Regarding political action, I think the problem is that the people in power - the upper end of the professional managerial class - have deliberately made it so that the plebs can't change things easily.
That of course is the big reason why they hate Donald Trump and Elon Musk and people like them because those people do actually change things and in fact solve long standing problems while doing so.
Solving problems is of course anathema to the PMC because solving a problem means it does away and nothing needs to be spent on it any more. The PMC want to "manage" problems because managing the problem leads to funding and jobs for the sisterhood and so on.
The problem the PMC have is that, despite all their desperate attempts at denial, people are noticing more and more that the PMC is not delivering what it says it is and yes, I know it takes 10 years of rinse repeat in LA to get nothing, but nationally that isn't the case so much.
Nor is it in other countries. In the YooKay, we thought Brexit would solve the problem. it didn't because the PMC just pretended to implement it while doing a deliberately shit job and ignoring completely the underlying concern. They are going to get a Reform like wake up call unless they manage to actually ban the party or cheat blatently, and in that case I expect actual revolt. Elsewhere much the same, from Japan to Chile voters are electing candidates who promise to solve stuff and not manage decline. Some of them will fail, some of them will solve things the wrong way, but the desire is there. It just takes a while
cf. Gavin Newsom and "homelessnessness," the perfect no-info platform that can never be achieved and can mean whatever he wants and bankroll bureaucratic soldiers.
Discomfort has to be seriously ramped up for any action from the populace. You basically have to take away people's toilet paper for any sustained attention, and most frogs will get boiled regardless.
I had read somewhere that it was 15 million. Maybe that was just the steak. Or just the lobster. Not both. Anyway… Divided by 1.3 million active service members that was $11 each. They damn well deserve it.
Or they think nothing about the billions of fraud ( that we know about) found in one state. Trillions sent overseas to their home country. Just the tip of the iceberg. But feeding our troops a special meal, while they sacrifice for our country - well now that’s a outrage🤷🏻♀️
I’m currently on vacation in Europe. I paid a couple of hundred dollars to ascend into the atmosphere and cross half the globe in the span of a few hours. I showed a stranger employed by a foreign government a picture of my face and he allowed me inside his country. For the cost of a sandwich I got to spend time in the room with hundreds of priceless and beautiful works of art. I am not “rich” or anywhere close to it by any of the relative metrics we use to discuss such things in contemporary America but by any reasonable historical standard I am unfathomably blessed. Our problems are real. But the mainstream discourse is written by and for people who, largely, are blinded to blessing by their own inflated sense of self-importance. The point is not to change Los Angeles or hold Karen Bass accountable or mourn Renee Good, the point is memememememe, look at me, listen to me. That is the only way to understand it properly.
I think this is a sign that the Left is losing. They have controlled the media for decades now and exaggerated everything to the nth degree. Normal people are numb to it. Life goes on as we wait for the hysterical joyless woke scolds to fade away.
My sense is that the left is losing but the right isn't winning. Obamacare is a disaster, for example, and everyone knows it, but the Republicans who control the White House and both branches of Congress won't repeal it and replace it. We have cancer on the left and a void on the right.
We don't have a void on the right, we have another cancer tumor, being fed by the same junk food that feeds the left. If the right rolls over and lets the left do as they please, they can continue to enjoy their kickbacks while pretending they really care about us.
Either the right skipped the class on what happens to Controlled Opposition in communist countries or they're just too slimy to care.
what I find fascinating is the strange new trend to fiercely love and protect their own learned helplessness. that tells me there's enough power in it to feed both monsters. meanwhile the cancer has not only become sentient... it's working on points for style
No one is winning except for the politicians. Congress, both houses, both parties need to be cleaned out. It’s a rats nest, an abomination. Nothing (I wish there was an emoji for screaming rage) will be done about the massive fraud, nothing will be done about voter fraud ie ballot harvesting, nothing will be done about allowing people who publicly state their goals are to convert you to their religion or murder you. Nothing. God help us.
Good luck it’s a religious war , come to Dearborn, Mich . I hope the people of Iran want democracy and want to be westernized. The women are suppressed by choice , even in America.
