All right. We had our various pity parties–or not–time to find our boots and lace them up again and get back to work.
Now, there is no easy route. There is no Great Leader who will wave his magic wand and make everything right. There’s no Chosen One who will assemble his followers and fix the world. It’s a lovely trope in fiction. In reality, that isn’t how it works. Never has been. Fixing anything is messy and it’s a group project, and we all hate group projects. (And I’d wager that every one of us has ended up doing everyone else’s work at least once.)
On the bright side, though, it’s a project that breaks up in to small bits really well, and your bit can succeed without relying on everyone else’s bit being done correctly. You can make real progress.
On the down side, you will get attacked. For those still raising children, or not financially independent, you need to be more cautious. (I’ve watched the attacks happen to a local friend of mine running for local office. Relentless, and at least one went viral nationwide, which didn’t actually fix the slander.)
Snelson had some great suggestions in the comments yesterday. If what he’s doing is something you can do, go forth and do. If you can show up to local party meetings–and I don’t care which party–and get involved, annoy people, keep them on track, get them off track, go do that. If you can run for a down ballot office, my hat’s off to you, and please be braced for impact.
If you can copy HSLDA’s tactics for your local city council, or your state legislature, or your school board, and run a news list, and tell everyone who really cares about issue XYZ when they should show up, call, email, write, about that issue, do that. I mean, if you can find a passion for . . . deregulating food from home kitchens, get a group of people together who care about that issue. Or for allowing hens in city limits–you can definitely get a list for that. Or for improving county election security. Or, there’s a nascent movement I spotted for, how was that phrased, “The other twenty-nine kids’ right to learn” about de-mainstreaming disruptive children. That’d be a good issue to be involved with.
If you have the pocket books to hire the lawyers and sue, and you find standing, go you forth and do just that. I suspect that certain big figures from the MAGA movement have attorneys combing everything today.
If all of that’s too public, I want you to think of whisper campaigns. Not actually whispering–that would defeat the purpose. Not shouting either, that’s rude. But comments that seed doubt. “Funny how everything that passed and everyone who won in our state is something China cares about, isn’t it?” “I don’t know anyone who voted for X, do you? Do you know why they did?” “Why hasn’t that guy resigned from his megachurch position? Is he a Christian Nationalist?” You’re just asking questions. Totally reasonable questions. Look at the person, or the issue, find what the other side would just ask questions about if they weren’t in favor of, and ask those questions. That’s how that game works. I’ve had good luck with persuading perfectly normal Democrats against mail-in ballots before by asking why abusive spouses should get to vote their victims’ ballots. “I mean, if he’ll hit her for cooking his steak wrong, then he’ll definitely force her to vote the way he wants.”
Now for your own family, I want you to start thinking practically. We’re all (almost) preppers here anyway, right? I think this is the biggest conglomeration of “Actually this is how to survive a week long power outage” people that isn’t a dedicated prepper website. So make sure that’s in order. Make sure you have what you need if your bank account gets hung up for a couple days-we had an internet outage here a couple years ago that shut down all the banking in town, my credit union stayed open on the honor system but most simply closed doors, only stores that could deal in cash and checks and had cashiers who could do math stayed open. Make sure you have what you need if your power goes out–we know corrupt government is associated with lack of basic services–see South Africa for details. Make sure if the garbage trucks don’t come for a month you have a plan so you don’t get rats. Not apocalypse, just . . . lack of services on schedule. My in-laws get city water only occasionally, so they and all their neighbors yell to each other when the water comes on and fill all their storage containers. Basic big city third world stuff. Charge your phone battery and your backup battery when there is power. Not Mad Max, Kinshasa on a Tuesday or Johannesburg on a Wednesday. If you normally rely on a big freezer, be prepared to cook and can without power if you don’t have backup power for it.
Make yourself a network of people. Who can come over with a chainsaw if there’s a tree down in your yard? Who can you go over to with a chainsaw if there’s a tree down in his yard? Networks are vitally important when you’re in a low-trust situation. You have to know who will help and who will steal. You need to know who will give you a reference to a real roofing company. You need to give references to your mechanic, your roofer, your driveway paver, and you need to give business to your network’s references. Don’t hire based on “I did an online search and got quotes.” Hire on “I know a guy.” Not least because the fall-out of failing as a “known guy” is no more jobs, not dissolving the company and starting a new one. This is not the American norm, but it is the way most of the world gets people who do things. And our unassimilated immigrants are doing just that–giving work exclusively to people in their trust network, while we’re . . . not.
Yes, this means you-YOU!-have to talk to actual human beings.
We didn’t pick this, but we’re here.
There’s no man coming on a white horse to save you. But you don’t need one of those, anyway. Get your saddle on your own horse and ride.
One of the young men in the family (pursuing hard science degree on the cheap, living at home) had the experience for the first time in his life of calling for a tow. I’m kind of amazed, given what he drives, that he hasn’t had to previously: mostly probably based on being cheap and sharing rides, someone else called the last several times. (The old beater decided that oil was better on the outside of the engine than inside. This is widely acknowledged as contrary to continued operation.)
Things you don’t know how to do til you do it.
We raised our kids pretty country. They all learned to shoot a gun, butcher small livestock and/or game, fish, cook, clean, garden . . . it’s how both of us grew up, on opposite sides of the world. A lot of people haven’t had the opportunity to have those experiences, to learn those skills, even poorly.
We could have a long discussion about what people should know how to do: Robert A. Heinlein put in Lazarus Long’s mouth the words “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” I suspect most of us are missing at least one off that list due to old injuries if nothing else.
But the bigger thing is that people don’t have a chance to try, and we live in a society that says “leave it to the experts” for most of those things, and makes it cheaper to have it done by someone else than to do it yourself. And for children, well, if you’re in class for seven to eight hours a day, followed by extracurriculars, no matter how good those extracurriculars are, you’re not going to have time to learn to do very many things. Especially if they are things that have a long lead time–you probably aren’t going to go down to the market and buy a live cockerel and take it home to butcher, at least, not in most of the USA today. You’ve got to buy a chick at the feed store and raise it for several months first. Which you do learn a good deal more from doing, but you’ve got to have the several months. Also most urban areas, I hear, frown on slaughtering in your front yard.
This is why we keep getting young folks who very much know things that just ain’t so. They know what they know from what they saw or heard, not from what they did, and they never were exposed to the actual things they’re hearing about or seeing at a nice, sterile, electronics mediated remove.
For us adults, there’s also not enough time in the day to do all the things. We might take a first aid class now and then, but we don’t practice the skills regularly. We might in theory know how to change oil but not have done it in the last four decades. It’s been a hot minute since I last messed with a spark plug, and I’d really rather pay someone to do that than try to figure out how the heck to get at them (I learned on a ’69 Chevy SUV, ok? It had a lot less stuff in the engine compartment).
The sum total of human knowledge is too great for one person to be able to even do it all as an amateur. If you tried, you’d never specialize enough in anything to make a living at it.
Let me encourage you to dust off an old skill or acquire a new one, though. It’s good for the brain, really, ask the neuroscientists, they get all enthusiastic. Several of my cello students took up music for exactly that reason. Maybe I’ll break out my spindle: I put it away when the first little someone figured out how to crawl and get into the wool, quite a while ago. It’s a nice, warm, indoors wintry sort of skill, and once upon a time I could even make even yarn. At this late date I’ll be starting over from vague memories and books. (Yes, I know there are you-tubes, no, my brain doesn’t work that way.)
