LOL... Virginia Governor Northam had a Train Wreck Week

[caroljane]

1 hour ago, Jonathan said:

Didn't our Carol join in on the repeating the lie that Trump had said that Nazis were good people? Am I remembering that correctly?

J

 

No, you're not.  I  don't even remember hearing that particular lle -if I (don't) remember that correctly. My memory is not that infallible though, so if you have any quotes fom me, I will stand, you know, corrected.

[Jon Letendre]

 

[Jon Letendre]

On 2/3/2019 at 2:10 PM, Jon Letendre said:

Yes, what greater demonstration is there? Well, you could make all of us pay taxes for it and then have Planned Parenthood donate a third of that to the Democrat Party. That might add spice to the demonstration.

You hit the nail on the head with your notes above about the history of all this. They were able to express their cult religious beliefs back then because everyone did it. Then Christianity came along. To survive, they went underground. Now they want to impose their sick system on everyone again and be again safe, out in the open.

 

Your tax tax money goes to PP who gives it to Democrats who push for legalized infanticide.

 

  https://mobile.twitter.com/LiveAction

 

 

Planned Parenthood gave over $2,000,000 to Virginia's extreme pro-abortion governor and thousands more to Kathy Tran. Follow the money to see who they're answering to.

 

 

 

 

9:36 AM · Feb 4, 2019

[Jonathan]

34 minutes ago, caroljane said:

No, you're not.  I  don't even remember hearing that particular lle -if I (don't) remember that correctly. My memory is not that infallible though, so if you have any quotes fom me, I will stand, you know, corrected.

Are you sure? I could've sworn that that lie was on the list of the many lies that you repeated about Trump after hearing them from the leftist activist media.

J

[caroljane]

4 minutes ago, Jonathan said:

Are you sure? I could've sworn that that lie was on the list of the many lies that you repeated about Trump after hearing them from the leftist activist media.

J

Yes, pretty sure, I don't remember reading or hearing any Trump statement about Nazis being good people. (Tyrants like Kim and Putin, yeah ... but I can't find anything in my own  comments about Trump praising  Hitler et  al.

 

[Brant Gaede]

58 minutes ago, caroljane said:

Yes, pretty sure, I don't remember reading or hearing any Trump statement about Nazis being good people. (Tyrants like Kim and Putin, yeah ... but I can't find anything in my own  comments about Trump praising  Hitler et  al.

 

Hitler made the trains run on time.

--Brant

[caroljane]

6 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

Hitler made the trains run on time.

--Brant

Wasn't that Mussolini?

Hitler made the trains run on time to Auschwitz, that we know. 

[Brant Gaede]

I went with the name I could spell.

--Brant

[Jon Letendre]

Important message from Gov, Northam

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

It's in the news this morning that--in some poll or other--50% of Democrats still support Northam.

God, I hope he stays in office.

That will be a festering sore with "Democrat" written all over it.

Then come new elections...

 

Michael

[Jonathan]

16 hours ago, caroljane said:

Yes, pretty sure, I don't remember reading or hearing any Trump statement about Nazis being good people. (Tyrants like Kim and Putin, yeah ... but I can't find anything in my own  comments about Trump praising  Hitler et  al.

 

Hmmm. Don't Putin and Kim share your ideology? Why are you upset with them? They're doing what they do for the causes that you believe in.

J

[9thdoctor]

5 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

It's in the news this morning that--in some poll or other--50% of Democrats still support Northam.

God, I hope he stays in office.

That will be a festering sore with "Democrat" written all over it.

Then come new elections...

 

Michael

The Lt. Gov. now has a rape accusation hanging over him.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/washpost-pushes-back-against-justin-fairfax-statement-on-sexual-assault-allegation

http://reason.com/blog/2019/02/04/justin-fairfax-virginia-sexual-misconduc

This leaves the SJW crowd with something like a Sophie's Choice in reverse.  We believe accusers, right?  With the sole exception of a Clinton accuser. 

