Remember mean girls? Or really the “cool kids” of either sex? Remember how they used to make your life a misery? No matter what you did, either trying to pass unnoticed, or trying to fit in could save you from their scathing looks and their expressions of utter derision. And you could never even figure out why they were doing it or what had triggered this particular attack. Their rules seemed to change all the time. The only rule was you were wrong, they were right, you were a loser and they were super-cool.
As an aside, know how any of the main culprits are doing now decades later? We’ll table that for a moment.
I was talking to Bill (Reader) the other day (incidentally pray for any conservatives under cover in the ivies. No, seriously.) We were talking about the peculiar experience our kind had through the Covidiocy and he said part of the reason most of us held fast even though the entire world was vying to convince us this was a world-ending emergency is that we had experience from school. Elementary and middle school and yeah, even high school. As in, most of us had been bullied or ostracized or looked down upon by people the establishment (teachers, employees) and most other students treated as minor divinities. And most of us couldn’t fit in or escape attacks even if we tried. So eventually we gave up trying and the lesson public school taught us was to stand with our arms crossed and feet planted, glare back and tell the world, “No. You move.”
Or at least it did some of us. Others broke, badly. But those of us on the broadly defined right — “to the right of Lenin” being how I define it — obviously didn’t break. Even if we might have gone a little nuts.
In answer to the above question: most of the mean girls whom I loathed and who made me miserable (they couldn’t hit me. I was massive. But ridicule and subtle derision and pranks are no respecters of size and strength) and whom I chanced to hear of — mom was never able to understand ‘went to school together’ isn’t the same as ‘are besties’ — have… not done great in life, honestly. About the most successful has a decentish mid-level career, but is on husband number 5? 6? and looks like she was run over by a train.
Now the crash and burn of these people might be/is because they had their glory days too early. Or at least I always thought so. But in thinking about our current cultural situation, I have…. more nuanced opinions.
You see, mean girls — in my case, literal. It was an all-girl school, but mean girls, really, can be either sex — are products of a certain set of circumstances.
Schools aren’t natural environments. They are centers of centralized authority, administered from above by people who don’t much care, but do a great deal of picking of winners and losers. (Winners and losers for reasons that have bloody nothing to do with the ostensible reason for the existence of schools: education.) In fact by people who are social-engineering and picking the winners they think are “good” for their goals. (Mostly of making them look good.) Also you’re locked into it, not allowed to escape. You have to be there every week day for a set of years. With the same people, in a closed and artificial system.
People who become “winners” in this game are mostly experts at socially manipulating circumstances to make themselves seem superior and put together. They congregate in networks that do not admit challenge, and work mostly to keep them ontop.
Once they get to the real world, people respond differently to their manipulation tactics, but more importantly, their networks are disrupted and people can avoid them/don’t need to be around them every day. I suppose some of them — the brightest — will adapt and learn to avoid the situation. But most don’t, from what I can see (not that I have done a systematic study, or have any intention of.) Because their entire power/lifestyle was built on DERIDING OTHERS to make themselves seem important, and because they didn’t even have any firm principles behind that but just “tear down anyone and anything that might be a threat to our power” they have nothing to build from or towards.
So, let’s talk about the present situation of the left.
We used to believe — still see this in comments — that the left (and their distant patron the USSR) were ultimately good at one thing: propaganda. And for a long time, they seemed to be so. They could convince people of the most ridiculous things and more importantly, they’d made leftism into a positional good. If you wanted to show you were high class you’d be as leftist as possible in public, all the way to communist.
Turns out though that this wasn’t in any way shape or form a natural system, any more than the public schools are. It turns out they could act superior, sell leftism as a positional good, and act like we were the baddies because they controlled critical positions in the information/art/entertainment industrial complex. They could therefore keep out anyone who disagreed with them, and act like all smart people agreed with the most outrageous idiocies of the communist mind.
The fact that the pipe line of this system often started with the leftist teachers/professors in schools is not a coincidence.
There was no way to tell of course. Not while they controlled the information system we were forced to use every day. In fact, like with school, we assumed this was just the natural order of things. See how even people on the right argued that the right just wasn’t as creative as the left, since all great writers/artists were leftist. (Even Jordan Peterson. And the reason he adduced was mentally deficient. In his mind, it was because the right is more rule prone and doesn’t want to change the system. Missing that the system and the rules have been leftist my whole life. That to be on the right is to be a rebel. Sigh.)
