No Man’s Land

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Attention please. May I have the attention of the room?

Yes, what I have to say is pretty darn important. Mostly because if y’all keep doing this loop, it’s a waste of time, effort and lives. Secondarily because it pisses me off. (And nobody wants that.)

This morning a young friend did the “We can’t abandon education. It’s this bad because we abandoned it, and the left loves a vacuum.” I hadn’t had coffee yet, and I about put my head through my desk. (This is very bad.)

No, he’s not stupid, and yes, I can understand him. I was exactly like him 30 years ago. All of us were, on the blogs back then. “We shouldn’t have abandoned all these artsy and social fields. That’s why the left took over.”

Well, I’m here to tell you that theory of how the left took over the arts, education, news reporting and the soft sciences is poppycock. As we should have realized, because it makes no sense whatsoever. And as long as you’re running on that theory, you’ll sacrifice your life and make the left’s grip on power stronger.

It was Dave Freer who first opened my eyes to how this was poppycock with a question on Mad Genius Club, to the people who said the right wasn’t “creative:” Given a normal distribution of talents, and even a 50/50 distribution in the population, there should be a lot more fiction writers on the right. Where are they?

It was that normal distribution. The left deploys a lot of psych bs to explain how we’re not creative because we’re rules follower and part of institutionalized power. The left tokes like fiends. Because they are the ones in power. But the bs is good for covering what actually happened.

So, this is actually difficult to explain, so I’ll describe what I’ve watched over the years:

Young bright, right leaning person goes “Everything in education/writing/music/art/journalism/news, henceforth known as “field taken over by the left” is effed up, because the right abandoned it. I must get in there and fix it/reconquer it for our people. Study, excel, strive. Go in. Spend 10/15/20 years grinding against “circumstances”. Eventually get ejected with the feeling he/she/squirrel isn’t good enough and failed in some horrible way.

Thing is, people, Dave Freer is right. As far as I can tell, and despite the Marxist idea that we’re conformists and therefore not creative, in sixty years on this earth, talents and interests are evenly distributed through the population. Just as many people on the right want to be artists/teachers/writers/journalists, etc. etc.

And it beggars the mind, and requires Marxist special pleading of their being “so smart” which goes back to the idea that Marxism is “scientific governance for smart people.”

So, why are some fields entirely left? If the right didn’t abandon it?

Because the right is meritocratic. And mostly we enter a field to “do the thing” and we try to be best at “the thing”.

The left while they might be attracted to the field because of their inclinations and talents (some of them are very talented) enter the field to “promote the revolution” by which they mean Marxism.

They will not promote/support, they will outright sabottage/destroy anyone who doesn’t explicitly support them.

Over a period, and it’s not very long, any field thus run will be EXCLUSIVELY leftist. Run it as a thought experiment, if you don’t believe me. And once it’s explicitly left, the only way to get in is to sell your soul by pretending to “support the thing” and even then they will destroy you on a hint of a doubt.

The “cancelling” everyone complains about has been going on for at least fifty years. Now it’s explicitly political. Before they would tell you it’s because you’re not good enough.

And the thing is that they’re right. Because they’ve changed the parameters so that “good enough” means “Marxist.”

Take me. The only way to avoid being explicitly Marxist was to sound bubbleheaded. Just another middle class girl, with nothing to say and taking no risks. Midlister. Get rid of her.

Same with people in Academia, where the standards have been changed to “conforms to and preaches CRT”.

So, please stop saying we abandoned fields and that the left has taken over in a vacuum. The left took over by destroying and chewing up lives devoted to whatever the field is. And they will continue doing it.

At this point, the only way to fix this is to make parallel structures and start anew.

I’d say “the only way to fix this is to burn the institutions and salt the earth, then start anew” but the difference is that we don’t need to burn the structures. Or at least I don’t think so.

Although the left has as many gifted, talented and passionate people as the right, their talents get perverted for “the ideology” instead of whatever it is they are in. Also, because they promote for intensity of ideological purity, they promote a lot of dross to the leadership.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that any human institution eventually falls to bureaucrats, but that works twice as fast and twice as hard when it’s corrupted by Marxism. As we saw with East Germany, it is impossible for Marxists to create functional institutions, even in a society that is devoted to “functioning.”

The same thing that allows their take over prevents their functioning in whatever the institution does. And as institutions become too corrupt to function, alternate forms appear.

We’re not half over the bumps of indie publishing, but it EXISTS and is more successful than it has any right to be, simply because what it replaces is so f*cked.

I see schools, and film, and … well, everything headed that way.

But it will go smoother and faster and consume fewer very bright and talented souls if we avoid the “two step” of “Oh, this is inexplicably abandoned by the right. I should go and make a brave effort.” “It chewed me up and spit me out. I must be bad.”

You’re not bad. It was never abandoned. It was Rechtsrein because those of our kind had been purged. And the very standards have been changed to purge YOU.

Go and build elsewhere. That field is self-salting.

And there is a never end of opportunity for parallel structures to emerge. Be on the lookout for chances, PARTICULARLY if you already are in one of those fields and have cred.

Build under, build over, build around.

Stop assuming those who went before you were stupid.

And be no afraid!

237 thoughts on “No Man’s Land”

  1. So we BYPASS… and let the first woodpecker to come along destroy Leftist civilization.
    Or, in glorious irony a few snail darters and a couple spotted owls…

    1. Lefties are mainly midwits (IQ scores between 85 and 115)! Many have never experienced an original thought in their middling lifetimes but envy and avarice are two of their foremost motivators. If not for their skullduggery, they would never attain or secure positions of influence in any endeavor.

      1. I beg to differ. With the exception of me and one other in my family, all are flaming leftists. Lowest IQ in the lot is 133. All have jobs that require deep knowledge, skill and measurable real world metrics divorced from woke marxism. As we were all raised in the same environment my only conclusion is that they allow their emotions to overrule their intellect. I say this as I was forced to learn to override my emotions at an early age.

          1. If I may — I have noted this elsewhere, and repeat it for you all to consider:

            I believe the primary distinction that makes people liberal IS being notably deficient in a form of intelligence, just not the one we think of, primarily, as “intelligence”: Intellect.

            Intellect is the capacity to learn from books.

            Wisdom is the capacity to learn from experience

            I assert: If there was a “WQ” (“Wisdom Quotient”) test to match the IQ test, then self-identified “liberals” would have a strong tendency to be lumped in the bottom 1/3rd of the resulting bell curve. Yes, they are all “Widiots”.

            Hence, what is the most common defining trait amongst the Left is not stupidity, but foolishness (we often use those terms interchangeably — particularly “stupid” for “fool” — but in actuality, they refer to different mental deficiencies)

            Think about it — a man can be uneducated, yet have a high degree of wisdom. And it’s self-evident that there are brilliant people who are also clearly abject fools — Noam Chompsky is the poster boy for this class. The two are similar but distinct qualities which are not really linked to the same genes — it’s easy to have a highly variant ranking in them both.

            And it explains a lot about liberals — their relentless obsession with Marxism, no matter how many times it fails. How they never seem to learn from prior mistakes in general. And how they keep trying to push the same failed ideas over and over and over.

            They are, collectively, like 6yos — they have no experience at all, from a thought and planning perspective. No matter what happens, they won’t learn from it.

            THIS brings up another think which I whimsically refer to as the “Liberal Midnight Reset Button®” :

            The Liberal Midnight Reset Button® operates to protect Officially Accepted Liberal Dogma® from challenges to the latters’ “integrity”.

            Consider:

            a) Suppose you meet a libtard who appears reasonable (they do exist… kinda like actual true moderate Muslims, rare but they are not quite unicorns). They are open and honest and fully willing to discuss, without excessive histrionics, any point of view they espouse…

            b) Now, pick a topic dear to them, which you know they believe in but which you also know to be clearly wrongheaded, even if well-meaning.

            c) Start with their supposition, and take them, step by logical step through from their supposition, getting acquiescence at each stage: “Yeah, that follows, uh-huh…”. Show by such reasoning that the net affect of their supposition is the end result will be the exact opposite of what they purportedly support or believe in.

            d) OK, you’ve won. Now what? Wait. You’ll hear something like… “Hmmm. I’m going to have to think about that.”, and you’ll go your own separate ways.

            e) Now, a week passes, seek them out. Bring the subject of their supposition up again, subtly. You will hear them espousing the exact same notions of their original supposition unchanged, unaltered, as though the entire reasoning process you took them through in “c” never happened!

