Over the years I’ve sat on so many fences that I’m thinking of taking a plaster cast of the rear end and selling it to fencing manufacturers as some kind of template for their products.
In an effort to maintain our sanity living amongst the hoards of loonie lefties and fantasy driven lemmings my husband and I simply chose to drop out of their world. We refuse to agree with, support, engage in or tolerate their nonsense. We moved to a very rural area where almost everyone, including the young people, are rooted in basic common sense reality. Young people up here are getting married early. Having babies. Men are ranchers and farmers and tradesmen. And yes, doctors and dentists, etc. Almost everyone is self sufficient, growing their own food, living off-grid. It’s the best move we ever made. We refuse to engage, indulge or comply.
Disengaging from the madness is definitely one solution. It's hard to see how this could be scaled up, though.
I continually have to check and re-check myself - is what I *think* I'm seeing really true, or is it just that I've become one of those grumpy old men?
There may be an element of the old "things were so much better back in my day" going on, but I think there have been many changes for the worse and that I'm not just making it all up.
Some of it might be ascribed to youthful idealism. I was one of those idealists too. I thought that taxing the rich (who, I thought were all 'unfairly' rich, obviously) and being 'nice' to each other would solve everything. As you grow up and mature you begin to realize that these are actually terrible solutions to the problems you perceive - and that solutions that don't take into account human 'nature' are a load of bollocks - those kind of ideas have to be *forced* on people and they don't work. Never have, never will. They lead to vastly more misery and suffering than you were trying to solve in the first place.
What we seem to have these days is a large group of people who seem to be locked in a kind of perpetual adolescence and think their simple 'compassion' based solutions are just ticketyboo. They don't really see themselves as the authoritarian and totalitarian nutcases they are in reality. Nutcases may be too strong a word, maybe deluded and immature would be more apposite.
You know a two-state solution will not work, for the simplest of reasons: neither side wants it.
The Arabs (the invented people called palestinians) wants the entirety of Israel as theirs, and jews dead or driven out (again, I might add).
The jews, enough of them, support settlements that violate the previous agreements and treaties and these settlements are not a response to Arab violence but a conscious and purposeful policy, funded in large parts by US-based jewish and christian fundamentalist groups.
Both groups hold mutually exclusive goals.
Even if you could get 95% of Arabs to agree to a two-state solution for real, the remaining 5% would behave the way the various IRA-groups did. Even if you could somehow curb the activities of the US jewish/christian groups, there are plenty enough hard-line racial supremacist jews in Israel willing to go back to the brand of terrorism their predecessors engaged in, in the 1910s onwards.
And that would force the opposite group to react, and from there it would go back to normal: endless slow-burn war.
So let them at it, deport every jew and arab in West that argues for this crap, finances it and causes trouble here. Dump them in the water outside the territorial line if you have to. Ideally, put ten of each kind in the same life-raft. Maybe they'll learn to co-operate to survive, but my money is on them fighting until the boat sinks.
So let them at it, and get rid of them from here once and for all.
Speaking of, it's not reality vs fantasy, but reality vs reality. What's that you say, there's only one reality? (Insert pop-culture mumbo-jumbo about quantum whatsits.)
Well yes, there's only one actually existing material reality. But there are many perceptions of it and many communications of those perceptions, and many perceptions of those communications of perceptions, and [...] . This is the problem: eventually, you may believe the idea of reality over reality.
(Obviously, I tend to fall on the side of the interpretation-communication that is closest to what is empirically observable and that actually matters to daily life, so here's me with my bias on full display.)
However, on a positive note, all the people saying we are about due a civilisational collapse are wrong. It's already happened (1914-1945) and we are living the aftermath right now. Western civilisation has collapsed. What is happening now is the paradigms re-arranging themselves into new patterns, while the beneficients of the old ones fail to adapt and desperately try to "carry snow in their hands", clutching harder and harder as it shrinks.
Last time, it took centuries for a new clear paradigm to emerge (usually, Hastings is used as the definite marker for when it was firmly established); this time thanks to our technomagic it will take at most a decade or so until we will have had a watershed-moment.
And look at Stürmer the same way. Imagine a competent dictator-in-spe instead of this "White man's Idi Amin" you have for a PM.
