One of the Quora kids who think they know everything, tries to make the point that what would have passed for lunacy in 1999 is standard Republican intellectual fare today.

An opinion can be well-founded and/or well-reasoned. His is neither, but it’s important anyway because it reflects the feelings of so many. Ah, there’s that problem again. Feelings. You see the damage being done when you stop to realize: None of what the Quora commenter listed is nearly as off-the-rocker as “I voted Biden/Harris in 2020 and I’m not sorry.”

The President is senile. Electronic and print media are pretending he isn’t. His communications apparatus is presenting his embarrassing failures as successes. The media is doing little to nothing to correct this.

We have this new industry of “fact checking” that answers to no one and forms questionable conclusions in a bubble and as a monolith. They label things as “misinformation” that are not false, and in some cases, are provably or demonstrably true. We have become numb to this, after years of seeing persons in positions of authority add their signatures to things that are known lies, forced to conclude what people must say in totalitarian dictatorships: “Maybe it’s a lie, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so whatevs.” If any one resource is “caught spreading misinformation,” someone somewhere with power takes steps to disconnect them. There is usually no appeal and we almost never know who exactly is making the necessary judgment call. They cite “community standards” that do not exist in any written, open format that could be cited or referenced. They just suspend/disconnect and that’s that.

Unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats suspend or shut down entire industries on the shaky pretext of a deadly pandemic, leaving literally millions unemployed. They don’t suspend-until some such-and-such a specific date. They just suspend. While those affected stumble around wondering when or if they’ll ever see an honestly-earned dollar again, these decision-makers get to collect a regular paycheck.

And then there is the Afghanistan embarrassment. The news is still changing too quickly for me to insert an excerpt or a link, we just have to keep watching it. It’s sort of a combination of “hard to look away from a derailment” and “I can’t trust anybody’s version.”

We need to update our “misery index” again, because you need to start with that before adding in unemployment/inflation, bank lending rates, etc. Economic indicators are like the top floor of a building. The overall mental health of our society is like the foundation.

None of it is doing too well right now.

The people who were lining up to get rid of Bad Orange Man are very quiet. I have to say, I’d be quiet too.

So, it’s “Please wear masks regardless of your vaccination status.” And apparently everywhere, multiple counties. China Virus stats are up, so our leaders are clamping down hard…on us. Good to know.

We’ve been through this before. A few times. Once again, it’s up to me to point out the obvious…to point out what everybody with a brain knows already, but people with better manners are going to leave unsaid.

What we’re seeing play out here, is a conflict between two ways to look at medicine. There are the very loud people, what I call the “Puppeteers and puppets” people, who perceive it’s the job of the medical authorities to tell us what to do…and our role is to do what they tell us. This seems reasonable, at first, until you ponder the most obvious question: Are they sure? And the clear and obvious answer is, no they’re not, and that’s okay. It’s science, which is supposed to constantly evolve as we learn more things. It’s science about what is still essentially a novel virus.

And then there are the people like me, who understand what’s wrong with that. The puppeteers are not sure, and that’s okay. But the central premise for everything we’re doing, is that they are sure. They’re scientists, after all! Are you a scientist? Am I a scientist? No and no. They outrank us, so let’s pretend they’re sure when they’re not.

So I guess you call us the “No Pretend” people.

“Puppeteer and Puppet” people will demand to know, with some justification…what does it matter? If they’re not sure, but they know more than we do, we might as well pretend they’re sure even if they’re not sure. Are you worried there’s a danger with the vaccines? Are you worried there’s some perceived cost involved in wearing the masks? The answer in my case is no & no. I just refuse to pretend.

If we see things as they really are, and think about those things the way they really are, we have to admit to an unsavory truth: It’s the Puppeteer-and-Puppet people, not us, who can’t handle this lack of certainty. We, as a whole, are romping around in the tall-grass looking for a Cracker Jack prize…we’ve been doing it for nineteen months now…haven’t found it yet. So it’s worse than a lack of certainty. We literally don’t know what we’re doing. They can’t handle that, so they’re observing this sanctimonious never-ever-circumvent hierarchy, with Tony the Tyrant on top, as a substitute for knowing what we’re doing. The people at the top are supposedly giving us the very best of known science, which is probably true. They’re probably being candid and sincere, usually, about everything they know. The problem is they don’t know. So the Puppeteer-and-Puppet people want this rigid chain-of-command observed, and all of the time, as a substitute for knowing what we’re doing. because they can’t handle the truth that we don’t know what we’re doing.

We won’t do this pretending. The Puppeteer-and-puppet people say that means people like me are putting them in some kind of danger. But that’s just more pretending. They pretend the science backs them up on this, but every now and then they have to deal with the fact that the science doesn’t back them up on this. So then they have to veer off into this “manners” thing, protesting that we have to wear masks to show we care. They want to pretend their Puppeteers are authorities on manners, rather than medicine. Well, anyone who’s actually dealt with a few doctors knows why we shouldn’t put doctors in charge of manners. We No-Pretend people aren’t ready to pretend that either.

Maybe this is my bias talking, but I think we No-Pretend people are the ones who have it right. We shouldn’t pretend clearly unknown things are known, or that clearly false things are true. It’s important we refrain from doing that, because pretending leads to more pretending. Now we’re supposed to pretend a higher vaccination rate is what’s needed to get rid of COVID, and that we’re almost up to that level, but not quite there yet. This, as a foundational premise, would legitimize more puppeteer-and-puppet rule-making, so a lot of people want that. We can pretend that’s “evidence” if we want to pretend that. But it isn’t.

A lot of people are “string” people. They’ve been making real nuisances of themselves. They fancy themselves to be superior to the puppets, and they want to tell the puppets what to do, but they have to receive instructions from the puppeteers about what to do. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in this chain of command, in which they take up this middle-position, playing no role in formulating the commands, but rather in enforcing them. They are often heard issuing the final conclusive staccato note in these deliberations, something to the effect of “just do it!” They’re accustomed to the puppets complying, because they seldom to never are confronted with the obvious rejoinder: That’s not a logical argument. That isn’t even an assertion. It’s just being pushy.

We’re divided right now because we’re being prevailed upon to pretend good crowd management is the same as good individual management; someone has taken a stab at the vaccination rate needed to bring about herd immunity, and their guess is that it’s very high. So the narrative is that unvaccinated people are selfish and harmful. We’re all supposed to pretend there are good scientific arguments in support of that, when there aren’t any, and the No-Pretend people aren’t pretending while the string people are yelling “just do it!”

Puppeteer-and-puppet people are prone to buy into “Let’s Try This Let’s Try That” medicine. That’s where the doc sees he’s not going to figure out exactly what’s wrong with your kid, or your pet, anytime soon, but the parent/owner is just a little bit off her rocker so he’d like to get her out of his office, but he’s figured out his role is more like a psychologist than a medical doctor, and he sees an opportunity to fulfill expectations without finding anything definite. So he prescribes something to treat the whatever…let’s just try it and see what it does. This makes the kid/pet into an experimental subject, which lends cachet. For a lot of parents/owners, that’s a huge plus. It makes for a good story to tell. But, it also just might possibly work, so there are valid reasons to opt into this, and there are valid reasons not to opt into it. It’s generally a good discussion to have. It’s also generally a discussion that, when all’s said & done, doesn’t happen.

“Let’s try this let’s try that” medicine is popular…with some. That’s another reason we’re divided. The Puppeteer Class has been wrong so often in this thing; people point it out, and the rebuttal is “Yeah but that’s to be expected, it’s how science works.” So it is! But because that’s how science works, y’all can stop pretending, anytime you want, that the No-Pretend people are hurting you just by being No-Pretend people. Also, let’s stop pretending the puppeteers are taking actual responsibility for end results. They aren’t.

You have your vaccines now. If you’re worried about the China Virus, take your vaccine. And your booster shot too. Pretty soon, there are going to be multiple booster shots…and the people who’ve taken all five of them, will be blaming the people who’ve only taken four.

But let’s not have any more pretending about “We’d be all done with it by now if it weren’t for that guy over there,” or about “doing this” or “getting rid of it once and for all” or “kicking COVID’s butt.” Y’all aren’t doing that.

Lately it seems like we’re living in a Twilight Zone episode. In fact, I notice among the loudest of us, there’s an idea that if we’re not living in one yet, something’s wrong, and we have to get started on it a.s.a.p.

Let’s see…have I got this right? We had

1. Those dirty rotten unvax people are keeping us from reaching herd immunity; but then it emerged natural immunity was as effective as vaccine-driven immunity. Fauci The Great just wasn’t a fan of it, so after we admitted he wasn’t being straight with us it was

2. Those dirty rotten unvax people are unwittingly using their bodies as petri dishes to make new variants of the virus, like Delta for example; but then it emerged that a lot of us were still testing negative for the virus and antibodies as well, meaning we hadn’t contracted it; so then there was

3. Those dirty rotten unvax people are shedding the virus; but then it emerged that vaxxed people were shedding it too, so then we had

4. Those dirty rotten unvax people are shedding the virus more often and faster than the vax people; but then it emerged that that wasn’t true, so then we had

5. Those dirty rotten unvax people are filling up our hospitals, and all the deaths are unvax people; but then it emerged that a) When you’re dead, you’re no longer filling up a hospital and b) here, there and elsewhere there are some deaths from COVID among vaxxed people, our experts had just been covering them up; so then we had

6. Those dirty rotten unvax people are getting sicker than vaxxed people when & if they get the ‘Vid! Well yes, that’s true; that’s the whole point of having a vaccine. It gives your body a leg-up on forming the necessary resistance to fend off the virus, should you ever be infected with it. The problem is, that substantiates “I wouldn’t be doing it this way if I were them.” It doesn’t substantiate “They’re hurting me.” You can’t have a good witch hunt without they’re-hurting-me.

As these arguments have failed, one after another, like tumbling dominoes; those who rely on them to do their witch-hunting have slipped easily from one to another, as if it’s expected at a certain time, like changing underwear. Being right is fun, being wrong is not-so-fun. So they haven’t noticed the ground shifting beneath their feet. “What exactly are the unvaxxed doing to hurt you?” is a question that only burbles up to the surface, every now and then. It’s guaranteed not to happen if you never allow the target of your ire to say anything in response, or if you don’t listen. The “Why Aren’t You Vaccinated?” Karen-types are often seen falling short at one of those, or the other. So they don’t notice that while their lecture stays consistent, the support for it has to swivel around, changing over time. The overarching objective that endures, is to blame the right people for…whatever. To live in this pretend world of they’re-hurting-me.

Vax-tivists say they don’t owe anything to unvax people. That’s not wrong. In fact, that’s the problem. Unvax people don’t disagree. You have to have disagreement over something to have conflict, and you have to have conflict in order to achieve the true goal here: Making the designated group the target of widespread public hatred, preferably as the scapegoat for the misery China has brought down on us all.

What China has accomplished here is truly remarkable. They, the communists, have managed to acquire leverage over us, to tell us what to think by telling us what not to think. But our own government, sprawling out of control or any sensible restraint, still lacks the power to tell us what not to think. For that, you need large, corporate entities. We don’t think the virus came from China, because Disney won’t let us think the virus came from China. And who owns Disney? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count. Disney, in turn, owns just about everything. Don’t piss off The Mouse!

And because we aren’t allowed to blame China, when the evidence doesn’t point anywhere else, we fall for these smoke-and-mirror parlor tricks. We end up living on Maple Street, blaming each other.

Like a bunch of filthy rats, eating each other. Like communists.

The China virus has communists acting just like capitalists, and us capitalists acting just like communists.

Everybody arguing likes to think they’re arguing rationally with facts, logic and reason, and it’s the other guy getting hoodwinked by his hysteria and his emotions. Everybody gets more excited about it when we’re arguing about medicine, and this is understandable. We all understand how precious health is and what a life-changing event it would be if health were to go away so that we can’t get it back again.

Well, here’s something else people need to understand:

“Just wait ’til” arguments are emotion, not reason.

This may not be evident to the people who need to know; the people who go around using them, with varying degrees of frequency. It is abundantly apparent to those of us who have been continually on the receiving end of them for the last sixteen to nineteen months. “Just wait ’til you catch the ‘vid.” “Just wait ’til you’re on a ventilator.” “Just wait ’til you suffer permanent lung or organ damage.” “Just wait ’til it’s your family members who have it, and they caught it from you.”

These are not rational arguments. They feel like they are, to the person who is making them. That’s the problem. Feel.

“Future events will prove me right” is something you say when all other maneuvers have failed. If all other maneuvers have failed, there’s a reason why. Also, it is a tacit admission that present events, and past events, have not provided foundation for what you’re saying. By now, we have a certain depth of history behind a viral infection that, last year, was truly novel. If an argument is strong, it is reasonable to expect some past events should provide support for it, so there’s no reason to go delving into the future unless your argument is weak.

In addition to all that, it’s a turn-off when someone who’s trying to convince you to do something, is looking forward to your death or serious injury. It doesn’t close the sale. It doesn’t inspire reasonable, normal people to do what the other fellow wants them to do.

