In the end, you know, Marx was right, but not in the way he thought he was, which is why the system he created is such a life-destroying sh*tshow and the world won’t be free or stop declining towards hellish living conditions in the spots invaded by it, till there are tickets sold for the annual piss on Marx’s grave gathering.
Seeing things, but then interpreting them upside down and sideways, btw, was bog standard for the angry, hirsute inkblot.
I went trough school with people like him. — and I’m sure you did too — These are people who are actually very smart. They’re just broken on their ability to understand things and take everything into account.
Some are control freaks who can’t understand that in real life, and human life particularly chaos gets a vote. They’d account for all the known factors and think they had the entire situation. (We see this in climate modelers, who discount things that can’t be controlled, like the sun’s variable output, and then pretend these don’t exist.)
Some are simply men of system. Or women of system. They need a myth that “explains everything.” Which requires even more ignoring of inconvenient facts and ideas.
I suspect Marx was both.
I first encountered this type in a school friend in sixth grade. She could read some passage, understand every word, but think it meant something completely different.
Something like “The sky was blue, the sun shone and the birds flew” and she’d come up with “He’s saying the world ended, and everyone is dead” and you’d scratch your head and go “The hell?” until she explained her thought pattern, which ended up sounding a lot like Marxist deconstructionism.
Oh, I forgot the third pattern of distortion, which Marx DEFINITELY had: the need to feel superior. If you see what other people have already seen and said, you are just one of them. You need to stand out and see something different and hopefully something that makes you more caring/superior.
Because our education has been taken over by crazy people who suffer from all of these and, to boot, worship in the church of eternal redistribution, there’s some bizarre idea that Marx was the first to notice the iniquitous oppression of the industrial revolution and/or speak out on behalf of the workers and that’s why his work is justifiable/important.
Please.
That’s like current idiots speaking out in favor of women in SF/F and thereby erasing ALL THE REAL PIONEERS. And the women who were in SF/F from the beginning. And reducing writers to their genitals/skin color. And ignoring personal inclination when it comes to writing sf/f. Or working in a dockyard. Or being an engineer. (“You must do this for the sake of female liberation, comrade.” “BUT I don’t want to do that.” “Doesn’t matter. You must be a slave to female liberation.”)
It’s in fact exactly like, because on top of all there was so much virtue signaling and currying favor with the ELITE OPINION of the time it’s not even funny. Or do you think it’s a coincidence the elites EMBRACED Marxism (despite lots of attempts to claim the contrary?)
So, quickly: The industrial revolution was not a disaster to your average peasant. It was a disaster for landowners.
Yes, yes, the conditions in the factories were terrible. By our standards. The lifespan was very short. By our standards. The anomie of the big cities, yadda yadda. When compared to what? Small villages? Ask those of us raised in them. Yes, there was child labor. As compared to what at that time? Other than the life of the upper classes?
Look, we don’t have to guess about this stuff. In India, in China, in other places that came to the industrial revolution very late, we’ve seen peasants leave the land where their ancestors had labored, to flock to the big cities, to take work we find horrible and exploitative at wages we find ridiculous.
And even if China has added “labor camp” and prisoner wrinkles to it, note that’s because China is a shitty communist country, not because the migration wasn’t there before. Also the labor camp aspects, as much as one can tell (and it’s hard to tell, due to the raging insanity of the regime) seem to have grown as the people grew more prosperous, as a result of the industrial revolution and thereby demanded higher wages, which positioned China more poorly as the “factory of the world.”
In fact, idealizing “living off the land” has been in place since at least the Roman empire, and probably before. It’s also been MISERABLE at least since then and probably before.
Because pre-industrial revolution farming sucked. It sucked horribly. And it kept you on the edge of subsistence. It double sucked when you were subjected to a Lord. Look, systems of serfdom, etc. didn’t come about because living in a Lord’s domain was so great, and everyone wove wreaths and danced around maypoles all the time, okay?
The bucolic paradise of a farmer’s life was mostly a creation of city dwellers, often noblemen, who saw it from the outside.
There are estimations that most people had trouble rearing even one child, and most of one generation’s peasants were people fallen from higher status. I don’t know. That might be exaggerated. Or it might not.
Even during the industrial revolution, it was normal for ladies bountiful to take baskets of food to tenant farmers because…. they couldn’t make it on their own.
And btw, the more the industrial revolution pulled people to the cities, the more the Lords and “elites” talked about how great the countryside was and how terrible the factories/cities/new way of living were.
A lot of artists and pseudo bohemians jumped in on this bandwagon and so did Marx, who was both a pseudo bohemian, by birth “elite” (Well, his family had a virtual slave attached to him. He impregnated her too, as was his privilege), and by self-flattery intellectual.
Therefore the factories were the worst thing ever, the men who owned them, aka capitalists were terrible, terrible people — mostly because Marx wasn’t one, and probably because they laughed at him — and the proletariat they exploited horribly would rise up and–
All bullshit of course. Later on his fiction needed retconning by Anthony Gramsci who, having the sense to realize the “workers” weren’t rising up, just getting wealthier and escaping the clutches of the “elites” more made the “proletariat” a sort of “world proletariat” centered on poorer/more dysfunctional countries. This had the advantage of making the exploited masses always be elsewhere (or the supposed exploiters) and therefore made it easier to pitch group against group to the eternal profit of rather corrupt “elites.” Mostly political classes which are descended from “the best people.”
But Marx was right.
I mean, in one small thing. The history of humanity is a struggle between self proclaimed “classes.”
It just has absolute ZERO to do with who owns “capital” and who “works” all of which are bullshit class divisions.
The struggle is between those who want to outfit humans with saddles, so they can ride them like ponies and those who escape being ridden. And both tendencies appear to be cultural.
If you’re culturally descended from the romantics, who found living in the countryside great and the industrial revolution a tragedy, you might be an idiot. If you’re not an idiot, then you’re probably identifying with the rulers who, looking from the outside, thought that living off the land was great, and the famines and struggles, honestly, probably more than those dirty peasants deserved. I mean, the rebellious masses never tug the forelock enough amiright?
Most of Marx’s most vociferous followers in the present, including Sandy of the Occasional Cortex and Bernie are of this kind. “The masses need to be ruled, and I’m just the person to do it.” They might use the environment or the land, or whatever to justify why their way is best, but what they mean is “These people should live in poverty, so I can have my inevitable place as their ruler.”
If you’re culturally a bourgeois, you’ll be accused of all sorts of horrible things. They’ll throw stuff at you, tell you that you want to exploit people (they project like an imax) and call you unimaginative, a stick in the mud, conformist, and whatever else they find.
In fact, you’re something quite new in the world. You neither want to be ruled nor to rule. You want to rule yourself. You apply the virtues of thrift, self control, and planing, to stay out of the clutches of the would be nobles in government, and you don’t have any interest in paying for those who refuse to follow those virtues either (though you’re unreasonably generous, often, to those in genuine need.)
The Marxists hate this so much they made bourgeoisie an insult. They keep trying to justify the success that comes to those who observe principles of self rule as all sorts of “privilege.” They keep trying to show that those who just let themselves be ruled are much better off, but the lie only holds up as long as no one actually looks closely. I mean, look at the “ruled” cities in the US.
These are, broadly speaking, US. The people who neither want to lead nor follow, but want to tread their own path and earn their own way.
And in the US we’re still majority. (The tell was when people in 2016 voted for the candidate that promised the jobs instead of those who promised welfare.)
The intellectual descendants of Marx HATE that, and keep trying to tell us the “struggle” is between wholly imaginary classes, “workers” “Intellectuals” “capitalists” or between races, or between sexes. Anything to continue refusing to own up to the fact that they have all these lovely spurs, and we’re supposed to wear the saddle, so they can ride us.
And this is why though they have hundreds of countries who conform to their model, they must take us down. While we exist, we refute their beloved theory.
And it’s why we must fight like rabid wolverines. Because we have nowhere else to go.
Keep fighting! Make the annual pissing on Marx’s grave festival a thing.
Do it for humanity.
Do it for the future.
Do it for the children.
(Posts on PJM this week (two are behind paywall. Should you decide to pay for them/membership please use discount code HOYT):
https://pjmedia.com/columns/sarah-hoyt/2020/07/29/be-not-afraid-in-the-end-we-win-they-lose-n725921
According To Hoyt 
I suspect Marx was both.
Marx was a grifter. Any biography, even ones by his followers, show that.
He may be the most talented grifter in human history, but that is all he was.
And also the grifter who has done the most wide ranging harm in history.
Rousseau set up the mindset that made Marx marketable, so I think he gets some votes. Certainly both graves should be replaced with urinals.
The grift that keeps on taking. . .
*turning ideas over in head*
Isn’t a grifter basically the same thing as somebody who does the justify-to-yourself-what-you-shouldn’t-want, but it’s pointed outward vs inward?
I guess…they’re just con artists.
Yeah. I’m a bit more sympathetic to those who con themselves, but only a bit.
I have always been bitterly amused that the most notorious progs – Marx, Rousseau, and our modern ilk – are almost without exception horrible people when it comes to their personal dealings with families and employees. They declaim the greatest good wishes for humanity at large, but are total sh*ts to those in their personal lives. Weird, that.
They project more than an outdoor theater
His wife blamed the death of one of their children on Karl, because he wouldn’t bother to pay for a doctor and insisted on keeping their apartment cold (fuel for heating and hot water cost money he could spend on himself). The girl came down with something that turned into a severe pneumonia and she died.
There’s a special place in perdition for anyone who would do that to their children.
In Dante’s Inferno those that break their familial bonds like that would be in the circle of the traitors the 9th level. Marx probably kicked cats too the self important schlub.
You realize what this means, right?
Hitler was literally closer to a decent human being than Marx.
This is true. Hitler was a great boss to his secretary, and a good neighbor by all accounts. Marx raped his maid and did other charming things.
Marx, Stalin, Mao, etc. were just unbelievable buttholes, but Hitler could have been a decent person. Maybe. Or maybe he was just a better actor, or shrewder about certain things.
Hitler’s problem was his prejudice. He was correct to be prejudiced against communists. He was incorrect to be prejudiced against peoples, ie. Jews and Slavs.
His prejudice defeated Hitler. If he had gone into Russia as anticommunist liberator, Stalin would have hung on a lamp post. Instead he thought of Slavs as subhuman, and Stalin was able to make the battle one of Russia defeating the invader..
If all Jewish scientists had stayed in Europe, as good Germans, he would have had the A bomb. So if Hitler had not been prejudiced, he would have been more dangerous. Yet Hitler’s prejudice was not that different from many at the time. America’s record certainly has some major stains. Remember, nice people can and are prejudiced. Just ask anyone with a relative who has drunk the kool-aid. Nice people poisoned by prejudice.
Today the prejudiced are the democrats, with their cancel culture, and bias against anyone who disagrees with them. Prejudice is dangerous to those who practice it, since it can be a source of false information. If you are sure you know, it becomes more difficult to find and live the Truth. We need to learn what we don’t know, a lifelong journey.
Apparently a Jewish girl noped him. And he had been gassed in WWI. A monster, sure. But it was ultimately his choice. He chose his hell.
And there are many now who think the same. In Europe, mostly. Including expatriate Americans. Blood and fucking soil.
It’s instinct. It’s the oldest sin of mankind.
Only America has risen above it. Which is another reason they hate us. My mom: “People are so mixed” said with anguish “You can’t tell their ancestry or breed.”
Yeah.
Nor do most of us care. Heck, I was a little disappointed when Ancestry updated my profile and took out the “Iberian peninsula,” bit. I was hoping for some exotic blood.
It might come back. Also Ancestry is unreliable, at least compared to 23 and me.
Indeed. Hybrid vigor for the win!
…Which explains why America has to have great dentists, because our teeth/jaw mismatches are all over the place. *Wry G*
I’ve read, now and then, about how American Jews being Americans weirds out Europeans.
It’s attitudes like these (and Deep Lurker’s comment below) that make Bob’s “let’s kill everyone” positions start to sound somewhat less insane.
The rest of the world can’t seem to comprehend even kindergarten level Civilization.
It just matters to them in ways that don’t make any sense to me.
I know it mattered to my grandmother, mostly as setting basic expectations in a person, but I’d look at someone’s clothes with my near zero understanding of fashion before I’d be guessing their ancestry to identify behavior– maybe that’s the difference?
The race is a place-stay for culture? With small enough countries, it’s not complete out of there, and it would explain stuff like somebody whose grand-dad was from France being known as George-the-Frenchman or some such.
The late, great Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals lays it all out in great detail. What a bunch!
When did he die?
Yah, according to Wiki he isn’t dead.
I do apologize. I had thought he was dead these several years. The last Inhad from him was his history of art.
I believe Percy Shelley falls in that category too.
