THE WOKE: Everyone we don’t like is a nazi. If you disagree with us about anything, you’re a nazi. That black woman? Nazi. That Jewish guy? Jewish nazi. That old guy who literally got blown up fighting nazis? Also a nazi for not agreeing with us. If you question this in any way? Nazi. And we’re going to get crazier and crazier so that we can weaponize this until we can bully everyone into compliance.
THE DEMOCRATS: Cool. We can use you useful idiots to consolidate power.
THE MEDIA: We are happy to reinforce this nonsense.
HOLLYWOOD: We can still keep raping each other though right?
THE WOKE: Sure.
THE REPUBLICANS: Duuuuuuuuuuuur…
BIG TECH: Awesome, then we’ll start installing a dystopian nightmare system that makes everyone you guys designate as undesirable subhuman filth unable to function in society.
GINA CARANO: You guys are kinda acting like nazis.
DISNEY: FIRED!
This post isn’t really about Gina Carano. Her firing is just another milestone in the culture war. I’ve been talking about this problem for about a decade now, as it’s gotten worse and worse, accelerating as big powerful lefty institutions discovered that they could harness the fire. You either toe their arbitrary line, or they try to destroy you.
And of course, regular people see this and understand it, but they keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to get cancelled themselves. Or they actively join in condemning whoever just got cancelled, in the hopes that they’ll be seen as friendly. Only that only works temporarily, because eventually the mob will turn on them too. We’ve seen that happen over and over with “allies”. You’re only an ally as long as you are useful.
When there are no Other-Than-Lefty targets, they eat each other in a cannibal feeding frenzy. I’ve documented a bunch of those here over the years. But as soon as there is an OTL target, they fixate on that. The nail that sticks up must be hammered down.
Of course the social justice mobs don’t actually give a shit about any of the stuff they claim to. They’re just in this to feel powerful. They’ll happily destroy any of the groups they’re claiming to want to help on any given day. There isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to their bullshit. That’s because it isn’t about “the victims”. The oppressed can be swapped out as needed. They’re just a handy excuse.
Of course the DNC and their allied megacorporations don’t give a shit about any of this woke nonsense. They just use the woke as clubs against their foes. They are the epitome of Useful Idiots. They use SJWs the same way they use BLM or Antifa, or whatever disaffected organization they can get some mileage out of today, and then they ignore them when they are inconvenient.
You can go look at Gina Carano’s tweet for yourself and see how “Anti-Semitic” it is. It shows young victims of the Holocaust in a concentration camp labeled Germany 1944 next to a pic of migrant kids in cages labeled America 2020, which insensitively minimizes the magnitude of the horrors of the Holocaust.
Oh wait… Sorry. That tweet was from her costar Pedro Pascal and is in no way controversial at all. My bad.
Gina’s tweet says absolutely nothing negative about Jews at all. It is about how it was the German people (not just the German government) harming the Jews after a propaganda campaign convinced the people it was okay to, accompanied by an image of a Jewish woman being victimized.
Don’t take my word for it. Both of these are still screen capped and on the internet. (WordPress is being buggy today and not letting me post Jpegs). So alluding to the fact that some people today are acting like the actual nazis did is a super insensitive hate crime, but those same people literally labeling everyone they disagree with nazis (one of the most evil organizations in history, which logically should be destroyed) regardless of their beliefs is perfectly fine.
The narrative will be about how Carano is Anti-Semetic and the regular useful idiots will run with it. Bullshit. She’s at worse ineloquent. But that’s a lame excuse too, because I’m a really successful professional wordsmith, and these same fuckers keep trying to cancel me for all sorts of insane made up nonsense things I never wrote. It doesn’t matter how clearly or understandably you state your point, they’ll just twist it into whatever horrible thing they want it to be and run with that instead.
If I recall correctly the last time they labeled Gina Carano as Anti-Semitic it was because she put up the famous picture of the lone man in the crowd who DID NOT SALUTE and something about be that guy. Back when Americans actually learned history, we all knew this picture. And somehow the historical ignoramuses took that and ran with it to prove she was a Jew hating nazi… which is literally fucking backwards as to the point of the meme. But it doesn’t matter what you do or say. They just lie and make shit up.
And when she didn’t bend the knee, that made her target number one. People are supposed to cower before the mob and apologize and beg forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you did anything wrong or not. That’s how it works. Celebrities, big companies, it doesn’t matter, you have to do the public show trial apology to placate them (actual behavior doesn’t matter, just the show) And if you don’t, it makes you a continual target, and they will keep coming after you, over and over, forever.
People making excuses for the cancelling are fools. They might even be well intentioned, but they are still fools. They are allowing the left to weaponize internet outrage into a tool that can be used to selectively dehumanize and remove voices that stand in the way. They tested this out on the most extreme voices, and when they got away with that without too much backlash, they keep working their way inward, labeling the next level extreme, and then the next, and the next. So on and so forth, until everyone who isn’t in lockstep compliance with the leftist orthodoxy of the day is a dangerous extremist.
And in just a few years we’ve gone from don’t let those dangerous extremists share their dangerous extreme ideas on certain internet sites, to they shouldn’t be allowed to have jobs, bank accounts, credit cards, or any ability to communicate. While the bar for “extremism” has been lowered to include basically whoever they want at any given moment.
“Hey, why is a Detroit election van dropping off dozens of big mystery boxes to the supposedly shut down vote counting center at 3:00 AM way after the deadline? There are several angles of this event on security camera videos. I don’t know. Maybe we should audit that or something?”
-Shut up, you extremist insurrectionist domestic terrorist. Now we need to remove you from society for everyone’s safety.
We’re slouching our way toward a Chinese Communist social credit system, only because it’s disorganized and coming from multiple allied angles instead of codified by a central committee, people are acting like it is fine.
The problem with what Gina Carano said isn’t that our modern left acts like nazis, it is that any historical comparison will never line up perfectly because we live in different situations/cultures. People get all fake-outraged like “how dare she compare the bullshit we are putting modern republicans through currently to the absolute horrors suffered by Jews!” except that the butt hurt people are picturing 1943 level nazi evils, when our current modern left is probably only about at a 1933 level of nazi fuckery. The Nazis didn’t suddenly appear on the scene and kill millions of people overnight. It took years of consolidating power, propaganda, and growing evil.
Today the left is still pushing and seeing what they can get away with. Both them and the nazis used statist control freak behavior designed to dehumanize and remove all opposition to their power grabs. Our modern left has not got to the cattle cars and concentration camps part… yet. This may hurt some feelings, but this comparison is far more accurate than the casual, tiresome, endless “everyone I don’t like is a nazi” line they use against all of us (regardless of our actual beliefs).
I’m not saying that Gina Carano getting fired is “tyranny”. I am however saying that her firing is yet another warning to entertainers and people in the public eye that we must always comply with the rigid groupthink narrative, or they’ll never work for the handful of megacorporations which absolutely dominate their industry ever again. Meanwhile, if you have the proper politics you can apparently be a horrible piece of shit and get a pass for years. The message is clear. Be on the winning team, or else.
The left has paid attention to the culture war for a long time, because they understand the value of entertainment products for shaping philosophy. They locked up most of publishing years ago, and writers like me who talked about it got dismissed as cranks. Then they did video games, comic books, RPGs, podcasting, Youtubing, whatever, it doesn’t matter, if it is something that they can sink their hooks into, they will, and then they’ll go about driving out everyone who doesn’t toe their line.
They did the same thing to academia. They did the same to news. So now all your entertainment, education, and information has to follow leftist orthodoxy or else, and that’s been growing and accelerating for years… and yet conservatives are continually shocked when the left sets the tone and the rules of discourse in our culture, and yet they roll over and act like all this culture war stuff is meaningless.
It isn’t. Don’t think you’re safe. It is coming for you too. Gina Carano is a wildly popular actress on the biggest show streaming. The rest of us are nobodies in comparison. So what happens when one of us says something that could be construed as bad? (and as we’ve seen, they can declare anything bad). You’re fucking toast. The message is clear, you think wrong, you’d better keep your mouth shut or we’ll ruin you.
It’s the same reason they’ve gone nuts censoring social media for the last few years. They want you to feel isolated, alone, and unable to speak (if you speak you might discover that you’re not alone). If you go someplace else to talk to people who agree with you, they crush those places. They can’t allow dissent. We all have to agree or else. They need to control the space so that they can label all dissenting views as fake news. If you go someplace that doesn’t adhere to rigid leftist orthodoxy, then you’ll get mocked as being in a “right wing echo chamber”, which is ironic considering since they control all entertainment/news/media/publishing you’d basically have to live in a cave in the forest to avoid being exposed to leftist views.
And the powerful lefty institutions fucking love this. Because this gives them a giant club to dominate American culture. (Those 1933 nazi propagandists would have loved the internet!)
People ask me what the solution is. Sorry. I don’t have a good easy answer. I’m just a pebble in the avalanche.
“Disney canceled Gina Carano apparently because of a social media post where she highlighted the dangers of dehumanizing others, but they rehired JAMES GUNN who made numerous disturbing remarks about rape and pedophilia,” Cheong wrote. “Just so you know, this is where Disney stands on morality.”
.
.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/gina-carano-dropped-by-talent-agency-after-star-axed-from-disney-show-over-social-media-post?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=benshapiro&fbclid=IwAR2ugIekDlIM7yo9c-vYV1Pv89wZt8LS4TeKFpOMB1E8JFMCJdhwy_EL7zs
It addition to them licking China’s taint by bowing to the genocide in Xinjiang in the Mulan movie. Screw them.
All I’ve seen today are posts about the horrible “anti-Semitic” post from her and how she deserved to get fired. And when I commented that in fact it was not Anti-Semitic at all, I was quickly informed that I must be a white nationalist Trump loving Nazi. Yeah. That’s it. So, if your opinion differs from theirs in any way, you must be evil.
