And Yet Again

As I’ve said in the past, here and here, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet was a conundrum.  Others, it seems, are even more positive than I am:

Almost nobody is more reviled by the international intelligentsia and media than the late Augusto Pinochet, the late 20th -century Chilean dictator. He holds a prominent position in the political left’s “rogues’ gallery” comprised of those who stood in opposition to their goals.
His supposed “crimes” included conducting a military coup to illegitimately grab control of the Chilean government from a popularly elected president, rounding up and torturing huge numbers of innocent citizens (killing as many as 80,000 in the process) and corruptly stealing vast sums of money while ruling as a dictator.
But many of those claims are either false or exaggerated — most credible estimates of those killed are below 5,000 — or they must be viewed in context. More important, if we raise the examination of Pinochet from the bitter soil of leftist ressentiment to the question of human flourishing, he appears as one of recent history’s shining lights.

Read the whole thing — and my earlier posts on the topic too, if you haven’t seen them before.

I will never forget two things about my visit to Chile:  the sight of old women placing flowers on the sidewalk outside Pinochet’s modest private home (now a museum) in Valparaiso, and at a formal dinner one night, one of the toasts was:  “To General Augusto Pinochet, savior of Chile.”

It was delivered without irony, well received and supported by all the guests, and even more telling, it was said in English — no doubt for our benefit, and to make a point.

Interesting stuff.

Technically Speaking

 

The Whore Of The Bronx may have a point, for once:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Tuesday declared that “sex work is work”

We need to examine her statement a little.  Let’s postulate that “work” is something you do that you’d rather not do with strangers, for money.

Which sounds like every job I’ve ever had in my entire life.

Familiar Road

We’ve seen all this before, yea even upon this very website.  From Insty’s link comes this silliness:

Leaving aside the self-contradiction — if Socialists are all about wealth redistribution, they should have no problem with richer states supporting the poorer states, yes? — any partition of North America is more likely to look like this:

And I’ve taken the liberty of renaming the respective nation-states;  denizens of the PSSA will be called “Pissahs” (New England pronunciation) while the Constitutional Republic’s citizens will be known as “Crappies” (after the fish).

I jest, but only a little.  Some comments:

Note that in my map — which is a lot more realistic than the first one — Pennsylvania, Illinois and indeed California / Oregon / Washington will likely divide themselves up, leaving Philadelphia, Chicago and the West Coast respectively to remain the bastions of socialism they’ve become (Austin remains a blueberry in the Texan bowl of tomato soup, and Denver / Boulder would retain their joint title of “Rocky Mountain LA”).  Northern Virginia, like Chicago, can be excised from the rest of its mostly-conservative state.

As for New Mexico:  several people have told me that the “Africa of America” (cf. Doc Russia) is really more conservative than presidential elections would suggest.  I disagree.  Too much of the state is either sucking on the government’s tit (Indians) or wants to (i.e. most of its Mexican immigrants), or else they don’t give a fuck because they’re always high on peyote, so into the PSSA they go.

Finally:  I am assured by almost all my Canucki Readers that non-Vancouver B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and that other prairie state (Manitoba?) would really prefer to be part of the Constitutional Republic as drawn.  As our Socialists / Greens hate oil so much, this would relieve them of the oil sands and fracking fields contained in those erstwhile provinces, not to mention all those icky gun-loving knickledraggers who are more like Middle Americans (whom the Left likewise despise).  Me, I say “Welcome aboard!”  I would most certainly not extend that welcome to people from Ontario (unless they split themselves away from Toronto), and as for the Frog Quebeckers, fuck ’em and their strange un-American language.  I don’t care aboot the hundred or so people who live in Nova Scotia;  they can decide for themselves.

Feel free to disagree with my hypothesis in Comments.

More Diversity Fruits

Then there’s this asshole:

Tunisian Migrant Charged in Connection to French Church Terror Attack

Wait for it…

Brahim Aouissaoui, a 21-year-old Tunisian national was shot and seriously injured during the October 29th attack in Nice, France. He has finally been charged after his condition improved enough to be questioned by police.
The French broadcaster RTL reported on Monday that police had found an audio message on the migrant’s phone, in which he described France as the “land of unbelievers”, as well as “photographs relating” to the so-called Islamic State.
Police also found an image on Aouissaoui’s phone of the Chechen Islamist terrorist Abdulzakh Anzorov, who beheaded a French teacher, Samuel Paty — two weeks prior to the terror attack in Nice — after the teacher showed a class on free speech a Charlie Hebdo caricature of the Islamic prophet Muhammed.
During the attack at the Basilica of Notre-Dame in Nice, Aouissaoui reportedly yelled out the jihadist war cry “Allahu Akbar” during and after the attack. Along with three knives, two mobile phones, the Tunisian migrant was also carrying a copy of the Quran.

