It's been oddly quiet after the election - no cities burning, that sort of thing. And this is interesting:
Only anecdotal but my girlfriend says her lefty keyboard warrior friends have been oddly silent on Facebook since Tuesday. This is the way.
Very oddly quiet for a bunch of folks who wouldn't shut up about how Trump was a fascist and democracy would be dead if he won. Very oddly quiet.
Sumd00d posted to the neighborhood Facebook group, recommending that people prepare their lanai screen for the high winds by cutting them.
[blink] [blink]
That's some righteous hurricane prep, right there [rolls eyes so hard you can hear it over the hurricane]
My thought is why not open all your windows to keep the wind from blowing them out, amirite? Sheesh.
If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I have been at least a luke-warm supporter of Donald Trump for years. Heck, there are over 200 posts there, mostly talking up his virtues. Go, read, if you don't believe me.
But I am no longer comfortable posting about how Donald Trump would make a good President, because I do not any longer think that he would.
The Donald has come out against Ron DeSantis, not that this is surprising - after all, they are opponents for the Republican nomination. I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the dishonest way that this opposition has come out:
Donald Trump's people attacked Ron DeSantis for (a) not slavishly following The Donald's massively damaging lockdown recommendations and then for (b) being entirely correct in doing so.
Let me be clear: Ron DeSantis saved Florida's economy by ignoring advice from Donald Trump's administration. I was here. I saw this. I had just moved here from The Democratic People's Socialist Republic of Maryland and know people whose lives were destroyed by the Covid lockdowns imposed by a Republican Governor there. So where are the "Trump War Room" objections to the Covid-19 lockdowns from (Republican) Governor Larry Hogan?
[crickets]
Go ahead. Amaze me.
[I'm waiting]
Yeah, that's what I thought. Someone who was all up The Donald's butt is a-OK, but someone who did something positive for his State (even though it went against your flunky's advice) is the Worst Thing Ever. Quite frankly, I'd have more respect for this if (a) their advice was worth a plug nickel and (b) if your flunkies weren't trying to undermine you at ever step and if (c) you had had a damn clue about (b).
You didn't, and still don't seem to. Quite frankly, this is the biggest knock against you - you brought your enemies into your inner circle, and you won't recognize allies if they don't kiss your butt.
To The Donald (as if he'd pay attention); We thought you were on our side. We trusted you. Like Bluto in Annimal House, wef**ked up. And now we see that someone who actually earned that trust is in your cross-hairs.
And so while I think you accomplished a lot in your first term, I don't think you are earning a second one. Your ego is too big to allow someone actually accomplished to join you in the Oval Office. And so, adieu. Good luck, because you're going to need it.
You are in an election. You are facing adversity. Remember that Adversity does not build character, it reveals it. You are revealing more than you should like. Stop doing that, or keep losing supporters.
Sorry, you've lost a supporter here. Don't come calling after the nomination. You're not Presidential material.
Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
AWA over at Gunfreezone posts about a new study showing that increased Concealed Weapon permitting leads to increased gun crime:
He recommends clicking through to read the whole thing. I don't. I've seen enough studies about gun control. As the old saying goes, if you torture the data enough it will confess to anything.Concealed-carry laws boost gun crime by a third, study finds
A new study finds concealed-carry laws lead to a boost in gun crime by between 29% and 32%, mostly by triggering a surge in gun theft.
The study comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that struck down New York’s attempt to limit the ability to carry a gun outside their homes. That ruling was seen as particularly significant as other states have sought to restrict concealed-carry permits.
Oh, it isn’t people being shot. It is guns being stolen.
I described the errors as “systematic” before the jump because there is a pattern of distortions in the anti-gun literature that have been repeated over decades even though they violate known good practice in the social and medical sciences. These include but are not limited to:Failure to control for socioeconomic differences between star and control groups, even when the differences are known to correlate with large differences in per-capita rates of criminal devianceAnd I described this pattern as “fraud” before the jump because the magnitude of these errors would be too great and their direction too consistent for honest error, even if we did not in several prominent cases have direct evidence that the fraud must have been intended.
Choice of study periods that ignore well-documented trends that run contrary to the study’s conclusions immediately before or after the period.
Selective use of suicide statistics, counting them only in star but not control groups and/or ignoring massive evidence that would-be suicides rapidly substitute other methods when firearms are not available.
