We’re Not Going Back. You can’t make us.
Let me introduce you to a concept called “singularity.”
It was the hot thing in my field in the 90s. We were accelerating in tech so fast that eventually we were going to hit a point called the singularity. After that point, everything that came before would be non-understandable to the average human. And everything that comes after would not be understandable to us now.
This went along with augmented humans, where were were all going to have hardware ports in our brains and be plugging in thumb drives for extra knowledge. And stuff.
For the record, I was always agnostic on this. (Kind of like on aliens, yes.)
I’ve written one trans-humanist story, and it was because I was invited to a trans-humanist anthology. It’s kind of the price of admission. You get a call that says “Hey do you want to be in x y z anthology?” What they are actually saying is “Do you want six hundred bucks?” (More or less.) And if you’re trying to make a living with words (which is a remarkably precarious existence) you go “Sure, I can do that.” And when the prompt is something like “psychedelic drugs of the seventies” or “Alien strip clubs” you build in a morning to go down the weirdest internet rabbit holes, and become an expert (over time) in the strangest subjects.
What you don’t do is say “Your notion is silly. What even.” Because, you know, you want six hundred bucks, which are the difference between buying groceries and… uh…. not.
But I never truly bought it. Look, yes, a lot of people are nuts. My husband, for instance, wanted us fully hooked on to Alexa, and it took me months of carefully disconnecting the thing whenever I caught it connected before he gave up.
I can see — just not near, because tech is not there — augmented thought and reality devices in a headband, or perhaps a hood, or even glasses, or a neat clip that goes around your ear. Kind of like based bluetooth headsets. Heck, people get me one I can reliably dictate to with my thoughts, so I can write every minute I’m not actually asleep and I’ll buy it and never take it off.
But actual hardware installed in the head? Or inserted in my body not to treat a permanent problem, but just because? Yeah. No. No with bells on and a little mandolin.
Look, I came of age in the time of reel-to-reel home movies. Now? Now my DVDs are gathering dust, because everything is streamed. I’m not doing that with things that require major surgery.
And as for singularity? Like the last trump, it happens every day, little by little and man by man. If you’d brought me forward from 1990 even to day, I’d have a week of extreme confusion trying to understand how we live now. And hard adaptation. Me from the sixties… well, I’d probably eventually happen (Humans are more pliable than most people think) but it would take a long, long time.
But sometimes, sometimes, there singularities of experience and understanding. And once you go there, you can never ever go back. You just can’t.
And we went through one of those in the last six years. And how. Things we thought we knew turned out not to be so. Experts have proven themselves either craven, stupid, or bizarrely twisted. And if they believed half the things they told us too, they’re experts ONLY in make believe.
The masks came down. The whole beautifully painted picture of a reality that we all accepted because …. well, because pretty much everyone did. Even those of us who thought that they were out of their minds on certain things accepted some vast parts of it.
Because you had to believe some parts of it, and well… We believed things like that our politicians, no matter how idiotic, weren’t deliberately malicious and trying to kill us. We believed things like that our medical establishment was actually trying to keep people healthy. We believed– well, a lot of things that just weren’t so.
But the last few years have proven we were wrong. However stupid we thought our politicians were they’re dumber than that, but also they will say and do anything, even if it kills you, to avoid losing power or to gain more power. Our doctors might be fine — I know there are several here as regulars — but the establishment is horrendous.
And we’re not going back. What’s been seen can’t be unseen.
Yesterday, while doing my instapundit rounds (as one does) I went via Powerline Blog. I’ve been trying to give them a link now and then since they got rid of the unbearably idiotic guy. You know, pour encourager les autres.
But yesterday I tripped on one of them “Oh, no. We’re set to win the mid terms, and then Trump goes and says he’ll run again, and it’s allllllll lost.”
AHAHAHAHAH! Oh, wait, you really believe that. Let me laugh harder. AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH!
I can’t imagine or even figure out the heads of people who think if only we “got rid” of Trump somehow, we’d all go back to the nice “establishment republicans” and everything will go back to the way it was in the nineties, with more rainbows and butterflies this time.
It’s not that I don’t understand the desire. To most people, even on the right, in my circles, the nineties now appear like a gold age of live-and-let-live. Yes, democrats had bad ideas, but they weren’t actively indoctrinating kiddies in racism in kindergarten. They weren’t actively locking us in our houses, or demanding we take an unproven and insane “vaccine.” Can we just go back to that? they ask.
No, you can’t. You can’t because it was never true. I laugh in the face of right wingers who talk about his new “cancellation” thing. Because it was going on since the mid eighties when I moved here. It’s just they used other innuendo to justify it. You were just a “bad person” in some way. A bad writer, a bad movie maker. You’d gone crazy. You’d lost your touch. Whatever. Now it’s just in the open.
Being in the open doesn’t make it worse. It makes it, however, more noticeable and allows people to see how stupid it is. and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Which is why we’re not going back to the “nice nineties” — because now we know what was going on behind the scenes, all the time. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You can’t go back. It’s impossible.
