… as we dissidents have been pointing out for decades now, practically no government action since the late 1950s has had The People’s approval. Had The People been consulted at any point between 1960 and now, America would still be a White Christian nation. Lots more White boys would still be alive, having never been sent to some irrelevant, unpronounceable place to die. Lots more Black folks would be alive, too, since abortion disproportionately affects Blacks and abortion was always a fringe lunacy — even a half-century of nonstop propaganda has barely pushed it into majority support. Gays would still be in the closet, since even after a propaganda barrage that makes the abortion thing look like a mere suggestion public tolerance of homosexuality polls even lower. The borders, of course, would be closed — they don’t allow those polls to be taken anymore, because “immigration restriction” polled at something like 75% just a few years ago and the lunacy of the political class in a “democracy” going hard against three-quarters of the entire population is too glaring even for this tv-and-iCrap-addled country to stomach.
The People keep giving the wrong answer, in other words, so The People will not be asked anything of importance. Same as it ever was.
The problem with democracy, though, isn’t that people are fools. People are fools, of course, but since that’s as universal as gravity, any human institution will be staffed entirely with fools. But … just as the general characteristic “great leader” doesn’t necessarily translate into any specific competence, so the general truth “people are fools” doesn’t mean everyone is a fool about everything. Since we all know at least one other human being, we all know a blithering idiot who’s remarkably shrewd about one little slice of life. Junkies, for example, are idiots — taking hard drugs is a remarkably stupid idea, as every addict I’ve ever met readily confessed. And yet, when it comes to getting their drug of choice these morons are endlessly inventive. Billy Bob up the holler has six teeth and a fourth grade education, but he can MacGyver up methamphetamine out of household products like a Chemistry PhD.
The problem with democracy is twofold. The first — that it’s the best technique ever devised for organizing self-righteousness — deserves a book in itself. The second, though, is covered by a single word: ultracrepidarianism. It means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge.” Peter Strzok, for example, was probably a perfectly competent FBI agent, when it came to doing the things the FBI actually hired him to do. But he decided that he was also some kind of political science expert, as well as a human love machine, and here we are. See also: our “elected” “representatives” What else would you call sending someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose areas of expertise are “mixing drinks” and “having big tits,” to Congress, where she’s expected to make decisions of war and peace? Ultracrepidarianism is a feature, not a bug, of democratic systems, which is why even the very best “representatives” fuck up everything they touch.
Combine required ultracrepidarianism with real shrewdness and you get Stephen A. Douglas.
Take those, add in religious fervor, and you get the suicide cult that is the Democratic Party.
And here we are.
Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.
March 21, 2020
QotD: The reason people don’t get a say in how the rulers carry on
March 20, 2020
QotD: Absolute and relative poverty
That the poor of our nation live better than 90 percent of anyone only 100 years ago, better than anyone at all from more than 200 years ago, shows just how fabulous an economic system it is.
Sure, it’s not perfect, it could do with some revisions here and there, but this system — the rule of law, markets, and capitalism — delivers in the one thing that truly matters: raising the living standards of the people, most especially poor people. Even more, no other economic system has managed this at all.
Tim Worstall, “Appalachia’s woes show the success of American capitalism”, Washington Examiner, 2018-01-09.
March 19, 2020
QotD: Everybody knows the good guys lost the war
Anyway, the song is called “Everybody knows” and it’s a marvel of double-meaning.
What the song says explicitly is a bunch of stuff people like my brother — look, European, left — believed at the time. Stuff like “Everybody knows the war is over/everybody knows the good guys lost.”
Bizarrely, before they went into hysterical denial of communism being the regime in the USSR and starting to call those seeking to re-establish it “right wingers” the left kept insisting the good guys had lost the cold war. Apparently we just look richer and more concerned for the right of the individual, but the evil Kapitalism of Amerika (it’s much more scary written with a K) kills more people than the Gulag and destroys everyone’s soul in the process. We’re just sneaky about it. So sneaky, in fact, that we don’t need to prevent people from leaving, we need to prevent people from coming here. That’s how sneaky we are.
Stop laughing. There’s a good chance your college student believes this. There’s also a good chance your college student is stupid enough to buy Bernie’s line that bread lines are preferable to our over abundance of food, because at least “everyone is equal.” Someone should ask comrade Bernie about the State stores for very important functionaries that crop up everywhere that has tried the communist slimming diet (It is to die for) and which has goods comparable with what the low middle class in America can afford, sprinkled with a few gold geegaws which is the communists idea of classy.
