“I know there’s no way I can convince you this is not one of their tricks, but I don’t care.” – V for Vendetta
I asked what was on the menu, and they said Himalayan Rabbit. The waiter said they found Himalayan on the road.
It used to be that people didn’t have to have an opinion on, well, everything. Now, it seems, that everyone wants an opinion on everything:
- Ukraine versus Russia.
- Palestine versus Israel.
- Meghan and Harry versus the rest of the English royal family.
- Twix™ versus vodka. I mean, you can have both.
And you’re supposed to care about these things, deeply, even though the media noise it appears that Meghan and Harry have the collective I.Q. of a poorly-watered houseplant. I guess they’re more like a cactus with a fancy title.
I’ll take a controversial opinion: I don’t really care about any of those things I listed above, and you can’t make me. And, if forced to choose, I’d rather live in a world without vodka than a world without Twix©, because, well, bourbon.
Did he name the ear he didn’t cut off Van Stay?
Neil Postman wrote about part of this in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it. News gets filtered down to the barest elements – image and emotion. Our consciousness is then hit with a barrage of unactionable information.
I don’t care about any of those things precisely because I started learning about them as they developed, after I dig deeper into details. I tend to do that when I get the sense that the propaganda is flying hot and heavy: what are the facts of the situation?
Another corollary: if I lived in 1745 America, would I even hear of these conflicts taking place half a world away? Does it make any difference to me that these fights are taking place?
Not really. And I won’t have been upset that Carl the Butcher three states away didn’t give a “thumbs up” to my “killed the Indians raiding our village” update on Ye Olde Facebooke®.
But we don’t live in 1745 America, so we hear about them. I will say that the filters still do work in that a car crash in the next county gets a lot more news locally than a school bus filled with nuns and orphans going over a cliff in India or the Rwandans deciding that they want to eat half 1.3 million residents of the Congo.
Never eat a Monopoly® board. It tastes gamey.
We are primed, however, to affiliate with our tribe. People who enjoy the same football (0.3048 meterball to you Europeans) or baseball (cricket, but with beer) team mainly all get along pretty well in the stadium or at work on Monday after the game. But if I don’t like the local team, nobody at work really cares. In this, although they affiliate, they’re much more in the role of spectator rather than moral participants.
That has ceased. Tribes used to be fun, but now they’ve turned feral. I mainly blame the GloboLeft, because they simply are broken emotionally.
I’ve written before about the mechanism where GloboLeftists have cast their empathy net so far that they’ve essentially forgotten about humanity. Note that their incessant handwringing about COVID Vaxxing® disappeared the second that a Russian tank tread touched Ukrainian clay.
Yes, GloboLeftists care about borders. Just not our borders. Have an unending stream of invaders into Europe that makes The Camp of the Saints look like a best-case scenario instead of impossible dystopian fiction? Not a problem.
Oh, Europe. I’d say, “never change” to you but I can’t write Arabic script.
But let one group of Slavic people invade another group of Slavic people in countries where potatoes are used instead of coins?
Count me out, but I’ll pop some popcorn as I watch the GloboLeft switches trip and the gold and blue flags pop up.
I decided to read about what was really going on, and came up with the opinion that I don’t care if the Russians are attacking the Ukrainians. And no one can make me care.
Frankly, I’m happier to let those things go. If I want to spend my energy caring, I’ll care about things much closer to home, and spend it on things that are much more important than if one quasi-dictator takes out another.
By all means, please, feel free to care about any or all of those things.
The reason that I blame the GloboLeft is that they have always cared more than the TradRight about what the people care about. The high point of these were the communist governments of the 20th century. Stalin’s minions cared what you thought about Stalin. Mao’s Long March Through the Institutions was built on rooting out people that didn’t think like Mao.
It didn’t matter if you were a good bricklayer, you had to be a bricklayer that thought like Mao.
Since eggs are more expensive now, are people more likely to poach them?
One of the commentators had previously described this as an essentially feminine characteristic. I guess I can see that. Ma Wilder cared what I thought. Pa Wilder just wanted peace and quiet.
