I’m tired. Today, while trying to write I was struck by a weird combination of anxiety and mourning, for no reason I can figure out, except perhaps exhaustion. It kept me checking the news every 2 minutes, also for no discernible reason.
And when I sat down to write a post, it seemed like I couldn’t find a theme, until started searching for a post to use as a blast from the past. And then I ran across this post from 2015 which I excerpted bellow.
I was suddenly and startlingly aware that this must be said (again) and that it explains why we’re all exhausted, and why even people of good will on the left can’t seem to understand they’re not fighting the monsters that exist only in their imaginations, and why if we engage them and they’re at risk of having their world view upended they become hysterically defensive.
And why they, so often, rewrite overnight.
It’s not that they’re NPCs. It’s not that they’re less human than we are. It is that they belong to a culture, they were taught a history, and given a mission. Their mission, their view of themselves in this world history makes them who they are and gives their world meaning.
We’re humans. None of us sees the world unaided by the lenses of our culture. This is why acculturation is so difficult, and will leave scars, and why it feels like going insane. In many ways it is like going insane. Your entire view of the world dissolves, and another replaces it. It’s like reality dissolving before your eyes.
Which is why the human solution to absorbing another culture — and perhaps the most human solution. Stop staring at me like I’m crazy. I’ve been thinking really strange things all day, and perhaps I am — is to kill the adults and raise the kids in the winning culture. No, I’m not suggesting anyone do that, but it is what was done throughout history. (Sometimes women were kept too, but that wasn’t the kinder fate.)
[I can see in my future a sword and sorcery story from early times, that I don’t want to write, but probably will. Because I’m trying to puzzle these mechanics out and I think in fiction. I think by running imaginary scenarios.]
THIS is the excerpt that gelled my thoughts such as they are, on our national moment. It is from deep in the puppy years, and it…. feels like it. I’m cutting out the name of the person I’m talking about, not to ressurrect old fights, because this is NOT about that.
BEGINNING OF EXCERPT:
But one thing is to know it instinctively – and even then when I write about it, people email me to tell me that I am wrong and “paranoid” and yeah, one is always afraid – and another to have one’s nose rubbed in it in the form of a supposed adult saying with the simplicity of a 12 year old that the people who oppose her are “racist, sexist, homophobic” and “bad to reprehensible” even before the “poopy-head” level classification of “neo-nazis.”
Look, it is the fact that [NAME OMITTED] is sincere and, in her own mind, fighting on the side of angels, that is shocking and scary. And it fits perfectly with what I’ve seen in the publishing world (other than Baen, natch) in my years working as a professional writer.
These people don’t live in the world we live in.
Most of us – well, some of us – went through excellent universities, and read voraciously, and were subjected to the barrage of media that projected the same mental picture [NAME OMITTED] has: the left is eternally right (when they were wrong, their mistakes – like segregation – are now attributed to the right) and the future is a bright socialist utopia (really communist, but we’ll call it socialist so as not to scare the squares) and anyone who stands against it is an evil right winger, a fascist, a neo nazi and by definition racist, sexist, homophobic.
The thing is that this view was propagated pretty uniformly from the academic/media/entertainment complex for most of the twentieth century and people absorbed it to some extent. But most people in the real world come across enough stuff that doesn’t fit, or perhaps read enough about the fall of the Soviet Union to know it’s not just “this time it will be different” but the system itself is flawed.
And some of us come to view individual rights, individual conscience and individual freedom as the only best system (not perfect. No system is perfect.)
But that’s because the places we work in, the world we move in isn’t a unified front. Those who stay in academia, those who go into the arts or into publishing, though, move from a world of being fed a message into a world of being fed the same message. Not only is there no incentive to doubt, but doubting or showing any wobbling of belief will be detrimental to you. You stay within that world because it’s safe and because it’s what everyone around you believes. How can everything you know be wrong.
Shadowdancer in her excellent post about why “Nazi” is not a word to throw around lightly mentions her years in East Germany:
This was particularly emphasized by the fact that the Second World War was excised entirely from East German education at the time, and they were only taught about ‘The Great War’ – what the rest of the world was calling World War I. Socialist Germany was a big exercise in erasing the past and reconstructing it in a great big lie – and somewhat inconveniently, there were still people who remembered WWII. It was a verboten subject, and the younger generation knew nothing of it. They didn’t believe that someone as evil as Hitler could have ever existed.
Dad, the Aristotlean gadfly that he was, liked to smuggle in copies of Mein Kampf and give it away as gifts, his own little subversive fight for the truth. I know he horrified one of our babysitters with it, who was a college student and an avowed Marxist who enjoyed being able to pit wills and philosophical arguments with ‘someone unfortunate enough not to be educated in Socialist education.’ It was her awakening into questioning what she knew.
One of the people working at the consulate fell in love with an East German woman. The only way they could marry was if she escaped East Berlin, and so he smuggled her out. The details of that I don’t know, but I remember my dad saying she was struck dumb for three days from sheer culture shock after she saw West Berlin for the first time – and realized that everything she’d been raised to believe, and had known as truth was in fact a carefully manufactured and maintained lie that was possible only through total control of information. Everything had to be spoon fed. They had to develop a disdain, to instill contempt, pity and aversion to Capitalism, America and other countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
In a way [NAME OMITTED] lives in a similar world. A world in which some verities are so absolute they can’t ever be questioned.
END OF EXCERPT
Other people have said this. Other people have talked about the “two different movies” in the head of the left and the right.
Would that it was only that; that it was only superficial indoctrination. But it’s not. It’s something more than that, something that reaches far, far back, and that in the west, in the current time and place, had hardened into a complete encasing reality and culture that can’t and won’t be challenged. Because if it’s challenged, people defend it harder. It’s the only way they can stay sane within their own views, their culture.
This is why in the culture wars when we call out gross and horrifying evil from the other side, we find ourselves accused of things that don’t even make sense.
Take the whole puppy thing, (Please, not actually, because Larry has threatened anyone who picks it up under that name with the wrath of Larry) but look at it.
We were a gonzo band of idealists, half of us — more or less. I never actually counted, partly because there was the inner ring, the outer ring, the outer, outer ring, and the ululating multitudes — women, the other half … well, men of such varied backgrounds that they can’t be lumped as anything in particular. However, one thing is sure certain: not a single one of us was an editor. Not a single one of us was a publisher. Not a single one of us — even — was wealthy. I don’t know the background of every single one of the 100 or so people I interacted with that year, and at any rate those three years or so are very foggy because I had major surgery that had problems healing, and took more painkillers than at any other time in my life (Not opiates, which make me ill, but pain and pain killers are both exhausting.) However, I don’t think a single one of them was born wealthy or from a powerful family, though some were bestselling authors and doing relatively well. (In a profession where you can make a lot of money one year and none the next, mind.)
In our simple and frankly simple-minded way we tried to rally the fans themselves to rescue an award that had been won by people we respected from thralldom to pseudo literary pretentiousness.
Against us, everything was marshaled, from international publications, to whispers in private gatherings. From claims of our origins which made no sense, to weirder things, including threats to our children and spouses. The truth which we didn’t realize at the time, is that we were threatening people’s paychecks. You see we, innocents that we were, were all workers in the word vineyards, creating something for the masses to consume, for which we wanted to be paid. But the top tiers of our field, the revered ones, were those who were writing not to be read, but to receive awards for their correct world view, which in turns translated into either amazingly well paid academia and consultant jobs and/or Hollywood jobs.
We were chumps who believed in writing for readers’ enjoyment. But our insanity in trying to give awards to people we enjoyed reading was threatening their livelihood.
NOTE that all of them were powerful people, with contacts well beyond ours. They might not make much money from writing, but they all had well known names as “smart” (leftism is a positional good) defenders of leftist ideology. They COULD get us slandered in international publications. We mostly took to our blogs.
If this starts to look like our current political situation, you’re not wrong.
However, over all, and still subsisting in many official pages the most bizarre and strangest thing is the narrative they peddled, and which people believed:
That we were powerful people, afraid to lose our power, and therefore we were trying to keep “women, gays, people of color” (some of which were in our number, some even in the inner circles) from writing science fiction. And that our entire effort was this repressive attempt to keep minorities down, so we could remain powerful.
It is bizarre that this narrative was ever accepted, since we were writers, who in the general run of the publishing world have the right to only two things: sell the work of their minds, and get paid for it.
One of the amusing after-shots of this whole mess was the writer who accused me of getting him blacklisted at Baen (this after I was dumped by Baen, incidentally.) This was someone nominally on our side, and I could only stare at the level of sheer insanity.
Sure, maybe Larry who makes most of their money could get someone blacklisted at Baen. Frankly, I doubt it. I doubt it, because publishers don’t like it when you dictate to them. I mean, not that Larry would do that to anyone, but if they had another, less scrupulous bestseller who tried to do it, I doubt it would work.
But except for Larry, the rest of us were at best midlisters. maybe midlisters with some following, but you know, none of us was a major figure.
So what power were we afraid to lose? Supposing we were racist, sexist and homophobic (the people who read me and can say that with a straight face need their heads examined) and wanted to keep minorities from being published, what were we intending to do to bring this about? Stop them getting awards? Shit, honeychild, none of us at that point had got any awards. If not getting awards kept you from getting published, none of us would be published. (Oh, sorry, I’d got the Prometheus. And I love my Prometheus win. But it wasn’t the make or break for “I’ll continue writing” or I’d have given up in the 12 years since.)
The idea that we were these powerful beings, jealous of our power and wanting to keep it, was so crazy bizarro — particularly when one of our major opponents was the largest publishing house in the business — that it should have been laughed out of the room.
That it wasn’t tells you how deep the indoctrination is.
We were saying that preachy lefty fiction is not the best fiction, and therefore in the culture of the left, honed and polished over a century in all institutions of learning and in all arts and publishing and mass communication, we must be on the side of oppressors. We must be racist/sexist/homophobic. HAD TO BE. Because otherwise reality would dissolve.
And so people, good bad and indifferent, and of all levels of intelligence, piously repeated a story which rationally, on the face of it wouldn’t fool my cat Havelock, who is, frankly, mentally disabled.
They had to. Because if they didn’t, the world was not what they thought, and they couldn’t go on. They just couldn’t.
And if you’re thinking of all the people, good bad and indifferent and everything in between who piously believe that BLM really was about black lives — and who also, despite video evidence — believe Kyle Rittenhouse killed black men, not white psychopaths. Or piously believe a guided tour of the Capitol by unarmed people was “an insurrection.” Or who really, piously believe that Covid 19 was the worst thing ever, fully deserving the Covidiocy treatment. Or–
Yeah. That’s what it is. They have to believe the institutions and means of information they always trusted, otherwise their world will dissolve. And they’ll swallow the most ridiculous lies to keep their world and their guideposts intact. Because otherwise they’ll undergo a mental experience much like a primitive whose tribe has lost a war and who is unfortunate enough not to be killed: he’ll have to change everything about himself involuntarily.
This is not invincible. It’s getting broken little by little.
What level of cognitive dissonance does it take for it to break?
Well, it didn’t break for the Germans when they could smell the smoke of the burning human bodies down the road. It didn’t break for them when their nation became desperate enough to recruit old, broken down men and beardless youths.
They still believed in the glorious Reich of a 1000 years. It’s just fewer believed it every day, and that the daily breakdown of civilization was exposing more and more of them to the fact they believed a lie.
Now, some never stopped believing it. I heard them mutter darkly in German about the horrible Americans who had destroyed the German dream. Not shaved-head neo-nazis, but normal guys, in a pub, after hours.
But the problem isn’t that. The vast majority of them did give it up. The problem rather is what they boomeranged into, because of the underpinnings of their culture.
