Speaking Out

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The government doesn’t grant you your fundamental rights. You have those by virtue of being human.

Good governments protect them. Bad governments violate them. The fact that they can, and do violate them doesn’t mean they never existed. In fact, arguably, the fact they violate them means they exist.

Which is why I was completely befuddled when I was told that no, of course these aren’t natural rights, since if they were we wouldn’t need a bill of rights to protect them.

I think I merely pointed out that the fact the founders, it turns out rightly, didn’t trust future governments doesn’t mean the rights don’t exist before and beyond governments. It simply means bad governments can violate them. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the morality of doing so.

These are negative rights. They are rights you have in the absence of anyone violating them. (Remember Obama hated that, as he hates anything that doesn’t give him power over us.)

Rights like the right to bear arms don’t mean you have the right to have someone give you weapons. (No matter how much we throw ourselves on the floor and scream.) In the same way the right to free speech doesn’t mean we have the right to make people listen to our speech, compel people to agree with our speech or even insist people don’t contradict us.

In fact is the right to free speech I wish to talk about. By the time I was eighteen and doing 12th grade in the US, I knew the second amendment was under fire.

But I never thought I’d live to see the day when the left openly — not covertly — attacked the first amendment and talked about abolishing it.

Honestly, I think that’s a measure of how we’re winning.

The unalienable rights are well and good, but while the left had the effective lock on mass communication, they really weren’t scared of speech that disagreed with them. Even the times they were “forced” to tolerate it, like during presidential debates, they made sure anything that went against their beliefs was curtailed, mocked, made to seem bad. They could do this by seeding the questions with the left ahead of time, and afterwards by making anything the right candidate said seem stupid.

I still remember — possibly the last time they had that power — how they turned Romney’s anodyne comment about women in binders into — SOMEHOW — a chauvinist and anti-feminist attack. It was inexplicable. But it was everywhere at once and very loud and people went along because they weren’t sure what it all meant, but there must be something in it.

Now they don’t have that power. And they’ve been badly trained by years of having effective monopoly on communication. Then there’s the fact their best ideas were from the USSR and have been proven to bring nothing but horror and poverty.

And meanwhile while for inscrutable reasons (except a resistance to letting us go or perhaps being afraid the Human race will have better chances of survival if we leave the Earth) they were keeping us off space, geeks geeked the computer revolution. Which led to places like this blog and Twitter, and various other means by which someone not-approved can talk.

You can tell how threatened they are by it when you realize they are already stomping on “normal people speaking out on the internet” in the rest of the anglo sphere. (Because abuses elsewhere wouldn’t shock us as much.) And trust me on this, even in the rest of the anglosphere, they have nothing even remotely close to our vigorous political blogging and reporting sphere.

Anyway, in this crowd I do not need to tell you the importance of free speech, or that the right worth protecting is the right to unpopular speech or speech unapproved of from the top.

No. What I want to tell you, instead, is that at a time when it often feels we have an uphill battle.

But this is an actual sign we’re winning. Even if it’s an annoying one. And one where the other side is all stompy. And really bad things on that front are happening in Europe.

but the truth is the left could afford to pretend to be pro free speech and keep pushing the free speech boundaries mostly in ways that destroyed the culture and helped them get what they wanted until they lost the speech monopoly. And speech they didn’t like started to be heard.

Now they’ve had to drop the mask on that as on so many other things.

And now we can see them for the enemies of our unalienable rights they are.

Which means they have no chance of winning the fight. No. You can’t stop a million voices even with force.

Once more I’d like to remind you that typewriters took down the USSR.

They will make noise. They will threaten.

But you need to learn — I’ve learned — the more noise they make, the more they’re losing.

And they are losing.

Keep talking. Don’t stop.

129 thoughts on “Speaking Out”

  1. This blog, and others like it, are indeed an example of truly free speech. The “mass media” is now helpless because the ability to ‘speak’ and distribute ‘speech’ is unable to be a monopoly or controlled. When there were just three major TV networks in the USA it was a lot easier to direct the message. Oops, here’s the internet and independent reports and several viewpoints on anything news and poof, the control is now gone.

    Even with a simple comment on a blog – the message gets out.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. And when the government tries to shut down that free speech, we know it immediately, and the organization(s) doing that become valid targets for all kinds of measures of elimination.

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  2. “The government doesn’t grant you your fundamental rights. You have those by virtue of being human.” Precisely right. Many people get this wrong when they speak of Constitutional rights as things created by the Constitution.

    The right interpretation is actually quite obvious, as you said. The words are Plain English, and they speak of rights protected, or rights that shall not be infringed — they do not say that these rights are created.

    Neil Smith put it another way; he commented that the Bill of Rights is misnamed, and the better name would be the Bill of Prohibitions. I think it was part of an essay on the question whether the Constitution applies to children, in other words whether children have rights under the Constitution. He answered that the Constitution doesn’t apply to you or me or our children at all; it only applies to politicians and it tells them about things they are forbidden to do. For example, they are forbidden to disarm the people. The question when a young human should handle a gun is a question for parents to answer, one that depends on the individual. The government, under the plain words of the Constitution, has no authority over that decisioin.

