Y’know FinDom? That thing where “successful” dudes give up their credit card deetsi to random, if highly charismatic, chicks online? A bit perverse eh? Well, yea sure it is, but at least the “subs” involved don’t go around proudly advertising their weakness and degeneracy. Unlike, y’know, pet owners?
As you’ve surely noticed over the past few decades, insidiously sweeping our fattening, aging Western World is a trend that has seen some cats but A LOT OF DOGSii rise well above their proper submissive societal stations. With the cruelest (and cutest) of “switch“-es, a staggering numbers of potential human parents have been, how shall we say, PetDom‘d into becoming “fur-mommies” and “fur-daddies.” And they’re public about it too!iii
For all this lack of shame, you might argue that dogs and cats have never had it better. And sure, I might concede that point, even ignoring for a moment the extreme societal elevation of cats to near-diety status in Ancient Egypt, to the point that killing a cat would result in the offender being put to death (and you thought Hammurabi’s Code was strict for architects!), or the similar elevation of dogs in Ancient Celtic society, but this doesn’t diminish the impact of the broader phenomenon, viz. pet prioritisation today is at levels globally unknown in living memory.
Though speaking of houses, your humble author certainly isn’t trying to throw stones in glass houses because even our own family home isn’t immune from these curious (and increasing?) societal pressures and norms! Indeed, our newest family member – the only other girl in our house who isn’t The Girl – is our little feline friend Peach, who joined our family late last year while I was out-of-town on a business trip in Boston. How convenient! Of course, I was still “asked” for “approval,” which I “granted,” but mainly because I could sense the missing gap in the family’s dynamic (deflectors are great!) as well as the fact that “we” were kinda “done” having kidsiv but still had some unfinished (or unrequited) drives to nurture the near-helpless.
Of course, after our last cat was eaten by a coyote ran away to live with a nice old lady somewhere,v there was still some scar tissue to work through, so when “we” decided it was time for a new cat, “we” also decided that our new furry friend should be an *indoor* cat, not an outdoor cat, unlike her dearly departed predecessor. Deal! Right?? Well, throughout the wicked winter months typical of the Canadian Prairies, the temptation to escape the cozy confines of our mid-century suburban bungalow was ~0, so we had zero issues, and Peach proved to be an angel! Cute, soft, quiet, and tolerant of considerable abuse from our boys.
But the honeymoon phase wasn’t to last! So as spring turned to summer and the robins started nesting right outside of Peach’s window perch,vi the warm, long-day’d sun radiated our driveway and gardens to the point that even the least curious cat in the world couldn’t help but poke her nose outside. Of course, as a protective parent, The Girl branded this curiousity as “escaping” and soon recruited our vigilant Spartan to stand guard at the front door whenever it opened, which he has done and continues to do unquestioningly, like all great soldiers.
Of course, per Russ Roberts, eternal vigiliance might work in theory, but in practice less so! So out the door and up a tree (or under our neighbour’s deck) has Peach “escaped” on a couple of occasions now, perhaps once a month from April onwards. In early July she even managed to sneak out my office window, which my farm-boy father had opened for fresh air and ventilation on a hot summer’s evening while watching out boys, quite in spite of our most excellent air conditioning system. In normal summers, this open window wouldn’t have provided the same avenue for “escape”, but this year we didn’t yet have the insect screen installed because it’d been so dry and we’d had hardly any mosquitoes.
Either way, now Pavlovianly associating my office door with freedom, Peach has recently been keen to assert her DOMINATION by peeing on said door about once a week, communicating in no uncertain terms that she’s had quite enough of this “indoor” business thankyouverymuch and would rather prefer to spend her beautiful summer afternoons chasing birds in the backyard if that was quite alright with everyone.
And y’know it’s quite alright with me! Growing up, our family home had several cats come and go over the years and of course it was always a little sad when they ran away, were taken in by old ladies down the block (this actually happened), or got hit by cars in front of our house (this also actually happened!)… but it was part of growing up. All good things must come to an end and there’s no reward (freedom!) without some risk. But The Girl isn’t quite convinced… yet. Thankfully, her rational faculties truly being like 4-5 sigma above the mean, after the 4th pee-on-door in as many weeks, we’ve now at least established a “red line”…. and we can only hope it’s more seriously enforced than Obama‘s “red line” in Syria!
