Ayup. This, right here.
Imagine if Hollywood would make movies where the bad guys didn’t skate on the good guys being idiots.
Jan 162021
Jan 152021
Seems we’re running headlong into the Crazy Years. What with the very worst people in the last hundred years of US history getting ready to take over the Senate and White House, after having already taken over the House, Media and universities, we’re likely due for some extreme unpleasantness. The incoming administration is promising to turn seventy million or more Americans into overnight felons and the Big Tech companies going overtime into making sure that the conversation is distinctly one-sided, it’s understandable that a lot of people have a lot of things to say. Some of it rather uncomplimentary about those on the totalitarian side of the aisle… and sometimes what people say slips over into expression of threats of violence.
We may have ourselves an honest to Odin civil war on our hands before long. Up until recently I’ve thought that such a thing was the stuff of fever dreams… but here we are. And while a civil war might be inevitable, it would be *bad.* I know there are some deluded fools actually salivating over the prospect, but the only people who would benefit from another American civil war are our enemies. No good will come of it.
So: I invite everyone to refer back to the old blog post “How To Get Banned,” from waaaay back in 2010. The very first way of getting banned? Issuing threats of violence in the comments. Threatening people does no good; all it will do is get the authorities to notice you, and I’m sorry, any government types who are drooling over the opportunity to kick in a million doors and arrest and imprison more people that the Soviet gulag system ever dreamed of will *not* be intimidated by an angry comment. What will happen, though, is that such comments will be used to claim “terms of service” violations for my little website.
Yes, Twitter and Facebook and the like do not seem to give a damn if leftwing extremists, jihadis, ChiComs and other people who wish America ill use their platforms for threats of violence. But Big Tech *does* go after those of us in the counter culture. The hypocrisy is breathtaking, but the fact is that for the moment rational people have to realize that we’re living in a system with different rules for different people.
So… dream up all the fantasies and strategems you like. Plan. Stock up. Prepare. Just… don’t post incitements to violence or criminality here. I will delete those when I see ’em, and start banning those who repeatedly violate. As far as I know, such posts could well be false flags intended to harm the blog and my business. Paranoid? Sure. But these are the times in which we live.
And I am about on my last nerve with the trolls. Feel free to disagree, debate, argue. But those who act the jackass, whose arguments start with insults? Feh.
Jan 072021
So for the last 24+ hours I’ve been listening to news outlets such as NPR and the Bbc hyperventilating about the events in Washington. It seems the talking points memos got out, as there has been incessant repetition of phrases like “armed insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorism.” The action of people walking up to and then into a building is inevitably referred to as “storming” the building.
And then today, the pervy corrupt scumbag nice old gentleman who will be the next President said:
what we witnessed yesterday was not dissent, it was not disorder, it was not protest. It was chaos. They weren’t protesters — don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob of insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.
Now, to be fair Biden *did* actually say something true, though I suspect he didn’t mean it the way reality interprets it:
No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true, and it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. The American people saw it in plain view. And I hope it’s sensitized them to what we have to do.
Yes, the American people saw it. The American people saw the better part of a year where “Black Lives Matter” protests turned into cities on fire. Government buildings utterly trashed, police cars set ablaze, sizable sections of cities simply ceded to *actual* insurrectionists. The American people saw this chaos being lauded by the press and many in government. We saw the gaslighting on a scale not seen since the Commies and the Nazis.
FLOYD PROTESTS: Damage from looting and arson amid mostly peaceful protests over the police killing of George Floyd will cost $1-2 billion in claims, according to the Insurance Information Institute. pic.twitter.com/uaNPwwnUEQ
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) September 16, 2020
So what will the American people take from this? Compare and contrast protestors who set cities on fire, who continued their hijinks for weeks and months, and were praised and rewarded for it, with protestors who broke a few windows, wandered around a building for a few *hours,* and THEN LEFT, all without starting *any* fires, and are getting called domestic terrorists by the press and the next President. Cities set on fire by the left are, at worst, attributed to ‘a few bad apples among mostly peaceful protestors.” There is no such attribution of “only a few are bad” for the right wingers actions.
The lesson to learn here is that one side really is allowed to do pretty much whatever they want without a whole lot of official pushback. The other side finds that any protest at all will get them called domestic terrorists by the media and the government. One side is allowed to behave as badly as they like. The other side is being pushed into a corner.
Yeah. This will end well.
At least we’ll get some good memes before the end.
Jan 022021
Snerk.
Dec 222020
John Burk/Ross’ videos are usually a hoot. But this one is special.
At about the 2 minute mark he responds to the question “How many of your friends and family are you willing to sacrifice on your altar of “freedom”?”
With…
“How many people have to die before I’m willing to sacrifice my, or somebody else’s, liberty just so you can feel safe? All of them. Your kids, your grandparents, your brother, your sister, your cousin that you’re having sexual relations with… every single one of them. Does that offend you? Good. Because I don’t care.”
