Bubbles

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Every time I hit x, I find someone talking with great certainty of what appears to be a parallel universe.

I’m not talking here of the doomers who are almost certainly foreign (or clankers) who mix up timelines and history, and seem convinced we’ve been living in dystopia since the 70s but also think that the US is somehow responsible for the inflationary policies of the rest of the world. (In the seventies! When the Mediterranean countries were already on the third or fourth cycle of inflating away their debt. Which arguably is also what the US tried to do.)

I’m talking of people I read and respect, who seem convinced all of the right has suddenly, overnight, become anti-semitic or worse.

They’re living in bubbles. And can’t seem to see outside them.

I wish I could say that this is a problem of the internet. Or perhaps not, since the internet isn’t going away. But honestly it’s weirder when the bubble is in real life.

For years I laughed at people who said that the communists were taking over or the like, because it was so weird and out of touch. What I should have done was check where they were coming from.

Yes, there are states, professions, locations where your view of reality will be completely distorted. It doesn’t make your view any more accurate, but it does explain why you think that.

I found this out in 2020 when we had to cross the country during lockdown. I found that the hard lockdown, unavoidable in urban Colorado, where the signs on the highway told you that you should be home, even though driving alone in your car (or with the person you lived with) could not cause contagion. But a couple of hours away, still in Colorado, little towns were fully open and people looked at you oddly if you wore a mask. And in other states, the enforcement was far less draconian and sometimes wildly spotty.

Another point at which I realized my bubble had blinded me was yesterday while talking about all the stratagems we used to go through to figure out which churches were less likely to serve up sermons on the wickedness of the right and the saintliness of the left. This was a theme of the last six years in Colorado, and I suddenly realized we haven’t found anything even half as bad since we moved. In fact, the worst sermons here would be very good in those days. (Like, I get annoyed because I think I know what the sermon is driving at, but not thing is explicit, and sometimes there is at least an attempt to head that idea off.)

Here’s the thing, yes, the net, and particularly X can make it worse. It’s still not as bad as the days the left controlled twitter. But– But other countries have realized that they can sow dissension and truly weird ideas in the US with their fifty cent army, some of which aren’t even clankers.

Can I tell you how to fix this? Well, I can’t tell you to regularly drive across the country and observe other places. I can’t tell you even to ignore all the bots and the crazies on X. But you should. Honestly, you should. It’s just that you might become confused about who is a bot or a foreign agent.

There are tells of grammar and syntax for foreign, more importantly there’s tells of worldview, like thinking the US is evenly divided by race, or that um… the media is perfectly accurate about how we live* and if you look, it starts to become obvious. For the clankers, not sure. Except sooner or later the “wait what?” comes through. (*Yes, this will also catch our hard left. or, as I said, foreigners.)

However and beyond twitter, keep one very clear thing in mind “Who would benefit if I believed this? And are they the kind of countries who would be paying for a fifty cent army?”

Other than that? Look at facts. Facts are hard to ignore or explain.

If there is a great anti-semitic movement in this country, how come the violence are the same ol’ leftist rentamobs and open-borders invaders we’ve always seen? I mean, it’s a good question, isn’t it?

In the same way, about my long running argument linked above, if everyone’s standards of life have been declining since the seventies, how come they actually haven’t, and if we were transported to the seventies most of us would bitch? I agree that currently the US is screwing the young, but that’s because we’ve become a stupid gerontocracy. And by “we” in this case I mostly mean the left. However, the young still have options we didn’t have, and those with a modicum of drive can forge their own paths. Claiming they can’t because Phds are more expensive or manual labor pays less doesn’t help anything and makes me want to b&tch slap the doomers. (Okay, that last one is constant, but still.) Yes, I’ll write about why the future is so bright we should all buy stock in shades, BUT first and more importantly, if your view of the present and future is that dark and you’re not a bot or a driven ideologue (For some reason the “everything has gone to hell since the seventies” is a favorite of card-carrying communists. I’m not sure why, except in the seventies the USSR still seemed ascendant?) check your bubble. Check what you might not be seeing.

As always, I’m going to recommend you listen to people talking in the grocery store, engage in casual chatter with your delivery people, and compare to what you think you know.

