And if you want to see how bad - how ridiculous things are- this is not innocuous-https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/opinion/bird-names-colonialism.html
A bonkers NPR report on the subject mentioned that the name of a duck was going to change because it was potentially offensive to some people. With the typical prudery of the woke, the reporter didn't say what the offensive name was! I had to look elsewhere to learn that it's the "oldsquaw."
In their effort to avoid "racism" in bird naming, they're eliminating all names of people. So keep your old bird books. They'll be useful again after the anti-woke blowback.
There's also a coalition of astronomers calling for the renaming of the Magellanic Cloud because of Magellan's "violent, colonialist legacy." All this self-hating "year zero" cultural revolution crap is way out of hand.
Thing with common names, they are the vernacular. The woke can no sooner change them than they can change your brother's nickname. Scientific names, sure. Those are standardized descriptors. What a region or a local population elects to call something, however, is immutable.
Back up where I lived in Delaware, there's a serious move to rename Plantation Road (the major "back way" to avoid Coastal Highway when it's clogged with tourist traffic) and a couple of adjacent suburbs with "Plantation" in the name.
This actually reports one of the better approaches I've seen. Instead of removing names connected to someone whose utterances are out of favor, it is removing ALL human names. That neutralizes the controversy -- there will be no favored names or unfavored names, just a more objective basis for naming -- its about the characteristics of the bird, not honoring or dishonoring some human.
Yes. Perhaps removing all names of humans from everything would be the human thing to do. Impersonal, scientific names for everything. For instance, manatee has the word man in it. Men are bad. So re-name it Aquatic Creature 331PX or something like that,
Perhaps people shouldn’t have names either . We could have numbers. Not an original idea. But that way we could have a detached rational border devoid of cultural bias.
It doesn't "neutralize the controversy" at all. It's a complete surrender to people who fret about memorializing anything with the name of someone who's "problematic" by the changing standards of the nanosecond, and sets the stage for whatever asinine thing they want next.
These progressive initiatives never end. There's actually fairly broad (but far from unanimous) agreement that perhaps we shouldn't have statues of Confederate leaders. But look how in the past three years that's morphed into the vandalism or removal of statues of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Theodore Roosevelt. I was a lefty 30 years ago, and I participated in some activism, so I know that none of these people or groups ever achieve their stated goal, declare Miller Time, and go on with their lives. It's always an eternal struggle. There's no good reason the Audubon Society needs to do this to widen the demographics of people who care about birds.
You miss the point entirely. With statues, or names on buildings, there is no escaping the often artificial controversy. But, with naming animals and plants, if none are named after people, then which people are "suitable" and what "disqualifies" is a moot point. IF the campaign were to, say, rename a species named for someone who first identified it, or was admired by the person who first identified it, and call it, e.g., the Martin Luther King Butterfly but in appropriate Latin, that would perpetuate the obsession. But by all means, make it all viewpoint-neutral terminology, preferably related to the characteristics of the species. There are some rather specific reasons for taking down confederate statues. They were for the most part erected some forty years after the Civil War, not so much to honor the dead as to promote the ideology that The South was right all along, the war was an unfortunate and unnecessary tragedy, and after all "Negroes really are an inferior sub-species." There were even calls to repeal the 14th and 15th amendments. But, I still favor keeping a few Lee statues -- we just need to add a bronze plaque explaining his role in the larger scheme of things. If George Brinton "We're Not Here To Take Your Property" McClellan had marched into Richmond in 1862, while that would not have instantly ended the war, it would have set matters on track to restore the union status quo ante. Without Lee's year of victories, there would have been no Emancipation Proclamation, nor any 13th, 14th or 15th amendments.
Happy Thanksgiving, Rod. I’m thankful for you and your column and for the book you wrote, “Live Not By Lies”. Take care of yourself. I hope your “cold” resolves and that it’s not mononucleosis. And I hope your heart heals.
I disagree that the rioting is uncalled for. Riot away, Ireland. Riot so hard they're terrified. And then riot more until they get the point.
My early elementary daughter was sexually assaulted on a school bus last year, in addition to experiencing daily violence at her public school. She's now at wonderful Christian school. When we came forward with complaints, we were ignored (you know, those other kids have trauma). We were actually laughed at by the immigrant assistant superintendent (he mocked me, a teacher with lots of experience, when I pointed out the cultural problems that exist in the district).
It's easy to say rioting is wrong, but it's different when extremist leftist lunatics enable a culture that harms your child. If the Irish are up against people like those that run my child's former district, I say keep rioting. Otherwise they're just laughing at you.
It was pretty targeted. It's not like colonial thugs ran loose in the streets of Boston looting and burning at random.
Political violence does however have a tendency to spin out of control. That's what sent the French Revolution careening off course and finally into a bloodbath, as the several faction turned out mobs to further their cause and frighten their rivals.
Yes, which suggests that "the authorities" need to rent some testicles for a few days so they can begin to reclaim Ireland for the Irish, Sweden for the Swedish, and unlikeliest of all, Britain for the British.
"What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?" —Thomas Jefferson
My sincere sympathies about what happened to your daughter, that's awful and the response from the school district sounds even worse.
There's something about the respectable right that is infuriatingly pacifist, and satisfied with asymmetrical responses. They riot, loot, burn, we Tweet. They protest, accuse, defame, we Reason. They come at us with the full arsenal of a massively weaponised government apparatus, we...what do we do? Nothing. Nothing effective anyway.
Rioting should be the very first step (of many) but modern conservatives are not built like their fathers. I fear nothing will wake them from their torpor.
How can we condemn the Left for rioting if we reserve the right to do it for ourselves?
Of course I believe that what the Irish state is doing here is worse than what the rioters did, but I believe a sustained series of PEACEFUL mass protests would be more effective in the long run. Rioting just gives the bastards in the State the excuse to crack down.
I wish you were right, Rod. But January 6th was 99% peaceful minus the Feds, and look what happened. The people in charge in the West do not respect democracy, and they do not respect peaceful protest.
I still agree that peaceful is the way to go for now.
Re: But January 6th was 99% peaceful minus the Feds, and look what happened.
What happened is that the minority of miscreants got the book thrown at them while the business of transferring power according to the results of the election was completed as it should be, despite the wishes of the incumbent and some lunatic supporters to cling to power. The system worked.
Jon, to claim that locking people up without trial for a protest that was no worse, less violent in fact, than dozens of similar protests on the Left, many of them on Capitol Hill, is the "system working" convinces me that you a troll. Or very stupid. Or both.
More than 1100 people have no faced criminal charges (I know of no acquittals) with dozens rotting in jail - solitary confinement - for over two years with no trial. People walked into the capital witah police standing at open doors admitting them and they are now in jail. They were protesting what looked like fraud and hoping to get a count of legitimate ballots. If police had not stood aside to let them in it might be different,
Jon refuses to look at anything but Regime Media, he has told us that. He thinks they tell the truth. It is so sad.
Their trials have been delayed, unconscionably so, but that's been true of a lot of people after the lockdowns left the court dockets jam-packed. An acquaintance of mine in Baltimore was arrested for a fairly heinous crime in fall of 2019-- and he was stuck in jail for nearly three years without trial (ultimately he pled the case and was released for time served).
Please refrain from insult. No, I don't buy into paranoid, fear-mongering propaganda-- that's makes me smart or at least discerning, not stupid
The George Floyd riots were at least ginned up, and certainly connived at on the part of the police. There was no doubt of this post Ferguson, which was set up to be the racial reckoning spark, but somehow spluttered, and went out when even Eric ("My People") Holder's DoJ couldn't deliver a true bill. That wasn't going to happen a second time, so the rent-a-mobs were ready.
As I ask elsewhere, what effect will peaceful protests have on the political class? Have you read Nikki Haley's platform?
Re: The George Floyd riots were at least ginned up, and certainly connived at on the part of the police.
Can you expand on this? I think you can make a case that the police overreacted in some cities to the actions of provocateurs and that sent things out of control. But I can't see there was any deliberate plan on the part of the police for that result.
No. Read carefully what I wrote, Jon. They didn't foment it. They let it rip. They winked at it. That's what "connived" means. That's certainly what happened in New York.
Ray Kelly, the great former NYPD commissioner, is on record saying there are tried and true techniques for breaking up a mob, the kind that gutted Macy's in the summer of 2020. But the cops just watched because Bill DeBlasio, I mean Chirlane McCray, I mean Al Sharpton, I mean Barack Obama, told them to.
OK, but what would be their motive? The police generally skew rightwards politically (yes, there are individual exceptions) so were they hoping for a political reaction that would ensure Trump's reelection, or on a more diffuse scale discredit BLM and its cause?
I think you discount the reality that the police are a finite organization with limited power. They have been overwhelmed by urban mobs in riot going back the New York Draft riots in 1863. And most of of large cities are underpoliced-- we need more cops (though better cops too). We pretty much always have to bring in the National Guard to handle such things.
That’s what happened in Charlottesville as well. They stood down and let everything happen. I don’t blame them necessarily, they follow orders given from above. As all police departments do.
Remember those "Fiery but peaceful protests" in Kenosha, Wisconsin? The first night of the rioting over there was just the warm-up act, but Sheriff David Clarke, former sheriff of Milwaukee county, got on the radio the next day as the guest host for Mark Belling's 3-hour talk radio program. The major topic - how to strategically defend Kenosha from a law-enforcement perspective, from someone who had experience.
Was any of it done? No. I sincerely believe that half of Kenosha would have burned to the ground had it not been for the Rittenhouse shootings; that Antifa and all these groups were given a wink and a nod that they would be "safe" in their rioting, and that they got scared when some of their people actually got killed. It was eerie how fast the Antifa people left once that happened - what had been a full-out riot when Rittenhouse was attacked was totally cleared out two hours later.
As it was, the damage to Kenosha was much, much worse than the media reported. Furthermore, they totally ignored the fact that even in Racine, there had been a "public safety house" that had been burned out.
One thing I find that people don't realize: After the past couple years, no cop wants to be the one in a viral video without context causing harm to someone, even if that person is a criminal. And nearly all politicians are afraid to be the ones who order it or condone it. This goes back to "Occupy Wall Street" 15 years ago, when encampments and blocked streets intimidated the politicians in big "blue" cities.
I think the tide is turning slightly, though. When protesters surrounded the DNC headquarters in DC a week ago, blocking all fire exits and creating a dangerous, illegal situation, the cops stepped in, and no one is crying for the protesters.
The winking/conniving of the past 15+ years has caused two generations of protesters not to understand the principles of civil disobedience. They holler and scream and whine when they get arrested, but without the arrest to give their protest moral weight, they're just a bunch of douchebags and vandals.
To explain I was actually thinking of the Baltimore authorities in 2015 who reacted to internet rumors of a "Purge" (see the movies of that name) by shutting down the public transport system just before the schools let out-- older students did not ride school busses but had MTA passes. That stranded lots of teenagers, many at the MTA nexus by Mondawin Mall-- and they became a mob and touched off the rioting.
One should not credit municipal authorities with too much intelligence.
Burning vehicles is not only wrong in itself, it is dangerous. It is as dangerous as burning down a building. It is dangerous for the firemen who have to put out the fire. Burning vehicles is self-defeating. And burning vehicles is so left-wing and so Muslim.
Antifa torched two car lots in Kenosha in 2020, right along Sheridan Road, the main drag through the old part of the city. (Sheridan Road will take you all the way to Chicago going south and will also get a person to Milwaukee, though the name of the street changes going north.) The heat was so hot it melted city lamp-posts over. The owner of the car lots, an Indian immigrant who had come to the US with practically nothing decades ago, had tons of issues trying to get anything from insurance, not just in the fact that riots are often not covered, but most of the cars were burnt so badly the VINs were not readable, and his office had burned to the ground as well, along with the paperwork for the vehicles. Those cars sat out there for months, and then the city of Kenosha went after him for the "eyesore".
Why didn't they haul the cars to a junk yard? even a city as incompetent as Baltimore is pretty good about taking abandoned cars away when they are notified of such.
Jon, they weren't abandoned - they were on the private property of the car lot. However, without VINs, what other "proof" did the owner have that they existed? What else was he supposed to do when fighting with the insurance took months and months?
Rod, I don't actually condemn the left for rioting - a lot of times I think it's stupid, but it gets a point across.
The bastards in the state are like abusive husbands. If we just politely protest they won't crack down on us. Really, they'll crack down either way, so we may as well push back.
I'm sorry, but at this point suggesting peaceful mass protests is breathtakingly naive. You're our beloved alarmist and I would suggest most of your readership shares some sense of how desperate the hour is. Your alarmism is necessary, and helpful.
But do you really think peaceful protests are going to get the job done? If the Irish had peacefully marched, do you believe they wouldn't still have been referred to as 'far right'? All institutional control is within the hands of a cohort which despises us and what we represent.
And yes, I would point to J6 as an example of the kind of response even mostly peaceful protest prompts in the US.
I’m with Rod on this. As Christians, doing evil so that good more result is never acceptable. Further, it shows that we are hypocritical because we sanctimoniously proclaiming”law and order” when it comes to political enemies’ bad behavior. Yes, it is true that the far-right label will be used in any event. But, as we saw in Charlottesville,the use of violence by a despised group can have long term consequences. The public backlash is then leveraged by the Left to acquire more power. This is what sank Trump in 2020.
If you mean looting a Foot Locker, I'm in full agreement. That does nothing for our cause and only weakens it (incidentally it's been reported that looting in Ireland was done by people of 'indeterminate origin').
But I think we can aggressively protest without falling into sin. If some people want to call that rioting or not, that's just semantics. But I don't dispute your core point.
IMHO fair points are made by Mr. Dreher, but also many of the commenters as well (e.g., pointing out the treatment of "J6" people vs. the coddling of the "mostly peaceful protestors" who are allies of the Left).
Peaceful mass protests should be the first step, and hopefully a successful one. If nothing else, this might help "red-pill" the tens of millions of "blue-pilled normies" still comprising a majority of our citizenry.
At the same time, we are in a post-2020 world in which an unelected regime has been installed into the White House, apparently run by Obama (in alliance with enemies foreign and domestic). By definition, such de facto revolutionaries care not about our Constitutional Republic nor the legitimate preferences of the citizenry, for it is the former they intend to displace and the latter they see either as counter-revolutionaries / reactionaries, or subjects.
Yuri Bezmenov warned us of the subversion / demoralization. Anyone who's read "And Not a Shot is Fired" or studied "color revolutions" readily recognizes what occurred in 2020, and is underway now. So ...
1) We must pray and repent and seek God's face, asking that He heal our land and deliver us from the evil that has seized control of our nation;
2) Pursue peaceful means to reinstate and restore our Constitutional Republic;
3) Be cognizant of the fact that peaceful means might fail (particularly since with the complicity of both political parties the election fraud infrastructure remains intact), and so at that time pray for guidance on next steps.
In normal circumstances (a functioning democracy), absolutely yes.
Things get more questionable when you have the federal government (on the side of Democrats) strong-arming media / social media to silence / cancel opposing political voices (contra to the spirit, if not the letter of the First Amendment).
And far more questionable when elections are neither "free and fair."
Both of which have been the state of play in this country leading up to and through the 2020 election, and since.
Re: And far more questionable when elections are neither "free and fair."
There is zero evidence in the real world that there is any more trouble with our elections than there was twenty, thirty, forty or sixty years ago. The inability of the Right to accept defeat and to grasp the basic fact that much (not all) of its program is anathema to a majority of citizens is cause for my own dismay.
Donald Trump was never popular to begin with; his 2016 win was a fluke (due mainly to a very unlikable opposing candidate, her tactical blunders, and the byzantine nature of presidential election rules). Once in office as a minority president, the man did absolutely nothing to expand his appeal (unlike Bush in 2001-- and before 9-11 even). When the digestive residue hit the rotating air moving device in 2020 his Potemkin presidency stood revealed in all its incompetent squalor and thereafter the election was Biden's to lose, and even Sleepy Joe managed not to. And yet here we go again. The the GOP-- or rather conservative Americans-- just had the great good sense to dump Trump and go with someone like Desantis, of proven ability, Biden would be leaving office in January of 2025 and your side would see at least some of its program (most especially on immigration, probably not on abortion etc.) actually put in place. But go ahead and throw it all away for another gaudy grudge match between two cognitively impaired candidates for the nursing home if not the loony bin.
Jon - Tom is right. We know that the public is being misled by elite institutions. If a brainwashed public is defrauded of their vote because they acted on a steady stream of lies by leftist institutions, it is silly to talk about “persuasion”.
So people who disagree with you are "brainwashed"? Stop and think a minute how condescending and arrogant that sounds. This is the rhetoric of power lust pure and simple.
We wouldn't be reserving the right to riot for ourselves. We would just be replying in kind - a "proportional response" like the Left seems to think the Israelis should be doing rather the bombing Hamas.
We shouldn't riot. Instead we should protest peacefully.
We must have PEACEFUL protests ... like the ones we saw in 2020. Remember those?
<<<Pay no attention to the smoke, the flames, the broken glass, the burning cars and the looting mobs you see behind the me. It's not strictly speaking a riot but can be more accurately described as a PEACEFUL protest.>>>
I think about how the Indians' success in nonviolent resistance against the British was dependent on the British having some sense of decency; they weren't going to just mow down unarmed civilians. But if the Indians had tried that against the Nazis, the Nazis would have probably been more than happy to exterminate them—and laughed at them for being weak while doing it.
Point being, resistance on the physical plane (i.e. violence) may sometimes be necessary when we're dealing with the sort of sub-animal humans who are incapable of understanding anything else. Pure pacifism seems like a recipe to have the worst among us inherit the earth, since there certainly are people who aren't gonna stop until they are made to stop. But of course crossing that line should not be taken lightly.
Only a rigid pacifist denies that violence may be necessary when defending oneself. But beware the delusion that you are "defending yourself" when your real motive is to impose your will on others.
OK, I'm game. Help me out here. "pure pacificism a disaster", "won't stop until they are made to stop" "should not be taken lightly". Ok. But what are you calling for.
I've objected strongly to calls for rioting, looting, burning, the sort of thing that happened in Dublin, the Summer of 2020 type thing. Are you calling for taking the initiative and doing something like that? You just do not strike me as that kind of person.
Defense, stocking weapons, that sort of thing I get. But there was an implication here, I thought, of taking initiative, and an initiative that was not peaceful. So what is it you are calling for? Honest question.
For me, I can see "riot/loot/burn". I can see "prepare to defend" and I can see "work through peaceful and lawful means". I'm for the last two. You seem to feel they are not sufficient (and maybe they aren't) but what do you call for?
What am I missing as I sit in horror at college educated folk (not the downtrodden unhoused of Ireland) calling for riots as their answer? (Not saying you are necessarily calling for that as some here are- but I wonder what you do call for.)
You've got a guy on today's forum (Nov., 25) literally saying whites should start a race war (yes, start). I bet no one says anything. I just don't get it. Where is the line here? You spoke of one and not taking things lightly, so where is the line.
I'm not calling for anything. I was only stating that, in principle, political violence is never entirely off the table, because pure pacifism is not a tenable moral position. The world is messy and complex, and I do not know in general terms where the specific line is between offense and proactive defense. Rioting is probably useless, but the way things are going, it also seems inevitable. Riots are sort of like volcanos: it hardly matters whether anyone "calls" for them or not, since they're just gonna do what they will anyway.
Thanks - I still need more help to understand. You stated "Political violence is never entirely off the table". I assume you mean offense, defense is not a problem. Could you give an example of political violence that should be on the table that is not defensive?
I think the issue has to do with what we consider "defense". The BLM rioters, for example, perceived themselves as acting in defense, because (rightly or wrongly) they believed that blacks are under siege from white supremacy and the police. And likewise, if global elites and their policies make working class whites feel like their backs are to the wall, then they may perceive their own violence as defensive in nature. So, many things could be framed as defense if you believe that you have already been aggressed against. It can be hard to isolate the causality or to judge the merits in general terms.
Also, with people saying they favor riots, I think it has to do with a grim sense of satisfaction. Like: "What, elites, did you think that you could sow the wind and not reap the whirlwind? How long did you think you could keep going like you do and not provoke this sort of thing?" So there's a poetic sense that the elites deserve to meet their nemesis, even if any given riot itself is irrational and wrong.
Exactly my thought. Sadly, a lot of conservatives want to check out and act like talking and writing more papers will change the direction of travel. We shouldn’t tell our enemies that we are unwilling to use tactics because they’ll see it as a weakness, not compassion.
I’m going to misquote the movie Golda super bad here, but in the movie they had her saying something like ‘we don’t have to do it, but we need to make the Egyptians think that we will rape,murder, burn their houses down and destroy their cities. We have to make them want to save their families enough to stop killing ours.’
We can’t keep capitulating to monsters because we think it’s ‘nice’. Nice got us in this mess. I’m so over the ‘respectable right.’ We can’t be afraid of ugly or of civil disobedience. We don’t have the luxury of leaving options on the table like it’s 1990.
Word have meanings, and we are not ruled by tyrants, though a case can be made that we are ruled by fools. Resorting to violence because the public has not accepted one's political program is nothing but a guarantee of ruin. And yes, Hell loves that sort of thing.
I'm enjoying the elites increasingly feeling under siege. From their parties losing favor and power and their namecalling/propagana increasingly bouncing off DGAF shields, to things like Hollywood in general and Disney in particular increasingly failing...the rot is clear and the pushback is inevitable.
About time.
South Park lampooning Disney's corporate board, but could be the gathering of any power elite nowadays.
I honestly don't feel like they feel under siege. They seem strangely unbothered, they have this weird unnerving confidence - it's a religious thing with them.
That's fake. When you see them flip out with every setback, you see the falseness of their confidence. See, in their world view, they are inevitable, and such defeats cannot happen. But they are happening, with increasing regularity.
These are just people, not gods. Serious feet of clay, made so by their arrogance, the cultural bubble they shelter in, not being nearly as smart as they think they are, and forming world views around a whole series of things that simply are not real and in the longer term, unsupportable.
Ireland is the only European nation without a conservative political party. A big part of that is the historic political battle between Fianna Fail and Finn Gael that goes back to the 1920s. Both of these parties were socially fairly conservative until fairly recently. But that's all gone now. The Irish are pretty much all in on the European Union and modernist social policies. The votes on divorce, homosexual marriage and abortion weren't even close. The Ireland of "The Quiet Man" is dead. On top of that, there are always the troubles in Ulster that highly influence the southern republic. Irish politics are almost unnatural.
There is a newish party here which is trying to capture votes with a more socially conservative platform https://aontu.ie/ but I’m not sure if they’re making much progress at present. In the north the nationalist/republican parties have always been socialist but until recently were socially conservative, whereas the main unionist parties have been more economically conservative, though still very socially conservative. Nowadays though especially since the catholic abuse scandal shattered the dominant consensus, not to mention Brexit, the republicans are determined to show they are good Europeans and falling over themselves to prove their progressive credentials.
Here's the thing about the Irish. Wokeism is a very new ideology in Ireland and even liberalism was late to bloom in Ireland. The Irish are and always have been a very tribal people and many Irish still retain that tribal nature (especially the working class which was the same class that filled the ranks of the IRA in the past). So just because the Irish are largely disgusted with the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and have been less and less pious in practicing their ancestral Catholic Faith does not mean that Ireland as a whole has embraced Wokeism, actually as I said the Irish are still digesting liberalism (and they may very well vomit that out as we are watching in Dublin tonight). When Irish get pissed off they are quite a force to be dealt with on either side of the pond, just look at the history of Boston or New York.
Any foreigner going to Ireland and making trouble for the native Irish is in for a very rude awakening. It's not going to end well for them. I used to hang out in Irish Pubs in San Francisco with the Irish (construction workers from Ireland), unlike American bars there were never any problems in those pubs. Sometimes Irish friends would fight amongst themselves but outsiders seemed to understand it was a bad idea to start trouble in those pubs. They don't call them the Fighting Irish for nothing. Even here in America. Go to South Boston or Charlestown and start problems with the local Irish-Americans and see what happens. It's a bad idea.
You're getting there, Rod, but you still have a long way to go.
Violence is ultimately going to have to be on the table, which means that it will probably have to be the answer. Not necessarily the only answer, but the elites need to know fear. Real, tangible fear for their physical safety before they'll change their ways.
So, rise up you native Irishmen. Bring back the IRA and the Provos, united this time against a common enemy. And that enemy isn't the immigrant down the block. He'll have to go eventually, but your real enemy is your political overclass. They are the ones who need to be unable to sleep at night, who have to send underlings to start their cars in the morning, and who occasionally disappear without a trace.
Elected officials and the bureaucrats who serve them need to learn to fear their voters again. Focus their minds
Long story but to bring it into the 60s you have the Provo- Official split. The Officials were called that because they dominated the groups governing body. They placed an emphasis on Marxism and would eventually renounce armed struggle and essentially morph into the Workers Party. That party did align with the Leninist in the European Parliament. The Provos were much more into armed struggle and less into Marxism. They actually had more of a following. But the Sinn Fein which became their political front was always pretty left wing but not woke until fairly recently.
Brian Kaller here -- I just got home through a maze of riot police blocking off the Dublin streets. Rod, I sent you more in an e-mail, but the people I talked to who came out of the riot area all said locals formed a peaceful protest after the stabbing, which turned violent when police tried to break it up. They said the looters, on the other hand, didn't look Irish.
You need to stop confirming the left's lunacy when they call the right racists. Too many examples like this and it won't be lunacy.
Quote: <<<Varadkar was born in Dublin and studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin. ... Varadkar is the third child and only son of Ashok and Miriam (née Howell) Varadkar. His father was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s, to work as a doctor.[7] His mother, born in Dungarvan, County Waterford, >>>
I was horrified by his remarks but his race has nothing to do with it. I want to throw up every time you make racist remarks about the British Prime Minister, and now this? Troll. Well, I will not stop calling your racism down no matter how many times you troll.
Edit to add: I like nearly all your other posts, Derek, in fact, I generally like them a lot. I just don't get it. "A non-Conservative is a bad leader" OK. But "An Indian is a bad leader?" Would Vivek automatically be a bad leader, for instance? Please consider that stating a person's race as a reason for their being a bad leader is indeed racist.
He says they haven't ruled out terrorism as a motive of the attacker-- so far, so good. It's an improvement over the initial statement. But he sure thinks he knows all he needs to know about the motivations of the rioters, and is talking about passing new laws targeting them that could be easily used on even peaceful protesters. As with Sunak, we see an Indian (or half Indian) PM coming down harder on a native white population reacting to nonwhite immigrant violence than the immigrants themselves.
We do not assume a person's race is the reason for a negative action unless there is evidence for it. To assume based on race if the definition of prejudice. I heard him speak and he sounded no different from Joe Biden with his horror of these terrible right wing acts - only word he lacked that Biden has is MAGA.
Is your theory that he did this because he has to prove loyalty to whites, rather than that Indians are generally more disloyal? If so, at least that is not a mean "prejudgment". I know that disloyalty probably part is Derek's reason because he has said that about Sunak more than once.
I guess I was lucky - in 6th grade when i was 11, we had a teacher who gave us a great talk. "Prejudice" is a combination of two words "pre" and "judge".
******* No matter what you know or believe (rightly or wrongly) you know about the average person in a group, you never judge in advance that a member of that group is bad or good based merely on race/religion/ethnicity. You do not pre-judge. *******
I don't think necessarily it's about proving loyalty to white people so much as seamlessly integrating into the current ruling class, which has largely turned against their own civilizational heritage. The Irish republic doesn't have the history of colonialism the U.K. does; I suspect they have economic migrants being shooed their direction because that's what Brussels will do to any country with a national government that will take them.
The issue isn't that either of these guys are Indian per se. It's that you have immigrants, or their children, who have assimilated very nicely acting for the benefit of more immigrants who have not assimilated to Western norms, including the rule of law which is increasingly under attack. Even as an American, I can't help but notice when some politician of recent immigrant background (usually Democrat) is in favor of a defacto open border, or going soft on nonwhite criminals while throwing the book at white ones. This is antiwhite, and it's as wrong as negatively targeting any other group on the basis of their birth.
But that- favoring open borders - is because they are Democrats. They are virtually required by their party to be in lock step.