    A somewhat separate point is that The Bill of Rights/Prohibitions does not really protect any rights itself. At the time it was adopted, it was argued that it was redundant. The cover letter that went out with the amendments sort of says the same thing. If you read the body of the Constitution it’s very clear that none of the things prohibited by the Bill of Rights are things that the Federal government was allowed to do under the Constitution without those amendments. For example, take away the 2nd Amendment and you will still find no permission for the Federal government to control personal weapons, simply because the legal powers are enumerated in Article 1 Section 8 and no such authority can be found in that article. The articles in the Bill of Rights simply state a few of the rights the founders were particularly concerned about, to the point that being redundant and explicit about them was considered worth doing.

    Liked by 6 people

    1. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. “

      Liked by 2 people

  3. The Leftroids want to keep us out of space because we could get completely beyond their reach.

    Right now, Britain’s OFCOM ‘Ministry Of Truth’ is threatening Rumble with unspecified ‘consequences’ if they don’t toe the line:

    We are contacting you to ask that you please reply to our previous email, which outlines your responsibilities under the Online Safety Act, and the offer of a further meeting.

    We view a supervisory relationship between Ofcom and a service as the most effective way to review and assess compliance with its safety and governance duties.

    Rumble maintains that “We ain’t got no ‘responsibilities’ or ‘duties’ to you lot. Bugger off!”

    Being based on a distant asteroid or space habitat would make forcing ‘compliance’ much harder.

    Liked by 3 people

    2. Rumble moved from Canada (where it was founded) to Florida some years back specifically because the founder saw the writing on the wall with respect to future Canadian censorship.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Good. So a reply quoting the 1st Amendment at them should settle the matter, optionally combined with the phrase “so bugger off”.

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    5. These are the same jackasses who threatened to “extradite and imprison” US citizens for Wrongthink tweets. “Bugger off” isn’t nearly strong enough; “Molon labe”, with its connotations, is preferred.👿

      Liked by 1 person

  4. Perzackly, ma’am.

    To borrow from James Warner Bellah (if you’re gonna pilfer, pilfer from the best), the American left has been largely if not yet entirely driven to Spanish Man’s Grave, where they’re sure their Medicine (“Racist! Nazi! Trumpanzee! FillInTheBlankoPhobe! Epstein list! 34Felonies! REEEEEEEEEE!”) will protect them (“ghost dancing harder,” as I think Miz Hoyt said a few days ago) as it has always done in the past.

    Now is the time to show them that G_d hates them, Satan has abandoned them, and their Medicine is no good. Relentless mockery and resolute determination in the face of their spittle-flecked hysterics will go a long way toward accomplishing that end.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Satan hasn’t abandoned them, they have no souls left to sell to Satan, so he ignores them. Even though they pray that Satan and God don’t exist, because if they do, they’re in a world of shit.

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      1. I suspect Satan is watching them and chuckling about how much they’d “love” being in His playground.

        Oh, He doesn’t need to purchase their souls. Their choices “give their souls to Him”. [Twisted Grin]

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  5. My understanding is it really started with talk radio even before we had social media. I do remember discovering conservative voices on the radio while in college and during the early 00’s at my first job.

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    1. I have liberal friends that seem to think if it wasn’t for the FNC and Rush Limbaugh we would have achieved Utopia by now. I saw somebody comment somewhere the other day that if you are arguing with a boomer leftist you are arguing with the TV and the TV cannot hear you and does not care.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Pretty much the whole reason Talk Radio took off so hard in the ’90s was because it had been abandoned by the left as obsolete, or only for the late night weirdos. Once it became popular with normal folks the left tried various voices on it as well, none of which have really stuck. They even took nominally center-right folks and (through contracts) got them to push left (Ed Schultz, Joe Scarborough), which didn’t really work out for them either because, outside of Rush, it was never about the personality talking, but the ideas they were talking about.

        I remember several years ago (Obama admin?) where the left was trying to push a bill through that defined who could be defined as a news reporter in an attempt to limit what people could post/gather information. It got shot down as people pointed out that the 1A protected the rights of the whole people, not just “the press.”

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Can’t remember when that bill came up, but I do remember it. It’s likely to have been during Obama’s occupancy of the White House, and of course it was a Democrat creation (although I think there was a fair number of Republican morons involved as well).

          It was during the second half of the Obama occupancy that I realized the Democratic party had made destroying both the Second Amendment AND the First the centerpiece of their platform. A bit late, maybe, but at least I got there; it was like a hammer to the head when the ramifications of the “hate speech” rhetoric and all the deplatforming/canceling finally came together. Couldn’t believe I had ever voted for the only political party in our nation’s history to commit itself to killing TWO amendments in the Bill of Rights. Democrats Delenda Est.

