Reclaiming the Culture

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

A few days ago, I was on the book of faces, on a thread started by Brad Torgersen, in which we’d already had at least three progressives come by and scream at us that Hillary had won the popular vote and why weren’t we making her president, when progressive #4 came by to announce that it just wasn’t fair we weren’t giving the presidency to Hillary Clinton, despite her popular vote in.  By that time I’d grown a little testy (who, me? Nevah) and my answer was “Another constitutional scholar!” after which I gave a cursory answer about the electoral college protecting us from being dictated to by California, and, in the long run, from ending up in a civil war.

The lady (!) arguing with me came back with one of the most bizarre answers I’ve heard in a long time.  She said since I’d first resorted to ad hominem, she won.  A few of the other people on the thread asked her WHAT she’d won, and that’s, indeed, the material question.  Never mind that, to my knowledge so far “constitutional scholar” is not yet a recognized insult, she seemed to think she could win an argument about FACTS (i.e. does the electoral college exist?  Can it be said to have a beneficial purpose?) because an opponent used a logical fallacy.

That is not how the world works.  If we’re both arguing over whether the sky is blue or bright red, and I call you the corrugated son of a whorish slug, it doesn’t make the sky bright red.  That she thought it did alarmed me more than her belief that the electoral college was somehow unfair.  But that doesn’t mean her ignorance of our fundamental structures as a nation and the reason for them was any less alarming.

And then a friend on the book of faces posted this video.  If you have time to see it, the gentleman who calls himself Big Joe, schooled the derpapotomi in style, but in the middle of this, one of the shrieking ignorami who presumes to tell him that he needs to “educate” himself, also tells him he’s so “ignorant” because Trump wasn’t elected, he was “selected” by the electoral college.

At that point, the hair was standing up at the back of my head, and I immediately went to the phone and called my two millenials to ask them if they knew what the electoral college was, and  what its function was.

Older son said he knew but only because his last History Teacher in High School was a retired Navy Commander who, upon discovering that they knew nothing about how the republic was constituted, and after he was done blowing a gasket, took them through an accelerated course on what the founding fathers had wrought.  Before that all they really knew was that the founding fathers had owned slaves and therefore all their opinions were tainted.

Younger son said he learned about the structure of government from PJM and from the books I flung at his head when he said something particularly stupid.  (Sometimes literally flung at his head.)  In school he learned only that the founding fathers owned slaves and were rich, and therefore all their work was tainted.

I’m not going to pretend my sons are representative of their generation.  I’m not even going to pretend the derpapotamus who thought Constitutional Scholar was an insult is representative of the generation between mine and my sons’.

I’m just going to say that while a lot of people are taught about our system, they are taught about it wrapped in a lot of scolding about the founding fathers owning slaves (and there will be a post about slavery next week, because Americans have SOMEHOW got the bizarre idea it’s uniquely American, and this is a stick the Liberals use to discredit the whole American experiment.  A stick that must be wrenched out of their hands and used on their own backs.  I don’t despise Barrack Obama because he’s descended from slavers on both sides or his family — no, truly, research it — but because he’s chockfull of socialist ideas which are a re-institution of slavery and just as offensive to the human spirit as the original.)

Experimental questions to less politically involved young people got me answers about our system that ranged from its being a democracy (which is about as accurate as saying it is a monarchy) or — and this is a doozy — that we live in “capitalism” which is not a political system, it’s not even, really, an economic system, more what emerges when government doesn’t screw with the economy.

Look, this is the problem we’re up against.  Back in the nineties, I found Rush Limbaugh’s habit of referring to America under Clinton as occupied America, annoying and thought of it as a schtick.  (Even though I hated what Clinton did on most fronts, starting with Motor Voter.)

But in the last ten years, I’ve come to realize he was right.  America was and largely still is an occupied country.  Foreign agents (natural born, but recruited early by Soviet Agit Prop) control our media, our education, our entertainment.  And most of what the occupiers have done is try to destroy that which is uniquely American: our individualism, and our system of government.  They also try to inoculate against people finding about our system on their own and thinking it’s brilliant, by tainting the character of the founding fathers and the idea of America as a nation AT LEAST as good as any other, if not better.

It is important, as we face the difficult task of rebuilding, to look towards the countries that came out of occupation by the enemy for examples.

As in France after World War II it might be convenient, as the tide turns and people pretend they were always in the resistance to the occupation, to let them pretend, and to not forget but turn a blind eye to their acts while under enemy influence.

But most of all, and above all, it is important to storm the bastions of the enemy, and to start teaching facts to young and old; it is important to start a great work of teaching citizens about our system.

This is more important in America than anywhere else, since our polity depends on at least a decent percentage of informed citizens.  (It will never be all of them.)

Now I don’t see any point in storming the schools or the bastions of current culture.  Due to what Iowa Hawk defined as the process of the vile progs taking over an institution, gutting it, skinning it, then wearing its skin demanding respect, all those institutions are in great trouble, and thanks to technology all the gatekeepers in such institutions will be taken down in the next ten years or so.

So, build under, build around, build over, and make sure you teach and explain as we go.

A lot of the people behaving very badly aren’t stupid.  They just know a lot of things that just ain’t so.  And a lot of them aren’t evil: they were intentionally corrupted by enemy agents, and turned into weapons against their own country and their own form of government.

Not all will be reachable, but a lot of them will be.  Yeah, this will call for you to be patient, when it’s the last thing you want to be.

But we’ve already started the most important part of this work: we’re talking back, and letting them know we’re here.

Yeah, this is sending a lot of them into a blind panic.  This happens when the foundations of your world shift under you.

But once they calm down some percentage will be reclaimable.  And we need to reclaim them, because our country needs them.

Be not afraid.  Go forth and work and teach as you go. In the end, we win they lose.  But it doesn’t absolve you from doing everything you can.  Go and do it.

494 thoughts on “Reclaiming the Culture”

  1. I mentioned your comment about how American history is taught to my wife, who took American history at a community college not many years ago. She said yes, what she was taught was that the Founders were rich men who owned slaves. Nothing about constitutional principles or the like. Of course, her main text was Zinn, which totally omits any discussion of ethical or legal principles or of the Constitutional Convention. In fact Zinn seems to be almost universal; writing it and getting it adopted was a major propaganda coup.

      1. Not all, but far too many, yes, particularly in public schools. I think a Zinn book burning would be a wonderful thing, if only that didn’t result in more sales of his books. I guess that’ll have to wait until after his book isn’t assigned reading everywhere.

        2. I’m imagining Kip Russell’s dad going through Zinn and changing everything that was false or misleading. But there wouldn’t be much left of the original text, would there?

        4. I recently was in an interesting thread stemming from my observation that book burning was at least as much protected speech as flag burning. I don’t know if anyone was prepared to accept it though some admitted their arguments weren’t very strong.

          1. the worst part is the ‘America is horrible the government is horrible… but the government still needs to have all of the power’ in Zinn’s screed

        2. My guess is that he writes what they want to hear. The name Zinn means nothing for me, but his A People’s History of the United States does, because the term “people’s” has come to signal communist/socialist propaganda ahead. Figured from the blurb he was in dire need of a laxative, and gave it a pass.

          1. oh, they sourced overseas for a bit and went under, but more and more folks are homebuilding them with 3D printing, so quality internets should be making a comeback.
            I hope.

        3. For penance, read the Federalist and Antifederalist papers, The Constitution, the Declaration (and be prepared to identify which phrases are found in which), and research whether Ben Franklin did indeed ever say, “An hour ago, my good woman, it WAS on a woman, now what do you think?”

          1. For extra credit, read Madison’s “Notes of debates in the Federal Convention of 1787”. Preferably the whole thing. If you can’t, at least read Hamilton’s proposal — you’ll never think favorably of him again. And read Pauline Maier’s “Ratification” which describes the machine politics used to get our Constitution ratified. Oh yes, and Tom Paine’s “Common Sense”.

        2. Speaking of “useful idiots” and “useful dupes,” it seems some of the special snowflake rioters at Trump’s inauguration are upset that “Ernst Stavro Soros” threw them to the wolves:

          Source for both the sweet, sweet liberal tears and the “Ernst Stavro Soros” moniker – which I am *so* stealing – is here: http://weaponsman.com/?p=38606

          Mwahahahahahaha.

            1. In my gut I agree with you, but looking at ten years in the slammer has a way of encouraging self-reflection.

              Of course, it is likely they will find themselves welcomed by the Bloods, the Crips, and other inmate fraternities (okay, maybe not so much by the Aryan Nation.)

    3. Not to be unduly pedantic, but not all this nation’s Founders owned slaves. Benjy Franklin did not — he was founder of the first abolitionist society in America. Neither of the Adams boys owned slaves, nor did Gouverneur Morris, author of the preamble of the Constitution.

      In fact, a search of the web finds this answer: of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, 27 owned slaves while 28 did not.

    4. Benefits of a homeschool education: first encountering Zinn at 17 in college and wondering how anyone could be so mean-spirited and ill-informed about history. Downside of the homeschool education: I assumed it was somehow an honest mistake, only realizing what a clever piece of work Zinn’s book really is at a later date. Result: own homeschooled daughters will learn history AND how to look for biases – from any point of view – in their texts.

      1. I collided with Zinn in grad school (hey, I’d been in the Real World for a decade, working a Real Job). I’ll take an honest Marxist historian over his tripe any day. At least E. P. Thompson and Sean Willentz consider alternative motives besides racism/sexism/whatever-phobia.

  2. I had a bizarre sense, along about 2006 that bad stuff (unspecified at the time) was coming down the pike, and we would desperately need to get in touch with our history – our real history, about real people, trying to perfect self-government, making it work. We would have to know that our metaphorical American ancestors were in the main, decent, striving people, doing their best with what they had. And the best way to do that, I thought, was to make a ripping good yarn out of it, and tempt readers into an interest in history. Historical fiction is a gateway drug to a serious interest in it all …
    So here I am, ten novels later …

  3. Every time I wonder if I am missing anything by having stopped going to Facebook I read something like this and realize that I am, indeed. missing somethings, and am demmed glad of it.

    1. As soon as it came out that the ZuckerBook terms of service, and their actual implementation of code, approved and implemented monitoring of everything else I did on my machine while logged in (like monitoring all the webs sites I visited), I implemented a lightning raid strategy: Whenever I am moved to go look at photos posted by actual real world friends, I rapidly log in, look at the pictures, and then find the hidden “Log Out” thingee and exfil as rapidly as possible.

      1. The rulers don’t get surveilled, silly.

        And ya. Seeing the same from folks whining that decreasing h1b and the current immigration blocks will send tech running. My response: join everyone else whose been running for the last two decades.

      2. I laughed out loud when I saw the piece of tape on Zuckerberg’s Apple laptop camera.

        My laptop camera has had tape on it for years and years, and everybody used to call me paranoid. I don’t hear that much anymore.

        1. My last job involved me working at an IT Walk-Up Bar. So I saw employees from all over the company. The vast majority of them had placed something over the camera in the company-issued laptops that they used.

  4. The most amazing thing for me in the aftermath of the election was the progressive Demos coming right out and screaming that anyone who does not live in a city is inbred subhuman scum. Nancy Pelosi was the last I heard: “Well, thank you for asking that question because the cultural issue, and especially when it comes to rural America, the isolation that some people feel there, plus they don’t think that Democrats are people of faith, when the fact is that we are. And I say, this will be a little not in keeping with the spirit of the day of unity, but I say they pray in church on Sunday and prey on people the rest of the week, and while we’re doing the Lord’s work by ministering to the needs of God’s creation they are ignoring those needs which is to dishonor the God who made them.” She isn’t even the worse, you can hunt up vile stuff without much trouble.
    Michael Moore wasn’t surprised that Trump won. He published a prediction, “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win.” It’s mostly snark, but the first point is, the Democrats have lost Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 64 electoral votes, what Romney lost by, game over, the Republicans don’t need Florida or Colorado. And Hillary ignored those rustbelt states, and didn’t dream anyone would blame her for NAFTA and their long lost jobs.

    1. I stopped reading Facebook the day before yesterday, after I read a a comment from a now “friend” of mine, a bright, college-educated woman in her 60s who reads SFF, who said of DJT voters who live in red states, “Those people don’t care about education as much as we do and are too lazy to move where the jobs are.” I became enraged at this and decided I’d had enough. I will not tolerate such bigotry.

        1. Still not there, but it is funner to slap down stupid statements by family in person anyhow.
          [actually a cousin’s boyfriend, not family] – “Texas can get away with being a Right To Work State because there isn’t much manufacturing there. It’s all farming and cattle.”
          “So Toyota, Ford, GM, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Dell, Bell Helicopter, Northrop Grumman, Vaught, Peterbuilt (the cousin and me have an uncle that works for Pete!), Texas Industries, all the costal refineries, the NASA support around Houston, [I had more, it went on for some time] don’t count as manufacturing?”

          1. That poor dear little snowflake never has been to Texas, has he?

            (Old AF friend and good buddy is now a city councilman in Plano, TX – and he was over the moon at Toyota moving their corporate HQ to Plano from California.)

            1. Not sure he has left the Milwaukee area much (we were in the sticks of the U.P. of Michigan when he made that statement, so I know he left WI at least once).

          2. Get away with? It’s why the manufacturers are there in part. Forgot LM too. Big plant in fort Worth for f16/35.

            1. That was before I even lived in Texas so I missed that one.
              Also, he, for some reason, thought Louisiana (where I was living at the time) was just tourism and Casinos.

          3. Don’t forget the steel mills and factories building equipment for the oil business……

            2. I mentioned the foundries and forges, Hughes, Fairchild . . . at the time, I was working at the airport, so I knew all the aircraft companies lurking in Texas for some reason.

      2. The phrase that has bothered me for years is “voting against their best interests.” As though the speaker *knows* what they are. Very patronizing.

        I also have noticed that nobody, but nobody, seems to understand that yes, someone could vote against Hilary because they didn’t like her policies. “But those policies would *help* them!” Well, if you are talking to someone for whom the last eight years have been hard and getting harder, and you have a candidate who says she is going to continue those policies, do you really think they will like those policies?

        Or as I saw posted somewhere else, if you have a person whose life has been getting steadily worse, you insult them at every turn, and offer them the choice between more of the same and a big “F YOU!”, why are you surprised when they hit the big red button?

        1. Usually that phrase implies “voting based on those silly, unimportant social issues rather than for the party that will give them the most government moolah.” Laying aside for the moment that the folks in question might not think that Robin Hood policies are in their best interest (as one person put it, America doesn’t have poor people, we have temporarily embarrassed millionaires), people wiser than I have pointed out that if the social issues are really silly and unimportant, the Dems could change THEIR position on those issues to match rural America’s and just suck up all those votes. But of course, the Left doesn’t think those issues are silly or unimportant; they just think that, as the smartest people around, they’ve come up with the right answers, and those stupid rubes out their should just leave the thinking about abortion and gay marriage and immigration and the like to their betters.

          1. Actually it is even more specific than that because it means “voting for stupid non-progressive positions on social issues”. No one was ever accused of voting against their own interests by being a single issue voter on abortion if they are pro-choice.

