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Page added on May 2, 2019
Present at the Death
Well, the penny finally dropped. I’m not sure why it took me this long to realize that the collective tantrum that’s seized America’s mass media, intelligentsia, and privileged classes generally for the last two and a half years, since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, was described right down to the small details back in the 1970s by pioneering grief researcher Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Granted, she was talking about the five psychological stages that people go through when coming to terms with the reality of a terminal illness, but it makes an accurate model for what we may as well call the five stages of Donald Trump.
The first stage, of course, is denial: in Kübler-Ross’ sequence, the stunned refusal to admit that what’s happened has actually happened. The iconic protester shrieking “NO!!!” as Trump took the oath of office makes a good poster child for this stage, but I’m thinking here also of the widespread fixation among Democrats on the popular-vote totals, the insistence that it was all a mere fluke or must have been rigged by the Russians, the public figures who announced that they would never utter the phrase “President Trump,” and so on. All this was a straightforward if pointless attempt to deny the fact that the American people, according to the rules set out by the Constitution, had just elected Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States.
The second stage is anger: in Kübler-Ross’ sequence, blind unreasoning rage kindled by the sudden appearance of a yawning gap between expectations and reality. Here again, the internet promptly provided a poster child for this stage, but no one who had any contact with the mass media or the privileged strata of American society can have missed the torrents of futile rage poured out, not only at Trump himself, but at anything and everything that could conceivably be connected or associated or lumped together with him.
The third stage is bargaining. It’s important not to misunderstand this stage, as the bargains in question aren’t made with whatever has kickstarted the process. In Kübler-Ross’ writings, this is the stage at which terminally ill people repent their sins and make sweeping promises to God or their family or their doctor, in the hope that this will make the unwanted reality go away. The bargaining stage this time around had plenty of manifestations; the two most visible were the Mueller report, on the one hand, and such pledges of collective virtue as the “Green New Deal” and reparations for slavery on the other. In the former case, Democrats acted as though loudly professing faith in Robert Mueller would guarantee that the man’s report would bring down Trump’s presidency; in the latter—well, I don’t think there was even that much logic in it, since a political party that wants to win elections isn’t wise to pledge allegiance to policies supported by a fifth of the electorate at most. The actions of the bargaining phase, as Kübler-Ross points out, don’t have to make sense to anyone else.
The fourth stage is depression, and we’re starting to see the first stirrings of that now. As frantic efforts to twist the Mueller report around to mean what Democrats want it to mean fall apart, Trump’s opponents are starting to take the measure of the uphill struggle that will be needed to defeat an incumbent president with a passionately devoted base and a campaign fund that’s already reached gargantuan size, when the economy is booming, the anti-Trump media has discredited itself in the eyes of many voters and is shedding viewers at an impressive rate, and the Democratic party is split down the middle by bitter internal feuds. Websites on the leftward end of the blogosphere have accordingly started to post a scattering of glum essays on what it will mean if Trump wins a second term in the White House.
Off in the distance, finally, is the fifth stage, which is acceptance. Here again, it’s important not to misunderstand this stage. Acceptance doesn’t mean you have to like what’s happened. Acceptance means dealing with the fact that it’s not going to go away just because you don’t like it. It’s the process of coming to terms with the fact that the world has changed, and it has a payoff that none of the other stages have: it allows you to do something meaningful about the new reality. If you’re dealing with a terminal illness, it allows you to make the arrangements that will allow you to die with some degree of dignity and ensure that your estate is settled the way you want it. If you’re dealing with a new political reality, it allows you to find your feet again and figure out how to offer the voters what they want, instead of what you want them to want.
We live in the opening stages of just such a new political reality now. Among the best measures of the rise of the new reality is the recent flurry of denunciations of “populism” in the mainstream media. And what, pray tell, is populism? It’s the political stance that says that the majority has the right to have a voice in the making of collective decisions. The opposite of populism, though you won’t hear that mentioned in the denunciations I have in mind, is elitism: the viewpoint that only the self-proclaimed Good People have the right to a voice in decisions. That’s a core feature of the ideology that’s going to bits just now.
We can talk about the emergence of the new political reality in various ways, and I’ve explored some of them in previous posts here. The one I’d like to consider this week derives from the metaphor I’ve just used, the stages of grieving that Kübler-Ross discussed in her books. That is to say, we are talking about a death.
