The liberal perspective on US decline

 This is a long and thoughtful article on the decline of the USA from the perspective of a good liberal Democrat. It’s worth reading, if only to see how completely the author manages to miss the point while rather comprehensively, for the most part, describing the Four Americas as he sees them.

Just America’s origins in theory, its intolerant dogma, and its coercive tactics remind me of 1930s left-wing ideology. Liberalism as white supremacy recalls the Communist Party’s attack on social democracy as “social fascism.” Just American aesthetics are the new socialist realism.

The dead end of Just America is a tragedy. This country has had great movements for justice in the past and badly needs one now. But in order to work, it has to throw its arms out wide. It has to tell a story in which most of us can see ourselves, and start on a path that most of us want to follow.

All four of the narratives I’ve described emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever more extreme version of itself.

All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them.

It’s common these days to hear people talk about sick America, dying America, the end of America. The same kinds of things were said in 1861, in 1893, in 1933, and in 1968. The sickness, the death, is always a moral condition. Maybe this comes from our Puritan heritage. If we are dying, it can’t be from natural causes. It must be a prolonged act of suicide, which is a form of murder.

I don’t think we are dying. We have no choice but to live together—we’re quarantined as fellow citizens. Knowing who we are lets us see what kinds of change are possible. Countries are not social-science experiments. They have organic qualities, some positive, some destructive, that can’t be wished away. Our passion for equality, the individualism it produces, the hustle for money, the love of novelty, the attachment to democracy, the distrust of authority and intellect—these won’t disappear. A way forward that tries to evade or crush them on the road to some free, smart, real, or just utopia will never arrive and instead will run into a strong reaction. But a way forward that tries to make us Equal Americans, all with the same rights and opportunities—the only basis for shared citizenship and self-government—is a road that connects our past and our future.

It’s fascinating how concepts such as “immigration” and “offshoring” and “real wages” and “1965 Naturalization Act” and “surveillance society” don’t even enter into the thought processes of the liberal attempting to understand the current situation. And it’s informative to see that despite this, even the self-styled Smart American can see that the situation is untenable.

It’s impossible to resolve the situation through dialogue because all of the assumptions upon which the dialogue is based are fake. The Smart Americans are not that Smart and their beloved credentials are fraudulent. The Free Americans are not Free. Many of the Real Americans are not actually Americans, and the Just Americans are neither just nor are most of them even actual Americans.

Rhetorical contortions

Boomers are so desperate to avoid being held accountable for their actions that some of them are actually trying to “warn” Generation X about “establishing a norm” that they themselves established before Generation X was even born.

Gen X will not be called boomers, but following generations will continue vilifying the older generation for the worlds imperfections as you are establishing a norm. its like the SJW crowd, they never think the mob will come for them.

And at heart, that’s what you anti boomers are. Social justice warriors.

Hosea 8:7 For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind

Talk about projection. This is why it is impossible to have any respect or sympathy for Boomers. This is why they will always be contemptible. They are unrepentant to the end, like children desperate to avoid being held responsible for the actions that everyone knows they committed, always attempting to blame others for their own choices.

Now, what generation was it that coined popularized the phrase “never trust anyone over 30”, Boomer? Was it the Millennials? Was it the Silents? Was it Generation X?

No, it was the Boomers. (Yes, the guy who actually coined the phrase in 1964 was born in 1940, but it was the Boomers who made a motto of it. In like manner, John Lennon wasn’t a Boomer either, but The Beatles are Boomer music nonetheless.)

And what is the Third Law of SJW? SJWs always project.

What the Boomer is doing here is projecting the social justice tendencies of his own generation onto Generation X, while simultaneously trying to blame Generation X for establishing a norm that was already established by the Boomers. That level of rhetorical contortion is impressively twisted, but because rhetoric requires at least some element of truth to be effective, it is completely toothless.

In any event, it’s not a mob coming for you, Boomer. It’s a pillow, which is a fate far more gentle than your generation collectively deserves.

4/5 Pillows.

Ask not for whom the pillow fluffs,

Boomer, it fluffs for thee.

Monday AM Arktoons

BIG BEAR’S BIG COMIC Episode 8: In Da Forest 

COSMIC WARRIOR Episode 8: The Battle for Phobos

You can also participate in ARK Madness, which is a survey competition to determine which Arktoons series should be the next to spawn a spin-off series. In the first round, ALT-HERO is matched up against AVALON, while SHADE goes up against the new SILENZIOSA, just to name two of the eight matchups.

