Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2008, 07:41:39 AM
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“We do not want a deterioration of international relations, we want to be respected. We want our people, our values to be respected. We have always been a peace-loving state. Practically there is not a single occasion in the history of the Russian or Soviet state when we first started military actions. We have not attacked anyone, we only secured the rights and dignity of people as peacekeepers.” —Russia president Dimitry Medvedev
“I could care less about the color of Barack Obama’s skin, but the thinness of it is starting to wear on me.” —Dennis Miller
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In today's L.A. Times there was a good article on Sen. Biden; good and bad was pointed out.
But I did like the quote, "Respected, but not always popular".
Not bad for one's epitaph
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“Not only is [Sarah Palin] young, they’re saying she’s the prettiest candidate for vice president since John Edwards.” —Jimmy Kimmel
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“A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?” —Marcus Tullius Cicero
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There comes a point when every society advances enough to eliminate natural selection.Then you get liberals.
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"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
-- Frederic Bastiat, "The Law," 1850
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"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
-- Woodrow Wilson, after signing the legislation that created the Federal Reserve
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"Separation of economics and State" Ayn Rand
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"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, page 413
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a) The price of freedom is infernal vigilantes
b) I'll keep my money, freedom, and guns. You keep the change.
c) Democracy has no convictions for which people would be willing to stake their lives."
Dr. Ernst Hanfstaengl
d) "Military power wins battles, but spiritual power wins wars."
Gen G.C. Marshall
e) "We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a
symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other."
Gen G.C. Marshall
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"Unsustainable developments usually have a longer life than is good for the reputation of the prophet."
internet friend Bob Polhausen
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There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. —Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
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Friedrich Hayek in "The Constitution of Liberty," 1960:
Not only is liberty a system under which all government action is guided by principles, but it is an ideal that will not be preserved unless it is itself accepted as an overriding principle governing all particular acts of legislation.
Where no such fundamental rule is stubbornly adhered to as an ultimate ideal about which there must be no compromise for the sake of material advantages—as an ideal which, even though it may have to be temporarily infringed during a passing emergency, must form the basis of all permanent arrangements—freedom is almost certain to be destroyed by piecemeal encroachments. For in each particular instance it will be possible to promise concrete and tangible advantages as the result of a curtailment of freedom, while the benefits sacrificed will in their nature always be unknown and uncertain.
If freedom were not treated as the supreme principle, the fact that the promises which a free society has to offer can always be only chances and not certainties, only opportunities and not definite gifts to particular individuals, would inevitably prove a fatal weakness and lead to its slow erosion.
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"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
Friedrich Nietzsche
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"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
Henry David Thoreau
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'We should not expect the state to appear in the guise of an extravagant good fairy at every christening, a loquacious companion at every stage of life's journey, and the unknown mourner at every funeral.'
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For some reason, this strikes me as profound:
"I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the bat, and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn't my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?"
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"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation." --C.S. Lewis*
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"Liberals will always be against the right to self-defense because it gives them cover for their personal cowardice."
Cold War Scout
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"Liberals will always be against the right to self-defense because it gives them cover for their personal cowardice."
Cold War Scout
Brilliant ! CWS for the win!
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“I have never understood why it is greed to keep the money you’ve earned, but not greed to want to take someone else’s money” Thomas Sowell
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You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society."
-- Václav Havel
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Confucius:
A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.
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There is a fact that stares us in the face but which we refuse to see; the inverse relation between grievance and protest. The less justified the grievance the more violent the protest. When the wrong is tangible and obvious the protest will be limited and specific. It is when the wrong is vague or even fictitious that the protest is likely to become revolutionary, to be directed against the Establishment, the power structure, and the whole way of life of a society.
- Eric Hoffer, The Destructive Rush for Happiness, column, 1968
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https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/hermann_goering.html
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Pro tip: don't be the second person to recognize that things have escalated.
Rob Crowley
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Not exactly a quote, but quite pithy:
Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.
