Month: April 2023

Reason 453 Why The Right Is Sane, And The Left Is Nuts

“John Spartan, you are fined five credits for repeated violations of the verbal morality statute.” – Demolition Man

What happens when you put a zebra in the lion cage?  Well, me?  I got fired from the zoo.

On Monday I put together a post on how toxic empathy is destroying the world.  Really, it is.  That was, however, just one, small bit of the picture.  To go a little deeper, we have to understand the pathology of the most wretched hive of scum and villainy.  No, I’m not talking The View®.  Okay, I’m not talking The View™ exclusively, I’m talking about the minds of Leftists.

Jonathan Haidt is a PhD in something or other.  To be an academic, they all have to write stuff down, and have other academics pretend to read it.  If enough academics pretend to read it, then they can write books that the cosmopolitan elite buy and put on their bookshelves so other members of the cosmopolitan elite can see that they have the same virtuous books on the shelf.

As such, a lot of it is garbage.  Case in point?  Actual people who are professors at colleges talking about girls with outies and boys with innies as if that was somehow “science”, forgetting that we’ve known about the x and y chromosomes since Nettie Stevens was studying worm sperm at an all-woman college and found the y chromosome.  Then, in the 1920s, the improbably named Theophilus Shickel Painter determined how the x and y chromosomes made boys and girls.  And none of this paragraph is made up.  Sometimes, history writes the humor for me.

My XY chromosomes are awesome.  They look great in a pair of genes.

So, Haidt had to write something, so he came up with Moral Foundations Theory.  I’ll spare you the details because you have a search engine, and can read.  Originally, they broke the foundations into five.  I think they added a sixth, changed the name of one, and following it is like following a soap opera, since Haidt has to write more books to keep that sweet, sweet money coming in from people who buy copies of his book to look smart to the other members of the cosmopolitan elite, and it helps if he does TED® talks.  Here are the original five, with rough definitions:

  • Care/Harm – this is really the empathy I discussed on a post (LINK) earlier this week. It is the real foundation for the toxic behavior of the Left.  It’s a focus on a concern for the wellbeing of others, compassion, kindness, . . . sorry, fell asleep for a moment.
  • Fairness/Reciprocity – this is really based on the idea that people should have equal outcomes in the test I took, regardless of their contributions. It’s pretty heavily skewed towards that.  As a friend once told me, “We can treat everybody equally, or we can treat everybody fairly.  It’s not the same.”  As shown in the graph below, this is sort of blended.
  • In-group/Loyalty – this is about dedication to your group, distrust of non-group, and self-sacrifice for one’s community. True patriotism is a part of this.
  • Authority/Respect – it’s a respect for hierarchy, duty, and traditions.
  • Purity/Sanctity – this is tied to religious sanctity, as well as some ideas or objects having an innate value and they are sacred. The flip side is a revulsion against dirty and degenerate things.

I hear he liked to vote by mail.

To be clear, I am not endorsing Haidt’s work uncritically.  His is just one tool that we can use to slice the way the mind works via data to better understand ourselves, and how we as humans differ from one another.  I took the test at yourmorals.org and determined that I am somewhere to the far right of Genghis Khan.  Not sure if anyone wants to know, but I have zero time for slackers, don’t care about hard luck stories, am more loyal than a Sardaukar, am huge into tradition, and my sanctity scores were really high.  They added “proportionality” which meant, those who contribute, get rewarded, and that was very high, too.

I think this will surprise zero regular readers.  I can imagine my FBI agent dutifully noting all this in my Permanent Record, though.

This, however, is not about me.  Let’s take a closer look at what they did with the theory.  In essence, they tested lots of folks along with their self-identified political leanings.  The result is the graph below, which is enough for a TED® Talk:

So, I see 2chan and 5chan.  Where is 4chan?  Original by J. Haidt, CC BY-SA 4.0

Turns out that Leftists are fixated on empathy and on equity.  They’re the kind of people that look at a pit bull that just ate an orphanage and say, “Awww, she’s such a sweety, I wonder what those orphans did to provoke her.  We just need to give her one more chance – pit bulls are just as safe as any other dog.”

This is how the Left processes things – through those two small channels.  Those are the filters they use, and every problem in the world is first filtered through a hazy gauze of empathy and equity.  Why are there an unceasing horde of illegals surging through what used to be a border?  The filter is, first, empathy – “They just want a better life,” and then equity, “Everyone deserves the life we have her in America.”  As each one of my children will tell you, I find there is no word in the English language I despise more than the word, “deserve.”  I guess it’s my inner Viking showing through.