A reasonable request

The Smartest Man in the World has a simple request for President Trump:

I’m sorry, but I’ve gotta say it.

Dear President Trump: With all due respect, stop claiming credit for poisoning the human race. You’re smarter than that.

Forget what Gates told you, what Fauci told you, what that fashionably complexioned little cipher from the WHO told you. In fact, even if Javanka told you to fiercely claim credit for this fiasco, have them escorted from the room by Secret Service agents. (Yes, family is important, but we’re talking about the survival of humanity here.)

I vouched for your IQ the first time you ran; I said that you intellectually outclassed the typical Harvard professor. Granted, the typical Harvard professor is a drooling libtard who also believes in getting “vaccinated” with Covid/HIV spike proteins, but you need to outclass them, and claiming credit for the whole fiasco hardly does the trick.

Please reconsider your self-portrayal as “Mr. Operation Warp Speed”. By doing away with long-term safety tests for these genetic toxins, the government has horribly endangered the health and welfare of every man, woman, and child in America. Thank you for your service, and thanks for your attention.

Sincerely, Chris Langan

He’s not wrong. President Trump is still the greatest US President since Andrew Jackson, no question, but of all his failures, it’s probably his endorsement and encouragement of the not-vaxx that is going to be the most lasting stain on his record, regardless of what eventually comes out about the current political situation and the election fraud.

And I only say “probably” because a) we don’t know exactly how bad it is going to be in the long term and b) we don’t know what else is going to come out. As bad as his failure to rein in Big Tech was, Operation Warp Speed was observably worse. 

The correct word

A spade should always be called a spade. And those who engage in foolish behavior and make foolish choices are accurately described as fools. There is absolutely no excuse for getting not-vaxxed; the information is available and anyone who believes a single word of the mainstream media hasn’t been paying attention since William Randolph Hearst was lying about the Spanish sinking the USS Maine:

She is being called a sheep. She did her research, she watched other people get the shot and they were fine (aren’t we all different) and so on. She did it to “help the community”. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Those mocking her may want to go easy. I don’t think any of us are going to get out of this.

There is tremendous social and media pressure on people to have their messenger RNA modified with experimental substances. So, the way to alleviate that pressure is to counteract it with effective rhetoric, which will involve coming down hard on every single individual who gives into the pressure, and making poster boys and girls of those who experience the adverse effects.

Those who can still be saved from the not-vaxxes should be the primary concern, not those who have already been victimized by them as a result of their tragic credulity. Defending the behavior of the sheep is only going to result in more sheep, and more victims.

“But what were we to do?”

The plaintive cry of the Boomers seeking to excuse the wickedness of their g-g-generations:

What was a boomer who saw the evil to do to make change? Y’all happily — and humorously even though you mean it — acclaim the DotP — but what would you have had us do? Vote? Write articles or letters? Shoot doctors? March in the streets?

We would have had you simply behave like every other generation before you instead of rejecting their values and traditions. We would have had you practice stewardship of the nation rather than strip-mining it.

  • Stay married.  48.9 percent of Boomers who ever married had been through at least one divorce by 2014. That number is almost certainly over 50 percent by now.
  • Bear children rather than murdering them. As many as 30.4 percent of Boomer pregnancies ended in abortion. Now that Boomers can’t get pregnant anymore, the abortion rate is lower than it was when it was first legalized in 1973.
  • Pass your houses and second houses on to your children instead of selling them to foreigners and corporations.
  • For middle-class and upper middle-class women, raise your children instead of working. As the wealthiest generation in human history, Boomer mothers had less need to work than any women in all of human history. And yet, female participation in the workforce doubled.
  • Call that which is good, good, and that which is evil, evil.
  • Pass on your knowledge and your skills rather than hide them from your children.
  • Advise the younger generations to avoid the wide and easy path you walked.
All the Boomers had to do was not change anything and things would have been massively better today. American society would have continued to progress on its upward curve and yet another generation would have been better off than its predecessors. Instead, Boomers chose to “change the world”, to embrace the lies, to sell the farm and eat the seed corn. They will leave behind them a broken, bankrupt, declining, demoralized, and occupied nation.
Even now, Boomers could sell the condo, give the house to the kids, get rid of the boat, the jetski, and the Thunderbird, and utilize their resources to help their children and grandchildren get out of debt and into home ownership. They could stop robbing the younger generations by accepting Social Security and Medicare subsidies in excess of their own contributions. And I have no doubt that a few of them have already done some of those things or are doing them.
But you know, and we know, that most Boomers will refuse to do even what little they can still do after a lifetime of relentless self-absorption.

