A commenter on our previous post asks how any intelligent person could actually be suspicious about the result of the recent election. He also mentions, in support of his confidence that the results are legitimate, that Joe Biden won the popular vote by millions of votes.
Here’s my reply:
First of all, the point about the popular vote is irrelevant: it’s the Electoral College that determines the presidency, not the great mass of voters in huge Blue population centers.
Second, the people telling us “nothing to see here” — the political operatives of the Democrat Party, and its foot-soldiers in the press — are the same ones who perpetrated the four-year operation to remove Donald Trump from office, by any means necessary. They subverted our most powerful institutions of justice, national security, and intelligence to do so. They created a truly audacious hoax, using a fraudulent opposition document paid for by the Clinton campaign, as the basis for surveillance of Mr. Trump’s campaign, legal harassment of his allies, and a relentless smear campaign in all media. When it came to light that the whole thing was a pack of lies, they insisted as one that its critics had all been taken in by a crazy conspiracy theory. To this day, we are still waiting for justice to be done. (Spoiler alert: it won’t.) At every turn, these powerful and implacable enemies of the President have done everything they can, again and again and again, to defeat, slander, and remove him from office. Anyone who questions this sustained assault is censored, cancelled, doxxed, shouted down, and excluded from polite society.
Given all that we have seen of these people, how can any intelligent person not assume that they would do everything they can to steal this election? Do we think they are too scrupulous, too dedicated to honesty and fair play? Given that they know they will get the faithful and absolute support of the press to erect a stone wall against any scrutiny, why wouldn’t they do the very best they could to prevent Donald Trump from winning a second term? We know that they have pressed constantly, in advance of the election, for everything that might undermine the security of the system. They have introduced mail-in ballots on an unprecedented scale, when voting by mail is known to be so ripe for error and abuse that it is scrupulously avoided in most other countries. They have further reduced the security of voting-by-mail by sending unrequested ballots to many millions of voters, many of whom have turned out to be dead, or no longer at their previous addresses, or use two different names, both of which were sent ballots. They have permitted “vote-harvesting”, which interrupts the vitally important chain of custody. They have resolutely resisted the most basic tool of election security — voter ID — which is such an obviously necessary measure that it is the law pretty much everywhere else on Earth. They have altered mail-ballot rules (in some cases, in clear violation of the Constitution) to weaken the security of the mail-in vote, by discarding requirement for timely receipt, for making sure that signatures match, and for ensuring that ballots are correctly filled out.
Third, there are great and gathering currents of evidence that something was very seriously amiss here, and amiss in just the places that mattered most. Taken individually, perhaps, they don’t amount to much, but taken together those currents all flow in the same direction. There is statistical evidence – from Benford’s Law anomalies to rejected mail-ballot percentages. There are obvious geographical curiosities — where, for example, the vote in adjacent red Midwestern counties separated by a state border voted in wildly different ways, despite having very similar patterns in the past. There are sworn affidavits from poll-workers explicitly testifying, under oath, to egregious malfeasance of various kinds. There is the curious fact that in places where the down-ticket Republicans did very well indeed — far outperforming 2016 — but somehow Donald Trump’s lead slipped away in the wee hours of Election Night, and in the days after. There is the refusal to admit observers (or letting them into gigantic spaces, but keeping them so far away they couldn’t see anything). There is the suspension of the vote-count in key cities in the middle of the night, so as to send the observers home, then resuming the counting in secret. There are the great tranches of Biden ballots that suddenly arrived en masse once the deficits had been reckoned — thousands and thousands of pristine ballots, perfectly marked in the little ovals with black ink, with no down-ticket candidates marked at all, just Biden. There is the discarding of large numbers of mail-in ballot envelopes, making it all but impossible to separate timely and legitimate ballots from fraudulent ones. There is the extremely shady history of the Dominion voting system, which was used in many of the swing states where Biden miraculously rose from the dead to overtake Trump by narrow margins.
Is any of this conclusive? Well, we will never know unless we do everything we can to verify the results, and unless we do everything we can — despite the howls from the media — to make sure that we count only those votes that were cast in accordance with local voting laws, and with the Constitution. No matter what happens from here, the stench of fraud is already thick enough that there are going to be many, many millions of American citizens who will have lost all faith in our system of elections. At the very least, we should try to keep that number of citizens as low as possible, and that means letting this investigation, and this contest in the courts and legislatures, play out to the end.
The damage is already done, though. After the arbitrary authoritarianism of our mayors and governors all year in dealing with both the Wuhan virus and the anarchy and violence in the streets, followed by this reeking election, our national morale is now, to a very great extent, broken beyond repair. As far as confidence in the rule of law is concerned, and trust in the Republic to honor its founding principles, 2020 will have been, probably for at least fifty to a hundred million Americans, the year they began to check out.
62 Comments
Nothing is falsifiable with the black holes in the chain of custody in these crucial urban jurisdictions. A stolen election is as sound a hypothesis as any.
Bottom line, 2016 was the last time when voting will ever be allowed to change the government.
AG,
Well, right. If you can get the power, even at the cost of sowing corrosive loss of faith, and bitter anger, in people you don’t care two pins about, why not do it? It’s perfectly rational; it just isn’t particularly moral. (But then again, if your religion tells you that by disenfranchising evil people you are working toward the greater good of all, you won’t have any moral worries, either. How can it be a sin to cast out the Devil?)
As Curtis Yarvin said in his recent essay about the election: if you care about power, then the way you use power is, first and foremost, to create more power. Then you can do whatever you want.
This was quick:
https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/dominion-voting-systems-lawyers-up-abruptly-backs-out-of-pa-state-house-fact-finding-hearing/
All,
At Anti-Gnostic: 2016 was the first time in our lives that voting did *almost* change the government. We have their answer.
NO, your vote doesn’t count.
As far as 50-100 million American’s checking out; fine. Well, Bye. If all you had in you was voting this was doomed anyway.
As far as the Constitution: …………………………………………………………………………………….where have you been?……….
As far as what to do: Organize. Off the books. No smack talk, any ‘tools’ or ‘tool time’ do completely separately.
You can organize food distribution networks, and don’t doubt they’ll be needed. Hunger is a next logical step, speaking of which…
The Left and the Dems cannot stop now.
They can’t sit pat, they’ll come out swinging. They went over the Rubicon, and the utter lack of resistance other than legal motions [LOL] will not calm their terror of us. Nor do they have a ability to self limit.
It actually will be interesting to see a state without a right wing, without a replacement army or police rule.
vxxc,
Oh, I’ve been right here, watching, for long years now. I write these things because they need saying.
