Month: April 2023

Protecting Kids

Anarchist thugs, Law and Order

Well now, this is interesting:

Law enforcement officials with the Fort Worth Police Department shut down Antifa agitators over the weekend who counter-protested a small group of demonstrators from “Protect Texas Kids” who were protesting a drag show event.

One would think:  why?  Surely, if someone protests, and another counter-protests, then both are protected?

Well yes, except that this was Pantifa, and their “counter-protest” was anything but peaceful:

During the event, “officers observed a member of the counter-protest group, later identified as 20-year-old Samuel Fowlkes, approach the ‘Protect Texas Kids’ protesters and spray them with pepper spray.” 

And, even better, there’s video of all of it.  Note the paramilitary outfits of the Pantifas, complete with guns.

The FWPD are to be commended for not shooting these little fascist assholes dead.

Rough Men, Rough Justice

Crime, Law and Order

Saith Insty, who has said the same thing many times before:

But remember, ultimately the police aren’t there to protect the public from criminals. They’re there to protect criminals from the rough justice meted out by a public that takes matters into its own hands for lack of a better alternative.

Said in response to this:

Progressives nationwide have attacked police and law enforcement, alleging that our legal system is systemically racist and oppressive. They have caused recidivist criminals to haunt our streets and commit more crimes—and have refused to deal with homelessness in spite of the mental illness and drug addictions that so often afflict our cities’ most vulnerable. Numerous efforts to reduce the use of drugs have been rebuffed in the name, of course, of racism.
This approach has unleashed a crime wave and diminished our sense of safety on the streets. It is, therefore, unsurprising to see ever more law-abiding people seeking to arm themselves. As a result, there will be more guns out there, including in the hands of people who should never be near them.

And hot from the news desk:

This is the horrifying moment suspected Haitian gang members beg for mercy before a vigilante lynch mob stones and burns them alive. 
The mob beat and burned 13 men to death with gasoline-soaked tyres on Monday after pulling them from police custody at a traffic stop, police and witnesses in the capital Port-au-Prince said.
Six more burned bodies were seen in a nearby neighbourhood later on in the day, and witnesses claimed to have seen police kill them before residents set them on fire.

And it’s not going to stop:

Residents in the Haitian capital have put gang members on notice and promised they will be lynched if they attempt to seek vengeance for the deaths of 13 alleged accomplices who were stoned and set on fire.

Sounds okay to me.

Of course, pace the “there will be more guns out there, including in the hands of people who should never be near them” trope, one could (and should) argue that there are already guns in the hands of people who should never be near them — those people being gang members — and all that’s happening now is that ordinary people are preparing to take the law back into their own hands because those deputized to enforce the law are unwilling or being prevented from doing so.

Actual Meanings

Deep Thoughts

I have to admit that I’ve missed Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom these past few years — Jeff was one of the First Wave of bloggers, and his writings were always interesting, not to say educational.

As is his latest post.  Witness:

At its essence, stakeholder capitalism is Marxian capitalism run through a lens of business ethics. It is the attempt to maintain authoritarian control over capitalism by forcing upon the Invisible Hand a Velvet Glove, then using that glove, which hides an iron fist, to pound the world into adopting values that both assert and maintain its worldview. It is Theory applied to markets, marketing, wealth creation and management, and an overall globalized ethos of required and policed “virtue,” with the end goal being — as it always is under the discourses of cultural Marxist thought — power: who has it, who controls it, and who uses it for their own ends most effectively and ruthlessly.

Seldom have I seen varied metaphors blended so seamlessly into a single argument.

And the well-stated zinger:

In the stakeholder capitalist system, investors aren’t — or at least, they shouldn’t be — solely interested in profits driven by production and consumption. And this is because to the stakeholder capitalist, itself a euphemism for collectivist corporatist, “it is well proven that our current form of Capitalism is inherently unsustainable because it requires endless growth on a planet with finite resources.”

Of course, none of this is “well proven” — the history of shareholder capitalism suggests the opposite, in fact, as innovation has led to the production of more and more out of less and less — but whether this is or isn’t the material case is incidental to those who are working on this inorganic worldwide paradigm shift commonly known as The Great Reset.

Read the whole thing, because it’s protean.

The “Clean Vs. Dirty” Thing

Conservatism, Essays, Marxists, Wokism

One of Jeff Goldstein’s fine statements in Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand (as discussed in the above post) is this one:

The Global Elites behind BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, the WEF, the WHO, the UN, et al., have never liked that presumptuous, barely-credentialed nobodies, can get on planes and travel the globe, just as they do. They never accepted that the filthies can eat a fine rib eye, or drive a nice car, or own a comfortable home — and not have to rely on their largess, or answer to their diktats.