Look, there is evidence a good percent of Islamic people are not blending into Western culture. That is just not true of Indians. If it is, then point out the evidence?
And yes, assuming an elected person is bad because of their race or religion is prejudice, even if that person is Islamic. But wanting to stop wholesale immigration of those who we now know will be likely, they or their descendants, to oppose Western culture with its freedoms and decent treatment of women? That is not prejudice. (And still there are exceptions, i,.e., persecuted Iranian women who fled.)
Do some here really not know you cannot assume a given individual is "bad because of their membership in a group? Wanting to stop open borders and labeling someone bad because of race, religion or ethnicity are two different things.
Equating 'have to say' with 'is a bad leader' is a bit of a stretch. But, let's try these two sentences.
"The Indian taoiseach is a bad leader" and "The Indian taoiseach is a good leader". Are they equally racist or not? Is it the ethic (not racial) association that makes it racist or the negative connotation of one sentence that makes it racist?
You are pretending not to understand. You are an intelligent person and understand what I said. But I will spell it out anyway. Derek obvious was telling us the Taoiseach's words were bad. Either that else he had not looked them up but assumed they would be bad. I stated this was based on this comment and prior comments about Indian leaders from Derek. And I explained about not judging by averages in a prior post.
Linda Arnold is very much like a lefty in throwing around terms like "racist." Let me put it this way. I love Italy and I love Italian culture although I have not one ounce of Italian blood in me. I could move my family to Italy next week and I would never be accepted as being Italian, my children would not be accepted as Italian, even if my children married Italians my grandchildren would not be accepted as Italian. Perhaps my great-grandchildren would. I like cultures where, to be a true member, you must steep in that culture for at least a century to be a member.
The Indian who is Taoiseech of Ireland I suppose loves the country where he was born. That is natural. But is he steeped in Irish culture and the 800 years of battle with the English? Is he Catholic? Does he enjoy Irish folk music? Is he heterosexual? Does he have a wife or children? Or is he a Dublin globalist who is part of the monster regime of the European Union, a wrecker of the Catholic church and traditional Irish cultural life, a man who happily degrades the nation that he has supreme political power by living in sodomy? Men like Leo Varadkar are destroying ancient Ireland and making Ireland meaningless culturally and just a small adjunct to the communal European project.
That would explain the films. So unlike "the right" to attack police/garda. Good to have an eyewitness as I agreed based on what I could see but a lot of cover was worn.
Rod's email at substack does not work, he told us about 10 days ago that it does not. You could make reach him with something like this (I presume he does not read the hundreds of comments each day) but replying to one of his comments.
I'd value anything more you have to say on the forum about this
I had to read this blog post to get any idea of what had actually happened in Dublin, all the media reports just say there was "a stabbing" and that "the far right rioted" as a result. It's hard to know why people were mad when the media refuses to actually share the news.
Here where I live, the head of the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has been temporarily suspended from the state's hate crimes task force, but news reports weren't telling me why. They were saying she posted "pro-Palestinian" comments on social media and compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
But then I dig a little deeper and find the actual primary sources—screenshots of her social media—and it's actually something bigger. She's an October 7 denialist. She doesn't believe the Hamas attack really happened.
Why couldn't news outlets just tell me so? Increasingly I have to root around the Internet to find out what someone really said or did that got them in trouble.
My wife has a super-busy job, so she tried subscribing to the New York Times daily newsletter to keep up with the world. For the past couple years I've been amazed by all the things she didn't know because the Times literally didn't report those things.
I think it’s terrible that the news leaves out crucial details about the story because they are afraid of how some people will take it.
It would be a little like reporting the Rodney King beating, and not mentioning that King was black and the officers white. The story makes no sense without it.
Looters and protesters are almost always two different groups. After the Rodney King protests in LA, while the protesters were blacks and whites, the looters were recent immigrants from Guatemala. There was also a case of a white guy and a Mexican guy who robbed a black-owned business as gunpoint, then walked out saying f*** Rodney King.
Would you extend that same right to a people who have experienced that invasion by foreginers, displacement, subjugation, discrimination, and extermination for 75 years? And what about the powers that have subsidized it?
So all Palestinians are "barbarians" and we can steal their land and herd them into tiny enclaves and camps because "civilized" people want to take over?
So only politically independent people have a right to stay in their homes when conquered by another people? It's OK to kick out people and forcibly take their homes and land if they don't have an Independent government?
"Invasion by foreigners"? If you want to go down that road, you'd probably better look at the bigger picture in the Middle East, Asia Minor and Africa, all of which was formerly people by Christians, Jews, Berbers, Buddhists, indigenous religions, but now, for the most part, strangely ISN'T. Why, it's as if at some point "foreign invaders" swept through the whole regions.
The actual expulsion and/or extermination of conquered people is quite rare. Usually what happened in most cases is the latest the conquered people continued to live in their land with new masters, sometimes adopting the culture of their conquerors--or sometimes even the reverse happening.
Most of the Islamic conquest of the 7th and 8th centuries was like this, in fact.
I know that over a million Israelis are Arabs. Many of them seem to get along well enough with the Israeli government. And the fact that there never was a Palestine suggests to me that there never were a Palestinian people.
I know you're an American convert to Islam, Talib. Was it necessary for you to advocate for the most questionable of causes because you had become a Muslim? My ancestry is British/Swedish, and for the last forty years, I have deplored what those nations have become, and never seen any particular need to speak up for them.
I have a half cousin in Sweden, Stina. She's from the dumbest class of all, college professors. Thirty years ago, she cut me off because in a letter I had mentioned that Houston was being overrun with Latino drug gangs who were illegally in the country. If Stina is still alive, I wonder what she thinks about mass immigration now?
I don't blame the Israelis. I'm sure they think they need to do these things to defend their lives and what they regard as an acceptable quality of life for themselves. After October 7, my inclination is to think they're onto something.
Why don't you address the ungenerosity of the Arab nations, which could easily have relieved their perceived burdens by taking them in?
How about limiting it to Gaza, the
matter of the billions of dollars in aid the "government" of Gaza has received in the last eighteen years? Why haven't they used it to do the obvious thing which so many have pointed out, turn it into a Singapore? The "government" waxes in luxury in Qatar, meanwhile, Hamas soldiers use pipe donated by the Israelis for a reliable, safe water supply to make rockets which they can launch into Israel.
It's Israel which agreed for many years that there could be a two state solution, the Palestinians who have said, "Never!"
The whole "Palestine" thing annoys me as it does because in the 1940s there were no citizens of a Palestine, because no country called by that name existed. The Israelis, many of whom were descendants of people who had been there for centuries, accepted the less than wonderful land which the United Nations alloted to them. The Arabs were not only not contented with their better land, they weren't contented with peace.
Do you really believe that if the "Palestinians" had demonstrated the peacefulness and constructiveness of Christians in Arab nations they wouldn't have had their country? Maybe the question to ask is why they are so committed to destruction and self - destruction?
My great great grandfather never owned slaves in the American South. He did have the misfortune of having his farm in northern Virginia grabbed in The Failed War of Southern Rebellion. It was never returned to him. I don't know what he did during the war, but after, he moved to southwestern Virginia, and started a new life as a miner, which couldn't possibly have been as congenial to him as having a farm.
History is about dispossessed people. Speaking of dispossession, how about the Jews of Europe in 1945? They'd been dispossessed of everything. Israel was to be a home for them, quite unlike what they'd been familiar with in prewar Europe, but a chance, at least. They could have turned it down. They could have remained in deNazified and deNazifying Europe, organized their own Hamases and Hezbollahs, and spent the last seventy - five years engaged in terrorism against non - Jewish Europe. They didn't.
I've alluded in this comments section to the fact that a psychopathic cousin, married into a multimillionaire family, manipulated me out of a will which would have given me somewhere around $100,000 - 150,000 badly needed dollars. I think I would be within moral if not theological rights to kill my cousin, but I haven't and won't. I've been helped spectacularly by my wonderful church, without whom I could not have survived, still, the rage that I must receive this help doesn't subside. Any moral non - idiot acknowledges that my cousin is an evil bastard, but I'm sure that if in the presence of members of my church, I started to mull aloud the possibility of going to shoot my cousin, I'd be met with immediate dropped jaws and looks of disbelief.
On the other hand, obsession with murdering Jews is habitual for the "Palestinian" people, isn't it? They shouldn't wonder why things are as they are for them.
I have a feminist sociologist niece who works with the transgender on surgeries. She disowned my brother long ago. She even changed her surname- usually a no-no with educated left-wing women- because she hates my brother so much. It is rather convenient to have a bad person related to you disown you.
Yes, I've had that happen several times. Good losses all of them, especially my cousin, the psychopath, though as a parting gesture he defamed me out of the will of an aunt from my side of the family.
Yes, exactly. Palestine is the best argument there is for the downside of unrestricted immigration, and ensuring that refugees either return home eventually or agree to live peacefully under the existing system.
Bingo. There's plenty of great examples in history. Palestine is probably the most recent one. Another would be Anglophone American migration to Texas and California which resulted in Mexico losing both Texas and California.
Rod's favorite fool speaks. Palestine is actually the best argument for what anyone but an irrational Arab can understand: if you wage unprovoked war over and over and over again and you lose each time, it's time to accept defeat and come up with a different strategy.
I think we can refrain from personal insults? I'm not out here calling anyone names, please do me and everyone else here the same courtesy. Besides, apart from the folks behind BDS, it's not clear that anyone on the Palestinian side has any kind of strategy at all.
Your comments are consistently foolish but you are correct that I should not have called you a fool. My apologies. I should have called Rod a fool for citing your letter.
In the Orthodox tradition, to be a fool is among the highest of all honors. Haha. Sort of like the fool in *King Lear*, who's just about the only one who tells the truth; sort of like the joker in Bob Dylan's song "All Along the Watchtower". Sort of like Jesus, even. May we all be fools. If you are Rod's favorite fool, then I am jealous.
So, if they have been subjected to evil, they have a right to subject others to evil?
Because the Nazis exterminated 6 million, they have the right to take someone else's land?
Because they were subjected to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, the Pogroms of Russia, the Passion Play riots in Germany, the extortion of Richard I, and countless other atrocities, that gives them the right to take someone else's land?
Would you then not justify the African Americans to forcibly take land from, say, Nigeria, to pay for the injustice done to them by the slaveholders of the American South? Or justify the Roma to forcibly take land in India because of their mistreatment in Europe?
But the Jews have had a continued presence in the area for over 4000 years. Legitimate DNA analysis and archeology prove this. They are indigenous to the region but most of them were driven out by the Romans in the 1st century. They never wanted to leave. The same is true of the Palestinians (not the Arabs) in many important ways. One can feel sorrow and outrage at the treatment of both peoples.
And it's strange, Talib, how you use the neutral language of realpolitik to describe the brutal invasion of the region by the Arabs in 7th and 8th centuries but it's the language of "rights" and anticolonialism when talking about the Jews and the Western powers. Why, it's almost like you're deliberately using a double standard...
Yes, both the Arab-speaking Palestinians and Jews have DNA dating back to the ancient Canaanites who lived there thousands of years (though in the case of Ashkenazi Jews it's mixed with significant European content). I've pointed this out several times in Rod's column. The Jews and Arab-speaking Palestinians have genetically more in common than the Arab-speaking Palestinians and any other Arab-speaking group.
And yes, there has been an amount of Jewish population since the Roman conquests in 70 CE and 136 CE...but they hadn't been the majority population there for centuries. The vast majority of today's Jews haven't had ancestors living in Canaan for centuries.
As far as different attitudes concerning what happened 1400 years ago and what's happening now, well, I can't change the past, for one. Second, the modern Israeli settlement *is* settler colonialism, whereas the Arab conquests 1400 years ago were certainly conquests, but ones that did not involve the systematic driving out or extermination of native populations.
But most importantly, we can't do anything about what happened 1400 years ago, but we can address what is happening ***now***. And my government didn't subsidize the conquests 1400 years ago, but they're subsidizing them ***now***.
Ah, yes, the (mostly) benevolent conquest of hundreds of millions of people did not, unlike every such conquest in human history, involve the "systematic driving out or extermination of native populations." The Arabs, unlike every other people in history, never resorted to that kind of brutality to achieve their geopolitical aims. Christian, Jewish and certainly Hindu historians might have something to say about that, as would the tens of millions of African, Hindu, Middle Eastern, and European peoples enslaved by the conquerers down through the centuries.
Well, Talib, good for you for belonging to a group that stands so far above the standard set by the rest of the humanity.
Extermination - you're referring to a Palestininan population in Gaza that has *increased* over 75 years. I'm so tired of these lies being casually thrown around on the internet - if you think a population increase constitutes extermination, then you need a dictionary, a hot cup of tea and a lie down, mate.
Ok, so forget the fact that for the last 23 years, at least 23,785 Palestinans have died, including 6,538 children...compared to Israeli casualties of 2,562, of which 177 have been children. (See https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/ ) And this is before the recent massacres since October 7th. Forget that high Israeli officials in the current government have used explicitly genocidal language in reference to their conquest of Gaza. Forget that the exact same measures used against Gaza in the last month of cutting off fuel, food, and water were called "Genocide" when the Russians did it against the Ukraine--were far fewer children died in two years of fighting than in less than two months in Gaza. Forget that the equivalent ordinance of two Hiroshima bombs have been dropped on Gaza since October 7. Forget that between the displacement of 750,000 in 1948 and the displacement of 250,000 in 1967, cramming many of those on a tiny strip of land that is under a complete lock down and economic blockade for two decades. Let's just say that this is all just an overreaction.
You tell me that it's OK to riot over a single knife attack that injuries three children, but the Palestinians better just suck it up and quit their whining about how hard they have it?
No, sorry--the Irish knife attack is tragic, and the Irish people have every right to be upset. But if you think they have a right to riot over this event--thar did not result in a single death--my God, then what are you prepared to justify for the Palestinian people who have suffered infinitely more?
Now this, this is the most honest, balanced description of the situation in that particular part of the middle east that has ever been seen. I mean, all relevant facts are presented here in a completely unbiased, objective manner.
Forgetting that Palestinian suffering has been largely at their own hands - rejecting deals which would have given them their own nation, then electing a horde of murderous, thieving savages as a government which compels Israel to limit shipments so that they can't import weapons.
