26 thoughts on “The New Curmudgeons

  1. well what is the left if not reactionary? “Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, etc”, they have indoctrinated a generation to believe all life is a Head Start Program.

  2. They might have taken the time to show up at the polls if they wanted their voices to be heard.

  3. They might be young enough and therefore naïve enough to believe pre-election polls are honest indicators of likely result. Since the pre-election polls showed Brexit failing, they didn’t need to bother voting — that would be piling on. But after you get burned a time or two, you realize the pre-election polls are not information services but are intended as voter suppression tactics, your vote may actually matter, and you’d better show up. They’ll learn.

  4. Poor wilted snowflakes. They better have a care with how they speak about their parents, lest they get turned out of the basement and have to fend for themselves on a barista’s wage, or worse yet, try and find employment with their Wymen’s Study degrees.

  5. It’s funny how cowardly the left is. It is willing to stand up to anyone who is too moral and good to actually abuse them (e.g. Christian bakers), yet cowers in the face of microaggression, much less the jihadist face of those who would actually destroy them.

  6. Nobody likes being uncomfortable, but you can live with it if you have a vision for what is on the other side of your discomfort – be it dieting, working out, saving now for a future benefit – or putting up with hard times in the hopes of a better life for you and/or your children.

    The Hebrews complained all the way out of Egypt and through the wilderness. Washington’s Continental army endured endless hardships while a sizable portion of their countrymen wanted to remain subjects of England. Men and women of vision don’t whine about their current circumstances – they do something about it, rather than expecting others to do it for them.

  7. I’ve noticed this both locally and in US politics as well. They seem afraid of chang, of ggrowing up, of becoming responsible.

  8. It is as if their government schools have failed to teach them history, whereby the greatest prosperity of the nation was when the Corn Laws were repealed, and the sinking into a second class economy was when the government took greater and greater control.

    Which is, of course, exactly the case. Gosh, why does Labour work against this? Self-interest perhaps?

  9. Government is Light. Government is Nourishment. Government is Life Giver. Government is the Death Panel. Government Giveth, and Government Taketh Away. That is what millennials believe and snowflakes are being taught. There is no room for individualism and self-realization. And the bigger the Government, the better. Globalist Utopia.

    And in related news, a Princeton Professor is trying to rewrite Declaration of Independence based on a misplaced period. This particular millennial is arguing that Founding Fathers meant a much larger role for the Government. Damn the syntax, damn the Federalist Papers, damn anything but their slave-to-the-government goal and ambition.

  10. The referendum hinged in part on youth turnout, and the government even tried to lower the voting age for the referendum to 16 from 18.

    It failed, but the Remain campaign still pushed to register young voters, with some success: The deadline to register was extended by two days after a voter-registration website crashed because it was overwhelmed by visitors.

    Prime Minister David Cameron turned to Tinder, the dating app, and TheLADbible, a website popular among young men, to tout the benefits of staying in the European Union. The opposition Labour Party, which supported remaining in the bloc, also reached out to young voters.

    More than one million people between 18 and 34 registered in recent months, the most ever for a British election, according to Bite the Ballot and HOPE Not Hate, which encourage young people to vote. Turnout for the referendum, at around 72 percent, was the highest for any national election in Britain since 1992.

    And they still lost the vote.

  11. They seem afraid of chang, of ggrowing up, of becoming responsible.

    Change is scary. Growing up and becoming responsible means facing inevitable failures. Children these days are taught to fear both those things, so it is no wonder that they flock to the safety of leftist ideology. The problem is, in the real world both failure and change are inevitable, and it leads to great discomfort, which leads to an ever increasing demand for some great paternalist protector.

  12. A politics based strictly on nostalgia has nothing but bitter memories to offer. The goal of recreating the past is and always will be Sisyphean.

  13. Yeah, Emery, I sure miss those days when we still had rights and everyone was equal before the law.

    It could be that those voting for Brexit – or those who declared independence from Britain – weren’t focusing on the present or the past, but on the future.

  14. What’s going on–here and elsewhere (see Hilliary Clinton will not be indicted), is that as conservatives have made the case with facts, the left is arguing the facts don’t matter. That is, after all, how we get from “we’re going to negotiate a deal” to “Europe will commit economic hara-kiri by imposing punitive duties in the British”, and how we get from “we’re tired of Brussels regulating the heck out of our bananas and cabbage” to “a politics based strictly on nostalgia.”

    Pretty slick, and enough people fall for it to wreak havoc.

  15. Next shoe:

    Budapest (AFP) – Hungary announced Tuesday a referendum on taking in migrants under a troubled EU quota plan, a scheme that right-wing Prime Minister and fierce Brussels critic Viktor Orban has vehemently rejected.

    Last year Orban voted against sharing 160,000 migrants around the 28-nation European Union via mandatory quotas, saying the bloc has no right to “redraw Europe’s cultural and religious identity”.

    Those darn Hungarians! Don’t they know what’s better for them? How dare they question EU authority regarding their sovereignty and identity as a nation?

  16. is that as conservatives have made the case with facts, the left is arguing the facts don’t matter.

    BB, some animals are just more equal than others.

