How To Get Laid
Or End A War – Or Make A Friend – Or Save A Culture
Note for new readers – auto-estimated reading times are greatly exaggerated (lots of pix/links)
Hey Folks!
Last time I talked about how both the (fake-mob) left and the (fake-mob) right have been co-opted and manipulated for decades – today I want to talk about how it is that this extremely creepy distortion and misuse happened to our own side (whichever side that is), as well as to the one we passionately thought we were opposing, without most of us ever noticing (the degradation in ourselves, and our movements).
I will have to get into psychology a bit – but fear not, I’m a veteran of the worst possible use of that, also – so I am not going to ask you for deep knowledge of statistics or lore, just to think about the clues you have seen right in front of you your whole life, and how we might interpret those clues differently.
(That same personal witness I try always to reference, when I’m doing history and economics).
I should also be clear for my friends on all sides. No, my points aren’t ‘raunchy’ nor about taking advantage of others, what I really want to talk about is our modern mindset and our crazy stress levels.
The reason I’m going after this understanding level today, instead of starting with history, politics and economics, (though I will, as always, get there) is that my anti-tribalism quest outright demands it.
I have repeatedly insisted the most basic teams in contention for power right now are not the left vs the right, (both mass-movements already co-opted by the mega-powerful to serve evil for decades) nor is our moment mostly about rich vs poor, or even any fundamental racial or geographical struggle for power and resources. All of those quarrels are happening and important (as I document regularly) but the way we experience these forces and participate in these tribes and events depends entirely on how things are set up inside our own heads. What tools have we got, and more importantly, what goals?
The simplest strong idea I have offered in many previous essays is – gratitude people are completely different from bitterness people. But I have to qualify that at once, before some bristle at the suggestion that I’m making a moral assertion about the relative ‘worth’ of human beings – I am very simply not. What I am after (my technician head, coming to the rescue of my passionately seeking but often clueless romantic head) is an observable improvement in practical function in the physical world.
Now just try out these ideas and see how much less abrasive, and perhaps even obvious, they feel.
It is much easier to work very hard and gain steadily increasing skill and range when you love the work – and to make sustained sacrifices without complaint, when you love the one you sacrifice for.
Thing is, those are both just restatements (reformulations?) of my first point. Gratitude enables us to access resources of enthusiasm energy and dedication which boredom and resentment simply do not.
One of the things that seems to be most unusual about my way of thinking, is that while we all take steps and grow through many phases in our understanding over the years, I remain keenly aware of the kinds of feelings and ideas I had before crossing many important thresholds of understanding.
Even where I have understood stronger ideas for decades, I haven’t ever forgotten or lost sympathy for the way it feels when we don’t have those better insights, nor do I deny or block-out the embarrassing memory of the quality of flailing stress and strange leaps of paranoid imagination we can so often take, without truly solid insights to guide our thinking about the world, and especially about other people.
Similarly (my most important life-source gratitude) I have never once in my 36 years of marriage forgotten what it was like to be lonely, before I met my dear wife. We’ve never stopped being grateful for the good company, and acting like that, in the way we treat each other (which really is how to make marriage work, 101 – that is, you have to really want it to, but if you do, you’ll figure it out together).
Are there stresses, challenges, temptations and even tragedies? OMG yes, tons of all of the above. Do any of those things cause us to doubt one another? Nope, because we aren’t anchored on an idea that can be refuted, or an emotion which changes according to setting and stresses – we are one cause.
But there’s a tricky side to that incomparable benefit – we have now both crossed many thresholds of understanding, since our care for each other has nourished us long and well enough to grow that much.
So – when I think about how to help others see and then get some of the sweet (and also outstandingly practical) benefits of gratitude, love and all-in relationship, I have to think about how to get past two understanding thresholds at once, without relying on the tools that either later epiphany offers, to help commend these more love-strengthening insights. This is no small challenge (and people who don’t feel huge sympathy for the insane problems facing young people today, are both clueless and cruel).
The tragic but undeniable fact is, the west has been normalizing and mass-promoting (via advertising) a special kind of glorified/alienated individualist madness, calibrated to best serve the interests of corporate and state-power, for generations – so long that most of us no longer have any contact with or witness of, a more mutual embracing and fundamentally humane common mentality before (not to be confused with the question of historical material conditions, an entirely separate subject and struggle).
The (darkly) funny thing about this loss of mutuality and shared ‘sense’ is that on one level (thanks to the crazy unhealthy bloating of our modern egos) everybody, and I mean everybody, ends up thinking they are the only one who isn’t ever fooled, where pretty much everyone else on earth is basically a dumb and easily manipulable sucker. A position which is so obviously paradoxical, contradictory to observation and staggeringly unlikely, as to be outright infantile (and yet, as I say, also universal).
This absolutely unfounded but widespread emotional confidence in ideas which our logical minds could quite easily recognize as absurd, always makes me think about some of the weird things that both the CIA and the 70s counterculture learned about brainwashing, and the surprisingly few universal indoctrination techniques which we find, which link every widespread system of cult or partisan indoctrination. (Again, the functional persists for reasons of consistent effect, not by superstition).
One – if you join our special club, you’ll feel and truly be, better than everyone else.
Two – in order to join our club you must believe that our sacred arbitrary idea n – is not arbitrary or conditional but a universal and all-cases truth. We all do. Those who don’t are bad and must be rejected and opposed in all cases, even if everything else they have to say is sound. Not us=wrong.
The first is an appeal to the most unwholesome and negative sort of desire and status competition – ‘bigging-up’ by endlessly increasing our hatred of the tribe we aren’t. But the second rule is the key, because as long as we accept their sacred n, and reject the words of all who do not, we actively filter out all of the information the world is constantly trying to give us, to help us break out of the cult!
Oddly, half of us will laugh at the foolishness of rejecting the words of “Unclean nonbelievers!” While the other half finds gross violation of intersectional orthodoxy – a hilariously stupid reason for spite and continued ignorance. Both have an excellent point about the other (and could really use a mirror).
Now I should point out that I grew up with lefties who casually joked these indoctrination rules could apply to Catholicism, just as well as to a tribe of fanatics or cult (idea n for them being immaculate conception), but my own personal beer-hall witness showed me that Marxists have no less fondness for their unquestionable n-truths of dialectical materialism, dictatorship of the proletariat and historical inevitability, and perhaps an even greater contempt for those as yet unconverted and thus, sinners.
It’s really worth asking ourselves (and re-asking, regularly) – do we want to sneer, or understand?
That is, since both sides ADORE this error of logic, are we fair minded enough to accept that it says nothing about the basic qualities of either side, or do we work hard to maintain the negative emotional ideas we find most satisfying – even if that means discarding such clear and simple principle?
Now let me add an important qualifier to those two key points common to systems of indoctrination. The fundamental question is the one which is deliberately not asked by any modern mass-formation tribe – whether fraudulent-cultural, faith-based, political or even philosophical (yes, such thinkers still exist, completely ignored by the over-passionate tribalists though they have always been).
The real question is about goals. What is our intended destination – and by what means will we try to get there? What are we even trying for, or at least to get closer to? And what approaches and techniques do we consider our reasonable tools and entitlements, in order to achieve that goal or destination?
Or – How dedicated are we to our own personal emotion-driven manias, versus common principles?
Tribalists get angry with me for insisting principle is incomparably more important than dogma, but I’ve done the dogma trip many times, and come out the far side every time, wondering why those who didn’t leave, could concentrate such furious passion into vengeance-ideology, instead of responding with natural gratitude and optimism to the almost always very nice people gathered around them.
I’m after practical function in the world, not who is the most good or pure, according to some grandiose theoretical framework which always pretends to be enlightenment, but ends up viciously judging the moral worth of people by category, without mercy, pity or any basis in human compassion. (tres digital – and for sure one of the left’s great driving contributions to our sad modern state of techno-feudalism).
The reason “left” and “right” don’t mean anything anymore is not that the two old aspirational sides have completely vanished (they are both drowned-out and masked by the corporate fake tribalists, in terms of BigMedia portrayals, but both are still vital minorities within their own movements, and still trying their best) but very simply because all modern movements now exist alongside heavily promoted popular variations of them with completely backwards and usually outright evil goals.
It is super important to recognize that this is not because the left or right is fundamentally good or bad, (the false-case which tribalists waste all their energy trying to make, over and over again) but because modern people are so often locked-into a state of mania paranoia and narcissism – that we demand fake versions of everything, to meet our consumerist ‘needs.’ So now we can ‘do religion’ without the slightest trace of humility, and ‘care for the world’ without any love for the people on it, whatsoever!
Let me give you a few examples of real (and very painful) lessons within our living memory which we might have learned from. Big social changes from which we can all still see the rotting corpses today.
The best thing about the boomer generation absolutely was their sense of aspiration toward freedom. But for anyone who isn’t a boomer, the extent to which that aspiration was ultimately perverted into freedom from any and all social responsibility and awareness of others, is staggering and terrifying.
We must be clear. Freedom from arbitrary external restraint, want and fear are all legitimate (and very nearly universal) aspirations – but we’ve run the experiment for most of a century now, and can clearly see that freedom from responsibility is functionally identical to mass sociopathy. So destructive to every part of the now starved and degraded commons we once shared and relied upon for resilience and community, as to end up not being any kind of freedom at all – experientially, it is way more like solitary confinement, for every ‘winner’ who adopts this “I’m the centre of the universe” approach.
Thanks to Boomer self-absorption, my X-er generation had to raise ourselves and each other, so we defiantly resolved not to repeat their mistakes. We were sure we were more clever (and way less mean).
Our embrace of computing and our fundamental anti-institutional bias (our own sacred n) made us falsely certain “the system” as a whole was beyond repair and needed to be taken down completely.
The (incredibly obvious, in retrospect) thing that we did not see, was that early micro-computers were so wonky – and so entirely useless for any practical domestic tasks – that only especially clever and frustration tolerant ‘self-starter’ types got into them in a big way. This naturally filtered the community for a very rare subset of initiative and relentless pursuit of solution, which we within it then generalized out to the larger culture, even though we knew even then, that the vast majority weren’t interested in engaging with any hard numbers and creative solutions at all (and thus, weren’t actually learning the lessons we were, just enjoying the often unfounded optimism we felt about many solutions in potentia).
We did not ever carefully distinguish between institutions which were clearly “life-support systems” and those which really were (and remain) oppressive anachronistic and bureaucratic hellscapes of legal entanglement and brick-wall monopolist corruption, where citizen hopes go to die, en masse.
We also didn’t go back and try to repair the extreme damage the entitled boomers did to cultural norms, even though most of us had experienced outsize pain in childhood because of them. This is because we were (again, that arrogance of ‘we’-ness) pretty sure they actually had the basic ideas right, we just had to implement those ideas with way more kindness and awareness of others, and way less narcissism.
But boy do I ever miss healthy institutions (and anything that filters for smart, without gathering mean).
I don’t want to take shots at the millennials or anyone younger (could, but don’t feel properly entitled) and also to be clear, I have much more to say about the errors of my own generation (still in progress).
But even without going further than those two generations of mass error and conceit, I can honestly say that these two mistaken idealisms in combination – the boomers mistaking sociopathic narcissism and entitlement for freedom, and us Xers approaching our own society as an essentially hostile force to be gradually dismantled overcome and then transcended by new means, really have brought us to this truly scary, and for many, hopeless-feeling, time and situation.
None of that was about wrong intentions. It’s about believing, without watching where we’re steering.
The problem is – both of those false-faith n ideas still persist and still gain strength, year after year, because they are incredibly seductive to that part inside all of us, which doesn’t want the aspirational path, but instead craves righteous anger – someone to blame when we feel upset – and entitlement to claim and take extra (because we were clearly shorted on a fundamental level, by some faceless other).
Jealousy, avarice, greed and dishonesty aren’t wrong because someone else told us so, but because investing our energy there over time makes us into less capable, less happy, and generally shittier people (even for an atheist, the Christians nailed a lot of sins, just right – on practical grounds!)
We all know some people who clearly live on one side of this divide or the other. People whose basic love for the world (or even their own family, or great work) makes them functionally unsinkable, no matter what storms hit them in life. And others, who will always find a way to be miserable and unsatisfied, no matter how great their fortune and opportunity. (Must be noted – opportunities do have a way of avoiding these folks over time, giving them even more ‘good’ reasons to feel short-changed!)
But I think it’s actually even more helpful if we stop and realize that for almost all of us (except the most outstandingly beatific and the most pathetically self-abasing and miserably misanthropic) we actually live on both sides of that divide, depending on how our life is going at the time. Which means we actually do have the experience of how much better it feels when we’re aspiring and growing in capacity, than it does when we are locked into that strange fear anger stress and panic loop that leaves us grumpy grasping and jealous. Self-destructively self-centred, rejecting all nourishment with scorn.
So – why is it so hard for us as individuals, but even more disturbingly as societies and communities, to get ourselves into that positive aspirational growth and building mindset, so we can embrace some kind of common sanity – and return to a sense of democratic participation and societal advance?
Part of it is so obvious and constant we have had to learn to tune it out, so it has become very hard to think about it clearly, even though we’re soaking in it. Modern life is objectively frustrating as hell.
I can still vividly remember exchanging my well-worn printed card-stock library card for my first digital library card when I was a ten year old kid (1975) and Toronto was one of the first cities in the world to move from microfilm and printed cards in the back pocket, to digital tags scanners and library databases (thanks to a Canadian computer company GEAC, for which a friend of mine worked as a microprocessor designer). On my second visit with that card, I had to wait forty minutes to check out my books, because the computer had a problem. They all knew me (I almost lived there) but still...
Fast forward a half a century and I found myself waiting around in the bank for forty minutes, because their marketing computer had decided I was female (made it so easy to sort and discard their spam mail – LOL) and even though I had been banking in person at that branch for no less than thirty years straight, and every one of the tellers not only knew me, they all knew my standard corny jokes, too – “the computer had a problem” and the fact that every single human in the room knew better about the state of reality and my identity, simply did not matter at all – nothing could proceed until the false digital model was somehow satisfied – and that screwy reality didn’t shock any of us one bit (like I say, we’re necessarily numb to that one). We still all had to wait and waste time, to serve the great lord of dumb-ass algorythms and unfounded confidence in data-accuracy. We got bored, because if we moderns allowed ourselves to get furious, every time a company uses a computer to tell us to screw-off we would spend some days screaming aloud, all day long! (and not everyone can live on Yonge St). ;o)
The fake world we created for ‘convenience’ has completely swallowed and overtaken the real world!
But again, for my older friends it is crucial to recognize – cellphones are objectively very bad for the emotional development of young people in the here and now – but television really did rot your brain, too! The fact that you can see the new threat, but still not perceive your own indoctrination is typical, understandable and even to be expected – but it still leaves a wrong feeling of relative rightness!
Yes, AI is already threatening to rob people of the ability to concentrate hard enough to conceive of and then write about big ideas (which is especially scary, to me, because it means obliterating the tools of visualization and complex intention by which we humans have always made better thing happen), but the whole history of the recording industry (much as I love it) robbed us as a culture of the (once very common) ability to play musical instruments and read music ourselves, so we could all create and participate in art directly, together, instead of just as passive (and always dollar-paying) consumers.