          2. people wiser than I have pointed out that if the social issues are really silly and unimportant, the Dems could change THEIR position on those issues to match rural America’s and just suck up all those votes
            ———————–

            As opposed to the constant announcements about how Republican candidates need to shift *their* stances on social issues in order to avoid scaring off all of the liberals…

        2. Exactly. I’ve told them whenever they say it to me that claiming I’m “voting against my best interests” is extremely insulting and that they’d better take it back immediately. Then never do, of course.

          1. “How the @!#$ do you know what my ‘best interests’ are, you sorry ignorant sack of horse manure?”

            1. Okay, polite equivalent: “I do not think I would ever be so arrogant as to presume to tell somebody what her “best interest” are.”

                1. They’re being nice. They’re calling you stupid. If you were really voting in favor of your best interests, you would be EVIL.

        3. Tommy Frank’s book, What’s The Matter With Kansas, is a textbook case of asking all the wrong questions and knowing all the “right” answers for them.

          2. I wouldn’t shorten that name. It’s too similar to Tommy Franks, the general who was in charge of CENTCOM during Bush’s first term.

            1. It ought be noted that Thomas Frank has spent the last year warning the Democrat Party about just how badly they were alienating their core constituency.

              Wiki:
              “Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? is a 2016 book by Thomas Frank about how the American Democratic Party has changed to support elitism in the form of a professional class instead of the working class.”

        4. The thing that I find weird about “voting against your best interests” is that if you told a progressive, or an average college student, that they were voting for what was in their own interest, they would deny it indignantly. You never see them saying, “I vote for what serves my interests”; it’s always “what’s good for everybody” or “for the disadvantaged” or “for the Earth” or something. So apparently voting for what serves your own interest is discreditable in their eyes, and they think good people like themselves vote for some higher moral principle. But they condemn working class people for insufficient self-interest. I think they are failing to correlate all the contents of their minds.

          1. Failure to correlate is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s called doublethink, and has been the bedrock of Ingsoc for seventy years. Report for re-education!

        5. The reason I voted against Hillary are personal antipathy that just plain hatred is too mild a word for it. I had the pleasure of having Blanche Dale work for me while I was stationed at Andrews AFB. Blanche Dale was the wife of the former White House Travel Office manager, Billy Dale. So you can say I got my information straight from the horse’s mouth.

          The end result of the Travelgate scandal was that Billy Dale was innocent of all misdeeds and crimes he’d been accused of. The only finding was an opinion that he was keeping too much currency in the petty cash fund; but that opinion was made by people with no concept of how the rest of the world operates, and minor palm greasing is required to do business setting up trips in many countries the President has to visit.

          Had Hillary merely said, “Bill, we’re privatizing your civil service job. You can transfer to another office management job elsewhere, or retire.” I wouldn’t have even squeaked. Nope. Her fault lies in a malicious need to justify everything she does. Telling minions to sic the government dogs on him to build a case against an innocent man is a pretty bad abuse of power. Using those same dogs to go after his extended family because they couldn’t find anything on him the first pass is worse. Continually hammering at them until the stress caused Mrs. Dale to have a stroke from which she never fully recovered is as foul a deed as any committed by your various war criminals of the past 100 years.

          Sure, getting it from me makes it 3rd hand rumor. But I know what I saw, and I know what I was told, and it certainly fits with her modus operandi ever since. Trust Hillary? I’d sooner trust a scorpion on my nose as I swim across the river.

          1. I was the reason that the firing happened so late in the day. The administration wanted to be sure that the Travel Office had their e-mail accounts cut off before it happened. I was one of only two people in my group who could do that and the only Republican in my group. They held the ticket for cutting them off from e-mail for about 3 hours, till I came in at 2 pm. If you want to be bored with the details you can find them here: https://www.facebook.com/tomr1/posts/10207103392598506

            1. Huh. I was too young for the TravelGate problem to make an impression on me, but I really hate those “clean out your desk” firings. (Some of my jobs have been in radio, where you sometimes don’t even get that level of dignity. I once got let go over the phone at the beginning of December, right when I was wondering how to ask for more hours for some extra money.)

        6. The phrase that has bothered me for years is “voting against their best interests.”

          I’ve used it on a Smallbiz businessman from down-state who votes Detroit Democrat (of course his business is now outside of the city and so is his house)
          Him [after I mentioned we were part of a merger in part so the controlling company can move their headquarters from Kenosha, WI to Cork, Ireland)- “That shouldn’t be allowed! We need to Tax Corporations more, and they should not be allowed to move to another country.”(or state even, but that came out later)
          Me- “Corporations do not ‘pay’ taxes. They pass that cost along.”
          Him- “They do to pay taxes! I should know, I own my own business!”
          Me- “Where do you get the money you pay out in taxes?”
          Him- {almost mumbling} “My . . . customers. . . .mostly”
          Me- “Better be ALL of it from your customers, or you won’t be in business very long”

      3. You should stay engaged and call them out for their bigotry whenever they demonstrate it. Don’t worry, they’ll unfriend you and block you soon enough…

        1. Ayup – rub their noses in their bigotry and make them unfriend you.

          If you wish to be subtle about it, begin by asking how many of “Those people” they know well enough to speak of what motivates them, of how much education they have and what (and how many) jobs they do?

          Funny how “Those people” is racist when we say it but perfectly acceptable when they do.

          1. Had a friend from HS defriend me last year about graduation time. A PhD in—-Woman’s Studies— and a professor. (What other job would she be qualified for?) She was lamenting the fact that her daughter was about to graduate from a top notch engineering school, and would soon be facing a hostile world and no job offers from engineering firms because, gasp, Her daughter was a female! All I did was point out to her the real world involving females (and minorities) with engineering degrees. My son graduated from a top notch engineering school with a BS in electrical engineering a few years earlier. He was in the top 1/3 of the class, along with another white male veteran. They were the last two people in the class hired. (Age discrimination? Or vet discrimination?) The women and minorities, regardless of class rank or GPA, all had multiple job OFFERS to choose from before graduation day. Of the 9 women he kept in touch with after graduation (through facebook and other social media) 8 no longer work in the field. Next day, I was defriended. Just for pointing out these facts.

            Oh, the first job he got a few months after graduating was to fill a slot that someone from the same school who had multiple job offers had filled and quickly failed in.

            1. It has been my understanding that pointing out inconvenient facts is the fastest way to become friendless on FB. It may constitute a TOS violation.

            2. Yep. You don’t have a job guarantee after school. Undergrad in aero engineering and no job offers and only two interviews between senior year and year after I graduated with hundreds of applications. GPA 3.7 so not a c student. In part because hiring freeze in govt and LRB Boeing retaliation. Got my MS with full tuition from top 5 school but half my class wasn’t hired when we graduated. And our research was directly for these companies.

              And no surprise on the percentage that left. Most seem to move to admin or oversight quick vs math.

                1. In undergrad I was only one without and did manage a temp job. But I graduated into the recession and when Boeing was being persecuted by NLRB for going to South Carolina. Grad school did surprise me that we had people without offers. GT ain’t podunk U and I had to delay my offer so I could finish my degree.

                2. The issue (IMO) is the problem of getting thru the HR wall from the online apps. Career fairs came down to ‘apply online’

                3. The way it was explained to me, when I got out with my aero e degree in 1989, is that aerospace is unlike other engineering disciplines in that the hiring is cyclical with about a 20 year cycle, and that 1989 was near the bottom of the cycle. At that point McDonnell-Douglas (this was before Boeing bought them) had laid off 1/3 of their engineers three years in a row. Anyway, the placement office suggested that I go to grad school in surveying, or some such.

                  The thing is, I programmed computers as a serious amateur and I sent an email a year and half or so later that got me a job doing that. Now I program computers as a serious professional and I’ve never been in a position to use the degree I spent so much time acquiring.

                  But someday…

                  1. That makes sense. I was graduating about ten years later, which means they were at the top of the cycle. (I did a year and a half of engineering classes before realizing that I hated it, so I knew a lot of them.)

            3. A couple of jobs ago, I had a female friend who was looking for a Computer Science-related job. I gave her the contact information for one of the higher-ups at my company, and then mentioned to said higher-up that I’d done so. He was delighted due to the scarcity of female software developers.

              She ultimately didn’t get a job there, though I don’t know the reasons why.

            4. “(Age discrimination? Or vet discrimination?) ”

              How about “doesn’t check off enough diversity boxes to be able to sue over not being hired” discrimination?

              (Waiting for Mr Gauch to assert that this isn’t government dictating to private business because the government isn’t directly filing the lawsuit in 3…2…1)

      4. I dropped off Facebook years ago. I’m the only one among my family or most of my personal acquaintances who skews conservative, so every day my feed was getting multiple memes and links of egregious disagreement with me, and having to bite my tongue and manacle my fingers to avoid getting into amity-destroying arguments was just too much of an effort.

        I can cope with knowing my loved ones think (or would if they knew what they really were) that my opinions are rubbish, just so long as I don’t have to be reminded of it every day.

      5. I 99% quit FB this past summer due to the election. Now I’m very selected and read:

        1. When I’m tagged
        2. A couple of groups (Sarah’s and some RPG ones)
        3. Once and a while a quick skim.

        1. I only use FB because one of my friends insists on being contacted via FB chat. So I am signed up under the name of my Evil Alter Blogger.

              1. Given the way you can change platforms at will, deal with lack of internet adn lack of cell signal, etc… kind of a point.

                Or might be preference bias.

      6. I have not been on FaceCrack for several years. It got on my nerves the first time I signed up, and I came back 3-4 times and abandoned it since then. The wife is a habitual poster/lurker and is always getting upset over something she sees or has posted against her. There are a LOT of maleducated morons out there.

      7. Because the jobs are for retail or low paid services that they are not trained in in hyper expensive urban cores and their lives already buried their costs in their home.

      8. Carol, the thing that induced you to stop reading Facebook, was pretty much typical daily experience for a lot of us living in urban California for at least the last 30 years or so. I suspect it’s been the same for people living in large urban areas elsewhere in the country.

        And the leftists wonder why they lost a lot of voters that they’ve taken for granted for a long time.

    2. Friend of my mother is, shall we say, superannuated and has voted Democrat from FDR on. And he was grumping that he “couldn’t for that woman.” Not couldn’t vote for a woman, mind, just not that one. It takes a helluvalot to lose an FDR-and-ever-since Democrat, but by gum they managed it.

    3. Sadly none of that is new. Been hearing it as long as I can remember. As for Catholic Pelosi, it’s a costume they put on and use as a shield. Pharisees.

      1. She espouses the most ridiculous and erroneous things and pretends they are Catholic. Some of that was taught to her in the Sixties, but some is from her own brain.

        Nobody else says that St. Joseph supports abortion, for example.

        1. She got “slapped down” once (IMO not hard enough) by one high Catholic clergyman for a remark that the anti-abortion doctrine of the Catholic Church was “something new”.

          2. Pelosi, John Kerry, and Dick Durban should have been excommunicated by the church for their rabid support of abortion, but the church leaders have NO Balls.

            1. To be fair, excommunication is a very serious thing, and Catholics believe it actually cuts you off from the Church. Church leaders would prefer not to imperil somebody’s soul.

              (Side note: Couldn’t name either son after my dad because I don’t name kids after Congress-critters. Stuck it in the middle, instead.)

              1. It does not imperil your soul. It does, however, carry the connotation that you have, by your actions, already done so.

              2. It would seem that deliberately misleading others as to the doctrines of the Church should require censure at minimum and excommunication for repeated offense. This is particularly true for those who present themselves as figures of authority.

                1. There was a case in (IIRC) Germany where a Catholic lay couple performed Mass and publicized doing so.

                  Apparently, the Church’s position was that they excommunicated themselves and the formal excommunication was just an acknowledgement of that fact.

                  IE They had put themselves outside of the Church by their actions and the Church was only acknowledging that fact.

    4. Tangent, read at own risk.

      I think the only thing that keeps me from leaving FB and FL completely is fear of being forgotten (which for personal reasons has been forefront of my emotions starting MLK Day).

      A few days (weeks? I lose track of time) ago our hostess discussed when she was in her teens she feared she would disappear if people didn’t see her (or something along those lines). I realized coming to work today an ongoing fear I have is just an adult version of that. I’m afraid if I die it will take so long for someone to notice I’m not around my cats would starve to death before some checked on me and, seeing I was dead, took care of them.

      I think being on FB, FL, Google Hangouts, etc is a weird self-treatment for believing you don’t exist and don’t matter.

      I also worry that it may engender those same fears in people who have grown up having them as a constant. What would happen to these people if their friends stopped tagging or texting for a day. I know how hard losing one person as a constant Google Hangouts companion has effected me and I didn’t grow up with social media.

        2. Back in the 90s, DragonCon had the deputy ME for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as a panel. He said that if you die alone with your pets, you go from Master to Meat in about three days.

      2. I remember a story from the 70s where the Arcology that was the world was running out of room. So… it was decided that people with out enough friends would be placed into suspended animation. The alternative was going out and rejoining the real world. The protagonists were two old chess playing men whose only friends were each other and various AI personalities. They were both shocked that the only real people they new were each other.

  5. You know, I’m pretty sure Schoolhouse Rock was ever meant to be right-wing propoganda, but I’m starting to understand why certain people think America Rocks! has aged poorly. I thought they were just talking about Elbow Room, but they never *said* “just Elbow Room.”

    If We’re Gonna Send Your Vote to College is verboten, that makes more sense.

    I’m a millenial, too, and we got a lot of “the founders were rich landowners who were upset about completely reasonable taxes–what, did they think the French & Indian War was free?” I’m not really sure if it was home or school where I learned government structure. The more I read… the more I realize it probably wasn’t the latter.

    Though I did have a good Federal State and Local Government class later, so maybe.

    1. How do they explain away the fact that the Boston tea party was a protest against a tax cut. The protest because if the British could cut taxes without their consent, then they could raise them without consent.

      1. Ron Chernow’s biography of Washington is interesting, because he was a loyal British soldier when he was young. The problem is the classism of the British-trained officers meant that colonials were deliberately excluded and unrewarded for their efforts, and there was quite a bit of resentment that the Revolution tapped. (Washington was also fairly mediocre as a military strategist; his strengths ended up being almost entirely based on the charisma he developed. He held together the Army with sheer willpower, it seems like.)

        1. And the myriad bullet holes in his clothing, while he remained untouched … mythic, that

          1. Oh yes. It just goes to show that the best strategist is not necessarily the one who wins. You need a lot of different skills to run a war successfully.

            1. Tangentially, while I haven’t read Nathaniel Filbrick’s “Valiant Ambition”, it’s currently on my to-read list (at three pages and counting…) after hearing the author on a podcast I follow. It’s a comparison of Benedict Arnold and George Washington during the War of Independence. Filbrick lays out a case that Washington was a poor tactical commander but an excellent strategist, while Benedict was an excellent tactical commander but routinely failed to grasp the larger picture of the war itself.

