It’s All a Grand Plan (swallow this post after you read it!)- A Blast From The past from November 2013
So two days ago a friend sent me this “quote”:
“America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.” – Josef Stalin
It appears it has been all over face book. It seemed wrong to me. I mean, it appeared on the order of “Ninety percent of quotes on the internet are wrong,” George Washington.
What appeared PARTICUARLY wrong was, so to say, the “psychology” of the quote. It’s clearly how some Americans view America, but is it how Josef Stalin would see it?
Let’s leave aside the whole question of how much he believed in communism or whether he did. He was a psychopath, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t dress his wishes in some form of ideology, and if he did it was communism. If he believed in communism, the idea that America was “moral” is right out. In fact, we know he had this idea that America just pretty much was promiscuously commercial from his quote about selling us a rope. (And that one sounds real.)
In any case, whether he believed in communism or not, he would not say that aloud if he believed it. Think how bad it would be for someone continuously denouncing us for that criminally evil regime – capitalism – to say we were moral.
Besides, children, veddy bad news, but despite our puritan streak, no one in the rest of the world views us as moral. Mostly because we’re more open at our weirdness than they are. It’s like a friend tells me the Japanese are in general very straight-laced, which is why their porn is so wild. But HERE we get the porn and the tentacle anime and… and we assume that Japanese is a seething mass of bizarre and sex. That’s sort of how the rest of the world sees us. If you start an internet rumor that a fad of putting goldfish in your ears for sexual satisfaction is spreading in America, they’ll believe it. And they would probably even more so when murderous uncle Joe was alive.
The “America is a healthy body” is also something he would not say aloud. Because again, whether he believed communism or not, that was what they were selling to the masses, and in communist doctrine no capitalist country is healthy as such. (It’s in conflict, in contradiction, just waiting to be transitioned, you might say.)
Then we have “its spiritual life” – oh, BROTHER. Let alone that communists are atheists, and that there is a good chance Stalin saw his god in front of the shaving mirror every morning… Even if he subscribed to the idea that a spiritual life of some sort was good, he would look at us and think we had none.
Look, it’s unfair. It’s like our being the prudes that everyone else thinks are the class sluts, because we wear makeup and our skirt is a bit short (meaning we don’t pretend to be holier than thou) but as much as America is more religious than other Western countries, measurably, statistically, this is NOT how the world sees us. They see our multitude of religions. If you’re devout, how can you be friends with people who believe differently? Clearly, you’re not devout. They see our crazier manifestations – and that’s mostly what they see there, the snake handling sects, the spiritist sects, and then the fake churches like the idiots who picket soldiers funerals. It’s mostly what they see because it’s what their media finds “interesting” – and they think of our religion, here in America as somewhere between a carnival and a freak show.
Why would someone viewing that think of it as a strength? It would be more “Keep those crazy americans busy with their crazy religions, they’re less likely to believe we’re infiltrating.”
Of all of that only patriotism makes sense, since communism is an international creed and us such believes that undermining patriotism is essential to its spread.
So, yes, I went to snopes and the quote is fake. Or at least “likely fake.” (Trust me, it’s fake.)
Which bring us to why I spent so much time analyzing it. No, it’s not to inure you about future bad quotes. They will go around, and all of us will fall for some of them sometime.
The reason I spent so much time introducing this is that when I went to Snopes, I found this listed under one particular kind of lie. The “The enemy is so clever” lie.
We’ve seen this with the Russians far too much and all through my life. “They’re so clever, that they engineered this and that and the other thing.” “They’re so brilliant, this is happening just according to their plan.”
Guys, take a deep breath, step back. If this is all according to their plan, it’s the only plan of theirs that ever went right. I mean, seriously, they couldn’t feed their own homeland with all those five years plans, but they can do a near hundred year plan to take over the rest of the world?
But Sarah, you’ll say, you say we’re still suffering from the effects of Soviet agit prop!
Oh, sure we are, but agit prop is not a careful plan. Look, communism is very good at proselytizing. Arguably it’s the one thing it’s good at. It hits, like all other communitarian doctrines, the part of the human brain that’s both looking for “fair” and longing for a return to childhood, with benevolent overseeing parents.
Put enough agit prop over there (and they put a lot) and some of it is going to hit and corrupt the vision of other countries. Besides, communism is so tailor made for intellectuals, explaining how things would be better if the intelligentsia ruled us.
BUT that is not a plan. Not unless it’s in the sense of “we do this, and this just might happen.” Witness for instance, that a plan would have come to fruition much earlier – like, before the USSR collapsed. Also, people that good at planning would have made sure that their system worked. (It is one of the funniest things about communism that they are central planners, but their plans never work. Okay, funny in a bitter way. I’m not laughing at the mass graves their delusions have caused.
There is a tendency to look at trends we don’t like in society and things that aid ideologies we don’t approve of, and think that it’s all a fiendish plan.
Both sides do it. The left looked at the tea parties and panicked, because it doesn’t fit their conceptual universe for people to protest high taxes. So they invented the boogey man of the Koch brothers (rather libertarian old bachelors whom a friend who worked for them assured me are very nice.)
Soros is not on the same level – because, well, we KNOW he finances all sorts of left causes (and given his history, anyone who thinks he’s one the side of angels and works for causes he endorses, should think again. Once you sell out your own people as a kid, well… you’re done, morally speaking. Particularly when you still brag about it as an old man.) And he has more money than the Kochs ever did.
But does that mean it’s all his “plan”? Is it all going according to his plan? Oh, please, guys – OWS. No, seriously. OWS. Yes, we all saw the ads on Craigslist, but nowhere did it say “must poop on police cars” okay?
He’s a man who wants to see the world burn and to that end tosses a lot of money at various disruptive causes. But he does not have a detailed plan, and everything does not go according to his plan, or you’d be looking at his face in a big screen every morning, while you did your mandated exercises. (Big Soros is watching you. Ick.)
Here’s the thing and the reason I don’t believe in the “conspiracy theory of history” except in the sense that some humans will look for power, and that the way they do it is always predictable: humans are strange.
No, seriously, humans are strange. There has never been a satisfactory enough theory to the way the individual human mind works. Oh, somewhat… but each school of psychology has hold of an end and no one has the full elephant. Which is why psychology remains a semi-soft science.
This simplifies somewhat when you have a crowd, but it’s still not conclusive. And when you have something like a country, which is a conglomerate of crowds… well…
History takes sudden turns, precipitated by events and one or two odd individuals in a crowd who don’t react the way you expect. “Scientific history” is poppycock. If it weren’t, the United States wouldn’t exist.
Yes, it is all explainable in retrospect, how we came to be. It’s easy to make up just-so stories about the past.
I doubt there’s ever been a human plan that worked, throughout history, and those of us who believe in a divine plan also believe it has taken some weird turns to accommodate us. Or as grandma would say “G-d writes straight on crooked lines.” (Or for those of you don’t believe, yes, those could be “just so” stories too, but if it’s all the same with you, I’ll throw my lot in with grandma. You see, I knew her, and I trust her judgement.)
We’re not G-d. Yes, I know. Very upsetting. But we’re not. This means that any plan that takes more than a generation will take some very weird turns, go sideways, and slide upside down, in the game of telephone that’s multi-generational belief.
Take for instance old Joe’s supposed quote above. Even if it had been true, could he have predicted the effect of a massive demographic bulge on American culture which did most of the loosening of said culture? I doubt it. I think the man had a talent for killing and terror, but no demonstrable intelligence otherwise.
Then why are we attributing G-d like intelligence to him?
Well, both because it puts the other side in the light of traitors and because it means we can’t do anything – see how comfortable that is? We can’t do anything, so why try? We can be absolute lumps and lecture all our friends still trying to turn things around and save us from a crash with “You fools. It’s been planned for decades. There’s nothing you can do.” Which is very comfortable and morally superior.
I see it all the time, even now, even from respectable thinkers, about the deblacle that is Obama Care. “They planned this all. It’s all incredibly smart. Game over, man.”
Oh, please. You don’t need to drink their ink. No one in their right mind could have planned that insanity. Did they plan for the plan to collapse into single payer? Surely. But not by the sheer incompetence of governmental administration.
We’re well outside their plan, guys. They’re the gang that can’t shoot straight. No, this doesn’t mean they’re completely ineffective. They’re very good at destruction and destruction is half of their job. BUT it means when their plan goes wrong (and it always does) there is an opening for us to come in, to save things, to fix things, to make things work the way we want.
Will it go exactly according to plan for us? Oh, heck no. BUT we can push it in the right direction and keep working.
We’re good at working and at building.
This morning, I got up and I cleaned poop from the hallway. Our geriatric cat is having diarrhea.
Being a conservative/libertarian is sort of like that. You’re always cleaning poop you didn’t make. And you don’t want to, because you have no interest in power over others. But if you just leave it there, someone will slip on it and make a bigger mess.
It’s not a plan. It’s just that you know where the spray cleaner is, and the paper towels, so you do it. And you change what would otherwise have happened.
Be of good cheer. Destruction is not a plan and incompetence is not a destination.
Giving up would be premature and despair is a sin. In the long run, destroyers always lose, and you always need the person who knows where the cleaner is kept and how to use the paper towels.
Square your shoulders and be alert. You, those you love, and perhaps the entire country depend on you. This is not time to go wobbly.
According To Hoyt 
“Square your shoulders and be alert. You, those you love, and perhaps the entire country depend on you. This is not time to go wobbly.”
No matter which odds are stacked against you, go, go go for it.
It helps that the Left is so damned clueless about how people think and function. And how unanticipated actions, taken for random reasons (“It just seemed like a good idea at the time”), end up completely changing the outcomes.
Of course, the highly and conventionally educated Right isn’t a whole lot better. They also are terribly clueless.
In the military, you’d have the Clueless officers (a few in the bunch worth their pay, but damned few), the equally clueless GI Joes – well trained on specific actions, but not all that good with surprises, the oddballs, good at improvising to get the job done (they end up at every level – but fewer in the officer corps), and, the guys who have both training, and common sense – the sargeants. Who train the new officers well enough to at least stay alive (and keep as many of their men in that condition), who are a good sounding board for ideas in progress, and who are terrific at organizing the whole shebang so the stuff and men get to where they are supposed to be, the non-coms understand the plan enough to handle their part of it, and they make everything seem like it was all planned.
In education, that USED to be the spinster who was WAY overqualified for the job, who used her intelligence to streamline the job and get things done in the face of administrative stupidity, and mentored and assisted the new guys.
Of course, the highly and conventionally educated Right isn’t a whole lot better. They also are terribly clueless.
Arguably the Right is more clueless…at least most leftist politicians know what mouth noises to make to appeal to their base. The Right thinks the same, or very similar, mouth noises appeal to their base as well.
I mean, look at the Democrat Senator from Utah if you don’t believe me.
Soros (and several others of his ilk) is in dire need of about 12 grams of aeris et plumbi delivered at 540 knots or so.
A while ago, I finalized realized that Soros is just the Ur Limousine Liberal. He drives through, throws money at things he thinks are problems, and never, ever, has to live with the consequences.
What makes him malicious is he also likes to short things and break them, on the assumption that he can make lots of money kicking out the foundations of society without ever running out of foundations of society.
All those leftists who declare their hatred of Nazis, by which they mean anyone who disagrees with them, have no problem with Soros who was an actual collaborator with the Nazis (his excuses for doing so are BS).
Of course these are the same people who wax poetic about the VW Beetle, a car whose shape was designed by Hitler himself, as he declared that he wanted a car “of the Volk, for the Volk” and handed out drawings of what he wanted it to look like.
Meanwhile modern leftist ideology with its determination to redistribute wealth by racial identity group is rather Nazi-like.
I suspect the Herbie movies may have something to do with many people’s affection for the VW Beetle.
It’s been glorified by old hippies now in hollywood, too.
Beetles are cute in a round sort of way. I wouldn’t want to drive or own one, but their visual aesthetics aren’t bad.
Ma had one in the mid-late 1970’s and liked it, but mainly as the engine weight over the drive wheels meant that she could get to work from a couple miles out of town when many in town said they couldn’t make it. I recall it was 4-on-the-floor so the sticker, likely not original, on the steering wheel wasn’t quite right, but I did like its brevity:
TO START CAR:
SIT DOWN
BUCKLE UP
TURN KEY
The use of that bottom pan instead of a frame made them great on high snow. If the wheels could get traction to push her forward she’d just slide.
Helped by having the engine in the back to put weight there.
Yep.
People may or may not like the looks and the safety comment is true, but I’m hard pressed to think of a consumer car that meets its design goals as exactly as the Type 1.
Had a roommate in college. Buck jumped off a bank along the road, landed on her car hood. Type 1 VW. Buck ran away. She was able to drive off. Drove around with a caved in hood until she could afford to get it fixed.
My parents had one when I was a child. It was pretty good.
They’re quite dangerous in an accident, not much crumple zone and too close to the windshield…
The gas tank sitting in your lap didn’t improve the safety, either…
Hey now, for what it is the old air-cooled VW was a pretty nice car. I wanted one for a long time before I moved on to wanting a kit car outright.
And give Hilter (and Porche) his due, there were vintage VW Bugs running like a charm long after a similar year Lada (the Bug’s Soviet counterpart) fell apart.
Surprised this hasn’t been posted
I like this one better:
https://pin.it/24qRaQ6
Communism is better than capitalism?
Okay, where would you rather have surgery? The U.S., or Russia?
Where would you rather see a doctor?
Buy a car?
Drive a car?
Take a plane ride?
Buy a house?
Go to the grocery store?
Rely on electricity?
Rely on any public utilities for that matter?
Live downstream from a dam?
Walk down the street at night? (Okay, that one may be a wash.)
BUT UNDER COMMUNISM, HEALTH CARE IS FREE!!1!
O’care sure ain’t
wEll ObvIousLy it’S becAUse we hAveN’t ImplemEnTed TruE cOmmuNisM yEt!
Uh huh.
You get what you pay for.
Doesn’t matter what the media for payment is.
In Russia Health care kill you 🙂
Even socialism health care (soft Russian Health care) will kill you. Just ask the Canadians who, for the last 2 years, haven’t been able to cross the US border to pay for health care they get for “Free” at home. That doesn’t count those that fly in from Europe.
I’m waiting for the Trucker Convoy members who held out to find their healthcare canceled.
Or they just can’t get critical appointments, prescriptions are back ordered … Oh, wait … *SOP, never mind.
Rumored/implied
In the US too, if you have doctors blindly pushing Pharma’s deadly shots, or recommending useless procedures…medical errors kill nearly 300k per year
Plus doctors are afraid to act due to the War on Drugs and pharma companies prefer either lifestyle drugs or drugs with federal protections (although the COVID protections were ridiculous given the pre-commitment by the FDA to zero valid testing, the Bextra class action alone explains why pharma demanded it)
I know someone with a condition that any medical reference or subject expert says initial pain control is opioids (usually Tylenol 3 or similar) who has basically been told she’ll never get it. C’s PCP has a sign up that reads “we no longer prescribe pain meds” and has for years.
Not to mention at least one class of last resort pain meds ( COX-2 inhibitor) was effectively made legal by a jury due to the class award given for one leading others to be pulled despite multiple users testifying that they daily contemplated suicide to escape the pain before it was introduced.
Compassionate care of people with chronic pain my happy ass. We sacrificed that for grandstanding politicians and lawyers making 5 figures an hour from class actions while giving the nominal victims pennies.
Contingency Fee: If you lose the case, the lawyer gets nothing. If you win, you get nothing.
Correction: health care is free*.
= Not including drugs, hospital gowns, clean linens, or timely service.
Yeah, but the ‘free’ health care doled out to the kulaks is completely different from what is provided to the kommissars.
Under socialized medicine, patients are an expense which ends when they die.
After, what, 12 years of 0bamacare, we have fewer doctors and nurses, and a F*kton more medical bureaucrats. And they wonder why health care didn’t get more affordable.
And worth every penny.
Back in the 90s, some students from my high school did an exchange trip to Russia. One of them came back with a quote from a Russian they’d met: “You can tell Americans by the fact that they smile all the time.” (There was a follow-up to that, something along the lines of “Americans have a lot to smile about.”)
Russia is deeply unhappy. More alcoholism, pessimism, suicides, abortions than just about any country you could name.
And those statistics, for other countries, are often completely fabricated, definitely unreliable, or outright unknown.
Which usually means even worse than the statistics they publish.
Different cultures may have different relationships with what you or I would call “facts.” If the truth would get you killed, no ifs ands or buts, and for nothing, you lie. Do that often enough, it becomes a habit. Spread that over an entire population, reinforce it, that’s a culture.
Spreading virtue through a culture is a much tougher row to hoe. But the benefits down the line are worth it.
And very few cultures value truth over appearances. Though some will honor a man who holds his integrity through ANYTHING, even if they think he’s nuts. (See the Korean Admiral Yi Sun-Sin and all the times he got backstabbed.)
Though the koreans may be a bad example. They consider it dishonorable to cause an enemy to loose face.
That can be a pragmatic thing in wartime, similar to “Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across”. An enemy that has lost face, in that kind of honor/shame culture, might just fight all the harder, thinking that if they can wipe you out then they’ll be able to save face. Whereas if you can allow them to surrender with honor, you’ll save the lives of many of your own soldiers.
I don’t actually know if that’s how it works, but the golden-bridge quote is the first thing I thought of when I read your comment.
Yes and no…For the Koreans they actually differentiate between honor and face. In Japan honor and face seem to be conflated, and in China they’re sort of conflated, but face is the one that matters. (it’s a bit more of a ‘if you can get away with it’.)
Japan and China might allow the enemy to save face in order to gain some form of advantage of them. For Korea there is also a component of how you treat others reflects on you. Your honor is more important than Face, because it’s harder to change. Honestly I wish my grandfather was still around. He could explain it far better than I. (He lived the vast majority of his life there.)
Now the salt: I know MUCH more about Korea than I do about the other two, so I could be misreading them.
Story about Paul Linbarger (aka Cordwainer Smith) was that as a linguist in intelligence he composed a series of Japanese phrases that were innocuous in Japanese, but sounded like, “I surrender!” in English so Japanese troops could surrender without losing face.
That totally fits his fiction as well. The Instrumentality of Mankind would be proud.
He is an author too forgotten. His rhymes with history, especially the utopia ended with The Rediscovery of Man fit our times quite well.
I have to dedicate my cat world to him, when I put out the first in a couple of months. 🙂
Good choice! “The Game of Rat and Dragon” has been one of my favorites for decades.
I’m not sure ours did as much as we thought/hoped.
Certainly, it doesn’t now.
The left has been changing it for …. decades. All about “respecting the position.” I first noticed it — of all things — with publishers insisting mysteries not make fun of policemen “because they’re professionals” Then it got crazier. Like my son’s middle-school English teacher, insisting I respect her for her knowledge. (Snort giggle.)
Yeah. And they’ve corrupted a vast swath of society. But not all.
Points at election night NOT ALL, Herb. Not all.
Teachers lost respect when two things happened at the same time:
Social conditions made it harder for the profession to cream the top of the female college graduates.
Teacher’s professional organizations started behaving like Teamsters.
As for the police, they had a lot of respect until they came out as state enforcers first, foremost, and only during COVID and the 2020 riots.
Was that the idiot who had her students swarm your blog, way back when?
________________________________
Yep
When was this?
Oh, heck, shortly after the blog started. Older son was in middle school. So… (I was promised there would be no math)…. 2003 or 04 or thereabouts.
We didn’t really have all of our teeth then. The twits would make amusing chew toys for us now
________________________________
Yep
Ah. I don’t think I found this place until over a decade later.
One of her semi-literate monkeys was the valedictorian of the class, partly because she had perfect grades in English. Think about it.
I’ve often noted the the Russian novel ‘War and Peace’, which is a generally upbeat novel by Russian standards, literally has a character die because he decides that things are going too well in his life.
You, if Putin used the excuse “have you read Russian literature…that made us invade Ukraine” I’d probably buy it. Certainly more than that DeNazification story
THIS.
There was a disturbing document in a Russian site. Dear Lord. It read like the Final Solution but for Ukranians.
B. Durbin said
“Russia is deeply unhappy. More alcoholism, pessimism, suicides, abortions than just about any country you could name.”
And it seems Russia has been that way for a long time. In high school one of the new english teachers did a class on dystopias. All of us that were in it were vaguely depressed. But in in another lit class we read Dostoyevskys “Crime and punishment”. That freakin book made reading through Brave New World, 1984, This Perfect Day and parts of Clockwork Orange in order look like a cakewalk. Is there ANY Russian novel which has a happy Ending? Anna Karenina jumps in front of a train. War and peace has people dead in several places and add to that you can never keep all the names straight. It’s enough to make you want to slit your wrists so you don’t have to read any more…
War and Peace has a happy, upbeat ending. Given that it’s set during the Napoleonic Wars, the fact that characters die is not a surprise. My own complaints about it aren’t that characters die. It’s that – as I noted above – you have things like one character quite literally dying because he decides that life is going too well. And that’s not hyperbole, or a metaphor. It quite literally causes him to die.
There are some fun modern Russian novels out there. But yeah, mostly it’s like “Why are you doing this!???” Author torture of characters happens a lot, even if it’s just psychological drama.
OTOH, that’s why writers like Tolkien and Bujold are so popular over there. Sprawling story, serious issues, but there’s still virtues and jokes and happy endings.
For happy endings you have to go back to their fairy tales.
A saying about the classic Russian novel: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and they both spend the next 700 pages brooding about it.
Seen recently:
Englishman: “I will die for honor”
Frenchman: “I will die for love”
American: “I will die for freedom”
Russian: “I will die”
More truth than poetry there…
“It’s enough to make you want to slit your wrists so you don’t have to read any more…”
I could swear that was the explicit goal of every English program I was ever in. (And I’m an English Lit major.) When I reached yet another “I hate this stuff” point in grad school, I finally realized it was time to bail on the academic game for good; took my master’s degree and got out only just before they succeeded in using what I love most to destroy my will to live.
Some of the Russian fairy tales aren’t depressing.
They have their regional fillips, of course, but they aren’t depressing.
Why, like other Slavonic regions, you can actually blow off the stranger on the road and come back and apologize, and it’s all right. Don’t try that in any other region!
There’s also the rule where you often have to kill the monster with one blow or it will be restored by the second. So when it tells you to hit again, you say, “Was I born twice, that I should slay you twice?” Except that one’s also Arabic.
It isn’t the ’90s any more..it’s a greatly different country…
If communists had decent healthcare the N1 rocket would have been the primary heavy-lift booster of the past 50 years.
We do have one thing working for us.
Evil will oft evil mar.
An immutable law of the universe.
On Soviet agirprop, Blue team agitprop, and suchlike… It’s tossing the whole pot of spaghetti at the wall. No seriously.
There’s a lot of attempts to affect America and the opinions of America like that. Most of them fail because they don’t “get” us. Some of them succeed in ways that were almost always never intended, for values of “succeed.” Some things stick that have absolutely nothing to do with how they started, I think.
The thing is that agitprop is destructive. That they can’t build doesn’t mean they can’t destroy.
Also it doesn’t need to build on the prior cases if they failed.
C4C
This late in Biden’s term, the Senate should refuse the nomination so that President Harris can have an opportunity to nominate.
Speaking of fake quotes, the other day I saw someone attributing this quote to Vladimir Lenin: “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” I was immediately skeptical, did a VERY quick DDG search, and found that there was no evidence Lenin ever said that. Why was I skeptical? Well, a communist talking about inflation? That should have run alarm bells.
And, that is not the way that Lenin would have thought.
No. It doesn’t sound like his writings at all. Granted, eliminating the bourgeoisie was one of his goals, as a “good” Marxist, but that doesn’t ring right.
Stalin’s level of intelligence is an interesting historical question. The view of him as a rather dull-witted thug is at least partly a reaction to the propaganda portrayal of him as “the genius of our time.” I’ve read several post-Soviet biographies by authors who had access to previously closed archives that show evidence of a considerable intelligence, albeit Machiavellian and cruel. There are books in the Kremlin library which have annotations in his handwriting that clearly show he was understanding and engaging with complex subjects.
“Evil makes you stupid” was certainly involved, and there is also evidence that he had a depressive disorder and some of the descriptions of him as plodding or slow came from periods when he was in a down phase. But there’s also the issue of his upbringing: born into a family of illiterate peasants, in a household disrupted by a violent, alcoholic father’s unpredictable rages, and then receiving a narrowly focused seminary education.
That’s why I felt confident in portraying at least some of his clones in the Grissom timeline as quite intelligent. Soso Gamsakhurdia is an outlier, having been genemodded for increased resilience and then put in the family of Georgia’s great twentieth-century literary lions. But even the others are working in fields that require substantial mental horsepower and a fair amount of solid education: engineers, pilots, etc.
Stalin can’t have been stupid; a mere idiot thug would never survive that whirling maelstrom of power-hungry backstabbers. Whatever his actual intelligence level, he was a pure genius in the arts of manipulation and coercion.
THIS.
I don’t think he was stupid. He’d at least need cunning to get and hold power in a cannibalistic system. I just don’t think his framing was ours.
Speaking of Obama, there’s a clip making the rounds of his appearance today in the White House to celebrate the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act. It shows everyone crowding around O, while Biden starts to leave, realizes nobody is following him, looks back, turns away….
If the Turnip in chief weren’t a) screwing our country further into the ground b) a nasty lying prepubescent girl fondling pile of dog excrement I’d almost feel sad for him. Some seem to think Obumbles is actually in charge but hell he’d have trouble organizing an orgy at a cat house (no offense meant to the feline race mind you). He had trouble keeping three thoughts in order with a teleprompter. Thinking he’s some Sauron like source of evil plans is ludicrous at best. Speaking of which I saw a meme that suggested given the way things are going there’s probably a hobbit taking a ring to a volcano. I just wish he’d hurry the heck up…
At the very least, his backers are still around, and there is an influence on Democrat politics that feels like OBama.
If that isn’t /his/ race war obsession, then one of his backers supplied it.
Bob there is an assumption you are making. That is that Obama was himself ever in charge. He’s so radically incompetent that thinking he is some sort of SPECTRE villain is just silly. He could (on a good day and with a fully prepared teleprompter) deliver an almost acceptable speech. He is very good at finding people to find and expose dirt on an opponent. He manages to dress well (one could argue that Michelle dresses him, but not after looking at her style). He doesn’t drool or soil himself unlike the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He was well above his incompetence level as a back rank Illinois state senator. Heck he never sponsored a bill either there or in his brief tenure in the senate. He’s a nothing a nobody a cipher. If this were the 50’s/60’s he feels like a classic cut out agent for the USSR. But even they at their most desperate wouldn’t want the Crap Midas king of fail. There’s somebody back there pulling his strings, but darned if I can figure out who.
I’m not sure it’s a single ‘who’. I think it’s a dog pile of competing influences.
Right Plural Puppeteers makes sense. But the question is how has this not leaked, old saying is “3 people can keep a secret if 2 are dead”, similarly the standard that the security types use is that chance of some secret getting exposed goes up in a non linear fashion (some say factorial) with the number of people that know the secret. Admittedly the press don’t want to play and just keep quite (liberal partisans with Bylines), but still there should be some hint other than grocery store tabloids. Its frickin’ wierd (and I didn’t say frickin’) seriously gives me the heebie jeebies.
You’re assuming way more organization than I think is reasonable. Think more of cabal of advisors each with their own priorities, agendas, and pet causes, each who find him useful for whatever reason. Advisor A is currently the favorite, but Advisor B has a project that captures what passes for the Figure Head’s imagination… since the Figure Head is the one who has the actual power, so for that project Advisor B is pulling the strings. But for other projects Advisor A is… then you have advisor C which doesn’t have pet projects, but says things that Figure Head finds interesting, philisophically so that starts showing up in policy and Advisor C pulls other strings.
None of it is planned. None of it is organized. There’s nothing to report since it all looks like Figure Head is being Leaderly and Listening To His Advisors. It only becomes obvious when the Figure Head is a turnip who doesn’t have any self to filter through. Whatever else he is, Obama is a human with his own interests and world view that filters all the things his advisors tell him. The current Turnip in Chair doesn’t have any of that so it’s more obvious.
Hmm it does explain some of the thrashing. There are conflicting goals although many things are in common so there is SOME unity. But usually in that case someone tries to seize the reins. It’s essentially the good old politics that would show up in every monarchy as the king got old and there were multiple heirs all unsuitable in various fashions. They already have thrown ANTIFA/BLM under the bus in a lame version of night of the long knives, but the internal strugglr hasn’t quite broken out yet. Although there is a great deal of tension between the ancient Oligarchs (Pelosi et alia as well as RINOs and uniparty adherents) Vs the Squad and their out and out socialist/Maoist tendencies. If the GOP weren’t so prone to live up to their name as the stupid party this would provide an immense chance to chase the tranzi/sjw’s out of power for 20-30 years, but the GOP leaders have the backbone of a sea cucumber.
A traditional vaudeville show will have a ventriloquist with 3 or 4 dummies.
The Washington Vaudeville Show has half a dozen ventriloquists and ONE dummy.
And every once and a while our current Charlie Mccarthy stand in blurts out something on his own. Its more like possession than ventriloquism or marionettes, the last vestiges of the Turnip in Chief are there, he was never a nice or intelligent man but he was more than the meat puppet he is now.
What we’ve got is more like Mortimer Snerd than Charlie McCarthy.
———————————
Candidate Joe Biden, August 2020: “We have assembled the most extensive, comprehensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”
Minutes later: “What do you mean, I wasn’t supposed to say that?”
Perhaps, Although even Mortimer could make some clever sly comments from time to time (it of course being Edgar Bergen running the show…). In any case comparing Turnip in Chief to any ventriloquists dummy (or puppet or muppet) is likely going to leave the puppet as winner.
Did they wheel out McCain’s daughter? After all, her father was the savior of Obamacare (and probably put the final nail into GOP credibility in the process).
I thought the rope quote was Lenin?
I thought it was Stalin. I could be wrong. All commies look alike to me.
Butt ugly, down to the bone.
Hell, I thought it was Marx.
Some quick research indicates it appears in a US journal in the 50s. The closest to a source is some manuscript notes about Lenin’s supposed statements attached to a book n 1931.
Yeah, it’s always somebody trying to send Setnaffa to the gulags or something…
Well, I’m not eorried. Can’t change things with worry. Can’t spend the extra cycles on the blame game. We’re “here” now. How do we get “there” as efficiently as possible?
Well, we need to agree on the definitions of “here” and “there”; but otherwise, yeah, it’s that simple.
May God defend the right. And I wish Numbers 6:24-26 to those who believe.
I’ve had the urge to illuminate Psalm 20 and post it to as many people as I could. I may have to actually do that.
Sarah, much of it, if not planned, was intended. Destructive attacks against society and culture tend to be “fire and forget” weapons. Viz: the Frankfurt school, modern art, the long march through the institutions, direct corruption of political class, etc. When the USSR fell apart, the subversions it supported continued on their own inertia and eventually, the Chinese picked up where the Soviets left off. The fact that such subversions have been so successful is attributable to two main factors: our tolerance of such subversion attempts (based on an unrealistic comfort level with our own strength) and the areas of cultural apathy or rot which were exploited.
The solution is simple, if not easy– we have to fix our own cultural rot and expunge it from our nation. Rather difficult when you are being overrun with millions of invading immigrants from the worst cultures on the planet (which is part of the reason for the Left’s advocacy for that invasion), but there it is.
I have a feeling the invasion won’t last. You’re thinking like a leftist.
They’re coming here for the free beer and chocolate. Once that stops flowing, they melt. We already had La Grande Salida under Obama, and this will be bigger.
Will they melt or go rouge and take what’s left until they’re hunted down?
I do worry this latest wave is going to lead to unofficial enforcement, and I say that as someone who lived a decadish on the border and my family didn’t finally leave until my father died and Mom moved to be near my sister and the grandkids.
The tenor of who is crossing is not what it was 35 years ago. El Paso is the least safe since Pancho Villa and company rode the border.
Some of them are. But not most.
Look….. these people don’t get third worlders. When the going gets rough, they skeedadle back home where they know the rules.
Hell, Herb, as much as I love this country and loved it in abstract, if we’d gone through this time with the threat of food shortages before I was fully accultured? Say 3 years in? I’d have convinced Dan to go with me to Portugal, where I have connections, linkages, friends and WOULD NEVER GO HUNGRY. (Had. None of this applies. When I go back, it’s like being a ghost. But that’s not important, because now I’m AMERICAN and I’m here and will go through and come out on the other side or not with my people.)
Hmmm…maybe my border time has skewed my perspective as I’m used to functional extended families that span the border so the idea of someone leaving the US after coming seems weird as they’re part of the “US family” now.
Also, most of those doing domestic and service type jobs in El Paso go home at night, although they cross into the US illegally a lot just to save time (probably more now that passports are required unlike pre-9/11).
Meanwhile the illegals who intend to stay mostly pass through El Paso if that.
No. These days a lot of them are coming from lower down than Mexico.
That I know, that’s why I say they are of a much different character of those from the 80s and 90s. Most of them were from southern Mexico and originally intended to return home. On the border you’ll hear tales of houses built by illegals who sent money home but never returned them as they grew ties (read children) in the US.
That wasn’t ideal, but was survivable. Someone coming with the intent to temp work and send money home to build a home but grows ties and decides to stay still brought the idea of saving and taking care of yourself as well as being part of a place in a way the current transients don’t seem to have.
“…go rouge…”: Evidence that some typos work perfectly in context, maybe even better then the intended word. 😉
Dooh
The invasion has been ongoing for my entire adult life. The rate waxes and wanes, but never ends. Sure, the free stuff is an incentive, but not the only one. That’s just a libertarian fairy tale trotted out to justify open borders and “free” trade presumably without the welfare, but curiously they are never willing to end all immigration until the welfare problem is solved.
hell no. It is mostly the free stuff and the prosperity.
I come from a net emmigrant culture. I know.
c4c