Neo Wishful Thinking

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Some weeks ago on twitter, I ran into the fascinating, mildly horrifying phenomenon of “neo feudalists” which like “Democratic Socialism” means institutionalized oppression, but with sprinkles and fun confetti. Yes, I’m being dismissive. Brutally and bluntly dismissive, just as I’m dismissive of the idea that us becoming monarchists would fix everything that hails us and be much much better than what we have.

I am mildly horrified that these strains of so called “thought” occur at all. The mechanism seems to be “Well, you know what we’ve been doing and what it claims to be has not worked, so the things that our teachers said were terrible must really be the way to go.” This is applying for everything, btw, from the relationships between the sexes to government, to how to find happiness.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky and your teachers/influences were exceptionally malicious you might, like a blind pig, happen onto the truffle of happiness, but that’s not the way to bet. Because the reverse of “so wrong it’s not even wrong” is more “so wrong it’s not even wrong.”

But despite the fact I slept only about four hours (apparently May was cursed. All of it can be summed as “it’s always something”) I’m going to try to take this from the top.

First on the monarchy will solve everything that hails us. It will too. In a fantasy land, in which the king is a magical being wedded to the land, etc. In the real world? Francis Turner yesterday pointed out the succession problem, but there’s another one that none of the would be faithful monarchists have given a thought to.

Okay, as far as I can tell one of their “ups” for monarchy is that kings are national, so at least you have a champion who, viewing your country as his fiefdom is of course pro-your-country.

In theory this is absolutely true. Note “in theory.” In practical fact, over the course of history kings viewed the country not as an extension of themselves but as their farm. And depending on whether they’re a good landowner or not, that can be very bad, very fast. Countries were impoverished by kings sucking any and all bits of wealth they could, regardless and using them on what they liked. Usually stupid wars (and some were incredibly stupid) because they viewed that as increasing their prestige. See all the contesting of far flung kingdoms to which the king had a tenuous claim. Look, ultimately the truth is that administering the competing legal rights of your subjects and keeping the law impartial is not sexy. Leading in war is sexy.

Francis Turner either in the article or in our talk before he wrote it (note I slept four hours last night, and not the hours you’d expect. Sleep started at around six I think) said at least monarchy wouldn’t have the “deep state” but this is not true. A lot of kings, at times grew a “deep state” as a way to avoid work/be able to drain the treasury behind the cover of the bureaucrats/creating a baffle of bullshit so the parlous state of the kingdom didn’t attach to them.

BUT no one has seemed to realize what monarchy would mean in the modern world. Look, kings and queens were already all cousins/linked, even in days with really, really slow travel. They honestly weren’t nationals of that country, but practically their own breed. (One of the reasons I laughed like an hyena when some idiots claimed Portuguese used to be all blonds, because look at picture of Portuguese kings.) Now have that in a world with flights and instant communication. You think we have a detached more interested in each other’s opinion than anything else international elite? Oooh, boy, you ain’t seen nothing yet. If you want to be governed by Hollywood? Go ahead. Because regardless of what you start out with, you’re going to end up with that kind of insular, super-rich elite. Only now they have not just propaganda and money, but actual de facto power that you gave them. At birth.

Are you people actually on drugs? And why are you boggarting them?

I can now hear “But we want a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy!” My throat clearing and coughing might be “Great Britain.” And if you think the king is an impartial figure head, you’ve not heard the British opinions of say King Charles III. Yes, some royals will become very popular. But it’s hit or miss. Like presidents, you know?

Okay, now I hear “but monarchy is natural to humanity.” So are lice, intestinal parasites, and sleeping naked in trees. Just because evolution predisposes us to it and there’s a hole in our heads marked “king” there’s no reason to indulge it, much less give it power.

As for republics only lasting x amount of time? Yeah. Well, you know? Monarchies, even if you have a dynasty that lasts however many years? The system only lasts about that long, between getting rid of main branch of family, younger son is installed, all the bureaucracy changes/advertises itself as totally new thing. So, pah.

As for Neo Feudalism…. My answer was “You want to jump to late stage communism?” and I was told no, because in Feudalism the upper classes had duties they were honor bound to obey, etc.

It’s like the idea Monarchy will be fine, because the kings will be Christian.

People, I can’t believe I have to say this explicitly: You can’t mandate that someone be Christian. Not really Christian, to the point that it puts internal stops on their ability to be tyrants. You can mandate that to hold office someone be outwardly Christian, sure. But that might only accelerate the level at which everything is taken over by non believers who make the right mouth noises. Because real believers will ask themselves if they’re really Christian and can call themselves that, while someone doing it for the power will just say yeah, they’re super duper Christian. (We’ll leave as an exercise for the reader WHICH brand of Christian, which at this point is not even just an American thing. Even in technically very Catholic Portugal, you got all sorts.

So if you’re counting on the oaths and mutual duties being enforced by the fact that everyone is “really Christian” I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to sell you, gators and all. Because no. You don’t get to mandate what is in other people’s minds and hearts. That’s not how any of that works. And if you read medieval treatises, while believe in “God” was more or less universal, at least in written documents, people often didn’t act as if they REALLY believed. Or they came up with really interesting ways to carve themselves exceptions.

“Oh, but it will be written. The rights and obligations will be written down!” Looks meaningfully at the US constitution. Yeah. Sure. Spelling out rights and obligations in a written document will avoid all problems. It’s not like people in power have ignored that before. Not at all. It’s all unicorns and pretty flowers.

Also the way things were arranged in the middle ages was three classes: nobles,(those who fought) farmers (for simplicity let’s say workers, since farmers barely registers now) (those who fed everyone) and clergy (those who prayed). We’ll not even poke at clergy, because who is going to certify that? Again we come up with “Which denomination?” (Note feudalism broke down in any country in contact with other countries with different religions. Because a powerful Church (and that broke down too, see Henry VIII) punishing transgressors with excommunication was necessary for the whole thing. So what’s your substitute for the Church? The UN? (Laughs out loud.)) Who is going to arbitrate all the mutual obligations and such? The king? See above. And who is going to invest in industry, particularly when it changes? Do you really want to depend on the nobility all being genius planners who understand technological innovation? Because I don’t. I’ll point out the “best people” in France had a carefully planned central communication thing with computers, that got end-run by the chaotic innovation called the internet.

What is the advantage of this neo-Feudalism? “Everyone knows what their rights and obligations are!” Is that it? Because, what you just said is “If only everyone” only in a more complicated way. Look, I had toddlers. They knew exactly what should be done/shouldn’t be done, etc. BUT, get this, they were really good at rule-lawyering. If you think that adult humans aren’t just as good at rule lawyering, you might never have met humans. (And your human-suit is wearing thin.)

But but but… Neo Feudalism. Like old Feudalism, super-stable (It wasn’t. Let me sing to you of horrible peasant revolts.) BUT Neo, which means everyone gets sprinkles and cupcakes.

I’m just saying it sounds better in the original Frankish, okay.

Ultimately ANY form of government works great is small and voluntary. Even communism works great in those circumstances.

No form of government works well for large nation-states. Not really. And all of them deform over time, as the powerful try to become more powerful and the less powerful fight back as best they can.

ULTIMATELY, stripped down, there are two basic forms of government:

The one person as leader, born that way (or can pretend to be), chosen by G-d or the international bodies, or the best people, or whatever you want, has power over everyone else. There’s the succession problem, but it’s relatively stable and fills the niche in our instinct trained by evolving in ape/early human bands. “A strong leader protects us all!” In practicality, it depends on the leader. And it always devolves to the king not being particularly interested in the welfare of his citizens. ALWAYS. Yes, there are exceptions to stupid/glory-seeking kings. They are exceptions. And usually have trouble accomplishing much, because by then the system is designed for the default.

The other option, relatively recent and feels super risky — let’s call it “The American Way” — is “Every man a king.” Every little potentate can choose to surrender his or her power to someone for governance and to deal with other people/nations. It works mostly in the default. I.e. it kind of functions while falling apart. And it feels super-risky to the primeval monkey in the back brain. As in “The leaderless band gets destroyed.” But we’re not a primitive band.

The second one has the advantage that you can take back the power you surrendered. And that the people in power know it. Also called “Why the Biden Junta still hasn’t accomplished what they would like to have done to us the first month, even if nothing has gone kinetic yet.”

Neither is ideal. Both have issues, because both are designed for humans. There is no ideal system.

Given no ideal system, I choose the one where I can take back my power at least in theory over the one where I’m born fitted with a saddle someone can ride by “custom and religion.”

You make your choice. And you pay the price.

237 thoughts on “Neo Wishful Thinking”

  1. Our current system would work just fine IF the people within it had MORAL COMPASSES that functioned, or at least worked with a morality not wholly alien to the nation as a whole. (This is more or less what I was trying to get at the other day, in a very clumsy, sleep-deprived manner that wandered off into some bizarre direction I barely recognize.)

    Remember: Institutions–governments, businesses, what have you–do not have moral compasses. That means we have to rely on the people within them to have functional, non-alien ones. And that’s where things have fallen down.

    How to fix it? How should I know, I’m just some rando commenting on a blog, like I’m going to figure out what several millennia of human history has struggled with? Pfft. But that seems to me like the root problem that’s gotta be addressed…somehow.

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    1. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

      John Adams”

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      1. Okay. I’m going to write on this. The quote is not spurious but out of context and John Adams was NOT THAT STUPID. Unclear terms, and he knew it.
        Stop that. STOP BLAMING THE PEOPLE for he crimes of the elite. STOP IT. RIGHT NOW. Don’t make me come through the screen.

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    2. If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself. Madison

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  2. The fact that America was populated (for the most part) by individuals and groups seeking their own “freedom” from the start, set up a population that is NOT conducive to rule by a King or some sort of Royal leadership. They all wanted to set up their own version of life, rule and community and it didn’t include any European Royalty.

    The very messy and error prone protocol of representative democracy evolved here in North America to deal with the above attitudes and preferences. It’s been said by lots of folks and in a lot of ways – The American system is just awful, but it’s way ahead of every other one. Anyone wanting the “neo” this or that is just delusional and wants to have a quick and painless answer to the chaos of today. Ain’t happening Skippy!

    I’m willing to also bet (carp shield up) that any of our regular fellow travelers here get the fact that none of these counter proposals would work and the American messy way of governance, while needing an oil change and tune up, is the only way to go.

    Ok… why am I hearing “Braveheart” music in the background??

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    3. With the instructions they were given, if the jury followed them it was impossible to reach any other verdict. It was a kangaroo court the entire way through, from the prosecutors, judge and jury of partisan Democrats.

      The USA is now officially a banana republic, Soviet show trials, included.

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        1. Trump and his lawyers should all wear ties with kangaroos on them for the next court appearance before Merchan.

          Curious to see if they will go the direct US Supreme Curt route. I susepct the US Supreme Court would prefer the NY Appellate Courts to reverse the farce that occurred in NYC, but given how the Democrats stacked those courts with rabid partisans, I expect the NY courts to uphold it.

          I also expect Merchan to try to hold Trump in custody with a ridiculous bail, or bar him from leaving NY State (or even city) so he cannot campaign.

          Would be nice to see a state like Texas or Florida to send a national guard detachment to serve as bodyguards/protection for Trump, given that one of the first things the Dems are going to do is pull Trump’s Secret Service protection.

          They want Trump dead, plain and simple.

          As I noted in yesterday’s thread: Delta Tau Chi had a fairer trial before Dean Wormer and Omega House (Animal House reference for those who may not remember) than Trump had before Judge Merchan.

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          1. Cardshark I’m afraid that Merchan (I shall not give him the honorific of judge which he so clearly does not deserve) will not continue to behave in his partisan and petty fashion. I expect him to sentence Trump to the maximum on all 34 counts and to deny bail (even though traditionally it would be granted until appeals are completed, usually on personal recognizance) and have him report to be sent to prison even though this is far outside the norm even for violent crimes where there are clear points for appeal. I expect this to be appealed up the line in NY state courts and to fail on appeal throughout unless it hits an actual appeal judge that believes in the law (i.e. a miracle in NY state).

            Ultimately it goes to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Chief Justice of the 2nd Circuit is Debra Ann Livingston (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debra_Ann_Livingston) a Bush (the younger) appointee who actually had found in favor of Trump previously when Congress tried to subpoena Trump’s taxes on separation of powers issues. The judges are about 2/3 Clinton/Obama/Biden appointees with two ancient (85+) Carter appointees vs ~10 Trump/Bush II/ Bush I appointees. I expect ALL the Obama and Biden appointees to be rabidly sectarian, there might be a slightly left old style liberal amongst the Clinton appointees and the 2 Carter Appointees.

            I think the democrats are going to quickly find they have chosen poorly. First, they have opened up a whole realm of attack that had been beyond the pale in ways that are so abhorrent that the normally recalcitrant right are going to say “Ok the gloves are off, this is no longer Marquise of Queensbury rules”. Second I think Iowahawk’s comment copied in Instapundit, roughly

            “This is the point where the scientists find applying Electricity and atomic weapons to the monster only makes it bigger and meaner

            applies to Trump. They just marched their candidates right up to the claymore mine and started tweaking the trigger line.

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    4. The Democrats are “thinking wishfully” that this will end their “Trump Problem”. 👿😈👿👿👿👿👿👿👿👿

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        1. Somehow, I don’t think you do.

          More likely you hope they remember, at the very end, that it was their own choice.

          (It was either that or the obligatory Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade quotation: “He chose … poorly.”)

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          1. Indeed and I eagerly anticipate the same result for the Turnip in Chief as for the baddie in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade .

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            1. “Because you can’t swing a broadsword

              When you’re in the forest!

              Not even when you see the lightning spark.

              No, you can’t swing a broadsword when you’re in the forest,

              Unless you feel like glowing after dark!”

              Michael Longcor, “Pennsic War IV”

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            2. It’s all right, they’re 1-irons. Not even G*d can hit a 1-iron.

              Well, OK. Jack Nicklaus can hit a 1-iron. But nobody else!

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    5. From fairly early on in this, self selected spokesmen on behalf of lawyers and judges have been complaining very loudly that various other parties were inciting violence, and that this is bad.

      Now, some of this was very carefully stated, so that normal sorts of legal analysis would not be tripping lots of usual red flags.

      But, the fundamental problem is that if you speak loudly for a general audience, you also have to address the untrained thought patterns of that general audience. Loud statements addressing the public on behalf of lawyers, and of judges need to step a little outside the formal legal system mindset, and also understand how they can persuade the public that the current state of the formal legal system is better than alternatives.

      A catastrophic failure in this analysis might instead be introduced as evidence A in a lay tribunal investigating a specific portion of the formal legal system.

      The best preservation of the prestige, respect, and reputation of the institutions such as law schools would have been to correct course, apologize, and be broadly persuasive, /before/ the political tide of the current house of cards turns.

      Violence has always been an alternative to litigation in the American system. The formal legal system in America has always been relying on its ability to persuade people to trust it for dispute resolution, instead of whatever alternatives.

      1. One, a judge should not speak about threat of violence unless it is a real possibility. Speaking about it when it is only hypothetical can have the result of priming idiots. 2. If it is a real possibility, a judge ought to carefully consider their statements, and consider that their audience includes more than their fellow judges. In particular, they should not inspire a lay audience to conclude that a judge is denying civil rights under color of law.

      Maybe 3/4 of law school heads signed as letter dated January 12, 2021. Perhaps the signing process took much longer than the date in question. But, if they all signed in six days, that is fast, and perhaps evidence of internal arrangements that could have predated january 6, 2021. In combination with the scaffold outside McConnell’s office evidence that January 6 was a conspiracy involving Pelosi, it looks like some of the law school heads could have also been co-conspirators.

      Vivek R., Chris C., and DeSantis were all running against Trump, and from law schools signatory to the letter. To my knowledge, none of them discussed that letter as being suspicious, improper, and potentially something that they needed to personally address to preserve personal credibility.

      The judge in this case may be able to provide a concluding statement that is persuasive that the exercise was not a Star Chamber.

      Absent that, we need to see results from the judicial review.

      If nothing satisfactory is forthcoming there, we would need to see some statements from Vivek, Christie, and DeSantis, if they hope to preserve any credibility of their own.

      One of the forecasts is that an improper conviction would be used by various secretaries of state as a pretense in a criminal conspiracy to remove Trump from the ballot. We shall see, and we shall see about any judicial review if such occurs.

      If such does occur, the just reprisal might be to remove all possible voters for Pelosi as speaker from consideration for the US house.

      (I personally would like to applaud the law schools, for doing so much to prove that modern American universities are garbage, do not serve the public good, and may be a danger to public safety. I think studying critical theory at universities has done a lot to make (some, but not all) university trained individuals insane enough to pull stunts that are so effective in discrediting them with an American culture audience. Bravo. Thank you for doing so much to ensure that these universities have any future at all.)

      We had the reasons to conclude a ways back that all current Republican politicians needed to be removed, as being too suspicious as willing collaborators with the Democrats.

      Now we maybe can gather evidence that would be more persuasive of that, with a wider range of Republican voters.

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      1. DeSantis has put out a statement in support of Trump, as has Marco Rubio. Vivek and Christie, not yet.

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        1. The ‘to my knowledge’ missing statement is specifically as to whether being from that specific law school raises questions about their impartiality, and what their specific position in response to the letter is.

          Look, if I have an accounting degree, and my school or a professional body endorse defrauding my customer by cooking the books, I kinda ought to say something about that. If I want to retain my customers, or obtain new ones.

          Right now, many lawyers can take a position that the claim by the law school was a) about a narrow area of practice b) does not directly promise misconduct anyway c) is thus unrelated to their actual area of practice.

          There are clearly a bunch of parallel arguments, that point to relevant cases in some fairly common areas of legal practice. Many times criminal law, because it seems like it much rarer to have riots over tort, or whatever.

          From a criminal defense law perspective, there are two questions. One, consider a black man accused of raping a white woman. What is a public defender’s obligation to see that he is fairly represented in court? At what point should threat of riot be a reason for a public defender to turn a blind eye to a lynching, in advance of a trial? Two, is one liable if one defends a person accused of a crime, who later commits a crime?

          From a prosecution perspective, why would a bipartisan letter concerned about professional reputation omit a Democrat example of someone litigating a case not based in facts, and unlikely to win? Why not, say, mention Marilyn Mosby?

          Well, they were only able to obtain over a hundred signatures from academic bureaucrats by being very narrow in the statements they made. At any school where CRT is in the curriculum, and respected by the bureaucracy, anything but lockstep endorsement is likely to result in an early retirement. This narrows drastically the sort of statements that one can make.

          The thing that absolutely requires a lawyer write off their career, and find a new job or retire, is pissing off enough judges, or convincing enough judges that they are too untrustworthy to listen to. The profession also favors willingness to write off losing fights.

          This is certainly not an obviously winnable fight, professionally. ABA accredited law schools are obviously potentially in close communication with the ABA. Without states amending professional regulations to open the bar to those without accredited JDs, you would probably have to already be willing to quit the field.

          As high profile Republican politicians, DeSantis, Christie, adn Vivek are lawyers who cannot say that this matter is entirely unrelated to their future careers. Now, they perhaps are expecting to retire from politics, and go back into law. But the question remains, should they be trusted to deal fairly and honestly with their customers?

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          2. Well, allow me to state that Barbara Gleisner Fines, Dean of my law school alma mater, is a leftist tool.

            Is that enough ritual denunciation, or do I need to have a longer struggle session before I can be rehabilitated?

            Seriously Bob, you’re engaging in the same kind of Cultural Revolution guilt by association as the commies.

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            1. Apologies for behaving in such a way that gave you that impression.

              It’s me, not you, and probably only tangentially specific lawyers like Twitter’s esotericcd, and Dan McLaughlin, etc.

              If I can’t find a sane persuasive statement within myself to bring to a red state governor to suggest that maybe his oversight of a certain university is in error, then /I/ am a do nothing, and culpable in my own silence. That is maybe the core motivation driving my difficulties letting the matter rest.

              I’ve been worried that a lot of focus on Trump is a misdirection of goals. There is much more problem than was created by simply a series of US presidents. I’ve also maybe never as an adult had a healthy relationship with politics, and setting myself up for expecting a favorable president is absolutely setting myself up for failure and depression in my personal life.

              My improved answer is also something that I can be a disaster with.

              It does help me to hear you say that, but it had already helped me quite a bit to hear you talk about differences on other narrower matters with other judges and lawyers. Those other statements were the most that I had heard in terms of inside baseball for law. (An obvious explanation for why I do not hear much inside baseball is that I am too fussy, and have perhaps misapplied the inside baseball I have heard for other professions.)

              I had maybe some underlying physical health issues, but I spent most of the Obama years useless. It is not a coincidence that I started getting better in 2016 when Trump was elected. It was pretty clear in hindsight that I was over weighting Obama in how I was evaluating the possibility for hope everywhere else in life. I have been determined not to make the same mistake.

              I have absolutely been making other mistakes.

              Okay, ‘try to redirect attention to smaller scale potential problems’ is a good idea on paper. Those are in practice more easily addressed.

              If I am expecting myself to be well enough to write a simple letter, and I am not that well, that is a problem with me setting myself up for failure.

              I’ve been letting myself try to write those letters, but it turns out that I am just angry, and do not have a single persuasive reason why someone should solve a specific problem in a certain way.

              If I have a dozen interlocking reasons, keep on losing my temper over what seems like a single reason, then cannot let a solitary statemetn stand on its own? There may be someone else doing something wrogn, somewhere. But, I definitely have an anger problem.

              Ideally, I would simply leave the RL environment that I keep on losing my temper over. It’s still actually healthier for me than where I was during the Obama years. The degree of feeling self hatred, helplessness, depression, and anger I had during those years are not something I wish to return to, and my easiest path of leaving seems to default to stewing in isolation again.

              Also, I am salty about the covid lockdown, and the vaccine mandate, and even if the current organization is one I am very angry at about that, I’m not sure any organization that existed then is one whose past actions and policies would be very pleasing to me.

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      2. Pelosi no longer represents the Democrats in the House. That job falls to Hakeem Jeffries now.

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    6. Well, there’s my good mood for the weekend shot to hell.

      You know how there’s always that one guy in a movie that screams “THEY CAN’T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS!!!”? That’s me right now. And yet they do. And will. And I don’t know what it’s going to take for enough people to wake up to either cow these bastards into submission or…well, I’d rather not think about “or.”

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  4. I can’t tell you what I want to have happen to NYC and all the Demoncrats right now. Burning in hell for all eternity just doesn’t seem to be enough. Saw something on the tube about what Romans did, no not Crucifixion though that does sound good, no, I was talking about how they erased you from all records forever. Damnatio Memoriae.

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      1. Of course, it’s not the Real Estates fault.

        It’s the fault of the people who govern NYC and the idiots who elected them. [Extremely Not Happy]

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          1. Well, you’d think Nobody Would Be THAT STUPID but people do stupid things.

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          3. Some voted for them. They deserve it.

            Some were either aware or culpalbly ignorant of it and could reasonably have acted against it. They deserve greater or lesser punishment — some fully up to the responsibility of those who voted.

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  5. The rare good nobles and monarchs managed their lands as if they were something to be built and improved on. The family as a group was to be improved and enriched over the generations. Sometimes, also rare, this brought improvements to the lives of the population.

    Note that this turned out to be vanishingly rare. As in “I can name most of the examples off the top of my head” rare. (Including my favorite Habsburg black sheep, Uncle Johann the reformer who married a postmaster’s daughter, much to Franz Josef’s dismay and ire.)

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        1. OK. I thought it was intended for the previous post, “The Problem With Monarchy and Democracy – By Francis Turner”, but I see it could apply to either one. Mea culpa.

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          1. In response to the post. For quite a while I have explained my relationship with God, as an old retired warrior living back beyond nowhere. There is a knock on the door. I open it. It is the King inviting me on an adventure.

            I had someone suggest it might be the start of an interesting story. So I started it. It is probably prophetic. It takes place in 2429. Civilization has collapsed. No electronics, no electricity, books used for fuel, not for knowledge. A world of slavery and evil, a world of takers, not makers. If you build it, they will take it.

            The important detail of the relationship of King and warrior is that the king is trying to restore freedom. He invites the warrior to join him. The warrior may be the only one left in the “kingdom” who is free to chose. So I have been living in two different centuries, appreciating how much worse it will get, if “we” do not turn. Yet writing a story of Hope in the midst of despair.

            So I have a different view of kings at the moment. One who invites us on an adventure.

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      2. We’re not Marxists. You are not marked by your class origins.

        One can live well even in a palace – Marcus Aurelius

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        1. Not sure how that relates to my comment, but…

          No, we’re not, unless of course one is referring to the marked arrogance and smug superiority common among the self-designated “elite”, which is observable. And “class”, as the leftists/Marxists use it, is a myth.

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  6. Very, very nervous right now.

    Sentencing is July 11, and we all know that Merchan will impose the maximum that he can get away with. We also know that he is absolutely missing all of his crayons – I fear that he will not have the brain to suspend it pending appeal, but remand Trump directly from the courtroom.

    Kinetics incoming.

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    1. Writer on Dana Loesch’s blog says rumor suggests probation. That….would actually be a clever move. It would show, “magnanimity,” and “no one is above the law,” while letting thr Biden campaign still use the, “convicted felon,” mantra.

      But *would* this bunch of power-drunken….folks…be that clever?

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      2. So a question that is beyond my legal ken:

        Can Biden pardon Trump, given this is a (novel) state prosecution based on uncharged Federal “crime”?

        If he could, I think that would make appeals moot, and leave the felony conviction as a fact for campaign use by the Dem side.

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        1. I don’t know if it is legal for Biden to issue a pardon in this situation.

          But I’d be extremely surprised if the Biden White House issued a pardon.

          The people who control Biden don’t want Trump to go up against Biden so won’t do “any favors to Trump”.

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        2. Short answer, no. That was specifically the rationale for charging in state court with Letitia James et al, is to prevent a Presidential pardon.

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          1. i.e. to prevent Trump from pardoning himself if he were to win the election despite the conviction.

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        3. As this is NOT a federal crime I believe Biden can NOT pardon Trump. The Governor of NY could potentially pardon Trump. However, I do not know if the NY governor has full pardon powers or is restricted by boards (many different models across the 50 states). Also Ms. Hochul is an absolute Obama type partisan WAY left even of Andrew Cuomo. That kind of political maneuver really isn’t in the wheelhouse of a raging partisan.

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      4. They will go for jail time because they want to have newspaper pictures of Trump in a jail cell in jail clothes. They want him to die in prison, which is what usually happens to political opponents of regimes like the one in the White House after the show trial is completed.

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    3. They’ve already guaranteed a Trump landslide. And now Merchan the Idiot is going to work to make it even bigger.

      As for kinetics, that’s what the left wants (and needs).

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      1. Yes re kinetics only feeding the left agenda. This is still very much a legal thing.

        Also note since the trial is over the gag order should be gone. Expect much speech.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. You know how out in the open it was last time? Even so, I know people who deny it.

          Not. This. Time. This time they’re going to have to find more votes than there are citizens. Watch. This is a preference cascade in the making.

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            1. Biden’s lost the minority vote. He’s lost the minority vote so badly that, if all other numbers were exactly the same, and only the black vote changed to what it’s polling today, Trump would have won 2020 with over 300 electoral votes.

              And this was said on CNN.

              I’m not saying this is a cakewalk or that violence won’t happen. I’m saying that they have screwed the pooch so monumentally badly that the fraud will be obvious, undeniable, and the regime will behave exactly the way it claims to fear Donald Trump acting.

              And then it goes kinetic. May the George have mercy.

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              1. My concern is this – instead of voting for Trump (or even RFK jr.), the minority voters who are disgusted with Biden instead stay home. Then their votes will still be counted by “helpful” poll workers (who prefer Biden) who just want to make sure that the stay at homes “got a chance to make their voices heard”.

                That’s above and beyond issues like intentionally miscounting votes. But that’s an entirely different problem.

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      3. “They’ve already guaranteed a Trump landslide.”

        I’m sorry, but I think they’ve just done exactly the opposite. Because I’m an Alaskan, and I remember what happened to Sen. Ted Stevens. The parallels are strong: prosecutors ginning up campaign finance violation charges, ramming through a conviction in a kangaroo court — in that case, by conspiring with FBI agents to withhold exculpatory evidence in blatant prosecutorial misconduct — knowing that, while it would be overturned on appeal, said reversal would occur only after the election, with Begich being able to campaign on his opponent being “a convicted felon corrupt politician” before then.

        And it worked. Indeed, I know people it worked on. Republicans who had voted for Stevens many times previously, but who didn’t that time because, as members of “the party of Law and Order” they couldn’t possibly support or vote for a convicted felon, even if it meant losing the election, because “for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” and so, better to lose “sticking to your guns” than compromise your sacred values “the party of Law and Order” by electing a convicted felon. And I’m afraid there will be too many of that sort who will do the same thing again, with the same excuses. Perhaps even the very same people, in the case of this state.

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        1. You are welcome to your belief, but always remember, that was on a smaller scale, and people are Fed Up with the regime. The lies, the failures, the inflation, the open borders.

          Again, current polling shows Biden losing core minorities that have always voted lock-step for the Dems. They lose that, they’re toast no matter what. And they’re losing them because urban blacks and latinos know lawfare when they see it, and hate it.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. I think it doesn’t help the Democrats that the actual charge against Trump is just so utterly and completely silly. He’s literally accused of making an NDA payment, and not recording it as “Money spent to convince slut to not blab.”

          That is *literally* the charge. That’s what they convicted him of doing.

          Who’s going to take that seriously?

          Liked by 1 person

          1. And from the same people who said of Clinton, “No big deal, everybody lies about sex.”

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          2. “Who’s going to take that seriously?”

            People who only read the headlines. By which I mean the classic “low-information voters” who only peripherally and passively pay attention to politics. The sort of people who will only hear the “convicted of 34 counts of felony campaign contributions” and not bother getting to the details of what those purported “felonies” were claimed to be. The sort who make up most of the “mushy middle” swing voters. A lot of the people I know belonging to my parents’ generation (early 60s).

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            1. Sure, and then the gather around the modern equivalent of the water cooler to exchange gossip, bring up the Trump conviction, and someone giggles and says, “Yeah, but did you her what they convicted him of?”

              If the conviction had happened in October, maybe the LIVs wouldn’t have time to find out. But it happened over five months before the election.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Right, they chose the prosecutions now to tie Trump up in early campaigning because they dare not release the Turnip or the Side Piece this early in the campaign season. But having done that (and perhaps succeeded more than some had intended) they’re a house cat that jumped a whitetail deer and managed to have it fall down. Now they have to figure out what to do next. Merchan in traditional kitty style (no offense intended in comparing noble kitty cats to weasel scat like Merchan) is going for the death bite to the jugular not realizing this isn’t going to work. Merchan wants what he believes is the brass ring a 2nd Circuit seat appointment from Biden or successor(s). To expect him to do something clever and subtle seems unlikely.

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  7. Via Powerline, a call to target Democratic Party officeholders with criminal charges:

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/05/guilty.php

    From the piece: “No Democratic officeholder should be allowed to retire, in any jurisdiction with Republican law enforcement, without facing criminal charges. There can’t be a single Democratic official in America against whom a criminal case can’t be brought that is better than this case against Trump. It should be open season on Democrats in the criminal courts.”

    Liked by 1 person

    3. Also, they should file charges against all of the former intelligence officials who signed the letter declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian election interference. What those former officials did is *literally* election interference according to the definition just provided by Bragg’s prosecution of Trump. At least some of the officials have since stated that they knew virtually nothing about the laptop at the time, and signed the letter because it was handed to them, and they wanted to make sure that Trump didn’t win the election. They had no knowledge of any Russian involvement with the laptop.