For that matter, computers themselves did not arise spontaneously, they were upgrades demanded by the huge budgets of tabulating paperwork bureaucrats. The abstract model of the citizenry, whether on paper or in digital form, supplanting observable reality (and imprisoning us all, within absurdity) may even be the key function of the modern (that is, around one hundred year old) western world.
It isn’t just the petty stuff, either (frustrating and unending as those screw-you systems are, for all of us) every last thing about life has been made more and more difficult and expensive, except narcissism.
As a Marxist pal used to explain with a laugh, “Loneliness is infinitely more profitable than any kind of community. If no one trusts each other and shares stuff, then everyone needs to buy one their own everything, even if they almost never use it.”
My younger friends simply cannot understand the extent to which once widespread workers-rights have been utterly destroyed, thanks to decades of (deliberately sustained) underemployment and a regular series of stage managed fiscal emergencies. Even basic social conventions of mutual respect have been so eroded, that absolutely any human thing we might want to do or try, now carries the risk not just of frustration and failure, but a gauntlet of actively mean digital public mocking along the way. Yikes!
The efforts demanded are much harder than ever, the rewards and dignity offered incomparably less. Small wonder that for so many young people, the juice simply no longer seems “worth the squeeze.”
But again – whether it is housing stress or deep loneliness and isolation – we have to step back from the things which are hurting and frustrating us – absolutely objective and legitimate complaints though these are – and ask ourselves – wait a second, what big course are we steering-for again?
If we allow ourselves to be swept-up in feeling helpless and just endlessly reacting, emotionally, to each and every thing which bothers us, we have taken our hand off the tiller and will never make land. Worse still, we have given over our navigation, to anyone who can effectively excite our emotions!
On the other hand, if we think about the bigger course we’re steering, the north star we selected as our aspirational guide, we can put most of the sting of these frustrations behind us. Not by suppressing it, but by learning to become more porous to it, so while frustrations will happen, they mostly pass right through us, without leaving a bunch of enduringly vexing gunk, clogging our mental air-filters!
Connecting solidly to something bigger, is a proven means to scale down the unavoidable bullshit of modern life in-proportion, and not let it (freakin’ computers, after all) embitter us or lessen our lives.
One very heartbreaking fail (of which I know countless examples myself) is people I’ve known for years who have preserved their righteous political anger intact, but let their love for the world die out.
Here is a hard truth about that (which I offer not out of spite, but because I love you and your potential for growth). Political anger without love for humanity makes us just another selfish asshole – insisting our own anger is the point of (and an aspect of) the world, as opposed to say – getting over ourselves for the sake of getting things done, so the world makes less people angry in future. (our old aspiration).
My friends on the new-right like to point to a mental heat-map, which purports to prove that people who self-describe as conservative care most about their family and local community, while people who self-describe as progressive, care much more about distant things like whales and far-off mountains.
I am not convinced that it says any such thing – but – there is way more than nothing to the insight. Where the (predominant) error creeps in, is again, along tribalist lines. Because they are emotionally interested in proving the hypocrisy of self-described progressives (so easy a target, they are bound to get lazy and slack, if they stay mired there too long) they make use of the data to find what they want.
What I see most clearly, is a map of burnt hopes turned into bitterness and tantrums, along with a strong suggestion of maniacal overspecialization – and always foolish tribalist self-harming divisions.
That is – live in a state of bitterness for long enough and it will even hard-wire itself into your brain.
And no – that is NOT revolutionary – not heroic – not self-sacrificial – not in any way about the environment or “justice” – at all. It’s just another modality of bratty ego-supremacy without mirrors (or perhaps about lacking the ability to raise their gaze high enough to look into the ones they do have).
Now about that title.
I’m a strange guy and it shows, I have a wide range of genuine enthusiasms which help me connect to other tryers and keeners, and I really love learning from people who aren’t like me on a deep, non trivial level, so pretty much everyplace I have ever worked (as an adult) I’ve ended up becoming the equivalent of a jailhouse lawyer. I hear whispered problems other friends on staff never do, I write letters, help people think of how best to say difficult things, or get through strategically or emotionally hard times. It just happens that way and feels enough like natural duty that I’ve never questioned it.
Some of the problems are truly heartbreaking and hard to share with people – but I have so often found insights learned from helping one person, to be useful to another person in difficulty, that I have accepted that bearing this extra emotional weight is also ultimately a gain in usefulness and insight.
Mind you, I have also been cut-in on some moments which have rare fine power and magic, and shared joys which are not ever shared widely, lest they lose their very personal meaning, by repetition-dilution.
I still get a big smile when I think about my young salesman friend dropping into my basement office one morning with a huge smile on his face to announce, “Snyders, you got me so laid last night!”
His particular difficulty was one that many of us encounter when we’re young. How do you express your romantic feelings for someone who you are already friends with, and trust and care about?
He was afraid of offending her and making her think he didn’t like her that way, if he didn’t make a move, and even more afraid of wrecking the friendship if he did, and what kind of a move, anyhow?
I told him something very simple and powerful. I said, show her that you are in full control of yourself, and you can enjoy her company without making a move at all. That way, she doesn’t have to worry about playing defence against your moves, and she can think about and express how she really feels.