Will Smith, what a giver, always helping comedians work on their punchlines.

On the other side, on what Haidt labels “conservatives, the values converge.  The empathy and equity are tempered with tradition, group health, and respect for hierarchy.  In this much, much healthier worldview, values are kept in proportion with one another, not in this maladjusted split that drives the far Left.

I’ll admit, my values have changed as I’ve gotten older – this is a normal process people go through.  It’s crazy.  It’s call wisdom.  I have a few gray hairs, but I don’t pluck them out.  I’ve earned every one of them.  And I’ve lived long enough to see that the wheels of justice go slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.  Me?  I’m not sure anyone under 35 should be allowed to vote.  But I also am in favor of Congresscritter’s kids being bussed to the front line in the event they send our troops off to fight.

Imagine the inauguration:  “I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voice suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

There are several lessons here:

  1. Leftist really are crazy. Like a pit bull chewing through a school of orphans, I’m sure they mean well.  They’re such sweethearts.  But their morality is worse than Robert Downey Jr. and Charlie Sheen fighting over a pound of cocaine back in 1997.  Oddly, Charlie Sheen was only arrested for being Charlie Sheen.
  2. Keep life in balance. Me?  Genghis Khan was, according to stories, a legendary horseman.  That takes balance.  That’s enough for me.
  3. I appreciate The View©. Where else can you go to watch a segment called, “Should You Let Your Kids Go to the Mall” where the topic was debated between a transgender Eskimo and Muslim drag queen?

Wilder Gone Wild – Tucker, Biden Re-Selection Kickoff, Musk, and MORE! 9pm EDT – The Funniest News On the ‘Net.

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

In this episode:

  • Tucker Carlson
  • Yet more Biden shenanigans
  • Magoo running for re-selection
  • More Muskiness

and?  ThinkRealFast.

Catch it live or on replay!

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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUskuritR5P3BBJpOr5gzhg/streams

A Few Good Memes

“The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort.” – Rollerball

In a life filled with signs, be that bird.

I’ve got that “scratchy throat, feeling warm, feeling tired, and just a bit under the weather, so, here’s a low-effort memedrop based upon several themes.  All memes are cage-free, organic, and gluten-free.  Enjoy!

Someone, somewhere needs to do this:

I maintain that we’re now at “peak trans” and will soon be getting off this treadmill:

To be fair, not many thirty-year-olds have cratered an entire product line:

Scott Adams points out that LinkedIn® might be allowing companies to quietly discriminate – against white people.

Part of the story is what the media says, and part is what it doesn’t say.  See the toxic empathy of the Left showing up here:

Read more books!

And when life couldn’t get more hilarious . . .

I wonder if Netflix® forgot we have actual pictures and sculptures of Cleopatra done while she was alive?

Poor Ohio.

And, ways that we’re slipping into a dystopia:

And don’t forget COVID – remember there are no refunds.

And cats.   Why?  Why not.

Finally, random things.

See you all on Friday.

Misplaced Empathy Will Kill Us All

“Look, I just fix stuff, okay? This whole empathy thing it’s, uh, not exactly my strong point, all right?” – Andromeda

The Mrs. says I have no empathy. I have no idea why she would feel that way.

I was in a pretty deep sleep, having another stupid dream. My definition of a stupid dream is something like, “being at work, and writing an email”. If I’m going to dream, I don’t want to waste it on work, I want to be out conquering the green-skinned warrior women from Alpha Centauri, not dreaming about doing my taxes.

Occasionally, though, I have a fully formed thought so perfect that it jars me out of a deep sleep, and I have to write it down, like that time I invented the goldfish treadmill, or the silent alarm clock that slapped The Mrs. in the face with a comically large clown glove so her alarm wouldn’t wake me up.

The Mrs. did not appreciate the prototype of that alarm clock. The Mrs. then said, “The time is not right for that invention.”

Regardless, the subject of my slumber’s epiphany was . . . empathy. It started with a dream of me going to work. I was late (which never happens) so I was going 105 miles per hour (Trudeaus per fortnight) in a 25 miles per hour zone. Someone in the dream said (I didn’t see them) that, “You leave John Wilder alone. He was only speeding because he was late.” I started laughing. Here, someone was making excuses for me because of misplaced empathy.

I laughed, and woke up laughing. I also knew I was changing what I was going to write about today.

In my defense, the sign said, “Speed limit 35 ahead” and there were three people in the car, so three times five is 105, right?

