Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Quote of the Day, Consequences edition

The whole thing is long but hits center mass.  Here's an excerpt:

f) long-term, having a large class of unemployed, under-employed, and broke, hungry, shiftless lumpenproletariat is how revolutions start. Middle classes do not revolt. This year has seen the biggest targeted wipeout of the middle class, worldwide, and shifting them to the lower class, than anything since the Great Depression. And we're still in the early innings of it, as COVID2.0 now appears to be clearing its throat.

g) That's before the blatant disenfranchising of a third of the adults in this country by the most ham-fistedly blatant electoral fraud (outside of every election in Central America, ever) in living memory.

Yup.  You should go read the whole thing.  And it's been a while since I posted this: New Gingrich on what the Second Amendment is really about.  It's long, but really gets rolling at about 5 minutes in.  Newt's point is exactly the same one that Aesop makes.

The Continental Congress was an unauthorized, unsanctioned, unlawful, treasonous, and seditious assembly, and every man-jack of them were eventually targeted for arrest and hanging.


11 comments:

Glen Filthie said...

That moron just slays me. When the pandemic panic came out he was right in the thick of it, gobbling in fright and all for the scientific oogily-boogily that entitled the bad guys to tyrannize the people they supposedly served. Now he’s going to lead the second civil war, HAR HAR HAR!

I’d take him out with a weaponized crapcopter bomb... but he’s too entertaining. 😆👍

Richard said...

In fact, revolutions are made by the middle class.
Robespierre and Castro were lawyers. Guevara and Habash were doctors. Arafat was an engineer. Stalin was a seminarian (go figure). Ho was a schoolteacher and Giap an educational administrator.

And a more bourgeois group than our founders is hard to imagine, save a few that seriously rich.

Aesop said...

You're a legend in your own mind, Glen.
Keep giggling to yourself up there in Canuckistan, and stay out of serious discussions down here.
Grown-ups are talking.

@Richard,
Nice try. Castro founded a law group. Although he studied law (in between multiple failed attempts to overthrow neighboring countries' governments), he never graduated nor earned any degree in such, and his one experiment in capitalism went belly up, and he remained broke and poor, living off his wife's family's money until he figured out a good gig being a revolutionary, at which he became rich.
And the middle class in neither France, Cuba, China, nor Russia revolted.

The revolutions are always triggered by, and run for the benefit of, the street class and underclass.
Mark and Lenin spake revolutionary rhetoric for the intelligentsia, but those are the people who turned their noses up at it. Ditto the French middle class, who only embraced it when the choice was that, or Madame Guillotine.

The leaders are always the fuck-ups from the middle and upper-middle class who couldn't figure out (or didn't have the patience) to find success slowly and patiently by working hard and doing smart things.

They're ever the get-rich-quick jackholes who realize the only people buying their B.S. are their fellow ne'er-do-well third and fourth sons, who didn't get the family business, and the envious lumpenproletariat with a chip on their shoulders because they "coulda been contendahs", but couldn't hack it under free enterprise, because too lazy, too crooked, too stupid, or too drunk (or, usually, all of the above.)

True in France, Russia, post-Weimar Germany, China, Cuba, and everywhere else, since ever.

The few crooked bright ones from the middle class who stumble in may connive and survive for a while, but the post-consolidation purges usually clean them out, and then it's Revolutionary Company Men who lapped up communism with mother's milk all the way afterwards, right until the collapse, and bankruptcy.

And if thousands of their fellows hadn't sent them to Philadelphia, the Continental Congress would have been simply an upper-middle class bitchfest, and the only reason those selected served at all was because they had enough set aside to afford the luxury of being political dilettantes. While they weren't kings rich beyond the dreams of avarice, they were certainly in the top 25,000 of the 2,500,000 colonists alive in 1776.

You tell me how long a revolution composed of only the top 1% of anyone in any country would last. (Thought Exercise: predict how many actual votes anything sponsored and proposed by the Hollywood Party, right now, run by such brilliant political minds as Jane Fonda, Barbra Streissand, and the coven of witches on The Spew would get in the country at large. I'll wait.)
And see if you can explain to the class the curious number of times this tiny contingent of propertied men referred to "the people" pretty much every time they opened their collective mouths officially, to justify what they did.

If you think the American Revolution was sponsored and ushered in by the middle class, I'm afraid you deserve a refund on tuition from someone.

