These are my (admittedly pessimistic) thoughts on governments around the world. What can I say — this period has allowed me to stop and think, which is something that I was too busy to do before. The lockstep behavior of so many governments, at the behest of the powers that be, in order to advance a clear agenda, has also tipped their hands and allowed us, those who want to open our eyes to the truth, to see what’s really going on.
Tag Archives: people
On these times
Here is a video I’ve been meaning to do for some time: my thoughts on these times we’re living in, and what we can do to improve our lot. This is quite a different video from what you may be used to seeing from me, but I hope it’s useful to you nonetheless.
On race and color
I’m going to start with a statement that I’ve made before: people are people are people; they should be judged on their merit alone. I know that when I meet someone of a different race, I don’t judge them based on their skin or appearance. Although there may be an initial element of surprise at how differently they look from me (and that’s okay), I will judge them based on their merit, and by that I mean this: are they a good and decent person; are they honest and hardworking?
I believe most people in the world judge others based on these basic questions, if given the chance. I think the time when the color of one’s skin or their race automatically meant certain things, is in the past. Race relations have been getting better, slowly but surely, until new tensions were introduced by weaponized untruths such as critical race theory (in the US) and ridiculous immigration quotas (in Europe). We’ve been allowing shysters and grifters to dictate new codes of morality to us, the decent, law-abiding people, new codes that are meant to terrify us and induce false guilt, not correct any wrongdoings.
I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t racial problems in the world. There are plenty, but on the whole, they are fewer than before. People are behaving better toward each other. They may grumble, they may make stupid remarks, they may even get into fights, particularly when drunk or angry (for unrelated reasons such as the economy and lack of jobs), but in the end, I believe people are judged by their peers based on their merit, not their race or their color. I believe all of the racial tensions that we’re seeing now aren’t based on color or race, but on misguided (and in part, insane) expectations and on differences in culture/tradition/religion. Now let’s delve into some of the issues that have cropped up lately.
I’m not going to use the various new terminologies of critical race theory that have gotten a lot of press. I refuse to learn them. I am going to talk as a person would talk to another person, based on common sense and mutual respect. Those who would use new words to describe old problems and would accuse instead of discuss are the ones who are causing the racial tensions and the bad color optics. Do not listen to them. Call them out for what they are. Use your common sense. Do not let a bunch of loud gasbags who probably haven’t put in an honest day’s work in their entire lives, dictate how you live your life. These are assholes, plain and simple; lying assholes who couch their utter lack of actual thinking and actual work in academic language, who come up with bullshit papers that build on more bullshit papers, to justify their utterly meaningless careers and lives. They are contributing nothing to the wellbeing of humanity — they are actually detracting from it — and in the end, they will get the full brunt of what they deserve, as they live and after they depart this world.
There are old problems, and there are new problems. Let’s talk about the old problems first, because they’ve been around longer.
Slavery. Colonization. Exploitation. These are the old problems. When it comes to the current racial tensions related to these acts of the past, we’re talking about the era of colonization and expansion of European empires, and the time of plantations and slavery in the US.
This was wrong thinking that went beyond pretentious after-dinner discussions and was put into action by many countries. This caused so much harm, for so long, harm that’s been thoroughly documented in the annals of history. It is important to point out that it was government officials, people of influence and others with an axe to grind or an ulterior motive such as cheap labor and easy wealth, that created these problems. The wrong thinking, the thing that got this nasty ball of evil rolling, was the idea that cultures different from Western standards were primitive and thus inferior. It then stood to (wrong) reason that they could be conquered, colonized and exploited for their vast natural wealth, which they “weren’t putting to good use”. And it didn’t take long for the conquerors to “realize” that the people of those countries, being “primitive” and thus “inferior”, could also be put to good use as slaves.
