Category Archives: Stop an Echo

An echo, in fact, *is* a rotten chestnut bouncing around in an echo chamber, imparting its moldy “wisdom” on everyone it hits.

Stopping an Echo is the act of publicly challenging one or more of these chestnuts. The object is not really to change the mind of the person who just offered the chestnut, but to provide a baffle, a challenge if you will, to let the hot air out of it before it has a chance to infect someone who might be listening or reading.

Race and Science and Culture (Oh My!)

Over on the Hello Kitty of Bloggin, as Morgan puts it, a friend posted:

“The very concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” — Craig Venter, DNA sequencing pioneer.

I guess I don’t see race as a bad or good thing, so I scratch my head when I see stuff like this.

On its face, the statement has an absurdity to it. I’d heard it or something like it before, so I looked it up to see what they were trying to say. And there is SOME truth to it, when you look at it in a purely scientific (read: genetic purity) way. But there is more to the universe than science. And this oversimplification appears to be *trying* to do something good, though the effect comes off more like a poke in the eye, which isn’t helpful. So I took this as an opportunity to stop a few echoes with one stone.

What they’re basically saying is that there isn’t enough genetic difference to call people of different relatively subtle, at some level, yet relatively uniform physical characteristics to call us different subspecies – that we’re all basically the same when it comes to biological makeup and mental capacity. Which is true.

There’s speculation (probably true) that eventually there will be enough intermixing to where a lot of those differences are blended out in most areas of the world. Which will be fine by me, but I’ll have been dead for centuries by that time. Maybe millennia.

Now, we call a set of people of different relatively subtle, at some level, yet relatively uniform physical characteristics from the same basic genetic background a “race”, and this is not a useless distinction no matter what geneticists say.

The problem comes when we start pre-judging people based on those characteristics, say, on sight. Evolutionarily speaking, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. But biology isn’t fair, and culturally, we’ve developed this idea of fairness as important. Which is a GOOD thing. And this, at the core, is why racism is wrong. It’s fundamentally unfair to the person being judged. Regardless of the race of the person being judged. (There are people trying to define that last bit out of the word “racism”, but in doing so, they lose the moral core of why it is wrong in the first place.)

Different groups of us have evolved (and every one of them in the same way) to view humans who look drastically different with skepticism at a level much deeper than our intellects reside. It’s a defense mechanism. An instinctual reflex. This, like many of our other instincts, is something we have to teach out of our offspring — or to put it more correctly, to overrride this instinct — to be what we have come to know as “civilized”. That’s never going to stop. We will need to do this with each generation going forward. It won’t “evolve out” in a generation or two or five or fifty.

We will have to deal with this as a species.

Now this recognition of differences goes beyond physical appearance — and there are differences that register much more strongly than initial reaction to physical appearance. And this is the realm of culture.

A lot of the reason racial prejudices have persisted is — for essentially the same reason these physical differences evolved (genetic isolation of different populations of people), different cultures evolved along with them. And cultural similarities are very very important to how people get along with each other. It’s how we recognize, “hey, this person has basically the same beliefs I do, so I know what to expect from him. He’s not a danger to me” (mimicking this can also be the way sociopaths, even of the same race, gain people’s trust — but I digress). A population of people needs to be consistent enough so that the people in that population know what to expect from others. When we don’t know what to expect, our brains go into chaos mode and our defenses go up.

Here’s the cool thing. It turns out all of that cultural stuff … is software. And it can run in the brain of anyone from any race.

Therefore — there is no such thing as “White” culture or “Black” culture. THESE are the social constructs, far more than are the minor genetic differences that developed among genetically isolated populations that we call “race”. What we see as “race” is real categorical physical differences. What cultural characteristics we project onto those differences … if they’re calling *that* a social construct I’d agree.