Tendentious misapplication of Uniform Crime Report data, for example by ignoring the fact that UCR reports of homicides are entered before trial and therefore fail to account for an unknown but significant percentage of findings of misadventure and lawful self-defense.
Russia -
— RAMZPAUL (@ramzpaul) June 16, 2022
The world’s largest exporter of wheat.
The world’s largest exporter of fertilizer.
The world’s largest exporter of natural gas.
The world’s second largest exporter of oil.
America -
The world’s largest exporter of LGBTQ+.
It's a real mystery,that's for sure.
Softness to traitors will destroy us all.- Maximilian Robespierre
Smartest kid in class, right there [rolls eyes]. Maybe he should have read Shakespeare.
But cruel are the times, when we are traitors,
And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumor
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,But float upon a wild and violent sea
Each way and none- William Shakespeare, Macbeth
First the god news: de-forestation is down by two-thirds since 1980:
In the past decade, the yearly reduction in forest area was 0.12 percent – down from 0.19 percent in the 1990s and 0.35 percent in the 1980s. In other words, out of 100 hectares of forested area in 2010, 98.85 hectares still green the world today. Emphatically, we are not running out of forests.
This is from the latest UN report on the subject, found via a link from Chris Lynch.
Now the bad news: ancient forest is being clear cut for wind farms:
Lately we’ve been reporting on what many people are calling one of the greatest environmental felonies in Europe: the deforestation of the 1000-year old Reinhardswald, known as the “fairy tale forest”, in order to make way for largescale industrial wind parks to produce “green” energy. Proponents claim the wind parks will save our environment and climate. Clearing the forests has already commenced.
I guess that "sustainable electricity" comes from cutting down thousand year old forest. Good to know.
Unknown whether the report talks about how deforestation is up in Scandinavia because the forests are being cut down to make wood pellet fuel. What a weird "environmentalism" that burns the forest in order to save it.
Color me skeptical that the Democrats can do much in the current political situation - their margins in Congress are razor thin and rely on a fair number of Democrats from gun friendly states like West Virginia. But we're hearing the usual banging of the gun control drum, so it's time to dust this 4 year old post off. I mean, it's on the right hand side bar for your convenience, but some things need to be said again, and again.
(originally posted March 2, 2018)
Somewhere along the road, something disappeared from my side bar:
Oh, now this is rich. German greenies calculate that a blog which gets 15,000 hits or more a month (yay! we qualify!) pumps out 8 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.
Hmmm ... rough math time: 15,000 "hits" corresponds to roughly 20,000 page views (in the old SiteMeter days). I've been running about 4 times that for 12 years now so - let's see ... carry the one - this blog has belched 350 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere.
Sigh. Those are rookie numbers. Must up my game.
Or we can all just think it's a bunch of Eco-fascist nonsense by some very unsavory totalitarian would-be overlords who deserve all the mockery we can give them. And so this will go proudly back into the side bar to make a permanent focus of mockery for the oh-so-mockable.
Pretty much everyone is mocking Taylor Lorenz' WaPo article about how EVIL conservatives scuppered the new Ministry of Truth. You remember Taylor, don't you? She's the one who doxxed the woman who ran the Libs of TikTok account and then sobbed about how mean everyone was to her.
Anyhow, this is the bit from her article that is the most jaw droppingly stupid:
Jankowicz’s case is a perfect example of this system at work, said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “They try to define people by these single, decontextualized moments,” Brooking said. “In Nina’s case it’s a few TikTok videos, or one or two comments out of thousands of public appearances. They fixate on these small instances and they define this villain.”...Okay, Taylor - now do Roseanne.
The Czar of Muscovy wrote a long, long time ago that you will understand the media perfectly if you just think of them as mean middle school girls. Jealous. not very smart, but mean.
He's making the right enemies. He has cleverly aligned himself with 80% of the voters in his battles against Covid lockdowns, pedophile teachers, and now Disney. He had and has massive support in all of these.
It helps that he comes across as trying to protect children in each of these areas. It also helps that his opponents are just so creepy and weird. Both of those things will help him with the Minivan Mom voter demographic.
The Democratic Party has been intellectually out of gas for a long time now. They've basically defined themselves by what they are not - not George W. Bush, not Donald Trump - rather than what they are. They've had a lot of success doing this over the last 20 years.
