It's starting to seem like it may just be impossible to have a democratic society based on adults conversing and compromising with each other here in the 21st century, which is defined by life lived inside the digital panopticon and the Circe effect of this, which turns everyone into swinish rage-addled infants.
Because everyone has been primed by the virtual Pavlovian Skinner Box to vomit rage and hatred on cue (and because our media class exists only to pour gasoline on every fire), we just can't seem to approach any kind of adult acceptance of life in a free country. As in, the realization that all these issues represent conflicting rights which people may understandably disagree on: like, fetus vs mom, whose right prevails?; or, asking a business to craft a personal message they may disagree with vs compelled speech (would it be ok for a black caterer to refuse working a KKK reunion? is an obvious rejoinder); or does Affirmative Action represent racial discrimination or its opposite?
The irony here for me is that our liberal ruling class never stops preening about democracy, saving democracy, their commitment to democracy, while at the same time refusing to abide any decision they lose, and refusing to accept that different people have different values, but instead painting all opposition in the most extreme deranged terms, while also trying to ban dissent and sentence their opponents to social death. You can either be in favor of democracy or you can paint all your political opponents as evil Nazi fascists, but you can't do both.
But then again I've come to see the flaw in my thinking: in our age of "this word needs whatever i need it to mean", I guess "democracy" has come to mean: I get my way all the time and hold all power in perpetuity, or else I will try to destroy you.
Since Trump the Left has gone full Vietnam: they will destroy this village called Democracy in order to save it.
I'm no fan of "our liberal ruling class" but there's another fundamental problem with our 21st c democracy: one that no politician or pundit - Left or Right - dares say out loud. Nobody dares lay any of the blame for its failure on the wider democratic citizenry itself. To take very different (20th c) context, it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of WW2 were all about Hitler and his gang and that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Hitler and Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddably ignorant-but-opinionated, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing 'ordinary folk'.
Perhaps Western liberal democracy's greatest flaw is its tendency to flatter 'ordinary folk', absolving them of personal responsibility for the mess we're in.
It's always an interesting chicken/egg question: does the mob coalesce (even implicitly) and then the dictator appear or vice versa?
Even way back in Plato's day, he was talking about demagogues riling up the mob using fear and flattery, so this issue i think speaks to something deeper in the human psyche, probably mostly around group psychology.
We're always going to be herd animals, for better or worse, who respond to social cues and this has upsides like how people come together during war or disaster but the major downside is mob manias that can burn through societies like wildfires and convince people that all their enemies (or even just all that exists) needs to be destroyed in the name of some vague Promised Land.
Our current elite class were handed the richest strongest country in history but have been corrupted by global capital and the all the different ways there are to cash in and make multiple millions. Thus they now only represent global capital and its needs and not anything else, certainly not American citizens.
Well said. I do take issue with the idea that the mother, (or a doctor, Practitioner, etc) has the ‘right’ to kill a baby. The mother has the right to choose not being pregnant in the first place, the baby has the right to life once conceived. And Lord knows it’s not like we’re mandating conduct whilst pregnant, we have mothers deliver all the time who not only had no prenatal care, they’ve been abusing drugs and doing God knows what the whole time.
hey all i said was that people disagree and that adults in a democracy should be able to come together and have a clear-headed conversation leading to some acceptable compromise (or at the very least admit that other people and values exist and can't be wished or deleted away)...utopian, i know!
There's a million versions, but basically they're having a board meeting and the boss proposes something. Two brown nosers give brown noser answers and one guy says something totally common sense. He gets thrown out of the window for it. Maybe try searching boardroom suggestion meme.
Bitcoin fixes this. New social networks like nostr are fully decentralized, and people can do things like filter out all posts that didn’t come with a small bit of work attached. All you need to do is make it cost something to spew nonsense, and the quality of the discourse goes up like crazy.
You can’t tell somebody at work that they look good in their outfit, but non-binary furry cocker spaniel queer tree humpers can instruct your 8 year old on anal sex it out in a burlesque show. Right.
Democrats think black people can’t get into college, which is run completely by Democrats btw, because black people, according to Democrats are incapable of intellectual achievement, but if a white guy were to repeat the lyrics from a rap sing on the radio, he’s a racist. Right.
If I gave 280 billion dollars during COVID to crooks fraudulently applying for emergency loans, I’d be in Supermax for 300 years, but if the federales screw that up, well no biggie. Right.
The problem is that the ruling class is out of touch and they don’t care. They aren’t interested in equality or Justice or America for that matter. They are interested in you ShuttingTFU and letting them grind you down. The only way to make them care is either to take away their money or take away their power. At at that point we don’t have to care about these clowns either. The question is how to do it.
