A rainbow over the ashes. San Francisco is even more insane than LA. The week Xi Jingping comes into town, his court eunuch gavin cleans it all up in days after letting it descend into mayhem for years.
I still don’t understand how they pulled off such an unprecedented feat in San Francisco. If you’ve been there, you know that there are huge crowds living in the streets. Was it mounted cops? Cattle prods? Gas vans?
That they did it unobserved is even more eerie than that they did it all.
I lived in the East Bay for 6 yrs and the storm sewer were labeled in blue “Flows to sea.” I suggest not checking the storm sewer outputs for the next couple of weeks. 🤣
And didn't they break some law that says that homeless cannot be made to move if there are no places for them to go? That's why this has grown so rapidly because of that ruling by the 9th Circuit. I'd love to see video of whoever removing those camps and people, and a time lapse video of them all coming back, if that happens.
My ability to disconnect has become unhealthy, its soooo easy to sit around and say "hmm, yeah that happens to empires" while I look for useless"kriff-krafts" on Amazon.
I don't think it's unhealthy. I used to follow the news constantly, along with social media, but I ended up in a constant state of rage, while being unable to do a damned thing to change anything that was happening. So I disconnected. I feel much better now. When I do see something and start to get angry, I just remind myself that I can't change it and I'm just hurting myself.
LOL! I had to quit Prime at the beginning of the year, or I was never gonna get my cards paid off. When I really need something for my preps, I can usually get a free 7 or 30 day trial.
I understand. There’s a point where you have to put YOUR energy into living as peaceful and positive as you can. All the energy we collectively put into sorrow and resentment affects everything around us-guilty.
It’s all local. Family. Friends. Community/church. County. State. Use the gifts that God has given us to spread His love.
One of my sources of encouragement is seeing the many people (at least on Substack) awakening to the actual evil all around us. I pray that we will have an Awakening that brings many to the Lord.
If it's the Lord you have faith in, isn't there something in the Word about you being given agency? Things are going to get WAY worse if you throw in the towel. We can beat these malfeasance-soaked imbeciles -- we only lack courage and conviction.
California is a giant pinata of rot, so it's hard to resist.
A few months ago I saw a homeless guy snoozing with his head on his backpack. This was at the corner of the Exxon where we get gas, and across the street from the grocery store. I was shocked and furious. That is NOT OK here in small town South Carolina.
The key to understanding all of this is understanding weaponized resentment.
Politicians know that they can get power and get RICH by appealing to the resentments of people who have failed in life, and being gay is a failure. No one was born gay. It is just a bad choice in life, albeit a choice often conditioned by having been sexually molested by a gay man as a boy. Most gay men were molested as boys, and they will admit it if pressed. It's an open secret among them.
BLM is weaponized resentment of the failure of blacks, due itself to resentful black culture.
Feminism is weaponized resentment of men for slights on the playground decades ago, and for their innate physical weakness relative to men.
Marxism is nothing but the resentment of the rich, a way to make everyone poor just to feel better about themselves. (Georgism is a truly practical answer, btw, because it would not impoverish or oppress anyone.)
All of the left's ideology is resentment alone, and those resentful people elect the most corrupt imaginable grifters as long as those grifters, like Newscum and Pelosi, say the right words to sooth the pain of their resentments.
"Man would fain be great and sees that he is little; would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults." - Pascal
We can try to debate everything under the sun with leftists, but it will get nowhere because all they really want is to injure others as a revenge for their own perceived failures. That is the unspoken truth, and no one on the left can ever speak it.
Hard agree. Literal resentment, with avenues for expression provided by skilled manipulators. That is why politics is now about presentation and not policies as such. No one really debates policies.
That is the appeal of mass immigration of people we know will struggle to assimilate. The resentment is practically guaranteed. And it is generational. The gift that keeps on giving.
Although I see feminism is running aground as the widespread adoption of their worldview among young women is leading to mass singledom and childlessness as men are walking away.
