Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

Unhinged

Marxists, Seen On Campus

As Longtime (and, probably, Recent) Readers know full well, intemperate speech is not exactly an unknown event on this here back porch, and I often “permit” (okay, encourage) the same in Comments.  But I’m just a guy with a digital megaphone, little different from the loons one would find at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, London or the average screamer on a city street.

I am not, however, a college “professor” who does the same in a classroom:

The investigation found that Castro would belittle students who disagreed with his religious beliefs or lack thereof. Students alleged that Castro made his political beliefs known in the classroom by saying things such as he “would cut off [former U.S. Attorney General] Jeff Sessions’ head and play soccer with it,” and that he would “hang [President Donald] Trump by [President-elect Joe] Biden’s entrails” for example.

Note that I’m not interested in his Twatter account where he said this:

Castro celebrated the news of Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) contracting COVID-19 and hoped that President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence would contract the virus too, in addition to calling Trump a “fat klansman.”

That’s his right to say that — Glenn Reynolds once suggested on his private Twatter account that we should run over violent protestors who attacked our cars, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either.  (Actually, there’s a great deal correct about it, but we can discuss that another time.)

The minute, however, you subject your students –essentially, a captive audience — to your unhinged ravings and penalize them for disagreement, you should be shown the door, the window, the wall and finally the street as you are tossed out on your tenured ass.  (Which, amazingly, Texas A&M are doing to him subject to his appeal, which is also his right.)

There is a clear distinction here between freedom of speech and professorial misconduct.  For far too long, students have had to toe the line and simply acquiesce with the antics of such professors even (or especially) when they disagreed with these Marxist loons.  My own kids used to tell me about this when they were still at college.  (I did no such thing, and for some reason none of my professors ever confronted me when I called attention to their silliness.)  So it’s long past time that this conduct was censured — and by the way, as a side issue, tenure should not be treated as a barrier to censure either.

Ditto this asshole (same link):

Alvard was reportedly notified of disciplinary sanctions following the results of the investigation into his classroom conduct and behavior. In the memo, Alvard was charged with “creat[ing] a negative learning environment for some students that materially affected their ability to participate and learn” and that Alvard “failed to deliver instruction and class materials in an unbiased and respectful manner.”

What the hell has happened to Texas A&M?

Then we have another academic fuckwit getting his two cents in:

“Republicans, you should not be allowed to speak about being shocked by President Donald Trump or the recent right-wing raid in Washington, D.C., for your words ring hollow,” wrote Jones, who is the chair of the Pan-African Studies department. “You all should be forced to shut the hell up unless whatever you have to say begins with, ‘I’m sorry.’ You should not be allowed to condemn Trump or attempt to distance yourselves from him unless you begin with, ‘I have helped him, and I’m sorry,’” he wrote.

Ummm who exactly is going to force us to shut up, asshole?  You?  The federal government?

Actually, I know who he wants to shut us up:  Big Tech — Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. — and they’re getting down to that with gusto, the Leftist cocksuckers.

Here’s one little statement for our worthy head of the “Pan-African [whatever that is] Studies” department:  We’re not going to distance ourselves from Donald Trump — and by “we”, I mean the 75 million people who voted for him over your senile, fraudulent candidate and his cocksucking accomplice — and we sure as hell aren’t going to apologize to you or anyone else for our support of him.

 

Interesting Take

Bad News, Marxists

Here’s a mordant look at our near future:

Nothing will be fair about the coming fight.  It’s no use whining about the other side’s lack of principles, its lies, hypocrisy, unfairness, ruthlessness, and control of virtually every important institution.  They’re evil totalitarians, what the hell do we expect?  Their principle is absolute power and they’ll do whatever is necessary to acquire and keep it.
…
The demonstrators who entered the Capitol could have been murdered en masse.  Any expectation that their murderers would receive justice from the Corruptocracy would be delusional naiveté.
No more foolishness or naiveté.  Any supposedly peaceful protest will be infiltrated by agent provocateurs bent on making trouble for our cause (including the protests being advertised for next week).  The totalitarians will do what they do until they’re completely defeated.  This is war, which calls for the unremitting exercise of cold, ruthless rationality.  We will administer justice and show mercy when appropriate, but we will expect or receive neither from the other side.
Let’s get on with it.