  17. An observation: it is curious how elections and referenda are the will of the people and speaking to power, unless they do not fit the libturd worldview.

  18. The Hungarians already had a big dose of totalitarian control under the Soviets, and they didn’t like it, and they kicked hard against it. Blood, not red ink, ran in the streets.

    Here is a compelling documentary of the 1956 Olympic Water Polo finals between Hungary and the USSR, played at the height of the conflict: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322332/

  19. NW: Yes we have problems; yesterday’s solutions will not solve them. How many baby boomers will have to die before we can have forward looking politics again?

  20. Yeah, that’s what we need: more “forward”! We should put that on a three color poster or something.

    Idiot.

  21. An enlightening article on the Brexit by English political philosopher John Gray: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/07/strange-death-liberal-politics
    Gray is not on the right, at least not in the American sense of the word. His biggest argument with the Left is that he does not see history as progressive. Gray faults the Left for having a utopian view of the future transplanted, Gray says, from the Christian religion. He regards as especially foolish the Leftist belief that it can create a desirable future using the power of reason. Gray thinks that the vote exposed critical weaknesses in Labour’s governing philosophy more so than in the Tory’s governing philosophy.

    Free movement of labour between countries with vastly different wage levels, working conditions and welfare benefits is a systemic threat to the job opportunities and living standards of Labour’s core supporters. Labour cannot admit this, because that would mean the EU is structured to make social democracy impossible. This used to be understood, not only on Labour’s Bennite left but also by Keynesian centrists such as Peter Shore and, more recently, Austin Mitchell. Today the fact goes almost unnoticed, except by those who have to suffer the consequences. Figures such as Gisela Stuart, Frank Field and Kate Hoey, who recognise the clash between EU structures and social-democratic values, are a small minority in the party.
    . . .
    The contradictions of the world-view shared by progressive thinkers and established elites are becoming acutely evident. There is constant talk about being in a time of unprecedented change. Globalisation is connecting the world as never before; our lives are being continuously transformed by disruptive technologies; old ways of life and hierarchies in society are fast dissolving . . . these are the ruling clichés of the age. What is striking is that they are deployed to prop up a failing ancien régime. Not only in Britain and continental Europe but also in the Unite States, the human costs of a broken form of capitalism have fuelled popular revulsion – a revolt that has produced a mood of hysteria and something like blind panic among bien-pensants who pride themselves on their judicious ­rationality. Brexit will be followed by the end of Western civilisation, they foam, while a Trump presidency would be a planetary catastrophe. A paranoid style of liberalism has emerged that sees disaster and demonic evil at every turn.

  22. Yesterday’s solutions, Emery? 20th Century Progressive Utopiansim would drag everyone backwards to a top-down, managed economy that is good only for transferring the benefits of productivity from the producers of goods to the producers of regulations. In a time where we enjoy the greatest capacity for individual empowerment through technology, communications, logistics and more, the endless commitment of the few to deny and control the many creeps unabated. I am working for a world where my grandchildren may someday have the same liberty and freedom that my grandparents had.

  23. Night Writer, it is frightening how quickly the vocabulary of freedom has fallen into disuse. Instead we have the vocabulary of government granted rights. David French (the same David French William Kristol wanted to draft to replace Trump) notes that the Iowa Civil Rights Commission has decided that its oppressive gender regulations will apply to every public church service (and nearly all Christian church services can be defined as public).
    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/437499/other-news-iowas-civil-rights-commission-seeks-regulate-church-services?target=author&tid=1048
    The ICRC is using the same tactics that the soviets used to crush religion in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. In theory, Soviet citizens were free to attend religious cervices, but in fact the Soviets did everything that it could to discourage church service attendance. Services were open only to registered members of a church. Priests and ministers had regular jobs to do, and had to run the church in their spare time. No evangelizing was allowed. Churches were forbidden to do charity work (that was the job of the State). Getting ahead in the Soviet Union started with belonging to communist youth groups, and these groups’ meetings were purposely scheduled to conflict with church services. Workers’ shifts were broken up so that church could not be attended as a family function.
    For some reason, the enemies of religion do not use the institutionally and culturally atheist Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s as an example of the utopia of a society where science and reason and science had replaced religion.

  24. NW: Yes we have problems; yesterday’s solutions will not solve them. How many baby boomers will have to die before we can have forward looking politics again?

    Now, for starters, let’s decide what “yesterday’s solutions” are. I would argue that, in light of the horrors of the 20th Century, central control is one of “yesterday’s solutions”, and “Brexit” is a move towards the future. Or, the past, as once again, it was the English who led the way out of the morass of mercantilism and high tariffs by repealing the Corn Laws in the 19th Century.

    Honestly, Emery, can we drop the self-righteous BS for a while and start actually debating the issues? Are the British better, or worse, off with the Brussels regulatory state telling them what kind of bananas and hair dryers they can buy? Are they better off, or worse off, with Brussels imposing far higher tariffs than they would impose?

    I argue they are worse off with Brussels, and it’s not a close call.

  25. Will the UK survive, Emery, without the EU specifying the curvature of cucumbers that may be sold?

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