That was the thinking of the time, and it wasn’t new even then. The idea of conquering lands and taking slaves has been around since the beginning of our recorded time. Just look at what the Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian kings used to do. Look at the oldest city states in that region of the world, and you’ll see that as soon as a city was formed and developed, its king wouldn’t be content enough to hold it, develop it and care for it, but would quickly look around for other city states to conquer, for wealth to steal, for people to kill and enslave.
Coming back to the more recent time of colonization and slavery, it is important to point out once more that it wasn’t everybody of that time (17th, 18th and 19th centuries) who thought this way. It was, as it usually is, the tail the wagged the dog — a relatively small group of people of wealth, government officials and others with influence and a mercenary spirit that developed these ideas into the actual deeds that happened. If you’ll look through accounts of the time and newspaper articles, I’m sure you’ll find people who spoke out against these things. But just as it happens now, when entire nations are dragged into wars unwillingly and those who are in the military have to obey the orders that are given to them, no matter what they think of them, those countries were eventually “convinced” into doing these things. I doubt that any normal, decent person of the time, when presented with the situation impartially, thought it was a good idea to go and kill the people of another nation and take their wealth, but that’s not how these ideas are usually presented. No, they’re presented as propaganda through various mediums such as newspapers, books, textbooks, speeches, etc. Certain sound bites are repeated over and over, until people believe them.
What I’m trying to say is that you can’t hold entire nations or entire races and colors, responsible for the decisions of a few bad eggs. You must realize that coercion was used quite a lot by rulers and regimes of the past. People did things not because they believed in them or they liked them, but because they were ordered to do so. You also can’t hold entire races or colors responsible for these acts, because not all of them participated in them. You have to remember that numerous so-called “white countries” never engaged in colonization and slavery. They’re the ones that weren’t wealthy in the Middle Ages and in the Industrial Era, and they aren’t doing that well nowdays, either.
I can give you one personal example: my country of birth, Romania, has never engaged in any of those acts. What’s more, Romania has been overrun, conquered, raped and pillaged throughout history more times than I care to remember. Did we, as Romanians, ever vow to go and conquer, rape and pillage other countries ourselves? No. All we wanted to do was to defend our country, even though we were outnumbered and outgunned most of the time. We did the best we could, we suffered through the occupations, through the tributes paid in blood and money and children, through all of the corrupt regimes, and all this time we tried our best to get along with all the different races that wanted to settle in our country: we had Tartars, Ottomans, Russians, Germans (Saxons), Romans, Slavs, Huns (and the list can go on). We were enslaved, we were persecuted, we had our lands stolen from us, we had our children stolen from us, and yet we are somehow still here as a nation and as a country and as a language, and we get along with the various ethnic groups that now exist within our borders. I’m not saying you should emulate Romania’s example, because it involved terrible suffering. I’m saying that not all white people did harm to the black people, or to the people from the Far East, and so on. Even more to the point, the very countries that are now blamed for these historic harms (US, UK, France, Spain, etc.) contain so many different white people of different origins, that you cannot issue blanket statements about their general guilt without being terribly wrong.
Here’s something else to think about: white men, women and children were also slaves, throughout history, including the time that people from Africa were enslaved. And in the slave trade of today (that’s right, slavery still exists, but it’s hidden from view), people of all colors are being sold into slavery. I would also encourage you to read up on serfdom and indentured servitude, which were practiced throughout Europe for much longer than slavery and weren’t much better in my opinion. If you want to read up on some of the biggest injustices done throughout history, you should read up on European history. Those particular readings will point out quite clearly that white Europeans did unspeakable things to other white Europeans from neighboring countries and even from the very same countries, long before they stepped out of Europe to do more of those same things to people of other races and colors. I’m not saying these things to get into an argument about which race or color suffered more. That’s a very unpleasant game to play. All races have suffered throughout history. All have inflicted needless harm and killing on their own people. Instead of playing the comparison game, we should come together to create a better world for our children, no matter what color they may be.