What will you do?
Maybe don’t make it running a beater with the oil outside the engine, though? This one might get a touch pricey: we’ll find out next week if he pulled over fast enough or if we’re up for the learning experience of putting some other old beater’s engine into this old beater. It has been done before.
Note from Holly: this post is just shy of two years old now. I was looking for old posts on Art, in keeping with the theme of the week as it’s turned out so far, and the search popped this up, and well . . . it seems like a good reminder? Not sure what it has to do with Art, but search serendipity shouldn’t be ignored.)
Most of the time we look at a landscape, particularly if we live in it, and we know exactly where the road or the walking path is. We know that if we set off from here, we’ll walk that way, and…
And then there’s snow storms in Colorado, where I lived most of my adult life.
Colorado is not, as most people who know it only from TV think, a place where it snows early in Fall, and it stays covered up till next Spring. That’s more a thing of Ohio or Pennsylvania. I mean, there are places in Colorado — the high ranges — where it’s definitely like that, but that’s not most of it. Most of it, you have sun and snow, and days that are completely dry, and then days you are buried. There is no guarantee what type of day you’ll have. Some days you’ll wake up to a beautiful sunny day, then find yourself buried in snow by nightfall. Once in Manitou Springs, it was sunny in front of our house, and snowing in the back.
And then there were the sudden snowstorms that covered everything. Once or twice they caught us on the road, and even WHERE the road was became a matter of opinion. Obvious (and dangerous) if one side goes down a deep ravine, but the other side? Yeah, you’re on your own. It’s uncharted flat white.
We find ourselves kind of like that in our current political landscape.
You see, there has been a storm, a bad one, and it flattened everything. But in its wake, we are left in a changed landscape, where the usual sign posts don’t apply — except for the ravines, of course. Those are still there and hellofdangerous.
I probably don’t need to elaborate for this audience, but the storm was the stolen election, and its threat that we’d never again be free to choose our path, that — from now on — we were in the hands of the international oligarchs, and that at most we could carve our tiny little paces of semi-freedom, but we’d never be a free PEOPLE — or by extension, a free species (most of the species is. The West even is iffy. The US remains the last, best hope of mankind) — again.
Yes, I know, I expected differently. Because like with the Diamond Princess and the Covidiocy, I did the math. They can’t win. it’s impossible.
But even I expected a long period of darkness, or a blood bath in the way to our being free again. I prayed otherwise, but….
Well, on election day we got our miracle, a culmination of at least two previous miracles. And here we are.
And everything has changed. The problem is that the if you really look at it, the storm has been a succession of storms, starting about 100 years ago. And throughout it, it looked like there would be only one road, and only one way to move, and it would all end up in a prolonged darkness, which the sun of freedom might never penetrate.
But these things are never as they look, and beneath the snow cover, things were moving and the landscape was changing.
To be precise, the industry was changing, from one where large and central had all the benefits of being more economic and more profitable, to one where — not fully yet, but we can see it from here — distributed everything, and largely automated factories with minimal human labor are the future. And what a future it is. The same tech allows distributed communication, and it allows information to travel from those who have it to those who need it in almost no time. (Seriously. I once fixed my vaccum in no time by looking at a few you tube videos. You can also learn just about anything from those. From practical skills to languages, to history, to–). Even though there’s some resistance (including from Musk, sigh. It’s his reflexive liberal. It’s not fair to work from home, since not everyone can. Poppycock.) obviously distributed, from home, from your small town, a bit from everywhere working (and living) is the future. And it is a future that also allows women to work/pursue an avocation while looking after their own kids. This is leading to revolutions in teaching and in… well, just about everything else.
The world simply isn’t the same as when civilization started getting frosted over, and we assumed the future was the world of 1984 or Brave New World, and the most we could do was delay it a bit.
Paradoxically while that world seemed to be driving to a super state across the world (which FYI is inevitable tyranny) the fact we can communicate effortlessly across borders and across the world, perhaps by making us aware of cultural differences is fueling a drive towards nationalism. Which, contrary to what you’ve been taught in school is not fueling a drive for war, or Hitler like racial purges or whatever the crazy. WWI was caused by INTERNATIONALISM, i.e. by the royal families of Europe getting ambitious and trying to establish multi-continental empires. Being governed small and closer to home is always better for freedom. If those in power know you can come to their house and isekai protest them (like truck con protest them) they tend to behave a bit better. (Or, put up barricades if they’re Jarred Polis, whose conscience must be the deepest dark dingiest hell on Earth.)
Anyway, in this new world, a few things become not clear. Like, sure, RFK is still a commie (well, his dad was one TBF) but is he a bad person to be in charge of the FDA? Consider what the FDA is and what it’s been up to. What we know for absolute sure it has done is bad enough. I’m sure there’s stuff we don’t even know about. As long as he doesn’t try to fill it up with stranger and more strict requirements for… everything, why should we mind?
Tulsi Gabbard is still at the very least commie-adjacent, but she was victimized by the security apparatus by being put on a no fly list. Sure she might just reverse the polarity of the abuses. But she might also have seen the elephant and, in the light of the new day, seek to put the brakes on the overstepping. It’s worth a try.
Things like tariffs…. well, I ain’t no fan of them, but you know? The president has to at least be able to threaten them convincingly, so I’m willing to leave his elbow free. And I don’t know. I don’t like tariffs, but I hate taxes, particularly since they eat months of my husband’s time in calculating what all my strange little businesses owe. Maybe, just maybe we can swap them for tariffs, or come up with a yet more creative solution to finance the essential functions of government.
I’m open to what might come. I mean, today DOGE announced it’s hiring, but the job won’t be paid. Using American culture of voluntarism to cut the wasteful state? It’s amazing. It’s the most American thing ever. And think of all our retirees who just found a fun project for their golden years. (If I didn’t have books to write, I’d be volunteering myself. And if we had more money, my husband (and younger kid) would already be applying. Since they’re math geniuses, they probably could help.)
Meanwhile, yes, of course, the ravine stays. I will be watching very carefully and squawk at everything and anything that trespasses on the essential rules: The state should be small (we can start with smaller) and afraid of its people, not the people afraid of their state. And DON’T HURT PEOPLE AND DON’T TAKE THEIR STUFF.
Those are ravines indeed, and we’ve been driving with a wheel over that abyss for far too long. We might not know where the road is, but let’s get the heck out of the dangerous spot.
The rest? The rest is wide open.
Where a dark and dreary road the entire world was pushed into used to be, there is now a trackless wilderness. Into which we can cut paths, alleys, roads, delightful little gardens, and probably fly over it, or tunnel under too.
What is dawning is a day of great experimentation free of the “certainties” of the 20th century which, if we’re all lucky, is now dead and will soon be buried.
Let’s try to make stuff better. Some of it will even succeed. And let’s stop doing the stuff we already know doesn’t work. No, it won’t be different this time. Let 100 million eggs with no omelets be waste enough. Don’t add to it.
Go and create and figure out ways to do things: cheaper, better, with less hurting people and taking their stuff.
