Oh, now that was a swell thought...

So, y'all been enjoying this ongoing game of "What Fresh New Swill Will We Be Expected To Swallow Today?"  

There's little point of my recounting or even summarizing all the electoral fraud shenanigans;  many others have already done a really good job of this, including dismissing the nothingburgers among the legitimate gotchas. For some context, just to give the first nod to "best titles", I'll give the link love to Larry Correia:

• The 2020 election:  fuckery is afoot
• Election 2020:  the more fuckery update
• [Added 11/12] I asked one simple question to people who work with fraud

Indeed.

Other resources are worth the time as well, including this from the redoubtable Glenn Greenwald, and this interview (this link starts at about 7:10 on the timeline, where the best bits begin, and continue until about the 20-minute mark) in which one Robert Barnes very clearly lays out several of the most glaring "indicia of fraud" concepts.  There are others.  

Actually...there are a lot of others.  

Some of the usual suspects, of course, like Project Veritas, Breitbart, American Thinker, etc.;  and of course many sources come with varying degrees of obvious Team Red partisanship.  Caveat lector as always.

But again--there are a lot, and with a significant number not easily dismissible without the assistance of partisan beer goggles.  And there's a different vibe about the group of them, as a whole.  This isn't like what you're used to with the Hive Mind wokester crowd rallying behind an idea, where everyone refers primarily to each other, leading eventually back to a singular and highly partisan source, using the same talking points, same strategy, same rebuttals, etc.  No, from what I've seen here, there are simply a lot of reports (of evidence of shenanigans), from different people, stressing different evidence from different sources, appearing in different places...what's the same isn't the who, nor the evidentiary details, nor the style, nor the source, but only the obvious conclusions to be drawn from taking the body of reporting as a whole.  Even when multiple accounts do point to the same observation (e.g., the statistical impossibility of huge tranches of Biden-only-with-no-downticket-votes happening only in critical swing state locations), they often seem to do it from different angles, or the same observation gets made in both a statistical and a historical context by different people in different states...things like that.  To me at least, the signature of this landscape says grassroots, and self-motivated involvement, as opposed to water-carriers carrying water.

Woodward and Bernstein introduced the world to the modern term "follow the money", and this has the feel of a whole bunch of crowdsourced citizen-analysts, with various degrees of standing to analyze (e.g., I've seen things from data analysts, auditors, poll workers, historians, lawyers, and of course pundits, researchers, and activists as well), independently "following the money" with a fat lot of differentiated observations that all point to the same conclusions...

And boy, do these differ in presentation from the stank all the Cool Kids are so busy pimping:  I see a noticeable amount of "here are my sources;  by all means check my work";  as opposed to all the shouting, shaming, and Most Glorious Censorship of our modern MiniTru.  ("Joe Biden loves me / this I know / 'cause Twit-Face-Google / told me so.")

Really,  taken as a whole, it seems like the sort of broad evidential saturation that you'd absolutely dream of having on your side in a court case.  (Or, presently, quite possibly a lot of court cases.)  And as of this writing it keeps coming, with increasing reports and claims of actual intentional malfeasance, to go on top of the initial "this is just not possible" statistical and historical observations which merely imply malfeasance.

So, shenanigans then.  (Duh.)  And so we have Team Blue partisans looking away from the evidence so hard they risk snapping their own necks, and Big Tech and the urinealist media have their "nothing to see here" support schtick in full swing.  But a lot of people still seem to have noticed that what we're being asked to believe simply wouldn't pass as credible fiction, it's so over the top.  And now we have the great Hive Mind push to legitimize the shenanigans before they can be questioned.

Which reminds me:  I've found a pretty good analogy for trying to find some way to explain this shitshow to my girls, currently eleven and nine.  "Imagine you're watching a football game and the visiting team, heavy underdogs in the betting, are driving down the field for the go-ahead score at a critical point late in the game.  Suddenly there are multiple, inexplicable calls, all favoring the home team and shifting the momentum of the game.  The announcers and commentators can't figure this out, looking repeatedly at replays and scratching their heads, but the fans clearly love it, and play continues.  Then the home team commits a horrible roughing penalty, stripping the ball and returning it to within an inch of the goal line (but still clearly short).  Flags fly everywhere, but then the officials confer privately amongst themselves...with the clock running...and then rule that there was no flag on the play and the result is a home team touchdown.  The crowd goes wild.  At this point the home team literally races to get off the PAT play before the ridiculous spectacle can be reviewed.  (Oh, and it can't be challenged, see, because now they're now inside the two minute warning, even though the game clock hasn't been reset, and remember, the call on the field favors the home team...and how about that, now there's also been a glitch in the video footage for replay.)  And everyone knows that once that point-after kick is away, it's all a done deal, because you know, no backsies.  That's basically what's happening now."

And so now we have Biden already acting like he's official, with the mendacious partisanship level cranked up to eleven in support, all while more and more evidence piles up illustrating just how far and wide the Team Blue shenanigans went.  I've now seen some opinions coming forth that this is QED desperation;  that they know they've been made, and simply have to go all in or get completely destroyed from being hoist on their own petard.  It's a plausible idea, and maybe it's even true.  Under any amount of scrutiny, it just looks really bad for Team Blue here.

And then the thought hit me.  Oh shit.

Oh, shit.  No, no, no, no...

We've been here before.  

Remember the absolutely massive amount of evidence, and even public demand, to go after the Clinton cabal in 1998, for actual abuse of power crimes?  Waco.  Filegate.  Ron Brown.  Vince Foster.  (I'll stop there, but do you remember?  It was a lot, and the evidence was good.)  

All we needed, for a "within the system" remedy, was an opposition committed and competent enough to hit a barn from the inside.  It should have been the easiest layup of all time.

I may have written this here before, but it bears repeating now:  I can remember the exact instant when I finally gave up completely on "working within the system".  Why, it was in 1998, when I heard that Team Red was actually going to go after Slick Willy...for getting some unauthorized nooky in the White House, and for nothing else.  

They did it!  They missed the barn!  

And JFC, it's the same crowd that needs to come into play as a viable opposition now, to make any of this current cluster-coitus into something constructive.  

Shit.  We're screwed, aren't we?

____________________________

Why does this matter?  It's a question I've asked myself as well, and it's a reasonable one.  Claire recently touched on the idea too:  for those of us who have lost faith in the system to even show an interest in correcting itself, why sweat over these latest shenanigans, which for all their impressive magnitude, are hardly new in principle?

I'm not going to claim any sort of intellectual purity here, but I think there's a part of me that still wants to believe that a correction can happen;  that the grassroots of Greater Leavemethefuckaloneistan actually can rise up above the Establishment and bloody its nose just a little bit.  No delusions here that any such would somehow produce a true long-term solution, and maybe it's just sheer misplaced spite at decades, now, of having pretty much all the things I hold dear under continual attack by a mendacious, sanctimonious Establishment that now wants so bad--so very bad--to rid itself of an aberration in its hegemony (an embarrassing one that makes it look bad just like it really is).  But I don't think all this would bug me so much if that weren't at least a little bit true.

And so the realization that effectively exposing the obvious fraud here, and at least delegitimizing the transparently engineered election result, is going to depend on the cooperation of the same people that can and did turn a gigantic abuse of power case into a flaccid burlesque theater, leaves me a bit more despondent than usual, during the week after a presidential election.  

(What's most bizarre to me is that Trump himself, preening peacock and general toad though he may be, has actually proven himself unexpectedly capable of the sort of fortitude needed to lead such an effort.  I may have no confidence in the Team Red party apparatus to do anything substantial--hello, history--but DJT himself, now, he just might start swinging, and to the extent he appeals to people not on his own merits but simply as a functional stickfinger salute to the more couth, polished forms of authoritarian statism...well, he just might bring enough to the yard to land some hits.  (Personally, I like the idea that if he does wind up losing the war here, he could really stir things up with simple outgoing pardons of Julian Assange and Ed Snowden.))

In the end, philosophically, I remain where I have been for a while--over a generation now--but I think I have to admit I got caught hoping for better, here.

Damn buffoon sure has been entertaining, hasn't he?  The ability to give that much apoplexy to the pretentious mob...is actually pretty impressive.

Hello there, Robert Gore.