I think the appeal of leftism is emotional. Logic doesn't get a look in. When you talk to former leftists it is almost always observation of reality and logic that leads them away from it. But as more seem to be stuck in a permanent adolescence the more they turn away from reality because it is harsh. Like your comment on homosexuality. That view was common only 30 years ago and is now unthinkable to most.
Yes, a comparison to permanent adolescence seems about right.
Adolescents typically develop a resentment of their own lack of power relative to adults. They grow out of it as they see that they can accomplish things on their own - or maybe they don't grow out of it if they become leftists.
I think it is a form of learned helplessness. This inculcates pessimism, and that is the hook for the leftists. After all their promised utopia is basically a kind of comeuppance mentality. Once we get power we'll kick the fat cats out etc. Revenge for the impotent who, deep down, know they are inadequates.
The cure is to convince them that they are not inadequate. They can each live a long and happy life with the right attitude and hard work. The first step in that cure is to turn off the fucking TV and to never listen to NPR or read the NY Times.
At this point, we should all be very tired of pretending that being gay is anything other than an ancient and self-destructive vice, similar to alcoholism in many ways.
That's all it is, a vice which spreads anal warts, shortens lives, and prevents family formation.
When I was in grad school during the AIDS excitement 3 decades ago, a histology professor showed the class slides of the cells lining the rectum and those lining the vagina. Clearly, only one of these was "designed" for intercourse. It's science! Real science!
Widespread homosexuality portends societal collapse. Lesbian Camille Paglia rightly pointed this out in an interview a few years ago.
- Semen contains an immune suppressant which evolved to get women's bodies to not kill off the sperm before it could fertilize an egg. If you inject that immune suppressant directly into the bloodstream via a torn rectum along with a virus like AIDS, the virus has an exceptionally easy time infecting the person. This is why gay men are most susceptible to AIDS, hetero women second, and straight men third.
- Semen contains some opioid proteins which evolved to get women to enjoy sex more. Injecting those proteins into a torn rectum may account for some of the obviously addict-like behavior among gay men.
I agree that widespread homosexuality portends societal collapse. The bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah makes sense as warnings about things people knew even back then.
I read Camille Paglia in my 30’s (I’m 60 now). She put the blame back on the women! In other words, she proclaimed SELF RESPONSIBILITY. I never forgot that.
I was raised in LA, in the bluest and leftest milieu you can imagine, where everyone eats, drinks, and breathes lifestyle tolerance from the earliest age. I’ve come around entirely to your point of view.
Thanks. It took me quite a while to change. I was a standard-issue liberal, but after working in San Francisco for 20 years, I lost all respect for gay men. They really are killing themselves with their lifestyles and I saw it myself. Lots of alcohol and hard drug use as well. Nothing to be proud of.
It's really surprising what living or working in a super-woke environment can do to a person's affiliations. I, too, was a good left-winger, living in rural Pennsylvania, listening to NPR, watching MSNBC, and voting for all the right candidates. Then a decade ago we moved to Vermont, hotbed of wokery, and within a year we all were listening to Tucker and voting conservative. Extended family are shocked at the change. Maybe it's that we got to see the fruits of Leftism up close.
I’m a 3rd generation SF native, born and raised. I haven’t been to that Soddom and Gemorrah for a few years. I want to keep SF in my memories when it was magnificent...especially at Christmas! Absolutely amazing!
Honestly, you sound so ignorant. Just stop. Reading your words are lowering my IQ. You don’t have to believe one way or the other about this, that, that’s fine, that’s you’re right— but what you said above is just so low vibrational and dumb. It’s pathetic— I may have gotten anal warts from your words.
I have no objection to anything that you have said, I only have a question. What does it mean to be ‘low vibrational’ because I honestly would like to know.