          Liked by 2 people

        2. The only left talk host that was semi-entertaining was the late Alan Berg. All the crazies called him and eventually he was killed by real Neo-Nazis.

          Art Bell could be fun and his show was great for figuring out how to identify bull-sh-ters.

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          1. There’s a play about Alan Berg and The Order, called God’s Country. I actually know someone who helped produce that show in the PNW, and Richard Butler (of the Aryan Nations) came to the show. She was one of the people calling ticket holders and offering them a free switch to another night. And the guy actually wanted to shake the actors’ hands afterwards, because the thing about a documentary play is that if you see nothing wrong with the actions, you’d take the presentation as a positive.

            As a side note, after he died, his daughter sold off the compound specifically so the AN couldn’t use the property anymore. Good.

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              1. Given the Arabian/Muslim “involvement” on all levels in the East African slave trade, I’m not really surprised that their DNA fingerprints show up.

                Liked by 2 people

    3. Which is why some folks are trying so hard to nuke the AM band, by removing it from automobiles. A small station can carry one heck of a long way, especially at night, unlike FM.

      Lose that “millions of drive-time listenrers” and most AM commercial stations fold. Then go the donor-supported ones.

      If only for “Civil Defense” and “major emergency” stuff, the AM band and a large audience of AM receivers (with honking big batteries) everywhere, it is a priceless way to keep folks informed in emergencies, largely by piggy-backing off existing systems.

      And for you preppers, the hand-crank radios are kinda handy too.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. And when things are really messed up… AM can be heard on a crystal set. It’s a whole lot of not much, but it’s there. Just have a good high-impedance earphone and you can cobble the rest with scrap if needs be.

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        1. All they will do is recreate all the pirate radio stations, Transmit, run, you can pop up a pirate radio station quite quickly, and then tear it down and be some where else again. The technology is not that complicated, and for Christ sake you can use tubes if you need to. Top of a mountain and you can reach quite a ways with low power transmitter, and you can easily make a high power transmitter mobile and hide it in a Semi trailer, I think the Army has them in some lot somewhere. So, no they can’t stop the wave.

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  6. That was wonderful. Also true. How many people today say things like oh its a free country and I can say what I want. So now I can go online and say what I want to say maybe make fool out of myself but that’s normal. I did see someone point out that talk radio got there first. And that’s true but limited. Rush, Sean, etc, and the grandmaster in NY, Bob Grant had a reach but it was circumscribed. Now who believes CNN.

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  7. The National News Media has told Americans that Trump (almost all of the modern Republican Presidents) is a Nazi.

    Yet, the National News Media would be destroyed if any of the prior Republican Presidents were Nazis.

    Heck, the Democratic Party would have been destroyed decades ago if the National News Media was correct.

    A certain Liberal Lady was said that she doesn’t want people to call other visitors to her Facebook page “Idiots”.

    But she still apparently believes the National News Media.

    So sadly, the term “Idiot” seems to apply. [Frown]

    Liked by 1 person

    1. It’s a bit like the well worn observation that gun owners obviously aren’t as scary as the left makes them out to be, because if they were that scary, there would be no left.

      Liked by 4 people

        1. The left can’t accept responsibility for their own lives, they can’t control their own emotions. So, they can’t believe others can be responsible and act, not without emotion, but with the control they do not have. Everyone is like me, so everyone must be as weak as I am. That is the basis of their ideology everyone is the same, which is a blatant lie told by liars to cover their own failures. That’s why it is so hard for the left to accept limitations to their tyranny and ideology. You can’t have different thoughts because we are all the same. You can’t call me fat, because we are all the same, even though I am fat. I want to be a Man/Woman because we’re all the same, even though we are not. If they admit we are different in any way, their world view crumbles. And they wake up with tattoos on their face and rings in their noses in their fifties with no children surrounded by cats that will eat their worthless ass as they die from obesity with blinders on, alone. I don’t hate them, I pity them, and may god have mercy on their souls, fetid as they are.

          I think my muse got this one right.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I have literally seen a leftist argue for gun control because he could not be trusted with a gun.

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            1. I’ve seen that too. It’s -common- with those people. Quite often their physical incompetence is so profound they would literally shoot themselves or someone else by accident. These would be the ones who hire an electrician to replace light bulbs. And they take cabs because they can’t drive.

              Therefore they think -you- must be banned. Because as we all know, #Liberals are the smart ones. “If I can’t do this, imagine how dangerous a Repugnican would be!”

              Then they watch that video of Sidney Sweeney the cute jeans girl shooting a tactical pistol course like John Wick, and they burn.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Saw that. It was definitely not a photo op; she’s been doing it a while.😃

                Tampon Timmy could stand a few lessons from her. Of course; it wouldn’t do any good; inept is inept, even with lessons…

                Liked by 1 person

  8. Yesterday I had a Facebook notice on a cousin’s post (I haven’t been directly on FB in years, but I logged in on the phone to receive my sweet and encouraging younger cousin’s positive direct messages).

