*Reposted with author’s permission from a Facebook note, here. Because it needs wider dissemination. The note was written December 2019. As a side note, from my misspent youth, even though I still like to think I was fighting on the side of angels, let me say that what he says about violence being addictive is 100% right. So is danger. For years after moving to the US I MISSED it. I mean, I didn’t miss it, but my body craved the adrenaline rush. Took a while to dry out.- SAH*
The Danger of War Elephants (a.k.a. whipping up mobs)- by Marc MacYoung
On ancient battlefields elephants could wreak major havoc. The tricky part of that idea is the question, “To which side?” See, war elephants could just a easily go berserk and start crushing your own side as the enemy. That’s why the Carthaginian ‘drivers’ were equipped to kill the elephant if it flipped out and started killing the wrong team. With one as-hard-as-possible downward strike in the right spot and Dumbo was done. However, if the driver was killed, fell off or dropped his prod all hell broke loose for everyone.
A very strong analogy can be made comparing mobs to war elephants. While there are many comparisons, where the analogy really works is a berserk elephant and the driver (Indian term, mahouts) having lost the prod. The mob, like an enraged elephant, doesn’t care who it crushes.
It is common for conspiracy types to talk about shadow forces manipulating and whipping up the mob. There is an equally strong tendency among the middle-class, self-certified intellectuals to poo-poo the idea that such dark organization exists. Into this mix we also have the media and politicians, who are doing everything in their power to downplay that it is, in fact, a mob. (Read, “Yes there was a disturbance downtown. But it wasn’t a berserk elephant rampaging the streets.”) Both the conspiracy types and the pseudo intellectuals use this media-downplay as proof of their position. Which initially doesn’t seem to make sense, but if you turn your head and squint, you can see how that works.
Here’s the problem, even if the conspiracy theorist are right about shadowy, goading mahouts or, the faux-intellectuals are correct, and there are none—that’s still a rampaging elephant coming down the street at you. In other words, no matter why it’s there, you still have to deal with the mob.
Yep, that’s a pissed off, self-righteous, very dangerous mob of people deep in a part of their brains that most Westerners don’t understand —and more importantly, apparently don’t want to. It’s much easier to pretend ‘people don’t do that,’ even if it means dismissing evidence we see with our own eyes.
Thing is, even in the deepest and darkest depths of this phenomenon, we never quite lose our individuality. (That’s why we can deny the idea and that we’re susceptible to it happening to us.) What we do however, is accept certain ‘group’ beliefs as unquestionably true and reject any information that would challenge, disprove, counter or limit the idea. It’s easy to demonize anyone who doesn’t think like us and it’s even easier to declare them our enemy. Rome delenda est. (Brownie points if you see what I did there.) In short, when this switch is thrown, we become zealots for these ideas. Fanatics who, even if we don’t physically act out ourselves, we approve of the behaviors of those who do. In a mob scenario, that means not everyone will be smashing windows, throwing bricks, and busting heads of those-whom-the- mob-has targeted. In fact, most won’t, but they’ll cheer on and encourage those who do. (Look up the tricoteuse—women knitting during the guillotinings of the French Revolution/Terror.) It is this support that spurs on the violence. Violence that we know is wrong, but because it’s for the ‘Cause,’ that makes it all right in our minds.
And yes, anytime you have a mob of adrenalized, ideologically excited people, you’re a thin hair away from violence erupting. Like a fume-filled room with gasoline on the floor, all it takes is a small spark. Or, in this case, finding a target. That target doesn’t have to be legitimate. When people are in this mindset, the slightest accusation or interpretation will be enough to green light the attack. For example one person screaming “Fascist” at a particular individual will be enough to trigger a mob attack. Another example, is while rampaging down the street smashing a Starbuck’s front window because the person with the club decides that store represents “Corporate and capitalistic oppression.” While it seems like a whim decision, the ground work for that decision to ‘just happen’ has been laid a long time back.
Before we get to the mahouts let’s take a look at the rampaging elephant (a.k.a., the mob)
In truth, it’s more like a pack of dogs that got out of the yard. They can do a lot of damage yes, but only until someone shoots them. Opening fire is the historic and effective counter to mobs. (That, by the way, is the difference between a city response and a country response. City authorities will quietly destroy dogs behind closed doors after they’ve captured them. Rural response is to shoot any dogs that threaten livestock on the spot.) But shooting into angry mobs is frowned upon in civilized society. The combination of perceived power and delayed response (or outright lack of response) encourages the mob mentality in cities.
I’m going to use a specific example, but it is far from the only one. What I am talking about is a very human behavior, no matter who is doing it. Something many people in the West don’t know about (but especially those who have been told by academics how wonderful Communism is) are the decades of intense internal purges against those who were not ideologically pure enough or who had fallen from the ‘true path.’ A useful and commonly understood term from Maoist China is “struggle sessions.” These were crazed —and sanctioned —attacks on fellow communists that the mob deemed had fallen from Mao’s narrow interpretation of communism. And for the record, this whole situation met the standards of behind the scenes forces, namely Mao destroying anyone who might pose a challenge to his power and control. The thing is, like a berserk elephant, the mobs rampaged through the streets and halls of power taking down anyone they turned their attention to. Oh yeah, one more thing. a lot of the rampaging mobs were young, idealistic and whipped up by local ‘mahouts.’
But, after a certain point, it was mob mentality that was driving the attacks and purges, not the ideology. It became about the rush and addiction to hurting people. Who did it hurt most? Other communists and countrymen. That’s the rampaging elephant crushing the side it’s ‘supposed to be on.’ Because hey, when you’re feeding your addiction to this power, it doesn’t matter who gets crushed, it’s all about the crushing. What originally appeared mercurial, starts making sense in the context of feeding an addiction.
Now let’s look at the conspiracy nut’s position that there are shadowy, behind-the-scenes, conspirators pushing the mob forward for their own purpose. Thing is, it’s very doubtful that there is a single, Mao-like overlord or group driving this behavior in the US and Europe. In other words there is no uber-mahout with countless mini-mahouts doing ‘his’ bidding, driving elephants for ultimate and unified goals.
Having said that, that doesn’t mean there aren’t behind the scenes –or often pretty open about it—people/groups out there organizing mobs and whipping people up to target others for an agenda. These groups are often at cross purposes, but just as often closely aligned and using the same mobs. These groups have weaponized mobs and use the threat of and actual mob- violence for their own agendas. The outright denial of this reality is just as nuts as the idea of an ultimate-mahout pulling the strings.
The problem with using mobs as your war elephants is how easy it is to lose the elephant killing spike when the elephant goes berserk and turns on your side (or you even). Now you have a rampaging elephant and no way to stop it. That’s the danger of weaponizing a mob. They start picking the targets, not you. Sure you can do it. A mob can cause a lot of damage to your enemies and it’s really easy to recruit more to replace burnouts, jailed, and the fallen. This especially in light of how many mass movements recruit young, idealistic and the diagnosed mentally ill for their cause. These people act as goons and torpedoes for the person/group at very little direct cost –or negative consequence—to said person/group. Usually it’s not these shadow players who get their heads that get split or thrown in prison, but the ‘addicted’ mob members. Remember, like meth, it’s real easy to get addicted. And addiction that ‘works’ until the addict crashes and burns. That’s how it usually works, until it doesn’t. This is when the mob turns on its handlers. As happened in Evergreen University, where packs of armed students roamed the campus looking for a professor. The war elephant they’d spent so much time developing, turned on administration and faculty
There’s also another historical point that needs to be brought up. But before we go there, ask yourself this. “Which side is the elephant actually on?” Thinking about an out-of-control elephant crushing it’s own side is actually a misnomer. The only side an elephant can be on is its own. The mahouts are using the elephants for their own purposes. They have a side and it’s not the elephant’s. They’re using the elephant for their own ends. Destruction is going to happen to whoever is in front of the rampaging elephant, that’s why traditionally mahouts were equipped and ready to kill the elephant. But it goes further than that. War elephants can outlast their usefulness. The historical example I’m talking about is how the Nazi Party purged the Brownshirts after they’d served their purpose and the Nazis had come to power.
