Steve - you've been one of my favorite writers on AT for years and still are - but it seems like you, as well as other writers, have developed a blind spot on the whole picture which is bigger than Trump or DaGOP.
When you wrote - "Tens of millions of Americans placed their unfettered faith and trust in Donald Trump and the Republican Party." - which is absolutely true, you also appeal to to both for the needed solution to our ills.
Here is my take - learned by reading all of the articles which I have archived for future reference - DaGOP, as a functioning opposition political party, is and has been dead for years - that's fact. That includes the Conservative movement which has been a mirage - a total failure - http://crushlimbraw.blogspo... - read for hours!
Unfortunately, DaGOP still functions as a fundraising operation and receives 'wishing well' votes by default - thus disappointing a steadily increasing portion of its supporters who are utterly frustrated by the results - another fact!
Let's look at history - The Dem party has been taken over by the Left - lock, stock and barrel - fact! How did it happen?
Hold that thought and let's look at Trump.
He was and is both an effect and a cause. Trump rode a political wave and thus was an effect and benefited from the already building distrust of BOTH parties - a coalition of D and R voters - mostly blue collar, middle class and White - fact!
He is now the cause for the turmoil in DaDCSwamp - and rightly so - opposed by both parties - fact!
What's next? More turmoil to come - anyone who thinks DaDeepState will give up easy is delusional - http://crushlimbraw.blogspo... - another mother-lode of articles.
Finally, what's happening now? The Alt Right - inevitably - will take over the political leadership of DaGOP within 5-10 years (my estimate) - http://crushlimbraw.blogspo... - read for yourself.
I also understand that most writers, pundits and commenters here ridicule that statement - just as they ridiculed Trump - but the Alt Right has one unique characteristic - it deals in REALITY!
If the Alt Right does not succeed politically - along with Trump or his successors - the lessons of history show that this nation, or what's left of it - will go through another civil war.
Sad, but true!
Labels
- Politics (7783)
- Government (7458)
- Political Correctness (5213)
- Culture (4783)
- Fedonomics (4352)
- Education (3710)
- Mentoring (3347)
- ChristianActionProject (2989)
- Immigration (1313)
- Religion (782)
- CultureEducation (620)
- Homeschooling (449)
- CAP Lessons (65)
Monday, July 31, 2017
bionic mosquito: Paradoxe de la Lumière Noire
Paradoxe de la Lumière Noire
Consider this question
Open your eyes
Examine your own
reflection
What are you willing
to die for?
For a New Libertarian: a talk by Jeff Deist
given jointly to students at Mises University and participants at the Corax
2017 conference:
In closing, I’ll mention an email exchange I had recently with
the blogger Bionic Mosquito. If you’re not reading Bionic Mosquito, you should
be!
OK, that’s all of the important stuff; you can stop here if you
want.
Now that we have that out of the way…The above was from Jeff’s
conclusion; what was he after?
…libertarians have a bad tendency to fall into utopianism, into
portraying liberty as something new age and evolved. In this sense they can
sound a lot like progressives: liberty will work when human finally shed their
stubborn old ideas about family and tribe, become purely rational freethinkers
(always the opposite), reject the mythology of religion and faith, and give up
their outdated ethnic or nationalist or cultural alliances for the new
hyper-individualist creed. We need people to drop their old-fashioned sexual
hangups and bourgeois values, except for materialism.
Libertarians of this stripe – and admittedly, there are many –
sound like Cultural Marxists; as I prefer to put it, Cultural Gramsci-ists. Antonio
Gramsci was a Marxist thinker and philosopher. He concluded that the
west would not be won over to communism via an uprising of the working class;
what was necessary was to destroy the culture.
Gramsci was the Frankfurt School before there was a Frankfurt
School.
Libertarians of the left embrace Gramsci – some by name (I’m not
lying), the rest in spirit. They are joined in their quest to
destroy traditional western culture by the likes of George Soros and most
western governments and institutions.
Who do you think has a better handle on where this
culture-destroying road leads – your government or the likes of Kevin Carson
and Reason Magazine? (Or are they all on the same team?)
Returning to Deist:
…while libertarians enthusiastically embrace markets, they have
for decades made the disastrous mistake of appearing hostile to family, to
religion, to tradition, to culture, and to civic or social institution — in
other words, hostile to civil society itself.
Which is bizarre if we think about it. Civil society provides
the very mechanisms we need to organize society without the state.
Many years ago, well before bionic was even a twinkle in my eye
and well before I was able to maturely consider anything associated with this
idea of libertarians and culture, I tried explaining libertarian theory to my
father. He asked, very directly: “What are you? A
communist?” I thought he was crazy, but I have come to learn that he
understood this stuff far better than I did.
Something or someone will govern. Those who
believe otherwise understand nothing of human nature and human
reality. Communists and libertarians such as these hold a common
view – a view proven to not only fail in practice but one that has demonstrably
been the deadliest ever foisted on man: there need be no hierarchy; a new man
will emerge, requiring no authority above himself.
