Tag: Painful Truths

Shamelessy stolen from Ace’s place

…and Southerners have noticed.

It really does astound me that the national Democratic apparatus apparently thought that they could defecate on an entire section of the country for fifty years and still get that section to vote for them at the end of it. What did they think Southerners are, hard Left progressives or something? Folks below the Mason-Dixon line have basic self-respect and dignity, is what I’m saying. Try to heap scorn on their heads, and they’ll vote with their feet.

My Republican colleagues: note that, by the way. We shouldn’t take that vote for granted. Look what happened to the Democrats, when they did…

It’s funny that some in the media are just now noticing this- all you have to do is turn on your television for a while and it’s blindingly obvious. It’s no longer the gentle mocking of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’, it’s the outright despite of Honey Boo-Boo.

And far too many of us accept it without comment or pushback.

link via the BlogFather

Two very different men travel very different roads to arrive at the same place- recognition of the war right-thinking folk are caught up in whether they like it or not. First, I present John C. Wright, probably one of the best scifi/fantasy writers to come along in my lifetime, talking about Thanksgiving and giving thanks-

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays for three reasons: first, it drives the Leftists crazy because it is a clearly and openly Christian holiday in the midst of a society they are fervidly attempting to dechristianize; second, it drives Leftists crazy because it is a holiday based on a historical fact, namely, Indian and Pilgrim cooperation, which flips the middle finger at the Leftist preferred narrative about non-civilized White men committing malign genocide on the non-savage Red men; and finally and most of all, it drives the Leftists crazy because the concept of being thankful, of feeling gratitude, of thanks for benefits never to be repaid, is utterly alien to their way of thinking and their way of life.What do you think?

One benefit that accrues to the Christian, even if all of history, logic, and revelation should turn out to be false, and God a myth no more real than Global Warming, nonetheless, is that we Christian men feel gratitude toward our Creator for the infinite gift of creation. A noble pagan can indeed receive a gift in his stockings at Christmas, and be grateful to the giver, but a Christian can feel grateful for the legs he puts into his stockings each morning, and the world on which he walks.1

The Left does not give thanks, not to anyone, human or divine, past or present, not for any reason.

Then there is Milo Yiannopoulos, a colorful Brit who writes on gamers and the gaming industry, specifically a kerfuffle called #gamergate, but which actually has ramifications far beyond computer games into the basic cultural divide that has grown up in the Anglosphere-

If you are a controversial public figure, you are going to receive threats. I am one; I do. Jack Thompson received death and rape threats on a regular basis. Prominent atheists constantly receive threats. Well-known YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who isn’t overtly political, says he receives them on a monthly basis. Most of these threats aren’t serious, and the FBI has confirmed there was never any serious danger to Sarkeesian in Utah: in fact, she chose to cancel her talk to make a political statement about that state’s concealed carry laws.
The response of most people, famous or otherwise, is to ignore trolls. They are just words on the internet. People like Sarkeesian, who drone on constantly about online harassment, aren’t doing so because they really feel threatened. If that were the case, they wouldn’t, as Brianna Wu did, advertise their precise location less than 48 hours after receiving a death threat. They are doing so because they have an agenda.
Whenever feminist groups have partnered with social media organisations, their censorship targets have been critics of feminism and not abusers. Their overarching aim is to press for government regulation of the internet, perhaps even targeting anonymity itself. That’s because anonymity is a place where cultural hegemony is challenged. With their media connections and celebrity support, social justice warriors are the cultural hegemony, regardless of how much they claim to be oppressed victims.
Your piece fails to mention that not a single arrest or prosecution has been brought as a result of alleged threats in which the GamerGate movement has been implicated—without, I should point out, a shred of evidence linking any GamerGate supporter to any threat. And it fails to acknowledge that radical far-left pseudo-academic feminist troublemakers use threats as currency online in a perverted sort of Olympics, showing off to one another and begging for funds with each round of new insults that, in many cases, observers suspect they have sent to themselves.

 

There is a war going on, and it’s far from Syria or Afghanistan. There is a war for the culture and soul of the West, heirs to the Enlightenment, that is being relentlessly perpetrated by the heirs of my old crowd- the radicals of the Sixties and Seventies, who themselves got their inspiration from the old-line Stalinists of the Forties and Fifties.

The old tropes of “peace, love, and understanding” have been twisted into a puritanical yet libertine philosophy that portrays Western culture as misogynistic, hateful, patriarchal… “anything goes” sexually but political thought must be within rigidly defined parameters or it is loudly and nastily condemned.

As a white southron male I am considered the fount of all evil, so I don’t expect my words to be heeded by any but those who already have arrived at the place I am in. But looking around at the actors in our current cultural play, from the President on down to the SJWs of GamerGate and the looters cying #ferguson, I am convinced it will come to no good end.

I suggest a little reading of history, especially of the forces unleashed at the end of the First World War. There will be a reckoning, and I suspect no one will be entirely happy with the outcome.

Or maybe just look up the Fall of Rome.

 

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

 

 

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

– Rudyard Kipling

Are they right?

 

From the comments at Instapundit:

Nothing in my life produces as much cognitive dissonance as my conservative outlook and my love for rock n’ roll.