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      1. Bookkeeping for the win: They participated in a conspiracy to not record and declare their in-kind contribution to the 2020 Biden Harris campaign with a value beyond the legal limit on paper of teh correct color with teh correct color ink, which could be a tax law issue, or an FEC issue, or something to do with sunspots, doesn’t really matter.

        As McConnell said during the filibuster debate: “So the pendulum, Mr. President would swing both ways and it would swing hard.”

        Welcome to the new norms.

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    1. I’m afraid the odds of a, “MAGA extremist terror atrocity,” just went through the roof. Note, I mean the sort carefully nurtured and carried out by provocateurs, not a genuine event.

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      2. The Democrats are still trying to light their Reichstag Fire. So far they have only managed Reichstag Fizzles. Brian Sicknick as Horst Wessel didn’t work out for them either. There wasn’t even a song.

        The keep shrieking ‘Trump Iz Hitler!!’ when they’re the ones running the Nazi playbook page for page.

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            1. I’m *counting* on that sense of humor. Surely the creator of the duck billed platypus will have a place where I am welcome in the great beyond.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. He’s got Kipling, Tolkien, CS Lewis, and Jerry Pournelle…… which may explain a LOT.

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                  1. Also Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers and Randall Garrett. Things are absolutely *guaranteed* to get weird. Weirder.

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          2. Eh, they’re trying, but it’s hard to spin him into a role model. Even Wessel’s violence had to be toned down once they were trying to play down the street fighting, but at least it was fighting for political reasons.

            Liked by 1 person

              2. 🙄

                Even Wessel got some propaganda treatment — turned into “Hans Westmar” for one — but Floyd’s got nothing.

                Liked by 1 person

          3. George Floyd was a dirtbag petty criminal and drug addict that died of a fentanyl overdose.

            Why are the ‘heroes’ of the left almost without exception criminals, sociopaths and degenerates?

            Liked by 3 people

            1. Horst was a dirtbag petty criminal who died because of his stupid criminal behavior and was turned into a martyr through propaganda. So he was pretty much exactly like Floyd.

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        3. Uggh I just had a Horrible Idea. False flag attack on Turnip in Chief. The dems get him off the the head of the ticket, use that to subtly threaten Harris (Gosh you wouldn’t want that to happen to you or your family would you?). Their only issue is Ohio ballot access so this would have to happen between now and Late July. With A July 11 sentencing date if they go full throw Trump in Riker and then claim that this is a violent response. They relieve themselves of the turnip maybe even make a failed attempt against Harris (don’t want that to succeed or they have a republican president). Or maybe vice versa they toast Harris leave Biden and get him a better (basically any Democrat off the street, though likely Newsom) VP candidate and solve the Turnip issue after the election (maybe 2 years in, puppet mastering Turnip til then). They use the attack against Harris to gin up racial conflict (ala Saint Floyd). The only problem is it has to be pre August 7 to get on the Ohio ballot. Of course, Ohio went Trump the last 2 times so maybe they just write off its 17 electoral votes? I’ve probably read way too much Clancy and Schlichter but this is NOT making me comfortable. These bozos love them some convoluted stuff (and I didn’t say stuff). This is really their idea of a great plan.

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        4. Remember that Horst Wessel’s murder and the Reichstag Fire were actually carried out by Communists. They only need to get one person to act.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Actually, the Reichstag Fire was almost certainly set by Hitler’s Brownshirts and blamed on the communists. Who killed Horst Wessel was less clear, but the Party instantly capitalized on it.

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            1. It is quite certain that Wessel was murdered by a Communist, though the evidence that it was politically motivated is much, much more slim. (His landlady and he were in a dispute over rent, and her husband had been a Communist.)

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      3. Strictly speaking…

        Opposition is a) driven by their own internal insanity b) probably working from a play book privately agreed upon in advance.

        If they planned it, adn were going to ‘successfully’ execute, they probably were already going to do so, so the probability likely has not changed much.

        What has changed is some of the information we use to estimate the probability. This distinction is perhaps of interest only to stats nerds.

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      4. Well, that’s one way to replace your candidate. Although I’m not sure they can sequence things to avoid Speaker of the House issues… unless there’s just a couple more “retirements”.

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    2. While they’re almost certainly going to try a false flag, I think the regime understands it’s in too deep a mire even for that to pull them out.

      So they’re going to take the country to war (against Russia or China, take your pick), and reinstitute the draft, because it rallied the country behind Saint FDR, so it has to work for them, right? Right? RIGHT!?

      Liked by 1 person

          1. It would have to be a ridiculously huge one to have any attempt at the necessary unity. And they’d have to push very hard for it (as in providing a sudden upsurge in “provocations” by the bad guys) in a very short period of time, given when the election is set for.

            Unless Xi is crazy enough to invade Taiwan this coming October.

            Liked by 1 person

              1. Based on that, it doesn’t look like the mainlanders are ready yet. It’s not quite as much bluster as “Operation Fishkill” (the mocking name given to the nonsense China pulled when Pelosi visited Taiwan). But it’s still just at the “make a lot of noise and look intimidating” phase. As the host notes, there’s a possibility that the PLAN is trying to get the ROC forces used to the idea of Chinese ships and planes being very close to the island. Though it seems clear that Xi is hoping to pull off a successful invasion before he finally shuffles off this mortal coil.

                On another note, my choice of October for the invasion time wasn’t due to our upcoming election. IIRC that’s one of the two times during the year when an invasion of Taiwan is practical due to the tides.

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                1. Yup Tides and weather. It’s not like Bay of Fundy level tides but they’re serious and Typhoons are a pain when you’re moving troops on commercial RORO and are trying to establish airheads at major airports. Taiwan is very hard to invade

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                  1. For all the justified angst about mainland China’s drone efforts, it’s the PLA on their commercial ferries and the escorting PLAN ships that would be most vulnerable out on the water during any forced crossing.

                    Sure they could jam guidance signals, but the new AI-target-designation self-directed drones the Ukrainians have been starting to use would have an easier time distinguishing ships on the water from background than the Ukrainians do using theirs to plink tanks.

                    Facing swarms of little quadcopter drones and bunches of waterborne drone boats, plus sea mines and the traditional antiship stuff the Taiwanese would be lobbing at them, and any attempt to move major tonnage across the Taiwan Straight could get pretty darned spicy.

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                    1. It would be particularly bad as most commercial stuff has limited redundancy. They are not built for battle damage. Though larger long distance Ocean going ships will always have SOME redundancy, the sea itself is an enemy
                      .

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                  2. The Taiwan strait is a hundred miles wide. The English Channel is only 30 miles wide, the Allies had complete sea and air supremacy, they were veterans of 3 years of war, and still D-Day was a nightmare. Murphy got his grubby fingers into everything. Fortunately, he didn’t play favorites.

                    I don’t think the communist Chinese have a clue what a barrel of worms they’re looking to open.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    1. It’s not just the 90 mile distance that is the issue. Taiwan has LOTS of mountainous terrain. That means there are MANY beaches that have no decent access inland (or are limited to one or two narrow passes for access). So the good choices are very limited and very obvious. The real issue for Taiwan is if China blockades them. Without outside help I can’t see Taiwan breaking out. I would NOT expect the Biden Administration to give other than lip service, and honestly our navy has been getting short shrift (and stupid flag level brass) for quite awhile. Another thing that needs to change should trump win is it seems like there needs to be a purge of the flag level people to go back to paying attention to things like seamanship and actual drills rather than multi hour struggle sessions over pronouns,

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            2. Most likely Russia, since the echo chamber is married to endless virtue signal dopamine over Ukraine. But the problem is that even they know that (even if they’d rather die than ever admit it) their “commitment” begins and ends with pasting cute little blue and yellow flags in their X usernames.

              It would take something like, as you said, a provocation, such as a Russian attack on US soil. But for all his many faults, Putin isn’t as stupid as the undead husk being propped up in the Oval Office, so there’s close to zero chance of that happening.

