C.S. Lewis says it perfectly: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
That really is good. And apt. We live in fantasy times.
I watched a brief segment of the BBC today while at the dentist waiting room. The discussion was on immigration. The scale of the delusion among the commentators and guests was quite difficult to fathom.
All the standard tropes were trotted out and seemingly accepted; we desperately need many more immigrants, we rely on immigrant labour for crucial things, we must reconsider our approach to handling illegals and house and train them because we need them etc etc.
None of it conformed to reality. And yet there it was. Articulate people enthusiastic about something most of the world bans.
Question: Are there insurance and /or liability issues at play? Here in USA business owners fear being sued by the anxious snowflakes or the folks looking to financially gain from minor injury
Yeah, I was going to comment about that. Here in Belgium they took away most of the attractions from the public playgrounds, the towering slides and all - the ones that were great fun for the kids and were incidentally a good way for them to overcome their fear of heights - because the mayor was liable in the event of an accident. Now it's supposed to be safe but it's just a bore.
There's a balance to be had: a warning label on a box of rat poison, including what (if anything) to do in case of poisoning, is not a problem. A label on an inflatable toy stating that "This is not a lifebuoy" is. Or from the user's manual for my chainsaw: "Do not stop moving chain using your hand".
How about "Do not attempt to stop moving chain; cut power to engine in case of accident or emergency" instead?
In principle, I'm for removing things like helmet-laws for motorcycles or rails on dangerous roads, but in reality doing so would only cause idiots to harm and kill sensible and responsible people. A balance is needed, where the ruthless retard is made to suffer the consequences of their actions and normal people are encouraged to think first and assume responsibility of their actions /in advance to acting/.
Consequence and cost always matters more than intent, that's unavoidable and besides: intent is subjective ans as such cannot be known completely, only argued about, while consequence and cost are objective.
There's another reason for the safety-hysteria too, that you (or Morgoth) may not have considered:
Such a fence cost money. It must be produced or imported, then bought by the council or eq. authority, using OPM. Ideally, the safety measure should be impermanent, needing replacement or repairs at regular intervals ("updates"); this way, politicians in bed with local or even national or globalist (i.e. traitors to their nations) corporations can leech off of the public even more than they do via taxation.
F.e. the average cost for a road sign here ("Beware of horses crossing the road") is about 1 250:-/£90-£95, excluding the 25% over-the-counter VAT. Consider counting the number of signs you come across when popping down to the corner-store. That's excluding storage, delivery, the pole it's attached to, the cost of putting it into the street and repaving.
Money, money, must be funny, in a rich man's world...
I used to work in a government office with an industrial coffee machine that had a huge black and yellow sticker on it that said,"Safety glasses must be worn while operating this equipment." I could never quite tell if it was a joke or not.
The fencing you describe on Britain's streets is all over the place - I know of cities in Canada who have multiple "pylon contractors" who do nothing but place those orange cones around construction sites. The cones can stay there for months on end, redirecting normal traffic, while nothing actually gets done on said construction sites. It's maddening.
It could all just be bureaucratic insanity taking on a life of it's own. But it's hard not to wonder if it's part of a "death by a thousand cuts" ploy to increase levels of sheeple-ness. Honest to God, the fencing and barriers reminds me of the structures erected to guide livestock to the slaughter.
Was it the crafty department store designers who first started the trend towards mass population control with its velvet-lined traps leading to Santa Claus or was it Disneyland? The evidence of ever more intrusive barricades and devices to shuttle humans from one place to another is reminiscent of wildlife viaducts and zoos.
At Disneyland it was totally necessary. I remember waiting in one of those maze lines for an hour and a half at the then-new Matterhorn. Freeform line would not have worked. Ditto lift lines at ski areas.
So presumably, one can imagine little Timmy braving the ten-foot-high wall of flame in order to make every effort to get to the aforementioned assembly point.
Totally agree. Like clearing pigeons. Don't shoot them, just remove the food supply. Nature takes care of the rest. That's how you fix an infestation 😜
The petty bureaucrats and officious H&S officers got drunk on their new-found power during convid and have now metastasised. They are everywhere, and they can't let go.
