Yeah. My best friend (of 37 years) has turned into one of these in middle age. It’s hard to even be around him now. We meet up for beers (we live over an hour apart now) and it’s “What’s up? How’s it going?”
“Trump is ruining the economy, my company charges me $600 a months for health insurance (for three, and he is a millionaire), and the country is a fascist hellhole!”
“Define fascism.”
And then he goes off and I’m sorry I came.
Every time. We’re in our fifties. Who does that? Their minds are ruined. I don’t know if they will ever be well again. I’ve even tried to get him to move to Canada with help from the Canadian half of my family just so maybe we can be normal again, but this is their religion, and they are fanatics.
I have the same experience, partially from being invloved in politics on the fringes as a consequence of work/study and from personal interest: there's as if there's some kind of circuit-breaker in their minds that's been burned out and now their minds are shorting out.
"Nice weather we've been having, eh Phil?"
"Do you know how little time we've left to fight climate change?"
There's a Swedish idiom applicable to such people:
"Goddag yxskaft" - lit. "Hello axehandle". It means someone who will reply in non sequiteurs from them being as blunt in the head as an axe-handle; i.e. the sharp worky-bit is missing.
I am going to shamelessly plunder that. Next time someone gets all huffy with me and asks me to define woke I'm going to reply with "a group of people for whom the sharp worky-bit is missing"
With my family it's like Tourette syndrome. Nice weather, which will only get warmer because Trump doesn't beleive in climate change. School's starting soon. That's all going away since Trump gutted the DOE. Did you hear they extracted DNA from the Dragon Man skull and determined it was indeed from a Denisovan? I hope they still have their funding, because in America we don't belive in science any more!
I remember Alex Berenson writing about a liberal cousin--I think--that he met with after covid had wound down a bit. She was asking him a bunch of utterly retarded questions about it and he very seriously looked her in the eye and said something like that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard and she stopped the nonsense. Everyone's not that easy to shut up but entertaining it or debating it only gives them more ground to be stupid. Find a thought terminating cliche that fits the idiot you're currently in front of and slap it on them like you own their ass--that'll shut most people up--then change the subject.
I really love this! I will try to find a canned response so that it's not such an exhausting thing...................maybe I'll just use that one....The most ridiculous thing I've ever heard....
I know what you mean. When I was younger, I could think fast on my feet and I grew up in a very sarcastic household so I could lay some serious smack down on somebody without stopping to take a breath. And I would get a bit of enjoyment from doing it :) but I'm mid 50s now and just don't have the mental bandwidth to bother.
Same - along with raised voices. I had to train myself out of sarcasm once I went out into the world. It doesn't win friends, and there are already enough people who don't like me!
For me it's my parents. I try to steer the conversation to real things in our lives. Their grandkids, their house, my dad's job. They're not there with me for long, but I try to focus on the time we are together, spending time in the real world. How do you do it?
It is hard to describe the dodgy way everyday conversations must now be conducted. Always with lots of background noise trying to burst into it whether it belongs there or not.
It is exhausting. I’ve gravitate toward friends who are curious about me and who respect my opinions, even when we disagree. I’ve found some good people :)
Fortunately, our friends and acquaintances are always grounded in the real world. Rain, drought, crops, community stuff, like news about who's in the hospital, who died, etc. Lots of older folks in our circles.
It takes practice but if you really listen to them you can hear them contradicting themselves in just four sentences. Then point out the contradictions. They will usually get huffy right away but then just let them go. If they actually care like they say they do they will admit to themselves that they were guilty of doublethink and be careful about the shit they let into their brains and out of their mouths.
If they double down and get even more angry, kindly suggest they ask their therapists to increase the dosage.
My brother called me a “ridiculous conservative“. Dude, I’m a f*cking liberal from 2004! In 2004, his views would be considered completely and utterly insane! This is not the world I was meant to live in.
I wish they would stop. I can tell it's bad for their psyches, always thinking about how bad Trump is. My latest idea is to have something like a swear jar. "Put another dollar in the jar, Mom."
“Who does that?” Unfortunately almost everyone I grew up with and around. It’s such a preposterous ritual. But it’s one I have to sit through over and over every time I return to the big blue city I grew up in.
Up here it's *far* worse, Canadians have double and tripled-down on the Trump Derangement. I have one old high-school buddy on a group chat who doesn't even think Trump was shot and that he staged it. I just avoid the conversation like some lunatic on a street corner.
Mark Crispin Miller at NFU posits that the vax and accompanying spike protein has played a role in this. People all over the place are just off their rockers, behaving in very antisocial ways with no brake on their emotions.
(I'm guessing your erstwhile friend was quick to line up for the vax and might take a dim view of the mouth breathers who shunned it.)
Toby Rogers has written a lot about vaxxing in general causing massive neurological dysfunction which has and is resulting in people losing much of what makes us decent humans--compassion, empathy etc--and also the ability to think critically and not act like maniacs. I definitely think the covid shots did this in a big way but all the other ones have done much damage as well. He says that the crazy vaxxing in the US is driving the trans/queer rates because almost all of those people are on the autism spectrum which vax plays a huge role in.