In a post three years ago, in the heat of the 2016 election, I described what was then dying and is now settling into rigor mortis under the label “American liberalism.” That was a flawed label, I now think, because it’s considerably too broad. American liberalism is a fabric that includes many different strands, many of which have been shoved out of sight in recent decades and some of which could well have a great deal to offer in the post-Trump future. The specific political stance I have in mind belongs to that subset of liberalism we can call progressivism—the belief that this complicated thing we call “history” has a one-way motor hardwired into it, so that it moves inevitably in the direction that liberals think it should go. At the same time, there are many flavors of progressivism, and it’s one of these in particular that has dominated political discourse in the US over the last six decades or so.
We can call it privileged progressivism: the belief that history always moves toward better things, and that this necessarily involves giving the already privileged more of what they want.
Let’s take a step back and talk a little about the realities of class and privilege in American society. I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts more than once that the most effective way to sort out where someone fits in the convoluted caste system of today’s America is to note how they get the majority of their income. Does it come from return on investments? Does it come from a monthly salary with benefits? Does it come from an hourly wage, usually with no benefits worth mentioning? Does it come from government welfare payments? In the US today, it’s usually one of those four—and the investment class, the salary class, the wage class, and the welfare class are thus the four great classes of modern American society.
Are there people who don’t fall into those categories? Sure. I’m one of them; I make most of my income from royalties on my books. People in my classlet fit into the holes and corners of the class structure just outlined. If they make the sort of modest but decent income I do, they exist somewhere between the wage and salary classes, with salary class educations but wage class income and benefits; if they make incomes in the upper middle class range and display all the right attitudes and values, they can win acceptance into the salary class; if they strike it rich and end up with serious investment income, they’re in the investment class, and the other people in that class treat them as they would any other nouveau-riche aspirant to gentility. The four main classes provide the framework into which eccentric classlets like mine have to fit.
Ever since the Second World War, furthermore, the salary class has been in the ascendant. Read novels from between the wars, and it’s taken for granted that what sets people apart as members of the privileged classes is the possession of enough investment income that they don’t have to work. I’m thinking here, because it’s a favorite book of mine and I reread it not too long ago, of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge. In the denouement, the thing that tells you that Larry Darrell is on his way to a destiny most of the other characters can neither follow nor understand is that he has gotten rid of his investments, given the money away, and thus irrevocably removed himself from among the self-proclaimed Good People of his era.
If Maugham were writing today, Darrell’s quest for freedom would have involved quitting a job with a six- or seven-figure salary and an ample benefits package, because that’s what marks you in today’s world as one of the Good People, or in other words a member of the privileged classes. The ascendancy of the salary class is why in 1920, the CEOs of major corporations were the obsequious lackeys of the boards of directors, while now it’s generally the other way around; it’s also why interest rates, the most basic measure of the returns that provide the investment class with their income, have spent so many years at such rock-bottom levels. Members of the salary class borrow more money than they invest, and so benefit from low interest rates; members of the investment class invest more than they borrow, and so the level at which interest rates are set is a fair measure of the balance of power between the two classes.
The ascendancy of the salary class also explains why every proposal enacted to help the two less prosperous classes, to benefit the environment, or to solve some other problem, always benefits the salary class more than it does the purported beneficiaries of the proposal. People living on welfare in today’s America scrape by with a wretched standard of living, but that can’t be said of the legions of salaried bureaucrats who administer those same welfare programs. Similarly, the big push to send unemployed wage class Americans to college, there to get job training for jobs that didn’t happen to exist, turned into a disaster for millions of people who were lured into taking out student loans they will never be able to pay off and cannot discharge by bankruptcy. On the other hand, it was a huge success for the salaried employees of universities and banks, who prospered mightily from the scheme and ended up carrying none of the costs.
This is also why the environmental reforms promoted by well-funded think tanks and corporate media outlets impose costs solely on farmers, coal miners, and other people outside the salary class, while the earth-wrecking behaviors of the salary class—the long commutes in SUVs, the vacations in Puerto Vallarta or Mazatlan, the sprawling, amenity-laden, and nearly uninsulated McMansions that use as much electricity as a city block in eastern Europe or an entire town in Indonesia, and the rest of it—get a free pass. Any time you see an environmental protest that focuses on demanding that governments do something, while neglecting the massive carbon footprints of the people involved in the protest, you’re looking at privileged progressivism on the hoof.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this sort of privileged self-interest, though, came recently from R.F. “Beto” O’Rourke, currently a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was asked by someone at a campaign event how he would solve the problem of “food deserts”—that is, areas that have no grocery stores. We’ll set aside for the moment the far from minor issue that under the US constitution, regulating the geographical distribution of grocery stores is not a duty assigned to the federal government, much less the office of the president. The point relevant here is that O’Rourke’s answer was that there ought to be a sustainable organic farm-to-table restaurant in every neighborhood.
