A long drive in a weirdly uncomfortable rental car over the weekend locked my lower back and left me hobbling, as if the driver’s seat had been designed in a medieval dungeon, but I figured that some normal Monday deadlifting would get the blood flowing and fix the problem.
As a faithful reader of all your posts, but commenting rarely, I thank you for pointing out the absurdity of institutional, performative narrative enforcement, regardless of the obvious break with reality and common sense. You are a hugely entertaining and grounding sane voice with a knack for ferreting out the insane cesspool of blatant nonsense. As a fellow back pain sufferer, I feel your rental car induced pain. Keep up the great work in 2025 and enjoy your excursions into the beauty that surrounds you in the Peoples Republic of California.
Rob, good comment, glad you decided to comment today. Your name makes me wonder if we are, or were, in the same business at one time. Either way, I love this substack. Not sure why I just wrote "either way", I need the Military Command Structure Office of Candid Gender Mystique in a World Rendered Off-balance by Tactical Response Weapons and Positive Framing of Archaic Colonialist Subjugation to walk me through my transgression.
the last guy to try going through those official channels was told to lift something rather offensive to his lips instead... the specialist's "woman's penis," to be specific
I haven't seen something that incredible since the time that Captain Picard had to deal with that temporal anomaly cause by the convergence of three separate inverse tachyon pulses in the neutral zone !
Captain!
What is it, Lieutenant?
Engineering reports that the Tholians have de-contextualized the local triple nexus! Contextualization is down to 74%!
Red Alert! Shields to maximum, energize phaser banks, decouple the Heisenberg compensators, and prepare to re-contextualize the quantum flux matrix on my command!
What the navy is doing is what the soviets called “ political officers” in all military units . The soviets failed and the “ gender officers” will fail also. I also thought 47 pulled a rabbit out of the hat with the H1b “ civil war” . All illegals bad and must be removed but legal job stealers o k . 47 reframed the entire issue , now most everybody thinks the system is rigged and needs major changes. I think there was talk of expanding the H1b program in the next C R , 47 made sure that was DOA. I still think 47 is about 5 steps ahead of those who would keep America last.
I'm unvaccinated and, sadly (I assumed), died during Biden's Winter of Death, but hardly anyone noticed, probably because of all the disinformation going around at the time. My science-denying family pretend that I'm still alive. Even the dog must think my death was just a psyop. I thought things would be easier because everyone's expectations would be so low, but no one tells you that things don't really change much for us unvaccinated Covid victims.
I'm also unvaccinated, and I think I saw you in the Winter Death line about 3 or 4 skeptics behind me... I was gonna skip dying that Winter but then I freaked out over contributing to Biden's waning patience. Poor guy did his best to hide his irritation with us until that Red Shade & Marines-Ready-to-Roll Speech. Well, his displeasure with us AND shitting his pants with pneumatic regularity.
"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century"
"China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down."
"The only way for us to match them is by legislating a rising carbon price along with efficiency and renewable standards that will stimulate massive private investment in clean-tech. Hard to do with a one-party democracy."
“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”
And:
‘Damned Efficient Slavery’ vs. ‘Inefficient Freedom’
"Communism is mounting an attack upon the western world with economic weapons, Sir David Eccles, president of the Board of Trade of the United Kingdom, declared yesterday.
He said that while the western nations are pooling their military resources against any war arising from the Soviet Union, “not enough attention has been given to pooling our economic resources, either for the expansion of trade between ourselves, or for meeting the economic offensive that is coming from the Sino-Soviet bloc.”
Sir David, member of the British cabinet, addressed members of the British-American Chamber of Commerce and Trade Centre, the San Francisco World Trade Association and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.
Because the Soviets mobilize and direct all their economic resources from one centre, he said, they have a great advantage.
“Vice-President Nixon called the Russian system slavery. All right, slavery it is. But damned efficient slavery.
“The west, on the other hand, is fragmented into sovereign states, as often as not pursuing rival economic policies.
“We lack imaginative plans for expansion of the free world’s wealth. Indeed, we go our own sweet ways protecting our domestic industries to the detriment of those of our closest allies, trying to block each other’s trade when we should be collaborating for raising standards of life.
