This is one of the smartest posts that has been posted here in a great while.
I still can't adequately articulate what I have seen but this comes pretty close. Foucault and postmodernism are close to the root problem (if not the actual root problem).
I'll never forget when I was a dumbass lib Sociology graduate student and I tried to tell my class (in so many words) that I couldn't shake the feeling all of this theory was just orienting people to tear down all of the systems that we have built and held dear... I left that room convinced not only did they know it, they were rooting for it.
When your enemies say they want to destroy everything about you, believe it.
I think there could he something here if only because the Juggalos really represent the broken part of White America.
We know how the rot affects inner cities with spiraling competence, broken families, and an overall downward trend generation over generation. This is just that same phenomenon in white communities.
Even at his best the hope with Pence was that the Dems didn't want a true stodgy conservative in office. Trump has always been more moderate than the GOP writ large, even if that was counter to the media narrative.
That was a bad plan, and the shaky alliance obviously fell apart. I don't blame Pence as much as others -- what loyalty did he really have to MAGA? But the Vance pick is certainly looking like a home run now.
Celsius, my friend.
Mid-20s is like upper 70s-low 80s, which is hot for the pacific northwest / rocky mountain regions in BC.
It's not modernizing. It's a direct and measurable consequence of the fact our public schools have been churning out semi-retarded citizens for at least two generations now.
I keep saying this to everyone who will listen: I manage a team of social workers in a blue city... I work with adults every single day who don't even know how to spell their own name.
Not only is this true, but also:
They still have the original McNuggets that were a mix of white and dark meat. First time I had some mcnuggets in Tokyo I was blasted back to the 90s.
Well, I'm an idiot. Here I was thinking she was going to lecture the man child throwing a tantrum, even through the words "out of respect..."
Perfect summation of everything wrong with the left. Manchild tantrum more important than the ideas of another.
It's also all that they have because they've been trying to redefine masculinity for years.
These people don't understand brain chemistry, don't understand sex roles, don't understand anything, but they want to dictate to you what's masculine and feminine.
I hate the feminists and the communists, sure -- but I have a special level of hatred reserved for the charlatan men who barked on command.
Still play Out of the Park Baseball every day, but I've been blessed to have a great online league that's been going with the same core group for 6+ years.
I play NBA2k16 for my repetitive mind-off time
I've been replaying the retro FF games -- just have a replay of 6 left.
(For the curious, FF1 - B+ tier / FF2 - F tier / FF3 - B tier / FF4 - A+ tier / FFV - B+ tier / FF6 - S tier (obviously) -- I liked 3 way more than I expected, and 5 was a lot of fun throughout)
Charles got absolutely broken by the military. Maybe he was broken beforehand, I dunno.
But the dude has been an absolute lunatic before he ever put on a dress and decided to look like the villain in a children's book.
Oh, but if there are two words all Koreans know it's fuck and THAT ONE. Not that they get offended by it, but they know what this idiot was trying to do.
I spent a few years teaching English in Korea. My favorite favorite class was this class of near-fluent sixth graders. I told the class they could ask me any question as long as it was thoughful.
The school hired a black teacher, which was a big deal. Parents had to vote on it and everything.
Her first day, one of my students comes to class all concerned and asked "teacher what is a nigger?"
That was a good lesson... I love honest questions like that. We had a good talk, and the kid ended it by asking "so when I was in New York and someone called me a chink... kind of the same thing?"
Yeah kid, you got it. Now you gotta understand the inherent violence risk that comes with it for obvious reasons.
Because these feuds go beyond individuals.
I am sure I could go to the Congo or Afghanistan and find plenty of good people to break bread with, but all I would need to do is run into one or two people who hate me on sight with an itchy trigger finger and it would be game over.
And there are plenty of those running around, believe me.
There is not a fine line between brave and stupid in these cases. Every white idiot who ends up dead or raped in these third world shitholes got exactly what they deserved -- because you know none of them are taking the proper security measures.
Man am I glad Pokemon went to shit before this.
Ten years ago this would upset me. Now... well, this is the beginning of the end. RIP.
When* are those keys is the better question.
Maybe someone went back to 1946 and stayed there.
One of the scariest moments of my life... I don't tell this story very often because I don't think I can convey it accurately if you don't already understand how bad the problem is:
A long time ago I was self-described "very liberal" to the point where I was a PhD student in Sociology. Yes, that was me.
But right from the rip it didn't sit well. Why the fuck were we reading Marx on day 1? Why the fuck are these idiots celebrating Freud? I stumbled through two years while always reading stuff on the periphery, as well.
The summer I was supposed to be writing my thesis I was reading. It started with The Myth of Male Power (which is nearly impossible to find now, on purpose) and went into Who Stole Feminism? and went through about 50 other books and dozens of papers.