Sir, this is a process. Not everyone is as far along down into the rabbit-hole as you are. If people are to believe that it’s all over, that the Constitution actually no longer applies, that the rule of law now means nothing, etc., then they need concrete examples. So unimaginable is that awful prospect, for most people, that they need to be confronted with it, again and again, before they can even begin to consider it. (Very few of them have ever thought about any of it at all; to most folks, the United States is just an eternally existing natural feature of the world, like the Pacific Ocean.) Very few people understand the great cycles of history, the inherent instability of democracy, the precariousness of the republican form, the mortal dependency of republics upon civic virtue, and so on. And given the great takeover of education since the Sixties, fewer and fewer people even have an inkling of the depth of their ignorance about these things.
So you can’t just go around like a broken record, saying “The Republic is dead, and we are doomed, so ORGANIZE ORGANIZE ORGANIZE NOW NOW NOW!!!!!”, because normal people — who might, if brought along the right way, come to accept the possibility of such a sea-change in their lives, and in the life of this great nation — will just think you’re a crazy person, and will simply tune you out.
“THE END IS NEAR!!!!” Nobody listens to that sort of talk. The end may, in fact, be very near indeed, but you can’t tell them; you have to show them. You have to keep in mind that this idea — that the United States of America as we’ve known it for almost 250 years might actually be nearing the end of its lifespan — is, quite literally, not believable to most people. They have to see it actually failing, before their eyes, for a long time, before they can begin to change.
So yes, I still mention the Constitution from time to time. And I can’t say I’d mind if we can still squeeze enough juice out of it to buy ourselves another four years.
Fair points and taken Malcolm.
However: I am not crazy, just realistic.
I say organize because whether the constitution exists or not we should have long ago and must now. I am hardly saying THE END IS NEAR, however for some things it certainly is, and perhaps for some people.
All that happened was the pretense of the vote deciding anything was dropped this month and that’s all= the end of pretense.
As far as the Constitution: The Bill of Rights is largely intact, the core government – articles 1-7 have been sham since the New Deal. Our actual Constitution is the Federal Register. This is a matter of public record, it’s simply people want to go on being children.
On the matter of being children vs down the rabbit hole- maybe they’re in the rabbit hole still and I’m in the sunlight, but it doesn’t matter. Facts are Facts. Bringing them along slowly…a process…dear Sir…
We all have been trying to bring them along for what decades? Perhaps it’s time we just leveled with them and now is the time with the shock of the brazen election theft on TV is still fresh? Or not.
The truth is they won’t be bought along, they’ll accept whatever fate. They really will. This isn’t the End, it’s just the end of the pretense of Republican government and that elections matter.
It’s the end of being childish.
No, your vote doesn’t count- now it’s official.
When I say organize, it’s so not to be helpless before people with no limits learned, ever. It’s not to save America, America will go on in whatever form. Organizing is for survival, or cutting a better deal than the passive and despised get.
They’re not going to fight to save or restore the Republic, that fight never happened and never will. I’m just being honest…if they want to tune out, do.
They’re happier that way.
vxxc,
I didn’t say you were crazy. I said that to get people to listen at all, you have to understand what they will and won’t listen to.
My aim here is to try to make a bridge between two worlds. I understand how a great many normal Americans still see things, because I still remember what it was like to see things that way myself. I had to go through a long process of my own to begin to understand the gravity and historical underpinnings of our current predicament, and all around us are people who, I believe, could see it too — who can sense that something has gone horribly, awfully wrong — but who can’t see all at once how bad the situation is, and need to get there a step at a time. Go too fast, and it’s too much.
When you have believed all your life that there is solid ground beneath your feet, it’s hard to let that go. Meanwhile, everything they are told, everything they hear all day long, are taught in schools, and believe they ought to be able to trust, makes all of this seem like a kind of madness, a fever-dream. (As I said in the post, though, the events of 2020 will likely have been rather a rude awakening for a great many people, which may be the only silver lining to a very dark year.)
So: you spread the message in your way, and I’ll do it in mine. You seem already to have given up on a lot of folks I’d still like to bring along.
Trump’s lawyers, especially Guilliani, refuse to reveal their evidence. They say it must be shown first to the courts. That is a fatal error. The people must be convinced, too, and that must be done now, before the vote is finalized in everyone’s mind.
In the end, this vote will stand. Biden is the next President. The Democrats will get the 50 Senate seats needed to control it. And the whole leftist agenda will be enacted.
bob sykes, you are conceding Ga. two Senates seats already? I’m not.
One “concrete example” came with the passage of GW’s so-called Patriot Act.
In one fell swoop, the Fourth Amendment and the effective protections of the Fifth were nullified. Officially. (vxxc’s relating ‘since the New Deal’ notwithstanding.)
Insofar as the First Amendment’s concerned, haven’t we all so recently witnessed the executives of many states, to my knowledge without comment from those states’ legislatures decree by executive fiat that, that too is out the window? (Speaking specifically here about that pesky ‘prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ bit. Nevermind expressing one’s fondness of MAGA gear in large swatches of our urban environs.)
Soon, I figure, Beto’ll be coming, accompanied by the IRS, to a neighborhood nearby and then it’ll be Katy bar the door.
Good luck getting Amazon to timely deliver those reinforcing door hinges you’ve been meaning to install for awhile now.
What you need to ask someone like this is do you think that there has never been any voter fraud in, say, the last 100 years? Never any fraud in federal elections? Then why is it impossible to believe now? Voter fraud is part of Democratic Party folklore, they laugh about it and its perpetrators are held up as wily heroes.
http://www.pahousegop.com/News/18605/Media-Advisories/State-Government-Committee-to-Hold-Virtual-Information-Hearing-on-Voting-Machines-
Take a wild guess who decided they’d rather meet with some lawyers than with Mr. Grove.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/dominion-voting-systems-lawyers-up-abruptly-backs-out-of-pa-state-house-fact-finding-hearing/
That’s putting the reasonable with the doubt.
https://twitter.com/peterdukephoto/status/1330028850022060032
Taking off from the title of Malcolm’s preceding post Let’s get Kraken in my opinion, this is a necessary link (Generally, I much prefer to avoid linking to other’s opinion blogs – exception being if a blog provides “expert witness type” informational type help.)
The video is what I’m pointing to in this instance – but good comments too:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2020/11/about-electoral-fraud-in-pennsylvania.html
Lastly, directing to the commentor who prompted this current post, tho’ I can’t recall whether your objection included, specifically, “There’s been no credible evidence presented!” I would simply encourage you to do some reading here – Rule 901 for example:
https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/Rules%20of%20Evidence.
@Malcolm
I understand your method, I have tried it myself. It fails. It.Failed.
It was always going to fail, they had no stake in or connection to such wild theories [which are simply facts in the public record].
Now Sir they are vulnerable to the approach, now Sir is the time they will listen. All until now in terms of explaining was practice; practice where all of us who told them cast seeds among deaf stones*.
Well now they are no longer stones, now their ears are open.
