Trump Is A Big Fat Liar

The twisted genius of Donald Trump is his ability to deflect and to paint his opponents with his own weaknesses.

I suppose it started with Swiftboating.  John Kerry was a decorated war veteran, who actually went to Vietnam, while George W. Bush got a cushy deal with the air guard to fly jets one weekend a month and avoid being shot at.   Seems like a simple thing - who's the war hero and who's the draft-dodger?

Well, by the time Rodger Ailes got done with Kerry, people thought Kerry was the coward, and George W. valiantly patrolled the skies over Texas, preventing invasion from Mexico.  And sadly, the media went along with this - needing "news" for the "news cycle" and reporting on any stupid thing, no matter how sketchy, so long as it sold eyeballs to advertisers.  So these "Swift boat veterans" (all two of them) got lots of air time.  But no one else did.

And before long, the mainstream media was baited into stories about whether Kerry threw away his medals, threw them over the White House fence, or how many medals he threw, or maybe it was just the ribbons.  No shit, this crap-reporting went on for days - weeks, even.  "This just in!  New controversy as to whether Kerry threw three or four medals over the White House fence.  We'll have pundits on both sides of this pressing issue with their analysis!"

What the ever-loving fuck? Dick Cheney was no doubt cackling with glee when he saw the mainstream media get sucked into this.   Before long, everyone forgot about Bush and the focus was on Kerry - was he a hero or a zero?   The coupe de grace was a shitty piece on 60 Minutes done by that douchebag Dan Rather (why, just why?) using what was clearly a phony "Memo" that they never bothered to vet or submit to a document expert - or a 3rd grader - either of whom could have pointed out that Word 2000 fonts don't print on an IBM Selectric typewriter in an era before personal computers existed.  Bush was exonerated - by a classic false-flag operation!

Maybe it started with Reagan - the "Teflon" President.  They could make credible accusations against him and nothing stuck.  Even the Iran-Contra kerfuffle (whose repercussions are still being felt today, with the war in Iraq, our relationship with Iran, and the migration caravans at our borders) which was clearly a violation of many Federal laws, was swept away when Ronnie went on TeeVee and aw-shucked us into believing that he had no idea what was going on.   I mean, I could believe that about George W, but Ronnie?  Well, maybe he was starting to lose it.  It happens to all of us.

But those guys were freaking amateurs compared to Trump, who appears to be dumb as a post, but has this almost autistic-like handle on the American psyche.   He knows just when to drop a Tweet-bomb to distract from bad news and once again the mainstream media is taken in.  GDP craters the worst since 1929 and the "leade" story (I hate that spelling - Newhouse fags!) is that Trump is going to delay the election, which apparently he can do through Twitter, as under the Constitution, Tweets are now considered Presidential decrees.

What is odd is that the media runs as a sidebar article how Trump drops these Tweet-bombs to distract from what is going on.   So the story is, "We've been taken in by Trump yet again - and rather than do something about it, we'll just get taken in!"   But of course, they are now firmly addicted to the powerful drug of click-bait.   They know what we want to read and watch and what makes money for the network or paper.   So they have to go with click-bait.  If they don't, viewers and readers will migrate to other channels of information.

So yes, we are the problem, or more precisely, the great unwashed masses who believe just about anything you put on TeeVee.

Trump's latest whopper of a lie - and one dutifully reported only by the right-wing media this time around - is that Biden is"ducking" the debates.   Emphasis on the word "ducking" which is in every article and thus was created by design, no doubt after testing the word with focus groups.   The reality is (boring! change the channel!) that Biden has agreed to three debates so far and Trump has agreed to none.

Trump huddles in a bunker in the White House and "ducks" the press and won't commit to any debates.   So the narrative is.... Biden did that, not Trump.   Trump isn't the Teflon President, he's the trampoline one, whatever you say about him bounces back and sticks to you.

Or it will, if we let it.

I said early on in this blog that any business relationship you enter into predicated by a lie, no matter how trivial will go downhill from there:

Liars play their hand early. When you answer the phone and someone says "how are YOU today?" they are lying to you, as they really don't care about how well you are doing. When you get a piece of mail that says "urgent!" when it is just an ad, or is faked-up to look like a tax refund check or something important - to get you to open it - they are lying to you. When a commercial says you can "lease a new car for $199 a month!" and you get down to the dealer and realize it will cost far more than that, they are lying to you.