Sometimes, having a venal incompetent corrupt sock-puppet clown of a fairy-fondling fruit in office is preferable.
(Edit: Normally, I don't bother editing for spelling errors, but upon re-reading I saw some of them mucked up the meaning.)
Yeah - I think the whole 'two-state solution' thing is effectively dead now - and in the eyes of clear-sighted Jews may have died in 1948 when they realized the true character of their neighbours.
In a lot of ways I see Israel as a bit like Sweden during covid - an example to the idiots they were surrounded with on how to do things better. If I was given a choice to live in Israel or Syria, say, it really wouldn't be a very hard decision now would it?
There is only one reality - and many different perceptions of it. I agree - we're always going to struggle with that mismatch between the 'is' and our ideas of what is.
Your point about preferring some gormless tit in charge (I liked your description better) over some competent maniac is well-taken. The problem comes when said gormless tit introduces all sorts of mechanisms of power and control that can then be exploited by the competent maniac who might replace them.
No Lenin without the Tsarist corruption, no Hitler without Weimar, one might condense it to.
It is mostly ignored on purpose or forgotten, but neither regimes were more brutal or unjust than the ones they replaced, they were just more efficient and better at it.
Starmer, "the poor man's Tony Blair", is on a clear path of making a Cromwell not just possible but necessary.
The so-called Palestinians don’t want to live in peace with the Jews. The proposal that they should have a State (in Israel or anywhere) is preposterous. They don’t deserve a State - even if they existed as a people, which they don’t.
That's the sad reality - I think the majority really don't want to live in peaceful co-existence with Israel and the Jews. I wish it were not true, but it appears to be.
Arthur Wellesley, The Duke of Wellington, the Iron Fucking Duke, the man who crushed Napoleon, was once the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. A great warrior, a man to be respected and feared, and never to be fucked with.
Now we have Top Gear, Two Tier, Fabulously Queer Kier Starmer in the role. The man who crushed Lucy Connolley. The man who gets his clothes and expensive glasses paid for by his...ahem...friend.
It should be surprising that such a corrupt buffoon is the PM, but today it would be surprising if he weren't.
Yup - I have the same fears. It's gonna get a whole lot worse.
Just looking at the illegal immigration issue, for example, we have a really well-organized and well-funded operation to ferry these people across the channel. There is no good reason why this cannot be stopped. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that this is *desired* by the 'powers that be'.
Why it is desired is a bit of a mystery - but there's definitely no 'innocent' explanation.
The under 30 crowd, the laptop generation, has been living in their own reality their entire lives. The reality we, over 30, know and previously enjoyed simply doesn't exist for them. A lot of 30+ have embraced these alternative realities as well, because "real" reality has become so unlikable, so we are basically screwed. Add in an innumerable amount of body alterations - injections, dental work, food stuffs, meds, etc. what we are working with is no longer "human". They are the cyborgs. They are programmable. They can change their "minds" in an instant and make it make "sense" to themselves. They are the hive mind. They preach tolerance and acceptance but they have no idea what it means. All they know is that they want what they want now and are used to getting it. They have been programmed to be cluster B psych patients and will destroy everything because they all they know is how to be insufferable children who throw tantrums at everything. They've felt like garbage since day 1 of life (shots!) and have never known what healthy feels like and they want everyone else to be just as miserable as they are. The boomers get on board because they feel irrelevant in society and can now feel like they have a purpose. Charlie Kirk is an avatar in their twisted minds and avatars get offed multiple times a night in the "reality" they exist in - gaming. This is the only somewhat logical explanation I have. Rationality isn't a part of their existence.
Hard to disagree with much of what you write here Kat, sadly.
I really like your description of Charlie Kirk being some kind of avatar in their minds. They really don't seem to be able to perceive the 'human' in the same way as the rest of us.
I was talking about this kind of thing with daughter number 2 the other day. Although we both despise Starmer with a passion, neither of us would want him to be assassinated. We'd be horrified and actually sad for his family. He's a human being, not someone we'd want to be in close proximity to, but human nevertheless.
I think the 'left' - for want of a better word - really do have a very limited 'Overton' window of what they consider to be an acceptable human being - and that's a big difference with the 'right'.
And that's excluding the extreme nutters on both the left and right here.
