Someone at a social media site, who I will not dignify with a link, wrote:
I think we need to find a way to stop the working class from voting altogether.
This individual, who is in the UK and is obviously a furious anti-Brexiter, also wrote:
Idiots and racists shouldn’t be able to ruin the lives of people who do well in life by voting for things they don’t understand. The problem in this country boils down to low information morons having the ability to vote.
The above attitude reminds me of something written by that great historian and social analyst Harry Flashman, describing how people of his aristocratic class viewed the workers of the Chartist movement, circa 1848:
You have no notion, today, how high feeling ran; the mill-folk were the enemy then, as though they were Frenchmen or Afghans.
There are people in the US who have similar views of politics, only with reference to Trump voters rather than to Brexit. Many Democrats, and especially ‘progressives’, assume and assert that Trump voters are ignorant people who are failing economically. It is difficult for them to credit that there are quite a few Trump voters who are educated and thoughtful, and who in some cases are quite successful in career/economics terms…if such people exist, it is assumed that they must either be an insignificant minority or devious malefactors who are manipulating the ignorant masses in their own self-interest.
An example of this attitude appeared on MSNBC back in August, with anchor Chris Hayes and Washington Post writer Dave Weigel avidly agreeing with one another about the characteristics of Trump supporters (of whom they don’t approve)…men without a college degree who have enough income to buy a boat (Hayes qualifies it as *white* men). Personally, I tend to *admire* people who have managed to do ok or very well for themselves without the benefit of a college credential. (And anyone believing that a college degree necessarily implies that an individual has acquired a broad base of knowledge and thinking skills hasn’t been paying very good attention of late.)
The snobbery we are seeing today is partly income-based. it is partly based on a faux-aristocratic contempt for people who work with their hands, and it is…more than any other single factor, I think…credential-based.
Indeed, education-based credentials seem increasingly to fill the social role once filled by family connections. In his outstanding autobiography, Tom Watson Jr of IBM mentions that in his youth he was interested in a local girl, but her mother forbade her to have anything to do with him because he didn’t come from an Old Family…the fact that his father was the founder of IBM, already a successful and prominent company, evidently wasn’t a substitute. Such ‘really, not our sort’ thinking would today be more likely based on the college one attended than based on family lineage.
Those expressing such attitudes exist in the Democratic Party in parallel with those who talk about their great concern for Working People. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, talked just recently about how physically tiring her work as a bartendress had been…and I don’t doubt that this was so…and asserted that Republicans don’t tend to have any experience doing such jobs. Yet this same AOC posted a picture of her staring angrily at Joe Manchin–who one might think she would have considered as a possible ally on behalf of Working People–because he dared to question any Defund the Police policy. And this same AOC helped ensure that Amazon, with the jobs it would have brought for those Working People, was not made welcome in her district.
It appears that a lot of those to whom the we-care-about-working-people message is targeted aren’t believing it.
(I’m not fond of the term ‘working class’, btw, it implies a fixed social structure and lack of mobility which is alien to American ideas. The fact that Class terminology has become so common is a worrisome indicator.)
Discuss, if so inclined.
(classic song reference in the title)
The problem in this country boils down to low information morons having the ability to vote.
Let me take a wild guess!
The evidence that they are “low information” is that they disagree with the speaker.
My dear husband happens to be one of those who’s had success without a degree. (No, we don’t have a boat. We have kids.) It’s because he found a route where he could demonstrate ability, showing he had both “information” and the ability to use it.
Things get really funny when folks try to “cure our lack of information” on things where we disagree with them… and they didn’t realize one or the other of us had working experience in the subject. Being lectured on how “everyone” in the military really is, for example. (both veterans, and at least half our social circle either is or was in; we sometimes know one or two folks who fit what “everyone” is supposed to be)
I notice that most of the folks talking about “class” like “working class” want to have a way to say ur doin it wrong to those sections of reality that dare break script.
This sort of thing has been growing up for a long, long time. I ran into it in the Army, with many of the officers who looked down on those of us in the enlisted ranks as being “Not our sort…”. Some of that is situational, some is cultural, and some is a necessity of leading men into situations where they’re going to die. You have to isolate yourself, or you go mad.
However, comma… There’s been a real growth in the intensity and the prevalence of this attitude, which is picked up by many who go to college and mistake their indoctrination for an education, and think that diploma on the wall is a marker for virtue. Our new-minted noble class thinks it is better, more virtuous, smarter, and that just about everything else about them is superior to the “common schlub”. They’re nobles without the nobless oblige.
Actual point of fact? They’re mostly idiots with credentials. The Emperor ain’t wearing any clothes, and if you want to argue the point, take a long, hard look at everything this new noble class has administered and run over the last hundred years. Whatever it is we are selecting for and rewarding, it sure as hell ain’t performance. Anywhere–You look at the military, the civil service, most corporations, and local government: It’s all idiots, their idiotic policies, and utter, abject failure, all the way down. This latest COVID-19 thing is symptomatic of the dysfunction.
In the final analysis, there are rather more of “the rest of us” than there are of “them”, and the numbers are going to be what tells, in the end. There’s only so much smarm to be tolerated, and then the ropes are going to come out. They may have successfully stolen this election, but the aftermath of them getting away with it is going to be absolutely ‘effing horrendous. The Biden/Harris crew is going to try cementing their power-grab, and then when the resistance to it starts, guess what? It won’t go well, at all. Not. At. All.
I kinda expect Biden/Harris over-reach within 24 months, followed by counter-reaction, followed by God alone knows what, which could well include armed insurrection. The idiot class in this country is too stupid to understand two essential facts: One, that they’re idiots, and two, that they’re not all-powerful or a vast majority. At this point, there are an awful lot of people who are just looking on in disgust at it all, and who are thinking “Y’know… I think we may have to resort to deadly force to get these people to leave us the hell alone…”.
Look at the way they’re freeing all the criminals, and decriminalizing all the low-level crime. Think that won’t recoil, and in a way they aren’t expecting? LOL… Don’t count on your de-funded police to be able to do squat when the reactionaries finally get fed up with being victimized by the idiot class and their criminal clients. Vigilantism has a long, ugly history in this country.
It might be fun to stand that on its head. Deny the vote to the rich and anyone who is upper class, this is England, right?
As it is, one must remember they are in the middle of an operation so stupid as to boggle the mind. This has generated a lot of heartfelt feelings. ;)
“Look at the way they’re freeing all the criminals, and decriminalizing all the low-level crime.” You do know you have the largest prison population per-capita, in the world? Perhaps lightening up on that might be a good idea.
I’ve said constantly that the incandescent rage that the left feels towards Trump was basically a phenomenon of white liberals with graduate degrees, that someone could succeed without doing things “the right way.” That class of people is overwhelmingly overrepresented on twitter. They weren’t so overrepresented on facebook, which is (was?) always much more decentralized, but the left did what they could to change that before the election.
The left is going to overreach. They are going to go after Trump to try to take him out of the game, and they think that he’s going to go down easy, and they are going to be catastrophically wrong.
You do know you have the largest prison population per-capita, in the world?
As the old headline went:
Crime at all time low, in spite of soaring prison population.
But hey, the guys oh so graciously giving blanket “mercy” to the criminals don’t have to worry about their mother waking up with a guy whose rap sheet is longer than he is tall, coming in the window.
“Look at the way they’re freeing all the criminals, and decriminalizing all the low-level crime.” You do know you have the largest prison population per-capita, in the world? Perhaps lightening up on that might be a good idea.
Fun fact: one-third of black men in America have a felony conviction.
Maybe that has something to do with incarceration rate?
https://news.uga.edu/total-us-population-with-felony-convictions/
More importantly, the stat used for the “incarcerated population” stats includes immigration detainees, while another popular statistic is based on the law enforcement supervision number, which includes people on parole or never in jail at all but awaiting trial. Which means you get to count everybody that has a deportation warrant out on them.
(I’m not fond of the term ‘working class’, btw, it implies a fixed social structure and lack of mobility which is alien to American ideas. The fact that Class terminology has become so common is a worrisome indicator.)
I’ll paraphrase what Glenn Reynolds often says. Since people don’t want to talk about class in America, this kind of discussion sublimates into race, and then takes a bend to allow one group of whites to look down on another because racism.
We are well on our way to having one party that unites mostly the working and middle-classes but really anybody whose livelihood requires them to operate at a fixed location on one side, and the globalist elite with their welfare-dependent clients on the other.
“one party that unites mostly the working and middle-classes”
The parties are definitely realigning. Trump accelerated some already existing trends. Black Americans are completely in the grip of the Democrats, thought Trump is unique among GOP possible candidates able to appeal to a cross section of black men, which is small but definitely not zero. The “Black Lives Matter” movement is designed to appeal to the white professional class, but is a massive turnoff to Hispanics, as well as the white “working class” who are completely lost to the Dems now anyway. The GOP is going to move towards being distrustful of the permanent DC class, but not of government in general–no more austerity, privatization of SS, etc.–which might be tricky to do. It’s quite odd seeing the Democrats being the party of the CIA and massive military commitments, but that’s a part of their promotion of government power everywhere. To go with Kirk’s comment above, we’re in the final stages of a shift of the parties from being something like hippy vs. military to more like enlisted vs. Pentagon, because the hippy trash have taken over the establishment.
You do know you have the largest prison population per-capita, in the world? Perhaps lightening up on that might be a good idea.
The US criminal-justice system is massively effed up. Trump is one of two recent presidents to have made a serious effort to reduce that system’s heavy-handed burdens on minority men. (The other president was Obama, but Obama handled the issue much less competently than Trump has. By framing it as mainly an issue of racial injustice, Obama won praise from his left-wing base but made it difficult for mainstream white voters and pols to support him.)
@ Jonathan,
The US justice system may be “massively effed up”, but I would submit that if you’ve got a relatively tiny fraction of the population committing most of the crimes, and those crimes are also mostly against that tiny fraction’s fellows…? Then, maybe, just maybe… That tiny fraction is the real problem, not the fact that they’re getting “ensnared” in the justice system.
It ain’t hard to go through life without finding oneself at the mercy of the “evil” criminal justice system. The fact that most of these people are lifelong habitual criminals has more to do with their culture and their behavior than it does anything else–And, that’s all stuff under their control. It’s like blaming the grower for the drug addiction, when in the final analysis, it’s the junkie that puts that needle in their arm. No mob of Bolivian peasants or Afghan tribesmen showed up in Compton one morning and made those addicts take their first hit of crack, or heroin at gunpoint. They all sought that crap out, and made the choice.
Fuzzy-headed thinking like this crap is why we have the problems we do. Habitual criminals should simply be culled from the population at large, either by summary execution or by secluding them in some separate Coventry where they can only harm their fellows. Do that, with diligence, and watch “black criminality” recede into the rear view mirror. It is, in essence, what was done with the issue of Scots-Irish Criminality, only there the community did a lot of the work by virtue of the women refusing to mate with the criminal class. It’s unfortunate that the numbers are so high in black America, and that the women are so indiscriminate and uncaring about who they favor with access to the machinery of reproduction. It’s an unpopular thing to point out, but the facts are there in the demography–One key reason that we have the problems we do with the black family and communities in general is that we offered up the state as surrogate father, without thought to the effect. Most of the black criminal class now plaguing their own wouldn’t have been born, were we not subsidizing their mothers and enabling them to support children without demanding that the fathers grow up and get off the street. You want productive black communities? Quit paying for and subsidizing the growth of the criminal element of the population. In the Scots-Irish community, we had similar levels of violence and criminality back in the old days. Decades of hard work and selective pressure reduced that rate to the point where they match the rest of the European immigrations very closely.
The smart people decided to remove those pressures from the black communities, and we have what we have. No incentive for the young women to incentivize the young males to take up productive labor to support them and the kids, soooo… Goodbye, black family structure, and hello endemic criminal class. It’s almost like that’s what they intended, ain’t it?
Some numbers. China has 120 per 100,000 in jail. You have 655 per 100,000 in jail. Maybe consider this next time you get all high sand mighty about the poor Uighur’s treatment, in China.
The snobbery we are seeing today is partly income-based. it is partly based on a faux-aristocratic contempt for people who work with their hands, and it is…more than any other single factor, I think…credential-based.
Long-dead historian Moses Finley made similar observations about the Greco-Roman society in his book The Ancient Economy. The ancient aristocrats of that era wouldn’t be caught dead working in a factory or a mine, but they had no trouble owning either- and they certainly looked down upon the poor wretches who had to work in them.
That has always struck me as amazingly similar to the attitude today of our self-described elite, who as noted despise Trump supporters and Brexiters, change country as needed. It also seems to me that it explains pretty well why our supposed betters are completely indifferent to the de-industrialization of the United States. That is, they cannot process the closure of tens of thousands of factories as anything important, because they can’t imagine anyone worthy would want to work there- and besides who cares where widgets are made? Their money can be invested anywhere.
