I realized over the last few days that the big problem in this country is not that we’re two households — not even vaguely both alike in dignity — but that we’re two cultures that really can’t communicate at all.
Yes, I know that tests have been done, and blah blah, and we understand the left better than they understand us. This is kind of, sort of almost true. Except where it isn’t. And where it isn’t, it’s close to Scott Adams different movies in the head, but that’s also not the right metaphor.
What you need to know to understand the divide is that the left has for the last, oh, easily 80 years, dominated the public discord. They did this partly because in the early industrial age, the left’s idea of centralizing, streamlining and top down control seemed logical. After all, it worked for making widgets. You didn’t need fifty little factories, replicating effort and doing unneeded stuff. You needed Widgets Amalgamated United, which could produce more widgets, faster than anyone around. And it made sense for the government to give incentives to the unified widget manufacturers because that made the production better, right?
Note none of those assumptions are actually correct, not the least because Widgets Amalgamated United if given a monopoly has zero incentive to innovate, deliver etc. Second because WAU will have incentive to abuse specialized workers, which means workers have to unionize, and next thing you know WAU is on strike and there’s no Widgets for anyone.
OTOH you and I can probably see how it looked like it should work. Which means all intellectuals and thinkers were working towards this future that seemed so clear to them. Add to it WWI, from which entirely the wrong conclusions were drawn (Partly due to already prevalent Marxism) and instead of thinking that the war was caused by internationalism and inadvisable alliances, they decided it was due to patriotism and nationalism.) What you have is a progressive — that is statist and centralized — prospiracy with heavy Marxist overtones (because it was the “cool” theory of everything.
Because of this, the hiring was perverted because the idea was that “everyone who is smart knows centralization and top down is best.” So the only people not believing it must be dumb. No one wants to hire dummies.
Except for those who stealthed, and those who changed while on the job, no one who dissented from the leftist chorus got hired. And if you changed while on the job you’d get sidelined.
This was so effective and ubiquitous that it did not change after the USSR fell, proving what a pile of refuse that model was.
That means that those of us who came to dissent (and often kept very quiet about it) came to it painfully, by adding things up logically until we couldn’t deny them. We had to get past the “but everyone else, including very smart people thinks this” and the “Am I crazy?” Which means we came to our positions by unremitting logic, and not a bit of natural stubborn.
Granted, it got easier with the net. It’s glorious to know we’re not alone. but it’s still not the dominant opinion. Even those who represent us in government tend to believe in centralized/ top down.
So we need RELENTLESS logic and analysis to remain on the for lack of a better term “right.” (The American right is not the European right. Our only points of contact is that we both dissent.) Granted, given how many people we’ve attracted recently, a lot of them are more emotional, and it’s more “The left is screwing up everything. No, just no.” However a surprising number of the red pilled also have come to where they are through relentless logic after the first shock that sent them thinking. (This is anedoctal, but I do know a number of them.)
On the left, meanwhile, the left is default. No thinking needed. In fact a lot of it is based on the general feeling that the left is “nicer” and “cares about people.” (None of this is right. To the extent the “parties changed sides” (They didn’t. Search the excellent article on side switching on this blog. I’m writing this on the road, so I can’t link it for you.) they changed who they represent. These days the left is the party of plutocratic grifters and big business.)
The “two movies” thing comes from this. The movie the left has in its head is the result of the mass industrial education and entertainment complex, and it has bloody nothing to do with reality. OTOH ours comes from analyzing things and double checking, because… we’re still a small and persecuted minority, even if we are a majority. We lack the privilege of being part of the main narrative.
This incidentally is why so many n the left, when cornered, yell “Educate yourself” even if it’s been proven we know more on the subject than they do. “Educate yourself” means in fact “Connect to the main source of infotainment and get what the narrative is supposed to be.”
They don’t understand us. They don’t understand us at all. They can’t even vaguely figure out how we come to conclusions. They keep screaming at us that the “consensus” is against us, and expect us to change. Or that “Most scientists think” and expect us to change. They also ubiquitously think that we connect to the few outlets on the “kind of right” the way they connect to the centralized narrative. The number of times I’ve been told I was misled by fox news or whatever when I haven’t watched news in years, and I check everything to destruction is almost funny.
So that’s their blindness. But we have our own, of which I’ve only become fully aware this week.
The number of people running around with the hair on fire, going “They took Mike Liddel’s phone! They’re coming for us next! Game over, man, game over” was bizarre and strange, and I couldn’t figure it out until it suddenly clicked.
Calm down. Pick a rock, sit on it. Take deep breaths.
This is not the end. Heck, this is not the middle. It might not even be the beginning. Well, not for us.
The problem is you are, as people do, looking at it as “under what circumstances would we run around like lunatics seizing the phones of everyone related to Obama, and minor peripheral figures who were pissed off about Trump winning.” And that would be “We’ve won so overwhelmingly that all that’s left is the mop up.”
But that’s because we are stuck in “minority thinking.” The only time we’d risk coming out in force is assured victory.
That’s not where the left is. They still think of themselves as the overwhelming majority (the narrative says so.) They have explanations for the Trump win (“collusion.” And the famous Trump as Svengalli theory.) BUT they know that “the people” are with them. And that the arrow of history is theirs.
This means they think that all these people, being intimidated/tricked by Trump can be shocked back to reality, if only the narrative is more explicit about how evil/bad the right is. Hence the Red Wedding Speech, the “quasi-fascist” bullshit, and running around seizing people’s phones, but not persecuting people (Because there’s nothing to persecute them on, really.)
It’s all theater designed to a) get out their vote. (Because some of their rank and file are, in the secret of their own hearts, starting to think they might like a functioning economy and might just not vote) b) scared the lumpen mass, hypnotized by Trump, into falling back in line with the mass industrial narrative complex.
They’re only about 50 years too late. For sure more than 20 years late. But then what can you expect of a political party devoted to “solutions” that seemed logical 100 years ago?
That’s what you have to remember. Everything they do is from within the narrative. It makes sense in the narrative. It fails in real life.
American greatness had a great article about how stupid the elites were, but also seemed to think this meant they couldn’t have planned everything from the Covidiocy on, because mostly it’s been bad for them. I was laughing halfway through and going “Embrace the healing power of “and”.” They’re both extremely stupid, and planned all this because from inside the narrative it would lead to their perfect win and utopia. It’s just that the narrative has bloody nothing to do with reality.
Be not afraid. Yes, they are in complete control and their plans are infallible. Unfortunately for them, not in our world, but in one in which humanity and the laws of physics themselves are completely different.
They are not doing this because they’re winning. In fact, this is just more ghost dance of a culture in extremis. And the culture in extremis is theirs.
Spit out the blackpill. You know precisely where it’s been, and you shouldn’t eat things that have been up a donkey’s rear end.
I won’t say “Ride right through them, they’re demoralized as hell” because they’re not. Not yet.
But you know, “ride right through them. They’re fighting phantoms!” also works.
Be no afraid. Sursum Corda. This is no time to go wobbly. This is the time to point, laugh, and build as fast as you can.
Go to it.
According To Hoyt 
WAU is also a Single Point of Failure. Even in mass-everything, second (and third) sourcing is a Good Idea. And scattered production means NO simple single target. Backup by… inherency?
The German’s learned this lesson during WWII and implemented solution after WWII. There are small/medium sized factories all over the country now. For example, I know one company in a small village that supplies industrial furnaces all over the world! Their main office building is already heated in winter by wood stove using wooden pallets. (LOL ref to your wood heating post).
I was bemused when I checked out a couple of sources for paving blocks. Home Desperate; no comments on the pallets (though that might show up when I actually buy). The mini-chain that competes here has a $35 deposit on each pallet.
I couldn’t count the number of pallets that came to our place over a couple of decades. IIRC, this would be the first time I ran into a situation where the vendor wanted them back. OTOH, about 25 years ago, I heard from a guy building a specialized saw to rebuild pallets, so at some level, they’re not firewood in the rough.
Are we talking pallets or pellets here?
Wooden pallets are support devices designed specifically to stack goods on so as to lift them off the ground and allow them to be picked up with a fork truck. They typically get reused by shippers until they fall into disrepair and get discarded. As they are load bearing they are usually made from fairly hard woods rather than soft pine and such so make decent firewood once torn down.
Wood pellets are processed firewood intended for use in special feed systems on some wood stoves that eliminate the need to feed your fire with chunks of firewood.
Would anyone have a deposit required for pellets?
Alright, anyone even remotely sane?
NO.
Which brings us back to the original: which wood product was the company heating with?
Broken down pallets (the 1 x pieces–nails removed) make good kindling.
shipping pallets. They broke them down. Didn’t care about the nails which they separated for recycling from the ash using a magnet….
I’ve tried magnets for burn piles here. A) the magnet doesn’t always get the nails, and B) some of our soil is ferrous. The quirks of living downwind of a (dormant) volcano. I toss the 2 x 3ish pieces and use the slats.
If Tom really meant pellets, my apologies. I’ll plead insufficient caffeine while posting.
Never underestimate the power of a well crafted typo. –Murphy
And no, I don’t have a pellet stove. Mumble-teen cords of wood for the stove in the shop will keep me warm for years.
We are out of firewood, as of last winter. It has been years since we’ve been able to get any at our preferred cost (saw fuel, hauling, sweat).
