Popping Intellectual Zits

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So this week, while commenting on Mad Genius Club, I realized something odd about this ideological fight we’re engaged in: It’s largely one sided. I mean, we have lately bestirred ourselves to respond, but only because we realized utter silence and ignoring them has lost us a lot of ground.

However, even now we engage half heartedly.

If I wanted to, I could spend the entire week, every day, pounding on the idiocies emanating from the left side of the isle. The Genius of the Guardian, for instance, is still whining about how Larry tried to rig the Hugos. He’s also saying there’s no proof that the SJWs ever rigged anything. (Rolls eyes.) The irrationality in that tweet and the repetition of comfort-blanket aphorisms that have been disproven could fill entire notebooks.

But I am only mentioning it, because someone mentioned it to me. In the same way, I heard that some people got all bent out of shape by my post indicating that mollycoddling women and demanding more of men is not good for women, nor men, nor society.

That’s fine. I didn’t bother going to their page, because what are they going to say? They’re going to call me mysoginist or perhaps even racist and definitely evil. But I’ve heard it all a million times before, and it wouldn’t be engaging what I said, or even who I am, but an imaginary enemy, someone that the media assures them everyone who disagrees with them is: fanatical religious, ill-educated, fearing the change in the course of “progress” which is what they call anything they want to happen.

I know Larry Correia engages them on Twitter – sometimes – and other people on our side spend considerable time disproving their greater insanity. Now and then we all write about them, but then we forget and write about other things.

However, they write about us all.the.time. More importantly, they read us ALL the time. Every comment.

My first thought about this was – and this is paraphrased, because I can’t find the precise book and quote – PJ O’Rourke’s view on Arabs vs. the US. After being told, in the same breath, that someone hated the US and was waiting for a student visa, he said something like: they hate us and they love us. We are a ravishing 20 year old girl and they’re a pimply 13 year old boy. They want to punish us and they want to have us. Every minute of their waking lives is filled with thoughts of us, and they can’t stand that we rarely give them any thought at all.

The loves part might seem odd, but the more I turned this idea in my head, the more it made sense, in the same way the Arabs “love” the US. They want to live here and make us like them. It’s the love of an abusive spouse who wants to control you.

In the same way, we know how the left acts about minority and women who don’t toe the line. They “love” us in the abstract and can’t imagine why we will not let them “love” us for our own good. (Gee, no wonder these people inflate rape statistics in colleges. This is their idea of love and support.)

Further, like a 20 year old woman has ideas an concerns beyond the realm of a 13 year old boy, we have ideas and concerns beyond them. Once we’d exploded the Marxist lies, a whole world was open to us that those clinging to the safe “narrative” they were taught and afraid of their peers derision can’t imagine.

Further, just like most Arab societies are prisoners of the dictates of Islam that retard scientific (and other) development, these people are prisoners of dictates, such as the hierarchy of victims, which neither allow them to think nor to create freely. And they can’t imagine why or how we do what we do? Can’t we understand this makes us “apostates” from polite society? How can we NOT care?

We fascinate them. More importantly, we disquiet them. Allow themselves to think about our experiences, thoughts and education that brought us into opposition with them, and their way might start to seem less than inevitable, less than revealed truth, and just a set of not particularly coherent syllogisms they were taught. Allow themselves to think about it, and they might come to believe as we do, and then they’ll be apostates and isolated by all “good” people.

So they peruse every post and every comment and loudly denounce it in their sites, not because the post and comments matter that much (why would they matter if they were so sure of their ideas?) but because this ritual denunciation, which always centers on a disproportionate shunning of everything we are, allows them to calm their fears and to stop thinking. They pronounce the magical incantation: “Racis” “Sexis” “Nazi” “evil” and suddenly they’re on the side of the good people again, and averted the fear that they might unknowingly trip over the invisible line and become one of us.

This is why they intone ritual condemnations from their “voices” in the media and blogsphere, even when they make no rational sense: “binders full of women” “tried to buy the Hugos” etc, etc, etc.

But they have to come back and keep denouncing us, because we’re not kowtowing, which they’ve been told will automatically happen when people are exposed to their “inevitable” truths. We insist on committing bad-thought, and force the poor darlings to keep denouncing us, just to keep themselves sane.

And that – ladies and gentlemen – is the amount of thought I’m willing to give them for the month. Because the truth is I have a life beyond their concerns. I have friends, family, work, and I can go weeks at a time without thinking of their desperate need to be noticed.

We don’t have to surround our opponents in incantations to keep the bad-think away. I couldn’t care less what they think and believe, and if they left us alone and didn’t try to interfere with our ability to earn a living; or to slander us personally, I could probably go entire years without mentioning them. (As is I don’t read their blogs or twitter feeds, and largely delete their spam unread.) If they didn’t make scientists cry, we’d never give them a second thought.

Which of course is why they must keep throwing their tantrums, in a vain effort to get us to submit to their “claims” on us.

Because tantrums and obsession are ever so much more fun than metaphorically speaking buying Clearasil, having good grades in school, and eventually becoming a young man some woman might be interested in.

Which is why in the end we win, they lose. Because we have lives, skills and goals beyond “look at me, look at me.”

Be not afraid.

 

431 thoughts on “Popping Intellectual Zits”

  1. They read us, but they don’t READ us. *Skim until Offended* “She Said Retard! That’s offensive to the Developmentally disabled!” (But Trig Palin should have been aborted) “Well, she also insulted Muslims, she must be a Bigoted Christian!”

    Thus they prove to themselves that they don’t have to listen to you, but they’ll keep reading, looking for more out of context “ammo” (Even though they hate guns).

  2. I’m of two minds here. Yes, Millions for defense, but not one red cent for tribute. . .

    BUT. . . every moment the SJWs spend obsessing on us, is a moment they cannot be doing effective action against us. And, on the flip side, since they never give up, it wastes time we could be doing something effective.

    Still Defense has the virtue of exposing the idiocy of the SJWs to the uninvolved. So it’s a recruiting tool, of sorts, to get more people to think. (I’d say think OUR way, but the opposition doesn’t really do cogitation, It’s more like masturbation, but that’s a discussion for another day. . .)

    1. BUT. . . every moment the SJWs spend obsessing on us, is a moment they cannot be doing effective action against us.

      The problem with that statement is that there are still tons of easily-swayed people out there, and the maniacal howlings from the Left will convince many of them how Eeeeeeevil we are. It’s kind of a conundrum, really. Spend time answering their tantrums, and risk violating the premise of not wrestling with the pig, or write them off and don’t give any kind of response that might convince some of those who would otherwise be drawn in by their one-sided arguments that maybe the accusations aren’t true, thereby losing some potential allies, once they shook off the blinders and started to think for themselves.

      1. Actually, we’re getting though fine by just being productive. Ask yourself why the economy is FINALLY improving. . . .and then look at the cost of a gallon of gas. Here in Virginia, the gas tax went up 5 cents a gallon as of yesterday. And at my USUAL gas station, it was STILL 3 cents lower than when I filled up on Monday. . . .

        The so-called Affordable Care Act is also doing our work for us.

        And then there’s this little gem, seen on FreeRepublic:

        “I’d like to thank the TSA for protecting our country by stealing my daughters makeup remover, hair products, and throwing all of her packed clothes back into her suitcase like a retarded monkey would. She is 17 and asked why they did that. She stopped herself and said “never mind , it’s government people doing their stupid crap .”.

        I was so proud of her and really want to thank the TSA thief by helping her see the true face of government employees.”

        In the final analysis, all we REALLY have to do is keep on keeping on. Goobermensclerosis will kill itself off. . .by sheer overreach.

      2. If your dam is fainting, you should have an engineer look at it before it collapses entirely! 🙂

        1. Or a beaver. You can have ’em free if Fish and Game will let you take ’em. (Why the little rodents can’t eat the wild trees on the bank of the creek, but have to come a hundred feet up to get the tasty and expensive fruit trees . . .)

  4. I tend to treat them like flies. Mostly they stay outside and the screened windows prevent their entrance. I hear them buzzing, but they are easy to ignore.
    And occasionally one gets inside. That’s when the fly swatter comes out. A flick of the wrist, a damp paper towel, and their entire existence is once again below my attention.
    No sense going on a rampage about a pest until it gets up close. Then swat ’em.

      1. Somebody help me out here. I totally have this awesome metaphor to make about liberals eating fecal matter and in possession of the mental ability of inbred flies and I just can’t work out the verbiage. Anyone who can complete this for me wins one cool point exchangeable for absolutely nothing.

  5. The phrase “Living rent free in their brains” comes to mind.

    As others have commented, to the extent that happens with hard targets like us, they’re “off the streets” and not otherwise causing trouble.

  6. Was anyone else surprised that a certain talentless troll happened to be a creepy stalker too?

    1. Y’know the thing is, there’s so many talentless trolls out there who’ve benighted us with their presence, that I have to ask “Which one?” or “Did you mean all of them?” It seems to be a defining trait with the SJWs and glitteries.

            1. If you shut off half your brain and direct it to mindless herd-following and hatred, obviously it would tend to have some effect on one’s creativity. A few people are creative enough to overcome that artificial limitation on their brains, but not many.

              Another example of how liberals eat their own and cannibalize themselves.

            2. Funny enough, I encountered warnings about the SJW creepy stalkers and rapist in the comments on an article about the rape culture.

                1. I tried to find it, but it was a few years ago at a site I don’t frequent, following a link meander.

            3. Hey there, just a minute…

              Oh. Wait. Never mind, I thought you were disparaging us left-handed types.

              Moving on now…

              1. …I was in the midst of blowing my nose when I read that. It’s quite clear now, thank you. XD

                Has there been a dearth of punnage to punt about over the holidays? Rhys has been unleashing them at random throughout the day, and I think us Huns have missed the randomly flying carp.

  8. Sarah’s summarized the entire reason for Clamps’ stalking me for *looks at calendar* almost 6 years now. Especially about the abusive twisted ‘love/hate/sex/control’ thing. *shudder*.

    Funnily enough I saw your new post right after updating the sticky (unlike how LJ did it, I can see the day-to-day now, so I spend even less time paying attention to looking) and frankly am unsurprised that the descriptions of abusive partner/spouse/jilted lover keep cropping up in the descriptions of these people. What surprises me is how it’s these people who are able to howl and scream about the ‘rape culture’ narrative, when they themselves are the pathological abusers, the virtual and not so virtual rapists, the ones who are completely and totally okay with the violation of the ‘other’ that they’ve declared their enemy.

    The fact is, every time I poke my head to see what’s all the latest bunch of stupidity about (Huffpo? Really? The Rock? I know the man is an awesome nerd, but did you really just sink into the high school level of .. oh wait never mind I thought for five seconds Huffpo was run by actual adults, not cliquish emotional and mental teenagers) I’m always, always reminded of high school. How it was TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE to the ‘popular’ groups that there was SOMEONE THERE who just didn’t give a shit about what they felt was important. That someone out there didn’t think they were the center of their respective universe and THUS NEEDED TO BE SOCIALLY ELIMINATED… WHY AREN’T they CARING?!!!!!!!!!!!!1

    *shakes head*

    Flaming stupid; it’s basically like they never grew up and are now throwing giant tantrums that the adults are going ¬_¬;;; at their antics, and taking them even less seriously than before. Resulting in more tantrums and escalation.

    Unfortunately for us, they’re ‘aged’ adult, even though they don’t behave like adults. I sometimes wonder if there wasn’t a darned good reason for the rites of passage / rites to adulthood. On the other hand, they can suffer the consequences of nominal adulthood as well, so it seems a bit of a tradeoff.

    1. That’s among the things that irritates me more than almost anything else: teen behavior, teen morals in people who should have been mature way past when. I, damn it, like adults. Adults can make plenty of mistakes and act like idiots too, but at least they try to act as, well, adults. Which includes admitting that they can be wrong too. Teens are smugly sure they know everything and are the ones in the right. They are the ones who most often try to create utopias – if we all just did this or that… well guess what honey, that is something you can wait for the rest of your life, and your great great great something grandchildrens’ lives too, and it is not going to happen so daydream on but don’t pester the grown ups who are actually trying to find solutions which might work because they take into account things like, you know, facts and reality.