Almost worse is the person who “helpfully” points out that it doesn’t matter if she thinks that it’s antisemitic or not, it only matters that a Jewish person might think so.
Elevating the abandonment of your own discernment to a virtue is chilling. Making it a moral mandate that others must also abandon their own discernment is scary shit.
Interestingly, it doesn’t look like the SJWs actually asked any Jewish people about their opinions. A work colleague who is Jewish commented to me: “What she posted isn’t anti-Semitic. Refusing to see how the Holocaust began with dehumanizing others is the thing which denies the Holocaust and is anti-Semitic.” He then went on to crack a good joke about who’s a rebel against which empire that I can’t effectively reproduce.
I am Jewish. There was nothing anti-semitic about Carano’s comments. Only some Goyim ultra liberal douche would interpret Carano’s post as insulting to Jews. I can’t stand it when waspy a-holes tell Jews when we should be offended. Disney Boys, we let you know when it happens. Your first clue will be the garden hose spray of blood escaping your sapheno-femoral junction, and your second will be when the flames of hell are warming your backsides.
Anyway, Disney was looking for a reason to can her. The minute she tweeted something that they could CLAIM was offensive, that was it. Whether it really was offensive meant nothing to them. The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.
“Whether it really was offensive meant nothing to them”
Fen’s Law: The Left doesn’t really believe in the things they lecture the rest of us about.
Applied here, it means they don’t care about anti-semitism. We can argue it wasn’t anti-semitic till we are blue in the face and it won’t make a difference, because that’s not their true position. They aren’t there. We are shelling a hill they never occupied to begin with. Wasting time, energy and ammunition.
Carano had to be punished because she spotlighted how the Left’s dehumanizing propaganda is the same tactic used to radicalize the German public into harming the Jews. To the Left, it is bad timing to have that warning placed in the public consciousness, as it ruins any surprise they intended to inflict on us. Now the rollout for the hotline to report your neighbor’s Wrong Thought must be postponed?
All they’ve done is create a Streisand Effect. Her message is reaching thousands instead of the hundreds if they had just left her alone. One more reason why I encourage us to fight back. If we don’t get on the field, the other team can’t score an own goal. History is full of causes that were hopeless until Murphy was given a chance to intercede.
Although I am reading that Carano’s agency has also dumped her. I hope her sacrifice isn’t for nothing. I wonder how many more of us this has to happen to before something is done.
Fen, I like the law, but it’s only half accurate. Certainly there are lefties who use the outrage solely as a club, but even worse is that there are those who *actually believe all that shit*.
“True Believers”, “Useful Idiots”, “Painfully Naive”, take your pick. But I’ve got… well, former close friends who fall into the category. It’s depressing to watch. :-\
Part of being Woke is knowing What Minorities Think & Feel better than the minorities themselves.
That’s just the start. The full-blown Woke is when you know that if someone doesn’t agree with you about What Minorities Think & Feel must not be a minority. (See Biden about voting for him and being black.)
Either that, or the minority is so cowed by the presence of his or her white oppressors that the minority is afraid to speak out in his or her own defense. And so the white progressive must speak out on because the minority is too scared to do so.
“so the white progressive must speak out on because the minority is too scared to do so.”
Yah, it’s the soft bigotry that the minority is not capable of defending their own interests. These people use black corpses as props to Virtue Signal as Righteous Dudes. It’s sickening.
Worse, it’s now against their self-interest to end oppression, because they would run out of props to boost their self-esteem. I am expecting a whole new round of Virtue Signaling to compensate for the knowledge that the stole an election. On some level, they have to know they cheated their fellow countrymen.
In my experience, the sequence goes
1. The minority agrees with me!
2. The minority is too frightened/suffering from false consciousness to realize the truth.
3. The minority is an imposter (when it dawns on them that that much resistance to their wisdom can not be fear or ignorance).
But no doubt there is variation.
Well… I’m feeling a bit ironic right now LOL
I just dumped a rant about it on FB (have been avoiding FB for a while but this pissed me off). So I’m probably in for it. I did throw ad some additional background for people.
“I don’t know how many here have ever gone to the “Museum of Tolerance” but I took my daughter to the LA branch once for a school report. One of the most unsettling exhibits was called “Ordinary People”. It documented how most ordinary citizens, at best, did not oppose what was happening. Many took active part.”
“One of the most unsettling exhibits was called “Ordinary People”. It documented how most ordinary citizens, at best, did not oppose what was happening. Many took active part.”
That’s the takeway from Carano’s first meme about dehumanizing neighbors. Very powerful, on point, and (unfortunately) very timely.
This was repeatedly pointed out again and again. Larry’s been doing it for far, far longer than I have.
The crime you’re punished for is mere disagreement against ‘those who are better.’
The moment we gave up reason and the ability to discern, and the ability to say ‘no’ and back it up was when the culture war was lost. And I hate it.
I don’t say it wasn’t anti-Semitic (at first). I ask them to explain how it was anti-Semitic. They are usually just repeating what they’ve read, and haven’t even seen it themselves.
This has been going on for well over a decade. I lost an IT training job in the Albany, New York area back in 2001 for the crime of reading a gunsmithing book on my lunch break.
I was actually called into the head of the company’s office and told not to do that again, because it made people uncomfortable.
A little over a month later, I was “downsized.” Even though my student assessments were excellent.
My son, now 25, was reprimanded by his first grade teacher for having a book about the American Civil War, with contemporary battleground photographs, in the classroom. The book was FROM THE SCHOOL LIBRARY, and he had checked it out during library time.
“It’s a trap!”
-Adm. Ackbar
Lol – I got fired once because the owner found out I played DnD (technically I was playing White Wolf VtM but ..) and was actually scared I was raising demons and doing magic. Seriously if I could do that would I have been working at that job?
Nothing says “nerd level 20” like pointing out that it isn’t actually Dungeons & Dragons that you play. Ask me how I know. ????
I think the uproar about D&D lasted for like one minute after the 60 minute program. Its certainly not religious people who have problems with it, as many( like Larry) are involved in playing it or ( like Tracy Hickman) writing it. Sadly, getting fired because you read American history seems far more likely today.
As always, on point and well said.
And this meme, of course, is a violation of Facebook’s community standards. I got a nasty note from them when they yanked my comment.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/everyone-i-dont-like-is-hitler
They don’t like the truth.
Especially when it’s presented in such a gloriously deft way.
Timing was really convenient since Josh Whedon got #meetooed by almost the entire female cast of Buffy this week.
Almost as if Disney wanted to shift attention from the bad behavior of the director of multiple blockbusters.
I’m sure it’s all a coincidence.
Carano’s been drawing a lot of fire lately from the SJWs who wanted her fired from The Mandalorian. It started when she refused to put her pronouns in her Twitter profile.
“That Other Ogre, M44, fuck/off”
Did I get the format right? 😉
And yet, nothing happened to JW and he’s still living high on the hog.
Not exactly; he’ll still be suffering from these allegations by not having any work at Disney or the other studios, no invites to cons, plus a whole lot of other things, most likely.
Interesting that nothing’s been heard from Alyson Hannigan or her hubby, Alexis Dennisof.
And the International Socialists – who said, “Hold my beer” – get wistful homages in the NYT.
Yep. The Nazis were certainly evil, but the Russian Communists were worse, and the Chinese Communists were the worst of all three. But Disney apparently has no problem taking their money, or using the slave labor of their Uyghur concentration camps to make movies, TV shows, and other products.
Jordon Petterson an interesting take on how the horrors of the Nazi pale in comparison to the Marxists, but no one is taught the history today:
https://youtu.be/NDTbNmUgeXk
120 million murdered in the last century alone.
He also has a lecture where he tells his students straight out that over 90% of them, if they lived in Germany in the 30’s into the 40’s would have been a Nazi or at minimum just fell inline. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVCAhGL0ohw&t=150s
I guess the only question is, does anyone outdo the Nazis on a murders per year per capita basis?
It would be a difficult equation to solve, given the fairly rapidly shifting political boundaries of the time, but I’m sort of vaguely imagining it as “number of people murdered divided by number of people under political control over time that political control was held”.
Like, *numerically*, Pol Pot didn’t kill nearly as many people as the Nazis, but it was something like 25% of the entire population of the country he controlled, in what, four years?
So while raw numbers certainly have relevance, and I’m absolutely not saying that “there are lots of Chinese so it was less bad when Mao murdered a whole fuck ton of them”, I do wonder if we can come up with some sort of “Evil Factor” that takes the variables into account.
Is it worse to murder a million people out of a population of a billion, or 95% of a population of 100,000? Does it matter if you commit the murders over the course of 100 years instead of all in one week?
Yeah, I realize that I’m super weird.
Wishing for “like” button.
I have to admit that it always frustrates me when otherwise intelligent people seem to be under the impression that the political spectrum runs from “International Socialism” on the left to “National Socialism” on the right, with no other options.
It is a bit of deliberate obfuscation by the Left, that one is either with them on the Right Side of History, or is a nasty Nazi.
The site MyLife is trying to do exactly that, and they’re now adding the “social” aspect – by saying your score is lower because you have connections to low scoring people.
This system could easily be expanded by correlating gun permits, hunting licenses, voting data and FEC donor data. There was already a “Trumpwatch” list in hit list format showing the names, addresses on a map and donation amount of conservative donors.
How do you know they aren’t diddling with your score whether or not you are connected to low-scoring people?
Answer. You don’t.
That’s pretty devious – it serves to isolate those with “wrong thought”
Although I think the conservative boycott tactic is wrong. We keep falling back to a new position, only to have that position likewise compromised by Marxists because we aren’t actually fighting the cause of the compromise.