Empathy sounds good. It is good, because empathy is really what enables conscience, remorse, and the power to change behavior that hurts others. There’s even a term for people who don’t have empathy: sociopath. Oddly, that’s what my ex-wife called me during our marriage, but I thought my car just had a great suspension.

Regardless, when I ran over that pedestrian, I didn’t feel a thing.

So, yeah, empathy is important. It’s important enough that psychologist Jonathan Haidt had it listed as number one on his list of the foundations of morality, though he used the word “care”. I’ll skip the others for now for a later post, probably on Friday, so we can focus on just one: care/harm, which I’ll call “empathy”.

That is the single foundation of morality that Leftists score higher on than folks on the Right. And, in my boredom at work (in my dream) I figured it out – the reason why the Right can’t talk to the Left is that the Left is so full of empathy that they can’t stop crying enough to have a decent conversation.

The Mrs. screamed, “You never listen to a single word I say!” What a funny way to start a conversation, right?

Before we get to the punchline, it’s very important to consider this question: Who do normal people primarily feel empathy for?

  • Those who are weaker than us. A good example to illustrate this is Bill Gates. When Bill Gates lost $30 billion, who cried? Not Bill. I don’t think Bill cries at all unless he has solid gold tissue paper infused with Moon rocks and sasquatch hair to better absorb his tears.
  • People who are experiencing similar problems to the ones they’ve had, and that are similar to them. I can’t really understand how a Kalahari Bushman feels after not getting an antelope, but I can understand how I feel when the Pizza Hut™ is 20 minutes late with the pizza.
  • Connectedness to the object of empathy. Typically, I feel a lot more empathy for The Mrs. when she’s feeling blue than I do for Kim Jong Il when he runs out of vodka during his endless game of SimKorea®. I feel more about people in my town than in the next town over, and by the time that it’s a bus full of 275 nuns and 1,043 orphans falling off a cliff in India, my empathy has drained down to, “Huh, maybe they should put up guardrails” and “Who knew that they had mountains in India? Or nuns?”

It’s not horrible to feel this way, it’s natural. I should care more about my parents (in general) than an Iraqi cabdriver in Paris. And I can only imagine so much of the pain someone is suffering if I have no basis to relate to it. And no one has felt sympathy for Bill Gates since 1982.

Leftists, though, score really high on empathy, much higher than people on the Right. My theory is that most of them live in big cities, and live a much more anonymous and disconnected life than we do here in Modern Mayberry, where I can’t go into the liquor store without the clerk saying, “Oh, Wilder, you again. Do you even have a home?” The social fabric, ability to contribute, and sense of belongingness in smaller communities is often richer.

I would look exactly like that, if I had hair, and if it was brown, and if I hadn’t discovered carbohydrates.

I think this begins to rot their brains. They have natural feelings of empathy, but no natural way to use them, so this normally virtuous process becomes subverted. Ever see someone on the Right screaming because someone couldn’t kill babies in a state they don’t live in? No.

But their empathy isn’t what people on the Right experience Leftists score higher in empathy tests (which shows how they feel), but those same Leftists contribute less to charities than people on the Right. Why? Because they think that everyone should feel the same compassion Leftists feel and everyone should share in and help out, so the Leftists raise taxes and take money by force to feed their need to be empathetic.

The result: Leftist empathy is paid for using everyone’s money. Sort of like my relationship with my kids, but if my kids had guns.

But it doesn’t stop there. The particular thought that woke me up was the idea that a Leftist would explain away any crime if the person committing it met their empathy filter, because they care about empathy more than every other foundation of virtue.

This is devastating at the level of a civilization. It means that, no matter what, feelings are now the highest form of virtue. Let’s take some examples of this type of thinking in real life:

  • “That man shouldn’t get a ticket for going 105 in a 25, he was late to work!”
  • “Timmy didn’t mean to break your window, he was just playing, and he’s only four.”
  • “How can they give him a DUI? His parents were alcoholics.”
  • “No mother should have to fear her son will be shot while he’s out robbing convenience stores.”
  • “It’s not fair that the homeowner had a weapon of war, an AK-15, when he shot that boy who only had a revolver.”
  • “No human is illegal – besides, they do the work that we won’t.”
  • “Those are mostly peaceful riots – only a few billion dollars’ worth of property damage was done. That’s why the store owners have insurance.”
  • “Why not give them reparations? America owes it to them.”
  • “How can Americans be bothered to have to have state-issued identification to vote? It’s unfair.”
  • “Those Christians are awful! Why else would a trans person feel like she had to kill them?”
  • “Muslim shooter kills 30. Muslims will be the most impacted by the backlash.”

