Generation X, We’re Now On Our Own

The last of the Silent Generation are leaving us. The oldest Baby Boomers, born in 1945 and so 71-72 years old, are now the bulk of the elderly. Pretty soon, those of us of Generation X will be the voice of reason wedged between the insanely selfish Baby Boomers and the insanely pathetic Millennials.

There are many repeating patterns in Nature that skip one or two generations. The mindlessly narcissistic hubris of the generation that led the world into the hemoclysm of World Wars I and II is re-expressing itself in the consumer-rapist greed of the Boomers.

The grim cynicism of the generations that stopped Hitler is another pattern that has skipped some generations. The Boomers don’t get it: their world is very serious. The God-given mission to squeeze every last cent of material productivity out of the Earth is one that brooks no levity.

Neither do the Millennials get it: their world is also very serious. In the hyper-connected cyberworld of the Millennial, to take your finger off the pulse for one moment is to risk becoming fatally unfashionable.

Their great taboo is to never ask who is pulling the strings of all these fashions and fads and to what ends. The Millennial merely follows, a perfectly feminine creation for an excessively feminine age.

We in Generation X – often raised by our grandparents in the Silent and Greatest Generations while our parents were building careers – do get it. Make no mistake: for us, in between two opposing and mutually annihilating generations that are both deeply detached from reality, survival for our generation will involve getting out of the way while the nutbars fight each other.

As the 21st century takes a more definite form, four distinct groups of enemies have arisen to challenge those who wish for a peaceful world. These are Boomer globalists, Boomer nationalists, Millennial globalists and Millennial nationalists.

The Boomer globalists and nationalists are already familiar to us as the representatives of the various political interests. The globalists are the alliance of the capitalists and communists who want to bring the whole world under the yoke of one system.

The nationalists are those resisting this process, who usually bring with them masses of conservative baggage in the form of disrespecting anyone not like them, in particular women, other races and other sexual orientations.

The Millennial globalists and nationalists are their useful idiots on the streets and in cyberspace. Millennial globalists like Antifa and other social justice warriors will attack nationalist interests under the delusion that they are doing “good”, because there’s nothing a brainless dog enjoys more than biting someone and then getting a pat on the head from the master.

Their opposition, the Millennial nationalists, are naturally the foot soldiers of the wealthy, often religious and ethnonationalist interests who oppose the globalist interests. In practice, many of these people (usually men) are involved in the burgeoning alt-right movement.

This is the arrangement of major sociodemographic forces in the West as we drift towards the second quarter of this century.

However, the timeline before us is chaos, about which little can be known. We can say this for certain: the Baby Boomers will cling to power like shit clings to a blanket, and the Millennials will demand power as if they were all royalty and born to it.

Keeping the world on a even keel will involve making sure that the balance of these forces does not come out of alignment and cause the whole shithouse to go up in flames.

Probably the best historical example of the current plight of Generation X is the way in which Britain was, 80 years ago, caught between insane right-wing Nazis and insane left-wing Communists. At that time, the best strategy was to work on consolidating the strength of one’s position, and to wait for a future opportunity to expand while enemy forces exhaust themselves.

What Waitangi Day Could Mean For New Zealanders

Today is Waitangi Day, the national holiday of New Zealand. Our national holiday is today because it commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the document of partnership between the native Maori tribes and the British pioneers that led to the founding of modern New Zealand.

Everyone knows that. Here’s something you probably didn’t know. In the original articles of Australian Federation, which are held for public viewing in the Australian National Museum, it stated clearly that only white people and Maoris were allowed to vote in Australian Federal elections.

Why Maoris?

The framers of the early Australian Constitution were no fools, but they were not right about everything. Back in the late 19th century when the desire for federalism swept the Australian continent in response to an ever-increasing majority of the people being native born, it was anticipated that New Zealand would join the nascent Southern nation as another state.

After all, New Zealand was born of exactly the same sociohistorical phenomenon as Australia – the British Empire – and the white majority of New Zealand was not much culturally different to the white majority of Australia.

There was one catch. The early framers of the Australian constitution knew that the New Zealand Maori had been treated in a significantly different manner to the Aborigines of Australia, and that race attitudes were very different across the Tasman Sea.

Maori New Zealanders have had their own Parliamentary representation since 1868, about a century before Australian Aborigines were considered proper human beings by their settler culture.

In other words, it has been known from the beginning that our attitude to the native people made us fundamentally different in mentality to our brothers across the ditch.

