Month: October 2023

Guest Contributor – GlennW – 28OCT2023 – Reaction to Chucking Pebbles

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Hi photog,

I’ve been watching the comments to your post to see if a discussion breaks out. Well, maybe I should be the first one to jump in and see what happens.

As you may remember, I read and listened to ZMan religiously until the kerfuffle with Michael Anton. After giving it some thought I decided that Anton was a lot more right than the ZMan and I just lost interest. I’m sure ZMan would brand me as a “civ-nat” but I just can’t care anymore. As I get older I find one dimensional labels, including “civ-nat”, worse than useless and try to avoid them when possible.

There are several ideas I would like to throw out there and see what your readers think. It seems to me that the white collar and entrepreneurial community always knew the blue collar folks were getting the shaft. For the most part they thought they were on the “right side” of history so they were safe. Now they are starting to realize they are just the next ones to be eaten by the crocodile. The next couple of years should be interesting.

You are correct that ZMan doesn’t think the races can live together under one set of laws fairly enforced. A big problem for the Dissident Right is they can’t really provide a definition of “race.” White, black, and brown aren’t races. I have heard ZMan say on several occasions that the original colonies should have grouped together into five different countries, instead of one, due to differences in the English immigrants. For anyone whose interested I believe he got that idea from the book Albion’s Seed.

If that’s true, and you multiply that across all European immigration to the U.S., there are literally hundreds of white groups (really clans) in North America. Add to that all the other immigration that’s happened over the years and I am a bit perplexed as to how the Dissident Right would implement a government. ZMan never provides a sketch of what this reconstituted government would look like and I suspect that’s on purpose.

Also, per their theory, I should prefer to live next to other white people (yes, I’m white) over anyone else. I happen to be Christian and find that I have more affinity for other Christians than a generic white person. I would, in no uncertain terms, rather live next to a black family from my church than Richard Dawkins. I don’t think I’m the only one that feels that way and would fight any attempt to cram some form of involuntary segregation down my throat.

In the end I don’t think the Dissident Right will be a majority on the “right”. If they hope to accomplish anything they will have to learn to work with the civ-nats who they love to hate. Maybe ZMan is coming around to that view? I guess we’ll see in time.

How Do You Un-Crash the Country to Win an Election?

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I think a pretty good case could be made that the Democrats and the Deep State manufactured two crises in 2020 to scuttle Donald Trump’s reelection.  The FBI used Antifa and BLM to gin up the George Floyd riots and then the CIA released the COVID virus and the CDC and Fauci orchestrated the destruction of the US economy afterwards.  Now that’s a mighty desperate gambit.  And even with the mail in ballot scam it barely worked.

But you could say it worked too well.  Between the disruptions to life caused by urban crime and the business disruptions caused by everything that went on, the United States hasn’t been able to get back to normal.  But then how do you avoid the stigma of running a circus like this?

Apparently, you don’t.  Joe Biden is as popular as leprosy, even among Democrats.  Even someone as in the tank for the Democrats as James Carville is telling whoever will listen to him that Biden will lose in a matchup with Trump.  Apparently, Trump hatred isn’t enough to blind Carville to the reality of how bad “Bidenomics” is really playing out across the country.  The claims that inflation is in the low single digits aren’t fooling the people paying the bills in American households.  And trumpeting low unemployment numbers doesn’t comfort people working two jobs and still unable to pay their rent bill.

And that’s just the, “it’s the economy stupid” dimension to the state of things.  The total list of problems is staggering.

If you live or work in a city you have

  • violent crime
  • disappearing retail stores because of organized looting
  • squalor associated with homeless encampments
  • dysfunctional schools
  • and race hatred running amok

Drugs and illegal aliens have flooded the country.  And everyone is dealing with corporate and government systemic racism branded as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  Government agencies are continuously making proclamations declaring the United States as a hotbed of white supremacy and putting out guidelines to remind us of, and proselytize our children against, our various sins.

Well, then how do they win the next election.  Can they just depend on election fraud for everything?  It seems kinda dicey.  And so, I think that explains the various wars.  Dementia Joe has been doing his best wag the dog act now for a year and a half.  But despite pulling out all the stops the only ones buying it are the true believers and the people who make their money off of the war machine.  So then, what’s left to do?  I guess we’ll find out.

Honestly, I’m at the point where I wouldn’t be surprised by anything the Left does to remain in power.  Fraud and kangaroo courts have already made their appearance as political strategies.  Martial law and suspension of elections would be the next logical extension.

But it begs the question, could they have already done so much damage to the country’s sense of normalcy and well-being that they have undermined their own legitimacy?  Of course, it’s hard to know for sure.  The last time we were this far over the edge was probably the civil war.  And back then each side was united in its struggle to win the war.  Currently there is a three-way split of the population.  One third Left, one third Right and one third in the middle.  I guess it’s possible for things to get so bad that the middle third might jump far enough to the Right to even overrule fraud and banana republic tactics.  I’m not saying it will but there’s enough doubt that maybe it might.