“We cherish our freedom. All right, freedom it is, but sadly inefficient freedom.”"
FF - It's the endless pursuit of "efficiency" that drives these social engineers who capture the imaginations of those with great power. Who see debate as messy and freedom as inefficient. Vilfredo Pareto, a mathematician and social science philosopher active in the late 1800's - early 1900's,
developed many theories on efficiency, optimization. Most widely known for his Pareto Principle (80-20 rule). But also for his theories on the Circulation of the Elites. How the Elon Musk's of the world end up atop any governing model. He also taught a young Benito Mussolini during his studies in Switzerland at the turn of the century. Who later lauded his "efficient" governing model, Fascism, as the best form of government, ever. Not free. But Damned Efficient.
Inefficient Freedom that welcomes debate is the secret sauce of America's success. Yet the social engineers and egos of the powerful refuse to concede their ideas of efficiency are inferior. And end up destroying it all chasing out every last bit of what they consider inefficiency, like debate and freedom. Until it all implodes. Fools never learn.
Great research, and always makes me wonder if there is true patience for their plans to gel in the distant future or if they are all just holding each other's tails as they march forward and suddenly see light at the end of their ivy league to 24 hour security NY doorman bubble tunnel.
They’ve been remarkably patient, a very long time in the making. Is why they’ve gotten so much done under our noses. The latest generation of social engineers have grown impatient, unlike their predecessors. They’re so close to finally achieving their centuries-long plan they can taste it. And want it done in their lifetime’s. Unlike their more patient predecessors. Their impatience is what has more and more of us alerted now and rising from our slumber.
If they had been more patient then most of us here exchanging the information we are, learning more and more, doing more to resist, shaping a different future would’ve been happily going about our lives oblivious to the changes happening outside our awareness. Their impatience turned the temperature of the warm water in the pot we were relaxing in up to boil so fast we’re jumping out instead of being boiled alive.
As has been done many times in history it’s the arrogance of the wicked that is their undoing. Prematurely going in for the kill thinking they have it all figured out. Underestimating the human spirit, resilience. Believing they are man-gods, and that notions of God are the opiate of the masses. Every single one of these social engineers, those who believe they are made of finer clay than all other men, possess the blood of rulers are atheists. Without exception. Every last one. The world over. It’s why Communist regimes like the Soviet Union and Communist China reject God, any church isn’t separate from the state, religions, if allowed at all, are treated like any other ordinary club with rituals. No higher power than man. They get that so wrong. Is their undoing.
I don’t think it’s “impatience” in the classic sense. I think it was social media. Much like graphite tips on its control rods caused the Chernobyl reactor to runaway and then explode, social media gave voice to the leftist drones, who felt unrelenting pressure to profess greater loyalty to avant-garde principles, driving those principles to pervert & metastasize at an ever increasing pace. Then race pimps like DiAngelo and Kendi added more fuel to the fire, only to be overtaken by mega dollar money from the Stryker & Pritzker families to foster & normalize child “gender” butchery. Again, all of this “fuel” is supercharged by social media.
That's exactly how I saw COVID, someone got overly excited and said go with it before the rest of the team was on board and before all the kinks were worked out. I'm waiting to see them start back stabbing each other.
Chris, I had a brief moment of panic reading your post over my breakfast coffee. Oh God, I thought, dementia has arrived, I just cannot understand those PowerPoint bullet points. Thankfully I soon realised the dementia is theirs, not mine.
Reading Ian Fleming's biography by Nicholas Shakespeare - excellent book, highly recommend - we reach the part during the end of the war when Fleming's AU30 unit of hand-picked commandos raced to beat the Russians to reach German naval HQ. The mission: ensure German naval documents weren't destroyed, and surrendering admirals were captured and interrogated. Upon placing them into custody, one of Fleming's first orders was as follows: every admiral and naval commander that was captured was ordered to write a 10,000 word paper on why they thought the German navy was defeated.
Want to know what was missing? Any mention of the "intersection of climate, gender, and naval security". Funny, eh?