I read many years ago an article about people who accompany authors on book tours to help manage signings and media appearances, as well as making sure everything on the road goes smoothly. There were certain authors who had a bad reputation among these wranglers and one of them was Betty Friedan. She was notoriously rude, obnoxious, demanding, and just plain mean even to the women who worked her book tours.
On the other hand, the media made Phyllis Schafly look like an evil harridan but everyone who knew her or worked with her said she was warm and friendly. Go figure.
Wait.
Authors have RODIES?
At least in the past, some pampered bestselling authors did have roadies, yes.
I’m not even sure it was a pampering thing. Florence King, who took to pampering about like an electric eel takes to cuddles, had a roadie/handler on book tours to get her to interviews and help her as needed in an unfamiliar city. From the language used, I drew the conclusion that it was a publisher-provided service and that the roadie varied by city, rather than following the author around. FWIW.
Back when publishers actually made money and sold books, it was to their advantage to make sure that bestselling authors got where they were going.
Right. Back when they gave a damn.
That’s what I meant by pampering. Giving the author somebody to keep them from getting lost and helping them find food and whatnot helped keep authors on schedule and happy, and hence more likely to have a successful publicity tour and willing to do another for the next book. Back when publishers cared about making money by selling books instead of pushing the narrative du jour and funneling money to the “right” politicians in the form of unjustifiable advances.
Where do they get the money for those advances, anyway? All their books lose money; just ask the accountants! It’s evident that the publishers are laundering money, so where does it come from? Soros?
———————————
Q: How do you get a million dollars day-trading in the stock market?
A: Start with two million!
Could be from the owners (or their friends), could be from other sources the publishers manage. Many of the big publishers are part of big conglomerates. Some also have other divisions that make money publishing textbooks, classics that are required reading, reference works, older popular works (Agatha Christie, Louis L’amour, Doyle, Sayers, etc.), etc.
A; Actually start with 10-100 Million 🙂
It seems likely that is for the benefit of the bookstores, ensuring they don’t have throngs of adoring fans wondering where their highly anticipated author could have gotten to, how it is that their author arrived an hour and a half late, reeking of cheap liquor and cheaper hookers.
–
I recall Michael Medved telling of, while still young and full of Liberal piety, serving as Teddy Kennedy’s local “assistant/driver” when the
LiarLion of the Senate came to his community to do some stumping for local candidates.Medved cites that experience as the beginning of his conversion to conservatism.
–
*snaps fingers* MEDVED!
Thank you, I’ve been trying to remember his name since yesterday as an example of someone who does what Ellen DeGeneres does, but without seeming kinda fake, like a preschool teacher trying to show interest in the 45th macaroni rainbow of the day.
Plus, last time I was listening to him regularly, he was recovering from…some kind of cancer, I think, and I wanted to see how he’s doing. Now I can find his podcast. 😀
And today they produce “Ellen.”
I have no idea if she’s more of a “monster” than your average media personality. (Though weirdly no one really complains about Trump on that.)
What I know is that her show is …. mentally handicapped. I got subjected to it in a hospital waiting room, while son was having issues recovering from anesthesia (so it took a while. The entire family reacts weirdly to anesthesia. Blame Neanderthal genes) and I kept thinking it was a show for toddlers. Seriously. I kept expecting her to ask someone their name, and then clap they knew it and give them some prize. It was THAT fucking stupid. I wanted to scream.
Everyone always goes on and on about how “excited” Ellen is when she’s interviewing guests and how “engaging” she is as a host.
I don’t get it.
Honestly, on the rare occasions when I watch clips of the show, she seems completely uninterested in whoever she’s speaking with and completely bored out of her mind.
I’ve had the opposite reaction to the few clips,of her show I’ve seen. But then, I’m looking for interviews with specific people, most of whom have electric personalities.
*shrug*
She was pretty good as Dory. As for the rest, most of the Woke strike me as fairly toxic, so I’m not surprised. OTOH, the Left is eating it’s own at a great rate, and much of what people are being ‘cancelled’ over strikes me as bushwa.
She usually seems excited, and does a good job, but….well, if I was going to parody her, I’d probably go the route of the school teacher who acts super excited about absolutely everything.
Even though the way she does it trips all my “they are faking it/humoring them” responses, I THINK she’s just doing what the Coast to Coast hosts do, where they almost never sound less than in at least warm agreement with the person being interviewed.
Her sitcom was amusing enough back in the day. It got lame when she came out as gay, because *every* joke had to center around that for some reason.
We get it, you dig chicks. Now make with the funnies already!
It always struck me that Marx must be a rehash of the Leviathan, just with a ‘scientific’ venier now, rather than a simple divine right of kings rational.
Their motto says it after all: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Ask, what is the noun? What is the verb? Answer, and the hidden dagger is in plain sight.
c4c
c4c
Therefore the factories were the worst thing ever, the men who owned them, aka capitalists were terrible, terrible people
There was also a very strong strain of anti-Semitism in Marx’s screeds and Marx was explicit in stating that his vision of “ending capitalism” entailed “ending Jews”.
It should surprise no-one that the modern left shares this hatred of Jews.
He was the very definition of “Self-hating Jew”. His piece “On the Jewish Question” leaves no doubt.
Yeah, Marx was just a spoiled brat who was pissed that his inherited position in the elite no longer meant sh*t. So he tried to come up with a system by stealing ideals, that would destroy all those uppity peasants and get them back on the farm where he could screw and abuse them to his heart’s content. Just like his father, and his father’s father.
Sadly though, there are far too many idiots in the world today (common core, anyone) who fall for this sh*t.
Time for the Wayback Machine: “History consists for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same ‘troublous storms that toss the private state, and render life unsweet.’ These vices are the CAUSES of those storms. religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are THE PRETEXTS. The pretexts are always found in soome specious appearance of a real good.” –Edmund Burke
Thomas Sowell’s “Vision of the Anointed” ( https://amzn.to/313oMoE ) is all about this. They’re the “anointed” and, thus, they must see stuff that us poor, benighted peons can’t possibly grasp.
Things that make you go hmmmmm…. I popped over to Amazon to download a sample of it (i’ve got a couple others of his on my TBR) and the kindle edition is ‘Not currently available for purchase’ And “Item under review.”
But Amazon doesn’t censor……. In a pig’s eye!
It’s available (still) on KoboBooks and you can preview it.
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-vision-of-the-anointed-4
In their defense, when I got it last year, it was an OCR scan that had some serious punctuation and spacing problems. So this once it might be complaints about the quality of the scan, not politics. Perhaps.
The left also makes quality complaints about my books on a regular basis forcing me to confirm “yes, I want to sell this book, despite ONE typo being identified in it.”
Only ONE? In a *book*? Congratulations!
Oh, there’s more than one. I’ve found four just glancing at the file. Books are like that. But that’s how I know it’s crank complaints. Someone emailed all their friends and told them to complain of this ONE typo.
Amazon has not yet figured out* that there should be penalties for false complaints. In the case of a judicial system, the penalty for a false accusation should be that the false accuser gets put on trial to see if you can prove that they knew the accusation was false (to the same “beyond a reasonable doubt” standards, because after all, you don’t want to punish cases of mistaken identity), and then if it’s proven that they knowingly made a false accusation, they get the same punishment that they were trying to inflict on the other person. In the case of false complaints of book quality, etc., you can’t exactly punish the person judicially. But you can set an invisible flag on their account that says “Known to submit false complaints”, and any complaints that that account submits in the future will just be ignored and not trigger any action.
* Or, of course, they have figured it out but deliberately allow leftist complaints to go through and just ignore conservative complaints, like Twitter does.
Slashdot, years ago, set up a meta-moderation system where the moderation choices got reviewed. For all the stupidity of Slashdot, that one of the better ideas. That and adding a base-URL in plaintext next to links, to avoid the worst trolling of the time: {useful/interesting seeming link} [goat.se]. If you do not know – YOU LUCKY BASTAGE!
Do not know, but have heard about. You saw? Poor Ox!
On the other hoof, I have had the good fortune to only hear/read about the.. coprophagic… atrocity that is/was Two Girls, One Cup. So I might be ahead, somewhat. Of course they both fall into the decidedly dubious class of “small kidneystones are less annoying.”
While the problem in this case was a publisher switch, they definitely do listen to conservative complaints– I’ve flagged things for obscenity/being off topic before, and they’ve vanished.
Of course, I also do it very high quality, and have heard some of the outrage twits complaining stuff they flagged wasn’t removed. (It didn’t actually fit the standards claimed.)
That said, if there’s suddenly a bunch of very similar complaints that aren’t identical, it probably is a real complaint…unless you can add a human algorithm to go “Oh, yeah, there was a twitter storm about him, they’re malice-flags.”
Based on some observations by some other people I’ve seen, it is possible that there may be a coordinated effort to put things under review due to quality complaints right now, because this would make at least four that I have seen.
FWIW, I have it on Audible. I have a lot of economics, politics, and history stuff for when I’m driving.
He just did another “piss off the progs by treating blacks as humans” article, probably got another flag-storm going.
Might be the Chinese, though, if they’re so desperate they’re sending seeds to fake sales.
It’s also available if you click on the link above, then all editions, then kindle, then the one that has a price listed.
Looking at the data on it, he switched publishers.
File Size: 2368 KB
Print Length: 278 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: B004NSVEV4
Publisher: Basic Books (July 23, 2019)
Publication Date: July 23, 2019
Sold by: Hachette Book Group
Language: English
ASIN: B07R3HQMF9
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #45,477 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#5 in Public Affairs & Administration (Kindle Store)
#11 in Public Policy (Kindle Store)
#15 in Social Policy
is the one I link, and
File Size: 2368 KB
Print Length: 278 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: B004NSVEV4
Publisher: Basic Books (July 23, 2019)
Publication Date: July 23, 2019
Sold by: Hachette Book Group
Language: English
ASIN: B07R3HQMF9
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #45,477 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#5 in Public Affairs & Administration (Kindle Store)
#11 in Public Policy (Kindle Store)
#15 in Social Policy
is the one at TWIB’s link drop page.
The live link is also the one that searching for “anointed sowel” brings up, which is much more useful for somebody that maybe heard the name of both and is going “dang, I can’t remember anything about that book except I wanted it.”
>> “Things that make you go hmmmmm….”
How many years has it been since I heard an Arsenio Hall reference? 🙂
Dunno about you, but I think it was within the past year I heard “Don’t Touch That!” which mentions “the gummy gums of Arsenio Hall.”
I now suddenly ponder future historians, working with disjoint fragments of information, trying to locate where the Arsenio Hall was constructed.
“Those people over there are people who think the Arsenio Hall was built in New York.”
Nope. Cleveland, Ohio. 😆
Seriously, he was born in Cleveland, Ohio. 😉
Wait, are telling me there actually is a building called the Arsenio Hall? I just picked New York at random.
Nope, there is a Man named Arsenio Hall and he was born in Cleveland, Ohio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenio_Hall
I already knew about the man. Orvan and I were joking that future historians would think Arsenio Hall was a building.
😀
And I was playing off that by saying that Hall’s Origin as in Cleveland Ohio. 😉
So where was the Albert of Albert Hall born?
4,000 holes… rather small.. but they had to count them all…
Brighton, Alabama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hall_(actor)
😆
And the root of it is the gnawing feeling that they aren’t so goddamned special after all. It eats into the ‘intellectual’ class like acid. Especially the Academics, most of whom are lousy scholars and don’t much LIKE scholarship.
That’s why they were afraid of my Father. He was a Scholar, he knew his stuff, and he published. Maybe not a lot compared to somebody like Agatha Christie, but one hell of a lot more than most of them ever managed.
Also known as the ‘Delusions of Adequacy World Tour’. . .
I think farming is fascinating, but I don’t think we all should be feudal. Not unless we can be landowners with armies of robot helpers (tractors, fertilizer, pest control, water management, construction, and a million other things) That is… A small personal dream. I may or may not layout my estate in my free time, outbuildings and all. And free energy, like a nuclear reactor for every village. Maybe I am weird? Or read too much sf?
But I thank heaven for modern farming… Every time I eat. Because famine is a memory of the past thanks to that.
A useful graph of famine vs population vs time… one can easily match up various historical events with the regional spikes and declines.
I’ve said before, all of history could look this way and ask, “You have food OVERproducton?! And you call it a problem?! Anyone wanna trade times? PLEASE!” Same for much else. Britain lost a cryptographer (I think he was) to an infection from a rose thorn scratch at the start of WWII. Now? “Take one of these, three times a day, for two weeks. But be sure to take all of them, even if everything seems alright.” (Actually, it might be different now. I haven’t had a course of antibiotics for a decade or more.)
