A Streetcar Named Indictment.
Indicted again
My tears have been falling
A small, lonely cell
The future portends
A bracelet of gold
A monitor band
I’ll wear on my ankle
Cuz I’m indicted again
More even than starvation!
The Dear Leader has now declared suicide illegal.
Yikes. Thought the one in the NYT was bad?
Given Deneen’s influence, the incredible sloppiness of the writing in Regime Change is a surprise. Many of his sentences are ambiguous if not incomprehensible, many of his paragraphs internally contradictory. There are places where the literal meaning of the words on the page [is] precisely opposite to what he plainly intends to convey. (When he says that it was “not uncoincidental” that two related things coincided, I doubt he means they happened together merely by chance.)
Even going to great lengths to puzzle out the strongest versions of the arguments Deneen seems to be making will get the reader only so far. Every one of his major claims disintegrates under scrutiny. You’re left with the impression that he barely understands his own ideas, and that he misunderstands entirely the thing he’s arguing against.
… Yes, people are ticked off about woke overreach by the progressive left. But the idea that most Americans favor a crackdown on pornography or a reintroduction of Sabbath laws or any of Deneen’s other post-liberal fantasies is comical.
*****************
Yeah, but when Deneen and his monk take over, this reviewer will be the first heretic burned at the stake.
*****************
To make matters worse – taken to task by two lady reviewers in the NYT and Reason.
Post-monk, they’ll only open their mouths to sing the Cathophate’s national anthem, Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.
[A]ccording to … 2020 figures, Texas’s gun death rate is around 67 percent higher than that of California’s, per 100,000 people.
*****************
The governor has issued a statement:
“Hell that’s mostly drunk ol cowboys be blowin they haids off. That don’t count.”
He claimed he could alter the course of hurricanes. He claimed 9/11 was divine punishment for “pagans, abortionists, gays, lesbians, [and] the American Civil Liberties Union.” He joins Brother Falwell in the bowels of hell.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House, and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the president of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis? That’s your money. That’s your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.
*******************
[A] lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog is not a leader.
*******************
Keep it coming.
Patrick Deneen is the revolution’s Menshevik to Adrian Vermeule‘s Bolshevik; but he’s a prominent enough theocrat to score a scathing review in today’s NYT.
Me, I’ve got some sympathy for Deneen: He’s deeply invested in top-down Bang ‘Er Mandates, as in Viktor Orban’s spectacularly failed mission to get drunk suicidal Hungarians to do the missus and seed the world with Hungarians. Orban’s more than done his bit, focusing relentlessly on getting women out of college and splayed panting ‘pon the ágy; but so reluctant are the men that the state has confiscated the fertility clinics, and – in a blow to Natural Law and all that stuff – been engineering the little buggers. Sad.
Because they don’t want their graduating seniors (their ceremony was scheduled in the same venue, later this evening) shot to pieces, the way the Huguenot High School seniors are currently being gunned down.
What will the end of public life in America be like? Looks as though we’re going to find out.
****************
What’ll it be? UD‘s putting her money on a student who was expelled and feels disrespected.
Oh, wait. They say there were two shooters. Maybe a gang thing.
***************
Richmond has long had a humongous murder rate.
***************
Ok, so now they say it was indeed just one person. Who brought multiple weapons and might have targeted one of the murdered people – a just-graduated student – in particular, but seems to have been happy to spray the crowd too.
**************
The Graduation Day shooting was just one of a handful of violent acts this week that left 12 people shot in Richmond over a 72-hour span.
Bernie Ecclestone is actually appearing physically as we speak on trial for fraud/tax evasion, but a glance at his Wikipedia page tells you there’s so much more (TAX AVOIDANCE HITLER REMARKS BRIBERY ACCUSATION ILLEGAL POSSESSION OF A FIREARM) where that came from.
His attorneys will argue that at 92 the old crook is simply too tuckered out to go to jail.
The purge of the last intellectuals at Hillsdale–sur-Mere (formerly New College) has outdone itself: No professors of American history remain in the history department.
