Sunday, February 12, 2017

I'm so tired...

... and this presidential term has only just begun.

I was alive and politically aware during the post 9/11 W. Bush administration, and back then, I saw my fair share of leftwing nonsense. I vividly remember, for example, a young lady shrieking hysterically at me on a Boston street because I had the audacity to question the motives of an ANSWER-driven protest against the war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, mind you. Not the legitimately controversial war in Iraq. Believe me, Bush Derangement Syndrome was a real phenomenon and a toxic one. All the same, it doesn't hold a candle to what is happening now.

As I announced on a private post on Facebook recently, I'm officially over the schadenfreude. What was funny for the first couple weeks is now an aggravation. Some folks just need to shut up for a second and calm the hell down before someone gets killed.

So you don't like Trump. I get it. I didn't vote for him either. But you need to stop lying about what he's doing. That executive order on immigration, for example? That wasn't a "Muslim ban." Millions of Muslims were still classed as eligible to travel to the US, and my Muslim students - of which I have a fair number - were left completely unmolested. Trump's order was, in fact, a narrowly targeted - and time-limited - halt on migration from countries that are destabilized and consequently unable to vet their citizens.

And yes, we as Americans have the same fundamental right as the inhabitants of any other sovereign nation: the right to control whom we welcome to our shores. As much as I would like to embrace everybody, we must be prudent in the use of our resources or else end up helping no one.

You're asking us to deny the evidence of our supposedly lying eyes, but we can't do that. We know what has happened in Germany since Angela Merkel threw open her country's doors to all comers, and we know it's been a disaster. We know the Boston Marathon bombers were migrants, as were the perpetrators of other terrorist attacks on our soil. You can debate the effectiveness of Trump's order or criticize its implementation, but if you're in contact with reality at all, you KNOW safeguards are needed to protect the people - Muslim immigrants included - who are already here.

Another thing you need to stop doing? Objectifying yourselves. Here, I'm thinking of the ladies of the self-proclaimed Women's March in particular. I honestly don't know what you expected to accomplish by being intentionally vulgar, but I do know that I resent - deeply - your attempts to boil down a woman's interests to the state of her private parts. It's damnably difficult to vote with my vag; that's why I - along with most women of my acquaintance - vote with my mind.

But more than anything else, you need to stop forcing yourselves on your neighbors. The absolute worst way to get people to listen to your concerns is to scream at them and/or attempt to browbeat them into submission. And yet, you keep doubling down, hijacking every pursuit, no matter how apolitical, for the sake of your own ideological ends. Car forums? Local gardening clubs? Cooking groups on Facebook? These are not the places to air your fears about Trump. I'm sorry, but you need to have some sense of propriety.

At this point, I feel a bit like a broken record, so I think I'll stop here. Let me end, though, with a tidbit of adult wisdom: You can't control what other people think of you, nor can you coerce people into accepting you. The love and affirmation you evidently crave cannot be won via the muzzle of a gun. Forget this, and you get leaders like Trump - living, breathing rebellions against cultural totalitarianism. Why? Because people don't take kindly to being bullied into silence.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar -- or with self-serving attempts to justify your own political violence. Punching Nazis? There's no way in hell I'm granting you that power -- especially since you do a shit job at identifying who the real Nazis actually are.

13 comments:

  1. Yayyyyyy! well said, your lips to God's ear.

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  2. -- But more than anything else, you need to stop forcing yourselves on your neighbors. --

    They will not stop, for an obvious reason: It's their final tactic before going to guns.

    Consider: Electoral politics has failed them. The media have failed them. The entertainment industry has failed them. The Deep State is failing them. Street demonstrations have failed them. Slander and unfounded accusations have failed them. The forces that defeated them in November have resisted all those thrusts. What's left is invasive hectoring...and violence.

    I'll be writing more about this later.

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    1. Reluctant as I am to link rough language on a civilized blog, Mr. Porretto, if folks on our side haven't read this and pondered it, they need to.

      https://mountainguerrilla.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/skull-stomping-sacred-cows-reality-isnt-nice-its-a-2x4-to-the-teeth/

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    2. Saw that. Scary.

      There's also a response to it; no less bloody in outcome, probably, but a different view:
      http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2017/02/natzsofast.html

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    3. And something else from Mr. MacYoung:
      http://macyoungsmusings.blogspot.com/2016/08/why-civilian-unrest-scares-me.html

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    4. In the aftermath of the Iraq war, when the first terrorist bomb went off, killing Iraqis instead of being aimed at Americans, I had a flash of insight. My insight said 'THIS changes everything'. Indeed, everything did change. Iraqis gave their support to the US against the terrorists in their midst.