That was an excellent Tablet article. I think we're now in the epistemic equivalent of c.1989 East Germany. The intellectual equivalent of the sledgehammers to bring the wall down are being distributed, and quickly.
"David Samuels, writing at Tablet about the development of media systems that exist to manipulate your perception — or your perception of your perception, if that makes sense — and push you down narrative paths chosen by other people: “The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia.”"
Yes, this makes perfect sense, and I'm going to toot my own horn here;
This is the analysis I and my wife did 25 years ago, and put into circulation in academia. I'm not saying Samuels or anyone else is plagiarising in any way, mind - I'm saying the analysis and realisation isn't new. It's just that it has been impossible for it to be spoken out loud until post-2020ish.
You can loop perception of perception indefinitely, not just inside one mind but (normally) between minds. Chinese whispers I believe it was called in the Royal Navy, when they used speaking tubes onboard the manowars. "Shallow on starboard bow, two cable-lengths at 20 degrees off of the forecastle" (or something actually maritime, I can just about tell the front from the rear on a boat) becomes "All hands to port, full stop and weigh anchor!" due to interference.
Of course, with what I spoke about then and many (thankfully! finally!) others with much more reach do now, is intentional as you note, the idea to install a Thought Police inside your head.
Ah, the "this side towards enemy"-end, got it! 😇 And a Happy New Year, by the way!
My father-in-law is among other things a retired pilot with a captain's license, and annoying him by being a complete ignoramous about all things nautical is great fun when we're visiting them.
"That wheel-thing with a string from a sail through it, is it supposed to be on the floor like that?"
Isn’t Trump a fascist dictator? Aren’t his supporters mindless, brainwashed fools who support whatever he says? Is it possible that Trump is a democratic leader who considers competing policy choices after hearing arguments from his constituents? Is it fathomable that Trump supporters can disagree with him and even oppose him on one issue while, at the same time, supporting his presidency? Mind blowing isn’t it?
When I was a PhD student (40+ years ago), arguing was primarily what we did. The fun part was, you could tell someone to "blow it out their a**" then go have a beer with them. "I disagree with what you said but we are still friends." Healthy, vigorous debate, intended to lead to some kind of "truth." Try doing that in academia today. (Luckily, I have been happily retired for 10-1/2 years.)
One of my very bright (but misguided) fraternity brothers was a staunch socialist. We would have raging intellectual debates (‘76 election cycle was in full swing), all in earnest but with the best of fun. And then go drink beers, as you said. Neither of us doubted the other’s character. Boy, those days are LONG gone.
Fantastic article – thanks! Personally, I don’t think the NUMBER of women is the exact key, but rather the “radical feminization” of the college environment. I think men aren’t going to college for the same basic reason the U.S. military is failing badly in its recruiting goals* – the unmistakeable message is clear that “men are sh*t and militant feminism (etc) über alles.” Who wants to spend 4(+) yrs in an environment that hates you? I was in school 1975-79 (after 3.5 yrs in the Army), and have recently been thinking, “Where would I go to school if I was a high school senior today?” The list is a LOT shorter than it was in 1975.
* The military’s primary source of recruits has been poor and middle class men from the South, the very core of those despised by today’s Illuminati.
As a woman myself, I want to be in a situation where the majority of students, or even workers, are men.
I prefer more gender balance, or where the numbers are tipped towards men.
As a real life example, I want to take an adult evening class in the spring. If the class is being taught by a woman or if I find that the majority of the class is female, I’m dropping in the first week.
Further thought on: “As a real life example, I want to take an adult evening class in the spring. If the class is being taught by a woman or…”
I recently watched a news segment (probably on FNC) about this. Community colleges are still predominately male, presumably because they don’t teach the humanities, i.e., they’re generally confined to topics with real-world application. After I retired and we bought our farm (literally), I took a CC course on welding to refresh my 47 yr old memories from high school metal shop. Oddly, as a CPA, they’d gotten very rusty. 😂
Do you think that’s due to men’s focus on order vs. women’s on emotion? I think “feminization” is an alternate label for the focus on emotion endemic in the Left’s modern agenda (i.e., all the -isms and -phobias depend on the observer’s emotional reaction), leading to the lack of comprehensible mores about communication and interaction.*
I have this nightmare vision of going on a modern date as a sophomore, with an approval app needing to be constantly cross-clicked by the girl/woman (OK to compliment my clothes, OK to open the door for me, OK to hold my hand, OK to kiss me, OK to kiss me again (required despite her leaning in…).