I can pluck a baby from anywhere in the world, and raise him here in America and by the time he’s 8 everyone who actually engages with him will indentify him as an American. He will act in a manner that will reassure the people who interact with him that he is not a threat to them or the order of their lives. Depending on how he dresses and cuts his hair and the amount of hardware he has or doesn’t have sticking through his skin in various places, most people will pick up on that before they ever say a word to each other. Or I can raise him in France or any at least western country… same thing.

Contrary to popular belief in some circles … we have come a very VERY long way, especially in America. The [main] reason we see so much of it in America, and in some other western countries is because it is in these countries that we actually have significant racial diversity. So the issue gets pressed in these countries more than in others.  (The other reason is that there are certain political interests that benefit from cultivating cultural division.)

As I was saying earlier, fear of significant difference is an evolved response. I would speculate that … when it comes to race … we will all look much more similar as we intermix before that response evolves out of us — if it ever does — because that response is just a part of a much bigger evolved response — the general fear of the unknown, the uncertain. And at that point … the point will be moot.

Fortunately, we have culture, and if we can come to a point where just about everyone in our country, at least, is culturally similar enough so that we can act as a cohesive group of people. Remember, there is no such thing as white culture or black culture. Culture is not based on skin color. Culture is how we learn to act, and about shared idioms and traditions that glue us together, that help us relate to each other.

In this light, I cannot say I’m on the “diversity is what makes us great” bandwagon. It is not. Diversity is a symptom of greatness, not the cause. The greatness … comes from the culture.

And culture has no color.

Loading Likes...

Fisking JuliasGoat

I saw this post come across my facebook feed touting some SJW’s twitter screed.

I couldn’t take it.  I don’t ram cars into crowds of people.  But I have a pen.  And I’m not afraid to use it. 🙂

Listen up. Someone with the Twitter handle @JuliusGoat just dropped one of the best Twitter threads in history, about the white supremacist/Nazi march in Charlottesville

I’ve compiled all of it here for your reading pleasure and education:

Well no, JuilasGoat fan, not exactly.

While very (very!) few people have anything but disgust for white supremists and Nazis, this tirade is really just another re-hashing of the litany of leftist screeds against America and American Culture.  Which, by the way, has no color.  “White culture” is a term leftists came up with to delegitimize western culture.  This is the backdrop against which these damaged people, these Alt-Righter white supremists  are taking the stage.  They are reacting poorly, but directly, to the perpetual 8-track tape looping of this kind of screed of half-truths disguised as facts for the last 40, 50 years.

Since this screed is the same screed directed at America in general, I can only see it as trying to identify anyone who values American Culture as one of these sick punks that could only gather, what, 150-200 people, to some stupid rally that everyone should have ignored in the first place.  These people feed on hate, and counter-protests and news coverage feeds that hate.  They are otherwise universally rejected.

If you want to go back in history to find out where “they” (whom this guy conflates with “we”) … came from, a lot of them were people from Europe basically driven out because of their religous beliefs.  We outlawed that sort of thing here.  We outlawed burning churches and hanging innocent people from trees, too.  Oh, sure, some people still did it, as some people still murder and steal.  But it wasn’t because we “allow” it. We don’t “allow” murder and yet it still happens.  Some people are evil in any population.

Imagine if these people ever faced actual oppression.

Nobody is trying to legislate away their right to marry. Nobody is trying to make them buy insurance to pay for ‘male health care.’ 

Neither were “they”. Somebody *was* trying to legislate away The People’s right to define what they recognize as marriage and not have that definition forced upon them from the top. The proper way to do this would be through discussion and working it out in the culture — and eventually legislation. The legislation kept failing to pass, so they had the courts make the rule by fiat based on a Constitutional amendment that addressed slavery and racism, and whose authors would laugh at the idea that they meant what the courts interpreted today.  Most people are willing to live and let live.  The people who got this ruling do not, and they, in fact, are using it to oppress people who have religious objections to lending their businesses to events they feel it would be wrong for them to lend them to.  And now the same people want us to learn 87 different gender pronouns or be fired.

