*I thought this was worth rerunning, even if less than 2 years old, because we find ourselves casting from history on what will happen here, and it’s important to understand certain things: How different we are from other nations; how different this crisis is from crisis in the past; and, more importantly, how corrupt our understanding of the past is, because of our establishment’s corruption. Sure, those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. But those who believe Marxist versions of history are doomed to be very surprised – SAH*
The Wrong Story A Blast From The Past From August 7 2020
Having dealt with what I’m sure is yet the same troll in the comments, telling us that without Marxism the “upper classes” wouldn’t give a fig for the lower classes, world without end, connected with something that has been going on in my head all morning.
Anyway, this morning I was reading a book from a non-woke author who has been pounded in reviews for daring to tell the truth about pre-conquest Mexican history, and yet, in analyzing previous Mexican/indigenous societies he speaks repeatedly of “class warfare” and seems to think it’s a normal part of civilization.
Which made me pound my head repeatedly on the breakfast table.
Class warfare isn’t a thing. It was never a thing until Marx brought it to the vocabulary. Hell and damnation, it wasn’t even a thing in the French revolution. No, I’m serious.
The fact that some people have more and some have less has never caused war or the fall of any civilization. What causes war or the fall of civilization is closing pathways to “having more” to large segments of the population.
The French revolution wasn’t class warfare. Yes, aristo, aristo a la lanterne. But what it actually was was the violent reorganization of a society whose ruling elite had become obsolete and unable to adapt to new economic circumstances, and also who refused to let society change normally.
Which I can completely understand is something that would make our current self-proclaimed ruling elites uncomfortable, since that’s exactly what they’re doing.
French aristocrats were often not the wealthiest people around. In fact, their means of wealth had been falling for over a century, and most of them were deeply indebted. What they had by law, though, was power over everyone BORN under them. It wasn’t economic, but state power, ultimately. And they not only refused to relinquish it, allow the bourgeois (often far wealthier) into their circles, but kept coming up with more and better ways to keep the “interlopers” out.
They were in fact doing what a lot of our soi disant “elites” are doing, trying to silence dissent and return to a way of life that hasn’t been normal or healthy for a century or so. (The left’s ideal time is the 1930s for instance. Only with more sex stuff, and — in their heads but nor really since they’re now for straight up apartheid under the guise of safe spaces — racial integration.)
But it wasn’t “classes” in the sense that Marx preached them. It had nothing to do with wealth, income levels, or daily occupation. (The nobility QUITE lacked means of production, that being part of the problem, in the industrial age.)
It was more accurately castes: i.e. privileges given by the government depending on the condition of your birth. Which, again, is what the left is trying to institute here.
Anyway, there has never been “class struggle” in any history ever, in the Marxist sense. That was Marxist…. Well…. Marx was a high functioning autist and invented patterns even where they didn’t exist. And he wanted to plug in to the romantic ethos of the time and make the industrial revolution bad. So he came up with that load of fecal matter. It means nothing.
If you believe in Marxist “classes” and “Class warfare” and you’re not a leftist, kindly consider you’ve been profoundly mal-educated.
(If you are a leftist, you’ve also been profoundly mal-educated, but you like it, you believe in it, and by gum you’re going to wallow in it like a pig in muck.)
History could more accurately be described as a battle of memes.
Humans live not by bread alone. Regardless of how food and the other necessary goods of society are produced, that’s not what makes people happy/unhappy, etc. It’s the story in their heads about the society and what makes it tick that counts. And the story always lags reality. And is often used for the rulers’ purposes.
Hence the romantics were an attempt to make life pre-industrial-revolution wonderful. And convince peasants living in rural submission was better.
At some point, though, the story breaks, when its fit to reality (it’s NEVER 100% because human life is fluid) becomes glaringly broken. This is when revolutions happen.
For instance, it was easy for rural French peasants to groan under the oppression of the nobility, because there was a unified narrative that you were supposed to serve in the place you were born to. And because honestly, the noblemen were different enough so as to be another breed, almost.
It was when the industrial revolution advanced enough that there was a vast group of wealthy people who were told they were inferior “by reason of birth” that the wheels came off. Particularly as the bankrupt nobility tried to push them back into rural subjection.
In the case of the book I’m reading, he talked about pre-Mexican peasants rebelling against the priests who lived so much better, because class warfare. This is not real. Or serious. It’s more likely they rebelled (we don’t know for sure, as we have no written accounts) because the priests failed in their role according to societal narrative.
I.e. they were supposed to keep bad things away, and didn’t.
In the same way the current covidiocy and intentional crash of the economy is an attempt to reverse the clock and to implant the narrative that “we’re all in this together” thereby giving the Marxist intelligentsia of the west control over the story in people’s heads.
“The heroic people and their heroic leaders defeated the virus with the power of government and therefore the government must have more power and narratives must come from the top and be unified.”
This is their preferred narrative. It leaks out with things like DeBolshevik wanting a ticker tape parade “when we defeat” the virus. Or their being really upset at Trump for not falling in line with “government is the way to defeat this” or imposing unified solutions from the top.
It’s not going to work. In fact, it’s hitting hardest those places they have full control of: Arts, entertainment, news, education– What they’re actually doing is destroying their areas of power to gain power. Which is a ghost dance typical of what happens when an “elite” displaced by a change in circumstances which makes their story no longer fit tries to hold on to power.
The more they do, the more they flail around, the harder the fall will be. Which frankly is scaring the shit out of me, as I think it’s going to be guillotines and terror. Not their fake attempts at terror, but the real one, where people Have.Had.Just.About.Enough and have no way to make the bullshit stop except a massive spasm of violence.
This is the way civilizations DO fall.
But the picture in everyone’s head right now is “classes” in “permanent war” which is an invention of Marx and has no contact with reality.
History is not permanent class warfare. History IS permanent change. And when the story in people’s heads doesn’t match the narrative, a time comes when it is reset VIOLENTLY.
The Marxist narrative was never right — which is why it brings death, starvation and destruction wherever it gets power — but it made sense to people in a regimented post-industrial world. It also poisoned them for any practical solution, but hey, the ruling classes could USE it to get more power. So it worked, after a fashion.
Only in the information age it doesn’t. And people are buying it less and less. And know all the ways in which it breaks. But still retain fragments of it in their head. Which means as it falls apart, it will fall faster, harder and more violently.
The more it has penetrated everything and cued people for the wrong reaction, the more violent the outcome.
But screaming the story louder, or having seeded it everywhere doesn’t stop its fall. It just makes the fall more violent.
Reality is a bitch. It always wins.
And the current “elite” inability to understand that, or even to process that they are in fact in charge and not bold rebels (which their Marxist upbringing insists they are) is setting us up for a “blood to our ankles” situation.
Pray that I’m wrong.
According To Hoyt 
I’m not sure it’s correct to say that the nobility lacked means of production. As I understand the history, the nobility were the landowning class—they not only owned the land they themselves occupied and worked, but the land most other people occupied and worked. And under the old order, land was THE means of production.
On the other hand, while factories were becoming means of production (and owners of capital were becoming wealthy), that seems to have been taking place more in Britain than in France. France’s noblesse du robe were lawyers and administrators who don’t seem to have produced much of anything. And while France did have merchants, I don’t think what merchants do count as “production” in the Marxist sense; at least, after the Russian Revolution merchants seem to have been regarded as parasites. So it’s not obvious to me that the French Revolution is properly described as a struggle between two classes as defined by owning different productive assets. But it looks to me like there was a category of rulers who owned the productive asset land, and a different category struggling against them who weren’t defined by ownership of a productive asset.
I wonder if the aristos might be regarded as a caste? They seem to have been insistent on endogamy, though perhaps not to as great a degree as the Spanish hidalgos.
The nobles were in the charming habit of hunting up any feudal duty they could find and forcing compliance unless the peasants could prove it had been dropped. So they were having to perform duties that in medieval times had been exchanged in verbal agreement and so been one at a time.
yep.
I saw a news report today that VP Harris was upset that staffers didn’t rise to their feet when she entered a room. Maybe true, maybe not, but fits with this woman’s personality. She wants the people who work for her to show respect when she won’t even bother to read their briefings. (She might be illiterate. Nobody could be that bad at their job unless there’s something else going on.)
I’ve been contemplating that she joined the “elite” by being willing to do anything to be a member. This strange class of people in our country isn’t defined by birth or education, but by ideology. They’re not competent. They don’t have to be in order to join. For years, they skimmed wealth and power from the productive class and reveled in their status. But it’s all falling apart now, because their class is filled with dumb people who are convinced of their superiority. They can’t make anything work, and it shows.
She wants the people who work for her to show respect when she won’t even bother to read their briefings.
She demands respect but won’t pay others the basic courtesy of treating their work (for her, even) as if it has value. In other words, she’s a classic neo-feudal liberal, who thinks feudalism was one-way, and doesn’t realize that the obligations flowed in both directions. The vassals had a duty to their liege, sure, but the liege had a duty to his vassals as well. A different duty, but a duty nonetheless. Neo-feudalists want all the privileges of being liege lords (including some that never existed), but none of the responsiblities / duties that the position actually entails.
Pretty much…and they usually think they deserve all the privileges without the responsibilities. It is one thing to try to be essentially a god-like figure ruling over others; it’s quite another to think you’re entitled to it.
They’ve seen every media depiction of decadent aristocrats and said “I want that”.
Without realizing come the Revolution they’re more likely to be executed as no longer useful idiots than be the new aristocrats.
RIght now is the closest they’ll get. Had they stopped circa 2000 it probably would have stabilized there, but that just wasn’t good enough.
Thugga the new Tribal Chief does not need a community organizer. Or any LGBWTFBBQ silliness. He does not need politicians or soy boys or rad fems. He demands tribute. The Revolution devolves quickly into (at best) feudalism once it has killed off almost everybody. Most likely though, it devolves into warlords and primitive tribal structure which might turn into something like feudalism later on.
And I don’t mean lords and ladies noblesse oblige feudalism either. More like a protection racket with serfs (essentially slaves) as the broad base and a few thugs at the top with guns.
Dear Man, that’s movies not reality.
Reality is the revolution would devolve…. is devolving into the seventies but worse for ten years or so, then we back to who we are.
Take that colander off your face. You look ridiculous.
It was meant to be tongue in cheek humor. Alas, it was poorly crafted and looks funny. I’m much better at it with caffeine. Which I haven’t had in decent enough quantity since the early 2000s.
What’s happening now looks pretty awful, but not mass murder, chaos, dogs and cats living together. The financial and economic outlook for the next year is grim. But what can’t go on, won’t. Some things that have been successfully juggled for decades are going to crash down. Not all the way down.
The brighter portents are the increasing numbers of people that see the stupidity and malice that is going on in government. I don’t think the Blue party is going to be able to save itself. They will try (as they have many times in the past) to reinvent themselves. The Red team will try and run their usual no-really-we’re-Conservative! candidates. The economy will continue to slip, and things will slowly ooze downward like soap scum on the shower walls, and keep doing so as long as we keep trying to spend our way to wealth and keep trying to get more golden eggs from the ailing goose.
I expect the Democrats to try 2022 as 2020 harder and fail. They know they’re going to lose seats. They’d rather lose them to uniparty establishment pricks than Trumpian threats. So that’s what the Red team is going to try and run, with the tacit support of their political “opponents.”
What concerns me in truth is 2024. I fully expect there to be enough Establishment pricks elected to be not just a do-nothing Congress, but let Biden slide in enough “bi-partisan” (you be bi, we’ll be partisan) legislation to screw us over even more. Then voters will be quite thoroughly upset with their elected officials, the Republican base most especially. And then Democrats will be hoping for a 2018 sweep when the R base stays home, or engages in infighting. Which we must do to get more Trump and DeSantis people in political office, with non-traitorous staff, to fix what’s been broken.
