LateralBornThinker

Open heart, open mind, open eyes.

Gen X. Thoroughly unimpressed, I should have been a Luddite.

Mild advocate for the British Empire.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@NicoleFromBC 🤣 That was better than expected.

https://t.co/3x7cu3KYFX

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

But don't you understand?

There was a way. There was always a way.

We had it within our grasp, because we had already grasped it. The childhoods that you and your daughter had were available because you and your daughter had them.

All that the Boomers, and their parents, the eldest of the post WW2 generations, had to do was...

Nothing.

Just live in the paradise that their ancestors won for them, and make the minimum, the bare minimum, of effort that would have been required to actually sustain it.

That's all.

Just keep things the way they were.

But they couldn't handle that. Their fathers and grandfathers, the heroes that won WW2, made them jealous.

They wanted to be heroes, too.

So, for the sake of their own egos, they had to become Social Justice Warriors. They had to be Champions of Progress and Change.

They had to see the world they inherited as a pile of problems to be solved, rather than a pile of solutions to be cherished and preserved.

So they could feel like they were doing something important.

Almost all of the elder generations, even the ones who call themselves conservative and vote republican, are, in truth, socialist liberal progressives. Because they looked at paradise, and wanted to fix it instead of protect it.

That's why the "republican" option was Reagan, the gun-ban guy, the social-welfare guy, the kiss-up-to-the-commies guy, the amnesty-for-foreign-invaders guy.

Reagan, the Hollywood liberal, the Obama of the 80s, instead of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan.

Teens can't have a summer job because elders had to be Third-World Compassion Heroes, and give us Hart-Cellar and eleventy-billion barbarians who don't care about civilization, but will work cheap.

Teens can't have a car because elders had to be Climate Emergency Heroes and give us emissions control laws and Cash for Clunkers.

Teens can't have safe schools to learn at, because elders had to Anti-Racist Heroes and made it illegal to exclude violent thugs from our school districts. Just because those thugs generally come color-coded for your convenience.

Teens can't have safe public spaces to hang out in, because elders had to be Compassion for the Underclass Heroes, and release violent savages into society, again and again, with a lecture and a slap on the wrist.

Teens can't have a healthy economy to inherit, because elders had to be Equality Heroes and make sure every corporation that actually did anything useful was punished for not being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive enough to suit the ideal universe that exists only in their heads.

Teens can't have dates, because elders had to be Anti-Sexist Heroes, and let feminists spend forty years diminishing the social value of men, until you had to a be a billionaire rockstar adventurer to avoid being an unsexy loser by default.

Teens can't even be fit, healthy, and pretty, because elders had to be Sex Equality Heroes, and move women into the corporate workforce in droves, leaving children to be fed by corporate industrial slop factories.

Teens can't have sane, well-adjusted, unspoiled girlfriends and wives, because elders had to be Champions of Sexual Freedom, and normalize unlimited female promiscuity, all in exchange for the largely unfulfilled promise of a little unshaven free-love yeti snatch.

And worst, of all, the crowning irony, the final dead hamster in the water pipe, is that all of this would be fixable, perhaps in three to five election cycles...

Except.

Except the elders don't understand that any of this of this is happening.

They haven't had a child in the household since 1997. They haven't looked for an entry-level job since 1973. They haven't gone on a date since 1981. They haven't been laid off... ever.

They are safe with their paid-off houses and their investments and their pensions from 45 years at the same company and their social security and their medical plans.

It's affecting the youngest generations first and worst. While the elders sit on their cruise ship, surveying the short with binoculars, wondering who all these ragged distressed looking people standing on the shore are.

And why they are holding signs that say "HELP", "THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT", and "YOU STOLE THE LIFE I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE".

Then they shrug, conclude that these must be the whiny losers, and everyone further inland is probably just fine, and everything is fine, because they fixed everything and they are all heroes, and the Summer of Love was the end of the Problematic Era of History and the beginning of the Great Enlightenment.

And when I am 74 years old, and the elders are all safely tucked into their cemetery plots, I will be torn apart by an angry mob for having white hair, and therefore being "one of them".

And the mob will not care that I didn't get to cast a vote until 1992, for the Man Who Predicted All Of This.

He called it the "giant sucking sound".

Which is apt because it's why everything sucks now.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@_NotDisabled @CraigEvans082 @joshryanjames @RCMPAlberta @lethpolice Why would you expect anyone to be calm and reasonable once they're attacked?

Why is the onus upon the victim?

Your sense of empathy has been extended too far.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@lmorossec0pz @jasonjamesbnn Yeah, because it's not like its been a subject of interest in the US since McCarthy right?

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@MarkJCarney Peace, order and good government were the founding principles.

Flooding Canada with the 3rd world was not on the list.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@rx2 @GDuker52004 @MarcNixon24 It's ok, there are lots of NPCs out there, you aren't alone.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@realMaalouf Because they've infiltrated and paid off our governments.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@ukhomeoffice @DefenceHQ How will you be keeping them under guard?