Anyway, I think about such things when I listen to the news and watch the various talking heads talk.  I entered the working world during Jimmy Carter’s term in office.  Inflation was so bad in 1980 that the cheapest insurance company in town gave all of its employees a bonus in the middle of the year just because they felt so bad for us.  But the economic conditions today are much, much worse.  I realize that the Democrats in 1980 were loyal Americans and today they’re Bolsheviks but maybe there are enough independents to help us save the country.  I’m not staking my life on it.  I’m just wistfully hoping it could happen.

David French Is Leaving X. Tell Elon He’ll Have to Shut it Down.

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The man who has defined fake conservatism for our generation is flouncing out of Elon Musk’s sandbox.

“I’m leaving Twitter, for the indefinite future. The reason is simple: this site is becoming more like Gab every day. It’s a font of hatred, lies, and harassment.”

Oh, the humanity.

https://x.com/orionscoldfire/status/1718116605442355234?s=20

Who’s next Mitt Romney?  JEB! Bush?

Chucking Pebbles

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Last week I was listening to the Friday morning Power Hour podcast that the ZMan produces.  And during the discussion he mentioned that he was surprised when a particular civ-nat pundit who was usually very mainstream normie-con started exhibiting a lot of the talking points that the ZMan associated with the dissident right perspective.  I don’t think ZMan was very specific about the exact context and exactly how far to the right this fellow had gone, but I guess the change from the pundit’s usual rhetoric to this new point of view was sufficiently great to merit surprise.

I found this interesting.  Usually, ZMan is extremely dismissive of civnattery.  He finds their points of view hopelessly naïve and foolish.  So, his surprise caught my attention.  Now what exactly the details of this change were, I can’t say.  But what I assume was that this pundit started using the vocabulary of the dissident right.  Maybe he used a term like anti-white racism or just anti-white as a description of someone on the Left or some policy.  Something like that might surprise coming from someone who has up until now avoided racialist terminology.  Maybe it was a comment about the dishonesty of the establishment Republicans and their phony struggle against the Left’s policies.  Or maybe it was an opinion against the war in Ukraine.  But whatever it was it’s part of a trend that is no longer possible to ignore.  The normies, a lot of them, are waking up.

I have a theory about why the Dissident Right has been at the cutting edge of the awakening on the Right.  I think many on the dissident Right have their roots in the blue-collar working class.  And that is the segment of White America that was impacted first by the policies and prejudices that the Left and their minions installed during the last fifty years.  It was the working class that had a ringside seat for the Great Society upheavals with welfare culture destroying the schools and neighborhoods that they inhabited.  And it was the working class that were the first and hardest hit by the off-shoring that went hand in hand with the globalization program of the Left.

And so, the most discerning of the working class were able to express the things they saw and they became the vanguard of the Dissident Right.  But now that the whole program of the Left has emerged the white-collar workers and the entrepreneurial community have been impacted and now the intelligentsia.  Even leftist journalists can see what’s happening and recognize the Orwellian nature of what’s going on.  In that environment it makes sense that even the blindest of normie-con pundits would stumble onto the truth.

Now the funny thing is that even tripping over facts doesn’t mean that unanimity will break out between the Dissident Right and the people to their immediate left.  The folks on the Dissident Right talk about a river that they cross that separates them from the rest of the Right.  And that difference has more to do with their beliefs about the incompatibility of different ethnicities and races of people.  And they see this as part and parcel of the problems that are afflicting this country.  And they don’t believe that the possibility exists for different types of people to live together under one set of laws even if it were fairly enforced.

Currently the dissidents and those on the other side of the river just shout back and forth at each other and shake their fists because it’s an academic question.  The administrative state, since the 1960s, has used things like affirmative action and other forms of discrimination to stir up animosity between various communities.  It’s currently illegal to hire people based only on their individual talents.  A quota must be filled regardless of whether qualified applicants can be found based on race and gender.  If this ever gets fixed then we could find out if the Dissident Right is correct in their belief that different people can’t coexist amicably.  Until then it’s just speculation and we can stay on separate sides of the river pointing at each other and maybe chucking pebbles across from time to time.

Gilda – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Currently the cable channels available to me contain two kinds of movies I might watch.  There are Halloween movies (horror and slasher movies) and classics (mostly movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s with a smattering of later movies that supposedly have “timeless” qualities).