Now before anyone objects that this particular variation does not work in all cases – I agree with you!
The part which absolutely is universal and incomparably powerful is thinking about the other person’s feelings needs wants and cares, instead of just our own worries, plans, needs and projected fears.
This is why I see such a strong connection between that fear-stress-anger trap of constant reaction to stress and justification for trespass against others, to compensate (not to mention, epic-scale society wide self-medication), and the resentment and selfishness (negativity and narcissism) tribe, which alone could legitimately be called “the bad guys” (and is represented by huge numbers of those who self-describe as left, right and even plenty of those who think themselves aloof and apolitical).
Do we want to stay mad and make a whole philosophy out of it (bold new innovations in bigotry) or do we want to make things better, so there is less to complain about over time, because of our planning and hard work?
F#ck left AND right. They are both full of whiners and asshole-narcissists.
Look for aspiration instead – it is inevitably the product of gratitude, which is the source of principle. (When we ignore that factor altogether, we must be prepared in advance to deal with the unprincipled.)
Getting over ourselves to find the wealth of the world, always in those around us. Living in gratitude, learning ever better how to think about the other person as if their feelings and priorities are just as real and important as our own. Overcoming the side within each of us, which would rather wallow than grow.
Or – to reformulate for my pals on the right, the essential recipe remains: Humility, Honour, Mercy, Strength. (but I swear, this really is just a restatement of the same basic formula, in different terms).
Now – as the rough equivalent of a math book offering some ‘solved problems’ to make the use of the formulae clearer, let me have a bit of my own special kind of fun, pissing everyone off, all at once – whee!
The two modern issues which are most revealing about the harms of tribalist false-simplifications, furious righteousness and the way we are all played for suckers by the tiny club of ultra rich psychopaths who actually do seem to run the world, are pretty clear – Immigration – and our recent spate of worldwide Medical Madness. It is no coincidence that these are also two key areas where ‘our betters’ have been seeking to impose mass digital censorship (thought-control) on the populace at large.
They don’t want us to recognize their tricks and share the insight – ‘cause then we’ll start stepping out of their snares and laughing, before they can round us all up for dinner!
The reason is simple as hell – and I’ll start here, because it explains so damned much. For centuries the ruling classes of the world were especially well educated, widely travelled, well-versed in history and many appropriate sciences, so that they had a near monopoly on the skill-sets required to ‘run the system’. (Kind of like the days before the printing press, when no one but a priest was even able to read a bible!)
This absolutely did give them the sense that this position of command is their natural entitlement. Which makes us (the whole rest of society ) their train-set.
Thing is, they really aren’t who they used to be. Just compare a guy like Prime Minister Paul Martin, who called a federal judicial inquiry on his own government to address a scandal, and destroyed an American attempt to set up a free trade zone in South America by publicly telling the assembled group “America does not honour their trade deals” (which has in fact been Canada’s experience with NAFTA, from the very start – Trump didn’t create this cheating omni-hostility – he just doesn’t bother hiding it).
Or how about one of the funniest and yet also saddest historical images of Canadian US relations of all time – Lester Pearson giving a public lecture in Buffalo about the Vietnam war being a terrible mistake – in 1965, at the war’s very start (when the wise advice from a superb international diplomat might have helped most) – then later being lifted right off his feet by his collar by psycho Lyndon Johnson, who yelled “How dare you come into my house and piss on my carpet!”
In any case – compare men capable of that much nerve, to that whiny shit who sneeringly dismissed the will of millions as “Unacceptable views” and thus publicly asserted – my arrogant ignorant city-boy contempt is now official national policy, so there!
We can say a lot about the weird capitalist entanglements and social entitlements of our previous ruling class (and as I say, the material side is also important, just not my focus today), but we can also see clear evidence that once, we had leaders who were, at least in some sense gratitude people. Now? Really not so much.
Which means that once, they were capable of doing the right thing (at least some of the time), because they truly cared enough to be able to sacrifice a personal advantage, for the sake of making things better for others (such honour is the most important urge and capacity we gain, when we gain love). Nowadays, as we have seen demonstrated time and again they simply do not have this capacity.
The simplest way to explain what was wrong about the governmental response to our global medical crisis, is to point-out what we all saw and witnessed personally. They worked incredibly hard on controlling the message, and never even noticed the realities they were dealing with, or the countless human lives they pointlessly wrecked.
For this brave new bitterness-selfishness-unprincipled-entitlement class of “leaders” the NARRATIVE actually was the threat. All that doctor shit had to be delegated to someone who paid more attention in school, the economic effects? Likewise. As for the cultural and psychological devastation? Suicides and ruined hopes? Well, again, these folks just didn’t have the patience to study history, or philosophy or psychology. Their priority was simply – RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH! Even though that authority was not founded in sound ethics, or even healthy psychological development.
So now – try this thought experiment.
What if someone came to you in the middle of the worst health crisis in a half a century and told you they could offer your provincial health care system more than twenty thousand experienced and expert health care professionals, ready to start working right away, that very day.
The definition of a god-send, right? Exactly what you need most, in the most practical way. Hooray!
