Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

Exceptional

Patriotism

Can American exceptionalism be revived?  At City Journal, Alan C. Guelzo gives a cogent reasons why we can, after a look at our history and the three legs of its foundation:  political, economic and diplomatic.

I believe that the American experiment, based on the Declaration and embodied in the Constitution, belongs to an exceptional moment in human history, and remains exceptional. I believe that the U.S. economy is flexible enough to recover its mobility and astonish the world with its capacity to disrupt artificial barriers. And I believe that we can repair the deviations we have sustained from an overconfident mission-mentality without needing to accommodate ourselves to the mores of globalization.

Read it all (it’s long, but very worthwhile).  However, there’s a whole ‘nother essay brewing in his final analysis:

Can this, realistically, be done? Can we disentangle our public life from the grasp of the new hierarchy of bureaucrats and, overseas, pull back from foreign-policy crusades? Can we, in short, recur successfully to our first principles?
Well, we did it once before.  [emphasis added]

And it’s getting to the point, I think, where we may have to do it the same way as the Founders did it.  As the man said:

What We Face

Bad News, Marxists, Two-Minute Hate

As we conservatives gird up to face what would destroy us and our beloved country, consider this article a warning.

Under a prevalent view that has emerged from universities in recent years, a wrong opinion is seen as tantamount to a thrown punch or even an indication of a willingness to genocide—which invites the idea that an offended party who throws a real punch (or worse) is simply acting in self-defense. This idea has become so pervasive and is so taken-for-granted at this point that even workaday journalists now pay homage to this academic conceit in their work.

Who defines what constitutes a “wrong” opinion?  (Hint: it isn’t you.)  Read the whole disgusting thing.

And as a wise man once said:

“Of course, the game the Left has always played is to use violence as a pretext to impose their preferred policies. We’ve had waves of left-wing violence since the Obama administration, all intended to elicit a response. Those responses are used to justify what amounts to political terrorism.”.

Feel free to see what people think, here.

Damn, and I was only at the range a couple days ago, practicing with a sniper rifle.

Well, if you’ll excuse me… that 1911 isn’t going to shoot itself.  Maybe it’s also time for a little AK practice, too.

Go Back

Patriotism

From Liz Sheld at PJM:

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee said on a Sunday snuff show that Trump’s tweets telling The Squad to “go back to where they came from” reminded him of the time he was told to “go back from where he came from.” Cummings made his remarks to George Stephanopoulos, who also revealed that has been told to “go back to where he came from.”  This is a new epidemic, so many Democrats have been told to “go back,” why are we only hearing about it until now?

I have to say that nobody has ever told me  to go back to where I came from, but that may be because I’ve made every effort not  to change the United States nation as I see it, but to preserve  it — original intent of the Founders, traditional American values and traditions, strict Constitutional construction, reverence for the flag and all it stands for, unswerving loyalty to our Armed Forces, respect for law and order, paying taxes, serving on a jury, defending the United States against criticism when traveling overseas (okay, I’m not sure whether a drunken fistfight with a Scot constitutes actual defense, but hey)… and of course, I don’t think I have to prove my undying support for the Second Amendment (along with the nochschleppers  in the Bill of Rights).  Frankly, if someone were to tell me to go back, I’d have nowhere to go.  I’m here, and I’m staying — to the utter dismay, I hope, of liberal assholes and socialists everywhere.

As for these fucking Socialist Congressweasels (we all know who they are), the same cannot be said.

I’m not setting myself up as some paragon of civic virtue, here;  but at the same time, I would suggest that my version of civic virtue is more in line with mainstream America than theirs — and I suspect that there are far more like me than there are of them — even among “traditional” Democrat voters.

I guess we’ll just have to wait for the 2020 elections to see if what I say is true.