But DeSantis is now shining the spotlight on what they are, like being the party that wants to teach weird sex fetishes to kindergartners. This is exposing just how, well, weird the party is. So weird that people don't want to be associated with it.
I guess we'll see how this plays out, but until the Democrats stop coming up with more creepy nonsense aimed at kittle kids, I expect that DeSantis will keep doing what he's been doing.
I'm struggling to understand what the Administration is trying to accomplish (other than a Press Conference). If they ban 80% lowers, people will just 3D print them. Heck, I've been posting about this for almost a decade, and the technology is way more advanced now. What are they going to do, criminalize 3D printers?
It seems that it's all a tale told by and for idiots, full of sound and fury but ultimately signifying nothing.
The Romans were hated by a lot of people in the ancient world. This bothered the Romans not a bit. Their attitude was spelled out in the post title, although the original latin has a certain je ne sais quois: Oderint, dum metuant.
The Powers That Be in these United States seem to have forgotten that this is a dynamic, and that things done to instill fear can lead to hate. Big Country hits this nail on the head looking at all the sanctions that the US PTB are piling on Russia:
Two is that #ourguys are purely fucking up by the numbers. Initially, the Russian Population was starting to protest against the war. Lots of Grannies, regular civvies, and yeah, Vlad had a crackdown on it, as he is wont to be. However, all this 'other stuff'... the cutting off of Paypal, Applepay, Goolagpay, services and well, just about any and all economic 'stuff' in Russia by OUR Oligarchs?
Yeah, that's not helping us... in fact it just goes to prove the point to the Russian People that Putin IS right and that they, the Russian People as a whole have been targeted by the dissolute and decadent west for elimination. Hell, it ain't a hard argument to make, and we're proving it by putting the hurt on the Russian People as a whole. The Russians as history has shown rally around The Rodina when shit like this happens. A nearly singlemindedness and even bloodthirsty willingness to protect The Motherland
No matter what the cost.
So this makes me nervous, 'cos instead of them blaming Putin, they're realizing, from their POV, he might be right and it's time to make US hurt as badly as we're making them hurt. And as far as I can tell, that'd be the Giant Flashbulb Option, as they really don't have a way of fucking up or fucking with the general Untied Staaz population.
So if our beef is with Vlad and the Oligarchs (their Oligarchs, not our Oligarchs) then why do the sanctions seem to be targeted at the Russian People? Oh, and I still don't have a good explanation as to why Ukraine absolutely positively has to be a member of NATO. Still waiting on that one.
Ya know, what comes to mind is the ancient Greek saying that those who the Gods would destroy first are turned mad. About sums up the US PTB, right there.
And an anonymous commenter leaves a really concerning comment over at Big Country's place:
More or less right on the money. Couple that with the administration coming up with shit like sanctions on India because they won't sanction Russia. Now India are looking at what they can trade without using the USD. Good work retards.
Lot of Arab countries now talking about investing more in/with China too. Worth watching what the BRICS countries do, once the move away from trade in USD kicks in...
"Good work, retards" looks like it's fixin' the be an excellent epitaph for the US PTB once they destroy the dollar as the world's reserve currency and the US standard of living drops by 70%.
Ah, brings to mind the old days, working at Three Letter Security Agency back in the '80s. We all agreed that if the balloon went up we'd just go out and sunbathe in the parking lot and wait for that last big flash bulb to go off. Been a long time since I thought of that. And so, a musical tribute to the last tanning session (stolen from Western Rifle Shooters):
Damn, I wish we had a smarter and less reckless Ruling Class.
I wrote this a month ago and don't think any differently:
The ghosts of Stalingrad
Peter doesn't think we have any compelling national interest to get into a war with Russia over Ukraine. I agree, and would amplify it like this:
Why on earth are we talking about getting into a war in Russia in the winter?
I mean, you could ask Napoleon how that turned out, or the German 6th Army. Heck, you could ask the Afghani allies we just left behind how good an idea this is. Since our military has such a good track record this century.
Peter's take is that the Powers That Be are getting desperate as the economy is mired in stagflation, the vaxx mandate is increasingly unpopular, and Biden's approval rating drops lower than any President in my lifetime. A foreign adventure is often the prescription for what ails them - politics ends at the water's edge, right?
Except no - firstly, this is nothing but madness. Bill Clinton at least had the good sense to bomb a Somali aspirin factory rather than Sevastapol. Secondly, we've heard from Democrats for 20 years that politics does NOT end at the water's edge.
