The Totalitarian Train Is Rolling Down the Tracks

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

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If I could communicate just one thing, across the increasing divide of language and thought to the left it would be this: that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you’re running someone down is not righteousness.

It’s just the feeling apes get when they run off another ape.

If you’re part of a band and all of you were piling on an outsider — or an insider who was just declared an outsider and run off — you’ll also feel very connected to your band, and a feeling of being loved and belonging.

It’s not real. It’s the result of a “reward” rush of endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine that flood your body after stress and a perceived “victory.”  Oxytocin, particularly, promotes a feeling of bonding with those around you.

Just remember, as you’re high fiving each other and believing that something that feels so good has to be good and morally “just” you could be the victim tomorrow.  Because the feelings don’t last, and that rush of “righteousness and victory” is addictive. Those who are your comrades today will be looking for someone to kick in the face tomorrow. And it really could be you.

I know there’s no point telling them that. The young ones were never taught to think, and frankly have been given no moral guidance whatsoever, besides (like all places whose communications and power structures have been taken over by leftists) “obey the party.” They have been reduced, in less than three generations to savages who cannot reason their way out of a philosophical paperback, even if it happens to be soaking wet, and instead identify good with “pleases the tribe.” They are therefore prey to the power hungry bullies in their midst, many of which are already addicted to the rush of victory.  (And this is why I tell you not to let strangers raise your children.) And they’re scaring the living daylights out of me. And not the way they think they are.

Not the way they think they are, because the way they’re scaring me is not the way that will make me roll over to avoid confrontation.  To be absolutely honest, I’m not sure there’s a way that makes me do that, anyway. I am broken in that I have a tendency to run screaming (and clutching something heavy) at whatever is scaring me.  But I do have a default mode of “I’m too lazy to bother obliterating you” which causes me to ignore most people making threatening displays towards me (or say, manipulating their cat’s paws to keep me out of a con. Yeah. I saw that.  One more move, missy, and I put in action my plan of taking a line a day from your copious social media use and making it famous for its total absence of thought and vicious idiocy. Keep it up and your name will become a laugh line till even your comrades are afraid of associating with you. You’ve been warned. At this point, only my laziness is saving you from having your lunacy exposed and mocked.)

But that’s besides the point.  This is bypassing my laziness and engaging the “kill it before it grows” mode in my brain.  Which I don’t like. I’m middle aged. My kids are almost on their own. Running around the hills with Kalashnikov has lost all appeal.

More importantly, if this goes hot I don’t think what emerges on the other side is a constitutional republic.  And while not all other forms of government are bad (well run empires are okay. The problem being “well run.”) they all are more dangerous, in the sense that their triggers for going totalitarian are more easily tripped.

I just don’t know if we can avoid going hot.  Not if the left keeps on the path it’s been.

You see, they took the wrong lessons from the 20th century.  You could say they took the wrong lessons because the totalitarian-sympathizers in education and academia made sure they did so.

It simply wasn’t convenient to people who by the time the Nazis fell were mostly communist or socialist to point out that what happened under the Nazis was what happens every time under totalitarian and economically deluded regimes.  Because then someone might take a close look at good ol’ uncle Joe and see his own death camps, massacres and enforced famines.  Or the others around the world in regimes that STILL make the left moist with desire like the PRC.

So instead they took the one form that the National socialists of Germany had given to their murderous craziness and made that what was bad.  I.e. despite the fact that the national socialists murdered in service of an invented theory of greatness that had no basis in reality, the left chose one aspect of that theory to blame for everything: the obsession with race.

Look, racism is insane. And it’s all over the left, right now, in their belief that culture is the same as race, and that therefore to disapprove of cultural dysfunction is to be racist. They, themselves are racist for subscribing to that theory. They’re also wrong on all levels, from genetics to history to human behavior, but never mind.

They are comfortable blaming racism for the evils of the 20th century because they never see their own racism (yes, wanting people of color to behave in a certain way, denying them agency, and also fetishisticizing them as the saviors of Marxism IS racism, kiddies) AND because they are happily and willfully unaware of the much greater numbers of dead under regimes that outwardly had no racial component to their crazy cakes theories.  (Outwardly? Well, yes. Because communism — the Donner party of political theories — reduces everyone to abject poverty and need until they eat each other. And societies under stress enforce conformity. Racial minorities, or anyone visibly different, propaganda to the contrary, did not do well in the soviet union. And I would bet you cash money they’re pretty uncomfortable in Venezuela right now.)

However, what their obsession with the racial component of Germany’s mid-century murder spree has done is make it impossible for them to see what really causes it.

Any regime, any human group who walls out any other group for any difference can end up that way. If you think white males cause all the evil in the world; if you think you have the right to destroy people’s livelihood and careers because their opinions differ from yours; if you get a righteous and unexamined rush of mistreating people that you identify as “evil” and “not really people” you might as well be on the streets in your brown shirts, breaking windows.

This is how our maleducated youth has come around to believing crazy crap like that the Jews control the world, or that the rich are “hoarding the stash” without which we’d all live on unicorn (but not cow) farts and rainbows.

Because it’s easier to blame a group of people who have never actually done you any harm (expressing a contrary opinion is not causing you harm) and going after their ability to survive than to examine history, or look in the mirror and see the angry ape looking back.

And the more crimes you commit for your “victory rush” the less you’ll be willing to admit you were wrong and crazy.

This is how normal Germans — then the most civilized nation in the world — came to lie to themselves about the camps, even when they could smell the smoke and see the victims. This is how they could even pile on, and take the goods of those marched out to the camps with a clear conscience.

They’d made them non-people.

And the important thing there is not that they were doing this to racial (or other) minorities.  The important thing is that they were this to a large group of people that their leaders had told them were bad-evil and not really human.

It’s a very ancient human mechanism. And one that has few brakes, short of an entire group of people having a moment of sudden recognition and rejection of everything they were taught.

And I can’t remember a single time in history that happened without massive military defeat first.

And no matter how much the rest of us wish to hold off, at some point the switch flips, and we’ll go after them as hard as they’ve been going after us.  Only we’re competent. And frankly a lot more vicious than they can even imagine.

I wake up screaming.

 

 

 

315 thoughts on “The Totalitarian Train Is Rolling Down the Tracks”

  2. “They’d made them non-people.”
    That’s my primary objection to Islam. According to the Koran, if you’re not Muslim, you don’t deserve to be treated as a human being. And Muslims take their Koran seriously. A Muslim may not shoot an infidel, but they’re not going to do much to stop another Muslim from doing so.

    1. I have for some time feared the response might eventually be one that could be described as “defensive genocide.” It would be very, very ugly.

      1. That was Ann Coulter’s view on 9/12 that got her fired from NRO.

        I fear we’re going to learn she was Cassandra.

        1. “Stop! We don’t want to fight back!”

          “Aha, you are weak and have no will!”

          “No, we just really don’t want to kill each and every one of you, your wives, kids and cousins. Please don’t make us do so in self defense”

            1. Yeah. We don’t want to go there. We really, truly don’t.

              Doesn’t mean we won’t if pushed far enough.

              1. I don’t. I don’t want to live with myself if we do.

                But I want to live with myself even less if it needs to happen and we don’t.

                  1. This. *Exactly* this. I am by nature, lazy, and peace loving, and for the most part tolerant. Leave me alone and I am more than happy to accord you the same.

                    However… You make the world a miserable place for my children, grand-children, etc. It is game on.

                    I’ve had a good life.

                    I want my kids to have one even more than continuing with mine.

                3. As with any emergency or crisis planning, the best thing to do is work out in advance, “What will I do if X occurs?”

                  Because otherwise the default tendency is either to freeze, or to let adrenaline take over. Neither, if the fit hits the shan, would be a good response to this kind of situation.

                  So horrible as it may be, you have to explore the worst-case scenarios in your head… hopefully to avoid them.

                  And if you can’t avoid them….

                  I’m going to make an anime recommendation here – Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress. Very short world setting summary: What does it take to survive a planet taken over by super-fast, super-strong zombies? (Hint: the society is not at all democratic. Not. At. All.)

                  I’m recc’ing this because I think it makes a very good metaphor for a culture under attack… and a scary object lesson for why we need to fight to keep it from getting that far.

                  Also because it is, frankly, an awesome anime with real heroic characters who know the value of building things. The main character is an engineer!

            2. Also, once the blood is up, limited action isn’t something that American, as a whole, really do.

              1. I’ve been saying for some time that the obdurate idiocy of the anti-war people here and the pro-war Islamists worldwide was going to push things into full-on flatten everything mode. However stupid Bush’d ‘Nation Building’ may have been, he made the right choice by choosing to fight a limited war by limited means. If the Left had been prepared to allow the object lesson to stand, and we had freaking LEFT when the governments in question fell we might be in a much better position internationally. Unfortunately the object lesson has been muddied, and Obumbles couldn’t keep his paws off of any piss-up going and simultaneously couldn’t accomplish anything useful.

                *sigh*

                Sooner or later some idiot camel-pesterer is going to pull off an attack that really stirs up the anger of the American People and then life is gonna get ugly. We will probably end up with an Empire, which we won’t be good at. Maybe an Empire abroad and a representative Government at home, but I kinda doubt it.

              2. “Nothing exceeds like excess. Do you want to be a PROBLEM that we will proceed to SOLVE. Not ‘manage’, SOLVE. So it stays SOLVED?”

                1. People forget (or never learned) that WWII MacArthur was NOT the first MacArthur to spend time in the PI. By a long chalk.

          3. Shortly after 9/11 a number of grad students I knew who came from various middle-Eastern countries told me they’d been talking with folks they knew back home. They said they were warning their friends and family that they really really didn’t want to provoke the US into coming into the region to play “Cowboys and Arabs. Look how well that worked out for the American Indian tribes!” (Note: Their wording, not mine!)

