There are very bizarre ideas stalking abroad in daylight unashamed. And they should be ashamed, because they’re bad ideas and quite frankly ideas that are antithetical to what America is. At least an America distinct from Europe. (And if you don’t want to be distinct from Europe, your understanding of history leaves much to be desired, but we recommend a trip over there, living as the natives for a month. Just a month It will cure you, I betcha.)
Oh, yeah, the poor kid who got stabbed by a black kid is a problem, and a bunch of black people and academics coming out to say that just touching the poor oppression flower was worthy of being killed is a problem.
What it doesn’t have anything to do is with the color of the people doing it, except insofar as the US has spent the last several decades weaponizing people who tan into a dysfunctional culture. Yes, that is specifically one political side in the US, but it doesn’t make it any less real, and it is a shame for all of us. Also, if it makes you feel better that side of the political spectrum wants to do it to every single American, not just people who tan.
None of which is an excuse to run around being idiots. I’m particularly fascinated — in the way one is fascinated by a poisonous snake: from a distance and preferably from behind glass — by the bright idea that suddenly only Northern Europeans are white, or only Northern Europeans understand freedom and representative government. You know, the form of government inspired by the Mediterranean people — Greek and Roman, mostly — and which frankly had a hell of a time in the Norse countries where the harsh climate has always inspired more communitarian solutions. It is not a fluke that the Scandinavians and frankly the Germans took to socialism like ducklings finding their long lost mother (National socialism is, duh, socialism) or that the parts of the US colonized mostly by Scandinavians tend to be the most easily seduced by socialist solutions. Pfui. It would help if people engaged their brains before running their mouths.
All this to say that, no, I also don’t have anything against light eyed blonds. Despite the fact my husband has dark hair I’ve always had a weakness for redheaded men. (Actually forget the despite. The problem, gentle readers, is that from the age of 14 or so I became incapable of speaking or even moving much near red-headed men. Which is fine. I caught a mathematician, which honestly is my sexual orientation.) Note what I said THE CLIMATE encourages a certain type of CULTURE. In areas where they were the primary colonizers, the culture LINGERED, but individuals who moved away are as capable of loving liberty as the rest of humanity (You know, that means not a lot. Though Americans seem more predisposed to it and I suspect it’s nature AND nurture.)
Oh, but but but AFRICA. Yes, poor fucked up Africa, thank you for noticing. Yes, it does have a lot in common with our blighted urban areas (but then again no, if you look granularly. In fact very no.) Um… has it occurred to you it is because it suffers from the same bullshit from the top down? Look, there is much flapping about colonialism, and that’s as it may be. Colonialism is the only way humans have found to communicate a superior culture to a dysfunctional one that doesn’t involve killing every adult over the age of 3. In that sense Africa didn’t so much suffer from colonialism as from lack thereof. Yes, atrocities and all. Calm your tits. Did they kill everyone over the age of three? No? Then by the standards by which their own ancestors — as mired in tribalism as Africa, when they got colonized by Greeks and Romans and an endless succession of various peoples who were to an extent more functional (meaning their tribes were larger and almost nation sized) — what Africa got was soft colonization. (Which happened in Europe too. Even the Romans rarely killed every adult. Only on occasion.)
What truly and completely fucked up Africa was that the colonizers lost confidence in themselves and their culture before they brought the colonized to the level where people started going “I don’t care what color his skin is, so and so is an Englishman/Frenchman.” Which takes a lot of centuries, the sort of centuries which made the wild Celtiberians “Romans” and sometimes even Good Romans.
Instead Europe got the softs and started examining its conscience — colonialism done right requires you have none, just the certainty of your purpose — and asking itself whether the tribal cultures were better — no, if they were they would have got out of the neolithic on their own and colonized Europe — and all sorts of daft things.
And then they started treating Africans the exact same way as America treats its urban underclass (which is largely but by no means exclusively dark skinned. I won’t say African, because they ain’t. They’re not even African American. Most of them have slightly more African blood than I do, and mine is very little. They just are sometimes darker and mostly have the African hair. (Sometimes.)) I.e. they started “respecting their culture” and treating them as covalent partners in the whole civilization thing. And then when that didn’t work, they brought the African leaders over to educate in Marxism and resentment — see the Patrice Lumumba “University” in Moscow and our ivy leagues which might outstrip it in both silliness and Marxism. (BIRM.)
As a result Africa remains tribal, has no clue why it can’t succeed, but KNOWS it is because they were colonized and are exploited. They’re not sure what they’re exploited for, though those who went to college in the west will tell you that the colonizers took all their raw materials (A triumph of the narrative over their lying eyes.)
In that, btw, Africans are still saner than inner city government dependents. Most of them — the uneducated ones — know the whole resentment and oppression schtick is eye wash to impress the people giving them freebies. Beneath it the operational (just not civilized, and in fact anti-innovation/development/wealth) tribal structures remain, so that the money coming in gets stolen precisely according to tribe and hierarchy. And at that level they don’t so much … well, they just act like tribe-members. PEOPLE WHO BELONG TO THE TRIBE. Not as a club, but as ownership. Which is dysfunctional, but it’s also the natural state of mankind. Yes, your ancestors too, gentle reader, were owned by tribes. How long ago depends on where you came from, but honestly the structure lingers still even in Europe. It just has less power. Except for where socialists use it to divide and conquer. Or introduce other tribes to do the conquering. Whichever.
What we have in the US with people who tan — and some who don’t tan — is different. It is the — deliberate? — creation of a culture that s’welp me, is less functional than tribal culture, bizarre as that might seem. Partly because at least tribes survive. They’re mechanisms to survive, in a way. While the dependent culture of the welfare class is not survivable long term. Or, individually, short term.
What it has nothing to do with is Africa. (And anyone whining about IQ just proved theirs is room temperature, if that. Yeah, Africans, even in tests not administered by racists in SA have issues with IQ tests. Because, you know, what IQ tests test is ACADEMIC aptitude. This is notoriously hard to test in people for whom academics are a foreign language. Believe it or not even pictures on a paper aren’t instantly identifiable if you’ve not been trained in interpreting them. Look, the IQs bandied about means 90% of those people would die, just in the environment they live in. This is not real. (I have doubts about ANY IQ measurements being real, because I studied the tests and administered them and though I do rather well in them, I know all the begs and the loopholes that cause freakish and unwarranted highs and lows. But that’s something else. If you prefer, yes, IQ tests are real, we’re just unsure what they’re real about.)