            So what happened? The Liberal Midnight Reset Button® is what happened. At some point in the ensuing day or so, after they dropped off to sleep, their tiny widdle libtard brain started to process the new information. It carefully examined the new information in relation to Officially Accepted Liberal Dogma® (OALD), found it to be unacceptably running counter to it, and purged the new information without adding it to the libtard’s store of knowledge. BAM, conflict ended, Liberal Twitticism remains intact.

            With practice, you can even watch this thing start to kick in as you have the discussion with them. In many cases, if they learn you’re “dangerous” to their precious Officially Accepted Liberal Dogma®, they will preemptively act to terminate, redirect, or otherwise alter the conversation to avoid the necessary mental CPU cycles required to purge the non-agreeing data.

            You think I’m being facetious? Only in a sense. This process does exist and it really does act to prevent true libtards from actually learning anything new. And yes, I’ve seen it kick in on more than one occasion.

            1. “Hmmm. I’m going to have to think about that.”

              …………..
              Or “You just think I’m/We’re Stupid because we aren’t as old as you!” … Cue the sobbing and tears …

              Sigh.

              Our go to response is “We do not have to live with the consequences (very long is implied). You do. This is your future.”

              1. }}} Or “You just think I’m/We’re Stupid because we aren’t as old as you!” … Cue the sobbing and tears …

                Oh, there are any number of avoidance issues — I am pretty much assuming here that they have followed the arguments and are personally intellectually honest not to just reject it on the basis of What They Want (your response falls into that category… again: They agreed with each step that it followed reasonably from what preceded it). So they assert a reasonable position, that “they have to think about it.” And that CAN be a reasonable position, as long as you DO think about it and accept the conclusion if they cannot find fault in the process they used to Get There.

                But… instead they don’t think about it (and I don’t think it’s even a malicious “not thinking”, its an error of omission, not action, and thusly, it fades from their minds that it ever happened.

                It’s all a part and parcel of the entire internal mechanisms which are causative of their lack of wisdom, their inability to retain and process lessons of experience.

                1. Some do learn, eventually. One of the 7 nieces finally have. Happens when reality takes a swipe. Hard.

      2. If you do not understand an opponent, you are highly unlikely to defeat them.

        There are plenty of high IQ lefties. Progressivism as such is not a lack of reasoning. It is a result of reasoning from a different set of faulty premises.

        Projecting contempt for those of “average” intellect (based on a questionable test score) effectively neutralizes any likelyhood of useful persuasion.

        A society run by the wise beats one run by the brilliant.

        1. Yeah.

          IQ is a heavily overrated metric.

          Left meme set does not work. Iterating through it faster and more efficiently tends to result in nothing when one is still more or less deliberately overlooking the issues.

          Very different minds can score the same value of IQ. It is lossy, even where it is better estimated instead of worse guessed.

          Contempt for low intelligence, and contempt for moderate intelligence are mistakes on the path towards communism and other totalitarian bullshit. High intelligence can also be nuts. Additionally, folks who don’t hit the extremes of high are better at managing their own lives than having a ‘smart’ person ordering them around results in.

          It is also better to value all flavors of human life. Wokring hard to dehumanize a group tends to have bad conseuqneces, some of which are sure to show up pretty close to home.

          1. See a comment immediately above about Wisdom vs. Intellect.

            Intellect is valuable, but what the liberals lack is Wisdom.

        2. Well said.
          I’d go further, and say that the “smart thus higher quality” is part of the nonsense of Progs’ assumptions– being able to do something incredibly wrong very, very fast is not a good thing! Someone who is not very smart, but does the work to get a good answer, is better.

          It’s like the thinking version of “Fast is slow and slow is fast.”

            1. [sigh]

              There was supposed to be a dash before “bumper sticker.” WP is messing with the formatting again, I take it?

          2. My grandfather used to say “If you have time to do it again, you have time to do it right the first time.” (mostly to people who use being rushed as an excuse for do-it-over level mistakes.)

        3. I don’t doubt that a lot of them are smart, in the IQ way. (Although it must be remembered… who’s designing the IQ tests?) The problem with leftists (well, one of the problems) is that they seem to lack intellectual curiosity. They seem to arrive at a simplistic set of principles early on, which they do not allow to be challenged henceforth. And I’m always surprised when people say that the Right is “rule abiding” and the Left is “rule challenging.” The Left is only rule challenging when they aren’t in power, and then they challenge indiscriminately, without any real underlying rationale. It’s not a pursuit of truth as much as it is intellectual vandalism.

  3. Yuuuup.

    Though, slight complexity with academia.

    It wasn’t a sudden complete take over, all at once. Some fields have been hard left for a very long time, others had somewhat retained value because of later take over.

    But, left influence on university politics was enough to spin up some counterfeit fields, fields carefully curated so that nobody put the tests that show the field false on record. These have been in place for decades, and basically serve the political purposes of the government funding sponsors.

    Now, the lunatics are in the process of ‘consolidating’ control over the universities, and basically killing them.

    Universities are basically in the public trust business. The credentialing to employers, the skills training, the parental investment, and the research are all matters of public trust.

    So, the premise of the power consolidating is that the old professors, who were teaching blacks applied mathematics decades ago, have a concealed super racism against blacks, and so the Education theories have to be followed now, including ceasing to grade. Everyone has to listen to the fields that have never had any interest in learned advanced applied mathematics, nor in teaching applied mathematics to anyone.

    This screws over public trust in the credential. Because, letting this or that person credential in advanced math, without helping them actually learn the applied math, is a disservice to very many people.

    The dumbass fields hostile to actually learning math also tell students that there are racist or sexist conspiracies against them learning math, which can possibly have a negative impact on student investment levels.

    Pushing CRT secretly is very likely to increase parental skepticism of the investment, particularly for black parents. 2020 was a really bit white supremacist terror campaign, and blacks are very likely to try to filter out the official truth in their estimate of what is really good or bad. The oral history there is very clear that officially there wasn’t discrimination, and officially it was ‘good’. A middle class black parent is fairly likely to wonder if sending a kid to university is likely to result in the kid coming back ready to burn down the neighborhood, destroy the home and business of their parents, and consider it a righteous deed.

    Then there is the completely awful mental health advice of the official academic establishment, and the extent to which encouraging your kids to trust these people can wind up with your kids dead.

    Research is pretty much a result of faculty being trusted in their reputation as experts, and to public belief that these experts will not cheerfully defraud them.

    Critical Theory inherently makes claims about speech and power. Faculty at state sponsored schools teaching critical theory, are inherently claiming to speak on behalf of disadvantaged victims. This is false. They cheerled the arson of poor neighborhoods, and carefully did not encourage the arson of wealthy university campuses.
    The medical schools and the medical researchers shut down much of the economy as non-essential, while apparently never considering the possibility that any university money making program, such as English or Education, might be suspended as being a non-essential activity.
    A majority of law schools have made some official statements, to the effect that they can and will defraud the public when it comes to legal representation, and to what topics are allowed to have a voice in court.

    1. I get asked, “Why are you not at [university]? You’d be so good there!” Nope. And the way colleges and universities are going? I’ll be around after the Ivory Towers are torn down by mobs of outraged parents.

      1. Speaking as someone with too many degrees, you made the right call.

        (Long, messy, family story. But at least I can attest that yes, academia wrecks anyone who doesn’t know how to kowtow to the biggest ego in the room.)

        Frankly, what we need are less colleges and more libraries with interlibrary loan. And access to academic journals. If we can get academic subjects into position so anyone can read up on history, science, what have you, then individuals can totally flatten the ivory towers.

        Honestly, for the cost of one graduate course (just the course, not housing), you could buy a dozen specialized academic textbooks to chew your way through.

        And for all the problems with Amazon, a heck of a lot of these books are available to buy there if you just search the right topic.

        If we can get kids taught the basics of reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic, including logic and what the scientific method actually is, we’d fix a lot of problems.

          1. This, to be frank.

            Libraries hire credentialed librarians, who come from library science programs at some of the same universities burning down everything being ‘anti-racist’.

            Anti-racist may mean destructive idiot and probable race war nutter.

            1. Yeah, librarians tend to be very leftwing. Another reason I’m working in a warehouse instead of a library right now.

        2. More libraries? Definitely.

          Fewer universities, I think probably.

          I would quibble slightly about books to courses. There are fields where a single graduate course can run as low as $1500, and have textbooks as high as $200 or $300. OTOH, same field, publishers like Dover can provide old classics for $15-$20 dollars.

          But, the general situation with textbooks, references, and journals is pretty absurd, and could stand some improvement. If the publications are all paywalled away from access, then the effective amount of knowledge added is much much less then the official amount of knowledge added. If a new discovery is not tested, because nobody knows about it, then is it really a discovery?

          1. Most academic publications don’t really include a whole lot of useful knowledge anyway. When you have articles like

            Transgender Asian-Americans in the California National Guard 1918-1941
            Some Aspects of Reproduction in One Weird Bacterial Species Part 37 of As Long As My Career Lasts
            Ellipton Particles: I Just Made Them Up But What If They Were Real
            Economic Modeling of the Price of Candy Bars And How That’s Systematic Racism

            (Obviously, I made those up)

            … then the chance of happening on a paper that really advances the field is infinitesimal. But all those pyramid scheme victims professors and postdocs gotta publish something, so this is the kind of thing we get.

          2. I’ve been buying older textbooks on Abebooks for about $5 a pop with free shipping. It remains to be seen if I actually wind up making use of my purchases or not.

            I’ve got some really awesome books for basically nothing. I don’t know whether that’s awesome or awful.

      2. I’ve gotten a hold of a couple of ‘how to academic’ books, newly written.

        I’m pretty sure that study of them will not result in finding that they contain the advice ‘try not to let angry parents tear down the Ivory Towers around you’.

        To me, that item of advice seems to be the most critical and fundamental thing to be saying to anyone even near academia.

  4. At this point, the only way to fix this is to make parallel structures and start anew.

    The trick is to avoid having them do the same thing to the parallel structures they did to the originals, all without becoming them by stifling contrary views and becoming our own echo chamber.

      1. No, the methods will be strictly “legal”. The first and worst impacts will be in anything requiring “licenses” to “legally” operate, in whole or in part. See CA and their new medical licensing standards.

        1. No. They have already used illegal methods, secure in the knowledge they will not prosecute.

    4. As horrid as it sounds (bcuz righties tend to be classical liberals who value freedom of thought etc), we need to be as ruthless as them. “I’m so sorry Xir, but you wouldn’t be happy at this school, you’d always be clashing with our institutional values and conditions of employment. Thank you for your interest, and best wishes.”

      If we aren’t as ruthless, we will just repeat history.

      1. If we aren’t as ruthless, we will just repeat history.

        You cannot create liberty through tyranny. There’s a reason the vast majority of revolutions throughout history have simply replaced one tyrant with another. What happens when you give someone the power implicit in that kind of ruthlessness? Maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll hand that power to a Cincinnatus who’ll set it aside when the job is done (and I’ve seen that some historians even question whether Cincinnatus and the taking then returning power are actually historical and not pure legend). More likely you’ll find a Robespierre and a St. Just who will always be just one more act of ruthlessness away from getting just the right society.

        I have…much that I disagree with regarding Mr. Jefferson, but in one thing he and I are in complete agreement: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

        1. “You cannot create liberty through tyranny.”

          At some level the participants of the American Revolution did. After 1774 or so Tories were persecuted in many of the colonies. Estimates vary but between 25,000 and 100,000 Loyalists ended up in Canada and many left without their property. Some left voluntarily, but many were ‘encouraged’ Many others went elsewhere in the British domains. The Reader is not saying this was right but he believes that some level of this will be an outcome of the oncoming unpleasantness. Human nature being what it is, there will be a sorting.

          Quick reference – https://www.revolutionary-war.net/tories-loyalists-to-the-king/

          1. After 1774 or so Tories were persecuted in many of the colonies.

            Now compare that to France.

            Estimates vary but between 25,000 and 100,000 Loyalists ended up in Canada and many left without their property.

            I’d like to see sourcing on those estimates even as I’ve seen too many “estimates” that are what suits someone’s vision. (See what Sowell often has to say about The Vision of the Anointed and elsewhere). But taking them at face value, though, at the upper end, based on the 1790 census, that’s about 3% of free persons in the US, many of whom would be leaving voluntarily because they were loyalist and would, you know, return to the nation they’re loyal to.

            1. The Reader would rather not compare it to France. He does note that an equivalent percentage today would be about 10 million. He can easily see that number being ‘encouraged’ to go elsewhere. He hopes it will be that low. Who or what that 10 million may be loyal to is an open question but I’m sure the CCP could find a place for them.

              1. My point about invoking France was that the US citizenry’s (let alone government’s) reaction to loyalists was mild, practically pablum, compared to just about any other revolution in history.

                1. The Reader agrees. But it was still ugly, and if it happens again, it will be ugly.

              2. My observation is that, historically, most revolutions go bad. The American Revolution was a rare exception.

                1. I think Tom Kratman made the point that they saw it not so much s a revolution, but as a rebellion to assert their traditional rights as Englishmen against an increasingly oppressive parliament.

                  Mindset matters.

            2. Of course, those are the figures for those that had the resources to leave AND WERE ALLOWED TO.

              The number who were simply killed and not recorded is unknown, but was certainly much higher. The French Revolution was fought in a much more connected country with far more in the way of record keeping than the 1776 – 1783 American colonies.

  5. “No Man’s Land”?

    Does that mean “Only Women Allowed”? [Very Big Crazy Grin]

          1. Ah, don’t tell them that. They’ll stop sending me fish. 😉

          2. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and you’ll have the undying hatred of his wife and kids ’cause now the guy is never home…

            3. Build a man a fire and you warm him for a day. Set a man on fire and you warm him for the rest of his life. 😛

          3. Give him a fish and he’ll eat for a day, Teach him to pun and he’ll eat for a lifetime. 🙂

        3. The B52s have been loaded with carp and are on route to your location. Sorry about the carplateral damage.

      1. I think that I’ve seen snippets of that novel. So the title definitely fits. [Very Big Grin]

  6. I wonder if the core issue is that those fields became bottlenecked by centralized distribution systems, and that all centralized distribution centers are intrinsically vulnerable to ideological take-over?

    I’ve noticed that conservatives tend to dominate in areas before the gate keepers move in. Then they vanish. I think I’ve speculated before that that’s why the “dead Internet” theory seems to resonate with so many folks on social media: they’re on the other side of a gate-kept social media, and you simply can’t replace erasing half of the original works out there with echo-chamber knockoffs.

  7. Absolutely right Sarah! To tolerate the intolerant is to allow them to run/ruin everything. You cannot confront the unreasonable with reason. War is sometimes necessary and cannot be won by rifle barrels with flowers in them. I gave up on the publishing industry in 1979 when I realized I didn’t have the genius of an Orson Scott Card to survive the censorship despite my views.

  8. I’m a creator, and a rabid non-democrat (I’m not a republican, more a Trumpian). I got into publishing in ’95, and it was changing fast already. My genre at the time, ‘Frontier Fiction,’ did not really exist so they put my books in the Western catalog, told me to join Western Writers of America, which I did. I even got a blurb from Terry C. Johnston, “Frontier Fiction at its Finest!” But, like I said, publishing was already changing. Clan of the Cave Bear type novels were being published. Westerns were fading fast. I’d go into the book stores (remember them?) and there would be huge sections of the same new release, usually a curvaceous female with long blonde tresses, standing outside of the cave (Not a man one). Where were the cave men, I wondered. Well, they were inside masticating the hides with their long, failing teeth, and teaching the little cave kiddies how to make spittle beer or which mushrooms to eat and which not. But the woman, the huntress, had taken charge… in the primeval forests and in the publishing biz. But… I digress.

    Eventually I tired of my genre and wanted to publish in others. I’d been writing sci-fi since college, but my editor and agent were not interested in supporting that. So I went rogue and I was an early Amazon kindle guy. Before that, my Vietnam (fictionalized) memoir was a finalist at the LAST ebook contest award program, the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards, sponsored by Microsoft and Adobe (my ebook was ‘published as an pdf). And, yes, my writing became more political and more reactionary (to the growing power of the liberal culture masters). I soon realized that only certain memes were being published. Yes, the Left owned the culture because they owned publishing, Hollywood, TV, the education establishment, etc. The Right was rolling out ‘Talk Radio,’ the only thing they had going at that time.