            Then they told me that the folks back home had a really tough time understanding the warning.

            1. In certain cultures, the “coward of the county” is just that, a weakling coward. Around here, however…

            2. This is one thing that I’ve been trying to explain for years to people.

              Americans are cautious and careful and “cowardly” not because they aren’t capable of violence. It’s just that we’ve become very, very good at violence. We’ve seen what the Beast of Revelations looks like, and it has a nuclear trefoil. Or the long, screeching radio howl of long-life radioactive elements ninety minutes after the keys have been turned. Or the rolling firestorm of a B-52 Arclight strike turning a whole square mile of forest into a wasteland that would have taken days of artillery fire on the Somme to create.

              If we just unleashed our infantry during Iraq or Afghanistan-with simple rules of engagement-there would not be a single city standing, a single village left if someone fired a round in their general directions. It might have been horrible for a lot of our soldiers, but we would have done it.

              Americans are very good at killing things, even more than most of the West. We’ve taken the belief that it’s our job to make the poor bastard on the other side die for his country/cause/God. And, were more than wiling to help them along the way. Which is why those of us that know these things try to enforce things like rules, laws, and customs. We know just how shallow they are, just what sort of weak chains they are on the monsters we’ve made. But, they’re what we have and we need to keep the monsters under control and in check.

              Nobody wants to see those monsters let loose in the world.

              But, because they are chained, too many people think that they are harmless, and they are like people poking the lions at the zoo.

              One day, the lion swipes back.

              And, one day, the cage may be left unlocked.

              1. America often presents as mild-mannered, restrained and even somewhat timid.


                That is because the world won’t like it when we’re angry.

                1. There is reason John Wayne was the personification of America.

                  And why he remains one of our most popular screen stars forty-three years after his last film.

                  1. I’ve said before that the USA is represented by (later) Bugs Bunny – can and will endure quite a lot and shrug or laugh it off, but once a line is crossed, if you are the one who crossed it,.. you poor bastard. You’re not just going to be completely defeated, but utterly humiliated in the process.

                  3. I do not think the world wants us to , like Rooster Cogburn, shout ” Fill your hands you son of a b*tch”. but somehow they keep pushing us closer and closer to the edge. This will not end well…

              2. Reminds me of a D&D story I heard once. Long story short, party needs to interrogate a minion. After some failures, the palaxin steps in. And what he essentially says is, “My rules of conduct are there to protect you. Because otherwise I would quite happily break them, and go to extremes doing so. And you can be assured that if I ever do break those rules, it’ll be important enough that it won’t be a minor violation. I’ll go all out, because the rules will no longer be keeping me in check. So are you going to tell me what I want to know?”

        2. Yes, that was part of it, but I am of the opinion that the way that she said it was what caused so many outlets to drop her. And how she expressed it was because of the personal emotional pain that she was feeling.

          Coulter was a friend of Barbara Olsen, the wife of the Solicitor General, Ted Olsen. She was on American flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon. Coulter’s grief filled the column, as did her anger. Much of what she said was harsh, but not entirely outside of the rhetoric of the time. I’m convinced that it was the first sentence of the final paragraph that caused the kickback, and the rapid retreat of those who carried her column:
          —
          “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
          —
          I think that the term the Left uses these days is “problematic.” It seemed like there were almost as many cries for Coulter’s blood as for terrorist blood.

          It’s probably someplace else that I didn’t see offhand, but one blogger preserved the column in question here: http://mahoundsparadise.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-911-column-that-got-ann-coulter.html

          The outlets that kept her were the ones that had no problem with what she had written, and wanted more of it so she wrote more. It seemed to me for the first couple of years almost like it was a schtick, she wrote that way because that paid the bills. But eventually the line between what she was writing and who she was seemed to blur, and then vanish.

          I was a big fan of pre-9/11 Coulter. I think that the writer and pundit she became after that was much less than she could have been.

          1. Oh, I know it was that sentence that got her dropped.

            But what a lot of people don’t understand is that was an argument from mercy. I was at the time, and often still am, convinced that is not viable and the only peace possible with much of Islam is the peace of the grave. See remark elsewhere about children and women of reproductive age.

      2. Talked with someone once who had a security clearance much higher than mine- in the intelligence community. Mentioned to him some terrorism attempts I KNEW had happened, but any and all references to them had totally disappeared. It soon became apparent that he was very uncomfortable and was dodging questions about specifics. So I asked: “If the American people knew the true number of terrorism acts that have been stopped, the government wouldn’t be able to stop an American version of Kristallnacht, would it?” He answered “No.”

        2. Oh man. That’s not a good thing to fear at all. And Krystalnacht was an unjustifiable attack against the Jewish people who were NOT engaged in terrorism or any other aggressions against the rest of the population; whereas if the number of covered up terrorist acts, plus their supporting populations comprised an overwhelming majority of a certain demographic, that would be justification to round them up and either incarcerate them, or expel them from the country. Although to be honest, if you’re a terrorist or a supporter of terrorists, I’m fine with just shooting you and burying the evidence.

        3. A very highly placed leader in the intelligence community once said “Jihadists want to die for Allah. We want to kill them. Sounds like win-win to me” I say no more.

        4. There would even be justification. Which is even sadder and makes me angrier. I don’t want to go down that path, that path always seems to be a part of the worst parts of history.

          But, if this keeps up, Islam may only be a religion practiced in Hell.

      3. Of course to be avoided if expedient. I’ve come to the position that objecting is racist against my culture. 🙂

        If it is racist to object to a culture that genuinely institutionalizes, say, rape of women, it is also racist to object to a culture that destroys the first culture by killing everyone in it down to the infant in swaddling clothes.

        Someone who is comfortable institutionalizing cultural or religious preferences retains the moral authority to object. Anyone else? Entitlement spending and the DoJ civil rights division are violations of the establishment clause. XD

        Having embraced my culture’s imperative towards destroying cultures and polities with whom we can have no peaceful relationship, I have also worked out a lot of the practical downsides to recklessly and unnecessarily carrying out mass murders. You have much fewer markets to sell to.

        1. “killing everyone in it down to the infant in swaddling clothes”

          If, IF, Culture & Race are one and the same thing, then elimination down to the last swaddled infant is necessary, as there is no chance for redemption nor reformation of the culture.

          1. The indian schools were quite effective in destroying the culture of the Plains Indians to the point that peace became possible.

            But that won’t scale infinitely. When you look at the possibility of exterminating not only the Iranians, but the Russians, Chinese, etc., sparing the innocent becomes laughably impractical, and the dangers of not pulling up trouble by the roots more serious. Of course, once it reaches the point of killing off the whole rest of the world, it is almost certainly practically impossible to organize and sequence the necessary wars.

            I don’t know what kind of peace is possible. One critical unknown detail is what the American people are actually willing to live with. What our expectations are.

            And the denazification of Germany was cultural genocide.

            1. And of course, there’s the current resettlement and reeducation camps in China for the Uighurs. The Chinese are not, and never have been, averse to drastic measures to eliminate what they see as threats to Chinese hegemony.

              What the Chinese are doing is one of those “Gee I’m conflicted.” type things. Western Christian based civilization norms say what they’re doing is wrong. Chinese civilization is neither Western nor Christian based. And the Uighurs pose a legitimate threat to the Han.

              1. Couldn’t remember them, asked husband if they were dangerous.
                “Anywhere but China? Yes. Think Muslim Mongols.”

                Ouch.

                1. The problem is that Uighur Islam was moderate Islam with old lay imams. But instead of leveraging that to annoy other countries, China let the Saudi funding in first, then radicalized the men further, and then started the concentration camps, surveillance state, and destruction of whole small cities. (Replaced with the usual ghost city skyscrapers where nobody will ever live. Because real estate bubble graft.)

                  Red China gets creepier by the day. Victor Mair on Language Log can fill you in about some of the weird Newspeak stuff. Also, they have revived bureaucrat jobs that have not existed since the Cultural Revolution. They are trying to replace Christmas with Mao’s birthday, to a lot of passive resistance.

                  2. College campuses I am sure would like to also replace Christmas with Mao’s birthday, as they are fully engaged in pursuing Mao’s Cultural Revolution Redux

        2. destroys the first culture by killing everyone in it down to the infant in swaddling clothes.

          Nope, start with children under 13 and women of child bearing age.

          Then let the remaining men live with the remains and instruction that should they complain or breed they are next.

          That has long been my “I don’t say it too often” advice to Israel about Palestinians. It is rapidly becoming my general advice.

      4. If the atomic bomb had not been used, it is probably even odds that the Japanese as a culture/race would have become one only carried by the people in the internment camps and similar. The idea isn’t far fetched at all.

        WRT modern movements, a nuked city or similar would light off something 10x worse among 60% of populace.

        1. I’m still not convinced the failure of the Japanese to have children at population sustaining rates isn’t the side effect of the war and the subsequent defeat.

          1. I think the start of that is sufficiently post war. Plus we have it here and in Europe.

              1. True, but my point was more it wasn’t just the American reaction that led to 100% death rates. It was the American “we will kill until you surrender without condition” running into the “death before surrender” mindset of the Japanese.

                While the anger against Germany was not as great (my paternal grandfather said he and a lot of people were disappointed with the Europe first strategy…they wanted revenge on Japan) it was still the unconstitutional surrender one. Germans not named Hitler understood it and acted accordingly.

                Japan understood and said, “works for us” until the Emperor intervened.

    2. Lots of societies do that. The native reference for indigenous groups for themselves is often something akin to “The People”. While the reference to others is either explicitly, or at least implied, something like “Not us, therefore targets”.

    3. No: Muslims are a historically oppressed group acting out of post-colonial trauma caused by white men who are Islamophobes and bigots you white supremacist. Racism is prejudice plus power and Muslims don’t have any power only evil white Christian men do, and that’s why only evil white Christian men can be held responsible for what they say and do.