In extreme cases, youngish women making chopping motions with both hands...on matters as mundane as the latest speech by a semi-entity of a politician...like having the interpreter for the audibly-compromised...
Yeah the whole thing was one of those fusterclucks - and a few agent provocateurs in the right places are more than enough to spark an angry crowd into violence
Here's my attempt to give the narrative a teeny tiny bit of credit for getting a few things right on covid, but the main point is even what they got right, they twisted backwards and inside out, into destructive insanity.
Yeah - I don't think I'd quibble too much with your (very) thin list of what they got, sort of (for very small values of 'sort of') got right.
Grotesque exaggeration seems to be one of the key features of today's world - and it can be seen not just with the whole covid farce. We live in the Age of The Drama Queen
The root cause of “different realities” is, of course, that the long-held common ideal (that which gives rise to common values) fundamental to a cohesive society has been eroded, white-anted and undermined. Moral fecklessness is a consequence of the insufficiency of one’s supreme value. The realization of this, along with a catalyzing event, is, in my view, one of the driving forces behind the recent surge in interest in Christianity. Let’s hope Christian churches prove worthy.
Oh, and a brief footnote: Technically going from 5,000 to 500,000 is only a 9,900% increase. 500,000 is 10,000% of the baseline of 5,000. A distinction without practical difference I will confess.
Thanks for another great article. I have come to understand that the technique for achieving popularity in opinion media involves saying what others think in a way that they wish they had said themselves. You seem to be very much headed in the right direction.
In an effort to maintain our sanity living amongst the hoards of loonie lefties and fantasy driven lemmings my husband and I simply chose to drop out of their world. We refuse to agree with, support, engage in or tolerate their nonsense. We moved to a very rural area where almost everyone, including the young people, are rooted in basic common sense reality. Young people up here are getting married early. Having babies. Men are ranchers and farmers and tradesmen. And yes, doctors and dentists, etc. Almost everyone is self sufficient, growing their own food, living off-grid. It’s the best move we ever made. We refuse to engage, indulge or comply.
Disengaging from the madness is definitely one solution. It's hard to see how this could be scaled up, though.
I continually have to check and re-check myself - is what I *think* I'm seeing really true, or is it just that I've become one of those grumpy old men?
There may be an element of the old "things were so much better back in my day" going on, but I think there have been many changes for the worse and that I'm not just making it all up.
Some of it might be ascribed to youthful idealism. I was one of those idealists too. I thought that taxing the rich (who, I thought were all 'unfairly' rich, obviously) and being 'nice' to each other would solve everything. As you grow up and mature you begin to realize that these are actually terrible solutions to the problems you perceive - and that solutions that don't take into account human 'nature' are a load of bollocks - those kind of ideas have to be *forced* on people and they don't work. Never have, never will. They lead to vastly more misery and suffering than you were trying to solve in the first place.
What we seem to have these days is a large group of people who seem to be locked in a kind of perpetual adolescence and think their simple 'compassion' based solutions are just ticketyboo. They don't really see themselves as the authoritarian and totalitarian nutcases they are in reality. Nutcases may be too strong a word, maybe deluded and immature would be more apposite.
You know a two-state solution will not work, for the simplest of reasons: neither side wants it.
The Arabs (the invented people called palestinians) wants the entirety of Israel as theirs, and jews dead or driven out (again, I might add).
The jews, enough of them, support settlements that violate the previous agreements and treaties and these settlements are not a response to Arab violence but a conscious and purposeful policy, funded in large parts by US-based jewish and christian fundamentalist groups.
Both groups hold mutually exclusive goals.
Even if you could get 95% of Arabs to agree to a two-state solution for real, the remaining 5% would behave the way the various IRA-groups did. Even if you could somehow curb the activities of the US jewish/christian groups, there are plenty enough hard-line racial supremacist jews in Israel willing to go back to the brand of terrorism their predecessors engaged in, in the 1910s onwards.
And that would force the opposite group to react, and from there it would go back to normal: endless slow-burn war.
So let them at it, deport every jew and arab in West that argues for this crap, finances it and causes trouble here. Dump them in the water outside the territorial line if you have to. Ideally, put ten of each kind in the same life-raft. Maybe they'll learn to co-operate to survive, but my money is on them fighting until the boat sinks.
