Remember in the 1980s, when some “conservative” fundies rejoiced at the deaths of AIDS patients.
It was a pretty depraved stance. Everyone knows that.
Someone tell the fairly irredeemable LA Times drone Michael Hiltzik – who has reprised that particular bit of human depravity by declaring “Mocking some anti-vaxxers’ deaths is necessary“.
Helpfully, he adds “My exception applies to those who have actively undermined public health for the sake of an ideology and a culture war”.
I’m not going to extensively pull-quote the column – which is full of the sort of “two weeks to stop the virus” cheerleading that seems to have come from a CDC press release in April 2020, or from someone who thinks Gavin Newsom is on the right track.
That’s not especially remarkable.
Remarkable? Humanity is secondary to progs like Hiltzik:
It may be ghoulish to celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents. And it may be proper to express sympathy and solicitude to those they leave behind.
But mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled…There may be no other way to make sure that the lessons of these teachable moments are heard.
Actually, there is another way: : stop politicizing public health. Stop spreading distrust of “the Trump Vaccine” during the elections, and then turn around and claim credit for it. Stop making “sowing controllable panic” the default setting for public health messaging. Stop being whores for the Democrats, if you’re the media.
But let’s not pretend this – mocking and giggling about opponents, on whatever issue, that die unfortunate deaths – is anything but the default setting for ghouls like Hiltzik. After watching people like him giggle and guffaw over the deaths of Tony Snow, Antonin Scalia and Rush Limbaugh, and hoot and holler for the death of Steve Scaliise, it’s a stretch to assume they have any other setting.
Sort of like guffawing about dead AIDS patents, only apparently acceptable.
Representative Todd LIppert is leaving the House so he can tour rural Minnesota teaching rural Minnesotans about January 6:
I've decided not to run for re-election in 2022. Since the insurrection a year ago, I’ve felt a sense of urgency about helping Dems connect in rural areas. Our democracy depends on it. I plan to give my time to this work.
Governor Klink had a union obligation to save the bloody shirt yesterday:
A year ago, we witnessed an assault on our democracy when the U.S. Capitol building was stormed during an attempted insurrection. Today, we must protect and uphold our democratic ideals by ensuring this never happens again.
I mean, he’s not wrong – although I doubt he knows why.
The part of our “democratic ideals” that the mooks ofJanuary 6 attacked was the process – the Constitutionally-mandated steps for determining who the President is.
The rioters tried to circumvent that process. That – not the hooliganism in the Capitol itself – was the attack on democracy.
When government encourages or (hold onto this word) allows people to chuck the process and impose rule themselves – that’s the very definition of an attack on democracy.
Like, January 6? Sure.
Even if they’re dead sure the election was stolen, because Rudy Giuliani said so, and Sidney Powell had
Like when a group of protesters tore down the statue of Christopher Columbus on the Minnesota Capitol mall – bypassing the rule of law (the Capitol Architecture Committee), but with the tacit blessing of the Administration (whose Lieutenant Governor, Peggy Flanagan, chairs the committee); the DFL machine then “punished” the ringleader by “sentencing” him to preach to school kids why Columbus was evil enough to warrant trashing the process. Which would be more or less like “sentencing” Sheriff Hutchinson to a punitive round of tequila shots.
Is the destruction of the statue as big an assault on the rule of law as the riot a the Capitol?
In and of itself, of course not.
Is the fact that our institutions, and our media, tolerate one side attacking the rule of law while hammering on the oppositions attacks?
Today is the Honorable Sixth, the day when patriots everywhere raise their fingers to the usurper in Washington, in memory of the innocents slaughtered and the political prisoners still held captive for attempting to secure democracy by peaceful means.
Joe Doakes
I mean, if it were Democrats and the occupant were a Repubican, that’s what we’d have heard all day yesterday…
There is no defense for what the mob did that day. None. The people have a right to form loud, angry crowds to petition and protest their government. They need not do so in ways that are pleasant or polite. The “Stop the Steal” protesters who listened to the speeches and went home were exercising their rights as citizens.