Even the reporters choked, because farm-to-table restaurants are a current fad among the well-to-do, and a modest dinner for two at one of these establishments generally costs enough to keep a wage class family of four fed for a week or more. Nobody from the wage class or the welfare class, the two classes that have to deal with food deserts, can afford to eat at a farm-to-table restaurant—for that matter, neither can I—so O’Rourke’s suggestion amounts to saying that the best solution to the problem of inadequate food for the poor is to give salary class people more options for fine dining. Somehow the words “Let them eat organic arugula” come forcibly to mind.
It’s important to realize, though, that the people who benefit from these arrangements by and large don’t see themselves as riding roughshod over the public good or profiting off the sufferings of others, even when that’s basically what they’re doing. That’s what differentiates privileged progressivism from the privileged conservatism of the pre-Trump Republican Party, an ideology that can summed up tolerably well with the words “I’ve got mine, Jack.” Believers in privileged progressivism are convinced that they are the Good People, that their attitudes are really shared by every morally good person and their lifestyles are what every human being really wants. What’s more, they believe that the arc of history bends inevitably toward them: that eventually, as a result of the unstoppable march of progress, every single human being on earth will have the same attitudes they do and lead the same lifestyles they do, because their attitudes and lifestyles are what goodness, truth, right, and justice are all about.
If you want to see that belief system in action, watch the way that people of color who want to become members of the upper ranks of the salary class are expected to systematically discard everything that sets them apart from other members of the salary class. (Note that I’m not talking about athletes, musicians, university professors, or other people in the entertainment sector, who are expected to flaunt their differences from the salary-class norm, so they can be patronized accordingly.) If it’s not a matter of raw biology—for example, skin color—out it goes: attitudes, values, lifestyles, all must conform to the privileged-progressive template. There is no room for anything but the most harmlessly cosmetic of variations.
This isn’t simply a matter of ordinary conformism, tbough of course that’s involved as well. To the privileged progressives, their attitudes and lifestyles are the hallmarks of the glorious future everyone will eventually embrace, whether they want to or not. Every person who embraces these things in advance of that final triumph, discarding their own values and preferences in the process, hastens the coming of the privileged progressive utopia, where people of every continent and gender and ethnic group without exception will all believe exactly the same set of rigidly dogmatic ideologies and embrace exactly the same suffocatingly narrow range of lifestyles.
That, in turn, is why privileged progressivism started coming apart at the seams when Donald Trump broke free of the pack of Republican candidates in the 2016 election campaign. He did that, as my readers will remember, by addressing the concerns of the millions of wage class Americans who were being expected to foot the bill for the attitudes and lifestyles of the salary class, and who had been plunged into destitution and misery by forty years of policies that benefited the salary class at their expense. Like most ideologies of the privileged, privileged progressivism only made sense so long as its proponents could pretend that theirs was the only viewpoint that mattered. Once the viewpoints of the excluded forced themselves onto the public stage by way of Trump’s electoral victory, that was no longer the case.
The new political reality we face in today’s America is one in which it’s no longer possible to pretend that history has a motor driving it in whatever direction will give the salary class whatever it happens to want. That means, in turn, that members of the salary class who want something may just have to bargain for it, and provide members of other classes with some of the things they want, even when this inconveniences the salary class. It also means, as some of my readers may have noticed, that some of the underprivileged groups who’ve been told to wait patiently for crumbs to fall from the table of the salary class are beginning to speak up for themselves and demand that their needs be taken into account now, thank you very much.
It’s indicative of this that the media is belatedly starting to talk about the yawning gaps between what salary class politicians say they believe and the way they live their lives. New York mayor Bill de Blasio is the latest poster child for this phenomenon: the proponent of a grandiose set of green reforms, he also drives ten miles every day in an SUV to work out in a fashionable gym. Could he have some exercise equipment installed in Gracie Mansion and spare the atmosphere a lot of unnecessary carbon? Sure, but until recently the rule that members of the salary class get whatever they want shielded him from criticism. The criticism he’s now fielding shows that the rule in question no longer applies.
That is to say, we are returning to politics as usual. As the shrieks of denial and anger, the chatter of bargaining, and the moans of depression fall silent, what’s beginning to emerge is ordinary politics, in which different sectors of the electorate offer their support to politicians in exchange for the policies they want and need, and politicians who don’t follow through on their promises can expect to have the sectors that supported them turn to someone else next time around. What this shows, in turn, is that the period that came to an end in 2016 was a period of politics as unusual, in which the interests of a single class temporarily eclipsed the needs of everyone else.
Yes, there have been such periods before in American history, and it’s interesting to note that each of them ended in a hotly contested election in which the candidate who won was cordially hated by the establishment and its tame media. If you want a list, dear reader, I encourage you to sit down with a good history of the United States and make one yourself; a basic knowledge of American history is rare enough these days that the experience will probably do you good.
What makes for a period of politics as unusual, finally, is the same theme I’ve been developing here since the last months of 2018: what happens when all of reality is expected to conform to a single, self-interested narrative that privileges the experience of one class, or species, or group of individuals over all others. More than two centuries ago, the poet William Blake gave a cogent name to that habit of thought: “single vision.” In the posts ahead, we’ll gather up the threads of our exploration of single vision, and try to glimpse something of what lies beyond it.
Ecosophia by John Michael Greer
29 Comments on "Present at the Death"
Wutz Up Doc on Thu, 2nd May 2019 5:53 am
I like Greer better when he’s writing about licking rocks and humping trees.
Davy on Thu, 2nd May 2019 6:18 am
I am glad to see Greer is seeing the absurdity of American liberalism and its current suicide. He is musing on some kind of rebirth but that is to be seen. The dying still has a way to go. This is not claiming any victory for conservatives. Their way is already a dead end. Progressivism will be needed to change directions even if just a little. The alternative is meaningless and that is where we are at currently.
Dr Derp on Thu, 2nd May 2019 6:19 am
Wutz Up Doc is a juanpee mental condition.
Sissyfuss on Thu, 2nd May 2019 8:48 am
Finding a political system that can survive the Limits to Growth and Climate Disruption should be quite the challenge. Meanwhile, I’ll get back to my bargaining fighting it out with my acceptance.
More Davy Sock Puppetry on Thu, 2nd May 2019 1:06 pm
Dr Derp on Thu, 2nd May 2019 6:19 am
Truth buster on Thu, 2nd May 2019 1:17 pm
So dr derp is a JuanP sock I take it. Lol
boney joe on Fri, 3rd May 2019 1:00 pm
“I am glad to see Greer is seeing the absurdity of American liberalism and its current suicide.”
Davy, you are clueless. Greer is bought and paid for by Trump. If you bothered to read Greer’s insipid, blathering nonsense, you would be clapping your hands with glee.
Juanpee sock on Fri, 3rd May 2019 1:40 pm
JuanP posted this:
boney joe on Fri, 3rd May 2019 1:00 pm
Davy is retarded on Fri, 3rd May 2019 3:58 pm
Davy is retarded posted this:
Juanpee sock on Fri, 3rd May 2019 1:40 pm
Theedrich on Sat, 4th May 2019 2:31 am
Nancy Pelosi is menstruating out of her mouth. Even more than the rest of American politicians, she wants the irreconcilable opposites of “greenness” and “growth.” Like Bill de Blasio in NYC, she wants America’s submergence in a sea of sewage from outhouse countries at the same time that she purports to further “clean” energy and costless perpetual motion machines. Her nemesis, President Trump, is unabashedly driving at growth at all costs, even at the cost of the “racist” prevention and expulsion of dross from the country.
Meanwhile, neither Pelosi nor Trump, nor any other notable world leader, dares speak the unutterable: the only way for homo sapiens to survive is through eugenics and the extinction of the feebleminded majority. Yes, Pelosi and other utopian religious types who abhor the very name of evolution win the vote-getting contest. But as they say, Nature bats last. One way or another, be it through AGW, disease, war or general breakdown, this planet will force its will on our species. It’s a higher life form or bust.
makati1 on Sat, 4th May 2019 3:41 am
Theedrich, perhaps it will be the ‘meek’ who actually inherit the earth? After all, you need survival skills, not smarts, to survive what is coming. Do you really think the American “snowflake” has a chance? LMAO!
Our prehistoric ancestors manged quite well for many thousands of years before the machine age or oil. I suspect that that skill level will be the last ones on earth, not the ‘intelligentsia’.
We peaked out as an intelligent race last century. Yes, there are some still advancing, but they are far outnumbered by the ones regressing. Who will adjust the best and fastest? A silicon valley techie or the ‘wetback’ that knows how to survive with a knife and a bag of corn? My money is on the ‘wetback’. Or the 33,000 gangs and their two million members in the US. Or, pick any country and look at their lesser classes. They are already dealing with our future. Survival.