You allude to it briefly—this exactly parallels the whole misinformation/disinformation/censorship tsunami.
I don't know about the UK, but a big reason for all those fences here in the US is liability. It's not that they're trying to protect us, they just don't want us to sue them.
It most certainly is. I think of bureaucracy as a side effect, not a necessity. Like barnacles on the keel of a boat, they need scraped off every now and then while leaving the vessel watertight. A specialist skill if you will.
Are they protecting us from ourselves? By implementing some illusion that if people think and act for themselves they’ll be in terrible danger? We don’t need government to cushion us from the human experience. Survival of the fittest has worked before, can we let it work now too please…
In Guatemala and Colombia a lot of places that would have rails and safety features in the states do not, and to such a degree that when we saw such, we’d joke that there must actually be something unsafe. .
Interesting piece. I wonder if this is a distinctly British phenomenon. I've spent a lot of time in the UK, mostly in Bristol, London, and Cardiff, and memories of the kind you took pictures of are indelible in my mind, I must admit.
It is not new, but the scale is relatively recent. I think it is a visual representation of what government has degenerated into. Control mechanisms primarily emerging from the anxious. What are hate speech laws if not an inability to manage emotions triggered by other people using words? They are just mental fences they control.
A fine observation, I think. Do you think these mental fences do, at least to some degree, coincide with what has been called the feminization of society? Or would you to say that something different is at work?
Many of these overly anal 'safety measures' that keep cropping up - especially somewhere where you just aren't expecting it and a brand new metal eyesore has appeared that wasn't there before - have annoyed me because they've been intrusively out of place, or made me feel mildly insulted, thinking (ffs what sort of mongs do they think we are!?) to myself for a long time.
I've thought at times that I might just be being more cynical than is warranted, but you've nailed it down here perfectly.
Funnily enough, at moments when I've shaken my head in mild exasperation at some unnecessary steel contraption and signage plonked there 'for our own safety', the word 'bureaucracy' has often sprung to mind too...
I can even visualise the individual bureaucrat responsible for their existence too; a pompous, laminated jobsworth whose personality is as interesting as a dead accountant in a brown suit busily reviewing and rubber-stamping their approval - not just figuratively with a signature - but with an actual rubber stamp of course, and the brief surge of self-importance and power at the official - and somehow very 'bureaucratic' sounding - 'clunk-smack' of the stamp hitting the paper.
C.S. Lewis says it perfectly: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I quite agree. When their conscience is clear then anything goes.
Great quote. Another one is Saul Bellow's “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
That really is good. And apt. We live in fantasy times.
I watched a brief segment of the BBC today while at the dentist waiting room. The discussion was on immigration. The scale of the delusion among the commentators and guests was quite difficult to fathom.
All the standard tropes were trotted out and seemingly accepted; we desperately need many more immigrants, we rely on immigrant labour for crucial things, we must reconsider our approach to handling illegals and house and train them because we need them etc etc.
None of it conformed to reality. And yet there it was. Articulate people enthusiastic about something most of the world bans.
Great insight. These anxious middling morons belong in a human zoo (to feel safe)… I’ll take the risks and stay wild.
Especially the road crossing. I accept the barriers may have a place in front of schools with very young kids, but not every junction.
A clown world.
Agreed!
Question: Are there insurance and /or liability issues at play? Here in USA business owners fear being sued by the anxious snowflakes or the folks looking to financially gain from minor injury
Yeah, I was going to comment about that. Here in Belgium they took away most of the attractions from the public playgrounds, the towering slides and all - the ones that were great fun for the kids and were incidentally a good way for them to overcome their fear of heights - because the mayor was liable in the event of an accident. Now it's supposed to be safe but it's just a bore.
Authority:
Big slides are dangerous! We need to make them safe and boring; think of the children!
Also authority:
https://youtube.com/shorts/nPvEmQjCph0?feature=shared
🤣
Quite possibly. It wouldn't surprise me.