Posting has been pretty dark here for a while--not really my intention even given the deliberate attempt to pull back from all Teh Stoopid for a good bit--but this deserves a bookmark.  "The Last Gasp", by one Robert Gore.

I came across it via the Zelman Partisans blog (hat tip to Sheila Stokes for this post), which linked to Gore's "Basic Math", which then identified itself as a companion piece for "The Last Gasp".  So, arguably, I found it nearly by accident.

It does sorta get your attention right away:

When you can’t love, you hate. When you can’t build, you destroy. When you’re ignored, you scream. When you can’t tell the truth, you lie. When you can’t reason, you panic. When no one will follow you out of admiration or respect, you compel. When you can’t live, you kill.

This is it, the last gasp of the psychopaths who express their contempt and hatred for humanity by trying to rule it. Compulsion, not voluntary and natural cooperation. Power, pull, and politics, not incentives, competition, honest production, and value-for-value trade. From each according to his virtue to each according to his depravity.

Nicely said.

It goes on from there, with a refreshing excellence.  Gore's style strikes me as a mashup of Rothbardian ideas, laid out and presented in a Butler Shaffer artistic style, using a tone that reminds me of Robert Higgs, with some polite nods to Will Grigg.  (Meaning, of course, that in me it would naturally find a friendly audience.  :-)

Boy, I hope he's right--with the "last gasp" idea.  It makes perfect sense in a go-to-the-logical-conclusion kind of way, but of course I'm also reminded of an El Neil backstory (I think it was in Forge of the Elders) which talked about a similar tyranny inexplicably snatching an unexpected total victory from the jaws of similar defeat, right at the point everyone thought it was over and could finally move the hell on to better things.  "No one is more dangerous than the suicidal," indeed.

Anyway, hello there, Robert Gore.

A ranging shot from Leviathan?

The following was originally posted over at Claire's place, as a comment to this post in which she comments on (among other things) both the sudden Democratic Party wagon-circling around the barely-still-functional Joe Biden, and also on the emergent COVID-19 hysteria which has since illustrated, with full-spectrum clarity, just how willing and even eager so many otherwise intelligent people are to be led around by the nose, by the world's oldest protection racket.

It seemed appropriate somehow to warehouse this extended comment here as well. (As a housekeeping choice, I've backdated it to the date of the comment, but otherwise it's as it appears there.)



ORIGINAL COMMENT

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Claire, I’ll echo the “blog when you’re inspired to do so” sentiment. I see blogging at least a bit as a true art, and authentic art is, at heart, the channeling of a muse. Whenever you hear yours, by all means bring her beautiful voice to life again. (The hard part, sometimes, is just knowing when that voice is authentic, and not a manifestation imposed by the noisier parts of an active mind.)

_____________

In re the sudden wagon-circling around Biden, it seems clear enough that all the handlers are scrambling for a viable plan in this fainting-couch chaos of their own making. Bernie’s crime is simply that he’s had enough unexpected success on his own, now, that he’s forgotten his place, which of course is nothing more than to appear on cue for the purpose of making the party’s anointed one look more palatable to the credulous; he’s become big enough that he has to be put down–publicly. It’s amusing not because he’s actually “too far left” for the party (ha!), but that he’s too bluntly honest about the direction it’s all supposed to go, and since the Hive appears to have concluded there aren’t yet enough rubes ready for The Long Game to wind down, well, he’s got to go. The audacity of the shenanigans needed to accomplish this simply shows us the magnitude of the internal problem. (That is, if it really is a problem. After all, it could yet be another part of the show; it’s not like we’re dealing with honest people, here, in the first place…)

I can’t imagine anybody’s actually thinking of putting Biden into the general election on purpose. My guess (conjecture, of course, but hey, the popcorn’s already on the table, so have at it, eh wot?) is that he’s just being propped up temporarily to limp the party into the convention, where he can be publicly judged to be (suddenly and tragically) medically unfit for office, suitably lionized as a faithful soldier ready for retirement with honors, and then replaced by the pre-circled-wagon crowd with a True Anointed One. Everyone makes out, right? Bernie gets effectively sidestepped, Joe turns his humiliation into a Great American Hero story, and the party rallies around…

…well, at that point, as I seem to remember some professional cretin arrogantly saying, “What difference does it make?” (shudder)

I can’t quite make out Gabbard in all this, either. Sure, her politics are repulsive, but there does seem to be a certain honor and consistency there, and maybe the party really does simply fear that on her own she’d run away with the public and put their investments at risk. She’s an interesting X factor–or at least, at this point, she should be. (He says with full understanding that we’re so far beyond “should be”s, now, as to be firmly into the realm of the “absurd” of Voltaire’s famous quote.)

_____________

And in re Coronavirus…well, yes, it scares me, but not principally for any reason of epidemiology. Sure, it seems obvious enough that it’s a nasty little beast, a serious threat to people with certain vulnerabilities, and quite possibly comically under-reported…but…

If I take a step back, and take a sober look at what appears to be a worldwide…uniformity of both the under-reporting and the hysteria…first focused on establishing a public belief in lethality far past what even the most generous numbers seem to indicate (nicely said, Bear)…then shifting to focus on the inevitable impact on world markets…then shifting further to discussions of mandated quarantine, loss of resource and manufacturing supply, and most recently the potential for unrest due to resource scarcity…

…well, what are we always told is the solution to problems of this magnitude? Hm.

And then there are the outré, ridiculed, but persistent claims that [this Coronavirus] is a runaway bioweapon…and all the shifting stories and claims from governments worldwide…well, initially shifting; now, instead, coalescing around the “under-reported” leitmotif and moving toward increased discussions of mandatory quarantine…

Hell yes, I’m scared of Coronavirus, the worldwide phenomenon…because somehow, it has the feel of a goddamn ranging shot.

'Where is all this leading?'

The following was originally posted over at Claire's place, as a comment to this post in which she comments on the ridiculous spectacle of the remaining field of Democratic presidential candidates trying without apology to out-Orwell each other in full view of everyone.  Included here are 1) my original comment, 2) a response from another commenter, and 3) my follow-up.

It seemed appropriate somehow to warehouse this exchange here as well.  (As a housekeeping choice, I've backdated it to the date of the comment, but otherwise it's as it appears there.)



ORIGINAL COMMENT

---

Claire, first and foremost I hope you can find and keep your peace with the great Pandora’s Box that is the Internet. Heaven knows I still struggle as well…with the outrage fatigue, the “need” to know what stank the pernicious piddlewits are pimping today…against all the wonderful things that the same landscape still provides.

Playing with my kids helps–a lot–but the struggle remains. I do pretty well at the goal of living-free-being-the-best-revenge (and thank you once again and always, for your part in encouraging that), but boy, are there days…

Anyway, peace to you, Freedomista.

_________________________

I hate the fact that these tiresome, committed people are in any way living rent-free in my head, but I have to admit that the current ramp-up of Teh Stoopid does have me worried. It’s not that the depth of the ignorance, idiocy, or the unapologetic chutzpah is on its own shocking, although there are certainly days when I do have to marvel at what now passes for not just socially acceptable but even routine; rather, what I keep finding myself left with is the one overarching question which seems to have absolutely no good possible answer:

Where is all this leading?

Much ink has been spilled already, and rightly so, about the control zealotocracy increasingly demanding the unconditional surrender of every remaining vestige of individual sovereignty and freedom. Any honest assessment of the landscape makes it perfectly clear that it’s on, to these people: by any means necessary; only the result is acceptable; no law, ethics, or morality is any sort of impediment to the cause. The puppet masters set masses of people at each other’s throats–quite successfully–for increasingly trivial differences, and boy do the useful idiots know their narrative…if not so much how to defend or even really articulate it past the most sophomoric talking points. Rational discourse, even the most Pyrrhic forms of individual interposition, are becoming less and less possible by the day. And I’m sure it’s not me; the rate of acceleration of all this “let’s you and him fight” theater is well past tiresome, and into alarming.

Alarming because ultimately there’s got to be a reason for it. The real puppet masters may be evil in the purest sense of that word, but I cannot believe they are stupid. The comically hubristic antics we see each day, across the spectrum, must, at some level, serve a purpose. And with pretty much all the gloves coming off on every topic, by the day, the entirely reasonable question “what purpose is that?”…sits there, nagging.