The 2020 Election turned into a cheat, and the cheat turned into a battle of wills. My side lost the battle of wills. And then the people who won it used the Capitol Penetration on January 6, and other things, to try to make their victory more decisive, and — let’s all just come out and admit it — accumulate for themselves a level of influence over things elevated as far as possible, above what was merited by their “victory.”

Now we know the whole thing was a mistake. So people like me are looking around and wondering…alright, is this the part where I keep my mouth shut and allow others to gradually come to the conclusion we were right all along, on their own? Or do we go with the “Nobody else will toot my horn for me, so here I go?” Past history would tend to suggest they need the horn tooted. They don’t learn on their own.

I’m settling for a combination of both. And I’m monitoring, recording and taking notes. One liberal expresses disappointment in Placeholder Joe’s handling of Afghanistan but stops short of admitting to a mistake. Another wants to talk about Iraq and how she knew that was the wrong thing to do…I guess trying to shoehorn in a one-for-two for herself before admitting to any error…

You really can’t get any more bait-and-switchy than this, can you? I mean, can you? The booby prize for getting rid of Trump and replacing him with the kindly old Grandpa was prestige on the world stage, a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state, dignity, respect, cogent analysis of whatever situation came along, even-tempered leadership…you know, “Hooray the adults are in charge again” stuff. How’d that go?

They want to look like they don’t make mistakes.

What they look like, to me, are people who can’t learn from mistakes. That’s far worse than making mistakes, assuming that on those occasions you make them, you can admit you made them and learn to, as the liberals like to say, “do better.”

I guess it’s up to the rest of us to learn it’s a mistake to do anything their way. But this is a realization that I’d made back in…oh, around the late 1970’s. But now I understand that includes running elections. There’s just no getting around it. Liberals will not admit to their mistakes, so the rest of us are going ot have to “admit” them on their behalf.

What else are we to learn from this?

After we’re done beating up on the liberals for caring more about the appearance of WinningTheArgument than about actually being right, and in so doing hurting others, I think we have to be fair and admit this is essentially what politics is, and on all sides. Those who do it for a living say to all the rest of us, “We can see what’s distressing you, and the cure for the problem is to vote for my guy.” It’s salesmanship 101: The solution to my problems has something to do with a solution to your problems. This may or may not be true, but validating it is entirely up to the buyer. When you’re the buyer, and you do a bad job of this, you get taken and at some point you have to admit you sucked in your execution of this very critical task. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. This one is more bitter and quite a bit bigger than most other such pills, because this is a situation where the delivery was the photo-negative opposite of what was promised, and the consequences are disastrous.

The liberals shoved us out of the way and seized the controls. Now it’s glaringly apparent to everyone paying attention — us, them, our friends, our foes, their friends, their foes — everyone involved would have been a lot better off if they’d just jammed their hands in their pockets and kept them there. There’s no one they can blame for this. It’s all on them, and they know it.

But we can’t rely on them to learn from the mistake, and avoid doing it again. We just can’t. If they had what it took, they wouldn’t be liberals.

Part of the reason we’re divided in 2021, in politics, in both intensity and frequency, is that for approximately half a century there has been this drive to avoid making each other feel bad.

You say: Hold up there Freeberg. How can this political division, which makes people feel bad, be the result of some effort to avoid making each other feel bad? That’s kind of like Superman being hurt by rocks from his home world, isn’t it? Makes no sense! In order for me to explain this I have to simplify things, a lot. It is necessary to remove the emotional attachments. So let’s say we’re discussing whether or not water is wet.

All the Sesame-Street pandering to feelings has resulted in a new deliberative tool having been forged, a rhetorical device of: “If you mention that water is wet you make me feel bad.” Note — the people on the other side wouldn’t have to use this device. You can easily prove water is wet, so it wouldn’t make any sense to go wading (ha!) into an argument wielding a rhetorical device of “You make me feel bad if you say water is *not* wet.” It would be needlessly convoluted, time consuming and wasteful. So this new device is available only for those who assert the weaker positions. But since 1960 or so, it is available.

Black people owned slaves too. You make me feel bad!

The virus really did come from China. You make me feel bad!

Gay married couples have fights & divorces too. Feel bad!

Here’s a rich guy who didn’t inherit anything. Down-tingles!!

Women on average can’t lift as much. Triggered!!

Aside from furnishing this new rhetorical tool to people who have taken the wrong position on something, and know they’ve taken the wrong position, this divides us in other ways. It splinters us. Think of all the ways you can respond to this situation, of “I’m going to feel bad if you mention water is wet.”

Normal people will respond with: Well then you know what? Let’s just avoid the subject entirely. That’s the default response from anyone who is decent. And, uh, maybe their husbands.

Then you have dickheads like me. No, we can avoid talking about it if we want, but water is wet and nothing we say, or refuse to say, is ever going to change that.

And then you have bullies, which people like me are tempted to be, and we try not to cross that line…we get no credit for it, no one knows how hard we try not to be the asshole who says: “I’m going to stress the wetness of water again and again and again until that whelp is lying on the floor in a fetal position, quivering and pissing himself.” Those types are certainly out there. The temptation is out there. That’s what polarizes us.

There are also some real assholes on the other side. The kind that grew up crying whenever mommy was in earshot, and stopped when she left the room. “I know water is really wet, but if I act like I’m triggered whenever anyone mentions it, I get to start fights and make it look like it’s the other guy’s fault.” These crybabies really don’t care if water is wet or not wet. They thrive on the thrill of breaking things and making it look like the other guy did it. They’re like porch pirates who don’t know what’s in the box they’re stealing. It’s the thrill they get from doing something they know is wrong.

Deep down we all know what’s true. We don’t need me to actually say it. But…here I go.

It was a mistake to get feelings involved in these discussions in the first place. If water is wet, it doesn’t matter who’s throwing a temper tantrum over it. It’s still wet.

Some 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greeks began to debate and inspect the concept of what’s true, and what truth is. We’re behind where they were 25 centuries ago, because of our…feelings, nothing more than feelings, whoa oh oh feelings…

The public at large is in a state of agitation and distress because democrats and liberals have taken control of the situation with the China Virus, and they have done nothing about it apart from shaming, censoring and criminalizing anyone who mentions it’s a China Virus.

Their message to the public is one of “Don’t you worry, we’re going to kick COVID’s butt” and the public’s response is “That’s why we’re worried.” Remember, we’re still waiting for this crew to kick Climate Change‘s butt, and poverty‘s butt, and illiteracy‘s butt, and bigotry‘s butt, and crime in inner cities‘ butt, and stagnant wages & high cost of living‘s butts, and and and and………

All they have done with these things amounts to creating campaign issues out of them. And then fix exactly nothing because if they did, the campaign tools and weapons would go away. They’d lose their ability to do things they couldn’t do before. They know this, everybody else knows they know it, they know everybody else knows, we know they know we know they know…

We have a good understanding here, whether we’re allowed or motivated, to talk about it, or not. Issue after issue after issue, democrats make a problem, then they campaign on it, win, and rather than fix the problem, make it worse. They exacerbate it, intensify it, pull more people into it to expand it in both breadth and depth. Then they run on it again, win again, lather rinse & repeat…

Why not just admit to what’s obvious? Since China infected us with a deadly virus, the democrat party has seen the list of issues subject to this cycle, increase by one item. Let’s be honest, that is what’s changed.

The public is right to be agitated.

A number of events have me thinking about people and what makes them tick. And, occasionally, collide.

When you strip away the good manners, and all the other devices that conceal motivations, you see the behavior of the individual is more or less dictated by answers to just one from among a very few questions. I reduce these to just three:

1. How do I make the gadget work?

2. What are people going to say/think/feel about me?

3. How does it make me feel?

If it isn’t a singularity, it becomes one in short order; whoever finds himself obsessing over a plurality of these, with the passage of just one or two challenges, will subjugate all others in favor of just one. And after this happens a few times, the personality crystalizes. The individual starts to favor the same one out of the above three, consistently, all the way up to the dirt nap.

And so, whether or not we like it, we have our taxonomy. We have our tribes. And we’re tempted toward tribal thinking.

When people congregate, they get along much better if all in attendance are motivated (chiefly) by one of these. When the congregation straddles a line between two or more of these, there are obstacles. An obstacle is not an impossibility. People can still get along with each other, and with a bit of effort, start to see the other’s point of view. But it takes substantially more effort if the two of you are motivated by different things.

We are deep into an odd-numbered year, weary with the China Virus mess, struggling to get along in life, many of us afflicted with health problems resulting from medical neglect, or acquainted with a friend or relative who is so afflicted.

So few among us have the capacity or spare bandwidth to deal with the awful truth, but here it is: Biden/Harris got 81 million votes, or democrats are stealing our elections. And it is virtually impossible for Biden/Harris to have received that many votes. Also, if the democrats did steal the last election, it is virtually impossible for them to have been doing it for the first time.

There is a real possibility, and some would credibly assert a likelihood, that democrats haven’t legitimately won a national election since Bill Clinton in 1992 (a three-way, Taft/Roosevelt/Wilson type of fluke).

The most ominous thing about this is the possibility, by no means remote, that very soon after people see posts like this on social media, those posts will be scrubbed. There’s this mindset out there that anything that calls election results into question, must be “misinformation,” not because the question would be illegitimate but rather because it might put a damper on the public’s enthusiasm or drive to vote the next time. And so “admins” have to “combat” this “misinformation” by censoring any such questions, along with any insinuations or observations that might inspire such questions. This opens up a brand new chapter, not unprecedented but quite different from what came immediately before, in which people are responsible for what other people do, or don’t do…but it would seem no one person is responsible for his or her own actions. Also, that it’s “misinformation” to point out “Hey, we don’t really know X for sure” — when we don’t.

When we know something is *not* so, there’s no need to censor it. There’s no need to censor phlogiston theory. There’s no need to censor “That wrestling match was totally legitimate.” There’s no need to censor “The moon is made of cheese.” The need for censorship exists when the message is provably true, or open to question with an outright refutation being impossible. That is the situation that exists with these doubts against the Biden/Harris “victory” of 2020.

Liberals go through the motions of coming up with brand new ideas, and then the conservatives complain about them. High up on the list of these complaints the conservatives have about the liberal idea, is the observation that the idea is anything but new.

Liberals then complain about the conservatives. They ascribe all sorts of personal defects to the conservatives that are rather silly, for if they apply at all, a search for an enthused self-identifying liberal who shares such defects in equal measure, is a brief search. High up on the list of these complaints the liberals have about conservatives that apply with equal legitimacy to liberals, is the complaint that conservatives do a lot of complaining. But that one, at least, has the virtue of being true.

Moderates complain that both conservatives and liberals are enthused and entrenched, beyond what circumstances would legitimately permit, into their respective ideologies. If only conservatives would forget about being conservative, and liberals forget about being liberal, and if each of those two sides would stop complaining about the other, we could get things done.

Where the conservatives and liberals overlap, you have the prime, vital and unifying characteristic of the moderate. “If only everybody else would stop complaining about anything, and be more like me, we could all get things done.”

You allow all of them to have their say and enjoy their influence, put ’em in a big bag, shake it up, hold your “free and fair” election…and evidently, what you get is the Biden administration.

Hmmm…what’s the takeaway?

1. Sliming other people because they “complain” is useless. It is silly, in no small part because it is, in & of itself, complaining; therefore it is the act of assuming the form and shape of the target of one’s loathing.

2. Therefore, making a villain out of everybody who complains, is a useless exercise.

3. Pursuing it to its logical end, we construct, and then must endure the consequences of, substandard results. People who think shushing up complaints is apt to give us good things, are just saying what sounds good without thinking it over, failing to pay attention, or engaged in some combination of those two things.

4. Nobody’s really above it. There may be some people who abstain from it entirely, either by way of self-restraint or a mental handicap that denies them the fundamentals of complaining; but they’re not above it, they’re beneath it.

5. Most importantly, our ability to discuss these issues comes from our empowerment to vote. And that comes from one or several complaints someone had. We owe what we have to the complainers. It comes under “Be careful what you wish for”; without those who complained in years past, you wouldn’t have anyone complaining in the here & now. They wouldn’t be allowed to, and they wouldn’t dare. Think a few more times on whether you really want to live in such a world.

Rather than looking back on history to when society at large blamed Jews, poor people, rich people, blacks, whites, gays, witches, straights, women, men, etc….let’s remove the emotionalism from it and just call the scapegoated group A. The history of human beings is much easier to understand, when you look for the simpler patterns, because when you review it in this sort of context you find the patterns. And once you find them you see they’re not complicated. So the era is unspecified, but it was cool to blame A. Let’s leave the problems unspecified too. Cows gave spoiled milk, real estate & gasoline were expensive, unemployment was sky-high…whatever…everybody blamed A because it was cool to blame A.

The pattern you’re going to see as you read up on history is that an effort arose to defrock A of any influence. Lots of people from all sorts of different walks of life participated in it, and they believed in it passionately, so the effort was both intense and broad. There was little resistance against this. Resistance would have been punished, with a sneering attitude of…so what, you’re with the A? And so members of Group A became pariahs. They may or may not have been driven underground or herded into boxcars, but the one consistent thing is that they weren’t allowed to have an effect on anything.