Sarah Hoyt, “Everybody Knows”, According to Hoyt, 2019-12-11.
March 18, 2020
What is really driving the Wuhan Coronavirus panic
… besides the wall-to-wall hysteria in the mainstream media, I mean. Severian discusses the insights of “perverted old cokehead” Sigmund Freud on anxiety and its effects, then segues to our current, shared, plight:
Photographic portrait of Sigmund Freud, signed by the sitter (“Prof. Sigmund Freud”) by Max Halberstadt (c. 1921)
Wikimedia Commons
Everyone who has thought about it for five minutes knows that something’s not right. […] As y’all have noted, actual hard information on the coronavirus is hard to come by. Is it fully air-transmissible? What are the infection rates? Hell, what are the death totals? And speaking of the death totals, even if you trust China’s figures (which no reasonable person can possibly do), they seem … low. Like, really low. I actually trust Italy’s government to deliver some vague approximation of the truth, and even there, where they’re in full-blown freakout mode, it seems to kill off old folks with compromised immune systems and lung problems at a fractionally higher rate than your garden-variety flu.
So, you know … it’s the flu. Not great by any means, and more infectious (possibly) than some other flus in our recent past, but for all that just the flu. The ongoing sky-is-falling global freakout has next to nothing to do with the actual bug. We live in a deeply anxious age, and that anxiety has to discharge somehow. It’s global hysteria — classic hysteria, Freudian hysteria, an excess of stress that must be discharged by “converting” it into behavior.
The people who are freaking out about it aren’t worried about dying from it. No, really, they’re not. Nor should they be — no reasonably healthy person under age 70 has any reason to be worried about that. Instead, what they’re worried about is powerlessness. We’ve all long suspected that we’re ruled by idiots and grifters. We’ve all long sensed that our “leaders” hold us in deep contempt. And we’ve long known that none of our problems are worth anything to the global pirate capitalist class. The only reason those bastards care if we all drop dead from the plague is that they can’t sell enough iCrap to each other to keep the company stock price up.
We know this. But we can’t say it, and we can’t act on it, because doing so goes against our self-image. Our media, our education system, our “culture” (such as it is) has spent the last half-century telling us what special and unique snowflakes we all are, even as it’s forcing us into ever-greater conformity. We’ve broken all the taboos, transgressed all the boundaries, liberated all the oppressed. If there ever were to be such a thing as “social justice,” then truly we’ve achieved it, here in this best of all possible worlds where you can lose your job for not addressing your co-worker as a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin and 6’2″ dudes with beards down to their collarbones can go wee-wee in the little girls’ room …
… and yet. And yet. And yet feminists (just to stick with a theme), despite running everything for the last 30 years, still can’t get that lousy 25 cent raise. Seven out of every five college girls are sexually assaulted the minute they step on campus, despite boys being as rare as sasquatches on most campuses (and despite the ever-growing clamor for free college for everyone). You’re free to — hell, you’re practically required to — make up your own pronouns, but you’re not allowed to ask just how a degree in “gender studies” could be worth even one dollar in student loan debt, let alone one hundred thousand dollars. We keep agitating for change, keep voting for it, keep tweeting about it … and nothing happens.
That profound sense of powerlessness is exactly, and I do mean exactly, what screwed up Anna O. She hated her father for not allowing her any personal agency. In her heart of hearts she wanted him dead. And yet she knew herself to be a loving daughter, so that overwhelming sense of relief — indeed, of joy — she felt when he kicked the bucket sent her around the bend.
QotD: The “magic” of capitalism
In 1776, America set off to unleash human potential by combining market economics, the rule of law and equality of opportunity. This foundation was an act of genius that in only 241 years converted our original villages and prairies into $96 trillion of wealth.
Other places which did much the same thing — that mixture of capitalism, the rule of law and free markets — achieved much the same end. We generally refer to those places as the developed world, while those that didn’t are still the Third World. There is nowhere at all that has become rich, absent some vast natural resource, without adopting this system.
We can show this, too, with the numbers from Angus Madison. The average GDP per capita over history, all countries, all empires, was some $600 a year or so — That’s in today’s dollars, meaning history was, by our standards, abject destitution for everyone. This is also why we use $1.90 a day (at modern American prices) as our measure of global absolute poverty. Because that’s just what the past was and we celebrate when people, a country, a nation, rise above that historical existence.