I mean really, who want’s to keep thugs around after they beat up who you wanted them to? But that reality isn’t likely to be seen to someone who has become addicted to the rush of being part of a mob.
All of these factors go into why you should pay close attention to what someone who is trying to whip up a crowd is actually saying. If it involves motivating a crowd and calling for a action the situation has been taken out of everyday activity and daily routine. It’s moved into a different territory. Is it dangerous? Don’t know yet, that’s why you have to pay attention.
What is this person saying and implying? Not what you think he or she means, but what are the actual words and what are other ways to look at it? This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s really important. If you automatically assume you know what the person is saying, you’re likely to get worked up about it—for good or bad. Instead, stop and consider other interpretations of that message. Often you’ll find there to be two or three ways it could be interpreted if you weren’t automatically filling the blanks and ascribing motivation. This is to say way too often people either assign the best or worst intentions to what someone ‘meant’ without considering alternative interpretations. Then they argue that position as if it is an unquestionable truth.
This especially when it comes to ‘calls for violence.’ There are many currents and levels at play here. There are absolute fanatics who will choose to act violently no matter what was actually said. As such, a fair point can be made that a person’s words didn’t encourage or promote violence; so claiming the loony acted on ‘orders’ is over the top. On the other hand, another way this can go is when someone actually does encourage violent action against enemies of the “Cause” and it’s dismissed as “He didn’t really mean that.” Uhhh, Yes, yes he did. He came out and clearly said it.
There’s no real simple answer to this issue, but the idea of mobs being used as war elephants makes a lot of sense. So if you know someone who has been recruited or is trying to be recruited, or even if you’ve found yourself addicted, hopefully this information will be useful to you. If nothing else it can help you better understand the perspectives of those arguing over “He’s encouraging violence” vs. “No he’s not.” Because it isn’t black and white.
M
According To Hoyt 
Good analogy. On that note, I just last night read a fictional equivalent of this very thing—mostly unstoppable figure when enraged turned loose in a battle… and then he gets turned around. Oops.
Berserkers, the madness of Hercules….
Wow, you wrote this six months ago? Could have been this morning.
I didn’t. Marc MacYoung did.
Which I now see.
Weirdly, just as all these mobs are rampaging … I’m writing about a fictional mob in the current W-I-P … and how it is stopped in it’s tracks by several brave and determined characters.
John Christian Falkenberg provides one of my favourite fictional examples of that.
Christian Johnny is the best!!
and the news is talking about them like its a horrible thing? oh wait, thats real too
The one mob I’ve had the misfortune to be close to was . . . terrifying. Because I swear I felt the moment when the shift from “excited crowd” to “mob/war elephant” hit the people closest to where I was. I’d already been in the process of departing the area, and I departed even faster, carefully, so I didn’t attract attention. (I also managed to get between two opposing crowds when I was in Germany, but the sense of visceral “Oh [rude word]” wasn’t there. My feelings were more “Bother. It’s a private fight and I’m leaving.”)
I think the technical term is “Un-Ass”.
I know people have issues with Kevin Williamson here, but I think this quote of his serves as a nice addendum to the idea of mob violence being addictive:
“They do not desire to hurt people because they hate them — they hate them because they desire to hurt people. What we call “cancel culture” is very little more than free-floating sadism in search of a target…they find targets, and construct reasons to hate those targets, retrofitting the moral justification onto the sadism, because sadism with self-righteousness is much more enjoyable than sadism on its own — it’s bacon and eggs.”
Full context here:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/re-re-re-re-the-disturbing-campaign-against-tucker-carlson/
Pretty much O’Brien from 1984: The purpose of hate is hate, the purpose of violence is violence, the purpose of power is power.
Also self-righteousness is a lot more expensive when you actually have to do good. It costs time and money.
I have ancestors who were repeatedly driven from their homes by mob violence in the 1840s, and the more I have learned of history, the more I despise mobocracy. Those who incite them and imagine that they can control the outcome are fools who play with fire.
And, as the case with fires, in order for them to get out of control, the social conditions have to be right. It’s a lot harder to get a forest fire started in the dead of winter in a blizzard that in that same forest in a hot, dry summer. There are those who have been consciously and systematically working to create the conditions in which mob violence can be used as a political tool. The rash of violence we have seen in the past month shows how successful that effort has been.
People have been bored to tears, penned up like cattle, unable to see anybody outside of a small social circle (if at all), worried-to-terrified that they’ll lose what little they have, and have spend the last three to four months being lectured by their “betters” that Emmanuel Goldstein-as-COVID-19 will destroy them all.
Throw in four years of half of our political establishment going “I Love Me” jacket insane because Trump won against Hillary!, at least fifty years of cultural indoctrination that has told children that America worse than Nazi Germany, a “popular culture” that increasingly doesn’t care to appeal to any audience except their own narcissistic self-masturbation and desire for instant gratification, and political and economic policies that have made very sure to destroy most chances for urban blacks to have any job that isn’t make-work or criminal in nature.
I’m only surprised that it was this soon that something stupid would set things off, George Floyd becoming the next Horst Wessel, and that people were being encouraged to do this kind of stuff. Did anyone remember reports of piles of bricks and such being left near protest areas in the early days of this going on? Almost like people wanted to do more damage?
Marxists ever since, well, Marx, have always been trying to stir up class hatred. I’m old enough to remember when Angela Davis and Bill Ayers (and other less infamous associates) were active terrorists, and I also remember that they got named as University professors without ever repenting of their extreme ideology. Since I’m not a close student of academic history, it baffles me how the peers who celebrated them could have failed to recognize that they might as well have been swallowing a dose of Radium or Plutonium.
Because they were media superstars and they knew how to talk a great game of the Upcoming Class Struggle, where they would be a vital part of being in charge of.
And because lionizing them ticked off the squares.
What’s interesting is there is a Brit who is openly socialist, to the point his RPG company uses a yellow sickle and hammer on a red field, who is angry as hell at Democrats, BLM, etc for using race to divide lower cases from each other.
That’s one of the reasons the Communists and hard Socialists were/are so peeved at the 1619 project. The historical inaccuracy is part of it, but the idea that no one can escape the taint of slavery and so there is no point in trying to work across racial lines in order to bring about the Great Proletariat Revolution is even more irksome to the Reds. If race is everything, then Marx was wrong, and Marx is never wrong. Strange bedfellows indeed.
…oh, my. Are we seeing the Roman Catholic/Orthodox Catholic split or the Roman Catholic/Protestant split in the Faith of Marx?
Roman Catholic/Orthodox split. Because the closer the groups are the nastier the fights. Marx overlooked nationalism in his search for the unification of the working class. Working class Brits were never going to unify with working class French and he failed to see that.
Thought so, too. Marx was too obsessed with his ideals over the ties of blood and your neighbors, which is why the nationalist strains of Marxism worked so much better than the worker strains.