    Here I go again… Andrew Breitbart said that ‘politics is downstream from culture.’ Yeah, the Right said, and went on publishing nothing (in the few houses they had, Regnery being one) but political tomes by Conservatives and Right Wing talking heads.

    I’ll shut up in a minute here… My point is that you have to give the liberal left credit for one thing. They, like the real commies, know how to play ‘the long game’ (THE LONG MARCH). And they stick together, work together, like good comrades. While we on the Right seem to embrace, ‘Every man/woman for him/her self!”

    Is it right? Am I bitter? No and no. (Actually, I’m pissed off, but no way ready to give up.) But that is the way it is. The Right is still obsessed with politics although there are signs that they are awakening. Actually, Rush Limbaugh started this with his Revolutionary War series. But other folks are now getting in gear with patriotic kiddie books. I have reached out to a lot of these folks, hoping they would take a look at my recent books, which are stealthy little B-40 rocket launchers in the culture war… But the response was stone cold silence.

    Well, as Granny Yokum would say, “I has spoken.” Oh, and thank you Sarah, for letting me do that here.

      1. ESR had a post in which he gave the definition of SF as “that branch of fantastic literature which affirms the rational knowability of the universe, and has as its most particular reader experience the sense of conceptual breakthrough – of having understood the universe in a new and larger way.”

        Sounds like exactly the sort of message our enemies would hate and want to undermine, yes? He also noted the genre’s similarities to mysteries. The post was here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6005

        P.S. – Insert obligatory gripe about ESR not blogging any more here. Yes, I’m STILL annoyed by that; thanks ibiblio.

  9. Sarah,

    I first “met” you through L. Neil Smith’s “Libertarian Enterprise”. Now I subscribe to “According to Hoyt”. Rejuvenating!

    The Left describes their own takeover strategy as a “March through the institutions”, starting in the 1960’s. It’s sort of a million person “chimney climb” where they all support and promote each other.

    By profession, I’m a computer scientist. Very little leftism there, IMO. My degree is in Mathematics. Even less leftism there. Proofs don’t care about your politics.

    Now to my contribution. Ayn Rand thought new University students adopted the prevailing liberal ethos because they wanted to belong, to be part of a group. That’s true, as far as it goes. My brother did that — joined ZPG, never married, never had children. “Save the planet!” Idiot!

    But I think that analysis is too shallow, too superficial. Here’s a deeper dive. During the 1960’s, women started attending college in much greater numbers. Sociologist and psychologists investigating the new crop found something very interesting: a third of the new female college graduates believed that they could not live up to their own diploma. The investigators dubbed this the “Imposter Syndrome”! (Google it!)

    They now turned their attention to men. Surprise! Same one-third fraction had the same Imposter Syndrome.

    Here’s the connection to the Left. You are a college graduate. You are highly paid. But you don’t believe you deserve it. By the psychological mechanism of projection, you believe everyone else is like you — and no one deserves what they are paid. So therefore, high taxes are only Justice, with a capital J.

    My hypothesis suggests the following scientifically testable hypotheses (“falsifiable, in the sense of Karl Popper).

    STEM majors are less likely to believe themselves to be Imposters. Humanities majors are more likely. Hence STEM graduates are less likely to be leftists and humanities graduates are more likely. (Old joke: if Vegetarians eat nothing but vegetables, what do Humanitarians eat?)
    Prestige schools (the Ivy League, Stanford, etc.) will graduate more Imposters — and more Leftists — than other colleges do.

    I suggested the above and more as a book project to Charles Murray, He declined, but he did point out a subtle hole in my thinking: someone who believes he’s an Imposter may actually be quite capable — and therefore mistaken!

    Perhaps I’ll write to Amity Shaeles and suggest the project to her. It would’ve be an interesting book. One possible title: “Are Liberals Imposters?”

    Now just to be intellectually rigorous, I should mention that Thomas Sowell has an entirely different explanation for why highly intelligent, highly educated people become leftists: Envy. I “If I’m so smart, why am I not rich?”) Why am I teaching high school when my high school classmates who became blue-collar workers — plumbers, electricians, HVAC installers, automobile mechanics — all make six figure incomes? They never even went to college! And they all voted for Trump! Idiots!

    Anyway, that’s my two cents.

    Cordially,

    Craig Franklin

    PS. Sarah, I’d love to correspond with you privately. What’s your email? One of my hobbies is songwriting and I’d love to share one of my better songs (“Spirit Of Liberty”) with you.

    1. If you send it to the promo email (Sundays) I’ll give you the other one.
      Also: You should be aware math and computer programing programs are now also “woke.”

      1. Yep. It’s also infecting engineering. Watering down curricula: more humanities, less math, science, and engineering. When I got my BSEE, it generally took ~130-150 credit hours, you got 3-4 tests per class plus finals, and homework at best was 5% of grade. In the covidiocy, they’re giving take home, online tests that you get 3 cracks at, with best score being recorded.

        If they want to do that with the BSBS degrees, fine and dandy. But in STEM it means people are going to die and that torques me off.

    2. “someone who believes he’s an Imposter may actually be quite capable — and therefore mistaken!”
      That’s almost always someone with self confidence issues. And that could be a factor of just who the person is, but more likely what kind of environment he or she has been raised in.

    3. STEM majors are less likely to believe themselves to be Imposters. Humanities majors are more likely. Hence STEM graduates are less likely to be leftists and humanities graduates are more likely.

      Hypothesis false: STEM, especially computer related, has insane levels of Impostor Syndrome.

      A Certain Large Company has an internal nervous-laughter-joke that it is where brilliant people go to feel terrible about themselves. When standards are high it is hard to believe you actually made it.

      1. I don’t know about “brilliant”. But, yes, a field “When standards are high it is hard to believe you actually made it”. A field where one is a has been by age 40, a job for youngsters. It is hard to believe I had 3 different, all successful while I was at them, jobs between 33 and 59 (had experience in the field before then, which helped, but not in compared to these 3 jobs.) Not only did I start late, 32 before getting the 4 year degree, a job based off a class I despised in ’75 (14 years before), and waited 6 months after graduation to look for work. Am I in the category “can’t believe I made it?” Despite knowing I am dang good at it? 100%

        Note, prior career, with part of the criteria was having the thick emotional skin of an alligator, was not a good fit. Would not have left except under extreme long term job riffs and seniority loss. While I say “stupid owl, stupid mountain” a lot, I should be saying Thank God! At the time? No. Now? Yes. Hindsight 20/20 and all that.

    4. Craig, I think there’s a flip side of that too. Thanks to the Dunning-Krueger effect, the least capable are supremely confident, and are convinced that they should be the leaders. If the more capable are suffering from crises of confidence, and the field is one in which truths are not easily provable, guess what happens.

  10. We lost those fields not because we abandoned them, but because we never realized that we needed to fight for them.

    I keep thinking of the political correctness that was the big new thing when I first went to college. We rolled our eyes and scoffed and just humored them so we could get things done; we kept thinking they’d come around, grow up, etc, but they were never dealing in good faith. And they and their direct ideological descendants own it all now. By the time I realized we were in the middle of an existential war in which the ability to keep creating and participating in any given field was the prize, it was far too late to do anything about it. Even now there’s an infuriatingly large number of non-leftists who refuse to admit there’s a cultural war being waged or, worse, act like there’s some virtue in continuing to lose it.

  11. Problem is, if you build elsewhere they will follow, like locusts — or termites. This will only end when they are completely discredited, such that anybody caught promoting their Marxist ideologies is immediately dismissed as an idiot. Until then, they will continue to gnaw their way into every social structure and destroy them from within.

    I’m beginning to doubt that enough people will wake up and see the rot before it all comes crashing down around their ears.
    ———————————
    ‘Progressives’ believe everybody else is even stupider than they are. This explains a lot.

    2. We can’t control what future problems will arise but we can do our best to give future generations a good start.

      1. It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. (J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Return of the King”. )

    3. Most people are dumber than I am. But there are a whole slew of people A LOT smarter than I am. The trick is to leave the first group alone, not get taken advantage of by the latter, and just do the best I can with what I have.

  12. Social Theory of Risk, the left are afraid of change and so go for collectivism and positions that confer status with clear paths to the status through credentials and a clear hierarchy (e.g., academia, government, back-office arts). Above all, they avoid positions with objective measures of success that cannot be got through effort alone. They like routine and for everyone to be the bloody same. All this routine covers seething resentment and hatred for those with talent or those who refuse to grant them the status they believe is theirs. Swots in other words. Wimberpool from Dance to the Music of Time.