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@RandomHvacGuy It's hard to top this picture for illustrating pure unadulterated incompetence.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@DisneyPlusCA How is the dialogue and story telling?

...does a 5th of the script consist of the word 'bro'?

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@rx2 @GDuker52004 @MarcNixon24 Not a bot, just operating on the same level as one.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@rotten_kaiser @FrancesWiddows1 @Tkemlups AI aren't built to be this morally bereft. It's a very rabid leftie.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@canadiandad77 @ManonRaven @FrancesWiddows1 @Tkemlups Oh this has been an ongoing affair today. Francis has a very well developed sense of patience and tolerance... it's a tour de force on dealing with very difficult people.

I'm quite impressed.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@Hania16836 Fecal launching howler monkeys have provided us with greater inspiration than this underwhelming collection of narcissistic thieves.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@shairnn 48

2x2-1
3x3-1
4x4-1
5x5-1

7x7=49 - 1= 48

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@hicasamadim I keep scrolling through all the wrong answers....

It's simple, you count the intersections.

9.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@TomTSEC It pays their bills, lines their pockets, and it's perfectly legal for them to lie and push propaganda.

They won't stop anytime soon.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@JBPVFM @augeradam @JonFraserTF By seeing who moved into the once well kept homes whose lawns now resemble hay fields.

The pattern is consistent... it isn't racism, it's just reality.

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@baharkarakrt xy = 3

X = 6

Y= 0.5

[LateralBornThinker @AvernusGate]

@UCCavalier Honestly, if I wasn't already following, this would have done the trick.

Very well done.

[Upper Canadian Cavalier @UCCavalier]

Nobody ever signed a treaty. That's what people miss when they go hunting for the conspiracy and can't find a smoking gun with the right prints on it. In the '60s and '70s the cultural Marxists and big business simply noticed they were both leaning on the same wall, so they kept leaning, and they used the boomers to do most of the actual pushing. Down came the guardrails. The old rules, the limits, the thousand small restraints earlier generations had bolted into place for one plain reason, which was so their grandchildren would never have to learn the hard way what those restraints were for.

The Cultural Marxists wanted them gone because they hated the civilization that put them there. Big Business wanted them gone because a rule is a cost and a man with no obligations is easy to sell to. Destruction on the one hand, easy money on the other, and the wall doesn't much care which way it falls.

The sexual revolution is where you can watch the whole thing happen in daylight, if you're willing to look at it straight instead of through the haze it got sold in. Liberation, they called it. Throwing off the hangups of a grey and repressed age. It was nothing of the sort. It was the most useful thing that ever dropped into the laps of both halves of this arrangement, and the people pushing hardest were not confused about what they were doing.

The cultural Marxists wanted it because they'd grasped something the old man Marx only half saw. You don't bring a civilization down by grabbing its factories. You bring it down by dissolving the family, because the family is the one institution that raises a man loyal to something older and higher than the state and the marketplace both. Marcuse gave the method a name, "repressive desublimation," and what it meant was plain enough once you scrape the academic varnish off.

Loosen a man's restraints and you loosen the man. Run him through his appetites instead of his duties and he'll never be much trouble to you....wonder why free internet pornography is so prolific and why the shooter hated it so much? Reich had been using the phrase "sexual revolution" for decades before a single boomer lived it, and he meant it the way a sapper means a charge, the bourgeois family as the thing that had to be blown apart before the new man could be poured over the rubble. These weren't prudes who got carried away with a good time. They wrote down what they were doing and why.

Business looked at the identical wreckage and saw a market opening up. Think for a second about who the merchant is actually afraid of. A married man with children and obligations is a miserable customer. He saves. He buys things built to last because he means to hand them down. There are people in his life who'd be ashamed of him if he behaved like a fool, and that shame is worth more to the social order than any law on the books.

Cut every one of those cords and what's left is the perfect consumer, lonely and twitchy and reaching for the next thing to plug the hole where his duties used to sit. Atomized people spend. A broken home needs two of everything. What the radicals wanted done to the soul, the merchant wanted done to the wallet, and once again the opposite motives spat out the identical result. The family came down from both sides at once.

The boomers were the conduit. Not the architects of any of it. The conduit. They were handed the richest and best defended civilization that has ever stood, every wall intact and every account still in the black, and somebody flattered them into believing that knocking it flat was the bravest thing a generation had ever tried. They mistook spending an inheritance for having earned one. They lived their whole lives off the interest on walls they didn't build and couldn't have built, and most of them will go into the ground having handed their own children the invoice along with the rubble.

So here's the verdict, and it isn't close. Not one of the three has any claim to govern what comes after. Not the cultural Marxists, who know how to pull down and nothing besides. Not the merchant class, who'd pry the floorboards out from under their own grandchildren and lecture you about freedom while they did it. Not the boomers, trusted with the whole of it and equal to none. You judge a class by what it leaves behind, and all three are leaving the same scorched field.