That’s perfectly orthodox Marxism. Anything that splits the working class is counter-revolutionary. (Especially when they start talking about “historical.” The contradictions of capitalism grind up those historical advantages, and you ought to treat the new workers as allies.)
Speaking of CCPlague…
I am not anti-vax by any stretch of imagination but goddamnit, I am actually terrified of me and more importantly, my kids being part of the wider Population Test, and whatever else they decide to sneak into the vaccines. The whole rush to vaccine NOW when they never developed one for the previous outbreaks of coronavirus have me deeply mistrusting the whole thing.
I would like to think that any attempts to sneak “something” into the vaccinations would result in the entire UN being burned to the ground…
But, these people are so stupid that I wouldn’t be surprised if they started to require that you have some separate “digital passport” proving that you got all your vaccinations, controlled by the UN or WHO or some such.
I would like to think that any attempts to sneak “something” into the vaccinations would result in the entire UN being burned to the ground…
There’s been multiple cases where “someone” put HCG into vaccines sent to specific areas, best documented one being Catholic sponsored doctors in Kenya. this link seems to have the basic facts laid out with a minimum of debated bits included, and it has names/dates.
Little to no “Burn it to the ground” involved there, so probably won’t be in the future, unless they have bad target selection.
HCG?
Follow the link and you’ll find out; it’s in the first sentence of the abstract of the article she linked.
It’s the hormone that pregnancy tests respond to.
There was a prototype to make basically a pregnancy vaccine, I think in the 70s– can’t be reversed, isn’t very reliable, so it went nowhere.
Worked by combining that hormone, which is required to keep the pregnancy going, with a vaccine.
That trained the immune system to destroy the hormone like it was the disease.
Thanks for the link. I read it, and wow. Things I hadn’t thought of being possible. I’m not anti-vaccine, but let’s say that things like that don’t build trust when there’s needles that people want to stick me with. Since I happen to believe that children are gifts not garbage, and we have room for those we’re sent (Heh, we’d be willing to adopt, but it would have to be sent our way since we’re not looking. But conceptually, we don’t have a problem with adoption)
Vaccines are great tools– which function by hacking the immune system.
There are evil or just “need to be carefully considered by the people actually involved” considerations to be made type uses for that.
Recognizing that fact doesn’t make us anti-vaccine any more than opposing murders done with a firearm makes us anti-gun– but it is enough to get you labeled “anti-vaxx.”
As Dave points out the links to the Gates foundation and after Bill Gates has REPEATEDLY said stuff about vaccinations that frankly give ME all the red flags flying just from listening to him… it’ s… AUGH.
I just can’t trust it. Even on a basic ‘but viruses evolve so effing quickly! level.
Bill Gates is one of the great Utopians, I think. He wants to believe that a few people, the right people, can save the world. That the world can be perfect.
The catch is…it will never be perfect as long as human beings are human beings. At some point, I wrote in my (increasing) pile of notes-“Perfection of the human condition will never be possible. We can’t even agree on what this ‘perfection’ would look like without drawing back into childhood metaphors. The Empire realized this a long time ago, and always saw it’s goal as a rolling effort to at the very least raise the baseline of humanity up.”
A lot of the tech oligarchs fall into that category.
Especially a lot of the early ones. They tend to be believers in that there is an absolutely simple solution to everything.
Look, like most business people the tech oligarchs don’t GET politics of philosophy. They get making money.
So long as Marxism is a social good, they’ll throw down on that side.
Most of them got insanely rich in their 20’s, when they knew everything about everything. Once they got rich, they didn’t have to learn anything. Why should they? They were rich, which proved that they knew everything!
Bill Gates has also donated over a million dollars to the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility, an organization dedicated to subverting the Constitutional rights of American citizens.
Bloomberg spent far more, and bought an entire anti-2nd Amendment government in Virginia!
He didn’t bring up the last group that used tattoos to keep track of people. How did he miss that one?
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Government is a gorilla with a sledgehammer. The bigger it is, the harder and more indiscriminately it pounds every problem presented to it. That is not useful when you’re trying to fix a watch.
I think he mentioned the tattoos one before, and it’s in his longer videos, which are an hour long and while fascinating, I find my attention unable to stick with it because babies.
Tattoos are old-school. In the modern US we use implanted RFID chips.
Most people are probably familiar with them as used in pets. However, there are periodic pushes to get parents to have their children chipped, and at least two bills have been proposed to do it to schoolchildren. It’s for their own good, you know… If you pick up a stray child you can take it to the vet and see if it’s kidnapped, or something. Other uses are unclear, but obviously of great social benefit.
the existence of some of those has since been pointed out to be legitimate.
Interestingly, that analogy can be extended to the conditions. One thing we – as a society – have been failing to do is clear the undergrowth. Not disciplining children leads to the sort of immaturity that leads to mobs. Then, they’ve been soaked in kerosene by filling their heads with malarkey in the
educationindoctrination system. Only then do the matches get passed out…I was thinking about that listening to a reading of Danny Deaver yesterday and then remembering Heinlein’s comment about the insanity of not training a puppy except by locking it outside then shooting it when, as an adult dog, it makes messes in the house.
We have failed our and now, like the color sergeant, we’re going to be white for what we have to watch. We deserve it because we avoided the little pains of raising children and instead have to face the pains of removing unsocialized adults.
And the village idiot runs the school.
When the left refers to villages, this is the one they are really thinking of:
I too have thought of that, Herb.
Part of it is having our kids raised by low-pay, low-training strangers as most daycares.
BUT I think more importantly is having forbid spanking. ALL great apes spank. It’s less abusive than the mind games of time outs, etc.
Now, not all kids need it — younger son could be distracted. His brother couldn’t — BUT the ones who need it really really need it. And not getting it turns them into monsters.
Spanking vs timeout doesn’t seem straight either or. Time out can give the kid a chance to deescalate. It can do that for the parents too. Are you calling it a mind game when the kid is too young to understand the connection between cause(misbehavior) and effect (timeout)?
Yes. Yes I am. They don’t remember that long. A smack on the butt (read what I said. I didn’t say a “beating.) particularly a diapered but stings just enough (without really hurting) to make that connection.
ONCE THEY CAN REASON it’s different. But before about two or three, you train them to listen to you. It might — does — save their lives.
Also older son? timeouts never worked that well.
Younger son, timeouts didn’t work AT ALL. He’d sit in the middle of his room, glaring and seething, and then come out and exact revenge. (I DID say he’s all mine, right?)
OTOH taking away his computer cord for a period of time did work. BUT those are when they can think and link the two.
For my own sake, I am carefully phrasing what I say regarding spanking. Because I love my kids and don’t want an off the cuff comment to bite me later. Until they are grown, for their sake I am a bit paranoid. I apologise if that appeared combative. I wanted to hear how the timeout was an abusive mind game. I get what you’re saying about spanking. Thank you!
One other bit. The society has also been filling their heads with the idea – to continue the analogy – that they must all be the most incredible wonderful torches ever. They should never be content to be shade for a rabbit, or a home for birds or insects, or something with attractive flowers. They should not settle for being cut down and used to make something. No, to be all they can be they must CRUSADE! and the way to crusade is to burn and burn hot.
The number of my fellow Latter-day Saints cheering these mobs on is very depressing. They’ve completely forgotten that mobs, like the Federal Government, are not your friends.
!!??!!??
