Author: photog

We’re Fresh Out of “Give a Damn.”

photog Current Events, Trump

In the last three weeks there have been two opinion pieces in the New York Times that, to me, acknowledge that the Left’s narrative is starting to become untenable.

The first is called, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back.” is from a fifty-something divorced career woman bemoaning that men no longer are interested in bringing her out to expensive restaurants.  She goes through this whole long description of a scene in one of these restaurants where all the patrons are women either in groups or alone and men aren’t present at all.  We hear all about how men used to value escorting “high-status” women out into society to signal their own high status as the possessor of such a trophy.  She finishes up with an embarrassing plea for all the good men to come back and be of service to her.

The second one is called, “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?” and is by a woke loser who up until recently gave his brother-in-law the cold shoulder because he didn’t want a COVID vaccine.  His disdain was palpable in his writing and the only reason he relented is because he wanted to take up surfing and his brother-in-law is an excellent surfer and was generous enough not to reciprocate his callous political snobbery.  But the lefty snob makes the whole thing sound as if it’s his enlightened attitude that suddenly allowed him to lower himself to feigning friendship with his wife’s brother.  And all the shots he takes at his brother-in-law.  He’s only a lowly electrician while the writer is an Ivy League graduate and obviously part of the elite few.  He ends by sagely noting that by sharing this surfing hobby he is opening up a space where he can interact with even someone as benighted as this ignorant tradesman, who also happens to be part of his family.

So, what do these two articles tell me about the current state of the Left.  What it seems to signal to me is that the cancel culture they constructed to keep normal people out of their little echo chamber has worked a little too well.  They’ve excluded all the normal people and they’re trapped inside with just the psychopaths that really believe the stuff they’ve been gaslighting the world with.

The women watched one season too many of “Sex and the City” and convinced themselves that they would always be in demand and men would be beating down the doors to squire them around Gotham City for the chance to have geriatric sex with them.  So now instead of being a doting grandmother and spending her golden years with husband and family, she’s a lonely, frustrated single women hoping for some chump to show up and pick up the tab one last time before she checks out of the Hotel California.  They kicked all the men out of their club because they didn’t need them.  They could play girl boss and not need a man to be happy.  That is until they stopped showing up.

The guy with the surfer electrician for a brother-in-law was the typical COVID cancel-culturist.  He says, “Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?  I wasn’t the only one thinking this. A 2021 essay for USA Today declared, “It’s time to start shunning the ‘vaccine hesitant.’” An L.A. Times piece went further, arguing that to create “teachable moments,” it may be necessary to mock some anti-vaxxers’ deaths.”  Pretty close to that female pediatrician who mocked the Texas flood victims because they voted for Trump.

But now this Ivy League genius wants to add some human interest to his boring life and finds out that this rube related to his wife is accomplished at the thing that he wants to do.  And on a dime, he switches on his “live and let live” mode and now we’re all just one big happy family!  Funny how that happens after they lose a big election.  Real funny.

So, the New York Times is hinting that maybe we should “all just get along.”  It’s a funny thing about that.  It’s almost like I don’t care anymore what they want.  They tortured us for four years and called us everything under the sun.  They did everything they could to force us to kowtow to COVID and trans-madness and there is no inflation and “Biden is sharp as a whip” and every other crazy thing they could think of.  And now it’s, “let’s let bygones be bygones.”  Yeah, I don’t think it’s gonna happen.  We’re fresh out of “give a damn.”

Reaction or Revolution

photog Current Events, Trump , ,

All my life I have had to listen to the analogy of a pendulum to describe how our politics behaves.  The theory goes each generation and each decade has its zeitgeist and after the culture swings to the Left, in the next decade or generation it comes back to the Right.

From experience I’d say there are several problems with this theory.  The biggest one is that no matter how much the population wanted a rightward correction the Uni-party has blocked it pretty effectively for the last forty-five years or so.  So even if there is some kind of periodic swing in popular political and cultural attitudes it’s never been allowed to influence real life.  Instead, what we have seen is a ratchet effect where at worst nothing happens during conservative periods and during periods of liberal ascendancy things lurch horribly leftward.

