Today’s effort is a selection of outrageous but, on the whole, empirical observations involving liberal use of hate crime, gratuitous digs at national archetypes, things quite likely to be coming down the road and other associated species of socially forbidden literary fruit. And some of it, I confess, is an important restatement of where I’m coming from for newer readers.
France had for many decades been a country with an admirable sense of communitarianism and great nosh – but blighted by widespread m’enfutisme*, after-sales service arrogance, and myriad levels of fonctionnaires**. But its pace of life and weather south of the Loire made it impossibly easy to forgive.
However in recent years, to the strangulation of the culture by jobsworths and pinched-goblin bureaucrats has been added anal rape by neoliberal tossers and their favourite toy, Artificial Intelligence.
France has become Fawlty Towers without the laughs.
This is the reason why, with great regret, I am quitting France (at least for the time being). I suspect that its importance as a retirement jaunt for Brits is going to drop dramatically.
Yesterday, for the third time in four months, AXA Bank blocked my access to my own account that contains my own money for no reason whatsoever. And so for the third time, I had to get my personal AXA Banker to come round, guide me through an online experience whose “navigation” was not so much counter-intuitive as impenetrable.
He’s a nice guy, but I was made to feel as if I didn’t understand and it was really my fault. You see, he knew what to do, because he has to deal with this shit day in day out. He solved in under ten minutes what three hours of dealing with autistic AI simply couldn’t handle. The worse this nonsense gets, the more young people in particular accept it as their lot: for they have never known anything better than explanations via the Salvador Dali school of empirical logic. Indeed, the more complicated online access gets, the more the 7in8ers are in awe of it.
*Couldn’t care less, I want my lunch
*Mean-faced, saddo junior pen-pushers who can’t say yes but just love to say no.
The Earthly invasion by AI goes, of course, far further abroad than France. Not to beat about the bush, AI is what we highly trained cultural radicals refer to as “in the fucking way”. AI will send you round in circles online because it has no emotional intelligence: the clue is in the name: it is artificial and therefore cannot expect to serve the Homo sapiens species at least partly ruled by tribal emotional wiring designed to help the easily confused. It is not better than us because it has a Great Big Lumbering left brain thinking in tramlines: it will only ever be (a) 2001’s psychopathic Hal and (b) a weapon the ruling class can use against human artisans because it has no “natural order” right brain hemisphere….or at best, a right brain programmed by a dysfunctional Geek.
This isn’t Ludditism on my part, it is Base Camp social anthropology. A world in which everyone with an IQ in average figures should be expected to work in one calling or another will become one of the élites’ “useless eaters” if AI takes over his and her metier. For the Schwabs, Soroses and Kissingers of this world, this is a three-card trick: a self-fulfilling prophecy being accelerated by their actions, not ours.
AI is there to destroy your calling – be it cabinet making, glass blowing, painting, new product ideas, marketing, after-sales customer concern, car design, fashion or a million other ways of realising your potential as a human being. In so doing, it is absolutely certain to destroy creativity, dreams and – ultimately – liberty that comes from independent, sound income sources in a varietal culture.
That too is not Marxism. It replaces “Workers of the World Unite” with “Crafters of the World find your niche”. By all means, let robots do the boring factory stuff. But People are not brought into this world to be bored, crushed back onto the sofa and then lampooned as Wayne Slob.
Such an independence of mind and personal aspiration can only ever come from sound familial structures and educational systems that encourage (and look for) the potential in every single human being. It’s what teachers used to do: now they force-feed their students with antiquated and catechismic ideologies that encourage obedience and associate contrarianism with risk and fear. At times it looks and feels like the forced gavage of geese.
This further is not Utopianism. If we had the family and educational values that were near-universal in the First World of the 1950s, there is absolutely no way that the Virus/Vaccine BS could’ve been pull off.
Restrict the robots to the production line, fire AI, and put the world Back To Work.
I remain a fan of radical reality. The UK Labour Party’s current obsession with minority narcissism has nowhere near enough electoral appeal to ever turn into Government – or truly effective Opposition.
The Left in Britain has nowhere to go. In France, it is a lot less up itself than in the UK, but it still thinks in the CGT clichés of forty years ago. Italy is run by a banker. Greece is a colony of Brussels. The USA is busy interfering in the affairs of every place from Pakistan to Ukraine, but ruled at home by unelected technocrats working an empty hologram in the Oval Office from behind.
The opposition in political classes across the globe has stood by and gawped unthinkingly at the developing “Health”, “Climate”, “Food Supply” and “Rasputin” excuses for totalitarian actions that don’t follow science so much as invent phlogiston-filled New Normal Science in which up is across, down is stable, vaccine failure is super-infection and a drug trial is a show-trial.
It’s mostly been pulled off by concerted use of censorship.
The following personal example of censorious jackbooting is not Sample of One research, but rather a sample of 14,303 known loyal and recorded followers via one source or another.
My last post here was a pretty nasty attack on G7 gymnastics. WordPress told me that, once live, it would immediately be shared by 8,047 direct Slog followers. For once, I did nothing to merchandise it on Twitter….where it’s supposed to appear automatically on my timeline and that of my 4,011 followers there. I left both The Slog and Twitter alone for six hours.
The six hours produced 149 visits to the site. And seven 5-Star ratings.
So then I put my personal 1,628 mailing list into operation. (Note how tiny that is compared to 12,058 alleged messages being sent out by my social media and platform)
Tiny or not, over the next six hours the article’s hits went up by 866 with 23 comments.
So then I turned to merchandising the article among Twitter followers all of whom were supposed to have seen it already.
That has added another 1,077 hits, another 17 comments…and the 7 Five Star ratings have become 75 Five Star ratings. And trust me, I only just finished the merchandising…so those numbers will continue to rise.
In short, long before this exercise is finished – doing nothing but assuming contractual fulfilment – my platform, Twitter and Google produced 149 hits. That total, since my personal intervention, has gone up to 2,092. That represents roughly a 75% level of censorship. As for approval ratings, they multiplied some fifteen times. So all of those (at one level or another this study can’t hope to record exactly) committed fraud: simple as that.
Now the only way to digest this disgusting betrayal of Free Speech is to accept the fact that ( for example) 72 per cent of British voters think they still have it, 7.5 million Brits write a regular blog – so 72.5 million don’t, and right down at Underclass zero, they think Free Speech is a marketing gift you get for being perpetually needle-boosted.
So the act of blogging something is the usual 1in8 number: when we talk to the 7in8 about rampant censorship, our claim leaves them suspicious and clueless. The 0.03 per cent are of course exploiting this to the full.
One valedictory comment if I may. My early professional career involved training in market research (largely qualitative) and depth interviews conducted among the mass populace. The experience taught me three incredibly important lessons:
*The key skill in research is having the ability to spot when respondents are telling you social lies.
*People express opinions, but if as a manufacturer/retailer/policy-maker or entrepreneur, if you listen only to these opinions, you will go bankrupt in very short order.
*Harken not unto what they say, but focus instead on their behavioural track record.
Failure to observe these three simple rules is the reason why the 7in8ers believe the likes of Johnson, Macron, Zelenskyy, Fauci, Vallance, Whitty and Biden rather than those experienced practitioners who rightly point out that these lamentable dissemblers are full of phlogiston.
Never, ever listen to those who feel the need to tell you who they are and what they’re about. Real people show rather than tell.
The Slog 