And people, for what it’s worth — men included, are being forced to pay for “female health care”.

The law never:

Enslaved their great-grandparents
 Robbed their grandparents
 Imprisoned their parents
 Shot them when unarmed

All tragedies when they happened. While it is true that some people’s great grandparents were enslaved and this enslavement was protected by law, the fact of the matter is that very few of our great grandparents owned slaves, many of them were vehemently against it, and that the founders founded this country in the midst of slavery with ideals that demanded its abolition.  A lot of our great grandparents put their lives on the line (and often lost them) to finally rid this country of this sick practice during a period where it was also ending in other (Western) nations.  Of course this practice does still exist in the world today.  Just not in the West.

To have blame laid upon you that you had nothing to do with solely on account of your skin color is racism.  It’s practically the definition of racism.  If you’re really against racism, you should be against all racism.  If not, you’re a racist.

There is no massive effort at the state and local level to disenfranchise them of the vote.

There is no massive effort at any level to disenfranchise anybody of the vote.  This is an invention of the left. Although Democrats’ history of doing just that in the south means they are familiar with how to do it. This probably makes them feel guilty, so they project that guilt on their opponents today. So they strive to make and keep voter fraud easy and undetectable, and accuse anyone who objects of disenfranchising minorities.

There is no history of centuries of bad science devoted to ‘proving’ their intellectual inferiority.

Bad science which virtually nobody buys today, and which was rebuffed by other scientists even while it was going on.

There is no travel ban on them because of their religion. There is no danger for them when they carry dangerous weaponry publicly.

There is no travel ban on people because of their religion.  There is a travel ban for non-Americans coming into the country from a few, but hardly all, and not the largest, middle-eastern countries because they don’t have strong enough governments to support any kind of meaningful vetting process.  There is certainly a strong correlation between these tumultuous countries and their primary religion, but that’s not our fault.  There are 50 Muslim majority countries.  The travel ban applies to 7.  And nobody who is an American Muslim is inhibited by America from travelling anywhere any other American is inhibited to traveling to.  If it is a “Muslim Ban” it is a piss poor excuse for one.

There should be no danger for anyone to carry a dangerous weapon publicly.  There probably is more danger for a colored person doing this than a white person.  This stems from a cultural correlation which could be overcome in a generation or so by assimilation into the mainstream culture rather than the constantly encouraged posturing against it.

Their churches were never burned. Their lawns never decorated with burning crosses. Their ancestors never hung from trees.

You might be surprised to learn that the KKK hated more than black people. When I was a little kid, I lived in terror of the KKK.  I was told they wanted to tar and feather me.  The thought of having burning hot tar applied to me because someone hated my religion … when you’re 8, that’s pretty terrifying.

But we drove the Democrats who did all of this out of office long ago, and would shame and throw anyone who did in jail today, probably wishing we could legally do worse.

Their mothers aren’t being torn away by ICE troopers and sent away forever. They won’t be forced to leave the only country they ever knew.

That’s on the mothers who broke immigration law getting here in the first place and a risk they took coming here improperly. It is sad.  But it is also preventable.  Don’t break the law, and law enforcement won’t come take you away.  Or your kids.

The president has not set up a hotline to report crime committed at their hands.

There are crime hotlines all over the country and have been for a long time. And none of them say “only call if the guy isn’t white”.

They are chanting ‘we will not be replaced.’

Replaced as … what?

Well, you know, these particular people are not particularly deep and I have no room for their ilk.  But … let me ask you….

  • Does a country have a right to decide who they allow to become “one of them”?
    Is it a cultural thing?
  • Does, say, Peru have a right to exclude people who want to become Peruvian?  Why?
  • Has the United States historically had its own culture?
  • Has the United States allowed people from all countries, cultures, races, and creeds to immigrate?
  • What were the implied conditions of that immigration? (hint: read the citizenship pledge).
  • Would Peru have the right to disallow Americans from immigrating to Peru?

