Nostalgie De La Boue

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I was — blamelessly (standing on the corner, reading my Bible.) — hanging out in my discord group, when someone posted a link to a twitter post. This Twitter post:

If you follow the link, you’ll find other additional qualities that are now not just right wing but “white supremacy.” This of course includes everything needed to make you a good employee, such as showing up on time, planning, actually executing plans, etc. etc. ad nauseam.

And you’re going to say “Yes, Sarah, but the left are massive racists, so to whom is this a surprise. And of course, you are right. It takes a special kind of mind to think that the ability to show up on time or do what you’re supposed to do at work is constricted to white people or a sign of white supremacy. In fact, if you think that, you are by definition a white supremacist since those are the traits required to be successful and therefore to think that only whites have them is … well… white supremacy beliefs. Or as I like to put it “Those who confuse culture with genetics are taking the side of Hitler in the long fight between nature and nurture.” (Which is particularly hilarious when these are the people who accuse just about everyone else of being “basically Hitler.”)

The problem is that there is more than that going on. Yes, the left really believes that these traits are white supremacy, but the left also believes quite honestly (if neither rationally not reasonably) that such traits are evil and should be eradicated, as well as never taught to those under their control, such as public school kids.

And that’s more complicated to explain. It is in fact, not just first world delusions, but gentry delusions.

The left has a raging case of nostalgie de la boue. Yes, I’m speaking furrin’ at you again. Fortunately this is the future, and you have a computer at your fingertips.

From Grokipedia: https://grokipedia.com/page/Nostalgie_de_la_boue

I remember reading — in some bewilderment — this longing, drooling article, Jonesing for Times Square in the seventies in some NY city paper (I’m not being cute, it’s been 30 years, and I’ve slept since then) in the late nineties. How it was more fun, more authentic, because you could bump into pimps and whores and get shanked at any corner, in daylight. And I remember thinking “These are the illusions of people so well off that they get their kicks by slumming, in controlled, carefully dosed portions never realizing that these conditions condemn those worse off than they are to live in hell 24/7.”

I suppose that goes along with most lefties, particularly most communists being rich kids. (No? Go track it.) Perhaps they feel guilty for their privileged upbringing. Or perhaps — I’ve seen this very often, in the arts — they are tormented by the idea that they’re missing something: that their lives, as well off as they are, are pretend lives, not serious.

You hear it in the sneering put down of “First world problems.” (Not used in a funny and self deprecating way, but applied to other people’s struggles. To make you think they mean nothing.) Because you know, not having to deal with lack of clean water, or children dying of diarrhea or the other conditions obtaining in the third world made your problems — say, unemployment, or a shitty job, or even a bad marriage — less “authentic.” Less important.

It all goes back, of course, to the basic communist belief about humanity. Humanity is evil bad. There is no such thing as a good person, which is why people need to be watched and controlled continuously by an omnipresent, omnipotent government. (Why people are supposed to be evil in individual cases, but wonderful in aggregate in a government, I don’t know, except that communists always imagine they’ll be the ones in power, and of course, they have superior moral sense.)

And to the other basic communist belief: wealth cannot be created. It can only be distributed endlessly. which means anyone managing to accumulate more wealth is taking it from someone else. (That’s right, that computer you are reading this on was passed on and redistributed from Knut the nut who first built it from river mud in the fertile crescent. Oh, wait. No, he couldn’t build it! Dang it. He stole it from a fish in the fertile crescent when he asserted his imperialistic colonialist domain over the Euphrates. or something.)

If you combine those, the people using the discipline that in our current world allows people to get ahead (absent DEI (Or as originally acronymed DIE, later ditched for being too on the nose, I’d guess.) means that you’re using a “trick” to accumulate more of the wealth for yourself, which makes it evil and also white supremacy. (Since as we know every successful person ever is white. Because they’re declared white, no matter what their color actually is. Some things never change.)

It would be hilarious. And in fact we’ve laughed about it more than once, when we go “White supremacy is… spin the wheel”. But the problem is that it’s also tragic, destructive and insidious.

It’s tragic because taken to its ultimate conclusion it enforces a kind of “cultural revolution” destructiveness, when the most skilled craftsmen and best workers had to abase themselves and promise to stop being that good. China did lose a good deal of multi-generational skills and knowledge, and we’re in the process of losing it also, because after all to do the thing precisely and with pride is supremacy, and evil, and oppressive.