That poses a very tricky causation versus correlation question. Did the vax exacerbate TDS or are vaxxing and TDS simply fellow travelers? Of course, the now-vaxxed had TDS before the vax came out- that was why Pfizer waited until just after the election to announce the clinical trial results. But the TDS crowd does seem just that much more unhinged since those heady days five or so years ago.
This shit happened long before covid. The overuse and too-high dosage of SSRI’s have more to do with it. And that shit was well underway by the early 1960’s.
You hit the nail on the head: “this is their religion.” It’s so incredibly sad. After 9/10, I’m in shock about the depravity and delusion on the progressive left.
Yes. This is why they call normies Nazis: they need an enemy to fight that shows how serious they are and thus deserving of respect. Virtue signaling, again.
I’m thinking about what should be our (the Righteous ones) response to the opposing (Leftists ones). Just yesterday I saw/heard myself moderating my speech as not to offend someone I knew. Whereas another friend was speaking freely, not offensively, to the same person who he didn’t know or his political views. I made decision to change my filter.
I’m pretty blunt and sardonic. I try to just talk about other things with these people, but you did notice the, “Define fascism.” didn’t you?
The fact is none of them can. They’ve never even considered they might have to do so, or that they ought to be able to since they keep calling people fascist.
I personally have zero tolerance for calling people fascist since my grandfather had to go fight the SOBs, and wiped them out.
And he was lucky. He was a bridge builder. He only got strafed and caught in artillery strikes occasionally. But he shipped out two months before my mother was born (his eldest) and didn’t see her until she was four years old. What a waste of years.
Anyway, that’s why I just can’t tolerate the “fascism” garbage.
Maurice didn't say sending his friend to another country would cure his friend, he said it would make things normal again for Maurice :) Like sending a crazy relative to Bedlam.
lol. No. But removing him from being under American sovereignty and rules might reduce his affliction, whilst also exposing him to the rules and rulers he thinks he prefers.
And I am within eyeshot of Canada across the lake, while he is an hour away. Getting him there removes him from his social circle and puts him closer to me.
Indeed. The last five or so years have turned me into a full on Jungian. He brilliantly articulates how the religious libido manifests in modern “secular” man.
It's a tribe identification ritual. Kind of like the friend-or-foe systems on military aircraft. They repeat the liberal koans expecting you to nod in approval. This means you are one of them, safe. The problem is that when they are conducting their test they are tone deaf. So if the listener doesn't actually agree but says nothing (which is most often the case, since they know challenging them will only result in a wild show of moral indignation and disbelief), the signaler inaccurately reads this as agreement and so they keep on going with their diatribe. Ultimately it's a psychological trap where the only way of winning is not to play.
"This is their religion and they are fanatics." Yup. They're filling a God-shaped hole with hate. And they can't go back because it would challenge their reasons for their anger.
Over the last year I’ve pretty much lost 2 friends of over 25 years because I had the audacity to say the climate is always changing so who’s to say it’s caused by man? Would’ve thought I had propositioned their wives for lewd sex acts than voicing my own opinion rather than bow down at the altar of the “experts”. Schools and the media have destroyed peoples minds, sad thing is they see themselves as the good guys.
..see, and that's the thing: u ask them to define 'fascism', and most of them CANNOT do it. it's more regurgitated liberal double-speak, typically learned from the main stream media and/or higher education.
oh, if u ask them to define anything, for that matter, get ready for a LOT of yelling/whining, and possibly another lost 'friendship' (which i've personally experienced, and have also found myself questioning said 'friendship').
Does your friend ever watch world news? In Nepal they just torched the parliament building. In Lebanon they don't have electricity or running water most days. These are only different problems from the Drumpf menace but it helps anybody to have some perspective
I was one who couldn’t get negronis in Midtown for like a year because I wouldn’t flash a vax card. I’ve got more being-on-the-outs-with-the-fascist-regime cred than these people.
you could have scored one at the blind tiger in the village...or smith social in cobble hill. lots of places had the scary signage but once you got inside nobody asked you for the MOTB
Here's the thing. I'm of Argentine background. If the US, and Trump, were as fascist and "far-right" as the Cluster B Red Guards jerking themselves off online claim they are, they would have been picked up in the dead of night, thrown into Ford Falcons with no license plates, and very quickly tossed into the Atlantic out of airplanes. So yeah, performative victim minstreling online isn't *quite* the same thing as "fighting fascism"...
I was cracking up pretty loudly after reading that paragraph. Just what I needed, Chris, especially after feeling so demoralized yesterday. Levity helps! More importantly, Ezra Klein and other asshats like him are such phonies. When was the last time people living under fascism could speak out publicly against fascism, as you correctly point out? Absurd.
Some of these people work in jobs where decent judgment is expected, and ghoulishly gloating over a murder demonstrates untrustworthy character. Certainly true of teachers and medical professionals. I see what story they'll tell about it, but I'm not enormously concerned. I'd like to think some of them will learn a lesson, land on their feet, and be less dumb in the future.
Hilarious. Do they ever listen to themselves? My working theory is that the people who come up with such language are not native English speakers. If they were, they would recognize the unintended reference to cloud-cuckoo land.
I remember when the editorial line was "sex sells". Now it's "accusations of fascism with genocidal intent sells" and I think we're allowed to miss the good old days on that note.
There's also a lovely connection to that grand old American philosophical tradition of Pragmaticism, from CS Peirce and William James, about how a stated belief should always be considered "equal to its cash value". That is, words should never be taken as meaning something inconsistent with relevant action, and how nonsense inevitably descend from ignoring this razor. But philosophizing overmuch seems inappropriate in the current funerary mood. More later, after the vigil.
'I remember when the editorial line was "sex sells". Now it's "accusations of fascism with genocidal intent sells..."'
Good point. Considering how sex has always been one of the strongest impulses influencing human relations, it's noteworthy that TDS, which IMO can be considered a mental illness, has now supplanted it.
“We’ve indulged an enormous amount of dimwitted cosplay from childish moral narcissists. You see the cost. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop tolerating this monstrous idiocy. How incredibly shameful these years have been.”
How undeniably true. In the name of tolerance we allowed this cancerous behavior to continue far too long. We all must repent.
I find it odd that these supposed democracy protectors/fascism-fighters never raised a voice or even asked a question when Biden summarily fired thousands of workers because they wouldn’t take a shot that didn’t even prevent transmission. Supposedly you would have a milder case of Covid which is disputable. But if we follow this logic, shouldn’t all diabetics be excluded from pastry shops? No they were too cowed or possibly unintelligent to even question this policy and meekly obeyed, presenting their vaccine cards. Now having a different opinion is fascist but firing thousands of workers because they won’t bend to your will was all good.
The problem with this Fake Left Theater is that there’s a growing contingent on the Right that’s ready to answer lefty cosplaying with with reality.
The 21st-century begins with farce and quickly shifts to jackboots kicking puffy faces and saying: “THIS what you mean?”
One can see this cadre’s numbers swelling. And they’ve less of a cosplay aura about them. Worse, tens of millions of average Joes systematically *not* schooled in basic liberal thought—men ranging from 20 to 50—are so sick of the Lefty theater that a lot of them would welcome a *real*, non-theatrical stomping for Act 5.
I find the modern left akin to an insecure boyfriend constantly yelling at and accusing his girlfriend of cheating on him. It’s perplexing for the accused party who isn’t doing or considering that but at some point you break up or cheat.
I really wish we could “break up” with the crazies but I have no idea how that would work.
Act 3 is when the Right attacks Ezra, Act 4 is when Ezra bravely drains a negroni live on TikTok in Union Station and leads an army of disabled homeless fentanyl users into battle against the the Vance-led police state, and he WINS, and Act 5 is when everyone left undergoes trans surgery and later Ives the rest of their mutilated life out as a furry.
In my several years on this planet I have seen a plethora of different authoritarian leaders all over the World. Our current leader, compared with the crowd after Hitler is not in the top 100 of tyrants. He’s no African despot of the Patrice Lamumba, Idi Amin age. He doesn’t hold s candle to Pol Pot or the Great Leaders of N Korea and the original Big Guy, Chairman Mao. South America would scoff at his Fidel lite persona. Even a powerless loser like Che was more dictatorial. Europe? How about the entire Soviet Union? They would have so many of their citizens shot they would run out of bullets.
Meanwhile, our tyrant can’t even please the lock’em up crowd cause he has a worry about the law and the reaction of his opponents destroying the country he is trying to protect and make great again.
The democrats are the party of projection. They wish they had such a powerful leader as Trump. Rather than being populated with weak, worthless leaders like Biden, Harris and the geriatric ward that is called leadership they would love a strong man, a Trump, who could use his cudgels to get those far-right Nazis in line or in the camps or in the dirt where they belong. So, not having a leader they have to rely on nut job random freaks to get to their enemy. A press that performs the propaganda role so essential to a successful dictatorship and an intellectual elite who are morally bankrupt and financially corrupt as well. Can they win and subdue their enemies? Only if the enemy continues to treat them like they are citizens with the same rights of citizenship granted and guaranteed to all of us, even our most abhorrent citizens. So, until the far right MAGA dictator and his followers keep the dialogue going, looking for bi-partisanship and civility and trying to talk to the opposition like fellow Americans, the real dictatorship will wait in the wings fighting for control with every power possible, including assassination , in order to achieve the power they crave. If they do again, God protect us from the evil that they will bring.
Thanks Barry, it’s hard to write when you’re as angry as I am. This has been a long time effort by the left to get to this place. I was as complacent about the situation, especially in government and academia. I lost respect for the media ages ago. This murder, essentially an attack on free speech, only reinforced my belief that we are truly in a battle for the survival of our nation.
Agree. I’m thinking about what should be our (the Righteous ones) response to the opposing (Leftists ones). Just yesterday I saw/heard myself moderating my speech as not to offend someone I knew. Whereas another friend was speaking freely, not offensively, to the same person who he didn’t know or his political views. I made decision to change my filter.
I don’t want to paint those who disagree with me as people that I don’t want to speak but I will not civilly engage with anyone who thinks that by saying and doing anything, including murder, to suppress my freedom to speak is a good thing or merits understanding.
Always good to remind the hyperbolic, “Nazi”-spewing nitwits that they’re still allowed to leave their ghettos without papers, Star of David armbands, or prisoner number tattoos.
Yet they cheered for those armbands for the unvaccinated. (Generalizing here, but likely.) Maybe the symbol on the armband could be that really cool-looking image of the "virus" that some graphic designer cooked up.
I'm about ready to check out from this reality for a few days. I've hung on to see them catch the evil assassin, yet, now they are begging for the publics help? SMDH Good Grief! Either he had help getting away, or, he fell off the face of the Earth? I'm betting it's the former. He left behind too much to be smart enough to elude all the man power hunting him. Time to binge watch some series for a few days. I've been saving Foundation: season 3 for just such an occasion. It's on Apple TV, BTW.
I agree with everything you say though I personally don't subscribe to the 'What kind of person would celebrate the death of another human being' mindset. I think it all depends who that person is. The death of Pol Pot, Hiter and Stalin, who were all humans, wouldn't have unduly bothered me, perhaps because I don't have the Christian thing of believing that all humans have dignity and are redeemable. I see no dignity at all in serial killers like Ted Bundy or that animal that killed Iryna Zarutska.
For me it all comes down, not to a matter of principle, but to one of judgement and a sense of proportion. I have noisy neighbours and while I would celebrate them moving away, killing them would be out of all proportion. However, once we move into the political arena some simple-minded people believe that normal ideas of proportion can be suspended. They have been inculcated into the idea that Politics is very very important, so much so that it's unconnected to the rest of life and therefore anything goes.
To any sane person, Charlie Kirk was an honest, upstanding, brave, smart, well-meaning, good man and for someone to want to murder such a person shows that something must have gone seriously wrong with their judgement and sense of proportion. Schools, the media, politicians, peers, parents etc. are all implicated in this left-wing madness. Yet to be happy that child torturers and murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are dead is not madness at all but a normal, healthy dislike of evil and cruelty. If this were just a matter of principle - never celebrate the death of another person - it would be easy but it's not. It's about judgement gone astray.
Unfortunately, one man’s Hitler is another man’s savior. I understand exactly what you said about proportion and I agree. But real life applications of proportion gets really messy.
I completely agree. Any kind of non-Manichean thinking is messy.
I think nations are best when all its citizens are more or less on the same page, like in Japan of how many western countries once were. Of course, every nation has always had its dissenters and rebels but often their number was small enough to contain and to cow into silence. Unfortunately, western countries at present seem to be split between the traditionalists/conservatives and the progressives, the latter being probably fewer in number but often holding positions of influence (schools, universities, media, justice and in the UK, politics). I think cultural evolution will prove progressivism to be a non-viable way of structuring societies but that is for the future and since we live in the present is of little consolation to us.
I think convincing progressives that Charlie Kirk was good and Tyler Robinson was bad will be a work of decades, even if we ever manage it at all, for the reason you pointed out (to them things look very different). So rather than indulge in endless fruitless discussions that invariably end with, 'But you only think that way because of where you're standing', I would prefer some kind of clean separation. That way we can have our Charlie Kirks, Victor Davis Hansons and Karoline Leavitts and they can have their AOCs, Gavin Newsoms and Tyler Robinsons and we will all be happy. And no, I have no idea how to achieve that.
The events of the last few days bring to mind a famous quote from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn:
“The most terrifying force of death, comes from the hands of men who wanted to be left alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know, that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over.
The moment the men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. TRUE TERROR will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the men who just wanted to be left alone.”
Yeah. My best friend (of 37 years) has turned into one of these in middle age. It’s hard to even be around him now. We meet up for beers (we live over an hour apart now) and it’s “What’s up? How’s it going?”
“Trump is ruining the economy, my company charges me $600 a months for health insurance (for three, and he is a millionaire), and the country is a fascist hellhole!”
“Define fascism.”
And then he goes off and I’m sorry I came.
Every time. We’re in our fifties. Who does that? Their minds are ruined. I don’t know if they will ever be well again. I’ve even tried to get him to move to Canada with help from the Canadian half of my family just so maybe we can be normal again, but this is their religion, and they are fanatics.
I have the same experience, partially from being invloved in politics on the fringes as a consequence of work/study and from personal interest: there's as if there's some kind of circuit-breaker in their minds that's been burned out and now their minds are shorting out.
"Nice weather we've been having, eh Phil?"
"Do you know how little time we've left to fight climate change?"
There's a Swedish idiom applicable to such people:
"Goddag yxskaft" - lit. "Hello axehandle". It means someone who will reply in non sequiteurs from them being as blunt in the head as an axe-handle; i.e. the sharp worky-bit is missing.
‘The sharp worky-bit is missing’. Yes. Sums it up nicely.
The sharp worky-bit is missing 🤣
I am going to shamelessly plunder that. Next time someone gets all huffy with me and asks me to define woke I'm going to reply with "a group of people for whom the sharp worky-bit is missing"
Plunder away!
Call it a delayed pay-back for Lindisfarne, maybe?
🤣🤣
That's awesome.
The "sharp worky-bit" makes it an assault axe with full auto-chop!
WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
I'm stealing "assault axe", just so you know.
Given the number of axes I have, I probably count as a militia all on my lonesone.
Like!
The problem is then they try to beat you over the head with the axe handle.
With my family it's like Tourette syndrome. Nice weather, which will only get warmer because Trump doesn't beleive in climate change. School's starting soon. That's all going away since Trump gutted the DOE. Did you hear they extracted DNA from the Dragon Man skull and determined it was indeed from a Denisovan? I hope they still have their funding, because in America we don't belive in science any more!