So let them at it, and get rid of them from here once and for all.
Speaking of, it's not reality vs fantasy, but reality vs reality. What's that you say, there's only one reality? (Insert pop-culture mumbo-jumbo about quantum whatsits.)
Well yes, there's only one actually existing material reality. But there are many perceptions of it and many communications of those perceptions, and many perceptions of those communications of perceptions, and [...] . This is the problem: eventually, you may believe the idea of reality over reality.
(Obviously, I tend to fall on the side of the interpretation-communication that is closest to what is empirically observable and that actually matters to daily life, so here's me with my bias on full display.)
However, on a positive note, all the people saying we are about due a civilisational collapse are wrong. It's already happened (1914-1945) and we are living the aftermath right now. Western civilisation has collapsed. What is happening now is the paradigms re-arranging themselves into new patterns, while the beneficients of the old ones fail to adapt and desperately try to "carry snow in their hands", clutching harder and harder as it shrinks.
Last time, it took centuries for a new clear paradigm to emerge (usually, Hastings is used as the definite marker for when it was firmly established); this time thanks to our technomagic it will take at most a decade or so until we will have had a watershed-moment.
And look at Stürmer the same way. Imagine a competent dictator-in-spe instead of this "White man's Idi Amin" you have for a PM.
Sometimes, having a venal incompetent corrupt sock-puppet clown of a fairy-fondling fruit in office is preferable.
(Edit: Normally, I don't bother editing for spelling errors, but upon re-reading I saw some of them mucked up the meaning.)
Yeah - I think the whole 'two-state solution' thing is effectively dead now - and in the eyes of clear-sighted Jews may have died in 1948 when they realized the true character of their neighbours.
In a lot of ways I see Israel as a bit like Sweden during covid - an example to the idiots they were surrounded with on how to do things better. If I was given a choice to live in Israel or Syria, say, it really wouldn't be a very hard decision now would it?
There is only one reality - and many different perceptions of it. I agree - we're always going to struggle with that mismatch between the 'is' and our ideas of what is.
Your point about preferring some gormless tit in charge (I liked your description better) over some competent maniac is well-taken. The problem comes when said gormless tit introduces all sorts of mechanisms of power and control that can then be exploited by the competent maniac who might replace them.
Yup.
No Lenin without the Tsarist corruption, no Hitler without Weimar, one might condense it to.
It is mostly ignored on purpose or forgotten, but neither regimes were more brutal or unjust than the ones they replaced, they were just more efficient and better at it.
Starmer, "the poor man's Tony Blair", is on a clear path of making a Cromwell not just possible but necessary.
The so-called Palestinians don’t want to live in peace with the Jews. The proposal that they should have a State (in Israel or anywhere) is preposterous. They don’t deserve a State - even if they existed as a people, which they don’t.
That's the sad reality - I think the majority really don't want to live in peaceful co-existence with Israel and the Jews. I wish it were not true, but it appears to be.
Arthur Wellesley, The Duke of Wellington, the Iron Fucking Duke, the man who crushed Napoleon, was once the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. A great warrior, a man to be respected and feared, and never to be fucked with.
Now we have Top Gear, Two Tier, Fabulously Queer Kier Starmer in the role. The man who crushed Lucy Connolley. The man who gets his clothes and expensive glasses paid for by his...ahem...friend.
It should be surprising that such a corrupt buffoon is the PM, but today it would be surprising if he weren't.
Its going to get worse before it gets worse.
Yup - I have the same fears. It's gonna get a whole lot worse.
Just looking at the illegal immigration issue, for example, we have a really well-organized and well-funded operation to ferry these people across the channel. There is no good reason why this cannot be stopped. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that this is *desired* by the 'powers that be'.
Why it is desired is a bit of a mystery - but there's definitely no 'innocent' explanation.