Now is the time. [it was always going to come in a rush]. The time may not come again. The gentle slow way…sorry sir..has no more time.
Now is the time, it may not come again.
Now is the time to say:
1] Your vote now officially doesn’t count.
2] We are now all subject to the raw and lawless application of power.
3] We are presently powerless by choice, but have vast potential lying latent…if only perchance we would…
Organize.
Something, anything.
Any organization would instantly improve our lot. No need to march around Starbucks with AR-15’s [that was bluff, and it failed] in fact put those things away. Out of sight.
Those truck rallies were a great thing.
Let’s all do that again, I’ll show if someone pops me an email on it.
*[I’m mixing metaphors, but it’s a consistent mix! ;)]
@Malcolm, et al..
I haven’t given up on the others.
I’m just saying at the present, they’re useless. They may be helpful later.
Sir you may be trying to get people who, ah…let me put it this way…don’t stick their neck out unless forced to, and then only if watched…to act outside their immediate self interests: Sgt Vxxc says this is impossible. People who truly will act or risk for the common good are exceptional, and always have been [please do not believe nonsense about WW2, etc]. If you wait on them the answer is never. They will not risk. Frankly those are the people who join a lynch mob – at best. They’ll join if there’s pressure, no real risk, and above all has social approval – like most lynch mobs.
To even get any of them moving this would have to happen: A President of the United States is elected who says: People of America – rise and defend the Constitution.
^What do you think the chances of that are now?^ Zero.
If however President Zero was elected ..all they’d do is nod approval. Instead of whatever they are nodding to now.
Moreover those we’d all like to bring along…aren’t coming. Ever. That’s why many national efforts require conscription, and frankly even then the historical norm is they require watching or they desert. Americans are no different.
The people you may sir tragically be waiting for are never coming, and never were.
However it’s not a question of all, or even a question of most. It’s a matter of enough..
vxxc,
We do what we’re good at. Here are the things I’m pretty good at, in no particular order at all:
1) Crosswords. (I’m very good at crosswords.)
2) Thinking about things, and making connections.
3) Knowing stuff.
4) Explaining stuff I understand to people who don’t.
5) Recording and mixing.
6) Playing drums and guitar.
7) Singing.
8) Southern Chinese martial arts. (45 years now.)
9) Cooking.
10) Teaching southern Chinese martial arts.
11) Driving.
12) Coding in C++.
13) Repairing things around the house.
14) Spelling.
15) Writing sentences.
16) Metabolizing alcohol.
17) Shooting.
18) Chess.
Some of these things are useful in the current context, others not at all. (Some may even be liabilities.) I’m 64 years old.
So: I do what I can. OK? You may well be right about who can and can’t be counted on, but organizing guerilla militias just isn’t in my skill-set. If I can help a few people get to an understanding of what’s happening here, and what the stakes are, that’s useful in its own way, I reckon. And it’s what I have to offer.
You reckon right Malcolm.
Plus, there’s no fee.
https://hereistheevidence.com/
I’m reckoning a big ol’ shoe to drop tomorrow, maybe the day after.
And shoes, generally speaking, usually come in pairs.
& Malcolm, for what it’s worth don’t get the idea vxxc’s just thinking ‘militias’ there was this
Organization does not necessarily demand immediate general hostilities and armed melees (exempt the Left Coast here please) follow.
Guess it doesn’t matter to y’all conspiracy theorists that the people who are actually seeing the evidence – or more accurately, the lack thereof – aren’t buying all of this nonsense. Read the judge’s opinion in the most recent of many many many state and federal Trump cases that have been thrown out – in PA (again!). His scathing extensive opinion refers to the “evidence” presented as a “Frankenstein’s monster” of stitched together bullshit (my word). But no doubt Malcolm will have an opinion as to why the opinions of these many state and federal judges are in some way irrelevant, that somehow the Trumpsters have been prevented from showing the ”real” evidence…you know, all those dead people voting, all those sworn affidavits etc etc etc. I guess all these judges, liberal and conservative, state and federal must be in on this vast conspiracy by the Democrats to steal the election. I still don’t get, though, why if the Dems are so darn clever, they couldn’t flip the Senate…and lost so many House seats.
So stay in your mirrored echo chamber.
Over and out.
David D,
Well, if suspecting election tampering, for all the reasons listed in my post, means that I am in a “mirrored echo chamber”, I’ll say at least that it’s a roomy place, well furnished, and attractive enough that there may well be a hundred million of us in here. So at least it won’t get lonesome.
I haven’t read the Brann decision, but I’ll say this: if the Trump legal team doesn’t present a compelling case to the courts, they won’t prevail. And if the legal challenges don’t work out, Trump will step aside, Biden will be inaugurated on January 20th, and we’ll all just have to take it from there.
As for your questions about the House and Senate, none of us in this hall of mirrors is going to be at all surprised when both Democrats win their January runoffs by barely sufficient (but sufficient!) margins, and so Blue will have control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. It almost feels like a foregone conclusion.
It seems as if you think there really was “nothing to see here” — just a nice clean election, all fair and square, thanks very much, and neat as ninepence. I’m sure as well that you think yours is the sane and clear-eyed position, in contrast to all these loonies and sore losers over here. Fair enough! You’re as entitled to your opinion as we are to ours. (I’d say “it’s a free country, after all”, but that’s starting to feel just a tad precarious; if I still had to hold a job I’d be more than a little nervous about writing the things I do.)
So what’s your hurry? If you really do have Truth, Justice, and the American Way all lined up in your corner, you can have no doubt about what the outcome will be. If these challenges are obviously ridiculous, then all you have to do is to let them play out, wait for the inevitable result, then crack a beer and relax as the triumphant Democrats — those great patriots Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Schumer, Harris, Warren, Nadler, Schiff, et al. — roll up their sleeves to begin the the happy task of reducing to rubble, once and for all, what the Founders erected.
JK,
I was never any good at organizing truck-rallies, either. (I’m really not much of an “organizer” at all, if the truth be told.)
David D,
There’s the possibility (I’d use ‘likelihood’ but) the lawyers, in these early stages/courts are including a spanner in these early writs for relief. The Constitution as we all well realize poses time limits/intervals which must be met therefore, and speaking as an ‘amateur’ strategist, my thinking of all these lower courts might well reckon to be referred to as speedbumps.
And if these courts are speedbumps the last thing a competent Constitutional lawyer, aware of these ‘set in stone’ time constraints would hope for, would be for a judge to sustain a motion which would then, very likely, be sent back to a lower court for a reconsideration. After which time, likely a longer amount of time, the motion would only then be furthered along to the speedbump that sustained. Lengthening the process.