Perhaps they have never heard that it was mob action that drove the Saints out of Jackson County, MO in 1833, And out of Clay County, in 1836. And out of Caldwell County, and the entire state in 1838. And out of Nauvoo, in 1843. In all these cases, state officials either stood by and let it happen, actively cheered it on, or ordered out the militia to “keep order”, and watched the militia dissolve into mobs with mob tactics. Joseph Smith, who probably saw his people suffer from mobocracy more than any other man in American history would be *appalled* that any of his followers or their descendants would *approve* it.
The progressives are everywhere.
The denomination of the church I currently sing at is probably about to splinter, because of ONE SJW church administrator who wants her sin and rule-breaking retroactively validated by the denomination. (I say sin NOT because of the action per se, but because she made/makes that action more important than her Vocation as a spiritual leader and good shepherd.)
Where there’s one, it will metastasize and there’ll be six, and then they’ll take over.
It’s pretty common; two friends in meatspace have changed churches several times due to far-left sermons and extremely questionable theology. “Back in the day, all we had to worry about was hypocrisy and busybodies. Now…”
There is a reason why I keep telling people “you need to stomp on mob violence hard and with both feet, or the end results will never be pretty.” This is most of them.
The Mob is humans allowed to exert all of their worst impulses with no immediate or instant consequences. It’s a form of intoxication and it’s addictive. And, the Usual Suspects that are using these mobs right now are going to discover that the mob is like any other addict. They don’t care how they get their hit, they’ll just do whatever it takes to get the hit.
This. Exactly. I’ve lived with people who were addicted to rage, sadism, and tearing things apart because they belonged to someone else who’d be hurt by their destruction. The first time the mobs started going after the Confederate statues, I knew this was at work. Not actual outrage. No; the fact that they could scream and rage and destroy things and pat themselves on the back for doing it.
They don’t just “express their anger and get over it”. They won’t stop. Until someone makes them stop.
And the fact that our news media and large corporations are actively enabling them… it makes me sick.
The 24-hour news cycle needs blood to keep it fed. Of course they’ll keep this news cycle going, because that means eyeballs on the screen, which lets them sell advertising, which makes them money.
The large corporations are kind of caught in two grips of a vice. The first is that they’ve been hiring mostly college graduates, and most of the college graduates are from “progressive” or “liberal” institutions that have been soaked in this hatred of the West since the late ’60s at the earliest. It could be entirely possible that they could have gone entirely through a four year degree without having been exposed or having to seriously debate the other side of the arguments.
The second grip in the vice is the power of the media-and especially social media-these days. It is very easy for the wokescolds to create a hue and cry that can ruin a company. And, an amazing number of these companies are in…careful shape. So, anything that risks the company has to be avoided.
tearing things apart because they belonged to someone else who’d be hurt by their destruction
QFT
It’s “the politics of envy”, Nihilism Edition.
I wouldn’t call it sadism, just rage. Or if it is sadism, it is pathetic and incompetent sadism, like eating cotton candy and thinking it is a gourmet meal.
The addiction is also discussed by Dr. Karlyn in recent videos.
Whoof.
…You know, this is actually why I make a deliberate effort to prescribe myself medicinal anime eps when I start getting wound up badly? Because she’s right, you have to break the cycle of negative thoughts and ruminations if you want to go from traumatized/angry at everything to “working toward getting better”. And for me at least, the best way to do that is to get “out of my own head” for a bit. If you’re overwhelmed with adrenaline and need to burn it off, watch monsters attacking. Better, watch monsters being beaten.That way you send a direct message to your brain of “emergency status over, time to wind down.”
Yeah, I’ve watched the battle of Italica in GATE a few times recently.
I also like the way Rory Mercury ripped that SJW in the Japanese Assembly a new one in Episode 8.
Yes. GATE is one of my ‘bitchslap the idealists’ anime. Rise of the Shield Hero is another.
The other is Highschool of the Dead where the SJW gets EATEN by zombies.
Anime as antidote….. monster bashing…
Knight Sabers! Sanjou!
(Grin)
Oh. So playing a krogan in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer just to trigger the Blood Rage via melee kills has a plausible medical explanation? 😉
(Not to mention simply playing a default human engineer and spamming Overload and Incinerate over and over?)
That would be one explanation for why illegal aliens persist in re-creating the dysfunctional shitholes they ran away from.
Our brains operate in patterns. We find or imagine patterns in everything. Some folks have patterns that don’t fit reality, and do things that make no sense to us. If people, especially children, are placed in a warped environment, they will form warped patterns. Being placed in a normal environment causes conflict with their distorted patterns, and they will cling to them desperately because they are familiar, no matter how wrong they are.
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They say I can’t be a nonconformist because I’m not like the other nonconformists.
I think part of the reason for the mobs now was to provoke Trump into stomping hard with the military. That would give them another Kent State and they’d be singing the 21st century version of “four dead in O-HI-O” until the election.
Of course, since Trump isn’t the stupid and impulsive boor his enemies imagine him to be (you’d think they’d learn by now. Of course, if they could learn they wouldn’t be Progressives) he didn’t take the bait, other than a few tweets echoing what most of the country was thinking at the time. As a result, he’s got tons of B-reel to use in his ads this fall, he can portray the Democrats at the state and local level as ineffective at best and actively hostile to minorities at worst (the fact that the mobs weren’t allowed into Beverly Hills won’t be ignored in those ads), he can say “I told you so” about the people going after the Confederate statues going after the Founding Fathers, and the DOJ is currently investigating hundreds of the activists behind the riots, and that group is going to have a huge overlap with the people that the Biden campaign will rely on for their ground game in November.
And, it doesn’t help that Biden popped out of his basement to confirm that we’ll have another three months of quarantine a few days ago and he just looked…lost.
I”m not sure if he really knows what’s going on and that’s kind of sad.
There’s no real simple answer to this issue, but the idea of mobs being used as war elephants makes a lot of sense.
Well, there is, but we’re afraid to use it.
Grapeshot will stop a mob, although a nasty enough one might require the “peace of the dead” to pacify it.
They did not pull down the Emmancipation Memorial yesterday, so maybe we’re getting control of the mob without grapeshot, but we got damn close and I’m not sure we won’t get there.
I think some of the voices revving up the crowd are hoping for grapeshot to at the least elect Biden and at best trigger the actual revolution. Actually, both can be the goals and which is which is based on who is doing the revving.
This is when our Hostess warns us to keep an eye out for a pregnant woman shot dead during a “peaceful” protest that encounters LE or troops.
I recall an old site with photos of anarchists (and iirc the IRA) hiding behind various women, some preggers, and occasionally children, leaning out and tossing rocks, shooting sling shots or in a few pistols and revolvers at LE and Military. After 9/11 it started adding Muhj and Palestinians to the collection.
They don’t even need to be shot anymore. Merely being arrested is used as pretext to riot. Look at what happened in Madison, Wisconsin the other day.
Technically, it doesn’t need to be a pregnant woman, either. But our Hostess has repeatedly brought up one of the tells that she’s seen every single time. And that’s the pregnant woman who is fatally shot during a protest confrontation with law enforcement that wasn’t expected to turn violent.
It’s apparently a script that the string-pullers are incapable of deviating from. Think of it as a religious sacrifice.
Righteous outrage seems a little misplaced, considering how publicly dismissive their platform is of pregnancy and children.
Of course, consistency has never been one of their strong points.
They don’t care about pregnant women. Otherwise they’d find another pawn. But they know that everyone else cares about pregnant women.
They don’t need to persuade themselves to turn against law enforcement. They’re already aligned that way. It’s everyone else that they need to convince.
