Quotulatiousness

November 5, 2024

It’s not really about Peanut and Fred

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tom Knighton explains that the online furor isn’t really about poor Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon … but they’ve become a trigger for a lot of simmering anger over the abuse of power and the unequal application of justice:

By now, you’ve probably already heard about Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon. If you haven’t, then your blood pressure is probably thankful.

The short version is a man from New York rescued a baby squirrel, named him Peanut, and raised him. The squirrel became an Instagram star, apparently, thanks to cute pictures of him wearing cowboy hats and so on.

A woman from Texas, apparently, reported the man for having Peanut and a raccoon named Fred. Anonymously, at the time.

As a result, state officials stormed the house, took Peanut and Fred from their home, interrogated the man and his wife as if they were terrorists, tossed the house like officials were raiding a drug kingpin’s house, questioned the wife’s immigrant status (she’s from Germany), then euthanized both animals, supposedly to test for rabies.

And as a result, a lot of people are pissed.

I’m pissed.

Now, I’m someone who has put meat in the freezer by my own hand. I have no delusions about where meat comes from and I’m not some crazed animal rights activist that thinks animal lives are the same as human lives.

But that doesn’t matter because none of the outrage is really about the squirrel.

No, it’s about justice.

See, the issue with Peanut here is the uneven application of the law.

For Peanut, the letter of the law had to be applied. An animal raised inside of a home with other animals raised inside of the same home, none of which showed even an inkling of being diseased were taken from their loving owners because of some BS regulation that shouldn’t have applied in this case.

This after four years of more uneven application of the law.

For example, we’ve seen George Soros-backed district attorneys vow not to prosecute people for some crimes. Some of those are victimless crimes, which doesn’t bother me, but it also includes things like shoplifting, which is anything but victimless. As a result, shoplifting got so bad and brazen in some places that many chains just shuttered locations because they couldn’t make a profit.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we were locked in our homes and told we couldn’t go to church, to school, to visit our dying family in the hospital, to do anything except for approved activities, and even then, there were rules we were forced to follow.

All of that went out the window when a career criminal died at the hands of a police officer and mobs throughout the nation set fire to entire neighborhoods. At that point, the deadly virus that was akin to ebola and the Black Death really wasn’t that bad and people should totally be fine with rioters destroying communities.

Very few of them were arrested and even fewer were convicted over their actions during those riots.

[…]

See, on every level, our nation of laws has been corrupted so that only some people get a pass while others don’t. Peanut and Fred didn’t have to be seized like they were. While the law is the law, anyone could see that there was no threat to people or the animals. There was absolutely no reason for any of it, but the law was suddenly the law whereas New York is notorious for giving certain parties a pass when it comes to the law.

Then we have them questioning the wife’s immigration status, whereas they turn illegal immigrants back out onto the streets after committing actual crimes. It’s rank hypocrisy at best.

But the truth is that while the law itself provides equal protection, the application of that law is anything but equal. There, some animals are more equal than others, and so Peanut and Fred were murdered by the state.

We love our pets. We cherish them. We understand the sense of loss when people lose a pet.

“… in an effort at harm reduction, I selected the proven authoritarian over the aspiring totalitarian”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille explains why he voted for “literally Hitler” instead of “the historic first woman president” in today’s US election:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

For me and millions of other Americans, the 2024 U.S. election is already effectively over. Like most Arizonans, I mailed in my ballot and it awaits the count. Now, I suffer through the remaining days of hectoring political ads and finger-waggers nagging me about how I should have voted. This country doesn’t lack strong opinions about two of the worst candidates to ever grace a presidential race. Unfortunately, I felt obliged to vote for one of them, and in an effort at harm reduction, I selected the proven authoritarian over the aspiring totalitarian; I marked my ballot for Donald Trump.

There’s no doubt that Trump is a thin-skinned narcissist. Legendarily intolerant of criticism or even disagreement, he wants broadcast licenses pulled from news networks that he thinks have been mean to him and called for government to crack down on cable operations that aren’t actually subject to government regulation. The man needs perspective as much as he needs a social studies class.