And if the future seems dark, go and look at the new tech, the new things we can now do, and don’t look at it through cautionary tales written half a century ago (No, truly, even if you discount USSR propaganda, a lot of the writers were just trying to write for the money.) And then think how you could use that to forge your own path.

Things feel dark because the left is dying. And they still have enough control over the opinion industrial complex to influence how the rest of us feel.

Talk of past unity and present strife ignores the fact that in the past there was only one opinion broadcast: the left’s.

Today the world seems to be falling apart but the truth is that we’re finally, at long last, fighting back.

Which is why the left is trying to obfuscate by being louder, crazier, and more than occasionally pretending to be on the right.

Oh, yeah, another reality check, people who say they’re on the right but parrot all the leftist talking points, probably aren’t on the right. High chances they’re ALSO not your friends.

We all tend to fall into the occasional bubble. And heck “Obsessed with politics” is a bubble. BUT thanks to the net, we can reality check.

Always reality check.

And don’t fall into despair.

Sursum corda. In the end we win, they lose.

No other outcome is possible — they’re at war with reality — but more importantly, no other outcome is acceptable.

Be not afraid. And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

79 thoughts on “Bubbles”

      1. I haven’t figured out if it’s a sign of the apocalypse or “good marketing”, but at the Kroger affiliate, they were offering Harvest Spice….[wait for it] Mister Clean. Hard nope.

        Liked by 1 person

  3. Lots and lots and lots to unpack in this one!

    Overwhelmingly righty Christians are supporters of jewish people and Israel. That is consistent with the Bible, especially the letter to the Romans. I am a Christian and I support our jewish brothers and sisters.

    The Left though have been antisemitic for a very long time. It’s only in the last few years that they have felt able to wear that on their sleeves without being obliterated. Fashionable genocide of jewish people is fashionable, since 1917.

    The masks were fun. The size of the Covid critter is 0.1 micron, whereas the pore size of the masks was 10 microns. So it was like trying to stop mosquitoes using chicken wire. But lefties aren’t good at SI units of measure.

    I happen to have a PhD in chemistry. I wanted to be a scientist and do R&D, which I was blessed to do. Now retired after many fun years. But I am further blessed that I was born then and not this century, as science and universities have gone mad. On the other hand it has led to a very large drift away from college to trades.

    ‘Showing Up In Droves’ – Gen Z Trades Graduation-Caps For Hard-Hats (29 Oct)

    I think this is encouraging, as guys are escaping the bubble to do real and practical stuff. Working in a trade is a doorway to moving to managing a business. I never went there but I still have my hard hat. I used it recently when climbing a ladder and trimming a fallen branch on a tree in my front yard. I got the hard hat when working at a nickel refinery.

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      1. If things across the country are anything like around here, someone good at carpentry and basic construction/repair, and is reliable (especially at returning calls to at least come out and give an estimate) could write their own ticket as an independent. Many of the established companies are already too busy to deal with small home issues, and many don’t even respond to inquiries.

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    2. It doesn’t help that some recognized names that seemed to be on the right are suddenly making tinfoil hat wearers look sane.

      *glares at Tucker Carlson*

      Musk has apparently started talking about making posts on X include the country of origin, so he’s presumably aware of the issue of foreign “influencers” who pretend to be locals. However, I suspect that VPNs might be able to circumvent that.

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      1. junior, go out to Amazon and try and play a Prime Video from behind a VPN. You can’t, because Amazon knows you’re behind one. Elon will have the same tech. I suspect he will handle it automatically if he decides to do it.

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          1. They work unless someone has decided not to make it work. I suspect that Amazon or my bank have to care. Steam? They want more players.

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            1. And YouTube takes a third approach: They’ll let you claim to be from anywhere, but they auto-translate the site to “your country’s” language and script.

              Which was funny. Apparently Gotham City is actually in Slovakia, since Asus lets you pick it, and that’s how YouTube interpreted it.

              “Som Batman”.

              Liked by 1 person

        2. Re: Prime videos, that depends. I cancelled my Prime years ago because I was no longer getting enough value for my money from it, so I can’t test this myself. But I suspect that my custom VPN solution (dead simple to set up for any computer professional, and should be doable for an amateur willing to read a bit) would not be detected.

          Step 1: Be visiting a friend in the appropriate country who’s willing to let you use their Internet connection remotely. In my case, that’s my parents who live in the US.

          Step 2: Install Tailscale on your computer, and create a Tailscale account if you don’t have one. (This is simple if you’re willing to read instructions).

          Step 3: With your friend’s permission, install Tailscale on one of their computers and link it up to your Tailscale account. Or purchase a Raspberry Pi computer, install Raspberry Pi Linux on it, and install Tailscale on that, then give it your friend’s WiFi password. (The Raspberry Pi option is complicated, the “install Tailscale on your friend’s computer” option is simple).

          Step 4: Configure the Tailscale installation on your friend’s computer / your Raspberry Pi device to offer itself as an exit node. (This is simple but might need a bit of reading instructions to know the right checkbox to click).

          Step 5: Set up your computer to use your friend’s computer / your Raspberry Pi as an exit node. (This is super simple).

          Everything apart from step 1 is easy for any computer professional, and definitely within the reach of a non-professional if said non-pro is willing to read and follow instructions. Step 1 might be the sticking point for most people.

          But if you do this, then all the traffic that Amazon sees isn’t coming from any known VPN endpoint. Tailscale is routing it to the exit node, then from the exit node it looks like ordinary HTTP traffic from a residential ISP.

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        2. Carlson’s worse, imo. Owens was never a mainstream conservative voice like Carlson was. So while she’s causing problems now, she likely didn’t take that many people with her. Carlson, on the other hand, built up an audience at Fox that trusted and supported him. And a lot of that audience probably followed him into his new streaming show. Some of them probably didn’t ditch him when he went weird.

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              1. Based on what I can find online regarding his viewership numbers, you weren’t the only one that followed that arc. His numbers started to decline in 2024. The Russia trip, which was the start of his going unhinged, was early that year.

                Liked by 2 people

        1. No idea. I wouldn’t think UAE money, as apparently he was already quite well off even before he started at Fox. But it bugs me in particular that he had a big audience that likely followed him away from Fox, and some of that audience is likely still listening to him after his turn toward whatever is going on now.

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            1. Hmm…

              Fox apparently lost about half of its viewership in that time slot when Carlson was forced out. There’s been a decline in viewers for his streaming show, but a quick internet search suggests that didn’t start happening until 2024, which would have been after the Russia trip. And the Russia trip was when he first started showing signs of… whatever’s going on now. That would suggest that the viewership only started to decline after the Putin interview and the visit to the Russian grocery store.

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                1. Yeah, the Russia trip was when he gave the first clue that something odd was going on. The anti-semitism was another sign of that (one that all of the types that go along that route eventually seem to end up at).

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    3. If it helps, 0.1 micron is one 254,000th of an inch. Somehow I don’t think it will though.

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    4. The size of the Covid critter is 0.1 micron, whereas the pore size of the masks was 10 microns.

      And the booger that the covid critter is stuck inside is damn near big enough to see.

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  4. Picking on the clanker can be fun. The guy in the middle and the two on the top are fine, but look at the guy in the bottom right. What’s happening with his legs?

    Okay, now I’ll read the article and maybe have something intelligent to say about its contents. Later.

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  5. I also notice how many of the most strident voices bewailing our “fall” since the 70s, weren’t around then.

    Just like a lot of the most strident anti-semite “right” wing types, only started showing up recently. Wonder where they (the actual people, not bot (human and clanker) farm types) were the past 40 years. Actually, I don’t wonder, pretty sure I know.

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    1. Yup. I pointed out to a younger coworker that I’ve been through three market crashes, three climate scares (cold, acid rain, warming), a super El Niño, several versions of “worst hurricane EVAH!!!” and the Cubs winning the World Series. Nothing seems to be worth a political emergency any more.

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      1. Same.

        These days it is “What? World coming to an end? Again? Seriously? … Oh well. So, about (whatever) …”

        Get asked “How can you ignore (whatever)?”

        “Easy. Dig hole. Jump in pulling dirt in with me.” Not like anything I can do will change a thing. Yes, I have some standards. Things I can speak up about, that not only matter, but are achievable.

        I am glad we’ve got the litter (mostly) dealt with.

        I’m glad the air is clean, a lot cleaner than when there was both field and slash burning.

        We can swim in the local waters now (hypothermia, so not recommended, but that is natural).

        We can eat the fish fished out of the rivers, and creeks.

        Eat the crawdads (haven’t, but we can safely).

        FYI. They do not like it when I ask if they want to starve trees, regarding the CO2 “problem” (whether getting “too” cold or hot). Dang inconvenient science. I mean really.

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        1. They do not like it when I ask if they want to starve trees…

          Indeed they don’t. It’s one more case of Reality threatening to force their reasoning minds to think thoughts that their emotions forbid them to entertain.

          Nobody likes that Some of them snap, some in ways you don’t even wanna learn about on the net, never mind first hand. Everybody’s a lot closer to their own personal snapping point than they were in 2019. (Capt. Obvious told me this, so it’s peer-reviewed.)

          Tempted tho I am to troll some some of them, there’s only Stupid Prizes to be won there. Keep Matthew 5:25 top of mind these days.

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  6. I’m getting tired of the posts either attempting to use Reagan to blast Trump, or blaming him for everything that’s wrong now. Reagan lived in his era, and was in the White House 40 years ago. A lot has changed since then.

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      1. And the blatantly open Dem craziness was just getting started. The first of what we now consider “normal” nominations of conservative justices to the US Supreme Court happened in the second to last year of Reagan’s term, with the Bork nomination.

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  7. I enjoy reading the NAR (Not always right) website. I’ve known for a long time that the comment page is virulent anti-trump, bringing up politics even when the story doesn’t call for it. But in the last few months I’ve started seeing stories that lean that way. I’m sure that a lot of those are made up as well.

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  8. From what I’m seeing, the theory is that the neo-Nazis are going mainstream due to people like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. Owens has gone full anti-semite for a while now and Carlson is interviewing increasingly marginal conspiracy types. One theory suggests Carlson has been bought by Qatar.

    Right now what I’m seeing is more, “This is dangerous, we can’t let the anti-semites make us look bad,” than people, “The neo-Nazis are taking over!”

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  9. A couple of notes. A few days ago I made a comment to someone who was bemoaning that the Left has changed the meaning of all the words to prevent rational discussion. What I recommended for her was to ignore abstract or generalized terms (left, right, far right, justice, empathy, compassion, etc.) and listen only to facts and concrete terms and examples. How does someone treat someone in need. By their fruit shall you know them. The Left has no real compassion. Their attitude is that the government should take care of “those people”.

    Then today, Instapundit had several articles comparing Musk’s Grokopedia to Wikipedia. Reading them side by side totally reinforced that. Wikipedia had insinuations and descriptions. Grokopedia had links and references to the original sources.

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  10. Aside from the bots, and the false flags, there are a few people who seem to have gone through some mental breakdown. I rank Tucker and Candace in that last group. This decade broke a LOT of people.

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  11. Speaking of crazier, people who work in grocery stores I’ve talked to say there’s a rumor going ’round that Walmart will close on November first to avoid people who no longer have working EBTs mass-loading carts and running for the doors in mobs.

    I’m not saying it’s true, I’m saying it’s the rumor going around and people coming into the stores are acting crazy, trying to get their stuff “before that happens”. So… keep an eye out, people.

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      3. Not helped by the fact that part of the Walmart new employee orientation is (allegedly) how to apply for SNAP benefits while a part time employee. At least that is what has been written on the SNAP not funded Nov 1, NextDoor conversations.

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          1. Considering that several of the dancers say basically “Black Wal-Mart employees who don’t let us loot ain’t black”, I’m not surprised.

            Liked by 1 person

    2. Sadly, all too few will see cutting off welfare as the problem, rather than handing it out in the first place.
      ———————————
      Welfare is pay without work. In order to provide pay without work for some, others have to work without pay. We used to call that slavery.

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    3. If I hadn’t got a new job in 2019, which now pays twice what the old one did, I’d be completely unable to pay the bills by now. My only hope would be that the food stamps threshold got a LOT higher in the years since I was using them to make up the gap between a grad student stipend and the needs of a wife and two kids. And to have them suddenly yanked away… *grimace* This is the stuff civil unrest is made of. Things could get very ugly, very quickly, almost everywhere.