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Not exactly a quote, but quite pithy:
Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.
Poor people have poor ways.
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"Let’s set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace–and you can have it in the next second–surrender.
Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face–that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand–the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he would rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin–just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said that “the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits–not animals.” And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
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Nicholas A. Christakis
@NAChristakis
Here is a problem I have with so many of the statements by university presidents, including the recent one from Harvard: How and why did Harvard (and Penn, Cornell, etc.) become such an easy place for such anti-semitism to be expressed in the first place?
These university leaders profess to be shocked -- shocked! -- to discover all this sloppy and illiberal thinking on their campuses. But they do not seriously ask what the *source* of all this anti-semitic (and not anti-Israel per se) expression is.
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Exactly so.
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Lynn Chu
The Obama-Biden foreign policy is pure socialist leveling. Average the entire region out ignoring all reality. Pretend the Middle East is a statistic rather than nations, cultures and religions. Weaken America. Strengthen her worst enemies. This is literally their “policy.”
It’s an Obama policy since Biden has no ideas of his own.
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Second post, perhaps an ego driven one. While chatting elsewhere with someone regarding the recently released en toto surveillance video, I typed the following, which I feel succinctly captures WHY doubt is so easy to embrace where they current narrative is involved:
Oh there were folks that acted wretchedly—on both sides (say her name: Ashli Babbit)—many of whom arrived on busses, that were working for federal “law” enforcement in various capacities, some of whom have since been shown to have ANTIFA affiliations (wait, what, our rulers and moral superiors would not launch false flag or entrapment operations on American soil, other than the ones where the’ve already been caught doing so, would they?), but for the most part the vast majority of the video captured during the event does not support the narrative foisted by the MSM, Democrats, and sundry federal factotums deeply invested in the status quo, distinctions without a difference though they be.
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Thread Nazi here :-D
This would be better in the Insurrection thread :-D
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Eli Steele
@Hebro_Steele
Leftist blacks and their allies have spent the last several decades gaslighting us that our nation is systemically racist. They created articles, books, TV shows and films to overwhelm us with poetic truths. When we objected, they denied us straight answers and instead subjected us to racial trainings of every kind. They lied to us that this was the difficult work, the difficult conversations that was needed to be done in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion. New allies that agreed to put race before humanity were rewarded with cheap lawn signs that virtue signaled their goodness to their neighbors. In the meanwhile, these Leftists leaders rode their grift along with the exploitation of white guilt to dizzying heights, including the presidencies of Harvard, MIT, and Penn. Why then would we expect them to react with integrity and morals when the true and undeniable evil of antisemitism emerged before their very eyes? After all, they long ago met the devil at the crossroads and sacrificed their humanity for racial essentialism and that is the moral rot that we saw on full display yesterday.
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2nd Post:
Legal scholar Eugene Volokh in an interview with Politico, Dec. 5:
To the extent that people do conclude, “Yes, this speech is beyond the pale, we have to suppress this kind of speech,” and that it’s legitimate for the government to suppress this kind of speech or for private universities that have before endorsed broad free speech rights . . . I think it would be very dangerous.
There’s a phenomenon I call “censorship envy,” which I think we’re seeing a lot of here. It’s just a reflection of what I think is human nature. If somebody says things that I find really offensive, but everybody else has to deal with things that they find offensive, I can say, OK, fine, I’m just going to try to ignore this person or argue against them or just have to deal with it, because everybody has to deal with it.
But if I see that other groups have gotten speech that they dislike suppressed, then I think what kind of chump am I if I tolerate speech I dislike. I should get at least the kind of protection against offensive speech that other groups are getting. And I think we’re seeing that in a lot of arguments for suppressing the anti-Israel speech.
