The Alt-Right brigade have jumped the shark with all their nationalistic posturing. Da Joos, da Catholics, people of Irish, German, French, etc stock are not "true" Americans according to their ringleaders. Bah. That line of reasoning excludes almost everyone, because many patriotic Americans truly are mongrels. There is no room in their America for me and my family, or my friends and their families. Good luck with that.
The Left have jumped their own shark with their hatred and ridicule of everyone with white skin (among other things). No, you can't have any more of my money. And if you're against "cultural appropriation" give me your car and your pants. Those things were invented by whitey.
More and more I find my views are best expressed by Ben Shapiro. I don't agree with him all of the time, but at least we're in the same ballpark on most things. He did a good job at Berkeley. Milo is doing a good job too.
Washington is a cartoon, and who knows what the truth is in the headlines. I do know one thing: Trump had better build the wall, or at least make a show out of trying to build the wall. His constituents will turn on him like rabid wolves if he doesn't. Tackling DACA before giving tax cuts to working stiffs is a strategic error on his part, IMHO.
Have we reached the point where we are ungovernable? Maybe. All the grief that the left is hurling at Trump will be returned a hundred-fold if the left succeeds in installing their candidate in 2020. That person will be torn limb from limb, regardless of race or gender, because people have had ENOUGH.
One thing seems clear to me: the "media", better described as the propaganda wing of the uniparty, will need to be obliterated before we can turn things around. We have a steep hill to climb. FB, Twitter, and other social sites have banned much conservative commentary. None of the right wing sites I'd "liked" on FB a few years ago show up on my page now. None.
I talked to a college-educated white guy the other day who vehemently believes that Trump is cutting all Medicaid care for sick kids who aren't white. I'm not kidding. Progressivism has become a sick, twisted religion rather than a political flavor. The mob wants to jail climate change deniers. Next thing we know they'll be putting people on the rack or burning them at the stake.
Hey, I warned you that these are stray thoughts!
I miss you all! We haven't had a lively debate for awhile. I'm pouring wine and making a cheese platter.
ReplyDeleteIf we're not ungovernable yet...
Delete🤔 🙄
... what can we do to accelerate the process?
Because, I mean, that's the play, here...
😎
I am not too concerned with Trump at this point. There was a post on FB from a Seattle TV station about how Trump was "in and out of the state" after the hurricane. The reft hates him, the right hates him, and I do not particularly trust either to give an accurate report of what he said or did.
ReplyDeleteFor the same token, I don't really pay attention to the "alt right." Who are the alt right? That seems to be a term thrown around as much as "Nazi." Are they the RINO's? Are they the fringe? The sites I look at do not do anything as you described, Lady Red. As for RINO's, I don't give the south end of a rat facing north about them.
Trump is working with Democrats? That what Trump has always done -- worth with people. In the process he may very well defend both side. He has also said that his DACA deal is not what it has been portrayed as.
Matt, my favorite site is Gateway Pundit. Jim Hoft and his crew do a wonderful job there!
DeleteAs far as the "Alt-Right" and "RINOs" and "cucks" and "Nazis" and "White Supremacists"...what a toxic stew! I'm truly sick of it. My small-l libertarian brain has turned away from them all.
I pray for President Trump and Vice President Pence daily. I've never ever seen such a concerted effort to undermine our republic as I've seen being waged against this president and his supporters.
The sum of all mainstream political programming is not worth a bucket of warm spit.
ReplyDelete:|
Had to be said.
When I have the time I need to check out Quillette more.
lady red – I should add – I too miss a lively debate. And thank you for posting this.
DeleteBut the usual topics are dead to me.
Because somewhere, more or less all of culture and society became WWE.
Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong.
Kinda done with this planet. Now no, this is not a cry for help. 😜
I got comfortable a long time ago with the idea that we would move out into the solar system.
Mars starts here. Mars starts now.
Think that sounds nuts?
Go turn on the cable news for an hour and come back and tell me again how nuts I sound. 🤔 😇
Once upon a time, Congress ordered six frigates – American's first capital ships.
I'll be happy when Mars has its first six frigates. It will need them.
It will be a while. True.
But I will wager this:
That when the day comes when those frigates launch, the entity – the state, the corporation, the whatever it will be, or become – that entity will trace its roots, through some vital lineages, to an entity that exists today.
Aaaaand that's what I'm looking for.
Nights like this I miss Ari so damn much.
DeleteThere was a guy who could sit there and trade track recommendations for each of our own Music For Humanity To Bend Over And Kiss Its Sad Sad Ass Goodby To playlists and kinda feel... uplifted by the process.
I fear we will not see his like again.
I miss Ari too. So much.
DeleteWell, I'm probably too old to be shooting off to Mars and building a new colony. I'll have to settle for dealing with things here on good ol' Mother Earth. I hope you get there lewy! If you do, gaze at the beautiful blue planet in the distance and remember us.
ReplyDeleteI too am exhausted. The realm of "ridiculous" rules the day; the more ridiculous, the more vehemently defended by the pseudo-people. Is a person actually a person if they refuse to think for themselves? Or are they a potted plant with no claim to personhood? Strange thoughts rattle around my head some days. Most days.
*sigh*
I once knew why I work so hard. Now I'm not so sure. Is my energy being expended wisely? Should I be on a different path? Perhaps. I'd love to regain the passion I once carried in my heart. It's in there! Somewhere.
pseudo-people - that's perfect.
Deletep-ppl for short.
I remember in the wake of 9-11, there were stories about what perfectly reasonable people in Pakistan - and by that I mean Western educated, English speaking, professional - believed about the United States. Totally ridiculous paranoid conspiracy theory.
I was smug in my faith in the common sense of the median American. We would never fall for crap like that. Our politics may be bitter, but not that crazy!.
