If there are two bright spots in this current legislative session, it is the emergence of Harry Niska and Walter Hudson, as two of the best state legislators in the United States.
Here, Walter finishes the job Harry started, giving the single best explanation of why the DFL, and the StarTribune, are lying about the removal of language, regarding pedophilia from state statute.
Pass this around, like it’s hot.
January 6 was, at worst, a bunch of goons and wannabes playing “Three Percenter” games. Maybe they were provoked by a Fed, maybe not.
Watergate? That was a President and his committee doing something that they knew was wrong enough that they felt the explicit need to cover it up. amind
The Durham report describes something much worse: the active co-option of the institutions of American law enforcement to political ends.
David Strom on the choice this nation, as individuals and as a collective (or collectives) faces:
But right here, right now anybody who had faith in those liars has a choice: declare your alliance to the truth, or to the lies. Do you care more about America or hate Donald Trump so much that you are willing to give up America? Because defending the abuses of power is a rejection of America itself.
The choice is stark, but the stakes really are that high. Not because Donald Trump is the only man who can “save America,” because if that were true America would already be lost. Donald Trump is not immortal, nor has he proven capable of fighting the “deep state.” This is not about Trump, but about who rules America–the people or the Elite.
No, the choice is between upholding the rule of law, limits on power, ensuring accountability in government, and preservation of our constitutional order, or just handing raw power to the Left, the Administrative State, and an MSM dedicated to lying to you all the time.
A smaller but equally corrosive scandal is out there in plain sight; as I’ve been tirelessly pointing out for six and a half years, we don’t have to infer that the media is not just biased, but actively working for the same people the FBI has been busted working for; representatives of our media “elites” said it, proudly, in front of a friendly crowd, just after the ’16 election.
Trump’s greatest failure was his inability to drain the swamp. He made a start – but in the context of this week’s news, “getting a start” is a little like “getting halfway across Omaha Beach before calling it a ‘L'”.
This is going to have to be the next great national crusade.
More on this to come.
It may have felt like I was picking on “Emery” last week, asking him to define exactly when “his” life developed enough moral value that it his. mother would have ceased being able to abort “him”.
Of course, someone who can’t define when their own life acquired moral weight also can’t, logically, tell you why it’s OK for their mother not to abort them now. “I’m alive”. OK – since when? And why? What is this magical threshold? Whistling and hoping the question goes away isn’t much more intellectually honest than telling your teenagers that the stork brings babies.
But I have yet to meet a Democrat, anywhere, at any level, who can, will or, I suspect, is allowed to try to answer that question.
So, that’s one such question.
What are the rest?
Let’s build a list: the questions no Democrat can, will, or is allowed to answer:
When Did It Become Not Acceptable For Your Mother To Abort You.
Not some generic woman. Not some abstract fetus. Your mom, and you. When did your life gain moral standing? When did your body (and, uh, associated consciousness, mind, spirit or soul) become someone with its own bodily autonomy?
How Can You Tell “Universal” Background Checks Are Working Without A Registry?
The police find a gun. They suspect that the person who got the gun to the perp didn’t take a background check. If the record doesn’t exist tying a transfer to the perp, how do you prove it if all of them aren’t kept on record?
And how is this record – of data points, almost like, I dunno, a base of data (is there a word for that) kept, without a registry?
So, What City Got (Sustainably) More Affordable After Rent Control?
Beyond New York and San Francisco, the list of places with rent control and the list of cities with literally zero habitable affordable housing are pretty much the same list.
Why do high school kids earning Minimum Wage – who, according to the BLS, overwhelmingly live in homes with middle class incomes – need a “living wage”?
Don’t say “because many of them support their families” – most of them don’t, and as we saw last week, the “living wage” has slashed low-income jobs in the Twin Cities.
So…why?
I’d like to continue the list. Any others?
University of Saint Thomas, as a matter of policy, apparently doesn’t tell young women if their assigned dorm roommate is is a bio-male who identifies as female:
This, according to [UST Housing Director Zoe] Chang, is done as discreetly as possible in order to avoid upsetting parents. The video, OMG said in an email, documents the “mountain of rule changes and preferential treatment provided to trans students when it comes to their housing accommodations.”
The video:
If progressive policies are so unambiguously good, why do they have to lie about all of them?
Sure, it’s entirely plausible that an entire “white supremacist” group without a single inbred-looking morbidly overweight guy among ’em might march through DC without a mob of “counterprotesters” howling for their blood. It’s a crazy world, anything can happen.
What makes this whole thing seem just a tad lessplausible is…:
(more…)At what point in your mother’s pregnancy with you was it no longer OK to abort you?
Put another way – when did your life acquire moral weight? When did your choice – and existence – become something warranting defending?
Not some generic “woman”; your mother.
Not some abstract “fetus”; you.
Please leave an answer in the comments.
And if your answer is any variation of “It was entirely my mother’s choice, up until the moment I emerged” – in other words, that your very justification for existence didn’t develop moral weight until another human said it did, feel free to follow up with a logically consistent reason that murder is wrong. Either that, or consider me to have branded you a moral coward, and see yourself out.
Only Democrats/Lefties/pro-choicers in the comments, please.
Language NSFW, and you might wanna watch the volume, too:
Some are more eloquent. Some use their indoor voices. Some use words.
But one way or another, this is the archtype for all modern leftist oratory.
Dems: Public broadcasting is NOT state media! 1% of their funding comes from government!
Normies: Then defunding won’t hurt anythi…
Dems: NOOO! You’ll KILL ELMO! Why do you hate Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers?
Dems: Trans women are women!
Normies: Except in athletic competition, where their innate masculine physical traits are a huge advantage, not to mention in prison where they tend to rape bio-women…
Dems: Genocide!
…that the DFL made Minnesota a sanctuary state for Munchausen Mommies like this soulless crone.
(WARNING: You may vomit):
And when a Munchhausen Mom like this walks through a custody order to bring the kid that they’re “transing” to MN, the state will put her wishes above that of the other state’s court order.
Food for ugly, nightmarish thought.
DFL: Let’s fully fund education!
Normies: Could you define that term? Because we already pay an awful lot of money, and the results keep getting worse…
DFL: You hate children! Why do you hate children?
1980: Journalists and teachers were among my role models and beacons of sanity. And the guys in KISS were symptoms of the decline of civilization.
2023: One of the guys from KISS is a beacon of sanity:
And our “journalists” are signs of the decline of civilization:
I didn’t see that coming…
…more than about 30 years ago.
(Note to Soledad O’Brien: Your comparison would make sense if Paul Stanley’s parents had seen him at age six, standing in front of a mirror holding a tennis racket for a guitar, and hustled him into makeup and a leather pants suit).
Dems: Blue America *carries* Red America. Without us, Red America would starve.
Normies: OK. Let’s talk national divorce, since you don’t need…
Dems: Why are you talking treason!?!? NEVER!
To: Rep. Samantha Vang
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Gaslighting
Rep. Vang,
You wrote the “Social Credit” bill (you call it ‘Stop Hate’, but my title is more accurate) that I talked about on my show over the weekend.
You got a storm of criticism – almost all of it justified.
This was your response:
Well,no. That’s not what it does.
Y’see, the market for hate crime far, far outstrips the supply, notwithstanding the DFL’s “Reichstag Firing”. For example:
The mosque fires were set, not just by one guy, the the one criminal in Minneapolis dumb enough to actually commit a crime that Minneapolis’s city government still gives a sh*t about.
No – Rep. Vang’s bill will essentially collect statemens about “microagressions” reported by protected classes.
Bumper sticker they don’t like?
Something overheard in a cafe?
A Trump sign?
Nobody knows. The bill allows no scrutiny, no Data Practices requests, no accountability or transparency of any kind.
It is, in every respect, a “social credit” bill.
Which is a key part of the Communist system, Rep. Vang, that your parents and her people fled.
That is all.
DFL: Walz runs the most transparent administration in history.
Normies: His administration us utterly opaque, hides information, and communicates only in giggly selfies.
DFL: Our HR office will be in touch.
DFL: The surplus is immense, and a monument to DFL wisdom.
Normies: It’s mostly one-time money. You turned it into permanent spending. It’ll be a deficit next session.
DFL: We ALWAYS said it was one-time money!
DFL: the police are in occupying force of oppressors, and must be defunded!
Normies: we oppose defunding the police.
DFL: hey, we never said anything about defunding the police!
DFL: we will make Minnesota a safe place for children to get gender affirming care
Normies: we oppose allowing children who can’t rent a car or consent to getting a tattoo to opt for life changing gender altering surgery.
DFL: hey, who said anything about altering gender!
DFL: it’s good for children younger than 13 to attend a highly sexualized drag shows.
Normies: we oppose children attending highly sexualized drag shows
DFL: don’t you DARE call us groomers!
DFL: it’s time to ban magazines larger than seven rounds, as well as “assault weapons”
Normies: so, do you want to confiscate firearms?
DFL: how dare you say anybody’s coming for your guns! You’re paranoid!
Earlier in this exceptionally loosely linked series, I lamented that the conditions that set up the great American resurgence of the early 1980s aren’t, largely, there in our society today.