Now it depends on the antibiotic. Some are once a day for five days, others range up to the 3/day for 14 days. It also depends on what is being treated. Dental infections tend to receive longer courses of antibiotics than, say, sinus infections.
–
I just had a redo of a root canal (actually two, the tooth has two root canals, who knew?), to clean out bacteria, because of a dental infection, no antibiotics. The root canal is suppose to let the infection be taken care of without antibiotics. I get to go to the regular dentist Tuesday for the permanent filling (specialist who redoes root canals only puts in a temporary).
Heh. I’ve never had an infection after a dental procedure, only before, so that’s what I was thinking about. Had an infected molar that the dentist told me had gotten down into my jawbone and produced an infected area the size of a nickel. Boy, that one hurt.
The infection I have is from before the dental procedure. It is why they had to do the root canal. Just they didn’t give antibiotics to clear it up. OTOH, mine is more the size of a dot on the xRay. One of those, for two prior cleanings “Occasionally one of these two teeth hurt-ish, but aren’t now.” But the third time, hadn’t been hurting but had gotten two “blisters”, so for a year of/on problems. They took an *xray & saw the infection between the two teeth. Question was which old (we’re talking 15 & 17 years ago) prior root canal needed redoing. Specialist, as our dentist doesn’t redo them.
* I don’t have dental insurance so other than cleaning I put off the extras as long as possible. Not that medicare, when it kicks in pays, for dental procedures beyond cleanings & xrays.
And bone infections might require a month or two of antibiotics, IV, via PICC line. In my recent case it was vancomycin.
Give it time, I’m sure the Hunger is just waiting to come back….
“Make the annual pissing on Marx’s grave festival a thing.”
T’hell wit dat! Set up a bar graveside and open a keg – one red solo cup, one dollar!
Over time the concession license fee can be auctioned off and maybe get a brewery to sponsor it (Sam Adams or Coors would seem appropriate).
–
I rather like that idea.
Coors..the same at both ends.
While I have NOT run the experiment, nor do I intend to, I suspect the.. output.. would be more flavor (note: did NOT say pleasant) than the input. Once upon a time I risked a can of Coors Light. Mind you, I drink plain seltzer when abstaining from stimulants/depressants.. and I was disappointed in the extreme. Not much later I bought another can, and compared it to plain seltzer spiked with a carefully computed amount of rectified spirits* to get the equivalent ABV. So help me, the (spiked) PLAIN SELTZER had more and better flavor. That should NOT happen!
* 190 proof. Not the 151 nonsense. As much ethanol as distillation can provide.
Back when I drank as a young man I used to call Bud Light “fuzzy water” and Coors Light “sweet fuzzy water”. Neither had much of a flavor.
Also, I read the manifesto recently, he doesn’t even make the middle class sound bad. It’s like bad fictional history plus imaginary not- humans for the speculative future, and pretty boring as a novel. But the part about the middle class, he admits they made life better materially. All the gains are from bourgeois innovation.
#defineirony
People who disdain the wisdom of dead old white men who slavishly follow the economic-political theory of a dead old white man.
Forgot to clicky the boxy…
There was a British show on history. Some Archeologists had been digging in a village pit and found human bones, jumbled, cleaned, possibly boiled. They dated them, thinking that some horrible event had taken place. They found the bones stretched over 300 years in small groupings. Missing for years then some for a couple years, then none, and repeated. They first thought, what all Archeologists think that it was some ritual, but that didn’t fit. Just a pit off by itself. Not a lot else in it. It was also the ages of the people when they died. Some were very young, some children, some older, some adults, some injured (broken bones, part healed). It was strange. They finally came up with something that fit all the evidence and looked at the history of the years when the peopled died. It matched their new theory. It was simple, every now and then there was a famine. Some had to die that the village could go on. Those that were not going to survive the famine anyway were sacrificed so that the village could live. Over the period, they put them in the pit, out of sight, were they could be ignored. But always another famine would come, and again it was needed. A small Farming Village, like thousands of others, that survived by doing what had to be done. It wasn’t just about hunger, if the people lived, they would eat and then everybody starved and died.
Yes, they moved to the cities, for the work, pay, and lack of famines (hunger yes, famines no). Village life long was hard, demanding, cruel and hope/pray that there is enough food until the next harvest.
Who knew that a village in England discovered the “Cold Equations” so long ago.
Kodos The Executioner
Some years (goodness, decades!) back I ran into a study my (history teacher) Mother had mentioned when I was still in high school. It showed (or, be fair, purportedly showed) that the first generation of factory workers in the British Industrial Revolution at an average of a thousand calories a day more than their pastoral farmer Parents had, and were less illiterate, and less ignorant besides. Sadly, I no longer remember the name of the book I found it in, but I’m sure it’s around somewhere.
Were they well fed and well educated? Hell, no! But they were malnourished, not starving. They were subliterate not illiterate. They were ignorant, not pig-ignorant.
If you dig into who started railing against ‘the injustices of industrialism’ you do tend to find two types; people who belonged to the Landed Class, pining for lost glories, and people descended from the older middle class, pissed off that they weren’t uncommon anymore.
I mean, being able to read and write and parse a little Latin used to MEAN something before all these peasants got uppity!
I think the modern ‘Intellectuals’ still suffer from that resentment. Especially in the face of people with name tags on their shirts who actually understand how the technology we all depend upon WORKS.
And the name-tag guys often reciprocate, until you prove you aren’t a jerk.
I had the job of Head Of Security at a small outlet mall in New Jersey (I was ridiculously placed there, but I needed the job), and the Head of Maintenance was standoffish until one day he unloaded on me about how I obviously thought I was better than him because I had a large vocabulary and read all the time. I told him, “Don’t be ridiculous; I’m not better than you, I just swallowed a dictionary when I was small. YOU know how to fix things. You’re the only reason anything around here WORKS!”
From then on we were friends, until Management got around to undoing their mistake and firing me.
BTW and a side note: I never thought people in the village were malnourished. Of course I didn’t.
BUT I noticed families that immigrated and were usually the poorest of the poor, when they came back, they had a citified look.
Citified?
Yeah. Their features were just different and they looked like the kids whose parents were from the city and had just bought houses in the village, when they could afford cars….
Looking at old pictures, though, makes it clear. We (even those of us slightly overweight) had that sharpened look you see on the faces of people where food is scarce.
Look, my family (unlike mom’s) was middle class. We always had food on the table, and at a minimum an egg for protein.
BUT food was seasonal. People in cities got canned/frozen stuff. We only got stuff when in season. Which means winter was no vegetables or fruits. And vitamins weren’t available/given.
Yeah……
Lovely rural life.
Ah, the lovely rural life! The Landowner living in reasonable comfort, and everybody else enjoying the Pastoral squalor.
*spit*
In early modern London, the rate of baptism was what you would expect from the percentage of population in London.
The rate of funerals, OTOH, was through the roof.
With the current situation, we’re getting a chance to revisit this. When I get groceries, I get to play “what’s available and what’s short this time?” Thursday, rice was available, if you count a lone 25 pound bag at the restaurant supply as “available”, while Kroger peanut butter in the 4 pound jars was missing. The house brand of Mozzarella was totally out at the independent store, but Monterey Jack is a fair substitute.
Green beans & beets are still out. Black and Kidney beans are in limited supply. People griping about the mask order, plentiful.
The mission was really happy to get a bag-o-squash. “It’ll go into today’s salad.” Not sure to be amused or scared.
Scared.
What’s short varies by time AND location. Locally, green beans are no issue at the moment, beans in general are available though brand preferences might take a hit. Rice is available – but form factor varies. There are plenty of place where “odd” brands fill in. In some cases the ‘Hispanic’ product is used as that’s what can be had, and it not in the ‘ethnic’ food aisle. There are plenty of places where one item is spread across a shelf so the shelf doesn’t look Soviet Union. I overheard that supply chain issues were not expected to settle out to something approaching normal for about a year. If you have preferences and they are available and keep, stock up when/while you can. Things aren’t smooth now. It’s likely get downright bumpy through the Winter and into Spring.
The bulk rice we usually get for the mission came from Texas; the lone bag at the restaurant supply from California. I’m guessing there’s trouble at the production end, since both states use a fair amount of Mexican labor. Early on in COVID Panic, there were a bunch of stories about migrant workers (legal and otherwise) gone back to Mexico for the duration.
I’m not sure what other effects Gavin Noisome’s orders have had on Cal Agriculture, but knowing that guy, he’s screwed them over but good.
Only good news is that pinto beans are back on the shelf, though running 30% more expensive than March. That shortage I understand; 2020 got mean early in the year for several production areas. What’s out there now is probably this years crop from $SOMEWHERE.
The non-wheat flours and starches we use are in short supply; much of that is milled in Oregon, and Kate’s done her work to screw that up. Fortunately, we’ve been paranoid about problems for years.
I’m not doing apples to apples because I can’t and won’t do the mask thing for WalMart, but I’ve noticed our out of the way HyVee has very few things missing. The big rice bags aren’t here, but they may have NEVER been here; I couldn’t find medium grain, but checking the shop online thing they’ve got it now….
But I know my folks in Washington are having a lot of supply issues. And the folks in Oregon have mentioned it. And stuff I use to get from that area when I buy Amazon is now coming from Kansas instead.
I suspect it may be indulgence of protesters involved. You can’t have a supply chain where your truck not only may be hijacked but will hit illegal hours on the road because some idiot has daddy issues and is playin gon the freeway.
I’ve seen a couple of stories where the truck drivers have said they won’t deliver in towns that defund their police. Reginald Denny is still remembered.
Hell, the kid in IIRC Minneapolis that came around a corner to find the activists had decided to play in traffic!
That kid was put in the hospital even WITH some members of the mob dragging him away from the guys trying to beat him to death.
What scares me?
Some very nice, inoffensive folks I speak with think that is a sign in the mob’s favor.
Yeah, they were trying to rip apart the guy who was driving, on the road, and had no way to know they were there– but somebody dragged him away before he was dead!
Had I the misfortune to live in a large city I would be SERIOUSLY considering flame-projectors for the vehicle, ala South Africa. People tend to move the hell away from fire.
I’ve been a driver for decades, and made my decisions on how I’d behave in similar situations many years ago. Most of the drivers I know have done the same. I do have to try to find the name of that poor gasoline tanker driver who got the tar kicked out of him.
Darwin at work (as the shooting in Austin showed too)
We are blocking this road!
Look a driver, get him
beat driver
We are blocking this road!
Look a driver, get him
beat driver
We are blocking this road!
Look a driver, get him
beat driver
We are blocking the road!
Driver sees us and DOES NOT STOP,
Whaaaa He’s being mean to us, why no one care?
This will not end well.
The other end is Protesters carrying guns
butbutbut Michigan “terrorists” had guns to intimidate Whitmer!!!!!!11
How many pointed their guns at someone?
there is a big difference between carrying a pistol in holster secured in place, or an AR slung over the back with the mag out, and carrying an AK at muzzle down ready, mag in, stopping someone while doing your illegal activity, and then lifting the muzzle towards them. Only a fool lets you cover them at that point. I’m not interested in hearing whinging about added orifices received.
Bogdan Vechirko, of Otsego.
Which they helpfully announced ASAP.
Along with releasing the booking photo. For, you know, driving on a road…interesting how a supposedly shut down and BARRIERS ERECTED blocked road somehow didn’t stop traffic.
Oh! Look, he was released in June. And the investigation is pending, and suddenly the claim that the freeway was shut down for hours is “they were in the process of” shutting it down. Hm, that sounds an awful lot like the a-holes in Seattle, where the guy was driving his sports car on the freeway when protesters walked on it, and he managed to NOT kill himself on their large, black vehicles, but hit two of the useful idiots. That one, the news story insisted the road was closed…while citing the cops’ PR twitter, which clearly stated they had re-opened it hours earlier, and only started re-closing it AFTER the accident, although the PR twitter had good reason to not realize the closure was probably triggered by the accident.
Note: they didn’t release THAT booking photo. He’s a black immigrant.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/truck-driver-minneapolis-protesters-interstate-35w-bogdan-vechirko-released-from-jail/
If I’m in a car and they swarm, I’m stomping the gas. I won’t go meekly to hell without an escort.
When we moved down to El Paso, my husband (I have mentioned international terror is his weird fandom, right?) did a basic “tactics to not be dead” type thing.
Things like “if you see a baby seat on the side of the road, with a kid in it, DO NOT STOP unless there is absolutely nowhere that somebody could hide in sight, they have sniped people before” and “if someone throws himself or herself in front of the car, do not stop. The NICEST option is that you, and the kids, will die.”
Basically, exactly the tactics you would use if you wanted to survive being a driver in Afghanistan.
In the 19th century, writers commented on the “more virile” appearance of French peasants who had served as soldiers and so got to enjoy army rations while still young enough to grow some more.
I seem to recall that one of the complaints the English had about our troops stationed there for two world wars was how “well fed” we seemed. This was exemplified in an exchange i the movie about WWI’s Lost battalion, in an exchange between a German officer and American prisoner:
Maj. Prinz: You Americans, you always have so much of everything. No matter. Eventually you have to surrender.
Lt. Leak: I don’t think so.
Maj. Prinz: Are you officers so callous? You’re surrounded. You have no chance of relief. Every night you send out patrols, and every night we kill them. We can hear the cries of your wounded Lieutenant. There is no dishonor in surrender.
Lt. Leak: Maybe for you, but my guys are different.
Maj. Prinz: What do you mean?
Lt. Leak: What you’re up against Major, is a bunch of Mick, Pollack, Dago, and Jew boy gangsters from New York City. They’ll never surrender. Never.
Yeah. Americans are BIGGER in comparison to their bloodlines. Not fatter. Bigger.
More protein.
I think this is what our current stomping on our rights is supposed to “fix” for the elites.
Yep. According to BMI (based on European norms) I am “obese”. Body fat percentage (both electrical test in my scale and “what does a particular body fat percentage look like” pics agree) I’m right on the edge of “fit” and “overweight” (up a bit since the shutdowns have kept me from my primary exercise for several months). I am hardly a “bodybuilder” type. Just…big for my height, at least as compared to those scrawny French dudes. 😉 The only time I had a “healthy” BMI (again, those European norms) was when I was training as a competitive cyclist and I had a body fat under 10%. (I don’t think I’ll ever see that again. If I can get down to about 15% I’ll be ecstatic. 😉 )
BMI isn’t just based on European norms, it is also completely based around a runner’s physique. Whenever dealing with BMI remember that Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he was Mister Universe, was obese according to BMI.
And runners have notoriously poor outcomes in old age.
Don’t go crazy and hoard but make sure you’re a few weeks ahead on non-perishables especially if there’s something you particularly like and would miss if it weren’t in the pipeline for a month or two.
Taken note of – yes, there is a particular brand of loose tea that I like. I’ll make certain that I have a six-month supply of it. And also, see if we can cram any more non-perishable items in the pantry.
We’ve been preparing for shortages for a good few years…
At least I have the pseudo-virtue of having my paternal ancestor actually come from Bohemia. I have a vegetable garden, a tractor, and lots of lovely wooded land. I still would not want to have to subsistence farm it.
“Well, his family had a virtual slave attached to him. He impregnated her too, as was his privilege.”
#YesAllLeftists
And got Engels to “take the fall” for it.
The boy lived to grow up, which is more than can be said for Rousseau’s children.
Gramsci is also the guy who came up with the idea that Capitalists use culture to numb the Proletariat into tolerating their lot. You know, cheap entertainment, cheap food and beer (OK, wine in Italy and France), and the illusion that if you work hard, you can have a better lifestyle, thus turning yourself into a traitor to your class. Cultural hegemony is the term. (Gramsci’s theory is a lot more complicated and eloquent sounding, at least until you think too hard. Fanon and Co. then picked the idea up and made it worse.)
It was thinking of this. It’s funny how Marxism appeals only to intellectuals while wherever the workers organized themselves (the US & UK mostly) they stayed away from it. I think religion had a lot to do with that. Meaney at the AFL CIO was an old line RC, no communism for him and the old British Labour Party came out of the chapels. The fact that neither of those churches was the establishment church probably helped.
Now, the American unions are all led by lawyers who’ve never worked and the UK by a bunch of intellectuals living in Islington. Workers concerns are gone and they worry about all the woke causes.
I remember coming across a line from Habermas where he was claiming that intellectuals must lead the class struggle because they were not members of any class and thinking that only intellectuals were members of a class the rest of us worked for a living.
What it comes down to is the Intellectuals kept trying to shoehorn the ‘working class’ into a lifestyle the working class wanted nothing to do with. I’ve posted about it before, and it sounds like a caricature, but the Progressives really did imagine the ‘workers’ living in Bauhaus Worker Housing, convenient to public transportation, and going to lectures or listening to Mahler in the evenings. You run into it again and again. Basically, they expected the workers to want to live the way the ‘intellectual’ class lived.
The workers, OTOH, wanted cars. They’d had enough public transportation, thank you very much. They wanted to go down to the Pub/Bar of an evening, or listen to Jazz, or watch The Fights on TV. They wanted nothing to do with the kind of furniture the ‘Intellectuals’ were so goddamned fond of; the Modernist chairs that catch you like a karate chop under the shoulder blades.
And, since Industrialism generates huge amounts of wealth, the workers could get what they wanted, and didn’t have to settle for what the Intellectual Twerps thought they OUGHT to want.
This – and this disinclination on the part of the so-called ‘working class’ to behave in the manner that the ‘intellectual woke-class’ assumed that they should … well, the intellectual woke-class went off in a snit. “Their working class pets wouldn’t do as they were ordered! Wah, wah wah!”
And the intellectual woke-class went off looking for a body of people who would do as they were ordered.
Alas, hilarity hasn’t yet ensured, although I am still waiting.
….wait… so the guys who think that if they take popular characters, and make them {target minority group}, and make them do {currently desired thing to have the plebs doing], we’ll do it– think that the only reason folks aren’t commies is the same brain washing?
Gads. No wonder they go into shock when folks would rather go without than read/watch/buy their junk.
I guess it kind of goes with the whole government violence thing, though– it’s fine to say you’ll send cops to pull my gun from my cold, dead hands, but heaven forbid that I don’t come protect you from the cops who are arresting you for using explosives on them and federal buildings.
It’s funny (but definitely NOT amusing) how fireworks are so deadly dangerous that they must be banned ‘for the children’ but somehow they are not deadly weapons when deliberately shot at the police.
———————————
Dark Willow: “Bored now.”
My mom doesn’t watch the news.
She heard “Fireworks” and assumed the cute little bottle rockets, which is still stupid and dangerous adn will set things on fire, but….
Guess her reaction when I explained no, it was the stuff she wouldn’t let us buy in Kansas because it was the civilian grade version of what the professionals used, and she didn’t want the RESPONSIBLE folks in her family messing with that. Guys who would have been kicked out as idiots by the irresponsible cousins? Oh, dear Lord!
I am 100% convinced if they could make us buy their stuff, they would.
That’s what the “mandatory minimum living allowance” thing functions as.
Plus grants, and…yeah, gonna stop now before I get pissed.
Too late for me. Been pissed since Lockdown Order #1.
Amenn
Ditto. No library except with masks and by appointment… I could bite something.
Maybe that’s why the mask order is in place? Maybe they should change it to a muzzle order?
I found a mask with an image of a mouth with a ballgag in it. Could wear that for the implication of being silenced…
It makes (very twisted) sense. That would explain why they want to cancel everyone who doesn’t write their prescribed style, with everyone following the Left’s party line, with “special” demographics always being the heroes and capitalists/religionists/conservatives of any stripe the (usually hypocritical in some fashion) bad guy. Because they “know” that if you say it, it must be true, therefore no alternative views can be allowed, because they will tarnish the purity of the One True Way (TM).
True, which makes progressesivm a subset of psychosis. I agree, so how do we get it to be diagnosed as such and the sufferers committed as a danger to themselves and others?
I know, Soviet Union. Still this time it is real.
In England specifically, the alternative to factory work wasn’t even farming, but begging or crime – due to something Sir Thomas More described in Utopia: “your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heard say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves.”
https://www.bartleby.com/209/55.html
That is, the great English landowners were converting land from grain crops (that required many men to raise) to sheep pastures (which needed far fewer men) because wool brought higher prices than grain. (And More wrote that in the early 16th century – the practice continued all the way up to the Industrial Revolution.) What happened to the surplus population? Well, a lot of them went to the British colonies, once there were any; but before the factories the rest had to beg, steal or starve.
The “dark Satanic mills” saved the lives of those who worked in them.
See “Highland Clearances”.
It started under the Tudors, as it turns out, down in central and northern England, then spread north to Scotland. The Tudors . . . were not great for the common Englishman, even if they did have good taste in art and music.
There was the same thing noted in the Highlands of Scotland – when the highland lairds went to sheepfolds, instead of basic farming in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Where did the excess population go?
Well, off to America, Canada, Australia. And then the recruiters for the Highland regiments wondered – where had all the men gone?
*points at Grandma*
Via the mines, but yes.
“The bucolic paradise of a farmer’s life was mostly a creation of city dwellers, often noblemen, who saw it from the outside.”
A job interview for a position with the Parks Dept.
Hiring interviewer, “So many of our applicants these days seem to have A-levels and University degrees … no use to us at all, never know where you are with them. You’re the sort of chap we’re looking for! A lazy, criminal, drunkard.”
–
When I was in my MA program I took a class on Marx (yeah, yeah, I know). When you read his stuff in chronological order, which we did, you can see him getting louder and louder and more insistent that he be listened to. When he teamed up with Engels to write the Manifesto, the screaming reached its peak…”Pay attention to meee!” Sadly, most in academia did.
I am a child of the 70s so high school and college were filled with Marxism and its off-shoots. But, I grew up with a father who read Eric Hoffer, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Maya Angelou, and many others across genre and philosophy. We had an eclectic library to say the least. I’m trying to keep that legacy going and keep the screaming Marxists from the door.
They made us read him in FOUR courses in 7th grade. Ask me why I hate him. It was very obvious to me he was an insane blowhard.
I can only remember one weirdo professor in my college days (first iteration). History 1101 of the US until 1876.
He spent the class talking about how the red man black man and polka dot were all oppressed by “Whitey” no kid.
I dropped him since my pallor was not pleasing to him and he wasn’t shy about saying so.
I understand he got sacked when they found him. Hallucinating naked on top of his furniture which he had smashed and stacked up in the center of his living room.
Damn. You weren’t at Cal by any chance were you? LOL!
Too bad the rest of them don’t display their insanity so plainly. Though in some of our cities, those that do are invited to use the streets for toilets.
At this point I am so angry at our would be rulers that I think Conan the Barbarian made a great point when he stated what is best in life.
Be aware that you are NOT alone.
Was just saying it’s a miracle I haven’t been arrested for assault of some idiot yet.
There but for the grace of God…
You’ve met Dan. He says I can’t kill people. In a moment of weakness in our wedding ceremony I promised to obey him.
THAT’s the only thing keeping a lot of idiots alive.
This has been a strange conversation for me. Earlier I was picturing you having rodies, and now…
[suspicious look] What else are you not telling us about your lifestyle?
Ah Sweah Ah will nawt kill anyone.
?
What part confuses you?
The fact that WordPress hid the video
…does Sarah have a HUD that gives her possible responses to queries?
(…and thank you SO much for putting that image in my head, DGM.)
Is “Bless your heart” added to the menu when the Southern mod is installed? 😉
Dunno. Sounds like that’s a bit too extreme. 😉
I don’t know, but “This is my shocked face” and “Behold my middle fingers” are clearly in vanilla. 😛
And for extreme situations “Bless your little heart”. That reads as F you AND the horse you rode in on… Favorite Maternal uncle was married to a Georgia Bell type. Heard her deploy that ONCE when we went to a restaurant down in Atlanta area and we were badly handled by a waitress. Thought my Mom was going to squirt Coca-Cola out her nose, did NOT understand why as a 5 year old.
For the record: if it turns out I’ve just created a “Sarahnator” meme, I regret nothing.
Yeah, but sooner or later he’s Going to Have Had Quite Enough, Thank You.
“Where’s Sarah?”
“Got more fuel for her flamethrower and headed west. Why, did you want her to stop by on the way home?”
Nah, it always happens with the type who keeps everyone else from losing it that eventually, instead of saying, “Ok, that’s enough, have at it.” they are the one who snaps and starts destroying things and killing people.
So you’ll find Sarah sitting in her kitchen with her head down on the table. “Where’s Dan?” “He went off and started the Boog without me. He is SO not getting any dinner tonight!”
🙂
I’m pretty sure if he went, we wouldn’t find her at home.
^^^This^^^
I keep reminding myself of that bit from a Forever Knight ep, where the enraged vampire detective has a serious bad guy dangling over the edge of a building. Then his partner comes up. Does he use the “If you kill him you will be just like him” argument? Nooooope.
“You can’t kill him… think of the paperwork.”
Vampire detective blinks, blanches, puts guy back on the roof.
This morning I tried “Do you have proof commies are human?” I just got the look… Sigh.
I almost posted “human rights are for Humans, not Communists” earlier today, but I am not positive they have all abandoned their humanity.
Same, actually. The argument makes me feel skeevy. mostly I was picking on my husband.
People keep writing things that imply they think that human equates to good, or at least not monstrous. It does not. It is a DNA thing. In other words “I do not think that that word means what you think it does.”.
