The good Baron proffers a depressing Yes. Gates of Vienna and MavPhil have been sphere-mates for a good long time, going on 20 years. The Baron's wife Dymphna was a regular reader of MavPhil back in the early days and an e-mail correspondent of mine. It has been some years since she quit the sublunary. My very belated condolences to the Baron.
Category: Politics
The American Kakistocracy
A kakistocracy is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. (Wikipedia) This is what we have under the current bunch of Dems. The worst have risen to the top. 'President' Joe Biden should come to mind as leader of the pack. But can a puppet preside over anything? The question answers itself.
Biden is surely one of the worst in point of truthfulness. I used to say that Barack Obama was a master of the multiple modes of mendacity, but it appears that Joey B. has him beat. Here is a (partial) catalog of his sins against truth. HT: Tony Flood.
And here is a stab at a typology of untruthfulness.
On the bright side, Speaker McCarthy here demonstrates the fine art of political demolition as he shuts down a PBS wonkette politely, but decisively. The C-SPAN video runs for 3:33.
Tulsi Gabbard Exposes George Santos
Would that Tulsi would and could lay bare the brazen bullshit of every single swamp critter in the District of Columbia from the life-long liar Joey B. on down and not leaving out Alejandro Mayorkas, 'Director of Homeland Security' — how is that for an Orwellian title! — and Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, and do it with the style, grace, and integrity she demonstrates in this amazing video.
Please watch it and propagate it.
Who Killed JFK?
Here:
In a remarkable television broadcast on December 15, 2022, Tucker Carlson made an explosive charge. He pointed out that, contrary to law, the White House was refusing to release thousands of pages of documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Carlson said that these documents proved CIA involvement in the assassination and that someone within the government who had looked at these documents made a direct statement to this effect.
Here is what Carlson said: “Not long after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on camera in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, a lot of Americans started to have some questions about the Kennedy assassination. It was, you’d have to admit, a pretty extraordinary sequence of events. A lone gunman murders the president of the United States. And then, less than 48 hours later, that lone gunman is himself murdered by another lone gunman.
What are the odds of that?
And here is the Tucker Carlson broadcast that RFK, Jr. called "the most courageous newscast in 60 years."
Tucker Carlson on the Tulsi Gabbard Show
Tony Flood comments:
Their occasional descent into verbal coarseness was as disappointing as it was unexpected. It seems that even for some people I most admire, the effort to resist that cultural pull downward is no longer worth the bother.
Our society-wide descent into verbal and other forms of coarseness and crudity outside of locker-room-type contexts can with justice be laid at the doorstep of the Boomer cohort (1946-1964). Tucker and Tulsi are Gen-Xers, and their generation followed ours in the downward direction. I myself, on Facebook and also here a few times, have employed harsh invective against our political enemies using such words as 'shithead,' 'crapweasel' (which I picked up from Michelle Malkin), and 'chucklephuck.' I may also have used 'asshole.' Much less offensive is 'p.c.-whipped,' which I got from Ed Feser. I don't need to explain the allusion.
There are two words, however, that I never use in any context. These are words I never even mention let alone use, except via oblique mention. The one is the c-word when used as a synecdoche. So used, it is not merely crude but vile. The other is the mf-word, which is unspeakably vile for reasons only the morally obtuse will not understand.
One attempt at justification goes like this. "You attack me verbally or physically and I will reply in kind to give you a taste of your own medicine in the hope that this will dissuade you from future bad behavior." For when bad behavior goes unpunished, more bad behavior inevitably follows. As one of my aphorisms has it:
Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.
The problem, however, is that our enemies won't be dissuaded in this way, except in a few instances. They feel themselves to be fully justified in their attacks on us. And so the downward spiral continues. Cruder and cruder. I call it 'crudification,' to give an ugly word to an ugly thing.
Tony Flood is a Christian and he knows that charity is demanded of Christians. But is it prudent in this time of civilizational collapse to be a Christian and walk the walk? It all depends on whether the underlying metaphysics is true.
And so once again we see that all roads lead to metaphysical Rome.
Democrat Election Skulduggery
The Dems are now a hard-Left party. For a leftist, the end justifies the means. If you have to cheat to win, then you cheat. And so they cheat. Case in point: Arizona election fraud. See here, here, and here.
When caught, leftists lie about their cheating and about their lying. Do leftists ever tell the truth? Yes, of course — when it serves their purpose. Truth is not a leftist value. Their highest value is power, its gaining and maintaining.
