Given the fanaticism of the managerial class, most political topics are useful only in sorting people into political buckets. Liberals support “taxing the rich” while conservatives oppose “socialism”. The only thing that matters in these “debates” is which side you are on as nothing is ever debated. In fact, the debate around the topic looks more like a distraction. The point of the debate is to provide cover for what is happening behind the scenes between pols and their handlers.
While those ceremonial debates are useless, there are some issues that are useful, because they reveal truths about the system and the people in it. Firearms policy is one of those issues. The 2A community in America is large and extremely well informed on the topic of guns and gun laws. Knowing the rules is an important part of every subculture within the gun community. Knowing the local laws is often a prerequisite for entry into the community, so the members are highly informed.
This is one reason the Left struggles with the issue. The Left wins when they can claim the moral high ground, because that means Conservative Inc. will fold up like a cheap tent and beg for forgiveness. Part of seizing the moral high ground though is claiming a thoroughgoing knowledge of the issue. The reason the Left is festooned with barnacles claiming to be policy experts is so they can claim a mastery of the topic. This lets them say “we know best” and push through their policies.
With guns, this is not possible. All of the facts work against gun grabbing. Whether it is the mythological gun show loophole or the assault weapon ban, any discussion of the issue quickly reveals the Left knows nothing about guns. In fact, it is like they make a point of not knowing anything about guns or gun laws. They say insane things that even the sympathetic find cringe inducing. One result is the people in favor of gun grabbing tend to come off as ignorant fanatics.
The gun issue is useful in another way. All of those normies on the other side of the divide think that facts matter when dealing with the Left. Gun grabbing is a great issue to show them that facts really do not matter much at all. No matter how many times they explain the facts of firearms to these people, they will keep chanting the slogans from their cult about guns. The reason for that is the Left is about morality, their morality, not facts or reason. They are the anointed, so facts do not matter.
Here is an example of how a sense of moral superiority is what really matters, rather than factual accuracy or rational debate. Taken at face value, it would mean Arne Duncan knows nothing about guns or voting. There has never been a time when voting was more difficult than buying a gun. In fact, voting has always been easier than doing pretty much anything. The most difficult part of voting today is not vomiting all over the voting booth when looking at the choices on offer.
Now, Arne Duncan is not just another airhead on Twitter. He is a very special airhead, who is the executive director of something called the Emerson Collective. This is a not-for-profit founded by the widow of Steve Jobs. They are another monastery in the ruling class theological framework, promoting the usual stuff. Amusingly, Arne Duncan wrote a book titled, How Schools Work, which is his firsthand account of how he was a terrible Secretary of Education during the Obama years.
Note his Twitter profile. He has a picture of himself with a gaggle of black people, which is supposed to tell us he is a member of the anointed. He is such a good guy; black people just want to be around him. Sure, he lives in a gated, whites-only neighborhood with a bunch of other rich white people, but the brothers just love him. The picture would be better if he were wearing a pith helmet and a safari outfit. His act is the modern version of the white man’s burden, without doing any heavy lifting.
That was the point of his tweet. In fact, it is the point of his entire life. He and his fellow travelers on the Progressive carny circuit are all about their virtue. He does not have to be troubled with facts about voting and gun laws, for example. Those are for the servant class to quarrel over. Arne has a dream, a dream where everyone gets a ballot, even the imaginary, and those votes are dutifully ignored. The point of democracy is so worthless layabouts like Arne Duncan can express their moral superiority.
For the most part, it is a pointless waste of time for dissidents to engage in the nuts and bolts of political discourse. Most issue are of the first type, where the debates are about signaling your team affiliation. Some issues, like the gun issue, are useful in that they can be used to reveal to the open minded, the reality of liberal democracy. After all, what is the point of engaging with someone like Arne Duncan, who is a noxious blend of breathtaking stupidity and sanctimonious codswallop?
It goes beyond that though. The people behind these ridiculous operations like the Emerson Collective are not interested in making society better. The widow Jobs just wants some grace on the cheap. She has plenty of money, so she can underwrite this stuff, because it makes a nice addition to her moral charm bracelet. Nothing about the Emerson Collective is about helping people. It is about boosting the ego of the people involved, by letting them pretend they are on the side of angels.