Something or someone will govern. And never
in human history has the entirety of governance been made manifest solely
in markets. Honest trade has never been the sole
governing function, the sole means by which civil society is ordered.
Of two things I am certain: first, man will always embrace
religion – gods or God, something bigger, greater, and more profound than
himself. As I have all of recorded history on my side, evident in
every culture anywhere in the world, I will entertain as reasonable no contrary
positions to this.
Second, for as long as man will continue to populate this world,
he will first be born into a family; he will have a father and mother. And
into this family he will find himself in his first governance
structure. I have all of recorded history (and biology) on my side
of this one as well, so save your disagreements.
Absent some dystopian, test-tube nightmare – a category within
which I can place the ideas of many left-libertarians and Cultural Gramsci-ists
– children will be born and raised thus.
In order to function in this world, individuals will
join. Many stay connected to family for a lifetime – to pretend this
isn’t true is to ignore reality. As infants grow and mature, they might
choose to leave family and form another – literally or
figuratively. They join social and civic groups; they form other
bonds, institutions, organizations. Individuals choose to belong.
It scarcely needs to be said that family has always been the
first line of defense against the state, and the most important source of
primary loyalty — or divided loyalty, from the perspective of politicians. Our
connection with ancestors, and our concern for progeny, forms a story in which
the state is not the main character.
No, Jeff…sadly, it needs to be
said. Left-libertarians might ask themselves: why does the state
spend so much energy to destroy the family? Is it because the state
holds the same objective as these left-libertarians: the state is also
looking to end the state?
I am willing to bet not; and I am willing to bet that the state
– in full concert with Antonio Gramsci – knows better than the shallow-thinking
(or merely dishonest) left-libertarians where this road leads.
Religion forms another important line of defense against the
state. In fact the whole history of man cannot be understood without
understanding the role of religion. Even today healthy percentages of people in
the West believe in God, regardless of their actual religious observance. And
believing in a deity by itself challenges the state’s omniscience and status.
Again, religion stands as a potential rival for the individual’s allegiance….
Law from a source outside of and higher than any man living
today – feel free to call it God, feel free to call it custom and
tradition. Beginning with the
Renaissance, we have moved to a place where some men are above the law –
the enlightened thinkers have authority over all of us because they are
the law.
Individuals choose to belong. It is to these that
they choose: family, civic organizations, religion. Something will
govern. It can be through these voluntary (or at least reasonably
voluntary) means, or it can be through coercion: government, as we know it
today. I prefer the cultural means; to choose otherwise means you
choose government coercion.
Because governance cannot be avoided in human relationships.
I assure you I’m neither interested in nor judgmental toward
your personal beliefs or lifestyle preferences — and neither was Murray
Rothbard. And of course libertarianism per se has nothing to say about how one
lives.
I would hope this need not be said, yet it obviously must.
But it remains true that civil society should be celebrated by
libertarians at every turn. To believe otherwise is to ignore what humans
actually want and actually do, which is create communities.
To believe otherwise is to hope for the creation of a new man –
something every utopian political philosophy calls for; something that has
always resulted in death and destruction.
There is a word for people who believe in nothing: not
government, family, God, society, morality, or civilization. And that word is
nihilist, not libertarian.
I suggest Jeff is only slightly exaggerating: they believe
in something, in markets – just not private
property…which, I know, is impossible…but, there you have it. So,
maybe Jeff isn’t exaggerating.
In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter
to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance.
Try to convince a large portion of your neighbors that these
don’t matter; you will quickly learn the meaning of the term irrelevance, as
you will find yourself irrelevant.
I asked [bionic mosquito] the same hypothetical question I have
for you: what would you fight for? The answer to this question tells us a lot
about what libertarians ought to care about.
By this I mean what would you physically fight for, where doing
so could mean serious injury or death. Or arrest and imprisonment, or the loss
of your home, your money, and your possessions.
How many of you reading this blog will fight (physically fight)
for the non-aggression principle? How many are fighting against 40%
or greater tax rates, tens of thousands of new rules and regulations every
year, privacy violations of every imaginable (and unimaginable) type?
I suggest that the answer is zero. Because, for the
small handful who have fought this fight, they are in prison or dead…in neither
case reading this blog.
On the other hand, how many will fight for your family, your
home, maybe even religion – all offering governance structures outside of the
state? I suspect some number more – much more – than zero. Your
neighbors will understand this without hesitation.
So…why work to destroy this? Why aren’t these
embraced as a key foundation for moving toward a libertarian world?
Conclusion
Consider this question
Look deep inside
Deliver a true
confession
What are you willing
to live for?
Isn’t it the same question?
Epilogue
So, what of this Paradoxe de la Lumière Noire, this
Paradox of Black Light?
Libertarianism is a very individualistic political philosophy;
to the extent we can move toward it, it can only be made a reality in this
world by accepting that man is a social (and not merely material) being.
And this social construct has been developed and nurtured over
hundreds of generations; it is foolish to think man will allow it to
drastically change anytime soon…
…at least not without a fight.