People who lie to you at the get-go aren't going to become more honest over time. Just walk away from deceptive advertising, practices, and come-ons. Every time you send business to people to operate this way, you encourage more people to do it - and drive out of business the few honest people left.

This mantra is a useful tool in helping you parse your way through the numerous financial obligations and offers you see every day in your life.  It is hard and time-consuming to wade through pages of fine print on some credit card offer to figure out if it is legit or not (most are not).  But if you can spot a whopper of a lie early on - or even a trivial one - odds are, you can safely dismiss the rest of the offer without reading it.

For example, a credit card offer comes in the mail, faked up to look like a government check, official communication or has the words, "Important!  Open Right Away!" on it.  These are all lies and you can assume that the offer won't be a good one, otherwise they wouldn't have to lie to you about it.

Sadly, people go for the lies and eschew truth.  I received an offer from Capital One that sounded "too good to be true" and what made me nervous was the lack of four-point fine print that went on for pages, or the lack of a faked-up mailer.  I almost threw it away because the offer was too direct and too honest, oddly enough.  But it turned out to be a good deal - offering a $200 bonus if I would make a deposit, and paying interest almost ten times what I am getting from an ordinary savings account.

But getting back to Trump, the same rules about commerce should apply to politics as well.  Yea, I know, everyone says that "all politicians are liars" but let's face it, Trump can't tell the truth if his life depended on it.  He has to spin everything in his life to be "great" or "fantastic" even if a truckload of horse shit fell on him.  The guy lies to us - all the time.

And to me, that's all I need to know.   Yes, you could go through policy analysis - the actual policies, not the click-bait camera-ready Tweet-bombs designed to distract and disseminate.  And if you wade through all that you would come to the same conclusion you get from the 300-yard drive-by view.  If it looks like a scam from that far away, odds are, it is.

But again, the genius of Trump (and his lackeys) is that they can flip even this.  Trump lies whenever his lips are moving, but if you confronted them about this, they would dig through 1,000 hours of interview videos stretching back decades to find an instance of Biden putting a favorable spin on something and then say, "See? He's the liar!  Not Trump!  That's why he  won't debate!"

And sadly, the mainstream media will go along with this, calling it "Liar-gate" or something to that effect, with its own spinning logo and text crawl on the evening news, and talking heads debating the matter until the plebes don't even know what to think.

But make no mistake about it, Trump is a big fat liar, and the reason why he lies all the time, is that the truth is scary - and scariest of all to him.

Identity-Theft Politics

Elizabeth Warren didn't invent it but she benefited from it.

In a recent posting, I mentioned Rachel Doezel, the white woman from Minnesota who dyed her skin and teased her hair and claimed that she was black. Her parents exposed her as a fraud when she ran for and was successfully elected as president of the local chapter of the NAACP.  Doezel finally admitted to the deception, but claimed that she felt black inside and therefore that counted for something.

It is an interesting argument, and one that seems to be gaining steam. As I noted before, a lot of middle-class white kids like to act out as rappers and gangsters and other badass personas as part of our culture of belligerence.  Once again whitey steals from the black community, this time expropriating the entire rap and hip-hop culture, or a minstrel show caricature of it.  In fact, some of the biggest selling rap stars are in fact white. And the largest audience for rap music is young white teenagers.

That sort of thing started with Elvis and perhaps before. Today we condemn people wearing blackface, re-enacting minstrel shows. However, blackface was really just another example of expropriating Black culture.  Minstrel shows were originally performed by black performers. White people decided to get in on this act by painting their faces black and mimicking the originators of that genre.

The odd thing is, some of those blackface musicians were not mocking blacks, but paying homage to those early black artists.  But of course, later on, it became a farce - exaggerating the movements and antics of black minstrel show performers, who themselves used exaggerated movements and language to entertain a largely white audience with a caricature.  Cultural appropriation isn't always bad, but I think we can agree blackface always was.

The question is, why would anyone voluntarily assume the aspects of a minority group?   After all, there are many disadvantages, economically, to being black.   But I suspect Ms. Doezel and others who "act black" are doing so because culturally, it is considered much cooler.  The channels aimed at the youth market prominently feature black artists and black music.   So, many young people perhaps identify with black culture (or what they perceive to be black culture, as viewed from the safety of cable TV or the Internet) as it provides a social advantage among their peer group.