  6. Good morning Sarah and the Huns! I’m a regular lurker here, and I can confirm your sons’ experiences. About 5 years ago, I took a class in US History which covered the period from when the first humans crossed the Alaskan land bridge to the Civil War at a local community college. I had taken an AP US history class in high school 39 years ago, but sadly, I was more interested in reading magazines on rock music and reading SF so I didn’t pay a lot of attention at that time. When I retook this US history class 34 years later, I was shocked at many things. First, at how dumbed-down the primary text was. It was written at what I think of as a junior-high school level. It confirmed my impression that community colleges exist to give young adults something approximating the education they should have received when they were in secondary school (that would fill in more time for them when they should have been working at their first jobs). Second, we had to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. You’ve probably heard of it. It had interesting material in it, but I kept mentally gagging on reading about how evil the Founders were because they were slave-owning capitalists. There was nothing about the philosophical roots of the structure of our government and how radically groundbreaking it is. Third, my professor was an immigrant from Canada who was lecturing us along these same (Socialist, America-bashing) lines. I had signed up for an “honors contract” in this class, which meant that I had to write a research paper and give a brief oral presentation. I chose to write on Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court case where Justice John Marshall decided that the Supreme Court had the right to overrule acts of Congress. My research for that paper saved me from being convicted for mass murder and book burning. I read some of the Federalist papers and Madison’s Notes on the Debates over the Constitution (along with my husband), and we were both struck with how brilliant even the lesser-known figures in those debates were, especially compared to the minds of politicians today.

    1. What I mean to conclude with is that my research project is what finally brought out in me my love for our government and admiration for our Founders. We will have a lot of work ahead of us if we are to re-educate our country.

    2. Canadian teachers. *spit*
      Took a GenEd course (Ontario higher learning requirement to get a college or university diploma) on Canada: Culture and Change. I had to correct the teacher two or three times on history and geography. The two examples off the top of my head 1.) Canada was the largest country in the world 2.) Yankee was a derogatory term used by the Confederates about the Union first used in the ACW.

      What made this worse was that the large majority of my college class were immigrants or foreign students taking in all she was spouting as gospel. I eventually just shut up and collected my grade.

      1. My daughter comes to me from time to time with what I think of as “stupid teacher tricks”. Most recent one was a substitute art teacher turning the class into a debate on Trump vs. Clinton. (Okay, it was just before the innauguration so this was on a lot of people’s minds, but art class?)

        She seems to have absorbed a lot of my politics by osmosis if by nothing else and this has been known to put her at odds with her teachers and fellow classmates. I’ve told her I’ll back her if she wants to fight that fight but if she doesn’t she can just shrug and give the teacher the answer they want and we can talk about the various issues on our own.

        One of the issues she did have was some difficulty because her peers were shunning her over her politics using slurs like “racist” and “gender traitor” (Something Sarah has mentioned being directed at her as well). Lately she tells me she has found more conservative students to hang with so that’s an improvement.

        So far, I’ve only had to go to war once a couple years ago on the issue of Athena’s then belief in Asatru. (Since then she seems to have fallen into comfortable agnosticism.) But the swords are kept sharp just in case.

        1. Yep. The shunning is the most disturbing part of it all to me. Especially outside of political endeavors. See it on a daily basis and it does harm people.

        2. Funny how it is that the people who hurl terms like “gender traitor” would go ballistic over an accusation of “race traitor.”

          As for debating Clinton/Trump in art class … Trump wrote The Art of the Deal while Hillary cannot even tell an artful lie. No contest, Trump is the greater artist.

          1. Not at all, the call Clarence Thomas (for example) a race traitor all the time.

            Oh, you mean calling white progs race traitors…

    3. Welcome, former lurker! Make yourself at home. Watch out for the dragon, the bull-man and the undead werecat. And beware of flying carp.

      2. OTOH, the wallaby is completely trustworthy (for certain values of trust … or is that values of worthy?) but should never be read while imbibing food nor drink.

          1. All my warning label needs to read is, “Lives a somewhat alternate lifestyle and like most people who do forgets to shut up about it but at least he doesn’t want the government to force you to endorse it.”

            1. I’m just looking for excuses to post Big Bang Theory clips… and speaking of puns about “pun” (with an added bonus of everybody’s favorite feature, autocorrupt):

                    2. Well, those aren’t really things to agree on so much as they are acknowledgements of natural law…

    4. In the interest of fairness, we probably ought concede that Zinn’s real objection to the Founders was not that they were slaveholders but that they were capitalists.

      It is a basic tenet of Progressivism that all citizens are property of the State (i.e., slaves) and their only real objection to slavery is when it is practiced by private individuals.

      1. Rephrasing: Progressives do not object to the principle of people being property, they object to the principle of people being private property, either of others or themselves.

        1. At least private slave owners had some financial reason to keep slaves fed and well. Government masters don’t as shown by love canal, Animas, bomb tests and the black book of progressivism

          1. Ah, Love Canal or how a corporation can follow the law, have property seized by immanent domain, make full disclosure, have the seizing government resell it without any disclosure, and still have the corporation taking the blame.

            1. Well, technically it was not sold by eminent domain. Just some oral history where it was threatened. But ya. The Corp made every effort to keep site secure up to and including public disclosure at school board meetings

      2. It is a basic tenet of Progressivism that all citizens are property of the State (i.e., slaves) and their only real objection to slavery is when it is practiced by private individuals.

        Oh, so very much this. May I steal?

    5. I was in a discussion in another place, all intellectuals, and a discussion of government broke out; one chap thought to quiet things by moderating between Liberals and Libertarians, and said that what I called controlling people was often protecting them, and why was I more concerned with the victimizers than the victims. That seemed a bit extreme, and I said that those protected from drinking alcohol during prohibition seemed to feel they were victims, not being protected. Which unleashed a storm of words about Liberals and Libertarians.

      I ended up saying this:

      Since I am neither Liberal nor Libertarian, I wouldn’t know. I thought I was pointing out that protecting people from things they don’t want to be protected from looks a lot like control. Children need to be protected from pederasts. One of those protections is jailing people who have child pornography on their hard disks; even cartoons of child pornography. How it got there is of no concern; claiming you didn’t know it was there is no defense.

      In a case forty years ago, a chap was suspected of embezzling from a bank; also with mail fraud; both federal crimes. There wasn’t enough evidence to get a search warrant, but the feds were morally certain that he was guilty and a search of his house would prove it. A federal postal inspector mailed him, registered mail, some kiddie porn (printed; this is before the Internet). The chap had to sign for it. Now they had absolute proof that he had kiddie porn in his house, obtained a warrant from a friendly judge, searched his house, ignored the porn but found plenty of evidence of embezzling, and charged him. I expect it would be easier now to download a video file to someone, and in these days of terabyte hard drives it would not be noticed until discovered by a search team…

      Good way to protect people?

      Yes, often people do need protecting, and law officers need a victory over very clever criminals every now and then. Government is a positive good, not merely necessary. No one wants to live in a Hobbesian society where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes solved that problem: absolute monarchy. He protects you, you submit to him. In 1648 the English decided that had gone too far. Then they found they needed the King after all, and brought his son back. In 1688 the decided they needed a king, but not that one, and came up with a new balance between King and Parliament. That experiment was still going on in 1776. The Convention of 1787 had all that in mind when they drafted the Constitution (sorry to repeat what used to be taught in 5th grade). It’s always a balance between government doing too much, and places where anarchy reigns and it does too little. There are always people who think we have too much government and those who think we have too little. We will hardly settle that here.

      I was trying to point out that people with perfectly good motives for protecting others do end up controlling them for their own good, and sometimes the protected people resent the hell out of it.

      —-

      I thought I was being a bit condescending, repeating history that I learned in fifth grade in a country school in Capleville Tennessee, but apparently they don’t teach such things now; and no one reads Macaulay or or other historians. I fear for the Republic.

      1. I now suspect I needed to say what happened in 1648 (they killed the king) and then Cromwell’s Commonwealth where they protected the people from Christmas among other things, and explained that there was a Restoration, and in 1688 the Glorious Revolution and Bill of Rights, but I keep forgetting that is no longer the heritage of every American, even in country schools.

        Terrifying.

        1. Sad when you think you have to explain important history. Scary thing is that I have learned a little of this on my own. Some of that history is now taught as a specialized history. And usually not even in high school these days.

        2. Michael Barone has written a very readable history of that period in his Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers and clearly indicates the origins of American independence in that era.

          Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

          1. Sadly, when I mention the Magna Carta, I often get blank stares. Apparently, since those vicious slave-owning Founding Fathers found the concepts of it important, it must be relegated to the dustbin as well.

            1. Heck, my parents told me back when I was watching the animated Robin Hood as a kid that “Prince John” actually had been king and had signed the Magna Carta…

            2. So they have gone beyond throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When they noticed the baby is dirty they decided there is no point even trying to wash, let’s just throw it out, and find ourselves a clean baby.

        4. My dad was horrified to figure out I didn’t get his old schoolyard chant– something like “Charlemagne, Charlemagne, thought rich and poor should learn the same, now we all shall curse his name” — because I’d never been taught anything about the guy.

          I had heard the name, because one of the “A Wizard in Rhyme” books mentioned that his knights were called Paladins and I was already mad for D&D style ‘dins, but a parody song provided the majority of what I’d ever heard of for the guy.

      2. You end up protecting people from themselves and letting loose the monster in the mind that escapes when that is the only available outlet. Every person calculates risk and reward differently and for some extreme sports are fun and stress relieving while others need to have their body defended by here’s of cats in a warm, locked home. Let both of them do as they wish and it minimizes their conflict. Force the adrenaline junkie to live like a cat lady or vice versa and I cannot see how you would not create significant damage to psyche.

          1. All people are not the same? Tha … that … that’s something-ist!!!!

            Next you’ll be telling me one size does not fit all, that inequality results from different behaviours and that ADHD is sometimes inaccurately diagnosed!

            HMM: Youngest in class twice as likely to take ADHD medication. “A likely cause of the late birth date effect is that some teachers compare the maturity of their students without due regard to their relative age, resulting in higher rates of diagnosis among younger class members. . . . The late birth date effect is not the only factor creating unease about ADHD. Multiple studies, including the WA study, have established boys are three to four times more likely to be medicated for ADHD. If, as is routinely claimed, ADHD is a neurobiological disorder, a child’s birthdate or gender should have no bearing on their chances of being diagnosed.”

            Posted at 5:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds
            https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/255541/

            1. Oh dear lord, you did claim that one size does not fit all. You monster. I suppose you would bar government from giving milk and cookies to everybody on the grounds some folk have gluten issues and others are lactose intolerant.

              2. You want to give kids food with SUGAR!!??

                You BARBARIAN! Are you trying to kill them by giving them heart disease and diabetes!?

                  2. That has to be the most ignorant thing I have ever seen… As C12H22O11, does that mean that ‘Carbon Free Sugar’ is actually water?
                    I thought some of the ‘gluten free’ labels (like potato chips) were pretty stupid, but at least they were honest.

                    1. I well remember when the current diet craze was “Fat Free!” … resulting in seeing the proclamation on packages of candy corn.

                    2. IIRC one jelly company advertised their jelly as “fat-free” with the phase “never had it never will”. 😉

                    4. “It’s the ideal snack! It’s only 15 Calories. It’s fat-free. It has no artificial colors, no artificial flavors, no preservatives, and is all-natural.”

                      “Great! What is it?”

                      “A sugar cube.”

                      “Wha….?”

                    6. I figured they’d jumped the Carcharodon megalodon when I came across some bottle water labelled as “gluten free”.

                  3. I know what they’re trying to *say* with the label, but my brain immediately went “uhhh, chemistry doesn’t work that way”. Also, pretty sure that “certified carbon free” is a fancy way of saying “we can charge you at least twice as much for this because you have guilt.” I refuse to buy in.

                    1. Some time ago, I purchased something electronic… maybe a piece of stereo equipment?… Anyway, they’d had tons of fun with the box. It was labeled as being Fat Free, Dolphin Safe, Extra-Low calorie, and probably a dozen other faddish food label things. 😉

                  4. Too bad I cremated my father. If I’d buried him whole I could hook up a dynamo and make my own electricity. As a Professor of the History of Science he always wanted somebody to show him an inorganic banana.

                    1. *snicker” My own dad was cremated also, but as a research biologist, his own bug-bear was hearing grocery items described as “organic”.

                      “You idiots – EVERYTHING is organic!” And yes, I’ve used this in one of my own books – for the character of a crusty old veterinarian with no patience for new-age BS.

                    2. My own pet peeve is ‘Natural’. Botulism is natural. Cyanide is natural. For social apes murdering the Alpha and his young children, followed by raping his mate is natural. You can keep ‘Natual’.

                    3. I’m reminded of a co-worker that proudly proclaimed, “I only drink organic milk.” I asked him and what the heck is this stuff called milk, calcium caseinate?

                    7. Apparently, there are some people who don’t think caffeine (as in coffee) is natural. 😦

                  5. Sure! According to reference.com:
                    “Also known as sucrose, sugar is made up of 22 hydrogen atoms, 11 oxygen atoms and 12 carbon atoms in each molecule.”

                    Take away the carbon and you have two hydrogens for each oxygen. In other words, sugar without carbon is water. The last time I looked, water fountains were still OK in schools.

            2. “If, as is routinely claimed, ADHD is a neurobiological disorder, a child’s birthdate or gender should have no bearing on their chances of being diagnosed.”

              Alas, false. Because it can have a real effect on their having the disorder. All sorts of such disorders are unevenly distributed. Birthdates also affect your prenatal development — less so than in the past, when nutrition varied a lot — but conceivably even today.

      3. The scenario you describe about deliberately setting up someone for a house search for a crime he did not do is utterly terrifying to me. The damage done to the system and the rule of law as well as public trust far outweigh the ability to arrest and try the criminal for the crimes s/he did commit.

        Consider that there have been many attempts to get people’s lives utterly destroyed by inserting such filth into their computers for “holding the wrong political opinions”; while being openly protecting of self admitted pederasts in the past few years; it seems to me that such tactics are no different from granting and cheering Obama’s rampant abuse of the executive order; then howling that the world is ending because that power is now in Trump’s hands.

        Then of course there is the unfortunate reality that simply some criminals get away with it – loopholes in laws; circumstance; etc.

        Perhaps I am too idealistic about the stringent standards that law needs to be held to; but that is how I am. I despair about journalism the same way.

        1. It doesn’t even have to be law-based. In the last week, a Nazi flag was hung up outside a duplex. Someone put a picture up online and within a few hours the address was published and the family was getting harassed (vandalized, etc.) Problem was, the mixed-race couple that lived there had been targeted by a neighbor, who put the flag up without their knowledge, and by the time they found out about it, the persecution was already underway.

          Internet mob justice is *worse* than vigilante justice, because it can be used as a weapon at totally random people. (“I am Cinna the poet!“)

          1. Close but slightly inaccurate. The neighbors living in the other half of the duplex had hung the flag deliberately, “as a statement over the current political climate … Our president has spoken out in the past with plans of action that eerily mirror the times of Hitler. We were simply exercising our constitutional right to freedom of speech.”

            Thus is demonstrated the pugnacious ignorance of Liberals; if they truly believed we were headed down the path toward fascist tyranny they would not have dared hang that flag, just as many conservatives eschew bumper stickers because who needs their car keyed or egged by some “tolerant” Proglodyte? They felt free to make so offensive a statement precisely because they did not believe it.

            Horrible neighbors protest Trump with Nazi flag, force family to flee
            A Wisconsin family of six is being forced to move after their duplex neighbor put up a Nazi flag in a sign of protest against President Trump and a viral photo brought angry strangers to their door.

            The Diaz family’s troubles began when a passerby snapped a photo of the two-story Oshkosh duplex on Saturday and posted it on social media. The picture quickly went viral – and drew outrage.