Remember Bill Gates? No one feels bad for him. But Leftists feel empathy especially for those they look down on, that they feel better than. The Left feels that the people the Left gives their empathy to are somehow lesser than they are. They have no empathy for productive taxpayers, but empathy for murderers and looters.

Why do the Leftists throttle news about blacks killing blacks? Because they treat them with the same empathy they treat toddlers. Black people can’t be expected to know better, after all. Why do they elevate news of an 85-year-old white man shooting a 16-year-old black kid while burying the story of a black man shooting up an entire white family? Because Leftists view the white guy as more capable of self-control than the black guy, who shouldn’t be judged by this one event because there were thousands of people that he didn’t shoot, after all.

I wonder why one of these got national news attention?

In my humble opinion, the law should be entirely color blind. And ideology blind. That’s the reason we have the law. The January 6 “rioters” should be punished in exactly the same fashion as the George Floyd “protestors” if they committed crimes. Walking through the Capitol? Yeah, not an issue. Sitting at Pelosi’s desk and stealing her laptop? That’s a crime, and the guy should be punished in a fair and proportionate way. Period.

Many of the George Floyd rioters did far worse, yet few have paid for crimes up to and including murder and the $2 billion dollars in damages done. The law has simply ceased to be ideology and color blind and is now converged to punish only people on the Right. The idea that hate crimes have been enshrined in law and that “hate speech” is rapidly becoming criminalized despite that pesky First Amendment is telling that the justice system is becoming broken.

The last (nearly 60!) years since Johnson’s Great Society was implemented have shown trillions spent to work on the “root cause” of poverty and racial disparity in this country. There have been trillions spent on this project out of empathy. Result? Roadway design is being called, by Transportation Secretary Zoolander, racist:

And the last three uniparty presidents, looking around, decided we just didn’t have enough foreigners, so they’ll Uber some in:

Unchecked, pathological empathy by the rank and file of the Left is destroying the country – if you pick a big city, it’s nearly certain that some new horror is occurring daily, and that there is no one even pretending to stop it.

Thanks, George Soros!

Pathological empathy is killing us, literally. The destruction of society is ongoing. And we know why. What I do know is if we can see it, if we can ridicule it, and if we can polarize it we can make change happen. The guy who dresses as a girl who got his own Bud Light® can?

He was the polarizing figure that society coalesced around, coming as he did on the shooting by yet another transsexual, brought it home for many. “This has gone too far.”

So, point out the hypocrisy of this misplaced empathy when you can, and don’t dream about writing emails at work.

Choose Who You Are. It’s Easy.

“Yes, sir! That’s exactly who I am and what I am, sir. A victim, sir!” – A Clockwork Orange

If someone named David is a victim of ID theft, do I have to call them Dav?

“As I’ve gotten older . . . I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves.  If you listen to the people – if you just sit and listen – you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves.  There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that the tell – always on the receiving end of some injustice.  There’s the person who is always kind of the hero in every story they tell.  The smart person – they deliver the clever put down.  There are lots of versions of this.  And you gotta be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you.  You are, in the way you craft your narrative, kind of crafting your character.  And so, I did at some point decide:  I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative that I’m the happiest person anybody knows.  And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is.”

-Michael Lewis

My first question after I read this was, “Okay, which Michael Lewis?”  I’m thinking there might be a million of them, but the A.I. refused to even guess and then pouted and now won’t open the pod bay doors for me.  So, I’m guessing that every other person in Michigan is named “Michael Lewis”.  Regardless, the most famous author named Michael Lewis is the guy who writes interesting financial books, so I’ll assume it’s him.

The nice thing about water from Flint is that you can use it to make a Pb and Jelly sandwich.

Regardless of who wrote it, it’s a good and fairly true quote.

Why?

Attitude is everything.

If you believe you’re happy, if you talk about being happy, you’ll . . . be happy.  As I’ve written before, being happy is really the easiest thing in the world.  Many mornings I’ll run into the secretary administrative assistant at the door.  Regardless of the weather, I’ll greet her with, “What a beautiful day it is!”  It could be sunny and hot, rainy, cold, snowing, or even volcano-y.  My greeting is the same.