But humans are flawed. So no one did the logical thing of: Let’s monitor things for a year or two and see if they get better. Hold those in power to account.

Nope. What you’re going to find happened instead was, other people were left with the influence, but responsibility for results was not attached to this power, because the coolness-factor of blaming A for everything, remained. So those with power, did not labor under the heavy burden of improving things. They just continued to blame A. And they didn’t have to work too hard at it.

What happens when the people who have the power, don’t labor under the responsibility of making things better? Things don’t get better. When things don’t get better, they get worse.

And when people in power can direct the public’s agitation and blame-seeking as easily as you can direct the stream when you’re watering your lawn — you are going to find there was deterioration and things continued to get worse until there was a much more devastating crisis, like a Depression, or a war.

You’re also going to find that when there was a problem, but things got better, it wasn’t that easy for the powerful to direct this public blame like watering a lawn. You’re going to find that’s when the public had & used critical thinking skills, and said to the powerful “No thanks…we’ll figure out for ourselves why things are rancid, and we’ll put the blame where it makes sense.”

Right now we think we’re so hip and cool because society as a whole is blaming the unvaxxed, the whites, the males, the straights, the Trump supporters…all the people who have already been driven, with GREAT fanfare, from influence. Hooray! Yay for our side!! Yay!! But…why isn’t the pandemic over?

The truth is, the pandemic was over when the vaccines became widely available. Ever since then, if you’re really that worried about getting sick, you can just get the shot and then it’s the other guy’s problem. Just like locking up your car; the lock doesn’t have to be that good, the thieves will just meander onward to the next car that isn’t locked.

Since then, the “pandemic” has been a political thing. A blame game, an excuse to defrock those who have already lost influence, from influence. It’s an old game. People like to say Hitler was a bad guy, worst of the worst. It isn’t so common for anyone to put some quality thought into exploring why & how. Hitler had a lot of peculiar and unique strengths, but as far as running the country he was just another piece of crap bureaucrat who exploited the public’s suffering, to accumulate power for himself by blaming specified groups. It led to bad things and this is what makes him such a bad guy within the tapestry of history. But this particular aspect of him wasn’t, and isn’t, that unusual. Something like that is going to happen anytime the powerful who make the decisions tell the public “blame that group over there,” and the public responds with “Duh okay whatever you say boss derp derp derp.” Things aren’t going to get better.

There has lately been a sharp uptick, on social media, of messages to the effect of “Take the vaccine you idiot.” I was wondering if it was just my imagination, then someone found this.

Click to embiggen

I haven’t bothered to hunt all these down to see if they’re genuine. It doesn’t matter much, does it? People have their hackneyed lectures to give because they came up with them themselves, or they’re spewing what someone else gave them…whatever. A wave is a wave. I do wonder if my tax dollars are paying for this one, though. They probably are, and there isn’t likely to be much I can do about it.

People are frustrated. They feel like they’re doing all the right things, and here come our busybody “leaders” to clamp down again. They’re not allowed to get mad at the busybodies and this causes some strange things to happen in human psychology.

Really, all of the last year-and-a-half has been like this. People consciously realize they should have opposed the “peaceful protests” that were actually violent riots, last summer, and expressed frustration at them, even anger. But socially, they feel like they’re not allowed to do so. So they redirect onto the “insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January sixth.”

They consciously realize COVID-19 was not a natural event like a hurricane, and the “bat soup” theory doesn’t gel. But socially, they feel like any acknowledgment of this would end with an indictment or besmirching against China, which is full of people who aren’t white, and that must be racist. So they redirect onto that jerk who wouldn’t wear his mask. He must have done it to us.

They’ve built up an association in their minds between following the instructions from the NIH, the WHO, the CDC and Dr. Fauci, and “beating this thing.” They’ve built up an association in their minds between failing to follow these instructions, and ending up on a ventilator. Consciously, they understand that what we’ve seen happen is the opposite — people follow the instructions, get vaccinated to BeatThisThing, and end up getting told No whoopsie, sorry! You’ve got to keep wearing your mask! If a woman’s husband did as good a job relocating the freeway again after tootling through the backroads as Dr. Fauci has done guiding toward beating-this-thing, she’d insist on pulling over to ask for directions, and maybe grab the steering wheel or kill the ignition. But it’s not socially permissible to doubt the great Dr. F. And so this myth arises that “If everyone got vaccinated we’d have beat-this-thing by now.” We’re supposed to pretend science backs up that notion, when actually science says we’re infected and we’re never getting rid of it.

We can develop herd immunity, sure. There are ways to get there, and there is advice from our experts. We hope there will be a lot of overlap between the advice we receive, and what actually works. To date there’s been very little of this overlap. The experts have taken to inventing boogeymen to explain this, rather than admitting “I was wrong, hopefully I get it right next time”; and we let them. Getting mad at and placing blame on that guy over there, is quick, easy, costs nothing, and it’s socially uplifting and fun.

This is what too much emotion does to your thinking process. It keeps pushing you to focus anger and blame in the wrong place, to fabricate delicate fantasies about why things are the way they are. It lulls you into looking for the lost watch in the ditch with the best light, rather than the one on the other side of the road, where you dropped it.

Yesterday I hung up on our first “schedule your free vaccine appointment” telemarketer. Yay, my tax dollars at work.

Obviously the times are changing. Thirteen years ago people were wondering “Is America ready for a black President?” Now we can see not only was she ready; it turns out, the election of our first black President didn’t change diddly squat. The implied accusation, that we weren’t ready and could never be ready because we’re just too bigoted, stood firm. In fact it has metastasized like a cancer. There’s a lesson here about caving in to people who say “I’m going to spread the slander about you unless you do such-and-such a thing.” It never seems to ever pay off to do the such-and-such a thing. The more years I see come and go, the more impressed I am by seemingly smart people who rush around doing the such-and-such in this futile effort to defend their reputations, against predators who lack the standing or dignity to do real damage. It seems they never learn this.

Two recent events dwarf this O-Election in significance, and by quite a big differential. There is the Voldemort Virus, of course, and all the lockdown fever and “we’re all in this together” nonsense that goes with it. And then there is the big problem from four years earlier that all this was exploited to address, and possibly engineered to address: The election of Donald Trump back in 2017, and with that, the demise of journalistic objectivity. One Lewis Wallace had the audacity to announce this in what I consider the most important column of the last ten years, give or take. He weirdly tied this in with his own status as a transgender, then got sacked for having written it. And then, arguably, was proven correct in the ensuing years, over and over again.

But is this really a change? This is one of those questions that arouses decent points to be made on both sides. It would be hard to live through the earlier Obama years and come out of them saying there was any neutrality left that needed killing. But, it’s just as hard to live through the Trump years, and into these first few months of the Biden administration, and deny some meaningful event has taken place.

There’s been one, and things are different.

How would I explain the news cycle and the zeitgeist of the now, after time-traveling to something that came before. Before Obama, before the September 11 attacks, Clinton’s impeachment, all of that. Modern times, but not weird-modern-times…like, early 1980’s, late 1970’s, thirty-five to forty-five years ago. They/we wouldn’t recognize this mess. In fact, they/we would require some cushioning of the blow. How would we even begin to explain the differences?

1. I’d say the one advantage we have now versus then is that the divisions are clear. Back then, people thought Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather were centrists. With the FCC Fairness Doctrine in place, we just swallowed what was spooned out to us by…well, the whatever. Passive voice is necessary here as the subject of the sentence is an afterthought. “They” would tell us what was going on in the world and what it meant. A few of us would suspect there was a slant to it, that the purveyors of this information were concealing meaningful details. But, unable to tell a complete story about it, and unable to assess the extent of the deception, would go about our business. We knew the news leaned left, but people “knew” this the way they knew Roosevelt was in a wheelchair or that John Kennedy was screwing around on his wife. Now, you can look at how Chris Wallace, et al, treated Donald Trump during those debates. Look at the fact checkers beclowning themselves. The partisans are out and proud.

2. Charles Krauthammer commented many years ago that conservatives think liberals are merely misguided, but liberals think conservatives are awful, terrible people. These feelings are essentially the same now but much more intense. Also, liberalism has been revealed as an ongoing effort to misguide easily misguided people, and this effort is conducted by liberals who are awful, terrible people. This is why, when conservatives find themselves “debating” liberals, there is this confusion arising especially when the conservative and liberal happen to like each other, or even are married to each other. What happens in the discussion is ever-changing, but the one constant is that the conservative is left wondering the same old thing, every time: What has happened to my co-worker, my old college buddy, my wife…etc.? Are they being earnestly snookered? Or have they turned evil? Do they really not care about these kids being “educated” in ramshackle substandard school districts, the aborted babies, the waiters and busboys who can’t find jobs with a higher minimum wage in place and the shelter-in-place orders…? This has been going on a long time. But nowadays, it’s much easier to see that when a liberal is the caboose and not the locomotive, that he’s among the deceived and not the deceiver — there’s a certain willingness. Al Gore’s house uses a lot more energy than the average — oh, I don’t care about that. The liberal may throw a “fact check” back at you about it, but it’s pure sophistry. He’s really saying he just doesn’t care about what should be a game changing revelation. Today we can see this. In times previous, we couldn’t.

3. Back then, there was a prevailing notion among those who supported the guy who lost the election, that the winner, hopefully, would remain unchallenged by subsequent events and his term in office, while not preferred, would be a successful one. In other words, the passengers who didn’t like the pilot, would hope the pilot wouldn’t crash the plane. That’s gone now, as the man-in-the-street has become a much more political creature. He’s not hoping the pilot crashes the plane necessarily, but he doesn’t envision a safe landing. This is perhaps the most meaningful change and it isn’t a good one. For this I suppose we can blame the changing nature of impeachment, from a truly exceptional emergency-case maneuver, to a standard political weapon. Congress merely lurching off in the direction of impeaching Richard Nixon, was the precedent-shattering transformation of the day. Looking back on it, it’s just adorable. Now we have real wisdom. You can tell it’s “wisdom” when there’s a tragedy involved in gaining it. And the tragedy here is that impeachment hurts the vision. “Step One: Got to get rid of that guy.” It’s tainted both sides.

4. Those who are elected, or appointed, enjoy many tools they didn’t have in the box before, to choose their own constituencies. There are people who’ve noticed this and they like the changes being made, sympathizing with these new-constituents being enfranchised. These people are morons. There’s no kind way to put it. Government picking and choosing the people who get to elect the government is like the killer robot being in possession of it’s own remote control. Who’s being enfranchised, and how this affects subsequent electoral outcomes, are less-important considerations. Government selecting the character and priorities of itself, is untenable and out of character with the intent of our founding. Anyway; this is somewhat new. Not completely new. But you know there’s been a change because these enfranchising maneuvers are more-or-less commonplace now. Illegal aliens, convicted felons, children. As far as I’m concerned, it’s okay to have these measures on the table and put up for referendum — people should be able to vote to give away their vote, to help that killer robot seize it’s own remote, if that’s really what they want to do. But they should understand this is what’s really being discussed. And where it happens, it should always be by referendum. Congress, and state legislatures, shouldn’t be able to sit down and decide “Yeah, totally, we want 16-year-olds to be able to re-elect us,” because enfranchising this guy means disenfranchising, to some degree, that other guy.

5. Laws that are supposed to stand for something, and include real penalties that can’t be dodged, are now up for debate. Compared to generations previous, we have a sprawling mess of “not-laws” that are supposed to declare some certain action illegal, and don’t, because they’re offset by cultural taboos that say you can’t enforce the law. There are also things we’re supposed to enjoy the right to “tweet” and to say out loud, but we can expect to be punished if we do, so we don’t really have the rights we’re supposed to have. Up above I mentioned the vaccines. Do we want to start requiring those? If we’re thinking about passing a law, we’ll have to discuss it first, and consider the constitutional ramifications. Layers of judicial oversight would have to hear the case. But if it’s a cultural demand, we bypass all that, and then we have to head into a dirty, mud-slinging melee between two factions competing with each other for the coveted position of “mainstream thought.” This is why people like me haven’t been too crazy about the civil disobedience remedy against the lockdown-mania. This isn’t supposed to be how we decide what’s allowed vs. not-allowed. We have written laws, and written protections against what could be penalized, for a reason. That’s all jeopardized with this business of “It’s illegal on paper but we’re gonna go ahead and do it” and “It can’t be punished on paper, but just try it and see what happens to your career.”

6. Some thirty years ago or so it was understood throughout all sorts of different cultures and walks of life, that people should be treated equally regardless of their sex, religious creed, or skin color. Now it seems to be universally understood that that’s not supposed to happen. I’m not sure who we could “credit” for having brought that change about, but it’s gotten a big helping hand from people who weren’t elected to anything anywhere, and there is no set of circumstances available under which this can lead to racial harmony or anything good for society overall.

