Pity the poor Liberal, my friends: they are in a bad place right now. Let’s take a quick look over there – we have two types of Liberals:
- Absolute lunatics. These are the people who are out there setting Tesla’s on fire and trying to tackle Trumpsters on the train (did you see that video? Hilarious when the Liberal face-plants).
- The intellectual Liberal who sounds oh, so reasonable and just wants peace, love and freedom.
The trouble for both types is that Liberalism cannot exist in anything like a free society. This paradox stems from the underlying error of Liberalism which is the assertion that human Reason, uncorrected by Authority, is sufficient. Back there in the 18th century when the so-called “Enlightenment” was creating the first Liberals the phrasing went along the lines of “I will follow Reason wherever it leads”. This sounds like a good idea and maybe it even was a good idea to some extent…but while the assertion was made by people who asserted they would always come to the correct thing via Reason, the facts of history show us that Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler were able to follow their Reason to some rather surprising results.
I bring this up because one of the second types – goes by the handle Carl @HistoryBoomer – has a post on X who is trying to explain to us benighted MAGA/Conservative types why Liberals are fleeing to Bluesky – he says, in part:
“Leftists are leaving Twitter because they can’t take criticism.”
Imagine you have a favorite diner, but the new owner is a Trump fan. Trump posters, Trump statues, Trump menu items.
Eventually you tire of waiters saying “Hail Trump” and leave.
Many of you underrate the effect of Elon being 100% behind Trump and daily spewing pro-Trump propaganda (often pure lies). This isn’t just a pro-Trump guy buying a diner. This is a guy who spends 20 hours a day tweeting his love of Trump and his hatred of “corrupt” Democrats.
He’s then got this chart showing that Musk’s account is popular, as are other Trump and pro-Trump accounts. So, you see, its just too much Trump all the time! It isn’t healthy. And, darn it, he’s going to have to leave if it doesn’t stop…presumably to retreat to Bluesky.
Have you been to Bluesky? I opened an account when it became a thing right after the election and I maintain it – because by checking it once very few days I can quickly discern the talking points of the Liberals. It is all there is over there – nothing but the most mindless Liberal propaganda. And it is just like Twitter was prior to Musk purchasing it. No real dissent…just endless repetition of the talking points. It is depressing. Mind-numbing. But it is the only place Liberalism can exist.
For the most part, Liberals don’t even engage in debate. We see it here when our resident Liberals show up from time to time – they just want to come here and put out the talking points and get furious when we don’t respond to their talking points in a way which allows them to just keep repeating the talking points. Forcing them to think and defend their position is something most Liberals hate. But even those who want to take a stab at an intellectual argument always fall back on departure if they can’t censor, and censorship if they’ve got the power. This is because they can’t defend their positions.
Don’t get me wrong, they think they can. They think they’re both smart and well-informed. Very sure of themselves. And so, for instance, a Liberal who is in love with the idea of high speed rail might come around to point out how awesome high speed rail is and how Europe and China are pressing ahead with this wonderful, Green tech which makes travel fantastic because they once took the bullet train from Paris to Brussels and we’d better get moving on this or we’ll be left behind by the world!
To which we respond: a high speed train from Los Angeles to New York would take nineteen and a half hours…if it was non-stop and there were no problems. And has anyone ever built a high speed rail crossing something like the Rocky Mountains?
Whammo – argument is over. The Liberal will not address the practical difficulty of building a high speed rail and that ends it…the Liberal might keep repeating the talking points for a while but is totally incapable of actually defending the position…because it is indefensible. Because there is no need for a nationwide high speed rail system in the USA. We like our cars. We like flying. You might be able to successfully build high speed rail for a few well-traveled corridors (Los Angeles to San Diego, DC to NYC, eg) but there’s just never gonna be a guy who wants to get on a train in LA and arrive nearly a full day later in NYC – he can be there is six hours by plane.
And it does go back to Liberalism’s initial error: that Reason alone is sufficient. Never has been, never will be. There must be an Authority which is outside of our control – something which tells us that certain things are always right, certain other things are always wrong and we are to simply conform ourselves to this. The seeming oddity of this is that it is liberating – once you know the rules, then you can do all sorts of fun and interesting things….like have a really cool give-and-take-argument over an issue where at the end of the day the best idea emerges victorious and everyone with any sense bows before it. My example about high speed rail was just to take a rather low-key issue…but it is like that on every issue.