      And sometimes it does seem that the youth revolution of the 60’s and 70’s worked. The teens are now in control. Never mind that many of them are getting to retirement age or even past it, they are still teens. Teens who have mostly also raised the next generation of permanent teens.

      Bah! (And I didn’t get this opinion only around now when I’m well into middle age myself. I started to get it when I was in my 20’s, and wondering when half of my age mates or people a bit older than me would start to behave like, well, adults… way too many didn’t).

      1. That’s what just makes me want to reach out and shake these people. Their 18-21 y.o. brains are chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ” and “Hey hey, ho ho, racist laws have got to go” as they toddle along Main Street with canes and walkers, or calling out of the windows of their government offices and urging people to “stick it to the man.” I have visions of a neurologist doing a cranial MRI on and finding nothing but beads and tie-dye. Or a red bandana embroidered with the hammer and sickle.

    2. You know, that’s funny what you say about high school. It is exactly what I remember, too. Everybody hated me because I didn’t give a crap about what they were doing. I thought Everybody hated me, so I didn’t waste my time. YET… when it came time for yearbooks, both people I thought hated me, AND people I thought didn’t care were insistent on getting my John Hancock. Some of the beautiful popular people were complaining that I had more signatures than they did. Furthermore, I never used a canned message. They shared them, reading everything I wrote. Because I was totally honest without being a jerk about it.

      So I asked one of my most vociferous critics, “Why bother getting my signature?” He said, “Are you kidding? You went through this whole morass without giving a crap or caving to pressure. That is epic whether we like you or not. Congratulations.”

      Even if we don’t appear to benefit from it now, I suspect folks will notice sooner or later. So many have no idea why we have principles or axioms– all they see is that they are onerous to live up to and might precipitate “oppression” or “being judgemental”. But they have a purpose, and will cut through the static like socratic reason though swirling clouds of sophistry. So pull out and polish your stubborn. You are going to need it.

      1. Wow, at least your detractors were self-aware enough to recognize you and your being an epically stubborn person. Cool ^^ Personally, I have no intention of changing and anyone who’s been watching my updates on the Andrew P. Marston / Clamps stalker thread can attest at my sheer refusal to cave into to harassment and bullying – especially as it doesn’t take much effort on my part. My page is what crops up if anyone googles ‘yamamanama’ and ‘stalker’ – to the point that Clamps himself uses ‘yama’ and ‘vox day’ as his search string. (No joke. it’s the latest update too.)

    3. I don’t know who’s paying for it, but there’s a 12th man (Seahawk fanboy group name– think like Browncoats but football) billboard about “Friends don’t let friends bully.”

      Hello, did anybody consider that “bullying” as they define it is social pressure, so telling a bunch of highly enthusiastic people to apply social pressure to influence the behavior of others is….?

      Oh, booger it; I already horrify people by pointing out when they are bulling over others, and then they get to have vapors over my calling them on their bullying, which at least is a lot more concrete than what they were going on before…..

      1. But Foxfier, when the “Good People” do something, It’s OK.

        It’s when the “Bad People” do the same thing that’s it’s Bad! [Sarcasm]

        2. You’re just using the wrong face. And perhaps if you swung more from the shoulder. Kiai is good, too.

      3. What really annoys me is people who use the government to bully others. That’s REAL bullying. Most of them are, of course, liberals, leftists, and progressives.

      2. Eh, ‘list of people to unfollow for being OH SO BOOOOOOOOOOORING they need to entertain meeee mooooarrr’ more or less. On the other hand, they also have Obama on the unfollow… Still, it’s more the tone of the High School Populars saying “shun these people” that had me shaking my head. (having looked at The Rock’s twitter feed, the guy’s relentlessly positive and upbeat most of the time so I can TOTALLY see why the gloommongers don’t like him…)

        1. Wow, that’s even more pathetic. Usually they go for the “you’re so gay” attack, especially if it’s a very masculine male, but basically “you’re boring”?

          For a guy who not only makes me grin in memory from stuff he actually did, but who is so delightfully over the top that I’m setting here trying not to bellow: “THE BOULDER is not going to ENGAGE with the worthless rag! THE BOULDER is now going to Twitter to look this up!”

          1. I like the guy. He’s delightful and he clearly loves his work and has fun. No pretensions required – and the fact that he’s such a massively epic gamer nerd is absolutely endearing. He doesn’t mind taking on silly roles or his character dying horrible, often stupid deaths, and he has no problems with self-depreciation to bring out a smile. (It’s one of the reasons why I also like Nickelback. Check out their tropes page and the official video for This Afternoon. I *laughed*, and it’s such a kick-back song.)

    5. You probably know already, Vox is preparing a case to label Clamps a internet stalker and present it for charges, criminal I think. He was looking for victims to help fill the docket. If you haven’t already, you might give him some more ammo. I think he is going to enjoy whacking a troll.

      1. I know. I’ve had to start commenting on Vox’s blog to establish my identity during a spate of Clamps’ desperate attempts to abuse a flaw in Blogger’s comment capability that allowed him to pretend he was other people. I posted saying that I would re-post screenshots of my own comments for other people to reference as authentication of being me on the Affsdiary forums, since that’s someplace that Clampsy can’t pretend to be someone else on or mess with in any way.

        He still tried, like the fucking moron that he is. Since that didn’t work, the flaming idiot took to twitter screeching and howling about how he’s sooooo victimized and how Vox is ‘making things up.’ Clamps seems to also think I’m Vox’s BFF even though I tend to run into Vox’s blog only because Clamps insists on bringing me up over there, or one of the Dread Ilk brings up how Clamps has been stalking me. Well, ok, the other reason is when someone links something interesting on Vox’s blog.

        In the meantime, Clamps has been soulfoully staring at my webpage all through the holidays, and I’ve the screenshots of his IP and visits to prove that. BUT HE ISN’T OBSESSED WITH ME AND DOESN’T CARE PINKY SWEAAARS! e_e

  9. Sarah, the problem is that no matter how many times we point out that reality doesn’t match their narrative, they won’t stop repeating the lies. The “one in five” college rape myth has been debunked by even the DoJ; doesn’t matter. They will still use it to try and pass laws and regulations or kick men out of school.

    It isn’t just us who have lives beyond their concerns; everyone who isn’t them does. The problem is that every time one of our fellow citizens pops his head up for a look around, the lies of the Left are waiting for them. Someone has to be there to call them on it, and I don’t have a fast solution on how to do that efficiently and still be legal.

    2. The men have already pretty much left. At this point, unless you are going for an engineering degree or the sciences, the university is not someplace a man wants to be.

      1. And yet anyone in pursuit of a solid STEM degree still must squander precious resources for classes who’s sole purpose is to justify bloated liberal arts departments. Somewhere between a third and a half of college credits, at least at the undergrad level, have absolutely no purpose other than to produce what college administrators refer to as “well rounded” graduates.
        I wait impatiently for that glorious day when the college bubble bursts wide open and so many campuses of glorified extended high school crumble of their own weight in tuition.

        1. …squander precious resources…

          Oh, yeah. This right here. The money wasted…

          The most infuriating part? For me, at least, it’s that they’re failing in any objective sense to produce this “well-rounded” graduate. They’ve created check-box classes that suck up money but do nothing to spark interest or broaden knowledge.

          When you’re trying to get STEM students interested in your “broader” studies you might want to be able to point to objective success…

          1. The most infuriating part? For me, at least, it’s that they’re failing in any objective sense to produce this “well-rounded” graduate. They’ve created check-box classes that suck up money but do nothing to spark interest or broaden knowledge.
            They have their own definitions and “Well Rounded” in true speak is actually narrow minded and, of course, totally in their manner of thought. They actually work hard not to allow true well rounded knowledge, because it leads to thought and the kind of learning that tends to lead to NOT thinking their preferred thoughts

            1. Yep. My time in Big City College turned me rather more classically liberal (conservative, in today’s connotation) and against the racist, sexist, bully-pulpit bullcrap I had to put up with from class lecturers. This did not help ease my way through college at all, but it did make it much easier to identify when someone in a position of authority, or anyone really, is closed to reasonable discourse.

              1. Yeah, they consider their yelling at us to shut the F up as being reasonable discourse. They consider well reasoned arguments with facts and logic as personal attacks.

        2. Looking back at my college time, of the classes that were not taught in the Science and Math building, there was 1 history class, 3 or 4 Psych classes, a CAD class, and my 1 hour Trap and Skeet PE class that weren’t complete and utter wastes of my time. So, something like 19 credit hours out of the 60-80 that weren’t required by my majors. Actually, you can drop the 12 Psych hours from that since that was one of my majors as well, so 7 credit hours out of the 60-80 “general studies” hours. I padded as many of those general credits as I could with math and science classes.

        3. Liberal Arts are important. Problem being that it’s not what you get in the intro level classes. I thank my parents every time I think about all the stuff I tested out of. I got to take 300/400 courses to make up my general studies.
          I think we’re losing something important if our STEM students aren’t learning history, literature, art, etc., quite possibly the key to remaining or re-becoming a functional republic. There’s this idea floating around that all the geeky (smart) kids should go STEM and leave the running of things to those who know better. I think that needs to be squashed.

          1. When I was in college, way back in the Dark Ages of the early ’90s, the engineering students were the ones taking humanities courses for fun. Most engineers, oddly, realize there’s more to life than their profession.

            Now… We never did see a humanities major taking a high-level engineering class…

            1. Anthropology degree here. I was one of the rare ones who took programming and maths courses for fun. Actually, I was the *only* one I know of that did, which sort of proves your point (graduated in ’03).

              2. History here, only one to take the ecosystems biology “weeder” course (heavy on physics, biochem, genetics, and stats) and a fluvial restoration (rebuilding rivers) engineering course. Great fun, nice to get out of the department, but maaann, that ecosystems class kicked my tail from the Gulf of Mexico to Winnipeg and back.

                  1. Hmm, I may pass the word to the Latin teachers at St. Angus-in-the-Grass. We use the Cambridge and other book series (some of which predate my taking HS Latin in the 1980s.

            2. Most of us don’t have the math background for the high level engineering class. I did take a physics for poets class and far too many biology classes to be considered healthy, however.

          2. The problem is that even if they take history etc classes, they are not being taught history etc. Rather, in all too many cases, they are being taught politically correct lies.

          3. The way to fix that would be to teach actual well-rounded stuff in basic school, not add it on to college.

            Instead the same mess that’s inflicted in high school get doubled in college.

            1. I’ve long said that the best way to kill Common Core is to co-opt it. Could you imagine the squealing if the DoEd budget for 2016 came with a rider requiring Common Core to teach the failures and evils of socialism, basic statistics to ID propaganda, and – since roughly half of the high school seniors are or will be part of the unorganized militia – basic weapons handling and marksmanship for AR rifles and M9 handguns?

              Add in language requiring federal education disbursements go to districts with vouchers or directly to parents and dare Obama to veto it.

          4. It’s not that we aren’t learning it, it is that they are teaching the same thing I was taught the previous 13 years in grades K-12! My Ancient & Medieval History class was the only history class in college that wasn’t a waste of time, and that was because she actually taught us and wasn’t afraid to tell us how full of crap (and why they were) the authors of the text book were…She could also argue both sides of any debate you wanted to have so well you were never sure what her real opinion was! Had an english class on sci-fi and fantasy lit. Spent most of our time talking about greek mythology (the only sci-fi in that class was the books I was reading on my own). I could have passed the class just showing up for the tests, because I knew more than anyone else in it of Greek mythology just because I was a rabid fan of the Hercules and Xena TV shows! And we know how accurate they were! That’s the level of financial waste we’re talking about.

            1. So wait – I’m not the only one who looks at some liberal arguing with me thinking “I could argue your side far better than this??”

              1. *points around here* About a quarter of the arguments we have are on our own side, for (what one side says) are piss poor things to build an argument on. Not that their conclusion is wrong, or their goal, but how they get there.

