Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

Officer Class

Military

To Americans, who unlike the Brits are self-consciously class-indifferent, this piece might be a load of old nonsense, but here we are:

When your job involves abseiling out of helicopters, kicking down doors and taking out the bad guys, you might be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t really matter what school you went to.
But the SAS is getting worried that not enough posh officers are applying to command its high-stakes operations.
The elite regiment has typically been led by former public schoolboys whose privileged education is said to instil the leadership skills and poise required.
‘The typical SAS officer is confident, relaxed, bright and unflappable,’ said one of the regiment’s warrant officers. ‘Many of the most successful officers have been to the top public schools, but recently we have seen a number of guys coming forward who just don’t cut it. It’s a shame, but they are just not posh enough. The bottom line is that the officers shouldn’t be speaking like soldiers. We don’t want officers who are shouters or know-it-alls.’
…

Former officers of the SAS include General Mark Carleton-Smith, the head of the Army, and Major Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, a former Private Secretary to Princes William and Harry, who one source described as ‘the archetypal SAS officer’. Both were educated at Eton, while other recent commanding officers attended Winchester and Harrow.

Over There, the term “officer and a gentleman” used to be something of a redundancy — one could only become an officer if one was of the privileged class — but it seems like it has been somewhat undermined, and not to everyone’s liking, either.  Imagine taking orders from this guy…

Round about now, Mr. Free Market (who was an officer in the Paras under the old regime) is chuckling into his whisky.

Conservative Stuff

Conservatism, Good Stuff, Patriotism, Resistance

One of the socio-political dichotomies we conservatives face is that while we are often described (in our “Republican” guise) as the party of the rich, the fact is that while there may be a few wealthy conservatives, the vast bulk of us are in fact middle-class, nay even working class (as defined in American terms).  Donald Trump saw this, and tapped into the latter:  the non-rich, conservative and intensely patriotic folks who are exemplified by Readers of this website.

And we are all familiar with the efforts of the ungodly (Leftists, Commies, Wokists — you all know who they are) to censor, muzzle, “cancel” and otherwise stifle our ability to function in today’s world, whether it be by woke banks not wanting to facilitate the “wrong” kind of financial transaction (e.g. buying guns), or media groups not wanting our voices to become public (Facebook bannings, YouTube censorship, de-hosting Deplorable websites such as mine*, etc.) and similar bastardy.  As I said, you’re all familiar with the situation so I’m not going to catalogue their misdeeds.

Once again thanks to Insty, I’ve stumbled upon an alternative which may help us sidestep the Left.  Read this and feel relieved (as I was) that we may have a way out of this mess.

I was particularly impressed by this company (despite its name**) which gives us a chance to help a truly American industry.

So I’m going to see what happens with New Founding, and I’ll let you know.

*Nobody has tried to silence me — yet — probably because my readership is too small to bother with.  Let me assure you, however, that should that day come, Tech Support II has a backup plan which could be enacted within hours, and I’d be back in business, so to speak.

**As a devotee of side-by-side (as opposed to over/under) shotguns, I hesitated a bit, but never mind.

Culture Clash

Immigration, Muzzies

Another one in Germany:

A 29-year-old Afghan man in Germany attacked and severely injured a 58-year-old landscape gardener who was working in a park in Berlin, allegedly because he didn’t like the fact that as a woman she was working, police said Sunday.
The attack in the city’s Wilmersdorf district took place Saturday afternoon, and a 66-year-old passerby, who tried to come to the woman’s rescue, was also severely injured.

I am truly curious to see what happens when (not if)  the new crop of Afghan “refugees” tries this kind of nonsense here in the U.S.

It may require just a few Righteous Shootings to help them assimilate.  Just sayin’.

Fire This Asshole

Drive Time, Wokism

Last Sunday was the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, whereby car enthusiasts converge on the famed golf course and drool over the various examples of automotive gorgeousity strewn around like a rich man’s carelessly-scattered diamonds on green velvet.

Here are a couple other examples:

Iso Rivolta:

Ferrari Pininfarina:

And all was well in the land, until this little Wokist twerp got in on the act:

Let’s get two things cleared up before we continue. The first is that while the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is certainly far from the most momentous cultural event of the year, it is the most prestigious car show anywhere in the world. For a few days in late summer, the 18th fairway at the Pebble Beach golf course is the very highest point for any rich person who covets vintage cars, and the highest honor for any person working in the business of restoring classics.
The second is that Mercedes was not just a car company that was busy at work doing normal car stuff during the time in which Nazis were in power in Germany. Mercedes was an early and direct supporter of Adolf Hitler long before he took power, helping him out while he was still an outsider figure in Bavarian politics. When Hitler got out of prison in 1924, he got picked up in a Mercedes-Benz.

Ergo, says this girlyman, we should not have the 540K as the winner because it was driven by Nazis.  Here’s the car in question:

And then this:

This is exactly how this car is seen in this world of the mega-rich: an encapsulation of “the optimistic mood” of Germany in 1934. Let us ask: for whom was this an optimistic time, and who is the kind of person who looks back on that time now, remembering its icons for their … optimism? Rich people, that’s who.

Wow… wealth envy and oh-so laudable “anti-Nazi” sentiment all wrapped up in a neat little bundle.  Read the whole thing to get the RCOB that Longtime Reader Ken S. warned me I’d get, when he sent it to me yesterday.  And I did.

Even better is that the writer suffers from the usual hypocrisy of his ilk, in that he owns a… Volkswagen Beetle, surely the most Hitlerish of all German cars of the 1930s.

So just for the hell of it, feast your eyes on a couple other examples of this eeeevil car:

And to hell with this wokist revisionism.  Let’s just enjoy the automotive excellence.

Pity, though:  I used to enjoy reading Jalopnik.

Now Accents?

Mocking Furriners, Snowflakes, Wokism

Great Cicero’s bleeding adenoids, have we come to this?

Linguist Dr Rob Drummond, who works at Manchester Met University, argued using accents for comedic effect in sitcoms like Fawlty Towers, where Andrew Sachs famously portrayed a clumsy Spanish waiter called Manuel, promotes ‘lazy stereotypes’ and can be ‘pretty damaging’.

Damaging to whom, exactly?

While my native accent is pure Johannesburg WASP (often mistaken for British in America, but never in Britishland), I love doing accents.  While some are not so good (my Texas twang fools absolutely nobody), my Indian-, French- and even German-accented English are all pretty good.  (Afrikaans-flavored English, of course, is second nature.)  My Scottish accent is passable outside the U.K., but nothing beats my Australian — I’ve fooled even native Aussies into thinking I was pure Ocker, and having armed myself with some Strine slang, it’s unbeatable.

And if I live somewhere for any lengthy period of time, the native accent is easy — when I lived in north Jersey, even some of my NJ buddies could be fooled when I called them up and asked in my best Hoboken Nasal, “Yo, howya dooin’?”

So now I can’t do accents anymore, in case someone is “damaged”?

Fuck that.