Mailvox: the New Puritans
BA
muses on the observably
religious character of the SJWs:
Is it atheism per se or
is it a mindset that may or may not include atheism? Or perhaps the old time
heretics didn't quite have the nerve to go full bore atheist. Specifically,
I'm wondering if the West’s, and in particular America’s, current
political/cultural rift goes back to the Reformation and even earlier. Runciman
discusses some on his Medieval Manichee.
Adherents to the older Christian faiths accept and embrace the obligation of doing the right thing in both private and public life. Live, stumble, sin, repent, pray, try through good works to be a better person because the final judgement is rendered at the end of life, so one had best be on the qui vive at all times. One must also constantly examine if what one is doing is right, and accept that all too often it will not be.
By contrast, for a certain kind of 16th and 17th century Protestant, grace, like perfect pitch, is a lucky attribute. One is born of the Elect or not, and nothing can change that. For those with a guaranteed first class reservation to Heaven so long as they profess the faith, there is a whole lot of leeway in day to day life. Better yet, there is a whole lot of self examination that one can dispense with.That sword of uncertainty simply does not hang over head.
Which gets us to the modern secular True Believer. If all is fore ordained and one’s place is secure (or non-existent, in the case of atheists), criticism (or destruction), the easier path, rather than creation, the harder, becomes the standard. Marching and emoting and punching Nazis is more fun than, say working the soup kitchen or helping building habitats for the poor or teaching the illiterate to read.* Making errors (much less making up for errors) scarcely enters into the equation.
How wonderful a faith is that? No real effort involved, and if there are inconsistencies or temptations to act like a jerk, well, not really a problem because, you see – One is one of the Elect. Too bad about the rest of you sinners. Perhaps you should move down south with the rest of your heathen kind. Or just die. And by the way, where’s my check?
Not surprisingly, for those few Elect who do create, the results are, shall we say, not sublime. And their jokes are terrible.
The roots for this mindset go deep and, no surprise, go deepest in states like Massachusetts. That it screws up the individual in small and society at large in any number of ways is obvious, but if one is a true believer, inconvenient facts are there to be ignored. They have to be. If acknowledged, they are shattering. I’ve seen it happen, as no doubt you have as well. Not pretty. So rather than face up to failure, one must blame failure onto others.
Case in point - an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago gave a whole litany of LBJ’s 1960’s Great Society acts and then observed that every single one of the problems they were meant to address had all gotten worse. Mea Culpa? Of course not. The writer blamed Nixon’s 1970’s law and order policies. Can’t have been anything else. It was a question of Elect and Non-Elect. The writer’s solution was to get Republicans to join with Democrats and double down the policies of old.
Adherents to the older Christian faiths accept and embrace the obligation of doing the right thing in both private and public life. Live, stumble, sin, repent, pray, try through good works to be a better person because the final judgement is rendered at the end of life, so one had best be on the qui vive at all times. One must also constantly examine if what one is doing is right, and accept that all too often it will not be.
By contrast, for a certain kind of 16th and 17th century Protestant, grace, like perfect pitch, is a lucky attribute. One is born of the Elect or not, and nothing can change that. For those with a guaranteed first class reservation to Heaven so long as they profess the faith, there is a whole lot of leeway in day to day life. Better yet, there is a whole lot of self examination that one can dispense with.That sword of uncertainty simply does not hang over head.
Which gets us to the modern secular True Believer. If all is fore ordained and one’s place is secure (or non-existent, in the case of atheists), criticism (or destruction), the easier path, rather than creation, the harder, becomes the standard. Marching and emoting and punching Nazis is more fun than, say working the soup kitchen or helping building habitats for the poor or teaching the illiterate to read.* Making errors (much less making up for errors) scarcely enters into the equation.
How wonderful a faith is that? No real effort involved, and if there are inconsistencies or temptations to act like a jerk, well, not really a problem because, you see – One is one of the Elect. Too bad about the rest of you sinners. Perhaps you should move down south with the rest of your heathen kind. Or just die. And by the way, where’s my check?
Not surprisingly, for those few Elect who do create, the results are, shall we say, not sublime. And their jokes are terrible.
The roots for this mindset go deep and, no surprise, go deepest in states like Massachusetts. That it screws up the individual in small and society at large in any number of ways is obvious, but if one is a true believer, inconvenient facts are there to be ignored. They have to be. If acknowledged, they are shattering. I’ve seen it happen, as no doubt you have as well. Not pretty. So rather than face up to failure, one must blame failure onto others.
Case in point - an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago gave a whole litany of LBJ’s 1960’s Great Society acts and then observed that every single one of the problems they were meant to address had all gotten worse. Mea Culpa? Of course not. The writer blamed Nixon’s 1970’s law and order policies. Can’t have been anything else. It was a question of Elect and Non-Elect. The writer’s solution was to get Republicans to join with Democrats and double down the policies of old.
There is only one answer to the
ongoing question so often asked by the Right of the Left: are they evil or are
they stupid?