Forgetting that Hamas turned pipes intended for drinking water into rockets, and forgetting that Israel supplied Gaza with 13% of its drinking water and 50% of its electricity before the war. Forgetting that Israel pulled out of Gaza nearly 20 years ago and left Hamas - which has explicitly stated its intent to destroy Israel through terrorism - to its own devices, so it could dig an elaborate tunnel network under Gaza for military purposes, rather than say, oh, I don't know...actually governing for the poor Gazans you seem to care so deeply about.
Forget that Israel opens humanitarian corridors and communicates their battle plans with civilians *extensively* as the risk of their own soldiers, to spare civilian lives, while Hamas shoots anyone trying to leave the battlefront. Because they're such great and merciful people.
Forget that the word 'genocide' has been watered down to the strength of a Diet Coke over the last month, and now basically includes any military strategy at all. You could rain confetti on the enemy and *certain people* would call it genocide.
How about instead of 'sucking it up' the Palestinians directed some of their relentless hatred toward Hamas - toward the people who are so bloody infatuated with their idea of killing Jews that they couldn't give a damn about helping their own people? Credit where credit's due, I've seen a couple of clips of ordinary Gazans doing just that since Israel attacked, and under a brutal military dictatorship you've got to hand it to anyone willing to speak out. But it almost never happens.
The Irish have a right to riot in the same way the English do because of Rotherham, and the French do because of knife attacks, and the Swedish do because of gang-related crimes, and the Germans do because of mass sexual assault by immigrants in 2015. You might detect a pattern here.
And your minimising an event which involved children being stabbed exposes the moral vacuum of your argument.
The Palestinians have *never* been offered by the Israelis a plan that would respect true sovereignty in the 1967 borders. Even the supposed "generous offer" in 2000 would not allow Palestine to have a true military, must allow military flights over their own airspace, not control the Jordan Valley, break up the Palestinian "state" by access roads over which Palestine would have no control, swap valuable land in the West Bank with worthless parts of the Negev (including a toxic waste dump), and not have control over their own borders.
And if you look at the earlier plan of partition in 1947 by the UN, despite having only 630,000 Jewish people in Palestine (or 32 percent of the population), they were to be given 56 percent of the land as a state--so despite there being more than twice as many Arabs than Jews, they were to be given less than half the land.
Tell me what part of either deal--or any other subsequent deal--would be fair and just?
Okay but ETA was never offered a state. The Uyghurs haven't been offered a state (note the lack of outrage on their behalf from the left). Puerto Rico isn't even a state in the US. Chechnya hasn't been offered sovereignty by the Russians. Taiwan is in murky waters sovereignty-wise. There are tiny islands still under the control of the British crown. You don't always get your way, especially in a horribly complex place like Middle East.
If you're offered a deal, you take it and use it as the basis to help your people thrive - and terms can always be renegotiated later on. Leaving aside the *stated fact* that Hamas is not operating on good faith (it's founded on the principle of eradicating Israel). Has rejecting deals really helped the Palestinian people?
Surely there's some alternate history where they take what's on the table and turn Gaza into a thriving Levantine paradise, a tourist mecca (so to speak), a financial hub, a high-tech-corridor using cutting-edge irrigation methods to feed its people, or something like that? Heck, the Bible tours alone would keep the population in Keffiyehs for a good long while.
What's troubling though is there is a subtext in your argument that suggests that Palestinian discontent somehow justifies October 7th. And I reject that completely.
The list of dangerous "far right" extremists gets longer every day: Trump, Elon, Rogan, Tucker, Orban, DeSantis, Peterson and now Wilders and that guy who won in Argentina.
The message from our globalist overlords and their MSM propaganda wing is becoming clearer and harder to deny: you either obey us and convert to the Social Justice belief system (the One Truth Faith of our Western elites) or else we will smear you with bigotry accusations, depict you as beyond the moral pale, and do all we can to destroy you.
The globalist corporate class and the civilizational termites of the New Left have joined forces because they both have the same enemies and the same goal: to smother all native Western populations in a tsunami of mass immigration and mass guilt and shame (backed by a full-spectrum propaganda assault designed to make the average person believe "All Good People do as we say and quietly accept their colonization") designed to render them mute and powerless, with no choice but to submit if they don't want to be denounced and immiserated.
These people have no idea of the backlash they're creating, will be the last ones to see it coming, and will never ever take responsibility for their actions. They have tied themselves to the party line of "Everyone who dissents is a dangerous extremist who needs to be banned and monitored". I guess we're all "far right" now.
That was part of my Thanksgiving. I learned yesterday from my left-wing, unmarried know-it-all Sister-in-law that Finland just elected a "nut." When informed that Holland had the most recent elections, she amended herself and said the Dutch had elected a "nut." Fortunately, she returns to Ohio today.
The Left weaponises allegations of racism in the same way that the Right weaponises allegations of antisemitism
Rightists tend to dismiss as antisemitic anyone who thinks that the global financial system is deeply corrupt; or destroying a different hapless country in the Middle East every few years is evil; or having US foreign policy massively influenced by one small rogue state is absurd.
Leftists tend to dismiss as racist anyone who thinks that immigration should be controlled or reduced; or laws should be properly enforced; or some cultural groups (e.g. Muslims) present difficulties for peaceful coexistence; or policemen are not monsters but public servants doing a difficult but necessary task, with the same mix of wickedness, frailty and folly as anyone else.
the way to change things in Ireland is for Irish people that oppose immigration to become active in elections in Ireland and populate the government with like-minded representatives. In that the Irish political establishment is committed to immigration and the institutions that support immigration (the EU, etc.) - it would be a difficult and lengthy battle. Protests are not enough. Rioting counter-productive. Is there the will in Ireland to makes these changes through hard won electoral gains?
And that’s been the problem for the past 20 or so years—the cultural Left has been consciously moving much faster than any electoral machinery can correct—before the voters, that is, intended victims, can have a chance to register ANY discontent, enough institutional transformation has taken root to blanket the entire hillside with alien cover.
A big cause of the bad choices we get is because our politics beslimes anyone who gets too close to it. Only narcissists and sociopaths are willing to run that gantlet nowadays.
Very true. And the press bears much of the blame for that. On many days, I’d like to send the lot of them on a cruise in a leaky boat into a hurricane.
back here in the US we not only have problems with illegal migrants, but with legal migranst (or first gen descendants of legal immigrants) like Rashiad Tlaib , Pramila Jayapal and Ihlan Omar. the problem s that many third world legal migrants are getting elected to positions of power or their progeny are. The vast majority vote for Democratic candidates. Take a look at Northen Virginia which is a dark blue part of the state. Yes the public revolted against the Fairfax County school board, but they still ended up voting for Democratic candidates for Congress and the state government.
These while not committing murders are slowly legally implementing changes to this country
yes except that these people are fundamentally changing our country at the state, local and national level. this is not a matter whether or not I like these candidates but rather what their agenda is. Look at the northen tier of Virginian counties. they are solidly blue. it wasn't until the Fairfax County School Board was exposed that the constiuents pushed back. Sadly though they still voted for Democratic candidates for the state legislature. The vast majority of Fairfax county is made up of federal employess many of whom are South Asians
as a result of Oct 7th we are seeing major protest marches by thousands of immigrants from the Middle East. these people vote Democratic
That's pricey territory around there. I'd suggest it isn't immigrants who changed the voting patters, but Americans, white and black, with serious degrees working for the government. Education has become one of the major fault lines in politics.
Meanwhile even Donald Trump managed to make some inroads into the Hispanic vote, and a slight though definite salient into the black vote. If the GOP wants to become the working class party (IMO, it should) it will have to become comfortable with non-white people.
very pricey with a large South Asian demographic, I used to live part-time in that county and watched the demographics slowly change
"The 5 largest ethnic groups in Fairfax County, VA are White (Non-Hispanic) (49.3%), Asian (Non-Hispanic) (19.9%), Black or African American (Non-Hispanic) (9.54%), White (Hispanic) (7.32%), and Other (Hispanic) (4.94%)."
" it will have to become comfortable with non-white people" and who says that Republicans aren't comfortable with non-whites?. I think that is a myth pushed by the left. if Republicans didn't like non-whites then why did they elect an African-American woman as Va's Lt. Governor? why did they elect Nikki Haley (a non-white) to be SC's governor?
"Republican candidates were backed by 14% of Black voters, compared with 8% in the last midterm elections four years ago, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive national survey of the electorate.
In Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp more than doubled his support among Black voters to 12% in 2022 compared with 5% four years ago, according to VoteCast. He defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams both times."
African-Americans: Congressional Representatives: Byron Donalds, Burgess Owens, Wesley Hunt, John James. Senator Tim Scott, (also elected Republican nominee Hershel Walker). KY Att Gen and Gov. nominee Daniel Cameron. As mentioned, Winsome Sears.
These were all elected from majority White districts/states. Chances are poor for a Black Democrat to be elected from a majority white district/state.
I won't even go into Hispanics and Asians, but there are many. Again, commonly from majority white districts. Much less common for Democrats from these groups to be elected from majority white districts. And yes, I incude "majority white that usually vote democrat" for all three of these groups.
Indians and Muslims are probably lost causes. They don't care about concepts like small government. Both are very anti-Christian and they regard the Republicans as the Christian party. East Asians are very successful but come from very conformist societies that also don't recognize the concept of small government. Fifty years ago, East Asians were usually Republican voters. East Asians have swung left since 1990. East Asian doctors in Fairfax County vote the same as white liberal Fairfax County doctors. Certain Hispanic groups have moved towards the Republicans. Rural Hispanics and Hispanics with small businesses have moved right. Urban Hispanics are part of the Democratic coalition. The professional political class of Hispanics rely on the crumbs of the Democratic machine.
"Urban Hispanics are part of the Democratic coalition" this may be changing but it will take awhile
My brother just moved from a neighborhood that had over the past 20 years become evermore an enclave of East/South Asians. They dont really assimilate. many still wear the clothing of their homeland especially the women. one thing that irritated my brother was how they ignored the rules of the HOA
but in the cases of Tlaib, Jayapal and Omar their fellow ethnics voting overwhelming for them. In Tlaib's case close to 100% of Dearbornistan's Muslim community voted for her. The same goes for Omar where she won the vast majority of Somali votes. Wouldn't surprise me if the Indian community of Seattle voted overwhelmingly for Jayapal
A Congressional district is now about 760,000 people. All three women must be getting many voters who do not share their ethnicity. Minneapolis elected Swedish-American Martin Olav Sabo for many years, then the egregious Keith Ellison, and now this little Somali monster, Ilhan Omar. There is something both naive and self-hating about Swedish-Americans. They provide Ilhan Omar votes and they provide Pramila Jayapal votes in Seattle.
And if you want to see how bad - how ridiculous things are- this is not innocuous-https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/opinion/bird-names-colonialism.html
I know right?
I know you might not be able to to access this but this is about making sure birds aren’t named after racists.
But at least we still have the common names! The double crested cormorant will always have a special place in my birding journal!
No, the common names are changing, too.
A bonkers NPR report on the subject mentioned that the name of a duck was going to change because it was potentially offensive to some people. With the typical prudery of the woke, the reporter didn't say what the offensive name was! I had to look elsewhere to learn that it's the "oldsquaw."
In their effort to avoid "racism" in bird naming, they're eliminating all names of people. So keep your old bird books. They'll be useful again after the anti-woke blowback.
There's also a coalition of astronomers calling for the renaming of the Magellanic Cloud because of Magellan's "violent, colonialist legacy." All this self-hating "year zero" cultural revolution crap is way out of hand.
What's next. Re-naming The Audubon Society.
Shh! Don't give them ideas.
Apparently they've already thought about it:
<https://www.audubon.org/news/national-audubon-society-announces-decision-retain-current-name>.
Well so far it hasn’t happened but it has been proposed and I’m expecting it.
Thing with common names, they are the vernacular. The woke can no sooner change them than they can change your brother's nickname. Scientific names, sure. Those are standardized descriptors. What a region or a local population elects to call something, however, is immutable.
(Just to be clear, nobody down south calls the double crested cormorant the double crested cormorant.)
I wrote a thing about this stupidity! 😂
https://theplenum.substack.com/p/a-birdemic-of-racism
I read a column in the spectator or American conservative about it. Maddening!
I’m a little bit of a birder and belong to the Audubon Society and I’m really annoyed by this nonesense.
You need to tell them so. Pushback is the only way this crap stops.
Back up where I lived in Delaware, there's a serious move to rename Plantation Road (the major "back way" to avoid Coastal Highway when it's clogged with tourist traffic) and a couple of adjacent suburbs with "Plantation" in the name.
I have and will resign if they dump the Audubon name.
Yes. You need to tell them.
That is just the stupidest damn thing.
This actually reports one of the better approaches I've seen. Instead of removing names connected to someone whose utterances are out of favor, it is removing ALL human names. That neutralizes the controversy -- there will be no favored names or unfavored names, just a more objective basis for naming -- its about the characteristics of the bird, not honoring or dishonoring some human.
Yes. Perhaps removing all names of humans from everything would be the human thing to do. Impersonal, scientific names for everything. For instance, manatee has the word man in it. Men are bad. So re-name it Aquatic Creature 331PX or something like that,
Perhaps people shouldn’t have names either . We could have numbers. Not an original idea. But that way we could have a detached rational border devoid of cultural bias.
Globalism at its finest.
THX-1138
It doesn't "neutralize the controversy" at all. It's a complete surrender to people who fret about memorializing anything with the name of someone who's "problematic" by the changing standards of the nanosecond, and sets the stage for whatever asinine thing they want next.
These progressive initiatives never end. There's actually fairly broad (but far from unanimous) agreement that perhaps we shouldn't have statues of Confederate leaders. But look how in the past three years that's morphed into the vandalism or removal of statues of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Theodore Roosevelt. I was a lefty 30 years ago, and I participated in some activism, so I know that none of these people or groups ever achieve their stated goal, declare Miller Time, and go on with their lives. It's always an eternal struggle. There's no good reason the Audubon Society needs to do this to widen the demographics of people who care about birds.
You miss the point entirely. With statues, or names on buildings, there is no escaping the often artificial controversy. But, with naming animals and plants, if none are named after people, then which people are "suitable" and what "disqualifies" is a moot point. IF the campaign were to, say, rename a species named for someone who first identified it, or was admired by the person who first identified it, and call it, e.g., the Martin Luther King Butterfly but in appropriate Latin, that would perpetuate the obsession. But by all means, make it all viewpoint-neutral terminology, preferably related to the characteristics of the species. There are some rather specific reasons for taking down confederate statues. They were for the most part erected some forty years after the Civil War, not so much to honor the dead as to promote the ideology that The South was right all along, the war was an unfortunate and unnecessary tragedy, and after all "Negroes really are an inferior sub-species." There were even calls to repeal the 14th and 15th amendments. But, I still favor keeping a few Lee statues -- we just need to add a bronze plaque explaining his role in the larger scheme of things. If George Brinton "We're Not Here To Take Your Property" McClellan had marched into Richmond in 1862, while that would not have instantly ended the war, it would have set matters on track to restore the union status quo ante. Without Lee's year of victories, there would have been no Emancipation Proclamation, nor any 13th, 14th or 15th amendments.
Happy Thanksgiving, Rod. I’m thankful for you and your column and for the book you wrote, “Live Not By Lies”. Take care of yourself. I hope your “cold” resolves and that it’s not mononucleosis. And I hope your heart heals.
Wait till they get mass mail voting and ballot harvesting.
I disagree that the rioting is uncalled for. Riot away, Ireland. Riot so hard they're terrified. And then riot more until they get the point.
My early elementary daughter was sexually assaulted on a school bus last year, in addition to experiencing daily violence at her public school. She's now at wonderful Christian school. When we came forward with complaints, we were ignored (you know, those other kids have trauma). We were actually laughed at by the immigrant assistant superintendent (he mocked me, a teacher with lots of experience, when I pointed out the cultural problems that exist in the district).
It's easy to say rioting is wrong, but it's different when extremist leftist lunatics enable a culture that harms your child. If the Irish are up against people like those that run my child's former district, I say keep rioting. Otherwise they're just laughing at you.
I'm sorry this happened to your child. Glad you found a better school
Yes, what was The Boston Tea Party if not a riot?
It was pretty targeted. It's not like colonial thugs ran loose in the streets of Boston looting and burning at random.
Political violence does however have a tendency to spin out of control. That's what sent the French Revolution careening off course and finally into a bloodbath, as the several faction turned out mobs to further their cause and frighten their rivals.
Yes, which suggests that "the authorities" need to rent some testicles for a few days so they can begin to reclaim Ireland for the Irish, Sweden for the Swedish, and unlikeliest of all, Britain for the British.
It was racist, too. And cultural appropriation when the rioters wore Indian outfits.
"What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?" —Thomas Jefferson
My sincere sympathies about what happened to your daughter, that's awful and the response from the school district sounds even worse.
There's something about the respectable right that is infuriatingly pacifist, and satisfied with asymmetrical responses. They riot, loot, burn, we Tweet. They protest, accuse, defame, we Reason. They come at us with the full arsenal of a massively weaponised government apparatus, we...what do we do? Nothing. Nothing effective anyway.
Rioting should be the very first step (of many) but modern conservatives are not built like their fathers. I fear nothing will wake them from their torpor.
How can we condemn the Left for rioting if we reserve the right to do it for ourselves?
Of course I believe that what the Irish state is doing here is worse than what the rioters did, but I believe a sustained series of PEACEFUL mass protests would be more effective in the long run. Rioting just gives the bastards in the State the excuse to crack down.
I wish you were right, Rod. But January 6th was 99% peaceful minus the Feds, and look what happened. The people in charge in the West do not respect democracy, and they do not respect peaceful protest.
I still agree that peaceful is the way to go for now.
Re: But January 6th was 99% peaceful minus the Feds, and look what happened.
What happened is that the minority of miscreants got the book thrown at them while the business of transferring power according to the results of the election was completed as it should be, despite the wishes of the incumbent and some lunatic supporters to cling to power. The system worked.
Jon, to claim that locking people up without trial for a protest that was no worse, less violent in fact, than dozens of similar protests on the Left, many of them on Capitol Hill, is the "system working" convinces me that you a troll. Or very stupid. Or both.
More than 1100 people have no faced criminal charges (I know of no acquittals) with dozens rotting in jail - solitary confinement - for over two years with no trial. People walked into the capital witah police standing at open doors admitting them and they are now in jail. They were protesting what looked like fraud and hoping to get a count of legitimate ballots. If police had not stood aside to let them in it might be different,
Jon refuses to look at anything but Regime Media, he has told us that. He thinks they tell the truth. It is so sad.
Their trials have been delayed, unconscionably so, but that's been true of a lot of people after the lockdowns left the court dockets jam-packed. An acquaintance of mine in Baltimore was arrested for a fairly heinous crime in fall of 2019-- and he was stuck in jail for nearly three years without trial (ultimately he pled the case and was released for time served).
Please refrain from insult. No, I don't buy into paranoid, fear-mongering propaganda-- that's makes me smart or at least discerning, not stupid
They locked up people for months without trial. That whole thing was a sham.
And as I said the delays in bringing these people-- any people, on any charge anywhere-- to trial is an outrage. On that we may agree I hope.
The George Floyd riots were at least ginned up, and certainly connived at on the part of the police. There was no doubt of this post Ferguson, which was set up to be the racial reckoning spark, but somehow spluttered, and went out when even Eric ("My People") Holder's DoJ couldn't deliver a true bill. That wasn't going to happen a second time, so the rent-a-mobs were ready.
As I ask elsewhere, what effect will peaceful protests have on the political class? Have you read Nikki Haley's platform?
Re: The George Floyd riots were at least ginned up, and certainly connived at on the part of the police.
Can you expand on this? I think you can make a case that the police overreacted in some cities to the actions of provocateurs and that sent things out of control. But I can't see there was any deliberate plan on the part of the police for that result.
No. Read carefully what I wrote, Jon. They didn't foment it. They let it rip. They winked at it. That's what "connived" means. That's certainly what happened in New York.
Ray Kelly, the great former NYPD commissioner, is on record saying there are tried and true techniques for breaking up a mob, the kind that gutted Macy's in the summer of 2020. But the cops just watched because Bill DeBlasio, I mean Chirlane McCray, I mean Al Sharpton, I mean Barack Obama, told them to.
OK, but what would be their motive? The police generally skew rightwards politically (yes, there are individual exceptions) so were they hoping for a political reaction that would ensure Trump's reelection, or on a more diffuse scale discredit BLM and its cause?
I think you discount the reality that the police are a finite organization with limited power. They have been overwhelmed by urban mobs in riot going back the New York Draft riots in 1863. And most of of large cities are underpoliced-- we need more cops (though better cops too). We pretty much always have to bring in the National Guard to handle such things.
Barack Obama? In 2020? Really?
That’s what happened in Charlottesville as well. They stood down and let everything happen. I don’t blame them necessarily, they follow orders given from above. As all police departments do.
Remember those "Fiery but peaceful protests" in Kenosha, Wisconsin? The first night of the rioting over there was just the warm-up act, but Sheriff David Clarke, former sheriff of Milwaukee county, got on the radio the next day as the guest host for Mark Belling's 3-hour talk radio program. The major topic - how to strategically defend Kenosha from a law-enforcement perspective, from someone who had experience.
Was any of it done? No. I sincerely believe that half of Kenosha would have burned to the ground had it not been for the Rittenhouse shootings; that Antifa and all these groups were given a wink and a nod that they would be "safe" in their rioting, and that they got scared when some of their people actually got killed. It was eerie how fast the Antifa people left once that happened - what had been a full-out riot when Rittenhouse was attacked was totally cleared out two hours later.
As it was, the damage to Kenosha was much, much worse than the media reported. Furthermore, they totally ignored the fact that even in Racine, there had been a "public safety house" that had been burned out.
One thing I find that people don't realize: After the past couple years, no cop wants to be the one in a viral video without context causing harm to someone, even if that person is a criminal. And nearly all politicians are afraid to be the ones who order it or condone it. This goes back to "Occupy Wall Street" 15 years ago, when encampments and blocked streets intimidated the politicians in big "blue" cities.
I think the tide is turning slightly, though. When protesters surrounded the DNC headquarters in DC a week ago, blocking all fire exits and creating a dangerous, illegal situation, the cops stepped in, and no one is crying for the protesters.
The winking/conniving of the past 15+ years has caused two generations of protesters not to understand the principles of civil disobedience. They holler and scream and whine when they get arrested, but without the arrest to give their protest moral weight, they're just a bunch of douchebags and vandals.
Overreacted?!??
To explain I was actually thinking of the Baltimore authorities in 2015 who reacted to internet rumors of a "Purge" (see the movies of that name) by shutting down the public transport system just before the schools let out-- older students did not ride school busses but had MTA passes. That stranded lots of teenagers, many at the MTA nexus by Mondawin Mall-- and they became a mob and touched off the rioting.
One should not credit municipal authorities with too much intelligence.
Burning vehicles is not only wrong in itself, it is dangerous. It is as dangerous as burning down a building. It is dangerous for the firemen who have to put out the fire. Burning vehicles is self-defeating. And burning vehicles is so left-wing and so Muslim.
Antifa torched two car lots in Kenosha in 2020, right along Sheridan Road, the main drag through the old part of the city. (Sheridan Road will take you all the way to Chicago going south and will also get a person to Milwaukee, though the name of the street changes going north.) The heat was so hot it melted city lamp-posts over. The owner of the car lots, an Indian immigrant who had come to the US with practically nothing decades ago, had tons of issues trying to get anything from insurance, not just in the fact that riots are often not covered, but most of the cars were burnt so badly the VINs were not readable, and his office had burned to the ground as well, along with the paperwork for the vehicles. Those cars sat out there for months, and then the city of Kenosha went after him for the "eyesore".
Why didn't they haul the cars to a junk yard? even a city as incompetent as Baltimore is pretty good about taking abandoned cars away when they are notified of such.
Jon, they weren't abandoned - they were on the private property of the car lot. However, without VINs, what other "proof" did the owner have that they existed? What else was he supposed to do when fighting with the insurance took months and months?
Rod, I don't actually condemn the left for rioting - a lot of times I think it's stupid, but it gets a point across.
The bastards in the state are like abusive husbands. If we just politely protest they won't crack down on us. Really, they'll crack down either way, so we may as well push back.
I'm sorry, but at this point suggesting peaceful mass protests is breathtakingly naive. You're our beloved alarmist and I would suggest most of your readership shares some sense of how desperate the hour is. Your alarmism is necessary, and helpful.
But do you really think peaceful protests are going to get the job done? If the Irish had peacefully marched, do you believe they wouldn't still have been referred to as 'far right'? All institutional control is within the hands of a cohort which despises us and what we represent.
And yes, I would point to J6 as an example of the kind of response even mostly peaceful protest prompts in the US.
I’m with Rod on this. As Christians, doing evil so that good more result is never acceptable. Further, it shows that we are hypocritical because we sanctimoniously proclaiming”law and order” when it comes to political enemies’ bad behavior. Yes, it is true that the far-right label will be used in any event. But, as we saw in Charlottesville,the use of violence by a despised group can have long term consequences. The public backlash is then leveraged by the Left to acquire more power. This is what sank Trump in 2020.
If you mean looting a Foot Locker, I'm in full agreement. That does nothing for our cause and only weakens it (incidentally it's been reported that looting in Ireland was done by people of 'indeterminate origin').
But I think we can aggressively protest without falling into sin. If some people want to call that rioting or not, that's just semantics. But I don't dispute your core point.
IMHO fair points are made by Mr. Dreher, but also many of the commenters as well (e.g., pointing out the treatment of "J6" people vs. the coddling of the "mostly peaceful protestors" who are allies of the Left).
Peaceful mass protests should be the first step, and hopefully a successful one. If nothing else, this might help "red-pill" the tens of millions of "blue-pilled normies" still comprising a majority of our citizenry.
At the same time, we are in a post-2020 world in which an unelected regime has been installed into the White House, apparently run by Obama (in alliance with enemies foreign and domestic). By definition, such de facto revolutionaries care not about our Constitutional Republic nor the legitimate preferences of the citizenry, for it is the former they intend to displace and the latter they see either as counter-revolutionaries / reactionaries, or subjects.
Yuri Bezmenov warned us of the subversion / demoralization. Anyone who's read "And Not a Shot is Fired" or studied "color revolutions" readily recognizes what occurred in 2020, and is underway now. So ...
1) We must pray and repent and seek God's face, asking that He heal our land and deliver us from the evil that has seized control of our nation;
2) Pursue peaceful means to reinstate and restore our Constitutional Republic;
3) Be cognizant of the fact that peaceful means might fail (particularly since with the complicity of both political parties the election fraud infrastructure remains intact), and so at that time pray for guidance on next steps.
Not getting your way in politics (generally because you have failed to convince the public of your cause) is absolutely no excuse for violence.
In normal circumstances (a functioning democracy), absolutely yes.
Things get more questionable when you have the federal government (on the side of Democrats) strong-arming media / social media to silence / cancel opposing political voices (contra to the spirit, if not the letter of the First Amendment).
And far more questionable when elections are neither "free and fair."
Both of which have been the state of play in this country leading up to and through the 2020 election, and since.
Re: And far more questionable when elections are neither "free and fair."
There is zero evidence in the real world that there is any more trouble with our elections than there was twenty, thirty, forty or sixty years ago. The inability of the Right to accept defeat and to grasp the basic fact that much (not all) of its program is anathema to a majority of citizens is cause for my own dismay.
Donald Trump was never popular to begin with; his 2016 win was a fluke (due mainly to a very unlikable opposing candidate, her tactical blunders, and the byzantine nature of presidential election rules). Once in office as a minority president, the man did absolutely nothing to expand his appeal (unlike Bush in 2001-- and before 9-11 even). When the digestive residue hit the rotating air moving device in 2020 his Potemkin presidency stood revealed in all its incompetent squalor and thereafter the election was Biden's to lose, and even Sleepy Joe managed not to. And yet here we go again. The the GOP-- or rather conservative Americans-- just had the great good sense to dump Trump and go with someone like Desantis, of proven ability, Biden would be leaving office in January of 2025 and your side would see at least some of its program (most especially on immigration, probably not on abortion etc.) actually put in place. But go ahead and throw it all away for another gaudy grudge match between two cognitively impaired candidates for the nursing home if not the loony bin.