I’ll return to the example of France. The French nation and people have a culture that goes back, in one form or another, to pre-Roman times, through Vercingetorix, Charles Martel, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, a phalanx of seminal authors and artists, and centuries of stories, mythical and historical, that helped define what “French” actually meant, to the world but especially to France.
The demographic bleeding-out of World War I caused a crisis in faith in that myth – a malaise, to borrow a term that’s come up in this series before, and most certainly will again. With nearly 10% of the population dead, wounded or missing. and much of the country’s heartland devastated, it’d be fair to say France had Les Bleus
Unlike France in 1940, America hasn’t been demoralized by a great military, demographic and spiritual catastrophe in its recent past (and remember – the end of World War 1 and the invasion of France were about as far apart as 9/11 and today). In the past 40 years, America vanquished its greatest foe to date without a (non-proxy) shot being fired, followed by the greatest expansion in wealth in history. America should be stoked.
But we’re kind of the opposite today.
Every rational, sane, intellectually honest American knows our history – like the history of every nation – is full of imperfections, things that modern mores reject. That’s true of every country ever – at least, the ones that evolve positively. And for the most part, with a few extremely notable exceptions, Western Civilization has done that for the past few hundred years. The notion of “progress” in the human condition was meaningless before Western Civilization as we know it today started evolving.
And so Western culture – especially American culture – developed its own myths and legends. It was the land of opportunity, and of equality.
No, not equal opportunity for everyone at every time – but that, too, has progressed. And generations of immigrants choosing American, and disproportionally succeeding at it, are evidence that the myths have not only some basis in truth, but are in fact not merely myths of facts of American life.
But the powers that be in our culture have been working to undercut those parts of our national mythology.
Equality? In 1987, a Gallup poll showed that about a third of black Americans thought racism was a driving force in American life. In 2015, that figure had doubled. Does anyone seriously think that America got twice as racist between 1990 and the third year of Barack Obama’s third time?
Even more toxically in the long run? The notion that we are a nation of equal opportunity is being pecked away at by a league of leftist intellectual lilliputians.
I was listening to NPR a few weeks ago (so you don’t have to), a show called Marketplace, a show that tries to talk about economics.
They were interviewing Alyssa Quart, a woman whose career seems to revolve around convincing Americans that there is no opportunity. She was flogging a book, Bootstrapped: A Self-Made Myth And The Dystopian Social Safety Net It Created.
And it’s exactly as cynical as you might think:
“Boots were really important in the 19th century,” Quart said in an interview with “Marketplace” host Reema Khrais. “If you’re wealthy, you had someone who could help you put them on. If you’re a working man, you were struggling to pull them up every day. So pulling yourself over your bootstraps became this symbol of getting ahead in this country all on your own steam.”
In her latest book, “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream,” Quart looks at how this symbol helped create what she calls the “dystopian social safety net.”
“If we have a country where the social welfare state is much more fragile than, say, other advanced industrialized countries,” said Quart, “you have people then relying on this ragtag network of nonprofits, volunteers, crowdfunding.”
Quart’s message is being spread on fertile ground, at least among Gen-Zs, who’ve grown up with the message that “Boomers” got all the money and left them the scraps (which, by the way, I also felt as an angry and under-employed GenXer just out of college).
Thing is, Quart made a good point – unintentionally, and in a way that indicts the modern Left’s sabotage of American culture. She endlessly belabors the lack of government insitutions to “support” the poor, which is the usual leftist twaddle. Because…
…of course the idea of dragging one’s self up, completely solo, “by one’s bootstraps” is rare to unheard of. Of course America had institutions that fostered that.
Family.
Church.
Communities – and by that, we’re talking social communities, not governments.
Which are the things Big Left has been aggressively demolishing.
So yeah – coming up by one’s bootstraps is hard. Never easier than in any other culture in history…
…but Big Left is going to change that.
Yesterday, we talked about the Five Christians You Meet in the Movies.
And it started me thinking.
Last year, I started but didn’t quite follow through on a statistical study of race and gender characteristics in TV advertisements, as well as the tone or general sense of stereotype associated with the “Characters”. Spoiler alert: white males are subject to a certain…stereotyping, outside of ads for home improvement, sometimes. The numbers were jarringly uniform; there seems to be an unspoken (maybe) pact to portray white males as dim buffoons at best, cads at worst.
And while I don’t watch a ton of TV, I see enough to know the parallels are there.
There are five kinds of men – of all races – visible on television, either programming or advertisement, today:
The Impotent Buffoon: The most notable example of this “male” is the “boyfriend” on most TV/streamingt shows aimed at Millennials and younger. Mewling, incompetent, the inevitable inferior in the relationship whether he knows it or not. The first crisis in the plot inevitably shows him to be about as useful as a set of debate notes in front of Lieutenant Governor Flanagan. This is also the “husband” in most TV ads, these days; schlubby, married to a woman who’s waaaaay out of his league (and, in many cases, with kids who are made to appear much, much smarter than him). In a recent development, that incompetent male isn’t always white anymore (the guy in the “WeBuyAnyCar.com” ad jumps to mind).
