Societal decline is now obvious to (almost) everyone. Even the most Kool-Aid soaked, hive mind dwelling, moonbat sees it. Inmates at college campuses are starting to realize even they are within the event horizon of their own foolishness. The rest of us are like “no shit Sherlock”.
We saw it coming. We knew years and years ago. Long ago, I took drastic measures. I didn’t wait around while the tadpoles caught up with their own failures. I vamoosed. If stupid shit is both obvious and destructive, why stay around to get the biggest dose? I chose to avoid bullshit every single day.
I had to! Bullshit grates on us all, but some have more tolerance than others. It really gets to me. I’m allergic to stupid. Every time a woke fuck opens zer’s mouth and demonstrates how little they know of the real world, I feel degraded. Hearing supposed examples of homo sapiens rejecting their God given intellect is profoundly unpleasant.
As an adult, I can’t live in a made up world. I gave up a lot of wealth and convenience to secure a personal place of peace. It’s not without drawbacks. I slop the hogs every night at sunset. Pigs are a pain in the ass. It’s not without rewards. Right after sunset I see brilliant stars in an unpolluted sky.
Pigshit and glittering skies. It’s a package deal.
One protection against bullshit is distance. Distance keeps most of the crap at bay. The worst shit happens when idiots cluster together to fuck up en masse. So don’t be near them. If there’s a place where shit invariably builds high, I’m somewhere else. Shit generally belongs to “that place”… the land of dipshits… “over there”… where “you can’t expect anything better”… “because they’re fuckin’ idiots”. The rest of us, through exposure to reality and tradition, stay rooted.
Unaccomplished nobodies protesting the world that feeds them? Far away. A dozen assholes lever their ass off the couch just enough to shoot each other on an “average” weekend? Far away. Homeless derelicts building tent cities? Far away. Cities are far away; not just in miles but in spirit. They devolve into holding pens for domestic cattle. Vote farms creating their own problems.
Thus, I’m aware of but usually not in direct contact with the endless litany of social decline. However…
Yesterday I was in a hardware store; picking out some metal for a future welding project.
Wandering around the store was a woketard. It’s easy to identify such cretins. Look for someone who should be an adult, acting like a not-adult. This guy wasn’t sporting purple hair, six pounds of piercings, or a face tattoo… but he was definitely too stupid and pointless to be in a hardware store. He was expensively dressed like a bum and lugging around a skateboard.
If you’re old enough to buy beer and still consider a skateboard legitimate transport… you’re a loser.
He appeared the limp soyboy sort of half-criminal that vote farms have been breeding in box lots as the rule of law fades. He wasn’t the hardened violent sort of criminal that’s actually motivated and purposeful. He was a generic shoplifting wanker and not an Al Capone bad ass. I hefted the 3′ rod of steel I was carrying. If I was wrong and he was a genuine thug, he’d be laid out cold before you can say “Curmudgeon don’t play that game”.
I don’t know if he deliberately avoided me or did so by chance but our paths never crossed. He wandered about a bit and then walked out the door. This set off the shoplifting detectors, which seemed almost superfluous given the skulking twit’s obvious behavior.
“Sir! Sir! Please come back through he detectors, something must be wrong.” The cashier scampered over and tried to get him to come back inside.
He shuffled about back and forth just past the detector. Mouthing some words about “I paid for the candy”. (Apparently he’d bought a pack of Twizzlers.)
He was unwilling to come back through the detector. He wasn’t willing to get on the skateboard and flee. He seemed confused. Maybe he was high.
I weighed my options. I would really enjoy shoving a skateboard up a thief’s ass… but why? It’s society that allowed this cretin to exist. A few decades ago it would be different. Me or some dude like me would pin captain skateboard’s goatee to the pavement until the cops came. No more. Police no longer enforce laws. They don’t appreciate those who do. Laws may exist for me, but they no longer exist for losers like skateboard shoplifter guy. He knows this. I do too.
The clerk tried a bit more to get him to come back through detectors (I’m not sure what that would’ve accomplished). The guy finally connected a few synapses and realized he was outside. He shrugged, gave an uneven grin, and walked away.
Walked! FUCK! There was a time when committing a crime meant you ran.
The clerk was pissed. “They tell me not to chase ’em so I don’t.”
That’s part of it. The hardware store simply cannot afford the liability of maintaining civilization. They’ll keep factoring the cost of theft into the consumer price until something changes. Presumably, at some point, my steel will be shipped via internet orders. It will depart secure facilities, be shipped in a secure environment, and cost twice as much. Stores will be rare, poorly stocked, and resemble fortresses. Picture a Seven-Eleven in Detroit.
Nobody bothered calling the cops. Nobody even suggested it. We all know they wouldn’t show up. If they showed up they wouldn’t do anything. Oh sure, if I’d tackled a dude half my age and held him down, they’d have showed up… and arrested me. Cops defend thieves against citizens. It wasn’t always this way but it is now.
“I was only hired 5 days ago and there’s been one of them every shift so far.” The clerk muttered.
“Damn! Every day?” I wasn’t that cynical. I had no idea it was so widespread.
“Every day.” She sighed.
“I just paid $17 for a hunk of metal when I could have just walked out the door? Show’s what kind of dipshit I am!” I joked.
Then I paused. I’d hit to close to home. People like me obey laws. Every little crack in society makes us feel like chumps. Skateboard guy had just stolen shit. I was paying. Why? At some point it’s not clear that the one paying is the smart one. The day law abiding citizens stop paying is the day it all burns down. Break out the fiddle Nero, it’s time to watch the lights go out.
I was already walking out the door, having paid in full.
Who knows if there’s a day when nobody pays for the stuff at that particular hardware store. I know there are neighborhoods like that. Not coincidentally, those neighborhoods don’t have hardware stores (at least of the sort I’m used to).
I wasn’t aware California’s “small theft isn’t theft” logic had landed on the shores of my world. It has. Now I know.
Yep.
Then there are the stores that make you scan, pay and bag your own, and then look at you like you are the criminal, when you see people walk in, grab something and walk out without being accosted.
It’s the same with any form of self-defense. Yes, defending yourself is a good thing. But assume you will be the one arrested, especially if you manage to slab the SOB that tried to kill you.
Lots of prosecutors have made their name on the backs of good citizens who were trying to stay alive.
One of the things that depresses me is that, no, this isn’t something that we can run from. Disengagement helps in day to day life, but we’re disengaging from a signal that our day to day lives will eventually be destroyed.
For one thing, every western nation has gone full retard in breathtaking synchronization. Two: Eventually they will get around to the Kulaks. If we can’t run, and we can’t fight, we lose. Eventually, everything we build today will be stolen and burnt tomorrow, or just gratuitously destroyed beneath a tide of stupidity and destructive people.
How is this stopped? My parents still fantasize about voting fixing this. I can’t see it. How exactly is that going to work? How can you force the police at at least the local level to do their damn jobs (or get out of the way)? The local courts? The local legislature?
I don’t know what it’s possible to do, and everything that I am doing seems like whiling away time before an inevitable brutal end. I lived in California for a time, and saw the rot, and that the place had no future. I got the hell out and moved back home (for many reasons, most of them personal), but was never under the impression that the destruction eating away at that place wouldn’t eventually reach my home.
PPS: By “back home”, I mean my home state, near my extended family. I’m still a “productive member of society”, however that’s defined these days.
PS: To try for some levity: When I did live in California (Palmdale, north of LA by about 1.5 hours, south of the Mojave desert) I had my mailbox stolen.
We had communal mailboxes: Large metal hefty things anchored in the concrete. Every single mailbox on my street was stolen. I had to go to this mail facility every Saturday morning and stand in line for several hours to pick up my mail. (It was several hours because a large fraction of the mailboxes in the entire city were stolen.) There were piles of freshly new armored mailboxes with deeper concrete anchors piled up behind a barbed wire fence.
The story going around the mailroom is that gangs of monster-truck driving thugs were riding up from LA and systematically ripping those armored mailboxes out of the concrete with tow chains, then making off with them. They’d be broken into so that checks could be stolen.Somehow the solution was an arms race between mailbox armor and monster-truck towing capacity, not arresting the Mad-Max punks.
Si se puede, mofo!!!
I haven’t noticed any of that up here yet. Though a year or so before COVID a law was passed in my city that the police couldn’t stop car thieves-even they saw it happening! BUT this is Alaska and there was nothing that said YOU couldn’t get the car back. After one car recovery where one woman shot at the woman driving her stolen car, Things changed back.
JFM
When my first husband worked at a lumber yard, one day some guys loaded up their truck and drove off without paying. He chased them on foot for several blocks until they sped up. His boss asked him what he’d have done if he caught them? LOL! I don’t think even he knew .. he just reacted! Despite having the license number, I don’t think the police bothered to ever catch them. That was in a small Texas town 40 years ago. The difference between then and now is that back then the thieves were afraid of getting caught. And – there were fewer of them.
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Beatrix Potter (of Peter Rabbit fame) wrote a little book called “Ginger and Pickles” in 1909. Ginger and Pickles are a tomcat and a terrier who own a store, and who offer low prices to attract customers, then give those customers unlimited credit. They do a booming business. But Ginger’s and Pickles’ customers don’t pay their bills at the end of the month. Eventually, they have to close the shop because nobody pays.
After they close, the customers have no choice but to shop at the other store in town, a high-priced store that insists on cash on the barrel head for every purchase.
Twas ever thus. Some stores will close. Others will revert to securing all inventory and customers will have to carry a barcode to the counter and pay before getting the item. Like 150 years ago, when customers gave their list to the store clerk instead of picking out the items themselves.
One can do the Right Thing, or one can be part of the problem.
I (and apparently you) choose the first.
It is who we are, and how we live. We stand for civilization.
Others not so much.
Things that can’t continue, won’t continue.
Eventually the government that fails to protect its citizens will fall. Chaos ensues. When it gets bad enough, the people demand a Caesar. Funny thing is, Caesar always shows up, though in various disguises. Sometimes his name is Julius, sometimes Octavian, sometimes Bonaparte, and sometimes Adolf. But he always shows up when called. History 101.
Wow – haven’t heard of that here, yet. And we all pay for it . . . (sigh)