Her racism is a part of the Democratic Demonization Strategy—to lie about good guys so they are hated.
This Demonization leads to the Dem Derangement Syndrome, that Krauthamer mislabelled BDS, then TDS. (Since neither Bush nor Trump, but Dems are deranged).
Re Attiah's firing: "But I don’t want people fired simply for rejecting Charlie Kirk’s politics. . . It could be that the Post realized that it no longer wishes to platform left-wing racists who feel comfortable routinely demonizing white males as white males." It could be that they don't want a liar who refuses to get the story correct. As you noted, Kirk did NOT make that quote about "Black women" - it was about a handful of specific women. Attiah lied and said it was Black women. There was a video of him on youtube making the statement, and the captions read "Black women," dishonestly, where the names of the specific women should have been. If Attiah is deaf, she has an honest excuse. Otherwise, she sucks as a journalist and likely should have been fired long ago. I read a substack piece of hers about Kirk, and it was full of false testimony, likely the same lies that got him killed. Good riddance.
How about the governor of Illinois, that matinee idol Pritzker, who said anybody who accused him of calling Republicans Nazis was lying? I and about 500 other people posted the video evidence in the comments on X.
Remember that in Dante’s purgatorio wrath is represented by a choking acrid blinding smoke. I pray that the smoke clears for all that are caught up in it. “In your anger do not sin…”
Hatred and anger are dark passions which never serve the Light. Yes, evolution crafted them for a reason-- but linked to human intelligence they are a spiritual danger. Along with fear, shame, envy, and jealousy they are as fodder to demons and open us up Hell's sweet persuasions.
Oh, that's an easy one. If I am not mistaken, Jesus was familiar with the Pentateuch, which says in Deuteronomy, "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. I will repay." And as God in the form of a man, would it not be his prerogative to do as he did?
Jesus was incapable of sin. I think we can agree on that. In the modern world he could go into a crack house or the raunchiest gay back room and not fall to temptation. But prudence dictates the rest of of us should try to avoid undue temptation.
Some of this is semantics, but anger is the proper, ordered response to injustice. If one doesn't feel "anger" in the face of injustice, then he is immoral and lacking in virtue. And with that feeling of anger, one should be motivated to work against the injustice. So perhaps it is better to use the term "wrath" to describe disordered anger, which is of course sinful.
Feeling anger is one thing. Letting anger make your choices and use you like a tool is something very different. Ever fly off the handle and say or do things you very much regretted afterward? That's a common human experience. This is why we should look on anger with the same caution we look on indulgence in other unbridled passions like lust.
It is important to distinguish between anger and wrath. Anger is a reaction which we don't always have control over (like sadness, happiness, etc.) whereas wrath is a choice. A good father can be angry that his child wrecked the car, but he can choose to react with loving and patient rather than wrathful discipline.
Re: Anger is a reaction which we don't always have control over
I very much agree. And there's grades of anger, from small annoyances like the twist cap that we can't get off a bottle to the guy who cuts you off in traffic, to more serious things. I don't think even great saints and bodhisattvas are passionless. But they are capable of lashing those passions.
I'm not sure hatred was "crafted" for a "reason." What reason? Lions don't hate zebras, they merely find it necessary to eat them. Human intelligence carried away by passions like anger and rage makes them more dangerous. Constrained by human intelligence -- which is one part of the result of God breathing into man's nostrils so that he became a living soul -- they can be channeled in occasionally useful ways.
The problem in humans is that these passions "stick". My old cat occasionally doesn't want to be bothered and he'll turn around and bite if I bother him-- and then a half hour later show up purring to be petted. Humans nurse their hatreds and grudges. Letting go of past hurts is one of the most difficult things we must do if we seek spiritual and mental good health (I know something about this)
It works for me. Maybe you're clicking on the photo at the top, instead of the embedded video right under it. Anyway, here's the link cued to the 1:50 mark, when Vance's final remarks begin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngofqx9EfcM&t=6650s
The problem isn't "hate speech" - it is false testimony - the repeating of untrue allegations, such as "Kirk said x," when he didn't. No need to go after hate speech. Just go after direct incitement - "punch a TERF," and slander.
Back in the 1960s, when he was a college student, my friend’s dad had an interning job at a book publisher in which he truncated quotes from reviews. So things like, “This is the worst thing I have ever read. The author needs to observe a ‘real’ author who knows how to tell a gripping story.” would become, “…gripping story…”.
Unlike old-school radical Marxists and Bolsheviks, modern day Discord Marxists are not really capable of political organization or anything political in general. This is because effective politics requires you to be a practical-minded adult (even if you are also morally questionable, as the Bolsheviks were).
The only influence that they have inherited from the Old Marxist era is that they agree it is justified to lie about your political enemies ("ends justify the means"). Hence spreading lies and poisoning the discourse is basically the only thing that they do effectively.
It really is kind of remarkable. Most of these people lead a parasitical lifestyle but also have an ideology that makes them think that they are socially and morally superior to everyone else. That's probably the perfect recipe to make someone socially obnoxious and undesirable. They were shielded from the consequences of this for some time, but times might be changing now.
Also false testimony about Floyd: calling his death his "murder." The media often implied racism was a factor, using context to make the smear, but they out and out lied on cause of death.
Derek Chauvin was convicted of both second and third degree murder. as a matter of legal fact (and yes, the law gets to make those distinctions) Floyd was murdered.
Floyd was loaded with enough fentanyl to kill a horse, and his heart stopped as he vigorously resisted arrest for passing a counterfeit bill. The autopsy revealed he was not strangled, as his trachea was not crushed, and he first claimed "I can't breathe" as he sat in the back of the police car. Derek Chauvin was convicted as a sacrificial victim offered to the leftist gods who rule Minneapolis so they would not burn down the city. It is no more complicated than that.
Re: Floyd was loaded with enough fentanyl to kill a horse,
This has been debunked numerous times. If he had done that much fentanyl he wouldn't have gotten five feet. Those kinds of ODs kill quickly, as soon as the drug reaches the brain stem (unlike Cocaine and meth which can cause heart attacks hours after a use indulges). Junkies are even found with needles still in their arms.
I believe the findings by multiple medical examiners and by a court of law with all the legal protections for the accused in place. Your assertion is a falsehood devised by evil people who just cannot conceive the police ever do anything wrong.
Check out the "Innocence Project", which proudly--with justification--asserts that it has freed over 250 people wrongly convicted, all of whom were tried "with all the legal protections for the accused in place." It is undisputed that Floyd had fentanyl in his system, that cause of death was not strangulation, that he was initially placed peaceably in the back of the police car, and that Chauvin used a method expressly approved by the Minneapolis Police Department to subdue him only after he became agitated. It is possible that Chauvin kept him in that hold too long, but as the police manual did not specify a time limit for use of the hold, the very worst Chauvin should have been convicted of is negligent homicide. The murder conviction was a travesty of justice prompted by the leftist narrative that all white cops are racists.
Jon, color me as someone who knows the police do a lot of things wrong. They're human, no less subject to incompetence or wickedness than any of the rest of us. That doesn't mean there's no truth in what Richard says about the powers that be in Minneapolis, including the courts, making a scapegoat of Derek Chauvin. He may have held that pin position too long on a guy who had heart conditions and was under the influence of sedating and/or respiration-suppressing drugs. But murder or even manslaughter in any degree? I'm deeply skeptical. And that's largely because of the liberal media's predictable toeing of the proverbial company line. Whenever events can be finessed to support their exhausted oppressor v. oppressed narrative -- and with all their usual suspects lined up on both sides of that fictitious divide -- slanted they are.
Jon, a Minneapolis jury convicted Chauvin of murder. One of the most left-wing cities in America. Chauvin would not have been convicted of murder in West Virginia. Or even any of the many counties in Minnesota in the north of the state. Chauvin was unwise to work for the city of Minneapolis as was the other three cops.
Derek, abusive policing is a problem all across the nation. I've mentioned by own home town in Michigan-- where there was a shooting, of a white homeowner, so egregious it beggars belief-- and yet no charges were ever filed and no law suit was brought, in large part because the widow was given a massive settlement on the condition that she hold her peace. It took an insurer threatening to cancel the city's policies (which would have forced the city to disincorporate and throw itself on the state's mercy) to finally compel reforms.
We've seen case after case around the country where the police always get off-- or are never charged at all. And when that sort of thing provokes vast public disorder then, yes, something does have to stop and change. Alas, it seems that for some people it's just never the right time for that change. They'd probably defend the cops who shot the white guy in my home town dead in front of his wife and toddler child. Because some people seem to think the police are little gods in blue who can do no wrong.
George Floyd was a lowlife and petty criminal and he passed a counterfeit twenty. But he was dumb as a box of rocks-- I very much doubt he was a counterfeiter himself-- that takes some skills and know-how. Most likely someone passed the bogus bill to him-- maybe his drug dealer-- figuring he was too dumb to know it was fake. What should have happened is that the cops should have talked to him and tried to find out where he got the funny money-- information which could have been given to the Feds whose job it is to deal with counterfeit money. The whole ugly mess would have been avoided-- no dead guy (even if, to be candid, he was not exactly a major loss) and no nationwide upheavals.
VP Vance's comments rightly underscore that without truth, there can be no unity. Ms. Attiyeh embodies this issue quite well, with her lies about Kirk (sadly, she is not alone among the press in this regard).
Likewise, unity is not possible with people whose thirst is merely for the power of their leftist, marxist project.
Kirk's assassination has galvanized "the normies" to return to church and for peaceful vigils. No George Floyd like violent riots (Floyd riots caused 19 deaths and $2B in damages, conservative estimates). Not seeing violence from the right and God willing, won't see it either.
Mark Halperin suggested that most of the left/liberal folks he knows have NO idea about Kirk or how their fellow countrymen think or view these issues. None--and hence the MSM slants are unwitting--similar to the famous Pauline Kale comment that she knew no-one who voted for Nixon so how could he have won.
Maybe this is true; but when the left and MSM continues to aggressively push for left wing ideas, and yes, until recently, continued to suggest that Tyler Robinson was MAGA, it is offensive to the rest of us that can see REALITY.
Read Mark Steyn's column today on the trans movement for some perspective on that travesty.
Finally, it will be a major achievement if our government can hamper the NGOs funding these left wing marxist enterprises (protesters for rent, Intifada, radical trans groups such as those in Utah, campaigns for no cash bail local judges and DAs, not to mention releasing criminals). And yes, it is infuriating that people like Soros obtain tax breaks for donating to such "non profits" that clearly are outside the intent of the non-profit provisions of the tax code.
Name the lies that comprise the "constant trafficking.
Look, absent a group of people CELEBRATING murder and putting their celebrations online for all to see, not to mention releasing violent criminals and what is constant--lawfare--then I would ignore your comment. As sadly, I suspect your stance is obvious to all
However, we have to confront rhetoric such as your now. You might not like Trump's tone--your call--but I won't grant your "but both sides" garbage.
I hope Donald Trump and Vance have the good sense to steal the indoctrinated students out from under the left's grasp. Kids like me were told by everyone to go off to these diploma mills to get radicalized then struggled to find work afterwards. We were sold a bill of sale by the left, thanks to Saint Xenia I eventually found work in the field I was trained in.
So if the universities are going to reveal themselves to be radicalized leftist institutions that no longer honor free speech, why not forgive the atrocious loans they tricked students into? I promise you, if Donald Trump cut university funding to zilch AND forgave all student loans like the left always promised they would but never did? The Republican party would never lose an election for decades.
A very interesting idea!!! It just might work too on the principle that the government was funding biased think tanks that were not allowing freedom of speech. The forgiveness of debt could be labeled as a tuition refund as the university and college administration had a duty of care to guarantee freedom of speech rather than DEI indoctrination.
Yes, and they could use the money that would have gone to the institutions to pay the student debt, so that the taxpayers wouldn't be (or at least, wouldn't completely be) on the hook for more money than they would have been to fund the institutions.
