We all agree that young men who shoot up schools and grocery stores and such should be investigated and understood, with the goal of understanding what led them to do it. The important thing to learn would hopefully be how to spot the same sort of whacko *before* he goes bugnuts. Some things seem obvious, such as “as a kid he loves to torture cats.” Such a lil dickens should be put under one hell of a microscope, up to and including institutionalization. Another possible marker of a whacko mind? Writings of a particularly creepy and violent nature.
That’s a brief little tale written and posted online waaaay back in 1988, in the earliest days of Ye Olde Internet. As a story, it’s not well written. As a warning sign, it’s got kinda flashing neon lights. One would hope that the author of such a thing *today* would draw the attention of The Authorities. You would hope that the actual author would have been kept far from the reigns of power.
At first it looks like anger. On closer examination, I think terror might be closer to the truth. Either would be appropriate… but the latter is more likely as that critter is faced with incomprehensible cosmic horror.
In short… the British government plans to implant 1,500 military age foreign men into a village with a total native population of 600. Men from cultures *very* different from English, with whole different ideas about just how wrong it is to sexually assault girls (and probably boys as well).
There is no good end to this story. And the people in charge fully know this… and they’re not just doing it anyway, they’re accelerating it.
Tench Coxe (May 22, 1755 – July 17, 1824) was an American political economist and a delegate for Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress in 1788-1789, and a key anti-Federalist, writing under the pseudonym “A Pennsylvanian”.
Quotes
The power of the sword, say the minority…, is in the hands of Congress. My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress has no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every terrible implement of the soldier are the birthright of Americans.[1]
Recently I’ve seen a lot of pundits and politicians yammering on about “the Europeans figured out how to ban guns, why can’t we?” Because… we’re not Europeans. Yes, we are descended from Europe; our history and much of our culture of course comes from Europe, as did, at least at one time, most of our people. But our reason for existence? That’s all us, baby. The foundational principle of the United States is “liberty.” Not “safety,” not “peaceableness,” not “conformity” or “quiet.” LIBERTY. How many other nations have foundational principles in the first place, rather than being based on “this here plot of land” or “this here ethnic group?” We’re built and based on a philosophy, the cornerstone of which is “leave me alone to live my life as I see fit.”
“If the filibuster obstructs us, we will abolish it. If the Supreme Court objects, we will expand it. And we will not rest until we have taken weapons of war out of circulation and our communities each and every day.”
The new favorite phrase of the lying idiotarians is “weapons of war.”
And the senile groper-in-Chief continues to blather about how awful it is that citizens are currently allowed to have conventional rifles with standard capacity magazines:
November should prove interesting. Whether or not you believe the Dems rigged the game in the last election… you can bet your ass they’re certainly going to *try* to rig the next one. Between their desire to strip Americans of their rights and their desire to see Americans offspring aborted as often as possible they’ll be highly motivated to make sure they don’t lose their grip on power.
Alrighty then. This particular bit of video has been making the rounds the last few days. In short, it shows an apparently unhinged feller going bugnuts on a subway train in New York City, at one point assaulting a woman who begs for help from her fellow passengers. Nobody raises a finger, other than to film it.
The arguments I’ve seen basically boil down to two sides;
1: “Where are the men? What has happened to make men such cowards that they will not help a woman in distress?”
2: “Strong independent woman don’t need no man.”
Argument #2 is of course pure snark. There is validity to it… a lot of modern feminists sneer about the utility of men, but they get kinda quiet about that when TSHTF. But that need not be litigated here. Argument #1 is of greater interest.
This is hardly the first Public Transit video depicting violence and a lot of people standing around doing nothing more helpful than looking uncomfortable. The basic story is not new; look at Kitty Genovese. People stand around and are basically useless a lot of the time. “It’s not my fight.” “I could get injured.” “If I ignore it it’ll go away.” “Someone else will help.” “Maybe I’m wrong about what’s really going on, who’s the bad guy.” And so on.