Log yards used to have end piece piles available for anyone. Then they went to “employees, contractors, do we know you?” (Non resell contractors.) Now they get sent to the Seneca/Sierra power generating burner (mostly powers the mill), or a small amount to Lane Forest for selling. We did get one of the Lane Forest Bins ($350 at that time) to see how many chords came out of it (5 or 6, I think) to see if it would make a good troop fund raiser (at $125 – $175/split chord). Answer, not really. A lot of saw work required, which makes it an adult only activity initially, as well as space, for a $400 – $750 profit (for a troop who has earned $8k net profit picking up Christmas trees? Not worth it.) Took us 7 burning seasons to go through our stacks.
Our other sources: Haven’t heard of “Firewood Finders” (landing burn piles) locally for years. Does east side USFS still have the permits for dead beetle kill? We used to get the Pine when visiting the inlaws. After all we were there to get them, SIL, and BIL, their wood, with BIL and his wife’s help. Why not haul pickup and utility trailer back?
In our neck of the woods best time for free firewood is in the spring when folks are clearing winter kills and damage. Sometimes large logs, but fairly often you will see it cut into fireplace if not wood stove lengths and stacked on the curb.
But this is North Alabama so your milage may vary, and in any case long gone for this year as obviously we are fast approaching fall.
I don’t know the current regulations (OTOH, the forest is closed to power saws until rainy season), since our firewood came from our own trees, but general cutting was 4 cords per person, and you could have multiple permits to do wood for a family or so.
Don’t know if there’s anything special for beetle-killed areas. A bunch of those got dealt with in the Bootleg fire last year. 400K acre fires tend to eliminate a lot of things…
Prime season around here is late Spring to early Summer. We hit IPF-III and Extreme July 25th, which was a bit late, but it hasn’t backed off. Not sure when it will. Winter?
There are pallet return and repair facilities all over the country. I have driven many semi-truck loads of used pallets from major retail company warehouses to these facilities where the pallets are inspected and repaired or scrapped.
https://www.chep.com/us/en/pallet-collection
This is not all pallets, but it is a large percentage of those used for food or other products with basic sanitary requirements. So, yes there is a deposit paid on most pallets. Old badly broken pallets may not be worth hauling away, but if someone is selling you clean pallets in good condition, they are probably stolen.
Home Depot tends to shed pallets, particularly for larger buys of concrete mix and similar materials. So-so condition of the pallets, but I assume that HD gets what they want, and the forfeited deposit is baked into the price.
Most of the other pallets sans deposit were custom jobs for things like a wood stove or the snowplow blade that got shipped from the Midwest to Oregon. ‘Sides, it was closer to a crate than a pallet, with more than normal damage from uncrating.
I suspect shipping woes have created a bit of a backlog for pallets. I got a load of something, the vendor stuck it on a pallet with no expectation of getting it back. It doesn’t help that we’re not that close to any interstate.
Current example is the chip factory in Taiwan. The only one in the world that can do what it can do. No problem. Just located in a dangerous earthquake zone, typhoons pass by frequently, and there is a nearby evil group trying to do a hostile takeover.
What could go wrong. Seattle awaits the great Cascadia Quake. So Cal advances North at the speed your finger nails grow. Single points of failure just waiting to happen. That still doesn’t include the unknown unknowns. Where will the next F5 tornado hit?
Where will the next F5 tornado hit?
A trailer park, of course. Tornadoes aim for them.
What do a tornado and a Tennessee divorce have in common?
Either way, someone’s gonna lose a trailer.
Yes, TSMC got the lion’s share of the Great Offshoring from Silicon Valley in the 1990s and the Aughts. When I was laid off in 2001, the only semi firms that actually manufactured chips did RF, and I suspect those were pilot lines. The infrastructure, both the really big equipment outfits like Applied Materials and the tiny ones doing custom work in a garage either moved out or shut down.
It’d be hellish to start manufacturing in Silicon Valley now, even if you could get TPTB to drop their pearls and consider the permitting. (The San Jose fire marshal freaked out when HP built LED and silicon fabs in the city. That was in the 1980s. I know the silicon fab is gone, and am pretty sure the LED stuff left.)
I suggest “hit em with heavy artillery, then ride right through them with lances”!
I suggest ride right past them, or slow down to a snail crawl, especially if your a long haul driver delivering a load of goods to D. C., Philly, NYC etc.
“On the left, meanwhile, the left is default”
Sad to say, even on the right, our default setting is often highly left. Early training and indoctrination are a biotch to overcome. It takes an active conscious effort, and whenever we get tired, or overtasked, we sometimes revert to leftward leaning.
Mike Liddle has a good case against the FBI and the judge, if any, that signed the warrant, if any. Total lack of due process, and total lack of compensation for the property seized. At the very least, they could have cloned his phone and data in under an hour and provided him with 100% replacement phone with the same number and all his data, or just gave his old phone back since they had everything on it by then.
I hope he sues the bejeezus out of them.
A legal bejeezus-ectomy would be a glorious thing.
Sadly though when Big Government alphabet agency loses big, we all lose big.
You know, I wonder if it would be possible to sue to have a department’s budget reduced, rather than damages, on the argument that since the damages would come out of tax dollars, one would be effectively fining oneself?
Budgets come from Congress, and the courts cannot compel the actions of a future Congress.
Well if the left gets control of the Supreme Court don’t be too sure on that. There are a number of states where leftist high courts have ordered their legislatures to do exactly that. ‘
New Jersey’s is notorious for doing so, to the point where the state income tax is a result of the NJ Supreme Court ordering the legislature to enact one in order to provide “fair funding” of public schools.
These kinds of judicial decrees are the role model for what Democrats want to do on a national level.
The Fibbies and the judges rely on various flavors of qualified immunity, though in another case (a really bad police shoot in Aurora, CO that Insty pointed out a day or so ago) if the action is unconstitutional, qualified immunity can (might; depends on the judge) away, and the bad actor can be sued personally.
OTOH, finding a judge willing to go after Wray and Garland is going to be tough-to-impossible.
On the gripping hand, qualified immunity never showed up in the constitution.
Qualified immunity also doesn’t stop personal action, legal or otherwise. You have to wonder sometimes, if the founder put the 2nd Amendment in because they recognized that sometimes justice and self defense can’t be achieved through legal means?
That, by my reading of both the Constitution and the various correspondence on the subject, mostly the Federalist Papers, is exactly why it’s there. The founders weren’t concerned with deer hunting; they were concerned with out-of-control government, which they’d just dealt with, and with ensuring that the citizens would always have the means to deal with it if it happened again. I understand that was also the idea behind the funding discrepancy (in Article 1, Section 8) between the Navy (provide and maintain) and the Army (raise and support, but no appropriation for longer than two years); keep the Army, which could take over the country, weak and temporary, and fund the Navy, which couldn’t, more permanently if desired.
That’s exactly why they did it. Of course, I’m pretty sure that Jefferson’s quote about a revolution every 20 years was the shorthand for “threats that aren’t carried out eventually are treated as bluffs”… as we’re seeing. Again, it’s not whether you see it as a bluff, but whether your opponent does.
The process is the punishment. The Feds just print money to persecute people, which is how they wore General Flynn down with that bogus witch hunt. They are doing this and doing this publicly and loudly in order to scare people into not donating to Trump or non-RINO Republicans, and to scare people into not working for or providing services for anyone who Democrats have declared to be an “enemy of the state”., A lot of if it is simply straight up early Mussolini fascism.
THIS times 1000.
Donate when and if you can. But I get upwards of 25 to 50 e-mails and texts per day screaming for donations from dozens of sources. I couldn’t afford the postage, much less donations, for all those; even assuming they were worthy causes and legit organizations.
I hope someone’s writing up a lawsuit on that warrant right now, because it says they can seize his password for the phone.
You very much cannot do that.
5th amendment; it’d be like writing a warrant that you can seize all their papers and do a fishing expedition for an unknown crime, which they didn’t even manage in the “oh my gosh who thought it was OK to put this in writing?” Trump warrant.
We had some fun yesterday with Mike’s situation.
He went on Warroom, Emerald Robinson, and his own show and read the subpoena.
The subpoena stated specifically that Mike was not to share the contents of the subpoena, which Mike read verbatim.
“There’s my notice! FBI!”
He’s not worried about anything, and he witnessed for Christ to the demons surrounding him.
🙂
Secrecy clauses on subpoenas are un-Constitutional, a clear violation of people’s 1st Amendment rights. Anyone that signs off on one has committed a crime and needs to be immediately and permanently removed from office. More proof the FBI are operating in violation of the Constitution, and need to be completely disbanded.
Facebook is apparently monitoring people’s private messages and forwarding any messages which constitute thought crime to the FBI:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/09/15/facebook-worked-with-fbi-to-spy-on-americans-who-questioned-2020-election-n1629782
In essence this is like tapping people’s phones without a warrant and reporting them to the FBI for expressing anything which is contrary to the Democratic Party narrative.
The Reader believes anyone stupid enough to believe Farcebook Messenger is private should earn a Darwin Award. Maybe the Reader could sell them the bridge stored in his off-dimension closet.
Or they had the naive belief that free speech was still a thing, and having a private corporation acting on the government’s behalf is something that shouldn’t be allowed.
It shouldn’t be allowed. Unfortunately, our current remedies for gross violations of our constitutional rights don’t address this evil dynamic. The Reader feels the world stuffs a new black pill at him every day.
A private corporation acting in that manner ceases to be a private corporation. It’s the same thing when they have a “confidential informant”, that informant then becomes a government agent.
And all you have to do is prove that in your case.
“Parallel Construction ” is the term for claiming that you developed the information separately, and therefore inside sources don’t exist to provide illegal access.
“Sources and methods. ” Hopefully your judge won’t buy it….