Quite frankly, it's time for Congress to step up as the Adult Supervision* and pass a resolution saying that we do not have a compelling national interest in NATO expansion into Ukraine, and we sure as heck don't have a compelling interest in Americans getting killed over that. It sure would be something to see the Democrats filibuster that.
It's been a long time since I've tagged a post "Atomic War" ...
* This just goes to illustrate how weird things are.
UPDATE 22 January 2022 18:17: J.Kb has a must read post about this.
I would expand on this, with several additional arguments:
One thing that I have not been able to figure out is who would benefit from the US sending 8,500 (or 50,000 - the number keeps changing) US troops to Stalingrad in winter. We've seen this movie before and we all know how it comes out. There are pretty much no good arguments to do this - nothing but huffing and puffing about "deterring aggression" and "stopping Putin's land grab" and "country borders are sacred". Let's quickly dispense with these arguments and move on to who really wins.
Deterring Aggression. It's not 1939, and the US Establishment isn't Neville Chamberland. A quick review of the first two decades of this century will establish the wars we've fought: Afghanistan (2001-2021), Iraq (2003 - present), Libya (2011), Syria (2013). The problem isn't an American meekness; on the contrary. Vladimir Putin knows this, and doesn't have to read between the lines to understand what NATO expansion plans for Ukraine would mean to a Russia that shares a border with it.
Putin's "Land Grab". So Russia has demanded guarantees from NATO that (a) Ukraine will not be admitted to the coalition (as this would compel NATO to defend Ukraine in the future, by treaty), and also guarantees that NATO offensive weapons will not be stationed in Ukraine. The NATO General Secretary has explicitly rejected both demands, as has the US State Department (at least according to the Russian foreign ministry; while this is not proof, it does concur with the NATO General Secretary's public statements from two days ago). So what options does Putin have? More importantly, what options are we giving him?
"National Borders are sacrosanct". Well, except for the US-Mexico border, I guess. This doesn't pass the "red face" test - the fact that people can say this without shame only shows that our elites are, well, shameless.
So who wins in this showdown? We know who is facing the risks - you know, that whole Stalingrad in winter thing, but Russia is facing substantial risks as well from sanctions, a military with some good units but many not so good ones, potential guerrilla war, etc. NATO appears to be splintering before our eyes as Germany, France, and others refuse to do any heavy lifting (Germany's offer a a few thousand mil surplus helmets to Ukraine speaks volumes on how tight this "alliance" is).
Oh yeah - Russia has a bunch of nuclear missiles aimed at us. That would never go sideways, right? So there are lots of potential losers here.
Who wins?
China. This is long, but clearly and plainly laid out. I highly recommend you spend the time to watch it:
Other winners: The Military Industrial Complex (Defense suppliers and retired 4 stars who get cushy and well paid gigs on their boards of directors). The Biden Administration which gets to keep the Hunter Biden Ukrainian payoffs swept under the carpet. The Democratic Party which is desperately looking for something - anything - to change the electorate's focus from the disastrous Afghanistan bug out, or inflation, or the increasingly unpopular Covid lockdowns, or the Teacher's Unions destroying public education, or the weakening economy.
I guess that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out what adding that whole "Stalingrad in winter" thing to that list will do in the run up to the elections.
Tucker Carlson quite rightly asks: how does any of this make America stronger? Clearly it doesn't - to the contrary. But if you don't pound the jingoistic War Drum with the idiots in the media you're Putin's Stooge or Neville Chamberlin or unpatriotic. Or something.
I'm so old that I remember Democrats shouting that they were tired of their patriotism being questioned. Times sure have changed.
But remember: these people are all so much smarter (and nicer!) than you are. You stooge, you.
UPDATE 27 January 2022 17:46: Divemedic has a detailed post about another downside - our diminished military capability and top-heavy brass. You should read the whole thing but this is the summation:
The US has cut its ability to project power so severely, that it can no longer afford to be, nor can it be, the world’s policeman.
Russia and China know that.
But hey - on to Stalingrad!
UPDATE 27 January 2022 18:40: LOL:
The other things the BBC were moaning about were the winter famine wiping out the children of the Taliban and the poor pitiful Ukrainians who are ill-equipped to fight the Red Army. I see a confluence of benefits here. The Taliban have $89 billion dollars in high tech weaponry they manifestly don't need and the Ukraine produces most of Europes wheat. They could trade weaponry to the breadbasket of Europe for food. Win win!
Helpful. That's me.
Maybe $89 B of food would give them enough weapons to get to Stalingrad, amirite? Who says that Atomic War can't be hilarious?
UPDATE 27 January 2022 19:01: Yeah, yeah, I can stop anytime. Kurt Schlicter (LTC USA, Ret) has an informative post about the difference between the Cold War NATO of his service days and today's NATO. He echos and amplifies what Divemedic highlights, from an Army (vs. a Navy) perspective. He is even more pessimistic (and sarcastically so) than Divemedic is. But he gets deadly serious in his key point:
It seems like we might have trouble achieving our objectives. And one of the biggest reasons is that it’s not clear what our objectives would even be. Since none of the usual hawks can be bothered to articulate a vital American interest involved in defending Ukraine’s borders, that makes it hard to come up with objectives for the military. “Stop Putin” is not really a military objective; it’s sort of an amorphous goal.
So what does victory look like? Putin held off to the outskirts of Kiev? Putin tossed back over the Belarus and Russian borders? What’s our desired end state? Or are we not going to articulate that either? Maybe we can just sort of exist in a tense status quo over some sort of demilitarized zone for seven decades or so. Gee, sound familiar?
Now all these questions deserve answers, but don’t look for any since none of the answers are good. And bad answers would slow the rush to war, so we can’t have them come out. Instead, the establishment is going back to the classics. If you ask what America’s vital interest is, you love Putin. If you ask what our military objectives would be, much less how we can rev up the combat power way over there to attain them, you love Putin. Yeah, it’s always a delight to be a vet of the Cold War being who is told he digs the Russians by a bunch of DC saps whose experience with the Bear is trying a Moscow Mule once, deciding it was icky, and asking for a white wine spritzer instead.
The Ukrainians are getting a raw deal, and I hope they drown their invaders in a river of blood. But it’s not our fight. And, if we did fight, there’s a significant chance we would lose. Then every two-bit tyrant on Earth will be coming for a piece of the helpless giant. We’re weak right now, folks, and the worst thing we can do is get up in front of everyone and prove it.
This. This exactly. The Administration looks like it is trying to draw into an inside straight. With the potential death, destruction, and risk to America's international position, I'd sure like answers - any answers - to the question what do we get out of any of this?
When people are taken out of their depth they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
All they have to do is threaten to dynamite their computer chip plants, and the Chinese will simply not invade. Simple.
"Simple", of course, applies to the authors of the paper. All you have to do it listen to all the hysterical talk about what happened a year ago in Washington, and look at what the current Administration is doing to the economy to get a sense of what governments will do to consolidate power - even at the expense of economic damage.
Oh, and it seems that this article is the one that was downloaded most often from the War College web site in 2021. Oooooh kaaaay.
Via Samizdata, we find something very, very disturbing: a significant number of published medical studies are fraudulent:
As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.
...
Mol, like Roberts, has conducted systematic reviews only to realise that most of the trials included either were zombie trials that were fatally flawed or were untrustworthy. What, he asked, is the scale of the problem? Although retractions are increasing, only about 0.04% of biomedical studies have been retracted, suggesting the problem is small. But the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials.
Bolded text is my emphasis. The problem seems to be institutional: researchers must "publish or perish" and it's the most eye-catching studies that get published because publishers are trying to increase subscription revenue in order to survive. Neither researcher nor publisher are incentivized to not make up data, because there is very little reputational risk involved here - only 0.04% of studies get retracted.
If this analysis is consistent across all medical fields, then it's a coin toss as to whether a random medical study has made-up data.
And notice that this only considers the motivation of individual advancement or profit; there's another whole political motivation that can apply in the cases of, say, the safety and effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquinine. Or Climate Change. In both of these cases, the more you know about the actual science and the more you examine the data, the less trustworthy "consensus" science appears.
But none of this will stop morons who know none of this from sneering that they "trust the science".
So General Lee's statue has been removed from Charlottesville's main drag. People have been tossing the word "traitor" around quite generously. Of course, to these folks it's Year Zero, and there's never been any history until today. Or something.
And so they look like morons. They literally know nothing.