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3rd post:
@hughhewitt
Bravo Governor Shapiro. To repeat: The Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers must retire President Gay today. They must also exit every administrator and faculty member complicit in the building over years of a hard left tower or ideological conformity and anti-Semitism. Throw them all out at every level and from every school and department. (Pay them off from the $50 billion dollar endowment if necessary.) Start over and really commit to free speech and intellectual diversity. Dismantle the DEI bureaucracy and the oppressor-oppressed idiocy and return to merit. This is not hard. It will require courage. It existed in Cambridge for hundreds of years. Go and get it back.
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“Few phrases are as reliable as ‘my truth’ for identifying seasoned purveyors of cant and doubletalk. Truth isn’t something that can be identified or modified by a possessive pronoun. If my truth is different from your truth and your truth is different from her truth, these aren’t truths. ‘My truth’ is the device deployed to elevate the particular viewpoint of a member of a particular group or identity, by claiming the validation of the ‘truth’ for a narrow ideological cause.”
– Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal ($). He was writing about the views of the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay. As of the time of writing, Gay is still in a job, but for how long?
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Samizdata quote of the day – end of easy corporate choices edition
Johnathan Pearce (London) · Economics, Business & Globalization · Slogans & Quotations
“In recent years, businesses have been shaped by the beguiling mantra of ‘win-win’. When confronted with any difficult choice – sustainability or efficiency? excellence or equity? stakeholders or shareholders? – their chieftains have kidded themselves into thinking that you can have both. Sustainability leads to efficiency in the long term; equity is the best way of securing excellence; pleasing all the stakeholders leads to higher share prices. This will be the year that finally brings an end to the idea that you can have your cake and eat it. Companies will have to make tough decisions that they’ve been putting off as long as possible. Consumers will no longer wear the idea that, say, the green transition is cost free.
“Win-win was an affordable luxury in an era of free money and rampant virtue signalling. But higher interest rates will make both companies and consumers more cost conscious. And virtue signalling is far from cost free, as several chief executive officers have discovered. Companies will tell their young recruits to put their noses to the grindstone rather than working from home. The yoga classes and pizza parties will be cancelled. The Business Roundtable will soft pedal the talk of stakeholder capitalism.”
– Adrian Wooldridge. He is writing in Bloomberg ($), a business news and information service that at times seems to have bought into sometimes fashionable ideas, but the need to make a profit tends to keep that in check.
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Never embrace the ideals of socialism. Never allow yourselves to be seduced by the siren song of social justice. . . At the same time, we have to raise awareness among the business sector, that the masses are necessary—Milton Friedman used to say that the social role of an entrepreneur is to make money. But that’s not enough. Part of their investment must include investing in those who defend the ideals of freedom, so socialists can make no further advances. And if they don’t do it, they [the socialists] will get into the State, and use the State to impose a long term agenda that will destroy everything it touches. So we need a commitment from all of those who create wealth, to fight against socialism, to fight against statism, and to understand that if they fail to do so, the socialists will keep coming.
Argentina’s Javier Milei
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Every now and again they reveal themselves directly, warts and all:
“The era of free will is over.” – Yuval Harari, a lecturer at the World Economic Forum (WEF)
https://survivalblog.com/2024/02/01/the-editors-quote-of-the-day-33/
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"As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, 'I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.'"
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"I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man."
- Who do you suppose paid for it? Those are not choices you make with your own money.
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"I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man."
In its own way, there is a lot of insight there pithily condensed into one sentence.
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"I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man."
In its own way, there is a lot of insight there pithily condensed into one sentence.
Adults can play make believe too! On someone else’s dime, better yet!
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I’ve my share of issues with Mitch, but he does have a habit of cutting to the meat of the matter now and then:
@KanekoaTheGreat
Mitch McConnell Rips Schumer’s Call for ‘New Elections’ in Israel: ‘This Is Unprecedented’
“It is grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of the democratically elected leader of Israel. This is unprecedented. We should not treat fellow democracies this way at all. Things that upset left-wing activists are not a prime minister's policies."
