Conservative Values

Conservatives Know Liberals; Liberals Don’t Know Conservatives

Mark Noonan89 Comments

From Volokh Conspiracy:

…One other point that I find really interesting and important about Haidt’s work is his findings on the ability of different groups to empathize across these ideological divides. So in his book (p. 287) Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.

In short, Haidt’s research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards–or as a friend of mine once remarked, “Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people”–and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this…

We see this all the time.  First off, anyone who is right of center in any meaningful sense can usually with 100% accuracy determine what a liberal will think on any issue before the liberal is queried.  This is why we don’t need to tune in to CNN, read the New York Times editorial page or watch the President’s State of the Union Address.  We already know what they are going to say. There is never a surprise in a liberal.

Secondly, we know that liberals will not know what we think about any particular issue, even after they have asked us.  Whatever we say will just go through the liberal’s mental filter and come out as us saying whatever the liberal believed we should have said, given that we are conservative.  The most recent example of this absurdity is the way liberals treated Huckabee’s recent comments  –  whatever one wishes to think about them, all Huckabee said as that liberals treat women as if they are unable to control their libidos and need Uncle Sugar to take care of them.  Once that went through the liberal filter, it came out in liberal thinking that Huckabee thinks that women cannot control their libidos and need Uncle Sugar to take care of them.  I can assure one and all that if Huckabee is still prominent 20 years from now, liberals will be condemning him for having once upon a time said that women cannot control their libidos.

If you read the whole article linked from Volokh, you’ll see that it starts out describing how people originally come to their views – that we tend to take up views which meet our predispositions and then tend to concentrate on evidence which confirms us, rejecting that which denies our view.  This is probably true to a certain extent.  I can see why I was open to the conservative argument when I first started paying attention to politics in the late 1970’s – Carter’s liberalism was such a clear failure that I’d have had to be an idiot to think that liberalism had the answers.  Any particular liberal out there can provide us with reasons why liberal twaddle appealed to them at the start.  But I think there is this difference – when you start entering in to conservative thought, you’ll find a variety of views right from the get-go.  Unlike the mindlessness of liberalism, conservatism has dissidents.

And because we have dissidents, we are forced to argue and when you argue (if you are to be at all successful) you have to get in to the mindset of your opponent.  You have to accord their point of view some respect and assume that they want the same good end as you, even if their means of doing so are different (and perhaps incorrect).  Liberals don’t have dissidents – the powers that be of liberalism decree that this or that is the only acceptable view and everyone must conform to it – and everyone who doesn’t is slandered as a hate-filled bigot.   Naturally, all of us would urge liberals to try and understand our views, but that won’t really be successful – a liberal who enters in to the worldview of a conservative in order to understand it would very swiftly cease to be a liberal.  Not saying that they’d go out and become TEA Party activists the next day, but they’d cease to be liberal because they’d cease to automatically accept whatever the liberal powers-that-be decree…and thus they would be ostracized by fellow liberals, and most people cannot tolerate ostracism (not for nothing did the ancient Greeks give you a choice between drinking hemlock and going in to exile; some choose hemlock as the preferable option).

What all this means is don’t expect liberals to be kind or merciful: they can’t be and remain liberals.  To remain liberals they must remain ignorant of and fearful about us.  Just keep that in mind as we battle it out.

An Expert Offers an Opinion on Expert Opinion

Mark Noonan1 Comment

And, as you might guess, he’s in favor of the experts:

…I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all. By this, I do not mean the death of actual expertise, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. There will always be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other specialists in various fields. Rather, what I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live…

The author, Tom Nichols, presents himself as, “…an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy.”  The first question that leaps to my mind is, “how do you attain ‘achievement’ in public policy?”.  I know that when I go to a doctor that I’m going to get some doctoring done – a blood pressure test, a cut stitched up, or some brain surgeried upon.  How do I know I’ve got some “public policy” when I go to an expert in public policy?  Now, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Nichols is clearly an intelligent and well-informed man and his article well repays reading – but the one thing certain about Mr. Nichols is that he’s no democrat.  He’s an elitist – someone who has gathered a certain amount of knowledge attached to a credential and thus thinks his views should carry more weight than people without the certain knowledge and, especially, the credential.  Here’s the worst thing I read:

...There was once a time when presidents would win elections and then scour universities and think-tanks for a brain trust; that’s how Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others ended up in government service while moving between places like Harvard and Columbia…

While Mr. Nichols is clearly well-informed, I doubt that he’s really thought the matter through.  The lauding of Kissinger, alone, reveals that.  What are Kissinger’s greatest achievements?  Detente with the USSR, opening relations with the People’s Republic of China and negotiating the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam.  Somewhere on a trip between Harvard and Columbia, I guess, Kissinger decided that the USSR was eternal and had to be kowtowed to, that Mao’s China could be a partner for us and that scuttling the Republic of Vietnam were in our best interests.  Fortunately, shortly after Kissinger stopped being our national expert, we managed to get that bone-headed, non-expert Ronald Reagan who at least managed to dismantle the USSR, even if he couldn’t undo our defeat in Vietnam, nor turn our policy towards China in a rational manner (which would be to have nothing to do with that beastly, anti-human government).

Experts brought us the United States Federal Reserve.  Experts decided that we should enter full-blown, provide-them-everything-we-can-even-if-we-stinted-our-own-forces alliance with the USSR against Germany, without a reciprocal requirement of the USSR to immediately enter in to the war against Japan.  Experts shoved us in to the Korean War and then settled for a stalemate with enemies who disposed less than a 10th of the power of the United States. Experts got us in to Vietnam (and experts lost us Vietnam). Experts brought us Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, affirmative action, the EPA and $17 trillion in debt.  Had the experts consulted the average American on any of these things, none of them would have come out as they did.  Think about it – ok, American people, I want you to decide: 33,000 dead over three years for a stalemate in Korea, or 10,000 dead in a year for complete victory?  You pick.  The experts picked the former.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.  That was from Chesterton, explaining that in the very important things in life – whether to marry, to bear children, to fight a war – it is of no use going to an expert.  The expert won’t know the right answer because he lacks sufficient knowledge to decide.  No matter how much time he spends in Harvard and Columbia, no matter how many credentials he acquires, he simply will not know enough.  The most brilliant economist ever produced in a university won’t know the answer to even the simple question of how much spaghetti should be produced next month.  And yet he’ll propose to tell us how to organize our whole economy.

This does not mean the average bumpkin will get it right, either, of course.  But if the average bumpkin is making his own decisions, then he’s likely only to affect – for good or ill – himself and those around him.  The expert proposes to decide for society and thus it is all of society which pays the price if the expert gets it wrong, as he almost invariably does for lack of sufficient knowledge.  But, also, I think the bumpkins will more often get it right than wrong.  A bumpkin, for instance, instinctively knows that if you’re going to fight a war, you fight it all the way with everything you’ve got.  It is true that a bumpkin might be demagogued in to a war – but he won’t be demagogued in to a war where he’s forbidden to use all of his power to fight it…or that he’s got to be more careful about offending opinions than the lives of his comrades.

I do understand the distaste Mr. Nichols has for the opinions of the ignorant and the way they can be shouted so loud because of the internet.  They irritate me, as well.  Nothing quite gets on the nerves so much as to listen to people who clearly know nothing making absurd statements about an issue.  But some of the most absurd statements these days come from people with the credentials from the prestige universities.  I understand the desire that the terms of the debate be set by just a few and that we all argue only within those parameters.  This is called adhering to the party line.  But patient people, people with a bit of love for the people; leaders who are any good, at all, learn how to humor people and get their views across even in the face of the most mind-boggling idiocy.  No great king, President or Prime Minister of the past worked with a collection of geniuses.  He worked with people, which means a certain percentage were fools and some of them quite destructive fools, at that.  There is an appeal in exiling the fools but we face two insuperable obstacles: we can’t define “fool” with sufficient precision and without the fools the truly great cannot achieve their highest potential.  Paradox of human life – it is only by the frictions of dealing with a wide variety of people, some of whom seem to go out of their way to deliberately hamper action, that we can find the leaders who will be able to thread their way through crisis to victory.