Rome is burning. Or if you prefer, this is really very 3rd world dictatorship. This is what you see in Venezuela or Cuba or any other dystopian hellhole. The ruling class and its activities are totally detached from the reality on the street. So you see fluffy stories about nonsense and hear happy talk while people starve and crime accelerates and dissidents are tossed in gulags or disappeared. One notable difference is that the citizens of those places know what’s going on and are either for the regime or against the regime. Whereas the unbelievable thing in America, at least in some areas, has been for the public to pretend that somehow everything is normal while clearly it’s on the skids, particularly in what used to be the richest, most cosmopolitan areas, which are now the Deep State prison cities. Life in America is very different culturally and on a practical level than it was only 5 years ago. Maybe this is a long reach, but it’s my impression that this phenomenon also dovetails with the incredible naïveté of the upper middle class nitwits marching for Hamas. It’s all of a piece as Antonio Garcia Martinez points out in one of the best pieces to date on the war in the ME:
“Contemporary society lives in a miasma of showy hypocrisy. Elites talk of diversity and inclusion and then send their kids to private schools. Everyone among a certain class tweeted out #BLM and “defund the police,” and then protected themselves from the resulting wave of urban violence, which impacted mostly minorities, by living in upscale neighborhoods. Similarly, Western political elites will clamor for a “two-state solution,” but it will be Jewish children whose heads will be bashed in if the approach fails (as indeed it did, and they were). The two-state solution is not the way out of the current situation: It’s how we got here.
Westerners view the Middle East with a new wokified Orientalism: It’s an exotic stage on which to project (if not enact) their own political dramas around identity and oppression. The problem is that the liberal mind cannot imagine what’s inside the illiberal mind; the entire thrust of a liberal education ensures that impossibility. So you have well-meaning (neo) liberals like Noah Smith who propose that simply lifting Gaza’s per capita GDP will pacify it forever. If only they had a bit more disposable income, they’d beat their swords into plowshares (to echo Isaiah), or their AK-47s into iPhones. The liberal who loves life inside our capitalist society of spectacle has a bit of trouble understanding a populace who’d really rather kill, rape, and plunder a sworn ethnic enemy while screaming “God is great!” at the top of their lungs than founding a Y Combinator startup.
Never mind that the United States’ own misguided attempt to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy caused more civilian deaths—roughly 200,000 by most accounts—than 10 Israels would cause in a decade. Why doesn’t everyone want what we want?, laments the well-meaning liberal, as yet another crusading liberal experiment abroad fails miserably.
Israel is now an outcast among nations for the same reason the Jew was an outcast among European peoples: a stubborn refusal to abandon his traditions and peoplehood, and an equally stubborn refusal to take up the universalist crusade of the Christian gospels and its secular descendents like liberalism and wokeness.”
Whether it’s the homeless guy down the road starting a massive blaze or the carnage in the ME, these folks will be living in LaLa Land, until the fire is upon them.
The world in which I was fortunate enough to be raised is no more.
We watched it happen. Hell, we made it happen. We deliberately, afflicted as we are with a generations long case of terminal complacency, set about destroying all of that which had made us great.
Now all that remains is to apathetically gaze at our collective navels, and watch what's left of the freest, richest society ever known swirl into the sewer that is socialism.
LA is a third world country no one is reporting on. I just checked the covers of WSJ, CNN, MSNBC and the fire and destruction is not a headline, so far. California may just be a failed state. I don’t know what’s working well there, the power grid? The freeway system? Crime? Drugs? Police? Last but not least public education?
Well the bright side is, it might not be too long before you don't have to circle the Von's parking lot for 45 minutes before finding a pigeon hole for a parking spot.
CA bureaucracy created the "pigeon hole" parking lot. The CA building code requires a certain number of spaces, based on occupancy load. New construction is squeezed into tighter and tighter spaces to produce more marginal profit to overcome the growing costs of doing business ( min wage mandates, ever increasing taxes on everything from rain water capture, to plastic bag use), and this is overcome with more consumer traffic. Push all that into the shrinking available land for parking, take up a certain share for chinese made solar arrays, dedicated spaces for "international laborers", hocking their wares snd services, and viola, pigeon hole parking spaces. Go to any non-coastal state, and notice the difference in parking lot layout and size.