This whole "steak and lobster" thing is stupid. I mean, what correct-thinking person doesn't think the entire welfare apparatus isn't a waste of money?
Since congress, (Dingbat Dingell included) is content to waste about $93 Billion every half hour on corruption and fraud, flyspecking the military for a food expenditure is especially insulting. It’s also a blatant attempt to smear Sec. Hegseth.
100 years ago we in Ohio would not have known who Karen Bass (or her then equivalent) was. 50 years ago we might have heard about the huge fires in LA the same week they happened and had some criticism of Bass. Now we see them in real time so the people monetizing disaster have to spice up the event in order to get our attention and I know who Bass is and shake my head in disgust at what a poor mayor she is.
What has changed? The manner in which someone is selling us the news. Karen Bass is no more disgusting today that her rent-seeking predecessors were 100 years ago, I just know about it, and know about instantly. My outrage meter goes to 11, I click in whenever I see her name in the headlines, and my provider monetizes my clicks.
Voters are unlikely to replace Karen Bass, and even if they do her replacement will be the same or worse. My outrage won't change that election. What we need is a huge natural disaster to take her off the front pages. Then we need to recognize that her lawbreaking will continue until the voters in LA care more about it than clickers in Ohio.
I suspect what we're seeing are the consequences of Hitler-Hitler-Hitler, and racist-racist-racist, and existential threat (X3)! People have become inured to the constant rage so constant rage doesn't sell any more and the word-churners have to move on more quickly than before in order to keep selling their rage-shit.
Nothing ever happens, in ten minutes or even ten years. Ten decades, maybe. In the Letter to the Galatians it says that Jesus came "in the fullness of time." If you read the prior 500 years if history and philosophy in that context, that phrase makes sense. What "fullness of time" is our era leading to?
That perspective may or may not be comforting but the panorama is a relief from going cross-eyed.
What it is, is opportunity. As the man said: "We can just do things".
Curmudgeons such as myself and many others (who said it a lot more eloquently, freely admitted) have pointed out since the advent of online mainstream media and social media's outrage factories that it is sound and fury signifying nothing.
Yes, cancelling was a thing - in the media, and in reality for some of us. But as many pointed out during Covid-fascism in many Western nations:
They can't fire all of us. And they didn't - some paid, some are still paying, and paid a lot too, but 99.9...9% who opposed Covid-tyranny, political correctness policies , woke, DEI and so on didn't suffer worse than nasty words online.
And that is the realisation that has sunk in as if it was an Iranian ship.
We can just do things, and all they can do is whine and nbitch and kvetch about it to each other, and no-one cares about them.
Right now it looks as if "nothing ever happens". That's because we're at the top of the slope and haven't built up speed and momentum yet. Soon, we'll hit the mogul (skiing) and the ramps, and then it'll look like "it's always been like this". In ten years we'll be (back) at "things used to be better", and in another ten we're att "nothing ever happens" again.
I mean, remember when the Cold War was the "nothing ever happens"?
Chris, I don't know if you're old enough to remember this thing called DOGE. It led to the collapse of government services and caused millions of deaths as school lunch programs were canceled and LGBTQIAA+ health clinics were shuttered and daycare centers defunded. It was a HOLOCAUST. But you might not know about it because you were distracted cramming your maw with ribeye and Chardonnay.
Chris, you've touched on something in this one that I think needs more examination. Memory and the inability to escape herd mentality. They're mad and let David Ryu know, then they're mad and let Karen Bass know. But ten minutes later they're in their group chat on *insert social media platform here* talking about what a wonderful job politician Y is doing because Chardonnay Karen and White Zinfandel Kate said so.
Ever seen a flock of birds in the air all turning and swooping the same direction simultaneously? That's called murmuration. It's also the title of a short story I wrote that's about how easy it is to propagandize and shape the opinions of the gullible and weak minded. People are similar to those birds. Turn this way, then that, and don’t remember where they were even going in the first place. The current moment, the trending topic, is all that matters. “For it is the doom of men that they forget.” Merlin, Excalibur, 1981.