Africa suffers from being mollycoddled, flooded with money and goods that discourage any local enterprise, and on top of that has its brightest lights indoctrinated in socialism. (Look, when the brightest kids aspire to growing up and be chauffeurs for an NGO big wig, the problem is not the long dismantled top-down colonialism. It’s soft undermining and Europe exporting its neuroticism.)
The inner cities in the US (and most other western countries, even before those western countries had any group of people who could even vaguely tan.) suffer from being welfare clients. It has some things in common with Africa, yeah: A perverse education that teaches them all their problems are due to oppression and that other people are scheming to keep them down all the time. And also that they can’t do anything on their own. And also being given big gobs of cash for doing bloody nothing.
They are worse off than Africa because they don’t even have a tribal structure. In fact, due to the perversity of Welfare structures, they don’t really have families, just a generational matriarchy that discards men and boys into a culture of macho posturing and competition.
What they also don’t have that their ancestors did, even when just freed from slavery, is Christianity. Which frankly is what made the West what it is. The knowledge that all humans are fundamentally human. And that individuals matter.
At some point, the West decided that Christianity was uncool and we shouldn’t impose its values on anyone, including those little barbarians in our schools.
Look, I’m not going to tell you you have to believe in Christianity. OR in any G-d. What I’m going to tell you is that removing those VALUES and the culture from our culture has benefited no one. To the extent the self sufficient, self feeding classes retain them, they are protective against the virus of socialism.
And the virus of socialism is what has destroyed those dependent on government and created a culture where “How dare you touch me” is reason enough to kill. This incident isn’t even rare. It’s just normally it doesn’t involve white people. After KC won the Super Bowl a Kansas City resident told me the morgues filled with skinny black kids full of holes, because looking at someone funny is reason enough to be shot. (Or being suspected of looking at someone funny. Or walking the wrong way on the street.)
The left looks at that and sees a vibrant culture that needs just more money to flourish and build rockets or something. But the left is full of shit. Giving more money to people who have no internal ability for self improvement or frankly to live in civilization doesn’t make them more functional. Arguably, it goes the other way.
And before you think that’s because these people are black, kindly go read Theodore Dalrymple. Long before England got invaded by people who tan, their welfare class was INDISTINGUISHABLE from the vibrant goblin neighborhoods in our urban centers. They might be blond and blue eyed, but they acted exactly like their darker cousins across the pond. I’m here to tell you it was the same with the welfare class of the country I was born and raised in.
It’s not the skin color, you see. If it were Abigail Spanberger would be a firebrand for freedom and Clarence Thomas would be communist. Or if you prefer, replace those with Bernie Sanders and Thomas Sowell. The parallel stands. And it remains crazy. (I want to point out right now that in terms of defending freedom, you could give me a million Spanbergers for a single Sensurround (https://x.com/ShamashAran on X) and you’d still have to give me change of around a million Spanbergers.) It’s socialism.
Socialism, in the absence of any moderating cultural influence — say Christianity or America’s civic religion based on our funding documents — will turn ANY POPULATION into worthless goblins. In fact, even with moderating influences, the longer socialism is applied the more worthless the population becomes.
No, this doesn’t mean that we should just seal off or worse exterminate vast portions of our population. (The place you’re looking for is in Europe and almost 100 years ago now. Go.)
It means we need to stop lying to the young. I DO recommend as a beginning point stop telling kids who tan that slavery was invented by white people to enslave black people. It’s a stupid and ridiculous lie, (and the reason I was told this was told them was “so they have something to be proud of.” Because apparently being the weakest people in history is something to be proud of. What?) and we shouldn’t subsidize the telling of lies to the young.
Then teach them history. Real history. If you’re going to teach them American history, warts and all, teach them all of the world’s history WARTS AND ALL. Because while it’s true that the US is not perfect, boy oh boy, at least we have tried.
Then get rid of welfare and the soft soppy idea that people who have fallen so far as to need the collective to keep them from dying are in any way doing something right, or “shouldn’t be preached to.” In fact, for the love of all that is human and worth saving, PLEASE go and preach to these people. Yes, I know it will be taking your life in your hands, but I’ll point out missionaries went and preached in places where they might (and did) become dinner (and before you kick on that, yes they did. Cannibalism is just something humans do.) Just make sure what you’re preaching is REAL Christian doctrine (or USAian doctrine. I don’t kick either) not the passing fancy of college professors drunk on socialism. Because that later doesn’t help anything.
We do have a problem. A massive one. Fortunately it doesn’t require us to get rid of everyone who tans. Or even most people who tan. What it does require us is to stop poisoning our citizens (all of them, really) against our own country, its history and its people.
And it requires a willingness which I know doesn’t exist, to turn off the money spigot corrupting people here and abroad. And it might not exist but it NEEDS to. So if all you do is convince others that this stupidity needs to stop you won’t have lived in vain.
Socialism kills, fast or slow. But on the way there, it makes people into dumb animals posturing and killing for no good reason.
The enemy is collectivism. The enemy is welfare. The enemy is turning humans into dependent zoo animals.
None of which will be solved by doing the same, but harder, and with different colors of skin as the all precious must be coddled.
All it will do is destroy the little that is still functioning. And make it harder to come back.
I beg you with tears in my eyes to believe civilization is worth saving. It is socialism that must be torn down.
Please start working towards civilization.
According To Hoyt 
“…we recommend a trip over there, living as the natives for a month…”
I remind one and all of Freddie wandering around America and being stunned by the Buc-ee’s gas stations. Okay? It’s a gas station with a store. And his jaw is on the ground.
Because in Germany, a gas station is one or two pumps on the side of the road, barely any room to pull up, and some surly b@st@rd guarding the pump like “How DARE you stop here?! This gas is too good for your sheisse-auto!” Maybe there’s a pop machine if you’re lucky.
The really “big” rest stops on the autobahn are about like your average Circle K in Phoenix, or so I’m told. But built in the 1930s, so they’ve got some wear on them, know what I mean?
America? Buc-ee’s.
America is better.
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“Okay? It’s a gas station with a store.”
[Makes a LOT of popcorn, settles into the La-Z-Boy, and waits for the horde of angry Texans to descend upon The Phantom for daring to refer to Buc-ee’s like it’s just a regular gas station]
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I mean, it’s no Bass Pro Shop, right?
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He visited Bass Pro Shop, too, and was adorable.
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Buc-ee’s is only in some parts of the country. Most of us have a fairly small convenience store attached to the gas station, instead.
Or a Costco, if you have a membership there.
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–
Which does not (generally) have the rows upon rows of fuel pumps as shown in the X post for Buc-ee’s.
Locally, along I-5, there are trucker stations (I couldn’t tell you the name), that do have lots of fuel pumps, as well as restaurants, convince stores, showers, and bathrooms.
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Flying J is a big one in Arizona. Some of the newer ones are nearly resorts.
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“Flying J” sounds familiar.
Most the upcoming off ramp signs have “Trucker Stop Exit Ahead”.
“Resort”, but the ones I’ve seen do not have sleeping options; except for parking the truck (or RV) off in a designated parking area.
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Smaller truck stops (lots of pumps, add a cafe/convenience store, and in certain (*cough* Nevada *cough*) states, a mini casino. Loves and Pilot both have stuck stops just north of Flyover Falls on US 97. I have no idea why two competing truck stops are located next to each other.
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Laughs.
Ever notice a lack of rest areas or large fuel stops, like Loves, Flying J, Pilot, etc., near the native casinos?
Canyonville was particularly bad for stop options. Noticed there is a very nice new rest area on the west side of the freeway. Easy on/off access. Haven’t stopped there yet (designation was the next exit, not the casino).
One thing I’ve noticed, PNW truck stops, while there are “restaurants”, they are Subway, McDonald’s, etc., fast food. Convince store sections are super 7-11’s, plus (depending on location), tourist China sourced stocked items (rarely local items). Though I guess (based on pictures) that is what Buc-ee’s is?
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It’s an excellent rest area, can confirm. A little bit easier to access southbound than northbound (signage and going under the freeway for northbound). I think the casino actually runs it, on the theory that if they get people to stop, said people might take a longer break with them.
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For that matter north bound is a bit difficult getting out of Canyonville, these days. Didn’t use to be. Or at least I don’t remember it being difficult. But then it has been almost 49 years since I have driven the South Umpqua (Sept. ’77) for the last time.
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They’re owned by the same company.
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Loves and Flying J are always within a short distance of each other, sometimes at the same exit, sometimes one exit apart. Most of the big truck stop chains/travel centers are competing to get your business which often results in the closest thing to an old time gas war you see nowadays. Trying to be just a tiny bit cheaper or offer better customer loyalty discounts (or trying to get trucking companies to sign up for fuel accounts and other services).
My wife worked 17 years for Flying J/Pilot (those two are the same company) and knows how they work and what they offer as far as discounts. We have loyalty accounts at several different chains. When we’re going somewhere and need fuel we can weigh off the different loyalty discounts before filling up. Comes in handy, especially since we both retired.
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Yes, lots of Flying J, and at least in Oregon, Pilot.
My personal favorite is the I-80 truckstop in the Quad Cities area of Iowa (Bettendorf, Davenport, etc). It’s huge and (at least years ago) had a really good buffet restaurant. FWIW, it got featured in the Alton Brown Feasting on Asphalt. OTOH, Little America in Nebraska is pretty good, too, though I’m not sure how extensive the fuel pump setup is. Last time I did an I-80 road trip was in 2014, and a lot has changed over the years.
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“Pilot” also looks familiar.
Can you tell that I am not looking at names when we see one along the highway systems, stopping or not?
2020 and before, it was rarely the fuel prices that we cared about, not because we were flush with money. It was “Can we easily get into the fuel island? Can we easily get back out?” When your rig is 42′ feet (pickup/hitch/RV; and we were “short” compared to other setups out there). Even when it can bend, somewhat, at the 20′ mark, turning and maneuvering radius sucks. Backing out is no-go zones.
Since 2020, and ongoing, above not as critical, but we still pay attention to it. These days the consideration also includes “are there bathrooms?” The stretch between Bend and Ontario is particularly bad for lack of stop options. Getting better. There is a newer, very nice rest area in that stretch.
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Yeah. The local gas stations typically have four, maybe five islands, usually with two pumps on each island (though occasionally one if a particular island or pair of islands is in a smaller space).
Truck stops are typically only seen once you get out of the metropolitan areas. But they’re usually very visible as you drive past the various small towns that a highway runs through.
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Actually, now that I think about it, make it *four* pumps per island. While there are technically only two pumps on a given island, both sides of the pump are usable, and so most islands can support four customers at once.
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Our local Costco has 5 islands of 3 double sided pumps. They can put 30 (single*) vehicles through at a time. Always a shock to stop somewhere the Costco building is larger, and yet they only have the standard 2 double sided pumps, and fewer rows. Still aw to see the Truck Stop or Buc-ee setups.
(*) Always fun to see an RV towing setup in front of you in line …
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Thoughts:
The US once had those “two pumps gas stations.” One of my uncles had one, although his did have a sort of general store attached. They got regulated out of existence.
The Circle-K sized and smaller gas stations tend to cluster. “We need to stop for gas.” Take your choice of two, or three, or four gas stations at the stop.
Buc-ee’s is its own thing, and limited to a portion of the country.
The Memoirs of Milton and Rose Friedman included an encounter with a German gas station in occupied Germany shortly after WWII. The woman running the station was willing to sell gas, but because of currency controls it had to be via barter.
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There were two gas stations in $TINY_TOWN. One is defunct, while the other is quite active. Both are two-pump setups. It’s been a while since I’ve bought gas/fuel locally, but I seem to recall each pump being a single, so two cars can fill at one time. The defunct station still has the pumps; somebody tried resurrecting it a couple-three years back, but it failed in a few months.
I get gas at the Fred Meyer (Kroger) station for the road vehicles, and non-oxy gas and off-road diesel at one of the fuel depots in F-Falls. Can’t get non-oxy Regular any more, but the small engines (and vehicles when I’m rotating the old stuff out) don’t mind higher octane gas.