The fact their entire eco-system of “creatives” was being supported by our tax money via several NGOs just made them seem more popular and like everyone liked them, which of course reinforced their idea and other’s perception of superiority.
… but this is not the case anymore. And it’s becoming glaringly obvious it was all fake.
In fact, the more distributed the information system gets the more the left is becoming like the mean girls once they leave high school: bitter, vociferous, and attracting only the mentally ill.
I know one looks at the “socialists” winning tickets in our big cities and the one certified fascist in Maine and is tempted to believe they have some kind of power still.
They do actually, it’s called FRAUD. Note mostly these people “win” in big cities, which are always hubs of fraud (because it’s way easier to fraud the vote where people are largely anonymous and there’s a lot of them.) Hence the opposition from lefties (and RINOS) to the SAVE America act.
However, they are a rump (appropriately) movement at this point. Their strength is MOSTLY fraud. They’re not really convincing anyone. Or at least not anyone who isn’t indoctrinated and/or still captive of the artificial educational establishment.
They are ultimately mean girls. They didn’t work for their cultural ascendance, it was handed to them. And their entire power was based on tearing down, destroying and debasing their native culture. They can not create, build or uplift…. well, anything.
The reign of the mean girls is coming to an end. First slowly (these last 20 years) then suddenly, you’ll see communists and leftists in general being derided as the sapskulls with nothing but evil and vain gloating on their side.
Their fall will be sudden and terrible.
And glorious.
According To Hoyt 
By the time I was a junior in high school, my academic record put me up near the top of the class. OTOH, it was a brand school, no history or traditions whatever, and so no established cliques.
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I was fine on academics. The SOCIAL cliques, though….
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We nerds formed a clique in HS, but it was a brand-new “experimental,” school, and we were left alone.
Junior high, now….why, why did the girls in my gym class take pleasure in stabbing me in the butt with pins while I was reading? I mentioned it at home and Dad gave me his techniques on dealing with bullies:
I tried 2, which is why the gym teacher wanted me placed in “adaptive,” PE (it would now be, “Special Needs,” class). That resulted in what I think was the only time my parents went to school to have a chat with the principal. I stayed in regular class, and kept getting ventilated.
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Yes. The adults around ME took one of three tacks:
1. You’re lying. It can’t be that bad, you’re just after attention.
2. Ignore them.
3. If you’d just conform, they wouldn’t bother you.
All of which are weak and massive failures.
1. If anything, I was minimizing.
2. Ignoring means they f***ing ESCALATE.
3. And no matter how hard you try to fit in, it doesn’t work. Especially when a blind mole could pick you out of a lineup.
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This, yes. I took to carrying a massive dictionary around and sitting in the bus with sharpened pencils sticking out. It slowed them down. A little.
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My sister and I are attacked. The principle punishes us because we don’t try hard enough to get along with the other kids.
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There is a special place in hell … .
The behavior of those kids is the animal behavior of sub-human primates, and incompatible with civilization. Even a tribal society knows better.
Or perhaps these “schoolmasters” actually want to show what such a society is like, and are willing to sacrifice a few of their charges to the attempt?
One of Jane Haddam’s lesser mysteries has such a subplot. (Maybe Other People’s Music?)
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When I was sexually harassed (pawed). “They’re just tryin’ to be friendly. Have you tried bein’ friendly back?”
I did NOT say what I was thinking when the Vice-Principal said that. I just said that I would certainly think about it. He smiled and shooed me on my way.
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Oh, yeah, just a little ‘friendly’ groping. 😡 And when allowed to get away with groping, how much farther will they go? We all know the answer. Hell, we’ve seen outright rapes covered up if the perps pretend to be ‘trans’. Reward the guilty and punish the innocent.
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I was usually trying not to hit anybody, but groping made the berzerker come out.
The gropers stopped, and so did everyone else. So that was convenient.
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So, I was in an all girls school from 7th through 12th grade. This prevented the groping. beatings happened, but not groping. HOWEVER before that (the two years before that) I attended a school in a decayed industrial town near the village.