And take a deep breath of the crisp, cool air of the new world.
By dint of a rather unusual past for my time and place, I am perhaps a bit of an expert on the lack of comprehension between the sexes.
I am the only child of an only child. My father was a Silent, as is my mother, and I am a fairly late in life child. As a child, I knew exactly one other almost-only child: she had had an older brother, who perished in a plane crash.
My mother had three siblings and numerous cousins. My father had a couple cousins he knew as a child, given family propensity to alcoholism and poor choices. One of those lived long enough and sane enough for me to meet. My father was an introvert’s introvert: other than professional colleagues and family he had no social group. None. Not one person. No clubs, no church, nothing.
And then I was home schooled.
Then I went away to college-my parents were both professors and there was no way I was staying home and going to their college-and met an international student, married him, and we had a normal size family of six, and I got to figure out how guys communicate, quite a lot from bringing up boys who had friends who were boys. I had a pretty good start on how girls communicate, being one, being in girls’ clubs, having a mother who is an extrovert. And my husband is also an extrovert, so marriage brought an instant social group of fifty-odd, prone to dropping in randomly.
Back then, there were some rules, still. Boys were weird in the first place, but they knew they had to actually ask girls out and girls could say no or yes. But there were also those who opened with sexual harassment and were shocked that didn’t work. The jerks you shall always have with you, I suppose.
My general rule was to go out with a guy who asked nicely once. To a public event, taking ourselves separately. No alcohol, ever, on dates, but then I met the man I married just before I turned twenty-one and married him not long after, so that wasn’t an issue. Not because I was irredeemably law abiding, but because I wasn’t stupid and had plans that involved keeping my security clearance. Turns out that pays off in personal safety.
I did some dumb things that could have ended very badly, but for the most part, most guys are just fine, and I was fine. (One boyfriend had a plane! He let me fly it!)
But I also grew up and live in possibly the highest per capita concealed and open carry state: the estimate before Constitutional Carry came into place was 10%. No one actually knows now. It is guaranteed that someone in any group of people is armed. That makes it a lot safer to make most dumb choices. (Maaaybe not flying the plane, though.)
Back to communication. Boys are weird. They don’t get hints well. “Wow, the trash is really full” gets a “Yep, sure is” instead of taking it out. They don’t like it when girls cry and want to fix it. I trained the girls early on that if they just wanted to have a good cry they should retreat to their room because the boys want to fix it, and if it doesn’t need fixing don’t upset the boys. Told the boys the girls have a right to cry when they want to and they can’t go in their room to find out why they’re crying. Worked out pretty well when they hit teens.
If someone does the girls wrong, they have their own brute squad. Conversely, the girls protect their brothers: No, that girl wants to get with you. Stop helping her if you don’t want to get dragged into her shit. She’s creating problems with other guys to get you. This is apparently fairly incomprehensible to the male mind. But it’s a female tactic. (Not all women, not all men. But quite enough of them.)
Men prefer direct. Women tend towards being subtle. Plausible deniability, yes, but also . . . when you look at a group of men you can tell who is in charge at a glance. He’s giving directions to accomplish the task. Women, it’s often more egalitarian looking on the surface, with the boss’ buddies passing on instructions. (Like Sarah, I tend towards male style interaction more than female, but I’m better at female than she is–I also didn’t switch cultures as an adult, so I have an advantage there.) You have to discover who is in charge, in a new group of women, because she’s not setting up for a direct challenge, so she’s not obvious. In many cultures it’s obvious: it’s the senior family female, but in ours it isn’t. Don’t challenge the boss if you don’t mean to, which means figuring out the pecking order, and who’s actually in charge.
We used to have a taboo on talking to men about women’s stuff. You didn’t admit you had a period, let alone cramps, in front of men. Remember that? That went away at some point, probably before I was born. Women wouldn’t’ve had to reject drugs of unknown provenance because they never would have expressed a problem to men. In a lot of ways it’s a good thing that it’s not shameful to bring up a problem, but . . . we don’t have a structure set up around it. The old structure worked.
Ideally, a woman could say “No, thanks,” and not have to worry about the man getting upset. Or the woman. But that’s not the world we’re in. Because, did you know, women also get upset about the rejection? Because it says “I don’t trust you,” straight out, and we aren’t supposed to say that. So the deflection response, that says “I don’t trust you” in a plausibly deniable form, so that the response isn’t anger.
So I suspect the needed adjustment for women is going to be going back to do not talk about intimate matters, such as cramps, around people you will not accept drugs from. There’s a downside, of course, in that men will be trying to figure out why women aren’t pulling their weight today. We’re stuck in a species with sexual dimorphism.
Gentlemen and ladies, don’t take a deflection response as something to argue with. Because also, it could be a really annoying allergy–not even TO the medicine itself, but to the coating, that one doesn’t want to risk–and every single person with an allergy or with a child with an allergy has had to deal with the “Oh, that’s not real” response, a lot of us from medical doctors. Take “Oh, that won’t work,” as being a rejection, a polite rejection, and carry on as you would have if you didn’t have the medicine to offer. And know that if one accepts food, drink, medicines, from you, that you are in the high trust zone. Not the date zone, the high trust zone. These are two very different things. And maybe now it makes sense why the coffee shop is a safer first date offer?
Furthermore, it’s not a cultural unity. It’s a lot safer to not deflect in the rural west, as far as I can tell, than anywhere else on the planet. That might be because heavily armed. Might be because no one stands close to anyone else anyway. Maybe you don’t have to reduce friction in social interactions in areas where there are few social interactions.
Assuming good intentions will get you quite far. There’s a line from the DeMolay organization my boys all participated in that goes something like “When a Brother has acted foolishly, I must assume he was motivated by good intentions which I know not, and had I his motivations, I might have acted more foolishly than I judge him to have.” It’s pretty good advice, really, in dealing with honest folk, and I hope you are all trying to avoid dealing with dishonest folk.
And now you’re staring at me as though I’ve lost my mind. I might have. I was fighting typesetting till late last night. But I don’t think so.
It occurred to me sometime ago that we were in a long, sustained war since the beginning of the 20th century. It’s just that war has morphed and gone underground, by other means.
Look, part of this was America’s showing in WWII. Not that it was bad, but that it was very, very good and it showed the ideologies who would conquer the world that they couldn’t do it shoulder-to-shoulder, in serried ranks. I mean they kept threatening us with it, but in fact that time had already passed. (Sometime I need to do a post about how most of threats we’re terrified of are actually things that are no longer possible, or at least highly unlikely.)
So, the ideologies that would conquer the world: it was before Marxism existed, of course, that people became obsessed with idea of a rule “of the people” involving “if only everyone” and also that there was a permanent underclass who needed to rule so they wouldn’t be oppressed.
In fact Marx, the least original thinker in the world, culled his ideas from the kind of red-throated insanity of the French revolution. To be fair to him, all of the civilized word was going through this, processing the shock of the immense violation that the French Revolution represented.