In other cases, pretending to be a minority may provide actual economic advantage.  I mentioned before how at Crystal City (now home to Amazon, formerly home of the Patent Office) they passed a law that people with handicapped placards didn't have to pay for meter parking. Overnight, every car at a meter had a handicapped placard.  Not only did you not have to pay, you could leave your car there all day.  Meter income went to zero, so they changed the law so handicapped people could stay all day, but had to pay the meter. Overnight, the handicapped placards disappeared and street parking again became available.

And a lot of people do this.  My Dad did, Mark's Dad did.  Just slip Mom's Handicap placard on the windshield when you go to the store - and get the best parking place!  People think the idea of handicapped parking wasn't to make the playing field "even" but to provide an advantage to the handicapped, so as to make up for their handicap.   It is wrong, but a lot of people believe that, deep down, even if they don't say it out loud.

Hence people bring a dog into the store, claiming it to be a service pet, when it is just an unruly mutt.  Or worse yet, they want to bring a chicken or a ferret on an airplane.  Having a "disability" is now seen as advantageous.  Where's my special meal?  I want low-salt, low-fat, gluten-free, kosher, halal happy meal! (e.g., a box of air).   And in many cases, the "special" meal ends were better than the standard fare, which served only to reinforce the notion that being a special snowflake has its advantages.

In the past, being handicapped or being a minority or even being a woman (who are not a minority, but a slim majority - whey aren't they running things?) kind of sucked.   You got the short end of the stick most of the time - discriminated against, harassed, assaulted, or left out of society in general.  Today, we have made great strides in eliminating or reducing these barriers.  But in some instances, such as with affirmative action, there may actually be benefits to being a minority or woman.  If you are a government contractor, it may pay to put the company in your wife's name, particularly if she is Black or Hispanic.  As a former "small business" (we also get set-asides) government contractor, I was asked this question every year when I renewed my SAMS registration.   And yes, I knew people who did this - putting the company in the wife's name or taking on a minority partner to get more contracts.  Act shocked.   You create a gaming system and some people play the game, others play the system.

Identity-Theft politics doesn't end there.  Title IX stipulates that schools receiving government money have to support women's athletics.   However, some States, such as Connecticut, have allowed "transgender" women (who are boys, genetically) to compete in women's sports.   It would not be a big deal, but apparently one or two of these transgender athletes are cleaning up at the local and State track meets - winning all the prizes, because they have a much more muscular body mass, as is typical of males.  As a result, they would be eligible for scholarships and women athletes would miss out.  Is that fair to women?   Are men going to take that away, too?

But wait, there's more.  Apparently people are now claiming to be sexual minorities, which at the present time appears to be little more than an attention-getting device.  But, since the Supreme Court has ruled that an employer cannot discriminate based on sexual orientation, it opens the door for people to claim discrimination, simply by claiming to be bisexual, queer, asexual, any one of the LGBTQ letters that are being constantly added to these days.

Back in the day, all we wanted was to be left the hell alone to live our lives as we saw fit and not to be persecuted.  Gays didn't want special set-asides or treatment, or for folks to walk on eggs around us.  As I noted to my conservative straight employee, I was not in favor of such anti-discrimination laws, as if enacted, he could sue me for discriminating against him for being straight!   With each additional cause of action in the workplace comes thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands of frivolous lawsuits and as many more settlements that never make it to court.

Gays have historically have a higher income and wealth level than Lesbians and straight people.  All that fabulous doesn't come cheap!  So in terms of discrimination, back in the day, what we were worried about was the Cops arresting us in a gay bar for... being gay in a bar.  Or some yahoo beating us over the head with a baseball bat.  That was real injustice.  To hear these transgender folk tell it, that's nothing compared to being called by the wrong pronoun.  We just wanted to be left the hell alone, thank you.  We did just fine, economically, even if some fundamentalist Christian employer wouldn't hire us.   Life wasn't fair - and we didn't expect it to be.   We did OK even then - and better than most.   We weren't victims.