* – I think this is an intentional tactic by Leftists to disrupt society to advance socialist control. It has no real connection to the purported cause célèbres.
Supplemental thought – I recall young men considering college in 1972 looking FAVORABLY on the % of women at a prospective school – less competition for a marriage partner.
I too, fondly recall those late night attempts to drink the bar dry. Vigorous, and often very loud arguments between people who are still friends, fifty years later.
But Chris, this "debate" wasn't conducted, moderated, and performed by experts! Nobody even told us ahead of time what the scientifically correct conclusion was, so we could suss out which participants were the good, smart ones and which were the stupid uneducated racist fascist bigots! It was absolute chaos, a Very Dark Moment in Our Democracy.
I'm not sad to see the end of this cartoonish, Disney Adult inversion of reality that has passed for politics for the past decade, but I will miss it just a little bit. So long and thanks for all the smuggies.
The Chernobyl series has a couple of relevant quotes by Legasov:
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid". He also says, "The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all".
Thanks Chris for pointing out that part of the new normal, post November 5th, is to have these types of debates to define the contours of what reality really looks like outside of the clown world of the last 15 years. The H1B debate was clearly an example of what the Samuels article describes as a “preference cascade”. The permission structure was, immigration is good for America, diversity is our strength, then millions of illegals swarmed the southern border the last four years and swept that permission structure away.
The reconstitution of the structure then became, illegal immigration bad, legal immigration good for America because we need the top 1% of foreign workers to supplement the lack of smart and motivated Americans to make America Great Again. As the old saying goes”In God we trust, everyone else brings data”, well the new media brought data, and in a few days of intense discourse swept that permission structure away as well. Now we can have a clean sheet, reality based discussion about what America First really means, and a big part of that has to be Americans first.
I was glad to watch the debate go on. I'm woefully ignorant about the different types of legal immigration. I never considered that a legal immigration visa could be used to meet dei goals, possibly affordably.
For me, it has become clear that the H1B program has been terribly misused, and is another example of the administrative state overreaching significantly.
How many billions are the Feds, State and local governments wasting on DEIB, money that actually slows down progress and effectiveness of everything, and isn't just another line item on the budget?
As a faithful reader of all your posts, but commenting rarely, I thank you for pointing out the absurdity of institutional, performative narrative enforcement, regardless of the obvious break with reality and common sense. You are a hugely entertaining and grounding sane voice with a knack for ferreting out the insane cesspool of blatant nonsense. As a fellow back pain sufferer, I feel your rental car induced pain. Keep up the great work in 2025 and enjoy your excursions into the beauty that surrounds you in the Peoples Republic of California.
Rob, good comment, glad you decided to comment today. Your name makes me wonder if we are, or were, in the same business at one time. Either way, I love this substack. Not sure why I just wrote "either way", I need the Military Command Structure Office of Candid Gender Mystique in a World Rendered Off-balance by Tactical Response Weapons and Positive Framing of Archaic Colonialist Subjugation to walk me through my transgression.
Good luck with that, Ha!
Rob, perfect comment. Chris your voice is nourishing.
Thanks for saying it out loud for me too.
Like!
My back is really fucked up...I think I'll do some dead lifts...you must be infantry.
The question is did he check with his units gender specialist before attempting that deadlift?
🤣
the last guy to try going through those official channels was told to lift something rather offensive to his lips instead... the specialist's "woman's penis," to be specific
🤣
More like a jarhead.
I'm sure his wife isn't saying iToLDyOusO!
Oh, you've met my bride.
He sure as hell isn’t a pilot…all the “lifting” we did was hydraulic in nature…at the bar.
I think a few squat thrusts would have been better to start off.
