As everyone knows, I don’t have guest posts here at my back porch. However, I recently received an email from Longtime Reader Preussenotto, and it is of such outstanding quality that I’ve decided to share it here (with just a couple of grammatical alterations).
Been noticing a theme lately with a lot of my fellow denizens of the blog. Maybe it’s hitting you too. [it is — K.]
Not sure exactly where to start but here goes (I’m not as gifted a writer as the Divine Sarah):
I know you are not an American Football fan/follower. I am. My favorite rooting team happens to be the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers have been owned by the same family since the teams founding and have the reputation of a team that does it the “right” way. There have been periods of great success, and periods of not-so-great achievements. All teams go through this. Lately there’s been a lot of downs.
But to listen to the sports pundits and the fans, and we all seem to be falling into the trap: that because the uniforms haven’t changed, and the ownership hasn’t changed, that the quality of players, scouts, executives, and ownership are all still the same championship caliber it was.
Not so.
There are still those of us out there who fall into the temptation, to believe. This belief is because of an illusion created by reputation. Fans/pundits look at the brand name and think it’s the same thing as it was when you cheered them on as a kid.
I know you were in the retail business. Look at that as an example. We fall into the temptation to believe that a Whirlpool appliance, or a Craftsman tool, or an ACDelco replacement part, is the same because they had a reputation of being a quality item, and it WAS, back in the day. But that reputation is now a complete illusion. Modern appliances, modern Craftsman tools, modern auto parts’ replacements are complete shit in quality. By design. But they have been trading off our brand loyalty forever, and when you see the logo on the package, you THINK you are getting a decent thing.
The above is probably something we have all noticed but let’s transfer it to those of us with a conservative political bent.
We look at the situation facing the British Isles. We Yanks fondly remember Churchill & Thatcher, “This was their finest hour” or “Don’t go wobbly on me, George.” But all of that is a complete illusion. The Brits had the reputation of being stalwarts but with the generations of Third World imports, and Welfare State layabouts… It’s just not the same Britain as it was. The way the Tories ran Britain was an absolute crime, and not fundamentally different from the Labour party.
Its not just the Limeys. Frogland, Krautland, all the Euros have fallen victim to this. It seems the Poles and Hungos & maybe the Serbs still have a sense of who they are, but overall, Europe as a power is an illusion. They are trading on a Brand-Name reputation rather than actual success.
It’s most pronounced here in the States by the Stupid Party (Team Elephant). We all seem to think this is the Party of Ronald Reagan, but it isn’t anymore. Apart from the charlatans and rent-seekers that infest any political activity, the party is overrun by the soft-socialist types who fled the hard-left Team Jackass people. You can call them the Reagan Democrats or Flag Waving Union types, but they brought the soft-socialist ideology into the Stupid Party and moved it left as well.
So today you have the Uniparty. We are all failing into the trap of the Republican Party reputation. But it’s a complete illusion. People say today JFK would be a Republican, that’s not just because Team Jackass went bat-shit-crazy left, but because the Stupid Party cranked left as well. It’s not a credit to the brand. Today’s Republican officeholder has far more in common with Woodrow Wilson, LBJ, FDR than Barry Goldwater or Calvin Coolidge.
But we all are tempted to believe that by checking “R” we are at least getting something of what we want. Maybe we are right, more often we are switching from actual cigarettes to lite cigarettes, hoping the tumor will be smaller, or hoping we’ll get raped by those with smaller dicks.
And I don’t know where to go. The Libertarians are a mess; the Democrats are unthinkable, and I’m too old to start a revolution.
Off to the range, I guess. I still at least am armed.
Thanks again for keeping the last interesting thing alive on the internet.
No, all thanks are due to you, old buddy, for expressing what both I and my Readers are feeling right now.
Tomorrow’s post will be very much part of this same feeling.
Everything’s been enshitified.
Couldn’t agree more, although to be fair, Craftsman’s hand tools are still decent and can hold their own against the big brands.
I think quite a few of us understand that the republican party isn’t what it once was. If it was ever even that, they’ve always been soft. Reagan was an anomaly as evidenced by the elder Bush who followed him (and got wobbly). So it’s not that we’ve fallen into the trap, it’s that we’ve no other choice, as you pointed out. Either we vote for the lesser of two evils, or we simply don’t vote.
And yeah, brand names mean nothing. It’s all made by the same factories in China, just with a different label on the box. Might as well buy from Harbor Freight and save a few bucks. I had some faint hope that all the Trump tariff stuff would encourage companies to bring production back home, and maybe it will in some cases. But it won’t be enough.
Enshitification. That’s the word of the day. Embrace it.
Enshitification…..
Today, I has learned a new word! Just starting my second cuppa cofeve to boot.
Enlightenment, cofeve, and the sun is out….
It’s gonna be a great day!
Sorry, no sale on the uni-party BS. Take about 5 minutes to look at how red states are run vs blue states and that trope falls apart instantly.
People say this sort of thing because their preferred party is not perfect (and I have plenty of complaints about the GOP) but it is fundamentally immature to say because I don’t like something that it us therefore the same as something else which is obviously worse amd different.
There have always been squishy Republicans, even (or especially) back in Reagan times, when they were know as “Rockefeller Republicans”. Today, they’re the GOPe, people like our soon-to-be-ex-Senator Cornyn.