The destination marked on the President’s team of attorneys map is clearly designated. But there’s a bunch of speedbumps that must be negotiated before that destination can be reached. But as time is of the essence the last thing the driver of ‘the lawyer car’ would want to do would be to fatally hole the car’s oilpan on a speedbump necessitating a lengthy visit to Jiffy Lube.
Dinging the oilpan on the speedbumps is therefore okay, nothing ventured toward the destination is nothing gained, so long as negotiating the map can be continued.
We shall see how this all turns out but, and this is just my opinion but, for now I think the driver is running the race just fine.
I for one would think that all this great national audience should want to see a clear winner rather than seeing the race end in the pits.
Malcolm,
Is ‘music-stuff’ the product of a team?
(If a tree falls in the forest …)
JK,
“Is ‘music-stuff’ the product of a team?”
Often, yes. But my job was relatively solitary – only one engineer on a project, after all – and nowadays the mixing I do for clients I do in a studio in my basement, on a little dirt road at the far end of Cape Cod.
At any rate, to whatever extent music production is a team effort, I was almost never the organizer.
You’ve mentioned some experience with drumming?
https://www.wearethemighty.com/music/revolutionary-war-music-drummer-uniforms/?rebelltitem=1
@Malcolm
Didn’t I specify to avoid any 2A or militia stuff? IT FAILED. I wasn’t exactly specific, but I stayed away from that.
Well, here are exact words; “No need to march around Starbucks with AR-15’s [that was bluff, and it failed] in fact put those things away. Out of sight.
Those truck rallies were a great thing.
Let’s all do that again”
Let me be more specific: any organizing should be quiet, non-public, and avoid any mention of 2A, operations, militia, training for combat, or running around in the woods except for deer season, hunting deer.
Organizing should happen around emergency food banks and distribution, ride sharing, pitching in for disaster relief; and preparing only for the following non-political and unarmed contingency:
Food shortages caused by the collapse of the dollar, more exactly food shortages in the food distribution system in America, which would be the result of a collapse of the dollar.
No money changes hands, no range time, no politics, and God help us no more keyboard warrior saber rattling.
Here is exactly why: 1] legal and sensible
2] no harm or politics discussed
3] Food distribution system breakdown due to collapse of the dollar an entirely reasonable [and mathematically likely] contingency for which the country is not prepared.
4] Note that America’s food system requires money of value, as does the gasoline system food is distributed on.
5] The dollar…where do I begin?
Where I end: https://stats.bis.org/statx/srs/table/d5.1
^$ is Fuxed ^
6] Along the way you’ll actually have an organization and see who can be relied on to show up, who can’t.
7] No money changes hands: keep out grifters, and no tax status BS either.
8] No ops training or worse talk, do elsewhere. It’s everywhere.
9] we have plenty of those, we have no organization to even eat with.
10] you do like food right? Certainly you need it. Get in front of this one, just get in front of something, just once.
11] Water and electrical power can and are command economy as needed, proven- food and gasoline are not and require money. $$
12] Helpful not harmful charities are not a legitimate target. Asshats with AR-15s are.
^That is what we need.
I may add that the 2A is very clearly about local militias, not a bunch of nearly useless individuals with tricked out toys*, and the only use is a depot for the enemy.
*Difference between you j@goffs and Airsoft is airsoft actually used on something other than paper, you w@nkers.
I thought I said this all before, but here it is in one place.
No militias, instead do food bank and esp emergency relief food distribution groups, and do soon.
Like possibly the next 58 days, ahem.
Malcolm,
You are really selling yourself short!
Let me help with the Metaskills based on your profile.
1) Crosswords. (I’m very good at crosswords.) encryption
2) Thinking about things, and making connections. ORGANIZING and you can head over to my bis.org chart on the derivatives and see why I say King$ is fuxxed.
Fuxxed as in pox pozzed Fu—d
3) Knowing stuff. everyone needs guys like that
4) Explaining stuff I understand to people who don’t. explain why we need to organize to eat, before we go Irish@Famine and eat each other
5) Recording and mixing. useful IO/ Information Operations [propaganda] skills
6) Playing drums and guitar. IO – Information Operations
7) Singing. IO
8) Southern Chinese martial arts. (45 years now.) train us
9) Cooking. Good, cuz we’re gonna get hungry
10) Teaching southern Chinese martial arts. train other trainers
11) Driving. we need truck drivers
12) Coding in C++. good teach us too
13) Repairing things around the house. As if we don’t all need that.
14) Spelling. IO
15) Writing sentences. IO
16) Metabolizing alcohol. Good for HUMINT
17) Shooting. Just to hunt for food OK
18) Chess. Russian Liaison Officer. Sometimes you gotta listen to the enemy. Especially the Neo-Libs.
Just tell the Neo-Libs we’re interested in the Rape of Russia and why it’s happening here…and who, this will calm them down, as being found out at last is their worst nightmare.
Ah, our president, the great patriot, is spending his days golfing and tweeting. What a leader! Sure, he has the right to trot out Rudy Guliani and his band of incompetent lawyers to delay the inevitable as long as possible. Talk about creating mischief! And the Dems wouldn’t need to make any more mischief as you claim they will in edging two Repub senators if they had just gotten it right the first time! If they are so darn clever, it shouldn’t be coming down to this.
As for neat and tidy election comment, is any election completely neat and tidy? Is any count perfect? No. But millions of votes imperfect, I think not. Trump won the last time. He lost this time. And as far as anyone but those who peddle in unproven conspiracy theories agree, he did so fair and square. That’s what the courts are saying…over and over and over again. No evidence of widespread fraud presented – despite what the Trump team lawyers are saying outside the courtroom but are unable to say inside for fear of the court’s wrath coming down on them. So, sure, let the process play out, but at what point does failure to acknowledge the results causing its own harm?
Now might be a propitious time to review what’s happened (and is happening) since the last time we did this exercise in 2016.
Dispassionately.
David dick,
The harm’s already done. There’s harm in every direction from here.
You remind me of an old joke:
vxxc,
As you said before: fair points, and taken.
As I don’t even own an AR, I’ll charitably assume you aren’t lumping me in with the “asshats and j@goffs” you mentioned. (Are you from Pittsburgh?) And I won’t mention militias again, as I wouldn’t even have the first idea of how to organize one. (Forgive me for misreading you.)
Thanks also for reviewing my skill-set; that gave me a laugh. Some thoughts about that:
I won’t be doing any more coding; I’m done with that, and anyway, C++ is pretty much obsolete now.
Happy to help with the IO stuff as I can.
I’ve laid off teaching Hung Gar since moving pretty much full-time to the Outer Cape four or five years ago, but I’ve been thinking about starting up again, so yes, there’s that, maybe.
I can certainly drink vodka and play chess with any Russians that need entertaining, so put me down for that.
I’ll say it again: I’m no organizer of people. Simply not in my nature. I’m much more the monastic, contemplative sort. People get on my nerves too quickly. I’d make a decent vizier, but a lousy sultan.