    So I looked, and sure enough it was photos and data on half a dozen billionaires, giving their net worth, then showing the minimum wage, and the gist was, “Tax the billionaires out of existence!”

    What truly bummed me was the cousin who gave it a like. They are both, of course, upper middle-class, college educated white women, one younger than me, one older. The one who posted has been living in France, thanks to her husband’s job, so I suppose she’s absorbed the cultural attitudes. The other was a military spouse who has lived overseas and I don’t understand her liking the post.

    I thought about answering, noting that logic could easily be extended to millionaires, and oh, by the way, just how large is your 401k? Not to mention most of those billionaires donate to leftist causes and candidates, so they wouldn’t be able to contribute any more.

    But I didn’t want to add FB to the tablet. And maybe I’m just avoiding conflict.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I’d love for a way for all of us to become billionaires that didn’t involve inflating the dollar into being worth less than the paper it’s printed on. Thing is there already are ways, and they either require a lot of hard work, or an incredible amount of dumb luck, and sometimes both.

      Liked by 1 person

          1. “Check your privileges!”

            OK:

            Straight – check.

            White – check

            Christian – check

            Male – check.

            Able Bodied – check’.

            Neurotypical’ – check (AFAIK)

            Employed – check

            All good, thanks.

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            1. “You have white privilege!”

              “You’re only half right. I find YOUR definition of “privilege” to be neither accurate nor acceptable. Since you choose to not communicate in mutually acceptable terms, I find you have nothing of value to say to me in the first place. Good day.”

              Liked by 1 person

              1. I find you have nothing of value to say to me in the first place. Good day.

                I lost all of my patience with the whole “privilege” nonsense when Whoopi Goldberg(?) said that Holocaust survivors should shut up about anti-semitism because they still had “white privilege”.

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                1. I know I can safely ignore anything someone has to say if they use the specific terms “yt” (for “white”) or “wypipo.” That tells me we will not be engaging in any sort of mutually intelligible dialogue and it’s not worth my time.

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                  1. Oh.

                    Conspiracy theory time!

                    So, 420 common era, the magical land of Yt sank beneath the sea.

                    (Prounced fairly close to ‘it’.)

                    Some people in America can claim descent from the lost land of Yt.

                    Particularly off Americans might then describe these descendants as the Yt Nation, and might also propose an ideology of Yt nationalism.

                    Liked by 1 person

                  2. Anything with three sets of paren around a name or group.

                    Anything with “I just don’t want my kids growing up as a minority in their own country.” Note: this is -insane- coming from someone who states they wont have more than one or two kids. (lol. Its a call to pogrom and genocide, but they will deny it.)

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      2. I like to content myself with my standard of living being so much higher than my grandparents’. Yes, more money would be nice, but I get so much cool stuff.

        Yesterday, I had a fresh tomato, avocado, and mozzarella salad with balsamic vinegar, and discussed fun movies and music with people that I had streamed after telecommuting to my job that I do with my orange cat in my lap (he is a clingy boy.) It’s been hot here lately, but the AC and good insulation do their job, so it wasn’t an issue. Earlier this summer, I went to Yosemite and took the kids on some epic hikes, and then we went to summer camps out of state, only a day away in my car. One of those camps has a (semi) replica of Fort Clatsop, from the Lewis & Clark expedition. They said the proportions were correct, but the original was badly-made, with gaps and mud floors and such, hence the “semi” of the description. (And electricity, of course.) Imagine a winter with three non-rainy days out of three months in a place like that.

        Dude. DUDE. My life is pretty awesome by any historical standard.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I read a book about John Jacob Astor’s attempt to establish a fur trading empire in the Northwest (with Thomas Jefferson’s encouragement), and what those people went through, not only getting across this continent but trying to hack a living out of the rain-soaked coastal forest in what is now Astoria… It’s great fodder for imagination and was an amazing feat, but man, am I ever glad that I don’t have to live like that.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. If you like to read about hair-raising travels, find “The Worst Journey in the World / Antarctic 1910-1913” by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922). Available for free download at gutenberg.org.

            To mention one small tidbit, it mentions that they couldn’t use sled dogs for their journey because it was too cold, so the humans had to pull the sleds. Yikes.

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                1. Years ago, I was quoting Carl Sagan’s description of Mars: “In the daytime it is distinctly chilly. At night the temperature can plunge to a hundred degrees below zero. It is enveloped by planetary dust storms driven by winds that can reach half the speed of sound”. My roommate dryly noted: “Sounds a lot like North Dakota”…

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. Yep. High desert prairies of the eastern approach to the Rockies. Which include N. Dakota, eastern Montana and Wyoming. Also the deserts of Nevada, and sage brush flats of Idaho, and Oregon. Mountains (Blues, Steens/Klamath, to far east, Cascades down middle) are closer and break the wind some in Oregon, but you still get them. There is something called “Prairie Madness” caused by the wind.