                The Left doesn’t allow that same kind of thing, so of course they’re going to have a LOT of people who make really, really cruddy arguments.

                My mom tried to get the (apparently Catholic– Devil’s Advocate is an actual Church job, after all) idea that if you can’t argue against a thing, you don’t know enough to argue for it into my head. In some cases the other side’s points are either based in a totally foreign measure of what’s important, on falsehoods, or are just really weak, but one should still know what they are…..

                1. Speaking of being able to argue the other side, a number of years ago I was teaching a small college science class of 18 students. Halfway through I tossed the crappy lab manual and assigned students to teams to argue the social impacts of three controversial science topics in debates. They had a month to prepare. Three young ladies, my best students, said they wanted to argue the affirmative in using human cloning for medical research since they didn’t support that and wanted to understand the other side. A week before they were scheduled to debate, these students came to me and said they hadn’t realized some of the medical aspects of human cloning and were reconsidering their original positions.

                  1. Nobody had ever explained to them that human experimentation is really, really useful?

                    What, did they think folks had done it for giggles, or being Just That Evil or something?

                    *headdesk* And that is why so many folks start twitching when folks use the “because they’re evil” point and leave it there. It may be true, but there’s usually a lot more important reasons, important because they carry over…..

              2. The only Leftoid I have met who could argue both sides equally well was a teacher I had. Plenty of times we get people showing that leftoids don’t have a clue as to what the rest of us really think, yet conservatives and libertarians for the most part totally understand the thinking of those we oppose, and that is for the greater part WHY we oppose them.

                1. Plus, we also understand that their good intentions are irrelevant. What matters is how things actually unfold, rather than how they wish they would.

                  After all, if wishes were horses, we’d all be eating steak.

            2. I’m going to school right now (at a CA community college) and am trying to transfer to a State college. Last semester, the only class I even used the book for was my statistics class. That one kicked my a**. I thought the Business Law class would be hard, but I literally did not open the book all semester.

              Outside of the math, economics, and accounting classes, I’ve been breezing through them with almost no effort. These classes are wasting my time, but I need the sheepskin so I can start the process of becoming a CPA. At least by going the CC rout, I am getting most of the stupid requirements out of the way as cheaply as possible.

          5. The coursework called “General Education for Engineering” back when I dodged Triceratops on my way to university classes here in CA was very heavily centered on intro courses with extremely heavy writing loads. I had a hard enough time hitting my “college wall” that without testing out of all lower division English classes I’m not sure I would have made it through. Eventually, though, I figured out a set of standard tricks that all the humanities class instructors wanted to see performed in papers, managed to get at least a little sleep, plus I got enough year-seniority that I no longer got stuck with 6:30am Calculus lectures, so I found my stride and acheived the high and holy honor of my Bachelor of Science degree.

            But from the new grads I’ve participated in interview panels for here in Silicon Valley, even with all the subsequent upward creep of General Ed. requirements reported by friends who have kids in college, I have to basically conclude that the STEM BSc degree is now devalued to basically the equivalent of a High School Diploma or GED back when dinosaurs and Ronald Reagan roamed the Earth.

            I just don’t see any positive end result of what is now just about the third generation of kids going through college under a post-expanded-General-Ed requirements curricula, in either STEM or where all the crash-and-burn Engineering majors went back in my day, the Business School (which also had the expanded GE requirements).

            It just doesn’t seem to be actually acheiving anything out here in the real world.

          6. In college, late 60s – early 70s:

            The physics, chem/bio/pre-med students typically took music, art and literature classes for fun. I don’t recall any liberal arts majors taking physics, chemistry or math courses for fun, except for a poly-sci major who kept taking more upper-division math. Also, the rock-climbing and mountaineering enthusiasts were overwhelmingly STEM majors there.

            1. One of the profs at Flat State had a double MA in history and mathamatics/logic. Yes, he did go to a Jesuit high school and undergrad college, why do you ask?

            1. It was where I got my BA, and all the IT majors were required to take it. When I went back 10 years later for my MBA, it was no longer a requirement… which was a Bad Thing for the quality of IT graduate.

        4. and conversely, Art School kids complain when being forced to take two whole science classes because it is ‘not related to their major’.

          1. Only 2 science classes? I had to take 4, and 2 of them had to have labs.
            I graduated in ’89.

          2. I began college in the early ’80s thinking I was going to be a Computer Science major. (I was interested in computers, and I thought that college= training for a job.) So I took programming classes in 6502 Assembler and Pascal, and did OK….but first semester Calculus 112 kicked my heinie pretty hard. Oh, I passed it with C+, but only because my roommate (a math major) and I were in the same class, and we would study together. I looked at Calculus 113, the weeder course, and decided that I wasn’t really good enough at this to spend the money on it. I didn’t think that a Computer Science major with average (or below average) grades was going to have a lot of job offers. So I eventually became a Humanities major (and the job offers just started rolling in…bwahahah!). So I’m one of the few Humanities majors I know of who actually took a few courses in the STEM world. I don’t regret the experience–it was part of an actual well-rounded education, after all!

        5. Actually, I rather enjoyed my “well-rounded” classes (except, of course, the time required, since every professor seemed to think that his was the only class you were taking, and 60-80 hours per week of out-of-class work was a pain). But, then again, this was while today’s professors were just getting started in the “revolution, man” business. If the required liberal arts classes today were to become something other than indoctrination, we might get back to the day when there really was a difference between a graduate of an accredited college and the DeVry Institute.

    3. My what sharp horns on that dilemma. In time, they may come to see undermining the legitimacy of the law as a tactical error. Briefly.

  10. “They love us and they hate us” may be too kind, Sarah. Seems to me they just want to kill us and take our stuff.

    Also seems to me that a large number of the SJWs are seriously bipolar. Internet comments are a twitch for them. Never get between a nut and his twitch, I always say. ~:)

    1. I would just point out that she said that was her first thought on the subject. A couple of paragraphs later, she changed it to “loving” us in the abstract, where they are like the abusive spouse who, when their S.O. doesn’t act the way they think they should, tries to force them into the mold that they have constructed in their minds, by any means necessary.

      1. No. I think it’s borderline personality disorder writ large. Bipolar is too predictable.

            1. Yes, I’m bipolar, and no, it isn’t predictable. Many RPGs I’ve run , i made modified rules for it because most of them make the assumption you are either up, or down, with no potential for some normality in between.

                1. Yes, that’s my point, many people assume that you’re always ‘up’ or ‘down’… and that many of us aren’t used to compartmentalizing and controlling minor ups and downs.

                  1. …many people assume that you’re always ‘up’ or ‘down…

                    There are so many things that I’m finding out in recent years (about the last 10 years or so) that other people think. No WONDER I never understood them. Bipolar runs the gamut. It’s a staticky sine wave, not a square wave. Sheesh.

                    1. [synthnerd] It can also be a saw wave, a sheared sine, and various filtered waveforms including forms of noise. [/synthnerd]

                    2. Individual variation.

                      Saying even staticky sine wave implies too much regularity, too much certainty.

                      a) It is chemical and biological, not purely electrical b) Even accounting for medication levels, a person may not have any particularly noticeable pattern. c) Exactly what chemistry is poorly regulated differs from person to person. d) Saying up and down obscures that the extremes can damage the brain in a way that worsens problems. Note not must or in all cases.

                      The only certainty is going one way builds a concentration, and maybe a charge. It cannot always keep going that way forever. That condition cannot be satisfied in a living human.

                    3. Amen– it’s amazing how much stuff I thought that everyone knew is, apparently, obscure– or actually thought to be false. What the hey!?

              2. Paraphrase Mary’s thought about alignment taking issues we’ve broken our hearts over for thousands of years, and simplifying it to paste.

                ‘Up’ and ‘down’ don’t exactly exactly map to ‘happy’ and ‘sad’. I wouldn’t know how to describe them to someone who doesn’t know.

                When the brain works normally, there is feed back that moderates fluctuations in the chemistry. Bipolar has some mechanism or another broke. Saying a sinusoid rather than a straight line might be an example, but is not a simplification because the individual variation is so great.

                I don’t like the ‘SJW because bipolar’ argument. I think it doesn’t credit the bipolars that don’t do that sort of crud.

                There are good and bad ways to manage bipolar. Best practice is very challenging, and difficult.

          2. I’d suggest that anyone who thinks bipolar is predictable has not spent years wondering if things will be calm enough to scrape together the nerve to get something done.

            Either that or works with prisoners in a place with a severe PCP problem, extremely restrictive ROE, and courts that view hard drugs as a victimless crime not worth keeping in prison.

          1. “Tainted love/OOOh Tainted love . . .”
            Touch me baby…..
            but not there
            or there
            or like that

      1. They seem mostly Borderline to me. Always insisting that the reality in their minds is the only true reality, and always angry when Reality gives them a full body check.

        2. If I recall, “borderline” and the similar cluster-B disorders are basically “arrested development” – still act like a child, with a child’s sense of “other people” not being terribly real, and anything justified to salve one’s own feelings.

          They’ve just learned to put on a mostly adult mask until the right type of disconnect between their desired worldview and reality occurs, or they realize someone has seen behind the mask.

          2. Dgarsys I think you’ve hit it on the head. earlier TXRed and pohljalainen were comparing them to 14-21 year not fully developped personalities (although to my taste this is a severe slight to most folks in that age group 🙂 ). The left have avoided growing up. That’s why they love big government;. Its a parent figure they defer to for their needs. Similarly it’s why they love the Ivory Tower types. Again an authority that they can turn their morals over to so they know right from wrong without having to think or use their own G*d given conscience. That’s the source of the Love/hate relationship with the right. All kids want the neat advantages/rights of being an adult, what is terrifying is we on the right say to them ” Look here is the responsibility that goes with that right”. And that sends them screaming back to the corner howling ‘No, I won’t, I Hate you!” like a three year old gone berserk.

            An example of this is the mess that is affirmative consent. There’s an immense treasure there (sexuality) that they want. What they don’t want to acknowledge is the responsibility of the act, both in the reproductive sense and the emotional sense. They just scream like a 3 year old that its not fair that the can’t have all they candy want without any “bad” things happening and we’re mean to tell them otherwise.

            If they were a 3 year old I’d recommend a time out, or for a particularly rebellious one a short application of the hand to a bare backside. I haven’t a clue what to do with a single adult let alone a society where 50%+ seem to have this affliction (given presidential voting in the last few elections).

            I appreciate our Hostess’ admonition to not give up, but sometimes I fear
            the light I see is not the end of the tunnel but an oncoming train. It’s like we’re stuck in a version of the “Marching Morons” but the problem isn’t intellect its maturity, and only some of us actually became adults.

    4. No, they want to enslave us so that there is more stuff for them to take. Of course since we are not the ones making the stuff (according to them) we justly get no credit for it, or renumeration (because sexism, racism).

      1. Or, to misappropriate a Mel Brooks line:
        “They are my people. They *love* me. *I* love them.” [pause for a beat]
        “Pull!” [raises shotgun and shoots peasant flying over head. Peasant screams]

    6. I have a friend from high school who has become quite the SJW in the past decade. He didn’t have a very good relationship at all with his father (who was absent for most of his childhood and teen years), and he became involved with a Quakeresque, highly liberal Christian community. He also suffered from clinical depression for many years. Lately I have begun to wonder if his SJW orientation was influenced by his father–he’s basically trying to be his Anti-Dad.

  11. The left hates the world, and cannot understand why anyone would object to their airy abstractions for reengineering reality. There’s a reason mass murder has followed leftist victories: Real human beings cannot live in the other-worldly realm leftists would create. Something has to be sacrificed when human beings cannot live under leftist rule, either the ideology or the subject population will have to go.

    1. It’s like the piece in the Wall Street Journal about high-rises being built so each apartment has it’s own balcony swimming pool. The left says “oohh, floating pool, that’s so neat! Where do I sign up?” The rest of us think, “engineering load, plumbing, what about wind storms, what about rain drainage, how do you keep it clean, what about birds . . .” and make note of the address so we don’t walk near there in heavy weather.