Bingo - LOLOL
That Naval College power point slide is amazing!
"local contextualization of the triple nexus"
I haven't seen something that incredible since the time that Captain Picard had to deal with that temporal anomaly cause by the convergence of three separate inverse tachyon pulses in the neutral zone !
Captain!
What is it, Lieutenant?
Engineering reports that the Tholians have de-contextualized the local triple nexus! Contextualization is down to 74%!
Red Alert! Shields to maximum, energize phaser banks, decouple the Heisenberg compensators, and prepare to re-contextualize the quantum flux matrix on my command!
The jokes just write themselves
This is the snake eating its own tail.
What the navy is doing is what the soviets called “ political officers” in all military units . The soviets failed and the “ gender officers” will fail also. I also thought 47 pulled a rabbit out of the hat with the H1b “ civil war” . All illegals bad and must be removed but legal job stealers o k . 47 reframed the entire issue , now most everybody thinks the system is rigged and needs major changes. I think there was talk of expanding the H1b program in the next C R , 47 made sure that was DOA. I still think 47 is about 5 steps ahead of those who would keep America last.
^^^This^^^
I'm unvaccinated and, sadly (I assumed), died during Biden's Winter of Death, but hardly anyone noticed, probably because of all the disinformation going around at the time. My science-denying family pretend that I'm still alive. Even the dog must think my death was just a psyop. I thought things would be easier because everyone's expectations would be so low, but no one tells you that things don't really change much for us unvaccinated Covid victims.
I'm also unvaccinated, and I think I saw you in the Winter Death line about 3 or 4 skeptics behind me... I was gonna skip dying that Winter but then I freaked out over contributing to Biden's waning patience. Poor guy did his best to hide his irritation with us until that Red Shade & Marines-Ready-to-Roll Speech. Well, his displeasure with us AND shitting his pants with pneumatic regularity.
Im 88 and I died the first day they said I would, but for some insane reason I still think I'm not dead. Is this stochastic?
Did I die too? these last 4 years sure don't seem like heaven... being vaccinated must be a bigger sin than I thought...
😂😂😂
If only people could smell the piss that they have allowed the news media to tell them was rain on the back of their collective neck.
Some snapshots from the past that speak to this messy, inefficient debate thing:
Our One-Party Democracy - Thomas Friedman
The New York Times, September 8, 2009:
https://archive.ph/RBOvl#selection-663.0-663.310
"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century"
"China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down."
"The only way for us to match them is by legislating a rising carbon price along with efficiency and renewable standards that will stimulate massive private investment in clean-tech. Hard to do with a one-party democracy."
“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”
And:
‘Damned Efficient Slavery’ vs. ‘Inefficient Freedom’
SAN FRANCISCO (AP), January 4th, 1958
https://archive.org/details/dailycolonist0158uvic_1/mode/2up?view=theater
"Communism is mounting an attack upon the western world with economic weapons, Sir David Eccles, president of the Board of Trade of the United Kingdom, declared yesterday.
He said that while the western nations are pooling their military resources against any war arising from the Soviet Union, “not enough attention has been given to pooling our economic resources, either for the expansion of trade between ourselves, or for meeting the economic offensive that is coming from the Sino-Soviet bloc.”
Sir David, member of the British cabinet, addressed members of the British-American Chamber of Commerce and Trade Centre, the San Francisco World Trade Association and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.
Because the Soviets mobilize and direct all their economic resources from one centre, he said, they have a great advantage.
“Vice-President Nixon called the Russian system slavery. All right, slavery it is. But damned efficient slavery.
“The west, on the other hand, is fragmented into sovereign states, as often as not pursuing rival economic policies.
“We lack imaginative plans for expansion of the free world’s wealth. Indeed, we go our own sweet ways protecting our domestic industries to the detriment of those of our closest allies, trying to block each other’s trade when we should be collaborating for raising standards of life.
“We cherish our freedom. All right, freedom it is, but sadly inefficient freedom.”"