Abortion is good. People are born in the wrong body. Migrants always improve the community. Muslims are never the bad guys. Black people can never be racists. Women are paid less than men. Funding a program means you get your desired result. Lack of funding means you will never get your desired result. Roads are Socialism. All of us have seen this – these assertions and many others, all made with vigor and not one of them defensible on the merits. The least push back on them and the Liberal has to censor you or retreat if censorship isn’t possible.
And that is why they hate Musk – sure, the DOGE stuff is a huge thing and supporting the Bad Orange Man is an outrage…but the very worst thing Musk did was allow criticism of Liberalism on X. It is intolerable…because Liberalism is indefensible. Trust me, if they could win an argument with us, they’d be having arguments with us day in and day out. They can’t so they don’t. Vast contrast to us on the Right who are arguing amongst ourselves all the time and we really do have diversity…we don’t agree on everything. We’d be bored to tears if we all did.
So, the Liberals are retreating – to their intellectual ghettos like Bluesky and MSNBC. This is good – we’ve got them on the run. Any of them worth anything will stay and eventually abandon Liberalism. Not necessarily all Liberal views – because some sorts of Liberal views are defensible (even if most of us on the Right still think them mistaken). But anyone of intellect and honesty is going to leave the Left…it is a dead and boring thing. A new dawn comes…the mind is being freed from Liberal bigotry.
Blogs For Victory 
Every comment on high speed rail reminds me of a long-standing (and as far as I know continuing) fuss over the cockamamie idea of high-speed rail between Denver and the ski communities on the western side of the Rockies.
Background: There is basically one route from Denver to the west, which is I-70, going west into the mountains, through a couple of tunnels at an elevation of about 11,000 feet, and then into Summit and Eagle counties and on westward. This is the route that must be taken by everyone, from truckers to tourists, and during ski season it is a parking lot. A 1.5 hour drive from Denver to Summit County can take 5 hours or more. I once had to go through Summit County to Denver at about noon on a Sunday toward the tail end of ski season and even that late in the day the westbound traffic, mercifully on the other side of the highway, was literally bumper-to-bumper and barely moving for the entire 60+ miles to Denver.
Someone came up with the great idea to “solve” this by building a high-speed rail system from Denver to the Western Slope. Setting aside the most obvious problems with this, including steep slopes and massive blizzards and don’t forget—MOUNTAINS—- there are other things to consider. Such as price.
A ticket on this magical train was estimated to cost about $40.00. Each way. The calculation, if it can be called that, was that to avoid the awful traffic people would happily add $80.00 to the cost of a day of skiing, if it had the benefit of adding usable hours to the day, being convenient and offering the entertainment value of a bullet train ride across the Rockies.
Some “minor” details, such as getting the skiers and their gear from the train terminal to the various ski slopes, didn’t seem to bother the planners. They never stopped to consider that four skiers could chip in for gas and get to and from the slopes for about $5.00 each and park near the lifts, with all their gear easily accessible all day long, for the inconvenience of leaving Denver at dawn and heading home before the big rush, which a lot of skiers do.
But the big thing they never considered was the number of people traveling to and from their condos or second homes, with their kids and their dogs, for a whole weekend in the mountains. AS IF a family with two kids would spend $160.00 each way and leave Fido at home, to get to the train terminus (we now hesitate to use the term “train station”) only to then wrestle their belongings onto some other form of transportation to get to their condo, where they would be without transportation to go to the market, the ski areas, restaurants, etc. I had a ski condo, and then a second home in ski country, and the first thing we would do after arriving and getting the dogs settled would be to go shopping for food and deciding which restaurants to visit and where to ski–there is no way we would have considered being dropped off there without transportation.
In other words, the reality of life in these ski areas was never a consideration. The reality of families spending weekends in their condos or second homes, going out to shop or eat or ski, simply did not exist. Evidently none of them had ever actually gone skiing, with the accompanying clutter of extra gloves and hats and equipment along with bulky skis and poles and boots, all of which would have to somehow be hauled to a train, onto a train, off a train, onto secondary transportation and then somehow stored at the ski area till it all had to be hauled back through the same process in reverse. (Not to mention that a lot of day skiers take their lunches and snacks with them, to avoid the high cost of ski area food, and go back to their cars to eat.)
Whenever I hear of a high-speed train boondoggle I think of the utter lack of comprehension, or at least acceptance, of reality by the Colorado train supporters, passionately arguing for the expense and difficulties of a project doomed to fail, but only after funneling millions or perhaps even billions of dollars into certain bank accounts.
(What they never did discuss was developing an alternate route across the mountains to take the pressure off I-70. There is a smaller highway system south of Denver that goes over a mountain pass 1,000 feet lower than the tunnel system on 70, which could be expanded to carry considerable traffic across the Continental Divide, which has the advantage of slightly different weather patterns, offering an alternate route to the west. The tunnel vision (so to speak LOL) has always been on I-70 and that fantasy train. What IS it, with Leftists and trains?)
I think that, primarily, they want trains because they want to eventually force us to give up private automobiles. Not them, of course. Oh, sure, nobody would own a car but just as back in the old USSR, the elite would have “personally assigned” autos…because, you know, the elites need to be able to get around fast…and if traffic is always light because the Proles aren’t on the roads, even better! It really is just all parts of a very large and connected system to get us out of cars, out of our houses, out of the countryside (and away from the elite vacation spots – you think they like rubbing elbows with the poors in Martha’s Vineyard and Malibu?). To get us into high rise cities where we can be shoved into Life Pods eating bugs and taking the bus/train to get around.
This is why they won’t consider the practical aspects of it – the lack of market for long-distance train travel and the huge obstacles physical and financial to getting such a system built across the 3 million square miles of the USA.
Here in Nevada the thing they’re trying for is a high speed rail between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Naturally the Greenies are helping to get government funds and clearances for this. Now, there might be a genuine market here – anyone who has left Las Vegas on a Sunday morning heading to LA knows that its a nightmare of bumper to bumper traffic…and if there’s an accident, God help you. A few months back we were driving from San Diego back to Las Vegas and a truck loaded with lithium batteries caught fire on the I-15 North and so that was closed for more than a day…they routed us around via I-40 and it took us like 12 hours to get home from that point.
Of course, the fact that the Greenies have been preventing making the I-15 from Lancaster, CA to Primm, NV 4 lanes each way has played a role here! So, too the apparent refusal of any to build out the obvious alternate routes available on either side of the I-15. That corridor has to be one of the most traveled in America…the amount of commercial traffic on it is astonishing and its pretty much the only way to get goods from LA out into the rest of the USA. But no real improvement on it since the 1970’s.
So, lets build a train! There used to be regular passenger rail service from Las Vegas to Los Angeles (it was part of the reason Bugsy selected Las Vegas). But it was terminated because air and road travel was faster and/or cheaper. But, it could be there – there might be a market. If you’re coming to Vegas to party, might as well get that started in LA! Get on board that train, get that first drink in hand…relax and ride the rails right into the Strip! It makes sense.
Except for one, little problem: the Cajon Pass.
If you’ve never driven it, then its quite the adventure! A very steep grade and it goes on for miles, twisting and turning a bit. There is a rail line going through it…so trains can operate here. But high speed rail requires a much more sophisticated road bed and you aren’t going 125 mph anywhere through that pass even on the best road bed because it does curve quite a bit. Anyways, the highest grade any high speed rail manages today is 4%…the grade in the Cajon Pass is 6%…so, we don’t actually have a locomotive that is built for this. This isn’t stopping government money from flowing in…and this line only goes, initially, to Victor Valley – at the top of the Cajon Pass and more than 90 miles from Los Angeles. The concept here is that it will eventually run to Rancho Cucamonga (about 60 miles from Los Angeles and at the bottom of the Cajon Pass) and then connect with the proposed Los Angeles rail system to be extended out to the Inland Empire.
Is it just me, or is everyone starting to see a lot of IF piling up here? California has been working on its own high speed rail in a the flat Central Valley and they’ve pretty much got nothing to show after gobs of money spent.
Main thing, suppose they do get this thing built (and the Cajon Pass is just the most remarkable natural obstacle…anyone who has driven from Las Vegas to Los Angeles is delighted and impressed by the major mountain ranges you pass through…and though each of them is less daunting than Cajon, the bottom line is we ain’t building a choo choo in Kansas here), who is going to want to drive to Rancho Cucamonga, drop their car off at a lot for 3 days and hop on a train to Vegas? Where once you arrive you’ll have to catch a cab because you don’t have your car with you?
Still, with all that, it can be done…but I doubt it can be done where you’re going to get to Vegas faster than air…and I can’t imagine it being cheaper. I see a massive boondoggle eventually going bankrupt after the last crony gets paid.
In their fanatical pursuit of their social engineering obsessions, one of the areas the Left has decided to ignore is that of cost/benefit analysis. The CA/LV train effort is a classic example.
Cost: Extremely high
Benefit: Extremely limited. It seems to be designed to get a small percentage of the population moved quickly, for no other purpose than to pursue entertainment. That is, demanding that a large percentage of the population subsidize the pleasure-seeking of a very small percentage.
Risk: Potentially high, as train tracks are easily vandalized in terror attacks, especially in remote mountainous areas
On the other hand developing one or two alternate highway systems would have a different analysis:
Cost: High to moderately high
Benefit: Multiple benefits to many different demographics. This would let those entertainment-seekers get back and forth more quickly, but it would also benefit trucking, as well as providing egress routes in case of emergencies and rapid access for military purposes if that need were to arise.
Risk: Moderate, no less than today’s normal and accepted automobile travel risks, and potentially less than that if roads are properly constructed, maintained and monitored.
The national security aspect of it is a nightmare – as we rolled along at 5 mph after being re-routed off the I-15 it became blazingly obvious to me that all an enemy had to do to cripple ground transport out of LA would be to blow the bridge over the Mojave River in either Apple Valley or Barstow, CA (or, both). There is no way the required goods and people can move without the I-15…which (as noted) should be four lanes each way (between Primm, NV and Barstow, CA it is two lanes each way!). There are roads to either side of the I-15 – none of them go straight through but they could easily be made at least up to US-95 (which runs from Reno to Las Vegas) in quality and provide two alternate routes not much longer in road miles than I-15. Keep in mind that the Interstate system was designed when the West had a far lower population. There are only 5 east-west Interstates coming out of the major West Coast ports. Oregon and Nevada share a lot of border but you can’t take an Interstate direct from Oregon to Nevada. This in spite of the massive growth in population in the area. We’re screwed if the enemy can insert agents to blow up just a dozen bridges in the West.
A lot of people (most people) are not aware that our interstate highway system was designed to enable the fast movement of military vehicles in emergencies. The story told is that when General Eisenhower saw how efficiently the Germans could move men and materiel during the war because of their autobahn system he realized we need something like that here, and that is why federal funding goes to help maintain the federal (interstate) highway system. (Of course now it goes for almost everything, but that’s another story for another thread.)
After a big storm about 25 years ago the entire western part of Colorado was cut off from the eastern slope when I-70 was shut down. People were stranded and sleeping in cars. Avalanches closed the interstate and the other roads going into Summit County, where ordinarily people could then catch 70 at the bottom of the pass and proceed on westward were closed off from the north and south as well, as the narrow two-lane roads were also blocked. An alternative four-lane highway from southern Denver across the mountains on another route would have avoided this, but since then literally nothing has been done to correct the problem. That is a very serious defect in planning as it might be essential to be able to move quickly across the mountains, in either direction, for any of several emergencies.
If you look at a map you see three east-west interstates in the Rocky Mountain West—-I-40 through New Mexico, I-70 through Colorado and I-80 through Wyoming. I-80 is a treacherous death trap in the winter, a monument to bad planning mostly because of high winds blocking visibility and creating miles of black ice on some steep inclines, and Wyomingites will argue persuasively that the highway should have been built many miles north of where it is now. As we focus on rebuilding our infrastructure part of that plan ought to be building some major roadways across the country, instead of fretting about “encouraging” car and truck traffic.
Florida has only I-75 running north and south, in a state where mass evacuations are routine and completely ignoring the needs of the eastern and most heavily populated half of the state. For a state as heavily populated as Florida, getting from one place to another can be a nightmare.
Now that we have experienced, on an admittedly fairly minor level, the consequences of failure of electrical power, we need to be aware that simple and easy attacks on our electrical grid, whether physical or cyberattacks like the ones we have already experienced, could force mass evacuations of many highly populated areas, and for a nation so dependent on cars we are pathetically unprepared for anything like this.
Big time – and we snarl our own traffic by our short sightedness. I mentioned no Interstate direct between Nevada and Oregon – so all east-west traffic has to bottleneck through the mountains north of Lake Tahoe…you know, it snows there a bit from time to time. But if you’ve got to get a load from Denver to Portland you are either going way south to San Francisco before you go up, or looping around from Salt Lake into Idaho…if we built an Interstate from Winnemucca, NV, to Bend, OR that solves the problem…there’s not even a good secondary road on that route. Its kinda insane.