‘Twas always thus with the Left, starting with the Montagnards and Jacobins of the French Revolution and on through Communist Russia into modern-day Venezuela and Cuba.  Any expectation of fair play or conscience from these bastards is, as the man said, delusional naiveté.

I wonder if they have any idea what’s coming.  Hell, I wonder if we have any idea what’s coming.

Size Matters

Business, Deep Thoughts, Politics

When I first visited these United States back in 1982, one of the immediate things I noticed was the sheer size of the market.

I don’t think that people outside the U.S. can quite comprehend the scale of industry of all kinds that native-born Americans pretty much take for granted, if they think about it at all.  After the Great Wetback Episode of ’86, I remember watching TV in Longtime Friend Trevor’s place, and snorting with laughter at some car dealer whose claim to fame was that he was “The Largest Chev-lay Truck Dealer in South-East Texas” or some such puffery, and wondering why the geographical area was so tightly defined.  As it happened, the dealership was a little outside San Antonio, and one evening I and a few others drove south for an evening’s carousing and passed said Chev-lay dealer’s place.

It was the largest car dealership I’d ever seen.  It seemed as though the lot contained well over a thousand cars and trucks, and I was completely gobsmacked.  By chance, one of the group was involved in a car dealership — I think in advertising — back in Austin, so I asked her how many times this guy was likely to turn his stock over in a year, thinking that it might take at least a year or maybe even two to sell it all.  When she said, “About four or five times a year”, I could not believe her.  That would involve selling about 5,000 vehicles a year, or roughly 15 vehicles per day, every single business day of the year.  And this was one dealer in a small town (as San Antonio was still back then) — and of course we passed dozens of dealers on our way into town.

Similar discoveries lay ahead — such as the fact that Jewel supermarkets in Chicago was larger in both size and sales than the national chain I’d just left in South Africa (OK Bazaars, for those with long memories) — and just about every week brought more and more.

I ran into a fellow consultant in Chicago, a Belgian who was making a very good living in South America by selling a piece of software he’d discovered in France, and whose franchise he’d purchased for the international (outside Europe) market, as the Frogs weren’t interested in selling outside their home territory.  It was the only one of its kind in Europe, so after setting up the easy business in South America, he decided that it was time to try and crack open the U.S. market.  He attended an industry conference in Miami, and found to his horror that not only did he have competition, but he had lots of competition from companies selling almost the identical product, and at several different points on the pricing scale withal.  He stood absolutely no chance of success, so he slunk back to South America, tail between his legs.

This country is enormous.  The scale of business and the size of the market simply boggles the mind, and it’s no surprise that when the Euros try to bully us into using metric, for instance, we can them them to piss off because outside the sciences and drug dealers, the U.S. market prefers to work with Imperial units, thank you very much, and the U.S. market is big enough for the rest of the world, in most cases, not to matter.

I told you all that so I could talk about this.

Via Insty, as usual, I read an interesting article entitled A Nation Divided, which bemoans the fact that not only are we facing a permanent political divide between Right and Left, but we run the risk losing our conservative voice by falling under a Big Tech monopoly as well:

Now, Apple, Amazon, and Google are teaming up to make life extra difficult for Parler, a right-leaning alternative to Twitter. Apple and Google are removing it from their app stores while Amazon, who has been hosting the site, is yanking their hosting.
Now, Parler will migrate over to someone else and be back up and running soon enough, but it’s still troubling. Especially with people being de-platformed and then some of the biggest in the tech industry doing everything they can to shut down the alternative.

I doubt that.  Remember that when Roger Ailes came up with Fox News, his selling point to Murdoch was the simplest ever:  “Half the market.”

At some point, the Left is going to run away with itself.  That outlets like Gab and Parler even exist in the face of a near-monopoly like Twitter shows that half the market is still there to be had.

Okay, to put on my marketing wizard’s pointy hat for a moment:  not quite half the market because conservatives have better things to do with their time — like holding down a real job — than to fuck around in a glorified chat room 24/7, but remember what I said above:  even a third of the U.S. market is a huge number, and perfectly capable of supporting not only a competitor to Twitter, but to Facebook, GoDaddy and [gasp]  even Amazon.  Think I’m mistaken about the last?  Remember when Kmart was the market leader in mass merchandisers?  Not so popular now, are they, thanks to Walmart.  Think Walmart is too big to fail?  Say hello to Amazon.

