Tag: Tough History Coming

Quote of the Day – Sudden Jihad Edition

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From Sean Sorrentino on Facebook:

If we keep pretending to ourselves that this takes “Extensive pre-planning and training,” then we fool ourselves into believing that it can’t happen. The real limiting factor is finding about a dozen psychos who are so mentally whacked that they think that this is a good idea, but are still composed enough that they can work together effectively. The tools and the tactics are easy to pick up. It’s the broken, yet not shattered brains that are in short supply.

RTWT.

9/11

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So here we are, fourteen years after the attack, and there are finally (still mostly empty) structures where there used to be only the “National Embarrassing Vacant Lot and Monument to Red Tape & Inefficiency.”  Four years ago our embassy in Benghazi, Libya was attacked and four Americans lost their lives there under the watch of President Obama and Secretary of State (and Presidential hopeful) Hillary Clinton, who proceeded to lie to us about it.

I’m kinda concerned about what might happen on this day, both here in the States and across the globe.  The “JV team” of ISIS seems to have grown into the big leagues.  Pretty much the entire Middle East is in uproar if not chaos.  Hundreds of thousands of “refugees” – the majority, military-age males – are streaming away from the conflicts – plural – and into Europe.  That’ll not end well.

And our President has overseen the negotiation of a not-Treaty that will result, later if not sooner, with Iran building nuclear weapons.

And THAT will not end well.

And here?  Well, as Glenn Reynolds keeps repeating: 

My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.

Fasten your seat belts.  The ride might get bumpy over the next few years.

Hate

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I just banned another commenter.  This pretty much never happens unless the commenter is a spammer.  That’s not the case this time.  This time the commenter was banned because he advocates killing police officers.

I find it interesting that this happened on the same day that I was pointed to this article:  How Social Justice Warriors Are Creating An Entire Generation Of Fascists. Excerpt:

Like the far-right that they claim to be so staunchly opposed to, the far-left is based entirely around hate. Humans are perpetual morons who always need a bad guy. To neo-Nazis, the bad guys are Jews, “degenerates”, and non-whites. To SJWs, the bad guys are people like Communismkills: not only is she a white person who isn’t self-flagellating, but she’s also a woman who doesn’t see herself as a victim of some evil patriarchal conspiracy. To an SJW, that’s heresy: all white people are evil and all women are victims. If a woman doesn’t think that she’s a victim, then she has “internalized misogyny” and she just doesn’t know any better, so she needs SJWs to speak on her behalf. Likewise, if a black person doesn’t tow(sic) the SJW line exactly, then they will be immediately labeled an “Uncle Tom” or “house nigger” by the extremely patronizing SJWs who see minorities as nothing more than political props and tools and who view all races as monoliths with intrinsic characteristics (which, ironically, is the absolute definition of racism).

Read the whole thing.  It’s sickening, but informative.  I’m reminded once again of philosopher Eric Hoffer’s seminal work The True Believer, and his observation on hate:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.”

Another example of this came today in another article, Salem on the Thames: What Connecticut College’s Andrew Pessin Affair Teaches Us. Dr. Andrew Pessin’s story is an illuminating example of one college campus fusing and coalescing into one flaming mass of hatred. He’ll be lucky to get another teaching job anywhere. He’s been made an unperson, much like Dr. Walter Palmer, the dentist who killed a lion in Zimbabwe.

This all goes back to the piece I linked in this morning’s post, Balkanization Part II, and even more to a piece I wrote the better part of ten years ago, Reasonable People.

The fabric of civil society is has been fraying noticeably for a while.  How much longer before it begins to shred?  I’m not taking any bets.

Balkanization, Part II

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Awhile back I wrote a post entitled Balkanization about how the Tucson Unified School District was running elementary and secondary education courses in “Race studies.”  What it appeared to be was advanced indoctrination in “The White Man is Keeping Us DOWN!“

This kind of stuff dates back to the 60’s radicals – many of whom occupy (or have occupied) teaching positions in the schools of education across the country – Howard Zinn, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn being only the most “famous.”  First you teach the educators, then they teach the pupils.

And the end result?  Balkanization – defined as

to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units

Note with particular attention the word “hostile.”

Perusing Gerard Van der Leun’s site the other day, I came across this really excellent essay: Liberals May Regret Their New Rules. Excerpt:

(America is) becoming a nation where an elite that is certain of its power and its moral rightness is waging a cultural war on a despised minority. Except it’s not actually a minority – it only seems that way because it is marginalized by the coastal elitist liberals who run the mainstream media.

Today in America, we have a liberal president (who) refuses to recognize the majority sent to Congress as a reaction to his progressive failures, and who uses extra-Constitutional means like executive orders to stifle the voice of his opponents. We have a liberal establishment on a secular jihad against people who dare place their conscience ahead of progressive dogma. And we have two different sets of laws, one for the little people and one for liberals like Lois Lerner, Al Sharpton and Hillary Clinton, who can blatantly commit federal crimes and walk away scot free and smirking.

Today in America, a despised minority that is really no minority is the target of an establishment that considers this minority unworthy of respect, unworthy of rights, and unworthy of having a say in the direction of this country. It’s an establishment that has one law for itself, and another for its enemies. It’s an establishment that inflicts an ever-increasing series of petty humiliations on its opponents and considers this all hilarious.

That’s a recipe for disaster. You cannot expect to change the status quo for yourself and then expect those you victimize not to play by the new rules you have created. You cannot expect to be able to discard the rule of law in favor of the rule of force and have those you target not respond in kind.

RTWT. It’s a cautionary tale that I don’t think the Left on the whole is capable of learning.  But a few can.

“Tough history coming,” indeed.

Quote of the Day – Mostly Cajun Edition

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In response to last week’s Obamacare Supreme Court decision:

I once harbored feelings that it would all hold together until I was gone. Now I’m a whole lot less sure.

In comments, from Raging’ Dave:

Hold together? Not even close. Now that the Supreme Clown Court has tossed the Rule of Law aside in order to save Obamacare, the debt bomb that was coming down on us just got rocket boosters so it can out-do terminal velocity.

Quote of the Day – GeekWitha.45 Edition

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From a comment to yesterday’s post:

One of my old friends, a scholar of Talmud and Kaballah, once opined that there was a really important reason $DEITY led Moses and the Israelites around the desert for 40 years between their deliverance from slavery and arrival at the promised land, and it had little to do with petty Divine annoyance on the subject of golden calfs. It was, he explained, to give that society time to let the slave generation die off and train the new generation to conditions of self reliance, to become people fit to determine their own fate. I think there’s a lot to that. Slave instincts of servility are pernicious, and difficult for even the hardiest to shake off.

The Geek’s comment produced this, from reader Magus (edited for clarity):

That one concept has set off a chain of thought within me that makes me weep for the future.

The American Revolution will probably be unique in the rest of human history. There are no more frontiers. There are no more areas where people can learn that they are or can become competent in managing their own life. Now there’s always an “agency” to take your problem to. And if you don’t take your issue to the appropriate “agency” you are punished.

We are among the last generations that will know anything like freedom or liberty. Privacy, for the most part, has already been destroyed. If you say anything like that to the majority of people now they’ll tell you that “you’re batshit crazy”.

Freedom is not comfortable or stable, and people want comfort and stability.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said:

In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal.

I believe they’re both describing the same condition.

And I am reminded once more of the words of the Rev. Donald Sensing from 2003:

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

Loss of Faith

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Back in March I wrote R·S·P·E·C·T for and the Rule of Law about the increasing and increasingly outrageous abuses of local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies upon the citizenry of this country. One image I posted in that piece was this:


What we’re witnessing in Ferguson, MO is the reaction of a population when they have completely lost faith in the Rule of Law. You may argue (and I may agree with you) as to whether this population chose the wrong “victim” as their breaking point, but the fact remains that – as a group – blacks feel that the legal system oppresses them and kills their male population with impunity. As was pointed out in comments to that earlier piece, the image above was an abbreviated version of this one:

photo becomethis.jpg
Apparently the end result is not a sniper in a ghillie suit, it’s this:

Ferguson photo 72C7809D-9BCA-4E65-A509-71E14DB8900D-140810-DC-Riots4A-640x413.jpg
Right now.

Rev. Donald Sensing wrote in the distant past of 2004,

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

Barack Obama stated in October of 2008,

…we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Now in November of 2014 that transformation seems to be nearing completion, and that transformation is a growing nationwide loss of respect for and faith in the Rule of Law.  Ferguson is a spasm of outrage, limited (now) to small areas.  But I’m reminded once again of this Quote of the Day from the now-defunct Woodpile Report:

Middle class America is no less violent than any other people. They seem passive because they’re results oriented. They rise not out of blood frenzy but to solve the otherwise insoluble. Their methods of choice are good will, cooperation, forbearance, negotiation and finally, appeasement, roughly in that order. Only when these fail to end the abuse do they revert to blowback. And they do so irretrievably. Once the course is set and the outcome defined, doubt is put aside. The middle class is known, condemned actually, for carrying out violence with the efficiency of an industrial project where bloody destruction at any scale is not only in play, it’s a metric. Remorse is left for the next generation, they’ll have the leisure for it. We’d like to believe this is merely dark speculation. History says it isn’t.

I wish I’d archived that entire piece before it disappeared.

As I’ve noted more than once, our austerity riots are going to be epic.

“Tough history coming” indeed.