        1. Because they succeed in the west they don’t count. Just like how Christians cannot claim asylum in England because violent religion.

      2. And when the evil white Christian men get fed up with always being the patsy and strike back the idiots selling that narrative will have the nerve to be SURPRISED.

        Proving conclusively that they have no active brain cells.

        1. So what you’re saying is…you want to kill all the Muslims and turn America into the Handmaid’s High Castle?

          1. Handmaids High Castle – that’s the one where Hitler is made to wear that red dress cowl thingee?

            1. Someone needs to write that up, preferably as a musical. I think we might have a “Springtime for Hitler” level hit on our hands.

        2. I think, quite honestly, that the media is doing what they’re doing re: that fucking idiot in NZ because the response to it from the people hasn’t been massive support for everything Leftist and a sudden slide into mass Communism everywhere.

          The response from the rest of the world has been a rather tacit “And… so? Our churches, our temples, our synagogues and places of common gathering were commonly attacked by Muslims, and you didn’t care, but we’re supposed to suddenly care that they got attacked by someone who isn’t part of their faith… why? We keep hearing ‘don’t blame all Muslims’ for terror attacks, but suddenly we’re supposed to blame bunches of people because of one guy’s actions? That’s not how it works, fools.” Instead of reacting by generally surrendering (though NZ seems to be doing that right now) people are bracing themselves for retaliatory attacks… as usual.

          Y’know there was an article about ‘men not doing their share of emotional labor’; here it seems to be that the Left thinks they’re entitled to command where other people’s ’emotional labor’ should go and consider important. It doesn’t work that way.

          1. Having some minor familiarity of men I can state with confidence that the reason they do not do “their share of emotional labor” is that they consider most of that to be make work of the worst sort: the sort which if left undone reduces the amount of additional labor needed.

            1. *chuckle* I’m much like that myself. I don’t really know how to respond to ‘how do you deal with stress’, because it’s usually chocolate and a weepy, then getting down to work, and then when the source of stress is gone, then my stress goes away. I am, however, told that I do stress a great deal about trying to prepare for everything that could go wrong, and then being aware that the thing that will go wrong is something I missed and completely out of my control anyway.

            2. As somebody who has done a lot of time with various forms of therapist, I can say there’s another aspect to it. Women want men to talk about their emotions, but far too many aren’t prepared to listen to the first tentative steps. One doesn’t start out talking about the closely held emotions. One starts with things a little more distant. Feelings about sports stars, or the like. And women was men to get into the deep stuff and dismiss the offered emotions…and then men clam up, because their audience has proved itself untrustworthy.

              1. And sometimes men don’t *have* emotions, at least not the way others expect.

                I generally go through life in a level calm. But even after decades of marriage, my wife still asks me bizarre questions about how do I “feel” about this or that thing that is usually absolutely trivial. Why should I care, much less “feel”?

                From my point of view way too many people ride some kind of emotional roller coaster. It’s not like I’m some kind of Mr. Spock or something, it’s just that I see too many adults acting like children throwing tantrums.

          2. This – and we’re supposed to care deeply (I wish that I could write that ‘deeply’ in bold, and underlined) because this is a Muslim place of worship, when Christian churches and Jewish temples have been targeted and repeatedly – even in the last couple of weeks before this atrocity? And we’re supposed and hounded into displaying public sympathy for their loss, while all the other incidents get the ‘meh – Muzzies being Muzzies’ treatment?

            I’ve been observing the international media winning over the plight of the Rohinga minority of Burma with a cynical eye. Yeah, I’d be more sympathetic to your poor pitiful plight … if it weren’t that Muzzies weren’t so brutal in their treatment of religious minorities in other national spheres.

            1. Deeply ?

              As The Phantom put it further below, a priest was stabbed in the middle of mass in the biggest Catholic church in his country, and there’s no news or reports of the perp. It’s like they’re suddenly cracking down on any mention of Muslim atrocity anywhere.

              I’m not in the LEAST bit sympathetic to the Rohingya. Frankly, I’m of the opinion they pushed the Buddhists too far, and now the Buddhists are no longer willing to listen to reason and are hell bent on genocide.

              And frankly, since that’s what the Muslims generally go for once they reach a certain percentage of population in a country as religiously mandated protocol I don’t feel that the response they’ve gotten is unjustified.

              I used to write about this regularly back in my Livejournal days (I’m sure Foxfier and Mary remember ’em… How often would I do a round-up? Almost daily?) and stopped because it got to a point where I felt that warning the West / Dar al-Harb again and again and again was pointless, and it’d simply going to be a matter of waiting until the scales were tipped and crashed on the ground. Because things like this ‘happened over there’, it was easy to dismiss that things like this even happened at all, there was a constant sense of ‘but our governments won’t let that happen; our police will protect us, our military will defend us…’

              And we’re seeing exactly how ‘defended’ the people are in Germany, in Europe, in Canada. Short of One Nation suddenly getting more power than ever before, I doubt Australia will survive either, but likely will fracture into individual states.

              So yeah, while the media may have gotten ‘what they wanted’ in the NZ shooter, and are happy to play the pawns to what he wanted, this doesn’t mean that people aren’t paying attention. And frankly, since the media/Left haven’t gotten more of what they wanted, they’re pushing a crackdown on civil rights for non-Leftists everywhere… like he wanted…

              So I guess is, what do we do now? I’m of the opinion, frankly that there’ll be more of the same ‘massaging’ of content that we’ve seen in FB and Twitter and other net-hosting. There’ll be more muzzling of conservatives and alternatives to ‘approved’ media and discussion places.

              I guess there’s always the Dark Web – for now- but that would require building a place for discussion there.

              But what do I know? I’m just someone out the back of beyond, borderline conspiracy theorist, not liking what she’s seeing (things are escalating, every warning of ‘not safe not safe’ going off…)

                1. Indeedie! The Russian guy got to lj before I did.
                  (Not a metaphor, foxfire is a Russian male who is at a guess a bit older than I am.)

                2. I haven’t thought about LJ forever.

                  My main online friends group from the aughts migrated there from Boston NetGoth email list. It worked great.

                  Then people left for Facebook and we fell apart as a group.

            4. Nah. The Ockham’s Razor for that is really simple. Most places where Muslims commit atrocities are places where we expect atrocities to be committed–Third World type locales. in other words, it’s not “newsworthy” because it’s seen as normal.

              However, we don’t expect massacres in the First World, so when something like what happened in New Zealand goes down, it’s newsworthy because it is seen as abnormal.

          3. Like the Vegas shooting, there’s a ton of unanswered questions I have about the New Zealand shooting. But the reactions to both are different enough to set my Spider-senses off.

            1. I think he said this sufficiently well — and briefly — to be worth repeating in full, but visit the original for embedded links:

              One Strike and You’re Out
              By Charles C. W. Cooke
              March 22, 2019 12:02 PM

              New Zealand has confirmed that it will ban — and confiscate — any firearm that resembles those that were used in the recent terroristic attack. In response, the gun-control movement has taken a break from assuring gun owners that “nobody is talking about confiscation” and set about lionizing New Zealand’s parliament for agreeing to . . . engage in confiscation. In future, we can presumably expect to see similar dance to the one that President Obama performed when he spoke of Australia. To wit: “Why can’t we be more like New Zealand? How dare you suggest I want to do what New Zealand did.”

              I noted earlier in the week that there was something creepy and authoritarian about the way in which New Zealand’s prime minister was being urged to act with such haste as to guarantee that nobody could object (Phil Klein has a good column on this topic). Today, I have noticed something even creepier, and even more authoritarian: The suggestion that if a traumatic thing happens to a nation even once, the correct governmental response is to abolish or to curtail the liberties of its citizenry. I keep seeing it argued that Britain, Australia, and New Zealand should be praised for having reacted to attacks by instantly limiting the right to bear arms. But what is the ruling principle here? That people get to enjoy certain rights unless one guy abuses them, and then that’s it? That would be a strange way to run a free country, would it not?

              In most other circumstances, this argument would be self-evidently absurd. If a serial killer walks free and then murders again, we do not say, “Right, that’s it,” and move to limit the presumption of innocence or to abolish jury trials. If a bomber stockpiles explosives in his home, we do not say, “Ah well, I guess we need to abolish the Fourth Amendment, and before anyone can object,” and nor do we praise other countries in which privacy has been severely abridged for their instant “leadership” in the face of evil. We shouldn’t do it with guns, either. And, thanks to the Second Amendment, which was passed to prevent precisely this sort of behavior, we won’t.

            2. I saw a clip of video somewhere that someone took from the supposed shooter video.

              The brass was vanishing into mid-air, like a badly done Counterstrike render.

              Nick Monroe noted that mentions of the supposed ‘brave local Muslim’ driving off the car that ‘had people’ (plural) in it by picking up a discarded gun is gone, as is reference to any other possible shooter, or more than one person being involved.

              Somewhere else saying that the video livestreamed was not remotely viral, and varies between 200 people seeing it, and 4000 views. That’s not viral, if true. Also something about multiple simultaneous uploads.

              And, apparently the FBI are down there in NZ. What are they doing there? Last I checked, America wasn’t even remotely involved.

              And why was 12 Rules for Life suddenly banned in NZ, when Mein Kampf still is available

              1. > And why was 12 Rules for Life suddenly banned in NZ, when Mein Kampf still is available
                —
                Because almost nobody actually *reads* Mein Kampf. Heinrich Himmler was the only ranking Nazi who claimed to have read it; all of the others, from Goering to the various gauleiters, are on public record admitting they never read it. Hess assembled the text from notes on various speeches and monologues; there are some well-founded claims that AH himself never read the book.