      1. Now, now. The plebes can worry about all that stuff.

        Oh, wait. The plebes are us, and their policies always have a tendency of getting rid of people like us, which tends to end badly.

        1. They also want you to have a car elevator up to your apartment, so you never have to get out of your car and use the elevator with the plebes.

          OTOH, this would mean you would have a stinky enclosed garage area right next to your apartment and pool. What’s the point? How would that even work? What would it be good for, unless you were moving a lot of boxes into your car or out of it?

          1. Well, of course, it wouldn’t be good for anything except bragging rights ( “I don’t even have to get in the elevator to get to my car! I can get in the car, start it, and let it warm up while I ride down to the street!” ).

            Nope, it’s not really good for anything, since they could more easily invest in powered carts that could go right up to the door of the apartment, be loaded, and then taken down a service elevator and driven to the car, if they really wanted to be going overboard. The cart would be far less weight to move up and down.

          3. The car elevator is right out of “I Will Fear No Evil” by Heinlein. It was needed for saftey not status. Eunice was killed when she used the passenger elevator instead because the car elevator could not handle the weight of her bosses car. If they are needed in real life it alarms and disgusts me.

      3. Oooh, maybe if the pools were relocated to the middle of the building? I’m picturing something involving really thick clear bottomed pools, and it couldn’t be too very high, but you’d be able to get at least partly real sun into the area around the pools, which could be supplemented into a greenhouse type atmosphere? It would still be a bear to build, but maybe incorporate domes into the entire thing, centered under the pool? Not sure what the design limits of the various clear building materials are.

        1. Turn the entire center column of the building into one pool with airlocks on each apartment’s transparent aluminum enclosed balcony.

          1. Waterproof the apartment envelope, then add a big honking valve near the front door. When you want to swim, open the valve.

            Oh, you’ll need a big honking drain and waterproof belongings and furniture too.

            Though actually, for the drain, I suppose you could just open a window.

            1. One of those designs already had the window built in, it was made of acrylic panels. Pop one of those babies loose and the water will carry any unlucky swimmer over the edge and down to the ground.

    2. There’s an even more basic reason mass murder follows Leftist revolution like a loyal dog;

      The Leftist Intellectuals may work for revolution, and expect to end up on top when it is done, but they are inevitably used by smart monsters like Stalin and Mao, and are among the very first to be liquidated.

      1. I brought this point up in a history class full of leftists once. I think it would have gone better if my best response to, “Well, if they execute us what do you think they’ll do to you?” would have been something more interesting than, “I’ll probably already be dead. I’m too old, fat and slow to survive the fight.”

        The other side of this is that leftists always think that “Well, they (Mao, Stalin, Pot, etc.) didn’t do it right. If they just did it the way we’d do it HERE….”

        Yup. When I think of how many of the historians in that room had failed to learn the lessons of history it makes me want to vomit.

  12. The problem with these people is that they believe everything is political. They’re unable to see anything without filtering it through the political lens. There’s a reason that I’m about to really get on their bad side when I release the first part of my serial next week, and that’s because I skewer them. They’ve pissed me off, and I’m not a fun guy to be around when you’ve pissed me off.

    Earlier today, I read this over at Townhall about the movie “American Sniper”:

    New York Times film critic A.O. Scott has indicted the film as political propaganda: “The politics of the Iraq war are entirely absent, which is a political statement in its own right,” he declared. “And though George W. Bush’s name is never invoked, ‘American Sniper’ can be seen as an expression of nostalgia for his Manichaean approach to foreign policy.”

    Now, I’m not a fan of the Iraq War. I didn’t support going in, and I didn’t support how it was fought when we did. That’s not what the movie was about, and apparently, that’s a freaking problem.

    I hate to break it to Scott there, but Chris Kyle wasn’t some guy who railed against the war. He was a guy who fought it. The fact that he’s not anti-war is a statement in and of itself? Really?

    Screw these people. I’ve got stories to write. 😀

    1. Oh, please, whatever you do DON’T screw these people. You don’t know where they’ve been. There’s no reason to believe they’ve stuck to the same species. If they are female they will inevitably claim they were raped, and that you owe them child support (and never mind that the DNA test shows the father was a baboon). No good can possibly cme of it.

      2. I think someobody reported the quote here some days ago, but do a search on “Don’t stick it in crazy…”

          1. Wise words, learned rather too late… Ah well. Good judgement comes from bad judgement, but do I have to make *all* the mistakes?

            *rueful chuckle*

    2. I still cannot fathom to this day why Iraq is not a US protectorate administered by a military governor and US companies are not busily pumping oil, refining it into finished products, and selling them to Europe at prices Russia cannot match. Or, if that was to hard, just turn the country over to Israel to run.
      Remind me now, didn’t we win? Twice? And now having left it better than we found it, it’s in danger of being lost again. This does not compute in my head.

      1. It’s because, no matter what the Left screeches and bleats, George W. Bush was not a Right-Wing radical. He was barely on the conservative side of the middle, and he decided that to appease the Dems, he had to fight a “kinder, gentler” war, rather than going in and ruthlessly getting the job done, then setting up a system that would eventually lead to a modern, decent system that would run itself, after the next generation grew up.

        2. That and to keep the left from – as much as possible, at least – screaming, “IMPERIALISM!” Frigging murdering incompetent idiots.

        3. Such a policy as you (and I) would’ve preferred would’ve required a multi-decadal commitment by our Federal government. What odds that the next (now current) Dem administration would’ve maintained said commitment?

        4. We actually did a fair amount of that, the getting the job done and setting up systems thing. There was some discussion of U.S. companies coming in and handling the oil fields, but I think that was short lived. I mean, the whole thing was about the oil, right? No blood for oil and all. So rather than bolster the stupidity they went other directions.

          My silly notion was to administer (and protect) the oil production and dump the profits back into Iraq where we could continue with the infrastructure improvements and school construction and…

          A few years of seeing the actual monetary benefit of all the oil money Saddam and his cronies had been sucking up — well, clean streets, fancy souks and new cars undercut a great deal of tension.

          However, media collusion was never going to allow the positive spin and went a long way toward never reporting the work that was being done. Constantly undermining the effort and the fickle will of the American people — tie this to political grandstanding by shallow children (who even now don’t really get what’s gone wrong, or that their chubby little fingers are the proximate cause) and there were mis-steps, then failures, then withdrawal.

          1. iirc they had an agreement for several companies to start helping them bring the oil back on line, but the leftoids screamed about it so a “more transparent” rebid was set up and the effing Chinese outbid everyone for the most part, so very little of the oil came our way. Of course, right now the chicoms are not getting as much as they wish out of there either.

        5. I’m of the opinion that we should be slow to go to war, but when we do, we should smite our enemies like the fiery hand of God facepalming their entire military.

        6. I don’t think we have the temperament to be good at colonialism, and I hope that factored into Bush’s thinking. Hell, we stuck around too long as it is; we should have gone in, toppled Saddam’s government, and left him a note saying “Fucking behave, or we’ll be back”.

          The Left would have a cow, once a day, breach presentation, if we took a protectorate that could actually be of benefit to us. Furthermore, we would get an endless raft of shit from the rest of the world, and it would wear on us. When the inevitable insurgency started up we wouldn’t be able to bring ourselves to the proper “Kick ’em in the balls, and then put the boot in while they’re down” frame of mind. And never mind hitting their suppliers hard enough to make them desist (*cough*cough* the French *cough*cough*). A Protectorate just isn’t in the cards, or if it is it will be some totally worthless basket case like Somalia that the Left wants to rescue, and the instant there is enough of a culture there to actually generate some wealth, the Left will start agitating that we leave.

        7. George W Bush also had a few things most people (including people here) either weren’t aware of or are discounting that kept him from acting. Some of this is stuff I picked up as a DoD contractor at the time; some of it is based on what has come out since

          1. The original plan was, in fact, to fight a real war. The strategy as I overheard it went something like this:
          a) our allies in Europe and Japan are dependent on Middle East oil. That oil in 2001 / 2002 is largely controlled by 3 countries: Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia / Gulf States. Any 2 of them could provide enough oil to supply Europe / Japan; 1 could be off-line.
          b) We had casus belli to send troops two places: Afghanistan, because they were harboring Bin Laden, and Iraq, because we were already at war with them and had nothing more after Gulf I than a cease-fire which Iraq was violating anyway. In addition, there was a law passed in 1998 and signed by Bill Clinton making regime change in Iraq official US policy.
          c. The strategy was to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq. This would (just coincidentally) put US troops on both sides of the mullahs in Iran. We get Iraq’s oil production back up…. then take out Iran. Whether or not we would try and reform the Saudis was never really touched on.

          2. Bush didn’t have anything like a reliable majority in Congress and especially the Senate. Anybody besides me remember Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords? Especially since no one had even thought of “the nuclear option”, he had to pull at least enough Democrats to avoid a filibuster. In fact, one of the things that led to DHS and TSA being created and made civil service employees is that the Democrats were threatening to do just that if they weren’t. “To professionalize, you must federalize” was the motto.

          3. Bush was also having to fight his own bureaucracy, particularly in the State Department. The 4th Branch is very much a Democrat constituency, and they weren’t happy getting Bush in the first place. Remember Valerie Plame? Scooter Libbby got the blame, but it was actually Richard Armitage over at State that leaked her. Several other examples, including the fact that our Governor General in Iraq, Bremer, was from State and viewed his job as supervising the military cowboys.

          4. Both 2 and 3 (not to mention his own distaste for operating that way) are why Bush couldn’t just “pull an Obama” and issue executive orders; unlike Obama, he couldn’t be sure he’d have 34 Senators who would back him up if Congress impeached him.

          Just my .02

          1. On your point 4, besides Bush’s possible personal distaste for large scale use of Executive Orders, IMO Obama is breaking new ground for such usage.

            Before Obama, it would be unthinkable for a President do so much via Executive Orders.

            Of course, Obama has the press on his side and Bush wouldn’t have the press on his side if Bush had tried it.

            It’d be interesting if the next Republican President uses Obama’s tactics and asks his critics in the Press “where were you when Obama did the same?” [Very Big Evil Grin]

      2. Again, not a fan of the war. Not a fan of going back again either.

        However, it’s telling that the fact that there’s no decrying of the war automatically makes the movie a political statement itself.

        1. never a fan of war, but our going was inevitable, and likely our going back even more so. We keep going to war with a screaming chatter monkey on our backs and keep doing stupid stuff to try and keep it as quiet as possible.

              1. A buddy on a message board I was a member of once said that if a people needed to be conquered, then they could have been conquered by a nicer bunch of folks.

                If we go to war, I honestly think we should leave the nice at home and go scorched earth. Shock and Awe? That’s wasn’t “shock and awe”. Let me call the shots, and I’d show them what “shock and awe” would look like. It wouldn’t be pretty, but I doubt we’d have many problems afterward.

                    2. I’m really OK with that theory.

                      I don’t want to win just that war. I want to win all the wars not fought because they realize that I will not just win, but absolutely destroy them.

                2. During Bush’s administration, I kept running into people who would tell me, with a straight face, that wee were “lashing out in unreasoning anger” or words to that effect.

                  “Lashing out in unreasoning anger”? And Mecca doesn’t glow in the dark?

                  *spit*

                  3. For the first week after 9/11, “lake of glass” was the most-frequently-projected description I heard for downtown Kabul. Then people began to settle down a little. A lot of people should be glad it was Bush who was in charge of the immediate response…

                5. I’ve been terming this the “Appoint Col. Kratman As Supreme Allied Commander” methodology.

                  Plus there’s precedent: Ike was still but an O-5 until the build up began in earnest before WWII.

                6. What I never liked about “shock and awe” was the press expected — and played it — like a replay of Guernica. In reality, it was “shock and awe” IN THE MINDS OF THE ENEMY COMMAND AND CONTROL. So the goal wasn’t to break the fighting spirit of the entire nation but to leave the commanders isolated, ignorant, and incapable.

                  Which worked.

                  1. Yeah, the stubborn way the Left insists on a “We failed” narrative gets old fast. We took down an army much admired in the region. One hailed as the “fourth largest in the world”. And we did it in less than a month, without initiating a draft, or doing a long buildup.