But ours is a government of laws, not of men. A rule-of-law system has no place for physical intimidation or mobs obstructing the peaceful, constitutional transfer of power. The Founding Fathers feared few things more than mob rule. They created a federal district to avoid a repeat of a 1783 riot around the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
Donald Trump, his lieutenants (especially Sidney Powell and the tragically-fallen Rudy Giuliani), and Trump’s personality cult, did something that doesn’t, and can’t, play well with small-“d” democracy: it put the person ahead of the process:
There is also no defense of what Donald Trump did to summon the crowd, tell it that there remained any option but counting Biden’s electoral victory, and urge the assemblage to march on the Capitol because “if we allow this group of people to illegally take over our country . . . you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump’s recklessness disgraced the office of the presidency.
Additionally, there is no defense of Trump’s pressuring Pence to take unilateral, unlawful action against the counting of electoral votes, then telling the crowd that Pence might do so, knowing full well that they would discover when they reached the Capitol that Pence would not. Some of them, entering the Capitol, chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” It was Trump who led them to believe that his own vice president was allowing their country to be stolen.
Let’s be honest about what that explosion of personality cult over process actually did:
What happened at the Capitol that day is best understood as a riot that was particularly dangerous because of its setting and context. It was not a purely peaceful protest, or a cartoonish costume party with a little bit of trespassing. The Secret Service had to rush Pence to safety. Members of Congress emptied the chamber and fled for cover. The vote-counting process was interrupted for five and a half hours. The Capitol itself was wreathed in smoke. This is the stuff of a banana republic.
When the subject of banana republics pop up, Democrats perk their ears up, being wannabe Generalissimos in their own ways. Republicans, even Trump supporters, are correct in pointing out that Democrats were trashing the democratic process since before Donald Trump was a reality TV star, much less President:
For two decades, prominent Democrats have attacked the legitimacy of American elections. They claimed that the 2000 election was stolen from Al Gore. They indulged ridiculous fantasies about Ohio being stolen in 2004, resulting in dozens of Democratic members of Congress objecting to counting its electoral votes. Many of those Democrats are now powerful committee chairs, including the chair of the committee investigating January 6. Violent protests marred Trump’s inauguration, and leading Democrats denounced him as illegitimate. Polls showed that supermajorities of Democratic voters believed that Russian hackers stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton, and she has given every indication that she shares that view. In 2018, Stacey Abrams was anointed a hero by her party for refusing to accept the legitimacy of her loss of a governor’s race. It would have been wrong for Trump to emulate this behavior; but he went well beyond what even the most reckless Democrat has done in contesting an election.
Left-wing mobs have targeted the workings of government, for example overwhelming the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011 to protest Scott Walker’s union-dues bill. Republican legislators had to be evacuated by police, as Democratic legislators egged on the mob. In 2018, protesters repeatedly disrupted the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, chased Republican senators down hallways and into elevators, accosted them in restaurants, and broke through Capitol barricades, resulting in hundreds of arrests. Law enforcement was unduly lax in punishing these offenses against democratic self-government.
It’s true. But it’s no excuse – any more than January 6 will be a legitimate excuse for more Democrat violence and tyranny-mongering. That is, in fact, something that Republicans of good conscience need to stomp on, hard. Because it dismisses nothing to note that January 6 was an attack on the Constitutional process different from others only in its perps:
The New York Timeseditorializes that “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now,” and one of its columnists argues that Democrats should “Wave the ‘Bloody Shirt’ of Jan. 6” as Republicans did against Democrats after the Civil War — as if this compares to a four-year war in which 3 million Americans served and 750,000 died. Other opportunists (including Joe Biden) call the riot the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” or say it is comparable to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. CNN and other cable news obsessives plan wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary in order to inflate its importance and help Democrats wave that bloody shirt.
This is a loss of perspective. In 1915, a former Harvard professor set off a bomb at the Capitol and shot J. P. Morgan. In 1954, five congressmen were shot by Puerto Rican nationalists in the House chamber. In the early 1970s, the left-wing Weather Underground set off bombs at the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department. In 1983–84, the Communist group M19 bombed the Capitol, an FBI office, and Fort McNair and the Navy Yard in D.C. In 2001, 3,000 people died on 9/11, air travel was grounded across the country, the president was shuttled to a secure location, and a wing of the Pentagon was destroyed. In 2017, a gun-toting Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to massacre Republican congressmen at a baseball practice, gravely wounding Steve Scalise, the Republican House whip.
I say “Republicans of good conscience” because there are Republicans who have joined the personality cult, and many who’ve prospered, politically and financially, greatly from it.