                There’s no pedant like a German pedant, and AH sure liked to hear himself talk…

                Heck, even I bailed out halfway. Let me put it this way: AH is to Ayn Rand, as Ayn Rand is to Terry Pratchett. NZ’s population is about 4.7 million. The book might be for sale there, but I bet I have enough fingers to count every Zed who has read that book all the way through.

              1. To me, the big tipoff is the fact that they made possession and distribution of the video a criminal offense. Paging Barbra Streisand!

                One of the anons noticed that the video’s sound is odd; places where you’d expect ambient noise have absolute quiet. Nope, nothing funny about that at all.

                  1. I’m not familiar with the Go Pro, so can’t say. One commenter claims the behavior is normal for loud noises after ambient, while others say the audio looks edited.

                    I gather there was a curious 30 second dropout when the perm was explaining his motives. (I’m limited on bandwidth, so never tried to download it myself. Take all conclusions with an appropriate amount of salt.)

                5. https://www.lyrn.ai/2018/12/26/a-style-based-generator-architecture-for-generative-adversarial-networks/

                  So far, apparently this has been mostly used to put other people’s faces or generated faces on porn, I’ve been told. Or to make that fake Obama speech video (which is still pretty visually fake, but the computer learned that he moves a lot and gestures a lot, his head bobs and positions… there’s some adjustment to the voice, but I’m sure that’s not far out of reach.)

                  Think of the possibilities. And be afraid.

                    2. speaking of nicknames, new ones I’ve heard:

                      Lipstick Lenin
                      Anorexia Occasional Cortex
                      She Guevara
                      Bolshevik Barbie

                      etc

                    3. between that and even die-hard conservatives saying his speeches were mesmerizing (also pointing out that 10 minutes after, you couldn’t say what he was talking about) I knew it was a play to emotion, not substance.
                      He gave me Carter-like feelings, set off all sorts of alarms, and paying attention to him off script or thinking it was like minds only scared the tripes out of me more.

                6. I’ve just linked the tech stuff that’s been unnerving me for a little while now, and a fake video (I know, ironic considering it’s Buzzfeed that gave the example, but this also means they have that available to them.)

                  It’s what made me wonder… why are they suddenly refusing to show the face of the guy supposedly making the OK sign in court? The supposed face of the shooter is on various news articles, taken from the supposed go-pro footage…

                  So yeah. My distrust of the news is very, very deep right now.

                7. I have seen to claims online that NZ is also banning the publication or dissemination of the killer’s manifesto.
                  Apologies for not having a link immediately at hand…

                  2. Several sources are reporting it. NZ is shutting down sources domestically of both the video and the manifesto, and blocking sites internationally.

            4. Vegas shooting is well explained by the report that one of his doctor’s had given him anxiety medication.

              That the official investigation did not talk about that angle much does not mean it isn’t the explanation.

              1. Ringo’s facebook story about how it snuck up on the wife was rather chilling. Funny how it is almost never ever blamed on a psychotic break due to side effects, unless it isn’t a psychotic use drug (The acne med suicides are one example)

                1. yes, because the way the psychiatric profession currently operates depends on us ignoring the demonstrated side effects of these medications… like, forinstance, how waaaaaayyyy too many boys are ADHD or ADD and need medication, and then have to keep taking it as adults because they never learned to handle themselves…

                  1. I once tried to take Prilosec.
                    in the first “build up week” I started having issues and got to a point I couldn’t do simple tasks (I was trying to stick a simple label onto a panel, just needs to be there. took 15 minutes to do it) and was wound like a clock spring. Side effect of the Prilosec. Every person I know over 25 who is on ADD meds is also on Prilosec, and suddenly needs an anxiety medicine as well.
                    chemical haze

                    1. because most of them don’t need them anymore and i will be many didn’t need them in the first place

                  2. I’ve known parents who once their kids are on the medication for ADHD, etc., the medication “isn’t working”, so they want the dose upped … because the PARENTS are stealing the kids meds. Not that the kids needed the medication in the first place.

                    Our son as a toddler would get overwhelmed at a lot of activities. We were insisted, starting with daycare/preschool, that he got to retreat, then rejoin when he could. We were told that “maybe” we should see about some medications. We had a concert return of “NO”. Pretty sure it was all sensory overload. (Once we even got a “Well! You don’t have to be huffy about it!” … Yes. Yes, we did, as a matter of fact.)

                    Kid eventually out grew the impulse. Learned to deal. Never will be a social butterfly, dad & I probably failed him in that regard, but then difficult to teach by example, when we aren’t by any definition social butterflies ourselves.

          4. It’s more that there too busy trying to blame the existence of gun, which emphasizing the religious angle would take away from. The left is using it to once again scream for banning guns.

              1. Well yes, which is precisely why the left/Democrats (but I repeat myself) want to ban guns.

  3. An acquaintance posted to Facebook this morning that her daughter’s friend had posted something about how she hated white people and when her daughter suggested that this wasn’t a good thing to say came back with boilerplate intersectionalist rhetoric about how there’s no such thing as racism against white people and the all white people are privileged and deserve it. Teenagers. Kids. So now this poor girl is sick to her stomach and feeling dirty and horrible because she’s white. But whatever, right? She can’t be HURT because she’s white.

    Make no mistake (and people who troll Sarah’s site for wrong-think, I’m looking at you) that not a one of you actually thinks that racism is bad. Not one. RACISM is not bad. Hating people is not bad. Unpersoning and Othering is not BAD. Those things cause NO harm… they can’t. They aren’t toxic. They don’t tear society apart. In fact, if you’re an Intersectionalist progressive “woke” person, you know very well that all of those things are moral mandates that you MUST do in order to be a good person.

    Harboring that hatred in your heart doesn’t cause you harm. Raising your children in an environment where it’s expected and required to hate some people because of their race doesn’t hurt your children. The objects of your mandatory hatred are SO superior to any others that nothing you can possibly do hurts them anyway. So really, you don’t even think that Supremacy is wrong because your whole ideology rests on the FACT of that supremacy.

    And I feel helpless because I don’t know how to explain to you that racism in any form hurts people because it’s racism. It rots your soul. It corrupts and harms your children. It ruins society. Because. It’s. Evil. But you don’t think it is.

    “If I could communicate just one thing, across the increasing divide of language and thought to the left it would be this: that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you’re running someone down is not righteousness.”

    I’m just going to crawl over broken glass and vote for Trump in 2020.

    1. Reversing the polarity of evil does not diminish the evil.

      (And if that switch they’re pushing so hard at should ever actually flip… ouch!)

      1. My basic issue with the alt-right, and why it’s so heartbreaking. They come *so damned close*. They know they’ve been lied to, but can’t break out of the paradigm in which the lie is emplaced.

        1. That’s why so many people misunderstand horseshoe theory: it’s not that both sides have the same political goals and ideology, it’s that both have the same beliefs about reality.

        2. So many people misunderstand horseshoe theory: it’s not that both sides have the same politics and ideology, it’s that both sides accept the same basic premises about reality.

          1. CS Lewis nicely explained this with Screwtape’s advice that it mattered not whether “the patient” was Patriot or Pacifist, so long as he stood at one or the other extreme.

        3. At least in the case of one prominent Alt-Right promoter, there are Kremlin fingerprints all over the message. (Partly in his continual promotion of Russia as the country that’s protecting Western Civilization [as if Russia ever managed more than a cargo-cult imitation of European ideas]; partly in the repetition elsewhere online of his characteristic talking points by many, many denizens of the St. Petersburg Troll Factory.) And from Putin’s perspective, the effort makes sense—he’d really like the US to favor Russia, or at least be too busy with internal chaos to interfere with Russia expanding her control over her neighbors.

          Ironic thing is, if (God forbid) this effort succeeds—racist Americans won’t see Russia as a fellow White country, but as ‹insert epithet here› Slavs.

      3. I sometimes think they are so virulently opposed to Christian Faith because of their recognition of the effectiveness of such writers as Lewis and Chesterton at exposing the fallacies of their positions.

        Then I shrug and acknowledge I’m giving them too much credit.

        2. Someone wrote an article whose argument was basically, “You don’t like the Christian right? Wait until you see the non-Christian right.”

          Neo-paganism with a Eurocentric bent is growing. It overlaps with the alt-right, but isn’t synonymous with it. What it will means is all the “nice people” rules of Christianity will be replaces with revived, as best can be, Germanic (mostly) practices from prior to the 1st century.

            1. *shrugs*

              Not what I want, but I learned long ago our culture doesn’t want my ideas or genes travelling into the next generation.

          2. Which…is really disturbing, because there was already a movement towards that in historical Naziism. Apparently certain factions within the Party had taken some Roman writings (Tacitus’ Germania) and used it as the basis for a lot of the national myth-making.

            Not that I ma reading a book on that at the moment or anything. (A Most Dangerous Book, if you want to know the title. Christopher Krebs)

            1. Hitler and his buddies did a lot of that, along with editing the crud out of even traditions that were too much of a threat.

              ….you know, that makes the “hijack everything for progressive politics” creepy, as well as annoying.

            2. Well, one of my best sources, an academic archeologist specialing in Iron Age Scandinavia (I think) and with a strong interest in Indo-European culture is big on it (YouTuber Survive the Jive).

              And I just saw today he was discussing it on Red Ice.

    2. One wonders what these people would talk about if they didn’t have white people. What else do they have in common to unite them?

        1. The Democrats have a history of going after new constituencies and throwing the old ones under the bus, even when they gained no advantage by doing it.

