Category: Wokery

Politics by Assassination, Anyone?

Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. What I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means. David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability.  Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles.  But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point.  Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it.  Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life.  Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich.  Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case.  You are politically dead.

Politics is war.  Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

A semantic stretch is involved in Horowitz's "Politics is war." On a very strict definition of 'war,' war is only between states.  To put it pedantically, the only admissible values of the variables x, y in 'x is at war with y' are states. If so, there cannot be a war on drugs, on terror, on Christmas, a war between political factions or parties, between sub-state entities, or between a sub-state entity such as Hamas and a state such as Israel.

Critical thinking requires close attention to extended (stretched) uses of terms. Nevertheless, some semantic extensions are justified: politics is sufficiently like war to be called war.  In war sensu stricto assassination is often justified. 

This brings me to Luigi Mangione and his (alleged)  assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care.  Mangione has been charged with the premeditated murder of Thompson whom he shot in the back, not for personal reasons, but for political ones. So, with a bit of a stretch, we may call Mangione's (alleged) killing of Thompson a case of political assassination, despite the fact that Thompson was not a politician.

Now to the point: if you have no problem with Mangione's deed, then, by parity of reasoning, you should have no problem  with some right-winger assassinating U. S. District Judge James Boasberg.  Recall:

Mr. Trump signed a proclamation under the Alien Enemies Act last month, claiming that Tren de Aragua is "perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion" against the U.S. and declaring that all members of the gang in the U.S. unlawfully were subject to immediate detention and removal. [. . .] 

The day after Mr. Trump's proclamation, five Venezuelan nationals who were being held at a detention center in Texas filed a lawsuit that alleged Mr. Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act violated the terms of the law and asked a federal district court in Washington, D.C., to block their removals.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg swiftly agreed to stop their deportations for 14 days and later expanded his temporary order to prohibit the administration from removing all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to Mr. Trump's proclamation.

So: Do you have a problem with assassinating U. S. District Judges who unconstitutionally presume to put themselves about the duly-elected Commander-in-Chief who quite reasonably ordered the deportation of vicious Tren de Aragua illegal aliens?  I do! 

This is why I consider the death penalty to be what justice demands in the Mangione case, should he be convicted.  If he is found guilty, he should be made an example of and executed within a 'reasonable' period of time (two years?), time enough for a 'reasonable' number of appeals (two? three?).  I'm all for due process and the presumption of innocence.

We are doomed if we do not take a strong stand against  assassination.

Unfortunately, a majority of leftists, according to this article, think political assassination is a societal good. Excerpt:

Before the 21st century, Democrats were mostly working- and middle-class Americans who believed in the rule of law and loved America. The murderous ones—the violent Black Panthers and Weathermen—existed on the fringe. Now, though, the fringe has moved to the heart of the Democrat party, which is a death cult. And like all death cults, it’s requiring greater sacrifices. The latest manifestation is that a majority of self-identified leftists believe that assassinating people for political ends (e.g., Donald Trump and Elon Musk) is fully justified.

One of the things that radical Muslims and leftists have in common is that they are death cults. The Islamic penchant for rape, torture, and murder on gleefully sadistic scales (e.g., the Yazidis, Israelis, and Christians in Africa) speaks for itself. However, we in the West have been indoctrinated not to recognize the Democrat death cult for what it is.

To the leftist fools who call for political assassinations, whether in plain English, or under cover of such formulations as "Take down Elon Musk," I say:  Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind! (Hosea 8:7)

Related:  Paul Gottfried, On Democratic Party Violence

The Left’s Ideological Capture of the American Academy of Pediatrics

Here:

At the same time, the organization [the AAP] began uncritically embracing political positions popular on the left, calling for “the strongest possible regulations of handguns for civilian use,” for example, and going all-in on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The AAP’s “sample language for office forms,” for example, lists nine possible gender identities, eight possible sexual orientations, and asks, “What sex were you assigned at birth?” The guidance insists that pediatricians announce their pronouns to patients and ask about children’s gender identity during every visit, while also “degenderizing” their own language by using phrases such as “as a person who has a uterus” rather than “as a woman.” The AAP also supports policies that allow biological males to play on female sports teams, and its recommendations have been cited in lawsuits brought by trans activists against states that have banned boys in girls’ sports.