All this personal intrigue aside, to be fair to my lovely family, all of this is bloody mild compared to the bizzaro-world full-on PetDom displayed by most of the childless university “educated” types currently swelling the ranks of our present oligarchic bureaucracy and its many-tentacled extensions. Thankfully the words “Sorry I can’t come for a drink after work I have to spend an hour commuting in traffic to go let my dog out to pee. He’s a rescue y’know so I really have to go… sorry”, only to scuttle off like happy little cucks, have never crossed my lips. While even we are far from immune from the powerful global forces at play, which is to say the inevitable forces of decadence and abundance permeating our declining civilisation,vii we can and must do all we can to resist.viii
But hey, if you’re going to lean into it like a dead salmon “swimming” downstream, I guess it’s a pretty cute way to go.ix
- And privkeys??!↩
- “Doges” if you will. Though I guess I can’t be too harsh a critic since those derps outperformed BTC since 2013! ↩
- PetDom’d subs are insanely proud and open about their abuses, and even incredibly defensive about the weakness of their pets – especially dogs and especially dysgenic rescues – and in turn defensive about their piss-poor “fur-mommy” abilities and their utter failure to meaningfully improve the behaviour of their derpy mutts.
Meanwhile, these (left-leaning) “fur-mommies” imagine that fentanyl-fucked street scum “just need the right incentives” or “just need a second chance” or “UBI” to fix their brokenness, very evidently missing the KEY FUCKING LESSON from their own lived experience: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Same is true for 99.9% of people, especially past, say, 21 years-of-age. So Bukele styles, if you have a face tattoo, in the fucking paddy wagon and off to prison you go! Get the fuck out of our society. If you suck that much, you simply don’t belong amongst the living. Go dig your own grave ditch and jump in it. ↩
- Even starting a family at 29-years-old, the earliest in our peer group of university “educated” professional / ambitious types, wasn’t early enough…
Indeed, who could’ve predicted that the “Higher Education For All” approach would be functionally equivalent a “One Child Policy” for the West. Almost exactly the kind of error that China would want their Great Power Competitor to commit! And y’know what they say: never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake, innit? Which is as equally true for SV as Ivy League…
All of which is really and truly hilarious because the net effect of all these short-sighted demographic bombing is that the Americans – who made their claim to fame copying the Brits (minus the King), who in turn made their claim to fame by copying (and importing) the Germans – are now being copied by the Chinese, who also just wanted to be German, and of course who in turn just wanted to be like the mtDNA Haplogroup X / Y-DNA Haplogroup R1b / Mound-Building Indo-Europeans (ie. Aryans), which of course the Chinese ruling class has been since at least (red-haired pale-eyed) Ghenghis Khan injected himself into their elite bloodline. And how! ↩
- Poor Benny…
- Right outside our windows… little hungry beaks!
- Of course we can’t properly speak about “abundance” without quoting from MP’s seminal 2017 treatise, from which:
And you believe “communication technologies” have improved something, don’t you ? The only thing the Internet has improved is the outcome of the coming culling : “everyone is interconnected” just means the tolerance for the continuance of the life on land is that much narrower. Millions of people could happily inhabit the land pre reddit, and nobody’d have been bothered, but now that you have wikipedia that figure is maybe as high as the low thousands. This is how it works, nuclear winter wasn’t really much of a threat to the human race before “the information superhighway” showed up to make it a necessity.
And if you’re curious : the discovery of ironworking itself didn’t drive the largest migration in human history, displacing iron age tribes from the golden crescent all the way to Ireland directly. No, it was indirectly, through the improved plowing that it allowed finally being capable of land exhaustion, which created the need of diverting some of that pig iron from making more plows to making a few swords.
The only thing technology does is that it reduces the tolerable carrying capacity of the Petri dish. The better the technology, the fewer actual physical agents needed to create a supermajority of agents and drive the failure mode of agent abundance. That’s all technology ever does.
This is the whole story, really, people organize their activity to “get what they want” and “avoid senseless death, pain and suffering”. If they’re not successful at this, they keep trying. If they are successful at it… they stop trying. Once they stop trying it stops working, and that’s that, “inexplicably” the barbaric Christians conquer the civilised lands of the Arabs. Or vice-versa, depending what exact time it is.
- Per X:
- On one hand, anyone so readily tempted by the dysgenic attraction of being PetDom’d clearly lacks the discipline to succeed in the 21st century and beyond, but there’s always the lingering utopian hope that weakness is a *choice* in the same way that undecorated and derivative post-modern architecture is a *choice*, at least as far as Baumol’s Cost Disease is insufficient to explain the lack of detail and decoration in new architecture (archived). Unfortunately, the “evidence-based” conclusion is that these are merely the ebbs and flows of history! And we can do our best, but also shouldn’t throw good money after bad chasing “virtuous” wastes of time, especially not at the expense of future generations. ↩