And don’t worry, they cleaned up San Fran I hear for Xi to come visit with Newsom and even to meet with the demented Biden next week. Rest assured Californians - they’ll sell you all out. Lol.
It’s NOT Californians. It’s stupid lefties that don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. If you go toward the mountains and rural areas of CA, it’s all about freedom and ✝️.
Freedom? And lavender Jesus? Kewl. But...what if the problem is ignorant rightwing authoritarians? This may come as a surprise to you but your country has way too many of those, like DOUBLE the percentage of similar (ostensibly developed, lol) nations. NO WONDER someone thinks they need more guns than people (who could it be...not the authoritarians, Shirley ;)
I am conservative. There are many types of conservatives. We aren’t uniform in our thinking like lefties are. However if there is a thread that runs throughout all forms of conservativism it is none of us want others running our lives. We are all for government staying out of our lives. The conservative movement is characterized by being ANTI -Authoritarian.
c/p of a comment I made on SH's Stack: "I feel like I don't even live here anymore. I'm just observing life as it's happening around me... It's like I rented a movie that sucks, but there's nothing else to do so I let it play, not really watching it, with a faint hope that it'll somehow get better, even though I know it won't...."
A rainbow over the ashes. San Francisco is even more insane than LA. The week Xi Jingping comes into town, his court eunuch gavin cleans it all up in days after letting it descend into mayhem for years.
It's important to put on a good show for a major communist
Gotta please the boss. Recently having received in person his orders regarding conditions for the visit.
Wouldn't want to go the way of Mayor Adams
lol
Just in case you didn't see it, Newsom admits it's true they only cleaned it up because of the leaders:
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/monday-comes-around (first video, not too far down the page)
Hi Chris - finally saw this article in the WSJ today. You’ll be glad to know Pete Buttigieg has offered assistance...https://www.wsj.com/us-news/los-angeles-i-10-freeway-shutdown-expected-to-snarl-traffic-75cac141?st=01z52b2krq0rscu&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Well they are butthole buddies.
Xi only gives and Newsom only receives (at either end).
Yep
I still don’t understand how they pulled off such an unprecedented feat in San Francisco. If you’ve been there, you know that there are huge crowds living in the streets. Was it mounted cops? Cattle prods? Gas vans?
That they did it unobserved is even more eerie than that they did it all.
Yeah - just what did SF do with all the homeless? Is anybody there asking?
I lived in the East Bay for 6 yrs and the storm sewer were labeled in blue “Flows to sea.” I suggest not checking the storm sewer outputs for the next couple of weeks. 🤣
And didn't they break some law that says that homeless cannot be made to move if there are no places for them to go? That's why this has grown so rapidly because of that ruling by the 9th Circuit. I'd love to see video of whoever removing those camps and people, and a time lapse video of them all coming back, if that happens.
I’m surprised they didn’t imprison all the dissidents
demoralization is too mild a word Yuri. Yeshua did a much better job with describing end times
My ability to disconnect has become unhealthy, its soooo easy to sit around and say "hmm, yeah that happens to empires" while I look for useless"kriff-krafts" on Amazon.
I don't think it's unhealthy. I used to follow the news constantly, along with social media, but I ended up in a constant state of rage, while being unable to do a damned thing to change anything that was happening. So I disconnected. I feel much better now. When I do see something and start to get angry, I just remind myself that I can't change it and I'm just hurting myself.
Yeah, but I buy too many damn kriff-krafts!....:)
What are kriff-krafts?
I just made it up. Sounded silly enough for the stacks
LOL! I had to quit Prime at the beginning of the year, or I was never gonna get my cards paid off. When I really need something for my preps, I can usually get a free 7 or 30 day trial.
You wanted to know what kriff-krafts were because of "buying" FOMO....LOLOL...JJ....:)
Unnecessary ‘Stuff’, probably 😂
I’m with you Ryan. I’m trying to figure out how to convince my wife that I need a new 1x6x24 ‘Kriff-Kraft’ so I can ‘see’ better...