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                    2. Because of the difference in pressure set up by the enormous precipitation always and everywhere upon Trenco there is wind—and what a wind! Except at the very poles, where it is too cold for even Trenconian life to exist, there is hardly a spot in which or a time at which an Earthly gale would not be considered a dead calm, and along the equator, at every sunrise and at every sunset, the wind blows from the day side to the night side at the rate of well over eight hundred miles an hour!

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          2. When I was a kid reading Service and London under the covers at night, I had dreams of going to Alaska and heading out into the howling wilderness on my sled drawn by trusty Huskies to establish my own little spread using my axe, saw, mattock & shovel. Then we moved to Minneapolis and I got citified and soft; better to read about than do that kind of thing I guess.*

            Decades later I worked one summer in Alaska as the mechanic on a fire response helicopter. The chief of our fire region invited my pilot and me out to his place for dinner one night. Turns out he and his wife had done that kind of carving. Of course his sled and team of dogs was a ’72 VW Microbus and most of his tools were powered by a Honda generator, but the idea was the same.

            *Probably could if I absolutely had to, but would rather not find out . . .

            Liked by 1 person

          3. I’m reading the book The Northern Gardener by Mary Lahr Schier for our Master Gardener book club. The first chapter, Apples, describes the difficulty that growers had developing Apple tree varieties that would grow in the Minnesota climate.

            It tracks perfectly with the problems my great grandfather had trying to establish an orchard on his homestead in the Badlands of North Dakota.

            Solving growing healthy food difficulties in the harsher climates were existential matters back when it was a 2 day trip by wagon to get groceries. If you had the money to buy any.

            Heck, I’m old enough to remember getting an orange and exotic nuts like Brazil nuts in my Christmas stocking. They were treats worthy of a major feast day.

            My kids will remember the tribulations of life before dial-up internet.

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      3. “Thing is there already are ways…”

        The fact that people still manage to become billionaires despite everything the kleptocratic state can do to stop them is really quite amazing.

        But here’s a thought experiment to raise your blood pressure.

        Imagine that you had invested alllll the money you’ve paid in fees, taxes, levies, licenses etc. to all the various levels of government, at the market rate, since you started working.

        Just think about that a little. How much money would that be?

        Well, I will tell you. Once upon a time in the 1960s, a man with a job in construction, like a carpenter, could buy a house, and his wife could live with him and raise their children. And now a man with a job in construction lives in his car, has no wife, has no children, and probably is still in debt.

        It hacks me off.

        Liked by 5 people

        1. During recent travel we were listening to an Old Time Radio show… imagine three 16 year old boys having both the free time and enough money to buy/modify/build their own hot-rods… sure, it was fiction, but it had to be at least somewhat believable when it first aired.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Based on family and coworker stories, I can believe it. (Coworker grew up modding farm tractors for tractor pulls, and did the same to cars, as well as just fixing things that broke. There are some interesting ways to modify a carburetor that are not quickly visible.)

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          2. “…imagine three 16 year old boys having both the free time and enough money to buy/modify/build their own hot-rods…”

            Oh, holy fructose. You hit one of my buttons, Orvan.

            In the 1950s, a 1930s Ford with a four-banger flat head was 20 years old. A kid could take one apart with five wrenches and a screwdriver. He could afford to buy the junker from the wreckers with a paper route. His dad knew how to make it run and tune it because he had to know that. Everybody knew that stuff if they drove at all.

            The engine had Babbitt bearings which could be re-poured cheaply. Very, very cheaply. Cable drum brakes, with shoes that could be re-lined. Etc.

            Go try to fix a 20 year old car now. Like a 2005 Honda Civic, the cheapest thing on the road. The kid’s dad is driving the Civic because it’s the only POS he can afford. The computer to re-flash the engine management costs more than the kid is making on his paper route, and that assumes some 40 year old “foreign student” isn’t doing the paper delivery.

            And if you managed all that at 16 and have your hotrod, now try to pay for insurance. You know how when you see two kids in a car these days the girl is driving? The boy can’t have insurance on a crappy 2005 Civic because it is like $8K a year or more. As in, double or more than what the car is worth. Annually.

            2025, the 16 year old kid is hot-rodding a Chinese kick scooter he got off Temu. Which his parents had to buy, because again, no paper route.

            [/rant/.]

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Newspapers are effectively dead now out here, with the local MurkeyNews daily now shrunk to a few pages the size of a trade paperback, but back a few years at the end of thrown-somewhere-in-your-yard delivery, no kids were allowed to have paper routes anymore because child labor bad, so it was adults in cars tossing them randomly out the window as they drove by in the predawn hours.

              Effects of removing youth work and pay and getting up because you have a job left as an exercise for the reader.

              Liked by 2 people

      4. Like Beth, I don’t need billions. Or even one. Or even a million. Once taxes are paid, house and truck are clear of all debts, I don’t really need much. Electricity for the lights and the computer. Water and sewer. Trash pickup. Most of the rest I’m happy to do on my own.

        Were I independently wealthy, well, I’d probably spend more time writing. Instead of working. That’d be about it. I don’t travel much, or want expensive cars (expensive maintenance), or a bigger house (more to clean). I might feed the cats chicken more often. That’d be about it.