And some Republicans have reacted by washing their hands of the GOP – some for reasons I can respect (Ed Morrissey), others I can not (the Lincoln Project), many in between. Some “Never-Trumpers” yip and bark at the party like bitter ex-spouses.
It is my view that none of the Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 results should ever hold office again, and that no candidate who is unwilling to forthrightly condemn both the violence of January 6 and the lies that inspired that violence ought to enjoy the support of any conservative, any organ of the Republican Party, or, indeed, any American who calls himself a patriot. No candidate who cannot give a simple yes or no answer — and give the correct one — to the question of whether the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump ought to hold office. If that puts the Republican Party into the minority for a generation, then the Republican Party deserves it, having become a menace not only to the conservative principles and governance it purports to cherish but to the political structure of the nation and the Constitution itself. Those who have no use for caudillos and mobs, and who hope to see our constitutional order endure, should seriously consider separating themselves from the Republican Party unless and until it proves capable of reforming itself.
“Reforming itself”
Like, magically?
Well, no. The party “reforms itself” when those who show up decide it shall be reformed.
Our democracy – and the Constitutional process Williamson rightly extols elsewhere – won’t survive a generation of one-party government by today’s Democrat party. The Democrat party of the Watergate era, led by Ernie Hollings and Scoop Jackson and Daniel Inouye, people who believe in America whatever their political differences, didn’t see power as the means to the end. They weren’t the generation of “progressives” that gave us San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and Minneapolis, or for that matter California and Illinois, as they are today; those are the inevitable consequences of one-party rule, at least by this Democrat party at this time in its history.
Packed courts.
Centralized elections.
A packed Senate.
More promotion of the administrative state to circumvent the legislative and judicial processes that can’t be won in elections.
Those are the consequences of a “generation of minority status” for the opposition.
That’s not acceptable.
The GOP will have to “reform itself” by good people showing up and reforming it.
Not by sitting splendidly above it all listening to Bulwark podcasts and heckling.
Not by waiting for some third-party to spring into place.
Not by waiting for the Reform Fairy.
Not, for that matter, by waiting for someone else to reform it. With all due respect to those who stormed out in a cloud of principled righteousness in 2015, 2017 and 2020, starting next month, your opinions are duly noted, and will no longer be of any relevance.
This nation has two choices, if we’re to remain a nation (or, potentially, a viable society).
One of them – by far the most radical and traumatic – is secession; from individual states, and maybe from the US itself.
(And no – that wasn’t “settled in 1865” any more than it was settled in 1776. It’s only “illegal” when the secedees have the will to bring the secessionists to heel).
In the summer of 2015, a chimney sweep in Elgin, Oregon, redrew the map of the American West. “Imagine for a moment Idaho’s western border stretching to the Pacific Ocean,” Grant Darrow wrote in a letter to the editor of his local paper. Rural Oregon, he insisted, should break its ties with the urbanites of Portland and liberals of Salem, and join Idaho. “The political diversity in this state is becoming unpalatable,” he argued. “Rural Oregonians in general and Eastern Oregonians in particular are growing increasingly dismayed by the manner in which Oregon’s Legislature and Oregon’s urban dwellers have marginalized their values, demonized their lifestyle, villainized their resource-based livelihoods, and classified them as second-class citizens at best.”
…
In the half decade or so since Darrow’s diatribe, a simple and outlandish idea, percolating in rural Oregon since the 1960s—what if we were just Idaho?—has grown into a grassroots secession movement. Last month, Harney County, in the high desert of eastern Oregon, became the state’s eighth to pass a nonbinding ballot measure supporting Darrow’s proposal. Move Oregon’s Border signs now dot the region’s empty highways, and Mike McCarter, a retired agricultural nurseryman and gun-club owner who runs a group pushing for the boundary reshuffle, travels the state in a bright-red trucker hat bearing the slogan. “We don’t care to move, because we’re tied to our land here,” he told me recently. “So why not just allow us to be governed by another state?” He mentioned a supporter so certain that her property will become part of Idaho that she already flies its state flag on her lawn. “We’re going to be Idaho,” she told him.
The movement has passed in nearly every county in which it’s gone to the ballot. As the article points out, it seems unlikely the Idaho legislature will accept the new border (which would drive Idaho’s western border to the Pacific – much less Oregon’s California-lite legislature full of unicorn-chasing feebs.
