h a l f b a k e r yPoint of hors d'oevre
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Many people claim that we are going to Hell in a
handcart
because of the youth of today and it wasn't like this in
their day, and also that however it was in their day never
did them any harm. Suspicions, though, exist in view of
the fact that the same people (nearly) were saying that
back
in the Bronze Age, as is recorded in Ancient Greek
drama, so it's said. A war can then be waged using
statistics and anecdotal evidence which generally leads
to
an impasse. At the same time, there's a dementia
village
in the Netherlands for people who are unable to
remember
what it's like now. Hence there are three demographics
here: the Youth Of Today, Grumpy Old People (possibly
middle-aged) and the elderly, all of whom are
considered
to benefit from living in what is widely regarded as a
simpler time.
It is in fact not strictly necessary to rely on anecdotal or
spuriously statistical evidence to resolve this
disagreement.
Set up a small town of around 9000 individuals with
families and re-run the 1950s there. Have schools that
don't spare the rod (illegal of course) and teaches, a
long-
term institution which cures you of your homosexuality
by
means of electric shocks and a police force which will
club
you over the head without due process. All the media
and
products fed into the town are period and the children,
and
also presumably the older people, are not let in on the
secret. As far as they're concerned, it really is the late
1940s to early 1960s. Introduce lifestyle changes
accordingly, getting them up to about 1963, then release
the now grown up children and reset the clock to 1945 or
thereabouts for a new intake. Monitor the children as
they
move through adulthood in the modern world and see
how
they perform in various ways.
In the meantime, the older people, suffering from
dementia, continue to believe they're in mid-life and are
offered a hyper-real shelter from the contemporary
world.
There is of course plenty of domestic violence, abusive
relationships, including inter-generational ones, and
untapped potential from ascribed gender roles.
Generate money from occupations relevant at the time
plus discreet tourism. Produce a fair amount of stuff in-
house, such as canning and printing labels, farming,
newspapers, books and magazines. Sell some of these to
the wider public via a mysterious period lorry which turns
up once a week and carts the stuff away. Also maintain
classic cars with the appropriate parts.
After all this, which will of course completely blight the
lives of the people who emerge from the social
experiment
without at any time having given even uninformed
consent,
as is in keeping with the Zeitgeist, settle once and for all
the question of whether it really was better in the old
days.
Like Project Orion?
https://en.wikipedi...ension_(miniseries)
CBC was way ahead of you, [nineteenthly] [Sgt Teacup, Jan 05 2017]
Celebration, Florida
https://en.wikipedi...elebration,_Florida
Mostly Baked. [sninctown, Jan 06 2017]
Year 2500: Internet Stock Market Bubble Reenactment Society
Year_202500_3a_20In...enactment_20Society
[hippo, Jan 06 2017]
[link]
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// a police force which will club you over the head without due process. // |
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Isn't the "without due process" thing inherent in the term "police force" ? |
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I think the issue here is with how to contain the cultural relaxations which have by now stained the psyches of all but the most resolute reactionaries. For the teachers, for example, the question will be how to school children in the 1950s mode while suppressing the latte-sipping liberalities which those teachers have at their moral and cultural cores, how to apply Lochgelly to knuckles without the sort of hesitation which the youth of both today and yesterday would take for weakness and, needless to say, exploit as such. From the operational perspective, there is a degree of comfort to be taken from Milgram, but such inculcation will divert undoubtedly limited resources away from the essential tourist-attractive services such as buffing up bobbies helmets and making boiled sweets, which leaves us with the unsavoury but goals-congruent option of staffing the project with members of the Lords, or if they can’t be persuaded to do an honest day's work, the government's stash of clones of Norman Tebbit being shipped from the Svalbard seed vault (yes, this is the real purpose of the SSV, a hedge against the entropy of the universe by ensuring that the second post-diluvian age is inhabited only by those with the backbone to cycle around the few wind-blasted mountaintop islands that constitute the Earth's landmass, swinging birch canes and looking for work) to staff the classrooms, tuck shops and WRI meetings of nineteenthly's vision. |
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Wow ... are there REALLY only three sentences in that paragraph? |
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He must be quite out of breath. And It's "Hell in a
handbasket", [nineteenthly], I should know, I been in it for a
while now. Ha. |
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I was going to plead for paragraph breaks but I don't think it would make a difference. |
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Handcarts? Handbaskets ? Oh, what we would have given for a handbasket. We had to go to hell all rolled up in a snotty handkerchief, try THAT for an uncomfortable experience. |
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If I were to read the whole idea, would there be a point to it? |
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Do you not remember where you are, [MB]? |
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You're in a general? Or did you mean you're in other:general? |
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Either way, make noise, bang on the walls - we'll find you and get you out soon. |
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(+) for mentioning the dementia village. That is one great idea. |
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Echo the dementia village reference, and kudos for doing so.
The Alzheimer's Association is very much interested in that
design, btw. |
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Baked, (allegedly) without all the negative stuff you
mentioned. The town of Celebration, Florida is a centrally-
planned community of ~10,000 people, run by the Walt
Disney company to forever be a perfect slice of 1950's
suburban America. |
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I knew some people who grew up there. Good, wholesome
people. |
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So, on the basis that there is a limit to the extent to which we can look back, we start a series of parallel NDMAH Towns, one for 1950s, one for 1960s, one for 1970s and so on and so forth, for each decade for the next couple of hundred years, sealing off the relevant decade so that some time the 23rd C. we can look back and formally analyse the optimum time ("Tindale Time"), exterminate everyone who isn't within the Tindale Time bubble and then time the glass dome to break shortly after the present and Non-Tindale Time bodies have decomposed, leaving the Tindale Timers to optimally colonise the fresh, green planet Earth. |
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I think the thing I like best about this idea is that it has led me to view the Midwich Cuckoos very much from the point of view of the Cuckoos themselves, with their bizarre yoof slang, their snapchatting and their extravagant rolls of the eyes, the authority figures in that book being, well, Norman Tebbit. |
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But how will you stop the 1950's-time-capsule
people from independently creating 21st century
things? It seems that instead of multiple temporal
islands, each frozen in their time, you'll have
parallel streams of societal evolution each coming
from an arbitrary point of genesis.
Another
thought is that, to some extent, these towns
already exist in more rural areas of the country,
about which we elite metropolitan types smirk,
while sipping our lattes and checking our
smartphones, describing our bumpkin country cousins
as "behind the times".
Some of this
discussion about our connection with previous
epochs reminds me - I once met someone whose
grandfather was born in the 18th century. |
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I think all these eras will find immortality, not in
preserved bubbles of temporal stasis, but in new and
ever-more-specific re-enactment societies, each with
their traditional membership of oddballs and misfits
(for example, see link). |
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The simulation argument is compatible with the current
state of the planet being considered just such a time, and
that's really depressing. However, I don't agree with the
simulation argument, so that's okay. |
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I didn't think they were that intoxicated - perhaps just buzzed a bit. |
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