Ditch Google for Bing, and when Bing becomes infested with SJW moderation drop back to DuckDuckGo, and when DuckDuckGo becomes infested….
The tactic is not sustainable. Even Drudge has gone wobbly. At some point we are going to have to make a stand.
O’Sullivan’s law, friend. Also Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
The first states that any organization not leftist will *become* leftist over time if not explicitly guarded against. Leftism is entropy, and will destroy the organization from within. The only way to survive is to cut it out, root and branch.
Normies will create a thing, an organization. They will be dedicated to why they created the thing, and how they do it. They will hire people based on their ability to do the job, because they want their thing to succeed.
Leftists don’t think that way.
The leftist will hire based on ideology. Leftists and *only* leftists will be hired by that person, once they have the ability to do so. The organization will become leftist over time in this manner, and the reason for its existence will be completely erased. It will become yet another organization based on leftism, supporting leftism, and agitating for more leftism.
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy does not only apply to government bureaus, but to most any organization these days. It states that in any organization there will be but two basic kinds of people: Those devoted to the goals of the organization, those who joined or started it to do a thing. And the second, those devoted to the organization itself.
I’m sure it is clear how the two dovetail in practice.
Perhaps a Cina Garano character will make her way into the eventual MHI screenplay…
Part of the difficulty inherent in attempting to follow the dictates of the Woke crowd is that those dictates change so often because they believe in nothing. I would prefer to maintain my beliefs.
Oh they believe in something. Power. The accumulation of it, along with cash and babes (or boys).
The constant changing is so that they can sort out who is paying attention and doing the necessary labor to remain up to date.
If you’re using the respectful language of 20 years ago, you’re clearly a hater because you don’t bother to stay current.
A good point.
All this furore reminds me more of Stalin’s purges than Hitler’s madness.
For example, people being purged and their likenesses removed from pictures of them with Stalin,
Cancelling people strikes me as a more modern version of this.
Both Hitler and Stalin and Mao committed purges against identifiable population groups. Just Stalin and Mao had better PR specialists working for them, often in our own State Department…
“Part of the difficulty inherent in attempting to follow the dictates of the Woke crowd is that those dictates change”
That’s deliberate. The goal is get you accustomed to denying reality, because if they can force you to deny your reality they control your reality. So they keep changing Wrong Think from one frivolous denial to another. It’s not the actual Thing that matters to them, it’s the ACT of getting you to deny a Thing. So many more Things will be declared out of bounds.
Tomorrow the color “Blue” will be designated racist. And once they have our neural pathways established to deny truth, quite a number of people will convince themselves that it is indeed racist, simply to avoid the dissonance in their head.
I keep telling people to re-read 1984 and then think “why bother, they’re living it.”
Athena, I’ve had better reactions to having folks watch the movie 1984 than read it first. It’s a very powerful flick. Several have then gone out and read the book afterwards.
Have ’em watch Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. I think we may approaching that sort of dystopia more closely.
Brave New World all the way if you ask me, though Brazil gave me awful nightmares.
It is getting to the point when you have to move to Eastern Europe or Russia to avoid this Orwellian crap.
My, how times have changed.
There was a novel about that, but I cannot remember the title or the author…
probably Hogan’s Multiplex man (or possibly some other novel, I’m not sure) – I remember how funny it seemed in nineties that Eastern Europe would stick with liberty while the rest of the world would devolve to totality we’ve been through. Not that funny anymore.
Eastern Europe is holding up a bit and will hold up for some time, but considering how the rest of the EU sees us and how part of our politics are either oldschool commies (rebranded in other parties) or getting woke for the younger generations, not sure if it will hold much longer.
Considering that Biden is going for gun ban we here in Czech republic will be probably the last country that allows assualt rifles for self defense for normal citizens, so I won’t have to lose content of my gun safe in a boating accident for some time just yet.
But Russia – the Orwell is actually strong with this one. Goverment mandated cameras in cars, internet under “control”…
That’s how there are so many ‘Driving in Russia’ videos out there. Downloaded from the mandated cameras and monetized.
I pray that eastern Europe will hold out for some time, but when you’re in between two separate madhouses (one gradually devolving into izlamist tyranny and the other having never really recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union). Perhaps a mutual protection pacts amongst some of the eastern european nations will come about?
Yeah, I would avoid moving to Russia if I were you; at least, not unless you genuinely love Putin and never expect to criticize him in any way. Otherwise, you risk accidentally slipping on ice and falling backwards onto a bullet 9 times in a row. You know, natural causes.
Well, at least you would know who your enemy is.
I spent all of yesterday at Ace’s trying to explain that maybe Barr wasn’t a Super Secret Deep State Agent, maybe he backed off because he lost faith that we would support him.
And I am still not certain if I am right. There have been so many betrayals that I no longer know who to trust.
You’ve noticed that one of the right’s weaknesses is the speed with which it bayonets it’s own, as well?
Instapundit has hordes of commenters angry whenever they see an article they disagree with linked, and not all of them are trolls. We can’t win by mirroring our opposition; we need to be smarter, which means not cutting off sources of information just because we don’t like what they say.
Too old to move that much….If they come for me one day, the best thing to do is just make sure I take a large honor guard to Valhalla with me…
While I don’t subscribe to that religion, I find myself wanting lots of company from the opposing team when I go before the throne for judgement.
“make sure I take a large honor guard to Valhalla”
It won’t go down that way. It will happen one sunny Spring morning, a knock on your door by a polite young policewoman asking you to come downtown to answer a few questions from detectives.
“No need to call your daughter, we found her picking up the kids from school. They’re waiting for you now but appear distraught. If you like, we can let you see them before the interview?”
And while you are being processed a SWAT detail will comb through you home for weapons. Concerned neighbors will be warded off with implied references to distribution of narcotics or child pornography or whatever will cause them to abandon any defense of you.
And you will disappear. The next face you see will be mine, offering you a piece of my rat in exchange for news about the world outside the camps.
Kindly explain how to perform this 100 million times, with no slip ups, and fast enough that no one figures out the game.
Show your work.
It’s not about figuring out the game, it’s about being able to do something about it once you realized it’s being played and they are all against you.
As for showing my work, I give you the 20th Century dictatorships of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others.
Prove me wrong.
Yes it is: the entire reason to pull that kind of trick is to confiscate without triggering a mass uprising. Once everyone figures out the game they know the red line has been crossed.
Your question reduces to “Will Americans rise up?”. That can’t be answered 100% until it happens or not, but the trend line is pretty clearly pointing towards “yes”.
And they still believe in their hearts that if they back us into a corner and make it clear that we no longer have anything to lose that it will all go their way.
Belief in the inevitable superiority of the Aryan race (or in this case, the fascist left) was also the downfall of the nazi’s.
“believe in their hearts”
Why shouldn’t they? We keep teaching them that there are no consequences for backing us into a corner. After a certain point we share blame for our oppression.
California is fairly unique in that “political affiliation” is a protected class and being fired for political beliefs or activities is considered wrongful termination under CA labor law. I’ve pointed this out several times and I get “ok, yeah, but Gina’s tweet compared Republics to Jews in the Holocaust and that’s NOT political”
I shouldn’t be surprised but how the hell do these people function in real life ?
Also, she never mentioned Republicans or conservatives, but rather people whose political views are different, which means she can totally claim that.
Disclaimer: Not a lawyer
It’s not what the law says, it’s how it’s interpreted and enforced. Republican and conservative aren’t political affiliations, they are masks the Avowed Enemies of Freedom and Everything We Hold Dear hide behind to destroy our fragile democracy / sarc
“how the hell do these people function in real life ?”
Most of them don’t, frankly. I forget where I saw this, but something like 20% of households in the United States don’t have a single income earner, and that’s held fairly steady for several decades (if someone else has a source for that, please correct me).
Prescription medication. The docs have been writing them up like we are lab rats in a beta test. I still have a few Woke friends (because of Archery) and they are easily on 4-5 meds to deal with mental health issues. It can be a little scary once you realize you are not dealing with a Person but with some very potent drugs.
If the walls ever come down, the pharmacies will close and these people will go stark raving mad. Do not be at all surprised by what you witness. Anything is possible.
Hopefully we can allow people who need medication the dignity of not having to purchase street drugs. I would think the FBI has better things to do then to frighten doctors, but there you have it. People who take medication are people, btw. They don’t turn into medication themselves.
One of the refrains I hear is “human rights are not political” which sounds nice on its face, I guess, but is arbitrarily applied.
Their concept of human rights includes the right to an abortion, for teenagers to receive abortions without parental knowledge or consent, and children and teenagers to receive puberty blockers without parental consent. Also that education, healthcare, and housing are human rights. So really they are saying that nothing is political at the same time they are saying *everything* is.
Well, it would imply that political opponents have human rights, looked at from one direction.
But mostly it means that if you complain about injecting politics into something non-political, like football, that you’re erasing and denying the rights of people whose identities are political in special ways that other people’s aren’t.
Exactly that. I’ve seen that argument play out so many freaking times on every corner of the internet. If I so much as say, “Hey, I go to cat groups so I can escape from the world for a little while, please leave the current events somewhere else,” then I’d have a gazillion people pouncing on me and saying that I’m “sheltering bigots” or some nonsense.
Gina has always been my pick for Julie if an MHI movie or series ever happens.
As always, Larry nails the situation perfectly.
Oh, Gina Carano with glasses!
Nice!
She’s not a redhead.
Hair dye for the win.
I’m pretty sure she actually naturally has red, or red-tinted, hair.
I’d go with her for Heather, anyway. She has the right physical presence for a force-of-nature character like her.