They were hoping to groom this fellow as the next Obama.  He was going to be able to skirt Virginia's term limits by serving most of Northam's term, then running for reelection.  After that, next stop, White House in 2024.  Or 2028, if whoever beats Trump in 2020 is a two-termer.  Probably a partial Senate term to fill the gap in that case. 

[Jon Letendre]

This is just getting started so we still have only the slightest hint at how evil they all are. There may never be another President from the Democrat Party. 

[Jon Letendre]

 

[caroljane]

15 hours ago, Jonathan said:

Hmmm. Don't Putin and Kim share your ideology? Why are you upset with them? They're doing what they do for the causes that you believe in.

J

Tyrants tend not to have ideologies these days; they use the multitudes of idealists  who are desperate  for a leader to realize their ideal, and the aspiring tyrant uses them, or kills them as is politically expediient, until they achieve that power. You used to know things like this Jonathan - when was it that your memory started to fail? I noticed mine was becoming annoyingly selective after I turned 112.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I just read an article about ruling class elitists, especially the 1% cronies. (I can't remember where. If I find it later, I will post it.)

The article said that ruling class elitists vastly prefer countries that are soft progressive to right wing dictatorships.

When I add my own reasoning, this makes perfect sense.

Suppose you had a biiiiiiiiiig pile of money gotten through any means possible (legitimate and illegitimate) but no army to protect it. What do you suppose would happen over time?

Obviously, ill-intentioned people would show up and take it from you.

So the crony 1% likes to keep governments in their hip pockets. Governments have armies.

The problem with right wing dictatorships for them is that the oppressive tactics of tyrants, the secret police, etc., keep the resentment cauldron boiling among the masses. Sometimes that boiling erupts, down go the dictators, and down goes the walls to the money of the 1%--including all of their crony corporation-government schemes like endless war for profit.

A soft progressive country doesn't have that resentment problem. Everybody is corrupt, including the population. So they tend to be more docile as the disparity between the biiiiiiiiiig pile of money flowing to the 1% gets even bigger through crony corporatist schemes and the rest, who get peanuts. But that growing disparity is not a problem because the rest know they didn't earn the peanuts, thus they are afraid of being found out and losing their peanuts. When push comes to shove, their focus is on their peanuts.

They remain docile and let the crony schemes roll, even when some of their children get picked off to fight in stupid endless wars, or a community here and there gets sacrificed in a large-scale experiment (with drugs like oxycontin, drinking water shenanigans, etc.).

Why do the people in soft progressive countries not see what is going on? According to the human nature I observe, people fight to preserve the dishonest in their lives with a lot more attention to detail than they do the honest. They are simply not paying attention to reality. Instead, they are paying attention to the unearned in their lives.

(As an aside, when progressive countries get too dictatorial, you get Venezuela. The elitists really don't like that mix unless they get a shot at taking over everything. They want docile cattle, not chaos.)

There's another element of human nature, too. When taken to the extreme, in my model, the 1% gets executed--like in killed dead executed--because they disobey a fundamental law of human nature. If you are sitting at a banquet with your friends and you are right next to a vast mob of starving people, and your armed forces are weak, don't expect morality, tradition, class, law or anything else to save your ass. The starving people will attack. They are motivated.

Look what happened with the Communist revolution in Russia. I maintain this would not have happened with a well-fed population no matter what philosophy or religion or anything else got injected into the culture.

For human nature, hunger is more foundational than social organization. Hungry people either die or fight. They don't become passive without being bashed over the head. Which means the only thing more foundational than hunger is brute force.

Like it or not, freedom cannot be maintained where most people are starving to death while some people feast on a banquet.

For those who like to deduce reality from principles, this is a sour note in their symphony of how the world works. But for those who like to start with reality, then derive their principles from that, this is about as real as it gets.

Getting back to the original point, since the 1% cronies know that the population needs to be well-fed to stay in line, they know that soft progressive governments do a pretty good job of that while dictatorships depend on the personality of the dictator.

Now the catch, a big one. Soft progressive governments sacrifice the individual dreams of their populations, the appeal of greatness in the lives of their populations. They opt for the turkey-fed-on-the-farm-until-slaughter model of living over the hero model of an individual striving for excellence and great achievements. But at least, for the crony 1% assholes, social upheaval is kept to a minimum or happens only on issues that don't threaten their biiiiiiiiiig pile of unearned money.