You deserve it!
Where I’m at. Lord’s will, whatever happens now.
I understand. There’s a point where you have to put YOUR energy into living as peaceful and positive as you can. All the energy we collectively put into sorrow and resentment affects everything around us-guilty.
God holds me up and strengthens me.
It’s all local. Family. Friends. Community/church. County. State. Use the gifts that God has given us to spread His love.
One of my sources of encouragement is seeing the many people (at least on Substack) awakening to the actual evil all around us. I pray that we will have an Awakening that brings many to the Lord.
I think this awakening is helped by the dysfunction most cannot ignore. Many have no mental framework yet to process it, but it starts with noticing.
So many facts. Get together with the like-minded people in your area (or out of it!)
Being able to speak freely is incredibly liberating.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/santa-fe-a-snowy-screaming-success
If it's the Lord you have faith in, isn't there something in the Word about you being given agency? Things are going to get WAY worse if you throw in the towel. We can beat these malfeasance-soaked imbeciles -- we only lack courage and conviction.
At this point, the most important thing we can do is try to become as self-sufficient as possible. It's really the only way to fight back.
Seriously?
There's not a person here that ain't going down swinging.
Just commiserating.
It's ok; nobody here is gonna wait for the jack boots to show up at the door.
Ryan, I've sometimes wondered if Substack was developed as a convenient source for aggregating the identities of those who would "go down swinging."
It is. It's like a box canyon.
Oh well, we'll just have to scale the walls
Count me in.
This 100%. Can’t muster the effort to care. Like trying to bail out the Titanic.
Make sure you pay close attention to your own hometown first before bashing beyond-your-backyard...
We're all on the same team man.
We'll be in the foxhole with you.
Hold your fire for the enemy.
If we’re all on the same team...who is the enemy? Maybe Walt Kelly was right....
You're either for totalitarianism or your not.
How about those teams.
Are job is to wake up those who can't distinguish the two.
The totalitarians are gone; their contempt for us measures their purity.
California is a giant pinata of rot, so it's hard to resist.
A few months ago I saw a homeless guy snoozing with his head on his backpack. This was at the corner of the Exxon where we get gas, and across the street from the grocery store. I was shocked and furious. That is NOT OK here in small town South Carolina.
The Amazon effect, the results of combining bread AND the circus, on a CCP redistribution platform.
No doubt, right?!
Me toooo Ryan Gardner .
The key to understanding all of this is understanding weaponized resentment.
Politicians know that they can get power and get RICH by appealing to the resentments of people who have failed in life, and being gay is a failure. No one was born gay. It is just a bad choice in life, albeit a choice often conditioned by having been sexually molested by a gay man as a boy. Most gay men were molested as boys, and they will admit it if pressed. It's an open secret among them.
BLM is weaponized resentment of the failure of blacks, due itself to resentful black culture.
Feminism is weaponized resentment of men for slights on the playground decades ago, and for their innate physical weakness relative to men.
Marxism is nothing but the resentment of the rich, a way to make everyone poor just to feel better about themselves. (Georgism is a truly practical answer, btw, because it would not impoverish or oppress anyone.)
All of the left's ideology is resentment alone, and those resentful people elect the most corrupt imaginable grifters as long as those grifters, like Newscum and Pelosi, say the right words to sooth the pain of their resentments.
"Man would fain be great and sees that he is little; would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults." - Pascal
We can try to debate everything under the sun with leftists, but it will get nowhere because all they really want is to injure others as a revenge for their own perceived failures. That is the unspoken truth, and no one on the left can ever speak it.
Resentment and hatred.
Packaged as love, kindness, and tolerance.
Whoa to those who call evil, good…
Woe.
Sorry. Sometimes, I just can't not do it.
Maybe I meant to right it that way…
Write.
Wright!
I too would like it to stop.
You can edit comments.
You can't edit someone else's comments.
True.
