In the comments below, Major Hoople bemoans the lack of collective action and discipline in Our Thing.  It’s a common compliant.  Get five of our guys in a room and you’ll get nine different opinions… that everyone in the room is ready to fight everyone else about.

The funny thing is, though, SJWs think the same thing about themselves.  No, really, they do.  That was one of the things that made faculty meetings such joys, back in my professin’ days — no matter how trivial the issue at hand, the meeting couldn’t move forward until everyone had gotten up on xzyher soapbox and delivered xzheyr standard diatribe.  “As a post-structuralist lesbian Maoist furry, I feel that….”  The outside observer would see a room full of identical freaks, but the people inside saw a glorious rainbow of diversity.  Real diversity.  God help us, they really did.  They really do.  It’s one of the keys to understanding them.

Let me back up.  There was a time, my young friends, when “the team player” was an archetype, a cultural touchstone, a role model.  Well within living memory, the ability to “go along to get along” was a highly valued trait, and most folks were taught to aspire to it.  I grew up in this world, and a lovely one it was, too, since it rested on stable identities.

In that world, you knew yourself to be more than the sum of your parts.  Nobody liked going to work, of course, but life in the office was so much easier back then, because nobody worried that he’d be mistaken for his job.  Yeah, I’m a Customer Service Representative — it says so right there on my nametag — but that’s not what they’re gonna put on my tombstone.  I’m really a husband, a father, a stamp collector, the rhythm guitarist in this really kickass little bar band.  All of those are social roles, and life isn’t method acting — you can play the part without being the part.

In fact, “losing ourselves in the part” used to be our big worry.  Maybe I am just a customer service rep…?  The office, the commute, my neckties all laid out for me at the start of each week… is that really all there is to life?  What happens when the long nights start taking their toll — as they must — and I have to give up the bar band?  What happens when the kids grow up?

You could see this worry everywhere in our culture, our art.  Watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  Judge Reinhold’s character is wrestling with this type of question, and he’s in high school, fer chrissakes.  See what I mean about that movie being made on Mars? Remember that; it’ll be on the final.

There’s a certain type of person, though, who just couldn’t grok those worries, because the very notion of social roles was incomprehensible.  We didn’t know about the autism spectrum back then, but that’s what that type of person effectively is: A high-functioning autistic.  For the autistic, what’s now is forever.  Bob’s nametag says “customer service representative.”  Therefore, Bob is a customer service representative, and only a customer service representative, now and forever.  Bob the family man, Bob the stamp collector, Bob the bar-band strummer… all those fry the autistic’s circuits.  It says “customer service representative,” damn it!  The train is fine.

Two sides of the same coin.  Normal people were worried that they were becoming their jobs.  The autistics couldn’t grasp that anyone could be anything else.

The autistics all went into the ivory tower, which gave us identity politics.  “Identity politics” only makes sense to the autistic — that is, to people who can’t process change.  Normal people have such a hard time with it because we can’t see the logical connection between, say, being gay and being pro-abortion.  I mean, if you’re gay it’s a moot point, right?  Nor is there any logical connection between being gay and favoring redistributive economics, or worrying about global warming, or whatever.  Maybe you do believe in redistributive economics and are worried about global warming, but those are just individual opinions, right?  I’m not obliged to vote Republican because I dig blondes.  It’s a non sequitur.

Not to the autistic, it isn’t.  They’re told that this — pro-abortion, being “green,” the whole Liberal schmear — just is gayness, and they go with it, because that’s the only way the world makes sense to them.  Just how “gay” came to mean all that is above my pay grade, but we all know it’s true.  More importantly, we all know they believe it, with all their hearts and souls.

That’s the situation in which we find ourselves, my young friends, here in the Current Year.  Most of us would like to be team players, but we have no role models.  Because the autistics control the culture, we’ve internalized their worries.  If I’m a member of the team, we instinctively feel, then somehow I am the team, and only the team, now and forever.  It’s a stark choice: Either I give up my individuality completely to advance the team’s goals, or I take my ball and go home.

But it’s a false choice, kameraden, one that could only be beaten into us by very long, very expensive training — i.e. the American “education” system, K-thru-PhD.

Part II coming soon.

Not hypothetical this time.

In the “Column Suggestions” comments, contrariandutchman suggested “What would Comrade Ilyich do in the current situation?”  He wouldn’t let a crisis go to waste, that’s for damn sure.  He’d mobilize people to simple, direct action, and he’d hold the fucking line.  I’m no Ulyanov, but I can suggest a few simple things we Dissidents can do:

Get on Facebook, Twitter, etc.  I know, but look: The Feds, the Chinese, the Korean gangsters… they’ve got your info already.  Use a burner email if it makes you feel better, since these are going to be burner social media accounts anyway.  Jump on there, take a few simple steps to make it look realistic (see below), friend everyone you’ve ever come in contact with, and hashtag the shit out of them: #CancelChina.  #BuyAmerican.  (I’d love to use #GrowAPair, but that’s probably too on the nose).  In between posting a few “personal” things for kayfabe, you should be reposting every single meme that highlights a) the Chinese origin of the virus, and b) the colossal stupidity of the American government “response.”

Y’all, this stuff works.  Even with all the caveats about online marketing being a giant fraud —  and oh boy is it — people really do get so many of their social signals from social media.  Why do you think SJWs spend so much time policing Twitter?  Like the man said, SJWs always project.  They worry about the Twitter sheeple being led astray by dank memes, because they themselves are led around by their nose rings by dank memes.  The key is to stand strong.  They’ll call you a racist for talking meme-ing about closing the borders.  Your response? “So you’d rather my family die of some foreign infection than take sensible measures to #ControlTheSpread.  That’s cool.  I know you don’t have any kids or close friends, but normal people do.  #CancelChina.”

Cards on the table: You know how I keep saying that today’s blue-haired, nose-ringed SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer?  Well, the day has finally arrived, kameraden.  These “people” (in the loosest biological sense) can only feel alive by being sanctimonious on social media.  As I’ve written before (the NPC guide; check the archives) they’re worried to death that they’re not really real.  The retweets and upvotes they get for their emotional incontinence is the only thing that convinces them they’re tethered to Planet Earth (and not some glitch in the Matrix).  Use that.  Nudge their sanctimony in the right direction.  It’s like stampeding the herd — all you have to do is get two or three to panic in your chosen direction, and you can run them right off the cliff.

They want to be obergruppenfuhrers.  LET THEM.  Make it easy for them.  It’s far too late to avert American fascism – it’s already here.  The best we can do is emphasize the “autarky” bit.  We’ll never get a better chance.

You do, of course, have to make some effort to make your profile look real.  Favorite some stuff.  Facebook, for instance, leads you through a whole series of questionnaires.  What music do you like? Movies? TV shows?  That kind of thing.  Have some fun with it, but try not to be too obvious about it.  Don’t make “Whitesnake” your favorite band, “Whitey Ford” your favorite sportsman, “Nights in White Satin” your favorite song, “Arian Foster” your favorite ex-running back, etc.  Ok, sure, do some of that — destroying the SJWs is supposed to be fun, after all — but the goal is not to get caught out as a bot.  Actually interact with some of your old classmates from high school, or whoever you end up “friending.”  You can find out pretty quickly that way who’s reachable, and who has swallowed all the kool-aid.

Above all, target women.  Safety-at-all-costs is a chick thing, and while lots of “people” (again: biology) of both sexes and all 57+ genders have turned into chicks over this, you’ll have the best luck with biological females.  They set the social tone, so they really boost the signal.  Turn a few of them into obergruppenfuhrers, and the stosstrupp organization will take care of itself.  You can buy another piece of cheap plastic Chinese crap that breaks in two weeks, or you can spend that money on healthy, locally-sourced food for your kids.  Keep America Safe!!!

And finally: hold the fucking line.  Ulyanov, Mustache Guy… most of their political genius consisted of knowing when to compromise, and when to stand firm.  Their many, many detractors insisted they’d destroyed the Party when they held out for total power when the chips were down.  We know how that worked out.  Yeah, they’ll call you racists.  Yes, they’ll threaten to unfriend you (big whoop — it’s a burner account).  They might even report you to the Facebook or Twitter police, get you banned.  So fucking what?  Get back out there!  If you pick your shots, if you don’t friend too many obvious kool-aid drinkers on the first go (nose rings and rainbow hair are sure tells), most people won’t narc on you, because people are herd animals and don’t want to stand out.

All of this can be done from the comfort of your own basement, loaded shotgun at your side, watching the fires from the Diversity Riots downtown.  You’ll never get a better chance to actually do something for Dissent in America.  It’s perfectly legal and completely free.  Do what Ulyanov would’ve.

World War I taught the medical profession lots of things.  It also forced them to confront the ugly reality of what they do.  No doctor gets out of training without having one of those “nothing you can do” moments — the patient has cancer, it’s inoperable, that’s it.  But very few physicians, even ER docs, have to make life-or-death decisions for their patients based on limited resources.  In the trenches, though, every medico had to make those — strain all resources to (maybe) save one, at the probable cost of a dozen others; or let the one die, using those resources to (probably) save the twelve.  Or the fifty.  Or the five thousand.

This is triage, of course, and it’s standard medical practice now.  And from there it has spread into the cognitive toolkit of most adults.  Resources being finite, and wants being infinite, at some point a decision has to be made.  Time was, we all thanked God that we lived in a safe, rich country like America, where those decisions were limit cases — do we do the liver transplant on the 90 year old diabetic Alzheimer’s patient, or not?

But then the internet happened, as my students would’ve written back in my teaching days, and all of a sudden “limits” of any kind are a foreign concept.  Indeed, the very notion of trade-offs has disappeared.  You all probably remember the Obamacare debacle, especially the “death panels.”  You had putative grown-ups out there insisting, with all apparent sincerity, that a gazillion-dollar entitlement would actually save the taxpayers money.  And furthermore, these ostensible adults claimed, again with all apparent sincerity, those life-or-death type decisions would never come up.  Rationing?  Wouldn’t happen.  Couldn’t happen.  “Death panels” were just another lie of the vast right wing conspiracy…

That should’ve been our great national WTF? moment, the point where we realized, as a nation, that the vast majority of our so-called leaders were malignant buffoons.  It wasn’t, though, for the simple reason that if we realized that our so-called leaders were malignant buffoons, then we’d have to face up to the fact that most of our friends and neighbors, indeed some of our nearest and dearest, are also malignant buffoons.  Because people believed Obama, y’all.  They really truly did.  The Lightworker promised there’d be no limits, no downsides, no trade-offs at all, and fools that we are, we believed Him.  Or enough of us did, anyway, that those of us who didn’t had to make a stark choice: Stick our heads in the sand, or admit that so many people we know and love are drooling idiots.

