Amerika

This week our media industry generated many interesting media products for us but the basic outlook did not change: like a song in the key of “D,” we may throw in some riffs and licks, but we’re still in the key of civilization collapse inexorably grinding forward because no one has woken from their solipsistic stupor to recognize and counteract it.

• Ebola. Does anyone else hear the call? No, mainly because this epidemic is mostly a news creation. Ebola is bad news, sure, if it gets ahold of you — but it spreads slowly and kills too many of its victims too quickly to really take hold. The always-worse-than-useless United Nations says we have sixty days only to fight this, or renew their budget, or something. Beating Ebola is easy: do not live in the third world. The third world has zero social order — it’s the most individualistic place on earth. In the first world, there’s a fight over stopping the flights. Detractors say that stopping flights from hard-hit areas will cause spread through other methods and we would have to stop flights from all countries that did not stop flights. They’re half-right. Stop the passengers. If they have visited any country with a known outbreak, including the Dallas barrios, send them back. If they come here and get infected, send them back. This means that every country will feel the incentive fall on them to avoid poisoning us with whatever Ebola-infected zombies happen to be wandering through their airports.
• Decline of the West. Putin noticed, because Eurasia wants to seize Europe and its wealth so it can also dominate Asia, which Eurasians recognize (but Europeans do not) is the only model for security on the continent stretching from UK to Siberia. The western model is broken and yet it keeps being forced on the world by globalism, mostly so the Baby Boomers can keep up the value of their stock porfolios and die just before their kids inherit a true flaming dystopia. Even more, people are noticing that the first world model is broken because it contains many third-world states with permanent minority underclasses, and soon will be ruled by Asians who are better at repetitive technical tasks, and worse at invention, mental clarity and other things that would have kept them from being third-world wastelands in the first place.
• Date rape. No one wants to say the truth about “date rape,” which is that when you make casual sex — essentially prostitution for no pay — legitimate, then the line of consent thins out. When sex is like sneezing, rape is no longer a violation of your soul; at best, it’s a theft of some goods. I suggest a $50 ticket for date rape paid directly to the woman, if she can produce evidence for non-consent, which she almost never can because consent was murky under murky conditions of intoxication and mutual lust. The whole thing is ridiculous but might have an upside, as Heather MacDonald points out: the end of the campus orgy. Now you see (perhaps) why our forefathers suppressed female sexuality and demanded proof that a woman fought back if she cried rape: that way, no one gets violated. In our current way, we’re all suspects and probably guilty and the only victory goes to the tribunal itself.
• Brazilification. Libertarians love the idea of an open market with no constraints; what they do not realize is that this ideal model leads to a massive third-world nation with a few rich people selling it cheeseburgers. David Brooks penned an article comparing Houston to San Francisco and came out in favor of Houston, mainly because SF is the other alternative: a gated community owned by large corporations which excludes those not obedient enough to learn the current trends and spend twelve hours a day hanging around the office. Others disagree, noticing how everything that makes America great disappears in both models, namely a thriving middle class who are not zombie big-city proles without a culture, values or heritage. Even worse, Dot-Com Bubble 3.0 is ready to pop, since for all their talk of engineering and education, the new generations have not invented anything substantially better other than what’s basically updated daytime TV: a way to waste your time, and now you can do it from the office, since your jobs are all make-work anyway.
• Self-hatred. Ivy League students think that the US is a greater threat to ‘world peace’ than ISIS. Never mind that world peace has never existed and cannot without requiring first an end to conflict, which completely contradicts evolution and the idea that anyone might have a better idea than someone else. Slowly it emerges that we hate ourselves because democracy is dysfunctional, and living our lives to make shekels and buy cheeseburgers just isn’t satisfying, much as our kings told us before we deposed them and murdered their families. The wisdom of the Crowd is stupidity. It destroys civilizations. You either rationalize the decline and become a liberal, or resist it as a conservative and have people tell you that you’re weird.

In other words the forecast is officially “sunny and clear skies” but to anyone who can think between the lines remains at “cloudy with continued failure, misery and existential doubt.” The solution as always is to stop listening to what people think they want and to focus instead on what has actually worked since the dawn of time. Wonder if the GOP will stop being neoliberal long enough to notice.

Tags: decay, decline, ebola, gop, republicans