      If/when the left resorts to deadly methods to get their desired results they will see the same reaction from within their own ranks. When they expose themselves not as the opposition but as the enemy, they'll be left with a losing position in a lost war.

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  3. It is not enough to just let them have their way on many things. You will be forced to care.

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  4. Moderate and right of center traditional Americans, now known as deplorables, are slow to anger. But once angered, the crap will hit the fan and it will be hard to shutdown. The Left will wish they hadn't provoked those traditional minded citizens. Most deplorables are self sufficient type people whereas the Left needs the services the deplorabls know how to perform.
    Some on the Right are calling for Civil War II and if the Left expands its anarchist/violent activities, it just may, God forbid, occur. Syria is an example of why we should avoid CWII at all costs, except for the need to resist giving up our Constitutional rights.

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  5. "The absolute worst way to get people to listen to your concerns is to scream at them and/or attempt to browbeat them into submission."

    I believe you are making the mistake of judging the motives for their actions based upon your own values and motives. I don't know you, but I strongly suspect you aren't a Nazi, and if not then no amount of telling you that you are will change your self opinion. While many on the left, and certainly those financing and championing their actions, may believe you are a Nazi (or at least a Nazi to be), I strongly suspect that they also know they won't change your mind. These actions have little to do with with convincing anyone, but are entirely focused on three things.

    The goal of the leftists is not to change your mind, but to control your behavior. For years they have controlled a lot of people's behavior through shaming them when they said the "wrong" things and praising them when they said the "right" things. For example, if you raised the point that same-sex and opposite-sex marriage isn't the same because one of those is inherently biologically incapable of producing the next generation, you were branded as hateful. With the election of Trump, however, they are beginning to see that this tactic of "change" has diminishing returns, so they are, instead, resorting to naked violent intimidation. Behave how they want you to, or you will suffer. The inconvenience of blocked roads, the nascent threat of property destruction, or maybe even actual physical violence against your body, you will be made to comply, and they are demonstrating their ability to follow through on the threats.

    The demonstrations also act as a rally point, an visible focus that allows others of similar mind to join. They dress themselves in the mantle of their ideological heroes, creating the fantasy of a great and noble struggle with themselves as the protagonist. Meryl Streep's patently ridiculous comment about standing up to the brownshirts is really how almost everyone in the "resistance" sees themselves.

    The third motive, however, is most concerning for me. I am becoming increasingly worried that there is a significantly sizable number of people who are so emotionally and personally invested in Trump being the new Hitler and his supporters being the new Nazis, that there is nothing that will happen (or, more like not happen) to make them admit to themselves and everyone else that they were wrong. In many of these demonstrations, I see the slow, tenuous, escalation and urging of each other to act. After all, if one is really truly convinced they are standing up to Hitler, the Nazis, and the destruction of America, then it would be morally wrong not to act against them, right? Like the mass of penguins approaching the edge of the ice floe, slowing getting closer and closer, pushing each other, until, finally, the front of the mass falls in the water, only to be followed soon after by the hundreds diving in with purpose. This is what I want to not see, but no one in a leadership position with the left is doing anything to stop it. In fact, in many cases they seem to be the penguins at the back pushing the hardest.

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  6. I agree 100%. It's going to be a long four years.

    I just had a long argument with a group of friends who are anti-Trump over his press secretary. Yes. That's the important thing: his press secretary and his political advisers. I countered with the long list of accomplishments and positive moves in just the first three weeks. It's very tiresome.

    I didn't vote for him, and I don't want to have to defend him, but it is necessary for someone to stand up and point out that the man is actually doing what he said he'd do. And the best you have to offer in reply is an SNL skit.

    (sigh) It's going to be a long four years.

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  7. Stephanie S.:
    "Not the legitimately controversial war in Iraq."

    The Iraq intervention is not "legitimately controversial".

    The US case vs Saddam is in fact substantiated. In the operative context of the Gulf War ceasefire enforcement, President Bush's decision for Operation Iraqi Freedom was substantively correct on the facts, procedurally correct on law and precedent, and justified on policy. Whereas the illegitimate controversy is based on a brazenly revisionist anti-OIF narrative.

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  8. "Some folks just need to shut up for a second and calm the hell down before someone gets killed."

    Someone getting killed is the whole point. They're just building up to it. It's not like Leftists the world over haven't used this approach before.

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