                    I suspect the Left knows, at least dimly, that that is extraordinary. They won’t admit it, though. What they will do is take it as a sign that the military can do anything, anywhere, at any time. And the Left will consequently get us into serious trouble by not limiting missions to what the military is good at; killing people and breaking things.

                    Ebola mission, anyone?

                  2. it was also a plan to do as much damage to the fighting ability as possible without saturation bombing scale “collateral damage” to give a bloody shirt for our press to wave about like they did in Viet Nam

                7. Most of us? We’re too nice, my friend. Even some of us utter b*stards, we’re too effing nice. We live here, in this paradise of the world, not in some third world wannabe craphole. That’s a part of why we *don’t,* by and large, do… very unpleasant things to them and theirs, many times over, until their great grandchildren get the message: “Do. Not. Pock. With. The. United. States.”

                  But nice as we are, there’s limits. We lose a city, or even just a significant part (again), I fear there will be not just a surge but a cascade of retributionary fervor. It’s not so much them that I fear- it’s *us.* Because that genie won’t go willingly back into the bottle.

                  1. This is the consequence I fear, stemming from our failure to maintain course in Iraq (and ultimately in Afghanistan).

                    Things were being done, good was being accomplished, people were being helped. The military restrained its response and took steps to rebuild.

                    The politicians flubbed it, and let the insurgency undermine those efforts. Then they abandoned those projects, and let ISIS toss them aside.

                    There’s a very real “I tried to be nice and you spit in my face” counter-response boiling under the surface. Having to go back — I don’t think it would be nice.

                  2. And this is what I’m afraid may happen with a number of social things here in the States. If men really got torqued off about 3rd wave (we are still on the 3rd wave, right?) feminism and decided to do something about it? Or if a race war really DID get started? I worry about a very real “you want something to complain about? I’ll GIVE you something to complain about” impulse.

                  3. If I were designing weapons systems, I would create the BPB. The Big Pockin’ Bomb.

                  4. And there are a number of people (myself included) who think that one reason we did so badly in Iraq was because of the Disloyal Opposition here at home. If we lose a city, I suspect people will want to correct that issue first.

                    2. …because of the Disloyal Opposition here at home.

                      It is my view that the “Powell Doctrine” stuff was the U.S. military’s collective Lesson Learned from the Vietnam War.

                      My guess is the collective lesson learned by the current generation of future 4-star Generals is going to be something along the lines of “Use much more firepower, allow fewer reporters access to the combat zone, emphasize ‘Thunder Runs’ over ‘Hearts and Minds,’ and basically leave vast stretches of smoking ruins when you depart for home within six months or less.”

                    3. (hit post too soon)
                      …six months or less” in order to get inside teh OODA loop of the Disloyal Opposition back home – basically get in and wreck thoroughly before the opposition can get organized back home.

                  5. We’re good at hard & fast. Not so good at hang in there until it’s changed. Planning should take that into account – the enemy’s will.

                    1. While I still believe we had every right and reason to go into both countries, I have since changed my thinking on our efforts at nation building.

                      While the Marines were apparently by far better at it than most over there, we both did not do enough “hearts and minds” fourth generation warfare (a la William S Lind) AND should not have tried to rebuild a culture that just didn’t “get” a civilization of trust beyond tribalism.

                      Smash the place. Tell them “don’t mess with us”, declare victory, and leave.

                      Worst – we got rid of their army. THAT , and a government that could surrender to us, we should have kept.

                    2. “Worst – we got rid of their army. THAT , and a government that could surrender to us, we should have kept.”

                      Very much so. Let loose thousands of young (and not so young) men who for their entire adult lives have been trained in the application of violence, without giving them the benefit of a command structure to keep them in line? Great idea! Eliminate any source of legitimizing and stabilizing the continuation of authority? Create an environment where chaos rules and law and order are the chancy at best? Perfect!

                      *facepalm*

                    4. Why am I not surprised that it was State that screwed us again? That idea was so unbelievably f*cked up it almost had to be.

        2. I just saw this:

          http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2894154/ISIS-fighters-contracted-Ebola-World-Health-Organisation-investigating-reports-Islamist-militants-disease-showed-Iraqi-hospital.html

          Which makes me think of the Clancy novel and weaponizing the ebola virus. Which for ISIS can go one of two ways. They control it and succeed and sometime soon a guy with the virus blows himself up – or whatever the best way to mass distribute body fluids – in Times Square.

          Or we read how there is a new ebola hot spot in Iraq.

          1. The reports are of dubious provenance. Assuming they do turn out to be correct, I’m of two minds about the subject. The nasty part of my mind says Good, couldn’t happen to a better bunch of people, and the nice part of my mind says Nobody deserves that. (Also, containment could be an issue in non-scientific groups such as ISIS—too much of a chance of collateral damage.)

            2. The objective is to stop them, with extreme prejudice when necessary. And there’s a lot of necessary going around.

              The way I look at it, those that won’t stop short of death, kill them. Quickly, for preference, because I don’t like pointless suffering- shoot them, and so on. Don’t waste time lecturing them on the errors of their ways.

              But that requires a lot of bullets in a lot of trained hands, and putting our people into danger. This I don’t like either, but it is often necessary. That is also expensive. Wars cost lives and slow infrastructure.

              In the sense that them being dead means they can’t hurt me and mine, good. Quicker it happens, happier I’ll be. I am truly sorrowful that innocent lives will be harmed along with the guilty, and I hate like all heck that folks who supported us are stuck in the middle of the mess.

              But. They are an avowed and admitted threat to us. They cheer and dance in the streets when our soldiers and civilians die. They delight in any misfortune that comes our way, and the worse, the better in their eyes. If those who would kill and maim our people, rape our womenfolk, and tyrannize through terror and slaughter die horribly, well I’ve no pity to spare for *them.* Let them go to their god one way or the other, and leave the good people of the world in peace in their absence.

          2. ISTR reading that the Paleos have used those with blood-borne diseases as suicide bombers, in hopes of spreading their disease along with the shrapnel. But, for some reason it doesn’t seem effective. It may be that the wounded are given massive antibiotic and other treatments just because of the wounds, or it may be that the explosion sterilizes any ejecta.

            So we got that going for us.

          3. My vague understanding of sharia burial protocol is there is a fair amount of handling/preparation of the deceased, and that cremation is absolutely forbidden. For a hemorrhagic fever like ebola that is going to be a playground for spread to the ones doing the preparation and their direct contacts. If these stories are for real I foresee an acute shortage of undertakers in the so called Caliphate in the next 14-21 days.

          4. *reads article, almost drowns in cola laughing*

            Rainbow Six was meant to be fiction, and the left-leaning, humanity hating scientific Greenies were the bad guys. It made sense. (And then I found out about the extinction projects and I keep wanting to have them start with themselves…)

            I don’t think ISIS has the technological capacity for the kind of bio-isolation necessary to transport the thing. I figure the new ebola hot spot in Iraq scenario is more likely.

    3. It’s deliberate. “The Personal is Political” gives them the excuse to cut into everything that binds people together. Divide and conquer baby. It’s all in the playbook.

    4. Wow – they didn’t politicize it? Holy sh*t. I may actually see it. Given that the trailer was in the middle of a bunch of fluff for the Marigold hotel (or whatever) and other lefty crud……

      Reminds me of the Huffpo review that took Interstellar to task for failing to make the disaster all about humanity screwing everything up.

      On a related note, I don’t know if it’s “borderline” childishness or narcissism, or touters, but these people really, REALLY can’t keep crapping their ideology and worldview over everything they touch.

      Show after show where the guy is the buffoon, and expected to – among other things – always take her side, even if she’s publicly embarrassing herself, except when she decides he should have told her so she doesn’t publicly embarrass herself. (There are few things I’ve come to loath in the last few years than the churchy feminism of “happy wife happy life” without a corollary “happy husband”)

      The smart alec minority (who really comes across as bitter) making fun of how regressive/sexist/bigoted someone is and anything traditional.

      The “science” documentary that goes out of its way to dedicate screen time to explain the only reason women scientists were mocked or disbelieved is sexism, even after spending ten minutes detailing how the guy who figured out plate tectonics died trying to convince a scientific community that thought he was nuts.

      Or the recent , last minute blindsiding in the Legend of Korra.

      Leaving aside Hines missing well over half of Wrights point (and Wright is a far, FAR better writer) – the entire good storytelling part – in his supposed “fisking” – what kind of nutcase films themselves watching a TV show?

      if it was the show makers – it’s a gimme that they had those cameras there JUST to capture the reaction when they suddenly put in a major SJW-ism.

      The very existence of those cameras in and of itself is a huge flag that it was almost certainly piss poor storytelling, because this should have had the groundwork laid over one or more seasons, and NOT been a sudden “reveal” to get a reaction from.

      But then they did the same with the “Red Wedding” from the TV series based on GRRM’s narcissistic horror story in fantasy drag. (The books lost me when Bran got shoved out the window, and I never picked up the second book since the ending of the first didn’t redeem anything).

      They have to crap all over it, and be SEEN crapping over it, and be seen rejoicing on it being crapped on.

      1. On the GRRM books:

        I started with them when they first came out, but ultimately had to give up after multiple iterations of setting up a redeeming character for the reader to invest in (one of the bare few available) and then slaughtering them (or pushing them out a window, or…).

        I’ve not heard anything since to incline me to believe it has not continued as an exploration of brutal and despicable people doing brutal and despicable things for brutal and despicable reasons.

            1. George R. R. Martin, he of the loud shirts and long books (and some really effectively creepy horror short-stories), restorer of an old theater in Santa Fe NM.

              1. Ah! Thanks. Too pop for me. I avoid anything with mass appeal until I get a recommendation from a reliable source.

      2. Let me point out that as much as I am okay with gay relationships, I get SO tired of the “obligatory lesbian romance” — it’s always lesbian, too, because the writers are mostly male. And it’s always — ALWAYS — stupid and unmotivated, in both books and movies. (Like Willow. don’t get me started on Willow.)

        1. There are some girls who decide they are gay during college (and not afterward) but it is usually girls who have no close friends or boyfriends, and then are presented with someone of the same sex who wants them. In other words, it is a variant on the freshman flurry of Must Find Someone. But Willow had close friends and boyfriends, so it did not make sense.

          Korra and Asami had pretty much no reason to act that way, and had never shown any inclinations that way in the series. The story arc was that they were fiercely competitive young women who had trouble being friends because of squabbling over the same guy. Even if they were depressed and suffering from PTSD, it would have made more sense for them to have gotten all snuggly with guys the had just met at the wedding. Also, the parallelism of the last scene with the Kuvira scene was creepy and wrong, even more than the scene by itself.

          But even if you had no objections to everything else, it is unbelievably stupid to paint a shamanic trip to a spirit world as a romantic dream vacation!

          1. Another critique of the final scene is that it changes Korra from a strong woman to a man with tits, in that the Hero gets the pretty girl in the end. (Waiting for the chance to explode some feminist brains with that one. Small bangs, I know.)

            Of course, there are all kinds of ways to TRY to subvert the Hero gets the Girl trope, but they virtually ALWAYS come out forced and unbelievable.

    5. I’m looking forward to that post, T.L. *grin*

      The other stupid thing is, these idiots who whine about soldiers NOT railing against the war also simultaneously dismiss the military as bloodthirsty baby-killing animals who don’t do the ‘decent’ thing of allowing the military to be removed from ‘proper government’ as a whole and then WORLD PEACE WILL ENSUE, as per their delusions.

      They also don’t understand that they’re talking down to a class of men that are tougher and more reliable than the simpering emasculati can ever be. Such men do not overly concern themselves with the whimperings of fools. The funnier thing is, if it came down to it, if it came down to a firefight, this Scott person would be screeching for Kyle ‘having to protect him.’ IIRC Kyle’s gone private (I could be wrong, I’ll ask hubby when he gets home – the man’s a fan of the guy and the dude who wrote Red Circle) so… no, actually. But the fact that they EXPECT other people to shed blood on their behalf while they sneer at the same people shows how contemptuous as a group these empty gutless wastes of space are.