I overheard a conversation recently in which two guys went from discussing how stupid it was to bring a metal pole to a protest because someone might beat you with it to agreeing that Alex Pretti was perfectly justified in bringing a gun to a protest and only hypocritical 2A types would criticize it. A “murmuration”-that’s a good way of visualizing their thought process.
Indeed! One must always be mindful of the possibility of lightning when toting metal poles at protests. I wonder if the UN has casualty numbers on these incidents?
You're right. They're so indoctrinated, so blinded by ideology, that they don't see the obvious contradiction. They can't think outside the toothpaste tube they've forced themselves into.
In my corvidly estimation you are a very bad hooman for comparing the most beautiful, skilled, Logosian avian ballet to what those gankbrained cream-lapping useless-eater chuckleschmucks do.
95+ % of politicians of both parties are too stupid to pour piss out of a boot with directions on the bottom. 99% are too stupid to hold a productive job. Dingleberry and Bass prove it every day. And that fossil Clyburn is going to run again. And life goes on.
I’m old enough to be in the Greatest Generation. Learn the Melian Dialogue. Suck it up, Buttercup, and take back what you’re owed by the left, that they sucked out of your whingeing parents. The strong take what they want and the weaklings endure what they must. Which are you?
And a year after the Melian Dialogue and destruction of Melos, Athens attempted to conquer Syracuse, but the Athenian army was destroyed. It crippled Athenian military power, emboldened Sparta, encouraged revolts in the Delian League, and led to Persian support for Sparta. Though Athens continued fighting for another decade, it never recovered its former strength, ultimately surrendering in 404 BCE.
So Melos appealed to fairness and justice but was destroyed by an imperial army. Melos destroyed, then Athens destroyed by Sparta, then Sparta defeated at Thebes….
I’d guess if we could ask the citizens of Melos, they would say get out the checkbook.
The exercise might have backfired on Athens by triggering the general rebellion they were trying to prevent.
No question it was a shitty thing to do but the reality is some nations will throw their weight around without an ounce of compassion and the rest of the world can only hope for benign neglect.
Athens attacked not for material gain—Melos was militarily and economically insignificant—but to enforce imperial dominance. So do we credit Melos for resisting although they were no match for the stronger military? Will Switzerland ultimately fall to an imperial power? Do the weaker nations always have to succumb to the demands of stronger nations and endure what they must? America stood up to the Crown, Afghans stood up to the Soviets, and America for that matter. Sometimes the strongest don’t prevail, but mostly they do.
Talk about being on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue! That’s the left’s default position and it becomes predictable and hilarious each time they step in it! 💩
Regarding political action, I think the problem is that the people in power - the upper end of the professional managerial class - have deliberately made it so that the plebs can't change things easily.
That of course is the big reason why they hate Donald Trump and Elon Musk and people like them because those people do actually change things and in fact solve long standing problems while doing so.
Solving problems is of course anathema to the PMC because solving a problem means it does away and nothing needs to be spent on it any more. The PMC want to "manage" problems because managing the problem leads to funding and jobs for the sisterhood and so on.
The problem the PMC have is that, despite all their desperate attempts at denial, people are noticing more and more that the PMC is not delivering what it says it is and yes, I know it takes 10 years of rinse repeat in LA to get nothing, but nationally that isn't the case so much.
Nor is it in other countries. In the YooKay, we thought Brexit would solve the problem. it didn't because the PMC just pretended to implement it while doing a deliberately shit job and ignoring completely the underlying concern. They are going to get a Reform like wake up call unless they manage to actually ban the party or cheat blatently, and in that case I expect actual revolt. Elsewhere much the same, from Japan to Chile voters are electing candidates who promise to solve stuff and not manage decline. Some of them will fail, some of them will solve things the wrong way, but the desire is there. It just takes a while
Great post! Hope springs eternal...
Dude, Amelia is going to summon everybody in the UK to the barricades.
cf. Gavin Newsom and "homelessnessness," the perfect no-info platform that can never be achieved and can mean whatever he wants and bankroll bureaucratic soldiers.