There had been peasant revolts… always pretty much. Look, despite the soft-water-color monarchy fools (mostly tbf European fools, though some people on this side of the Atlantic are … gullible (?Yeah, gullible is a good term)) try to sell you, monarchy and any system with hierarchy dictated by birth which you can neither choose nor change monarchy pretty much sucks and will end up having peasant revolts. (Yes, yes, constitutional monarchy is better. And also depending on the quality of the king, yadda yadda, except that you can’t guarantee the quality of the king, nor vote him out if he’s well…. Biden like. And constitutional monarchy is a way to still have kings for the feel while not having kings for anything practical. BUT in this case, I’m talking about historical, pre-French-revolution monarchy and its problems.)
However the French revolution was shocking like the covidiocy was shocking. It was a ‘this is not even possible’ moment.
And it was possible, suddenly, because of one innovation (this one simple trick!) — the printing press. And the propaganda it enabled.
While media was nowhere near as concentrated as it would become in the late 20th century, the big printing presses and their broadsides were responsible for disseminating the idea of the revolution and spurring people on to revolt, and concentrated enough to have it be in the hands of a wild-eyed bourgeois elite which spurred each other on to insanity. Oh, also, things were pretty sucky to be fair. I mean what fed the fire of the revolution is that the lower classes really were pinched like crazy. And had endured centuries of being treated as subhuman. But still, without the propaganda and the dissemination of ideas, the French peasants revolt would have engulfed a few cities, maybe a province, then fizzled.
That it didn’t scared the living daylights out of everyone in power. Well, and anyone literate, even the people in America who initially supported it, when they realized how ridiculous it had gotten.
Which means that by the early nineteenth century the intellectual establishment was still processing the shock (these things process slowly) and Marx codified the insanity into what sounded like more exact intellectual format.
And then they tried it on. WWI was a sad disappointment for the “Workers of the world” uniting, since apparently they still preferred their national identities. Which then led to fascism, that embraced that and various weird retcons of international socialism, including the very latest attempt here, with DEI, with “race” replacing class (and race being quite inventive as it ended up including women and sexual orientation and… insane little buggers these Marxists.)
Anyway, WWII was even more of a disappointment, at least for the Marxists (red or black bah, let the devil come and choose between them) idea that they could take the world by the force of arms, because it turned out the US had better arms. And thought it was at the time under the grip of a Marxist though not an avowed one, the US refused to do the taking over and occupying thing, since ultimately as a national character we’re terrible imperialists: all we want to do is go home.
Since then, the enemies of the US have been fighting the US by other means.
The most effective, starting right after WWII (or arguably before) was internal corruption and subversion. McCarthy was too late (no, seriously, when you have an hour, go and listen.) and all our institutions have been corrupted by Marxism for way too long. No, longer than you think.
This was facilitated by having central control of the means of communication, education and entertainment. They could promote the ideas of communism while assuring you they were strong anti-communists.
Also, the number of times they threw the USSR a life line or ignored its obvious lying to pretend they were an equal enemy and super-dangerous leads me to believe they liked the state of balance between two powers. Either because they liked it for puddinghead reasons (without a challenge we’d go soft!) or to keep a certain amount of state control because we were “threatened.”
That was one form of the long war. The cold war, where the forces of Marxism could pick out small helpless countries one by one while at home we were told that people there had “chosen” this and that “the people” liked communism and that we were oppressors for not letting them have it.
Except the slow grind didn’t work. The truth is that Marxism is as shitty a framework for government as it was an intellectual framework for the economy. Imposing any form of Marxism — starts as communism, quickly devolves to fascism and then to a sort of feudalism — means that the society thus afflicted cannot survive. Not long term. Not economically, not mentally and definitely not morally.
Things started falling apart more and more obviously by four decades after WWII and then the USSR came thundering down not long after.
Well, all credit to Ronald Reagan, because without him the democrats would have kept propping up the rotten corpse of the USSR (let’s remember it had tried to collapse in the sixties already) like a kind of international Weekend at Bernies.
But as it started thundering down, the people here who’d become willing mind-slaves of the Marxists lost their minds, until they found two new means of attack: race and ecology. (Remember for the left race also includes your sex and who you sleep with. Because, you know, these G-d blinded idiots can’t understand CHOICE and that there are characteristics you choose and aren’t simply born with. Here, between you and me, are they clankers, or do they just think they are?)
This worked middling well until recently. Or appeared to work middling well. Let’s remember again, due to their control of the means of mass communication and indoctrination, until recently it was hard to distinguish how well it worked from how well it appeared to work. And they controlled appearances. All memorex, no reality, is a possibility for what was happening. In fact given the slow creep of means of cheating being introduced in the US since the 90s and that cheating mostly benefits the left — no? then why are they always the ones who make it possible to cheat and bitch if you try to clean up the votes? — it’s quite likely their recover scam after the USSR never worked that well.
Anyway, by the end of the 20th century it was becoming clear that despite their best efforts, they were barely holding onto the US by fraud, and that they were certainly not controlling hearts and minds. And frankly, by the late teens the rest of the world was also starting to get ideas and to rebel, though less penetrated by the internet and free association which here started breaking the spell of mass media control.
And that’s when they came up with the ultimate idea to attack the west: a human wave. Mass immigration. They figured this would for sure get their race/group communism to stick.
It wouldn’t have of course. It won’t even in Europe. But it will cause a hell of a disturbance for a few decades. And if they could do that here, maybe they could break up the US and destroy our dangerous ideas. (Really, they’ve wanted us to break up since the USSR did, because they don’t understand the differences between us and them — no seriously — and want revenge.)
Except that the collectivists drink their own ink and believe their own propaganda. They thought that say here they could swamp us with JUST people from South of the border. They might very well have thought they could swamp us with people from Mexico.
Of course they couldn’t. The population isn’t as great as they thought. And frankly, we’re very spread out. But by the end they were recruiting wholesale from anywhere in the world to throw them in here, which meant their weapon — people — lacked internal cohesion and were as likely to turn on each other as on us.
Also, of course, they don’t have control of communication. No matter how many movies they put out on the plight of the poor illegals, the people aren’t listening, and instead really would like to stop getting elbowed out of jobs by people who work for 1/4 the salary while also drawing every possible form of welfare. And they would like people to stop trying to camp on their lawn and sh*t on their sidewalk. Oh, and they’d like their children and pets to be safe.
So…. So, in the US Trump might just about have saved us from having a violent spasm that would leave a bunch of people very dead (not all them, or even most of them, just illegals) and the country in a mess (and still not give the left its triumph.)
Europe… has bigger problems. Partly because they stopped reproducing about a generation before we fell into that kind of trouble (though there are signs with the young ‘uns here and there that this might well change within ten years.) And also because most of them have been well and truly swamped by waves of immigration. And they still don’t know how to deal with any of it, because — for various cultural reasons — this type of blog, and a kind of grassroots communication is much harder to take hold there.
Frankly I’m amazed they’re managing as much of a rebellion as they are, and we wish the insurgent forces in Great Britain, still fighting to reclaim their homeland, well. I will tell them be of good cheer. If the Marxists weren’t terrified, they wouldn’t be so openly dropping the mask and showing us their hideous totalitarian faces. You are winning, but I’m afraid the victory will cost you dearly. (Salutes.)
Here? Here we are winning. We are winning magnificently. After sixty years of non-stop shrieking, indoctrination, positional-good-Marxist-display, and guilt and shame beat downs, we’re hunching our shoulders and ignoring the self-proclaimed “elites.”