A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.
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Charles Haywood had a related essay recently called the Brawndo Tyranny. He’s a great writer, by the way. https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/02/23/on-the-brawndo-tyranny/
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Good one! Thanks.
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I must thank you H I for both the site and the article.
He thinks everything in modern politics is an op.
Solid dude.
Z Man has said it before, but just to repeat, we need a new ruling class. And we need one badly.
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It’s been the joke for 10+ years now, but it’s kinda easy to see now why late 18th century French felt that their entire ruling class had to be wiped out.
A New Tomorrow (cont)
And the band played on.
Sometimes analogies can be clarifying. Imagine that you live on the east coast of Florida, a massive hurricane is spinning up in the South Atlantic, and it may be headed your way. You walk to the beach & stare out at the storm clouds on the horizon contemplating your options. You could retreat to the couch & TV, get some snacks & just muddle through. You could summon the neighbors to join you on the beach for a group hug. You could shake your fist at the impending hurricane and scream about the injustice of it discriminating against you. You could call 911 and demand that the hurricane be arrested for potential future trespass. You could bury your head in the sand & just pretend it doesn’t exist. This is the quality of current political debate in the USA. Perhaps the hurricane will do us a great favor.
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All the time spent squatting here could have been spent on starting your own blog called “A New Tomorrow”, where you would write at length about topics that interest you. You could have promoted it by adding the URL to your name in comments in other blogs and by posting/commenting on Gab. That way, you would have built an audience of followers that are genuinely interested in what you have to say.
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Several great lines, particularly about Arne wearing a pith helmet. Literally laughed out loud, and it is a great distillation of the vapidity and hypocrisy of White Progressives. “Is that you, Mr. Silvergoldstein?”
I haven’t thought of “Think” Tanks as indulgences but that’s also funny and spot on.
The Left never will win the gun issue so do not discount utilization of extra-legal brute force. I doubt most gun owners do much more than mutter about “muh Constitution” but there might be a sliver of them who realize guns aren’t the most powerful tool they have in their arsenal. That would Make Cable Television Great Again if it happened but it’s not likely enough to justify reattaching the cord.
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“moral charm bracelet” was awesome.
The widow Jobs has nothing on the free-donating horror that is Mackenzie Scott.
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“there might be a sliver of them who realize guns aren’t the most powerful tool they have in their arsenal.”
To be honest, if the Heemeyer’s Killdozer hadn’t have gotten stuck, I don’t know how they could have stopped it short of just waiting it out. Or an Apache. Or a tank.
Naturally, I assumed you were referring to the Killdozer, but in hindsight now realize it could be many other things.
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The most difficult part of voting today is not vomiting all over the voting booth when looking at the choices on offer.
Does Staples sell keyboards at bulk discounts?
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“For the most part, it is a pointless waste of time for dissidents to engage in the nuts and bolts of political discourse.” Here is how I engage with Lefties:
-You want to raise taxes on rich liberals like Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc., and all of woke Corporate America? Go for it.
-You want to keep aborting the future of the black race? Sounds racist, but that’s on you.
-You want to flood the country with illegals? Sounds hard on unions and working class blacks, but at least they can buy cheap crap from China thanks to the Left exporting industries.
-You say there is institutional racism? Are there any conservative institutions? I agree that all those leftwing institutions are racist and sexist (the media, Hollywood, corporate America, government at all levels, all of academia). We should burn them to the ground and start over.
-You want to defund the police? Inner city blacks will suffer, but they keep voting for it, so what can I do? It won’t hurt me in suburbia.
-Cut the military? Less tranny surgeries and foreign wars. I can live with that.
-Liberal judges? Look what all the conservative appointments have gotten us. Roberts?
The sniveling Kavanaugh who turns around stabs Trump in the back?
-You want to bankrupt the country with unlimited spending? This is transactional America baby, and I can get mine cut just fine.
-You want to fight the unicorn of global warming? Just means higher gas prices for the poor. I can still afford to fill my SUV.
