From the Knuckledragger:
Wow. Only one load of .45 ACP from the Chip McCormick PowerMag in my 1911. (Can’t see it taking more than one round each; hell, the muzzle flash alone would probably drop half of them.) And assuming that I’d qualify as a “Nazi” to them, of course.
They’re going to have to do a lot better than that…
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This line comes from Chris DeGroot, and I nearly made it a QOTD, but I think it actually deserves more discussion.
“Over time, any nation in which personal autonomy is taken for granted as the highest good must become deficient in social cohesion.”
And that’s where the Enlightenment falls apart. In their rush to overcome the oppressive social environment such as under royalty or an official State church (not to mention religious excesses such as the Inquisition), the Founding Fathers, Enlightened all, created a system with ironclad rights (which they called “natural”) which were guaranteed to the individual and protected by the Constitution.
I have no idea what John Adams or Thomas Jefferson would have thought of a society with many nebulous and self-identified genders about which nobody dare breathe an ugly or even judgmental word (despite that “freedom of speech” thing). Let’s not even talk about the demonization of White men or the “reverse” racism enshrined in racial-preference laws. If they’d had that situation back then, Washington may well have called out the militia to enforce a series of mass floggings… ummmm…
Sorry, I went away to warm and wonderful place there for a moment.
The point is that intelligent people (such as, say, the Founding Fathers) have always known that the concept of individual rights stood at the very top of an extremely slippery slope, but I suppose that the aforementioned probably counted on the common sense of the people and their elected officials not to take society to a place where a White woman wearing a caftan on a hot summer’s day could be decried as “cultural appropriation”, and punished (by censure from university authorities, for example, or by socially-acceptable ostracization).
So much for that idea.
DeGroot’s statement is perfectly true, of course, so at a time when we as a nation are hopelessly divided into a multiplicity of self-interested groups of increasingly-freakish people — not to mention nigh-monolithic groups such as “Blacks”, “progressives” or “LGBTOSTFU” — it seems an impossible task to call for such exotica as “national unity” (what a fucking joke) or make pleas that sound like “Can’t we all just get along?”
No, we can’t, ever; not when The Other has been institutionally demonized by the Perpetually Aggrieved.
Well-meaning people may think that there must be a way for us to come together and put aside our differences, but that’s never going to happen. As long as the most trivial differences between us have been magnified into chasms separating us into “Nazis” and “racists” (to name but two), such harmony is absolutely impossible.
I wish there was a workable, lasting solution, but there isn’t. Even the mass floggings alluded to above aren’t possible, otherwise the Left would have started them already — on us — for being the Nazi / racist / evil / Trumpians / whatever we are (according to their standards, of course).
The only thing that does cause so splintered a nation to unify is a calamity (e.g. a hurricane’s devastation) or a palpable evil perpetrated by a hostile entity (e.g. 9/11). Because of the sheer size of the United States, natural calamity is generally localized and is not a “national” event. And even the actions of a hostile entity have an increasingly-abbreviated shelf life nowadays, so I see no “unity” in our collective future. Hell, I don’t even see comity appearing anytime soon.
But then, I’m The Enemy.
My many rants about the shittiness of modern architecture are by now a fixture of this weblog, and I see no reason why I should end them anytime soon. Take a look at Britain’s Ugliest Buildings, and tell me why I shouldn’t pray for a series of Muslim assholes piloting airliners on one final mission for Allah, with these dungheaps as targets.
My least favorite (and it was a tough decision, let me tell you) is the so-called “Walkie-Talkie” building, not because of its inherent ugliness — it would actually work quite well in a more modern city e.g. Abu Dhabi — but because of the violence it has done to the skyline of one of my favorite cities in the world, viz.:
Somebody hide the TNT, willya?
Oh, here’s a good one:
A couple who fed their daughter an extreme vegan diet have admitted causing her serious injury.
The mother and father, aged 32 and 34 respectively, who cannot be named for legal reasons fed the girl oats and rice milk.
The girl’s diet was so restricted that she developed rickets, a degenerative bone disease caused by malnourishment.
This diet resulted in severe deficiencies in nutrients across the board for the infant, including a lack of calcium, phosphate, vitamin B12, vitamin A, iron and zinc.
Her levels of vitamin D — which can cause bone disease if found to be too low — were ‘undetectable’.
The infant had fractures scattered throughout her tiny body and her bones were so brittle doctors believed they could have been broken by ‘normal handling’.
The treatment of the girl was only brought to the attention of doctors in March this year, when doctors attended to the infant after she suffered a seizure.
One doctor described her as ‘floppy’ and noted how the diminutive one-and-a-half year old didn’t crawl or talk during the month in care.
And here’s the best part:
The daughter and her two siblings have since been taken into foster care.
Under the reign of World-Emperor Kim, the parents would also receive daily floggings and an all-meat diet during their ten-year prison sentence. And if these two fanatics were to starve themselves to death rather than eat that eeeevil meat, so much the better.
Fucking bullshit.