          Still, the sudden and public anti-Semitism in some of the Party members is surprising…

        2. And so much so that if the Democrats win in 2020, the Irans of the world are going to believe based on the Democrats defense of open Jew hatred by the likes of Omar that they are free to launch a full-fledged attack on Israel, knowing that the Democrats will cut off arms sales to Israel and any support (and if the Samantha Power crew gets their way, join in). Iran which almost certainly has nukes already (they are the ones paying for the Norks testing) would likely use them, forcing Israel to launch a full-fledged nuclear response, which very likely would trigger a full scale nuclear war, as Pakistan and India follow suit against each other and countries like Turkey try to seize nuclear weapons the US still foolishly has at bases there. The Democrats have told the rest of the world “death to the Jews” is okay, and the rest of the world has heard loud and clear.,

          2. There are few things I fear more than Israel deciding it is “if again, then not just us” and launching their nukes.

            Several Arab states will cease to have populations in the four digit range. The nuking of the dam at Aswan alone will kill anyone who survives the nukes that fall down river and wash enough radioactive sediment into the Med that the old “the solution to pollution is dilution” theory may not hold.

            Israeli pilots knowing they are on one way missions (ie, not enough fuel to get home, no home to go to, and dead wherever they land) will make it to Morocco and may take care of Islamabad for India.

            I doubt Pakistan has enough nukes to take out India though. You can throw a lot of nukes at 2 billion people (give or take) and not make a noticeable dent. The more third world regions of the country especially will do well as they don’t have much infrastructure they depend on that nukes will disrupt.

            1. Yup Samson and Masada are strong in the the memories of the Jewish people. Iran really does not want to push the button with 1-2 small weapons. Estimates for Israel I’ve seen run from 50-200 weapons including sophisticated fusion boosted weapons. If they have to respond I suspect they’ll lash out at everyone as if they don’t the Arab Nations would come out of the woodwork to attack them. MAD rides again…

    3. So am I – crawling over broken glass to vote for Trump in 2020.

      These so-woke Social Justice idiots are sleepwalking into Hell. And they have no idea, and wouldn’t take one if offered on a silver platter. Hateful bigots like Ilhan Omar and bone-ignorant morons like Alexandria the Occasional Cortex are — god help us all – progressive thought leaders.

      1. Yeah. I don’t see any better alternatives to President Donald Trump for the next election. The real question is whether he feels up to running for another 4 years of major abuse by the news media, idiot entertainment industry, and the domestic enemy socialists.

        1. Depends. He might, if he sincerely gets feedback from the people he talks to that he’s doing a good job.

          And there are no better alternatives; none of the ‘pubs are worth it right now. It’s pretty much ‘Trump, or you get a Democract, and a slide into socialism from there’ from where I sit and watch.

          1. Oh, after considering the reactions to Trump’s appointing Stephen Moore to the Fed, I think he’d do a second term just for the pleasure of pissing off his enemies. He does not seem a retiring type, does he now?

            1. Considering that I think the final push he got to run for President was that disastrous 2011 press corps dinner where he was pretty much made the butt of the jokes, I think he’s got a pretty good ego and loads of confidence regardless.

              And that’s what I think a lot of people don’t understand. Outside of the US, outside of Europe… the confidence of a perceived strong man matters a lot.

              Right now, I’d refuse to vote for any Republican that’s against the wall, and has actively hindered any progress that Trump’s been trying to do in fix things. I can’t vote in American elections though, so…

              I’d have voted for Trump in 2016 out of sheer lols. I’d vote for him in 2020 if I could’ve, to spite the Republicans and against the Dems. Full stop. No crawling over broken glass for me on that one. (Betcha’ll glad I can’t vote for American Presidents, hey?)

            2. “pleasure of pissing off his enemies”

              In some ways the legislature fears a second term incumbent President because they have nothing left to lose politically. There is no holding back for appearance sake for reelection. Legacy, yes, but usually the die is cast by then. Given the way the extreme Left Democrats are helping write President Trumps reelection campaign, continually shooting themselves in the foot and the head while dancing a jig, second term President Trump is not only going to keep the Senate, but win back the house, AND have a super majority in each. Can you imagine them squawking, in shock, yet? All President Trump cares about now is doing what he thinks is right, that he can do alone and influencing anything else through the legislation. He just does not care about their opinions.

      2. Nothing this side of the grave is likely to deter my voting Trump in 2020 … the other side of the grave I expect to be voting Democrat.

    4. I’m a bit curious. What did you reply to your friend to help her in this situation? I’m always looking for ideas and techniques.

    5. I’m always looking for ideas and techniques. What did you post to your friend to help out in this situation? Thanks!

      1. What did I respond? Not a danged thing.

        I can’t make it so her daughter doesn’t feel like sh*t. I can’t make her daughter’s “friend” learn how not to justify perpetuate racism as an actual virtue. I can’t hold back the destruction and toxicity that racism causes in our society. And going on a political tirade won’t make the daughter feel better either.

        The only thing I can come up with is, “Don’t let anyone who supports this win.”

        1. Thanks much, Synova. No, there nothing we can do to *make* your friend’s daughter nor to *make* the daughter’s “friend” realize her problem. I was wondering if you had any advice for your own friend on how to approach her daughter. Also, on second thought, if your friend posted anything on how she was handling this.

        2. I’ve spoken of English’s astonishing lack of words defining amicable social relationships before, but something the kid needs to learn is:

          “Just because you know someone, doesn’t make them your friend.”

    6. boilerplate intersectionalist rhetoric about how there’s no such thing as racism against white people

      That was standard teaching in 1974 in Navy EO seminars. There was enough pushback and obvious disbelief that it was removed from the curriculum.

    7. And having taught a large part of an entire generation that it is perfectly okay to hate other people because of what color they are or because they don’t fit in the “intersectional grid” as being oppressed people, and to deem such people as non-persons, the inevitable result will be concentration camps, gas chambers, ovens and mass graves. Look at how the same leftists who denounce everyone they disagree with as Nazis are see easily embracing old-fashioned Jew hatred using rhetoric right out of Mein Kampf and Goebbels propaganda films.

    8. “…So now this poor girl is sick to her stomach and feeling dirty and horrible because she’s white. But whatever, right? She can’t be HURT because she’s white.”

      This illustrates why, in spite of his literary brilliance, I regard Samuel R Delany with so much loathing: He has peddled that poison and there is no excuse for it.

    1. She never answered, “Alright, what species is Obama, anyway?”

      Now, I have NO issue with someone not being human, but if she’s gonna play that game, I’m gonna game that play.

    2. One wants 7th century morality, the other wants 7th century food supplies. A match made in heaven, I tell you.

    3. The problem with Omar is that she’s only ever been rewarded for saying those sorts of things and never been taught to temper her language in public.
      It’s like the opposite of wokeness. Just as with her antisemitism it will be excused because she had a bad childhood and is from Africa and is Muslim and normal standards of civilization are too much to ask of her.

      The people who made excuses for her over the antisemitism are simply supremacists. Her standards are lower.

      1. she’s only parroting what she was taught, for a lot of it she’s never be able to present any evidence because there is none.

  6. They are rabid dogs.
    The problem with the above is that it is selecting a group that may be destroyed blamelessly like what they think and do to us. The only difference that I can see is that it is not right to make a rabid dog suffer unnecessarily but they have no problem with causing non-progressives pain, in fact they glory in it.
    Is this enough difference to make regarding them as rabid dogs OK? Why or why not. This is something that I have been struggling with.

    Obligatory Kipling quote:

    Whether the State can loose and bind
    In Heaven as well as on Earth:
    If it be wiser to kill mankind
    Before or after the birth–
    These are matters of high concern
    Where State-kept schoolmen are;
    But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
    Endeth in Holy War.

    Whether The People be led by The Lord,
    Or lured by the loudest throat:
    If it be quicker to die by the sword
    Or cheaper to die by vote–
    These are things we have dealt with once,
    (And they will not rise from their grave)
    For Holy People, however it runs,
    Endeth in wholly Slave.

    Whatsoever, for any cause,
    Seeketh to take or give
    Power above or beyond the Laws,
    Suffer it not to live!
    Holy State or Holy King–
    Or Holy People’s Will–
    Have no truck with the senseless thing.
    Order the guns and kill!
    Saying –after–me:–

    Once there was The People–Terror gave it birth;
    Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth
    Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, 0 ye slain!
    Once there was The People–it shall never be again!

  7. The problem with that train is there is a bridge* out, and nobody is entirely sure where it is (or rather, where it is not) but the chasm it drops into is great.

    *Construction was expected to continue forever but they eventually ran out of other people’s money.

  8. I just don’t know if we can avoid going hot. Not if the left keeps on the path it’s been.

    The Left wants it to go hot; they are just working themselves up to it. They thought Occupy would do it and Antifa is the group that is ready, and has been since WTC in Seattle.

    The rest still need to finish depersonalizing their enemies to do it, but that is accelerating.

    I predict no matter what happens in November 2020 they are coming for us. If they win it won’t start full scale until January 2021, although I still expect post election riots to begin the process.

    If they lose in November 2020 I expect the guerrilla war to break out the next day.

    Either way I see the 70s Days of Rage as the best possible outcome for the 2020s.

    1. I’ve been expecting street violence since the summer of 2017.

      What worries me is that from a tactical perspective, whoever controls the government has a tremendous advantage once the shin-kicking starts. They can claim legitimacy. My fear is that the current Rabid Left will get power and start the slaughter.

      And the only way to stop that may be a preemptive strike.

      1. I had been expecting something happening immediately after Election Night 2016. I just hadn’t figured on a multi-year hissyfit as an option.

      2. We’ve had Antifa and Black Lives Matter, but they lost enthusiasm when they found that their paymasters were stingy and their targets were likely to fight back.

        1. BLM was quickly seen by the people they wanted for support or to sway to their side as a Leftoid against the Leftoid problem. All the “Racist” police departments were in Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, St. Louis etc. and perhaps someone realized “if we want these guys to help us with our planned crackdowns, we best stop ensuring they will never do our work”
          antifa only gets traction with bullies who want no resistance to their bullying, and worse, the targets not only tend to thump them back (and better at it) they also laugh at them

        2. because George Soros – oh, I’m sorry, ‘Media Matters’- suddenly found out that paying an army takes a lot more than what they were paying OWS.