Look, I’ve seen Europe, which has a more advanced case of this, going from having the most astonishing artists in the world to lionizing people who do bad line art in public spaces, art which at the time I viewed it, would have shamed my 10 year old son who didn’t even have any artistic ambitions (that was the other.)

And I’ve seen what it’s done to fiction. No. Really. I had a meme on Saturday about “Human slop.” You don’t have to be an expert to find that screeds screaming about the oppression of left handed Tahitian Lesbians of uncertain parentage in fact reflect very little about the human condition, much less contribute anything to the continuing exploration of what it means to be human in the world, which is the de-minimis requirement of decent fiction. As for the word use… well!

But it goes deeper than that. It goes to teachers who don’t teach, because teaching and actually enforcing learning is white supremacy or right wing (and right wing is bad, remember). (It inevitably results in students who can’t read, and now four generations in, in graduate students, or professor, who likewise can’t read. Or at least not with any fluency.) It goes to jobs exported overseas, because your workers were convinced to be as bad as slave workers in China.

It goes into unsafe cities, because requiring people not to kill or rob is bad and right wing.

In fact, this nostalgie de la boue, this craving for the low and evil and dark is ultimately a wrench unscrewing all the underpinnings of civilization.

And it is built so deeply that even after you free yourself of every other leftist illusion, you still find it trying to destroy your novel or your art by making it pointlessly dark or despairing. Because you internalized that as being “thoughtful” or “important.” (Ask me how I know. Years. it took me years. And in the early published books, a lot of revising.)

Look, in every time in the world, the gentry amused themselves by going out among the peasants and enjoying the “low” entertainment. But at least the gentry paid lip service to civilization. They might sneer at the “bourgeoisie” who refused to have affairs and who were honest in their dealings. Or at least the most corrupt ones did. But they also sent their second sons to fight and die for civilization. And the smarter gentry, the ones who survived, kept private virtue in their own lives. The others met either the tumbrils or bankruptcy. Until their nostalgie de la boue was exercised only by the young and foolish for a limited time.

This however is the gentry infecting the poor, the innocent, the hapless and those who don’t know their nonsense is just that: nonsense.

It’s time to wash the leftist mud from societal beliefs and build again. Because the alternative is not some beautiful egalitarian paradise. It’s actually just mud… and misery, and all the evils humanity built civilization to escape.

70 thoughts on “Nostalgie De La Boue”

  2. Alice forgot to include ‘speaking English’ in her list. Because English is the language of the colonizers, don’t’cha know.

    For some reason the French spoken in Quebec, and the versions of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in Mexico and points south are not to be considered languages of colonizers. I suppose noticing that they are is also ‘White Supremacy!’

    Liked by 6 people

    1. Just like the Spanish/Portuguese split in South America is a symbol of White Christian Patriarchy – since it was shoved down the throats of assorted Iberian Monarchs.

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      1. sigh …. ‘Look! Squirrel! moment …. should read:

        “”since it was shoved down the throats of assorted Iberian Monarchs, by the Pope!“”

        Liked by 1 person

    2. It wasn’t long ago… okay, it was an eternity in internet time… that someone went viral for demanding that white people stop studying Spanish as a second language, and pick a European language instead. I don’t know if it was a troll or not. If it was, it worked, because it garnered a lot of support, and I am hard pressed to believe that it was all meta-trolling in the replies.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I saw one Spanish teacher who was very serious that Spanish was NOT a European language, and was the language of BIPOC cultures and peoples. The thought that Spanish came from Spain apparently never, ever occurred to her. I’d wonder how she managed to get a college degree and teaching certificate in Spanish without ever learning that the language originated in Europe, but I fear I can guess.

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        1. Europa was a cow.

          If we wave our hands /very/ hard, we can insist that the Phoenicians were African.

          Then we can argue that the Greek and Latin alphabets were not derived from European cultures, and da da da.

          Basically this would be where the esoteric nutjobs who want to appropriate a ‘pure’ Norse culture as the solely European tradition, and the ancient African jets people are shaking hands in mutual appreciation and agreement.

          If you need to invent history hundreds of years ago to justify current regimes, then you are doing it wrong.

          If your current day regime is relatively peaceful, it is somewhat justified, and there is no need to have the past line up with some just so story.

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  3. Does seem as if the working model is “break as many young people as possible, while importing as many pre-broken ones until all possible resistance to the performative annointed vision goes away.”

    It never turns out to be enough, of course so double down, double down, and try not to look too hard at the sweet girl-child who is now a breastless, chemically-castrated 15-year-old on SSRIs who can barely participate in her own life. Or the cat-boys, raging like the survivors Arachosia, of the whole cohorts quietly pissing their lives away before they’re even lived on gummies, games, and reels.

    They’re losing, by the numbers, but as they go they’re going to try to take as much of the next generations with them as they can.

    Hold the line.

    Liked by 6 people

    1. I remember reading about some much Netflix series about teen suicide in 2017, and thinking “tptb are breaking their tools, or the young people they saw as tools.”

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      1. The series “13 Reasons Why”? I never saw it myself, but iirc the titular “reasons” are the reasons why the character committed suicide. It got renewed for a new season.

        Nothing that I heard about it made me want to watch it.

        Liked by 1 person

        2. Nope, nope, nopeity nope.

          Sometimes I think that my impulses that executives of such and such company should be hanged are clearly just me being incorrect. Then we have the case of the people who willingly chose to support that project.

          I can still be incorrect.

          Liked by 2 people

  4. I read that entire list, and I am sorely tempted to say “Your terms are acceptable.” Except that their monkeys-with-hammers reaction to civilization makes it very hard to maintain one’s emotional restraint. And the gratification of being rid of their lunacy (no offense to any natural satellites) has been excessively delayed.

    I would say more, but I’m pretty firmly dedicated to the politeness trait.

    Republica restituendae.

    Liked by 5 people

  5. Your paragraph on internalizing the darkness when writing synchronizes quite well with Dave Freer’s acceptance speech (or at least what he posted over on Mad Genius’ Club) of his Prometheus Award: Be Subversive! Make Books Enjoyable to Read! We’ll be winning the hearts and, soon thereafter, the minds of the young and they won’t even realize it until they are saved.

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  7. You and I seemed to be joined by some sort of existential thought thread, Sarah. I started working on a “Jimmy Goes To University” story two days ago, and today I saw the 100% perfect example of what you’re talking about.

    https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2026/08/17/ve-haf-veys/

    TL/DR: SumDood in Germany installed a little tiny shower in his rented apartment 10 years ago. Paid for it himself. The story is that the government (Bezirksamt, whatever t.f. level of bureaucratic nonsense that is) just removed it. Yeah, NOT the landlord. The government.

    “The state declared it’s too luxurious because now he has a shower and a bathtub. This is apparently too luxurious and would improve the rental property too much, which could lead to the neighborhood becoming too expensive. So the German state called in contractors to rip it out. And it’s gone.”

    Because crappy, run-down neighborhoods must be PROTECTED you see. In this case, protected from the people who physically live in them, and might dare to have a go at fixing them up a little.

    ‘You WILL enjoy your poverty, peasant, or you will wish you had.’

    Also, I have to make up a scene where Our Heroes go to Humanities 101 first lecture an get an earful of Lefty gunk. I’m going to steal your list of Whitenesssss!!!! because it seems excellently Leftish. (Gollem hissss at the end, of course.) I’m thinking of having one of Our Heroes call out the instructor for taking roll call and having a seating chart. Racist whiteness and statist oppression, you know.

    Also, the White Race is to blame for the recent demise (or self-unalivement most likely) of that famous Cambridge professor who ran four marathons in three days. And invented time. Or something. Yes, we whiteys are to blame, according to the academic Left who set this nutbar up to fail in the first place. Because telling the truth and having academic standards is hateful racism, you see. Also the scientific method, mathematics, logic, and measuring stuff. So they say.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Sounds like the anti-gentrification whiners here in the US.

      Also sounds suspiciously like a “social class enforcement” mechanism. Though based on the comments in the X post that your link is linked to, it sounds as if it’s more of an “East German mentality survives” sort of issue.

      Liked by 1 person

  8. I’m wondering now, in the wake of the Jason Arday melt-down and suicide, if academia (at least in this country) isn’t about to dissolve into a puddle of unwatched/unattended goo, just as Hollywood is.

    Good time to get cracking on building up, building under and building around.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. If an academic will endanger himself when his words and ideas are discussed thoughtfully, it might be correct to confine him for his own safety.

      That academics blamed outsiders and outsider speech is basically diagnostic of the wider problem academia has within and without.

      A mathematician might have looked at critical theory, and looked at mathematics, and concluded that critical theory is disproven by contradiction.

      The critical theorists answered this question by defaming mathematics as racist, sexist, and hetronormative, part of the grand conspiracy of conservatism that rests on prehistoric word magic and black magic, and which underpins peace(1), civilization, and western civilization. ‘logic is the patriarchy’, and also that non-criminal behavior is white, etc.