This garbage is beneath refutation.  The best way to combat it is by executive order, which is what President Trump did in Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.

Who Put the ‘Man’ in ‘Manufacture’?

A congresswoman asked the question recently. It is a  question from a fem-Dem that exposes her ignorance.

There is no 'man' in 'manufacture' in the way there is a 'bomp' in the "bomp bah bomp bah bomp" and a 'ram' in the "rama lama  ding dong."  

'Manufacture' is built out of two Latin words, manus, manus (fourth declension, feminine) meaning hand, and the verb facere, meaning to make.  Etymologically, to manufacture something it to make it by hand, which is something women can do and often do better than men.

It is also interesting to note that manus, manus (the singular and the plural are the same except that the 'u' is  short in the singular, long in the plural) is one of the few Latin nouns that is both feminine and ends in -us. Herewith, another reason why there is no 'man' in 'manufacture.'

I could easily go on, and you hope I won't.

But it does raise a question: why are Dems so ignorant? The person in question is a "white, educated female" like so many Never- and Anti-Trumpers. Educated?  Here is another word currently badly misused. Graduating with a degree from a leftist seminary doesn't make one educated in  any serious sense of the term.  We live in a time of inflation and not just of the monetary variety.

Why do Dems and 'liberals' generally have such low standards?  It is almost as if they have never met a standard they did not want  to erase, erode, eviscerate, eradicate.  

I have a lot to say on this topic, but it is time to get to work on more serious writing.  There is more to life than sanitizing the spaces befouled by leftists.  'Sanitize' in the sense of cleaning and making sane. 

MASA! Make America sane again! 

Let Them Eat Woke

Alex Castellanos:

Democrats, your party has a product problem, not a marketing problem. Don’t look around. Look in the mirror. Your problem is staring back. You’ve lost the ability to govern your country. That’s why your party expired in 2024 with Kamala Harris. That election was not a changing of the guard, it was the end of an era. The organizing principles that have defined the Democratic Party since the 1930s are now exhausted and near the grave.

Right. The Dems persist in thinking that their problem is one of 'messaging.' In a sense, it is: they have no message and they have no messenger.  I heard Jen "Circle Back" Psakis last night describe Kamala Harris as "brilliant." Truth is, she's a lazy, inauthentic know-nothing, and the opposite of brilliant. Just listen to her speak. She thinks the Cloud is a physical object up in the sky!

And you voted for her? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? Or were you emoting?  I understand that you don't like Trump.  Do you live your whole life on the basis  of likes and dislikes? Do you make major life decisions on the basis of knee-jerk reactions? Perhaps you are spending too much time on Facebook. Thumbs up! Thumbs down! Don't be a knee-jerk jerk off.

Addendum

My claim that the Dems have no message is not quite right. They have a message, a nefarious one that they wisely do not broadcast plainly, knowing that it would not sell well among the majority if honestly presented.  Hence all the vacuous and obfuscatory nonsense spouted by Kamala and Tampon Tim, together with merely performative clownish gyrations, pantomimed page-turnings, and expressions of unhinged hilarity and 'joyousness.' They must think we are idiots. But the joke is on them since expressions of contempt do not win votes.

As for their message, it is garbage from the git-go. Leading the cavalcade of Unsinn: the claim that there is no biological difference between men and women, a falsehood that underpins the morally offensive policy that biological males must be permitted to compete in women's sporting events. 

Integration, Free Association, Open Immigration

An addendum to The Integrationist Fantasy.

Forced integration violates the right to free association. To add to both the irony and the outrage, the integrators refuse to integrate with the integrated.

Open immigration is not only in open defiance of the rule of law, it also leads to a particularly offensive form of forced integration, as when illegal aliens are shipped to various locales to the detriment of the citizens who live there, citizens who lack the political clout to prevent the invasion.

It is no surprise why Trump garnered such strong support from the the black, Hispanic, and working class demographics.