Is there, then, no place for an expert?  Depends.  When I’m heading in for brain surgery then I very much want an expert.  Same thing when I want the leaking faucet fixed.  But in the grand scheme of things and in the largest issues of life, then the experts must just join the argument and do their best with everyone else.  If an expert feels he isn’t getting his way, then it might not be so much a flaw among the morons, but a flaw in the expert’s argument.

In the end, I trust to democracy – the rule of the people.  This is not an arrogant assumption that I know better than the man with more education, but that I know what’s best for me – and even if I’m wrong, it is still vastly better for me to decide for myself than to supinely accept some allegedly expert opinion in contravention of my own sense of the matter.  Experts, after all, vigorously assured me that we had to bail out the banks in 2008-2009 in order to save the economy – my common sense rebelled against it back then and my common sense has been proven correct in the event.  The banks were bailed out, but the economy didn’t get better.  I felt instinctively that if someone made a bone-headed investment decision and faced bankruptcy, then he’d better just deal with his bankruptcy and work for the best.  I’ll bet that if the question were put that way in 2008, the vast majority of the non-experts would have agreed that the failures must endure the results of their actions.  Experts disagreed and they won the argument.  How is that working out for us?

Here we are in 2014 and our nation is a wasteland, brought to this state of affairs by experts bamboozling us in to accepting a load of nonsense about how things work.  To be sure, we average dimwits played our despicable role in this – too many of us, too many times, were eager to accept an expert opinion if it was couched in terms of “no pain, lots of gain”.  But the con artist is not let off because his mark is a sucker.  As we move forward and try to find the ways and means of fixing the problems and restoring America, I think our best course of action is to just go with plain, old common sense – the sense of the average person, even if he’s at a TEA Party demonstration with a misspelled sign.  He might not be educated, might not know all the nuances of the issue, but if his basic thrust is “leave me alone to take care of me and mine”, then I think he’s on to something…and his desire should take precedence over even the very best written policy paper from a credentialed expert.

Secession is the Answer Update

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Spreading like wildfire around the country:

There’s nothing like a guy with a few million bucks to lend instant credibility to a previously penny-ante movement to split up the state of California.

Venture capitalist Tim Draper of Silicon Valley has filed paperwork for a November ballot measure that would divide California into six states, calling the Golden State as presently constituted “too big and bloated.”

I think that six is a bit high, but the point still holds – California is too big and bloated.
I think this idea will start to get legs – people are tired of out of touch, remote government.

Mark Steyn, NRO, Liberal Fascism and the Conservative Coward

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Taking note of the Duck Dynasty fracas, Mark Steyn wrote what we expected – a witty and devastating critique of a culture being bound hand and foot by liberal fascist control freaks.  To illustrate his point, Mr. Steyn noted a couple of old jokes from ancient times (ie, the 1970’s):

…Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.

Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”…

This caused the editor of NRO – Jason Steorts – to first make a tut-tutting criticism of Mr. Steyn for not understanding that being a meany is bad and then, when massive criticism was directed at Mr. Steorts, he just doubled down:

The point is basic courtesy, Mark. It’s that you could mount your opposing argument without insulting people. Sure, you have the right to insult people, but I can’t sympathize much with someone who exercises that right just to prove it exists, which seems to have been part of your rhetorical strategy. What I would like to de-normalize is boorishness, whatever its content…

And this, in turn, prompted a small comment from me:

No, Mr. Steyn cannot mount an argument against the left without insulting them. To disagree with them is, in their view, to be insulting. We’re not dealing with rational people, here. We’re dealing with people who are, in the largest sense of the word, insane. For crying out loud, they really think that its ok to kill a baby! When you’re dealing with that sort of irrationality, trying to keep it polite is the least of your concerns. Our job, as sane people, is to drive these people entirely out of power. We won’t do that if we try to pretend that lunacy has a proper place in the debate.