Given that the Commie Cough seems to have maybe struck my family (will find out in a few days), the subject is of great import to me. And tyranny remains of great import to me. This pandemic will end. But tyranny could last far longer and cause much greater pain. No plague in the last five hundred years compares to the plague of democide in the last century.
Dec 212020
Not only funny, but sends a message.
Dec 212020
From the Washington Post:
Why Americans are numb to the staggering coronavirus death toll
A number of reasons are given for why Americans are just kinda shrugging at the ~300,000 deaths from the Commie Cough. One reason: it’s just too big, the human brain refuses to try to conceive of such vastness and simply shuts down trying. Another is that many people have bought into conspiracy theories. Another is that people are isolated from the actual deaths, the infected dying alone, sealed away from friends and family.
But there are two obvious reasons that didn’t seem to get mentioned:
1: We’ve all heard about overcounting… someone dying of cancer dies with the CCP virus in their system so it gets notched up to the Commie Cough. How often does that happen? Is it statistically insignificant? Or is it a sizable fraction? We just don’t know.
2: And perhaps most importantly, look at how the pandemic was sold to us in the beginning:
Now, assuming the vaccine works well enough, the pandemic should start tapering off in a couple months I’d think. We’re currently sitting at about 318,000 *official* deaths, losing about 2,600 more per day. Two more months of that, assuming that the death rate somehow stays constant (which would be damned peculiar) will lead to a total of about 473,000 deaths. Substantially less than the 1.2 million, especially if a large fraction of those deaths weren’t really killed by Pinko Pox but were already sick folk just sorta pushed over the edge.
3: The lockdowns indicate that the Government Takes This Seriously. That riots were allowed to proceed and that liquor stores were considered essential businesses, indicates that the Government Does Not Take This Seriously.
When were were oversold into a panic from the beginning, and then the data is not only well below the original fearmongering but is not widely trusted, and the government sending massively mixed signals… well, it only makes sense that lots of people kinda stop worrying about things too much.
Dec 172020
Gotta love a chart that presents only part of the data as being *all* of the data…
Dec 132020
This makes for dismal reading:
How Well-Intentioned White Families Can Perpetuate Racism
The basic thesis here is that well to do families who want the best for their kids, and make efforts to provide for them, are evil and unjust. At least when those families are white, that is. Behold:
Pinsker: What would it look like for a white affluent parent to make a choice not to give their children “the best”? Is it a matter of not calling the school to get the best math teacher? Or is there a more proactive thing a parent might be able to do?
Hagerman: I think part of it is how we choose to define “the best.” Some of the parents in my book, they rejected the idea that their child needed to be in all the AP classes. They valued other elements of their children’s personalities, such as their concerns about ethics or fairness or social justice. There were a handful of parents in my study who resisted having a separate track for AP students, for example, which can sometimes be a segregating force within schools.
Any parent who would prioritize “social justice” indoctrination for their kids over math and history and critical thinking skills needs to consider whether of not they should really be parents. And any parent who would get rid of AP classes because they can “sometimes be a segregating force within schools” needs to have their ass handed to them. Athletics departments are “segregating forces,” because not every kid can hurl the sportsball with equal efficacy. Allowing student to choose their own friends and social circles is a “segregating force.”
And then there’s this summary:
“My overall point is that in this moment when being a good citizen conflicts with being a good parent, I think that most white parents choose to be good parents, when, sometimes at the very least, they should choose to be good citizens. “
The State über alles, citizen!
My god some people are awful. Is it important to do things to help make society, your city, your state, your nation better? Sure. And few if any things could make your nation better than to make your kids be as good as they can be, especially if your kids are on the high end of the bell curve. Is your kid average? Then ramming him or her onto a more aggressive educational track will have minimal benefits. But is he or she particularly intelligent or talented? Then for frak’s sake, do everything in your power to foster that. Actually stymieing the development of those who can actually grow substantially is not only child abuse, it’s damn near treasonous.
Dec 022020
Some might consider it sad that a drunk YouTuber knows more about not only the history of heroic literature, but also the importance of heroic myths and tales, than the “professional” story tellers who are paid to actually tell stories about heroes.
The video starts off with appropriately smartasssed mockery of some questionable decisions being made by major comic book publishers, then turns serious and thoughtful on the subject of what heroes our culture celebrates. This is a subject that interests me greatly. In my own dabblings with writing literature I almost never include a Lance Squarejaw action hero, but try to write more or less normal folk who try, to varying degrees, to do what seems to need doing. But so much of modern culture denigrates even that, mocking the very notion of the “hero.” The very traits that in past generations would be seen as not only heroic but necessary for a vital civilization are now “problematic” and “toxic masculinity.” John Wayne is despised while the media celebrates Ellen Page rebranding her/himself as Elliot Page. Restraint and rationality are sneered at while children twerking is touted as high art.
I used to love the show “Adam Ruins Everything.” But when he got to the episode on “Cowboys” and the conclusion that tales of a heroic ideal should be wiped form our culture, I was out.