      We tend to start by dividing academia and the tertiary schools into good fields and bad fields, good schools and bad schools.

      The methodology of promotion for junior faculty may be set across a school, by all faculty in every field that school suffers. The accommodations for disabled and ‘disabled’ students is probably going to be contaminated by terrible ideas even at a good school.

      Arday proves a sucking chest wound we intuited, scholars who sincerely do not believe in truth. The defense of Arday proves the gangrene, that many institutions are thoroughly corrupt. They are blind and cannot navigate back to restoring the basis for respect. The stuff that grabs the public eye and the layman’s eye to academia is melanoma. A bunch of melanomas, on the legs. We could cut off the tail of the lizard, or propose surviving chemo, if we could last this long.

      This(2) was the most interesting and theoretically novel industrial accident in the last ten years. It was foreseeable how to maybe steer back to sober ‘best practices’, and to a sustainable convincing of the public. The insight was available, but the internal politics may have made it impossible to use in time. I think it might still be possible to hire relatively sane and start narrow schools fresh.

      (1)They do not use this word for it, but it is a correct word. They are savages and also barbarian to American culture.

      (2) I find Arday’s death fairly troubling. I was processing this some going into this morning. So I paralleled Sarah and others.

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      1. Argh.

        I am troubled by my footnoting and my impulsive digressions obscuring what could have been a message closer to what I thought I meant.

        2020 is the most interesting industrial accident, the industrial accident of academia.

        The death of Arday is a tragedy that had me thinking over the weekend.

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    2. “I’m melting! I’m mellltiiing!!”

      (“Did anyone bring the popcorn? No, seriously, anyone got any popcorn?”)

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Man, I really hope it is. In my more reflective moments, the thought of so much loss makes me sad…but then I remember that most of what makes academia civilizationally valuable has already been lost. Not just lost, actually, but systematically abused, discarded, trampled underfoot, and left to rot, if not outright set on fire by leftists over the past 100+ years. The process cannot be anything other than painful, but academia in its present form has to die.

      Liked by 1 person

  9. Those who try it with an open mind discover that it’s merde, not boue. Those who have bought into the delusion with heart, mind, and soul scatter that substance everywhere they go.

    I wonder if we should teach ninth-graders a survive-a-week-in-the-wild course. It would answer the “technology is bad” part of the delusion. And the various weapons of aboriginal peoples and their history of conquest might answer the ideal of the noble savage. Add how just about every tribe called itself “the people” and everyone else something less …

    Civilization, even with its checkered history, is a miracle we enjoy daily. Few of it appreciate it enough. And we all are threatened by those who refuse to appreciate it at all.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. “survive-a-week-in-the-wild course.“

      –

      Not long enough to get the message across to most.

      Plus it needs to be an environment that teaches what happens when “everyone is responsible”.

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  10. When I was a kid I played at being an Indian (feather) and what living that way would be like. I also played pioneer homesteader, Mormon handcart pioneer, Star Wars™, pirate, and a lot of other things. I also watched DadRed clean rabbits and helped my babysitter’s husband and my grandfather clean fish and crabs and shrimp. I lost my desire to live that way when I was in my early teens. Hygiene, the precariousness of farming, and things like that cured me. Too, I found out who did most of the work preparing all the bison and other things. It wasn’t the dudes.

    Amazing what learning skills and actually doing the things will do for one’s view of the “good old days.” Also seeing what happens to the members of the “weekend knife and gun club” helps, too.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. I grew up around my grandparent’s and aunts and uncle’s farms. They were Wheat and barley farmers and also had small dairy herds and chickens for extra spending money.

      It was difficult, back breaking work. If you had a couple of bad harvests, you might not only lose everything, but also starve while it’s happening.

      I have no illusions about the “homestead life” or how technology has improved the lot of humanity the world over.

      For the vast expanse of human history a given family was lucky to feed themselves, nevermind have extra to sell. Now with drastically fewer farmers we feed most of the world.

      People have NO IDEA what an astounding leap forward it is that our country actually has an obesity problem and our peasants aren’t starving, huddled in dark hovels, devoid of very basic necessities.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. We still have farmers (incorporated companies) in the family. Only one (cousin’s wife’s family) is the farm the primary income concern (multi-national properties). The rest? No. Their farms only have to pay for the farming. They have outside income to live on, no matter what the farm does.

