Always Has Been

In one of his customary well-reasoned comments, Longtime Reader GMC makes this statement (discussing this post):

“If citizens do not have faith that the State will hold up its end of the social contract, they will take matters into their own hands.”

Will, and should.

My only corollary to this is a reminder that in answer to all those who wail about people “taking the law into their own hands” (not the same as the above, but parallel to it), we have to note that the law has never left our hands.  The law is not the sole preserve of lawyers and judges, but of the People in general (a point that GMC likewise addresses in his comment about jury nullification).  Likewise, the enforcement of the law is deputized by the People to agents of the State — and if said agents are incapable of or unwilling to perform that responsibility, the the People have not only a right but a duty to take the enforcement back into their own hands.

The law belongs to us, We The People, not to all its priests and Sanhedrin, and even less so to its enforcers — despite all their delusions to the contrary.

Sue Them Out Of Existence

…Ford, that is, after the Waukesha incident where (according to the NYT) an SUV killed several people in a Christmas parade.

Ford is clearly responsible for the criminal misuse of its product. Yes, the company is selling a legal product through legal means, but it is ultimately Ford’s duty and moral obligation to ensure that criminals or those with potential future criminal intent are not able to acquire its products, whether through a Ford dealership, a used car dealer, a private party sale, or even by theft.

Silly, is it?  Change “Ford” to “Remington” or “Colt”, and “car” to “gun” — and this is precisely what the media and Left are advocating.

Evil bastards.

Accursed Menus

Here’s a rant after my own heart:

I was puzzled, so I checked the website and got nowhere. The password I’d used for the account was suddenly not accepted.
So I phoned the number on the website. And got nowhere. This time the problem seemed to be my PIN.
Or maybe my account number. Or maybe my customer ID. Or my PCN number. Whatever that was. The recorded message didn’t really care. I gave up.
I had become the innocent victim of the new digital age in which the algorithm reigns supreme.
There was a time when a human being with a problem talked to another human being who helped to get it sorted. Those days are gone.
The lives of big companies and government officials are made so much easier if we customers or clients can be kept at arm’s length.

The online experience is bad enough — but when you dare to call the “Customer Care” (ha!) telephone number, that’s really when the SHTF.

A combination of the two above means that I will be changing my Medicare supplemental insurer, because it seems to be the only way I can punish these assholes for their bovine indifference to my situation.

I’ll let Humphrys finish this rant:

Increasingly, we are being deprived of even a semblance of what we once thought of as customer service.
We are left talking to a computer screen behind which sits not another human being, but an algorithm. Or a recorded telephone announcement that may or may not respond to our pleas for help.
It’s as though any human compassion in the relationship between customer and provider has simply disappeared. And that’s very sad.

Or enraging.  Ten guesses which side I’m on.

Morons

From some politician I’ve never heard of:

The chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC) released a memo on Election Day evening that asserts the results clearly show Republicans “must become the party of parents.”

Ummm excuse me, Captain Obvious, but conservative Republicans have always been the party of parents — or, to be more specific, of the family.  Conservatives espouse the family as the basic building block of societal strength and cohesion.

It’s the godless Left who strive always to break up the family, who think that children belong to the State, who are trying to set children against their parents and who are constantly railing against those longstanding institutions (like the family) because unfairness or racism or whatever fucking tarbrush they use to paint them — and us — as evil.

So when some mainstream Republican asshole [redundancy alert]  suddenly realizes that “OMG we now have a weapon to beat the Democrats!”, it just reinforces to the rest of us how out of touch and useless they are.

Wake up, you idiots.

Job Opportunity

Email from Longtime Friend Gibby:

“Idiots are working as ‘armorers’ on film set… You should be doing this work and not idiots (don’t care who her dad was!). Reach out — I’m am sure you could get this sort of piece work (forgive the horrible pun…) if you put your resume out?”

No doubt I could.  Except that it would probably require that I:

  1. live in California and
  2. work in Hollywood, which in turn would mean
  3. being exposed to show business people, and
  4. paying taxes to the State of California.

Nope. They’d have to pay me more than they pay Alec Baldwin — and I still wouldn’t do that.

Let ’em all kill each other.