The Desolation of Dreams

I’m not entirely sure, but I think new footage of the appalling events of Jan 6th has been released. For those of you who are not aware, this was a dark, dark, day in US history where the whole country teetered on a knife edge as Adolf Trump was very nearly installed as Dictator-in-Chief. It was a close run thing. How the US survived this calamitous existential threat is something we can only wonder at.

I looked at some footage, and here’s a screenshot at random, which clearly shows the dire emergency and extreme danger that the USA was in

I mean, c’mon man, these people are basically equivalent to the murderous psychopaths of Hamas, but without the paragliders. Dangerous extremist types who want to turn America into MAGAstan.

They were indulging in this clearly violent and dangerous walk-through because they felt the 2020 election was unfair.

It is well established that, despite having security holes a mile wide, the 2020 US election was the fairest, most secure, and true election that has ever been held anywhere in human history.

I might have the quote a little bit wrong, but I think some famous American once said

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be elected by the will of the people but by the content of their postal vote.

Something like that anyway.

The world has stolen Greta’s dreams, along with several elections, and we’re fast replacing MLK’s dream with a fucking nightmare of hyper-sensitivity to racial differences.

The young people of today are able to tell you¹ that whitey is bad, the cause of all the world’s evils because of their colonialist genes, that women can have penises, and that capitalism is bad² and all sorts of other goodies, but they can’t work out that signing up for crushing debt by pursuing a college education is not conducive to future financial prosperity³ (for most).

It’s not all their fault - let’s be honest about that. College degrees are required for many jobs - so there’s not much choice if you want to pursue certain careers.

But the worse thing is that they’ve been sold a glittering, shiny, dream.

The Feline of Maleficence meows lyrical about this in his recent post.

how higher education became a cargo cult

El Gato attacks the dream that if you go to college you’ll end up better off. He basically restates what I think of as the Carlin Principle

The point is that you can’t send over 50% of your young people to college and end up with all of them earning in the top 10%

There’s thing called math, you see, and although a lot of people these days seem to want 2+2 to equal 5, it really, really, really, really, doesn’t work that way.

Most parents want the best for their kids. Some parents just want them to have the very best neo-vagina. Very few parents will say something like this :

You’re as thick as two fridge doors. You have nothing going for you. You could study 36 hours a day and you’d be lucky to remember to flip all those burgers in your future career

No, we tell them that if they work hard they can achieve anything; they can realise their dreams.

This is not entirely true.

I may have a dream of becoming a famous internet influencer⁴, but I noted the other day that Konstantin Kisin has twice the number of paid subscribers on Substack than I have free subscribers.

There’s a reason for this - and it’s because people feel (and rightly so, in my opinion) someone like KK is worth it⁵. Ah, the evils of that free market capitalist thingamajig. I’m so special. Why haven’t I succeeded yet? Must be because I’m oppressed, right?

The reason I’m not as famous or well-quoted as Thomas Sowell⁶ is, basically, because I’m not Thomas Sowell. And no amount of work, or wishful thinking, would ever turn me into Thomas Sowell.

Dreams can be nice sometimes - but then you wake up.

In the bad old patriarchal days (or if you’re a radfem, the current old patriarchal days) people had some really shitty dreams. They wanted to do awful, oppressive, things like get married and start families. Extremist bastards. Nowadays it’s about getting to 3 digits in the number of people you’ve shagged as a result of Tinder, or living a life of luxury provided by your 666 man⁷.

If you are, actually, a 666 man then why would you want to settle down with someone when you can destroy the dreams of luxury of a few hundred women a year?

OK - I’m being deliberately provocative here, but what dreams as individuals and as a society do we have?

You’ll notice that many ‘societal’ dreams - ensuring fairness and justice and equality etc - are essentially nothing more than tokenistic efforts. I’m going to respect pronouns and show my support for LGBTQWERTY people and I’m going to put the Ukrainian flag on my profile. That’ll show them damned Russkies.

I’ve done my bit. I’m practically the next Gandhi.

I’ve long wondered whether the high divorce rates today are partly due to unrealistic expectations and dreams of what married life is about. We’re all sold this hyper-romantic dream by Hollywood and TV shows, but the reality is a little different. It takes work to make a marriage work. It may be easy work, and you may not notice it as ‘work’, but a marriage is made up of a million miraculous moments of microaffections. Tiny threads that, if you let them, become woven together into the strongest of all possible bonds.

There is today a strong sense of entitlement. We’ve gone from entitlement being something you earn, to something you’re given - usually by Big Government.

Someone like Thomas Sowell is entitled to respect because he has earned that respect. Fiona Bulge, who was formerly Alfred Snott, demands and screeches for respect because of its assumed identity.

If you don’t give Fiona the respect it “deserves” then Big Government will step in and slap a fine on you - or give you a criminal record.

Alfred may dream of becoming Fiona in reality - and adopt an exaggerated caricature of womanhood to try to convince us all - but it’s nothing more than a dream.

Nothing wrong with shooting for the moon, and we shouldn’t be deterred from that. Dreams motivate us to better ourselves. But we should not expect our dreams to come true; therein lies desolation.

1. But not in any great detail. They just know this stuff, but can’t explain any of it.

2. And also racist, apparently

3. Unless you’ve done a degree in “Semiotic Trans-Lesbianism in Indigenous Basket Weaving”. Then you’ve got it made. Eat your heart out Rockefeller.

4. Actually I don’t - but let’s suppose I did

5. And he almost certainly works a good deal harder than I do

6. An absolute fucking legend with a capital L. Possibly America’s greatest living intellectual.

7. 6 foot tall, 6 figure salary, and a 6 pack. Think Carlin again - the math just doesn’t work.