  9. “And no matter how much the rest of us wish to hold off, at some point the switch flips, and we’ll go after them as hard as they’ve been going after us. Only we’re competent. And frankly a lot more vicious than they can even imagine.”

    As Larry Correia recently observed, when Americans get to fuckery, it is fuckery the likes of which the world has never before seen. I shudder to think about it.

    1. Since at least Sherman the American way of war has been as brutal as possible as quickly as possible so it is over.

      That is, in essence, the logic between everything from The March to the Sea to all the strategic bombing of Japan (remember, the deadliest air raid of the was was not either of the nuclear bombings, but Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo on March 10, 1945).

      1. The problem being that since 1945, we’ve been unwilling to fight that way. And I keep wondering how much trouble would have been averted had Kabul and Kandahar become radioactive craters on 12 Sep 2001.

        1. Mecca and Medina would be much more effective. There would be multiple unmistakable messages sent.

          1. We should have. We really should have. Just retarget missiles to M & M from Russia.

          2. Actually those are the two ones you want to avoid nuking, in the same way we excluded Kyoto from consideration; nuke their holy cities and they will never surrender.

              1. I always wonder about construction in a particular area of Mecca, but I’m paranoid (or extremely underhooved) that way as to things. And I will *NOT* say the rest in public.

              2. And to some degree their eschatology implies that those cities are immune to harm, protected by Allah. It is distinctly unclear to me what would happen if they were destroyed. Would the shock of that loss break Islam like the failure of the second coming to arrive on schedule has done to to Christian fanatics like the Millerites in the past? Or would it drive them into a mass Jihad? I think I’d distinctly prefer to not find out.

                1. Actually, the Raqqa strand of Muslim apocalyptic theory says that Mecca gets destroyed as a sign of the coming end. (That would be the Iranian zillionth imam strain.)

        3. The thing about it is that, technically speaking, all of our hot wars after 1945 have been wars of choice, and we know that, subconsciously.

          If we ever think our backs are to the wall, the Enola Gay is getting cranked up, the necromantic rituals are being performed around Sherman and Sheridan’s graves, and Andy Jackson is showing up for the party without being asked.

          Cornering the US of A is a bad idea.

          1. The stuff *I* know about scares me, and I can only assume most of what I know is at least 40 years out of date. Gulf Wars were what the USA can do *with the limiters still engaged* and is just a wee bit miffed. Angry is… well there’s a Very Different World on the other side of that. Good or bad, getting there will be “A whole lot of NO fun.”

      2. I’m quite serious in being a Lincolnist-Shermanist.

        Originally merely because I was raised to favor the Union, and am a natural bloody minded fanatic. Now because I have come to see it as the only philosophically valid position, with a strong moral imperative.

        Y’all can surrender at any point you are willing follow through on it. Until then, all of your cities are not worth the bones of one British grenadier to me, and I’m not saying that as someone who puts a particularly high value on British lives.

        If spending infantry will create a lasting peace short of the point of convincing my fellows to support me, I am willing to do so. If not, I’m going to seek to destroy as many of your lives as cheaply as possible, and cause you as much suffering as does not interfere with killing you expediently. Your choice.

        Many of my brothers and sisters here have not elected to predict everything they might do in the extremes of rage, then cultivate the ability to do it in cold blood, so that the decision to implement may be made calmly and deliberately. That may be the sane choice.

        1. Many of my brothers and sisters here have not elected to predict everything they might do in the extremes of rage, then cultivate the ability to do it in cold blood, so that the decision to implement may be made calmly and deliberately. That may be the sane choice.

          I do not like some of the things I routinely rehearse doing in my mind.

          However, the ones I like the least are ones I rehearse more and more because I suspect it’ll be necessary and I don’t want to fail.

          Speaking of, I need more range time.

            1. My wife and I each bought a 9mm a few weeks ago, after I realized I can buy new 9mm for less than I can reload my favored calibers for…

        2. I’m pretty sure the reason Sherman had his mental breakdown at the beginning of the Civil War is that he, almost alone at the time, knew what would be required, especially of him, and it broke him. For a time. Then he pulled himself together and did it.

          1. Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome?

            (I’m reading posts chronologically backward today)

      3. The allied bombing of Dresden also killed more people and did more damage than the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.

        1. Cite please?

          The highest figure I’ve seen for the firestorm in Dresden is 25,000 which is about 2/3rds of the lowest estimate I have seen for Nagasaki, which was the lesser of the two atomic bombings.

          1. I’ve never bothered to dig into this, but I have read claims that the Soviets “enhanced” the Dresden deaths and minimized Dresden’s value as a military target for anti-American propaganda.

            1. The Polish has a bunch of their main Polish Arabian stallions traipsing through the streets of downtown Dresden, and most of them survived okay. So yeah, really bad, but the firestorm had its limits.

    2. I think only Israel, founded by survivors of the camps, can beat us for steel there.

      1. And I don’t even mind, since they are the Jews, best assurance you will fail at wiping them out EVER, and a lot are Americans, too.

        Becomes a “make sure they don’t need to use the Samson option” at that point.

  10. I’m middle aged. My kids are almost on their own. Running around the hills with Kalashnikov has lost all appeal.

    First, AR-15s replaced with M16A3s and M4s are they are recoverd/brought over by allies. Always be able to use your opponent’s supply chain as a guerrilla. Vietnam shipped large amounts of ARVN small arms to rebels in Central America for just this reason in the 80s.

    Second, while it has not appeal if we didn’t when we needed to, The Lieutenant wouldn’t like it.

    Neither would The Captain.

  11. I have thought for years that the worst thing to happen for Leftists is for conservatives to accept the validity of the Left’s tactics. They will be shocked that we do not care what they think when we start acting like them. I don’t like it, but I think a lot of individual Leftists have to be hurt, physically and financially, before they stop living in fantasy land.

    1. should we go HOT, the leftist leadership does care. we kill off a bunch of useful fools and they will use that to seize power.
      what the don’t / can’t see is that the leadership is a target, congressmen are targets. they made that allowable when GOP congressman were shot at on a baseball field.

      1. Leadership is a priority target. This is always true when your enemy is highly leadership bound and we’re talking about people where the followers need cheat sheets for “Hey, hey, ho, ho” chants (no really, seen a video where the chant leader got lost reading the sheet for the chant and the crowd stopped while she caught up).

        1. I know that, you know that, and I am willing to bet almost all (if not all) of the readers here know that.
          I do not think that the leadership of the DEMs know that, especial the members of congress.
          boy will they be surprised.

        2. Leadership is a priority target — but who is the Left’s leadership? I do not for one moment believe that Schumer, Pelosi, Sanders, Obama or even the Clintons are (or were) anything other than fronts for the actual Command and Control of the Left’s party.

            1. I will enjoy seeing the day Georgi can’t find a safe place to bolt to.
              Can’t go home to Hungary.
              can’t go to Georgia.
              Best stay far from Ukraine.

          2. I once observed that the best evidence of the nonexistence of a secret cabal running the world was that if they existed, they were doing a piss poor job of it.

            My interlocutor replied, “You’re assuming their goals are peace and prosperity.”

            Got me, there…

            1. There is a ruler of the world,
              And Loki is his name-oh!
              L-o-k-i-oh!
              L-o-k-i-oh!
              L-o-k-i-oh!
              And Loki is his name-oh!

        3. “How are we suddenly fighting on so many fronts?!”

          “When we killed communications to prevent a ‘GO’ signal, we f—ed up bigtime.”

          “How so?”

          “Our cutting off comms WAS the ‘GO’ code.”

    2. I think this is in part behind a lot of the Never Trumpers attitude; they prefer to appear nice and polite and would rather lose by following Marquis de Queensbury rules than fight back. Trump fights back, and they hate that. They fail to realize that they will be buried in the mass graves right next to the Trump supporters if the left gets their way.

      1. Most of the Never Trumpers are just the loyal opposition and in the game for the money and perks. They never expected enough people to get tired of the game and the role they play.

        1. “What?! You people take this crap seriously?”

          There is undoubtedly a certain security in playing Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Globetrotters.

          I would make a Pro-Rassling analogy but I lack sufficient familiarity with that particular beverage.

      2. Actually, the Never Trumpers will go first. Leftists have as much contempt for Bill Kristol types as most conservatives do.

        They are useful, but that does not mean they are respected.

  12. (expressing a contrary opinion is not causing you harm)
    Oh contrair my fine young Portagee.
    When your side of an argument is based on feelz and fairy tales while the opposition is so crass and cruel as to use actual fact, well then your only option is of course to demonize them, shout them down, utterly silence their voices. Because your belief is your religion, and any argument counter to it is heresy and an affront to all that is right and Holy.

    1. So, what are they pushing so hard for? What are they hearing that the common person does not? What are they aware of, that they feel they can get away with this, without being disbarred, never mind dragged from the courthouse and tarred and feathered?

      2. What is the reaction of the cornered man? I think we’re seeing the ‘do as much damage as they can before they’re kicked out’ stage of the left going down. The question is ‘how much damage are they actually going to do’. My guess is better than the worst possible, but more than we want to deal with.

  14. “The young ones were never taught to never think”

    FIFY

    “You see, they took were given the wrong lessons from the 20th century.”

    Fixed that, too. You may need to hire an editor if such errors keep recurring.

  15. “So instead they took the one form that the National socialists of Germany had given to their murderous craziness and made that what was bad.”

    I fairness, they had already reached that conclusion by the end of The War To End All Wars WWI.

    They still were not right, but they were at least consistently wrong.