And if there’s one thing anyone can bet the house on, it’s that at some point a competitor to Amazon will arise, and put them out of business.  After all, General Motors was once the Big Cheese of automotive manufacturing, but as little as a decade ago, they required a government bailout to keep their doors open and since then they haven’t exactly gone back to their position of market eminence.

And apart from crappy financial management, the one thing that causes all big enterprises to fail eventually is losing touch with their market, whether in spirit or by the market changing to a different model.

I showed just the tiniest bit of this a couple of days ago when I talked about disentangling myself from Big Tech, Big Retail and Amazon.  Sure, I’m just one guy.  But let’s just think about what would happen if the 75 million Trump voters like me did exactly what I was doing — individuals and conservative-minded businesses alike.  I would also venture to suggest that when it comes to the conservative market, 75 million is a massive underestimation.

As  to who would actually fund all this… I would suggest that Elon Musk is not the only billionaire in town — hell, a bunch of old boys at the Houston Cattleman’s Annual Ball in Houston could probably buy the New York Times  with the change rattling around in their pockets, if they wanted to.  (FYI, if Mexico’s Carlos Slim wanted continued access just to the Texas market, he’d probably sell his share of the NYT  in a NY minute.)

Size matters.  There is sufficient size in this country, whether geography, population or commerce, to support two competing visions of America.  Would it be easy?  Nobody said it would be, but if there’s one thing I have faith in, it’s in that restless American spirit which once said, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…” and I think you know the rest.

Let me also offer the words of John Adams, who when he realized the immensity of the task ahead and the purpose and intellectual powers required, cried:  “We have not men sufficient for the times!”  Whereupon Jefferson, Madison, Hancock, Washington and several others said, “Hold my beer.”

We also have men sufficient for our time.  They just haven’t been motivated enough, yet.  But they will be.

Unlike the earlier men, though, the only impediment we face is not external (George III, Russia!!), but internal.  That would be when the Left attempts to prevent such a severing, or suppressing competition by passing a series of laws forbidding such.

Allow me then to quote, or rather paraphrase the words of George Washington when he was asked why he was preparing a number of boats to cross the Delaware at midnight on Christmas Eve:

“We are going to murder our enemies in their sleep.” 

Panic In D.C.

Good Stuff, Patriotism, Politics

What amuses me about the whole patriotic “invasion” of the Capitol has been the panicked response from the Establishment.  Here are a few examples:

Justice Department warns of national security fallout from Capitol Hill insurrection

“We have to do a full review of what was taken, or copied, or even left behind in terms of bugs and listening devices, etc.,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), raising the possibility that foreign adversaries could have easily infiltrated the crowd that encircled the Capitol.

You mean, apart from the listening devices already in place, planted by (oh, say) Eric Swalwell’s ChiCom mistress or Dianne Feinstein’s ChiCom chauffeur?

But wait, it gets better:

“If this were an organized, fully intent terrorist group — and there were certainly terrorist activities yesterday, but I mean, al Qaeda style — they could have killed a lot of representatives and god knows what else,” Gallego said.

You mean the terrorist who walked around with Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, or the terrorist who was sitting behind her desk?  The whole thing looked more like a college fraternity romp, no matter how scawwwwy it appeared to the timorous at the time.

To be serious for a moment:  from all accounts, there were about 200,000 pissed-off Trump supporters in D.C. last Wednesday, of which about 0.001% decided to “invade” the Capitol and disrupt the oh-so august proceedings of certifying the results of a fraudulent election.  Imagine if that percentage had been, say, 13% — the percentage of Americans who actually fought in the Revolution under George Washington — and if those 26,000 people had been fully armed and quite intent on overthrowing the government?

But they weren’t, of course.  They were, to coin a phrase, mostly peaceful people who just wanted their voices to be heard.

But that seems to have been enough to disturb the Establishment from their everyday job of fucking over the people in this country:

Beyond the security question, this person told me the mob action has been a psychological blow on the DC bureaucracy which didn’t think such an open expression of tangible disrespect for the government was possible. In other words, the capitol mob was a blow to their status, and Washingtonians believe the entire protest represents more than just anger at the election outcome: the disrespectful spirit of the day represents a real threat to their power going forward. This is one reason for the paranoia of Democrats at the moment, and they worry that more such protests are not only possible but likely. Part of the reason there is such fury on the left to run Trump out of office right away is that DC is genuinely afraid of him and his followers.

And here’s a news flash for these pricks:  we’re not going away, no matter how hard you try to suppress us.

One last giggle:

Among other things, the fact that apparently some Capitol Police were friendly with the protestors who entered the building have federal bureaucrats wondering whether they can fully trust their own security personnel.

Just remember, socialists:  these are also the people whom you are going to send out to try to disarm American citizens.

Good luck with that shit.

Me, Too

Elections, Politics

I’m with DaTechGuy on this one:

I’m with Trump because he was with me. He improved the economy, he fought for life, he fought for Israel, brought peace to the middle east, made us energy self sufficient and fought for what was right. Yeah he was loud and carried himself with braggadocio but he literally took the wish list of conservatives like myself that republicans have promised for decades and took it seriously doing his best to fill it.
…
That President Trump did this is remarkable. That he did this with all of DC all of Hollywood, all of Academia and all of media trying to destroy him makes it nothing short of incredible.

Also:

I was and still am a Ted Cruz guy. I would support Cruz in a heartbeat for president. I came to Trump reluctantly as the only alternative to Clinton.

I don’t think Trump is going to run again in 2024 because he’ll be too old by then.  I’m hoping for Ted Cruz, because he has the very best chance of repeating the Trump agenda — I don’t think he could have done it before because we needed Trump to show the way.

Otherwise, if Ted doesn’t run then I’ll be pulling for Mike Pompeo.  Both have The Right Stuff, I think.

Much Ado Etc.

Marxists, Media Assholes

Predictably, the Left has gone batshit-crazy after last week’s fun and games in Washington D.C. — I know, I shouldn’t call it “fun and games” when someone died, but in the grand scheme of things, I think that was accidental and not an essential part of the real story.

It’s also deeply ironic that after a year of rioting and whole city centers set ablaze, all either actively or tacitly supported by the left, that a single large protest by conservatives has become somehow worse than Kristallnacht  and the result of Trump calling for a seditious overthrow of the U.S. government, to name but two examples of the overheated Leftist rhetoric we’re now seeing.

Whenever someone supported by the Left does something stupid, the Left is all about “finding the root causes of the discontent”, or else categorizing it as justified because of some (often imaginary) injustice.  So I’m going to apply the same principle here.

Trump was voted out of office not by a popular vote, but by electoral fraud.  That’s not rhetoric or an untruth, it is a fact.  So when Trump called on his supporters to fill the streets of D.C. and “peacefully protest” (his exact words) this miscarriage of our electoral process, it should have come as no surprise that the people who gave him over seventy million (legal) votes felt as aggrieved as he was (and is), and did exactly what he called for.

That some people got carried away is inexcusable, yet quite understandable.  Let us never forget that the protest vote in D.C. was “largely peaceful” (to use the Left’s own excuse for a riot) and in fact overwhelmingly peaceful — there were hundreds of thousands of people there, and if we can agree that in any crowd, ten percent of them are going to be assholes, what’s amazing is that so few of them stormed the Capitol and sat behind Nancy Pelosi’s desk, thus “desecrating” the seat of government.

All this other talk about invoking the 25th Amendment and / or impeaching Trump to remove him from office stat  is all smoke and nonsense, given that he has but three or so weeks left in office anyway, and — this is important — under the terms of the Constitution, you cannot impeach a former President.

So fuck ’em, and the fraudulent horse they rode in on.

We didn’t start the hatred, by the way;  de-personalization and demonization of the opposition has always been part and parcel of the Left’s toolkit in their drive to power.  But now that we’re in this place, our hatred for these Marxist cocksuckers is not going to die away just because they’re asking us to stop.  If anything, the rancor and hatred is only going to increase, especially when the Left starts carrying out all the actions they’ve threatened us with.