Because it is a beautiful day.  And, one thing I’ve learned is that the weather absolutely doesn’t care about me, at all.  The snow doesn’t care that I love it.  The hot day doesn’t care that I like cold weather, though I think it might be personal with the volcanoes.  But I’m alive, breathing, walking and talking.  If I spent all day hating a temperature reading, that wouldn’t leave me time to hate people who deserve it, like communists, leftists, and mimes.

How could the day not be beautiful?  I get to choose how I feel, so why not be happy about it?

My insurance agent told me I can jump in an active volcano.  Once.

I read the Michael Lewis quote and immediately recognized it to be a rule I’d been living with.  I’ve written before about how absolutely horrid victims are to be around.  Everything happens to them.  They are at the center of their own story, but initiate no action.  They have all the resilience of a bean bag, and are psychic vampires that attempt to suck emotional sustenance in the form of pity from their unwitting prey by demonstrating how mean the world has been to them.  The technical term for this affliction is “Antifa® Member”.

They sing their own lives with their story.  I avoid these types of people as if they were constructed entirely out of George Soros’ toe cheese, which I guess explains why he’s long been called the “Creamy-Fingered Puppet Master”.

George Soros wants to destroy our culture?  I knew he was behind American Idol.

The Hero?  I can live with them.  Often, they’re really newts who brag about being distantly related to the Tyrannosaurus Rex.  They get their ego from being the one who has done the most, has the most gifted child, the cousin who went to Harvard®, and that they vacationed on Mars last summer.  The Hero does this this because they feel awful about themselves, and need to bolster their ego by telling these stories.

Again, I’m okay with The Hero, since if you listen to their stories and don’t try to top theirs, they eventually can be good people to hang out with, and as they get older or develop trust with you they drop the act.  They want to be liked, and if you like them for who they are, they often stop the Hero stuff.

The person who puts people down?  I don’t meet that guy (or gal) often enough to have any sort of read on dealing with them.  They just aren’t any in circle I’m in since I’ve been an adult.  I guess that tells me lots about how successful the strategy of “being a complete tool” is.

What’s the difference between a Hoover® vacuum and a limo carrying George Soros and his son?  The Hoover™ only has one dirtbag in it.

But there are lots of other ways to tell my story.  The best part is that I get to choose.  I get to choose to be the happiest guy people know.  I get to choose to be the guy in the room that is calm when everything is going to hell (I really enjoy that one, and it comes naturally).  I get to choose what I’m afraid of.

To be clear, this isn’t the Lefty talking point about “Your Truth®”.  That’s bogus, and denies objective reality.  Me?  I don’t deny that it’s snowing.  I don’t deny that it’s 103°F out.  I don’t deny that that pesky volcano keeps following me around.  But I do get to choose how that fact fits in with how I feel.

And so can you.

And so can those 5.04 million people in Michigan named, “Michael Lewis”.

Some Signposts On The Way To Collapse

“It’s a growth economy, Gus. We’ve already made like, 500 rupee.” – Psych

What’s worse than rushing to the liquor store five minutes before it closes?  Getting there thirty minutes before it opens.

For the most part, I like to have my posts be about a bigger, underlying principle.  In my life, I have found the first thing I enjoy is making people think about life in a different way and examine new possibilities.  The second thing is a never-ending stream of jokes.  To be clear, I never tell jokes to amuse others; I tell jokes because they amuse me.  They maybe Dad jokes, that’s why I save them in a Dadabase.

Tonight, however, I’m going to just enjoy our current economy, and just give some milestones on the current descent into whatever economic future that we’re creating in a relatively short post.

First up, is the idea that $100,000 isn’t a lot of money anymore:

How many Zoomers does it take to change a lightbulb?  100,000.  One to change it, and 99,999 to throw the parade.

I kid, a bit.  Zoomers certainly are the most fragile generation that we’ve ever produced, since when I was growing up trigger warnings was what Pa Wilder gave me if he saw my finger head towards one when I wasn’t planning on shooting.  A safe space?  That was the place that Pa had a safe.

As much as I’d like to bag on the Zoomers, it really is a rough world that they’re coming into, economically and otherwise.  Most of the jobs are in the cities, and the housing costs there are ludicrous.  I’d rent in the cities for longer than two months, but I only can afford to give up one kidney.

A policy of unpoliced and encouraged illegal immigration for decades has consequences?  Perish the thought!

It’s not just housing which has become more unaffordable than at any time in history (at least in the cities).  Cars have recently gone to silly levels – the latest average monthly payment for a new car is $716 for an average of 69 (hehe) months.  The average loan amount is $41,445.  The last three cars I bought (all used) totaled $45,000 or so.