To get back to colonial times, sure, plenty of people ended up believing the propaganda. Yes, they enjoyed the prosperity that trickled down, more or less, even though it was ill-begotten. Yes, many ended up thinking they were a superior race. Just like it’s happening today, when people are drinking the period-appropriate koolaid and they end up screaming bloody murder on the streets, vandalizing cities and terrorizing innocent people in the name of stupid ideas that they’ve bought into…
Furthermore, you cannot hold entire races and colors responsible for the actions of dead people who died long ago. It’s been many generations since then. The people who got those horrible situations started are dead. The people who participated in them are dead. The people who were enslaved and exploited are dead. Long dead. Colonization itself is dead. The kind of slavery that some are getting so worked up about is long dead. Make no mistake, critical race theory is actually injecting racism into the public discourse, mostly at the expense of whites. It is trying to legitimize anti-white language and behaviors. Refuse this hateful lunacy now or you will regret it. We, the whites of today, are not guilty of the past crimes of our nations, done at the behest of leaders long dead, nor are we responsible for heeding all the bitchy, whiny speechifying of entitled little shits writing bogus papers out of their tenured offices at leftist academic institutions.
We have an old saying in Romania that goes like this when translated: “If you stir up the manure pile, it’s going to stink again.” That’s what’s going on now. The people who are stirring up the manure pile are doing this on purpose, because they want to cause a stink. They have an axe to grind themselves, an agenda that they want to fulfill, and their agenda is pretty simple: they want to profit from the mess that they’re stirring up. They want to justify their meaningless, useless little lives. I can assure you that decent people on both sides of this issue never thought of arguing about these things after race relations became somewhat normal, but the people who are stirring up these tensions are not decent people. They masquerade as respectable people, self-appointed thought leaders, self-appointed community leaders or academicians, but they are none of those things. This is where the misguided and insane expectations I mentioned at the start of my post come in… These people would disturb the race relations in entire countries simply to advance their personal agendas, and they must not be allowed to do so.
Immigration. This is a new problem, and it’s one that perhaps deserves its own post, so I’m only going to talk about it here as it relates to race and color. (As a side note, immigration itself isn’t new. Just have a look at the history of immigration into the US during the late 19th and early 20th century and the attitudes of existing US citizens back then. Tensions related to immigration have always been around. What is new are the waves of undocumented and mostly unwanted immigrants pouring into the US and Western Europe.)
I must first say that I am myself an immigrant, so I cannot be against immigration. I emigrated to the United States in 1991 with my parents, all three of us seeking a better life. We went there and we worked hard. Our hard work was in the end rewarded, as we became prosperous. We learned English, proper English and we did our best to integrate ourselves into the communities where we lived. We respected the laws, the culture and the traditions of the United States. We paid our dues and we did well.
As an immigrant, I must also say that current-day immigrants are treating the countries that are receiving them with disrespect. They’re not learning the language, they’re not trying their best to integrate into communities, and they don’t obey the laws, and the culture and the traditions of those places. Instead, they form enclaves where they begin to bully, abuse and assault the unfortunate citizens who live in the area, forcing them to move or worse, killing them or raping their children (there are plenty of cases of this sort of behavior in Western Europe). They force their outside religion on the citizens of their adoptive countries and they proselytize aggressively.
Do you see the incredible tragedy of what’s happening? A people uprooted, abused, killed and raped by their own country, moves to another country where they end up uprooting, abusing, killing and raping the people of that country. The victims become the abusers! And then we wonder why there are racial tensions… If some of the things you’ve just read in this paragraph seem unreal to you, please do some online searches on violence in the UK and in France. Just the things that have happened in recent months ought to make you realize the situation has become untenable.