I was reading Erik Larson’s history about the first American ambassador to Nazi German in 1933, a book called “In the Garden of Beasts,” and near the end he shares a quote from a British observer that I shared with my students today in context to this. The observer wrote on the National Socialist movement, “All the young are in the net, anyone who tried to keep out of being a Nazi is hazed until they change their mind; a form of mass cruelty which exists only in such a country.” After reading this I replaced “Nazi” with other forms of ideology in today’s world and asked if it sounds familiar.
A dude I went to grad school with is all about how all conservatives and/or Republicans are evil, and how all forms of Christianity are based on perpetuating white colonial and racist beliefs and power structures.
I know for certain that if he knew anything about my politics or beliefs, he would attempt to doxx and smear me. I mainly stick around to get a look into the thought processes of the woke.
See the thing the wokistas don’t know is …
We can keep our mouths shut. They can’t. And we’re studying them.
When members of the National Socialist
Workers Party hate being called National Socialist Workers Party members .
They’re member of the National Sockalist *Wokester* Party, which is clearly better, because reasons.
Just throwing my 2 cents in: Gina carero is correct in her analysis. The use of mobs to enforce government will is common in history, from witch trials, to protestant persecution during the European wars of religion, to many programs against Jews, the Armenian genocide, African genocide, suppression of blacks post civil war in the southern USA, to abuse of whites in south Africa post Mandela. Government troops didn’t have to get their hands dirty with mobs and militias doing the grunt work. In addition while government agencies are sometimes constrained by law, mobs of brainwashed people are not.
My apologies for poor grammar. Typing on a phone is not my forte.
I’m waiting for the Theme Police to start censoring ebooks at Amazon. You -know- they’re going to do that. Just a matter of time.
LOOKING FOR A MONSTER HUNTERS FAN SITE
I really love this series and want to find a fan site to discuss fun stuff like “Do werewolves go into heat?”, “Does Owen Pitt have a brother named Brad?”, or “Franks vs… , who would win?
As this site apparently has nothing to do with MHI, I was wondering if anyone here has a good recommendation?
There is a fan page on Facebook (Monster Hunter International: Hunters Unite) and a fan page on MeWe (Monster Hunter Nation) and my newsletter (the sign up is on this page) is only book related stuff.
But since I’m the guy who writes MHI and this is my personal blog where I can write about whatever I feel like, oh well. Don’t like it. Keep on scrolling. I don’t give a shit. 😀
Thanks for the links, and can’t wait for the next book!
Also, you’re obviously right about you doing what you like with your site. Still, may want to add a political discussions tab so everyone can find what they want. Otherwise, it’s kind of like going to remington.com and finding nothing but cornbread recipes. No matter how much you like cornbread, it’s not what you were looking for.
No skin off my nose either way, but doing something simple that works better for everyone is almost never a bad thing.
No.
And it isn’t simple at all.
But thanks for the unheeded advice about how I should conduct my business. But I’ve been doing this for a long time and probably know more about how to be a successful writer than you do. One of the reasons I’m as successful (after being consistent in quality and prolific in output) is because I’m part of the tiny percentage of authors who openly deviates from the mushy oatmeal of Manhattan publishing groupthink.
I just gave you three mostly politics free resources. I’ll be damned if I shut up on my personal blog to suit you too. 🙂
Besides, as we’ve seen with dozens of other writers/actors/influencers who are Other Than Left, I could hide all my personal politics in the deepest darkest hole, and someone would still come along and complain that wasn’t good enough and I need to hide them more. Now, if I was a leftist on the other hand, then I could say whatever I wanted with impunity, be cheered for it, and get a lot of money worth of free advertising from the adoring media.
So you’ll live. 😀
Then there’s the fact that a lot of us originally came for the political rants, and stayed for the stories.
Same. I found this site because of his Opinion On Gun Control. The fisk re Tony Stark was gravy.
I stuck around because I want to write, but I keep getting hung up on character dialogue. I don’t understand how people can stand around in a night club and talk about “nothing”. It’s a huge blindspot for me.
Plus, after reading his tips, I am not sure if I have the discipline to do what he does.
On the bright side, I’m learning about a host of good authors I was ignorant of. I stalled on Poul Anderson and Frank Herbert, so coming here was like finding pirate treasure 🙂 I have a ton of reading to catch up on.
And I have yet to read my first Monster Hunter book. Do you envy me? What should I start with?
“I stuck around because I want to write, but I keep getting hung up on character dialogue. I don’t understand how people can stand around in a night club and talk about “nothing”. It’s a huge blindspot for me.”
Fen,
I am also a wanna-be writer, so take this with a grain of salt. If your characters are standing around talking about “nothing”, then I think that’s part of your problem. Pointless dialog is pointless. You can, however, use pointless-seeming dialog as a window into a character. As a way to show the reader what kind of person your character is. If they say “How about those Mets?” Is the character a baseball super-fan? Is he secretly making fun of baseball super-fans, or being funny? Or is he one of those people who are unable to relate to others without the crutch of talking about sports?
Thanks Stuart. And I think I get it. Pointless dialogue doesn’t have to be pointless. We can give it purpose.
I may try parking myself where people engage in small talk and actually listen till I get the hang of it.
Yes. You should go stalk someone else instead of me, guy who has commented over 30 times in the last day. That sounds like a splendid idea.
Yah sorry about the 30 comments. I was awake all night and the people here were interesting.
Hey Steve, would you mind terribly if I came into your house and reorganized your 8-track collection to suit my tastes?
Interesting what you choose to respond to.
If Steve was unaware he transgressed, I’m pretty sure our host set him straight. Why do you need to peck at him? Are you a Thread Vulture, picking over carcasses already mauled by the Lion?
Nah. You smell like a bully from here. Why don’t you go back to spreading lies about me. It’s more entertaining. 🙂
Says the guy spamming up the thread making demands that other people indulge his revolutionary fantasies. But I’m the bully.
Self Awareness 1
General Fen 0
So pointing out that these little narcissistic demands that blog owners write about what you want them to write about seems to have you tilted a bit. Interesting. And please, do go on about the “lies” I’m telling about you, General Fen of Teen Girl Squad.
Not sure what happened to you lately, but Triggered Projecting Asshole Narcissist isn’t a good look for anybody
The notion that her tweet was anti-Semitic is a complete and blatant lie.
And as a Jew from the Soviet Union, with half my family having been murdered by the actual Nazis and their civilian accomplices all over Europe, I am sick of these leftist scum using me as a cover in their fascist takeover.
Those shouting “Nazi” the loudest are the ones conforming most to the actual policies of the Nazis. I sent Disney+ some feedback this morning and pointed out that they just proved how right her tweet actually is. I doubt they have the self awareness to understand that though.
Ah, but we’re ‘good’ Nazis! So that makes it OK!
Hopefully they will realize the error of their ways when we all cancel Disney+ right back.
Funny how quickly they fire a woman who has an opinion that isn’t in lockstep with leftist ideology.
Never think that they don’t “understand.” They understand just fine. This is policy, not a mistake.
This is the hill Disney has chosen to die on. (Corporately speaking, of course.) We should respect their choice and help them along with it. ~:D
Seeing the cookie-cutter attack headlines which sprang up in 24 hours, it’s making my eye twitch with memories about SP3. Same thing happened to us back then. I imagine Disney’s Carano-haters had their fingers poised on the SEND button ready to launch the same attack verbage to all the culture geek punditry and media. It’s all lies, of course. Carano said nothing bad about Jews, and never has. “Abhorrent” is a wholesale creation of the Carano-haters. They are depending on people to not research what Carano actually posted.
Guaranteed those same people are the ones whose antisemitism is purely conditional.
the Lucas Film statement that Carano’s statement “denigrated” people and cultural is a bald-faced lie.
And they do it because no one will contradict them.
I went and read what Carano said as soon as I saw this thing blow up. Saying that the shirtstorm is “all lies” is like calling the Titanic a “boat.” Technically true, misleading by understatement. ~:D
Why they -really- hate her is she’s right. That’s the unforgivable sin these days, calling the Left on their bullshit and getting a bulls-eye on them.
Oh well, one more good reason why I don’t need a Disney+ account.
As I saw pointed out elsewhere, it was telling that none of the stories that talked about her supposed anti-semitism actually quoted what she wrote.
Yes, the whole SP thing is very, very reminiscent. They’re doing to Carano what they did to Larry: Proving the point of the point.
They’re now self-demonstrating tropes then?
Yep.
Sort of like self-peeling bananas. Very efficient.
Were they actually complaining about anti-Semitism (haven’t delved in that sewer). Maybe they’re mad about her denigrating the German people.
It’s supposedly anti-semitic by “belittling what the Jews went through”
“They are depending on people to not research what Carano actually posted.”
I think it’s worse – they know it won’t matter.
I went through something similar a few years back on Facebook. They were deliberately distorting what Jordan Peterson had said so they could clutch their pearls over the specter of the Strawman they had fabricated.
I tried to defend him simply by posting direct quotes to prove he didn’t say what they claimed. From the exact same article they were referencing. It took me awhile to realize that only made it worse.
See, they weren’t interested in truth, they were crafting a fantasy narrative though affirmation and false assertion, an illusion that their self-esteem depended on. They were not interested in debate, this was about something else. Coming along to dispel it was most unwelcome. Presenting the facts was treated as a lethal attack, because to their world Truth was lethal.
We have reached a point where we cannot reason with them. Where our “silence is violence” and justification for what they imagine is retaliatory violence. How do we maneuver in those waters?
I am astounded at how anyone could have spent time on Earth in the last decade and not understand this.
The same people who claim Antifa is a myth and BLM is an all-black organization and OMB ordered an insurrection.
Add to that, PETA and Antifa are alt-right organizations. And yes, I was told this.
I’ve been telling people this for years, and even many who are nominally on my side just don’t get it.
They came for science fiction first because they knew we would recognize their playbook and see through all of their lies.