There’s an old saw you might occasionally notice embroidered into wall hangings in trailer homes inhabited by little old ladies, something like “Grant me the serenity to accept what I can’t change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” These are good wise words and they suggest the little old ladies might be on to something. In fact, every year I see come and go, I become more convinced that true satisfaction in life is connected to that wisdom. But I would put a little bit of a twist on it:

Grant me the patience to allow the problems to solve themselves that will naturally solve themselves; the courage to solve the ones that won’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. This is where we have to reckon with our status in the universe, as aberrations. Let’s say your house is on fire. From the universe’s point of view, that’s a problem that will naturally resolve itself. The fire will exhaust it’s fuel, or else it will spread to where there is more fuel and then exhaust that. Either way, the conflagration will reach full entropy and a sort of order will be restored. But that’s not in your interest. From your point of view, this is an urgent matter that requires your attention and you’d better hop to it. That’s because, as an aberration, you rely on other aberrations. What’s a natural state of rest and order for you, is not that state to the universe as a whole, and vice-versa. The universe can chug along just fine with your home reduced to ashes, but if you smell smoke, you’d better locate the source and act on it as necessary.

How do liberals fit into that?

Whether or not they’re a problem we have to solve with urgency, is, in & of itself, a question we have to answer with urgency. I can’t help noticing it seems to resurface again and again and again. People who agree with me about politics continually chide me against engaging the liberals, wisely counseling that ignoring them is the far better alternative. I tried that in 2008 though. We all did. These assholes are a house fire.

The way I see it, they are a symptom of a larger problem. Cavemen lacked the technology we have, and with that they lacked the understanding of the basics we have. But they didn’t tolerate liberals. When they roasted the carcass over the fire and prepared to share it because it was far too much for any one family to eat, the hunters who brought down the kill got the choice cuts. The others had to contribute in some way. Nobody got to amble to the front of the line and say, “I contributed nothing but I think deep thoughts and do a lot of complaining, and I have visions of where society should go. So feed me and my non-productive friends first, and then you mighty hunters who brought down the kill, we might think about tossing you some bones.” That’s essentially what liberalism has become today. It would not, could not, have existed back then. Can you just imagine?

Ignore the liberals? Ignore the house fire?

Not only are there consequences. We’re living in them. And more are coming, if we continue to let the house cook away. There’s lots more fuel.

Liberalism hurts people.

I think we should go ahead and engage them, simply because the alternative is contrary to the assurance of our continued existence. Just like a house fire. This isn’t something on which we need to speculate; we’ve lived through a cycle or two of their destructive ways of thinking and their destructive deeds, and we know for sure. Socrates, who was known for derailing seemingly invincible propositions merely by asking “Socratic” questions, would have wondered what’s taking us so long. The philosophy of liberalism, such as it is, cannot even survive exposure to it’s own premises.

Retreating from liberalism is like retreating from a duel in which your opponent is constantly stabbing himself. Why? Seems like a waste of energy to me. It’s needlessly hasty, and it exposes innocent fellow universe-travelers to unnecessary pain.

Something got me hot and bothered about narratives thirteen years ago, which would be just after our election of America’s First Holy President…but it’s impossible to say what it was now because YouTube has yanked the video. And my memory is not filling in the gaps.

Narratives are important. They represent the broadest gulf within supposedly responsible thinking people — how they’d like to think they think, versus how they really think. Narratives are responsible for all the polarization in our society. Wherever the discourse deteriorates, and reasoned discussion melts down into shouting matches, bordering on a fist fight, there are narratives.

A narrative can be true, false, or partially true. Narratives can represent things that are known, unknown, or are probable based on other things that are known.

Narratives are convincing because they’re so often at least partially true, and at least partially known.

However — and this is key — there is no such thing as a narrative that is fully known and fully true. Such a thing then becomes a fact, and ceases to be a narrative. Truth can assert itself, and there’s no social appeal involved in repeatedly asserting something that is so plainly true that it’s obvious to mediocre people.

This is why narratives are not to be trusted. The loudest ones are the ones that are pretending to be something they aren’t; the falsehoods, and the uncertainties, marching around cloaked in the disguise of known, sure facts, which is something a narrative can never be.

You hear them most often, and expressed with the most bumptious confidence, when the speaker literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and is trying to convince himself.

This year, just like any other year, celebrations of Father’s Day will be rather subdued. Now part of the reason for that is that we Dads are spoiled, in a way; the best way to celebrate FD is to “let” us grill food for everybody else to eat, outside, and that can be any day we have the necessary supplies available, and don’t have to work.

We can find any one of a number of ways to treat Mom right that are out of the ordinary. If your Mom is like most Moms, pretty much anything you can do that will involve her skipping a cooking or cleaning regimen, will be as good as anything else you can do. So Mother’s Day is a special one-off, by design, whereas Father’s Day means we stay home and use our grilling equipment, on a summer Sunday on which we’d be doing that anyway.

I’ll be doing that today. Me, the Dad. I don’t look that good.

Unless you’re dealing with a situation in which the male space has been whittled down to nearly nothing, it isn’t set apart from the other weekends. So to fix that, you have to do something like invite friends over to help with the eating and such. Which we’re doing.

But there’s a darker reason we celebrate Father’s Day quietly. Here, as in many other places, we go the extra mile to avoid offense. A lot of people see a celebration of fatherhood as an attack on the moms, especially the single moms.

This is not a competition. Moms and Dads are both important. However, one thing that should be noted this Sunday is that humans are better than other animals, and anything that sets us apart from them, in a good way, is to be celebrated. And the thing no one ever wants to discuss is that fatherhood does that while motherhood does not. Following the momma in a Congo line is a trait that applies to many lower species. And it applies to humans, too. But eventually the kids have to mature and take on life.

There are some species that mate for life. The father sticks around, and raises the kids. With most species that is not the case. He does what has to be done for him to become a father, then he’s out of there and the momma raises the kid. Humans are unique, in that we can go either way.

But one way is better than the other way.

We’ve got a lot of people walking around among us who are laboring under the misunderstanding that if daddy goes and takes a hike — or is sent packing — not much is lost, and most-to-all of the recovery needed can be achieved by heading to the courthouse and extracting some money out of him. This flawed idea endures, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t make sufficient sense for anyone with a name or reputation worth defending, to string the words together in sequence. No one says it, but many act on it. Also, very few people who have actually lived under such an arrangement, would agree with it. Daddies are not billfolds.

On Father’s Day, that should be our motto: Dad’s not (just) a wallet. There’s more to it than that.

One of the many ways we’ve all helped to bring about this progressive whatever…”revolution” I guess is how they like to think of it…mess…anyway.

We have made it a rather reflexive habit to assume the best of their intentions. Others more articulate than me, have already commented on this. But we also make charitable assumptions about their inferences. “We have twelve years to save the planet” comes off sounding like: There is a line, or a curve, of exhaustion of some resource; someone has made an assessment of how much of that resource there is, done the necessarily math on it and come up with that amount of time.

Sure there was fraud in the 2020 elections, but not nearly enough to change the result.

The protests are/were mostly peaceful.

ALL non-binary kids are born that way.

Epstein hung himself.

Hillary Clinton is the smartest woman who ever lived.

Hydroxychloriquine will kill ya dead.

Donald Trump mocked a disabled reporter and called Nazis “fine people.”

Being on time, is a western/white-person concept.

Russia is our enemy and they put Trump in the White House.

China, on the other hand, is not our enemy. The virus came from…well just don’t say it came from there.

I have many different copies of this sort of list floating around…other people have started their own lists. Listing all of them is not the point, this is not “Pokemon” and we don’t gotta catch ’em all. Some of this stuff has yet to be falsified and might very well be true. The interesting thing here is what we hear when liberals say this stuff. We presume the message is “I’ve gone out and checked it, or I’m speaking on behalf of someone else who has.” We say it’s raining outside. That must mean it is.

Well…no.

A lot of the time, this stuff is: You see, what we’re trying to do is build a new world, in which everyone believes…it’s raining.

Or…we want to do some stuff, and we’ve figured out we’re not going to get any of it done until such time as everyone thinks it’s raining. So spread the word.

Or…So-and-so said it’s raining outside, and you see, what we’re trying to do is build a new world in which everyone trusts that guy implicitly. So do your part to make sure everyone thinks it’s raining outside, because he said it is.

Or…I have already repeated that it’s raining outside, so I have an emotional investment in the idea that it’s raining outside.

Or…Give up on fighting us, we have the votes that it’s raining outside, right or wrong.

Or…We don’t give a crap what you think it’s doing outside, we have your kids trapped in our “education” system and we’ll teach them it’s raining outside.

This is the frustrating thing about arguing with liberals. Heard one of them the other day say “Joe Biden is obviously competent” and, when asked for evidence, he didn’t have anything. He just said something about the spending programs being extremely popular, which his opposition quickly showed wasn’t even true. When you have a friend or a relative offering up these chestnuts, you have to make these spot-decisions about whether you’re talking to someone who’s stupid, or evil, or a combination of both, or maybe just emotionally invested in something of which they can’t let go. But you also have to make an interpretation of what they’re really trying to say. No one anywhere is truly qualified to say “Man is screwing up the atmosphere.” No one’s pulling out a super long ladder, climbing up and looking. So on that one, we can rule out the idea that they checked to see if it’s raining and are reporting on what they say. They’re doing something else. A lot of the other things they say are like that too.

That’s one thing I know for sure. It is a Northern Star of stasis and certainty in an enormous sky of constant movement. An oasis in a desert of hazardous predictions that, tempting as they may be, cannot be assured with any genuine confidence. That’s one we can take to the bank.

On whether or not he’ll be President again, or whether he’ll be abducted by aliens at midnight tonight, I haven’t a clue. None of that is relevant; no one really cares about it; it’s minutiae. When people talk about any of that what they’re really talking about is “Are we done with him for good?” That remains true whether they want this to be the case, or not. It is the operative question. And we’re not.

The opposite belief, “Thank God that’s over,” is an absolute impossibility. It is putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Further than that, it’s a just plain stupid supposition. How do you see such a world of tomorrow, emerging from the eddies and currents of today? There’s no path from this to that. None. The tube’s been squeezed, his constituency has tasted meaningful representation. The Morlocks have been out of the underworld.

It’s like the crown heads of Europe saying “Thank goodness they’re all done storming that stupid Bastille and got that guillotine stuff out of their systems.”

For the past several years I have occasionally read “psychological profiles” and the like, struggling to triage a borderline mental illness that is Trump support. It’s actually Trump hatred that is more mystifying and more baffling. I’m sure history will ultimately record it that way. It is the #NeverTrump types who more closely resemble the witch hunters in Salem. And those witch hunters are the ones on the wrong side of history, whose wounded consciences and mental enfeeblements continue to fascinate us. Isn’t that obvious? If we could time travel back to 1692 and put one faction, or the other, in straight-jackets and padded cells, it would be the hunters, not the witches or their defenders. We relate to the hunters, but we think the worse of ourselves when we do, and that’s what makes The Crucible a dark story. It makes us wonder what’s wrong with us. That correlates to the Trump-phobes, not the Trump-philes.

This is not empty, biased, rah rah “Hooray for Our Side” stuff. It is objective reality. When you “know” there’s water in the pool just because someone’s trying to warn you there isn’t any, and you hate that guy, but you don’t really know very much about the water level in the pool — it’s time to reassess. And that’s where they’ve been for awhile. They don’t really know anything about Hydroxychloroquine being particularly dangerous, or that the Voldemort Virus didn’t originate in the lab to which President Trump was directing his scrutiny. They just didn’t want to agree with Orange Man on anything. And look how certain they were.

What has been happening here is not new. It is the dynamic of “Forgotten Man” politics. History doesn’t offer us much by way of these events coming to a sudden stop. They don’t. They burn away like old tire fires, across years and decades, even centuries. America herself, arguably, is just one long “Forgotten Man” political saga. Well, Trump’s constituency was forgotten too, and for a good long time.

Now, the Trump haters are wallowing in their marinade of “Thank goodness that’s over” and doubling-down on the forgetting, turning it into a pillorying. A pity-party of “blame those guys for everything, and be loud about it.”

It is a tactical error of historic severity, and proportion. It is a screw-up worthy of documentation and preservation across the ages.

But, dividers can’t become uniters. It isn’t in their physiology. They’re doing what they do. They can’t stop.

It continues to surprise me, how many people say “We need to come together and stop being so divided,” and then immediately turn around and support a political party dedicated to bringing pain.

We shouldn’t have such a party in the United States, let alone a major political party. No organized party should remain organized after making it their priority that it should hurt this much to make a quarter millions dollars a year. Or that it should cost this much to hire unskilled help, should the need arise. Or “No justice, no peace.” Or that every divorce that might possibly happen, has to happen. Or that it ought to hurt this much to buy a gun, or the ammunition for it. Get hired/promoted when you’re a white guy. Register your car. Buy a kilowatt-hour of energy. Buy groceries. Water your lawn.

