The month is November of 2025. It could well be 1930 for all it matters. 1930 with AI. 1930 with the Internet. The Troubles continue unabated. I open Substack. A woman in Chicago was burned alive. An Italian couple was gang raped. A young upstart politician is talking to the older generation as if these problems are new. I scroll further. Tyrone still can’t read after a hundred years of trying to teach him. Rajesh apparently runs all the anon accounts on X. The children can’t navigate life without dopamine hits from an iPad. I am not surprised by any of this.
The year is 2004 and I am 14 years old. My modem screams as I connect to a free AOL trial account over a 50 foot long RJ11 cable. I open the 4chan boards. A woman travelled to deepest Africa and had her head removed. Indians are being mowed down by trains. Jews are posting about the extinction of white people but forgot to hide their country of origin again. A poster is discussing using primitive neural networks to create the first deep fakes. I am not surprised by any of this.
On Being Unsurprised
Recently Tucker Carlson expressed his views on being “shocked” by the news with Shawn Ryan. He described this as a process of slow hardening to surprise. After all, how many times do you have to see the same news for it to stop surprising you? I suspect, based on Tucker’s description of his “awakening”, that Tucker is not a very intelligent person. He thinks he is, but this is the sign of an average midwit.
[Insert bell curve meme here.]
I’ll admit, there was a time when I could be surprised by politics. I was probably 13 when that stopped. You see, I’m old. Now, at 35, I’ve officially reached “unc” status. I come from a time when the Internet was more free. Not totally free, we still had proto-social networks like MySpace to corral us, but mostly free.
Back then we had BestGore and LiveLeak. As a teenager, my friends and I would send each other shock clips like the BME Pain Olympics for fun. If you had an emotional reaction to anything it meant you lost the game and were probably a pussy. I was not a pussy. I watched everything. Everything. So I simply cannot be surprised in 2025 when the Internet rediscovers things like the natural predator of the Jeet or the schemes of the Jew. I’ve seen these episodes before. It bores me to death.
Just how old am I? How unsurprised am I?
I’ve been around for a while. Let’s take a short drive down memory lane.
Trains vs Indians Over Time
The date is June 15th 2004. A train derails in India and kills 20.
The date is October 29th 2005. A train crash kills 102.
The date is July 11th 2006. Train bombers kill 209 using seven bombs.
The date is February 18th 2007. More train bombings kill 70.
The date is January 22nd 2008. A man is struck and killed by a train.
The date is February 13th 2009. 15 are killed in a train accident.
The date is May 28th 2010. Another train crash kills 148.
The date is January 1st 2011. A man is killed and 2 injured in a train accident.
The date is April 19th 2012. 2 are killed after falling off a train.
The date is April 10th 2013. A person is killed in a train derailment.
Are you surprised? I just Google searched [man killed by train in India {year}] to find this information. I am not an expert on India’s trains. I’m not autistic enough to be enamored by large metal beasts. I’m just a guy that witnessed India’s rail system through the lens of LiveLeak videos at the turn of the millenium. So I knew this information existed intuitively. These are also by no means a comprehensive list of train killings in India. In fact, they have an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the subject. I’ve barely scratched the surface. It happens so often that you can search for it by year and will never turn up a single year without a death by train.
Knowing this information, are you still surprised that Indians are dying by rail? If you are “shocked” by this information at this point you are being purposefully ignorant of the situation. If you think it shouldn’t be happening at all you aren’t alone. After all, when I watched those LiveLeak clips as a teenager I wasn’t cheering for the train. The first time I saw it I was shocked. The second time I saw it happen I kind of knew what was coming. However, by the fifth and fiftieth time I was simply bored of it.
Now we could all describe the situation as “systemic” so we can all excuse the Indian people themselves and sleep a bit more comfortably at night. If we did this we might say something like, “India’s rail system is outdated and over capacity!” If you lean to the Left you might even point the finger at the British for building the rail system in the first place. However, none of this will stop [man killed by train in India {2026}] from happening.
We might draw up a list of prescriptions for the situation. You might say, “India should invest in safety for their rail systems.” This will be correct. It will also be promptly ignored and relegated to the archives of the Internet along with every other great idea left to rot in the dustbin of history. After all, ancient Rome possibly invented plastic. However, the story goes, the emperor of Rome had the inventor killed so as not to threaten his precious glass industry. Telling India that their trains aren’t safe is like telling India their streets aren’t clean. You can shout into the void all you like, but you can’t clean up Mumbai by yourself.
Conclusions: We Know What To Do
You can search the past for other such echoes throughout the decades. Terms like [woman killed in Chicago {year}] or [repeat offender let go {year}] to see a bloody history of crimes against the United States and her citizens. In fact, we can repeat this exercise throughout any Western nation at this point and see a similar trail of carnage and bloodshed. We all know the solutions to these problems. We know what we would do to stop the Troubles from mounting against our gates. Maybe we should stop being “shocked” about all of this and start doing something about it.
P.S. try this with the Israel lobby and you’ll find a few thousand years worth of examples.
Wow, your point about 1930 with AI really resonated; doesn't the power of these neural networks also present an amplified moral imperative to act, rather than just observing the troubles?