And businesses doing something very much other than what they agreed to do,and having no consequences for it is how we transition from a high trust society to one where you have to take photos of the price tags on the shelves because they won’t match what gets run up at the cash register.
There are serious costs to having to assume that everything on the label is a lie.
Anyone who believes we have privacy in any electronic format is mistaken but I think we should expect to have privacy. Getting there is one of many things which requires replacement of the old ways of thinking.
There are no private messages.
If you whisper sweet nothings into your dear one’s ear, it isn’t even private if you have a cell phone in the room.
That’s going to be a scene in one of my stories. Main Character is accused of posting porn online and ‘corrupting the children’. It’s a video of her and her husband, uh…you know. From an unusual angle.
Her answer? “That was recorded with my phone, but not by me. Somebody cracked in through a backdoor, took the video and posted it without my knowledge or permission. Why are you harassing me about it?”
Of course, they’re harassing her because she says Wrong Things and makes Leftroids look bad, but they can’t admit that. They want to know what she’s going to do, expecting to force some sort of apology. They don’t get it.
“I’m going to keep my phone out of the bedroom from now on.”
We have three cell phones in the house, two particularly dumb flip-phones and one a refurbed iPhone (needed to run the travel trailer’s controls. Arggh.) All are kept off unless needed, and since the iPhone automatically turns on when it gets power, I make sure to turn it off right away when we get a power failure. And, it’s in an opaque sleeve. (Yes, I keep it on charge.)
OTOH, snooping cars and/or odd behavior from them is a thing. Twice now, the Honda Ridgeline opened its windows while sitting in the garage. The first time, a few years ago, and the second, a couple weeks ago. In that case, all four windows were partly opened, to the same level, and the sunroof was also partly opened. Nothing for the rear window.
The lizard people with the Remote Control of Powah get to be annoying. /sarc, I think.
the car: our car has a setting that if you press unlock three times (or something stupid like that) it does that. Without knowing that, we managed to put down the windows in a downpour
That’s a “feature” (multiple ‘unlock’ presses of a remote key triggers) that I am glad to NOT have. Now, give me a way to remotely roll ALL windows FULLY UP and I’ll be interested.
Oh! Thanks! (It’s easy to hit keys on the fob when it’s in my pocket; my default screwup is to lock the doors inadvertently. I have a trinket on another fob/key set to minimize unintentional button presses. Must do the same for the Honda.)
It’s amazing what weird and occasionally(?) useful(???) features are hidden in the Bible-thick Honda manual. Maybe time for another RTFM session.
And yes, it’s in TFM. Curiously, there is a means to close all the windows, but you have to use the key in the driver’s side door lock. (Lock door, release, then lock door again and windows start to close. Release when desired.)
The fob only does the unlock, but it’s repeat before 10 seconds. Alas, the procedure is awfully close to the double-click one that the Subarus use to do the doors and the hatch.
The Reader is scared to do that with is 21 F-150. There is a digital version in the car he uses for reference (which the dealer updates at services). The pdf is well over 700 pages.
As memory serves, the Ridgeline came with a limited set of manuals, and I bought the general manual from them. I have a pdf of the manual (627 pages) that I keep on the home computers.
I really don’t drive it that much; the 2016 Forester is somewhere in the mid 30K mile range, while the Honda is 4 years old, but only has 8000 miles on it. The usual trip is to town, 40 road miles one way, and the Subaru does a better job as a grocery-getter. Still, even that’s once a week. Retirement does change one’s habits.
The infuriating thing is that, as both a theoretical and practical matter we should have inviolable privacy through any electronics and software built by people who weren’t actively malicious towards their users.
RSA is something like 50 years old. Various kinds of encryption, both practically and absolutely unbreakable, are a thing. It is not some impossibility to have devices which faithfully talk only to each other, securing their communications and storage with encryption that no one can break.
Our assumptions about computers and information technology and privacy are only because we’ve been living in a deeply abusive dark age: Everything was designed either in the sunny dawn of the internet when no one cared and just wanted to build cool stuff as fast as possible, or the post-2000s creepy dystopia, where all our tech companies were compromised by psycopaths.
Trying to implement some things myself right now.
Steve, this won’t show as me because I’m typing from the phone. I don’t have blinders. I readily concede you’re right. It sucks and they’ve been doing it a long time. But what I want you to consider is that this doesn’t mean they’re winning. Their strategies are diverging more and more and failing.
I don’t think we’re as far apart as you think.
I’m dubious about elections solving it. There’s a chance but it’s slim. And I agreed on the way to solving it we’re going to hurt individually and civilizationionaly.
Not happy about it. I just know this is not the end, and it’s not already list. That’s all.
And somehow this is in the wrong place. For the record anyone who thought those are private is high. They reach in and delete private links. That’s not private
I’m not sure they thought it was private as much as people thought that they would have to be actually charged and have due process before their words could be used against them.
Of course, that sort of casual bypassing the 1st and 5th Amendments has been a pattern and practice for a while too.
Maybe the reason I’m seeing this not as the way down but starting to turn is that I’ve been aware of their infringements for 35 years. They just used to be stealthy
Sounds about right– Range magazine has been going since at least ’91, they got inspired to start in part by the abuses being done to rural communities.
Folks who are interested can read a lot of the table of contents to find out why so many rural folks were startled that people were startled by various developments since then.
http://rangemagazine.com/issues/index.htm
They recognized issues, they are working to fix them, and they’re rather good at spreading information and getting results.
The question is why they aren’t stealthy any more? Is it because we have better observation, or is it because they don’t care if we see because they think nothing will happen? Probably it’s both, but only the second involves them making a fatal misstep.
Because the net and distributed peer to
Peer news blew it sky high. It wasn’t a choice. They still think they’re hidden. It’s obvious
They’re used to being hidden
Do not discount the incompetent moron factor.
Compare the level of competence between Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
Hillary was definitely a mover and running her own corruption scheme. The current VP is even more of a fence turtle than the last D veep was and, somehow, even less competent than her boss with dementia.
And once the old warhorses age out, she’s literally the best they’ve got.
I don’t think the folks that think they are the powers behind the throne are any more capable either. Look at every single one who popped up in the Trump saga, and they’re all basically useless stuffed shirts, who’s only skills were navigating the bureaucracy.
It sounds like “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” for wanna-be-tyrants.
The question is why they aren’t stealthy any more?
You can’t stop the signal, Mal.
They used to have a lock on information. Not anymore.
If you don’t control the encryption keys it isn’t private.
^THIS^ ^THAT^ ^THE OTHER, TOO^
Absolutely. I do seem to recall them advertising Messenger as utilizing end-to-end encryption, with you and your recipients being the only key holders. It was foolish to trust them of course, but us humans really want to trust.
There are leftists who really believe that private companies can do whatever they please even when they are fronts for the government.
Except, of course, bake, or not bake, a cake.
They will cite that case
Of course they will. The fact that they were arguing the other side of that case. and still, in other contexts, claim the result was wrong, doesn’t bother them.
Cue the cartoon of a [manure] cake, complete with flies buzzing around it, and the Head Baker berating, “NO! I said a SHEET CAKE!”
“The number of people running around with the hair on fire, going “They took Mike Liddel’s phone! They’re coming for us next! Game over, man, game over” was bizarre and strange, and I couldn’t figure it out until it suddenly clicked.”
Sarah, I’ll spit out the blackpill if you take off the blinders. This is no different than the nonsense they pulled all along (including TLA harassment) for every election since 2000. That’s precisely what I meant by “pattern and practice”, and it applies across the board. “Black Panthers with clubs in Philly” isn’t any different than “SturmAntifa in Portland”. IRS in 2010 vs FBI in 2020 / 2022.
The difference is that more and more people are figuring out who the real enemy is.
Not looking for an argument, but if people are figuring this out, why a black pill at all?
I’m simply responding to what I’m called.
At this point, people may be figuring it out, but they haven’t yet also figured out that the Left isn’t going to ever stop…. until they are stopped.
I think that’s the issue, they don’t have to be stopped, we just have to go on. That’s the difference between them and us since by going on and, thus, making them irrelevant, we win and they lose. If we fix ourselves on stopping them, we’re playing into their narcissism and they win since we become them, or a negative of them but it still the same thing since we’ll have broken what was valuable in the first place.
What we need to do is keep and preach the faith.
I agree.
I’m heartened by the number of Christians running for office and winning (so far). Many, many are going to their knees as the #1 activity that will restore the Republic.
We must continue to raise families, build our lives, and love our families, friends, and the Almighty.
By building great lives, we win, and we remain strong while they destroy themselves.
If we must fight, we’re in a better position if we focus on our lives rather than becoming “activists.” IMO, anyhow.
I am not (very) religious and arguably barely even ‘spiritual’ but I most heartily applaud this trend!
The linked post is from an ex-Democrat who had supported Biden in 2019, and now considers the Democrats conduct to have created a near totalitarian state:
https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/this-is-the-moment-i-gave-up-on-joe-biden/
A while back, when we were still in California, I told a group of my players about the Muslim gangs raping underage working and lower class girls in England. A few days later, one of them got in touch with C (not with me!) and told her that I shouldn’t get my news from the Daily Mail. Now, I had not told her that I got my news from that source, mainly because I hadn’t; I learned about the issue from the British libertarian blog site Samizdata, followed up their link to a news story—I believe it was in the Guardian, which is hardly a right-wing paper!—and went from there to the actual official report submitted by a British academic specialized in child welfare. That is, I was relying on exactly the kind of sources she ought to have found credible. But instead of asking me my sources, or even checking such sources, she looked only far enough to find a source she could dismiss as biased, and then assumed that that must have been the source I was relying on.