If we're concerned about the tax payer, why not go a step further. Don't just cut funding - make the universities foot the entire bill. Let the very people that turned education into a profiteering racket pay for it.
You raise a good point, why isn't more done to ensure kids get jobs out of college in the field they studied anyway? If we keep these universities, let's force them to demonstrate they contribute to our economy and they claim. If they don't, do that really have a right to exist?
I think that last part is a very good idea. Forgive student loans but also, create a pool of loans and grants for young people who want to learn a trade (Trump has allowed Pell grants to be used at trade schools for the first time) or who are trying to start a small business or who have a technology to commercialize. The money would be used to support this generation and get them on their feet. Including low interest home loans might help, but we have done that before and it made a mess in 2008. Use the money that was being given to NGOs (and which came right back into the pockets of politicians) and spend it HERE on our youngest generations. Yours is a capital idea.
Praise God the idea resonates with you brother Rare Earth! I completely agree about creating a pool of funds for kids. In fact, we have all this infrastructure for student loans, why not do exactly what you say? Don't gut the industry and kill all those jobs, instead retool it.
Wipe out the debt that's blackmailed the young. I voted for Kamala Harris last election despite my pro-life convictions because the radical left put an economic noose around my neck. Then use the same infrastructure to create very low cost loan products that can be used for trade schools or entrepreneur schemes as long as you have a valid business plan.
Why should poor peole who didn't go to college pay the debt of students who chose majors with no employment hopes? This is theft. and a recipe for more stupid decision making. Now, if you want to confiscate the university endowments for that purpose, I'm open to the consideration.
I agree with you of all we were to do is what Biden proposed - which was blatantly unfair and nothing more than an attempt to buy votes. But if we expanded the scope, if we did more for young people going into trades and starting small businesses, I can get intrigued. Maybe it could be coupled with two years of national service? I am just throwing out ideas. But in no way did I or do I support the Biden idea. At any rate, I have begun to take seriously the complaints of the younger generation. Maybe their wearing me down - as kids always do?
I am completely in favor of trades as a viable and healthy alternative to the dreck peddled in too many colleges and universities. Too many community colleges peddle the same crap and need to be reformed.
You are absolutely correct. There is a myth that community colleges somehow are better at providing students with practical education. That is nonsense. Trade schools do that and some community colleges have actual workforce education, but most serve up the same courses of study that the four-year colleges and universities do only worse. They are happy to help the students sign off on government loans and provide them worthless two year degrees in gender studies, or international affairs, etc. In fact, many students, and I do me many, are so poorly advised and so ill-informed by community colleges, that they use up all their student aid monies (because it has always been capped) at the two-year level! It is disgraceful, but education is a business, so caveat emptor. Unfortunately, the average community college student is the least likely student to be prepared to make discerning choices. If the community college can keep a student for more than two years as the "find themselves," they will do it and take the money. It is unconscionable.
I think it'd be wrong for them to foot all of it. We'd have to look at multiple funding sources, maybe in part the very schools that radicalized us kids in the first place.
I recall that Biden turned down the whole student debt forgiveness idea when running for office, then became convinced that key voting constituencies really wanted him to do that, so he did. A lot of people complained "I paid off my loans" or "I got a good job without taking on loans" and really didn't see any reason they should now pay off someone else's loans. Since government guaranteed loans are paid back from tax money to the extent they are not paid back by the borrower, it means a lot of would be paying other people's loans. I pointed out that a lot of students had been scammed by guidance counselors (or whatever they are called now), teachers, the general culture, college recruiters, all drumming the message You Must All Go To College You Are Nothing If You Don't, not to mention, You'll Get Much Better Paid Jobs So You Can Easily Pay Off The Loans. That was indeed a lie. So far -- nothing to do with left-wing infantile disorder indoctrination. Its just that, when a small minority of people went to college, they did indeed tend to get higher paying jobs, but, when more than half the population goes to college, a lot of jobs you used to get with a high school diploma demanded a college degree, because why not when there are so many and you can get one -- jobs like assistant manager at a department store. But the hard part is, who will pay? I'd like to be able to charge it to all those who insisted that all those students to go college, but they don't make enough to even begin to pay. Its a hard one to sort out.
I really appreciate your nuanced take on this. While I think the schools should pay something I'm being cruel by wanting them to pay everything - that's unreasonable. And not every college degree is indoctrination - STEM is still STEM.
Plus each of the things you mention aren't really malicious per say, they are more like overreactions without taking context in mind. Historically, going to college did get you better pay and a shot at opportunities that you didn't get other ways. If a college degree translates to better job performance, it seems like a great idea to require it (this is an oversimplification - IO Psychology has found out some of the things that predict job performance and just having a degree of experience are actually pretty bad predictors of performance).
I'm reminded of a quote from my friend Rick, "For every problem there is a solution that is elegant, simple, and wrong."
Because you know, aren't universities kind of weird? They are certainly ahuman - they ignore basic rhythms of life past societies were built on.
Here's an idea, let's take all these kids teeming with hormones because God has decided they are ready to start families. Now instead of helping them marry and find a living wage job out of Highschool so they can support a family, were going to separate them from their families and communities, put them all together, and tee hee, wouldn't you know the sexual revolution happens.
Finding a spouse was a community affair in olden times. The entire village helped figure out who belonged with who. Now we force these kids who don't know anything to figure out that question all by themselves before their brain has finished developing, and we strip them of the childhood community that would have naturally allowed relationships to develop.
Any society that labels teen pregnancy "an epidemic" has lost its mind. Late teens is precisely when kids should be marrying and starting families - it's the time of peak fertility.
Teens having kids when they are not socially mature and able to support them as adults is a big problem. Ideally we should be marrying and having kids in one's early to mid 20s. People's brains are not fully developed until around age 25 (varying by individual of course). The grim past reality under which half the kids born did not live and malnutrition shortened women's fertile years is no longer with us and we need not be in a huge hurry to have children as if we were Paleolithic hunters and gatherers.
I think it is just the malleability of their brains that make coupling so important at a young(er) age. We have told women and men to "establish" themselves professionally first, and then pair up. Well... that just makes two selfish people coming together later than they should to create children and a relationship that they often resent for "changing" things for them.
I myself married late, after a lot of things had set with me. Although it seems to be working in my case, I can attest to the wisdom of growing up together as well.
I was born late in my parents' lives- -and I very much think I benefited from having older, and maybe wiser, adults as parents. Though does come with the reality of losing them sooner.
People should not be having kids they are incapable of supporting. As I just posted elsewhere even in the Middle Ages men (the ones not noblemen) waited until they could support families to marry-- apprentices and jouneymen (teens and maybe earliest twenties) did not marry. The main exceptions were in areas where deadly malaria was prevalent as a great scourge.
In the not so distant past young people could graduate high school maybe take a year or two getting established in a job (for the men maybe a stint in the military) and then marry, buy a house and start having kids. IMO, that would be the ideal. I am certainly not suggest we wait until 30!
I am old enough to remember working class people-- friends of my older step-siblings-- who married too soon-- at 18 or 19 in the late 70s and early 80s. And every last one of those marriages failed in no great time-- luckily almost none of them had children to be harmed in the divorce. "Marry in haste repent at leisure" was a proverb the Middle Ages knew too.
People should not have a society that doesn’t have an economy in which young people can’t support a family. Start with getting rid of the useless credentialism and the equally useless public schools. Replace the latter with what we had in 1950 and scrap absolutely everything done since in those schools. Start with de-consolidating school districts.
In 1950 public schools were ubiquitous. Heck they were so a century ago-- both my parents and my step mother, were educated in public schools.
I'm all in favor of bringing back shop classes and HomeEc- though on a coed basis. Boys should know how to cook; nothing wrong with girls leaning handy skills. Maybe refocus PE classes less on sports and more on healthy exercise, and where possible outdoors.
I don't know how to get rid of credentialism. And much of it is due not so much to ensuring people are bright and studious, but as an imperfect way to ensure they have long-term soft skills needed for many jobs as there's no way to test for those.
I've always thought so...two dumbass kids who are utterly reliant on each other for their survival, in the malleability of their brains, will naturally "cleave" together as the Bible demands. Then, the two shall truly become one and model Christ as intended.
Social immaturity is something that we have chosen to allow in our youths. (I’m trying to preserve the words “children” and “kids” for prepubescents, and “youths” for the 13-21 set.) I grew up in a rural small town in the 1970s. Many of my high school peers were working part time at jobs that few youths today would ever take—farm labor, part-time clerk work in the drug store, stocking shelves at the grocery store, etc. Today those jobs are held by immigrants or older women, or are automated. Those older women would have been housewives in my youth. Men are nowhere to be seen. My male peers today have either left town as I did, or they are on disability or they are dead.
None of this is inevitable. It is a choice or the result of other choices.
Re: Social immaturity is something that we have chosen to allow in our youths.
I agree with this very much. We do prolong immaturity far past the point of necessity (and it does take time to learn skills and settle into a career-- even in Middle Ages tradesmen did not marry until they had passed through the apprentice and journeymen phases). And I've commented as well on the fact that except among the poor teens generally do not work unlike in my youth when almost all of us did.
I also agree with not labeling teenagers as "children".
That we have 35-year olds acting like spoiled, rich 12-year old olds is mildly horrifying to me. Consider that Our Savior was finished in His earthly ministry at the age of 33.
As Good Time Charlie realized, you ain’t a kid at 33.
For most of human history, children worked alongside their parents in agriculture or crafts, as their age permitted them to take on small, then increasing, parts of the family's labor. When factory production became predominant, children were valued for small, dextrous hands, and worked by heartless magnates who had no emotional bond, no interest in them as family or growing progeny. Thus, the movement to ban child labor. But this left some unfilled time. Much of it was absorbed by school, but not all. Now we begin to realize that children actually need to take on responsibility, but responsibly, and not as objected of vicious exploitation.
Children? Or youths? That distinction is extremely important. My high school peers who worked at 16 are much better people in every way than almost anyone I know who never worked in their youth but ran through the intense college-professional track.
Some of it is technology though. My first job was bagging groceries. That's a job that's long since gone now due to technology with the self checkout areas.
There is an old saying, "It takes a village to raise a child." When these socially immature people were imbedded in communities of wiser and more capable adults, often of the same family, it didn't matter if they had more growing to do - your clan took care of you.
The industrial revolution plus the university system destroyed this. But with the Internet this doesn't have to be. Keep these teens in their communities and either connect them to trades schools or remote colleges. Let them grow with the community of children they knew from when they were young.
Let's deindustrialize and resgricultarixe to. After all, our first professions were gardener and herdsman.
We have younger couples often with a baby (or one on the way) at my church. But they are in their 20s, not teenagers. Again, I am not urging people wait until they are 30.
You are right brother, our current system encourages waiting to that age. I'm saying that is a weird way to structure the system in the first place and now that we are considering new ways to structure things we shouldn't maintain the faulty existing design.
As it stands, I can foresee that we will have a dictator in the next decade. Congress will be even more of a rump than today, and the court system will increasingly defeat itself by trying and failing to exercise executive power.
I don’t think a dictatorship is exactly the most likely outcome. Dictators are aberrations in a national character, a thing that is a temporary state (albeit maybe a longer running one than what we think of when we hear “temporary”). The trend we are seeing now feels a lot more imperial Rome, where the emperor and the bureaucracy ruled, and the senate had become a club for the wealthy to sit around and pretend to be relevant. Rome had no equivalent to the judiciary of course, but the senate was intended as a check to any attempt to consolidate power in the hands of one man and ultimately failed at that task. As with Rome, our system of government was intended to prevent a return to monarchy. We just elect ours.
That link suggests that originalism killed the constitution, starting around 1971. Its a bad philosophy, but it hasn't killed the constitution. Murray is generally short-sighted and wrong. (I finally had to read The Bell Curve after some editors returned an encyclopedia entry to me asking for some coverage of it.) His circular reason and poorly constructed premises were obvious.
No, that’s Jill Lepore’s thesis. Murray draws a distinction between googoo progressives like TR and militant progressives like Frankfurter, Brandeis, and Harlan Fiske Stone.
I find a lot of flaws in Roosevelt, and admire Brandeis's development of the constitutional right to be left alone. That right is almost universally expected by all Americans, although we differ on what should be left along in our own lives and what "there oughta be a law" against in our neighbors' lives. Its as American as apple pie.
That's why it seemed something was missing in the linked article as evidence of Murray's thesis. The "Living Constitution" is no constitution at all, since it would be infinitely malleable, like any statute or regulation. (That is roughly what the British "constitution" is like). But Originalism is too static. The fundamental principles have to be applied to new developments without a constitutional amendment anytime a new technology is invented. the Olmstead ruling was wrong in saying that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to wiretapping because it doesn't mention telephones. Scalia was correct to apply 4th amendment jurisprudence to electronic surveillance of private home, even from public streets.
Our Founders gave us the ability to amend the Constitution as needed. That’s how we fix things we think are problems or adjust issues as needed. Otherwise, I think more things should be left to the states.
Meh. Murray is just making a partisan argument there-- in favor of the "malefactors of great wealth" whose wings were clipped a bit under the New Deal. Heck slaveowners used to moan and whine that the Constitution of the Founders was killed by the Civil War.
I would disagree. America started becoming more centralized after the Civil War, it became even more centralized when Wilson was president and then once F.D.R. became president, it further accelerated. The Founders vision of America ended in some ways at least with the Civil War.
Free speech only applies to people who believe in reasonable discussion. We already punish psychopaths who manipulate or Charles Manson bs. They are ideologically against us and, tbh, what you pointed out doesn't sound like it'll root it out. That redline is America and that redline has to be maintained. It requires entirely deradicalizes everyone in every major institution. I'd prefer a new constitution, but they need to be made an enemy of the state to keep it legal. In order to do so, they'd have to translate dei into enlightenment liberal terms. Again, I'd prefer a new constitution, but all that s--- has to be figured out.
Re: Free speech only applies to people who believe in reasonable discussion.
Not what the First Amendment says. There are limits to free speech-- we have laws against perjury, fraud and direct incitation to violence and slander can be sued over-- but the last thing we need is some Bureau of Freedom and Truth telling us what we can and cannot say. File under Cure Worse Than Disease.
You would be correct even if I don't share your paranoia about the government, specifically, setting communication standards in code. I specifically mentioned the Charles Manson one because that is an example that is malicious. Besides that, the alien exclusion acts were legal with the first amendment. In any case, that's not my point. Their speech is manipulative and subversive and they use it to undermine the state and culture and take over our institutions. They are an enemy of the state.
You're going to find this odd, but the idea that free speech is for reasonable discourse isn't my idea or values at all. It's literally the values of the enlightenment and framers of the constitution. It's not until Rousseau that that changes which Jefferson embodied more (and which was the basis of the French revolution). The constitution employs that language with the "reasonable person" limit for what can be considered a threat. Lo, it's even in the fourth amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."
I specifically used liberal constitutional concepts I do not agree with. The Charles Manson example is perfectly normal.
Edit: If you mean deradicalization, we did that with the nazis in Germany. They were too nuts and if they were deradicalized then they could teach in uni or work in government. There are catastrophic issues that liberalism cannot deal with and goes over their head.
Free speech applies to any speech. It can't be regulated or banned as speech. We all put up with a lot of godawful nonsense because we don't trust a government censor to determine which speech is worthy of protection. If your speech threatens murder, arson, rape, then what is actionable is the criminal intent, not the speech as speech. There is also the doctrine of fighting words. But many people could label someone else's speech as "unreasonable" for any reason or no reason.
I agree it's a bit ambiguous, but that is part and parcel of how us law works, if a "reasonable person" can constitute it as a threat. That is the semantics determination of the legal guilt of the speech.
Edit: Look, they are threatening, inciting and lying in news media, universities and government. I'm not sure what you want because that's exactly what they're doing. There's nothing abnormal about that except it is applied to dei subversive language. It just has to be clearly and legally untangled because what we have is crazy rn.
There is a huge difference between "reasonable speech" and the legal standard of the hypothetical "reasonable person." There is no such standard as "reasonable speech." When deciding whether speech is libelous (in the USA almost exclusively a civil tort, not a criminal offense), it can be a standard whether the "reasonable person" would have known the statement was false before publishing it. The "reasonable person" standard is used in many areas of law, not particularly with regard to speech.
It also applies in criminal law as I gave an example. Maybe "people who believe in a reasonable discussion" can simply mean "reasonable people" in terms of inciting violence without splitting hairs. We could split hairs if you want to; do you want to?
Maybe you are indulging in sloppy grandstanding, moving words around from precise contexts where they mean something and have a well established common usage, to delusional mental constructs where they serve your notion of how it oughtta be rather than statements of legal jurisprudence.
We have a media problem. Kirk was killed because of the lies told about what he said. This is something the media has taken to doing regularly about those it wishes to smear.
How about something like a "Truth in Reporting" statute, a variation of the old Fairness Doctrine, whereby if it can be proven that a media outlet has knowingly lied about a public figure's words or his/her record they can be sanctioned?
We really can’t have force of government policing discourse. Common law provisions against incitement and fighting words as well as civil actions over slander, libel and defamation are sufficient. (Assuming the legal profession itself hasn’t been totally cowed by the Woke.)
You can't legislate morality, remember. You certainly can't legislate quality journalism. But we could begin to teach our children to think so they could eventually tell the difference.
Permit a niggle. Kirk was killed because the kid who killed him and the furry friends who corrupted him don't know the difference between what Kirk said and what they think he said, what set the cortisol flowing, got the rage going. That's what they're programmed for. They don't know how to read, they don't know how to reason, and they don't know how to argue. So it's pass the ammunition.
Perhaps it's precisely because people can be so easily caricatured these days before a wide audience that Kirk's murder makes me as anxious as it does. It could be me next if I dare say anything.
"Kirk was killed because of the lies told about what he said."
You have no evidence to support such a statement. Maybe what you claim will eventually be shown true, but there is nothing that illustrates such a claim thus far.
There is a lot of reason to believe that Kirk was killed because of such lies. He was regularly described as a Nazi, homophobic misogynist, etc. There has also been a lot of violent rhetoric from the hard left about how to deal with so-called “Nazis”.
Elementary reasoning suggests strongly that Kirk was killed precisely for these reasons.
It does remain possible that the killer fired at Kirk for purely idiosyncratic reasons, but from what we already know or have been told by the governor and others in a position to know, this appears very much like a classic political assassination. Enough so that asserting it as such is acceptable now.
Yes. Unlike Heather Cox Richardson, I don’t say things without good reasons. In my case, the governor of Utah had already identified the killer’s political context. Politicians do not make statements like that without being sure they’re accurate. The political costs of being wrong are existential for their careers.
There are two forms of reasoning - inductive and deductive. Iacobuzio is engaging in deductive reasoning. To most of us he seems on firm ground in his deductions. Engraving "Catch this fascist" seems a good piece of evidence to support his thoughts and there is more, as you know. Charlie Kirk was not a fascist, that is a falsehood, also called a lie, but the shooter believed him to be one and the shooter killed him with that in mind, obviously.
This is tangential brother Rate Earth, but I recently learned about a new story of reasoning called Abductive Reasoning. It's similar to inductive in that wecare driving rules from a set of observations. What's different about it is it involves creating sets of inductive reasoning assertions and then filtering them by probability or likelihood of truthfulness.
I've seen at least two detailed discussions putting initial claims that he "hated empathy" and "said its worth some deaths to preserve the Second Amendment" in context which shows his intent was grossly distorted by cherry-picking. In this post, Rod explicitly said that a statement by the Washington Post reporter was "a lie." While I would like some elaboration of the details, other comments have specified that what Kirk said about specific women has been quoted as a general statement about "black women." I think its pretty clear some of the critiques are grossly distorted or lies. That said, I might still disagree with him.
Rod, it is an interesting thought that the death of Charlie Kirk paved the way to a Vance presidency that otherwise might have been a non-starter. Politics takes weird and unpredictable turns.
I think much of this has to do with the change in tone on the left from the liberal to the radical. I want to tread cautiously, because exceptions exist in all ages, but there always seemed to be a clear line back in the 60s and 70s between what we think of liberalism and radical leftism. Now, it really feels like the situation has been reversed, where the radicals run the show and set the tone, and liberals are increasingly adrift between not wanting to be conservative on one hand and not wanting any part of what is becoming something malign and malignant.
There is some overlap between the radical left and the community of people with serious mental illness. Medicated and treated, you couldn’t tell me from an average person who tends to be a little moody at times. But I think that treatment of mental illness among the trans and other transgressive movements tends to be rejected much of the time and channeled into reinforcement of the ideology, because it feeds on itself. Whether it is a gateway into possession is another discussion entirely, but I would say that untreated mental illness might be a factor in that as well.
Getting back to where we are now, I think that the reversal of who represents the left is a real difference between where we were and where we are. I think the watershed moment of this past week has been a majority of people that used to think in terms of “bleeding heart soft headed dummy liberals” making up the modern left suddenly realizing that this is not the situation at all. They have come to realize that their mental model of the right versus left in this country is broken and that the left has been playing a much different game for a while now.
It is hard to say where this ends up, but I think it is reasonable to say we are headed towards some level of civil violence. It has been revealing to read what the mainstream leftist rags have been writing about Charlie Kirk as well as a growing awareness on the right that civil conflict may indeed be coming. The irony is that they call out the right for that while ignoring the fact the left has understood and expected this for some time.
I don’t think the full impact of Kirk’s murder will be known for a while, but it is turning into a watershed moment, even for those who didn’t know much about him. In the end, I think it doesn’t really have much to do with Charlie Kirk and who he was, but the fact that people have been awoken in a way too dramatic to ignore that they are now considered an enemy whose murder is justifiable by those on the left.
As a former leftist I'd say part of the mental illness is a fundamental mispdrception of reality by the left. What is the quote? "Reality has a left wing bias".
When you are indoctrinated into believing your side is the one that sees reality clearly regardless of the issue, well then why would you compromise on anything? If you convince yourself the other side has no valid points - well then why listen to them?
Right. It's an epistemic question really. Breaking out of any incorrect or incomplete understanding of any aspect of reality is very often only possible if one's foundations of understanding are reordered, or even knocked away. For minor things, this is easy and we all do it all the time ("Oh, so that's what she looks like? Funny, I always pictured her as a redhead..." or "you know, I really do like cilantro, but it took me years to get over how my mother's overuse of it put me off"). Such adjustments are often inconsequential. But for systems that undergird our reality this is tricky work, and can often cause other things to also fall apart - things you might not have realized were even connected. If it cuts to our self conception (our "identity"), we can be unmade (one of the harder aspects of addiction rehab is filling the void the addiction's absence leaves).
As someone that was addicted to pornography for decades, I know exactly what you mean. Without Jesus as our foundation we can't see the nuance of reality and correct our faulty beliefs.
I, too, escaped the brain virus long ago (before most people knew it existed—the early 90s), and have tried to articulate this to friends and family myself. Well said.
I would say being a cradle-Catholic helped, but my brother didn’t escape
I concur with what you have written, save for one detail...this week and last many have been saying something similar to what you said here "...but I think it is reasonable to say we are headed towards some level of civil violence." When we say this we seem to not acknowledge that we are already there; we already have and have had civil violence. The violent riots in the summer of 2020 are on example. The killing of the Israeli couple in NYC, the cold-blooded murder of the CEO of UHC, the many mass shootings at schools, the two attempts on the life of the president, Charlie Kirk's murder...etc. So what do we mean when we say that we are heading toward some level of civil violence? It seems we are drawing a distinction between the violence that is and has been, but what is that distinction, exactly?
I think part of the distinction is the perceived mass shattering of public perception on a broad scale. Something about this shooting feels qualitatively different then past ones for reasons that by the grace of God I can't put into words.
Yeah, I got to thinking that I should have clarified what I meant. I think maybe violence that was explicitly political and openly approved of by the side that the actor represented. The two attempts on Trumps life are murky with regard to motive, the riots in 2020 had race as a primary focus, etc.
So, we have a murder here that was clearly a political act and openly approved of. I think that is what feels different this time around. Je suis Charlie suddenly has a far more relevant meaning now to everyone who attends a conservative rally or speaking engagement, goes to a Christian church, etc.
Basically, I think Kirk’s assassination has let the genie out of the bottle. You now have perfect clarity for anyone on the right who still did not understand the situation, and you have celebration on the left of having taken a scalp in a way that has a clear political justification.
I think it goes back, too, to the moronic question of “is it okay to punch Nazis?” The obvious problem is who defines a Nazi? Apparently, it’s okay to shoot anyone on the right who has the wrong views.
In this environment, it is going to start becoming a shoving match until it turns openly violent in an organized manner, maybe similar to The Troubles. I don’t think the right is going to stay passive any longer, because the murder was not just an act of violence against one man, but against ideas that many people have. Every war starts with a single shot, I suppose.
Thank you for the response. I thought more about it too. I came to a similar conclusion as you that the right is not going to remain mostly passive any more, to date despite what the left says, the right's passivity has been a brake on more violence. If the actions the right takes from here on are legal, that is good, but we all have a sense of foreboding because it may not all be legal action. If the right becomes violent too, then we have as you says the American version of the Troubles, and by that I mean tit-for-tat violence and a spiraling of disorder...I'll leave it at that.
The videos of Normie Charlie Kirk mourners body slamming leftist trolls who vandalized memorials in front of them and held them for the cops who then arrested the trolls should give you an idea of how the vibe has shifted. With a few notable exceptions (the Kenosha Kid, for example) Normies didn't physically respond to the aggression of the lefties during the Summer of Floyd.
They're not putting up with it now and the cops are backing their plays.
The mainstream Left has been suborning murder for a very long time, and passing it off as entertainment and free speech. I am unaware of no such moral failing on the mainstream right.
Every recent murder, and attempted murder, is the child of this, from the attempted assassination of President Reagan to today.
The bleeding-heart liberal types, starting especially in the late 1980s, were indoctrinated in university into a specifically neo-Marxist notion of what it meant to be “on the Left”. As time went on, this took over more and more departments. Frankfurt School critical theory melded with postmodern notions of truth and turned race and sexual politics into the new class struggle. But both the revolutionary ethos and utopianism of Marxism were retained.
It was perfect stuff for seducing American students. You can be radical without actually fighting for the working class. It was also perfect for recruiting young people to the Democratic Party.
But since it’s fake, it was certain to spiral into shrill nonsense. As we saw. After a couple decades it arrived at Woke, Inc. And now it’s just hysteria and nihilism.
"It was perfect stuff for seducing American students. You can be radical without actually fighting for the working class."
This is excellent observation and analysis; it certainly coincides with my experience as well.
But I'm not so sure 'hysteria and nihilism' fully captures the zeitgeist on the current left. Hysteria and nihilism can be abandoned when reality intervenes, albeit with some embarrassment, perhaps. But for many of the Woke, the heady mix of oppressor-bashing and oppressee-championing has crystalized into a worryingly durable infrastructure of essentially religious practice and meaning. Breaking this up and tearing away the splintered remains will seem soul-destroying to many, at least to those who still believe they have souls, I guess.
“But I think that treatment of mental illness among the trans and other transgressive movements tends to be rejected much of the time and channeled into reinforcement of the ideology, because it feeds on itself.”
Excellent point. I think that we see this with the whole “Celebrate Neurodivergence!” movement as well. It’s one thing to believe that mental illness should not be stigmatized; it’s another thing completely to believe and act like it’s a feature, not a bug. I sincerely doubt that many parents of severely autistic kids or folks who have disabling personality disorders, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia are all good with their illnesses.
"Rage blinds. We have to make sure to go after the funders of violent radicalism while respecting legitimate dissent protected by the First Amendment. I’m not sure that this is a line that will be respected in the days to come. We will see.
"Rage blinds. We have to make sure to go after the funders of violent radicalism while respecting legitimate dissent protected by the First Amendment. I’m not sure that this is a line that will be respected in the days to come. We will see...
"THIS IS WRONG! I’m entirely in favor of the government doing whatever it is constitutionally permitted to do to dismantle these networks and organizations. But what Bondi said is blatantly unconstitutional, and should be resisted."
Good. Maybe if Charlie Kirk becomes the right's George Floyd, Rod will be on the right side after all. But it's too bad he started out by pouring gasoline on the fire.
"I think J.D. Vance is going to do this. I pray he fights well, and justly, not tyrannically."
At this point I'd accept a little "tyrannically" so long as he/the right/the administration actually fights.
The worm has definitely turned - you can practically feel the wind blowing in a different direction - but real change requires follow-through and not just tough words. For too long on the right it's been tough words and little more. Would like to think this time, finally, after all this, it'll be different. But we'll need to wait and see.
"At this point I'd accept a little "tyrannically" so long as he/the right/the administration actually fights."
What an amazingly keyboard-warrior take. The hell with ethics, the rule of law, and the Constitution -- just FIGHT!!!! You're a modern-day Madison, kgasmart.
Just fight - as in, declare Antifa a terrorist organization, which it certainly is. Investigate the NGOs behind the movement; prosecute those on Discord who knew this murder was coming and did nothing.
There's plenty that *can* be done. But saying, "We're really mad this time!" and then doing nothing... would be par for the course.
For starters, we could make certain liberal ideas unemployable.
For example, if you are on record supporting transgenderism or DEI, you would be unqualified for government work. We could also put some pressure on businesses to make you unemployable on the private sector as well.
One of the benefits of a database (e.g. Palantir) is that we can create a fingerprint of every statement you've made on a public online forum, and then these could be used to flag potential leftists before they are allowed to join a company or agency. Furthermore, we could also train AI models to identify "at-risk" liberals who are more likely to commit violence, and then restrict their internet access, public transportation, and launch additional monitoring from law enforcement.
You should read Phillip K. Dick's "Minority Report." In it these super intelligent creatures called "pre-cogs" could "see into the future," and could see what crimes were going to be committed and by whom. There was a special police force empowered to pick up the future perpetrators before they committed the offense. Tom Cruise made a movie out of it, but it left a lot to be desired. Per the usual, the book was better.
Re: <<<...we could make certain liberal ideas unemployable; ... a database (so that) we can create a fingerprint of every statement you've made on a public online forum, and then these could be used to flag potential leftists; ... we could also train AI models to identify "at-risk" liberals who are more likely to commit violence, and then restrict their internet access, public transportation, and launch additional monitoring from law enforcement.>>>
What horrible ideas! Those sound like things the Left would do.
I'd accept a little overreach. What's "a little" and "overreach?" It will depend. I'd like to see Discord servers where threats of violence are made shut down. Reddit is an absolute cesspit of leftist extremism - I'd like to see the Administration put a boot on the company's neck. Does this amount to censorship? Probably. But we're well past the point where the question is - are we going to have censorship or not? The question now is "Whose censorship, and to what purpose?"
Or, as I suggested upthread, how about a "Truth in Reporting" statute whereby if it can be proven that a media outlet has knowingly lied about a public figure's words or his/her record they can be sanctioned? Karen Attiah was fired by the Washington Post - could she, SHOULD she be sued for defaming a dead man, Charlie Kirk - because she certainly did lie about what he'd said, could/should have known what she wrote was false. What sanctions should the Washington Post itself face for publishing these lies?
Currently, a public figure can't successfully sue for defamation unless they can prove "actual malice". This comes from a Supreme Court decision, decided on 1st Amendment grounds.
I think it was a little bit of ironic humor, not to be taken literally. It is a way of expressing a sense of frustration with the status quo that includes a lot of talk and no action.
Again, there is no "Antifa" organization. It's just a word certain people apply to themselves. You can't treat it as if it's La Cosa Nostra or the Ku Klux Klan.
Antifa, or rather the various "chapters," are at least as formal and institutionalized as La Cosa Nostra, contrary to what Jerry Nadler would have us believe.
Rod is correct in pointing out that for some, transgenderism is a way station on path to transhumanism. Sam Altman says that he is not a transhumanist, but if you read what he has written, it is hard to accept that.
The point was him being a transhumanist. He’s a homosexual Satanist too. I’m open to being persuaded otherwise, but Rod doesn’t seem fussy in his choice of friends when they’re rich and powerful.
Here is a link to the Washington Post's letter terminating Karen Attiah. It was because of her racist remarks connected to Charlie Kirk. https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/1967766824897900866/photo/1
Her racism is a part of the Democratic Demonization Strategy—to lie about good guys so they are hated.
This Demonization leads to the Dem Derangement Syndrome, that Krauthamer mislabelled BDS, then TDS. (Since neither Bush nor Trump, but Dems are deranged).
Re Attiah's firing: "But I don’t want people fired simply for rejecting Charlie Kirk’s politics. . . It could be that the Post realized that it no longer wishes to platform left-wing racists who feel comfortable routinely demonizing white males as white males." It could be that they don't want a liar who refuses to get the story correct. As you noted, Kirk did NOT make that quote about "Black women" - it was about a handful of specific women. Attiah lied and said it was Black women. There was a video of him on youtube making the statement, and the captions read "Black women," dishonestly, where the names of the specific women should have been. If Attiah is deaf, she has an honest excuse. Otherwise, she sucks as a journalist and likely should have been fired long ago. I read a substack piece of hers about Kirk, and it was full of false testimony, likely the same lies that got him killed. Good riddance.
How about the governor of Illinois, that matinee idol Pritzker, who said anybody who accused him of calling Republicans Nazis was lying? I and about 500 other people posted the video evidence in the comments on X.
One can hope that the Democrats nominate Blutto for president.
"One can hope that the Democrats nominate Blutto for president."
Blutto! You're showing your age.
Yes, I know!
"What's that? The Democrats nominated Blutto!? BUY STOCK IN ALL SPINNACH COMPANIES! NO ZOOMER, THERE IS NO TIME TO EXPLAIN!"
LOL. My first thought was John Belushi's Bluto character in Animal House. Hey, he did become a senator the closing credits told us.
Senator Blutarsky. "Animal House" came out weeks before I went to college as a freshman. I have attended toga parties.
Never trust a billionaire to be governor.
Isn’t his sister a big shot among the trans folk?
And his family rakes in the dough from this horror.
Remember that in Dante’s purgatorio wrath is represented by a choking acrid blinding smoke. I pray that the smoke clears for all that are caught up in it. “In your anger do not sin…”
Hatred and anger are dark passions which never serve the Light. Yes, evolution crafted them for a reason-- but linked to human intelligence they are a spiritual danger. Along with fear, shame, envy, and jealousy they are as fodder to demons and open us up Hell's sweet persuasions.
Oh, really? What about the guy who made a whip of cords and overturned the tables of the money changers? What about Him?
Oh, that's an easy one. If I am not mistaken, Jesus was familiar with the Pentateuch, which says in Deuteronomy, "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. I will repay." And as God in the form of a man, would it not be his prerogative to do as he did?
No, He had two natures. Are you saying it was His divine nature only that made that whip of cords? Because I don't see it.
Your ability to see which of Jesus' two natures braided the whip is impressive. Not being so endowed, I'll stand down.
I can see merit to both arguments.
