Tag: Evil Bastards

Sleeping Dragon

Elections, Politics

I’ve heard the conservative-leaning electorate described as the “slumbering giant” or similar, and this article gives several good reasons why we are quietly waiting our turn to vote rather than burning down Harvard or the New York Times  building.  (Okay, also because that would be illegal, and we have jobs and such.)

More to the point is why we are quiet at the moment.  Just out of curiosity, can anyone give me a single instance where a conservative voter has gone around yanking “Biden” or “Clinton” yard signs out of people’s gardens?  Not one?  I can’t think of any either.  Nor, by the way, have I read any reports of cars being keyed or otherwise damaged simply because they sported a “Howard Dean For President”, “Clinton/Gore” or “Biden/Harris” bumper sticker — and in both the above, had there been any such incidents, you can be damn sure that it would have got full coverage on the nightly news or in the Washington Post.

No:  all such hostility has come from the Left, pretty much as it always has.

That said, just because we aren’t crucifying the board of the Soros Foundation en masse  or hanging random Pantifa rioters from lamp posts does not mean that we aren’t seething with rage — and believe me, we have every good reason to be enraged, not just at the above but also at the way that Big Government has become the equivalent of a giant weight pressing down on all of us.  (Here’s a little boo-hoo article from City Journal which talks about the topic in detail.)

In three weeks’ time we’ll see of all the above is true enough to bring out the conservative vote in droves, and keep the Left away from the levers of power.

Just don’t believe the polls.  As the first linked article suggests, they’re asking questions in a frame which no longer exists, and in any event, the Left has a real interest in making us think that we don’t stand a chance — just as they did when that Trotskyist bitch Hillary Clinton ran for office in 2016 — so the polls are not to be believed.

Here’s what I think:  the sleeping conservative dragon is going to wake up, and I don’t think the Left are going to like the results.  If it were me, I’d be warming up the helicopters’ engines and handing out pre-noosed ropes — we already have sufficient guns and ammo — in preparation for the Glorious Day (as Mr. Free Market puts it).

But like all conservatives, I’d be satisfied with a massive Trump / Republican electoral victory next month.  And for that, the Left should be grateful.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings – International Division

Righteous Shootings

So over in Brazil, these three mopes decide on doing a little undocumented clothes shopping, and call on a local emporium, waving a gun in the owner’s face etc. etc.

Whereupon Our Hero pulls out his own gun and shoots all three dead.  [pause to let the massive applause and cheers die down]

Now there are a couple of noteworthy aspects to this happy little episode.

 1) El Grandes Huevos had the gun pointed at him when he pulled his own gun
2) from his waistband, and
3) kept shooting until it was all over.

To recap:  no sexy quick-draw holster, no quick reloads.  Just eight(?) bullets and two brass balls.

We should all be so manly.

Good Guy 3, Choirboys 0.

Chart-Toppers

Funny Stuff

Every so often, something is said or written that deserves to be memorialized in stone.  Since the start of the new millennium, I’ve identified two — one from each decade — that I think are the best.

2001 – 2010:  “Democracy — Whisky — Sexy”  (Iraq)
There is no better encapsulation of the benefits of Western society.

2011 – 2020:  “Don’t Trust China — China Is Asshole”  (Hong Kong)
Six words that can (and should) direct U.S. foreign and domestic policy, forever.

That both were written on signs displayed by foreigners means that we need to up our game.

Just Like The Bloody Romans

Marxists, Politics

Those who remember Monty Python’s Life Of Brian  will be familiar with the line “What have the Romans ever done for us?”  followed by the recitation of roads, laws, plumbing, a supply of potable water, etc.

This via Insty:

So whenever some stupid Marxist [redundancy alert]  suggests that eliminating capitalism will help the Pore & Starvin, we should use one of their own arguments against them by saying:  “So really, what you want is for 80% of the world to live in poverty, again?”

But logic has never been a particular strength of the Left, especially when it contradicts dialectic.

Acceptable Risk

Disaster, Gummint, Nannies

The inimitable Heather Mac Donald takes the Nannies to task, in her inimitable way.  This paragraph in particular struck home for me:

We set highway speeding limits to maximize convenience at what we consider an acceptable risk to human life. It is statistically certain that every year, there will be tens of thousands of driving deaths. A considerable portion of those deaths could be averted by “following the science” of force and velocity and enforcing a speed limit of, say, 15 miles an hour. But we tolerate motor-vehicle deaths because we value driving 75 miles an hour on the highway, and up to 55 miles an hour in cities, more than we do saving those thousands of lives. When those deaths come—nearly 100 a day in 2019—we do not cancel the policy. Nor would it be logical to cancel a liberal highway speed because a legislator who voted for it died in a car accident.

Bill Whittle once said more or less the same thing about accidental gun deaths:  while even one such death was tragic, the plain fact of the matter is that some freedoms come with risk, sometimes deadly risk;  and the overall benefit to our society is far, far greater than the danger that may (or may not) ensue.   Using statistics of “gun deaths” (even correct ones) to bolster calls for gun control / -confiscation is likewise irrelevant.

It’s called the price of freedom, and We The People have been balancing those freedoms against the collateral harm to individuals ever since our Republic was formed and the Constitution and Bill of Rights promulgated.  All individual rights are potentially harmful, whether it’s freedom of speech, assembly, religion, gun ownership, privacy or any of the others.

And to Heather’s point above:  driving isn’t even a right protected by the Bill of Rights.  How much more, then, should our First- and Second Amendment rights (and all the other rights for that matter) be protected, even when we know that some tragedy is bound to follow thereby?

“If it saves just one life” sounds great on a bumper sticker, but as a basis for public policy, it’s not only foolish but in many cases more harmful in the long run.  Heather again:

We could reduce coronavirus transmission to zero by locking everyone in a separate cell until a vaccine was developed. There are some public-health experts who from the start appeared ready to implement such radical social distancing. The extent to which we veer from that maximal coronavirus protection policy depends on how we value its costs and the competing goods: forgone life-saving medical care and deaths of despair from unemployment and social isolation, on the one hand, and the ability to support one’s family through work and to build prosperity through entrepreneurship, on the other. The advocates of maximal lockdowns have rarely conceded such trade-offs, but they are ever-present.

The current wave of totalitarianism and loss of freedoms caused by State overreaction to the Chinkvirus needs to be rolled back, and fast.  It just sucks that we have to rely on judges — many of whom, to judge from their records, are not especially friends of freedom — to hold back the mini-Mussolinis in their totalitarian quest for absolute power over the governed.

And just so we know what kind of “acceptable risk” we’re talking about, comes this from Fox News: