Category: Current Events

Guest Contributor – Glenn W – 04FEB2024 – Free Association

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Hi photog,

I basically agree with your analysis (I haven’t listened to the Zman’s podcast though). Freedom of association is critically important and it’s childish for people to demand to be included in clubs where they aren’t welcome. For example all the current hubbub about Taylor Swift is, in my opinion, because football was one of the last few bastions of testosterone heavy entertainment remaining and now even it is being eroded.

I completely agree that all levels of government must be color blind in their enforcement of the law. Separate but equal was always nonsense.

I will say I have some reservations about “public accommodations” being excluded from freedom of association. I can see forcing grocery stores to allow all law abiding members of a community (that would exclude shop lifters) to purchase food. On the other hand I don’t see why we need to force coffee shops to serve their over priced drinks to everyone. When I was younger the general attitude was that if we force people who don’t like each other to associate then we’ll all discover we aren’t so different after all. The ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and write… That just doesn’t seem to be true.

Feel free to call me an idiot (well, within reason :-)).

Open and Closed Associations

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I listened to the ZMan’s Friday podcast and the topic was an explanation for why he considers the ideal of the color-blind society of such activists as Chris Rufo to be doomed to failure. And I’ll have to say here that he was very clear about why he saw it as unsatisfactory from his point of view.
In a nutshell, he saw the color-blind basis for a multiracial society to be unacceptable because it would not allow for what he called closed associations. And he defined open and closed associations as differing in their method of exclusion. In an open association basically, anyone was admitted who adhered to the basis for which the association was established. In a closed association, those in charge can exclude anyone for basically any reason or no reason at all.
In the ZMan’s mind a society that adheres to a color-blind basis for race relations would never allow closed associations to exist. Now this conclusion is interesting. His position was that the idea of the color-blind society had been put forward back during the William F. Buckley Jr. era of the conservative movement in the 1960s and 1970s and that trying it again would end in the same failure.
I listened carefully to his arguments and came away with several thoughts on his assumptions and conclusions.
My first thought has to do with how the color-blind premise should be applied to American society. What seems fair to me is that if we have a multi-racial society then the most important case where color-blindness should be applied is by the government. In other words, the government treats us all the same. There should be no mention of race in any government policies. We all follow the same equations for our income tax calculations. We all get the same government benefits based on the same measurements of work history and age. We all get to vote just once in an election. And we all have to obey the same laws and we all get the same sentences for committing the same crimes.
And in terms of public accommodations, we can all use the same grocery stores and get the same rates from the electric company. And once again, if we live in the same town, we all have to conform to the same local laws. So, if the local laws say you can’t smoke pot, then anyone regardless of color will be arrested for doing so. And we can eat at the same restaurants. But that restaurant even though it is a public accommodation, is still a private enterprise. It can demand that patrons dress in a certain way. It can demand that diners behave in a specific manner. And regardless of race if someone can’t follow those rules he can be ejected, possibly with police assistance if the result becomes trespass.
And if there is a professional society like the AMA or the Bar Association or an engineering accreditation program these would also be considered public accommodations. As would schools and colleges. But once again everyone must follow the same rules and be judged by the same objective standards. Here the use of standardized testing goes a long way to reinforce these ideas. And this objectivity will prove that when conditions are as equal as they can be that the human population will produce a bell curve of outcomes. That’s right we’re not all exactly the same and that’s just the nature of populations.
And these above referenced cases and things of the same sort are what would be considered public accommodations.
But I don’t assume that private associations need to be open to the general public. In the 1960s and 1970s much was made about how men’s clubs and associations had to be opened up to participation by women. Under a careful analysis of this history, I believe that the Supreme Court could quite easily decide that private associations could limit their memberships based on sex if the whole basis for the association is based on being male or female.
And likewise, why couldn’t there be a club based on its members being of a particular ethnicity or physical characteristic. After all there are already clubs for tall people and there are organizations for senior citizens. There could be clubs for people with blond hair and blue eyes. Parenthetically the ZMan’s favorite example of minorities is “ginger midgets.” There could be a National Association for the Advancement of Ginger Midgets, (NAAGM). And in what way do any of these associations harm people who are not these things? They don’t and therefore they are not unethical.
Based on what the ZMan said in his podcast he would disagree with my analysis because he would say that no mechanism exists to force the federal government to accept the restoration of free association for private, non-public accommodation associations. And maybe he’s right. But regardless, I think that getting the federal government to have to give up on affirmative action and be forced to adhere to color-blind standards would be an enormous improvement over the nightmarish anti-white polices currently practiced in Washington DC.
If and when these first steps have been initiated more effort can be expended to continue working toward the full restoration of the freedoms we were promised under the Bill of Rights. Saying that because past efforts to reestablish constitutional practices have failed that no progress can be made is incorrect. The recent Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action in college admissions and on abortion are clear examples that even after many decades, a bad decision can be corrected. I think there is great merit in pushing for a color-blind federal government.
What do you think?

Punxsutawney Phil Sees An Early Spring

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Well!  And who wouldn’t be glad for an early spring?  Well, skiers I guess.  But for the rest of us, Yeah!  Bring it!

Well done Phil.  Now if only he had really shown some spunk and predicted Joe Biden’s demise in November and I’d probably make the trek down to Punxsutawney next year to shake his hand, er, paw.

I’ll take my good news as it comes.

Rejoice O denizens of snowy climes.  Hope exists for better times.

 

You and Here

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Because of their neurological abnormalities many Leftists are truly miserable people and therefore pathologically envious of normal people for being happy.  And that’s why a big part of the leftist project is to make us miserable.

Taking the fun out of our lives is a very big part of their work.  That is specifically why they are always in our faces about everything they don’t want us doing.  We can’t enjoy sports or activities or entertainment the way we want to because they have to decide how those things get done.  And worst of all they say we can’t do them without their participation.  And that’s why they especially hate things that they can’t share in.  That’s why shooting ranges and normal families are anathema.  Those things are bad fun because they exclude them categorically.

And so, whenever we are happy, in a real sense, we are measurably hurting the leftist project.  So, there is the justification for the “pursuit of happiness.”  But over the last half century it’s gotten harder and harder to just enjoy life.  Too many components of it have been compromised and degraded by the Left.

But that makes it more important than ever to find the means to bring joy into our lives.  Even if you are a “happy warrior,” fighting the culture war 24/7 is not a recipe for hilarity.  Sure, mocking the Left can be fun to some extent but there is a definite tendency to become a grim, glum purveyor of gloom and doom.

And I find that this very syndrome has infected me to a greater extent than I like.  And thinking about it today I realized I need to begin prioritizing a lot more fun into my week.  Chronicling the outrages of the week is mostly a dour and depressing occupation.  Even schadenfreude over some leftist’s misfortune is a weak substitute for some constructive endeavor or even some mindless fun like watching a goofy movie.

As I’ve said previously, I’ll be trying to wean myself off the outrage stuff.  To start with I think I’ll start publishing parts of my stories on the site and adding more content on creative topics like photography and science fiction/fantasy.  I’ve lately been reading about how difficult it is to get genre fiction discovered on Amazon because the algorithms are specifically calibrated for authors who release materials exclusively through the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program.  In addition, the algorithms are optimized for book series that release a new volume every month.  For that reason, authors now write at least three series novels in advance in order to get noticed by that algorithm.  Now this sounds like madness to me.  Following that logic, an author should probably write a decalogy series all at once before finding out whether anyone wants to read it.  And in fact, it seems that a really mediocre series has a much better chance of being a hit than a single novel even if it is remarkably well-written and interesting.

Well, we do live in a strange world.  So, I figure I should start putting my stuff out there and at least have the satisfaction of publishing it on my own platform.  At least I’ll get some constructive feedback from the sf&f fans on the site.  And it’ll be fun.

H. L. Mencken is quoted as defining puritanism as, “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”  And I think he was exactly right.  We need to enjoy life.  We will still have to fight the culture wars but we can’t put our lives, our happiness on hold until we win.  So let the someone, somewhere being happy be you, here.

Britain Wants a Citizen Army?

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Neil Oliver reacts to a call by the British military for conscription to be revived in anticipation of war with Russia or Iran or whoever else they think needs killing.

Well, well.  I guess this is our wake up call to what we’ll be seeing soon.  I think Mr. Oliver has it about right.  Why would anyone agree to a government that wants to drag our kids off to die in a war that has no more sense to it than did World War I?  Seeing the abomination going on in Ukraine should be proof enough that unless someone invades this country (like they currently are!) we have no reason to send to our sons off to die.  I volunteer Hunter Biden and whatever spawn the rest of the Democrats and Neo-cons have hatched out.

We may be sub-humans to the denizens of Washington but our lives are way too precious to lose them mucking about in frozen trenches on the steppes or anywhere else that those idiots want to start a new war.  Luckily there’s an election coming up just in time to make all the eighteen year-olds think twice before pulling the lever for Psycho Joe.

Okay, Let’s Talk About Journalism

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So, we all laughed while Taylor Lorentz wailed about the “Slaughter of the Innocents” among the millennial generation of journalists.  Of course, we did.  Everyone on our side despises them because they are everything that is wrong about the mainstream media.

They are dishonest, stupid, lazy and almost completely unqualified to perform their primary mission; discover what is happening in the world and communicate it to the people reading, listening and watching their news outlets.  Instead, they have become the Ministry of Truth.  And thereby, they have deserved the monumental collapse in public trust in them and also the huge drops in paying audience.

Now, fair to say, a part of the lost audience is not directly related to their lack of skill and honesty.  The internet has upended the financial model that used to govern how newspapers and other forms of journalism made their money; advertising.

Google and Facebook have swallowed almost all the advertising dollars by means of their surveillance of people’s search histories and other internet activity.  So, it’s not fair to blame media’s collapsing profits completely on their lousy work.  And in fact, some countries (e.g., Australia) are now forcing Facebook to pay news sites for the content that they allow people to post on their Facebook pages.  But the new world is what it is.  News sites are struggling to keep their doors open.

Well, okay.  What that means is that news will become a subscription-based product.  People will have to pay for what they want to read or see.  And most people tend to be unwilling to pay money to be insulted.  Which means one of two approaches must be adopted by the news corporations.

The first approach is to continue with what they currently do.  They can keep up a far-left-biased version of the news which insults half of the viewing public.  And this means building their financial model based on whatever payments they calculate they can get from the left-leaning half of the country.

The second approach is to try to perform objective journalism and get money from anyone who wants to know what’s actually going on in the world.  Now this would be a wholly novel idea.  So far, it’s never been tried by any major news organization.  And for all I know maybe it would produce less income than the first approach.  But I tend to believe that providing unbiased news coverage and separating it completely from a program that featured opinion pieces from both sides of the partisan divide would serve the public better and at the same time would make more money.

And why do I think unbiased news would make more money?  Because we’ve seen what the opposite looks like.  The opposite of unbiased news is Taylor Lorentz.  And that model is crashing and burning from coast to coast.  And it will get worse.  Eventually, people will get to pay a la carte for their media.  When that happens places like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News will either have to provide the public what they want or go out of business.

And all of this is actually for the good.  We pay for the awful cable companies with our cable bill and we never get our money’s worth.  I would pay extra if none of my money went to ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and certainly not MSNBC and CNN.  Of late Fox News has been barely half a step better than these.  If my internet provider would charge a fair price for access to the internet and I could choose from the media options that I preferred and paid for nothing else it would be a much better world.  Instead of five or ten large leftist media outlets there would probably be one or two at most.

And from where I stand that would be a vast improvement.  Because that would mean that about eighty percent of the obnoxious leftist journalists currently employed by these woke fake-news corporations would be driving cabs and waiting tables in New York and DC.  Sorry Taylor Lorentz, but that’s what should happen.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 31JAN2024 – Lots of Guns

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I agree. I believe blood must be spilled to effect major change and revolt.

61% of US counties are 2d Amendment sanctuaries. Depending on who you believe, there are anywhere from 200 million to five hundred million weapons in private hands. Those include not just AR -15s, shotguns and pistols, but sniper rifles of extreme accuracy and range, machine guns up to .50 caliber, artillery up to 152mm, antiarmor rockets and missiles, old bazookas, RPGs, miniguns, flamethrowers and tons of explosives for IEDs. Also between a trillion and five trillion rounds for said weapons.

If the left wishes to disarm the People, who they gonna call? I do not believe the military will turn their guns on US citizens en mass. Several national guards would refuse Bidens attempt to federalize them. Most police would not obey Biden or their own blue governors, either.

History teaches us that it only takes 2-3% of the population willing to take up arms and fight to succeed in rebellion. The Bolsheviks were only about 3% of the Russian populace and they defeated the Czarists.

We have upward of 25 million veterans, mostly conservative. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and the Carolinas alone have millions of hunters who are good at camouflage, stalking, and are proficient with firearms.

The left doesn’t really want any part of a shooting rebellion. They just think they do. Once victorious, the hangings will begin. Pelosi, Soros, the Bidens, Clintons and Obamas are likely to suffer from rope burn if they don’t bug out on their private jets.

After the Revolution – Part 2

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So, I’ll skip over to the far-left edge of what might happen after the revolution.  What if the revolution is their revolution?  Meaning, what if the Left wins completely.  Well, this is even simpler.  According to the game plan we’re already following the feds will enforce California-like policies everywhere and all the time.  Fossil fuels will disappear from everyone’s lives (except for the elites) and normalcy will be totally outlawed in all areas of life.  Third world immigrants will be planted in every corner of the nation and we’ll resemble South Africa in almost every way.  Of course, such a place will collapse because of dysfunction eventually, but enough time will elapse before a collapse, so that none of us or our children will ever see anything approaching a livable environment.

Well, I’m sure you know that’s not the option I’m hoping for.

And finally, we reach my revolution.  And it’s one that has some evidence on the ground.  I point to what Governor Abbott is trying to do in Texas.  This revolution consists of the red states pushing back against the unconstitutional policies of the federal government and protecting their citizens from the consequences.  Whether it’s illegal aliens or lunatic energy policies based on “climate,” attacks on constitutional rights or federally sponsored rioting by Antifa and BLM; the individual governors and governments of the red states and hopefully a coalition of these states will adopt policies and strategies to nullify the dysfunction being levied against them.

And the eventual outcome of this movement might be the most positive end case of all.  As we’re seeing with the blue cities suffering under the illegal immigration floods, these blue states begin to understand how disastrous these altruistic sounding policies they’ve signed up for turn out to be in the real world.  Imagine for a minute what it would be like if the red and blue states were allowed to diverge down different paths on something like climate energy polices.  Imagine Blue America has been purged of fossil fuels and Red America hasn’t.  Someone going from Minnesota to, let us say, South Dakota would see his neighbors enjoying a warm home heated by oil or gas, a car that can drive an unlimited distance with refuels that take just a couple of minutes cheap goods due to low transportation costs and delicious meals of red meat from carbon dioxide emitting cattle.  Whereas he eats a cricket burrito while sitting at a frozen electrical charging station waiting for hours for his battery car to charge enough for the next hundred miles of his journey to his home where he’ll wrap himself in layers to survive the environmentally friendly temperature setpoint of fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit.  Now how long do you think those good progressives will endure this while living side by side with their neighboring red state Americans laughing at them?  Exactly, they’ll go berserk and demand their governors adopt the same policies.

Now this could also drive the feds to wage actual war on the red states claiming that climate disaster forced them into it.  But let’s assume this revolution goes our way.  So, what I see is that having a Red America and Blue America side by side might just be the way to win over the Blues.  With all of the awful policies of the Left, having a counterexample to observe in close proximity should be an effective lure to convince them just how stupid they really are.

But even if it doesn’t it would be like North and South Korea.  On one side of the border, poverty and insanity.  On the other prosperity and normalcy.  So, after my revolution we would have the two Americas still formally one country but with completely different lifestyles and cultures.  And to my mind over time the various blue states would begin to slowly migrate into the red model.

The biggest question I have is how much violence and disruption would there be?  How will the federal government react to nullification?  Potentially it could be a war.  But more likely the feds would use intimidation and gestapo tactics to try and break the leadership of the red states.  The crux of it is whether there are strong enough local leaders to overcome the federal intimidation.  I guess I’m still slightly hopeful that this could be done in the immediate future.

So, that is my roundup of the various scenarios for “after the revolution.”  It’s a bizarre range of things.  I left out the option where there is no revolution and we just continue under the same stalemate we currently endure.  I couldn’t see defining the null case as a revolution.

So, what do you think?  Do you disagree?  Did I leave out another version?  Did I get one of the scenarios wrong in some important detail.  Please leave your thoughts in the comments.  And enjoy the revolution comrades!

Schadenfreude – Taylor Lorenz Version

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You might remember this female apparatchik from her doxxing of the Libs of TikTok lady.  Well, things must be getting lonely out there for La Lorentz at the Washington Post and now she must be feeling the icy chill of an upcoming pink slip because here she moans and groans about how all we plebes will be devastated if the intrepid reporters who provide us with the truth (pravda) are forced onto the bread lines.

I’ve provided a group of right leaning pundits laughing heartily at her warning.

Oh, Taylor, Taylor.  When will you ever learn.  What goes around, comes around.

After the Revolution – Part 1

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One of the ZMan’s favorite phrases during his podcasts seems to be “after the revolution.”  This is usually followed by a comment about some benighted leftist finding out how the guillotine works, up close and personal.  Ouch!

But what seems to be a lot less easy to find is any thoughts about what would be going on after the revolution.  And maybe this is because the more hard-line folks on the Right have truly apocalyptic dreams for the world if things go their own way and it would be unwise to discuss the specifics in the open.  But really it’s because the Right is not a monolithic movement but a coalition of those who want to be free of the Left, there really isn’t one vision of what “after the revolution” would look like.

But I thought it might be interesting to think a little bit about what some of these visions might be and also what I myself would like “after the revolution” to look like.

Let’s start with the wildest visions of the really hard-core cases, something that would closely resemble what the people who made that new movie “Civil War” imagine people on the Right want as the future.

So, in this extreme vision of post-America the country would be divided into a bunch of independent countries that each is based on the regional ethnic make-up and political predilections.  The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic (including Virginia and maybe North Carolina) would be the rump USA nation.  It would be run by the same elite that currently runs the whole country.  I think it would also include the Great Lakes states, the Pacific northwest (with at least a part of California) and Hawaii.  Then the South would be its own country.  The Midwest would be another.  Some people think that Texas and the southwest (with or without all or part of California) would be another.  Maybe Alaska joins up with Canada.

In this setup whole ethnic populations would be swapped between these areas at least partially by force.  What the forms of government for these successor states would be is a subject of wild speculation by those who desire this drastic fate for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  But if such a division of the country and its people occurred it’s possible to imagine multiple forms of government.  Perhaps this time around, the Puritans will decide on something more explicitly oligarchic.  Maybe the Midwest will continue on with a representative democracy.  Maybe the South will get a king and the Southwest will decide to join up with Mexico.  Personally, this particular scenario sounds quite bleak to me.  But I hesitate to say that it is completely impossible.

But I think that reaching this scenario will involve maximal violence and destruction.  Millions of people will die and economic and social upheaval will devastate the whole continent.  And in this weakened condition, attack from external threats doesn’t seem far-fetched.

The next in line from most extreme to least would be a 50/50 split of the country between blue and red states.  Blue America would be similar to the Puritan nation from above.  Let’s say New England, Mid-Atlantic states with Virginia and North Carolina, Great Lakes states also including Michigan and Illinois, the whole West Coast, Nevada, New Mexico, possibly Arizona and Hawaii.  Everything else would be Red America.

As far as political systems, Blue America would be California on steroids.  No fossil fuels, no red meat, lots of cricket burgers and all transgender all the time.  Red America might be like what we had in this country before the 1960s.  Maybe it will include an amendment that allows states to secede at will.  I assume that both nations would be highly antagonistic and constantly sniping at each other about all the compromises that would have to be enacted because of the divorce.  They’d even be fighting over who would keep the name USA.  But since Amerigo Vespucci was part of the whole European colonial plot maybe the blue states can find some obscure native American (there’s that name again) term for the real estate.

I could actually see how this arrangement would be an improvement over our present situation.  Getting to this state doesn’t seem to be something that will happen easily or without copious violence.  So even this less drastic alternative isn’t my favorite scenario.  I’m certain there would be open war before the divorce occurred.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss some other scenarios including the one I favor.