made that list too, falling for the media spin on Trump Coronavirus Hoax and refusing to correct it. [end rand])
I was thinking of the “plan” he proposed to socialize water rights and sell them off, which had the added benefit of zero clues about how water demand works.
Uh…. There was this heated thing when Rick edited one of my articles and introduced a misspelling on the title. The words “Whore fingers off my posts” might have been typed.
He’s LONG since dropped off my read list. He’s a Bill Kristol waiting to happen.
He wrote it in one of his columns for National Review IIRC
Now that there is funny.
If you’re willing to hire teenagers, there is NO job so easy they cannot creatively mangle it. I say it with love, because they can also not merely rise to the occasion, but transcend it.
A good sense of humour helps.
every teen has not lasted. Not that I blame them (two of them were okay workers)
they get fed up and leave (It has got to be a point in their favor at the other companies locally that they left before 6 months at our place, I swear)
He tried the same crap with me, but A: I am not a new hire, and been doing my job (and for a time planning’s) 12+ years, and B: They have no one who knows what exactly I do. I had two hires tell me supposedly I was to train them on my job (I kick off this plane, and well) and it never happened.
One is still bouncing around the company (she wants to be in the warehouse I am again, but) the other I would have refused to train. 6 months after hire he worked less than 30 days. He is still showing as hired (anniversary announcement included him as being one year) but the guy couldn’t handle working at the shipyard as a fire watch (after welding work in the ship is done, sit in chair, keep an eye out for smoke, call if any shows up)
It may have been linked here, but I’ve gotten a lot of miles out of the study on thinking and being “smarter”– which did actual science, and defined smarter by brain scans that identified using-thing-I-know vs creating-new-pathways.
It found that kids were “smarter” by the definition they were using, because they thought through a task each and every time.
While adults generally knew how to do it, and did it quickly, without thinking.
I blame puberty. I am grateful though that my son’s moments of derp aren’t in disaster levels and pray they never will reach there. (so far, only at tease mercilessly if he derps level)
“… they think history comes with an arrow”
Meh. So does Cupid — that does not mean good things will result.
–
I recently saw an article on a boy who likes girly things (to the extent of hair and makeup such that he really does look like a girl), including clothing and all. And he states in the article that he’s happy with his body, he is fine with being a boy, he just likes all the girly things. He also doesn’t care that he gets misgendered, just corrects people and moves on.
And that’s one of the sanest things I’ve seen coming out of the gender swirl right now. He’s fine with who he is, which is a super-cute boy who has long hair and makeup and pink glittery clothes and a killer sense of style. It underscores that we put expectations on what people like, and there’s always going to be extreme outliers.
It’s SO refreshing to hear of a (young) sane human! I was fearing the kind was edging ever closer to extinction.
Well, there appears to always have been the cross-dressers.
One fictional one (character in Alma’s Familiar Tales) is happily married (to a woman) that he fathered a child with. 😉
This. This is one of the things that has me so worried for children.
My wife was a tomboy. Is a tomboy, still. Never interested in dolls, dresses or frilly things. Detests the color pink.
Loved camping and hiking and all the outdoor stuff. Always wanted to be doing what her brothers were doing, not her sisters.
Always got along better with men than with women.
Our modern paradigm would have had her gender reassigned in a minute; totaling screwing up her body with hormone treatments and possibly surgery (barbaric genital mutilation).
As an adult, she loves being a Mother. She has never had any body image issues, (of course, she’s stunningly beautiful, so there is that).
Saying that she’s actually a male on the inside is beyond laughable and into the absurd. She reads these reports/articles of children receiving these hormone treatments (for reasons), and is horrified at the thought that the same could have happened to her if she’d been born a few decades later.
Disgusting.
I was a tomboy. Other than the fact I like to dress up on occasion (very occasion, because I don’t have patience) what you described is me.
And thank you very much, I AM a woman. Not typical, but a woman.
I was sort of a tomboy, too – liked male-oriented things; books about war and adventure, couldn’t quite get what it was about clothes and makeup, although thanks to Mom I was always dressed nicely and had some grasp of appropriate social skills. And I was perfectly happy being a female, otherwise.
The deeply horrible thing about the current trans-fixation is that it nails even the slightest speck of non-conformity to a very strict norm … into the other box.
Sigh. I’m so old I can remember when the surest way to get yelled at was to try to impose your definition upon somebody else’s expression of their sexual identity. Stereotyping as “male” and “female” was a horrendous thought crime and denial of individual choice.
–
Guess you could say I was a tomboy too. Didn’t care about frilly dresses or short ones (of an age that I had to wear dresses to school), or makeup, did like my dolls, but only specific ones. The stuffed animals, the model horses … Then there were horses, camping, fishing, hunting camp, hunting (when old enough though never saw anything) … Horses. Chose non-typical fields. HATE makeup. Can not wear perfume.
Part of it was growing up with a dad who hunted & fished. Went almost every weekend, no matter the weather, rain or shine. All 5 of us met Grandma & Grandpa. That is dad, mom, and 3 girls, no brothers. The only thing I balked at was when they started ocean fishing as I was completing HS. Chumming is illegal & I get sick on the dock … My sisters? Same experience. Try to get either one to go camping or fishing; not happening. Pretty sure both consider the Hilton roughing it; well maybe not the Hilton but definitely Hotel 6 …
THIS. Kids on the autism spectrum. Odds. Lots of girls and guys who don’t really fit into the social boxes. When you hit the age where the mating dance and pairing impulses kick in, it can feel unbearably lonely.
It is (or was) expected and normal for teens to have body issues in puberty. To feel as if the body they have wasn’t “right” or “theirs” until they’d passed through to the final adult form and had time to settle in. Touch A teen, touch a tender spot.
And NOW the trans activists are telling these kids that all that will magically go away if they chemically and surgically sterilize themselves and render normal mammalian mating impossible forever -?
There’s a special Hell….
I was very tomboyish too, but got more feminine when I got to late high school. Other than that I likely would have been pushed into puberty blockers. Though I wonder how that would’ve worked as I started puberty early as well.
It scares me too.
The concatenation of idiots pushing ‘gender reassignment’ are no better than the Quack who made a name for himself grafting monkey testicle tissue to his (male) patients. (Voronof, or something like it). He died broke and disgraced, and I hope they do too.
That boy, I have no issues with at all. He sounds like he is having fun, versus Desmond is Amazing, who hangs out with drug users and looks quite drugged in some of his appearances. Wholesome vs disturbing.
“I refuse to say we’ve reached (and possibly passed) peak stupidity”
Never bet against stupidity. Just when you think it has hit rock bottom new techniques will be developed. There is no end of stupidity attainable by the intelligent creative mind.
–
I keep telling folks that Stupid (as well as Silly) is NOT a conserved quantity.
There’s an alleged Einstein quote on the subject:
“Only two things are limitless: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Shouldn’t there be some sort of intellectual Absolute Zero? A theoretical limit of stupidity that actual, physical idiots can asymptotically approach, but never quite achieve?
That would be Absolute Ignorance. Stupidity is negative.
Somewhere in Hell, there’s a research team…
Shouldn’t there be some sort of intellectual Absolute Zero?
Technically speaking, brain death should do it.
But, in entirely too many jurisdictions the dead vote Democrat, so the evidence says otherwise.
“So if this isn’t peak incompetence and insanity I don’t precisely know what comes after.”
An ever-swirling, ever-deepening vortex into the abyss. A nightmare of pseudo-science replete with crystals, astrological charts, auras, chakras and the musical stylings of the Miidy Blues and their inheritors.
Ad that’s just the lobby.
–
But all the while calling it “science!”
“traitors to their species? How does that even work?”
Remember Heinlein’s Hierarchy of Loyalty? With loyalty to species at the highest level? Reverse that, reject everything at the bottom of that ziggurat (they’ve been in favor of destruction of the family since, at least, ancient Greece) and work your way outward. Once you enter the race of rejection there is only one ending.
–
No, and three search engines sayeth not. Are you sure it was RAH?
It’s in his naval academy speech. The section about how adolescent male baboons serving sentry duty is a form of patriotism, and how patriotism is ultimately a species survival trait.
Danke Schoen, BABY, danke schoen.
–
Thanks!
Article in the latest issue of A(tlantic) magazine in the library states, quite seriously, that the Nuclear Family was a mistake.
Classic upper-class liberalism, pushing ideas they don’t actually follow themselves. As has been pointed out in articles linked (several times, IIRC) on Instapundit, the rate of marriage among upper-class liberals is much, much higher than their political views would lead you to expect. They might preach the doctrines of the Sexual Revolution, including “free” love (scare quotes very much deliberate on my part, as the costs of such behavior are hidden but extremely real). But what they actually practice is things like monogamy after marriage, and raising children in an intact family. At least, that’s what the upper-class liberals practice. Which, to the surprise of pretty much nobody who understands human nature, results in better life outcomes for their children, who then remain in the upper-class strata of society.
I read an interview with a writer whose book was about a world in which we all mother each other, rather than each of us having to look after our own families and no others.
She talked of the difficulties of coping with her mother’s dying in England while she was doing something in America, and a world where someone else would be looking after her mother. But not a world in which she could never have come to America because she was too busy looking after other people’s mothers.
(And that’s not getting into the way this world would have no one with whom the buck stopped.)
Oh, and I bet you money I’m going to be called transphobic for this paragraph. Which is insane.
Not…exactly.
It’s wrong, and it’s not healthy, but I’m starting to think that it’s a variation on that has-a-point observation that the worst part of being a thief isn’t that nobody trusts you, it’s that you can’t trust anybody else.
The constant accusations that others are motivated by irrational fear or hatred? Even when it makes absolutely no sense as a possible motivation?
That’s the motivation that they reflexively expect, because it’s either what they have inside, or the main thing that they see from their intimates.
Which doesn’t make it less destructive or annoying, but does make it sad.
“when I think of the eyes of the future on us, I can’t decide?”
They likely won’t pay us any attention, writing our era off as “The Crazy Years” with the implicit conclusion that there is no understanding societal insanity and scant benefit in poking about in the puddle of puke.
A few students will write graduate theses on the causes and nobody will pay attention to their conclusions. How many today actually pay attention to the Fall of Rome or the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire? Unless they can use it for a movie or TV series featuring washboard-ab hunks and nymphets showing their tits nobody cares about such things now.
–
The overall reaction? A headshake. Maybe a facepalm as well. A simple sigh for the understated.
God willing we will be as completely forgotten as the strawberries of Ancient Ephesus.
“… their ancestors thought the earth was flat.”
Okay, it has been a very long time since I explored the higher fields of mathematics required to prove the thesis, but I remember enough to know that, according to certain understandings of math, topologically the Earth is flat, it is just that space it is in is warped.
Ask Dan about it – I’m sure he’d be happy to prattle on about the intellectual concepts involved. Be sure to smile and gaze adoringly as you nod off. Or maybe toss this one of Eris’S apple into the middle of a chat between Dan & Marshall.
–
“… my “knowledge” was useless to them”
Poop culture reference I don’t expect you’ll get/welcome: Shut up, Sheldon.
–
Tyypoo or editorial comment?
I acknowledge the first — this keyboard has far too much character.
Sigmund suggests it could well be the second, also.
–
I didn’t watch the show and still got the reference. arrgh.
“I remember feeling very superior to the rest of the village when they said things like Catholicism was the first religion (note not the first CHRISTIAN religion), just the first religion, and I would get on my high horse and lecture them …”
Because I am on my third (large) cuppa joe this morning I will point out that, depending on one’s definition of “religion” they could arguably be right about Catholicism being first (also depending on what value you assign to “first.”)
I’ve not drunk enough coffee nor alcohol to pursue such an argument, merely enough to envisage the form it could take.
No, I am not, contrary to assertions of some character assassins, willing to argue over just anything and will dispute any such claims strongly.
–
Well, when you believe that your deity/deities are the only real one(s), anything else is a delusional cult, not a religion.
My guess is that the wallaby is going off of that Christianity, unlike ancient state cults, demanded sincerity of inner belief. Pagans, and even Jews to a certain extent, believed deities required obedience and observance, but affection was optional.* Moreover, worship was a transactional quid pro quo: “[God], give me this and I’ll do that,” or “[God], I’ll do this and you do that.” Then, like Judaism by the time of Classical culture, Christianity believed in their God being the only one, but unlike Judaism and more like certain other mystery cults, they believed their worship was open to all, instead of just a chosen people. Western culture is so shaped by Christianity, it’s hard to recognize just how our notions of what religion is — personal devotion, proselytizing, demographically diverse — are different from everything else before and from elsewhere.
*One of my favorite exchanges on Game of Thrones is when a character makes this distinction:
All the gods of this world are au fond unlikeable. Things to be appeased. That sometimes, and it’s hard to calculate quite why, pay off. When one runs into apparently admiring or affectionate terms, it turns out to be like the Kindly Ones (aka The Furies) or The Fair Folk.
It’s all groveling to tyrants, all the way down.
Only the Christians, because of Christ call their God “Abba” : “Daddy”.
That Jewish tale of God laughing delightedly “My children have bested me!” springs to mind, notable that He was being told off by rules lawyers that He was meddling in something ‘not His jurisdiction’ and being apparently right on the score.
There was no smiting.
They are the same guy, so that makes sense…..
❤
Remind me of the Aesop’s fable where the lion observed that the reason that human statues always showed the lion being killed was that it was humans that carved them.
Haven’t heard that one– but I can practically hear my mom doing her very Irish snort and calling that silly– you don’t make statues about dogs biting a man unless it’s incidental, you do make them for man biting dog, so to speak.
“the left accusing everyone who actually comes out as having a dissenting opinion as ‘selling out.’ ”
When they prattle about “speaking Truth to Power” they’re mostly engaging in telling lies to themselves.
–
That phrase seemed to go into the memory hole along with the Question Authority signs when BHO got elected. Funny, that.
“How about the obsession with statistical groups all performing alike …”
Yeah, how ’bout that?
If they accept that ability to score well on “intelligence” tests is not evenly distributed throughout all “racial” groups then they are in grave danger of having to grapple with Charles Murray’s actual arguments in lieu of denouncing them as racist.
When the core problem is their belief that such intelligence is significant beyond certain specific applications.
–
If you believe that people really do deserve to be treated well or poorly based on how “smart” they are, and other artifacts with which they are born, as opposed to how they behave…?
Bloody aristos.
Speaking of the ‘nouveau aristos’, they don’t like it when we have free speech…
“I have absolutely no clue what the number of middle aged Portuguese women immigrants there are in the population of the US, but I guarandamntee that we’re under represented in science fiction writers”
You miss the critical point here: YOU are inauthentic. You fail to conform to their conceptualization of “middle aged Portuguese women immigrants” and therefore the error is yours, not theirs.
Yep, they’re standing in the bottom of a well assuming ladders.
–
“I was fairly sure China must be FILTHY …”
There you go, engaging in invidious stereotyping!
The photographic evidence clearly refutes your racist assumption.
–
WordPress! I have subscribed! Your own page says I subscribed! Send meeeee the commeeeeeeeents.
Management is NOT responsible for WordPress!
Screeching at it appears to have done the trick, surprisingly.
Alas, it sometimes seems nobody is responsible for WordPress…
Are you implying that it is more than 3.6 Rontgen?
She is delusional. Take her to the infirmary.
And no, those smoking black lumps on the ground are not graphite!
c4c
To be fair, there’s a whole lot of really, really stupid stuff our ancestors were into- or at least their contemporaries who didn’t go on and leave offspring.
Most of it gets forgotten, or laughed at by later generations.
What I don’t think the people who wrote about that realize is that our science too, from hard to soft is subject to the same pressures.
I remember in high school, being amused at the arrogance of the science folks who would declaim “people used to think matter was infinitely divisible. But now we know that it has basic components: atoms.” Of course, atoms are made up of electrons, protons and neutrons (further divisions). And right about then was when things like ‘quarks’ were becoming a big deal – which are further subdivisions of atoms.