The answer, of course, is "yes". As I mentioned the other day, all of the Left's ideologies, from Marxism to Gramscian cultural marxism to feminism to atheism to multiculturalism to neo-liberal globalism are nothing more than the various skinsuits worn by the Neo-Babelists as suits them at the time. These diverse and incoherent ideologies are nothing more than rationalizations encouraging the adherent to condemn and attack Christendom on whatever grounds happens to appeal most to him.
And Neo-Babelism is more than a superset of useful ideologies, it is a religion, indeed, one could go so far as to say that it is the first religion.
The answer, of course, is "yes". As I mentioned the other day, all of the Left's ideologies, from Marxism to Gramscian cultural marxism to feminism to atheism to multiculturalism to neo-liberal globalism are nothing more than the various skinsuits worn by the Neo-Babelists as suits them at the time. These diverse and incoherent ideologies are nothing more than rationalizations encouraging the adherent to condemn and attack Christendom on whatever grounds happens to appeal most to him.
And Neo-Babelism is more than a superset of useful ideologies, it is a religion, indeed, one could go so far as to say that it is the first religion.
Sunday, July 30, 2017
A quick not to our readers and mentors - by Crush
We will be traveling for about a week, so new posts will be sporadic. However, as I have said before - this is not a news site - it's an accumulating archive of analyses and insights by the best authors I can find on the major topics listed.
If you have not used it as such, try it the next time a discussion comes up - do a key word search and most likely you will have a whole list of results which are an education in itself if you read most of them.
Don't just regurgitate what you already know - some of what we know, ain't so - as Will Rogers so aptly said. Prove it!
We tend to rationalize what we already know - and end up delusional - I meet people like that daily on the net. They come from across the political spectrum - Leftists, Conservatives, Christians, Atheists, You name it - any wonder we're so screwed up? I have had to change many things that I thought were true - which ain't so! Had to put my ego in my back pocket!
Read this - https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2017/06/another-suggested-study-for-mentors.html - and check it out yourself!
Keep at it, folks - we have a long way to go!
Crush
If you have not used it as such, try it the next time a discussion comes up - do a key word search and most likely you will have a whole list of results which are an education in itself if you read most of them.
Don't just regurgitate what you already know - some of what we know, ain't so - as Will Rogers so aptly said. Prove it!
We tend to rationalize what we already know - and end up delusional - I meet people like that daily on the net. They come from across the political spectrum - Leftists, Conservatives, Christians, Atheists, You name it - any wonder we're so screwed up? I have had to change many things that I thought were true - which ain't so! Had to put my ego in my back pocket!
Read this - https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2017/06/another-suggested-study-for-mentors.html - and check it out yourself!
Keep at it, folks - we have a long way to go!
Crush
Labels:
Mentoring
New study documents voter fraud in 2016 election | Power Line - BY PAUL MIRENGOFF
I wrote here about the attempt of the Presidential
Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to obtain voter data from the states
to determine whether, or to what extent, voter fraud is a problem. More than a
few states have resisted, even though many of them make the same information
available for purchase by campaigns, political parties, researchers or even the
general public.
What,
it must be asked, are these states trying to conceal?
A new study by the Government Accountability
Institute suggests the answer. It shows that thousands of votes in the 2016
election were illegal duplicate votes from people who registered and voted in
more than one state.
Our friend Hans von Spakovsky, a
member of the Commission on Election Integrity, reports:
The Government Accountability Institute was able to obtain voter
registration and voter history data from only 21 states because while some
states shared it freely, “others impose exorbitant costs or refuse to comply
with voter information requests”. . .
The institute compared the lists using an “extremely
conservative matching approach that sought only to identify two votes cast in
the same legal name.” It found that 8,471 votes in 2016 were “highly likely”
duplicates.
Extrapolating this to all 50 states would likely produce, with
“high-confidence,” around 45,000 duplicate votes.
The
Government Accountability Institute wasn’t content just to match names and
birthdays, which can be the same for different individuals. It contracted with
companies that have commercial databases to further cross-check these
individuals using their Social Security numbers and other information. When
names, birthdates and Social Security numbers are matched, there is virtually
no chance of false positives.
Notice
that the study is confined to only one type of voter fraud — cases where an
individual uses the same name to vote in more than one state. It does not
capture cases of ineligible voting by noncitizens and felons — likely the most
common type of fraud — and absentee ballot fraud.
Even
so, 45,000 fraudulent votes is not an inconsequential number. As Hans points
out, Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes out of over
700,000 cast. (New Hampshire was one of the states that refused to turn over
its data for this study. There have been allegations of Massachusetts residents
voting there).
In
addition, the 2000 presidential election was decided by 537 votes out of a
total of 105 million cast. And in 2008, Al Franken won his Minnesota Senate
race by a mere 312 votes. He ended up being the deciding vote that gave this
country Obamacare.
The
Institute’s work should prove helpful to the Commission on Election Integrity
as it overcomes obstacles thrown up by those who claim voter fraud doesn’t
exist, but are unwilling to have that claim tested.