As the saying goes, anybody who demands you give up the means of resistance, intends for you something he knows you would resist. Indeed. We’re seeing a fat lot of push for getting this thing (disarming the peasantry) done immediately. Why? What do these creeps know that we don’t?

Oh, sure, it could be something simple. Maybe it’s just covering for their sorry corrupt asses by misdirecting elsewhere. Insider knowledge of impending economic or social collapse. A hive-mind sense that their best opportunity for total domination is now, so strike with everything possible. Et cetera.

The thing is, the real puppet masters would seem to be above things like this. It reminds me of a comment I recall Claire making when talking about the increasing demands of the Total Surveillance State–the idea that you don’t go to the trouble to spy on everyone, everywhere, to catch mere criminals.

So what is it, then? Here we are, currently witnessing the most comically slipshod soft coup attempt I’ve ever even heard of, much less seen–this is stuff that would not be believable in fiction–and not only do the masses not seem to care about how embarrassingly bad it is and has been since even before Orange Man was elected, but more of the same is openly promised–and apparently cheered–going forward. The fainting-couch, Kabuki theater flavor of it all is so completely over the top, it would be tempting to think of it as freedom-lover agitprop…but frankly I don’t think any of us could have–would have–gone that far.

So again: what is it?

Eep. Apparently I needed to give vent to that. Like I said above, the struggle continues. 🙂



ANONYMOUS FROM FEB 10

---

@Kevin Wilmeth

Imagine drones bought from Hobby Lobby dropping firebombs on the roofs of government buildings. Dropping them every week. Dropping them until government falls apart because it can’t defend the bureaucrats who are funding it. Then government stays persistently fallen apart throughout the next phase, in which every militia general tries to set themselves up as a new king. For your own good, of course.

The technological singularity shifting power to the individual is the thing the current politicians are unsuccessfully trying to prevent with their too-little too-late attempts to LARP the Soviet Union.

Only the goofballs are playing the LARP Soviet game, because the competent who in times past would be nobility can actually do the military math about swarm attacks. Even the US Navy did the math correctly, in Millennium Challenge 2002.

What is coming next is a lot more freedom. The whining from the 99% who are not libertarians is going to be epic.



FOLLOW UP COMMENT

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Anon 2/10, I hope you’re right. I hardly relish the idea of that sort of conflict, for several reasons (not least of which because I suspect you are right about strongmen stepping into any available gap), but good god, look at the state into which we have “progressed” thus far, at the insistence of these obnoxious people who seem so fully committed to forcing the issue no matter what. It’s not so much that they are making peaceful revolution impossible, as it is that they are increasingly making peaceful existence impossible.

I think that in the end I do share the faith that the peasantry, if it must, will find its ways of rising to the challenge, whether it’s riflemen “behind every blade of grass”, or the flash-mob drone swarm of the deplorables, or some other Hayduke-ian creativity none of us has thought of yet. Or all that, in combination…

It’s the days between here and there, that I’m dreading.

My pipe-dream hope is that someone, somewhere, figures out how to make a peaceful statement that makes the lunacy of the continued wolverine-poking so self-evidently obvious that even the most tone-deaf, chest-thumping wokester agitator can’t miss it, or ignore it. (In this regard, I miss Mike Vanderboegh, who had a real flair for pursuing this goal–this quest for peace via the dire warning.) This really doesn’t seem like it should be all that difficult–from the “live and let live, how fucking hard is that?” angle, through to “you really haven’t thought this through, have you, hipster brainiac?”…and yet here we are.

The only problem with improvising creativity, is that it is inherently reactive. (Maybe that’s where my faith comes from, that in a world gone sideways, free people will ultimately prove more creative than the planners of other people’s business.) We’re still living in a world of strategy, where these improvising, reactive traits haven’t been truly needed yet.

And maybe that’s why the “let’s you and him fight” crowd seems so incapable of grokking the stupidity of bringing their imposed reality to blows–they can only plan, not improvise. The strategy, on paper, may seem solid. Even the tactics–the planned tactics–may seem plausible. But at the point of action, the human tendency for creativity can, and usually does, intervene, and often in unintended ways. (“In any battle the first casualty is the battle plan.”) I dunno, it seems like most folks in Claire’s commentariat would have no problem seeing this result as obvious, but maybe the obnoxious polypragmatoi just…don’t. (After all, this crowd may have tried many different things to achieve their goals, over the nearly forty years I’ve been paying attention, but I can’t say that any of the methods I have seen truly qualify as creative.)

Hey, maybe we can glom on a bit to current trends, here. I’ve been enjoying some of the Babylon Bee’s satire titles lately, including this one, “Democrats Warn That American People May Tamper With Next Election”…in a similar way, maybe we can simply promise to interfere with their revolution. 🙂

Personal heroes - because Joel asked.

The following was inspired by reading Joel's post this morning.  Apparently in responding I got a bit carried away, and all of this made more sense here as its own post, than there just as a comment.  :-)

The question was,

"Anybody else ever have the good or bad fortune to meet a personal hero?"

Well...

I have met two, myself, and for all the reasons you discuss here, I think I have been amazingly lucky, because I hold them both in even higher regard as time goes by.

Jeff Cooper 

The first was the late Jeff Cooper. At the time I met him I was in my early twenties and fantastically not-necessarily-stupid-but...dense. I'd been reading his work for the better part of a decade by then, and had been actively corresponding by letter (remember letters?) for the latter part of that time; I was at least arguably a card-stock fanboy. When the meatspace meeting finally occurred, I had the oh-so-carefully-prepared list of questions with me, the storied shortness of breath and anxiety of meeting the great personal hero of my life...and then, at the moment of truth, and to the absolute credit of my parents, I had the great good sense to realize that what I most needed to do was to let all of that simply fall away, and instead just pay attention and learn.

And he was magnificent in person. I knew even then, as a wee mental niggling picked up gradually over time, that he was by no means flawless, but somehow it was still easy to see that he was a good man, with truly fantastic and selfless gifts of attitude, analysis, and personal excellence to offer to anyone paying attention. In person, those qualities stood out even more than they came through in his writing, even adjusting (both then and now) for an instructor-mentor being "on" all the time.

As an aside, for most of my own life, it has been reasonably common for someone who has read me, to remark upon later meeting me in person that "wow, you talk just like you write"*. Whenever I hear that, I smile and think of Jeff Cooper; I don't know if that was a deliberate aspiration of mine in terms of writing style, but it absolutely was a deliberate aspiration to unapologetic personal excellence. 

Personal excellence. Along with what is unfortunately pigeonholed under the name "the combat mind-set" (because it is so much greater than that), that is one of the two great components of Cooper's legacy. The late William Grigg (who is on the short list of people who I'd have wanted to meet in person) used to write, always of others, "This is a man. Take notes." So true, here, and boy, I did. I did on mind-set, I did on personal excellence, on how he interacted with his wife Janelle (who with obvious affection he called The Countess, a glorious human being in her own right), on mentoring and teaching...very nearly the whole enchilada. This is what a role model is supposed to be like.

Make no mistake, I understand the man had flaws, the most serious of which was his commitment to a State military apparatus. He did have a love of, and even thirst for, fighting that I will never share. But, apropos of the topical core of your post, Joel, I was fortunate to have seen him, at the most critical and formative times, through a lens of "merely" observation. I was lucky to realize that I didn't need a hero to be perfect across the board; at the time I met Cooper I could very easily have set myself up for a classic fanboy fall, but that didn't happen--the not-stupid part of dumb-me, delivered at an important moment.

And that moment was truly important. It was Cooper, after all, from whom I learned about Claire not long after, and I would not have been ready for her without him--just as I would not have been ready for the larger pantheon that followed--Codrea, Vanderboegh, Rothbard, Shaffer, Grigg, etc.--without her.

Robert Fripp

The other personal hero I've met in meatspace is English guitarist Robert Fripp. As with Cooper, it is difficult to overstate how important Fripp has been in my life, and even though like Cooper the influence began with something simple and defined (in Fripp's case, music), it simply exploded with context and contact--and I would say for the same reason: the personal excellence, the talk-walking--on the very most important points to me--was so obvious that other human flaws could easily be contextualized to their proper (in)significance.