"There is Israel's policies. Make no mistake, the Democratic Party doesn't have an anti-Bibi problem, it has an anti Israel problem. Israel is not a colony of America whose leaders serve at the pleasure of the party in power in Washington. Only Israeli citizens should have a say in who runs their government. This is the very definition of democracy and sovereignty. Either we respect their decisions, or we disrespect their democracy.”
Why is Senator Chuck Schumer publicly advocating for the ousting of the democratically elected leader of a U.S. ally?
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ZANG.
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How did American capitalism mutate into American corporatism?
Samizdata Illuminatus (Arkham, Massachusetts) · Slogans & Quotations
In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.
What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.
This used to go by the name “crony capitalism” which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.
The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system –have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream. We hardly know anymore for whom to cheer or boo in the great struggles of our time.
– Jeffrey Tucker
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Shipwreckedcrew
@shipwreckedcrew
Amazing how the septuagenarians and octogenarians in the Democrat party are willing to break faith on a decades-long commitment to the security of Israel because a bunch of know-nothing college kids and chuckleheaded academics have joined with a small foreign contingent in the party -- many of whom can't even vote -- to mau-mau them into obedience.
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Second post:
Imagine going back in time, a decade or so, and telling anti-fascists that one day they’ll be doing the bidding of fascists. Imagine telling anti-racists that they would soon become propagandists for racists. Imagine telling those woke campus feminists, the sort who thought that being propositioned at the student bar was ‘rape culture’, that in the not-too-distant future they’d be making excuses for literal rape. They’d have thought you mad. And yet it’s happened. Many of yesteryear’s self-righteous haters of bigotry have morphed into the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas – one of the most bigoted movements on Earth.
– Brendan O’Neill
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"Amazing how the septuagenarians and octogenarians in the Democrat party are willing to break faith on a decades-long commitment to the security of Israel because a bunch of know-nothing college kids and chuckleheaded academics have joined with a small foreign contingent in the party -- many of whom can't even vote -- to mau-mau them into obedience."
My understanding is the larger factor is the substantial arab/muslim vote in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey.
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"Amazing how the septuagenarians and octogenarians in the Democrat party are willing to break faith on a decades-long commitment to the security of Israel because a bunch of know-nothing college kids and chuckleheaded academics have joined with a small foreign contingent in the party -- many of whom can't even vote -- to mau-mau them into obedience."
My understanding is the larger factor is the substantial arab/muslim vote in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey.
Perhaps for Biden and those who count electoral college votes for him, but congress’s concerns are far more parochial and hence far more likely to be impacted by the local Mau-Maus.
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Matt Taibbi was asked “why doesn’t he pay much attention to the sins (or threats) from “the right”?”
He gave a great answer:
Why I don’t spend a lot of time on the Republicans:
1) There is a enormous army of MSM reporters already going after them from every angle, with most major news organizations little more than proxies for the DNC, to the point where stations hire Biden spokespeople as anchors;
2) The Republicans have very little institutional power nationally. It’s not their point of view prevailing in schools, on campuses, in newsrooms (where over 90% of working reporters vote blue), and especially in the intelligence and military apparatus, which has openly aligned itself with Democrats. Even if Donald Trump were a “threat to Democracy” he lacks the institutional pull to do much damage, which can’t be said of Democrats;
3) The Democrats’ ambitions are significantly more dangerous than those of the Republicans. From digital surveillance to censorship to making Intel and enforcement agencies central players in domestic governance — all plans being executed globally as well as in our one country — they are thinking on a much bigger and more dangerous scale than Republicans. I lived in third world countries and the endless criminal indictments of people like Trump and ongoing lawfare efforts to prevent even third party challenges are classic authoritarian symptoms. The Republicans aren’t near this kind of capability;
4) Last and most important, the Democrats are being organized around a more potent but also much dumber, more cultlike ideology. People like Yuval Harari and his Transhumanist “divinity” concept scare me a lot more than the Rs, and I was once undercover in an apocalyptic church in Texas. Ask your average Russian or Cuban what overempowered pseudo-intellectuals are capable of.