So tonight, my choice was between John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982) and the 1946 film noir “Gilda.”  In deference to Camera Girl’s presence (she wanted something quiet in the background) I put on the older movie.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The plot of Gilda is slightly goofy.  The motives of the three main characters are hard to reconcile with their actions.  Glenn Ford plays Johnny Farrell, an American down on his luck in Buenos Aires for some unknown reason.  We meet him he has just won a sum of money in a craps game from some American soldiers.  As he walks away, he is accosted by a robber armed with a pistol.  He is rescued by Ballin Mundson who happens by with a walking stick that has a retractable 18-inch blade hidden inside.  We find out that Ballin owns an illegal gambling casino.  And after a very short time Johnny inexplicably becomes Ballen’s indispensable operations manager.

When Ballen returns from a business trip he introduces Johnny to his new American bride Gilda played by the absurdly beautiful Rita Hayworth.  But of course, Ballen doesn’t know that Johnny and Gilda were married and divorced sometime before the start of the movie timeline.  And they vehemently hate each other.  But neither of them reveals to Ballen this common history.  And because Gilda resents Ballen’s trust in and friendship with Johnny she attempts to torture Johnny by forcing him to cover up for a string of flirtations that she initiates with every man who catches her eye at the casino.  The logic of this isn’t really well explained.  But Johnny apparently feels its his responsibility to keep Gilda from upsetting Ballen.

During this part of the movie, we learn that Ballen has other business interests in addition to the casino.  Somehow through patents he has a monopoly on the world-wide production of tungsten (of all things).  And eventually we find out that his position was provided to him by Nazis(!).  Eventually the Nazis return and want their monopoly back.  A crisis arises when Ballen refuses their demands and he murders one of the Nazis at the casino.  Ballen must flee the country to escape the law.  He tells Johnny to find Gilda and bring her back to his house from which he will be fleeing with Johnny and Gilda that night.

When Johnny extracts Gilda from a romantic rendezvous that she was on and brings her to Ballen’s house they have a bitter fight which of course ends with them in a passionate kiss.  And, of course Ballen enters the room at that exact moment.  He rushes out and drives away.  Johnny jumps in his own car and follows him to the airport where Ballen runs to a waiting plane and flies out over the ocean.  The police have followed both of them and they tell Johnny that they have been waiting for the Nazis because they want to bust up the tungsten cartel.  They watch Ballen’s plane heading off into the night when it suddenly explodes.  We are then shown Ballen parachuting into the ocean where he is picked up by a boat.  He tells his rescuers that he will be hiding out for a while but he will return to deal with a situation, which we assume is Johnny and Gilda.

Thinking Ballen dead, his will is read and Gilda is his sole heir but Johnny is the sole executor of his estate.  So, Johnny marries Gilda to get control of the casino and the tungsten empire.  Afterward he treats her like dirt as revenge for what Johnny thinks of as her disloyalty with other men.  Gilda rebels by acting even more disloyal.  Finally, there is a rapprochement when Johnny finds out that Gilda has only been pretending to have affairs with various men.  Now the police tell Johnny that he must give up the casino and tungsten business because Argentina is about to seize them.  Johnny and Gilda decide to return home to America.  But at that juncture Ballen returns and announces that he is going to kill the couple.  And because he has to kill them both he won’t use his sword cane but his gun instead.  But just as he bears down on them, the friendly philosopher/bathroom attendant (I didn’t mention him before?) Uncle Pio stabs Ballen in the back with his own sword cane.  The understanding police inspector declines to press charges against the amiable killer saying, “you can’t murder someone who has already been declared dead plus haven’t you ever heard of justifiable homicide?”  And Johnny and Gilda live happily ever after.  Well, anyway we hope so.

Good lord.  This movie is a hopeless mess.  As I said earlier the plot and the motivations of the main characters are hopelessly absurd.  Gilda’s marriage to Ballen can’t be reconciled with her actions.  And Gilda’s and Johnny’s feelings for each other are hopelessly confusing and annoying to the audience.  The whole plot of the Nazi tungsten business makes no sense and seems ridiculous on its face.  Sure, uranium would have made sense for crypto-Nazis to be dabbling in but tungsten?  What were they planning to do, deprive the world of light bulbs?  And then there is the laid-back police inspector who wouldn’t let a little thing like homicide stand in the way of a happy ending.  Add to this Gilda’s almost incessant habit of saying Johnny’s name in every sentence she utters at him and you have a movie in which it is impossible to suspend disbelief.  The only possible motive for this movie was to showcase Rita Hayworth’s face and figure.  And without a doubt that is a worthwhile endeavor.  Hayworth is featured in several song and dance routines where she parades and shakes her very charming assets for the audience.  She was a very lovely woman in the prime of her life.  Now is this a movie worth recommending?  I would say only if all that I’ve said is taken into account.  You have to be going in just to watch Rita Hayworth dance to “Put the Blame on Mame.”  If not then don’t.