Now start with the thing almost nobody will say out loud, which is that monogamy was never natural and was never really about love. It was a settlement, and a hard-won one. Left alone, a society drifts back toward the pattern you find in nearly every pre-civilized arrangement on the record, where a handful of high-status men hold most of the women and a long tail of men hold none. Monogamy broke that up deliberately.

By promising nearly every man a wife and a stake in the thing, it disarmed the single most dangerous object a society can manufacture, which is a surplus of young men with no woman and no prospect of one. It gave them something to lose. That, underneath all the flattering stories, is most of what a civilization actually is. It's the deal that turns rivals into builders.

Pull the deal apart and the old pattern comes back quick, because it was never buried deep to begin with. And here's the part the romantics can't stand to hear. Women adjust to that world faster than men do because their biological programing is older than any ideology you could teach them.

Their deepest pull is toward securing resources and protection for offspring, and when the choice gets forced, a share in a strong and provisioned man tends to beat sole possession of a weak one. That instinct doesn't care about fairness. It has no loyalty to the abstract idea of creating a stable meritocratic society where every decent man is rewarded for his contributions.

You don't even have to imagine this, because it's already here, just dressed politely. The high-status man still builds his harem. He just collects it across time instead of all at once and calls it bad luck with marriage. Look at Trump. Three wives, three families, three sets of children strung along one man's lifetime, while the ordinary man's kids, if he's fortunate enough to have any at all, grow up under one roof with one father the whole way. Not to mention all the younger women who have been happy to be the mistress.

Those are forms of covert polygamy. Serial monogamy is the costume it wears in a society that still likes to pretend it disapproves. The women and the resources and the reproduction pool at the top exactly the way they always have.

Then look down at what the arrangement leaves at the bottom, because this is where the bill comes due. A climbing share of young men are hitting their mid-twenties having never been with a woman at all, at a scale no functioning society before ours ever produced.

They were handed an economy where the steady work their grandfathers raised families on got hollowed out, shipped off, or handed to whoever would do it for less. They were handed a dating market that funnels nearly all the similar aged females into thinner sliver of older men they struggle to compete with, running on the same atomizing technology the merchants got rich building.

They have to enter a labour market where they are activistly discriminated against whether it is for the gender, race or sexuality. The government in an effort to continue an economy that has multiple ponzi schemes sustaining it imports millions or foreigners to further drive down effective wages.

Zoomers were handed a culture that names them the problem the second they notice any of it. A civilization does this to a whole cohort of its men and then acts surprised by the result. It isn't being cruel by accident. It's wiring an instability straight into its own structure, its undermining its own foundation, and foundations don't survive that.

What's on the far side of the sexual revolution was never freedom. It's the law of the jungle, which is only the oldest law there is and the exact thing every civilization was ever built to climb out from under. Take the rules away, you dismantle all of the social structures and societal guardrails and you do not get freedom. You get predators and you get prey.

The strong take more than the old order would ever have let them, the weak lose even the little the old order had guaranteed, and the gap between them opens wider every year with nothing in view to close it. Once it's open far enough the soft things start to go, the courtesies and the protections, because they were never load-bearing on their own. They were resting on the civilization underneath the whole time.

Which brings down chivalry too, and chivalry's the one that ought to make people sit up, because it wasn't even old. Most of what flashes to mind when you say the word was a Victorian invention, aged on purpose to look medieval, a coat of paint over a much harder past, meant to gentle men who hadn't been gentle before and wouldn't stay gentled for long. The paint goes first. Then everything leaning on it. The manners, the deference, the quiet assumption that the strong owe the weak anything at all.

And when that assumption's gone, women have no say in what comes next. Not because nature ordered it that way but because the thing that had given them a say was the civilization now being dismantled around them, and you can't keep drawing the dividend after you've sold the share.

Power won't tolerate that kind of emptiness for long. It never has, not once, not anywhere. When the men controlling a civilization show themselves unfit to run it, the only live question is who picks it up off the floor, and the whole of recorded history keeps handing back the same answer. War bands of young aggressive men. Hard men gathered around one harder and more magnetic than the rest.

And the men those bands get built out of are exactly the ones a society like this throws away by the million. The comfortable and the invested never follow a war band. The discarded always have. That's how Hengist took Kent and how the Normans took England and how every aristocracy that ever drew breath first clawed its way up off the dirt, whatever noble tale it told about itself afterward. The cycle starts over from nothing.

One man pulls dangerous men to him, takes what he can hold and holds it, and three generations on his descendants are calling it noble blood and believing it. A new order founds itself on the bones of the old in precisely the way the old one did, back before anyone was writing it down and pretending it had simply always been there. And these men will know to keep it in the family, because the hardest lesson in all that wreckage is the one the boomers flunked cold. Power you hold for a single generation is power you've already thrown away.

And underneath every bit of it, at the very bottom, people are going to relearn the thing the guardrails existed to spare them from ever knowing. There is no truth but power. Everything else, the whole of it, the rights and the manners and the gentle stories we told the children, was only ever scaffolding thrown up over that one fact to make it survivable. Take the scaffolding down and the fact's still standing there exactly where it always stood. Patient. Waiting for them to notice it again.