Hard agree. Literal resentment, with avenues for expression provided by skilled manipulators. That is why politics is now about presentation and not policies as such. No one really debates policies.
That is the appeal of mass immigration of people we know will struggle to assimilate. The resentment is practically guaranteed. And it is generational. The gift that keeps on giving.
Although I see feminism is running aground as the widespread adoption of their worldview among young women is leading to mass singledom and childlessness as men are walking away.
Yes, every single leftist policy results in suffering for the many while shoveling more money up to the very rich.
Eventually you'd think leftists would want to stop hurting themselves. Maybe the pleasure of hurting others outweighs the pain.
I also see young women turning away from militant feminism as they see those older feminists now becoming childless cat ladies.
I think the appeal of leftism is emotional. Logic doesn't get a look in. When you talk to former leftists it is almost always observation of reality and logic that leads them away from it. But as more seem to be stuck in a permanent adolescence the more they turn away from reality because it is harsh. Like your comment on homosexuality. That view was common only 30 years ago and is now unthinkable to most.
Yes, a comparison to permanent adolescence seems about right.
Adolescents typically develop a resentment of their own lack of power relative to adults. They grow out of it as they see that they can accomplish things on their own - or maybe they don't grow out of it if they become leftists.
I think it is a form of learned helplessness. This inculcates pessimism, and that is the hook for the leftists. After all their promised utopia is basically a kind of comeuppance mentality. Once we get power we'll kick the fat cats out etc. Revenge for the impotent who, deep down, know they are inadequates.
I agree.
The cure is to convince them that they are not inadequate. They can each live a long and happy life with the right attitude and hard work. The first step in that cure is to turn off the fucking TV and to never listen to NPR or read the NY Times.
Being gay is literally not a failure— it’s just being gay. Don’t be a moron. You came across very intelligent… until not
At this point, we should all be very tired of pretending that being gay is anything other than an ancient and self-destructive vice, similar to alcoholism in many ways.
That's all it is, a vice which spreads anal warts, shortens lives, and prevents family formation.
Let's stop lying about it.
When I was in grad school during the AIDS excitement 3 decades ago, a histology professor showed the class slides of the cells lining the rectum and those lining the vagina. Clearly, only one of these was "designed" for intercourse. It's science! Real science!
Widespread homosexuality portends societal collapse. Lesbian Camille Paglia rightly pointed this out in an interview a few years ago.
Some more weird biology facts about anal sex:
- Semen contains an immune suppressant which evolved to get women's bodies to not kill off the sperm before it could fertilize an egg. If you inject that immune suppressant directly into the bloodstream via a torn rectum along with a virus like AIDS, the virus has an exceptionally easy time infecting the person. This is why gay men are most susceptible to AIDS, hetero women second, and straight men third.
- Semen contains some opioid proteins which evolved to get women to enjoy sex more. Injecting those proteins into a torn rectum may account for some of the obviously addict-like behavior among gay men.
I agree that widespread homosexuality portends societal collapse. The bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah makes sense as warnings about things people knew even back then.
I read Camille Paglia in my 30’s (I’m 60 now). She put the blame back on the women! In other words, she proclaimed SELF RESPONSIBILITY. I never forgot that.
I was raised in LA, in the bluest and leftest milieu you can imagine, where everyone eats, drinks, and breathes lifestyle tolerance from the earliest age. I’ve come around entirely to your point of view.
Thanks. It took me quite a while to change. I was a standard-issue liberal, but after working in San Francisco for 20 years, I lost all respect for gay men. They really are killing themselves with their lifestyles and I saw it myself. Lots of alcohol and hard drug use as well. Nothing to be proud of.
It's really surprising what living or working in a super-woke environment can do to a person's affiliations. I, too, was a good left-winger, living in rural Pennsylvania, listening to NPR, watching MSNBC, and voting for all the right candidates. Then a decade ago we moved to Vermont, hotbed of wokery, and within a year we all were listening to Tucker and voting conservative. Extended family are shocked at the change. Maybe it's that we got to see the fruits of Leftism up close.
