Counter-Currents
1,033 words
A new trend has emerged in the country where I live. Maybe it has been going on for quite some time elsewhere, but it’s advent in my neck of the woods is recent.
I am, of course, talking about the sudden (for me at least) prevalence of bottle caps which are attached to the bottle. Milk, juice, pop, energy drinks . . . all now come with caps that cling to the bottle with a stubborn fortitude.
These fixed bottle caps are designed to make it easier to recycle the bottle. I know this because the caps told me.
The cap reads, “Attached cap to recycle better.”
Far be it from me to doubt the methods and intentions of PepsiCo, but that sounds like bull crap.
You shouldn’t be drinking these sugary beverages, anyway. I purchased these products for research purposes only.
Being part Irish and part Italian, I’ve inherited the genetic traits that enable a long memory — how else can you bear generational grudges without one? — and I remember the days when we were specifically instructed to remove bottle caps from plastic bottles in order to facilitate the recycling process. Apparently there have been advances in recycling technology and now recycling plants are able to take those erstwhile unrecyclable caps and do whatever it is recycling plants do in order to make plastic reusable.
This about-face and the sudden, ubiquitous appearance of attached bottle caps made me reminisce about what I lazily call The Covid Years: that period of time roughly starting in 2020, reaching its dizzying peak of madness in 2021, then at some point in 2022 vanishing slowly and softly like dried dandelion seeds in the wind.
At the start of The Covid Years, the same supermarkets and corner shops where these plastic bottles with attached caps now line the shelves suddenly were emblazoned with arrows on the floor directing you to walk in the direction they indicated — for your health, of course. Overnight, “protective” plexiglass barriers, which are still up in many locales, began separating cashier and shopper at the check-out counters. I never saw anyone putting up those plexiglass screens or sticking those arrows on the floor or installing the hand sanitizer on the walls of so many buildings. They just appeared. Obviously, I’m sure a crew of employees or some other team of laborers did the work during closing time, but the speed with which it was all set up was astonishing.
These attached caps also make it awkward to drink out of the bottle, but the decision has been made for us that this is the way bottles come now. If you don’t like it, you’re out of luck. In complex, post-industrial societies, so many decisions are made for us. Apart from a bottle of Pepsi, little else is actually in our hands. When directives come down from on high, we have no choice but to comply with them. I wouldn’t be surprised if both big companies such as PepsiCo and comparatively smaller companies such as the ones that supply milk to local supermarkets conformed to the idea of attached bottle caps because a higher environmental, social, and governance (ESG) score was the promised reward.
I’m not the only one who’s noticed.
The average person is increasingly removed from what Ted Kaczynski called “the power process.” Changes in the industrial society are imposed upon us. We aren’t free to do anything other than adapt to and comply with them. Obedience, in fact, is the most cherished and valued trait in modern man. And sooner or later, everyone obeys. Like bottles with attached caps, there might be a sudden and relatively minor change to which the citizens must adapt. It might be the reduction of speed limits on a motorway. Kaczynski wrote about this as well, in Industrial Society and Its Future:
When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one . . . But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion . . . [O]ne cannot just go where one likes at one’s pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations . . . Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional.
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The last line is key. You can hold out for as long as possible, but eventually these changes become not only impositions, but obligations. I’m reminded of how long I went without owning a smartphone. Nowadays, not only is a smartphone a necessity, in many cases it is a requirement. Kaczynski called this “learned dependence.”
Traffic regulations, having to own a smartphone, and bottles with attached caps may seem like small things, but enough small things all piled up amount to a rather big thing. The “visionaries” at Davos are no longer boisterously talking about the need for a “great reset” and gleefully divulging their plans to ensure that we own nothing and are happy, but their plans are no less in effect. At the recent World Economic Forum, a panel of luminaries again waxed urgently about the need for digital biometric IDs that show if you’ve had the correct vaccinations in order to open bank accounts, access schools, and more.
Simply put, we are not autonomous anymore. Our ability to make decisions, particularly spontaneous ones, is restricted so severely yet so artfully that we don’t even notice. For all the guff about Our Democracy and The Will of the People, it turns out that neither matter all that much. The People are a mishmash of ideologically and economically antagonistic competitors, and in most Western countries there is a significant portion of the People who are a fifth column of foreign malcontents. Their will can be manipulated through constant and sophisticated propaganda, or ignored entirely. As The Covid Years showed us, most people will employ that most desirable characteristic in order to be a successful member of society – obedience — and do whatever they are told.
Whether or not that’s a good thing, I’ll leave you to exercise a bit of freethinking and decide for yourself.
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14 comments
The effect of all these anti-freedom impositions is that the way to be free is to be above the law, which the Jews and their allies are.
If you were an attendee at the child-effing rites of the temple of Jeffrey Epstein, you know you are above the law because you are still enjoying your impunity.
