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Please indulge me for a moment; I need to get this off my chest. There are a few things about our everyday life that just annoy the hell out of me. Here is a list, in no particular order:
1. Sloppy/inappropriate dress. People, circulating in public, who look as if they just rolled out of bed. Colors and patterns in the most abhorrent taste. A grown man, in an upscale restaurant, wearing a football jersey and those ridiculous three-quarter-length shorts that make him look like a toddler. Women wearing tights that show every nook and cranny of their (usually) disgusting physique. Fat women with clothing that emphasizes their most unattractive characteristics. 2. Bodily mutilation. Tattoos, piercings, and Lord knows what else. I’ll be writing a separate post about this in the near future. 3. Dull faces. You know, that catatonic expression. Many years in the making; now exacerbated by (a) the scamdemic, with its extended isolation, and vax-induced brain fog; and (b) social interaction taking place increasingly on line. 4. Uptalk. Enunciating a statement as if it were a question; constant rising intonation. Especially annoying on men. Makes them sound like little girls. 5. Substitutions for “you’re welcome.” These include “of course” and “no problem.” The other day, in a shop, a young lady (with all kinds of metal protruding from her face) was helpful, and I thanked her. The response: “Of course,” said with a look of feigned surprise, and a little artificial giggle. 6. No sense of humor. In the Before Times, one could usually engage in mildly amusing banter with random strangers. This has become increasingly difficult. 7. Constant fussing with phones. Two people sitting together in a restaurant, each absorbed in his phone. Sitting with someone who shows you a photo of every object that comes up in conversation, or feels compelled to “google” every topic right there on the spot. Related to this: the annoying assumption that everybody and their grandmother has a smart phone, texts, scans, etc. etc. “Just scan your blah-blah code into the reader.” When I inform them that I don’t even have a phone, I get the catatonic look. Thank heavens I grew up without cell phones and computers. 8. After paying in cash, cashier struggles to make change. Here is yet another result of the online/electronic lifestyle, not to mention substandard education. The computer (in whatever form) does all necessary calculations. Even worse: you approach the cashier with your bag of dog food, or whatever. “Can I get a phone number?” or “Are you a discount-club member?” Good grief. Can I just pay for the goddamn dog food? 9. Awful customer service. Or lack thereof. On the phone, the ubiquitous Filipina. Endless automated prompts that lead you around in a circle. 10. Terrible quality. Nothing seems to work quite right. As commenter Mary Contrary over at Samizdata put it, “the general enshittification of everything.” 11. Loud and obnoxious music. I go to the supermarket at seven in the morning to beat the crowds, and they have some demented rap music blasting from the loudspeakers. 12. Left-turn scofflaws. I’m waiting at a red light. It turns green, but I have to wait for a succession of cars in the oncoming left-turn lane, who are all turning left despite their signal being red. Often I see a convoy of up to four cars running the red light, one after the other. Please feel free to share your own pet peeves.
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In my recent post on Covid (12/3/24), I remarked that a calling card of the Left has always been the redefinition of terminology, so that words are transformed into a fundamentally altered, or even opposite, meaning. Revisiting this phenomenon, I was reminded of a story.
One day during the late 1980s, I was sitting in a café in Philadelphia, discussing current affairs with a wise old gentleman who had vast experience in the world of think tanks and public policy. We were lamenting the adoption by the city of some harebrained program championed by the usual nutjob Leftist coalition. We concluded that it was well-nigh impossible to challenge the move in a public forum because all of the keywords associated with the program were ingrained in the hivemind as positive: war on poverty, anti-discrimination, equal rights, empowerment, etc. My interlocutor, with a deep sigh, then proclaimed: “The Left owns the rhetoric.” Never were truer words spoken. We face the same problem today. The components of Leftist ideology are so infused in our language that we hardly notice it, to the degree that we often are unable to formulate an adequate response in our own minds. We become paralyzed, without knowing why. Consider, for example, the controversy surrounding the bathrooms at the Capitol in Washington, DC. A few members of Congress are bravely resisting the Alphabet freak show, and I applaud their efforts. But they are hamstrung by the lexicon itself because they engage in arguments about gender. Until recently, this word was almost exclusively a linguistic term, denoting an attribute of a noun: masculine, feminine, or neuter. When the subject was people (or animals), the operative word was sex. As in male or female. If you argue over “gender,” you have already conceded half the battle. Once this linguistic battle is lost, the door is open to a torrent of twisted Orwellian doublespeak. A good example is the mind-bending term gender-affirming care to describe the genital mutilation of children. A related sleight-of-hand is the use of the third-person plural, they, in place of the grammatically correct singular form, he or she. In addition to being a linguistic atrocity, this usage serves to blur the identification of people as male or female. The language now forces us all to speak of each other as androgynous beings. Chalk up another victory for the Left. Higher culture requires the ability to identify and analyze differences, great and subtle, between people, things, and concepts. This intellectual process used to be called discrimination. We all know what happened to the word. For decades already, noticing differences between people, once obligatory in educated circles, is taboo. A final example, and this one a bit more subtle: The use of the word planet instead of world. I am hearing this more and more. “Everyone on the planet knows that…” “They have the best sausage on the planet” “No one on the planet believes that…” etc. In all cases, up until very recently, the usage would have been “in the world” instead of “on the planet.” Planet denotes a hunk of rock, an inanimate object. It is a favorite word of the Climate-Industrial Complex. In contrast, world denotes people, nations, cultures, etc. A huge difference. When we use planet, we are already sucked halfway into the Green scam, without a single argument being made. In my recent post Intellectual Decay, Bitcoin Edition (11/23/24), I discussed the problem of subjective value, first as applied to money, and then to art and culture in general. I examined this issue in depth in an article I wrote in 2007 for American Thinker, entitled “Speaking Truth to Art.” I invite you to read the piece, as relevant now as it was then.
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Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. 
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