            Rosangela Diaz, a mother of four, said she did not even know about the flag until she saw a Facebook post about it. Her neighbor, who has not been identified, has said he flew it to make a “political statement” against President Trump.

            [SNIP]

            “[T]he reason we chose to do so was simple in our minds,” the couple said in the statement. “To us, America today feels much like it’s heading towards an era likened to the times of Nazi Germany. Our president has spoken out in the past with plans of action that eerily mirror the times of Hitler. We were simply exercising our constitutional right to freedom of speech.”

            However, the couple seemed to acknowledge its political statement may have gone too far.

            “We are very sorry for the extreme misunderstanding of our actions and we would like to let people know that we meant no disrespect,” the statement said.
            [END EXCERPT]

            Needless to say, people taking aggressive steps in response to such provocation are stepping outside boundaries of appropriate reaction. It is one thing to inform somebody he (or she, or ze*) is being an ass, it is quite another to kick their ass.

            *WP spellcheck informs me that “ze” is not a word; is WP being dismissive of the concerns of the gender identity-challenged?

  7. “It is important, as we face the difficult task of rebuilding, to look towards the countries that came out of occupation by the enemy for examples.”

    I think it’s also important to factor in that the enemy is not beaten. Not by a longshot. The enemy is still quite alive, well, and more than capable of offensive action. It is not in their nature to defend (one of their most effective strategies), but to attack. They are already counterattacking, consolidating their position, and planning for the long term.

    They’re sort of like Giap’s NVA: wage war not against the enemy’s forces, but against their public’s opinion. They might experience defeat after defeat, but as long as they keep a body count (body of lies) in the news, fatigue will win the day.

    Whatever we try to build, and wherever we try to build it, they will attack it, infiltrate it, and discredit it.

    1. Nixon’s not immediately publicly hanging the WH Plumbers out to swing in the wind lost the Vietnam War.

      An executive branch uncompromised by Watergate would have just ordered the airstrikes, which would have easily wiped out the NVA armored assault in 1975 just like they did in 1972, and a strong executive would have never left the door open for Teddy Kennedy (and Walter Mondale) to side with America’s enemies in Congress. Remember, the War Powers Act only passed after Watergate hit.

      In spite of winning over Walter Cronkite, the guerrilla war in the south was in the end an abject failure – all the VC were pretty much dead by 1970, and after the US pulled out, the ARVN formations were well set to counter any retry of a guerrilla uprising. US politics would not allow setting up the ARVN as an armor-heavy mobile force with strong intrinsic air power that could possibly invade the North, so a weak COIN-centric ARVN with US guarantees of air support and resupply were all they were allowed.

      All the North’s success at winning over the American media would not have mattered one whit if Nixon had not been an idiot.

      1. All of that is true, but that wasn’t my point. My point was from the view of North Vietnam. They didn’t care how many battles they lost, as long as they stayed in the fight. That was Giap’s fairly well-known strategy, and it was effective. Sure it wasn’t the only thing, but it’s definitely an applied Leftwing philosophy. The Left is doing the same thing domestically now. they won’t stop, no matter how many times they get a beatdown.

        How many electoral drubbings have they received since their “permanent” victories in 2006 and 2008? These victories have to be exploited because the left is already working overtime.

        1. “That was Giap’s fairly well-known strategy, and it was effective.”

          Oh, it’s highly effective…… as long as your opponent is being hamstrung by a Fifth Column from actually fighting flat out, because “we mustn’t be mean to our enemies. You wouldn’t want them to think badly of you. Our values will be lost if we don’t handicap ourselves into losing.”

          This column linked by Sarah this morning puts it pretty well: http://nicedoggie.net/?p=12742

          1. Yeah, I read that when it went up at ace’s. Right on point. Giap knew precisely how he could rely on the American media. The guy was no fool. If he didn’t have our media to depend on, I wonder how he would have conducted the war.

            I’m all on board with total war against the Left. It’s about time. It suits my temperament perfectly. I want peace, badly, and I’m of the opinion that the best way to make an aggressor sue for peace is by using overwhelming force.

            ““Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot” – Machiavelli

            Generous hasn’t worked.

            1. You do have to pick your targets carefully, though. There are the hardline leftists / SJWs who have been driving all the Twitter mobs and so on, but there are also a large number of basically decent people who have believed the lies they’ve been fed by the media. If you attack the latter, you’re likely to drive people away rather than convert new conservative voters. So we need to be careful not to engage in blue-on-blue, or even blue-on-could-have-been-persuaded-to-turn-blue.

              1. Good point. It’s similar to the effect of watching today’s Democrat party being run into the ground by the hard Left. They’re not concerned with their less-committed allies, or with who exactly they attack (basket of deplorables), only that they’re attacking.

                That’s why I’ve liked hearing some of the rhetoric from Trump (America, not some identity group, first) or Carson at his confirmation hearing – healthcare for ALL Americans despite being repeatedly pressed about focusing on an identity group.

          2. Try “Man of the House” by former Speaker Tip O’Neill.

            Among some bragging about some really dirtball-level political finagling, he talks about how he joined up with a Democratic clique that decided to oppose the war in order to advance their own careers, all the way up to their “victory” by getting enough voted to de-fund the war, leaving Nixon holding the bag.

            Some of the stuff O’Neill brags about would go down hard even in a banana republic, like sheduling a session at night after everyone went home, but only letting the Democratic members know, and having the doors locked and guarded by the Sergeant at Arms so nobody could come in to vote against them.

            *That* is the kind of goverment Democrats run…

            1. Considering that Nixon scuttled a peace treaty in 1968, and lied about it to LBJ (and LBJ knew he was lying but said nothing because he didn’t want to reveal they had the South Vietnamese government bugged), the only sympathy I have is for those who died because of petty politics. I don’t even care much that Nixon lied to LBJ, because, well, LBJ.

        2. I’d contend that’s more like the strategy of the grassroots non-left: Stay in the fight no matter what, and look for the winds of stupid to blow some good fortune your way.

          The left is currently using a strategy more like the US strategy in Vietnam – apply overwhelming (cultural, at this point) firepower to try make the other side think resistance is futile. And like LBJ, sure he can make a deal with Uncle Ho, they think all they need to do is make the right noises during the election campaign and the conservatives and libertarians of various stripes will ‘compromise’ and submit in the end to the inevitable arrow of history.

          But the campaign of the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua ran into National Socialist Bernie, and as a result she had to abandon some of the standard lies that D politicians emit every four years to fool those gullible flyover idiots. Forced to tack to the left in the primary, Hillary ended up generating vast winds of stupid, blowing Donald right into office. And while Donald is not Ronald, he’s definitely not Hillary.

          So now we have the some breathing room to build under and around, but we are not rolling our tanks into Saigon yet – a bunch of hard fighting lies ahead, and if the other side ends up not pulling a Nixon, we could easily still lose.

          But we won’t – to quote our hostess, In the end, We Win, They Lose: History doesn’t have an arrow, people uncoerced always move towards more freedom, and technology only makes it harder for the other side to keep enforcing the approved thoughts.

          I’ve known Vietnamese who fought on both sides of the war in the South, who all ended up having to flee their country for their lives. And I’ve known millenial engineers who were raised in Vietnam who didn’t really buy the Party line fed to them since birth.

          If those kids could avoid buying the Communist Party approved dogma while completely immersed in it long enough to get over here, the kids born here have a good chance. And if the kids have a chance, we all do.

          1. > people uncoerced always move towards more freedom

            I used to think that, but experience has shown most people will go for either maintenance of the status quo or more personal comfort.

            They’ve always had someone to tell them what to think and what to do; “freedom” isn’t something they know or value.

            1. Your measure of freedom may not be the same one they have– for an extreme example, the freedom to beat up anybody who is weaker vs the freedom from fearing abuse by those more powerful are both freedoms folks might pursue, but they’re not compatible.

              Folks can hunger for freedom without knowing the wisest way to reach it.

    1. Sent excerpts and the link to the full article to my daughter in law suggesting that she quiz the grandkids.

    2. My best friend’s son recently was graduated from NSU (a HBC – historically black college [as a white, he was given a minority scholarship]) with a degree in history.
      Incredibly, it seems that the history students at NSU are taught a lot about the black diaspora from Africa; however, they are indeed taught that blacks sold other blacks into slavery. Sadly, I don’t think that included Obama’s father’s family being sellers and Obama’s mother’s family being buyers.

  9. “But once they calm down some percentage will be reclaimable. And we need to reclaim them, because our country needs them.”

    Anecdote in support of this:

    My sister, who is a lesbian and extremely intelligent, is becoming an excellent example. Part of her problem is that she doesn’t even realize just how far Left she is. Fancies herself in the middle, maybe leaning Left, but in reality, she fell all the way over (on social issues). She doesn’t even understand a lot of the dubious sociological “theory” which underpins many of her opinions.

    Initially she was a victim of the textbook mass hysteria, but she’s started to come around. And the thing that did it was a Facebook video which highlighted the culture which produced Donald Trump and the hypocrisy of the opposition to his so-called misogyny and sexism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ7_zzJ2mEU
    She really started to come around after that. She’s not there, but…baby steps.

    Seeing the obvious opening, I slipped in the following comment on her Book of Face (which I am usually loathe to do):

    “This whole thing gets into the true nature of political correctness. It’s not about *what* someone can say, but *who* can say it. It’s about power.

    This guy’s list obviously isn’t comprehensive, but here’s an example that bears mentioning: the ooo-ing and ahhh-ing over Malia Obama landing an internship with Lena Dunham, a dreadful writer who’s characterized herself as a sexual predator toward her own sister and fantasized about the extinction of white men.

    In a rational society, this would have invited scorn and derision, but these were views held by the bien pensants, so it doesn’t get media hysterics, but praise. Lauding the POTUS’s daughter for her close association with such a person only legitimizes such execrable views. The problem isn’t only what the lowest common denominator is, but what the hell are we considering to be the highest?

    It’s a great example for the game “Pretend X had said/done that.”

  10. She said since I’d first resorted to ad hominem, she won. A few of the other people on the thread asked her WHAT she’d won, and that’s, indeed, the material question. Never mind that, to my knowledge so far “constitutional scholar” is not yet a recognized insult,
    ————————–

    A little over a month ago, I half-jokingly called someone I was arguing with a “manners Nazi” (due to some stupid justifications of his actions in a video game). He promptly invoked Godwin’s Law. And so far as I could tell, he was completely serious.

    A while back, I got into a spirited discussion about the American War of Independence on a forum that has a lot of Brits. They opened with the “Americans didn’t want to pay their share” bit, to which I countered that the cry was “No taxation without representation.” If they’d had their own MPs, then they likely wouldn’t have revolted. Someone pointed out that British colonists didn’t get MPs anywhere. But it was then noted that the American colonies had so many residents that they couldn’t be considered minor parts of the Empire. Someone else rounded out the conversation by noting that by the early 1800s, New York was the largest English-speaking city in the world. You can’t take a population like that with democratic traditions, and then deny them representation. The results should have been predictable.

    1. “Someone pointed out that British colonists didn’t get MPs anywhere.”

      Yeah, and that has what precisely to do with it being unjust? I wasn’t aware that a large number of groups being subject to something suddenly made it okay. Somehow, I don’t think that, “Well, okay, blacks were considered inferior to whites in the Jim Crow era, but that was okay because all other skin colors were considered inferior to whites in those days” would go over very well.

      Seems to me the correct response there would have been, “Yeah, and that wasn’t right, and thank goodness that our ancestors had the balls to do something about it!”

      1. His argument was that the American colonists shouldn’t have expected special treatment different from other colonists.

        1. And they didn’t. They believed that all colonists should have representation if they were to be taxed.

    2. From the musical 1776:

      Dr. Benjamin Franklin: Please Mr. Dickinson, but must you start banging? How is a man to sleep?
      [laughter from Congress]
      John Dickinson: Forgive me, Dr. Franklin, but must YOU start speaking? How is a man to stay awake?
      [More laughter]
      John Dickinson: We’ll promise to be quiet – I’m sure everyone prefers that you remained asleep.
      Dr. Benjamin Franklin: If I’m to hear myself called an Englishman, sir, I assure you I prefer I’d remained asleep.
      John Dickinson: What’s so terrible about being called an Englishman? The English don’t seem to mind.
      Dr. Benjamin Franklin: Nor would I, were I given the full rights of an Englishman. But to call me one without those rights is like calling an ox a bull. He’s thankful for the honor, but he’d much rather have restored what’s rightfully his.

      Americans were objecting to the withdrawal of rights of self-governance through state parliamentary bodies and consolidation of power in the colonial governors who were agents of the King, not representatives of the people of the colonies.

      In 1776 the approximate population of Great Britain was 6.5 million people, the population of Britain’s North American colonists (unrepresented in Parliament) was approximately 2.5 million.

      From Wikipedia [cites at article]:

      The colonists did not object that the taxes were high (they were low),[9] but because they had no representation in the Parliament. Benjamin Franklin testified in Parliament in 1766 that Americans already contributed heavily to the defense of the Empire. He said that local governments had raised, outfitted, and paid 25,000 soldiers to fight France—as many as Britain itself sent—and spent many millions from American treasuries doing so in the French and Indian War alone.[10][11]

      in October 1765. Moderates led by John Dickinson drew up a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances” stating that taxes passed without representation violated their rights as Englishmen.

      [Parliament] did not see anything in the unwritten British constitution that made taxes special[16] and noted that Parliament had taxed American trade for decades. Parliament insisted that the colonies effectively enjoyed a “virtual representation” as most British people did, as only a small minority of the British population elected representatives to Parliament.[17] Americans such as James Otis maintained that the Americans were not in fact virtually represented.[18]

    3. Don’t forget the Iron Act of 1750. It seems the colonies were meant to be consumers of British manufactured goods, and iron could not be processed into steel in the colonies. All for the greater good of Mother Britain of course.

    4. As Burke pointed out, the English themselves were passionate about that very issue.

      “Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened, you know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates; or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens, and most eloquent tongues, have been exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered. In order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning the importance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who in argument defended the excellence of the English Constitution to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry point of fact, and to prove that the right had been acknowledged in ancient parchments and blind usages to reside in a certain body called a House of Commons. They went much farther; they attempted to prove, and they succeeded, that in theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a House of Commons as an immediate representative of the people, whether the old records had delivered this oracle or not. They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty can subsist. The Colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty might be safe, or might be endangered, in twenty other particulars, without their being much pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound.”

  11. It’s not entirely new, even when I went to High School some twenty-five odd (very odd) years ago my US History text, while I don’t remember being really egregiously bad in other areas footnoted the 2nd Amendment section of the Constitution in the back with a an explanation about how it “really” only meant militias. I was quickly and thoroughly disabused of that notion by my country lawyer father, who, unlike the authors, actually knew about Constitutional law.

    Worse was my 8th grade “Social Studies” teacher when we first relocated to true-blue NOVA (Fairfax County, which will surprise no-one who has ever lived there) who was an unashamed apologist for the still extant Soviet Union, regularly regaling us with stories about how much more “equal” women were there than here (equally trodden upon, maybe). She also liked to tell us about how Ronald Reagan hadn’t “really” beaten Walter Mondale in a landslide, it just looked like it, because of the Electoral College. A stupid lie so stupid that even 13 year old me thought it was dumb and also proof that the left’s obsession with the dismantling of the EC goes back well before Bush/Gore. Reasons why are best left as an exercise to the reader.