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Some of the very modern Autobahn gas stations have a full-service restaurant inside, and/or coffee shop, along with the snacks/drinks/maps/junque. Restrooms are pay-to-use, mostly to cover cleaning and repairs (one or two Euro/person), and very clean. Those often cater to tour bus traffic as well as passenger cars/tour vans. In town, there are a few 7-11-type places, but more gas pumps and some cold drinks and snacks. (Ah, the glorious day when I beheld an entire wall of nothing but Studentenfutter! [trail mix {literally “student chow,” as in dog chow}])
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Now that I think about it, the “no frills” gas stations are probably part of the reason why gas is so expensive in Europe (above and beyond the very high government taxes). My understanding is that gas stations in the US make barely any money on gas sales. They sell that for as cheaply as possible, which means just a sliver above what it costs them. Where most gas stations make the bulk of their profit is through the convenience store sales. If they don’t have convenience stores attached to gas stations in Europe, then that means that the sole means of turning a profit is via gas sales. So the gas price needs to be higher to allow for it.
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That’s the setup in $TINY_TOWN. Gas/diesel, also propane, water (a fair number of homes in the area don’t have wells), plus groceries/snacks & beer.
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So my mom was bookeeper for an ESSO (Later EXXON) station where I grew up. At least in the 70s, the gas BARELY made money, literally a few hundred dollars a month profit. Hardly worth the effort. Moderate money was repairs and tune ups, big money was towing especially towing for Large Trucks. Problem there is the hardware cost money as did the training required to be certified by CT state to go out onto I-95 or similar. Towing only companies ate into that business at the start of the 80’s, by mid 80’s new cars were getting more complicated to service and less prone to random break downs than their 60’s and 70’s cousins. And large Self serve stations with one brain dead dude (or dudette) working for minimum wage running the pumps could (just) make a profit especially if they had a small store attached,
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A few years ago, I was watching a “discussion” on Public TV between an Asian Indian and a bunch of “College Professors”.
It was funny in a way because the “College Professors” kept saying that the Asian Indian had “racial ideas” but couldn’t call the Asian Indian “Racist” because “ONLY WHITES CAN BE RASCIST”.
Oh, the Asian Indian kept pushing them on that stupid idea. IE “Are you calling me Racist?” [Very Very Big Crazy Grin]
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Thomas Sowell, in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”, argues that Dalrymple’s examples of “their welfare class was INDISTINGUISHABLE from the vibrant goblin neighborhoods in our urban centers.” is no accident; that lower class culture was native to many (most?) of the colonists from the British Isles to America, Canada, and Australia. America broke away from it; Australia and Canada, not so much.
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Envy and resentment do not build, they only destroy. ☹️
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I knew it! A calculating woman. I had one of those.
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Looking at it, it seems to me a bunch of people have been effectively getting the French Noble treatment, whether they asked for it or not, and what usually follows is the French noble treatment, whether they deserve it or not.
On a completely different subject, I’m coming to suspect that IQ test measure some combination of both native ability and understanding of structural concepts together, and that knowing and being able to use those structural concepts can have a very large impact on measured IQ.
Apparently a lot of African cultures don’t have a strong concept of time. I don’t recall the exact details off hand, but they basically have ‘back in myth’ ‘near past’ and present, but don’t have a huge concept of future. And if you language doesn’t even have a word for a concept, how do you use and explain it? Probably though hard to define and quantify intuition. How much is a pinch? What is the temperature of the rock in the fire? Hot?
I recall the Egyptians has this with navigation. Everything was oriented to the flow of the Nile river, which screwed then up royaly when they ran into a river that flowed upstream downstream. I wonder if that was the major reason they never permanently expanded beyond that river either, because how do you navigate a boarder when you can’t even describe where it is without a brain buster?
Well, that’s my digression into being a pink ape for the day.
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yes. But beyond concepts the whole “things on paper” stumped a good portion of the village I grew up in, and these were people who ran households and weren’t stupid in every day life.
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As I do not speak all African languages I cannot say that for sure this is true, but:
I cannot find any direct translations for “maintenance” in any African language. My searches find verbs like “to look after” (the goats), for instance. Without a concept for an action, like maintenance, a culture is unable to perform that action. And that is why the railroads in the Congo are rusted and immobile, and I suspect that the power grid in South Africa will go the same way.
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Sadly, maintenance seems to be a foreign concept even to some from this side of the pond who ought to know better.
When I worked at the powerplant, we had a new guy come in as Plant Manager. His plan was to maximize time on line. Did so by ignoring preventive maintenance downtime. After 18 months, his numbers looked so good he was moved up the chain. The poor bustard who succeeded him was left to deal with the rash of burned up blowers, blown boiler tubes, encrusted precipitators, etc., etc., etc. caused by his shortsightedness.
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Leftists.
We will seize the Means of Production and then we will happily run them forever and live off the proceeds.
They are completely blind to the way that capital will still need to be saved up.
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and worked, and husbanded. And someone needs to want the product
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George Orwell once said that the problem with capitalism was that no one would make boots unless there was profit in it. Under socialism. the government would just order so many boots.
He really thought that would fix it.
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He was a socialist. Which is to say a willing idiot.
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First guy knew. He was betting he could game the promotion system before any major breakdowns.
Which is a good bet if PM is the culture and hardware you inherit.
They -look for- such opportunities. It is -not- ignorance. It is predation and evil.
If you assume sociopathy and/or evil, you will much better understand the average professional “manager” that appears ignorant.
They know. They don’t trouble themselves with the fate of the food or of the tools.
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Seems inaccurate, but what do I know? Grok says
Many major African languages have native or well-established terms for the concept of “maintenance” (ongoing upkeep, repair, and preservation of mechanical devices, roads, buildings, etc.), even if some derive from or adapt around verbs like “to keep,” “to care for,” “to repair,” or “to service.” This idea is not absent from African linguistic or cultural traditions—debates claiming otherwise often stem from incomplete translations or modern technical contexts. Here are examples from widely spoken languages:
Like English “snow” having many nuanced terms (powder, slush, etc.), African languages often express upkeep through descriptive phrases or context-specific verbs rather than one exact cognate. Technical/maintenance culture exists historically (e.g., traditional building repairs, tool care) and adapts well in modern usage across engineering, roads, and facilities. If you’re exploring a specific language, dialect, or context (e.g., preventive vs. corrective maintenance), more details would let me refine this further. Languages evolve, and borrowed/adapted terms are common globally for new technical needs.