The Stupidity of the American Voter

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G790p0LcgbI?rel=0]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hcu1S2GKf0?rel=0]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7IlKhqJPH8?rel=0]
Well, he’s right.  I made the argument during what passed as “debate” over Obamacare (as did literally thousands of others) that you could not:

  • add millions to the health insurance rolls
  • add tens of thousands of IRS and other government agents to the federal payroll to regulate the Act
  • not add any doctors or medical centers to the existing system
  • eliminate lifetime payout caps
  • remove limits of insurability for those with pre-existing conditions

and honestly promise a DECREASE in health insurance costs and an IMPROVEMENT in health care services.  Much less “If you like your Plan, you can keep your Plan.  If you like your Doctor, you can keep your Doctor.”

Former Congressman Thad McCotter put it quite succinctly in March of 2010:

The Democratic Party believes that you can take an imperfect health-care system and fix it by putting it under the most dysfunctional and broken entity in the United States today: It’s called the Federal Government.

That proposition is insane.

But that’s how they sold it.  A lot of people bought the lies.  Even worse, a lot still do.

The Democrats depend on the stupidity of their supporters.  After all, it’s served them remarkably well in the past.  In 2000 (long before I started this blog) I wrote a piece now archived at KeepandBearArms.com entitled An Uncomfortable Conclusion.  I will reproduce it here, as fourteen years later I wouldn’t change a word:

With the continuing legal maneuvers in the Florida election debacle, I have been forced to a conclusion that I may have been unconsciously fending off. The Democratic party thinks we’re stupid. Not “amiable uncle Joe” stupid, but DANGEROUSLY stupid. Lead-by-the-hand-no-sharp-objects-don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth stupid. And they don’t think that just Republicans and independents are stupid, no no! They think ANYBODY not in the Democratic power elite is, by definition, a drooling idiot. A muttering moron. Pinheads barely capable of dressing ourselves.

Take, for example, the position under which the Gore election machine petitioned for a recount – that only supporters of the Democratic candidate for President lacked the skills necessary to vote properly, and that through a manual recount those erroneously marked ballots could be “properly” counted in Mr. Gore’s favor. They did this in open court and on national television, and with a straight face.

So, it is with some regret that I can no longer hold that uncomfortable conclusion at bay:

They’re right. We are.

Not all of us, of course, but enough. Those of us still capable of intelligent, logical, independent thought have been overwhelmed by the public school system production lines that have been cranking out large quantities of substandard product for the last thirty-five years or so. The majority of three or four generations have managed to make it into the working world with no knowledge of history, no understanding of the Constitution or civics, no awareness of geography, no ability to do even mildly complex mathematics, no comprehension of science, and realistically little to no ability to read with comprehension, or write with clarity. And we seem to have developed attention spans roughly equivalent to that of your average small bird. (Ed. – Twitter didn’t come along until 2006!)

After all, about half the public accepted the Democratic premise that we were too stupid to vote correctly because their guy didn’t win by a landslide, didn’t they? And the other half was outraged, not that they made such a ludicrous argument, but that they didn’t want to play fair and by the rules that no one seems to understand or to be able to explain.

The other majority party isn’t blameless in this; they like an ignorant electorate too. It’s easier to lead people who can’t or won’t think for themselves. It took both parties and many years of active bipartisan meddling to make the education system into an international laughingstock.

However, the end result of this downward spiral has been an electorate ignorant in the simple foundations of this country and its government. Most especially the foundation of a rule of law in which EVERYONE is equal under the laws of the land. The Democrats have taken advantage of this general ignorance to its logical extreme. President Clinton, when testifying under oath, debates the meaning of the word “is,” and essentially gets away with it. Vice President Gore, when shown to be in direct violation of campaign finance law states that there was no “controlling legal authority.”

Laws don’t MEAN anything to them. A law is an inconvenient bit of wording that just has to be “interpreted” properly to achieve their ends. When they file suit, they must shop for the proper judge, or they might not be able to get the “spin” they want. Like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, words mean just what they want them to mean, no more no less. And that meaning can change at any time.

What has this election proven? The system is broken beyond a shadow of a doubt. Humpty-Dumpty is smashed. Regardless of who wins the recount in Florida, we have a system that has abandoned the rule of law because the populace let it, not knowing any better. Everything is up for interpretation. We don’t live in the United States of America anymore, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We live in `Merica, land of the free to do whatever we please, with no adverse consequences to our actions because that just wouldn’t be “fair”. Ain’t Democracy wunnerful? Let’s just vote ourselves bread and circuses and wait for the Barbarians to come over the walls. Bet that’ll get more than 49% of the vote, huh?

(This is the piece that got me kicked off of Democratic Underground, BTW. Somebody had to Google my name to find it and then point a DU administrator at it.)