Meanwhile, these same folks remain big fans of foreign intervention, even though they infamously can’t hide their contempt for the people who serve in the military. And I won’t mention their feelings toward police.
Indeed, education-based credentials seem increasingly to fill the social role once filled by family connections..
I won’t disagree, but my own idea is that these education-based credentials are regarded as a patent of nobility by those who obtain them. They are bitterly resentful when they don’t get the respect they think they deserve from the so-called working class, and even more resentful when they don’t get a landed estate complete with an attached workforce of serfs immediately upon graduation.
…talked just recently about how physically tiring her work as a bartendress had been…and I don’t doubt that this was so…and asserted that Republicans don’t tend to have any experience doing such jobs.
AOC is a remarkably ignorant and apparently stupid woman, despite her degree, and is no doubt lazy as well. If she thinks being a barista is tiring, she should try stocking groceries, or working in a stamping plant. Working at the latter, I found I quite literally could not eat enough food to avoid losing weight. Many millions of people work such jobs without complaint, or the fatuous idea that they shouldn’t have to work so hard, but not her. Her idea that Republicans never work is even more despicable. After she said this, someone posted a picture of various Republican congressmen, each one of whom was missing a body part or two.
Did I mention that our supposed elite despises the military- yes, I did. Anyway, I think AOC is all too typical of the people ruling the United States- ignorant, stupid, lazy, and entitled.
This won’t end well, at least for the United States.
“China has 120 per 100,000 in jail.”
LOL. China has 100,000 per 100,000 in jail.
Some numbers. China has 120 per 100,000 in jail. You have 655 per 100,000 in jail. Maybe consider this next time you get all high sand mighty about the poor Uighur’s treatment, in China.
How do you know how many people China has in jail? Because they tell you so? Why would you believe them? How many people do they simply murder without trial, and dispose of in a furnace? How many die in their concentration camps? How many people work in slave labor camps?
Maybe you should consider that, the next time you want to get all high sand mighty about how evil the US happens to be.
LOL. China has 100,000 per 100,000 in jail.
Awesome. Great point, and I wish I’d thought of that.
What is of key importance today is that the contempt and hatred of the Leftist wanna-be overlords towards the “working class” is now being returned. There are a lot more “working class” than overlords, and the “working class” tends to act against threats a lot more readily than overlords.
Subotai Bahadur
We should totally focus on China’s claimed numbers of people in jail, and not on things like we put people in jail for killing someone, while China puts them in jail for knowing someone who owned an unapproved Bible.
Guess Pinky wishes we were executing more people!
Ooh, I know, let’s copy the UK and put people in jail because they effectively resist when a criminal tries to kill them!
*rude noise* Not sure how I can expect anything better of the same logic that holds a woman shooting her attempted rapist, and a rapist murdering his victim, are morally the same because someone is dead.
But hey, that’s the kind of mindset you can afford to have when you’re pretty sure the price will be paid by someone else.
“Maybe you should consider that, the next time you want to get all high sand mighty about how evil the US happens to be.”
The US is evil, there is little doubt about that. Sometimes I try to make that fact apparent to you wonderful people. In my estimation China is less evil than the US. But that’s just an opinion.
It’s easy to assume a posture and preen over how moral you are, when you’re not going to ever face the implications of that posture. This is why you have all these Soros-supported DAs going for all these “decriminalization” programs, and why they’re completely uncaring about the likely effect on small business owners and the public. After all, the bankrupted small pharmacy that’s been shoplifted out of business in San Francisco won’t be donating to anyone’s re-election campaign, and the corporate big guys are grateful that they’ve lost all their competitors. They’ve got the deep pockets to afford the losses accrued and will continue to donate to the DA’s re-election campaign.
Of course, the DA lives out in the suburbs with their wives and kids, who won’t ever face the dangers that the rest of the public has to face. They won’t walk the streets strewn with feces, and they won’t lose their business because customers won’t dare the streets and sidewalks to visit it, any more.
When the whole thing implodes, the Gods of the Copy-Book Headings are going to be ever so busy…
“The US is evil, there is little doubt about that. Sometimes I try to make that fact apparent to you wonderful people. In my estimation China is less evil than the US. But that’s just an opinion.”
Opinions are like a** holes, everyone’s got one. In Penny’s case, that’s the sum and total.
On getting back to the topic under discussion: yes, the social snobbery regarding anyone who has a job where they work with their hands, live a genial blue-collar life, or own and run a small business — is absolutely poisonous.
Seriously, I wouldn’t mind the social condescension quite so much, if our elite class/college edumacated/media solons hadn’t proved themselves to be so f**king incompetent, over and over again. And toneless, arrogant and out of touch.
I kinda expect Biden/Harris over-reach within 24 months, followed by counter-reaction, followed by God alone knows what, which could well include armed insurrection.
I expect they’ll overreach within 24 hours, because they can’t imagine that they ever can overreach.
In fact, their party may have already overreached to the point that the present regime is done.
Anyone heard of the lilypad problem? The idea is that a lilypad is fully covered at day 20, but what day is it half covered? Day 19, DuckDuckGo informs me. I’ve seen this mentioned a few times over the years, generally to illustrate that people are bad at understanding exponential growth. Yep, me too.
Now apply this idea to political instability, especially vote fraud and its consequences. The first mention of fraud I can recall from modern times was in the 1960 Presidential race, in Illinois. It was a hush-hush tinfoil notion, with the implication that no one should take it seriously. Much later, it became conventional wisdom that of course the race was stolen, which was a good thing! I found this a jarring assertion.
Then came the Washington state governor’s race, where recounts continued until the democrat won. Then, the Norm Coleman Senate race, same result. Then, the 2018 election, with good claims made that multiple House seats and the Arizona senate race were decided by fraud. Etc, etc, I’m trying to be brief.
Today, we have Texas and several other states suing over fraud, in the Supreme court. I will submit that this is a substantial escalation, with an end result that will likely not be accepted by either side.
So how’s that lilypad doing? It seems to me we’re at at day 19, because- reportedly- almost no Trump voters and 30% of Biden voters believe the election was stolen.
What happens on day 20? I don’t know but I think nothing good.
The US is evil, there is little doubt about that. Sometimes I try to make that fact apparent to you wonderful people. In my estimation China is less evil than the US. But that’s just an opinion.
My God.
Pengun, within living memory the Chinese government starved tens of millions of its own citizen to death. Within my memory, it murdered many thousands of its own citizens because they wanted freedom.
Google the Tianmen Square massacre, before google deletes any mention, if they haven’t already.
Essentially any accusation you can make against the US you can make against any other nation, but worse.
On getting back to the topic under discussion: yes, the social snobbery regarding anyone who has a job where they work with their hands, live a genial blue-collar life, or own and run a small business — is absolutely poisonous.
Be easier to ignore if they would stop trying to force us to say our assigned lines, and act out what their gameplan says we should.
Penguin, within living memory the Chinese government starved tens of millions of its own citizen to death. Within my memory, it murdered many thousands of its own citizens because they wanted freedom.
Those people don’t count– just like the “working class” folks destroyed by “precautions,” or the victims of the crimes committed by socially desirable criminals, or those who die because their ability to defend themselves offended the anti-gunners– they’re not REAL people. If they were REAL people, they’d be, well, properly useful lackeys at least.
Like that old joke: Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
Except they’re not joking.
PenGun
“The US is evil, there is little doubt about that. Sometimes I try to make that fact apparent to you wonderful people. In my estimation China is less evil than the US. But that’s just an opinion.”
PenGun here reminds me of Graham Greene, who delighted in firing broadsides at the US. (Ironically, Greene lost the Shirley Temple libel lawsuit not in the US, but in the UK.)It’s not that PenGun likes the PRC, but a certain view of the PRC enables one to fire a broadside at the US.Face-off with the anti-Americans.
Where was Graham Greene living when he fired this broadside at the United States? On the Riviera…Nice place to live if you prefer living in the Soviet Union compared to the United States. :)
Like Graham Greene, PenGun fires broadsides at the US, knowing that, just as Graham Green would never have had to actually choose between living in the US or the Soviet Union, PenGun will never have to actually choose between living in the US or the PRC.
BTW, I have perused about 10 Famous Quotes sites for that Graham Greene quote. Only 1 had it. Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene, Volume III, has some Graham Greene quotes that never made the Famous Quotes sites. Though in defense of those sites, Graham Greene’s memorable quotes were greatly in excess of the 15-25 that one usually finds on such sites.
PenGun, late of the UK, is our Vancouver Island comic.
Graham Greene: Brit Twit. Conclusion: look to authors of fiction for good fiction. Don’t look to them for political wisdom. Open Letter of the 400 gives us a trenchant example of the alleged political wisdom of the literary and academic classes, albeit from 80 years ago. Some things never change, it appears.
One could certainly make the case that the governments of all countries are necessarily evil. The only one I can think of that perhaps was not, was Asoka after his enlightenment, but even that’s a stretch.
Still America has killed a great many people for very bad reasons, with apparently no remorse at all. Collateral damage is probably the biggest number. What you did to just Mosul was a monsterous war crime. There are so many of these its hard to keep count. The million or so innocents you most probably killed just over the Iraq war is evil. What you do to your own population is also pretty hard to take.
Some numbers. China has 120 per 100,000 in jail. You have 655 per 100,000 in jail. Maybe consider this next time you get all high sand mighty about the poor Uighur’s treatment, in China.
Wholesale executions is one way to hold the number incarcerated.
The US is evil, there is little doubt about that. Sometimes I try to make that fact apparent to you wonderful people. In my estimation China is less evil than the US. But that’s just an opinion.
A stupid opinion, but an opinion nonetheless. Are you aware of the exhibition in Las Vegas of the human body? Where did the bodies come from, you might ask. Answer: executed Chinese.
It’s easy for Canadians to get sanctimonious, because fundamentally, Canada does not matter any more than Lichtenstein or Monaco does. No one cares what any of those countries says or does, any more than anyone cares what Peru does. The NYC police department is larger than the entire Canadian army. It’s easy to sit on the porch and criticize what the big dogs do.
It is odd because I think we can all cite examples of Trump supporters whose education and/or wealth dwarf those who think they are their “betters”. But from where or how does this sense of elitism originate?
That is a mystery to me.
PenGun is a classic troll who posts only to seek attention. Responding produces more nasty comments by him. There is some irony that he lives in BC which has a heavy Chinese population, most of which left China for good reasons.
My post ‘Advanced Degrees and Deep Resentments’ is relevant here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/64638.html
Conservatives and Trump supporters need to be careful to not make the mistake that the Progs are making by stereotyping their opponents. I see a lot of people asserting/assuming that the Progs are people who are lazy/unemployed, have degrees in useless subjects, etc….I know a lot of counter-examples.
It is dangerous to underrate one’s opponents.
“I see a lot of people asserting/assuming that the Progs are people who are lazy/unemployed, have degrees in useless subjects, etc…It is dangerous to underrate one’s opponents.”
Um, they’ve taken over every big city, the media, the intelligence community, the top layers of the Pentagon now, the boardrooms of every company especially in tech, etc. Underrating them would be insanity.
It is dangerous to underrate one’s opponents.
I take your point.
But the fact remains that vast swarms of these people are ignorant arrogant fools who know nothing and understand less. AOC is a prize example.
As to the rest, I recall a Shakespeare quote, they have worked not wisely but too well.
At best, they’re competent in the same way that the 1914 European elites were competent, or the pre-Chavez Venezuelan elite. At worst, they’re simply traitors.
Yes, they’ve taken over the commanding heights of American society. But do not forget or fail to note what they’ve done with that control. I’ll list a few examples:
Hollywood. They’ve destroyed longstanding billion-dollar pop culture franchises like Star Trek, severely damaged Star Wars, and aborted another, Battlestar Galactica. They’ve gone all-in on politics, alienating half the country, and all-in on lockdowns, destroying movie theaters and severely impacting their own revenues streams.
Cities. They’ve long since destroyed many, such as Detroit and Baltimore, but lately they’ve been busy destroying the rest, such as Minneapolis and Seattle. Quite literally, with fire.
The US military. They’ve imposed rules-of-engagement such that American troops have been prosecuted for shooting back at people shooting at them, because those people were not in uniform. I note especially the fate of Seal Team 6 years ago, in which they were shot at, requested permission to return fire, were denied, then were killed when their enemy got a second chance. The US Navy has infamously become a joke, unable to avoid colliding with better-crewed civilian vessels, with ships that are covered in rust. I further note that the US had to restart production of a modified design from the 1980s, because its attempts to produce a modern surface warship were a miserable, expensive failure.
Professional sports. Football has famously had problems, but the NBA has gone fully woke and is going fully broke. Ratings have collapsed and revenue dropped by 40%.