They already owned most of “mainstream” science fiction for generations. How do you think Baen Books captured the “non-woke” readers for over three decades from the Locus in-crowd?
There has always been a chunk of the science fiction “creators” and “hard core fans” that have been enamored with “wokeness” and perversity dating back to the ’50s and ’60s. It’s just that casual fans didn’t really understand how bad it was until the last decade or so.
You know times are bad when you carefully weigh every cent of your entertainment budget with moral questions just so you don’t end up funding the people who want to rape children and destroy civilization.
So you end up filtering your choices to the point that most of the entertainment budget goes to more practical purposes like being proficient in firearms. Or reading history. Or exploring the true truth and beauty of the universe with a math/science related hobby.
Or writing my OWN books because I can’t stand most of what is published.
Mild cognitive dissonance that just about every average person suffers from…Otherwise known as “It can’t happen here”. I’ll plead to a mild case of it in the past myself mainly because the increase in the noose’s tightness was so gradual for so many years….Now? Only hoping that I have enough toys to pass around when the time comes…..otherwise just staying under the radar….so far.
Counter: “It’s Already Happened Here Before, and the Democrats Were In Charge That Time, Too”.
I’m genuinely not sure how I’m supposed to start having kids at any point in the foreseeable future, with all this going on.
You will be required to have them For The Greater Good. You don’t expect the Sacred Instruments of Revealed Truth to do their laundry or shopping for themselves, do you? / sarc
Not helping. Sorry.
But there is a need for those who will carry the fight to pass the relearned lessons along to a new generation….
This too shall pass. Marriage and having kids is an act of defiant hope, in every generation. Don’t let jerks kill off your joys or your genes.
^ that. I’m doing my best to raise my kids to be independent thinkers and self sufficient individuals.
Most of history was a complete hellscape, and yet…. people still started families, had kids, raised them.
I hate the “leap of faith” cliche, but it applies here: functioning family and friend bonds are part of what make even a terrible life endurable.
I’m trying. Honestly, Larry’s comment about “a cave in the forest” sounds rather appealing right now. Away from cacophony.
Eventually they will come to your cave and yell at you for your campfire making too much carbon.
There is no escaping these people.
There is no way to truly sheild from them, which means you don’t have to worry about how to do that; only how to survive the inevitable attack.
Which is a very freeing situation.
What if I have range card at the mouth of my cave and about 600m or more of clear terrain?
They are Control Freaks and they need victims. They will never leave us alone. Just like how an abusive husband will never let his wife divorce him.
In today’s political climate, the most powerful act of resistance is to live your life according to traditional values in spite of all the insanity going on. Read Live Not By Lies by Rod Dreher, it’s an excellent book that explains how to do this effectively. Ever since Mrs. Vasicek and I got married, we’ve had scripture study and family prayer every day without fail, and we just had our first baby last year. It is not only possible to stand up to this madness, it is absolutely necessary, and you will be blessed with strength as you do so!
Thanks. I’m not great with scripture and prayer habits, but I need to be.
The basic idea is to be true to your core beliefs….and carry on. Civilizations have gone through rough spots like this before….and survived to come back even better (at least for a time).
Be a rebel. Have a family.
Thank you, Larry.
It’s your fault I got married in the first place, so I should probably listen, huh? 🙂
As someone who as Larry knows had my life shattered a few times…
Survival alone is an act of defiance. So is doing what’s right for you. Don’t give up. We’ll get through it. We’re the survivors, not the hothouse flowers.
Greetings, chocolate rabbit. Good to see you posting! Two thumbs up.
I’m trying, and pushing forward. I struggle with anxiety sometimes, and this issue seems to be particularly getting at me, because I see people on both sides of it too eager to attack one another and impugn their motives. (Admittedly, in this specific case, one side is doing that WORSE, but I am definitely seeing it both ways.)
When someone says something that strikes me as strange, I like to take a step back and say, “Am I reading it the way they meant it? Or am I letting emotion take control?” I like to assume that other people are good, or at least trying to be good. I think that most of the time, offense is not intended.
As I’ve read more arguments, I’m understanding why a lot of people were uncomfortable with Gina’s post, and I have come to agree that it was poorly-worded and probably ill-advised (as political memes tend to be), but to take the logical leap that it means she thinks disagreeing with someone’s politics is the same as hating their ethnicity, or that mob harassment is totally exactly the same thing as death camps, is totally absurd. The point of the message was “harassing and attacking your neighbors for being different from you is bad” and that can be applied no matter the context. That it was poorly delivered does NOT mean there was ill intent.
And yet, still, people would rather scream at each other than LISTEN.
I took the time to listen to an opposing viewpoint so I could understand why people felt uncomfortable. I would appreciate others doing likewise. Instead all we get is people who think the only way to fix this is to kill each other.
I don’t want to raise my children in the midst of a civil war.
(And just to make sure I’m not getting misunderstood myself, I don’t think anything I’ve seen on this page constitutes people wanting to kill each other. I just saw an argument of that nature a few minutes ago in another place and it’s still gnawing at me. I think I need an internet break.)
Emma:
Gina Carano was making the point that genocide doesn’t START with death camps and gas chambers. The German National Socialist Workers Party had to lay the groundwork of hate first. That took about 8 years, from 1932 to 1940.
So far, the Democrats have been at it for almost 5 years. Was last summer their preview of Kristallnacht 2?
Don’t forget that their hero, Fascist Dictator Roosevelt, admired Hitler and the Nazis until that became unfashionable. Many of his speeches were copied almost word for word from Mussolini’s speeches.
———————————
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
I was in your position many years ago and settled on not having kids, for some very logical reasons.
It’s my deepest regret.
Just have them anyway and then train them how to recognize Leftist bullshit at 200 yards. Ten year old girls are hilarious, particularly when they have a favorite assault rifle.
When it comes to having kids you can’t second guess the future. Kids are for the long haul and you just can’t see that far ahead.
That’s the same for your personal situation as it is for the state of the world. You might wait to have kids until you’re “settled” and as soon as you step out of the loo with the wand tester and positive result your world can fall apart. No one can tell what will happen tomorrow.
So the only thing you can do is take reasonable preparations, cross your fingers, plan to raise resilient rebels, and take the plunge.
That’s also their intent.
Their low IQ peasants will happily have 3-4 more kids for the “benefits”
Eh, I’ve got grown kids and two little ones. The world needs better people and if the sane people leave replacement to the insane, well…
All you have to do is keep them out of the public school system, and many of the private ones.
Things have been much worse than they are right now. And yet, somehow, the human race has continued on through the millennia. We’ve actually been unusually blessed here in the US with the conditions over the last century or two.
Everything is now inter-connected though. The neighboring tribes won’t be untouched by whatever corruption ravages our little village.
Black Death 2.0 – this time with international travel.
Social media is already being considered a disease, with negative impacts on society. I wonder how history will regard it. Maybe on par with the Inquisition?
Will there be studies explaining how it vectored like a plague and turned its victims in mindless zombies? 🙂 The wife already thinks holding cell phones up near our brain 24/7 is altering humans in ways we will realize later. Like when people painted their lips to glow radioactive.
Missed the edit – Radium is what I was thinking of. Glowing in the dark was all the rage. Are we really any smarter?
Eh… I doubt that. The radio waves put out by cell phones are closer to one’s brain, but far less powerful than the radio waves put out by broadcasting stations, which people have been living with for a hundred years at this point. I have not chased down the numbers, but I suspect that if you measure the amount of energy passing through your head in the form of radio waves, the radio broadcasting stations in your city are probably putting a lot more total radio-wave energy through your head than your cell phone does.
OTOH, if it turns out my estimate is wrong and cell phones near your head put out more energy locally than radio towers five miles away, then my argument fails. If you do happen to run the numbers and it turns out that way, do let me know — I’d be curious to find out if that’s the case.
The content of what is on screens in the form of propaganda and “culture” has more effect on the brain than the transport mechanism.
We used to sip from media and entertainment. Now we struggle in an ocean of sewage.
When will be hearing ‘Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better!’
We already are. Meat is the most nutritious and beneficial food on earth, yet the PETA/Humane Society/Sea Shepherd people are trying to have us go full vegetarian because animals are better than us.
Sickens me. Kids don’t develop when they don’t get animal fats and proteins.
From the “What to do about it?” file:
I already 100% boycott Disney since March 2020, can’t really do it any harder. I already boycott 95% of Hollywood except comic book movies, which are now mostly Disney and will therefore mostly suck anyway, taking me to 100% pretty damn soon. I already don’t buy Big Five books except in rare cases, so my culture-based boycott is pretty much across the board.
Korean shows on Snotflix and Japanese anime on Crunchy Roll, that’s my viewing lately. The reason for this is not politics, particularly. It’s more that the only shows that have any sort of original characters or story lines lately are Korean dramas and anime. Everything made in USA you can call the whole episode plot from the opening scene. Canadian made? Not even worth watching the opening scene.
Norwegian TV series can be good too – just finished Beforeigners. From the same writer as Lilyhammer.
Been meaning to watch Beforeigners. Thank you for the reminder.
Not to mention that Japan and Korea have no fucks to give when it comes to telling a story. There’s something in the soil over there that just kills any fucks people try to plant on contact.
“There’s something in the soil over there …”
Tritinites? Something about being the first country in history to get nuked because they were begging for it just that hard…
I don’t hold it against the younger generations. They got born after all that just like I did.
Eh…
There are things there if you’re familiar enough with the culture. It’s just that what’s culturally important to us isn’t as important to them, and vice versa. For instance, if there’s only one super rich executive in a Korean show, then he or she is the ultimate bad guy. This is even more reliable in Korean shows than it is in Law and Order.
Also, I’ve started to notice a trend in the more recent Korean shows (all on Netflix, since that’s where I’ve been watching them lately) to include certain things that are more in line with what the Western SJWs would push.
This is why I won’t watch Studio Ghibli, all Woke all the time.
Some of the Korean shows are starting to have some SJW boilerplate in them, but they’re easy to skip. Or just fast-forward through the stupid parts, that’s an option.
Crunchyroll is woke.
Pondering a Funimation subscription. Thoughts anyone?
Animelabs has been alright. Subs are free. New episodes for current releases – you wait a week if you’re not on premium.
Funimation is woke and employs sex criminals.
The entertainment industry doesn’t have any respect for their own craft anymore.
Thanks for the heads up.
Aw, they’re becoming too progressive for you, won’t worship the USA, and are not neocon enough? Poor baby, all of those in society (racial minorities, women, and LGBT’s) finally having a voice because of the Interwebs, making people understand that we need to work on racial and sexual matters, with Hollywood following suit, is making you feel bad? Looks like clueless privileged white people like you will have to sing or swim, but I see that you’ve never learned how due to all of the neocon brainwashing your small intellectually challenged mind has been (willingly) subjected to.
Pretty soon, when South Korean TV and movies becomes similarly ‘woke’ you’ll have nothing to watch except for all of those Christofascist garbage movies on Pureflix and TBN that reinforce all of what you now believe about the world. When you do, and when you find those movies/TV shows unbearable, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself.
Oooh-kay.
So, do you have a problem of some sort with people watching Christofascist garbage movies on Preflix and TBN? Does this chap your hiney or something?
Personally, I’m looking forward to the Dirtyjew movies that Ben Shapiro is going to produce. That might bother you, considering how you feel about Jews.
All sarcasm aside:
What you’ve failed to note is where you are just now. Trying to pretend that the targets of your ideological scorn can’t create good content doesn’t fly on this blog. Oopsie. Still, ideologically narrow content does tend to suck which is why pretty much everyone here and certainly our host argues against ideological purity tests or mandatory check-lists when creating fiction.
Do you know who argues FOR those things?
You.
I’m pretty sure most of us can do both. Weigh, hey, and up she rises, ya commie herpes boil.
Meanwhile, since “cancel culture” is more and more starting to look like the wokescolds building a wall around themselves and calling everyone else imprisoned, I suspect a lot of ever higher profile actors and producers are going to start jumping ship and openly joining the “cancelled” side… Which, judging by networks like, say, the eeevil Christofascist Hallmark channel, is the side whose ratings haven’t been in freefall for the past decade or so.
Until that glorious peak of irony, I can add a few Turkish dramas (found translated on YouTube) to the list of Korean and Japanese shows. Really, once the culture shock wears off, you’d be surprised how good they can be. And I’m also pretty sure none of these countries will be diving down the woke plague pit anytime soon.
Prior to the smashing of Baen’s Bar, the Movies & TV forum was a pretty lively discussion, talking about classics (often Dr Who, of all things) and new stuff (everything Marvel, but quite a few others as well) including a police procedural by Ukraine outfit Ivory Studios.
I mention this because if the Woko Haram imbeciles believe they can stamp out other mindsets… they’re seriously underestimating the scope of the tasks.
Pro tip to Blake – the world is pretty f*cking big.
Mew
Did you mean sink or swim?
Singing while swimming would be rather odd.
The really sad part is that it is dipshits like this who look at shit tier quality entertainment products which fail as entertainment products, and then whine that it must be because the audience hates (insert group X here). You only hated The Last Jedi because you don’t like STRONK WOMYNS!
Somebody needs to update the NPC’s script.
I read her tweet. There was nothing Anti-Semitic on it. She described the process of dehumanization of Jews in Nazi Germany, which is well known to historians. She warned about the danger of crowd mentality, when manipulated by those in power to identify as The Enemy to whatever group of people they have decided to target. She was absolutely right.
“I read her tweet.”
I think I know where she first went wrong – staying on Twitter. They have purged most the conservative voices, but they are control freaks who need victims to oppress. I bet her remark would have gone unnoticed back in October.
I guess we can take some solace in the fact that, as their pool of victims diminishes, they too will face the guillotine.
The more things change…
The problem is that in the entertainment industry, it helps to keep a high level of visibility. And maintaining a social media account is a good and inexpensive way to do that.
Now you’ve got me wondering if she had an intern managing her social media who posted that. Wouldn’t that be a crazy wrinkle.
No. There’s no reason to believe Carano wasn’t fully aware of what was going on her Twitter feed. In particular, this is not the first time that the Nazis have been mentioned. When she refused to put her pronouns in her Twitter feed, the SJWs began trying to get her fired. Her response was to post a message of a Nazi rally, circle the lone man not saluting, and write, “Be that guy.”
Yes you’re right. I caught all that background info over at Ace’s this morning.
My bad.
Excellent news, if the purity death spiral has begun…
Well, not for the nominally woke.. but the leadership will increasingly be under scrutiny for the latest violations of Wokeness.
I hope it hurts.
Mew
What she posted was what I was taught growing up — you have to be taught to hate. It also earned Rodgers and Hammerstein a shelf full of awards.
But these days Woko Haram demand hatred, and call it tolerance.
The Right by contrast practice tolerance, and get attacked for their bigotry.
The Right invites it. By telegraphing weakness. They have taught the Bully they are his to torment.
It’s become so common amoung the NR and NeverTrumper types that it was coined it as the Vichy Fetish.
“So passes Denethor, son of Ecthelion”
“People ask me what the solution is. Sorry. I don’t have a good easy answer. I’m just a pebble in the avalanche.”
Drop fiction, study history. The time between the death of Caesar and Octavian (Augustus) becoming the first Emperor is regularly glossed over in modern teaching and it really shouldn’t be: The second triumvirate, with their utter failure at civil and military command, going against Sextus and the Sicilian war is a far more interesting narrative than anything Hollywood’s pedos have made in the past two decades.
The right dropping fiction is what got us to this point.
Sorry. There is a handful of people who do what I do as well as I do. So no. The only reason I have an audience is because I create fiction.
I’m also a history dork.
And like I said above, it’s really hard to draw parallels between us and any prior time. And I’m pretty sure the Romans didn’t have a propaganda apparatus that could feed continual narrative to every corner of the world in seconds.
True, but the Romans did have a UBI, ran massive budget deficits, and whole-heartedly embraced what we now call “modern monetary theory.” It’s why you can trace the decline and fall of their empire by the silver content of their coins.
And yet much good fiction is somewhat based on historical events…I think Weber’s Honor Harrington series is such…having her character compared to Horatio Hornblower as such.
The Harrington series quite literally has a character whose name is a pun on one of the leaders of France during the Reign of Terror.
This is not an accident.
It’s also that you have an audience as a SF author, and you have a clear line of communication with your audience that goes both ways (this blog, for example).
One of the reasons the left can exercise so much power is that there’s a clear line of communication between the mob and the people in power. It’s also one of the reasons the left destroys anyone they can who isn’t on the left and has an audience; they can’t take the risk that the non-left will be able to coordinate between the public and those with power that can stand up against the left.
Larry is exactly right. The world has enough political theory and history wonks. We need more culture makers like him.
Respectfully I disagree – about the parallels element. Both the Nazis and the communists had propaganda apparatuses that were almost as good as what exists today. Their level of control and commitment may not have been on the same level as the Big Tech\MSM\Hollywood\Academia union, but it sufficed to reshape nations.
The period between around 204 BC and 188 BC, between Scipio (later Africanus) sailing to Tunisia and the crushing of Antiochus Megas’ army at Magnesia, is another interesting period of history, when Rome utterly crushed three of its main rivals in the Mediterranean and made the fourth (Egypt) a client state. That period was the real creation of the empire. After that the remaining history of the Republic was basically one internal vicious and bloody political squabble after another occasionally interrupted by intermittent barbarian invasions or client kingdom revolts.
Mithradates VI is a very, very modern character for his time. Preaching he was opposed to slavery — but only when it was Romans enslaving Greeks; very modern people’s republic generalissimo. Cruel, but understandably so, based on his personal history. Brilliant, but doomed.
“People making excuses for the cancelling are fools. They might even be well intentioned, but they are still fools. ”
Since you brought it up, I still have shares available in “Good Intentions Paving & Handbasket Inc.” If anyone’s interested.
I don’t read or watch horror because history is scary enough for me. I think it’s time to reread chapter 7 of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” ‘The Nazification of Germany.’
I was always curious how so many Germans could go Nazi, or stand by while their country did. When I asked my Muse for that wisdom, I didn’t mean I wanted to learn first-hand. SMH. I can still hear Her laughing at me. Mocking.
There’s people who won’t be happy until they are licking plates in gulag. Because they know their own imprisonment is for the Greater Good, and the people they hate are suffering too.
We call that the Vichy Fetish.
Holy shit. This Fen dude has posted THIRTY TIMES since I last checked my blog comments. YESTERDAY AFTERNOON.
Dude, get a hobby. Preferably one that isn’t on my page.
This is the same guy who was astounded and butt hurt that Sarah Hoyt was going to ban him off her page. I CAN’T POSSIBLY IMAGINE WHY.
Nah, I had fun with it. I’ve never been accused of being anything as interesting as a “Paid Turkish Provocateur Troll” before. I couldn’t help but admire her creativity.
Turkish because she sleuthed the troll’s Twitter feed or something. Which was pure genius in rendering me stunned speechless, as I have never been to Turkey and never had a Twitter account.
As you might imagine, it’s impossible to stay angry over such a bizzare encounter. So I bear her no ill will. How could anyone? It inspired me to grow an evil mustache to twirl as I explain my dastardly plan.
But to make you feel better, I will confess to many sleepless nights worrying that the REAL Turkish Provocateur is still out there somewhere, provocateering(?) for over a year now.
