Portland protests Aug. 17: What you need to know

Same Sex Marriage

 

Ah, got it. (I've got to keep up! I've got to keep up!)

 

That would be a huge improvement on the Il Duce look they've been sporting the past two decades.

A while back the founders of Protest Warrior published one of the funniest books I have ever read:

Of course, there's a section mocking Anarcho-Marxist loons:

 

I think the government could de-escalate the violence very simply by making a law that protesters cannot disguise themselves or hide their face/head in any way. No masks, no bandanas, nothing. And arrest anyone on either side who does that. It's cowardly anyway. If you have something to say and really believe you are in the right, why should you disguise your identity? You can bet those who do that are the bad guys.

 

Leftists lie consistently, or are ignorant of facts, but was assuming they think it's eventually for the greater good. That's changed somewhat with their support for Antifa and harassing innocent people in public and at their homes. Their ignorance is now becoming dangerous.
Their leaders lie in order to gain power.

 

You win the internet today for that reference.

 

That about sums it up.

 

Victor Davis Hanson is, along with Thomas Sowell, probably the leading intellectual in America today. His interviews are easily available on YouTube. Going on a cruise in a week or two with Mark Steyn and guest speakers. Steyn is too laugh out loud funny to be considered an intellectual but still has a great interview with Hanson. Admire them all.

 

I don't think we need a Plan B. I think we just need more people like President Trump--maybe some with a little more finesse and sensitivity???--to get a common sense message out there. The GOP, however flawed it has been on follow through, has always had a superior game plan to what the Democrats have offered, at least for many decades now, but they are terrible at messaging.

The GOP and we conservatives/libertarians/classical liberals need to do better to argue our convictions in an understandable and persuasive way. We need to learn how to counter the ridiculous accusations and dishonest characterizations of our point of view that the left puts out there and do so in a way that is compelling and believable. Propaganda, canned rhetoric, and mindless spin isn't getting it done for us like it does for the snowflakes.

One of President Trump's greatest strengths is that he tells it like it is, however politcially incorrect it may be. He is who he is and most of his supporters have accepted that as he isn't going to change just because he is criticized. But we do need some of us telling it like it is in a way that is a bit less abrasive maybe? We absolutely must get over our reluctance to speak up though. And we need a better effort at putting it into a compelling argument when we do.

 

The problem with conservatives getting their message across is contained in your post here. It's too intelligent, the words and phrasing will make their minds wander. These are not people who would listen to Victor Davis Hanson.

Trump has the right idea in that he'll take an issue, boil it down to a few simple words that everyone can understand, tell it to the folks, and then laugh. Of course he takes a lot of heat for this because he's not a stereotypical cookie-cutter politician the left would prefer, at least for the Republicans, but he is certainly the most engaging character ever elected in any democracy and, as well, is largely doing a terrific job.
The country should enjoy the man while they have him for they'll never see his like again.

 

To the extent that the KKK even exists in 2019...

The KKK feels most welcome under the Umbrella of Trump's GOP.

^That is a FACT.

Sorry, if that muddles your hideously flawed "narrative".

 

Ah yes.

Judging people for how they look instead of how they are.

And sure, just like Warren, except not like that at all.

 

To the extent that the KKK even exists today what makes you think they support the GOP - and for what reasons?? Last KKK member in politics was, I believe, Robert Byrd (D).

 

The KKK is an absolute joke in its current state, and it would've withered and died long ago if the leftists could stop whipping up bullcrap hysteria about them, and keeping them limping along, because the liberals need their big, bad hooded bogeymen to play the role of violent oppressor when they indulge their persecution complex fetishes.

The KKK has killed less people in the last half a century as will get shot down on any given hot weekend on the streets of Chicago, but let's pretend the KKK is still big and scary, so the professional leftist crybullies can get their rocks off to their murderous racist redneck fantasies.

 

So? That doesn’t mean anything. So you think all conservatives should change what they believe in because some of those views overlap with some idiots? You guys have idiots on the left as well, LOTS of them. Do you change your beliefs because some overlap with YOUR idiots? You leftists keep saying “well the kkk likes trump, therefore trump likes the kkk”. Complete garbage, and you know it, lol.

 

He may know it, but what if he doesn't?

 

Hanson is dry, but very insightful if you can get past the delivery. I've been listening to Sowell since my early 20's. He's been pulling the rug out from under the leftist narrative going back to the 70's.