I’m not sure how to characterize that sort of mental process, but it doesn’t seem to me to involve any concern with actual facts.
It does not. The process is to determine what the current central cultural thesis is and assert it. The search for truth is not a priority. The corespondnace with the group is.
For a lot of people it is not whether or not it is true that matters; it is whether or not everyone is saying it that is the important part.
And yes, it is such an alien mindset to me that trying to think in its forms is about as sensicle as saying my favorite color is sweet.
Given the method, it’s very possible that she was trying to get C (your wife, I am guessing) to pressure you into not saying things that made her uncomfortable.
The question of truth or evidence didn’t really come into it– “wow, this makes me uncomfortable” was the Thing.
You may well be right, but if so it was a singularly ineffective method. For one thing, coding a complaint about my making her uncomfortable as a critique of my choices of sources—and an ill-informed one at the—was hardly transparent! For another, well, I’ve taken Jordan Peterson’s online test of the Big Five personality traits, and I’m in the bottom 5% on agreeableness; if the truth makes her uncomfortable so much the worse for her, as far as I’m concerned. In fact the whole transaction has severely lowered my respect for her.
You may well be right, but if so it was a singularly ineffective method.
:snickers: Against one of us? Oh, I just bet. I got treated to seeing some idiot trying to get my dad to “control” my mom, only to find out who it was that was the limiter….
For one thing, coding a complaint about my making her uncomfortable as a critique of my choices of sources—and an ill-informed one at the—was hardly transparent!
Ah, but it is a culturally correct option, if you were One Of The Nice People.
And while I’m sad that she did such a thing, your reaction is correct– it SHOULD lower your respect for her. Sadly.
The thing is, I did sympathize with her visible distress during the face to face discussion and her plea for it to end. Then she came up with that stealth attack on my position, and my sympathy ended. It seems as if she didn’t want to argue with me out in the open when I could confront her with evidence and logic and even simple denial of her assertions.
I keep posting this because it just keeps coming up:
— Orwell, “The Principles of Newspeak”
Today it’s fake news or misinformation instead of prolefeed or bellyfeel, but it’s still duckspeaking.
Not speaking for anyone ‘cepting me, I do what little I can to save the Republic (Actually to save civilization.) but I’m black pilling all to hell in so far as preparing for the worst, just in case.
Off to buy a couple of kerosene lamps right now, you know, just in case.
& oh, planning my savage teenage granddaughter’s tomorrow’s homeschooling practical ballistics lesson.
I think mixing up a bunch of foo-gas and building a foo-gas launcher would be a great extra credit exercise.
Preparing ain’t surrendering.
Agreed. Black-pill (to me, YMMV) means “O, Woe is Me. All is lost, and I’ll trudge through those gates labeled Arbiet Macht Frei. Maybe they’ll treat me better there.”
Red-pill; “We’re in a heap of trouble, and look at those poor sheep going through a gate where the idiots couldn’t spell “Arbeit” correctly. Let’s see what we can do to break that camp.”
Interesting thoughts and viewpoint. I’ll make one point about the statement: “but it’s still not the dominant opinion. ” That is true. The ‘mass media’ along with the left organizations are all yelling from the rooftops that “THIS” is the message and it’s reality. Meanwhile, us poor schmucks sitting in Realityville shake our heads and deal with our needs and daily living.
While I am hoping this all ends with a whimper and not a bang I’m afraid there will be somewhat of a bang to resolve the ‘narrative’ from real life and people living day to day. The actual majority of (at least in the USA) people are not really worried about pronouns or a lot of the other nonsense but about the kids reading and working math problems. They are worried about the price of gas, ground beef, and the new pair of shoes that little Sammie needs for school. In the long run – real life needs will outweigh any of the crazy the “narrative” demands.
The more that the mass media screams and insists that we believe … against the evidence of our own lying eyes … the more the audience slips out between their fingers.
The only reason we have any cable TV at all is because when we went to cancel it, they gave us a very good discount on it and included the Spanish language channels we can’t get locally.
I think the only time we use it is when Mexico’s soccer team is playing someone…
–
True as that is, I don’t think it’s quite what you meant to say. 😛
Public discourse can also be discord, of course.
It’s true either way, though.
But that’s because we are stuck in “minority thinking.” The only time we’d risk coming out in force is assured victory.
And, if we were doing something THAT big, we’d also decided it was This Or We Don’t Survive, for a lot of us.
Because it would break a TON of our boundaries– even in just basic natural law of war, whatever you use IS GOING to be used against you.
That is a good point. One of the things that seemed nuts about the way Europe handled the Ukraine conflict is they seem to expect they could embargo Russia, but still get Russian gas at the same time.
It just seemed kind of deluded for them to assume that they could launch an embargo and not expect one in return. I mean, I understand launching an embargo, and then trying to get the gas anyway, but it really seems to have surprised them that Russia has soft embargoed them right back.
I think they really don’t think their tactics will be ever used against them, and you are right that that has been a huge blind spot on both sides.
The problem is that the European politicians, like the Democrats here, believe that platitudes about “how nations should behave” simply are not going to get bad actors to stop acting badly. The idea that Iran will give up its nukes so that it “can rejoin the community of nations” is at best the thinking of a crackhead and at worst malicious willingness to help them get nukes.
The problem with Democrats and leftists generally, to paraphrase Obama, is that very often they believe their own BS.
Something of a parallel column at American Conservative today – https://www.theamericanconservative.com/counterculture-warriors/
That does explain a lot well. Whether the right can handle being the counterculture with skill and wit, though, is another matter entirely.
ROFL. We’re managing it. Seriously. Look at it. Do you think the left EVER handled counterculture with skill and wit?????
They had laugh tracks from the press, and exclamations of how witty they were, but they’re always boorish and witless.
Since when is ‘w’ pronounced the same as ‘sh’?
I know, I just worry too much sometimes, not helped by the fact that I just don’t see a lot of this reaching the average person from where I am.
I swear, the Captain America films were prophetic. HYDRA’s entire plan in “The Winter Soldier” practically looked like this – and it worked about as well. I keep wondering how the screenwriters pulled it off.
They write what they know?
The basic goal in Winter Soldier is something that the left has been chasing since even before Obama’s political mentor (back during the Weatherman days) predicted that they’d need to kill at least a quarter of the population in order to bring about their utopia.
Oh, yes, definitely. It’s just the way they have HYDRA act in the movie that has me looking at the screenwriters, turning to look at the Usual Suspects, and then glancing back at the writers to ask, “How much did you worry that they would catch on to the fact that you read their playbook? Were you worried they would come down on you like a ton of bricks and make you rewrite the script, or did you figure it would slip past them? Because it very clearly slipped past them.”
Well, “understand them better” does not mean “understand them perfectly.”
Personally, I think the big disconnect many have is summed up in the old saw “The right thinks the Left is mistaken while the Left thinks the Right is evil.”
Frankly, at least among the political class, I don’t think they are “mistaken.” They know exactly where their policies lead and that destination is either the goal or “acceptable collateral damage.”
What that means for their moral character I leave as an exercise for the student.
(And here’s homint that’s clear from typing with this weird reply box where I can only see about the top half of the current line making editing/proofing difficult.)
Compose your post in an editor, then drag it to the reply box. Even Notepad will work.
The left is both mistaken and evil. Just look at the folks at the World Economic Forum, who are the ones who came up with The Great Reset” and Build Back Better. They openly declare that they seek a massive reduction in the world’s population and that they consider most people to be widgets.
The Democrats of course love the WEF crowd and after gaslighting people by proclaiming that the “Build Back Better” stuff was a right wing conspiracy theory, titled their multi-trillion dollar leftist wish list the “Build Back Better Act”:, and use that phrase on the state level as a declaration of policy,
The simple fact is that they HATE the people they desire to rule.
The desire to rule is an alternate choice; what they really want is for everyone who disagrees with them to just die. Food will still appear in the markets and energy will still appear at the wall outlet, of course. Both by magic.
I think too many of us “understand them” but we are so utterly boggled that they really are that utterly tunnel visioned that we don’t quite know what to do about it.
Sometimes, the best way to win is to laugh at their stupidity since it drives them crazy. When people like the left see humor, it goes deep in their psyche and when the (dim) lightbulb in their brain turns on, they may wake up. In my book, I talk some about coronavirus and the “Donkeypox” (its a subtle pox on Democrats! LOL) epidemics of the 2020s.
Or send illegal aliens to their nest. 🙂
The Hamptons and Rumson NJ — Springsteen lives there — should be next.
Call the governors. They may be a step ahead of us, and this location is prime real estate.
Apparently the Democratic Party response as demanded by California Governor Newsome is to have the DOJ charge Republican governors with kidnapping. Given what this DOJ has done, it would not surprise me if they do exactly that, because feckless is an understatement for the DOJ and FBI at this point.
Reading the comments on Twitter concerning Martha’s Vinyard has been very entertaining.
I read this and said out loud “Noooooo….” Good night, this surprised even me. You know they’ll do it. Evil reigns for the moment, and they won’t stop till something stops them.
… doesn’t that just open the FICUS’ administration up to lawsuits on the same charge from the states? Y’know, given that they moved people across state line first…
The argument that the leftists are making (and it is apparently a coordinated one since a bunch of activist groups and politicians are saying the same thing Newsome did) is that the Federal government has the authority to move illegal immigrants around all over the country but state’s don’t.
DeSantis is a top target for termination by the Democrats. I expect the HarrisBiden DOJ to eagerly embrace the leftist claims and unleash the FBI and DOJ on him prior to the upcoming election. They desperately want him out as Governor of Florida.