Jesus was incapable of sin. I think we can agree on that. In the modern world he could go into a crack house or the raunchiest gay back room and not fall to temptation. But prudence dictates the rest of of us should try to avoid undue temptation.
You are right not to see it, TI, because although Christ has two natures, they are in hypostatic union and inseparable.
Some of this is semantics, but anger is the proper, ordered response to injustice. If one doesn't feel "anger" in the face of injustice, then he is immoral and lacking in virtue. And with that feeling of anger, one should be motivated to work against the injustice. So perhaps it is better to use the term "wrath" to describe disordered anger, which is of course sinful.
Okay, but then what do you do with the "wrath of God"?
This is a question of biblical hermeneutics and translation and does not pertain to the moral question of anger/wrath in humans.
God does not suffer the passions as we do, so any language applied to him is analogical, of course.
Feeling anger is one thing. Letting anger make your choices and use you like a tool is something very different. Ever fly off the handle and say or do things you very much regretted afterward? That's a common human experience. This is why we should look on anger with the same caution we look on indulgence in other unbridled passions like lust.
As I became more religious, I found myself less angry and more forgiving. Perhaps it is a side benefit of being religious.
It is important to distinguish between anger and wrath. Anger is a reaction which we don't always have control over (like sadness, happiness, etc.) whereas wrath is a choice. A good father can be angry that his child wrecked the car, but he can choose to react with loving and patient rather than wrathful discipline.
Re: Anger is a reaction which we don't always have control over
I very much agree. And there's grades of anger, from small annoyances like the twist cap that we can't get off a bottle to the guy who cuts you off in traffic, to more serious things. I don't think even great saints and bodhisattvas are passionless. But they are capable of lashing those passions.
I'm not sure hatred was "crafted" for a "reason." What reason? Lions don't hate zebras, they merely find it necessary to eat them. Human intelligence carried away by passions like anger and rage makes them more dangerous. Constrained by human intelligence -- which is one part of the result of God breathing into man's nostrils so that he became a living soul -- they can be channeled in occasionally useful ways.
The problem in humans is that these passions "stick". My old cat occasionally doesn't want to be bothered and he'll turn around and bite if I bother him-- and then a half hour later show up purring to be petted. Humans nurse their hatreds and grudges. Letting go of past hurts is one of the most difficult things we must do if we seek spiritual and mental good health (I know something about this)
Rod, the cued youtube video doesn't work. Please tell us the minute marker where you want us to start. Thanks.
It works for me. Maybe you're clicking on the photo at the top, instead of the embedded video right under it. Anyway, here's the link cued to the 1:50 mark, when Vance's final remarks begin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngofqx9EfcM&t=6650s
Thanks!
The problem isn't "hate speech" - it is false testimony - the repeating of untrue allegations, such as "Kirk said x," when he didn't. No need to go after hate speech. Just go after direct incitement - "punch a TERF," and slander.
Great point. False testimony has been a Biblical taboo since OT times.
There's also clever ways to truncate a person's quotes so they are deprived of any context and seem to be saying awful things.
Back in the 1960s, when he was a college student, my friend’s dad had an interning job at a book publisher in which he truncated quotes from reviews. So things like, “This is the worst thing I have ever read. The author needs to observe a ‘real’ author who knows how to tell a gripping story.” would become, “…gripping story…”.
How the sausage is made, as they say.
Unlike old-school radical Marxists and Bolsheviks, modern day Discord Marxists are not really capable of political organization or anything political in general. This is because effective politics requires you to be a practical-minded adult (even if you are also morally questionable, as the Bolsheviks were).
The only influence that they have inherited from the Old Marxist era is that they agree it is justified to lie about your political enemies ("ends justify the means"). Hence spreading lies and poisoning the discourse is basically the only thing that they do effectively.
It really is kind of remarkable. Most of these people lead a parasitical lifestyle but also have an ideology that makes them think that they are socially and morally superior to everyone else. That's probably the perfect recipe to make someone socially obnoxious and undesirable. They were shielded from the consequences of this for some time, but times might be changing now.
False testimony was saying Floyd's death had anything to do with racism.
Also false testimony about Floyd: calling his death his "murder." The media often implied racism was a factor, using context to make the smear, but they out and out lied on cause of death.
Derek Chauvin was convicted of both second and third degree murder. as a matter of legal fact (and yes, the law gets to make those distinctions) Floyd was murdered.
And O.J. was innocent of murder, no? Or should I say "not guilty?"
Floyd was loaded with enough fentanyl to kill a horse, and his heart stopped as he vigorously resisted arrest for passing a counterfeit bill. The autopsy revealed he was not strangled, as his trachea was not crushed, and he first claimed "I can't breathe" as he sat in the back of the police car. Derek Chauvin was convicted as a sacrificial victim offered to the leftist gods who rule Minneapolis so they would not burn down the city. It is no more complicated than that.
Re: Floyd was loaded with enough fentanyl to kill a horse,
This has been debunked numerous times. If he had done that much fentanyl he wouldn't have gotten five feet. Those kinds of ODs kill quickly, as soon as the drug reaches the brain stem (unlike Cocaine and meth which can cause heart attacks hours after a use indulges). Junkies are even found with needles still in their arms.
I believe the findings by multiple medical examiners and by a court of law with all the legal protections for the accused in place. Your assertion is a falsehood devised by evil people who just cannot conceive the police ever do anything wrong.
Check out the "Innocence Project", which proudly--with justification--asserts that it has freed over 250 people wrongly convicted, all of whom were tried "with all the legal protections for the accused in place." It is undisputed that Floyd had fentanyl in his system, that cause of death was not strangulation, that he was initially placed peaceably in the back of the police car, and that Chauvin used a method expressly approved by the Minneapolis Police Department to subdue him only after he became agitated. It is possible that Chauvin kept him in that hold too long, but as the police manual did not specify a time limit for use of the hold, the very worst Chauvin should have been convicted of is negligent homicide. The murder conviction was a travesty of justice prompted by the leftist narrative that all white cops are racists.
Jon, color me as someone who knows the police do a lot of things wrong. They're human, no less subject to incompetence or wickedness than any of the rest of us. That doesn't mean there's no truth in what Richard says about the powers that be in Minneapolis, including the courts, making a scapegoat of Derek Chauvin. He may have held that pin position too long on a guy who had heart conditions and was under the influence of sedating and/or respiration-suppressing drugs. But murder or even manslaughter in any degree? I'm deeply skeptical. And that's largely because of the liberal media's predictable toeing of the proverbial company line. Whenever events can be finessed to support their exhausted oppressor v. oppressed narrative -- and with all their usual suspects lined up on both sides of that fictitious divide -- slanted they are.
Railroaded into that conviction during the height of the Woke nonsense, much as Trump was 'convicted' of felony in NYC. Both verdicts were jokes.
Jon, a Minneapolis jury convicted Chauvin of murder. One of the most left-wing cities in America. Chauvin would not have been convicted of murder in West Virginia. Or even any of the many counties in Minnesota in the north of the state. Chauvin was unwise to work for the city of Minneapolis as was the other three cops.
Derek, abusive policing is a problem all across the nation. I've mentioned by own home town in Michigan-- where there was a shooting, of a white homeowner, so egregious it beggars belief-- and yet no charges were ever filed and no law suit was brought, in large part because the widow was given a massive settlement on the condition that she hold her peace. It took an insurer threatening to cancel the city's policies (which would have forced the city to disincorporate and throw itself on the state's mercy) to finally compel reforms.
We've seen case after case around the country where the police always get off-- or are never charged at all. And when that sort of thing provokes vast public disorder then, yes, something does have to stop and change. Alas, it seems that for some people it's just never the right time for that change. They'd probably defend the cops who shot the white guy in my home town dead in front of his wife and toddler child. Because some people seem to think the police are little gods in blue who can do no wrong.
George Floyd was a lowlife and petty criminal and he passed a counterfeit twenty. But he was dumb as a box of rocks-- I very much doubt he was a counterfeiter himself-- that takes some skills and know-how. Most likely someone passed the bogus bill to him-- maybe his drug dealer-- figuring he was too dumb to know it was fake. What should have happened is that the cops should have talked to him and tried to find out where he got the funny money-- information which could have been given to the Feds whose job it is to deal with counterfeit money. The whole ugly mess would have been avoided-- no dead guy (even if, to be candid, he was not exactly a major loss) and no nationwide upheavals.
VP Vance's comments rightly underscore that without truth, there can be no unity. Ms. Attiyeh embodies this issue quite well, with her lies about Kirk (sadly, she is not alone among the press in this regard).
Likewise, unity is not possible with people whose thirst is merely for the power of their leftist, marxist project.
Kirk's assassination has galvanized "the normies" to return to church and for peaceful vigils. No George Floyd like violent riots (Floyd riots caused 19 deaths and $2B in damages, conservative estimates). Not seeing violence from the right and God willing, won't see it either.
Mark Halperin suggested that most of the left/liberal folks he knows have NO idea about Kirk or how their fellow countrymen think or view these issues. None--and hence the MSM slants are unwitting--similar to the famous Pauline Kale comment that she knew no-one who voted for Nixon so how could he have won.
Maybe this is true; but when the left and MSM continues to aggressively push for left wing ideas, and yes, until recently, continued to suggest that Tyler Robinson was MAGA, it is offensive to the rest of us that can see REALITY.
Read Mark Steyn's column today on the trans movement for some perspective on that travesty.
https://www.steynonline.com/15582/the-war-on-reality
Finally, it will be a major achievement if our government can hamper the NGOs funding these left wing marxist enterprises (protesters for rent, Intifada, radical trans groups such as those in Utah, campaigns for no cash bail local judges and DAs, not to mention releasing criminals). And yes, it is infuriating that people like Soros obtain tax breaks for donating to such "non profits" that clearly are outside the intent of the non-profit provisions of the tax code.
In the name of God why doesn't Thune allow hearings on this? Don't answer that.
Well seems like, based on Stephen Miller's comments and other information that is emerging, that the action will now be judicial. One hopes so.
Question: how does the constant trafficking in falsehood by Vance's boss play into your "without truth, there can be no unity"?
'Don't take him literally, just take him seriously!!!!' retort coming in 3,2,1...
Name the lies that comprise the "constant trafficking.
Look, absent a group of people CELEBRATING murder and putting their celebrations online for all to see, not to mention releasing violent criminals and what is constant--lawfare--then I would ignore your comment. As sadly, I suspect your stance is obvious to all
However, we have to confront rhetoric such as your now. You might not like Trump's tone--your call--but I won't grant your "but both sides" garbage.
I hope Donald Trump and Vance have the good sense to steal the indoctrinated students out from under the left's grasp. Kids like me were told by everyone to go off to these diploma mills to get radicalized then struggled to find work afterwards. We were sold a bill of sale by the left, thanks to Saint Xenia I eventually found work in the field I was trained in.
So if the universities are going to reveal themselves to be radicalized leftist institutions that no longer honor free speech, why not forgive the atrocious loans they tricked students into? I promise you, if Donald Trump cut university funding to zilch AND forgave all student loans like the left always promised they would but never did? The Republican party would never lose an election for decades.
A very interesting idea!!! It just might work too on the principle that the government was funding biased think tanks that were not allowing freedom of speech. The forgiveness of debt could be labeled as a tuition refund as the university and college administration had a duty of care to guarantee freedom of speech rather than DEI indoctrination.
Yes, and they could use the money that would have gone to the institutions to pay the student debt, so that the taxpayers wouldn't be (or at least, wouldn't completely be) on the hook for more money than they would have been to fund the institutions.
If we're concerned about the tax payer, why not go a step further. Don't just cut funding - make the universities foot the entire bill. Let the very people that turned education into a profiteering racket pay for it.
You raise a good point, why isn't more done to ensure kids get jobs out of college in the field they studied anyway? If we keep these universities, let's force them to demonstrate they contribute to our economy and they claim. If they don't, do that really have a right to exist?
