This is came about another meme I posted in Facebook that went something about “Why libertarians hate AOC? Because she stole the acronym of their most important issue.” After that it was a couple of questions of what was AOC (Age of Consent) followed by the libertarians in my timeline explaining what really was the most important issued for Libertarians… about a dozen different ones. My buddy Brian then came up with the jewel above and I had to immortalize it in a meme.
This one I had never seen before and I have to say is right in the motherloving money. But intellectuals love Revolutions only till the consequences land on their feet and they face the crap regular people have to deal with. After that, you will probably see them supporting the revolution from the comfort of the foreign country they ran to avoid the mess they helped create.
From what I found, it originates from the book “The Opium of Intellectuals” written by Raymond Aron originally published in 1955 and I can’t find a dead tree copy for a decent price.
Enough profound stuff for the day.
That’s why Interlibrary Loan programs exist. Request a copy through your local library, and you’ll get to read it. If you find you want to own a copy, that’s a different problem, but I find that I want to own a small minority of the books I read.
YMMV…..
I come from a generation that was instructed on going to libraries, learning to use the cards and the whole thing. But I have to admit I am weird as in I can’t deal with time limits to read a book. It ticks me off not to read at the pace I want.
So, if I find an author that intrigues me, I get a books, read it and if I like it, I get the rest.
If I don’t like it, I put it in a special pile and the local library gets a yearly donation.
I know, your method makes more sense.
PS: then again, I don’t buy new except in a very few circumstances
The Internet Archive has a copy. Although many of their books are copyright-bounded, this one isn’t crippled by time limits!
https://archive.org/details/RaymondAronTheOpiumOfTheIntellectuals
“Side? I am on nobody’s side, because nobody is on my side, little orc.” Treebeard (Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien)
I don’t think he called him an “orc”. Maybe in the film, but not in the book. He establishes they are not orcs quickly, and says that it’s a good thing, or he would have squashed them immediately, before he even spoke to them. They say they are hobbits, and he is curious because he’s never heard of hobbits. Then they ask whose side he is on, and he says what you just quoted. Minus the part about orcs. He wouldn’t have been talking with them if he thought they were orcs.
I lean strongly toward libertarian ideals, but I can’t stand most self-declared libertarians with their purity tests. If you’re not exactly alike on whichever of the 150 answers they like, you’re a non-person.
It comes across as just more examples of special snowflakes. Each one thinks they’re right, everyone else is wrong with the problem being they won’t change and expect everyone else to. Libertarian has become code for I’m so special my beliefs won’t fit in your silly little parties.
Which is one reason they’ll never be a political force to be reckoned with.
Watching the libertarians defend Antifa was the last straw.
They proved that as long as you let them smoke pot and watch child porn they would let the socialist murder you and burn your house.
Which libertarians? The one I pay attention to is SF novelist L. Neil Smith, and I don’t think he has done any such thing, or is likely to.
One of many reasons I no longer call myself a Libertarian. If your party can’t articulate a consistent set of policies, you may as well be a Whig in the 1850’s.
And “Religion is the opiate of the people”…
The intelligentsia. Yeah; their dystopia is not our utopia.
Intellectuals are far more prone to accepting the chains of tyranny, as long as they are soft fur lined shackles, as long as they are rewarded as a class of quislings and sycophants, as long as they can remain the highest order of useful dupes, as long as the brunt of the power they kneel before is aimed at, targeted, “perceived” lower classes of “cognitive ability”, as long as they are not themselves subjected to the harsh arbitrary power of raw naked tyranny. They are a kind of corporate slave class, certainly the smart ass smug enablers of their slave masters power. An entire class of fools from my perspective. The real virus set upon us. Carriers of the pandemic of tyranny. If their masters are the bubonic infected rat, they are the flea.
In this fashion they are then people who can dissimulate freely and dress it up as superior political/social humanism, their primary weapon being revisionism; results an insidious class bigotry, a safe perch from which to stir the pot of neo-bolshevik revolution, rationalize and bullshit themselves using their far superior intellect to justify the sense of political and social power their class has effected in effecting the ideological farce aspects of tyranny. It’s a sublime power trip, submit the ego to a higher tyranny.
Look at it from another perspective.
Us dirt people, we just want to be left alone, and simply get along with others, make a decent paycheck, and have a plain nice life. We are not asking’ for nuthin’ but what we earned for ourselves. There are none like us.
But here’s the thing, everyone hates us for one thing or another.
What gives?
