Off the Rail Politics

Richard G said:
Wow. I feel like I’ve turned on the TV in the closing minutes of a rescreen of Deliverance and missed the banjo duel.

Then as I rewind to the beginning, this movie seemed to start in the middle of something. The guy who asked woke is bad, with a question mark, is out early.

Just read an article in The Australian this morning by one of my favourite columnists, holidaying in Canada. Trudeau finally achieves something worthwhile: wokeism is plummeting amongst the young. One of Janet Albrechtsen’s finest traits is her championing her children’s generation.

During the divisive referendum here last year I read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. A few years ago I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Those classics helped orient me in current debates. Now, taking in the rarity of the civil discourse in this thread and on RFF generally, so often, and considering the warnings about AI above, I’ve just started reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary. It’s about the structure of the brain but later goes beyond that. One of its implications for us is that the advice above to just go out and shoot (cameras, photographs) will be a step for the good towards salvation. On the way to this point early in the year I read John Gray’s The New Leviathans. A much chillier message from that book.

I have a love hate relationship with books. Why are there so many, why are they on the bookstore shelves. Why were they published or written? Then I pick one, like the sculptor Anne Trufitt’s Day Book and read it and couldn’t put it down and marvel at such a life and present mind, her childhood resonating with different chords throughout her life. A random pick.

Good to see the word evil above. Childhood, including what of it can be maintained during schooling, is under threat. Jonathan Haidt leads one pushback.

The ideas in this thread matter. Children and young adults are precious as they are our only hope.
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You may be the only person who as actually read "Wealth Of Nations" other than, perhaps, Smith himself ;) A number of years ago, P.J. O'Rourke hilariously set about to read it and explain it to the reader. It's really funny.

Another fine read I would commend to your attention is "The Road To Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek. He wrote it in the closing hours of WWII as a warning to the obvious winners that if they didn't stop government meddling in their economies (which was seen as a wartime necessity) what the outcomes would be. We now have the benefit of 80 years of rearview mirror and Hayek was spot on. He was brilliant economist. This book does suffer a bit as an academic German speaker being translated into English, but it is well worth the slog.

The collectivists are evil. They always have been. Their interest is power and domination over everyone else. We have the lab experiments of Mao's China, Stalin's Russia, Hilter's Germany, Castro's Cuba and dozens of lesser examples that show - without fail -that collectivism leads to oppression, sooner or later. This seems to not be so clear to our youngsters who've been miseducated at the hands of the pimps of collectivism - the academy.

The mechanisms of control for the collectivists have never changed. It makes no difference whether we're talking about Stalin, Mao, Kim Jung Un, or Western leftists like Trudeau, Obama and Biden. If anything, the modern Western leftists are more dangerous, because they are much more sly and measured in bringing this foul air to the body politic. But they all do the exact same things sooner or later: They attack faith. They attack family. They attack individual freedom and try to con people into sacrificing for the "greater good". This is pimp talk for "yet your ass on the street and bring me my money bitch". They are vile.

One only has to look at what the Biden bunch did this weekend for a really trenchant example. On Easter - the most sacred holiday in the Christian calendar - they decide to pimp the transexual behavioural deviance while simulatneously forbidding children to express religious themes in the White House Easter egg hunt. It was a perfectly planned twofer: Attack faith and family all at once. There is a particularly warm wing in hell waiting for these people.
 
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The coincidence of Easter Sunday and TDOV was a perversity hardly commented on. Fortunately some on X chose to highlight the visibility of some particularly vicious killers who cannot be called men as of this week in Scotland. Scotland is weird. A tradition of rationality and genius well and truly subverted.
 
The TDOV always falls on March 31. Easter falls on different dates each year. This year, they coincided; it was not some horrible "woke" conspiracy.
 
Retro-Grouch said:
The TDOV always falls on March 31. Easter falls on different dates each year. This year, they coincided; it was not some horrible "woke" conspiracy.
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It is when POTUS explicitly prohibits religious expression by children in the Easter celebration at the White House.

It is when POTUS goes on and on (and on) about TDOV, but barely manages to mention the most sacred of Christian holiday - which precedes all this madness by some 2000 years.

There is an agenda. It is obvious - floating dates notwithstanding.
 
I've heard it said that one of the more clever ideas of USA's original architects was that the new nation would be built upon principles no more ideological than "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". And for the most part, I'd say it's worked out pretty well, though there are constant adjustments to be made to ensure that everyone gets the opportunity.

Cameras can be a fun way to hold a bit of history in one's hands! And Soviet camera industry is a particular favorite of mine, because in it, I get a sense of idealism and good intentions (delivering copies of Contax II, Leica II, even Hasselblad to the people surely must qualify), but later, neglect, and stagnation, punctuated by a few too-little-too-late efforts (Electronic Zenit cameras, Kiev-90 et al) which often delivered little more than promises.

By the late 1980s, the USSR camera industry was still delivering cameras based on 1960s designs, while the west was enjoying motorized, autofocus marvels. But the latter were not the product of mandates, but the ongoing pursuit of profit in a highly competitive industry. Not suggesting that laissez-faire is the way to go, but simply, that, properly channeled, pursuit of personal gain is one of the most powerful tools for getting stuff done.
 
In Finland we got more than our share of the Soviet high tech.
 
chuckroast said:
It is when POTUS explicitly prohibits religious expression by children in the Easter celebration at the White House.

It is when POTUS goes on and on (and on) about TDOV, but barely manages to mention the most sacred of Christian holiday - which precedes all this madness by some 2000 years.