You might also read this: Blog: Hackers in competition
breach voting machine security in minutes
Labels:
Government,
Politics
Costs of green electricity driving Aussies off the grid and into poverty - By Thomas Lifson
When greenies get their way, poor people suffer. Global
warming hysteria tends to be an affliction of the affluent, who don’t have to
worry about where their next meal is coming from or how they will keep the
lights on at night. But for those lacking the leisure to hypothesize a crisis
that keeps getting stuck
on pause, the costs of green energy can wreck lives.
It is happening in Australia, in the State
of Queensland, ironically rich in coal deposits:
The Sunday
Mail of Brisbane explains in an editorial:
TODAY’S
confronting revelation that more than 464 Queenslanders a week are having their
electricity disconnected because of soaring power prices is a wake-up call to
the Labor Party. (snip)
Labor’s
zealotry on renewable energy targets is sending the country broke. (snip)
It
comes as we also reveal that the Adani coal mine project will proceed with $400
million to be pumped into the project over the next few months, creating
hundreds of jobs. This at a time when unemployment is at double-digit levels in
north Queensland.
With
a Queensland state election looming – the likely date being late October or
early November – cost-of-living pressures are emerging as a major poll issue.
In fact, power prices could emerge as the biggest single issue. (snip)
Latest
official figures from the Australian Energy Regulator show a 55 per cent leap
in the number of households that had their power cut off in the three months to
March. With more than 18,000 disconnections in the first nine months, the
2016-17 total is set to easily top last year’s 21,667. And in a further indication
of consumers’ struggle, the number of Queensland customers entering formal
payment plans with their providers has soared by a third to 42,361. Payment
plans allow consumers to pay agreed amounts in instalments – according to their
capacity and estimated usage over the coming year – to make it easier to
budget.
Welfare
specialists say people are doing it incredibly tough around cost-of-living
pressures. Mark Henley, CEO of Queensland Council of Social Service, says
energy is “the one that is really hurting people’’. Of course, it’s the regions
that once again are hit hardest. The air-conditioning costs in north Queensland
are onerous because of the heat.
Queensland
is subtropical to tropical in climate. People need their
airconditioning. If the Queensland elections turn into a referendum on
green energy policies, the results could be historic.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/07/costs_of_green_electricity_driving_aussies_off_the_grid_and_into_poverty.html
McCain Gonna McCain - By C. Edmund Wright
There was a report from Bloomberg of
"audible gasps on the Senate floor" as John McCain voted NO on the
Obama Care skinny repeal bill. Gasps, really? I would've gasped had he
done anything different. McCain was simply, predictably, being McCain.
This is the same McCain who continually tries to sabotage Donald
Trump. This is the same McCain he's been for at least 25 years.
Consider
a little history for context sake:
The
Arizona Senator and I first crossed paths during the 1992 Campaign between
incumbent George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. McCain was emerging as a media
darling during this time, putting his days in the Keating Five Savings and Loan
Scandal behind him. The Keating Five? Oh, McCain and four Democrats,
of course. Some things never change. Certainly not McCain.
Meanwhile,
Clinton's team of James Carville and George Stephanopoulos had put North
Carolina squarely in the cross hairs as a must-win state in 92, and a series of
odd events had landed me as Communications Director of NC Bush Quayle.
Thus, as a small government pro-liberty Reagan conservative, I was in the
service of a mushy moderate President who was determined to distance himself
from Reagan, along with his rhetorically challenged VP. It was a root
canal experience, let me tell you.
Team
Bush was struggling because they couldn't, or wouldn't, run clearly to the
right of Clinton and expose the differences. When Ross Perot entered the race,
he further muddied the waters because his agenda agreed with the conservative
agenda about 75% of the time, yet he clearly despised Bush more than he wanted
to defeat Clinton. Whatever Perot's motivations were, the result was that the
92 election was an ideological mess, and Bush was not a man who even understood
that, let alone overcame it.
To
make things worse, enter John McCain, who was riding his war hero story, and a
questionable passion for the pro-life position, into stardom on the right
during this time. A big part of McCain's self-serving strategy was to
ingratiate himself to the liberal media by trashing other Republicans, which he
did often. So, paradoxically, he gained credibility on the right, by trashing
the right, because he became the only man (ostensibly) on the right that the
media liked, and we were desperate on the right to be liked by anyone in the
media. Consider: talk radio was new and small, CNN was the only cable channel,
and Andrew Breitbart was just starting to emerge from his "hippy
dippy" liberal youth (his words).
The
Mainstream Media still ruled the roost, and McCain's message to them was
that Bush "must stop being so extreme," as in so extremely
conservative. The exact opposite was true. Bush wasn't nearly conservative
enough, nor capable of articulating those views on which he was
conservative. Clearly McCain knew this, wanted Bush to lose, and to climb
the ladder in the vacuum a Bush loss would create. And the media was all
too happy to help. I was forced to try and use whatever media influence in
North Carolina I could muster to overcome McCain's message, which is why I
remember it like yesterday.