Education. I don’t think I need to say anything here, but I will anyway. It’s a shambling expensive mess that cannot survive. The teacher’s union has made impossible demands in many locales and is openly anti-American in others. Higher education is awash in ruinously expensive administrators, with classes taught by barely paid grad students. Many colleges won’t survive, even if the don’t get shut down for cause, which they should be.
Tech. Intel has struggled for years to produce 7 nm chips, and they can’t. But at least they have a really strong diversity program. Meanwhile Taiwan Semiconductor is shipping 5nm. Apple is doing better, but just about everything they make is made elsewhere. The rest of them have decided to become the censorship arm of the democrat party, which has its own problems.
Politics. These folks have been successful enough to steal an election, barring action by the Supreme Court. But they’ve done so in such a clumsy way as to alienate and enrage just about every Trump voter. They’ve made obscure news outlets like OANN and Newsmax suddenly successful, cratered Fox News- the only supposedly non-leftist mainstream outlet in existence- and charmingly believe that if their their tech pals won’t let people talk about vote fraud on facebook or youtube no one will talk about it anywhere else, either.
This is not a picture of success. They may well succeed in turning the US into Venezuela, but I doubt it. They have a much better chance of ending the authority of the US government over vast swathes of the country, if not all of it. And thereby ending their regime. We’ll see, whether we want to or not.
Collateral damage is probably the biggest number. What you did to just Mosul was a monsterous war crime. There are so many of these its hard to keep count. The million or so innocents you most probably killed just over the Iraq war is evil.
See?
The Kurds gassed, deliberately, to try to exterminate them– fine, at least now*. The torture rooms, the random kidnapping and rape because those in power wanted to, that’s fine.
But then someone he has to recognize as real people were involved, and made him uncomfortable: thus, it’s full on evil.
Even if you have to bend over backwards and believe the most obvious lies to justify it. Then you can preen over how standing back, or even actively supporting evil, makes you a better person than those who try to fight actual evil.
It really is related to the original topic. This is the same narcissism-based morality, where every option is weighed by how much the chooser wishes the result, and morality assigned to justify it.
It’s very human, and no less dangerous for that.
* My roommate for a bit in Pensacola was an artist in New York city, before she enlisted as an AO. Her studio had a view of the towers. I found out about the attempted extermination of the “marsh Arabs” from a Newyorker she had– when they didn’t think there was a chance of actually doing something, it was a worthy thing to object to.
Above is me.
I see a lot of people asserting/assuming that the Progs are people who are lazy/unemployed, have degrees in useless subjects, etc….I know a lot of counter-examples.
I’m sure you do. What I have for examples are my kids. I have five. Two are lawyers and lefties. One has several graduate degrees and is a lefty but may be reevaluating as she is married with a child now.
Two are conservative. One is my younger son who was never interested in college and is a fireman, what he wanted to be since he was 12. The other is the youngest.
My non-college educated son is the only one who owns his own home.
I just think progs, like my own kids, are not very practical in routine things.
Still America has killed a great many people for very bad reasons, with apparently no remorse at all.
No remorse? Are you joking?
There is still hand-wringing going on about the Hiroshima bombing, by people who know nothing about the endless atrocities committed by Imperial Japan in China and in the Philippines, which was at the time US territory. I still recall being shocked years ago when I read that there were more casualties in Manila than Hiroshima, per Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club. He is Filipino and if I recall, his family was affected by that.
But as Foxfier notes, people like Richard fernandez of his family don’t count. It’s only people wronged by America, or more often, people who assert they were wronged by America, who matter.
Collateral damage is probably the biggest number. What you did to just Mosul was a monsterous war crime.
So what just happened to Mosul? Did it match what Russia did to Grozny during the Second Chechen War? Just in case you haven’t heard, Russia shelled the city into a ruin, killing thousands and forcing most of the rest of the population to flee. Did we put the inhabitants of Mosul into camps, like China has done to the Uighyers? Did we starve them, like they were Ukrainian kulaks? What did we do?
In any case, if we displease the government if Iraq, they can tell us to leave. Obama removed US troops in 2010 and I know Trump wants out too, so it should be a win-win that makes everyone happy. Except from everything I’ve seen, the Iraqis don’t want us to leave, at least quite yet.
The million or so innocents you most probably killed just over the Iraq war is evil. What you do to your own population is also pretty hard to take..
A Million? BS. And what do we do to our own population that should inspire angst from Canada? Enforce US law? Put criminals in jail?
Mind you own business.
The million or so innocents you most probably killed just over the Iraq war is evil. What you do to your own population is also pretty hard to take..
Is this more of PenGun’s vomit ? I scroll past his comments. Somebody today raised the issue of arguing from authority. I think it was elsewhere. Attributing great wisdom to medical journals. I asked if that included Lancet, which published the article, since retracted, that began the autism hoax about immunizations.
A second example of the decline into politics of “The Lancet” is the hit job they did on America in Iraq. That PenGun would quote it shows how common it is on the left. The Lancet journal sent a team to Baghdad. Instead of counting dead and wounded admitted to hospitals, the way a serious study would be conducted, they did a survey of Sunni neighborhoods, where hostility to the Americans was highest and then extrapolated the numbers to all of Iraq. No measurement, just a survey to ask how many had been killed or wounded. Zero evidence. That article was also discredited.
The million or so innocents you most probably killed just over the Iraq war is evil. What you do to your own population is also pretty hard to take..
Is this more of PenGun’s vomit ? I scroll past his comments. Somebody today raised the issue of arguing from authority. I think it was elsewhere. Attributing great wisdom to medical journals. I asked if that included Lancet, which published the article, since retracted, that began the autism hoax about immunizations.
A second example of the decline into politics of “The Lancet” is the hit job they did on America in Iraq. That PenGun would quote it shows how common it is on the left. The Lancet journal sent a team to Baghdad. Instead of counting dead and wounded admitted to hospitals, the way a serious study would be conducted, they did a survey of Sunni neighborhoods, where hostility to the Americans was highest and then extrapolated the numbers to all of Iraq. No measurement, just a survey to ask how many had been killed or wounded. Zero evidence. That article was also discredited.
The author of the autism study had his license revoked.
“…example of the decline into politics…”
Pop fiction, in particular SF. Sad Puppies as evidence; which is to say that the woke see no evidence at all.
Comic books. A whole industry collapsing, just as millions of new fans of classic characters are coming of (economic, consuming) age.
The Postal Service. By touching ballots, they’ve “touched pitch, and been defiled.”
The Grocery markets. A whole category of “organic” and “gluten free” and “without peanut” etc etc foods that cost more, therefore don’t sell, and consequently raise the price of everything else.
Classical music. First they thought orchestras had too many pudgy middle-aged Jewish musicians, and demanded “Blind Auditions”. Then, sunuvagun, they found that they’d hired too many young Asian musicians. Back to visual inspection of candidates, color quotas — more “PoC”s — and worse music.
SAT scores. An essay about overcoming adversity and embracing diversity trumps vocabulary and logic?
“Personal” computers? No no NO! Now you have data in the cloud, software as a service, voice interpreters on supercomputers somewhere unknown, and nothing local or personal about any of it — except the personal bits that the FBI is using to build a criminal case against you should it become necessary some day in the future.
Don’t even start with “health care” — having nothing whatever to do with provision of care and everything and only to do with who pays whom, and how much.
Hasn’t the Lancet also published some junk science about Covid19 they have likely regretted even if they did or didn’t take it back?
Death6
And here we have Mr David Brooks, asserting that the problem with Rural Americans is that they have no contact with the Expert Class…in which class he includes himself.
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/12/09/arrogant-dem-quote-of-the-week-rural-americans-have-no-contact-with-the-expert-class-1003898/
Actually, those of us in Rural, Small-Town and Suburban America have had plenty of contact with The Expert Class. We usually come away from the experience that the current Expert Class couldn’t pour p*ss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel.
““Look at how much more Republicans are affected by conspiracy theories than the Democrats, so it can’t just be the internet, there must be some demand,” Brooks said, pointing out the “two core problems.””
LOL. The Democrat base actually believed the Russia-gate BS, so anyone claiming they don’t believe in conspiracy theories is either a liar, a moron, or a lying moron.
There needs to be a new class division set up… One that distinguishes between the productive and useful, and those that are not.
Most, if not nearly all, of our “elite” self-identify and self-qualify as unproductive and useless, creating more problem than they produce solution. The sad thing for them, as time goes on? This is not their natural environment, like Europe, where they can weasel their way into the power structure and stay there indefinitely. Here in the US, the population is sufficiently independent-minded enough that eventually, they’re going to notice that nothing these parasites do actually works, and then they’ll begin routing around them. In a lot of areas, that’s already happened.
The future is decentralized and mostly self-organized. The facts are readily apparent, and I suspect that what we’re going through is the last gasp of the control-freak apparatchiks who want to run everyone’s lives for them. Like the Communists, this ambition is going to founder on the simple fact that they cannot manage it all down to the fine micro-level they would need to in order for it to work. Thus, it will inevitably implode under the weight of its own internal and inherent self-contradictions.
What is interesting to observe is the steady drip-drip-drip of people effectively realizing this fact, and then failing to really consciously acknowledge that set of facts. I was just talking to a former Microsoftie a few days ago, who was bewailing the inflexibility and sclerotic nature of the current Microsoft compared to the halcyon days of yore–Meanwhile, said former Microsoftie is in the process of moving out and away from the Seattle region, while starting his own business. He kinda-sorta recognizes that Microsoft got too damn big and inflexible to adapt, but he still can’t articulate why it failed to really succeed in new markets like phones. Same guy bewails the shutdown of the Courier project, blames the executives on top, and yet can’t quite wrap his head around the fact that the real reason it all failed was that the elephantine nature of the company could no longer adapt to new markets.
Watching IBM tank over the last few decades ought to be instructive to anyone shilling for the success of socialism or communism, either one. The fact is that we just don’t do hierarchy or big structures very well, over the long haul. First generation, maybe you’ll see success. But, the minute the original set of innovators and free-thinkers are shown the door by their rote-minded successors, it’s time to start the countdown to self-destruction.
My recollection is that John F’n Kerry was attacked in 2004 for being elitist, which he was, and the feeble defense was that what was so bad about being elite, which of course he was not. These people need to be brutally mocked till they go away. All of them are credentialed idiots who have never accomplished anything. Trump made that point occasionally but not nearly often enough.
Elite people are rarely elitist. Kerry, on the other hand, is a pusillanimous ass that could, at best, aspire vainly to mediocrity.
The recent death of General Yeager should remind us what elite actually means.
David Brooks link, courtesy of David Foster:
Blue cities are thriving? Not these days. Vacancy rates are rising and rental rates are falling in blue cities like NYC, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Expert class? This prompts at least 2 observations. First there is a great desire on the part of the self-proclaimed “expert class” to be the ones in control, to dictate to the untermenschen, the deplorables- or to act as cheerleaders for those “Democrats” in politics or other fields bringing down the hammer.
Second, these self-proclaimed “experts” have shown themselves to be ignorant fools. Consider Herr Docktor Nobel Prize Paul Krugman, who has worn both academic and journalist hats. Among his foolish prophecies was the prediction 4 years ago that Trump’s election would tank the stock market. Consider David Brooks’s worshiping the crease in Barack Obama’s pants. Academia’s “experts” tell us about “intersectionality” and such nonsense. These clowns are “experts?” The emperor has no clothes.
Here’s a fine example of the “elite” that presumes to be arbiters of what’s good and right:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/hes-radioactive-inside-johnny-depps-self-made-implosion
I’ve said before that we are truly deplorable to value so lightly the wisdom our betters so graciously bestow in the limited time available between their stints of rehab and incarcerations for tax evasion, drug possession, spousal abuse and child porn.
But from where or how does this sense of elitism originate?.
From over a century of putting formal education on such a high pedestal, that we no longer respect wisdom that does not come from that paradigm.
Instead, we blindly worship credentials, positions, popularity, presentation … the mere appearances of wisdom, which do not guarantee the presence of actual wisdom. We are even encouraged to think that our own common sense and close-to-the-problem insights count for nothing, relative to the pontifications of the possessors of these mere appearances. That is how we effectively unplug most of the distributed intellect in our society from the process of problem solving … ss it no wonder that our problems persist, despite copious amounts of “awareness” and spending?
And many who possess those appearances treat their elite status as an investment. Those who are part of the societal elite are all-in invested in their elite status – financially, professionally, politically, even in terms of reputation and their own self-esteem. They have built their ENTIRE lives around being perceived as the elite.
Which is why they hate Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t give even one rat’s patootie about maintaining that perceived value … and that threatens the value of their investment. He instead focuses on policies that expand on individual liberty. And every expansion of our liberty he brings about (in energy policy, in regulatory reform, in the judiciary, in the economy), calls into question the perceived value of their investment … for it depends upon US needing THEM.
The most unforgivable thing about Trump is that he has the credential too, along with a lot of money. This makes him a class traitor.
What the talk of post Presidential prosecution fails to take into account is how sclerotic and lazy the Justice Department has become. Someone that can afford good representation can hold them at bay indefinitely. They’re great at intimidating some shlub that has to mortgage his house to pay a third rate lawyer. Here they would have to face the prospect of going against better lawyers, comparable investigative resources and actually facing a jury. I expect Democratic self preservation to stop them from creating a precedent that they will truly regret as well.
Second, these self-proclaimed “experts” have shown themselves to be ignorant fools.
Yes, agreed: there is a destructive tendency for “experts” to think that once they have been so anointed they are experts in everything rather than in one particular specialty.
However: a greater problem is corruption: these experts claim to act selflessly on behalf of everyone, and yet the policies they promote always serve their own interests–usually to the detriment of others.
OK, first, let’s call attention to this:
Mika Brzezinski: I’m Done Being Polite To Republicans
https://www.dailywire.com/news/mika-brzezinski-im-done-being-polite-to-republicans
==================================================================
But then, I want to call attention to this:
Google “mika brzezinski hates republicans”
https://www.google.com/search?q=mika+brzezinski+hates+republicans
Now duckduckgo the same:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mika+brzezinski+hates+republicans
It’s like they come from TWO DIFFERENT PLANETS…
I was looking for the above, which I’d already read, but Google can’t even ACK IT EXISTS.
}}} (And anyone believing that a college degree necessarily implies that an individual has acquired a broad base of knowledge and thinking skills hasn’t been paying very good attention of late.)
More critically, anyone who is foolish enough to assume that someone LACKING a college degree means that the individual in question CANNOT have acquired a “broad base of knowledge and thinking skills” is a complete and total fool.
Sure, there are a lot of people who aren’t “Collidge Eddicated” who are, admittedly, the actual “deplorables” of whom Hillary snarked, but there are a lot of people out there who are just plain self-taught and probably far more world-aware than anyone living in an insular college bubble could even begin to comprehend.
Some, like me, are both. I’m old enough to have learned How The World Works, for the most part, and have plenty of college credits to stand with the best of them — including a lot that indirectly exercised and required critical thinking skills. And my cultural knowledge, from
1 — having had a much better k-12 education, with far more cultural input and far less indoctrination.
2 — grown up in a much more culturally privileged time (every moment spent ignoring cultural background and sucking up The Agenda is a lost moment forever)
3 — grown up in a far more independent age, where exploring was not unusual, and poking your nose into places no one told you to go leads to all kinds of cultural surprises and understanding
4 — had multiple decades to absorb random cultural aspects of things occurring in Real Time.
5 — had multiple decades to absorb random cultural aspects of things that only time-on-earth offers… i.e., it takes TIME to read 1000 books. Even if you’re a remarkably fast reader. It takes time to see plays, hear music, watch movies. To EXPLORE the world.
The 5 items above can be possessed by ANYONE regardless of their college education. The idea that someone who did not go to college MUST be a yokel with no grasp of the important things in the world is about as arrogantly STUPID as human brains are allowed to be by the limits needed to function at all.
}}} “Look at the way they’re freeing all the criminals, and decriminalizing all the low-level crime.” You do know you have the largest prison population per-capita, in the world? Perhaps lightening up on that might be a good idea.
Ahhhh, penny. So much clueless, so little time.
We also have a markedly lower amount of violent crime. In fact, the violent crime rate in the USA — as well as the murder rate — has been trending steadily downward… in direct correlation with the increase in prisoners, over the last FIVE decades.
Yes, “Correlation is not causation”. But it does pass the smell test, at the very least.
Don’t get me wrong. Marijuana, for the most part (except dealing to kids) should be pretty much legalized. And anyone in prison for possession and non-violent behavior while using and distributing should seriously be considered for release. And yeah, that would certainly cut back on a huge chunk of that population. And let’s expunge their records at the same time, so they aren’t completely unable to get a job for zero intelligent reason. Convert some percentage of the prisons into “rehab” schemes, so they also don’t just get dumped back onto the street totally unprepared for life — do things to get them better educations, a trade, anything of that sort, and give them a year or so of reasonable opportunity to re-learn how to live with less structure, otherwise, you’re likely to see a mass of senseless and unneeded recidivism…
But none of that is what is being discussed, here. They’re talking about releasing people who have done serious crimes and misdemeanors. Of letting them out without bail even when arrested for violent crimes and with a clear predisposition to do more.
You’re looking at A Clockwork Orange, here… just 20y later than Kubrick had it happening…
}}} It’s like blaming the grower for the drug addiction, when in the final analysis, it’s the junkie that puts that needle in their arm. No mob of Bolivian peasants or Afghan tribesmen showed up in Compton one morning and made those addicts take their first hit of crack, or heroin at gunpoint. They all sought that crap out, and made the choice.
Even more critically, their idiot PARENTS decided to raise a kid in Compton.
I am put in mind of a Sam Kinneson bit about famine in the desert… “See this? It’s SAND! You know what grows in it? NOTHING!!! MOVE you idiots!! Get out of the desert!!” Yeah, the reality of it isn’t that simple, but it’s still the main point — when you’re living in a dysfunctional place, GTFO. Do what you have to do, but LEAVE. If America has one relatively common quality to most of the people who live here, it’s ancestors who had the courage to do exactly that: “Man, this place sucks! I’m going to America!!”.
Yes, it’s interesting to note that the one group that seems eternally challenged in America is the one group whose ancestors never generally made that choice… Meanwhile, others who share many characteristics with that group but who did make that choice do fine. Ethiopians who are here do quite well, with one of the highest median incomes of any nationality group. They also happen to rank very highly in having Master’s degrees or better as educational accomplishments. Go figure… :-/
}}} What is of key importance today is that the contempt and hatred of the Leftist wanna-be overlords towards the “working class” is now being returned. There are a lot more “working class” than overlords, and the “working class” tends to act against threats a lot more readily than overlords. — Subotai Bahadur
Remember what happens between the Morlocks and the Eloi…
:-D
OBloodyHell, excellent point on the differences between Google and DuckDuckGo on “mika brzezinski hates republicans.”
It’s amazing to think back 20+ years to when google first came on the scene, how magical it was to actually find what you wanted, far far better than the previously existing search engines that didn’t use the pagerank algorithm. Now they’ve destroyed themselves for partisan reasons.
Doesn’t everyone use google’s search machinery behind the scenes though? So the difference is that duckduckgo presumably isn’t using the post-search weighting to only choose “approved” sources?
}}} Graham Greene: Brit Twit. Conclusion: look to authors of fiction for good fiction. Don’t look to them for political wisdom.
Don’t look to scientists, hippies, recent college graduates, or liberals for it, either. :-D
Even Einstein did not grasp the benefit of an effective defense:
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
— Albert Einstein
Of course you can. The worst possible position to ever be in, is to be unprepared for an attack. THAT is when someone with the will to attack is least concerned with your response to that attack, and they will know the repercussions to them for such an attack will be the least. Thus, they are most able to benefit from an attack. At that point, the only single thing holding them in check is innate good will. This, “good will” is always desired, but never to be trusted.
In making this comment, Einstein was utterly and abysmally clueless in every possible way.
So many people failed to comprehend the notion of MAD as the defense against nuclear weapons in the hands of rational national powers (irrational ones, such as Iraq, Iran, and nominally North Korea, are a different problem), which is itself based in this precept. A rational government does not wish to destroy itself and all that it controls, and the Power Elite, whomever they are, are very much not interested in the destruction of all their power. So the threat of retaliation is very much a stay against their hand being raised in war…
“We also have a markedly lower amount of violent crime.”
Perhaps compared to your violent crime in your past, but markedly higher than other first world countries.
“It’s like they come from TWO DIFFERENT PLANETS…”
Yup. I had not looked before but Duck Duck is brain dead. They want me to read the same article multiple times in different places. Google at least does not repeat its self.
What the talk of post Presidential prosecution fails to take into account is how sclerotic and lazy the Justice Department has become..
I’m not sure sclerotic and lazy is an accurate description. I note the DOJ is quite prompt to leap into action when the interests of the democrat party are threatened but not otherwise. For example, the truck driver who came forward to say he delivered a truck load of fraudulent ballots now says he is being harassed by the FBI, who have no interests in the ballots. Further examples are legion.
I take this as an example that the constitutional republic has already collapsed. When law enforcement enforces the law only against certain people, then the rule of law has effectively disappeared. And if the rule of law has gone away, then all we have left is rule by force.
I expect Democratic self preservation to stop them from creating a precedent that they will truly regret as well.
I would think so too, but understanding the consequences of their actions doesn’t seem to be something they’re good at, in any way. Remember, these are the folks that did away with the filibuster for judicial appointments, which bit them almost immediately, sent Iran pallets of cash and endorsed that murderous regime’s desire to get nuclear weapons- which they promise to use against us asap- and are right now doing away with law enforcement in the cities they control, and where they mostly live.
These aren’t the actions of competent people who have a good grasp on reality.
Mika Brzezinski: I’m Done Being Polite To Republicans
Actually I wouldn’t have expected her to be polite to Republicans, anymore than I expect random leftists on the internet to be polite to people who disagree with them.
These people essentially are at the Dredd Scott stage of political discourse, in which they imagine Trump supporters have no rights they should feel bound to respect. Their problem is that there are a lot of Trump supporters doing things like delivering food to blue cities, ensuring blue cities have electricity, and keeping blue criminals from burning blue cities to the ground.
I suppose this comment says things that have mostly said already, but I’d still like to express my amazement at just how foolish these folks have managed to be. I have the ghastly sense that I’m one of the people who knows a tsunami is coming when the ocean recedes from the beach, while our supposed betters are busy frolicking and picking up seashells, with no clue.
As usual, I hope I’m wrong.
}}} We usually come away from the experience that the current Expert Class couldn’t pour p*ss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel.
I’ve always loved that turn of phrase. :-D
the bureau found time to charge elliot brody, for imdb related violations, even though he was hacked along with a thousand other persons by a quatari outfit fronted by a moroccan diplomat, who was the envoy for yemen, george nader was charged after he was cited 157 times in the mueller report, the doj did not prosecute any of the kavanaugh libeling gang like blasey ford. or her atty monica (lne) and her attorney deep state bureau official david laufman, they didn’t charge fan fan or russell lowe, years later, they did charge midlevel offficials of transport logistics, the carrier for uranium one,
“I expect Democratic self preservation to stop them from creating a precedent that they will truly regret as well.”
I don’t. I’ve lived the last decade and a half in CA and NY. They have destroyed these states while simultaneously solidfying their political deathgrip on every possible lever of power. They’re going to overreach, because up to now they haven’t had any repercussions from anything they’ve ever done. They just weaponized the IC to spy on their opponent, seized the DOJ to attempt to remove a president, brazenly stole a national election–what is possibly going to make them say, oh, no, THAT is too far to go…?
}}} “We also have a markedly lower amount of violent crime.”
Perhaps compared to your violent crime in your past, but markedly higher than other first world countries.
WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG YOU IGNORANT TWATWAFFLE.
Jesus, you are fucking STUPID.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp?title=2019®ion=150&displayColumn=0
First, we’ll need to establish what we mean by “markedly”… I’m going to argue that it’s a crime rate that is 150% or greater of the specified country.
I tried to make it neat, but, monospaced vs. non-monospaced…. :-P At least the columns are followable.
As you can see, my selection of “first world countries” is mostly Euro, but I offer non-euros in the lower part.
The country selection was arbitrary, and done before I did any of the spreadsheet calcs this came from.
————————————Violent
Country—————————-Crime
Rank——————————–Rate
45……….United States………….47.13
……………………………………………………..150%………GT?
========================================================================
38……….Sweden………………..49.35……….74.03……….N
51……….France………………..46.39……….69.59……….N
56……….Italy…………………45.02……….67.53……….N
57……….Ireland……………….44.52……….66.78……….N
62……….UK……………………42.72……….64.08……….N
64……….Belgium……………….42.46……….63.69……….N
76……….Greece………………..38.57……….57.86……….N
82……….Norway………………..35.32……….52.98……….N
84……….Germany……………….34.51……….51.77……….N
89……….Spain…………………32.46……….48.69……….N
91……….Portugal………………32.13……….48.20……….N
98……….Netherlands……………28.57……….42.86……….Y
102………Denmark……………….24.25……….36.38……….Y
104………Iceland……………….23.28……….34.92……….Y
106………Finland……………….22.80……….34.20……….Y
109………Switzerland……………21.50……….32.25……….Y
111………Austria……………….21.37……….32.06……….Y
54……….China…………………45.46……….68.19……….N
61……….Australia……………..42.76……….64.14……….N
63……….India…………………42.72……….64.08……….N
73……….New Zealand……………39.55……….59.33……….N
74……….Canada………………..39.51……….59.27……….N
85……….South Korea……………34.05……….51.08……….N
110………Singapore……………..21.47……….32.21……….Y
117………Japan…………………13.73……….20.60……….Y
Equally critically, in many of those nations, the violent crime rate is INCREASING, while in the USA it has been steadily decreasing for literally FIFTY YEARS.