              The only other option would be Israel, but getting into a war with an ally the US needs more than the ally needs the US would be too stupid even for our Star Chamber LARPers, especially over a bunch of insane cultists no one actually genuinely cares about.

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            3. It depends on what the rats in their heads tell them.

              They purged the military. Expanding it via the draft would greatly undo that. They want the military to protect them and their project. Sending it overseas would be detrimental to that desire. The veteran cadre they fear most isn’t eligible to be drafted. All these are as relevant as the stuff above.

              They want a vast number of contradictory things, and they’re all driven by fear. (Shrug) You don’t know which way the stampede is going to break until it starts. But the wind is rising, the hair on your arms bristles with static, and they’re clearly spooked. Stay alert, and be ready to get out of the way.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. BUT they might not realize any of your first paragraph. There is a level at which they follow scripts, and they might think “WWII script” is the one to run…. shrug.

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              2. “The veteran cadre they fear most isn’t eligible to be drafted”

                Are they eligible to be reactivated via IRR?

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              3. But the wind is rising, the hair on your arms bristles with static, and they’re clearly spooked. Stay alert, and be ready to get out of the way.

                …………….

                Yes. They will eat their own. That is the stampede that is coming. Pelosi, the squad, are going to be among the first. Ironically Sen. Fetterman isn’t going to be one them. Oh, they could try to go after him. Good luck with that. Who had “Fetterman makes sense” on their 2023 bingo card?

                Liked by 1 person

          2. I they think they can rally the Youth of America (TM) by sending them, “Greetings from the President…” letters, they’re smoking something stronger than weed.

            Liked by 1 person

        3. The problem is finding an opponent that would provide the necessary challenge. They can’t just say, “We’re going back into Iraq! Reinstitute the draft, and cancel the elections!” The entire country – including their own supporters – would have lots of questions about just what the heck was going on, and why a reinvasion of Iraq was such a national emergency.

          I assume that’s at least part of what you mean by saying that the rest of the world “can’t”. The various countries simply don’t present enough of a challenge – unless the US gets into multiple wars at the same time.

          Even sending the army into Ukraine to confront the Russians (as bad of an idea as that would be) might not justify the state of emergency required – at least not in time for the elections.

          If the US got into a war with China, then it might depending on what the government was prepared to do. But an initial clash with China would be naval and air only (with very limited ground assets), unless TPTB decided to open the war with an attempted invasion of Shanghai, or something similarly stupid. None of our allies in the region share a land border with China (Vietnam would probably like to align with us instead of Moscow these days, but nothing has happened there yet; note that the Vietnamese and the Japanese apparently have been in discussions). So short of us somehow getting large numbers of troops ashore in mainland China, a war with Beijing still isn’t likely to constitute a national emergency.

          Unless someone launches. And then the emergency will only last as long as the missiles are in the air. One way or the other.

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          1. To be honest, if you’re going to send weapons in the first place, it seems wrong to then limit how they’re used. But at this point, I count on the wunderkind in power to molest any poodle that wanders by.

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  9. Returning to our original post, another form of “neo wishful thinking” IMO is the notion that repealing the so called “Progressive” Constitutional amendments — income tax, popular election of Senators, and women’s suffrage — would magically reverse all the leftist evils of the past 100+ years. I especially do not get how having Senators elected by their state legislatures (which are far easier to bribe and manipulate) rather than the general public would make them more conscientious about representing their states. The very reason the 17th Amendment was passed was due to a series of scandals in which wealthy plutocrats literally bought their seats by bribing a few dozen legislators. At least under the current system they have to “buy” several hundred thousand or million votes.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. “they have to “buy” several hundred thousand or million votes.”

      Or one election supervisor per county, plus the SecState, to count them.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. They might have to buy the votes, but they don’t have to buy the voters. Election fraud and corruption makes actual voters irrelevant.

      Bloomborg bought a majority in the Virginia state government to ram through an appalling ‘gun control’ law. Which has since been struck down as un-Constitutional.

      ———————————

      Grandpa voted Republican until the day he died — but he’s been voting Democrat ever since.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I suspect that one of the reasons I don’t buy the “repeal the 17th Amendment” idea is that I live in Illinois and know WAY better than to EVER believe they would choose anyone purely for the “good of the state”. Also, the 1858 Senate race that prompted the Lincoln-Douglas debates was conducted under the old system, which gave Douglas the win (more Democrats got elected to the legislature) even though Lincoln won the popular vote. So forgive me for being more than a bit cynical about that idea.

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        1. Abolishing federal income tax I can see, but DO NOT GET ME STARTED on repealing the 19th Amendment….. yes, I know women IN GENERAL tend to be more liberal but holding up pink hatted AWFLs as “evidence” that women should never have been allowed to vote makes as much sense as holding up mass shooters as “evidence” that the 2nd Amendment should be repealed.

          Liked by 2 people

        2. To my taste the issue of the 17th amendment was to try to reduce corruption in the Senate created by Big Boss party control in various states. Given the current set of Senators (and most Senators since the passing of the 17th amendment) I would say that was a flat out failure. One thing it did is change the nature of the Senate. The Senate’s creation in the Connecticut Compromise was to make sure the STATES and their governments per se had direct and equal representation in the legislative body. It was also intended to NOT be directly responsive to the masses but to be a deliberative body intended to act as a counterweight to the more responsive and intentionally volatile House. By making it directly elected (even with the longer 6 year term) it’s candidates now spend a fair bit of their time gathering reelection funds (itself a potentially corrupting practice). They are also less responsive to their state governments than they would be if appointed by the state legislatures. Would removing the 17th fix things? Probably not but it might return the dynamic to what was originally intended.

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          1. “they are also less responsive to their state governments than they would be if appointed by the state legislatures”

            Aha! The idea is that they will be more responsive to the state GOVERNMENT, which may or may not represent the best interests of state residents. In the big blue states dominated by large cities (NY, CA, IL) there are vast swaths of rural/interior/downstate/upstate residents whose interests tend to get shoved aside by their state government. Simply repealing the 17th Amendment will do absolutely nothing to make Senators more responsive to this population unless it is also combined with a reversal of Reynolds vs. Sims. And even that might not be enough.

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    3. Agreed. My list of things that would be far more useful to restoring the Constitution than repealing the 16th, 17th, and 19th (Though are there really that many people who think the 19th is the issue?)

      Lift the cap of 435 Representatives. The whole point of the House is that there’s one rep for every X people, not “every state gets one, then we split the remaining 385 proportionally.” And this isn’t even an amendment! It’s a law. I like the Wyoming Rule as a basis: the population of the smallest state is used as the people per representative unit. Yes, California would have another 17 reps and electoral college votes. But Texas would get 13 and Florida 11.

      Overturn Reynolds v. Sims to allow the states to have their own split between population and geographic representation. This will go a long way in neutering the power of the blue cities over red countryside.

      Overturn South Dakota v. Dole to prevent the federal government from coercing state governments into passing legislation that the feds are powerless to do themselves. The original case was about tying federal funding of highways to states passing laws about alcohol, but under it, Democrats could pass a law saying that states are ineligible for federal Medicare or Medicaid funding if they don’t allow abortions. We don’t have federalism when the feds can coerce states like that.

      Overturn Wickard v. Filmore. The feds have the right to prohibit what you grow on your own property for your own use because it displaces what you would have bought in interstate commerce. Do I really need to explain how much that mocks the notion of freedom?

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      1. “Democrats could pass a law saying that states are ineligible for federal Medicare or Medicaid funding if they don’t allow abortions.”

        In an overlooked clause of the infamous Obamacare decision, SCOTUS partially handled that by saying that the states could not be forced to implement the Medicaid expansion by withholding any current funding, only future *increases*. It’s one reason TX didn’t do it.

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        1. Yes, the feds couldn’t withhold funding for not setting up the insurance exchanges. Now, our current SCOTUS probably wouldn’t let them do that with abortion, but that’s why we have to keep the strict constructionalist majority on SCOTUS. Because a “living document” and/or “respect precedent even when it’s bad” majority would let pro-abortion types get away with it.

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      2. You’re missing the larger point.