2016 showed that we really can, actually, bounce back quickly. That won’t bring back businesses that shuttered, lives lost, or wealth that’s been lost. But it is the opportunity to try again, without the boot on our necks. Americans are quite good at that when we are given the chance.
caffeine is broken today. I’ve had a ton of it, and it’s still not working. Not sure why.
Weird. Caffeine was always my go to for energy, motivation, and awake-ness. When I started having a reaction to it my throat would swell up. As long as it isn’t that, maybe it will pass?
Right now I’m trying to thrash my way through the next chapter. Words are being difficult. And I am being highly tempted to school a reviewer that no, show/tell does not automatically mean that anything written in first person is always “tell.”
But I’m not going to do that because you don’t argue with reviewers when they are a little bit wrong. You make zombies out of them that have absolutely nothing to do with the the actual person/bot that annoyed you and then you shoot them in the face. The zombies. Fictitiously. With words.
yep. True.
I despise the first person haters. Heinlein wrote mostly in first person and so do I. If you think first person is inferior, you’re likely to be a dumbass who despises the individual.
Several of my favorites write in first person, too. It makes no sense to hate on first. There are many, many fans who will disagree with you.
If it is just a taste thing (which I suspect is at the root of the issue), “I don’t like it, myself” is perfectly fine. The “excessive telling” and “rambling” mess just irked me a smidgen. I usually like to write in third, but this one just won’t come out any other way. shrug
And I know I ramble. That’s something that sometimes gets cut in the editing process (no, we don’t need to know every step the MC takes). But blaming it on first person is just wrong.
I DESPISE present tense and just abandoned a promising mystery because of it, but don’t presume to dictate.
Present is a hard break in immersion for me. I’ve yet to find a story where it just works. The so-awkward-its-cute thing tends to irritate me personally, but I’ll never tell an author it’s just flat wrong to use the trope.
…
I have many little opinions about things like that. But I’ll take my nitpicks of things like “lie/lay” and “breathe/breath” to my deathbed. And decimated (it’s 1/10 not 9/10). But I try to notice when its just my taste and not actual butchering of the English language…
The one I just abandoned had a reason for being present tense. It just supremely annoys me.
I have never seen a present-tense story done well. I find them intensely annoying. 😛 Maybe it’s possible to write a good story in present tense, but I don’t have any idea how it could be done.
I have seen a lot of good stories written in first person. Having a single point of view rigidly enforced can make a story simpler to tell. Events are funneled down to a single thread. Only what the narrator character sees, knows and notices has to be written. Other characters are seen only from the outside, so their motives can be unclear or misunderstood.
I can think of a few examples:
It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me. I attempted to wiggle my toes, succeeded. I was sprawled there in a hospital bed and my legs were done up in plaster casts, but they were still mine.
On an otherwise ordinary Tuesday I got the chance to live the American dream. I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss out of a fourteenth-story window.
For me it started way too early on July 12, ’07, with my phone shrilling in a frequency guaranteed to peel off the skull.
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
Take it from someone who grew up in this business. You should never, ever, ever hunt vampires in a dark basement as the sun is going down.
When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city — which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was.
Call me Ishmael.
It was wondered by him if a sudden switch to illeism and passive voice would give the hostess a new tolerance for the lesser crimes against narrative style. It was also recognized by him that baiting the hostess in this manner would likely earn him a carp to the face, but he found the temptation irresistible.
She launches the carp.
Temptation was found irresistible.
It was pointed out by him that she probably meant “The carp was launched by her.” Wisely running for cover was his next action. 😛
He realized he would only die tired.
Which is why they want to take guns away from everybody except the elitists and their hired goons.
Good thing we’ve made that impossible. Long before they could confiscate even 1% of the guns, millions more would be turned against them.
We’ve got more than 600 million guns, and criminals only kill a few thousand people a year with them. A few dozen more die in gun ‘accidents’. (Look into the facts in any of those ‘accidents’ and you almost invariably find that it was the result of gross stupidity) That is one of the best safety records of any common implement. I suspect that more people are accidentally killed by bathtubs than guns.
———————————
Democrats trust violent criminals and terrorists with guns more than they trust you.
Speaking of all the guns we have…
Anybody remember Deterrence Dispensed, the guys who designed the fully-3D-printed FGC-9 automatic? Well, apparently they got bored and decided to take it to the next level:
…We’re going to have 3D-printed nukes before this is over, aren’t we?
They’re spoiled children in other words.
This describes the head of an organization I once belonged to. The casual comment that a wasted report (generated, printed by me, on my own resources) “was only paper” started a chain of events that ended with a walk-away on my part 6 weeks later, and the gradual, but total collapse of that organization in a couple of years.
Agreed on spoiled children, except that the remedy will go far beyond a time out in the corner, and the spanking will be with considerable energy. Either ballistic or cruder means of employing Newton’s laws.
It’s all falling apart because of the years they’ve been skimming wealth and power from the productive class. As part of that skimming, they made it harder and harder to be productive, leaving less and less able to be skimmed, but they don’t recognize that they’ve damaged or even destroyed the economic base that supported them. Now that support is no longer sufficient to prop them up, and they have no idea why that’s happening. All they can do is to try more of what failed, without the brains to understand why it isn’t working.
Regarding this class of people, I don’t know if this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
From the Tweet: “Am hearing that Brentwood, prestigious private school in LA, is in chaos after almost zero white seniors got into to UC schools. When friends went there in happier times, UC acceptance was like 80%. This year, bipoc kids only.
Parents who spent $60K/yr+ for 6 years little upset”
One presumes that these are the people who lobbied for the abolition of the SAT as an entrance criterion to the UC schools because of “Equity”.
One of Keenan’s further comments was that the people who didn’t get in can get jobs as tutors for those who did. h/t Insty.
Wow, a bunch of rich liberals got what they voted for. Boo-hoo.
Schadenfreude? Who, me? 😛
“The customer never knows what he wants until after he sees what he gets.”
Despite this, the customer can still make a better guess as to what he wants than any outside expert.