WILD WEST BRITAIN Violent crime surges by more than 50% in parts of UK as moped muggings and knife crime soar
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6468826/violent-crime-surges-by-more-than-50-in-parts-of-uk-as-moped-muggings-and-knife-crime-soar/
Violent crimes totaled 1.29 million across the whole of the UK, up by a fifth on the year before
Paris is sinking dangerously into the spiral of thefts and violence
https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/paris-s-enfonce-dangereusement-dans-la-spirale-des-vols-et-des-violences-20191028
Almost everything lights up in red in this report. Intentional attacks on physical integrity have increased by 9% in intramural Paris, with more than 35,000 attacks since the start of the year.
(and this ignores the massive increase of rape in France and England, which goes largely unreported because it’s not PC given the perps)
New Study Looks at Rapes in Paris — And Says Nine Out of Ten Go Unreported
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywj59w/new-study-looks-at-rapes-in-paris-and-says-nine-out-of-ten-go-unreported
The study, which analyzed 598 cases over a two-year period, sheds new light on the demographics of rapists and their victims in the French capital.
Murders and rapes going unreported in no-go zones for police as minority communities launch own justice systems
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2541635/Murders-rapes-going-unreported-no-zones-police-minority-communities-launch-justice-systems.html
So, Pengy: Blow it out your ass.
As you can no doubt guess from the “}}}”, that was me.
}}} Mika Brzezinski: I’m Done Being Polite To Republicans
Actually I wouldn’t have expected her to be polite to Republicans, anymore than I expect random leftists on the internet to be polite to people who disagree with them.
Oh, my own take on that is that it’s hilarious that she THOUGHT she was “being polite to Republicans” before this point… ;-)
My understanding is that we have higher murder rate (due to usually only 2 or 3 cities), but much lower rates of most other serious crimes.
Has anyone seen Tulsi’s activities in the last week or so? She clearly thinks that social conservative, economically liberal is the way to go, and she’s certainly going to go nowhere with that in the Democrat party…
Oh, my own take on that is that it’s hilarious that she THOUGHT she was “being polite to Republicans” before this point… ;-)
Well, yes. But that’s another aspect of all this- these folks imagine themselves to be paragons of virtue and restraint, but in reality they’re viciously nasty and rude, demanding absurd deference at all times for no reason.
That’s OK. I can be nasty and rude too, because that’s what leftists deserve. But what I find tedious and annoying is their appalling ignorance and inability to make any other sort of argument other than rude nastiness.
Note- I do not consider whining that they don’t get respect an argument. It’s just whining.
New Study Looks at Rapes in Paris — And Says Nine Out of Ten Go Unreported
It’s pretty easy to get good looking crime statistics if no one bothers to report crime, isn’t it?
“}}} “We also have a markedly lower amount of violent crime.”
Your quote. You are doing the old apples and oranges trick. The word ‘violent’ is important here. You have about 4 times the intentional murder rate that Canada has, for example. More numbers here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
“There needs to be a new class division set up… One that distinguishes between the productive and useful, and those that are not.”
One corrective might be to implement Heinlein’s vision of citizenship as something earned, not automatically conferred by birth. And you need to remain productive; go on the dole and you lose your right to vote (because now, you have an interest in keeping the free stuff flowing).
The important bit, especially in light if all the election fraud, is that only citizens have the right to vote.
… umm – and how many of those murders “4 times the intentional murder rate that Canada has” are murders by inner-city thugs, committed by inner city thugs of other inner-city thugs, hmm? Thugs of color, killing other thugs of color?
Eliminate certain inner-city crimes in a few specific cities (mostly Dem-run, let it be admitted) and the US turns out to be quite blandly law-abiding.
The pretense that a goal of the Enlightenment—that facts could be gathered—and of technocracy—that officials respecting facts could wisely rule—was a goal and it held sway for a while, but it has long since passed. Politicians realized no constituency existed for harsh truths, and so steadily corrupted the gathering of, reporting of, and acting on facts. The People—starting with politicians themselves—needed publicity, reassurance, and self-respect, all more easily earned through polite lies. Over time, bored with the old lies, the successor lies became more outrageous, more oblivious, until outlandish claims swiftly became established, “the science is settled” truths.
We argue about statistics when numbers are shaded, distorted, differently gathered and recorded between jurisdictions in the United States and between nations, thinking that our arguments have substance, that we, once we examine the facts, can come to conclusions and take action, but no one wants the conclusions and no one wants the action because they are slanderous and painful.
Bacon’s four idols reign and the corrupt rule.
We think we can master our fates by thought, but we are no better than animals, acting out strategies which rise and fall, whose success and failure are determined against reality, which cares only who survives.
The Enlightenment belief in reason and science led directly to “scientific socialism” whose inevitable rule will destroy its host. What succeeds Christendom and Enlightenment is not yet known, but by the standards of the past (liberty, prosperity) it is likely to be as defective as it holds the present.
All I know is that this future cannot escape Man, and so will hold all the evils of our time in new and strange forms, but there shall they all be.
“Still America has killed a great many people for very bad reasons, with apparently no remorse at all. Collateral damage is probably the biggest number. What you did to just Mosul was a monstrous war crime. There are so many of these its hard to keep count. The million or so innocents you most probably killed just over the Iraq war is evil.”
Thank goodness, Trump exposed the corruption of the Entrenched Bureaucracy and their servile hacks in media. These are the lying liars that brought us the war in the Middle East in tandem with the DNC and the RNC, and they are the lying liars who sabotaged Trump and intentionally fed him false information. Now, they are baaaccck in the cat bird seat. Trump was the antidote.
Yeah, let’s not pretend that the RNC brought you Trump; that’s a crock. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and as we can all clearly see, at the end of the day, he had very little institutional support from them. This is too nuanced for Mika and other dullards, like the shrews on The View. Of course, the DNC dealt with their populists by smearing and putting their fist on the scale. Remember the primary election vote count in Iowa.
@ Occasional Commentator,
Nice nick that you picked out. I like it.
“One corrective might be to implement Heinlein’s vision of citizenship as something earned, not automatically conferred by birth. And you need to remain productive; go on the dole and you lose your right to vote (because now, you have an interest in keeping the free stuff flowing).
The important bit, especially in light if all the election fraud, is that only citizens have the right to vote.”
I’m a veteran, and I don’t like the “Heinlein vision” of citizenship through service, particularly. Mainly because I don’t think that “veterans” are any more virtuous or wise than the average of the population, and that while I agree with Heinlein that you’d get people who were committed to the system that way, well… I’m not so sure it would work out, in practice. In some ways, I think I’d rather avoid the side-effects sure to come with a Heinleinesque “service for the franchise” system, not the least of which would be the tendency for it all to devolve into what early feudalism turned into, the theory that might makes right. I can see waaaaaaaaaaaay too much potential for abuse with that sort of system.
I’m reading a very interesting book right now, one written by a biologist. Entitled “The Human Swarm“, the author makes the point that human societies are dynamic creatures all on their own, separate and different from the participants. He outlines a process where a society will come together, and then split apart over generations due to “reasons” (which he hasn’t laid out, merely observed…). On the band level, when we were wandering the world and populating it, it’s not a big deal; Mutwe and Gorm get tired of dealing with the BS from their elders, gather a few like-minded others, and split off to do their own thing, running things their own way. You can analyze a lot of what’s going on here in the US today as this process taking place on a much larger scale.
And, that’s the rub of it: Scale. We don’t do hierarchy or organization over time in any really workable way. As humans, we scale “organization” very poorly; yes, we can pull off a “NASA in the 1960s” really well, occasionally, but the end result is almost always a sclerotic, hag-ridden bureaucratic hell like the NASA of the late 1970s and onward. Same-same with other things–The US Army during WWII became the same force, with many of the same people, that fought so very poorly in Korea, reformed itself in the late 1950s, and then self-destructed in the late 1960s.
The root problem is, I think, that scaling thing. We keep building these vast organizational coral reef structures, thinking they’re going to last. Instead, they turn into things like the Late Roman Empire, and self-destruct due to the inherent internal self-contradictions. We keep doing this over and over and over, when you look at things from the long scale perspective in time.
My solution to all of this? Cease investing all of this power and authority in the organization. The root of the issue is that when you have power sinks in a society, the wrong sort of people become attracted to them, like so many flies to honey. Imagine an Adolf Hitler where there was no Nazi party for him to co-opt, where he remained a low-level crank agitating in some tiny village somewhere. How different would things have been, if the most he could have done was influence a few people around him? How far would his ideas have gotten, absent the reef structure he co-opted in the form of the Nazi party and the German state?
You’re always going to have men and women like Hitler, whose ideas are essentially nuts and entirely destructive. The trick is to avoid giving them power and authority to put those ideas into action, while simultaneously retaining enough of an organizational structure to do big things like the NASA moon shot.
To my thought processes, another part of the problem is the vast amount of anomie these gigantic reef structures inflict on their participants. Who the hell enjoys being a tiny cog in a vast machine? Anyone? Aren’t we happier when we’re on the smaller scale, knowing our peers and working with them to accomplish things? Why the hell did we ever get away from the band structure, small groups coming together to do vast things like settle the Americas, back after the last Ice Age? There was no NASA project started by the Eurasian ancestors of our last-wave-before-the-modern-European endeavors, it was all self-organized little clots of people doing the things we do best–Chaotically and spontaneously self-organize in small groups that went forth and conquered two new continents. That was an amazing accomplishment, no matter how you look at it, and the same damn thing went on with the settling of the emptied continent of North America, only with records, guns, and modern manufacturing techniques. All of which were mostly created, again, by small groups of people working together absent the over-arcing big bureaucracies we keep setting up like crazed drug addicts.
Want a happier life, one on more of a human scale? Cease building these massive empires of misery, and investing yourself in them. The Russians are a classic example of this–Look at the misery they’ve self-inflicted on themselves from the Czars on down. As Solzhenitsyn put it so pithily:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat.”
All he needed to do was realize that the root of the problem wasn’t the Communists, but all the power he and his fellow Russians had put into their reef-structure of the “almighty State” for someone to co-opt and rule them with. Withdraw that power, and what do you have? A bunch of cranks starving in their garrets because their ideas don’t work in the real world.
Don’t want to live immured in misery? Quit building and participating in these structures, which inevitably get taken over by those with insane power-lust and turned into charnel houses for the rest of us. If there wasn’t any power for them to grab, they’d be lonely isolated nut jobs standing on street corners and railing at the birds.
You can’t fix the structure. The flaws are inherent; not even the animal kingdom can manage these things over the long haul–Biology is replete with example after example of organizational life and death over the long haul, even ants. Cease trying to make this crap work–If even the animals whose biology is suited to the hive can’t make things work, why the hell do we think we can?
No, my solution isn’t to make it so only veterans can vote; my solution is end the entire ‘effing paradigm of these vast organizational structures we keep setting up and watching fail around us. Our worst instincts and individuals inevitably come forward to run them, so why do we keep setting them up? There’s no reason to have them, when you get down to it: How long has the NASA reef structure held us back from space? Good God, Jerry Pournelle showed the way forward with his ideas about how to “do space” back in the late 1970s, but it took Elon Musk to actually do it, working well outside the NASA bureaucracy to actually do the iterative work to create the Falcon rocket system that SpaceX is using to implement that vision. All NASA is doing, grudgingly, is administer the resources it collects from the rest of us to pay for it. And, that we could do a hell of a lot more cheaply with some other system besides the freakin’ US federal government…
Good Christ above, the admin costs along the way have to be staggering…
And, of course, that’s the f**king point: The “purpose” of NASA ain’t to get humanity into space, it’s to keep those bureaucrats comfortably supported in their holy “careers”, just like so much of the rest of government.
Again, why are we supporting these deadweights? Is anyone’s life improved by their labors against us? End the “almighty System”, and let the apparatchiks and nomenklatura starve while the rest of us live our lives productively and happily.
Anonymous (Kirk?): “Quit building and participating in these structures, which inevitably get taken over by those with insane power-lust and turned into charnel houses for the rest of us.”
On one level, I could not agree more. History demonstrates that eventually the Political Class in any society throttles the Golden Goose on which it depends, leading to the 100% historical record of civilizations collapsing. Creating a system in which a permanent Political Class becomes impossible would be a tremendous step forward.