    I’ve known a few over the years, mostly to my cost because I didn’t take them seriously.

  13. I just saw a great line from LawDog:

    If you’re using my money, you just paid for my opinion.

    –
    ‘Whether you want it or not’ is strongly implied… 😛
    ———————————
    Today, every child in America is born $91,000 in debt.

  14. Exactly right, and this acceptance/promotion of leftists and favored minorities has been going on for 50 years…longer than that in some places, like CA, NY, and the Ivy League..The only way for most conservatives to break through the Red curtain is to fake it ’til you make it…

  16. I agree parellel systems are the way to go. All the way. What stops Leftists infiltrating and taking over those systems you spend time, blood and money to re-create?

        1. As if we could get the Huns and Hun-inclined into a herd in the first place! (Maybe if there was a book give-away, with free samples of King Harvey coffee. Maybe.)

          2. I’d like to point out that the fact the Huns exist at all, is an example of decentralization working perfectly.

            Various very different individuals who manage to coalesce under one banner with a shared interest and no coercion required.

            1. Groups in video games are another example– most of the modern MMOs have some sort of a format to promote group management because people formed groups automatically. Fellowships, Guilds, Free Companies, Teams…. they all formed automatically, so the games want to encourage and promote that social angle, because it will keep people in game when nothing else will.

        2. A cellular organization structure can exist without a hierarchical leadership. But you usually need several people all on the same wavelength driving the cells.

  17. Victim of No-Man’s-Land here:
    after 20 years of trying, every year, to land a full time teaching job in the higher ed Humanities, I realized finally (too late) that I was never going to be hired, since I was not leftist enough. Yet there are not yet any alternatives where I might be a competitive applicant.
    Higher education delenda est… and I’ll bring the marshmallows.

    1. It’s no better in biology. It’s amazing how hard that was pushed because “we’re going to have all these environmental remediation jobs!”

      …Right. A worse scam than Solyndra, you ask me. And what jobs there are out there, if you’re not a Ph.D., pay at the level that you have to be able to camp out on someone else’s sofa and raid their fridge to get by.

      1. Son is running (ran?) into the same in Chemistry. Oh the jobs might be there in the east or California. While pay better than he currently makes in manufacturing, still not what someone at a high tech earns. Where are a lot of high tech workers living? They rarely make enough money to pay their own rent, let alone own. Besides, so far, where the jobs are, he does not want to be. Used to be a number of labs locally. Those were all bought out for their patents and shutdown (just before he graduated). He had two mentors, one each at different companies head hunting him, until they were suddenly (can’t blame them) scrambling for their own jobs. There are two other options, but both those came under nepotism (ish … cousin’s husbands, both Phd’s). But they were scrambling for their jobs too. Again, timing. To be fair, latter two, they both change companies every few years because whatever project they are working on finishes, so on to the next project. Son has now been out of college 10 years, which doesn’t help.

  18. “I’d say “the only way to fix this is to burn the institutions and salt the earth, then start anew” but the difference is that we don’t need to burn the structures. Or at least I don’t think so.”

    The Reader thinks we do need to burn the structures as part of generating the preference cascade needed to stop the left. The useful idiots, which the Reader believes are the vast majority, can be shocked out of their world view. Hopefully, without #teamheadsonpikes taking the field.

    The Reader also believes that some additional defense for future institutions and structures beyond decentralization is necessary. He is not sure what it is but some sort of fissioning of institutions into competing structures when they reach a certain size instead of continual growth is an interesting thought. And no the Reader does not have any formulated notion of how that would work. He is just thinking out loud.

    1. Stop allowing the government to throw money around. If the government was not allowed to ‘invest’ in education, we would not have centralized silos like we do.

      The concept of doing things for the ‘public interest’ needs to stripped back down to the bare bone. At best it should be something limited to ONLY the level above individual, ie, local municipality with representatives that live and are responsible to their neighbors.

      1. “Stop allowing the government to throw money around. If the government was not allowed to ‘invest’ in education, we would not have centralized silos like we do.”

        I advocate an amendment banning government at all levels from providing or funding the education of minors (excluding only children in custody and wards of the state). With a requirement to read the entire constitution aloud before witnesses before you can vote or work in government.

    2. I’m in agreement: some institutions absolutely need to be nuked from orbit while the offices and buildings are fully occupied.

      And, mechanisms must be created and implemented to prevent the Leftist Corruption Program from re-corrupting their replacements. What that may be, I dunno, but some variant of a Moderately Polite but Completely Ruthless TeamHeadsOnPikes to enforce standards and performance seems like the only way; any acceptance, aka “Tolerance,” of Leftist Corruption in any endeavor guarantees future failure.

      Reality is a stone cold bitch who will not be denied. She can be carefully and consistently incorporated into daily operation, meting out small amounts of daily pain (but only to some, mostly those who seek creation of “Alternate Realities”) or ignored while fragile towers that will collapse catastrophically in a decade or three are constructed.

      I doubt we can now avoid much of the Catastrophic Collapse part; some, perhaps, but it’s absolutely worthwhile to try; are we sufficiently worried and ruthless enough to do it?

  19. Bypassing and burning/salting the Earth is already happening. A lot of people just don’t realize it yet.

    Khan Academy, Duolingo, free online programming bootcamps, Udemy, Skillshare, and trade schools are getting more and more popular, and with reason.

    Want a job programming? Sit down and show your potential employer what you can do… degree not required. Sure, maybe if you’re going to get hired for a major corporation, they’ll worry about a degree. But the smaller the business, the more they care about skills and the less they worry about sheepskins. Guess who’ll be leading the charge for innovation in the future?

    I’m currently a student at two universities (completing the college career I’ve had off-and-on since the 90s). One is brick-and-mortar, and the other is online. Sure, you get the in-person social pressure to conform in thought… when you’re in a classroom with a bunch of other people. The online class pays lipservice to the leftist agenda… but young Millennials and GenZers use sites like RateMyProfessor to decide which professors are a waste of time and which are going to get students; and the Disease Which Must Not Be Named has given a huge push to young people refusing to attend universities in person. And they won’t tolerate being charged in-person rates from online schools. I got no blowback whatsoever this year from expressing nuanced views in my online courses.

    The entire education system is in the process of getting a major enema, because kids are refusing more and more to go into major debt for a sheepskin that won’t get them a job, or show up to class for something they could learn online.

    And that’s not even discussing the way that employers are getting hosed by the Quiet Quitting movement, publishing is getting trounced by self-publishing, major news networks are getting pimp-slapped by independent media…

    1. Quiet quitting is also being accompanied by “quiet firing” – companies deliberately giving people too few hours of work to survive on so they quite, and the companies can hire new people for cheaper rates.

      1. Yeah. And there’s…. um…. I don’t agree with the anti-work movement, but under “sympathy for the devil”, “give it all to the corporation” has screwed my generation big time.

        1. “give it all to the corporation” has screwed my generation big time.

          …………
          In spades. At least when hubby worked 12 (scheduled) – 13 hours per day, he got per hour pay for OT despite being salaried (not exempt). He preferred working sites that were straight 8/day. But those sites were few, especially non-bad weather seasons.

          Me? Not so much. I paid for it in the so frequent limited dollars for raises bucket. Especially after the company I worked for got bought.
          ……………………….
          “One does not live to work. One works to live.”

        3. Part of the problem is that with the internet and email, work has gone from “paid by the week” to “paid by the hour”. Meaning if you work 9-5 and take any time for lunch, you don’t get paid for 8 hours. Heck, a lot of corporations expect you to clock out just to use the facilities – they consider it “wage theft” if you don’t.

          And they used to hire enough people that someone working a customer service position could take a 5-to-10 minute break every 2 hours to go… somewhere else and not scream at the customers. Now? Nope.

          I had the delightful experience the past 2 days of being stuck out as one person with no working phone to call for assistance, unable to leave where I was to get higher management when there was a Problem when the rest of the equipment started going down. With a line of customers that kept getting longer and angrier no matter how many times I asked them to at least consider going inside where things were working and pass a message that we needed IT, or at least more help.

          I am not impressed with people ATM, and exhausted even after getting a night’s sleep. Argh.

          1. Which is why every standard eight hour shift that I’ve seen is 8 to 5. Nine hours, including one unpaid hour for lunch.