And no, we didn't seek out Christian businesses and tried to force them to bake cakes or photograph our weddings or whatever.   Maybe those Christians are dolts, but trying to force someone to accept you is just wrong - and will backfire in a big way.  Besides, it is kind of cruel to force someone into an awkward position like that.  And how good do you think the photos of your Lesbian wedding will be if the photographer is seething all the time?   Just cut that shit out - it ain't helping.

Today?  Well, victimhood is not only the new norm, it is aspirational.   So in a way, it is why people are seeking out some sort of minority status.   After all, we all hate white heterosexual men (about 30% of the population - a minority!) so if you are one, maybe you couldn't be blamed if you posit that you are one of the few.  Put your hair in a man-bun and call yourself an asexual fairy or whatever - and now you can join the protest!

Maybe we should go back to the old days - when there were initiation ceremonies and they didn't just let anyone join the club.   Just kidding.  But it reminds me of a comment made by a friend of mine back in 1985.  Syracuse University was being very touchy-feely even back then, and put on a panel discussion about gays and whatnot, and he agreed to appear on the panel as the token gay (well, the only one "out" anyway).  They went on and on about why he was gay and whatnot, and he said to me, "I really wanted to just say, 'I like [performing fellatio]' but I couldn't say that!"   I though that was pretty funny - these academics treating this all with grave seriousness.  As I noted before, the Gay Student Association used to have a social every week with free beer.  Today, it is the Lesbian Gay Transgender Studies Building and not nearly as much fun.  It may be gay, but they didn't look very happy.

But a comment my friend made that also stuck with me was, "There are so many of these guys who want to say they were gay in college, but later on get married!"   I am not sure that is the case, but it struck me as odd, that even back then, people would affect an affection, perhaps for attention, or to gain acceptance or popularity within a peer group.  Perhaps today, this is even moreso.

Before I leave the topic of sexual minorities, there has been a lot of ink spilled about a transgender murder spree.   The narrative is that transgender women (that is to say, men who dress and appear as women - the nomenclature is so confusing!) are being murdered. This is indeed true, but if you scratch the surface, many if not most of these victims are prostitutes, and the murder rate of prostitutes is alarming.  The fact that the majority of these prostitutes murdered are racial minorities is also alarming - and yet no one at these protests is protesting the slaughter of women this way.  Kids today even mock it, calling riding in the back of  a car, "Riding Dead Hooker".   In one town in Long Island, people complained about dead prostitutes' body parts washing up on shore - not because the tragedy of young women being murdered, but because it inconvenienced them on their daily beach walk.

So yea, we should be outraged about all the transgender prostitutes being murdered - and the black, Hispanic, and white prostitutes being murdered, the underage runaways murdered and so on and so forth. But you will never see these Antifarts protest that, will you?  And yet thousands die every year.   It is a tragedy, and it kind of irks me that they are making this into a transgender tragedy, as if it doesn't affect women as well.  Taking away even that.

But getting back to topic, I think you will see more of this Identity-Theft Politics as we go forward.  We have demonized heterosexual white males to the point where young boys are being raised with the narrative that they are little more than demons and their kind has ruined the country, the planet, and God-knows-what-else.   So people seek a new identity - and sometimes such an identity can have social advantages or even financial ones.  It's been done before.

I am not taking a piss on Elizabeth Warren - she is a decent human being and has some very good ideas.   But she fell into the trap that many middle- and upper-class whites did back in the 1960's.  My own Mother, after a few drinks, would allege we were also related to Pocahontas.  I think a lot of WASP-y types did that back in the day.  It made for colorful cocktail conversation, and added an air of mystery about oneself.

Of course, a little bit of Indian blood from a distant ancestor was OK - you still got into the country club.   But there were rules about that sort of thing.  Very strict rules.

It illustrates, however, how this Identity-Theft Politics is nothing new.  Claiming minority ancestry, or mimicking the behaviors or culture of minorities often had social advantages or even financial ones.  It worked for Elvis.   It didn't hurt Ms. Warren, either.

But maybe it is time we changed that.  Because when someone claims minority status speciously, they inevitably take away from someone else who actually is that minority, whether it is cultural or economic - or a combination of the two.

Yea, looking at you, Marshal Mathers!

Protesting Real Injustice

Protesting the police is cowardly and easy to do, as the police are restrained in terms of what they can do. You don't see these protesters down in South Central protesting the Crips or the Bloods.