I don’t get up every morning and decide to invade a foreign country, I don’t try to tax anybody, I don’t drop bombs on someone, I don’t burn loot murder, I don’t burn cities down, I don’t print mountains of monopoly fiat money, I don’t publish lies presented as truth, I don’t fund or import musloids and other alien invaders, I don’t give illegal aliens Danegeld, I don’t campaign on promises then drop my draws and tell those who voted for me to kiss my ass, I’m not flying 200-300 mid east islamists in the dead of night every night on return cargo planes, I don’t commit vast vote fraud and gerrymander, I don’t overthrow sovereign countries, (yet), I don’t devalue a dollar, if anything I value it with my personal labor and wealth creation industriousness, yet everyone hates me, even my government. Because I got a Rifle?; My most precious piece of property: because I have it to feed and defend my own, to be self reliant and anti-fragile self sufficient? Because I get up each day, and produce or create something tangible? Because I have faith in God that teaches prudence is a great virtue, that I must wear the whole armor of his grace, that humility and grace and charity is essential? Because I’m White? Because all that it MAKES ME privileged!? Though I humbly admit I am privileged for these codes precepts and the time honored traditions derived from these codes of our great Christian western 2000 history which created our culture. And that our culture has survived 2000 + years exactly because it is upstream of all politics.
I get that, the hate. And envy. Trump is dead nuts right. The world runs on hate. It baths itself in hate. It is replacing everything, hate, and envy, there’s a specific reason why both are the two great mortal sins, it’s making the world spin off it’s axis, hate, and envy. Yet, I don’t hate anyone. Some things I don’t like, some things are unacceptable. Some things I refuse to put up with. Some things are worth changing, but who am I to say really. And some things, well that’s the way it is. Accept it, move on. My vision, my heart and mind are not clouded with hate or envy.
What I see, it is going to come down to us dirt people having to set things right. Who else is there in any-case? Who else is there who can redress this evil, this darkness? There isn’t anybody else. Never has been. Us dirt people, through the entire history of mankind, that everyone hates, we are the only people who ever effect positive change in this world. Paradoxically we are the garbage collectors, we are the glue which holds civilization together, funny that last, as those intellectuals see themselves as the glue. The dichotomy is profound.
It isn’t hate I feel, it is the righteous primal truth my arse is sovereign, nobody gets to tell me or decide for me what my priorities are. I am not a victim, I will not be a victim, I don’t even know how to be; but it is anger, cold hard quiet resolute anger. Not because I think this crazy fucked up world and it’s remedies will fall in the laps of us dirt people: that’s just what is happening, and I can choose to be a part of it, or not. I can’t change any of that, only the ground around my feet, my castle, my land, it’s all I can do anything to change.
It isn’t anger so much, it is a mix of disgust, fed-up-ness, disgust, for the waste of it all, fed up with this fucking drama, fed up with being one of those to pay for all this fucking stupidity, then turned around and crammed up my ass, it’s a fucking circus world of immature spoiled shit stirring selfish whining seriously fucked up red diaper baby brats.
And when everyone who hates me because I’m a dirt person starts fucking with me personally like they all have been threatening and hinting at, I think I’m going to be one of the dirt people who decide fuck this, fuck that, fuck being the worlds whipping goat, fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you, because fuck you thats why, and I’m not going to give a fuck about anything or anybody but my fellow dirt people, I’m going to tear it down, I’m going to burn it all to the fuckin’ ground, I’m gonna have no mercy, no compassion, my give it shit won’t exist. I won’t be alone. I know. We are legion. I can see the same cold simmering rage kept under lock and key in others. It’s that we do not take council of our fears and our just anger. This separates us from the savages and vandals running wild. It is a resolve like no other.
There’s no words needed. I don’t even understand my motives to write all this, other than maybe it is of help to other dirt people who are part of the Zeitgeist. It certainly is what it is.
When us dirt people let this thing loose, it will be terrible like nothing anyone knows about. None of these ruthless assholes who deem themselves my master in living memory understands how mean us good folks get when our codes are violated.
For you fucking peeping perverts and agent provocateurs, you fucking trolls, you shit stirrers, best run to your boss’s, tell em’ you best be asking yourselves if you want this thing let loose. Your fucking with something you have no idea how bad it is. You all better think on this real careful like, I’m telling you all, you don’t want the dirt monster out. It’s ruthless, it doesn’t care, it has no feelings, it is completely fearless, it is destruction of everything in its path. It won’t stop till it decides it’s ready to stop because the dirt monster is all that can stop the dirt monster.
Understand?
It just popped into my mind that Libertarians are like swingers, convinced that their love of transgressive behavior makes them superior
Note that I am talking about the lame ass political party that supports antifa and thinks Cuties is a good film
I’m perfectly fine with “the we want the gay couples to be able to defend their Marijuana fields with M16s” small l libertarians and I’m disappointed Vermin Supreme didn’t make the ballots.