And
yes, I fully understand that now, everybody on the planet is onto McCain's
schtick. Most of that didn't really happen until at least 2000, and into 2008
and beyond. In ‘92 however, I was on a lonely planet. I even got into a heated
dispute with the host on the G. Gordon Liddy Radio Show in early 1993 about
this. Gordon was still drinking the McCain Kool Aid, as were all of his
listeners.
Now
back to the future: everyone knows what's in the Kool Aid now.
So
here we are, with McCain shaking off the effects of cancer to cast a vote that
ensures we probably won’t get the same treatment he did. The John McCain who
sabotaged the so called 'skinny repeal' vote over Obama Care, and who fought
openly with Donald Trump months ago, is exactly the same John McCain he has
always been. He not only trashes conservatives at every opportunity, he then
takes credit for being this courageous "maverick," even as everybody
knows that trashing conservatives to the media is the easiest, most gutless
thing a person can do.
Almost
everything about McCain's carefully crafted image is a lie. It always has been.
And now, in a somewhat cruel irony, McCain has access to massive amounts of
Obama Care-exempted health care, while voting to make sure you and I remain
trapped under this failed disaster. In other words, McCain is just being
McCain. This is who he's always been.
He
"reached across the aisle" in the 1980's to enrich himself while the
Savings and Loan scandal was bankrupting average Americans. He reached across
the aisle in the 90's to help Bill Clinton. He reached across the aisle in 2005
and 06 in the name of comprehensive immigration reform. He reached across the
aisle to help foist the corrupt Dodd-Frank bill on us. And on and on it
goes.
Now
he's reaching across the aisle in service of a corrupt, lobbyist contrived and
bureaucrat enforced abomination called ObamaCare. Of course he is. This is who
John McCain is, and always has been.
Edmund Wright is a contributor to Breitbart, American Thinker, Newsmax
TV, and author of 2013 Amazon Best Selling Elections book, WTF? How Karl Rove
and the Establishment Lost…Again.
Labels:
Politics
Vox Popoli: The war against God
The war against God
It's good to see that even the
cucks at National Review are not interested in adopting the New Atheists
subsequent to their rejection and no-platforming by the Left:
Why
must ardent secularists from the Islamic world like Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the type
of people the Left looks to for inspiration in the history of Western
secularism — be deemed bigots, while Sharia-supporting conspiracy theorists
like Linda Sarsour are cherished? Why has criticizing Islam caused the New
Atheists to cross a red line in the progressive imagination?
These positions make no sense if one thinks of the Left as seriously secular, convinced of the need to end the reign of superstition. But American liberals profess neither the passionate skepticism of Hume nor the honest, urgent atheism of Nietzsche. They prefer to embrace a shallow, culture-war atheism instead.
This culture-war atheism provides “evidence,” quick and easy, to support the proposition that America is split into two camps: the intelligent, sophisticated, urbane, righteous liberals and the idiotic, gullible, backward, bigoted conservatives. The former are atheists and the latter are believers, flattering one side and bludgeoning the other. In fact, it is this type of thinking that made progressives fall in love with the New Atheists in the first place.
New Atheism pleased the Left as long as it stuck to criticizing “God,” who was associated with the beliefs of President George W. Bush and his supporters. It was thus fun, rather than offensive, for Bill Maher to call “religion” ridiculous, because he was assumed to be talking about Christianity. Christopher Hitchens could call God a “dictator” and Heaven a “celestial North Korea,” and the Left would laugh. Berkeley students would not think to disinvite Richard Dawkins when he was saying “Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion.”
Truth be told, New Atheism was always fundamentally unserious.
These positions make no sense if one thinks of the Left as seriously secular, convinced of the need to end the reign of superstition. But American liberals profess neither the passionate skepticism of Hume nor the honest, urgent atheism of Nietzsche. They prefer to embrace a shallow, culture-war atheism instead.
This culture-war atheism provides “evidence,” quick and easy, to support the proposition that America is split into two camps: the intelligent, sophisticated, urbane, righteous liberals and the idiotic, gullible, backward, bigoted conservatives. The former are atheists and the latter are believers, flattering one side and bludgeoning the other. In fact, it is this type of thinking that made progressives fall in love with the New Atheists in the first place.
New Atheism pleased the Left as long as it stuck to criticizing “God,” who was associated with the beliefs of President George W. Bush and his supporters. It was thus fun, rather than offensive, for Bill Maher to call “religion” ridiculous, because he was assumed to be talking about Christianity. Christopher Hitchens could call God a “dictator” and Heaven a “celestial North Korea,” and the Left would laugh. Berkeley students would not think to disinvite Richard Dawkins when he was saying “Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion.”
Truth be told, New Atheism was always fundamentally unserious.
The Left rejects the New Atheists because it was never truly atheist or
secular. It is merely anti-Christian and anti-Western. The Left embraces Islam
because it presently serves as a more effective anti-Christian weapon than the
atheism or secular humanism upon which it previously relied.