I have a pretty good record of picking dangerous phenomena ahead of time. I feel confident on this one, and that’s before we get to the demographic/class shifts in the parties.
Full piece here:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/matt-taibbi-was-asked-why-doesnt-he-pay-much-attention-to-the-sins-or-threats-from-the-right/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=matt-taibbi-was-asked-why-doesnt-he-pay-much-attention-to-the-sins-or-threats-from-the-right
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Samizdata quote of the day – the toppling of the woke authoritarians
Wokeism. Climate extremism. Kindly authoritarianism. This is now the operating system of Western, ‘centrist’ politics. Take Joe Biden, America’s somnambulant president. At the 2020 election, even anti-woke liberals insisted this scion of the old Democratic establishment – a man so old he can’t even be slurred as a Boomer (he’s actually Silent Generation) – was the man to return America to normality, before the BLM riots and MAGA mania. ‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden’, declared a piece in the Atlantic, arguing that Trump is to the culture war what kerosene is to a dumpster fire, fueling the woke extremes. That take has aged like milk. On his first day in office, Biden signed sweeping Executive Orders on ‘racial equity’ and gender ideology. He later tried to apportion Covid relief on the basis of race. He’s a Net Zero zealot. He has allowed the justice system to be weaponised against his opponents. He invited Dylan Mulvaney to the White House, FFS. Biden’s return to ‘normalcy’ has been so successful millions of Americans are starting to wonder if Donald Trump might actually be the saner choice.
https://www.samizdata.net/2024/05/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-the-toppling-of-the-woke-authoritarians/
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“…you can’t long remain a free society if you don’t believe in freedom. And it’s no good just saying you believe in it: you have to live it. Sometimes that means politicians deciding ‘we would rather live with this injustice or this social problem than expand the state to deal with it.’ When was the last time you heard anyone say that? And that’s the problem.”
– David Frost, Daily Telegraph (£)
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This is the part of the 1953 sci-fi movie where the scientists figure out the high voltage lines & atom bombs only make the monster bigger.
David Burg/iowahawk
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Scott Adams
Democrats solved Trump’s biggest political problems.
They proved the legal system can completely control him. No dictator risk.
They proved there is no secret MAGA army waiting to be activated. (You would have heard from them by now.)
And best of all, they generated massive empathy for Trump. “If they can do it to me…” is powerful.
Trump’s campaign funding is solved.
Republican animal spirits have never been higher.
This is the biggest political mistake in American history.
BBG here: If Biden or his handlers understood what they unleashed they’d pardon Trump, state indeed the courts should not be used to decide elections, and vow to henceforth advocate for the Democratic Party to take the high moral road (with their fingers crossed behind their backs, of course). Fortunately “Progressive” stalwarts would have collective kittens before committing sepbuku at a White House gate were that to occur, so no worries there.
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"Our universities are becoming bastions of unfreedom, if my few young academic friends are to be believed, and we are raising up a generation of secular ayatollahs."
Theodore Dalrymple
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For Those Keeping Score
By CHARLES C. W. COOKE
June 27, 2024 12:32 PM
If I’m understanding correctly, the overarching message of the last two weeks has been that Donald Trump is set to become a dictator if he wins in November, but that, in spite of this, it’s just awful that the Supreme Court won’t let the executive branch run its own trials or impose criminal penalties without Congress, and it’s just great that the executive branch remains able to strip constitutional rights without due process and bully Facebook into moderating as it sees fit.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/for-those-keeping-score/
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@RevolverNewsUSA
Remarkable monologue from David Sacks:
"The Democratic party is a collection of interests who want to remain in power. The Democratic Party is the party of government. Its goal is to allocate money and power from the government to the collection of interests who back the Democratic Party. In other words, it's basically a collection of interests who want to loot the Republic.
Well obviously, no one's going to vote for that. So they have to make it about something else. They choose a figurehead, they talk about how this is about saving democracy. They basically invent, hoax after hoax, lie after lie to basically maintain their power.