On another level, I wonder if this would turn out to be simply another “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” fantasy. To paraphrase Hemmingway, a man alone does not stand a chance. Nor would a small band of men when faced with a much larger band. To look at a historical example, back when Europe and Asia were mostly “small band” societies, Genghis Khan was able to conquer much of the world by assembling a number of tribes into a temporary coherent horde. Alexander the Great did something similar when he was able to organize a large army which could dominate the city states and small units in his contemporary world.
Then there is the practical question — how would small bands build & maintain the vast infrastructure required to generate reliable electric power, for example?
In a world in which NASA has been perverted and the US Constitution has been perverted, it may be the only answer is the “blood of patriots” — the willingness of individuals to come together and resist over-reaching rulers … to the death, if need be.
An interesting aside for PenGun — it seems that the Canadian government has decided to entertain unspecified numbers of Chinese People’s Liberation Army troops in Canada, for the official purpose of giving them the kind of “winter warfare” training that the Chinese Communist Party’s troops are not able to get in occupied Tibet.
Will those PLA troops ever go home? Even if Canadians manage to elect more reasonable politicians in the future? What was that legend about the Trojan Horse again?
Oh well! Life in Canada under their future overlords will undoubtedly be very, very peaceful indeed.
Gavin, you believe your own propaganda. Always a mistake. We burned Washington and the Germans in Europe feared our troops more than any other. It was Model who said the Americans advance with a host of machines, and the British advance singing. The Canadians are silent and came to kill people.
Anyway we can take care of ourselves just fine. The Chinese who should be our friends, are not, because of America and its panic over losing top spot.
Mika Brzezinski: I’m Done Being Polite To Republicans
I’m done being polite to you and your ilk, Mika.
Because civility in response to intellectual dishonesty is counterproductive in the defense of liberty.
And the most prevalent and corrosive form of intellectual dishonesty today, is in the acceptance that “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can ourselves.” Your faction owns that belief, Mika.
PenGun: “The Canadians are silent and came to kill people.”
A good acknowledgement of the homicidal evil which lurks beneath Canada’s placid surface.
However, my money is still on the Chinese. To paraphrase Chairman Mao, China could lose 90% of its population in a war with Canada, and the remaining Chinese would still outnumber Canadians by 4 to 1.
@ Gavin Longmuir,
No idea why my ID got stripped out, because I did put it in… Anyway, yeah, I guess my “voice” comes through clearly.
In any event, to reply to what you’re saying, all I have to say is this: It won’t ever stop until we all just stop participating in and supporting these vast social structures that do nothing but abuse us all. What, exactly, do we as a collective get out of this BS? Sure, you get to participate in something bigger than yourself, but that “thing” turns around and rips out your entrails, eventually.
The structure isn’t really even the problem, either. You can do scale, when vast projects demand a lot of cooperation–After all, what was the “Moon-shot NASA” but a coordination of a bunch of little teams, from organizations like Playtex fer cryin’ out loud (they built a lot of the spacesuits, after all…)?
Large-scale fixed organizations are sclerosis personified, after enough time goes by. My contention is that it’s a huge mistake to keep them fixed; far better to do things above the band level as ad-hoc structures that come together to solve a problem and then immediately dissolve once its done with. You leave a fixed point of power, a hierarchy to capture, and someone is going to go for it. Ghengis Khan and Adolf Hitler both co-opted existing hierarchies, and then turned them on their victims. Had the vast majority of the Mongols said “Yeah, y’know what…? We don’t like the way the Chin are screwing with us, so we’re on the team for dealing with that, but this whole idea of conquering the world…? Screw that…”.
The flaw wasn’t necessarily in the structure, but the participants: The Mongols loved the idea of conquering everything they saw, and lording it over the stationary agriculturalists, just as the Nazis spoke to that part of the German psyche that said “Yeah, we wanna get back at everyone for Versailles, and while we’re at it, let’s us loot Europe and everything we can put our boots on…”. Both “leaders” spoke to the inherent immaturity and greed of their respective peoples, in that nobody was there asking “Yeah, so we conquer Chin, then go after everyone else… Then what? Where do we go from there, and what the hell are we building?”.
Had you the ability to go back and show the Germans of 1930 where the hell it would all end, odds are pretty good that Hitler would have lasted about five minutes past the point they all knew what was coming. Same with the Mongols–Show them the brief moment of glory, sure they might have shown up for it all, but then show them the following centuries of irrelevance and exploitation by everyone else, not to mention the sheer destruction they were bringing to the world. How many would have signed on with Ghengis, knowing the eventual outcome?
A lot of these issues are rooted in our essential immaturity and failure to think from premise “A” on to the inevitable and eventual result “M” down the road. We consent to participate in things like the Nuremberg rallies, failing to grasp that there will be inevitable Nuremberg trials when the party (pun intended…) is all over.
It’s down to an internal failure of ours, as human beings. We need to grow the hell up, and recognize that these massive reef structures we build up are not at all as sturdy or necessary as we think. When you come down to it, what really changed when the Roman Empire fell? Were any of the artisans making products out in the hinterlands any less capable? Were any of the fine-grain issues of the Roman economy really all that changed? What created the “Fall of Rome” was a collective mass delusion, just as the Great Depression was another self-created delusion brought on by a collective failure to recognize that the economy is just another damn game we play with each other. Was there really anything that changed, between 1933 and 1943, aside from the illusory rules and policies of the government? What stopped 1936-40 being any less of a boom era than ’46-50, besides government policy, regulation, and the perceptions of the public?
Well, yeah, there was that little thing called a world war that left the US as the only intact major industrial power, but still… Consider if the Truman administration had played post-WWII regulatory economic games the way the Roosevelt administration did during what should have been the recovery from a normal economic downturn? What then, for the post-WWII boom?
Whole thing exists only in our heads, just like the fiction of national governments and great causes. Cease believing and participating in the madness, and the whole issue solves itself. The problems lie within us, just as the solutions do. The Russians could have great lives living in Russia, but they keep returning again and again to despotism as a way of life. Grow the f**k up, and manage your lives for yourselves, only giving what authority and power you absolutely need to give to any external hierarchy, and then withdraw it the moment it has performed its task.
The real issue is that too many of remain as children, invested in childlike games of power and control, failing to recognize that the more power you grant an externality, the less control you have over your own life, and the more it will try to control yours.
I’m a veteran, and I don’t like the “Heinlein vision” of citizenship through service, particularly.
Ditto. But, I’m increasingly less fond of the idea of treating the civil right of voting as indistinguishable from a human right such as self-defense. Life, liberty, and conscience are gifts of the Creator. Voting, and trial by jury, and rights of way on the public roads — these are creations of our fellow citizens and ourselves, for the intended mutual benefit of us all and for our posterity, and may be modified as necessary.
Buried in the history and philosophy and axioms of public mutual civil governance is the idea of the land-owning citizen. Some one whose wealth is bound up in one location, the physical resources, the investment of time and labor into the estate and the prospect of income and other rewards in the future. While a migrant agricultural worker or a tinker or peddler or fry-cook, or bard or circuit-riding pastor might be a good person, that person has no “stake” in the fortunes and community. In times of drought or economic downturn or civil insurrection — such a person has no reason not to pack up and flee. The person WITH his (her) future and wealth staked to the land is the person concerned with protecting and improving that land and all the community around it. The landowner/home owner is the one with motivation to take up arms to defend the land or his small individual castle from invaders or intruders. And short of arming and organizing for battle, it’s the land owner who most wants to organize and cooperate with neighbors for justice in court, safety in the streets, reliance in contracts, soundness of the currency …
In Washington’s Continental Army, the early “minutemen” faded away relatively quickly. They had to return to their lands to secure those private interests. The landless soldiers, who were PROMISED land in exchange for military service, were the people who won that war, and that land, and their rights. And ours.
It’s that idea (which I admit could be false) which drives me away from the prospect of cash reparations to the heirs of Dixie’s slaves. On the other hand, redeeming the long-over-due promise of 40 acres and a mule (or tractor) to those willing to take it — I could get behind that.
PenGun says: “The US is evil, there is little doubt about that. Sometimes I try to make that fact apparent to you wonderful people. In my estimation China is less evil than the US. But that’s just an opinion.”
Well, given that’s your view, how about you go live in China, and I’ll stay here? Won’t we both then have our just desserts?
Too bad this blog is infested with PenGun the troll. I come by every day to see if anything good is posted. He drives me away.
Mike, look on the bright side. When China precipitates WWIII, it will be fought (at first) over Canadian territory. When the war is over, we can buy it for $0.25 an acre. Taiwan (ROC) can have China.
Kirk: “… far better to do things above the band level as ad-hoc structures that come together to solve a problem and then immediately dissolve once its done with.”
Absolutely! Project Teams that accomplish a clearly-defined goal and then dissolve are the proven best way to go. Some years ago, quite a few businesses adopted the “Task Force” approach, which was claimed to be based on the WWII Military approach. People with the full range of disciplines would be dedicated to the Task Force until the job was done, and then they would return to their parent organization. That is where one problem comes in — what to do with people between projects? Another problem is what to do with standing business requirements, such as accounting or quality control? The Task Force concept evolved into “Matrix Management” where everyone had two bosses, and only bureaucracy thrived.
Building sustainable organizations is a problem which the human race has not solved. Political structures like countries are today’s prime example, but it applies to everything from armies to business companies. Just think about faded names like IBM, Xerox, Kodak. Professor Charles Handy pushed the concept of the “Sigmoid Curve” — basically all organizations go through a life cycle from struggling, to growing, to plateauing, to declining. It applies to the Catholic Church as much as to the British Empire. The Political Class’s fearmongering about the CovidScam shows lots of us don’t want to accept that every individual dies; maybe we need to learn to accept that all organizations die too. Washington DC and all its preening people have had their day in the sun; the old US has evolved into something unsustainable, and it is dying. Now we need to focus on the hard work of building a replacement.
When the war is over, we can buy it for $0.25 an acre.
It’s not worth $.025 per acre now, or even $0.25 per square mile. It probably won’t be worth more after a war, unless perhaps the Chinese wipe out the present inhabitants.
He drives me away.
Well, I certainly don’t want to you to be chased away. I’d boot PenGun and keep you if it was to me.
Anyway, I find PenGun hilarious. I”m amazed that he keeps coming back and saying so many stupid things, as if he’s getting paid. Plus, I find his attitude very revealing. I think it shows just how the US has essentially no allies anywhere on this planet, because if Canada is full of people hostile towards the US- and I think it is- imagine Germany.
We have what are essentially protectorates who don’t even notice the benefits they receive from us, let alone appreciate them. When I see that the Canadian government is inviting Chinese troops into their country to train- well, I can’t say I’m amazed or even surprised.
Canada quite plainly takes our friendship and non-hostility for granted. It isn’t that I think Canada faces great military challenges at the moment- it does not- but that the Canadian regime doesn’t even seem to realize that they have chosen to side with a country that has worked very hard to make the United States its mortal enemy. Long term, this will have consequences for them.
On the other hand, redeeming the long-over-due promise of 40 acres and a mule (or tractor) to those willing to take it — I could get behind that.
No thank you. It won’t work. Plus the welfare state has already bestowed benefits far exceeding those 40 acres and the mule. Double plus slavery ended 150 years ago and the civil right movement was more than half a century ago.
There simply isn’t enough we can ever do to placate the reparations crowd and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
“Canadian regime doesn’t even seem to realize that they have chosen to side with a country that has worked very hard to make the United States its mortal enemy.”
We have no reasons not to be friends with China. What has China done to America that makes you hate them? Is it the fact that they are passing you like you are standing still? I suspect that’s your problem, not being first. ;)
“Canada quite plainly takes our friendship and non-hostility for granted.”
This is just creepy,
only 60 million in the last century,
It shouldn’t be surprising that the life expectancy of human institutions scales with the active human life expectancy, say 40-60 years. It’s the difference between living through something and reading about it.
The ever more dire problems of the American military apparatus probably comes down to senility. It was born on Dec. 7, 1941, 79 years ago and hasn’t had an easy life. If you look at history, previously, the military, especially the army, was all but moribund between wars and constructed anew when the necessity became obvious. This is exactly what happened after WWI. The advent of the Cold War prevented it from becoming dormant and therefore it has never regenerated.
The founders, in the same way, intended the government to be renewed through every election. I believe that they never addressed limiting terms because the very real sacrifices and privations that they had endured in the process of gaining independence blinded them to the notion that anyone would be willing to devote more than a limited period of their life to it. They also lived at a time when most public men were willing to go to great lengths to avoid any hint of self dealing in their government service. Things have changed.
We seem to have arrived at the point where we have elected a President that is both floridly senile and floridly corrupt. Franklin Roosevelt successfully kept most Americans from realizing the true extent of his disability. Things have change there as well. Public information is no longer controlled by a dozen or so organizations that can be either bought off or intimidated. There seems to be a significant number of voters that regret voting for Joe now that some of the evidence of his corruption is coming out and I don’t see that process ending anytime soon. The thing I find surprising is that they were apparently willing to accept all his other, undeniable, disqualifications.