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Afrikaans is Dutch in paint.
Swahilli is a trade, synthetic language.
The others, I don’t know. BUT Portugal has words for “maintenance” and no one does the THING.
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I asked the followup – if they know about it, why don’t they do it?
IMHO, Grok is trying to be ‘nice’. That answer went
The gap between understanding the concept of maintenance and consistently executing it at scale (especially for public infrastructure like roads, buildings, and utilities) stems primarily from institutional, economic, and incentive structures rather than a wholesale absence of the idea. Many African societies historically practiced upkeep in traditional contexts (e.g., communal tool care, building repairs, or resource management), but modern large-scale execution often falters due to systemic conditions.
1. Political Economy and Incentives (“Build New, Neglect Old”) Politicians and officials frequently prioritize new visible projects (ribbon-cuttings for prestige, patronage, or elections) over routine maintenance, which is invisible and yields no quick political credit. This “capital bias” is widespread: spending skews toward construction while maintenance budgets are chronically underfunded or diverted. Corruption exacerbates this—contracts for new builds offer bigger kickback opportunities than ongoing upkeep. Weak oversight, patronage networks, and short political horizons reinforce a reactive “repair when broken” cycle rather than preventive maintenance.
2. Institutional and Governance Weaknesses Many post-independence systems inherited or developed limited technical capacity, fragmented responsibilities, and poor data for planning. Local governments often lack resources, skills, or clear ownership for assets. Road funds and agencies exist on paper but suffer from leakage, inefficiency, or political interference. This creates “institutional voids” where accountability is diffuse—leading to rapid decay of even donor-built projects.
3. Resource and Economic Constraints Chronic underfunding is common: maintenance requires reliable revenue (e.g., fuel levies, user fees), but fiscal pressures, debt, low tax collection, and competing priorities (e.g., salaries, subsidies) crowd it out. In low-income settings, preventive spending feels like a luxury when immediate needs dominate. High population growth and urbanization strain existing assets faster than budgets can respond. Skills shortages (engineers, technicians) and brain drain compound execution problems.
4. Cultural and Attitudinal Factors (Secondary but Real) Some analysts and locals describe a predominant “repair culture” (fix after failure) over systematic prevention, linked to:
These are not universal or fixed—”African culture” varies enormously (e.g., stronger maintenance in places like Botswana or Rwanda with better governance). Traditional societies often sustained tools, homes, and environments effectively; modern failures track more closely with governance quality than ethnicity or inherent traits.
Variation matters: Outcomes differ by country. Stronger institutions and leadership correlate with better results, showing the issue is solvable through better incentives, transparency (e.g., performance-based contracts), ring-fenced funds, and local capacity-building. External aid sometimes worsens the “build-neglect-rebuild” cycle by focusing on capital without sustainability plans. In short, conceptual understanding exists, but execution fails where incentives reward extraction or new builds, institutions are weak, and resources are scarce. Addressing it requires aligning political rewards with long-term stewardship—easier said than done, but evidenced in the better-performing outliers.
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Ethiopia had an established and functioning government from before Augustus deemphasized the whole Republic thingee through to Haile Selassie. Of course they had a word for upkeep.
Now of note, Ethiopians take great pride in never having been anyone’s colonial possession, in spite of Mussolini’s best efforts, so that means their troubles are all their own fault.
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Given much of Africa, a better word to search for might be Inshalla
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That’s mostly North Africa, I think.
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You can only take that so far, though. For example, Chinese doesn’t have verb tenses. This means, for example, that you can’t say “I walked”. You say “I walk”, and then add words (such as “yesterday”) indicating that the walk in question happened in the past.
But no one would ever accuse the Chinese of not being aware of the past.
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Exactly. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is flat-out wrong.
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South Africa is currently exporting more copper than it mines. It will crash, and hard.
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“Without a concept for an action, like maintenance, a culture is unable to perform that action.”
While it may be true that a culture that doesn’t have the concept of maintenance won’t perform maintenance, it’s not true that not having a word for it means they don’t have the concept. That’s the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it’s wrong. See my 10:07 PM post (which I won’t duplicate here) for plenty of examples of English words that were developed well after the concept existed.
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“And if you language doesn’t even have a word for a concept, how do you use and explain it?”
Quite easily: by coming up with a new word, defining it, and using it.
The idea that language shapes thought is obviously true… but the idea that language shapes thought to the point of limiting it is absurd. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong.
It’s easy to prove it, too. English didn’t have a word for telephone until Alexander Graham Bell invented one. (As did Elisha Gray, whom Bell beat to the patent office by mere days: Gray filed a patent caveat (a notification that “Hey, I’m going to file a patent for this once I finish writing it up, so don’t accept anyone else’s patents for it”) for his telephone on the same day that Bell filed his patent (not a caveat, an actual patent). So Bell beat Gray to the patent and nobody except Wikipedia remembers Gray’s name.) English also didn’t have a word for televisions or computers until they became common. Or spaceships, or smartphones… But in each case, it’s clear that people could understand the concept before the word was coined, and coining the word merely made it more convenient to talk about the concept.
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“And if you language doesn’t even have a word for a concept, how do you use and explain it?”
You steal works from another language, of course.
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steal words
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Or make up your own – 1959:
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I thought disaku daraibu (it’s been a long time, but maybe ヂサク ダライブ）funny. radioラヂオ, too.
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Bell and Gray were inventors, people who specifically set out to make things other people haven’t thought of yet. And just because an average person can understand a concept once it has been explained to them does not mean they’re likely to develop it off of first principles. It took Newton to develop calculus, and we used to teach it to high schoolers.
Again, my contention is not that they are unable to learn those concepts. Rather it is if they grew up in a language lacking those concepts, it is unlikely that they were ever taught them.
Language isn’t a cage, so much as it is a toolbox, and a toolbox that has never seen a screwdriver will struggle with screws until it adds them.
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Substitute “language” for “culture” and I’ll have no problems with your argument. But there are also many concepts that languages don’t have words for because we use phrases for them instead. Such as “home equity loan” or “amortized interest” or “round-trip flight”. Our culture has those concepts, and teaches them to adults (SOME adults, obviously there are many adults who have not grasped the concept of amortized interest or they would be making better financial decisions). But we don’t have words for the concept, and have had to resort to phrases instead.