The Douchebag: These are the people that all the “Jocks” in every John Hughes teensploitation movie grew up to be. The recent simulacrum of this type was the “partner” FBI agent in the (often excellent) Christina Applegate/Linda Cardellini streamer Dead to Me; a youngish man with all the physical symbols of being upper-middle class; he went to a pseudy-Ivy on, of course, a lacrosse scholarship, and exudes the casual arrogance that the modern TV viewer has been trained to expect to shortly see torn straight down by his senior partner – a (grabs checklist of modern “virtue” tropes) Latina single mother who worked her way up from a street, uh, FBI agent. (Sub-flavor: The gay douchebag, who usually ends up being the good guy).
Old Money: The definitive versions? The senior partners in the arbitrage firm in Trading Places.
The Melodrama Villain: Usually middle aged or older, usually coded as American aristocrats. If a show needs an “evil” Macguffin, it’s usually one of these guys. Even in car ads, for crying out loud, the “baddie” usuallyl resembles the “Goldstein” character in the Macintosh “1984” ad.
The Bankable A-Lister: Bankable A-listers are always exempt from all these tropes. Competent, intelligent, hot…perfect. The sort of thing that we’re supposed to be moving away from when the character is female.
Now, on level this is all good critical fun.
On the other hand – remember the complaints of African-Americans to Stepin Fetchit and Amos and Andy, or Natives to a century of movie stereotypes of Indians, or Latinos to decades of “lazy Mexican” tropes, who asked “why should our young people grow up with this vision of themselves all round them in popular culture?”
They were right.
If you’re a young man today, growing up as a generation of young men that’ve had their boyish “male” traits sanded off or drugged into submission by a feminized school system – and whose very testosterone levels are being eroded by diet or environment or God only knows what? When you look at pop culture around you, what do you see?
The loudest voices in our culture telling you “your type” is impotent, ineffective, useless, and if you draw a winning ticket in life’s lottery, anything from insufferable to evil?
Perhaps the proper term isn’t “stochastic terror”.
Maybe gaslighting?
Grooming for failure and misery?
Intergenerational abuse?
The more I think about it, I’m talking myself back to “stochastic terror”.
Not gonna prevaricate: This kid had me pretty depressed (in a “howling with laughter” kind of way) last week:
This young lady was the perfect antidote:
Let the Great Sort continue!
I’ve been inadvertently mis-scheduling posts lately. It’s been a busy week.
But my work ethic doesn’t like having just one post for a day.
So – how about Chicago: Mobs (plural) of teens not at all stochastically terrorize THE FREAKING LOOP:
Or, to put it in the mob’s own words and pictures:
One couple who got mobbed and rescued by a good samaritan as the Chicago PD drove languidly past:
The “young man”, the boyfriend in the piece above, was black, btw.
Fearless prediction: it’s coming to Minneapolis. This summer. Just you watch.
I’ve listened to a lot of vapid, trite radio in my life.
Janeane Garofalo’s attempt at a talk show. Most any “audio essay” by David Sedaris. Just about every local show on AM950, from Nick Coleman and Wendy Wilde and Two Putt Tommy and Steve Timmer through Bart McNeil or whatever his name is. Lots of dreadful stuff.
But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything quite this stomach-pumpingly vacuous as this two year old episode of “Radiolab”, an NPR podcast [1] which combines an oppressive amount of cutesy sound editing with a programming lineup that captures all of the lows of “This American Life” with none of TAL’s occasional highs.
it’s a rebroadcast [2] from a couple of years ago, when the Covid pandemic had come and gone for most of America, but was still leaving the world a Camusian hellscape for the organically-fed fashionably angsty member of the Laptop Class that work for and listen to National Public Radio.
And in it, the plush-bottom yoohoos in the studio seem to be straining to make the case that 2020 and 2021 is a candidate to be horrible years in history, as compared to…
…536AD. When something, a bunch of volcanoes or comet dust or something blotted out much of the sunlight for years, causing a chain reaction of crop failures, famines, plagues (as hungry rats invaded granaries) and wars that led to the death of perhaps 20% of the people on the planet at the time.
But Covid’s pretty bad, too!
Here’s the neat (if nauseous) trick: Listen to it, and you can almost feel like you’re sitting in a “breakfast place” on Eat Street listening to a bunch of non-profiteers bitching about how lack of rent control is genocide.
NPR should really be funding itself.
(more…)
You are currently browsing the archives for the Culture War category.