FF - It's the endless pursuit of "efficiency" that drives these social engineers who capture the imaginations of those with great power. Who see debate as messy and freedom as inefficient. Vilfredo Pareto, a mathematician and social science philosopher active in the late 1800's - early 1900's,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto
developed many theories on efficiency, optimization. Most widely known for his Pareto Principle (80-20 rule). But also for his theories on the Circulation of the Elites. How the Elon Musk's of the world end up atop any governing model. He also taught a young Benito Mussolini during his studies in Switzerland at the turn of the century. Who later lauded his "efficient" governing model, Fascism, as the best form of government, ever. Not free. But Damned Efficient.
Inefficient Freedom that welcomes debate is the secret sauce of America's success. Yet the social engineers and egos of the powerful refuse to concede their ideas of efficiency are inferior. And end up destroying it all chasing out every last bit of what they consider inefficiency, like debate and freedom. Until it all implodes. Fools never learn.
Friedman is such an absolute tool.
"The way to compete with China is to make yourself less competitive"
I often wonder what it feels like when actual excrement comes out of ones mouth.
Yep. If he was just a lone fart in the wind....
Friedman’s amazing in that respect – no matter how much he spews, his brain produces more.
I have some expertise in this area – we have 3 horses and 2 miniature donkeys. (I need to go apologize to them for bringing them up in this context.)
A classic.
Great research, and always makes me wonder if there is true patience for their plans to gel in the distant future or if they are all just holding each other's tails as they march forward and suddenly see light at the end of their ivy league to 24 hour security NY doorman bubble tunnel.
They’ve been remarkably patient, a very long time in the making. Is why they’ve gotten so much done under our noses. The latest generation of social engineers have grown impatient, unlike their predecessors. They’re so close to finally achieving their centuries-long plan they can taste it. And want it done in their lifetime’s. Unlike their more patient predecessors. Their impatience is what has more and more of us alerted now and rising from our slumber.
If they had been more patient then most of us here exchanging the information we are, learning more and more, doing more to resist, shaping a different future would’ve been happily going about our lives oblivious to the changes happening outside our awareness. Their impatience turned the temperature of the warm water in the pot we were relaxing in up to boil so fast we’re jumping out instead of being boiled alive.
As has been done many times in history it’s the arrogance of the wicked that is their undoing. Prematurely going in for the kill thinking they have it all figured out. Underestimating the human spirit, resilience. Believing they are man-gods, and that notions of God are the opiate of the masses. Every single one of these social engineers, those who believe they are made of finer clay than all other men, possess the blood of rulers are atheists. Without exception. Every last one. The world over. It’s why Communist regimes like the Soviet Union and Communist China reject God, any church isn’t separate from the state, religions, if allowed at all, are treated like any other ordinary club with rituals. No higher power than man. They get that so wrong. Is their undoing.
I don’t think it’s “impatience” in the classic sense. I think it was social media. Much like graphite tips on its control rods caused the Chernobyl reactor to runaway and then explode, social media gave voice to the leftist drones, who felt unrelenting pressure to profess greater loyalty to avant-garde principles, driving those principles to pervert & metastasize at an ever increasing pace. Then race pimps like DiAngelo and Kendi added more fuel to the fire, only to be overtaken by mega dollar money from the Stryker & Pritzker families to foster & normalize child “gender” butchery. Again, all of this “fuel” is supercharged by social media.
I can see that as a not insignificant factor.
That's exactly how I saw COVID, someone got overly excited and said go with it before the rest of the team was on board and before all the kinks were worked out. I'm waiting to see them start back stabbing each other.
No, they really did think it was time and that they were ready.
Chris, I had a brief moment of panic reading your post over my breakfast coffee. Oh God, I thought, dementia has arrived, I just cannot understand those PowerPoint bullet points. Thankfully I soon realised the dementia is theirs, not mine.
I fear those sitting in the audience, taking notes…
They are not asked to believe it, only to enforce it. History echos.
Same…I thought “What even is this?” I examined it several times before it hit me. It’s Ridiculousness. More woke ridiculousness. How does this make any sense to anyone? No wonder our military is in shambles. Instead of doing this https://youtu.be/MIYGFSONKbk?feature=shared, we should be doing this https://youtu.be/W_tm6_-mOy8?feature=shared.