I know, I know, and I made the same choice you did: I stuck my head in the sand.  It was that, or move to a prepper shack.

Alas, that didn’t solve the problem.  It got much worse, actually, as un-confronted problems tend to do.  Because once a person buys into a fantasy, they own it.  You know where this is going: The same people who refused to believe that medical care could possibly be rationed under Obama are now demanding that the world stop spinning, lest they come down with the sniffles.  It’s actually worse than that, because now they’re on offense.  If you’re not 100% on board with shutting down the entire Earth to reduce the possibility of them catching the 98%-chance-of-complete-recovery flu, you must be cheering for mass death.

No, really.  I’m not even talking about actual triage situations, where one has to make those heartless bastard-type decisions about patients lying right in front of you.  It’s a total inability to deal with the most basic facts of elementary-school biology.  In any epidemic, the number of fatalities will be greater than zero.  It’s not a question of “letting” So-and-So die.  So-and-So is going to die anyway.  The question is, given all that, at what point do you reach zero marginal returns?  No one suggests shutting down the city in a chicken pox outbreak, though chicken pox can and will kill you under the right conditions.  The actual cost to everyone is far, far greater than the marginally reduced possibility of infection is beneficial to the few who might die…

At least, that’s how we used to do it. These days, we’re Borderline Nation.  “Splitting” is one of the key diagnostic criteria of Borderline Personality Disorder.  Stop me if this sounds familiar:

• Things are either “always” or “never”
• People can either be “evil” and “crooked” or “angels” and “perfect”
• Opportunities can either have “no risk” or be a “complete con”
• Science, history, or news is either a “complete fact” or a “complete lie”
• When things go wrong, a person will feel “cheated,” “ruined,” or “screwed”

What makes splitting all the more confusing is that the belief can sometimes be iron-clad or shift back-and-forth from one moment to the next.

People who split are often seen to be overly dramatic or overwrought, especially when declaring that things have either “completely fallen apart” or “completely turned around.” Such behavior can be exhausting to those around them.

One of the chief complaints y’all had on de-lurking day was irregular content output.  I can’t speak for Morgan, Nate, or Philmon, but I’m almost entirely a reactive blogger — I’m lousy at generating ideas on my own, so something out there has to ping me.

That being the case, and since we’re all stuck here for a few more days, how about it, Twenty Readers (I think that’s what we’re up to now)?  Any column suggestions?  Throw ’em out there, and if I can, I will – hopefully the others will too.

As all but the newest readers probably know, I’m retired from the professin’ biz, but I spent many a decade in and around higher “education.”  Generally, academics come in three types:  The rarest is the enthusiast, the guy who is devoted to his subject and dedicated to the advancement of knowledge for its own sake.  These were rare birds even back when; these days, they all have “emeritus” after their names.  You can still find a few in the very STEM-iest of STEM outposts, but in the Humanities they’ve gone the way of the mastodon.

The second, more common type is the closet case.  I don’t mean “closeted homosexual,” of course, since no one in academia is that (the hershey highway being one of the faster roads to tenure).  I mean the kind of guy you look at him, and you think his parents must’ve chained him up in a closet and fed him with a slingshot, so tremulous and awkward and maladjusted is he.  They’re in academia, quite simply, because they can’t function anywhere else.  Think Laura from The Glass Menagerie, but she really believes her little blown-glass beasties are real, and wants to have sex with them.

By far the most common type, though, is what I call the missionary without balls.  Though I disagree with their goals — believing, as I do, that America has more than enough problems for young people to tackle right here at home — I respect those pious young folks who go on mission trips to far-off lands.  They’re actually putting their faith on the line — you go to the Third World, even the nicer parts, and you’re gonna see some things you can’t un-see.  I doubt they recognize this consciously, but they know it all the same.  It takes a bit of scrotal heft to go, and that’s before you throw in the near-certainty of near-constant rejection.

The academic missionaries, though, the eunuchs — they want to preach to a captive audience.  Making “converts” is easy when you’ve got to recite the catechism to pass the class.  At the end of my teaching days, when my give-a-damn had bottomed out and I’d obviously checked out, I used to tell students “of course, your term papers will also have to cover privilege, et cetera,” waving my hands in the general direction of the ether.

Now, the Basic College Girl will be in your office hours if everything on the assignment prompt isn’t spelled out to the letter.  I’ve had BCGs tell me to my face that it’s unfair for me to fail them for plagiarism, because the assignment said you have to footnote your sources and she put

*Wikipedia

at the end of three pages of cut-and-paste.  But none of them ever asked me what “privilege, etc.” means.  Not one, not ever.