The Democrats have proven that there is no limit to the abuses of power that they perpetrate in their quest to become the CCP of the USA.
Since the fed gov is technically in charge of our borders, and thus responsible for defending them, it makes logical sense to send the offenders of our borders to those who can make the decision on what to do with them.
Since they are breaking federal law, send them to the federal camp so they can be dealt with appropriately (i.e., DC).
Remember reptilian aliens have a nest for their eggs. Therefore a few illegal ones won’t matter (LOL)
Darnit that’s funny!
(Every time I see your screen name my brain turns it into Tom Bombadil.)
Humor is direct pipeline to the soul… Really pisses off Them off when we laugh at them directly too! Nother is better than a fool who finally recognizes they really are one (and they might change afterward). I tried putting some humor in my book too. I think it’s good to put the reader on an emotional rollercoaster if possible. Learned about that in my old Jaycee Haunted House project days. There are 5 (normal) senses, and you must try to stimulate them all with your haunted house (or with your written words.) I kind of think you need to do that with all the dopamine addicts out there these days. There is history, mystery, philosophy, etc. in my book too. I started slowly with the background story and tried to build up suspense with chapter cliffhangers to the final climax at the end and its aftermath. Just need to work on sequel(s) and prequel, if God permits me more days on this good Earth. This planet is good, it’s just mostly the ruling sentient species that is bad.
Could you please tell me the title of your book so I can read it?
A hearty yes to the humor, especially mockery. There’s nothing like being assaulted for a well timed 🤭 giggle.
I know SAH doesn’t like us promoting our books on her forum, but just this once, hopefully with her permission. I will say the title and my name (won’t do it anymore on this blog): “The Master Code” by T.A. Hunter on Amazon. There’s some humor in it, but more drama, mystery, and conspiracy thriller. If I could ever get it made into a movie, I’d love it to be a farce with famous actors playing character parts (kind of like “Airplane!”). The world needs more laughter! Lot’s of people in my book die, so it would be fun in a movie guessing which actor would be next! LOL. Also, I just got a new email for private comments about it: tahunter.author at that g mail place. Won’t say that one here anymore either unless asked. 🙂
Not sure of the policy, but you might want to submit the book listing for the Sunday(usually) Book Promo list. See the Monday entry this week for the particulars.
Not sure, because there IS NO POLICY. Sheesh. Unless it is a pornographic or otherwise highly offensive book. (One of the few I haven’t shared was bizarrely anti-semitic.)
Thanks for clarification. I’d much rather be a “amateur” author who happens to be on a your forum to contribute in a mostly positive manner and learn from the forum. I might once in a while mention my book in a text, but I just feel bad about telling the title in multiple posts. That’s not why I’m on this forum so that’s why I will keep to a minimum. I already ran a promo so I’ll wait six months to maybe resubmit. I did put in a self-nomination for the 2023 Prometheus Award as my book fits well with the LFS.org criteria. 🙂
Much appreciated. I’ll send a note to that email for further comments.
I have never actually complained about promoting books here. I don’t like it when you promote it on facebook diner.
Heck, send it in for the weekly promo!
Worst that happens is… nothing.
Can’t go wrong, really.
Alright, there ARE ways to go wrong, but you know better than to trip THOSE.
One of the most useful counters to the black pill is to start thinking and discussing how to rebuild useful institutions in this country. Right now, neither the Republican or Democrats or the professional ideological think tanks are able to break themselves out of the tyranny of the past.
So, the question that those on the Right should be pondering is what do we do if we catch Bismarck’s rider on horse riding past representing history. If the right is not prepared to govern, then the left will regroup in whatever crisis happens in the near future.
I would suggest that a read of Margaret Thatcher’s biographies and statecraft indicate some of the political problems with trying to make a break with the past with elites still pining for it. These are probably some of the best political autobiographies from the Right this century perhaps alongside Churchill’s multi-volume tomes.
“If the right is not prepared to govern, then the left will regroup in whatever crisis happens in the near future.”
If the events of the past 6 years have shown ANYTHING, it is this: You cannot govern the Left. They will simply disobey, riot, murder, refuse to carry out orders or enforce laws, etc., and as long as they are allowed to live among us, we will not be able to have the high trust society required.
No, that only works so long as the left is allowed to do that. When Antifa showed up in communities where they weren’t allowed to do as they pleased, nothing happened. When the 2017 Inauguration Day rioters were arrested, they freaked out (they were all subsequently released for political reasons). The riots in places like Portland would have ended quickly if the local DAs hadn’t consistently dropped all charges against them. The Left knows that nothing will happen to them as a consequence of their misbehavior. Actual consequences scares the crap out of them.
When the country decides it has had enough of the Left’s shenanigans, those shenanigans will be stopped.
This.
When they tried the rioting game in Indianapolis, the mayor’s response was a curfew and aggressive enforcement. And the Governor made it plain that if the paddy wagons ran out, the National Guard would be called to put a stop to it.
There were no riots after that, and haven’t been since. That’s why I’m hoping we’re safe to stay put.
Keep a weather eye on your local politics. The Reader wouldn’t be surprised if the Soros funded DA machine comes for Indianapolis at some point. The Reader was stunned when they won in Northern Virginia a few years ago.
When the Portland riots head out of Portland, they get arrested.
And the riots don’t happen.
Sometimes, they shift tactics, so you have to be wary.
BLM/Antifa tried a “peaceful protest” in Flyover Falls in June 2020 for St. George of the Fentanyl. Locals greeted them with (lots of) firearms, and it stayed peaceful.
OTOH, come Labor Day, “somebody” set a fire at a state park, eventually burning about 14.5 thousand acres. Curiously, the federal Inciweb listing for the fire shows the cause as “unknown”, while contemporary news reports indicated it started at the day-use area just off the main highway. When every major road across the Cascades mysteriously had wildfires nearby. This one managed to cut off one of the cross-Cascades routes.
And, smaller fires were set around the area at the same timeframe, including one near $TINY_TOWN. I never heard of any arsonists caught by TPTB, though any caught by the locals could well have received the 3S penalty.
Yep, definitely have to keep an eye out for the tactic shifts like that.
These idiots really like fire.
I’ve heard tales of pissed-off people tying captured arsonists and leaving them at the head of the fire. No idea if it’s true, but it would encourager le auters.
Autres. Authors don’t often set fires
There’s a joke in there somewhere…
I’ve heard similar stories, but more in line with “smack over the head”.
Smacked over the head, staged to look like they got trapped by a widow maker. Or ran over by a frantic fleeing deer, bear, etc.
That’s true for the street-level thug types. But what about the leftists that have infiltrated and conquered academia and the Deep State? Bureaucrats who pursue their favorite policies, nay, whole agencies who ignore direct orders? The only way to inflict consequences on them is to overturn century-old laws and precedents and upset literally several million iron rice bowls.
Not that it can’t happen, it’s just a lot more involved than facing down Antifa with your buddies all toting shotguns.
We deal with the big actors by dealing with the small actors.
That is also how people have cleaned up police departments, bad schools, even just social clubs.
It’s a lot of work, it’s not fast, and again it is a lot of work that never stays done.
Difference being you don’t have innocent targets, or the victims of the same, turning around to wipe you out– nor do you get recruited into a live action replay of Chesterton’s Parable of the Lamp-post.
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good – ” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is knocked down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their un-mediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
The Deep State could be neutered in a heartbeat if Congress would just show some spine. Zero out their budget, and they’re suddenly not a problem (which is why Liawatha and friends tried to make their new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau self-financing a few years ago). But the voters would need to make it clear to Congress that this must be done.
And if Congress did that to a few of the big ones, and made it clear that they were willing to continue, I suspect the civil servants would suddenly got a lot meeker.
Academia is suffering from its own set of problems of late. What form the university takes in twenty years is sort of up in the air.
if Congress would just show some spine
Umm… I might have some news for you. 🙂
Seriously, though, if you’re going to defund the FBI or overturn the Civil Service Act or even outlaw public employee unions, you need a majority of the House and 60%+1 of the Senate and the White House, plus you somehow have to neuter all the Hawaiian judges and the DC Circuit, and make sure that Chief Justice Roberts got up on the right side of the bed that day.
So like I said, it’s a little more involved.
Let me repeat myself for emphasis – ” But the voters would need to make it clear to Congress that this must be done.”
Piss off the voters hard enough, and even a judge that refuses to go along will find himself impeached.
I never said it would be easy. But it is doable. And if the Deep State pisses off enough people, it will become easy.
I don’t know about easy, but plausible and messy do come to mind.
You do need that 60% in the Senate to abolish an agency – but budget items can be done through reconciliation with 51 votes in the Senate.
You do need the House as well.
True. And it would be an actual budget, unlike some of the crap the Dems have used that process on.
As Larry is wont to say “Internet argument is a spectator sport.” There are two purposes of which “changing the mind of the true believer with which you are arguing” is not one: First, present your case for the people on the sidelines to judge. Second, and at least as important: show the people on your side that they are not alone.
On that WAU thing, Thomas Sowell notes in several places that there are efficiencies of skale. There are also dis-efficiencies of scale. Going up in size increases efficiency to. a. point. after which things become less efficient. This is why no auto manufacturer manufactures, tires for instance (or, indeed, most of their parts). It’s simply not efficient to throw all that into the same manufacturing concern. Where that point, where “larger -> more efficient” is varies on a case by case basis and is strongly influenced by the state of the art.
Which is why Tesla is more vertically integrated, they need the rethought parts foe their competitive advantage. But rumors have it that SpaceX uses a ton of Tesla parts to keep from reinventing the wheel a second time.