What’s next?
From what I see today, I think we’re moving into Pa Wilder territory – Trump absolutely doesn’t care what I think about him. Trump just deported a bunch of Venezuelan gangsters to “entertainment camps” in El Salvador. Normally, the GloboLeftist media would have brought up a storm of complaint.
I’m sure those prisoners will soon be El Salvadorable.
Now, not so much. Why? The pendulum is moving, rapidly, right. When even CNN sees that the party of “caring” is less popular than Ebola at a Methodist potluck in Minnesota, even they can read the room.
Me, I care about our borders first. And, I’m also glad I live in a Universe where I can have both vodka and Twix®.
“And, if forced to choose, I’d rather live in a world without vodka than a world without Twix©, because, well, bourbon.”
I was about to scold you for mixing Twix with vodka (how uncouth) but then I was glad to see you came to your senses.
Yes, in this Universe there is room for redemption.
Be careful. The Left are more upset over indifference than hate–the whole reason that “not being racist” became “racist” in their view.
Yup. They hate their own splitters even more.
There are serious issues with mental health that come from endlessly hearing about problems and tragedies that you can’t do anything about. Why do I need to know about a bus going over a cliff in Pakistan, killing 50 people? What am I supposed to do about it? If my neighbor’s house is destroyed in a tornado, that is something I can help with. I certainly like having all of this information at my finger tips but it really isn’t helpful for mental stability.
Most people can’t differentiate between information and information that pertains to them. I try to determine if I care.
Paging (heh) Dr. Watson, talking to Sherlock Homes….
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9097989-his-ignorance-was-as-remarkable-as-his-knowledge-of-contemporary
(Ironic ending paragraph) Meanwhile, the $10 billion Webb Telescope has discovered two extraordinary galaxies at the literal dawn of time that, according to our theories, shouldn’t even exist… 🙂
Almost everything we have been told to think has been wrong.
What is coming is an entirely new paradigm with the status quo crew trying to stop it by killing most people, and a lot of people will self-delete instead of change their entire way of being.
Good luck.
Nice choice, my friend.
My grandmother once admonished by grandfather about his calm response to something and she asked: “Aren’t you worried?” He replied: “Why should I worry? There’s nothing I can do about it.”
He was a wise old man that served in WW1, dealt with the Great Depression, dealt with another world war, and watched as they put a man on the moon. I think his success was dealing with only what he could change, and not having any concern about much of anything else.
I remember watching a documentary series about WWI, and how the front lines were only a short distance from Paris. You’d think people would be in a state of panic, but the Parisians carried on with their daily lives as if the war wasn’t even happening.
At one point of the war, the French troops got so disillusioned that they just walked off the front lines and went into town. Fortunately for them, the Germans weren’t aware of it, otherwise they could have easily broken through the abandoned trenches and won the war.
The main take away I got from that is that war seems really huge on TV, but it really occupies just a tiny tiny percentage of actual real estate. Even in the most horrific of battles, life carries on as normal over the other 99.999999999% of the earth.
Very true. Except in Russia or China. Then? “The Battle of the Mu-Shu where the Kwan-Le fought the Kai-Shen and 350 million died, 32 million due to cannibalism.”
I’m not that familiar with Chinese military history, but that number seems really high. Should it be thousands instead of millions?
Neither the Chinese nor the Stalin era Russians viewed life as precious so they had/have no problem committing atrocities against their own people (or civilians in general). So yeah, if you lived in these areas, they were more likely to make your life a living hell particularly if civil war or revolution was at play.
It’s not surprising that these countries also believed strongly in the concept of “human wave” attacks and would slaughter thousands of their own soldiers by just charging them en masse against fortified positions.
IIRC, Russian lost about 20 million people in WWII, with Stalin killing anywhere from 3 to 10 million in the Holodomor famine in addition to those that were purged for political reasons. If Stalin hadn’t killed so many of his own people before Barbarossa , I think the Russians could have won the war much more quickly and with significantly less loss of life.
