My family did the same during covid. We talked for hours and hours, sharing research and laughing at the latest crazy rules. It was the only way to get through the insanity of it.
Every week I visited the supermarket unmasked, hoping to see another unmasked person. One time I caught sight of an unmasked shopper disappearing down the next aisle....I walked after him hoping to exchange a smile......it turned out to be my brother.
Good for you on the above. Happily where I lived there was no attempt to shut down outdoor spaces-- probably because Baltimore is so infamous for lawlessness they knew darn well no one would obey.
Masks were performative etiquette - a "I care" statement. A very low bump (not even a hill) to die on. I was quite gobsmacked to see some people masking outdoors (I did that exactly once- while biking in 19 degrees (F, of course) and even the thin paper mask helped warm the frigid air up a bit as I took breaths.
2020 we still lived in suburban New York. The town had, has, an outdoor track, blacktopped and level: you could measure your walk easily by the quarter mile. They shut it down and posted a cop to make sure nobody used it. Idiots.
My "favorite" experience was hiking in the back country, a wilderness area in WV, Dolly Sods, and passing a couple of hikers on the trail wearing masks in the middle of nowhere.
In Jan 2021 I was a scofflaw up in NY. Visitors to the state were supposed to have evidence of a recent negative Covid test, or isolate for three days. Well, I went up to Holiday Valley (near the Seneca lands) to ski. The locals seem not to have cared and the Seneca nation itself is notorious for flipping off Albany . They did enforce masks inside, probably just in case state poobahs came calling.
I was living in New Paltz at the time. Very early on in the masking, it was “strongly encouraged” that people had to not only stay six feet apart but mask up while walking outdoors along the rail trail. There was a woman on the town Facebook group (the heavily “monitored” Facebook group) who lived along the trail and must’ve spent every moment she could spare from looking out her living room window at the “violators” to post her complaints about them. Sad.
In my own Hall of Shame, Bureaucratic Idiocy wing, was this:
In June of 2020 Baltimore allowed limited reopenings. Bars could be open but only for outdoor service. OK, hanging out outside on a pleasant summer evening works! So one evening a while after the initial reopening I stopped out at a favorite place, and bought a drink at a service window while awaiting friends. The outdoor seating was all occupied-- and some employee came up to me and told me I was not allowed to drink my drink unless seated! Yes, we had some words on that-- but it really was an ordinance-- no eating or drinking while standing and the bar had been ticketed for not enforcing it! That fiendish virus-- smart enough to target people on their feet not on their behinds!
In DC it was common to see people driving around alone while masked. Everyone wore a mask outside - walking, running, biking, shopping, whatever, all masked. When we started plotting our escape in the summer of 2020 we drove more than an hour west and found a lovely restaurant where we could sit outside (everything in DC was still closed) and have a nice meal and a drink. We looked around at the other people and thought, wow, there’s still normal life out here. Let’s move out here. And so we did.
Baltimore and DC are just 40 miles apart, but culturally they might as well have been on different continents. DC also freaked out and became paralyzed if three snow flakes fell, while Baltimore handled winter precipitation in stride.
One day I saw a small child trying to get onto the swings but the father said "Oh no, you can't go on the swings until the government says it's safe."
Knowing what a bunch of incompetents and charlatans the government are, that sentiment made my blood boil. So I thought I would be performing a service by surreptitiously cutting off the tape.
The following day the parents assumed someone in authority had removed the tape and allowed their kids to enjoy the playground.
We had the same experience. My wife would get snide comments, no one said a peep to me. Of course I look like a biker. Big beard, shaved head, heavy set.
I had a beard for a year. After shaving it off, I noticed that I got a little more snottiness from people in transactions and while out in public....nothing major, but noticeable. My wife says I look slightly "mean" with facial hair.
In the NYC metro area, years ago, I would regularly get cut-off on highways, while driving our minivan. I would then take my pickup truck to work, and the "Red Sea" would part.
I've written about this before but it's worth repeating. My brother in law looks a bit like subway shooter, Bernie Goetz: very thin, with coke-bottle glasses. He has had a series of subway run-ins. He was attacked in school and stabbed in the boy's bathroom, mugged. He's kind of a badass though, and is not one to cower away. He's been in about 5 fights with strangers, as an adult, in his life, not a brawler but not one to back down. He was quite "pro-Goetz".
I think it may be wise to attempt to change your look, if you are constantly singled out or bullied. It's probably very difficult for women.
After enlarging your profile pick, the eyes say: kind and approachable. The beard and hair say: not a push-over. But since I've been reading your comments for a while now, maybe I'm letting that influence me. Hard to say!
I do have a look about me, though I'm mild as a lazy kitten. In Baltimore it served me well when it came to projecting a "Don't mess with me - I have superpowers" look at potential thuglets.
OK, fine, but it goes both ways. During the pandemic my kids were freaked out and insisted everybody wear masks. They're kids, and that much younger than they are now. For my birthday we went to nice steakhouse, the four of us, and the fat goober at the next table said, "You know that doesn't do you any good, don't you?"
If I felt like a shindy and ruining everybody's evening I would have told him to shut up and how was everything in Dogpatch? But I kept quiet.
Minding your own effing business is a virtue as well.
The stricture for indoor venues where I lived was that one must wear a mask while being seated or getting up for some purpose, but while seated one could lose the mask. File under "Schizoid Byzantine etiquette customs".
There was a spike in probably unnecessary deaths in New York, and that was likely because the MTA cut down on the number of cars per train and people were more crammed together even than usual. It was more or less then when Sonny Boy ("Climb Upon my Knee Sonny Boy") Cuomo asked for a U.S. Navy hospital ship, which it turned out filled not one bed. It could have been time to change course, but by then it was too late and our Andrew had that book contract. Of course the people who took the subway were the kind of people who take the subway, eh?
What tore it was the summer of love of course. I've written about how I can't unsee Mitt Romney taking of his mask OUTDOORS to say "I'm here because Black Lives Matter". That's plumbing the depths, don't you think, Jon?
In Austin TX, the bars were closed for awhile, whereas it was totally fine to be open if you were a restaurant that serves booze. So my local bar, instead of selling a pint for $4, began selling the pint for $2 along with the mandatory purchase of a Slim Jim stick for $2—thereby becoming a "restaurant". There, problem solved.
Yes. I wore a mask when I shopped anywhere, and when I took my husband to his seemingly innumerable doctors' appointments (heart failure, COPD, etc). I got grief from some people for still being masked in the car, but when the doctors' appointments were only 5 minutes away from each other, it was more trouble to take it off than just leave it on. The worst, however, (and I've shared this story before) was when I realized we had to get everything on the same floor (we used to watch TV in the finished basement) so I hired some movers to move the stuff upstairs to make it possible for him to never have to use the stairs. Three guys came - and one of them refused to put on a mask. So I told him "Look, I'm paying you, it's my house, my husband's on oxygen, and if you don't want to wear a mask, then fine, leave. I'll find someone else to do the job." He got pissy about it, but did mask up. The other 2 (who took one look at my husband and made no objections) did most of the work, and we got things set up the way they are now.
N95 for sick people was worth doing. Of course there were lies about that at the beginning that anyone with a little knowledge could see right through.
I was definitely one who was annoyed by the flouting of “rules” at first…actually for a fairly long time.
It was the attitude, like I was the dumbest person on the planet for complying. For my part, I, too, wondered why people wouldn’t just put on their face hankies and let’s get this over with.
My Dad hates what the military has become, but, the man will always follow orders. I was raised that if the Commander in Chief gives an order, well, that’s not really up for debate. He and my mom were very frightened for awhile that he would be recalled. He’s still mad at the young “idiots” who went and got themselves discharged for refusing the vaccine. He is a very loyal man to the military and this country.
My opinions about the whole thing have evolved and I try not to judge anyone too harshly (sh*, I washed my groceries for about a month).
I think as this wonderful interview illustrates, we ALL need to have a seat, take a deep breath, and start listening more. I don’t think for a second that out in the real world any one of us would have difficulty being agreeably hospitable to one another.
Perhaps it’s the spirit of Lent that has heightened my sense of being the pot who’s constantly calling the kettle black. Perhaps it’s also the spirit of Lent that my mind is extra all over the place.
I get it among older people, but I'm talking about young people among young people, and long after the immediate uncertainty and crisis. When they're in their cars; when they're in the park. When most others aren't doing it, which would defeat the point anyway.
Sweden took the right approach. The government acknowledged it had no authority to order lockdowns and mandates but could only make recommendations for its citizens who it came to Covid. Recall that Sweden, always the favorite social-democratic Nordic utopia among the liberal intelligentsia, became a "pariah" star in 2020/21 per the NYT and MSNBC.
When masks finally became optional, it was interesting to see brave, little old ladies shopping for groceries, mask-free and unafraid, yet at the same time, have masked 20 y.o. store employees back away from me in terror if I infringed on the 6ft cordon sanitaire to ask them a question.
I'm 67 and my partner is 72. When the "vaccine" came out we waited several months before getting the shot and even though our doctor encouraged us to get the booster, we declined. We didn't wear masks any more than we had to. Our doctor was surprised because he says we are two of the very few people he has seen who has never had covid.
I think the masks really came off (if ya will) with the BLM stuff: oh, so it's okay to go out to "fight racism", but not to pray to God? The double standard was grotesque, to the point that maybe it wasn't even hypocrisy anymore. It was simply power.
There's probably an anthropological study out there to be written on the social theatre of this whole misgotten episode.
I think you're right. I've seen teenagers going around with black hoodies pulled over their heads even in the middle of the hottest of summers. At first I thought it was just because they thought it was the cool thing to do
but now I think they're trying to hide from the world.