There were organized groping (And probably rape) gangs in the school, composed of the kids who had failed six grade so many times they were sixteen and seventeen (you weren’t allowed to expel them.)
Why do I say “probably rape”? Well, because they caught me and groped me once or twice. And I berserked and did SERIOUS damage to them. So I never got to find out what else they intended. After that they left me the heck alone. Me and those girls under my protection/my friends. At the time, in our generation, at five seven and frankly strong as the average guy (it’s a family trait) I could beat most of the boys. And berserking is a force multiplier, because I didn’t care what happened to me, I’d grab the nearest implement and go to war. (The danger of that state is that I don’t distinguish friend or foe. There is one person in the world I recognize in the middle of a fit, and that’s Dan, who can stop it by just holding me. But that’s it.)
So they stayed away. And I’ll say this THANK G-D. Not just for saving me from harm, but because if they’d taken it further, or even if mom knew they’d ambushed me to grope, mom would have berserked. That entire are of Portugal would now be known as “The ruins.”
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I wish your VP had been more like ours. I can still see Mr. Ford – Mr. Bobby Jo Ford, from Arkansas – in his office, wearing a suit like it was a military uniform. Short brown hair, brown eyes…he may have been former military for all I know.
But at this high school, the Principal was God; remote, rarely visible. Mr. Ford was God’s enforcer, and he was a natural for the job.
I just can’t see him saying what yours said to you. I could see him calling the boys in question in and, ah, “counseling” them.
The only concrete thing I remember after all this time was when the school had a rash of bomb threats. Mostly to get out of class, but I think once involved smoking in the john. He got on the intercom and explained that if we had another bomb threat he would lock two bathrooms. For every threat, he’d lock up two more. So, if we wanted to have to ask our teachers for a hall pass to use the bathroom in the administrative section, just keep calling bomb threats.
Someone called in a bomb threat. He locked one girls’ room and one boys’ room. No more bomb threats.
God rest his soul.
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When I was in 5th? grade, three older punks would seek me out and beat me up during recess. Nobody did nuttin’ about it. One day I found a busted piece of a baseball bat buried under some long grass. When they came for me yet again, I bonked two of ’em over the head real good. The third one ran and cried to the teacher.
That time they listened — only not to me. There was a huge foo-foo-raw, most of which went over 9 year old me’s head. They called my parents, the cops, and some Very Serious Men in suits. I got expelled and spent the rest of the year going to ‘special’ school on the Short Bus. Met some ‘interesting’ kids there.
I learned something, all right, just not what they wanted me to learn. I learned that convenience is more important than justice. That criminals are coddled until something happens that can’t be covered up, and then they punish the victim for making them look bad.
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Comes under “would rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6”, lessons.
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c4c
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The mean guys from JH and HS (it wasn’t the mean girls who went after me so much, but the guys) seem to have ended up either maturing, or in prison or dead. That was as of my 10 year reunion. I’ve not been to a later one, because I’m not on social media, so I don’t know that they are happening.
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For the 20th reunion, I got a call from $OLD_FRIEND (since 3rd grade, close through HS, now have lost track). Huge school (900-1000 grads circa 1970), but they couldn’t find two. One was me, the other a girl I had dated. (Google search implies she married while in college in another state, and sadly passed away at 29.)
I passed on that and any future high school reunions. U of Redacted Alumni Assn found me briefly, but my last move shook them off. Set foot on that campus 5 years or so post graduation, then never again. (College friend was finishing his PhD–very slowly, but did complete.)
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Haven’t been to many reunions. Apparently can’t “find me”. (??? Mom still lives in our childhood home. I’ve been at our current address for 37 1/2 years.) Went to the 10th, and 50th. Hadn’t lost many by 10th reunion. OTOH, a good 1/3 by our 50th. Been losing more since then, two years ago, as they hit late 60’s and 70 (this year).
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I went to a girls’ high school and didn’t have too many problems (partly because the administration actually paid attention to little problems before they became unmanageable, and partly because my “I don’t care, Margaret” field was already established.) I did take a night class with the local boys’ school, and I remember when one of my male friends looked at another member of the class, who had just said something typically dumb teenaged male, and said something along the lines of, “It will be a big shock to his system when he goes to college and has to deal with girls on a regular basis.”