I don’t know Mr. Steort from Adam – until just yesterday, hadn’t the foggiest clue who NRO’s editor was, or that they even had one.  But the fact that someone like Mr. Steort is editing the on-line descendent of the magazine William F. Buckley founded to “stand athwart history yelling, ‘stop!” speaks volumes about how low we’ve fallen.  Per the comment at Red State, that has now been changed to, “Standing Athwart History, Yelling Okay Go Right Ahead (We Don’t Want to Offend Anyone)”.  Red State also noted that Mr. Steort is in favor of gay marriage, but that isn’t as important as the discovery, by me, that in reading Mr. Steort’s article in favor of gay marriage, I also discovered that he’s in favor of insanity, as well.  To quote:

…Romantic attraction is a unique type of desire in which a person is wanted in his or her unity and totality, and sexual activity is the unique expression and bodily dimension of such desire. The desire is thus unique in both its “inner” (“subjective,” “mental”) and its “outer” (“objective,” “bodily”) dimensions, and its fulfillment is intrinsically good…

If this is conservatism, then we’re in trouble.  Its basically a statement that “if it feels good, do it”…and its good.  As G. K. Chesterton noted, the purpose of Progressives is to go on making mistakes, and the purpose of Conservatives is to go on preventing the mistakes from being corrected.  A Progressive comes up with a completely stupid and insane idea and immediately puts it in to effect – when it all falls apart and destroys everything in its path, here comes the Conservative to say, “we can’t change it; it is part of the sacred inheritance of the past!”.  Mr. Steort exemplifies this.  I really can’t say this is a matter of stupidity, however; Mr. Steort is clearly not a dumb man.  But he just as clearly doesn’t want to offend against the liberal world view.  That would be bad.  It would get liberals mad and they’d say nasty things about you.  And, so, I’ll put it down as cowardice.  Much easier to write pretend-conservative pieces where you essentially concede the liberal argument while making small asides which claim you still respect and honor that old time religion.

As I noted in my small comment, liberals are essentially insane.  Not in the clinical sense where we could diagnose and treat them, but in the fact that what they propose flies in the face of facts and logic.  That what they propose, if really and fully implemented, would utterly destroy human life on earth.  People who think that babies can be killed, that tax increases cause prosperity, that crony-capitalism is a good idea, that government employees are altruistic, that a small elite can better decide things than people on their own; that a hack, Chicago politician is a new messiah – these are not rational views to hold.  Added to their irrationality and completing it is a mercilessness which knows no bounds.  You can rely on it that no matter how nice and polite we are, the left will still seek to destroy anyone who dares to dissent.  This is not a call for us to start being mean and merciless – but for pity’s sake, don’t just sit there and be a punching bag.  Hit back.  And keep on hitting because until we completely remove the left from all ability to effect policy in this nation, we will not be able to reform and save it.

You Say You Want a Revolution…

Mark Noonan3 Comments

…well, you ain’t alone and you’ve got allies you never suspected:

On Thursday, a town hall meeting hosted by Al Sharpton and the National Action Network to address gun violence exploded into a revolt against “Chicago Machine” politics, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and the aldermen in City Hall, with panel and audience members calling to vote out their elected officials.

One 82-year-old preacher even called for “Tea Party” style meetings in some of Chicago’s south side communities such as Altgeld Gardens and Trumbull Park.

“This was a historic event,” Paul McKinley of V.O.T.E. (Voices of the Ex-Offender) and former 2nd Congressional District GOP nominee to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr. told Breitbart News. “Not because of Al Sharpton coming to town,” he continued. “This was first time since electing Mayor Harold Washington in the eighties that all of these grassroots groups and community organizers have come together under one roof to talk about the problems plaguing our community.”

While the stated goal for Sharpton was to bring the many different groups together to discuss solutions to the city’s violence epidemic, he may not have gotten the types of responses he was looking for. Calls for more gun control laws and getting guns off the streets were nonexistent and not mentioned by residents throughout the session.

Instead, attendees offered solutions addressing the problems facing their community as a whole rather than just taking on “gun violence” itself. Audience members addressed the need for jobs and solving the foreclosure crisis plaguing Chicago’s south and west sides. Perhaps the loudest message—and one that Reverend Al or the Chicago media have yet to report on—echoed by several different people in attendance as well as panel members was that it is time for the black community to start voting differently.

“The manner in which we have been voting needs to change,” Wendy Pearson, an activist against Chicago school closings, told the room. “I’m here to say to you that we have been trained to vote in a specific manner… we need to start looking at the manner in which our elected officials have been voting… if they have not voted in a manner that is beneficial to you, yours, and your community, then you need to start voting them out.”

