Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
(Emphasis added.)
Continuing the 1984 references:
D’you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.’
‘What did they do that for?’ said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:
‘My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent — might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here’s the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes — said she’d never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?’
‘What happened to the man?’ said Winston.
‘Ah, that I couldn’t say, of course. But I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if — ’ Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
‘Good,’ said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.
‘Of course we can’t afford to take chances,’ agreed Winston dutifully.
‘What I mean to say, there is a war on,’ said Parsons.
I read once that Orwell’s basic premise behind 1984 was that mankind had created a social structure that most people couldn’t cope with, and the natural response was to relapse into authoritarianism. Finding it harder and harder to argue with that.
Agree. Self-governance is hard. It’s hard collectively, and it’s hard individually. The broadly superficial perception that democracy is some kind of natural end state, and when we achieve it we can all relax, is foolish and misguided and ultimately self destructive. Yet to listen to Western mythmaking, it’s a pretty pervasive belief.
Haha, yeah. Also, Ted Cruz has been observed traveling to Mexico and back…very suspicious.
By “winner”, do you mean “winning candidate for ‘crazy woke liberal enemy of the state’”? Because if so, I agree. I’m going to email Laura Loomer and tell her to watch out for suspicious-looking cigarette-smoking skeletons!
Parsons would make a great mascot or symbol for a typical ‘Leopards Eating Faces Party’ voter. When his adorable little Junior Spy turned him in, he was still proud of her and from his jail cell, bemoaned the fact that he had somehow been an enemy of the state without realizing it.
Just meant - if they were serious about actually doing anything/addressing the underlying factors…
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
–Ben Franklin, revolutionary
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.
–Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary
It would seem we’ve been lucky up to the last decade and are long overdue.
The actual underlying factor is “we hate brown people”. Reporting white employers won’t address that; claiming that random brown citizens are “illegals” will.
More than once over the years I’ve wondered if we could create a society so complicated to live in that most people couldn’t do it. I was thinking more in the sense of administrative complexity, work complexity etc. than I was in the sense of wise self-governance.
e.g. If every job required PhD level expertise and intellect, if paying a parking ticket was as complex as doing a tax return by hand, if meeting a mate required all the skills of a professional social worker, etc. Pretty quickly some small fraction of the populace could thrive, or even survive, in that milieu, and the rest would drop out somehow into some underworld underclass.
Or just stay in their bedrooms at their parents’ homes 24/7 and conduct all of their social interactions over screens?
Nah.
“Report them all, and let ICE sort deport them out!”
Isn’t that the premise of Brazil?
“Report to deport, and let Bukele sort”.
The video above shows this political cartoon from Hitler’s era, showing Goebbels painting Hitler
I hadn’t seen it before, it’s pretty good.
I wish I were more artistic, or that the AI image generators weren’t so restrictive, because we need a new one with Lutnick or Vance painting Trump in the same way.
I took a picture of a woman who is probably on birth control and sent it in. Waiting to see how much of a bounty I earned.
Can we take pictures of our annoying MAGA neighbors and send them in as possible illegals and get “crypto” for it?
We’re turning the whole country into a giant HOA where everyone reports their neighbors for allowing their grass to grow a quarter-inch too long.
The biggest problem here is that abstact intelligence is the human equivalent of the tail of a peacock. It does not really impart any valuable aspect to survival (in the broad terms of natural selection), and people capable of navigating extreme bureaucratic complexity are simply not better-suited to form a stable society. We get by on skill-set diversity, and the people we currently have at the “top of the heap” have serious deficiencies outside their narrow ranges of expertise (e.g., a quantum physics doctorate very well may not be able to fix an engine or cook a decent meal). The society you describe would almost certainly collapse within a generation or two (assuming, as you suggest, that the right to breed were severely restricted).
Could such a system be imagined in theory? Maybe.
It runs into a common problem, though. The Brownshirts (and their family and so on) need to themselves be insulated from all this bureacracy as well. Otherwise, they just shoot the few at the top of the heap.
The legal system is already like that. I had to go to city court and made a motion to dismiss and the city attorney objected because under some rule, motions had to be in writing 7 days before the heaing. How would I know to even look up the rules let alone where the rules are located. And this was a “dog barking too much” case. I had to use my pre-paid legal consulting to know what to do for the trial
in city court
because my dog barks
They were “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’,” no doubt.