Is it bad that my first thought after seeing those Ukraine headlines was the classic line from the first Shrek: "Some of you will die, but that's a sacrifice I am willing to make"?
The people quoted here who are wigging out on Twitter about the supposed end of the Civil Rights Act-- well, that's exactly why I don't bother with Twitter. Among a mountain of other objections I have to Twitter, it's full of people who set their own hair on fire.
The ones mischaracterizing the Supreme Court decision which, obviously, they did not trouble to, like, uh, actually read, how much you wanna bet they have all taken 4-5 injections of the cooties juice by now? They weren't too big on reading the package inserts, either. ... Oh, right, there were no package inserts.
When the Ukraine thing started last year, people I respected posted extremely uninformed comments. I decided to delete all my tweets, prune my follows to about a dozen, private my account, and stay away for awhile. One month of absence turned into several. When SCOTUS made their Roe decision, one of my remaining follows turned her avatar into the Handmaid's Tale, so I pruned further. In the last 16 months I've probably spent less than an hour on Twitter, and my mental health has improved significantly.
Here. I'll give you another reason to stay off Twitter, Facebook, et al... For the last 6 months or so, a number of the podcasts I frequent have put up the red flag of concern over "Artificial Intelligence". Well, dig. If you understand what has been revealed regarding the government/media/malinformation complex, he media gatekeepers have been employing AI for quite a while now. Half (75%, 90%???) of the posts that bedevil you are probably AI generated. You are sparring with a ghost. Give it up. You have better things to do (like post on the Chris Bray Blog).
when i opened my costume shop in 1982, i decided that we would never make drag costumes. by drag, i did not mean legitimate cross dressed costumes that are written into the story (the men in Some Like it Hot are on the lam, the trouser roles in operas, Tootsie, Mrs Doubtfire, etc) but an individual man's perverse desire to ridicule women (james howard kunstler calls them Women as Monsters).
i opened my own business so that i could run it as a benign dictator, so that we could do things my way. a gay employee asked me once why we wouldn't make drag costumes and i told him that i found drag to be offensive and insulting to women. that is my personal feeling and as the owner of the company, i made the decisions and it was irrelevant if other people found my stance "unfair," capricious or arbitrary. maybe i'm lucky that he didn't sue me.
the reason you open your own business is not so that you can work your ass off and slave around the clock only to be told what you can and cannot do by some bureaucrat who can't actually do anything.
Right on! But my preference is for commenters to abide by the capitalization rules of standard written English. They exist for a reason and that is because text is easier to read when they are followed.
Thank you for an excellent and enjoyable read. The hysterics are definitely a sign that the sociopaths are losing.
While this SCOTUS decision is a step in the right direction, it's much too narrow. I hope I live long enough to see property rights upheld in the courts. While many forms of discrimination are morally indefensible, they should not be illegal. There should be nothing illegal about "I reserve the right to refuse service to anyone at anytime for any reason. Or no reason at all. Because it's MY STUFF."
When I was much younger and more naive, I thought that ninety percent of the trouble people have with each other was caused by people who just couldn't leave other people - and other people's stuff - TF alone, and respect their boundaries. But I was wrong. It's one hundred percent.
Good stuff. Your articles on Jim Jones are worth rereading. The amazing support he got from San Francisco politicians such as Willy Brown is terrifying.
Jim was a very smart and wily con man...he knew that if you surround liberals with poor black people and claim to be representing them in the name of Justice and Equality, it's like knowing the code to someone's alarm. these are like a hypnotist's words they're helpless against, which is why he was so successful and why the Bigotry Accusation has become the go-to move for the power hungry, it still retains the same power it did 50 years ago.
"The land reform of Tiberius Gracchus is THE BEGINNING OF AUTOCRATIC MONARCHY AND IF WE DON'T KILL HIM RIGHT NOW THE REPUBLIC IS DOOMED."
I have bad news about this comparison, however, because in our case, JFK and RFK were our Gracchi brothers and our imperial period of wealth and power is already behind us. So no, the freeways probably won't get fixed.
Whoa hang on bigot, who said anything about immigration? I for one welcome the Syrian Orontes discharging itself into our Tiber, I just think the citizens should know where Cato was getting those figs from.
My Dad told me about Jonestown when I was maybe 7. (Obviously he didn’t teach me EVERYTHING.) So I grew up oftentimes looking for that fingerprint warning sign where people base their system of beliefs on the foundation that other people who believe those things are all friends and having friends would be nice.
Very well written and 100% accurate. As you say, where will it end? And when? The worst places to live are run by "D"s and they can do nothing but agitate and riot. But they control almost all our institutions either directly or through RINO controlled opposition. The rest of us must continue to fight them but at the same time set up parallel institutions of all kinds. And look to religious groups of all faiths that see the evil these assorted communists, facists, and anarchists promote, as we do, as allies to defeat them.
You are mildly positive that this thing is in the death throws. I'm not so sure, I think it does ultimately end in its own destruction, but given the reaction of the population had to the COVID mandates (sitting down and taking it), I don't think this all ends for at least another decade, and that decade things will get worse.
I think it ends but persists, just as the New Left of the 1960s faded but left its seeds planted in the culture. We'll see. But the Dylan Mulvaneyness of the current culture is getting on everyone's last nerve, so SOME form of change has to come soon. Whether it lasts....
It's starting to seem like it may just be impossible to have a democratic society based on adults conversing and compromising with each other here in the 21st century, which is defined by life lived inside the digital panopticon and the Circe effect of this, which turns everyone into swinish rage-addled infants.
Because everyone has been primed by the virtual Pavlovian Skinner Box to vomit rage and hatred on cue (and because our media class exists only to pour gasoline on every fire), we just can't seem to approach any kind of adult acceptance of life in a free country. As in, the realization that all these issues represent conflicting rights which people may understandably disagree on: like, fetus vs mom, whose right prevails?; or, asking a business to craft a personal message they may disagree with vs compelled speech (would it be ok for a black caterer to refuse working a KKK reunion? is an obvious rejoinder); or does Affirmative Action represent racial discrimination or its opposite?
The irony here for me is that our liberal ruling class never stops preening about democracy, saving democracy, their commitment to democracy, while at the same time refusing to abide any decision they lose, and refusing to accept that different people have different values, but instead painting all opposition in the most extreme deranged terms, while also trying to ban dissent and sentence their opponents to social death. You can either be in favor of democracy or you can paint all your political opponents as evil Nazi fascists, but you can't do both.
But then again I've come to see the flaw in my thinking: in our age of "this word needs whatever i need it to mean", I guess "democracy" has come to mean: I get my way all the time and hold all power in perpetuity, or else I will try to destroy you.
Since Trump the Left has gone full Vietnam: they will destroy this village called Democracy in order to save it.
Very well said.
thanks!
happy 4th!
I'm no fan of "our liberal ruling class" but there's another fundamental problem with our 21st c democracy: one that no politician or pundit - Left or Right - dares say out loud. Nobody dares lay any of the blame for its failure on the wider democratic citizenry itself. To take very different (20th c) context, it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of WW2 were all about Hitler and his gang and that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Hitler and Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddably ignorant-but-opinionated, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing 'ordinary folk'.
Perhaps Western liberal democracy's greatest flaw is its tendency to flatter 'ordinary folk', absolving them of personal responsibility for the mess we're in.
It's always an interesting chicken/egg question: does the mob coalesce (even implicitly) and then the dictator appear or vice versa?
Even way back in Plato's day, he was talking about demagogues riling up the mob using fear and flattery, so this issue i think speaks to something deeper in the human psyche, probably mostly around group psychology.
We're always going to be herd animals, for better or worse, who respond to social cues and this has upsides like how people come together during war or disaster but the major downside is mob manias that can burn through societies like wildfires and convince people that all their enemies (or even just all that exists) needs to be destroyed in the name of some vague Promised Land.
Our current elite class were handed the richest strongest country in history but have been corrupted by global capital and the all the different ways there are to cash in and make multiple millions. Thus they now only represent global capital and its needs and not anything else, certainly not American citizens.
Because they don’t live for GOD. They live for temporal things. They live for vanity, greed, ego, lust, and the list goes on.
Don’t worry. Democracy is returning, and here’s where we find out what a bloodthirsty 🩸 Bitch Pallas Athena is...
(Shhh ...she’s us).
Well said. I do take issue with the idea that the mother, (or a doctor, Practitioner, etc) has the ‘right’ to kill a baby. The mother has the right to choose not being pregnant in the first place, the baby has the right to life once conceived. And Lord knows it’s not like we’re mandating conduct whilst pregnant, we have mothers deliver all the time who not only had no prenatal care, they’ve been abusing drugs and doing God knows what the whole time.
hey all i said was that people disagree and that adults in a democracy should be able to come together and have a clear-headed conversation leading to some acceptable compromise (or at the very least admit that other people and values exist and can't be wished or deleted away)...utopian, i know!