Trump was elected, not because of his great achievements (sorry, Sir. We didn’t even KNOW you in 16. Now? Now we like you fine) but because of our being tired of having our legs pissed on by people who told us it was raining.
And we’ve carried on. Their magnificent coup, the most corrupt and frankly large scale bit of election fraud in the US ever, installed someone who was practically dead and while hurting us very badly never got hold of our hearts and minds, let alone made us believe they were legitimate. We went from zero to Let’s Go Brandon in minutes, it felt like.
Meanwhile everything they do turns to shit. They have become contaminated with Obama’s Mierda’s touch. They’ve lost all ability to create (I have this theory they never had it, just coasted on whatever they could steal from the few conservatives still in whatever field, but that’s harder to prove) and they can’t convince anyone. Not in the face of the dismal results of their philosophy.
Does this mean the future is guaranteed? The future is never guaranteed. And Liberty must be won day by day.
No, what it means is we have a chance. We have a chance of winning this. It might be too late for the rest of the world. (But maybe not. Salutes Great Britain’s people who are still fighting.)
But America? Well, boys and girls: it’s time to drop our shackles, ignore the Marxists and aim for the stars.
I can’t promise you we’ll make it. But I think we’re going to.
Be not afraid. Keep fighting.
The future is shining bright, and America will lead the world into it.
As much time as I spent immersed in other worlds as a teen, I can’t say I was ever into flying cars. Yes, I had posters of Mars and of Shuttle Mission patches on my walls when other girls had music and movie stars. And I had actual stars, and nebulae . . .
Flying cars just weren’t the thing that caught my attention in all the novels I read.
I still think the new Tesla Roadster is cool, and Nathan Brindle (have you read his novels? You should!) mentioned the suction stuff is very useful for low grav vehicles, so . . . check out the Moonmobile! (I call the Cybertrucks MarsCars, because they look like they’re meant to shed the Mars dust to me . . .)
Also, for added coolness, Elon Musk reposted our very own M.C.A. Hogarth’s comment on the test, which you may read here: https://x.com/mcahogarth/status/2110918617294360600 (Also you should read her novels, if you haven’t. Why haven’t you?)
What aspects of the new model look most interesting or otherworldly to you? Would you want one? I could fly over that guy going the wrong way on the one way street . . .
Yesterday, I linked one of Sargent Mom’s posts at Chicago Boyz (I still find it funny that my friend who is neither a boy nor from Chicago posts there) and on my reading it, and the comments before linking, I found that the very first comment was tediously familiar.
Note I’m not saying the commenter if a troll or ill intentioned. I’ve known him “from the blogs” for long before I started using my own name, and/or came out politically. I just think he’s not thinking things through. As aren’t all the people who make that same comment.
They are also hopelessly provincial, historically blinkered or, yes, both. It pains me to say so, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how people convince themselves of this nonsense otherwise. Though I will admit there might be a strong contention of “kids these days” and “get off my lawn” in there. In which case — at sixty — I’d like to point out that getting old is no reason to convince yourself of a bunch of nonsense. There’s much you can shake your fist at the younger generations for without swallowing old Soviet propaganda (spit it out. It’s been up Stanlin’s dead ass) or spreading pernicious lies that blackpill or worse the rest of the people still fighting.
The comment goes like this in its most commonly found form “The Republic is gone. Within its earstwhile boundaries, there are just a bunch of disparate people, who have nothing in common. It’s time to break it all apart and go our separate ways.”
My normal response to that would be “Poppycock on stilts” and throwing the nearest dictionary in the general direction of your head.
But because it keeps surfacing, it is obvious most people have swallowed this nonsense without having any clue where it came from, how it contradicts history or how utterly stupid it is. So I’ll unpack.
First, its origins: Perhaps it is unfair to call it Soviet Propaganda. I suspect it is, because of how deeply laid-in it is with a certain generation, but I know for a fact it started being widely circulated in the mid nineties, when the Soviet Union had fallen apart. Though it was mostly spread by old Soviets indulging revenge-fantasies, and by their friendly useful idiots in the US singing along with their old mentors.
All of a sudden, when my kids were little, the idea was everywhere, served up by every single leftist “The US will now fall apart like the Soviet Union fell apart. The only thing that held each together was the need to fight the other.”
It persisted till the mid two thousands, everywhere. I even remember a giggle-worthy pseudo-scholarly paper by some Russian about how the US would fall apart and in what lines, which made it blindly clear the poor dear only knew the US from Hollywood movies.
Do I need to unpack why it is utterly insane?
Yes. The Soviet Empire was mostly held together by the cold war. Let’s put it more bluntly: by the US helping them maintain it locked tight, because due to the cold war and Soviet propaganda, we were terrified Russia might get mad and bomb us all with its superior (largely imaginary) weapons.
(And Russia finally had a beginning on the empire of their dreams, which ideally for them would compass the entire Earth. Paranoiacs are like that.)
However Russia, with its very old culture, its crazy new Communist cult, and its even older tendency to want to invade and subdue everyone else so they don’t attack her is not the US, and never was. Because the Soviet Union fell apart, it didn’t nor does it follow that the Us should also. This is sort of like saying “Because you can beat egg whites into a firm froth, you should also be able to beat egg yolks into a firm froth.” Er…. what?
Neither of these things is like the other, and because the Soviets resented losing their empire and wanted the US to fall apart, it doesn’t oblige us to do so to make them happy in their revenge fantasies, okay.
Alright, Sarah, you’ll say, but just because the USSR’s bitter remnants believed it, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Do you see all our divisions and all our blah blah blah?
Yeah I see them. I also — as an outsider who became an insider — am here to tell you that all of those, save the divisions between Americans and those new imports brought over the border these last few years or those imports who are consciously staying foreign, are very small.
No, seriously.
Look: I’ve lived all over this great land. Even during my 30 years in Colorado, we made extensive trips elsewhere to visit and because we have friends/colleagues everywhere. This not counting the fact both our boys dated girls from all over. (Odds, you know?)
There are differences. Sometimes deep differences, in how you interact, where you shop, how you shop, and such. However, if you dropped me blindfolded into various cities in succession, I’d be able to tell you which ones were in America from the way we …. move, the way we look, and the way we hold ourselves.
I’ll never forget when, ten years after moving here, I visited Portugal and my mom had a melt down because having passed me on the street, she didn’t recognize me, just thought I was “some tourist.” This was capped by “You have become American.” (I’m not older son. I didn’t rub it in and say “Why, thank you, ma’am.” BUT I thought it.)
Go to the area where most of your local recent arriveds are and look at them. You’ll see the difference without much effort. I can’t fully explain it, but to me the rest of the world holds itself like a dog expecting the foot to come out and kick them at any minute. We don’t. In fact, that look in an American is a sign of profound trauma.
More importantly, when we had to suddenly function for a month in another state without help, while the national brands and chains helped, mostly we’d have found our way easily enough, just because it’s America. There are commonalities.
Having real-estate shopped across states just recently, you can suss out a neighborhood, evaluate your neighbors, and choose an area which you might or might not love, but you can live in easily enough in a week or so.
What I’m trying to say is despite all the regional differences, there is an overculture which is “American” and one that makes it easier for an American to fit in another area of America. Now, part of that overculture is of course believing them guys ain’t like us y’all. But that’s something completely different.