They still believed in their own superiority. As well go back to the Germanic tribes, and uproot that. They still believed in strong-man government. They just fell into soft and increasingly hardening socialism.
Now, we’re not quite as bad as the Germans were, and the underpinning of our culture are different — thank heavens — and more and more people are waking every day — thank heavens on that too — because the people who took over in the color revolution are the most bumbling, bizarrely incompetent bunch of aspiring-morons in the history of humanity.
We used to marvel at some of the Roman Emperors and how they managed to stay in power, but the Romans didn’t have fast means to distribute individual opinion. We do. And yet we’re suffering through the reign of someone more imbecile and self-adoring than Commodus.
People are waking up.
Again, calm the effe down, they’re not the majority. if they were the majority, they would not have bothered developing the most exhaustive means of stealing elections ever known or turned our elections into a mockery of the word. My best estimate is that they are about 20 to 25% of the population. Because if they were any more than that they wouldn’t need so many crazy ways to circumvent our voting.
But 20 to 25% is a huge number, given what we know, what we’ve seen. It’s a massive number of people who believe a narrative that’s patently and obviously false.
In this war we’re fighting to save our nation, people who otherwise would be on our side, are fighting on the other side, convinced we’re some kind of ogre coming to devour everything good and worth fighting for. They see us through a deep fog of lies and distortions. Many of the, perhaps, are aware of what they’ve become and assume we must be the same only worse.
Imagine how hard you’d fight someone who had all of your worst characteristics magnified.
In the end we win they lose.
But Lord, the magnitude of destruction that will be needed to lift that fog of lies.
And Lord, how many good people we will lose fighting on both sides.
And even so, may the fog be lifted. May we see clearly.
And may we have the courage not to close our eyes.
According To Hoyt 
Looks like your shocked face will get a workout….
https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-matt-taibbi-twitter-files-jim-jordan-daniel-werfel-lina-khan-84ee518?st=d3ftrebkq9ig6p3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
“The IRS Makes a Strange House Call on Matt Taibbi
An agent shows up at the home of the Twitter files journalist who testified before Congress.”
😐
Not “strange” at all for today’s government goons.
“Nice life ya got there. Be a shame if it got broke.”
The only difference is that the Mafia shows some restraint.
The Mafia know the story of the Golden Goose, and would prefer to keep the eggs coming, thank you. The State and the Do-Goodniks prefer to believe in— Heck if I know. Wish fulfillment of the worst kind, I suppose.
Fantasy, at any rate. And not the entertaining kind…
is that on insty yet, STeve?
No, not that I’ve seen. I haven’t been looking at email or anything else since I saw that just before clocking in for work.
well, it is now.
May I beg that if you come across these and it’s not at insty you send it to my personal hotmail? I still might not put it up — today my FIL is actively dying, and we’re organizing Dan’s trip out, so I’m sleep walking and constantly interrupted — BUT there’s a chance….
Sorry to hear about your FIL. That’s never a great time. Best of luck on the trip set up.
So sorry about your FIL. It’s rough. Even when you think you’re ready and expecting it, you’re not ready. Prayers commencing.
I will.
My condolences to you and Dan about his father.
May the Lord bless you and yours, may He make His countenance to shine upon you, and grant you His Peace.
Thank you.
So sorry about Dan’s father. Prayers with you, Dan, your kids, and Dan’s dad and family. This position is never easy, even when you know it is coming. One is never ready.
Praying.
I am praying for you.
Thank you.
Prayers for your husband and FIL. It’s hard, very hard.
May God grant him comfort and peace as he passes from this shadowy world to a better, brighter realm. May He offer all of you the same as you endure your loss, and hope for the later reunion. May your tears be freely shed for what was had for a time and will be regained one day. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Sorry to hear about Dan’s father; prayers are with you and Dan and your family
I lost my father five months ago. It feels like last month. My brother’s FIL is begining a rapid decline now, too.
There’s a lot of it going around now. May God be with us all.
I’m sorry to hear that. I will pray for your family.
May the Good Lord comfort and strengthen you in this time of distress.
Praying. My grandmother just passed away the other day; but she got allllll the Sacraments and last rites first, so that was a blessing.
Condolences to your family
FIL is episcopal, and I’m sure he has had all that for his faith, but his church is so decayed. At MIL’s funeral G-d was never mentioned.
I’m so sorry.
A workout? By now, Sarah’s Shocked Face is ready to win multiple gold medals in the Shocked Face Olympics. 😛
There was a Radio Show, The UNexpected and most were, well, rather depressing, but ONE stood out. A gal who had always had to settle for second best (or worse) said she wanted the BEST, the MOST VALUABLE of… some bit of jewelry, and her husband agreed. And then she was, yet again, disappointed when the jewelry she got was silver. So she went to the jeweler’s and tried trade up to gold. And got a shock… “Do you want the difference in cash or a check?” No, it wasn’t gold. Platinum.
[Mind, Doing It Right, she’d have been along and been able to make the choice herself right off – but that wouldn’t be a Story, now would it?]
Re: Tabbibi: Note, the IRS “visit” was just before he was to go to testify. Wat a coinkidink, eh?
The post makes a good point that the “middle left” of their followers have to defend the insane and indefensible to avoid breaking their own worldviews.
The .gov and media / education / business establishments are invested in harvesting resources from these people, and will not stop until either the resources are gone, or they are in some way made to stop.
The stolen elections and compromised “justice system” make the last option more likely than I want to think about.
I think that it will be more painful to see through the smoke of war, than the fog of war.
But as our host says. Eventually, they lose, we win, because we have goals which reach into the future. Survive, and be ready to teach America to our children, and those of the survivors.
John in Indy
What’s being described is a false religion. In order to cut through the fog, you have to understand its fundamental presuppositions and attack those. Raw facts won’t work:. they interpret the raw facts according to the presuppositions
This does indeed explain how I’ve been so. exhausted -_-
Amen.