For those who missed the allusion to “filthies”, here’s its foundation:  another Jeff (Tucker) wrote a brilliant piece called Clean vs. Dirty: A Way to Understand Everything, and here’s its basic premise:

It is possible to understand nearly everything going on today – the Covid response, the political tribalism, the censorship, the failure of the major media to talk about anything that matters, the cultural and class divides, even migration trends – as a grand effort by those people who perceive themselves to be clean to stay away from people they regard as dirty.
…
They don’t want pet waste on their carpet, thus comparing ideas with which they disagree with a nasty pathogen. They are seeking to stay clean.
In this case and in every case, they are glad for the government to operate as the clean-up crew. It’s dirty ideas and people who hold them they oppose. They don’t want to have friends who articulate them or live in communities where such people live.

And the reason they don’t want to deal with people like Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Elon Musk or, for that matter, any unwashed scum with uncomfortable ideas supported by incontrovertible evidence and/or historical precedent — the reason is that their own worldview is based upon theory and (they think) altruism.  The thing about both theory and altruism is that these are clean philosophies — their motives are pure, you see — and they hate to see those cherished ideals get messed upon when some Unwashed (like, for example, me) points out that their climate “science” is based upon shaky data and wishful thinking, while their predictive models are hopelessly in accurate and cannot form the basis of social or political policy.

The Cleanies likewise hate it when someone lowers income tax rates, because revenues will be “lost” — except, of course, that anyone with the slightest knowledge of history (never mind economics) can point out that when tax rates are cut, tax revenues increase, in some cases massively.

But those messy, messy realities sully the purity of their philosophy, so best to ignore — or better yet, suppress — those dirty realists.

Of course, the reality I’d like to impose on them is fairly simple:

…but no doubt, someone’s going to have a problem with this Occamic proposition.

It might, however, be the only solution — messy though it is.

New Africa, Same As Old Africa

Africa, Third World

Now it’s the Sudan which has exploded:

Fighting has erupted across Khartoum and at other sites in Sudan in a battle between two powerful rival military factions, engulfing the capital Khartoum in warfare for the first time and raising the risk of a nationwide civil conflict.  The fighting between forces loyal to two top generals has put the nation at risk of collapse and could have consequences far beyond its borders.  Both sides have tens of thousands of fighters, foreign backers, mineral riches and other resources that could insulate them from sanctions.  It’s a recipe for the kind of prolonged conflict that has devastated other countries in the Middle East and Africa, from Lebanon and Syria to Libya and Ethiopia. The fighting, which began as Sudan attempted to transition to democracy, already has killed hundreds of people and left millions trapped in urban areas, sheltering from gunfire, explosions and looters.  

Even better:

Sudan borders five additional countries: Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, Eritrea and South Sudan, which seceded in 2011 and took 75% of Khartoum’s oil resources with it. Nearly all are mired in their own internal conflicts, with various rebel groups operating along the porous borders.

In other words, same ol’ Africa.  Here’s a map, for a little perspective:

Most notably, every single African country on this map can most charitably described as a “shithole”.

Anyway…

Forgive me if I don’t give a shit, about any of them.

We’re All Gonna Die (Again) Pt. 27

Plagues and Poxes

India’s latest contribution to the world (other than more Indians) is the Arcturus virus, which is ten times deadlier than Asian Killer Hornets and “ghost guns” combined.

Once again, we have the panic-inducing headlines from the usual suspects:

Arcturus has already killed 5 Brits: New super-infectious Covid strain now makes up one in 40 new cases amid fears it could trigger fresh wave

The variant, thought to be the most infectious yet, is causing carnage in India, with cases having exploded 90-fold since it first took off two months ago.

…which has the usual not-so hidden agenda:

Some of the worst-hit states have already brought back mandatory face masks to control its rapid spread.

This, from a country which allows the families of recently-deceased to deposit the corpses in the streets at night, to be picked up by local government workers as part of the morning’s trash collection.

Considering that the Indian population is now larger than China’s, in a country which doesn’t have anything like China’s industry to feed it, a cynic might suggest that Arcturus is, on balance, not that great a threat to India at all.

And even if the death rate in Britain explodes ninety-fold like India’s, that would raise the tally to… uh, carry the 3, to 450 — which in a British population of 67 million, is ummm far less than the number of elderly people killed in pedestrian accidents last year.  The first non-Indian fatality from this doubleplusungood NewWuFlu, by the way, was an elderly Brit living in Thailand, and in poor health.

In other words, this new bug (just like the WuFlu) is going to kill some old people with existing health issues — in further words, a nothingburger — unless we get the usual overreaction from government.

And I’m going to take a wild guess and say that if Big Brother and his Karens try to do all that WuFlu lockdown / social distancing / mask mandates / closing businesses stuff, people are going to tell government to get fucked.  Once bitten and all that.

One would hope so, anyway;  but if there’s one thing we do know, it’s that some people are quite comfortable with the government’s boot pressing down on their neck.