They always have these excuses. You can’t raise a family of eight and pay for their college educations on $3.25 an hour, or we have to break storefront windows to show how upset we are over the latest police shooting, or she was in an abusive marriage and didn’t realize it. Or something to do with spotted owls, or snail darters, or shrimp in the vernal pools. Or, the public debt is out of control. That last one, by the way, justifies any & all initiatives to make things more expensive, which is over half of the pain deliberately brought. So it’s odd that I haven’t heard it for a very long time. When I was coming of age, federal spending was just about to cross the trillion-dollar-annual threshold. That really got people’s attention. People of all political stripes worried about the increasing debt. “Stagflation” was looming large in the rear-view mirror. Liberals said “We have to make the rich pay their fair share” and it sounded sincere.

Now no one gives a crap. But democrats still say “make the rich pay their fair share” which proves they’re really just all about hurting people who are trying to run their businesses. They never cared about anything else. And the casual consumers of news, who know little but claim not to be intransigently tethered to one side or the other, thinking themselves to be above it all, slobber like Pavlov’s dogs. Oh yes, make those rich so-and-sos pay! They have to endure a certain minimum of pain! Well, why?

These people are lying and don’t know they’re lying. They get away with it a lot, because they look sincere. Well that’s the thing about lying to yourself: You look sincere, because you are, and yet if you aren’t being truthful with yourself then you can’t deal truthfully with anyone else. And the truth is, an agenda of hurt is going to cause division. You can blame the division on the other guy, but there’s nothing divisive about “Please don’t make it painful for me to run a business when you aren’t helping anybody by doing so, just to make it painful to run a business.”

We are always going to have destructive people, because destroying things is easy. We’re also always going to have people like me, who think things through all the way, lack any desire to destroy or bring pain to anyone just-because, and say “When that guy pays more taxes, and the receipts get blown on nonsense, that doesn’t help anybody.” We’re always going to have both these types. So an agenda of “This perfectly legal thing that helps many and hurts nobody, ought to hurt a certain amount” will always drive a wedge between the two. That’s where the divisiveness is.

Also, it’s undignified. It’s proof that whoever thinks this, labors under skewed priorities. They’re looking for new problems, probably because they’re not dealing with enough already. Haven’t had to accept any real responsibilities in life. Have it too easy. And that’s probably because the businesses they want to tax more just to make it hurt more, have made it that way.

If I take the term “fact checker” literally, I’m not left thinking of it the way they want me to think of it, because they want me to think of them as a sort of filter. Someone makes a statement, the statement goes into the hopper, then the fact checkers check it to see if it IS a fact. If we really believed that was the process, and wanted to come up with a phrase to accurately describe it, they would be statement checkers.

They could be statistic validators. Maybe statistic checkers, statement validators or verity verifiers.

“Fact check” means a fact is what goes into this hopper. Logically, what happens within the innards of the mechanism, must be something besides making sure the fact is a fact, as that must have already been done.

And so I am to believe that these professionals and volunteers apply their talents and resources to something already known to be true, and check it for something. Like for example, whether the people for whom they work, have an interest in the rest of us knowing that fact, or whether they have an interest in that fact being suppressed. That’s what a tin-eared technically-precise reading of that term would mean. Reminds me of one of David Burge’s most famous tweets, about covering the stories. With a pillow until they stop moving.

Ironically…that’s a completely accurate way of looking at it.

Fourteen months ago, just a few days after our first “shelter in place” order, I predicted in a round-about way that for this debacle to come to a close, there would have to be some sort of civil disobedience. I didn’t like that idea then and I don’t like it now. We’re a nation of laws, laws require definition, and you can’t function according to “this law counts because we like it but that other law doesn’t count because we’re civilly disobeying it.”

But I do have to admit, even at the beginning of this I could see this is not absolute. Our nation got started, after all, with civil disobedience. Still & all, like everyone else, I’ve been learning.

Stay inside, don’t go anywhere, and watch teevee ALL of the time like a couple of liberals? No problem, we like each other. And we’ve got all the James Bond movies! We’ll watch one a night and after 24 nights, this thing is bound to be over!

Heh…heh…no really, that was our plan. Oh, the Governor might keep this going into June 2020? Shocker! We-ell…we have more movies…

Okay. So we’ve been met with a series of surprises. Our leaders/rulers/aristocrats, call ’em what you will, “public health officials,” etc…well, there’s no point arguing about it anymore. There is no doubt. They’ve exploited the crisis. It’s just so obvious that writing it down or saying it out loud is an exercise in redundancy. It’s like saying water is wet. No one arguing honestly is going to doubt it or question it, so if they’re doing that they’re just wasting your time.

Scott Morefield at Townhall says Never Again…Never, EVER again.

Like a snowball that’s turned into an avalanche, the restoration of the rights and liberties millions of Americans, particularly those in blue states, lost over the past 14 months seems to be unstoppable at this point. Indeed, the precipitous fall of Covidstan has happened quicker and in more places than any of us could have possibly predicted even three weeks ago. We’ve got a long way to go, particularly with schools, workplaces, and public transportation, but I never imagined that restrictions and mask mandates would end in places like New York, Connecticut, and Virginia anytime before 2022, but thankfully, here we are.

That’s good news we should all celebrate heartily, but if you think this sudden relinquishing of unconstitutional governmental power has anything to do with our overlords’ sudden, Damascus-road-like grasp of ‘science,’ I’ve got an autographed picture of Gretchen Whitmer at a mask burning to sell you. From the CDC’s constant mixed messaging to Dr. Anthony Fauci finally admitting that he was wearing a mask after being vaccinated only for show after indignantly denying it to Sen. Rand Paul just weeks earlier, any attempt to portray these blubbering fools as anything short of utterly incompetent or pure evil is going to fall on deaf ears with me.

No, they’ve loosened their iron grip on forced public masking, not because they ever “followed the science” (LOL), but because WE forced them to do so. And by “we,” I’m talking about a pretty big tent. If you at any point during this charade pushed back by refusing to comply, speaking out in some capacity against local or state authorities, or even engaging in the information war by telling the truth to those in your circle of influence, however small or large that might be, YOU had a role in winning this battle.

I dunno, it’s too soon to say. I do agree people like me deserve a high-five. And the people who are actually civilly disobeying, deserve a bigger one. See, I haven’t been doing that. I’ve refused to wear a mask when alone, and I’ve maintained that since Day One just because I know what’s stupid when I see it. But in the grocery store, when the sign says you have to wear a mask, I wear one. But does it matter? A year ago it wasn’t all about masks, it was about staying home. Masks were in there, to be sure. But the larger concern was that these assholes were shutting off our jobs, like flipping a giant light switch. And because they themselves had never had a real job, we could see they were laboring under the delusion that when you’re ready to restart the economy, you just flip the switch the other way. The quiet panic was over the fact that this all-important consideration wasn’t receiving the attention it deserved.

It’s difficult to see exactly where you are, when you’re actually right there. It’s much easier to make the observation in hindsight, so we’ll have to wait awhile on this. I do like that headline though, never ever again. Damn straight.

Because for the last year, our high advisers who hold themselves to be so superior to us, have outwardly identified public trust or lack of it, as the problem. And they’ve been right about that. We’ve watched as they peg this sense of trust, accurately, as a high value asset in the struggle to slow the spread of the China Virus. And then they got rid of that sense of trust as fast as they could, as if it were a liability. In most cases, it’s genuinely difficult to envision how they could have done a “better” job of that. This has been a debacle wrapped in a flaming dumpster fire wrapped in a shitshow. A disaster bigger than Biden or Trump…although historians will blame it on one or the other of those guys, depending on which way they lean, and you can guess which way the loudest “historians” will lean. But the big takeaway is what it takes to enable a loss of liberty on such an unprecedented scale, and how well it works. I’ve read about it in the write-ups over all the stuff that happened before I was born, and it did make an impression on me, but now that I’ve lived through it — words don’t do it justice. I’m just genuinely shocked. There’s-a-virus-out-there and…that’s it? That’s all it takes? Just like that, we’re a command economy with stay-at-home orders and you need a Mother-may-I to do anything?

Just speaking for myself, it’s a thing I needed to have happen. I had no idea we as a species were so pliable. And here in America.

But it’s not all humble pie for people like us. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Anybody who chastised me for “paying too much attention to politics” before the Voldemort Virus came along, can apologize to me anytime they want. And I do have some names in mind. But people also suffer from the sin of pride, so I know if I expect no apologies I won’t be disappointed.

I’m not in favor of replacing the word “liberals” with “leftists.” It is true that much of the criticism we have for the liberals should more fairly be redirected toward dedicated leftists, and in a lot of cases it is true that the real problem is there, with leftism. But not all the criticism, and not all the cases.

There is something we could call, for lack of a better term, a “liberation fallacy.” We have been inundated for the past several decades with a variety of movements to “liberate” women, minorities, or this-or-that designated-oppressed victim-group. And we have become accustomed to an all-but-expected bait-and-switch fake-out of sorts. We see the most vivid evidence of this in what we consider to be “higher education.” “You’re liberated, so don’t listen to anything anybody in authority has to say, at least without questioning it — unless the authority is me, your college professor.” I have never understood how this works. It’s almost like a magic spell from a fairy tale. Familiarity breeds contempt, or something? The kid’s parents are so uncool, if they say it’s sunny outside that must be proof it’s raining. But the prof can decide on their grades, and they see their grades as their gateway to their glorious future, I guess. I dunno. Like I said, I’ve never fully understood.

Doubt all those uncool gassy old people, but believe everything the professor says.

Before that it was in the labor unions. Don’t listen to that boss of yours, he can’t tell you what to do. He’s in “management.” But we’re the union! Men who laugh at the law, tremble in fear at our edicts. We’re the new boss. You’re liberated from those guys over there. Not from us.

Feminism has treated women no differently. Their narrative for half a century has been that women can, or ought to be able to, choose

1. Whether to work or not
2. Whether to live out the sex life of a nun, housewife or whore
3. Whether or not to dress to appeal to the male gaze
4. Their religion/spirituality

And nobody should deign to influence a woman in any way about any of this under any circumstances. But the feminist movement, which illustrates itself as the bringer of all this freedom, so deigns, pretty much constantly and without a second thought. The movement has been constantly pressuring them to work, to flirt, to divorce, to abandon Christianity, and as far as how to make up and dress…well, thanks to the magic of the “fashion industry” it’s gone back and forth on that. Liberated fashion, what is that? You have to buy magazines to find out what it is. Today. It’ll change tomorrow.

But everyone who’s been “liberated” has been subjected to a similar mind-scramble. It’s quite invasive. You might as well peel back their skull and stick an egg beater in there. What’s that like, anyway? Us white males can only guess at it. The liberation-fallacy doesn’t focus its mind-control on us, it just casts us as the bad guys. I don’t have any basis of comparison, but I think I’d prefer it that way. The activists want to blame us for everything but they’re not trying to bamboozle us, gaslight us or confound us. Our opinions aren’t that important to them.

The point is — the above is quite a lot of detail. All of it is accurate. None of it really applies to “leftism.” This is how modern liberalism works. Through a fallacy.

It’s the same practical joke played out over and over again, just like…fishing. Fishing is a joke, the same one applied repeatedly throughout thousands of years. We name liberals after the thing they promise to provide but don’t provide, which is “liberty.” We do this because the liberals want us to do it. Every person participating in communication in English, is a potential recruit. If each participant were similarly susceptible to the practical joke played by the fishermen, the fishermen would have an interest in being represented according to what they purport to provide but are not actually providing, and we would call them “worm givers.” But they play their joke on fish, not people, so that’s why we call them fishermen.

Liberals, like fishermen, do not care if their joke fails on an individual level. Here and there, now and then, a woman may be “liberated” and appreciate the “liberty” she has…and use it to make a choice that the liberals don’t like. She may decide to become a housewife. And the liberals will react with scorn, ridicule, stigma, and a subtext of “Hold up there, we wanted you to have the choice so you could make it the way we want you to make it.” Some women pick up on this, are not bothered by it in the least, and keep on homeschooling. They’re very much like the fish making off with the bait. Liberals being concerned with group dynamics, will just ignore her and go on about their business of recruiting others, just like the fisherman reaching for another worm to put on the hook. It’s a bulk process, concerned with breadth and not depth. That’s why liberal ideas are derailed and devastated with just a little bit of honest inspection.

Liberalism works according to this fallacy: You’re oppressed, you’re put-upon, we’re going to march in the streets and achieve “change” so we can get even with the dirty rotten so-and-sos. This is what was born with the Storming of the Bastille in 1789. It is an indoctrination tool, a sort of on-ramp to the highway of leftism. Leftism, being the superset, incorporates everything else; the moral relativism, the nanny-state nonsense, the big-government tax-and-spend redistribution schemes, the graft, the grift, the thuggery, the corruption. “If you’re friends with us, we’ll just wave all those environmental restrictions and you can go ahead and build.” That’s leftism. They aren’t synonymous.

I like, admire and respect Dennis Prager and everybody else who’s trying to recapture the word “liberal” and restore it to its original meaning. Your intentions are noble. Just a little misguided is all.

Where do we go from here? Can we hope to reverse this massive power/freedom transfer imposed on us by the Voldemort Virus? Where is the technology taking us? These are complicated questions because technology changes us as it evolves; and we evolve with it. But, it seems, never in quite the way we expected. In fact when history records how it all went down, in the end we can’t trust the history.

First we have to understand what we mean when we use the word “technology.”

Technology, we think, began with fire. Or, hunting weapons. Spear points, maybe. We don’t know for sure because we weren’t there. But we can be pretty sure the first invention came from the arsneal of tools you have to have to kill an animal, cook it and eat it. Vegans, lacto-ovo, health nuts and other meat-haters would protest that the rabbit-food diet came first so their tools must have come first, but that won’t work because you can eat that pottage without tools. We must have built things first to take down the small game. Traps, maybe. But also fire.

Community arrived, with all of its challenges, when someone killed something too big for their family or clan to eat. Others who were outside the clan wanted some, because the smell of the pig meat over the fire was delicious, they’d never experienced anything like it. Anyone who’s smelled pork roast at a barbecue understands this. Pigs, I surmise, were built by God to smell good over a fire, to serve as a launching point for what came next. After a few false starts, some “sucks to be you,” and some rotting pig carcasses lying around going to waste, the clan had to settle on the unavoidable thought: We have nothing to gain by keeping this to ourselves, we can’t eat all of it. And so multiple families would gather around a common fire with a common carcass roasting over it, because, why not? What a beautiful evening that must have been. The birth of community. Think about this when you have those cookouts King Joe is thinking about maybe allowing you to have. You’re celebrating the first time humans became genuinely better, through their own innovation.

And from this came a question: Can I have seconds?

And so community arrived with its first challenge: Apportionment. We have gathered together to bring a demand commensurate with the supply. How do we figure out who gets what? And so there was capitalism. There was ownership. This caveman brought down the boar. That caveman did not. Therefore, he must remit a service. Professions, starting with “the oldest profession,” came from that. “Performance reviews” came from that. If a hunter sucked at hunting, it wasn’t just an isolated opinion, it was evident to everybody.

With just this much technology, and no more, there was merit. If a “leftist caveman” tried to “earn” a bigger share of the roast pig by way of his charisma, giving fancy speeches, or writing poetry, he would have been ostracized. Perhaps leftism got a brief but abortive start back then when community was born. The conversation would have been very short. “You did not hunt the pig, what will you do to earn more?” “I know, I’ll make all the decisions about who gets how much, so you don’t have to worry about it! How’s that?” “Hmmmm…fuck off.”

We’ll never know for sure, but we do know you need some more technology to sustain that nonsense. Cavemen wouldn’t have tolerated it. We tolerate it just fine.

The nonsense might have started with simple machines. Maybe with the wheel. Look what I built! It rolls! That’s really great…I have no idea what you did and I can’t understand how it works, so use your wheel to bring me things. Uh, what? And so slavery was born. And the dysfunction that enshrouds us, to this day, was born. He who can do things, must serve the one who doesn’t bother to try.

The guy who fixes your computer will understand this perfectly. He knows how to do something, you don’t know how to do it. So you get to order him around like he’s your little bitch because you “need” him to do it. You break the computer, he fixes it, after he leaves you find you can’t do the thing you used to be able to do, so you blame him. This is why he hates you.

Ah well…maybe I’m letting my personal experiences get in the way. Slavery must have existed before tech. It is the default condition. It’s our Original Sin. Although, if technology can’t be blamed for our desire to enslave others, we probably can blame it fairly for enabling our hunt for excuses. Before technology there was only one justification for it: I’m bigger than you are and I’ll kill you if you don’t serve me. With technology, as kingdoms and civilizations rose and fell, the excuses thrived and multiplied. The Sun God Ra, or Jupiter, or Yahweh, or Allah, put me and my friends in charge. Our secular types fancy themselves to have ended all that, but they haven’t ended anything at all. Instead, they’ve started something, and what they’ve started is a whole new round of these excuses.

We’re doing it for “the workers.” They have nothing to lose but their chains.

Vox Populi Vox Dei; the people chose me. You have to do what I say.

We have to decrease the surplus population. We can’t have undesirables breeding faster than normal, better people.

We’re just taxing you to make you pay your fair share.

A lot of evolving civilizations older than ours, and ours included, claim to have “ended slavery.” It would be nice if that were true. But you don’t need cotton fields or whips and chains to have slavery. It’s in the human heart. Theft of services is our default behavior. Technology has served to highlight this, and often to eliminate it by getting rid of the opportunity. But it’s also given us new opportunities for slavery.

The latest is “climate change.” People with access to the instrumentation that can measure our climate, have begun publishing alarmist gossip about the measurements they’re making. They can detect variations they weren’t detecting before, which stands to reason because the instrumentation is more precise than it used to be. But it’s really just a new wave of Malthusianism — the Chicken-Little “sky is falling” screed that humans will overpopulate the planet and deplete its resources, triggering a mass extinction event.

It’s true that the Earth has seen mass extinction events. But if the past has taught us anything about these events, it’s that when they’re sudden, they require sudden triggers. History has all but falsified the notion of population, or any other gradually changing metric, slowly trudging toward some “tipping point” and setting off a cataclysm. The Earth is a living thing, and living things adapt to changes on a micro scale by way of adjustments on a micro scale. The Malthusian dread did not come to pass, because as the population increases, resources become available to service them, until they can’t for whatever reason. And where the resources are no longer available, the population doesn’t increase there. It increases somewhere else. It’s how nature works. It’s really quite amazing.

Carbon in the atmosphere works the same way. There’s no such thing as “too much” of it. If you get a heavy saturation, what you have is a global environment that’s just a tiny bit friendlier to plants and a tiny bit more hostile to animals. So in a few generations you’ll have more plants and fewer animals. It works both ways. If there isn’t “enough” carbon you’re going to get more animals and fewer plants. It’s like a pendulum, and the fossil record shows it’s been working that way. Again, it’s all really quite amazing.

Ah…maybe I’m wrong about all this. The above contains all sorts of stuff I can’t prove, just like the existence of God is something I can’t prove. These are matters of faith, and inferential reasoning based on circumstantial evidence, and my knowledge of history and technology, which I admit fall short of what could be considered exhaustive, or even commanding. I’ve been waiting for years with an open mind to see something that will upset it and require a macro-scale rethink. Occasionally it’s happened, and now, in 2021, that’s where I am. That’s how I see it. Technology made us better, thousands and thousands of years ago, when it created a necessity and offered a reward for our coming together and sharing things. Since then, it’s done some amazing things but it hasn’t made us better people. The Internet was supposed to have done that. It was supposed to make us better informed. Then someone figured out that a lot of what’s on the Internet is nonsense. And so we needed “fact checkers.” But no one with a working brain takes the fact checkers seriously anymore, because fact checking has devolved into just one more way for unproductive people to mold and shape the most intimate aspects of the lives of more productive people. There we go again. Another excuse. So no, the Internet has not made us better. It hasn’t even made us more informed. We can probably credit it for clarifying our thinking about challenges that were confronting us before we had the Internet, so that our responses to the challenges improve. But on the whole, the Internet has been an exercise in over-promising and under-delivering. Buying and selling things is quicker and more convenient, thank goodness. There are always cat pictures. And who can ever get tired of nice looking women soaking up the sun, using fish as bras? But, life goes on, and we just keep on truckin’, now with Internet.

Others in my profession do not see it that way. They look forward to some near-future event, just around the corner. Some prognosticate a terrible event, like war, famine, disease, the above-mentioned “climate change” apocalypse. Others foresee something glorious, a “technological singularity,” in which the automatons attend to their own programming and do it so well, and so quickly, that human suppositions about anything & everything will become irrelevant.

They’re succumbing to emotional reasoning. You can tell this because the event that’s going to change everything and turn it all upside-down, is always just around the corner. That’s what commands attention, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that that’s what’s really true. And it has not escaped my notice that my colleagues who most enthusiastically look forward to the technological singularity, are the ones who speak of success and failure only in vague terms, obfuscating and avoiding questions of cause and effect. They speak of this country over here, or that company over there, “doing/did it right” and that other one “doing/did it wrong.” You would reasonably expect, if you were to take these verdicts seriously, there would be a meticulously fleshed-out recipe bundled in showing how the successful entity did it “right” so that other attempts can follow suit. The pattern I’ve noticed is that you very rarely get that, and if you don’t get it, what you’re seeing is essentially cheerleading, not the sober, reasoned assessment of the results it’s pretending to be. I have also noticed these emotional-reasoners, in assessing the processes that turned out “right” or “wrong,” form their opinions in echo chambers. They compare notes with others who think like they do. They don’t ask the people most directly impacted. Some of them build things. But it isn’t in their pattern to hang around after someone has used their creations, and gather end-user evaluations, wart & all.

I do not believe technology is bringing us to a singularity. This is not to say I doubt the ability of automatons to program themselves. That much has already been done. The ramifications for the field of cryptography are real, interesting, and promising. But for us to experience what they’re talking about, the machines would have to do what the singularity-proponents are not doing, and assess. Note that God, who supposedly does everything perfectly, stops, looks back and assesses. Six times, in Genesis 1, He makes the observation that “it was good” — there is no way to interpret that, without some consideration for a residual potential that it might not have been good. It is, clearly, some sort of question getting settled by means of an assessment. And then the seventh time, at the end of the chapter in 1:31 “He saw that it was all very good.” Six unit tests followed by a system test.

This is a uniquely human contribution to the cycle. Machines, by & large, can’t do it. This is why I reserve a special carve-out for cryptography and maintain some hope for a micro-singularity in that one field, because distinguishing success from failure is so easy: Your algorithm is good, if this other self-programming automated process can’t break it. If that other process can break it, then it’s back to the drawing board with you. I see a potential for getting rid of the human element in that one evaluation chore, but in none other. Singularity-proponents don’t understand this. They don’t evaluate.

With the deterioration of monarchal rule just a couple hundred years ago, the idea emerged that humans ordering other humans around without compensation, just by virtue of having been born into some higher station, is wrong. Here in the United States, we’re dedicated to that. But, we don’t always uphold it. This, I think, is where we’re headed. The unproductive people are going to continue to sniff around for excuses, always with the aim of restoring the feudal system and inserting themselves as a higher layer of aristocracy, ready to tell the rest of us when to jump, how high, when we can come back down again. Technology will continue to evolve and improve, providing the rest of us with more & better tools for getting our work done — and providing them with more & better tools to pull their scams. Young people will fall for these scams, since young people can only acquire the knowledge that comes from others, which requires gullibility. Then they’ll get snookered, and become wise. We’re all going to have to do that as the scammers become more and more sophisticated. Sometimes, we’ll achieve this knowledge without having been suckered into commitments, or having established new entitlements that can’t ever be demolished or reversed. Other times, we won’t be so lucky, and we’ll be trapped.

Meanwhile, the massive increase in public debt from the Biden bail-outs, is a millstone around our necks. In our near future, that’s got some influence. If you’re looking for things to worry about that are imminent, worry about that, because it’s there waiting for us no matter what technology does. Buckle up bitches.

People all throughout the First World are wondering, if we’re all supposed to want the same things then why is there so much arguing on the Internet? The Internet comes off looking not too good; it looks at first blush like we’ve been properly taught throughout all these generations, “Don’t argue about politics, religion or sports” and we obeyed, keeping a long-lived albeit fragile peace, then along came the Internet.

I have a long record of preaching against this. I’m of the opinion that the Internet is one giant tempest-in-a-teapot, not because there is lots of arguing, or because there is mean-spirited, undisciplined arguing. The problem is the level of skill is so low. This “don’t discuss it” thing has worked against us; people are out of practice. They find themselves defending premises they never in their wildest dreams thought would ever be challenged anywhere, and they don’t know how to do it. Lacking the knowledge or the experience needed to defend an axiom with a justifying argument, they retreat into some sort of soothing protective shelter. I examined some of this a month ago by taking a look at the You See people. Poor, sniveling wretches living in a tiny mental cloister in which their idea must win, all the time and every time, because it’s just such a novelty. They are utterly undone by the realization that their idea is not novel.

The Internet is a raucous and noisy place, because people have this need to defend the indefensible, and when that germinates into a need to do some arguing when they don’t know how to argue, they use these templates. The templates exist on what might be thought of as a sort of tree, just like a tree you’d find in a redwood forest, or — forgive me, it’s become part of my vocational discipline to see things this way — a sort of class-inheritance tree you’d find in an application or module written in an object-oriented language. “You see” is at the root. Some well-known and often-seen you-see stuff includes

1. Gender is nothing but a social construct
2. Mankind is a poison on the planet
3. Capitalism is the disease and socialism is the cure
4. “Robber Barons” blah blah blah…

All nonsense. Honest argument and open, scrutinizing discussion would reveal all this stuff to be nonsense, so the purveyors retreat to their dopamine rush of you-see, comforting themselves in this false realization that they’ve hit on something titillating, intellectually stimulating, and new.