But there are of course a few new ones:
“If I wade in, I could get sued, by the perp, by the bus/train company, by a bystander, by the victim herself.”
“If I use any kind of force, I could get arrested.”
“That guy is black. I’m white. If I intervene and edited video goes out, I could get cancelled, lose my job, my career, my friends, home, family.”
It is normal for people, and I believe men in particular, to fantasize about playing the hero. I’ve often seen people, and here in particular that tends to be man-hating modern feminists, claim that the “male power fantasy” is that they will be Billy Badass, able to lay a beatdown on their opponents, be just the meanest, toughest, strongest, scariest sumbitch out there. I have no doubt that many men daydream about just that, viewing themselves as the GigaChad that all the women insta-swoon over. But I also believe that a lot of other men have a different sort of “male fantasy:” that when the moment comes, when they are needed, they will prove to be competent. That they will be up to the task, whatever that task is. Change the tire, put out the fire, save the damsel in distress. And, if needed, wade into the fight and succeed. But these sort of fantasies rarely ever get put to the test. And actual violent lunatic is *not* someone you, a sane person, want to go up against. And so if you don’t actually have to… it seems most of the time, you don’t.
Especially now when trying to be a hero, doing the right thing, being selfless, stands a not unreasonable chance of having a large and vindictive chunk of society dropping on you and your future like a ton of angry, unthinking bricks.
What would you do? What would I do? Hell if I know. What I’d like to *think* I’d do is, to start off, *not* wade in and try to lay out the whacko. That would not go well. But what I’d like to think I’d do is to spot one or two likely looking other guys, preferably large and young, get their attention and have a *group* wade in. A few people stepping between whacko and victim might shut down the aggression. Might not. But three against one is way better odds than one against one.
– – –
Perhaps just through random chance, YouTube recommends this video after the one above:
It shows the sort of thing that any decent man *wishes* he could pull off… and any smart man knows he couldn’t. In reality, Our Hero would be incapacitated or dead in seconds.
Counterpoint: Snack Man.
Huh. The Snack man video is “age restricted.” The clip from “Nobody” doesn’t seem to be. Go ahead and try to make that make any kind of sense.
There is one potential snag to this story being the next big thing for them to dance upon… as reported, the shooter doesn’t fit The Narrative. Still, it’s interesting that this sort of thing is becoming popular again. Must be an election coming up.
Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. … In an effort to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.
Yeah, those kids are going to be fabulously prepared for the future.
No, it hasn’t. Let me illustrate with a fairly famous scene:
An alien takes on the guise of Abraham Lincoln. The alien does it well enough that it seems that “Lincoln” actually thinks he’s Lincoln. Lincoln then goes on to use the term “negress,” which is not only a term describing race, but also sex. That in and of itself would be enough to set off the baying hounds of wokism… he’s “assuming her gender,” as well as using a word that was probably pretty cringey even back in the 1960’s, never mind 2022. And how does Lt. Uhura respond? By *not* being offended. By not *taking* offense, by not assuming that offense was intended. Nobody gets mad, nobody tries to police speech or teach “Lincoln” about his privilege or in any way demonstrate the sort of unhinged lunacy that defines wokism. Those characters just smiled and went on about their day. They were all about free speech.
“We’ve learned not to fear words.” Try to square that with wokism.
Also note in that clip above, Kirk points out that humans have finally learned to be delighted with what they are. Can you think of any concept more transphobic?
Honestly, that one clip above utterly refutes most of the world view of the woke. If people thought as suggested above… the woke would find no purchase and they’d be about as relevant as theosophists.
Also: Yes, the bridge of the Enterprise was multi-ethnic, certainly “progressive” for its time. But it was also *mono* cultural. Everyone spoke the same language, had the same basic values. They didn’t bow to “other ways of knowing;” they relied exclusively on objective reasoning and hard science. The only two who even had non-American accents were two white guys (Scotty and Chekov).