I wish I was smart enough to figure out where we are headed. Since I’m on this ride to the end, I think I’ll hold on and try to be optimistic and open for the chance to help things in the right direction. Without meaning to imply any aspersion, I would far rather have someone to support in ’24 other than Trump. It would be a sign that things were headed toward renewal with resources to continue.
Canada, like Britain, has stagnated and become worse than than they realize since WWII. Maybe it was that the British killed off most of the superior genes in the male population. Millions of young women never married as a result of the Somme and similar atrocities by the High Command. In old age many of those never married women were victims of the worst serial killer in history, at least who was not a politician.
He was a doctor named Harold Shipman.
Canada was the home of some of my grand parents and I have spent time tracing family there. The forces of the left, especially BC and around Toronto, seem to be running things. No good will come of that. It would certainly be amusing to see fossil fuel banned in that frozen waste.
the progress with harper, who was from alberta which is their texas, was shortlived wasn’t it,
I see that Shipman died by hanging but he had to do it himself, so much for the welfare state.
I was reading an article that I can’t find anymore where in 1905,in England, a couple was murdered in February, the murderers were hanged in May. Justice doesn’t seem to have progressed in the mean time.
I’m sure there’s something to be said about Canada, but who really cares? They’re an irrelevancy, which is what they have willfully rendered themselves domestically and internationally. I don’t think they’re ever going to survive two Trudeaus, even if the second one is probably actually a Castro.
I don’t see Canada surviving long-term. The various interest groups are even more differentiated than here in the US, and then there’s the internecine way Ottawa has treated the provinces actually producing anything of value. The inherent conflicts and contradictions of it all will inevitably catch up with them, and where it will end will likely be a soft divorce a la what happened to the former Czechoslovakia. Whether it comes before or after we start shooting at each other here in the US? Who knows? Who cares? It will go down as a footnote in history, because that’s all Canada has turned itself into. “Oh, yeah… Around about the same time the US broke up in Civil War II, the former Canadian provinces also broke up…”.
No doubt there will be all kinds of scholarly articles written about the whole thing, eventually. I doubt they’ll actually recount true causes in any of it, but they will manage to decorate some academic’s CV with plenty of glamor…
I suspect Canada will do better over the next while that the US for a bunch of reasons. We are mostly united.
Alberta is a climate crime. They are sensitive about this and rattle sabres a lot. As Vlad has decided that the entire Nord Stream nonsense, that has gone unpunished so far, should be punished, oil is not going up for a while. So they are quieter now, as they are really as badly off as the fracking crowd, with costs of production exceeding any possible price they can get now. I suspect this will continue, until Nord Stream goes through.
Quebec is the other province that has expressed a desire for independence. We have survived one try at that, and probably can deal with another.
Now we are unsatisfied with various things but we don’t hate each other, not like you guys. Good luck with that.
Oh yeah. No points for grammar.
It will go down as a footnote in history, because that’s all Canada has turned itself into. “Oh, yeah… Around about the same time the US broke up in Civil War II, the former Canadian provinces also broke up…”.
Canada was a quiet neighbor once “54-40 or fight” was settled. They supported Britain in WWI and WWII. I suspect that ended most male gene type activities. The troll brags about the health care system, which used to be excellent. I went to conferences in Saskatoon until they ended after every faculty member had emigrated. That was about 1993. I sat on a committee with the architect who was designing the first new hospital to be built in Canada in many years. That was about 2000.
If we should ever see a separation into red and blue states, I suspect Alberta will join us. A lot depends on the anonymous billionaires that run Biden. If they leave us alone, there can be peace. If the crazies, like the troll, get power, it will end with the coastal crusts on their own. Chicago, where I grew up, is a couple of years from collapse, as is Illinois.
“I suspect that ended most male gene type activities.” So we quit f&%king, is that your point? Incomprehensible and again, poor grammar.
PenGun pinata is back, to be smacked around yet again!
We have no reasons not to be friends with China.
You have no reasons not to be friendly with the murderous regime of China that your Chinese-dominated government and government-dominated media will tell you about. The invitation for winter training of Chinese troops is a story that was discovered by the Canadian equivalent of Breitbart, from what I’ve read. I’d bet most Canadians aren’t even aware of it. Don’t worry, be happy.
What has China done to America that makes you hate them?
I don’t hate China, and I certainly don’t hate the Chinese people, who are the main victims of the CCP. That said, We demolished Imperial Japan for them- an empire that was digesting them bit by bit- and our reward a few short years later was the unprovoked attack on our forces in Korea. Later, we allied with them against the USSR, to their vast benefit, and allowed them access to our market. Our reward has been a campaign of espionage and likely blackmail on a scale unprecedented in human history.
But it ain’t just us. China has militarized the South China Sea, attacked Indian troops on Indian soil, and seems to be gearing up to invade Taiwan. They’ve alienated just about every neighboring country, inspiring a new arms race, and have pushed nations such as India and Japan towards a new alliance with the US. In short, the CCP is the 21st century equivalent of Nazi Germany, uniting the world against it.
This is just creepy,
And then there’s Canada, the empty wasteland no one cares much about, not even Canadians. Anyway, I’ll say it again, trying to dumb it down enough even for you, pinata.
The government of Canada seems to have made a deliberate choice to favor China- the far away land eager to grab more expensive commitments- against the United States- the country right next door which is eager shed them.
However, I’m pretty sure whatever happens the US we won’t lose interest in events on our border. We won’t forget a quite deliberate stab in the back, and in the event of war, knowing Canada plainly wants to be on the other side- well, you’re a pretty close and easy target.
Your problem, pinata, is that you’re right next to us, not your wanna-be pals, the butchers of Beijing. Good luck with that. Or not.
Search for China vs Australia. One result:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1370632/China-Australia-news-australia-belt-and-road-Canberra-law-investment-world-war-3-ont
Lots more. If Canada wants to stay on Beijing’s good side, they’ll have to be very good boys indeed. They’ll be on a very short leash. Crawling comes easier to some. Knee pads not included, available on Alibaba.
Related:
https://quillette.com/2020/12/15/journalisms-ivory-towers/
Seems to me that the most serious cases of Status Anxiety in the US these days are among people with college degrees…especially ‘advanced’ degrees…but with less-than-stellar career tracks and prospects.
The angry reactions to the suggestion that Jill Biden should maybe not be referred to as Doctor Jill Biden seem like the way that various English aristocrats would once have reacted to the failure to refer to a Lord with proper use of his title. These reactions…contrary to media suggestions..clearly have more to do with a demand for credential-respecting than they have anything to do with gender.
Like I said above last week:
“I’ve said constantly that the incandescent rage that the left feels towards Trump was basically a phenomenon of white liberals with graduate degrees”
The “Dr.” Jill story is purely by and for these idiots.
MCS” “… I would far rather have someone to support in ’24 other than Trump”
I can understand that, but let’s be serious. President Trump got more votes from more citizens than any Republican in history, and he won the genuine affirmative votes of a larger share of the population than any President ever. There is no doubt that every vote recorded for Trump was from a real eligible citizen; no-one knows how many of Beijing Biden’s apparent votes were misdirected Trump votes or multiple voting or dead voting or illegal alien voting or imaginary votes created in some German data center. Certainly, the American people far prefer President Trump to Pierre Delicto and the rest of the Swamp Republicrats.
Yet President Trump will leave office as a result of massive electoral fraud which is quite acceptable to the 90% Democrat voting swamp rats in DC.
We have to be realistic. It would be nice to have a broad base of talent to run for President in 2024 — but if the Archangel Gabriel came down from Heaven and ran as a Republican in 2024, he would “lose” to Chelsea Clinton or Hunter Biden. There is no reason for ruling Democrats ever again to allow an honest election.
I don’t want to be defeatist, but we have to face facts. The social compact has been broken; the US we used to know has been murdered. The question now is what will arise in its place.
The day after the election, even before Biden had “passed” Trump, I was saying it was over, they stole it fair and square. My guess is they’re going to steal both GA seats, since it appears the GOP has done nothing to stop it. Although we’ll have to see. It’s entirely possible that enough Team Trump folks will come out to prevent the sort of shenanigans they pulled in Atlanta last month (on tape even!!!). And it’s likely that the GOPe will fight far harder to save the Senate than they did for Trump.
That being said, I’m not despondent about the future. I don’t believe the Dems are going to pack the court, add new states, etc. I do think if they do have total control they will legalize all current illegal immigrants, which is very bad. But, they don’t understand Hispanics at all, and “Black Lives Matter” is the perfect campaign to draw some more white suburban folks into their coalition, but it will permanently scare off large numbers of Hispanics, and drive away all rural voters of any race.
I think that the GOP in WI, PA, GA, MI, etc., will tighten up voting–severely restrict mail-ins, get rid of these crooked machines, etc. They’ll do so thinking that they’ve gotten rid of Trump, so they can now move to get their power back, but their time is over, it’s a populist party now.
I think the 2022 election will be a massive wave for the GOP, and probably several more after that.
That being said, don’t think I’m a pollyanna, the country is completely screwed, the conservative base now thinks the government isn’t just incompetent, but deeply corrupt to the point of being illegitimate. That is really, really bad. I just don’t think that the establishment is capable enough to keeping hold on power, at least in the sense of winning elections.
Gavin,
My lack of enthusiasm for Trump 2024 comes down to one simple fact. On Inauguration Day, 2025, he will be 78-1/2. Realism tells me that is just too old for the hardest job in the world.
His legacy is compromised by having nearly as much opposition from his own party as from Democrats. Regardless of whether or not Trump could successfully undertake another term, we would be much better served by finding and nominating someone worthy to be his inevitable successor now.
My political prognosticator is a long way out of warranty but I’ll predict that by 2024, a good many more people will have had their fill of Harris/Biden and Democrats in general. If not, then many of the darker comments above may come into play. I see 2024 as an opportunity for eight years instead of four and a chance at lasting change for the better. It will also be an opportunity to take advantage of, what I consider, the inevitable collapse of the Democratic party. In four years, between holding their noses and holding their breath, I predict hypoxia will take a heavy toll among a group with not many brain cells to spare.
The angry reactions to the suggestion that Jill Biden should maybe not be referred to as Doctor Jill Biden seem like the way that various English aristocrats would once have reacted to the failure to refer to a Lord with proper use of his title. These reactions…contrary to media suggestions..clearly have more to do with a demand for credential-respecting than they have anything to do with gender.
I agree completely. I have watched this for years as various semi-medical groups have added “Doctor” to their resumes. I also agree there is a large population, most of whom are devoted Democrats, that are anxious about poor ROI on college degrees, especially if they have student loans. That is where the “cancel student loans” enthusiasm comes from.
I also agree that Trump is too old for 2024. I do wonder if Ivanka is interested? She has made a few noises in that vein. Nikki Haley has compromised too much. I like Rand Paul. Ted Cruz would have been Trump’s next Supreme Court nominee, I think, and would be better there. The next four years will be interesting. I doubt I will be around then but my mother lived to 103.
Whoever gets the nom in 2024 has to have a) Trump’s endorsement, and b) the ability to hold Trump-esque rallies. If Trump thinks no one can do that, he’ll probably run again. If the nominee is a politician, I strongly doubt it will be someone from DC.
Trump would by all signs want Ivanka to succeed him, but there’s limited evidence she’d be interested. The brutal question would be how she would fly with suburban women, and Hispanic men.
(Tulsi has a far better chance at the nom than Haley, at this point, but then so do any of us, haha.)
There is no reason for ruling Democrats ever again to allow an honest election.
And there is equally no reason for Trump-supporting Americans to abide by phony election results, or to obey illegal decrees by the regime, or to not use the same tactics leftists have pioneered against us.
I note that already most Virginia counties have declared themselves Second Amendment Sanctuaries- against the leftist government of that state- and I note also that this “proud boys” group has been engaging leftists in street battles, to a small extent.
The social compact has been broken; the US we used to know has been murdered.
Again, we have no reason not to notice that fact and react accordingly. But I will hypothesize that the social compact was actually broken a long time ago, certainly by the time Bill Clinton was able to remain in office despite bottomless corruption.
One of the less famous Clinton scandals was how they obtained a swarm of confidential FBI files, early in his first term. It seems very likely to me that the information contained in those files was quite helpful in Clinton avoiding consequences, considering he surely had compromising information on a variety of potential adversaries. For example, Dennis Hastert, who eventually became House Speaker after Newt Gingrich was forced out after the 1998 elections. Much later, after he left office, it became public knowledge that Hastert had been paying off his victims from his time as a pedophile high school wrestling couch since the 1960s.