        And set a little aside for friends in need. That’s always nice.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I am retired and can afford all of what I need (not want) and already have most of what I want (I still would like to get a model train set – a boyhood dream). Live in an old quirky house, drive an older car, and have no desire to travel. Books (used) are my only weakness.

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  9. So the Boomer-GOP Neo-Con alt-Right need to MAGA sideload fnordlib Zarnzanohagobab?

    Do I say complete nonsense, or can people actually read meaning into it, should they work at it? IOW, imagine meaning that I did not intend, because I have coined some of those words (or implied definitions) with no idea what they mean.

    The premise for a lot of the speech control is that by constraining speech, that they will be effective in either preventing crimes or preventing actions.

    In reality, law compliance is heavily related to culture, and to implementations of the law. By implementations, I not only mean formal theory and official documentation, but what people with formal authority actually do with it, or seem to do.

    People can see that the emperor has no clothes, regardless of whether they feel safe to say so. Very deep and visceral observations are not simply a function of top down leadership, and really effective marketing.

    The basic assumption of the university business is that these people are not intentionally and maliciously lying to the public. It is a basic problem for various people if the public has very much in the way of an intuition that ‘these people are not my friends, and are hurting me on purpose, and know it’. The models that a long time university bro might use to estimate this are very much not the ones that people with different life paths might use.

    Keir Starmer is a bit of a fuck up, and was badly trained by his instructors and faculty if he was utterly convinced of behavior models that failed to predict consequences.

    There’s a point where doubling down on belief in Chomsky’s linguistics, and trying to insist harder that the emperor is clothed merely makes things worse.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. “Do I say complete nonsense, or can people actually read meaning into it, should they work at it?”

      You will be arrested for using the word MAGA in a sentence, because you are not a registered #DemocRat. The fact that it is an acronym not a word, and that the sentence is not readable is no excuse.

      Elbows up.

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      2. This is partly because the majority of university professors are rabidly lefty. They do this for grades. Because, say, using Marxist Literary Criticism gets you an ‘A’ even though it is more intellectually bankrupt than Post WWI Germany was financially bankrupt.

        Also, American culture is cooler than wokism. We get guns, the better holidays, prettier women and more masculine men, we piss off the wokescolds, and we’re quite uncaring about their hyperventilating perpetual two minute hate screeds. Plus, we tend to be a lot happier. And happiness is damned attractive, no matter the age.

        The wokescolds only got ANY traction at all with full control of the media, entertainment, and schooling from preschool to postgrad. Now, all that control is crumbling. Proper historians will not look kindly upon those who simply chanted along with the crowd.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. That’s part of it. But there are also stories about the students that turn up in the class of an instructor that doesn’t toe the latest fad line, with the express purpose of disrupting the class and attempting to get the instructor fired.

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        2. Part of me wants to go back to college, just so I can whizz in the coffee of the hard leftroids. Figure of speech. (grin)

          That, and again all those 20 somethings…. (grin)

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    3. “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

      ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

      ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
      ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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      1. WordPress is acting weird again: your comment “Please do not sideload lib, whatever you do” had a bunch of blank lines underneath, with nothing but dots in them. No text whatsoever.

        ;-)

        Liked by 1 person

  10. Ah yes, the urge to censor. This is the panicked reaction of the scoundrel to the possibility he might be found out.

    Returning to the subject of yesterday, the banning of people from the woods because of “fire risk” there was a particularly egregious defense of the ban in a national newspaper.

    News for today, the province of New Brunswick has used wildfire risk as an excuse to shut down shooting ranges in the province. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland have banned access to even -private- forests, with Newfoundland threatening a $150,000 fine plus six months in jail. I assume because it’ll be more than six months before the case can be heard that this is illegal and obscene over-reach, and they want all the would-be protesters to know it’ll be six months of their life as the ticket to get in.

    Now, a couple of other things are going on today that kind-of follow along the same path.

    One, the movie “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue” will not be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, because it’s Jewish. The reason given was that #HamAss, the terrorist organization, had not cleared footage they themselves took of their Oct. 7th atrocities and proudly posted on the internet, for viewing in a movie. That apparently is what TIFF said. For real.

    Also the proudly named Anti-Hate Network at AntiHate.ca seems not to have noticed the Jewish guy that got beat up by a member of the vibrantly diverse in Montreal, in broad daylight, in front of his kid, for being Jewish. I heard about it (and saw the video), but AntiHate.ca didn’t? Somehow?

    The US Ambassador to Canada Hoekstra politely explains in a podcast with Jasmine Lane that Canada is not special. Canadians may think they’re more important than everyone else in the world, but they’re merely one nation of many that the Trump Administration are now negotiating with. Everyone is losing their minds over this one. Elbows up.

    And now the really great one, Scott Reid [#Lieberal] explains in a completely unhinged screaming rant that people are stupid, so government must -compel- them to behave properly.