This is, many Democrats and their media supporters will eagerly tell you, evidence of “fascism“. But, as John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told The New York Times, “Trump isn’t capable of philosophical thought”. Trump’s authoritarianism isn’t an ideology; it’s a personality disorder.

That should be enough to disqualify a candidate for president. You’d think that, in a nation of 330 million people, if one major party chooses to run a profoundly problematic and authoritarian nominee for president, the other could find somebody more qualified. But you’d be wrong. In Kamala Harris, Democrats picked a vacuous sociopath uninterested in policy, but willing to serve as a vehicle for those around her who have tried their hands at totalitarian speech controls, and who are increasingly hostile to Israel, the only majority-Jewish state on the planet, and to Jews as a people.

In 2021, The Washington Post reported that former staffers for Vice President Harris complained she “would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared”. That failure to prepare for responsibilities and public appearances feeds her propensity for word salads, leaving the impression she’s reciting the results of a dropped Scrabble board.

In a Biden-Harris administration already lacking for adult supervision — President Joe Biden’s failing mental faculties are now a matter of record, as is his inability to make decisions — that suggests a potential President Harris would have no firmer hand on the wheel. That would leave the relatively faceless minions around her free to continue to exercise their instincts. And their instincts are terrible.

History of Ostia Antica: The Best Preserved Ancient Roman City in the World

Filed under: Architecture, History, Italy — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Augustinian Thomist
Published Jul 4, 2024

A 4k documentary and historical tour of the most well preserved ancient Roman city in the world filmed on site.

– Contents –
00:00 Introduction of Roman Ostia
01:10 Necropolis outside city gate
01:50 City gate
02:26 Early history of Ostia
04:41 Baths of Neptune
06:55 Theater of Ostia
12:10 House of the Infant Hercules
12:50 Square of Corporation Temple and Mosaics
21:21 Altar of Romulus and Remus
23:15 Four temple sanctuary
23:57 Temple of Pertinax
27:28 Grand Warehouse of Ostia
28:26 House of the Millstones
28:56 Ostia’s synagogues: Europe’s oldest synagogues
30:30 Ancient apartment buildings: House of the Paintings and House of the infant Bacchus
31:50 House of Jupiter and Ganymede
32:43 Ancient wine bar
34:50 House of Diana
36:25 Square of the Lares
37:45 Main Forum of Ostia, Temple of Jupiter
41:36 Baths of the Coachmen
(more…)

QotD: “If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others”

Filed under: Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A message to trans people:

I’m a biological essentialist about sex — your sex is a given of your chromosomes and organs, and I will never actually believe that you can invert it by choice.

I am, however, conditionally willing not to challenge your weird Gnostic beliefs on this point, and to treat you as the sex you “identify” as anyway. Here are the conditions:

1. You must be good at passing. If you can’t present a convincing pretense, it’s neither in my interest nor anyone else’s to help you prop up an unconvincing one.

2. You must be harmless. Most obviously, you must not use your “identification” to prey on others, whether directly by violence or by using the physical advantage of your sex to overwhelm them in sports, or in any other way. And if you’re told you’re unwelcome in a bathroom or changing room, it’s on you to not impose.

3. You must be modest. Your desire to role-play as M or F does not entitle you to violate prevailing norms about where, and to whom, you expose your genitals. If you aren’t polite enough to refrain from this, I won’t be even a bit polite to you.

4. Children are off-limits. The moment you engage in behavior that seems intended to confuse or indoctrinate them, you enter the category of “predator” and stay there. My response to sexual predation on children only begins with rejection and rudeness.

5. If you try to use the force of law to gain what equal and voluntary negotiation with individuals won’t give you, you also enter the category of “predator” and stay there.

The meta-rule is: the more your behavior imposes costs on others, the less polite and accepting I will be. If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-07-28.

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