Some Theory

Africa, Immigration, Patriotism

I had never heard the term before, but looked it up when reading this excellent article from Z-Man.  Magic Dirt Theory  is “The theory that someone immigrating to a country automatically and magically becomes the same as the native population.”  Hence:

[P]eople like Rashida Tlaib think it is real. She thinks if her people move here, displacing the heritage stock, nothing changes but the complexion. Her people will suddenly stop acting like her people and take on the habits of our people, but with more color.

But, as Z-Man points out, that’s bullshit.

[M]uch of what we think of as American society exists because heritage Americans support it. The people who created this society would have done so wherever they landed. We know this because it has happened in places like Australia and even Africa. Despite it all, countries like Rhodesia and South Africa were able to create first world societies. In the game of dirt, no place has more tragic dirt than the Dark Continent. Yet Rhodesia existed. South Africa existed.

Yup.  When a people has a culture of corruption, that culture will follow them.  Likewise, if they’re dependent on government handouts in their source country, that notion of dependency will come with them.  And if they come from a culture of rampant crime… let’s talk about El Salvador’s MS-13, shall we?

Now what we have the Left trying its level best to destroy everything that we hold dear and sacred about our country — and it is OUR country, not some rancid fucking cross between Third World Shithole #1 and Third World Shithole #2 — all in the name of some made-up meme about equality or racism or colonialism or patriarchy or FFS why don’t we just start whipping these people in the streets for trying to undermine all the things that a) started this country and b) made it great.  (Oh, and by the way, this IS and HAS ALWAYS BEEN a great country, despite what these MFCS Leftists keep trying to push on the rest of us.)

My only regret in all this is that Donald Trump doesn’t have an identical twin brother so we could vote him into office in 2024 and 2028 — which would at least give us time to make the necessary concrete blocks for the feet of every last socialist in the United States.

I need to quit ranting now, lest I get even more angry and the Southern Poverty Law Center gets all miffed  and declares Splendid Isolation  and its readers to be a hate group — like we care.  (That  bunch of godless hucksters needs to stand near the head of the line of the concrete block distribution, but let’s not go there yet.)

What pisses me off royally (if I may be a little solipsistic here) is that I came to this country to pursue the American Dream — the original dream, as created by “heritage Americans” — and now these fucking bastards on the Left want to take that away from me.  Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, and again I say, fuck ’em.

What I want to do with this Magic Dirt is bury all these bastards six feet under it.

Out Of The Past 4

Grammar Nazism

Stopping The Rot

August 12, 2008
7:55 AM CDT

Finally, someone has taken a stand:

A judge flew into a rage in court yesterday after being presented with a charge sheet littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

In an extraordinary outburst at the Old Bailey, Judge David Paget bemoaned declining standards of written English and branded a bureaucrat from the Crown Prosecution Service an ‘illiterate idiot’.

In the papers, the official had consistently misspelt the word ‘grievous’, four times accusing the defendant of ‘greivous bodily harm’.

The judge also slammed the bureaucrat for stating that the defendant had used an offensive weapon, ‘namely axe,’ instead of ‘namely an axe’.

After reading the charge sheet the judge threw the papers down on to the bench in disgust and fumed: ‘It’s quite disgraceful. This is supposed to be a centre of excellence. To have an indictment drawn up by some illiterate idiot is not good enough.’

That noise you hear in the background is thunderous applause from the Literate Nation.

I am so sick of seeing misspellings in public documents (to say nothing of in newspaper articles). And for those who would substitute the stupidity of “alternative spelling”, allow me to castigate them as fucking morons.

I don’t mind the occasional misstep, especially in a live format like blogs or comments thereto. What I detest is repetitive misspelling—because to me, that indicates a drift towards illiteracy. And I don’t excuse “their” for “there” (and vice-versa), “your” for “you’re” (ditto), or any of the onomatopoeic blunders which bedevil the English language.

I am especially harsh when people refuse to use basic spellchecking software when they have it available.

Words are important. Spelling is important: it’s a basic tenet of communication that the people doing the communicating have a common method of discourse—did I say “basic tenet”? I meant axiomatic.