I'm pretty sure that being brought up with all these techs has affected their basic brain morphology and produced in them a type of culturally generated autism, or a basic solipsism, or whatever the correct phrasing for such a condition would be.
This was known to be a thing among adolescents who are already self-conscious and feeling socially awkward. The mask let them hide whatever they thought ugly, while avoiding the shame of non-conformity at the same time. Many of them kept wearing them long after other age groups had stopped; they wanted to feel safe, but avoidance of sickness was the least worry.
Yeah: I remember that when I was an adolescent, I thought my jaw looked weird. (In fact it's slightly asymmetrical, but for the life of me I can't comprehend what funhouse mirror must have been set up in my mind back then.) Anyway, if masks had come along at that time, I would have probably been quite glad for the scenario.
The moral of this story is: thank God we never have to be teenagers again.
Ha, nice! It is expected that NCOs — at least initially — be unsmiling and grim, which has the fringe benefit of reducing small talk, or “cross[ing] the bridgeless gulf of chatter.” Hard to do with a face diaper.
Personally, I find myself fond of small talk, these days. I'm more wary of people who wanna do big talk, although they are totally unfamiliar with it and only express emotions coated with a thin veneer of idea-like rhetoric.
(That's why they consider an intellectual disagreement to be a personal attack: they're just expressing their feelings, but we mistake them for having actual ideas.)
Mrs S, this is a question from honest curiosity, not disbelief or malice. The timeline of Covid restrictions and the absolute rejection of previous public health protocol in the US did not sit well with me, though I went along because I'm a pretty trusting person in general and did not know where to go to find any other information and otherwise didn't know which sources to believe. That all said, in your research did you find out how exactly Covid is transmitted? If it's basically a lung problem, wouldn't breathing on others transmit it? So therefore wouldn't masks help, at least somewhat?
No "they" about it. Use "we". The fear derived from a large fraction of the citizenry, not from on high. And under the rule of squeaky wheels ("The squeaky wheel gets grease") they were listened to.
At the risk of being a bit rude here, Rod was, very early on, one of the alarm-bell ringers. I think I first read about Covid, then just in China and later Italy, on his blog.
My understanding is that you'd need the widespread proper wearing of surgical-quality masks for it to make a significant difference. Widespread happened, but not proper wearing, and not the quality. Viral particles can pass through ordinary fabric.
I also think it's sort of like with climate change, where the problem is basically economic: what's the cost/benefit tradeoff? Any type of masking would presumably produce at least a tiny improvement, but at what holistic cost?
In my view, the main factors (other than age) were Vitamin D and obesity: sunlight protected, and fat people got hit hard (and this would help explain the mystery of Africa). It seems to me that any effect of masking was negligible relative to those factors.
Remember, fat is an identity now, and we are thus no longer allowed to mention that remaining fat is practically the single worst thing anyone could do for their longevity and health.
For me it was the opposite: I used the time I was no longer wasting on commuting to and from work for increased and daily biking. And I was no longer subjected to pizza lunches and donuts for all in the morning at the office. Or for a few weeks going out for drinks with friends on the weekend. Or tons of sweets after Liturgy at church. I lost weight-- unintentionally at first.
N95 masks for the sick were useful. Paper, or even worse cloth masks were theater. I oppose the mask mandates but sick people need to do the best that they can.
I worked in an essential industry so I just went to work everyday still. I oddly enough remember covid as a good time in life except for church being canceled.
I worked from home, and while I didn't mind not having a commute, the isolation was wearing on me. I did lots of biking, and did the Liturgy online courtesy of a church I once attended up in Ohio.
My friends started doing small backyard get-togethers as soon as the weather warmed up.
Rod's "Covid Diaries" posts on TAC were a godsend, letting us keep in touch with others, during the initial days when no one quite knew what was going to happen.
Rod, Ms. Brodsky nailed it when she mentioned the Internet never forgets. That there is no redemption, no forgiveness under the religion of woke ideology is frightening. Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote “No Future Without Forgiveness”. He promoted Truth and Reconciliation. But a video you posted from South Africa showing a new leader and a whole stadium chanting “Kill The Boer, The Farmer” shows a terrible predicament. The potential to be condemned increases dramatically when there is no forgetting, no redemption, no forgiveness, no mercy. The Internet and AI offer no refuge.
Speaking of Live Not By Lies, I am most interested in your thoughts on the mainstream media headlines that Greece is the first Orthodox Christian nation to allow gay marriage and adoption. What is the impact on other Orthodox countries and the Orthodox Church? You recently posted an article about an infant baptism performed by a Greek Orthodox leader where the parents were homosexual. Thoughts?
I think there is zero chance any other Orthodox country will go this way anytime soon. Greece is pretty Westernized among Orthodox countries. The Greek Orthodox Church fought this, but Greece is not as faithful as it once was.
I pray you are right. I am neither Greek nor Orthodox, but my heart sank when I saw that news. I hope you do a write up on it. Curious for your thoughts on a deep dive.
It's hard to know what to say, to be honest. I don't know much of anything about Greece. This move is utterly contrary to Orthodox teaching, and the Greek bishops fought it. But Greece is fairly post-Christian, I am told. But honestly, I don't know for sure.
I think people expect the Orthodox to look to Greece like Catholics look to the Vatican. The way Orthodoxy works in the US, in particular, the parishes have a lot more weight - want better bishops? Build the community to better parishes. I don't think that necessarily works so well on the Catholic side; there's a lot more power accumulated at the top. On one hand, it's very sad that this has happened in Greece, on the other, I don't know how it affects much in the Orthodox Church at large or in my parish here in the US.
Orthodoxy features a degree of decentralization- and non-clericalism- that I find very healthy. This goes way back. When the Isaurian emperors imposed iconoclasm on Byzantium, the bishops mostly kowtowed to them. The common people kept their icons buried in their gardens and kept alive the tradition of iconodulia across three generations.
Nothing but contempt for the rainbow jackboot Wokies. Nothing but. I've experienced doxxing attempts twice in my life, where activists tried to contact my bosses/employers and make trouble for me. Interestingly, though, the first time, it was from rightwing douchebags. And of all points of interest, from fans of the original Battlestar Galactica (of which, I was and still am) and who hated the remake from Ronald D. Moore (still a big fan of that one, too. RDM does great space-based shows, from his involvement in Star Trek, including being showrunner of Deep Space Nine, to his BSG remake, to his current show of alternate space race history, For All Mankind). At the time, I was in the Army, and those freaks managed to get email to my Sergeant Major at AFN Europe. Who was a fan of my show, and we were friends, at least as much friends as a black sheep out on the edge Specialist disc jockey could be with a network Sergeant Major. But she got my back, quoting regs, that I can state political opinions if I keep my Army stuff out of it.
The second time, many years later, working for a local public radio station doing morning drive (my current gig). Stated some conservative viewpoints on FB, Wokies went to my home page, saw my place of employment, tried bringing that to my boss. He laughed it off and that was that. But it did convince me to use a pseudonym on social media and I ramped up the security and privacy settings on my information all the way up. Life is too short and I've no time for swatting away those poop eating flies.
The point of the first para was that it was right wing douchenozzles that gave me my first taste of doxxing. In fact, it was not even the difference of opinion over BSG which really set them off, that was just gasoline on the fire. They REALLY hated my less than positive opinions of GWBush and the Iraq War.
Interesting. Reminds me of the book "They Thought They Were Free" by Milton Meyer about German society during the rise of the Nazis, and there's a few passages in there that suggest the Nazis might have been stopped early on had people the courage to take a stand against it, and stand with friends and colleagues who did. But everyone just kept their heads down until it was too late.
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows.... In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked-if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D....
Had the French army had attacked Germany when the Germans militarized the Rhineland in 1936, the German army was ready to overthrow Hitler. But that was the last chance to stand up to Hitler. Once he bluffed France at the Rhineland, Hitler was unstoppable until 1945.
Also if the French and Brits had crossed the Rhine in September 1939, when every last bit of German military hardware was in Poland, the war might have ended much earlier rather than later.
Keep in mind that when Germany invaded Poland Stalin was allied with Hitler. That very definitely affected any calculus Britain and France may have had at the time.
An eye-opening read. I'm fascinated by that period as well, the early years of the Third Reich, how society was molded/transformed and what the thought process of "ordinary" Germans could have possibly been
Before I was out of grade school my father insisted on the lesson that bullies must be stood up to, unpleasant as it may be. They just get more bullying if you let them have their way.
He's right. Playground 101. If bullies see that their bullying has positive results (for them), no reason to stop. Besides, the people who do it tend to like inflicting misery, so the suffering of their victims is all good, as far as they are concerned. But they do not like it when they receive pain.
The trouble is that every society has boundary policing when it comes to expression -- it's one of the main ways societies maintain social cohesion. What those boundaries are changes, it's true, but the nature of the policing doesn't change that much, although of course technology can provide new ways in which social boundary policing can manifest.
In the recent past there was tremendous pressure, socially, to conform to certain prevailing rules regarding religion (including attendance at some church, regardless of how one really believed), sex, gender roles, and so on, just to take a few areas ... there are many others. These social views flipped, and so the flipped versions of them have also become enforced, in many ways, in reverse, and for the same basic reason -- social cohesion. There are new ways one shows conformity to the regnant set of values -- what used to be demonstrated, in other words, by nominal Sunday attendance, is now dominated by political statements or yard signs or what have you, but it's the same thing going on. And there weren't very many openly vocal dissenters under the old system, either, because they suffered the same social penalties if they did so.