  16. I’m troubled by the similarities to 1920s Germany.

    When you dig into it, German politics of that era had three factions. The Conservatives wanted order, restoration of the monarchy, repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles, and a strong military. The Social Democrats wanted a welfare state. And the Communists wanted Red Revolution – blood red.

    Everybody feared the Communists. The Conservatives had the will to deal with the problem, but not the political strength. The Social Democrats had the strength, but not the will.

    Then toss in political dysfunction and the Great Depression…and you have an opportunity for a party that offers the Conservatives and Social Democrats each about two-thirds of what they want, by leveraging the fact that those groups are NOT diametrically opposed.

    And if that party is selling Fascist autocracy as the solution to political dysfunction, you get Hitler. Who made everybody happy except the Communists and the Jews – who he made dead.

    I’m seeing a similar situation in the USA. The Rabid Left is starting to worry a lot of people…including the Old Democrats.

    1. “hen toss in political dysfunction and the Great Depression…and you have an opportunity for a party that offers the Conservatives and Social Democrats each about two-thirds of what they want, by leveraging the fact that those groups are NOT diametrically opposed.”

      Not just those groups—ALSO the Communists. A considerable number of people switched from the Communist side to the Nazi side. Both kinds of totalitarian were revolutionary, both were anti-bourgeoisie, both offered the opportunity to beat up people in the streets and feel good about it.

      Both Nazis and Communists were also very anti-“Wall Street”, to transpose modern American terminology into 1920s and 1930s Germany. See this 1932 piece by Joseph Goebbels, in which he concisely explains the basic principles of Naziism.

      https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm

    2. I’ve been wondering if the time has come for my kind of crazy to have a place in national politics.

      Then looked at the personal costs, and tried instead to focus myself on putting my own life in order.

      Please do not be so in love with your own sense of invincibility that you must take away my ability to work and raise a family. I’m very far from being the most dangerous person in America. I might be by far the most harmless of the people you could alienate with raging overconfidence.

    3. add in also economics, at least I was thought that, during the 20’s that inflation was so bad that it took a wheel barrel full of money th buy a loaf of bread.

      1. Early ’20s. By the late ’20s, the Weimar government had things under control. But the Great Depression was a world-wide event, and threw the German economy back into the ditch.

      2. Some reporter tweeted a picture of how much cash it took to buy a $4.50 breakfast in Venezuela. Not _quite_ a wheel barrel. It’s on Twitchy if you want to find it.

  17. Very good post.

    “If you’re part of a band and all of you were piling on an outsider — or an insider who was just declared an outsider and run off — you’ll also feel very connected to your band, and a feeling of being loved and belonging.”

    Yes. Oxytocin surges are not *always* a good thing.

    I remember in a documentary about WWII, an anti-Nazi German reflected on his emotions during the early stages of the Nazi movement and the regime. He said he had felt a real pull toward joining the mass meetings. He knew it was evil, but still couldn’t help feeling bad by not being there, that he was missing out on something important.

    This isn’t some weird German-only genetic thing.

    1. Oh come on. It could never happen here. We’re so much better and smarter than the Russians, Germans, cubans, cambodians, Japanese, Chinese, and Venezuelans.

        1. Yes. I always despised “pep assembly” ditched them whenever possible. Or took a book to read. Present physically; mentally, not so much.

          1. I hated them too. Because for one I didn’t care and for two I hate crowds and find them exhausting.

            1. Aye. And any residual respect I had for one football coach (whose name was suspiciously like German Measles) was erased when he made a point of railing against those (he was at least smart enough not to say ‘that one’) who did not rise for the National Anthem or Pledge. I rose for those – but only for those. The alleged school allegiance stuff? Feh, the book on particle accelerators was a better use of my time. I suspect he knew it, too. The exits were guarded (they knew…) but eventually I simply did a sit-in. Last class of the day, time for assembly, just stayed there, reading. The wrestling coach was smarter than the football coach and let me be. Still not sure if it was good or bad that I did NOT take advantage of an insecure PA system to have Spike Jones’ Der Fuehrer’s Face during the all-too-reminiscent ‘salute’.

              1. **I’m sitting thoroughly bored at a homecoming rally during school hours, but hey, I wasn’t in English, so . . .**
                “Don’t you want to show support for our team?”
                I hate most of the guys on the team and especially the coach, why would I support them?

                  1. “Who Cares?” won a vote for class motto by 2 or 3 votes, but the supervising teacher and the whiny pets nixed it. Really cannot recall what they went with.

                    1. The German teacher / wrestling coach was a *bit* miffed that my response to a sports-related extra credit question was “Irrelevant.” It is amusing to see how much… “false importance”… there is. Most of it deserves “Who Cares?” as it’s about as important as “Who shot J.R.?”

                2. “I don’t want to be here, and what makes that group of bullies and thugs ‘my team’?”

                  see also: mandatory candy sales to support ‘the team’…

                  Later I read an article about the Komsomol, where Soviet schools forced children to cheer at Party rallies and work to support Party activities. Frankly, it looked like the same setup to me.

                  “We keep yelling ‘Go, Team!’, but they keep coming back…”

                  2. The one attempt at “team sports” I tried, I had the “joy” of getting that crappy football coach as a stand-in, when the usual track coach tore an Achilles during a Teachers v Varsity Basketball homecoming pep game.
                    Other than using my status as a reserve to skip class when meets were happening, I stopped bothering.
                    So when Go Team time came, I let them go and I stayed.

                    1. I like to bake now and again.

                      “Why don’t you make any brownies for your team?”

                      “I’m all out of strychnine.”

                      Yes, I was asked that, and yes I *did* answer thus.
                      The question STOPPED.

            2. “for one I didn’t care and for two I hate crowds and find them exhausting.”

              Well, yes. Aren’t those both implied?

          2. I knew there was a reason I liked this place…was part of a group of Odds who hid out in the choir room or sympathetic English teacher’s room, depending on the year.
            Never could understand (well, I did, really, and despised the reasons) why we had pep rallies for ball games but not for band or choir contest.

        2. Apparently, my school was good on this– our “pep rallies” were just an excuse for the folks who liked doing skits, whatever got attention, and ended with academic awards. They even had the library open for those who didn’t want loud and bright.

  18. Sadly, the people who really need to hear this can’t. They’re too busy listening to the hoots of their troop.

  19. Heard a good point on the radio this morning– the guys listening to this have basically been pushed into having Views but not doing anything.
    Doing stuff rather than talking is not really a Thing. (We notice the ones who do because they have made themselves a threat.)

  20. Somebody stabbed the priest in the middle of Mass at the biggest Catholic church in Canada this morning. We still don’t have a name, even though there’s a picture.

    If he was a white nationalist from Alberta, we’d have a name already.

    Now, I say that not to talk shit about a visible minority group in Canada. I’ve decided I don’t care about that anymore since the New Zealand attack. While it is fun to hoot and throw shit at the chosen enemy with the rest of my monkey troupe as Sarah says, the larger issue is being ignored.

    That issue is the governments of Western nations are acting really weird.

    Their priorities are visible in the media, because they pretty much own the media. (In Canada, the new 2019 Liberal budget has a section in which the government essentially -buys- all the media. Not kidding. They’re not content with the CBC, they’re buying the whole thing.)

    Their policy is to cover over any terrorist act EXCEPT those done by anyone who can be portrayed as a Right Winger. This is the case in Canada, the UK, the USA, New Zealand, Australia, and Germany. Most of Europe, really.

    We all know that. It’s all we talk about half the time. No point belaboring it.

    Next question then: -WHY?- For what purpose are the parties of the Left and the Right cooperating to browbeat their own citizenry? Not to win elections certainly, because we have Trump and Brexit. Nobody likes the propaganda, all the media companies are in free-fall.

    These are not stupid people, alright? The prime minister of New Zealand does not believe gun control is going to make New Zealand safer, not when all she has to do is look north and see the Chinese navy.

    And I don’t believe the “culture war” bullshit either. All you need to do is look at Martina Navratilova, the super special lesbian pet of the international media. She’s the Queen of that, and they’re trashing her like Trump all over the television. She’s now a TERF and hated loudly in all the Cool Kid places.

    There’s capital “M” Money involved here. Money does not move on culture, so something’s going on. Who benefits from keeping the people of the West down?

    1. Their policy is to cover over any terrorist act EXCEPT those done by anyone who can be portrayed as a Right Winger. This is the case in Canada, the UK, the USA, New Zealand, Australia, and Germany. Most of Europe, really.

      I think you dropped a negative somewhere.

            1. not all that local. Took me a moment to figure out what they missed.
              Then again, I’ve lived under Louisiana/New Orleans politics, so, probably why it was clear to me.

    2. Yes, indeed – I’d like to know the answer to that. At least if it were a matter of economics, it would be a better excuse tor turning over the lower-class girls to rape gangs, and undercutting the accomplishments of white Europeans in coming up with nifty ideas like representative democracy, air conditioning, steam power and the internet.

      1. In part, I’d say it’s arrogance. The anointed elite believe that when push comes to shove, they’ll be able to control ‘the dirty browns’ that they’ve unleashed on the populace with the intent of culling possible opposition. They probably reckon they can do it with a new version of The Terrors, because what are the military after all, but biddable flesh killerbots? The Germans have been cracking down hard on the ability of the normal Germans to talk to each other – and believe me that is not working when these are the children of what used to be Socialist East Germany; their parents are still around, and remember what it was like. So they do it the way they used to back then… kaffeeklatch, with the important talk buried under normal conversation. Behave as if their apartments are bugged. Be aware that they can be disappeared at any time. Quiet, private meetings, small groups at a time, as if they’re no different from a bunch of mates having a dinner party or a drink of beer.

        Word got around despite their best efforts at preventing the normal everyday people from talking on social media.