I think that last part is a very good idea. Forgive student loans but also, create a pool of loans and grants for young people who want to learn a trade (Trump has allowed Pell grants to be used at trade schools for the first time) or who are trying to start a small business or who have a technology to commercialize. The money would be used to support this generation and get them on their feet. Including low interest home loans might help, but we have done that before and it made a mess in 2008. Use the money that was being given to NGOs (and which came right back into the pockets of politicians) and spend it HERE on our youngest generations. Yours is a capital idea.
Praise God the idea resonates with you brother Rare Earth! I completely agree about creating a pool of funds for kids. In fact, we have all this infrastructure for student loans, why not do exactly what you say? Don't gut the industry and kill all those jobs, instead retool it.
Wipe out the debt that's blackmailed the young. I voted for Kamala Harris last election despite my pro-life convictions because the radical left put an economic noose around my neck. Then use the same infrastructure to create very low cost loan products that can be used for trade schools or entrepreneur schemes as long as you have a valid business plan.
Why should poor peole who didn't go to college pay the debt of students who chose majors with no employment hopes? This is theft. and a recipe for more stupid decision making. Now, if you want to confiscate the university endowments for that purpose, I'm open to the consideration.
I agree with you of all we were to do is what Biden proposed - which was blatantly unfair and nothing more than an attempt to buy votes. But if we expanded the scope, if we did more for young people going into trades and starting small businesses, I can get intrigued. Maybe it could be coupled with two years of national service? I am just throwing out ideas. But in no way did I or do I support the Biden idea. At any rate, I have begun to take seriously the complaints of the younger generation. Maybe their wearing me down - as kids always do?
I am completely in favor of trades as a viable and healthy alternative to the dreck peddled in too many colleges and universities. Too many community colleges peddle the same crap and need to be reformed.
You are absolutely correct. There is a myth that community colleges somehow are better at providing students with practical education. That is nonsense. Trade schools do that and some community colleges have actual workforce education, but most serve up the same courses of study that the four-year colleges and universities do only worse. They are happy to help the students sign off on government loans and provide them worthless two year degrees in gender studies, or international affairs, etc. In fact, many students, and I do me many, are so poorly advised and so ill-informed by community colleges, that they use up all their student aid monies (because it has always been capped) at the two-year level! It is disgraceful, but education is a business, so caveat emptor. Unfortunately, the average community college student is the least likely student to be prepared to make discerning choices. If the community college can keep a student for more than two years as the "find themselves," they will do it and take the money. It is unconscionable.
Ah, the conservative argument for student debt forgiveness. But still, should taxpayers foot the bill?
I think it'd be wrong for them to foot all of it. We'd have to look at multiple funding sources, maybe in part the very schools that radicalized us kids in the first place.
I recall that Biden turned down the whole student debt forgiveness idea when running for office, then became convinced that key voting constituencies really wanted him to do that, so he did. A lot of people complained "I paid off my loans" or "I got a good job without taking on loans" and really didn't see any reason they should now pay off someone else's loans. Since government guaranteed loans are paid back from tax money to the extent they are not paid back by the borrower, it means a lot of would be paying other people's loans. I pointed out that a lot of students had been scammed by guidance counselors (or whatever they are called now), teachers, the general culture, college recruiters, all drumming the message You Must All Go To College You Are Nothing If You Don't, not to mention, You'll Get Much Better Paid Jobs So You Can Easily Pay Off The Loans. That was indeed a lie. So far -- nothing to do with left-wing infantile disorder indoctrination. Its just that, when a small minority of people went to college, they did indeed tend to get higher paying jobs, but, when more than half the population goes to college, a lot of jobs you used to get with a high school diploma demanded a college degree, because why not when there are so many and you can get one -- jobs like assistant manager at a department store. But the hard part is, who will pay? I'd like to be able to charge it to all those who insisted that all those students to go college, but they don't make enough to even begin to pay. Its a hard one to sort out.
I really appreciate your nuanced take on this. While I think the schools should pay something I'm being cruel by wanting them to pay everything - that's unreasonable. And not every college degree is indoctrination - STEM is still STEM.
Plus each of the things you mention aren't really malicious per say, they are more like overreactions without taking context in mind. Historically, going to college did get you better pay and a shot at opportunities that you didn't get other ways. If a college degree translates to better job performance, it seems like a great idea to require it (this is an oversimplification - IO Psychology has found out some of the things that predict job performance and just having a degree of experience are actually pretty bad predictors of performance).
I'm reminded of a quote from my friend Rick, "For every problem there is a solution that is elegant, simple, and wrong."
No.
And there we have it.
Because you know, aren't universities kind of weird? They are certainly ahuman - they ignore basic rhythms of life past societies were built on.
Here's an idea, let's take all these kids teeming with hormones because God has decided they are ready to start families. Now instead of helping them marry and find a living wage job out of Highschool so they can support a family, were going to separate them from their families and communities, put them all together, and tee hee, wouldn't you know the sexual revolution happens.
Finding a spouse was a community affair in olden times. The entire village helped figure out who belonged with who. Now we force these kids who don't know anything to figure out that question all by themselves before their brain has finished developing, and we strip them of the childhood community that would have naturally allowed relationships to develop.
Is it any wonder we have a loneliness epidemic?
Any society that labels teen pregnancy "an epidemic" has lost its mind. Late teens is precisely when kids should be marrying and starting families - it's the time of peak fertility.
Have we lost our collective minds?
"Have we lost our collective minds?"
The mind is still there. We were trained not to listen to it.
Teens having kids when they are not socially mature and able to support them as adults is a big problem. Ideally we should be marrying and having kids in one's early to mid 20s. People's brains are not fully developed until around age 25 (varying by individual of course). The grim past reality under which half the kids born did not live and malnutrition shortened women's fertile years is no longer with us and we need not be in a huge hurry to have children as if we were Paleolithic hunters and gatherers.
I think it is just the malleability of their brains that make coupling so important at a young(er) age. We have told women and men to "establish" themselves professionally first, and then pair up. Well... that just makes two selfish people coming together later than they should to create children and a relationship that they often resent for "changing" things for them.
I myself married late, after a lot of things had set with me. Although it seems to be working in my case, I can attest to the wisdom of growing up together as well.
I was born late in my parents' lives- -and I very much think I benefited from having older, and maybe wiser, adults as parents. Though does come with the reality of losing them sooner.
People should not be having kids they are incapable of supporting. As I just posted elsewhere even in the Middle Ages men (the ones not noblemen) waited until they could support families to marry-- apprentices and jouneymen (teens and maybe earliest twenties) did not marry. The main exceptions were in areas where deadly malaria was prevalent as a great scourge.
In the not so distant past young people could graduate high school maybe take a year or two getting established in a job (for the men maybe a stint in the military) and then marry, buy a house and start having kids. IMO, that would be the ideal. I am certainly not suggest we wait until 30!
I am old enough to remember working class people-- friends of my older step-siblings-- who married too soon-- at 18 or 19 in the late 70s and early 80s. And every last one of those marriages failed in no great time-- luckily almost none of them had children to be harmed in the divorce. "Marry in haste repent at leisure" was a proverb the Middle Ages knew too.
People should not have a society that doesn’t have an economy in which young people can’t support a family. Start with getting rid of the useless credentialism and the equally useless public schools. Replace the latter with what we had in 1950 and scrap absolutely everything done since in those schools. Start with de-consolidating school districts.
In 1950 public schools were ubiquitous. Heck they were so a century ago-- both my parents and my step mother, were educated in public schools.
I'm all in favor of bringing back shop classes and HomeEc- though on a coed basis. Boys should know how to cook; nothing wrong with girls leaning handy skills. Maybe refocus PE classes less on sports and more on healthy exercise, and where possible outdoors.
I don't know how to get rid of credentialism. And much of it is due not so much to ensuring people are bright and studious, but as an imperfect way to ensure they have long-term soft skills needed for many jobs as there's no way to test for those.
That is such a fascinating point. Maybe this is part of why there are so many divorces.
I've always thought so...two dumbass kids who are utterly reliant on each other for their survival, in the malleability of their brains, will naturally "cleave" together as the Bible demands. Then, the two shall truly become one and model Christ as intended.
Social immaturity is something that we have chosen to allow in our youths. (I’m trying to preserve the words “children” and “kids” for prepubescents, and “youths” for the 13-21 set.) I grew up in a rural small town in the 1970s. Many of my high school peers were working part time at jobs that few youths today would ever take—farm labor, part-time clerk work in the drug store, stocking shelves at the grocery store, etc. Today those jobs are held by immigrants or older women, or are automated. Those older women would have been housewives in my youth. Men are nowhere to be seen. My male peers today have either left town as I did, or they are on disability or they are dead.
None of this is inevitable. It is a choice or the result of other choices.
Re: Social immaturity is something that we have chosen to allow in our youths.
I agree with this very much. We do prolong immaturity far past the point of necessity (and it does take time to learn skills and settle into a career-- even in Middle Ages tradesmen did not marry until they had passed through the apprentice and journeymen phases). And I've commented as well on the fact that except among the poor teens generally do not work unlike in my youth when almost all of us did.
I also agree with not labeling teenagers as "children".
That we have 35-year olds acting like spoiled, rich 12-year old olds is mildly horrifying to me. Consider that Our Savior was finished in His earthly ministry at the age of 33.
As Good Time Charlie realized, you ain’t a kid at 33.
You play around you lose your wife,
You play too long, you lose your life
For most of human history, children worked alongside their parents in agriculture or crafts, as their age permitted them to take on small, then increasing, parts of the family's labor. When factory production became predominant, children were valued for small, dextrous hands, and worked by heartless magnates who had no emotional bond, no interest in them as family or growing progeny. Thus, the movement to ban child labor. But this left some unfilled time. Much of it was absorbed by school, but not all. Now we begin to realize that children actually need to take on responsibility, but responsibly, and not as objected of vicious exploitation.
Children? Or youths? That distinction is extremely important. My high school peers who worked at 16 are much better people in every way than almost anyone I know who never worked in their youth but ran through the intense college-professional track.
Some of it is technology though. My first job was bagging groceries. That's a job that's long since gone now due to technology with the self checkout areas.
There is an old saying, "It takes a village to raise a child." When these socially immature people were imbedded in communities of wiser and more capable adults, often of the same family, it didn't matter if they had more growing to do - your clan took care of you.
The industrial revolution plus the university system destroyed this. But with the Internet this doesn't have to be. Keep these teens in their communities and either connect them to trades schools or remote colleges. Let them grow with the community of children they knew from when they were young.
Let's deindustrialize and resgricultarixe to. After all, our first professions were gardener and herdsman.
We have younger couples often with a baby (or one on the way) at my church. But they are in their 20s, not teenagers. Again, I am not urging people wait until they are 30.
You are right brother, our current system encourages waiting to that age. I'm saying that is a weird way to structure the system in the first place and now that we are considering new ways to structure things we shouldn't maintain the faulty existing design.
I can't like this enough!
As it stands, I can foresee that we will have a dictator in the next decade. Congress will be even more of a rump than today, and the court system will increasingly defeat itself by trying and failing to exercise executive power.
I don’t think a dictatorship is exactly the most likely outcome. Dictators are aberrations in a national character, a thing that is a temporary state (albeit maybe a longer running one than what we think of when we hear “temporary”). The trend we are seeing now feels a lot more imperial Rome, where the emperor and the bureaucracy ruled, and the senate had become a club for the wealthy to sit around and pretend to be relevant. Rome had no equivalent to the judiciary of course, but the senate was intended as a check to any attempt to consolidate power in the hands of one man and ultimately failed at that task. As with Rome, our system of government was intended to prevent a return to monarchy. We just elect ours.
This sounds about right.
Trump has some disturbing monarchial delusions.
Charles Murray says, corrrectly, that the Founders' Constitution died 1937-1941. I think it's going to be a question of saving what's left.