This is a great comparison of Russians, the US’s, China’s, and Britain’s recruitment strategies.
Reading Ian Fleming's biography by Nicholas Shakespeare - excellent book, highly recommend - we reach the part during the end of the war when Fleming's AU30 unit of hand-picked commandos raced to beat the Russians to reach German naval HQ. The mission: ensure German naval documents weren't destroyed, and surrendering admirals were captured and interrogated. Upon placing them into custody, one of Fleming's first orders was as follows: every admiral and naval commander that was captured was ordered to write a 10,000 word paper on why they thought the German navy was defeated.
Want to know what was missing? Any mention of the "intersection of climate, gender, and naval security". Funny, eh?
That was an excellent Tablet article. I think we're now in the epistemic equivalent of c.1989 East Germany. The intellectual equivalent of the sledgehammers to bring the wall down are being distributed, and quickly.
"David Samuels, writing at Tablet about the development of media systems that exist to manipulate your perception — or your perception of your perception, if that makes sense — and push you down narrative paths chosen by other people: “The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia.”"
Yes, this makes perfect sense, and I'm going to toot my own horn here;
This is the analysis I and my wife did 25 years ago, and put into circulation in academia. I'm not saying Samuels or anyone else is plagiarising in any way, mind - I'm saying the analysis and realisation isn't new. It's just that it has been impossible for it to be spoken out loud until post-2020ish.
You can loop perception of perception indefinitely, not just inside one mind but (normally) between minds. Chinese whispers I believe it was called in the Royal Navy, when they used speaking tubes onboard the manowars. "Shallow on starboard bow, two cable-lengths at 20 degrees off of the forecastle" (or something actually maritime, I can just about tell the front from the rear on a boat) becomes "All hands to port, full stop and weigh anchor!" due to interference.
Of course, with what I spoke about then and many (thankfully! finally!) others with much more reach do now, is intentional as you note, the idea to install a Thought Police inside your head.
The end-goal is to make CrimeStop a real thing.
Pssst Rikard, as a 25 yr navy vet, I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty that the front is the pointy end.
Ah, the "this side towards enemy"-end, got it! 😇 And a Happy New Year, by the way!
My father-in-law is among other things a retired pilot with a captain's license, and annoying him by being a complete ignoramous about all things nautical is great fun when we're visiting them.
"That wheel-thing with a string from a sail through it, is it supposed to be on the floor like that?"
Cue instantly raised BP.
Isn’t Trump a fascist dictator? Aren’t his supporters mindless, brainwashed fools who support whatever he says? Is it possible that Trump is a democratic leader who considers competing policy choices after hearing arguments from his constituents? Is it fathomable that Trump supporters can disagree with him and even oppose him on one issue while, at the same time, supporting his presidency? Mind blowing isn’t it?
When I was a PhD student (40+ years ago), arguing was primarily what we did. The fun part was, you could tell someone to "blow it out their a**" then go have a beer with them. "I disagree with what you said but we are still friends." Healthy, vigorous debate, intended to lead to some kind of "truth." Try doing that in academia today. (Luckily, I have been happily retired for 10-1/2 years.)
One of my very bright (but misguided) fraternity brothers was a staunch socialist. We would have raging intellectual debates (‘76 election cycle was in full swing), all in earnest but with the best of fun. And then go drink beers, as you said. Neither of us doubted the other’s character. Boy, those days are LONG gone.
Well, of course those days are gone when women outnumber men in college.
You’re just not going to get that camaraderie in such a feminized space.
https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Fantastic article – thanks! Personally, I don’t think the NUMBER of women is the exact key, but rather the “radical feminization” of the college environment. I think men aren’t going to college for the same basic reason the U.S. military is failing badly in its recruiting goals* – the unmistakeable message is clear that “men are sh*t and militant feminism (etc) über alles.” Who wants to spend 4(+) yrs in an environment that hates you? I was in school 1975-79 (after 3.5 yrs in the Army), and have recently been thinking, “Where would I go to school if I was a high school senior today?” The list is a LOT shorter than it was in 1975.