Rod Dreher
Dreher's right about a lot of things despite his TDS. But who among us is wholly free of faults, foibles, and fatuities? Read on:
The United States is a country where we castrate young males and cut the breasts off of young females, and call it liberation. We are a country where it is considered moral progress to bring in deviant men who dress like women, and have them read to children modern fairy tales teaching them to question their bodies and their sexual identities. We are ruled by an elite class that treats LGBT culture as sacred, and that celebrates its way of life in commerce, in advertising, in education, and everywhere it can possibly be inculcated into the rhythms of daily life. Our ruling class and its dominant value system now celebrates racism, and calls it "diversity, equity, and inclusion." Our young people are suffering a horrible mental health crisis. Millions of our people, especially poor and working class people, are succumbing to "deaths of despair" via drug and alcohol addiction.
Our young are going to live with less material, social, and emotional security than their parents and grandparents, while our liberals are tearing down all sources of solidarity outside of radical politics, and our conservatives mostly don't care. The United States is busy destroying its higher education system, which used to be the envy of the world, all for the sake of ideologizing it. We are also destroying the capacity for excellence in science and nearly every other field of endeavor, for the sake of DEI ideology. The rich are getting richer, and the numbers of the economically precarious grow daily. And for the past two decades, Washington has not seen a war it didn't want to fight, even as the woke war machine understandably struggles to convince young Americans that serving in the armed forces is worth doing. Respect for God is in collapse among American youth. Violent crime is up. American pop culture celebrates what is most violent, sexual, and degraded in the human experience, and exports that baseness globally. Over and over, as I travel through Eastern Europe, I hear the same thing from beleaguered parents, teachers, and religious leaders: that there is no way to resist American pop culture and its effect on their young. A high school teacher in Poland once told me that there is nothing at all in his country remotely as powerful as Western pop culture in forming the moral sensibilities of young Poles. What we Americans have done and are doing to our country, we are training the next generation of young people abroad to do to theirs.
And on and on.
Try being a normal conservative outside of the US bubble, and you'll see how America, which used to be a beacon of hope to others, is now seen with ambivalence, and even hostility, by people who see how the United States is destroying its own society, and is also trying to export its corruption abroad. It's a challenge to love your country when you listen to older people in the former Soviet bloc ask you, one way or the other, what happened to the Shining City on a Hill that they used to love?
Excellent, Rod, excellent! But then why the hell do you attack Trump? Did you listen to his announcement speech? WTF is wrong with you?
So Long, Nancy
I bid Madame Speaker a fond adieu on Substack.
The Militant Defends Trump and Our Civil Liberties
I never thought I'd be quoting from The Militant! A tip of the hat to Tony Flood who writes,
I could consider making a tactical alliance with one who signs off with "The fight to defend constitutional liberties is at the center of the class struggle today." This is classic Marxism, not Antifa terrorism.
Populist democracy makes for strange bedfellows. This is true democracy, not Orwellian 'democracy' which is the wokester's name for oligarchy. Why then am I not a socialist? Two reasons. First, socialism does not work economically. Second, because socialism runs counter to human nature and will not be freely adopted, socialism must be enforced. Enforcement requires a massive state apparatus inimical to individual liberty. It would be interesting to do a comparison between totalitarian state socialism and 'woke' capitalism. Both are totalitarian, anti-populist, and suppressive of individual freedoms such as freedom of speech and thought. (See fourth quotation below.) How then do they differ? Excerpts:
Throughout the final days of the 2022 campaign, Democrats centered their fire on former President Donald Trump. They claim “democracy itself” is threatened if he ever holds office again. Before Trump was even elected in 2016, Democrats unleashed the FBI against him — and against constitutional freedoms working people have won in blood and sorely need. They’ve used congressional witch hunts and launched a cascade of legal cases against him, his family members and political allies.
Speeches by prominent Democrats make abundantly clear they will continue on this course whoever wins control of Congress. The real culprits responsible for Trump, they insist, are the millions of working people President Joseph Biden calls “semi-fascists” and believes can’t be trusted to make political decisions.
The entirety of Biden’s prime-time Nov. 2 speech — his main address prior to the election — was to attack so-called MAGA Republicans as a “threat to democracy.”
[. . .]
Then in the Nov. 2 speech, Biden said Trump supporters threaten the rule of law, not because of what they do, but because of what they think and say. This is an attack on freedom of speech itself.
[. . .]
The only other issue Democrats campaigned around is abortion, built on false claims that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling this summer outlawed it. But that isn’t true. It held abortion had no basis in the Constitution and returned the debate over the issue to the people and their elected representatives.
[. . .]
Smear opponents as ‘foreign agents’
From the beginning, one key theme of the Democrats’ assault on Trump and his administration was the utterly disproven charge that they were hooked up with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They got the FBI to put forward the Steele Dossier, a collection of gossip and smears paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, to try and impeach Trump.
Another Useful Idiot Crosses My Path
I'm the chess guy hereabouts. A year ago I got a call from an 86-year-old retired chemist with an interest in the game. A meeting was arranged, a game was played, and then the talk turned to politics. The old man told us that he had voted for Biden out of revulsion at Trump. He said he had been a Republican all his life but lately became a Democrat. Brian and I were gentle with him, drawing him out to see how deep he'd dig his hole. It was deep enough for us to write him off as an utterly clueless old man living in the past.
Part of the problem with such people is that they live by a code of civility that will get you killed in the present-day political world should you dare to enter it. They don't understand that the Left is at war with us, and leftists no longer hide the fact. Their stealth ideologues of, say, 10-15 years ago are now out in the open and brazen in their plans and proclamations. Leftists see politics as war, and if we don't, we lose.
Brian and I are a couple of patzers, which is not to say that we won't clean your clock at the local coffee house. We are 'B' players (1600-1800) in the USCF hierarchy. The game with the old man turned into a training session. He acquitted himself so poorly we never heard from him again despite our welcoming manner.
That is another fault of old men. Their outsized egos make them impermeable to instruction. They cannot stand to lose. But life is hierarchical and you will lose again and again and again. Wokesters with their promotion of 'equity' (equality of outcome) and their assault on merit rail against life's natural hierarchy, but to no ultimate avail. In the end, reality wins. With apologies to Ron DeSantis, reality is where 'woke' goes to die.
Fetterman Unfettered: Against Ableism
In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is currently competing with Dr. Mehmet Oz for a seat in the U. S. Senate. Any objective person who observes both men in action can see that Fetterman is mentally, morally, and politically unfit for office. (I won't comment on the 'hoodie,' the ugly forearm tattoos, the neck bulge, the man's lack of a career outside of politics, or his 'anti-gravitas': the man's overall thuggish appearance.)
Mentally, he has trouble formulating clear sentences. A recent stroke has left him impaired. Morally, he is a brazen liar: he recently stated in a debate with Dr. Oz that he supports fracking when it is obvious from his previous assertions and his overall position that he does not. Politically, he supports destructive hard-Left positions with respect to drugs and crime and everything else.
But let's say you believe in 'equity' as wokesters use the word. You believe in equality of outcome and proportional representation regardless of merit and qualifications. If 'equity' is your concern why shouldn't a stroke-impaired man be a U. S. senator? After all, if dementia is no bar to high office, why should stroke-impairment be? Fetterman's fit with the Biden bunch couldn't be tighter. To demand qualifications for high office or for any job at all is to discriminate against the unqualified, and we now know that discrimination is among the worst of sins. We are all equal and the supposed accomplishments and talents of Dr. Oz the heart surgeon really ought to count for nothing in an equitable society. We have made progress in the 'progressive' sense of the term. And we are better people for it.
The disabled are just as qualified as the rest of us. For they are not really disabled at all; they are differently abled. I myself was born with only one functioning ear. But this birth defect gives me the ability to block out sound in bed by putting my good ear down on the pillow. Clearly, this wonderful ability of mine compensates for all of the drawbacks of monaural hearing such as the inability to tell from which direction a sound is coming. The point generalizes: all disabilities are really abilities in disguise. No one should ever be evaluated in any way on the basis of supposed 'talents' or 'qualifications' or 'abilities' or 'accomplishments.' What I said in my first paragraph convicts me of the thought crime of 'ableism.' I ought to check myself into the nearest 'progressive' re-education camp.
Tulsi Gabbard Endorses Kari Lake for Arizona Governorship
Three Axes of Conflict
Antony Beevor in The Spanish Civil War (Orbis 1982, Penguin 2001, p. 279) writes that in the aftermath of the war both sides engaged in gross simplifications for propaganda purposes:
As a result, the three axes of conflict (left-right, centralist-regionalist, and authoritarian-libertarian) have often been crudely amalgamated, leaving the ferocity of the war partly unexplained.
