From Lawrence Person:
“Antifa is riots is #BlackLivesMatter is #DefundThePolice is Marxist revolution is cancel culture is civilian disarmament is George Soros is mainstream media bias is the Democratic Party.”
Sounds about right. An all-embracing umbrella of awful.
Well, I’m not willing to try Palmer’s rehabilitation.
Now what, Bill?
Seen as part of this article:
“The real question is not whether Trump will leave office in the event that he loses, but whether Democrats will accept the result if he wins.”
Hell, they didn’t accept his election in 2016, so expect the Loony Hysteria Switch to be pushed from 10 to 15.
It may involve mass rioting — worse than at present — and overt rebellion. Clean yer guns and make sure of your ammo stocks: this could get interesting.
From Lileks:
“What the modern hard left wants is the same they’ve wanted since the French Revolution: claim the present in the name of the future, repudiate the past, then own the past, redefine it to their terms, then make it off limits for discussion unless you keep within the lines they’ve defined. Discussion of the past outside of the boundaries is counter-revolutionary, and proper consciousness has to be displayed at all times. “
An example (still from JL):
“But is it possible now to discuss motel signage and architecture without discussing discriminatory rental policies?”
I have a better idea. Discuss whatever you want, without ever checking your speech or writing for anything that these assholes may think is doubleplusungood (to use one of their literary epithets).
Hell, it’s what I do every single day, here on this back porch of mine, and I encourage you to do likewise in your everyday conversations and thoughts.
As NYFC seems to be about to crash and burn, and given that the situation seems to be echoing in other large, similarly-Democrat-governed cities and states around the country, it raises rather an interesting discussion point.
Should the federal government even get involved? (That explains the hidden Nero reference in the title, by the way.)
In the first instance, we all know that as a federal republic, the states have a great deal of autonomy when it comes to various policy initiatives and experiments — the famed laboratories of democracy of which USSC Judge Louis Brandeis once spoke. Logically speaking (I know, I know), should a state like New York have no problem with abolishing the NYPD, should it not be regarded as such an experiment? Ditto Seattle, where Pantifa seems to have created an enclave within the city and declared it a Soviet collective or something. In both cases, the attitude of these states’ respective governors is best characterized by a “boys will be boys” laissez-faire response.
My question is: in the absence of any state action, is there a compelling reason for the federal government to step in and end such experiments?
I’m not sure there is. And yes, there’s a certain degree of Schadenfreude involved, in that I know that this foolishness will end in tears; but at the same time, I also have a kind of Let Africa Sink attitude towards the whole thing — as long as when the cities implode, the federal government is not expected to be part of either the deconstruction of said stupidity, nor the mini-Marshall Plan that will be required to rebuild the fools’ paradises.
The question arising from the above, therefore, is: as the nation’s economy has greatly decentralized away from the large urban centers, are cities still that important to our country? Strip away the romantic public relations veneer, and I think we can find that they aren’t.
Take Wall Street, for example. With the growth of the Internet and the ability to conduct stock trades remotely, i.e. away from the actual floor of the NYSE, I can think of no compelling reason why the stock exchange should occupy any real estate at all. The importance of New York as a financial center is not what it was, say, in the 20th century, and if the Wuhan virus has taught us anything, it is the degree to which the Internet has taken away the need for such centralization.
I know, it sucks for those fools wealthy people who plonked down $5 million for that 2BD 2BA condo on the Upper West Side, and who would have to pull up the drawbridges against hordes of rampaging looters every night; but quite frankly, I don’t think there’s going to be a great deal of sympathy for these people in the population at large — even though The Donald is one of those same people. (His hotels, for one thing, are going to go under in such a scenario, but the vagaries of fortune of overpriced urban real estate investments are not, as a rule, the concern of suburbanites and country folk in Ohio, Missouri or Utah.)
So, to quote a one-time quasi-revolutionary: “You say you want a revolution?” Go ahead, have fun. Just don’t expect taxpayers from Texas, South Dakota or Arizona to bail you out when it all goes pear-shaped; because while you’re screwing around with anarcho-socialist communes (which have always — always — failed in the past), we Deplorables in Flyover Country will be too busy making America great again to have the time or money to waste on helping you out. And contrary to your expectations, American greatness does not depend solely on places like Seattle or NYFC anymore.
And then we have things like this to laugh at:
Far-left actor Tom Arnold took to Twitter over the weekend to announce it is time for “white liberal men” to borrow their dad’s hunting rifles “and go nose to nose with Trump’s gang of misfit tools” in the wake of the death of George Floyd, amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.
“2nd Amendment is for everyone including black men with long guns but it’s fucking time for us white liberal men to stand up for our brothers & sisters,” tweeted Arnold. “Borrow our dad’s hunting rifles & go nose to nose with Trump’s gang of misfit tools.”
Actually, Tom, we Trump Misfits know that hunting rifles are really not the proper weapons to be used at arms’ length — unless, of course, a bayonet is attached to something like one of my own “hunting rifles”:
I’m too old to mess with close-quarter fighting anyway, and prefer to engage at, shall we say, a little further than arm’s length:
But your call to arms has been noted, Mr. Arnold. Go ahead, keep prodding the bear, and let’s see how it turns out.