Let’s see – urban lotus-eaters, out of touch with and imposing their dystopian vision on the rest of the state, from a riot-torn city full of people who love central planning? Sounds familiar.
The second option – getting serious about Federalism, checks and balances, and enumerated, divided power, again – would be hypothetically simpler. And, sometimes, I think it would lead just as quickly to mass secession, as Big Left decided to hit the exits.
…that Covid provides a disturbing proportion of our society with a reason to wake up in the morning; “enforcing the misery” gives their lives whatever meaning it has.
First, kudos to the guy, who learned the important lesson: when a woman, no matter how wrong, no matter how impaired, no matter how depraved, attacks you, don’t hit back; your best bet is to hope for enough bruising (or, nowadays with video everywhere, clear video) to make your case in court.
Which I hope the guy does – winning everything this vile shrew owns or will ever own.
Back on point: as the emergency winds down, expect more of this, as Karens, bereft of their purpose and. meaning, lash out.
And – given that most “wars of religion” are really wars over other longstanding fault lines that happen to have a veneer of religious difference slapped on, what other fault lines will the pandemic adhere to?
In Medieval times, the monks in the monastery received offerings freely given by church-goers and the monks distributed that money to the poor, called alms. Naturally, the smell of free money brought hordes with their hands out. Monasteries invented a new job title – Almoner – for the guy who decided which poor got the money. With limited funds to distribute but unlimited demand for funds, the Almoner was charged with separating the Deserving Poor from the Undeserving Poor.
In modern times, we’ve lost that distinction. We’ve mostly replaced charity with welfare given regardless of worthiness, effort, or responsibility. “Make bad choices, get free money” provides no incentive to repent, to change, to grow in wisdom and maturity to become a self-sufficient and productive member of society.
The Salvation Army is a religion formed 150 years ago in the back streets of London to minister to the wretched poor. Its motto is “Blood and Fire,” recalling the Blood of Christ and the Fire of the Holy Spirit. They’re always one of the first on-scene after a natural disaster, bring comfort to those who have lost everything. I’m not a member of their church but for years, I’ve made a point of donating at the red kettles to the point that I won’t shop Target during the holy days because Target banned the Salvation Army whereas Wal-Mart welcomed them.
But this year, the Salvation Army is struggling. They’ve insulted their donor base. The big-shots forgot my donation was not payment on a debt I owed to them, my donation was a gift freely given. There aren’t as many people ringing bells outside stores and I’m not as eager to give money to an outfit that preaches woke liberalism instead of traditional Christianity. The leadership blames the misunderstanding on a statement by its Social Justice Committee which right-wing media have blown out of context. I ask: “Why does a Christian religion so fundamental its motto is “Blood and Fire” even HAVE a Social Justice Committee?” They’ve lost their way. They forgot their core mission, their reason for existing, the reason people give them money.
Disband the committee, renew your organizational focus on saving souls and alleviating suffering, and the donors will come back. Leave social justice to the politicians.
Joe Doakes
I interviewed a Salvation Army rep on my show a few weeks ago. He, like a lot of rank and file in the Army, pointed out that the Army is not partisan, and has to deal with social issues as they come to them; that being said, a lot of rank and file in the Salvation Army were un-thrilled by the way the natonal HQ handled things.
I still support the Salvation Army, and I hope. you do as well.
Part of it is that most of the companies I want to boycott over recent transgressions, I shopped shopping at years ago over previous ones.
Example: I stopped patronizing Pepsi, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut back in the ’90s, when they were donating big bank to gun control groups. Dick’s Sporting Goods became traef to me when they pulled “modern sporting rifles” from their shelves.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is looking for a new heat gun at a hardware store when Kirk THUNT, used car salesman and chairman of The Arne Carlson Project, an anti-Trump organization based in Forest Lake, walks around the corner.
THUNT: Merg.
BERG: Er…hi ,Kirk…
THUNT: You routinely refuse to condemn Donald Trump for trying to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when he was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: I condemn, and condemned, the riot, the “storming” of the Capitol, and anyone who thought they could overtake the Constitutional process by force. All the talk about killing the Vice President is just baked wind; the Secret Service would have leveled anyone who tried. The electoral commission was alarmed – justifiably – but they finished their job. Democracy was never in danger, and everyone involved is in a world of legal hurt. The federal criminal justice system is doing what it does.
