.204 Ruger T/C Encore. 32 grain Nosler lead free Ballistic Tip. Single GSW to the chest. Didn’t exit.
DRT.
They know to fear me now.
250 Yards
READ. THIS. ESSAY.
Suicide of the Liberals, by Gary Saul Morson.
Pullquotes:
Between 1900 and 1917, waves of unprecedented terror struck Russia. Several parties professing incompatible ideologies competed (and cooperated) in causing havoc.
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Instead of the pendulum’s swinging back—a metaphor of inevitability that excuses people from taking a stand—the killing grew and grew, both in numbers and in cruelty.
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How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem.
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One sometimes hears that “the pendulum is bound to swing back.” But how does one know there is a pendulum at all, rather than—let us say—a snowball accelerating downhill? It is unwise to comfort oneself with metaphors. When a party is willing to push its power as far as it can go, it will keep going until it meets sufficient opposition.
Seriously. Read it. History doesn’t repeat, but it very often rhymes.
Going to Blogorado!
I attended Blogorado for the first time in 2017. I missed it in 2018 due to my illness. I tried as hard as I could to make it to the 2019 gathering, but that effort ended in disaster when I managed to blow up the engine in my truck, stranding me in Las Vegas, NM. That was the most expensive vacation (that wasn’t) I’ve ever experienced in my life. I could’ve taken my wife to Tahiti for what that ended up costing.
Blogorado 2020 is this weekend. I leave tomorrow. I’ve never needed a vacation this badly in my life.
I’m taking the T-shirts I had made for last year:
That’s “the most photographed barn in Colorado.” It’s gone, now, but not forgotten.
Them’s Fightin’ Words (Quote of the Day – Glenn Reynolds Edition)
I have said repeatedly that some time beginning in the 1960’s the Left’s infiltration of education, media and politics kicked into high gear. A few years later, they had control of all three. That was the period when the Right stopped being their “loyal opposition” and became “The Enemy.” Opposition to Leftist ideology and policy wasn’t from ignorance or misunderstanding, not because those on the Right were too stupid to understand (though that was part of it), it was because the Right was evil. Only an evil person could oppose such obviously correct thought.
What do you do with evil?
You don’t debate with evil. You don’t negotiate with evil. You certainly don’t compromise with evil.
You placate evil while you look around for a rock sufficient to bash its head in. You DESTROY evil.
We’re past the placation stage.
The Left has been “Othering” the Right for at least the last forty years, basically since Reagan was elected. The evidence is everywhere. Here’s an example:
There’s lots more. Andy Ngo, Aaron Danielson, Bernell Trammell, Adam Haner, and many others have been the recipients of the tolerance, caring and acceptance of the Left, and I imagine that after November 3 there will be a whole lot more.
Today at Instapundit was this post by Stephen Green comparing 2020 America to 1917 Russia, but Prof. Reynolds tacked on the QotD:
I don’t think it’s 1917. But in 1917, it’s obvious in retrospect that the only moral and practical thing to do was to kill Bolsheviks, starting at the top. An unparalleled human tragedy could have been prevented, had the Czarists, or the Mensheviks, been willing to act appropriately.
Quote of the Day – Austin Schue
From A Poor Farrier’s Journey to Political Sanity. (RTWT)
American politics now looks like the end-state of a dysfunctional, increasingly abusive marriage between Right and Left. Younger adults have been put in the role of children who now must decide who gets custody. When I don’t play my expected role, I’m not just accused of ignorance by ideologues, but of betrayal.
Tough History Coming, Part XX
In re: The Left’s response to the Trumps testing positive for COVID-19, Charles Krauthammer, 2002: “To understand the workings of American politics you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
You do not debate with evil. You do not negotiate with evil. You do not compromise with evil. You do not tolerate evil. You destroy evil. It’s a religious crusade.
The Right is “The Other.”
I’m reading Evan Sayet’s new book The Woke Supremacy. In it he relates the story of Jimmy Fallon as host of the Tonight Show having a guest on the September 15, 2016 episode:
“Fallon, whose show was number one in the ratings at the time, did what late-night talk show hosts do in a normal society and booked one of the biggest names and most entertaining guests he could find. He then did what late-night talk show hosts do by being engaging, fun and funny. Fallon was warm and welcoming as he treated his guest in exactly the fashion he’d treated all of his other guests, and in the style that had made him number one in late-night in the first place.
“The trouble was that the guest was Donald Trump.
“By the next morning, Variety, one of the two uber-powerful trade magazines for the entertainment industry, came out with a hit piece that set the tone and let all of Hollywood know what the Powers-That-Be in the (Woke) Supremacy expected them to do.
…
“The word most often used by (Fallon’s) attackers for the “wrong” he had committed was that, by treating Trump in the way the TV show host treated any and all other people, Fallon had served to ‘humanize’ the Other.”
The Trumps aren’t human to the Left. No one who isn’t Progressive is.
This will not end well.
Quote of the Day – Anonymous Edition
“The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” wrote associate Justice Robert Jackson in 1949.
This response is QotD:
“No Justice Jackson, it is a restraining order against government. And government, like any abusive person, does not respect or obey restraining orders.”
Read This
Professor Angelo Codevilla is generally worth your time, and this essay is no exception: Revolution 2020. Excerpt:
Progressivism’s foundational proposition—that the American way of life suffers from excessive freedom and insufficient latitude for experts to lead each into doing what is best for all—is the intellectual basis of the oligarchy’s ever-increasing size, wealth, and power. The theme that the USA was ill-conceived in 1776-89 and must be re-conceived has resounded from Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government (1885) to the campaigns of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden: “listen to the scientists!” The criticism’s main point has been constant: America’s original conception validated the people’s right to live as they please, and made it hard to marshal them for Progressive purposes.
But the Progressive critique adds a moral basis: the American people’s indulgence of their preferences—private ease and comfort, focus on families, religious observance, patriotism—has made for every secular sin imaginable: racism, sexism, greed, etc. Because most Americans are racist, sexist, un-appreciative of real virtue or refinement (these are somehow rolled together), because these Americans resist knuckling under to their betters, America is a sick society that needs to be punished and to have its noxious freedoms reformed.
Two Years Ago on This Day…
…late in the evening, I was rolled into surgery at Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona where a stranger’s liver was transplanted into my (dying) body.
I did not expect to wake up after surgery. If I had not had the surgery, I doubt I’d have woken up on the 24th.
Living in the future is amazing.
This pretty much says it all:
