Monday 18 July 2016

It’s Not the One Percent, It’s The Stupid, Stupid

In the 1950’s to 1970’s British Trades Unions were astonishingly effective at organising strikes, marches and cross-industry support. Way too effective for a bunch of Brits. Everyone knew that the organisers had been to one or other of the Eastern European countries or even Mother Russia, where they were trained in industrial disruption. It only stopped when, under Gorbachov, the Russians gave up on worldwide sponsorship of industrial sabotage.

This makes me wonder who is behind Black Lives Matter, the various feminist organisations, the complete collapse of common-sense in American universities and all those other groups that seem to be able to organise large marches and press coverage more or less at the drop of a hat. Who organised the pro-Remain march for Saturday 2nd of July when the vote was only known on around 06:00 on Thursday 29th? 30,000 people were there - transport alone would be substantial - in forty-eight calendar hours. Um. This is odd, because march organisers have to give the Police six days' notice. And somebody printed all those pamphlets and posters for the “Syrain refugees" telling them to get to Sweden and not get caught in Denmark.

Who’s organising this? And no, it’s not a grass-roots Facebook / Twitter co-ordinated thing. That works when you have a tight, cohesive society with shared values and experiences. Tunisia, say, or Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco and other Muslim countries. We’re talking about the Anglosphere. That has nothing like the culture needed. It vanished when they closed all those mining and steel towns and valleys.

The current tin-foil hat theory is that a lot of this stuff is funded by Governments who hate right-wing / Republican voters and are importing foreigners who will vote left-wing / Democrat and give the Government an excuse to tax the ingrates to the hilt to pay for all the social security the immigrants and people with useless degrees need to claim. It’s a war on Decent White People and the immigrants are the canon fodder. And I grant it must feel like that sometimes to many native-born folk.

Angela Merkel importing over a million unskilled, unsocialised and angry young men in less than a year was a decision of such monumental stupidity that the only possible explanations involve drugs, temporary insanity or a side-effect of the menopause that needs to be researched with urgency in case it happens again. Either that or she never stopped being an East German communist dedicated to the overthrow of the West.

I voted Remain, but I embraced the Brexit within a day once it became clear that and why it was the new reality. That’s what private-sector people do: we follow our customers, legal rulings, and adapt to whatever idiot legislation comes from Government from time to time. We are realists, even if a lot of money goes on senior management’s pet projects. Politics is usually not about realism, so much so that when it was, it got a special cynical-sounding name: realpolitick . The opposite of science, said someone much cleverer than me, is not art, but politics. In science, if Nature refutes your theory, your theory is wrong (somewhere). In politics, if the People reject your policies, the People are wrong. In Politics, ideology comes first, there are no facts, only data spun as needed.

Angel Merkel let in all those girl-gropers, not because she wanted to “elect a new people”, but because she was guided by ideas that made sense in a different world. The UN UDHR is the foundation document of a civilised world, but it was written in 1948, when millions of people simply could not get to Europe, and anyway, the difference between the standard of living of French and Tunisian peasant farmers might arguably have been to the favour of the Tunisian. Writing a UDHR today, practicalities would trump ideals. The right to asylum would be restricted to political refugees, not economic migrants, farmers fleeing drought, or people dodging war lords. Merkel was blinded by an ideological principle to the facts, and the poor girl wanted to believe the best of all people. Really. It was that dumb.

So let’s talk about the activists. The activist movements are made up of people who don’t have STEM degrees, a 132+lb deadlift, or anything else that demonstrates self-discipline. As a result they are always going to be under-paid and haunted by a daily sense of irrelevance. They were lied to by their teachers, professors, parents and politicians. Nobody told them they had to study maths and science, stay away from drugs and junk food, play actual sports, and that being a better person isn’t a lot of fun. Nobody told them that life is not supposed to be fun, or even enjoyable. Nobody told them that self-discipline is way better than happiness, and self-improvement is way better than self-esteem. Nobody showed them how to live with insecurity, doubt, self-loathing, shyness, sexual frustration, and all that other neurotic stuff. In fact, very few people can do that, unless they have an entire culture dedicated to supporting it. White men have had that culture for centuries. When people grow up in a culture that praises living in the moment, feelings and happiness, they are pretty much screwed when they try to compete with the elite self-deniers, self-improvers and trained test-takers. Those activists want revenge. They don’t want to be taught how to live right, lift weights, cut code and identify and cook nutritious food. They want to mess up the people who lied to them.

The people who fund these misfits have money, so almost by definition are older. They think these activists are suffering the same institutional problems that the activists’ parents and grandparents suffered. Which would be awful if it was true. And the activists try to identify their problem (of being duped and ill-prepared for life) with those of their parents and grandparents (who were generally not duped and quite prepared for life in the very imperfect world they were born into). In that conflation lies the money, and a way to avoid accepting the horrible truth that they have been taken, had, took, bamboozled, mislead, waylaid, led astray, run amok and treated like dupes, and weren’t smart enough to spot it. Their teachers in turn weren’t doing it deliberately but were fighting the last war: they were fighting for pride and self-esteem when the real fight was for self-improvement, discipline and living without any fun. My generation did that standing on our heads - and it turned a lot of us into a bunch of neurotics, drunks, addicts, co-dependents and self-focussed people who weren’t sure about the value of the values we had been brought up with. See why the teachers did what they did? So those activist organisations are being funded by misguided people as well.

By definition, anyone who can fund a high-level legal action, cover the media with astroturf, or fund a movement, is rich or a corporation. But they aren’t always funding it to protect their rich-iosity and profits. Often it will be vanity, an incorrect understanding of the exact political and social realities, or just plain cussedness.

This leaves the virtue-signallers, the well-meaning, the bien-pensants, and politically naive who side with these movements because it irritates their parents or older siblings, or because leaving flowers with “Love” and a heart at the site of a suicide bombing is their idea of getting involved, whereas in fact it is a narcissistic indulgence. The other word for them is “useful idiots”. And even Black Lives Matter are telling them to get lost.

That’s what I think is happening now. It’s a bunch of people who were lied to by their parents and teachers, who have no chance in a tech- and service-based economy, who have a huge grudge and are being funded by people with money or institutional influence who think they are still fighting the last socio-political war (which was a Good War), and being seriously duped by the people they are funding, and by their own mistaken analysis of the current situation. (I'm looking at you, Mr Soros.)

It’s not a plot, it’s just the stupid. Stupid, however, can drive a truck on a seafront just as much as a plot can.

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