I've always appreciated being warned to not immerse the plugged-in toaster in water. Such care for my safety from Morons.
I get that. My toaster oven had a sticker “don’t touch when hot”.
I am so grateful for that warning!
Disaster averted with a sticker! Impressive.
Ain’t it amazing?!
Even better, my boyfriend once bought a handgun that had a warning stamped on the barrel: "DANGEROUS IF USED IMPROPERLY" or something to that effect.
"...erosion in normal adult functioning."
Yes, exactly that is the issue.
There's a balance to be had: a warning label on a box of rat poison, including what (if anything) to do in case of poisoning, is not a problem. A label on an inflatable toy stating that "This is not a lifebuoy" is. Or from the user's manual for my chainsaw: "Do not stop moving chain using your hand".
How about "Do not attempt to stop moving chain; cut power to engine in case of accident or emergency" instead?
In principle, I'm for removing things like helmet-laws for motorcycles or rails on dangerous roads, but in reality doing so would only cause idiots to harm and kill sensible and responsible people. A balance is needed, where the ruthless retard is made to suffer the consequences of their actions and normal people are encouraged to think first and assume responsibility of their actions /in advance to acting/.
Consequence and cost always matters more than intent, that's unavoidable and besides: intent is subjective ans as such cannot be known completely, only argued about, while consequence and cost are objective.
There's another reason for the safety-hysteria too, that you (or Morgoth) may not have considered:
Such a fence cost money. It must be produced or imported, then bought by the council or eq. authority, using OPM. Ideally, the safety measure should be impermanent, needing replacement or repairs at regular intervals ("updates"); this way, politicians in bed with local or even national or globalist (i.e. traitors to their nations) corporations can leech off of the public even more than they do via taxation.
F.e. the average cost for a road sign here ("Beware of horses crossing the road") is about 1 250:-/£90-£95, excluding the 25% over-the-counter VAT. Consider counting the number of signs you come across when popping down to the corner-store. That's excluding storage, delivery, the pole it's attached to, the cost of putting it into the street and repaving.
Money, money, must be funny, in a rich man's world...
I used to work in a government office with an industrial coffee machine that had a huge black and yellow sticker on it that said,"Safety glasses must be worn while operating this equipment." I could never quite tell if it was a joke or not.
The fencing you describe on Britain's streets is all over the place - I know of cities in Canada who have multiple "pylon contractors" who do nothing but place those orange cones around construction sites. The cones can stay there for months on end, redirecting normal traffic, while nothing actually gets done on said construction sites. It's maddening.
It could all just be bureaucratic insanity taking on a life of it's own. But it's hard not to wonder if it's part of a "death by a thousand cuts" ploy to increase levels of sheeple-ness. Honest to God, the fencing and barriers reminds me of the structures erected to guide livestock to the slaughter.
I think it is unsupervised bureaucracy basically. They are often inefficient and useless anyway.
People are too timid and passive. That is my real worry. They don't get angry when they see the fencing or the cones. They question nothing.
Was it the crafty department store designers who first started the trend towards mass population control with its velvet-lined traps leading to Santa Claus or was it Disneyland? The evidence of ever more intrusive barricades and devices to shuttle humans from one place to another is reminiscent of wildlife viaducts and zoos.
It is like a zoo in a way, and our leaders resemble zoo keepers more and more each day.
At Disneyland it was totally necessary. I remember waiting in one of those maze lines for an hour and a half at the then-new Matterhorn. Freeform line would not have worked. Ditto lift lines at ski areas.
Yes. Of course. Without the extensive pens directing fun-seekers to Disney rides, there would certainly be murders and extreme violence.
Exactly. Mayhem and chaos.
Clearly they have too much money.
A co-culprit might be the liability lawsuit culture, and insurance company mini-hitlers, but that is nowhere near as bad in the UK as it is in the US.
It will play a part. But the culture has shifted. I maintain it is a tiny number pushing this.