Spelling is the first building block—some would say the foundation—of shared language. To litter the place with “alternatives” at best slows the communication process down (like trying to decipher “cn i haz yr tlno?”), and at worst it undermines the language itself.

And don’t give me that shit about how English is a “fluid” language or any of that jive. I have no problem with introducing a new word to the English language, especially when an equivalent is non-existent; but if a perfectly decent descriptive word already exists, why clutter the language with a bunch of “near-spellings” which serve only to confuse, and render the lazy the equivalent of the diligent?

Gah.

Out Of The Past 3

Old Essays, Patriotism

Separate But Equal

November 12, 2008
11:16 AM CDT

A German Kurd looks at “parallel” societies within a single country:

The largest group in Germany with an immigrant background – after the Aussiedler or ethnic German resettlers – are the Turks, who were once recruited as guest workers and, unlike many Portuguese, Spanish and Greek economic migrants, did not return to their native country. These people of Turkish origin have now lived in this country for half a century. That would be a success story in itself if the following problem did not exist: many of them are not culturally, religiously, economically, socially or politically integrated. That creates an atmosphere of mutual critical scrutiny. Many issues have been debated in Germany – from the smell of garlic that allegedly wafts from housing blocks where the majority of tenants are from the Orient and how to tie a headscarf so that it doesn’t allow ambiguous assumptions about someone’s loyalty to the constitution and democracy to ethical controversies about specific slaughtering methods that are traditional in some cultures. Nevertheless, there is no subject that people argue about more passionately than Islam. All in all, you could say that although these debates have been vigorously and tirelessly conducted, people still haven’t really got to know one another even after 50 years. That applies to both sides. We stand on the threshold of the others’ home, as it were, but know nothing about them apart from their name. You may consider that good, you may consider that bad; there are equally good arguments for ignorance as there are for interest.

Here’s what I know: nothing creates friction within a society more quickly, or more certainly, than separate-but-equal mini-societies, who do not share a common language, culture, religion or worldview.

It is, despite the writer’s example of Israel, a recipe for failure. (Israel can have a divided society because it allows its security apparatus a degree of freedom unknown in the West.)

Now, I’m not suggesting some monolithic all-or-nothing nation: far from it. Monolithic cultures, and people who advocate them, tend to lead to State-sponsored activities like public beheadings, extermination camps and mass resettlement/expulsion of “the others”.

But there has to be some kind of glue, some common ground, or else humans, by nature, will always be suspicious of “the others”. This is a genetic impulse which is so deeply implanted in the human psyche as to be fundamental, and not capable of change.

So: what common ground, then?

Religion is pointless—too many imaginary friends, too much subjectivity, and (such as in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states), too much fertile ground for oppression.

Culture is essentially a meaningless basis for a society, especially in a nation of immigrants such as ours, or in a world which has become far smaller since civilization (and its corollary, mechanical progress) increased. We are, in essence, made richer by diverse cultures in a society, as long as one does not exist to the exclusion of the other, or another does not nullify the country’s principle culture.

Language. This is it. Unless people can talk to each other and be understood, there is absolutely no way that hostility and enmity can be prevented, and there is no way that people can come together. And note that I’m not supporting language chauvinism such as has been practiced in France over the years: that way ultimately ends up stultifying not only progress, but the society as a whole. The Language Police are little different, in their rigidity, than the Religious Police.

Note too that I’m not suggesting that retail stores, for example, be disallowed from speaking to their customers in any language they choose—but I am insisting that government should use one, and only one language to communicate with its citizens. (I don’t care, for example, if Mexican immigrants can’t read an IRS form. Call it a “spur to learning”, if you will.) In the long run, while accommodation to non-English-speakers may sound high-minded or even polite, it will end up doing more permanent harm than the temporary inconvenience caused by its opposite policy.

There’s more, of course, a lot more, but that would do for a start.

The very existence of nation-states creates the basis for “parallel societies”—but to create a microcosm of that situation within a nation will simply bring the global turmoil and enmity to people’s front door, instead of keeping it outside the borders.