        The feral gub’mint should not be funding the states in the first place. Where did that money come from? It was extorted from the states’ own citizens! The whole institution of robbing the people, concentrating the money where it will most effectively fuel corruption, and then doling some of it back out to the state bureaucracies if they submit is inescapably primed to promote abuse.

        Like most other forms of government ‘help’, the only reason the ‘help’ is needed is because of what the government has taken from them. Leave the money IN the states and they can take care of their own budgets.

        The same principle should apply to the states. Eliminate state-wide taxation and the state equivalents of the IRS. Taxes should be strictly local. Why should a bunch of corruptocrats in Sacra-de-mento decide how much the folks in Merced should be taxed? They don’t know jack shit about Merced. If the people in a county want certain services from the state, they can vote to pay for them. If they become dissatisfied with the state’s services, they can vote to STOP paying for them.

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        1. I don’t disagree. But you eat the elephant one bite at a time. “You don’t get to withhold money you promised in order to get us to pass a law you’re not allowed to pass” is step one.

          If we can’t get people to agree to that much federalism, anything more drastic is a pipe dream.

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      4. “are there really that many people who think the 19th is the issue?”

        If you hang around Insty long enough, yes, nearly EVERY time some story is posted about the latest antics of AWFLs or the pink hat brigade, there are a whole bunch of “this proves the 19th Amendment was a mistake” comments with multiple upvotes.

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        2. By that criterion, there are enough male ass-hats to discredit the idea of men voting. :-P

          But that’s the Leftroid way. Make up a group based on ONE characteristic, point to ONE horrible example and screech “See? That’s how they are!”

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  12. Argued with fuedalists too. In my experience their biggest mistake is believing that realities of technology at the time are a result of the system. Like “oh people had so much more freedom under kings.”
    Yeah, because the fastest messages could be delivered is via horse. So the king couldn’t micromanage things if he wanted to since it would take days to issue orders and get feedback. It wasn’t the political system that gave people those “freedoms” back then, it was the tech level.

    Liked by 2 people

  13. “You shall not do what is unjust, nor judge unjustly… Judge your neighbor according to justice.” (Lev. 19:15)

    “May the Lord be judge, and judge between me and you; and see, and judge my cause, and deliver me out of your hand.” (1 Sam. 24:16)

    The whole thing would be ridiculous, were it not so unjust.

    Psalm 7 in its entirety seems like it would be a good prayer for all Americans today. We have a reference to it on our money, after all.

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  14. Wouldn’t care for kings, or princes, or any hereditary leaders. Sure as heck don’t want to be a serf. Can we just stick with a plain old republic, like we once had?

    Liked by 1 person

  15. leaving the Romans and the Vatican aside for the moment, a good argument could be made that the modern deep state goes back to Richelieu under Louis XIII. Certainly there is no magic wall between monarchy and deep state.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. That went through my mind. Before communism, Chinese monarchies have pretty much been nothing BUT deep-state-types. Does the CCP count, too?

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  17. Two nights ago, before the insane Trump verdict, I got this little scene in my head:

    ———————————

    She disengaged her cybernetic overmind, opened her eyes and returned her attention to their immediate surroundings. “Three million. That’s how many you’d have to kill. The rot is too pervasive, and too deeply entrenched, for any lesser measures to be effective. Corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and big-money donors are just the start. The purge must include contractors, labor unions, professional associations, banks, mega-corporations, colleges, ‘nonprofits’, ‘think tanks’, foreign agents — basically, any entity that is funded by the government, or feeds political ‘contributions’ into it, is part of the problem.”

    “But you’ve got all the evidence! Just lay it out and remove them from office.”

    She shook her head. “They can’t be dealt with under the law. They have subverted the law enforcement agencies and the courts, which now do their bidding. They will turn the law against any threat to their corruption. As we have seen, time and time again.”

    “So you think they should be dragged out of their offices and strung up?”

    She sighed in despair. “No, I’m not saying it’s right, or that it should be done. I set up the parameters considering only the problem, and the goal. I didn’t think to exclude mass murder from the solution set. But then…I explored thousands of alternatives, ran millions of scenarios, looking for a better way, and I couldn’t find one. This is the only action that provides any hope of success. Kill off the most corrupt three million, and there’s a good chance of restoring the Republic.”

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  19. Are these the same as the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” crowd? I’ve read some of their stuff over the past few years and I can’t quite grok it. I feel like I’m a muggle and they’re speaking Thieves’ Cant at me or something. Just a bunch of very pretentious words that don’t actually mean to do anything except say “we’re smarter than you normies.” Maybe they’ve got some points, maybe they don’t, and I’d know if they’d actually use, y’know, normal colloquial college-level English. I mean, the average English level I see at my current job is about sixth-grade because most of my fellow workers are from India and so it’s a second or third language to them, but I’m not THAT rusty.

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      1. Is this the Curtis Yarvin stuff? And his crowd? He seems to think he’s a lot smarter than someone like me (and admittedly, I’m not really that big of a brain and I have a tendency to be a bit of a dumbass) but the pro-monarchy stuff just reads like, well, like wishful thinking. Those articles of his have not done the smarty-pants expert crowd any favors in my mind. Yarvin in particular is also REALLY long-winded and I don’t have the time to waste on him anymore.

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      2. From Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado I’ve got a little list

        Then the Idiot who praises with Enthusiastic tone all centuries but this and all Countries but his own

        Indeed these fools have been around a long time. Of course, Gilbert was also not fond of lady novelists (same stanza) but I’m sure the members of that profession in this forum would convince him otherwise …

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  20. Just occurred to me that the, “Oh, if the King only knew! His evil advisers are misleading him!” trope may be the original, “good cop/bad cop.”

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    1. Literally thousands of men died in the Gulag in the 1930s through 1950s writing letters to Comrade Stalin to tell him of the great injustices that had been perpetrated against them, and surely if the All-Wise Comrade Stalin knew, he would rectify it!

      Liked by 1 person

  21. Meanwhile, Larry Hogan (former (R) Gov. Of Maryland and Asa Hutchinson have made, “Now, now, we must respect the ruling of the jury and the rule of law,” statements. If this trial had had anything to do with the rule of law I might – might – agree. As it is….

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  22. Yes NYC and other hell’s on Earth called Democrat or Blue cities are full of innocents trapped by a corrupt system.

    But Enough is god damned enough.

    I say we boycott all these places until the Trump convictions are over turned. Peaceful and harms the least amount of people. Make every blue city feel our pain, until they scream or go bankrupt.

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  25. If I said Monarchs couldn’t have a Deep State I didn’t mean it. There are plenty of examples of such things (e.g. Tokugawa Japan and various dynasties in China to think of two off the top of my head).

    What I wanted to say was that democracy’s weakness is the Deep State and that we need to find a way to counter that before it leads the nation into collapse. I would note that the above dynasties are examples of a requirement for collapse to remove the bureaucracy. Japan managed the process OK with the Meiji restoration (yes there was a nasty civil war – the Boshin war – but it was brief and not too destructive). China did not and ended up with warlords and then the Chicoms.

    We really badly need to figure out how to remove Deep State from our societies ASAP

    Liked by 2 people

    2. It’s fairly easy to defeat the Deep State in a government like ours if the will is there. The legislatures simply cut off funding to the bureaucracies.

      Problem solved.

      Unfortunately, one party is basically dedicated to expanding the bureaucracy as much as possible, while the other doesn’t have the will.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. No it is much harder than that. There is too much government that people rely on that will stop if we fire all the bureaucrats.

        Take the FBI. In theory I’d say fire everyone, sell the assets.

        BUT

        Who goes after the Kiddie Pr0n? Who goes after the Russian/Nigerian scammers? That’s just two areas where I know the FBI does a decent job (could they do better? maybe. In theory. But they do as well as any other law enforcement group). I expect there are other areas where they do a good job too that no one else does (or potentially can do, due to jurisdictional issues).

        You can make the same argument for pretty much every bureaucracy and it is legitimate in that some number of people somewhere receive an actual positive benefit from this particular part of a larger bureaucracy.

        Liked by 1 person

  26. Someone with more skill than I needs to make a meme. Trump’s mugshot photo, with the caption, “What next? Polonium Tea?”

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  27. Me, I like free society.

    But many don’t. It is cold and impersonal. It is easy to lose meaning. They seek socialism as an alternative. Feudalism, with its reciprocal duties, is warmer and more meaningful than free markets. And it is more local and personal than socialism.

    I think it is a good idea if socialists turn from socialism and seek feudal arrangements in their personal affairs.

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    1. I’m in the SCA, and I absolutely don’t want feudalism. Just the custom of, “Ah, the serf has died. Take his best animal (if any) from his family to recompense me for my loss,” would ensure that.

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    2. Everything old is eww again.

      The CSA was explicitly, if informally, neofeudal in nature. The Planters spoke and wrote a great deal about their duty to protect the lower classes from the depredations of Capitalism, and used the term. (Leaving aside that the Planter class did more to impoverish the people of the South and eliminate any rival power centers than the worst Yankee industrialists.)

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    3. Don’t pin too many hopes on Fetterman. He’s a classic PA Union Democrat. I have a bunch of them in the family. Trade Union DNA is deep in the Dem party, which produces one of their legislative strengths – SOLIDARITY!, which is why they kick R ass regularly in Congress. He may provide good soundbites on some subjects, but when push comes to shove, he’ll vote what the Whip wants

      Liked by 1 person

  28. Finally got my church Bookclub to read 1 Samuel. Specifically I wanted the youngsters to read what G-d had to say about Monarchy in 1 Samual 8, because more than one has been muttering about needing a Christian Monarchy, and that that is G-D’s preferred government. Spoilers: Wanting a king is idolatry, only G-d is worthy of being king.

    My impression, is more, that the kids don’t want the responsibility and stress of being politically active, and think having a monarchy will take away their responsibility as citizens.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Honestly, I don’t think that’s the best anti-monarchical Biblical passage. God is laying out the pros and cons, but one could decide that the pros outweigh the cons. Certainly, the entire book of Judges is structured to show that the previous system of no kings just wasn’t working. They go from an assassin to a woman to a coward to a fool to a brute to no judge at all.

      I prefer the parable of the trees (Judges 9:8-15) for why we shouldn’t have kings. Specifically, that all the people who would make good kings are busy with their own business and the only people who want to be king are the ones who are useless when not actively harmful.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. It’s probably worth noting that the form of government that The Author chose for Israel was pretty much non-existent.

      “Here are the laws that I gave you. Follow them. Don’t be wicked. I’ll support you as needed. When things get really bad – probably because of your own wickedness – I’ll pick a judge to resolve the problem.”

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  29. The differences between a oligarchy masquerading as a democratic republic and an honest monarchy is not meaningful to the average person, I suspect. This is why at this point, the installation of a King-for-life here in the US would just elicit a shrug from me – we’re already living under such a system, but it’s just not honest about what it is. Every time I hear about “The Kennedy Family” or “The Clintons”, we’re talking about US royalty. It’s just embarrassing who we elevate to such heights,.

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  30. This is bizarre. Being a monarchist, Jacobite, etc. in a romantic way is well different from being a feudalist in a romantic way.

    However, like being a slave LARPer, there are people out there who could help you try it out, and they have varying degrees of benevolence. Try joining a household in the SCA, for example, and dealing with SCA politics, for a taste of the highs and lows.

    All that said… feudalism didn’t exist anywhere in a textbook form, and mostly applied to either guys with a small tank and tank crew (ie, knights), and people who ran a group of small tanks and tank crews and had land (smaller lords and ladies). Peasants were not part of that feudal contract/covenant stuff. Men at arms got money/goods/services and other hire, so they weren’t part of it either.

    The land/peasant system was basically descended from Roman industrial slave farms (latifundiae). I really don’t think anybody wants that.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Ehhh…(waggles hand)

      In some places, at some times. Being a serf was bad, but being a peasant wasn’t necessarily. Any catch all category that comprises an outright supermajority of the population is going to have a lot of variability. If everybody other than Gentry and Clerisy are Peasantry, then yeomen, tradesmen, and merchants were peasants.

      Then you throw the semi-mythical Assizes of Jerusalem and the Magna Carta into the mix, the rising power of the guilds, rigorously training the peasantry to use longbows, even minor things like Henry II abusing forest law to starve recalcitrant nobles of manpower, shake well, add labor shortages from civil wars and plague…

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        1. The Magna Carta applied to the king and the barons. But John shoved the thing full of poison pills that limited the barons, and freely granted royal prerogatives to villages, towns, and cities across the country.
          Empowering the populace was not the goal of either side, but it was the effect.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. I’ve said many times: the blueprints are sound. They can guide the rebuild. but the first step in any construction is clearing the site. Now where did I leave that bulldozer key….

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  31. Also, I found out yesterday that Josephus (I think in the Antiquities, have to check) gave the name of Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses’ foster mom, as Thermouthis, which was the Greek version of the Egyptian name Renenutet.

    Renenutet was a goddess of grains and grapes, fertile fields, harvest, the protection of storerooms and fields from vermin, the protection of children from predators, milk, breastfeeding, the giving of the true name (“ren”) to humans, the care and feeding of Pharaoh throughout his life from babyhood on, and zotting things with her gaze. Oh, and sometimes she was pictured as the wife of Sobek, the Nile god with the crocodile head.

    She was pictured as a cobra-headed woman (teeny-tiny head, slightly bigger cobra hood, big wig/crown around hood and head), a woman with a cobra body, or just a cobra.

    At various points it was a popular name for Egyptian women, so it’s a plausible name for Pharaoh’s daughter.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I mention this because it’s how I got to sleep last night. We need some distractions from injustice.

      Also, notice that the “sticking it to the Egyptian gods” theme of the Ten Plagues included a lot of damage to storerooms and fields. It’s the woman with the name who’s praised, not the cobra-headed false goddess.

      Liked by 1 person

  32. I wonder how many of the neo-feudalists are either just too disgusted with politics as they see it to be bothered, and want someone to “fix it,” aka the Man on the White Horse? And how many assume they would be mid to upper ranked nobility, or at the very least gentry, and forget that that was 5% of the population at best, a little more in Hungary and Poland.

    And even there, Hungarian and Polish nobility had a lot of people who could wear swords and skip certain taxes, but were poor as church mice.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. LE Modesitt had a panel on which he explained the logistics of knighthood—that is, the basic land amounts you need to support a horse, gear, and maintenance. It’s a lot, and knighthood is the unlanded gentry rank.

        I think a lot of people are deeply unclear on the amount of land/work needed for support of a family, because they are so far removed from subsistence by technology. It’s similar to how a lot of people push vegetarian or vegan lifestyles without realizing that a culture’s basic foods are indicative of what the land can support, and more carnivorous lifestyles have to do with lands that are poor for farming, but perhaps great for grazing animals.

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        2. Yup, that’s why most knights were either part of the wealthy lord family, working for a lord, looking for a lord to work for, working the jousting/melee circuit, or were as poor as church mice with their tiny little house and land and stable (and possibly a tiny family).

          Liked by 2 people

        3. With subsistence farming — ‘back-to-the-land’, ‘organic’ farming like the Leftroids want to impose — it takes four farmers to support themselves plus one additional non-farmer. 80% of the available labor is consumed just providing food. Crop yields are 1/2 to 1/4 of what we get from Eeevul industrial farming, so it takes more farmland to support each person. Welcome back to the Dark Ages!

          Liked by 2 people

              1. I look at the bones of medieval people and cringe. The long-term wear and tear on joints, including the spine, badly-healed cracks and fractures, and other every-day injuries make me ache. I like the mechanized world, thank you!

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  33. There’s a quote attributed to Lysander Spooner about the Constitution being insufficient to prevent where we are. I’ve always hated it. It’s doubly dumb coming from the pro-monarchy crowd: If our current (much-ignored) system of governance is judged by this standard, you prefer the one before that? On what grounds? It wasn’t able to prevent where we are either.

    No, the value of the Constitution is that of the Magna Carta – to point out that we can, and have before, restricted the reach of power.

    Liked by 1 person

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