Another day, another young black man is gunned down in the streets. No, it wasn't a police shooting. It usually isn't. More black people are killed by black people than by the police by a factor of ten or a hundred or more.

In this case it was the age-old animosity between Hispanics and Blacks, something we don't talk about because we lump them altogether as "people of color" and assume them to be one voting bloc, which they are not. As I noted before, Hispanics often have a visceral hatred of black people and the feeling is usually reciprocal - and historic.

In this instance, a young man, 22 years old, on his first day at the job at a Burger King was trying to do the right thing by going to work at a shitty minimum wage job and busting his ass to get ahead. Some angry Hispanic lady in the line said it was taking too long to get her food and complained loudly. He apologized and gave her her money back and told her to leave.

She decided to get her gang banger boyfriend to get even with his kid and they gunned him down in the parking lot of the Burger King. What a sad tale. I'm sure this young man's mother is in tears right now at yet no one is protesting this or celebrating his life.    There are no memorials with flowers and teddy bears. No carefully crafted photos from his high school yearbook.  No outrage.

And what is really outrageous is that some people think that a transaction involving fast food is worth killing people over.   Maybe this is where we need to start, if we are to really make changes in our society.

Why aren't these BLM protesters, who are mostly white, going down to the street corner where the Crips and the Bloods are selling drugs into the ghetto and poisoning a new generation of young people and throw Molotov cocktails at them?

The simple answer is they are cowards. If you throw a Molotov cocktail at a gang member, he pulls out a gun and shoots you in the head. There's none of this mamby-pamby fussing around with the police to where they try to restrain you with tear gas and rubber bullets. Gang members use the real thing.

This is the real injustice in the world, but nobody wants to address it or talk about it. In fact what we want to do is restrain the police even further so they can't go after these gang members. And when the police do have some success in it bringing down MS-13, liberals write articles implying the MS-13 is some sort of social club and not all that bad.

Yes, black lives matter. But more black people are gunned down by other blacks than by the police by a factor of a hundred to one or more. The fact we don't protest this is the real obscenity.  Over 100 people have been murdered in Chicago in 2020, and yet we don't hear a peep about this from these Antifart protesters.   To them, the police are the problem, because they once got a speeding ticket in their Scion.

But maybe in a way it is poetic justice. As I mentioned before, the police can go after law-abiding citizens for violating various laws. Once you have a fixed address, job, assets and whatnot, you are vulnerable to our legal system. The secretary driving home from the company Christmas party blowing .09 on the breathalyzer can lose her job, her career, and what little money she's managed to save. The five-time offender who's been to jail three times and has killed people, keeps driving drunk without a license or even registration. He is untouchable.

In the same way, these protesters can go after the police because the police have a fixed address and a deep pocket which can be sued. Going after a gang banger? They shoot back - with real bullets. And while it seems romantic to throw a Molotov cocktail at a police car (but in reality, could be deadly), these same protesters realize that if they tried that shit down at South Central, they'd be dead on the street in a matter of seconds.

That's why I say these Antifarts and whatnot are the ultimate cowards. They really don't want to go after the real demons in our society, because they don't have the courage to do so.  The police are a safe target - you can jump on a police car or even set it on fire, and the worst that can happen to you is - if you are caught - they arrest you.

The real villains in our society just shoot you dead.  Nobody protests them, because of that.

POSTSCRIPT:  The article linked above reports:

A woman reportedly became so upset about the delay that she said she was going to have "her man" come to the restaurant, so an employee refunded her $40 and asked her to leave.

How the fuck do you spend $40 at Burger King????  That is something else we need to change in our society - people using fast-food restaurants as their kitchens!

False Narratives

Do leafblower "Dads" actually exist?  Who are the Moms in the "Wall of Moms"?  Or are these just catchy click-bait names?

I wrote before about high-index words, a term Heinlein used in If This Goes On.  The word "Mom" resonates with people, for obvious reasons.  Even if your Mother was a drunken alcoholic who attacked you with the cutlery, you still have a reaction to that word.   After all, you suckled at her teat, quite literally.