            1. Once I switch fields, 8 to 5, one hour unpaid lunch (typically at 12 – 1 PM, but phones often killed that at the last job). Son’s manufacturing job is 6 am – 3 PM with a 1/2 hour unpaid lunch and 2, 15 minutes, unpaid breaks.

              Hubby’s however, was typically 7 to 3, straight 8 hours. Lunch and breaks as they are available. Rarely was there a day without time for breaks. After all, log yards the logs have to be laid out, and picked up so more loads can be laid down. Water has to be put down on hot dry, dusty, days. All that means staying in the shack away from machines while it is done. When on a log scale ramp, which most are long gone, rarely were trucks there the entire day. Even if so, enough people to rotate, so plenty of break time were had. At one time the employer wanted an unpaid lunch hour. Everyone said “fine, what hour is everything to be shutdown?” Idea was dropped faster than a hot potato.

              What has been interesting between the two of us is I know how his job worked, I had worked at his job. He had no idea what writing software was like, or dealing with software users. If he had, there wouldn’t have been as many quips when I was helping him with something (“Don’t need to tell me every step!”, “You don’t treat your clients that way!” … Answer: “Um, yes. Need to.”). What I did not miss about his job? 1) No one being happy with the results, job hazard. 2) Also job hazard, the weather, be it rain/snow/sleet/ice and mud, or 110 F out on the asphalt, and dusty in spite of the water put down. At least with software I had heat or air conditioning, immediate feed back when programming solution came together, and people were grateful.

              1. I wonder if it’s a leftover / symptom of centralized thinking. People are widgets, ignore everything else, treat them like replaceable widgets, and shrug when the replacement just doesn’t work. . .

                It .. is a constant chipping at the systems of trust civilization depends on. Can’t trust your employer has your best interests in mind and wants to give you a fair wage for what you do. Can’t trust employees won’t shirk or screw around with a bad work ethic.

                I mean, it’s signals-interference mixed in with that (eg, employer has no idea what’s actually going on) but still. . . trusting each other to work for the business because it benefits you both isn’t exactly a seemingly high priority anymore.

                1. This. The corporation is always advertising, “We’re hiring!” and turnover is high. Upper management doesn’t have to deal with the losses from not retaining skilled people. And every job in the store is skilled, drat it all – just not college skills!

                  1. Semantic locally has/had something in the paper every 6 to 18 months “hiring” (“had” because we haven’t gotten a paper for years now, so still ???). I did breakdown and apply, desperation, in 2003. Never got a call or my application/resume got lost in snail mail. I suspect that was a damn good thing. Until the last company instituted an “extra maintenance” fee, where our IT did all the updates, and year end setup, I was burning out during the year end process (which by the time I left, was 3x’s a year – Calendar, Fiscal, Federal). Note, year end setup was technically the responsibility of clients IT (do not get me started). And what I was doing was not a true customer support center.

                    Had a friend who signed up for the holiday seasonal Harry & Davidson order customer season (surprised us, computer literate she was not); she didn’t make it through training. I just told her “Hey. After a day I’d find a hole, jump in it, and pull the hole in after me.” Okay, might have been reason that got strange looks when people later found out I wrote software for a living. Didn’t make the statement any less true. Just not the same reason she was unable to succeed at it. Yes, I can work with clients. No I can not work with clients at the level of a customer call/order center. No way in heck (or that worse word).

                    1. I did the Harry & David call center one year. Not too bad, because we weren’t calling people, they were calling us… and that makes all the difference in the world. (Also, the moment someone was a problem, you kicked them up to a manager. I didn’t have to put up with angry people.)

                2. Because both offloaded the care for the relationship to the government. The government sets “fair hours” and benefits, etc.
                  Of course the government sucks at it.

          3. I had that realization from the other direction; oh, all of those supposedly “8 hour jobs” were maybe 5 hours of actual work in a day. If the person was unusually dedicated and had an environment that didn’t needlessly interrupt them.

            Which certainly helped my efforts seem not quite so pathetic.

            1. Oh. One of those jobs where the meetings and the phones keep you from ever getting work done? Been there. Done that. Luckily production tracking was not something I was ever saddled with. Log Scaling, that is actually illegal (we heard complaints, but illegal to act on them). But programming I was lucky to never be in one of those shops.

              1. “Here is your job– oh, you’ll also be doing all this other stuff. What, why is your job not done? You had eight hours!”

                2. I’ve heard of that. Never experienced it personally. Worse I’ve ever had to do was make a sign for my office door (when I had an office) or the outside of a cubical. “Interrupt at your peril”. Did not stop the phones however.

                  Phones were a constant interruption at the last job. (Office or production meetings? What are those? Seriously, they did not happen.) When someone got fed up, with the “perceived lack of production”, the trouble system was created. Before that most of us had our own private tracking system, to print pages and pages, if needed. Since the trouble system became the only way to trigger updates (not exactly true, you could bypass, but why?), 99% of all calls triggered an update, even if it was on an existing ticket (since ticket also allowed us to see if the client had been sent the current program, or if an update had been applied or not, which were most the other 1%), everything went into the tracking system, who triggered, who completed it. Which flipped the silent narrative. (Also easy to “game the system”, if one bothered. I won’t tell if you won’t.) OTOH harder on those on longer projects who did not answer phones. Luckily small enough company that didn’t matter, or didn’t use too. Not sure about the last few years since company was sold (after I retired).

                  Also different from a true customer center (one we were programmers, we just had to support it too), was no phone call tracking. Not for quality assurance. Not time spent solving (two minutes, 2 hours, did not matter) problem or even over explaining (so they wouldn’t call back 10 minutes off the phone). Might, just might, have been very guilty of the latter. (Like all of you haven’t noticed 😉 Just saying.)

                  1. I got put on fixing the guys’ write-ups for the records, because they couldn’t fill them out correctly.

                    Then I got told I wasn’t getting as much calibration done as they were.

                    (Being me, I pointed this out, and also pointed out that I was doing the things that couldn’t be done in five minutes– they snagged the stuff that looked easy so they got higher numbers.)

                    I’m still not sure if that was a joke by our office head or not, but after the first time I didn’t get any smoke.

        1. Who can afford that?

          The last time I had to deal with a lawyer – settling someone dying intestate – cost me $3K I never recovered.

          And how on earth would anyone prove it?Officially there just “weren’t enough hours” available.

      4. You’re not wrong, but there are a couple of things that companies can’t control (yet):

        First, a growing segment of young people are getting used to working a couple of part-time jobs and pooling money with roommates to pay the rent. This means that if one place terminates them, they don’t care. Unskilled workers are so in-demand right now that it doesn’t matter to them. The entire unskilled labor market is being treated like a gig economy. Government healthcare is easy to get and they’re uninterested in a career as a cube-dweller anyway, and the dating market is so bad they don’t have any incentive to try to provide for a family.

        Second, websites like Glassdoor allow them to give reviews of what employers are like. Get a bunch of bad reviews and you’ll be unable to hire any unskilled labor at all. This is just going to grow in its market effects.

        Third, the left has been propagating an environment conducive to false accusations of racism and sexism for decades. They’re going to reach the point where intentionally constructive firing isn’t going to result in lawyers being called. It’s going to result in accusations on TikTok and having the Cancel Mob show up on their doorstep. So the corporation will be in the position of having a bunch of quiet-quitting drones on the payroll and being pushed out by smaller businesses.

        Or, if they push hard enough to keep driving up the costs of food, fuel, and housing, and making the corporations the only employers in the market, the economy will go one of two ways:

        Total economic collapse when too many people are on welfare

        Angry mobs showing up on the doorsteps of the ruling class

        Or they could encourage the people who refuse to work and live on the dole to get morbidly obese and then engineer some type of malady that deletes people that have morbid obesity as a preexisting comorbidity, which would cut down dole dependents and shrinking budgets, but that’s just me putting on my tinfoil hat.

        1. Never attribute that much intelligence to the other side. They are mostly people, and as a group (because of how they were promoted) not very good at seeing what’s ahead or how people will react.
          And you’re wrong, you know? Young people are still growing up, acquiring skills and getting married. On average ten years later than we did, which has some effects on population, but still doing it.

            1. The text I was supposed to quote there was: “They are mostly people, and as a group (because of how they were promoted) not very good at seeing what’s ahead or how people will react.”