And then there is:

5. You see, what we’re trying to do is…

Now you know you’re dealing with a progressive, or at least someone who would like to think of themselves that way. They’ve joined up with a movement that is bigger than themselves. And they think they’re being uplifting, positive, welcoming types by encouraging you to climb aboard the bandwagon. You see, what we’re trying to do is forks off into all sorts of other silly garbage like

1. Atone for the sins of the past
2. Shatter the “glass ceiling”
3. Eliminate inequality in all its forms
4. Make the rich pay their fair share
5. Help the blah blah blah…

Notice that none of this is really an argument at all, it’s just an effort. “You see, what we’re trying to do is” is a sort of escape hatch. The speaker is not arguing, quite to the contrary he’s calling for a cessation of arguing. The subtext is something like: If you’re not onboard with this, no harm no foul, just let us go about our business and you won’t be affected.

But of course you will, if they’re successful. That’s the whole point.

And then there is:

6. You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which…

The poor dears, you almost have to feel sorry for them. They think this spares them from any scrutinizing questions, but anyone who’s been paying attention can see each and every single one of the irritants of our modern world, is a direct result of someone in the past laboring away at world-building. Building that perfect world…in which no one with a working brain would really want to live.

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which is a launch point for such toxic garbage as

1. Everyone can get…
2. There is no…
3. People assume that…

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which everyone can get branches off into

1. Health care
2. to vote
3. Housing
4. Food and/or food stamps
5. College tuition
6. Abortions
7. Whatever gender (identity) they want

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which there is no comes from watching too much Star Trek. The theory is that after we conquer all these undesirable conditions and undesirable behaviors, we can start exploring the stars and meeting alien civilizations or some such thing.

1. Bigotry
2. Intolerance
3. Poverty
4. Illiteracy
5. Disease
6. Fossil fuel consumption
7. Guns
8. Meat
9. Judeo-Christianity
10. Home schooling
11. Nuclear families
12. Individuality
13. Advantage to being a pretty woman
14. Responsibility
15. Distinction between X and Y

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which people assume that is mind control. These are the people-programmers, telling strangers what to think.

1. Women can do anything men can do
2. White people don’t belong wherever they are
3. The United States was actually founded in 1619 and its purpose has always been to keep slavery alive and what-not

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which there is no distinction between X and Y is the template-argument of the equivocator. An equivocator is a prevaricator, whether he wants to admit it or not, because a lot of these things they want to pretend are the same, are actually different.

1. Republicans and democrats
2. Men and women
3. Illegal and legal aliens
4. Standard of living of ambitious people vs. the standard of living of lazy people

Why is the Internet such a noisy, argumentative place? The problem is that there is a demand for arguments, that outstrips the supply because too many people don’t know how to build an argument.

The other problem is, with such a demand that is greater than the available supply, we have managed to come up with a supply. The arguments are being mass-produced, by people who know how to produce little-to-nothing else. And they’re creating “arguments,” like the ones above, and others, without much thought.

After this past year of “plan-demic,” we have seen how natural it is for people to come up with strange, arcane and counterproductive new rules without taking any responsibility for the end results. It is an intrinsic attribute of our species, I’m afraid. In our heart of hearts, we seek to enslave each other, to come up with these new rules under which others are supposed to live, but not to abide by them ourselves. And we like to think we’re ready to discuss the pros and the cons, but all too often, we’re not. We fall back on these templates.

The Internet has not created the problem. It has revealed it.

I’m celebrating Liz Cheney’s defrocking by thinking about her constituents, and I don’t mean Wyoming people. I mean her real constituents. The #NeverTrump types can see with their own eyes that someone’s performing competently at a job, and still wish to replace him because they don’t like his vibe. They’d rather let a building burn to the ground than call a fireman who happens to chew tobacco, or use profanity, or skip Church, or watch Beavis and Butthead, or, or, or…

These are people you can invite up into the hills for berry picking, and they’ll go, but they’ll wear the nice slacks they wear to church, along with dark socks and formal business shoes, because they don’t own anything else. So you end up turning around miles earlier than you intended because you don’t want them to slip and break a leg.

Some other things they don’t own:

1. A car that burns gas and has a stick shift.
2. Tools. Spare parts. Anything for which you’d have to remember “righty tighty, lefty loosey.” Which they’ve never heard before.
3. Sneakers, jeans, hiking boots — signs of society’s degeneracy!
4. Any kind of outdoor grill.
5. Lawncare or gardening tools; you hire people to do that.
6. Any music of any genre that was written after 1939.
7. Pretty much anything that has anything to do with sex at all.
8. Buzz saw, chop saw, saw table, router, power drill, power washer, shop vac, chainsaw, etc.
9. Work gloves.
10. Guns & ammo.

This is the guy on the camping trip who isn’t good for anything and complains so much you wish you left him behind. He bought a Thermos along filled with flavored Cuppaccino. He says things like “full of you-know-what” and “poo poo” and “ca ca” when there aren’t any kids in earshot, or even any women. You tell a dirty joke, and he doesn’t get it. Even worse, maybe he does get it, finds it funny, everyone can see he thinks it’s funny, and he still winces in cosmetic disgust as if St. Peter is watching. It’s a familiar gesture. A grimace, a nose-wrinkling, a shaking of the head.

People like this live in tiny worlds, which is fine. We’re all born into tiny worlds. But they work so hard at keeping theirs tiny. They want to do that. They hurt people to do it. They may have lots of kids and they may tell all those kids “You can be anything you want to be in life,” but they don’t really mean it. They don’t give a fig about immediate or eventual results. They’re protocol-obsessed.

They hate Trump because they don’t value what he did. They’ve never had to count on a job actually getting done right, never lost anything because it didn’t happen. They don’t even understand the concept of “an important job”; to their way of thinking, a job is important when it’s a job done by a person who is important, and what makes a person important is their power over you. Their parents paid their college tuition, and to this day, they’re not too sure of how it got done. Their graduation was a ritual and everything after that has been a ritual. You can explain to them until you’re blue in the face that they’re safe because hard men protect them, and are unafraid of doing terrible things, and they’ll nod and agree like they understand. But they don’t. There’s no reason.

They’re important people. We have our current President because of them. They always know who to fire. As far as the long term plan, they haven’t a clue.

We’ve got a lot more people walking around among us who have some awareness of this and think of it as a sort of harmless preference or taste thing. Well yes, they say, there were people hurt by the old ways of doing things and Trump did help them, but my friend coworker neighbor or relative was deeply offended when he said “Grab ’em by the pussy” so she can’t stand him, and I’ve known her for like forever so I support her decision…

Things change when you’ve actually seen good people hurt by bad policies. Things are different when you know there are people in the building that’s burning.

There are words we can use to describe people who want the building to keep burning, knowing there are people inside roasting alive, because their business is in resisting any & all efforts from the fireman or anybody else who uses coarse potty-mouth language. Knowing full well there is human suffering happening that ought to be the focus of their energies, but isn’t. People upholding some cosmetic veneer of decency, while stripping themselves of all empathy for those whose lives are directly impacted by the question at hand.

Monsters.

Style-over-substance, high-hairdo, prickly, over-sensitive, brittle, puritanical, empathy-deficient people-hating sweater-wearing monsters.

As far as I’m concerned, Congresswoman Stefanik hung the moon. It’s true I’ve held other conservatives in high regard and a little while later they disappointed me. Liz Cheney is one of those. Maybe Stefanik will someday too, but to date it hasn’t happened.

Here she is going after Congressman Schiff for his lying about the “whistleblower.”

I am willing to bet a large amount that Elise Stefanik owns hiking boots. And I’ll further bet she looks awesome and fantastic in them.

The Census is a ten-year event so people should be talking about it more. It says something, if anybody’s willing to take the time to notice, about the policies that arouse such passion between these ten-year events. California and New York are losing congressional seats. This is part of a pattern you can see now — with every gain and every loss — so it isn’t just those two states. I’m seeing, among the states losing seats, the only one that could be described as “red” is West Virginia, and among those gaining the only one that could be described as “blue” is Oregon. Each of those is highly debatable, and apart from those two, it’s a clean sweep.

With the last election as close as it was, this is a referendum.

As a referendum, it is not an outlier. Left-wing indictments against the “systemic racism” of the United States, our “patriarchy,” our use of God’s Measurement System as opposed to the flaky Metric surrender-monkey kilo-centi-stuff, guns guns guns, etc. etc. etc…are mere flies upon the windshield of: Which way are the boats headed? This one counter-argument defeats all of those attacks. It’s almost embarrassing to watch. The immigration crisis exists because people want to come here. Yes President Biden made it much worse, but not by making anything work any better than it was working before. He made it worse by saying “come on in!”

The interstate situation is somewhat different, since you don’t need to immigrate when you move from one state to another. And it’s clear there’s a lot of movement. It’s clear that, when leftists run things for awhile, people don’t want to live there anymore and that includes leftists. People in general should be spending more time wondering about this. I think both sides would agree The Right simply wants to keep businesses running; we can argue about whether they’re empowering evil soulless corporations that are polluting the environment or trying to make sure no one has any health care, or whether they’re really just trying to make it easy for people to work for a living. But I think all up and down the ideological spectrum people would agree that’s the overall point, and they’d be right. The Left, on the other hand, wants to Build A Perfect World, in which people have full and unrestricted access to the blah blah blah and there is no more blah blah blah. People in general would agree with that and they’d be right about that too. So where’s the perfect world? How come people keep leaving it after it materializes?

Why — The Left would retort — is The Left running everything right now? The White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. There’s an old Reagan quote that comes to mind: If you’re explaining, you’re losing. Blogs, like this one, don’t really help over the shorter term of time because we explain. If you pay attention while you’re doing this explaining, after a prolonged period of repeated experiences you’ll gradually come to see the wisdom of what Ronald Reagan was saying. People don’t like having things explained to them, even obvious things — especially obvious things. There is no explanation of the right-wing position that leaves a mark, at least, none that leaves a mark on par with simply letting The Left run things for awhile. That is convincing. No right-wing pundit could have delivered a smackdown that would make an impression quite like the two years of putting The Left in charge 1993-1994, or 2009-2010, or 2021-2022. Lots of righties would like to come up with one that does. But it hasn’t happened. I don’t think the human genome permits it. We have to go through the misery of bad ideas to figure out how bad they are. It’s in our genetic wiring. Can’t figure out what a bad idea it was to bite that apple, until we’re cast out of the Garden of Eden.

People talk about “Republicans are dead” or “the democrat party is finished” or “The United States is over.” When they say things like this they’re admitting to their own limitations as they attempt to comprehend a sustained conflict. The concept is an uncomfortable one for us, but that’s the environment in which we live. We live in a tempest in a teapot. There are forces in play which keep the conflict going. The Left has bad ideas; if it were not so, they’d merely take over at any one of the three biannual chapters mentioned in the previous paragraph, we’d all see what good ideas they have, and we’d leave it that way. That hasn’t happened. The Right cannot make an impression on people, that’s on par with letting their opposition run things; if that were not so, any one of a number of pundits or bloggers, like me, would state the case and then the next election would be a rout. That hasn’t happened either. The United States is far from over, and people want to live here. If that were not so, we wouldn’t have an immigration crisis.

The one thing that keeps things screwed up, that might be the easiest to fix, is this “purpling” thing. Blue states losing their population as refugees swarm to red states, with better policies, is nothing new. It’s been happening in California since I moved in, swimming upstream against the crowd, some thirty years ago. If only people would move in to red states and then vote like they’re in a red state, problems would dissipate over time the way problems do when people are applying their intelligence. But we’ve seen how blue-state refugees don’t do that. Their tendency is to vote, in the new state, for the same dumb policies that made their old states miserable, and worth leaving. This has been a constant source of distress to the newer states undergoing the purpling-process. Please remember, they say, you’re refugees and not missionaries. But the refugees don’t listen.

Is there an answer? Maybe some hurdles, some barricades to help thwart this purpling process. But overall, there may not not be an answer. We may be doomed to swim around in this tempest in a teapot forever, as a “reward” for our continued refusal to learn what a dumb, bad policy is. Our system of elected representation is what I like to call a Batman system: It gives us the government we deserve, not necessarily the one we need.

About a month ago someone asked me to make a financial commitment toward a dumb plan, via e-mail. When I declined I got back a paragraph explaining the benefits of the dumb plan. This stuff had already been explained to me, almost word-for-word, when this very brief conversation had started.

I replied curtly: I just gave you my answer, and you responded to my answer by re-explaining your plan. Don’t do that.

This is part of what’s wrong with all of our evolving society now. Too many people simply don’t understand how to have two-way discussions of things. Or, for that matter, to absorb and process reactions other than the single one they have in mind. They talk when they should listen. They’re ready to be masters of puppets, but they’re not ready to truly co-exist with others. They think they are but they aren’t.