Advertisers know that "Mom" will get to you.  So an internet ad blares, "Obama wants Moms to go back to school!" - although I doubt the former President would discriminate in such a manner.    Products are described as being "invented by a Mom!" or "Invented by a Teacher!" because, as I noted before, we know all-too-well how Dad's inventions end up working out.  Oh, Dad!

Yes, Dad is also a high-index word.  And even if your Dad beat the tar out of you, you have this Norman Rockwell image of a Dad helping you out with your Boy Scout Merit Badge projects, or telling "Dad Jokes" and just being this all-around nice guy, if not a little clueless - even if none of that ever happened.

So naturally, I was a bit suspicious when the media (yes, the media, not the protesters) started touting a "Wall of Moms" were protecting their precious babies who were protesting.   The image was one of 40-something mini-van or mini-ute driving, "mom-jeans" wearing, pre-menopausal women, locking arms to protect their brood.

A "Wall of Moms" or just a group of protesters who are female?   These aren't the protester's Moms, these are just the protesters.  Wow, one black guy - at a BLM protest!

But a funny thing, in addition to being all-white, these "Moms" were awfully young.  Of course, it is possible to be a "Mom" as early as age 13, but I am not sure that was the image they were trying to project.  The "Wall of Moms" meme was designed to project the image that these protesters are just ordinary middle-class kids, protesting for their rights, and their cause is so just that their parents came out to help.   But this doesn't appear to be the case, and if you're going to lie to me, what does that say about your protest movement?

I mean, you get out the ladies from the Bridge Club and maybe I'll believe you.  But of course, they are all voting Republican, because they want you in jail and the streets cleared and their city back to normal.  This is how Democrats lose elections.

The "leaf-blower Dad" meme isn't  much better.  Again, we are being baited with these high-index words, to make it sound like good old middle-class Dad took a weekend off from obsessing about his lawn ("Hey you kids!  Get off my lawn!") to help out his children with their protest, whose cause is so just that a middle-class working guy would get involved with throwing Molotov cocktails.

But again, we have been baited and lied to.  And again, you can be a "Dad" as early as age 13 or thereabouts.  I know one wayward youth who knocked up his girlfriend at age 17 and said, "I'm going to be a Father!" - not realizing that Fatherhood has a lot more to it than implanting your seed.   The jury will be out on that for two decades, at least.   Likely, teenage Dad won't make much of a Father.

Leafblower "Dad" is just another protester with a leafblower.   This guy's "Dad" is at home wondering why the hell his kid is wasting his life.

Again, we are being lied to that somehow, middle-class, middle-income, working people are coming out in support of their children, and what's more, this is a good thing because these kids are protesting for a just cause.

Or just because.

Because in addition to the lie about "Moms" and "Dads" helping their kids out with a protest, the other thing they gloss over - lie about - is that this is a "Black Lives Matter" protest, and not just some all-white  Antifarts and Buggery Boys going at it in the streets, discrediting the BLM movement.  We are already aware that "Black Umbrella Man" is a white supremacist and a Hell's Angel who set fires and painted graffiti in Minneapolis with the explicit intent of discrediting the BLM movement and starting a race war.

So... Antifarts to the rescue?  I think not.    The best thing white people can do is go home.   If they did this, the demonstrations would be truly "peaceful" and it would be far easier to spot the white troublemakers in the crowd.

But like so much else, white people have to take away from blacks.  Those silly blacks don't know how to protest!  We white folks need to "organize" by jumping on the hood of a Police car and then declaring the Police to be "aggressors"!   We're helping out the blacks because, well, you know, they aren't as smart as we are!

You see how racist and narcissistic this is.   ANTIFARTS GO HOME!   Stop trying to steal the light from the BLM!

We understand why the Buggery Boys (White Supremacists) are at it - to discredit the BLM movement.  But you Antifarts?  You claim to be "helping" but all you are doing is helping yourself and having a good time.

Of course, the question remains why the media is complicit in this - telling a narrative of "Moms" and "Dads" helping out their children with rioting.   And the answer isn't, "The liberal media, man!" but rather it sells clicks and the media today is all about selling eyeballs to advertisers.  Maybe the "Wall of Moms" was something the protesters concocted and the media went along with it, as it had a good selling angle.  But "leafblower Dad" appears to be created from whole cloth by the media itself.  It makes a nice bookend to "Wall of Moms" don't it?