But I’ll be glad to pitch in as I can.
Finally, just to be clear, here’s my own opinion about civil war, and those “asshats” you mentioned: anyone who thinks a civil war will be fun or exciting is an idiot, and a fool. Five years ago I wrote:
Well here is where we are, so this is where we start. With acknowledgment that Biden won, that there was no widescale fraud (see: tossed out legal cases), that Trump should recognize reality (for a change…or one of the first times, actually) and stop riling up a gullible base that doesn’t bother to read what the courts – you know, the place where FACTS MATTER – are saying about the election. But Trump doesn’t have it in him to acknowledge he has ever lost anything. So here we are, but we can’t start. Transition work can’t start (see: pandemic raging across country that will need to have a seamless handoff…soon, please).
Otherwise, a cute joke. But irrelevant.
I’m in alignment with David dick. This “fraud” accusation is just what trump has always done whenever he loses, and there’s never any reason to believe it. Here he was in 2016 when he lost the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz:
“Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.” https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/694890328273346560
He claimed “fraud” when he lost the Emmys, and claimed “fraud” when he lost the popular vote in the 2016 general.
Trump cannot admit loss, or that anyone is better than him. He cannot admit to himself that he is anything less than perfect. Remember when he had to draw on the hurricane map with the sharpie, because he said the hurricane was going to hit Alabama?
I mean, look at how this man talks about himself:
This is the sickness that is malignant narcissism, and some of the worst dictators in history have been afflicted with it.
We now watch as he flails around trying to overturn the results of the election. And as 73 million people go along with this destructive activity, one question I’ve always wondered, why so many were fooled in 1930s Germany, has been conclusively answered for me. Get a malignant narcissist in power, and a good chunk of the population will mirror him and accept anything he says or does. It’s quite frankly incredible to witness this, and says a lot about human psychology.
Martin and David, I think we’ve all had our say on this one, and have made our opinions quite abundantly clear. There are those of us who think there is good reason to suspect egregious hanky-panky in the recent election, and those of us who apparently don’t. And there we are.
(Martin, take comfort: there are many of us — perhaps a hundred million or more! — who also feel that it is “quite frankly incredible to witness this”, if perhaps not for exactly the same reasons you do. So you’re not alone in that.)
Trump’s personality is not at all the point, as far as I’m concerned (or any of the rest of us over here); it certainly isn’t as if Obama isn’t a world-class narcissist, or either of the Clintons, or LBJ, or JFK, or most presidents.) This is about whether there was serious fraud — about whether the election was, in fact, stolen. That would be a pretty big deal, if so, and it’s worth making the effort, I think, to do what we can to resolve any doubts.
As for my little joke being irrelevant, David dick, I happen to think it was marvelously apt. So I guess we disagree about that, too.
This business will play itself out over the next few weeks, regardless of how you or I feel about it — after all, it isn’t as if any of us have any control over these events! — and then we’ll see where matters stand.
OK?
@Malcolm,
No ‘you’ referring to national trends means you personally. I have nothing but respect for you, I was referring to the 2A nimrods.
The problem is they talked way, way too much smack. In truth a victorious represser/disarmer could take that talk as justification, those are in fact threats of the worst kind: empty.
When I said you jagoffs, I am referring in context, but I could have been clearer.
Er, I hope you do get your hands on some sort of tool in any case. AR or not [really hand sized tools more practical].
I really think you’re selling yourself short on coding, coding anything. I’m in networks and never learned to ‘code’ other than cisco, juniper, whatever machine was in front of me. Just no time.
You are absolutely right about such a conflict being horrid and not Heinlein.
But these things happen to all societies from time to time. It will not, not be the fall of Rome or 1200 BC or the end of the world.
As far as our high trust civilization; that’s been eroded out from under us along with every other value, replaced by vice and corruption.
I actually lean towards more of the same as most likely, the problem is the same is increasingly insane and vicious, in its low, degraded, idiocratic way. Do not overly lament what is already in our ‘elites’ and ‘popular’ top down pornocratic culture already gone…**
**But yet thrives among our people.
Everywhere. The Americans are the most decent and generous people on earth.
Americans deserve better.
I’ll die giving it to them, I expect not alone.
However having taken stock of the nation and our people in toto, as much as one can, and closely examining our actual political and administrative systems: we will recover and be better than before – the before I refer to is now.
I’m going to leave you with this ‘whitepill’ since you understand C++ you understand systems and at least rudimentary networking. >Look at the actual American political federation of 85,000 political entities – each one that has it’s own legislative, executive, and judicial branch and you will see the Republic mirrored [as servers mirror] tens of thousands of times, including in your own town or city.
Each one usually possessing it’s own intrinsic force in police, sheriff, what have you. Each one has legitimacy.
Now look at the Internet: A Federation of 10^x networks, all in ‘Federations’ of ‘Autonomous Systems’ [see BGP overview, BGP runs the Internet and most large networks].
Funny how the American Political Federation looks like the Internet ~ but of course it’s the other way round. The Internet looks like America because it evolved here…
That’s pretty damn resilient Malcolm, et al.
No, we don’t sit on our hands. That never works – and would hand the most powerful nation on earth over without challenge to corrupt, warmongering lunatics. Passivity never works.
OTOH when your actual political system looks like the Internet, because in administrative terms they are identical: this is a resilient system of systems, and there is far too much cause for hope to despair.
Seriously Sir. They’re freaking identical.
Here’s BGP: you’re smart enough to get it.
https://www.imperva.com/blog/bgp-routing-explained/
Addendum:
You know what the bitch about BGP is?
Getting it to converge. By design that happens slowly. It was built to be reliable and durable, from cisco: “BGP was built for reliability, scalability, and control, not speed.”
It scales down well as up.
It’s just…slow.. by design it doesn’t change with every passing network trend.
Ahem: neither does the Republic ;)
The Republic is far, far more than the Capitol. That’s just HQ: not the whole shebang. Not at all. They’re not the center of the universe…and their growing madness comes from that dawning, horrific realization. It’s not Rome.
It’s America.
Well here we are then.
What pray tell was “the one thing” you witnessed the President did that conclusively answers for you anything that was alleged?
That he’s ‘literally Hitler’?
I’m old enough to remember Ronnie Reagan having said about him the very same thing. And then GHWB and so on to the simpleton GWB.
But did anyone one of them order a Hellfire rain down on a US citizen’s head – and soon after that, that deceased citizen’s son’s head?
The [public] records say “No. No US President has ever before or since, without due process, ordered the execution of a US citizen without the concurrence of, any US Court, personally directed the execution of a Father and and his son.”
So ‘literally Hitler’ Trump couldn’t even manage to do as the Hitleresque presidential predecessor in the historical record managed to do?