    2. Oy, I recall watching the televised[1] election returns.. Minnesota even being a question mark for some time and, as Mark Russell put it, D.C. blinking as if to say “Help me! Help me!” ala The Fly.

      [1] This was long enough ago that there was these things ‘black and white’ sets still around and one TV station tech with a few monochrome monitors was aghast that the chosen shades of red and blue for their network (NBC) looked identical on those monitors.

      1. And back in 84, the networks hadn’t settled on the colors for each party. So the electoral returns map was the US in a glorious shade of blue, except for the lone holdout of commie red Minnesota.

        1. That’s not quite true. From Quora:

          “It’s really only been that way since 2000. Prior to that year, news organizations produced maps in a variety of different color schemes, and often it was the reverse: red for Democratic states and blue for Republican states. Some media outlets apparently alternated color schemes from one election cycle to the next in order to avoid creating any permanent association between colors and parties. But these maps were mostly only seen on election night, with very occasional viewings before and after. Hardly anyone noticed, or cared about, the color scheme.”

        2. And how is it that the Communists are blue and everyone else is red?

          Oh, right. The Commies own the media…

          1. IIRC, it was explicitly set up the way it is now because the networks didn’t want people to automatically assume that the Dems were commies.

              2. They may not be, but iirc that was the rationale provided. Also worth noting is that iirc the decision was made for the ’92 election, at which point the Soviet Union was already gone.

                  1. That was before they settled on the colors. She must have been watching a different network than the one I watched, because the electoral map I saw was almost solid blue.

          2. And how is it that the Communists are blue and everyone else is red?

            The Democrats consider themselves blue-blooded elites while Republicans are red-blooded Americans? 😉

          3. Most networks switched back and forth when labeling states on the map from election to election.

            Bush and Gore, however, kept it in the news so that it stuck

            1. One of the college bars near Flat State U had a guest appearance by a group called “The Red State Blues Band.” No idea if they were any good, but I liked the name.

      2. It would have almost certainly been the first I was allowed to stay up for and the first I’d have watched with any degree of understanding. I knew it was a big deal though and was excited to see my President doing so well.

        I vaguely remember Carter/Reagan and even have some idea that we might have gone to my grandmother’s to watch the returns, but at age 8 didn’t understand anything except that a new guy wanted to replace our President and that was probably bad. Note: my parents would have been appalled had they known as they both cordially loathed old Jimmy.

        1. Jimmy Carter is why I will not vote for a third Party candidate unless said Party has a strong presence in Congress. Layers of conflicting narrative have muddied the waters, but my recollection is that Jimmy was a compromise candidate. The Democrats knew that against Nixon’s hand picked successor they could run a talking dog and win, and the major factions couldn’t agree who’s turn it was. So Jimmy arrived in DC with few if any allied in HIS OWN PARTY.

          Maybe with the Democrats solidly behind him (instead of jockeying for position) Jimmy would have been an awful President, but we’ll never know.

          I think this is why he’s been such a neurotic mess ever since, kissing up to every third world kleptocrat and murderer. He was (at least nominally) President of the United States, and his STILL got dissed by the likes of Teddy “Mary Jo who?” Kennedy.

          1. That was part of it. Other factors include that Teddy was still wet behind the ears from swimming off Chappaquiddick and that Jimmy had been (IIRC) chair of the committee which drew up the rules for the nominating process after the 1972 debacle (just as George McGovern had, I believe, been in charge of the “democratizing” of the Democrats’ nomination process following the 1968 charlie foxtrot.)

            1. Teddy was wet behind the ears until the day fate finally got tired of his fat, drunken ass.

              I used to have a convention button that read; John, Robert, Teddy, two out of three ain’t bad! I wore it just to outrage the worshipers at the Shrine of St. Kennedy The Martyred. Not a BAD president, but well in the pack of mediocrities.

              As P. J. O’Rourke quoted about the Kennedys (I really don’t think it was original with P.J., but he didn’t attribute it); It’s always tempting to impute, unlikely virtues to the cute.

              I will say this about Teddy; I have sometimes wondered is his shenanigans were an unconscious reaction to what happened to his brothers. “Like hell I’m gonna be President, they shot Johnny and Rob!”

    3. When I was in high school, back in the Stone Age (e.g., late ‘70s), I was lucky enough to take an AP American History course. Lucky not because it was AP, but rather because the teacher spent the bulk of our time on the founding era. She took shameless advantage of the fact that no American parent can possibly complain (or at least, complain effectively!) about their child having reading assignments from The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, Thomas Paine, Jefferson on a citizen’s DUTY to rebel when the government becomes intolerable, and the like.

      So we spent more than a semester on a bunch of seriously radical writings by the founding fathers, then blew through the remainder of the syllabus in about half of the spring semester… and got the best AP scores in American History ever from our school (more than 60% scored 5, most of the rest scored 4, and a few students with 3 brought up the rear).

      Tassie was a trully effective subversive, who quite effectively undid the indoctrination of the rest of our school years. [Raises a glass in her honor!]

      1. We did the Federalist the next year, AP Government. But despite the aforementioned textbook that misunderstood (lied about) the 2nd Amendment in AP American History, that was the teacher who introduced me to the Holy Musical, so all was far from lost that year. We’d also gotten back out of Fairfax County by then, which certainly made a difference in the kind and degree of indoctrination.

        1. The Federalist was worth reading and said some interesting things. But it was Madison, Hamilton, and Jay doing a sales pitch for a document that had already been written, including parts that one or another of them had fought against. Madison’s notes were even more interesting, because they show more of what the Founders were actually thinking at the time (not how they explained it afterward) and they give you more of their voices. And I have to say that reading it provided a neat counterexample to Bismarck’s line about sausage and law.

    4. Lurker, first comment.

      I visited St. Petersburg and Moscow during the late 80’s (late ’88 I think it was) with my DODDS high school class. In away, your teacher was right. They were equally miserable, undernourished, uncared for, and despondent as any male Soviet citizen.

      1. In the mid-90s some students from my school visited Russia. One of them related that one of the Russians there said to them that they could tell they were Americans, because Americans were always smiling. “Americans have something to smile about,” the Russian concluded.

        1. When I was there, it was easy to pick out the foreigners. We were the only ones wearing bright colors. The Soviets were wearing black, brown, or grey exclusively.

      2. Oh, of that I have no doubt. Unfortunately in her version of reality the women were getting all that good feminist respect that the eee-vil capitalists were denying her. And we were supposed to lap up the superior virtue of their system, sigh…

          2. You left out the part about not washing their hands or instruments between procedures. Kind of like Kermit Gosnell except free.

            What’s the difference between that and in a “back alley with a coat hangar”? BTW: note the slanted phrasing there: “in a back alley” (what, not even a front alley, much less in a room accessed through an alley?) “with a coat hangar” (more probably a knitting needle or forceps, medical equipment not being terribly expensive and “back alley abortionists” would seem to be inclined to perform the task quickly and efficiently.)

            Given the demonstrated credibility gap of the MSM, I somewhat doubt their claims about these horrors. I am old enough to remember that such procedures were most commonly performed by “kindly” practitioners (doctors or surgical nurses) in their home examining rooms. I guess somebody is relying on alternative facts.

            1. back alley abortions (still practiced in Portugal when I was a kid) were a) only done in truly desperate cases b) VERY carefully administered.
              So, rare and safe. Why? Because of the enormous risk for both patient and provider.
              This is one of those things I can’t get the left to UNDERSTAND.

            2. If anybody is interested in the stats– most abortions, as best we can tell, were done by medical personnel. This blog has lots of sources. specific page is the Bad Old Days one.

              There’s some pretty heavy argument on if there’s been a significant change in the do-it-yourself abortion percent between start of last century and start of this, and some researchers suggest that it’s more an attempt at self-harm than birth control. (sort of like cutting tends to be self-harm rather than a serious suicide attempt)

  13. And they wonder why we don’t send our kids to public schools. I can’t even really blame the teachers: they’re so misundereducated.
    My kids know what the electoral college is because they read the Constitution. It’s not hard reading. Maybe . . . Yeah, maybe I need to do a ‘Read the Constitution on President’s Day’ thing on the cute kids’ pics and political memes page. (Also snow photos, these days.)

    1. The Constitution is the perfect way for kids to learn about our system. It’s short and written in easy-to-understand language (somewhat of a hindrance for those who would like to pretend it’s an obscure religious text whose meaning can only be teased out by the High Priests of the Temples of Ivy). I first read it when I was 10 and frankly found it easier going than most of our textbooks.

    2. Not necessarily this subject, but I find I keep running into alleged High School graduates that don’t know things I recall being covered in elementary school. Ouch.

    3. “I can’t even really blame the teachers”

      Most teachers in public schools are required to teach according to the state approved curricula and texts and have very little opportunity to deviate from those requirements, nor comment upon the stupidity contained therein.

      The more accurate title for their function is not Teachers but Instructors.

      1. And have been so thoroughly brainwashed that they would teach them no matter what the law says.

        It’s now become common for schools of education to announce up front that unless you provide sufficient evidence of Party loyalty in terms of organizations joined / not joined and donations made / not made you will not be allowed to get a degree from them.

    4. Some years after I’d moved out, my Dad asked if I’d go to a parent-teacher meeting with him. My sister was in junior high then. Dad had spent a lot of time around jet engines and was a bit deaf.

      So, we’re there with the teacher, who is babbling something at a hundred miles an hour, and Dad asked her to repeat herself. Which threw her into an instant, arm-waving, over-the-top rage.

      “Wuffo yo [something something]. Ah gots de degrih in Eeenleeesh!”

      Dad said, “I’m sure you do.” And we got up and walked out.

      1. I’m in that boat a lot. My 86 year old father spent a lot of time around wood saws and shotguns and has trouble with either fast speakers or ones with an ‘accent’. I spend a lot of time making trouble calls to the various customer no-service departments of things he owns/uses.
        One recently, I really felt bad about. The guy was actually trying hard to understand the issue, but his accent was so bad and he talked so fast, I kept asking to speak to a Supervisor. Finally, I admitted ‘I can’t understand what you are saying’.

  15. Pretty sure that if Trump had lost to Clinton, but won the popular vote, and Trumpers were arguing that their candidate really won, the Dems would call them sore losers. And they’d be right.

    1. If it had been a case of 51/49 wins in EC states and 60/40 for other states (think a few swing states just tipping vs healthy margins in all losing states) maybe you could understand. But when it’s thin win or a definite win in most other states and pop vote comes from one lopsided state it’s sour grapes. But the EC Is how the game is played. Elections shouldn’t be calvinball

      1. Fun with numbers. Clinton beat Trump in California by about 4.5 million votes. How many of those were illegal may actually get addressed since the libs are whining about voter fraud so loudly. But what those raw numbers tell us is that if you exclude Cali Mr. Trump won the popular vote in the rest of the nation by around 1.5 million.
        And the Electoral College in a landslide, boo yah.

        1. Yeah, it’s Mr Clements third lie but iirc if you use the quick and dirty drop the high and low method of outlier management and drop both Cali and TX it’s Trump by 700k or similar. It’s not a case of tricksy targeting of states but a close election with California being a major outlier and going hard for one candidate. If the reverse happened and Texas went 65/30 on a 48/51 election it would be the second line in the article.

        2. I don’t know how many of California’s votes were cast illegally, but there are other factors that I believe depressed the vote for Trump.

          From my own perspective, I didn’t like Trump. I disliked Clinton more, but since I knew my vote between the two was irrelevant, I didn’t really feel a need to vote for (or against) either. The electoral votes were going to Clinton either way.

          There was a Senate race; the only legally valid votes were for Democrats. The same went for some Congressional races, including my district. I think there might have been a Republican on one or two state and local offices that were pretty far down-ballot. The net effect discourages Republicans from voting at all in the general election.

          1. Part of the ‘Calvinball’ issue. If Republicans in CA had been told that their vote would count for something, even though Hillary was a shoo-in for the win, a lot more of them would have been motivated to have gone out and voted.
            Almost like 2000, when west Florida still had an hour of open polls and certain liberal networks were already calling the state for Gore.
            Finally, don’t forget that some states intelligently have the law that if the winner has a margin of victory greater than all the absentee ballots, the absentee ballots are not counted.

    2. I don’t think this is a point worth arguing, especially as we can break out the memes:


      ANY Proglodyte argument can be rebutted with that quote.

      Trump lied about the crowd size at his inauguration!
      What difference, at this point, does it make?

      Trump is lying about the number of illegal alien votes!
      What difference, at this point, does it make?

      2. Best thing is, they have to argue he lied about how many illegal votes there were but have to admit that there were many more illegal votes than they claimed there were.
        “He lied!”
        Oh, How?
        “He said ‘Millions’ and it’s only Hundreds of Thousands!”
        My, that’s a lot of illegal votes . . . Thought you said there was no voter fraud?
        “Racist!”

          1. Best thing about the silly vote contesting by the Green Commie Thief. Trumps vote went up a hair, but Detroit had “issues” in that districts showing 260 ballots voted only having an actual 40-50 or so votes in the box. I don’t hear much now on what happened, but I know it won’t get reported, but I’ve not bothered to hunt it up.

            1. Which is why Trump pulling a B’rer Rabbit getting the media to demand a vote fraud investigation is so happy making.

              They asked for it, and I hope he gives it to them — with a frozen swordfish sideways.

            2. I’m more scared by most of the 59% of precincts that didn’t match being off by only one or two. That both triggers the “whatever was originally reported has to stand” option, and is small enough that your immediate reaction to just one is “oh, yeah, honest mistake.”

              If it was real accidents, there’d be a wider range of “oops”– and if it was half-hazard cheating, there’d be just a few with huge differences. (like the ones you mentioned)

              But more than half of ’em, and being so neatly organized to both not raise eyebrows if found alone, and to prevent a change?
              That suggest a near total control of the outcome.
              http://www.wnd.com/2016/12/recount-uncovers-serious-fraud-in-detroit/

    3. The whole reason Hillary won the popular is because she feared he’d get the pop, and lose, so she ignored the rubes in WI, MI, etc. and made certain they got the vote out in NYC, CA, and Chicago. The Strategy dictated on high from Brooklyn, cost her the Electoral because when things on the ground were “Trump is within the margin of fraud Plus” and when her people on said ground tried to organize her preferred community, they were told to shut the hell up, and get those workers back to Chicago and working on ensuring she won the Popular to go with her landslide Electoral.