As noted WAU works if what you need are many indistinguishable widgets. If what you want are bolts and nuts the WAU model is king. Vertical integration may or may not be useful, do I really want to control the steel plant that provides the steel for my bolts? Unless you can TOTALLY eat its production the answer is likely no, if you own it and can’t fully consume it it will be idle. Also if it suffers an issue (Act of God, accident etc.) your main bolt plant goes idle until you fix the issue. Having multiple suppliers means resiliency. And having a state granted monopoly essentially means change happens way slow or is fought. Look at the old AT&T/Bell Western model. The telephones were AMAZINGLY sturdy but you could have any color you wanted if it was black and any type you want if its the standard model, Or look at NASA who until recently had a monopoly on space travel, if you want to go you use our hardware, do we innovate, oh hell no. And WAU doesn’t work well if there is even a moderate amount of creativity involved. People have been trying to widgetize software since the publication of “The Mythical Man Month” made clear the model for software development was massively broken. Hollywood has tried to widgetize entertainment cranking out nothing but woke remakes and woke sequels as the WAU model is poor at innovation. Trad Publishing has been doing the same grabbing more and more of the same type of author (even though the originals didn’t sell a hell of a lot) and not understanding even what their business actually is (Hint it is NOT about being the cool publisher for the English professor types).
This post puts me in mind of the Cultural Theory of Risk — I’ve been meaning to write a guest post about this rare piece of useful sociology but fritter fritter. Essentially, the divide is between the individualists who asses risk (all change is risk) for themselves and act according to their analysis, and the collectivists who want to stop all change because change is scary and if we must have it then everyone must change together.
Thus, in the traditional “opposite land” of leftist rhetoric, the progressives are reactionary and the reactionaries progressive.
The other two quadrants in cultural theory of risk are the hierarchists who,like structure and order and the fatalists to whom things happen. The theory would be much improved if it included a fifth category — psychopaths.
Perhaps one day I’ll write it, then again, perhaps one day the horse will learn to sing.
The collectivists really don’t want “collective solutions” however. What they really want is a small cadre of ruling elite who decide what the “solution” is and impose it on everyone, and then declare it to be for the collective good. Collectivism is inevitably totalitarian.
of course lets us pray for that day to come when we can ride right thru them, scatter them and run down each one on horseback and trample them … these scum should be treated like Nazis of old … hunted down to the last man … Never Again …
There’s definitely a long term problem, especially among the previously left wing but got burnt, to still accept the bad arguments from the left.
The biggest difference is if they accept it and still hold it, or accept it but realize the left was wrong, and so just flat invert it.
So you end up with three broad flavors on pretty much every subject on the right– left ditch, right ditch and aaaalllllll over the road.
Thus the alt-right
The original use of the term is the clearest example, yes.
:shudder:
“left ditch, right ditch and aaaalllllll over the road”
Sounds like “many squirrels” country…which I guess is appropriate.
dominated the public discord
The left gas most certainly dominated the discord
Argh! WP delenda est. This belongs elsewhere.
Snelson,
Once again, the Right needs to decide what is to be done before winning power. You seem to suggest that only a separation or worse is possible. I am not altogether sure that is the case as history and other countries give different models of what might happen. One lesson from my economics background that is eternal is that people respond to incentives and thus you must structure any rebuilt or new institution with the proper positive incentives for desired behavior and negative incentives for punishment of undesired behavior.
No. She has consistently said separation is not possible or desirable.
He’s actually talking to me…. and it doesn’t have to be desirable to be necessary. Again, the last 6 years has shown that we can’t trust the Left enough to live with them.
To be necessary it must first be possible.
Well, possible is a funny concept. A lot of things become POSSIBLE when enough pain has been inflicted by not making it happen. It’s not like “allowing Leftists to live among us and sabotage us” is the equivalent of the Law of Gravity.
Not really; necessity and possibility aren’t really related. I’d say, for example, I’d argue that while it’s necessary (for long-term species survival) to colonize other stellar systems, at the moment at least it’s not possible to do so.
“The number of times I’ve been told I was misled by fox news or whatever when I haven’t watched news in years, and I check everything to destruction is almost funny.” This. I can’t count the number of times close friends I have known and held on to since grade school have used that on me. Sadly I keep having those friends fall by the wayside. They may be monumentally wrong about politics but I do so miss the friends I grew up with and hung on to while I rambled around in the Navy.
A former friend blew up when we explained about “we haven’t seen Fox News in the last decade or so” declared “it’s a SHORT HAND”– which I hadn’t thought of in some time, but rather supports Sarah’s point.
A large part of why he’s a former friend is that we then provided primary sources, and he couldn’t.
TBF we often use “CNN” as an equivalent shorthand.
….I don’t… partly because my parents trained me to be able to support details like that.
I actually had a leftist friend once say to me,
‘Peggy, why can’t you get your news and political opinions from the Daily Show like me.’
In the middle of a conversation where I was talking about ‘The Righteous Mind’ and ‘Special Providence’.
“Because ‘The Daily Show’ is full of crap and I expect the news to have at least a passing resemblance to reality.”
Like when somebody aggressively demanded of me, “Why do you watch Tucker Carlson?”
Me: “Because I haven’t caught Tucker Carlson lying to me. Did you see the Rittenhouse trial?”
Leftroid: “Part of it. What’s that got to do with anything?”
Me: “I saw the talking heads on MSNBC and CNN show clips of the trial, official video straight out of the courtroom, and then flat-out lie about what was on the video. They said I didn’t see what I just saw, but something completely different instead. How can they still have an audience? I never got that from Tucker Carlson.”
———————————
Facts do not depend on opinions. Unfortunately, for far too many people, opinions do not depend on facts, either.
If they’re getting their opinions from the Daily Show to fit in with their current crew, I wonder why they can’t just drop in yours for a bit while they’re over?
If their goal is to fit in rather than seek truth, why get so uptight about which rolodex they’re running at the moment?
I tend to come across as artsy which gets translated to leftest politics in most peoples minds. I’m an odd, and that usually makes conservatives uncomfortable. I’m super duper extremely shy, but I can do the first 5 min because my Mom trained me thru sales books like, ‘How to Win Friends and influence people’. So people think I’m snooty instead of scared to death.
Lefties, the useful idiot type, in my experience are much more caring on an individual level than righties. They will call, they will reach out. Thus I am almost always the token libertarian leaning conservative friend, who they think is a partisan Republican, because they can’t conceive of a nice sweet girl who checks on you when your sick, and drops off food not being a Democrat.
Lefties will usually try to pester a conservative in this situation, and try to claim moral superiority. My friend had just met me a few months before the lock downs, and she likes to initiate political conversations. So we were talking a bunch on the phone. But she periodically would want to confront me on my supposed evil Republicanism.
So she would start a conversation like ‘Peggy, how can you be a Republican, when they support slavery.’ and I would reply with something like, ‘You do know that the Republicans were a spin-off of the Wiggs that were a single issue party to abolish slavery? I don’t think that we should be so worried about historical slavery when there is still real slavery in the world.’ She replied with something like, ‘There is no legal slavery in the world, the US are the ones who did slavery.’ I said ‘The Middle East, parts of Africa, and parts of Asia all have legal slavery, I think some countries in the Middle East changed the name of the institution so the UN could play pretend that they had ended slavery, but it’s still going on.’ She said, ‘I’m going to fact check you and tell you how wrong you are.’ To her credit, I’m quite sure she fact checked me, because we never discussed slavery again.
We were discussing War the day she said I should get my political opinions from the Daily Show. I was explaining that I was a Jacksonian-Jeffersonian, and that I believed that people really can’t fix other countries problems through policing and that the best thing that the US could do would be to go full isolationist and be a shining city on the hill as an inspiration to the rest of the world. I was sort of apologizing that a lot of innocent people were going to die when we withdrew, but I couldn’t see how we could sustain USA world police in the face of our cultural and financial crisis. She thought that it would be unicorns and rainbow sherbet once the US left.
She is a TV watcher, I have only watch clips of Fox on forums. I listen to Tim Pool IRL (for my lefty sanity check). But I mostly read, I get too emotional when I hear voices.
I guess no one got the joke, both books I was talking about with her that day were by leftist intellectuals, or at least people who say they are voting for Hillary on their blogs.
Eventually she stopped talking about politics with me, after we discussed socialized medicine, and I pointed out that the British basically have death panels now, and that I had heard that they were talking about denying medical care to people who smoked or were overweight because they were running out of money.
I still consider her a friend, she is one of a very few people that have tried to set me up, with a right leaning guy, since she knew my politics, and I really appreciate that.
I have a hard time making friends, and try not to refuse anyone who is willing to initiate conversation. I am bad at initiating conversation, because my life is pretty much a disaster that seems to only be solvable with a miracle or two, and I don’t want to rain on anyones parade.
… you know, if I said something like that, I’d be giving you a backhanded complement.
Note, I figure you’re accurate in your interpretation, just going “wow, different worlds….”
I know a biology student who once asked an instructor in a college class one day why they were banding birds in one season and doing the territory study on campus in another season – isn’t it possible that the birds have different territories when they’re breeding and when they’re not?
Instructor (aggressively): Well, do you think there’s a difference?
Student: …I don’t know, that’s why I asked.
Instructor: The girl behind you is shaking her head.
Student: (What does the girl behind me shaking her head have to do with the scientific method?)
Student did finish her degree, but has distrusted academics ever since….