The deal is, a culture in a country has a right to self-preservation and self-determination.  When we bring people here from wildly different cultures and do not expect integration into our famous “melting pot” and instead remain more like a salad bowl, we do not have a cohesive culture and in turn become a nation in name only.  It turns out multiculturalism is a lie.  It does not work.  It cannot work.  But promoting the idea as a central goal is a very good way to destroy a culture.  And none of this has a thing to do with race.

I’ll tell you.


THIS is ‘white people’ oppression: We used to be the only voice. Now we hold the only microphone.

This “us” and “them” stuff is what divides us. America has been integrating since its inception because of her values, and it is one of the few countries that has had to do this on any kind of scale. Posts like this only serve to keep us divided.  You are a big part of the problem.

THIS is ‘oppression’ of white Christians in this country. Christmas used to be the only holiday acknowledged, now it’s not.

Not even remotely true.  Plus … it’s not only white people who are Christian or who celebrate Christmas.  This obsession over race you have.  It’s not healthy.

Americans have historically adopted holidays and customs from the cultures of immigrants who have assimilated.

I would so love to see these people get all the oppression they insist they receive, just for a year. Just to see.

You’re that hateful, eh?  Besides, if what passes for oppression on the left actually were actually applied to “white Christians”, you would have to admit that it’s pretty rampant.  Most of the stuff brought up in this screed was stamped out by … wait for it … “white Christians” … a long time ago.

Give them a world where you ACTUALLY can’t say Christmas. A world where the name “Geoff” on a resume puts it in the trash.

You mean, like, say, in a lot of Middle Eastern countries?  And we … we are headed in that direction.

Give them a world where they suddenly get a 20% pay cut, and then 70 women every day tell them to smile more.

Ah, the old, thoroughly debunkedWomen make 78% of what men make for the same work.”  It’s not true.  Not even close.

Give them a world where their polo shirt makes people nervous, so they’re kicked off the flight from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis.

How about a world where people assimilate into the culture they adopt or are born into, kind of like the rest of the planet, rather than be encouraged not to and then harbor resentment for not being accepted by the culture they allegedly voluntarily immigrated into?

Give them a world where they inherited nothing but a very real understanding of what oppression really is.

Probably because this is all they’ve been taught by their leftist “betters”, so that they will look to them as children look to parents for protection rather than to take their lives into their own hands and make what they can out of them — the only real path to self-respect and honest respect from others.  Give a man a fish and he eats for a day … and eventually becomes your slave.  Teach him to fish, and he becomes his own man.

Give them a world where if they pulled up on a campus with torches lit and started throwing hands, the cops would punch their eyes out.”

I think we’re misrepresinting what happened in Charlottesville here – which can be excused a little because the media has only given us some of the facts.
according to the cops, there were plenty of people “throwing hands” on both sides, and judging from past Antifa rallies, I’d lay bets it wasn’t even the idiot white supremists who threw the first punches (the linked video shows this). Cops don’t typically do anything until the flaming bottles and bricks start flying.  Or somebody pulls a gun.  Or somebody tries to pull one of the cops’ guns on them.

Loading Likes...


I have a very dear friend who has some native ancestry and Indian Nation issues are very important to her.

Thus I’m in an awkward, bad position between her friendship and the DAPL hysteria.

I’m not upset with her.  I’m upset with the people who have fed the hysteria for their own political and economic purposes.  There are those who don’t want us to use oil, period, because Man Bear Pig (who ironically are now posting about how low gas prices are because Obama … who wanted them to go up… I’m so confused)  — and those with economic interests in the status quo … transporting more oil over their railways or in trucks over our highways (burning fossil fuels whose exhaust feeds Man Bear Pig — again, these people don’t appear to have a need to be consistent.)

I ran across a post this morning where she asked

“So where were your safety measures for THIS pipeline spill?” linking an article about a spill in Montana in the Yellowstone River a few years ago by an Exxon pipeline.

Naturally curious me, I go read about it.  And this is what I found.