No less an expert than John Adams (perhaps you've heard of him) estimated in the day in so many words that "one third of the colonists are for King George, one third are for independence, and one third don't care, and wish to be left alone."

A country with a prosperous, fat, dumb, and happy middle class like Sweden or Switzerland haven't had a revolution in 170 years. Slum-ridden poverty-endemic countries in Africa and South America have them every month, on average. Sometimes, bi-weekly.

No one ever revolted because they were making too much money.
Stop gainsaying historical facts.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Glen Filthie said...

HAR HAR HAR!!! You faggots in California giggle, Aesop. Up here in Alberta we chit and laugh like Texans - only bigger! :)

I see you are an expert on history in addition to your renowned expertise on virology. I take back all the rotten things I said about you! In the coming civil war, me and my crapcopter air force are at your service!

I think Richard has the right of it. If you look at Lenin, Trotsky, Adolf You-Know-Who, their entourages, and other historical shakers and movers - they were from the middle class and even the aristocracy. I don't know if it is historically correct to say revolutions are exclusively triggered by the underclass...

Aesop said...

Having evidently less experience with giggling faggots than my worthy debate opponent, I concede that point of discussion.

Hitler's disdain for the upper class, and the total dearth of any of same in his inner cohort, ever, however, is a matter of historical record.

Goering was a Great War war hero who afterwards couldn't kill anything but a keg and a rack of pork.
Himmler was a failed chicken farmer. (FFS, all that requires is a rooster and a couple of hens, and he f***ed it up by the numbers, amidst poverty and famine!) The rest of his entourage of clowns and reprobates were a running joke from 1920-1945, in Germany and abroad.

The middle class with jobs, skills, and money, were either sent to konzentrationslagers, most of them wearing yellow stars, or threatened with same, before they'd even give so much as the time of day to the Nazi Party, and the communists in Germany were of even lower estate than the Nazis, who only achieved their actual power at gunpoint, after deposing the multi-headed government in an election they lost, and blaming all their political problems on foreign intrigue.

(Stop me if you've heard this one.)

And I repeat, stop gainsaying documented and witnessed history to suit your own failed narrative. You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own set of facts.

Old NFO said...

Time to hunker down and be prepared for whatever comes next.

Richard said...

@Aesop

You should stick to medicine or whatever it is you do because your understanding of history is poor.

Aesop said...

As if you merely saying it makes it so.

Show your work, Slick.

Countries that have a large middle class don't revolt.
Countries that revolt don't have a large middle class.
People who are happy and comfortable have no reason to revolt.

"Sire, the peasants are revolting!" - every minister to every king when it happened
"Sire, the shopkeepers, merchants, and bankers are revolting!" - said no minister, anywhere, ever

Louis XVI and marie Antoinette weren't sent to the guillotine by people with the 18th C. equivalent of big screen TVs, Coach purses, and 157 cable channels. They were dragged there by the peasantry who couldn't afford to buy bread. That's how nearly all revolutions happen. The only time middle class people get involved is when they suddenly find themselves no longer middle class, because everyone is always convinced they can get their pet crocodile to eat them last, and only when the jaws are up to their own ass do they realize the problem with that estimation.

Perhaps they never covered that in Common Core history, but like the moon landings, it actually happened.

And the fact that you've convinced yourself that Reality is otherwise is of little note.

All I've got going for those propositions is a few hundred years of recorded modern history.
All you've got going for the counter-argument is gainsaying.

Quite the poser, that is.

I've got more grasp of history in my little finger than you have in your entire family tree. So instead of another baseless riposte, lay your cards out, and explain to us all how you've gotten the right of things. If you're the legendary scholar of history you allege, this should be child's play for you, and if not, we can all use the entertainment.

Win-win.

Roy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
The Lab Manager said...

It's nice of Newt here to find some balls when he should have been doing some of that limited government stuff that he and others promised in the 90's that would come if only they could get both houses of congress, oh wait, we need the presidency to, well, you proles who pay the taxes simply don't understand how this government stuff works up here in DC. Ahs shucks, they got us again, keep sending us campaign money.

Homesteader said...

Mr. Franklin, from The Autobiography-

"My list of virtues contain’d at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show’d itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list, giving an extensive meaning to the word.

I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it. I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix’d opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present.

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny’d myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some difference, etc.

I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag’d in went on more pleasantly.

The modest way in which I propos’d my opinions procur’d them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail’d with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right."

Food for thought, this Holy Day.

Merry Christmas to you all.