I suspect that the more educated would be disadvantaged in the future, unless their education was in survival skills. I won’t be here to see if I am correct, but some of the younger people here will be. Learned skills cannot be taken from you. They are more valuable than gold.
Cloggie on Sat, 4th May 2019 5:26 am
Theedrich, perhaps it will be the ‘meek’ who actually inherit the earth? After all, you need survival skills, not smarts, to survive what is coming. Do you really think the American “snowflake” has a chance? LMAO!
Mak, I think you are underestimating the extent in which ‘wetbacks’, Philipinos, Africans, Muslims, etc., are dependent on western, and increasingly Chinese, economic strength, to keep their basic systems going.
A spoiled western snowflake can be “brutalized” into a survival unit within a matter of years, under changing circumstances. Think of the Germans of Weimar, who in the thirties were all depressed homos, only to morph in a colossal fighting machine that overran entire Europe from Atlantic to the Caucasus, based on morale, not superior weapons.
Intelligence and spirit always beats “the meek”.
(The Germans eventually lost anyway, because they had to fight the entire world and that was even too much for them. Normally the Germans can beat three out of four {Americans, Russians, French, British}, “with two fingers in the nose”, but not all four).
makati1 on Sat, 4th May 2019 6:26 am
Cloggie, and you know this because? I live here. Have you ever been in a 3rd world country other than the tourist areas? I suspect that they will survive long after the West is history. They don’t “need” a BAU “system”.
You really don’t see the real world. Come here and live in the countryside with Filipinos for a year. You will understand what I am saying. Philippine culture still exists as it has for the last few thousand years.
Yes, it has some luxuries that will go away, but they are luxuries, not necessities. Those beautiful rice terraces are man made and maintained. No machines. The rice fields I pass traveling around the country do not use any machines, just human and animal power.
And, no, “snowflakes” will be among the first to die. to them, reality is a terrifying idea, to be avoided at all costs. When the SHTF and the current money system crashes, all those ‘financial advisors’ will be lost. When those 401ks/USTs/USBs/Euros are nothing but zeros, then what? Social Security and all of the other social safety nets and subsidies goes when the dollar goes. They cannot print gold, food, or shelter.
The ability to kill means survival, not the ability to think. You are missing the point, but then you are a techie dreamer.
Davy on Sat, 4th May 2019 6:42 am
Even if humanity were reduced by 80% things fall apart because the parts are less than the whole. The system the parts fit into make for a greater system. The techno intelligence of today’s globalism needs the feeble minded. Maybe not as many but it still is required. Today’s intelligence is not ancient intelligence it is primarily techno. That means unsustainable lacking robust resilience. The drones of the hive are needed now more than ever in the past to maintain intelligence. Drones are expendable because that is how nature works. Our survival consists of emulating nature not intelligence. Intelligence is part of nature but not nature. Can the 10%-20% left that are supposed to be intelligent make some kind of world? A significant amount of the remaining intelligent people are individualistic psychopathic narcissists who will not submit to a common cause. This is what capitalism is breeding at our finest schools. Many of the rest are highly intelligent delusionals who have narrow minded views of the world. So much of our finest academia today is lost in grand delusions of techno utopian denial. Many are so specialized that they could never feed themselves.
Wisdom is needed and wisdom is not always from the most intelligent. Intelligence is needed for wisdom but it is relevant to place and scale. A band of Osage in 15th century Missouri country had wise leaders and the people were very adapted to their local ecosystem. What could replace a future group post Anthropocene globalism survivors? The Osage emerged over many hundreds of years. Would early Romans, Greeks, or Chinese be possible?
The condition of wisdom and deep adaptation is what is relevant to the shock of bifurcation. Wisdom is about decisions about what knowledge to utilize. Decisions are about choices. Choices are about options and consequences. If we look at our options and consequences today we see that we have superhuman knowledge but few awakened who could take the best of that vast storage house of knowledge and combine it with real leadership of the wise. Today our most intelligent are among the least resilient, sustainable, and most of all lack deep wisdom. IOW they would die off taking stored knowledge and organic intelligence with them in a generation or two.