For people like me, I can't stand progressivism because I don't want to be a crony, but that's the only place where greatness is sanctioned in a progressive country. I also don't want to be a turkey because I am well aware of Thanksgiving.

I found an answer in Rand when I was young, but, in practice, I am mostly a man without a country. (That is, until Trump came along.  )

Michael

[Jonathan]

7 hours ago, caroljane said:

Tyrants tend not to have ideologies these days; they use the multitudes of idealists  who are desperate  for a leader to realize their ideal, and the aspiring tyrant uses them, or kills them as is politically expediient, until they achieve that power. You used to know things like this Jonathan - when was it that your memory started to fail? I noticed mine was becoming annoyingly selective after I turned 112.

Which "ideal" have Putin and Kim preached, mine or yours?

Which "ideal," mine or yours, includes the component of force used to compel others to pay for the "ideal"?

Do you not advocate, and even cheer, the idea of punishing those from whom you wish to confiscate wealth? Do you not vilify such people, prior to knowing anything about them or how they produced their wealth, and promote the use of the power and force of government to realize your "ideal"?

Putin and Kim don't cease to have ideologies just because you're uncomfortable admitting that your differences with them are merely a matter of degree rather than of kind.

J

 

[Jon Letendre]

Democrat politicians care about women. Except the ones they raped, fuck those bitches.

 

[Jon Letendre]

And the next scumbag, compliments of the Democrat Party  ...

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Fun with Virginia:

Mark Herring Resigns as Democrat Attorneys General Group Co-Chair

And, of course, who can resist?

Ah, Dems...

Michael

 

[Jon Letendre]

 

[Jon Letendre]

Herring quit a professional association, it’s not meaningful.

All three of these goblins need to resign their positions of power over the citizens of Virginia.

[Darrell Hougen]

On 2/4/2019 at 12:41 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Just to be clear, I am not proposing a right to kill. I am proposing a matter of individual sovereignty where the US government has no jurisdiction. Each woman would establish what rights she would enforce within her own body, even whether the right to life was a right at all.

I don't have to like what they do to their citizens in Somalia, like whether they kill their citizens for apostasy or just because, but I have no sovereignty there. Ditto for the US government. That's the principle I propose.

Hi Michael,

In my opinion, your example concerning Somalia shows the problem with your formulation. You're putting the cart before the horse by putting sovereignty before individual rights.

Here is a relevant quote of Ayn Rand:

Quote

A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens. A free nation—a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens—has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government. The government of such a nation is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of its citizens and has no rights other than the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific, delimited task (the task of protecting them from physical force, derived from their right of self-defense) . . . .

Such a nation has a right to its sovereignty (derived from the rights of its citizens) and a right to demand that its sovereignty be respected by all other nations.

. . .

Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexistent “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.

In other words, there is no reason to respect the so-called "sovereignty" of a state or country that doesn't protect individual rights. Such a country has no legitimacy.

The question of abortion is complex because the thing growing inside a woman undergoes a number of developmental changes, from zygote to blastocyst to a collection of distinct items including the placenta, amniotic sac, and embryo. The embryo further develops into the fetus and the fetus undergoes a number of changes including development of the ability to feel pain.

The process of development takes place over an extended period of time. During that time, the thing that is developing goes from being mostly a part of the mother to mostly distinct with complete separation happening at birth. Also, during that time, the pregnant woman has the opportunity to choose whether to continue the pregnancy or not.

So, the first question is, does the mother have any obligation toward the developing fetus? In my view the answer is yes; she has an obligation to not be cruel. If she wishes to have a elective abortion --- if she simply doesn't want the responsibility of caring for her offspring for the next 20 years, then she should have an abortion early, before the fetus develops the ability to feel pain.

