Well, with few words you managed to transport me back to a region I lived in for many years in the States. Mostly rural, dairy farming long since gone, small cities, college towns, light industry. All the character and sense of "being home", in places where you could decompress, all that was gradually siphoned off by the optimizers, the efficiency consultants and small-time opportunists masquerading as "public servants". Young people, the ones with the most promise, moved on to some distant CareerLand without looking back. I'm quite a bit older than you. When I was coming of age, anyone willing to work -- which was virtually everyone -- could afford a cozy apartment and a big old gas-guzzling land yacht made in Detroit. One-income families able to own their own spacious homes. Virtually no crime relative to present dystopian conditions. Americans gave all that up without a whimper, seduced by every shiny, shabby lure dangled in front of their faces.
Roadside boxstores is an image many of us have learned to associate with American "architecture." Now visible everywhere of course. Even restaurants and bars and churches follow the same "efficient" design protocol. Just put up a box and use it for whatever, no need for external embellishment or any actual features that would make the building unique, just a big ass sign to let the punters know what goes on inside the box.
Along with the university professors who train them. Also: university education departments that churn our propagandists who impose their slanted version of reality that makes this all acceptable.
Heartbreaking. We've been through the exact same thing over here too. The towns emptied as industry moved first to the cities and then to Asia, farms shuttered and farmland turned to forests.
The leaders turned to rulers, and the rulers to despots and tyrants.
In the UK I feel like a stranger in a very strange land. I was using public transport one morning and there was not one language I understood, very unsettling.
A friend in Germany - a tall, pale, busty lass with blonde hair and blue eyes - told me that thrice now she's had some swarthy type approach her to say, "We're going to replace people who look like you" or something similar.
You may be right. The topic has so many parts to unravel, especially in Germany, where they are still hanging their heads over the Nazis and are constantly bending over backward to show "we're not like that!" The problem is that they are bending over forward and trying to make us Normies do the same. I don't think I'd enjoy a muslim crank up my backside, thankyouverymuch.
Somehow most of Europe (add Canada and much of the U.S. in there) have put the globalist loonies in high positions. Unfortunately they don't understand that this Muslim horde is no different from the prior one that conquered most of Europe.
I much prefer an enemy with a gun to a spineless friend. The survival of the West is a very near thing, and now we face population collapse as the Western girls won't get their pants off, get in the bed, and do their duty. At least, thank God, the productive Western men who want a family have the Filipinas. We just may make it™, but it's going to be close. (edited for typos)
Absolutely right, from what I've seen only Western women I've met willing to take their pants off to do their duty as you put it are French and German oddly enough. I've met a bunch of German women of late and French ones who are crazy for any and all Westerners, or have 1-2 kids already and talk enthusiastically about kid #3 & 4.
The rest just look down on everyone around them as though they were scum. That said yeah Filippinas are certainly along with Thais and Japanese women, rushing over to start families with Western-men, which is pretty heart-warming. I've also met some African women out here (mostly from Kenya & Nigeria), who have old Christian values, and whom are disgusted by liberalism and would happily take on Western-men, and whom whenever I talk to them SEETHE at the thought of Islam.
It is indeed going to be close, but as it has been said; nothing good is ever easy. And the Occident is good. Therefore we must be tested and we must challenge the odds.
I have noticed the Irish, the French and Japanese are standing up. I'm very partial to them, and to German youths now for doing their part by singing their songs and defying the invaders. Hope must be our buckler, Faith our sword and we must gather what friends and allies we must, and also renew our cultures/art and armour ourselves with our individual cultures/civilizations.
That represents my family to a tee: very plain, always armed, and ready for "either peace or war" - take your pick. That attitude has helped me quite a bit on the road to my dotage, but it's caused me a lot of trouble, too.
There's nothing worse than two men in a fight and only one knows it. Here in the States, the Dems know it. The ReBiblican pussies better figure it out.
My wife's father is pure Highland Scot - mainly from Clan Fraser. My favorite people and place, and the spirit of the Highland Scots lives on across the former British colonies. In the US, from Thomas Paine and the Scottish Highland warriors who taught General Washington guerilla warfare and thus enabled him to defeat the English (and got some revenge for Culloden in the process) down to the current day, there is still a fierce pride among the Scots, and more generally in the peoples of Europe. Look at Ireland - they are just the first to actively rebel against the globalist traitors. Now their plans are known it's only a matter of time.
I just don't see the peoples of Europe surrendering to Islam. The fight may be long, it may be bloody, but there is no doubt as to the outcome.
Cool! I’ve some Scots blood in my veins, mixed in with Irish & French! Mon frere, je vais examiner ton écusson avec joie!
I shall examine your coat with joy. Tbh, much of my own writing is centred around fantasy/mythology, but mostly around the notion of building a ‘Scottish-French LOTR Mythology’ of sorts.
I do wonder what a proper Scot (especially one from the noble Highlands, where I’ve left my heart countless times) such as yourself, might make of a mongrel’s writings and musings on our great legacy X)
Trudeau is bringing in 120,000 people *a month* into this country, the vast majority of them Indian gig economy slaves sleeping eight to a room in rapidly decaying suburban homes. To say Canada's future is dystopian is a vast understatement.
Not under this government. As I write these "students" are protesting across the country with the usual public-sector and menopausal white women supporting them. Trudeau and his junta won't do a damn thing, and major corporations love that sweet, sweet inexhaustible supply of cheap labour.