That is an interesting observation. Murray linked the death to FDR? Could you elaborate?
Yes.
https://x.com/charlesmurray/status/1966897688785678513
That link suggests that originalism killed the constitution, starting around 1971. Its a bad philosophy, but it hasn't killed the constitution. Murray is generally short-sighted and wrong. (I finally had to read The Bell Curve after some editors returned an encyclopedia entry to me asking for some coverage of it.) His circular reason and poorly constructed premises were obvious.
No, that’s Jill Lepore’s thesis. Murray draws a distinction between googoo progressives like TR and militant progressives like Frankfurter, Brandeis, and Harlan Fiske Stone.
I find a lot of flaws in Roosevelt, and admire Brandeis's development of the constitutional right to be left alone. That right is almost universally expected by all Americans, although we differ on what should be left along in our own lives and what "there oughta be a law" against in our neighbors' lives. Its as American as apple pie.
Of course The Atlantic suggests that originalism killed the Constitution.
That's why it seemed something was missing in the linked article as evidence of Murray's thesis. The "Living Constitution" is no constitution at all, since it would be infinitely malleable, like any statute or regulation. (That is roughly what the British "constitution" is like). But Originalism is too static. The fundamental principles have to be applied to new developments without a constitutional amendment anytime a new technology is invented. the Olmstead ruling was wrong in saying that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to wiretapping because it doesn't mention telephones. Scalia was correct to apply 4th amendment jurisprudence to electronic surveillance of private home, even from public streets.
Our Founders gave us the ability to amend the Constitution as needed. That’s how we fix things we think are problems or adjust issues as needed. Otherwise, I think more things should be left to the states.
Meh. Murray is just making a partisan argument there-- in favor of the "malefactors of great wealth" whose wings were clipped a bit under the New Deal. Heck slaveowners used to moan and whine that the Constitution of the Founders was killed by the Civil War.
I would disagree. America started becoming more centralized after the Civil War, it became even more centralized when Wilson was president and then once F.D.R. became president, it further accelerated. The Founders vision of America ended in some ways at least with the Civil War.
Will the United States last until 2029?
A cathedral in my church issued a “both sides” statement. I am calling them out for it.
Free speech only applies to people who believe in reasonable discussion. We already punish psychopaths who manipulate or Charles Manson bs. They are ideologically against us and, tbh, what you pointed out doesn't sound like it'll root it out. That redline is America and that redline has to be maintained. It requires entirely deradicalizes everyone in every major institution. I'd prefer a new constitution, but they need to be made an enemy of the state to keep it legal. In order to do so, they'd have to translate dei into enlightenment liberal terms. Again, I'd prefer a new constitution, but all that s--- has to be figured out.
Re: Free speech only applies to people who believe in reasonable discussion.
Not what the First Amendment says. There are limits to free speech-- we have laws against perjury, fraud and direct incitation to violence and slander can be sued over-- but the last thing we need is some Bureau of Freedom and Truth telling us what we can and cannot say. File under Cure Worse Than Disease.
You would be correct even if I don't share your paranoia about the government, specifically, setting communication standards in code. I specifically mentioned the Charles Manson one because that is an example that is malicious. Besides that, the alien exclusion acts were legal with the first amendment. In any case, that's not my point. Their speech is manipulative and subversive and they use it to undermine the state and culture and take over our institutions. They are an enemy of the state.
Your ideas here are as bad, or worse, than all those of the Left that we’ve been pushing against.
You're going to find this odd, but the idea that free speech is for reasonable discourse isn't my idea or values at all. It's literally the values of the enlightenment and framers of the constitution. It's not until Rousseau that that changes which Jefferson embodied more (and which was the basis of the French revolution). The constitution employs that language with the "reasonable person" limit for what can be considered a threat. Lo, it's even in the fourth amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."
I specifically used liberal constitutional concepts I do not agree with. The Charles Manson example is perfectly normal.
Edit: If you mean deradicalization, we did that with the nazis in Germany. They were too nuts and if they were deradicalized then they could teach in uni or work in government. There are catastrophic issues that liberalism cannot deal with and goes over their head.
Free speech applies to any speech. It can't be regulated or banned as speech. We all put up with a lot of godawful nonsense because we don't trust a government censor to determine which speech is worthy of protection. If your speech threatens murder, arson, rape, then what is actionable is the criminal intent, not the speech as speech. There is also the doctrine of fighting words. But many people could label someone else's speech as "unreasonable" for any reason or no reason.
I agree it's a bit ambiguous, but that is part and parcel of how us law works, if a "reasonable person" can constitute it as a threat. That is the semantics determination of the legal guilt of the speech.
Edit: Look, they are threatening, inciting and lying in news media, universities and government. I'm not sure what you want because that's exactly what they're doing. There's nothing abnormal about that except it is applied to dei subversive language. It just has to be clearly and legally untangled because what we have is crazy rn.
There is a huge difference between "reasonable speech" and the legal standard of the hypothetical "reasonable person." There is no such standard as "reasonable speech." When deciding whether speech is libelous (in the USA almost exclusively a civil tort, not a criminal offense), it can be a standard whether the "reasonable person" would have known the statement was false before publishing it. The "reasonable person" standard is used in many areas of law, not particularly with regard to speech.
It also applies in criminal law as I gave an example. Maybe "people who believe in a reasonable discussion" can simply mean "reasonable people" in terms of inciting violence without splitting hairs. We could split hairs if you want to; do you want to?
Maybe you are indulging in sloppy grandstanding, moving words around from precise contexts where they mean something and have a well established common usage, to delusional mental constructs where they serve your notion of how it oughtta be rather than statements of legal jurisprudence.
I never said "reasonable speech" to begin with, that was your rephrasing. You're arguing with yourself. I explicitly said "reasonable person."
Charles Manson was not punished for his speech. He was punished for the murders he commanded.
We have a media problem. Kirk was killed because of the lies told about what he said. This is something the media has taken to doing regularly about those it wishes to smear.
How about something like a "Truth in Reporting" statute, a variation of the old Fairness Doctrine, whereby if it can be proven that a media outlet has knowingly lied about a public figure's words or his/her record they can be sanctioned?
You can never prove that.
We really can’t have force of government policing discourse. Common law provisions against incitement and fighting words as well as civil actions over slander, libel and defamation are sufficient. (Assuming the legal profession itself hasn’t been totally cowed by the Woke.)
That’d shut down every news organization in the country and the internet if it applied there too. Tempting…
You can't legislate morality, remember. You certainly can't legislate quality journalism. But we could begin to teach our children to think so they could eventually tell the difference.
Permit a niggle. Kirk was killed because the kid who killed him and the furry friends who corrupted him don't know the difference between what Kirk said and what they think he said, what set the cortisol flowing, got the rage going. That's what they're programmed for. They don't know how to read, they don't know how to reason, and they don't know how to argue. So it's pass the ammunition.
The whole event was sub-discursive, and apologies if I’m coining an ugly phrase.
No apologies needed, it's an apt phrase for the ugly times we are in.
"Sub-discursive" decribes a lot of commentary on the internet these days (with the exception of blogs like these of course!)
An excellent summary.
This is one of the themes my Priest hit during his homily this past Sunday. They didn't hate Kirk. They hated a caricature of Kirk.
Perhaps it's precisely because people can be so easily caricatured these days before a wide audience that Kirk's murder makes me as anxious as it does. It could be me next if I dare say anything.
"Kirk was killed because of the lies told about what he said."
You have no evidence to support such a statement. Maybe what you claim will eventually be shown true, but there is nothing that illustrates such a claim thus far.
There is a lot of reason to believe that Kirk was killed because of such lies. He was regularly described as a Nazi, homophobic misogynist, etc. There has also been a lot of violent rhetoric from the hard left about how to deal with so-called “Nazis”.
Elementary reasoning suggests strongly that Kirk was killed precisely for these reasons.
It does remain possible that the killer fired at Kirk for purely idiosyncratic reasons, but from what we already know or have been told by the governor and others in a position to know, this appears very much like a classic political assassination. Enough so that asserting it as such is acceptable now.
You can read the texts now between him and his roommate for a closer look. 😕
Yes. Unlike Heather Cox Richardson, I don’t say things without good reasons. In my case, the governor of Utah had already identified the killer’s political context. Politicians do not make statements like that without being sure they’re accurate. The political costs of being wrong are existential for their careers.
There are two forms of reasoning - inductive and deductive. Iacobuzio is engaging in deductive reasoning. To most of us he seems on firm ground in his deductions. Engraving "Catch this fascist" seems a good piece of evidence to support his thoughts and there is more, as you know. Charlie Kirk was not a fascist, that is a falsehood, also called a lie, but the shooter believed him to be one and the shooter killed him with that in mind, obviously.
This is tangential brother Rate Earth, but I recently learned about a new story of reasoning called Abductive Reasoning. It's similar to inductive in that wecare driving rules from a set of observations. What's different about it is it involves creating sets of inductive reasoning assertions and then filtering them by probability or likelihood of truthfulness.
I find the idea fascinating.
I've seen at least two detailed discussions putting initial claims that he "hated empathy" and "said its worth some deaths to preserve the Second Amendment" in context which shows his intent was grossly distorted by cherry-picking. In this post, Rod explicitly said that a statement by the Washington Post reporter was "a lie." While I would like some elaboration of the details, other comments have specified that what Kirk said about specific women has been quoted as a general statement about "black women." I think its pretty clear some of the critiques are grossly distorted or lies. That said, I might still disagree with him.
Rod, it is an interesting thought that the death of Charlie Kirk paved the way to a Vance presidency that otherwise might have been a non-starter. Politics takes weird and unpredictable turns.
I think much of this has to do with the change in tone on the left from the liberal to the radical. I want to tread cautiously, because exceptions exist in all ages, but there always seemed to be a clear line back in the 60s and 70s between what we think of liberalism and radical leftism. Now, it really feels like the situation has been reversed, where the radicals run the show and set the tone, and liberals are increasingly adrift between not wanting to be conservative on one hand and not wanting any part of what is becoming something malign and malignant.
There is some overlap between the radical left and the community of people with serious mental illness. Medicated and treated, you couldn’t tell me from an average person who tends to be a little moody at times. But I think that treatment of mental illness among the trans and other transgressive movements tends to be rejected much of the time and channeled into reinforcement of the ideology, because it feeds on itself. Whether it is a gateway into possession is another discussion entirely, but I would say that untreated mental illness might be a factor in that as well.
Getting back to where we are now, I think that the reversal of who represents the left is a real difference between where we were and where we are. I think the watershed moment of this past week has been a majority of people that used to think in terms of “bleeding heart soft headed dummy liberals” making up the modern left suddenly realizing that this is not the situation at all. They have come to realize that their mental model of the right versus left in this country is broken and that the left has been playing a much different game for a while now.
It is hard to say where this ends up, but I think it is reasonable to say we are headed towards some level of civil violence. It has been revealing to read what the mainstream leftist rags have been writing about Charlie Kirk as well as a growing awareness on the right that civil conflict may indeed be coming. The irony is that they call out the right for that while ignoring the fact the left has understood and expected this for some time.
I don’t think the full impact of Kirk’s murder will be known for a while, but it is turning into a watershed moment, even for those who didn’t know much about him. In the end, I think it doesn’t really have much to do with Charlie Kirk and who he was, but the fact that people have been awoken in a way too dramatic to ignore that they are now considered an enemy whose murder is justifiable by those on the left.
This is a great post, friend.
This is very much of the same view.
https://www.takimag.com/article/not-a-civil-war-something-worse-americas-years-of-lead/
Is Taki still alive? How old is he?
Late 80s, I think? But yes, he's still alive, and still pens a weekly. Also just put out a new autobiography.
Thanks
Taki is very old. He still pens a monthly in Chronicles. And he has his own website that is probably run by others. He's pushing ninety.