And I think what's happened is, the mask has come off, the whole shell game has been revealed. It's obvious that Biden was always a puppet for these interests who were hiding behind him. And now, it's all being exposed."
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"always a puppet for these interests who were hiding behind him."
or he hiding behind them? :wink:
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https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/top-10-thomas-sowell-quotes
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Frank J. Fleming
@IMAO_
The way Trump is remaining completely silent while the Democrats self-destruct is kinda scary; it's like that scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptor uses the door handle.
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:-D :-D :-D
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I’ve some quibbles here, but have little doubt many of the pathological political processes currently on full display have, at their root, the desire to be seen favorably, particularly when a politician’s ego is in play:
A conclusion is hard to escape: America suffers from an incompetent leadership class. Its problem isn’t ruthlessness but softness, its inability to deal with the world without a media that constantly lies to make it feel better about itself.
– Holman W Jenkins, Jnr.
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@jason_meister
If we just oust Joe Biden, disenfranchise millions of voters, imprison Donald Trump, abuse the FISA court, weaponize the justice system, rig primaries, remove names from ballots, raid the private residence of a former president with deadly force, shutoff surveillance cameras, fabricate evidence, gag, censor, eliminate the Electoral College, expand the Supreme Court, ban Voter ID, deny Sercret Service resources, and flood the country with tens of millions of illegals we could save democracy.
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Pithy.
ZANG.
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RNC Research
@RNCResearch
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10m
"I cured the economy."
— Joe Biden (six days ago before the current market crash)
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And I’d add they seek to gaslight and demoralize you every step along the way. Don’t fall for it:
The System creates Democrat presidential “candidates” out of thin air.
They run ghosts.
Then they install them. They did it in 2008, 2020 and they’re doing it again now.
2016 was an aberration - they were caught flat-footed by Trump’s powerful appeal and vowed never again.
This is a war against the System, its ghosts and the illusion of “democracy” - all used to move us into tyranny.
If you don’t get this by now - if you’re not willing to fight this war - you’re going to be roadkill.
88 days to save America.
FOCUS.
Clarice Feldman
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I think much of this also applies to climate alarmism, too:
Kevin Bass PhD MS
@kevinnbass
I'm saying all of this as someone who used to be a leftist: Left-wing political positions are the projection of leftist psychological needs. Challenging them on rational grounds gets you canceled because there is no way to directly challenge someone's psychological integrity without provoking a severe, negative reaction. The misinformation research field is essentially one big project dedicated to protecting and legitimating the integrity of leftist psychopathological projections. That is why leftists are so obsessed with misinformation. Leftists are terrified about misinformation in the same way that small children are terrified about not going to sleep in complete darkness, i.e. in always having a night light on. To leftists, right-wing views are not just wrong: they are terrible monsters that threaten to destroy the leftists' entire construction of psychological meaning and reality itself. "Misinformation" is simply a very sanitized and scientized way to characterize the abject horror that leftists feel when they hear right-wing interpretations of the world. They use the word "misinformation" to hide their visceral, primordial horror at right-wing views, to give their horror the veneer of respectability. But they betray their real feelings in how they propose to act on misinformation: they want to destroy the First Amendment, they want to prevent these views from being expressed to anyone, and as Hillary Clinton recently recommended, they want to imprison people who express these views. This is a position that someone takes who is experiencing an intense psychological reaction at differences of opinion, and that is what these leftists are experiencing when they hear us express our views. I know because until last year, I was a leftist. Leftists literally become deranged when they have to listen to right-wingers, because their views are required for the maintenance of their psychological integrity. Like one, big, mass cult religion. That's what leftism is today in America. All of their behavior follows from that.