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    2. I used to live on a farm. I know what bullshit smells like. 😛

      Living on a farm did not agree with me. Early mornings, looooong days of grueling work, hot sun, frigid snow, bottomless mud, itchy dust from the various crops, getting rousted out of bed at 2 AM because some cows broke through a fence…

      I went into electronic engineering. Thankfully, it’s kept me far from cows ever since.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. This is an excellent essay. It’s helping me refine (perhaps not enough yet) an idea I’ve been incubating since earlier this summer.

          It strikes me that perhaps nostalgie de la boue is adjacent to (or works hand-in-glove with) the cultural enervation that Raspail caricatured in The Camp of the Saints.

          I haven’t read a ton of essays or discussion of Camp, and I read the book only this summer (the new Vauban Press edition on Kindle), but one thing I noticed about the book is Raspail observed on (without commenting on) the unassimilated migrants already in Paris, New York, and other cities mentioned: mostly sequestered, voluntarily or otherwise, doing menial “undesirable” work, etc., and left to organize themselves or not.

          I think Raspail was driving at something: a country that isn’t prepared to require and promote/facilitate the assimilation and integration of immigrant populations is committing slow-motion suicide. The intellectuals of the book rhapsodized over the migrants of the Last Chance Armada, but were in no hurry to experience the dirty jobs the cousins of the Last Chancers who were already inside the wire had been doing.

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    5. “I lost my desire to live that way when I was in my early teens.“

      –

      Amen.

      Yes, we backpacked, car tent, then RV *dry camped.

      But at most it was 10 to 14 days at a stretch; max. Never wanted to live that way.

      (*) No hook-ups. Important distinction. I know of RV campers who do not go unless they have at least water and power to the site they are staying.

      Liked by 1 person

    6. And this (odd as it may sound at first) is why my Early Mars Colonial Era characters keep going on about “design for abundance” — or some interoperable equivalent. It’s surely about not building in basic ideas and attitudes that reflect a scarcity that everyone hopes/believes will be temporary, so that later on culture and society “thinks small and lean” — unnecessarily. But it’s far more than that.

      If you figure on having “a lot” right from the get-go, then if (when, says history) some surprise happens disadvantegeously, some misfortune strikes you and maybe hard — you get to keep on eating, drinking, and breathing. Maybe running off that “surplus” abundance; but you can and do.

      Solar power? Yeah, it’s “green” and requires zero fuel. But dust storms on Mars can last weeks and block all but a few percent of sunlight. Nuclear? Needs high-tech fuel, and some obligatory basic safety practices; but doesn’t care if the sun shines or not, and makes lots of “waste” heat to keep you warm on a planet whose average temperature is Antarctic (~-60 C or ~-75 F).

      “All your solar yesterdays have but lighted fools the way to dusty death” is a popular (mis-)quote. (And see many, many defunct actual solar-powered probes for how true it’s proven, already.)

      Liked by 1 person

  11. One of the editors of the Wall Street Journal, Danial Henninger, wrote a scathing essay about people who longed for the days when NYC was “edgy” and “raw” in the 1970s. Yes, it might have been more alive and authentic, but getting mugged once a week, assaults, dead druggies in Times Square, the area around Madison Square Garden being very dangerous, and other things made NYC horrible.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. It’s all very exciting, I’m sure, to watch the news reports of crime and disorder on the news and feel like you are all edgy and brave for living “surrounded ” by it from the comfort of your highly secured upscale apartment. Especially, when you go, by cab, into the uncertain areas to see a Broadway play.

      I mean, you WOULD, take the subway, but the schedule just doesn’t jive with your work schedule. Right?.

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    2. It’s also often been noted that Times Square of the 1970s is why films such as the original “Death Wish” were made, and were popular with audiences.

      TPTB seem to be doing their utmost to block another such film from being made. Citizen Vigilante (which even by sympathetic accounts is a bad movie, even if the subject matter is timely) is being outright repressed by European governments. And movies such as the Death Wish remake with Bruce Willis are apparently lacking when compared with the original (note that I haven’t seen either one).

      Liked by 1 person

    3. One of my uncles (past five years ago) lived in New York for a year in the 1970’s.

      His opinion was profound and profane. The words “nuclear bombardment” were a part of it.

      Turned me off when I could have gone at least twice pre-COVID/post-Giuliani. Really regret that now, I missed something important.

      Liked by 1 person

  12. It seems to come down to modern leftists hating themselves and projecting that hate onto the rest of the world. They really believe the marxist slop they’ve been infected with along with the whole “noble savage” BS. Why else would they want to import the dregs of the third world and cultures that will eventually destroy them?

