The Metric System is Rainbow Communism

Your Progress is Fake

The French Revolution (1789–99) provided an opportunity for the French to reform their unwieldy and archaic system of many local weights and measures…

This opening line from the Wikipedia entry on the metric system really is all you need to know. Before I go on let me acknowledge the implied rage of anti-imperial nerds who are already gnashing their teeth reading my post title - some of them practical decimal users and others anti-American euro-signallers (I am not American, as an aside). To them I can admit to the one and only valid argument you are bursting to make, and that is the practical ease (specifically to a machinist or similar miniscule-measurer) of being able to use a decimal as opposed to a fraction.

However! This sole and precious noteworthy innovation of their darling metric system could have been introduced within the existing and organically evolved imperial system, and named accordingly in line with a rooted value tradition that predates the Roman Empire. That system was (like all tradition) not a flawed oddity to be casually discarded, but a deeply functional thread in the living tapestry of our history.

That system had human-rooted values - a foot is the length of a foot! - as opposed to the materialist “sciency-sounding” names (metre, kilometre) invented by the year-zero progressive anti-monarchist eunuchs during the bloody French Revolution. That typically communistic murder-spree was (I delight in reminding) finally halted when the hobos-turned-commissars were rounded up and put back to work by the deserved enthroning of Emperor Napoleon.

Also of note from the Wikipedia metric description:

Talleyrand had ambitions that a new natural and standardised system would be embraced worldwide, and was keen to involve other countries in its development. Great Britain ignored invitations to co-operate, so the French Academy of Sciences decided in 1791 to go it alone and they set up a commission for the purpose. The commission decided that the standard of length should be based on the size of the Earth. They defined that length to be the “metre” and its length as one ten-millionth of the length of an Earth quadrant, the length of the meridian arc on the Earth’s surface from the equator to the north pole.

Such perfect heart-warming globalism.

What is a kilometre but a cheaply progressive and renamed mile? The mīlle passus “mile” is the Roman distance measured as equivalent to one thousand paces - you can picture it in your mind, instantly. By imposing the use of a metre as opposed to a yard, with only an ever so slight difference in actual length (a yard is .9 of a metre!) there is committed only a kind of Orwellian political exercise - excused as an abstract “improvement”. There is also an arrogant disrespect for our own past achievements and for the spiritual/esoteric aspect to the more ancient system. As though we would surpass the pyramids or the Pantheon with our slightly adjusted and renamed measuring scheme. Even the glorious Moon landings were conducted by a remnant imperial system nation! What is the great engineering claim of the metric-nerds? The london pickle?

What is more natural and right than saying a barleycorn, an inch, a hand, a footyard, a furlong, a mile, a league, a fathom, a cable? Who is not still, to this day, dying to measure important things in inches and feet and relatable natural forms?

So, year-zero revolutionaries, when your I-f*cking-love-science same-sex dance party has ended, and you retire fearfully into the night, remember to rest your rouged cheeks on that pillow of fake innovation, and draw tightly your blanket of materialist word games…

…then cry yourselves to sleep, metric-cucks.