:|
Yeah. I know, right?
Find your tribe. Be nobody's b*tch. Pack for Mars.
This is all I can muster by way of political philosophizing. But there is
plenty to "unpack" there as the lit-crit morons would say.
Needless to say I don't expect to get to Mars.
But there are roughly two sides shaping up in the world as I see it, one side which would like to see some preservation of the private economy, and the other side which is fine with sweeping up all economic activity into the State.
How close to economic armageddon did the US come in say 1979? How long was that crisis in the making?
The Severin dynasty in Rome devalued the denarius one last good notch before it all fell into hyper inflation, and it extended Roman citizenship, while it still meant something, to basically everybody.
Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla squeezed another few decades of juice out of a system already dead on the inside.
Sound familiar?
Sound familiar?
Sorry. That was cut and paste error repeat, not manic persistence. Though I do have to filter. ;)
DeleteFind your tribe find a real community of real (not pseudo) people who you care enough about to want to help make resilient.
DeleteThis is pretty much what I'm trying to spend all my work energy on these days. That's about as concrete as I can make my crazy words.
More than 30 years ago (I am so old) I wrote a college paper regarding the necessity of humanity to at least mine space, and hopefully spread out into the solar system.
ReplyDeleteThe foolishness of those who base things on a zero-sum game of limited terrestrial resources, and therefore essentially a lifetime of near poverty for all the world (we have so spread those limited resources out fairly, don'tcha see?)still drives me crazy.
And in furtherance of that goal, 0bama turned NASA into a global-warming/muslim uplift organization, with nearly zero thought of further exploration.
Thank God for the Space Privateers.
That paper (which I will never find again) started with a quote from Robert Heinlein - "Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for mankind to put all it's eggs in" - and ended with the line "In space it is raining soup, and we don't even have a bowl"
Absolutely spot on. And the Space Privateers are almost here.
DeleteI don't know if I would ever even be able to marshall the economic resources to lift even one gram of my ashes and deposit them (the cheap way, from orbit) on the surface of Mars.
Let alone my living, breathing butt. (There's an image).
But the very possibility of making money in outer space with technology and capital structures available today in the world has already changed the game of geo-politics and the global economy. Yes. Really.
All I propose is a political sensibility informed by that nuance, which is really something that's only been happening the last couple years.
And it is a nuance; something happening at the margin – but growing, and representative of the future (if we have one) and so is a thing I care deeply about.
Because really, space is becoming the sub rosa game changer that it's always been promised to be.
And from the perspective of preserving the scope of human potential – making a future where all human outcomes remain possible – this seems to me to be essential.
Not saying we should bone up on our zero gee tolerance.
But I think that from the perspective of the dying, legacy political Dem and Rep paradigm, things are going to be similarly disorienting. And so I think that paradigm is best abandoned. It's not the dog, it's the tail, and it just wags when the dog wags it.
As to Americans being brought down to the levels of insanity that have characterized the Third World forever?
ReplyDeleteThat has been done purposely (my own little private paranoid conspiracy theory) beginning with the acceptance of the Frankfurt school in US academia, and then the embrace of their avowed purpose to call into question, and eventually destroy EVERY tenet of western civilization.
We see the results today.
We are living in the (possibly) Biblical Times of "Those who call good evil, and call evil good" - look around, can anyone with any knowledge of how things were as little as 20 years ago deny how much worse they've gotten, with the gleeful applause and cheers of the self-named intelligentsia, who were instrumental in the destruction of everything that had made western society into what it was, The Very Best On The Face Of The Earth, EVER.
Dances – dude. Right on. In fact the hippy libertarian wing of the Conservative Movement (lol I just wrote that, owning it!) as a whole is in agreement with you.
DeleteI'll be brave and speak on behalf of them.
There's at least two others that I know of in the area! 😜
Also, Dances, all – please excuse my mood, there was some ugly sh*t that went down the last few days, but it's just business, nothing grave or serious. Don't take my flip sarcasm as disrespect or (more than my usual level of) mental unbalance.
DeleteDances – with respect to actual hippy libertarians of the Heinlein tradition – are you familiar with Eric S. Raymond?
Dances - the Frankfurt School is something I learned about from Raymond.
DeleteGramscian Damage.
Sorry, don't know Raymond, but will look him up
DeleteIn my college paper I proposed a world-wide consortium to exploit space for all of humanity, with solar power satellites so all portions of the world could have electricity. With heavy industries moved into space so all the world could have clean air & water.
ReplyDeleteWho knows what manufacturing breakthroughs could be mad in free fall factories? Foamed steel girders, perhaps, with all the strength of solid steel, but 1/5th the weight & material usage.
For that matter, rather than dirty and dangerous mining on the Earth's surface, how about capturing one of the huge nickel-iron meteors or planetoids out in the rings of Saturn, or further. After all, what is a 6 year voyage to capture such a thing, compared to metals that are more than could be mine don Earth in a century?
So. Power and materials. Combine that with innate human intelligence, and NO-ONE can make us stop, or even tell us how far we might go
I think you'd be a Belter in the Expanse show universe. It's where I'd end up too I think.
DeleteWith the Epstein drive, they've cut that six years down to a couple months IIRC. Saturn is where all the good ice is, I hear.
But back to current reality:
DeleteConsider that today we have not so innate, not so human intelligence of the Deep Learning variety, and combine also with 21st century self replicating machine technology (3D printing)...
And with the current state of tech, getting off world is starting to look to me (and a few other technologists) like a race for the door... quick, get out there and establish some facts on the ground, as it were.
"Facts on the ground". First time in human history that that metaphor fails us.
See? It's happening already. Space will change us, is changing us. Maybe just in time.