McKinley told the room, “Stop blaming just anybody for the violence in the city of Chicago. Blame the right people, not just white people, but the right people. Because it’s not just white folks a part of this, but it is on the fifth floor. The fifth floor took your schools, the fifth floor just took your jobs that he said that he gave to the ex-offender… and every single alderman was a part of this criminal process.”…

As I’ve been saying since before the 2012 election, there is a growing dismay with just how bad things are out there.  The Ruling Class and its lapdogs in the MSM don’t talk about it – in fact, they’ll ignore this, too.  To them, there can’t be an event where a lot of black people are fed up with a liberal government.  Just isn’t possible.  The TEA Party is racist, ya dig?  But these people are just as much TEA Party activists as a mostly white crowd in rural Oklahoma.  In fact, they are more so – they aren’t worried about the long term effects of liberal government: they are living with the hideous effects of long term liberal government.

These are the people we need to talk to.  Some people get it – Rand Paul recently opened up an office in Detroit.  Sure, its a help to his Presidential ambitions, but it is also good for Detroit.  Paul is a conservative who knows that conservatism can help – and would be voted for by lots of people who currently vote Democrat.  Now, would we get a majority in Chicago?  No.  Don’t need it, anyway.  But if we can drive up our total in Chicago by 10 or 20 percentage points, then Illinois becomes a Red State.  Do that in Los Angeles and California becomes a Red State.  Do that in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania becomes a Red State.  Starting to see the picture?  Bottom line, except for a few places like Rhode Island and Maryland, there is no State which is safe from the GOP if we can just get a bit more in the large, urban areas.

These people are ready for a change.  Their schools suck, there are no jobs, blood sucking politicians are bleeding them dry, crime is rampant and they aren’t allowed to own guns.  If we go in there and offer them real change – show them some respect and offer them some help – then we’ll get their votes, and we’ll win every election.

Continue reading →

New Rule for Dealing With Liberal Stories

Mark Noonan82 Comments

Recently we had a story claiming that a gay server was denied a tip because the family was a pack of homophobic bigots as well as a story about an alleged poor woman who essentially had to live like an idiot because of the bad, mean, nasty way America treats poor people.  There were two commonalities in these stories:

1.  They supported the liberal narrative about the United States (we’re just bad, bad people) and so were embraced and spread widely by liberals.

2.  They were complete nonsense.

The people who did the actual perpetration of the stories were likely just con artists who knew their target audiences.  For the first story (the gay server denied a tip) it was probably an attempted replay of an earlier story claimed by a black woman of being denied a tip by racists, and she picked up a pack of money from sympathetic people. For the poor woman, it appears a more straight-forward scam: she was asking for people to help her out financially and appears to have succeeded (at least temporarily) in picking up a bucket of money.  The con artists aside, what this tells us about the left is that they will readily believe anything as long as it confirms them in their world view.  There is no bit of nonsense too absurd for them – think about it: they actually believed that someone would (a) find out what sexual orientation their server was and then (b) go out of their way to insult the server.  The left bought it because it confirmed their view that Christians are just hateful bigots who go out of their way to insult people of different views.

The left will never cease to be suckers about this sort of thing.  There seems to be some sort of malfunction in the liberal brain – while some can start to think (and thus wind up as Libertarians or Conservatives), most of them never seem to form a single, independent thought in their lives.  But there is a lesson for us on the right:  whenever you hear a story which tends to confirm the liberal narrative about life in the United States, our first and best course of action is to presume it is a lie.  Don’t go out on a limb and definitely call it a lie, but you’ll be safe if you immediately search for holes in the story and start pointing them out.  As for the gay server thing, I saw that on a liberal website some weeks ago and immediately pointed out that it is highly unlikely that a group of patrons would know the sexual orientation of their server – so even if they were a pack of hideous homophobes, they would not likely have opportunity to give vent to their all-consuming hatred.  The story seemed false from day one for me – but the comments from the liberals were all shocked and hurt about how this hateful thing had happened and applause for the “courage” of the gay server (with no explanation of how it is courageous to be untipped).