Only it was not a hooray, because we didn’t hire more than twenty thousand medical professionals in the middle of that health emergency – we fired them! Not because they did anything which was medically unsound in any way, they just didn’t want to get ‘the spike’ (protein).
Now before you get excited in either direction – I want you to check your memory again, and gather your own evidence. Ten years ago the word Vaccine implied three very useful things – Prevents Disease – Prevents Transmission – Is at least Fifty-Thousand Times safer than the disease itself.
Whatever the fuck that shit was, that they made us put in our bodies – it failed on all three standards.
Every single person I know who dutifully followed government advice to keep hitting the spike, over and over again (after the three they forced on most), ended up getting a pretty bad case of the bug (facebook got very depressing, for awhile there) – the bug by then being omicron, and almost never producing the most worrisome intense pneumonia-type symptoms caused by earlier variants.
This is apocryphal, but as a guy in the sixty-ish cohort, I lost zero friends to the bug, but had three friends hospitalized from the spike itself, and all were warned not to even think about doing it again (by the medical professionals treating them, after other medical professionals had just sickened them).
I also lost two friends to heart-attacks and have three who are now struggling with life-threatening auto-immune diseases, when all five of them were previously in excellent robust health for their age.
I am not saying in any way that the bug wasn’t dangerous – it absolutely was – but the spike was not effective, what saved us was the omicron variant and natural immunity – as was predicted, quite early, by many professional epidemiologists who were silenced for years by unprincipled politicians obsessed by narrative – who didn’t give a shit how much they damaged the citizens they were supposed to defend and represent.
Now – some might say – but they didn’t know – they were going with the best information they had at the time, and trying to save lives! Even though this is another cheap-shot example of ramping up our emotions, simply to justify taking more than we know is fair (claiming the right to violate principles, yet again) it can be addressed easily.
Very early in the emergency, a Pfizzy executive testified to an open session of the European Parliament that they had not ever tested whether their product had any transmission prevention effect at all! Their figures were based on models, ONLY.
“We were moving at the speed of science!” she said, as if that word should silence and awe them all.
So in fact what we had was politicians saying – the word means this – so the thing must be this – even though it was already clear that it was not. They forced us to take it based on a mathematical model that the Pfizzy people came up with – which model also happened to benefit them by actual BILLIONS in fast corporate-monopoly profit.
I am incredibly tempted to go on a huge tangent here (I read a hell of a lot of compelling peer-reviewed papers in that period, which were completely ignored by our western media), but instead of a wall of data, let me ask you to consider another thing which you know yourself, without needing any special expertise.
How often does a doctor tell you – “take one of these pills, or the whole bottle, once a week – or once an hour – for either two days – or twenty years?” Absolutely never, of course – that would be stupid.
So now ask yourself this – what is the mechanism in mrna medicine which controls which tissues express how much of the new programmed protein, and for how long?
The answer is that there isn’t any. Some people made spike protein for a few months and then began to clear the program from their system, some people are still making lots of it, years later. Sometimes it provokes a response from the immune system which probably helps it identify the bug. But sometimes it just provokes irritation (the trigger for all latent disease) in specific tissues, or even system-wide.
The creepiest bit of all, which is clear and on the record and not even slightly controversial is that they didn’t get very good persistence with their first variations. Test subjects cleared the new program from their cells too quickly and no longer expressed the spike in their bloodstream, after a few weeks.
So they did something very “Interesting” (in a science-geek way). You can look this one up – a small team actually won a Nobel prize for using a new, ABSOLUTELY NOT ORGANIC molecule, as part of a MRNA sequence for the very first time. They did this almost like a preservative, to make it last.
But really, think about that for a second. All of DNA has been a miraculously subtle and versatile combinatorial alphabet based on just four molecules which make up the distinct letters of the code – right up until six years ago. Now, thanks to the glories of human hubris, it’s officially five.
So when people said “That isn’t anything I recognize as a proven method of disease prophylaxis or cure,” they had a fair point. And when others said they did not want to be part of a gigantic reckless medical experiment, they had a fair point too. The idea we can easily declare that kind of a cellular novelty ‘safe in every way’ is insane.
But just like the absurdity of discarding simple reality, which I experienced in the library or the bank, the real suffering locked-down humans involved were deemed to be completely unimportant, compared to the glorious (and yet also wildly erroneous) model of control, for which all else must be (and was, we all saw it) sacrificed!
Finally – didn’t you even notice those digital obedience passports were instant fascism?
To repeat – the most skeptical groups were not the right-wing (that was just a great line for promoting politically useful anger, in Democrat-Oligarch owned BigMedia) the most skeptical were actually the poor, the marginalized and the so-often discussed “people of colour”. The exact same people who called themselves “Anti-Racist” turned right around and proudly hung “No Blacks Allowed” signs in their businesses, the moment they were asked to – even at the very same time as they were still yelling about the kinds of unfair brick-wall structural injustices – which they were actively doing themselves!
So – why are so many people on the right riled up? Because most (fake-mob) leftists backed actual practical fascism (defined as a synthesis of tight state and corporate control) for years in a row, and are so foolish they still haven’t noticed they screwed up. Pathetic isn’t strong enough. (and the fact that the dems are still very widely despised, even though Trump has alienated most of his change-seeking base, says a lot about how tuned-out they remain, as a class of entitled faux-elites and a fast-sinking party).