Philosophers do well to study history to offset their penchant for the bird's-eye view. They need to come to ground from time to time if only to fuel themselves for further flight. Feasting on the carrion of fact, however, is not particularly nutritious. So what caught this philosopher's eye was the three-axes schema. Philosophers love schemata. They love the synoptic and panoptic survey. 'Spectators of all time and existence . . . ."
The three-axes schema strikes me as relevant to the current political war in the USA as we teeter on the brink of World War Three thanks to the stupidity and criminality of the Democrat Party and the useful idiots who support it.
1) Left-Right. It might be useful to distinguish between the Old Left, the New Left, and the 'Woke' Left. (Having sneered, I now drop the sneer quotes, at least for the space of this paragraph.) What distinguishes the Woke Left is corporate capitalism, the globalist capitalism of mega-corporations with the economic, and in consequence thereof political, clout to bend both government and the Fourth Estate to their collective will, thereby destroying the independence of both of the latter and eliminating checks on their unbalanced power.
2) Centralism-Regionalism. Liberty versus tyranny defines the battle for the soul of America. Tyranny emanates from the central government which, while endlessly mouthing 'democracy' and 'rule of law' respects neither. Liberty, if it can survive, will be defended locally and regionally by citizens with the civil courage to speak out and face 'cancellation' and worse. (I am thinking, among other things, of ordinary citizens who attend school board meetings and protest being labelled 'domestic terrorists' for rejecting the indoctrination of their children in Critical Race Theory, in 1619-type historical revisionism, in transgender ideology, and in anti-Caucasian ethno-masochism.) Regionalism is or is closely related to federalism. (The overturning of Roe v. Wade scored a point for the latter; the Left's febrile outrage clearly demonstrates its anti-federalism and anti-democratic spirit. )
3) Authoritarian-Libertarian. American conservatism is not authoritarian but classically liberal. But while classically liberal, and thus opposed to throne-and-altar paleo-conservatism, it also opposes the anti-religionism and anti-traditionalism of the Left, especially that of the 'woke' Left, which is a particularly virulent and lethal strain of leftism. It thus treads the via media avoiding both the Road to Serfdom (you get the allusion, of course) and the road to anarchy as lately instantiated by Atifa black shirts and BLM Marxist thugs.
Citizenry, Government, and Firearms
You say you don't trust the citizenry with firearms, but you do trust the government with them? If "the government is us" as Barack Obama and Joe Biden have said, what you say makes no sense. For if that were so, there would no difference in point of trustworthiness between the governors and the governed. But of course, Barry and Joey were bullshitting in Harry Frankfurt's sense, that is, shooting their mouths off with no concern for the truth, not even the concern the liar must have for the truth given his intention to hide it from us.
The government is most assuredly not us, but it is composed of people like us. And what are we like?
We are a mixed bag of a few saints, many scamps, and a broad mass of moral and intellectual mediocrities. And the same holds for those in government except that in government, scamps, fools, clowns, know-nothings, liars, bullshitters, quislings and the incompetent rise to high posts in a way that is impossible in the private sector.
The current (mal)administration is one of the worst if not the worst in the nation's history. The names say it all: Biden, Harris, Garland, Mayorkas, Granholm, Yellen, Buttigieg, Jean-Pierre, Pelosi, Schumer, and I'm just warming up.
And you are still a Democrat?
Why Tulsi Gabbard is Leaving the Democrat Party and Why You Should Too
Here at Substack. HT: Anthony Flood. Full text follows. Please propagate. Do your bit to restore some sanity to this country and to the world.
Why I'm leaving the Democratic Party
I love our country. Our God-given rights of freedom, life, and liberty enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights are my inspiration. I answered the call to duty and took an oath, dedicating my life to supporting and defending those freedoms, both in uniform and in public office.
Growing up in Hawaii gave me a special appreciation of our home, water, and precious natural resources. So when I was 21 years old I decided to run for Hawaii State House so that I could be in a position to protect our environment. I wasn’t politically affiliated before that, but as I was about to file my election papers, I had to choose which party to affiliate with.
As I did my research, I was inspired by Democrats who stood up against the war in Vietnam, and those who fought for Hawaii’s plantation workers who were being abused and exploited by wealthy landowners. I was inspired by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and drawn to the ideals of a big-tent Democratic Party that stood up for working men and women — the little guy. In contrast, the Republican Party seemed like one that stood for the interests of big business and warmongering elites. So I became a Democrat and remained one for over 20 years — an independent Democrat to be sure, but a Democrat nonetheless.
I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.
Here are some of the main reasons I’m leaving the Democratic Party, in brief. I’ll be tackling each of these in more depth in the coming weeks.
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