Hats Off to Huntington Beach, California

It was the summer of '65. I was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California listening to the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, sing about hot rods, surfing, boy-girl relations and such when a song came on that "blew my mind" in the parlance of the day. But what I want to say, today, is that the city so-named 

. . . voted to approve the initiative brought by Mayor Pat Burns to Declare the City of Huntington Beach a “Non-Sanctuary City for Illegal Immigration for the Prevention of Crime.” As the City Council Members commented, the intent of this Resolution is to deliberately sidestep the Governor’s efforts to subvert the good work of federal immigration authorities and to announce the City’s cooperation with the federal government, the Trump Administration, and Border Czar Tom Homan’s work. This new City policy and Declaration are common sense, supports our law enforcement, and advances public safety throughout the City. What the Governor is doing does not.

Read it all. (HT: Fellow native-Californian, Ingvarius Maximus of Alhambra)

What is Fueling the L. A. Fires?

The obvious answer in terms of tinder-dry flammable materials, the Santa Ana winds, etc. does not cut deep enough. Ideologically, nature idolatry plays a major role in the ferocity, force, and human impact of the L. A. fires.  Their source is in radical environmentalism. Radical environmentalism, as opposed to a wise stewardship of nature, is an anti-humanism. This species of wokery issues in extreme misanthropy.  By radical environmentalism I mean positions like that of David Foreman, founder of Earth First.  His extremism is displayed in the following quotations:

  • “Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We’re not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.”
  • “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
  • “Humanity is the cancer of nature.”
  • “I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today” and, “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.”
  • “The optimum human population of earth is zero.”

This AI-generated list may be verified at AZ Quotes.

Quote-the-optimum-human-population-of-earth-is-zero-david-foreman-78-94-43

Now not every environmentalist on the Left embraces the late Foreman's absurdities. But the mitigated forms of leftist environmentalism are also objectionable.  Here is a paradox worth thinking about. A sane environmentalism cannot be anti-human. It must promote human flourishing. But this will require various violent interventions in nature including drilling, mining, farming, dam-building, tunneling, road-building, and the like.  These are anti-environmental actions. To refuse to manage nature for the sake of human flourishing by engaging in these anti-environmental actions will lead, as it has in the case of the California conflagration, to a worse environmental outcome.

That is the paradox. A sound environmentalism must be in some measure anti-environmental.  But a paradox is not a contradiction, and this is one that must be accepted.

So, even apart from arson, the L. A. inferno is in large part man-made by the likes of Governor Hair-Style and Mayor Dumbass. (Those choice epithets courtesy of Kurt Schlichter.) Wildfires there will always be. Their benighted policies, however,  have made things worse than they had to be.

The Integrationist Fantasy

Top o' the Stack.

E pluribus unum? Out of many, one? It can work, and it did work for a time, though not perfectly. But thanks to ‘progressives,’ regression has set in. Whether a One can be made of Many depends on the nature of the Many.

A viable One cannot be made out of just any Many.

To think otherwise is to succumb to what I call the Integrationist Fantasy. This is the dangerous conceit that people can be brought together peacefully and productively despite deep differences in their languages, religions, cultures, traditions, and values.

Read it all; it's short: your Twitterized (X'ed out?) brain will be able to process it.

Culpably Ignorant Dems

Is a soupçon of Schadenfreude justifiable? He who lives by DEI can expect to die by it.  Michael Shellenberger at X:

I’m not suggesting that Democrats consciously sought to destroy Los Angeles. The entertainment industry professionals in Malibu, Topanga Canyon, and Pacific Palisades, who voted overwhelmingly for California’s progressive Governor, Gavin Newsom, and LA’s radical Left mayor, Karen Bass, thought they were voting for social justice and sustainability. They didn’t imagine their vote would result in their homes burning down.

And yet that’s what their votes resulted in.

Too tepid for my taste. The Dems in question are not inherently stupid, but they deserve to be condemned for their culpable ignorance. They should have known better than to support the likes of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Karen "Go to the URL" Bass, Kristin Crowley, George Gascon, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the reprobates that populate their once-respectable party. They should have by now seen through the scam called 'social justice.'

The trouble with these people is that you cannot reason with them no matter how calm, fact-based, and rigorous your arguments. These Hollyweirdos do not inhabit the plane of reason and common sense.  They need to experience at their bodies and in their lives the consequences of their willful self-enstupidation.  Only then will some of them see the light.

Does the current LaLaLand conflagration have an upside? It does: it came at just the right time to galvanize the MAGA forces so that they can hit the ground running, take back the country, restore the republic, and defeat the depredatory Dems. May the Winds of Woke not prevail against them.

