Apocryphal news" stories insane (or just inane) narratives names swatted like tennis balls around Twitter... I could retrieve a few but to what end? Youve heard most of them. East Indians are saying that they can see the Himalayas for the first time in years as their city streets lie comatose. New Yorkers say they can see fish now in the Hudson as Long Island lies embalmed. Something about Englishmen and their nightingalesthe size of their wings... I couldnt quite make it out but in the same genre. A CNN mouthpiece publishing a letter to his newborn son or toddler (who obviously cant read and hence is obviously not the letters true target) celebrating the collapse of the U.S. economy as a vast obstacle removed from the Green New Deals Juggernaut. And the prep-school Ocasio girl-woman who masquerades as a hyphenated traditional Latina from the barrio saying... well basically that its a good thing all structure is collapsing around us because were really going to love (those of us who survive) life in Naked-and-Afraid Land.
I hate cars and car culture. Always have. I hate the racket I hate the razed acres of concrete and glass I hate the stop-and-start enforced focus on material circumstances that wont allow your thoughts to stray without deadly risk. I walked six hundred miles of Irish and Scots backroad in a month on two separate occasions in my twenties. I permitted (not purposely) my drivers license to lapse as a graduate student in Austin where I walked to classes and to the grocery store and to the laundromatand then walked dozens more miles per week for pleasure. In retirement these days I aspire to grow nut and fruit groves on my North Georgia 25 acres and I seldom have either the need or the want to leave my property. But... but I do have to travel to the grocery store once a week and I could scarcely hike that sixteen-mile round-trip with a backpack and bring home what my wife and I require to survive. Much of what I unload from the truck also goes into a refrigeratorand no I cant run that from the turns of a windmill.
I get it" you see: I mean that our high-tech progressive economys artificial world is often a noisy tasteless stinking hectic sometimes poisonous sprawl. Im all for reducing those horrid qualities. Im doing what I can on my own to subtract from them. But...
But I dont understand the ambition to exterminate the human race or large parts of it in order to achieve some sort of green silence. Even if nothing were at stake but my own suicide who would look after my saplings if I checked out? The deer and wild blackberry would gnaw and choke them to nothing within a season. Mother Nature doesnt favor diversity. She gives the victory to the swift and she allows the strong to throttle everything weaker around them. Pope Francis says that Mother Nature doesnt forgive implying that the human foibles which once found leniency before Gods throne have now grown insufferable before the universes new ruler (whom he seems to hold in higher reverence). Quite right: Mother Nature is best pictured as a ravening animal a T-Rex. Without my human hand the cherry trees would never bear fruit the bluebirds would have no houses and the whole forest would eventually go up in smoke after lightning ignited a conflagration in uncleared brush.
So maybe I should live and others should die in my place. Maybe all the capitalist car-drivers should go. What gives me the moral authority to pass a death sentence upon them? Why my self-evident virtue of course! So let millions starve as we shift all power to solar panels and wind turbines (which will purge more avian species from the earth in less time than any extermination event since the Dinosaur Asteroid) let a PRC-style board of central planning keep my dole coming because Im one of the faithful (credentials verified by a chip that Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci have planted in my head) and let the others" shelter-in-place until they rot as squad cars and Humvees cruise the streets. To make an omelet you have to break some eggs... or whatever version of Pope Lenins holy writ Ms. Ocasio thumbed before deleting it.
Would I be safe then? With Big Brother enfolding me deep in his warm data bank would I finally see a quiet dawn gild skies unplowed by any contrails? Huawei 5G is supposed to combine with the Gates microchip to keep me apprised of any abnormal fluctuations in my vital rhythms. Rising blood pressure? I receive a kind of Amber Alert on my cellphone. Irregular heartbeat? The same. Marcus Welby M.D. will have fused with SuperNanny (in Gestapo apron) to tweak instantly and minutely any slightest menace to my good health. The invasions of privacy pouring in from all directions need not worry me; after all as that profound ethical philosopher Andrew Cuomo has lately opined nothing is worse than death. (Or as Claudio answered his sister Isabellas appeal to his honor Death is a fearful thing!") And why will the supreme technicians sitting at the invisible nexus of the planetary network take such interest in my prolonged survival? Why?
Well why not? Why wouldnt they? They are the Peoples Government. The Peoples Government loves the People by definition. They will see that Im cared for in all circumstances. If I need to stay home in a mask with a can of Lysol then I will do so as long as They command. If my job disappears and I have no visible means of support then They will send a check. They know whats best for meand for you. For all of us. They are experts. Why would you be so selfish as to attempt to frustrate their mapping of our safest course? Why should you have the right (again channeling philosopher Cuomos wisdom) to precipitate my death through your non-compliance?
