Shot in the Dark

The Decline And Fall Of Max Boot

They say the most arrogant and obnoxious residents of New York City are the ones born in Buffalo.

Likewise, the most annoying, provincial, arrogant hangers-on to any ideology are the ones that came to it with the  most personal sturm und drang.

There’ a former conservative blogger who, along with some other personal changes, flipped their politics a while ago.  They’ve written a few angst soaked social media posts theatrically apologizing for and renouncing having ever been a conservative, much less an outspoken one.

Which I found a little insulting and a lot depressing.  I mean, I grew up liberal, to the extent that I didn’t tell anyone that I’d voted for Reagan (in the middle of one of the most Republican states in the Union, mind you) – but consider the things I learned as a larval prorgressive key to my development.  I’ve never apologized for having once written a party platform at a mock government that’d send a tingle up Bernie Sanders’ leg – although some have thought I should (and have been told to go pound sand, albeit in a good-natured kind of way).

So be what you want to be.  Go with God.  It’s a free country.  So far.

Which is why the ever-more-constipated-sounding virtue signaling of Max Boot, once one of the best foreign policy writers out there, has been such a buzzkill.  He’s changed his alignment…

…well, no.  He’s let his never-Trumpism define his politics, which were always “Eisenhower Republican”;  think New Dealers who opposed communism.

His departure from the GOP (OK, its departure from him) is kind of cloying and annoying.

His swerve into virtue-blasting, on the other hand, is a sign he’s over as a significant public thinker.

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Mitch Berg

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5 responses to “The Decline And Fall Of Max Boot”

  1. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    And one by one, the so-called opinion leaders fall to the one side or the other. Trump has does us all a great service by provoking this or at least catalyzing it.

    Of course, the tell in Boot’s case was that dorky hat he wears with such aplomb.

  2. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Almost all of the #nevertrumpers believe that politics is what justifies man to God. This fits in with their common background as “neocons” (McCain apparently believed that the idea of America was too beautiful a thing to be left to actual Americans to manage).

  3. Swiftee Pinochet Avatar
    Swiftee Pinochet

    From the link:

    “Surely there is a third way between a full-throated embrace of white identity and a supine adoption of the politics of self-hatred.”

    Yes, there is, and we were following it up until the time the left discovered the benefit of instructing their minority serfs it was time to be anti-white “Woke”.

    Now, it’s no longer good enough to pull minorities up with generous subsidized family financing, higher education and employment quotas. Now we must cut them reparations checks and most importantly, Caucasian men must admit they are, and have always been the only thing between minorities and greatness.

    And it’s not just race based. California has a new rule also states that by the end of July 2021, at least two women must sit on boards with five members, and there must be at least three women on boards with six or more members.

    In 2000, Robert Mugabe kicked out all of the Caucasian farmers and awarded the farms to Negro Zimbabwen’s; problem is, none of them knew how to run a farm. Within 5 years, they were importing most of their staples. What happens if Cali corporations can’t find enough competent women to sit on their boards? Their choices are either hire unqualified tokens, or pay hefty fines. Makes perfect sense in Clown World.

    In my 30 years of engineering, setting aside, I have worked with less than a dozen minorities not of Chinese or (dot) Indian race. I’ve worked all over the country and in dozens of industries, ranging from water treatment, to medical device manufacturing, to food and ag and mining. If there’s someone who can say they’ve had as broad an exposure as possible, it’s me.

    According to this report, Chinese top the field earning STEM related undergrad degrees, followed by Caucasians, Hispanics and Negroes respectively.

    Hispanics lead in “—-” Studies programs, followed by Chinese, Negroes and Caucasians respectively.

    And what have Negroes done with all those college quotas they’ve enjoyed over the past 30 years? Public Administration and Social Services. Take a look into any major city, or bureaucracy led by those graduates and tell me they made good use of the benefits.

    I’m not afraid of being replaced; I’m afraid I won’t be.

  4. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    “Their choices are either hire unqualified tokens, or pay hefty fines. ”
    From what I have seen, it will be the former.
    It is an effective critique of capitalism (and libertarianism) that market forces are not sufficient to produce a meritocracy.

  5. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    From the “our elites are idiots” files: this New York Times article refers, again and again, to Orwells novel 1984: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-1984.html
    But the title is not     1984. It is Nineteen Eighty-Four.
    The article also includes this clunker: “If Amazon vetted each title the way physical bookstores do, it would need lots more employees.”
    “lots more”? Really? Not “many more,” or even “a lot more” (“lot” is already a plual)? The NY Times doesn’t bother to use real words anymore.

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