While not denying science as it understood things then, I laughed mightily at the progressive notion that those folks “back then” didn’t know nothin’ and were totally ignorant rubes, because they didn’t talk about atoms (though one of the Greeks, iirc, most certainly did). I said “Just wait, you’ll someday be ridiculed for your ideas, too.”
Democritus.
I was SO close to coming up with that name, but didn’t. I was thinking Demosthenes. I did check, you’re right.
Here’s one thing that they’ll laugh at in horror-letting idiots get access to evergreen franchises without adult supervision.
I saw the last two episodes of Doctor Who, and they reached the “skinning a beloved institution alive, wearing it’s skin, and demanding the same level of respect” level before the mid-point of the second episode.
(I know, people are going to say “they already had in the previous season,” but this is where it hit that “I’m OUT” point.)
The Social Justice Morons killed Star Trek, put Star Wars on life support (and they will kill it with Star Wars-The High Republic, showing they learned NOTHING from The Mandelorian), and now they’ve killed Doctor Who. When you pull this kind of fifth grade “edgy grade school” fanfic-level plot TWIST! on a major franchise, you have definitely hit a middle.
I haven’t watched the Doctor in years but I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW WHAT THEY DID!!!!!
Don’t need to describe it (and in fairness, I haven’t seen it myself). Ace put up a pretty solid post just the other day that described just how far off the deep end the writers have gone. It’s pure derangement in pursuit of shoving the message down the throats of everyone.
On the positive side, PM Johnson has apparently stated publicly that he’d like to get rid of the tax on British citizens that supports the BBC.
oooooh, I will have to see the screaming about that one!
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386120.php
Got the link for you.
Thank you!
I watched a bit about Picard (criticisms about it) and… wtf did they do to Seven of Nine???
Yea, WTF. If Secret Hideout isn’t a tax scam of some kind (well, more than most Hollywood productions), I would be shocked.
I bailed out during the Tennant run. Mrs. TRX suffered through the first couple of Capaldis, then announced she would be more entertained watching her “Judge Judy” reruns.
At least, the first time they killed the series, it was simple negligence. Their adherence to the Narrative even in the face of plummeting viewership shows this time it’s deliberate.
I watched the Doctor on PBS, mostly Tom Baker through Sylvester McCoy. I liked #4 and #5 and didn’t think the Beeb gave McCoy a chance with all their self-congratulatory specials about a show they seemed determined to choke the life out of…
(Oh, I see Doctor #8 getting a single season. Way to go, BBC. Too hard to find quarry backgrounds???)
Like Star Wars; I remember Han shooting first, and ain’t gonna pick up the revised versions, or heaven forbid, the ones after the Gawdawful prequels. I liked Dr. Who, and don’t want to see the dreck that’s being done now.
Jon Pertwee. Accept no imitations.
Peter Capaldi is the ultimate proof that a good actor can make a bad script work.
(But, then again, I’ve enjoyed Capaldi’s work since In The Thick Of It, so there you go.)
What’s really sad and irritating is that nobody at the BBC encouraged Chris Chibnell to go outside and look at the rabbits for a while anywhere in this process of the creation of the Fourteenth Doctor. Or after the first season didn’t work out at all, as ratings plummeted like a stone. The last two episodes were the frosting on that particular cake and nobody wants to have another slice.
I maintain that the most interesting thing that could happen for the major franchises would be for them to enter the public domain.
Star Trek Online used to have player made missions. Supposedly some of the missions were made by former Star Trek novel writers. These missions were very popular with the player base, because a lot of them had deep,immersive storylines and held to the Trek verse rules, so naturally when Star Trek Discovery came out this feature was killed, because nobody was playing the official missions associated with the Discovery arcs.
They were BAD. Badly written, annoying, and I found myself cheering on the monsters.
The last official arc I played was the DS9 reunion arc, where they got almost all the DS9 cast to voice their characters again. Except Sisko, because,yeah. That storyline arc was AMAZING.
(Garak was Garak, yaaaay, and Odo ❤ )
Amen.
Bring on the Sherlock zone!
You’re really not being fair to fan fic here…
Depends on the fanfic.
I got into fanfic during the Ranma 1/2 days. When you need a chart that involves time travel and alternate universes to keep track of a plot line, you definitely have reached a middle.