THUNT: The January 6 Commission just learned that Chief of Staff Meadows has text messages proving Trump was involved.
BERG: Maybe they do.
THUNT: Maybe? So you support the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: The commission is an investigation – of sorts. Findings are not a conclusion. I’m not going to pretend I know enough to draw a conclusion, even if my conclusion matters to anyone. Let the investigation run its course.
THUNT: Huh. Let it run its course? So you’re right there behind the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: Again, no. I am saying I believe the left has glommed onto it as a way of deflecting, eternally, away from their many very deliberate attempts to undercut out democracy, and the riots that they supported from 2015 to 2021.
THUNT: Deflection? So – you are a big fan of the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: I’m pretty sure I said exactly the opposite, several times. My “crime” with you seems to be the fact that I haven’t wet myself with outrage over Trump, with regard to this episode or any other during his administration. I was a Trump non-fan back when you were watching The Apprentice. I’m intellectually honest about the things he did right and wrong, but if you’re looking for…
…on cue from me, you’ve got the wrong guy .
THUNT: So you dismiss concerns about the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: For the fourth time in 90 seconds – no. I do think Big Left uses January 6 the same way a certain European socialist leader used this episode. But we’ve got a whole new set of problems to deal with, as a nation and, frankly, as a Republican.
THUNT: So you don’t think the GOP is forever rendered toxic by its association with Trump, meaning you support the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when he was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: Er, Kirk? I’ve just explained that every single point you make is bulls**t. And yet every time you take a breath, you tell me I support the…what is it you say?
THUNT: You are a hypocritical supporter of the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: And again, I am not.
THUNT: Denial means you are an enabler of the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: That’s false.
THUNT: Disagreement means you are a supporter the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: Once you got on the green, you only had to use your putter twice, right?
THUNT: Nonsensical responses mean you support the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
BERG: Look. The heat gun I’m looking for.
THUNT: Using heat guns means you support the attempt to overthrow the government and erase the Constitution on January 6, when Trump was complicit in sending mobs looking for the Vice President, and the Electoral Commission, and members of Congress, to try to kill them.
You’re a cop. You’ve stopped a driver and have him standing on the side of the road because he’s got warrants for his arrest. He dives back into the car, presumably going for his gun. What do you do?
a. grab him from behind and wrestle with him. No, because he might still grab his gun and shoot you. b. grab your expandable baton and smack him. No, because he’s diving into the car and there’s no room to swing the baton. c. grab your pepper spray and Mace him. No, because inside the car, it’ll blind you, too. d. grab your Taser and shock him. Maybe, depends on who else has hands on him that will also get shocked. What other options do you have? e. grab your . . . .
. . . too late. He shot you. You’re dead and so’s your partner.
Intellectually, she intended to grab her Taser but instinctively, she grabbed her pistol. It’s a learned response. It’s what cops practice the most. Gun instructors say “train as you will fight” because that’s how your body will react in the half-second available. And cops train with guns because that’s ‘the gravest extreme,’ when the training matters most.
Officer Potter did not commit murder. This was a horrible accident but entirely foreseeable because the decision-action table is too long, too many variables to run through, and nobody can ‘train as you fight’ for all of them.
Joe Doakes
A roof on qualified immunity quite a bit – Justifiably so – but at its core, it is intended to protect people like police from excessive liability for exactly this sort of situation.
Unlike civilians, who are legally strongly discouraged from doing anything but running away from altercations, the police are expected to go toward the sound of trouble.
The pendulum likely need to swing back. I’m pretty sure this is a terrible case to enact that swing.
Nearly a quarter of college students wouldn’t be friends with someone who voted for the other presidential candidate — with Democrats far more likely to dismiss people than Republicans — according to new Generation Lab/Axios polling.
And a disturbing number of leftists don’t want to hire or employ those people, either.
It’s the ugly, militant side of Urban Progressive Privillege: not only do people with UPP never need to recognize any different perspectives on life, they increasingly work to actively cleanse their echo chambers of any dissonance.
The Democrats routinely call Republicans and their activists “culture warriors,” but when it comes to pushing the country in a particular direction away from where it currently is, it’s always the Democrats who have been at the forefront. On abortion, they have been pushing to open up the definition to make it as widely available and as routine as any other form of birth control. With social spending, they have moved to make it more and more available while lowering the requirements further and further, creating programs that are impossible to pay for.