Now I am fine with calling them both psychotic and insane in the legal meaning of not being able to tell right from wrong. Evil is another tag that I am perfectly willing to apply. But not human, no, not unless you cut them and they bleed green or something.
*waggles hand* DNA came much later, as a means to describe the existing group.
“Human” in common use means person, specifically person made in God’s image and with the inherent moral requirements on us as a result. (Yes, I’m limiting it to the most common philosophies that will actually be involved in the “human”=”not a monster.” Nobody’s paying me for it.)
I’m equally skivved out by not human=> blanket OK to abuse as by are bad enough to deserve to die=> are not human, but I know which one tends to be shortly before humans do really, really bad things.
I need to lose some more weight before I can sit on my kitchen table like that, but yeah.
On a related note, some Twit on Twitter this morning posted a Nelson Mandela quote:
“Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the action of human beings.”
Most of the responses recognized how stupid this was, but there were several who seemed to think that hunter gather tribes lived in luxury, working little, eating plenty, and having lots of time for art, music, and dance. I think my favorite was the one who suggested we could get a good idea of how primitive tribes lived by watching the 80s comedy “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”
What the hell do they mean poverty is not natural. It’s the natural state of mankind.
I’ve lived in those cultures. It is not what they think it is. (50% mortality by age 5? I’m glad we are past that.)
That quote gave me a traumatic brain injury.
Sure would be a shame for someone (not me; I won’t get within a parsec of Twitter) to post the Lazarus Long “Bad Luck” quote, preferably from an anonymous account.
Today’s ‘poor’ live better than medieval lords.
* They’re not starving. Many of them are obscenely fat.
* Infectious disease is almost unknown in the worst slums.
* They have access to clean water and indoor bathrooms.
* Most of them have all their TEETH.
* They can read, if they just bother to learn.
* They have free access to 3,000 years of accumulated wisdom (and idiocy).
* They can work, earn money, and KEEP it.
* The roads are not covered in a foot of shit.
I’m sure there are many more.
———————————
“Ow d’yer know ‘e’s a King?”
“E ‘asn’t got shit all over ‘im!”
Actually one of the problems keeping poor people poor today is what I think of as “crab bucket socialism.” People can work and earn money, but they then have to conceal it from their relatives and neighbors in order to keep it. As soon as it is known they have even a few hundred bucks in their savings, everyone shows up needing help, $20 at a time, and how dare they not help out their sister, brother in law, grand-aunt, their next door neighbor, the neighbor’s sister in law, etc with gas money, grocery money, car repairs, new pair of shoes, etc. The only escape is to keep their money deeply hidden until they can move away and cut off ties to their old life.
Even where true, it involves being able to cut the strings and *leave*. And very, very few will do that.
Years ago I found myself in a conversation with a black gentleman who was sweeping the walk in front of an upscale hotel in Charleston, SC. He approached me because I was wearing a cross and he needed someone to unburden himself to. I forget many of the details, but they boiled down to he was working to better himself and the rest of the family was angry with him (there was more, but I don’t feel that’s shareable).
Ok, in an effort to get my post up, I will employ euphemism. Several years ago I met a gentleman of African descent sweeping the street outside an upscale hotel in Chaleston, SC. He approached me because I was wearing a cross and he needed to unburden himself to someone. The gist of it was he was trying to better his lot (and if that meant taking a maintenance job that included sweeping, so be it) and the rest of his family was furious with him and doing everything in their power to get him to stop.
Was their objection to his attempt to better his lot…or more to the kind of job he had taken?
At this point I’m not sure. There were other issues but they worked out to just trying in any way made the rest of them look bad.
*points up*
But they believe in property.
… in the tribal sense.
/sad
I knew that that’s how it worked in the African country where I worked for a while. But I hadn’t realized the same effect would happen back home. Though now that I think about it, of course it would, at least in some local cultures.
American Indians, depending on the tribe. I know among the Lakota/Dakota that people who want to run a business or build themselves have to leave the Rez and go far enough that relatives and “relatives” can’t swing by and help themselves to goods and services. What’s good for group survival in times of trouble has become toxic, especially for the individual.
Has happened pretty much forever, just the Loser Brother In Law effect plus entitlement.
My dad’s family, and the Basque inlaws on that side, have a bad strain of it; I suspect that the portion of my husband’s aunts/uncles that I haven’t met are distant because of that habit, going off of some reactions I’ve seen in his dad.
It’s basically weaponized “I need it, so you should give it to me.”
RRRRGGGHH. This. Yes.
And Marx’s infamous slogan is tailor-made to trick the “I need it, so you should give it to me” people into thinking that they will be deciding what their needs are. That someone else, who sees them as mere cogs in a machine, would be deciding their needs somehow never occurs to them until it’s far, FAR too late.
Marxism is a very effective mental trap for people who don’t value hard work and self-reliance.
*lightbulb*
It’s the crab-bucket, as an organizing theory for the whole society.
That One Responsible Cousin can never escape.
Basically. It’s exactly what you think a Grifter would create.
This. As more than one Cherokee/Creek/whatever has put it, “to be Indian is to have no money”. The only way to make and keep a job and standard of living was to leave all the kin-ties behind. Ouch.
See, that is not what happened back in the day when they were tribes. Aside from status hospitality, political moves, or religious donations, hard-working families or individuals had goodies and material wealth, while lazy tribespeople didn’t. If you had enough to support widows or orphans, then good, but it was virtue to support yourself and made you very marriageable (and socially desirable as an acquaintance, religious club member, etc.).
Nobody wanted anybody to starve, but a lot of charity had to be hidden as gifts, or trying to suck up as a status move. (Depending on the tribe, but most Woodland tribes were like that.)
And if you were not a lucky hunter or skilled farmer, you needed to get good at something you could trade for meat, grain, etc.
Never mind Medieval lords, just going back one century the poor of today have wealth that even the very richest man of that era could scarcely even conceive of.
https://thewriterinblack.com/2019/03/14/benefitting-from-prosperity-originally-the-poor-get-poorer-a-blast-from-the-past/
That one’s good, and makes some great points about how things are available now that no possible wealth could have bought a hundred years ago. Along with that, another good one would be this video from Bill Whittle showing how the poor get richer as the rich spend their money buying new things that then become less expensive as more people decide to buy them.
..and rhinos put out campfires. I love the movie and the sequel, but people BELIEVE IT?!
Sure. The same ones that think Disney’s “Pocahontas” is a documentary. It’s all historical and all, you know.
Marx was a lazy bum whose appeal is largely to other lazy bums.
The serf/vassal system fell apart fast in the 19th century for good reason. Being a tenant farmer was so crappy, former farmers and peasants would rather take their chances blowing themselves up, exposing themselves (unwittingly) to toxic stuff, getting black lung disease, losing fingers and limbs, and other factory/mining catastrophes than to spend one more minute toiling away for Lord Arglebargle. The reason why English estates started going downhill around that time, forcing landowners to do things like marry American heiresses to keep money flowing in (see: Downton Abbey) is because they couldn’t keep anyone from the lure of the factories and cities.
Marx and Engels never took this into account. Marx also didn’t see labor unions or a service economy coming. The Western left eventually turned on the working classes because aside from wage and safety issues, they had no desire to control the means of production or to create any kind of utopia.
Marx also shared the view of the previous generation’s smokestack barons – labor was labor; a vast interchangeable pool. But by his day that was going away; industry was having to compete for skilled labor. Not guild stuff; the new class of skills – pipefitters, ironworkers, electricians; trades that had were new or vastly changed even from Marx’ younger days. And the next step up; mathematicians, engineers, chemists, trades that had formerly been academia.
And he refused to see the mutual-aid groups that had formed, and the positive effects of the religious revivals that hit England and Scotland in the late 1700s-1800s (Methodists infiltrating the system and teaching adults to read, write, and save money. The horror! Scandal!)
A number of aristocrats went socialist, too.
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/imperial_rescript.html
Now this is the tale of the Council the German Kaiser decreed,
To ease the strong of their burden, to help the weak in their need,
He sent a word to the peoples, who struggle, and pant, and sweat,
That the straw might be counted fairly and the tally of bricks be set.
Almost all of them, Steve.
They saw communism as a way to maintain their noble status with just a different mythology built around why they were the ones who were entitled to rule over others and that only they could do “what is best for everyone”.
Don’t make me post the last few verses of The Walrus and the Carpenter again. Y’all ought know that point by now.
“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice: “because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.”
“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee.
–
Mrs. Hoyt, if you have to be poor in modern urban Detroit, or in 1930s Agua Limpa, only a lunatic would choose Detroit.
You are missing something. LLL. But a good start.
LLL?
Also, no. Sorry. Detroit is not an industrial society. OR subject to the laws of bourgeoisie.
Longer Letter Later.
Detroit is the product of modern industrialization, with many of the benefits thereof. No-one bleeds out in childbirth, or dies from ulcers, or minor injuries there because medicine is pre-industrial. No-one starves to death or becomes severely malnourished because no food exists. As you point out in your essay, this is because industrialization was *provably* a good thing overall.
1930s and 20s Auga Limpa had *no* bourgeoisie. Period. They were literally the very agricultural society your essay points out that industrialized cities were (or appeared to be) so much better than.
And yet, if you gave them a Babel fish for Portuguese, only a lunatic would choose modern day urban Detroit to grow up in.
The essay is correct, but incomplete. And no, I don’t know how to finish it, myself. I lack the history knowledge you have. All I have are some clues.
There are SO MANY THINGS that go into Detroit.
And you’d be wrong. i’d choose detroit.
You have NO idea.
Hobbit, take a look at the Bill Whittle video I linked elsewhere (I’ll link it again here, because I notice that I hid it with HTML code elsewhere): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkebmhTQN-4
Then realize that as Sarah describes it, the Portugal she grew up in was approximately equal to pre-WWII in the US. Granted that it doesn’t address physical dangers like gangs, but the number of things that make life better that were unavailable then are staggering.
Wayne Has it right. Our hostesses childhood Portugal reminds me of the things my Mom (born in the early 1930’s) described. Her familial house had JUST gotten indoor water (cold only)
and electricity shortly before she was born. It had NO bathroom only an outhouse (and that was still in use until mid 1960’s when I was a child). This is in a little town on the Connecticut shoreline less than 100 miles from what was arguably the largest city in the world at that time (NYC). The 1960’s Portugal sounds better than that. And the culture was very similar. At my birth in early 1960 I was probably related (3rd cousin or closer) to 25-30% of the populace. Trust me if I screwed up my mom knew almost instantly and maternal grandma and grandpa knew almost simultaneously, in small towns the propagation of juicy news exceeds C by several orders of magnitude . And heaven help me if I had done something to sully the family name. Ticking off granddad was bad and might lead to corporal punishment (if he did not think my Mom had already sufficiently dealt with the issue, which in general was NOT the case 🙂 ). But grandma was the worst, the guilt and shame was incredible, the “how could you let us down”.
I’ll think about it. But the projects in Detroit are Hell on earth. (See Dalyrmple’s Life at the Bottom). A kid there hardly stands a chance. As an adult…
Well yes, you can vote with your feet. Hadn’t thought about it that way. Detroit wins that one, because it’s a thousand times easier to get away to somewhere else. Hmmm….
Something else for me to think about.
The projects, sure.
But that’s not the result of industrialization but of Marx’s theology. It is in a way a return to feudalism. Never claimed that’s not bad.
And, yes, there’s escape.
I’ve been keeping a quiet eye on Pizzagate. One of the things curtailed by a free country is the number of good-looking young women in such desperate straits that they’ll sleep with fat old ugly rich men. Lately we’ve seen the Hollywood “casting couch” crowd finally take it on the chin a little bit, but the really -big- money guys are still not visible.
Until today. Today they released some Guislane Maxwell documents directly fingering Wild Bill C. It is entirely possible an entire generation of Lefty bigwigs will come to light, all flying on the Lolita Express to get that one thing they wanted and couldn’t get on their own. And hey, maybe some Righty ones too. I’d be okay with that.
But even then, the casting couch and the Lolita Express, that’s bad but it isn’t -involuntary-, if you want to make that distinction.
But under Marxism, this situation is reversed. Even the local Apparatchik can have anyone he wants whose Daddy isn’t in the Party. You take a look at North Korea, even a cursory look, and that one dynamic is probably the most responsible for keeping that situation stuck. They don’t want to give up their steady stream of fresh “mistresses.” And I use that term optimistically.
Because free capitalist countries are better in every respect for everyone -except- ugly fat old rich dudes with strange proclivities. My guess after all this time, it’s pretty much that.
Got confused for a minute between Wild Bill D and Wild Bill C.
I believe it was Beria who would troll the streets of Moscow looking for attractive women. When he found one he’d have his men bring her to his place. Once he was done with her his men would (usually) take her home. The really sick part is that the next day they’d deliver flowers to her.