Now, as I say above, the internet does expand this considerably due to the ability to ostracize people digitally which didn't exist previously, but the internet also creates a greater need for policing as well, socially, precisely because it provides such a large venue for the expression of dissenting views. The current environment is not one in which views are suppressed in general -- it's one which is drowning in all kinds of crackpotted views, thanks to the internet allowing every idiotic barfly a global megaphone. So the need for social policing mechanisms to ensure that people who actually have some power in the society, economically and socially, aren't influenced by said barfly's views, is even greater than it was in the pre-internet era -- hence the increased "vigilance" in social policing.
This isn't going away, I think. Railing about it won't make it go away, social policing of views which are permissibly expressed, in terms of boundaries, is a human thing. One can come to one's own way of going about the policing mechanisms, but the idea that it will be some kind of platonic dialogue at some stage where everyone simply engages in full on good faith philosophic exhcnage of views is hopelessly idealistic. Ideas will always be policed socially by power. Always.
I mostly agree with you about this, but in the US at least I've been told that within living memory there were smaller communities (not large cities or suburbs) where non-church goers and open atheists were ostracized.
I grew up in probably the most religiously observant county in the entire U.S.—Lancaster County, Pa.—in the 60s and 70s. And no one was ostracized for not attending church or even not belonging to a church. It’s true that if you wanted to hobnob with the small-town gentry there, the question of what church you belonged to might come into play. But otherwise, no.
I never experienced it and a century ago in Toledo OH my paternal non-churchgoing grandparents didn't. I only repeat what I've been told by others above
It was common enough in small towns throughout the US prior to the 1960s era. Keep in mind, it wasn't the internet, so it played out differently. Whisper campaigns, rumors, and people just not getting promotions, not getting jobs, not being sold houses and so on. It was more subtle in how it played out, but it was certainly the case that there was a lot of social pressure to be outwardly "church-going" regardless of how religious you were -- people knew not everyone was religious, but it was an act of social conformity.
Exactly, show us evidence. How many times has Rod written about his dad stop going to church because he was angry about some internal church thing that upset his dad. Rod's dad was not ostracized and this was in the 60's deep south small town.
And those literary reenactments of such religious intolerance have always struck me as false. I don’t want to say that there have NEVER been small-town dissidents who have faced ostracism, but in the U.S., it has always been easy enough to move on to more congenial places anyway. The one major episode of persecution I can think of has been the hounding of the Mormons past the 100th meridian. Beyond that, not much of any systematic sort.
And those writers representing such intolerance, definitely have larger anti-religious agendas. I’m thinking of Sinclair Lewis and his ilk. But Hawthorne himself was part of the New England crowd around Emerson that thought highly of its own broad-mindedness. Tales about this stuff always ring false to me, if only because of the very proliferation of religious freakiness in the U.S.
Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken certainly found deep wells in the ridiculing of those who unabashedly thumped for Holy Writ, as they often called it. Such phrasing, in fact, was common among popular writers like Stewart Holbrook and Joseph C. Lincoln. These are not the cultural exponents one expects to find in a religiously intolerant country.
You wrote: "Ideas will always be policed socially by power. Always."
Yes, but...when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, power at least admitted it was power. Now that progressives are in charge of most of our institutions, they're still pretending to be the minority. Here in my county, a rainbow flag flies during Pride Month from a government flagpole and the school curriculum is drenched in LGBT material from K through 12, and teachers and administrators (all of them employees of the state) have to go along unquestioningly with any new LGBT-positive policy.
And yet a handful of Muslim parents who politely ask to opt out of LGBT material are treated as the tyrants and oppressors—against the state, against the school system, against the unions, and against the LGBT lobby.
That's the biggest cultural difference right now: The people who hold all the cards are still pretending to be outsiders, a dissenting minority fighting the noble fight against power. Sure, power always polices ideas, but there's an added layer of poisonous gaslighting by the powerful than makes the present day quite a bit worse.
Miss Brodsky's last paragraph is right on. What kind of person wants an apology from someone for something not done to them? A dishonorable person. A dishonest person. A sociopath. Someone like Joy Reid fits the bill. She wants reparations and claims that African-Americans built all of America. That assertion is a lie. Moreover, Joy Reid has built nothing on her own but her media career blabbing her gums.
To her credit, Reid, while on a hot mike, said, "Not another f-----g war," during a Biden segment, but unfortunately profusely apologized afterwards -- and not for the profanity. She knows which side her bread's buttered.
I love the title of her book, which is excellent...even mandatory...advice for conservatives with a public platform in the Age of Woke.
In real life, of course, sometimes apologies are a decent and necessary thing...an indication of character. But in Cancel Culture where those howling for apologies are not acting in good faith and seek only a person's destruction, apologies are deadly. Never play defense with these jackals. Hit them back...hard.
My son Matt Walsh was the target of this little game when back in late 2022, Media Matters and other Woke outlets went after him big-time because he was drawing so much blood in the battle to save kids from sexual mutilation at the hands of the Gender Cult.
So after combing through every word he ever said or wrote starting when he broke into the media business as a shock jock on a small Delaware radio station in his early 20s, they triumphantly seized on and distorted a few stray out-of-context lines to spread scandalous lies all over the Internet. But it blew up in their faces.
In fact, Matt's answer on his Daily Wire show, which went viral, could serve as a template for how not to apologize to the Cancel Mob. The segment is classic...12 minutes long...but here's the wind-up excerpt near the close:
"Here's my official answer for the record: Kiss my ass. I do not apologize. In fact, by all rights you sick freaks should be the ones apologizing to me for lying and defaming me...and doing it all because I'm trying to prevent you from sexually mutilating children...you child-abusing psychopaths. I wouldn't apologize to you soulless parasites if I had a gun to my head. Instead I'd rather just tell you all to piss off. I apologize for nothing. I concede nothing. I will never surrender even a single inch of ground to a pitchfork mob of degenerate morons."
Yep. To them, an apology is just laying on your back, belly exposed, neck bared. They only see weakness, and they are taking advantage of your presumed adherence to the old rules of civilization to try to get you to expose that weakness. Don't do it. Attack, attack, attack, without mercy.
Below is a link to that show from October 2022. His response is in the first segment and runs around 12-13 minutes or so. He was in a hotel room at the time...on the road for a speech at I forget where.
Anyway, it's classic...and hopefully I'm not overstepping any boundary lines by posting it here:
Thanks...What Is A Woman broke new ground and became an incredible success despite Regime media's predictable silent treatment. God bless Elon Musk for promoting it on X.
Yup, I'm his Dad, and trust me: his story is amazing. If you didn't believe in God before hearing it, you might believe afterward. But it's not mine to tell. Maybe some day he will.
I started following Matt Walsh before fame and fortune. I am not sure how I found him originally but I remembered thinking this guy knows what’s happening and he’s not a fan. I am a subscriber to Daily Wire and have been since the beginning (also discovered Ben Shapiro before fame and fortune). Having this group of courageous and outspoken thinkers helps keep me sane.
She seems a nice person but my reaction is the same as it was to Bill Maher; there is no woke without liberals. Their rhetoric has been toxic since Nixon, this is the inevitable result. I don’t see how being traditionally liberal is going to hold back the hurricane now.
I appreciate your comments but I think that train has left the station at least for the time being. Depending on who comes out victorious that may be able to come back. I’ve been reading new authors:
Well said. I don't know the extent of her liberalism and I'm not interested in finding out but if she is like the typical liberal supporting affirmative action, disparate impact, acceptance pf transgenders etc., then she is part of the part of the problem. The basic problem with wokes is their beliefs and values, not merely their intolerance to people who do not share them. They are ignorant and a tolerant ignoramus is only marginally less dangerous than an intolerant one.
One may support this or that without being a fanatic or a canceling jackass. And yes THE problem is the intolerance and the vitriolic hate. The actual beliefs are things sane and decent people can agree to disagree on, as none of us are junior gods and the world does not listen to us but goes its own way regardless.
Rod should have asked her if she would date someone with conservative politics, as that appears to be the bridge too far for the younger folk nowadays. Plus being absolutely gorgeous no doubt there are people who would really like to know haha!
I'm not a young person, but I'd have no problem dating someone with different politics, insofar as hatchets were kept buried and mutual respect not self-aggrandizing egotism reigned supreme. (Yes, there are limits to that: Nazis and Maoists need not apply)
We're old school, though. Among my peers it is not uncommon to have a liberal and a conservative married (normally of course the woman is the liberal and the man the conservative). Among younger people it seems to be almost nonexistent.
My wife and I don't share the exact same politics, plus she's viewing things from the immigrant, ex-Soviet perspective. We argue, mostly with civility, though sometimes she just wishes I would shut up about it all. If she were a bleeding-heart, let all the criminals out of jail, invite the whole world across the southern border type I probably would have a problem with that.
My father was an Eisenhower/Nixon Republican. My mother came from a family of FDR Democrats. The only clear memory I have of any political disagreement (not even at the argument level) was when Nixon resigned. My Dad thought it appalling and ranted that Nixon had been forced from office just because he got caught at doing "what everyone did". Mom crowed that "Tricky Dick" got what he deserved.
I was at my son's collegiate swim championship this past weekend. He swims for a small D1 school in the Midwest. There were several thousand people in attendance. If you are unfamiliar with swimming, it is very boujee sport. The swimmers and spectators were over 95% white and unlike me, most of them very wealthy.
Prior to the start of the session every evening the national anthem is played. This year they added playing the "black national anthem" before playing the national anthem similar to what was done at the supper bowl. They asked everyone to rise and remove their hats for both songs.
I know many people find this objectionable due to the divisiveness of preferencing one group over another and the whole baggage with the football players kneeling during the national anthem. I am one of them.
I refused to stand for the first song but rose and removed my hat for the second. As I was sitting there I looked around. There were two other men on the opposite side of the pool who remained seated during the first song and rose for the national anthem. Less than half a percent of the attendees refused to go along with the crowd.