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There’s a meme I’ve seen on X a couple times: grade school talent show, girl tries standup comedy, gets a boy heckler.
Teacher tries to cut that off; girl says, approximately, ‘Oh, let him go on – it’s the closest he’ll ever get to a conversation with a girl.’
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Sometimes the school authorities just wanted to pick the easiest thing to do. Like punish the victim because there were more bullies.
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Didn’t have to be that there were more bullies. Merely that the bullies, or their parents, we’re willing to make the administrators’ lives harder than the victims were.
And, given how ‘chemically enhanced’ some of the parties involved are, that can be a real challenge.
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The road to hell is the path of least resistance.
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I went to a small Catholic HS, and my class was tiny even by those standards, so we didn’t have too much of the mean girls vibe (although it was there). Fast forward a few decades…
Went to an unofficial sort-of class reunion (combined our year with the next one), and I had to laugh. I sat at what could have been called “the kids’ table” with the othernot-quite cool kids. We had a raucously good time. Of course I went over to the other tables, because I had been at least passing friends with the whole class, and they were all dressed up and very much just “showing up”. Not a fun group like we were, although I still hope they enjoyed themselves.
Most amusing was I took my 16 YO daughter as my companion, as my wife was doing a college visit with our oldest son that weekend. When we arrived, the guys at the door jus stood kind of shocked as I introduced her “…and this is Mary”. After an appropriate pause she piped up “His daughter.” We all laughed, one of them saying “Damn Scripko, I thought for a moment you were doing really well for yourself!”
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Ah, yes – the mean girl clique … I brushed with that set in 7th and 8th grade, when my social life was a misery of trying to fit in … until over summer at camp, I had the most marvelous. liberating insight – why did I care about those girls’ opinions at all? I didn’t really like or respect them, they had nothing interesting to offer, really – save for bitchy, middle-school meanness … so … why? Why should their opinion of me matter at all!? I went back to school in the fall, feeling as if I had plate armor. I DID NOT CARE! THEIR BITCHY-MIDDLE-SCHOOL MEANNESS DIDN”T MATTER TO ME! I walked through the valley of public school darkness … and didn’t care.
Eventually, I fell into a circle of brainy friends, all of us in the academic and honors classes track, and the social games that the cool kids played mattered about as much as the price of tea in China.
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I only knew a few of those types in school thankfully. Experienced a bit of bullying up through middle school until I finally snapped and one of them took a trip down the stairs on his face. They mostly left me alone after that and while I never was part of any popular group I had a few real friends. Most of the mean girl/bully crowd would turn to abusing the younger kids, which I think is typical coward behavior. They would do that until either the kids fought back or someone they had learned wouldn’t put up with their crap made it clear they needed to stop. ………… The only ones I’ve ever heard anything about since (and school ended over 50 years ago) seem to have come to bad ends or turned into shriveled, nasty adults.
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By the time I was a junior in high school, my academic record put me up near the top of the class. OTOH, it was a brand school, no history or traditions whatever, and so no established cliques.
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About that….
Read the whole thing, but this:
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I note these folks also seem to be utterly and completely oblivious to anything in the bag labeled “counterintelligence”. Spotting intelligence gatherers such as these and surveilling them is counterintelligence 101. There’s nothing in this that says such ever occurred to them.
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They have previously been allowed to successfully fight them on the grounds of “I was just standing in public taking pictures.”
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One of the interesting things about counterintelligence is the tension it drives between the CI people and the LE people, especially where both are in the same agency – nationally in the U.S. both are in the FBI.
CI pretty much wants to leave people alone so they can follow them, tap their phones, black bag their residence, scrape their devices, to learn all about who they interact with and ID the money flows. LE OTOH wants to build probable cause and get arrest warrants that will build a prosecutable legal case. Different priorities, and different guardrails – as an example, an illegal search which never goes into a case is not a fruit of a poison tree thing, so back bagging and non-LE-blessed wiretaps are not the problem in CI that they are in LE.
Were I one of these commie bastards I’m pretty sure I should expect the full on CI treatment.