I also mentioned at the start of this post that I’d talk about how culture ties into this. Well, what we as Westerners must realize is that the things that we’re accusing the immigrants of doing are part of their culture and that in their own countries, the sorts of things they’re doing are considered normal. I don’t mean that murder is normal anywhere. But marriage with underage girls is quite normal in a lot of Arabic and African countries. It’s certainly not okay in Western countries. Rape is also condoned and victims are intimidated into silence. If you don’t believe me, research this. Large groups of people, multiple generations living together in small spaces is also normal in many other countries in the world, but it’s unusual in highly developed Western countries. Disrespect for women is also a cultural norm in many of these countries. Because the public infrastructure is not developed in a lot of these countries, it’s also normal for a lot of immigrants to be unfamiliar with bathrooms, with running water, with toilets, and with proper disposal of garbage and recyclables. But that’s where the integration part comes in. Governments must hold classes where they stress what is mandatory and what is recommended or polite in those countries, for each and every single immigrant. And immigrants must recognize that they must pay their dues. Out of respect for their adoptive countries, they must obey their laws or else… Out of respect for the countries where they’re received, they must do their best to fit in. Out of respect for the cultures in those countries, they must learn about them and about the traditions of the people who are allowing them to live in their countries, or else they must leave. Immigration is a two-way street. If immigrants only take and take and take and they don’t give back, they’re not welcome and they shouldn’t ever be welcome.
As I said at the start, people should be judged on their merit. I know that race and color ultimately do not matter if someone is a good and decent person. It’s cultural differences that introduce tension, particularly when there are stark differences between groups of people. We have to constantly keep in mind that in the West and the North, we have evolved to think very differently from those in the East and in the South. To some extent, it’s okay for these differences to exist, particularly when they’re part of long-standing traditions. That’s why there are countries, so that different cultures and traditions can exist and the people that belong to those cultures and traditions can congregate and separate from other people in those places. It’s when people from different countries are brought together in close quarters that problems arise, and this is why it’s so important for incoming immigrants to do their best to integrate. The onus is on them to change in order to fit into their adoptive countries, not the other way around! I do not believe the citizens of a country should be the ones that change in order to accommodate the immigrants. The citizens of a country have an absolute right to keep their own cultures and traditions alive, and the immigrants must change in order to fit into that place or else they are not welcome there, and rightfully so. I’m not saying they need to change completely, but they must fit in, out of respect. This was the norm, the expected behavior, during millennia of immigration. It’s only during the past decade or so that governments have tried to force-feed their citizens a different ideology, and it’s wrong. The way to handle these situations is to ask: how would peaceable, understanding people do this? Instead of legislating race relations, communities ought to hold open discussions where all points of view, from all sides are heard, solutions are developed and also implemented. with people of different nations, races and colors are the right ones, particularly when it comes to things that are deeply entrenched in people’s psyches like culture and tradition. Slow, steady and respectful wins the race, in more ways than one.
It’s also important to point out that I harbor no illusions, if it hasn’t already become abundantly clear to you, about people of one color getting along better with one another “if only other colors or races weren’t present”, as certain groups of angry people have espoused throughout history, including nowadays. That is most certainly not true and history has proven this beyond doubt. I believe quite strongly that people will always find reasons to argue, fight, hate, murder and persecute each other, even when they’re part of the very same family tree. Having people of a different race or color present “there” simply gives them a scapegoat to blame, but as soon as the scapegoat is out of the picture, they’ll go right back to finding fault with each other. No, as far as I’m concerned, peaceful co-existence is about people who share common values, particularly lifestyle and work values, who come together in communities where they can collaborate with each other to good effect, no matter what race or color they are. We also have to admit that this peaceful co-existence is made easier (not perfect, just easier) when those people also share common cultures and traditions, and that typically happens when they also share a common race. Will this change with time? Yes. It has been slowly changing, no thanks to the agitators. Nationality will in time supersede race and color, and that’s why immigrants must integrate into the cultures of each adoptive country, for the good of their communities and those countries as a whole. People need to have a common bond, something that holds them together, something that gives them a sense of identity, of belonging, of community. The more traits they share, the better their chances of getting along with each other will be.