The poison dwarf comes out

I think everyone who paid any attention at all to British politics knew John Bercow was always Labour at heart:

Mr Bercow – who was a Tory before becoming Commons chair in 2009 – caused fury on the Conservative benches for what they saw as bias in the handling of Brexit wrangling. He finally quit the supposedly impartial post in November 2019, but has now announced that he is a Labour member….

A senior Government source said: ‘This will surprise nobody and shows Labour is still the party of Remain.’ 

The move to Labour completes an extraordinary political journey for Mr Bercow, originally elected as a Tory MP, from self-confessed ‘hard-Right’ politics in his youth to Labour member. It also marks a sharp break with the tradition that Commons Speakers, who give up party political affiliations on taking that post, stay impartial by retiring to the Lords as crossbench peers. 

Mr Bercow told the Trevor Phillips programme on Sky News: ‘It’s not personal against Boris Johnson. I do think that he is someone who has only a nodding acquaintance with the truth in a leap year, and I think that the utter contempt with which he has treated Parliament is lamentable, and I think it has exacerbated the very strong feelings of resentment towards him, because I think a lot of people feel that’s not the way to behave…. ‘Now I’m a private citizen, as Robert Buckland says, I’m entitled to take a political view. And my view is a left of centre view. I identify with Labour values, Labour principles, Labour policies.’

It will surprise precisely no one to learn that John Berkowitz is about as British as Benjamin Netanyahu and Bill Kristol. Remember, identity reliably trumps ideology, and this guy was working as a professional infiltrator from the age of 18. Note his first assignment:  “As a young activist, Bercow was a member of the right-wing Conservative Monday Club. He stood as a candidate for the club’s national executive in 1981 with a manifesto calling for a programme of “assisted repatriation” of immigrants, and became secretary of its immigration and repatriation committee. However, at the age of 20 he left the club, citing the views of many of the club’s members as his reason.”

It is astonishing, is it not, to observe how many young would-be leaders of the right are actually left-wing foreigners in disguise.

Wicked to the end

This comment should prove educational for those who believe the younger generations are being too hard on the Boomers.

Early Boomer here, Thank You, Knowing that I have in some way Triggered whatever it is you are makes me feel that the pain and suffering I have left in my wake justifies the entire adventure.

They’ve earned their legacy. They fully merit history’s condemnation.

2/5 Pillows.

Speaking of Boomer wickedness, when abortion was legalized in 1973, the percentage of abortions to total pregnancies was 19.3. That percentage rose rapidly and peaked at 30.4 in 1982, the year that the last of the Boomers turned 18. That number gradually declined as Boomer women aged to menopause, and now that the Boomers can no longer get pregnant, the abortion percentage is lower than when it was first legalized, at 18.3 per 100 pregnancies.

That’s still 18.3 percent too high, of course, but it offers clear statistical evidence that the Boomers, as a generation, were considerably more wicked than their successors. Of course, not murdering one-third of your children is not a particularly high bar to clear.

Everyone knows that Boomers divorce at spectacularly high rates, but interestingly enough, Boomers also appear to commit suicide at a higher rate than Generation X, which is not at all what I would have expected given that our generational sins tend toward apathy, anger, and despair.

CDC officials emphasized that the Baby Boomer generation is witnessing the highest increase in suicides (A Baby Boomer is a person who was born post-World War II, between the years 1946 and 1964, when the annual birthrate increased dramatically in the US). “It is the Baby Boomer group where we see the highest rates of suicide,” CDC deputy director, Dr. Ileana Arias, told the New York Times. “There may be something about that group, and how they think about life issues and their life choices that may make a difference.”

And that was eight years ago. Since then, the suicide rate among the 55+ crowd has risen by two percent. Apparently pride and materialism are an even more lethal combination than despair.