Tag: Finding the Good

Who Are the Good Guys?

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If you pay attention to what’s going on in the world, it would be easy to get the impression that the world is full up with horrible people.  Specifically, you might say that anyone with power was a corrupt monster doing everything imaginable to destroy all the good things that made up America as it was seventy-five years ago.

And if we were judging based on the preponderance of examples that would be true.  Almost every Democrat politician is a monster.  Almost every Republican politician in a federal office is a crook.  The bureaucracy is a minefield ranging from the rapacious greed of the FDA to the jackbooted thuggery of the surveillance state.  The majority of corporate executives pay at least lip service and sometimes much more to promulgating anti-white policies like DEI and affirmative action along with destructive ideas like transgender rights.  As for the schools and colleges, they’re almost completely dedicated to indoctrinating children with poisonous lies about race and sexuality.  I won’t even bother to mention the mass media.

So, yeah, looking out there.  It’s a mess.  But can that be the entirety of it?  Are there no good guys?

I can think of a few.  Let’s start with politicians.  I’ll start with people who have done some good:

  • Trump did some good on two fronts. He opened up our eyes to what the Republicans were really all about and why even when we won an election nothing improved.  And when he got in office he tried to fix as many things as he was allowed to.  And this was while he was being undercut and sabotaged by the Republicans in Congress and in his own administration.  Without a doubt he is one of the good guys.
  • Rand Paul seems to me to be interested in serving the interests of his constituency. He was one of the earliest voices to speak out against the COVID lockdowns and vaccine and mask mandates.  He is a critic of the FBI’s surveillance of US citizens and he believes that a balanced budget is a necessity for the long-term survival of our country.  I think he’s one of the good guys.
  • Ron DeSantis has used his tenure as Florida’s governor to defend the rights of his citizens against bureaucratic malice and other governmental and corporate bad actors. He resisted the call to continue masking school children and others when it was obvious that it did no good.  He helped get legislation passed to prevent grade schools from indoctrinating very young children about various sexual deviancies that the schools wanted to make part of the curriculum.  And he punished Disney when they tried to throw their weight behind these school programs.  He has fired district attorneys who wouldn’t prosecute criminals because of racial issues and he has even begun the reform of the Florida State college system by putting conservatives on the boards of trustees and empowered them to get rid of affirmative action, gender studies programs, leftist bias against men and whites, DEI and all the other crap that has become the norm at American colleges.  Regardless of competition between him and Donald Trump about running for president I’ll say that DeSantis is one of the good guys.
  • And to a lesser extent I think Governor Abbott of Texas has done some things that help the people of his state survive the terrible policies of the federal government especially concerning illegal immigration. His policy of bussing illegals to cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago has worked brilliantly and has now got Mayor Adams of New York sounding like a nativist.  So, let’s say on balance Abbott has done some good for his state.

Moving on from politicians, let’s see who else might be doing some good out there:

  • Some of the Supreme Court justices have shown themselves honest. Thomas and Alito are rock solid.  The three new Trump picks are a mixed bag.  Good on some votes, bad on others.  Chief Justice Roberts is almost as bad as the communists but he votes mostly with the majority.  On average let’s say the current US supreme Court is kind of good.
  • Coming from the last place I’d expect honesty and courage, cable news, I’d have to say Tucker Carlson is one of the good guys. Over the last few years, he has said things on the air that no one else came close to saying.  He almost sounded like someone on the dissident right.  And this is a guy who was paid millions of dollars by Fox News to put out the kind of middle of the road Republican pablum that we came to expect from Sean Hannity and the rest of the suits there.  It basically got him fired.  And now that he’s been sidelined by a non-compete clause of his contract, he’s basically giving away his product on Elon Musk’s X rather than be silenced during this election year.  He’s shown nerve in the face of threats by crazy leftists against himself and his family.  He’s performing a service that currently is completely absent from mainstream media.  Yep, a good guy.
  • I’ll put Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss in a single entry. All three are leftist journalists who probably disagree with me on almost every social issue.  But what they have in common is that all three are honest enough to admit that the Biden White House and its allies in the federal government and the news media are routinely trampling on the constitutional rights of Americans in a whole host of areas.  From the COVID lockdowns and lies to the illegal surveillance of Republican politicians to suppression of the truth by the tech companies in collusion with the government these three have shown courage and integrity.  I guess I’ll have to grudgingly call them “good” guys.  But they’re still commies, regardless.
  • Chris Rufo is a pundit I guess you’d call him. I think he was associated with the Claremont folks in California.  But recently he went to work for Ron DeSantis reforming the Florida state colleges.  As part of that effort, he has been trail-blazing for anyone else who will be trying to rein in the leftists at red state colleges.  His efforts are already having real results.  New faculty is being hired.  Human resources policies have been changed and curriculum has been purged of leftist nut-jobbery.  I don’t know too much about him but I’m going to include him in the good guys because instead of just talking about stuff, he’s getting things done.
  • And what about Elon Musk? Is he on our side?  Maybe he is!  But at the very least he has provided a platform for our side’s words and opinions.  A place to spread news and find each other.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now.  Now it’s your turn.  Tell me what you think of my choices.  But more importantly, add names to this list.  Give folks out there something to be hopeful about.