And so we surrender our collective future in this swooning vision of the Earthly Father (loving husband of Gaia) to the kind of elite which has deliberately stockpiled 1500 varieties of corona virus which specially cultivated one strain in an insecure Wuhan lab to infect humans which locked its own citizens indoors with infected family members until entire buildings became death traps which ordered survivors back to work in patently unsafe conditions lest the GDP suffer further which destroyed documentation and silenced medical professionals lest the truth of its lethal incompetence leak out... which by the way has been forcing self-sufficient farmers of the sort I aspire to be off the land (no longer their land but the Peoples land) and into overcrowded cities for decades... this is the paradigm of our Uncle Li who will ensure our long healthy lives. This is the new pater patriae the upgraded and non-slaveholding (merely slave-ruling) George Washington. This is the collectivist Nurse Practitioner whose service to humanity in the Wuhan Institute of Virology was financed by 3.7 millions of donated Fauci money its sister facility in the same city pursuing the same redacted mission statement with more millions from Saint William of Gates. This is the colossus whose gaze blank and pitiless as the sun will save us from our own childish destructive behavior. This is what CNN reporters and Governor Cuomo and Ms. Latina-Campesina would put at the helm of the good ship New Green Deal. This defoliator of the African continent and heaviest polluter of Earths atmosphere in the planets history is supposed to redeem us from our great capitalist garbage dump.
I have no answers to such stupefying idiocy. I dont understand. I cannot comprehend how tens of millions of pampered college-educated upper-crusters eagerly even fanatically long to pull the plug on the system that has lofted them to the lap of luxury lest the haunts of their hazily recalled Spring Breaks slip under water in ten yearshow this is their Awful Horror yet they dont give a damn about an unsecured power grid whose toasting in an inevitable solar storm will leave nine in ten of them dead within months. Its as if the dismantling of something high-tech can somehow save their puny lives but the simple cheap supplementation of the technology on which they tweet and chirp and insta-blather every day must not happen. They must live cowering under their beds with chips in their heads: they must live at all costs. But... but if only the Great Satan may die then a weedy viney planet prowled only by insects and rats is a small price to pay. If anyone lives then they must live; but if theres a chance of wiping humanity off the earth then theyll volunteer their lives as deliriously as the zealous of Jonestown or Heavens Gate.
You can call it childish or stupid or insane. Columnists bloggers and commentators do so all the time. But that doesnt explain anything. Im not interested in marking tallies on a scorecard: Im trying to understand. Why are full adults more emotionally retarded than toddlers? Why are Ivy League graduates duller than a frozen egg? How can people who design websites and compile spreadsheets leap out a twelve-story window thinking theyre Superman? Its not a laughing matter inasmuch as its likely to kill our children and grandchildren. What exactly is it? Why is it happening?
Is it a response to the hyper-technologizing of society? Young people texting each other across the table on dates have become an endless stock of jokes... but our capitalist economy after all has created them. They cant be very happy in their state. Is it" a reflexive attack upon the Dr. Frankenstein who gave them the life of a mute neutered freak?
Or are we seeing some more specific kind of technological conditioning? Have social media" and all the restthe screens screens screens that mediate between the human mind and material reality at every turnproduced a freak insufficiently self-conscious to appreciate its freakishness? Do these cyber-human hybrids quite literally not know how to evaluate human nature or to calculate human happiness?
Would they have turned out better if wed had them read great literature in school? Generations of Westerners used to acquire an immense amount of self-knowledge at an accelerated rate by reading literary classicsas opposed to the propagandistic screeds ramrodded into the curriculum by a corrupt academic establishment. But what then corrupted the academic establishment?
Was it our abandonment of the land of natureof the daily tutorial in natural limitation which repelling grasshoppers from the garden and keeping foxes out of the henhouse provided? Did we lose our common sense when we all migrated to the city and achieved a much higher lifestyle by spinning basic facts to favor deep-pocketed scoundrels?
At this point does the ultimate cause even make any difference (to paraphrase yet another great thinker of our times Ms. Clintonalways pronounced Missus Clinton")? Science analyzes causes with a view to comprehending complex chain-reactions and perhaps intervening at critical links to forestall catastrophe. Yet weve already arrived at the last link; and the chain in any case appears to be a one and out" proposition. You can protect your peanut patch better next summer if you figure out what devastated it last summer. Once civilizations wagon trundles over the cliff however theres no restraining its free fall for a try at a better outcome.
Maybe Id just like to know for my personal satisfaction. Id like to understand the race of cowering wired-up inepts lining upwith masks and observing strict social-distancingoutside the door of the slaughterhouse. If the unexamined life is not worth living as Socrates insisted then maybe the examined life offers modest rewards.
But when examination brings no insights... then I suppose we must await enlightenment from a source that Socrates but dimly divined beyond this valley of shadows. In the meantime... I have no answers. I just dont understand.