        3. You’re right, thank you for the correction!

          Also, OT but… caffeine is only now starting to kick in. It’s not working as well as it used to. Maybe it’s the blood pressure lowering meds? I’m not used to taking blood pressure lowering medication at all. o_o

      2. Chris Kyle had left the military, and was working in the private sector, particularly in the realm of counseling returning veterans. He was also in the process of joining a police force local to me.

        Unfortunately, he and Chad Littlefiled were killed by one of the veterans they were trying to help.

        1. Yeah, I had vague memories that he’d gone private sector, but forgotten that such a wonderful guy had gotten killed. There were quite a few conspiracy theories surrounding his death too.

          He lived near you? I’d heard about him wanting to join the police. The man had a strong sense of duty.

  13. “They love us but they hate us.” False. They hate us and they love to use us like the morons that we are. The US University system is one of the best in the world. So come here, get a world class degree and take it home to figure out ways to kill Americans and Israelis. That’s what that is all about.

    As far as leftists and they’re relationship with the truth, you have to think of them as being Gandalf on the bridge with the Balrog of Truth approaching. They’ve got their sword they’ve got their staff and they’re screaming “You shall not PASS!!!!” Over and over again. Only this time we have to find a way to make the wizard fall off the bridge without taking the Balrog with him.

      1. Should have read: “The dark fire will not avail you, Flamers of Udun.”

        This joke is dead, Jim.

        1. Mr. Chupik, I’m sorry to grade you on this, but it is clear, you shall not pass.

          My apologies I was overcome by an ancestrally bad sense of humor :-).

              1. Idle’s Law: The Longer any internet discussion involving a group of Odds runs, the more likely it will result in Monty Python quotes.

    2. Not entirely true. The “love us” comes from wanting what we have, and wanting to be what we are (they really do, substitute just about any value of “they” {in the general sense} that you’d like), the “hate us” stems from knowing they can’t have it unless they become like us.

      The truly radicalized (the specific individuals, not the general “they”), hate us because of the temptation we represent. We are success outside of the ordained path. Visible, obvious and great success. No choice but to denounce us as [insert ideologically appropriate evil here] and declare our success a fraud. But — look around. The vast majority of the truly radicalized? They’re living every bit of the successful life they can lay their hands on, despite the nonsense coming out of their mouths.

      1. Why do the Imams all call the US the “great Satan?” Because we are the tempter, we show that there’s a different way that just might work better. That’s unacceptable. Replace imam with Progressive, same cries.

        1. Yeah, this becomes really apparent when talking to the average Mo in the ME. He’d really love to be comfortably middle-class and actual Americans (as opposed to cut-outs waved about) don’t bother him so much.

          1. You mean like the looters coming out of Bagdad driving Bobcats with generators in the buckets?

  14. “If I wanted to, I could spend the entire week, every day, pounding on the idiocies emanating from the left side of the isle.”

    Well, the last year you pretty much have. Not that I can blame you. They are a font of endless stupidity.

  15. I “engage” them, for the same reasons that I “debate” atheists. Not that I expect either of us to change our opinions, but for those who might be changed. Most atheist are that way from offended pride (personal), or unwillingness to concede reality. The latter believe that Man is the height of “intelligence,” and therefore there can’t be anything above that. (Another form of pride.)

    1. “concede reality” how? I’ve never even read a non-question-begging *definition* of “god”, let alone seen any evidence that such a thing actually exists. I’ve tried reading various “proofs” of god, but they all boil down to assumptions, unsubstantiated assertions, and declarations of ignorance (“We haven’t figured out X, therefore god”).

      None of these arguments has been convincing, let alone constituted any kind of proof. They usually look like rationalizations by people who already believe and just want to claim that their belief is reasonable.

      1. This is one of those topics we shouldna oughta take up. Save us all some heartburn and singed feathers.

          1. I do understand. There’s a few that come up that — stick under my ribs, as well.

            But we can bash vile progs with harmony and joy!

            1. See, now here would be a fantastic place for some kind of “Like” button, or some such.
              *ponders page for a moment, scratches head, nods*
              Ayup.

                  1. One of those cases in which I was almost ready to go see the movie based on presumed theme (Arthur as ex Legionairie bringing peace and order to post Roman Britain) and one line or one image in a trailer made me go, oh bloody hell no (anorexic girl in leather bikini.)

                    1. I rented it on twofer afternoon. It had some OK moments I might use in class (Pelagius vs. St. Augustine), and a lot of “oh no he didn’t” “YGTBSM,” and “yeaaaahhh riiiight.” With one big “sorry, Eisenstein did it better.”

                    2. While i am certainly partial to chicks in leather bikinis, (preferably not anorexic, but still of a body type suited to bikini-wearing) there is a proper time and place for them.

                      And that time and place is not Medieval England.

                    4. had sort of the same thing happen to me with the BBC’s latest “Robin Hood”
                      “hey … maybe that is worth watching … wait ..Why the @#$% does Robin have an OBVIOUSLY fiberglass hunnish style horse bow?”
                      Well, guess I won’t be watching that.

  16. I am finding that there are certain worlds that they simply can’t deal with. They are used to “racist” and “hate”, but they have trouble coping with “tiresome” and “vulgar”. I suspect that there are other old fashioned judgemental words they will have trouble with. It’s an ongoing project.

      1. I’m pretty sure they don’t know the word “Puerile”, and probably think it has something to do with “puree”. They KNOW what tiresome and vulgar mean.

        Similarly, I would love to hit them with “nekulturny” (which is spot on for the vast majority of them), but I doubt they have any clue what is means.

        1. I had to look up “nekulturny” but it fits them. [Very Big Evil Grin]

    2. A fun thing that I have done in person is to say the magic words “Sarah Palin” to a lefty then listen to them melt down for ten the thirty minutes. Just the bare words, nothing else. I wonder if it would work on lefty blogs and how long the comment thread would be?

    1. Yup, and Foxfier is a good example of this! She constantly scolds me for not linking, even if it’s me blogging about “I’ve seen this thing a lot lately” (ie, somewhere in my last thousand articles/posts read, this thing came up several times).

      I’m the bad example, because I’m a natural ranter about vague tendencies.

      2. It’s your own fault for talking about such interesting stuff and then synthesizing it into stuff folks actually want to read! *grin*

    2. The only time in my blogging life I’ve ever used that Do Not Link crap was when I was dealing with a book whose initials are ET and its psychotic author, and that was just because I didn’t want the crazy. Got it anyways, but that’s neither here nor there. My point is that if I’m not ready for a debate, I just don’t write about it.

      Hines and his ilk? Oh, they want to talk about us behind our backs. They want “the cool kids” to bond while they pick on those who aren’t socially acceptable. In this case, that’s us. We’re the kids who walk the halls, comfortable in our own skin, willfully ignorant of the cues required to be one of the cool kids.

      The thing is, I’m really OK with that. Hines? He’s just the guy who got wedgied by the very same people he’s now emulating.

      1. Heh, and additional support for Sarah’s “setting the narrative” thing, the very first thing I did was go “well, is it a valid worry?” Yes, because those crazies have a very well established history of taking disagreement as justification for actual attacks, up to and including on your livelihood and life. (Example, the Chick-fil-a packing guy who went to try to do a mass murder so that he could rub “hate sandwiches” in the face of the dying. Thank God he was stopped by the first person he attacked.)

        Do they have a valid worry that we’ll do the same? Well… no, not really. About as close as I can think of is the department store that fired a guy after his call for race-based execution of people selected specifically for the likelihood that they’d be innocent of any wrong-doing went viral on the internet. This is not anything like calling someone’s boss to make false claims because someone disagrees with you.

        They accuse us of trying to “doxx” them, by clicking on their name to see what they set as their homepage, but they actually do commit crimes in an attempt to seek out home addresses for those with the same or similar names, then publish them with suggestions that they should come to harm for being BadThinkDoers.

        1. If we were as violent as they think we are, there wouldn’t be any progressives left. We’re not.

          We, however, know they’d be as violent as they think we are except for the fact that they’re cowards. Even the ones who actually act are cowards. After all, they never attack a gun show or an NRA convention.

          There’s a reason for that.

          1. They are not only cowardly, they tend to ostentatious incompetence. We are less violent, less cowardly, and more compentent. If psh ever comes to shove, we win …. and they whine.

            1. “they tend to ostentatious incompetence”
              Yeah! What’s up with that? I’ve always thought of it as willful incompetence, but yours is better.

              1. I do so love the word ostentatious; it fits in so many places people don’t expect to find it.

                ‘Ostentatious incompetence’ because they not only do not understand how to fight, they are PROUD that they don’t know, and trumpet their lack of knowledge frequently. They are incompentent beyond simple need (as someone might be who is busy making a living) and use it in an ornamental and vulgar manner.

          2. Actually, they fear the gun show, but the reality is, Gun shows require all the guns to be unloaded, and typically zip-tied, in order to prevent accidents. So there are not actually a lot of “live” guns at a gun show.

            But that doesn’t mean that someone who shows up to start something won’t get a bayonet or rifle-butt to the head.

            1. Lotta pocket knives at gun shows. Plenty of ammo.

              Somebody might cause some trouble at the door, but a few feet inside…

              Well. Best they continue with their predilection to avoid ’em.

            2. On a practical level, there is a high probability of those who are really paranoid having a loaded weapon ready to go, and being very, very careful that nobody knows about it.

              See also, why shopping malls’ “no guns allowed” signs don’t attract mass killings the same way that schools do, even though they are far less defensible and various other tactical advantages.
              The worst that happens if you’re caught with a legal weapon there is you’re asked to leave. (Depends on state.)

              1. Might get charged with trespassing. According to some signs.

                Unfortunately Washington does not have a law protecting employees from being fired for having guns locked in their cars in the parking lot, which has drastically affected my exercise of my Concealed Carry rights. (And which has NOT stopped at least one known incident since I started working there)

                1. Might get charged with trespassing. According to some signs.

                  I know– they are wrong. By the law, they can ASK you to leave, and if you do not, THEN you are trespassing.

                  And yes, it has been tested.

          3. Hrm. Are we not as violent as they think we are? Or are we *potentially* that violent, but possessed of enough maturity and self-restraint to contain it to situations where it is warranted? I tend to look upon that fear with a bit of contempt. They are by and large not capable of that level of violence even in defense of their own lives, which makes them a burden on other citizens who must often protect them in situations of risk.

            They do indeed tend to look at the world through a glass that reflects their own prejudices, I must agree. It paints a very unflattering picture when you consider the projection involved.

            1. They do indeed tend to look at the world through a glass that reflects their own prejudices, I must agree. It paints a very unflattering picture when you consider the projection involved.

              This is why whenever the SJWs / Clamps hurl accusations, I take it as admission of what they themselves desire to do or have actually done, especially as a number of them are quite insane. “You must pay people to come here.” “None of the people who comment here are real, they’re all sock puppets you make up to make yourself look good.” “You stalk me.” “You want people raped / are racist / misogynist / homophobic” and ad nauseum.

              It provides very disturbing insights into significantly disturbed and twisted minds, I tell you.

            3. Everyone is “potentially” violent. Yes, even them.

              In their minds, simply because we are prepared to visit violence on another makes us violent. They’re unable to differentiate between offensive and defensive violence, however. They see us merely as violent.

              Since they, if they possessed our willingness to do violence, would use that against all who disagree with them, they see no reason why we wouldn’t do the same. Their projection issues are truly terrifying.

              1. Agreed, even them. What I was flailing after (and not quite getting at) was that we are more effectively violent, in general, when it comes to it. The rank and file on the other side seems to prefer violence-by-proxy, however. Riots, excuse me, “Peaceful Protests” with rocks thrown, molotov cocktails, property destroyed/burned/looted, innocents beaten to death with hammers, police assaulted (rarely shot)…

                It’s haphazard. Chaotic and uncontrolled. It’s the adult-in-body version of a child’s temper tantrum. Were we as incensed as they claim *they* are, i.e. the folks that chanted “What do we want? Dead Cops!”, I have to agree with Draven: the shooting would already have started.