Tim Worstall, “Appalachia’s woes show the success of American capitalism”, Washington Examiner, 2018-01-09.
March 17, 2020
When the state renounces enforcing the law, there are two alternatives
Yesterday, David Thompson linked to a post by Natalie Solent about how the police in London failed to do anything about a blatant theft at a Boots pharmacy because it was considered a “civil matter”. The accused thief was prosecuted privately by the parent corporation, which is apparently the first time this has happened in England. As Natalie says, this is the “nice” option when the government fails to enforce the law of the land — or enforces it only sporadically and unevenly.
In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Eric Oppen provides an example from the US in the post-Civil War era that shows the other option for private law enforcement:
Many of the victims of the kind of small-time crime committed by vagrants and the “homeless” are, themselves, far from rich. Repeated thefts can drive a small, struggling business under, and loss of, for example, a bicycle can represent a catastrophic blow to a poor person’s finances. This doesn’t address the sense of violation felt by those victimized by crime.
The original San Francisco Committees of Vigilance formed because the “forces of law and order” either were not doing their jobs, or were actively in league with the very criminals they were supposed to be suppressing. Many police were incompetent or lazy, while others were often corrupt on a scale that would shock Boss Hogg.
Do-it-yourself justice was far from uncommon in nineteenth-century America, including in the “civilized” East. In upstate New York, after decades of unpunished crime, the Loomis family gang received an epic comeuppance in 1865. Fifteen years earlier, their outraged neighbors had tried staging a raid on the Loomis farm, but uncertainty about who owned the stolen goods they found prevented any Loomis from being convicted. In 1865, many of their neighbors were returned Civil War combat veterans. They had become inured to violence, and they were tired of the Loomis’ thefts, arsons and intimidation. They killed George “Wash” Loomis, the leader of the gang, nearly lynched one of his brothers, and burned down the family’s home. After that, the Loomis family’s power was broken and their reign of crime was pretty much over.
These things happened because there was no other way to deal with these situations. Law enforcement, in those days, was primitive, especially outside of the major cities. Large corporations often had their own private police simply because of this fact.
The “social contract” is supposed to read something like “renounce personally avenging your wrongs, and society will do it for you.” But what can one do, when society is visibly abrogating the contract? Take it to court?
Vigilantism is not unknown even in Canada.
“Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park” by August Rode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
March 16, 2020
Cognitive dissonance, family style
Severian has some fun discussing current events with a nephew:
Image from Castle of Chaos – https://castleofchaos.com/blog/5-tips-for-surviving-a-zombie-apocalypse/
Just recently I had some fun with one of my nephews, who’s unexpectedly home for “Spring Break.”
Let’s take this Wuhan Flu thing seriously, I said. But since that hits a little too close to home, let’s pretend it’s a zombie outbreak. I want you to take it 100% seriously. The zombie virus has made it to our shores. It’s not too bad yet, but there’s definitely a walking dead situation. So … what do you want the government to do?
Nephew of course starts rattling off all the Chuck Norris fantasies young college guys have. Close the ports, call out the army, firebomb the streets wherever infected are sighted, yadda yadda. All of this is translated from the teenager, but you get the gist of it:
Me: Ok. Now, since we’ve stipulated that we’re taking this 100% seriously: Do you really want to give the government the power to do all that?
Nephew: Of course!
Me: Ok. Well then, do you really want to give Donald Trump the power to do that?
Nephew: Oh my god no!!! Orange Man bad!!!
Me: Now wait a minute, Nephew. You just said you’re taking this 100% seriously. You just said you want the government to have the power to set up flamethrower checkpoints on all major roads. Well, who is the current head of the government?
Nephew: But … but … but … Orange Man BAD!!!!
Me: Remember, Nephew, you promised to take this 100% seriously. So are you seriously telling me that the first thing you’d do, in the event of the zombie outbreak, is call an emergency presidential election, in the hopes that someone — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, somebody — would win, so that the right kind of person could take all those measures you said were so very, very, very immediately necessary?
Nephew: Uhhhh … no, I guess not.
Me: So you do want to give Donald Trump that power, since he is, in fact, the current head of the United States government?
Nephew: Oh my god no! Orange Man BAAAAAAADDDD!!!!
Me: Well then I guess you’re just not serious about this zombie outbreak, are you?