The fourth night of competition I was late getting to my seat. They started the music while I was walking down the hallway to my entrance, there are 5 or 6 entrances on each side of the natatorium. Outside several of the entrances stood small groups of 3-6 men. They stayed outside for the first song but went in and stood for the second.
I am not sure what to make of that. To me it seemed cowardly not to express your opinion, but I am trying to be understanding. Maybe there were extenuating circumstances.
*Edited to correct spelling errors. I originally typed this on my phone. Never a good idea for people with large hands.
It’s not an either/or but honestly that’s not no.1 for me or even the top 5. I remember the furor back in the day of women decrying male only clubs and griping until the rules were changed in their favor so the fact that they are getting it thrown back doesn’t elicit much sympathy from me.
There are cheatin' Republicans too. Why would anyone think otherwise? When we've caught illegal voting it breaks down about equally by party affiliation.
Honestly I don't know. I think most of them would shut up and take it although there is some push back starting to happen led by Riley Gaines which is a good thing. For what its worth, my son had better times than Katie Ledecky by the time he was 15, and he was ranked 27th in Ohio and probably did make the top 100 in the nation.
Again, well said. We have a Black National Anthem, Kawanzaa, their own Christmas, we've eliminated educational standards to allow them to graduate from high school, enter college and medical school,, freed them from punishment for crimes, and all we have accomplished is to make them worse - not all but a large percentage. We have created a feral sub-culture in America which we accommodate, in fact encourage, and I cannot imagine a way to turn back.
I recently came across a word that sadly to me aptly describes black culture: dysgenic, the definition of which appears below.
Dysgenics is the decrease in prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or well adapted to their environment due to selective pressure disfavoring the reproduction of those traits. The adjective "dysgenic" is the antonym of "eugenic". Wikipedia
Have you ever seen Madea's Witness Protection? Joe, her crippled up pot smoking brother (also Tyler Perry) is pretty sure he's Eugene Levy's father, so, finally, he asks, "Can you swim?" and the answer is no. "I'm your daddy."
Culturally swimming is more like tennis, golf, and cross county. I have four sons who play a bunch of sports. The boys all competed in some combination of swimming, cross county, track and basketball. They also tried out lacrosse, tennis, and soccer when they were younger. There is a a distinct demographic and culture in each of the sports. We got along well with most of the parents in all of the sports with a few exceptions here and there. Race was not a factor, attitude was.
The parents we had the most in common with were the track and cross country folks. They were there just to cheer on their kids. No screaming at the refs, bitching about why their kid wasn't on the swim relay or acting self important. Your mileage may vary, but that was our experience.
We tried to raise the boys to judge each person as an individual and have respect for everyone. My point with the original post was that it the people making the noise are a small minority but very few people push back. I hear a lot people complaining all the time about woke culture and catering to some group or other but no one does anything. Everyone just goes along. No one wants to be thought ill of. Really what is anyone going to do or say if you sit during a song. If they do, it is a chance to have a conversation. People either avoid the issue or just go along because they want to avoid a difficult conversation or situation.
Maybe the vast majority of the people think having a second "black national anthem" is a good thing, but I doubt it. Playing that song and asking everyone to stand is just one more small step in dividing this country.
Maybe the vast majority of the people think having a second "black national anthem" is a good thing, but I doubt it. Playing that song and asking everyone to stand is just one more small step in dividing this country.
It's not a small step at all. It, along with things like Black History Month. is a intentional and malicious malicious effort to divide the country. And it's working. Blacks hate whites more than at any time in my lifetime and many whites are simply fed up are simply fed up with blacks. I think you are wrong if you believe that a majority of Americans believe that a black national anthem is a goof thing. They ae so intimidated by the wokes ability to "cancel" anybody that they are simply afraid to say anything.
I hear you. I too have trouble with the tiny phone keys. I was half expecting you to take a knee during the Black National Anthem. I think that is my plan for if I hear it.
The weird thing to me is that the "black national anthem," Lift Every Voice and Sing, has long been a sort of black "insider" thing. It wasn't something you heard much when white people were around. I see it as an example of white people thinking they're honoring black history, but has anyone asked black Americans if they wanted white liberals singing one of their favorite songs? I'm predicting a black backlash to this in due time.
The facile nature of it is also irksome to me. None of these white people care about black poverty or bad black schools, but hey—we'll sing a song! So tiresome.
Asymmetrical psyops. It appears that, but in reality it isn't. So the population is forced like fish in a weir to choose a path which they think is benefitting them, but in reality it's prioritized destruction. If you look at the trail of destruction in certain communities it should be pretty obvious certain policies are acting against the group(s) supposedly receiving the benefit. Then you have the leadership saying "It's like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders." Where does one go? I've had enough common experience with those communities but I can't communicate with them because of phenotype assumptions. Like I'm the Invisible Man.
Varenniki is the Ukrainian version of pierogies, and are usually filled with saurkraut or potatoes and cheese, that type of fare. I've only known the Ukrainians to branch out to the things like cherries - I have a friend from eastern Ukraine, and his mom has made the cherry ones and they were amazing. They're sweet, but sweet in the European sense, not the American "pour sugar into everything" sense. I'd bet blueberries could work as well. Once cooked, they freeze well.
I'd say yes, as long as they aren't the real thick ones. My friend's mom rolled out the dough to somewhere about 1/8" (maybe slightly thinner) and used a drinking glass to cut out the pouches (~3" diameter round cookie cutter). These would stretch a little bit when they were filled, but there would be a dollop of the filling (for the cherry ones, if I remember correctly, they were cooked so that they were in a syrupy mix) and the dough would be folded in half over the filling, and one would use a fork to "seal" the edge of the dough pouch shut before being boiled to cook the dough.
If I have this right, crostatas are more like pie? These are more like dumplings, and in the Polish and Russian recipes, I don't think I've ever seen them filled with fruit or anything sweet.
I'm on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/peschel_press/). Our account is largely for business purposes, but I discovered I like cute kitty pictures, gardening pix, and fine sewing, as well as writers.
Anyway, about what's said online. It's true! Very few people will be as openly rude in person as they will be online.
Even more so, PROVING bullies have self-control, the targets are nearly always someone who can't or won't fight back.
This is why PETA representatives throw paint on old ladies wearing fur coats while carefully avoiding Hell's Angels decked out in leather from head to toe. An old lady may scream and cry but she won't beat you up so badly you'll be in traction for a year.
I'm in Instagram as an extension of my blog, but I use it as a way to relax- no politics! - and follow music, language, and comedy accounts that make me smile! :)
My family did the same during covid. We talked for hours and hours, sharing research and laughing at the latest crazy rules. It was the only way to get through the insanity of it.
Every week I visited the supermarket unmasked, hoping to see another unmasked person. One time I caught sight of an unmasked shopper disappearing down the next aisle....I walked after him hoping to exchange a smile......it turned out to be my brother.
Excellent! Cultivating a 'blitz spirit' was the only way to get through.
I also put scissors in my handbag and cut police tape off playgrounds whenever I came across it.
Good for you on the above. Happily where I lived there was no attempt to shut down outdoor spaces-- probably because Baltimore is so infamous for lawlessness they knew darn well no one would obey.
Masks were performative etiquette - a "I care" statement. A very low bump (not even a hill) to die on. I was quite gobsmacked to see some people masking outdoors (I did that exactly once- while biking in 19 degrees (F, of course) and even the thin paper mask helped warm the frigid air up a bit as I took breaths.
2020 we still lived in suburban New York. The town had, has, an outdoor track, blacktopped and level: you could measure your walk easily by the quarter mile. They shut it down and posted a cop to make sure nobody used it. Idiots.
My "favorite" experience was hiking in the back country, a wilderness area in WV, Dolly Sods, and passing a couple of hikers on the trail wearing masks in the middle of nowhere.
In Jan 2021 I was a scofflaw up in NY. Visitors to the state were supposed to have evidence of a recent negative Covid test, or isolate for three days. Well, I went up to Holiday Valley (near the Seneca lands) to ski. The locals seem not to have cared and the Seneca nation itself is notorious for flipping off Albany . They did enforce masks inside, probably just in case state poobahs came calling.
I was living in New Paltz at the time. Very early on in the masking, it was “strongly encouraged” that people had to not only stay six feet apart but mask up while walking outdoors along the rail trail. There was a woman on the town Facebook group (the heavily “monitored” Facebook group) who lived along the trail and must’ve spent every moment she could spare from looking out her living room window at the “violators” to post her complaints about them. Sad.
In my own Hall of Shame, Bureaucratic Idiocy wing, was this:
In June of 2020 Baltimore allowed limited reopenings. Bars could be open but only for outdoor service. OK, hanging out outside on a pleasant summer evening works! So one evening a while after the initial reopening I stopped out at a favorite place, and bought a drink at a service window while awaiting friends. The outdoor seating was all occupied-- and some employee came up to me and told me I was not allowed to drink my drink unless seated! Yes, we had some words on that-- but it really was an ordinance-- no eating or drinking while standing and the bar had been ticketed for not enforcing it! That fiendish virus-- smart enough to target people on their feet not on their behinds!
In DC it was common to see people driving around alone while masked. Everyone wore a mask outside - walking, running, biking, shopping, whatever, all masked. When we started plotting our escape in the summer of 2020 we drove more than an hour west and found a lovely restaurant where we could sit outside (everything in DC was still closed) and have a nice meal and a drink. We looked around at the other people and thought, wow, there’s still normal life out here. Let’s move out here. And so we did.
Baltimore and DC are just 40 miles apart, but culturally they might as well have been on different continents. DC also freaked out and became paralyzed if three snow flakes fell, while Baltimore handled winter precipitation in stride.