Discomfort has to be seriously ramped up for any action from the populace. You basically have to take away people's toilet paper for any sustained attention, and most frogs will get boiled regardless.
I had read somewhere that it was 15 million. Maybe that was just the steak. Or just the lobster. Not both. Anyway… Divided by 1.3 million active service members that was $11 each. They damn well deserve it.
Check out the Daily Arsenal YouTube channel. Videos about life on an aircraft carrier. Mind blowing.
Yes they do . Chris ‘s last video of the military kitchen was fantastic.
Ha! I forgot it was Chris whose article introduced me to the Daily Arsenal. I see now that that’s also where I got the $15M/1.3 service members
They get butthurt about a few billion for steak, but think nothing of the yearly trillion for missiles and bombs.
Or they think nothing about the billions of fraud ( that we know about) found in one state. Trillions sent overseas to their home country. Just the tip of the iceberg. But feeding our troops a special meal, while they sacrifice for our country - well now that’s a outrage🤷🏻♀️
I’m currently on vacation in Europe. I paid a couple of hundred dollars to ascend into the atmosphere and cross half the globe in the span of a few hours. I showed a stranger employed by a foreign government a picture of my face and he allowed me inside his country. For the cost of a sandwich I got to spend time in the room with hundreds of priceless and beautiful works of art. I am not “rich” or anywhere close to it by any of the relative metrics we use to discuss such things in contemporary America but by any reasonable historical standard I am unfathomably blessed. Our problems are real. But the mainstream discourse is written by and for people who, largely, are blinded to blessing by their own inflated sense of self-importance. The point is not to change Los Angeles or hold Karen Bass accountable or mourn Renee Good, the point is memememememe, look at me, listen to me. That is the only way to understand it properly.
$200 flight?
Can you book my flights please?
And I’m wondering if it was a caviar sandwich, knowing the cost of entry into European museums/galleries.
The commenter must live in the city.
I think this is a sign that the Left is losing. They have controlled the media for decades now and exaggerated everything to the nth degree. Normal people are numb to it. Life goes on as we wait for the hysterical joyless woke scolds to fade away.
My sense is that the left is losing but the right isn't winning. Obamacare is a disaster, for example, and everyone knows it, but the Republicans who control the White House and both branches of Congress won't repeal it and replace it. We have cancer on the left and a void on the right.
We don't have a void on the right, we have another cancer tumor, being fed by the same junk food that feeds the left. If the right rolls over and lets the left do as they please, they can continue to enjoy their kickbacks while pretending they really care about us.
Either the right skipped the class on what happens to Controlled Opposition in communist countries or they're just too slimy to care.
They don't care, including the Republicans who ran away from Communism (Miami Cubans).
what I find fascinating is the strange new trend to fiercely love and protect their own learned helplessness. that tells me there's enough power in it to feed both monsters. meanwhile the cancer has not only become sentient... it's working on points for style
No one is winning except for the politicians. Congress, both houses, both parties need to be cleaned out. It’s a rats nest, an abomination. Nothing (I wish there was an emoji for screaming rage) will be done about the massive fraud, nothing will be done about voter fraud ie ballot harvesting, nothing will be done about allowing people who publicly state their goals are to convert you to their religion or murder you. Nothing. God help us.
Yeah, I don't have much faith that the representatives on the right will act.
In some sense, this is how most representative governments end. It's no wonder.
Exactly… 🤬
Precisely. The leftist Democrats are losing big time but as usual, the Republicans refuse to win. They are afraid of winning.
The deadbeats on the right have a large calendar with the date circled when old Uncle Donald moves out of the WH and can’t nag them anymore.
How will we know we've won?
Good luck it’s a religious war , come to Dearborn, Mich . I hope the people of Iran want democracy and want to be westernized. The women are suppressed by choice , even in America.
Islam is not compatible with a constitutional republic. Of course, neither is the Democrat party.
Good question. Maybe when some CA districts start voting Republican again?