QotD: Company incentives to prevent sexual harassment
The funny thing about this is that anyone with two eyes and a modicum of understanding of the world knows that this is not where the crazy is headed. As the attempt to drown out the legitimate cases of harassment — mostly by leftists, in leftist-dominated institutions — by claiming #metoo and that all men were essentially harassers becomes more frantic, it has become obvious that any man can be accused of harassment at any time by anyone.
So, here is a genuine prediction: I predict that instead of giving HR more power, this will give companies pause before hiring women, which will lead to a lot of decent and qualified women being left unemployed.
The second-order effect of that, for companies that can’t avoid hiring women, is two-fold: they’ll either hire women to “make-believe” positions, in which they interact only or primarily with other women, creating a drain on the bottom line, or they will allow a lot more work-at-home by both men and women. I predict we’ll see a great move towards that in the next year. Sure, it’s still possible to claim someone is harassing you via the phone, but one-party consent states at least will allow men to record everything in order to defend themselves.
Weirdly, I believe the long-term result of this will be the dismantling of the daycare and child-warehousing practice which has led to a lot of the left’s ascendency in education.
This is because no matter how much you wish to wishful think that companies will just give Human Resources more power, people who actually live and work in the world know this isn’t likely. Human Resources would mostly just make it impossible for anyone to get any work done.
Sarah Hoyt, “Nobody Expects These Predictions”, PJ Media, 2017-12-31.
March 15, 2020
Nigerians Chasing Italians Like Cheetahs Hunt a Bull – WW2 – 081 – March 14, 1941
World War Two
Published 14 Mar 2020An Italian offensive into Greece is prepared, just as the Germans are preparing to also attack Greece via Bulgaria. Meanwhile, a daring and spectacular dash is made by the Nigerian army.
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Those damned unintended consequences
Sarah Hoyt on the differences between intention and the real world:
Unintended consequences are the bane of social engineers. They are why the “Scientific” and centralized method of governance never worked and will never work. (Sorry, guys, it just won’t.)
Part of it is because humans are contrary. Part of is because humans are chaotic. And part of it is because like weather systems, societies are so complex it’s almost impossible to figure out what a push in any given place will cause to happen in another place.
This is why price controls are the craziest of idiocies. They don’t work in the way they’re intended, but oh, they work in practically all the ways they’re not. So, take price controls on rent. All they really do is create a market in which housing is scarce, landlords don’t maintain their property AND the only people who can afford to live in cities that have rent control are the very wealthy.
BUT Sarah, you say, aren’t rent controls supposed to make them affordable. Yeah. All that and the good intentions will allow you to go skating in hell on the fourth of July weekend.
Let’s be real, okay? I saw rent control up close and personal in Portugal. Rents were controlled and landlords were penalized for “not keeping the property up”.
In Portugal at the time, and here too, most of the time from what I’ve seen, the administration of property might be some management company, but that’s not who OWNS the damn thing. The owners are usually people who bought the property so it would support them in old age/lean times.
To begin with, you’re removing these people’s ability to make money off their legitimately owned property. And no, they’re not the plutocrats bernie bros imagine. These are often people just making it by.
Second, people are going to get the money some other way, because the alternative is dying. And people don’t want to die or be destitute. So they’re going to find the money. I have no idea what it is in NYC, etc, but in Portugal? it was “key buying.” Sure, you can rent the house for the controlled price, but you have to make a huge payment upfront to “buy the key.” From what I remember this was on the order of a small house down payment. And if you couldn’t do that, you were stuck getting married and living with your parents. And if you say “greedy landlords” — well, see the other thing you could do was leave the lease in your will. So the landlord didn’t know if they’d ever get control of their property back, and they needed to live off this for x years (estimated length of life.) So, that was an unintended consequence. The kind that keeps surfacing in rent-controlled cities in the US.
The same applies to attempts to “help” the homeless. Part of this, as part of all attempts to “fix” poverty is that the people doing it, usually the result of generations of middle class parents and strives assume the homeless and the poor are people like them.
To an extent, they’re correct. The homeless and the poor are PEOPLE. But culture makes a difference, and culture is often based on class and place of upbringing. And the majority of humanity, judging by the world, might be made to strive but are not natural strivers. Without incentive, most of humanity sits back, relaxes and takes what it’s given.
M1918 BAR: America’s Walking Fire Assault Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Oct 2017Sold for $34,500 (transferrable).
