Tag Archives: politics

Foolishness

Posted on by
Reply

It seems a bunch of Army and Navy cadets flashed the “OK” sign—thumb and index finger touching in a circle with the remaining fingers extended—at last weekend’s Army-Navy football game. Now

West Point and Annapolis officials are trying to determine the motives

of those cadets.

Nonsense, and it’s…sad…to see otherwise intelligent Academy officials falling for the Left’s artificial hue and cry and wasting time looking into this. They’re just throwing their cadets under the bus by taking this idiocy seriously.

Only lately has the gesture been given

a different significance for some people around 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League, when it began to be used to signify white power.

This is nothing but a cynical effort to change the meaning of an innocent, well-meaning, gesture for deliberately divisive meaning. The OK sign has no history of any other meaning, and it has no connection to any other meaning. The distortion is dishonestly created.

No. The gesture means “OK,” and nothing else. That it might also be used in a bar room prankish game is neither here nor there.

It’s important that all of us not surrender any part of the lexicon to the manipulations and bastardizations of the Left.

It’s important to not surrender this gesture to a motley collection of snowflakes, virtue-signalers, and segregationist identity politickers.

Flash the OK sign whenever and wherever you wish to indicate approval.

That Was The Point

Posted on by
Reply

The subheadline on a Sunday Wall Street Journal article says it all.

European voters have viewed the process so negatively that even EU-skeptic parties have mostly dropped talk of leaving the bloc or the euro

That was the entire motive for Brussels’ extended bad faith pseudo-negotiations with Great Britain after those uppity citizens voted to go out from the European Union. To be sure, Brit politicians, who insisted they Knew Better than their subordinate citizens, contributed to the mess with their own combination of arrogance and incompetent negotiating, but they just played into Brussels’ hands, they did not create the chaos.

Brussels, with its antics, has successfully cowed other nations that were restive and contemplating leaving into sitting down and shutting up.

That could change if the UK secures a trade deal with the EU that gives it greater national sovereignty without hurting its economy and Brexit comes to be seen as a success for Britain.

What the new government in the UK needs to internalize and then keep uppermost in its collective mind, though, is that the nation doesn’t need much of a trade deal with the EU, especially if that deal does not acknowledge the national sovereignty of a newly freed Great Britain.

Great Britain is in a position to cut a good trade deal with the US and to cut another one with the member nations of its global Commonwealth—either bilaterally or with the group as a whole.  The success of those deals could well revive sentiment of those currently cowed EU-skeptic nations.

Congressional Supremacy

Posted on by
2

Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin (D, MI) was asked by Bill Hemmer on his Fox News show Friday morning after the Nadler Committee voted to send Articles of Impeachment to the House how she would vote on those Articles.

Slotkin led off by making a big deal about her CIA training (in objective analysis), then assuring us all that she would not vote based on polls, she would not be pushed one way or another, she would not vote based on newspaper articles.  No, she would vote on her gut and on what she thought was right.

Not one word, not one syllable, not a single minim of voting the way her constituents—her employers—instruct her to vote.  She hasn’t even asked her employers for their instruction.  She’s been elected, now it’s too Hell with her bosses.

Parliamentary Supremacy is alive and well in the Progressive-Democratic Party in the House.

And that stinks.

Culture and Compromise

Posted on by
Reply

The subheadline of a Federalist article about the Boris Johnson/Tories election just concluded in Great Britain caught my eye. Read the whole article; it’s valuable in its entirety.

It is far easier for the right to compromise on economics than for the left to compromise on culture, religion, and nationalism. And that is the formula conservatives need to remember.

We’ve seen this in our nation, too: the Left’s and its Progressive-Democratic Party’s constant drumbeat of attacks against the right of particular, disapproved-of Americans to practice their religion and attacks on our nation, demanding, instead that we subordinate ourselves to internationalism, wherein we lose control of our own lives.  Understand: these sorts of things are unique to our nation. No other nation in the world has a written-down Constitution that says in so many words—opens with the words—that We the People are sovereign in our nation. Not Government, not any arm of Government, we citizens. Government works for us.

We’ve seen also the refusal of Progressive-Democrats to compromise, even to try, with Republicans. The Republican Party is just a Trumpian personality cult, they say.  Supporters of Trump are racists, now including Conservatives.  Blacks who support Trump are, to use more polite terms, Uncle Toms or oreos.  Women who support Trump are, at best, voting against their interest, and at worst, as was said about a Republican woman candidate for Vice President, she should be gang-raped by blacks and then shat in her mouth.  Americans, generally, are just bitter Bible- and gun-clingers, ignorant, racist, and misogynistic.  The Left and Party are in open warfare against our American culture.

In contrast, an ability to compromise on matters of economics, what those of the Right, the Republican Party and Conservatives in general are willing and able to do is a far more successful method, and it’s far more protective of American culture: economics is near, if not at, the center of culture.

It’s how businessmen of a particular religion live their business lives while still doing business with customers of differing religious tenets, or no such tenets at all.  It’s how businessmen protect their rights to speak openly and freely by not selling a product with a particular message to customers demanding that message, and this freedom is especially protected by American free markets: there will be another business just down the block willing to sell the same article with the customer-desired message.

Free market economics is how we interact with each other within the framework of culture.  And the freedom of our market is how we find compromise among each other.  And that preserves our American culture.

The fundamental difference in Western politics now is cultural, and is between Westphalian sovereignty and unifying nationalism on one hand, and complete individualist internationalism and rule by technocratic institutions on the other.

Indeed, in American politics in particular, as well as the British politics of which Sumantra Maitra was writing at the link. And one is preservative of our culture, our way of life, our central ethos, while the other is overtly, carefully considered destruction of all of that.

Voting Rights

Posted on by
2

On the whole, convicted felons lose their right to cast votes in our elections for the rest of their lives. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear (D) wants to restore this right to nonviolent felons.

It’s been a truism in our American jurisprudence and our American society that when a miscreant—a felon in the present case—has paid his debt to society (nominally including a measure of “make whole” his immediate victim), he should be allowed to start over, reenter society, and try to live honorably and on his own efforts rather than continuing to be dependent on society, a dependence begun with his dependence on our prison system for his existence as well as for his punishment.

Now, some crimes want a lifetime punishment, and a few demand the criminal’s life in compensation to society and to the victim.  Most crimes, though, have punishments that society has determined to be sufficient at a smaller price than the criminal’s life or life span.  These crimes are identifiable by their finite jail terms with parole following after release or by their having been suspended on the criminal’s good behavior during the period of suspension.

Many of those short-of-life crimes are violent crimes; Beshear wants to limit his action to non-violent crimes.

In principle, I agree with that.  When a man’s debt has been paid, his bill should be so marked, including with additional detriments, like a fundamental right of citizenship—voting—also lifted.  But we need to be careful with the definition of “non-violent.”  I suggest that a con job is non-violent, or a burglary of an unoccupied building.  I suggest, though, that dealing drugs is not at all non-violent, even if no guns are used: it destroys lives.  Drug dealing has no merely temporary effects.  I suggest, further, that identity theft, for all that no guns may have been involved, is far from non-violent.  Identity theft can destroy a life as thoroughly as drugs: it takes financial resources necessary for the victim’s present life and his future life.

Again, I agree, in principle, with the concept of restoring a citizen’s right to vote to a felon whose crime was non-violent and who has completed his sentence in every respect, including restitution.  But we need to know the details of Beshear’s specific proposal before we can agree that he’s on the right track.