How to even respond to them? How? My own kids live in the Pickled Brained PNW, proving ground of this VERY weird brain virus. Scary.
But tell me…. How do you converse with them?
I remember Alex Berenson writing about a liberal cousin--I think--that he met with after covid had wound down a bit. She was asking him a bunch of utterly retarded questions about it and he very seriously looked her in the eye and said something like that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard and she stopped the nonsense. Everyone's not that easy to shut up but entertaining it or debating it only gives them more ground to be stupid. Find a thought terminating cliche that fits the idiot you're currently in front of and slap it on them like you own their ass--that'll shut most people up--then change the subject.
I really love this! I will try to find a canned response so that it's not such an exhausting thing...................maybe I'll just use that one....The most ridiculous thing I've ever heard....
I know what you mean. When I was younger, I could think fast on my feet and I grew up in a very sarcastic household so I could lay some serious smack down on somebody without stopping to take a breath. And I would get a bit of enjoyment from doing it :) but I'm mid 50s now and just don't have the mental bandwidth to bother.
Same - along with raised voices. I had to train myself out of sarcasm once I went out into the world. It doesn't win friends, and there are already enough people who don't like me!
For me it's my parents. I try to steer the conversation to real things in our lives. Their grandkids, their house, my dad's job. They're not there with me for long, but I try to focus on the time we are together, spending time in the real world. How do you do it?
It is hard to describe the dodgy way everyday conversations must now be conducted. Always with lots of background noise trying to burst into it whether it belongs there or not.
It is exhausting and now all too very weird.
It is exhausting. I’ve gravitate toward friends who are curious about me and who respect my opinions, even when we disagree. I’ve found some good people :)
Fortunately, our friends and acquaintances are always grounded in the real world. Rain, drought, crops, community stuff, like news about who's in the hospital, who died, etc. Lots of older folks in our circles.
Good, real stuff.
'But tell me…. How do you converse with them?'
Very carefully.
Yessssss
It takes practice but if you really listen to them you can hear them contradicting themselves in just four sentences. Then point out the contradictions. They will usually get huffy right away but then just let them go. If they actually care like they say they do they will admit to themselves that they were guilty of doublethink and be careful about the shit they let into their brains and out of their mouths.
If they double down and get even more angry, kindly suggest they ask their therapists to increase the dosage.
My brother called me a “ridiculous conservative“. Dude, I’m a f*cking liberal from 2004! In 2004, his views would be considered completely and utterly insane! This is not the world I was meant to live in.
I wish they would stop. I can tell it's bad for their psyches, always thinking about how bad Trump is. My latest idea is to have something like a swear jar. "Put another dollar in the jar, Mom."
Just call it the "Fight Fascism" jar and they'll throw in extra ducats.
“Who does that?” Unfortunately almost everyone I grew up with and around. It’s such a preposterous ritual. But it’s one I have to sit through over and over every time I return to the big blue city I grew up in.
Up here it's *far* worse, Canadians have double and tripled-down on the Trump Derangement. I have one old high-school buddy on a group chat who doesn't even think Trump was shot and that he staged it. I just avoid the conversation like some lunatic on a street corner.
Your buddy is NOT an outlier, I see it every day on FB
I have friends who believe that Trump faked his own assaination attempts. Normal enough on other subjects, but literally zombies on Trump.
How do they explain the death of Corey Comperatore at the Butler rally? Did that man fake it?
Obama care is what screwed up the medical insurance system.
A dumbocrap screw up everyone's medical insurance? The most smart, caring person on the planet? Never! (Said no one, with a functioning brain, ever.)
They literally said out loud “Romneycare was such a disaster in Taxachusetts we should do it nationwide!”
lolol
With respect, the medical insurance system was screwed up before Obamacare. At least for self-employed people like me.
Mark Crispin Miller at NFU posits that the vax and accompanying spike protein has played a role in this. People all over the place are just off their rockers, behaving in very antisocial ways with no brake on their emotions.
(I'm guessing your erstwhile friend was quick to line up for the vax and might take a dim view of the mouth breathers who shunned it.)
Toby Rogers has written a lot about vaxxing in general causing massive neurological dysfunction which has and is resulting in people losing much of what makes us decent humans--compassion, empathy etc--and also the ability to think critically and not act like maniacs. I definitely think the covid shots did this in a big way but all the other ones have done much damage as well. He says that the crazy vaxxing in the US is driving the trans/queer rates because almost all of those people are on the autism spectrum which vax plays a huge role in.
That poses a very tricky causation versus correlation question. Did the vax exacerbate TDS or are vaxxing and TDS simply fellow travelers? Of course, the now-vaxxed had TDS before the vax came out- that was why Pfizer waited until just after the election to announce the clinical trial results. But the TDS crowd does seem just that much more unhinged since those heady days five or so years ago.
This shit happened long before covid. The overuse and too-high dosage of SSRI’s have more to do with it. And that shit was well underway by the early 1960’s.
You hit the nail on the head: “this is their religion.” It’s so incredibly sad. After 9/10, I’m in shock about the depravity and delusion on the progressive left.
Yes. This is why they call normies Nazis: they need an enemy to fight that shows how serious they are and thus deserving of respect. Virtue signaling, again.