That sounds right. There were a lot of reasons why he was the first thing to go when the Stalin Survivors Club took power in the USSR.
The late Beria as a demonic figure in the court of Surtur made a great villain in a fanfic I read, precisely because of how evil he was in real life.
Not to defend the creep, but from reading Anne Applebaum’s book ‘Gulag’, I learned that Beria actually wanted to end the USSR gulag system after Stalin died. Not out of humanitarian sentiment but because it was nothing but a constant drain on their economy.
I admit she didn’t say what if anything Beria intended should replace it. I doubt he was going to set the prisoners free and embrace goodness and benevolence as a way of life.
Word has been seeping out from N Korea that Beria was a sweetheart. I mean, the girl gets to go home? Like, alive? That’s thoughtful. And flowers too. Wow, whatta guy.
The Chinese and Koreans are connoisseures of this shit. Thousands of years of Imperial courts, y’know. And all that fun goes away if the peasants ever get to shoot back.
That’s who the Left -really- is.
“I mean, the girl gets to go home? Like, alive?”
Most of the time. They discovered around a dozen bodies on his property after it had been turned into an embassy.
There’s a reason I say that socialism is just feudalism with the serial numbers rubbed out.
Friend of mine told me a story from when we had listening posts on the border of Iran and the USSR(pre carter(spit). Said they used to listen to Brezshnev(sp) bouncing underage girls in his limo while he was being driven around Moscow.
c4c
–
Might be the first, but definitely the second festival would wash out all the dirt and send Marx’s coffin crashing away on a raging yellow river.
———————————
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
Marx was right. History IS a class struggle — between the self-anointed political/intellectual/authoritarian ‘elites’ and everybody else.
So many lamp-posts to decorate, so little time…
———————————
“They were the bad guys, as you say, we were the good guys, and they made a very satisfying THUMP when they hit the floor!”
One of my absolute favorite scenes pretty much anywhere:
I like this one:
Drug Prohibition is socialism for criminals says Nobel Prize Winner Milton Friedman. A LOT of Republicans are in love with this brand of socialism.
Some of them are starting to get over it.
And this is germane to my post because…?
Michael, perhaps you should consider self-control on the stuff not prohibited for a little while, yes?
This is relevant……. how?
I know conservatives as a rule only pick the right option if they can’t figure out how to avoid it, but the subject is about Marx and his descendents.
Restraint of vigilante killing of the druggies is coercive tyranny. *Thhbbbt*
We all know that MOSS is funding your friends at NRO and BLM, and you want in on that grift, but at this point the whole criminal justice reform thing is transparently fraud, and possibly knowing treason.
The public is not willing to tolerate much in the way of protections for sellers of defective goods that cause serious harm. Okay, that 1980s law that protects the vaccine makers, but such carve outs are not the general rule.
All recreational drugs are effectively ‘defective’ where litigation for damages are concerned; they are basically used by suicidal people. Supposing that it that the de facto prohibition caused emergently by litigation will ever not exist is like regulating agriculture to require that unicorn shit be used for fertilizer. If you ever truly immunize the drug manufacturers from liability, that permits people like me to deliberately sell stuff intended to kill the junkies quickly.
The degree to which criminal justice reform is currently weaponized to promote race war, and to try to bring minorities on board as backers of a communist revolution, raises the probability that this was the original purpose of the funding sources. Sure, it is something that has seemed just to a number of innocents. Most of the big commie frauds of the last decades have seemed just to a number of innocents.
Killing people because their customs are incompatible with peace is a reasonable and principled act. The junkies are quite insistent that they are not responsible for their own deaths, and are at war with the sober, who are at fault for overdoses, self injury while insensate, and suicidal acts while under the influence.
The story of the junkie who is only harming themself, and who is at peace with their neighbor is a lie.
If necessary to change conditions to a state more resembling peace, killing druggies on an industrial scale would be no more wrong than killing Comanche, Nazis, or the Japanese to bring those wars to a close.
There are judges of who is or is not properly a leftist, conforming to the current desires of the inner party.
Being a little conservative only requires opposing the socialist conformity in some way. There are no judges fit to match to a single standard of conservatism, because there is no single standard. There are only people opposing different aspects of the leftwing dogma of the moment.
The leftwing thing you are bowing to is their trick of conflating what is owed to a human with what is owed to a human that conforms to certain standards of behavior. Law and government are things of force and persuasion. The protection of law and order cannot practically be provided to a large group whose behavior is war against that order. Hence, there is no valid principle that requires that the protection of law be provided in every circumstance.
Currently, it may still be practical to extend the protection of law to those who do not deserve it. It may be impractical to do otherwise.
Proposing that prohibition of substance abuse cannot ever be allowed, and that substance abusers must also always be protected against murder is a cheat.
The world may well not be as simple as I make it sound; Societies are a negotiation, that partly includes killing, and the possible state spaces are more than you or I can imagine.
Go bother people who a) cannot work out that your concern trolling is full of shit b) aren’t basically for criminal justice reform, and insofar as your arguments will have any effect, will be turned against it. Find some stupid neutrals somewhere else.
> Societies are a negotiation
The only negotiation I was ever involved in was being on the receiving end of “do|do not, or else.”
Like the Democrat meaning of “discussion”, it is entirely one-sided. Doesn’t meet any legal definition of “contract”, either.
You’ve never voted?
You’re forcibly prevented from leaving?
Not meeting the legal definition of contract is a worthless objection.
If this phenomena exists at all, it is more fundamental than law, and hence transitively more fundamental than concepts of contracts founded in a legal system.
There’s a similar argument that can be used for the individual negotiation side.
Okay, so humans aren’t psychic, so there is no mechanism that would permit the fundamental unit to be a group. Essentially, we are individuals; culture, religion, law and everything else is learned behavior, and aggregating into groups is not strictly correct.
The individuals with no concept and no ability to operate as a group disappear from history and prehistory.
To anyone who operates from a foundation in history, it looks like the assumption of group operation is default. This is simply a survival/selection bias. Collections of people that have learned to operate in a group have an advantage in driving off or killing other sets of individuals.
Cultures which are able to recognize individual right and individual choice are not the typical trend in human societies/governments that displace the competition. Okay, in practice, a million little tribal tyrannies are essentially rule by personality of the strong and the survivors. But that is not necessarily the theory that is used to dress it up, to minimize the continual cost from ongoing internal conflict.
The objective reality is that we are individuals, and iron bars do not make a cage, etc. However, if negotiation is the wrong word to describe the use of force by a society which can support individual choice and rights to suppress destabilization of the peace by internal criminal dissidents or external barbarian ‘dissidents’?
What do you call the mechanism by which I am deterred from acting on my dissent from America’s consensus on individual rights norms? Persuasion? My distrust for my own sanity, and willingness to crowd source feedback? My ambition to pull off the full project, and not waste myself getting stopped partway into trying to do it retail?
It is a mix of force and persuasion, in that gray area between government by pure persuasion and government by pure force, but at a more fundamental level than government. A government that theoretically permits individual rights rights will in practice not if the form is implemented via a people whose culture that does not recognize individual rights. Pure force and pure persuasion governments do not actually exist.
Negotiation may be as good a word for it as any commonly used English word.
If he did, he was doing the economist version of dentists that urge you to never drink milk, because the acid will damage your teeth.
Per wiki, he’s a Chicago school economist, not Austrian school. And after Kofi Annan, a Nobel has to be considered a neutral credential or a negative credential.
Being a Republican or a Libertarian does not make one competent in their expertise, or ensure that one’s opinions are of strictly correct conservative ideological thought.
Libertarians do not necessarily have a sound understanding of the set of possible societies, or the subset of societies that have actually existed.
Republicans are pretty much all heavily contaminated with one flavor of leftwing thought or another. (Me very much included. Recovering technocrat; I will never fit an accurate dictionary definition of a pure conservative.) Conservative is defined in contrast to an infectious meme complex. A human example of a pure conservative may well not exist at all.
And as for credentials… I would still be a crank, still crazy and perhaps profoundly wrong, if I had a Nobel prize, was a member of the national academy of sciences, and held a full professorship at a prestigious university. There is no credential that I could get that would oblige anyone here to believe that I was correct on any given issue. Even considering the hypothetical of somehow being in a RL project with someone here, and for some bizarre contrivance I was /the/ subject matter expert of part of it, I am human. If I can’t make a persuasive case if someone wants to know why, I’ve probably screwed up somewhere. If I don’t have the spoons to handle pushback, I probably don’t have the spoons to do the work right in the first place.
“Libertarians do not necessarily have a sound understanding of the set of possible societies, or the subset of societies that have actually existed.”
The problem with that argument is that the society Libertarians want has existed. While you’ll never have perfect agreement in any political movement, most libertarians would be happy living in a society similar to the US ca. 1880. Unless you want to argue that the racism and sexism of that society (which the libertarians would do away with) were somehow integral to that society.
What we moderns label as racism includes an essential feature of that society’s ability to function. Which feature is both absent from the theoretical models of Libertarianism I am familiar with, and a thing Libertarians object to in modern times.
The society of the 1880s increased its internal security in several ways. One is by killing a bunch of the indians, confining the remainder to reservations, and then working to destroy the indian cultures by forcing the teens into white run schools. Willingness to do that was a feature that I count as essential, that moderns definitely label racist, and Libertarian theory lacks a decision making process for when that sort of thing is okay. Beyond that, consider what was done during that era to suppress white banditry; I am particularly a fan of Isaac Parker.
Sure, the 1880s lacked the mad totalitarian bureaucracies of today. That does not make it a Libertarian utopia, even if the bits that least fit Libertarian theory are widely overlooked these days because they also do not fit the other theoretical frameworks we interpret history through.
Beyond the Marxist and Libertarian frameworks, there are widespread conventional frameworks that Americans have evolved to understand America, and American history. The most well digested explanations in those theories are for things that Americans frequently noticed, and often discussed. They explain poorly things that require understanding alien cultures as they have never been practiced in America. They also poorly explain unusual events, say, responses to extreme provocations, that the Americans of the time understood intuitively, or negotiated informally among themselves.
The process by which a hothead goes off to do something violent, or the process by which someone who knows what the right thing is and refuses to spend what it would cost to stop someone from doing the wrong thing.
There are no theoretical models of governments which match perfectly actual societies; there are only theoretical models of government which we haven’t yet collected the information to show the imperfections of. Some theoretical models are fine as a goal. The difference between your model, my model, and the communist model is that the communists are probably definitely incompatible with peace.
We may have a need to kill a bunch of the communists, confine the rest to a reservation, and maybe destroy their culture and religion somehow.
Maybe you and I can come to some sort of peaceable agreement, and maybe we can not. If we cannot, that may be my responsibility, but I’m not sure I want to live enough for it to be my problem.
And denying women a civic voice is not sexist if the main weapon systems of the era are muscle powered. Voting and aspects of legal personhood/adulthood are best understood as extensions of military service. That the tech and culture of America at that time permitted a very broad army, and that it could include women, does not mean that those ‘rights’ are inherent to human beings, even if the Americans of the day thought it was.
A government must before all other things succeed in driving off the competition, and hold territory using military force. ‘Society’ is broader than ‘government’, but to exist must avoid being displaced by an outside force, and must avoid the destruction of the population. Republics and Democracies are simply a subset of governments that hold territory through military excellence; they get the excellence through a combination of culture and by paying for extreme military service with rights under the government.
Women’s suffrage, etc, is only justified in certain social and military contexts. And ‘not being racist’ as modern American Libertarians, Republicans and Independents understand it, is likewise only justified in certain specific circumstances that might not always hold.
What answers does Libertarianism have to circumstances where those no longer hold? My contentions are that Libertarian theory does not have those answers, that a messy real world society can possibly answer problems posed by situations that attack the holes in a theory, that we can improve our theories of ideal government by studying responses that would cause a failure in this or that theory, and that humans cannot comprehend a theory that covers all possible state spaces of societies, and all possible policy consequences*.
*The best theory in the world for a past edition of a society will stop being true for that society when the theory becomes widely known and understood. Because first you will have people engaging in map-is-territory magical thinking with the model, then you will have people gaming the magical thinkers, and then you have disenchanted former believers figuring out a way to change the ‘dynamics’ of the ‘system’ as their only way to avoid being exploited by the gamers.
“What we moderns label as racism includes an essential feature of that society’s ability to function”
Good to know that you don’t have any useful opinions.
Tell me again how the left wing modern version of not being racist would have done a single thing to stop the raids of the Comanche.
I specifically described the useful modern definition of racist as Libertarian, Republican, or Independent, precisely because the Democrat, Socialist, and Critical Race Theory definitions are useless.