What sort of ‘literally Hitler’ can be so incompetent as that?
I’m disappointed in y’all.
(And yes it does say a lot about human psychology – to its “educateds” detriment.)
vxxc,
Oh yes, I know about how the Internet works. And, since “I never metaphor I didn’t like”, I’ve found that working for years as a software engineer provided me some handy metaphors for our national and cultural predicament.
For example, in this post from 2017, I noted that centralized governments increasingly must deal with their people through what, in object-oriented programming, are called “base-class pointers”.
But what you and I will almost certainly agree on in the context of this conversation is the brittleness of complex systems that exhibit “too-tight coupling”. It affects software, governments, and economic systems in identical ways. (See this post, from a couple of years ago.)
Your insightful remarks about the way the incandescent American idea has propagated itself at nested scales are, indeed, a potent whitepill, one that our readers should thank you for. It is an extraordinary testament to the genius of that American idea that it can have become, from a single room in Philadephia, such a perfect, self-replicating fractal — and in that way, perhaps even immortal.
PS: Yes, I have some tools: two short, two long. (Of the two long ones, one has a spiral inside and a lever, while the other is quite smooth, and makes a familiar sound when you slide one of its parts back and forth.)
Malcolm, it’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of FACTS. You speak of about having “good reason to suspect egregious hanky panky.” Where are the FACTS? You haven’t yet acknowledged that those who have had access to them – the courts – have seen no there there. Should we let this play out until Jan 19?
And I’m curious…. If it all “plays out,” and the results are unchanged, will you say that Biden won fair and square, that six million more people chose him than Trump, that the electoral college tally was a resounding win for Biden – and that it was a legitimate outcome? If not, then there will be nothing more to discuss, because clearly facts won’t have mattered.
Oh, and btw, I REALLY like your music stuff, Malcolm. Wish there were lots more of that…and less, well, you know ;)…
@Malcolm,
The American political system was probably coup proof by the 1820s. Certainly by Jackson.
The Continent rendered safe by Polk- ocean to ocean.
So we’re less an idea than an established bedrock fact.
In many ways our current problems and distortions all stem from a power struggle of centralization that was always going to fail. We’re a Federation.
Moreover every American political arrangement has been a Federation since the Iroquois Confederation (which lasted 3 centuries).
The Articles of Confederation.
The Federalist Republic we still currently enjoy.
The Confederacy.
What these lunatics are attempting to do is probably not possible.
However; without decent, sane people organizing for the common good, and the common defense what is possible and increasingly likely is another sort of counter to the Left, one familiar to history. History is so far shaping up with Americas Social Democrats aka the Democratic Party making a Devil’s Bargain with America’s Spartacists~ aka BLM, Antifa and the rest.
The GOP of course is currently in the position of the abdicated Monarchists~ but power and above all people cannot abide a vacuum. Tribune Trump has failed, but the power he saw lying fallow will not remain so. That power lies fallow is unnatural, and in current conditions impossible.
In a choice between extinctions ~ of you and yours::or the others who quite openly chose those howling for your blood ~ this choice is easy.
And people always choose survival.
Always.
vxxc,
Essential also in understanding this predicament is a thing the Founders understood well: that, in Aristotelian terms, the formal cause (the proposed system of republican self-government) requires a suitable material cause (the qualities and characteristics of the people).
Those things have, at the national scale, gotten seriously out of whack over the past half-century or more, for reasons that, I’m sure, will come readily to mind — and the degradation of national “matter” is so pervasive that a coming-apart seems inevitable. At that point the outcomes will have to be be determined at smaller, more local scales, and the results will, no doubt, vary greatly.
David dick,
Read my post. I’ve explained why there are good reasons to be suspicious. There are all sorts of curious facts, with more coming to light each day.
Your faith in the system, and the extent to which objectively accessible “facts” lead, automatically and algorithmically, to Truth and Justice, is touching. (Especially so, in a situation like this.)
On the other hand, some of us — gosh, maybe even half of us — feel that faith slipping away a bit. Doubt creeps in. To go out on a limb here, it’s almost as if we aren’t really being governed particularly well at all, and that Truth and Justice rarely seem to come through quite the way they ought. Sometimes it even seems, to a few of us — jeepers, I’ll come right out and say it — as if it’s really all about Power, and what powerful people reckon they can get away with, and not so much about Truth and Justice, or the Constitution and the Rule of Law, at all. (Could the last four, or twelve, years have had anything to do with that?)
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton mourns Vince Foster’s suicide with a glass of Chardonnay at her Westchester estate, and O.J.s search for the real killer continues.
“… there will be nothing more to discuss…”
Perhaps we’re there already. Let’s give that a try, anyway, as this is beginning, frankly, to get a little repetitive. Tedious, even.
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06CARACAS2063_a.html
So sad that someone who disagrees with you, or questions you, is repetitious and tedious. You never seem to tire of the three people who constantly respond to you in agreement. Talk about repetitious and tedious!
And I have read your post but you haven’t really responded to mine. About, you know, facts presented in a court of law.
But I know when I’m disinvited, so I will be, per your wishes, outta here. Enjoy your mirrored echo chamber where facts don’t matter. Carry on.
(But I still like your music, just won’t post anything to that effect because that would end up being just, well, repetitious and tedious…)
Over and OUT.
David,
Your tone from the very beginning of this conversation has been condescending and provocative. (You began by questioning how any intelligent person could possibly be taken in by such obvious nonsense.) I very patiently tried to explain; I wrote a whole new post for you, just to do so.
I said in that post, and have said many times over, that I think there are, quite obviously serious, factual reasons to suspect widespread, audacious skulduggery in this election. What happens in the courts, and the institutions of government, will only be part of that story, as it is in so many stories. It will, however, be the end of the legal process, and if Trump’s appeals fail, Biden will be sworn in with the full authority of our institutions. Have I not been clear about this?
Where we differ is in your faith that those institutions, and those institutions alone, can and will reliably deliver the underlying truth of what happened, and will produce a just outcome based on that underlying truth. I, and a great many millions of others, have lost that faith, especially after the clear abuses and miscarriages of justice we’ve seen in recent years.
Anyway: you said your piece, and I said mine, and we clearly disagreed. At some point further conversation between people who implacably disagree becomes unproductive, and yes, tedious. Do you really hope to persuade me, by this repetitive insistence, that if the Trump appeals fail in the courts, that it is will be established as an ontological truth beyond all doubt that the election was squeaky-clean? Or will it still be just barely possible that a massively powerful political/media juggernaut tried to steal an election in plain sight, and got away with it?
I’ve tried to be polite about it — I try always to be civil to commenters here — and suggested that we just stop bickering and see where things lead. You insisted on continuing to harangue me with your faith in the stainlessness of the political and legal process.