Never forget this simple truth: without the left we would be inconvenienced, without us they cannot exist. Now such a division would surely put our country in peril from external sources, but we the red majority feed them, shelter them, supply them with reliable energy on demand, not to mention providing them with the tax base essential for them to continue to fund their mad Marxist pipe dreams.
Evidence of this is everywhere from the current beginnings of panic as blue states see the real earners fleeing from their socialist utopias to parents “rioting” over the education system stealing the lives of their children.
These, remember, are the people who say that blue states contribute more because they attribute all a corporation’s earnings to its headquarters
And that their cost of living is higher.
I am amused by that idea. As if NYC contributes so much more than… places that GROW FOOD that NYC eats.
And that red states receive more tax benefits/welfare because a lot of federal government facilities (like, say, military bases) are located in red state areas.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” HL Mencken.
This. Scratch a rabid fanatic, and you will usually find someone whose income depends on the cause somehow. People will persecute unbelievers of the most outrageous lies to the death (literally) if they have a financial incentive.
Let’s be reasonable. Fanatics seek out those jobs and are ideally suited to them. Many were fanatics first
I suspect this is why an Aunt is so set on Der Vaxxine, as her income for the last year or two or three can be summed up: Moderna. And is deaf to counters.
“But you have a HEART CONDITION!”
“Yes, and ONE is MORE THAN ENOUGH!”
The left has been running their old “think of the children!!!” Play in order to protect mutilating and sexually grooming children. This play has made the right back off of every issue for the past 50 years. The stupid f***s can’t comprehend that this time it’s different, they can’t comprehend that they are pushing what we consider to be a satanic horror on children. This is WAR. Their pathetic “but the children” is met with pure contempt for their evil from our side.
So they scramble to throw victims robes on the vile filth that was the shooter here, they villainize the principal, and the pastor who’s daughter was killed. They blame Tennessee, saying “if you hadn’t banned our vile intentions for your kids we wouldn’t have to kill you”. And we see that horror face to face and say, sternly and directly, No. No. NO. NO. NO!!!! WAR.
Heather Heying (Dark Horse Podcast), talking about “affirming” care: “The very language has been used to trick the more typically agreeable nature of women into doing this thing that is bad for their children.”
It struck me that that statement is a microcosm of the entire leftist/activist project: Guilt people into handing over power to the Left that they could never win democratically.
The hell? Wrong clip.
No, that first one was a perfect representation of what seems to be going on in leftist noggins.
I mean who among us wouldn’t love to slap a lefty with a fish?
week old fish.
Part of it, I suspect, is that the shutdown and the associated telelearning alerted a number of otherwise slumbering parents what exactly was going on in their kids’ classes.
There have also been a few other wake-up moments, such as the girl who was raped in the Virginia school bathroom. But I suspect many are unaware of that incident. Telelearning, on the other hand, is something that a concerned parent will pay attention to.
They have been told it never happened, therefore it never happened. They will never go look up the facts, never read or acknowledge the truth. Any proof has been made up by our side.
The school bureaucrats not only failed to report the crime as required by law, they covered it up and quietly transferred the rapist to a different school to rape another 14 year old girl. Then had the girl’s father arrested for demanding answers.
They had zero issues with the rapes, but the bad publicity was doubleplusungood.
———————————
‘Progressives’ will do the wrong thing just because the people they hate do the right thing.
Wow. Just… wow.
See, am I the only one envisioning revenge movies with Keanu Reeves? Because that’s what pops up in my head when hearing stories like that. And Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. Apparently the… individuals in question are far less genre savvy.
No, you’re not alone. There’s a LOT of material there, and a well written story or indie film would probably do frighteningly well.
Especially now that the parents can remember what happened when they were kids, and realize that it’s not actually totally unheard of; my mom’s generation largely ignored the “victims of assault get punished more than the bully” thing because they accepted that it was kids fighting, and that happens.
My (our) generation? If we didn’t actually see situations where the innocent victim was punished for “fighting,” while their attacker wasn’t, we know someone we trust who did.
School administrators trained for one set of assumptions are not prepared for the other.
The thing is, the culture as a whole isn’t prepared to go vigilante yet. It might happen with individuals, but only in isolated cases. So it never occurs to the bureaucrats that this is even a possibility.
Attitudes are starting to shift, though. The kid in LA that tried to run over a mother and her infant and was let off by DA Gascogne with a slap on the wrist was gunned down a couple of months ago in front of his residence. It was almost certainly gang-related. But there was a lot of *Could it have been a vigilante?” commenting. And the fact that there were such comments at all should be serving as a red flag that vigilantes might not be so inconceivable in the near future.
It was almost certainly gang-related. But there was a lot of *Could it have been a vigilante?” commenting.
There’s not a contradiction– being that kind of a guy has a good chance of raising his profile in the “I wanna kill him” sweepstakes– but that’s almost worse.
We do not want to have the kind of society where gangs are doing law enforcement’s job.
What next, you’re going to tell us the government isn’t a gang? 😛
John Marcone is a wonderful character in fiction. I don’t particularly want to see him become real life. Particularly because such people don’t tend to exist in real life, absolute power corrupting absolutely.
Ah yes, “Gentleman Johnny”, Harry Dresden’s best enemy. 😉
Same way that I love watching Garak, but the smart thing to do if one met him woudl be to shoot him and pray you were fast enough to mostly survive.
Historically speaking, the Mafia got big because of this kind of a problem– if you paid off the Mafia, you were safe; if you paid off the government, they just came back for another payment tomorrow, and they’d still mess with your daughter.
No, but right now is nearly as bad: Law enforcement writ large won’t do its job of controlling crime and punishing criminals, but will come down like a ton of bricks on any normie who attempts a little self-help.
No, but right now is nearly as bad: Law enforcement writ large won’t do its job of controlling crime and punishing criminals, but will come down like a ton of bricks on any normie who attempts a little self-help.
Except that is not true.
Seattle, MAYBE– but the story gets pushed by folks who are trying to excuse INSANE STUPIDITY like Seattle and Portland, or Denver, and by goblins who want to be taken for poor innocent victims.
Like that rapist that BLM idolized after he was shot but sadly not killed, trying to take the kids when he didn’t have custody/visitation time– they claimed ‘cops coming down like a ton of bricks on an innocent normie,’ turned out it was what usually goes on before they start finding little, too-still bodies after the parent with custody calls for help.
THAT got on the national news, in the original form; how many people heard about the attempted stranger-child-snatching in Des Moines, where the mom successfully kept her kid back and the two attackers were caught in minutes, because the police had noticed them BUT they had not yet done anything illegal?
Was this the kid where it was caught on video and went viral on the news?
Read where he was gunned down. A little speculation that it was vigilante on the news, but that disappeared quickly. Like Foxier said. Gang-related or Vigilante? Embrace And.
No, we do not want to rely on vigilantes. But fear it is headed that direction thanks to TPTB.
They tried to have the father arrested twice. The first time was at the school when he came to pick up his daughter, and started demanding answers. The school officials called the cops on him. Ironically, this turned out for the best, as the school hadn’t reported the rape (which is required by law), and calling the cops alerted the police to the rape. A report was finally filed when the cop insisted on it, and the victim was taken to a hospital before it was too late for the rape kit to be used.
The second time was the school board meeting caught on video, when the school board tried to deny that anything had happened, and allowed trans “activists” to harass him and call him a liar.
All those that knew about the rape, and failed to report it, should have been thrown in jail and prohibited from ever seeking a position in education again.
The reason we have a formal system of justice is to make informal justice (lynch mobs, vigilantes, Committee Of Public Safety) unnecessary. When the formal system fails to deliver justice, informal justice will arise once more to take its place. Leftroids are pushing real hard for that.
———————————
Those who do not remember the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes. Those who do remember are doomed to watch everybody else repeat them.
Or “Police are not here to protect the not guilty, they are there to protect the guilty from the not guilty.”
I typed that (somewhere) and actually had someone as “What does that mean?” Mine and more than a few other responses were “Seriously?”
It bugs people when you point out that in a lot of the world, people who are accused of certain crimes-against-society don’t live to stand trial, no matter what the official law of the country happens to be. That is, if they are fortunate. Mobs tend to be cruel and creative when it comes to “justice”.
Yep….It all seems like bad Sci-Fi to me…I went through a famous University about 15 years before our esteemed author, and it was absolutely nothing like today..no bullshit courses, tough grading, all my friends were somewhere between conservative and ultra-conservative..Professors were interested in the courses they taught, and would sit and converse with us at dinner sometimes…High school had been fairly rigorous, and the students high achieving…Five (5) years after I graduated college, the high school was being ruined by leftism, and shortly thereafter my university started to deteriorate for the same reasons…It was that fast….
The left has been running their old “think of the children!!!” Play in order to protect mutilating and sexually grooming children. This play has made the right back off of every issue for the past 50 years. The stupid f***s can’t comprehend that this time it’s different, they can’t comprehend that they are pushing what we consider to be a satanic horror on children. This is WAR. Their pathetic “but the children” is met with pure contempt for their evil from our side.
So they scramble to throw victims robes on the vile filth that was the shooter here, they villainize the principal, and the pastor who’s daughter was killed. They blame Tennessee, saying “if you hadn’t banned our vile intentions for your kids we wouldn’t have to kill you”. And we see that horror face to face and say, sternly and directly, No. No. NO. NO. NO!!!! WAR.
In other words – “Approve of our kink and mental delusion, or we will slaughter your children!”
That’s not even an exaggeration. They’re openly threatening to shoot people: https://www.lelemoon.com/product/guns-trans-rights-or-else-shirt/
Some of the products & links have disappeared since the shooting (disappeared algorithmically, or taken down by individuals who developed a conscience…who knows which) but if you search “trans rights or else” and you’ll find a bonanza.
The narrative will be flushed as not the preferred perp. It will be warped that she was responding to the toxic religion presented to her by actually going to school there. Instead of the actual truth of the mental warpage of reality by the trans movement.
All of which I think is Sarah’s point.
What a mess.
That’s exactly what happened. First, the papers didn’t mention that we had our first TS school shooter — either no pronouns or she was used — then they floated the idea that this person was a martyr because her mean Christian parents didn’t approve of her choices, now it’s seems to be gone from the front page.
I would have thought white person kills black man would have been newsworthy, but I suppose the poor guy wasn’t really black.
I despise these people, more and more every day.
Apparently deadnaming and misgendering are worse crimes than murder, so there is nothing wrong with the use of pre-emptive deadly force. Wonderful. I merely observe that that kind of logic works both ways, while the devil laughs at the bloodshed.
It’s already that ‘MAGA Republicans are celebrating the killing of a trans person . . .’.
And don’t forget the outrage that there’s “so much focus” on a massacre at a Christian school by a “trans” person when there’s not just signs at protests, but actual freaking t-shirts for sale, with “Trans rights [pictures of guns in trans flag pattern] OR ELSE.”
That is called recognizing a threat has been carried out.
The Left knows it must take our children, if for no other reason than they don’t like having their own. It’s Nature’s unfair imposition on them.
This !!! And when they do have them they use them as trophies and for virtue signalling. They drive the poor kids into insanity with all the strange Munchausen-by-proxy behaviors like the affirming care for allegedly trans children. One of the old testaments most hated peoples were the Baal worshipers, the description is that they took their firstborn and placed it in the arms of a statue of Baal that was heated by an internal fire as an offering to their god. The Baal worshipers behavior seems mild compared to the insanity that is a modern leftist. At least the Baal worshipers only killed their first child.
What if I told you that people still worship Baal? An this whole “Thing” happening to civilization is more of a spiritual attack than a political power play?
Moloch worshippers were the baby burners. Baal is more whorehouses and the porn industry.
Hollywood?
But no, Baal and baalat meant “lord and lady.
Moloch/M L K/melech/malik all means “king.”
The word baal was originally the master of a house/household, as well as meaning “husband” in some uses. So it is that kind of lord, and a baalat is that kind of lady.
Baal was, among other things, a god of fertility. Baal worship included sex with the respective priests and priestesses (after making appropriate offerings, of course). It’s not entirely metaphorical that the prophets spoke of Israelites going a-whoring after them.
Confutus I have heard the worship by sacrifice of the first born attributed to both Ba’al and Molech (see here for example https://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/2007/01/11/baal-ashtoreth-and-molech-gods-old-testament-rivals/ ). Jeremiah 7:30-34 is one of examples of this being condemned although which deity is the problem is not noted. Ba’al seems to mean just lord or god and in usage you’ll se the Ba’al of foo where foo is a city. There is the great Ba’al who seems to be a Thunder/storm god similar to Zeus. That great Ba’al becomes a common Phoenician deity sometime in the 9th century BC.
The sexual worship and temple prostitution in that region is more usually related to Ashtoreth (or Asherah in OT, also sometimes later Astarte) a female fertility goddess and sometimes seen as a female counterpoint to Ba’al or Moloch. She seems to be Aphrodite, Hera and Demeter all rolled into one.
Also, the pagans that practiced child sacrifice did so on the grounds of giving their most precious possession. Whereas the left is doing so because they hate children.
Short version of long post – communists lie; to themselves, to each other and to everyone else. They lie about everything. If they didn’t lie they would have nothing, and their world would cease to exist and them with it.
And any number of others who are utterly terrified of their worldview falling apart.
My blank spent decades in a medical profession.
She still believes that the abuses of the last three years were necessary, because if they weren’t, she—and nearly all of her friends—have been party to an atrocity.
She can’t face that.
(And she married someone who believes in his bones that the search for Truth is the highest of moral dictates. It isn’t going well.)
Oof. Lord be with them and help her find both repentance and forgiveness. Holy Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for them to our Lord, your Son.
And… all of this. Just all of it. Thanks. Amen.
They were party to atrocities that killed a million people or more — and we haven’t seen the end of what they’ve already done. They’re still pushing the experimental mRNA inoculations that are STILL not approved for general use.
The government’s whole response to a nastier-than-average variant of the common cold was (and still is) batshit crazy.
———————————
A good Zombie Apocalypse novel is at least as believable as anything we’ve heard out of the ‘Publick Health Authoriteez’ over the last three years.
People talk to me at the register and speak of fatigue, grief, and people acting in ways they never would have even a few years ago. Yet when I tell them “everything is breaking” they stare at me as if it’s a new idea.
Flyby c4c.
whoosh
Maybe.
Today we have no governors, we have no representatives, we have no executive officers seriously subject to recall, only rulers. We vote but who we can vote for is decided by those in two rooms of the uniparty. Even then sometimes the vote doesn’t go the way the uniparty likes and then it’s the vote counters that count, not the votes. Pretty much true throughout today’s western world, not just the U. S.
My reply to the world today?
I’m attempting to live and share Albert Camus’; ” The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
Keep your powder dry.
Absolutely…And if you treat everyone with kindness and respect, they will respect your views, no matter how contrary they are to theirs….
Normal people, yes.
Unfortunately, there’s a tiny minority (and I suspect that they’re largely the ones responsible for pushing the crap we’re now having to deal with) that will hold you in contempt. They either cower and whine, or they weild the whip. There is no in-between for them.
They also warp the minds of those they come in contact with, distorting people who might respect your basic courtesies into mirrors of themselves.
Chris Muir pretty much nailed it in his Day By Day strip today; https://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2023/03/28/?post_type=comic
Minor fix: “It is that they belong to a cult
ure, they were taught a history, and given a mission.”Everything Sarah says about the Left is right, but I believe that there is another factor which makes leftists even more unpersuadable.
Not only is Leftism their worldview, it’s their righteousness. It’s what makes them good in their own eyes, better than other people who lack their intelligence and compassion.
So a challenge to Leftism creates more than cognitive dissonance. It’s an attack on their legitimacy as superior people. People will fight much harder to hold onto their righteousness than to a set of opinions that are only that.
The summer before I went to college (nearly 50.years ago – gosh!) I heard a lecture by a great anti-Communist thinker named Gerhard Niemeyer. He made the point that people believe Communist ideology not as a conclusion of reason but as a choice of the will. They believe it because they want it to be true. Therefore rational argument can’t touch them; they leave it only when something happens that shakes the hold of their will. We’ve come to call that being “red-pilled.”
“If we say it often enough, loud enough, and make it look like what we want, it will be what we want, and we will be as gods!” Whether that thing is physical comfort, emotional comfort, power, love (as they imagine it to be), or something else. They can will paradise into being.
Except their Paradise turns into Milton’s Pandemonium every time.
Sympathetic magic plain and simple. And their paradise isn’t Milton’s Pandemonium as much as it is a mix of 1984 with Brave New World with a soupçon of other nihilistic nightmares tossed in. For some reason their fondest desire is to be the boot stamping on the face of humanity from now to eternity or their version of the eschaton.
“What I tell me three times is true!” ?
The left hasn’t given up on their 1000 year Reich or the Soviet Union; they have just rebranded and are trying to expand it to the places that defeated the original versions.
You keep saying they’re not NPCs, but your (accurate) diagnosis of their behavior says different. They truly do act like NPCs — running a mental script we don’t share and from which they can’t deviate, even when it requires seemingly insane actions in the face of reality. Or more accurately, they won’t allow themselves to. They’re not inhuman; they’ve just subordinated their agency to a particular cultural narrative, and it’s possible that they could come out of it. (What’s that movie where Ryan Reynolds plays an NPC who wakes up?)
Deadpool?
I know there’s a YouTube series called ‘Epic NPC Man’ that’s pretty amusing. Other than that, I’m afraid I’ve got no clue.
Free Guy
Surprisingly decent film, saw it with the Disney Plus family members and enjoyed it.
Right! That was a fun movie.
Free Guy
“We were chumps who believed in writing for readers’ enjoyment. But our insanity in trying to give awards to people we enjoyed reading was threatening their livelihood.”
I’d rather write for beer drinking Bubba and his pals what want to read some action sci fi, some fantasy, some detective fic, or some western where the guy gets the girl and rides off into the sunset. I’d rather folks that just want a bit of entertainment at the end of a long day read my stuff and take a ride into a different world for a while, a world where good always wins in the end, even when the issue seems in doubt for a time.
I’d rather write worlds where the evil is vile, awful, despicable, cunning, and strange, but where virtue is honored, courage is valued, and truth matters more than lies.
It’s a sad thing that I have to go to write fiction to get that these days. But, needs must. Maybe those who read my little words will get a chuckle, a smile, and a few hours where they don’t have to suffer the petty wills of childish men and shrewish women.
Eh. A fool can dream. Rather be a dreaming fool than a cultist bent on corrupting minds and ripping down bright futures for grim and dreary decline.
THIS. THIS, EXACTLY.
mic drop, walk away, applause
Yeah, me too.
Me three. As I said to the IRS guy on the phone, “Do I have to report the whole 7 dollars in royalties I got from Amazon this past year?” He laughed. I laughed. Then he said,”Yes, they want you to report it.” Okay then.
I thought ten dollars was the cut-off?
Shrugs I don’t know, I don’t speak financial.
His reasoning was “Amazon reports it.”
Yeah, they do. They send the forms in.
Exactly. They get a 1099 from Amazon and they expect you to have the matching form.
The was a late season episode of Bones that touched on this. I don’t remember which particular one though.
c4c
Sarah – The supposedly smartest people in the room (world) are incompetent, selfish, and mentally ill.
If you try to follow every detail of how they are screwing up you can spend all day every day just following the bad news.
You HAVE to control how much time you spend as spectator and how much you spend on YOU. You can’t spend all day agitated and angry. I mean… you can, but it serves no useful purpose. It will be more complicated and worse tomorrow. It’s worth maybe ten or fifteen minutes in the morning and less important than brushing your teeth.
That is all today.
Mostly selfish and morally bankrupt. More greedy than bad relatives after a family member dies. (Going through losing a MIL and FIL right now, so the analogy fits…)
Had some long talks with forensic accountants that had represented corporations and Extreme High Value Individuals. Their stories seemed fantastic a decade ago, but not any more after all the revelations and leaks since.
Also I’ve been able to independently confirm most of what I heard. It helps to think of TPTB as Mafia and follow connections/money. It’s also easier now that they are openly arrogant due to having usurped the legal system.
Yeah, my response to people who claim not to believe in secret societies is, “If you believe in the Mafia, why wouldn’t you believe in a criminal in-group that got away with a lot more because they went to the right schools and were seen as being part of the elites rather than part of the underclass?”
There was a reason Marx used Catholicism as a template for Marxism. Simply put Marxism is a religion that just like every other religion and requires an unending faith in it’s underlying principals and dogma. Even though those underlying tenants and dogma are complete lies and run contrary to human nature. So of course it’s adherents go bonkers when they are confronted with reality, you have just attacked their church. So of course those that are the high priests of Marxism change the language and the mission constantly in order to cover up the lies of Marxism and keep their congregation in slavery to them. They have no other choice. But just like any religious war, it takes forever to open the congregations eyes to the madness of their priests. But once open that congregation will pull their false gods down, normally quiet violently. Their watching us, and trying to silence us, is amusing in a way, because it is their own people who do them in. Bastille day anyone? Keep your powder dry, be ever vigilant.
Cancel Culture is nothing more than the new ‘Spanish Inquisition’.
The Original Spanish Inquisition was Saner And Fairer than Cancel Culture.
Heck, the Spanish Inquisition was much Saner And Fairer than the secular investigative organizations in the Protestant nations of its time.
The Spanish Inquisition didn’t use torture as a investigative tool and would often find you “not guilty” if you were innocent of the charges.
Yeah, but the Spanish Inquisition, and most of the other inquisitions were ultimately controlled by the kinds (Not really, but well…. that’s where the bad stuff came in.)
And heaven knows, the woke got the state.
I didn’t expect that.
And now for something completely else…
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition are main weapon is the element of surprise, no wait two, no three…..
Speed, stealth and snappy red uniforms! 😀
“Nobody expects— oh, bugger.”
I prefer the Vatican Ninja Vampire Hunters. 😉
Now I want to read that series!
The Vatican Ninja Vampire Hunters are supporting characters in the “Love At First Bite” series by Declan Finn.
Unfortunately, the series is currently out-of-print (even in e-format).
Roughly, it’s an action-adventure series mixed with romance or is that a romance series mixed with action-adventure. [Crazy Grin]
One aspect of the series is that vampires can be good and can be evil (many are somewhat in the middle).
The main vampire character does go to Mass, Confession, take communion, and holy symbols aren’t a problem.
Oh, the Catholic Church is aware that some vampires can be good people.
The fact that the bad and/or evil vampires are bothered by holy symbols is a factor (while good vampires aren’t bothered) is a factor in the Church’s knowledge.
The Inquisition had much higher standards of due process.
There was a reason Marx used Catholicism as a template for Marxism. Simply put Marxism is a religion that just like every other religion and requires an unending faith in it’s underlying principals and dogma.
I think you’re giving him way too much credit.
Assuming he used it at all, he saw power, and he wanted power.
So he re-wrote things to give him what he wanted.
Same dang trick folks have been pulling since– well, ever.
I’d guess that Marx knew Catholicism through a German-state Lutheran lens, even though he grew up in a Jewish family. His biography on Britannica says that his father converted to an Evangelical Established congregation for work reasons. Since he was in Trier, it might be Calvinist, might be more Lutheranish.
It’s been so long since I looked into that phase of Protestant history outside of Prussia or England that I don’t recall all the different official denominations in the German lands.