      1. Not just dictated from Brooklyn… it was dictated from the computer model Brooklyn was using to plan everything…

        1. And everybody knows that computer models are always correct! [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]

        2. Well dang – Hillary’s strategy must have been right. We all know computer models are absolutely accurate.

          1. The model worked fine, She wanted to make damned sure she won the Popular. It was that evil Electoral that cost her (not including the Washington Electorals who refused to vote for her)

          1. As part of some desire to continue attacking the Electoral College as “unfair” and “undemocratic” and such?

            1. No, her fear was she’d lose the popular and was convinced she was going to ‘landslide’ the Electoral. She and her minions were convinced the fraud in WI, MI, PA, etc would give her those states, and the count they felt was going to be at least 319 for her, but he was going to soak her in the Fly Overs and those misogynists and racists were of course going to turn out in record numbers to vote for their dream candidate Trump. Reality had little to do with it, and when her folks actually out there noticed Trump gaining support in “Safe” WI, MI, and PA, they were stopped from working on drumming up support, and told to get out the vote in Chicago and NYC to ensure that she had the popular to go with the “Mandate” of her in the bag win. Mark Davis was right in that more people would turn out to vote against Hillary than she could inspire to turn out to vote for her, because she is who she is. Bernie supporters in MI and WI didn’t care to turn out for her. Trump had less suport in the “safe for him” red states than expected, and their work in CA, NYC and Chicago was enough to get her the popular (just CA does that), but Trump got WI, MI, and PA, that she, and her people were positive were hers no mater what.
              I’m now in a “Blue” section and locally there were very few Hilary signs with all the other leftoid support signs (this is a high union area, and a small UW campus across the river) and it was deep “red” once voting happened. I heard a report during the recounts that in these counties, she got fewer votes than the Dem turnout. “I just couldn’t go 4 years listening to her voice all the time.” and the reply was “Benghazi did it for me.” This was over heard as the diehard Dem at work was lamenting over the hit his 401K was going to take as Trump’s win was going to tank the S&P etc and two guys were laughing behind his back. One from WI, the other lives this side of the river in MI.

              1. Ah, so never presume Machiavellian plots when arrogance and laziness is a better explanation? 😉

  16. “She said since I’d first resorted to ad hominem, she won. A few of the other people on the thread asked her WHAT she’d won, and that’s, indeed, the material question.”

    I could be off-base here, but it seems to me that this is probably related to the Jon Stewart and knockoffs tendency to “destroy” their political opponents by presenting a clip out-of-context and then gaping at the alleged stupidity there. The Stewart clone hasn’t engaged his opponents best arguments, hasn’t proven himself right on the facts, probably hasn’t persuaded anyone who wasn’t already on his side, but hey, he’s got this clip of his opponent looking stupid, so he wins. Your commentator seems to have done something similar: she got you to make one sarcastic comment, thus she has proven that you have nothing of value to say, and she wins. She, like Jon Stewart, has “destroyed” you.

    1. Ah yeah. I recall watching some show like that years ago. It was the first and last time I did. Clips to show it was “real” but edited to omit real context. Reminded me of Soviet era Radio Moscow.

      1. Probably why when some group like Veritas catches them talking where they think they aren’t being monitored, the progs screech “selective editing” and wave their hands frantically. It’s their favorite tactic so they presume their enemies do the same.

    2. Yeah. Satire is a useful tool in politics. Clownboy isn’t sarcasm, it’s dishonest mocking. But today people think that dehumanizing and diminishing opponents argument is way to win. For instance the derision over alternate facts or rumsfeld’s known unknowns. They both have specific meanings and actually are valid as used but you simply act as if they are stupid and majority of followers don’t bother to see that you’re full of orvan’s septic system.

      1. What he’s really selling is flippancy, as discussed by Screwtape:

        “But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.”

          1. As I recall it he was not a Constitutional scholar; the actual job title was “senior lecturer,” Per the NY Times:

            “At the school, Mr. Obama taught three courses, ascending to senior lecturer, a title otherwise carried only by a few federal judges. His most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. Mr. Obama was so interested in the subject that he helped Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University, develop a leading casebook in the field.

            “His most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, was on racism and law. Mr. Obama improvised his own textbook, including classic cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and essays by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as conservative thinkers like Robert H. Bork.

            “Mr. Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say. … For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.”

            [WARNING: anyone clicking through to read that article should make sure your diabetes medications are within date and fully in effect.]

  18. This may be even harder than you think. Winning the culture war is not just something we need to do in the public setting. Winning in our own homes is what’s more important. It’s a very necessary first step and one that only causes problems if you’re infected by lefties. Take my own house (well, two houses. I’m divorced) as a case in point.

    My ex-wife has no particular political leaning. She is, quite frankly, deliberately clueless. She won’t watch the news. She won’t read anything but romance. She can’t cite a statistic or quote a politician or philosopher. She knew Bush was bad though. I haven’t spoken to her about Trump, but I would imagine that she’s crapping her pants right now. That’s bad enough, but it gets worse.

    My oldest daughter Riley had a school assignment. We were talking about it. It was a Social Studies assignment about government. Needless to say, my point of view was decidedly different from the one in her book. It gets worse. She sent me a questionnaire. Actually, it was more like a question. I was supposed to say what the two most important duties of government were. I gave my best answer. Oops.

    Apparently, “To promote liberty.” and “To prepare the next generation to continue to promote liberty.” were the wrong answer. Who knew? I mean, they asked for my opinion right? So, my ex gets a phone call from the school. Apparently, Riley was confused because what the school was teaching didn’t match what Daddy said. I get it. I’d be confused in her position too. That’s okay though because confusion is the beginning of the search for truth. Well, to everyone except my ex-wife it is.

    So, I get a text from my ex one night. She no longer wants me to talk politics with my daughter. Riley was trying to make sense out of things and didn’t know what to think. I was a bad father because I taught my daughter something that didn’t jibe with what she was learning in school. I disagree, but what do I know?

    What I know is that when I get that kind of feedback from someone I’m supposed to be raising kids with it makes it damn near impossible to teach her anything. I know it can’t be any easier for others in my position. My daughter is more than bright enough to draw her own conclusions based on facts. She’s eleven now so she’s getting to the age where she needs to start figuring things out for herself as well. When her mother tells her not to think though, it gest rough. I don’t know what the answer is but I do know it’s something we’re going to have to deal with.

    1. “Here, see what this text written by someone who was around before and during the revolution has to say. It can be rough going at times and you might not agree with it all, butCommon Sense is worth a read at least.”

      What, ox subversive? Moooowahahaha.

        1. I have decided, simply from watching 1776, that I like John Adams. “You’re obnoxious and disliked.” And yet he became the 2nd President. Kind of gives me hope. 😉

          1. N.B., while the show is inspired theatre it is not good history. It mistreats both John Dickinson and Judge Wilson, among others.

            Nor is it entirely fair in reducing Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman to back-up singers in Franklin and Jefferson’s chorus.

          2. John Adams was pretty likeable, though, even when he was being pigheaded.

            For extra entertainment, read his description of going to a Catholic sung Mass, just to see what it was like. He always found the meetinghouse boring, and so his conclusion was that Mass was just too interesting and pretty to be good…..

    2. It’s the no win situation of “here’s the Constitution. It explains the govt responsibilities, abilities and forbiddences. But your teacher may be expecting something else and you may need to lie and tell her what she wants to hear”

    3. My condolences. My youngest thinks I’m a monster because of my fire engine red Make America Great Again hat. Facts are irrelevant because of the sources, not because of their ability to be proved or disproved.

  19. Fair? Fair?? FAIR????

    Is it fair to run an election under one set of rules (the Electoral College representation was widely featured in all reporting up to the election) and then determine the winner by a wholly different regime?

    Hillary had every opportunity to campaign in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and other “battleground” states (why does your frickin’ Constitutional Scholar imagine ((crediting her with thought seems overly generous)) those states were called battleground states — because the Revolution had been fought in them????) Hillary and her campaign were too clever and thought they had PA, WI, and others in the bag and that campaigning there would be a waste of her time. They. Were. Wrong.

    Is it fair for a teacher to tell the class that their grade will be determined by 25% homework completion, 25% class attendance, 25% mid-term and 25% final exam … and then on the last day of class the final and mid-term will only count 5% each and the homework will count 65%?????

    Is it fair that idiots too dumb and lazy to bestir themselves to become even passingly familiar with the institutions by which this system of government operates are allowed to participate in selecting a president? Is it fair that I am not able to reach through the internet and strangle such idiots?

    I. Don’t. Think. So.

    1. Hillary’s campaigning strategy reminds me of a bit of advice I read the other day about winning a particular game. The individual writing the article pointed out that while setting up a big, showy win that devestates your opponent can be fun, it also opens you up to a surprise move by your opponent because you neglected the basics of your defense. Focus on winning, and only go for the showy finish if there is no possible way (no matter how improbable) that your opponent can pull an upset.

      If a candidate wins in their opponent’s seeming stronghold states, then yes it’s a crushing victory and it no doubt feels glorious, But the goal of your campaign isn’t to crush your opponent. It’s to get 51% of the electoral votes. So attention should be given to the battleground states even if you’re confident of winning them. Otherwise you’re ignoring your defenses.

      1. She was barely trying that though. She was running up score in exhibition games (CA, Chiraq, No)and expecting the playoffs to just go right.

    4. “Life’s not fair, is it? You see, I… well, I shall never be king. And you… shall never see the light of another day. Hmm-hmm-hmm, adieu.”

      I have such a mixed set of feelings about that line. Mr. BAD complaining about the unfairness of the world just because he didn’t get his way.

    5. Yes. Everyone from Michael Moore to her own husband was warning The Smartest Woman Who Ever Lived and her campaign staff of Magical Millennials that she was courting electoral college disaster.

      But nope, it’s not her fault. It’s that damned Constitution’s fault.

      Me, I think Bill went John Galt on her. He wasn’t anywhere near as prominent in the campaign as I expected him to be. No matter how much one dislikes Bill Clinton, it’s hard to deny that he is a fearsomely effective boots-on-the-ground politician. Hillary…is not.

      1. Bill didn’t want her to win:

        1. She would overshadow him in the history books.
        2. It would really crimp his dating life.

        1. THIS. There were times where Bill Clinton was clearly doing stuff to throw the election. When He brought up Obamacare as insane, or kind of threw shade on HRC’s health a couple times after the fainting incident. He’s just a nasty piece of work…

          1. Bill was just concerned about Hillary’s health. He could clearly see she’d not survive long under the rigors of the office, and sought to spare her. And you can believe as much or as little of that explanation as you wish.

      2. The Democrats I know loathed Dollar Billy. I figured he kept a low profile to keep the party from losing votes.

        1. As it turned out, getting more votes in Wisconsin was rather more important than getting more votes in California. There was an object lesson there.

          Fortunately for the future prospects of Trump and the GOP, it doesn’t seem like the lesson took hold.

          1. See, that is exactly why the Electoral College is so unfair! Why should the vote of some cheese head in Wisconsin do more to determine the president of this nation than that of a genuine Hollywood star? Why, Wisconsin doesn’t even have any celebrities!

    6. I will admit that a business class I had in college was to be graded as 50% class participation, 20% mid-term, 30% final. Unfortunately, during the Christmas break (it was a long time ago), the instructor died, and it was not clear to his replacement how to score the class participation.
      In that situation, we the students felt it was acceptable to change the rules.

  23. Never mind that, to my knowledge so far “constitutional scholar” is not yet a recognized insult, she seemed to think she could win an argument about FACTS (i.e. does the electoral college exist? Can it be said to have a beneficial purpose?) because an opponent used a logical fallacy.

    The fallacy fallacy:
    https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy

    “You presumed that because a claim has been poorly argued, or a fallacy has been made, that the claim itself must be wrong.”

  24. While I’ve had enough problems with the kids’ history texts that they started hiding them from me, I noticed that they had to memorize the amendments just as we did back in the day. And some are very good at identifying flaws in what passes for a liberal discourse these days. I do know that even the pro-Hillary crowd regionally regarded the post-election protests as an act of incredible stupidity. And they could back up why, not only that the election was over, but because by that point it was in the hands of the Electoral College.

    That said, education about our constitution does appear spotty. I can see how all without the first agenda. First, US History in school is about like a “See Europe in a Week” tour. Second, the effect of adding tidbits for interest can take away from the central point if teachers are not careful, Third, we have teachers who, having never been taught various things, are unaware of the hows and whys of how our government works. And fourth, we unfortunately can forget. I have a pocket constitution (you can print your own using the PDF and instructions found at http://www.constitutionbooklet.com/ ) that I re-read from time to time, and I still got the particulars wrong of what happens if an election gets thrown into Congress. And I noticed that my mother, a retired teacher, was reading it when she stayed with us.

    I think right now is an ideal time to try to teach the public what the constitution says, what with the Hillary Archipelago in shock that they no longer hold sway over the Red State Sea. The question is how. I’ve thought about writing a guide, but I’d have to go at it from the historical point of view, and frankly I worry about getting even that screwed up.

    1. Part of the tidbit for interest stuff is annoying because it’s ‘heres a random person thrown in because *identity*’ For example how some programs had more on George Carver (peanut fetishist who was mostly a patent mill) than George Washington or Jefferson.

      My history teachers were thankfully not left leaning and not overly political and emphasized source learning vs textbook.

      1. That’s more of a rabbit trail. An interesting tidbit would be something like Gibbons refused to see Ben Franklin, and Franklin offered to help him write the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

      2. The thing with George Washington Carver was that he was also a political leader who espoused black Americans lifting themselves up by education, hard work, and contributions to the community. Along with other black leaders of the time, he wanted to get rid of prejudice by routing around it, and by making segregated schools and businesses into awesome schools and businesses.

        Nobody wants to talk about this now.

  25. Interesting. In 1969, US history as taught in Illinois included a major section on the Constitution, along with a test one had to pass in order to graduate. We covered the EC at some length, as well as the Fed. As best as I recall, the test requrement was due to state law. I assume the law got repealed/perverted over the years.

  27. Sorry for that1:31, had trouble logging in. History lessons work better for young people if you can connect the dots to something relevant. Henry the Eighth, King of England, wanted to divorce his wife but couldn’t because he was Catholic and they didn’t allow it. So he quit the Catholics and started his own church, the Church of England, with himself as leader. And the first rule is: the King can get a divorce. Which annoyed the Pope, who excommunicated Henry. Which annoyed Parliament, who declared Catholics were bad news and seized their lands and churches, such as Westminster Abbey, a former Catholic monastery. Which annoyed members of other religions who wanted religious freedom, so they fled to live in the wilderness among savages, but still paid taxes to England until George got greedy and pissed them off, when the colonists dumped their tea in the harbor and quit the English nation and started their own nation with George Washington as leader. But George refused to be king which pissed off Congress, who invented the Electoral College to pick temporary leaders of the new nation, to be called President. Therefore, Trump is Henry’s fault.

    1. That’s why I liked James Burke’s “Connections” series. He tried to show how historical events connected together.

      2. The tangents he could fly off on were fascinating. Kind of a compendium of unintended consequences.

    3. Bit more nuanced than that on ol’ Henry. The Pope would have granted the divorce (annulment, actually, on the grounds of it being sinful to marry your deceased brother’s wife) – if he had been married to anyone but Catherine. Having the troops of your nephew surrounding the Pope’s territory was an ace compared to Henry’s duce… (It’s also interesting to me how many people think that Henry really had the habit of beheading all of his inconvenient exes.)

        2. To the tune of “There’s Nothing like a Dame”:

          There are wives whom you divorce; there are wives whom you behead;
          There are wives who are so stupid that you wonder why you wed;
          There are wives who keep on nagging ’till you want to start a war—
          But, what the heck, I’ll try one more

          (MAD Magazine, ca. June 1966)

    4. Illustrates why the style is dangerous– it depends heavily on the view of the person drawing the connections.

      So, as a homeschooling mom, I want my husband to use it with our kids– he’s tough but fair, and good at conveying the idea that people hardly ever do things for just one reason, and we can grade based on “yeah, you got the important bits” — but I for love of all that’s holy don’t want the public schools doing it! The just-so stories are dangerous.