I came out the other side with a worldview that made sense. I had to believe that my colleagues would be as thrilled as I was to learn something new. We had all talked about the inconsistencies in the coursework and theoretical background, and I thought I had found a missing piece of some value.
I have never in my life seen people so resistant to ideas that weren't in the pre-packaged box. There was no curiosity, there was an immediate "wait, take men's issues seriously? BURN THE HERETIC" backlash. It was immediately obvious these people were so far down the hole there was no coming back. Cognitive Dissonance had long been murdered. And the entire department of professors was united on this.
Classes for my third year started in a week or two. I wrote a very long email telling the powers that be exactly what they could do with a lifetime supply of chocolate and was back home 5 states away within 36 hours.
I ended up moving to Asia for 5 years... that was the depth of my despair. I definitely haven't done that sense justice in this post, either.
When I talk about why I left grad school these days, I usually just refer to it as "staring into an abyss that shook me to my soul."
It is why, more than anything else, I am MAGA to the core. I will stand with people who haven't bludgeoned their common sense to death with postmodernist bullshit every day.
I don't know who else could have broken me from that miasma if not for Trump and his unabashedly pro-America rhetoric. This is the fight worth having.
During the Dark Times of 2020-2022 we lived in Kansas which was (thankfully) pretty normal. We drove all over: denver once a month (8 hours each way), we did a loop down to the Grand Canyon and back in a week, and we went south towards Arkansas and up to the Dakotas.
I put 65,000 miles on my car in 2.5 years and none of that was a commute.
But I have noticed people cannot fucking drive anymore.
Well of course.
When the equal pay movement was really starting to get going in the 70s and 80s, the loudest and most vociferous voices were the wives of the CEOs who were afraid it would fuck up their gravy train.
Nah, the oversampling of Jews has less to do with intelligence and more to do with money.
You absolutely can buy your way into these schools, even if it's indirect.
It just underscores that the third world is really the third world.
China achieves its results (which still aren't at the level of the US) through some really authoritarian pratices. I think Yao Ming still isn't as famous in the USA as he deserves to be because he was (and is) so beholden to China.
India is largely undeveloped. They have a ton of people but not much else to show for it.
But they will surely put our factories there and decimate our middle class.
Just more evidence that globalization is a scam.
Because he was in academia fairly recently. You can't sneeze without meeting some gender weirdo.
But in all honesty they aren't all bad people. There are smart but weird people who aren't extremely unpleasant to be around, but they are pretty rare.
It isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I think Vance is a really smart guy and when you are really smart you tend to get along well with other people who are really smart just because you have that connection. Just another possible explanation.
I mean, I agree with this as well.
Tax cuts aren't a bribe and I won't really entertain a position otherwise.
The only way we can "bribe" people into having more kids is to bribe them into having stable families.
This means stable manufacturing jobs. Good paying jobs that lead into a stable life which leads into a stable family.
Bribe them with a decent economy and a fair justice system.
Bribe them with all the fruits of good citizenship.
That's the only way to fix this country. Every day under this administration we stray further from this.
But you cannot ever put a bandaid on this problem. Money can never replace stability and continuity in development of our children.
That's true enough.
But we're saying the same thing. His is a pessimistic view, mine is more optimistic.
The purpose of a system is what it does. And what the liberal system does is dogshit.
I will watch that video, but I disagree insofar as the word intent - the truth is more nefarious than that in my opinion.
I won't argue this was the intent of the original Theorists, and is certainly the intent of some of the more radical authors now. Hell, the idiots at Black Lives Matter were too dumb to understand they were basically articulating that intent in their words.
But I just think (largely fed by experience with these people) that most of the academics now are foot soldiers who honestly and ardently believe the bullshit of it all. These idiots really believe there is no biological differences between men and women. They really believe that all the disparate outcomes American blacks see is rooted in racism and not rooted in bad choices coupled with a fucked up incentive system via government handouts.
There will always be people plotting against the dominant world hegemony, and the middle of the 20th century was no exception to that. It is really, ironically, in the collapse of the Soviet Union that this mind virus really took hold. People stopped being vigilant about bad ideas and stopped seeing the danger in ideology. The 90s to now really accelerated the communization of our universities.
You can see evidence of what I am saying in how Democrats (much more likely to be captured by the mind virus and now almost entirely comprised of those afflicted) govern. Take New York as an example. Their state budget is almost $300,000,000,000 and they spend the most money on social services... and continue to invite people like illlegals to come here, and drive out productive people, and promise everyone the moon. The result is no one gets anything, systems completely break down, and waste spirals out of control. The schools fail and they just cover it up with statistics. The police fail and they aren't even allowed to do their jobs in the first place. The prisons fail so they just find reasons to not put people in prison.
They are in complete and utter denial. They are honestly trying their best but their worldview is so fucked they can't even aknowledge the problems they create.