Steyn is in a class of his own when it comes to delivery. That guy is sharp as a razor and damn funny.

 

Lucky you. I am very envious. I wish like hell that I could do that, but my very English wife would think being on a boat with several hundred American conservatives would be an example of Dr Johnson's observation that going to sea is like being in jail, with the added chance of being drowned. I've told her that they will probably not be armed, not with anything bigger than handguns anyway, but I can't change her mind.

I am a great admirer of Mark Steyn. He's got that quality of debunking solemn nonsense with common sense by just quoting the nonsense, and then sort of looking up with what you can imagine is a slightly puzzled expression ... is this real? And saying just the right thing. George Bernard Shaw said that Trotsky was a great polemicist, because he not only cut off his opponent's head, but then held it up to show that there were no brains inside it.

He must have a research team continually on the lookout for manifestations of modern insanity from the Left -- an entry for world's easiest job. His analyses of what's happening and where we're going are succinct. Give him a few pages of classical quotations and some precis of a couple of hundred academic studies and summaries of books, and he could contribute articles to the Claremont Review of Books, but I am so glad he doesn't. Conservative academics are a dime a dozen compared to a guy who has his finger on the pulse of popular culture.

I do find his books depressing, though.

 

They always look exactly the way you'd think.

 

There's no question that anti-masking laws would reduce the threat and incidence of violence. We have anti-masking laws in Virginia and they work as long as they are enforced.

You're right about covering your face at a public demonstration being an act of cowardice, too. There's no good reason for it, and if you want to break the law then be an adult about it and accept the responsibility and consequences of your actions.

 

Sowell started out as a Marxist.

 

Yeah 100 lb gay asian dude with no ability to defend himself picked a fight with a mob by taking pictures and writing words.

 

They usually smell the way you think, too.

We used to offer them bars of soap at the counter-demonstrations I attended. They didn't particularly appreciate our sense of humor...

 

In his 20's, and from his belief that "the people" were being abused by the system.

His intelligence led him to see reality as he entered his late 20's.

Basically, he began to understand human nature, which is something the unintelligent leftists outright reject in their grasping at unicorns.

 

I think I've said this before, but Lenin, who understood something about these things, made a sharp distinction, when building the Bolshevik Party, and training and educating its members, between 'propaganda' and 'agitation'. He used these words differently from the common usage. The former was presenting a lot of ideas -- inter-related ones, the full ideology-- to a few people (the intelligentsia, very imporant even for a mainly proletarian party); the latter was presenting one idea -- END THE WAR! or LAND TO THE PEASANTS! -- to many people.

You had to have both. A few thousand or tens of thousands of people who understood the 'many' ideas, who made up the cadres of the Party, recruited patiently over many years. And then, at the right time -- when society was manifestly collapsing and the rulers could no longer rule in the old way -- they could take a few simple ideas, judging which ones to use from moment to moment, to the many.

And with a bit of good luck ... (or, seen the other way, terrible bad luck) ... you could take power.

We could learn a lot from that fellow. He was not afraid to make bold moves if necessary: the Bolsheviks took power on a promise to end the war, thus winning over the ranks of the army. They had to give away Ukraine to the Germans to get peace. (No German should complain about the harshness of Versailles -- the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was ten times as hard on the losers). Not all that popular in Russia, despite the war-weariness.

Then, having won the civil war, he found the country in collapse, mass discontent with the Bolsheviks, the peasants not keen to give away their grain for little pieces of colored paper called 'rubles'. So he did a 180 turn and instituted the New Economic Policy, a (temporary reintroduction of capitalism), to give the workers in the cities something besides their own shoeleather to eat. Which worked of course (and is the model for the Chinese Party.)

He was up against a pretty nasty enemy, the Czarist regime, but a pretty stupid one as well. Sort of like us today, all proportions guarded, and acknowledging that the situation is different in a dozen different ways.

He was able to make cool, logical judgements, make temporary retreats if necessary, act boldly and ruthlessly when it was required. Before they took power, no one outside of Russia except a few specialists had even heard of the Bolsheviks. The New York TImes called them 'anarchists with leftist leanings'. But they knew how to achieve their goals. (Most of the other Marxists in Europe ended up with rifle butts crushing their skulls, or standing in front of firing squads, or machine-gunned on the ice (Finland)). They had the will, but no strategic/tactical sense.

The Bolsheviks were different. Learn from success I say, even if your goals are diametrically opposite to theirs.

Would we had some leaders like that today!