Here's the scary part: leftists now control the institutions and want to impose these same views and this same psychological orientation on everyone else. Their mission is now to implement a mass, universally accepted cult in this country, in the same way that the Catholic Church once sought and nearly succeeded to make everyone in Europe a Christian. Leftists want to make the world Left in the same way that Catholics wanted to make the world Christian. Leftists will fight against heterodoxy with the same tenacity that Catholics once burned heretics, and leftists now have nearly the power they need to do so.
https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/1836400345318146143
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2nd post:
J.K. Rowling
An infallible recipe for poor mental health and lifelong unhappiness is believing that unless the entire world validates your self-perception, it hates you. If you move through life telling yourself that unless you can force other people to play along you'll 'be 'erased', if the slightest hint that another person doesn't see you the way you've labelled yourself feels like an attack on your very existence, your life will be spent in a state of miserable insecurity and fragility.
Would I like to 'let go' of my femininity? Willingly; femininity is the set of stereotypes imposed on women by men. Would it 'make me feel like dying'? Of course it wouldn't.
Vulnerable young people are being harmed by your kind of hyperbolic language, which promotes the lie about the inevitability of suicide among the gender-questioning unless they're given often irreversible medical interventions. Rhetoric like this flies in the face of everything we know about mitigating suicide risk among those with mental health issues and it's particularly gruesome when done by self-congratulatory people on Twitter whose banner picture is 'be kind'.
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Blackwell Smith
20h ·
I got stuck in South Carolina this weekend. I got news for y’all a cashless society will fall apart without electricity. It gets weird fast. Hotels couldn’t even give me room. They couldn’t even make keys or check the reservation I made online. At the exact time when people needed them the most. I will never leave town without cash. I have a new respect for preppers. They aren’t crazy they are prepared.
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This makes me realize I need to have a decent amount of cash stashed in the truck.
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This makes me realize I need to have a decent amount of cash stashed in the truck.
Large, medium and small bills for exact change.
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This makes me realize I need to have a decent amount of cash stashed in the truck.
Large, medium and small bills for exact change.
While ammunition makes for fine trade goods, if you like investing in metals....
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George Shultz, secretary of state under President Reagan, did get it, and he explained it succinctly: “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.”
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While ammunition makes for fine trade goods, if you like investing in metals..
I recently sold my old silver nickels dimes quarters and halves and dollars when silver was 22 to 23 . I started, like everyone else pulling these out of circulation 1965 when I was eight.
So held in a tool box for 59 yrs. I knew that would be the time to buy as silver is now over 30. I should have told everyone here to buy! :|
OTOH it was only 5 to 6 K worth of stuff.
If only I was older and had money I would have been going to banks and hoarding up in the 60s. Would have done like others - go to Vegas and gather as many silver dollars as I could fit in a rental truck :-)
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BELMONT CLUB: Excellence in the Service of Mediocrity. “The problem of controlling Elon is an example of the dilemma of mediocrity controlling talent. How can Kamala Harris, who, according to Senator Ted Budd, has not connected a single person to the internet ‘using the $42.45 billion allocated for the BEAD program,’ meaningfully supervise a man whose Starlink satellite constellation had 4 million users worldwide? It would be like putting the Detroit Public Schools in charge of Albert Einstein.”
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Jeffery Tucker on Harris:
I've paid far more attention to Kamala than I ever imagined I would with a presidential candidate, listening to her interviews, speeches, and so on.
I suspect that many people, even people who are her partisans, are realizing something quite shocking. It's this: she knows less about policy, news, existing public controversies, and even recent history, than most people who read X or NYT or even just listen to the news on radio or TV. For that matter, I suspect that just about any person on the street knows more.
It's like she hasn't really paid much attention to anything for years. Interviewers are trying their best to be kind to her, but even the slightest bit of push on what she knows turns up a big nothing. It's not that she is being cagey or clever. The trouble is that she truly does not know.
It's hard to understand why. It could be that she has, for most of her career, been able to outsource knowledge and understanding to others. She has always just been a smiling face, the socializer, the spouter of bromides, and gotten by with faking it. After a while, it probably doesn't feel like faking; it feels like this is the way the job is supposed to be. She has not known any other way.