The other question is, does anyone other than the mother have a legitimate interest in her decision about whether to have an abortion or not? In my view, the answer to that question is also yes. In my view, people have a legitimate interest in justice and that interest extends to the period beyond which the developing fetus can feel pain. It may also extend to the period before that if the pregnant woman is behaving in such a way as to increase the probability of birth defects.

It boils down to a question of whether we are dealing with the rights of one person (counting just the pregnant woman) or two people (including the fetus). If only the pregnant woman is counted, then her individual rights should be respected. If there are two people, then the interests of both must be considered.

I don't have a problem with early term abortions because I don't think the fetus is sufficiently well developed for abortion to be a bad thing. However, I do believe that late term abortions are cruel and that society has a legitimate interest in preventing cruelty to innocent human life.

Again, it's a complex issue, so reasonable people can disagree.

Darrell

 

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, Darrell Hougen said:

You're putting the cart before the horse by putting sovereignty before individual rights.

Darrell,

This kind of formulation is what I call deducing reality from principles. Reality is what it is, not what it should be by logically extending a principle.

And the reality is humans have lived in governmental organizations since prehistory. Having leaders is built into the human brain. We come that way.

How anyone wants to call that, or ignore it, will not change that reality.

In my view, both rights and sovereignty are later, more higher-level concepts and, to be frank, both are necessary for human society to work. To argue by analogy, it's like saying the heart comes before the lungs in a human body. Or vice-versa. The reality is you need both. Remove one or remove the other and the body dies.

1 hour ago, Darrell Hougen said:

Such a country has no legitimacy.

Tell that to the guys with the guns.

In an imaginary world, such a country has no legitimacy. In the world we live in, it does.

I can project a future where such a country would no longer have legitimacy and fight for that, but I have stopped looking at present-day reality and lying to myself by claiming it doesn't.

It does.

And that fact doesn't depend on me liking it.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Darrell,

To continue, look at the quote you provided from Rand. She laid down the law and spoke with absolute certainty.

Now let's put that into reality.

We can start by asking what would happen if a country's founding documents affirmed, say, that all rights come from God? Is that government illegitimate? Is it an outlaw? That happens to be the USA.

And if it is illegitimate, when does it become legitimate, become sovereign?

Or what can we do? Pretend that the US was not legitimate until Rand came along? Because, don't forget, the only thing granting her the power to issue her decrees of who has rights and who does not, which countries have sovereignty and which do not, is her own tone of certainty. That's all. If nobody ever listened to her, would it matter to anyone out in the real world that she thought this one was illegitimate and that one not? 

It would not.

They will continue existing and interacting like they have always done.

A tone of certainty grants one some authority. Then once people start following the certain person, the authority is no longer tone because followers treat the person as an authority.

But even still, Rand's authority does not extend to the way the world is organized--or hell, even to the way the world has been organized over the centuries.

Were ancient Hellenic states illegitimate? Were they not sovereign? How about the Roman Empire? Was that illegitimate? Was that an outlaw? They held gladiator exhibitions, for God's sake. They killed people for entertainment.

Is modern-day Switzerland an illegitimate government? Or how about the island governments of tax heavens?

Is Brazil not sovereign? Or Thailand?

When does a nation have "a right to demand that its sovereignty be respected by all other nations?" When Rand says so? How about the vast portion of human history that does not fit her prescription? Or how about the modern world? Just look. There are sovereign nations all over the place.

I'm not making an argument for removing reason or moral equivalency. I'm simply saying when people look at reality, they have to recognize what exists and articulate that correctly before they try to change it.

Jordan Peterson once said something to the effect that ideologies are generally bad because people look at reality through an ideological lens, then ignore everything that doesn't fit in some imaginary perfect world according to it. Then they hurt people and justify it. (Sorry, I can't find the video right now.)

That was a wake-up call to me. I believe one has to see what is, then use ideology to make it better in the future, that is, if the ideology can make that reality better without lopping of some important part of it.

I see people in our subcommunity all the time say things exist that simply don't because they mix up what does exist with what they think should exist according to Rand's ideology--and they think this is the way to implement her ideology.

Rand herself started thinking that way at times in the end. It's tragic, but true.

And I say all this as someone who supports Rand's ideology.

Michael