Haha, you know you're the guy they throw out the window in that popular meme, right?
ha dont know that one, send me a link pls
There's a million versions, but basically they're having a board meeting and the boss proposes something. Two brown nosers give brown noser answers and one guy says something totally common sense. He gets thrown out of the window for it. Maybe try searching boardroom suggestion meme.
Thunderous applause!
Especially for this gem:
"...the Left has gone full Vietnam: they will destroy this village called Democracy in order to save it."
Now if that don't sum up the modern (i.e. post-1950s) Left, then I don't know what does.
(Godsdamned autospelling f*cking thing!)
Perfect
thx!
Bitcoin fixes this. New social networks like nostr are fully decentralized, and people can do things like filter out all posts that didn’t come with a small bit of work attached. All you need to do is make it cost something to spew nonsense, and the quality of the discourse goes up like crazy.
No, it doesn’t. Sorry. There’s no technical solution to this 🦍 thirsting for the 🩸 blood of its enemies.
Really too long a peace. Safe and fat and fed and coddled with toys aka tech and 🦍 this gets restless.
You can’t tell somebody at work that they look good in their outfit, but non-binary furry cocker spaniel queer tree humpers can instruct your 8 year old on anal sex it out in a burlesque show. Right.
Democrats think black people can’t get into college, which is run completely by Democrats btw, because black people, according to Democrats are incapable of intellectual achievement, but if a white guy were to repeat the lyrics from a rap sing on the radio, he’s a racist. Right.
If I gave 280 billion dollars during COVID to crooks fraudulently applying for emergency loans, I’d be in Supermax for 300 years, but if the federales screw that up, well no biggie. Right.
The problem is that the ruling class is out of touch and they don’t care. They aren’t interested in equality or Justice or America for that matter. They are interested in you ShuttingTFU and letting them grind you down. The only way to make them care is either to take away their money or take away their power. At at that point we don’t have to care about these clowns either. The question is how to do it.
🦍🩸💀
Is it bad that my first thought after seeing those Ukraine headlines was the classic line from the first Shrek: "Some of you will die, but that's a sacrifice I am willing to make"?
The people quoted here who are wigging out on Twitter about the supposed end of the Civil Rights Act-- well, that's exactly why I don't bother with Twitter. Among a mountain of other objections I have to Twitter, it's full of people who set their own hair on fire.
The ones mischaracterizing the Supreme Court decision which, obviously, they did not trouble to, like, uh, actually read, how much you wanna bet they have all taken 4-5 injections of the cooties juice by now? They weren't too big on reading the package inserts, either. ... Oh, right, there were no package inserts.
When the Ukraine thing started last year, people I respected posted extremely uninformed comments. I decided to delete all my tweets, prune my follows to about a dozen, private my account, and stay away for awhile. One month of absence turned into several. When SCOTUS made their Roe decision, one of my remaining follows turned her avatar into the Handmaid's Tale, so I pruned further. In the last 16 months I've probably spent less than an hour on Twitter, and my mental health has improved significantly.
Hence Musk pruning it
Admitted “log off go outside “
🤣
Here. I'll give you another reason to stay off Twitter, Facebook, et al... For the last 6 months or so, a number of the podcasts I frequent have put up the red flag of concern over "Artificial Intelligence". Well, dig. If you understand what has been revealed regarding the government/media/malinformation complex, he media gatekeepers have been employing AI for quite a while now. Half (75%, 90%???) of the posts that bedevil you are probably AI generated. You are sparring with a ghost. Give it up. You have better things to do (like post on the Chris Bray Blog).
when i opened my costume shop in 1982, i decided that we would never make drag costumes. by drag, i did not mean legitimate cross dressed costumes that are written into the story (the men in Some Like it Hot are on the lam, the trouser roles in operas, Tootsie, Mrs Doubtfire, etc) but an individual man's perverse desire to ridicule women (james howard kunstler calls them Women as Monsters).
i opened my own business so that i could run it as a benign dictator, so that we could do things my way. a gay employee asked me once why we wouldn't make drag costumes and i told him that i found drag to be offensive and insulting to women. that is my personal feeling and as the owner of the company, i made the decisions and it was irrelevant if other people found my stance "unfair," capricious or arbitrary. maybe i'm lucky that he didn't sue me.
the reason you open your own business is not so that you can work your ass off and slave around the clock only to be told what you can and cannot do by some bureaucrat who can't actually do anything.
Thank you for this -- 100% supportive of your right to only make what you want in your business.