On issues like education, they are tightening their control as much as possible and shutting families out, even going so far as to label concerned parents as “terrorists.”
I loved the Artemis Fowl books. I just saw the trailer for the movie and I feel like crying.
Artemis is a teenaged boy, a genius and ruthless criminal mastermind, assisted by his hulking bodyguard, Butler. The scriptwriters dragged out all the tropes to make him a naive kid guided by the Wise Old Black Man to Save the Planet from Ancient Evil and Rescue his Father . . . they turned him into a Disney Princess.
Look guys, you bought the movie rights to a wildly popular series of books because you wanted a ready-made fan base. But that fan base knows the character and knows the story. They don’t want you to ‘improve’ it, they want you to put the movie in their minds up there on the screen, like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.
Yeah, yeah, Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench and awesome special effects, great stuff. But couldn’t they have done it with a new story, one that nobody knows so the fans wouldn’t mind if it was butchered?
Joe Doakes
Hey, you’re lucky they didn’t turn him into an ass-kicking girl.
I don’t watch much TV, but a Sci-Fi series was recommended. It has commercials. They’re the same every break: out of four ads there will be one for childhood covid vaccine and one for Medicine for black homosexuals with HIV. Commercial ads are annoying enough, but relentless liberalism is infuriating.
Joe Doakes
The first cold, stormy Saturday we have, I’m going to do an ethnographic study of ads on TV, not so much to prove a political point as to illustrate the sociological absurdity that there is such a thing as “structural racism“ in our society.
…that the current, possibly-excessive, garment-rending over the “Omicron” variant is the sound of an awful lot of people who’ve gone through lives with little purpose or meaning, and have found a perverted version of both in bullying, shunning and scarlet-lettering people with different conclusions and means of dealing with Covid?
That depression and anxiety might be the least of society’s mental health issues when it comes to this pandemic – that the wave of cultural narcissism it’s released dwarves everything else (except, obviously, the suicide?)
Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club asks whether the Lesko Brandon administration is strolling into our next quagmire.
We canceled pipelines and oil leases at home, to signal our virtue on climate change. The price of gas at the pump, and natural gas for home heating, is going up. We’ve called on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil for us but we’ve also removed sanctions on Iran, which is funding Houthis in Yemen, who are attacking Saudi oilfields. The US could back the Saudis with arms sales or troops so they could keep pumping the oil we want, except Progressives insist the Saudis are repressing the Yemenis so we must not help them. Can “no blood for oil” be far behind?
We’ve caused a world-wide oil shortage and are about to stumble into another war in the Middle East with conflicting policy goals and no clear mission. But all the Left wants to talk about is Kyle.
I’ve had to spend a long weekend explaining to a lot of “progressives”: it’s entirely possible that not only are both of the following true:
Something can be a bad idea, legally and in common sense terms,
Self-defense is not only legitimate, but a very high hurdle to meet under the law in every state I’m aware of; that it’s a “license to kill” if you consider being arrested, spending two months in jail, having to bond for $2.5 Million to get released, spending 15 months in legal limbo, God only knows how much in legal bills, standing trial with a risk of two life sentences and a couple more decades to boot, and having to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder in case some depraved, entitled lefty narcissist decides to “even the score” to be a “license to kill”.
Most disturbing? Beyond the number of people who think that:
we should just ignore the law and make Rittenhoue an example because “we don’t want people wandering around defending themselves, or that
“crossing state lines” is a crime, or that
Kyle Rittenhouse was a “vigilante” for going to a riot with a gun, but Gage Grosskreutz wasn’t, or that
Rioting is sacrosanct protected speech?
…what could be worse?
This: I think both sides missed the most important lesson.
Which is, I believe, this.
Some Background: It is human nature to create order.
thout order, prosperity is impossible – and by “prosperity“, I don’t mean “his and hers Bentleys“, I mean living as something other than a subsistence farmer.
Without prosperity, freedom is academic. (And without freedom, order is tyranny, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves).
I’m no expert, but I think this is the real lesson of Kenosha that a lot of people on the right, and a lot more on the left, need to get.