On the automation of surveillance
We are seeing an increased use of surveillance at every level of our lives (on the street, at work, online, on our phones, etc.), and we see increased use of automation (simple, algorithmic and AI) to sort through all our activities. It’s a worrisome trend. We should be asking questions such as:
- Who’s surveilling us and why? It’s easy to answer this with two terms: government and big tech, but the answers can be and should be much more granulated.
- Who’s keeping track of that data? Exactly who are the players who have access to our data, who are running analysis on it and who are storing it, backing it up, etc.
- How long is our data kept and where?
- When algorithms decide our human fate, is that just? Should we tolerate it?
- Who wrote the algorithms and are they skewed in some way? Given the recent censorship issues on Facebook and Twitter, I think algorithms are clearly written with an agenda in mind and they can be easily skewed to fit the needs and wants of the companies who apply them.
- And many more questions like this…
I’d first like to point out the following: we live in a human world, and we’re meant to relate to each other in human ways; it doesn’t work well otherwise.
However, as I’ve pointed out in past posts, the world is too full of humans, and there are many complications that arise from that. Chief among them is this: an unusually large proportion of them aren’t relating to their fellow humans in human (or humane) ways and they are engaging in violence, murder, kidnappings, rape, pedophilia and other perversions, vandalism, theft, looting, corruption at all levels, drugs, road rage, terrorism, con schemes, etc.
That’s when law enforcement and governments, unable to keep track of every one of these so-called “humans” with existing personnel, turns to computers, mass surveillance, facial recognition, algorithms that identify suspicious behavior, etc., in an effort to sort through the mass influx of human faces, some of which are engaged in criminal/inhuman activities. The issue of why personnel cannot be ramped up in these institutions so that humans can sort through and keep track of these activities is up for debate, but I think we can all agree that when surveillance and automation are used to flag and identify the activities listed above, so that humans can sort through them, it is probably okay, and it is probably to be expected.
It is not okay when automation of surveillance is used to:
- Spy on our private activities simply for the purpose of keeping track of everything we do, “just in case” we do something wrong,
- Restrict freedom of speech, such as when social media algorithms simply won’t allow us to post certain links or words on our accounts, or will outright censor certain subjects or people,
- Dig through our online activities and disqualify us from obtaining a job simply for having posted something questionable in the past, or to destroy our lives altogether, as today’s cancel culture and supposed race inequality movement is actively trying to do to so many people,
- Monitor all our communications, such as our messages, emails and telephone calls, in the name of national security,
- And the list can probably go on and on…
Here’s my understanding of the direction of this trend so far: as long as humans will continue to grow in number and to present a very complex environment where it’s thoroughly difficult or outright impossible for a limited number of people involved in law enforcement to keep track of illegal activities, the arguments for the use of automation in surveillance (to the point where artificial intelligence will handle a large part of it) will continue to mount. Also, as long as hidden agendas will continue to be tolerated in government, in the media and in academia, hidden surveillance will continue, for various nefarious purposes, such as persecution, extortion, a building up of arguments to support certain policies, etc.
The solution as I see it is to decrease the world population till we stop being numbers and countless faces and we become communities once more, where we know everyone who lives around us, where we are not one nameless face in a mass, in a ridiculously large throng of people, but a meaningful, contributing member of a neighborhood, a village or a town. That’s when surveillance and its automation will no longer matter. It won’t even be an issue anymore. We’ve got to stop multiplying like rabbits. We’ve got to stop focusing on large numbers. We’ve got to focus on quality, not quantity. We’ve got to focus on meaningful human interactions and meaningful numbers when it comes to our communities and our towns. To those of you who live in smaller communities, what I’ve just said is obvious, but to those who still prefer to live in large cities, I think my words will sound quite strange. And for them and because of them, mass surveillance and the automation of surveillance will continue…
A pandemic of laziness
The rhythm of life in a temperate climate with four seasons is, understandably, cyclic. Spring is when nature thaws and outside work begins. Summer is when the work goes on in earnest, with a view of the cold seasons to come. Building work, for example, requires the summer heat for foundations, masonry, painting, etc. Agricultural work is spread out through the three warmer seasons. Autumn is when nature begins to wind down and withdraw into itself, and people tend to do the same. The focus of the work shifts to gathering and getting ready for the winter that is almost in sight. The coming freeze is made inescapably clear by the cold, frosty mornings of autumn. The signs are all there and no one can deny them.