I’m sure no one found out about that and used it to ensure that Hastert didn’t get too active in fighting the left, right? Not in America, no way. And certainly not the embattled corrupt President.
And then there’s John Roberts, Chief Justice. How exactly do you end up writing both sides of one of the most consequential decisions in Supreme Court history, anyway?
My guess is blackmail, in case that wasn’t obvious.
Guys! You are missing the point! The Democrat Establishment has just demonstrated they can steal a Presidential election in broad daylight — and get away with it. Do you really think they will never do it again?
Tell me — What is going to be different in 2024? It does not matter who the Republican nominee is in 2024 (assuming there still are elections in 2024), he/she/it will “lose”. There will be enough crooked votes to ensure that.
The world has changed. The only thing which could change it back would be if rank-and-file Democrats put their foot down and demanded honesty & fairness from the Swamp Democrat Establishment — and so far there is zero sign of that happening.
The DC Republicrat Party has declared itself irrelevant, and will die. Voting is no longer relevant. But Nature abhors a vacuum, and something will rise to fill the space. However, do not hold your breath. It took Russia 70 years to throw off their Communist overlords. It took China 500 years to recover from an emperor’s foolish decisions. Whatever comes next for the US, history tells us it will be a multi-generational struggle.
They’ve gamed the system to death, with no thought to what happens when the rest of the participants stop consenting to play the game any more.
The Democratic Party reminds me of a little girl I knew, once. She was an insufferable precocious little shit, a larval “barracks lawyer” who insisted on getting her way in everything, at every turn, in every way. Even when it wasn’t in her best interests, she’d insist on doing things “her way”. She had to run everything during recess playtimes, and if you had the misfortune of being forced into close association for schoolwork, God help you.
Of course, the teachers and adults absolutely loved her and supported her in every way imaginable. They helped create a monster.
Her final denouement came in her late teens and early twenties. By then, everyone who knew her was on to her, and her entire age group had essentially opted out of her company–A more complete ostracization is impossible to conceive of. It wasn’t that they didn’t play or socialize with her, it was more that they completely ignored her existence in every way imaginable. The adults in her world had also begun to figure out what was going on with her, and they also took steps to minimize interaction with her. After her mother finally drank herself to death, her father basically wrote her out of his life, blaming her for that–Not entirely sure that was fair, but that’s what happened. May have been an excuse.
In the end, she committed suicide in an intentionally ugly and guilt-inducing way. The funny thing was, nobody felt the least bit guilty about it all, and most just shook their heads and said “Oh, well… She’s not a loss…”. I think the funeral went unattended, and was mostly a pro-forma affair that her father felt socially required to conduct.
Every time I see Nancy Pelosi, I see that girl all grown up and ugly. The rest of the Democrats are very much in the same mold, and I see the party ending much as she did. Badly.
Gavin,
I agree that electoral politics, the Constitution, and [perhaps more importantly] the social contract have been fatally compromised. The Democrats now have free rein to falsify the results of any election in perpetuity. There is nothing to prevent them from doing so, nor is there any innate moral sense or patriotism that would give them pause before choosing dictatorial power first.
The problem is that people reflexively start thinking about what they can do “next election” to fix things. That is because we have a couple of centuries’ history where we have had “next elections” that meant something. Throughout human history, the vast majority of changes in government have not occurred by free and fair elections, nor has consent of the governed been involved. We are now in a different world and this is a very different game.
ELECTIONS NO LONGER COUNT. Thinking electorally, until a new social contract is created and accepted, is a waste of time and counterproductive. I do not doubt a new political “party” may and must be created, but it has to concentrate on creating that social contract, by other than electoral means and by whatever means necessary.
On December 11, 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that despite the explicit words of the Constitution in two different places; no one has standing to sue to oppose the imposition of a coup. That has implications for the legitimacy of the Supreme Court [and all courts] and the efficacy of appealing to the Constitution in the new regime that rejects it.
It is a new world, and not a pleasant one, nor one that most Americans are prepared for.
Subotai Bahadur
Good grief. Yes, they’ve just stolen an election in the most brazen fashion in generations, perhaps ever. But surrendering now is like throwing in the towel after Pearl Harbor. Each of the states where the theft happened has GOP legislatures, no? I bet you that many of their worthless reps are going to be primaried and replaced. Then eliminate mail-in voting, and throw out these absurd machines, and recruit an army of observers that won’t be cowed on election night, and we’ll shrink the margin of fraud back to where it’s always been. Things are bad, very bad, but the fight is always worth fighting.
The whole thing is coming down.
Of course the conservative base thinks the government is illegitimate, because it is. The establishment hasn’t been able to retain power by winning honest elections for a long time. It’s played every dirty trick it has and more- and it still wasn’t enough to avoid a political catastrophe.
I won’t say anything about other states, but I know Michigan had plenty of warning about fraud as a result of the 2016 election. Thanks to Jill Stein, it came out that Detroit had been recording far more ballots for Hillary then were actually cast. The GOP governor and the GOP controlled legislature did nothing except collude with democrats to hush it up as quickly as possible. I don’t expect much from those folks.
I do expect Biden and Harris to wear out their non-welcome very quickly. Biden is a senile old man who should be dying in a prison hospital. Harris is a corrupt cipher with no discernible ability to win votes or support outside of the California demonrat hothouse flowerbed. Their handlers behind the scenes are either hard left radicals who don’t dare discuss their policy schemes in public, or the same sort of folks who did open their mouths and thus made Donald Trump president. Even worse, they seem to delight in angering people with lawless and useless decrees, for no other reason than because they can. This isn’t a recipe for political success or stability.
I wouldn’t be so sure we’ll make it to 2022, let alone 2024.
“However, I’m pretty sure whatever happens the US we won’t lose interest in events on our border. We won’t forget a quite deliberate stab in the back, and in the event of war, knowing Canada plainly wants to be on the other side- well, you’re a pretty close and easy target.”
Just delusional. You think modern war is going to last long enough, for you to mount an expedition against Canada? Really? You think that we, trying to deal with everyone fairly, and to our advantage, are somehow stabbing you in the back?. Give your head a shake!
What might happen. China decides to take Taiwan, they will eventually one way or another, and you fight against them. They might just nuke a carrier group, just to get the party started. Will you risk your cities, by directly attacking China at that point? Will you?
You think that we, trying to deal with everyone fairly, and to our advantage, are somehow stabbing you in the back?
You are treating a totalitarian-expansionist dictatorship as equivalent, in terms of morality and threat potential, to a rights-respecting constitutional republic.
That makes you ripe for exploitation by the dictatorship, to improve their position at the expense of not only your nation, but ours.
China’s lack of respect for individual liberty renders them inherently untrustworthy, and they need to be confronted – not tolerated – on that if we value our own liberty, and lives.
Pengun: “China decides to take Taiwan, they will eventually one way or another, and you fight against them. They might just nuke a carrier group, just to get the party started. Will you risk your cities, by directly attacking China at that point? Will you?”
Well, we all know that Chinese-owned Canada is going to do no more for Taiwan than she has done for the people of Hong Kong. But it has to be admitted that on this point the broken clock has finally told it right. Yes, there is no chance that the US under Beijing Biden will do anything to help Taiwan when the time comes — as the Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly said it will.
While I admit to having been wrong in the past, my guess is that there will never be a shooting war between China and the US. China has been waging a successful economic war against the US for about 30 years — one that our “Free Trade” overlords have been too dumb (or too bought off) to notice. Thanks to the destruction of the US industrial base in that economic war, the US requires imports from China to make weapons — which lets us see exactly how unrealistic it would be for the US to attack China.
China does not want to risk a war either — the paper tiger has nuclear teeth, as Mao observed — and China now has a vast amount of sparkling new infrastructure it would hate to lose. It is much smarter for China simply to buy Western politicians. It has worked for China in Canada, and it has obviously worked in the US too with the elevation of Beijing Biden to Fake President-elect.
I have been watching the China-Taiwan situation for decades, having a vested interest by ancestry. I cannot guarantee it or offer a citation here but . . .
Taiwan for generations has had scientists capable of designing and making nuclear warheads and the industrial base to do it. And they have deployed a series of missiles whose CEP does not make sense at all with conventional warheads, but do if the warhead yields are measured in kilotons. Enough to make it prohibitively expensive to try to invade Taiwan; both for the invasion force and for the infrastructure on the mainland.
If the current coup in process succeeds, Biden will not defend Taiwan. But Taiwan has nothing to lose.
Subotai Bahadur
“China’s going to invade Taiwan in the next few years!!!!” has been a delusional cry for decades now. Why on earth would they, even if you think their military is capable of what would be one of the most complex amphibious operations in history? They’ve bought off the world, why take a military risk, and throw everything into chaos? Blackmail and bribes are far preferable to bombs as a strategy every time.
When the USA has weak leaders other countries become more self-reliant. The counter-Iran alliance of Israel and multiple Arab countries, which Trump fostered, isn’t likely to go away under a Biden presidency. Taiwan, Japan, Australia et al have a strong incentive to nuke up and cooperate vs. China.
““China’s going to invade Taiwan in the next few years!!!!” has been a delusional cry for decades now. Why on earth would they, even if you think their military is capable of what would be one of the most complex amphibious operations in history? They’ve bought off the world, why take a military risk, and throw everything into chaos? Blackmail and bribes are far preferable to bombs as a strategy every time.”
And, yet… History is filled with examples of people doing stupid things against their own self-interest. Germany could have dominated Central Europe for a hundred generations, but no, the Kaiser had to play games with his navy. Idiots, all of them… And, don’t make the mistake of thinking that China is somehow immune to this sort of crap. They’re not. Hell, if anything, they’re so damn insular and proud that they’re far more prone to it than about anyone else.
Anonymous: Actually, my crazy theory of the moment is that all the Navy UFO vids from the past couple years are the government’s way of telling China not to get any cute ideas about military adventurism, since we have black tech that they can’t even conceive of. Just keep to the agreement where they get rich, but we keep our military dominance.
The slightest glance at a map is all it takes to see that Taiwan is in an exposed position. No one knows this better than the Taiwanese. They have been preparing their defenses, some of which were built by the Japanese, since being driven from the mainland.
Aside from nuclear weapons that may or may not exist, there are thousands of advanced anti ship and anti air missiles that would make any invasion enormously expensive. There are prepared ground defenses in depth coupled with a topography that would make even a successful invasion only the beginning of the pain for an attacker. Even the CCP, that seems to have all the emotional maturity of a particularly nasty three year old, should be able to recognize that what was left would not be worth a tiny fraction of the cost.
Countering this is the fact that politicians and even generals are much cheaper to buy than missiles, planes and ships. This realization is just starting to dawn on many Americans, possibly too late. If Taiwan or America succumbs, this is the way it will happen. The CCP learned this from their Soviet tutors and has practiced this sort of warfare from its beginning.
A side note to Anonymous,
Germany didn’t exist except as a loose collection semi-feudal entities that all more or less spoke the same language before the middle of the 19th century. Advancing far enough to start a World War in 60+ years is probably some sort of record. Compare that to Italy, their consolidation dates to the same period.
On second thought, France wasn’t united under a single crown for that much longer before Napoleon started WW0.5. The Soviets didn’t quite manage WWIII in 70 years, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Maybe it’s just China’s turn.
It is much smarter for China simply to buy Western politicians. It has worked for China in Canada, and it has obviously worked in the US too with the elevation of Beijing Biden to Fake President-elect.
Absolutely. Biden and the Democrats are not the only “bought” politicians. Look at how much support Trump got from the GOPe.
The counter-Iran alliance of Israel and multiple Arab countries, which Trump fostered, isn’t likely to go away under a Biden presidency. Taiwan, Japan, Australia et al have a strong incentive to nuke up and cooperate vs. China..
It would a fitting reward for the globalists of America to steal an election to preserve their globalism, only to find the rest of the world had no interest in what they have to offer- and prefers the Trump approach over their own.
That is, I can’t imagine the Arab countries are going to dump the peace deals already in place because the anti-Israeli Biden handlers would wish them to, and I can’t imagine Japan et al are going to stay nuke-free at their behest either.
Yet another impending failure of the Deep State…
If you wanted an ally against Iran and your choice was between the Palestinians and Israel. Who would you choose? Corrupt ingrates that produce nothing except trouble or one of the top two militaries in the world?
“Corrupt ingrates that produce nothing except trouble or one of the top two militaries in the world?”
Well this is a huge shock. I had no idea the Palestinians were so militarily advanced. ;)
I hadn’t intended to mention Canada, but now that you brought it up, ingrates aren’t limited to the West Bank of the Jordan.
I have always found the whole ingrate thing rather funny. That there are people who should be grateful to you or anyone else seems a stretch. People and countries work for their own benefit, any help to others is almost always incidental.
I still think South America begins at the Peace Arch, well in my part of the world anyway. ;)