He was a parasite that lived off a rich benefactor who probably hated his father. Just like many of the children of the rich today. They push a religion that has never worked, can’t work and won’t work. But like all religions you can’t argue with their god, which in this case is Marx. It really is just self loathing, they hate everything that made them, because everything makes them unhappy. Even if they get their way, they are still not happy. Spoiled rotten little rich kids doing what they always do, making the world a pain in the ass.
You really need to broaden your experience with religion.
I suggest observant Catholics and practicing orthodox Jews, for a start.
I was not knocking religion, you believe what you want, as long as it don’t hurt people I don’t care, my point was Marxism isn’t anything new or even imaginative.
I was not asking for approval or permission to believe, I was commenting on your described experiences being on par with only knowing nuns who are nymphos.
Seriously. “Arguing with God” is such a major part of the Jewish faith that it’s a running gag, and Catholic saints are not far behind.
Usually not quite as literally as Jacob.
:grins:
Usually.
I absolutely do not buy the hypothesis that Marxism/socialism/communism only borrowed from a single flavor of Christianity, and that we can know which one it was for certain.
I may eventually come across some idiot who is morally certain that all of the Christian influence on socialism was all and only Mormon.
Socialists are all over the places, their influences were everyone they were in contact with, and they have borrowed from many different flavors of Christianity, in many different places.
To skinsuit an organization, you need to be able to at least fake some of the behaviors of the religion of the people who originally made the organization.
Most likely explanation is that it is a social hack– just like a fish and a submarine having some characteristics in common, that’s because it’s what works.
Just wanted to comment that the picture you’ve chosen for today’s post is particularly striking.
Midjourneybot
I enjoyed every word of this:
https://jeffgoldstein.substack.com/p/a-re-declaration-of-independence
So did I.
Forwarded to my family, thank you!
It’s all projection, the left knows their own evil, and since they are the ‘good’ people. The right has to be worse.
When I realized this a few years ago, I began to become scared of the left, those batshit crazy accusations are things they have actually done.
I remember [NAME REDACTED], I think. She made me kind of sad, because there was talent and intelligence there, and if she hadn’t lived in a hermetically sealed bubble all her life, she might have gotten along well in our circles.
As for the hardened ideology… we could get along just fine, if the fuckers didn’t have all the levers of power, or could be persuaded away from destroying everything rather than admitting they might be wrong about a few things (everything). Mock, ridicule, forget, and route around them. I wish there was a more satisfying solution than that, but it’s all I’ve got at the moment.
Praying for your FIL and you and Dan.
If we got together to at least suppress everyone who disagreed with US, could we call ourselves “The Hush Puppies?” Hypothetically speaking.
You’re a very silly person. Have some carp.
Every Southern boy knows that you serve catfish with Hush Puppies…. 😎
Don’t encourage him. He’s already incorrigible.
How do you corrige someone, anyway?
You them captains. You know, the Captains Corrigeous.
You make them…
Cur-rekt
I have intermittently been working on a blog post “What is a Nazi?” It’s an interesting question to ask. It’s a tiny fraction of Americans who have any clue as how they came to power and how bad things were before they came to power. When asked in relation to Ukraine, do westerners ever ask “Who killed more Ukrainians, Hitler or Stalin?”. How many people in Ukraine have family, grandparents & great-grandparents, who were killed by the enemy of the Nazis? And yet one side is considered the ultimate evil and the other is celebrated by too many in the West. In reality both were horribly evil.
The biggest con job of the 20th century was the one that made “International Socialism is completely totally utterly 100% the absolute opposite of National Socialism” into the conventional wisdom.
Closely related is the idea that there was an “international socialism” at all, instead of just being socialism for the glory of Russia.
Yep. It was Russian National socialism.
Humans don’t do well with INTERNATIONAL. We can barely grasp non-tribal.
Well, before Russia went communist, there were people who talked about international socialism. IE “Workers of the world unite”. World War I was a disappointment to those folks because the workers didn’t “unite” but fought for “their nation” during WWI.
After Russia went communist, Russia “pushed” international socialism and some bought into Russia’s brand because Russia was seen as “the first true socialist state” so thus should be the leader.
But of course, Mussolini discovered that Italians weren’t into “international” socialism thus he started his own brand of “national socialism”. IE Fascism.
Russia’s version of “International Socialism” worked in Europe mainly because the “local communist governments” (in the Eastern Block) were very aware of Russia’s troops.
There are books on the mass suicides in Germany right after WWII. Here is a link to one as an example just to illustrate https://www.city-journal.org/germany-mass-suicides-after-world-war-2
However IMO, our hostess hit the nail on the head with her post today. I believe when “ordinary everyday” Germans saw how vast the lie was that they had believed, the acculturation broke them, hence the suicides.
I suspect(italics) that some of these horrific shooting parties we have been seeing in the news may be similar suicides by assholes that wish to take people along when they go.
Oh, guaranteed. For example, the trans killer in Nashville texted a former classmate just as she was going in that she wanted to die but she’d shoot up a school and get the cops to kill her.
A classic pattern is that as soon as these creeps encounter resistance they either give up or kill themselves.
Chesterton wrote that the suicide wanted to kill the world, but since he can’t he has to settle for killing himself. School shooters and the like seem to take some of both sides.
And while I’m sure that there are other motives, misdirected hate seems to be part of much of what we’re seeing.
The whole hijacking of a mental illness which gender dysphoria is, is despicable. The harm they are doing to the transgendered as well as innocent children should guarantee burning in hell. It is a treatable condition, if the affected get proper treatment. Most who have any surgery regret it, and the untreated have a higher risk of suicide. It is never a good thing to feed a mental illness. You treat it and try and save the person. We used to have a Hippocratic Oath, First Do No Harm, now it seems it is First Make That Dollar.
Many blog posts ago there was a discussion on money. Found an article about needing many small unregulated banks to create their own currencies.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-banking-and-money-pbdc
Note: This is predominantly an anti mRNA vaccine Substack.
c4c