John Browning developed the Browning Automatic Rifle for use by American troops in World War One, taking inspiration from the other light automatic weapons in service including the Chauchat, Lewis, and MG08/15. Rather than being used as a light machine gun as we would understand it today, the BAR was an “automatic rifle”, intended to be used in much the same way as the Germans would use the Sturmgewehr in WWII. It would be fired in semiautomatic mode from the shoulder or hip while advancing on the enemy, using steady fire to keep them pinned down. Once troops broke into close contact, the gun could be switched to fully automatic to provide overwhelming firepower for the final assault on a position. While the walking fire from the hip was not particularly realistic in practice, the fully automatic firepower was a huge boon to the infantry. While it filled the game role as the Chauchat, the BAR was a much more refined weapon and much easier to use effectively.
The BAR was showed to the US Ordnance Department in 1917, and the first order for them was placed with Colt in July of 1917. In short order further contracts would be placed with Winchester and Marlin-Rockwell, although it would take many months to fabricate the production tooling and perfect the design for mass production. A few hand-fitted guns were ready in February 1918 for a public demonstration, but significant quantities were not being built until July of 1918.
These guns would be shipped to France for use by the AEF, but not actually put into combat service until the Meuse-Argonne offensive in late September of 1918, due to General Pershing’s desire to keep them secret from the Germans until a large number could be used at once. As a result, the guns saw only very limited use before the war ended on November 11th. In total 102,173 BARs would be built, about half of them being finished into 1919, after the armistice. They would go on to be changed and updated for use in World War Two, but that is a discussion for another day. This particular gun is an excellent example of an M1918 BAR in correct World War One configuration, which is a rare find today.
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March 14, 2020
“The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all”
In Quillette, Matt Johnson remembers the great anti-identitarian writer and speaker, Christopher Hitchens:
Christopher Hitchens speaking at The Amaz!ng Meeting held at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada on 20 January 2007.
Photo detail by ensceptico via Wikimedia Commons.
Hitchens thought fearlessly. As Martin Amis put it, he liked “the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite.” This is why he told the publisher of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything to organize a book tour that ran through the pulpits of the American South instead of remaining confined to the coasts. It’s why he relished every opportunity to lambaste Bill and Hillary Clinton in front of liberal audiences. It’s why he went after Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. He was an inveterate iconoclast — if there was a bloated reputation to puncture or a cherished dogma to deflate, he saw it as a duty and a pleasure to do so.
It’s no surprise that this oppositional inclination, coupled with blistering rhetorical ability, made Hitchens a deadly debater. After his death in December 2011, countless tributes and articles about Hitchens emphasized what a force he was in the studio and on the debate stage — his erudition and wit, his fluency, his seemingly superhuman memory. Hitchens is unforgettable for all these reasons, but people don’t miss him because he could turn a phrase or win an argument on CNN — they miss him because he thought for himself and refused to apologize for it. He didn’t want to write and speak as the representative of a community: “My own opinion is enough for me,” he told the audience at a debate on free speech in 2007, “and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority.”
“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” Orwell wrote in his original introduction to Animal Farm (which was, ironically, suppressed). He continued: “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” While there was far more official censorship in Orwell’s time, we’re living through an era of pervasive self-censorship, and as Packer explains, this type of silencing is “more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind.”
[…]
Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was — cliché is arguably forgivable here — very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.
It’s easy to imagine what Hitchens would have thought about a recent New York Times headline that declared “The Next President Should Not Be a Man” or a prominent writer and activist who announced that she “will not support white male candidates in the Dem primary.” The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all. You don’t have to bother defending candidates’ principles and positions when gender and race are the only relevant variables.
March 12, 2020
WW2 On The Homefront Starts next week!
World War Two
Published 11 Mar 2020Next week our monthly new sub series On The Homefront premieres hosted by Anna Deinhard. This is why…
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Canadian Ross MkIII Sniper Rifle with Warney & Swasey Scope
Forgotten Weapons
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The Canadian infantry that went to Europe in the early years of World War One were equipped primarily with the Ross MkIII rifle. The Ross would become quite the scandal, and was replaced in service with the SMLE in 1916 — but as a sniper rifle the Ross excelled. Its problems in service were largely based on poor quality ammunition, and this was not an issue for the sniper corps. In addition, Great Britain was having enough trouble equipping its own snipers to have any extra scoped rifles to hand over to the dominions.
And so, the Canadians modified 500 Ross rifles into a sniper configuration using American-sourced Warner & Swasey M1913 “Musket Sight” scopes. These were 5x magnification prismatic scopes, also used by American forces on the M1903 sniper rifle and the M1909 Benet-Mercie machine guns. The scope was not very good, suffering from fogging and other issues, but it was available. The Canadian rifles were made in two batches of 250 each, one in 1915 and one in 1917. This was actually more rifles than needed, and many of them (including the two in this video) remained in Canada for training (and were used at least until 1942).