The reason why Maoris were given the right to vote in Australian Federal Elections from the very beginning – unlike any other non-white race on Earth – is because it was understood that white New Zealanders would simply not accept federation into Australia otherwise.

Let’s be very clear about something at this point: this relationship is not one-way traffic. This intent of this essay is not to glorify the mostly middle-class people who colonised New Zealand and contrast them with the mostly working-class people who colonised Australia.

The Treaty of Waitangi is a partnership agreement that the Maoris have lived up to. By the standards of most international treaties in history that makes it very rare – and very precious.

One time at a factory I worked at in Brisbane, a pack of local bogans had cornered me and one of our co-workers, a Maori fellow named John. They engaged us in a conversation about who would win in a fight between the two of us and the six or seven or them.

John grinned and said: “We Kiwis are lovers, not fighters.”

It was a cunning way to defuse the situation, and it ended in good cheer. But it occurred to me shortly afterwards, based on what else I had observed in my half a year in Australia about the relations between white Australians and Aborigines, that it was highly unlikely an Aborigine would find cause to say the same about a white Australian.

Can an Australian Aborigine genuinely look at a white Australian and see one of his own, in the way a Maori New Zealander can look at a Paheka? Of course not. In fact, nothing like it.

This column’s contention for Waitangi Day is this. Forget the attention whores, the tub thumpers, the race baiters, the shit stirrers, and all the other dickheads who have turned this day into a low-rent freakshow. Let them have their day in front of the peanut gallery.

They have tried to divide and conquer us, as the ruling classes always have done to the people they have ruled, but in this they have failed.

However, let’s not dwell on that.

Instead, let us focus on the fact that the way we Kiwis have conducted race relations since the foundation of New Zealand has left us with far fewer daily unpleasantries than people of most other European colonies.

On my first day in Sydney, I walked out of the train station and up the main street towards the central city. On a dirty, water-logged mattress shoved up against a brick wall were a group of Aborigines, drinking meths out of plastic bottles.

On one of the first days I spent in Los Angeles I cycled to Malibu from Manhattan Beach. At Malibu, one can look up to the hills and see houses built like castles on huge sections, each property surely worth eight figures. From the same spot, one can look down to the beach and see several dozen people who sleep in cardboard boxes, and all of them are black.

And these are stories about the Functioning World; the non-Functioning World has horror stories about the friction of cultural borders rubbing up against each other that one can hardly believe.

On Waitangi Day, let’s spare a thought for the naked fact that, in most of the rest of the world, race relations are so bad that your skin colour is akin to a uniform and every street akin to a battlefield.

We managed to dodge the vast bulk of that – partly through design, partly through goodwill, partly through luck. Let’s take this day to appreciate that.

Where is Humanity on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a famous psychological theory based on the observation that people as a rule take care of their most pressing needs first, and only when those are satisfied do they develop an ambition to move to the next level.

The most common way to represent this is as a coloured pyramid – one can see an example as the title image of this essay. The ‘lower’ desires represent the more fundamental ones. The need represented by each level must be satisfied before a person is motivated to move on to the next one.

The lowest level is physiological needs. This basically means air, water and food. When the need for these are met a person moves on to safety needs, such as physical and economic security. Meeting those needs will mean a person advances to the level of love and belonging, where they try and satisfy a need for friendship, intimacy and belonging.

Above these three levels are two that are arguably not so much ‘needs’ as ‘decencies’. The first is the need for self-esteem. This relates to the human desire to be accepted and appreciated by others and by oneself. Generally the lower one’s self-regard the greater one’s need for fame or respect.

The last level is self-actualisation. This involves fulfilling one’s greatest potential; becoming the best version of oneself that it is possible to be.

It’s common for individuals to look at where they are themselves on Maslow’s hierarchy. It certainly is an interesting theory for anyone curious about how they fit into the grand scheme of things.

Some people are further than others. What we generally consider wealthy, fortunate, or “doing good” correlates pretty strongly with where a person is on the hierarchy of needs. If we take a look at humanity, though, we can see that as a whole we have not come very far.

According to the World Food Programme, 842 million people go to bed hungry on any given night. This represents about one in every eight people, all of whom have fallen at the first hurdle when it comes to the hierarchy of needs.

If one thinks about what that means in practice, it is one in every eight people who have no realistic chance of ever making progress in any of the other needs. After all, someone who goes to bed hungry will hardly be concerned with their bank account, because if they had any money they would have bought food with it.

It’s worth thinking that one in every eight people are that desperate – possibly that means one in every eight people are desperate enough to have a strong incentive to do serious harm to another human being, should an opportunity for a robbery arise.

After all, the major incentive a person has for not robbing someone is their desire for physical security, in the form of not going to jail, and their desire for social esteem, in the form of not being thought to be a robber.

As both of those needs are less fundamental than the need for food, a hungry person is unlikely to care about them very much. The desire for food is even more fundamental than the desire for peace, and so one in every eight of us is too hungry to care at all about all the war in the world.

A global universal basic income would raise us up the hierarchy, as it would take care of most basic physiological needs. It is the inability to fulfill the need for these that causes the vast majority of human suffering in the world.

It does, however, raise the spectre of overpopulation, at least in the minds of those who believe that some of the tropical peoples are incapable of keeping their breeding in check. If a person believes this, then it is natural to also believe that a global basic income will lead to ecological collapse.

Maybe humankind is doomed to remain at a reasonably low level because of the belief that if we co-operate too closely, factions within humanity will take advantage of this peace to wage war against other factions, perhaps even without those factions knowing about it.

A Look at the Fashions This Political Season

With a General Election called for the 23rd of September this year, the political fashion season is now upon us. Kiwis everywhere are asking themselves “What political cause do I have to pretend to support this season in order to virtue signal my advanced and Christ-like moral sophistication?” This article has the inside goss.

The first thing that everyone needs to know is that gays are out, refugees are in. Gays have been fashionable for long enough – homosexual law reform has been fashionable since the 1970s – and have now become an entrenched part of the Establishment, fielding more than twice as many MPs as would be proportionate for their numbers in the population.

Cynics might point out that the sort of refugees that have the tens of thousands of dollars necessary to make it to New Zealand are probably middle class anyway, but the trendy thing to do is to blame it all on American bombing.

Now that America has a white man in the big chair once again, it will now once again be fashionable to talk about the drone strike campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of people during the reign of Barack Obama.

Talking about this was exceptionally fashionable during the last years of George W. Bush, because the indiscriminate nature of the killing naturally upset human rights fans. Drone strikes regularly claim dozens of ancillary fatalities that are written off as ‘collateral damage.’

It was highly unfashionable to speak about this during the reign of Obama because he was just so goddamn ball-achingly cool. But now that it’s trendy to compare Trump to Hitler it will also be trendy to talk about the drone strikes again, as one can have little doubt that drones are something Hitler would have gleefully used had he been able.

Women are also out, and this has made it even more fashionable to be pro-Islam this season.

The fact is that, despite the rhetoric about the gender gap (almost entirely produced by yuppie lesbians trying to smooth the path to a C-suite position), it is really hard to get away with paying a woman less for literally the same work in New Zealand.

The vast majority of the feminists who were fashionable at university are now middle-class and assuming positions of power themselves – and often at greater rates than the males of Generation X because the females tend to have higher educational standards.

And what’s less cool than a competent, educated middle-class person in a position of power?

Throwing women under the bus is probably the only way we political fashionistas can cope with the cognitive dissonance that would be brought about by simultaneously supporting them and an aggressively male supremacist religious tradition that considers women barely better than animals.

Do note that transsexuals are not the hot new thing this political fashion season. It seemed for a long time as if they would be, because of all the noise they had been making.

But New Zealand has long ago had an openly transsexual Member of Parliament – a Georgina Beyer, assigned male at birth, who completed two terms as an MP for the Labour Party from 1999.

On the clearly unfashionable side of things is the economy. Bill English said that the economy was the primary issue this political fashion season, and he’s the epitome of uncool.

So whatever you do this political fashion season, don’t point out the fact that refugees cost the country $100,000 per year each, and so taking even as many as a thousand per year costs more money than the Feed the Kids Bill would have done.

Hungry kids are out, unless they are foreigners. So mentioning the $100,000,000 per year expense of taking in 1,000 refugees might be this season’s biggest faux pas.

Cannabis users will have to continue their forty-year wait to become fashionable, because most of them are poor, mentally ill and Maori and all of those are associated with being grotty and poor and uncool.

Alcohol will still be fashionable, though, because the alcohol industry will continue to dump tens of millions into advertising until the plebs can’t talk or think about anything else.

So get ready to crack some chardonnay with your newly-made Syrian friends on the 23rd September this year.