I could go on at impressive length (heard ya snicker, there) about the details of Fripp's musical impact, but that sort of thing is for the Craftygrass blog, not here. Suffice it to say that aside from my simply liking much of what he has done, the thing I admire the most is his commitment to the idea that a group forms for a purpose, makes itself available for the purpose (that wording is very intentional), and then stops, when the purpose has been achieved.**

When I met him, having both listened to his music and read his writings for just about a decade, it was on a week-long residential course he was leading, and much like Cooper, in person the man was even larger than his virtual persona. Fripp is humble without fanfare, truly excellent both with students and with his support team, and skilled almost beyond reckoning in both physical mechanics and their context in the greater whole. I would also say that a "freedomista" would be specifically impressed at how he challenges someone to grow.

The flaws he is most often accused of are, I think, telling, in that regard. Critics predisposed to disliking him have long supplied a reputation of Fripp's being authoritarian, but having worked with him for a week in a residential and educational setting, it seems pretty obvious to me that most of this is pure BS. If along with my own context I put together every story that I've heard about him that goes to this point, what I arrive at is that his style is actually the polar opposite: that he is so dispassionately committed to and trusting of the people he works with that, along with his own personal confidence and excellence within the realm of hazardous musical risk, it's simply terrifying, and people don't know how to handle an environment quite that...well, that anarchic. (He's been breathlessly accused of fomenting "musical anarchy" on at least one documentary I've seen, which of course makes me giggle.) I get the impression of someone who understands human nature very well, to the point where he simply does not bother responding to the absurd or the willfully ignorant, and of course the credulous can then easily "qui tacet consentire videtur" all that right into a self-evidently obvious explanation of passive-aggressiveness.

Anyway, as a musical role model, I know of no one better. The way he lives his life, too, while not resembling my own in many respects, is at worst still admirable for its consistency, privacy, and obvious pursuit of excellence, often at visible cost to himself. This is no pretender; if he's pretending just for fame and fortune, then he really sucks at it.

If there is to be any sort of a fall to come, with Fripp-as-personal-hero, it will most likely be because I some day discover what "his politics" actually are, and then that they are somehow beyond the usual level of atrocious (that anyone wishing to remain sane in this absurd world must put up with in order just to live among other people). One of the things I admire the most about him is that he enjoys his privacy, and does not stump for anything other than music. Based on what I can extrapolate from his considerable writing over the years, I would anticipate that one of the reasons he does not participate openly in politics, is that he might well be accused of much wrongthink--but again I would be guessing at that; I do love it that I do not, in fact, know, because he keeps it to himself.


Like I said before, I think I've been fantastically lucky to have met my two personal heroes--arguably the two most important non-family people in my life--in meatspace, and somehow come out on the far side, years later, having batted a thousand.

Others

Of course there have been other heroes, including a few of pretty significant importance, but either I have not met them in real life (e.g., Claire), or I don't consider the context sufficient to merit mention (e.g., I've met both mandolinist Sam Bush and banjoist Bela Fleck in person, but the meetings were so brief that I couldn't assess them with any real confidence).

Although I have not met him in person, I feel at least a bit honor-bound to address Massad Ayoob, who has been an incredible and positive influence on me in certain respects that I must acknowledge as heroic, but who is the best example I can share of a hero who fell from grace--or at least a hero whose uncovered flaw(s) are so vital that I cannot in conscience remand them into insignificance. I give the man full props for being, in some ways, exactly what he implied himself to be: a champion of what Grigg called the Mundanes, someone who would both freely and by profession teach you the things you should know if you need to save your life with lethal force some day. As a matter of the mechanics and considerations of doing this in the flawed legal landscape under which we all suffer, and to a lesser but still significant degree the mechanics of the physical act of saving your life in the first place, he is at least arguably without peer. I have no doubt he understands quite well, how to out the BS of those who think they understand how confrontations happen first on the street and then afterward in court, but really don't; his position both inside and outside the police and law/legal communities gives him a pretty unique perspective.

The problem, of course, is that in the end, when push comes to shove, he is by all appearances fully committed to the Only Ones mentality, to wit: cops' lives matter more than yours, and there is no systemic police problem to discuss. What I have seen, and not seen, from him on this topic is irreparably damning. He used to write about police corruption stories, you know, in almost a Peelian reform sort of way; when I first ran across him, he'd actually write about stories like Frank Serpico's--although looking back on it now, IIRC even then those kinds of stories always were rooted in the "bad apples" rationalization as well: the ultimate immunity and supremacy of the enforcement constabulary itself were presumed, and unquestioned, even then. Now? Well...I can't remember the last time I saw something under his name that addresses the topic at all, that does not simply sound like someone condescending to scold the whistleblower. The worst part about it all is that, having for years read his very useful information about the sort of "cute lawyer tricks" that can be used against you in a courtroom by unscrupulous prosecutors, I cannot help but see his repeated excusings of nearly any sort of police behavior at all, as anything but the same thing. It's become as predictable as gravity that if Ayoob writes about a police abuse or corruption case at all, these days, it is only to carry the water of Team True Blue and tell the very peasants he claims to champion, how it is always and ever not-what-you-think. Even more damningly, when asked, directly, questions that would go to the real point here--meat questions like "do you really believe that no abuse happens?", or "provide an example of what you would consider 'going too far'", or "would a regular person have been excused from this behavior too?", etc., what we hear is...nothing.

I used to care, more, about what happened to bring about this apparent change, from the writer who would champion the little guy standing up to the department, and discuss how important it is to avoid understandably misidentified appearances for the sake of one's own image with the public; into the writer who now treats any sort of systemic inquiry as de facto tinfoil hattery, automatically marginalizing any attempt even to get to the public's perception, much less addressing the legitimate question of "and do they have a point?"--and maybe I still do, as it still invokes a sense of betrayal and makes me angry. But not only is it not stopping, it's getting worse, and a reasonable person might start to wonder if that whole period of championing the little guy and pointing out the deliberate ways that the system deceives the people to serve its own purposes, was merely an advance guard to normalizing the horrors of the police state we suffer from now.

For anyone new to that topic who would like a compare and contrast exercise (it would be involved, but illustrative), I'd simply suggest reading the posts and commentary (watching how he handles the commentary is important) of a year's worth of Mas' posts at Backwoods Home magazine, covering the police abuse stories of your choice, and the posts and commentary of the same period at Will Grigg's Pro Libertate blog.

Okay, enough about that. Makes me irritated.


Finally, on a much happier note: although also not in meatspace, there is also you, Joel. Your example, for me at least, actually sums up much of what I think is important to consider in this weird, enigmatic notion of "heroism" that people seem so fascinated with.

You frequently lead, unapologetically, with this idea that you are a hermit by choice because you're difficult to be around, and didn't choose the desert for the social gatherings. I find this disclosure admirable and perfectly acceptable in a hero, who doesn't have to be anything at all like me.

Your heroism, to me, occupies a very abstract and mental place. To wit: you are easy to admire because you do what many people, myself absolutely included, desire at some level to do, but stop short for one reason or another. You're perfectly clear on what it takes to achieve it, and the risks and concerns that attend your own choices. All this is at once very hypothetical for an observer, and yet it also demystifies the experience in a way that I find extremely useful. It helps me with the life I have here, which in some ways is so very different (e.g., wife and three young kids, traditional day job, way too much time around obvious cheerleaders for Team Tide Pod and the Statist Beer Goggles Emporium, etc.), but which in others I think is functionally quite similar (e.g., the intention to live outside of the unwanted invasions of "regular" society, voluntary interdependence upon selected friends and neighbors, available retreat from aforementioned TTP and SBGE types, increasing self-sufficiency through personal learning and development)...

And finally, you live unapologetically and, I think, without real judgment. Oh sure, you like to declare the things you find absurd with wonder and even a little humor, but that's regular human being stuff, nothing recognizably like the pluperfect misanthropic malice increasingly emerging among the more socially acceptable of Master's minions. You're also the first to observe that even you, for all your choices that may seem drastic even to committed freedomistas, are also on a continuum, just perhaps in a very different place than most. That simple observation right there is more valuable, both first as an epiphany and afterward as a reminder, than it might appear.

And of course, with someone who openly (and repeatedly) declares his faults, and who regularly fesses up to his mistakes even when nobody else would ever have noticed, how could you even have a fall from hero grace? You said already that you're a 'mudge, so we knew that coming in...