To be clear, people don’t have to buy a new car.  I haven’t bought a new car since 1997, all of mine have been used.  The average used car goes for nearly $28,000, with a monthly payment of $526 at an interest rate of over 10%.  Ouch!

I wonder if this app is the biggest cause of suicide for Tesla® owners?

While the next two items are from Canada, I wonder how far behind the United States is.

For those who aren’t used to metric, a kilogram is roughly two pounds, and a Canadian dollar is roughly a handful of rounded pebbles that you might collect at the bottom of a stream – I think it’s called a metric dollar.

It’s pretty bad in Canada.  They could have had it all:  America’s sense of freedom, British literature, and French cuisine.  Instead?  They got French immigration policy, Britain’s love of pointless bureaucracy, and American economic policy.  And they’re paying for it, literally.

Thankfully, some folks are doing well in the economy.  I heard a rumor that one person was taking dollars to buy diesel fuel from a European source, but instead bought it from a Russian source.  Amazingly, when you make smart decisions like that, you can save a lot of money.

Me?  I’ve seen corruption, bribery, blackmail, jealousy, theft, fraud, and deception firsthand.  I’m never playing Monopoly with The Mrs. again.

To be fair, I will share that Russia has a new technological innovation that I can share, to at least partially offset all those leaked documents.  The Russians have apparently developed a new technology that allows them to see with the vision of one of the most ruthless killers on Earth:

Remember when Putin said he didn’t have any plans to invade the Ukraine?  I think he was telling the truth.

Again, this post is just is a different one, just a signpost on road that we’re on.  I’d offer $100,000 for your thoughts, but it would be that Canadian metric money.  What’s it called?  A rupee?

Decline or Collapse? Collapse.

“You didn’t find me, you collapsed a building on me.” – Sherlock Holmes:  A Game of Shadows

How do you get a philosophy student off the front porch?  Tip him for the pizza.

Finished my taxes.  All went well – I’m actually getting some of my money back.  In truth, I was pretty close to posting some memes.  This weekend at the Wilder house was just one filled with, “meh, let’s order pizza and relax because we don’t feel like doing much” across the board.  So, we relaxed, at least until it was time to do my annual tango with TurboTax®.

I almost decided to post some of the more amusing memes I’d found across the Internet, but had so far not found a time or place to use.  But, just as the clock headed reached 10 ‘til midnight, the muse struck me like a bag of wet sushi fish in a net stocking owned by a stripper named Destiny who is missing two fingers on her left hand.

How does civilization end?

Lots of people talk about an eternal decline.  That’s a wishful thought, I guess.  It’s the Bladerunner dystopia where everything is cheaper and coarser, ever more crowded, and ever less human.  I guess the bright side of the Bladerunner fate is an endless supply of robot clones of Sean Young back before she went crazy and decided to live on a diet of Twinkies® and gin.

Be glad I didn’t make you look at Old Cat Lady Sean Young.

To be clear, that’s mainly what we’re seeing.

  • Gangs of “youths” in Chicago rioted this weekend because it’s Chicago, they outnumber the police, and they can do anything and their chances of getting arrested are about the same as Kamala Harris having an idea that didn’t die of loneliness.
  • Power grids that went from reliable to “maybe” because people decided investing in infrastructure was homophobic or something.
  • A shrinking middle class, and less clear ways for most people to join it, especially the kids. My generation, Gen X, has a significantly smaller share of the national wealth than the Boomers did at my age.  And the Zoomers and Millennials?
  • Economic disruption – inflation and shortages jumped up when the papering-over of the economic problems of a made-up currency that was spent as fast as possible by both Left and Right could no longer be papered over. Even today, there is no thought to try to fix things, because that would stop the party and we know politicians love to party.
  • Moral decay and the loss of civic virtues that would make Caligula look like a prude. When late-stage Rome would have said, “Whoa, dude, you’re going too far,” it’s time to think about where we are.

There are more things, but making longer lists makes me better at making longer lists but doesn’t really tell the story, and you have a search engine.  The idea is that all of these things that are happening right now are going to lead us down a trail where each day, things get a bit duller, a bit uglier, and bit more unreliable, and a bit shabbier.  The United States (and other Western countries) exhibit a long, slow decline into the eventual status where everything is not only expensive, but it also sucks.

I congratulated someone for a great exit sign once.  “Nice going!”

Again, that’s an optimistic case.  It assumes that we’re making progress, and we’ll keep making progress, but a that progress will be spread over more and more people, like trying to make 300,000,000 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of a single jar of jelly.  That is the way that most civilizations have ended, with a whimper and not a crash.