To help you understand this, here is a parable:
Let me try to make the decline of history more concrete by way of an analogy. Imagine that you had fallen asleep in 2005 and stayed asleep until 2150. Further assume that when you woke up in 2150, everyone loved the Iraq War. Not just Rumsfeld-style liked it, but fucking loved it. They loved it so much, that if you dared to question the righteousness of liberating the Iraqis from bondage, you’d be considered unfit for civil conversation. Intellectuals in 2150 prove their intellectual-ness by signaling to each other they support the Iraq War more than other people. In other words, by 2150, mainstream opinion on the Iraq War would be such that Donald Rumsfeld in 2005 would – by 2150 standards – be considered only moderately pro-war.
Regardless of what you think about the Iraq War in the present day, you’d have a pretty low opinion of history as practiced in 2150.
We have all sorts of historians today rewriting the history of that period, because Reasons.* Color me unimpressed.
As it turns out, there are a ton of primary sources from the day that are available to us, that we can use to check today's historical narrative. That war was a defining event for the people of the day, and like the Greatest Generation's memoirs of World War II there were many, many who wrote of their experiences in the American War of Southern Independence.** We can use these memoirs to see just how retarded today's narrative is, if we are careful.
We want to choose quality sources, of course. There are quite a lot that can immediately be discarded as hopelessly biased - pretty much everything from Jubal Early and the "Lost Cause" school, for example. But how can we tell reliable sources from propaganda?
We want to look for a number of things: We'd like someone who understood history and how it is documented; a professional historian would be ideal, as he would be writing at least in part for future historians. We'd like someone who participated directly, of course, ideally fighting against the side that he defends in his writing. As lawyers like to say, this "admission against interest" gives a lot of credibility. And since the claim here is that modern historians lack credibility, we want credibility uber allies in the memoirs we choose from the time.
Is there such a source? There is.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr. was a Harvard history professor, and first President of the American Historical Association. Grandson and Great-Grandson of Presidents, he was from that Massachusetts Adams family, He is more properly referred to as General Charles Francis Adams, having served in the Union Army during the war.
And so to today's charge of Treason leveled against Robert E. Lee, what can we learn from General Adams? After all, Adams ticks all the boxes in what we are looking for in a credible source from the day.
Adams wrote a book (actually the transcript of a speech he gave to the Phi Beta Kappa Society - another box for us to tick!) that is available for free download today: Shall Cromwell Have a Statue? You can download it yourself (it's a pretty easy read), but Fosetti covered this years ago:
Adams' answer is unequivocally "yes."
He goes through a long argument about how Lee was not a traitor. For if we wish to call Lee a traitor, we would have to call Washington, Cromwell, William of Orange and Hampden traitors as well. Lee was loyal to his state, which was where he believed his primary loyalty lay.
Then Adams tries to make a distinction between Virginia's decision to secede and other Cotton States' decisions to secede. The latter states seceded when Lincoln won the election. Virginia did not. Virginia believed in secession (as did everyone who ratified the Constitution, according to Mr Adams). Virginia was willing to let the other states peacefully secede, but did not wish to secede with them. Only after the US government tried to re-supply Sumter, an act of war against a sovereign state (i.e. South Carolina), according to the logic of Virginia and the original understanding of the Constitution, did Virginia rebel. According to Virginia, the North had effectively changed the Constitution at that point and Virginia seceded to defend the original Constitution. Mr Adams understands this argument but sees it as hopeless outdated and out-of-touch. Nevertheless, he sees it as consistent. Lee then went with his state.
They should read Fosetti's review (or better yet, Adams' book) and learn what one of the best sources of the day believed. Or they can keep calling Lee a traitor and keep sounding like morons. Alas, my view of the world is so jaded lately that I suspect that I know how many people will choose. That's why I have a tag for "Decline of the Progressive West".
* I think there's something to the idea floated on Instapundit that as long as the South voted Democrat, historians were happy to present a different history. Now that the South reliably votes against the Democrats, it's book burning time:
But there’s also this: “Don’t overthink this, because it’s quite simple, really. When Democrats’ national position depended on unwavering support from ‘the Solid South,’ we got lots of pro-Southern propaganda: the Lost Cause, Gone With The Wind, Disneyfied Uncle Remus, etc. As a vital Democrat constituency group, southerners, even practical neo-Confederates, were absolved of all sins as long as they stayed in line.” If the south were still a vital constituency today, Democrats would sound like Bill Clinton did in the 1990s.
** It wasn't a Civil War because the Confederate States did not want to take over the north. "War Between the States" is ambiguous, losing the underlying motivations.