Apocryphal news" stories insane (or just inane) narratives names swatted like tennis balls around Twitter... I could retrieve a few but to what end? Youve heard most of them. East Indians are saying that they can see the Himalayas for the first time in years as their city streets lie comatose. New Yorkers say they can see fish now in the Hudson as Long Island lies embalmed. Something about Englishmen and their nightingalesthe size of their wings... I couldnt quite make it out but in the same genre. A CNN mouthpiece publishing a letter to his newborn son or toddler (who obviously cant read and hence is obviously not the letters true target) celebrating the collapse of the U.S. economy as a vast obstacle removed from the Green New Deals Juggernaut. And the prep-school Ocasio girl-woman who masquerades as a hyphenated traditional Latina from the barrio saying... well basically that its a good thing all structure is collapsing around us because were really going to love (those of us who survive) life in Naked-and-Afraid Land.
I hate cars and car culture. Always have. I hate the racket I hate the razed acres of concrete and glass I hate the stop-and-start enforced focus on material circumstances that wont allow your thoughts to stray without deadly risk. I walked six hundred miles of Irish and Scots backroad in a month on two separate occasions in my twenties. I permitted (not purposely) my drivers license to lapse as a graduate student in Austin where I walked to classes and to the grocery store and to the laundromatand then walked dozens more miles per week for pleasure. In retirement these days I aspire to grow nut and fruit groves on my North Georgia 25 acres and I seldom have either the need or the want to leave my property. But... but I do have to travel to the grocery store once a week and I could scarcely hike that sixteen-mile round-trip with a backpack and bring home what my wife and I require to survive. Much of what I unload from the truck also goes into a refrigeratorand no I cant run that from the turns of a windmill.
I get it" you see: I mean that our high-tech progressive economys artificial world is often a noisy tasteless stinking hectic sometimes poisonous sprawl. Im all for reducing those horrid qualities. Im doing what I can on my own to subtract from them. But...
But I dont understand the ambition to exterminate the human race or large parts of it in order to achieve some sort of green silence. Even if nothing were at stake but my own suicide who would look after my saplings if I checked out? The deer and wild blackberry would gnaw and choke them to nothing within a season. Mother Nature doesnt favor diversity. She gives the victory to the swift and she allows the strong to throttle everything weaker around them. Pope Francis says that Mother Nature doesnt forgive implying that the human foibles which once found leniency before Gods throne have now grown insufferable before the universes new ruler (whom he seems to hold in higher reverence). Quite right: Mother Nature is best pictured as a ravening animal a T-Rex. Without my human hand the cherry trees would never bear fruit the bluebirds would have no houses and the whole forest would eventually go up in smoke after lightning ignited a conflagration in uncleared brush.
So maybe I should live and others should die in my place. Maybe all the capitalist car-drivers should go. What gives me the moral authority to pass a death sentence upon them? Why my self-evident virtue of course! So let millions starve as we shift all power to solar panels and wind turbines (which will purge more avian species from the earth in less time than any extermination event since the Dinosaur Asteroid) let a PRC-style board of central planning keep my dole coming because Im one of the faithful (credentials verified by a chip that Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci have planted in my head) and let the others" shelter-in-place until they rot as squad cars and Humvees cruise the streets. To make an omelet you have to break some eggs... or whatever version of Pope Lenins holy writ Ms. Ocasio thumbed before deleting it.
Would I be safe then? With Big Brother enfolding me deep in his warm data bank would I finally see a quiet dawn gild skies unplowed by any contrails? Huawei 5G is supposed to combine with the Gates microchip to keep me apprised of any abnormal fluctuations in my vital rhythms. Rising blood pressure? I receive a kind of Amber Alert on my cellphone. Irregular heartbeat? The same. Marcus Welby M.D. will have fused with SuperNanny (in Gestapo apron) to tweak instantly and minutely any slightest menace to my good health. The invasions of privacy pouring in from all directions need not worry me; after all as that profound ethical philosopher Andrew Cuomo has lately opined nothing is worse than death. (Or as Claudio answered his sister Isabellas appeal to his honor Death is a fearful thing!") And why will the supreme technicians sitting at the invisible nexus of the planetary network take such interest in my prolonged survival? Why?
Well why not? Why wouldnt they? They are the Peoples Government. The Peoples Government loves the People by definition. They will see that Im cared for in all circumstances. If I need to stay home in a mask with a can of Lysol then I will do so as long as They command. If my job disappears and I have no visible means of support then They will send a check. They know whats best for meand for you. For all of us. They are experts. Why would you be so selfish as to attempt to frustrate their mapping of our safest course? Why should you have the right (again channeling philosopher Cuomos wisdom) to precipitate my death through your non-compliance?