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  13. The romanticizing of the poor offends me. Deeply. I have worked gardens and farmland with hand tools. I have gleaned, berry picked, and all sorts of basic, nigh timeless tasks my many times great ancestors did across the Big Pond in between stabbing each other both metaphorically and literally, repeatedly.

    Those of us what grew up without (you can make a list of “withouts” that would make the average person of today delirious with fright) tend to have wants and desires and quirks just like any person does. Many lack the personal drive and principles that tend to allow one to move upward, economically. Some have issues with addiction, or mental issues, and many lack proper education- even the ones that graduated high school or college in the last thirty odd years may be so, regardless of accreditation. The poor have no basis to the claim of any moral superiority over the elites, no more so than the latter can honestly claim the same over the former. That’s up the the individual, and their own personal moral compass.

    There is nothing romantic about living in a trailer park, with feral children running about and loose women going about doing the things they do with the rather useless men. There is nothing particularly laudable about the crumbling apartment complex, tagged to oblivion, with used needles and condoms on every stairwell. Those with the drive and passion to leave, do so.

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  14. Yep to all the replies so far. In my less-controlled moments a tiny corner of my reptile brain wants to see the whole thing collapse and see how ling they last. I’d outlast most of them, but probably only by a few weeks, having been ingrained with stubborn concepts like “go down fighting” to protect your family. But it would not be be fair to the vast majority of folks that are not full-on crazed leftists, to make them suffer just for the schadenfreude.

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    1. At the risk of being obvious, consider that our very existence is positively irritating if not triggering to them. Thus, even if I do not lift a finger to even contest their very foolish plans, they would be made even less effective and satisfying by my simple existence.

      Live well, live long, and cultivate contentment. It pisses the bastages off something fierce.

      Liked by 5 people

  15. I spent my adolescence living in NYC during the 1970’s when it was dirty and dangerous. My nephews, who grew up in the oh so green and leafy bougie NJ suburbs, went to an Ivy, and now live in a part of Brooklyn that I wouldn’t go into at any price after dark when I was their age, are all in on wanting gritty NY with skells and graffiti and crime and smells and all the rest of it. They also want the police defunded. At our last meeting, they were worrying about getting home early because the neighborhood wasn’t as safe. Cause and effect isn’t taught at the ivy’s any more.

    even my lefty sister didn’t go along with wanting the 70’s back, she having to walk those streets back in the day and having had a few dodgy moments. As for defunding the police, I laughed right in his face and told him I didn’t have a rich enough daddy to believe such nonsense, and my Da wasn’t poor.

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    1. The city-wide high school system in Jacksonville, FL decided to take a couple of hundred Humanities students (and me, I was invited to go despite not taking Humanities. My being on the school “It’s Academic,” team might have helped) and send them to NYC for a week in 1972 or 73. I think it was 73. Where did they house us? In a hotel off Times Square, of course. I was “sexually assaulted,” in an elevator in that hotel (the guy grabbed a boob and a buttock and kept moving) and my boy friend got propositioned by another guy, to my mild bewilderment. (I now realize I was his “beard,” but he was a good friend, if not romantic). I guess that qualifies as educational.

      I also just misssed a chance to share an elevator with Duke Ellington, but at that point I’d never heard of him.

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      1. Duke Ellington would have been cool. All those midtown hotels had gotten very seedy, then they all got cleaned up and expensive again. Then they put illegals into them at full whack so they’re all seedy again.

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  16. If you haven’t come across the concept of Luxury Beliefs put out by Rob Henderson, I recommend you have a look. HIs bio is fascinating in that he grew up in the foster system, went into the service, straightened his life out and ended up at Yale with a PhD from Cambridge. I read his x posts regularly. Interesting guy,

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  17. “It is in fact, not just first world delusions, but gentry delusions.”

    And even more specifically, it’s not just aristocrat/gentry delusions, but those of the nouveau riche or the parvenus the Grocky-pedia quote speaks of. “Now that we know for sure we’re out of there, let’s go back for a visit and laugh at the silly monkeys we used to be.” It’s not logical in the normal, rational sense; but it does make a psychological sort of sense, sorta-kinda.