Again: you’ve made your point, repeatedly. I have disagreed, and told you why. There’s no need for you to leave – I have not “disinvited” you – but we are not making progress here, so there’s no further point in flogging away at this argument for now. Okay?
At Malcolm,
In reply to the National Degradation and Republican matter moral, and political ~ moral behavior and belief in the Republic: I must respectfully disagree we’ve gone too far to recover. Here are my reasons:
1] The Constitution and belief in our Republican system still have the biggest if least organized team. Including at least 17 million veterans, moreover…every government official has taken the same Oath.
All of them.
2] The lack of an alternative other than deceit, fraud and rule by a corrupt, incompetent, ruthless yet physically craven oligarchy now quite exposed to all is not an attractive nor compelling alternative to the Republic which most only now notice has been swindled away Sir. . They are now forced to notice.
And if you think socialism is an unattractive alternative, neoliberalism and frankly internal neo-colonialism calling itself socialist is even less attractive.
3] The people’s values while eroded from the top remain quite sound morally. Of course my vehicle broke down this weekend and no less than 5 strangers stopped to help me, let me use their phone for a tow as I had no service there, etc etc. Strangers all.
Try that overseas, including Germany for instance.
^Those people deserve better, and they’re going to get it, even if those who abuse them get it good and hard .
4] returning to point 2: the ‘alternative’ has long abused and utterly lost the police with the exception of hustling chiefs held in contempt by their subordinates, and the left still isn’t very popular in the military outside the paid carpetbaggers around DC. They don’t fight Sir.
We do.
^In sum the Left and the Dems have no intrinsic force.^
5] the people are aroused now and have many ways to frustrate the diktats of our Mad Oligarchs and their pet dementia patient, along with his fetching companion Ms Google from Toronto.
They’re going to try and reboot Clinton without Bill, without the charm, with an economy they’re repressing and crushing, with no organs of force – force is referred to because they certainly lack legitimacy – and they’re already making every mistake they can …because they must.
Take for example Michelle Flournoy as SECDEF. She may be the 2d most openly corrupt woman in America after Hillary, and she’s even less likable. Why do this?
>Because they must. They must pay off all the people who let 2020 happen, including for example DOD.
Then they must satiate the lawyers by stocking DOJ with people who will go absolutely insane with prosecutions.
They’re going to have to feed the Left or be eaten.
I can go on. The incoming administration has to pay off every neoliberal hustler AND the GOP and the professional Left…AND satiate the bloodthirsty left…
Now they’ll be happy to feed them us rednecks for instance, and the White Working Class, and the Trumpers..but will we be happy to be eaten?
Is there enough money that can be created in the system to sate the DOD etc contractors?
Is there enough war to feed them?
Is there enough corporate bailouts to keep the Zombie companies going?
And did I mention China?
And Mexico ala open borders?
^I don’t envy the Dems their ‘gains’.
Ill gotten or not, and ill gotten they were…so they walk in with a legitimacy problem.
I’ll take the Federated system still quite intact below DC and certain state capitols and the people over the above collection of cowardly criminals and warmed over cretin conspirators from the 90s neoliberal heyday.
Biden is really the perfect emblem for the Blue state at the end.
It’s all yours Lefty.
And besides Flournoy Kerry’s to become ‘Energy Czar’![?]
Odd that the two first sons (figuratively speaking) served on oil production mega criminal enterprise boards.
And there’s more from where those two came from.
vxxc,
Your optimism is encouraging, and of course I agree that the Remnant you describe is alive and well. But what’s come to be known as the “Blob” — the massive, smothering Bioleninist conglomeration of the managerial state, its handlers above, yeast-like dependents below, and its multitudinous clerisy in media and academia — are not going to be easy to throw off.
The problem is due in large part to the severing, in the education of our children, of moral, philosophical, and cultural traditions over the past sixty years or so. Culture is not a fountain, to which any age can return; it’s a chain linking generation to generation, and we have — not everywhere, but for enough people in the West to constitute a terrible crisis of civilization — broken that chain. In particular, we have in our popular culture reverted to an awful nominalism, completely at odds with the political and moral philosophy of the Founders, that denies and rejects the axioms of natural law, and transcendent Good, upon which the American system depends. We’ve cast a generation of our young people into a nihilistic vacuum in which, shorn of any sense of higher essence or purpose, they must take on, without any of the guidance children have until now received always and everywhere, the impossible task of total self-creation. They can’t turn to their heritage and tradition and history for guidance, because they’ve been made to believe that all of it is just a litany of sins. (How little wonder that suicide rates among young people are skyrocketing!)
So yes, the team you describe is alive and well, and may have a numerical advantage in America (this note of optimism was the point, you may recall, of my “Red America” post from before the election) — but there is a terrible tumor in the body of the West, and it isn’t exactly shrinking.
PS: But having said that, vxxc, your attitude and spirit and optimism are exactly what we must maintain.
Ultimately, we must prevail, because what we have, and what we are, is simply better. And it’s ours. And we owe it to our children, and children’s children, to preserve it.
Ultimately if we struggle, resist and probably fight we will prevail.
They are not 10 feet tall, they are in fact morally vile, physically craven and personally repulsive garden variety sociopaths – who happened to have confidence game swindled the most trusting people on earth.
As sociopaths never plan past the next move: it didn’t occur to them what losing trust means. We don’t know yet, but it won’t be good for their ’cause’.
As for the casualty rates among our youth:
The America you speak of is a foreign country in which they reside; they have not yet discovered America. Nor are they so foolish as to believe the litany of sins, nor trust their teachers. They simply don’t know the truth. > this does not mean we teach or talk our way out from under.
It means if we lead, if we fight: they’ll follow.
No one follows Flournoy for instance except for money. Her evil name well known in military circles. Nearly all of us are true: the problem being no leadership.
Trump only went so far and no further.
He is not capable of responding to lawlessness, coup attempts, treason, disobedience by Generals and by State Dept officials except by calling his lawyers.
That’s his limit. But he has utterly exposed them all to all of us, those who will not see are hopeless. Who cares?
Remember we don’t need all, we don’t need most. We just need enough- we just need a little more than them.
I will need to return to pick up this thread beginning at 2:37 by vxxc at a later moment, but germane to his main point “organize’, and this worthwhile topic, is this video interview by Jonathan Pageau of Rod Dreher re: his new book “Live Not by Lies – a Manual for Christian Dissidents” about preparing for a ‘soft Totalitarian Future’:
mharko – how’s the shoulder? (I’ve come along very nicely.)
I’m doing well too, thank you! Been very active recently, building and futzing, and feel like I’m getting my game back. Guitar playing suffered some, but it’ll follow suit when the muse returns. I also am re-calibrating each movement, and trying to not get cocky. 3 months of convalescence will do that to ya, i guess. My PT was close by, within walking distance, and she was good, a Trump voter and a smart Nordic blonde. I’m in deep blue country, so it was therapeutic socially, too.