Yes, San Francisco has literally turned to shit under the far left. Sad, because the location cannot be beat, one of the best on earth.
I’m a 3rd generation SF native, born and raised. I haven’t been to that Soddom and Gemorrah for a few years. I want to keep SF in my memories when it was magnificent...especially at Christmas! Absolutely amazing!
Marxists have destroyed SF.
I'm also sad because it's a really beautiful location. I don't go there anymore either.
Honestly, you sound so ignorant. Just stop. Reading your words are lowering my IQ. You don’t have to believe one way or the other about this, that, that’s fine, that’s you’re right— but what you said above is just so low vibrational and dumb. It’s pathetic— I may have gotten anal warts from your words.
Truth is hard for some people 😉.
I have no objection to anything that you have said, I only have a question. What does it mean to be ‘low vibrational’ because I honestly would like to know.
Please and thank you.
Explain it too us.
Why do you insult these people?
The truth is not an insult. It may be tactless to speak the truth, but it remains the truth.
Gayness is just the same ancient vice it ever was, spread primarily through homo-pedophilia, which is a horrible crime.
I speaking to JG
Your eyes are brown, hater.
Rome is burning. Or if you prefer, this is really very 3rd world dictatorship. This is what you see in Venezuela or Cuba or any other dystopian hellhole. The ruling class and its activities are totally detached from the reality on the street. So you see fluffy stories about nonsense and hear happy talk while people starve and crime accelerates and dissidents are tossed in gulags or disappeared. One notable difference is that the citizens of those places know what’s going on and are either for the regime or against the regime. Whereas the unbelievable thing in America, at least in some areas, has been for the public to pretend that somehow everything is normal while clearly it’s on the skids, particularly in what used to be the richest, most cosmopolitan areas, which are now the Deep State prison cities. Life in America is very different culturally and on a practical level than it was only 5 years ago. Maybe this is a long reach, but it’s my impression that this phenomenon also dovetails with the incredible naïveté of the upper middle class nitwits marching for Hamas. It’s all of a piece as Antonio Garcia Martinez points out in one of the best pieces to date on the war in the ME:
“Contemporary society lives in a miasma of showy hypocrisy. Elites talk of diversity and inclusion and then send their kids to private schools. Everyone among a certain class tweeted out #BLM and “defund the police,” and then protected themselves from the resulting wave of urban violence, which impacted mostly minorities, by living in upscale neighborhoods. Similarly, Western political elites will clamor for a “two-state solution,” but it will be Jewish children whose heads will be bashed in if the approach fails (as indeed it did, and they were). The two-state solution is not the way out of the current situation: It’s how we got here.
Westerners view the Middle East with a new wokified Orientalism: It’s an exotic stage on which to project (if not enact) their own political dramas around identity and oppression. The problem is that the liberal mind cannot imagine what’s inside the illiberal mind; the entire thrust of a liberal education ensures that impossibility. So you have well-meaning (neo) liberals like Noah Smith who propose that simply lifting Gaza’s per capita GDP will pacify it forever. If only they had a bit more disposable income, they’d beat their swords into plowshares (to echo Isaiah), or their AK-47s into iPhones. The liberal who loves life inside our capitalist society of spectacle has a bit of trouble understanding a populace who’d really rather kill, rape, and plunder a sworn ethnic enemy while screaming “God is great!” at the top of their lungs than founding a Y Combinator startup.
Never mind that the United States’ own misguided attempt to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy caused more civilian deaths—roughly 200,000 by most accounts—than 10 Israels would cause in a decade. Why doesn’t everyone want what we want?, laments the well-meaning liberal, as yet another crusading liberal experiment abroad fails miserably.
Israel is now an outcast among nations for the same reason the Jew was an outcast among European peoples: a stubborn refusal to abandon his traditions and peoplehood, and an equally stubborn refusal to take up the universalist crusade of the Christian gospels and its secular descendents like liberalism and wokeness.”