Note: This is a repost from 2017 but is as topical today as then.
Helpful safety tip: don't put bags or open containers of gasoline in your car.
The Democrats are turning into Florida Man in every state ...
Hat tip: American Digest.
Well, I actually disagree with P.J. O'Rourke, who she quotes:
"Populism is a lie and a logical sophistry. The very idea of the “struggle of the haves against the have-nots” presupposes the zero-sum fallacy that only a fixed amount of good things exist in the world, and I can only have more good things if I take them from you." -P.J. O'Rourke
Now O'Rourke is a smart guy so it's very interesting what he left out of his piece - because what he left out sets up a straw man for him to knock down. Silly populists! Don't you know that you're getting in the way of the march towards a history so bright we'll have to wear shades?
Except that's not how it's worked out over the last 40 years, is it? Public policy has focused on a very specific set of preferences - environmental regulation, free trade, and open borders. Each of these has had two consequences. First, it has led to massive off-shoring of manufacturing to east Asia in particular, padding the bottom line of corporate America and leading to a lot of great high paying government jobs for Ivy League graduates like O'Rourke. Second, it has hollowed out the working class and the towns they live in. Not for nothing is it called the "Rust Belt".
This isn't an issue of mechanization and productivity reducing employment. Rather, it was an explicit choice (by both political parties) that U.S. Government policy should encourage factories and their high paying jobs to be located elsewhere than in the U.S.A.
And now Mr. O'Rourke wonders, mystified, where all this populism came from all of a sudden. And look at how cynically he phrases the issue: "I can only have good things if I take them from you" - when that's precisely what corporate America and O'Rourke's swell Ivy League buddies did to working class America.
They have made out very well financially on the destruction of industrial America. O'Rourke knows this - after all, he hails from Toledo Ohio.
And so to "populism", by which O'Rourke no doubt means "Donald Trump". I posted about this dynamic way back in the summer of 2016, when I linked to a post by the blogger who went by the nom de blog Archdruid. The Archdruid posted what I thought was all you needed to know to understand what was happening. This bit is most relevant to O'Rourke's rather pathetic strawman:
The result in both countries [UK and USA] was a political climate in which the only policies up for discussion were those that favored the interests of the affluent at the expense of the working classes and the poor. That point has been muddied so often, and in so many highly imaginative ways, that it’s probably necessary to detail it here. Rising real estate prices, for example, benefit those who own real estate, since their properties end up worth more, but it penalizes those who must rent their homes, since they have to pay more of their income for rent. Similarly, cutting social-welfare benefits for the disabled favors those who pay taxes at the expense of those who need those benefits to survive.In the same way, encouraging unrestricted immigration into a country that already has millions of people permanently out of work, and encouraging the offshoring of industrial jobs so that the jobless are left to compete for an ever-shrinking pool of jobs, benefit the affluent at the expense of everyone else. The law of supply and demand applies to labor just as it does to everything else: increase the supply of workers and decrease the demand for their services, and wages will be driven down. The affluent benefit from this, since they pay less for the services they want, but the working poor and the jobless are harmed by it, since they receive less income if they can find jobs at all.
At this point I must point out that I'm a member of that salary class, and have done very well over the last 30+ years. However, my chosen field (Computer/Network Security) sure doesn't seem to have taken away any working class jobs - and my upbringing leaves me infuriated by O'Rourke's sneering. And even more so by his seemingly intentional blindness to the consequences of the policies he advocates. This song brutally exposes what he can't be bothered to cast his eyes upon:
These people are our neighbors. They are our fellow countrymen. Are their dreams for the future of less import than our own? Should public policy in this country crush those dreams? Is there a reason why public policy should preference Palo Alto over Toledo?
I'm afraid this turned into a rant - that certainly is not directed at Tam. But the smug self-satisfaction of folks like O'Rourke - people who listened to their professors telling them that they were "the best and the brightest" and who actually bought into that malarky - they are really just showing the world that they're a bunch of dumbasses. Nice strawman, O'Rourke. Be a shame if someone knocked it down, amirite?
And at this point if you do not understand what is driving populism in this country (both the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders versions) then watch that video again. And read the quote from O'Rourke again. Repeat as necessary. You will know that you understand modern populism precisely when the hair on the back of your neck stands on end.
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever- Thomas Jefferson