Jon - Tom is right. We know that the public is being misled by elite institutions. If a brainwashed public is defrauded of their vote because they acted on a steady stream of lies by leftist institutions, it is silly to talk about “persuasion”.
So people who disagree with you are "brainwashed"? Stop and think a minute how condescending and arrogant that sounds. This is the rhetoric of power lust pure and simple.
We wouldn't be reserving the right to riot for ourselves. We would just be replying in kind - a "proportional response" like the Left seems to think the Israelis should be doing rather the bombing Hamas.
We shouldn't riot. Instead we should protest peacefully.
We must have PEACEFUL protests ... like the ones we saw in 2020. Remember those?
<<<Pay no attention to the smoke, the flames, the broken glass, the burning cars and the looting mobs you see behind the me. It's not strictly speaking a riot but can be more accurately described as a PEACEFUL protest.>>>
Remember:
Riots - bad.
PEACEFUL protests - good.
I think that there's a fine, fine line here. I think that violence can't be absolutely taken off the table. Most tyrants only understand power.
However, there's an incredible danger in just unleashing violence, especially to a mob, because it invites in the demons.
The balance probably only comes with a people who depend on God for their salvation.
I think about how the Indians' success in nonviolent resistance against the British was dependent on the British having some sense of decency; they weren't going to just mow down unarmed civilians. But if the Indians had tried that against the Nazis, the Nazis would have probably been more than happy to exterminate them—and laughed at them for being weak while doing it.
Point being, resistance on the physical plane (i.e. violence) may sometimes be necessary when we're dealing with the sort of sub-animal humans who are incapable of understanding anything else. Pure pacifism seems like a recipe to have the worst among us inherit the earth, since there certainly are people who aren't gonna stop until they are made to stop. But of course crossing that line should not be taken lightly.
Only a rigid pacifist denies that violence may be necessary when defending oneself. But beware the delusion that you are "defending yourself" when your real motive is to impose your will on others.
Of course.
OK, I'm game. Help me out here. "pure pacificism a disaster", "won't stop until they are made to stop" "should not be taken lightly". Ok. But what are you calling for.
I've objected strongly to calls for rioting, looting, burning, the sort of thing that happened in Dublin, the Summer of 2020 type thing. Are you calling for taking the initiative and doing something like that? You just do not strike me as that kind of person.
Defense, stocking weapons, that sort of thing I get. But there was an implication here, I thought, of taking initiative, and an initiative that was not peaceful. So what is it you are calling for? Honest question.
For me, I can see "riot/loot/burn". I can see "prepare to defend" and I can see "work through peaceful and lawful means". I'm for the last two. You seem to feel they are not sufficient (and maybe they aren't) but what do you call for?
What am I missing as I sit in horror at college educated folk (not the downtrodden unhoused of Ireland) calling for riots as their answer? (Not saying you are necessarily calling for that as some here are- but I wonder what you do call for.)
You've got a guy on today's forum (Nov., 25) literally saying whites should start a race war (yes, start). I bet no one says anything. I just don't get it. Where is the line here? You spoke of one and not taking things lightly, so where is the line.
I'm not calling for anything. I was only stating that, in principle, political violence is never entirely off the table, because pure pacifism is not a tenable moral position. The world is messy and complex, and I do not know in general terms where the specific line is between offense and proactive defense. Rioting is probably useless, but the way things are going, it also seems inevitable. Riots are sort of like volcanos: it hardly matters whether anyone "calls" for them or not, since they're just gonna do what they will anyway.
Thanks - I still need more help to understand. You stated "Political violence is never entirely off the table". I assume you mean offense, defense is not a problem. Could you give an example of political violence that should be on the table that is not defensive?
I think the issue has to do with what we consider "defense". The BLM rioters, for example, perceived themselves as acting in defense, because (rightly or wrongly) they believed that blacks are under siege from white supremacy and the police. And likewise, if global elites and their policies make working class whites feel like their backs are to the wall, then they may perceive their own violence as defensive in nature. So, many things could be framed as defense if you believe that you have already been aggressed against. It can be hard to isolate the causality or to judge the merits in general terms.
Also, with people saying they favor riots, I think it has to do with a grim sense of satisfaction. Like: "What, elites, did you think that you could sow the wind and not reap the whirlwind? How long did you think you could keep going like you do and not provoke this sort of thing?" So there's a poetic sense that the elites deserve to meet their nemesis, even if any given riot itself is irrational and wrong.
Exactly my thought. Sadly, a lot of conservatives want to check out and act like talking and writing more papers will change the direction of travel. We shouldn’t tell our enemies that we are unwilling to use tactics because they’ll see it as a weakness, not compassion.
I’m going to misquote the movie Golda super bad here, but in the movie they had her saying something like ‘we don’t have to do it, but we need to make the Egyptians think that we will rape,murder, burn their houses down and destroy their cities. We have to make them want to save their families enough to stop killing ours.’
We can’t keep capitulating to monsters because we think it’s ‘nice’. Nice got us in this mess. I’m so over the ‘respectable right.’ We can’t be afraid of ugly or of civil disobedience. We don’t have the luxury of leaving options on the table like it’s 1990.
Word have meanings, and we are not ruled by tyrants, though a case can be made that we are ruled by fools. Resorting to violence because the public has not accepted one's political program is nothing but a guarantee of ruin. And yes, Hell loves that sort of thing.
I'm enjoying the elites increasingly feeling under siege. From their parties losing favor and power and their namecalling/propagana increasingly bouncing off DGAF shields, to things like Hollywood in general and Disney in particular increasingly failing...the rot is clear and the pushback is inevitable.
About time.
South Park lampooning Disney's corporate board, but could be the gathering of any power elite nowadays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz8feYskRpk
Or this..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9_L2hf7Sf8
I honestly don't feel like they feel under siege. They seem strangely unbothered, they have this weird unnerving confidence - it's a religious thing with them.
That's fake. When you see them flip out with every setback, you see the falseness of their confidence. See, in their world view, they are inevitable, and such defeats cannot happen. But they are happening, with increasing regularity.
So do not be fooled.
This is an interesting take.
These are just people, not gods. Serious feet of clay, made so by their arrogance, the cultural bubble they shelter in, not being nearly as smart as they think they are, and forming world views around a whole series of things that simply are not real and in the longer term, unsupportable.
Ireland is the only European nation without a conservative political party. A big part of that is the historic political battle between Fianna Fail and Finn Gael that goes back to the 1920s. Both of these parties were socially fairly conservative until fairly recently. But that's all gone now. The Irish are pretty much all in on the European Union and modernist social policies. The votes on divorce, homosexual marriage and abortion weren't even close. The Ireland of "The Quiet Man" is dead. On top of that, there are always the troubles in Ulster that highly influence the southern republic. Irish politics are almost unnatural.
I'm so sorry the Irish don't conform to your personal expectations for them.
Thank you, I believe, is the correct response.
There is a newish party here which is trying to capture votes with a more socially conservative platform https://aontu.ie/ but I’m not sure if they’re making much progress at present. In the north the nationalist/republican parties have always been socialist but until recently were socially conservative, whereas the main unionist parties have been more economically conservative, though still very socially conservative. Nowadays though especially since the catholic abuse scandal shattered the dominant consensus, not to mention Brexit, the republicans are determined to show they are good Europeans and falling over themselves to prove their progressive credentials.
Yes I’m sorry but more power to the Irish who have had it up to the teeth with this.
Here's the thing about the Irish. Wokeism is a very new ideology in Ireland and even liberalism was late to bloom in Ireland. The Irish are and always have been a very tribal people and many Irish still retain that tribal nature (especially the working class which was the same class that filled the ranks of the IRA in the past). So just because the Irish are largely disgusted with the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and have been less and less pious in practicing their ancestral Catholic Faith does not mean that Ireland as a whole has embraced Wokeism, actually as I said the Irish are still digesting liberalism (and they may very well vomit that out as we are watching in Dublin tonight). When Irish get pissed off they are quite a force to be dealt with on either side of the pond, just look at the history of Boston or New York.
Any foreigner going to Ireland and making trouble for the native Irish is in for a very rude awakening. It's not going to end well for them. I used to hang out in Irish Pubs in San Francisco with the Irish (construction workers from Ireland), unlike American bars there were never any problems in those pubs. Sometimes Irish friends would fight amongst themselves but outsiders seemed to understand it was a bad idea to start trouble in those pubs. They don't call them the Fighting Irish for nothing. Even here in America. Go to South Boston or Charlestown and start problems with the local Irish-Americans and see what happens. It's a bad idea.
You're getting there, Rod, but you still have a long way to go.
Violence is ultimately going to have to be on the table, which means that it will probably have to be the answer. Not necessarily the only answer, but the elites need to know fear. Real, tangible fear for their physical safety before they'll change their ways.
So, rise up you native Irishmen. Bring back the IRA and the Provos, united this time against a common enemy. And that enemy isn't the immigrant down the block. He'll have to go eventually, but your real enemy is your political overclass. They are the ones who need to be unable to sleep at night, who have to send underlings to start their cars in the morning, and who occasionally disappear without a trace.
Elected officials and the bureaucrats who serve them need to learn to fear their voters again. Focus their minds
Well the Provos are Sinn Fein and they’ve gone totally woke.
Actually they’re now a cartel.
Weren't they Leninists to begin with?
Long story but to bring it into the 60s you have the Provo- Official split. The Officials were called that because they dominated the groups governing body. They placed an emphasis on Marxism and would eventually renounce armed struggle and essentially morph into the Workers Party. That party did align with the Leninist in the European Parliament. The Provos were much more into armed struggle and less into Marxism. They actually had more of a following. But the Sinn Fein which became their political front was always pretty left wing but not woke until fairly recently.
"... elites need to know fear. Real, tangible fear for their physical safety before they'll change their ways."
You took the words right out of my mouth.
And not just in Ireland.
Without violence, we'd be subjects of King Charles III.
Without violence, there's no Republic of Ireland.
And more-https://www.foxnews.com/us/pro-palestinian-protesters-disrupt-macys-thanksgiving-day-parade-new-york-city
Brian Kaller here -- I just got home through a maze of riot police blocking off the Dublin streets. Rod, I sent you more in an e-mail, but the people I talked to who came out of the riot area all said locals formed a peaceful protest after the stabbing, which turned violent when police tried to break it up. They said the looters, on the other hand, didn't look Irish.
Wow. Thanks for the first-hand report.
What does the Indian taoiseach have to say?
You need to stop confirming the left's lunacy when they call the right racists. Too many examples like this and it won't be lunacy.
Quote: <<<Varadkar was born in Dublin and studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin. ... Varadkar is the third child and only son of Ashok and Miriam (née Howell) Varadkar. His father was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s, to work as a doctor.[7] His mother, born in Dungarvan, County Waterford, >>>
I was horrified by his remarks but his race has nothing to do with it. I want to throw up every time you make racist remarks about the British Prime Minister, and now this? Troll. Well, I will not stop calling your racism down no matter how many times you troll.
Edit to add: I like nearly all your other posts, Derek, in fact, I generally like them a lot. I just don't get it. "A non-Conservative is a bad leader" OK. But "An Indian is a bad leader?" Would Vivek automatically be a bad leader, for instance? Please consider that stating a person's race as a reason for their being a bad leader is indeed racist.
He says they haven't ruled out terrorism as a motive of the attacker-- so far, so good. It's an improvement over the initial statement. But he sure thinks he knows all he needs to know about the motivations of the rioters, and is talking about passing new laws targeting them that could be easily used on even peaceful protesters. As with Sunak, we see an Indian (or half Indian) PM coming down harder on a native white population reacting to nonwhite immigrant violence than the immigrants themselves.
We do not assume a person's race is the reason for a negative action unless there is evidence for it. To assume based on race if the definition of prejudice. I heard him speak and he sounded no different from Joe Biden with his horror of these terrible right wing acts - only word he lacked that Biden has is MAGA.
Is your theory that he did this because he has to prove loyalty to whites, rather than that Indians are generally more disloyal? If so, at least that is not a mean "prejudgment". I know that disloyalty probably part is Derek's reason because he has said that about Sunak more than once.
I guess I was lucky - in 6th grade when i was 11, we had a teacher who gave us a great talk. "Prejudice" is a combination of two words "pre" and "judge".
******* No matter what you know or believe (rightly or wrongly) you know about the average person in a group, you never judge in advance that a member of that group is bad or good based merely on race/religion/ethnicity. You do not pre-judge. *******
I don't think necessarily it's about proving loyalty to white people so much as seamlessly integrating into the current ruling class, which has largely turned against their own civilizational heritage. The Irish republic doesn't have the history of colonialism the U.K. does; I suspect they have economic migrants being shooed their direction because that's what Brussels will do to any country with a national government that will take them.
The issue isn't that either of these guys are Indian per se. It's that you have immigrants, or their children, who have assimilated very nicely acting for the benefit of more immigrants who have not assimilated to Western norms, including the rule of law which is increasingly under attack. Even as an American, I can't help but notice when some politician of recent immigrant background (usually Democrat) is in favor of a defacto open border, or going soft on nonwhite criminals while throwing the book at white ones. This is antiwhite, and it's as wrong as negatively targeting any other group on the basis of their birth.
But that- favoring open borders - is because they are Democrats. They are virtually required by their party to be in lock step.
Look, there is evidence a good percent of Islamic people are not blending into Western culture. That is just not true of Indians. If it is, then point out the evidence?
And yes, assuming an elected person is bad because of their race or religion is prejudice, even if that person is Islamic. But wanting to stop wholesale immigration of those who we now know will be likely, they or their descendants, to oppose Western culture with its freedoms and decent treatment of women? That is not prejudice. (And still there are exceptions, i,.e., persecuted Iranian women who fled.)
Do some here really not know you cannot assume a given individual is "bad because of their membership in a group? Wanting to stop open borders and labeling someone bad because of race, religion or ethnicity are two different things.
(quick typo edit)
Equating 'have to say' with 'is a bad leader' is a bit of a stretch. But, let's try these two sentences.