The under 30 crowd, the laptop generation, has been living in their own reality their entire lives. The reality we, over 30, know and previously enjoyed simply doesn't exist for them. A lot of 30+ have embraced these alternative realities as well, because "real" reality has become so unlikable, so we are basically screwed. Add in an innumerable amount of body alterations - injections, dental work, food stuffs, meds, etc. what we are working with is no longer "human". They are the cyborgs. They are programmable. They can change their "minds" in an instant and make it make "sense" to themselves. They are the hive mind. They preach tolerance and acceptance but they have no idea what it means. All they know is that they want what they want now and are used to getting it. They have been programmed to be cluster B psych patients and will destroy everything because they all they know is how to be insufferable children who throw tantrums at everything. They've felt like garbage since day 1 of life (shots!) and have never known what healthy feels like and they want everyone else to be just as miserable as they are. The boomers get on board because they feel irrelevant in society and can now feel like they have a purpose. Charlie Kirk is an avatar in their twisted minds and avatars get offed multiple times a night in the "reality" they exist in - gaming. This is the only somewhat logical explanation I have. Rationality isn't a part of their existence.
Hard to disagree with much of what you write here Kat, sadly.
I really like your description of Charlie Kirk being some kind of avatar in their minds. They really don't seem to be able to perceive the 'human' in the same way as the rest of us.
I was talking about this kind of thing with daughter number 2 the other day. Although we both despise Starmer with a passion, neither of us would want him to be assassinated. We'd be horrified and actually sad for his family. He's a human being, not someone we'd want to be in close proximity to, but human nevertheless.
I think the 'left' - for want of a better word - really do have a very limited 'Overton' window of what they consider to be an acceptable human being - and that's a big difference with the 'right'.
And that's excluding the extreme nutters on both the left and right here.
Yeah... the nutters used to be sequestered to the basement for life. Now they live! 🧟♂️ And get to have public voices via the internet. Lucky us 🙄.
Roland Fryer is probably the Harvard professor you’re thinking of.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Fryer
Rounding up, at the current time we are ALL crazy.
😂
At school, the first rule of making points in debate was " using gestures is forbidden"...
Probably why I sucked at debate - couldn't stop those eyes from rolling
In extreme cases, youngish women making chopping motions with both hands...on matters as mundane as the latest speech by a semi-entity of a politician...like having the interpreter for the audibly-compromised...
Perfect.
Thanks Anneliese - much appreciated
The FBI has acknowledged it had 274 plainclothes agents in the massive crowds on Jan. 6, 2021:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/fbi-had-275-plainclothes-agents-embedded-in-jan-6-crowds-congressional-source-says
Yeah the whole thing was one of those fusterclucks - and a few agent provocateurs in the right places are more than enough to spark an angry crowd into violence
Here's my attempt to give the narrative a teeny tiny bit of credit for getting a few things right on covid, but the main point is even what they got right, they twisted backwards and inside out, into destructive insanity.
https://anotherbetrayedliberal.substack.com/p/what-the-narrative-gets-right-about
Resist digital IDs, somehow ...
Love from across the pond ...
Yeah - I don't think I'd quibble too much with your (very) thin list of what they got, sort of (for very small values of 'sort of') got right.
Grotesque exaggeration seems to be one of the key features of today's world - and it can be seen not just with the whole covid farce. We live in the Age of The Drama Queen
The root cause of “different realities” is, of course, that the long-held common ideal (that which gives rise to common values) fundamental to a cohesive society has been eroded, white-anted and undermined. Moral fecklessness is a consequence of the insufficiency of one’s supreme value. The realization of this, along with a catalyzing event, is, in my view, one of the driving forces behind the recent surge in interest in Christianity. Let’s hope Christian churches prove worthy.
Oh, and a brief footnote: Technically going from 5,000 to 500,000 is only a 9,900% increase. 500,000 is 10,000% of the baseline of 5,000. A distinction without practical difference I will confess.
Thanks for another great article. I have come to understand that the technique for achieving popularity in opinion media involves saying what others think in a way that they wish they had said themselves. You seem to be very much headed in the right direction.
Yeah - the percentage I originally calculated was derived from the 'exact' figures supplied by Google - and it comes even closer to 10,000%
I should have qualified what I wrote with 'close to' - sorry about that. Bit careless of me.
I think if I ever became 'too popular' I'd probably stop writing 😂
It's not fantasy, it's lies, lies deliberately told and repeated. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about this, and what to do about it - https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/live-not-by-lies-by-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn
Yes - their alternative 'reality' has been generated by continual widespread lies propagated by the media etc.
Objective reality......yeah, that used to be a thing didn't it?
Great article - love the humour.
Thanks Bettina - much appreciated