Now about that second ‘narrative’ landmine.
I have to start by saying I’ve lived my life aspirationally, but also mostly on the edge of poverty. Never had a chance to stop long enough for university, and while I made the most of my ten months at community college, and benefited hugely from the science and discipline I learned, to become a reasonably happy technician for many years, I stayed always at the retail level of things, not the corporate.
So when I tell you that the most obvious and frustrating feature of the modern working class is the vast wealth of untapped and wasted potential, I’m not spouting an idealism. More like a working geologist, reflecting on a lifetime of very promising prospecting expeditions, in many diverse territories.
Gen X people mostly started our adult lives in a series of economic recessions (‘82 and ‘87 were both permanent standard-lowerers, and ‘93 pretty much finished-off the dignity of skilled trades - and all incentive to maintain our industrial edge), which were (in retrospect) about mid-game in the long term entirely deliberate corporate and governmental destruction of worker’s rights (and general prosperity) in North America.
We were told again and again that the unique prosperity the boomers enjoyed was ‘normal’ so we just had to wait patiently for normal to return, and we’d get houses and careers too. So we got into our weird manias while waiting for our shot (and made plenty of art and culture, to go with the false and very destructive optimisms about computing and the subversion of public institutions) then by the time we looked up and asked about those jobs, another generation was ready, and far more eager than us, to bend over backwards to please the bosses (less pigheaded, but also more desperate). Prosperity skipped us completely, and every other generation since has been robbed!
What is supposed to happen, is that in cycles of growth and economic expansion the corporations are supposed to recognize they are not providing enough stimulus (taxes, but also community support) to the society around them, to get the sort of skilled workers they need, and then make society a bit better, so more of the wasted working classers with potential can study engineering, medicine etc. (reality improvement).
This isn’t an idealism, we saw it happen in generations with lower costs of living and more options in life – but when we are chased by constant desperation and survival panic, we can’t afford to up-skill.
My friends on the left rarely notice that the corporations in the Nordic countries spend a ton of energy (and money) on education. They want to make sure they get graduates they can actually use – and they hire many of them directly from school, already experienced thanks to educational internships which are worked into many technical programs. (no school lab can ever compare to the real thing – especially for awakening that love of work which can help us truly excel, relatively effortlessly).
Thing is – increasing the general incentives in our own society is expensive (means paying good salaries to workers and paying corporate taxes, instead of just paying out big shareholder dividends) and slow (years or decades) and worst of all – it gives workers the idea that they deserve to have rights in the first place!
On the other hand, if you let other countries around the world train people at their expense, and then you scout out the most promising people you can find, from countries which have lower working standards, you can meet all of your needs for skilled workers, without ever giving your own poor a leg up, or a feeling they belong.
There is absolutely nothing racist about saying that the poor in North America have been short-changed for generations now (almost exactly a half a century, if you go by hard economics) and that conditions for corporations here should be made very uncomfortable, until they start squeezing (and especially financializing) the entire society as a whole, a heck of a lot less. (That is, take their boots off our necks).
But the boomers, the last generation that actually could afford families and houses while still young in large number, are still sneering “Racist” from their cozy bubble-inflated properties, just as they always have. Screw the poor – f#ck our grandkids!
Justin “The hair” Trudeau (here’s a barf-bag) took in a million new Canadians in a single year, and his own housing minister said publicly that even if the Canadian construction industry worked on nothing but housing (which of course, it won’t) it would take TWENTY YEARS to restore the rental market in Canada to a level of reasonable affordability – the guy clearly said F#CK THE WORKERS AND F#CK THE POOR!
And Boomers still LOVE him. Carney is even smarmier and even more contemptuous of the poor. Personally, I see some pretty wild bonfires coming, of pretty little residential neighbourhoods full of comfortable self-righteous sociopaths.
Not saying I’d like that in any way at all – I’m a peace guy. But working-class anger is real, and has been building a long time, and the smug who think they have nothing to fear from it may just be the most dangerous dumb people on earth.
Now, since it is a fact of my life that most of my closest friends actually are immigrants, I should also point out that the way immigration has been abused here for decades, to destroy the aspirations and organization of labour (by the political Centre-left, even more than by the right) is just as clear from their side of the equation (though for many, it takes years before they are comfortable enough to say so, without fear of being misunderstood as ungrateful).
I can give you a direct example. I met my best friend when she was doing computer work for minimum wage, which should have commanded at least forty dollars an hour (roughly three times that much). That her skill-set was worth much more can not be questioned, because she now pulls-in more than a hundred grand a year (computing at a much higher level, but employing the same superb intelligence).
But when you first come to a new place and you’re trying to get established, you’ll take anything you can get – and employers absolutely do know and take deliberate advantage of that fact, to exploit newcomers for extra profit, and also use them to drive-down the wage and dignity demands of their local-born workers!
Corporations undermining labour rights with irresponsibly rapid floods of immigration was a leftist commonplace (and core issue) for literally a CENTURY. Elites call questioning this policy “racist” because they are the ones who are making the money exploiting the newcomers, and from squeezing the rest of us, their birthright-peons.