ANY language is capable of having a phrase for “taking care of your equipment”, even if they don’t have a word for it. Any language can express any concept; the only difference is how many spaces they have in the way they express it. Is German a superior language for thinking in, simply because most things that are phrases in other languages are single (very long) words in German?
It’s the culture you grew up in, not the language you speak, that most determines the concepts you are familiar with and the ones you are unable to conceive of. People can grow up speaking English and still have no concept of maintenance, just as they can grow up speaking a language that doesn’t have a word for “maintenance” and still have the concept of “keep your car fed with gas, and “bathe” it regularly by changing the oil and suchlike, and it’ll work for you for a long time”.
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As I said, Portuguese SUCK with maintenance. OF EVERYTHING. I think it goes all the way to Rome who built so it wouldn’t HAVE to be maintained. Alas modernity is not like that.
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“Quite easily: by coming up with a new word, defining it, and using it.”
Or the English version: stealing the word from a language that does have it and adding to the English dictionary
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One of the most horrifying insights from The GULag Archipelago is how Communism served as an accelerated amplifier for Thief Culture. From the very beginning of the USSR the Security Services used the Russian Underworld as a weapon against their political victims. Over time the Thieves’ Law came to dominate the camps, capturing both prisoners and guards alike, who then brought it home where it continued to spread through the population. To think and organize like a criminal is a powerful survival strategy in a totalitarian Communist state. By the fall of the Soviet regime, Thief Culture was ubiquitous. Russian language pop culture is toxic. Putin’s kleptocracy was virtually inevitable.
I have seen scattered reports over the years of local Democratic leaders in places like LA and Chicago making common cause with and mobilizing street gangs. Most recently against ICE. More sophisticated immigrants are organizing themselves and creating “Learing Centers.” I would not be surprised to learn that the gangs were used to “cure” the vote in LA. The process is well underway here as well.
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When you’re not allowed to create or really think, what else can a culture do?
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The CCP reportedly enlisted the Triads to help secure Hong Kong after the… tumultuous… protests back just before COVID.
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There is a long tradition in oligarchies to use criminal syndicates as a way to deal with rivals while keeping “official” hands clean. The syndicates get too uppity? Send the army in with “no prisoner” orders and the problem gets solved for a while.
Considering that the USSR was just three Russian midgets in a greatcoat and the PRC is yet another coastal oligarchy trying to rule too much country for the resources it has…
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Since the KGB/GRU basically was the post-USSR-collapse Russian mafia, Putin’s government skips the middleman.
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It is racism to say that Black People African Americans or whatever term you choose to use are somehow uncapable of behaving civilized. They want, the communists in melanin wing of the democommunists to eradicate themselves. More power for the islamofacists and old liberal honkies.
P.S.
Bill Maher congrats, with your endorsement of the Nazi in Maine, you just showed the world how Eight Million Jews ended up in ovens.
PPS
$%^& you Bill.
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Probably shouldn’t have raised my expectations…he’s a leftist, after all…but for Bill Maher to make so much sense and see so many things clearly despite that handicap and then throw in his lot with der Oysterfuhrer… Socialism is a communicable mental disease.
“We need a REAL Nazi on our side so we can defeat an imaginary one!” Maher can FOAD along with the rest of them.
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Really, what he’s seen clearly are the more insane outgrowths of leftist theory and intellectualism. He opposes them not because they’re insane and evil, but because their insanity repels normal people, thus undermining the practical project of getting the proles to accept centralized collectivism, which he accepts as Good.
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This.
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I DVR’d one of Maher’s shows when I saw CNN was carrying it. (Ain’t paying extra for HBO). He did a monologue whose theme was that the Big Names don’t ever deviate from the Party Line until, for one reason or another — retirement, for ex, or impending death — the truth can no longer hurt them.
He quoted one of Barney Frank’s last public statements: “The key to liberal democracy being able to come back is to get rid of the perception, that we have allowed to grow, that the entire Democratic Party is committed to a series of very drastic social reconstructions that go beyond the politically acceptable.”
He paused for applause, but had to make clappy-hands at the dead-silent audience to get any at all.
Maher may see the Democrat nutbaggery clearly enough, but his audience is Not Buying It. No surprise if he took the hint and is backing the nutbags again.
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New word, for me, on Twitchy, or Hotair, memes. “Dumocrat”. Thought it fit that party.
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Which also makes some sense. Because actually calling them asses as the donkey party, or just rats, is insulting to both donkeys and rats. Both are rather intelligent. Even though we’d rather rats weren’t.
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Trump started it.
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Typical Democrat sophistry: I can’t help noticing that instead of saying they weren’t doing those things, he said they needed get rid of the perception that the party wants to do those things. Because they DO want to do those things, and if too many Americans are aware of it, they won’t win elections.
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Oh, so he’s “stop scaring the normies before we have total control” leftist.
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Well, that’s my guess, anyway. The insanity isn’t enough to convince him that maybe there are fatal problems with the entire ideology, and he’s apparently more willing than Fetterman (another not full-crazy leftist) to support something he ought to reject to defeat a political enemy, so…
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He’s afraid of being out of a job. I know creatives and creative adjacent.
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a) A lot of communists joined the NSDAP when that seemed like a more winnable excuse to hurt people.
b) The Nazis let them.
c) The ‘reverse’ happening now is partly because the Democrats are a rump, and an ‘irrational regime’, who value being a scumbag enough to pull for them over any aspect of human decency.
d) Trans communists are a perfect excuse to speculate about them being opposite-sex reincarnations of Nazi warcriminals who were previously communist criminals, and picked the political allegience at each opportunity based on utility for jollies from hurting people.
The NAzis took pride in converting communists to Nazis, and Bernie has long identified himself as a national socialist.
The tattoo speaks to the man’s mindset and aspirations, but keep in mind that he wanted to run for election for the Democrats in 2026, and wasn’t previously up to establishing himself in politics.
We worry that the Democrats have some trick or fraud prepared, to win the whole of the stakes. But, from a different and maybe broader perspective, is now the best time within a ten year period for a man with other options to roll the dice on running for the Democrats?
I’m probably too optimistic or something, but I dunno.