  29. The truly stupid aren’t cureable. The merely ignorant can be educated. The problem with education is it involves change. Change is painful, it requires work. That’s the primary reason why we hate change; at least until we discover that we can use change to make things better for ourselves.

    I graduated high school in 1977. I remember going through American History in 7th grade, and actually picking apart the Constitution, not to mention memorizing the Preamble. When I joined the military, I became even more concerned about what it was I actually promised to support and defend, against all enemies, both foreign (of course) and domestic (never mentioned). Digging up the Federalist Papers, which had been mentioned in passing while in school, and the anti-Federalist papers (You mean there was a dissenting opinion!) really opened my eyes to a whole new concept of how the Great Experiment came to be.

    Of course that led to more reading from the Age of Enlightenment trying to understand what the Founders had been taught themselves. Hard work for a computer science geek. But it did show that in their drive to be fair, the liberals had driven us completely off the road and into the puckerbrush.

    Your experience with what your kids were exposed to in school mirrors mine with my kids. It isn’t pretty. And the only explanation that makes sense is that we’re hard-boiled frogs that started out in cold water, set up by some fairly clever, self-serving people with a long range plan. I know, that sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, doesn’t? Rule by the hidden Illuminati.

    Problem is, people like William Stoddard see it. You see it. Other Sean sees it. Van Stry sees it. Just about everyone here sees it. Yes, I know we’ve self-selected for reading and commenting on your blog that’s floored with conservative principles. We’re operating with a conservative bias filter in place; but I can’t imagine we’re all delusional and sharing the same hallucination. I think we’re looking at objective reality here.

    I don’t think we can deprogram the ignorati en-masse. We’re going to have to do it one painful mind at a time.

    1. Actually, my view is libertarian rather than conservative. Here in the United States there are commonalities of viewpoint between the two groups, but that’s because the United States was founded on Enlightenment ideas; a large part of what our conservatives are conserving is deeply radical from a larger historical perspective.

      2. One thing is to really stress to kids just how wild and crazy the Founders were, and how far they took the ideas of the English Enlightenment and some of the French. (My students hate questions about the Enlightenment and the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Because they see sooooo many of them.)

        1. So, have you pointed out that those pamphlets they put out, under names other than their own, were basically an early form of bloggers using pseudonyms?

          *grin*

          For a religious class, you can also go through the new testament and see how many folks are called by what they’re known for– “the disciple Jesus loved” for a really easy but not quite right example, the guy who came back to thank Jesus after he was cured for another– rather than their name and home town, as was more standard.

          FUN!

    2. The problem isn’t “education”; those people are *already* educated. And that’s the problem.

      A lot of people latch onto what they’re first taught with the tenacity of a pit bull with a pork chop. They put forth the effort to learn something, therefore they will defend it no matter how ridiculous it gets.

      Unlearning is much harder than learning, particularly when social status and group identity are involved.

      1. “Unlearning is much harder than learning” is a statement which anybody who’s tried acting should be able to agree. Learn a line wrong the first time through a script and relearning it properly is dang near impossible.

  30. I’ve mentioned this before, but my students get really, really tired of hearing the differences between the Fascists and the NSDAP. And yes, I don’t use Nazi to refer to the regime until after 1936. I want it to be stone cold clear that Fascist has a specific historical meaning, as does Nazi, and you don’t use them out of those contexts as cheap insults. Does it stay? No idea. Do they understand? At least for a few weeks they do.

    One bite at a time, that’s how you eat an elephant.

    1. One came from a country that looks like a blob, the other from a boot. And the idea of a scapegoat class being genocided is more common than not in history. Hell, it gave us one of most famous Roman phrases. Carthago delenda est

        1. Is that sorta like how pets look like their owners? (Too much time growing up in lil Portugal in new England)

      2. Carthage richly deserved it, though.

        When your customs are so cruel that they make the Romans say, “Whoa, dude… that is messed up!” you probably aren’t exactly a nation of Albert Schweitzers. Same story with the Druids, despite all the hippies who claim to be Druids nowadays.

        See also: the Aztecs, Maya, Inca, et al versus the Spanish Inquisition.

        1. Not to mention which, the Carthaginians were not a class, but a nation; and they were not subjected to genocide, their capital city was destroyed. Both the nation and its culture survived, more or less underground, under Roman rule; and there are tiny human skeletons from Tunisia, carbon-dated to the second century A.D., showing that the Carthaginian practice of sacrificing babies to Moloch continued three hundred years after the supposed genocide.

          1. I stand or rather sit corrected. Intent was mostly that intermarrying, selling off or otherwise muddying or destroying cultures and peoples by conquerers is not new and the horror of the Nazi is mostly from propaganda and the fact that we continually have hubris to think we are above that. Compare Holocaust with any of the Soviet genocides. One scapegoats a religion, other a class. Both were industrial murder machines, the Germans kinda just tried to be more efficient. Does kinda evoke reverse racism because the Japanese were not looked down on as harshly for their crimes, nor Saddam or Pol Pot.

            1. Prior to that war many of the Western Nation-States had hailed Germany as the exemplar of Western Civilization, with the best education, finest physicians, best scientists, most enlightened industrial policies and best tools. Fascism, as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler was “the Top” as Cole Porter put it.

              It ain’t as if the rest of the European nations were particularly fond of Jews anyway. Seeing what Germany did was a bit too close to seeing the big brother whom you’ve always looked up to and emulated go off the rails (more sordid and colorful imagery eschewed, although variations on “caught with three underage hookers, a crack pipe and a Boston Terrier” were briefly entertained.)

                1. Yup – to mid-to-late 19th Century – Germany and all that they represented seemed to be the best of the best. Leader in science, medicine, intellectual thought, even music … all of that. And then … WWI happened, with German atrocities in Belgium – some of which were exaggerated for effect by the Allies, but many not. And then WWII.

                  1. And how much were the atrocities of WWII discounted because the WWI atrocities had been exaggerated? There’s a reason it’s good policy to be truthful in your reporting.

                    1. Oh, yes – big-time. I discovered that in my college project, reading every issue of a certain newspaper from 1935 to 1945. (They were on microfilm, about two weeks of issue per reel, IIRC.)
                      There were stories about the horrors being perpetuated against European Jews leaking out of Europe pretty constantly during the war – and without exception, each one would be followed by letters to the editor pointing out how we had been fooled by exaggerated horrors in the first war, and that we shouldn’t get fooled again into believing them.

                    2. There are times I wonder if the greatest Nazi crime was that they were genuinely unimaginably evil. That sounds odd, perhaps, but it ‘raised the bar’ for badness, which might be letter “almost but not quite as evil” off the hook to some degree.

                      That there is some… amplification of negatives (oh how kind that turn of phrase seems to be!) in any conflict, but then it was discovered that the Nazis managed to exceed the worst imagined propaganda. Now anything or anyone not at least that evil – and publicly so, somehow – is “not really that bad.” Note that I am not arguing on behalf negative propaganda, or for jumping to conclusions. It’s almost as if we’ve been inoculated against all reports of evils. I am sure I have oversimplified this. (Ox clumsy.)

                    3. You can talk about the Nazis being unimaginably evil, but you know, there are at least three other cases of evil on the same scale: the Soviet Union, China, and Kampuchea. And yet somehow most people’s response to the other three is to refuse to imagine how evil they were, and even to admire them for their noble aspirations. Very few people seem to see that communism is the moral equivalent of Nazism.

                    4. Any time you look at a system of government and think “it would work if only those folk weren’t interfering,” it’s a short step to the killing fields. You can’t change human nature without eradicating its source, and that’s a line that has a very specific name.

        2. I suspect some of the hippies admit the druids weren’t all kind. At least the ones that call themselves the Reformed Druids of North America. (Why Reformed? Simple: No human sacrifices.)

        3. One of the poisonous things coming out of PC is that it gives the idea that if someone is attacked, they must be an innocent victim.

          This is a really, really bad idea if/when the folks thus persuaded then find out that they were not innocent victims. You wanna see real anti-Muslim backlash, wait until folks get their noses rubbed in the idea too hard, without the Christian idea that there are some things that you just don’t do even if they are to bad people.

          *shudder*

          1. “Christians Are Evil”

            “Whack” (by a Christian)

            “That’s not very Christian of you”. 😈 😈 😈 😈

          2. Doesn’t it tend to depend on a more complex dynamic? For example, if a white male is attacked by a gaggle of black girls, isn’t it presumably because Trump?

          3. One of the poisonous things coming out of PC is that it gives the idea that if someone is attacked, they must be an innocent victim.

            I’ll give the late Isaac Asimov props for being more honest than many “liberals” today. He once said that being oppressed does not confer virtue and the oppressed is perfectly willing to become the oppressor when the tables are turned. Someone claimed that the Jews (Asimov was Jewish) were an exception. He pointed out an example in history of just that (Maccabees maybe? I’m not up on Jewish history and it’s been more than 20 years since I read Asimov’s autobiography where he told this tale). The other person said “that was the only time.” Asimov responded with “that was their only chance.”

            1. And I see that changing the email for my wordpress account (sff.net is going away as of mid-March so I’m having to switch my primary email) has lost settings like my avatar.

              Annoying.

    2. Nazi, fascist, and Hitler all had well-defined meanings long before they became used as the Left’s synonyms for “anybody who opposes us.” I would like to see those terms return to their previous use only, instead of a kind of blind insult. Tangentially, your comment also reminds me of Rabbi Abraham Cooper’s recent opinion piece at Fox News (URL below).

      http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/01/27/stop-dropping-h-hitler-bomb-and-other-crucial-lessons-for-2017-on-holocaust-memorial-day.html

        1. I’m just surprised he hasn’t decried her as a “dagger at the throat” of public schools.

          In Schmuck Chumer’s defense, most of the voters he’s trying to scare are public school products.

          1. If the public schools are decimated, is Secretary DeVos going to go full Roman and make the faculty of the other nine schools beat the faculty of the tenth to death?

        3. “One out of ten” would be a vast improvement, given the current state of our public schools. And if anything needs an actual “decimation,” the Department of Education is a good place to start.

          Actually, they should just make a desert of the entire DoE and call it peace. Just divide up federal education funding amongst the states and let them decide how to spend it.

          1. Reagan wanted to get rid of it. He failed.

            Trump *might* be able to neuter it, but only because so many people dislike Common Core. Otherwise, “For the children!” will save it, and cast anyone who tries to kill it out of office.

  31. Sarah, I read your Darkship and Great Men books and assumed what you wrote in this post. America can be reclaimed and it’s up to each of us to do our part.

    1. yes, but some of us don’t want our great great great great grand-kids carrying scraps of the flag around with them and having to talk in hushed tones about the freedoms we used to have.

      1. OT,, but we have hopes of moving this summer and the house in question has a full height standard flagpole in the front yard!!!!!!!! Yes, I have put flags on my to-buy list.

  32. They really want to go with the “selected not elected” bit again? Because the last time they did that, we had eight years of a Republican president.

  33. One really good thing about being a Boy Scout Leader and merit badge counselor for the 3 Citizenship merit badges, Community, Nation, and World, is that I get to teach the Scouts things they haven’t heard in school. Like what the Constitution actually says. That the government doesn’t grant rights, but is prohibited from taking certain rights away.

    And since we live in a rural community, I get to point out that what a lot of city people think is an essential function of government isn’t. Like firefighting. Done by volunteers where we live. Trash pickup. Done by 3 different companies on my street on different days, depending on who you contract with. For the people who contact. Some take their trash to the dump and pay by the bag. Some still burn their trash- though unlawful.

    I also point out that the legislature can, and does, pass any laws it wants to. Apparently not paying attention to the Constitution at times. But ultimately, it’s the citizens who determine whether or not something is a crime. I tell them about jury nullification. If the jury, them, thinks a law is stupid and shouldn’t exist, they can vote not guilty even if the accused is guilty as sin of breaking that particular law.

    I do encourage people to get their young men involved in Boy Scouts and if they think like me, to become Merit Badge counselors. And, BTW- you can become a merit badge counselor without having kids in Scouts.

    2. You should see the looks on the boys faces when we are doing the Citizenship MB’s and they hear the truth for the first time if they have typical Young parental units. The common line is “This is not what my teachers in school tell me, and not what the books we have tell me.”

  35. Sarah said: “That she thought it did alarmed me more than her belief that the electoral college was somehow unfair.”

    The woman has two problems. First, she’s a Liberal. The Electoral College was unfair this time because her side lost. Next time, if her side wins the college but not the popular vote, the college will be declared All That, and they will praise it. Because Liberals are whining cheating f-ers, at base. They want what they want, and they don’t care how they get it.

    The second problem she has is one that Kate Paulk mentioned in her MGC post on the 26th, https://madgeniusclub.com/2017/01/26/responding-to-change/ It is the “That’s just your opinion, man!” falacy.

    The woman does not understand that the structures of the US government have managed to keep that place together for 200 years through the most tumultuous time in Human History. Bar none, these last 200 have seen more change than any other thousand years ever. Pre-industrial to moonshot. The USA remains the oldest republic in the world and the second oldest country. Only Britain is still older. Every other place was formed later (Canada eg) or has had a complete revolution/conquering/what have you during the 20th Century. Much vaunted Europe had two or three each, on average. Looking like they’re about to have another one.

    To her, all this structural business is something keeping her from whatever her version of Free Beer is. She’s a typical Liberal. She thinks it only matters if it gets her what she wants.

    You can’t talk to people like that. You can only defeat them. Once they are defeated and cast aside, they may eventually begin to think about things. But if you try to reason with them, they nitpick their way to “Victory!” like a dung beetle standing on top of an elephant crap. “I win!”

        1. Reminds me of an exchange from Dilbert. Lisa has just punched out a co-worker, and is now complaining about someone else creating a ‘hostile work environment’.

          Wally: This from a woman who beats her co-workers senseless.

          Lisa: He was senseless before I beat him!

    2. ” Much vaunted Europe had two or three each, on average.”

      The much-admired-by-progs France is on their fifth try at a republic, with intervening monarchies, empires, reigns of terror, anarchies, and Nazi collaborator regimes.

    3. Be fair, a Dung Beetle on top of a ton of elephant crap HAS won. It is a highly evolved creature designed (by either the Artist or Evolution or both) to consume dung.

      OTOH, this female drone we are discussing has been deliberately designed by her Progressive handlers to be useless other than regularly exercising her franchise in their favor.

      Given a choice between the two, I’ll take the beetle.

  36. Interesting. Maybe I will quiz the nieces and nephews when I drive down to Tucson today. I’ll be off the Internet for a week doting upon the new nephew (born Wednesday!) and helping my sister.

    1. Congrats on the addition!

      Good time to visit – looks like we’ll have a few dry days in these parts.

      Warning – if they are in Tucson Unified School District indoctrination centers, make sure you have a bite block handy.

  37. Reading some of the comments here makes me feel like I’m from the 19th century, even though I graduated from high school in 1969. All my teachers were patriotic, except maybe a couple English teachers I had in high school. My seventh grade geography teacher was rabidly anti-communist. I can’t remember much about my textbooks, but I do remember that the world history textbook from tenth grade had a little cartoon character who would show up occasionally in the margins and make a comment. For communism, he said (to an obvious Russian leader), “But I have very few abilities and a great many needs.”