What we really want is for corporations especially (but it eventually percolates to the retail level also) to pay their fair share back into the commons, in terms of wages for their workers and taxes. Given a playing field where dignity actually is the minimum maintained standard, poor workers have much lower life-costs, which means way more opportunities to make themselves more useful to employers – and also newcomers are welcomed into a society in far better health, and can immediately benefit from better working conditions and dignity themselves – they way the “elite” (clueless) still pretend things actually work! (Lets steel-man it, and allow it’s ‘cause they never had a real job!)
Now on the other hand – the wholesale destruction of rights in response to medical fear-porn was not any more of an error than discarding due process, when it comes to addressing any other matter (due process is one of those things that none of us think we’ll need, until we do – but then we really freakin’ NEED it).
How many times has ICE done a raid on an apartment building, just to help a well connected slumlord clear out a whole bunch of poor tenants all at once, so they could raise the rent on every unit, and sidestep otherwise frustrating rent controls? (definitely more than zero). Swatting for dollars.
And how often do we remember to direct our anger toward exploitative employers, instead of the understandably desperate who come here expecting a better life, only to learn the deal is really that even trained professionals have to spend years groveling in self-debasement for greed-heads first, just to pay their dues.
Most importantly of all – when are we going to give up our own addiction to shrill and yet ignorant accusation and finger-pointing, look in the mirror – laugh at the silly jackass we see there, and properly forgive the world for being a mess, as we do so?
I don’t mean stop being angry about things which are wrong, I mean stop being angry when Doctor Pavlov rings his bell. Stop saying “How high, sir?” whenever scumbag apologists like Ben Shapiro or Ta-Nahesi Ernie Ford stir the pot with their outrageous and flimsy emotionalist propaganda. Your anger gives them War Power. Don’t do that.
Stop being the suckers that we know in our hearts we have been, so we can start building and solving and growing, maybe even laughing TOGETHER and enjoying this whole crazy deal again, just a bit (a man can dream).
Because plan B is literally world war fucking three, folks. Nothing less than. These crazies actually freakin’ mean it. That really is exactly what “the elites” who consider themselves our natural rulers want all of us to do next, with our money and societies.
KILL KILL KILL!
Please tell me that we as human beings, are no longer stupid enough to fall for that shit anymore (several distinct deluges of depressing recent evidence, notwithstanding).
Or at least please leave me out of the moralizing and the righteous tantrums on behalf of misunderstood bullshit stories that we’re too mentally lazy to even be bothered to try to discuss openly and understand usefully.
I’m working on aspiration. Finding the true line between false armies and marking the trail so more can follow (as are untold thousands, around the world). Join us!
Anyhow, remediation is a different job (and I did my time already, thanks all the same).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No wait – two final thoughts. The first is an old joke that ‘got’ anti-tribalism before we even desperately needed it.
What’s the definition of a Liberal? – A Conservative who just got laid-off!
What’s the definition of a Conservative? – A Liberal who just got mugged!
And the other – one last re-formulation of my key idea.
People of principle have more in common with people of principle on the opposing side, than they do with bitterness entitlement and tantrum people who have no principle at all, on their very own team.
(Yes, it feels weird to say it so clearly – but it’s true, and no one has lately, so I will).
And yes that’s exactly why I do what I do – this whole Quixotic anti-tribalist humane hope-quest. (Aside from my general overall life-long orneriness, of course).
Here are a few outsider voices with highly perceptive perspectives on our crazy moment, that we far too rarely hear (since we are now on the crazy side of the map)
Wall St looted the Pentagon and picked its bones clean long before China gave them any trouble at all.
Brilliant cultural thinker Emmanuel Todd (who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union from infant mortality stats) – Talking with international peace-hero Prof. Glenn Diesen
Here is former NATO intelligence officer Jacques Baud, talking to Nima Alkhorshid on his truly superb show Dialogue works, about the tragic state of Europe (and the shocking loss of the EU as any kind of a hopeful project at all - all gone, evaporated!)
And here’s the dogged and illuminating (albeit frequently depressing) anti-monopolist Matt Stoller with a useful and different take on one of the biggest and most revealingly strange stories of the moment
Now here are a few links to my own pieces (and while I’m at it, a warm hello to my many recent new readers and subscribers – I’m extremely pleased to have you aboard!)
Here’s a piece with much more about the global medical emergency
Here are two pieces with much more about our moment of western Imperial over-reach – and the long awaited and even longer overdue global state-change which the global south has always wanted
Here’s one about the recent reviving of racism by some of the most perfect and shameless hypocrites we’ve seen in ages.
And in case you missed it, here’s an especially strong recent piece with much more about the state of our governmental madness, our war and poverty industry and our military planning (in short, all shite)
Dear Mr. Snyders, I am an American I am not a member of the democrat&republican (one word) PARTY (singular). It is my goal in life to destroy the democrat&republican PARTY, kill corporate person hood, and liberate the American People as I state on the back cover of my book.
Lebo Von Lo~Debar
Former/Always 82nd Airborne Infantryman, Disabled Veteran for Life, & Author of the book, "The Separation of Corporation and State" subtitled "Common Sense and the Two-Party Crisis" Available on Amazon.
https://a.co/d/fy5rSdW