They start, or wade into, these exchanges with scripts in their heads they want to see played out to the letter, and when they get back something that’s outside the guardrails they start you-see-ing. They waste their time and everybody else’s time with pablum. “You see, if you wear a mask it slows the spread, and we’re all in this together.” “You see, scientific theories are seldom if ever proven, but they’re still scientific.” “See, black people can’t be racist because they lack the power to do racist things.” “You see, even men should support feminism, because feminism is really all about equality between the sexes.” “You see, by using these slightly heavier bags and charging the ten cents, the stores encourage recycling which will help save the planet.” “You see, in times like these, with things the way they are, we all have to conserve water and a golden brown (dead) lawn looks classy in a way.” “You see, when you plug in your car to charge it, you don’t need to use gas.” “You see, by wearing these masks, we show each other that we care about each other.” “You see, a noose causes a special kind of hurt in black people that white people can’t understand. It’s like a fairy tale, magical kind of hurt.”

There is a bloated “new world” subclass of these that begin with, or could begin with, the words: “You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which…”

“You see, we’re trying to make a world in which everyone uses the Metric System.” “You see, we want a new world in which men and boys are not so attracted to fit girls, or who are attracted to girls who are not so fit.” “You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which money is not what motivates people.” “You see, we want a better environment in which bullying is a thing of the past.” “You see, we want to rid the world of bigotry forever.” It has not been lost on me that when such activists win at everything and reform everything exactly the way they want it, the things they wanted relegated to the past are not relegated to the past. They “celebrate” these past vices and plagues as if they were present things. Sometimes they even bring them back again so they have something they can continue vanquishing. And the new world they’re building, far from being a dream world, is the stuff of nightmares. No one with a choice would actually live in it…but people who don’t have choices, are compelled to do so, and suffering on a large scale is the unavoidable result.

A very large portion of all “arguing politics on the Internet,” probably more than half of it word-for-word, is just “you see.” Simple minds re-regurgitating things they’ve already said, because they ran into responses they didn’t like, and rather than responding to the responses they didn’t like, just you-see re-explaining.

“You see, when the Government spends that money, it creates jobs…(Whereas if the people and businesses were allowed to keep it Lord knows what they’d do with it, maybe shovel it into a paper shredder).”

They dismiss legitimate questions, anecdotal evidence, and logical problems with their plans by “you see”-ing away the questions, evidence and problems. They re-explain the essentials. It looks like having a discussion but it really isn’t that. It’s more like an involuntary reflex. It’s like a facial tic.

I blame the lilty-voiced kindly old aunties who spent decades and decades warbling away about “No discussion of sports, politics or religion allowed at this supper table.” I blame them, because we now have multiple generations of people who think they understand how to have a discussion, in fact fancy themselves to be experts at it. How could they not be? Look at all the time they put into it. But their go-to maneuver is to retreat into the comforting embryonic sac of “you see” followed by explaining — again — to some imaginary opponent who’s hearing of the issue for the very first time, when the actual situation is that they got back a question they couldn’t answer, or have been shamed by the presentation of some contradiction or conundrum they know they should have settled themselves before bothering anyone else with it. So they go for the facial tic and start explaining.

Telemarketers who bother old people in the middle of the day with their scam phone calls, are much more savvy. When they run into a scrutinizing question for which they’re unprepared, like “Why do you need my money to invest if it’s such a hot prospect, why don’t you do it yourself and keep all the profits?” they just cuss, hang up, and go on to the next call. The Internet-arguers trying to sell scams on blog threads or on social media, aren’t that sharp.

Friend/Relative #1: “I’m confused by all this conservative/liberal stuff. What’s the difference?”

Friend/Relative #2: “The difference is that liberals boldly embrace change because they’re not afraid of it. Conservatives cling to the past with bloody fingernails, even when it’s going away. They’re like the buggy whip factory worker making more whips after the car has been invented. They doom themselves.”

Friend/Relative #1: “Oh, well I definitely want to be a liberal then.”

Friend/Relative #2: “I’ve heard they’re called ‘liberals’ because they love liberty.”

Friend/Relative #1: “Oh! Well so much the better!”

That’s got to stop. This is wrong. Anyone who has been thinking for themselves, even for a moment, at any time over the last five years knows this is balderdash. President Trump was a reformer, a conservative reformer. The liberals resisted his reforms, clinging to a past that was going away, until they looked like buffoons. Now they’re going to try to bring it all back again. They may succeed at it, but they’ll end up looking even more buffoonish. They’re the ones manufacturing buggy whips.

They were, and are, afraid of change because they were, and are, afraid of their liberal swamp rat asses getting sent to jail where they belong.

And they hate liberty as if liberty shot their parents in an alleyway when they were eight. Their solution to every problem is some kind of encroachment or diminution against individual liberty.

The myth is that conservative and liberal have to do with change, and time. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is very much like using a boat’s compass to figure out where the front of the boat is. It is the application of a static concept upon a dynamic object, and such a “definition” will be wrong whenever the boat is headed in a direction different from the one on which you planned. That’s going to be roughly half the time, or more. “Liberals boldly embrace change” fails every time conservatives are the ones bringing the change, which is roughly half the time. “Liberals love liberty” fails all of the time.

Conservative vs. liberal has to do with definitions. Look it up:

Conservative (adj.): “marked by moderation or caution : marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners” (Merriam Webster) “(of an estimate) lower than what is probably the real amount or number” (Oxford)

Liberal (adj.): “not literal or strict : loose : not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms” (Merriam Webster) “Given, used, or occurring in generous amounts : giving generously : broadly construed or understood; not strictly literal or exact” (Oxford)

How it applies:

“Caitlyn Jennier is a woman” is a very *liberal* interpretation of “woman.” Conservatives are going to define “woman” conservatively, and they will tell you that’s a man, baby. And they’ll be right.

“Tom and George are married” is a liberal interpretation of “married.” Believe it or not, there are still conservatives running around who don’t recognize this. Our opinions are illegal, but we still have them…and, being the real lovers of liberty, we know we have a right to them. No matter what.

“Climate change is going to doom us all” is a liberal prognostication. It is the kite severed from the string. It is imagination running wild and free, unconstrained by anything.

“But it’s science!” is a liberal interpretation of “science.” It falls to conservatives to remind everyone else of the conservative understanding of science. Science doesn’t work that way.

“Absentee ballots must be received by this date” was interpreted liberally, which is how Joe Biden won some states last year. In violation of the local laws. Liberals violate laws a lot, rather capriciously, because they violate definitions. It’s what liberals do.

When liberals are “generous,” it’s with someone else’s money, which is a very liberal understanding of the concept of generosity.

In the antebellum era of the United States, history shows we had deep and irreconcilable conflicts regarding the proper interpretation of our founding documents, which held these truths to be self-evident,

…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it[.]

Today’s liberals would like to be viewed as proper ideological descendants of the abolitionists, who sought to end slavery. Those who were interested in the preservation of this institution, bent the rules on interpretations, and liberals would like us to think of them as conservatives. But if you could bring back one of those “conservatives” and ask him to justify his position, he would use tortured, liberal arguments. The most popular one at the time seems to have been something like: Yeah sure, all men are created equal, but these slaves aren’t men, they’re my property. Your document doesn’t say anything about rights of property, only rights of real men, and I don’t recognize them as such. I get to provide the final interpretation on this. Why? Because I want it! I want that authority so just go ahead and give it to me.

Liberals want us to think of those as conservative arguments. Why? Because they want it that way. So just give it to them! And…we do.

That doesn’t work. Not even half the time. In fact, the arguments used by the slaveholders to preserve the institution of slavery, are no different from the argument today’s “pro-choice” liberals use to preserve the industry of abortion. There’s no meaningful difference between these whatsoever. Yeah sure, the baby would have a right to life if it were a baby…but I do not recognize the “clump of cells” as a baby.

Here is something else that absolutely, positively, does not work:

Liberal (adj.) (Oxford) “Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise”

That definition has not been removed yet, nor do I know for sure that it will be anytime soon. But it should be.

Our liberties depend on our legal system. Our legal system relies on definitions remaining strong, and interpreted according to original intent. You can’t be a lover of liberty, while you’re being liberal with interpretations. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, you’re going to be using your fast-and-loose stretchy-Gumby elasticized definitions to remove someone’s freedom, and better than even odds you’re going to be hurting them by doing so. And feeling very, very smug about yourself while you’re doing it. That’s a liberal.

A year ago when the nonsense started, I took a stab at the “when” and ended up taking a pass on it, veering off into the arguably easier “how”:

Somehow, the relationship between rule-makers and rule-followers is going to get changed, forever…
:
Looks to me like we all go there. Don’t you dare step out of that house, followed by a zillion exclamation marks!! And then followed by…yeah okay, whatever.

I do not like the idea of the other 49 states copying this idea of ours, that laws mean nothing. Like all the rest of our ideas that get copied, it’s bad.

But I think that’s how it goes.

The Washington Examiner just put out an editorial that says more or less the same thing, but views the situation in the context of responsibilities resting on the top layers of our modern aristocracy, going unfulfilled. Our leaders have duties, and the rest of us should expect them to deliver.

Lockdowns, distancing requirements, and mask mandates need to end as soon as possible. That doesn’t mean today. It doesn’t mean tomorrow. But it means at some point.

Our leaders and health experts have a duty to articulate, right away, standards of when these should end.
:
We cannot wait for COVID-19 to disappear. That might never happen. And maybe Fauci has his own yardsticks. Maybe New York City will propose others. Maybe we’ll all disagree over the right ones.

But every public health authority and every government executive should lay down his or her proposed “finish line” right away. At least then, we’ll have something to fight over. Because right now, it seems indefinite. And indefinite “emergency powers” for the government are lethal to human freedom.

It is that very last line that tells the whole story, in my opinion. This should be simple. It’s complicated, not because we need to weigh safety against this “human freedom,” but because the loudest among us don’t give a rat’s south-end-when-facing-north about freedom. They sneer at the idea. They’re proud of not giving a crap.

Let them describe the conflict the way they see it. A hundred times. All hundred times, they’ll describe this concern over sickness and death as a novel idea…as if those of us looking forward to the end, are the neophytes who haven’t thought of things yet. As if we’re supposed to say “Oh the virus might kill people? Gee I hadn’t thought of that.” Time goes on and they learn nothing, because they refuse to think of themselves as the ones who are missing the vital nugget of game-changing information. They want that to be the other guy.

But, no. This is a balancing act of danger versus lethargy, of preserving safety versus preserving opportunity. It is an ancient struggle in our species, and a divisive one. Unfortunately, in these modern times, it’s always the safety-conscious ones, the ones who are so radicalized that they think of liberty as a disposable thing, or even a nuisance, who are the loudest ones.

They’re desperate. They really do think they carry the responsibility to avoid millions and millions of deaths, in their own little hands. And their voices carry. We have built an advanced society that is safety-conscious. That’s not a bad thing.

The problem is time. The more they win, the deeper we head into a territory in which other priorities have to be considered…and now, we’re a year into it.

My concern, just like a year ago, is what happens to the rule of law. We’re well on our way to ratifying ordinances, statues, codes, whatever, but in written form and as seriously as we can every establish any sort of law. And then, out of necessity, forming a more deeply respected but unwritten cultural protocol in which everybody gets to just walk all over it, California-style.

Society can survive the virus. But it can’t survive that.

So that’s my argument. We can listen to these safety-obsessed navel-gazers, and we can take their arguments seriously and we can act on them. But not to the exclusion of all other considerations. That leads to society’s undoing, and in the way I described. It can’t lead anywhere else, unless somewhere along the line there is a course-reversal. Putting it more concisely: It’s unsustainable.

This is the fourth time, in my lifetime, that a democrat administration has settled into a White House previously occupied by Republicans. Now, the democrats don’t have the same priorities or value systems I do, but in 1977, 1993 and 2009 they were able to describe specifically what’s better according to them. There was some petty b.s. like “We have a President who can pronounce ‘nuclear'” and there was some stuff about endangered species and there was some prejudiced bigoted stuff about “diversity” or something, not as many white males.

At least there was stuff!

This time they’re laying low. It’s weird. The party in charge is laying low. We all know why. There’s no bragging to be done. Even taking into account their own weird priorities, from their own weird frame of reference, they can’t brag.

Even if they could brag, they wouldn’t be able to nail down who’s really running the country. Their own supporters don’t know the answer to that.

The cool thing about a republic like ours is, in one way or another, the country as a whole is always winning. Just like people who go through life making decisions smart & dumb; we make good decisions and benefit from them, or we make poor decisions and we end up learning. Right now we’re learning. We’re learning in the aftermath of a decision that was supported by those among us who are opposed to defining things. Seriously, what were the very best arguments for this? “Trump Bad!” “But his tweets!” “OMG I can’t even!” Very convincing. But who among us wanted a White House that “calls a lid” with crises galore, including a border debacle that is defeat snatched from the jaws of victory?

So we’re learning. People who don’t define what the specific problem is and what to do about it and provide at least a high-level rough-sketch overview about how this is supposed to lead to a more desirable state — they’re not the ones who should prevail in these things. In a way, they don’t even want to prevail. They don’t want to accept the responsibility that comes with victory. They’re not in any position.

It’s a valuable lesson. I do tire of seeing it repeated over and over again.