Today we listen, watch, and are entertained not by ourselves or our peers but by people who get paid to do those things: the professionals. I’m sure you can think of other examples from your own experience. Is it any surprise, then, that people delegate their safety to professionals rather than learn why they need to do it themselves?It's an interesting angle. One wonders what the burgeoning DIY fad, with people tackling everything from beer-making to chicken-raising as a home endeavor, will have on this?
Tangentially related, I noted in comments at Sebastian's yesterday that I find it interesting that pretty much the entire waitstaff at my local in-town hipster pub are shooters. Further, while dining there just the other day I overheard two women at the next table over, and who stereotype would suggest were in a very liberal demographic, discussing one's plans to purchase a P-226 in .40S&W, which she described as her "dream gun". I found this rather heartening.
14 comments:
Can I come live in your magical world? Here in CO, everything seems to be going the opposite direction (although the recalls are a teensy bright spot).
I have a sad.
The 20ish kids I work with encourage me, several are shooters. Better yet, most of them openly mock the office propaganda drone whenever he opens his statist pie hole.
I'm also encouraged when I realize the drone is older than I am and he'll be dead soon. This whole perpetually adolescent baby boomer generation is slowly working it's way through our culture and history like a pot-bellied pig through a python. Things will be better when it finally passes.
This principle extends to even the basest aspects of the human existence.
The conservation and energy efficiency wonkess at the institution where I teach (who is a very delightful person) is in the process of placing electronic sensor-activated flush mechanisms on the urinals and toilets in the campus latrines.
She believes with good reason that this will conserve water (though at some locations this is debatable, inasmuch as the hopper gets flushed twice; once automatically when I get up to access the paper roll, and a second time, manually, after I wipe myself and deposit the soiled tissue sheets into it.).
Problem is, that more and more people, apparently becoming overly-pampered by the self-flushing plumbing fixtures, are neglecting to do the manual flushing in locations where the self-flush has yet to be installed and/or where a second manual flushing is warranted.
If people become accustomed to delegating the toilet-flushing function to professionals (albeit electronic ones), then we are in sad, sad shape indeed.
Heh. And to think I recall putting the quicklime down the hole of the outhouse... and can't stand the automated checkouts in the Home Depot/grocery stores.
The Internet is the greatest tool for media disintermediation since movable type. We don't have to put up with what the daily paper or the nightly newscast tells us is the news, we can find it for ourselves.
Same with music, movies and books: The consumer has more power today to choose what they want and when they want it than ever before.
Why would people who are used to that amount of control of their lives outsource their protection to someone else?
Today's DIY fad used to be called "daily life" according to my grandfather.
My grandma baked things. They were less expensive and tastier than store bought.
My grandpa grew food. It was less expensive and tastier than store bought.
My mother preserved fruits and veggies grown by my grandpa. They were less expensive and tastier than store bought. She astonished us kids by making chicken and dumplings starting with a live chicken.
My dad didn't do any of that stuff. He grew up on a farm, and ran away from home at 14 to work in a shipyard to get away from the DIY fad at home. Being an apprentice welder was easier work than being a child of a farmer, the hours were shorter, and it paid him money.
He followed the lessons of that experience the rest of his life, and in my memory never so much as mowed the yard once he had children over the age of 10.
To the extent that I go to professionals for entertainment, it's because they're better than my friends and me at entertaining things. I could throw together a band, but it wouldn't sound as good as CCR and I don't have the time. The same goes for the TV and movies I watch, the books I read, and so on.
The analogy breaks down for safety and defense because all the skill in the world does no good if it's not present when needed. The analogy is pretty much killed off by the fact police as a group aren't especially skilled.
@CarlosT - The analogy breaks down because you know it breaks down. If you listen to anyone who follows the "just call police" line of thinking, there is an assumption that defense is too hard to attempt if you are not a well-trained professional.
I think a significant part of the issue is that people are mistaken about the difficulty level of skills they are unfamiliar with, or the level of skill required.
They think that because it took them years to earn their degree in their field, that it would take years of study to be able to provide basic defense.
Never mind that carrying a gun safely can be learned in a day, or basic shooting in a weekend. Never mind that you can learn to cook just by reading a recipe, fix a leaky pipe with 10 minutes of youtube videos, or replace most car parts with a half hour of research. If you don't know how to do it, you don't know how hard or easy it is, and if you assume that everything takes a professional you won't ever find out how easy it is.
Good, albeit surprising, news!!! ;-)
Coming from Silicon Vally (or leaving it) it's funny to me that hipsters would tackle the dangers of non-Vegan chicken raising (e-coli!) and brewing explosive vats of suds, but require a GPS simply to walk around the block...
I have been strongly DIY oriented since I was a teen and a dealership ripped my mom off to the tune of $600 to replace a couple of wheel studs in a 1985 LeBaron.
I bought a Chilton manual and read it cover to cover. The internet was just a computer lab experiment back then.
There are some things I still have done at a shop such as tire mount and balance since the cost of the tools can't be justified with how rarely I'd use them. However, since the last two shops I used overtightened the lug nuts so badly I had to STAND on an 18" pull handle with 24" cheater bar to get them loose I'm wondering if I might should try harder to justify the cost.
In the world of personal defense I never set out to be a guncrank. I figured I'd be a "one gun, practice twice a year" guy. Now I own more than I can fit in my small safe and if a week goes by without burning some powder I get cranky.
The DIY craze has never left my family. I still harvest the majority of the meat my family eats with my own hands, be it a moo cow I slaughter or a moose or deer or bird I kill.
We also never buy seafood. Except shrimp. We still buy shrimp.
Yeah, I pay a lot more for my meat than if I just bought it. But its so damn fun.
Curiously the tools I use to obtain this meat are also the same tools I can use to provide security. Anyone that asks me why I "need " a gun generally gets laughed out of the room.
I am OK with delegating part of my safety to professionals provided the professionals agree. Modern "law enforcement" have about as much interest in protecting any given individual as they do in 19th century Russian literature. Their job is making sure that the powerful and connected are content, the taxes are collected, and the right people are winning in the black market.
Hiring a bodyguard with a strong resume, great; relying solely on police who are more interested in harassing and annoying than protecting and serving; no way.
Even entertainment is going back to DIY. There are entire TV series made and published on youtube, even full-length feature films! Digital video cameras and film editing (and animation) software is getting advanced and cheap enough that amateurs are putting out quality videos that would blow away the audiences who had just watched Episode IV: A New Hope.
And music too. There are thousands of new songs DAILY being added to youtube. Sure, lots of them suck. Some of it is great; there are folks who make their LIVING from DONATIONS for allowing their music to be downloaded free (or name-your-price) from websites like bandcamp.
There are currently more Castlevania games made by fans than professionally. Some of the top games on Steam are fan mods that were done well enough for Steam to pick up.
Not to mention the authors like Larry Correia who started publishing free stories on forums like The High Road (RIP).
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