Eirik, as much as I appreciate your uncivilized solidarity in this discussion, I must insist that we draft plans for rescuing Clued from the mud hordes so that he could organize our library and solar mood lighting for the seraglio—kind of like the mechanic they hauled around in a swing in Road Warrior. It would be nice to have someone keeping the lights on in our slave girls' hot tubs so that they're all squeaky clean for our rude attentions.
“Clued” takes James, and I guess lesser barbarians like myself, to task for their anti-civilizational bias, even concluding with the knock down ad hominem: “Fuck You!”:
Why tech allows the weak like Clued to survive in comfort. Ok, that’s fine, I sympathize and don’t personally want to see good folk like Clued, however physically challenged, be eaten by the predators. If that is possible in the long term.
However, the barbarian thesis is that civilization is ending because of the compounding and converging catastrophes that are ethno-racial, ecological, environmental, you name it. We may disagree about say, climate change or peak oil, but only those standing to make a big buck by defending techno-optimism really think that the future will be a bowl of cherries. More like a bowel of cherries. And, all past civilizations have bit the dust. Sure, some got up again, only to be smashed down once more:
As well, it has long been observed, and there is an amazing quote by an Medieval Islamic scholar that I should have looked up, but did not, being a lazy barbarian, saying that it is preciously the comforts of civilization which bring nations down, ultimately. People get soft, and then get fucked over.
So, it is barbarianism, or bust, or bust, then barbarianism. Oh, and even if we are wrong, preparing for doomsday, like old Noah, gets around the problem noted by another contributor, since one can always fall back on one’s preps if the evil day does not dawn:
How good is that! Doomsday ain’t all that bad.
Turd America
Trumpapocalypse Now: The Advent of an American Usurper at the fall of Western Civilization
Own the collected works of John Saxon, Professor X, Eirik Blood Axe, William Rapier and other counter culture critics, on Kindle, via the link below. Amazon:
The Great Train Wreck of the West
I'll have to agree with Clued. I like civilization. I like the internet and ice cream. My beef with civilization is we do not crush down to dust those who will not just let us go on our way without stealing, intimidating, attacking and spitting and spitting all over the public spaces. Why can we nit go barbarian on those that act as barbarians? I have no idea. I personally don't care if others wish to live as barbarians as long as the respect public spaces. Let them do as they wish in their space.
Genghis Khan probably would agree with you.
His great nephew Kublai Khan certainly did.
Internet and ice cream is a hard combination to be against, especially as a former frozen food clerk who now makes his living exclusively on the internet.
Tratuvf Xuna cebonoyl jbhyq nterr jvgu lbh.
Uvf terng arcurj Xhoynv Xuna pregnvayl qvq.
Vagrearg naq vpr pernz vf n uneq pbzovangvba gb or ntnvafg, rfcrpvnyyl nf n sbezre sebmra sbbq pyrex jub abj znxrf uvf yvivat rkpyhfviryl ba gur vagrearg.
To be more specific if Rome had crushed the living daylights out of the barbarians before they moved in then maybe they would have never fallen.
What if the US followed my "Great American Western Permaculture Project (Gulag)"? The Dindu plague would soon clean out the cities and keep them on the desert where they would hack away at rocks, dig ditches and plant self perpetuating green spaces. The lessening of violence and theft would make it even easier to identify those so inclined.
Mass building of public high rises with mandatory birth control for those who have no way to pay for their kids would immediately stop the perpetuation of trouble and making voting requirements based on marriage or poll taxes or high school diploma or some other positive property would stop political control by barbarians. We could clean the whole mess up in a decade or two. There's no need at all to have the whole mess collapse in a heap as some fantasize.
Civilization is a terminal disease. Once a virile population catches it, the decline begins. Heroes turn from flesh and blood into marble and from marble into movie caricatures and then into dust. Civilization is nothing but debt accumulation and justification for weakness. Hell literacy was only invented to record tax debt. For the first thousand years after cuiniform was invented in Mesopotamia no other use was even conceived.
I enjoy ice cream and air conditioning, but I never kid myself that they are strengths.
"...I enjoy ice cream and air conditioning, but I never kid myself that they are strengths..."
I never said they were but ask the Muslim army that attacked Churchill about how they fared against civilizations machine guns. People who can't build air conditioners are not likely to be able to build attack helicopters either.