      This is one of the reasons why, even back then, we squirreled away a few weeks’ worth of canned food and dry staples like rice and beans. Helped us scrape through a couple of very lean times. And we’ve squirreled away more than that since the covid apocalypse.

      I wonder, though…if the SNAP benefits get Thanos-snapped, who will the general public blame for it? The Republicans can say, “Hey, we have a budget that fully funds this. Talk to your local Democrat about why they don’t want you to have any food this week,” but there’s no telling whether that’ll reach the people who ought to know it.

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      1. We don’t have that much squirreled away. There is some. But we won’t survive everything shutting down because of a disaster. Part of it is we’d have to get out of dodge, and moving too much food, etc., wouldn’t be possible. Financially, we did the “pay us first”. Which is why we were able to weather the prolonged limited financial dips, whether it was one or us, or both, unemployed; without touching the pre-tax savings that trigger penalties, or hindered the momentum of compounded earnings (which allows us to financially secure now, even if SS is delayed due to democrats shenanigans).

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  12. All through history people have been complaining that modern times are corrupt and horrible, but there were the good old days when everything was better. Kids are always depicted as wearing strange clothes and hairstyles, playing loud music, and having absolutely no respect for their elders.

    People just keep recycling the same complaints.

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    1. When I was in grade school (dinosaurs didn’t walk the earth, but the Mustang hadn’t made it to market), there was a song we did at some assembly: “What’s the matter with kids today?” I’ve forgotten most of the lyrics and half of the chorus, but the ideas aren’t new. [Looks it up. From a 1958 musical Bye Bye Birdie]

      Yeah, I suspect there’s something on a clay tablet about the subject.

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      1. What’s that allegedly Roman complaint?

        “Time are bad, children are disrespectful of their elders, and every one is writing a book”?

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  13. Everything has gone to hell since the 1970s

    V. Putin, summarized

    ..

    Wasn’t it obvious? 1975 was the USSR high-water point. We got our butt handed to us, and we hit a military and social nadir. We started a comeback in 1976, then it really hit stride in 1981. Meanwhile, they were unable to keep up, the mask kept slipping, and…

    Well that was quick, eh?

    The Russians are in the “50 years dystopia”, not us.

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    1. Yep. They are absolutely convinced of this, and it shows.
      Eh. Someone showed up to defend this chick, so I called them both clankers.
      I’m going to have to confess twitter hooliganism again.
      … in my defense, I’m going on a LOOOONG drive early morning, and stomach flu decided this was the perfect night to strike.
      Pray for me.

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  14. My daughter and I have seen the reports and heard the rumors — we plan to avoid the grocery store (especially Walmart!) this weekend.

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    2. Ugh. If the SHTF happens in Flyover County, we’ll live off of storm storage. One of the places I buy food isn’t that far from WalMart, and one other is well known as the discount place. Yeah, we get groceries from 4 sources some weeks. A round trip to town costs 1.5 hours, so we try to get everything done in one day. [Looks at medical events, hearing cosmic laughter.]

      I usually get four big jars of peanut butter for the Gospel Mission on the first Tuesday (Kroger discount for dinosaurs like me), and that would be missed if I skip. Not sure anything I could CC would do any good, and open carry isn’t encouraged around here. (Concealed, yeah. A lot. It tends to be a polite county. Usually.)

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  15. One of the things that’s recently struck me, I suspect a certain fraction of the recent Jew hatred are people unable to reconcile with Palestine being run by a flayer cult, and having no clue, or unwilling to consider what would actually need to be done to deal with it.

    So instead they accuse Israel of doing bad things and causing all of it, because Israel standing down and dealing with the periodic flayer outbreak is less incomprehensible than dealing with the flayer problem at its source.

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  16. And if the future seems dark, go and look at the new tech, the new things we can now do, and don’t look at it through cautionary tales written half a century ago (No, truly, even if you discount USSR propaganda, a lot of the writers were just trying to write for the money.) And then think how you could use that to forge your own path.

    But if you do that– especially if you find something that brings you joy– they try to destroy it, then call you ‘Treatler’ for objecting.

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