                1. Have to toss this out there, because it always tingles in my brain:

                  …we are more effectively violent, in general, when it comes to it.

                  They probably really don’t want to hear it, but — yeah. Comes to violence, you’re unlikely to see me (or my ilk) mucking about in the streets starting a riot.

                  Comes to violence, they’re unlikely to see me at all. That which can be seen, can be hit.

                  Some are so prone to projections about violent little temper tantrums and random displays of civil disobedience.

                  Others are prone to understanding violence and the projection of force as a craft, with a defined output. And a goal.

                  There are people like that on both sides, of course. I suspect this side, however, carries more numbers. And they are far, far more dangerous than rioting thugs acting out their childish fantasies comfortable in the restraint of the authorities.

                  ‘Tis why Tea Party rallies and the like are peaceful affairs, don’cha know.

                  1. Comes to violence, all they are going to see of a lot of us is muzzle flashes at extended range.

            4. There’s a footnote in a fan fiction* where the author justifies having a character’s expanded background include possibly fatal combat, because in the show he was the only one of the folks that age who acted like he realized that people could get really hurt by his actions.

              Maybe it’s related to the whole “responsibility” thing? We have to not be as violent as we theoretically could be, because we know/accept/realize that we would be responsible for the results.

              If you imagine that it was possible to disavow all consequences, then their target choices do kind of make sense… we take steps that make us capable of causing more damage because in doing so we’re accepting the probable results of those actions, and we’ve compared it to the cost of not doing anything.

              If you not only don’t accept the consequence of doing a thing, but think you can reject the consequences of not doing anything, then the whole equation changes and attacking cops does make a bit more sense (because of direct observable effects and opportunities) than drug dealers and thieves. (whose immediate side-effects are much, much less than “ready and able to shoot you)

              It makes my head hurt, because you can’t remove consequences from an action, or inaction…..

              *Vathara’s Embers, Zuko. She points out that she knows it didn’t have the same damage level as everyone else because fire is nasty, but “we can’t do that on a kids’ show” isn’t an acceptable justification.

              1. Spot on, Miss Foxfier.

                Lack of responsibility and accepting the consequences seems to be a huge part of their actions. They do things for the immediate, personal effect: solar! Because it *feels* right. Give money to the poor, lower academic requirements for little brown people, make nice with enemies foreign and domestic because we’re nice people (not because we’re dealing with them from a position of strength, in an iron-fist-within-velvet-glove type of situation). All for how it makes them *feel.* They even warp science, because it makes them feel smart, and the scientific *method* doesn’t feed back into their “feel good” loop.

                In terms of violent actions, they are dealing from a position of weakness. From a position of strength, one must vary the weight of their attack if they don’t want to outright kill someone or cause permanent/severe harm. A weak person tend to fight all-out. Thus why they rely on the government to *force* our compliance to their whims. And why they see any potential for violence in us as an ultimate threat.

                1. Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun
                  Awesome! Thank you.
                  Also, very useful. I’ll be sharing that widely.

                3. I sometimes get notifications that someone “liked” a comment I made here – how the heck does one do that?

                  1. It’s not visible in this layout. If you read this in the WordPress Reader, there are like buttons. How you can go back and SEE your comments that are liked, or how you can see comments that YOU liked, I have no idea. WordPress would rather optimize the stats page for smartphones (ruining it for desktops) than provide fully realized features.

                  2. I’ve seen that, but only from Sarah. I just figured that as ruler of her domain she had powers beyond us lesser mortals.

                    3. I see it as an option if someone’s replying to me, but only then, and it’s from a little widget / drop down of recent comments. Kind of wish there was a way to figure out how to make it happen for everyone. I think Cedar’s blog has the ability to let other people like comments that weren’t made to them specifically. Damned if I know how though XD

                    5. The other place you can see like buttons is if you use the wordpress “Reader” page, that shows posts from all the blogs you follow. The only problem being the sub window everything pops up in is very narrow, and the threading can get to the point it’s off the sub-panel. but it can also let you reply to comments that are at the bottom of the displayed threading.

  18. Uhh small query here; is “Christian socialist” a nice way of saying “f****n’ lyin’ communist?
    Kinda like sayin’ the new pope is an Argentinian Jesuit?

    1. Actually, in Europe there’s a lot of “Christian Socialist Party vs. Communist Party” action. The Christian Socialists are the good guys.

      Yeah, socialism is kinda rampant in Europe.

      1. Yes. The Christian socialists are the MOST right wing party in Portugal, and until they went down the rabbit hole of America hatred and legislating morality, they were my horse to bet on. Now by default the sane parts of the family are settling on Social-Democrat. Still way to the left of anything sane, but well… beats the other options.

    2. On the second one, don’t get me started.
      On the first — I meant GWB and no, I don’t think so. I think “wooly headed do gooder” is a closer approach. He is a good man, as a person — something he doesn’t share with his successor, and belongs to that comfortable upper middle class who always sort of wished they could do something for the suffering classes and not knowing a heck of a lot about either hardship or economics falls for the socialist lie. My aunt, with less excuse, was a Christian socialist, in her youth. (She KNEW privation.) OTOH entire parties in Europe are devoted to this Christian-social-democracy. Bush is just odd for the US.

      1. Thank-you for a pretty good summary of GWB.

        I do think that you are a little too hard on him on the socialist front. He did try to deal with Social Security and to defuse the mortgage bubble before it burst. He just did not have the political capital that was not tied up with the terrorist wars.

          1. I suspect being head of a government inclines you toward government-driven solutions. You might be able to see other ways of doing it, but you have even less leverage for making it happen those ways.

            1. some are more inclined than others. GWB slightly less so than his father, but that leaves far,far too much room to come up with bailouts and other goofy financial scemes just as a f’rinstence.

      2. Maybe I’m too soft on Bush, but my take was that he was hoping that staying to “Nation Build” would reinforce the nature of the object lesson; “Don’t come to our negative attention”. I do think we should have wrecked the place and left, but I can see why that might have been politically impossible.

        We’re going to end up over there more or less permanently, though, and it isn’t going to be pleasant for anybody involved.

        1. the fault lay in the fact the object lesson and strategy needed to take place far longer than he was going to be in office, and his replacement was never guarantied to continue what was needed …. and it wasn’t, and it predictably failed. If, instead it was something he inherited from Clinton and the Repub controlled congress, Iraq might have been set up well enough, with better treaties put in place that once someone else came into office, their weaseling would have had less damage … pure speculation on my part there, though.

  19. RE; Popping Zits: [metaphorically speaking, of course]

    Squeezing zits can cause scars or deepen an infection. Proper medication (topical and systemic), sunlight, correction of hormone imbalance and/or diet and hygiene abnormalities is the best approach, but sometimes there is no cure when it is genetic.

  20. Earlier in the week, Mr. Wright went off on a cartoon shown on Nickolodia {sp} where the last scene of the last show had two girls walk hand in hand into the sunset. He was a bit upset that the creator or writers of the cartoon would end it having two hetero gals become lesbians at the end.

    Okay, John went off on something that outraged him. That’s his right, and you’d think it would end there.

    Jim Hines decided to lambaste puir John, which apparently got a little more traffic on his site than usual. This was several days later. Made me wonder what in the heck he was doing perusing Mr. Wright’s site if he disagrees with him so much.

    This didn’t break into the kind of tizzy that we get when someone picks on Larry, but it is a lesson that Sarah’s correct. They apparently do look on the “Evil League’s” sites looking to find something to fisk.

    Thanks Sarah. Your post explained so much for me.

    1. Note, it wasn’t that they had them walk off hand in hand kinda out of the blue, but that they went and decided to announce that was showing that they were Really Lesbians, and pretending that there’d been stuff leading up to it beyond really ugly stereotypes like “athletic, strong willed woman are homosexual.” (His comment section has a lot more detail about how very much they didn’t do this, and in fact set it up for the season one romance to go in the future.)

      It’s like if someone went and saw Frozen, then announced it meant that Anna was gay for her sister; do these folks have a concept of anything not being sexual?

        1. Yeah, stopped watching. “Look, she’s pretty, smart, had a wonderful male friend who is obviously devoted to her, is starting to stand up for herself and actually even physically fight– let’s make her gay!”

          Yeah, just what I needed when that was the go-to accusation for my not being sexually available to folks I couldn’t even have a conversation with.

  22. Somebody was talking about American Sniper. Read. The. Book. First.
    Almost everyone I know of whose in that community said Cooper did a damn good job. Seriously, read the book first.

  23. In a way, I’ve been that pimply faced obsessive 15-yr old. Even now, I have things that I dig up and gnaw on like a dog with a favorite bone long bereft of any nutritional content or ability to sustain life. Mostly, that winds up with me in the shower, muttering things like “what I should have said… or should have done is…” Heck, did it today with something that when you step back and look at it has NO real impact on my quality of life – just a kneejerk desire to be accepted by the cool kids. And then it just gets me in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

    Which, recognizing the issue, is going to take some effort to change.

    What they’re after is success without work, fulfillment without love, and freedom without respect for law – natural or otherwise. They’re not so much rebelling against those of us who are busy getting on with our lives as they are rebelling against their own human nature.
    Their obsession with us lies in the idea that we are getting what they say they want – happiness, fulfillment, success, satisfaction with life – by doing what they believe to be antithetical to it – hard work, discipline, etc.

  24. You and your Evil League Of Evil, just like Sarah Palin, live rent-free in their heads, generating liters and gobs of stomach acid, and your just STAND THERE SMILING! OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, it makes them so MAD. And then you go and IGNORE them. THEM!

    Well, every so often, throw them a bone: tell them to put on their big-boy Underoos and Grow Up. Don’t say “big-girl panties”; keep that sexist vibe going!

    As the Ozzies say, Good On Ya, Mate!

    The left, the SJWs and GHHs, are middle-school girl cliques that never grew up. Emotionally stunted, and did it to themselves.

    And folks, call the huffPo the PuffHo–it’s funnier that way.

    1. The Puffington Host.
      And I always tell them to pull up their pink lace panties. It’s disgusting the way they stand there with them around their ankles. Particularly the guys. I also call them chickies. PARTICULARLY the guys.

      1. A lady prof “of a certain age” used to look over the top of her glasses and say, “Boo hoo chickie poo. Suck it up and make do.” The most ferocious classics prof I ever crossed paths with – ooooold school and proud of it.

        1. For some reason, I get the idea that she never had to say that to you. [Wink]

          1. No. She could see I was trying as hard as I could to keep up (freshman in a senior seminar) and no way was I going to slack off in her class.

  25. They, their concerns, their opinions, their obsessions are the center of their universe and the fact that those are not the center of our universe threatens them with the possibility, the chance, the risk that they, what they feel, what they think, what they value … just might not actually be important. In which case they would have to leave the safe harbors of the pre-digested pap spat down their little chirping throats by their elders and actually grapple with something difficult.

    This is why they obsess over their petty micro-aggressions (what we conservatives call life in a world that doesn’t care how you feel) — because if it isn’t all about “them” then what is it all about?

    BTW — I saw a car with a COEXIST bumper sticker and it made me want to cry*; I’m the victim of micro-aggression and striving to become more sensitive in order to complain about pico-aggression.

    *What I wanted to cry is a topic for another conversation.

  26. “toe the line”

    Thank-you for getting that right. I realize darts is a lost pastime, but surely some amongst those “towing” the line have stepped up to shoot a free throw, or even run a foot-race?

    Demmed world is over-run with barbarians.

      1. The first is an eggcorn, which people do because they have learned a phrase from hearing it. The second is more an altered quotation, which does not really bother me.

        But I am afraid that toe the line and most rein idioms are lost to us, also thanks to orality reinforced by lots of people picking the wrong spelling (or having spellcheck software). On the bright side, we would not see all the mistakes if people weren’t writing so much more in daily life than their teachers assumed they ever would.

        1. One that always stands out to me is using “of” in place of “have” in phrases like “would of”, “should of”, “could of”. It particularly stands out because one of my high school teachers told us we should not be saying that, but I had always thought people were using the contractions, “would’ve”, “should’ve”, “could’ve”. Then I start seeing it repeatedly, and I realize she was right.