It could be, from time to time, that in a nation of 317 million people that a set of circumstances will occur which confirms some part of the liberal narrative.  The law of averages does work that way – but the plain facts are that the United States is not a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant nation.  We are not cruel to the poor, nor indifferent to the plight of those who suffer.  We are tolerant and mostly very polite about things and don’t give vent to our feelings for the most part (and in some cases, it would be better if we did).  We’re pretty nice people, all in all.  And, so, the chances of there being a true story confirming liberalism are very, very small.  When confronted with such stories – demand proof; independent verification and always keep a few links of liberal BS stories handy to slam back liberals who claim that this story is sure to be true.

The Knockout Game

Mark Noonan30 Comments

I’ve seen reports on this sort of activity for some time, but I guess it is getting rather widespread as even the MSM is starting to report on it.  For those still unaware, the “Knockout Game” appears to be something which mostly involves groups of young African-Americans who set out to “knock out” a victim with a punch – and it appears to be that you “win” by doing it in one punch.  While we cannot say for certain that there hasn’t been a group of white, Latino or Asian kids doing it, I’ve seen no reports of such.  Additionally, most of what I’ve seen is that the victims are non-black (whites, Jews, Asians, etc). 

The activity neatly encapsulates the entirety of our civilization’s collapse: it is almost a certainty that these young people have no fathers worthy of the name; it is almost a certainty that all of them have been heavily exposed to the glorified violence of popular culture; it is almost a certainty that none of them have been instructed in any religious faith, let alone the Christianity which is in the ancestry of nearly all of them; given that they are minority youth, it is almost a certainty that they have been fed a pack of lies about how white America is out to get them; it is almost a certainty that a very large number of them – and perhaps a majority – have never lived in a household where one or both parents work for a living on a regular basis; it is almost a certainty that whatever education they have is via the public schools and thus there is a high probability they are functionally illiterate and almost entirely ignorant of history.  These kids simply know no better – still responsible for their actions, but where was their instruction on how to live a decent life?

Now it is time to be very blunt:  these kids are the product of liberalism.  Yes, they are filled with rage and hopelessness and our liberals will tell us that is because of racism…but they are actually so filled by liberalism, itself.  The liberalism which broke down the family, ruined the education system, denigrated religious faith, preaches hatred of the United States, and so forth. These are the children of liberalism.

But aside from that, I find something very odd and very worrying – you would expect kids who have had their lives ruined to, well, be bad…but why such a cowardly and cruel activity?  I’ve seen some of the videos and its not like they are challenging someone to a fight and then winning.  They are sneaking up on people and whacking them in a cowardly, underhanded attack.  Where did that particularly nasty aspect of it come from?  Who is teaching them to be cruel and cowardly?  That is something I would look in to: where did this come from?

Other than that, the only fix for this is to entirely defeat liberalism – destroy it and remove every last liberal from any position of power and influence.  Only then can we start to fix our society and slowly build back towards a place where a young kid simply wouldn’t dream of doing something like the Knockout Game.

 

Welfare Outnumbers Full Time Workers

Mark Noonan11 Comments

They want to make beggars out of us because beggars are easier to please:

Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau.

They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.

There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers

Note that – the number of workers only gets up to 101.7 million because of government workers; which means when you add up total government dependency, it outnumbers self-sufficiency even more.  This is the terrible result of economic policies which reward crony capitalism and social policies which encourage dependency.  In a rational world, those who are dependent should be no more than 10% or so of the total population, not rising above 50% because – point blank – one man producing wealth cannot support one man consuming wealth.  Almost everyone should be self sufficient, or your nation is in terminal decline.

This is why I say we’ve only got a few years left – if we don’t halt and reverse this soon, America will collapse.  There will be no United States of America any longer as each section breaks free – especially among the areas with the least amount of dependency who will no longer wish to tax themselves in to penury to pay for the dependents.  It is change or die.

This Time, the Jews Aren’t Sticking Around

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Instructed by what happened after 1933 in Germany, modern Jews, it appears, are not waiting around to see what the New New Order will be like:

Some fifty years ago, a mass migration transformed Judaism in France and in other countries of Western Europe. Algeria, a French colony in North Africa, was granted independence in 1962. Over one million French residents — European settlers and natives that had opted for French citizenship and culture — had no choice but to flee across the Mediterranean to the mother country, and ten percent of them were Jewish. Overnight, the Jewish community in Metropolitan France grew from 300,000 to over 400,000 souls…

…Now, a reversal is taking place. Today Jews are migrating out of France, and this is occurring in increasingly larger numbers.