Canadian Warner & Swasey scopes can be identified by three elements. They have elevation dials marked out to 2400 yards, serial numbers between 1 and 500, and no data plate on top. Canadian scope cases are marked with the serial numbers of the scope and the rifle they were issued with.
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Comrade Sanders
Arthur Chrenkoff points out the amazing double-standard that has helped Bernie Sanders become a major candidate for the Democratic nomination:
Imagine a credible candidate for a significant elected office – never mind the Presidency of the United States of America, the elected office in the world – who has spent his career cheering on Mussolini, Franco and assorted Latin America authoritarian strongmen, who admires Nazi Germany’s record in job creation and public infrastructure, and who, while eschewing excesses of the past, proclaims himself a proud national socialist, but to reassure all he says he is a democratic national socialist.
Now think of Bernie Sanders and you can once again understand the pervasive double standard in our politics. The hypothetical candidate from the previous paragraph – and he or she are very much hypothetical – would be considered a political and social pariah. Bernie, on the other hand, is lionised by millions and until very recently, prior to the miraculous, Dr Frankenstein-like reanimation of Joe Biden, has been considered a probable presidential candidate by a major political party (coincidentally, of which he has never been a member in his entire career).
To the best of my knowledge, Sanders has never expressed any regret, misgivings or second thoughts about a lifetime of cheerleading for virtually every socialist/communist government around the world, from the Soviet Union to Vietnam and from Cuba to, most recently, Venezuela. It is not like the true nature of these regimes has been a secret until now. Anyone with any modicum of knowledge and common sense could see all long these were all totalitarian dictatorships and mass abusers of human rights, which nationalised poverty and whatever their meager economic or social progress it has been achieved at an unacceptable cost.
[…]
That an old Chomskyite like Sanders came so close to being the Democrat presidential candidate tells of a sickness at the heart of a major political party. Democrats still staunchly believe that Donald Trump is a Russian asset but almost ended up with an actual communist sympathser in charge. History didn’t end in 1989; it repeats itself like vomit rising in your throat.
On a lighter note, Larry Correia is amused at the current top two Democratic contenders:
That is about the most pathetic match up of losers to ever occur in any political contest in the history of ever.
Sanders is a Marxist doofus. His plans are gibberish. His philosophy is bullshit, designed to appeal to wishful thinkers who can’t do math, and greedy ass mooches. But don’t worry, he’s a total squish without an ounce of fight in him, so the DNC’s just gonna roll him over to make from for their chosen one …
Joe Biden! Who is either suffering from dementia, or is just really really dumb. (insert porque no los dos? meme girl here)
They can’t let Joe speak for more than five minutes because they know he’ll go off script and start babbling incoherently. And I’m not talking Trumpian style stream of consciousness yammering, but weird ass, dog faced pony soldiers, corn pop, hairy legs, girl sniffing, finger biting, he’ll slap you, fight me IRL, you wanna step outside?
I’ve known people who worked with Joe Biden years ago, and they all said the same thing. With him, what you see is what you get. There is no act. That’s how Joe Biden is. And he was a weird scoundrel back then, but I’m pretty sure his mind is going now.
On the plus side, Jill Biden moves faster than the Secret Service, and that lady will throw hands. Respect.
All the DNC needed to do was find somebody decent and dignified to run against Trump, but oh no, they went batshit crazy instead, and their anointed one is a doddering, senile, fool, who is so corrupt his son, Crackhead McStripperbang makes millions of dollars for imaginary jobs not at all related to his dad’s position, and they don’t even try and hide it. But don’t worry, Biden’s gonna come from behind, because nothing wins swing states like threatening to slap construction workers who are suspicious that Beto O’Dork actually does want to take their AR-14s.
As somebody who would rather reach into his own chest and pluck out his heart than vote democrat, I will admit that I find it terribly amusing all the liberals I know who are weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth about Old Rich White Guys There Are No Women Or People Of Color Running … While Tulsi Gabbard is over there, like WTF?
Sorry, progs. She said hurtful things about Hillary, so the media and Google basically Thanos-snapped her into dust. Meanwhile, the right are eagerly betting on whether Nikki Haley is going to run in 2024 or not … So who are the real misogynist bigots?