"The Indian taoiseach is a bad leader" and "The Indian taoiseach is a good leader". Are they equally racist or not? Is it the ethic (not racial) association that makes it racist or the negative connotation of one sentence that makes it racist?
You are pretending not to understand. You are an intelligent person and understand what I said. But I will spell it out anyway. Derek obvious was telling us the Taoiseach's words were bad. Either that else he had not looked them up but assumed they would be bad. I stated this was based on this comment and prior comments about Indian leaders from Derek. And I explained about not judging by averages in a prior post.
Yeah, the Derek part was just an introduction to the subject. My real question is, what makes a thing racist? is it identification of connotation?
Linda Arnold is very much like a lefty in throwing around terms like "racist." Let me put it this way. I love Italy and I love Italian culture although I have not one ounce of Italian blood in me. I could move my family to Italy next week and I would never be accepted as being Italian, my children would not be accepted as Italian, even if my children married Italians my grandchildren would not be accepted as Italian. Perhaps my great-grandchildren would. I like cultures where, to be a true member, you must steep in that culture for at least a century to be a member.
The Indian who is Taoiseech of Ireland I suppose loves the country where he was born. That is natural. But is he steeped in Irish culture and the 800 years of battle with the English? Is he Catholic? Does he enjoy Irish folk music? Is he heterosexual? Does he have a wife or children? Or is he a Dublin globalist who is part of the monster regime of the European Union, a wrecker of the Catholic church and traditional Irish cultural life, a man who happily degrades the nation that he has supreme political power by living in sodomy? Men like Leo Varadkar are destroying ancient Ireland and making Ireland meaningless culturally and just a small adjunct to the communal European project.
You may be right that stating a person will be bad leader because of his race is racist but it does not make it incorrect.
That would explain the films. So unlike "the right" to attack police/garda. Good to have an eyewitness as I agreed based on what I could see but a lot of cover was worn.
Rod's email at substack does not work, he told us about 10 days ago that it does not. You could make reach him with something like this (I presume he does not read the hundreds of comments each day) but replying to one of his comments.
I'd value anything more you have to say on the forum about this
I had to read this blog post to get any idea of what had actually happened in Dublin, all the media reports just say there was "a stabbing" and that "the far right rioted" as a result. It's hard to know why people were mad when the media refuses to actually share the news.
Here where I live, the head of the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has been temporarily suspended from the state's hate crimes task force, but news reports weren't telling me why. They were saying she posted "pro-Palestinian" comments on social media and compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
But then I dig a little deeper and find the actual primary sources—screenshots of her social media—and it's actually something bigger. She's an October 7 denialist. She doesn't believe the Hamas attack really happened.
Why couldn't news outlets just tell me so? Increasingly I have to root around the Internet to find out what someone really said or did that got them in trouble.
My wife has a super-busy job, so she tried subscribing to the New York Times daily newsletter to keep up with the world. For the past couple years I've been amazed by all the things she didn't know because the Times literally didn't report those things.
I think it’s terrible that the news leaves out crucial details about the story because they are afraid of how some people will take it.
It would be a little like reporting the Rodney King beating, and not mentioning that King was black and the officers white. The story makes no sense without it.
Looters and protesters are almost always two different groups. After the Rodney King protests in LA, while the protesters were blacks and whites, the looters were recent immigrants from Guatemala. There was also a case of a white guy and a Mexican guy who robbed a black-owned business as gunpoint, then walked out saying f*** Rodney King.
I’ve only ever heard about black people burning down Korean businesses, and the beating of Reginald Denny.
Also, the Korean store owner who shot that black teenage girl that contributed to the tension that lead to the riots.
I have never heard of those other incidents.
The people have the right to defend themselves and to repel invaders, PERIOD.
Would you extend that same right to a people who have experienced that invasion by foreginers, displacement, subjugation, discrimination, and extermination for 75 years? And what about the powers that have subsidized it?
Not the barbarians you’re thinking about.
I prefer "savages."
So all Palestinians are "barbarians" and we can steal their land and herd them into tiny enclaves and camps because "civilized" people want to take over?
Yes, Talib, please tell us when the Kingdom of Palestine came into existence.
So only politically independent people have a right to stay in their homes when conquered by another people? It's OK to kick out people and forcibly take their homes and land if they don't have an Independent government?
"Invasion by foreigners"? If you want to go down that road, you'd probably better look at the bigger picture in the Middle East, Asia Minor and Africa, all of which was formerly people by Christians, Jews, Berbers, Buddhists, indigenous religions, but now, for the most part, strangely ISN'T. Why, it's as if at some point "foreign invaders" swept through the whole regions.
The actual expulsion and/or extermination of conquered people is quite rare. Usually what happened in most cases is the latest the conquered people continued to live in their land with new masters, sometimes adopting the culture of their conquerors--or sometimes even the reverse happening.
Most of the Islamic conquest of the 7th and 8th centuries was like this, in fact.
Meantime, as JonF has pointed out in the past, eighty percent of "Anglo-Saxons" are genetically Celtic.
I know that over a million Israelis are Arabs. Many of them seem to get along well enough with the Israeli government. And the fact that there never was a Palestine suggests to me that there never were a Palestinian people.
I know you're an American convert to Islam, Talib. Was it necessary for you to advocate for the most questionable of causes because you had become a Muslim? My ancestry is British/Swedish, and for the last forty years, I have deplored what those nations have become, and never seen any particular need to speak up for them.
I have a half cousin in Sweden, Stina. She's from the dumbest class of all, college professors. Thirty years ago, she cut me off because in a letter I had mentioned that Houston was being overrun with Latino drug gangs who were illegally in the country. If Stina is still alive, I wonder what she thinks about mass immigration now?
"The fact that there was never a Palestine suggests you me that there never was a Palestinian people."
That's a curious definition.
There never was a Sami nation. Does that mean the Sami never have existed?
There never was a Kurdish nation. Does that mean the Kurds don't exist?
There never was a Roma nation. Does that mean the Roma don't exist?
And actually, Arab-speaking Israelis are discriminated against. They are citizens, but they cannot consider Israel their homeland--the Basic Law of Israel holds that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, and no other. They were subject to military rule until 1966. They cannot buy propery in certain neighborhoods (see https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians ). If they marry a non-Israeli Arab (say, from the West Bank or Gaza), their spouse cannot live in Israel. (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-knesset-passes-law-barring-palestinian-spouses-2022-03-10/ )
So no, the 2.1 million Arab Israelis don't have the same legal rights as Jewish Israelis.
I don't blame the Israelis. I'm sure they think they need to do these things to defend their lives and what they regard as an acceptable quality of life for themselves. After October 7, my inclination is to think they're onto something.
Why don't you address the ungenerosity of the Arab nations, which could easily have relieved their perceived burdens by taking them in?
How about limiting it to Gaza, the
matter of the billions of dollars in aid the "government" of Gaza has received in the last eighteen years? Why haven't they used it to do the obvious thing which so many have pointed out, turn it into a Singapore? The "government" waxes in luxury in Qatar, meanwhile, Hamas soldiers use pipe donated by the Israelis for a reliable, safe water supply to make rockets which they can launch into Israel.
It's Israel which agreed for many years that there could be a two state solution, the Palestinians who have said, "Never!"
The whole "Palestine" thing annoys me as it does because in the 1940s there were no citizens of a Palestine, because no country called by that name existed. The Israelis, many of whom were descendants of people who had been there for centuries, accepted the less than wonderful land which the United Nations alloted to them. The Arabs were not only not contented with their better land, they weren't contented with peace.
Do you really believe that if the "Palestinians" had demonstrated the peacefulness and constructiveness of Christians in Arab nations they wouldn't have had their country? Maybe the question to ask is why they are so committed to destruction and self - destruction?
My great great grandfather never owned slaves in the American South. He did have the misfortune of having his farm in northern Virginia grabbed in The Failed War of Southern Rebellion. It was never returned to him. I don't know what he did during the war, but after, he moved to southwestern Virginia, and started a new life as a miner, which couldn't possibly have been as congenial to him as having a farm.
History is about dispossessed people. Speaking of dispossession, how about the Jews of Europe in 1945? They'd been dispossessed of everything. Israel was to be a home for them, quite unlike what they'd been familiar with in prewar Europe, but a chance, at least. They could have turned it down. They could have remained in deNazified and deNazifying Europe, organized their own Hamases and Hezbollahs, and spent the last seventy - five years engaged in terrorism against non - Jewish Europe. They didn't.
I've alluded in this comments section to the fact that a psychopathic cousin, married into a multimillionaire family, manipulated me out of a will which would have given me somewhere around $100,000 - 150,000 badly needed dollars. I think I would be within moral if not theological rights to kill my cousin, but I haven't and won't. I've been helped spectacularly by my wonderful church, without whom I could not have survived, still, the rage that I must receive this help doesn't subside. Any moral non - idiot acknowledges that my cousin is an evil bastard, but I'm sure that if in the presence of members of my church, I started to mull aloud the possibility of going to shoot my cousin, I'd be met with immediate dropped jaws and looks of disbelief.
On the other hand, obsession with murdering Jews is habitual for the "Palestinian" people, isn't it? They shouldn't wonder why things are as they are for them.
I have a feminist sociologist niece who works with the transgender on surgeries. She disowned my brother long ago. She even changed her surname- usually a no-no with educated left-wing women- because she hates my brother so much. It is rather convenient to have a bad person related to you disown you.
Yes, I've had that happen several times. Good losses all of them, especially my cousin, the psychopath, though as a parting gesture he defamed me out of the will of an aunt from my side of the family.
Don't you remember, Bobby? The Kingdom of Palestine was established during the Jordanian occupation of '48 through '67. Oh, wait...
Zap!
Yes, exactly. Palestine is the best argument there is for the downside of unrestricted immigration, and ensuring that refugees either return home eventually or agree to live peacefully under the existing system.
Bingo. There's plenty of great examples in history. Palestine is probably the most recent one. Another would be Anglophone American migration to Texas and California which resulted in Mexico losing both Texas and California.
Rod's favorite fool speaks. Palestine is actually the best argument for what anyone but an irrational Arab can understand: if you wage unprovoked war over and over and over again and you lose each time, it's time to accept defeat and come up with a different strategy.
I think we can refrain from personal insults? I'm not out here calling anyone names, please do me and everyone else here the same courtesy. Besides, apart from the folks behind BDS, it's not clear that anyone on the Palestinian side has any kind of strategy at all.
Your comments are consistently foolish but you are correct that I should not have called you a fool. My apologies. I should have called Rod a fool for citing your letter.
Donald: Matthew 5:22-24. In case you are a Christian.
In the Orthodox tradition, to be a fool is among the highest of all honors. Haha. Sort of like the fool in *King Lear*, who's just about the only one who tells the truth; sort of like the joker in Bob Dylan's song "All Along the Watchtower". Sort of like Jesus, even. May we all be fools. If you are Rod's favorite fool, then I am jealous.
The Jews have been subjected to that for well over 1000 years before Islam. So get lost.
So, if they have been subjected to evil, they have a right to subject others to evil?
Because the Nazis exterminated 6 million, they have the right to take someone else's land?
Because they were subjected to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, the Pogroms of Russia, the Passion Play riots in Germany, the extortion of Richard I, and countless other atrocities, that gives them the right to take someone else's land?
Would you then not justify the African Americans to forcibly take land from, say, Nigeria, to pay for the injustice done to them by the slaveholders of the American South? Or justify the Roma to forcibly take land in India because of their mistreatment in Europe?
As to African Americans, it actually worked out a bit like that in Liberia
Very true; the freed slaves decided to institute a very similar culture in Liberia that they lived under in thr American South. It wasn't pretty.
But the Jews have had a continued presence in the area for over 4000 years. Legitimate DNA analysis and archeology prove this. They are indigenous to the region but most of them were driven out by the Romans in the 1st century. They never wanted to leave. The same is true of the Palestinians (not the Arabs) in many important ways. One can feel sorrow and outrage at the treatment of both peoples.
And it's strange, Talib, how you use the neutral language of realpolitik to describe the brutal invasion of the region by the Arabs in 7th and 8th centuries but it's the language of "rights" and anticolonialism when talking about the Jews and the Western powers. Why, it's almost like you're deliberately using a double standard...
Yes, both the Arab-speaking Palestinians and Jews have DNA dating back to the ancient Canaanites who lived there thousands of years (though in the case of Ashkenazi Jews it's mixed with significant European content). I've pointed this out several times in Rod's column. The Jews and Arab-speaking Palestinians have genetically more in common than the Arab-speaking Palestinians and any other Arab-speaking group.
And yes, there has been an amount of Jewish population since the Roman conquests in 70 CE and 136 CE...but they hadn't been the majority population there for centuries. The vast majority of today's Jews haven't had ancestors living in Canaan for centuries.
As far as different attitudes concerning what happened 1400 years ago and what's happening now, well, I can't change the past, for one. Second, the modern Israeli settlement *is* settler colonialism, whereas the Arab conquests 1400 years ago were certainly conquests, but ones that did not involve the systematic driving out or extermination of native populations.
But most importantly, we can't do anything about what happened 1400 years ago, but we can address what is happening ***now***. And my government didn't subsidize the conquests 1400 years ago, but they're subsidizing them ***now***.
Ah, yes, the (mostly) benevolent conquest of hundreds of millions of people did not, unlike every such conquest in human history, involve the "systematic driving out or extermination of native populations." The Arabs, unlike every other people in history, never resorted to that kind of brutality to achieve their geopolitical aims. Christian, Jewish and certainly Hindu historians might have something to say about that, as would the tens of millions of African, Hindu, Middle Eastern, and European peoples enslaved by the conquerers down through the centuries.
Well, Talib, good for you for belonging to a group that stands so far above the standard set by the rest of the humanity.
I love this 'settler colonialism' newspeak. Please tell us the definition of a colony.
Extermination - you're referring to a Palestininan population in Gaza that has *increased* over 75 years. I'm so tired of these lies being casually thrown around on the internet - if you think a population increase constitutes extermination, then you need a dictionary, a hot cup of tea and a lie down, mate.
Gazan population more than doubled from 2000 to 2023.
