Category Archives: culture

Wrong Vote Outcome

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They didn’t vote the way they were supposed to, so there’ll be a whole new election.  No, not for Georgia governor, but for Mayor of Istanbul.  Based solely on Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s plaint that there were “numerical mistakes,” “irregularities,” and outright “corruption” in that mayoral election—Erdoğan’s party didn’t win there; the Republican People’s Party’s Ekrem Imamoglu did—the Supreme Electoral Council has completely annulled the election and required a new one to be held.

Echoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) claim that if her Progressive-Democratic Party didn’t win big in 2020, President Donald Trump would refuse to accept the outcome, Erdoğan did just that in Istanbul:

a margin of only 15,000 votes in a city as large as Istanbul was too close to be fair.

And

He [Erdoğan] said a difference of “13,000 to 14,000 votes” was not enough in a city of 15 million inhabitants.

So his election board tossed the results.  This, after AKP spokesman Omer Celik, speaking for Erdoğan, promised

At the end of the day, we will accept the final result regardless of whether it is to our advantage or disadvantage[.]

Former German Greens leader Cem Özdemir, who has Turkish roots suggested that this shows Erdogan to be a

bitter old man, who has long passed the zenith of his power. …  In the world of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, everyone who thinks differently to him is a terrorist, and every election he loses is a sham election[.]

Apparently not so far past.  And there’s that echo, again.

Licensing Illegality

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The New York State Assembly wants to give drivers licenses to illegal aliens. The New York Immigration Coalition is completely on board and has begun pressuring the State’s Senate leadership to rubberstamp the Assembly on this. These Progressive-Democrats and their activist supporters rationalize the move this way:

He [NYIC Executive Director Steve Choi] said issuing licenses to immigrants would reduce hit-and-run-vehicle crashes, lower insurance costs and make it easier for immigrant laborers—including those working on farms—to get to work.

This is nonsense. Illegal aliens still will run from their accidents—they’re still illegal, and they would face arrest and deportation if they hung around.  This, in turn, means the license move will have little to no effect on insurance costs—just as, for instance, illegal aliens have little to no impact on the costs of other forms of insurance.

As to the other foolish claim, immigrant laborers already have no trouble getting to work, including to farm work. Only illegal aliens have this trouble. The illegal aliens could correct this problem, though, by (re)entering legally.

On that last, there is a valid beef: it takes entirely too long to get legal entry permission, and the caps on legal entry are far too low.  These, though, are not addressed at all by drivers licensing.

Disarmament

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The Progressive-Democratic Party wants to disarm us. That’s made clear by Party Presidential candidate and Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker’s (NJ) gun control plan.  Senator Spartacus wants, among other requirements [emphasis added]:

  • prospective gun owners must prove to the FBI that they’ve completed a gun-safety course to obtain a federal gun license
  • that federal license would be required to purchase a firearm
  • a federal background check on virtually all sales
  • the federal license would be good for only five years
  • current firearm owners would have to get this federal license, also
  • limit handgun purchases limited to one per person per month

This can only be taken as an assault on the federal republican nature of our nation and a backdoor assault on our 2nd Amendment.

Background checks already are required by the feds in order to purchase a firearm.  States already require licenses—which themselves carry safety courses as part of the licensing procedure—in order to carry firearms on public property (a couple of States have Constitutional Carry capabilities, instead).

No, this expansion of background checks and federalizing the licensing requirement can only be for building a Federal database of who has weapons.

Background checks to screen prospective owners and buyers for felony records can be useful—at the State level—but when the checks are used to build a database of weapons owners, which is the only purpose for requiring existing firearms owners with their proven track records, to get federally licensed, those checks become a lethal danger to individual liberty. Such databases are too easily used by governments at all levels of jurisdictions (the Federal level is only the most powerful) to seize legally owned weapons under any guise that seems convenient—whether an “emergency” or a claimed domestic violence threat.

Even the domestic violence bit might seem legitimate, but for the process for the accused to get his weapons back and government’s demonstrated intransigence in returning other seized property after the seizure has been deemed erroneous.  One has only to look at the lengthy nature of the proceedings for getting weapons back.  One has only to look at the outright refusal of jurisdictions to return confiscated vehicles, even cash, seized under drug or money laundering claims proven erroneous.

Avoid Debate

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It might make some folks uncomfortable.  That seems to be the position of Lance Morrow, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in his Wall Street Journal piece.  After all, goes the subhead on his piece:

It would push the country to angrier extremes on either side, stimulating fresh antagonisms.

Morrow urged us all to “stop and think” about the implications of having a debate, here on the matter of reparations for past slavery-related transgressions.

The notion may be too volatile to indulge in a presidential-campaign year.

Leaving aside Morrow’s other major concern—

By pressing the issue they may ensure the re-election of Donald Trump….

—the question remains: if not now, when?  Apparently, “later.”

Better to keep monsters, old and new, locked in the basement, and to let the conversation upstairs in the living room be as genteel as possible—even hypocritical. In matters of race hate, candor is overrated. Hypocrisy may be the moral way to go—until, as time passes, people become more civilized.

Yeah, it’s better just to let the matter fester, building to a later, vaster explosion.

Sure.

Socialism and Good Intentions

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Carol Roth, in her op-ed for FOXBusiness, said that Socialism begins with good intentions.

No, socialism does not.  Perhaps the first attempts did, but with its unbroken history of wealth concentration, power concentration, and utter failure—even for those in the concentrated top—before us and well known, that much is clear.  On the contrary, those proselytizing for and instigating socialist regimes have as their sole goal the accretion of wealth and power to themselves—and this time it’ll be different, this time they’ll pull it off.

Roth’s piece had a number of internal contradictions that illustrate the origins of socialist regimes, even though she seems to have missed them.

The first is her quote from Margaret Thatcher:

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Those pushing socialism know this a priori, though.  They have no concern for the future, just the current seizure of all that OPM.  They’ll get theirs, and to hell with anyone else.

Then she wrote,

Socialism is quite like robbing Peter to pay Paul….

That’s not starting out with good intentions.  Unless it’s a Good Thing to rob someone, especially if it’s someone you don’t like.

And this bit:

Socialism starts out with noble intentions, preying on the envy of the population….

It’s noble to “prey on” the base instincts of the poor?  It’s noble to take advantage of others’ envy, to encourage the weak immorally to act out that envy?  How does that “logic” work, exactly?

Socialism, in each of its iterations over the last 100 years has not started with good intentions.  It has started with the greed of the few with the skill to peddle snake oil.  Socialism accelerates downhill from there.