That pipeline (Silvertip) was placed 70 years ago and runs 5-12 feet deep under the river (incidentally, *now* it runs 40 feet beneath the river). 5-12 feet of sediment can easily be scoured out by erosion especially during floods. What they think happened in Montana was boulders moving along the bottom during recent flooding ripped an exposed section of the pipeline open, right there at the river bottom during flooding. No pipeline should be that close to the surface under a waterway — especially a river.

Pipelines in the past have been  cavalierly placed much too close to the surface. The proposed DAPL pipeline run would pass 95 to 115 feet deep under the lake.  So the answer is, safety measures weren’t in place for that pipeline. They didn’t exist when the pipeline was built. In the case of the one that recently ruptured, “under” was closer to “running right along the bottom of”. This was bad, and there are probably a lot more of these that need to be addressed with modern equipment and higher standards for how deep they go when they pass underneath waterways. Along with thicker metal and perhaps double-walls.

I would be more concerned with having companies like Exxon replace old sections of the hundreds of pipelines that currently run under bodies of water all over the country with the same kind of design developed for DAPL. I’m far more worried about contamination from those than I am about this DAPL run.

I do consider myself an environmentalist.  Not one of these hyper, every bug must be protected at all costs environmentalists.  But I, like most people, want clean air and water and unspoiled places to go to get away from life in the city and experience the wild country.  I’m kind of big on that, really.

So I’m serious about that addressing old pipelines bit.  Not only do we not want to waste crude oil, but no, I really don’t want it in the water and contaminating the rivers’ edges.

Loading Likes...

I Made Jim Give at the Office

So this meme post comes across my timeline when a friend commented on it.

I’ve seen it before.  But man.  It is so demonstrably untrue, this time I had to say something.

As with a lot of these things, there’s a lot missing. Of course conservatives care. They just don’t think they should be able to use the force of government to force anyone else to act like they care, and in what ways they must act like they care. Conservatives don’t typically have a need to be seen caring. They just do it.

To which one woman replied:

“Sorry. Cutting aid to starving children doesn’t seem like caring about anything but your own pocketbook.”

So I went on:

You talk as if aid is this thing that is just there in nature – like air, that everyone has a right to, and someone is taking it away.

It’s a matter of perspective. Aid should be given freely, not taken. When government is in charge of it, the only “taking” is done from the people who had it to begin with.

As if it is only aid if it came from the government. Well nothing comes from the government. Everything it has came from someone else (or will come from someone else, since it borrows heavily from our childrens’ and grandchildrens’ futures to pay for this aid in this generation).

And it is demonstrably untrue that conservatives don’t care and don’t give to charity. Conservatives give more to charity than liberals … here, a link from the definitively NOT conservative NYT on a study that surprised even the researcher. (note this is on TOP of what they are required to “give” through the government).

Political liberals are all about telling people how much of other people’s money people should get, but it apparently stops with supporting the mandates, not giving freely themselves.

“I’ll pass, I made Jim give at the office.”

Get this … here’s a real response I got.

Why are all of these trolls suddenly showing up on a Liberal FB page?? All of you need to leave us alone.

So you can be free to echo the hate you have based on demonstrably false premises without being challenged?  And we’re responsible for the divisiveness?

Loading Likes...

If You Were Serious….

Co-Blogger Philmon has a category called Stop an Echo — challenging those moldy, rotten chestnuts that everyone “knows” but that ain’t so.  One of my favorite techniques for doing this is to take liberal claims seriously, and extrapolate the implications.  If they don’t have an answer to even the most incandescently obvious consequences of their statements, they’re just parroting talking points.  Like so:

imagesIf you really believe in Global Warming, why are you still driving a car?  Heck, why haven’t you shorted oil company stocks, and gone long in green tech?  You’ll make zillions!  Even if you don’t want to grubby up your hands with capitalism, have you done anything — anything at all — to modify your own personal lifestyle?  Or are you just getting off on telling other people what to do?