President Richard Corcoran, himself under pressure because his last name reminds people of Johnnie Cochran, quickly appointed his replacement, “a man whose distinguished research career speaks for itself.”
[Iran’s theocrats intend to] double down on their efforts to force women to comply with a law that the vast majority of Iranians either despise or simply do not support... [A]s long as authorities insist on enforcing such unpopular laws, public order and civil unrest can be called into question over a few strands of a woman’s hair, potentially undermining one of the Islamic Republic’s last remaining—and increasingly defining—achievements: security… [T]he profoundly reluctant Iranian armed forces will ultimately be] called upon to restore public order by brutally cracking down on protests spurred by the stubbornness, indecision, and ineptitude of a hardline ruling elite that is both detached from the realities of Iranian society and feels shielded from the ramifications of social unrest.
As we await the next biker gang mass shooting in America, let us recall the all-important distinction between FLAUNT and FLOUT.
Flaunt is a verb that means to show off or display proudly, often in an ostentatious manner. For example: She likes to flaunt her wealth by driving a flashy car.
Flout is a verb that means to openly disregard or disrespect a law, rule, or convention. For example: He was arrested for flouting the city’s curfew.
I think we can agree that the writer in my headline meant FLOUTING.
Here’s something you don’t see every day: SUNY Broome’s Dean of Students has been arrested on “grand larceny in the second degree and identity theft in the first degree” charges. (He used to work at Penn State.)
The details should be interesting.
The Taos County Undersheriff tries to explain to locals complaining about the quality of policing before and after last month’s mass shooting at Red River’s biker rally (see these posts for background), that he told them decades ago how super-dangerous the event was, but no one listened. Thus it’s a bit rich, after years of criminality and menace finally culminating in what anyone with a brain knew would happen, to listen to locals bitching about all the blood.
After all, ‘who would have thought 28,000 bikers converging in a 1-square-mile mountain town of 539 people for Memorial Day weekend could get out of control?’
[R]ecently filed court documents point toward years of turmoil in the state with two rival gangs — the Bandidos and Mongols — perceiving themselves to be at war with the other.
Ol’ UD could have chosen from a zillion recent bloody gun incidents; why so much blogging about the Red River massacre? Because a town promoted a huge, violent, cult ritual! Year after year, knowing full well they were hosting thousands of cretinous warring sects and calling the event family friendly! Drawing children to the powder keg!
‘These guys all seem likable enough: [people tend to think] that they are misunderstood, outlaws from the old days, and they ride motorcycles instead of horses,’ [one policeman] said. ‘Even cops think, “Oh they are just tattooed long haired guys who like to ride motorcycles.” And the reality of it is they are long-haired tattooed guys who ride motorcycles and sell a hell of a lot of methamphetamine and murder people and steal motorcycles and extort people and beat people up in bars for no reasons.’
When people around the world wonder what peculiar American cultural traits produce daily large-scale gun carnage, they need to look at gunny gangy states like New Mexico, and gun-mad towns like Red River within that state. Here’s a perfectly respectable town – a yearlong tourist destination! – with a chronic violence fetish. Why? If the CDC is serious about studying American gun violence, it needs to dispatch a team of epidemiologists to Red River to ask people questions like Why do you think 28,000 armed bikers are cute? What is it about open powder kegs that makes you want to smoke cigarettes on top of them?
I think part of the answer must be that states like NM, always eager to liberalize their gun laws, proudly perceive themselves to be Badlands. Wild west shootouts have always been part of their frontier history, and in these post-frontier days, biker rallies virtually guarantee the survival of that self-affirming drama. Like their neighbor, whose famous tagline is Don’t Mess with Texas, biker rally states assume as a default position paranoid belligerence – and what better organized group to exteriorize that world view than the Mongols?
If I’m right, then mass murder is baked in to states like NM and Texas. If I’m right, it’s constitutive of state identity. Hell, NM done got MORE gun deaths than TX!
Not to get all Freudian, but the evidence points here: Mass murder isn’t what NM and Texas dread; it’s what they crave.
*******************
Slowly, slowly, at least parts of NM learn.