You meet more people now that they make you smoke outside. Perhaps social smoker is a way of saying you like people - you’re non-uptight - without the image of squalor.
Winter is coming. Not in a game of thrones White walkers invading from the north kind of way but a metaphorical struggle against the abyss of a new dark age.
There’s a reason Game of Thrones is so popular beyond it being well-made. Winter is coming encapsulates the spirit of our times. Winter is what the new age turned out to be - The 1960s followed by not really bothering with politics for 50 years is both the grandfather and the father of Brexit.
In my philosophy each culture goes through stages of development like a tree and the Renaissance was spring, the enlightenment summer, the 20th century was autumn and the new age is winter.
Through the baby boomers we are arriving at pre-Renaissance times. Civilisation has gone senile and as a greying baby it begins to resemble its infancy what came before the Renaissance.
I love how you've got "property of JimNastics" it makes the photographs work on two levels. It's not just appreciating the bird you've given the reason why there will soon not be any birds at all.
We need to restore the old mentality to education. Strict but rounded, the greatest generation educated you not only to raise your income and tax it but because they believed in the concept of character.
Millennials are educated purely for the purpose of being employed. Specialist niche skills without the ability to critical think, the older generation is farming for income tax and corporations don’t want people with the breadth of mind to understand what the other hand is doing. Either this or they do media studies at uni before getting a job in Tesco. Either way it’s a detritus.
I don't understand why they would choose Obama if he wasn't actually American. Is there shortage of cool black men with mediocre abilities that I'm not aware of?
First world problems. It's something to do with already having the best of the things that are really there along with losing the ability to concentrate.
Tighten the borders, restrain the moneylenders. The West doesn't need choice we need priority, things are too cheap and easy(unless they're important). It's the rest who need choice. We should absolutely support feminism in India.
Last March isn't that long, there are so-called able people with less dating success. Many of the women here wouldn't have the confidence to be in a relationship, self-esteem deriving almost entirely from rejecting men. That's nothing to envy so don't compare yourself to other people, 8 out of 10 pretend to be happier than they are.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday and better yet get into history. Soul-searching, history and the power of the brain. History knows the tremendous odds we overcome to be here, enthusiasm for the deep and meaningless is how you persevere in spite of unbelievable hard luck.
In the numbers, an infinity of numbers. My brain has different numbers to your brain so we don't conclude the same number by looking at the numbers, but in this universe all our numbers roughly the same. Similar enough in number to know the good fruit from the one that kills you.
A sense of inadequacy underpins all aspiration. Listening to teachers and passing exams and getting promoted come not from believing you're good enough as you are. Self-esteem and self-help are two completely different things, perfectionism and seeking the approval of customers or bosses the whole system of capitalism is based upon keeping up with the Jones comparing yourself to others and feeling all the less for it and using that as a spur to do more.
The norm here is to be tremendously excited when women respond in any way and it's important for you to understand the pressures men are living under. We can see you, but we can't get to you. If you're in any way desirable on this website you build a big wall and make men pay for it.
And I suppose that's why it's not always that relevant what people believe. The nationalists would help the earth better by accident than the liberals do by design. You can nail the argument down to a tee but recycling your tin cans still won't sort everything out.
The rest of the world needs to copy the western birth rate or die of natural causes more. Of course the sin was to industrialise the world in decades when it took centuries for us to adapt culturally, and better yet to bring them in here ensuring that the lower birth rate in the first world counts for nothing. Mass immigration is making sure there'll always be a larger generation of the greediest consumer.
The reason equal opportunities worked so well in America is because you were all penniless and fresh off the boat who then pillaged the native Americans and distributed their land equally amongst the colonisers. You were equally advantaged by standing on an Indian burial ground but from here on out you had roughly equal chance. The state seized land and gave it you for free - that was your socialism - and but you all got an equal freebie.
The problem of the melting pot is that it was never meant for people who are wildly different and divergent or super rich and mega poor. Internally America was built on a freebie for everyone, but a fair shake after this. Things start to break down when the chances in life are extremely different from one person to the next.
What a bunch of lies though. One of the bigger cover ups was in disguising the fact that immigrants lower wages and conditions for the native working class. British liberals now admit this but for years that lie was maintained in the same way the child grooming in Rotherham was covered up.
The truth is that immigration makes society less equal which is why inequality has increased throughout the years of mass immigration. It makes hiring people more profitable and working for people less profitable which is to say it grants more power to the bosses. There's a reason the opening of borders arose in tandem with soaring inequality, what trickles down from the bosses does not go to everyone but only a small sub-elite of the upper middle class. 80% of people are worse off and 80% of people were better off in 1968 or would have been had they been alive at the time.
And then we're left with liberal capitalism and the effect it had on global poverty. Well, if it wasn't for China - which is state capitalist not liberal capitalist - there wouldn't be any reduction in global poverty throughout the neoliberal era. China is the only country in the world where the prosperity of business has not all gone to the elite and sub-elite.
And there are liberal capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg who believe that if we can marshall the forces of mass distraction then we can make it so people don't mind being homeless. And being so connected is a replacement for having any real friends, that's what Facebook is. The hope of diversity rests upon nobody going outside anymore, a retreat into borderless cyberspace to live out some sort of Matrix with unlimited bread and circus.
Now these nerds need shooting. Same goes for Elon Musk who would put our milliions of drivers out of work overnight. The nerds are so wrong about this that even the US Republican party is behaving in an anti-capitalist way and upsetting business in the interest of the common good i.e. what is to most people a better quality of life.
Although enclave or not the internet is an example of permanent tourism. Diversity will make people's general attitude towards others more like it is on the internet. Home is where the heart is but the internet is basically homeless and will yield the same alienated people that diversity does.
The truth is that people need a sense of fellow-feeling and a home to call their own, if you take this away from them in exchange for cheap sweated goods and a curry then you have no place to complain about Trump, you are the reason for Trump.
And look at all the faces on these forums and ask yourself what stands out. This international dating website in borderless cyberspace is itself an enclave of white flighters. Although they come from all over the world what stands out about CS is the diversity that isn't here. These forums are middle aged, middle class and white more so than our countries in general. With all of cyberspace to choose from people still choose birds of a feather
How do you gauge the economic costs of being able to only appreciate your neighbours from a foreign and superficial perspective and you end up with a social life of permanent tourism? How do you factor the loneliness that comes from not being able to know your neighbours as well? The novelty of having nothing in common with the people around you is good for a couple of weeks, but not your whole life. The damage you do to the social fabric isn't calculated in quarterly profits but it is real.
And just over a year after writing the article Trump is in power. Iimmigrants make the rat race more intense and create fatter profits for the 1% which trickle down to the next 19% sub-elite. We know this.
But they do make everywhere feel like a 2* hotel and lower wages for people already on low wages. Human beings are not fungible and would prefer not to live by bread alone, they want something alternative to this soulless liberal capitalist Blade Runner future.
People who know who made their clothes and how, or people who notice the average person around them eating enough to feed a whole family are going to add to that desire to help the less fortunate. But you have to find a better way of helping than inviting them to move in with you, it's unsustainable and it is dangerous.
It's the flatlining productivity and soaring debt which bother me.
Two important questions to ask are 1) is American business getting any better at business? and 2) Can you afford to pay your own way?
When the answer is "no" to both of the above then all that glitters is not gold. I'm suspicious of the business investment happening now because it's not improving the business, it would seem that MAGA is built on having a mega Christmas that drives China deeper into the black. The economy looked great in the 2000s so long as you ignored debt and productivity which is to say you ignore both your ability to pay and your ability to do things.
ChesneyChrist Blog Comments (1,393)
RE: Social smoker?....
You meet more people now that they make you smoke outside. Perhaps social smoker is a way of saying you like people - you’re non-uptight - without the image of squalor.