I already warned a couple of friends about that. One pointed out a pregnant woman was removed by police from a car and miscarried already..
I told her that isn’t the one. When it happens, she’ll know it.
That said, they’ve gotten brazen enough when they do deploy the pregnant woman it will be too late to garner sympathy. The let the rage define them while the police stood by. Claiming the woman was out of control police won’t get much traction even with CNN and MSNBC holding seances to speak with the dead woman and her dead baby.
Not to mention Fox would counter with seances to interview aborted children.
The creepy thing is, completely independent to that, I’d been getting freaked out by just how many of the rich white college girls burning things look like they’re there months pregnant. I was wondering how on earth any parent would let their kid get like that? How does someone who, by rights, should have the world in the palm of their hands end up pregnant and burning police cars near CHAZ?
You have an unexamined assumption that needs to be checked:
By what evidence do you make the extraordinary claim that they have parents?
They never worked for any of that – not their grades, not to pay for school, not to support themselves. So they don’t value those things, nor do they see any connection between them and success. They got good grades because of scholastic favoritism, there was no question about affording college, and everything in their whole lives, from food to healthcare to pocket money, came without any effort on their part. There aren’t any *connections* there. Stuff just happens.
And nobody has ever told them “no” and made it stick. Rioting looks like fun, so they do it. That there might be consequences isn’t something that fits into their the-way-the-world-is.
They never worked for any of that – not their grades, not to pay for school, not to support themselves. So they don’t value those things, nor do they see any connection between them and success.
Think more insidiously.
It didn’t matter if they worked for it.
There is no connection at all. You are rewarded at the whim of others, for their own reasons.
It is seriously painful, and toxic, even in small doses.
Yes. This. If it doesn’t matter how hard you worked – even if you worked your butt off! – but whether or not you get anything out of it is purely up to the whim of others on that particular day?
Soul-crushing. And very, very hard to lever yourself out of the despair of “what does it matter what I do?”
I got lucky, the first time I ran into it I was already an adult. And I already recognized that chief as a rather miserable excuse for a human being. Very good at choosing to “reward” those who can’t do anything about it, and very plausibly deniable…it was only after you noticed that it made things so she got her way that things clicked.
Her retirement job?
Grade school principle.
The kids she would have started on would be out protesting with the other creeps, right now.
Try being raised with it. Ugh.
Though sometimes hard work did pay off. Sort of. “You got a 98 on the test? What’d you miss?”
…No, that was not a joke, nor meant to be. Brrr.
“You had an A? Why wasn’t it an A+. There was ONE A+ in the country. Why was it not yours?”
Familiar.
*Nod* Heh. And then there’s the slightly different angle of, “You want to write? You should write mysteries!” And on and on, without ever pausing once to listen to, but I’m no good at mysteries….
That and the, “I’m going to proof your draft for you!” And never giving it back.
…Yeah, I do backups of everything.
Yep. I didn’t get that so much, as I was the oldest, and as my daughter says “The Golden Child” – but yeah, I got grief over the B’s. when most of the other grades were A’s.
My poor youngest brother, though – the s**t he got from my parents over the single lonely B on his college course. I really wanted to slap my mother around, retroactively, when I heard about that, decades later.
Mom is woman out of time, I came to realize. She only had enough true maternal feeling in her tank for me and my younger brother. She was running low on my sister, and completely dry when it came to Little Brother. I was in play as the mother-figure, until I went away to the Air Force…
Oh, yes. EVERYONE’s career in trad pub….
Yep.
Like Palestinian terrorists parking trucks with rocket launchers behind schools, firing into Israel, driving away, and then claiming that Israel targets schools.
or literally placing towable rocket launchers in school courtyards and not bothering to move them
A rule of thumb for mob management might be to nail the megaphones first. Anybody with a loudhailer should be a target.
If I’ve learned anything from my many years of playing video games, it is this: always take out the healers first.
And Antifa has kindly marked theirs for anyone who might choose to do so.
Be prepared for the fourth. They’ve going to do something HEINOUS on the fourth.
I expect widespread Kristallnacht style violence, looting, arson and destruction, which will be cheered on by the Democrats and their media arm. I would not be surprised also if there is a concerted attempt to enter and try to harm politicians they don’t like, including an effort to actually storm the White House. Think of it as the American lefts very own effort at a Tet offensive.
Wouldn’t it make more sense (to a ruthless ideologue) to offer up the sacrifice of a “progressive,” but deeply unliked politician? Then they can have the martyr effect and blame the assassination on the huge crowds of “secret alt righters,” who must be sought and and punished.
THAT’S what they’re planning to do with Biden! Everything they’ve done makes sense in that perspective.
Trump should put Biden in protective custody for the next three weeks. Or Witness Protection!
He’s already got Secret Service protection.
“Witless Protection” ?
The one I am worried about is the possibility of an official light-off in Virginia. The Demoncrat passed gun control laws go into effect on July 1, Thursday. July 4 is Saturday.
That and the Mayor of Atlanta and the Prosecutor there trying to raise the ghost of Sherman to burn it all down again.
John
i dont see how those going into effect is going to do anything immediate… i dont think they’re really even set up for universal background checks. Also, i done expect the new gun laws to last.
Years ago (I think it was in one of his books), Jeff Cooper mentioned an interesting approach to deal with mobs. A) you need to identify the local controllers, (IMHO, this might be harder than when the Colonel wrote it; easy coms mean Professor Moriarty might be a few blocks away with video feedback). OTOH, there will be local leaders. The guy with the backpack of bricks or IEDs. The transwoman who has a studded baseball bat in xir hands, und so weiter.
B) Shoot them *quietly*. Don’t use the .30 Win Magnum (a Force Recon guy I knew swore by it), but use .22 LR rounds. A supressor would be good, even if you used supersonic ammo. Mobs should be noisy… Jeff recommended a chest shot; it’ll take a bit of time, but the blood won’t be obvious, especially if the perps are wearing jackets. (If armor, then it would be harder. Leg shots?
C) Rinse and repeat as necessary.
You don’t have to get the general if all the lower level officers are out of commision…
> suppressor
Sure, if you’re “law enforcement” or military. Otherwise, that suppressor is going to cause you enough trouble that unless you have some extraordinarily strong personal stake (they’re getting ready to torch your house, where your grandmother is in an iron lung and can’t be rescued) your most reasonable action is to step back and let them riot.
Did i misunderstand you? You are troubled by potential legalities over a suppressor, but not over sniping distant rioters? I assure you, popping a “riot leader” at 75 yards is legally perilous for anyone not government employed. The riot-breaking reality of such methods is not reflected in current US-jurisdiction use-of-force law, to the best of my knowledge.
As noted in the thread above, the Good folk are already discussing targeting Threat leadership, and best methods for a cull. That really ought to terrify some folks who think they get to dictate the violence game upon the rest of us.
One more reason why I weep at the prospect of an outbreak of open hostilities, but not for the outcome. Liberty wins. Reason wins. They lose.
The reality of our present legal system is that the ATF really doesn’t like people with untaxed suppressors, and they have a near-100% conviction rate when they find them. And even if the ATF did nothing, even a party hack prosecutor could use that like a club in the courtroom.
Plain old murder is a local matter, and people walk for that all the time.
“One of these things is not like the other.”
I’d add an additional directive to this – shoot the press also. They aren’t your friends. Camera people, reporters, associated crew, all of them. Make them afraid to show up. Even the ones on “our side” will bend over to make themselves appear righteous and not on the side of the “bad people” that started shooting. I say again, they are NOT your friends. I know it sucks – it’s wrong in every way except tactically – but unless the “story makers” are silenced, we may win the fights but we’ll end up being exiled by our own virtue signallers for the effort.