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Nazi propaganda showed and praised Communists who wised up and became Nazis. A children’s book where one story had Hitler Youth meeting up with a Nazi who told them about his early days in the Communist party. A movie showed a Communist trying to recruit a boy to the Communist Youth movement, but later, after the boy’s death at Communist hands, was moved to salute a Nazi parade. An account of a Nazi/Communist street fight where one Communist is moved by the Nazis caring for all the wounded that he tears up his party card, and is immediately welcomed to the Nazis he had just been fighting with.
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I have a series of posts on the topic of civilization and barbarism available at The Everyman Commentary. All five posts can be read in order through my newsletter here: https://carolinesnewsletter.substack.com/p/a-series-of-posts-at-the-everyman
Barbarism needs to be stopped here, and now. Let’s get to work.
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A good counter-example to the “color = destiny” concept is how successful the folk are who immigrate from Africa. I personally know several families from various countries over there and they do just fine because they weren’t raised with a victim mindset. (Quite a few medical professionals, as it happens. The fact that they can afford a middle-class lifestyle in California should speak for itself.)
And yeah, the IQ test people are full of it, even were it not for the fact that IQ is not a predictor of success. Even academically, in many ways. The folk who are willing to keep trying are the ones who succeed.
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Some people who immigrate, yes. But Somalis are from Africa, and there’s a reason why we’d like to send a lot of them back right now.
There are a number of different factors that come into play to determine whether or not a given immigrant will be successful. Certainly immigrating with just your family (or yourself if you don’t have a family) is an indicator that you likely have sufficient drive and ambition to succeed *ethically* (more or less) in your new home. That’s as opposed to those who operate “Learing Centers”.
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Does the individual and/or family immigrate, or does the tribe relocate? The Somalis relocate as an intact clan (tribe), and so maintain clan focus and organization. The local elders say, ‘Vote for this, this, and that” and so everyone does. Money is gotten any way possible, as easily as possible, and used for the good of the clan (here or back in Somalia).
Individuals tend to acculturate, work hard, and thrive, because they are free from the tribe and can prosper for themselves, or sink for themselves.
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The Somali groups are the opposite of integrating into the host culture, very true. The families I know either came over individually or, like the Nigerian groups at our church, already have a drive to success.
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I can’t verify it, but I remember reading that black African immigrants have a somewhat dim view of black inner city ghetto culture.
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I think Thomas Sowell made a point along those lines in Black Rednecks And White Liberals, but I’d have to double-check to see if my memory is correct.
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Yes, they do. Years ago it was known in Boston MA that that Jamaicans there routinely used the N-word to describe the native Blacks.
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When the black immigrants are darker (by a lot) than the American born ones, they can’t even be chastised for using the n-word. Not by those of us who don’t or barely tan, or do tan but not enough to be considered tan enough to be latan or black. Grinning while observing this happening, would not be advisable.
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If you come over to America for “the land of opportunity,” yeah, I can bet that you’d have a dim view of people not taking advantage of said opportunities.
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For some reason, ‘intellectuals’ are unable to grasp the reality that savages are not civilized. And that is what we are raising in those Democrat-ruled ‘disadvantaged neighborhoods’ — mobs of savages that do not understand, and actively hate, the civilization that provides not only their welfare payments, but everything they want to buy with money stolen from productive people. They even form tribes; for what else are street gangs?
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The intellectuals see them as “victims”. And according to the progressive matrix, this makes them better than you.
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a culture where “How dare you touch me” is reason enough to kill.
And what’s more, a culture where you taunt someone to get him to touch you, as a justification to kill him.
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I think that the most horrifying thing about the current so-called black urban thug sub-culture – which seems to be terribly popular among the black urban youth element, the black academic element, and the so-called black leaders who give it a veneer of justification and respectability, as well as a certain degree of political authority — is how it is guaranteed to alienate the rest of us from blacks generally. Look at the recent murder conviction of Karmelo Anthony, and at just about every news story about an all-hands brawl at some fast-food place, entertainment venue, or transport hub because a black customer is irate and chimping-out because they felt they have been disrespected by not getting two packets of ketchup with their order or some such trivial nonsense …
It’s just all too tiresome for the rest of us – and in the case of some poor people, like that Metcalf kid – fatal. So – it makes the rest of us NOT WILLING TO DEAL WITH BLACKS! Just make any social interaction brief, perfunctory, guardedly-polite … and walk away. Or not even wanting to deal with the black urban class. Not hire them, socially engage, encourage them as customers, and not EVER go into places where they are found in numbers.
I honestly have gone to any number of public events – local street festivals, book things, public observances and celebrations – looked around and noted that there are only a handful of blacks or none and all … and been totally relieved. This is sad, especially after having been alive at the tail end of the civil rights era. But honestly, as a person of Anglo paleness … all that I can do is to walk away.
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Thus the phrase “black fatigue”.
But none of this is new; Colin Flaherty started documenting it in the 1990s. What’s different now is it’s being videod and uploaded where everyone can see it.
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If this sort of behavior is not stopped and stopped hard, there will be a reaction, and afterward the society we’ll have will make blacks sigh for the days of Jim Crow. And anybody who suggests taking the boot off of blacks’ necks will be reminded firmly that “we tried that, we tried being nice, we tried treating them as equals, and they promptly proved why they weren’t!” And the boot will be on their necks forever and ever and ever.
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We stopped treating blacks as equals in 1966. Started treating them as damaged children that needed to be controlled, ‘helped’ and managed. The Dimocrats never forgave them for being freed from slavery and have been trying to put them back in chains ever since.
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This. This is why both sides are wrong. Honestly, black Americans ARE owed reparations, for the way they’ve been jerked around and social engineered by the leftist establishment in the fields they control.
They probably WON’T like the reparations they need do, though would consist of a lot of education and trusting them to be normal human beings. BUT love isn’t mollycoddling.
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and it’s not true. black people have been abused and mistreated in novel ways by the left, in revenge for being freed.
And while we’re not black, my children and I ping Hispanic or mixed race (look, for PORTUGUESE we’re very white. Mom was as pale as my FIL who was… um… blue in certain lights. OTOH dad has a great great from Africa, on his mom’s side (his dad was blond) and his genes win.)
I refuse to lay down for a future in which after being discriminated against for being “white males” my kids have to bow and tug the forelock to idiots who happen to be pale.