But, there is a kind of earnest honesty in a lot of fanfic vs. Star Trek: Discovery or the current run of Doctor Who.
where a lot of diseases (cancer) were attributed to curses and/or lack of faith
I think one place you’ll get resistance on the “See? Some cultures are not equal” is someone saying “But that’s not culture, that’s knowledge. There’s ignorant people in every culture.”
I wouldn’t make that mistake now, but I might have a couple of decades ago. Because ignorance very much IS informed by culture to at least some extent. You’ve commented on it before, I’m pretty certain.
–
Why is it that we are supposed to celebrate every sexual preference, fantasy and fetish EXCEPT the one that is shared by 95% of us, and is absolutely necessary for the existence of the human race?
Because forcing us to do so brings them power, and also lets them flaunt it. Countering reality is good because then their power does not have to share the stage with truth — it’s supreme.
^this^
Because they hate kids. And kids require that one particular sexual fetish.
I dunno, a lot of them seem to LOVE kids. The younger the better, for their purposes.
They’re making pretty good headway into getting official recognition as a “choice” or “lifestyle” in some places. “Put the P in LGBGTP!”
Expression of the self-destructive urge of humanity, via the coward’s route– same way that we’re supposed to kill off the whole human race because they aren’t happy about Other People.
–
Please don’t. The resulting text is hard to puzzle out, and it’s not good for your head, or the keyboard. Although, you CAN replace a broken keyboard.
I was thinking there’s no Zen big enough.
On the gender dysphoria paragraph, if it’s not intentional, it’s the most inspired typo around. (If it was intentional, a gold-plated carp for our hostess.) Brava!
“So if this isn’t peak incompetence and insanity I don’t precisely know what comes after.”
It is my belief that the American and by extension Canadian Left hit bottom in the Regan administration. Regan killed the Soviet Union and saved the US economy by doing the exact opposite of everything the Left believed in. We all watched as their whole thing fell down flat and went on fire.
But they couldn’t let it go. No, not them. They hit the bottom and then they started digging. They’ve been digging since the 1980s. They want a nice coercive totalitarian state where the Cognoscenti call the shots and the peasants freeze in the dark just like the Soviet Union, and they’re not going to let a little thing like Reality get in their way.
There is no bottom. There is no state called Deepest Hole. Because they are DIGGING. They will keep right on digging until they starve from the famine they created, or until somebody sticks a gun in their faces and makes them stop. That’s what finally stopped the Soviets, Regan pointed an orbiting laser at them.
I want that orbital laser. just sayin.
Of course leftists push “insane” ideas. You don’t breed fanaticism with reasonable propositions and a willingness to debate them. You push something like Gender Theory and dare people to disagree, then bring the pain when they do. It’s especially deadly when there’s no pushback, as in GOP moderates who run away from social issues. Libertarians haven’t been much of an improvement, either.
This is not a comment. Computer reboot and deep system cleanse eliminated all cookies and much else. This is to restore commentability. Had this been a real comment something witty would have been said.
Awwww, who’m I trying to kid? Something witless, likely, something half-witty almost assuredly.
–
Sarah, moron and genius alike could see the shadow of the earth on the moon or sun during an eclipse and see tangible, inarguable proof that the earth is not flat. This, of course, presumes at least a rudimentary understanding of the solar system and its structure, so actual “cave men” might not have had the basic understanding to jump to this correct conclusion. Hence the myths about dragons or snakes devouring it. Certainly by the times of Fertile Crescent civilizations no common peasant lacked the knowledge that the earth is round, unless you wish to postulate deception by the upper classes.
Huh? How does the lunar eclipse prove the world is not flat? At most it proves that it is round in one dimension.
“…the government, which, no matter which side is in power is run by a perpetual bureaucracy, educated in the “best” schools…”
The basic problem is/are bureaucracies/bureaucrats. Whoever first said ” Come the revolution, first we kill the lawyers.” was slightly mistaken. First we kill the bureaucrats, then the lawyers. Okay, maybe we just ship them all to somewhere such as Iran, where they can’t do any more harm than is already being done.
Thanks for the post.
Paul L. Quandt