Which is why this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is such a hoot (Brietbart News link).  Since most colleges nationwide are now online, there’s a remote chance that Snowflake’s parents might take a passing interest in her coursework.  The thought horrifies our missionary eunuchs.  Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA has called for narcs:

“To all college students who have their professors switching to online classes: Please share any and ALL videos of blatant indoctrination with [TPUSA],” tweeted Kirk on Sunday, including his organization’s contact information.

I know you’ll be shocked by this, but pretty much every professor I’ve met in my career was terrified at the thought of xyzheyr lecture being recorded… for this exact reason.  You simply can’t get away with preaching to the choir if the choir can put your sermon up on YouTube.  Nobody believes me when I say that anodyne-sounding classes like “Shakespeare’s Major Works” and “US in the Civil War Era” are often all-trannies, all the time.  Hey, here’s your chance!  If you really want to do some good for Our Thing, encourage your friends with kids in college to log on to their kids’ now-fully-online classes.  Watch a lecture or two for yourself.  You’ll be amazed at what you see.

If everybody gets just one parent to audit just one “class,” we could end the farce of higher “ed” as we know it.

Maimonides, Averroes, someone like that said that all religions are true, because they’re just different aspects of the one underlying Reality.  Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, pick your prophet — it’s all the same message, tailored to the specific historical / cultural traditions of his listeners.  I’m too tired this morning to go spelunking in my Big Book of Heresies, but I’m pretty sure most Gnostic sects believed something like this, too (except, of course, the Gnostics argued that the so-called prophets deliberately confused the Truth, which only they, the Gnostics, knew.  Like Vogelin said, the Gnostics were the SJWs of their day).

Speaking of Gnostics, it’s obvious that Marxists believe the same thing (which is why Vogelin accused them of trying to immanentize the eschaton).  For Marxists, “Capital” is the hypostasis on which all politics and culture are built…

…as fun as it is to throw silly Greek words around, I trust y’all see what I’m getting at.  Marx had this elaborate hierarchy of pre-capitalist forms of production.  The Middle Ages, for example, was a period of “primitive capital accumulation,” and the nerdier Marxists used to amuse themselves by writing massive Teutonic tomes about stuff like “hydraulic despotism.”  It all boils down to anthropomorphizing “Capital” — turning it into a real, thinking entity that bends men to its will.  Whether it’s the English feudal aristocracy enclosing the land, mighty Pharaoh controlling the water system, or the Scramble for Africa, it was just “Capital,” using the social, political, and cultural arrangements of the day to accomplish its mysterious ends.

Just because dorks like Karl Marx and Valentinus believed it dosen’t mean there’s not something to it, though.  There really is an underlying concept that drives all political behavior: Physical security.  It’s not a living, breathing entity, like the Gnostics’ pleroma or Marx’s “Capital,” but it’s omnipresent in political societies.

All men consent to be governed, in an absolute sense.  Yes, quite often the choice is between “obeying the chief” and “the chief’s goons pounding you to paste with sharp rocks,” but it is a choice.  In fact, when it comes right down to it, that’s the choice we all make every time we obey the government:

Is our current physical security worth the pain of obedience, or is it not?

The only differences between caveman days and the Current Year are scale and speed.  The NKVD can deprive you of a lot more liberties, a lot more efficiently, than Mighty Pharaoh could.  Mighty Pharaoh was a literal god on earth.  He didn’t leave the fellaheen alone in their daily lives because he respected their autonomy (the very notion of personal autonomy was a few thousand years in the future when Mighty Pharaoh ruled).  He didn’t monitor his subjects’ daily lives because he lacked the technology.  That’s it.  Put an Alexa in every mud hut along the Nile, and I promise you, Mighty Pharaoh would spend his days fucking with his slaves just on general principles.

But since he lacked this technology, Mighty Pharaoh had to confine himself to great matters of state.  Here, too, physical security was key.  You knew when Pharaoh blew it, because you’d be on the business end of a barbarian sword, spending your last few seconds of life watching your city burn and your wife and children being led off into slavery.  If you somehow survived the sack, you obey your new barbarian masters for the same reason you obeyed Mighty Pharaoh.

Unfortunately for us, speed and scale have considerably broadened our notion of physical security.  We know what kind of actions Mighty Pharaoh took in a plague.  Given the technological limitations of his time, he could do no other.  We modern folks, on the other hand….

… well, look around.  We’ve decided, as a culture, that “physical security” now extends to “never getting the sniffles.”  And we have, or soon will have, the technology to make that kind of monitoring a reality.  The mud huts along the Nile didn’t have two-way Alexas installed; the McMansions along the Mississippi soon will.  The state of the art of government really does allow for 24/7 individual surveillance.  If we don’t want the sniffles, this is the only way to do it.

Democracy, Mencken said, is the theory that The People know what they want, and they deserve to get it, good and hard.  Well… this, apparently, is what We the People want.  We’re so terrified of the possibility of getting the sniffles that we’re going into voluntary lockdown.  All I can say is: Y’all wanted this.  I’ll be in the reeducation camp soon enough, but don’t say nobody tried to warn you.

If you know your history, this Kung Flu thing is more fun than a barrel of jackbooted monkeys.  Hey, Liberals!  You know that thing you’ve been so ostentatiously, sanctimoniously worried about Donald Trump doing, ever since he got elected?  Starts with “F”?

He’s doing it.  This is that.  This exact thing right here.  And y’all are hopping mad, because he’s not doing more.

One begins to suspect y’all don’t really know what your favorite word actually means.

I’m not in the homework-assigning biz anymore (thank you, merciful Odin, for early retirement), so consider this a suggestion: The Nazi Doctors, by Robert Jay Lifton.  Yeah, the same guy who wrote Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which is I think #3 on the College Dissident Reading List (check the archives… but later).  Lifton is himself both a doctor and a Jew, so he’s got a serious vested interest in the subject.  It’s a real eye-opener.

It’s also very long, but don’t worry, the intro is all you need.  Lifton talks about the Nazis’ “biomedical vision.”  National Socialism is full to bursting with disease rhetoric.  Hitler routinely ranted about Jews as “bacilli,” “viruses,” “infections.”  Naive people are always shocked when you point out that Germany had the fewest Jews per capita of any large state in Europe in the Weimar period.  Experienced people know this is a feature, not a bug.  What’s the point of whipping up hysteria about a hidden enemy, if everybody can see one?

Jews are germs, the Nazis constantly repeated.  They’re in our national bloodstream.  They might be dormant, but they’re always there, ready to become virulent, to kill us nastily the moment our resistance gets a little bit weak.  You can be infected — you probably are infected — and not even know it, spreading the disease to everyone you meet.

And it’s not just people.  Just as viruses can remain alive on surfaces for days, even weeks, so artworks, books, clothing styles, whatever can transmit the “Jewish virus.”  Remember the famous “Degenerate Art” exhibition?  It only makes sense as an exercise in applied epidemiology — in terms of national hygiene.

Given all that, what measures aren’t appropriate?  It’s us or them, in the same way that it’s us or coronavirus.  The fact that every “educated” person in America thinks xheyr so very very Smart for yelling “Nazi!” and “fascist!” whenever the fry guy at Mickey D’s short-dicks them, but is furious that we haven’t imposed martial law to combat the flu, is amazing.  No, really, it is.  You can find Nazi shit everywhere in America.  The History Channel used to be called “The Hitler Channel” for a reason.  People who can’t find Germany on a map have had the Nazi bogeyman beaten into their heads since elementary school…

…and not a one of them has any idea what Nazism actually is, or how it happened, or why.  That’s a feat of propaganda that must be giving Doctor Goebbels wood down in Hell.

At this point, of course, the naive person who fancies xzyrzhelf worldly will point out that only a couple hundred people have died from coronavirus here in America so far.  In fact, the global death totals look like the proverbial drop in the bucket.  Even if you assume the Chinese are lying by a factor of ten, that’s, what, 12,000 people?  In a population of over one billion?  The fact that searching for “China coronavirus deaths” sends you links to everything but the numbers is pretty revealing in itself, but whatever, here’s the global total as of today:

17,234 deaths

As far as apocalyptic plagues go, that’s some pretty weak shit.  I bet more people died in car crashes in the same period.  Hell, I bet ten times more people died in car crashes.  “I told you so!”, says the naive Smart person who fancies xzyrhelf worldly…

And trust me, when the Media finally fully cottons to the rally-’round-the-flag effect of their panic-mongering on Trump’s poll numbers, that’s exactly what they’ll start pushing.  But by then it’ll be far too late.  See above — “lowest number of Jews per capita in Europe.”  Low numbers are a feature, not a bug, of Nazi propaganda.  Again, the only way to maintain popular enthusiasm for totalitarianism is to convince the people that the enemy is always there, lurking, waiting, plotting… but very rarely actually striking.

Goebbels et al had real problems with the Jews in German communities… because they were so harmless.  So valuable, actually.  When Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi-est Nazi of them all, railed about “good Jews,” he wasn’t joking.  Everyone knows one, he said.  “Yes yes, they’re all swine, but Meyer is a really decent fellow!”  It took a massive propaganda blitz, unprecedented in world history, to convince the average German that his friends and neighbors, too, were viruses in need of eradication.

The Nazis didn’t need to spend a pfennig on propaganda to convince all the gang-raped schoolgirls of East Prussia that the Soviets were bad.  And if there really were bodies piling up in the streets — if COVID-19 really was the New Black Death — then everything the government’s currently doing would be like spitting into the ocean.

Which is the point: If it really IS “us or them,” then nothing’s off the table.  But that’s the precisely the case that has to be made.

I’ve written several times, here and in the comments at Z Man’s, that I’ve lost some friends over the Great Kung Flu Freakout.  One of the ways it happened was: I tried to calm a hysterical friend down with the tried-and-true Game tactic “agree and amplify.”  If what you’re saying is true, I told him, then what are you worried about?  All you have to do is shelter in place for a few days, and then the Army will be along to screen you and move you off to the resettlement camp.

His response, verbatim: The Army?  What the hell are you talking about?

What the hell are you talking about? I shot back.  You want a national curfew.  Mandatory testing.  Hell, a mandatory national lockdown — shelter in place until the Government says it’s ok to leave the house.  How the fuck do you think we’re gonna accomplish all that?  By asking pretty please?

He just couldn’t grok it… and that’s why we’re no longer friends.

What we’ve effectively done with this “lockdown” business is: Declare war on the common cold.  Which — see above — is basically what Hitler’s regime did.  Same rhetoric, same methods…. same results, ultimately, and if you think the Orange Fuhrer is going to be better than the other one, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.  Cards on the table: At this point I actually do hope he calls off the November elections and proclaims himself God-Emperor Donald the First, because otherwise, he’s still enough of a patriot to go through with it….  which means — elections, the American people, and the Democratic Party being what they are — we’ll sooner than later hand the keys to the National Safety Quarantine Police State to someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Better, far better, to have Donald the Second, then Barron the First, et cetera ad nauseam, than La Presidenta por Vida.

Last but certainly not least: A certain kind of college freshman has a lot of fun speculating as to whether Hitler’s regime could’ve survived “without war.”  You know it’s a freshman batting that question around, because war was baked right into the Fuhrer’s cake.  See above.  You can’t win a war on “terror,” either — by definition it’s un-possible — but that hasn’t stopped us from bombing half the fucking world for two decades straight.  How, then, are we ever going to win the war on germs without nuking somebody?  Or, if you just can’t see past Hitler, consider that the Soviets conquered half the world, and seriously destabilized the other half, in the name of “defending the revolution.”  There’s your best-case scenario, y’all — a long twilight struggle against the global hygiene monitors.

Except this time, we’re the bad guys.

Hey y’all, since we’re all stuck in here for a while, now might be the perfect time for any longtime lurkers to de-lurk.  Assuming there are some, of course…. if nothing else, we’ll get an accurate count.  Last time I checked, we were up to Fifteen Readers.  Maybe we’ll crack twenty!!

I know, I know, the “register to comment” thing is a pain in the ass.  It was a group decision.  I initially got out-voted, but now I’ve come to see the wisdom in it, because I have to clean the spam filters.  I fully understand everyone’s concerns about “registering,” but look — I’m sure this isn’t the only blog y’all read.  I’m sure you’ve commented elsewhere.  The Thought Police will get you for that long before they get you for this.

So why not come on out and say hi?

Get a quarantine burner email account.  Stop in, say hi, share some thoughts about the passing situation.  If it helps, here are some questions to respond to:

1. What do you like about Rotten Chestnuts?
2. What do you dislike?
3. What would you like to read more of?
4. What would you like to read less of?

Consider it our own little “coming out” day.  The gays do it all the time.  Why do they get to have all the fun?

Confession time: I love Taylor Swift.

No, I’m not being ironic.  What, you think I’m some kind of fucking hipster?  I’m not joking, jesting, mocking, parodying, or exaggerating for effect.  I really do.  There are certain cultural productions — certain artists, certain works — that are epitomes.  Mozart, I’m told, is the epitome of Classical music.  He achieved, and perfected, all that could possibly be done in that form.  For symphonies to be written after Mozart, music would need to take a radically new direction.  Thus Beethoven.*

Taylor Swift, then, is the epitome of an entire generation, an entire worldview.  Since criticism of “feminism” is forbidden, this worldview doesn’t have a name yet, but you know the kind of thing I mean.  The Millennial world, the safety-at-any-cost world, the careerist shrike tankgrrl world. Men are responsible for all my problems, so why won’t men get off their video game- and porn-addicted asses to come solve them all for me?  How dare men not be there on demand, now that I’ve cock-carouseled through my 20s and 30s and am ready to finally “settle down?”  I just made partner at the law firm, damn it, and I’m ready to have my one designer kid.  I am woman, watch me Tweet, why do boys all have cold feet?

For brevity’s sake, let’s call it GrrlWrrld.  Taylor Swift is the epitome of GrrlWrrld.

Exhibit A: Her wonderful new song, “The Man,” summarized thusly: I live like an NBA player, but get criticized for it, because I’m a girl.  For anyone not completely mired in GrrlWrrld, the “no shit, Sherlock!” factor of that little ditty is off the charts… but that’s the point.  It’s a massive hit.  All the grrls in GrrlWrrld, of both sexes and all 57 genders, feel this is a deep and meaningful insight into their lives.  It’s just sooo unfaaaaaaiiiiiirrrrr!

But there’s hope, kameraden.  As the Z Man points out today in his more-than-typically excellent column, with the Kung Flu, we may well be witnessing the end of the purposeless female:

…suddenly the status hierarchy for women has changed. The mom I was chatting with was feeling really good about taking control of her household. Suddenly, the women taking care of their kids, taking over their schooling and being a stabilizing force are cool. Those career women sheltering in place with their box wine and social media account can no longer kid themselves about their real status in society.

Note, please, that I wrote “purposeless,” not “useless.”  They can be synonyms, but in this case they’re almost opposites.  The grrls of GrrlWrrld are the farthest thing from useless.  Indeed, they’re the most important part!  Every single one of our current socio-political arrangements is designed to maximize the impact of box-wine-chugging career women who spend their precious few off hours bitching on social media, aka Karen.

It’s unsustainable, of course, but it’s the socio-demographic analogue to cock-carouseling — you can only hide the pointlessness and vapidity of what you’re doing by doing it more and more, faster and faster, and by the time you hit the Wall it’s already too late.  The lucky few end up like Jessica Valenti, penning article after article for Jezebel and The Guardian about how sexist the world is for not catcalling her anymore.  The unlucky 99.9% end up voting for Hillary.

As Z Man points out, the Kung Flu could be the end to all that.  GrrlWrrld only “works” when the treadmill of Eat-Tweet-Shop is cranked to Sharyl Sandberg’s “consider that a divorce!” setting, and runs 24-7.  If it stops, even for a second…

…well, read the piece.  All those women are finally discovering their true purpose in life, and it’s not — surprise surprise — “cock-carouseling your way to senior partner for 75 cents on the dollar.”  All of a sudden, the empty, vapid hedonism of Taylor Swift’s world are revealed in all their glory.  Swift herself, of course, is heading towards The Wall at Mach 3.  When the GrrlWrrld treadmill is running at full power, her fans can continue believing that the reason she can’t find a man is because she’s just too Strong and Empowered (TM) for any wimpy modern dude to handle.

When the treadmill stops, though, it becomes obvious why no man in his right mind would ever want to take the risk, no matter how hot she still is for a few more months — if it doesn’t work out, it’s gonna be all over MTV, and she’ll somehow still end up with the kids, because the judge in divorce court is a tankgrrl too.  No thanks.

The treadmill just stopped.  Will the purposeless female hop right back on once this whole thing blows over in a few weeks?  The cynic in me says “of course!”…. but hope springs eternal.  If you know any young women who were heading down that path — which is to say, if you know any young women — now’s your opportunity to show them a better way.  If you’re a young guy, now is the perfect time to work on your game.  No, not that PUA shit, the real stuff — the “calm, competent, stoic, trustworthy” stuff.  We’re probably still screwed, but if we don’t take our shots when we have them, we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Godspeed, kameraden.  Keep your head down, your pecker up, and your powder dry.

*I don’t know if this is actually true; it’s what I’ve been told by knowledgeable people.  My own musical ability and knowledge ends at picking out “Chopsticks” on a cheap plastic keyboard.

The more you study the collective global panic as a panic — that is, as the violent discharge of years of accumulated anxiety — the more it makes sense.  Individuals can only avoid reality for so long.

Some of us have been saying “it can’t go on like this” since the late 1970s.  More people got on board in the 1980s, even more in the 1990s, but by then it was already far too late.  Entitlement “reform” is impossible.  You can barely even slow down the leviathan state’s growth, much less stop or reverse it.  But hey, that’s just math, and nobody likes math.  Just keep printing money, selling bonds, putting everything on the plastic.  Gibs, gibs, gibsmedat.  It’ll be fine!!

And then the 2000s happened, as my students would’ve written back in my professin’ days.  Math is hard, therefore easy to ignore, but anyone can see that identity politics is a suicide pact.  And yet, they persisted.  Even people who spent the Clinton years with their heads in the sand regarding the financial system were forced to wonder just what the hell the professorettes and the Human Resources harpies were shrieking about.  No organism in the history of carbon-based life has ever had it better than the average Millennial American woman, but to hear them tell it, they’re practically being dragged into Genghis Khan’s harem by their spiky, cropped, rainbow-dyed hair.  It’s gibbering lunacy….

… but saying it’s gibbering lunacy out loud will get you fired.  Fast forward a few years, and failing to sing the required hosannas on cue will get you fired.  And the hymn book is getting fatter and fatter by the day.  “I am woman, hear me roar!”  You look like a 6’2″ linebacker with a broken razor to me, ma’am, but if that’s how you identify, then by all means, whip out your wang in front of my first graders.  Heck, take them camping with the rest of the Boy Persyn Scouts!  Half my department has already been replaced by slave labor on H1-Bs; the break room smells like dirty diapers and unwashed feet, and it’s even worse when they start cooking lunch.  I can’t afford to lose my job.  Obamacare will cover the kids’ lifetime of therapy bills.

Fast forward to the Kung Flu.  Don’t listen to what the idiots say; listen to what they don’t say, what they can’t say.  Very few people are saying “Trump should’ve done X, Y, and Z,” where X, Y, and Z are real things that could possibly happen on this actual planet of Earth.  Those things go against the catechism, you see.  Witness all the Media goofs who were throwing the term “Chinese coronavirus” around with wild abandon back in January.  Back then, they were sure that Trump would be impeached — yes, they really believed that, with all their hearts and souls — so “Chinese coronavirus” was just a news item, something to generate a few clicks from the hypochondriacs.  They never thought it would become a real issue, because hey, even if it was a lethal pandemic, a Democrat would be President, and so all would be well.  (See also: the constant “everything’s hunky dory!!” coverage of Obama’s various epidemics, including the millions of actual infections, and tens of thousands of actual deaths, from Swine Flu).

The fact that these clowns are now screaming about the awful xenophobic racism of calling it “Chinese coronavirus” doesn’t bother them, the Media clowns, in the slightest.  They’re NPCs; they’re immune to cognitive dissonance.  But out in the real world, people peddling that nonsense are getting ruthlessly mocked on social media.  Indeed, from the social media accounts I can see, which belong to my impeccably normie relatives and their impeccably normie friends, for every Karen freaking out and sanctimoniously hyperventilating, there are two people laughing at her.