There is an agenda. It is obvious - floating dates notwithstanding.
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The prohibition against religious expression at the Easter celebration at the White House started about 50 years ago. Biden simply carried on the tradition like every president before him, including the last one.
 
Purely anecdotal of course, but I don't think I've ever witnessed a person who uses "woke" in pejorative sense, and is also capable of forming their own thoughts.

I'm always a bit wary when a group of people tells me I need to be afraid of something. Woke is one of those things which, if you back away from the manufactured hysteria and carefully concocted paranoid ravings... just isn't really a thing. The definition of what is "woke" always seems to shift, at the convenience of those setting the narrative. Does that not make anyone suspicious? Do you not question why some talking heads want to get you riled up and tilting at windmills? Particularly since so many of these talking heads are also selling something. Smells rotten to me.
 
Mos6502 said:
Purely anecdotal of course, but I don't think I've ever witnessed a person who uses "woke" in pejorative sense, and is also capable of forming their own thoughts.

I'm always a bit wary when a group of people tells me I need to be afraid of something. Woke is one of those things which, if you back away from the manufactured hysteria and carefully concocted paranoid ravings... just isn't really a thing. The definition of what is "woke" always seems to shift, at the convenience of those setting the narrative. Does that not make anyone suspicious? Do you not question why some talking heads want to get you riled up and tilting at windmills? Particularly since so many of these talking heads are also selling something. Smells rotten to me.
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It is a small number of people making ungodly amounts of noise over nonissues. They are certainly not to be feared. They are to be ridiculed.
 
"Woke is one of those things which, if you back away from the manufactured hysteria and carefully concocted paranoid ravings... just isn't really a thing."

Being a foreigner, at times, I am surprised by how blind Americans are to what is going on in their country.
I see parallels with Putin's Russia, though the scale is different. The propaganda mills are churning, and in both countries, their narratives are weaved to serve a selected elite.
(I do think the United States is the greatest country in the world. It is just a bit sick in the head for the time being.)
 
AndyCapp said:
"Woke is one of those things which, if you back away from the manufactured hysteria and carefully concocted paranoid ravings... just isn't really a thing."

Being a foreigner, at times, I am surprised by how blind Americans are to what is going on in their country.
I see parallels with Putin's Russia, though the scale is different. The propaganda mills are churning, and in both countries, their narratives are weaved to serve a selected elite.
(I do think the United States is the greatest country in the world. It is just a bit sick in the head for the time being.)
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This all happened during the pandemic when the police overreacted to a couple of drug-addled thugs. This was then used as an excuse to manufacture narratives about how very raaaaaaaaacist the US is (it isn't) and the early stage woken-puken ran around finding additional new ways to be offended. Today, anyone who disagrees with anything is "anything-phobic" and raised up as an example of said "systemic" bigotry. It's all hot air and nonsense.

The salvation here has been the comics. A number of rather sturdy voices have appeared - like Bill Maher and David Chapelle - who refused to be cowed by this nonsense and the noise has begun to die down.

The larger problem in the US is the utter sewer that its universities have become. They've completely miseducated several generations of youngsters by spending time on ideological drivel not teaching real things.
 
USA went a bit crazy during the pandemic, and I blame it partly on a lack of usual diversions like overseas holidays, concerts, and big-league sports. And it wouldn't surprise me a bit if some foreign elements were more than happy to stir the pot on social media!

The early part of the pandemic had it's lighter moments, as people got creative and did amazing things with their homes and gardens, got into crafts, even staged silly events online. But ultimately, America is more the land of Tony Robbins and hustle culture than it is about hygge, njuta or, heaven forbid, niksen, and yet, the latter two in particular seem like exactly the sorts of values which might've helped Americans cope with the times.
 
And it wouldn't surprise me a bit if some foreign elements were more than happy to stir the pot on social media!

As I recall, a Soviet officer exposed the Kremlin plan to rot the American society from the inside already in the eighties.
You can watch an extract here. The full interview is available on YouTube. This has been public knowledge since 1984.
If you can stomach PBD, you can watch him interview another informant on his show in 2022 here.
 
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AndyCapp said:
Hey, I found another Conspiracy Theorist :cool: and I thought I was all alone here!
Wherever you see trouble cooking, you can be sure the Kremlin is involved. And where there are Russians, there are the Americans. The cloak and dagger game goes on and on with horrible price of money and suffering. Why? Because they love it!
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No conspiracy. Mitrokhin was a senior KGB officer and archivist. When he defected to the West, he took copies of decades of reports of global KGB operations with him. These clearly show a pattern of KGB meddling in Western politics and culture. For example, he described how KGB infiltrated the 1960s counterculture and so-called "anti war" movement.

I don't think much has changed in the intervening years. Whether it was GRU, NKVD, KGB, SVR, Bratva, or Oligrachs, it's pretty much the same bunch with different business cards...
 
chuckroast said:
No conspiracy. Mitrokhin was a senior KGB officer and archivist. When he defected to the West, he took copies of decades of reports of global KGB operations with him. These clearly show a pattern of KGB meddling in Western politics and culture. For example, he described how KGB infiltrated the 1960s counterculture and so-called "anti war" movement.

I don't think much has changed in the intervening years. Whether it was GRU, NKVD, KGB, SVR, Bratva, or Oligrachs, it's pretty much the same bunch with different business cards...
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I tried to be humorous :cool:. It never seems to work.
 
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