“Don’t come apart on me, Frank.” – Scrooged
What makes a good tongue-twister? That’s not easy to say.
The story of the 20th century was one of things coming together.
Part of it was based on technology – the world shrank as successive technologies made communications, typically mass communications, easier and quicker. The world went from letters carried over land to telegrams to telephones and then radio and television. Information that previously took weeks to get out, could now go out to millions nearly immediately so we could all know how tough Meghan Markle had it last weekend.
With this communication, the model was simple: one to many. One person could have their ideas spread out to literally everyone. In the Soviet Union, radio versions of Stalin’s speeches could be broadcast instantaneously to every person with a radio in the Soviet Union, though those radios were powered by large industrial tractors produced in Tractor Collective Number 323 that weighed 17 metric tons.
With the advent of this communication, it became feasible to run an actual empire, in real time. Things started clumping together because the span of control allowed it, and the size of empire was useful. The Soviets started collecting satellite states like they were Hallmark© Christmas ornaments, and so did the NATO nations.
What does the blue in a communist flag stand for? Food.
Europe itself clumped together into the EU, which, oddly, was exactly the plan of an Austrian art-school reject. Up until the 1990s, clumping together was all the rage. There was strength in being together, and it was also strength in the titanic war without weapons between two competing ideologies: Western Capitalism versus Eastern European and Asian Collectivist Communism.
Some have said (and I would have argued, incorrectly, in the past) that technology is neutral. It is not. Technology absolutely changes the equation between the types of governments that can exist. Take, for example, weapons:
To be really good with a sword takes a lot of practice. I assume this because I watched a lot of movies where people learn to be good swordsmen and people always seem to get older in the montage. Beyond that, the suit of armor that a knight had to have was really, really expensive? How expensive? More than “hot dog at an NFL® game” expensive, it was completely unaffordable unless you had a manor and a bunch of dudes growing stuff for you. And, if you had it, those dudes couldn’t really do anything to you when you were out and about.
Which Knight was chosen to build the Round Table? Sir Cumference.
Freedom, in this case, belonged to those who had armor. That equation changed over time, and it’s a real reason I like firearms. I can go in a store and buy a close copy (or in some cases much better stuff) than the United States Army gives to the rank-and-file soldier. Remember, “military grade” is the code word for the cheapest stuff that they could buy that might do the job.
Anyway, as long as millions of Americans are as well armed as the average infantry soldier in our army, we are free. Round us up and try to put us in concentration camps like they did in Australia during the recent pandemic? Not going to happen because, well, all the guns. It doesn’t even take a montage to learn how to use a firearm.
Mao may have been ugly and smelled bad, but he knew something very true: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Why does the Left want to take away guns? Because they want power, and as long as you have weapons that equal theirs, they cannot make you do whatever it is that they want.
Robespierre, Trotsky, and Mao walk into a bar. There are no survivors.
But that’s a digression. Technology allowed the flourishing of really large empires, mainly due to information management and that “one to many” communication model. Being together in these combinations allowed two sides to fight each other.
Until they didn’t.
The biggest failure of Soviet-style communism wasn’t the socialist part, but the collectivist part. Capitalism in the West simply out produced them, but the collectivist mindset wasn’t really “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” That sounds spiffy, but in reality it became, “From each according to how little work they could get away with, to each according to how much they could milk the system for.”
I asked A.I. to make the workers lazy. Boom, the cell phones show up.
This collapsed. I think it was a coincidence that it was just as the Internet began to flourish, but the Internet has changed the entire way that communication can flow. The old model was “from one to many” while the new model is “from many to many”. Not everyone has an equal voice, but ideas now flow freely.
This is what puts the panties of Those Who Are In Power into a wad – they have lost control of the Narrative. It’s also going to be the story of the 21st century: the time when things dissolve.
We’ve seen it start with Brexit. Brexit would never have happened under the previous mode where the only options were the options from TPTB. In this case, the people rose up, and said no. Of course, in the case of Great Britain, TPTB decided to keep the unending flow of illegals headed there, because the last thing they want to reward were people from Great Britain deciding their own destiny.
I wonder if Departugul will be next? Or will it be Polend?
It’s too late to put the genie back into the bottle, however. We see strains on NATO where vastly divergent incentives have weakened that alliance, and I see similar strains on the EU right now, where countries like Poland and Hungary are being ostracized for not wanting to become minorities in their own lands.
Likewise, we see the pressures of division putting strains on the United States. Every reader here is a part of that, since you regularly partake in ideas that are not approved by those who would have you live in pods and eat bugs and give up your arms. For the greater good, you know.