Yeah, I kinda remember some kind of problem up on Donner Pass a few (many) years ago.
For all the bitching and moaning about pollution from cars, it is much less when cars and trucks are running at speed than when they are sitting, idling, stopping and starting. We should be working on roads that let them do that and then focus on ways to make the engines more efficient, rather than try to legislate ways to hamper their use.
There has been a lot of attention focused on the more dramatic events of the fast-moving Trump administration, but there has been a slightly more quiet and unobtrusive movement going on as well, and that has been the development of information about the whole Covid scheme.
I’ve always thought of Rand Paul as eminently reasonable and rational, so when I read a conclusion that sounds like the script of a movie I had to stop and think about it. It seems improbable—but then so did the idea that the FBI would commit perjury to trick a FISA court into permitting surveillance of American citizens.
So, for your consideration, with or without a dollop of skepticism, from the Rand Paul Review:
Mark, you write “Trust me, if they could win an argument with us, they’d be having arguments with us day in and day out.” And that is the basis of the Left’s successful shifting of political discourse from politics to people.
The Wayback Machine would dig up my old requests from at least two decades ago, asking Lefties to please explain their political philosophies. And of all the Lefties then populating the blog, only one ever did—and he was a dedicated Marxist who had studied Marx and for some reason found the arguments compelling, Not one other Lib, from then till now, has even tried to present a coherent outline of a true political philosophy. That is, an ideology that goes beyond GEORGE BUSH IS AN A**HOLE or ORANGE MAN BAD.
A Leftist’s idea of a “political argument” is a tirade on all the supposed defects of Donald Trump and his supporters, and explanations of why and how his policies prove their inferiority as human beings. As long as they can define “politics” in terms of personality they can argue all day long. And they do, at the tops of their lungs, waving the preprinted signs provided to them by their masters and trying to infiltrate blogs like this to shriek their indignant litanies of outrage.
It’s when you try to shift the discourse to discussion of the comparative merits of Constitutional governance (restricted federal power with most authority left to the states) vs the Leftist model (of consolidation of power in a central authority with little power left to the people) that you run into the wall—-not of resistance as much as incomprehension.
Every now and then a Lib will inadvertently touch on the aspect of Leftism that is tyranny, but then skitter away. I have a relative who did this, arguing back in the day that we SHOULD have the same government-imposed health care system across the nation because it was “fair”, and my argument that it deprived people of the freedom to live in places where they could choose their own health care systems was met with the argument that this would not be “fair” because not everyone could afford to move, so it was essential for “fairness” to impose the same system on everyone. A comment from me that limiting liberty and imposing a system on people who don’t want it sounded a lot like tyranny very abruptly ended the “discussion”.
I think this subliminal awareness of the dangers of actual discourse on the nuts and bolts of governance steers a lot of Leftists away from real discussion, while the majority of those who support and enable Leftist governance don’t even get that deep into the political weeds and just blindly operate on the happy conviction that their political affiliation assures their entitlement to the Higher Moral Ground because they are “against” whatever evils have been identified for them.
This popped up in my Inbox, just in time to resonate with my anecdote about the argument about imposing the same system on everyone being “fair”:
Your comments are not deleted because of “facts” you present; they’re deleted because they’re neither important nor relevant.//Moderator
Small minds discuss people.
So Rocks is trying to sneak back in, eh? I wonder what he tried to spew, before he was moderated. (And no, I did not do that, even though I am The Boss Of Everything.) No doubt it was just more petty squealing about someONE. As I said in an earlier post, “As long as they can define “politics” in terms of personality they can argue all day long. And they do, at the tops of their lungs, waving the preprinted signs provided to them by their masters and trying to infiltrate blogs like this to shriek their indignant litanies of outrage.”.
And oh my goodness they have developed outrage to almost an art form, quite stylized and predictable. And that’s fine—they can marinate in their chosen rage all they want. It’s just that they seem to think they should then inflict it on us. JD Vance summed it—-we don’t care.
And, with Easter just a month away, Jeff Childers poses an intriguing question:
Reading past the historical review of both Democrat and Republican periods in the political wilderness, he asks why churches are not acknowledging the 2000-year anniversary of the death and resurrection of Christ.
Seen on the wall of a DOGE office near you:
ROFL
Really long but with some funny lines: The annoyance factor goes down if you turn off your speakers and just read the captions.