The only places with truly different and often hostile cultures are fractured, purposely held apart places, including ghettos/inner cities and college campuses.
Which brings us to the whole “We just found out there are enemies in our midst!’ Did you? Really? JUST found out? Well, you must have been covering your ears and shutting your eyes pretty tight.
Colleges have been embeds of anti-Americanism since I’ve come here. The joke about the student who comes home and lectures the parents on not celebrating thanksgiving has been a joke forever. (And not funny, because true.) The other innovations? One day in 2000 I was working in my yard and by a trick of acoustics heard my neighbor across the street discuss his son, who had brought a boy as his SO to Thanksgiving last year, and this year was bringing a girl, and they didn’t even care what the girl was, wasn’t it great? The vice-versa is not that rare, either. Any direction. Now of course, it would be his son thinks he’s a girl.
In fact, the only thing that has happened since I have been here is that the anti-Americanism has moved explicitly down to Kindergarten and up. (Implicitly it was already in my 12th grade history book in 1981 when I was an exchange student. It already was clear enough to make me fume.) It has done so because they are “educated” and think everyone MUST agree with them. But in doing so, it has become visible for everyone, and the counter-attack is everywhere and truly ferocious, because people might tolerate their young adult children becoming idiots, but you don’t mess with their babies.
On that, btw, note that my generation already was heavily indoctrinated anti-American. I remember that none of my classmates would admit to America’s good qualities. It was so…. gauche. And yet, unless I mistake it, my generation formed the core of the Tea Parties. And we’re still here. Because those of us — even those of us with graduate degrees. Even those of us with graduate degrees from Europe! — who grew up, married and have kids know what reality is. Those with experience abroad, know how rare it is what we have here. And we want to keep it.
One additional point, here: the culture used to be WAY more diverse. WAY more. Pre-expressways and TV, them guys over there not only talked funny, but they had other strange habits. I know because I met with remnants of that in my inlaws’ generation. (In fact, I loved my FIL’s Connecticut accent (I’m an accent-loving person, except for my own) and was shocked and startled to hear it come out of my husband’s mouth when awakened in the middle of the night by a would-be-intruder this summer. Suddenly my relatively accentless husband was gone, and a Connecticut patrician was there. And he wasn’t amused.)
In fact, it might have been impossible for a continent-sized nation to have a common culture and way of being in the world absent fast-travel and fast means of communication. And it might be impossible for us not to with that.
Going further back in history, and when the fe(de)ral government was a less powerful polity and states could get their freak on with nobody bothering them, I remember reading a biography of someone shortly after the revolution (Well, you see, there’s this mystery series with a ghost that I want to write. Might involve going to Connecticut for a six month stay, heaven help me. We’ll see if the story shuts up) where this person was in Maryland, escaping the crazy puritans of New England, and then had to get away from there, because Maryland was full of crazy Catholic laws, etc.
We were more desunited in the past. In culture. And it was by region. We were still the United States, where it counted.
“But Sarah, it’s all gone. It’s all vanished. We’re not respecting the laws of the Republic, or the Constitution!”
Ah yup. And I’d agree with you there. However, just because we’re behaving very badly it doesn’t mean the laws are gone. Just that we’re ignoring them. And you know, to an extent we’ve been violating the Constitution, more or less, since we adopted it. Like our flag, it is still there. And we often come back to it. Sideways. Upside down. Kicking and screaming, but we do.
Look, there were worse — far — violations under Woodrow Wilson, FDR and frankly a lot of others in the 20th century. It’s just you didn’t hear about them, because the press didn’t tell you. So you had this idea that everything was hunky dory.
Part of the impression that everything is falling apart and the center cannot hold is that Mass Media can no longer hold the uber-narrative, and those of us who see cracks in it and would rather believe our lying eyes can find each other and create our own spaces. That doesn’t mean things on the ground are worse. Only that it looks that way, because you hear more voices, not one over-arching, all-singing-together-narrative.
Now, are there many among us who are frankly repulsive in their disdain for the land and the law that gave them everything? A-yup. And the pro-Hamas demonstrations are only a small show of that.
But here’s the thing, there always were. And if you say that it’s particularly bad now, I’m going to laugh in “I remember the seventies.”
And if you are going to scream in unassimilated immigrants, I’m going to say “Drives me bonkers too, and I think we need closed borders and a decade or so of mass deportations and of very limited legal immigration while we sort ourselves out.” And? Every period of mass migration did this. Mass migrations are a very bad thing. Combined with a welfare state and a victimhood ethos, they’re horrendous.
Doesn’t mean they’re lethal. Though remedy best come fast-ish within the next decade. As frankly, I suspect it will.
But you have to remember that’s not “Americans.” Americans are those who were born and raised here, or those who bothered to do the work to be more American than not. Those who haven’t are “people living here.” Not “Americans.”
And btw, my kids had a lot of friends who had one foreign-born parent. The kids were Americans. Often annoyingly so. (Note one foreign parent, not both, and none of them lived in an embedded foreign enclave.) In fact, those with one-foreign-born parent were more likely to believe in America as a credal nation.
Speaking of: America is a credal nation. Yes, it’s a land mass (and no, we’re not giving an inch of it to the idiot commies. For one, it would be like what Israel did when it pulled out of Gaza. We don’t need an enemy that close) and yes, it’s an history, a culture, and a way of living. Also a certain genetic heritage, and trust me, it’s still present in America. My kids might be second generation Americans (first born) on my side, but on the other side they’ve been here since before America was independent (and ancestors fought in the revolutionary side), are related to several presidents, and have a considerable contingent that greeted the pilgrims from the shore, okay? My ah…. new and impure blood (snort giggle. I’m just a mutt, y’all) didn’t erase that history. And both of my boys are very proud of it. It’s just good every once in a while to import a bit of DNA, less everyone have twenty toes and play banjo really well.
BUT those saying The Republic is Dead are mostly referring to it in the credal sense.
Nations don’t die because they go through a period of lawlessness. Almost every older (almost all of them) nation has gone through this. They go through periods of lawlessness, or even being outright occupied, and then come back.
But for a credal nation held together by “this we hold to be true” it can feel like it’s all gone.
Go read your Bible, kindly. No, I mean it, even if you are not a believer. Find an old testament. Steal it from a hotel room, if you must, and read the story of Israel.
Credal nations don’t go away. They just don’t. Look at all the foes of the Israelites. The Persian empire is gone, whatever the Iranians think. So are the others, including the mighty Romans. That little credal nation of Israel, though? Well, it went a long time without land, but it is still a people and a creed. And it will be.
I suspect should we be so unfortunate as to lose our land and our common links to each other, and our living together, Americans will yet persist. We might become even more genetically dilute (for us it will take effort) but 100 yeas from now or 500 there will be people claiming to be Americans (Or as some very strange sf writer made it, turning an insult on the boards into a point of pride, as we do, Usaians) even if they really can’t prove an ancestor ever set foot on the continent. And even if some of them are blue skinned and have tentacles.
And as long as the creed is there, we will come back, as an idea at some point.
Not that our falling apart is anywhere near. No, stop that. We are not Rome. The idea that we were is another Soviet idiocy. We used some of the forms, but dear Lord, not the …. history, the feel, the genetics. And if we were, that horrible Rome of the decadence continued for a thousand years or so.
