In 1998, a Usenet proto-realtalker speculated on the topic of national decline, and why it seemed the frequency and amplitude of glorious achievement of mid-20th Century America had slowed to a flatline. (via)
From: [email protected](Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science,sci.astro,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Solution to Fermi Paradox right here!
Date: 30 Dec 1998 06:29:33 GMTIn <[email protected]> [email protected] writes:
>Pick your favorite sci-fi, (say, something written 50 years ago making
>predictions about life near the year 2000), and it’s probably wildly
>optimistic.
>
> JSCOMMENT
Yeah, but that’s only because as a society we’ve become effete and lost the will to try new things just for the hell of it. In the 60’s they were trying things like nuclear propulsion, and they were walking on the moon. Then, something horrible happened in the early 70’s. I grew up then, and I could FEEL it. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it was, but I think what it was, was a generation of kids who grew up with television instead of playing with gizmos, and who got into power and then just turned our society into a big mess of paperwork and lawyering, because paperwork was all they’d ever learned to do. When I look at the physiology research done in the 60’s, it takes my breath away. The creativity of it! The things they did! I find my “new” ideas all the time in papers done in the 1960’s, but they never went anywhere (perfusion of organs with fluorocarbones to cool them, for example). One guy (the same guy in fact), before heart lung machines, repaired the hearts of babies by surgically cross-connecting them to the circulation of adult humans, who volunteered in order to save a life. Where has that kind of courage gone? Where are the Yeagers and the Goddards and the Microbe Hunters? How come the heros of our movies are no longer Micky Rooney or Spencer Tracy playing Thomas Edison, or Paul Muni playing Erlich or Pasteur, instead Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison and Woody Harrelson playing Larry Flint? And movies whose heros are lawyers. Arggh. I don’t care if it is Tom Cruise or John Travolta. And the rest of the movies seem to be re-creations of 60’s TV shows.
Paperwork and lawyering. Fixing and improving and advancing society by talk-talk, not building. A lawyer president and his lawyer wife. [ed: bubba and thecunt] Crises of power that don’t involve spy planes and sputniks, but incredibly complicated and deceptive word definitions and complicated tax frauds. You think we’re not preparing to go to Mars because SF is too optimistic? Sure. But it was optimistic about whether or not the can-do engineering of the 40’s and 50’s, done by the kids who’d grown up playing with radios and mechanics in the 20’s, was going to continue. Needless to say, it didn’t. I’ve seen a late 1950’s book of science fair projects for teenagers that include things like building your own X-ray machine and cyclotron (no, I’m not kidding– it can be done). There are rockets in there, and cloud chambers, and all kinds of wonderful electronics stuff. But we didn’t go that way. Instead, we turned our children into little Clintons, and our society into a bunch of people sitting at PCs, entering data about social engineering, not mechanical engineering. So instead of going to Mars, we went instead to beaurocratic Hell. Enjoy, everybody. It really could have been different. Nature didn’t stop us– WE stopped us.
Steve Harris
(God, look at me. I’m well on the way to being Uncle Al)
I haven’t read a more prescient synopsis of American culture trends than what I’ve written myself here at this blog. “Bureaucratic [sic] hell” = Burnham’s mass SCALE dystopia come to life.
Something horribly invidious happened to America around the late 1960s and early 1970s that abruptly turned the country from greatness to a path of decline, navel-gazing solipsism, and now finally to racial self-annihilation. Soy and sugar in the food supply? The explosion of a twisted ideology into everyday life? The Pill? TeeVee?
I’ll tell you something, the hallmark of national decline is the rise of the gynarchy and the diminution of male talents and preferences.
Gizmos = male
Paperwork and Lawyering = female
You want American history in a pithy aphorism? How about this:
Male became Female. Then came the End.
Or maybe you like your pithy aphorisms with more focus and bite:
Christian European became….
you catch my drift.
Boys used to be encouraged to tinker with material objects. Now they’re encouraged to explore their emotional landscape and inner femininity (while girls are pushed to become second-rate boys). Both White boys and White girls are brainwashed on a daily basis by every institutional power to hate their race, heritage, and ancestors’ accomplishments. An accident of decadence, or the rotten fruits of a deliberately perpetrated evil?
We can turn this sinking ship around and steer it to safe harbor, but that will mean returning to the wrong side of history where we laud boys for their distinctiveness and encourage them to tinker, not shame them for preferring stoicism over social justice blubbering. On the flip side, it will mean stopping the inhuman agenda of praising girls for acting boy-like and pushing girls to think their natural female talents are signs of weakness. Less “leaning in”, more “leaving alone” to pursue the lives their sex-based dispositions organically push them toward.
The Paperwork and Lawyering crowd needs to back off and allow the Gizmo crowd to rule again. If the P&Lers won’t (they won’t), then our culture will die, or the Gizmos will fashion new machines to loosen power from the soy-weakened grips of the P&Ls.
[crypto-donation-box]