Law and Order will win out in the end.   This endless orgy of violence and camping out might seem like fun, but like all protests before it, it will peter out, and nothing will get done, either, thanks to these misguided white kids who thought they should be leading a protest for Black Lives.

Such a shame, too.  It seemed like this time, it would be different.  Count on whitey to fuck up a wet dream.

A New Age of Elightenment? Or A New Dark Ages?

We could be on the brink of a new age of enlightenment, or the edge of an abyss of despair.  Could go either way.  History suggests we shouldn't be too optimistic.

For some reason - perhaps catastrophe theory - our civilization advances in fits and starts.   Mankind advances, in terms of technology, governance, intellect, and freedom - and then retreats back to a level of superstition, distrust, warfare, servitude and primitivism for an even longer period of time.

Perhaps this is part of the cycle of man - ages of enlightenment are eras where crops are plentiful and commerce is strong.   People then over-populate, there is a drought for several years, and suddenly these great institutions of civilization come crashing down.   Population pressures and competition for resources replace bold ideas about egalitarianism.

Perhaps civilization and liberalization are something that can only be digested on a full stomach.  The veneer of civilization is awfully thin.   We like to think of ourselves in the West as being culturally and intellectually sophisticated.  But once your life is reduced to a daily struggle for calories, your brain will revert to lizard mode.   Things there were once unthinkable become everyday events.

Civilization is a luxury that only the well-fed and well-off can afford.

Perhaps the best example of this cycle is the dark ages that followed the decline of the Roman Empire.   The Roman Empire was one of those pinnacles of civilization, although barbaric by today's standards - legalized slavery, conquest of nations, and barbaric gladiatorial games where people fought to the death for the amusement of citizens.  Nevertheless, by historical standards, the Roman empire represented one of these peaks of civilization, spreading written language, culture, trade, and law throughout what was the known world at the time.

But perhaps it was destined to fail.  Any civilization based on conquest is, by definition, going to produce an awful lot of discontented people who will eventually revolt when the time is ripe or opportunities exist. When people have nothing to lose and nothing invested in their own civilization, they will let it collapse from within.   That is something every 1%'er should realize while admiring the view from their $100M apartment on Fifth avenue.   Those little dots down there protesting may eventually figure out how to use the elevator.

But I digress.

In modern times, we saw this with Weimar Germany.  For a brief period after World War I, democracy flourished in Germany, and liberal values took hold.   It was the jazz age, and people felt liberated. Gay rights groups, for example, flourished, and there was a new level of acceptance.   Communists felt that revolution could take place (and sadly, it would) and the "workers" would control the "means of production".

The economy, however, was in ruins, and the stock market crash of 1929 certainly didn't help any.  Oddly enough, the Nazis took power during a period of mild economic revival, mostly by convincing people that things were worse than they really were and using the staged street-fighting between Communists and Fascists as an excuse for "Law and Order."   Stop me if this sounds familiar.

"Make it stop!" people seemed to say, much as those in Kabul did, when the Taliban took over and put an end to the incessant fighting between warlords, that had destroyed the city.  The greatest pleasure in life is the release from pain, and people will be grateful to you if you can remove pain from their lives.  The torturers in the basement of the KGB building knew this - they still know it today, under a new name, of course.

So Herr Hitler comes along and says he will fix things up in a jiffy and put those nasty Communists in jail, so there will be law and order again on the streets, and people go along with this - at first.  Well, some are die-hard true believers, even to this day.

Liberalization can only be digested on a full stomach.  And maybe that is why in the West, liberal values have taken hold.  Even if you are a "conservative" in America, your values are considered "liberal" by world standards, which is why the Republican Party once had a "Liberal" wing - one that believed that businessmen, using scientific management principles, could make government strong and efficient.  This was before the modern era where the GOP declared government to be the enemy - something that should be destroyed or at least "drowned in bathtub".

America, in the last half-century, has seen a move towards liberalism that has not been seen in the history of mankind.   Today, we are more concerned than ever, with issues like equality and liberation.   Women have rights, in theory, nearly equal to that of men - something revolutionary in a world where, until very recently, women were considered property or a mere nuisance - and are still considered such in much of the world today.   Odd thing, when you think about it, when they are responsible for the continuation of the species.   Men, if anything, are the disposable commodity - as many Lesbians will be quick to tell you.