If the purpose of a hero is to have a personally important point of reference to which to aspire and work towards, well hell, you fit the bill as well as anyone I've run across. Which could be considered an accusation of damning with faint praise, except that in my case the praise really isn't faint. :-)



____________________
* Usually that has been meant as a compliment, but then again I don't worry overmuch about the "TL;DR" crowd in terms of how it reflects on me. :-)

** A regular feature of King Crimson's work has been that, just as a given incarnation of the band has matured its voice and started to "succeed" in the marketplace, it dissolves, the magic having been in the listening to the muse to find the voice, rather than in the repetitive output of a matured-but-no-longer-growing voice. This is very frustrating to some people--there is obviously something in the psychology of the band name and wanting to ascribe "consistency" to it over time--but I find it utterly admirable. Part of this is that King Crimson are identified mostly in the "rock" music genre, and that is a genre that insists on consistency of the output behind a name. But not all genres are like that. With "jazz" music, by contrast, it is perfectly normal for a bandleader to form and dissolve various groups over time, often with very different styles and output. Crimson are a little different there, though, in that even though the styles of the different incarnations can be pretty wildly different, one can always feel the King Crimson muse present somehow, and it's not just the consistency of Robert's presence. People of course argue about that, but most of those arguments come from the sort of people that out their own ignorance pretty quickly.

Grigg is gone.

Sometimes, even God gets selfish.

If you'll forgive the crudity, this nevertheless sums it up just about perfectly:

The irony is that Grigg could have done it better without being crude.

There's a hole in the freedomverse today, and it's a big one.  I find it extremely telling that within just a few hours, I have seen more love for Will Grigg pass by my Facebook feed, than I have seen attention paid to any single person or event since I entered the TwitFace space just about ten years ago now.  It's difficult to explain how someone I never met in meatspace could become so important in my life, but anyone who spends any amount of time reading these pages will not fail to run across Grigg's name with some regularity.  I'd like to think that does not happen by accident.

I could go on and stumble for the words myself, but Dan Sanchez did a pretty fine job summing up the je ne sais quoi of Grigg's style, in an article for FEE today:

Each essay he wrote was a masterpiece of erudition and eloquence, precision and passion. He did not hurl invective. He simply described each official injustice exactly, stripped of all euphemism, as one would a crime committed by any “mundane” outside of the “punitive priesthood” and devoid of “blue privilege,” to use three of his many incisive coinages. He would illuminate the matter by drawing fascinating parallels from his expansive knowledge of history, literature, and popular culture: especially science fiction, which he loved. And he would slice to pieces the officious justifications of official victimizers with his razor-sharp reason. He was, bar none, the best writer in the liberty movement. And in his painstakingly produced podcast Freedom Zealot and his many interviews with Scott Horton, he seemed to craft final-draft prose as he spoke.

Yes, that.  All of that.  And for me, there is one other thing, too:  William Grigg was an actual living manifestation of something that is otherwise at least arguably an impossible enigma:  a true, literal Christian libertarian.  What I am usually used to is that the acceptance of God as the ultimate benign authoritarian, will ultimately and always trump the libertarian impulse at some point in the continuum;  but then somehow there was Constant Will, never budging from a libertarianism so beautifully radical it could easily be called the oh-so-naughty A-word...and yet somehow his devoutness was never in question--maybe it's because he always made it seem so personally, individually voluntary.  I found that inspiring and impressive, even alongside his more obvious stylistic brilliance.

He leaves behind a world that desperately needs him, but which seems even more desperate to ignore him.  "Those malignant bastards" do not deserve to breathe any easier for not having Will around any more, calling them out in his gloriously plain, honest language for what they are.

Somehow, in light of this terrible news, I am reminded of something I heard him say more than once:

This is a man.  Take notes.

He always said that about others--certainly worthy others--but based on everything I have learned about the man through his writing and social media presence, the sentiment is absolutely made for him.

Let me put it this way:  my own son will get the notes I have taken.

Rest in peace, Will, and thank you eternally for the attitude.

Actually, George...

(As seen on the TwitFace.)

I’m sure you were great on TV and all (I confess I have never been a proper Trekkie), and I’ve no reason to doubt that you have also been a personal inspiration to more than a few perfectly decent people trapped in the closet by shameful and needless sexual bigotry. Even more importantly, you have done much to shine needed light on one of American history’s darkest moments, in openly talking about your own family’s internment in WWII. (As things happened for me, I learned about that horrible exercise in genocide enablement from others, but I will always respect you specifically for swimming against the shameful tide to willfully ignore or forget it.)

But seriously, George, your snowflake comment here pretty much writes its own rejoinders. 

Since you brought it up, then, here’s a few other “the thing”s about snowflakes:

• Snowflakes evaporate (or sublimate) and vanish completely with the simple application of hot air. (That is: they are utterly dependent upon utopian environmental conditions.)
• Snowflakes have no minds of their own; they simply drift and fall wherever the winds may blow them. (Note that it does not matter who may supply the wind.)
• Snowflakes are also completely unlike any living thing, in that they have no individual defenses of their own. (Not only are they not organic—they’re inorganic!)
• Snowflakes’ entire capacity for creativity and uniqueness is expended at the point of their creation. Yes, they are formed beautiful and unique, and truly the process of crystalline self-organization is remarkable—but once the process completes, the magic is gone; there is no life. (Nor the sentience for self-awareness, much less the sapience for self-direction.)
• Snowflakes can be artificially manufactured by machine, or deliberate cloud-seeding. (Note that whosoever does this, does so with inherent intent to create an exploitable mob.)

Look, I understand that your intention in coming to the defense of the noble snowflake, was probably to call out the notion of unintended consequences. In itself, that is a reasonably noble instinct, which I would generally applaud. But—aside from a rather juvenile delivery—do you really not recognize the fractal irony in defending the accretion of mindless, non-adaptable, easily manufacturable participants in a societal contest over “legitimate” power?

And I not only mean the overall irony, George, I mean the personal irony. It somehow seems very odd that you would make a reference such as “in large numbers become an unstoppable avalanche that will bury you”, given your own personal and family histories. I would think that you would understand, implicitly, “the thing” about “in large numbers” as it relates to human society, which is this: the relationship between empathy and “large numbers” is strongly inverse. Are you really suggesting that the only thing that matters in a societal discussion is “large numbers”? That the little guy should just suck it up lest he be bur[ied] in an avalanche? Really?

The late Aaron Zelman had a name for that sort of cognitive disconnect: bagel brain.

It takes a special snowflake...

...to be that committed to not learning the takeaway lesson in the "shocking" Trump victory.

"Shocking"?  Please.  The American public has been begging for this farce for years, even generations.

It's been pretty ridiculous thus far, among the channels I follow.  People who I know are otherwise intelligent, and even reasonably perceptive, are nonetheless shamelessly shouting out their best entries for Fainting Couch Theater, and looking like utter and complete fools doing it.

The fractal ironies seem to be lost on this legion of hyperventilating, Holier-Than-Thou thespianics, who with great sanctimony and without irony ascribe to the vast, undifferentiated mass of people who outv*ted them, every single talking point attack that Team Blue managed to come up with.  And so I  am repeatedly informed that there are well over fifty million racist, misogynist, homophobic fascists out there, QED, simply because the Team Red buffoon won, so there.

Keep in mind these are the same people who are so (loudly) frightened of the mindless mob-mentality they see in Trump's authoritarianism.  The irony is simply lost on them, and you will not make any friends suggesting that they should just maybe look in the damn mirror.

And it's just childishly amusing to hear all this doomsday talk from the very selfsame who just about eight years ago went to such pains to..."reassure" critics that all our obviously racist thoughts about BHO were unfounded, and that we really needed to relax and take a nap.  Because this, of course, is different.  (While on that point, betcha we also see the return of the term "war criminal", which has been conspicuously missing in action since January of 2009.  Dissent will no longer be considered racist and antigovernment, but once again "the highest form of patriotism".)

The tone-deafness is really stunning to consider.  As just one example, I've seen multiple calls to abolish the Electoral College, because they are just sure that plain old mob democracy will produce their preferred result, and not this insult to their progressively superior way of thinking.  Did they somehow miss the fact that, for all Hillary's institutional advantages (e.g., "I want a love who looks at me the way the press looks at Hillary"), and against all the predictions and punditry, that very mob just matched them?  (Arguing minutiae is pointless--the popular v*te was supposed to favor Hillary heavily, and instead it was essentially a dead heat.)