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To what end? Even if they get the full-on CI treatment, nothing can be done to them on the legal side for it to matter. Might be able to get them in the court of public opinion *IF* you can leak the information in a manner that your methods aren’t revealed, but that’s actually a lot harder than people think unless you’re a Congresscritter that doesn’t have to worry about prosecution. And belief in the media is pretty low right now.
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To disrupt the funding. What ended up winning the war in Iraq and the broader WOT worldwide against AQ was the financial network tracking and disruption. The end of USAID flows jiggled those flows enough that their replacements are still near the surface and more easily disruptable – see datarepulican’s open source work, and a bit of skullduggery there could massively disrupt these operations. But to do that the actual frontline agitators and their useful idiots can’t be rounded up and jailed. They have to be receiving that cash to trace that cash.
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Which only works once you get to sources of foreign input. To trace the ones in the States (legally) you need warrants, et cetera. Yes, even when performing CI duties, if it is on American citizens our counterintel people need to follow the law. Otherwise, they are breaking the law and can themselves be prosecuted (there are legal ways around this, but they aren’t black & white either).
DR has done a lot of what can be done with open source to trace back to some of those foreign sources, but I guarantee there are more. And sure, we have people in this country that would break that law every day to do this stuff. But that doesn’t make it the right way to do things.
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(comment under moderation above)
Makes the college activists make more sense, suddenly, no?
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Isn’t that from Data Republican (small r) over on X? That article is a very thorough piece of work, which is what you would expect from her.
https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2067104659966443558?s=20
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Yes, the link and quote got put in moderation.
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Nick Searcy is apparently talking about something similar in regards to Sean Penn’s upcoming J6 film. The left will throw money at a bad piece of lefty political media with no chance of making the money back because it helps strengthen a narrative.
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Most likely I was just oblivious of getting snickered at by the cool kids – but I was also a 6’1” male when I started HS (3 year HS, so in 10th grade) and totally coincidentally none of the physical bullying got directed my way. One kid in back in junior high school tried something once, so I put him in a headlock for one entire between-classes period out between the portables one grey winter day, and he left me alone after that.
Girls, mean or otherwise, never even noticed me as far as I knew.
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And this is why stories set in schools drive me bonkers. It’s artificial. It is NOT real life. School is boring and the only way you can liven it up is to have things happen outside class time, even if it’s a boarding school.
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The thing is, school doesn’t have to be boring. I mean, my high school physics teacher used to pull a stunt where she’d have the class—in this all-girls school, so we’re not even talking gym rat girls—go and pick up the chemistry teacher’s car and move it around, just to prove a point.
I just went through a training where Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was used as a counter-example of good education.
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Sort of.
My HS was Catholic boarding school. Lent of 1964, early March**, I was in 11:30 study hall. (Which, tbf, was outside of normal school classes). Each class had to get up for early Mass, provide servers, etc, based on day of the week; I was a Freshman, it was our day on Thursdays, all the classes at noon on Fridays.
I have never been a morning person. Having been up since 0dark30, I had my elbow on my desk/chair thingy, chin in my hands, eyes closed. In comes our Prefect of Discipline, Fr. Caz. 6’3″ or so, 200#+, former Marine, football coach and my wrestling coach.
Eagle-eyed, he spotted me. Walked up and swiped my elbow off the desk. Caught myself before hitting my chin, came up swearing and then trying to choke that off when my eyes focused …
** How do I remember the date so closely? It was in our Main Building, a former mansion owned by a ‘wheat baron’. And the building burned down that March – I was going through boxes a few weeks ago and found the set of pictures our primary yearbook photographer took during and after.
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I was pretty oblivious to the mean ones in school, once I tripped into reading. Only raised my head twice. As a 9th grader and senior in HS. Three year middle and high schools (1 – 6, 7 – 9, and 10 – 12). Middle sister was two years behind me. Incoming 9th and sophomores were hazing targets, particularly if they had an older sibling still in school. I raised my head out of my book to go “No. Off limits.” Also extended to a neighbor. Guess it worked, she and neighbor were left alone. No clue why. Youngest sister was on her own, as we were both out of the schools by the time she was there, except for grade school (I was in 6th grade, when she was in first grade).
Hubby, OTOH, had to deal with his siblings reputations. He is 4 years younger than the other three. OTOH2, that was when it was possible to take troublemakers behind the stadium and beat them, resulting in life-time, at least until graduation, friendship. Didn’t work with the teachers, but classmates, it did. Helped that most of them were all from the same neighborhood, growing up together, regardless of what grade they were in.