I’m thinking about what should be our (the Righteous ones) response to the opposing (Leftists ones). Just yesterday I saw/heard myself moderating my speech as not to offend someone I knew. Whereas another friend was speaking freely, not offensively, to the same person who he didn’t know or his political views. I made decision to change my filter.
I’m pretty blunt and sardonic. I try to just talk about other things with these people, but you did notice the, “Define fascism.” didn’t you?
The fact is none of them can. They’ve never even considered they might have to do so, or that they ought to be able to since they keep calling people fascist.
I personally have zero tolerance for calling people fascist since my grandfather had to go fight the SOBs, and wiped them out.
And he was lucky. He was a bridge builder. He only got strafed and caught in artillery strikes occasionally. But he shipped out two months before my mother was born (his eldest) and didn’t see her until she was four years old. What a waste of years.
Anyway, that’s why I just can’t tolerate the “fascism” garbage.
When they say “fascism” reply “You mean like Biden’s mandates?”
You think moving to CANADA is going to cure him? Maurice, we need to have a talk.
Maurice didn't say sending his friend to another country would cure his friend, he said it would make things normal again for Maurice :) Like sending a crazy relative to Bedlam.
lol. No. But removing him from being under American sovereignty and rules might reduce his affliction, whilst also exposing him to the rules and rulers he thinks he prefers.
And I am within eyeshot of Canada across the lake, while he is an hour away. Getting him there removes him from his social circle and puts him closer to me.
"....but this is their religion..."
The religious impulse always finds a way.
Yes. Everyone has a religion, even the atheists.
Indeed. The last five or so years have turned me into a full on Jungian. He brilliantly articulates how the religious libido manifests in modern “secular” man.
It's a tribe identification ritual. Kind of like the friend-or-foe systems on military aircraft. They repeat the liberal koans expecting you to nod in approval. This means you are one of them, safe. The problem is that when they are conducting their test they are tone deaf. So if the listener doesn't actually agree but says nothing (which is most often the case, since they know challenging them will only result in a wild show of moral indignation and disbelief), the signaler inaccurately reads this as agreement and so they keep on going with their diatribe. Ultimately it's a psychological trap where the only way of winning is not to play.
Move on, man.
You're wasting your time.
Find another friend!
"This is their religion and they are fanatics." Yup. They're filling a God-shaped hole with hate. And they can't go back because it would challenge their reasons for their anger.
Over the last year I’ve pretty much lost 2 friends of over 25 years because I had the audacity to say the climate is always changing so who’s to say it’s caused by man? Would’ve thought I had propositioned their wives for lewd sex acts than voicing my own opinion rather than bow down at the altar of the “experts”. Schools and the media have destroyed peoples minds, sad thing is they see themselves as the good guys.
..see, and that's the thing: u ask them to define 'fascism', and most of them CANNOT do it. it's more regurgitated liberal double-speak, typically learned from the main stream media and/or higher education.
oh, if u ask them to define anything, for that matter, get ready for a LOT of yelling/whining, and possibly another lost 'friendship' (which i've personally experienced, and have also found myself questioning said 'friendship').
..anyway, that's my 2 cents..
Does your friend ever watch world news? In Nepal they just torched the parliament building. In Lebanon they don't have electricity or running water most days. These are only different problems from the Drumpf menace but it helps anybody to have some perspective
These idiots have no idea what a real Nazi was like. Too bad Ezra Klein can't be teleported back to Berlin in 1936 so he could find out.
Really tired of all the liberal urban elitists cosplaying Jacobin French revolutionaries these days. Or is it Red Guards?
They'd be more believable if they took off their furry costumes though...
Klein. 🤔 Berlin during the Nazi regime might be a great place for him.
Red Guards. That’s certainly how they act.
The problem is too many underemployed liberals *want* to be teleported back to 1936 Berlin. It's like their non-Christian Marvel movie fantasy
LOL
I was one who couldn’t get negronis in Midtown for like a year because I wouldn’t flash a vax card. I’ve got more being-on-the-outs-with-the-fascist-regime cred than these people.
This^
you could have scored one at the blind tiger in the village...or smith social in cobble hill. lots of places had the scary signage but once you got inside nobody asked you for the MOTB
I was going into Starbucks and just sitting down and not ordering anything because they were only carding if you went up to the counter. :)
true
Here's the thing. I'm of Argentine background. If the US, and Trump, were as fascist and "far-right" as the Cluster B Red Guards jerking themselves off online claim they are, they would have been picked up in the dead of night, thrown into Ford Falcons with no license plates, and very quickly tossed into the Atlantic out of airplanes. So yeah, performative victim minstreling online isn't *quite* the same thing as "fighting fascism"...
Great ideas for the future though! 🤔🤣
“This is Ezra. This is my last message.”
I was cracking up pretty loudly after reading that paragraph. Just what I needed, Chris, especially after feeling so demoralized yesterday. Levity helps! More importantly, Ezra Klein and other asshats like him are such phonies. When was the last time people living under fascism could speak out publicly against fascism, as you correctly point out? Absurd.
