I saw Miguel’s post They Want You Dead: OC In Colorado.
I went to the Twitter account of the woman who made the (now deleted) post.
She is an unhinged Leftist. Completely.
Everything she Tweets is a debunked conspiracy theory about Trump and the GOP all being Putin puppets. Her account is a TDS temper tantrum.
Miguel is right. This woman wanted to kill those guys OCing, but I would stipulate that it’s more likely that she was too cowardly to do it than being held back by having two kids in the car.
But this got me thinking.
It seems more and more that every deep Blue bubble in this country (and the equivalent in Europe) is turning into a Third World shit-hole. Complete with shit on the streets and once eradicated diseases coming back.
Have you ever wondered why Afghanistan or The Congo or Somalia are such shit holes? Why the Third World is what it is when these places often have such bountiful natural resources?
The answer is tribalism. All humans are tribal, that’s our nature. But tribalism comes in degrees.
Healthy societies can put tribalism aside to work together because no one tribe has a monopoly on intellect or skills or work ethic or value.
In Third World shit-holes, tribalism rules all. The people live steeped in hatred of all other tribes. They do little more than constantly hate and fight with other tribes, doing little more work than it takes to survive by subsistence living.
From Somalia to Afghanistan, life is mostly about getting revenge against other tribes for their attacks on you, that they committed for your attacks on them. And around and around it goes.
When a natural resource is discovered, rather than build infrastructure and invite investment, tribal leaders go to war over it and the winner enslaves the rest to mine diamonds or gold or coltan by hand.
Now think about the Blue enclaves in the US.
The supreme motivation for these politicians is “fuck Trump.”
Repairing roads, creating business-friendly economic climates, investing programs that will grow jobs takes a back seat to “fuck Trump” and squandering resources for the members of their tribe.
These places are turning into Thrid World shit-holes because they have a Thrid World shit-hole mentality, an all-consuming hatred of anyone outside the tribe.
“Healthy societies can put tribalism aside to work together because no one tribe has a monopoly on intellect or skills or work ethic or value.”
I want you to go back in recent history and think of all civil war conflicts we had in the 2oth Century. From Bosnian and Serbians that have been killing each other prior to the discovery of America to Tutsi and Hutus in Rwanda.
People from all warring factions live in the US and do so without killing each other and God knows they can buy guns, right?.
But we stand above tribalism and have Peace with Freedom (with the exception of College Football in the South and parts of the Midwest )
Since she’s threatening injury (except for kids in the car) it would appear her only choice of weapon was her car. How about red flag laws taking away her car due to threat?
While I think you’re spot on, I think there’s more to it.
Trump’s only been in for 3 years but these blue enclaves have been sliding backwards for decades, largely due to the reasons you listed. Why is that? Clearly Trump wasn’t around long enough for them to focus on him, and it’s been happening under blue presidents too.
I think it’s a desire to return to feudalism, with an elite at the top and all others at their service and convenience at the expense of their own. Humanity has existed this way for mostly all our history, and I think it’s simply caught up in the American experiment. Makes a lot of sense to me when framed that way.
Question is: how do we combat that? Voting has been dubious lately, and we’re running out of peaceful options.
Personally I’d say we already are on a new feudal system where working the land has been replaced with carrying debt. The factors are many and there certainly is more freedom and mobility, but you are still stuck with it.
In addition, it is two different worlds, at least to me. The government exists in its own sphere and does basically whatever it wants regardless of what the serfs want or would be good for them and puts on constant shows of political theater and misdirection to distract us from what else is happening. Not to mention things like ruthless shows of power when they crush a person with the legal system or whoops wrong house sorry we shot your wife and dog no you have basically no recourse.
Collectivism, in all of its forms, is rooted in cowardice.
Collective economics, whether you want to call it “socialism,” “communism,” “juche,” or “ujamaa,*” is an appeal to people that want to burgle other people’s houses but are scared of dogs.
Collective identities, whether you want to call it “communities of color” or “white nationalism,” is an appeal to people that are too scared to try anything risky for themselves to glomp onto the reflected glory of someone who did something grand and just so happens to share their skin tone, religious views, spoken language, or some other silly thing.
Collective rights, which is an absolute oxymoron, is an appeal to people to afraid to take care of themselves. Forget frightening notions of individual liberty and personal responsibility, just let the state coddle you from cradle to grave.