As I worked on our NGO’s charitable projects last year, which involved a lot of landscape and building work, I saw certain signs as well. By the end of the summer and in the fall, it was undeniable to me. Wherever I went, people just didn’t want to work. The concept of an honest day’s work got lost on most people. Somehow, it’d become esoteric to them. I have already attempted to exorcise it back into something known and unmysterious, through a post I wrote on the very subject.
Then, winter came and with it came a certain time when we all had to put… time… aside for reflection (or drivel, as the case may be). We all call that time now “the coronavirus pandemic”. It stretched on and on through spring and just as summer came round the corner, we were free (almost) once again to resume our work. The pace did indeed become frenetic, given the prolonged pause we were all forced to partake, but to my dismay, most people did not choose to engage in productive work, re-confirming last year’s observations.
I would have thought that economic activity would begin with a fury, with people wanting to make up for lost time, especially given the dim prospects of facing more waves of restrictions and economic troubles in the fall and winter but no, the frenetic pace was set mainly by people trying to organize parties and barbeques, to find places to vacation and by those eager to protest and vandalize anything and everything under the sun. I think I can best describe this frenetic post-quarantine activity with one phrase: no rhyme or reason whatsoever — wild flailing of arms and tongues, mad goings to and fro, but ultimately meaningless.
As I pointed out in a previous post, pent-up frustrations will out, and perhaps I’ll write a future post on the anarchic, asinine, “bite the hand that feeds you and shit your own bed” tendencies of the current post-modern ideologies that are driving these protests, or rather driving the people brainwashed into believing them into utter chaos and certain disaster, but for now I’d like to focus on an epidemic of much larger proportions than the coronavirus epidemic: rampant, universal laziness. At some point, this might have been called endemic, but we can safely call it epidemic, and we could even go so far as to call it a pandemic: a global pandemic of laziness. Many more people are infected with it than COVID-19 and with no cure in sight, many will die from it as well.
When I look at the generations of today that are of working age, what I mostly see is a blithe indifference to the inescapable, undeniable fact that life must contain a certain proportion of work. I’m talking about real work, hard work, an honest day’s work, backbreaking work, drudgery, sweaty bits and bobs, wet back, red neck kind of work. It simply must. Our mammalian bodies need this physical work in order to stay in condition. Going to the gym for an hour or so a few times a week is a poor substitute for proper physical work. Life requires work. Achievements require work. Even the pleasurable bits of life consist of physical labor, as horny teenage boys with sweaty palms will surely attest, several times a day.
And yet, once the people of today reach working age, they begin to assume, wrongly, that life can somehow function without work. Never mind us working, the robots will do our work and the government will pay us a universal basic income that will free us from the torture of work and allow us to focus on our creative sides, such as scratching our balls and asses as we watch television, or liking absolutely inconsequential posts on Facebook or Instagram. Let’s just do a bit of shopping with that free government money, let’s throw in a bit of work on the car, like upgrading the subwoofers or mufflers (for the completely tasteless), maybe get a little tattoo here and there, a bite or ten of fast food, and life is good and complete for probably 90-95% of people.
While this kind of stuff may allow various societies to slide by for a number of years, coasting on the hard work of a few motivated individuals, things will inevitably slip from existence to subsistence, and that is where the civilized world is headed if people don’t start doing some proper work.