But 2023 is a different story, and faces different problems.  The first, and biggest is energy and “peak” minerals.  I’ve written about this dozens of times, but our current civilization is one of the first built entirely around single-use materials, the most important of which is energy.  Each barrel of oil pumped and used cannot be reused later – it’s gone.  And, I assure everyone reading this, that biotic or abiotic, there is a finite amount of oil that can be extracted that makes economic and thermodynamic (provides more energy than it takes to extract).

I did sit on a block of ice too long once, got polaroids.

We go after the easy resources first, oil that seeps up under its own pressure – drill down 20 feet and Jed’s a millionaire.  In 2023 we’re using high tech and energy intensive methods to frack oil and drilling miles down in miles of water.

There are other materials that this applies to, as well.  The Romans could build wooden warships, and the trees could grow back.  Sure, we can reuse the steel from our ships, and do.  But when it comes to minerals like phosphorus, lithium, copper, and PEZ™, there are absolute limits to the quality deposits required.  And with something like phosphorous, there is no replacement, since it is an element vital to life and we can’t replace it with soybeans or turkey bacon.  Once these inputs stop, like my first marriage, it’s over.

The second idea is that our current civilization isn’t regional like Rome or China or Dave’s Tribe of Wandering Dudes.  The civilization of the world today is just that.  Outside of parts of Africa, South America, and Detroit, what we have is truly a single world civilization.  It’s all interconnected.  Russia declares war on the Ukraine?  Wheat prices go up.  If there’s an attack on Taiwan?  Large swaths of semiconductors are off the menu.

I hear that’s a robot’s favorite dish – silicon carne.

When Rome collapsed, only Rome collapsed, and people in China or South America didn’t have a clue.  If any part of the world collapses today?  The rest of the world will be degraded as well – perhaps enough to take everything down with it, since we work in a world without substitutes.

The final idea (for now) is that nobody really agrees with anybody.  This is not a new development.  But in 1940, the war in Europe really didn’t hurt the United States – we could make almost everything we needed (except pesky things like rubber and bananas) and were doing fine.  The world is at war?  No one cares.

Now, the economy is tightly coupled – one nation to another, these wars matter.  Since 1945, the (general) peace has been kept, and what conflicts were allowed were just large enough to make profits for Boeing® or General Dynamics™ but not large enough to mess with anything that mattered.  But if China takes Taiwan?  A huge number of semiconductors are no longer available on the international market, and those are used in everything from washing machines to cars to tanks to watches to . . . you get the picture.  And the reason you get the picture is because of thousands of semiconductors transporting the data directly to you.

A cop pulled Chuck Norris over once.  The cop got away with a warning.

One break?  Poof.

I think it’s much more likely that, instead of a gradual slide down into poverty, that one morning we wake up and find a huge chunk of the economy doesn’t work at all anymore, because the inputs are gone.  COVID was a stress test for this, and we failed.  Our just-in-time economy may bump profits, but it removes the idea of a resilient economy.

Oops!

The good news, though, is if the world experiences a prolonged and significant collapse?  No more taxes!  Well, at least no more taxes until Warlord Lance the First, of Modern Mayberry, wants his share.

Dependence: The Worst Drug Of All?

“I hate being dependable, man.” – Black Hawk Down

If I had a dream about a nocturnal horse, would that be a night mare?

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition.”  This is from Thomas Jefferson’s book, Notes on Virginia, which I assume referred to some girl Jefferson was dating.  Maybe it was Virginia Madsen, I mean, she was kinda hot in the 1984 version of Dune, so maybe that’s when they met?

One of the ideas that has been carefully cultivated here by the Left in late-stage Weimerica is the idea that individuals are weak.  It has long been my observation that people who live in large cities are more dependent due to the facts of living in a large city, and this is reflected in the vote totals.  This is part of the reason that Leftists love big cities, that and owning a penthouse on the Upper West Side.

In a big apartment, residents are slaves to elevators, sidewalks, and trash removal services whereas in Modern Mayberry I haven’t used an elevator in months, sidewalks are okay but not required, and if the trash truck doesn’t show up because the raccoons sabotaged it, I can burn mine (legally!) in the backyard.

Often, larger cities have restrictive laws that restrict the ability of individual citizens to protect themselves, leading to a complete dependence on the state for the most basic of human rights – the right to protect their own life.  Powerful Leftists, of course, are surrounded by people that they hired that have guns, even when the normal folks can’t have them.  This is what they call “equity”.