Maybe some specific districts, like the populous ones, on the coast.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1gm33py/californias_presidential_results_map_2020_v_2024/#lightbox
A lot of them do, the cities have been lost. Nationwide. Ban voting in the cities?
Or require voter ID
when all they do is cry and cry and no one listen or cares
When the propaganda machine goes silent.
This whole "steak and lobster" thing is stupid. I mean, what correct-thinking person doesn't think the entire welfare apparatus isn't a waste of money?
Since congress, (Dingbat Dingell included) is content to waste about $93 Billion every half hour on corruption and fraud, flyspecking the military for a food expenditure is especially insulting. It’s also a blatant attempt to smear Sec. Hegseth.
100 years ago we in Ohio would not have known who Karen Bass (or her then equivalent) was. 50 years ago we might have heard about the huge fires in LA the same week they happened and had some criticism of Bass. Now we see them in real time so the people monetizing disaster have to spice up the event in order to get our attention and I know who Bass is and shake my head in disgust at what a poor mayor she is.
What has changed? The manner in which someone is selling us the news. Karen Bass is no more disgusting today that her rent-seeking predecessors were 100 years ago, I just know about it, and know about instantly. My outrage meter goes to 11, I click in whenever I see her name in the headlines, and my provider monetizes my clicks.
Voters are unlikely to replace Karen Bass, and even if they do her replacement will be the same or worse. My outrage won't change that election. What we need is a huge natural disaster to take her off the front pages. Then we need to recognize that her lawbreaking will continue until the voters in LA care more about it than clickers in Ohio.
I suspect what we're seeing are the consequences of Hitler-Hitler-Hitler, and racist-racist-racist, and existential threat (X3)! People have become inured to the constant rage so constant rage doesn't sell any more and the word-churners have to move on more quickly than before in order to keep selling their rage-shit.
Nothing ever happens, in ten minutes or even ten years. Ten decades, maybe. In the Letter to the Galatians it says that Jesus came "in the fullness of time." If you read the prior 500 years if history and philosophy in that context, that phrase makes sense. What "fullness of time" is our era leading to?
That perspective may or may not be comforting but the panorama is a relief from going cross-eyed.
very interesting perspective
What it is, is opportunity. As the man said: "We can just do things".
Curmudgeons such as myself and many others (who said it a lot more eloquently, freely admitted) have pointed out since the advent of online mainstream media and social media's outrage factories that it is sound and fury signifying nothing.
Yes, cancelling was a thing - in the media, and in reality for some of us. But as many pointed out during Covid-fascism in many Western nations:
They can't fire all of us. And they didn't - some paid, some are still paying, and paid a lot too, but 99.9...9% who opposed Covid-tyranny, political correctness policies , woke, DEI and so on didn't suffer worse than nasty words online.
And that is the realisation that has sunk in as if it was an Iranian ship.
We can just do things, and all they can do is whine and nbitch and kvetch about it to each other, and no-one cares about them.
Right now it looks as if "nothing ever happens". That's because we're at the top of the slope and haven't built up speed and momentum yet. Soon, we'll hit the mogul (skiing) and the ramps, and then it'll look like "it's always been like this". In ten years we'll be (back) at "things used to be better", and in another ten we're att "nothing ever happens" again.
I mean, remember when the Cold War was the "nothing ever happens"?
Chris, I don't know if you're old enough to remember this thing called DOGE. It led to the collapse of government services and caused millions of deaths as school lunch programs were canceled and LGBTQIAA+ health clinics were shuttered and daycare centers defunded. It was a HOLOCAUST. But you might not know about it because you were distracted cramming your maw with ribeye and Chardonnay.
I remember the week when MILLIONS DIED!!!!!!
We hold a memorial service every year, in the future. Very moving.
Chris, you've touched on something in this one that I think needs more examination. Memory and the inability to escape herd mentality. They're mad and let David Ryu know, then they're mad and let Karen Bass know. But ten minutes later they're in their group chat on *insert social media platform here* talking about what a wonderful job politician Y is doing because Chardonnay Karen and White Zinfandel Kate said so.