        2. > Behave as if their apartments are bugged.

          If anyone in the apartment has a smartphone, or if there’s an Apple or Windows computer with a camera and microphone (most modern laptops, for example), it’s *already* bugged.

          Even Orwell didn’t figure people would voluntarily, if not enthusiastically, pay for their own surveillance…

          1. ehh, not quite true. what is true is that Alexa and the Google equivalent both listen to and store everything that is said all the time, unless you ‘specifically tell them not to’

            1. Depends on your security perspective.

              The hardware is already there. The open questions are whether it is powered, and what is happening on the software side. Hidden batteries and covert operation while ‘off’ are partly hardware design issues beyond the ability of ordinary users to assess. Software is also tricky.

              I’ve long tried to assume that all my telephone calls were monitored, and that any nearby phones could be used to listen in on anything said near by.

    3. Not money. Power. The current ruling elite of the West is a small transnational clique. The products of Ivy League schools or their foreign equivalents. (Trump is the first President in 28 years to NOT be a product of Harvard or Yale) And they have far more affinity for each other than for the people they govern.

      Remember, these people are NOT the best and the brightest. They are the well-bred and well-connected. Without inherited wealth and power, they really aren’t that impressive.

    4. It is worth noting that Martina Navratilova’s tennis coach was Renee RIchards (Look xer up), thus it requires major mental contortions to find Martina transphobic.

    5. I think the elite are out to eliminate the one example of freedom barely left in the world: The United States as envisioned by the its founders. And the Bill of Rights in particular. And any one that defends those.

  21. They have been reduced, in less than three generations to savages who cannot reason their way out of a philosophical paperback, even if it happens to be soaking wet, and instead identify good with “pleases the tribe.”

    Personally, I find philosophical paperbacks dense and hard to fight my way out of, even if wet – that’s why I always carry a machete.

    1. I find philosophical paperbacks are easily dealt with via low order explosives.

  23. “Why do people like you always think you’re more ruthless than people like me?” — Commodor Aivars Terekhov in “Shadow of Victory”

  24. One of the arguments against “taking to the streets” is that it allows “outside agitators” and agents provocateur to infiltrate your movement and act in ways intended to discredit the movement (e.g., spitting on Congressmen and shouting racial epithets).

    The Yellow Jackets Revolt and The Future of America
    By Sarah Hoyt
    The media has been so quiet on the Yellow Jackets in France that you could be excused for thinking my title refers to some kind of invasion by weird wasps.

    Well, for the record, it doesn’t. It refers to the ongoing revolt in France by various groups but mostly, honestly, middle aged, middle class people who have just had middle-class enough and are now setting fires to things and making life hell in the ritzy districts of Paris (and elsewhere.)

    You probably thought that was all over and done with, and you’d be excused for thinking it, because our media has worked so hard not to report it.

    The thing is, it’s very much still alive and it’s giving Marcon problems: Macron cuts short ski trip to attend emergency meeting of French ministers as Yellow Vest violence explodes in Paris and ‘stretched’ police arrest 25 rioters after cars are torched and shops are trashed.

    To give you an idea of how serious Marcon interrupting his ski trip is, imagine that John Jean Kerry was president, and imagine how hard it would be to make him give up his vacation for anything government-related. French and French-acting would be elites take their leisure very seriously, enfim.

    There are two very curious things about all of this and we’re going to go into both of them:

    1. Why our media is not reporting on this.

    2. Who the core group of the Yellow Jackets is and therefore what this means. …

      1. “No matter what’s on this sign, you’ll say it’s racist.” — Tea Party

          1. That whole mess….. Do you want vigilantism? Because this is how you get vigilantism.

  25. Oho, the Totalitarian Train is rolling down the tracks
    Oh, please let it be for me
    Oho, the Totalitarian Train is rolling down the tracks
    I wish, I wish I knew what it could be

    I got a lot of empty promises on my birthday
    In March I got a gray economy
    And once I got a rent controlled apartment
    Tom Steyer sent me a bathtub and an impeachment

    Oh, the Totalitarian Train is a-comin’ now
    Is it a prepaid surprise or C.O.D.?

    It could be curtains or taxes
    Or afford’ble healthcare or it could be

    Yes, it could be, yes, you’re right, it surely could be
    Somethin’ special
    Somethin’ very, very special now
    Just for me

    [To the tune of “Wells Fargo Wagon” from The Music Man]

  26. Between 1919 and 1945 or so, the academic subculture (emphasis on sub-) was so heavily infected with Communism and general Marxism that I consider it all but unsalvageable.

    1. all but. Me too. We need to build ourselves another culture. But don’t discount the people who are pretending so they can have a career. I’ve been there, (with writing. Until it was come out of the political closet or say things I could never forgive myself.) and so are many of my friends who are college professors.

      1. I think hope remains. There are bastions of thought — Hillsdale, Patrick Henry, a few others. Stanley Kurtz offered an illuminating endorsement of the benefits of Trump’s Executive Order defending freedom of campus speech. The key thing is to re-arrange the incentives, bringing them into line with students’ and society’s needs — a recent suggestion that colleges be made to finance their own students’ loans offered some possibility there.

        1. Kurtz:
          … President Trump’s executive order will soon generate concrete examples of unconstitutional policies that don’t make the federal cut. That will anger campus radicals, and potentially split Democrats on the issue.

          Trump’s order is also likely to supercharge the already robust campus-reform debate at the state level. Campus-free-speech bills have been passed or introduced in a great many states in recent years. Some are stronger than others. Over time, Trump’s order may kick off another round of legislative strengthening.

          The possibility of a second wave of state legislative reform on closely related campus issues is also real. I’ve proposed a model state-level bill to bring greater intellectual diversity to public university campuses, while still respecting academic freedom. And there are plenty of other ways in which the public might play a role in campus reform. Public university systems are governed by trustees appointed by governors and legislators, and funded by the public’s representatives as well. Trustees in particular may be energized by the public’s newfound concern with campus reform. Successful change modeled at state universities could then spread to private institutions. President Trump’s order might kick of a virtuous circle in which public and private universities begin to reform themselves, if only to stave off further legislative initiatives and funding cutoffs.

          It’s way too early to see its full effects, but Trump’s executive order has altered the campus-free-speech playing field, set off a new dynamic in which the public will play a major part, and given an impetus to reform efforts both inside and the outside of the academy. I call that a big win.

        2. Universities Should Invest in Their Students, Not Securities
          Nearly all American institutions of higher education raise money they put into endowments—money that is kept invested in securities. At the same time, many of their students borrow money from the federal government so they can afford to attend.

          As I will explain, this system is fraught with problems. It would be far better if colleges and universities would raise money to lend to students who need it to attend. I see several reasons why they should do so.

          First and foremost, lending to students gives schools “skin in the game.”

          Warren Buffett’s billions stand testament to the wisdom of ensuring that people and institutions stand to lose if they don’t deliver as promised. Alas, misaligned incentives plague higher education because major players have little skin in the game.

          Most professors and administrators are good people, but that means little at schools that need student tuition payments in order to survive. The existential imperative at many American universities is to get—and this is a direct quotation I have heard more than once in my quarter century in higher ed—“asses in classes.” What happens to students once they leave is of little concern. Whether they pay back their federal loans or not doesn’t matter because the school has gotten its money. If the student flounders, that doesn’t hurt the school.

          Universities know more about their students than banks or federal bureaucrats ever could. They are therefore in the best position to make loan decisions. In the securities market, by contrast, universities hold no advantages. As this CNBC story points out, university endowments “badly underperform market benchmarks” and most institutions would have earned significantly higher returns just by putting their money into treasury bonds.

          Universities purport to educate business, political, and social leaders but rarely lead reform movements themselves. Instead of preaching from their Ivory Towers, universities could show other lagging sectors (such as health care and government) that meaningful improvements can be had by changing root incentive structures so that good decisions are rewarded and bad ones are punished.

          Lending to customers is well established in business. Many manufacturers of big-ticket goods designed to improve the purchasers’ lives, like General Motors and General Electric, directly or indirectly lend the purchase price of their products to their customers. Many of them could obtain financing elsewhere, but the loan binds the interests of the manufacturers and their customers because if the products aren’t worth the price, purchasers are more likely to default on the loans. Extending a loan, therefore, serves as a sort of quality guaranty.

          The same holds for universities, at least one of which, Hillsdale College, indirectly lends to its own students through private loan funds. In this Martin Center article, the college’s president, Larry Arnn, explained that the school borrows from private lending institutions to extend loans to students who need financial assistance. Hillsdale, Arnn wrote, “acts as guarantor of each loan and pays the interest due for student borrowers while they are enrolled.”

          It should come as no surprise that Hillsdale’s default rate on its loans to students (a mere 1.7 percent at the time of that writing) is far below the default rate on federal loans, currently over 11 percent.

          [SNIP]

          Superior programs that meet real-world needs fill the seats with good students, but creating such programs is difficult and expensive. So, many colleges and universities opted instead for the illusion of quality combined with shrewd marketing. They filled seats by telling parents that their kids will be safe and get a job after graduation, while convincing prospective students that fun awaits them on campus. …

  27. I don’t drink because I made a religious promise but this post makes me want to drink.

  28. Pingback: Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Important Reading

  30. Reblogged this on troutinmilkdotcom and commented:
    I recently discovered this terrific blog by Sarah Hoyt. Brilliant, in my opinion, and I have a feeling I will be reposting her work again. Worthy read for those still able to think.

  31. Granny Weatherwax got it right:

    “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
    “It’s a lot more complicated than that–”
    “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
    “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–”
    “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

    https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

  32. Pingback: Rafi Eitan was the Spy who caught Adolph Eichmann, and Weekend Links! - Victory Girls Blog
  33. Pingback: WHY Is the Mueller Investigation Coming to an End NOW?

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