Search






Jeff's Amazon.com Wish List

Archive Calendar

November 2024
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  

Archives

Here's what I've learned over the last two+ years:

Unless and until those who people the contemporary socialist movement revert to donning berets and going full-on khaki, or carrying little red books in their tiny utilitarian shirt pockets, or referring to themselves as numbers like a cadre of high-ranking SPECTRE villains, the nuanced pragmatic conservatives of the stripe who backed McCain and mocked the TEA Party at its birth wouldn’t recognize a Marxist if several of them clenched themselves into a giant worker’s fist and went totally Caligula on our dear intellectual betters.

And that’s a shame. Because failure to identify what it is we’re fighting limits our ability to take the most effective and philosophically pointed stand against it.

45 Replies to “Here's what I've learned over the last two+ years:”

  1. Jeff G. says:

    OT: just finger walked the 10lb sledge with my left hand. Woot!

    Let’s see the pragmatists pull that off.

  2. DarthLevin says:

    Sometimes, Jeff, I find myself imagining what your new and improved grip strength could do to Jugears’s law-signing hand.

  3. Jeff G. says:

    I would only try to convince Mr Obama of the error of his ways through extremist rhetoric and right-wing verbal Visigothery, Darth.

  4. David Block says:

    I have to say that I attempt to ignore Rick Moran (Moron?) whenever possible. I wish to thank you and Doug Ross for your services to humanity and intelligence.

  5. newrouter says:

    “right wing Visigoth”

    there’s a pw clothing line there or coffee cups.

  6. The Monster says:

    Since the Visigoths settled in Spain and Portugal, using their name as an epithet is at least as raaaaacist as making the code word for the termination with extreme prejudice of Osama bin Laden “Geronimo”.

    Clearly, Moran hates Hispanics.

  7. newrouter says:

    hey diversity crowd please acknowledge “left wing Visigoths”. we wear flowers in our hair.

  8. Swen says:

    Speaking of Marxists, I’m sure I must be missing the nuance here.

  9. JD says:

    Moran would say you are a right wing Visigoth, Swen.

  10. geoffb says:

    From the Moran piece:

    are either too ignorant to know what the real definitions of “socialist,” “communist,” and “Marxist” are, or don’t care about the violence they do to language by using them.

    I guess referring to Obama and the Democrats as “liberals” just doesn’t cut it anymore.

    This definitional argument is often used by the left and they mean it when they do it too. Like the Protestants the “religion” of the left keeps fracturing and dividing into an ever changing soup of new names for the same basic belief system with each variety having some special small variant to call it’s own. Each also will have their own definition of those foundational words “socialist,” “communist,” and “Marxist”. The arguments could be said to be turtles all the way down. Post a definition and it will be disputed, and disputed, and disputed.

    They do differ from the Protestants (in more ways than this but in this especially) in that they will not deny that they are Christians as they are not trying to hide it whereas on the left the word salad is purposefully designed for deception. “Liberal” is/was a mask of convenience they stole from the corpse of the Old Democratic Party the New Left raped as I described at the pub a while back. To use it for the ones who run that Party now is to do “violence” to language and destroy meaning.

  11. serr8d says:

    The terms ‘Marxist’, ‘Socialist’, even ‘Communist’ have zero negatives to the ‘studious’ youth in this declining nation. Because the Marxist, Socialist and neo-Communist teachers that are teaching our youth don’t teach that which those of us who came up keenly aware of the negatives of various socialisms knew instinctively. There is no fear of dirty socialists now; and, as we’ve seen in Wisconsin, even a public embrace of some basic Marxist principles.

    It’s gonna take a lot of pain and suffering by these young socialists once they get into power to recalibrate their thinking. Of course, by then it’ll be a bit late, another page turned, our great nation CHANGED for the worse.

    Learn your history well, kids, or you will be doomed to repeat it. And socialism’s long and troubling history is bloody and violent and unpleasant and you won’t enjoy a minute of the reliving of it, trust me on this.