They may not be being rounded up and put in cattle cars for the camps but they are losing their jobs this time - https://x.com/ParkerThayer/status/1966199376247926941
That's almost exactly what Hitler did. right? It's 1934 and we have to stop OrangeManBad now because he's riding roughshod over our feelz
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE HAD AN HR DEPARTMENT
Some of these people work in jobs where decent judgment is expected, and ghoulishly gloating over a murder demonstrates untrustworthy character. Certainly true of teachers and medical professionals. I see what story they'll tell about it, but I'm not enormously concerned. I'd like to think some of them will learn a lesson, land on their feet, and be less dumb in the future.
Hospitals have HR departments to keep their dirty images clean . You have to sell your soul in HR .
The left loves to weaponize HR and RL solutions in hospital systems to flush out the nazis . https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/the-merger-of-rl-solutions-and-datix-11-things-to-know/
"cloud-based patient safety and risk management solution"
presuming this is the final one
Hilarious. Do they ever listen to themselves? My working theory is that the people who come up with such language are not native English speakers. If they were, they would recognize the unintended reference to cloud-cuckoo land.
I remember when the editorial line was "sex sells". Now it's "accusations of fascism with genocidal intent sells" and I think we're allowed to miss the good old days on that note.
There's also a lovely connection to that grand old American philosophical tradition of Pragmaticism, from CS Peirce and William James, about how a stated belief should always be considered "equal to its cash value". That is, words should never be taken as meaning something inconsistent with relevant action, and how nonsense inevitably descend from ignoring this razor. But philosophizing overmuch seems inappropriate in the current funerary mood. More later, after the vigil.
'I remember when the editorial line was "sex sells". Now it's "accusations of fascism with genocidal intent sells..."'
Good point. Considering how sex has always been one of the strongest impulses influencing human relations, it's noteworthy that TDS, which IMO can be considered a mental illness, has now supplanted it.
Well sex sells, ans violence sells. See: Aaron Spelling.
How did this NAZI TRASH got into my Bluesky feed!
I must see the manager immediately!
Your last paragraph:
“We’ve indulged an enormous amount of dimwitted cosplay from childish moral narcissists. You see the cost. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop tolerating this monstrous idiocy. How incredibly shameful these years have been.”
How undeniably true. In the name of tolerance we allowed this cancerous behavior to continue far too long. We all must repent.
Repent and act. It’s going to take courage.
dimwitted cosplay from childish moral narcissists"
At the highest levels. https://youtu.be/BSpudSgofgE?si=8utr4JvenYpLzWTD
I find it odd that these supposed democracy protectors/fascism-fighters never raised a voice or even asked a question when Biden summarily fired thousands of workers because they wouldn’t take a shot that didn’t even prevent transmission. Supposedly you would have a milder case of Covid which is disputable. But if we follow this logic, shouldn’t all diabetics be excluded from pastry shops? No they were too cowed or possibly unintelligent to even question this policy and meekly obeyed, presenting their vaccine cards. Now having a different opinion is fascist but firing thousands of workers because they won’t bend to your will was all good.
That's an example I bring up repeatedly when someone claims that Trump is an authoritarian dictator. So far, I have not had a reasonable response.
The problem with this Fake Left Theater is that there’s a growing contingent on the Right that’s ready to answer lefty cosplaying with with reality.
The 21st-century begins with farce and quickly shifts to jackboots kicking puffy faces and saying: “THIS what you mean?”
One can see this cadre’s numbers swelling. And they’ve less of a cosplay aura about them. Worse, tens of millions of average Joes systematically *not* schooled in basic liberal thought—men ranging from 20 to 50—are so sick of the Lefty theater that a lot of them would welcome a *real*, non-theatrical stomping for Act 5.
Excellent point. The problem with treating decent people like they are monsters is that it removes the disincentives for being a monster.
If you’re going to do the time, you might as well do the crime.
I find the modern left akin to an insecure boyfriend constantly yelling at and accusing his girlfriend of cheating on him. It’s perplexing for the accused party who isn’t doing or considering that but at some point you break up or cheat.
I really wish we could “break up” with the crazies but I have no idea how that would work.
Similar to how the over-the-top treatment of Romney led a bunch of people to vote for the orange menace out of spite.
Bravo. That’s putting it very well.
You're right. It's kinda scary.
First they came for the Communists! And I thought, yeah, I'll sit this one out...
If you keep telling people that what they want is fascism, eventually they’ll decide that fascism is what they want.
Act 3 is when the Right attacks Ezra, Act 4 is when Ezra bravely drains a negroni live on TikTok in Union Station and leads an army of disabled homeless fentanyl users into battle against the the Vance-led police state, and he WINS, and Act 5 is when everyone left undergoes trans surgery and later Ives the rest of their mutilated life out as a furry.
In my several years on this planet I have seen a plethora of different authoritarian leaders all over the World. Our current leader, compared with the crowd after Hitler is not in the top 100 of tyrants. He’s no African despot of the Patrice Lamumba, Idi Amin age. He doesn’t hold s candle to Pol Pot or the Great Leaders of N Korea and the original Big Guy, Chairman Mao. South America would scoff at his Fidel lite persona. Even a powerless loser like Che was more dictatorial. Europe? How about the entire Soviet Union? They would have so many of their citizens shot they would run out of bullets.
Meanwhile, our tyrant can’t even please the lock’em up crowd cause he has a worry about the law and the reaction of his opponents destroying the country he is trying to protect and make great again.