For folks that try to game out pitfall conversations– a bright eyed “Oh, I’m sure there’s a reason, I just wanted to know where to look to see the original researchers!” can sometimes deflect this stuff.
For teachers in public groups, the safe answer is something like “because doing both will interfere with the study,” or “because this is also training, and unless you have very experienced researchers it will likely introduce problems” or…. you get the idea.
Point out both the practical aspects, and lets you keep classroom authority.
(note, I hate the warping of classroom authority on information transmission, which is why we homeschool)
Yep. I’ve hit the, “Oh, You do X, you must be a progressive and agree with us on this unrelated political topic,” more than once. Because, in their minds, “Creative people are naturally progressive.” Meaning, left-leaning, of course, because they also equate, “left of center,” with, “intelligent, educated and morally superior.”
And I also know people in my tiny church who are natural Democrats, can’t conceive of being anything else and believe what the media tells them, because they are kind, decent people who are honest themselves and believe the people informing them are honest, kind and decent as well.
(Meant for Turquoise Thyme)
Yep. I’m artsy, therefore “leftist”. To be fair the right also assumes that.
Once worked with a fellow who, finally, asked, “You seem to have some very right and some very left views at the same time. HOW?!” “Simple, what I really want is to be left alone, without some gov’t [manure-sack] trying to get into my bedroom or my wallet or anything else. The Libertarians could have this, were they some version of sane. You’d think it’d be hard to f— up, and yet.. it seems every chance they get, they F it all the way up.”
I was told once I was so far around the political spectrum I made it a horseshoe back toward the center. Amused.
HAW!
The political version of Rincewind’s life-glass? Tied up so much that sense can’t be made of it by Normal Things?
Pretty much!
My experience is that “conservative” and “STEM-field” people are at least as creative and artistic as progressive artists. But that creativity and artistry often cannot even be comprehended by people outside their specialty simply because they don’t understand all the trade-offs and difficulties that had to be navigated to accomplish some particular elegant result in highly specialized field. And even if they could comprehend it, the brilliant bit of creativity might hidden away behind a wall, or inside a housing, or within some unreadable bit of computer code. As The Story of Mel put it:
there are lovely gems and brilliant coups
hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,
by the very nature of the process.
And so, because the artist deliberately makes things for the public, and usually makes them on a level that even an elementary school kid can comprehend… their creativity is seen by (and sometimes incessantly rubbed in the faces of) everyone. While no one thinks of the invisible, vastly more complex and elegant creative accomplishments that unceremoniously allow them to go about their comfortable modern lives that pharaohs of old would envy.
But every once in a while I will, in my own field or a related one, pick up a stone to make the path more fair or flat and discover underneath it was some stunningly ingenious piece of work that an anonymous genius had accomplished and then moved onto some new task without even autographing it.
Beyond that, we are also creative in the traditional arts. Its just that the gatekeepers kept us out or throttled back.
……………
Let alone document it. Once one gets done tracing and diagramming. Changing whatever is a huge pain. More than once I had to just comment section out, and rewrite, lets say, something a lot less ingenious but maintainable option. Maintainable for me at any rate.
I would say, “Ride right through them,” for no other reason than to scare them —-less. This is required. Doesn’t matter if it’s not nice or if there’s another way. A condition of victory is them being afraid of pissing us off. And not they-used-the-wrong-pronouns-and-I’m-literally-shaking fear. Actual fear.
I don’t want things getting to the point of the Left searching for someone to make an example of, which I think is close. When a conservative eventually fights back physically, support that person. Those who do are not enemies. Everything the Left does is for real no matter how stupid they are. They absolutely MUST SUFFER fir the injuries they have inflicted on people.
They want to be above not only the law, but also above justice. Don’t help them.
Yes
Speaking of widgets, giant things, and vertical integration. The largest private conglomerate in China, Fosun, is in trouble. It’s not clear to me whether it’s political or just financial — could be both — but their financial position is ugly and their short term debt is rapidly increasing. They already had a sh-t ton of long term debt, everyone in China does. Their bonds collapsed today, stock down 10% today and over half since last year.
They own, among other things, Club Med, Cirque de Soleil, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Lanvin, Wolford — no spicy lingerie in UK if that goes under — Tsingtao beer, and a whole bunch of insurance and banking, including the Banco Comercial Português, the largest private bank in Portugal.
they seem to own Solver Cross too so if you’re looking for a good quality prom there may be a liquidation sale in store for you.
These companies shouldn’t fail just because Fosun does, they are the assets that would be liquidated to cover Fosun’s debt. When Hostess failed a Russian guy bought a warehouse full of Twinkies since he didn’t understand this 😃. Wolves fans might rue the day since Fosun has put a lot of money into Wolves and got them back into the first division. My cousin, the Birmingham City fan, will be delighted.
China has no insolvency law, though Fosun is listed in HK which still does. Things are different there and I’ve been wrong about how long these things take as firms that anywhere else would have already been rolled up still keep plodding along eating scarce capital. E.g., Evergrande is still prostrate but they still go on not paying their bills.
Still, big quickly becomes too big as the span of control stretches and the entrepreneurs are replaced by managers and politicians, anyone who owns big tech shares is finding out, or will shortly find out the truth of that. J&J is an exception but their corporate structure explicitly splits into different divisions once it becomes a certain size. Áll the management consultants talk about how inefficient that is but J&J — there are others — shows how little management consultants and hedge fund asset strippers actually know.
That’s not vertical integration, though, that’s conglomeration, which seems to be a typical Chinese pattern. Where Westerners talk about synergy and try to have their corporate acquisitions make some kind of sense as a whole*, the Chinese seem to prefer to scatter their bets very widely. The anecdote of a shipping magnate who just happens to own a chain of laundromats in Indonesia among a dozen other non-shipping-related businesses springs to mind (although that might have come from Clavell’s Noble House).
*(unless incentivized to do otherwise by tax law etc., like in the US in the ’60s and ’70s)
Bit of both but, yes, it’s a conglomerate. They seldom work well over the long term because the price paid is too high and the “synergies”. I hate that word never materialize. Ling Temco Vought (LTV) is a notorious US example.
Big can be good, huge not so much,
Hewlett-Packard did much like J&J into the 1990s. If a business unit got big enough within a division, it was spun off into another division within the same group. There was also a fair amount of vertical integration, though the company was big enough that internal suppliers for some products were not considered viable by other divisions. (We lost a business opportunity for inkjet printers because the customer division thought we had the same business model as another, older vending division–if they went in the red, they’d tax the customers. We didn’t but couldn’t convince them.)
Once the Smart Set decided that A) Hewlett Packard was a Computer Company, and B) the non-computer people were going to make a fortune by betting on the Dot-com bubble to keep growing, both HP and Agilent (the spun-off traditional part of HP) were headed for rocky streams. As a side note, the group manager who did the failed all-in bet on the dot-com bubble oversaw the selloff of the semiconductor group and became CEO of Agilent. [shrugs. He always talked a good game.]
FWIW, the older parts of HP seem to have been spun off everywhere. The old HP instruments have new owners, and Agilent is now a chemical analysis/life science company. The HP instruments are now “Keysight”.
The Reader misses the old HP. Their test equipment was far and away the best in the industry. Back in the 70’s the then Second Tier Defense Contractor the Reader worked for (before its acquisition by the Great Big Defense Contractor in the 90’s) always had capital dollars that needed to be spent before the end of the year due to accounting cash flow requirements (combination of ‘use it or lose it’, executives looking bad because they hadn’t spent their capital allocation, and accounting requirements). The Reader worked in the test engineering organization and the factory always needed test equipment. Once the Reader figured the game, he worked a close relationship with the local HP sales rep. The Reader would give him a list of equipment , most of which had 8-12 week lead times around Labor Day and would get official quotes back around Halloween. In the meantime, the rep triggered HP to fab the equipment. The Reader would generate all the procurement paperwork in November and file it. The Monday after Thanksgiving was when confession was held on capital projects and a call for ‘anyone who could get capital in by the end of of the year’ went out. For several years the Reader got the department $250K – $300K of needed equipment this way. God help anyone who tried this in a corporation today.
(HP) “test equipment was far and away the best in the industry”. Agreed in general, with the exception of multiple oscilloscope models. Tektronix had a lock on those, at least into the early 2000s, with the sole exception of at least one Mil-grade example; the only approved scopes for inclusion in one of the sonar systems I worked on as a tech were HP (180 or something like that, IIRC). And a few specialty companies (Bang&Olafson, Amprobe, Fluke, a couple others) were single-shot best in business, but no one had a general-purpose line better than HP.
Tek scopes were the exception, at least until the early 2000’s. When I had to go into an antenna range in 2005 to troubleshoot a problem and the Tek scope booted Windows, I knew we were doomed.
Yeah, I seem to recall going WTF?!? the first time I had to use something (probably a ‘scope) that ran under Windows. Talk about a vast leap backward… 😦
The 5000 and 7000 series had some problems, but they paled in comparison to WinCrap.
For decades the Tektronix 465B was THE scope. Nothing else came close for less than twice the price. Sad to hear that they’ve sunk to using MS-WIN-BLOWS. Why not Linux?
I remember Kontron KLA-64 logic analyzers ran CP/M back in the 1980’s.
The 465B was a great scope at a good price, and I even specified some for general test use (up to ~500MHz IIRC), but most of the ones we used were modular; we had needs for features the 465 simply didn’t have. It’s been over 16 years since I retired, so my recollection is a bit spotty WRT model numbers and characteristics. The logic analyzers we used were all HP.