Wow, you're practically a terrorist. . . .
Lol....I was driven to it!
One day I saw a small child trying to get onto the swings but the father said "Oh no, you can't go on the swings until the government says it's safe."
Knowing what a bunch of incompetents and charlatans the government are, that sentiment made my blood boil. So I thought I would be performing a service by surreptitiously cutting off the tape.
The following day the parents assumed someone in authority had removed the tape and allowed their kids to enjoy the playground.
Sometimes the world is just waiting for a vigilante to rise to the occasion.
We had the same experience. My wife would get snide comments, no one said a peep to me. Of course I look like a biker. Big beard, shaved head, heavy set.
I had a beard for a year. After shaving it off, I noticed that I got a little more snottiness from people in transactions and while out in public....nothing major, but noticeable. My wife says I look slightly "mean" with facial hair.
In the NYC metro area, years ago, I would regularly get cut-off on highways, while driving our minivan. I would then take my pickup truck to work, and the "Red Sea" would part.
I've written about this before but it's worth repeating. My brother in law looks a bit like subway shooter, Bernie Goetz: very thin, with coke-bottle glasses. He has had a series of subway run-ins. He was attacked in school and stabbed in the boy's bathroom, mugged. He's kind of a badass though, and is not one to cower away. He's been in about 5 fights with strangers, as an adult, in his life, not a brawler but not one to back down. He was quite "pro-Goetz".
I think it may be wise to attempt to change your look, if you are constantly singled out or bullied. It's probably very difficult for women.
I guess that I might look like I could handle myself in a fight, although I've never been in one. I'm gentle, but they don't necessarily know that.
After enlarging your profile pick, the eyes say: kind and approachable. The beard and hair say: not a push-over. But since I've been reading your comments for a while now, maybe I'm letting that influence me. Hard to say!
I do have a look about me, though I'm mild as a lazy kitten. In Baltimore it served me well when it came to projecting a "Don't mess with me - I have superpowers" look at potential thuglets.
OK, fine, but it goes both ways. During the pandemic my kids were freaked out and insisted everybody wear masks. They're kids, and that much younger than they are now. For my birthday we went to nice steakhouse, the four of us, and the fat goober at the next table said, "You know that doesn't do you any good, don't you?"
If I felt like a shindy and ruining everybody's evening I would have told him to shut up and how was everything in Dogpatch? But I kept quiet.
Minding your own effing business is a virtue as well.
If people had left me alone I would have loved it.
The stricture for indoor venues where I lived was that one must wear a mask while being seated or getting up for some purpose, but while seated one could lose the mask. File under "Schizoid Byzantine etiquette customs".
It was the same here in the UK. It defied all sense.
It made no sense, but everybody freaked out.
There was a spike in probably unnecessary deaths in New York, and that was likely because the MTA cut down on the number of cars per train and people were more crammed together even than usual. It was more or less then when Sonny Boy ("Climb Upon my Knee Sonny Boy") Cuomo asked for a U.S. Navy hospital ship, which it turned out filled not one bed. It could have been time to change course, but by then it was too late and our Andrew had that book contract. Of course the people who took the subway were the kind of people who take the subway, eh?
What tore it was the summer of love of course. I've written about how I can't unsee Mitt Romney taking of his mask OUTDOORS to say "I'm here because Black Lives Matter". That's plumbing the depths, don't you think, Jon?
I think Mitt just wanted to appear to be a part of it, like his Dad.
He was brainwashed.
In Austin TX, the bars were closed for awhile, whereas it was totally fine to be open if you were a restaurant that serves booze. So my local bar, instead of selling a pint for $4, began selling the pint for $2 along with the mandatory purchase of a Slim Jim stick for $2—thereby becoming a "restaurant". There, problem solved.
Precisely the same thing happened in the UK.
Pubs could open if they served a scotch egg, which apparently counted as a meal.
I would approacha restaurant without a mask, put it on as I open the door, take it off as the door closed. A few nasty stares but Noone said anything
Yes. I wore a mask when I shopped anywhere, and when I took my husband to his seemingly innumerable doctors' appointments (heart failure, COPD, etc). I got grief from some people for still being masked in the car, but when the doctors' appointments were only 5 minutes away from each other, it was more trouble to take it off than just leave it on. The worst, however, (and I've shared this story before) was when I realized we had to get everything on the same floor (we used to watch TV in the finished basement) so I hired some movers to move the stuff upstairs to make it possible for him to never have to use the stairs. Three guys came - and one of them refused to put on a mask. So I told him "Look, I'm paying you, it's my house, my husband's on oxygen, and if you don't want to wear a mask, then fine, leave. I'll find someone else to do the job." He got pissy about it, but did mask up. The other 2 (who took one look at my husband and made no objections) did most of the work, and we got things set up the way they are now.
Respect has to work both ways.
N95 for sick people was worth doing. Of course there were lies about that at the beginning that anyone with a little knowledge could see right through.
I was definitely one who was annoyed by the flouting of “rules” at first…actually for a fairly long time.
It was the attitude, like I was the dumbest person on the planet for complying. For my part, I, too, wondered why people wouldn’t just put on their face hankies and let’s get this over with.
My Dad hates what the military has become, but, the man will always follow orders. I was raised that if the Commander in Chief gives an order, well, that’s not really up for debate. He and my mom were very frightened for awhile that he would be recalled. He’s still mad at the young “idiots” who went and got themselves discharged for refusing the vaccine. He is a very loyal man to the military and this country.
My opinions about the whole thing have evolved and I try not to judge anyone too harshly (sh*, I washed my groceries for about a month).
I think as this wonderful interview illustrates, we ALL need to have a seat, take a deep breath, and start listening more. I don’t think for a second that out in the real world any one of us would have difficulty being agreeably hospitable to one another.
Perhaps it’s the spirit of Lent that has heightened my sense of being the pot who’s constantly calling the kettle black. Perhaps it’s also the spirit of Lent that my mind is extra all over the place.
At some point, I started to wonder whether the people who insisted on wearing masks were simply ugly and thought they looked better with them on.
Some of us were protecting someone we loved as much as we could. Though I'm not saying I'm beautiful, by any means.
I get it among older people, but I'm talking about young people among young people, and long after the immediate uncertainty and crisis. When they're in their cars; when they're in the park. When most others aren't doing it, which would defeat the point anyway.
Sweden took the right approach. The government acknowledged it had no authority to order lockdowns and mandates but could only make recommendations for its citizens who it came to Covid. Recall that Sweden, always the favorite social-democratic Nordic utopia among the liberal intelligentsia, became a "pariah" star in 2020/21 per the NYT and MSNBC.
When masks finally became optional, it was interesting to see brave, little old ladies shopping for groceries, mask-free and unafraid, yet at the same time, have masked 20 y.o. store employees back away from me in terror if I infringed on the 6ft cordon sanitaire to ask them a question.
I'm 67 and my partner is 72. When the "vaccine" came out we waited several months before getting the shot and even though our doctor encouraged us to get the booster, we declined. We didn't wear masks any more than we had to. Our doctor was surprised because he says we are two of the very few people he has seen who has never had covid.
I think the masks really came off (if ya will) with the BLM stuff: oh, so it's okay to go out to "fight racism", but not to pray to God? The double standard was grotesque, to the point that maybe it wasn't even hypocrisy anymore. It was simply power.
There's probably an anthropological study out there to be written on the social theatre of this whole misgotten episode.
No booster here, ever!
I believe that as well. People seemed to love the masks
Could be social anxiety as well: they feel safe not showing their faces, just like they prefer interacting through digital screens.
I think you're right. I've seen teenagers going around with black hoodies pulled over their heads even in the middle of the hottest of summers. At first I thought it was just because they thought it was the cool thing to do
but now I think they're trying to hide from the world.
I'm pretty sure that being brought up with all these techs has affected their basic brain morphology and produced in them a type of culturally generated autism, or a basic solipsism, or whatever the correct phrasing for such a condition would be.
This was known to be a thing among adolescents who are already self-conscious and feeling socially awkward. The mask let them hide whatever they thought ugly, while avoiding the shame of non-conformity at the same time. Many of them kept wearing them long after other age groups had stopped; they wanted to feel safe, but avoidance of sickness was the least worry.
Yeah: I remember that when I was an adolescent, I thought my jaw looked weird. (In fact it's slightly asymmetrical, but for the life of me I can't comprehend what funhouse mirror must have been set up in my mind back then.) Anyway, if masks had come along at that time, I would have probably been quite glad for the scenario.
The moral of this story is: thank God we never have to be teenagers again.
You couldn't convince me to be 13 again if you offered all the gold in the multiverse.
I’m currently experiencing the brunt of the horribleness that is 13. The tech just adds fuel to the adolescent fire.
I know I definitely looked better! It certainly highlighted my eyes.
Ninja chic?
I like it!
The disadvantage for me was that people suddenly thought I was approachable.
Which would contradict your username here, right? Haha.
Ha, nice! It is expected that NCOs — at least initially — be unsmiling and grim, which has the fringe benefit of reducing small talk, or “cross[ing] the bridgeless gulf of chatter.” Hard to do with a face diaper.
Personally, I find myself fond of small talk, these days. I'm more wary of people who wanna do big talk, although they are totally unfamiliar with it and only express emotions coated with a thin veneer of idea-like rhetoric.
(That's why they consider an intellectual disagreement to be a personal attack: they're just expressing their feelings, but we mistake them for having actual ideas.)