The democrats are the party of projection. They wish they had such a powerful leader as Trump. Rather than being populated with weak, worthless leaders like Biden, Harris and the geriatric ward that is called leadership they would love a strong man, a Trump, who could use his cudgels to get those far-right Nazis in line or in the camps or in the dirt where they belong. So, not having a leader they have to rely on nut job random freaks to get to their enemy. A press that performs the propaganda role so essential to a successful dictatorship and an intellectual elite who are morally bankrupt and financially corrupt as well. Can they win and subdue their enemies? Only if the enemy continues to treat them like they are citizens with the same rights of citizenship granted and guaranteed to all of us, even our most abhorrent citizens. So, until the far right MAGA dictator and his followers keep the dialogue going, looking for bi-partisanship and civility and trying to talk to the opposition like fellow Americans, the real dictatorship will wait in the wings fighting for control with every power possible, including assassination , in order to achieve the power they crave. If they do again, God protect us from the evil that they will bring.
Well said.
Thanks Barry, it’s hard to write when you’re as angry as I am. This has been a long time effort by the left to get to this place. I was as complacent about the situation, especially in government and academia. I lost respect for the media ages ago. This murder, essentially an attack on free speech, only reinforced my belief that we are truly in a battle for the survival of our nation.
Agree. I’m thinking about what should be our (the Righteous ones) response to the opposing (Leftists ones). Just yesterday I saw/heard myself moderating my speech as not to offend someone I knew. Whereas another friend was speaking freely, not offensively, to the same person who he didn’t know or his political views. I made decision to change my filter.
I don’t want to paint those who disagree with me as people that I don’t want to speak but I will not civilly engage with anyone who thinks that by saying and doing anything, including murder, to suppress my freedom to speak is a good thing or merits understanding.
Always good to remind the hyperbolic, “Nazi”-spewing nitwits that they’re still allowed to leave their ghettos without papers, Star of David armbands, or prisoner number tattoos.
Yet they cheered for those armbands for the unvaccinated. (Generalizing here, but likely.) Maybe the symbol on the armband could be that really cool-looking image of the "virus" that some graphic designer cooked up.
I'm about ready to check out from this reality for a few days. I've hung on to see them catch the evil assassin, yet, now they are begging for the publics help? SMDH Good Grief! Either he had help getting away, or, he fell off the face of the Earth? I'm betting it's the former. He left behind too much to be smart enough to elude all the man power hunting him. Time to binge watch some series for a few days. I've been saving Foundation: season 3 for just such an occasion. It's on Apple TV, BTW.
Tuning out for a few days is never a bad idea.
I agree with everything you say though I personally don't subscribe to the 'What kind of person would celebrate the death of another human being' mindset. I think it all depends who that person is. The death of Pol Pot, Hiter and Stalin, who were all humans, wouldn't have unduly bothered me, perhaps because I don't have the Christian thing of believing that all humans have dignity and are redeemable. I see no dignity at all in serial killers like Ted Bundy or that animal that killed Iryna Zarutska.
For me it all comes down, not to a matter of principle, but to one of judgement and a sense of proportion. I have noisy neighbours and while I would celebrate them moving away, killing them would be out of all proportion. However, once we move into the political arena some simple-minded people believe that normal ideas of proportion can be suspended. They have been inculcated into the idea that Politics is very very important, so much so that it's unconnected to the rest of life and therefore anything goes.
To any sane person, Charlie Kirk was an honest, upstanding, brave, smart, well-meaning, good man and for someone to want to murder such a person shows that something must have gone seriously wrong with their judgement and sense of proportion. Schools, the media, politicians, peers, parents etc. are all implicated in this left-wing madness. Yet to be happy that child torturers and murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are dead is not madness at all but a normal, healthy dislike of evil and cruelty. If this were just a matter of principle - never celebrate the death of another person - it would be easy but it's not. It's about judgement gone astray.
Unfortunately, one man’s Hitler is another man’s savior. I understand exactly what you said about proportion and I agree. But real life applications of proportion gets really messy.
I completely agree. Any kind of non-Manichean thinking is messy.
I think nations are best when all its citizens are more or less on the same page, like in Japan of how many western countries once were. Of course, every nation has always had its dissenters and rebels but often their number was small enough to contain and to cow into silence. Unfortunately, western countries at present seem to be split between the traditionalists/conservatives and the progressives, the latter being probably fewer in number but often holding positions of influence (schools, universities, media, justice and in the UK, politics). I think cultural evolution will prove progressivism to be a non-viable way of structuring societies but that is for the future and since we live in the present is of little consolation to us.
I think convincing progressives that Charlie Kirk was good and Tyler Robinson was bad will be a work of decades, even if we ever manage it at all, for the reason you pointed out (to them things look very different). So rather than indulge in endless fruitless discussions that invariably end with, 'But you only think that way because of where you're standing', I would prefer some kind of clean separation. That way we can have our Charlie Kirks, Victor Davis Hansons and Karoline Leavitts and they can have their AOCs, Gavin Newsoms and Tyler Robinsons and we will all be happy. And no, I have no idea how to achieve that.
The events of the last few days bring to mind a famous quote from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn:
“The most terrifying force of death, comes from the hands of men who wanted to be left alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know, that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over.
The moment the men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. TRUE TERROR will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the men who just wanted to be left alone.”