Neither the sniper-shooting of a protestor, nor that of a pressie, is going to be ignored as “just a thing” or given to the same guy who investigates stolen vehicles. Prosecutors and investigators make their bones on cases like that.
Might make a storyline in some fiction somewhere, but quite another to actually do so.
Besides, presstitutes are Legion, and apparently reproduce by spontaneous fission. No “independent” could make a dent in the supply.
One interesting bit is how much of what you describe applies to a crowd right as a mosh pit forms, but somehow they rarely get out of hand (it happens). I wonder what the control factor is. Perhaps that the joining is planned and conscious and those encouraging, using band members, are very much of the same purpose as “the mob”. Another thing could be numbers, although the Death Walls and Circle Pits at a place like Wakken are as big or bigger than some statue destroying mobs.
The Wall of Epica too.
I knew a guy who was supposedly good at stopping a Mosh going over the edge way back in the late 80’s.
by the by, have you seen the newest Unleash The Archers release, Abyss?
I like. 🙂
She’s a history geek. it’s funny watching her with her glasses on, and interacting with people and you think “This is a metal singer?”
Good stuff.
Yes, I have. Awesomeness.
I was also watching videos of top 10 mosh pits. Some of the walls of death were pretty brutal. I need to get to a big European festival while I’m still young (although I did see a guy with a walker in one of these):
It looks like he’s heading out, but he might just be lining up.
Wandering off on this thread I will post this here.
Egad I love this woman. Storytime With Floor:
Here is some pretty good mosh pit footage at a Slayer show (sound not so hot, but floor level video of the pit):
And here is Metallica at Rock Am Ring 2008 with pretty good shots of the pit:
Oh, and do you listen to Seven Spires?
There were the band I was going to see for the first time this year I was the most excited about, but now that show is cancelled.
Dang it, Herb, I’m blaming you for the damage to my music budget. 🙂 I don’t know how I missed them.
You’re welcome.
I’ve come across references to them, but hadn’t gotten to it. Now I gotta listen to more.
vera nice
So I listened to a few and this popped up:
I’ve seen them in my reccomendations before (I think on an Epica video) but never gave a listen (likely something else made me go “Squirrel!”).
She ain’t got Tatiana Shmailyuk’s range of growls (then again, who does?) so a guy does them too, but they blend well, and I ain’t the biggest on the growls and screams.
Masha Scream has a decent growl:
Something about women from the former USSR maybe.
*click*
Hey, that’s damned good
*click*
another that’s damned good
*click*
ditto . . . Wait, what the . . .
Oh yeah!
Okay, I have more music when playing a melee-heavy character in Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer.
Except the volus protector w/batarian gauntlet. I need to find a copy of the Benny Hill theme for that.
“Let’s get paid!”
Correction: I have some good music to play when using an N7 Fury character in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. 🙂
I also think that mosh pits are joined mostly for “fun” rather than out of hatred (and yes, mosh pits can be a lot of fun; I miss the days when I was physically able to join one….sigh?). And yes, they can get out of hand, but a lot of times it is accidental when it does.
Mobs commit violence with malice aforethought.
Yes, they can be fun.
I’m on record as saying there are no mosh pits in Hell, because there is no unbridled joy in Hell.
You have to be careful destroying mobs. The six counties in the north of Ireland were well on their way to getting past all that BS. There were inter marriages and people more or less got along. Given time, it might have gotten to be like Glasgow where most of the sectarianism was confined to Celtic vs Rangers. Then came Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, or at least the latest one, there’s been a few.
The troubles started in 68 ish, we got out of town, but really got under way in 72. Before that it was young thugs in Derry, some political mostly not, in fighting. The police sided fairly strongly with one side. It was very late 60’s. Went on everywhere.
Civil rights parade in Derry with a small communist minority looking for trouble runs into the parachute regiment. 26 shot, 14 dead, All RC. The parachute regiment has an interesting ritual the last night of training they pair off, stand on a line, and punch one another for a set time. Defense is not encouraged, just aggression. Perfect for a combat regiment, not good for protests. General Ford, who put the paras there, should have been cashiered instead he was promoted, made ADC to the Queen, and made Grand Cross of the Bath.
FWIW the paras shot up the Protestants too. Ford was not a sectarian, just an idiot.
The communists (Devlin and all that crowd who became political Sinn Fein were Communists) got what they wanted. Civil War. The thing about Civil War Is you don’t get to choose your side and there are no neutrals.
30 years the troubles went on. 50,000 casualties. 700 British soldiers, 300 Police, 350 IRA, 160 Unionist Paramilitaries, 1800 civilians dead. 8000 arrested. The walls are still there.
Better to do what Trump and Barr are doing. Find the ring leaders and prosecute them.
I have, for several years, been equating Antifa to the SA of unlamented memory, and it has recently occurred to me that this does a disservice to..the Sturmabteilung. Yes, in terms of aims Antifa strongly resembles the Brownshirts. But in experience and discipline, there is no comparison. The SA were street fighters with a history of fighting similar groups (usually Communist) of like toughness. Antifa preys on individuals, and when opposed by even smallish band of people accustomed to mixing it up physically, they tend to lose. At least that is the impression I’ve been getting.
I think that, to whatever extent Antifa is being manipulated from behind the scenes, the manipulators think they have a more effective weapon then they do.
Which doesn’t mean Antifa isn’t dangerous. For one thing, they (like most ‘protest’ groups) are entirely too fond of fire, with little apparent grasp of the consequences if a fire gets completely out of control. But I do think that if they are ever seriously opposed, they will display the cohesion of a sugar cube under the blast of a fire hose.
I think even ad hoc groups of non-leftist opposition will prove to be better organized, and better disciplined in the crunch.
I may, of course, be whistling past the graveyard. But I don’t think so.
Yeah, except the SA were actually useful. For a while, anyway. The Imperial police had been the fist of Wilhelm II, Boss of All Things. Weimar police were the tentative enforcers of the various Weimar polities, which, as things started becoming unstock, wasn’t even paying them on time, much less giving them any real authority. Thus National Socialist Brownshirts were the de facto police in much of Germany; they patrolled, took complaints, and kidnapped people off the streets to be tried by National Socialist apparatchiks. What happened after that… most people made a point of not looking too hard at that.
Yes, less-visible branches of the SA were the *cause* of some of that crime, but you can’t be seen fighting crime unless there’s plenty of crime to fight, y’know. That’s how the DEA, and some other agencies operate today.
Germany at that time was a cess pool of festering idiocy. OTOH the terms of the Versailles Treaty pretty much ensured that Germany would be a broken state. That was the intention. It apparently never occurred to the Allied Elites who wrote the damn thing that broken states give rise to monsters.
WWI was the ultimate argument against letting the European Upper Classes control much of anything.
WWI was pretty much the end of the Age of Empires. It was replaced by, not the Age of Democracy, but the Age of Ideologies.
You sure you don’t mean the Age Of Idiocies?
Isn’t that what he said?
The Empires weren’t idiocies. The British Empire, in particular, was distinctly better than what has replaced it in Africa, and some parts of Asia. The Empires mostly managed this because the worst Elitist fools had no desire to leave London (or Paris, or whatever cultural center is applicable) and the actual work and most of the policy decisions were made by the men on the ground.
If there was still a country capable of it, I would call for a return to good old fashioned Colonial Paternalism.