 

Leftists as Political Retromingents

A retromingent is an animal that urinates backwards.

Posturing as 'progressive,' the leftist pisses on the past, seeking to erase its memory by destroying monuments and redacting the historical record.  There is no piety in the leftist, no reverence. Try using those words at a Manhattan or Georgetown cocktail party and see what happens.

This political retromingency helps explain the leftists' lack of respect for language. 

If you erase history, however, not only will you not be able to learn from it, but you won't have anything left to piss on, either.  Your retromingency will cut counter to your benighted and backwards  modus vivendi et micturendi.

Instructive story here. 

The New Yorker‘s Cavalcade of Ignorance

The rag has high production values. I'll say that much for it. Otherwise, the current issue is a tsunami of folderol.  Sample:

“American Fascist,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s contribution, uses some variation on the word “fascist” 44 times across two and a half pages, along with 15 combined mentions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin. One imagines the interior of Snyder’s brain as a scarcely endurable popcorn machine, a rhythm of repetitive hissing and clicking that produces buckets of nearly identical thought kernels. Perhaps silence would be even harder for Snyder to endure. He offers one accidental moment of reflection, which serves to frame the entire New Yorker feature: “A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meaning … When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.”

Snyder believes himself a meaning-bearer in a landscape of lies. He is hardly alone. Exempted from the need to understand or even bother to describe the objects of their disdain, the magazine’s chosen blatherers accuse the invisible masses of the worst possible affronts to democratic order, language, and perhaps reality itself before an audience that is presumed to share their prejudices and to have uniformly voted the same way that they did. They are on one side, with “bad America” arrayed on the other. Snyder quotes the historian Robert Paxton, who warns that “the Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base, which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.” This is a ludicrous, ahistorical, paranoid, self-discrediting, and of course convenient statement for Paxton and Snyder and The New Yorker. It allows them to stand bravely against an entire nation of monsters, and just sorta leave it at that.
Read more if you can stomach it.
 
Dems urge Biden to sabotage Trump.
 
Debunking the Debunkers. That reminds me of Joe and Mika who paid a visit to Hitler in his bunker.  Did they make it out alive?

Stealth Ideologues: Hillary and Kamala

On 21 October 2016, I laid into Hillary for lying about the Heller decision. The post concluded:

Hillary is a stealth ideologue who operates by deception. This is what makes her so despicable. If she were honest about her positions, her support would erode. So not only are her policies destructive; she refuses to own them.  She is an Obamination both at the level of ideas and at the level of character.

'Kamala' is substitutable for 'Hillary' salva veritate as the philosophers say.  In plain English, if the first name is substituted for the second in the above passage, its truth is preserved.  

If you complain that my tone is polemical, I will reply that of course it is, and justifiably so: we are at war with our political enemies. The cadre Dems I have just mentioned are not mere political opponents who share with us a commitment to the principles and values of our great constitutional republic, but revolutionaries out to replace that republic by way of a "fundamental transformation," as Barack Hussein Obama put it. To imagine that we are  engaged with them in a gentle(wo)manly debate under the umbrella of shared commitments is to play the useful idiot as so many rank-and-file Dems still do. You are a superannuated sucker if you still think it is 1960 or even 1980.

I leave undecided whether Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus was right when he wrote, "Polemos (Πόλεμος) is the father of all and the king of all . . . ." (Fr. 53 from G. S. Kirk and J E Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 195)

And then there is this from the same date (21.X.16):

Leviticus 19:15: The Lord versus Hillary

“You shall not do injustice in judgment; you shall not show partiality to the powerless; you shall not give preference to the powerful; you shall judge your fellow citizen with justice."  Alternate translations here.

In the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said the following about Supreme Court  nominations.  "And the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing on behalf of our rights as Americans." 

This is the sort of leftist claptrap according to which the judiciary assumes  legislative functions and the Constitution is a tabula rasa on which anything can be written.  The purpose of the court is not to stand up to the powerful or take the side of the powerless, but to apply the law and administer justice.  

 There must be no partiality to the powerful. Might does not make right.  But neither does lack of might. There must be no  "partiality to the powerless." 

(Credit where credit is due:  I am riffing on a comment I heard Dennis Prager make. Plagiarism is another mark of leftism.) 

Related: Weakness does not Justify