Right on! But my preference is for commenters to abide by the capitalization rules of standard written English. They exist for a reason and that is because text is easier to read when they are followed.
sorry, i haven't used capitals since high school, influenced by ee cummings and i never got out of the habit. i did sneak a few into my comment.
what i won't do is mess up pronouns to satisfy certain people's deranged fantasies. imagine how confusing that would be!
What was difficult to follow? I found the comment delightful.
"YOU CAN’T EVEN BUY ANYTHING ANYMORE BECAUSE ALL THE BUSINESSES CAN JUST TURN YOU AWAY, NOW" LMAO
Sounds like they're using the same old playbook as they did in the "Don't Say GAY" Op... Not that they have any other playbooks...
Nice article, Chris. Gavvy actually promised in 2003 - to end homelessness.
That makes 20 years of lying now.
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Newsom-details-plan-for-homeless-Mayor-elect-2509363.php
"I don't want to over-promise, but I also don't want to under-deliver. I want to hit the ground running."
I guess now we change that to: "I hit the ground ker-splat!"
Thank you for an excellent and enjoyable read. The hysterics are definitely a sign that the sociopaths are losing.
While this SCOTUS decision is a step in the right direction, it's much too narrow. I hope I live long enough to see property rights upheld in the courts. While many forms of discrimination are morally indefensible, they should not be illegal. There should be nothing illegal about "I reserve the right to refuse service to anyone at anytime for any reason. Or no reason at all. Because it's MY STUFF."
When I was much younger and more naive, I thought that ninety percent of the trouble people have with each other was caused by people who just couldn't leave other people - and other people's stuff - TF alone, and respect their boundaries. But I was wrong. It's one hundred percent.
Ah yes, the California freeways. Let's see what The Humungus has to say about them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-wIFDibK8g
THAT WAS AWESOME
Good stuff. Your articles on Jim Jones are worth rereading. The amazing support he got from San Francisco politicians such as Willy Brown is terrifying.
Jim was a very smart and wily con man...he knew that if you surround liberals with poor black people and claim to be representing them in the name of Justice and Equality, it's like knowing the code to someone's alarm. these are like a hypnotist's words they're helpless against, which is why he was so successful and why the Bigotry Accusation has become the go-to move for the power hungry, it still retains the same power it did 50 years ago.
Probably the perfect article to mention Luca Dellana's rules again.
https://luca-dellanna.com/mimetic-societies/
Well, that's not at all terrifying.
Gavin Newsom is iconic as a used car salesman {sorry to honest car salespeople}.
Kurt Russell played Newsom ahead of time in the Used Cars movie, with the legendary campaign slogan: "Trust Me!"
"The land reform of Tiberius Gracchus is THE BEGINNING OF AUTOCRATIC MONARCHY AND IF WE DON'T KILL HIM RIGHT NOW THE REPUBLIC IS DOOMED."
I have bad news about this comparison, however, because in our case, JFK and RFK were our Gracchi brothers and our imperial period of wealth and power is already behind us. So no, the freeways probably won't get fixed.
So what you're saying is, the Optimates are the REAL Carthagophiles?
I appreciate your reference sir immigration from North Africa and the Levant wasn't a major factor in Roman life until the Principate.
Whoa hang on bigot, who said anything about immigration? I for one welcome the Syrian Orontes discharging itself into our Tiber, I just think the citizens should know where Cato was getting those figs from.
A+ Brother.
My Dad told me about Jonestown when I was maybe 7. (Obviously he didn’t teach me EVERYTHING.) So I grew up oftentimes looking for that fingerprint warning sign where people base their system of beliefs on the foundation that other people who believe those things are all friends and having friends would be nice.
I laughed out loud at parts of this.
Well done.
Very well written and 100% accurate. As you say, where will it end? And when? The worst places to live are run by "D"s and they can do nothing but agitate and riot. But they control almost all our institutions either directly or through RINO controlled opposition. The rest of us must continue to fight them but at the same time set up parallel institutions of all kinds. And look to religious groups of all faiths that see the evil these assorted communists, facists, and anarchists promote, as we do, as allies to defeat them.
Danny Huckabee
You are mildly positive that this thing is in the death throws. I'm not so sure, I think it does ultimately end in its own destruction, but given the reaction of the population had to the COVID mandates (sitting down and taking it), I don't think this all ends for at least another decade, and that decade things will get worse.
I think it ends but persists, just as the New Left of the 1960s faded but left its seeds planted in the culture. We'll see. But the Dylan Mulvaneyness of the current culture is getting on everyone's last nerve, so SOME form of change has to come soon. Whether it lasts....