  12. Entropy says:

    What a world class shuck.

  13. Entropy says:

    Shmuck, should have been.

  14. newrouter says:

    “The terms ‘Marxist’, ‘Socialist’, even ‘Communist’ have zero negatives to the ‘studious’ youth in this declining nation. ”

    well then call them the “idiot statists” all of them from gore to pelosi to dean to obama. this term is open for use. but you have to want to use it no?

  15. SDN says:

    Actually, Entropy, shuck works too, since it’s a synonym for dishonesty. As in shuck and jive, which is what people like Moran are doing.

    I know, “jive”? Raaaaacist!

  16. Golem14 says:

    I think the left-wing Visigoths are the ones who say, “What’s in your wallet?”

  17. Pablo says:

    What a world class shuck.

    Eh. He’s a fairly pedestrian nitwit, notable only for ostensibly being one of ours. Noam Chomsky is a world class schmuck.

  18. guinsPen says:

    What concerns me and should concern anyone with any reverence for the English language

    Revere one’s mother…

    tongue?

    Happy Mothers’ Day, Moms!

  19. guinsPen says:

    We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

    In short order, I’d want to be conducting a final tally of unmelted stuff left in Iraq.

  20. Mueller says:

    I have found that if I take the 10 pound sledge and use it to hit the foot lever on the metal shear at work, it saves a lot of wear and tear on my knee joints.

  21. serr8d says:

    …Iraqi commandos landed…

    That concept has more mimsy than Jabberwocky. “Landed” in what, pray tell? From what floating platform?

    A more plausible take down scenario: a convoy of Mexican truckers conveying a hit squad made up of mercs from Mexican cartels with a few Iranian intelligence agents advising. Or Iraqi, if you insist, just remove the ‘intelligence’ descriptor.

  22. geoffb says:

    Big Mimsy jabbers wonky.

  23. guinsPen says:

    We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

    There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

    Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

    There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

    Now aponder.

  24. serr8d says:

    Even Maureen Dowd gets this one right…

    I don’t want closure. There is no closure after tragedy.

    I want memory, and justice, and revenge.

    When you’re dealing with a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.

    We briefly celebrated one of the few clear-cut military victories we’ve had in a long time, a win that made us feel like Americans again — smart and strong and capable of finding our enemies and striking back at them without getting trapped in multitrillion-dollar Groundhog Day occupations.

    Something about a fiery redhead who will on occasion slap at the faces of her festooned with ‘liberal guilt’ LeftLibProgg readership, gotta give her some one-hand clapping. I’ll leave to some other wag to define the placement of that one hand… )

  25. serr8d says:

    No I won’t. Placement, one-hand clapping.

  26. geoffb says:

    A couple of posts about the “international law” aspect of killing UBL which as these things do can be MEGO but which generally conclude that it was a “legal” action.

    Then there is Mark Steyn who cuts to the chase.

    When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader, the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later — and, indeed, the locals fought for king and (distant imperial) country as brave British troops during World War II. Even more amazingly, generations of English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi’s skull winding up as Lord Kitchener’s novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national greatness.

    Not a lot of that today. It’s hard to imagine Osama’s noggin as an attractive centerpiece at next year’s White House Community Organizer of the Year banquet, and entirely impossible to imagine America’s “educators” teaching the tale approvingly.

  27. B. Moe says:

    The problem I have is not whether the action was legal or not, but is how many American soldiers are dead, imprisoned or stood trial for similar actions under much greater duress in the face of a much more real threat?

    Why is it okay to change the rules of engagement for what was basically a political operation?

  28. guinsPen says:

    because you don’t want to become what you loathe.

    Lima beans.

  29. serr8d says:

    how many American soldiers are dead, imprisoned or stood trial

    Flashback: Caric Obama court-martialed three Navy Seals for giving an Iraqi terrorist a ‘fat lip’.

  30. vaguely says:

    There is much much more to eat than I have ever eaten before, and breakfast is due in ten minutes.