Mrs S, this is a question from honest curiosity, not disbelief or malice. The timeline of Covid restrictions and the absolute rejection of previous public health protocol in the US did not sit well with me, though I went along because I'm a pretty trusting person in general and did not know where to go to find any other information and otherwise didn't know which sources to believe. That all said, in your research did you find out how exactly Covid is transmitted? If it's basically a lung problem, wouldn't breathing on others transmit it? So therefore wouldn't masks help, at least somewhat?
Dana
"They" scared us to death. "They" had to tell us something. "They" told us lies.
No "they" about it. Use "we". The fear derived from a large fraction of the citizenry, not from on high. And under the rule of squeaky wheels ("The squeaky wheel gets grease") they were listened to.
At the risk of being a bit rude here, Rod was, very early on, one of the alarm-bell ringers. I think I first read about Covid, then just in China and later Italy, on his blog.
One of the Greatest Punch Lines to a Joke ever: Two Weeks to Level the Curve!!! It disarmed all opposition. It was also a lie.
My understanding is that you'd need the widespread proper wearing of surgical-quality masks for it to make a significant difference. Widespread happened, but not proper wearing, and not the quality. Viral particles can pass through ordinary fabric.
I also think it's sort of like with climate change, where the problem is basically economic: what's the cost/benefit tradeoff? Any type of masking would presumably produce at least a tiny improvement, but at what holistic cost?
In my view, the main factors (other than age) were Vitamin D and obesity: sunlight protected, and fat people got hit hard (and this would help explain the mystery of Africa). It seems to me that any effect of masking was negligible relative to those factors.
Remember, fat is an identity now, and we are thus no longer allowed to mention that remaining fat is practically the single worst thing anyone could do for their longevity and health.
For me it was the opposite: I used the time I was no longer wasting on commuting to and from work for increased and daily biking. And I was no longer subjected to pizza lunches and donuts for all in the morning at the office. Or for a few weeks going out for drinks with friends on the weekend. Or tons of sweets after Liturgy at church. I lost weight-- unintentionally at first.
N95 masks for the sick were useful. Paper, or even worse cloth masks were theater. I oppose the mask mandates but sick people need to do the best that they can.
"Slava Ukrainii!" has been around a long, long time.
I worked in an essential industry so I just went to work everyday still. I oddly enough remember covid as a good time in life except for church being canceled.
I worked from home, and while I didn't mind not having a commute, the isolation was wearing on me. I did lots of biking, and did the Liturgy online courtesy of a church I once attended up in Ohio.
My friends started doing small backyard get-togethers as soon as the weather warmed up.
Rod's "Covid Diaries" posts on TAC were a godsend, letting us keep in touch with others, during the initial days when no one quite knew what was going to happen.
Yes I was lucky I was still able to go into work. That kept my life very normal for the most part.
KB has a lot of wisdom.
Rod, Ms. Brodsky nailed it when she mentioned the Internet never forgets. That there is no redemption, no forgiveness under the religion of woke ideology is frightening. Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote “No Future Without Forgiveness”. He promoted Truth and Reconciliation. But a video you posted from South Africa showing a new leader and a whole stadium chanting “Kill The Boer, The Farmer” shows a terrible predicament. The potential to be condemned increases dramatically when there is no forgetting, no redemption, no forgiveness, no mercy. The Internet and AI offer no refuge.
Speaking of Live Not By Lies, I am most interested in your thoughts on the mainstream media headlines that Greece is the first Orthodox Christian nation to allow gay marriage and adoption. What is the impact on other Orthodox countries and the Orthodox Church? You recently posted an article about an infant baptism performed by a Greek Orthodox leader where the parents were homosexual. Thoughts?
I think there is zero chance any other Orthodox country will go this way anytime soon. Greece is pretty Westernized among Orthodox countries. The Greek Orthodox Church fought this, but Greece is not as faithful as it once was.
Maybe Cyprus? Though the ongoing cold war with Turkey over the island's long divided state may drain the energy from any other social division.
I pray you are right. I am neither Greek nor Orthodox, but my heart sank when I saw that news. I hope you do a write up on it. Curious for your thoughts on a deep dive.
It's hard to know what to say, to be honest. I don't know much of anything about Greece. This move is utterly contrary to Orthodox teaching, and the Greek bishops fought it. But Greece is fairly post-Christian, I am told. But honestly, I don't know for sure.
I think people expect the Orthodox to look to Greece like Catholics look to the Vatican. The way Orthodoxy works in the US, in particular, the parishes have a lot more weight - want better bishops? Build the community to better parishes. I don't think that necessarily works so well on the Catholic side; there's a lot more power accumulated at the top. On one hand, it's very sad that this has happened in Greece, on the other, I don't know how it affects much in the Orthodox Church at large or in my parish here in the US.
Orthodoxy features a degree of decentralization- and non-clericalism- that I find very healthy. This goes way back. When the Isaurian emperors imposed iconoclasm on Byzantium, the bishops mostly kowtowed to them. The common people kept their icons buried in their gardens and kept alive the tradition of iconodulia across three generations.
Tutu is dead, but where is the CofE now that it's a white neck on the block, eh?
Nothing but contempt for the rainbow jackboot Wokies. Nothing but. I've experienced doxxing attempts twice in my life, where activists tried to contact my bosses/employers and make trouble for me. Interestingly, though, the first time, it was from rightwing douchebags. And of all points of interest, from fans of the original Battlestar Galactica (of which, I was and still am) and who hated the remake from Ronald D. Moore (still a big fan of that one, too. RDM does great space-based shows, from his involvement in Star Trek, including being showrunner of Deep Space Nine, to his BSG remake, to his current show of alternate space race history, For All Mankind). At the time, I was in the Army, and those freaks managed to get email to my Sergeant Major at AFN Europe. Who was a fan of my show, and we were friends, at least as much friends as a black sheep out on the edge Specialist disc jockey could be with a network Sergeant Major. But she got my back, quoting regs, that I can state political opinions if I keep my Army stuff out of it.
The second time, many years later, working for a local public radio station doing morning drive (my current gig). Stated some conservative viewpoints on FB, Wokies went to my home page, saw my place of employment, tried bringing that to my boss. He laughed it off and that was that. But it did convince me to use a pseudonym on social media and I ramped up the security and privacy settings on my information all the way up. Life is too short and I've no time for swatting away those poop eating flies.
You lost me at the first paragraph but I get the drift, Stoney!
The point of the first para was that it was right wing douchenozzles that gave me my first taste of doxxing. In fact, it was not even the difference of opinion over BSG which really set them off, that was just gasoline on the fire. They REALLY hated my less than positive opinions of GWBush and the Iraq War.
Interesting. Reminds me of the book "They Thought They Were Free" by Milton Meyer about German society during the rise of the Nazis, and there's a few passages in there that suggest the Nazis might have been stopped early on had people the courage to take a stand against it, and stand with friends and colleagues who did. But everyone just kept their heads down until it was too late.
Once the Nazis were installed in power could they have been stopped then? I very much doubt it. The time for that was before the election.
From the book:
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows.... In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked-if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D....
Had the French army had attacked Germany when the Germans militarized the Rhineland in 1936, the German army was ready to overthrow Hitler. But that was the last chance to stand up to Hitler. Once he bluffed France at the Rhineland, Hitler was unstoppable until 1945.
Also if the French and Brits had crossed the Rhine in September 1939, when every last bit of German military hardware was in Poland, the war might have ended much earlier rather than later.
France was psychologically defeated before World War Two. It was a society as deeply divided as America is today.
Keep in mind that when Germany invaded Poland Stalin was allied with Hitler. That very definitely affected any calculus Britain and France may have had at the time.
Just ordered the book. That period interests me.
An eye-opening read. I'm fascinated by that period as well, the early years of the Third Reich, how society was molded/transformed and what the thought process of "ordinary" Germans could have possibly been
A lot of determined apathy.
Before I was out of grade school my father insisted on the lesson that bullies must be stood up to, unpleasant as it may be. They just get more bullying if you let them have their way.
He's right. Playground 101. If bullies see that their bullying has positive results (for them), no reason to stop. Besides, the people who do it tend to like inflicting misery, so the suffering of their victims is all good, as far as they are concerned. But they do not like it when they receive pain.
Even Mr. Brady taught Peter how to throw a bunch, after “try to reason with him” didn’t stop that bully from teasing poor Cindy about her lisp.
The trouble is that every society has boundary policing when it comes to expression -- it's one of the main ways societies maintain social cohesion. What those boundaries are changes, it's true, but the nature of the policing doesn't change that much, although of course technology can provide new ways in which social boundary policing can manifest.
In the recent past there was tremendous pressure, socially, to conform to certain prevailing rules regarding religion (including attendance at some church, regardless of how one really believed), sex, gender roles, and so on, just to take a few areas ... there are many others. These social views flipped, and so the flipped versions of them have also become enforced, in many ways, in reverse, and for the same basic reason -- social cohesion. There are new ways one shows conformity to the regnant set of values -- what used to be demonstrated, in other words, by nominal Sunday attendance, is now dominated by political statements or yard signs or what have you, but it's the same thing going on. And there weren't very many openly vocal dissenters under the old system, either, because they suffered the same social penalties if they did so.
Now, as I say above, the internet does expand this considerably due to the ability to ostracize people digitally which didn't exist previously, but the internet also creates a greater need for policing as well, socially, precisely because it provides such a large venue for the expression of dissenting views. The current environment is not one in which views are suppressed in general -- it's one which is drowning in all kinds of crackpotted views, thanks to the internet allowing every idiotic barfly a global megaphone. So the need for social policing mechanisms to ensure that people who actually have some power in the society, economically and socially, aren't influenced by said barfly's views, is even greater than it was in the pre-internet era -- hence the increased "vigilance" in social policing.