-You want Silicon Valley and the spy agencies in every nook and cranny of your life, and getting rich off your content? I prefer privacy, so I don’t broadcast my personal business.
What else you got?
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It’s a variation of, “is it good for my people?”
Lefty: “Muh gun control!”
Me: “How is that good for white people?”
This puts them in a quandary as they either have to lie about how it’s good (thus forcing them to defend white people with their ideology) or admitting that it’s just about sticking it to whites (“who cares”) in which case they know they’ll just be ignored while their self-morality is taken down a notch.
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Codswallop… I haven’t heard or read that word in forever. I say old chap, the gun control codswallop is reaching fever pitch. It may be time to prime the rifles and fix bayonets – the fuzzies are just over the ridge.
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“the fuzzies are just over the ridge.”
Seeing that Z Man mentions the white man’s burden, the use of the term ‘fuzzy’ has brought forth yet another reference to old Kipling; his poem ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’, of course. Shame I never learnt that at school when we had to study poetry… it’ll be on the curriculum for my son when he’s home schooled for sure.
Son: “Dad, what does a fuzzy wuzzy look like?”
Me: “Let us go to the local KFC and have a look.”
I jest of course. I’ll be nowhere near a goddamn KFC in a year’s time.
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KFC? Pish-posh, old sock. You really want to see the Fuzzy Wuzzy, go to Popeye’s. Here in America, at least, you know it’s time to call the realtor when a Popeye’s Chicken opens up anywhere in your zip code.
Never underestimate these people’s need to feel morally superior to other Whites. It’s like a drug to these people. Duncan may be using all of this as a grift, but I know plenty of White folks who act exactly like him who do it purely for joy they get at sermonizing to other Whites.
They will never quit. They can’t quit. Their life literally has no meaning without their daily affirmation of moral superiority. Facts and logic don’t mean squat to these people, just as facts and logic mean nothing to a hardcore drug addict. It’s that rush, that feeling of being a better human being that they crave above all else.
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And the only way to deal with them is simply laugh at them and walk away. Or don’t even laugh. Just stare at them and the turn away and leave. When you try and argue facts and logic with them you’re giving them what they crave.
I save my energy to speak to people who are on the fence or already slightly conservative.
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The “stare and say nothing” also works great with the Covidians I see during my walks.
Free people get a hearty “hello, how ‘ya doing” and their dogs get a pat on the head.
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Non-reactance drives them crazy because it fails to provide them any ammunition to initiate a religious ecstasy based on denouncing a Covidian heretic.
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That’s what I do now. I used to give them my best shitlord smirk, because I enjoy driving them bonkers, but then I realized, as y’all have, that “going bonkers” is the dopamine hit they crave. So now I’m cultivating an air of what Orwell called “protective stupidity.” I go out without a mask, and when they give me the death glare — normally the time I’d smirk at them — I just act baffled. What are you doing with that thing on your face, and why are you squinting your eyes? Do you have some chili pepper up in there or something? Stops ’em stone cold.
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Good God, that Twitter page… pure undiluted cringe.
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Heh. I was just about to post something similar. It is revolting. Have them all blown from cannon!
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Drop him into an immanent summer riot, let him be torn limb from limb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdbpmeUODME
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“The picture would be better if he were wearing a pith helmet and a safari outfit. His act is the modern version of the white man’s burden, without doing any heavy lifting.”
Z Man, you’ve got some zingers in your locker to be sure. But this one just made me burst out laughing loudly in the office. Fortunately, I am one of the only ones in the office today the others being afraid of some virus or something; who knows, it has been a year and I still ain’t seen nothin’.
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You should be careful using the Internet at work these days.
When Arne Duncan was Obama’s Secretary of Education he made a big push for nationwide year round school. His rationale was that the historic reason students had summers off was that we had an agrarian economy and students were required to do farm work by their families in the summer. Since we no longer have an agrarian economy or this demand for child labor on family farms, Duncan thought kids would benefit from spending the whole year in school.