Or at least not very often…..
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/pagett_mp.html
“Pagett, M.P., was a liar, and a fluent liar therewith —
He spoke of the heat of India as the “Asian Solar Myth”;
Came on a four months’ visit, to “study the East,” in November,
And I got him to sign an agreement vowing to stay till September.”
😎
To be fair, I’ve heard that garam has to be felt to be believed.
Eh, had an Indian co-worker who was complaining about how COLD it was when I was still coming into work wearing sandals and no jacket. I believe it.
Well, there’s a reason in Rada ni Drako’s alternate history/future timeline, the extraterrestrial scholars studying mankind’s past refer to this era as “The Second Ideology War,” with the usual academic spats over if it truly is the second, or if it is more a shifted continuation of the First Ideology War.
I knew I wasn’t the only one to have realized the fundamental shift before! it’s not something any of my history books have brought up.
Germany at that time was a cess pool of festering idiocy.
“At that time”?
Not saying they were STRANGE, mind you*, but it was amazing to realize how much of the “stupid Catholic tricks” I was taught were horrible were more “stupid German-blob of cultures tricks,” which predated and postdated any Catholic involvement in an area.
* they are human. We’re known for that.
> Germany at that time was a cess pool of festering idiocy.
As a measure of that, by any objective measure, the NSDAP were by far the best of the lot.
Antifa’s ancestors were one of them, and several near-enough BLM, and a couple different totally-not-a-Communist-wink-wink parties, a couple of nominally religious parties I never could get a handle on, and a floating bunch of the disaffected and angry who were members of more than one party, as long as they promised to burn it all down.
Funny, some of that doesn’t sound like early 20th century history at all…
” Weimar police were the tentative enforcers of the various Weimar polities, which, as things started becoming unstock, wasn’t even paying them on time”
If you want to read a terrifying book, try When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson. The Weimar Republic couldn’t pay for the ink a lot of the time, never mind the people printing the money.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll add it to the list.
You guys are a menace to my book budget.
I don’t compare Antifa to the SA. I compare Antifa to the Communist thugs that were running loose in German cities. And I remember that a primary excuse for the formation of the SA was to engage in street fights with the roving bands of Communists.
My biggest worry is that pushback against Antifa provides cover for an actual fascist group of street thugs to form.
Yep, since that’s what the German Communist Party called their band of thugs, oh sorry, their paramilitary wing: Antifa.
Antifa ARE actual Fascists. A Progressive is a Socialist is a Communist is a Fascist. The different gangs may fight one with another, but that doesn’t make them fundamentally different.
The number of White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and such filth in the country is actually pretty small, and this crap is not making them more generally accepted. The ‘Right’ (whatever that may mean outside of the Progressive echo chamber, is a lot better about ejecting the deranged than the Left has ever been. Oh, the Propaganda organs of the Establishment Left will LABEL any opposition to the Fascist Left ‘Right Wing Extremism’, but it won’t be any realer than the Russian Collusion idiocy.
That’s why I call them Antefa.
Profa
They profess to be globalists and anti-nationalists. That makes them communists.
Fascists have a few key differences with communists, and nationalism is one of them.
waggles hand. In real fact, the left’s internationalism was always Russian nationalism.
Not always! Sometimes it was Maoist and so Chinese.
They don’t hand out broken bricks and frozen water any more, it is much easier to have a few pallets of bricks delivered where they think they will be needed.
Or they plant bricks in the places they want destroyed, and then lead the rabble to them.
We have updated grapeshot, though — the M1028 120mm canister round, prominently featured in Strands Of Sorrow and highly effective at taking out zombies. A lot of those rioters do look brain-dead.
The brick thing is especially insidious– because it’s really, really easy to have a patsy. I have NOT been reassured by a couple of cities that complained about being called out on brick piles and they are “all in construction areas”– note, they don’t say that they talked to anybody who would be working there, just that there was construction going on.
Which is all over the place, because people have TIME.
120mm “canister” round, aka “Beehive”…
And there is the tie-back to that wonderful “bee” thread a while back.
If i were a Jew living in New York, I would be getting ready to bug out, because a mob that operates with state approval is a known recipe for the worst kind of violence against a despised minority. Given the climate of mob violence across the country, De Blasio’s evident anti-Semitism, and New York’s gun laws, there will be no protection and no effective self defense. I’m afraid too many of them who have been supporting liberal Democrats and Democrat policy won’t see it coming and won’t know what hit them.
“Well, the yellow star clashes with my Armani and the tattoo could have been nicer, but we’re still New Yorkers!”
Wikipedia says 13 percent of New York City’s population is Jewish. Sounds high to me, but even if it was half that, NYC is already broke and trying to weasel Federal money to make up its budget shortfall. And I have a sneaky suspicion the city’s Jewish population tends more toward taxpayers than service consumers; if a significant percentage of them loaded rental trucks and got the hell out, it would hurt NYC more than the raw numbers would imply.
“but we’re still New Yorkers!”
Overtaxed, overcharged, overcrowded, parasitized, and too dumb to leave.
If I were a Jew living in New York, I would not be living in New York since about 2008. I guess after several hundred years, a people grow accustomed to living among those who wish them ill.
c4c
Haven’t refreshed the comments since I opened this, this morning– is “dog whistle” the free bingo slot in Accusation Bingo for today?
(“He never said anything like that!” “But that’s what he MEANT! It’s a dog whistle!” As they say– if you hear the whistle, you’re the dog.)
I have “whiff of grapeshot” on my 2020 Bingo card.
Note I’d be very happy to leave that square uncovered. Delighted.
For some reason they keep hearing dogwhistles . . .
Watts, Detroit, Liberty City, downtown L.A., etc. were largely limited to those cities where the incidents occurred and concentrated on the neighborhoods where the rioters lived.
Ferguson changed that. While most of the destruction was there, I noticed protests started breaking out in other cities. This was the beginning of BLM.
What is going on now is the mobs are in the streets and online AND it’s being driven by Antifa, which is now partnered with BLM. Antifa’s not new. They were Black Bloc, who spent the ’90s at every leftist demonstration in Washington, D.C. doing what they’ve always done: smashing windows, fighting cops, burning cars, etc. while the “peaceful protesters” cover for them. Black Bloc’s biggest claim to fame was the WTO protests in 1999. They were always at every “antiwar” march (when they partnered with Code Pink) and every Occupy Wall Street encampment.
What’s happened over the past 10 years is that they’ve recruited a LOT of people. They’ve become well-funded and well-organized. So now we have the spectacle of what would’ve been another urban horror story of people destroying their own neighborhoods turned into an international mob led largely by what appears to be blonde middle class young women.
Antifa has been doing this in Europe for decades. They are genuinely an international terrorist organization and they and their financiers should be treated the same as Al Qaeda and its financial backers.
Given Antifa’s historical origins, I agree and this needs to be done.
While drone-fired Hellfire missiles and Green Berets and Navy SEALs are extremely effective kinetic assets, another most valuable asset in the fight against AQ and subsequently Daesh was the accountants attack front targeting their funding and financial backers – tracking down, freezing, and emptying the accounts and IDing and pursuing the backers with local authorities. This both takes away the cash and pressures the backers into a smaller lists of safe operating havens, which is when the kinetics come in handy.
Once Antifa is designated an international terrorist organization it becomes subject to these same financial forces – which is why I was so cheered when DJT didn’t use the word “domestic” when he said what he was going to do.