This migration starts within France, as a mere change of locations. In Greater Paris, middle-class Jewish families are deserting neighborhoods that have been engulfed by more recent immigrants from Africa and the Near East. These new immigrant populations have proven prone to violence, and as radical Muslims, many entertain negative views about Jews and Judaism. Harassment, arson, and assault are frequent. There have been several murders. Even the liberal-minded Imam Hassan Chalghoumi of Drancy, who advocates friendly relations with Christians and Jews, was threatened and assaulted.

“I did not leave Morocco for France to be confronted by Morocco again in France,” a Casablanca-born Jewish physician confided to me…

Get out while the getting is good.  As the Muslim population surges in Europe the Muslim radicals grow in number and strength and start making demands – demands which are, for the most part, immediately accepted by the Ruling Class of Europe.  This acceptance is because the Ruling Class of Europe (like the Ruling Class everywhere in the West, including the United States) is cowardly – cowardly because they are not Christian, not Jewish, not anything…just rulers with lots of money and power and a determination to hang on to both as long as they can…and if they can buy a little peace for themselves by grovelling to Islamists, they’ll do it.  The Jews, though, are seeing the writing on the wall and aren’t sticking around until the cattle cars come ’round to pick them up.

As in all forms of descent, momentum takes over – from a mere fearful desire to appease the Islamists comes a desire to be as anti-Semitic as the Islamists.  There are moves afoot in Europe to ban the kosher preparation of food as well as circumcision of children (no, not much effort to ban the Islamic preparation of food).  Its easier, you see?  To stand up for the Rights of Man (which France, once upon a time, claimed loyalty to) takes courage and, in the end, a willingness to kill or die for the cause.  That can disturb the sweet deal you’ve got where the money pours in and you get to attend swank conferences on the taxpayer’s dime.

For the moment, Jews can find refuge – in Israel and the United States.  But even the United States is not absolutely secure, because if the American left does emerge completely triumphant in our current battle, if they are able to marginalize us and thus obtain full power to do as they wish, then it will become uncomfortable for Jews in the United States, as well (which just makes it even more amazing that so many American Jews vote for the people who are already turning on them).  We already see in the more liberal areas of the United States a kowtowing to Islam, which is just how it started in Europe…but kowtowing isn’t enough.  Eventually, such actions lead a person to joining the other side…to become anti-Semitic (some on the left have already made this journey).  And, so, in the end, if I were to advise a foreign Jew where to go, I’d say Israel…and pray the IDF is, indeed, up to the task of taking out Iran’s nuclear weapons program (American Jews, you’re not off the hook – you have to stick around and help us defeat this nonsense).

And, of course, it isn’t just Jews under threat.  In Europe there are also plenty of Christians who no longer feel that Europe is safe for them.  While Europe is ostensibly filled with Christians, my guess is that the number of Europeans who actually live as Christians is in the 10% range (some countries have a higher number – Ireland and Poland, for instance; but even in those places, it is probably just a bare majority…in some places of Europe, especially the power centers, there are hardly any Christians, at all).  I’ve read stories of Europeans emigrating to the United States simply because they feel they can’t raise their children to be Christians in Europe – the whole of society is weighted against them.  A two-track destruction of European civilization is going on – hammering the Christians who built it, welcoming in the Muslims who wish to end it.

Say what you will, but this is a fight to the finish – Western, Christian civilization has been under attack for centuries (I’d date it to the misbegotten – and entirely misnamed, as it’s proponents were amazingly ignorant – so-called Enlightenment of the mid 18th century).  Point blank, we are already living in what amounts to a post-Christian era, but which is still a Christian framework of society (such concepts as individual liberty, the worth of the individual, etc, are Christian concepts alien to all other civilizations on Earth).  Now, it seems, the ignorant and cowardly heirs of the so-called Enlightenment are essentially calling in Islam to finish the job.  It makes more sense than you might think – Enlightenment thinking is very Determinist in view; fatalistic, as it were: and so is Islam.  The modern, Western Determinist figures everything happens because of what has happened before, no human free will.  The Islamist figures everything happened because of God’s will, no human free will.  It is Christians (and Jews) who actually hold that humans have a part to play independent of God’s will…that we can choose our fate.  This conception built our civilization, and the end of our civilization is built around the end of such a concept.