Yes, but not because of Israel's kindness. Israel's severely limited the food and humanitarian aid to Gaza during those 20 years, leading 1/3 of the population to be food insecure and malnutrition a serious problem--even before the recent hostilities. See https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2022/06/20/hidden-hunger-micronutrient-deficiencies-in-the-west-bank-and-gaza
Ok, so forget the fact that for the last 23 years, at least 23,785 Palestinans have died, including 6,538 children...compared to Israeli casualties of 2,562, of which 177 have been children. (See https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/ ) And this is before the recent massacres since October 7th. Forget that high Israeli officials in the current government have used explicitly genocidal language in reference to their conquest of Gaza. Forget that the exact same measures used against Gaza in the last month of cutting off fuel, food, and water were called "Genocide" when the Russians did it against the Ukraine--were far fewer children died in two years of fighting than in less than two months in Gaza. Forget that the equivalent ordinance of two Hiroshima bombs have been dropped on Gaza since October 7. Forget that between the displacement of 750,000 in 1948 and the displacement of 250,000 in 1967, cramming many of those on a tiny strip of land that is under a complete lock down and economic blockade for two decades. Let's just say that this is all just an overreaction.
You tell me that it's OK to riot over a single knife attack that injuries three children, but the Palestinians better just suck it up and quit their whining about how hard they have it?
No, sorry--the Irish knife attack is tragic, and the Irish people have every right to be upset. But if you think they have a right to riot over this event--thar did not result in a single death--my God, then what are you prepared to justify for the Palestinian people who have suffered infinitely more?
Now this, this is the most honest, balanced description of the situation in that particular part of the middle east that has ever been seen. I mean, all relevant facts are presented here in a completely unbiased, objective manner.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is perfect.
If you have specific corrections or additions to the facts presented, do so. Just saying "you're biased" proves nothing.
I don't need to prove anything. You have proved it all by yourself and you know it.
Forgetting that Palestinian suffering has been largely at their own hands - rejecting deals which would have given them their own nation, then electing a horde of murderous, thieving savages as a government which compels Israel to limit shipments so that they can't import weapons.
Forgetting that Hamas turned pipes intended for drinking water into rockets, and forgetting that Israel supplied Gaza with 13% of its drinking water and 50% of its electricity before the war. Forgetting that Israel pulled out of Gaza nearly 20 years ago and left Hamas - which has explicitly stated its intent to destroy Israel through terrorism - to its own devices, so it could dig an elaborate tunnel network under Gaza for military purposes, rather than say, oh, I don't know...actually governing for the poor Gazans you seem to care so deeply about.
Forget that Israel opens humanitarian corridors and communicates their battle plans with civilians *extensively* as the risk of their own soldiers, to spare civilian lives, while Hamas shoots anyone trying to leave the battlefront. Because they're such great and merciful people.
Forget that the word 'genocide' has been watered down to the strength of a Diet Coke over the last month, and now basically includes any military strategy at all. You could rain confetti on the enemy and *certain people* would call it genocide.
How about instead of 'sucking it up' the Palestinians directed some of their relentless hatred toward Hamas - toward the people who are so bloody infatuated with their idea of killing Jews that they couldn't give a damn about helping their own people? Credit where credit's due, I've seen a couple of clips of ordinary Gazans doing just that since Israel attacked, and under a brutal military dictatorship you've got to hand it to anyone willing to speak out. But it almost never happens.
The Irish have a right to riot in the same way the English do because of Rotherham, and the French do because of knife attacks, and the Swedish do because of gang-related crimes, and the Germans do because of mass sexual assault by immigrants in 2015. You might detect a pattern here.
And your minimising an event which involved children being stabbed exposes the moral vacuum of your argument.
Let's look at one of the claims:
The Palestinians have *never* been offered by the Israelis a plan that would respect true sovereignty in the 1967 borders. Even the supposed "generous offer" in 2000 would not allow Palestine to have a true military, must allow military flights over their own airspace, not control the Jordan Valley, break up the Palestinian "state" by access roads over which Palestine would have no control, swap valuable land in the West Bank with worthless parts of the Negev (including a toxic waste dump), and not have control over their own borders.
And if you look at the earlier plan of partition in 1947 by the UN, despite having only 630,000 Jewish people in Palestine (or 32 percent of the population), they were to be given 56 percent of the land as a state--so despite there being more than twice as many Arabs than Jews, they were to be given less than half the land.
Tell me what part of either deal--or any other subsequent deal--would be fair and just?
Okay but ETA was never offered a state. The Uyghurs haven't been offered a state (note the lack of outrage on their behalf from the left). Puerto Rico isn't even a state in the US. Chechnya hasn't been offered sovereignty by the Russians. Taiwan is in murky waters sovereignty-wise. There are tiny islands still under the control of the British crown. You don't always get your way, especially in a horribly complex place like Middle East.
If you're offered a deal, you take it and use it as the basis to help your people thrive - and terms can always be renegotiated later on. Leaving aside the *stated fact* that Hamas is not operating on good faith (it's founded on the principle of eradicating Israel). Has rejecting deals really helped the Palestinian people?
Surely there's some alternate history where they take what's on the table and turn Gaza into a thriving Levantine paradise, a tourist mecca (so to speak), a financial hub, a high-tech-corridor using cutting-edge irrigation methods to feed its people, or something like that? Heck, the Bible tours alone would keep the population in Keffiyehs for a good long while.
What's troubling though is there is a subtext in your argument that suggests that Palestinian discontent somehow justifies October 7th. And I reject that completely.
The list of dangerous "far right" extremists gets longer every day: Trump, Elon, Rogan, Tucker, Orban, DeSantis, Peterson and now Wilders and that guy who won in Argentina.
The message from our globalist overlords and their MSM propaganda wing is becoming clearer and harder to deny: you either obey us and convert to the Social Justice belief system (the One Truth Faith of our Western elites) or else we will smear you with bigotry accusations, depict you as beyond the moral pale, and do all we can to destroy you.
The globalist corporate class and the civilizational termites of the New Left have joined forces because they both have the same enemies and the same goal: to smother all native Western populations in a tsunami of mass immigration and mass guilt and shame (backed by a full-spectrum propaganda assault designed to make the average person believe "All Good People do as we say and quietly accept their colonization") designed to render them mute and powerless, with no choice but to submit if they don't want to be denounced and immiserated.
These people have no idea of the backlash they're creating, will be the last ones to see it coming, and will never ever take responsibility for their actions. They have tied themselves to the party line of "Everyone who dissents is a dangerous extremist who needs to be banned and monitored". I guess we're all "far right" now.
That was part of my Thanksgiving. I learned yesterday from my left-wing, unmarried know-it-all Sister-in-law that Finland just elected a "nut." When informed that Holland had the most recent elections, she amended herself and said the Dutch had elected a "nut." Fortunately, she returns to Ohio today.
There's something about the left that compels them to utter all their political thoughts.
My Thanksgiving- my Sister-in-Law has now left me in peace.
Sometimes the dumbest amongst us feel the need to proclaim their stupidity. Meathead on "All in the Family" is one.
The Left weaponises allegations of racism in the same way that the Right weaponises allegations of antisemitism
Rightists tend to dismiss as antisemitic anyone who thinks that the global financial system is deeply corrupt; or destroying a different hapless country in the Middle East every few years is evil; or having US foreign policy massively influenced by one small rogue state is absurd.
Leftists tend to dismiss as racist anyone who thinks that immigration should be controlled or reduced; or laws should be properly enforced; or some cultural groups (e.g. Muslims) present difficulties for peaceful coexistence; or policemen are not monsters but public servants doing a difficult but necessary task, with the same mix of wickedness, frailty and folly as anyone else.
the way to change things in Ireland is for Irish people that oppose immigration to become active in elections in Ireland and populate the government with like-minded representatives. In that the Irish political establishment is committed to immigration and the institutions that support immigration (the EU, etc.) - it would be a difficult and lengthy battle. Protests are not enough. Rioting counter-productive. Is there the will in Ireland to makes these changes through hard won electoral gains?
They can move more migrants in than you can keep up with.
it seems so, which makes the challenge nearly insurmountable
And that’s been the problem for the past 20 or so years—the cultural Left has been consciously moving much faster than any electoral machinery can correct—before the voters, that is, intended victims, can have a chance to register ANY discontent, enough institutional transformation has taken root to blanket the entire hillside with alien cover.
And then, when the voters DO get a chance to do something, they’re presented with fools or buffoons as choices.
A big cause of the bad choices we get is because our politics beslimes anyone who gets too close to it. Only narcissists and sociopaths are willing to run that gantlet nowadays.
Very true. And the press bears much of the blame for that. On many days, I’d like to send the lot of them on a cruise in a leaky boat into a hurricane.
Ireland desperately needs a conservative alternative party.
back here in the US we not only have problems with illegal migrants, but with legal migranst (or first gen descendants of legal immigrants) like Rashiad Tlaib , Pramila Jayapal and Ihlan Omar. the problem s that many third world legal migrants are getting elected to positions of power or their progeny are. The vast majority vote for Democratic candidates. Take a look at Northen Virginia which is a dark blue part of the state. Yes the public revolted against the Fairfax County school board, but they still ended up voting for Democratic candidates for Congress and the state government.
These while not committing murders are slowly legally implementing changes to this country
People voting for candidates you don't like is not exactly in the same league as crime and rioting.
yes except that these people are fundamentally changing our country at the state, local and national level. this is not a matter whether or not I like these candidates but rather what their agenda is. Look at the northen tier of Virginian counties. they are solidly blue. it wasn't until the Fairfax County School Board was exposed that the constiuents pushed back. Sadly though they still voted for Democratic candidates for the state legislature. The vast majority of Fairfax county is made up of federal employess many of whom are South Asians
as a result of Oct 7th we are seeing major protest marches by thousands of immigrants from the Middle East. these people vote Democratic
That's pricey territory around there. I'd suggest it isn't immigrants who changed the voting patters, but Americans, white and black, with serious degrees working for the government. Education has become one of the major fault lines in politics.
Meanwhile even Donald Trump managed to make some inroads into the Hispanic vote, and a slight though definite salient into the black vote. If the GOP wants to become the working class party (IMO, it should) it will have to become comfortable with non-white people.
very pricey with a large South Asian demographic, I used to live part-time in that county and watched the demographics slowly change
"The 5 largest ethnic groups in Fairfax County, VA are White (Non-Hispanic) (49.3%), Asian (Non-Hispanic) (19.9%), Black or African American (Non-Hispanic) (9.54%), White (Hispanic) (7.32%), and Other (Hispanic) (4.94%)."
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/fairfax-county-va#
" it will have to become comfortable with non-white people" and who says that Republicans aren't comfortable with non-whites?. I think that is a myth pushed by the left. if Republicans didn't like non-whites then why did they elect an African-American woman as Va's Lt. Governor? why did they elect Nikki Haley (a non-white) to be SC's governor?
"Republican candidates were backed by 14% of Black voters, compared with 8% in the last midterm elections four years ago, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive national survey of the electorate.
In Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp more than doubled his support among Black voters to 12% in 2022 compared with 5% four years ago, according to VoteCast. He defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams both times."
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-brian-p-kemp-stacey-abrams-politics-us-democratic-party-53d31c9c8a87231d00784b6effa8d59e#:
African-Americans: Congressional Representatives: Byron Donalds, Burgess Owens, Wesley Hunt, John James. Senator Tim Scott, (also elected Republican nominee Hershel Walker). KY Att Gen and Gov. nominee Daniel Cameron. As mentioned, Winsome Sears.
These were all elected from majority White districts/states. Chances are poor for a Black Democrat to be elected from a majority white district/state.
I won't even go into Hispanics and Asians, but there are many. Again, commonly from majority white districts. Much less common for Democrats from these groups to be elected from majority white districts. And yes, I incude "majority white that usually vote democrat" for all three of these groups.
thanks I couldn't remember them all
Indians and Muslims are probably lost causes. They don't care about concepts like small government. Both are very anti-Christian and they regard the Republicans as the Christian party. East Asians are very successful but come from very conformist societies that also don't recognize the concept of small government. Fifty years ago, East Asians were usually Republican voters. East Asians have swung left since 1990. East Asian doctors in Fairfax County vote the same as white liberal Fairfax County doctors. Certain Hispanic groups have moved towards the Republicans. Rural Hispanics and Hispanics with small businesses have moved right. Urban Hispanics are part of the Democratic coalition. The professional political class of Hispanics rely on the crumbs of the Democratic machine.
"Urban Hispanics are part of the Democratic coalition" this may be changing but it will take awhile
My brother just moved from a neighborhood that had over the past 20 years become evermore an enclave of East/South Asians. They dont really assimilate. many still wear the clothing of their homeland especially the women. one thing that irritated my brother was how they ignored the rules of the HOA
Left-wing white Americans were the voters who installed non-Americans like Congressladies Tlaib, Jayapal and Omar. Why? Neurotic self-hatred.
but in the cases of Tlaib, Jayapal and Omar their fellow ethnics voting overwhelming for them. In Tlaib's case close to 100% of Dearbornistan's Muslim community voted for her. The same goes for Omar where she won the vast majority of Somali votes. Wouldn't surprise me if the Indian community of Seattle voted overwhelmingly for Jayapal
A Congressional district is now about 760,000 people. All three women must be getting many voters who do not share their ethnicity. Minneapolis elected Swedish-American Martin Olav Sabo for many years, then the egregious Keith Ellison, and now this little Somali monster, Ilhan Omar. There is something both naive and self-hating about Swedish-Americans. They provide Ilhan Omar votes and they provide Pramila Jayapal votes in Seattle.
you're assuming that all 760,000 are voting in elections
one would need to do a deep dive into the racial makeup of Omar's district. (67% of the district is white)
https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/cong_dist/cd116/cd_based/ST27/CD116_MN05.pdf
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/congressional-district-5-mn
here is the breakdown of the 2022 election
https://ballotpedia.org/Minnesota%27s_5th_Congressional_District_election,_2022
Omar narrowly won the 2022 primary by 2.2%
https://www.minnpost.com/elections/2022/08/a-crack-in-omars-armor-tuesdays-5th-district-dfl-primary-in-charts/
I am not surprised that the district is two-thirds white. I guessed it was. Swedes are masochistic.