What I learned is to let the client talk, with little input until close to the end, then guide it, somewhat. What clients “want” is the “output”, with as easy of “input” as possible. I rarely had problems with this whether I was developing systems from scratch, programming, through delivery and training. Reworking an existing system; gutting what wasn’t working, rewriting, and adding new features. Or just adding custom items for new clients. The end result was “Exactly what is Needed.” A few of these clients/end users were reported to be “difficult”. Not so much for me. This is over a 35 (ish) career. Yes, I am bragging some.
Don’t get me wrong. There was one client. Who I got stuck with because although I couldn’t nail the end result without a lot of back and forth, a frustrating “lot more”, at least I could work with the client. The problem wasn’t the client exactly, is ONE person in their IT was the contact and source of ALL information (even when that person was swapped out, didn’t get better, got worse, was really glad when the original person rotated back in). Who did not have a clue what end users needed, wanted, let alone why. (Didn’t help that while his English was better than my Spanish, as in none, communication was a problem due to accent.) Plus the requirements were dictated by, in order: County (they tried to say state, but not the only client in that state, so while I didn’t say BS, I thought it some), and departments. Latter often which conflicted. I swear sometimes requirements came off as “If it rains on Tuesday, except for department Y, Z, K, and subset department O”. To the point where there was one request for change, after years of stability, requested, that was approved and paid for (not cheap either, on purpose), completed, delivered, and charged. Then months later, a sub-portion of the department, complained, and the request came to “put it back”. My response? Copy of the approved change order. With original message requesting change. With the question. “Do you really want to do this? I will write up a change order. Let me know.” Last I heard was “Will get back to you.” Then I retired. Heard only one thing after that “How did I deal with them?” Response – “Now you know. Carefully. Good Luck.”
Checking…
Nope, don’t care. They ruined a state to virtue signal then built an enclave for their little darlings only for their virtue signalling to catch up with them.
I would argue that the French Revolution was as much about state bankruptcy as anything else. I would also argue that Marx was wrong about just about everything, he never understood distribution and everything he didn’t understand was irredeemably evil. The best thing to do with Marx is ignore him since all he does is cause confusion.
My cynical little voice opines that Marx was merely trying to codify his own preferred lifestyle, to wit: Give me money and sex whenever I want it, or you’re mean and evil and I hate you.
Pretty much, yes. He was “an angry, smelly ink blot of a man”
Having read far too much about Karl Marx, he reminds me in so many ways of that guy that is very good at securing money and vices for people above him, to fuel his own vices and greed. But, in a very “by the docks” sort of way, very low-rent, low-key, and just scummy. He’s at best a pot dealer that can bag the simplest sort of woman, but no matter how much he says he thinks he’s big time…he knows he’s just a little two-bit hustler.
Which probably surprised him the most when he became…well, relatively famous for the stuff that was his justification for “you have to give me everything, because I know what to do with it,” hidden in a lot of verbiage of the rise of the proletariat.
He was a bad parent, maybe worse than that…one of his daughters committed suicide..
He exploited the maid and got her pregnant. When she insisted on admitting the boy was hers, he insisted that he could only visit her through the backdoor, and the only time his son ever saw him was once when they were walking opposite directions on a walkway.
My favorite realization is that the very “communism” he expects to arise from the “withering away of the dictatorship of the proletariat” is the very “capitalism” he riles against, except somehow without property and money.
He didn’t notice that there’s only two ways to organize society — force and persuasion — and that people, once they establish themselves as a force, aren’t going to want to relinquish that.
It is for this reason, more than anything else, that a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” never becomes true Communism — and which produces the funny canard “True Communism has never been tried!”
Never mind that Capitalism is supposed to collapse into the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and every day the Big Capitalist Countries — the US and Great Britain — don’t do that is a day that “True Communism” fails — and never mind that every Socialist Revolution is a “short circuit” where Communists decided they were tired of waiting for the Proletariat to rise up and Dictate — and that every day that such a Dictatorship fails to wither away is also a day that Communism has failed, yet again.
True Communism has failed every way it has been tried.
For all times it’s been tried at the country or countrIES level, you’d figure if it had even a ghost of a chance of working, by now it would have at least one success if only by utter and sheer accident. That it has failed from the start, failed after the start, and is still failing even now… should indicate that failure is its default mode, it’s rest state. And even in an excited state, cannot last very long before dropping back to the rest state… and doesn’t even emit photons in the drop, but Misery – not the mere misery of those directly involved, but the Misery is emitted and foist upon on others. Or: Pinochet wasn’t nearly nasty/effective enough about dealing the purveyors of such.
I do like the idea someone here had: Let them have an island all to themselves. Let them run things as they see fit. NO OUTSIDE ASSISTANCE to prop it all up. In a few decades (if that long…) someone can go see Utopia. Or, more likely, the remains of Abject Failure.
You mean, an island like…Cuba, for instance?
My challenge to the communists (and socialists, and fascists, and collectivists of every other stripe) is to take one of the many dysfunctional countries that have been destroyed by their noxious creeds and fix it. Any way they want. Surely, if communism is soooo great and noble, that should be easy.
Instead, they insist on ruining the few functional countries that remain. They don’t have to prove they can do that! We’ve all seen it, over and over. Time for them to show us something new.
———————————
Cally: [long rant about what the Federation did to her family]
Vila: “And it wasn’t even a crime!”
Cally: [menacing] “You mean it wasn’t against the law.”
Vila: [nervous] “Uh, yeah, right, that’s what I meant.”
“Real socialism/communism” is a trifle funnier, since you notice by “real” they mean “imaginary.”
Morning, all. I would argue that status is sometimes determined as much by occupation as by wealth, however it is measured. It doesn’t matter if you own a piece of land – if you would lose social standing by cultivating it yourself than you don’t own the means of production. British aristos wouldn’t have been caught dead engaging in ‘trade’, for example, even if they were down to their last farthing. The sclerotic paralysis of a society is the issue/warning of impending upheaval.
We really need a culture where producing things of quality is how you GET status.
My own synthesis of several ideas others have presented:
* Revolts occur when people are so hungry that attacking the government sounds like a better idea than the opposite.
* Revolutions happen when the second and third sons of the upper middle class in your society have no upward mobility and/or no job prospects.
