“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.
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.
First up: “President” Joe Biden says that a 9mm bullet from a pistol is “high caliber” and will blow a lung out of your body.Consequently, there’s “no rational basis” for having something as “high caliber” as a 9mm for “self protection” or hunting
He lies and says you couldn’t buy a cannon when the 2nd Amendment was written, when the government was also handing out letters of Marque and Reprisal, allowing private ship owners to work as armed privateers. He also says “you couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weapons” when the 2nd Amendment was written (“citation needed”).
The man who fled from Afghanistan goes on to say that in order to take on the government you need an F-15 or an Abrams tank. Which is why the Ukrainians, lacking F-15s and Abrams tanks, were conquered overnight by the Russians, I guess?? Then he goes on to say that “everybody’s getting more rational” about gun-grabbing.
And then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau goes ahead and gives a damn fine reason for Quebec to declare independence, opening the door for the western provinces to go their own way. A semi-autonomous region from from Alaska through BC and Alberta and Saskatchewan and Yukon down through Montana, the Dakotas to Texas through Iowa and Nebraska and New Mexico is looking better and better. Persuade Cook County to secede from Illinois and boy, do we have a deal.
To all those who would have citizens surrender their right to self defense to the same party that supports defunding the police, collective punishment for grievances from generations ago and wiping out vast swathes of their own offspring… how about “no.”
There’s just entirely too much mockable hand-wringing authoritarian panic-mongery gibberish in here to really pick from. It’s *all* just the worst, from some of the worst people on Earth:
Not only did The Washington Post mess this up in their tweet (left) about how George Floyd died, they did the same thing on their own website (right) pic.twitter.com/nWhNEAvFke
So much has changed in those two years. Two years ago, he died because he had taken a fatal dose of fentanyl, and now he’s been shot. But even more has changed:
The SFWA is the formerly respected “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,” presenters of the formerly respected Nebula Award. Mercedes Lackey is a… well, I guess now *formerly* respected writer of left-leaning science fiction, quite popular and successful, and now her reputation and potential future career could be trashed because she off-handedly referred to a black guy as “colored” rather than “person of color.” She’s 72. I suspect she spent a good many formative decades in a time when “colored” was the preferred term. So now the SFWA and the baying ghouls who populate it and Twitter are out for the blood of an old lady who many of them, five minutes earlier, considered a hero because she had gay characters in her stories back in the 80’s.
According to her husband, whose Twitter account virtue signals at a professional level, she has been badly emotionally damaged by the treatment she’s received. You tear up old people, sometimes you break them. I wonder just how happy and proud these bargain bin revenants will be if they manage to bring her to an end. I suspect “a lot.”
Here’s a potential explanation as to why so much of modern science fiction seems so awful: the gatekeepers have changed from the people who know what they’re doing and are good at it… to just whoever. And that invites the political whackaloons.
As the creep of leftist identity politics has spread throughout the organization, a startling erosion of quality came with it. This is perhaps most objectively apparent in their membership qualifications, which were changed in May of 2014. Until then, to be considered for “Active membership”, an applicant had to have sold three pieces of short fiction at a 8c per word or one book for $2,000 or more in a Qualifying Professional Market (in other words, a top-tier publisher like Tor or Del Ray).
It was after this time that the “Associate Member” tier was introduced, which came with a gallingly low bar for entry – one paid sale of short fiction at a pro rate OR one that has been self-published, or published by an indie or small press for an amount equivalent to 8c per word. In other words, slap a thousand words or more up on Kindle, fork over your $90 annual fee, and you get to vote on the finalists for the Nebulas.
I remember this when it happened. Thought I’d seen the last of this guy. Now it looks like I’ve seen the last of affordable gas and food.
Stumbled across this montage from the doomed Biden ‘88 campaign and I’m crying at the McLaughlin Group reactions at the end. pic.twitter.com/A9etqn8J4H
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will be on hand to receive 132 pallets of formula produced by Switzerland’s Nestle S.A. set to arrive in Indianapolis, the White House said Saturday.
132 pallets, huh? Wow. That might cover one good sized city for… what? A month?
I guess it’s a good thing that Americans have stopped having babies, because apparently we can’t feed them ourselves anymore. But *of* *course,* we can provide for illegal invaders. Yes, we should feed those in detention. But… they should leave detention as quickly as possible. Preferably on aircraft flying directly to Tierra del Fuego or points south. In a time of crisis in the US – and even in good times – illegal aliens should be deported ASAP.
I’ve visited a number of WalMarts and grocery stores lately, and the “baby formula” aisles look about like the “toilet paper” aisles during early 2020.
It seems that the root cause of the baby formula shortage was *one* Abbott factory in Michigan shutting down due to contamination concerns back in February, and not yet back up and running. Why are things so concentrated that one single factory can control the fates of so many Americans? Shouldn’t this sort of thing have more localized and widely distributed production? That one factory could fail for any of a number of reasons, including but not limited to accidental fires, Mostly Peaceful Protests, the spiking price of gas shutting down transport to and/or from.
And as always, you can count on the far left extremists to take this situation and go absolutely whackaloon. Take, for example, this article from Vox:
It is basically a propaganda piece extolling the evils of breastfeeding, compared to the good and proper approach of formula-feeding. While some of the points are valid, it’s worth noting that the world “mother” never once appears in the article. Nor do “woman” or “women,” odd omissions given the subject of the article. The closest they come is “birthing parent.” Even then, that only appears in a single panel of a cartoon explaining that if a “birth parent” doesn’t want to breastfeed its infant, it shouldn’t have to, full stop. Because the needs of a dependent human are less important the the shallow desires of someone else. Which logic I’d be interested in seeing deployed against, say, dependent humans such as prisoners and welfare recipients. How about men who simply “don’t want to” pay child support or alimony? I just got hit with a massive property tax bill. I don’t want to pay it. Would Vox be equally as sanguine about my desire to not take care of the responsibilities that I willingly signed up for?
Storytime: an EMP weapon goes off a few hundred kilometers over the central US, shutting down virtually *all* production lines in a thousand-mile radius for a span of a year or so. Fill in the rest.
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