* The military’s primary source of recruits has been poor and middle class men from the South, the very core of those despised by today’s Illuminati.
Not the number, but the proportion.
As a woman myself, I want to be in a situation where the majority of students, or even workers, are men.
I prefer more gender balance, or where the numbers are tipped towards men.
As a real life example, I want to take an adult evening class in the spring. If the class is being taught by a woman or if I find that the majority of the class is female, I’m dropping in the first week.
Further thought on: “As a real life example, I want to take an adult evening class in the spring. If the class is being taught by a woman or…”
I recently watched a news segment (probably on FNC) about this. Community colleges are still predominately male, presumably because they don’t teach the humanities, i.e., they’re generally confined to topics with real-world application. After I retired and we bought our farm (literally), I took a CC course on welding to refresh my 47 yr old memories from high school metal shop. Oddly, as a CPA, they’d gotten very rusty. 😂
Do you think that’s due to men’s focus on order vs. women’s on emotion? I think “feminization” is an alternate label for the focus on emotion endemic in the Left’s modern agenda (i.e., all the -isms and -phobias depend on the observer’s emotional reaction), leading to the lack of comprehensible mores about communication and interaction.*
I have this nightmare vision of going on a modern date as a sophomore, with an approval app needing to be constantly cross-clicked by the girl/woman (OK to compliment my clothes, OK to open the door for me, OK to hold my hand, OK to kiss me, OK to kiss me again (required despite her leaning in…).
* – I think this is an intentional tactic by Leftists to disrupt society to advance socialist control. It has no real connection to the purported cause célèbres.
Men’s focus on order and their not having a chip on one’s gendered shoulder, mainly.
Supplemental thought – I recall young men considering college in 1972 looking FAVORABLY on the % of women at a prospective school – less competition for a marriage partner.
Yes, when the gender balance was still tipped the other way.
Putting aside the corrosive environment, the mating numbers are even more heavily in the male’s favor today.
I’m not so sure about that, especially regarding the quality of women available in classes.
I mean, even simply getting laid in 2025 college, what are the prospects?
I too, fondly recall those late night attempts to drink the bar dry. Vigorous, and often very loud arguments between people who are still friends, fifty years later.
But Chris, this "debate" wasn't conducted, moderated, and performed by experts! Nobody even told us ahead of time what the scientifically correct conclusion was, so we could suss out which participants were the good, smart ones and which were the stupid uneducated racist fascist bigots! It was absolute chaos, a Very Dark Moment in Our Democracy.
I'm not sad to see the end of this cartoonish, Disney Adult inversion of reality that has passed for politics for the past decade, but I will miss it just a little bit. So long and thanks for all the smuggies.
The Chernobyl series has a couple of relevant quotes by Legasov:
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid". He also says, "The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all".
Absolutely brilliant series.
This needs to be repeated at every opportunity.
Thanks Chris for pointing out that part of the new normal, post November 5th, is to have these types of debates to define the contours of what reality really looks like outside of the clown world of the last 15 years. The H1B debate was clearly an example of what the Samuels article describes as a “preference cascade”. The permission structure was, immigration is good for America, diversity is our strength, then millions of illegals swarmed the southern border the last four years and swept that permission structure away.
The reconstitution of the structure then became, illegal immigration bad, legal immigration good for America because we need the top 1% of foreign workers to supplement the lack of smart and motivated Americans to make America Great Again. As the old saying goes”In God we trust, everyone else brings data”, well the new media brought data, and in a few days of intense discourse swept that permission structure away as well. Now we can have a clean sheet, reality based discussion about what America First really means, and a big part of that has to be Americans first.
I was glad to watch the debate go on. I'm woefully ignorant about the different types of legal immigration. I never considered that a legal immigration visa could be used to meet dei goals, possibly affordably.
For me, it has become clear that the H1B program has been terribly misused, and is another example of the administrative state overreaching significantly.
Sory about the back, I feel you.
How many billions are the Feds, State and local governments wasting on DEIB, money that actually slows down progress and effectiveness of everything, and isn't just another line item on the budget?