If you’re convinced there is no God, why do you keep picking fights with believers?  I don’t go out picking fights with liberals, because Reality’s gonna do that for me.  More to the point, has that ever worked?  Has the ol’ smirk-n-snark ever changed one single mind?  Doesn’t it bother you that, argument-wise, you’re the Washington Generals?  If you’re so wedded to facts and reason, shouldn’t your 0-and-whatever lifetime record be the slightest cause for concern?

If “reason” is so “heavily masculine-coded” that it’s just a buzzword, how do you expect to change any male minds?  We’re reasoners, after all — heck, according to you, that’s our main problem!  And if you don’t expect to change any male minds, how do you expect to break free of the shackles of Patriarchy that, according to you, is “the system which operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women‘s subordination, and to uphold male dominance”?  Poor benighted male that I am, you’re going to have to give me some step-by-step instructions on how to “smash patriarchy.”  Do you have a manual I can read?

I’d love to learn some “Game.”  Problem is, I don’t have the time or the money to hit the clubs every night.  And I can’t really do “Day Game,” because I have a “day job.”  And I don’t live in a ginormous city, so there are a limited number of clubs to hit… and since I’m not already an expert, and since those clubs have regulars, I’m now well known as that creepy guy who keeps “stacking routines” to “initiate kino.”  I’ll keep plugging away — practice makes perfect! — but I have to assume I’m not the only guy with these problems.  If y’all are really out there “sarging” every night — and I totes believe you — there should be lots of resources on “how to get laid on $15 a night,” “how to keep bouncers from throwing you out because you keep bugging all their regular customers,” “how to look good in work clothes after hitting the clubs until 3am and waking up in a stranger’s bed on the other side of town,” and so forth.  Can y’all point me to some of those sites?

How do laws against murder fail to prevent murder?  Y’all keep telling me that mass shootings are the result of our pathetically inadequate gun control laws.  I’m all for passing the most draconian gun laws… as soon as you explain to me how those laws will work when the laws against murder don’t.  Jihad Johnny is heading out to shoot up a nightclub.  He’s got murder in his heart.  He knows it’s illegal — in fact, is a death penalty offense in a lot of jurisdictions– but he’s willing to sacrifice it all for Allah.  But then he sees a sign that says “no firearms permitted on premises” and calls it off…. right?  That’s really how it’s supposed to work, right?

Come to think of it, I have a similar question about drugs.  Y’all are all about pot legalization, because cannabis has all those medical benefits.  But… how do you know?  Pot possession has been illegal in every jurisdiction in the land for almost your entire lives.  Since passing gun control laws will — according to y’all — make sure nobody has access to guns, I have to assume that “pot control” laws have completely eliminated access to pot.  So how do you know how great getting high is?  Or is this all theoretical?

How much money is “enough?”  I really thought we’d get the answer to that one when Obama said “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”  As the press loves to hold Obama’s feet to the fire — according to y’all, the media has a conservative bias — I was certain they’d get Him to put a precise dollar figure on that… but no.  So it’s up to y’all.  Heck, round it off to the nearest thousand dollars; just give me a ballpark figure.

Speaking of, can you give me a similar figure for “fair share”?  Y’all keep insisting that all our financial woes would be solved if only “the rich” would pay their “fair share.”  What amount is that, to the nearest thousand?  How about the nearest percentage point?  And while you’re at it, could you give me a quick definition of “the rich”?  I’ll need to see the criteria on this one, not just the dollar figure, since there are so many ways to define “rich.”  Are we talking AGI, net worth, investable assets, what?  (Since you’re so deeply informed on financial matters, I assume you know what those are and how to calculate them).

And while we’re talking money, y’all assure me that so much of our current predicament stems from “deregulation.”  Well, there’s an easy fix for that!  Let’s re-pass all those old regulations.  But I’ll need you to remind me: which specific regulations were they?