          2. Touche. Always good to get a reality check on the intelligence (or, as you put it, the lack thereof) of the would-be overlords.

        2. So the corporation will be in the position of having a bunch of quiet-quitting drones on the payroll and being pushed out by smaller businesses.

          There’s also the question of what “quiet quitting” consists of.

          The morning radio the other day was yaoyaoing about it, and they had a range– from what the Navy would call retired-in-place (not doing any work at all) to “doing the job paid for” and then down to making a legal fuss about being tasked with uncompensated work outside of your job description.

          Because, you see, a motivated go-getter will do work without being paid for it….

              1. A small detail, but I think a telling one, in how people view those in corporate work: Customers think they have the right to the pen in your pocket.

                No. The pen on counter, sure – although that’s also often a pen I brought in because management won’t stock them there. But the pen in my pocket is mine.

                1. …. Gosh o’holy fish-hooks, I would PUNCH someone.

                  You. Do. Not. Enter. My. Space.

                  Especially not a female and a breast pocket, but NO.

                  That’s like snagging food off of someone’s plate! (Which I do. To my husband. And with warning/testing, to my kids. SOMETIMES to my childhood family.)

                  1. He didn’t touch me, fortunately. Just demanded the pen like it came with the purchase. I gave him the one off the counter instead.

                    So it’s in my pocket and visible. So is my snack, my safety glasses (absolutely necessary when there’s flying bits of dirt), etc. Aye Chihuahua….

                    1. Gah, less bad, but still has me bristling in the “I make jokes about crossing someone’s space by ‘stealing’ their cart at Costco” way.

                      (that is, for those not familiar– a polite way of noticing someone is about to take their cart back and asking ‘mind if I steal your cart?’ so they don’t have to walk it to the parknig spot and you don’t have to grab a new one)

        3. “They’re going to reach the point where intentionally constructive firing isn’t going to result in lawyers being called. It’s going to result in accusations on TikTok and having the Cancel Mob show up on their doorstep. ”

          Only if you check off one or more oppression boxes. I know I don’t check off any of them.

    2. Which is why the Left is out to destroy small businesses. Much easier to control a few mega-corps, much more efficient to shake them down for bribes campaign contributions, than thousands of diverse small privately-owned companies. What happened during the Covidiocy? How many small businesses were driven into bankruptcy? If you believe that was unintentional, I’ve got a Perfect World to sell you…
      ———————————
      Governments can’t create prosperity; at best, they can refrain from destroying it.

    3. The entire education system is a pyramid scheme designed to generate hundreds of candidates for every available job so that the filter for ideology can be maximally effective, and immiserate all the rest. Yes, that’s a Marxist word, on purpose.

  20. Perhaps it’s inevitable that any human institution eventually falls to bureaucrats, but that works twice as fast and twice as hard when it’s corrupted by Marxism.

    I’m now informed that our moral and mental superiors have defined Cultural Marxism as a racist conspiracy theory. I guess Marxists are a race now? Makes as much sense as anything else these days.

      1. I think they believe that “Marxist” is code for something else. They’re so used to speaking in code themselves, they can’t imagine we’re any different.

        1. The furious accusations of “dog whistles” is their stifled consciences projecting their sins.

  21. Part of me thinks the answer is to use all the leftists as tree or ame ts and landfill; but even with God going with them (pillar of cloud by day, pillar of fire at night), the Israelites couldn’t clean up the original “Promised Land” of people as vile or more so than we have to deal with.

    We need to red-pill them We need to win them over to our side. In Luke 6, Jesus talks about using love (no, not sex, you silly person).

    We’ve tried everything else. Why not try what God said?

    1. Not “tree or ame ts”, should be “tree ornaments”.

      Fat finger, tiny phone keyboard.

    2. We’re seeing stuff on the left these days that would have made even the most unrepentant of the Exodus Israelites step back and say, “Dude, what is WRONG with you!?”

      For that matter, I think we’re starting to see stuff that would make even Sodom and Gomorrah say, “Hold up…”

    3. Clean up the Promised Land? Heck, they had such individuals amongst their own people. G-d didn’t give us the law because we were a perfect people, He did it because we kind of sucked and needed the guidance.

      1. And that was kinda my point. The Law was a sort of measuring device to show us all how badly we don’t measure up; but it didn’t fix us. Jesus’ death on the cross was good enough for everyone but is only effective for those “elected by God” who accepted it in place of their own good deeds.

        Thus, “Killin’ all them heathen” is a never-ending — and never successful — saga. As we see with internecine squabbles among every group that tries to achieve purity by force (yes, even self-labelled “Christians”). Humans are all, as Genesis points out, created in God’s image, so we should not hate anyone, even if they do detestable things.

        1. Are you certain that it’s hate, or just applying the only solution with a proven track record for solving the current urgent problem of “They won’t leave us alone as long as they are present.”

            1. Well, it’s the same principle of “the recidivism rate of executed criminals is 0.”

              Don’t start none, won’t be none.

            2. Killing dissidents and non-believers has a proven track record of going way too far. Not doing so means that they’re going to continue to be there. Yes. That means we’ll need to continuously out-argue them. It’s a fight that never ends and we’ll just have to accept that truth and deal with it.

              That’s the mistake that’s been done too often in the past–make a gain (Reagan Revolution, Gingrich Revolution, et al) and then drop it and turn attention to other things leaving the field to the other side.

              It’s enough to make a man snatch off his hat, throw it on the ground, and stomp on it.

              1. Nicolai Ceausescu was unavailable for comment; but his supporters are not gone. And neither are the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Poles, the Koreans, Fakun Gong, et cetera ad nauseum.

                The Brits were pretty good at killing South Asians; but now who runs Britain?

                Be realistic. It’s easier to win them over than kill them all.

            3. Depends how many you kill.

              Just how many Maoriori still dispute their coquestby the Maori?

                1. Nah, utopia is a mirage surrounded by killing fields.

                  Breaking a group, on the other hand, may mean slaughter and followup propaganda

                    1. That’s the problem – we didn’t get rid of the USSR. It fell over by itself, and we failed to take the opportunity to proclaim loudly how and why its murderous setup failed.

                    3. Allow me to rephrase: Reagan, and to a lesser extent Thatcher, suckered the USSR into pushing its economy past the breaking point trying to keep up, at which point it fell apart. We then massively failed to insist that the Soviet apparatchiks be treated like defeated Nazis and be tried under the USSR’s own laws (much of what they had been doing was illegal by Soviet law, in theory) on the pain of no more food aid, as well as to uproot the (now mostly unfunded and uncoordinated) Soviet front groups in our various institutions and make it elementary level education on why communism doesn’t work.

                    4. I’ll give you 9/10 for that as long as we can agree the jerks who supported the Soviets before and after the fall deserve 30′ pine enemas.

                      Mind you, I may talk tough; but I want mercy for myself, so hopefully we just send ’em the Gospel and let them convert or impale themselves.

            4. > “Has killing dissidents or non-believers ever sol ed anything?”

              The problem isn’t dissidents or non-believers. It’s aggressors. You can disagree with us all you want, but if you try to hurt us we have the right to stop you. Whatever that takes.

              1. The “Final Solution” was legal according to German Law at the time.

                “Rights” are not always baked into the law; but Romans 13 implies the only correct lawbreaking is if they try to stop us spreading the Gospel. After all, killing us just sends us to Heaven faster.

                1. > “The “Final Solution” was legal according to German Law at the time.”

                  What does that have to do with what I said? I’m discussing the right of self-defense, not the law.

                  > “Romans 13 implies the only correct lawbreaking is if they try to stop us spreading the Gospel. After all, killing us just sends us to Heaven faster.”

                  I guess you’ve forgotten I’m an atheist? An argument like that is dead on arrival with me.

                  1. It’s not up to me to convert anyone. I’m just expressing how/why I think like I do. This is America and you’re free to believe/disbelieve anything.

                2. “Rights” are not always baked into the law; but Romans 13 implies the only correct lawbreaking is if they try to stop us spreading the Gospel.

                  How do you figure?

                  It reads from my view, and is commonly interpreted, to say that governments have authority only in as far as they are just– and if they fail in that, then they are damning themselves.

                  It took a very long time to build up situations to where there was a practical option.

                    3. Well, can you argue that the arrest was not intended to stop his preaching?

                      You’re making my point.