So thanks again for your concern but, no impact no idea. Though it warms my heart to know you take me more seriously than I do.
Seriously, weirdo. Read the room. Shut the fuck up already.
Thirty something posts here today is creepy stalker territory.
And you don’t need to post ten more times to give me your life story about why you’re too autistic to understand how blog comments work. I don’t give a shit. Zip it.
“Shut the fuck up already.”
Copy
George Orwell: “Here’s a warning of what could be.”
21st Century ‘progressives’: “Hey, look at these ‘How to’ guides written by some schmuck named Orwell.”
“The problem with what Gina Carano said isn’t that our modern left acts like nazis, it is that any historical comparison will never line up perfectly because we live in different situations/cultures.”
Well, as the saying goes “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”
When *FRANCE* is calling one on one’s BS:
https://notthebee.com/article/french-leaders-are-warning-of-americas-out-of-control-leftism-and-cancel-culture
They are desperately trying to ignore that this garbage came from them.
*is howling with hysterical laughter* The HYPOCRISY ABOUNDS!
Dear God.
“His education minister also said the nation is fighting a ‘battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities.’
That “intellectual matrix” is Neo-Marxist Post-Modernism. That’s a very cumbersome tag and I feel stupid when I say it, like I am putting on airs. Can we just say Marxism?
But yes, the hypocrisy. If I remember Peterson correctly, post-modernism is the child of French philosophers*. So this is really just Frankenstein’s Monster slouching back toward the castle.
* Google cheat names Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida starring in the role of Dr Frankenstein
(meh, Ian beat me to it upthread and was more succinct)
I’m particularly done with people who explain that it’s okay when it’s private citizens doing it and that our rights and our values only apply to government.
I’m legitimately libertarian-ish and yes, I believe that all relationships should be voluntary. BUT!
Free speech and liberty are an *ethos* that is not limited to government. Our rights can’t be limited to government and still exist as protections or even concepts.
People are openly calling for the government to make laws against all sorts of speech they don’t like or opinions they view as bad for society. (I read my Dem Senator’s facebook.) Why do they think it’s okay for government to have laws to silence the bad people? Because they don’t *personally* value free speech or liberty AT ALL.
The private and public on this can’t be divided because all that’s necessary to violate what ought to be our principles is for government to look the other way while the violations are outsourced to the mob.
EXACTLY what Gina’s meme-share was talking about. It didn’t start with government rounding people up, it started with neighbors or family turning on you, stopping you from working or taking care of your family or even turning you into the state.
The woke sin-seekers make this delegated mob action their purpose in life and they don’t like if someone doesn’t praise them for their virtue.
How can something that is contrary to our most important formal statement of values be bad when the government does it but virtuous when off-loaded to the private sector?
The problem with the argument that “it’s a private entity so it’s okay” is the false assumption that our government and big business are distinct entities. The sad truth is, the lines of distinction are faint & eroding quickly. There’s a lot of interchange between the two, where big business lobbyist become administration officials, officials and family members of officials join corporate boards, former officials become media figures, others become academics, and then back again.
Then there’s the open fact that big business has a favorite political party, and has dumped billions to put that party into power- which makes that party indebted to those businesses.
Getting your face stamped by a privately owned boot isn’t any better than a government boot.
Big government is farming out censorship to Big Business in order to gain Big Deniability in the ‘legal’ circumvention of the First Amendment.
“people who explain that it’s okay when it’s private citizens doing it and that our rights and our values only apply to government.”
They are deliberately confusing the 1st Amendment with the principle of Freedom of Speech.
We shouldn’t let them get away with it.
Right.
It’s an important value. It HAS to exist in society itself.
It’s not “okay” if it doesn’t.
There’s a difference between “okay” and “legal”
They seem hung up on the fact that it’s not illegal if it’s not the government doing it, when that doesn’t mean it’s *okay*
I am so old that I remember a time when Morality covered the space left open by the Rule of Law.
Seems to be a lot of Chesteron’s Fence in play. So many things were allowed to be torn down, without really understanding what they were built for.
And now we are at a point where anything not deemed illegal is permissible. I work in DC, and the corruption has grown so bad that people are noseblind to it. Simple sins that we would never commit are accepted without pause.
I don’t know how we recover from that.
They take over escapism almost completely right when we need it the most????
Thank you for holding the torch, Larry. ????
I’m waiting for the day where 6 foot 4 inch tall me makes someone shorter feel inferior/offended and they come for me and take me out at the knees or re-educate me to think shorter thoughts.
“I’m waiting for the day where 6 foot 4 inch tall me makes someone shorter feel inferior/offended ”
And trees were all kept equal
By hatchet, axe and saw
– RUSH
She was correct, but facts no longer mean anything it’s all the feelz… And what is one more list? I’m on a bunch of them already…
Perhaps conservatives and libertarians need to play the language hopscotch game like the left. Instead of Hitler and Nazism say things like ” acts of totalitarian oppression”, or “excessive concern for others that diminishes their personal agency” instead of mommy daddy nanny state behaviour. A moving target is harder to hit.By the way I am closest to a Libertarian then anything else, and ‘tarians and conservatives need to work together to survive the shitstorm. Have you hugged a freedom fighter today?
In my opinion, the more academic language used a few years ago was what was holding the libertarian and conservatives back. The average Joe just nodded their head and went about their business while the left said, “literally Hilter!” and “Put ya’ll back in chains!”
When Trump and his group started going simple and pithy, then it resonated. That’s one of the reasons for this crazy. If we talk to academic, they don’t care because that’s not going to make a good slogan to catch people’s minds.
What’s really pretty funny in a horrible way is that Jewish people are not allowed to decide for ourselves about anti-semitism.
If a Jew notices that the left or the islamists are anti-semitic, he’ll get trashed for being too stupid to understand legitimate criticism of Israel.
If a Jew notices that a rightist or moderate or, gasp, a Christian is actually pretty friendly, he’ll get trashed for legitimizing such a blood-soaked monster.
It’s getting tiresome, frankly.
It’s totally objectifying
“not allowed to decide for ourselves about anti-semitism.”
Well if it’s any consolation, it’s the same for all identify groups.
Jordan Peterson remarked that during his dustup over the use of pronouns, several transexuals wrote to complain to him that the activists don’t really represent them. They weren’t asked and weren’t needed to champion them.
We saw something similar when blacks at the front of BLM protests asked the woke white women to stop torching everything in black neighborhoods.
We tend to view these instances as originating from the group when it is really just a handful of Appointed Champions. Their numbers are probably much less than we think. As Brigitte Gabriel so artfully coined: the peaceful majority is irrelevant. It’s a small minority of energetic activists that are in the driver’s seat during the worst moments of history.
And now I have that funny bad lip reading in my head: before it gets better, it’s getting worse 🙂 Maybe one day the majority will realize their strength and tell the SJWs to knock it off.
‘Jordan Peterson remarked that during his dustup over the use of pronouns, several transexuals wrote to complain to him that the activists don’t really represent them. They weren’t asked and weren’t needed to champion them.’
That was because they were exhibiting false consciousness. Everyone ‘knows’ that Woke-ID’d demographics ALWAYS share the same opinion about EVERYTHING. And those that don’t? They aren’t true Scotsmen.
The progressives know that if you Jews don’t speak up about something a white person did that’s obviously anti-semitic, then it’s because you’re too cowed by the Nazi white supremacists that are rampant in the US. So they speak up for you. It’s okay. No need to thank them. The knowledge that they’re helping you in this fashion is reward enough for them.
This was also the case for any minority who basically said to the Woke we are #NotYourShield when it came to the GamerGate thing that happened around the same time as Sad Puppies 3.
I was part of that, because no, unless I appoint you as my legal representative, or give you power of attorney, or that person is my next of kin, nobody has the RIGHT to get ‘offended’ on ‘my’ behalf to hide ‘their being offended’ by anything.
They steal our voice and pretend it’s us talking. We’re shields, fleshsuits. Not people.
I call them POOBOOs. People Offended On Behalf Of Others.
If I was still active on FB or Twatter I’d totally steal that.
Yup. You nailed it. As always!!!
Yah, I left FB back in 2016 because I had a ban-hammer hanging over my head and wasn’t going to self-censor forever over the sudden but inevitable 3rd strike.
Group of lefties called me a racist sexist homophobe for 2 weeks, but apparently my response that they were “just as corrupt as Hillary Clinton” was a bridge too far. Strike 2, muted for 7 days, coincidentally 7 days before the election…
Funny part is all my friends assumed what had happened was exactly what happened. Guess that says something about me I should have learned from.
But they didn’t have the audacity back then to moderate something like this. I see it’s gotten much worse since I was there. I wonder how it will end. My bet is the next round purges will be for The One Who Stopped Clapping.
Ctrl-Left has got to control. Till only 1 remains I guess. Kinda reminds me of that story about putting all the rats in a barrel until you were left with 2 cannibals.
My bad, the above was meant to go under the comment about the Facebook warning. Somehow I mess up the comment nesting.
This episode reminds me again of the words of Pastor Martin Niemoller. If you don’t know them, go read them and think on them.
BTW, Hitler got the German people to hate the Jews because he said they were ‘diseased.’ Enter Covid. No vaccination? You will therefore be automatically be hated because you will be considered ‘diseased’ as well.
First They Came For The Communists
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Martin Niemoller
“First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
“Then they stopped coming for anybody because it was actually pretty peaceful now.”
The latest wrinkle is noted anti-Semite Gina Carano has partnered with devout Orthodox Jew Ben Shapiro to produce a film. Shapiro’s Daily Wire has gotten into the entertainment business and they moved quickly once Carano was cancelled. I’m interested to see how often this will be repeated.