This is true, but a squishy GOP politician is far right wacko to the average Dem.
Preussenotto has it right, and it helps me whenever I see something like this, to know that I’m not alone. Years ago, I registered as a non-affiliated voter. I watched Reps become Dem-Lite, and I hate them for it. To me, party-affiliated politicians are useless. They either try to live on past glories from when their parties were good in their own ways, or they’ve decided that parroting the wacko versions of their party is the way to go.
Someday, I hope, “regular” people will decide that they’ve had enough of the party b.s. and begin to vote for pols who will actually get something done.
Maybe they we can get something as simple as the SAVE America Act passed.
From my cheap seat observation, as seen in New York…again…seems those ‘who can’t see six inches past their collective noses’ (as dad would say) enjoy their soft tyranny captivity…so they continue to elect insanity. These people are galactically irrational and beyond help; they simply cannot see they are electing their own ultimate demise while cheering their oppressors as they pine for tossed stale bread like a chick in the nest with mouths open waiting on MadMommie to give them a morsel…except this one is rotten and evil. Their minds are gone.
Brilliant, and absolutely correct. Specific case in point: 26 years ago building our place, went to the Sears store appliance sale, bought everything in one trip, including the stacked washer/dryer unit that has been around forever. 4 knobs, simple, worked like a champ, wash cycle was maybe 40 minutes…lasted 20+ years until the Mrs thought a new stacked front load washer and dryer was the ticket. These units were all the rage and touted as the ubiquitous (bravo sierra) ‘energy star efficient’, as if I cared, just wanted decent clothes cleaning and drying at altitude. Bought prominent appliance manufacturer’s latest set. Total crap. Why? Because government idiots and ninny’s decided HF pods were to be used and a cup of water was best for the environmentespite the fact one needs actual water volume to wash clothes. Oh, and WiFi doncha know (what?).
Old unit: $600, New ones: $2K with all manner of stupid settings, buttons, and electronics as if it were sitting in NASA computing a spacecraft entry path…and, of course, WiFi and a downloadable App. Huh? In operation Cycles were 3+ hours and, worse, clothes were never clean. Fast-forward: New hovel W/D unit (about $1500 less than the wizbang stackable deals) is the same as our original except 2 knobs (washer or dryer) and a couple of [actual] buttons for setting ‘things’. Simple, works like a champ, and done in 45 minutes. Manufacturers should have told the Ninny’s to stay the hay out of their business, but (guessing) K-Street – which needs to be leveled and turned into a grassy park with ice cream vendors – got involved and screwed up the simplest of household functions with ‘regulations’.
What I want to know is why are the Feckless Few – who seem to think We The People work for them and somehow we need their Supremely Asinine Guidance – somehow involved in washing machines at all? Like autos we see how that turned out; take a simple thing and make it stupidly complicated while making it NOT WORK because they believe they know better than actual engineers and manufacturers. Just because they wear Armani doesn’t make them smart, but it does put lipstick on a pig while demanding we get into the slop with them. That has to end before these idiots wreck the place even further.
I think the Speed Queen machines are still old school and reliable. I wish I would have found out about them before I bought the new Maytag units.
https://speedqueen.com/
Me, too. I can remember when every household in the neighborhood where I grew up had a Maytag Washer and dryer if they had even one boy in the family.
When our Lowes’ brand washer “went out” about nine years ago, I bought a Maytag, and it similarly went out while still under warranty. For the first six or seven service calls all the — I don’t know what to call the responders — not mechanics ( Junior Assistant Responders?) representatives did was swap out the PC board behind the control panel after verifying the machine did what we complained that it did and didn’t do what even the JAR agreed it should be doing.
Finally, one came to the house and looked farther than the circuit board behind the control panel, ordered a new wiring harness and promised us it would fix the problem when it arrived. It did, and so far our Whirlpool quality Maytag is still agitating away if not nicely, at least not so badly we need to call the Junior Assistant Responder out again.
Here’s a relevant article by John Derbyshire from 2009.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2009/05/chinese-junk-john-derbyshire/
(quote)
[F]eatures of China’s production environment…make a joke of all the free-trade slogans. There is, for example, “quality fade.” You cut a deal with a Chinese manufacturer to import beauty lotions in plastic bottles. You give precise specifications for the product and container. The first shipments are fine. Then customers begin to complain that the plastic of the bottles is too thin. You squeeze a bottle, it collapses. It turns out that your manufacturer has quietly adjusted the molds so that less plastic goes into making each bottle. Neither the importer nor his customers has been told of the change.
The reason for this:
(inner quote)
Factories did not see an attention to quality as something that would improve their business prospects, but merely as a barrier to increased profitability. Working to achieve higher levels of quality did not make me a friend of the factory, but a pariah.
(end inner quote)
In this, as in much else, the Chinese are great testers of limits. Just how much “quality fade” can a supplier get away with before the business relationship breaks down? You can be sure they will find out, and stop short a millimeter before the electric fence.
(end quote)
Preussenotto is spot on.
Pruesse is right about what he wrote about except the uniparty. There are some clear distinctions between the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. Too often though the line does get blurred due to Stupid Party politicians who enjoy big spending just on different things than the Evil Party.