Nobody wants to do physical labor anymore. Everyone wants to click around on a computer screen all day for greater pay. Most of the “white collar” work has become a joke, with everyone pretending to work but actually doing as little of it as possible, and very few people willing to do “blue collar” work, which is actually what builds and maintains civilizations. I’m not saying that blue collar work builds the arts and humanities or the sciences, but our physical world requires blue collar work in order to build and maintain the infrastructure that supports the higher endeavors. Let me put it to you this way: someone’s gotta lay the internet cables, build the routers and assemble the phones and tablets that you use to faff around all day while pretending to work. How about the obsession of modern man with food, which must be stuffed into their mouths at all times, in all sorts of forms? Out of the population of any civilized country, the percentage of people engaged in agriculture is ridiculously tiny, and in my view, it’s not because of agri-giants, it’s because no one wants to do the back-breaking work of tending to the lands and the farms. Thank goodness there’s farm machinery available that allows fewer people to still do all of the farmwork that’s needed to keep all those office workers well-fed to the point of morbid obesity, because we’d all be in for a seriously rude wake-up call otherwise.
I look around me and I see so few people willing to work hard, willing to put in an honest day’s work. I don’t care what their excuses are. Even if it’s just for a crummy, humdrum job, someone with a backbone will want to put in some good work so they can sleep well at night. Apparently, a lot of people have lost their backbones, because most of them aren’t doing good work. Look around you. Out of your circle of friends and acquaintances, how many of them put in an honest day’s work? Don’t tell me, just figure it out for yourself. Isn’t it worrisome once you do the math? Heck, look at yourself and be honest, you don’t have to tell me, you just have to admit it to yourself: have you been putting in an honest day’s work, day in and day out, in recent years? Please don’t post a comment to brag about how much work you’re doing. Just do a bit of self-assessment and be brave enough to admit to yourself where you stand.
I’m not saying we should be working to the point of breaking down our bodies, day in and day out. We should have a balance. Those of us who predominantly do office work should have 1-2 full days of proper physical labor each week, in order to keep things in balance. Those of us who predominantly do physical labor should have 1-2 full days of restful work each week, once again in order to keep things in balance. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s what weekends are good for? Office workers should, for their own health and personal satisfaction, engage in serious physical labor during the weekends, around their houses or in volunteer work with various organizations in their communities. Factory workers and those who do mainly physical labor should, for their own health and personal satisfaction, spend their weekends educating their minds by reading or watching documentaries on various subjects, meeting with friends and having meaningful conversations (not getting drunk and stuffing their stomachs).
I for one am having such a hard time finding people to help us with our physical work. About the only people who are willing to work, from my experience, are the older generations who’ve grown up under very different circumstances than today’s working youth and adults, and active or ex-military folks, who’ve served and know what it means to work hard. All the rest of them are just fluff. They simply can’t handle a full day of physical work. Most people I’ve seen are ready to fall down after a half hour of serious work, and that’s so problematic, in so many ways. The youth are the worst: they’re pampered little simps who parade in and out of coffee shops, instagramming their meaningless, unproductive lives, unable to read or write properly, subject to every whimsy of their “influencers”. I have seen so few of them that know the value of work. If I were to estimate, I think less than half a percent would be a fairly accurate figure. Everyone’s trying to make a fast buck without the work. It simply doesn’t bode well for the future of work and for our future as the human race. If things keep going this way, I truly hope that robots will become advanced enough and affordable enough so they can do the hard work, because everyone will simply be too old, too fat or too frail and out of practice to do anything worthwhile.
PS. I realize the youth critique is historically repetitive, and that virtually every older generation decries the state of their youth, yet I look at how much the older generations have accomplished and I am in awe. With every passing generation, we are accomplishing less and less, and we’d be in seriously bad shape if leaps in productivity, invention, automation and mass production didn’t offset the gradual and certain loss in elbow grease. Less and less people are doing the work that carries our civilization forward. Most are sitting back and benefitting, without having contributed. I look at what the young generations are accomplishing right now (triggered SJWs, influencers flogging shit left and right, carpentry faffers on YouTube more concerned with sucking up the dust in their workshops than doing any substantive woodwork, etc. ad nauseam), and I shudder.