Finding the Good in Today’s World – Part 1

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Going through the news and what passes for entertainment today is a pretty grim process.  It seems it’s woke wreckage and infantilism all the way down.  But if you let the mainstream media and the progressives in New York and Hollywood blind you to what else is out there then you’ve played into their hands.  Admittedly, it is work to “find the good” but it’s not an impossible task.

I’ll confess, I often fall back on complaining about how bad things have gotten and longing for the good old days.  But that doesn’t help anyone.  And in my defense, I do reviews of books, movies, tv shows and country music.  I do get a small but steady search traffic for those things and so I can claim that I do my small part for increasing the knowledge base of people interested in “finding the good.”  But I think it’s a good idea to put together information in an organized form and maybe supplement it with some comments.  After all I am what the idiot children call an “opinion leader” which I guess is a synonym for opinionated jerk.  So here goes.

First things first.  I believe in owning physical copies.  I buy paper books, CDs and DVDs.  I think some of the things I like will be cancelled by the industries that own them and will disappear.  And now we see Disney putting warnings on their old movies and publishers eliminating Dr. Seuss.  Well, okay.  Of course, I’ll need to buy a good supply of DVD players.  But they’re so cheap that it’s reasonable to do.  I’ve got a few hundred DVDs and a few hundred CDs and I used to have thousands of books but I pared that back a good deal and now it’s a few hundred of those.

And owning the physical copies means if I want to watch “The Sting” or read “Huckleberry Finn” I don’t have to search for a streaming service that hasn’t cancelled these works because they use forbidden words or ideas.  That’s enormously powerful.  And convenient.  Most of the streaming services only possess a small fraction of the “good” things you might want to see or hear or read.  Just yesterday I read that the BBC is going back and expurgating the “racist” dialog that they’ve discovered in John Cleese’s “Fawlty Towers” tv show.  John Cleese is a pompous fool who now regrets the thought policing that he and his generation introduced.  But I have the DVDs for that show and if I want to be reminded of when he actually was funny, I can watch them, so-called racism and all!

The next thing that you can use when looking for the good is chronological.  Basically, anything created before 1960 is probably free from systemic cultural poisoning.  Now granted there were plenty of leftists even back then but they had not captured the arts completely.  So, for instance, if you look at the book or movie awards from those years you will note that most of the books and movies are readable or watchable.  There are of course exceptions.  But compare that to the winners of book and movie awards today.  For me an Academy Award from the last decade or so is almost a guarantee that the movie is unwatchable psychobabble or celebrates disgusting sexual deviancy.  Nowadays it takes a review from someone I trust to get me to watch a movie or read a book.

So, I’ve gone on for a page with generalities.  In the next installments of this series, I’ll pick one area and provide some recommendations on things I’ve found that are good.  But just to get the ball rolling I’ll throw out one recommendation.

Modern television show: “Justified”

Here is a show that ran from 2010 to 2015 that was based on stories by Elmore Leonard, a truly great crime writer and running to almost eighty episodes and there isn’t a bad episode in the bunch.  That’s pretty rare.  Timothy Olyphant, Nick Searcy and Walton Goggins give highly entertaining and nuanced performances and even a racist, sexist homophobe such as myself will admit that Hollywood didn’t screw this show up somehow.  Camera Girl and I have re-watched this series every few years and we still enjoy every episode.  I hope I never wear out the fun of watching it.