Behavior the Democrats call racist was essential to produce the security level of the 1880s.
Behavior that reasonably anti-Communist Republicans would consider racist may still be justified in sufficiently alien circumstances. The practice of not carrying out mass reprisals along ethnic lines can only ever be practical in societies with cultures that are willing to punish indiscriminately, without regard to the criminal’s background. When an cultural group will escalate to civil war to prevent the punishment of any member, you cannot punish any member of that group unless you are prepared to fight that civil war. Things that make since in the context of a society that punishes without regard to family make no sense in that context.
If your response to what you quote of my response is using the Democrat definition, and you are a Libertarian, you have just made an argument that supports the case I am arguing.
Who said anything about the Democrat definition of racism?
You weakened your claim of “Libertarians would be happy in a real historical society” by then specifying the theoretical specification of ‘except for all the racism and sexism’. The question of exactly what the hell you meant by that is obvious.
Especially when the moderns are in the middle of making a big to do about how warring against the indian tribes was wrong, and claiming that it was somehow avoidable.
In any discussion of whether the current wave of protests discredit criminal justice reform, it is reasonable to ask whether you meant that 1880s America should have avoided racism by sending social workers to stop the indians from raiding.
I thought it was obvious that I was using the traditional definitions of racism and sexism, i.e. judge a person on their actions rather than their sex or skin color.
I know the Left gets a big kick out of redefining words to suit their own ends, but I don’t play that game.
You’re making his argument look pretty dang good by not answering it– either you’d need to show that the examples he gave aren’t racism and sexism, or how they weren’t an integral part of the society. Would help if you also gave some indication how they’d be removed.
Fox: Bob is trolling…
He generally is– but he also tends to leave really big, obvious holes in there, somewhere.
Which is why I phased it as making his argument look good. It does have one strength already, that “exactly like that, except-” is a big but.
I am very, very drained and not up to making an argument on behalf of a philosophy that I believe lacks in practical application when applied pure.
So I pointed out the thing making it look like Bob’s answers were unanswerable.
‘Libertarians would accept late nineteenth century America, except for the white supremacist terrorism’ is a much more defensible set of stipulations.
The white supremacist terrorism is much more defensible as being accidental rather than essential.
Of course, by conceding the wars against the indians as in line with Libertarianism, that opens up room for me to argue that path as a way to bypass mainstream Libertarian drug policy.
For all practical intents and purposes, that has the same problem all my other drug policy arguments do; I would have to convince a majority of Americans, and never will.
Yeah, sure current events may be radicializing people in my direction. They aren’t going to jump to my extreme, and will stop radicializing when they have policy adjusted in a way that satisfies things a little.
My position is simply not very persuasive, because it is rooted in my own personal baggage, which other people do not have. There are sound aspects to it, but as a whole there are some issues that seem likely to make the whole thing fail. I’m not certain of it, and if I understood the problems better I might at least be certain of what their identity’s are. Is it circular logic? Making wild assumptions about what norms the culture will support? Have I simply never been a good enough thinker?
The part of me that speaks on drug policy is definitely shaped by my own mental illness, personal unhappiness, and technocratic tendencies. I actually have very little that I realize I want to live for. (That is why I am so cheerfully willing to say that if my being a hardliner on drugs is a deal breaker for the Libertarians where peace is concerned, so be it. There are things that being killed would stop me from doing, but the ones I’ve formed the strongest emotional connections to are either not really all that positive a connection to life, or even less important to society.)
I firmly reject any obligation to be persuaded by Jeff’s appeals to Libertarianism, monstrous sewer Simon’s appeal to anti-Communism, or BLM’s appeal to not being racist. I am only in a position to use their arguments as fodder for my cause to the extent that they misread the audience, and make unnecessary errors.
Of course, by conceding the wars against the indians as in line with Libertarianism, that opens up room for me to argue that path as a way to bypass mainstream Libertarian drug policy.
Which is usually the catch in the big, obvious errors in your arguments.
It is actually trolling– in the fishing sense, not the hiding under bridges one.
Only partly.
I really am a skeptic of Libertarianism, have mixed feelings about criminal justice reform policies, think BLM is blatantly wrong, and have long been opposed to legalization. I really do see the exact same arguments applied to legalizing drug use as being as fairly applied to legalizing vigilantism. And we could be on the cusp of a de facto legalization of vigilantism, but we will probably back down and avoid it.
We definitely do not have the circumstances to justify a radically harsher way of punishing theft. But they do exist; there really are times and places massacring a village is justified as a way to suppress piracy or banditry. Unless one accepts selling the survivors into slavery as justified.
I’m not thinking of any nicer way of saying my core point than this: M. Simon can take his attempt to purity police conservatism with him to double hockeysticks.
Honestly, I stopped reading once I realized he was beating up on a strawman. I have no interest in a Doctorate of Thinkology.
Jeff,
I apologize. I probably should have ignored my impulses to speak further after making that initial accusation against NRO. I had forgotten about that by the time I started responding to you.
“… most libertarians would be happy living in a society similar to the US ca. 1880.”
Which part of the US ca 1880? New York? Arizona? Georgia? The Dakotas?
American society was a little more diverse then than it is now.
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And that’s what libertarians aim for. A less intrusive federal government allows the various states to figure out their own ways to solve their unique set of problems and allows Americans to find the kind of government that suits them best.
A) Before commenting on it I would have to see the context in which this statement was made. I am not saying Liberals have a tendency to pull quotes out of context or even to make things up. Nor am I declaring the Pope Catholic or suggesting the woods a good place to find bear scat.
B) Stipulating the Friedman quote is accurate …
1: I rate this on a par with Dr. Faucci saying we should keep the nation under lockdown until Wuhan Flu flees.
2: So what? Even the smartest people bat less than 1.000
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The thing that’s interesting is that a fair number of early industrialists took pride in having a clean factory that ran well, was reasonably safe and well lit, and provided a fair number of perks for workers. Because first of all, the factory was their baby, and second, because workers that weren’t happy would go get hired by another factory.
Another important thing was making factories as fireproof as possible. Lots of cast iron frames and brick or stone factories, because it was safer and meant not losing your whole investment in a day.
Early factories often had big bathing and laundry facilities near them, with nice hot running water for reasonable prices. Factory girls were considered beautiful, prosperous, well-fed, and well-dressed, as well as smart and clean. Factory men played sports and pursued hobbies on their Monday half-day off, often on factory grounds. Factory towns attracted all sorts of businesses and markets. Good workers became managers and sometimes married the factory owners’ daughters.
Many industrialists were interested in building nice houses or apartment houses for workers, so that the experienced workers wouldn’t move away. Sometimes you had to stay employed but the house was free; sometimes they had a real estate business going, and workers bought their houses and kept them.
Even when the “dark satanic mills” thing got more common and factories weren’t quite so new and clean and bright, there were still various industries that had better conditions, probably because they were more profitable and required more experience and less churn/turn-over of employees.
There’s a sort of chamber of commerce book written about Cincinnati in the 1850’s, which is just bursting with pride in the beautiful factories and all the cool things they were producing, and the wonderful automated machinery and skilled craftsmen and -women. And sure, bad stuff happened in the Queen City back then, but tons of good stuff happened too. Just the ads and statistics were fascinating.
Speaking of Cincinnati… Charles Dickens’ book on his travels in the US is online, and it’s very interesting. I mean, yes, he complains at epic length about certain things, and he sometimes forgets to mention his wife for long stretches of time. But given how much he disliked the bad facets of UK city life, it’s interesting to notice that he rather liked US cities.
Seriously, though, he’s hilarious. I think I mentioned this before, but the main reason I’d heard about Dickens’ book from childhood was that the Golden Lamb in Lebanon, Ohio is so proud of Dickens having stayed there. And then you read the book, and he’s complaining about everything except lemonade, or something equally silly!
Dickens was a city creature, really.
Dickens was a proto-socialist. of course he complained of everything….
The dozen US Presidents who stayed there made far fewer complaints.
The thing that’s interesting is that a fair number of early industrialists took pride in having a clean factory that ran well, was reasonably safe and well lit, and provided a fair number of perks for workers. Because first of all, the factory was their baby, and second, because workers that weren’t happy would go get hired by another factory.
And because to go through the pain in the neck to build that, even if it is a really good idea, you pretty much MUST have someone who thinks it is really, really cool!
Reading a (semi) recent biography of baseball great Willie Mays, who grew up in just such a community near Birmingham, Alabama, one is struck by how the effort to develop such a community was destroyed by the Depression. The plant ownership wanted to provide such benefits but the economic crash forced their attention to more immediate tasks.
The subsequent World War probably didn’t help, either.
of course, having grown up in West Virginia I am well aware of “Company Towns” and the evils attendant thereupon, and vaguely recall stories of Henry Ford requiring employees in his housing to be married and otherwise with a code of conduct acceptable to his standards.
Here in the Carolinas history records many “Mill Towns” in which workers “enjoyed” company-provided accommodations but I don’t know what rules applied. I am sure somebody has written a nice History on the topic, and equally sure that (like all human institutions) there is much Evil as well as Good to be said about the practice. Even about the same town, I expect.
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Looking at the picker’s cabins, I would strongly suspect the usual “saving them from the horrible conditions so they can sleep in the ditch instead” happened a lot.
A lot of the early industrialists in the UK were Quakers and they did take pride in it and over the next generation or two the non conformists and low church, I suppose you’d call them evangelicals, completely changed society’s view and steadily cleaned it all up.
Marx’s examples were taken from government blue books but by the time he pounded out his turgid diatribes the situation in the blue books had been rectified. Typical of Marx to be a generation behind.
FWIW. The Trump fortune is built on his fathers real estate developments. The houses are still called “Trump Houses” and are still in demand because they were well built. In capitalism, the customer chooses. That’s why big business prefers state capitalism, which is socialism for the rich and is what we got here today.
“Factory girls were considered beautiful, prosperous, well-fed, and well-dressed, as well as smart and clean.”
Welp ok as long as we can have John mccain andlyndon Johnson pit stops too
John McCain doesn’t rise to the level of notice in this.
And I’d say before Lyndon Johnson, we should consider Woodrow Wilson.
If there’s one thing that the Left and the Right ought to be able to agree on, it’s that Wilson was an absolute monster. I’ve said before he’s what would happen if the Left’s worst caricature of Trump (racist and xenophobic) and the Right’s worst caricature of Obama (I won and can do whatever I want) got together and had one very ugly baby.
Even Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t quite get to Woodrow Wilson levels of fail.
What Barry couldn’t achieve during his presidency he is striving to attain in his post-presidency.
I think he’s passed Jimmuh in the pestilential post-prezzy parade and he has years to add to his record. I’m unsure whether Billy Jeff gets points for his wife; that might put the trophy out of reach.
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you said the dread b word.
Nailed it ❤
Do comments get “moderated” often? I have a notice on my last one that it is “under moderation,” and will be visible to others afterwards. The only thing I can think of that might have triggered this was using a specific color as a descriptive adjective for someone. Pfui.
It depends on WordPress. I’ve had some that hit moderation that were like three very bland sentences to the effect of “Yeah! That sounds great. Thanks.” (best guess, the end of one word and the start of another triggered a spam filter) and there’s auto-moderate on more than one link.
I somehow turned off the automatic fill in for my wordpress credentials, so I fill in the email and name by hand. I’ve often enough screwed just that up and gone into moderation.
And then there are the times when I’ve included a reasonably legitimate use the word that is the Irish word for dog, followed by c and then k. But Sarah has that word set to go to automoderate, and there I go.
No. WP has been weird. But yes, I think so.
*Wags Hands*
The auto fill credentials through FireFox on my system hasn’t auto filled for months, if not a year-ish. It does give me a list to pull from to select. I’ve learned that if a response doesn’t post immediately to the page, don’t repost. It will show up.
Why? Dang if I know? Unless WP is recognizing words like dang, heck, & other self censored words, to filter on, IDK. I don’t think I have a history of controversial posts. Do I?
Maybe it doesn’t like my single letter name? I don’t log into WP. Unless I’m permanently logged in.
Why single letter name? At first, new to blog, I was being cautious. Now I kind of like it, or being lazy. YMMV. I am linked to the group on FB Sarah’s Diner & directly to Sarah’s FB page, with my full name, but a different (old) email.
The root of suffering is not control by others. It’s desire. I have discovered that as long as my needs are minimal I am truly free.
When St. Paul wrote that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (often misquoted as “money is the root of all evil”, which is very different in meaning from what he actually wrote) he wasn’t kidding. Those who see money as a useful tool which they can use to accomplish their goals will end up being very different people from those who desire money as an end in itself, or as something they can use to buy the things they desire. The latter will end up being ruled by their possessions, while the former will end up using money (and their possessions that money bought them) as tools rather than serving money as a master — and will, of course, be far more content than the ones who want, want, WANT.