    Somewhere inside all of these people, an Inner Child is whistling past the graveyard, trying to not believe she could be pulled back into all that, for-real and not pretend. Having a sort of tantrum, hopefully at least a cathartic one, trying to release the stored-up horror (real perhaps, or merely a social contagion, learned and secondhand). Under the eyes of an Inner Adult saying, quietly, “I don’t know whether to hug you hard or smack you silly, but you have to stop this. Or soon it won’t be play-pretend, and you might not find the ‘exit’ door so easily as you did before.”

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  19. That list is actually what constitutes human supremacy. It doesn’t matter what color their skin is. Anyone who doesn’t aspire to those things is, by definition, a loser.

    Wealth can easily be created by making more of whatever it is of value. The key is that each additional item made generally decreases the value of each item until you reach saturation point, at which point every additional item is actually a waste of value. Central planning by government control in collectivist countries frequently exceed saturation points on various items due to their inability to react to market forces. Housing in China comes to mind. Not that the buildings themselves were worth all that much in the first place.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. And in at least one huge way literally so, for hardcore Sixties Generation regulars (I was born then but I was never one of them, and knew it full well at the time growing up).

      Woodstock. Famous for rock-n-roll, utter mad chaotic anarchy in place of well-ordered customer service and safe crowd control, and — mud. Mud on the epic, Naploeonic scale. (“For Poland,” he wrote of beginning a campaign there in the spring, “God created a fifth element: mud.”) As a pure concrete metaphor for “the Sixties” it’s pretty good, maybe hard to beat.

      Less than a month after the genuinely-historic Apollo 11 landing — but which one is the “big” thing, to this day, out there in true-deep-blue boomerland?

      Nostalgie de la boue, bien sur!

      Liked by 3 people

  21. I’m tired of people digging our foundations out from under us, just to see the buildings collapse.

    I’m angry at the boomers, who seem to think that every generation after theirs needs to be tortured even worse. And making it impossible to have a life of any kind, in any way, shape or form that isn’t some kind of twisted entertainment for them.

    I’m frustrated with the fact that we don’t have flying cars, cities on the moon, more nuclear power, and everything that can make this world a better place.

    I’m furious at the mud-throwing feral humans and their enablers, both of whom need to be drowned immediately.

    Again and again, “bad luck” keeps showing up, and I’m told that I will have to fix it-but not the way it has to be fixed. Especially at this point.

    Liked by 5 people

  23. Not exactly nostalgia for the mud, but this kinda rhymes, stepping back into the mud but bragging about the past golden age, with… Okay, a story:

    Back in 2011 Beloved Spouse and I took a trip to meet up with members of her family at Disney World. We scheduled extra time around when they were going to be there to have some us time, and at my insistence Beloved Spouse and I rented a car and drove over to the space coast to tour KSC. We got the regular bus tour and saw the place my entire youth had dreamed about – the VAB, looking the same as it did in all that Apollo launch coverage, the crawlers, repurposed for STS, and all the rest.

    Atlantis was rolled out on the pad at LC39A for the last shuttle flight a few months later when we toured, right frigging there, with the service structure swung around it’s back and easily visible. The tour bus dropped us at the museum building where they have a full Saturn V stack, pickled and preserved and carefully restored and displayed on its side indoors out of the rain, plus a flight-config CM/SM and a lander, all perfect and real, and all sorts of actual flown hardware and informative displays, and all the educational stuff…and it just made me sad.

    It was all winding down, all looking backwards. The entire place felt like the kind of stuff we had just been seeing at Disney World (albeit Disney did it far better), polished for show, but nothing save that last shuttle out there on the pad had any go. And that was combined with a general feeling of impending layoffs and winding down and end-of-an-era that I’d felt multiple times over my decades working in cubical land: downsizing was heavy in the air.

    The past was the entire focus, in what was supposed to be, and was designed to be, the nation’s working spaceport. The only hardware other than Atlantis was stuff that was built to fly to space, but never made it, and now it sat regularly dusted off and not fulfilling its purpose.

    The only spot that seemed brighter was the fact that from the observation structure they built from chopped up chunks of the Saturn V launch tower, off to the south on the then-USAF Cape Canaveral Air Force Station side, you could just see an early SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket vertical over on their SLC40 pad. It looked tiny compared to the shuttle, but it was at least looking forward, not banned and pulled down and added to the other sad launch vehicles in the rocket garden at the KSC entrance so it would not disturb the alligators or something.

    We didn’t make the trek back over to KSC again when we went back to Disney in February 2020 (we came home about 4 days before they shut it all down for the fauciflu) so while I hope the feeling at KSC has improved with all the new activity between SpaceX and to some extent the SLS, I don’t know firsthand. Hopefully that shutting-it-down-except-for-the-museum-tour feeling is now gone. Hopefully the feeling there now is looking forward, not stepping back into the safe mud while looking at preserved bits of the glorious olden days when humans reached for the stars.