The innocent and the upright lose their freedom one humiliating little imposition at a time but the wickedly corrupt are above basic laws and even moral absolutes as long as the Jews say so.
“Freedom” was invented by Jews and is used by them to destroy native societies in all countries of the world.
Freedom is in our blood and it is not an invention of the Jews who erode it.
Spartacus likely knew what freedom was better than any Jew who ever lived.
This is an important point, and a hard pill for most on the right to swallow. Individualism and the idea of individual freedom are attractive, but when the individual is elevated above society, society and community decay, and people tend towards atomized hedonism and immaturity.
Loyalty and fidelity to family, community, religion, and nation, and the duties and responsibilities that follow, grant strength to those groups. Groups whose members see themselves as individuals foremost will be outcompeted by groups whose members are bound together by ties of loyalty and shared purpose.
Making family, community, religion, and nation different things was where all this went wrong.
Ha, this is the reason for those attached caps silliness. I cut them with scissors. Can’t stand that.
For the idiotic smartphone, I hold the longer I could but one-day, the services for the elderly made it compulsory for my mother’s registration, as if it was of any use for old persons who don’t know how to use them.
This is called creating a false need: selling junk is obviously one of the reasons.
It’s also a manifestation of sam Francis’s anarcho tyranny: criminals live with impunity, but honest citizens are constantly harassed.
The borders are open and foreign criminals are everywhere, but hey, bottle caps are attached, that’s the priority.
I appreciate the thrust of the article, but you do have some power in these things. Nobody is making you drink those drinks. You can put water, tea, coffee, etc. into a bottle of your choosing. You can even make your own soda if you like. Do you really need a smart phone? I don’t. I never presented a vaccine passport or wore a mask to the store, or walked in the direction of the arrows. I refused to disclose my social security number to anyone, including banks, landlords, or utility companies, or my address to banks, until about 2016…
I don’t agree that “We aren’t free to do anything other than adapt to and comply with them.” That’s not to say that they lack the power to coerce compliance, but their power depends on acquiescence. If enough people say “no”, and are willing to put up with some inconvenience, their plan fails, in most cases.
Last year my local super market (again overnight it seemed) managed to get rid of about 5 isles of conveyer belt till stations and replace them with about 14 self service tills. I complained, others I know complained. I heard people complaining directly to the manger about the change. Without sounding pretentious and uppity, it’s a high end supermarket with a cafe and a bar/deli restaurant. I do not shop there to ‘serve myself’. I go there because if I have time to spare I will have a coffee or a beer (metal cap removed) in a glass.
It is very much a ‘learned dependence’ that I resist most times. However, on occasion I only have a handful of items and the remaining 3 conveyer isles are very busy I have succumbed and used the self service. First thing I noticed is that as part of the new system it has facial recognition. Another example of being nudged to accept what the system dictates. We need food – make it awkward to stand in a long queue and A: serve yourself, less resource for the supermarket to employ and B: willingly become part of the cyber security creeping in to something as essential as feeding your family.
I refuse to use self-service checkout because I want to protect the jobs of the cashiers. I’ve even seen fast-food restaurants now where the “cashier” is some guy in India talking to you over a video chat. Nobody should put up with that. And soon they’ll replace that guy with an AI chat bot. If they could, corporations would outsource and automate away all our jobs. It’s up to us to gum up the works enough to put a stop to it.
I agree. I resist it 90% of the time. I also try and go when I know it is less likely to be the busiest part of the day or at the weekend.
Sorry to hear of your inconvenience Angelo. Possibly the marketing logic works like this?
POCs, including the highly regarded Black male, have shorter & flatter noses. Thus they won’t be nearly as inconvenienced by the attached bottle-caps as a white iro-italian. Also they’re much quicker to drink things, not bothering to savor the finer subtitles of packaging.
So, even if 1MM whites are bothered by the new tops, but no POCs (including Blacks) are, then we have a win.
The new bottle caps are unsanitary because its harder to take them off without touching something the liquid will also touch.
Are plastic bottles actually recycled? From every report I’ve read, they’re just tossed into a landfill with everything else—even though we dutifully collect them for supposed recycling. If anyone here knows different, we’d like to hear about it.
I read something weird about plastic recycling–that the plastic collected in the US is shredded in the US and then sent to third world countries where the next step, whatever that is, is supposed to take place, but often that step doesn’t happen and the stuff ends up in their rivers. I read that the only materials that make sense to collect curbside are aluminum cans and corrugated cardboard, and everything else is landfilled or burned. Also, they say if you put your materials in plastic bags, no matter how recyclable those materials are, the processing facility can’t handle plastic bags, so even the useful stuff is diverted from the facility into the normal wastestream if it’s put in plastic bags, which everyone does so it won’t blow around on the street when they put it out curbside. I would not be surprised if the real recycling figure is only 3% of everything put out by homeowners on the curb actually gets recycled.
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