Last money question, I promise:  How much should “health care” cost?  I know, I know, it’s waaaay too high now, and single payer will fix it.  I totes believe you about that, too.  But since some of my nearest and dearest work in the field, getting those health care costs where they should be is going to cause some big changes in their standard of living.  Doctors have student loans too, you know.  Am I going to have to put my heart surgeon nephew up on my couch for a few weeks while he finds a second job at the local Walmart?  How do they manage it up in Canada?

I’ve got lots more, but that’ll do for now.  Please leave your answers in the comments.  Thanks!

Loading Likes...

Oh No!!! PURGES!!!!!

Herr Trumpf is purging “principled conservatives.”  Also known as…wait for it…. dissidents!  (Remind me: Is dissent the highest form of patriotism again?  Or are we all supposed to get in line behind the John McCains and Mitt Romneys of the world, because that’s what “principled conservatives” do?)  Anyway….

Whether the establishment political class was on board with Trump from the beginning (and most were not), they are going to use loyalty to Trump as an excuse to purge conservatives of conscience from having any political work at all. And the people who still remain opposed to Trump are the same people who are likely to align with the conservative troublemakers in both the House and the Senate. With the willing aid of the Trumpkins, the goal is to crush Cruz’s actual and ideological allies and drive them from the party.

The only named “actual and ideological ally” of Ted Cruz?  Ben freakin’ Sasse.

As the Z Man quips, Ben Sasse is the epitome of the Trotsky Wing of the Republican Party.  His resume reads like something I’d make up to lampoon guys like Ben Sasse:

He spent a year in the dreaded private sector after college and then got on the gravy train of government work. A dozen years on the dole and runs for Senate and is now the shiny new penny “representing” Nebraska, a place he rarely visited for twenty years prior to his election. Instead of working his way up from dog catcher or state rep, he just parachuted into the Senate without much vetting.

Let’s see…yep: “consultant” (=lobbyist) for a year, then a year as “consultant/executive director” at some evangelical (=lobbying) group, then Homeland Security, HHS, and the Senate, with some Obama-style “professor” gigs thrown in.  Government or academia — when he’s not in government, or lobbying the government, he’s “teaching” government.  Dude is 44 years old and has never, ever held a job that didn’t involve kneepad service to the leviathan state.

What principle could he possibly have acquired, in all those years working his fingers to the bone shuffling regulations in the belly of the beast?  He’s a full time tax code comma-juggler…. but he gives the occasional shout-out to Jesus, so he’s a “conservative.”

Just for giggles, I googled Redstate’s last two endorsements for president: Bible-thumping no-hoper Rick Santorum (because he’s against abortion and global weathering) and that truest of true conservatives, the lisping Cuban Cabana Boy himself, Marco “Bootsie” Rubio, because “electability.”   I’m trying to figure out what “principle” this track record hews to… nope, coming up empty.  Unless, of course, it’s the principle of “throw the election to the Democrats, then climb up on our cross and scream ‘forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do’ at every possible opportunity for the next four to eight years.  Oh, and please donate!  Paypal, Patreon… it’s all good.”

The old 90s-style culture wars are dead, y’all.  You want to know why Republican voters don’t care about abortion anymore?  I’ll spell it out for you in little bitty words: IT’S THE FUCKING IMMIGRANTS.  The very same self-righteous Churchians who are out there marching for life are helping Obama import Aztecs and Muzzies as fast as they can fill the cargo holds.  The Constitution isn’t a suicide pact, and neither is the Gospel. The rest of us can see that for every baby you save from the butcher’s knife — and it’s a laudable goal, God bless you — you’re disemploying five American citizens, three of whom will be wounded in next week’s outbreak of Sudden Onset Jihad Syndrome.

While all that’s going on, the wonkblogs are yelling about “purges,” as if stone-faced men in jackboots have hauled poor Ben Sasse off to a meeting with a rubber hose and some thumbscrews.  In reality, of course, he’ll be back in the Senate sponsoring vital true conservative legislation in no time.  And should he be ousted in his next reelection bid — perhaps because the voters of the great state of Nebraska couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup — he’ll be right back on K Street the next day, true conservatively lobbying Congress for more true conservative pork.