And so, we find ourselves after almost half a century of forced radicalism living in a toxic environment where every part of society is ruled by laws and institutions that directly and indirectly damage our society.  Our children are taught lies and left ignorant of useful knowledge.  The relations between the sexes have been poisoned and families crippled.  Relations between races have been sown with hatred and misinformation and our cities have become dangerous and mismanaged morasses of impoverished, lazy and drug-addled misfits.  And one party pushes these policies strenuously to make these conditions universal and the other party allows them to succeed through sheer greed and stupidity.

And finally, finally in the last nine years one politician has admitted that all this is going on and has offered to help fix this.  And he has been blocked by every power of both political parties and the permanent bureaucracy by any means available (up to and including assassination).

Now some people say Trump and his efforts are doomed to failure because eventually the Democrats will regain power and do whatever it takes to permanently block any further shift to the Right.  These people are of the opinion that violent revolution is the only way to break free of the Left.  These people go under various names.  The Dissident Right seems to be the latest iteration for their designation as a group.  They’re typically reticent to go into specifics when it comes to how the revolution will proceed.  Maybe because they have no idea either.  But from what I can glean they assume that at a certain point some braver souls will manage to draw a line in the sand and force a final break between some area of the country and the central government.  Now recently there has been some talk about the opposite situation.  Because of Trump’s deportation efforts the Left Coast (California, Oregon and Washington) have talked about seceding from the United States.  Of course that would be the best outcome.  I feel that the rest of the country would agree to this split and losing that much leftist population would leave the remaining states lopsidedly conservative and permanently governed by the Right.

Of course, the other portion of the Right (civic nationalists and the rest) hope that something short of secession could be achieved that would still solve all the dysfunction mentioned above.  They feel that the naturally center/right nature of the majority of the American people could over time correct much of this mismanagement and correct our laws and institutions.

So those are the two futures that are currently imagined for our side.  The third future is the Left’s current trajectory, leftist disaster.

I’ve lived for the last sixty plus years watching this battle unfold.  In 2012 I became convinced that the whole thing was hopeless.  Since 2016 I’ve seen reason to hope.  If one man has been able to upend the whole Washington racket, I could believe that a coalition of people who want to fix this could succeed.

Now I didn’t say will succeed, but might.  Currently I’m hoping to hang on long enough to see it happen in real time.  Stay tuned.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 12JUL2025 – For We Were Young and Sure to Have Our Way

photog Ed Brault, Guest Contributors, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , ,
FSFAug1960
FSFAug1960

I started reading science fiction almost as soon as I learned to read. My folks belonged to the SF Book Club, and also subscribed to Analog and the magazine of fantasy and Science fiction. One of the first stories I remember was called “Callahan and the Wheelies. That got me started and I never stopped. I still read Analog, but in the online version. Been reading it since the early sixties.

Tom’s World – 12JUL2025 – The Joy of Reading

photog Guest Contributors, Literature, TomD , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

The gift of the ability to enjoy fiction, or nonfiction for that matter, has a requirement: an attention span exceeding a minute or two. And that seems to be becoming increasingly rare. Both my parents were readers, likewise myself and two siblings.

I don’t remember exactly when I started reading Sci-Fi but it was as a teenager somewhere along the line. But I suspect that I’m one of the few people on earth who, while in grammar school, read every single volume of Encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover.

I really wish that Nook and Kindle were available back then. I started with Nook probably around 2010 and now use both. Point being that every book I’ve read in the last 15 or so years is still available to me. When, in 2009, I moved from my last residence in metro Atlanta where I had lived for 20 years, I “donated” a long bed and a half pickup truck loads filled to the brim with mostly paperbacks. What a loss! And that wasn’t the only donation made from that house.

I could have that entire mass of books on around several gigs on a thumb drive with lots of room left.

But at least I have the last 15 years and I find myself rereading. +The device keeps perfect order, organizing by order of purchase, title or author.