The heart of the Left is Neo-Babelism, which is inherently globalist and Satanic in nature. All of its various ideologies, from communism to feminism to neo-liberalism to progressivism, are nothing more than the skinsuits it wears in its endless war against God. But unlike the New Atheists, the Neo-Babelists are not warring against the idea of God, much less questioning His existence. They are actually at war with the Almighty Himself, and His son, Jesus Christ.
The heart of the Left is Neo-Babelism, which is inherently globalist and Satanic in nature. All of its various ideologies, from communism to feminism to neo-liberalism to progressivism, are nothing more than the skinsuits it wears in its endless war against God. But unlike the New Atheists, the Neo-Babelists are not warring against the idea of God, much less questioning His existence. They are actually at war with the Almighty Himself, and His son, Jesus Christ.
Saturday, July 29, 2017
DUNKIRK: “People Should Be Hung From Lampposts, They Should Be Burned Alive, For What They’ve Done To Britain” - The Unz Review - PETER BRIMELOW
So I went to see this movie DUNKIRK at
the urging of James Kirkpatrick, VDARE.com’s lead tweetmeister and our ambassador to popular culture. In the
process, I made the interesting discovery that my young
Texan wife had never heard of Dunkirk. For me, it brought
flocking back a host of memories and emotions sternly repressed since I
left Britain for U.S. in 1970. Chief among them now: lethal
rage.
If you grew up in Britain in the 1950s, as John Derbyshire
and I did, the myth of the Dunkirk evacuation—using “myth” in its
affirming and sustaining sense—was everywhere. I remember reading illustrated
stories about it in children’s comics when I was about Felicity’s age (now 6).
Of course, the British were wrong to believe
this was the decisive turning point in World War II—there were, as we are
incessantly reminded, far bigger battles on the Eastern Front. But it was pretty decisive for Britain: the loss (or,
politically even more awkward, capture) of the 200,000-plus U.K. troops
retrieved from the beaches after being cut off by the German panzers would have
been devastating, perhaps fatal, for a country that could field only ten infantry divisions in 1939.
As it was, casualties were very heavy—one of many arresting points
made by Dunkirk is how terrifyingly quickly combat-damaged
ships can sink.
Moreover, Dunkirk was in a real sense a
people’s battle. Some 700 civilian craft were recruited to
get the men off the beaches and (as the movie recounts) their owners sometimes
went with them. When my father took charge of the municipal-socialistpublic transport
operation in Birkenhead in the 1960s, he had Mersey ferrymen who had gone. It was an intense
popular effort and it struck deep personal roots.
Although aimed at a mass audience, Dunkirk is
a very sophisticated movie and a remarkable technical achievement by
writer-producer director Christopher Nolan. It’s also a political achievement.
Nolan’s subject is one of the Anglosphere’s great patriotic epics and
thus ripe for anti-West snark, but it has actually
been well received by the Leftist cultural Establishment e.g.
·
Review: ‘Dunkirk’ Is a Tour de Force War Movie, Both Sweeping and
Intimate, [by Manohla Dargis, New York Times, July 20, 2015;
·
Why ‘Dunkirk’ Is the Christopher Nolan Movie We’ve Been Waiting
For, [by David Fear, Rolling Stone, July 24, 2017—“ a key WWII battle…an
epic rescue mission that essentially saved the Western World (no big whoop)”].
Nolan seems to have flown under the radar,
partly by eliminating virtually all dialog and hence minimizing the chance of
jarring Politically Correct sensibilities.
Even Churchill’s sacralized “We shall fight on
the beaches” June 4 oration announcing the evacuation to the House of Commons,
hearing which was so much an inescapable part of growing up in England in the
1950s, like listening to Kathleen Ferrier, that I could recite it from memory
and never without a thrill, appears here only as haltingly read, from a
newspaper, by an exhausted, wondering survivor as his train finally reaches
London.
But Nolan’s achievement goes far beyond
avoiding trouble. Quietly, possibly inadvertently, he has made a movie
that celebrates national identity.
He does this simply by showing a real nation
in action. USA Today’s reviewer Brian Truit has been beaten up for
observing that “the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead
actors of color may rub some the wrong way”. [Review: Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk’ examines WWII
heroism up close, July 17, 2017] This is a little unfair: as
Steve Sailer recently pointed out, director Tim Burton was
indeed attacked for not including people of color in a movie set on a Welsh
island in World War II, although as late as 1951 the proportion of “visible minorities” in Britain was
just 0.19% (!). And the 2007 movie Atonement did prominently
insert a wholly
fictitious black soldier i nto its famous five-minute
continuous tracking shot of the scene at Dunkirk. [Presenting the Black Past—How History Must Change The
Media, by Miranda Kaufman, MirandaKaufman.com,
November 14, 2013]
But the British army in Nolan’s Dunkirk is
totally, completely and stunningly white.
(One of the “couple of women,” a nurse, is
unsparingly shown, in a horrible below-decks underwater shot, dying an Equal
Opportunity death by drowning after her hospital ship is torpedoed. Is this an
implicit criticism of putting women in
the front line?)