Getting Real

I found this linked SOTI (can’t remember where, sorry):

And it gets worse:

Now I don’t know who these people are, but they sound seriously unhinged.  I’m trying to see how any rational person could define supporters of a Manhattan businessman (and one-time Democrat) as a “conspiracy-fueled belligerent death cult”.  Taking each word in turn:

What conspiracy?   The only people who have been obsessed with conspiracy have been Leftists — Russia, Ukraine — and this despite the fact that the real conspiracy has been by ex-Obama staffers, the various intelligence services and government bureaucrats against President Donald Trump.  Sheesh, just the Strzok-Page email exchanges alone are proof of that, and there’s so much more that I barely know where to begin.  This does not exist in the imaginations of Trump supporters:   it’s all been exhaustively documented — and despite that, Trump has only fired a few of the more egregious offenders, and prosecuted not a single one, not even the most obvious transgressors like Hillary Clinton (having a private — and illegal — email server while Secretary of State) or John Brennan (leaking classified information).

Belligerent?  Who’s talking about gulags, about the State coming to confiscate guns from private citizens?  And who is rioting in the streets, demanding to “burn it all down” and “destroy America”?  Trump supporters?  I wish we were that belligerent.  Every single act of belligerence — from attempting to assassinate a Republican Congressman at a ballgame, burning and looting, and threatening the lives and livelihoods of people working in the current Administration — has come from the Left.  Who screams invective at restaurant patrons, demanding support for the self-confessed Marxists at Black Lives Matter?  Not Trump supporters, for sure.

And a death cult?  What fevered imagination came up with that one?  Where are the Trumpian suicide squads, the Trump-sponsored bands of thugs roaming the streets and beating up political opponents, the conservatives en masse bellowing “Death to Marxists”?  (Although sometimes I wish we would, if only to drown out these assholes’ endless screams for a minute or two.)

No.  All the above are activities engaged in by the Left.

Ask yourselves this:  are these people to be taken seriously?  I mean, it’s all very well for lone loonies like this David Atkins to call for mass “deprogramming” pogroms (taking a leaf from the Stalinists of the 1950s, who must be nodding their gray heads with satisfaction from that Great Collective In The Sky).  But didn’t a former Cabinet Secretary (the snarling dwarf Robert Reich) first suggest some foolishness like this?  Is this suggestion of Atkins about to become policy, if Biden ever becomes President?

Just the magnitude of such an undertaking is astonishing.  Let’s remember that upwards of seventy million people either voted for Trump, or else were motivated to vote against “whatever it is that you Leftists want to implement”:  open borders, high taxes, gun confiscation, wealth redistribution, “hate speech” (we already have “hate crimes”), civil unrest and all the other foulness that the Left has been supporting and threatening for the past fifty-odd years.

But when a massive segment of the population says in no uncertain terms, “We don’t want that, because such lunacy has caused death, destruction, poverty and misery in every single country it has been implemented”, then we — all 70 million of us — are the ones in need of “reeducation”?

These twerps are getting worked up into a frenzy — anyone who’s ever had to deal with a thwarted child’s growing tantrum recognizes this progression all too well — and this unreasoning hatred towards people who reject their political philosophy is simply setting up a situation for bloodshed.  As much as we conservatives are called “Nazis” by the Left, the plain fact of the matter is that this demonization of political opposition has its roots in the Left:  whether by the Jacobins of Revolutionary France or by Hitler’s own National Socialist Party, we all know from their example that the elimination of political rivals begins with dehumanization and demonization.

My biggest fear, and it is very much a fear, is that the Left have been building themselves up into a febrile frenzy, and at some point, it’s going to burst into mass violence towards us conservatives.

And while we may chuckle and load up our spare magazines, I’m pretty sure that few of us want that mayhem to actually come to pass.

But I think they do, because when fanatics see that they’re losing, they often choose self-sacrifice as an alternative to failure.

And we’re the “death cult”?