This isn't going away, I think. Railing about it won't make it go away, social policing of views which are permissibly expressed, in terms of boundaries, is a human thing. One can come to one's own way of going about the policing mechanisms, but the idea that it will be some kind of platonic dialogue at some stage where everyone simply engages in full on good faith philosophic exhcnage of views is hopelessly idealistic. Ideas will always be policed socially by power. Always.
When did religious zealots try to get folk sacked from their jobs for not attending church?
I mostly agree with you about this, but in the US at least I've been told that within living memory there were smaller communities (not large cities or suburbs) where non-church goers and open atheists were ostracized.
There may be small communities in some countries where this was the case.
In the UK, in the twentieth century, I think you would search in vain to find a person who had been ostracised for not attending church.
I grew up in probably the most religiously observant county in the entire U.S.—Lancaster County, Pa.—in the 60s and 70s. And no one was ostracized for not attending church or even not belonging to a church. It’s true that if you wanted to hobnob with the small-town gentry there, the question of what church you belonged to might come into play. But otherwise, no.
I never experienced it and a century ago in Toledo OH my paternal non-churchgoing grandparents didn't. I only repeat what I've been told by others above
Those others are wrong. They don’t know what they’re talking about and they hate Christianity. That’s the sole motivation here.
I think you are being presumptuous. One of those people is an elderly church-goer in the Pentecostal tradition.
I grew up in the half 60’s and 70’s in a small Kansas town. That was never a thing there.
It was common enough in small towns throughout the US prior to the 1960s era. Keep in mind, it wasn't the internet, so it played out differently. Whisper campaigns, rumors, and people just not getting promotions, not getting jobs, not being sold houses and so on. It was more subtle in how it played out, but it was certainly the case that there was a lot of social pressure to be outwardly "church-going" regardless of how religious you were -- people knew not everyone was religious, but it was an act of social conformity.
Show me some evidence.
Exactly, show us evidence. How many times has Rod written about his dad stop going to church because he was angry about some internal church thing that upset his dad. Rod's dad was not ostracized and this was in the 60's deep south small town.
Read Main Street. Yes, yes, it's a novel, and Lewis doesn't really like Gopher Prairie, but you do get a feel for what it was like.
You get a feel for what Lewis was like, rather.
How do you know all this? Were you an adult in 1959? You’d need to be at least 82 years old now. Where have you lived as an adult?
You would have to go back several hundred years to find Christians treating atheists like this old lady has been treated,
"MS Society DEFENDS staff who sacked 90-year-old volunteer because she 'asked what pronouns meant'"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13088453/ms-society-slammed-firing-elderly-volunteer-pronouns.html
And those literary reenactments of such religious intolerance have always struck me as false. I don’t want to say that there have NEVER been small-town dissidents who have faced ostracism, but in the U.S., it has always been easy enough to move on to more congenial places anyway. The one major episode of persecution I can think of has been the hounding of the Mormons past the 100th meridian. Beyond that, not much of any systematic sort.
And those writers representing such intolerance, definitely have larger anti-religious agendas. I’m thinking of Sinclair Lewis and his ilk. But Hawthorne himself was part of the New England crowd around Emerson that thought highly of its own broad-mindedness. Tales about this stuff always ring false to me, if only because of the very proliferation of religious freakiness in the U.S.
Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken certainly found deep wells in the ridiculing of those who unabashedly thumped for Holy Writ, as they often called it. Such phrasing, in fact, was common among popular writers like Stewart Holbrook and Joseph C. Lincoln. These are not the cultural exponents one expects to find in a religiously intolerant country.
"some kind of Platonic dialogue where everyone simply engages in full in good faith philosophic exchange of views"
Sounds sort of like this place, actually.
You wrote: "Ideas will always be policed socially by power. Always."
Yes, but...when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, power at least admitted it was power. Now that progressives are in charge of most of our institutions, they're still pretending to be the minority. Here in my county, a rainbow flag flies during Pride Month from a government flagpole and the school curriculum is drenched in LGBT material from K through 12, and teachers and administrators (all of them employees of the state) have to go along unquestioningly with any new LGBT-positive policy.
And yet a handful of Muslim parents who politely ask to opt out of LGBT material are treated as the tyrants and oppressors—against the state, against the school system, against the unions, and against the LGBT lobby.
That's the biggest cultural difference right now: The people who hold all the cards are still pretending to be outsiders, a dissenting minority fighting the noble fight against power. Sure, power always polices ideas, but there's an added layer of poisonous gaslighting by the powerful than makes the present day quite a bit worse.
Miss Brodsky's last paragraph is right on. What kind of person wants an apology from someone for something not done to them? A dishonorable person. A dishonest person. A sociopath. Someone like Joy Reid fits the bill. She wants reparations and claims that African-Americans built all of America. That assertion is a lie. Moreover, Joy Reid has built nothing on her own but her media career blabbing her gums.
She’s not the only one...
To her credit, Reid, while on a hot mike, said, "Not another f-----g war," during a Biden segment, but unfortunately profusely apologized afterwards -- and not for the profanity. She knows which side her bread's buttered.
Not sure how this anecdote is to her credit.
I can’t even describe the depth of my contempt for her and her ilk...at least Keith Olbermann is confined to the fringe...
I love the title of her book, which is excellent...even mandatory...advice for conservatives with a public platform in the Age of Woke.
In real life, of course, sometimes apologies are a decent and necessary thing...an indication of character. But in Cancel Culture where those howling for apologies are not acting in good faith and seek only a person's destruction, apologies are deadly. Never play defense with these jackals. Hit them back...hard.
My son Matt Walsh was the target of this little game when back in late 2022, Media Matters and other Woke outlets went after him big-time because he was drawing so much blood in the battle to save kids from sexual mutilation at the hands of the Gender Cult.
So after combing through every word he ever said or wrote starting when he broke into the media business as a shock jock on a small Delaware radio station in his early 20s, they triumphantly seized on and distorted a few stray out-of-context lines to spread scandalous lies all over the Internet. But it blew up in their faces.
In fact, Matt's answer on his Daily Wire show, which went viral, could serve as a template for how not to apologize to the Cancel Mob. The segment is classic...12 minutes long...but here's the wind-up excerpt near the close:
"Here's my official answer for the record: Kiss my ass. I do not apologize. In fact, by all rights you sick freaks should be the ones apologizing to me for lying and defaming me...and doing it all because I'm trying to prevent you from sexually mutilating children...you child-abusing psychopaths. I wouldn't apologize to you soulless parasites if I had a gun to my head. Instead I'd rather just tell you all to piss off. I apologize for nothing. I concede nothing. I will never surrender even a single inch of ground to a pitchfork mob of degenerate morons."
Yep. To them, an apology is just laying on your back, belly exposed, neck bared. They only see weakness, and they are taking advantage of your presumed adherence to the old rules of civilization to try to get you to expose that weakness. Don't do it. Attack, attack, attack, without mercy.
Agreed: never, ever apologize to savages such as these.
I remember that episode now. Love the way he responded,
Thank you.
Below is a link to that show from October 2022. His response is in the first segment and runs around 12-13 minutes or so. He was in a hotel room at the time...on the road for a speech at I forget where.
Anyway, it's classic...and hopefully I'm not overstepping any boundary lines by posting it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0rCecrYQFI&t=2s
You’re his dad? The kids at school love Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman video
Thanks...What Is A Woman broke new ground and became an incredible success despite Regime media's predictable silent treatment. God bless Elon Musk for promoting it on X.
Yup, I'm his Dad, and trust me: his story is amazing. If you didn't believe in God before hearing it, you might believe afterward. But it's not mine to tell. Maybe some day he will.
I started following Matt Walsh before fame and fortune. I am not sure how I found him originally but I remembered thinking this guy knows what’s happening and he’s not a fan. I am a subscriber to Daily Wire and have been since the beginning (also discovered Ben Shapiro before fame and fortune). Having this group of courageous and outspoken thinkers helps keep me sane.
She seems a nice person but my reaction is the same as it was to Bill Maher; there is no woke without liberals. Their rhetoric has been toxic since Nixon, this is the inevitable result. I don’t see how being traditionally liberal is going to hold back the hurricane now.
I appreciate your comments but I think that train has left the station at least for the time being. Depending on who comes out victorious that may be able to come back. I’ve been reading new authors:
https://open.substack.com/pub/agentmax/p/living-accordance-with-reality?r=2819du&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Well said. I don't know the extent of her liberalism and I'm not interested in finding out but if she is like the typical liberal supporting affirmative action, disparate impact, acceptance pf transgenders etc., then she is part of the part of the problem. The basic problem with wokes is their beliefs and values, not merely their intolerance to people who do not share them. They are ignorant and a tolerant ignoramus is only marginally less dangerous than an intolerant one.
One may support this or that without being a fanatic or a canceling jackass. And yes THE problem is the intolerance and the vitriolic hate. The actual beliefs are things sane and decent people can agree to disagree on, as none of us are junior gods and the world does not listen to us but goes its own way regardless.
Rod should have asked her if she would date someone with conservative politics, as that appears to be the bridge too far for the younger folk nowadays. Plus being absolutely gorgeous no doubt there are people who would really like to know haha!
I'm not a young person, but I'd have no problem dating someone with different politics, insofar as hatchets were kept buried and mutual respect not self-aggrandizing egotism reigned supreme. (Yes, there are limits to that: Nazis and Maoists need not apply)
We're old school, though. Among my peers it is not uncommon to have a liberal and a conservative married (normally of course the woman is the liberal and the man the conservative). Among younger people it seems to be almost nonexistent.
My wife and I don't share the exact same politics, plus she's viewing things from the immigrant, ex-Soviet perspective. We argue, mostly with civility, though sometimes she just wishes I would shut up about it all. If she were a bleeding-heart, let all the criminals out of jail, invite the whole world across the southern border type I probably would have a problem with that.