    This is the Covid excuse. Everybody has to wear a mask, because some people are so stupid they will spread the disease. Everybody has to stay home, because some people are so stupid etc. Everybody has to take the mad-science jab, and if you don’t you’re stupid and selfish and horrible and we will MAKE you take it! For your own good, of course.

    I did not take it. I do not give a f- what Scott Reid says, and if I get a chance I’ll spit in his eye. But before I do that I’m going ask him WHICH PEOPLE ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!!!

    Because of course this is all a lie. It’s a very popular lie in Canada, and forms the basis of most of our government propaganda. Everyone must be locked down because of that one guy who’s too stupid to get it right, you see. But it’s funny, they never seem to be able to produce that guy when you ask.

    Now, the open secret these days is that the government has flooded Canada with about three million people who don’t know enough not to smoke in a dry forest, because they’ve never seen or even imagined a forest like we commonly have here. They don’t have that where they come from, because woodcutters have harvested every stick bigger than your finger for firewood. But you’re not going to hear Scott Reid say that. You’re going to hear him scream about how MAGA is nothing but pure selfishness, and they should all be in jail!

    No word on his views about yellow arm bands, but I think I can guess.

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        1. Most LAFD fire callouts are to “unhoused” encampment with exothermic reactions ongoing. For medical callouts, same location for ODs.

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          1. Saw a quick blurb on the TV news yesterday about a treehouse that caught fire in LA County. It turns out it was built by a homeless person in a tree on the sidewalk…

            Liked by 1 person

            1. There was a story running a few weeks ago about a property owner trying to get an “unhoused” treehouse removed from his property, without success. One supposes making sure it’s unoccupied and then “oh look, it caught fire” with a rock solid alibi works too.

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              1. Remember that a “rock-solid” alibi is going to involve locating all security cameras public and privately owned, and then neutralizing them.

                Bear in mind that by filing a complaint, the property owner has guaranteed that all that technology many people have assured me isn’t a factor will be focused on analyzing that evidence. Hope the LLM AI wasn’t “trained” to exclude certain classes of suspect…..

                Maybe the bureaucrats will be stupid. “You willing to bet your life on that?”

                Liked by 1 person

                1. Just the property owner as suspect? I’d bet on the whole street if not entire neighborhood for at least two blocks.

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                  1. Yep, you would, I would. The bureaucrat who got stuck with the complaint he filed earlier, OTOH…….

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        2. Ah yes, the bums. Or as we say in Canada, the un-housed. Let’s consider that a moment.

          I finally found the article that p1ssed me off the other day. Here’s the title:

          “The critics of Nova Scotia’s ban on accessing the woods don’t understand our culture.”

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            1. Oh, we’re going to be that way, are we? Third try: https://blazingcatfur.ca/2025/08/13/the-critics-of-nova-scotias-ban-on-accessing-the-woods-dont-understand-our-culture/

              Okay then.

              So here we have this guy. “Stephen Maher lives in rural Nova Scotia. He is the author of The Prince: The Rise and Fall of Justin Trudeau.”

              He says the following about fires in the woods.

              I miss running through the wooded trail near my house, and dislike running on the side of the road, with cars whizzing past me, but that’s life. There is no chance that my plodding morning jog will set the woods on fire, so the rule is absurd, but fires are mostly caused by dimwitted and careless people, and there is no way of separating them from their careful neighbours, so the ban is necessary.

              Emphasis mine. This is two lies. First, fires are overwhelmingly caused by lightning. More than 80%. That’s a big fat lie.

              Second, of the 20% that are caused by other-than-lightning, we have sparks from power lines, tree limbs falling on power lines, car accidents downing power lines, fires from construction equipment etc. etc. etc. And arson! Let’s not forget the arson, shall we? So much less than 20% of fires are caused by accidents/negligence/stupidity.

              As in, no. It’s not really a thing. Arson is a thing. People do set these fires deliberately, and there’s been a lot more of it the last 10 years or so. For political and sometimes, dare I say, religious reasons.

              So he’s just fricking lying, and the government is also lying. High, wide and handsome.

              He continues, “There is no sign of widespread opposition to the ban. Nova Scotia’s all-terrain vehicle users and nudists, for example, support the measure, although it means curtailing their recreational activities during a lovely August.”

              This is also a lie by omission, he does not mention that it was the ATV Association of Nova Scotia, not ATV riders, which said they would “comply”, not that they supported the ban. The nudists did support the ban, so surprising.

              “However, opposition is starting to spread through the social-media webs that rage farmers spun during the pandemic.”

              Yes, it is those freaks in Alberta, those #Libertarians who think this. He actually says that.

              “The world has entered the pyrocene era, where climate-induced wildfires are choking our lungs, destroying communities and turning our boreal forest into a source of emissions. The individualists who object to public safety measures to reduce the risk are the same people who complain loudest when governments try to reduce the emissions that have put us in this situation.“

              Had to work some global warming in there, right?