But don’t forget: it’s e before i in “gleichschaltung.”  PURGES!!!!

Loading Likes...

The Confederate Flag, Slavery’s Role in the Civil War, and Why Historical Literacy Doesn’t Mean a Thing

An interesting discussion going on over at Morgan’s.  I want to expand a bit on a point I made there.  I’m sure Umberto Eco and Dan Brown have put this more eloquently than I can, but symbols quickly take on a life of their own, outside — or even opposite — their historical context.  Here’s a familiar example:

untitledAsk any bong warrior on any campus in America what this means, and you’ll get some gassy bullshit about sticking it to The Man, man.  Crucially: you’ll get the same answer from people who know better.  Guevara’s real life and opinions are meaningless; his face on a t-shirt = rebellion.

The Confederate Battle Flag is going down a similar road.

just to make sure **everyone** is offended

just to make sure **everyone** is offended

As the battle lines stand now, one side says the Battle Flag stands for racism; the other says it stands for heritage.  That’s about to change.

Now, I could point out that slavery was the proximate cause of the Civil War, not the root cause, in the same way taxation was the proximate cause of the Revolutionary War (ever tried explaining the Revolution to a bright fifth grader?  It’s dollars to donuts they’ll say something like “wow, all those people got killed because Sam Adams didn’t want to pay his taxes?”).  I could say that the root causes were two fundamentally different notions of government, and the citizen’s relationship to the state.  We could have a long, interesting, and fruitful discussion about that (which seems to be where it’s heading over at Morgan’s, provided nobody checks the authenticity of my George Washington quote).

But none of it matters, because nobody who’s actually going to be wearing the Confederate flag on his clothing, or screaming for the flag-wearers to be jailed, knows a single fucking thing about the Civil War.  I have fairly extensive experience with the American educational system, and I promise you, most folks can’t get the date of the battle of Gettysburg right within 50 years.  Few if any have even heard of John C. Calhoun, much less know anything about his ideas.  And — see above — it wouldn’t matter if they did.  Keep gazing into Che’s eyes until you get it.

That being the case, the Confederate Battle Flag will soon come to mean nothing more than “rebellion” to people who are sick to death of being PC-whipped by a remote, clueless minority and their government lapdogs (as, I’m told, it already does in many parts of Eastern Europe).  And because this is Weimar America, the issue will never, ever die, until the “republic” does — I promise you, my friends, every single Republican candidate will be invited to disavow the CBF by the media at every single event from now until doomsday.

Pretty soon — if it hasn’t already happened — there will be exactly two possible opinions on the CBF: the SJW version, or the anti-SJW version.  You can either swallow the some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others Stalinist SJW bullshit, or you can side with General Lee.

History ain’t got nothing to do with it.

Loading Likes...

Nail. Head. BAM! Flush to the board

Just thought this needed bookmarking (via Chicks on the Right)….

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas (who is an Iraq War veteran) had this to say in response to those questions and it is the best response I’ve heard from anyone about this –

“Knowing what we know now, I absolutely would have sent the Pacific Fleet out of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 4 to intercept the Japanese Fleet,” Cotton told the Washington Examiner during an interview in his Capitol Hill office. “I say that to highlight how foolish the question is. You don’t get to live life in reverse. What a leader has to do is make a decision, at the moment of decision, based on the best information he has. George Bush did that in 2002 and 2003 and he was supported by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and John Kerry and every western country’s intelligence agency.”
“There are lessons we can learn from the early days of the Iraq war. One is that we clearly should be more critically analytical about our approach to intelligence assessments,” Cotton added.


Loading Likes...

“Exploiting” the Third World


Saw this posted on the innerwebs:






Loading Likes...

A Very Moldy Chestnut Troll






























Loading Likes...