Good morning kids. Hope you all had a blessed Christmas and that the light from the menorah this year, more than ever, serves as a beacon of hope not just for Jews but for all of us who yearn for freedom and for the darkness of evil and tyranny wherever it exists to be vanquished.
On that note, let us commence. The late, lamented and brilliant Andrew Breitbart long ago so eloquently observed that "politics is downstream from culture." I certainly agree with this but then it begs the question, what is culture? I'm not really looking for a Funk & Wagnall's definition of the word, but trying to put into words for me what seems to be a sort of chicken vs egg. situation. I guess culture is sort of a distillation, good and bad, of the shared human experience up to a certain moment in time of customs, traditions and patterns of behavior that taken together define a nation, society or community.
Why ask this question, because for me despite the fact that the human experience over thousands of years dictates that for a given society to thrive, people have to organize themselves and behave in a certain way. And yet in a quest for absolute power and control, people have time and again demonstrated the need to abandon rationality, sanity and common decency. And when that happens, you create misery, pain, suffering and waste beyond belief.
Not so very long ago, the notion that anyone would be cheering with near orgasmic glee the gunning down in cold blood of UHC CEO Brian Thompson would've been nearly unthinkable to anyone except someone like David Berkowitz.
Of course, those cheering the loudest would immediately point the finger at me accusing me of cheering what Daniel Penny did that caused the death of a deranged man threatening him and fellow passengers on a NYC subway train. The only thing people were cheering was that Daniel Penny had the bravery and presence of mind to risk his own life in restraining the deviant in question who could've been armed and indeed caused grievous bodily harm to Penny and anyone else at that time without warning. No one cheered the death, which sadly, as I and others noted was the fault of Leftist policy that created a deranged drug-addicted lost soul and unleashed him on society. So that being said, and in the wake of a sleeping woman being immolated on a NYC subway train late last week, we get this comment from a supposed thought-leader in and of the left:
Stalin famously said, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.” This is the statist bean-counter’s view of human life. Humans are sort of like widgets, existing to serve the needs of the state. . . I thought of Stalin’s words when I read what Nate Silver, the statistician, had to say about the fact that an illegal alien allegedly set a woman alight on the New York City subway. Just to get the facts straight, the illegal alien was kicked out of the country on Trump’s watch and sneaked back in on Biden’s watch. He lived for free in a homeless shelter while somehow managing to support a $ 30-a-day drug habit, in addition to drinking heavily.
. . .Bill Ackman points out what most Americans instinctively understand: That poor woman was burned alive in the most horrific fashion because of the Biden administration’s open border. Nate Silver, however, has a different take, which can be summed up thusly: “Hey, it was bad, but crime happens in big cities, so people shouldn’t get their knickers in a twist about the alleged murderer’s immigration status.”
NYC has a considerably lower crime rate than most large American cities. It's also a city of 8+ million where lots of crazy shit happens on a daily basis. I don't blame anyone for being concerned but it's sort of a test for whether you think in terms of narratives or base rates.
. . . I don’t mean to pick only on Nate Silver because his approach to the issue is typical for Democrats. They love to point out that illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than Americans or legal immigrants, which kind of overlooks the fact that every one of them is a criminal by virtue of being here. I also doubt the continuing validity of those statistics given crimes at the border that don’t go into the database, as well as the increasing aggression and geographic spread of Latin American gangs such as Tren de Aragua.
Well, a single death is a tragedy, but Comrade Stalin's fellow travelers in the Democrat Party of 2024 view it as yet another opportunity to blame the society they have worked so very hard to tear down and fundamentally transform by shifting the blame onto us who point out the conditions that allowed this barbarism to occur.
I do not know Nate Silver, nor his background. But for the life of me I cannot fathom how people that I grew up with, attended the same schools with and have similar backgrounds with, can even begin to rationalize things in so cold a manner so as to preserve their own personal political beliefs. His comments just beggar the imagination. I had quite a few liberal if not hardcore leftist professors in college back in the late 70s and yet here I am.
Then again, my mother of blessed memory and her family went through the same hell on earth courtesy of the Nazis as Anthony Blinken's (step?) father and yet there he and his ilk are, eagerly working to destroy the state of Israel and grease the wheels of Iran's atomic weapons program.
Luigi Mangione has killer abs, a broad smile and a vendetta against the U.S. health care system. Progressive politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were among several who criticized the killing, only to add “But …” to their statements. . . Chances are a MAGA rally wouldn’t cheer Mangione’s name in any setting, but liberal late-night TV watchers have had a similar reaction to some progressive politicians.Earlier this month, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” alerted his audience that Mangione had been captured after a brief manhunt.
The crowd’s reaction? Boos. . . Why are late-night TV audiences cheering on Mangione? It’s a complex constellation of reasons, from the Left’s embrace of political violence to our increasingly divided age. One possible culprit? Late-Night TV. These propaganda shows have been dehumanizing their political opponents for years. Trump is Hitler … and his fans are just as bad.
So, chicken and egg. Is the problem the Late Night schtick-meisters and the rest of the media/entertainment complex or is it the audiences cheering on murderers and the dehumanization of Trump and normal Americans. Or is it a self-licking ice cream cone?
There are signs, the biggest one being the relative landslide victory of Donald Trump last November and a rejection of the more openly avowed Leftist policies of the Democrat party across demographic lines. Let us hope and pray that this trend is indeed a cultural shift reflected in the election and that it continues for years to come, as it must if we and our progeny are to survive and thrive. What cannot go on will not go on. Hopefully it's the evil insanity of Leftist/Progressivism and not our beloved America as we want to restore.
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NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
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