The white pill is the people who burn and spray paint over the lenses of those horrid surveillance cameras you Britbongs have everywhere.
There is that. Few rifles, plenty of paint.
Excess of paint, but a lack of rifles...
Paintball guns may be the perfect middle ground! :D
Are you sure about that? I have never seen anything like that road crossing prison walk in the U.S.
It's ubiquitous in construction zones.
A recent example that springs to mind is my encounter with fire escape procedures at a heritage site comprised entirely of open fields.
I assume it involved the instruction - run away in any direction, lol.
It had the temerity to designate a fire meeting point.
So presumably, one can imagine little Timmy braving the ten-foot-high wall of flame in order to make every effort to get to the aforementioned assembly point.
Defund the government. That's the root solution to all this crap and so much more.
Totally agree. Like clearing pigeons. Don't shoot them, just remove the food supply. Nature takes care of the rest. That's how you fix an infestation 😜
The petty bureaucrats and officious H&S officers got drunk on their new-found power during convid and have now metastasised. They are everywhere, and they can't let go.
I agree. They got their glimpse of total obedience and that has become their Holy Grail.
You allude to it briefly—this exactly parallels the whole misinformation/disinformation/censorship tsunami.
I don't know about the UK, but a big reason for all those fences here in the US is liability. It's not that they're trying to protect us, they just don't want us to sue them.
It is definitely a factor for sure.
Just as the bureaucratic structure demands growth upon growth, they restrict and restrict our potential through control.
I am beginning to think that bureaucracy is one of the flywheels of society, causing inertia. With all the good and bad that can bring.
It most certainly is. I think of bureaucracy as a side effect, not a necessity. Like barnacles on the keel of a boat, they need scraped off every now and then while leaving the vessel watertight. A specialist skill if you will.
Are they protecting us from ourselves? By implementing some illusion that if people think and act for themselves they’ll be in terrible danger? We don’t need government to cushion us from the human experience. Survival of the fittest has worked before, can we let it work now too please…
In Guatemala and Colombia a lot of places that would have rails and safety features in the states do not, and to such a degree that when we saw such, we’d joke that there must actually be something unsafe. .
Interesting piece. I wonder if this is a distinctly British phenomenon. I've spent a lot of time in the UK, mostly in Bristol, London, and Cardiff, and memories of the kind you took pictures of are indelible in my mind, I must admit.
It is not new, but the scale is relatively recent. I think it is a visual representation of what government has degenerated into. Control mechanisms primarily emerging from the anxious. What are hate speech laws if not an inability to manage emotions triggered by other people using words? They are just mental fences they control.
A fine observation, I think. Do you think these mental fences do, at least to some degree, coincide with what has been called the feminization of society? Or would you to say that something different is at work?
Not sure it is feminization as such. But definitely risk aversion.
Although women generally dislike confrontation. So much of it could be that. Avoid disagreement.
This is bang on Spaceman!
Many of these overly anal 'safety measures' that keep cropping up - especially somewhere where you just aren't expecting it and a brand new metal eyesore has appeared that wasn't there before - have annoyed me because they've been intrusively out of place, or made me feel mildly insulted, thinking (ffs what sort of mongs do they think we are!?) to myself for a long time.
I've thought at times that I might just be being more cynical than is warranted, but you've nailed it down here perfectly.
Funnily enough, at moments when I've shaken my head in mild exasperation at some unnecessary steel contraption and signage plonked there 'for our own safety', the word 'bureaucracy' has often sprung to mind too...
I can even visualise the individual bureaucrat responsible for their existence too; a pompous, laminated jobsworth whose personality is as interesting as a dead accountant in a brown suit busily reviewing and rubber-stamping their approval - not just figuratively with a signature - but with an actual rubber stamp of course, and the brief surge of self-importance and power at the official - and somehow very 'bureaucratic' sounding - 'clunk-smack' of the stamp hitting the paper.
It is all bureaucracy for sure. People making decisions that do not affect them.
These eyesores are everywhere too. Nothing a bracing collapse won't fix.