Whether, vxxc mharko, chooses to join us again I’m curious about your thinking towards the points being in the conversation on the video you’ve provided at about the twenty (20:00) minute mark.
Our host you may recall is dealing with issues in that general regard.
mharko,
Do not take this personally.
I have no interest in enduring Mr. Dreher, or how to prepare for a ‘soft totalitarian future’ etc etc.
You may sum him for me if you like.
I must say that Dreher is a coward and sellout, and we’re the product.
And finally> the future is soft totalitarianism …. No. If we’re going to be futurist ‘soft’ totalitarianism only ever happens after the hard kind, and in leftist regimes that is a course of terror and chaos that runs it’s course. Then the more sober Barras or Stalin types, even Mao dispense with the St. Just’s, the Robespierre’s, the Yagodas, the Trotsky’s and then you have ‘soft’ totalitarianism.
You have the soft kind after all resistance is eliminated. You have the soft kind ..which is the creatures you may see in ‘The Death of Stalin.’ You get the soft kind after 30 million dead in the USSR, 70 million in China, etc, etc. The actual Jacobin terror only clocks in at 40,000 because they French don’t count the Vendee or the murders outside of Paris: the Vendee alone was a minimum of 300,000.
I have no positive interest in Mr. Dreher.
Or his ilk.
Now, the actual future may, may be living under the Directory of France~ corrupt and a government in the gutter ~ with a lot of repression, a lot more than we have had so far, basically a version of Venezuela. May.
The problem is the Neo-Liberals have yet to consolidate power, and they have to deal with the left…without the Right.
The good news is they can’t rely on the police or army to do the dirty work.
It will be bad in DC and any Dem controlled city. The rest of the nation is another matter, and here our Federated political aspects can make it locally better, or worse.
Again, don’t take this personally.
You may sum anything manly or useful Mr. Dreher suggests. I’m familiar with his writings and his ilk, and have no use for them. But if he has anything useful to say besides submit….no interest.
The first thing that grabbed me about the video i linked is the realization, sparked by Dreher’s comments, that the lesson the bolshevik takes from history is that famine is a very effective political strategy. Organize accordingly. It also works with plague, and a whole assortment of lesser social maladies and disaffections. Any resentments can be and are coalesced, weaponized and directed by puppet masters towards the place holders of power and social order. THEY have been intensively organizing for decades. Conservatism and traditionalism organize more organically, and at lower intensity, and fight a 2 front battle: against the radical and revolutionary ideologies on the one hand, and not degenerating into its own ideological closure and spiritual estrangement on the other.
JK: The conversation at ~20:00 turns to modes of resistance, and organization thereof, whether by church or other mutual interest group, under the general rubric of ‘memory’ which is a fundamental. Anamnesis is (Greek word I picked up from Voegelin) ‘unforgetting’ that pertains to recovering our forgotten imago Dei. But here it is applied to simply surviving the duration of persistent political attempts to quash a primal human directive. Dreher brings up the late (and missed) Roger Scruton who participated in these attempts behind the iron curtain to stimulate cohesive regathering and curation of human scale endeavors to forge ahead through art, music, literature… subversive to the narrative or veiled from censorious authority. Organized resistance can end up looking like just ‘keeping the faith’, as he describes the family he examples, standing your ground. Art, music, literature are our culture creators and sustainers, esp. when intended towards the genuine ground of being and not a dogmatic ideology of any sort.
Vxxc: I haven’t taken anything you wrote personally, but I’m not sure Rod or his ilk would say the same. I confess i had a similar initial inkling when i encountered his name in the link, but because i have a connection to Mr. Pageau, i followed up. Glad I did. Dreher may not be everything i want him to be, but then neither am I. At least he is in the arena. Shared it with the wife too.
If every one of us is going to be subject to your filter of purity, I don’t see how the objective of organizing is going to get very far, or what your organization will look like and undertake to do. I doubt I would pass the test. But I will continue in the ways of resistance and submission that have dynamically shaped and led me to what I am and represent today. On that you can depend.
With regard to reason:
https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-11-21
With regard to Dreher and TAC, etc…
Mharko-they were in the same building as CNAS for the longest time. mharko- he is false, they are false. He is in the arena as Judas Goat, do not be among the sheep.
I have no purity test [wow if you met my friends and comrades] I will not stand for the false. He is. They are.
CNAS is a creation of Flournoy, it’s the 2d largest conglomeration of contractors and absolutely the largest node of Warbux corruption in DC. She’s our new SECDEF, even if she isn’t.
BTW without Ludendorff and the Imperial German Army and it’s Gold, without the Soldiers Councils aka Soviets defecting to Lenin for peace ~ the Bolsheviks are a historical footnote.
Speaking of which:
The meek inherit mass graves.
If we don’t follow other than Dreher and any path of resistance but submission we too are a historical footnote. Like the Hittites we simply vanish. This happens not to some peoples and nations in history- it happens to most people’s and nations in history.
With regard to the Dilbert, i’m guessing the point is, perhaps, pointlessness.
Dreher is a smelly trap? The Judas goat. Well, just to reassure you, I have managed to avoid reading any Dreher books, and I only rarely glance at TAC. I’ve been a self-employed sheep my entire pilgrimage, and have learned to recognize my shepherd’s voice.
As it turned out, the Bolsheviks are not just a footnote, they are a perennial. The names are changed to protect the proletariat. I suspect the same is true of Hittites and Kulaks.
Your apothegm about the meek is grim. Do you know that this word ‘meek’ as found in the classic passage your parse is based on, refers to a concept not well translated into our English word meek? Biblical meekness is not weakness but rather refers to exercising or possessing strength under control – i.e. power without undue harshness. Like a sword, sheathed. It is the authentically strong who are gentle that will inherit the earth, whether in their graves or beyond.
I’m not following Dreher. I’m not sure, but he may be roughly following me, if I read his bio correctly. May we all find and follow sound leadership, especially when it comes from within and comports with the wisdom of the ages, though it’s often relegated to the footnotes, or slipping through our fingers.
The Panther
by Rilke
===============================
His tired gaze — from passing endless bars —
has turned into a vacant stare which nothing holds.
To him there seem to be a thousand bars,
and out beyond these bars exists no world.
His supple gait, the smoothness of strong strides
that gently turn in ever smaller circles
perform a dance of strength, centered deep within
a will, stunned, but untamed, indomitable.
But sometimes the curtains of his eyelids part,
the pupils of his eyes dilate as images
of past encounters enter while through his limbs
a tension strains in silence
only to cease to be, to die within his heart.
======================================
Oh Enemies, you have done America a Great Evil, and it will haunt you to the end of your blighted days.
Do you have any video of that? I’d care to find out more details.