If you look at yourself and your opinions, in the last six years, you’ll see how much you’ve changed.
The biggest points in my change are:
A complete and utter distrust of the scientific establishment. I used to think that other than stupid cr*p like global warming, you could trust most of it. I was one of those people who would look up the official research and “the way things are done.” Not anymore. I’ve learned the limits of irreproducibility and also that most non-applied (and some applied like medicine) science is just “Shut up, they explained.”
A complete and utter distrust of our three letter agencies. Used to be that I looked at Heinlein saying that we had the worst intelligence services in the universe and go “well, I guess he’d seen some bad stuff.” Now? Now I look at it and go “You forgot self-serving, corrupt and partisan.”
A complete and utter distrust in centralized government. You know, it’s funny because I thought I already had that distrust. Turns out I was wrong. I still thought they had some sort of competence and ability to do things that benefited the country. Now? Now I think they’re as stupid and incompetent as they’re evil. Government should be as small and localized as possible. No. Smaller and more localized than that. No. Than that too.
A determination that the worst thing that ever happened to this nation were the changes perpetrated by FDR.
And that includes the “Perpetual war establishment.” Used to be I thought that the whole “Foreign wars are a way to kill young males and keep the people subjugated” was commie talk. Now? Trump proved that the “intractable middle east” is not intractable, if you aren’t afraid to stop the wars.
Am I against the military? Never. Like the police they have their place. But I’m against stupid and senseless wars and “building democracy.” We couldn’t even do it in Europe after World War II. Germany is still very much itself and still hates us.
I am for the Stephen Green foreign diplomacy plan. Someone hits us, we hit them back as hard as we can with everything in our arsenal, with a care to sparing our enlisted men who are our most precious resources.
After the leveling, we grab what passes for their leadership by the scruff and say “You f*cked with us. This was a bad idea. Don’t make us come back.”
For the rest? Close the borders, become as self-sufficient as possible, and let the world do what it will.
Stop feeding the crazy of the world a never ending supply of American bodies.
Also I now think schools including curricula should be determined at the district level, no higher. And national or state teacher certification is a joke. Let the schools determine who is fit to and they want to teach their kids. You might see a lot of retired doctors, engineers and computer programmers do it: people who’ve lived and worked in the world and don’t have their empty heads stuffed full of “useless theory”. Yes, some of them will be very bad. That will be a massive improvement.
All this centralized certify this and make sure it’s done that way, and– It’s all bullshit, and has made everything worse. It’s time to sh*tcan it.
And that’s become startling clear to a vast majority of people.
And that’s why we can’t be dragged back to the “Nice nineties.” It’s not just that now the left has lost what remained of its marbles and are declaring their pride in being stupid commies. They always were that. Do you remember a time when they wouldn’t proudly display Che T-shirts or Mao posters? Or that they were shunned for it by the vast majority of lefties?
It’s that now the rest of us know how diligently they worked and how much they undermined our freedom in order to gain power. We know how completely incompetent they are at anything else than gaining and holding power. We know they’d kill all of us — on purpose — to maintain it.
You can’t just be nice to people like that. And any republicans who get elected and think they can be nice and “work across the isle” are already in people’s minds as “people to replace as soon as possible.”
So, no, Trump is not a killer for winning seats. Trump is the only reason a lot of us are voting for even the lamest most rino-ed up GOP on the tickets. Because thanks to Trump they dropped their masks, and we’ve seen what they were doing all the time behind the nice scenary. And we’ll move away from THAT incrementally if needed, but away.
And while I didn’t decide to vote for Trump until the day before the elections in 16 and it was a “well, which of these candidates is less likely to get me shot in the back of the head”, and thought I have doubts about some of the stuff he did, like allowing the merry hell of covidiocy to progress (yes, I know, local rule. But sometimes you need a “hell to the no” from the top.) I would vote for him. I might vote for him more readily than for the politicians who are now imitating him. He made it okay to talk back to the left. And he made the left reveal itself. Just in those he might have done a greater service to the republic than any president in the last 100 years. And he learns, so there’s a good chance he’ll come in and start dismantling the bureaucracy.
It’s worth a try.
I don’t have anything against him personally. Yeah, he has a bombastic personality but I recognize an Odd when I see one. And the bombastic personality is one of the standard overlays. It don’t make no never mind.
And if he goes away, I’m not going to forget everything I’ve seen and go back to “nineties nice.” That’s impossible. Get rid of Trump and we’ll find someone you like even less. Get rid of that one, and we’ll find someone else even more objectionable to the “nice” kind.
The left got the way it is now by never being fought, never being thwarted. They’re giant spoiled children with a death wish, who are trying to kill us all.
You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. We’ve seen it.
It’s green, it’s radioactive, it’s made of alien eyes, and what’s been seen can’t be unseen.
Stop wishing for “nice” back and help us build the good. Help us build a good and solid work for our kids and grand kids to grow up in.
And stop lamenting and whining. Otherwise we’re going to give you a lollipop and have you sit with the spoiled kiddies of the left.