The world of popular music is populated almost entirely by people whose sounds I love but whose outlooks I find hypocritical and self-serving.

I often think I’m the only human being who both owns a Stratocaster and voted for Mitt Romney.

Well, bucko, I know for a fact there are at least two, and if the results of the last election are any guide there’s a lot more than that.

I know, they told you there would be no math. Suck it up.

How broke they really are:
JP Morgan: $78 Trillion in derivatives / $1.8 Trillion in assets
Citibank: $56 Trillion in derivatives / $1.2 Trillion in assets
Bank of America: $53 Trillion in derivatives / $1.5 Trillion in assets
Goldman Sachs (aka US Government): $48 Trillion in derivatives / $89 Billion in assets

What can’t go on forever, won’t.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
– Winston Churchill

Truer words were never spoken. This is our Republic, if we can keep it. As my Lady said, “I didn’t vote for myself today, but for my children. My place is made in the world- but your future is still in front of you.”

(Well, maybe I polished that up a little, but the point remains…)

“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

– Benjamin Franklin

idea via Glenn

Words fail me.

Wow. Glad I’m not single and 25. Or 35. Or 45.

It all starts with Griggs v. Duke Power Co.

The doomsayer’s case amounts to this: teenagers take tests, score poorly, apply to safety schools, and borrow tens of thousands of dollars to major in Film Studies, guzzle beer, smoke weed, borrow more money, get into cocaine, pawn the Playstation, discover the concept of gender identity, sleep with anyone accordingly, study little, earn high marks and a quarter-million-dollar piece of paper, apply for jobs beyond their qualifications, settle for jobs that reflect their qualifications, default on their student loans, declare bankruptcy, discover that student loans are the only kind of debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, die, and pass on the debt to their heirs, parents, or taxpayers. And you thought fraternity initiations were cruel.

Yet records for new college enrollment continue apace. Parents, desperately seeking a marquee university bumper sticker to show off to the neighbors, tell their children that college is the ticket to the high life, despite the fact that half of recent graduates are working jobs that do not require a college degree. Politicians bend over backward to boost student loans and keep interest rates artificially low, despite $1 trillion in loans outstanding and default rates that would make Bear Stearns blush. The only thing Americans, Right and Left, seem to agree on is that college is an unquestionable good.

Daring to speak out against the lemming-like charge toward the higher education precipice seems to invite only scorn from reporters in the press, who, like me, are a tad self-conscious about their useless, over-priced, fraudulent, academically bankrupt journalism, communications, gender studies, and poli-sci diplomas.

I caught the beginning of this; my children caught it full-force. This is one of those messes that will take generations to untangle. All done with the best of intentions.

via Instapundit

Clark at Popehat has a long post up on a little thing called GamerGate; except that it’s actually about a bigger thing that is affecting our whole society- the cultural struggle between the ‘nannystaters’ and the ‘leave-me-be-ers’ for lack of a better term. (Oh, I have better terms, they’re just ruder than I feel like being this morning.) (And, it’s a much larger struggle than just that.)

As a poet once said: Cthulhu swims slowly, but he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?

The blue team has made amazing progress over the last three hundred years. Occasionally by force of arms, but usually by a much more clever strategy: entryism.

Entryism, for those not hip to the lingo, is “a political strategy in which an organization or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. In situations where the organization being ‘entered’ is hostile to entryism, the entryists may engage in a degree of subterfuge to hide the fact that they are an organization in their own right.”

Since World War II the Blue team in the US has entered into the stodgy old universities (taking advantage of the GI Bill and the resulting explosion in size of secondary education institutions), and taken them over completely. It has taken over the media (now called the “mainstream media” or MSM by the red team), because of this. It has taken over many corporate boards (although not all attempts have succeeded).

One advantage the blue team has is the aura of inevitability: as with small Iraqi militias or army units facing ISIS in the Levant, when faced with an enemy that wins every battle, one’s priors must be that in the coming battle one will lose. Thus, the winning move is to immediately surrender, ask for forgiveness, and join the winning team (millions of years of evolution make us pretty decent players at this game of thrones, remember).

Yes, I know, tl:dr. But do read it. Follow the links. He’s done an excellent job of capturing the essence of the cultural divide that is starting to tear this civilization apart- and it’s all about video games. Funny, that.

If you’re wondering, I, like Clark, find myself aligned with Red, with misgivings. Read the article and you’ll see what I mean.

Can you feel it?

Can you feel it lurking just under the surface? I can and I think you can as well. The Greeks knew it as “Nemesis.” Melville’s Ahab knew it as “thou damned whale” and he struck at it from Hell’s heart. Unperturbed it gathered him up and took him down. Then it took the boat and after that the ship. All save one followed. The whale beneath the surface of America’s life is still there and all signs point to its breaching soon. Exactly where and exactly how are still unknown, but soon.

…

It’s large and it’s under the boat and it is beginning to rise. The crew is confused and flailing about. And the captain is insane but convinced he’s on the right course. During the boom years it was commonly said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” True enough, but the rising of Leviathan can break the spine of our boat and send it down into the Maelstrom.

Coming soon to a civilization near you.