If I had to guess we probably have that long. Maybe more.
Oh, granted, we’ll go through periods much, much worse than this. And periods much better. Nations are things of humans, and that means they’re not…. pure ideas, that live in the purity of being themselves. Every nation goes through very bad times. And comes back. Often seeming decadence, or occupation, or attack, teaches the nation what it SHOULD be.
This doesn’t excuse you from fighting for America to be what it should be.
“But Sarah, wouldn’t it be better to divide?”
HOW? Do you see any “cut on the dotted line” lines on the map? Because I don’t.
And the American feeling and beliefs aren’t quietly divided into states or even regions. The first civil war happened the way it did because the South had common economic and cultural interests the North was unwilling to tolerate. (I’m not going to dip my toe anymore into that. And remember, it’s a forbidden topic for good and sufficient reason. BUT:) There was a clear geographic demarcation, even if the borders were fuzzy.
Now? Oh, for the love of Bob. Yes, there are baked in blue states. But if you think they’re that way because it’s what the population wants, let’s talk. I saw my state flipped from under me by massive fraud securing a tiny margin then going vote-by-mail.
Almost every state that’s baked in blue has some procedural trick (CA) or vote-by-mail holding it that way. What is the will of the people? What do the people believe? I don’t know. And neither do you. If you’re trusting the press, you need help of the mental kind.
I have had three very different people, in/from very different circles tell me they think NYC went Trump in 2020 and that’s why the occupiers are determined to destroy and punish it. Is it true? I don’t know. I found their reasons compelling. So. Why are all big cities hard left? Well, darlings, because vote fraud is hellofeasy in a big city. All you need is well organized vote fraud groups that control the polls. And one side that refuses to fight it. (Trust me. 2012 drove me nuts. And Colorado Springs was not that large.)
Now there is another thing, which is that in the big cities a lot of people work for colleges and big corporations. Judging by the number of you flying under false names and telling me for the love of heaven not to out you, there is a substantial legion that confesses progressivism from the lips out, while hating it in their breast. And the more they’re forced to confess it the more they hate it. But they can speak progressivism very very well (I’ve seen some of you under your real names, yes) and pass. The problem being that in those areas people overestimate the number of the true lefty believers and anti-Americans around them, because they are not allowed to tell the truth or appear as they are in public. It’s poison.
I have a strong feeling I can’t substantiate but is based on the amount of fraud needed and obvious even in supposed bastions of the left, that this is not a 50/50 country. It is at the very worst a 75/25 country, with the 25 being the “progressives.” But even then, I expect about half of that are true believers, and the rest are sleep walkers, who are convinced of the media narrative and that they have to vote for the left because the right are “racissss sexisss homophobes, and WORSE uneducated hicks.”
A lot of that narrative broke badly with the events in Israel and the displays in this country. I’ve been more sleep walkers awake than at any time since 9/11.
And the rest of the left are either very young and indoctrinated, or well…. the same old Soviet-lovers who never woke up and never will. But by themselves they’re not a reason to break up this great country.
Even if we could break up. Even if there were clear regions, instead of each of us knowing friends or relatives who are enmeshed in the left’s narrative, and who live next door, it would be inadvisable. The left can’t build. Only envy. And that means if we separate, we will prosper and they will hate us.
I refer you to October 7 in Israel as what would happen with neighbors whose whole purpose is hating us and taking us down.
So let’s eschew and bury that foolishness once and for all. This is our land. The Republic isn’t dead or close to it, though it’s occupied by an implacable enemy. Which we should each fight, overtly and covertly in every inventive and relentless way possible.
Because after this, comes a revival. They can’t win. And in many ways we already have. But because the defeat took a hundred years, the revival will be slow.
I might not see it, but others will. (Yeah, probably not others of my blood. And? They will be Americans. Even if they’re polka dotted with tentacles.)
It seems very peculiar to me, at less than a month before the election, that one of the candidates for the thirty-three regular senate elections has apparently vanished. Gone. Silent. In this day of all-online-all-the-time!
Officially Mr. Talarico has the flu. Odd that he’s not livestreaming something from his bed, don’t you think?
Speculation of course is rampant, ranging from hospitalized to . . . pretty much anything you can imagine. https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2108553958696399249 is a place you can start at, but PJMedia and NotTheBee are covering it if you like them. Probably our Texas Hun Contingent has more local input on the matter as well.
Given the last couple days of posts here (less last night’s chapters), though, I think we might as well speculate wildly.
Was the poor Senate candidate hauled off by aliens to install a new and improved Puppet Master? Or to have one safely removed? He’s from a very weird splinter sect off of Christianity, so weird I hesitate to call it Christian at all, but perhaps he got raptured? (IDK if they even believe in rapture.) Kidnapped by time travelers? If so, because he himself was a time traveler trying to mess up the timeline, or was he native to our time and they’re trying to prevent what he would have done? Bricked up in a cellar he was tricked into by asking him to get the Amontillado? Can we get Miss Drew or the Hardy Brothers on the case to solve this?
In any case, may God have mercy on him, whatever is wrong with him.
I don’t believe in aliens but I profoundly dislike Woo Woo. And Aliens at least aren’t woo woo. Or they weren’t. It could be argued that when everyone on the left started running around talking about UFOs being some kind of psychic phenomenon, (circa early seventies) it was a sign of true cultural rot or perhaps a sign that my (tongue in cheek, I think. I THINK) theory below is true, of course.
I don’t know how many of you remember this, but UFOs and aliens didn’t use to be in the same category of belief as elves, fairies, ghosts, weird spirit messages and the thing called “Earth changes” that has sneaked back in under the scientifist guise of “Global Warming” on the left.
UFOs were a sign of something physical out there. Of possibly more scientifically advanced but not supernatural aliens. Maybe very bad aliens. (Looks at Puppet Masters.)
And then it changed and became part of the new age circus. Which is when I gave up on it, though I always had trouble believing in aliens, which is why they don’t exist in my fiction, even when they seem to. (More on that later.)
Yesterday in a group, a friend said what is obvious about the left is that they seriously oppose human reproduction and longevity. Ultimately human life, I guess.
Here’s the list as to why:
NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:
1) Pushing to maximize abortion
2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality
3) Multiple different initiatives to make child rearing more difficult and expensive including a) Ramping up the intensity of social services scrutiny, effectively necessitating high intensity “helicopter parenting” b) Turning schools into indoctrination factories that don’t prepare children to function independently but do prepare them to have constant fights with their parents over their indoctrination c) Making healthcare more expensive through constantly ramping regulation, making the actual having of children more difficult and prohibitively expensive d) Pushing to nationalize healthcare, granting them further power over who lives or dies– allowing limitation of IVF, and also e) legitimizing legal euthanasia while also pushing to make healthcare decisions for the public (see Canada right now)
4) Pushing from other regulatory angles to make the de-facto standard a two-income family, ensuring children are raised in daycares and further pushing family budgets to the brink
5) Using the student loan system to turn the bulk of reproductive age, upwardly mobile people into collateral in a deal that passes billions of dollars directly from the US government to the same system that then indoctrinates those kids to the point of full societal dysfunction; encouraging, as much as possible, the use of sex as entertainment ONLY
6) Turning sterilizing yourself into the hot new fad for kids
7) Turning the simple identification of gender into a minefield so that even sex between people who aren’t mutilating themselves is suddenly difficult to even consider
8)Willfully manipulating nursing homes into putting elderly people in a position where they are MOST LIKELY to die during COVID
9) Adopting COVID policies which foreseeably shut down cancer diagnostics and treatment for almost two years, which is the most likely cause of the 10 fold increase in the rate of cancers since the COVID lockdowns (although I can’t entirely discount that the vaccines themselves are partially responsible because, sing it with me now, you can’t ensure the long term safety of something that hasn’t been around long enough to have long term safety data, which is why we do clinical trials and not mass experiments on the general public. I note in passing that the drug companies are so trustworthy they demanded legal indemnity as a condition of participating, while swearing blind that the product was safe and effective even though it was physically fucking impossible for them to have data to back that up due to minor problems like the requisite quantity of time not passing.)