Now she is expected to play the part of someone who knows some minimum something about a range of issues, and she simply cannot deal with it. What's remarkable is that her champions are as mortified by this as anyone.
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Well said.
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“I fear that Harris is every bit as vacuous behind the scenes as she seems to be on the public stage. I fear she will be tested early by a foreign adversary and stumble badly, whether it's in stopping Iran from building a nuclear weapon or China from blockading Taiwan or Russia from seizing a portion of a Baltic country. I fear she will capitulate too easily to her party's left flank, especially when it comes to identity politics, economic policy or polarizing cultural issues. I fear she'll have no domestic policy ideas that don't involve mindlessly expanding the role of government. I fear she'll surround herself with mediocre advisers, like her embarrassingly bad veep pick. I fear she won't muster the political will to curb mass migration. And I fear that a failed Harris presidency will do more to turbocharge the far right in this country than to diminish it.”
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@scottadamssays
I saw a clips today in which an MSNBC propagandist was asking how likely it was that five generals would lie about what Trump allegedly said behind closed doors.
Well...
51 Intel professionals lied about Hunter's laptop.
Hundreds of government and media pros lied about Russian Collusion
Thousands of government and media pros lied about the Fine People Hoax (and dozens of other Trump hoaxes).
Millions of medical professionals lied during the pandemic.
Millions of scientists are lying about the reliability of climate models.
Five lying generals isn't even a stretch.
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@scottadamssays
I saw a clips today in which an MSNBC propagandist was asking how likely it was that five generals would lie about what Trump allegedly said behind closed doors.
Well...
51 Intel professionals lied about Hunter's laptop.
Hundreds of government and media pros lied about Russian Collusion
Thousands of government and media pros lied about the Fine People Hoax (and dozens of other Trump hoaxes).
Millions of medical professionals lied during the pandemic.
Millions of scientists are lying about the reliability of climate models.
Five lying generals isn't even a stretch.
Well done!
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“Some 35 years after the collapse of the 20th century’s most rigorous experiment in the failure of central planning, the fall of the Soviet empire, and comparative success of the capitalist West, it is hard to fathom how we’ve got into this climate communist mess. It should be self-evident that the planet doesn’t have a thermostat, let alone one easily adjusted by national leaders ordering technology to improve through a cascade of plans lashed to a target. Decarbonisation will happen regardless and is likely to go faster by inventing better solutions funded from the proceeds from growth, or bottom-up innovation. Rather than five-year battery-powered tractor plans, in the context of mission-led state direction – the latest reinvention of the language of failure by top-down socialist planners.”
– Andy Mayer.
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Wretchard T. Cat:
The speed and relative comprehensiveness at which the main outposts of a bureaucratic empire have been overrun means that journalists and historians will be able to examine its ruins the way Hiram Bingham came upon Machu Picchu in 1911.
The Lost Empire of the Woke like every civilization before and since, had its dungeons, hieroglyphics, its cosmic projects, secret tunnels and networks. They may not have called them that but that's what they were. Like Bingham, the intruders will wander among them in wonder.
The Woke project was nothing if not an empire of the mind. It had a well developed system of beliefs, a world view, even a program of terraforming. It had billions in funding and came within an ace of establishing itself as orthodoxy. Of course it left its stamp in the ruins.
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@Anc_Aesthetics
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What we’re finding out in real time is the entire modern left is just smoke and mirrors.
There is no left wing voter base, all the elections are rigged and fake, all the liberal media outlets have no audience and are kept alive by USAID funding. All their politicians and political pundits are paid by USAID to say what the government wants.
The whole thing was a house of cards.
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2nd post:
@Indian_Bronson
What’s happening in America is roughly equivalent to the yearbook committee and theater kid types getting rocked by a football team and chess club alliance.
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It seems appropriate to close this massive post with a quote often attributed to Lenin (although nobody knows for sure):
There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.
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"I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according
to various 'party lines.'"
George Orwell