              News flash, it is not global warming that has allowed fuel to build up in the forests of the nation. It is the deliberate destruction of responsible logging and responsible forest management, something which Canada has historically excelled at and recently stopped doing completely. Ten years is long enough to build up quite a brush load in a forest.

              So there you go. That’s who is defending the Eastern provincial governments. The same sons of b1tch3s who defended Covid lockdowns and deplored the #FreedomConvoy. We are all supposed to be good little boys and girls, follow instructions and do as we’re told. Even when it is stupid, capricious and oppressive.

              Oh and by the way, the Indians got a free pass to put on a play in a forest in Nova Scotia.

              The Indigenized take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest was created in collaboration between Halifax-based Zuppa Theatre and The Sipu Tricksters, a Mi’kmaw collective from Sipekne’katik First Nation. It centres on Caliban’s story and reimagines the characters as Indigenous figures navigating the early days of colonization.

              After a debut last summer in Sipekne’katik, the production was set to open Friday in Point Pleasant Park.

              Yeah, Point Pleasant Park, where you will get fined $25,000 for walking, except not if you’re going to this play. Because Indians.

              No word on the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s stance regarding Indians culturally appropriating Shakespeare.

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  11. The one thing i will never do no matter what is bend a knee to those who would take my rights. That saying, “the older i get, the less of a deterrent life in prison becomes” seems apropos. I have seen a lot of things, good times, bad times, in between times, but the BS that is being pushed on the people from all sides these days is infuriating. And i mean from ALL sides. Its real easy to say not to worry about things we cant control, yea, sure, then what when it pinches one off in your lap?
    I keep getting banned from this news site or that and various blogs, all fine and dandy, but a testament to why its time to double down rather than relent.
    A bud of mine yesterday said, we are living in interesting times then he chuckled and said, you know, like the ancient Chinese curse.

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  13. They’re definitely trying to clamp down. Britain passed their law “To Protect the CHIIIIIILDREN!1!!” and are oddly using it to go after political opponents. Shocked. I’m totally shocked. Well, not really shocked at all.

    There’s a bill in the Senate that’s probably having the same intent with “protect the CHILDREN” as an excuse. I suspect it’ll be used to ID and silence dissenters like the UK is going to.

    https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1748

    Liked by 1 person

  14. The issue of not trusting future generations to not go stupid was a point of contention for some, who argued against including a Bill of Rights at all, under the fear that future idiots might conclude that any rights not enumerated and protected in that list do not exist.

    The “No, We Need This” side of that argument won out, but I have personally heard people asserting exactly that which those suspicious Founders feared.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Just waiting for Justice Thomas to start opining from the 9th as he has the 2nd.

        ” … as if millions of bureaucrats cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced….”

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  16. “Rights like the right to bear arms don’t mean you have the right to have someone give you weapons.”

    The usual suspects will apply Insane Troll Logic to this.

    “You agree that you have no right to be given weapons. It follows from this that you have no right to buy weapons cheaply, either. So if we apply taxes and regulations to raise the price of firearms to six or seven figures, it’s totally not a violation of your right to keep and bear arms. Why then are you so upset at our perfectly reasonable, prudent, and civilization-supporting proposals to do so?”

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The Formerly Golden State is currently appealing the 9th Circuit panel ruling that said “Ya needs ammo for ‘bearing’ to even make any sense at all, so showing ID, an every-time ammo background check, and an every-time fee to buy ammo are an infringement, and thus under Bruen rules, which you fail to even distantly approach satisfying State of California, that law gets tossed” looking for an En Banc different answer.

      Of course if they get that flip there will be no cognitive dissonance whatsoever between “To exercise this ‘enumerated ’Right’ you have to show ID, get a new background check every time, and pay a fee every time” and, say, exercising the right to vote, because showing ID to vote would be raaacisss, and a poll tax would be head-splodey-raaacisss.

      Because there are rights and then there are RIGHTS.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Well, speaking of Constitutionally-guaranteed (or enumerated) rights, the right to vote isn’t mentioned for citizens prior to the 15th Amendment, and every Amendment dealing with citizens’ (as contrasted with Representatives’, Senators’ and Electors’) voting deals only with “shall not be denied” issues, whether due to previous servitude, sex, or age. Nowhere is a specific right to vote mentioned. Just sayin’…😈

        Liked by 1 person

        2. Some of us have been pointing that out in regards to reforming the elections process for a decade or better. But the UniParty loved the current system, and there’s more than enough of a percentage of it left to cause real problems.

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  17. Good post.

    Sarah, I’m just going to remind you that ‘negative’ rights is a rebrand for inalienable rights by the left to make them sound ‘bad’ so they can suppress them and say they are getting rid of a ‘bad’ thing. Incidentally positive rights are all things that basically summarize to stealing….. ;)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. …like the Leftroids’ perennial bleating about their ‘rights’ to ‘free’ education, ‘free’ medical, ‘free’ housing…

      Or FDR (spit!) and ‘freedom from fear, freedom from want’. How, exactly, is the government supposed to provide those ‘freedoms’?

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