The story of the 20th century was of coming together. Our story, right now, is of things coming apart.
Woo hoo! I have changed your mind that tech innovation favors the common man!
So now all the 3-10% percent who want to be left alone have to do is: turn their paper wealth into gold coins, turn off their call phones and televisions, and take the license plates off their cars.
Well, yeah – that’s the rub. Tech can give many-many conversations, but it can also feed the panopticon that you reference above. Two edges to that sword.
I would put it in a slightly different spin. The story of the 21st century is of giving up. Having “won” the Big War and then outlasting the Soviet Union, the West appears to have just quit. Quit having babies, quit trying to achieve and build. Just….quit. That is why we can have stories about the “British” Prime Minister named Rishi Sunak firing the “British” Home Secretary named Suella Braverman. England just gave up on being English.
Or in Scotland, appointing Humza Yousaf as First Minister in March 2023.
“…born in Glasgow on April 7, 1985. He was educated at Hutchesons’ Grammar School and the University of Glasgow, graduating with a degree in Politics. He is also an alumnus of the US State Department’s prestigious International Visitor Learning Programme….”
https://exchanges.state.gov/non-us/program/international-visitor-leadership-program-ivlp
It seems very curious to me that Scotland, which is literally 95.4% white, and England, which is at 81.7% white, are today led by a Muslim and a Hindu. I suspect cell phones (and video games and television and…) have diverted the attention of many more than just communists.
Kamala is of course poised to continue this new tradition of South Asian ethnicity leaders here in the USA, as soon as “Joe Biden” runs out of ice cream.
https://religionnews.com/2020/11/07/5-faith-facts-about-vp-elect-kamala-harris-a-black-baptist-with-a-hindu-family/
The west didn’t quit, it just gave women the vote and every other damn thing they asked for, starting about 105 years ago when the first world war ended and the flower of Europa’s manhood lay in their graves, slaughtered mainly in the fields of France and Russia. After that, the decision making seems to have gone downhill. That’s how we got no children, education that teaches nothing, and immigration that may possibly destroy us
Ditchcritter
Agreed.
It’s true that anglo men are walking away from ‘their’ nations, and from Western Civ. I did the same, many years ago.
Globalists (Luciferians) and women rule the West. That’s how you end up with the Rishis and Kamalas running the show.
But I did not walk until forty years of beatdowns and degradations had been dished out to me, and to other men I witnessed. Overwhelmingly, this occurred via the collective power of women, as you say. The role of gelded men in the U.S. also played a large part in my decision to vamoose.
By no means did I ‘give up’. My nation and birthright were stolen from me, usurped. I continue to fight, but no longer from the HQ of the enemy, America.
I think there’s more to that thread – I hope to have that ready for Monday, but it might have to wait a week. England has fallen far faster than I ever would have expected.
I think that Poland has recently voted to no longer be European. Glad that I visited there a few years ago to see what it was like.
They’ve done so because they refuse to take in a million or two Muslim invaders, and told the EU to pound sand way up high and tight over it.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
I thought they vetoed the migration pact?
Anyone think Putin On The Ritz will attack Poland next? Easy war – you see a Polish tank coming at you, just shoot the guys who are pushing it.
Nah. Putin wants to push south and west. Not sure he cares about the Poles. And I’m not sure he could take them.
I’m doubling my daily allotment of PEZ.
It’s the only way to be sure. That, and nuking them from orbit.
John, it is an interesting situation to watch unfold. The forces of technology are pulling everything apart, even as the authoritarian powers of every stripe are using it to trying to bind the world into a vision of their own choosing.
One interesting note: it does make those that rely on technology to do so even more so dependent on those who fix and maintain it, as they themselves cannot do it.
Yes, and the current generation has no idea how it works. This is not a good combination.
I agree, and come here on a regular basis to receive my dose of vinegar to go with the gall in reading other news. Almost seems sweet in comparison. It is mind boggling to watch and listed to normies carry on with the old stuff, as if talking about it will preserve or renew it. I am ever so grateful I was born in this country, and more than a little in dread for what’s in store. My take, small that it is, is that things have already fallen apart, we’re just getting debris from the explosion falling on our heads, and the heavy pieces haven’t arrived yet. Having been near some big explosions in the past, I’m keeping my head down until it’s over.
There is no reform – there is simply restoration or revolution. They system is beyond reform.
We are the last, best hope of freedom for humanity. Period.
It doesn’t seem like anything’s falling apart.
It’s been apparent for years that it’s being maliciously demolished on purpose.
I agree. 100%. More to come on that.
Healung power of “and”