Bah.
That’s cute.
But some of us thirst for Freedom.
re industrialization with agricultural life….here’s a North Carolina woman from 1899:
“We all went to work in the Amazon Cotton Mill and we all worked there all our lives. We were all anxious to go to work because, I don’t know, we didn’t like the farming. It was so hot from sunup to sun down. No, that was not for me. Mill work was better…Once we went to work in the mill after we moved here from the farm, we had more clothes and more kinds of food…And we had a better house.”
and a present-day Chinese woman:
“(Farming) is really had work. Every morning, from 4am to 7am, you have to cut through the bark of 400 rubber trees in total darkness. It has to be done before daybreak, otherwise the sunshine will evaporate the rubber juice. If you were me, would you prefer the factory or the farm?”
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59010.html
c4c
Those who’ve paid attention to my ravings today may be wondering if I’ve had another round of insomnia.
Yup.
I’ve noticed another fun bit of trolling.
If the police shootings of blacks since Roe versus Wade justify the arson and otherwise avoidable deaths that have been caused by BLM, what about the 16/18 million black deaths by legal abortion? Proportionately, it would seem to justify a campaign of bombings and death squads. That would stop only when everyone who has ever been a certified Ob/Gyn is dead.
Defund/abolish Planned Parenthood is the analogy that is a more just alternative, but the more parallel analogy is defund/abolish the whole practice of medicine based in study of female anatomy. Preferably with a side order of screwing over the AMA, and breaking their monopoly on medical schools.
Anyway, I have a little voice inside of me. I’m borrowing Socrates’ metaphor. Normally it sometimes tries to talk me out of doing things that are wrong. Right now, it is giggling about how I’ve just messed up my chances of ever being anything but a bachelor.
Interestingly, Kanye West has recently begun drawing attention to how many black abortions there have been. He tweeted “Over 22,500,000 black babies have been aborted over the past 50 years.” I find his campaign an interesting phenomena. I doubt I’d vote for him with a more viable and proven candidate like President Trump available, but Kanye already sounds like a much better candidate than Biden.
*points at household Old Man Cat the fluffy*
So’s he. Without an interpreter….
But yes, Kanye seems to be doing an awesome job in political trolling for effect.
I kind of hope he manages to get some folks to try to envision exactly how many dead people that is… I don’t wish to poison their joy in holding their child, or grandchild, but I do hope to spare them having it poisoned by their past actions or inactions.
It’s more than the combined total for the best estimates of the Holocaust, Holodomor, and Pol Pot’s victims.
Praise The Lord. I’m thankful that someone who can do something positive about this is working on this, and I can just ignore it, and work on letting go of my anger.
Our book is After Hastings.
Spoiler free here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/21628888-august-2020—after-hastings—-no-spoilers
spoilers allowed here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/21628891-august-2020—after-hastings—-spoilers-allowed
The existence of communism was what forced Western countries to become more social and therefore allow for greater redistribution. It might have not been optimal for Romanians or East Germans, but their working class counterparts in the West benefited from it indirectly.
The strong middle class of the past is being dismantled right now, because with the Soviets gone, capitalists don’t have to play fair anymore.
The apparent prevalence of “leftism” is illusory. Mainstream leftists are just woke activists who care about cultural causes of little concern to the ruling classes. I don’t see serious left-wing, Marxist economists on prime TV talking about bread-and-butter issues of economics, just charlatans and “activists” who are basically grifters.
As Charles Murray has shown, upper middle class types will continue marrying and living orderly lives while the proles are mired in dysfunction and hopelessness. They don’t care.
And as Thomas Frank masterfully showed in his “What is the matter with Kansas?”, conservatives play very well the outrage card to do the bidding for the rich. This recent review explains it again:
Oh, The New York Times. The same people responsible by saying the US was created FOR slavery.
Yeah, we believe them.
You know that’s BULLSHIT right?
CHRISTIANITY allowed for charity, help (redistribution is a funny name for theft,Marxist Scum!) and charity schools and–
In fact the West has always felt responsible for those who had less.
Marx just perverted into envy being a virtue. You’re either mal-educated of a NYTimes bot trying to make your fake history reality.
Learn to code.
I am Spanish, very far away from the NYT HQ hehe… although I am pretty sure they would soon cancel me as “fascist” or something 🙂
The middle class did not emerge out of charity anywhere. Stable jobs, unions, tight borders, a robust industrial base, affordable education. That is what made it, and the lack of such things is unmaking it today.
I don’t care how much poverty might have descended globally like Pinker and apologists for optimism like to pinpoint. I care about Europe and the West generally.
Ah, Spanish, therefore European, not American, which probably explains something. American conservatives are not European conservatives except in name. Also, those politicians who are part of the Republican Party are not, by and large, American Conservatives. There are a few who are ok, though most even of them are lacking, yet still better than the alternative.
Crony Capitalism, which is wholly unlike actual capitalism in that it uses government laws and regulations to promote the interests of some companies at the expense of others, is one of the big problems with any observed decline in the Middle Class, due to this manipulation of the economy via raising obstacles to entry in various industries and killing profits by onerous taxes, resulting in companies either moving to other countries or else going out of business because they have to raise their prices so much that their customers won’t or can’t pay. This is not a result of conservatives trying to bilk the public out of all their money at the expense of their workers, it’s the result of Leftist policies costing them money.
I’m not going to claim there aren’t thieving idiots running some businesses, but you’ll find that most of those tend to promote Leftist liberal policies rather than conservative ones. American Conservative, that is, NOT European.
Oh. He is Spanish. Therefore an idiot by indoctrination.
Oscar, you are excused. We are literally not speaking the same language, even when you speak English.
We are literally not speaking the same language, even when you
speakthink you’re speaking English.Another evil aspect of Crony Capitalism is the government raising artificial barriers to entry — new businesses have to go through long, tortuous, expensive license and permit procedures before they can even TRY to make any money. See John Stossel’s segment about opening a lemonade stand.
Government regulations cause increased overhead; large corporations can hire extra lawyers and accountants to deal with the piles of paperwork, but small businesses can’t afford to have more unproductive ‘compliance’ employees than actual workers.
The fact that large corporations can dish out much bigger
bribescontributions than small businesses is just a coincidence!———————————
They got a building down in New York City called Whitehall Street where ya go and get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and seeee-lected.
Oh, there is more to this: Spanish, therefore not fully EVER grasping capitalism.
Their “revolution” was just a way for the “good families” to keep power.
It’s just …. well, Crony capitalism is a name for it, but only if you think of all the cronies being the same small set of families forever.
Trust me on this. It’s not even in the same universe as the US.
Hence my “dismissing” him.
A) He’s an idiot who doesn’t even know he is.
B) The words he uses don’t mean what they think they do.
C) He thinks the NYT is a respected source.
D) Given what socialism has done to Spanish birth rate, the only place Castelno Cerrao will be spoken in the future is in hell.
Given what socialism has done to Spanish birth rate, the only place Castelno Cerrao will be spoken in the future is in hell.
If it’s the same classic Spanish they used when California still belonged to Spain, there’s a couple of families in the High Desert who speak it.
But they’re still pissed at Spain for letting those tacky Mexican officials get delusions they had some kind of authority there…..
Yes. That. Castelano Cerrao.
Europeans, so I’m never sure which country did the “officially re-write the language” thing and which didn’t.
Spain did 😉
You can tell when they’re speaking it, because the lissssssping is astonishing 😀
The middle class arose long before the existence of trade unions, the industrial revolution or compulsory education.
And out of those three things the only one which really caused an increase in the middle class was the industrial revolution.
Oh, looky, we’ve got a new troll!
Yeah, I’ll let you guys play. given is beginning with attempting to laugh in print he’s a nincompoop. I’m already vaguely nauseated, thanks.
No.
I do not want to maintain the code he writes after he leaves the company. He should NOT learn to code.
LOL!
Point.
Presuming the person can learn to code to have anything to maintain.
Me? OTOH. Would be deemed friendly enough to teach them to code. Oh. Heck. No.
(Been there, knew the bosses kid wouldn’t do it. Retired before it became an issue. OTOH the kid went crazy nuts / crazier.)
I should warn you you’re in a blog with more history degrees (de facto or de jure) per capita than in most colleges.
Even those of us whose history is largely limited to where it contacted other stuff we know recognize that “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” is the predecessor of the many pasty-white, rich liberals yelling at blacks that they’re not allowed to think for themselves, their skin color requires them to think what the rich liberals insist they should.
Or the many nasty old guys who were able to, with a straight face, tell 20-something me what young women were allowed to believe or we weren’t REALLY women. (If you guessed it aligned amazingly well with fulfilling their fantasies, you have a good grasp of the situation.)
Hehe you are pretty much proving Thomas Frank’s point about the unforgivable “elitism” of liberals (as if conservatives weren’t usually just as elitist, if not more).
Conservatives love the culture wars, they love them so much they don’t mind “losing” them because no matter what they get to push through their corporate agenda, which is not that popular. This blogpost nails it for Britain:
https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/why-conservatives-love-the-culture-war/
Hehe you are pretty much proving Thomas Frank’s point about the unforgivable “elitism” of liberals (as if conservatives weren’t usually just as elitist, if not more).
I’m aware his “point” is that we poor, horrible, stupid yokels are just too dumb to grasp the sheer wonder that is his explaining what our real interests are, and unaccountably behave in ways his theory says we shan’t.
I am also aware that the results when I act in my interests, rather than what the self-appointed experts tell me I “should” want as being in “my interests,” the results are objectively better– while when I act, or am forced, into their standards, the results are objectively worse.
Romania, to use your example, wasn’t an exception; it was what happened when you get what you want with real people.
The good results that we managed, here in the US, were in spite of your pet theories.
I don’t much care what new shadow-monsters your theory creates, no matter how much you tell me that I must fight them because they are trying to control me. I can look around, and see that the guys trying to control me…are the guys yelling about a series of monsters, and telling me that I must fall in line or the monsters will get me.
What part of “U. S. Conservatives are not European Conservatives” do you not get?
ALL OF IT. To be fair neither do any other Europeans.
Problem is he doesn’t even get EUROPEAN conservatives. All he gets are Spanish/Portuguese conservatives, who are…. something else again.
As I routinely do when this comes up, here is the link to the differences:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/10/23/right-left-right-a-recent-blast-from-the-past/
My guess? All of it.
The whole “Left Wing” “Right Wing” dichotomy needs to stay in the study of the French Revolution where it belongs. It barely worked for Revolutionary France, and has no place in modern political discussions.
If conservatives love to push through corporate agendas, then a natural consequence of that would be that people working for large corporations would love to donate to the Republican party rather than the Democrat party, right?
Here are the actual facts: https://howmuch.net/articles/the-30-biggest-political-donors-on-the-fortune-500
Note how most of those corporations lean heavily Democrat, and for those who lean Republican, it’s by a small majority (53-47 in the case of the largest one).
The facts are against your theory. Whenever that happens, it is a test of whether you are intellectually honest. Will you take that into account, and revise your theory? Or will you try to explain away the facts somehow, and thereby entrench yourself into believing a falsehood? The latter would only do you harm, but far too many people choose it. Are you brave enough to change your mind when shown the truth?
To paraphrase: “The greatest trick the Democratic Party ever pulled was to convince people they were for the little guy.”
It might have not been optimal for Romanians or East Germans, but their working class counterparts in the West benefited from it indirectly.
Oh, yes, my family–working, lower middle class, because being poor is a state of mind– benefited just so wonderfully from having our money taken, redistributed, and being told we could sign up to get a little bit of it back.
*raises hand, backwards, with thumb and pinky folded*
Read between the lines.
You dance well for a person on stilts, but your plethora of unsupported allegations do not constitute an argument, much less a convincing argument.
Your every statement is an assertion of facts not in evidence and contrary to such facts as we have. To rebut it in detail would be without point as there is nothing too your claims but smoke and mirrors. America as a nation grew from a potent bourgeoisie and it is primarily the sleight-of-hand of our Left-wing that has promoted inequality – as can be demonstrated by the fact that inequality is greatest i those polities where Progressives dominate.
As for your middle paragraph it is a reeking pile of tautologies. Woke activists are peddling the same solution, fatal dosages of Marx (try reading their demands; many here have.) As all Marxist economists charlatans and “activists” who are basically grifters, of course that’s what we get on prime TV talking about bread-and-butter issues of economics.
Your quacks have misdiagnosed the illnesses and misprescribed cures for over a century. You have misunderstood (or have you merely misrepresented) Charles Murray’s arguments about the hypocrisy of a self-idolizing elite which practices one thing while prescribing toxic behaviour for the “lower classes.” As for Thomas Franks … the only Franks worth reading doesn’t feed monsters, he hunts them.
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