Surely, those two things above aren’t related.

Cities are thus an actual breeding ground for dependence, and here are just a few examples, since this isn’t the whole point of the post:

  • Control – This is always and forever the goal of the Left. In large cities, it’s often impossible to contact actual decision makers, since it’s actually George Soros, and he doesn’t take visitors.
  • Concentrates Economic Gains – When control is granted, the winners often cease to be those that produce, and then gravitate to those that run the systems, since it’s actually George Soros, and he gets all the cash.
  • Sole-Source Education – I’ve seen some parents just leave education and discussion on important topics entirely to the schools, and be utterly ignorant about the discussions on values that take place there, which is what George Soros likes. (Education problems aren’t limited to big cities.)
  • Splits Social Cohesion – Individuals become atomized, and the chance of seeing a random person on the street even more than once is minimal. There are millions of people, always in motion, so no one has the opportunity to think much about George Soros.

Obviously, this isn’t all places, everywhere, and some cities (those with 100% less Soros) are better than others, and the ‘burbs are almost always less dehumanizing than the ultra-dense cities that the modern world seems to favor.

Why did Elon move to the suburbs?  He wanted more space.

This is not how people were made to live.  We’ve spent the vast majority of our existence as a species living in smallish groups, and being responsible for each other and our own actions.  Even as far back as 1500 Anno Domini (3405 metric years) the largest city in Europe was Paris.  The population?  A staggering 200,000 to 250,000 people.

Yeah, that’s bigger than Modern Mayberry, but the population density was only about 2000 to 2500 people per square mile, which I assumed still left them room for their snail ranches, and if you walked for a couple of hours, you could be in the countryside.

Regardless of where it happens, though, dependence can have a horrible toll, especially in someone who is was born and raised to be independent:

  • Feelings of Helplessness and Hopelessness – I like to have as much control over my own destiny as possible. I realize that meteorites to strike, earthquakes happen, and PEZ® factories are bought out by Bulgarians.  Regardless, people who feel that they control their lives are happier, more confident, and have better body odor.
  • Anxiety and Fear – When there is a lack of control, people get afraid – I see that in people are dependent on others, I mean, you should have seen The Boy when he was a baby and I’d play “steal the bottle while he’s nursing”..
  • Shame, Loss of Feeling of Self-Worth – One of the compromises for society today is that most people aren’t in business, they have jobs, and many people feel in control at work, especially when they are contributing and working with a great team. However, lose the job?  The understanding of dependence hits in an avalanche.  Likewise, being dependent on the state for life just turns a person into a dehumanized cog who votes for the benefits.
  • Political Indoctrination – Upton Sinclair, a miserable Leftist himself, said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” He sniffed around the problem, but didn’t realize that the same problem existed with his beloved Leftism, but his book sales depended on him not understanding that.
  • Self-Censorship – When social or economic standing is based on not having the wrong opinion, people are afraid to stand up for what’s right.

I pretended to gag at dinner one night, but the family knew it was just another another dad choke.

This, in many more words, is what Jefferson was talking about.  And this is what we have seen repeatedly in countries where tyranny takes hold.

Dependence is also a drug.  When a person falls in love with their dependence, it becomes the easy way to explain giving up.  I’ve met people who love their dependence, who list their medications and conditions with a pride like they’d been given a medal from the disability fairy.  It’s a free pass to explain how they’re not responsible for their life.

Thus?  Jefferson was right:

  • Subservience comes from owing everything to the master,
  • Venality, (roughly, being corrupt) is part and parcel of dependence, since the life of a dependent person is built around personal gain,
  • Suffocates the germ of virtue, since life becomes about the material, and
  • and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition. This is the lynchpin.  This is the desired end state.

Thomas Jefferson bought a 2006 Ford® Taurus™.  He called it his Jefferson Carship.

Dependence is everything that the Left wants, because is serves their purpose.  To be clear, demagogues on the Right can use this, too, but most people on the Right are actually into individual freedom, and won’t follow a leader that pulls them away from that.  Remember when Trump got booed at one of his own rallies when he brought up the Vaxx?

I remember.

But this isn’t about them.  This is about us.  My suggestion to every person is to look at areas in their lives where their dependence is unhealthy, and be aware of them.  That’s the first step.

Then?  Eliminate every one of them that you can, and rather than being ruled by fear, be ruled by your own choices.

That’s the opposite of dependence, and is better for you in every way.