The old wise men of the Osage had all their culture myth memorized organically. The women had all the food and clothing knowledge memorized likewise in daily routine. The rest of the tribe had the young to be hunters, warriors and experts in building shelters. It was a community of various skill sets. We see emergence from nested skill sets combining making the sum greater than the parts. Look at the world today maybe 1% of the world is awakened. The definition of awakened is honest holistic intelligence. Not the most intelligent and not a drone. The 1% number is equivalent to a modern mega city. If we could call all these people into one point could they survive the end of the rest of the 99%? Would they be able to continue modernism with its techno superiority over nature? Is 10MIL a bottleneck number? Could 10MIL awakened current humans actually reboot a modernish civilization or would by necessity this number revert to aboriginal tendencies of hunting and gathering? If this group devolved technically to subsistence living could knowledge be retained. Would wisdom be retained? It takes the nurture of proper education to pass on and grow knowledge.
I don’t have the answers to these question but I don’t see a final solution as one of the answers that yield a new enduring civilization. Looks to me a final solution is a retirement party for extinction. Historically civilizations have required drones to take care of the hive. There are a few of the upper class and the productive class of craftsmen that are supported by the slaves and the drones. My conclusion is it is civilization itself which is the problem to proper human intelligence and wisdom. When humans lose scale they lose wisdom to properly craft intelligence obtained through the wise. Humans are likely heading for a rebirth or extinction. If it is a rebirth it will likely not be techno man. It will be more an aboriginal man. On the descent down we could possibly make a new hybrid man. Maybe he could actually better from learning from modern mistakes. This new man type of course requires an immediate quest of wisdom over our techno pursuit of ever greater knowledge of any kind and any and all capabilities which do not scale to the planet. Forget space travel and colonization. Humans don’t scale to that. We do not belong on alien planets. We emerged from the African plains not a moonscape.
Cloggie on Sat, 4th May 2019 8:01 am
You really don’t see the real world. Come here and live in the countryside with Filipinos for a year. You will understand what I am saying. Philippine culture still exists as it has for the last few thousand years.
As I have said numerous times before: I do not believe in a total collapse of global civilization and subsequent massive die-off, neither in the third world, nor in the West.
What I do know is that despite the basic resourcefulness of people in the third world you profess, their society is not one of the stone age. They have grids, water systems, sewage, mechanized agriculture, cars, buses, trains, computers, medical equipment. And for that to keep running, they are completely reliant on the West/China. For spare parts and further expansion.
In case of a hypothetical global collapse of industrial civilization (in which I do not believe), a massive die-off would occur in the third world, long before it would happen in the West.
Anonymouse on Sat, 4th May 2019 9:11 am
It sure is good to know, demented Davy is up well before 6am, preparing more of his un-read-by-anyhow-but-possibly-cloggjude? turd-salads. Sorry, I meant TARD-salads. That make-believe estate\farm\doomstead of yours must be staffed entirely by cloggedphincters make-believe robots to afford you the time to cut and paste your drool-worthy essays 20 hours a day.
I suppose getting up before 6am is not really a hardship for you though, since you dont really seem to actually sleep much at all. I understand lunatics dont really require sleep like normal humans do. Explains that.
Davy on Sat, 4th May 2019 9:20 am
annoy, does his routine morning stalking. He reminds me of those in early adolescence that masterbate daily. He finds his pleasures obsessively. It is rare annoy does not preform his intellectual masterbation on our board daily. annoy has been a daily distraction for years now. annoy thinks stalking shows superiority and cleverness but what it demonstrates is his mental capacity and personality dysfunctions. annoy and junapee, his good friend, are friends for a reason. Both are dirty and need to be banned if we want to improve this forum.
Anonymouse on Sat, 4th May 2019 9:34 am
How many times does it take dumbass?? All it ‘we’ need to do, to ‘improve’ this forum, is to have you, and Cloggjude, dont want him to feel left behind, go away, permanently.
‘We’ have been telling you this, for years. Now go find some place where you can be with you own kind, like the Missouri state mental hospital. Or, any amerikan prison. Or a Nascar rally. Any one of those places would be glad to have you and your pretentious overbearing lardass sitting around spewing your back-woods bullshit 24/7.
Cloggie on Sat, 4th May 2019 9:45 am
How many times does it take dumbass?? All it ‘we’ need to do, to ‘improve’ this forum, is to have you, and Cloggjude, dont want him to feel left behind, go away, permanently.
How about you f* off to Africa, where you belong, you stalking knucklehead. Go carve out a penis shaft for yourself, a small one and do a traditional rain dance for us before you take a hike.