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mean girls is exactly right. That and theatre kids who wanted to be the mean girls, which is worse in a way.
in other news, I’m in Ireland at the moment and have had occasion to speak to many young people. The kids are alright. Yes, they’re related to me 😜and yes the majority of them have lived, or still live, in the US, but … yeah, the kids are alright. I have to remember that the Irish news reflects the views of one postal code in Dublin (Dublin 6)and those who wish to live in Dublin 6 with their large EU State pensions, NGO sinecures, and board of director slots.
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As I tell people, the Europeans are NOT their governments.
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I have a niece currently working and living in Ireland. She was talking about applying for Irish citizenship. Why? Well, she just snuck a marriage to her Irish boyfriend in on Monday, much to everybody’s surprise except the parents.
I don’t even know his name…
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My HS was a (minor-league) New England boarding prep school; grad class was about 35, total school about 150, and all male at the time. (Economics changed that and it went co-ed in the 70s.)
While Holden Caulfield’s experience in his school was somewhat pathological, Salinger got the scenes right.
Our cliques formed mostly around classes, then dormitories (which were generally single-grade anyway), then sports teams. I got lucky: I had a cousin at that same school who was a Senior when I was a Freshman, so I had pre-arrival information and at least a contact in the Upper Ranks. We did have Freshman hazing, but nothing too weird.
HS seems to be the only place where the castes (mostly) change simply by continuing to get promoted.
Other than relatives (above-mentioned cousin had a similar deal at that school with his older brother), very little subsequent contact after graduation, though I did take my wife to see the place. We even got a free lunch!
I do get the alumni emails, and occasional fund-raising calls, which I ignore.
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In junior high, I was intensely aware of being a social outcast. Sometime in Freshman year in high school, I decided I didn’t give a damn, and did and said what I thought was cool, and largely ignored “the cool kids” except when I couldn’t avoid it.
It was genuinely shocking to me, mostly during senior year, to find out how many of them respected me. By that point, their good opinions didn’t mean anything to me, but it was a lesson, for sure.
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Graduating class size of about 200 students. None of them were besties. High school was a pretty lonely experience. Didn’t help that my mother was very ill for several years and then losing her halfway through, or my father remarrying the wrong woman less than a year later.
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“Schools aren’t natural environments.”
Only for fish. School was so miserable for me.
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I learned to be *really* good at repartee and making them look ridiculous.
I was still an outcast but they learned to leave me alone by high school
(I also made a point of being willing to lose fights if I had to in order to inflict damage, although that was mostly over by 7th grade.)
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that was my husband’s tactic.
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Yep. You’re going to beat the snot out of me. You’ll win the fight, but you’ll be feeling it for the next two weeks. You really want a pyrrhic victory?
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I was lucky enough to go to a small private high school, where we didn’t have enough people to really form cliques. Most of us were various flavors of nerdy and the nearest thing we had was the D&D group that apparently knew each other since grade school (school near Berkeley in the late ’80s, who knew?) and this odd group of very leftist kids that hung around two of the teachers a lot.
But I’ve seen the Mean Girl dynamic in a lot of places around here. Conventions (especially the local Furry cons where you have fag hags and the femboy chasers that use them for cover), jobs (what is HR if not the ultimate place for Mean Girls to get ahead and hopefully snag a C-suite exec?), and too many other places…
Now that you pointed it out, they need these very artificial places to survive, because any form of reality would probably pop them in the jaw a good hard one or three.
(Aside #1-Not thinking about one of my co-workers right now, who if I had a girlfriend would probably go to work with me so she could drag her behind the building and give her the sort of beating that her parents clearly failed to give her…I hate people that deal with their own failures by making other people fail…)
(Aside #2-I wonder now what the internal dynamics of someplace like a Mars colony, where you can’t go over the horizon away from the Mean Girls and wokescolds without a lot of gear…)
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Probably about the same as they are on a nuke sub: airlocks are hard to open for a reason.
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Most science fiction that takes long-distance/long-time space travel seriously has a lot of compatibility testing built into their selection criteria for that reason.