I suspect the WinCrap decision was probably the same as ours; [major defense contractor] wanted nothing to do with open-source operating systems or software, since tight control of revisions is nonexistent, as is customization. The only way would be to create a custom version in-house, with the associated personnel requirement.
When I started at HP (worked for a couple of other semi companies when I graduated, but when HP got interested, I grabbed the chance), it was a bit of a shock to compare HP scopes to Tek. There were some strong financial reasons to buy our own stuff, and the analog scopes HP had weren’t in the same league. It got a lot better with the digital equipment, especially when you could tie it together with the IEEE 488 bus.
OTOH, if HP ever made a curve tracer, none showed up in our department’s test area. That and a couple of storage-CRT terminals (used for an early CAD system) was the only Tek equipment in house, and that curve tracer stayed with us until the San Jose fab got shut down. (Yep, TSMC again.)
Berkshire Hathaway, Buffet’s company, is a successful conglomerate. I think the reason it’s successful is that it’s run as individual companies with only the capital expenditures central.
The argument is always about synergy and efficiency, neither tends to occur, quite the contrary in fact. the other argument is diversification but I can diversify my portfolio myself, I don’t need to pay them premium prices for their paying too much for a company I could buy if I wanted it.
There are successful big companies with diverse businesses but it’s really hard to do.
Amazon is starting to flounder
Yes they are. The pirate who built the company isn’t there a there anymore and the company will lose drive and focus as managers start to worry about things other than the business. An old, sad story alas.
The one to watch is Apple with their $1b HQ. Perfect example of Parkinson’s Law of Corpora5e HQ.
Yep. Build a huge new HQ; stop being able to do the work required. Does the word “Pentagon” sound familiar? We won WWII working out of century-old buildings and Quonset huts; since then, well… 😦
They don’t call it the Edifice Complex for nothing. The client I worked for in Germany folded a few months after the shiny new HQ/manufacturing plant got completed–construction started in 2001, so between 9/11 and the dot-com collapse, they were hosed. They might have survived in the old building. Oops.
The left are insane. They’ve been decomposing mentally since Trump beat Cankles. Even planting 40 Million fraudulent votes to install Sniffy McPuddingpants didn’t slow down their destruction.
Mostly what we need to do is avoid them. The same way we avoid the crazy homeless guy who yells at cars and then bats at invisible elves.
In a couple years, God-willing, they’ll all be gone.
Until then, use your common sense about where to go, what to buy, and what to say to whom…
Snelson134 and Ian,
Geographic separation and defensibility /border policies are exactly the sort of thing that should be examined and discussed before circumstances force it. In history, both of you are correct. Some splits are peaceful and successful, others are not.
“Diseconomies of scale” is a term and a concept that needs to be touted. Everyone knows about “Economies of scale” and that concept is intuitive and appealing. But diseconomies of scale is something that needs to be explained. It needs to go viral.
The idea that “Widgets Amalgamated United” was naturally Better because it was Bigger would never have taken such hold if it weren’t for people’s natural intuition to overvalue the Big over the Many.
(Quick: Without looking it up (or having looked it up in the past) Which company has the larger economic footprint as measured by such things as market capitalization? General Motors with its Big Auto Factories or McDonalds with its Many Fast-Food Outlets?)
“(Quick: Without looking it up (or having looked it up in the past) Which company has the larger economic footprint as measured by such things as market capitalization? General Motors with its Big Auto Factories or McDonalds with its Many Fast-Food Outlets?)”
That’s a little slippery; McD’s has 82% of its locations owned by franchisees – https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/03/what-percentage-of-mcdonalds-restaurants-are-owned.aspx, so, would you count GM-and-brands dealerships in that figure?
I don’t know the answer to the economic footprint comparison.
How about “the US with multiple companies in the same business driving competitive innovation and quality” vs. “the USSR with perfect economy of scale, avoiding wasteful duplication of effort”?
IIRC there was a dialog in the joint US-USSR crew in the capsule (station?) in “Lucifer’s Hammer” when the Soviet colonel made a disparaging comment about the “waste” inherent in the existence of both HP and TI calculators.
(I believe the response was “Well, I can walk into any store and buy either one. How about in Russia?”) 🙂
c4c
“But then what can you expect of a political party devoted to “solutions” that seemed logical 100 years ago?”
My usual reaction to those advocating for ‘light rail’. It’s a 19th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.
But the potential for graft is huuuuuuuuuge! (Recalls the fun and games with the Santa Clara county light rail system, carefully routed to reward the big political forces.)
Also the potential for graffiti.
They had “light rail”. They called them “streetcars” or “trolleys”, and I still remember riding them in DC back in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Something about GM pressuring cities to scrap them in favor of buses rings a bell (so to speak…). 😉
Remember:
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=758103225526638&set=a.654344065902555
Just a rambling, disconnected thought that sprung from nowhere, but I’m wondering…the American Left, bulwarked as it is by internal and overseas resources, is giving some evidence of preparations for electoral manipulation to retain power come November 8th.
Do they have any inkling what happens next if they are successful?
No, they don’t. They think their victory will be greeted with cries of joy because THEY KNOW the oppressed really want them in power and speeding us to a socialist republic.
It’s funny how fast the talk of “fortifying the election” (without actually admitting fraud) disappeared last time.
yep.
They are in for one HECKUVA surprise. And likely a good many things FAR more painful.
Therefore the lack shows they haven’t won, they have to track down the kulaks fighting still.
That’s how you fill the gulag.
Also “Bullwarked” so to put it, to coin a phrase.
Moo! Or, perhaps even “MOO, DAMNIT!“
They stole an election right in front of God and everybody, and nothing happened; of course they’re going to do it again! They’ve been flooding the primaries with ‘dark money’ from their rich donors all year. For the actual election they’ll crank it up to 11.
90% of the campaign funds for the Democrat candidate for governor in Wisconsin are from outside the state.
———————————
If voting could unseat the Democrats, they would have banned it years ago.
They win full power forever, of course.
:eyeroll:
Or at the very least until the King returns… It’s very unfortunate they don’t recognise His Existence.
“Educate yourself” from a Proggie always cracks me up. People doing their own research and truly educating themselves (homeschooling?) is absolutely the last thing the Culture of the Accepted Narrative wants you to do. Otherwise, you might find out that The Science ISN’T Settled, Big Brother DOESN’T Love You, and what Everyone Knows is just so much blather.
Yep.
“Educate yourself!”
“….that’s a clip from the Daily Show. With a laugh track. I gave you multiple unrelated studies….”
“You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him; you must love him” Orwell/1984
Malarkey Man was peddling his ‘fine people’ hoax again yesterday. He absolutely doesn’t understand why he [Malarkey Man] isn’t universally loved. Those of us headed for Gault’s Gulch could care less about the Martha’s Vineyard and the ‘let-them-eat-cake’ eaters.
break break –
The neo-(American)-Stasi will have no safe spaces!
“I realized over the last few days that the big problem in this country is not that we’re two households — not even vaguely both alike in dignity — but that we’re two cultures that really can’t communicate at all.”
Must respectfully disagree. Two cultures sure enough, but this is not a failure to communicate. It is a one-sided assault, and it always has been.
They do not want to talk to us. They take everything we love, pervert it, and then scream ‘RACIST!’ at us if we dare object.
I give you the assault on Tolkien from Amazon Prime television.
We are not allowed to object to the casting, the characterization, the plot, the pacing, the Woke themes, nothing. We are to shut up and consume, like mushrooms in a farm.
Elon Musk alone among the Blue Checkmark universe of Twittler mentioned that all the male characters in episode one were a bunch of humorless d1cks, and the heroine was the only relatable character. Cue the shirtstorm of bots calling down fire and doom upon him for daring to speak.
For myself, despite loving Tolkien and adoring the Peter Jackson movies (except the Hobbit, sorry dude it sucked) I have taken a very hard pass on that show. Even though it’s free with Prime, I’d sooner watch Love Island (which SUCKS far worse than usual this year, something I thought impossible) than suffer through the Rings of Power. Sandman, RoP, Witcher, Star Wars, I’m pretty much done.
Because Love Island is (occasionally) mildly entertaining, where the rest of that is depressing at best. And because I’ve actually read the Silmarilion and liked it. It seems likely the knobs in charge of the RoP read it, hated it and decided they needed to f- it over at any cost.
It isn’t that they don’t respect the source material. It is more that they hate it, and they hate all of us who liked it. They’re going to kill that thing and use its skin to steal from us.
But that’s just one thing. They do it to -everything-. They’re busy doing it to the Queen right now. They started before she was even cold, and now they’re in full cry. Many of us here in the Demented Dominion are not amused. We see their antics, and we do not forget.
So yes, two cultures. One largely oblivious, the other fulminating with hatred and trying to kill the first.
Update from the Real World, somebody agrees with me:
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/555876-we-cut-them-off-christina-pushaw-shares-her-strategy-for-defeating-legacy-media-activists/
Christina Pushaw said:
“Maybe 20, 30 years ago, yes, bias in the media was a problem, but we’ve reached a new phase,” she told attendees of the National Conservatism Convention in Aventura during a panel discussion on media and culture Tuesday. “It’s more than bias. It’s more than the old standards. It’s contempt. They hate you. They hate us. They hate everything that we stand for, and I really think they hate this country. So, what do we do? We cut them off.”
It isn’t a communication problem. It is hate. That requires a different response than a misunderstanding or a miscommunication. Shunning is a good start.
Also see The Little Mermaid remake.
Ouch.
@ ThePhantom > “two cultures. One largely oblivious, the other fulminating with hatred and trying to kill the first.”
That could have come straight out of Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.
High praise indeed. Thank you. ~:)