I grew up under REAL patriarchy, where I was assumed to be stupid for being female. It didn’t hold me back. I’d say it wouldn’t hurt me, but that’s not true. And I don’t want my sons hurt. (Even if grandchildren might never happen.) It might be inevitable, but I won’t go down quietly.
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Somewhat related, I’m very tired of the constantly increasing bilingual signs everywhere. My experience is if they can’t read English, they usually can’t read Spanish either.
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They’ve been a thing here in LA County longer than I can remember. I did find it amusing when I noticed that a lot of them in the area were switching from English/Spanish to English/Chinese. :P
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Self-checkouts in the past few years have had a translation option. The Spanish is there, they’re supposedly speaking Spanish (or at least won’t speak English), they still cannot figure out what they’re supposed to be doing. Meaning you have to walk them through it with no common language. Frustrating.
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Yikes.
Although maybe they don’t understand the Spanish, and maybe…
About a decade ago I saw an interaction between a white transit cop and a Hispanic man (and not a young one with something to prove; probably in his 40s or 50s). The cop was trying to write the guy a ticket because the man had gotten on the train without a boarding pass. But the Hispanic man was flat out ignoring the cop, acting as if the cop didn’t exist. It was one of the strangest forms of arrogance I’ve ever seen… and it was because the Hispanic man knew that nothing would happen to him as a result of his actions.
Eventually the cop’s partner, a Hispanic female, finished making her own rounds of the train car, and took over the ticket writing. She asked questions in Spanish, and wrote out the ticket. And then by the time she had finished turning around so that she and her partner could leave, the man had already ripped it up and dropped the pieces on the ground. The two cops saw that, and were obviously frustrated by it. But apparently there was nothing that they could do.
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It is kinda hilarious, in context, what the septic ideologies in academia have done to alienate me from academia.
On paper, as a fairly bloody minded arrogant know-it-all, there are ways to estimate that I really should have picked the other side, and now be having some sort of meltdown at failing gambles.
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Isn’t that the exact point Scott Adams made?
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Excellent post Sarah! Yes, we have a real problem, one the left has worked hard to create. Through misguided “charity”, excusing criminal behavior and promoting all the worst forms of culture as something special they have screwed up a lot of people. Not just the inner city folks either, they have made thug culture a fixture for too many youth nationwide. And use the resulting crime, poverty and drug use to keep themselves in power. We have a lot of work to turn things around but it can be done.
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“Giving more money to people who have no internal ability for self improvement or frankly to live in civilization doesn’t make them more functional. Arguably, it goes the other way.”
And
“it requires a willingness which I know doesn’t exist, to turn off the money spigot corrupting people here and abroad.”
Reminds me of something. If you want to destroy a man, simply remove the restraints. Give him money. Give him power. Give him fame and adulation. Then you see what kind of man he really is.
How many lottery winners end up ruined in the end? Not a few. Definitely not zero. Enough for the pattern to emerge.
Human beings are wired for struggle. We need it like we need proper rest and nutrition and for similar reasons. We go all bad when there is nothing to test ourselves against and strive for.
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Who needs lottery winners—or rock stars? I’ve got a book with short bios of all the Roman Emperors (not just the ones everybody knows, but everybody who got the title, even if just for a few months) and my impression is that the ones who went bad did so because there was nobody who could say “No!” to them and make it stick. Teenagers given that sort of power were the worst (Caligula, Nero, Commodus) but there were older men who went way off the rails once the legions were at their command and everybody called them “Caesar.”
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A B-52 has crashed.
Per Red State, it was on a test mission at Edwards, and crashed soon after take off.
Edwards Air Force Base, per wiki might be the place for flight test in the Air Force.
My understanding is that the B-52 has an ongoing development process for replacing/upgrading avionics, radar, and engines. Or rather, I heard about it some years back. It was in various open sources.
I don’t think I have anything else to say about this.
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Edwards is indeed the test location, and the usual place the shuttles landed.
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You don’t teach history because you don’t want people to know what happens when civilization fails.
And most of the people that think they’ll be on top when the light go out…won’t. And I welcome them to their unmarked graves.
I just wish the rest of us didn’t have to fill in the rest of the space…
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A murthering lot of us would come to a violent end. It takes relatively little mistakes to end up dead when alone in the zombie apocalypse- I mean the Communist Revolution. Best case you have some reliable folks around you to spread the load of survival and perhaps counter-revolution. Let’s not do the thing though, so long as we can be proactive in preventing the zombie apocalypse- I mean, Communist Revolution.
That means not giving the losers martyrs, succumbing to doomy doomsayers, and/or wallowing in the misery. That’s easy mode. We’ve a foundation to build with what time we have left. Best we get to it so that future generations can build upon it.
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I’ve expected a bullet to the back of the head since 08. Heck, to some extent since 78. Fortunately I believe in life hereafter.
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Pretty similar. I could have stepped off this mortal coil several times but didn’t. Now I’m getting to the first hereafter. As in, what the heck was I in here after?
Himself has a plan for us, though. Or at least, some guidelines.
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We may not always live up to our ideals, but at least we have them.
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and we need to fight for them.
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“Everyone does what I want, and this has nothing to do with my own behavior or how I benefit.” is an ideal.
It is a terrible, perhaps soul destroying, ideal. But it is technically an ideal.
The problem is not the absence of ideals. They have ideals that a clever person could work out are probably untrue. They have ideals that a wise person could work out are long term bad for a person, or are not likely to produce a stable ‘system’ long term.
What they are short on is ideas that can cost the holder if they show sincerity, and might possibly have good outcomes. They have ideas that other ‘scholars’ say are self consistent, but which are at best theoretically perfect according to a specific list of criteria, but fall apart quickly from an empirical perspective.
Anyway, I came by ATH earlier simply because an AMV more or less reminded me that Harris campaign, and perhaps a lot of Democrat campaigning now are best modeled as eighth grade syndrome. A dude whose LARPing totems included the Totenkopf SS, Brat/Joy, and the dude with ‘could have been my son’, ‘most ethical transparent’, and ‘now the planet can heal’. Yes, stupid malicious evil idiots.
But, to an extent, in their forties and sixties they are too young inside to be theater kids, and are almost living in their private conviction that they have a special eye, magical powers, or an invincible punch.
A three foot tall boy can get around with running around carelessly in a way a six foot man will cause trouble or get into trouble for doing.
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