We pay taxes to government – lots and lots of them. And providing “order” is the one unambiguously legitimate role of government.
And if government isn’t going to provide order, fairly and equally across society, in exchange for the burden of supporting it, and keep our businesses from getting burned, our cars from getting stolen, our kids from getting mugged on the way home from school?
People will start creating order for themselves. And one of these next times, it won’t be a 17 year old kid with more idealism than common sense and a loaner rifle.
It’ll be people who won’t run to the police to surrender when nasty nastiness happens.
It’ll be people who do their self-defense pre-emptively. People who don’t care about the high rhetoric and due process of the legal system.
People for whom shooting people isn’t something from video games; it’s something they do or did for their livelihood, either in the neighborhood or in Fallujah or Mogadishu or Helmand or somewhere in the Pine Barrens.
It’ll be people who keep secrets – you could even say, people who observe, and enforce, “codes of silence”.
Sounds like…the Mob? A Cartel? Omar’s crew from The Wire?
And here’s hoping Rittenhouse follows Nick Sandman into civil court.
UPDATE: Judge Schroeder after the Jury left the room: “Motion of the defense is granted, the charges are dismissed with prejudice. Mr. Rittenhouse is released from the obligation of his bond”.
Last Friday, heading into the closing weekend of the Virginia Gubernatorial contest, a group of ‘white supremacists” showed up “in support” of GOP challenger Glenn Younkin, in full Charlottesville regalia, lest anyone miss the reference. .
There was something a little fishy, though:
After they were thoroughly busted, the “Lincoln Project” – the group of “never-Trump” “republicans” that seems to always work toward Democrat Party interests [1] – admitted they were behind the stunt:
Lincoln Project claims credit for the "white supremacist" stunt at Youngkin's campaign event today. pic.twitter.com/h18Sfk5AUC
This is a less-polished episode from a campaign that’s been going on since 2009 at the very least, from Obama and Biden’s cabinets (ptr) all the way down to failed “fact-checker” Dog Gone, who used to promise in this comment section that there was a wave of white supremacist terror that’d dwarf 9/11 coming up, any day now.
Tne notion that, notwithstanding the fact that actual “white supremacist” groups have been shrinking by roughly an order of magnitude roughly every generation, that white American society is building a militant arm that is just acheing to go out and take over. Every event of recent history, and even distant history, is bent to support that narrative – from the very founding of this nation to the Minneapolis riots to Emmanuel Goldstein…
…schwoops. I skipped narratives, there.
I mean, not like the narrative was ever subtle, but how stupid do you have to be to miss it?
I know today's stunt was hilarious in the "Holy hell, they're really bad at this" sense, but what gets lost is that there was a coordinated effort to smear all Youngkin voters as white supremacists, and they shouldn't be allowed to move on from this. Don't ever let them forget.
The Lesko Brandon administration has a new idea: private sponsors. The State Department announced that individuals can sponsor people evacuated from Afghanistan during the rout. The evacuees are currently held in military installation waiting to be re-homed in America. It costs less than $2,500 but the sponsor must also find them housing, furniture, food, clothing, get them signed up for welfare, get Afghan children enrolled in schools, help Afghan parents and adults find jobs, and teach them English.
Doesn’t sound like a bargain to me. The administration’s stagflation policies already are impacting my family, without taking on responsibility another. And doesn’t the Third Amendment prohibit the government forcing citizens to provide room and board for soldiers (or maybe it doesn’t apply because they’re not US soldiers, they’re Taliban soldiers, so that makes everything better)? If the government can’t take care of the millions of immigrants it’s letting into the country, perhaps stop letting them in? Maybe even – dare I say – send them back?
This isn’t like Sally Struthers asking me to sponsor little Maria for less than the price of a cup of coffee every day. This is a big commitment and I don’t even get a letter every month. Who do they think will participate? Who is this program intended for? Liberals eager to signal their virtue by writing a one-time check then dumping the load on taxpayers? A pimp running a child sex ring who gets to pick-and-choose the young, pretty ones? A factory owner who needs to fill dangerous jobs on the cheap? A landscaper who gets free labor for life?
$2,500 is a pretty steep buy-in for such speculative return. Anybody want to go halves on one?
Joe Doakes
I wonder if there’s any possible way to turn this particular “commodity“ into a market, with an exchange, perhaps is the basis for a cryptocurrency?