Ever seen a flock of birds in the air all turning and swooping the same direction simultaneously? That's called murmuration. It's also the title of a short story I wrote that's about how easy it is to propagandize and shape the opinions of the gullible and weak minded. People are similar to those birds. Turn this way, then that, and don’t remember where they were even going in the first place. The current moment, the trending topic, is all that matters. “For it is the doom of men that they forget.” Merlin, Excalibur, 1981.
I overheard a conversation recently in which two guys went from discussing how stupid it was to bring a metal pole to a protest because someone might beat you with it to agreeing that Alex Pretti was perfectly justified in bringing a gun to a protest and only hypocritical 2A types would criticize it. A “murmuration”-that’s a good way of visualizing their thought process.
Besides, metal poles attract lightning.
Indeed! One must always be mindful of the possibility of lightning when toting metal poles at protests. I wonder if the UN has casualty numbers on these incidents?
You're right. They're so indoctrinated, so blinded by ideology, that they don't see the obvious contradiction. They can't think outside the toothpaste tube they've forced themselves into.
In my corvidly estimation you are a very bad hooman for comparing the most beautiful, skilled, Logosian avian ballet to what those gankbrained cream-lapping useless-eater chuckleschmucks do.
No shiny things for you.
CAW!
95+ % of politicians of both parties are too stupid to pour piss out of a boot with directions on the bottom. 99% are too stupid to hold a productive job. Dingleberry and Bass prove it every day. And that fossil Clyburn is going to run again. And life goes on.
Despite the fallen world we must continue to do good
Not me.
I'm flying over things and dropping rocks and big clams on them. I'm tired of all of you.
Well, except the ones who leave me a hot dog for breakfast (nitrate free), and sometimes a cookie, and do those call-and-response games in the Forest.
Them I'll feed in the desert if they ever need it.
PS--TURN OUT THE DAMN LIGHTS AT NIGHT. I'm trying to see the stars. Got an ancestor up there.
http://www.ianridpath.com/startales/corvusandcrater.html
I’m old enough to be in the Greatest Generation. Learn the Melian Dialogue. Suck it up, Buttercup, and take back what you’re owed by the left, that they sucked out of your whingeing parents. The strong take what they want and the weaklings endure what they must. Which are you?
And a year after the Melian Dialogue and destruction of Melos, Athens attempted to conquer Syracuse, but the Athenian army was destroyed. It crippled Athenian military power, emboldened Sparta, encouraged revolts in the Delian League, and led to Persian support for Sparta. Though Athens continued fighting for another decade, it never recovered its former strength, ultimately surrendering in 404 BCE.
So Melos appealed to fairness and justice but was destroyed by an imperial army. Melos destroyed, then Athens destroyed by Sparta, then Sparta defeated at Thebes….
And both Sparta and Athens crashed and burned but that doesn’t invalidate the basic truth of the Dialogue.
I’d guess if we could ask the citizens of Melos, they would say get out the checkbook.
The exercise might have backfired on Athens by triggering the general rebellion they were trying to prevent.
No question it was a shitty thing to do but the reality is some nations will throw their weight around without an ounce of compassion and the rest of the world can only hope for benign neglect.
Athens attacked not for material gain—Melos was militarily and economically insignificant—but to enforce imperial dominance. So do we credit Melos for resisting although they were no match for the stronger military? Will Switzerland ultimately fall to an imperial power? Do the weaker nations always have to succumb to the demands of stronger nations and endure what they must? America stood up to the Crown, Afghans stood up to the Soviets, and America for that matter. Sometimes the strongest don’t prevail, but mostly they do.
> I’m old enough to be in the Greatest Generation.
You're only five?
Damn, bro, you one of those Petri Dish babies like wins Olympic gold medals?
only when I compete with the women.
The Boomers start in 1946, the last year for GG is 1945. Either way I’m older than dirt.
I really like that you notice qualities of discourse and analyse it on meta level, not just what was said and if it’s fake news
Talk about being on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue! That’s the left’s default position and it becomes predictable and hilarious each time they step in it! 💩