The events in Egypt in 2008 was primarily a revolt: it takes a lot of hunger to make the idea of picking up an armored personnel carrier by hand and throwing it off a bridge a good idea, and the people there were getting that hungry.
The ultimate expression of a pure revolution was the American Revolution. All of the Founding Fathers were boxed out of the upper middle class safety valve in British society: the bureaucracy. They couldn’t get a government job in England or rise the ranks in the military like their English brothers, and the local governments were getting shut down. So they made their own opportunities.
The French Revolution started as a revolt that progressed into a revolution as the radicals started taking over. The Russian Revolution was also both: nearly every party in that mess were college-attending middle class people with no job prospects.
The danger to the US in the 30s was a revolt that then fed into a Communist or Fascist revolution. As fascist as Antifa is/was, I was never very afraid of it because it posed only a minor risk of a revolution but no risk of revolt. A serious downturn in the US economy could change that.
“We’re all in this together” made me grind my teeth. No, we were not in it together. We were six feet apart, remember? We were masked, we were gloved, we were behind plastic barriers. We needed totalitarian “vaccine passports” to be allowed to go places. We were glared at if we so much as had to move our mask to take a drink. We got hassled by authorities when we went to deserted beaches or wilderness areas to get away from this crap. We were herded into online venues where we could be shut down at the press of a button if someone didn’t like what we were saying.
If that was togetherness, I’d hate to see what division is like.
You ain’t kidding. What’s this “we,” kemosabe?
without Marxism the “upper classes” wouldn’t give a fig for the lower classes, world without end,
An upper class without any concern for the lower classes, using standard Marxist class divides, starves. It is a self-correcting problem. One I think American elites are on the verge of learning.
The reality is that statement can only be made by someone who thinks food comes from the grocery store, or in that person’s probable case, Uber.
Though not Uber for long if they have their way. Uber isn’t compatible with public transit. A locale that doesn’t allow it’s residents their own vehicles can’t support something like Uber.
no, PubTrans for you, Uber for them (or a replacement because their allied Unions hates teh Uber/Lyft)
Except that Uber cannot exist if the general public doesn’t have its own method of transport. You can have other delivery methods. But something like Uber requires that the proles have their own vehicles
and you expect them to be able to think ahead? (~_^) If they could see cause and effect, they’d not be the way they are. Well some do and those are the especially evil ones.
Uber reached an agreement with NYC this morning to put ll taxicab drivers on its app. To counter, said the Wall Street Journal, a shortage of Uber drivers and to send business to the cabbies, who have been hurt by covidiocy. (OK, I said the last word).
And then they’ll blame the plebs for not delivering the food via bus.
I pray Sarah’s wrong, too, but how do you all think we stop all this? The elite garbage won’t put an end to anything, so how do regular people just stop the Ferris wheel and shove the communists off?
There’s a shift happening. Instapundit has a link up to a chat between Bill Maher and Adam Carolla, and Maher apparently spent part of it talking about how voters in California are probably going to turn on the Democrats because of government overregulation. That’s not Donald Trump saying it. That’s not Mark Steyn saying it. It’s Bill Maher saying it. He’s popular on the left. And if he’s talking about voters turning on the Democrats, I suspect it’s suddenly going to become much more palatable to many on the left.
I think we’re on the verge of the “normals” in the Democratic Party starting to try and distance themselves from what their party has become.
Only if we clean up the voting.
One of the important elements for that to happen is for increasing numbers of people to suspect that there’s something fishy about the ballot counting, and subsequently make noise about it. That’s more likely to happen when people vote, but the election is announced for the candidate they didn’t vote for.
I’m disheartened by the number of idiots claiming there was no fraud in 2020.FRAUD WE SAW HAPPEN. Idiots on OUR side.
Mo Brooks found out what happens when you start bleating about “moving on” from the theft of the 2020 election.
Trump withdrew his endorsement, and we pay attention to that sort of thing.
I live next to his district. On the whole he seems to be doing a good job and he supported Trump in office. The only ad I’ve heard against him reminded me of the smear campaign the D’s ran against a previous Republican – those turned me completely off.
Reading his statement, he looks to have decided, “Whether there was fraud or not, the President picked the wrong way to fight it.”
All in all, if I lived in his district I’d probably give him the benefit of the doubt.
I would probably vote for him, too, if I had to know him well enough to vote/not vote for him. He’s always seemed to be a pretty solid, trustworthy guy for years.
I think he made a mistake about 2020.
Hell, here in GA we have someone on our side who openly aided in the fraud, especially in the runoff where he added more “just drop all the votes you can in here” boxes.
Now the SOB has a primary challenge for Secretary of State and wants to investigate. F* him. If he is the nominee, I’ll vote Dem. If the SoS is going to stack it for Dems I want it to be a Dem who does it.
SIGH.
Oh, and I suspect a lot of the “no fraud” crowd from our side knew there would be fraud, but hey, they had to get rid of Trump at any price.
Trump was interrupting the gravy train. There were trillions at stake.
They’re all corrupt and they all work together.
Technically, it is possible to innocently believe that one has seen no evidence of fraud.
Stronger statements than that are suspect.
Believing that oneself has investigated the issue, and can conclude no fraud, is fairly questionable. I would think that the only sincere innocents are those bereft of curiosity and imagination.
A real investigation of why people believe that fraud occurred, and into the merits of their arguments, might tend to show that there are some interesting coincidences.
Pretty much. The government’s insistence that THERE IS NO FRAUD, with the only evidence literally being the government’s own say so, is itself very suspicious.
If it is honest stupidity, the folks in question being stupid is itself a problem.
Trying to force people to shut up is not always the most effective persuasion.
THIS.
Yes to all you’ve said and especially THIS. This is what leaves the bitter taste, and robs me of mercy for anyone on our side who aided the sabotage.
Some of them were Trump supporters, or at least neutral. It’s like they allow people to reach in and change their minds. Makes me want to scream.
I suspect that some have their own fraud going on. Not to the same blatant levels as happened in six counties in 2020. But I’m sure that there are more than a few Republicans who enjoy some extra-legal padding for their margin of victory.