This is a crowd who believe themselves to be self-evidently superior beings, and are quite uninterested in the existence and influence of their lessers--so much so that they appear unable to believe that an actual revolt against their rainbow-shitting-unicornverse is possible, even after it occurred!  "How did this happen?" is the exact, precise equivalent of what Jeff Cooper would have called "getting caught in White":  they never really believed that their nightmare could happen in the first place, and now that it has, the excuse-making and condescending rationalization will have its out--"those people" are simply subhumanly stupid*, or they got hoodwinked by all that massive right-wing propaganda, or they cheated...anything at all to avoid the realization that "Never Hillary" is just as valid and rational a position as "Never Trump".

Which doesn't say that much anyway, because neither of those awful cretins should ever be entrusted with the life of a single housecat, much less the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings.  And  there's the biggest punchline of all:  the one thing both Team Red and Team Blue agree on wholeheartedly, is that only by supporting the system that would actually elect a de facto king, from choices representing some of the very worst examples of all humanity, can the system be improved.

And they got their legitimacy loud and clear.  Just about one hundred twenty million people, most of whom probably believed they were protesting by selecting the lesser evil, cast their vote for the other evil.  And once again the system is renewed, staffed comfortably with evil, and in absolutely no danger of actually having to change.  (Why?  Sixty million wanted Clinton, sixty million wanted Trump.  What's the problem here, folks?  It's not like you said "NO" or anything...)

For all the sound and fury, Americans once again, as they always do, elected the Establishment once again.  (Yes, Donald Trump is perfectly acceptable to the Establishment.  How do we know this?  Because he was allowed to remain on the stage.  We know from long experience that actual threats to the established order are removed long before they become a problem.)

See how this works?  Here's a handy review, as it will be precisely the same next time:
Step 1:  Complain loudly about how inevitably awful the Establishment choices are.
Step 2:  Hone your complaints to focus on the jingoistic mob mentality of your chosen opponent.
Step 3:  Go cast your v*te, because not v*ting is insane, fattening, and un-'Murickan.
Step 4:  Wear your "I Voted" sticker with no irony whatsoever.
Step 5:  Act surprised at the outcome you produced.  Tell everyone.

"This time for sure!"

______________________
* You think I'm kidding.  Actually, I have lost count of the number of article links on the TwitFace that go to a title of roughly this construction:  "Half of all Americans simply do not have the mental capacity to understand [insert progressive unicorn here:  climate science, economics, healthcare, voting, etc.]"  The dehumanizing condescension that inheres in this mentality really is breathtaking to behold.

Greenwald on 'nobody is coming to take your guns'.

Well, actually, no, that's not what he's writing about here:

The reality is that there is ample evidence uncovered by journalists suggesting that regimes donating money to the Clinton Foundation received special access to and even highly favorable treatment from the Clinton State Department. But it’s also true that nobody can dispositively prove the quid pro quo. Put another way, one cannot prove what was going on inside Hillary Clinton’s head at the time that she gave access to or otherwise acted in the interests of these donor regimes: Was she doing it as a favor in return for those donations, or simply because she has a proven affinity for Gulf State and Arab dictators, or because she was merely continuing decades of U.S. policy of propping up pro-U.S. tyrants in the region?

It's a great article (worth a RTWT), and should, if there were actually any sort of popular interest in restraining the ruling class, be more than enough to prevent HRC from ever again holding actual power over so much as a single cat, much less hundreds of millions of human lives.

But it's not about the guns at all.  And yet somehow, the "nobody is coming to take your guns" canard simply keeps popping into my head:

So if you want to defend the millions of dollars that went from tyrannical regimes to the Clinton Foundation as some sort of wily, pragmatic means of doing good work, go right ahead. But stop insulting everyone’s intelligence by pretending that these donations were motivated by noble ends. Beyond that, don’t dare exploit LGBT rights, AIDS, and other causes to smear those who question the propriety of receiving millions of dollars from the world’s most repressive, misogynistic, gay-hating regimes.

I know, I know, it's one thing to say all this about campaign finance, but it's like totally different when it comes to plebes with guns.  You can just sense a politician's scruples come roaring back into line, when it comes to plebes with guns.

Which nobody wants to take.  The guns, I mean.  Not the plebes.  Of course not the plebes.  Well, unless they want guns.  Then, maybe the plebes too.  Wait, is this thing on?

Clairespective.

Another capital-R resource from Claire.  This one covers--well--the idea that sometimes the path to better things does indeed go through the technically unacceptable.

Are we likely to see constitutional carry in Massachusetts, New York, or California any time soon? Ha! But I can tell you that a lot of us who were around in the dark old days of 1993 and 1994 never thought we’d see even this much, ever, in so many places.

And “this much” is a lot. A hell of a lot. Better yet, we’re going to see more.

Do I now approve of the “shall issue” permits that laid the groundwork for this? Nope. No way. But even I have to admit that the grassroots “shall issue” ccw movement gave birth to the constitutional carry movement. And constitutional carry is an unreservedly good thing.

I do indeed remember those darker days;  in fact it was right around then that I stumbled across Claire in the first place.  Worth, seriously worth, a RTWT.

The only downside I can see, honestly, is that celebrating a good thing for what it is, isn't going to help the sort of prag mindset that still can't distinguish between long-term strategy and true pre-emptive surrender.  Yes, there is a lesson in all this for those of us who can't bring ourselves to actively support ideas that might turn out later to be valuable incremental milestones.   (Duly noted and appreciated, and to borrow from Joel, the crow tastes pretty fine!)  But we, too, should recognize our important place in restraining the surrender impulse--and keep at it.  The real visionaries, as Claire's post suggests, will recognize us for what we are and work with us.

Here's to more such free-people assertions.  Many more!

Okay, is it just me...

...or has it gotten way past the eye-rolling stage, even by the usual election standards, the way many people are acting at the very idea of a Trump presidency?  

You know, as if he would somehow be materially different from any other "leader" in the same position?

Wait...you mean he might be a bigot against The Little People?

He might curtail basic human rights at home, and ignore them abroad?

He might go dick-swinging around the globe, in a way that might engender blowback?

He might shove societally suicidal policy down the national gullet?

He might do all the above by lying, deceiving, and conspiring with not-nice people to get what he wants, all at our expense?

You mean, in general, that he just might act with the impunity of a dictator, rather than with the accountability of an executive custodian?

ZOMG, your powers of perception are simply off the charts, man.  With informed, enlightened attitudes like that, you have me, like totally convinced that we can totally prevent even the slightest bit of all that by simply electing someone else.  Hill!  Bernie!  Cruz!  Rubio!  Kang!

Ferchrissakes, people:  yes, Trump is frightfully unfit to win The One Ring Sweepstakes.  But all this "leave the country!" "the sky is falling!" melodrama really does little more than out you as either a weapons-grade hypocrite, or as unconscionably, nearly unbelievably naive.  They're all unfit to wield power...over a cat, much less 330+ million people.  And they all have been since before any of us were born.

On the other hand, maybe you should leave, if you can't (or refuse to) see that the the real problem with The One Ring Sweepstakes isn't the competitors, but the prize.  If the office disposes of so much power that just putting a slightly-less-sophisticated buffoon in it can cause the whole thing to come apart, then maybe--just maybe--the office has too much damn power.

Yes, David. Yes.

Saw this from the redoubtable David Codrea today:

I vote for good when I engage in a mutually voluntary and acceptable association or transaction. When I vote for a political candidate, I'm picking up any chair in a bar fight I did not start, with the sole intent of extricating me and mine for the time being with minimal injuries.

Not sure I've ever seen it stated more honestly than that.  Even as someone who happens to be committed to the other decision that can arise out of that observation (I simply reject the fait accompli argument for the permanence of the state), I'm in full agreement with the observation itself.  

Yet another example of why David is one of the most important "gun writers" we've ever had.  

Mockingjay, Part 2.

I do love my better half.  She basically engineered yesterday to allow me time to make it into town and see the second Mockingjay film.  (This is not nearly the trivial matter it may sound.)

Blowback.

Man, is it a tiresome time.  We seem to be in one of those periods in which the perfectly inevitable disasters of the disarmament mindset are in crescendo, and the professional crisis exploitation crowd is in a feeding frenzy to match any in history.  Allusions to Solzhenitsyn and the Milton Mayer chorus just seem to write themselves out of daily events.  The level of dehumanization is reaching the point of inspiring genuine alarm among the historically literate.