Ginsu Missiles! 😀
(Modified Hellfire missile with steel blades instead of explosives)
Yet i see people on FB still insisting that Antifa is ‘not a group’ and there is no leadership or funding involved… heh, they’re going to be in for a surprise in the next few months i think. (So are many of the Antifa members who believe they’re a cell structure with no central command or funding)
I wonder if there is any relationship between dislike of crowds and fear of mobs.
The mob will not listen to voices of sanity.
It will only listen to acts of suppressing levels of force at this point.
Nonsense. The force needed to cause these imbeciles to scatter like surprised mice wouldn’t be all that big. These aren’t hardened street fighters, they are hobby protesters. The (Democrat) administrations of the cities plagued by them simply don’t want to alienate one of the few voting blocks likely to go to any trouble to vote for Creepy Joe the Wonder Veep, and don’t believe that their supine posture can cost them more votes than it gains.
I bet a lot of black inner city residents, especially black business owners affected by the riots, are thinking HARD about voting Republican for the first time in their lives.
I really hope the GOP runs a bunch of ads in major cities along the lines of “You’ve been voting for Democrats for decades, what has it gotten you? ::20 second list of local problems:: Maybe it’s time for a change? What have you got to lose? And remember, nobody has to know how you voted.”
Then cut a version in Spanish.
“LARPolutionaries” as one friend mockingly calls them.
Yeah. This is going to get uglier.
c4c
Mob action also allows the merely extreme a road to power via crushing the violently radical. People tend to happily give up rights if it means someone is going to put those rampaging bastidges down.
They are stetting themselves up for someone else to take them down.
I’ve been having a hard time with my inner Harvey Two-Face over the riots and the Trump response. The wild side definitely wants grape shot. A report yesterday that only 1 in 6 rioters were AA reinforces my feeling that once again, we have white Democrats going into black neighborhoods and destroying any sign that they have achieved the independence that comes with being in the middle class. Gots to keep them on that plantation if it kills -them.
The not so crazy side says that tactically, allowing them wite boyz to run rampant means exposing their leadership, at least the field officers, and getting the goods on them for Federal charges to decapitate the current movement. You won’t get the Soros/Blofeld class; They never get their hands dirty. So you will perhaps set them back a generation or so at best. I see a LOT of comments on various sites trashing Trump by his (supposed) supporters for not sending in the tanks, All I can say is delayed gratification may be worth the wait. Besides, the choice in the Presidential election? What choice would that be?
Re: Blofield
A certain evil manipulator and trouble-sower from Iran discovered that he was neither untouchable nor invincible. It was done, spectacularly and openly.
The implications are mind-boggling if any real linkage can even be credibly alleged against a foreign person or power to an effort to violently overthrow the US Government, -especially- if that effort fails to follow the Laws and Customs of War.
I doubt that things would run that way, outside of a book, but a ruthless person, say a hypothetical president, -could- get a number of such things done before anything could be done to stop it.
Matt Bracken wrote a piece about how our cities will erupt in violence. He said it would happen when the welfare dried up and the EBT cards weren’t working any more. It’s called “When the Music Stops: How America’s Cities Will Erupt in Violence.” The place it was at is down, but you can probably find it online.
https://jamesfetzer.org/2020/02/matt-bracken-when-the-music-stops-how-americas-cities-may-explode-in-violence/
It greatly understates the logistical problems that the flash mobs would face.
Another Bracken jewel.
https://ncrenegade.com/editorial/matthew-bracken-what-i-saw-at-the-coup/
Another jewel.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2929658/posts
I apologize for how OT this is but it’s so mind-bogglingly ridiculous I have to mention it somewhere:
MSN is denouncing MLP fandom, AKA ‘the Bronies’, for being a hotbed of Neo-Nazis. I am not making this up.
Does that sound absolutely ridiculous to anyone else?
Elf and I are sitting here…. best we can figure is that muscle bound guy is white and has a crew cut? You know, the roid looking one that yells “Oh, yeah!”
Maybe it’s that anti-communism episode?
Looking around, apparently some twit back in ’15 tried to fake the evidence for Roof being a bronie, based on hating bronies so anything evil must be them?
https://bronicuscatholicus.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/a-neo-nazi-brony/
His name is Bulk Biceps.
https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Bulk_Biceps
Because this is important information. ^.^
No, obviously it’s Rarity and Applejack who are the Nazi ponies. Because AJ is a “hick” and “all hicks are Nazis” and Rarity because she’s got a white coat, is elegant (fine manners are proof of Nazism?!?) and because she works with gems so she’s obviously a Rich Jew and all Rich Jews are evil.
I’ve seen both those arguments be seriously used. By idiots, granted, but then I’ve unhappily learned that toxic idiots comprise the biggest part of most fandoms.
Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie.
Rarity is fascist, and Applejack is with the Kempei Tai.
Rainbow Dash is an IJN flyer.
Twilight Sparkle is undercover FBI, secretly dedicated to the Deep State, and Spike is her handler for Qatari intelligence.
Sir, I have read fanfics about all those ideas.
I have read site posters elsewhere that take what you say and treat it /seriously/.
How can you do satire any more when it’s all too easy to find real life arguments even crazier than yours?
The loudest part, for sure.
The worst part is how they shout down every sane and rational person in fandoms. Especially when some of those sane people warn about the very creepy sexual predators who slipped in the back door and must now be “tolerated”.
Comment on this last night appears misplaced.
That’s a completely wrong characterization of Rarity and Applejack. Fluttershy is the Neo-Nazi and Pinkie Pie is the NSDAP member and officer of the DMB.
Rarity is with the Italian Fascist Party, and Applejack is clearly Kempei Tai.
Also, Rainbow Daesh. She is an islamofascist.
“Rainbow Dash. She is an islamofascist.”
A gay Islamofascist. Don’t forget that part now. Yes, I’ve seen THAT, too.
Yes. I know. Yes. It is.
Sounds reasonable to me.
If no one had claimed, I probably would, as a joke, to mock the over-broadness of those in the habit of accusing.
If one credits all left wing accusations of right-wing deviationism, the world is populated only by neo-con alt-right zionist neo-nazis.
If we aren’t still mid great panic, it hasn’t been anywhere near long enough to calm down, get grounded, and reorient to which accusations are advantageous to promote and which ones are not. And you win elections by screaming out wild accusations against everyone and their dog.
You don’t want them to let down Joe Biden, do you?
The whole thing sounds to me like a headline from the late great “Weekly World News”: ‘Nazis blitzkrieg their way into MLP fandom! Hitler’s Brain outed as Brony!’
Then people ask me why I don’t take the main news outlets seriously any more.
I ‘think’ the reason these ‘mobs’ have stayed in the cities is that the ‘mahoots’ know deep down if they try this outside the cities, they will get a rural response (e.g. shooting the leading edge and targeting the mahoots)… What happened in St. Louis is illustrative of what will happen if they cross the line. Thankfully, nobody tried the husband/wife with guns on their porch, it would not have ended well.
Why, what happened in St. Louis?
I’ve been wondering if i should start practicing shooting bottles at about fifty meters….
I would (and do, when able) run drills from contact to 300m. incremental progress is still progress. If no bottles, use bullseyes, such as B8s. Or use IDPA targets.
there is no 300m line of sight here.
I’m worried about people at shorter range who are gettign ready to throw glass bottles.
that is probably with 50m easy. I doubt many can even throw a glass bottle 20m.
I kinda want to see someone with a BB gun take out the Molotovs during the wind-up. Self-inflicted, the burns would be.