As a former leftist I'd say part of the mental illness is a fundamental mispdrception of reality by the left. What is the quote? "Reality has a left wing bias".
When you are indoctrinated into believing your side is the one that sees reality clearly regardless of the issue, well then why would you compromise on anything? If you convince yourself the other side has no valid points - well then why listen to them?
Right. It's an epistemic question really. Breaking out of any incorrect or incomplete understanding of any aspect of reality is very often only possible if one's foundations of understanding are reordered, or even knocked away. For minor things, this is easy and we all do it all the time ("Oh, so that's what she looks like? Funny, I always pictured her as a redhead..." or "you know, I really do like cilantro, but it took me years to get over how my mother's overuse of it put me off"). Such adjustments are often inconsequential. But for systems that undergird our reality this is tricky work, and can often cause other things to also fall apart - things you might not have realized were even connected. If it cuts to our self conception (our "identity"), we can be unmade (one of the harder aspects of addiction rehab is filling the void the addiction's absence leaves).
As someone that was addicted to pornography for decades, I know exactly what you mean. Without Jesus as our foundation we can't see the nuance of reality and correct our faulty beliefs.
I, too, escaped the brain virus long ago (before most people knew it existed—the early 90s), and have tried to articulate this to friends and family myself. Well said.
I would say being a cradle-Catholic helped, but my brother didn’t escape
I concur with what you have written, save for one detail...this week and last many have been saying something similar to what you said here "...but I think it is reasonable to say we are headed towards some level of civil violence." When we say this we seem to not acknowledge that we are already there; we already have and have had civil violence. The violent riots in the summer of 2020 are on example. The killing of the Israeli couple in NYC, the cold-blooded murder of the CEO of UHC, the many mass shootings at schools, the two attempts on the life of the president, Charlie Kirk's murder...etc. So what do we mean when we say that we are heading toward some level of civil violence? It seems we are drawing a distinction between the violence that is and has been, but what is that distinction, exactly?
PS_I am asking sincerely. I am not trolling one iota.
I think part of the distinction is the perceived mass shattering of public perception on a broad scale. Something about this shooting feels qualitatively different then past ones for reasons that by the grace of God I can't put into words.
Yeah, I got to thinking that I should have clarified what I meant. I think maybe violence that was explicitly political and openly approved of by the side that the actor represented. The two attempts on Trumps life are murky with regard to motive, the riots in 2020 had race as a primary focus, etc.
So, we have a murder here that was clearly a political act and openly approved of. I think that is what feels different this time around. Je suis Charlie suddenly has a far more relevant meaning now to everyone who attends a conservative rally or speaking engagement, goes to a Christian church, etc.
Basically, I think Kirk’s assassination has let the genie out of the bottle. You now have perfect clarity for anyone on the right who still did not understand the situation, and you have celebration on the left of having taken a scalp in a way that has a clear political justification.
I think it goes back, too, to the moronic question of “is it okay to punch Nazis?” The obvious problem is who defines a Nazi? Apparently, it’s okay to shoot anyone on the right who has the wrong views.
In this environment, it is going to start becoming a shoving match until it turns openly violent in an organized manner, maybe similar to The Troubles. I don’t think the right is going to stay passive any longer, because the murder was not just an act of violence against one man, but against ideas that many people have. Every war starts with a single shot, I suppose.
Thank you for the response. I thought more about it too. I came to a similar conclusion as you that the right is not going to remain mostly passive any more, to date despite what the left says, the right's passivity has been a brake on more violence. If the actions the right takes from here on are legal, that is good, but we all have a sense of foreboding because it may not all be legal action. If the right becomes violent too, then we have as you says the American version of the Troubles, and by that I mean tit-for-tat violence and a spiraling of disorder...I'll leave it at that.
The videos of Normie Charlie Kirk mourners body slamming leftist trolls who vandalized memorials in front of them and held them for the cops who then arrested the trolls should give you an idea of how the vibe has shifted. With a few notable exceptions (the Kenosha Kid, for example) Normies didn't physically respond to the aggression of the lefties during the Summer of Floyd.
They're not putting up with it now and the cops are backing their plays.
The mainstream Left has been suborning murder for a very long time, and passing it off as entertainment and free speech. I am unaware of no such moral failing on the mainstream right.
Every recent murder, and attempted murder, is the child of this, from the attempted assassination of President Reagan to today.
The bleeding-heart liberal types, starting especially in the late 1980s, were indoctrinated in university into a specifically neo-Marxist notion of what it meant to be “on the Left”. As time went on, this took over more and more departments. Frankfurt School critical theory melded with postmodern notions of truth and turned race and sexual politics into the new class struggle. But both the revolutionary ethos and utopianism of Marxism were retained.
It was perfect stuff for seducing American students. You can be radical without actually fighting for the working class. It was also perfect for recruiting young people to the Democratic Party.
But since it’s fake, it was certain to spiral into shrill nonsense. As we saw. After a couple decades it arrived at Woke, Inc. And now it’s just hysteria and nihilism.
"It was perfect stuff for seducing American students. You can be radical without actually fighting for the working class."
This is excellent observation and analysis; it certainly coincides with my experience as well.
But I'm not so sure 'hysteria and nihilism' fully captures the zeitgeist on the current left. Hysteria and nihilism can be abandoned when reality intervenes, albeit with some embarrassment, perhaps. But for many of the Woke, the heady mix of oppressor-bashing and oppressee-championing has crystalized into a worryingly durable infrastructure of essentially religious practice and meaning. Breaking this up and tearing away the splintered remains will seem soul-destroying to many, at least to those who still believe they have souls, I guess.
“But I think that treatment of mental illness among the trans and other transgressive movements tends to be rejected much of the time and channeled into reinforcement of the ideology, because it feeds on itself.”
Excellent point. I think that we see this with the whole “Celebrate Neurodivergence!” movement as well. It’s one thing to believe that mental illness should not be stigmatized; it’s another thing completely to believe and act like it’s a feature, not a bug. I sincerely doubt that many parents of severely autistic kids or folks who have disabling personality disorders, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia are all good with their illnesses.
"Rage blinds. We have to make sure to go after the funders of violent radicalism while respecting legitimate dissent protected by the First Amendment. I’m not sure that this is a line that will be respected in the days to come. We will see.
"Rage blinds. We have to make sure to go after the funders of violent radicalism while respecting legitimate dissent protected by the First Amendment. I’m not sure that this is a line that will be respected in the days to come. We will see...
"THIS IS WRONG! I’m entirely in favor of the government doing whatever it is constitutionally permitted to do to dismantle these networks and organizations. But what Bondi said is blatantly unconstitutional, and should be resisted."
Good. Maybe if Charlie Kirk becomes the right's George Floyd, Rod will be on the right side after all. But it's too bad he started out by pouring gasoline on the fire.
Whatever is constitutionally permitted is a HUGE limitation.
"I think J.D. Vance is going to do this. I pray he fights well, and justly, not tyrannically."
At this point I'd accept a little "tyrannically" so long as he/the right/the administration actually fights.
The worm has definitely turned - you can practically feel the wind blowing in a different direction - but real change requires follow-through and not just tough words. For too long on the right it's been tough words and little more. Would like to think this time, finally, after all this, it'll be different. But we'll need to wait and see.
"At this point I'd accept a little "tyrannically" so long as he/the right/the administration actually fights."
What an amazingly keyboard-warrior take. The hell with ethics, the rule of law, and the Constitution -- just FIGHT!!!! You're a modern-day Madison, kgasmart.
Just fight - as in, declare Antifa a terrorist organization, which it certainly is. Investigate the NGOs behind the movement; prosecute those on Discord who knew this murder was coming and did nothing.
There's plenty that *can* be done. But saying, "We're really mad this time!" and then doing nothing... would be par for the course.
I'm all for going after culpable individuals or groups, but according to the rule of law and respecting their own Constitutional rights.
"There's plenty that *can* be done. But saying, "We're really mad this time!" and then doing nothing... would be par for the course."
Agreed. What's dubious is that part where you state that you'll "accept a little 'tyrannically'". Seriously, what the hell does that even mean?
For starters, we could make certain liberal ideas unemployable.
For example, if you are on record supporting transgenderism or DEI, you would be unqualified for government work. We could also put some pressure on businesses to make you unemployable on the private sector as well.
One of the benefits of a database (e.g. Palantir) is that we can create a fingerprint of every statement you've made on a public online forum, and then these could be used to flag potential leftists before they are allowed to join a company or agency. Furthermore, we could also train AI models to identify "at-risk" liberals who are more likely to commit violence, and then restrict their internet access, public transportation, and launch additional monitoring from law enforcement.
Just like some conservatives during the Biden years were "de-banked."
You should read Phillip K. Dick's "Minority Report." In it these super intelligent creatures called "pre-cogs" could "see into the future," and could see what crimes were going to be committed and by whom. There was a special police force empowered to pick up the future perpetrators before they committed the offense. Tom Cruise made a movie out of it, but it left a lot to be desired. Per the usual, the book was better.
Re: <<<...we could make certain liberal ideas unemployable; ... a database (so that) we can create a fingerprint of every statement you've made on a public online forum, and then these could be used to flag potential leftists; ... we could also train AI models to identify "at-risk" liberals who are more likely to commit violence, and then restrict their internet access, public transportation, and launch additional monitoring from law enforcement.>>>
What horrible ideas! Those sound like things the Left would do.
Re: For starters, we could make certain liberal ideas unemployable.
Ugh. Rightwing wokery right there! Cancel those we disagree with. Also to be filed under "Cure worse than disease"
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
I'd accept a little overreach. What's "a little" and "overreach?" It will depend. I'd like to see Discord servers where threats of violence are made shut down. Reddit is an absolute cesspit of leftist extremism - I'd like to see the Administration put a boot on the company's neck. Does this amount to censorship? Probably. But we're well past the point where the question is - are we going to have censorship or not? The question now is "Whose censorship, and to what purpose?"
Or, as I suggested upthread, how about a "Truth in Reporting" statute whereby if it can be proven that a media outlet has knowingly lied about a public figure's words or his/her record they can be sanctioned? Karen Attiah was fired by the Washington Post - could she, SHOULD she be sued for defaming a dead man, Charlie Kirk - because she certainly did lie about what he'd said, could/should have known what she wrote was false. What sanctions should the Washington Post itself face for publishing these lies?
Currently, a public figure can't successfully sue for defamation unless they can prove "actual malice". This comes from a Supreme Court decision, decided on 1st Amendment grounds.
Couldn’t you just tweak the law to make it easier to sue for libel?
I think it was a little bit of ironic humor, not to be taken literally. It is a way of expressing a sense of frustration with the status quo that includes a lot of talk and no action.
Antifa was declared a terrorist organization during the first Trump administration, wasn't it?
Again, there is no "Antifa" organization. It's just a word certain people apply to themselves. You can't treat it as if it's La Cosa Nostra or the Ku Klux Klan.
I think Andy Ngo would disagree with you
Huh? He was assaulted yes but that hardly proves some vast conspiracy.
Andy's been following/reporting on Antifa for several years running. They're definitely a thing
Antifa, or rather the various "chapters," are at least as formal and institutionalized as La Cosa Nostra, contrary to what Jerry Nadler would have us believe.
You could feel the breeze in 2020 to... and yet here we are.
No need to worry, AI is going to swoop in and make the world perfect. Everything will be fine, at least that's what the internet says.
Rod is correct in pointing out that for some, transgenderism is a way station on path to transhumanism. Sam Altman says that he is not a transhumanist, but if you read what he has written, it is hard to accept that.
There’s Rod’s friend Peter Thiel too.
Peter Theil earned his money.
So?
The point was him being a transhumanist. He’s a homosexual Satanist too. I’m open to being persuaded otherwise, but Rod doesn’t seem fussy in his choice of friends when they’re rich and powerful.