Correct. Both are the puppets of corporate largesse who need these brown wage slaves to increase market share, dividends, and fatten the portfolios of Boomers on their third rental property. Only Max Bernier and the PPC are even attempting to put forward a programme to reverse this insanity, but in typical fashion the mainstream media are painting him and his party as *this* close to electing Heinrich Himmler.
Wonderfully written! Reading your description of your hometown, I immediately know the feeling, even though my own hometown is in the American South, because it's the same thing everywhere. Regional distinctions have been obliterated, so that now only generational distinctions remain. Talking about how things have changed with a fellow Gen X-er is like what I imagine it is to be an expat and to run into someone else from your home country, except there's no homeland to return to. It may be some of the same street names and even the same buildings, but it's like a foreign country now, compared to what it used to be. So here we are, a whole generation of temporal nomads, feeling alienated by the fake and ghey mass-produced culture around us. I guess that experience itself is the one constant for our generation.
For a gen Z like myself, it's just wistful longing for something we hardly know. My hometown has changed too, a wonderful local bookstore was just replaced too. Apartments stand in the fields I played in. If people of all ages were real with themselves, they would feel the same, this ain't progress.
My Gen-Z son (17 years old) listens longingly to my descriptions of growing up in the 70s and 80s. He can't comprehend, despite our best efforts to provide a similar childhood, the freedom we enjoyed riding bikes everywhere, spending summer days outside, unsupervised, unattached to a "device," and ambling aimlessly with no particular schedule or goal.
For God's sake - and your sake and mine - vote. Vote like your life depends on it because it very likely does - and much, much more. November is our last chance, and at best I'm just hopeful.
I feel the same way as soon as I cross the border on my fairly regular trips back to Canada from the US.
The hectoring MTO signs, volume of and poor skill of bad drivers around the GTA, everyone is from somewhere in India or East Africa, and the indigenous population who still haven’t woken from the Covid stupor, all of it is immediately apparent and I hate it.
*Very* different. The houses you lived in and passed by have all been renovated back to single-family use by U of T gentry and the C-Suite class, very common to see Range Rovers, Porsches, Teslas and other posh cars in front of every house along Madison, Huron, etc. The Brunswick House and many of the old student bars are long-gone, all ramen joints and gluten-free vegan pet supply shops now. Honest Ed's and Markham Street have all been leveled for new apartment blocks advertising 500sq ft apartments for $3000/mo. It's not Yorkville, but far from the boho quadrant you knew or even I did when I was in uni (early to mid 90s).
Public housing now from what I can see. There may be some students there but I gather it's mostly long-term down-and-outs on some sort of assistance. Police cars are a fixture in front of the building.
Poignant and hilarious (the second paragraph was gold). Thank you for sharing bringing back fun memories.
My similar story; Left the hometown 40 years ago, lived life, married, had kids, grandkids, full career, occasionally visited, but never paid much attention. Now I'm back there regularly caring for my 100 yr old mother who insists to live alone. As I move about the town, now with 500% more people, a demographic shift of unbelievable proportions, and an ever more dysfunctional city government and healthcare system that makes so many things so much harder, it is hard to believe it was once a small Mayberry like farm town, that has turned into a sanctuary for pierced, tatted and purple haired millennial misfits and the central American diaspora. So odd.
The level of socially sanctioned self-harm (i.e. tattooing/piercings) along with a chronic state of altered mental status (i.e. being "stoned") are, to me, the most depressing features of our current condition.
I am 62 nearly 63 and the same thing has happened in Sydney and the suburbs. I also have memories of the Galaxy Book shop in Park St Sydney ( new but all sci fi ) and a similar shop in Balmain with a crusty old hippy couple running that one . No musical instrument stores in town anymore because hardly any kids learn a skill that doesn’t include an iPhone or tablet. The woke have also taken over everything with that little rainbow sticker everywhere its the “T+” part that is control of this shoving it down your throat part , because it’s so in your face , not in their own spaces and places like it was and no one cared who wasn’t gay . I feel you and have that same feeling of things are going to shit quicker than a diarrhoea sandwich. Hang in there, people can only take so much bullshit I am hoping… After Covid that conviction has crumbled down…. Self care is my priority now …
And, I would looking forward to it breaking a lot more eagerly if I thought we were only going to throw out the bath water and not the baby. But, I suspect that we are close to something like the collapse of the Soviet Union where the dignity and wellbeing of the masses went down the drain along with the ideology.
Visited my oldest sister in 2014 when she was getting married again, spent a couple of hours wandering around the city where I used to roam as a teen.
The good places were gone; the corporate places had multiplied, as paradoxically at it may seem given how a sterile avatar of unlife they are. We went for coffee (fika). She got a good laugh out of me ordering coffee. If you recall the old "coffe flavoured coffee, man"-skit, that was about it. Poor wage-slave serving in a plastic fantastic concentration camp-esque box.
There's change, as in slow, autonomous, spontaneous, natural change. And then there's what you describe which is change, lexically speaking, but only in the sense amputating a limb is change.
Synchronicity and serendipity consipired to have me listening to Film Threat (Chris Gore and Alan Ng) on Youtube talking about The Acolyte (Disney "Star Wars") when your post popped into the in-box; how very fitting.
The part that gets me in the corporate chains is how the people behind the counter are all middle aged browns. Time was, it was teenagers, who were just as surly and incompetent as the browns, but at least they were ours. You could banter with them.
Via the Office of Unemployment a business-owner may receive subsidies (lowered to no employment-tax f.e.) if he accepts to have a couple of insert-quota-and-group here.
Normally, non-white migrants, cripples or mentally retarded/mentally ill people.
(Imagine the reaction of arabs when they understand they are lumped in with retards, ability-wise... I've seen it happen, it is tragically hilarious and iconoclastically glorious in all its perfidy.)
Long version, with tangents and stuff:
The business-owner therefore only need one, maybe two, regular employees for the serious stuff like book-keeping, orders, et cetera, and can have the quota-hirelings to pick up the slack. Obviously, quality and such suffers but it lines the pockets of the business owner in the short run, so he's happy. And as none of the normal employment-laws apply (except OHSA-stuff), he can swap the hirelings out indefinitely.
The OoU is happy, since they can report record numbers of migrants getting "employed". The business owner is happy, he gets employees at a 2/3 discount. The migrant is happy since "working" makes it easier to attain residency/citizenship and also makes you qualified for unemployment compensation, and the politicians are happy because they can prance about playing at being a "humanitarian superpower".
Meanwhile, real unemployment is ca 17% for those of working age (18-67). For real swedes, it's 4%. For negroes, it's +60% (for somalis, sudanese and such it is over 80%; 100% for the women). For youths (18-25) born here but with non-white migrant parents, unemployment is +25% and rising.
Meanwhile, we are ca 8 000 busdrivers short, the same for truckers/lorry-drivers, ca 20 000 teachers short, thousands of nurses short, doctors - we have more admin staff than doctors in the health care sector. . .Kicker: in 1906, the ration between civil service admin and worker staff, all levels and kinds was 1:25. On average, one paper-pusher per 25 workers, and said paper-pusher was most often a worker 50+ years old who got admin-duty until retirement.
In 1980, the number of admin staff had increased times 20 since 1906. The number of workers by times 6. How it looks today, no-one wants to find out. The various unions for civil service clerks et cetera number over 60 000 members, with great political clout.
The civil services' workers are all unionised in one union, no matter their actual job, and that union is under total control of the Socialist Democrat party, who abuses the workers as if they were statare (a kind of corvée-system not abolished until 1945 in Sweden).
I don't know the specifics, but I strongly suspect that the government is putting its thumbs on the scales for immigrants. We import "Temporary" Foreign Workers (TFWs) by the 747-load, and employers love them because they're cheap. At this point, the taxis and fast food joints are basically all Indians. Gas stations and convenience stores, too; somehow, they've taken over that sector, and I strongly suspect this is thanks to state subsidies, tax breaks and the like.
Growth of admin is a cancer everywhere. It's led to economic sclerosis, inflated costs, slowed construction and service schedules. Useless eaters everywhere.
LMIA scams: Canada essentially pays for its own demographic replacement so hundreds more Tim Hortons and Subway shops in small towns can employ more indentured Indians to live eight to a room in houses owned by the Indian owners of said franchises. Trudeau seems to determined to destroy this country out of pure spite.
Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) . It's a document that an employer in Canada needs to get before hiring a foreign worker. A positive LMIA will show that there is a need for a foreign worker to fill the job and will also show that no Canadian worker or permanent resident is available to do the job.
But the con behind this is that Indian and foreign-owned franchises and other businesses place fake job ads on various job boards with ridiculous parameters and at salaries so low that no one will apply for them. So then what happens is these foreign-owned companies go to the government and say, well, we tried but whoops no takers! Say, how about paying 60 percent of the wage so I can hire some Indian "studying" for a "hotel management diploma" at one of the hundreds of diploma mills in the country, pay them less than minimum wage, warehouse them 8 to a room in one of the many shitty houses I own, and then staff them for far beyond their allotted 40 hour per-week limit?
Then, these "students" apply for permanent residence even after their permits have expired. When faced with deportation, they protest, knowing full well Trudeau and his pathetic minions, fearing the "racist" label, will pander to them, let them stay in the country, and allow them to sponsor their dozens of family members to milk the health care system dry. And yes, it's a Ponzi scheme because Boomers need to maintain their house prices to retire - Trudeau literally just said this - and for some reason Canadians won't have kids so of course we need half a million military-age Punjabi males arriving every quarter to pick up the slack. The result? Skyrocketing rents and housing costs across the country with the accompanying tent encampments in towns big and small.
So the equivalent of a Montreal a year, and next year, and the year after that, keep flooding in. Since Trudeau came in in 2015, he's imported nearly *twenty percent* of the current population. Something like one in five "Canadians" are not even citizens. This is why you can't even get a coffee in some yokel town like Burk's Falls Ontario without *everyone* serving you being some sullen Punjabi kid.
Beautiful, sad, and true. Your description of the bookstore sounds exactly like Phoenix Books in San Luis Obispo (college town), right down to the old hippie at the front counter. It's still in business, but I always wonder how much longer they'll be able to hang on. I was looking for a copy of The Odyssey recently and they didn't have one; the old hippie said "No one assigns it much these days."
God that's awful. We're going full Faranheit 451 on our literary heritage.
Younger friend reported being assigned a passage from the Iliad in a college course. Not even the whole thing, mind you. She described with horror how her classmates did nothing but complain about how it was sexist or something.
The universities just need to be burned to the ground at this point. They serve no function.
Two of my kids attended Hillsdale College which is one of the remaining colleges with a core and still requires reading the "classics." You can bet I saved all the books. I am homeschooling my youngest after seeing during Covid how badly corrupted schools are, and this past year I simply assigned him books to read. Actual books. No electronic copies. Hard copies, turn the pages, take notes, answer questions. He has loved it (but he has a love of language and music and art so he might march to a different drummer than most kids his age).
You better believe it! There's some strange little tin off worlders around. We're not sure where they're from or what they want, but we wish they'd go back. 👽
God damn you. Stop it. You hear me? Stop it. I just got my oldest and best friend out of bed to ask him if he remembered driving my old VW together along winding country roads to our college 7-1/2 hours away and stopping by an old junk store full of every kind of stuff you ever heard of. Nothing was newer than forty years old, and that was in 1972. The grizzled old man who ran the place was impressed that a wet-behind-the-ears kid knew so many of the tools; I didn't bother to tell him I grew up on a subsistence farm in the booger-woods of West-By-God Virginia and had used a lot of them.
He pulled out a rolled paper tube about half the diameter of a drinking straw, filled with a black substance. "If you know what this is, I'll give it to you."
"It's a squib. They used to use them in the coal mines to set off black powder."
I sure wish I knew where my squib was. I put it in a book in my parents' house, in which after their deaths I subsequently and very foolishly let my niece and her various "men" live. She threw out all the old books, Goddamn her soul. No respect for old times, old people, old ways. Just wants to live there like a rat, with her pedophile husband (I know this for an ironclad fact.) and her retarded 20-year-old daughter who pisses in the upstairs bedroom floor every night of her life, and it drains through the ceiling. My grandpa built that house out of chestnut in 1890 with his bare hands and no power tools and now it's rotting to dust. Fuck them all.
Now see what you did? Now I'm as bummed-out about the past as you are. I still think you are one fascinating sonofabitch, though.
Your description of Gay Pride Month was superbly and sublimely vicious. I mean that as a compliment. I wish I had written it, and I have written some snarky material about that movement.
A nice little piece, really – makes me want to go back to my own stomping grounds back in New Zealand. Left it to live in a different kind of decay in Budapest.
Course I reckon it might not inspire the same reaction, yet honestly, I just don’t know. The Western world I grew up in and saw so much of – not just NZ but the UK and Aus, too – is a lost relic of a bygone era. Is this to be our fate, to witness the slow decay of the greatest civilisations built on earth?
Or could it just be that we’re getting too old?
Sometimes it’s hard to know. Thanks for the piece; it was a nice read. :)
No, it isn't, that's true. And we must remember that there's plenty of good change in the world, nay? At least I try to make myself remember. It's not always easy.
Budapest is a fantastic city – among the best I've lived in, and I've lived in many. A fine place to visit and dwell for many a Westerner, despite any problems Hungary might have. The situation is a little more complicated than some would have you believe.
Truth is, I could write an essay about it and probably will; just not here and now. Wouldn't want to bore anyone, you know? If, for some reason, you're interested, watch out for the Hun's coming, he'll do it justice, I'm sure of it!
Oh, and if you ever find yourself these ways, hit me up – I'll buy you a beer.
Well, with few words you managed to transport me back to a region I lived in for many years in the States. Mostly rural, dairy farming long since gone, small cities, college towns, light industry. All the character and sense of "being home", in places where you could decompress, all that was gradually siphoned off by the optimizers, the efficiency consultants and small-time opportunists masquerading as "public servants". Young people, the ones with the most promise, moved on to some distant CareerLand without looking back. I'm quite a bit older than you. When I was coming of age, anyone willing to work -- which was virtually everyone -- could afford a cozy apartment and a big old gas-guzzling land yacht made in Detroit. One-income families able to own their own spacious homes. Virtually no crime relative to present dystopian conditions. Americans gave all that up without a whimper, seduced by every shiny, shabby lure dangled in front of their faces.
The efficiency optimizers with MBAs are a plague upon the land. Locusts in human form.
Roadside boxstores is an image many of us have learned to associate with American "architecture." Now visible everywhere of course. Even restaurants and bars and churches follow the same "efficient" design protocol. Just put up a box and use it for whatever, no need for external embellishment or any actual features that would make the building unique, just a big ass sign to let the punters know what goes on inside the box.
Late 20C architecture is terrible. None of it is worth preserving. I suspect in the coming years we'll dismantle all of it.
I would love to know your reasons for optimism!
Pendulums swing back.
Along with the university professors who train them. Also: university education departments that churn our propagandists who impose their slanted version of reality that makes this all acceptable.
Heartbreaking. We've been through the exact same thing over here too. The towns emptied as industry moved first to the cities and then to Asia, farms shuttered and farmland turned to forests.
The leaders turned to rulers, and the rulers to despots and tyrants.
Same story everywhere.
In the UK I feel like a stranger in a very strange land. I was using public transport one morning and there was not one language I understood, very unsettling.
A friend in Germany - a tall, pale, busty lass with blonde hair and blue eyes - told me that thrice now she's had some swarthy type approach her to say, "We're going to replace people who look like you" or something similar.
They all believe this.
Not gonna happen, Germany's begun to wake up and the polls and votes are in. I think the tide is changing, if anything the scum will soon be deported.
You may be right. The topic has so many parts to unravel, especially in Germany, where they are still hanging their heads over the Nazis and are constantly bending over backward to show "we're not like that!" The problem is that they are bending over forward and trying to make us Normies do the same. I don't think I'd enjoy a muslim crank up my backside, thankyouverymuch.
Somehow most of Europe (add Canada and much of the U.S. in there) have put the globalist loonies in high positions. Unfortunately they don't understand that this Muslim horde is no different from the prior one that conquered most of Europe.
I much prefer an enemy with a gun to a spineless friend. The survival of the West is a very near thing, and now we face population collapse as the Western girls won't get their pants off, get in the bed, and do their duty. At least, thank God, the productive Western men who want a family have the Filipinas. We just may make it™, but it's going to be close. (edited for typos)
Absolutely right, from what I've seen only Western women I've met willing to take their pants off to do their duty as you put it are French and German oddly enough. I've met a bunch of German women of late and French ones who are crazy for any and all Westerners, or have 1-2 kids already and talk enthusiastically about kid #3 & 4.
The rest just look down on everyone around them as though they were scum. That said yeah Filippinas are certainly along with Thais and Japanese women, rushing over to start families with Western-men, which is pretty heart-warming. I've also met some African women out here (mostly from Kenya & Nigeria), who have old Christian values, and whom are disgusted by liberalism and would happily take on Western-men, and whom whenever I talk to them SEETHE at the thought of Islam.
It is indeed going to be close, but as it has been said; nothing good is ever easy. And the Occident is good. Therefore we must be tested and we must challenge the odds.
I have noticed the Irish, the French and Japanese are standing up. I'm very partial to them, and to German youths now for doing their part by singing their songs and defying the invaders. Hope must be our buckler, Faith our sword and we must gather what friends and allies we must, and also renew our cultures/art and armour ourselves with our individual cultures/civilizations.
I claim Highlander blood and as my father said, I ain't got quittin' sense. Our clan coat of arms is revealing:
https://www.scotclans.com/blogs/clans-g/gunn-crest-coats-of-arms
That represents my family to a tee: very plain, always armed, and ready for "either peace or war" - take your pick. That attitude has helped me quite a bit on the road to my dotage, but it's caused me a lot of trouble, too.
There's nothing worse than two men in a fight and only one knows it. Here in the States, the Dems know it. The ReBiblican pussies better figure it out.
My wife's father is pure Highland Scot - mainly from Clan Fraser. My favorite people and place, and the spirit of the Highland Scots lives on across the former British colonies. In the US, from Thomas Paine and the Scottish Highland warriors who taught General Washington guerilla warfare and thus enabled him to defeat the English (and got some revenge for Culloden in the process) down to the current day, there is still a fierce pride among the Scots, and more generally in the peoples of Europe. Look at Ireland - they are just the first to actively rebel against the globalist traitors. Now their plans are known it's only a matter of time.
I just don't see the peoples of Europe surrendering to Islam. The fight may be long, it may be bloody, but there is no doubt as to the outcome.
Cool! I’ve some Scots blood in my veins, mixed in with Irish & French! Mon frere, je vais examiner ton écusson avec joie!
I shall examine your coat with joy. Tbh, much of my own writing is centred around fantasy/mythology, but mostly around the notion of building a ‘Scottish-French LOTR Mythology’ of sorts.
I do wonder what a proper Scot (especially one from the noble Highlands, where I’ve left my heart countless times) such as yourself, might make of a mongrel’s writings and musings on our great legacy X)
Indeed I had a recent experience like that in Manchester.
I dread to think what’s it going to be like in 10 years.
Think about 30 years from now; it's more dreary still.
I used to think that to. But I now think it’s going to be much sooner.
The Balkanisation of the UK major cities and towns is underway.
Manchesters satellite towns of Oldham , Rochdale, Bury are a perfect example of this.
Bar perhaps Farage not one politician has mentioned this huge social change/upheaval in the sham / banana republic election we’re currently suffering.
Trudeau is bringing in 120,000 people *a month* into this country, the vast majority of them Indian gig economy slaves sleeping eight to a room in rapidly decaying suburban homes. To say Canada's future is dystopian is a vast understatement.
Counterpoint: if we can import them that fast, we can deport them at least that fast.
Channeling the horndog, Bill Clinton: GO, BABY!
Well said!
Not under this government. As I write these "students" are protesting across the country with the usual public-sector and menopausal white women supporting them. Trudeau and his junta won't do a damn thing, and major corporations love that sweet, sweet inexhaustible supply of cheap labour.
Oh, there's no way Trudeau will deport anyone. Or Poilievre for that matter.
Correct. Both are the puppets of corporate largesse who need these brown wage slaves to increase market share, dividends, and fatten the portfolios of Boomers on their third rental property. Only Max Bernier and the PPC are even attempting to put forward a programme to reverse this insanity, but in typical fashion the mainstream media are painting him and his party as *this* close to electing Heinrich Himmler.
Wonderfully written! Reading your description of your hometown, I immediately know the feeling, even though my own hometown is in the American South, because it's the same thing everywhere. Regional distinctions have been obliterated, so that now only generational distinctions remain. Talking about how things have changed with a fellow Gen X-er is like what I imagine it is to be an expat and to run into someone else from your home country, except there's no homeland to return to. It may be some of the same street names and even the same buildings, but it's like a foreign country now, compared to what it used to be. So here we are, a whole generation of temporal nomads, feeling alienated by the fake and ghey mass-produced culture around us. I guess that experience itself is the one constant for our generation.
Yeah it's the same everywhere.
The past is a foreign country. And these days, a better one.
For a gen Z like myself, it's just wistful longing for something we hardly know. My hometown has changed too, a wonderful local bookstore was just replaced too. Apartments stand in the fields I played in. If people of all ages were real with themselves, they would feel the same, this ain't progress.
It's vandalism.
My Gen-Z son (17 years old) listens longingly to my descriptions of growing up in the 70s and 80s. He can't comprehend, despite our best efforts to provide a similar childhood, the freedom we enjoyed riding bikes everywhere, spending summer days outside, unsupervised, unattached to a "device," and ambling aimlessly with no particular schedule or goal.
You know the greeting for your fellow expat:
"Next year in [insert your home nation here]"
If the jews could do it, so can any westerner.
“Next year, in 1985!” Who knows? Maybe Doc and Marty will scoop me up in the time machine.
For God's sake - and your sake and mine - vote. Vote like your life depends on it because it very likely does - and much, much more. November is our last chance, and at best I'm just hopeful.
Military recruiting centre turning into ‘new arrivals’ centre. Ironic, symbolic, sad.
I stood there for a couple of minutes marveling at the symbolic perfection.
Anal Ramadan! Still can't stop laughing. Spot on there. Deserves a meme:
https://patrick.net/post/1345598/2022-06-10-national-boycott-the-pedophilia-flag?start=73#comment-2071826
Ramadanal for short
Ha!
I feel the same way as soon as I cross the border on my fairly regular trips back to Canada from the US.
The hectoring MTO signs, volume of and poor skill of bad drivers around the GTA, everyone is from somewhere in India or East Africa, and the indigenous population who still haven’t woken from the Covid stupor, all of it is immediately apparent and I hate it.
Toronto in particular is a tumor. One that is metastasizing across the country.
Live near Yonge and Bloor: can confirm.
What's the Annex area like now? I used to live on Madison Avenue in the early to mid-70's.
*Very* different. The houses you lived in and passed by have all been renovated back to single-family use by U of T gentry and the C-Suite class, very common to see Range Rovers, Porsches, Teslas and other posh cars in front of every house along Madison, Huron, etc. The Brunswick House and many of the old student bars are long-gone, all ramen joints and gluten-free vegan pet supply shops now. Honest Ed's and Markham Street have all been leveled for new apartment blocks advertising 500sq ft apartments for $3000/mo. It's not Yorkville, but far from the boho quadrant you knew or even I did when I was in uni (early to mid 90s).
I could never see the sense of chopping up those beautiful old homes. I'm glad they have someone taking care of them now.
Is Rochdale still housing students?
Public housing now from what I can see. There may be some students there but I gather it's mostly long-term down-and-outs on some sort of assistance. Police cars are a fixture in front of the building.
What a shit show.
I hear you about the people. You'd think we were under chemical attack or something. Oh wait.
As for Bangladesh, it's infamous.
Driving is more IQ loaded than most are aware of (not James Thompson though, who accounts for it in his famour The 7 Tribes of Intellect).
Poignant and hilarious (the second paragraph was gold). Thank you for sharing bringing back fun memories.
My similar story; Left the hometown 40 years ago, lived life, married, had kids, grandkids, full career, occasionally visited, but never paid much attention. Now I'm back there regularly caring for my 100 yr old mother who insists to live alone. As I move about the town, now with 500% more people, a demographic shift of unbelievable proportions, and an ever more dysfunctional city government and healthcare system that makes so many things so much harder, it is hard to believe it was once a small Mayberry like farm town, that has turned into a sanctuary for pierced, tatted and purple haired millennial misfits and the central American diaspora. So odd.
The wildlife on the street is a whole other subject that I didn't have the time to get into.
Maybe next time, pretty please?😀
The level of socially sanctioned self-harm (i.e. tattooing/piercings) along with a chronic state of altered mental status (i.e. being "stoned") are, to me, the most depressing features of our current condition.
I am 62 nearly 63 and the same thing has happened in Sydney and the suburbs. I also have memories of the Galaxy Book shop in Park St Sydney ( new but all sci fi ) and a similar shop in Balmain with a crusty old hippy couple running that one . No musical instrument stores in town anymore because hardly any kids learn a skill that doesn’t include an iPhone or tablet. The woke have also taken over everything with that little rainbow sticker everywhere its the “T+” part that is control of this shoving it down your throat part , because it’s so in your face , not in their own spaces and places like it was and no one cared who wasn’t gay . I feel you and have that same feeling of things are going to shit quicker than a diarrhoea sandwich. Hang in there, people can only take so much bullshit I am hoping… After Covid that conviction has crumbled down…. Self care is my priority now …
One way or another, this decay and delirium can't last much longer.
(I hope)
No, this woke wave is pretty close to cresting.
And, I would looking forward to it breaking a lot more eagerly if I thought we were only going to throw out the bath water and not the baby. But, I suspect that we are close to something like the collapse of the Soviet Union where the dignity and wellbeing of the masses went down the drain along with the ideology.
We're definitely entering the late Brezhnev era.
I feel better after reading this. There really is not much to return to in the "hometown". At least I know I am not alone.
Could sing the chorus to this tune, I could.
Visited my oldest sister in 2014 when she was getting married again, spent a couple of hours wandering around the city where I used to roam as a teen.
The good places were gone; the corporate places had multiplied, as paradoxically at it may seem given how a sterile avatar of unlife they are. We went for coffee (fika). She got a good laugh out of me ordering coffee. If you recall the old "coffe flavoured coffee, man"-skit, that was about it. Poor wage-slave serving in a plastic fantastic concentration camp-esque box.
There's change, as in slow, autonomous, spontaneous, natural change. And then there's what you describe which is change, lexically speaking, but only in the sense amputating a limb is change.
Synchronicity and serendipity consipired to have me listening to Film Threat (Chris Gore and Alan Ng) on Youtube talking about The Acolyte (Disney "Star Wars") when your post popped into the in-box; how very fitting.
The part that gets me in the corporate chains is how the people behind the counter are all middle aged browns. Time was, it was teenagers, who were just as surly and incompetent as the browns, but at least they were ours. You could banter with them.
Possibly, Canada has a similar system to Sweden?
Short version:
Via the Office of Unemployment a business-owner may receive subsidies (lowered to no employment-tax f.e.) if he accepts to have a couple of insert-quota-and-group here.
Normally, non-white migrants, cripples or mentally retarded/mentally ill people.
(Imagine the reaction of arabs when they understand they are lumped in with retards, ability-wise... I've seen it happen, it is tragically hilarious and iconoclastically glorious in all its perfidy.)
Long version, with tangents and stuff:
The business-owner therefore only need one, maybe two, regular employees for the serious stuff like book-keeping, orders, et cetera, and can have the quota-hirelings to pick up the slack. Obviously, quality and such suffers but it lines the pockets of the business owner in the short run, so he's happy. And as none of the normal employment-laws apply (except OHSA-stuff), he can swap the hirelings out indefinitely.
The OoU is happy, since they can report record numbers of migrants getting "employed". The business owner is happy, he gets employees at a 2/3 discount. The migrant is happy since "working" makes it easier to attain residency/citizenship and also makes you qualified for unemployment compensation, and the politicians are happy because they can prance about playing at being a "humanitarian superpower".
Meanwhile, real unemployment is ca 17% for those of working age (18-67). For real swedes, it's 4%. For negroes, it's +60% (for somalis, sudanese and such it is over 80%; 100% for the women). For youths (18-25) born here but with non-white migrant parents, unemployment is +25% and rising.
Meanwhile, we are ca 8 000 busdrivers short, the same for truckers/lorry-drivers, ca 20 000 teachers short, thousands of nurses short, doctors - we have more admin staff than doctors in the health care sector. . .Kicker: in 1906, the ration between civil service admin and worker staff, all levels and kinds was 1:25. On average, one paper-pusher per 25 workers, and said paper-pusher was most often a worker 50+ years old who got admin-duty until retirement.
In 1980, the number of admin staff had increased times 20 since 1906. The number of workers by times 6. How it looks today, no-one wants to find out. The various unions for civil service clerks et cetera number over 60 000 members, with great political clout.
The civil services' workers are all unionised in one union, no matter their actual job, and that union is under total control of the Socialist Democrat party, who abuses the workers as if they were statare (a kind of corvée-system not abolished until 1945 in Sweden).
End of line.
I don't know the specifics, but I strongly suspect that the government is putting its thumbs on the scales for immigrants. We import "Temporary" Foreign Workers (TFWs) by the 747-load, and employers love them because they're cheap. At this point, the taxis and fast food joints are basically all Indians. Gas stations and convenience stores, too; somehow, they've taken over that sector, and I strongly suspect this is thanks to state subsidies, tax breaks and the like.
Growth of admin is a cancer everywhere. It's led to economic sclerosis, inflated costs, slowed construction and service schedules. Useless eaters everywhere.
LMIA scams: Canada essentially pays for its own demographic replacement so hundreds more Tim Hortons and Subway shops in small towns can employ more indentured Indians to live eight to a room in houses owned by the Indian owners of said franchises. Trudeau seems to determined to destroy this country out of pure spite.
What's LMIA?
The entire country is a real estate ponzi designed to funnel wealth to a nonproductive elite at the expense of everyone else.
Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) . It's a document that an employer in Canada needs to get before hiring a foreign worker. A positive LMIA will show that there is a need for a foreign worker to fill the job and will also show that no Canadian worker or permanent resident is available to do the job.
But the con behind this is that Indian and foreign-owned franchises and other businesses place fake job ads on various job boards with ridiculous parameters and at salaries so low that no one will apply for them. So then what happens is these foreign-owned companies go to the government and say, well, we tried but whoops no takers! Say, how about paying 60 percent of the wage so I can hire some Indian "studying" for a "hotel management diploma" at one of the hundreds of diploma mills in the country, pay them less than minimum wage, warehouse them 8 to a room in one of the many shitty houses I own, and then staff them for far beyond their allotted 40 hour per-week limit?
Then, these "students" apply for permanent residence even after their permits have expired. When faced with deportation, they protest, knowing full well Trudeau and his pathetic minions, fearing the "racist" label, will pander to them, let them stay in the country, and allow them to sponsor their dozens of family members to milk the health care system dry. And yes, it's a Ponzi scheme because Boomers need to maintain their house prices to retire - Trudeau literally just said this - and for some reason Canadians won't have kids so of course we need half a million military-age Punjabi males arriving every quarter to pick up the slack. The result? Skyrocketing rents and housing costs across the country with the accompanying tent encampments in towns big and small.
So the equivalent of a Montreal a year, and next year, and the year after that, keep flooding in. Since Trudeau came in in 2015, he's imported nearly *twenty percent* of the current population. Something like one in five "Canadians" are not even citizens. This is why you can't even get a coffee in some yokel town like Burk's Falls Ontario without *everyone* serving you being some sullen Punjabi kid.
Here at least most of the teenagers were friendly.
How are they getting all these jobs? In Canada, virtually all service jobs are filled by these brown misfits..
Beautiful, sad, and true. Your description of the bookstore sounds exactly like Phoenix Books in San Luis Obispo (college town), right down to the old hippie at the front counter. It's still in business, but I always wonder how much longer they'll be able to hang on. I was looking for a copy of The Odyssey recently and they didn't have one; the old hippie said "No one assigns it much these days."
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/03/e5/83/05/phoenix-books.jpg
God that's awful. We're going full Faranheit 451 on our literary heritage.
Younger friend reported being assigned a passage from the Iliad in a college course. Not even the whole thing, mind you. She described with horror how her classmates did nothing but complain about how it was sexist or something.
The universities just need to be burned to the ground at this point. They serve no function.
Two of my kids attended Hillsdale College which is one of the remaining colleges with a core and still requires reading the "classics." You can bet I saved all the books. I am homeschooling my youngest after seeing during Covid how badly corrupted schools are, and this past year I simply assigned him books to read. Actual books. No electronic copies. Hard copies, turn the pages, take notes, answer questions. He has loved it (but he has a love of language and music and art so he might march to a different drummer than most kids his age).
I was always under the assumption that you originally came from Mars?
Ausländer
Takk
Jon
Even Mars has these issues.
You better believe it! There's some strange little tin off worlders around. We're not sure where they're from or what they want, but we wish they'd go back. 👽
Tars Tarkis was my favourite character in the books ( the film version was hmmm ) :)
God damn you. Stop it. You hear me? Stop it. I just got my oldest and best friend out of bed to ask him if he remembered driving my old VW together along winding country roads to our college 7-1/2 hours away and stopping by an old junk store full of every kind of stuff you ever heard of. Nothing was newer than forty years old, and that was in 1972. The grizzled old man who ran the place was impressed that a wet-behind-the-ears kid knew so many of the tools; I didn't bother to tell him I grew up on a subsistence farm in the booger-woods of West-By-God Virginia and had used a lot of them.
He pulled out a rolled paper tube about half the diameter of a drinking straw, filled with a black substance. "If you know what this is, I'll give it to you."
"It's a squib. They used to use them in the coal mines to set off black powder."
I sure wish I knew where my squib was. I put it in a book in my parents' house, in which after their deaths I subsequently and very foolishly let my niece and her various "men" live. She threw out all the old books, Goddamn her soul. No respect for old times, old people, old ways. Just wants to live there like a rat, with her pedophile husband (I know this for an ironclad fact.) and her retarded 20-year-old daughter who pisses in the upstairs bedroom floor every night of her life, and it drains through the ceiling. My grandpa built that house out of chestnut in 1890 with his bare hands and no power tools and now it's rotting to dust. Fuck them all.
Now see what you did? Now I'm as bummed-out about the past as you are. I still think you are one fascinating sonofabitch, though.
Your description of Gay Pride Month was superbly and sublimely vicious. I mean that as a compliment. I wish I had written it, and I have written some snarky material about that movement.
Man, I wasn't even trying to unload on that pageant of perversion. You should see what I say when I'm angry.
We need to make gay gay again.
We need to make closets in again.
Pure gold. Check out my stuff if you like:
https://jcbourque.substack.com/
A nice little piece, really – makes me want to go back to my own stomping grounds back in New Zealand. Left it to live in a different kind of decay in Budapest.
Course I reckon it might not inspire the same reaction, yet honestly, I just don’t know. The Western world I grew up in and saw so much of – not just NZ but the UK and Aus, too – is a lost relic of a bygone era. Is this to be our fate, to witness the slow decay of the greatest civilisations built on earth?
Or could it just be that we’re getting too old?
Sometimes it’s hard to know. Thanks for the piece; it was a nice read. :)
Change isn't necessarily bad. Nothing lasts forever.
But I would not mind some good change, for a change.
I hear good things about Budapest.
No, it isn't, that's true. And we must remember that there's plenty of good change in the world, nay? At least I try to make myself remember. It's not always easy.
Budapest is a fantastic city – among the best I've lived in, and I've lived in many. A fine place to visit and dwell for many a Westerner, despite any problems Hungary might have. The situation is a little more complicated than some would have you believe.
Truth is, I could write an essay about it and probably will; just not here and now. Wouldn't want to bore anyone, you know? If, for some reason, you're interested, watch out for the Hun's coming, he'll do it justice, I'm sure of it!
Oh, and if you ever find yourself these ways, hit me up – I'll buy you a beer.
I might just do that some time.
Obviously, you're American/ Canadian/ English/ French/ Scottish/ Irish/ German/ Swedish. Circle one.
But definitely not Hungarian.
As an Indo-European, I can confirm that I am neither Finnish nor Hungarian.
Different language tree
They be
Before or after last Ice age retreated?
I myself believe my ancestors came from Doggerland
Jon