And so we surrender our collective future in this swooning vision of the Earthly Father (loving husband of Gaia) to the kind of elite which has deliberately stockpiled 1500 varieties of corona virus which specially cultivated one strain in an insecure Wuhan lab to infect humans which locked its own citizens indoors with infected family members until entire buildings became death traps which ordered survivors back to work in patently unsafe conditions lest the GDP suffer further which destroyed documentation and silenced medical professionals lest the truth of its lethal incompetence leak out... which by the way has been forcing self-sufficient farmers of the sort I aspire to be off the land (no longer their land but the Peoples land) and into overcrowded cities for decades... this is the paradigm of our Uncle Li who will ensure our long healthy lives. This is the new pater patriae the upgraded and non-slaveholding (merely slave-ruling) George Washington. This is the collectivist Nurse Practitioner whose service to humanity in the Wuhan Institute of Virology was financed by 3.7 millions of donated Fauci money its sister facility in the same city pursuing the same redacted mission statement with more millions from Saint William of Gates. This is the colossus whose gaze blank and pitiless as the sun will save us from our own childish destructive behavior. This is what CNN reporters and Governor Cuomo and Ms. Latina-Campesina would put at the helm of the good ship New Green Deal. This defoliator of the African continent and heaviest polluter of Earths atmosphere in the planets history is supposed to redeem us from our great capitalist garbage dump.
I have no answers to such stupefying idiocy. I dont understand. I cannot comprehend how tens of millions of pampered college-educated upper-crusters eagerly even fanatically long to pull the plug on the system that has lofted them to the lap of luxury lest the haunts of their hazily recalled Spring Breaks slip under water in ten yearshow this is their Awful Horror yet they dont give a damn about an unsecured power grid whose toasting in an inevitable solar storm will leave nine in ten of them dead within months. Its as if the dismantling of something high-tech can somehow save their puny lives but the simple cheap supplementation of the technology on which they tweet and chirp and insta-blather every day must not happen. They must live cowering under their beds with chips in their heads: they must live at all costs. But... but if only the Great Satan may die then a weedy viney planet prowled only by insects and rats is a small price to pay. If anyone lives then they must live; but if theres a chance of wiping humanity off the earth then theyll volunteer their lives as deliriously as the zealous of Jonestown or Heavens Gate.
You can call it childish or stupid or insane. Columnists bloggers and commentators do so all the time. But that doesnt explain anything. Im not interested in marking tallies on a scorecard: Im trying to understand. Why are full adults more emotionally retarded than toddlers? Why are Ivy League graduates duller than a frozen egg? How can people who design websites and compile spreadsheets leap out a twelve-story window thinking theyre Superman? Its not a laughing matter inasmuch as its likely to kill our children and grandchildren. What exactly is it? Why is it happening?
Is it a response to the hyper-technologizing of society? Young people texting each other across the table on dates have become an endless stock of jokes... but our capitalist economy after all has created them. They cant be very happy in their state. Is it" a reflexive attack upon the Dr. Frankenstein who gave them the life of a mute neutered freak?
Or are we seeing some more specific kind of technological conditioning? Have social media" and all the restthe screens screens screens that mediate between the human mind and material reality at every turnproduced a freak insufficiently self-conscious to appreciate its freakishness? Do these cyber-human hybrids quite literally not know how to evaluate human nature or to calculate human happiness?
Would they have turned out better if wed had them read great literature in school? Generations of Westerners used to acquire an immense amount of self-knowledge at an accelerated rate by reading literary classicsas opposed to the propagandistic screeds ramrodded into the curriculum by a corrupt academic establishment. But what then corrupted the academic establishment?
Was it our abandonment of the land of natureof the daily tutorial in natural limitation which repelling grasshoppers from the garden and keeping foxes out of the henhouse provided? Did we lose our common sense when we all migrated to the city and achieved a much higher lifestyle by spinning basic facts to favor deep-pocketed scoundrels?
At this point does the ultimate cause even make any difference (to paraphrase yet another great thinker of our times Ms. Clintonalways pronounced Missus Clinton")? Science analyzes causes with a view to comprehending complex chain-reactions and perhaps intervening at critical links to forestall catastrophe. Yet weve already arrived at the last link; and the chain in any case appears to be a one and out" proposition. You can protect your peanut patch better next summer if you figure out what devastated it last summer. Once civilizations wagon trundles over the cliff however theres no restraining its free fall for a try at a better outcome.
Maybe Id just like to know for my personal satisfaction. Id like to understand the race of cowering wired-up inepts lining upwith masks and observing strict social-distancingoutside the door of the slaughterhouse. If the unexamined life is not worth living as Socrates insisted then maybe the examined life offers modest rewards.
But when examination brings no insights... then I suppose we must await enlightenment from a source that Socrates but dimly divined beyond this valley of shadows. In the meantime... I have no answers. I just dont understand.