Their last movie, Run Hide Fight appears to be doing really well, so I hope this works out. The more indy places producing entertainment product the better.
Hopefully Shapiro is over his previous Some Cancellations Are Totes Cool stance. He’s always struck me as being a bit more about his personal brand than anything, so I’ll remain skeptical but hopeful.
Do you have an example in mind?
I actually agree with you, there was nothing that wrong with her tweet. I actually found it amusing how hysterical and drama-queenish she came off; it’s the same reason I like your blog and why Chicken Little was one of my favorite books as a kid. She didn’t deserve to be fired for it.
Sure, if “hysterical” and “drama queen” don’t really mean anything.
Indeed, I can’t see what’s so hysterical to point out that a bunch of people who:
– spent years openly encouraging violence against their political opponents,
– urged businesses to fire them and deny them service and citizens to harass them on the streets, and eventually
– accused them of an “insurrection” they had nothing to do with,
could be compared to a bunch of people who did all that, only 80 or so years ago.
———————————————
As for a solution to all this… It’s hard to say. Back when the USSR collapsed, a major reason was people abandoning it physically, as well as culturally – not exactly an option here. Sure, “get woke, go broke” is as valid as ever, but that hardly works when the woke are in charge of both taxation and literal money-printing. I suspect that nothing short of a massive financial crisis – and one very unusual at that – will be able to dislodge the left of their current government positions and diminish their cultural influence. Hopefully to the point where leftism becomes as dirty a concept in the West, as it is for those who endured it here.
And with said financial crisis in mind… Dogecoin, anyone?
1) Blacklisting was apparently only had when it was against the #1 mass murderers of the 20th century, the Communists.
2) By targeting the meme Carano reposted, are they saying hate isn’t taught, but innate?
Can you tell your publishers to use Gina as model for your future heroic female cover art?
As an outsider, I submit that the reason for the current politico-cultural clashes in the US is the lack of a mutually agreed external enemy. A minority of old farts on both sides still subscribe to the belief that Communism is bad but a supermajority do not agree, nor do they agree that China is the enemy, unlike the opinions that prevailed during the Cold War. And lacking an agreed common enemy you all are baring claws at each other instead of making the best of the lack.
You’ve got it exactly backwards. A supermajority know that communism is evil and China is our enemy, but the Leftroid elites and their useful idiots do not agree.
The reason for the current clashes is a growing divide between the left and the right brought on by a serious divergence in value systems. This comes from massive cultural shifts brought on by conscious efforts to change that culture.
The reason our system worked before is because our society as a whole shared most of the same values, but simply differed in how to achieve them. We have that same dynamic from some voting blocs, but that is a receding element. The trend is that more people are abandoning the middle, which leads to an erosion of trust.
Low trust societies behave exactly like you’re starting to see more and more of in the US.
You might find some data which show a slim majority that are socialism-curious, but no idea where you get data which say that a “supermajority” of Americans (or anywhere outside of China and North Korea, for that matter) think that Communism is okie dokie. Do you have a source for that?
Agree in part.
The breakdown isn’t just a moral shift- amoral bastards have always been among us.
The breakdown is in part because we are no longer getting the same three or four media spins on a given issue .. instead, every issue has a comfortable confirmation-bias media report. Compare COVID coverage, for example.
If people are literally getting only comfortable news, not other ways to interpret the same event, they lack a framework to understand much about others getting different news.
Whether you see this as better or worse is up to you.
Mew
I didn’t say it was a moral split, but a more general “value” split. The divide between Left and Right of the mid 20th century isn’t remotely comparable to the chasm we have today on nearly every issue. There is less and less area for compromise.
The Right tries to maintain the status quo, the Left never stops pushing the boundaries. That tension has been going on for decades, and has finally gotten to the point where the Right finally seems to have decided that maybe there aren’t many hills left to die on. So now the tension is palpable.
Values, morals, how finely do you want your hair diced?
The left, as you noted *and as I agreed with*, were constrained, in the middle of the **COLD WAR**, by the little detail that they would be the second against the wall, eh?
The detail I had hoped you would grasp is … there’s a greater barrier of information-insulation (isolation?) around the left today .. back then, the media was still just as dystopian, but .. again, more constrained.
Should you wish to discuss that, great!
Should you wish to violently argue with someone who agrees with you, kindly pick someone else.
Mew
How on Earth you manage to strain “violence” out of my response is mystifying.
Values vs. Morals is a pretty important distinction, particularly when I say that I use it as a broader term. If I value a small government solution to a societal ill as opposed to a big government one, that’s a value choice, not necessarily a moral one (though it could be).
Me not addressing your point about information filtration doesn’t mean I didn’t “grasp” it, asshole, it means I didn’t really think it material to the point I was making. It also doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s a major problem. Do I think it causative? I’m not convinced. I think it more a symptomatic. That’s something I’d be happy to discuss.
But if your reaction to me offering a pretty damn neutral clarification of my point is this sort of crap, maybe you need a break.
As another outsider, I can see where one might get this impression. My own was not much different years ago. Then I actually started conversing online with people on both sides, rather than just getting the media take on matters.
Consequently, the impression I got was the opposite – the mainstream media exist in a shrinking bubble, and have resorted to downplaying, denying, or outright censoring any dissent. Social media merely made this more apparent, in that you can see someone’s been blocked or banned, rather than just wonder “why’s that guy not on TV anymore”, or “why wasn’t there any follow-up to that scandal I saw on the news”.
Similarly, fear of Communism might seem quaint to Europeans (particularly those of us born in it), but the majority of Americans have well-founded concerns about government overreach. Particularly because, unlike in Europe, the federal government is usually of little help to individual states, meaning that increased taxes and business restrictions don’t come with increased benefits. Except for the aforementioned media, who get paid, bullied or blackmailed so as to promote such policies.
In short, outside impressions differ greatly based on whether they’re made from observing American media, or actually talking to Americans. So, stick around, hop to some forums, and ideally, find and discuss something you actually disagree on, and see which side will hear you out, and which will send you to the gulag.
I see above that what I wrote above about a supermajority no longer agreeing that Communism is bad as was the case during the Cold War was misinterpreted as my meaning that a supermajority thinks Communism is good. That’s not what I meant, more than two points of view are possible. The lack of a supermajority in favour of one proposition doe not automatically mean that there’s a supermajority in favour of its opposite. The simple majoritarian model of politics used in US elections (other than for the Presidency) may typically drive people either into one of two camps or to abstain from participating but that does not mean there are only three possible points of view, let alone two.
Appreciate the clarification, but like Indiana404, I’ve seen no evidence to support the your idea about a supermajority opinion on communism. I’ll ask again, do you have some data to back this up? Because all the data I’ve seen points to a majority of Americans who think socialism is bad, so I’m having a hard time buying the idea that they’re suddenly okay with communism.
I agree, and I gathered as much from the above post. However, my impression is the majority of Americans actually aren’t even vaguely positive or even ambivalent about Communism. They’re pretty openly disapproving of it.
And yes, the effectively two-party system might seem odd to us, but at least it’s based on clear and consistent policies, which is more than I can say for most parties in Europe. Rather, I think it’s European citizens who tend to be more subtle and compromise-seeking, if only because we’ve had centuries to learn that the hard way, and not enough headroom to go at each other again. When your back yard still has debris from actual wars, a culture war simply isn’t high on the agenda.
The thing about a two party system is that it only works when a majority of the country shares the same values. The Left and Right have moved much farther apart in the last 30 years and the strain is now becoming too much to bear.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-polarization-1994-2017/
I don’t see how either major party survives intact the next 4-8 years, as the political spectrum elongates and more voters find themselves without adequate representation from only two parties. The structural upheaval from that is going to make anyone’s predictions useless, but the changes are going to be monumental, whatever they are.
Maybe… I suspect it’s less about values per se but more about how these values are applied. I think the main rift nowadays – shown clearly in the change from 2004 to 2011 on the graphs linked above – is caused by the shift from policy-based to identity-based politics. The Obama era was marked by how any criticism of him was decried as racist, and how the left began putting people into ever narrowing social categories rather than address their opinions at face value.
Basically, from general purpose “gimme free stuff” socialism, they openly went into Animal Farm territory, declaring that people of [insert social identity here] are inherently more deserving of consideration than others. Now, socialist policies can be stupid to begin with, but it’s this arbitrary application that really exacerbated the mental decline in the left, and the respective recoil by anyone to the right of Marx. Whatever changes do happen from now on, I just don’t see a future where the left continues with identity politics as its main aspect.
Eh, we might just be differing on semantics here. I’d say identity politics among Democrats has been a growing factor in their policy process since before Obama. It just went ludicrous speed under him and has now gone plaid (With apologies to Mel Brooks). But I’d say that identity politics has become the Democrat’s primary value system (that shit really is the new religion), hence the divergence from, as you say, the more traditional policy-based orientation.
Identity Politics gets the Democrats votes and money, and it gives their followers prestige and money- especially the white Democrats of Privilege looking for moral affirmation that they are Better Than Those Racist Deplorables.
I agree with you.
We don’t have a two party system. We have a one party system pretending to be two. I learned that from Trump.
Identity politics created Obama. Not the other way, Larry. This started in the 1970’s. It started with the Teacher’s Union. It started with the indoctrination of our children by Hollywood from the movie “Hair” until today. I may be younger then some here, but that allows me to see it better. The face of the president isn’t important. Republicans aren’t that different, if you want to know the truth. I completely rejected the Tea Party movement when it was happening, and I was 100% wrong. I thought they would split up the party. It took Trump to show me we had no party. But we have a GREAT OPPORTUNITY. Covid can be made into a movement towards homeschooling. If more and more kids were homeschooled, we could start to win.
Meanwhile; What happens to Ashok, Rada, Karno, Jagdish, Harta next?