Anonymouse on Sat, 4th May 2019 10:28 am
Africa??, are you serious CloggJude? There are no ‘Africans’ here cloggretard. You have long overstayed the welcome you never had dipshit. You can email delusional davy a vid of you dancing to Hava Nagila before you take a hike.
Davy on Sat, 4th May 2019 10:46 am
Cloggo is right annoy, you belong somewhere else. Be a more than a little boy, annoy and move on. Adults are talking here.
The Church Lady on Sat, 4th May 2019 2:57 pm
Be SILENCED ye Whore of Babylon, for inscribed on DAVY’S scalp is the Beast’s true identity and shall forever be known, DAVY, MYSTERY, BABYLON the GREAT, the FATHER of PROSTITUTES and ABOMINATIONS of the EARTH.
JuanP on Sat, 4th May 2019 4:23 pm
The Church Lady on Sat, 4th May 2019 2:57 pm
FUCK JUANPEE
makati1 on Sat, 4th May 2019 6:57 pm
What adults Davy? Do you misleadingly include yourself in that group? LMAO! You are one of the most immature people on this site. Always using sexual slurs, innuendoes and putdowns. Not a mature, intelligent rebuttal in years. Just long word salads full of bullshit no one reads.
BTW: A boring, lonely Saturday night there in the back woods of Missouri? Maybe some flooding? A nice, sunny, Sunday morning here in the land of eternal summer. ^_^
Davy on Sun, 5th May 2019 3:44 am
“You are one of the most immature people on this site. Always using sexual slurs, innuendoes and putdowns.”
I do some of this because people like you, juanpee, and annoy do it daily to me. What do you expect stupid. You should live by your golden rule do unto others BS you obviously do not follow. FRAUD
“Not a mature, intelligent rebuttal in years. Just long word salads full of bullshit no one reads.”
Translation: Davy has moderated and neutered me daily for years and I am in denial of this.
“BTW: A boring, lonely Saturday night there in the back woods of Missouri? Maybe some flooding? A nice, sunny, Sunday morning here in the land of eternal summer. ^_^”
Makato showing his true colors. I know you want things terrible for me and then tell us how wonderful your 3rd world shanty town is because something must not be right or the point would not need to be made constantly. Maybe it isn’t so good there and maybe you are very lonely. BTW, I am on the Ozark Plateau it does not flood on my farm. The wet spring means wonderful hay. You can have your bug infested eternal summer. I like 4 seasons. Old people like you need constant warm weather because you are weak. I like the vigor that comes with some adversity. I will take Spring and Fall in Missouri any day over your eternal summer ^_^ WEIRDO
Theedrich on Sun, 5th May 2019 3:55 am
Mak, you make some good points. However, it was the most intelligent, not the knuckle-draggers, who developed the wheel. (Note that the Aztecs had wheeled toys, but, oddly, not wheeled carriages.) The Indo-Germanic peoples spread out from what is today the eastern Ukraine and southern Russia roughly 7,000 years ago due to the wheeled chariot and similar military inventions. Metals (copper, then iron) were first developed in the Levant not by the “street-smart” types but by people with curiosity and inventiveness. Today, the international narcotics and slavery-trading syndicates are run by criminals of high intelligence, not by the hordes of “mules” who barely know their left hands from their rights.
The whole “progress” of our species has been made possible only by intelligence, not by murderous thugs who are usually just the expendable puppets of smarter people. War itself has always stimulated the more ingenious types to invent more.
Even after the Mongols conquered half of Eurasia in the later Mediævum, they could not keep their empire for long, because force alone without lasting and competent intellectual guidance dwindles rapidly. In contrast, the Roman Empire endured for many centuries due to the premium it put on well-crafted law and the development of the mind in general. In the end, it was overwhelmed by a combo of resource exhaustion and invasion by largely ignorant barbarians. Ditto Byzantium. The Mohammedan world ceased growing intellectually around 1300-1400, and has been frozen in time ever since. Luckily for us (and thank you, Charles Martel), the technology and intellectual advances of classical antiquity were carried on and further developed, particularly through the medium of the medieval Catholic Church. It was not cretins, but scholars and inventors like Gutenberg, Copernicus, Galileo, who made today possible.