Whether it’s the homeless guy down the road starting a massive blaze or the carnage in the ME, these folks will be living in LaLa Land, until the fire is upon them.
Very well summarized Sir!
The world in which I was fortunate enough to be raised is no more.
We watched it happen. Hell, we made it happen. We deliberately, afflicted as we are with a generations long case of terminal complacency, set about destroying all of that which had made us great.
Now all that remains is to apathetically gaze at our collective navels, and watch what's left of the freest, richest society ever known swirl into the sewer that is socialism.
Chin up and fight back however you can. Don’t roll over for the morons and sadists.
LA is a third world country no one is reporting on. I just checked the covers of WSJ, CNN, MSNBC and the fire and destruction is not a headline, so far. California may just be a failed state. I don’t know what’s working well there, the power grid? The freeway system? Crime? Drugs? Police? Last but not least public education?
Well the bright side is, it might not be too long before you don't have to circle the Von's parking lot for 45 minutes before finding a pigeon hole for a parking spot.
CA bureaucracy created the "pigeon hole" parking lot. The CA building code requires a certain number of spaces, based on occupancy load. New construction is squeezed into tighter and tighter spaces to produce more marginal profit to overcome the growing costs of doing business ( min wage mandates, ever increasing taxes on everything from rain water capture, to plastic bag use), and this is overcome with more consumer traffic. Push all that into the shrinking available land for parking, take up a certain share for chinese made solar arrays, dedicated spaces for "international laborers", hocking their wares snd services, and viola, pigeon hole parking spaces. Go to any non-coastal state, and notice the difference in parking lot layout and size.
And don’t worry, they cleaned up San Fran I hear for Xi to come visit with Newsom and even to meet with the demented Biden next week. Rest assured Californians - they’ll sell you all out. Lol.
It’s NOT Californians. It’s stupid lefties that don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. If you go toward the mountains and rural areas of CA, it’s all about freedom and ✝️.
Sanity starts twenty miles away from the ocean.
Lol! I’m 3 blocks from the ocean. Nature has been my savior, besides God/Creator. But nature is God.
I need to make peace WHEREVER I am. That is the key, in my opinion.
Freedom? And lavender Jesus? Kewl. But...what if the problem is ignorant rightwing authoritarians? This may come as a surprise to you but your country has way too many of those, like DOUBLE the percentage of similar (ostensibly developed, lol) nations. NO WONDER someone thinks they need more guns than people (who could it be...not the authoritarians, Shirley ;)
I’m basically an anarchist. Unfortunately, people don’t live by natural law or a moral code. I do.
So, I have guns to protect myself, and that’s my right.
I’m the gal who just wants to be left alone.
Said this to swedish feminists, and they let out a mighty reet:
"Nothing has made women more equal than the right to own and carry guns"
Any woman should ask why male feminists wants to deny women the opportunity to carry weapons.
That’s why firearms are called, “the great equalizer”, for all.
Right wing authoritarians?
I am conservative. There are many types of conservatives. We aren’t uniform in our thinking like lefties are. However if there is a thread that runs throughout all forms of conservativism it is none of us want others running our lives. We are all for government staying out of our lives. The conservative movement is characterized by being ANTI -Authoritarian.
Totally agree. It is tiresome seeing people with a fully-approved downloaded version of conservatism that is basically Nazis minus the uniforms.
Indeed, the great criticism of modern conservatives is how much they are willing to let slip so as not to intrude in others lives.
I too am driven by a desire to keep people out of my life. But as we now know our enemies will come at us 24/7.
c/p of a comment I made on SH's Stack: "I feel like I don't even live here anymore. I'm just observing life as it's happening around me... It's like I rented a movie that sucks, but there's nothing else to do so I let it play, not really watching it, with a faint hope that it'll somehow get better, even though I know it won't...."
Epic. Perfect way to encapture the "feeling"
The movie doesn’t get better, but it does end, and then we go outside.
Why do I suspect most people ain't gonna like the ending?