There’s some rumbling about Mitch’s victory for the Senate his last election.
But .. those “move on from 2020” *ssholes are NOT ON OUR SIDE.
One of many things that I thank Trump for is making the Uniparty obvious to those who had not seen it before.
John in Indy
He encourages me when he continues to do so, as in the case of poor Mo Brooks.
In name only. They’re Establishment pricks. Not conservatives, not in line with the Red party base. No one who says “there was no fraud” gets any credibility. At best they are ignorant. And even that is grading on a curve.
The fact that we SEE them openly fighting to obfuscate and obstruct any attempt at making the election system MORE HONEST tells you everything you need to know, even if you were politically ignorant before.
The problem with more people losing faith in elections is I’m not sure you just undo that with laws. Legitimate elections, those the population believes in, are a feature of a high trust society. If you’ve destroyed trust to the point people quit believing in elections, how do you restore the trust?
This is the same issue I have with corporations cutting off wrong thinkers. I can no longer trust patronizing them is safe and a change of CEO and a mea culpa isn’t enough to undo the damage as I’ve seen cycles of “this was a mistake and we’ve fixed it” only to happen again (and always in the same direction).
This is true. But people will also only take action against fraud if they think there’s a reason to. What we want is an electorate that’s suspicious, but that is also confident that fraud can be fixed (or at least minimized).
That’s when things get done.
The key is to make the system transparent and auditable.
I think Australia has a system were representatives for all the parties in the election are directly monitoring the vote counting, and run off of a paper ballot system.
I expect there are other systems we can set up to ensure that the process is transparent and people can see that the vote has validity.
In theory representatives for every part can observe US vote counts. In 2020 the next county over declare a “flood” and shut down counting then restarted after observers went home.
I do want use to return to either paper or lever machines, though.
I can think of a few ways to screw up a lever machine, particularly if it’s electronic. Chicago had some masters at corrupting votes with the old lever machines, one of the more infamous was “I’ll demonstrate the machine to you”, meanwhile casting a vote as part of the demonstration.
I’m talking the old mechanical ones. I’ve been an election worker.
Yes, they can be screwed with, but one vote on one machine as a demo is light years away from current vulnerabilities. Paper ballot boxes can be stuffed as well.
The advantage is both are retail cheating. To pull off 2020 with either would require a couple of orders of magnitude more people in place than 2020 did. While I’d prefer paper replace all electronics in areas still on mechanical lever or that kept them after going to electronic and want to go back to them instead of paper letting levers stay would be an acceptable compromise to me.
It’s going to be a battle any way it happens. There’s been indications that some of the mail-in ballots were counterfeits, and some of the areas where that’s likely to have happened have been less than cooperative in investigations. (Stonewall comes to mind, along with the deliberate violation of rules/laws on procedures to deal with the mail-ins.)
It might boil down to a technological battle between official ballots and counterfeiters. There were some rumors that a bunch of real ballots had some UV water marks, but I never heard of any followups on that.
In the end the problem is civilization is an agreement. For a given organization there is a threshold which the percentage of population which refuses to agree must be kept below.
It is clear we are close to or above the threshold for a free Western society to house dissenters. It is also clear that is a relatively low percentage, perhaps below 20%.
We need to either purge the dissenters, peacefully if possible (allow them to find new homes in civilizations more to their liking) are accept we cannot have a free Western society here.
I doubt it is that high. The thing to remember is 2020 was decided by only four districts, in intensely corrupt cities, but that was also only possible because several larger suburbs, where cheating was not as easy, were also deceived by the newsies about what they were voting for and ended up turning out in enough numbers that the few areas where the left could fraud on an industrial scale were sufficient to tip things.
It was an all hands on deck battle for the DNC. Many of them were convinced they were fighting the reincarnation of Hitler and the Black Death.
Of course what they got was Mister “eat the bugs” bad finger the nuke juggler, Castro’s pretty boy freezing people’s bank accounts, and judge pedo in the girl’s restroom.
A lot of average people simply had no idea how bad that crew really was. During the last administration he was part of, the media was still mostly trusted, and they were able to paper over most of it, but now they’ve got a judge they’re trying to put on the SC who can’t even tell if she’s a black woman or not, and their nut hatch brigade think that is something to celebrate.
Sorry, I didn’t mean the election was that much. I’m speaking in broader terms with the election as one data point. The choice to end prosecution and punishment of crimes in major cities is another (and now we will have a justice on the Supreme Court pro child porn leniency). It doesn’t help that we’re at a point where the dissenters are not on the margin but “the elite”.
Thank you. You cannot live with people who won’t leave any aspect of your life alone.
Your lips to G-d’s ears.
The only other possibility is another 2016 – a shift so nutty that their fraud machine is entirely unprepared for it.
Oh, they’re prepared…….
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/03/25/did-clyburn-just-reveal-bidens-plan-for-the-democrats-election-power-grabs-n1584188
It is paywalled, but here’s the gist.
“That’s when he revealed what he really thinks will revive Biden’s presidency. “The things that he will be doing, going forward, I think he’s going to be doing some things on voting that may surprise some people, and a few other things. His numbers will go up.”
What exactly did Clyburn mean here? I have a hunch.
In light of the failure of Democrats to pass their power grabs legislatively, it seems likely that Clyburn believes Biden will attempt to implement these high-priority agenda items via executive action.
It wouldn’t be the first time a Democrat president abused his power to pass laws that failed to get through Congress via executive action.”
Easy peasy. Biden issues orders, Democrat jurisdictions refuse to enforce Voter ID etc., the elections are certified, and they’re in office because there’s no legal way to remove them. As we saw in 2020, the courts either won’t allow cases or will rule against it all the way to SCOTUS.
CA would be lost to the lefties even with perfectly honest voting. The Reader traveled to all parts of CA extensively in the two decades before he retired. He never found anyone who questioned the path the Democrats had the state on. Eventually the Reader left the topic out of conversation. CA is going to be one of the places where very bad things will need to happen before any change happens. Maher is whistling in the wind.