What is it with people named Bob?

And so over at Mike's place there has been a bit of back-and-forth between MBV and this Bob Nicholson character, who originally penned this anti-NRA hitpiece.  Mike gave him one of his nearly-patented responses, and somewhat unusually, this time he got a reply back.  To which Mike volleyed, bringing us to today, with Nicholson attempting what might be called a "who, me?" tactic to dismiss and avoid.

Ol' Bob offers us all the smarmy confidences of the professional Astroturfer, with the added narcissism that comes from thinking you're the smartest guy in the room because you have a professional license.  He goes to lengths to make sure we know he's one of us--in just exactly the sort of loudly self-outing way that only the completely tone-deaf can manage--even as he repeatedly condescends to the simplistic projections of himself that he has somehow convinced himself that we are.

Sadly, you know the type.  They're coming out of the woodwork again.

Anyway, he must have been a little flustered as he concluded his most recent facile attempt to dismiss Mike, as his ability to spell started to crack a bit there at the end.  No matter.  He'd have to work a lot harder at bad mechanics to get me to look past the inherent chutzpah of his content here:

"I beleive that thothing I supported infringes on rights. You disagree. Fine we will leave it there."

Oh Bob, please do piss up a rope, willya?  We both know perfectly well that you won't "leave it there".  You toss that phrase out there like you expect others to believe you mean it, but you don't.  See, the one thing--the one, single, solitary, only thing that free people require, in the absence of having actually harmed someone, is to be left in peace, unmolested.  And that is the one thing that you absolutely will not do, no matter what sort of sophist drivel you may spout to the contrary.  You will continue to agitate for the forcible prior-restraint violation of untold masses of people who have not harmed anyone.  Violation that, whether you choose to admit it or not, will be carried out with all the fervor, sanctimony, abuse, and blowback of the functionally identical War On (Some) Drugs.  At the point of the government's guns.

The government's guns, Bob.  You know how you thought you were being so smart in trying to chide Mike for calling you a "collectivist"?  Well, it's hard to get more functionally collective than forcibly imposing your political will--in the form of total State control over the exchange of private property between individuals engaged in peaceful commerce--with government "gun cops" running naughty-and-nice list operations.

Yes, Bob, you're a collectivist.  (Sadly, most people are, so don't let it get you down too much--but you do need to own that.)

You also need--seriously--to let go of these delusions you have, that you understand either the people you claim yourself to be among, or the people whose stank you are pimping.  You don't.  You think you do, but you don't.  The former can see right through what David Codrea calls your "big but", and the latter, giving you benefit of the doubt by presuming you are earnest-and-merely-stupid rather than a willfully contributing Astroturfer for them, ...well, they are playing you and your desire to make nice like a cheap accordion.  Seriously, if you actually think that the NRA represents gunnies, or that resistance to gun control is somehow about the prurience of protecting a hobby, or that MBV is somehow agitating for conflict rather than trying to prevent it, or that anything that the disarmament crowd wants is in any way about protecting life, liberty, and property:  your ignorance is weapons-grade.

You may think you want to live in the world you ask for, Bob.  But you don't.  Maybe you think that you can violate people just a little bit, no harm done, and that's the end of the matter.  Especially if some of those people are vulgar and unwashed, or (even worse) uppity.  And it's something that you're okay with, so forcing it on others must be okay too--even if they've not harmed anyone.  (Yet.)

It's not like they'll ever come for you, after all.  You're a model citizen.  (No, seriously, you're exactly what the Establishment wants.)  You think all the right things.  You haven't harmed anyone (ahem), or even broken any laws.  You're safe.

Right?

Oh, okay, I get it now.

Had a "duh" moment, among all this discouraging mouth-frothery since the latest perfectly inevitable disaster in Paris.  Some well-meaning gunnie (I forget where, actually) was waxing agog about the disarmament crowd's latest attempts to hold up another "gun free zone" mass murder, as somehow evidence that what we need to correct the failure is to impose the same failed policy everywhere.  Pretty standard stuff, really, and of course a valid point.  Not arguing that.

But then it hit me.  Sure, governments always tend to want to disarm their populaces, on the general principle of monopolizing power.  But within the context of this newest Menckenian hobgoblin--the deliberate planting of action-not-words Jihadis in refugee populations (and the larger Rube Goldberg plan that ISXX may or may not have, to drive all Muslims worldwide "back" into their loving, caring arms by deliberately causing their worldwide persecution with all the butchery in their name)--there is actually a very specific risk that a protection racket needs to button up, to avoid being outed.

The risk of being shown up by the victims population served.

Of course we can't have the peasantry armed.  If they are,  then common plebes might just take it upon themselves to Indiana Jones the Jihadis on the spot.  On its own, this is old hat for gunnies, who have long noted how often the concept works for individuals on mean streets.  But that's small potatoes, just showing up the cops.  Regular people taking out policy-blowback Jihadis when they actually attack, though?  That's showing up militaries, and governments.  

Think of all the denied exploitation opportunities--the wasted crises!  Hell, if that happens regularly enough, their wars may (gasp!) never happen.  

And, even worse:  if people learn that they don't need their governments to put down an "international threat" that really, actually did come to their very doors--well, then the little people might just start asking dangerous questions that really matter.  

The State can tolerate much, among "its people", but it can never tolerate that.  People will die first.  As good old Maddie Albright said, "We think the price is worth it."

At least say it out loud.

The indispensable David Codrea, here, vamps on yet another authoritarian nitwit's dutiful recitation of one of the classic facile sophistries of Ye Oulde Statist Playbook:  the Resistance Is Futile(TM) fiction.  To wit, according to the nitwit:

Assuming the military was part of the tyranny (which it would have to be for tyranny to have any meaning), any rebelling national band of “patriots” would be told something like, “you either lay down your arms or the entire city of Dallas, Texas will disappear. You have one hour. If you continue, the next city to disappear will be Atlanta, Georgia.”

As usual, David does a fine job at pointing out the obvious:  that anyone even dimly aware of human history can see that resistance is absolutely not futile;  that superior force of arms does not always translate into victory;  that tyranny's footsoldiers do not always run to stereotype;  etc.  There is no need to restate any of that.

What sticks out at me is that this "nuclear option" garbage, at least said out loud like this, seems to get trotted out in the early endgame, usually as a petulant reaction to the realization that the bloody peasants might actually mean it when they say no.  "Wait, you're just going to say no?  Well then, nukes!"

And that is but one setup to a classic exchange that we need to have so very much more of:

"I just can't believe you'd be willing to die over this."
"Well, not exactly willing.  But that's hardly the point.  The point is that you have made it abundantly clear that you are just fine with having me killed over this."

Well, at least they're saying it out loud, when they trot out "the nuclear option" like this.  The funny part is that I'm not even sure the state, itself, is stupid enough to nuke its own populace, for whatever reason.  Statists, however--QED above--may yet be even worse than the horror they support.

One of those 'because Claire' bookmarks.

"What are we as a society going to do?"

With Claire*, you don't get a magnum opus, you get a lupine opus.  This is one of those, not so much because of the size of the response, but because it just seems like it's all in there.  Nothing is perfect, but it's good enough that it becomes very difficult to quote it merely in part.

So, RTWT.

One feels a bit sorry for the original "first-time" commenter, who at least implicitly gets fairly savaged by the force of the article, and then by the Commentariat.  Claire does a perfectly fine job of declaring that she's speaking to attitudes rather than singling out ad hominem (she's better than most at this), but still...whoosh.  (I admit, full disclosure, that I am familiar with such criticism myself, and perhaps I make more of it than I should.)  Truth is, unless he speaks up again (and as of this writing he doesn't appear to have done so), we may never know what his actual intention was.  In one way that's a bit of a shame, but on the other hand, if someone really does need to learn this particular lesson, it's probably gonna leave a mark anyway.

Anyway, that aside, it's a truly excellent summary statement on the question, and what the question usually implies in society-as-it-is-now.  Duly bookmarked here, because I have a feeling I'll want to refer back to it.


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* Claire Wolfe.  Get it?

Outsourcing empathy: what could go wrong?