And speaking of Lesbians, gay rights have reached a pinnacle in recent years.  Things I never thought would happen in my lifetime - or even a Century beyond that - are accepted as new norms - gay marriage, gays having children, gay rights.   Things like "transgender" rights are an issue today - we are seeking out smaller and smaller groups of sexual minorities to cherish and enshrine, it seems.  The big "thought crime" you hear about today is to call someone by the wrong pronoun, which apparently should be dealt with by dealing out the death sentence.   I just don't get that - if someone looks androgynous, how can you be blamed for guessing their gender wrongly?   Maybe we all need to wear name tags with our gender pronouns on them to avoid confusion.  Maybe not.  Maybe people need to stop being so hyper-sensitive about "micro-aggressions" and worry about the real aggression in the world.

It seems we have woken up from a long dream, with regard to a lot of these issues, though.  The Black Lives Matter protests - by black people, originally, not the co-opted white version today that is being put on by narcissistic young people who think that the protest is about them - brought to the fore the basic issue that although we have made a lot of progress since 1865, black people remain stubbornly locked into the lower classes, in terms of economic advancement and treatment by society.  And a lot of people are asking, "Gee, why is this?   And why hasn't anyone really done anything about it?"

Like I said, we could be on the brink of a new age of understanding and enlightenment.   Or on the edge of the abyss.

Perhaps one reason the Wiemar Republic collapsed was that they were viewed as weak and indecisive, more concerned about the needs of special interest groups than society as a whole - at a time when the whole society was suffering.   In such times, people look to strong leaders to "get things done" - which was a movement at the time, worldwide.  In an era of Kings and Queens, Dictators just seemed like an alternative form of government.   Studebaker even named a car the "Dictator" as they already had a "President".    Only later would they recoil in horror at that marketing decision.

Today we are facing real crises in the economy - which was due for recession before the virus took hold.   The virus is only to going to take a mild recession and make it much worse.  And bear in mind that in many instances in history, these dark ages or ages of retraction were often accompanied by plagues and epidemics.   They might not have been the sole cause of such dark eras, but could have been the one thing that pushed civilization over a tipping point.

Revolutions often collapse because of their own silliness - silliness that can become deadly.   Mao's "cultural revolution" nearly destroyed China and was almost a parody of itself - a tragic parody.   Today, we are seeing just causes hijacked by wealthy young white people whose only agenda is silliness - fighting the police and each other, out of little more than mere boredom.    The rights of sexual minorities to just be left the hell alone has been hijacked by some attention-seekers who do not want to be left alone but want to be celebrated and force others to accept them.   This will backfire in a big way.

Like I said in an earlier posting, if you want a good conspiracy theory that's it.   The BLM movement seemed to have a lot of inertia and backers from both parties.   Real change seemed just on the horizon.   Then white people got involved, drove the whole bus off a cliff and here we are today, with Americans clamoring for "law and order" and the rights of blacks set back, yet again.  Every time it seems blacks are to advance, rioting breaks out and they are once again pushed back into their ghettos, which are now smoldering ruins.   If that isn't a conspiracy theory, I don't know what is.  And shame on these white kids for taking over a cause that is not theirs to lead.

Dawn of a new age?   Or over the precipice?   If history is any guide, I suggest the latter will be more likely - and this is something that has worried me for more than a decade now, as I have mentioned in previous postings.  When things go my way too much, I get nervous, as life just isn't a string of stoplights turning green as you approach them.   Whenever there is social advance on one front, there is a corresponding push-back.   And when one "side" advances far, it is like a rubber-band stretching out, further and further.

Eventually it snaps back - with a vengeance.

We saw this in Germany, in less than a decade or two.   For a few short years, liberalism ruled in Germany and it seemed they were on the brink of a new age of enlightenment and Democracy.   Then the concentration camps sprang up.   Then the gas chambers.   Then the ovens.   Shit can get really, really bad, in a real hurry in this world.   And in fairly recent times, too.   Look what happened in Cambodia, for example.   An entire country torn apart and millions killed - and it ain't over yet.

The stakes are very real - civilization itself is at stake.    And yet, we are told the pressing issue of the day is whether Bradly Manning, a traitor to his country, is called by the right pronoun.

This will not end well.