The Three Kingdoms War killed 20% of the population. Of the Earth.
I’ve heard that. Mainly from folk who finally are old enough to have figured out the code. We should teach it in schools.
Not caring is very nearly a super power.
I stopped caring in August, 2004, in northern Iraq. It was either that, or become the subject of a “60 Minutes” special report.
I served through three different wars. In two of them, I didn’t care about the enemy at all. I just had to identify them, so others could kill them. The Communists were good enemies, and I cared about them, but I never hated them. Hate clouds judgement. (The Communists killed more people I served with than the Serbs and Arabs combined. The cold war wasn’t all that cold in Berlin.)
Sounds like you have some stories . . .
Sadly, the normies hang on every word that TPTB allow on CNNMSNBCFAUXESPN, et al. Echo chambers. Doom Loops. Worst show on TV? “The NBA Today” on ESPN. Unwatchable.
Occasionally, I’ll eat at a bar where the noontime local news from Savannah is on one of the TVs. It’s all tripe, 90% centered on blacks or some squishy libtard cause, with weather being the other 10%.
The one truism about TV news is that “if it bleeds, it leads.” If no blood available, it’s a fire or some other disaster.
Exactly. Our local news is pretty good, because it’s actionable. Beyond that? A soap opera.
George Thorogood would like a word about that van Gogh joke.
Fixed it! Thank you!
Yes, but.
You’re focusing on the trees, and missing the forest.
Try replacing one of those with “Your government being nothing but a grifting, lying, sack of total shit.”
That should interest you greatly.
This is the one place where past performance is a guarantee of future behavior.
And you’re going to care about it, intimately, up close and personal, for the same reason you’re going to care deeply about whether or not your proctologist is using the whole fist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwDGQxIREhY
You will see this material again.
As Roger Daltrey asked once, “Tommy, can you feel me?”
Don’t worry. You will.
Let me know how much you’ll care then.
Not now. Then.
And maybe learn the words to Moon River.
Ha! (Fletch). That’s close enough that I care about it. And USAID, too.
I’ve thought for a while that as times got tougher, peoples’ circle of “give a f#ck” would get smaller and smaller, ultimately becoming just family, and then just them. I’ve been watching it come true online in a number of communities, and I feel it in my own life.
Caring about other people, especially very different people very far away, is a luxury. And that luxury is about all used up.
BBC News used to be the kings of this. EVERY news hour would feature some horrible thing happening to women or kids in some sh!teholistan or africa. I’m sure their target listeners felt a great glow that they knew of the plight of girls in some tribe of 300 in mud huts somewhere… meanwhile nothing about the rape gangs in Rotterdam.
My political focus is much more like real estate, local local local. Our HOA and School Board have more immediate effect on my life, and my kids’ lives, and my City Councilwoman is far more accessible than the third undersecretary of education at the Federal level. Yes, the big guys set a tone, and there are big impacts, but my ability to interact with them and change or influence them is very limited. So I care less about the big guys. I care a lot about my School Superintendent and the ISD’s Chief of Police.
Change what you can. Monitor, plan, but ultimately, there isn’t much the mice can do when the elephants dance, other than get nervous.
nick
Isn’t that global caring thing a European trait in general? Coworkers across the pond would get their annual August “holiday” and it seemed that they were usually taking their family to some 3rd world country to “vacation” for a month.
At first I thought they did this because it was cheaper, but later got the impression that this was just a mix of leftover colonialist tendencies mixed in with an overwhelming liberal guilt that made them feel they needed to go and help these people.
Yup, the circle gets smaller. But if I can convince people to prep? My life gets better.
Paraphrasing Mark Twain: “The man who doesn’t read the weather forecast has no advantage over the man who cannot read it.”
Or as Dean Wormer put it: “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, boy.”
Caring includes paying attention to what’s coming your way from far over the horizon.
Most people would rather be shopping in the markets of Pompeii, even as Vesuvius increases its smoke output.
No argument there.