For someone deeply immersed in the collective mindset, the sight of someone operating outside of it is a terrifying horror. The primal fight or flight instinct kicks in… But they’re too cowardly to fight. But they’ll be brave enough to snap a photo for TwitBook to tell the rest of their tribe how brave they were.
However, if enough of these people are gathered around one or two outsiders? Well… Go watch a nature documentary of a tribe of baboons encountering a single leopard. Then watch a herd of campus protesters swarming around a kid in a MAGA hat. They stop, they stare, they call out to others, they gather in larger numbers, they begin to make vocal displays to intimidate the threat and encourage each other, eventually some young male runs out of the herd, makes a probing attack, then vanishes back into the crowd… If that probe meets little resistance, the cycle continues. The attacks increase in frequency and power. Eventually the whole tribe defends and rips the interloper to meat.
* Happy Kwanza.
Yup. Tribalism and zero-sum thinking. The great thing about free-market economics is that it’s inherently positive-sum, and anyone who embraces the values of the (ugh) merchant class will happily cooperate with people of (oh, dear) other tribes for mutual benefit.
And, ditto Dead J: I’ve been complaining about feudalism since the early 90s. So much of today’s “progressivism” makes sense if considered as neofeudalism! Sumptuary laws, compulsory worship (with a highly-privileged priesthood) , rejection of the upstart merchant class and the attendant class mobility, all that stuff.
California’s new “gig economy” law fits neatly into this: there’s (as of midnight tonight) no such thing as a free worker; anyone wishing to earn a living must labor in the fields of some feudal lord, or at least be a regular employee of a recognized corporation. I departed my native California on Christmas morning and have lived in Tennessee for just over two days now; we shall see how that goes – gotta set up my consulting business anew in the coming weeks.
Congrats on your escape.
Mrs B, who works independently in finance, has evolved a hypothesis that a large middle class is inherently unstable. A vibrant middle class depends upon the rate of technological progress, but also that said technology opens up jobs for semiskilled labor.
Really unskilled labor – burger flipper – doesn’t pay well; very highly skilled jobs – rocket scientist, surgeons, etc. – are simply not things most people can successfully do well, and society doesn’t have a need for a high fraction of the population doing them poorly.
We see society having the right conditions for a vibrant middle class when the industrial revolution comes into full swing – call it the decades before the US civil war. The classic industrial job required some training, some skill, and importantly a good work ethic; and it was accessible by people in the middle of the bell curve. These jobs were enough to support a family well, and to make a good life on.
Now, however, the low hanging fruit in the job space is still cheap enough for Skippy the Burger Flipper to not be replaced. (Getting there though – seen the McDonald order kiosks?) But traditional factory work – manufacturing jobs, assembly lines, etc. – is increasingly automated; fewer people are needed to do the same work, and importantly those people need to be trained and operating at higher levels – less accessible to the average human.
Overall, then, it looks like we may indeed be headed to a different societal archetype. The question is, can we make the transition to something better than neofeudalism?
Hloy crap, are you me? CA escapee (sort of, long story) to TN here too. Got my place outside Memphis. You?
“CA escapee (sort of, long story) to TN here too. Got my place outside Memphis. You?”
We’re just east of Knoxville; official mailing address is Sevierville. Outrageously oversized house (by not-rich California standards) on 10 acres, with views. Also an outbuilding that’s officially a barn but was built as a workshop; needs electrifying, and I’ll have a big playpen separate from the dwelling.
Lucky you!
Boris: Many good points there.
I’d add that the university system adds to the problem, as it’s morphed into a network of training and indoctrination centers for the priesthood, and marketed itself to the extent that now everyone is expected to attend for several years (at enormous expense). So, rather than producing an oversupply of poorly-qualified rocket scientists, it’s turning out an oversupply of poorly-qualified (and indentured) evangelists.
Meanwhile, the construction trades remain very much in demand, and those low-paying jobs-for-teenagers remain (for now) a way to get some work experience and learn basic stuff like showing up on time, preferably before one starts trying to support a family. That does require a bit of forward thinking and deferred gratification, though: the infamous merchant-class values.
The university degree is our generation’s tulip bubble.
Couldn’t agree more with that.