They all packed heat when they went someplace new and unknown. They didn’t freak out about other people packing heat. They kept and bore arms.
They worked within (and accepted) a hierarchical command structure. When the Captain ordered, you obeyed.
It was a meritocracy. You didn’t rise through the ranks based on identity politics.
They guarded borders and prevented, sometimes violently and lethally, illegal border crossings. Whether it was Romulans or Klingons trying to sneak across the Neutral Zone, or Borg trying to migrate en masse into the inner Federation… the cops showed up to shoo ’em off.
Capitalism was alive and well. Private traders and private property were not loudly touted as they would have been had Ayn Rand written the scripts… but you had asteroid prospectors like Cyrano Jones plying his trade; space yachts like the SS Aurora out there being stolen by dipshit space hippies (who, like modern wokies, abandon objective reality for mystical nonsense, and end up being injured and killed by their ignorance); con men like Harcourt Fenton Mudd trying to make their fortunes dishonestly in a system that does not seem to mind if you make a fortune *honestly.* Yes, “Next Generation” tried to portray a post-capitalist future, but that only worked insofar as they were a post scarcity society: anyone could have a desktop fusion reactor and a desktop food replicator. Even in Next Gen, average schmoes could own their own stuff, including ships and plots of land. The Ferengi were depicted as despicable capitalists… and yet, they were legally allowed to be as capitalist as they liked, so long as they didn’t cheat. *Everybody* did business with the Ferengi. Because capitalism gets stuff done.
Related: private property is sacrosanct. And more to the point, you are your own property, and nobody can tell you what to do with you (outside the bounds of following the legal orders of your superiors, of course). And “you” include artificial people like androids and sentient computer programs. You do not belong to the village or the society or the state. Anyone tries that crap and Kirk will phaser the bejeebers out of the control system.
The favorite episode of those claiming that Star Trek was “woke” back in the sixties is “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield,” which shows irrational race hatred. As if irrational race hatred and modern progressive/woke politics are somehow mutually exclusive. These people love to hate white people, white history, white culture… and they hate ’em so much that they have expanded the franchise to hating Asians because they are “white adjacent.” Wokies *want* the government and society and businesses and regular people to treat people differently based on race. Captain Kirk and company not giving a rats ass about someones race? That sort of thinking is alien to wokism.
Numerous episodes deal with time travel, and they make great efforts to not change history. There’s an entire department of the Federation devoted to making sure that history remains unchanged. How about the woke? They make every effort to change history every chance they get. Whether it’s tearing down statues or re-naming institutions or *eliminating* institutions or destroying national pride by claiming that the founders or national heroes were actually evil or that the principals upon which this or that nation were built are evil and corrupt, the woke do everything they can to re-write history, the facts be damned. Modern wokies with access to time machines would be the Department of Temporal Investigations worst nightmare.
Related: the great works of western literature, philosophy, politics and science are still highly venerated. They have not been memory holed or retconned. Scotty is proud of his Scottish heritage. Chekov is proud of Russia. Kirk is clearly enamored of America and American history and virtues.
Numerous times humans are shown to have adopted the dress, food and customs of other races (Vulcans and Romulans spring to mind). And yet… nobody screeching about “Cultural Appropriation.” Everybody makes use of whatever they find that they like, that works for them, that profits them.
Several episodes deal with insanity. How does the federation, Starfleet, the crew of the Enterprise deal with the mentally ill? They send them to high-tech looney bins which work to MAKE THEM SANE. They do not try to convince them and the people around them that their “emotional interestingness” is Stunning And Brave. They do not go along with delusions. They cure people who are bugnuts. Doctor McCoy would take one look at the blue haired weirdos who populate Twitter and Libs of TikTok and start mass injectiosn of anti-whacko meds.
And… colonies. Colonies galore. Colonialism on a galactic scale. Small colony vessels, vast colony armadas. Worlds getting terraformed to suit *our* needs.