There’s a simple psychological explanation for that: Normies have been resigned to the idea that our so-called government is just a collection of dimwitted larcenous fuckups for a long, long time.  See above.  Most normies, both “Left” and “Right,” have been voting for fundamental, sweeping change for decades…. and we never get it.

The last American election that turned on actual issues was 1980.  Ronald Reagan ran an actual campaign, not just a series of “I’m not Jimmy Carter” commercials.  Though that undoubtedly would’ve done the trick, Reagan was a serious man with real ideas about how to approach the issues of his day.  Campaigns since then have fundamentally been about optics.  Bush the Elder ran as Reagan-Lite; his opponent ran as I’m-not-Reagan.  Clinton promised to be a chicken-fried Bush the Elder, which was the one promise he kept in his life.  Dole ran as not-Clinton, Bush the Younger ran as Clinton-with-a-Bible (Gore, of course, ran as Clinton-lite), Kerry ran as not-Bush, Obama ran as not-Bush-plus-black, the less said about McCain and Romney the better, but you get the point.  Your “choices,” Left or Right, were between “this, but more so” and “this, but less so,” with the poles switching with the letter of the empty suit in the White House.

By 2016, the normies had all resigned themselves to their fate.  Nobody was more surprised by Trump’s victory than Trump’s supporters.  “Voting” for Trump wasn’t voting; it was raising a middle finger to the System as a whole.  Not to toot my own horn too much, but I called this early on (no, seriously – check the archives!!).  Political jock-sniffers like Ace of Spades kept bitching that Trump didn’t have any actual positions, and whatever actual positions he made a brief nod to today would be replaced by something completely different tomorrow.  As I pointed out back then, probably ad nauseam, this wasn’t a bug to Trump’s supporters, but a feature.  They didn’t care about policy; they cared about telling the entrenched Elite to go fuck themselves.  That it actually worked, or seemed to, was as much of a shock to them as to the Elite…

…which, of course, sent the Elite completely around the bend, and here we are.  But that’s the thing: The only people who freaked out about Trump are the ones who think voting actually matters, that the American government can and will actually do stuff for the benefit of anyone who isn’t an Acela corridor leech.  Even the majority of Trump’s supporters have cottoned to the fact that he’s mostly hat and very few cattle.  Better him than Hillary, oh Christ yes, but if Hillary’s the bar for gubernatorial competence then please, bring on the Plague.  The real one.  Once again, we suckers voted for change; and once again we got “basically this, but less so.”

Which is why the commonest response to the Kung Flu out in Normie-land is bitter mockery.  The normies mock the idiots who bought crates of toilet paper, and they mock the Karens who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, screaming that we’re all gonna die.  Maybe so… maybe so, and we’ll die with unwiped asses if so.  But Karen, are you really screaming for the government to do something?  Donald Trump‘s government, the one you were so sure was going to chain you to the oven and force you to have White babies?  The next Karen I hear proclaiming that Hillary Clinton would’ve handled it so much better will be the first one, because not even Karen is that loopy and estrogen-addled.

But Obama, now… that’s a different story.  According to Karen, Obama was competence itself.  Obama would’ve handled it just fine….

I know, I know, but again, this column is about the psychology of dizzy bints.  Normies are reacting to the Kung Flu with bitter mockery and weary resignation, because — see above — we don’t have years of accumulated anxiety about the state of the nation.  We all made our peace with the fact that America’s irreparably fucked some years ago.  We’re stressed, yeah, but it’s normal stress now, just a part of our lives.  Even if we believe that the Kung Flu is the end of the world as we know it (and I for one believe this, though not because OMG we’re all gonna die!), our prevailing emotion is, again, weary resignation.  In a way, it’s kinda liberating.  Ever been the passenger in a car crash?  There’s an eerie calm, almost an elation that comes just before the crunch.  Yeah, it’s coming, and it’s gonna hurt… but there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Karen, on the other hand, has all kinds of anxiety built up, because she hasn’t come to that realization yet.  In fact, she’s trying mightily, with all her considerable psychic strength, to avoid an obvious, horrifying conclusion: She’s responsible for all this.  It wasn’t the American people who threw open the borders; it was Karen.  She wanted cheap Chinese shit and “affordable” daycare, and she got it.  It wasn’t the American people who imposed ever-tighter controls on what we can do, say, and think; it was Karen.  She wanted a police state to make sure no one’s feelings ever got hurt, and so now we have to waste umpteen hours of the President’s valuable time upbraiding him for saying “Chinese coronavirus.”  It wasn’t the normies who insisted that Trump waste his time defending himself in kangaroo court while the epidemic proceeded unchecked; it was Karen, because Orange Man said mean things on Twitter.

She’s the one who has been pushing all of this on us for years — more control, more surveillance, mandatory niceness, security at all costs.  She really thought the government could protect us from boo-boos, God help us all, she did.  And now she’s putting all her heart and soul into keeping that from entering her conscious mind.  It’s a helluva trick, but the unconscious is a powerful thing.  If it can give a tough, manly soldier hysterical blindness, it can surely give Karen an excuse to panic-buy toilet paper and shriek on social media about it.

Whatever the virus does or doesn’t do, the Great Freakout ends when Karen finally discharges all that pent-up psychic stress.  I give it another week or two, tops — after all, she’ll have been stuck inside the house with her kids all that time.