From what I could find, no one with any significant platform challenged these idiotic remarks by pointing out the busiest times on farms are planting and harvest which both fall during the traditional school year. Also at no point in U.S. history were farmers in a make or break position based on the labor of their 6-13 year old children. The only reason this effort failed was that teacher’s unions like having summers off. Duncan is typical of his class in that he revels in his ignorance.
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I have to admit, I love the “year round school” “debate.” It’s like when the irresistible force meets the immovable object, but both of them are drooling retards. Karen looooves the idea of year-round school, since for her schools are just daycares anyway — instead of having to find summer “enrichment” camps and whatnot at which to dump her sprogs for a few hours a day while she self-actualizes on Twitter, she can just dump them on the school.
Meanwhile, the teachers’ unions are so lazy, they make the lotus eaters look like beavers with ADD. They will die before they “teach” one second more than they have to (check who’s really running the “masks now, masks tomorrow, and masks forever!” mafia in your locality; it’s 100:1 it’s the teachers’ union). Since they contribute more to the Dems’ bottom line, they win… but it’s still hilarious to watch them tear into each other.
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It has become increasingly clear that our ruling class must be replaced as a matter of public interest. The “elite” are not elite in any meaningful way, other than being superior sociopaths. We need to replace the incompetent with the competent and root out the sociopaths destroying our societies.
First step: Sortez la guillotine!!!!
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people can’t even given up on wearing masks and you want the guillotines brought out
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We’ll likely get a new ruling class, but probably a competent woke tyranny instead of an incompetent one.
This is the price of giving into fear.
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It’s a veritable treasue trove of Zmanism’s today boys and girls. Last one my favorite
The reason the Left is festooned with barnacles claiming to be policy experts is so they can claim a mastery of the topic
The most difficult part of voting today is not vomiting all over the voting booth when looking at the choices on offer.
They are another monastery in the ruling class theological framework, promoting the usual stuff.
The picture would be better if he were wearing a pith helmet and a safari outfit.
Duncan, who is a noxious blend of breathtaking stupidity and sanctimonious codswallop?
She has plenty of money, so she can underwrite this stuff, because it makes a nice addition to her moral charm bracelet.
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“The picture would be better if he were wearing a pith helmet and a safari outfit.”
Too funny – I haven’t laughed this hard in a lone time. Its this truth that beings me back here daily.
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Sorry – “brings me back” – stupid typos.
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Arne’s proteges when he was CEO of Chicago schools, 2001-09, currently are shooting up their city at a record clip.
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The takedown of that Arne Duncan imbecile was brutal and a real thing of beauty! It’s among Zman’s funniest writing.
Ha! The title of this post alone was worth clicking on the page this morning. Most of the people in my general vicinity fit that description. You’d think these twits would realize if one has to put a sign in their yard advertising “Love Lives Here” it signifies the opposite. But, no. There seems to be no higher purpose to life today than advertising one’s idiocy.
I have been against describing our ruling class as morons like is often done on this blog. After all, these people win every fight and use all their insane Narratives to gain more money, power and prestige. They never lose any war only an occasional skirmish. No matter how insane their narrative, they shield themselves from any downside while they prosper from it.
Now that may be about to change now that Bill Gates has declared global jihad on the sun God and is going to chemically alert the weather on a global basis. He has started his campaign to shield us from much of the sun through airborne chemicals.
This is so dangerous on so many levels that it could have only been devised in a culture where no one can point out that the Emporer wears no clothes. The environment, as even school kids should know, is a fragile, highly complex interrelated system where one alteration can have dramatic and wide ranging consequences.
Gates is the first person in history who has had the ability to wage war on the sun God and change the environment for every living person. And apparently there is nothing anyone, including the Chinese, can do about it. The only positive is that this will also be the only instance where our betters get the opportunity to suffer the consequences with the rest of us
There is bound to be a chain reaction where all the other oligarchs get jealous and take all the other insane Narratives and make them even more dangerous. I can only imagine that the Great Reset crowd is now wondering how to up their game. But as they take the craziness up to the max, I wonder if they will be able to continue to shield themselves from the downsides of the outcomes or if Gates has singlehandedly removed their protective shield