  31. vaguely says:

    Blast, missed it by that m*urrrrrrch*

  32. vaguely says:

    Now my hands will never catch up with my mouth.

  33. motionview says:

    I remember in my formative years hearing the revolution vs working-within-the-system arguments coming from the hippies, yippies, black nationalists, radical environmentalists, etc. At the time, I naively thought that working within the system meant also working within the morals of the system – The American people are not ready for socialist revolution, so we will talk and organize and try to educate people for socialism, and when we can convince enough people, we will vote in socialism. As a child what I did not understand, and what Mr. Moran apparently currently does not understand, is that these people really, really think that they know what is best for everyone, and that is socialism. Since the American people will not vote for socialism, and have rejected it whenever directly presented it for the past 100 years, the left does not play by the “good man”, fair marketplace of ideas rules that is implicit in the AMerican political system.

    In short, they are socialists, they are Marxists, they are revolutionaries, who are smart and dedicated and relentless, who hide their socialist intentions in the language of left liberalism.

  34. serr8d says:

    Heh. OT, but I got a front-page link from The Tennessean today, for a post concerning the two Muslim ‘clerics’ tossed off a Delta flight out of Memphis. Cool beans.

  35. Spiny Norman says:

    Cool beans, indeed. Congrats!

  36. ThomasD says:

    #33 Stanley Kurtz’s book on Obama noted that Obama was present, during his formative years, for many of these arguments over the best method for implementing socialism that took place in the early-mid 1980’s.

  37. SDN says:

    But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader, the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message.

    Yes, Kitchener’s School was very effective.

    They do not consider the Meaning of Things; they consult not creed nor clan.
    Behold, they clap the slave on the back, and behold, he ariseth a man!
    They terribly carpet the earth with dead, and before their cannon cool,
    They walk unarmed by twos and threes to call the living to school.

    *******
    Certainly also is Kitchener mad. But one sure thing I know —
    If he who broke you be minded to teach you, to his Madrissa go!
    Go, and carry your shoes in your hand and bow your head on your breast,
    For he who did not slay you in sport, he will not teach you in jest.

  38. geoffb says:

    A collection of what is sure to be the wallpaper at the gutsy.com site.

  39. Challeron says:

    Mueller! You can run a Pexto with a ten-pound sledge? You must be shearing 28-gauge aluminum….

  40. Jeff G. says:

    One of my workouts today was 100 deadlifts on a v-bar with 105lbs, 5 sets of 20 each, 10 each hand back and forth. I want to eventually do the same thing with 205 lbs. I’m also squatting with a 100lb Atlas stone, which is nothing much, but I find it quite challenging. I’ve never really been a squatter or deadlifter, but I don’t want to be ridiculously out of proportion, either.

    Still failing — hell, not even close, if you want the truth — on the 45lb blob. It’s not so much the increase in weight, but rather the size of the damn thing. I’m going to master the 37.5 and the 40 next. Give me a few months.

  41. […] read from over the weekend. H/t Jeff G. Could it be that the Democrat Fabian Socialist principles of wealth redistribution, limitless […]

  42. geoffb says:

    Our “collective” money is really their money to collect.

    Senator Menendez says: “Big Oil certainly doesn’t need the collective money of taxpayers in this country. This is as good a time as any in terms of pain at the pump and in revenues needed for deficit reduction.”

  43. Slartibartfast says:

    I have given up my one man quest to protect the English language from right wing Visigoths who insist in raping, pillaging, and burning their way through the dictionary

    Well, as long as it isn’t rape rape…

  44. Blake says:

    I think I’ll start a blog about bloggers who engage in over the top hyperbole.

    The first object of ridicule would be Rick Moran.

    I could see Rick Moran and Andrew Sullivan vying for top honors each week.

  45. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I’ll give Moran this much credit: He’s the only libtard I know of willing to admit he identifies with Nurse Ratchit.

Comments are closed.