I live in LA County. While most of the people around me are lefties, there’s still a decently-sized Republican population here. If there weren’t, then the Dems wouldn’t have had to push through things like jungle primaries, and ballot harvesting.
Northern California (at least east of the marijuana smoked counties and north of the Bay Area/Sacramento Axis of Evil) is getting fed up. I’m not sure if there’s enough leverage/population to swing things, but it promises to be lively.
I hope you’re right. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Fear of starvation…when they break things enough people think they will starve rope will be found.
In an amazing fit of irony, the left has spent two decades now convincing people in the first culture where obesity is a disease of the poor that they are already one meal from starvation with the growth of “food insecurity” when there wasn’t enough actual hunger to justify more government and “food deserts” when 100% of the produce made by man wasn’t continuously available 24/7 within three blocks of someone’s house.
Since this is about fear of starvation, not actual starvation, by making people more afraid of what a single empty shelf means they’ve put the thing that will get them hung and their method of obtaining power on intersecting courses.
Within three blocks? No. Alright, there’s a Shell station/convenience store in that range, but produce (unless you meant PRODUCTION) isn’t really that. A couple bananas hardly count. Now, add in the (EXPENSIVE, yes really) option for delivery and it’s another matter. But starvation? Not hardly. There are places where “Brand X” is all there is because “Brand Y” isn’t there, but there’s still something there. And the items vary… a year ago, maybe, rice was almost fictional. Now, it’s plentiful. But kitty might be upset that $FavoriteFlavor/Brand isn’t there. But next month it might be something else.
I’d say take advantage of sales (duh) and stock up on, well, anything and everything you actually use. Best case, you have a bit less room and don’t need to buy Right Now. Worst case, you are ready to deal with the… fertilizer enhanced fan. No need for a “Five Year Plan” but being able to survive even the next storm knocking out Normality for a few days is something. And, of course, the more prepared one is to deal with $PROBLEM, the less likely $PROBLEM is to manifest. Why, since being even slightly ready for a multi-HOUR (never mind multi-day) power outage, the electrical service has been reliable save for a couple seconds here and there. And yes, I know, I just taunted Murphy and I shouldn’t oughta do dat.
Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Murphy.
I too was ready for the power outage that didn’t happen…. so lightning knocked out my neighborhood’s internet for half a day. Cell phone mobile hotspot doesn’t play nice with Zoom.
Maybe the French Revolution was caused by being annoyed with virtue signaling. I logged into the Native Instruments website (they make tools for electronic music production) to look up a product. I saw there was something in my cart and went to see what it was only to find this banner at the top of the page:
“Native Instruments stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, among whom are our colleagues, family, friends, partners, and fellow creators. We have suspended all sales to Russia and Belarus through our webshop, joining forces with the global organizations applying pressure to the Russian government. To our Russian and Belarusian music creators, we recognize how this decision impacts you directly and ask for your understanding.”
Really? Why do I care? Why do you care? Why do you hate Russian musicians regardless of their politics?
This doesn’t make me want to buy your software, but it does make me want to pirate copies for DJs in Russia who just want to make music.
I have upgraded Native Instruments Komplete nearly every year. When the more complete Komplete Ultimate came out I cross graded. This has not been an insignificant sum of money. That is what I want from you, not lectures about how moral you are by joining in the current 2-minute hate (oh, if it was only 2 minutes…Orwell was an optimist).
When Komplete Ultimate 14 comes out next year maybe I’ll sit on my wallet in protest of politicizing everything. Off to check the Arturia and Image-Line websites.
Just today, my bank just asked me to become an ally in the fight for racial justice. I suspect, knowing the bank as I do, that it’s dying so rolling left. It rhymes with argot.
GAH
The stupidity is compounded by our knowledge of what targeting civilians with strategic bombing did on both sides in WWII. Whenever it was used with the intent of “moral busting” it raised civilian resolve: UK, Germany, and Japan (and in Japan despite the fact we were systematically burning the country down…all the atomic bomb targets were skipped in LeMay’s campaign from largest city down to have targets of an adequate size left when the bomb was ready).
One of the consequences of Colonial Mexican / Latin American priestly exploitation, corruption, and disregard of their subjects was the evolution of the tradition of the common people to pray directly to their Saints to petition G_d for them, as the priests required payment first, and taught that people could not pray to G_d themselves.
On another subject, IMHO, one of the reasons thevorganized Left hates Trump so much, and tge reason he won’t go away is that he is not the leader of a populist movement, but rather its’ avatar.
Trump tapped into a preexisting anger and resentment of the people of America that their elected “representatives” were obeying their purchasers, not their constituents.
This anger has only become hotter and more focussed since 2016, as the Uniparty, the administrative State, and their financiers / owners / directors flail at us.
John in Indy
You do realize that “Catholics don’t think they can pray to God directly” is more black legend junk, right?
Jews were seeking intercession from saints, at Rachel’s Tomb and the tombs at Machpelah, and at Aaron’s tomb outside Petra, a long time before the Last Supper.
Also, there was a whole Mexican Civil War about direct devotion to Christ as king. You know, the one with all the martyrs.
THIS.
I’ve been doing some reading about the 1526 German Peasants’ Revolt, one of several in the first third of the 1500s in Central Europe. It used to be credited or blamed on Luther advancing that idea of the equality of souls and that people had a right to rebel against unjust rulers. When you really start looking at what was said, and what the nobles were saying and doing, it was about the German nobility trying to take back rights and understandings that had developed in the wake of the Black Death and the climate down-turn of the 1300s-early 1400s. The peasants argued that the nobles had their job, and weren’t doing it, while demanding that the peasants and city dwellers give up rights, including tax breaks/reductions and feudal duties. Luther provided a theological justification for SOME people, not all of them. (There were other elements as well, which is why some of the lower nobility joined the peasant side, at least temporarily).
The growing centralization and grabs for power by the European nobility kicked off a lot of what were later called ‘class wars.” Nope, it was mostly “don’t tread on me,” and “leave me alone and make sure that other people leave me alone.”
Many of Luther’s Theses were just that. John in Indy said in the comment just above that Trump is not so much the leader – he’s the avatar. Luther could be called the “Trump of the Reformation.” The nobility and the Church were pretty much the same thing at the time; a “family business” no matter which branch the particular person was in.
C4C
I remember seeing a comment somewhere recently that said the West’s understanding of the Chinese “Mandate from Heaven” isn’t correct — that the Chinese believe in the “Mandate from Heaven” in much the same way we view “Divine Right of Kings”.
In a literal sense, this is certainly true — that mass starvation, for example, won’t necessarily mean the people will automatically overthrow the government and replace it with a new one.
In a more figurative sense, however, governments always require a certain amount of “consent of the people”. If the current government loses that consent — and mass starvation would likely be a factor in that — then that government will fall.
In that sense, the “Mandate of Heaven”, or “Divine Right of Kings”, or “Consent of the Governed”, all pretty much mean the same thing: the people in power will stay in power so long as the ruled believe the people in power should have that power. The moment that the illusion is broken, however, is the moment that the people become ungovernable, and the people who “should” have that power, can no longer exercise it.
The Mandate of Heaven was an attempt by Chinese historians after the fact to explain why a Dynasty collapsed. According to Chinese scholarly thinking, only virtuous leaders could establish a successful dynasty. And since the founder of the dynasty was virtuous, any dynasty that lasted more than a couple of generations must have incorporated the virtuous founder’s ideals, making the entire dynasty virtuous. Heaven smiles on a virtuous dynasty, allowing it to remain in power. But after a while, every dynasty would fall. Historians were confronted with the problem of trying to explain why a virtuous dynasty had been overthrown and replaced. The rationale they came up with was that later emperors ceased to be virtuous, and so lost the mandate of heaven.
Westerners have become overly fixated on it for some reason.
Somewhere in Expanded Universe Heinlein points out in the long run all governments exist because of the consent of the governed. A well-run government, of any type, governs as lightly as possible and focuses its interaction with the typical person on protecting them from external threats. That focus makes the other, minority, interactions tolerable and the average person ignores the government.
That is why authoritarian governments start to all look alike*, as you concentrate on things other than defending the coast, delivering the mail, and skimming a percentage as protection money you have to get more aggressive because more people notice the government and notice the skim. As they notice they start to push back against things that aren’t the aforementioned defending the coast and delivering the mail.
If you read the bill of particulars in the Declaration you get a good sense of that. How the current government, which surpassed that bill long ago, continues to have the consent of the governed is beyond me.
It is also why we have a tendency due to our leftist indoctrination to boil fascism down to authoritarianism and use markers that could describe Elizabethian England as much as Nazi Germany to define fascism.
“How the current government, which surpassed that bill long ago, continues to have the consent of the governed is beyond me.”
herbn, you are assuming that they care about consent as long as they have assent. And with the help of people like Jeff Gauch and Foxfier, who reassure us that we shouldn’t revolt over creeping Fascism because they haven’t put us all in jail, they continue to have people show up, pay the taxes, and avoid trouble.
Remarkably reminiscent of Germans in 1930-1933 who weren’t worried about Herr Hitler because he was only still working up to massacre. He told them what he was; they didn’t believe him.
Dude. So much straw flying I’m going to get an asthma attack.
No one said that, except in your head.
My surprise is less they care about consent and more how they are still getting mass compliance.
George Orwell observed long ago that “fascism” had ceased to have any meaning other than “government that I disapprove of.” There are in fact definitions of fascism—one might start with Mussolini’s platform—but they have nothing to do with how the word is used, or even with how it was used in the 1940s.
It’s equally the case that “democracy” has ceased to mean anything other than “government that I approve of.” There are definitions of “democracy”—many of them implying condemnation, from Aristotle to Madison—but they have nothing to do with how the word is used now. I think Robinson Jeffers’s advice during World War II was sound: “Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy/And the dogs that talk revolution,/Drunk with talk, liars and believers.”
In point of fact, the symbol of the rods and the axe, which Heinlein cites in Starship Troopers, though its Latin name is the fasces, can equally well be taken as a symbol of democracy.
A big problem with democracy as a world is we’ve mushed republic and democracy together and then decided “democracy = elections”.
People are living with it, because it’s NOT AS BAD EVERYWHERE.
That was my revelation as we traveled across the country summer of 20.
Some places are pretty much “normal” by your definition. Possibly MOST places outside large cities. The large cities/blue states are unendurable,but most of the people who were really pissed off made the discovery I did and moved.
It’s going to take getting bad all over.
Fortunately the clown Junta stands ready.
It’s not really bad here, other than gas being $5.80 a gallon. That’s not the point. I did not consent to being ruled by a bunch of incompetent ass-clowns!
Eventually, they have to run out of people to blame for the consequences of their ass-clownery, right? Right?
———————————
Today, every child in America is born $89,000 in debt.
I absolutely GET that, but that’s us. Most of the normal people don’t SEE how bad it is elsewhere.
Gas has been about 3.80 in the place I usually go to fill up the tank. Used to be below $3.00 a bit over a year or so ago. I live in a city near a bunch of refineries so I suspect that’s keeping the price a bit lower than other places.
Before the Democrats stole the election for Harris-und-Biden gas was around $3.20 at the nearest station. About three weeks after that it started going up. Was that when it became clear that they’d gotten away with it, and we weren’t going to be saved by a miracle? Gas has been going up ever since, with a few slight reverses lasting a week or so.
How did Putin manage to drive our gas prices up, more than a year before invading Ukraine? That’s some next-level Evil Overlord manipulation there!
———————————
Anybody with enough functioning brain cells to form a quorum is violently allergic to socialism.
It was $3.99 (up from around $2.20 at the inauguration) here, but then it miraculously dropped back 10 cents. Praise Biden! Let the healing begin!
…I don’t actually NEED a sarc tag with this crowd, right? We’re all cool here?
c4c
“So what difference is there between our voters and wielders of franchise in the past? We have had enough guesses; I’ll state the obvious: Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. “And that is the one practical difference” ~~ RAH
SIGH!