And then this:
Whether they intend this to be a coordinated effort or passively want us gone, at some point you realize
The Democratic party? They’re the aliens in Independence Day.
Because I don’t like Woo Woo, I jumped off from this to aliens:
If the hypothesis that appeared in a lot of pulp age SF that humans were “the old ones” of the Galaxy (or the universe) who lost a war, and whose remnants were sent to Earth in exile, and whose “leaders” are being manipulated by “aliens” to keep them from achieving high tech, specifically space travel again, what would be different?
Space travel?
Well….
1- Shortly after the moon landing, there was a concerted effort by the left to confuse, thwart and obfuscate all attempts at space travel.
2- the talk of UFOs and possible space travel was corrupted by an entire slew of “sightings” and ideas that made UFOs and aliens into a supernatural, woo woo phenomenology fit only for New Age circles.
3- NASA might have gone the way of all government agencies, so natural, but–
4- Every democrat president is intent on crippling our ability to travel in space further, and discredit the very idea we SHOULD aim for it or attempt it.
5- Even space opera with or without minimally believable science, which — if nothing else — kept the idea we can eventually travel to and colonize the stars was shut down hard, in favor of fantasy and HARD science fiction. (I have nothing, absolutely nothing about hard science fiction, but with very few exceptions, it is only exciting to people who know enough science to understand what’s being done. It’s not how you popularize the idea of space colonization.) And the old masters who were pro-space were discredited and attacked. Even Baen who kept space travel fic alive, kind of, ended up in the narrow mil-sf sub-field most of the time. The rest became one of those self-fulfilling prophecies of trad pub: Space opera doesn’t sell, so we won’t publish any, and what we publish we won’t promote, so it doesn’t sell, so space opera doesn’t sell, so we– last verse, same as the first. Note trad pub did this even though space opera movies continued to do exceedingly well, even arrantly stupid ones.
6- our capacity to generate enough energy to allow for even thinking of space travel is under systematic attack, which
a) feeds into depopulation, or will this winter, but also
b) inexplicably nuclear is included in this and attacked twice as hard, which of course is at war with us going to space, interstellar travel and eventually FTL (yes, it’s “impossible.” Our species has an history of doing the impossible on the regular. It’s just incremental steps, which are being thwarted by cutting us off at the ankles.)
That second list is also not exhaustive and I’m sure other people can contribute more instances of “this just doesn’t make sense, unless….”
Now I said I don’t believe in aliens and I don’t. I mean, base level fundamental, either aliens are utterly incomprehensible to us, or we wouldn’t realize they’re sentient. I THINK. But at the same time, if our species is much, much older, the aliens could be us.
Maybe there’s a universe of space commies, and we’re the space Americans who’ve lost the battle but not the (final war.)
Look, no, I don’t believe in any of this. This is the process I go through to create universes. I go through the evidence, see if it’s coherent, etc.
But if this were true what would be different?
And mostly I say “aliens” because I don’t like woo woo.
On the other hand, if it’s aliens I can’t do anything about it. If however it’s activity by a well-dressed gentleman of wealth and taste whose expensive perfume can never fully disguise an underlying whiff of brimstone.
…. Well, I can pray.
Even if it’s the equivalent of looking for the car keys under the street light and doesn’t make much sense.
Anyway — I don’t believe in any of this. I think. But it was worth laying out to think on.
And of course the realization that the fine arts programs by and large do not graduate into paying fields hit the internet like a freight train.
First of all, we’ve got to exclude the B.Ed. degrees in the arts. Lots of arts majors are smart enough and capable of putting up with public schools enough to get the B.Ed. Those programs will be unaffected: they make as much as any other ed degree holder. The jobs are scrambly and often require midday commutes from one school to the next to the next, but they are education jobs. They pay well, like every other public education job, with good benefits.
No, the degrees affected will be the degrees like mine, a Bachelor of Arts in Music. This degree qualifies me to do exactly one thing, which is, go apply for a Master of Arts program. Had I done so, that would have qualified me to apply for a Doctoral program, the graduates of which are then eligible to compete for the very few professor of music jobs.
As it happens, I have a now-local friend who is, oh, about four or five years older than me, who did exactly that. She has a pile of student loans, and is paying them back on a professor salary, which is not nearly as well compensated as it used to be. Still not bad, but not what we’d call high paying.
I do not and am not. I was an academic full ride student, and could study anything I wanted as long as I kept my grades up. And I have spent the last decades working as a freelance musician, a little of this, a little of that, some weddings, some funerals, lots of teaching, some decidedly non-music-related gigs (points at Sarah), and that is very typical of my classmates, including those who did go on to get more degrees, including those who borrowed money. Dr. Professor Friend is, in fact, up for tenure this year, which is to say, she has just barely been a professor long enough to be eligible to apply. She will probably have her student loans paid off before she retires: she’s very frugal. Her first decade or so out of school she took whatever part time gigs she could get. It is a bad field to go into.
These degrees are demanded by the institutions for a look-in at the professor jobs, and there are more of us who would like to work professionally in the field than there are jobs available. Many more.
The Arts, with this rule, will become the property of rich kids and full ride scholarship kids, and the closure or reduction of most college arts programs, which means there will be no choir or theater for students in other majors to participate in. I do not like this. I think it will be bad for Art, and make the fields even more self-referential and nonsense-prone. I think the entire point of college was to expose students to a broad variety of information, and closing the arts departments will remove a large amount of human endeavor from the curriculum. (Especially since it looks like History is also in the same position of non-paying degrees.)
But I very much more dislike seeing my friends, my colleagues, kept in poverty, scrambling to pick up odd gigs, trying to make ends meet, when they would have done better to not have that mountain of debt, and would still be working at the coffee shop, the hardware store, the grocery, and performing and teaching on the side.
I think we have need of a great deal more educational reform, and that probably eliminating all federally backed student loans would be a good start, but as a prologue, this will do. It will slow the bleeding. It will help stop the old lie that if you study what you love the money will follow. Maybe it will help us get some reform into the high schools. That’s probably too much to hope for, for something that will affect only four or five percent of college students, but it might start the process.
Take what you will from this, and use it for your arguments with well-intentioned and naive folks, who haven’t and don’t work in the Arts, or who worked in the Arts two generations ago when it was a different career. Please.