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Off Topic – It’s alive! Actually, the Reader’s cardiologist changed direction between Wednesday and yesterday. The Reader was subject to chemical cardioversion, as opposed to direct current cardioversion. Apparently, the cardiologist forwarded the Reader’s EKG to an advanced reader of entrails (otherwise known as a full 12 channel EKG) and they decided that shooting a chemical into the Reader’s vein to disrupt the heart rhythm would be more effective. Well, they did the procedure yesterday (the Reader doesn’t recommend it – the chemical made him feel weird and nauseous). After 2 jolts of the chemical the advanced reader of entrails concluded that the Reader’s heart is in a normal rhythm and that it should slow down over the next few months. The Reader queried Grok last night, and it turns out that an elevated heart rate with a normal rhythm is a known but very rare side effect of valve repair surgery – so rare that the surgeon didn’t discuss it in advance, and the Reader’s research before surgery didn’t uncover it.
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Yeah! that you are back and more-or-less normal (for your personal values of normal). Thank you for the update.
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So, people who read full 12 channel EKGs are theadvancedreadersindarkness?
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👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
Yea!!!!!
Glad it is going well.
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O frabjous day!
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YAY
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More yay!
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The one instance I can think of where I was probably bullied is one I only picked up with hindsight (after being told outright that we were not friends because I had told someone else we were). At the time, I was happy enough to go along with the girls because I figured I was working on a skill I wanted to improve upon and helping someone else at the same time. Even as an adult, I doubt I’d recognize someone’s mean behavior as being purposefully mean at all. Which does make me wonder about how well I am interpreting political behavior.
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Juneteenth never made sense as a national holiday.
Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation is national scale, but was partisan in a way not convenient to Biden.
Biden basically renounced the post ACW peace consensus in the US on not relitigating such things. It could be an admission against interest, if we conclude that the post war Radical Republicans were correct, and we can return to hanging people for the crimes of Henry Wirz, as Biden is one of many people guilty of the crimes of Henry Wirz. Like Fauci and Birx. IE, they are partisan Democrats and also some crimes of false imprisonment and the like.
Hanging Biden, Birx, and Fauci in effigy is the most appropriate way to recognize June 19th as a national holiday.
Anyway, the Democrats can also kindly shut the fuck up about slavery. No modern Democrat has any grounds to complain about slavery of one hundred fifty years ago, given their PRC simping, and given their silence on the ‘undocumented’ human trafficking across US borders.
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The Dimocrats are the party of slavery, discrimination, Jim Crow and the Klan. Since slavery was legally abolished, they have to do it under the table and through the back door.
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The Party of Mean Girls is unhappy.
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The only way they can be happy is by making everybody else miserable. ☹️
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I have always found creativity to increase inverse to the amount of resources available. In high school (way before your eldest son was born), I had to submit a journal of “observations” for my English class. Of course it was done the night before, so I scrambled to find anything. In one entry, I described the headboard ornament on my parents bed contrasted with the “winter landscape of the bedsheets”, and got lavish praise from the teacher. No exciting exposition, no adventures, nothing that would make it on to TikTok these days. Just grasping at straws. I suppose that is why like Pre-Columbian, Mayan, and especially Aztec art. All they had were rocks. That is also why I want these for my driveway.
Heads on pikes my ass, I want human sacrifice to their gods.
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Nah. That’s just really an ADD thing. It’s not normal I know, because I’m also ADD. So are the boys.
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ADD is not a bad thing, it can keep you alive in a bad place or time.
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Had a “mean girl” and clique try some humiliation on me in college.
Big mistake. (grin) O rather poor life timing. This was me post-Infantry. Oh very poor choice.
Especially a big -huge- freaking mistake when I correctly discerned and publicly exposed her major kink. Left here there sputtering in several flavors of excessive glands.
Ran into her years later. She kinda leaned into her old snark, and I just said a few words and she got really… well… (grin) She seemed rather outraged that I just left there. Again.
Don’t tease old dogs. We bite.
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Second round of college. I am not formal military, not that tough. But I was over 30. Direct ask “How can you get pregnant your last year?” Not politely asked. Asked sarcastic tone. Response. “Oops?” Pause. “We didn’t get to choose timing. At least I haven’t miscarried this one,… yet.”
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