What is now happening to us is the same thing that happened to Rome and Byzantium: resource exhaustion and invasion by parasitic ignorami, enabled by governmental stupidity and stalemate. The enormous (and growing) global overload of over 7½ billion cannot be sustained by stupidoes, no matter how many sob stories are broadcast by the propagandists. And yes, I have seen the beautiful terraces of rice paddies glinting like silver in the afternoon sun rippling down mountainsides in Taiwan, built and maintained by industrious Taiwanese and Chinese. But even those farmers depend greatly on products, or at least defenses, provided by modern civilization. And given the American preference for stupid incompetents in every sphere, that civilization now rests on melting ice.
makati1 on Sun, 5th May 2019 4:29 am
Theedrich, all of those things have already been invented. All it takes now is the skills to make them out of indigenous materials or to recycle the stuff that will be laying around everywhere after. As I walk around the city, I see billions of $$ worth of recyclable stuff just waiting to be reused. It would take hundreds of years for a few billion of us to use up all the “stuff” already manufactured/refined. More time than we will be here as the climates change.
Anything electronic/electric is NOT a necessity. It is junk. Anything that runs on FFs is not a necessity, it is junk. We don’t need a banking system when bartering is back in style. BTW: it is still in style here in the Philippines. Another reason much of the 3rd world will survive. They have not list the skill.
I never said the West would survive in any form other than tribes/gangs. Especially the US, which has no culture other than that of its ‘wetback’ immigrants. They will be the new owners/settlers of America. That is, until climate change ends homo sapiens in any form. Maybe by 2100. But I will be dust by then. ^_^
makati1 on Sun, 5th May 2019 4:31 am
Delusional Davy is his usual 9 year old self, I see. Get help Davy.
https://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcsaoffblock&type=E111US0G91208&p=Free+Mantal+health+clinics+in+Missouri
LMAO! Heeee Haaaaw!
Davy on Sun, 5th May 2019 5:43 am
Planetary destruction by our species has been made possible by intelligence as well as progress. Do we deserve to complement our intelligence after what we have done? We create all kinds of excuses for the destruction intelligence has brought us. We try to tell ourselves it is a lack of intelligence that causes these things so more intelligence is needed. This then becomes a vicious circular trap. The human version of intelligence is appearing to be paradoxical so maybe the problem is we don’t really know or understand true intelligence. There is something faulty with human intelligence not the real intelligence. Excuses are often a sign of bargaining so the fact that we have so many excuses today for what is wrong is pointing to the human version of intelligence may be the culprit.
Intelligence has become a dualistic nightmare of matter and spirit. Intelligent humans don’t scale and which means they can’t handle intelligence. Our spirit desires greater matter. Matter is restricting our spirit. We can’t balance when we are out of scale so we push the scale further out in search of scale. Instead of the holistic wise use of intelligence we have intelligence for intelligence sake that always leads to the corruption by power. The “any progress is good” attitude has taken us to the brink. Has the inevitable corruption of intelligence brought us more destruction than progress? It appears that humans can’t handle the cycles our human intelligence inevitably creates. Time and time again civilizations have grown then decayed to nothing. This latest global civilization appears to be going the way all other civilizations have gone.
Does this mean we should not peruse higher intelligence? I would say we can’t help it because it is our nature to know and to control. We are here now so we have no choice but to use intelligence to try to find some right combination or is that just more magical thinking? The alternative is mass death because entropy never sleeps. I would say real progress is the proper use of intelligence with controls and humility. This likely means less intelligence to get higher progress. Humans do not appear capable of voluntarily using less intelligence especially when that involves survival in competition with nature and ourselves. Could it be intelligence will realize there is something higher than intelligence? Might it be that self-reflecting intelligence will somehow realize it is the balance of intelligence and other forces that is true progress? This might mean that intelligence is but one force that drives the universe not the force self-reflecting intelligence thinks is absolute. Maybe it is intelligence and something not intelligence that keeps the cycle of activity going. I would think all knowing intelligence would instantly freeze up because its next action would already be known.
We are at a critical juncture of ever greater intelligence. Intelligence is actually becoming mechanized and beyond what is human. This is introducing a new element for loss of control over intelligence. Intelligence is now being off loaded and housed in inanimate elements. The potential is now for both human and non-human extremes of intelligence unleashing complete destruction. Corruption may now become complete with this new situation. Maybe it is this new aspect of techno intelligence that allows intelligence to be controlled or not. This is one of those doors we are currently going through. We may not be able to go back through once entered. Tech is not going to save us anymore unless we solve this issue of lack of control over intelligence but it may take tech and wise use of intelligence to save us. Personally I feel if we were truly intelligent then we would see science telling us we do not scale to the planet with our civilized techno culture. This culture is obsessed with ever grater knowledge and control at the expense of nature. If we can’t acknowledge nature in this conversation then there will never be progress. We are to that point of so called “progress”.