    Hopefully it doesn’t feel like it did in 2011 anymore.

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    1. If there’s a perfect antithesis to nostalgie de la boue, I don’t know what it is (and maybe there isn’t one single unique solution value anyway). But I do have a candidate, and it’s intimately intertwined with the above-well-captured nostalgie also.

      I only wish it was my doing; it’s an “Ultra” ship name from Alastair Reynolds’ “Revelation Space” series. Which is to me, hands-down, the best ship name by anybody, ever, period (including that Iain Banks “Culture” series so beloved of one Elon Musk).

      Nostalgia for Infinity.

      I submit that some of us, never mind the (apparent) logical contradictions, were born with that.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. We did something similar, only in 1997. Family DisneyWorld, with a side trip to KSC. Bus tour also includes all that empty space, alligators, manatees, other wildlife, and the Atlantic. Although our March timing, the weather was not cooperating. Humid? Yes, when it was not raining sideways (KSC was cold*).

      (*) Given we were coming from Oregon, regularly experience Oregon coastal weather, that was a bit of a shock. DisneyWorld, we were walking around in summer clothing, no rain jackets or umbrellas, despite the rain. KSC we were under prepared. (Please note, for those who do not know. Oregon Coastal clothing is heavy duty hoodie and wind jacket, all year. Can have “nice” beach coastal days; do not count on it.)

      Liked by 4 people

    3. Small world. We did much the same in the spring of 2009 (Disney and a day at Kennedy: my wife is a wizard at planning our vacations). I was talking to one of the security guards and mentioned that when I’d visited back in 1971 with my brothers and sisters and parents, they took tourists into the VAB. The guard told me, “Yeah, we stopped doing that after 9/11.”

      My older son got me the Saturn V Haynes manual for my birthday about four years ago. Now if I can just get the parts…. :-)

      Liked by 1 person

      1. One excuse was we were not traveling 6300 miles round trip and not take the time to do what we could while we were there. The other is hubby was sure (there is) that the company his dad worked for had rockets in a “rocket garden”. Something cool to show his son what his grandfather was part of. A grandfather our son never knew (died before son was born; not that he remembers the paternal grandmother who died when he was 2).

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Yeah, in some distant future the Saturn V museum stacks at JSC, KSC and Huntsville, made up of various mix match stages, together make up the ultimate barn find.

        Liked by 1 person

  24. Interesting short video about nearly 300 luxury apartments in Downtown LA that are owned by a Chinese company (Greenland USA)… and are empty.

    Like

  25. I’m always curious about the “wealth” argument. The idea suggests that the same amount of wealth existed when there were less than 1 billion people on the planet as there is now with 7+ billion. So in the middle ages, when even kings lived in squallor and ate worse than a minimum wage worker today, everyone should have been 7x as wealthy. We should be poorer, not richer.

    It doesn’t seem to have worked that way, surprise surprise.

    So the idea that wealth cannot be created but only redistributed doesn’t stand up over time.

    Then there’s the fact that assets can be physically extracted from earth, air, and water. If gas, electricity, nitrogen and metals do not increase the asset base, where do they go?

    But I think the asset they most consistently and deliberately overlook is the human mind.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. Some day I want to write a story about a group of Americans who get stuck in a certain mountain valley in Austria (I saw the place) when A Disaster strikes and the area is cut off from communications and transport. When the Authorities finally get there, the Americans have gotten themselves and the locals organized, improved some things, adapted to others, and are ready to export civilization to where it is needed. Because that’s what chunks of our culture does. And what a certain kind of personality does, if given the chance or the need. We tinker, “what if” and dig in.

      Start with the mind and some basic skills and knowledge, and we can build a LOT and generate a LOT of wealth.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. A ‘thing’ from WWII was how many guys went from “drafted” to “Sarge.”

        My grandfather’s was that they were … I think it was at the 101st Mountain’s training, but I don’t really know… but they were learning how to use boats.

        The boat got a hole.

        The officer couldn’t swim, and neither could anyone else, and it was snowing, and the water was barely liquid.

        My grandfather kept them all alive, somehow, and so got promoted, and my mom– who didn’t meet him until the ’80s– knew folks who only addressed him as Sarge.

        I think this had a very positive effect on America’s culture in general.

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