          1. I’d always thought it was an Americanism, because it always sounded and looked WRONG to me, but the people I always saw using it were from America. So I came to the conclusion – after failing to correct people – that it was an Americanism.

              1. My idiot younger child used “I’m going to have him to call you.” And got the metaphorical back of my hand. “whoa, son, you don’t need to have sex with someone for him to call me.” “What?”
                Then he got the full blast.

        2. I’ve never heard the term Eggcorn before. What is that?

          Petard is more of a personal hobbyhorse because at one point I looked into it, and learned a verb that is only used now in that one phrase, Hoise. (And I remember there are other words that survive only in certain common expressions, and as usual, every time I mention it, I can’t remember any of them).

          It also bugs me about spellcheck, because I’m am sure there are a lot of words made adverbs by adding -ly, but I always get spell-checked into choosing -ally.

      1. We used to try to enforce it back in my BBS days (mid ’80’s) but the kids would come on and try to argue that as long as we understood what they were trying to say – the message got through – that the spelling didn’t count. Plus the abbreviations – precursors to TXT-speak – were important to conserve screen space and bandwidth in those 300 baud days. Or so they said.

        I guess we didn’t fight hard enough. The X-mas Modemmers won. (And don’t get me started on top-posters in e-mail!)

          1. When AOL invented Usenet.

            Not too many folks talk about excessive new membership in a culture overwhelming that culture’s ability to acculturate the newbies, resulting in the culture being destroyed.

            In some cases that can be deliberate. It’s how American culture defends itself from subcultures, by absorbing them like an Amoeba. Of course, Marketing people do this by instinct, looking for anything people do to make themselves unique individuals and marketing it to everybody else so they can be just as unique and individualistic.

            I knew Punk was dead when the Mall rat girls would buy a spiked wristband from Hot Topic and their friends would compliment them for being “Sooo Punk!”

            (And you know, pound for pound, the Amoeba is the most vicious animal on Earth!)

  29. Cora Buhlert and Paul Weimar, discussing the John C. Wright thing:

    “Paul Weimer ‏@PrinceJvstin · Dec 30
    Read a John C Wright piece about Legend of Korra, and now am disheartened and sad.

    Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert · Dec 30
    @PrinceJvstin Anything ever written by John C. Wright makes me feel that way.

    Paul Weimer ‏@PrinceJvstin · Dec 30
    @CoraBuhlert its not like he is Sarah Hoyt or Theodore Beale that way.”

    Nice how they prove Sarah’s point so perfectly. 🙂

    1. I’m highly amused to be so singled out considering the point under discussion is homosexuality and I’m on record as a supporter of gay marriage.
      As my grandmother would say “I’ve seen them blind, but not without a place for the eyes.”
      Prince Jvstin was the guy who had a meltdown here, and stopped reading because we disapproved of… NPR…. yeah.

            1. I found my first visit/comment here, from 2011 (egad!) but I don’t remember a lot of things from that far back. It’s healthier anyway.

    2. You know, the funny thing is, deprived of context, I read that and thought Mr. Weimer was disheartened by reading about how the producers of Korra ruined their storytelling in the last scene of the show just to score PC points. But apparently he’s disheartened by the thought that somewhere out there there exists someone whose opinions are different from his on the potential for implied hot girl-on-girl action in a kid’s cartoon (although I’m SURE he didn’t really think of it that way.).

      1. There’s girl-on-girl in Legend of Korra? How disappointing.

        I watch that on Apple TV, I haven’t got to that part yet. Last episode is it? Being a grown-up I don’t mind particularly, but it would be nice to have advance warning for in case kids might be watching.

        Hot tip, Netflix has Stein’s Gate. Its a a time travel sci-fi and one of the only time travel stories where they even try to get it right, IMHO. It will be boring for little kids because there’s not really any action in the first five or six episodes. No exploding robots etc. and the dialogue is… weird.

        BUT it is an anime -without- upskirt shots and various perversions. It does have one minor character who’s a boy that looks like a girl, but that bit actually fits into the plot and is handled rather nicely.

        1. Not so much, except that the very last shot it’s implied with Korra and Asami leaving together hand in hand. Then the creators said “Yes, it’s real!” in an interview. Of course there was zero to set it up, so it’s not pervasive.

          1. Oh, so this is like when JK Rowling “revealed” in an interview or a speech or something that Dumbledore was gay, years after the series was all published? The series with zero gayness in it.
            Gawd I hate that. Such retardation.

            I’ve decided I’m offended by the Korra thing. Worth a letter to Nickelodeon and a cc to the authors of the show. Plays to the whole “chicks with muscles must be gay, sporty chicks must be gay, girls can’t be friends without being gay”, etc. Kinda nauseating really, plus KID’S SHOW!!! so I’ll have to charge the cannons and fire off a broadside. I read John C. Wright’s broadside, maybe a little on the fire-and-brimstone side for my personal taste, but certainly on target.

            I suspect if a few pissed off viewers let them know its not going to be tolerated in a kid’s show, the whole thing will quietly disappear out of the next season and nothing more will be said about it. Because really, I don’t HAVE to buy the next season, do I?

            Money talks, bullshit walks.

            1. Actually that was the final episode of the final season. In fact, the last two seasons of the show apparently had been moved to online-only status and were never on the cable channel.

      2. I hate violating characters. I got what John was saying and though I don’t watch the show it made sense. Like again making Willow gay in Buffy. (Which had the added “all nerd girls are gay” thing.)
        In other circumstances a gay pairing might not have bothered me, except that it’s always inevitably two chicks. Someone on the other side informed me that having two gay guys as main characters was not progressive (well, what made her think I wanted to be progressive) if written by a woman, and I took her point, though that’s not why I wrote them. OTOH they continuously award points to guys as “progressive” for writing lesbians. This means one of two things a) the feminists want to eliminate men as potential romantic objects and are SO happy when they co-opt male authors. b) They LIKE chauvinism the embodiment of which is men fantasizing about women together.
        Either way, this makes AFGM the book they cannot endure. Yay me.

        2. I don’t know if women have as visceral a reaction to seeing naked women as men have to seeing naked men. But that could be part of it.

          Another part of it could be that they consider lesbians getting it on as at some level below actual sex, since nobody has an outie they can put anywhere. (Especially where it doesn’t belong, which bugs a lot of straight guys about gay sex),

          1. An editor told me that even straight women get turned on by lesbian sex. I don’t know what he’d been smoking, but this straight woman would like to tell him he’s fracking insane.

            1. ‘Tis when people make broad counter-factual statements about sex that I know they are unserious, and ought be treated so.

              Why, in any rational assessment of human beings, would anybody say “all whatever blah-blah”? Much less stand on such ignorance regarding physical intimacy (take it as casual as you like, you’re still baring your delicate bits for scrutiny and manipulation by outsiders — it’s intimate).

              I’d be inclined to ask why someone was burdening me with their sexual fantasies in a professional venue…

              1. “I’d be inclined to ask why someone was burdening me with their sexual fantasies in a professional venue…”

                Exactly! Far and away, too much information.

            2. It’s Penthouse Lesbianism. Two women playing around with each other because they are so aroused, and waiting for a man (the reader) to come in and finish the job. Because you know, once the magic wand shows up, they lose interest in each other and flow all over the man like paint.

            3. Maybe your editor was referring to this hypothesis:
              http:// http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog//evolutionary-entertainment/201304/born-both-ways
              which says that women’s sexuality is much more culturally influenced than men’s; that whether men are hetro- or homo- sexual oriented is mostly genetically determined, while women’s orientation is only slightly controlled by genetic factors, and more by cultural conditioning.

              This leaves room for him to be not-incorrect, while your response also fits.

              Anecdotally, I have 9 out-of-the-closet gay male friends/acquaintences (about 5% of my male universe), 3 out-of-the-closet lesbian acquaintences (no “friends”, and about 3% of my female universe), and 3 out-of-the-closet bi-sexual women and 0 bi-sexual men. This seems to be consistant with the hypothesis.

              1. I’m OLD. those percentages were reversed in the 70s Well, men were about the same, but women were way fewer. Yeah, women are more socially influenced. Which is why the more books/games/movies with lesbians the more we’ll have. (shrug.) Though a lot of it is (weirdly) positioning for a guy (on the bi side.) Lesbian friends complain of it. 😛

        3. The Willow thing bugged you too? I’m glad it wasn’t just me, because I thought that was a totally gratuitous destruction of a character for zero net gain in the plot. Nothing interesting at all, just a little wave to the gay lobby. That, plus they added Harriet the Spy for friggin’ eye candy and never did anything interesting with her. She just pranced around in short skirts and tripped when the monsters chased her.

          Idiots.

  31. Why the conflation of liberalism, to use the Merkin term, with SJWism? It may be true that it is primarily a problem inspired by PoMo Liberal arts colleges, but SJWs ire is most vehemently directed toward other Liberals. There has been a war raging in the internet Atheist community between entryist SJWs and opponents of their cultural marxism since 2011. Some have been reluctant to engage because they’ve been hoping it will all go away and they don’t want the hassle of being Witch of the Week, but more big figures are starting to push back. Gamergate has woken a lot of people up. Think of SJWs as the Tea Party of the left and how moderate Republican candidates have been forced to pay lip service. It’s the same race to crazy on different sides of the political spectrum. It’s not really a left or right issue, it is an authoritarian vs tolerant issue.
    >

      1. Of course, to say that the SJW are the “Left’s” version of the Tea Party “radicals” of the Right, is extremely strange.

        2. It kind of makes sense, just not when coupled with objecting to the SJW being “conflated” with the Left, and the characterization of “race to crazy” in equal measures only works if you idolize the middle. (Defined as where you’re standing, presumably.)

          The TEA party is a fairly pure philosophical group of the Right put into action– other than folks trying to claim it after the fact for their groups, it’s shared concerns.
          The SJW folks are a fairly pure philosophical group of the Left in action– other than the eat-their-own effect that’s inherent to their philosophy, it’s shared concerns.

          One’s rational and the other’s emotional, but that is rather a major dividing section for right and left.

            1. No idea; in reality, we’re the ones that are fighting for social justice– that is, to make the rules of the society such that they promote justice, and not their unjust parody of “justice,” either– but anything we call ourselves has the same issue. They WILL mangle the language to make themselves feel better.

              1. No, we don’t discriminate. We fight for justice pure and simple, and do not require it to be “social.”

                2. Example, which group is aimed at promoting this:
                  ARTICLE 3
                  SOCIAL JUSTICE

                  1928 Society ensures social justice when it provides the conditions that allow associations or individuals to obtain what is their due, according to their nature and their vocation. Social justice is linked to the common good and the exercise of authority.

                  I. RESPECT FOR THE HUMAN PERSON

                  1929 Social justice can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man. The person represents the ultimate end of society, which is ordered to him:

                  (quote)What is at stake is the dignity of the human person, whose defense and promotion have been entrusted to us by the Creator, and to whom the men and women at every moment of history are strictly and responsibly in debt.35(end quote)

                  1930 Respect for the human person entails respect for the rights that flow from his dignity as a creature. These rights are prior to society and must be recognized by it. They are the basis of the moral legitimacy of every authority: by flouting them, or refusing to recognize them in its positive legislation, a society undermines its own moral legitimacy.36 If it does not respect them, authority can rely only on force or violence to obtain obedience from its subjects. It is the Church’s role to remind men of good will of these rights and to distinguish them from unwarranted or false claims.
                  From the Vatican’s website for the Catechism, part three, section one, chapter two, article three. 😀

                    1. Please spread it all over the place– we’ve GOT to take back some of the stuff they steal, or we’ll run out of ground, and purloined theological terms are probably one of the easiest targets.

    2. “Think of SJWs as the Tea Party of the left … the same race to crazy on different sides of the political spectrum.”

      You’re new here, aren’t you?

    3. “SJWs ire is most vehemently directed toward other Liberals.”

      Leftists have repeatedly, throughout over a century, directed ire toward those closest to them politically. Up to and including massacres.

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