A Facebook friend--a good man, let me be clear, and one who is a bit of a personal inspiration to me regarding outlook on life--asked, today, after hearing of another hive-publicized shooting incident which may or may not have much in common with other mass shootings:

Again? My friends who are responsible gun owners--what's going on? Sorry, I don't want to put you on the spot (as in, you don't really have to respond), but something has to change, I think.

He then amended;

I guess I didn't state that right: Just because you have a gun, you don't have to know what's going on. I'm just curious what people have to say. I think I'm at the tipping point where I think we have to have some kind of licensing process.

I thought he deserved a response.  He's no sort of hard-core state bootlicker, and is more thoughtful than most.  And so, privately, I sent him the following.  It seemed worth posting here.

Hi, [S].  Thought I'd give a more thoughtful answer to your "what's going on?" question in the backchannel.  It is offered respectfully;  I know you to be a thoughtful person, and I'd not bother if I didn't think you would listen.  

Full disclosure:  I speak strongly.  I am contemptuous of all politics.  And I seem to say things that most people don't want to hear.  That said, I can assure you that I do not argue from ignorance, and I try to speak to attitudes rather than ad hominem to people.  (And so, for example, any reference to "you" in here isn't directed at you personally, etc.)  

With that in mind, here you go:

I don't think "tipping point" is a rational concept here. The core argument for gun rights, to the extent that even has any logical relation to today's shooting case (the few details available now don't suggest persuasively that it does), is not a statistical one, but a moral one. To wit: there is no magic statistical threshold that, once crossed, will suddenly make it morally acceptable to impose forcible prior restraint on people (gun owners, in this case) who have harmed no one, and never will.  The reverse, of course, is equally true:  gun controllers will never be persuaded by any amount of evidence that guns in the hands of the peasantry save more lives than they take.  For all the grandstanding to the contrary, the notion that either gunnies or gun controllers actually care about "performance" statistics is arguably the biggest fiction you'll ever hear on the subject.

What I find most depressing, though, is that so many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that gun control schemes will somehow do what they are advertised to do, despite all of history and basic human nature. The salesmanship may be stunning and slick, but the "performance" has been abysmal and even counterproductive (which, an uppity peasant might observe, makes it no different than the War on (some) Drugs, imperial warmongery, domestic surveillance...). And so after all the worst mass shooting disasters, we eventually* find out that 1) the site was already a de jure or de facto "gun-free zone", 2) there were other laws in place already that also failed to protect the innocent, and 3) none of the gun-control proposals on offer to fix the problem would actually have prevented the incident in the first place...oh, gee whiz! And it really doesn't take a whole lot of analysis to figure out that the "gun-free zone" is a much preferred site for a sick creep to work without interruption.

And yet somehow, the only socially acceptable remedy is more of what has (QED, each time) demonstrably failed to perform as advertised. Because simply entertaining other options is somehow prima facie evidence that you would spit-roast your own children for another box of ammo. "What's the matter with you cousin-humping redneck ammosexuals, who would rather hug your rifle than your kid? Why won't you have that 'national conversation' with us?" It's hard to get more tone-deaf than that, and yet most control-freaks I've met consider themselves far more subtle and nuanced than the rest of Us The Unwashed.

Adding to the chutzpah is the more recent sentiment that gun-rights supporters are getting too in-your-face and (buzzword alert) "extreme". Yes, more and more are exercising their rights with less than elegance. But the gun-controllers own this "problem", because they produced it from nothing. Who really thinks, seriously, that the gun-rights folks just up and decided one day that they needed to start carrying carbines to the local coffee shop to make a point? That's a politician's logic**, not that of a rational person who can see simple cause and effect. The aggravating displays we see now are an absolutely natural consequence of having been hounded, marginalized, and even dehumanized for decades by people who absolutely would NOT leave them alone, despite their never having harmed or threatened anyone, and despite having been promised many times along the way that "all we want is..."  Consider the pious (and very vocal) "reasonableness" of the idea that we must deny guns to "the mentally ill":  this is certainly designed to sound unassailably agreeable, but consider that these same people are also pushing the idea that simply wanting a gun is evidence of mental illness in and of itself.  (This is a great strategy, of course, because the disarmers can argue both that any pushback means that you must somehow want to hand carbines to the insane, and also that your obvious paranoia at being thus persecuted must be indicative of a pathology of your own.)

The disarmers' outright lies, the deliberate misdirections, the procedural shenanigans, the manufactured "stats", the nearly continuous astroturfing...and above all, the sanctimonious insistence that you, simply because you are a "gunnie", are somehow responsible for the actions of others and an enabler of future evil... All this, simply to provide empty absolution for a mind-set that cannot conceive of a non-political approach to a social problem. 

Jeez, I'm frankly amazed at how polite the gunnies have remained, for all these years.

Yes, something has to change. The concept of gun control, as forcible prior restraint on those who haven't harmed anyone, is morally repugnant on its face.  As "crime control" it is an absolute bomb, despite what you may have heard from the propaganda factories. And as any sort of "solution" for the disaster of mass shootings, how is it not the absolute height of irony and cynicism to advocate further disarming the victims when it's clear to anyone paying attention that the perpetrators simply ignore the law entirely?

Given all that, my own question is this: for anyone who believes in gun control as a deterrent to crime, where does your faith come from?  I mean seriously: why, exactly, do you think that anything that is proposed now, will somehow accomplish what the thousands of gun laws already on the books have failed to do?  Is it because a politician told you so? Is it because you believe that the NRA is hopelessly politicized and in it only for itself, while the Brady Center, SPLC, and Everytown for Gun Safety have only the best public interests at heart? Is it because you suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, or perhaps a simple hatred of The Other who you don't understand?

Which, ultimately, brings me back to the beginning. The biggest problem we have--as a society--is that we have created a world in which people outsource their empathy, and their morality, to others, rather than retaining it for themselves. That "we" are willing to outsource these core functions of our humanity to politicians, is chilling beyond words to anyone who has studied the history of genocide and mass atrocity. (And to be clear, here, a whole lot of "gunnies" do that too--drives me crazy to see it.) In such a world, an event as incomprehensibly nihilistic as Sandy Hook, or UCC, or Columbine, seems not only plausible but inevitable.

How to turn things back toward sanity?

Well, trying to remove, reduce, or control guns is doomed to failure, and will just get more people killed. And it does nothing to strike the root.

Arming the peasantry may well help a little by giving people a chance to fight back in desperate circumstances, but in and of itself that is not going to reverse sociopathic nihilism either. At best it will displace it, with an elevated threat of tactical failure.

Ultimately, the problem is in our minds. No law, no rule, no attempt to control other people against their will, will ever fix it. We have to take our empathy back, each one of us, and not let it go again.  (I think it was Jung who said "The salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul."  I'm no sort of religious man, but I don't think you have to be, to recognize the truth in that.)

Some say this is impossible, that it would be too much work, and in the end people will sooner accept devolving into civil war. Well, maybe. It sure looks that way some days. But I can't let myself believe that it has to be that way.  If nothing else, I have to answer to my daughters, and I want them to see me trying to build the world as I want to see it, from the ground up. 

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* This information is usually available right away, but is drowned out underneath all the sanctimonious grandstanding, and is often never reported in the mainstream at all.
** You know, politicians:  those folks who dream of a day when their approval ratings might make it up to their hat size.

File this under "Do you understand?"

Sure, we've long known that the Establishment propagandizes for the Establishment.  But this Greenwald article does make the case in a way that should be digestible by a larger audience of fence-sitters than I'd ever be able to reach.

We’re bravely here to report that these two incidents perhaps coincidentally occurred at “about” the same time: There was a hospital that blew up, and then there was this other event where the U.S. carried out an airstrike. As the blogger Billmon wrote: “London 1940: Civilians throughout the city were killed at about the same time as a German air strike, CNN reports.”

The entire article is designed to obfuscate who carried out this atrocity. The headline states: “Air attacks kill at least 19 at Afghanistan hospital; U.S. investigating.” What’s the U.S. role in this incident? They’re the investigators: like Sherlock Holmes after an unsolved crime.

This, too, pretty much says it all:

Now, if only we could get more folks to remember how this all works when the subject is "Plebes with gunz, ZOMG!", or "Working within the system is the only way to get results."

(That includes you too, Glenn Greenwald.  You may be better than most, but you too have your blind spots.)