The result of this homogeneity, as the Chicago
Tribune’s John Kass wrote in a brilliant column:
The star of “Dunkirk” is the character of the
British people at that time, in the worst days of the war, long before America
joined in, when the British Expeditionary Force was humiliated in Europe and
almost destroyed.
And so it is a movie about a people of a
certain time, a people who knew who they were, a people who firmly understood
their culture and their obligations to it, and to their nation, and to each
other.
‘Dunkirk’: Decency on a murderous beach,
July 21, 2017
I am old enough to remember that Britain. And
it looks like Christopher Nolan, born in 1970 in London
to a British father and an American mother, caught some sense of it too.
One small sign: Nolan has the British troops
standing in orderly, quiet queues (= lines in American), waiting to be taken
off. This is apparently what happened at Dunkirk. The British of that era were very good at queuing.
Significantly, the working class was best at it. It used to irritate my father
that everyone would queue for his buses except in affluent areas, where people
would just stand around and block the pavement (=sidewalk in American). “They
think they’re too good to queue,” he said. Social rot in Britain started from
the top.
(Nolan also has his troops being handed slices
of bread and jam by rescue workers. Known in the North of England as “jam
butties,” these were also omnipresent when I was a child. Reportedly, they’ve died out, along with so much
else).
So is it inadvertent? Does Nolan
realize what he’s done? It’s very hard to believe that anyone with deviant
political views could hide them well enough to survive in Hollywood. Nolan does
seem generally to avoid political statements, not typical of Leftists, but he
reportedly donated to Obama in 2012 [The Religious And Political Views of Christopher Nolan,
by Caitlin Frye, Hollowverse.com, November 25, 2012]. Still, it is a curious
fact that his The Dark Knight Rises, last in a Batman trilogy,
was seen as “fascist” by Left [“The Dark Knight Rises”: Christopher Nolan’s evil
masterpiece, by Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, July 18,
2012] and Right [The Dark Right Rises:Christopher Nolan as Fascist
Filmmaker?, by Gregory Hood and Luke Gordon, Counter-Currents,
December 7, 2012] alike. The villain Bane has emerged as a sort of Alt-Right
antihero—and Donald Trump (known to be a fan of The Dark Knight Rises)
is widely believed to have offered him an homage [Donald Trump’s Inauguration Speech Borrows Line from
Batman Villain Bane, by Aaron Couch ,
Hollywood Reporter, January 20, 2017 ).
But the real reason that Dunkirk’s inconveniently
honest portrayal of Britain and its army in 1940 is so stunning: successive
British governments have, in the twinkling of an eye (to quote Handel’s Messiah)
utterly destroyed that world through immigration policy. Incredibly,
whites—that is to say, the British—are projected to go into a minority, in a
land they have exclusively occupied for millennia, not long after the same
event is estimated to occur in the U.S. [RIP this Britain: With academic objectivity, Oxford
Professor and population expert DAVID COLEMAN says white Britons could be in
the minority by the 2060s – or sooner, by David
Coleman, Daily Mail, May 28, 2016].
In 2009, Nicholas Pringle published The Unknown Warriors, a book of
interviews with 150 of what in America is called the “Greatest Generation”—those who fought and
lived through World War II:
Sarah Robinson was just a teenager when World
War II broke out.
She endured the Blitz, watching for fires
during Luftwaffe air raids armed with a bucket of sand.
Often she would walk ten miles home from work
in the blackout, with bombs falling around her.
As soon as she turned 18, she joined the Royal
Navy to do her bit for the war effort.
Hers was a small part in a huge,
history-making enterprise, and her contribution epitomises her generation’s
sense of service and sacrifice.
Nearly 400,000 Britons died. Millions more
were scarred by the experience, physically and mentally.
But was it worth it? Her answer—and the answer
of many of her contemporaries, now in their 80s and 90s—is a resounding No.
Immigration tops the list of complaints…Many
writers are bewildered and overwhelmed by a multicultural Britain that, they
say bitterly, they were never consulted about nor feel
comfortable with.
`This isn`t the Britain we fought for,` say the `unknown
warriors` of WWII, by Tony Rennell, London Daily
Mail, November 21, 2009. Link added.
In 1940, my father, already in the British
Army in which he was to spend 6½ years, was stationed on the English Channel at
Folkstone, looking right at Dunkirk. Years later, reading about the German plans
for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England, I realized he was right where
paratroopers were to land and asked him what kind of resistance his unit would
have been able to mount.
He said: “They would have had to give us rifles.”
The Germans never came—but Britain was invaded
anyway. By 1990, when my father died, he was bitterly in agreement with
Pringle’s interviewees: it wasn’t worth it.
My considered reaction to Dunkirk:
People should be hung from lampposts—they should be burned alive—for what
they’ve done to Britain.
God send, if only for the sake of my three
little daughters, born almost exactly 100 years after my father, that America
can be saved from this terrible fate.
Peter Brimelow [Email him | Tweet
him]is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling
book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration
Disaster , is now available in Kindle format.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)