                    4. No, but you’ve made it clear you’ll no true scotsman out of anything you don’t agree with, and there’s an entire field of theology that makes the point better than I can, so not really worth the time to rehash after hitting the comment wall.

                    5. I’ll just point out that yes, killing someone is stopping them preaching. It’s still killing someone.
                      I’ll also point out the instructions given the apostles for a certain tpe and place, as a very revolutionary religion is not the same as instructions given to victims of a civil persecution.
                      Setnaffa, for the love of BOB don’t be Ghandi who said the Jews should have walked into the ovens to “defeat Hitler” — that’s not how it works. Enabling evil for evil’s sake is morally repulsive.

                    7. I seem to be grossly misunderstood. Please forgive me for trying one last time to unmuddy the water. I am not trying to convert anyone, just clear up my previous lack of eloquence.

                      Obviously, the Apostles were different than “normal” Christians. And yet, what do we do with Matthew 10:28? What should we fear? What should we obey?

                      All authority comes from Christ, according to the Bible (Matthew 28:18-20). Including evil illegitimi like Putin, Xi, and so many others. How they use/misuse that authority is on them. Christians (as indicated in Romans) are supposed to submit to it, except as regards being Christians and evangelizing (as previously noted, commanded by Christ).

                      Peter, it is true, walked out of jail. However, it should be noted than an angel from God woke him from sleep, unchained him, opened the doors, and kept the guards from noticing–including those to whom he was chained… Not a standard prison break by any measure. And later, it is said, he was crucified upside down, so it was a very specific event for a very specific purpose, at a very specific time.

                      Herod, by the way, had possibly a worse death, which I will not describe here.

                      We need to approach civil disobedience conscientiously, through our religious beliefs, to be sure. I do not understand conflating what I said with any Gandhi quotes about Jews and Nazis, tho. I am not advocating fatalism, or violence either. Read Psalm 91. If we believe God will protect us, the forever part of us, then a bit of discomfort may be okay—as long as it is for the right cause. But how to proceed? 2 Timothy 3:16-17 is interesting.

                      Christians are not all pacifists or “Quakers” (and along those lines read about Desmond Doss). Each is supposed to read the Bible, pray, and behave accordingly. Not all have the same skills, talents, gifts, or capacity for action. There were many who followed Jesus during the three year ministry. But he chose 12 to be closer. Similarly, not everyone is chosen to be a martyr; and I do not believe it is God’s will for us to provoke a government official into murdering us. But we cannot be silent for the time is short, at least for some in our potential audience.

                      Dear readers, you don’t need to believe what I do; but please remember every earth suit has an expiration date; and you might want to consider what comes next before that date arrives for you.

  22. This morning a young friend did the “We can’t abandon education. It’s this bad because we abandoned it, and the left loves a vacuum.” I hadn’t had coffee yet, and I about put my head through my desk. (This is very bad.)

    Ugh, yeah, the “you didn’t win so you must have not fought” thing.

    Ouch.

    1. Well, I do see it as a “we failed to fight” scenario. It’s not that we abandoned anything, but that most of us didn’t realize that there was a war on.

      If we’d had the kind of knowledge and pushback we’ve got right now back in the 80s, or the 90s when I first went to college, or even 15 years ago when I went to grad school, we might be okay by now. But by the time a large enough proportion of us realized that this was an existential war, our kind had been pushed out and marginalized, and the institutions had belonged to the enemy for decades already. And now here we are.

      1. Not having accurate information on the enemy — because you have been betrayed– is not failure to fight.

        As one of the kids who did push back, mostly by believing what they claimed to be promoting was sincere, as a grade school student, I very much dislike the “you didn’t fight” nonsense.

        1. It is true that our people, on the whole, didn’t fight. Was it actually a failure on our part, though? Maybe not. I’m looking back and thinking “if only we had known,” but how would we have known?

          As you say, we were lied to and betrayed. Gaslighted. And as Sarah pointed out, they were already completely in control of the cultural fields by that time. And public media was monolithic and also leftist, so unless you were one of those lunatic fringe right-wingers (or had already lived with leftists elsewhere), you weren’t going to know what was coming down the pike. That information simply wasn’t available to most of us.

          1. Related to already in control…..

            My mom has stories about when her dad was a kid.

            Before WWII.

            It was a known thing that socialists would get in jobs where they didn’t go to war– which are also the backbone of the culture.

            I don’t know how to fix that.

            (And, again, RANGE MAGAZINE! Break that control!)

      2. It was already impossible in the eighties or 90s. They were already in control of everything. I COULD SEE IT. In my field, in the eighties, you’d never be published if there was a hint of not left.

  23. This is so true. I know I was evicted from the arts. I had skills, which I thought I could translate into a career. Initially, I was making it up the commercial art ladder. But I kept failing the ‘test’ on if I was a liberal, each and every time. And being ousted from the local writer and art cliques, was a definite signal to those higher up the food chain as a ‘problem’.

    I grit my teeth every time some young’en spouts the ‘new right’, really misplaced leftists, tout that anyone who is conservative has no creativity. No, it is definitely a club, and a club, which specifically knows WHO they want in it, and the power to control it.

    Not to mention, conservatives, or realists, like ROI! Back decades ago, the arts had a very low ROI. Now with the gig economy, kindle unlimited, etc, I see that opening up, but decades ago? 1099 work-for-hire, and contracts which owned all your IP.

  24. The Marxists in federal service are very, very cynical. They know what they are about, and they know just how to get things done with the least amount of MAGA.

    Got a project that has to work? Assign MAGA. Got a special software program where people die if you don’t use the best programmers? Assign MAGA. (Think Iron Dome in Israel. The software is written by a contract/government team out in San Diego–meaning that 99% of the code is written by competent contractors (aka MAGA, as most of them are) and 1%–mostly GUI–is written by the government folks who fall asleep at their desks, snore, and sell real estate from their workspace while they are awake.

    Discussions are held, openly, about which programmers can actually code, and which are on the government dole/affirmative action/reparations gravy train. It’s openly discussed! And government workers giggle and are proud when they get tagged as a slacker. “I get paid bank to slack, so tee hee!”

    These f****** KNOW what they’re doing. And the contractors get treated like flea-bitten dogs that are allowed in the house only because needs must.

    2. At least when I was there, Department of the Army was different. Perhaps because so many employees were retired sergeants.

      1. That’s where I find hope. Individual compartments of competence and servant leadership exist, and maybe there are more of them than I imagine.

  26. If anything, I think the Left are less creative, or their talents get stunted by their ideology (see “The Left can’t Meme”), but being natural authoritarians, where they really excel is at becoming the editors, the publishers, and the producers and thereby holding the gates open for their brethren while slamming it shut for their opposites.

  28. OK, read all the comments, and no one brought up the little bit that has been bugging me. I sort of let it slide by and ran on context for the overall post, but .. what the heck does ” It was Rechtsrein” mean ?? Thanks in advance for my future enlightenment!

      1. Heh. You’re reminding me of something.

        Back in 2000 there was a short lived sci-fi / alt-history television series titled “The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne.” Phileas Fogg says of Passportout: “He speaks fourteen languages. All of them badly.”

        Relate much? 😛

  29. OK, thanks. I did get one translation that came close to that, but I still hadn’t made the connection to the rest of the sentence.

      1. Oh, well THAT is entirely understandable !! This post was another one I printed out ( after a bit of reformatting to work with our shop printer ) for sharing with coworkers. I will get you some more fans as well as I can!!

  31. “At this point, the only way to fix this is to make parallel structures and start anew.”

    Your argument supporting this rings true. I came here after hearing your name mentioned on episode #1100 (07 Oct 2022) of Andrew Klavan’s podcast. Dailywire is an example of starting anew. Happy to have discovered a non-woke, non-leftist artist.

  32. “Overall, there were estimated to be only 2.5 million people living in the original thirteen colonies in 1776, although that number should be taken with a grain of salt since the first census did not occur until 1790.”

    https://brilliantmaps.com/population-density-1775/

    Compared with France at the French Revolution

    “At the beginning of the eighteenth century, France had 20 million people living within its borders, a number equal to nearly 20 percent of the population of non-Russian Europe.”

    https://7murray.wixsite.com/french-revolution/population-increase

    10 times the people, in an equivalent land area, far more concentrated in villages and larger population centers, and with a religion based system of recording births and deaths. Whose records would be better?

    1. Too many places where someone could be ambushed and left, and the American Revolution was a much less centralized affair.

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