My father was an Eisenhower/Nixon Republican. My mother came from a family of FDR Democrats. The only clear memory I have of any political disagreement (not even at the argument level) was when Nixon resigned. My Dad thought it appalling and ranted that Nixon had been forced from office just because he got caught at doing "what everyone did". Mom crowed that "Tricky Dick" got what he deserved.
I was at my son's collegiate swim championship this past weekend. He swims for a small D1 school in the Midwest. There were several thousand people in attendance. If you are unfamiliar with swimming, it is very boujee sport. The swimmers and spectators were over 95% white and unlike me, most of them very wealthy.
Prior to the start of the session every evening the national anthem is played. This year they added playing the "black national anthem" before playing the national anthem similar to what was done at the supper bowl. They asked everyone to rise and remove their hats for both songs.
I know many people find this objectionable due to the divisiveness of preferencing one group over another and the whole baggage with the football players kneeling during the national anthem. I am one of them.
I refused to stand for the first song but rose and removed my hat for the second. As I was sitting there I looked around. There were two other men on the opposite side of the pool who remained seated during the first song and rose for the national anthem. Less than half a percent of the attendees refused to go along with the crowd.
The fourth night of competition I was late getting to my seat. They started the music while I was walking down the hallway to my entrance, there are 5 or 6 entrances on each side of the natatorium. Outside several of the entrances stood small groups of 3-6 men. They stayed outside for the first song but went in and stood for the second.
I am not sure what to make of that. To me it seemed cowardly not to express your opinion, but I am trying to be understanding. Maybe there were extenuating circumstances.
*Edited to correct spelling errors. I originally typed this on my phone. Never a good idea for people with large hands.
It’s not an either/or but honestly that’s not no.1 for me or even the top 5. I remember the furor back in the day of women decrying male only clubs and griping until the rules were changed in their favor so the fact that they are getting it thrown back doesn’t elicit much sympathy from me.
I sometimes dream of an election with a zero-percent voter turnout rate.
I abstain from voting, and I'm sometimes asked what would happen if everyone did as I do. My response: "Go for it—I have thought this through."
The Democrats would ballot harvest dead people so they still win.
Ah, the zombies—why is it always the zombies.
There are cheatin' Republicans too. Why would anyone think otherwise? When we've caught illegal voting it breaks down about equally by party affiliation.
Honestly I don't know. I think most of them would shut up and take it although there is some push back starting to happen led by Riley Gaines which is a good thing. For what its worth, my son had better times than Katie Ledecky by the time he was 15, and he was ranked 27th in Ohio and probably did make the top 100 in the nation.
Cowards. This infuriating tendency to accommodate is the main reason why this country is lost.
Again, well said. We have a Black National Anthem, Kawanzaa, their own Christmas, we've eliminated educational standards to allow them to graduate from high school, enter college and medical school,, freed them from punishment for crimes, and all we have accomplished is to make them worse - not all but a large percentage. We have created a feral sub-culture in America which we accommodate, in fact encourage, and I cannot imagine a way to turn back.
Brilliant! A feral sub-culture is a perfect description of this community.
I recently came across a word that sadly to me aptly describes black culture: dysgenic, the definition of which appears below.
Dysgenics is the decrease in prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or well adapted to their environment due to selective pressure disfavoring the reproduction of those traits. The adjective "dysgenic" is the antonym of "eugenic". Wikipedia
And everybody was white, right?
Have you ever seen Madea's Witness Protection? Joe, her crippled up pot smoking brother (also Tyler Perry) is pretty sure he's Eugene Levy's father, so, finally, he asks, "Can you swim?" and the answer is no. "I'm your daddy."
Culturally swimming is more like tennis, golf, and cross county. I have four sons who play a bunch of sports. The boys all competed in some combination of swimming, cross county, track and basketball. They also tried out lacrosse, tennis, and soccer when they were younger. There is a a distinct demographic and culture in each of the sports. We got along well with most of the parents in all of the sports with a few exceptions here and there. Race was not a factor, attitude was.
The parents we had the most in common with were the track and cross country folks. They were there just to cheer on their kids. No screaming at the refs, bitching about why their kid wasn't on the swim relay or acting self important. Your mileage may vary, but that was our experience.
We tried to raise the boys to judge each person as an individual and have respect for everyone. My point with the original post was that it the people making the noise are a small minority but very few people push back. I hear a lot people complaining all the time about woke culture and catering to some group or other but no one does anything. Everyone just goes along. No one wants to be thought ill of. Really what is anyone going to do or say if you sit during a song. If they do, it is a chance to have a conversation. People either avoid the issue or just go along because they want to avoid a difficult conversation or situation.
Maybe the vast majority of the people think having a second "black national anthem" is a good thing, but I doubt it. Playing that song and asking everyone to stand is just one more small step in dividing this country.
Live not by Lies.
Chad
Cross country was the most non-political, sport my kids were involved in. Your times, were your times
Maybe the vast majority of the people think having a second "black national anthem" is a good thing, but I doubt it. Playing that song and asking everyone to stand is just one more small step in dividing this country.
It's not a small step at all. It, along with things like Black History Month. is a intentional and malicious malicious effort to divide the country. And it's working. Blacks hate whites more than at any time in my lifetime and many whites are simply fed up are simply fed up with blacks. I think you are wrong if you believe that a majority of Americans believe that a black national anthem is a goof thing. They ae so intimidated by the wokes ability to "cancel" anybody that they are simply afraid to say anything.
February is the longest month of the year.
Never in a million years did I expect you to cite Madea's Witness Protection. I remember chuckling at that scene too.
The phrase "supper bowl" is still in there, and as far as I'm concerned, you should just leave it as it is.
Oh man, I definitely missed that typo with my edit. It is pretty funny though.
I read somewhere that Americans consume more calories on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year.
The next Monday also has the highest rate of people calling in sick. I think I saw it somewhere.
I hear you. I too have trouble with the tiny phone keys. I was half expecting you to take a knee during the Black National Anthem. I think that is my plan for if I hear it.
The weird thing to me is that the "black national anthem," Lift Every Voice and Sing, has long been a sort of black "insider" thing. It wasn't something you heard much when white people were around. I see it as an example of white people thinking they're honoring black history, but has anyone asked black Americans if they wanted white liberals singing one of their favorite songs? I'm predicting a black backlash to this in due time.
The facile nature of it is also irksome to me. None of these white people care about black poverty or bad black schools, but hey—we'll sing a song! So tiresome.
Until this Superbowl I never heard of any black national anthem.
And yes, few things are more tedious than performative liberalism where the show's the thing.
I have never mashed a Subscribe button so fast in all my time on Substack. Tee'd up the book for purchase on pay day.
Asymmetrical psyops. It appears that, but in reality it isn't. So the population is forced like fish in a weir to choose a path which they think is benefitting them, but in reality it's prioritized destruction. If you look at the trail of destruction in certain communities it should be pretty obvious certain policies are acting against the group(s) supposedly receiving the benefit. Then you have the leadership saying "It's like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders." Where does one go? I've had enough common experience with those communities but I can't communicate with them because of phenotype assumptions. Like I'm the Invisible Man.
Cherry varenniki is amazing, but not the only flavor! :)
Now I need to find a recipe! I’ll have fresh blueberries this summer.
Varenniki is the Ukrainian version of pierogies, and are usually filled with saurkraut or potatoes and cheese, that type of fare. I've only known the Ukrainians to branch out to the things like cherries - I have a friend from eastern Ukraine, and his mom has made the cherry ones and they were amazing. They're sweet, but sweet in the European sense, not the American "pour sugar into everything" sense. I'd bet blueberries could work as well. Once cooked, they freeze well.
I am going to be all over this over the summer! Same dough as pierogies?
I'd say yes, as long as they aren't the real thick ones. My friend's mom rolled out the dough to somewhere about 1/8" (maybe slightly thinner) and used a drinking glass to cut out the pouches (~3" diameter round cookie cutter). These would stretch a little bit when they were filled, but there would be a dollop of the filling (for the cherry ones, if I remember correctly, they were cooked so that they were in a syrupy mix) and the dough would be folded in half over the filling, and one would use a fork to "seal" the edge of the dough pouch shut before being boiled to cook the dough.
I bookmarked this recipe awhile back, it looks very close to what I remember, but my friend's mom didn't do the topping. https://cook.me/recipe/vareniki-pierogi-cherries/
Wonderful. Looking forward to much deliciousness!
Are they anything like Crostatas? I make them with Raspberries or blueberries usually.
If I have this right, crostatas are more like pie? These are more like dumplings, and in the Polish and Russian recipes, I don't think I've ever seen them filled with fruit or anything sweet.
Yeah, more like pie--I usually make them big like a pie, but you can make them small and hand-held.
But I like dumplings as well, might have to Google a recipe.
These also sound good. I shall look up a recipe. Anyone want to come cook with me? I can’t wait for summer now.
I'm on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/peschel_press/). Our account is largely for business purposes, but I discovered I like cute kitty pictures, gardening pix, and fine sewing, as well as writers.
Anyway, about what's said online. It's true! Very few people will be as openly rude in person as they will be online.
Even more so, PROVING bullies have self-control, the targets are nearly always someone who can't or won't fight back.
This is why PETA representatives throw paint on old ladies wearing fur coats while carefully avoiding Hell's Angels decked out in leather from head to toe. An old lady may scream and cry but she won't beat you up so badly you'll be in traction for a year.
I'm in Instagram as an extension of my blog, but I use it as a way to relax- no politics! - and follow music, language, and comedy accounts that make me smile! :)
Exactly! Instagram for me is for fun. No politics. Lots of kitty pix and author quotes and book love.