    Apparently, everything changed shortly after I left school, and I’m amazed there is as much resistance as there is.

    1. Hell, I went to a Private School that was generally considered ‘Conservative’ in the mid ’70’s, and was actually required to watch THE GRADUATE for a class on the social history of the ’60’s. The teacher wasn’t expecting anyone to peg the film as a tragedy, or think beyond the ‘happy’ ending to the train wreck that was inevitably coming. He also had problems with my wry observation that if instead of the National Guard the authorities at Kent State had called for the State Cops, a lot more kids would have died. The Ohio State cops of the time were very blue collar and notoriously short tempered with longhairs. Having you skull staved in with a billy club may not be as suddenly dramatic as being shot, but it leaves you just as dead.

    2. I graduated HS in 1970, and the seeds of rot (I’ll have my metaphors shaken, not stirred) were being planted. One business instructor I knew was trying to fight against the push to unionize the faculty, and a couple of my social studies/history teachers were very liberal*. OTOH, the rest of the faculty and the admin were pretty conservative. On the gripping hand, between MLK’s death and the late-war protests, things were going to go sideways.
      (*) We were supposed to go into downtown [City I’d rather not admit I was born in] to see Medium Cool, but the matinee was dark that day. We ended up seeing Easy Rider on school time. Hmm. Never did see MC.

  38. There is no effective treatment for Borderline Political Disorder. However that doesn’t mean it isn’t time to stop walking on eggshells. Stomping on Snowflakes is allowed.

      1. When you’ve lost Portland, you might as well pack it in… Think they’ll double down, instead?

      2. Few of any political suasion enjoy having their daily business interrupted by unruly folks, even protesters who agree with them. Look at the people on that flight to Seattle cheering when the crazy Clinton supporter was escorted off the plane, or the way many in highly-Democratic Chicago were annoyed with the Black Lives Matter protesters on Black Friday.

        On a related note, I expect the MSM did themselves little good of late for similar reasons. They’ve been so blatantly anti-Trump that I think they’ve effectively shifted the public slightly more in a pro-Trump direction.

        1. Well, of course nobody likes being interrupted. The question, though, is: Would they dare to cheer the abatement of the interruption?

          Related to that is the other question: Would law enforcement dare to abate the interruption in the first place?

          The answer to either question, IMHO, was “No” – right up until the 20th day of January.

          My take (perhaps mistaken) is that the pendulum has reached its highest point on one side, and is beginning its swing back. Which means we may need to worry about just how high it will get on the other side of its arc. Not yet, I don’t think – but my children (who can still afford to lose some dental enamel) are seeing the nutcases in all their glory on the social media they frequent. I am sincerely hoping (just as much as the last eight years) that the Secret Service is on its toes – even an “almost” attempt on Trump’s life would give that pendulum a powerful extra kick.

          1. I’m more worried about Baron. The first lady is probably very good at avoiding dangerous situations and paying attention to her security, and I’m pretty sure Trump both listens to his security guys and understands their reasoning.

            Baron, on the other hand, is a kid– and I’m worried that the security guys are decent folks who will figure that means he’s perfectly safe when there are folks who are freaking evil, in addition to being vulnerable to manipulation.

  39. I saw the most extraordinary post right after the election on checks and balances and the limitations of the executive office, cast as “So the same mechanisms that kept Obama from fixing everything will keep Trump from being able to destroy everything.” I think somebody said after reading it that they felt better about the structure of the US government.

  40. My take on the recent election is that the rank and file of both Parties, sick to the teeth of what was being served up by their Party Establishment, tried hard to nominate outsiders. The Democrat establishment managed to stomp on their outsider. The Republicans failed to do so. Then the party that had actually nominated an outsider won.

    The Democrat establishment hates outsiders. They accepted one – Jimmy Carter – and then sulked and backstabbed so much that they got Ronald Reagan stuffed down their throats. Naturally, that is seen as Carter’s fault. If the Democrat establishment trots out another Liberal Progressive Party Insider (One Each) in 2020, and another in 2024, then they may – MAY – be on the road to self destruction. We’ll see.

    Is Trump an actual outsider? Does it matter? If he can get the economy going (and it’s overdue, so simply reining in the more egregious agencies could do it), then he’ll be hard to beat in 2020. And if the Democrats don’t learn the lesson, and keep turning inward, then things could get interesting.

    1. Trump is doing something interesting. He’s snagging what was once traditional Democrat support, the ones the Democrats have ignored for at least a decade. That spells long-term trouble for the Democrats – and I don’t think they have grasped it yet.

      1. We’ll see. As I suggested, it looks like the Democrat establishment hasn’t realized that the old playbook just showed some fatal flaws. They’re just trotting out the same old plays; complain about minor election procedures, turn spurious ‘reasons’ the new President is illegitimate into chants and sound bites, encourage various twit celebrities to make fools of themselves, develop the unessential, and never EVER come to grips with facts and figures.

        If they keep this up, and Trump has kept a bunch of promises (which it looks like he will) and the economy is warming (Trumps cronies are likelier to do than than Obama’s were) Trump will be damned hard to beat in 2020. If they nominate another establishment figure who doesn’t excite the rank and file (or, gods forbid, Shrillary again) then Trump will get a landslide in 2020, and Congress will tilt further right.

        Then the crucial issue will be, can they pull their heads out of their bottoms by 2024.

        The Democrat Establishment as it exists now cemented itself in place with the rules-changes in 1972. Those were supposed to make victory over Nixon a sure thing, but when Nixon won the Left threw a temper tantrum over the kind of dirty tricks that both St. JFK and Johnson had pulled routinely and ousted a sitting President. That in turn was supposed to give them a clear track, but they squandered their political capitol by a) not agreeing on a major faction to win the next election and b) Compromising on Jimmy Carter and then backbiting him so thoroughly that he lost to Reagan.

        Since then, they’ve won a few and lost a few. When they have a Charismatic candidate (like Bubba Clinton) or a trick pony (like Obama) they win. When they trot out another tired old insider, even their tried and true vote-stealing fails.

        They need a shake up, and from what I can see they aren’t in the mood to accept one.

  41. It’s days like this that I envy Americans. You discuss your Constituion, Bill of Rights, Federalist Papers etc. I was curious if there was something similar here in Canada. Something that seems to be severely lacking in our education system. Well turns out there was once, briefly. The debates were published shortly afterward but were too costly. Only recently has a complete volume been published. And it’s almost out of print, and probably only used in some university obscure history course now. Canadians have no clue what really was motivating our Fathers of Confederation, or for that matter are able to name more than one or two. Our culture has been sunken for decades.

    1. I remember being shocked when visiting Windsor some twenty years ago and, upon visiting a bookstore*, finding NO general history of Canada available. When we inquired of a clerk he was a trifle embarrassed, saying there simply wasn’t much interest in such reading.

      I guess when you’ve been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the British Empire for most of your existence there isn’t mush interest in going beyond the school texts.

      *The bookstore was Walden/B. Dalton sized, IIRC.

      1. It’s our enduring charm and lasting shame. By NOT teaching an interest in Canadian history you get present leftist politicians able to make up meanings and concepts that majority of the voting population will just nod their heads and agree with. it doesn’t help that our current Prime Minister and his father before him have a communist and globalist view point of the world and our place in it. There are texts on general history of Canada. You just have to hunt for them and be mindful that very few of them have been written by conservatives if any.

        1. Start with an Anti-US draw. Seriously. An examination of how King George III kept Canada from joining the American Revolution, and then with the War of 1812, and then with the US Civil War. Then go from there.

          1. And a bad thought that might turn out good: What if books on Canadian history written by US authors started hitting the book stores? Surely there would be enough Canadian outcry that they would take up the banner.

              2. Can’t. Too ignorant of Canadian history. For the project I’m considering, I’d have to read the material first, then read it again to make notes, just to make sure which end is up.

                1. *sigh* There’s much I know, even more I don’t know, then there’s the stuff I don’t know I need to know.

                  1. Start with what you know, and go from there. History books can focus on a single event or period. When reading, pay attention to the foot notes and bibliography for further research – and don’t be surprised if some footnote references simply do not exist.

          2. That was easy. One complaint of the American colonists was that King George III had allowed, in Quebec where there were a hundred Catholics to every Protestants, for those Catholics to VOTE.

          1. Is this where I say “I hate you so much”? 🙂
            Seriously though, that may be a very good idea. Time to start doing some serious research.

          1. Just imagine how much our grandmothers would’ve killed to be able to go “oh, yeah, we’re going to study Civics this week– here, let’s look at the notes somebody took for the meeting. For side-study, we’ll compare them to the notes from rotary/4-H/Elks. By the way, we got these notes basically for free, accessing them with about as much trouble as picking a book off of our own shelf.”

            1. Given that both of them were in Korea during the post war period. The internet and a printer would have been used with more glee than decorum. (And it took a lot to get dad’s mom to loose decorum. She was a very proper British lady.)

    1. Well … that link certainly turned long in WP.

      A recent article about whether Sean Bean had “died” more than any other actor found he was in fourth place. Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price were second and third, just a few on-screen deaths ahead of Bean (I question how many of Lugosi’s ought count* given he was already undead in many of those roles.) But the unquestioned leader, by sizable margin was John Hurt.

      Now, when taking into account D.A. (Dying Average — deaths per film role) Bean claims the lead.

      *Ouch.

    2. Liked his acting. Don’t give an fat damn about his politics, and don’t wanna hear about ’em. I make it a rule to focus on an actor’s ability to act, rather than get caught up in his or her politics. The reason I don’t watch Jane Fonds fils is she’s awful. Her politics simply make her a double barreled failure.

      So, what did y’all like him in? I remember being chilled by Caligula in (as Stephen Fry puts it) “I Clavdivs”. Pity I just plain lack the stamina for long running story arcs these days. I’d go back and watch it again.

      2. I remember him from Alien, and the end of Spaceballs. I did catch a few clips of him as the War Doctor and thought it was neat.

        I’m guessing I’ll have to see if the series is on Netflix… and maybe actually get a Netflix account.

      3. Watership Down! (The movie, naturally. While he was also in the series, well… we’ll say it wasn’t enough to save it.)

        1. An actress who knows how to state the obvious and remind her fellow performers that they are paid to be dancing monkeys, not opine on what is or is not “un-American*.” I thought accusations of being un-American went out with Sen. McCarthy (and were especially disliked by the members of the acting community.)

          Sofía Vergara: It’s ‘very hard times’ for America right now
          Sofía Vergara is hoping her comedic chops will help brighten America’s mood.

          “It’s very hard times for everyone in the country right now,” she told Giuliana Rancic at the SAG Awards on Sunday night, “But it’s good that we can entertain them a little bit with the show and whatever we do, so we can get their minds off the problems we have.”
          [END EXCERPT]

          *Julia Louis-Dreyfus: ‘Immigrant ban is un-American’

  43. I got hit enough times with the “won the Popular Vote” thing that I decided to do a little research; here is what I found:
    “You’ve heard ad-infinitum that Hillary won the national popular vote. Yes she did, by 2,864,974 votes.
    Hillary won California by 4,269,978 votes, so she lost the other 49 states by 1,405,004 votes.
    Now I am going to tell you why she won California by such a large margin.
    There are two Senators in CA, like every other state; this year, one was up for election, but due to the California open primary system, there was no Republican challenger, just two Democrats.
    California has 53 Congressional Districts. Of those 53, eight had no Republican Challenger in the general election.
    Of the remaining districts, 21 have been so thoroughly gerrymandered that the Democrat won 2/3 or more of the vote. Fifteen of the districts were won by 70% or higher.
    Of the remaining, districts, Democrats won 7 by double digits.
    A total of TWO districts (CA-7, CA-24) were competitive; Democrats won them by 2.4% and 6.8% respectively.
    So to recap; in 36 of California’s 53 congressional districts, a Republican candidate was either absent or had zero chance of winning. State-wide, there was no Republican Senate candidate. In the months leading up to the election, all the major media outlets were telling the nation that Donald Trump had no chance to win.
    End result: Republicans stayed home in droves. Hence the lopsided win compared to the nation as a whole.
    And that, my friends, is what Voter Suppression looks like…”—Bruce Abbott

    1. I don’t think the republicans stayed home, I think most of us have taken to the lifeboats and as soon as i can afford to move i will join them.

    2. Well, I’m sure Republicans being openly attacked on California streets for the “crime” of supporting Trump or attending his rallies – while the cops stand by and watch, as happened in San Jose – also helped with the “voter suppression” part. And that tends to happen to conservatives in general, not just Trump’s voters.

      OTOH, you don’t seem to see a lot of that open, random thuggery and terrorism happening in the concealed-carry states . . .

      1. Hopefully California is foolish enough to rebel. Once their state government is then removed and the rebellion supporters stripped of the right to vote (see 14th amendment) California might be semi-functional again.

        1. Latest report i that a survey reveals one-third of Californians support secession. I have seen no figures on what percentage of those supporters have the slightest idea what secession would entail. What happens to the US military bases and national parks? What about those citizens who do not want to be torn from their native country (look at the red/blue by county map)?

          And then there’s all that debt they are not going to get any hope of a federal bailout on …

          California’s Secession Movement Gains Traction in Wake of Trump’s Election
          [SNIP]
          California may be the sixth-largest economy in the world, but to successfully resist Trump by seceding from the union is an endeavor unlikely to succeed. After all, it’s not just Californians who decide their state’s fate; two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states (or a constitutional convention) would have to approve a constitutional amendment allowing it, making the ambitious secession proposal a failure before it even arrives at the ballot box.

          1. Maybe coastal California could secede and inland California could remain. The new member of the UN of Ecotopia. The reduced area red state of California would retain the San Diego coast due to all the military installations.

            1. All I know is, if they manage to succeed before I move out, then I will stage a coup and install myself as ‘el presidente for life’. I’ll promise everybody everything to get their backing, then once installed I will kill them all in an inevitable betrayal. I will then take all of the money and escape to Switzerland to live in exile in exchange for letting the US come back in and manage the now poverty stricken wastelands.
              You know, like we do everywhere else 🙂

            3. If California secedes, do we still have to supply them with water? Shouldn’t any electricity they import from our grid be taxed as foreign sale?

              2. Yes, all the water and electric contracts are up for renegotiation with a new foreign country. And then all the people bragging about CA’s huge economy get very cold and thirsty in the dark.

          3. I must say, I was wondering how the California state government would react if some of the interior counties set out to secede and join the Union again. But I don’t know many progressives who even notice when they’re being logically inconsistent. . . .

            1. If California successfully succeeds, Mexico will invade within thirty minutes of the finalization.
              China and Russia will probably already be sitting off the coast with invasion fleets, but even if they don’t have them there, they will launch them.
              Anyone who thinks an independent country of California will exist for more than a few days is smoking crack.

  44. re: the above post; if anyone demands the CA district numbers, here they are:
    No Republican: 17, 29, 32, 34, 37, 40, 44, and 46. D+2/3 total vote: 2, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 28, 30, 33, 35, 38, 41, 43, 47, 51, and 53. D-Double digits: 3, 9, 16, 26, 31, 32, and 52.

  45. The “you committed a fallacy, so you are wrong” thing is called the Fallacy Fallacy.

    I think it comes from confusing “your argument is not supported” with “your argument is false.”

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