How it will come out remains to be seen – though, as a Christian, I’m absolutely assured that my side wins, in the end.  But this doesn’t mean we have no role to play – that we cannot or must not fight.  The only question is: will we fight?  The Jews are (wisely) starting to flee an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe – but you can only flee so far.  And there is no place for the (at least) 150 million Americans who believe in the Judeo-Christian West to flee to.

UPDATE:  The left goes to ever more extreme lengths to attack Israel – now the fact that IDF soldiers don’t rape Muslim women is “proof” that IDF soldiers don’t think of Muslim women as human beings.  On the flip side, this must mean that the Muslim men who rape Christian women are paying them a compliment those nasty IDF soldiers never could…

Maybe a Third Party?

Mark Noonan44 Comments

I’m not one of those who is overly worked up over the pending resolution of the CR/Debt issue – given we only hold the House, we never were going to get much out of it and the sole purpose of the fight, for me, was to have a fight.  There were (and are) two reasons to fight:

1.  You never win a battle on defense.  You must attack in order to win.  MacArthur once was asked what his formula was for defensive war – he gave the one word answer:  “defeat”.

2.  To clarify things.  Fights make people pick sides.  Might as well know clearly who is with you and who isn’t.

But now that we have had the fight and we have started to go on offense and we have clarified things, I’m starting to wonder if the GOP is worth saving.  Boehner’s a good guy and mostly with us, but he seems to have flunked out on what should have been the basic strategy – pass the necessary legislation with a defund of ObamaCare and then done NOTHING until the President broke down.  Every GOP leader should then have been on TV morning, noon and night saying only this:  we’ve passed the necessary legislation to keep government open, we’re just waiting for Harry Reid’s Senate to pass it and Obama to sign it.  If Reid did bring it up for a vote,  and it was killed – then pass it, again.  If Obama got it and veto’d it, pass it again.  Until they break, we give nothing.  Eventually, they break and we end up with much less than we asked for – but they broke, not us.  But, the GOP leadership wasn’t up to that – and the reason appears to be that most of the GOP leadership is afraid of the Ruling Class.

They were looking at polls – some of which were, as usual, completely bogus – and the chattering classes getting all mad and, of course, some GOPers actually attacking the GOP and the leadership got scared…they started to surrender almost the moment the government was shut down.  They believed, that is, the nonsense story that shutting down the government was going to crush the GOP.  They believe this because that is what the Ruling Class believes – honestly, folks, they actually believe that the 1990’s government shutdown was a disaster for the GOP…even though we retained our Congressional majority in the election held just after the shutdown.  Its absurd, but it is what they believe…and so the GOP leadership was frightened that we’d lose in 2014, and so quickly lost heart.  And here’s the thing where I get to wondering if we need a new party:  even if it could be proved that a particular action on principal would cause a defeat, it is still the thing to do.  You don’t decide to do the right thing only because it is politically popular; you do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.  ObamaCare is an utter disaster – we disagree with it in general and in particular…in general because Big Government is a fraud and in particular because this law is just hideously bad on its own.  This is what we conservatives are supposed to fight against and the only leverage we’ll have short of a GOP majority in the Senate in 2015 is the debt ceiling and spending.  It wasn’t a matter of fighting against it some other way – this was the only way to fight against it.  Those who said we must not shut down and we must increase the debt were essentially saying, “don’t fight against ObamaCare”.  Screw that.

So, the question remains – should we form a new party?  A party which won’t have Beltway squishes and tools of the Ruling Class who will cut us off at the knees?  Now, remember, one thing a Third Party guarantees is President Hillary Clinton, and probably for a full 8 years.  A new party might be able to get a majority by 2024, but the chances of getting it sooner are very, very small.  Or should we still work on the GOP and see if by “primarying” a few more squishes the rest might get the message?  Might understand that the GOP is either the party to dismantle Big Government, or its nothing?

Discuss.